The Nation 1882-04-13: Vol 34 Iss 876

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NEW YORK, THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 1882. The Week. THE President possesses a discretionin mak- ing up his Cabinet on which no reformer pro- poses to place any formal restriction. Cabinet offices are, and must be under every system, political offices, for the manner of filling which he cannot be held accountable any- where except at the polls. He may fairly, in making them, consider various things besides a man’s administrative capacity, because the Cabinet is, in a certain sense, a representative body. Butin making appointments to subor- dinate offices, he is bound to consider nothing but administrative efficiency. President Ar- thur has acknowledged this himself, both in his letter of acceptance as Vice-President, and in his message to Congress last year, which contained by implication complete condemna- tion of the use of the subordinate oflices of the Government to reward party services. Whatever, therefore, may be, said for the manner in which he has filled the Cabinet, it is difficult to see what can be said for the ap- pointment which he has just made to the Boston Collectorship. There is no point of view from which it will bear examination. The Presi- dent said in his message that the tenure of office should be ‘‘stable.” Well, the late Collector, Mr. Beard, had given universal satisfaction to the business community, and had brought the Custom-house to a high de- gree of efficiency; so that there was no ad- ministrative reason whatever for his removal. Nor was there any political reason which even a good party man ought to be willing to avow. Mr. Beard is undoubtedly the choice of the great body of the Massachusetts Republi- cans, and was carrying out to some extent that system of reform to which they gave emphatic approval in their platform of last year, which defined the reform as consisting in ‘‘the relief and exclusion of members of the legislative branch from the business of select- ing officeholders in the department of admin- istration ”; in the probibition of assessments on officeholders for party purposes ; in appointment through competitive examination and a short term of probation; and ‘‘tenure of office dur- ing good behavior or for a reasonable fixed term.” The Convention called on their repre- sentatives to support measures designed to bring this reform about, and denounced the system now in use as “aristocratic,” and as affording the ‘‘fewest restraints against abuse,” and as tending to ‘‘ extravagance and inefficiency in the public business,” and to ‘* selfishness, corruption, and violence in poli- tics.” The Republican press of Boston, too, with one exception, strongly approves of the retention of Mr. Beard, and strongly repro- bates his removal. This one exception is the Traveller, which has long been in a position of bitter antago- nism to the bulk of the Republican party, and represents nothing but the small clique which followed General Butier’s lead until he went over openly to the Democrats. Since then it has been rabidly ‘‘ Stalwart,” but has mainly displayed its Stalwartism in ridicule and abuse of civil-service reform, and has surpassed every politician now in public life in its advocacy of the spoils system. It not only does not believe in competitive examinations or tenure during good behavior, but does be- lieve in appointment for party services, and tenure during any kind of behavior which does not diminish a man’s usefulness as an electioneering agent. Moreover, no paper, except the Whiskey-Ring organs of the West, has descended to such coarse abuse of every- body who makes any profession of a desire to improve the character of the public service. Well, the editor of this paper, Mr. Worthing- ton, is to be the new Collector, in Mr. Beard’s place. As an expression of indifference to the opinions not only of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress, who have not a word to say for him, but of the best part and by far the larger part of the Republican party of the State, which has over and over repudiated both his opinions and his associates, nothing equal to this has occurred since General Grant ap- pointed Mr. Simmons, Butler’s henchman, to the same place. In that case, as in this, neither the wishes of the Boston merchants, nor of the local party leaders, nor of the Republican press, nor of the Senators or Representatives of the State, had any weight with the President. It would be interesting to know from some qualified source under what system such an appointment is made. It cannot the “spoils” system, properly so called, for in that case the Senators or Representatives would control the appointment; it cannot be the reformers’ system, for Mr. Worthington glories in his contempt for it, and will make haste to destroy any vestiges of it he may find in his office; it cannot be the business sys- tem, for he knows nothing about Custom- house duties. What system is it, then? be It is obvious to everybody who remembers the events of last spring, that the President by his nomination of Worthington for the Boston Collectorship has placed Senators Hoar and Dawes, of Massachusetts, in exactly the posi- tion in which Senators Conkling and Platt were placed by the Garfield Administration when they resigned their seats. ter tothe Governor in which they justified their course contains hardly any argument which the Massachusetts Senators might not now use. That Mr. Arthur felt the force of those arguments, and thought the resignation justi- fiable, we infer from his coming on to. Albany and lobbying for a month to procure the vin- dication of Messrs. Conkling amd®Platt by re- election, whether he has meant by his recent action to compel Messrs. Hoar and Dawes to resign, or to confess that he was mistaken in thinking Messrs. Conkling and Platt did right in resign- ing. In either case we trust Messrs. Hoar and Dawes will not resign ; but they can hardly avoid open opposition, however meekly they may feel, because in selecting Worthington The Nation. for the Collectorship the President bas made that nomination, of all possible nominations in the State, which most distinctly indicates his disregard for the formally expressed views of the Massachusetts Republicans on the ques- tion of civil-service reform, It is as if the Mayor of Boston, by way of revealing his opinion of the license and screen laws, wore to place a renowned and audacious liquor dealer and old toper at the head of the Police Commission. The President’s veto of the Anti-Chinese Bill has been sustained by a vote of the Sen- ate. The Pacific Coast is in a blaze of indig- nant excitement, and the Democrats, with an eye to the vote of the Pacific States, declare with exultation that now the record of the Republicans and of the Democrats respectively on the Chinese question is complete, Senator Miller, from California, has reintroduced the vetoed bill, changing only the period during which Chinese immigration is to be suspended, from twenty toten years, This change, whik to some extent meeting the President's most prominent objection to the bill, is quite insuf ficient to cover the case. Not only should any law passed by Congress upon this subject be consistent with the provisions of our treaty with China in point of form, but its substance should be such as to render the maintenance of friendly relations with China possible. The people of the Pacific States have lashed them selves into an unreasoning fury about the Chinese question, which has made them en tirely blind to their own manifest interests. The Californian papers give expression in various ways to this indignation. One the veto is *‘ appalling”; another says it is *‘ ar SAYS | bitrary”’; another says it has caused great ‘‘ de- jection”; and another that it has given ‘‘a | shock of painful character,” so painful, indeed, that ‘‘it is difficult to find language to describe it.” The Pacific Slope is not easily appalled, and never remains long dejected, and gets over even the most powerful shocks with much ra pidity. Of course reflection is not easy for per- | sons indeep affliction, but it will come by and } which Mr. Miller, their The long let- | by ; and when the time for 1t has come, we ad- vise the Californians to read the resolution Senator in Washing- ton, and the promoter of the Anti-Chinese Bill, introduced and got unanimously passed by the Republican State Convention in 1869. This resolution ran as follows : ‘**Resolved, That we recognize the power of the general Government to restrict or prevent Chinese immigration whenever the welfare of the nation demands such a measure by terminat- ing our commercial relations with China. But it should be considered that the adoption of non- = intercourss: in respect to China surrenders to We are forced, therefore, to ask | Europe the commerce of the Empire of China, We believe that the general prosperity will be greatly enhanced by fostering commercial inter- course with Asia, and that the closing of our ports at this time against Chinese immigration would be most injurious to the material interests of this coast, a reproach upon the intelligence of the American people, and contrary to the spirit of the age.” Of course Mr. Miller was no wiser or more trust- worthy then than he is now, when he is full of

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304 The Nation. [ Number 876 anti-Chinese fury and fuss, but the facts have stood by him as he was in 1869 remarkably, for the Chinese immigration has not increased in the same ratio as the white population, while the Chinese trade has increased in much greater ratio. Our imports from China in 1870 amounted to $8,520,000 ; in 1881 they amounted to $22,358,908. Our exports to China amounted in 1870 to $420,000 ; in 1881 they reached $4,661,957. President Arthur has now completed his Cabinet. As it stands it may be considered the Cabinet of his choice, forit is generally be- lieved that Mr. Lincoln will remain at the head of the War Department at the President’s request. Mr. Kirkwood leaves the Interior Department with the reputation of an upright and faithful officer, His successor, Mr. Teller, is a man of ability and brings to the discharge of his duties such an equipment as the experi- ence of the Senate, of an active law practice in land and mining cases, and of Western life gives. He takes charge of a department which isan unwieldy conglomeration of incongruous parts, some of which would separately be sufficient to put even more than ordinary executive ability to a severe test. The duties upon which Mr. Teller enters are of the most complicated and thankless kind, and in the judgment passed upon his performance of them he will be entitled to a candid considera- tion of the great difficulties which every man in that position has to contend with. Mr. William E. Chandler, who has been nominated as Secretary of the Navy, is un. doubtedly a man of capacity, who may soon succeed in mastering the duties of the depart- ment. But in some respects his appointment borders upon the grotesque. What end Pre- sident Arthur expects to accomplish by it is a matter of speculation. Mr. Chandler has so far been known mainly as a shrewd and not over- nice political manager. Although thoroughly in sympathy with and profoundly versed in ‘*Machine” methods, he has been counted as a member of a faction opposed to that to which the President belonged. If the President intended to make a concession to the ‘‘ Garfield Republicans,” for the purpose of ‘uniting the party,” it will be thought that he might have selected a representative carrying more weight with the great mass of them. Mr. Chandler has been considered one of the principal lieutenants of Mr. Blaine in his political operations. If he continues to be such, he may form a connecting link between the Administration and that candidate for the Presidency, but he would be a very uncom- fortable link for the President to have in his political family, supposing Mr. Arthur to cherish any aspirations himself. But if, as is rumored, Mr, Chandler has severed that inti- mate connection with Mr. Blaine, he will be regarded with distrust in that quarter, and it is difficult to see with whom he is to connect at all. Weapprehend that the President, in attempting an exceptionally shrewd thing in the way of political management, has made an investment that will not pay. When in addition to all this it is remembered that Mr. Chandler was rejected by the Senate when nominated for the office of Solicitor-General about a year ago, and that the same Senate will now have to pass upon his nomination fora higher position, the case appears in a still more curious light. The bill passed last week by the Senate for counting the electoral vote, originally drawn by Mr. Edmunds, probably guards as effi- ciently as any Congressional legislation can against a recurrence of such troubles as arose out of the electoral contest of 1876. It pro- vides, in the first place, that the electors of each State shall meet and give their votes on the second Monday in January next following their appointment. The law at present re- quires them to meet on the first Wednesday in December, a date which gives only an interval of a month from the November elec- tion for the settlement of all disputes in each State, as to the persons entitled to cer- tificates of election. In 1877, this interval was found to be altogether too small. The Senate bill now doubles it, and, having done this, proceeds to provide, or at any rate to suggest a way of providing, for the summary settle- ment of all disputes in any State by the State itself. The bill enacts that each State may, pursuant to its laws existing on the day fixed for the appointment of electors (this of course excludes retroactive measures passed after the popular election), determine, in the interval between their appointment and the meeting of the electors in January, any controversy con- cerning the appointment of any of them; and that the determination shall be conclusive evi- dence of their title, and shall bind the two Houses of Congress in counting the vote. It will be seen that the whole object of this bill is to throw upon the States themselves the responsibility of deciding all disputed ques- tions as to their respective electoral votes, and to limit the work of Congress to the function devolved upon the two Houses by the Constitu- tion—that of counting the votes sent in. In an interview reported by the Hvening Post on Friday, Postmaster Pearson com- mented with praiseworthy freedom on the re- cent letter of First Assistant Postmaster-Gen- eral Hatton. Mr. Hatton said that President Grant’s order forbidding postal clerks to hold municipal offices, and President Hayes’s order forbidding Federal officers to take part in poli- tical work, did not ‘‘ include employees of post- offices” What he meant was rather that un- der the present Administration these orders would not be applied to such persons, for the orders themselves are sufficiently explicit. The first one relates to postal employees in terms, and the second makes no exception in their favor. Mr. Hatton does, indeed, add, ‘‘ un- less the [municipal] employment interferes with the efficient discharge of their duties in the post-offiee,” He decides that ‘‘ under this limitation” a postal clerk may ‘‘accept the office of Alderman.” The original order, however, makes no such qualification. It was not intended merely to prohibit neglect of Federal duty for other work in particular cases, but to lay down a general rule for the correction and prevention of a tendency to neglect, which is inevitable if such double employment is tolerated. There is also a po- litical reason for the order. The inexpediency “to the Legislature. of blending diverse and perhaps conflicting public trusts in this way is recognized by the Constitution of this State, which provides (Article III.) that no member of the Legisla- ture shall receive any civil appointment from the Governor or the Legislature during the time for which he shall have been elected, and that no person who, at the time of election, or within a hundred days of it, holds a civil or military office under the United States or any city government, shall be eligible The State thus embodies a sound principle in its organic law, and the United States should at least respect it in practice. As to participation in politics, Mr. Hat- ton holds that it is not only the privilege but the duty of a postal clerk or other Federal officer to exercise his ‘‘rights as a citizen” by promoting ‘‘the success of all public and political measures” which he regards as ‘‘beneficial to his country” —that is, to help the ‘‘grand old party” to ‘win victo- ries.” Does this mean that a Democratic clerk will be allowed to promote ‘‘ political measures ” which he believes to be beneficial, or that only Republican officers will be per- mitted to help their ‘‘ grand old party”? Post- master Pearson points out the ‘‘radical change in the civil-service regulations ” which his superior officer’s letter implies, and says that the duties of municipal or State and Federal offices simultaneously occupied ‘‘ will naturally clash”; and while he cannot in the circumstances forbid the double em- ployment, he will deal as the interests of the service require with any man who neglects his duties for any reason whatever. This may have the effect of practically prohibiting in this city what the Washington department in terms allows. The scenes attending the burial of the late Jesse James on Thursday, at Kearney, Missouri, were very affecting. Crowds of people flocked together from all parts of the State to get a last sight of the dead bandit, who had, while alive, done so much to enable them to lead what they call in Boston ‘‘full” lives. Mrs. Samuels, Jesse’s mother, was on the ground early, and talked without reserve to everybody. Her conversation naturally, under the circum- stances, was colored with deep religious feeling, and she said to a reporter, who in his shy way ventured to express his sympathy with her in her bereavement, ‘‘I knew it had to come; but my dear boy Jesse is better off in heaven to-day than he would be here with us ”—a sen- timent from which no one will be likely to dissent. The officiating clergyman with much tact avoided dwelling on the life and charac- ter of the deceased, and improved the occasion by enlarging upon Jesse’s chances of future improvement in Paradise, ina manner that would probably have struck Mr. James him- self as rather mawkish. The wide-spread be- lief in the West that he has gone straight to heaven is a touching indication of the gene- ral softening of religious doctrines. Dr. G. Halsted Boyland, of Baltimore, has contributed a letter to the Lamson case in which he mentions the following facts as tend-

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Apr. 13, 1882] The Nation. 305 ing to show that Dr. Lamson is not crimi- nally responsible : first, that once, about twelve years ago, he went off into a *‘state of semi- syncope,” and was at that time of ‘‘ an anemic temperament generally’’; second, that on another occasion he displayed a_ violent and unreasonable temper; and third, that he prepared an anonymous Ietter contain- ing groundless complaints about a surgi- cal amphitheatre. He adds in a postcript, ‘*T remember well his passion for experiment- ing with different chemicals.” Ue modestly forwards this ‘‘ on oath, in the interest of jus- tice, for what it may be worth.” Now, sup- posing that twelve years hence Dr. Boyland himself should commit a crime, could not this letter be used in the interest of justice, for what it is worth, to show that in 1882 he had be- gun to develop symptoms of mental weakness, and mental weakness, too, on the very subject of responsibility forcrime? What isa better test of irresponsibility than symptoms of con- fusion in the patient’s mind 2s to responsibility? Dr. Boyland probably does not himself intend to polson any one in 1895, but we throw out the hint to all physicians contemplating a career of crime as among the possibilities of the future—for what it is worth. Bishop Elder, who presided at the late Catholic Provincial Council at Cincinnati, has written a long letter to the Cincinnati Cozm- mercial, explaining the pastoral letter issued by the Council, whose doctrines touching the sources of political power and the equality of men had alarmed that paper, as well as a great many others. The Bishops had de- nied that political power came from the people, or that men were ‘equal either in mind or body—which led some editors to tremble for popular government, and for equality before the law, and for the authority of the Declaration of Independence. Bishop Elder now says that the inequality of men isa fact which stares us in the face; that every- where around us we see differences in physical and mental power and in social advantages, and everywhere we sce the many ruled by the few. Therecan be no harm, therefore, he argues, in describing what exists and has al- ways existed, and this was all the Council did in the matter of equality. As to the source of power, he ci*es the Scriptural proposition that ‘* the powers that be are ordained of God,” in support of the doctrine of the Council that power does not come from the people, and points to the difference between the duties of officers and those of the people, in support of the proposition that rulers have rights which the ruled have not. All this is really very harmless word play. Power al- ways and everywhere originates with those who have it. If the priests have it, it origi- nates with the priests; if the aristocracy, with the aristocracy ; if the people, with the peo- ple. Nobody ever held power which be had got in the wrong place. Weshall bein danger from the pastoral letters of Catholic theologians whenever they seem likely to persuade the people to give up the elective system; but until this comes to pass, an opinion that power comes from some place else than the popular vote, is as harmless as an opinion that it comes out of a hole in the ground, During the week the Treasury called for redemption $15,000,000 more United States 33 per cent. bonds, which makes $90,000,000 called since last November. This gives some idea of the amount of the surplus revenues of the Government, and shows also how rapidly investment-money is being driven from United States bonds into other securities. No gold was exported during the week, al- though foreign exchange ruled most of the time near to the point at which gold must leave the country. The disbursements of the Treasury for imterest and called bonds were heavy, and the domestic exchanges were gene- rally in favor of this city. The method, however, of the banks in making a state- ment of average condition for six days, instead of actual condition at the close of the week, accounts for an apparent decrease in their surplus reserve. The money market was throughout very easy for borrowers, and at declining rates. At the Stock Exchange the course of prices for speculative stocks was downward, although varied with ‘sharp ral- lies” from time to time. United States 4 and 44 per cent. bonds advanced to the highest prices ever paid for them—1193 and 115% re- spectively. All the foreign money markets continue very easy. Silver bullion advanced in London to 524d. per ounce, and the bullion value here of the 4124-grain silver dollar to $0.8855. The Imperial Government of Austria has done a thing which if it had been done at the right moment by Prince Bismarck, would have saved Germany much shame, and if it had been done by the Czar a year ago, would have spared Russia great material loss and deep dis- grace in the eyes of the civilized world. There is justas much and just as little reason for anti- Semitic movements in Austria as there is in Germany or Russia. But the Imperial Prime Minister, Count Taaffe, has nipped them in the bud by issuing stringent orders forbidding all anti-Jewish demonstrations, and declaring the duty and the resolution of the Government to protect the rights of every subject, regard- less of politics or religion. In Germany the Jew-baiting movement has been suppressed by public opinion. The last elections showed that the disreputable disturbance had been caused by a very small minority of the people, who stopped their noise as soon as their fee- bleness was exposed. In Russia it will con- inue as long as the Government maintains an attitude leaving it uncertain on which side its sympathies are. In Austria and Germany people are sincerely ashamed of it, but in Russia they are not. Prince Gortchakoff has finally retired from office—we believe for the third time. His advanced age and long term of service have kept him on the point of retiring ever since he repudiated in 1870 the restrictions put on Russia in the Black Sea by the Treaty of Paris. This marked the close of that process of self- examination, not sulking, to which Russia, he said, ina famous mot, subjected herself after the Crimean war. It marked, too, her reap- pearance on the stage of European politics, and her readiness for any venture which might offer itself. For this rchabilitation the Empire was indebted to nobody so much as to the old diplomatist who is now disappearing, for this must be his last final departure. He belonged to the Metternich school of diplomacy, which plumed itself on its finesse, its reticences, its evasions, and its skill in the use of social in- fluences, and has, since the Emperor Nicholas’s death and the rise of Bismarck, had to play a game which was a lift!e too novel for en old man. Bismarck’s brutal frankness and truth fulness have in fact worked a change inthe methods of the art to which had learnt .t in the old days before 1859 could find it easy to adapt himself; and the Prussian was undoubtedly too much for Gortchakoll in the long game which preceded Sadowa The conditions of oilicial life in Russia, too since Nicholas’s death have changed. The good old times, which De Maistre describes, in which envoys and gene rals had nobody to account to but the sov nobody who cousiderably ercign, and no plaee in which they needed to stand well but the Cour‘, have come to an end in Russia as well as elsewhere. The great ad vantage which the Continental diplomatists used to enjoy over the English in having po public behind them, has been lost even by the Russian Foreign Office. Gortchakoft’s ‘‘ august master”—the Russians are the only diplomatists who make free use of the phrase —is really not his master any longer. There is behind the throne a power greater than the throne, and which the throne is vainly trying to shake off, but whose will is still somewhat inscrutable, and which a man of Gortcha koff’s training could never have effectively served. The world he leaves is in fact a new world, made by steam, electricity, and, though last not least, by dynamite and other explo- Sives. now There can be but little question that the ex hibition recently made of his treasury by the Sultan to General Wallace and Mr. Phelps was the result of his recent investigation of American matters through the former of these gentlemen. He doubtless heard of the ex- hibition of his securities made by Jay Gould, and thinks Gould is a great pasha, of unusual skill in ‘‘ squeezing” the taxpayers, and in all sorts of ways getting money out of people against their will, which 1s now the art which the Sultan estimates most highly. As he has several times within-the last year come near being out of mutton for the palace, owing to inability to pay a long-standing butcher's bill, and as he can borrow no more from the ‘*Galata bankers,” he probably thinks, from Jay Gould’s example. that by mercly ‘‘ show- ing his securities” he can revive his credit. This will hardly do in his case, however, be- cause he has no stock market to work on. Our advice to him is to get Gould to Constantino- ple, and put him at the head of the Ministry of Finance. We promise him that he will in three months open his eyes as to the resources of his unfortunate empire. Even Osman Pasha, the old ruffian who secures payment of his salary by knocking down the Treasury messengers and rifling their bags, thinks the Turks are a used-up people, but Gould would soon show bim his mistake,

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306 SUMMARY OF THE WEER’S NEWS. DOMESTIC. Tur President sent to the Senate on Wed- nesday a report of the Secretary of State re- lating to the American citizens imprisoned in Ireland, from which it appears that all but three of the prisoners have been set at liberty in respons tothe request of Mr. Lowell. Mr. Frelinghuysen further states that the negotia- tions have been carried on for some time ‘‘in i spirit of entire friendship.” The London Times says the Government hold all persons resident in Lreland liable to British law, and to be treated as British subjects, and that the naturalized subjects of the United States who have been released, were released for reasons entirely unconnected with their citizenship. The President sent a large batch of nomi- nations to the Senate on Thursday, among which were those of Senator Henry M. Teller, of Colorado, to be Secretary of the Interior, William E. Chandler, of New Hampshire, to be Secretary of the Navy, William H. Hunt, the Secretary of the Navy, to be Minister to Russia, and Roland Worthington, to be Col- lector of Customs at Boston. The last nomi- nation has been received with a general feel ing of disapproval throughout the country. The Senate took up the Chinese Billon Wed- nesday, and, on a motion to pass it over the veto, sustained the veto by a vote of 27 yeas to 21 nays. The bill to fix the day for the meeting of the electors of the President and Vice-Presi- dent, and to provide for and regulate the counting of votes for those oflicers, and for the decision of questions arising therefrom, was passed by a viva-roce vote by the Senate on Thursday. The Senate has passed a bill which opens the entire reservation recently occupied by the White River and Uncompahgre Utes to set- tlement. This tract of land, amounting to nearly 10,000,000 acres, is declared by the bill to be publie land, subject to disposal in ac- cordance with the regulations of the Ute Bill of the last Congress, Senator Dawes introduced a bill into the Senate on Thursday, appropriating $50,000 to provide for a deficiency in the subsistence of the Cheyenne and Arrapahoe Indians. He sub- mitted a telegram from General Pope, showing the necessity for an immediate appropriation to save these Indians from starvation, and ex- plained that the exhaustion of the regular ap- propriation had been caused bya rise in the price of beef, the principal element in Indian subsistence, and that an outbreak was threat- ened if the deficiency was not provided for. The Senate promptly passed the bill, but the House (by way of rebuke for encroachment on its prerogative) threw it out, and at once passed a bill of its own of the same tenor. \ resolution was passed by the Senate on Tuesday authorizing Lieutenant-Commander Sigsbee, United States Navy, to accept a decoration from the Emperor of Germany, and Senator Hawley to accept decorations tendered to him, as President of the Centen- nial Commission, by the Governments of the Netherlands, Spain, and Japan. The Hlouse passed the Army Appropriation Bill on Wednesday, and the Committee on Elections adopted, by a vote of 7 to 2, a resolution declaring that E, W. Mackey was duly elected and entitled to a seat as Repre- sentative from the contested Eleventh district of South Carolina. The debate on the bill to create a tariff com- mission continues in the House. The subject has been almost exhausted by the speeches which have already been made upon it, but there are over a hundred more members who have given their names to the Speaker as wishing to speak for or against the bill. The House Committee on Education and Labor has directed Representative Sherwin, The N a tion. of Alabama, to draft a bill to be submitted to the Committee, recommending that an appro- priation of $10,000,000 be made to be ex- pended throughout the United States for educational purposes in accordance with the ratio of illiteracy. The accounting officers of the Treasury, who were constituted a committee on the question of Government supplies, have made a report to Secretary Folger. They recommend that the existing laws be so amended as to do away with all advertising for proposals in the case of necessary articles of small value, and in the case of articles in which there cannot possibly be any competition. It is probable that Secretary Folger will bring the matter to the attention of Congress. The limited appropriation remaining at the disposal of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, and the expense of fitting out certain ships at the navy-yuards at New York, Boston, and Mare Island, California, have made it necessary to suspend work at all the other navy-yards until the next appropriation becomes available. Many artisans and laborers have thus been thrown out of employment. The Hydrographic Office at Washington has just perfected a new circumpolar chart show- ing the course of the Jeannette, the location of the islands discovered by Commander De Long, the boundaries of Wrangel Island, as recently determined by the United States ship Rodgers, and other valuable data, embraced, for the first time, in a chart of the Polar regions. The report of the Naval Board that exam- ined the Jeannette at San Francisco before she sailed in 1879 has just been made public. The report says, among other things, that it was not possible to make the Jeannette ‘‘ particu- larly adapted” for the service for which she was intended. It is regarded as singular that Commander De Long should have “been wil- ling to start in the Jeannette in the face of this report, as he had authority to buy a vessel that would be fit. . Secretary Hunt has received a despatch from Engineer Melville, dated Yakutsk, Janu- ary 27, in which he says that he has com- pleted all necessary arrangements for supplies and outfits for six months, and will ‘‘ leave this place for Bulun to-day, thence to the Lena delta to continue the search for missing comrades. The provision train is four days in advance of me, and, unless some unforeseen circumstance arises, | shall be at the Lena delta before March 1. No mails pass between Bulun and Yakutsk between March 8 and October; therefore no anxiety need be felt for the safety of myself and party for that time.’ teports received by the Agricultural De- partment at Washington show a hopeful pros- pect for good crops in the South. There is a general increase in the acreage of spring wheat and oats, and a slight decrease in that of cotton. The Secretary of War has not yet given out his report in the case of Sergeant Mason. It is said, however, that he has recommended a mitigation of the sentence to four or five months’ confinement in the regular guard- house, to forfeit all pay due or which may become due to him, and to be dishonorably dismissed from the service. Mrs. Scoville has filed a petition in the Coun- ty Court at Chicago, praying that a conservator be appointed for the person and estate of Charles J. Guiteau. She alleges that he is possessed of copyrights, manuscripts, etc., valued at several thousand dollars, and has a large income from the sale of photographs and autographs, and that by reason of his insanity he is incompetent to take charge of this property. She alleges also that he is negotiating a sale of his body to be preserved after death. In the Criminal Court at Washington on Monday Judge Wylie rendered his decision on the motion to quash the indictments in the Star-route conspiracy cases. He decided that the indictments were good and sufficient and [Number 876 must stand. It is believed that the cases will be brought to trial in May. The prosecution are confident that the same great array of evi- dence that secured the indictments will secure conviction, and the defence is said to be grow- ing despondent. 8. W. Dorsey having left WwW ‘ashington for New Mexico, his recognizance was declared forfeited and a bench-warrant issued for his arrest. Mr. Ker, of Philadel- phia, who drew up the indictments, said on Monday night that if Dorsey did not surrender himself no effort would be spared to find him, and, in conclusion, said, ‘‘ We have relied on Colonel Ingersoll’s honor, and he has prom- ised to produce his clients in court.” After Judge Wylie’s decision in the Star- route cases, on Monday, Colonel Totten, coun- sel for the defendants, stated that in the cases of Brady and Turner he had certain pleas of abatement to file, to the effect that, pe nding the time the Grand Jury were finding the in- dictment, certain persons other than the Dis- trict Attorney and his assistants had free ac- cess to the Grand Jury room, and laid before them pamphlets and other ex-parte evidence; but the court decided not to go into the matter. Mr. George M. Chilcott, of Pueblo, has been appointed United States Senator from Colo- rado, to succeed Mr. Teller, recently appointed Secretary of the Interior. The Senate and House Executive Commit- tees of the Democratic Congressional Cam- paign Committee met in Washington, on Mon- day, and elected General Rosecrans permanent chairman of the Joint Committee. The Republicans carried Rhode Island on Wednesday by 4,583 majority and elected a Legislature that will return Mr. Anthony to the Senate. A correspondence between Wharton Barker, a prominent Independent Republican of Penn- sylvania, and Mr. Mitchell, Senator from that State, has been published. Mr. Barker thinks that the Republican party will no longer be able to control Pennsylvania unless something be done to emancipate it from the control of the ‘‘ Machine” headed by Senator Cameron, and writes to ask Senator Mitchell to take some steps in the matter. The latter suggests a conference of regulars and independents. The Readjuster measure for redistricting Virginia for members of Congress, soas to give that party eight out of the ten members of Congress to which the State is entitled, pass- ed the House of Delegates on Saturday. Governor Cameron, of Virginie, has com- muted the sentence of the oyster dredgers, who were recently convicted of violating the oyster laws of the State, and sentenced to one year each in the Penitentiary. The captains are to be confined for sixty days in the County Jail, and all the seamen, except one, are par- doned. The Oregon Democratic Convention have adopted resolutions demanding the legislative regulation of railroads and the reform of the tariff. The resolution on the Chinese question states that the President’s veto of the Chinese Bill is a public misfortune, and that it treats with ‘‘contemptuous derision” the protests and appeals of the entire Pacific Coast. In behalf of the people of Oregon the veto is disapproved and condemned. The Mormon spring conference at Salt Lake City adjourned on Bandar. The Mormons purpose hereafter not to trade with Gentiles. A secret meeting of business men was held on Saturday, and stringent pledges to that effect were signet! The striking operatives of Fall River as represented in the Spinners’ Union have pub- lished a temperate and sensible address, in which they deplore the wide separation of capital and labor in the United States, and assert that only “foolish obstinacy and foolish pride” keep them apart. There is no material change in the condition of things at Lawrence; but ei few of the strikers have returned to wor

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Apr. 13, 1882] The Nation. M. de Struve, the new Russian Minister at Washington, was formally presented to the President, on Tuesday, by the Secretary of State. The boiler of the steamer Bella Mac ex- ploded near Brownsville, a few miles below Milwaukee, on Friday, killing six men and injuring many others. ; Jumbo, the elephant, arrived in New York by the steamer Assyrian Monarch on Sunday. He behaved well on the journey, and seems to be none the worse for it. FOREIGN. A Russian imperial ukase has been pub- lished, stating that in deference to the wish of Prince Gortchakoff, the Czar has relieved him of the functions of Minister of Foreign Affairs, on account of his shattered health and ad- vancing years. The Prince still retains the dignity of Imperial Chancellor and member of the Council of the Empire. By a second ukase, M. de Giers, who has been Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs for the last five years, was promoted to succeed Prince Gort- chakoff. This appointment is looked upon in Berlin as an ‘‘eminently pacific symptom,” and it is thought that it will do more to restore confidence regarding the intentions and policy of Russia than all the friendly assurances that have been hitherto received from St. Peters- burg. In Constantinople, also, the appoint- ment hus given great satisfaction. Because of the activity of the Nihilists of Moscow, the question of holding the coronation of the Czar elsewhere is being seriously dis- cussed. A despatch from Vienna to the London Daily News said that the Russian authorities took great precautions agaist a renewal of the anti-Jewish disturbances at Easter. Over 2,000 persons with unsatisfactory papers were expelled from Kieff. A despatch to London on Friday said that grave apprehensions have been felt in Warsaw of a renewal of the out- break against the Jews. Placards were post- ed threatening them, and causing great terror among the Jewish population. The Government ordered the shops to be closed, and took 1nili- tary precautions against an outbreak. Easter passed off in comparative quiet, however, and no serious disturbances have as yet occurred. Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland continue to arrive in the United States in con- siderable numbers. Count Taaffe, President of the Austrian Council and Minister of the Interior, has issued positive orders forbidding all meetings avowedly for the purpose of anti-Semitic demonstrations, and maintaining the duty of the Government to protect the rights of every sub- ject regardless of politics or religion. A meeting of the Mansion House Commit- tee, on behalf of the suffering Jews of Russia, was held in London on Thursday. A tele- gram from Mr. Laurence Oliphant, one of the honorary commissioners of the fund on the Continent, was read, which stated that 1,221 refugees had already registered at Brody, in Galicia. The committee’s fund was re- ported to have reached £66,000. The condition of lreland continues serious. The Coercion Act seems to be an admitted failure, and the Radicals are asking for the re- moval of Mr. Forster, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. Outrages of the most brutal kind continue. Mr. Smythe, a Westmeath land- lord, who, while returning from church a week ago last Sunday with some ladies, was fired at, but who escaped while one of the ladies was killed, has written a violent letter to Mr. Gladstone, in which he “lays the iit” of his sister-in-law’s murder at his oor, and says that ‘‘the terrorism existing under the protection of your police is so tre- mendous that I know there are but few who would venture to denounce the assassins had they seen them, Were they to do so their lives would certainly be forfeited, while the prisoners would almost as surely escape after the farce of a trial by jury.” Mayor Traill, a 307 resident magistrate of County Mayo, draws an interesting picture of the state of the county in a letter. He says he has often been threat- ened, and has been warned that his assassina- tion was not only planned but actually paid for. He never travels without the escort of two armed policemen and an armed groom, and his escort search all the plantations, hedges, etc., on the route; and the neighborhood of his house is patrolled all night by an armed guard, who are provided with dogs to aid in the search for explosives and assassins. Mr. Parnell was released for a week on parole on Monday, in order that he might visit a sister in Paris whose child had died. It was not generally known that he had only been released on parole, so the event was celebrated with great enthusiasm in parts of Ireland. In conversing with a triend on his way to Paris, Mr. Parnell said he had lhttle to com- plain of in regard to his treatment in prison. He and his imprisoned followers regarded the recent outrages with the greatest indigna- tion, and he expressed the belief taat the state of things in Ireland would improve if the Government introduced a bill to relieve the poor tenants of arrears of rent, and amended the clauses of the Land Act regarding pur- chase, so as practically to assist tenants to be- come owners of their farms—a result which he thought would go a long way to restore peace and order. The ‘‘no-rent”’ disturbances seem to have reached Scotland. Lord McDonald having sent summonses to twenty of the tenants on his estate of Skye, for non-payment of rent, the process-server was seized by a mob and warned not to return, and the summonses were burnt. The no-rent agitation is said to be rapidly spreading on the island. It is said that MacLean, who attempted to assassinate the Queen at Windsor, will be tried at Reading ‘‘ with unusual pomp.” A meeting was held at the Mansion House in London, the Lord Mayor presiding, on Wednesday, with a view to taking steps to raise a fund forassisting unemployed working people to emigrate to Canada. Sir Alexander T. Galt, the Canadian{High Commissioner, an- nounced that Canada offered to give £1 a head for certain families to which the Canadian Pacific Railway Company offered employ- ment. It was announced that £6,000 would ve required to start the scheme. ; The first of a series of large parties of colo- nists for Manitoba arrived in Halifax on Saturday. The party consisted of upward of 500 persons, and carried with them sums of money aggregating £500,000. The Easter Volunteer Review came off at Portsmouth, England, on Monday. The Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, and Sir Garnet Wolseley witnessed it. The returns issued by the Board of Trade show that during the month of March British imports increased, 1s compared with the same month last year, by £1,200,000, and that Brit- ish exports increased £1,900,000. Dean Bradley has issued a statement con- cerning the memorial window to Dean Stan- ley, subscribed to by Americans. He says that the list of subscribers thoroughly bears out the statement of the Rev. Phillips Brooks as to its widely representative character, and cites the names of our elder poets, including the late Mr. Longfellow. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the well-known English poet and painter, died on Tuesday, at the age of fifty-four. Sefor Sagasta, President of the Spanish Council, in replying to a deputation of Cata- lonian merchants, reiterated his refusal to make any modification of the commercial treaty with France. The Ministry count on 250 votes in the Chamber of Deputies in favor of the treaty. A meeting organized by Cata- lonian workmen was held in Madrid on Friday, at which free trade was denounced. It was declared that the treaty between France and Spain would be ruinous to Spanish industry, which the Government ought to foster by im posing high duties on foreign products. An anonymous proclamation has been circulated encouraging the workmen of Barcelona to per severe in their attitude of opposition to the Franco-Spanish treaty. Confidence has, how ever, been restored in a great measure inthe disturbed districts, and on Tuesday most of the shops and manufactories at Barcelona which were closed on account of the recent disturbances, were reopened, A syndicate of merchants has addressed a petition to the Spanish Cortes, praying that the Treaty of Commerce with France be ratitied only after an inquiry has been made by a com mittee into the industrial condition of the coun try. The improved state of affairsin Catalonia is said to be due to a report that the Govern- ment will consent to an amendment to the treaty providing that it may be terminated at the discretion of either Government. A despatch from Vienna says that the ‘*bitterly cold weather and frosts now pre vailing will, it is feared, greatly injure the crops. Fruit trees, vines, and young wheat in Rumania are almost entirely destroyed.” An official despatch published at Vienna states that the Austrian troops have completed the operations intended to clear the northern part of Crivoscie of insurgents. The Aus trians advanced until they sighted the Mon tenegrin cordon. and saluted the Montenegrin troops. The Porte, replying to the complaints of Bulgaria of the movement of Turkish troops near the frontier, stated that Bulgaria was aware of the efforts which are being made to produce a revolutionary movement, and should not be surprised at the Porte’s endeavor to guard against them. The Sultan of Turkey on Wednesday granted to General Wallace and Mr. Phelps, Ministers to Turkey and Austria respectively, the permission, now rarely given, to inspect the imperial treasury. A semi-oflicial newspaper in Constantinople says that the Porte has received a despatch announcing the movement of French troops toward the Tripolitan frontier, which inspires doubts of the value of the pacitic declarations of France. The Porte proposes to raise the effective force of Turkish troops in Tripoli to 30,000. News from Algiers announces that the French column has overtaken Bou Amena’s forces south of Fighig, and completely de feated them, capturing his provision train and twenty-six of his women. Almost all of the fighting men were killed or captured. Bou Amena himself escaped. Nearly all of the insurgents in the south of Tunis have taken refuge in Tripolitan territory. A despatch received from Tunis on Tuesday stated that the Wergama tribe, inhabiting the Tripolitan frontier, have petitioned to be allowed to lay down their arms, and it is believed that this will hasten the time when the various other tribes will submit. The French Government will despatch eight different expeditions to take observations on the transit of Venus on December 6, four of which will be stationed in the southern, and four in the northern hemisphere. M. Paul Bert, ex-Minister of Worship, has been elected a member of the French Acade- my of Sciences. Prince Bismarck, in reply to congratulations on his birthday extended by M. de Saburoff, the Russian Ambassador, wrote as follows: ‘‘It makes me happy to be able to inaugurate a new year of life by an expression of senti ments, personal and political, which facilitate the work in which we are both engaged.” A despatch from Cairo says that a plot has been discovered to assassinate Arabi Bey, Minister of War, and that many Circassian officers have been arrested in consequence. Tvespay, April 11, 1882.

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308 BRIGANDAGE AND PIETY. Tae extraordinary doing: in Missouri con- cerning the death and burial of Jesse James, the noted robber and murderer, have attracted a great deal of attention from the press, though hardly as much as they merit. James was a successful brigand of the worst kind for near- ly twenty years. He served as a guerilla in the war, and when peace was concluded be- came a common bandit of the Greek or Italian type, but without holding his victims to ran- there being no proper facilities in this country for transporting captives. His Operations, however, were extended over an area, and conducted with a boldness, which make the most famous of the Grecks or Italians seem a petty knave. He robbed all along the Mississippi, from Minne- sota down nearly to Louisiana, and some of his greatest exploits were performed in broad daylight, and not on lonely roads, but in the streets of small towns, and in business hours, and were frequently accom- panied by murder. In fact, when we consider the extent of country over which his jurisdic- tion extended, th» character of his crimes, the long period during which he enjoyed mm- punity, and the smallness of the force with which his blows were struck, we must admit him to be the greatest robber of either ancient or modern times, surpassing in many respects both the condottieri and the buccaneers. The manner of his death, too, has something unprecedented about it. All the great robbers of old times, and of other countries, lived in caves, or 12 mountain fastnesses,to which it was difficult for troops to pursue them, or in strong castles, or kept the sea in long, low, rakish black schooners. James, however, livedin a comfort- able house, surrounded by a loving family, and went off ou his expeditions apparently as a busi- ness man goes off to collect debts or to solicit orders. Moreover, although the State of Mis- souri had for long years been trying to arrest him, it was never able to do so, and in order to compass his death the Governor had to resort tu the means by which the Venctian Council of Ten and other me- dixval powers occasionally tried to get rid of obnoxious foreign sovereigns. He hired an assassin to go and kill him unawares, so that James really died what may be called a royal death. He fellas Henry IV., and William the Silent, and Admiral Coligny fell, the vic- tim of the hostility of a great community who were unable to get the better of him in open fight, but felt that his taking off was necessary to their safety and prosperity. The Governor in fact justifies his own course in language which might have been used by Elizabeth after the defeat of the Armada. He describes the assas- sination of James as the relief of the State from a great hindrance to its prosperity, and as likely to give an important stimulus to real- estate speculation, to raiiroad enterprise, and to forcign immigration. som, “Tf vou want to know the value of the deed,” he said, *‘ask the manacers of banks; ask the owners of Jand in thot part of the State; ask the managers of the many railroads constructed iu this State; ask the ticket agents at St. Louis, Kansas Citv, Omaha, and Chicago; ask the hotel keepers at St. Lows and Kansas City, ask the pro;erty-holders and real-estate agents at Kun- sas City and in Jackson County; ask those who own land in Clay and Platte; bear all their re- ‘The Nation. [Number &76

sponses, and then say it was not a good deed in behalf of law, order, and general prosperity.” James’s relations to the church, too, had a curiously medieval flavor about them. He was the son of a Baptist minister, but his career apparently did not strike his mother, or any of his family or neighbors, as in- consistent with the possession of a stock of fundamental and ineradicable piety. When he died, she rejoiced in the thought that he had gone to heaven. Two Baptist min- isters performed the funeral services, and a vast concourse of friends, including the sheriff, who was deeply affected, followed | the remains to the grave, not sorrowing, appa- rently, as those who are without hope. In fact, the James territory, which includes the adjacent corners of four States, is a region which seems closely to resemble in its reli- gious and moral condition a Frankish king- dom in Gaul in the sixth century. Every one knows how very early in the history of the | Church the tendency to make faith take the place of right living began to show itself. St. James had to warn the very first generation of Christians that pure religion and un- defiled consisted not in sound belief, but in good deeds. The difficulty of making peo- ple show their faith by their works has beset Christianity ever since. Barbarians rapidly accepted the Christian dogmas, and took eagerly to the rites and ceremonies of the Church, but they never were quite ready to accept its views about behavior. Gregory of Tours, in his most instructive chronicle, tells some very grotesque stories of the difficulties which the bishops had in Gaul in his day in refusing the communion to no- torious evil livers. One Frankish chicf—a great robber and cutthroat—insisted on having it administered to him, and the bishop had to let him have it, in order to save life, for he threatened to kill all the other communicants if he was not allowed to partake also. The comfort the Italian and Greek brigands find in the external observances of their creed, while committing the most atrocious crimes, is now an old story. <A sceptical or agnostic robber is in fact unknewn in eastern or south- ern Europe. The devout brigands all belong to the Catholic or Greek Church, which has always greaily exalted the value of external wor- ship and pious credulity, and thus furnishes only too much temptation to those who are ready to believe without limitation for the purpose of postponing any change in their habits. The Protestant Church has been much more exacting in the matter of conduct, and in fact has afferded in its teaching but few of the refuges for easy-going sinners which its great rival provides so plentifully. But the fight between faith and right-living neveitheless rages within its borders unceas- ingly, end not always to the advantage of the latter. It is not only in the James district in Missouri that one comes on the strange com- promises by which a certain external devout- hess is made to atone to the conscience not only for spiritual coldness, but for long and persistent violations of the fundamental rules of morality. tions about the state of society in that part of the country, they are hardly more start-

Startling as are these revela- | ling, everything considered, than the fre- quency with which our defaulters and em- bezzlers in this part of the world prove to have been vestrymen, deacons, Sunday-school superintendents, and prominent church mem- bers during long years of delinquency and perfidy. There is nothing new about it at all. It is, in fact, as we have said, simply another phase of one of the oldest struggles in the moral world. But the James story derives much freshness from the fact that he is prob- ably the first Protestant who managed to keep his standing good :n the local church and retain the affection of his pastor, and maintain a happy home, while openly pursuing robbery and murder as a profession. THE ‘‘ DUNGEON ” CORRESPONDENCE. THE official correspondence in the Irish ‘* dun- geon” cases has been communicated to Con. gress by Mr. Frelinghuysen. The correspon- dence begins in the Blaine period, and the first letter is an excellent specimen of the turgid, lurid, but somewhat obscure rhetoric in which Mr. Blaine was accustomed to open his diplo- matic controversies. He ought in common courtesy to have begun by finding out whether any American citizens had been imprisoned under the Coercion Act, but this was much too tame a method for his ardent and impres- sionable nature. He accordingly assumed at the very outset that the Act had been ap- plied to naturalized citizens of the United States ‘‘ whose business relations may render necessary their presence in Ireland,” or ‘‘ whose filial instincts and love for kindred may have prompted them to revisit their native country,” and then goes on to descrihe the manner in which these industrious and affectionate creatures ought to be tried, in- stead of pointing out the absurdity of try- ing them at all. They should, he said, ‘immediately upon arrest be informed of the specific crime or offence on which they were held, and be offered an opportunity for a speedy trial before an impartial court and jury,” all of which is ‘‘essential to every criminal prosecution.” But such naturalized citizens as he described and was writing about ought not to have been arrested or tried in any manner whatever, and it was a gratuitous piece of discourtesy to assume that the British Gov- ernment had done such a thing, or would think of doing it. The decencies of diplomatic inter- course, to say nothing of anything higher, re- quired Mr. Blaine to assume that if the British Government had arrested any naturalized citi- zen, it had some honest reason for believing that he had not returned to Ireland simply to revisit his aged parents, or prosecute some peaceful and respectable calling. Moreover, it was more than absurd to give the British a lecture on the mode of conducting criminal prosecutions—sometbing with which Lord Granville is probably as familiar as Mr. Blaine—before finding out exactly whether there were any American citizens who were in a position entitling them to the benefit of “those common principles of criminal juris- prudence” to which he called that pampered and haughty nobleman’s attention. Mr. Loweli’s answer brought the matter down to the regions of business and common

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mopapreensaomgrenese Apr. 13, 1882] 30 sense, which Mr. Blaine found so dull and dreary. It was in substance that as the matter in hand was to obtain a speedy trial or release for an American citizen, it would be just as well not to lecture the British Government on the impropriety of passing the Coercion Act, and not to undertake to instruct them as to the proper manner of conducting jury trials in criminal cases. Having thus cleared the ground of rhetorical rubbish, Mr. Lowell seems to have gone to work with businesslike judgment, first to find out what persons, if any, clamming American citizenship, were held in dungeons under the Coercion Act; next, whether their claims to American citizenship were well founded; and thirdly whether the British Government would release them if asked to do so. The result has been that of seven persons claiming American citizenship who have been arrested since January most have been released. Of these one is un- doubtedly not an American citizen. Another did reside in the United States after the war, during which he served in the Navy, and did apply for naturalization papers, but never got them until 1880, and has now been residing in Ireland and keeping a public house since 1875. He is accused not of ‘‘ business relations” in Ire- land, “‘ or filial instincts or love uf kindred,” but of participation in an attempt to murder a magistrate. Another, O'Connor, had an inter- view with Mr. I.owell, described in one of the latter’s despatches, in which he disclosed his strong desire for a war between England and America, but admitted that he was a bona- fide and permanent resident in Ireland. Al- though he was a Land League Secretary, Mr. Lowell suggested that he should not be locked up as long as he kept quiet. In fact, the sum and substance of the whole matter is that everything that can be done through the usual forms of intercourse between civilized nations, to procure the release or trial of every imprisoned Irishman who can make even a show of being an American citizen, has been done, and that these efforts have been remarkably successful aud are being con- tinued, although most of the objects are un- worthy of cither aid or interest. Only two things more remain to be said about it. One is that the precedents from our own diplomatic history which Mr. Lowell anticipates as likely to be cited against us, have not the importance which he seems to suppose, because they are war precedents. Our arbitrary imprisonment of foreigners, so far as it went, took place while war wus actu- ally raging on our own soil, a state of things for which there is no counterpart in Ireland. There the police holds the entire country, the courts are open, and any form of trial that Parliament chooses to prescribe can be peaceably and effectively held. Trial by jury is not, as Mr, Plaine, with characteris- tic inaccuracy, supposes, « foreigner’s right under international law. But some fair trial is his right iu time of peace. It is, however, discretionary with every government whether it will use i's influence or its power to obtain such trial for its citizens who have infringed foreign laws. The practice of our Govern- ment has hitherto been to deal with each case on its own merits, or, in other words, to let a The Nation. merely as a means of enabling him to defy the authorities of the country in which he has taken up his abode, get out of his scrape as best be can unless he chooses to come back to the country which he claims as his own, while fully protecting every honest man who has gone back to his native soil from motives cither of affection or of lawful pecuniary in- terest. SPANISH TROUBLES. Tne Sagasta Ministry in Spain has from the first determined to distinguish itself by all sorts of economic reforms; so many, in fact, that if they are all carried out, they will trans- form the kingdom, It has, however, to be borne in mind, in discussing Spanish affairs, that on immense amount of reform may be effected in legislation in that country of which no trace appears afterward in practice. At the last session of the Cortes, Seftor Comacho, the Minister of Finance, carried through very extensive changes in the system of internal taxation, including the reduction or aboiition of or change in the mode of assessing stamp duties, mining and real-estate taxes, taxcs on agricultural produce, the salt tax, in- ternal tolls on roads and bridges, besides alter- ing the system of keeping the public accounts, suppressing private lotteries, and opening new railroad and telegraph lines. Not con- tent with all this, he provided also for a ‘‘conversion” of the public debt, as he calls it, but really for its ‘‘ readjustment,” as it would be called in Virginia, or ‘‘ scaling down,” as it would be called in Tennessee, or its partial repudiation, as it would be and is called in other parts of the world. The Span- ish debt has been readjusted six times already within the present century. Each new régime which has come into power has felt unable to pay the interest, but has been too proud to re- sort to the plan of drawing a sponge over the whole account and making a new departure, although this expedient was actually resorted to in 1746 by Ferdinand VI. He found his father’s debts an inconvenient burden, and got a junta, composed of bishops, ministers, and lawyers, to declare that a king was not bound to discharge the debts of his predecessors; whereupon he indulged in a wholesale repu- diation, and begav borrowing anew, as did his successor, during the troubles following the French Revolution. At the close of the Revo- lutionary period nobody knew what the debt was exactly, and there were constant disputes about its amount till 1851, when it was de- cided to be about $550,000,000, and was di- vided into halves, once being called ‘‘ active,” on which interest was to be paid, the other ‘‘ pas- sive,” un which no interest was to be paid, but which was to be gradually redeemed. It is needless to say that neither the interest of the active nor the principal of the passive was ever forthcoming. On the contrary, the Government went on steadily increasing what was practically the passive, until, in 1870, the total debt was supposed to amount to about $1,185,000,000. Since then deticits have oc- curred every year, and the ‘floating debt "— or debt which could ne contracted without borrowing—has been largely increased. In person whose American citizenship is used ‘ 1876 a scaling operation was again performed, SSS ae ——_———SSESS the bondholders submitting to a considerable reduction of the principal in consideration of three per cent. interest to be paid regularly. But it has not been paid regularly, and Seflor Comacho now proposes another scaling, by which the principal will be again reduced over fifty-six percent., but the interest promised is to be four per cent. instead of three. Some of the bonds affected by this arrangement are held in Spain, and the holders of these the Minister has at his mercy. They cannot choose but submit. The foreigners, however, mainly Dutchmen and Englishmen, are not so tract- able, and are tired of scaling. They according- ly refuse his terms. They have in their hands, too, the means of coercing bim to a certain ex- tent. Before 1876, Spanish bonds had been for a long time excluded from the lists of the Lon- don and Amsterdam Exchanges, as a punish- ment for repeated acts of bad faith ; and as long as this exclusion lasted, of course, no fresh foreign loans were possible, and Lome loans were out of the question--Spaniurds, be- sides being poor, being much too shrewd to lend money to their own Government. In order to prevent this lust scaling having the same dis- agreeable consequences, Sefior Comacho asks the foreign bondholders not only to submit to the reduction of their principal, but in doing so to sign 2 pyper acknowledging that ‘all their rights are wholly satisfied.” This they absolutely refuse; and unless they do it, his new bonds will be excluded from quotation both in London and Amsterdam, and his hopes of a new loan nipped in the bud. His difficulties have been increased by the resolute opposition of the Catalonians, who carry on most of the manufacturing industry of Spain, to the commercial treaty which he proposes to conclude with France as part of his system of economic retorm. In this he makes heavy concessions to the French on the cotton, silk, and woollen goods of which the province has until now enjoyed a mono- poly. The manufacturers made a determined effort in the Cortes to arrest the negotiations, but without success, and the workingmen, par- tcularly in Barcelona, have of late shown a disposition to rise in insurrection sooner than submit to the competition of ‘‘ the pauper labor of France.” A great deal of violence has al- ready occurred, and more is expected, in anti- cipation of which the Government hes been compelled to pour huge bodies of troops into Barcelona and the other large towns, Nor is the discontent of the working classes contined to Catalonia. It has show: itself in Madrid and cvery place clse in which there are native manutactures, But its the Cata- lonian discontent which is most formidable, vecause the population far surpasses that of the rest of Spain both in energy and capacity, and is markedly indifferent to the national traditions. It is also much permeated by socialistic ideas, and has a deep-seated hatred of the clergy. In troublous times in Barce- lona it is dangerous for a priest to show himself in the streets. This being the case, one might naturally expect that turbulence in such a region would give no comfort to the reactionary party, whether Carlist or Clerical. But, curiously enough, it does. In Spanish politics, it is more than usually true that ‘ it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.” The

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310 Opposition to the established Government never had much sense of responsibility, and it has now less than ever. Its great object is always to bring about, in any way that offers itself, The Re publicans are ready to use this weapon against the failure of the existing régime. the Conservatives, the Carlists against the Con- stitutionalists, and the Clericals against every- body who is not a Clerical. Consequently, the turbulence of the Catalonian protectionists, socialists, and infidels, is grist for the Carlist mill, and they are doing their best to take ad- vantage of it. If it could be fanned into revo- lution, and the present monarchy should disap- pear in a general deédicle, they would desire no- thing better, for in a déhicle in Spain every thing is possible and one thing about as proba- They are, however, not likely to be gratified. Inthe work of economic re- form the Ministry has the support of the na- tional Republicans, like and the Army, which counts for so much in Spanish politics, has but little sympathy with the griefs of riotous operatives. ble as another. Castelar; THE NEW RULES OF PROCEDURE. LONDON, March 28, 1882. THOSE who in America follow the course of English politics must have been surprised to ob- serve the great warmth with which the question of altering the procedure of the House of Com- mons,by introducing a rule similar to your “‘ pre- vious question,” is discussed. You naturally ask, tirstly, how it happens that up till now there should not exist any standing order under which a debate can be closed, however long it may have lasted, and however small may be the mi- nority which seeks to continue it; and secondly, why itis that a change which might appear to be a mere matter of general convenience, equally to be desired or opposed by both the great par- ties, should now be vehemently urged by the one and opposed by the other. I shall try to answer both these questions. Down till the Reform Bill of 1832 the House of Commons was practically a small body. Its number was indeed very large when compared with the population of the country and with representative assemblies in other countries; but of this large number comparatively few attended the ordinary proceedings. When a great party debate or division was to be taken, mem- bers were whipped up from their country houses; but during nine-tenths of the session only a third or a fourth of the total were in constant attendance, and of this number very few took part in the discussions. In the great days of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox only some twenty or thirty mem- bers were in the habit of speaking, representing the Ministry on the one side and the leaders of the regular Opposition on the other. Moreover, the debates were generally short, as short as those of the House of Lords are now. Even in the de- cade before 1852, they generally lasted not more than two or three hours in each day, and turned on comparatively few questions, which were discussed with much oratorical dignity, but rather in the spirit and tone of an aristocratic assembly like the Roman Senate than of a body of practical business men dealing with compli- cated practical questions. The members be- longed exclusively to the upper classes; a great proportion of them represented pocket boroughs, and owed allegiance to the owners of those boroughs; the rest were very obedient to the leaders of their party, and controlled by the general sentiment of the aristocratic society to whieh they belonged. Not only was there no ‘The Nation. idea of obstruction, but the social pressure was so strong that any member who made himself a bore by long speeches or frequent speeches was very soon put down. The Reform Bill of 1852 completely changed the functions and duties of the House, but did not so quickly nor so completely affect its com- position. It found itself confronted by a host of great administrative and legal problems, which threw on it a tremendous mass of work. The sittings became long, and the topics discussed called out a much larger number of speakers. Assiduously as the House labored, new tasks were always arising, new arrears of work accumulat- ing. At length, after some ten or fifteen years, a class of men began to find their way in who had been previously unknown—men of whom Mr.Cob- den and Mr. Bright were the most conspicuous types, who did not belong to the upper ranks, and did not care for the social influences which had hitherto swayed Parliament. They brought in new elements of knowledge, and expressed with force and freedom the sentiments and demands of the middle classes, to some extent of the working classes also. Thus the number of speakers was always increasing, and debates came tobe less and less under the control of the recognized party leaders. The immense growth of administrative business, the additional sub- jects for discussion which were due to the deve- lopment of trade, the creation of railways, the expansion of our colonial empire, the complaints of the Irish people, whose voice was at last freely heard, the tendency of the House of Commons to draw all sorts of executive matters within its cognizance—all these causes piled up the load of business on the House, while at the same time the always increasing number of persons who attended regularly and wished to speak made it more and more difficult to get this business de- spatched. At last, about ten years ago, syste- matic obstruction began to appear. Occasional instances had occurred before, but it was not regularly practised till, in the year 1872, it was employed by some Tory members to delay a bill brought in for alterations in our military sys- tem. In the next Parliament these first crude be- ginnings were followed up by asection of the Trish members, who raised obstruction to the dignity of a science, and succeeded, chiefly by the ingenuity, skill, and tenacity of Mr. Parnell, in all but stop- ping the Parliamentary machine. The evil, which might possibly have been arrested in its infancy by a vigorous leader of the House, appeared at an unlucky time, because Mr. Disraeli had just quitted the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone was in opposition, and Sir Stafford Northcote, who led the majority, was new to his duties, and showed himself too kindly and good-natured to act with sufficient severity. Remedies of course were tried, but so far they have proved futile, and the experience of last session, when the dead- lock was only relieved by the unprecedented action of the Speaker in stopping an unprece- dentedly protracted debate, in which the Irish members had kept the House sitting through forty-two continuous hours, convinced nearly everybody that some stronger measures must be adopted. This is, in brief, the history of the subject. No provision for closing a debate against the will of any members who seek to go on speaking has existed, because, until some thirty years ago, members belonging almost exclusively to what is called ‘‘ Society ” were controlled by the opin- ion of Society, and by their sense of party allegiance ; and because it is only quite lately that a section of the representatives of Ireland have taken up an irreconcilable attitude. Not, however, that Irish members are the only ob- structives. They may claim to have perfected the art, but it is one which members of both the | Number 876 English parties have occasionally employed, and will doubtless continue to employ, unless some means be devised of checking its employment. Add to this the fact that, even apart from sys- tematic obstruction, the House of Commons is unable to grapple with its increasing work, that its debates grow longer because more men want to speak, and more subjects turn up for discussion, and it will easily be seen that our position is a serious one. Something must be done if the popular House is to retain its func- tions in the government of the country and the empire. Why then, it may well be asked--and this is the second point I desire to explain—why should so great a reluctance be felt to adopt the obvious and simple expedient of enabling a majority to close the debate by voting that the main question be now put? There are three principal reasons. The first is the strong conservative sentiment of what may be called a corporate body. Eng- lishmen are pretty tenacious of old usage in all things, and wisely so ; but in an assembly like the House of Commons the unwillingness of se- nior members to change the rules they have been accustomed to, even when those rules cause them personal inconvenience, is a notable phenomenon. The second is the idea that, somehow or other, the right of free speech will be trenched upon. So long as every member can have his say there is, it is argued, a security for the expression of every shade of opinion, for the unmasking of any mischievous schemes a Government may contemplate, for the advocacy of unpopular causes. Once this is gone, who can say to what lengths the tyranny of a majority may not proceed? A powerful Minister, sup- ported by acompact majority, may run measures through the House which may seriously affect the rights of particular classes before those classes have had a chance of stating their case in defence. Private members may be refused a hearing; the control of Parliament over the Executive may be reduced to a nullity. Argu- ments like these affect persons of all parties; not only the Tories, who, of course, oppose a pro- vosal coming from Mr. Gladstone, but also a certain number of more cautious or timid Libe- rals, and a small number of Radicals. Finally, the whole mass of the Tory party objects to the proposal because, being now in a minority, and expecting to be more often than not in a minority, they think it will be used to silence them, and possibly to bring about revolutionary changes. It is all very well to urge that the House of Commons cannot get on under its pres ent rules: they reply that after all it has flou- rished for more than six centuries, and that other less drastic measures, particularly the increase of a penal jurisdiction over individual offending members, would be sufficient to restore its effi- ciency. Many add that they would rather put up with all the inconveniences of the existing system than place themselves at the mercy of a Liberal majority. As to the Parnellite section of the Irish party, they are of course strenuously opposed, because it is they who would be the first subjects of the rule if introduced. Between all these elements of hostility the position of the Government is not an easy one. A good many of their habitual supporters—some say seventy or eighty—do not like the resolution in which Mr. Gladstone has embodied his new rule. Most of these, no doubt, will yield to pres- sure—that is, to the threat that if the resolution be lost, Mr. Gladstone will either dissolve or re- sign. Some few of the more obstinate may vote with the Tory Opposition; others may stay away; but the great bulk, dreading the dis- pleasure of their constitueuts, will follow the Government. It will pretty certainly secure a majority. But to obtain only a small majority

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& 1 a] ME Vt OE Bs 4 ee Apr. 13, 1882 | will be a sort of moral defeat, weakening its prestige, and increasing the risk of its being found in a minority in a division on some of the various minor amendments suggested to Mr. Gladstone’s proposal. Besides, it is always a misfortune for a Ministry to have to threaten any of its own supporters. They may submit for the moment, but they resent the appearance of dictation, and do not readily return to their former attitude of loyal confidence. There is, therefore, some anxiety felt as to the issue of this debate, which, having now proceeded for three nights, is hkely to extend over many more be- fore the rule is finally settled. Probably the most dangerous division will be on one of the amendments which raises the question whether the power to close a debate ought not to be vested in a majority of two-thirds rather than in a bare majority. This compromise pleases most of the hesitating Liberals and would be accepted by most of the Tories. Mr. Glad- stone refuses it because it would involve the leader of the majority in negotiations with the leader of the Opposition, and raise the latter into a position of responsibility, almost of power, for which there is no precedent. Others reject it because they think it would so weaken the rule as to make it almost useless, while at the same time it would bear just as hardly upon the rights of a small minority as would the closing of debate by a bare majority. However, that large class of people who think that a middle course is likely to be right because it is a middle course, look favorably on the two-thirds plan, so possibly the Government may elect rather to yield than run the risk of defeat. pz THE DEFEAT OF THE TOBACCO MONO- POLY. BERLIN, March 28, THE less expected the more gratifying was the news that the Volkswirthschaftsrath (Conseil Supérieur de Commeree) had rejected the to- bacco monopoly. In itself this result is of little consequence, as that board of so-called experts numbers only two out of its seventy-five members who are really tobacco experts, the one a manu- facturer and the other a planter. All the rest are wholly ignorant of everything concerning tobacco. Besides, the majority is so small— viz., thirty-three to thirty-one—that the decision might just as well have been on the opposite side; but it is nevertheless a great relief, not un- mixed with malicious joy, to the great majority of the people. The most exhilarating part of the whole performance, however, has been the discouragement of the official press and of Bismarck’s organs, and their subsequent reco- very in virtue of certain arithmetical calcula- tions. The Government’s “‘Own,” the Nord- deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, was richest in the manifestation of this sudden change of mind. For the first two days after the negative vote had been given, it did not dare to utter a word; then it mustered courage and declared that the majority of the Volkswirthschaftsrath had de- cided in favor of the monopoly. Its reasoning runs thus: ‘‘The majority were in favor of a higher duty and tax on tobacco; it is, therefore, the minority only which voted against such rais- ing. A minority, of course, has nothing to say as to how tobacco should be taxed. Of the ma- jority, however, a majority has declared for the monopoly, and this majority of the majority must be respected as the majority of the whole body.” I wonder that the worthy pa- per stops at this calculation in its funny argu- ment, Suppose that among the thirty-one members who voted for the monopoly, there were sixteen who were against allowing dama- ges as proposed by the Government, then the majority of the whole board would have given The Nation. 311 its vote against a higher indemnification. And | the masses than even the monopoly, and let it be further supposed that among these six- teen there were nine who wanted to reduce still more the Government’s demands, and that among these nine there were five who pre- ferred to pay no damages at all; then, ac- cording to the reasoning of the ofticial press, it would follow, as a matter of course, that the ma- jority was in favor of the monopoly withoutany payment of damages to the parties now interest- ed in the tobacco trade. Thus there is not the least difficulty in proving that two are a majo- rity of seventy-five. ‘‘Speed and alacrity,” says the prestidigitator, ‘‘is not sorcery ” (Geschwin- digkeit ist keine Hexerei). When the official mouthpieces of the Chancel- lor saw that these tricks were laughed at, they pro- posed that the eleven members who had not been present at the voting should be asked for their vote by letter; but they finally found out that the majority of these men too were against the monopoly. As they did not wish practically to turn to account their ingenious majority calcu- lation, they likewise dropped this new improve- ment in parliamentary practice. In any other country such a defeat, brought about by a body which was expressly invented and appointed for the purpose of voting the Chancellor’s most obnoxious plan, would have buried a mea- sure which from the beginning has been op- posed by the people. Bismarck, however, is not the man to submit with grace to a popular verdict. On the contrary, he challenges public opinion, and has no thought of confessing him- self beaten. He therefore will not withdraw bis pet measure, but will bring it before the Reichs- tag, to be convoked in May next. First, how- ever, he has to lay it before the Bundesrath. As matters stand at present, he will, in the begin- ning, meet with a vehement opposition, although he wilt finally obtain a majority. Of the fifty- eight votes of the Bundesrath, Prussia commands seventeen. She is sure of the votes of the smaller states and of Wiirtemberg, which poll twenty- two votes together, thus making thirty-nine in all; these, even if one or the other in the last hour should join the anti-monopolists, would still form a large majority over the legally-required number of twenty-nine. Positively opposed to Bismarck on this question are Saxony, with four, Baden, with three, Hesse, with three, and the thre» Hanse towns, with three together, amount- ing to thirteen in all. Even should doubtful Ba- varia throw her six votes against the Chancellor, twenty votes would probably be the utmost that the Opposition could command. In the Reichstag, however, Bismarck will be defeated, unless in the meantime he can barter for about one-half of the votes of the Centre. This I think is impossible. It is true, these men are equal to any emergency, and they will be ready to sell their votes fora satisfactory com- pensation, but what is satisfactory to them will not be satisfactory to Bismarck, who in spite of all the advances made to the Pope cannot come to terms with him. Any prospect of effecting a compromise is now further off than at any pre- vious time, and, besides, the Ultramontanes will ultimately hesitate to make themselves unpo- pular with their constituents. I therefore con- sider his endeavors to gain the Centre over to his side asentirely futile. What next! Bismarck will not give up his plan until he has exhausted his last resources. Do not forget that he is bound to raise more money for realizing at least part of his social programme held out to the working classes. When the monopoly is defeated he will fall back on some other method of making to- bacco bleed; probably on the American sys- tem, as it sharply controls and most heavily falls on the small home manufacturer. This system, in my opinion, will be more unpopular among may possibly reconcile them to the latte: As far asI can judge, the American law is not always strictly complied with : compromises with Government spies, tax-gatherers, and inte: nal-revenue officers are not uncommon; but here the police and Custom-house people will carry out their instructions to the letter, and by mo lesting tne manufacturers and imposing fines drive them to despair, while the profits of the trade will be thrown into the hands of the capi talist and large manufacturer. The only advan tage of the American system would be the con tinuance of Bremen as a large port, the chief im portance of which is based on tobacco. Some people apprehend that Bismarck would dissolve the Reichstag if it voted aguinst th: monopoly. [ do not think so, because, if he should, he would be sure to obtain, and not in this respect alone, a still more unruly majority against his plans. For the present, however, ly needs a more popular pretext, and it is more than uncertain whether he will find one. Othe: countries try to get rid of or solve difficult problems pressing on them. Here the powerful Chancellor systematically hunts them up for the purpose of intimidating or tiring out the people, in order to make it: more subservient to his ends. All he desires is to carry out his abso lutistic schemes, which, in spite of their tendency, he knows how to adapt skilfully to a constitu tional form. For a long while people did not understand the far-reaching bearmg of this policy, but finally they have appreciated its dangers, and they are now on their guard. The charm is broken; the number of his most devoted admirers is daily diminishing, and his popularity is dwindling, to say the least. It will not last long, and Bismarck will stand alone on one side, with nothing but his contemptible tools as his fol lowers, and on the other he will find the intellect, the independence, and generosity of the whole nation his opponents. Even the Second Chamber of the Grand Duchy of Baden unanimously voted the other day against the tobacco monopo- ly, while in former years no part of Germany contained so many enthusiastic supporters of the Chancellor as Baden, The same can to-day be said of the Liberals of Wiirtemberg. In Prussia he sues more and more opponents for libel and slan- der. The Bismarck offence is a standing charge on our courtcalendars. Among the last indicted is Professor Mommsen, for having said (Momm sen contradicts it) that more and more every day Bismarck showed himself a Merovingian major- domo, At the late supplementary election for the Reichstag held in Bunzlau, in Silesia, in place of the Conservative ex-Minister Falk, who had resigned, a member of the Party of Progress was chosen, while a very able but politically nondescript candidate, Dr. Engel, hitherto the chiet of our Statistical Bureau, was defeated, It is now no longer a mystery, even to tlie su perficial observer of our political development, that we are drifting into a centralization in comparison with which the French governmen tal machine 1s almost powerless. Whatever may be the political defects of the German, he hates all centralizing tendencies, and is perhaps too ob- stinate and too stubborn to submit uncondition ally to a majority. It was Bismarck himself who once said, that whenever there were two Germans together, there were three different opinions among them. If it were only in the px litacal field that the Chancellor had successfully concentrated all state functions, his absoiutistic aims at unification might be pleaded as an ex cuse; but he stretches out his hands into domains which belong to the individual sphere of the citizen and never ought to be interfered with. It often seems as if he had set up the Jesuits of Paraguay for his model. Atthe same time he is

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312 very cautious not to disturb the state rights, which ought to be weakened instead of being strengthened, for he knows very well that on the part of the petty sovercigns he would mect with 2 very energetic opposition. For this rea- on the small kings and princes have thus far been most obedient followers, while the Chancellor tries to prove by bis relations to the his Powers that he is far from any centralizing ten- dency. In refraining from violent encroach- ments upon the reserved rights of the small states, he puts all his energy and influence to work in order to realize his social schemes and to monopolize the whole economical and social life of thecountry. The state-rights men (Pu7- ticularisten) are so foolish as to believe that they have secured their aims, and do not see that they are only helping to lead the current into a course which some fine day will carry away their dams also, ; : Betore the last elections people could not dis- cern that Bismarck’s method was very dangerous toself- government in state and town. They hailed his promises that the Government would charge itself with the care of the poor, the maintenance of schools, and the grant of money to towns for improvements and meliorations. They did not understand that the assignment of the state taxes to the towns and communes implied a gross injustice to the poor in favor of the large real-estate owners, and such a crying inequality for the taxpayer that the solution of this prob- lem cannot go beyond the first stage of experi- ment. The principal result of our late progress consists in the appreciation of the fact that the power of the Government is swelling gigantical- ly. Tho intyinsic parts of this process begin to be distinguished by those who till now have been indifferent to the deterioration of our political life. The defeat of the tobacco monopoly marks a salutary change in our public affairs. ‘‘ No new taxes shall be laid,” is the general demand of the Liberals, ‘before their necessity be proved; but, when proved, we will suffer no new the same time those The next elections will +++ taxes without increasing at on spirits and whiskey.” prove this important change. THE PRECURSORS OF THE RENAIS- SANCE. Panis, March 16, 1882. M. MWuntTz, the learned librarian of our Na- tional School of Fine Arts, has given us a most interesting work on ‘ Les Précurseurs de la Re- naissance.’ There is perhaps no branch of lite- rature which blooms like the literature of art, as it combines interesting historical and esthetic details with the beauty of illustrations. The work of M. Muntz is not the history of the origin of the Italian Itenaissance ; under the name of **precursors” he chiefly takes the men who in Italy, and more especially in Tuscany, were the promoters of the new ideas, whether they were artists, archwologists, or even amateurs, from Frederic the Second and Nicholas of Pisa to Lorenzo the Magnificent. His work ends before the normal and progressive development—before Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo. M. Muntz notices with reason that there is no exact parallelism between the development of art and the development of literature. The first great precursor, the renovator of the art of sta- tuary in Italy, Nicculo Pisano, lived seventy years before the renovators of classical studies— Petrarchand Boceacero. ‘Theattempt of Niccolo Pisano was, so to speak, premature ; a second reuovation of art became necessary after him. The victory over Gothic art was not complete at first; it was really only achieved by Brunellesco and Donatello. The Nation. Niccolo Pisano has much exercised the imagi- nation of the lovers of art. We know now that he was born in Pisa, and really deserved the name of Pisano; but must we admit, with Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, with Springer, Schnaase, and others, that he studied art in South Italy and got his inspiration from the models he could find at Capua, at Solerno, at Amalfi, at Troja? Or must we believe, with C. Perkins, Dobbert, Milanesi, Hettner, Bode, that, his mind was really formed in Tuscany, and that, by the sole force of his genius, he rose above the vulzar masons of Pisa, of Florence, of Pistoia, of Lucca? ‘ This second hypothesis,” says M. Muntz, ‘‘which is in accordance with the testimony of Vasari, has now for its parti- sans ali impartial minds. The constituent cle- ments of the style of Niccolo Pisano can all he reduced to the models which the artist found in his native city—that is to say, to the sarcophagi and the vases now preserved in the Campo San- to, and, among them, especially the sarcophagus which represents the history of Phaedra and Hip- polytus, and which received the bones of the Countess Beatrix, the mother of the famors Countess Matilda.” Niccolo afterward visited all the cities of Italy, and was able to study the innumerable remains of antiquity at Rome, Pavia, Venice, etc. In his ‘Origins of the Renaissance in Italy,’ Gebbart has passed a very excellent judgment on the work of Niccolo Pisano : ‘‘ Niccolo, in the pulpits of Pisa and Sienna, and in the coffers of Saint Dominico in Bologna, restored the tra- ditions of the great art with an innocent gravity and a sure taste. He is not a neo-Greek, nor a superstitious antiquarian ; he is penetrated with the most general principles of antique sculpture ; ‘ but his eye and his hand have still the habits of the primitive sculptors: the movements are timid and awkward, the figures often heavy. His works give the impression of those of the end of the Empire. . . . Niccolo Pisano, if be discovered and studied Greece, did not renounce nature, and, in his best works, he is a close ob- server of life.’ The son of Niccolo, Giovanni (1240-1320), is a champion of naturalism ; he is dramatic, often violent, semi-barbarous. Remi- niscences of antiquity are found here and there, but the whole of his work marks the era of the triumph of Gothic style. The same can be said of all the school of the Pisani. Giotto, the founder of the Florentine schcol of painting, had not the same advantages as Niccolo Pisano: the frescoes of antiquity were as rare as the remains of antique scu]pture were abundant, Still, Giotto was seduced by antique models ; he constantly borrowed ideas taken from old mont- ments. You can see it at Assisi, at Padua, in that Christian monument of art, the Capella deli’ Arena. Such traces of antique forms and models can be found in the works of Simone di Memmi, of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, of Taddco Bartolo. It is a curious fact that Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, was, in the fifteenth century, very poor in antiqueremains. The rep- resentatives of science, the great writers, be- came the allies of the sculptors and of the paint- ers. M. Muntz gives us curious documents con- cerning the precursors of Donatello. In his opinion, the great renovation of the fifteenth century bad its origin in the journey which Brunellesco and Donatello made together to Rome, toward 1403. They rediscovered, as it were, the vld world ; they studied every column, every ruin along the Via Latina or the Via Appia ; they had the enthusiasm of genius. Can there be a more original, a more extraordinary creator than Donatello? He is, as it were, a connecting link between the past and the future. Sometimes he humbly copies the antique forms, sometimes he seems jealous of his independence. | character. r 876 [ Numbe He is an idealist one day, and the next day a realist ; he has a double soul. Ghiberti was a passionate lover of antiquity : the first book of his ‘Commentaries’ is a history of art in Greece andin Rome. This essay was probably inspired by conversation with Niccold Niccoli and Poggio. Rio has remarked the pre- ference which Ghiberti gives to Greek art ovcr Roman art. ‘‘ What strikes us before all,” says he, “is hisexclusive passion fcr Greek sculpture. He keeps a disdainful silence as to the monu- ments of imperial Rome which he had seen, and makes not the slightest allusion to the collection of statues which was then in the garden of the Medici.” Ghiberti describes with much enthu- siasm three fine statues which were discovered in his time in Rome, near the church of San Celso. Inthe doors of the Baptistery of Flcrence we find some figures which have a purely Greek Still, the author of these famous doors belongs to the Middle Ages, and the imita- | tion of antiquity is reduced merely to some de- | tails. The style is, on the whole, profoundly Chiistian. Alberti was the richest organization of the first Renaissance, the true precursor of Leonardo da Vinci. He was an artist and a humanist ; he wrote comedies in Latin ; he studied science ; he wrote the famous ‘De re ex‘ificatoria’; he was fascinated by the monuments of antiquity. I have spoken lately of the temple which he built in Rimini for the Malatestas. He wrote aiso a treatise on painting; he tried to revive the Greco-Roman world. His friend Rossellino in- spired himself with the same principles ; he copied in the Palazzo Piccolomini at Pienza and in the first Palazzo Ruccellai the masterpiece of Alberti, which is in Florence. We come now to the masters who were op- posed to the invasion of antique forms and formulas. Lucas della Robbia was the chief of a dynasty which was in opposition to the new ideas ; he was purely realistic and Christian ; he was a mystic. Masaccio seems to have never even glanced at a Greek or a Itoman statue ; he was a mere naturalist. So was Panicale da Massolino ; so were Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Piero cella Francesca. The pious Fra Angelico had a true Christian spirit ; still, like Donatello, he was capable of understanding the past. His frescoes of the chapel of the Vatican, representing the lives of Saint Stephenand Saint Lawrence, show us ‘the painter par caxcellence of Christianity sacrificing on the altar of the Greek and of the Roman genius.” ‘The thought is Christian; the forms, the composition, the types sre influenced by the old models. M. Muntz not only gives us a profound analysis of the work of the precursors ; he enters into minute details about the great collectors and archxologists of their time, Niccold Niccoli, Ambrosius of Camaldoli, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio, and, above all, the Medicis. He descrbes the court of Cosmo de’ Medici and of his children, and explains the great influence of Lorenzo il Magnifico. This family of the Medicis will always be remembered in the bhis- tory of art. If other sovereigns m Italy can rival them in their sacrifices, there will always be in the efforts of the Medicis a trait which will seduce the historian—I mean the familiarity which was established between them and the artists. They were really the friends of the men whom they protected. Their taste was delicate and severe ; their collections became a treasure for the world ; their inventories are among the most precious documents on art. Their library was magnificent. The Renaissance never showed a more brilliant organization than Lorenzo de’ Medici. He seduced his age by his courtesy, his intellect, his generosity ; his mind was universal. He was the first founder of a school of fine arts,

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Apr. 13, 1882] The Nation. He was a passionate admirer of antiquity, of its philosophy, of its art. He worshipped Plato as well as Praxiteles. He was for a quarter of a century the great arbiter in matters of art. His authority was felt in all Europe. He chose architects, painters, sculptors for all the sove- reigns. The artists loved to present to him their choicest works ; they knew that they would be repaid a hundredfold. He was so generous that finally he embarrassed his finances. M. Muntz bas been able, by using various documents, some of which are inedited, to give us a complete account of the various collections of Lorenzo. Irom the time of Lorenzo dates the thorough triumph of antiquity ; the antique formulas and ty pes are adopted by all the worshippers of pro- gress. They not only introduce some antique details into Christian subjects—V eroccbio, Palla- juolo, Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, Filip- pino Lippi delight in some subject taken from the Greeks or from the Romans. Science begins to take the place of inspiration. The old world, as it is represented by these artists of the fifteenth century, is defective ; they have not the quiet gravity, the calm simplicity of the precursors ; their buildings are too complex, their draperies too much agitated. Giulano da San Gallo, the favorite architect of Lorenzo, has too much eru- dition and not enough simplicity and majesty. Domenico Ghirlandajo, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli mark the transition between the pre- cursors and the Renaissance proper; the work of Botticelli is a true mythology. Still, at times, the old Christian simplicity gets the upper hand. It 1s difficult to understand how the same mind could conceive some ‘‘ Holy Families” full of an- gelic innocence, and the ‘‘ Birth of Venus” or the “* Calumny of Apelles” of the Uffizi. Ishall have something more to say on the men who were the enemies of the NKenaissance, and who struggled against the return toward the forms and ideas of the pagan world. Correspondence. THE NATION AND THE CHINESE QUES- TION. To THE Ep1ToR OF THE NaTION: Sir: The attitude of religious and political fanatics toward the Chinese question has neither surprised nor wounded the people of the Pacific Coast. But we had reason to expect that such a journal as the Nation would treat the subject with some degree of fairness, neither employing the arguments of demagogues nor neglecting the commonest courtesies of debate. To stigmatize the entire population of half a dozen States and Territories as hoodlums, tramps, and vagabonds is doubtless the easiest way to answer their de- mands, but your history bas given us the right to expect something better from you. But, dropping the question of courtesy, do you really think that the exclusion of an undesirable and dangerous class of immigrants offers any parallel to the enslavement of a class, perhaps equally undesirable, but already firmly rooted among us? Do you think that if, two hundred years ago, some Atlantic California had arisen to prevent the importation of negroes, our sub- sequent history would have been any less happy than it bas been? Youspeak of the deep “ faith of the American people . . . in the power of their institutions to withstand even the vice and ignorance of foreigners.” The belief that Ame- rica was a country under the special protection of Providence, and raised above the dangers of ordinary nations, was prevalent enough thirty or forty years ago, but I had thought that among educated men of our day it was nearly extinct, Observers of our political condition are not blind to the perils of an ignorant and degraded prole- tariat, and I have read the Nation to very little purpose if I am mistaken in thinking that it shares their fears. Do you, then, welcome the precipitation upon us of twenty or thirty thou- sand possible voters every year, not one of whom will ever have the first glimmering conception of the duties of American citizenship? You seem to fear that the enfranchisement of the negroes may be justified only on grounds of expediency. I confess that expediency, in a broad and high sense, is the oniy standard of right that I can conceive ; and by that standard both the negro and the Chinese question shoul4 be judged. I cannot close without referring to a little matter of detail. You say that ‘according to the best authorities,” the number of Chinese in the country has ‘‘ sensibly decreased since 1870.” Do you rank the United States Census among “the best authorities” ¢ And if you think that in calling an increase of over 67 per cent. between 1570 and 1880 a “‘ sensible decrease” you have displayed your accustomed candor ? S. E. M. so, do UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, March 26, 1882. {Our history not only gives our correspond- ent the right to expect better things of us than the stigmatization of ‘‘the entire population of half a dozen States as hoodlums, tramps. and vagabonds,” but gives us the right to ex- pect of him that he shall not put in our mouths wild and ridiculous assertions which we never made. We have not been guilty of such stig- matization, and we refuse to ‘‘drop the ques- tion of courtesy” ; we uphold it until our correspondent retracts and apologizes. Coming to his questions, we do not think ‘**the exclusion of an undesirable class of im- migrants offers a parallel to the enslavement of a class perhaps equally undesirable, but already firmly rooted among us.” We have never made any such parallel, and know no- thing about it. Our parallel was between the conduct of the Republican party in forcing the Southern whites to admit the negroes to a share in the government, when they were in a condition of ignorance and debasement from which the Chinese issued thousands of years ago, in spite of the solemn protests of six mil- lions of the white population of ten States, and the conduct of this same party in offering to allow the one million white population of half a dozen Pacific States and Territories to exclude, not from the franchise only, but from all residence and industry on American soil, the poor men of another much more civilized race, no matter what their character. This is our parallel, and the more our correspondent meditates on it the worse he will feel. As to “‘the deep faith of the American people in the power of their institutions to withstand the vice and ignorance of foreigners,” we think that, if it has not as yet gone too far, there is danger that it may do so. What is the rem- edy ? Clearly to legislate against vicious and ignorant foreigners. Nothing of the kind is proposed, however, by our Pacific State friends. On the contrary, they are crazy for legislation against a most peaceable, industri- ous, intelligent, and skilful class of foreigners, and actually use in the American Congress the very virtues of these foreigners as an argument for their exclusion. Moreover, these foreign- ers are the only ones who come to us who do 318 not seek to take part in our Government, and thus bring their ignorance into play for our political confusion. As to the numbers of the Chinese, we shall display our accustomed candor by saying that we have fallen into an error through compar ing the population in 1880 with the best esti- mates of 1876. Between 1870 and 1880 we acknowledge there has been an increase from 63,254 to 105,618, or 66.73 per cent. But the Chinese are, after all, only a little over 100,000 among 50,000,000, aud, if they go on at same rate, will at the end of the century num ber about 900,000 in a nation of 100,000,000 There is not cnough danger in this, on th very Worst view, to Warrant our total reversal of our policy with regard to immigration, and the revival of legal discrimination of the most odious kind directed against race and color The probabilities are that in the meantime white immigrants will do much to close the gap into which the Chinese are now entering on the Pacific Coast.—Ep. Nation. | the AGNOSTIC CHURCHES IN GERMANY To THE EpiTor OF THE NATION: Sir: In your article on ** Agnostic Worship,” in the Nation of Feb. 25, you imply that no at tempts are being made in Germany, France, and Italy to build up religious organizations upon a non-theological basis. As to France and Itaiy, [am unable to speak ; but the following facts will show that your implication is wrong in re gard to Germany. In June, 1859, there was formed at Gotha a Bund freireligioser Gi Deutschlands, and at the close of the year 1880 the number of meimden free religious socicties and clubs belonging to this Bund was 136, and there were ral newly-formed societies and clubs which bed besides, sevi not yet joined the national organization. ‘There are at present about twenty active free-religious speakers, some of whom do service for several The facts here given are to be found for 1882, pul societies. in the Freireligidser lished at Gotha. There is one of these freireligidjse Gemeinden in Berlin having a membership of over eight hun dred names. This society has a settled speaker, Herr Schiifer, who addresses it every Sunday morning in “a hall.” The speaker offers no prayer and reads from no book. Congregational Kalender singing before and after the discourse is the only exercise, Connected with the society is a Peli gionsschule, which is attended by 148 children. To the religious instruction of these children the speaker of the society devotes four hours a week. The children are instructed in the mythology and history and principles of the great historical religions, and Christianity is made no exception, but is treated in exactly the same way as the other religons. Belief in a personal God who can hear and answer prayer, in a divine Saviour, and in miracles, is classed among the superstitions. The children are fu thermore taught they have a religion of their own, different from Christianity and the other great religions—a religion based upon ethical and rational principle, and one which has to do with the present life. This school and society are a fair type of others in other cities, and represent a movement which is gradually assuming considerable pro portions. It thus appears that Gcrmany must be added to those nations in which an attempt is being made to build up a religious organization which is both non-theological and non-Christian, 8. B. W, Brenurs, March 21, 1882.

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314 rHE MASON CRAZE, To THE EptroR OF THE NATION: Sir: Sporadic cases of this surprising pertur- bation of judgment or obliquity of mental vision, which seems to have the West, have failed to show themselves even in the latitude of Boston, though most of the legal fraternity agree with the regarding the Judge-Advocate’s recent decision been almost epidemic at not Nation in as bordering upon the bouffe. An impossibility of success is held to imply an equal impossibility of attempt, so that Mason might have clapped his piece against Guiteau’s ear and pulled the trigger without committing an assault with in tent to kill, if it afterward appeared that he had accidentally reversed his cartridge in load ing, so that it could not explode. But there are those who, while recognizing the absurdity of this doctrine, have yet signed the petition for Mason’s pardon as a protest against the unseemly indulgences granted to Guiteau. It does seem surprising that, in view of our nation’s yet recent experiences, so many should still remain in apparent ignorance of the essential difference between an army and a mob. Had the officer in command chosen to make an example of such mutinous conduct on the spot, by cutting down or shooting Sergeant Mason the instant that he turned his piece against the prisoner whom he was detailed to protect, such an act would have been abundantly justifiable ; for Mason was a non-commissioned officer, and his conduct a direct incitement to mutiny, call- Those who would condone such offences, or resort to strained technicalities to prevent their punishment, seem to labor under an incomprehensible inability to understand their true nature. They fail to see that the crime is one against the whole com- munity, which for the protection of civil rights looks to the Army to support the law—by no means merely against the one detested wretch for whom the gallows waits. S. M. Q. ing for stern and instant repression. Boston, April 4, 1882. THE WORKING OF THE ELECTIVE SYS- TEM AT HARVARD. To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION : Sir: The discussion of the elective system of college work in your columns has shown what results may be supposed, on @-priori grounds, to attend such a system. Unhappily, though natu- rally enough, the products of this method do not coincide throughout with facts. It would be interesting to know what the actual results ap- pear to be, as seen from the inside of the college which has been selected by your correspondents as typical of the elective creed. It would, how- ever, be a delicate task for an instructor at Har- vard to take up the matter in print. I venture to hope that an ex-instructor of the same college may render this service—not, indeed, with entire delicacy, but with an indelicacy that admits of pardon The common objection to the Harvard system is stated in a letter published in your issue of February 16. The writer is speaking of the time when all studies now required shall become elective, and puts the case thus : ‘““What will Harvard’s degree mean? Not that the graduate has been trained in the me- thods of classical, scientific, and metaphysical thought, and introduced to history, political science, and all the more important branches of study. It will mean simply that he has pursued for four years the studies most agreeable to bis yet unformed taste—those which are easiest to him, or which look toward his profession. There is an immense pressure in our age, and in every age, for superficial education—something to give reputation and polish at the least expense of time and effort.” The Nation. Though the passage refers to the future, it ex- presses a view of the present which is held by many. In opposition to this view, I wish to show (1) that, instead of aiming at a saving of time, Harvard has considerably raised the ave- rage age of graduation of ber students within a brief term of years; (2) that the foundation of required work on which the * elective ” system is constructed is a substantial one ; (3) that the re- sults which the elective system has brought about, working in connection with its natural ally, the ‘‘ honor” system (non-existent in your letters), are such as the system of required work has never produced, at least at Harvard. To this end I shall describe the present state of things as briefly as the case will admit, and shall then allow myself an expression of opinion about the future. It will be observed that this letter confines itself to the system as it exists at Harvard, and neither alludes to other colleges and universities which, avowedly or not, are in sympathy with Harvard, nor takes up the question whether the elective system would be a proper one to intro duce next year throughout the country. The Harvard of to-day is a complex institu- tion, and its system should be judged, not with reference to one detail alone, but as a working unit. Harvard College is really more than a college : it isa college plus a body of preparatory schools. Harvard has the good fortune to be fed by sources which are quick to respond to any advance in her requirements, whether in methods or in quantity. There is of course nothing as yet in this country that corresponds to the rela- tion existing between the German universities and the Gymnasien ; but some faint approach to such a state of things is already to be seen in the relation of Harvard to her feeders. Secured by this large source of supply, she has steadily raised her demands and freely rejected ill-pre- pared candidates. The result is, that she is able to-day to exact a high quality of preparatory work, and that—a very important factor in her system—she is dealing with a maturer class of students than formerly. Statistics for the older classes are incomplete, and statistics at the best are treacherous, unless extending over a con- siderable term of years ; for the fluctuation from year to year is great. But there is sufficient evidence that the average age of graduation is rising. As nearly as the figures at my command will show, the average age in the ’60s was 21 years 9 months. The mean average of the last four classes, which is accurately known, was 22 years 4.7 months, or nearly 8 months higher than in the ’60s (the class of 1881 reached the remark- able average of 22 years 11.7 months). Or, to put the same thing in another way, at least the larger part of the final year at Harvard is prac- tically a pure addition to her course as it was taken by many men who are still young. It should be noted that this higher grade of preparation is as marked in respect of quality as in respect of quantity. The examinations for admission are of a kind to exact of the candidate a certain amount of power to work in absolute isolation from all helps. This is most conspicu- ously to be seen in the test of translation ‘‘ at sight.” which forms an important part of the exaniinations in languages. Of the young men selected in this way, the most worthless are weeded out during the first year, under a very watchful process which rests finally upon the test of frequent examinations. The actual depletion of the Freshman class through direct dropping at Christmas-time and ‘in June, and voluntary surrender under fear of dropping, is about ten per cent. The same pro- cess is repeated in the following years, though naturally on a less striking scale. At the beginning of the Sophomore year, the { Number 87 student—whose work, with the exception of training in the writing of English, is to be henceforth of his own choosing—has laid the following foundation: he has passed a somewhat severe admission-examination, after having had the training of some school which is in sympathy with the methods of the college, or after some other training of a kind to enable him to main- tain himself side by side with the graduates of such schools ; and the sum-total of his general preparation for the more special work of the last three years has covered the following range: Greek, Latin, mathematics, French and German (an elementary knowledge of one of the two is required for admission), and the elements of physics and chemistry. Furthermore, during the whole of this general preparation the aim of the work, so far as lies within the power of the college, has been not merely to make the student acquainted with certain subjects, but to prepare him to develop the power of self-direction. From this time on, with the single limitation that the student (in the words of the Catalogue) ‘‘must satisfy his instructors that he is qualified by his previous training to pursue the courses which he selects,” ‘‘all the courses given in the college are open to him in making his choice ; but he is strongly recommended to make his choice with great care, under the best advice, and in such a manner that his elective courses, from first to last, may form a rationally-con- nected whole.” The advice available to him will come mainly from his parents or from his instructors. In the case under discussion, the great majority of the parents concerned are educated, and are capable of guiding the choice of their sons with more or less intelligence. As regards the advice of instructors (if it is safe to judge from the experience of one of the young- est of them), it is asked and given to a consider- able extent, and it will be asked more and more as the intercourse between student and instruc- tor becomes more and more natural. However this may be, whether affected by parents and instructors or not, the choice of the student, though absolute in theory, in practice is largely guided by a certain distinct provision which is at once check and stimulus. This provision (which has not made its appearance in your col- umns) is the most striking feature of the new system. It is to this, working within the lines of the elective system, that the remarkable record of the last few classes owes its existence. The theory of this feature requires a statement : It is the aim of the college, from the very begin- ning of the Freshman year, so to train its stu dents that at the end of their course they shall be capable of taking a piece of work into their own hands and prosecuting it successfully, or, in homely language, to teach men to go, instead of being led. Go they must, from the moment they carry home their parchment on commence- ment morning. Very few of them will find an intellectual mentor ready to take them in hand when their alma mater turns them out of the college nursery. It is the belief of the college— and just here is the key-note of her whole sys- tem—that that young man is best trained, for whatsoever occupation in life, who, in addition to a general preparation of reasonable breadth, has acquired also the power of self-directed and self-watchful thought-—-who, in a word, pos- sesses, on however low a plane of absolute at- tainment, that trained habit of mind which enables a man to think continuously and accu- rately; and that a college graduate who lacks this mental habit may have a good deal o. infor- mation, but is not an educated man. In consequence of this idea, the system is so arranged as to induce students to concentrate their work in the last three years, and to aim at excellence of scholarship and the acquirement

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Apr. 13, 1882 of the power of self-guidance through advanced study in some group of logically-related mem- bers—as, for instance, in the classics, in mathe- matics, in some combination of the natural sciences. Examinations existing only to this end are held twice in the college course, the first set toward the end of the second year (for second-year honors, so called), the second set toward the end of the Senior year (for final hon- ors, so called). As a condition for presenting himself for one of these sets of examinations, a student (1) must have attained a specified stand- ing in the regular work of the preceding year or years in the department concerned—by which arrangement the spirit of the system is made to reach even the Freshman year ; (2) must have devoted to his honor-group a specified propor- tion of his elective work ; (3) must have done, with no help from his instructors beyond an in- dication of methods and of advisable books, a very considerable amount of specified outside work. (The fact that the student has in this work no instructor and no guide but himself is of the utmost importance.) This done, he pre- sents himself for the examinations, which cover the ground of his outside work, and also test him thoroughly by presenting fresh work to be done upon the spot without help. They are of a high character, and represent that grade of scholarship which can fairly be expected of the student at the stage of the college course to which they correspond. To meet the case of men who are willing to concentrate their work in part, but not suffi- ciently to become candidates for honors, the college offers what is called ‘honorable men- tion at graduation” to such as attain a high specified standing, in a specified number of hours, in one or more of certain studies. The result of this double system is that it is fast becoming ‘‘ bad form” to graduate without the one or the other of these two distinctions. And it may well be believed that it is not only the general sentiment of the students upon which the college can rely in this respect. Not many fathers or mothers who see in the yearly Catalogue the record of honors reprinted from the previous commencement programme will fail to throw their influence in the same direc- tion. The statistics of the last year, as seen in the Catalogue, are as follows: Second-year honors were won by 26 men (of whom 8 obtained them with the highest distinction) out of a class of 217 men ; final honors were won by 28 men (of whom 7 obtained them with the highest distinction) out of a graduating class of 182 men ; honorable mention was won by 108 men of the same class, of which number 36 received it in two or more subjects. Unfortunately, however, no statistics can ex- hibit the true difterence between the scholar- ship of the college under its present system and its scholarship under the old. We reach here a matter of opinion, hard for any one to judge of who has not known the college intimately under both systems. I beg to offer my own opinion, which 1s this: that the best men of my own time (quorum pace dixerim) were far inferior on the day of graduation, bothin working power and in actual attainment, to the best men of the present day. The spirit of the best of us was the schoolboy spirit ; the spirit of the best of the graduates of the last few years is the scholarly spirit. Hardly less important is the influence of these better men that seek honors upon their poorer fellows—say of the 108 honorable-menticn men in the last class upon the 74 who did not seek, or at least did not win, distinction at graduation. It is the natural result of the honor and honora- ble-mention system that the numerical advan- The Nation. tage in nearly every class-room lies with the ambitious students who have chosen the subject in question because they distinctly desire that which it has togive. Thesemen set the standard for the class. They are critical, exacting, im- patient of any waste of time. They furnish a ' powerful stimulus and a powerful support for the instructor, and the result is that he can, and does, demand higher work of the whole body of students under him—candidates for honors, candidates for honorable mention, and dullards and shirks that have still survived the weeding- out process—than is possible under the system of prescribed courses. And the result is that, while the best men under the present system are better than the best under the old, the worst men are at the same time less bad than the worst under the old. As regards the other side of college life, the conduct of the students, the effects of the pre- sent régime have been as admirable as in regard to scholarship. Under the more natural relation existing between student and instructor, due in part to the attitude deliberately assumed by the faculty, and in part to the incfeased interest of the students in the work of the university, and under the constantly-increasing influence of that best of all indirect moral agencies—intellectual interests and a conscious purpose—a standard of student-honor has already grown up which does not differ very appreciably from that of the world at large. With the schoolboy spirit of work is disappearing the schoolboy spirit of conduct. Wherever a firm authority is needed, it is still exercised ; but it is rarely needed. It is with difficulty that one who has lodged and lived in the midst of Harvard students within the last few years can believe in the reality of the things which he himself saw as student and as proctor under the old régime. Indeed, one sometimes becomes apprehensive that the sense of humor may be dying out at Harvard, and it is with something like a feeling of relief that one reads of such a bit of mischief as that recent one (conducted, it seems, in a perfectly orderly manner) whereby some sixty students made public confession of their conversion, for a single evening, to Mr. Oscar Wilde’s gospel of dress. The spirit of conduct and the spirit of scho- larship in the Harvard of to-day—to put into a single phrase the purport of this over-long letter —were well expressed by Mr. James Russell Lowell in my own time, when he began a course of lectures to undergraduates with words that stirred our boyish hearts: ‘‘Gentlemen and fellow-students.” It was, in honest truth, only a prophecy then ; it is fast becoming a reality now. So much as regards the present at Harvard. As regards the future, there is no reasonable ground for fear of precipitate action. Those who have watched the process of change know it to have been a cautious and gradual one. No step has been taken untjl the right to take it has been earned. It is more than probable that all the work of the college will become elective when the preparatory schools shall have been brought up to such a standard as to perform, both in quantity and in quality, the work now done in the Freshman year in the college. It is perfectly conceivable that this generation may not live to see that time ; but in the face of the astonishing rise in the standard of admission, especially in quality, within the last twenty years, it would be bold to make any confident assertion to this effect. The problems of university education in Ame- rica will probably remain for some time in an unsettled state. Their final settlement will turn upon the settlement of the simple question, What is education? If the answer now given by Har- vard is false, then her methods are false, and 315 will in time give way : if her answer is sound then her methods sound. For the high grade of working power which she is aiming more and more to produce in her students can be attained only by persistent and partly self directed effort within the limits of a group ot subjects of which the student can grasp the rela tions in something like the spirit of a specialist But this method requires concentration of work, and that concentration is possible only under the elective system. Respectfully yours, Ww are G. HALY. Irnmaca, N. Y., March 31, 1882. Notes. JAMES R. OsGoop & Co. are to publish the au thorized edition of the works of the late Presi dent Garfield, now being carefully prepared and edited by President Hinsdale, of Hiram College It will make two octavo volumes, and will prot ably leave the press toward the close of the year ‘ Rousseau,’ by Henry Graham, will form the seventeenth volume of Mrs, Oliphant’s ** Foreign Classics for English Readers,” of which J. B, Lip pincott & Co. are the American publishers Wm. Chambers’s ‘Story of a Busy Life,’ and ‘Toward the Sunrise,’ a book of travel, by Hush Johnston, are among this month’s issues of R Worthington. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have nearly ready * Tho mas A Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life,’ by the Rev. 8S. Kettlewell, in two volumes Svo. A. D. F. Randolph & Co. publish immediately ‘Saunterings in Europe,’ by Charles Wood. Simultaneously with the completion of part 4 of Skeat’s ‘Etymological Dictionary of the English Language,’ Maemillan & Co. announce that they have arranged with Oxford Univer sity for a cheap edition, specially made fo the American market, and unabridged. It is almost ready. Mr. Samuel Hollyer, 27 Warren Street, New York, invites subscriptions to a line and stipple engraving representing the late Henry W. Long fellow in his library. The prospectus indicates less familiarity with the pen than (we may as- sume) with the graver on the artist’s part. Longfellow’s ‘ Hyperion,’ on which, apparent- ly, the copyright has lapsed, has been published in paper covers by the John W. Lovell Com- pany, of this city, in good clear type, and at a very moderate price. ‘Bay-Path’ and ‘Arthur Bonnicastle’ are the two latest volumes in the Messrs. Scribner's uni- form, handy, and tasteful reprint of the late Dr Holland's works. Professor Newcomb’s ‘ Popular Astronomy ‘has undergone a fourth revision, and, as now pub lished by the Messrs. Harper, contains new mat- ter relating to the great telescopes completed within the past three years, the recent develop ment in cometary astronomy, and the approach- ing transit of Venus on December 6. These chauges are not relegated to an appendix, but take their proper places in the body of the work, thusimplying a further periodical revision, which a standard work of this character deserves. A catalogue which combines antiquarian int rest and legal utility has just been published by R. D. Cooke, 78 Cortlandt Street--namely, ‘Old Streets, Roads, Lanes, Piers, and Wharves of New York,’ by John J. Post, of the New York Bar. The arrangement is simple and lucid, the streets being enumerated alphabetically, first by their former and then by their existing names, with parallel identifications in each case. A third part of this thin volume shows the va rious street extensions and widenings, or vice versa. The labor of such a compilation merits

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316 a full reward. As a sample of Mr. Post's seru- pulous minuteness, we quote the ancient syno- nyms for that part of Nassau Street which lies between Wall and John Streets: “The Pie-w>- man's Street. The street that leads to the pie- Street that leads to the pie-woman’s. Pie-woman’s Lane. Pie-woman’s Street.” Mr. H. PV. Lubbard’s ‘ Newspaper and Bank Directory of the World’ (New Haven) does not differ very much intrinsically from similar un- dertakings, so far as the American portion is This fills volume i., which is distin- guished from its companion by a greater abun- dance of illustrations, and these, it must be ad- mitted, very curious. There is a large number of reduced facsimiles of newspapers, old and new, of all nations; views of newspaper offices (pretty ugly, as a rule); and photographs of edi- tors, with abundance of information about the history of printing and of presses. Then there are maps of the United States and of the several States, and physical and statistical accounts of each in the fashion of a gazetteer. The same scheme is pursued with vol. ii., which alone contains the list of banks and bankers and infor- mation pertinent thereto. Many of the general articles are in French, German, and Spanish, as On the whole, the enterprise Lears the marks of great energy, method, and inteligence. Two statements in this ‘ Directory’ are worth remarking: that nearly one-third of our American weekhes are ‘‘ patent insides” (or *‘outsides,” or ‘auxiliaries,’ or ‘‘ codpera- tives’); that 51,411 of the total 54,274 journals of the entire globe are published be- north latitude. Ginn, Heath & Co., of Boston, publish a sheet of cardboard, with test-ty pes, for the use of teach- ers in ascertaining the existence of near-sight The type is clear and suitable. All such aids in popularizing a most important branch of hygiene ought to be welcomed. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have published, at the in- stance of the State Charities Aid Association, a little work, on ‘ First Aid to the Injured,’ which appropriately bears on its cover the Geneva red It is designed as a manual for classes now being extensively formed for instruction in this ** first aid.” Mr. H. Courthope Bowen’s ‘Shakspere Read- ing the usual defects of abridgments, expurgatory and other, of the poet. Stil, the editor’s views on the quaiity of reading in public schools are eminently sound, and too little appreciated in this country, as he says they are The book will well serve his end ; and of course, without cutting, this use of Shakspere becomes impracticable, Among recent classical text-books we may mention, as on our table, Madvig’s edition of Cicero's ‘De Finibus’ (Harper’s), a nice thing for the pocket; and the Clarendon Press Livy, books v.-vii. (Macmillan), a little larger than the fore- coing, and well supplied with English notes. The text is Madvig’s. Electricity fills a large space—some eighty pag :—.u M. Louis Figuier’s ‘L’Année Scien- tifique’ for 1881, which promptly reaches us (New York: Ckristern). ‘The frontispiece, indeed, pic- tures the late International Exposition of Elec- tricity, and a special section is allotted to it. America, of course, comes prominently upon the scen: here, as in the section on public hygiene, The planting of Awer-can vines isstill noted as one of the defences againstthe phylloxera. Littré leadsthe Necrolo- gy. anda definition of him by aniece of Lamartine —*C’est un saint qui ne croit pas en Dieu "—is fitly quoted. Dr. I. 1. Hayes and Prof. J. C. woman's. concerned, well as in Enylish. and tween 30° and 60 among scholars, cross, (Cassell) has 30x k , in Engiand. because of the trichinosis scare. Watson are the only American men of science whose de.tus are bere recorded, A new ‘Constitutional History of England,’

The Nation.

by Professor Gneist, is announced to be shortly forthcoming. Aid is still needed for the American Archo- logical Institute’s Assos Expedition, which re- sumed work on March 1, with the added as- sistance of a young Danish architect of distinc- tion. The results thus far fully justify the pru- dent outlay. Contributions may be sent to Prof. C. E. Norton, at Cambridge, Mass, —D. Lothrop & Co., Boston, have recently published a book by Wm. F. Bainbridge, under the title ‘ Around-the-World Tour of Christian Missions: a Universal Survey.’ What claim this title has to accuracy may be stated in a mo- ment, The author made his somewhat leisurely circumnavigation in 1879-80, starting from Pro- vidence, R. I., and following for the most part the beaten tracks. He visited Japan and China, and a few Protestant missionary stations in the Zast Indies and Syria, returning to Europe by the Suez Canal. How many stations he actually saw it is not easy to make out from this wordy narrative ; it may have been one in fifty of those which would be included in a ‘universal survey of Christian missions.” Mr. Bainbridge does not even give a description of those he professes to describe. Thus there is a chapter on the “Sandwich Islands, Alaska, and Si- beria”; turnmg to which, we find the author on board of a steamer in the mid-Pacific Ocean, and reflecting that *‘in this vast solitude it is a little comforting to think that only a thousand miles away are the Sandwich Islands.” We do not learn whether a reciprocal sense of ‘‘ comfort ” was felt in Honolulu. This was his nearest acquaintance with the group; except for a rambling and inaccurate mention of the Ha- waiian mission, his ‘*survey” goes no further. The book is worthless, except for a list of mis- sions given in an appendix. Mrs. W. F. Bain- bridge’s companion volume, of ‘Round the World Letters,’ reproduced from the journals to which they were written, has a certain sprightli- ness of style. It does not pretend to be a “ uni- versal survey” of anything, and it is at least free from cant. —Mr. Alexander Johnston’s little handbook called a ‘ History of American Politics’ (Henry Holt & Co.) pusses to a second edition with its seventh thousand copies, and offers a sum total of forty additional pages. The quite new mat- ter consists of a very useful appendix of nine pages, exhibiting the Cabinet officers of the several Administrations, witb their dates of ap- pointment; and, besides many minor revisions, the period sitce Johnson’s Administration has been especially worked over, the whole ending with the accession of President Arthur. Of this manual we need not repeat our praise: it is at once a bird’s-eye view and an index, and deserves to find its way into every school of the higher grade, where the special knowledge of the teacber will have scope tor indefinite expansion concerning any topic, ¢haracter, or period. It is, perhaps, in strictness rather to be called a diary or an annual than a history, for its plan does not permit the exposition of political deve- lopment upon this, that, or the other line. The significant event is noved in its proper place, but we miss 1ts antecedents, and its conse quences are not always apparent assuch. The anti-slavery movement is a good ivstance of this. Precisely this defect is overcome in the ingenious and ad- mirable ‘Handbook of English Tolitical His- tory,’ edited by Mr. Dyke Acland and Professor

Ransome, and lately published in London by the | Messrs. Rivington. First we have, on the right- hand page, the course. year by year and month | by month, of political occurrences, with not infre- | quent references to the left-band page for details —of a bill, of a ministry, of a pedigree, of a [ Number 876 treaty, etec.—whbich would have encumbered the diary. Often a good deal of blank space is left for the student’s own notes, and the right-hand third of the same page is devoted to contem- poraneous events in foreign countries. This is all capitally executed, and, let us add, in very handsome typography. But now follows a series of ‘*Summaries,” arbitrarily chosen, of course, but with just knowledge and proportion, and which show chronologically the growth of the powers of Parliament, the drift of matters ecclesiastical, the significant dates and deeds in Welsh, Scottish, and Irish affairs, the steps toward Union, the French and American wars, the struggle for the Corn Laws, the romance of India, the march of Reform, and the like. This synthetic complement of the first part leaves nothing to be desired in the idea of a political manual, and we would counsel Mr. Johnston and his publishers to profit by so excellent an example. We should almost be prepared to re- commend imitation also of the arrangement of the first portion, even if it involved the entire resetting of the ‘‘ History.” —In Mr. Cutter’s report to the proprietors of the Boston Athenceum, on the completion of his herculean catalogue, he recites a number of laughable errors detected in the work after he came to it. One was the mistaking of ganz (Deutschland) for Ghent—“ French Gand,” it was explained. <A different sort of mistake was the failure toenter ‘‘G. W. Dasent’s ‘Tales trom the North,’ which is a translation of Asbjérnsen and Moe’s ‘Norske Folkeeventyr,’ under As- bjornsen. While Mr. Cutter was exposing this shortcoming, the Athenceum was printing a con- troversy which indirectly exculpated the cata- loguer at the expense of the translator—Sir George Dasent had studiously omitted to men- tion Asbjérnsen as the author whom he was re- producing. Such is the complaint of Mr. H. L. Breekstad, who brought out at Christmas time (through Sampson Low) atranslation not only of the ‘Folke Eventyr.’ but also of the second se- ries, the ‘Huldre Eventyr.’ Copies of *‘ Round the Yule Log,’ us the book is called, reached this country somewhat past the time for seasonable notice, but we cannot regard it as too late to re- commend the pretty volume to all parents, for their children’s sake and for their own. The translation is more racy t’ m Sir George Da- sent’s, as we recall the latter, and it has, what was altogether lacking there, the personal ele- ment of the story-teller—the setting of adven- ture, incident, landscape, weather, which gives an imexpressible charm to Asbjirnsen’s tales. Add to this that the illustrations are Norse and not Engli:h, and capital in their way. Mr. E. W. Gosse furnishes a brief introduction, and there are portraits of both Asbjérnsen and Moe. —Weare at a loss what to say of another child’s book, beariug the same London imprint, which has been lying beside ‘ Round the Yule Log‘ on our table. The Norse trolls and witches offer’sufficient to alarm and repel the mind of a sensitive child, even when Asbjirnsen repre- sents and reports them ; but Mr. Bram Stoker’s ‘Under the Sunset’ bas terrors which cannot so easily be shaken off. The first part is an allegory ot Paradise Lost, in which the entrance of sin takes the form of a pestilence, and the youthful reader 1s led along by such cheerful running- titles as “‘ The Scoifer Stricken,” ‘The Ice-cold Hand,” “ Warning of Danger,” ‘ The Procession of the Dead Past,” etc., and stimulated by occa- sional sentences like this: ‘* Lonely nizhts— black want, cold, hunger, and puip ; and through all these darkening shadows theswitt moving shadow of the Mother’s flving feet.” Thestory of David and Goliath is served up anew, with a nightmare etching of the giant’s overthrow. The book ends

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Apr. 13, 1882] with some illusory attempts at humor, still more or less combined with moral allegory, for which the author of ‘ Alice in Wonderland’ may be, but ought not to be, held responsible. To say that no child should be encouraged to read ‘ Un- der the Sunset’ is not the same as passing judg- ment on its readability ; but that is a secondary matter. The illustrations on copper are striking if gloomy, and in some degree vindicate the au- thor’s imaginativeness. —The circular reading-room of the British Museum, with its superintendent’s desk in the centre, from which he has a clear view of the whole room (like the warder in Bentham’s Pan- opticon), the great catalogue circling round this central post of observation, and the lines of read- ers’ desks radiating from that to the walls, where 20,000 selected volumes are arranged at their un- restricted disposal, 1s at once so simple and con- venient that it has excited great and deserved admiration in England. It is one of the fea- tures of the metropolis of which Londcn- ers are proud, although it was designed by a foreigner. Its simplicity, far from detract- ing from the credit of the design, is seen to be like that of Columbus’s egg—the simple plan that comes to the man that thoroughly under- stands his subject, and to him only. It has been always understood that it was made from Mr. Panizzi’s drawing; and that there might be no mistake about it, the architect wrote to Mr. Panizzi in 1858: ‘‘I feel no hesitation in stating that the idea of a circular reading- room with surrounding library, and with divi- sions formed wholly of bookcases, was perfectly original and entirely your own.” Mr, Panizzi evidently agreed with him—at least he never contradicted Mr. Smirke. And yet there is in existence a copy, presented to Punizzi by the author in 1836, of a ‘Mémoire,’ by M. Delessert, in which a circular library is proposed so like Panizzi’s that the ground plan might easily be mistaken for that of the Museum reading-room., There is this difference, that in M. Delessert’s plan the space occupied at the Museum by the catalogues is devoted to readers, and the Muse- um’s radiating readers’ desks are, in Delessert’s plan, radiating book-shelves, Panizzi’s modifica- tion would easily occur to any one who wanted more room for readers than was afforded in Delessert’s arrangement, especially if he had Delessert’s plan before him. On the other hand, the coincidence may be merely the result of an impression received, forgotten, and, after lying dormant for twenty years, revived when cir- cumstances made it useful. Or finally, it may be one of those common cases in which two minds, working on the same problem. arrive at the same result. Panizzi had no need to appropriate the credit of other people’s ideas. —An essay by Dr. Brinton, which has just appeared in a pamphlet, treats of ‘The Names of the Gods in the Kiché Myths.’ These myths are recorded in the Kiché book called ‘ Popol Vuh,’ the most substantial remnantof aboriginal literature which has conic down to us from the pre-Columbian time. Concerning this book Mr. Bandelier wrote, in his pa;cr on the ** Sources for Aboriginal History o- S;anish America,” “We do not hesitate to say iLat American abori- ginal history has no docume:t or source what- ever which is more valuable than the three last parts of the ‘Popol Vuh’; but we are equally convinced that a closer study of the Indian lan- guage in which it is composed is absolutely needed. A new translation of it should be undertaken.” A careful study, if not a new translation, of this unique docu nent seems to have been undertaken by Dr. Brinton, who secks to ‘“‘analyze the pro:cr names ef the divinities” which appear .n ‘ie pages of The Nation. 317 the ‘Popol Vuh’. His special facilities for this task, in addition to his familiarity with the my- thological field, consist in certain manuscript vocabularies and grammars of the Kiché and related languages, which are in his possession or at his service The essay, we are glad to say, is an honest and thorough piece of work, in- dicating a considerable advance upon anything thus far produced in the Central American field. Dr. Brinton complains, doubtless with good reason, of the ‘‘extreme paucity of material for studying the Kiché,” and says that, with the ex- ception of a brief vocabulary of the principal roots by Ximenez, ‘‘no dictionary is available” —which may be either a momentary oversight, or an utter discrediting by implication of Bras- seur’s ‘Grammar of the Quiché Language,’ which contains a vocabulary of eighty octavo pages. Mr. Bandelier, in the valuable essay above re- ferred to, expresses strong suspicions concerning the aboriginal origin of certain portions of the ‘Popol Vuh,’ especially of the cosmozony em- bodied in the first part, where he finds traces not only of the Mosaic traditions, but of the ‘‘ Logos” doctrine of the Gospel of St. John, and says: ‘* Whatever signification may be attached to the Logos, its conception as an acting individuality, a personal spiritual being, is certainly not Indian.” From this view Dr. Brinton emphati- cally dissents, expressing the conviction that “such an opinion will pass away when the original is accurately translated.” Never- theless, the ‘Popol Vuh,’ in the only form in which we know it, originated after the Dis- covery, and was reduced to writing by some one who had come under missionary teaching. It is only to be expected, therefore, that traces of Christian thought should appear in it; how much of this element there is in it can be de- cided only after the document becomes thorough- ly familiar to us. —Oun another point, which is attracting more and more attention, Dr. Brinton’s essay will enable his readers to come tu more enlightened conclusions—namely, the place of the Central American peoples (and the Mexican) in the line of human culture. A tribe whose religious be- liefs were as crude, and their practices as gross, as those of the Kichés seem to have been, can hardly be regarded as having attained to the con- ditions of civilization. The late Lewis H. Mor- gan endeavored, in various works of bis, to make people see that the name “ civilization” was a misnomer as applied to any of the American tribes or ‘‘nations.” The more carefully the aboriginal status of these tribes is studied, the more evident it becomes that Morgan was right; and now that he 1s gone, it is interesting to note the gradual but sure spread of his thoroughly ra- tional views. Thetemptation to extravagance is greater in the Central American field than anywhere else; but Dr. Brinton speaks with a caution quite in contrast with the old-fashioned random talk. While Dr. Le Plongeon and M. Charnay fairly revel in the conceptions they have formed of a rich and grand civilization once occupying the Central American region, Dr. Brinton simply speaks of the Kichés and Mayas as the race ‘“‘ which approached the nearest to a civilized condition.” This is the phraseology of the opening line of his pamphlet; but on page 27 he speaks of them as *‘ these secluded and semi- barbarous tribes.’ By ‘‘semi-barbarous” he means, of course, semi-civilized; but such desig- nations are very unsatisfactory. Would it not be a great gain if some such nomenclature as Morgan suggested in his ‘ Ancient Society’ could be generally adopted, so that the status of barbarism, in which all the American races were included, might be distinguished from savagery on the one side and from civilization on the other? —A number of well-known lawyers of this city have united in an appeal to the friends of Har- vard University, and especially of the Harvard Law School, for the purpose of raising a fund to add to the endowment of the Law School library A fund of $40,000 bas already been secured, but from $50,000 to $40,000 more is needed. Those who know whatan important part the Law School at Cambridge is playing in the elevation of the standards of professional education, will be sur prised to learn that of all the Cambridge schools it has the poorest endowment. The total en dowment is a little over forty eight thousand dollars (348,070 63); apart from the income of this fund the school lives upon its earnings. On the other hand, the Scientific School fund is set down at nearly eight hundred thousand dollars (=765,- 519 71); the Divinity School fund at over three hundred thousand ($510,853 90); and the Medical School fund (deducting their building fund of over $160,000) at nearly a hundred and nine teen thousand (&118,619 15), It be added that vigorous eiforts being made for the increase of the medical endowment. On the other hand, the expenses of the Law School have greatly increased. ‘There are now five professors and an instructor, where there were formerly only and afterward three professors ; and the professors, instead of being paid two or three thousand dollars, have now the not excessive salary of forty-five hun dred dollars. On the other band, instead of ad mitting to its degree any person who chooses to may are now two attend for eighteen months, the School nov quires a three years’ course of study, a thorough examination for the degree, another thorough examination in order to pass from one year to another, and, in the case of all who have not had the discipline indicated by a college degree, an examination for admission. The average expenses of the library for books and binding during the last ten years have been $3,289 26. In this period an undesirable econo my has been practised, and much that was need- ed has been left unbought. A fund of $6,000 would hardly supply what has thus beea paid; it is very desirable that it should be larger. It is hoped that New York will add to the 310,000 already provided enough to put the library of the School on an independent footing. The appeal is signed by Dorman B. Eatou, Wil- liam G. Choate, James C. Carter, Joseph H. Choate, and other well-known members of the bar. —The regular musical season is approaching its close. Already the Symphony Society has given its last concert, and other societies will soon fol- low its example. Dr. Damrosch had chosen an ambitious and attractive programme—Beetho- ven’s great ‘ Leonore” overture, and Berlioz’s dramatic symphony “Romeo and _ Juliet.” Beethoven's popular overture, which is really a perfect drama ina nutshell, is always welcome, and its presence on this occasion enabled the au- dience to estimate the vaiue of Berlioz’s proud boast to Feétis that he ‘took up where Beethoven had left it.” Perhaps also it was intended by the juxtaposition of these two works to suggest that Berlioz got his hint for the invisible chorus behind the scene in the third division of the symphony from the thrilling trumpet call in Beethoven’s overture Nevertheless it would have been better had the overture been omitted. The symphony is very long in itself when given without cuts, and a concert should never extend beyond two hours. In performing it the orchesira had the assistance of the Oratorio Society, and Miss Lena Little, Mr. Toedt, and Mr. Rem- meitz as soloists. Mr. Remmertz bas not sung so well on any previous occasion this season, his voice displaying, especially in the air in music

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318 the last division, a sonorous strength and vigor suggestive of Herr Betz of Berlin. The other solo- ists also did well, and the chorus and orchestra executed their tasks with an appearance of ease and confidence, and a display of enthusiasm, that howed most of the good points in the work in a clear and favorable hight. The most serious cri- ticism applies to the limited chorus in the first the unaccompanied passages so completely lost the pitch that the refntrance of the instruments produced a jar- ring The vigorously ap- plauded the leading numbers, especially the ‘*Mab, bright elf of Dreamland,” for tenor so- lo and small chorus, which had to be repeated, al- though, like the Queen Mab scherzo for orchestra alone, it is rather an empty and uninteresting piece of music. The same may be said of the famous adagio, which begins beautifully, but ends in a dreary, waste of sound. The whole symphony, truth to tell, leaves a depressing and monotonous feeling in the listener, the only two numbers which display true inspiration being the grand final chorus and the concert and feast at Capulet’s house, in which latter the vigorous pulsation of the rhythm and the combination of motives produce a stirring and almost delirious effect. division, which in brief discord. audience -Berlioz, who, during his lifetime, could only get his works performed by undertaking con- certs of his own, alludes in many of his letters to the sensation created by selections from his ‘*“Romeo and Juliet.” Thus he writes to his friend Ferrand from London in 1840, that the symphony was again the cause of many tears, ‘* passions inconcevables,” and brilliant conver- sions. The enthusiasm culminated in an Eng- lishman’s buying the baton with which Berlioz had conducted, for five pounds. Three months later, at a concert in the same city, the mean- ingless phrase assigned to the trombones in the Introduction was interrupted at its third repeti- tion by salvos of applause! It was, forsooth, a received tribute as such. The three principal objections to “‘ Romeo and Ju- liet” can be briefly summed up in a few sen- tences. The first relates to a personal matter. The tender and pathetic character of Shak- spere’s play was not so well calculated to arouse Berlioz’s creative powers as those subjects in which a bizarre, colossal, volcanic, stupendous tone prevails. The second is an wsthetic and for- mal objection. A programme prefixed to a sym- phonic poem is of advantage in so far as it indi- cates the emotions which inspired the composer to write his work. But a “dramatic symphony,” in which choral recitatives and choruses alter- nate with solo pieces and instrumental numbers in an endeavor to give color to a dramatic sub- ject, errs in so far as it compels the hearer to en- deavor to harmonize the details of the music with the details of the plot and action, with- out giving him the advantage he has in an opera of beholding with his eyes the pictorial which the ear fails to detect in the music. The general formal objection to the oratorio is simply exaggerated in such a ‘“‘symphony,” based on a dramatic sub- ject. The third objection is purely musical. Berlioz was so great a master of instrumental coloring that, as we may say, he covered his canvas with tints before he bethought him of his figures. In other words, he too frequently lacked ideas. Composing was hard work for Had he but united Schubert’s incessant flow of ideas with his own marvellous instinct for fine instrumental combinations, he would have been the greatest of modern orchestral composers. novelty, and scenes him. The Nation. [ Number 876 THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION FROM 1760 TO 1860. The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860. By Charles Duke Yonge, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History, Queen’s College, Belfast. London: Marcus Ward & Co.; New York: Harper & Bros. 1882. ‘‘ A LETTER,” writes Mr. Yonge, ‘‘of the Prince Consort examines the principle of ministerial responsibility with so remarkable a clearness of perception and distinctness of explanation that we may be excused for quoting it at length : ‘The notion that the responsibility of his ad- visers impairs the monarch’s dignity and impor- tance, is a complete mistake. Here we have no law of ministerial responsibility, for the simple reason that we have no written Constitution ; but this responsibility flows as a logical neces- sity from the dignity of the Crown and of the sovereign. Much ignorance of English life is pardonable in a prince and a German ; but an English pro- fessor of history who endorses with his approval the natural mistakes of a royal and foreign pe- dant cannot hope to escape censure. Now, the sentences selected by Mr. Yonge for special commendation are as curious a specimen of the mode in which words may conceal facts as can be found in all literature. The ‘‘ notion ” which is denounced as a ‘‘ complete mistake ” is a sim- ple truth. The responsibility of Ministers, not to the Crown, but to Parliament, is and must be a diminution in the power, and therefore in the importance, of the throne. Such responsibility has been, and always must be, hateful to des- potic or autocratic monarchs. Hence Prince Bismarck, and men like him, will not for a mo- ment tolerate it. Even the Prince Consort might, one would have thought, have reflected that the very reason why constitutional or democratic revolutionists insist upon ministerial responsibility is their desire to limit royal au- thority. Responsibility will always in the long run go hand in hand with power. This results not from any legal fiction, but from the laws of human nature. To fancy that a monarch can be powerful while his Ministers are responsible to the nation, is as absurd as to think that a man can be master in his own house while somebody else pays and controls his servants. The professor who instructs his students that the importance of the Crown is not diminished by the Parliamentary responsibility of Minis- ters, shows that he is a slave to words, and that he lacks the quality—of being able to distinguish fact from fiction—which is the most essential of all qualities in a person who undertakes to nar- rate and to explain the development of that mass of laws, conventions, practices, habits, and sentiments which passes under the misleading title of the English Constitution. For the marked characteristic of constitutional history during the century covered by Mr. Yonge’s work, is this: the Constitution of England underwent a radical and essential change, amounting to something like transformation into a new system of government, while the forms of the Constitution underwent scarcely any alteration whatever. Hence it isa matter of the utmost importance, and at the same time of the utmost difficulty, to distin- guish with the most careful discrimination forms and realities. Todo this requires much know- ledge and still more insight ; for in all English institutions names and things, shadow and sub- stance, are divided from each other by no sharp and clearly-drawn line. What was reality yes- terday may be little more than form to-day. We all know, for example, that the Queen's ac- tual power falls infinitely short of her theoreti- cal authority. Every one understands that the will and the intentions of Mr. Gladstone are of far more importance than the wishes of Queen Victoria ; but no one out of the Cabinet, and few perhaps within it, can tell with certainty where the actual and still less where the possible authority of the Crown begins or ends. The child who dreams that the Queen sits crowned upon her throne, and rules over the British Empire in the same sense in which Louis XIV. governed France, is a little more—and perhaps only a little more—astray from the truth than the Radical who fancies that the will or the caprice of the sovereign goes for nothing in the government of England. A writer, therefore, on constitutional history is certain to be a blind leader of the blind, un less he be gifted with what may be termed a sense of realities. Thisendowmentis a rare one. Mr. Yonge assuredly does not possess it. Of the outward and, so to speak, visible facts of his subject he knows as much as may be gained from the pages of Sir Thomas May, to whom he owes a debt which, as far as we have observed, he never acknowledges ; but of the spirit, the real nature, the life of the Constitution he knows nothing. A page of Bagehot’s ‘ English Consti- tution,’ a chapter of F. D. Maurice’s far too little known essay on the ‘ Representation and Educa- tion of the People,’ will teach intelligent readers far more that is worth knowing than a hundred such works as Prof. Yonge’s dreary manual. Yet the subject with which he deals might, in spite of its difficulties, have evoked, one would have thought, some remarks worth making and remembering. For Mr. Yonge’s account of constitutional changes, though dull, flat, and commonplace enough as a narrative, is not alto- gether profitless or unsuggestive reading. The mere enumeration in chronological order of the patent alterations in the Constitution of England must suggest to many intelligent readers reflec- tions which seem never to have occurred to their teacher. Any one, in short, who will try to look through words and forms to things and realities, may, from Prof. Yonge’s book and from ordinary knowledge of English literature and of modern England, draw some more or less important inferences as to the essential dif- ferences between the Georgian Constitution of 1760 and the Victorian Constitution of 1860, It is, in the first place, absolutely certain, let princes, pedants, or professors say what they like, that the importance of the Crown was far greater in the middle of the eighteenth than in the middle of the nineteenth century. The will of George III. went for much more in all politi- cal matters, whether great or small, than does, or at any time did, the will of his granddaughter. The King, when quite young, and without either prestige or experience, drove the most popular statesman of the age from power, At a later period he kept in power by his own will a Minis- ter who had the support neither of popularity nor of success. If the accession of Pitt not only to office but to authority was in one sense the defeat of George’s efforts to establish his own personal government, it was also the rout of the King’s foes. Pitt himself was, as all the world knows, hampered at every turn by the King’s wishes and (what was always the same thing) the King’s prejudices. George's liability to mad- ness rather increased than lessened his influ- ence. With that strange cunning which is often combined with mental unsoundness, the monarch drew no smal] advantage from the threat that he might at any moment go mad. Ministers who suggested Catholic Emancipation were held by all persons of good feeling to be heartless brutes, prepared to risk the chance of driving the sovereign into a lunatic asylum. Nor did the royal influence really depend on the char- acter of tbe monarch. People may have revered the ‘‘ good old King,” but Tories and Whigs alike supposed that the whole policy of the na- tion might be at once changed by the accession

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Apr. 13, 1882] to power of the bad young Prince. No one can assert that the expectation was groundless. George III.’s two sons were each of them real powers in English politics. That Catholic Eman- cipation was delayed till 1829, that the Reform Bill was carried in 1832, was due in great part to the character of George IV. and of his brother. If the one had been a little wiser, O'Connell might never have become the liberator of his countrymen ; if the other had been a trifle more obstinate, a revolutionary movement might have swept away both the House of Lords and the throne. No one can believe that the Queen, whatever may have been her secret influence (and future memoirs will probably show that it has not been inconsiderable), has played in Eng- lish politics anything like the part played by her grandfather or her uncles. In such matters, unnoticed trifies are even more instructive than the greater political transactions which excite general attention. Take, for example, the change which almost imperceptibly has come over the exercise of the right of pardon. Of all the prerogatives of the Crown, none would seem to be more personal to the monarch. There was undoubtedly a time, and that not a very distant time, when the sovereign really could determine whether a criminal should or should not go to the gallows. The story of Effie Deans’s pardon is a fiction, but it is a fiction true to fact. The scene painted by Scott might well have taken place at any time during the reign of George II. or of George III. The King sent the Perreaus to the gallows; the King (greatly to his credit) insisted that Dr. Dodd should meet with his deserved punish- ment. The King might, had he chosen, have pardoned any of these forgers, and great pres- sure was put upon him to pardon the clerical culprit. All this is now changed. No act of Parliament has restricted the royal prerogative, but a modern Effie Deans would not seek or ob- tain an interview with the Queen. She would have recourse not to Her Majesty, but to the Home Secretary. The prerogative of pardon has, in short, passed from the Crown to the Cabinet. In this case it may well be doubted whether a constitutional change is also a consti- tutional improvement ; but however this may be, the change is as certain as it is remarkable. | A sovereign who has ceased to have the right to pardon may retain dignity, but has certainly lost importance. The mode, in the second place, by which the royal power has been diminished has been the increasing development given to the system of Cabinet government. The Cabinet, as Bagehot has established, is in reality the mainspring of the machinery of the English Constitution. A body not known to the law, and which is in fact a committee virtually elected—or rather select- ed—by the Houses of Parliament, and mainly by the House of Commons, from among their num- ber, has become the real English Executive. As the result of a series of something like accidents, this body has in reality, though not in name, the means of appealing from any decision of the Houses of Parliament to the nation. Whoever wishes to determine where it is that supreme power in fact resides, under the complicated and misleading forms of the Constitution, must try to ascertain who are the persons who can in the last resort appoint the Cabinet. Under the Georgian Constitution, the appointment lay in effect part- ly with the King, partly with the two Houses of Parliament. The Crown's choice was no doubt limited : there were moments when the Crown had no choice at all. But, speaking generally, George III. and his sons could exert very great influence over the constitution of the Min- istry; they could often exert decisive influence on the answer to the vital question, who should The Nation. be Premier. They could, at lowest, all but veto the admission of certain persons to the precincts of the Cabinet. 1t was no mere form by which Ministers were treated as the King’s Ministry. When Lord Eldon constantly writes and talks of George III. as “my old master,” when George terms Eldon “ my ” Lord Chancellor, the words used have a real meaning. Before 1860 a great change had come over the working of the Constitution : every one knew and felt that in substance the Cabinet was chosen by’ Parlia- ment. Oddly enough, it was the Conservatives of the day who first made this apparent. That Lord Melbourne retained office, owing to the favor of the Queen, longer than he could other- wise have done, is certain ; but the result of the contest between Peel and the Whigs was dec1- sive. No Premier will ever again rely on royal influence to keep him in power when he has vir- tually if not in name lost the support of Parlia- ment. Authors such as Professor Yonge may still write as though it were an act of imperti- nence or impropriety for a party to force on the Crown the choice of a particular Premier. Every Englishman not blinded by formulas knows that the true impropriety would be for the Crown to refuse the Premiership to the real head of a Parliamentary majority. The ques- tion as to the choice of Ministers, which in truth still remains undecided, is not, What are the re- spective powers of Crown and Parliament? but whether it is in reality to be Parliament or the constituencies who appoint the Premier. Could any House of Commons have refused two years ago to support Mr. Gladstone’s claim to be Prime Minister ? For, in the third place, the formal and me- chanical changes in the Constitution and its working between 1760 and 1860, not to speak of the immense alterations which have been intro- duced since the last date, were clearly little else than the signs of a radical alteration in the rela- tion between Parliament and the nation. Dur- ing the whole reign of George IIi. the re- ceived doctrine of Whigs, even more distinctly than of Tories, was the sovereignty of Parlia-. ment. The electors, who formed a very limited part of the nation, had the right of electing members, but the members of the House of Com- mons were not, according to the orthodox Whig creed, in any sense the representatives of their constituents : they were a portion, and the most important portion, of the sovereign power. The policy of Fox at every stage of his political career, the language of Burke, the conduct of the House of Commons, both in expelling Wilkes and in supporting the war with the colonists of Anierica, can be understood only by students who keep in mind the prevalence of the belief in Parliamentary supremacy. Chatham differed from all the statesmen of his time by realizing the fact that the nation was the ultimate autho- rity in national affairs, and the policy of Chat- ham was at bottom almost as opposed to the theories of the regular Whig leaders as to the pre- judices of the King. Every Englishman of sense now feels, almost without the necessity for re- flection, that the absolute sovereignty of Parlia- ment as opposed to the will of the nation is as obsolete a dogma as the belief in the divine right of kings. The general faith in Parliamentary sovereignty was, it should be noticed, greatly shaken long before the passing of the Reform Act. The career of men such as Brougham and O’Connell marks the growth of that kind of popular agitation which aimed at controlling the action of Parliament by the force of public opinion. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Act itself, were carried by an appeal to forces scarcely represented in Parliament. Changes of political belief are almost always 319 the results of changed circumstances. In the earlier years of George III.’s reign Parliament was supreme, because the aristocracy and that portion of the mercantile classes which were represented in Parliament really contained in themselves the strength and power of the nation. Nothing, as Maurice has with great acuteness pointed out, shows more strikingly how great was the social revolution which took place in England within a period of about fiftv years, than the difference between Pitt's scheme of Parliamentary reform and the Reform Act actually carried by Lord Grey. Pitt’s proposals aimed at increasing the influence of the counties The independent landowners were in his day sound part of the Constitution. They, it was thought, might be trusted to resist both the en croachments of the Crown and the growth of corruption. The aim and effect of Lord Grey's Act were to give predominant influence to the large towns and to the trading and mercantile classes. The contrast between the two policies affords no just ground for censuring either Pitt or Grey. Each statesman tried to legislate, as every practical politician must legislate, with a view to the circumstances of his time. That each of them adopted a different method of re form shows that each had an eye for existing facts. In 1782 the landowners were still the pre dominant power in English politics ; in 1882 the growth of manufactures, the prodigious exten sion of trade, the rise of the great northern towns, had changed the balance of power. The need of the time was to recognize the pre dominance of the mercantile and trading inte rests. The pacific revolution which the Whiz statesmen carried out under the name of the Reform Act was neither more nor less than the transference of ultimate authority in the state from the aristocracy and the landowners to the traders and the middle classes. The Georgian Constitution as it existed from 1760 to the death of George IV. was an aristocratic system of government, in which the power of the nobility was restrained by the authority of the Crown and the growing power of the micdle classes. The Constitution as it existed from the time of the first Reform Act till 1868 was, in the main, a system of middle-class government, in which the predominant power of the middle classes was restrained on the one hand by the influence of the aristocracy, and on the other by the grow- ing power of the democracy as represented by the artisans of the large towns. THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF BERLIOZ. Hector Berlioz: Lettres Intimes. Avec une préface par Charles Gounod. Paris : Calmann Lévy ; New York: F. W. Christern. FEW composers have left their admirers such abundant material for estimating their char- acter, aims, and convictions as Berlioz. To his ‘Mémoires,’ which were published during his lifetime (with some necessary omissions), was 1882, added, three years ago, a volume of ‘ Corres- pondance Inédite,’ containing a large number of his letters to his son and his friends, among whom Liszt, Biilow, Glinka, Legouvé, Fétis, Hiller, Horace Vernet, and Schumann may be named. And now the same publisher has issued a new collection containing 141 letters to one of his most devoted friends, Humbert Ferrand, dating from 1825 to 1867. The preface, by Charles Gounod, is mostly concerned with a dis cussion ef the well-worn theme of the relations between genius, fatherland, and popularity. One sentence deserves citation : ‘‘ Happiness does not lie in the absence of suffering any more than genius lies in the absence of defects.” Gounod was personally acquainted with Berlioz, who

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3820 was fifteen years older than himself, and he tells how he used to hurry from his lessons with linlévy at the Conservatoire to the concert hall, to enjoy ‘‘this strange, impassioned, convulsive music, which opened to my vision borizons so new and so full of color.” One day he attended a rehearsal of ** Romeoand Juliet” before it had appeared in print \ few days later he went to see Berlioz, and played on his piano the passage **Jurez tous” from the finale. ‘‘ Where the devil did you learn that?” asked Berlioz. ‘ At one of your rehearsals,” was the answer ; and Berlioz could hardly believe his ears. hat Berlioz’s character was as “strange, im- passioned, and convulsive ” as his music, is proved “With ‘‘all impressions, all on every page of this correspondence. Gounod, Berlioz,” says sensations take on an extreme form: he does not know joy or sadness except in a state of : as he says himself, he is a ‘ * How unhappily lam organized !” says Berlioz in one of these letters—‘‘a true barometer: now low, variations, int or sombre, of my consuming thoughts,” ” delirium volcano. high, according to the now in another place he says that his life is a ro- ‘fone day another day ner- dog, grumbling, vicious as ~gusted with life, and ready to put an end to it,” were it not for his friends, A person of such a disposition absolutely needs a friend to whom he and the fact that Ferrand was such a friend lends the prin- cipal charm to these letters, of which evidently not one was written with the faintest idea of the possibility of its ever being published. They are all concerned with Berlioz himself, the ego being only occasionally displaced by the name of his wife, his son, or some famous artist or manager with whom he came in contact, and only in so far as he did come in ccntact with him. As Ferrand supplied the poems to some of Ber- lioz’s compositions, there was all the less reason in speaking of them for reserving his inmost con- victions, since he could allude to them as *‘our works.” In a letter dated January, 1867, two years before his death, he makes the interesting statement that if all his compositions were doomed to be burned except one, he would se- lect the ‘‘ Messe des Morts ” for preservation. He actually did burn some of his works—an over- ture to ‘Rob Roy,” a messe solennelle, and three or four inferior numbers in the opera “Francs Juges.” ‘* But,” be adds; *‘ when I tell you that this score has all the qualities which give life to works of art, you can believe ine, and Iam sure that you do believe me. ‘Ben- »” The overture “ Francs Juges,” at its first performance, produced “‘a stupendous and terrible effect, dilflicult to de- Forgetting that it was by himself, he felt inclined to exclaim, *‘ How monstrous, colos- sal, horrible!” At the first performance of “Romeo and Juliet” at Baden, he tells us that the adagio was the cause of many tears, and that nothing enchants him more than to arouse such an emotion by means of music alone. The great agitation into which his own music plunged him, sometimes prevented him from conducting with the necessary composure, 2nd he mentions a case where his constitutional neuralgic pains did him a good service by neatralizing this emo- tion and enabling him to conduct better than usual. That he was rated as a good conductor, and not only of bis own music, is known from various sources, and is indirectly evidenced by the account he gives on page 225 of a quarrel he mance which greatly interests him: at ease, calm, poetic, dreamy ; vous, bored, a mangy a thousand devils, di for music, and curiosity. can confide his joys and sorrows ; venuto’ is such a score. scribe.” had with a Ministre d’Etat because he (Berlioz) would not conduct the performances of Gluck’s * Alceste ” at the Opéra, He knew that certain The Nation. [ Number 876 passages had been altered and transposed to suit the voice of Mme. Viardot, and he would rather visk the refusal of his beloved ‘‘ Trojens” at the Op*ra than assist in producing in a mutilated form a work of Gluck’s, whom he worshipped hardly less than Beethoven and Shakspere. In this matter, indeed, he was more conscien- tious than in his e.pacity as critic, in which the position of the papers for which he wrote often compelled him to deal gently with works he would have rather torn to pieces. Before he ob- tained his post as regular critic of the Journal des Débats he ** worked like a nigger” for seve- ral less prominent papers—as many as four at a time—and in 1824 he complains of having to write ‘‘d-——d feuilleton articles for a hundred sous apiece.” His neuralgic pains were sometimes so severe that he had to devote three or four days to a single article. It is characteristic that some of the first articles he mentions were at- tacks on Italian music. The editor found that he was “‘a little hard (un peu duv) on the Italian Bellini he alludes toin one of the let- ters as a ‘‘ petit polisson,” and Cherubini as an *illustre vieillard.” Of Rossini he says on page 9: “*T had an offer to be introduced to him, but I did not accept, as you can well imagine. [do not love this Figaro, or rather I hate him more every day. His absurd jokes on Weber in the foyer of the German theatre exasperated me; I regretted not to have been present at the con- versation to box his ears.” Curiously enough, he was on good terms with Spontini, whose operas he greatly admired, and with that king of old fogies, Fétis, who wrote, in the Revue Mu- sicale, ‘“‘two superb articles” on Berlioz, and who said to a person who remarked that Berlioz had the devil in his body, ‘‘ Faith, if he has the devil in his body, he has a god in his head.” The devil, it will be noticed, plays a great réle in Berlioz’s correspondence. Allusions are made in several of the letters (July, 1861, and October, 1867) to offers he had received to go to America, or, as he says in the first letter, “les Etats-D/sunis.” In the second instance, he was offered, for six months in New York, a hundred thousand francs. He refused, because, he says, his desire for money was not great enough to overcome his antipathy to this grand nation and its utilitarian habits. It should be stated that Berlioz was, unlike Bee- thoven, a monarchist, or imperialist. He sel- dom alludes to political matters, and begs his friend to avoid them also ; but in a letter dated January 2, 1855, he says: “Je n’outlierai jamais que notre empereur nous a délivrés de la sale et stupide république! Tous les hommes civilisés doivent s’en souvenir. Il ale malheur d@étre un barbare en fait d’art ; mais quoi! c’est un barbare sauveur—et Néron était un artiste.” In view of Adelina Patti’s recent departure from this country, one more short extract will be of interest. Berlioz heard her in 1864 in ** Martha,” ‘‘ that insipid (pla/) opera [which] is played in all languages, in all theatres of the world.” He calls her the “ravissante petite Patti,” and adds that he sent her word that he pardoned her for having made him listen to such platitudes, but that he could do no more than that. ‘‘ Fortunately there is in this opera the delicious Irish air, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ which she sings with a poetic simplicity that would almost suffice, with its sweet perfume, to disinfect the rest of the score.” This was almost twenty years ago, and Mme. Patti still sings the same delicious Lrish melody and the same plati- tudes. school.” SCIO AND CREDO. Die Entstehung der physichen und geistigen Welt aus dem Aether. Von Jos. Schlesinger, Ord. Prof. der Geometrie an der k.k. Hochschule fiir Bodencultur in Wien. 1882. Pp. 97. Die Religion des Gewissens als Zuleunftsideal. Von Dr. Alex. Wernicke. Berlin, 1880. Pp. 127 Geist und Stoff. Erérterungen und Betracht- ungen itiber die Souveriinitat der Materie. Von J. Ludewig. Iserlohn, 1881. Pp. 244. The Philosophy of Self-Consciousness ; contain- ing an Analysis of Reason and the Rationale of Love. By P. F. Fitzgerald. London: Triibner & Co. 1382. Pp. 196. Evenings with the Skeptics ; or, Free Discussions on Free-Thinkers. By John Owen, Rector of East Anstey, Devon. London: Longmans; New York: J. W. Bouton. 1881. 2 vols. Pp. 454 and 516. The Creed of Science, Religious, Moral, and Social. By Wm. Graham, A.M. London: Kegan Paul & Co. 1831. Pp. 412. Some thirty-five years ago half a dozen young German students and teachers of science, who used to meet for discussion in a select Kneipe, had all concluded that the ultimate explanation of the universe must be mechanical. All knew that, from many considerations, obvious enough in Germany, such views must at least long re- main esoteric ; indeed, so strongly were uni- versity influences opposed to such opinions that, after the little band was scattered among the various universities, where each member has since become eminent, they were not even made subjects of correspondence. When individuals met in later years these views were always re_ ferred to, and great satisfaction, and indeed for a time enthusiasm, was felt that all, save Lotze alone, had remained true to the faith in mechan- ism. ‘‘ But of late years,” said the venerable prc- fessor who narrated the incident to the writer, ‘nearly allofus have come to see that there must be something else, while the Social Democrats have made us feel that something else is needed for social order.” The reaction against materialism is no doubt widespread and general. But the reaction against extreme idealism and liberal Christianity is at the very least no less so. As ‘*straws,” let us glance at a few of the latest and ablest books, chosen purely at random from a vast body of similar literature. The uncritical etberism of Spiiler, elaborated in several volumes, which regarded the cosmos as a kinetic organization of ether, attracted little attention. In 1878 B. Trost attempted a quasi- scientific application of the hypothesis to light ; the next year E. Reich attempted to apply it to anthropology and psychology; and at last Prof. Schlesinger urges that the soul must at least be regarded as a mass of accumulated force, and that to assume that it can vanish without trace at death, as materialism implies, is contrary to the law of the persistence of force. As opposed to the ponderable body, the imponderable, ethe- reaisoul-organization gathers in more force than it expends. Atoms may be constituted of homo- geneous cctoms, and may be really ether cells of peculiar constitution. Death is only the separa- tion of the ponderable from the imponderable soul. The latter is the conscious ego, and is im- mortal. This culmination of etherism is very far indeed from being science, but it shows one psychological drift, and suggests a possibility. Dr. Wernicke argues that the foundation for the religion of tbe future was laid by Kant. The voice of conscience is the voice of the im- manent God, calling on us to destroy the trans- cendental idols of himself which men have made.

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Apr. 13, 1882] The consummation to which the protestant prin- ciple must look forward is a vital but confes- sionless religion, and a subjective but most real deity, of whom the moral law is the only reve- lation. Unlike Schopenhauer’s will, all the echoes of the vast and mysterious past from which we sprang are heard, and the aggregate or resultant impulses are felt in conscience. The great task of religious teachers is how to formu- late rightly its vague and often inarticulate promptings, although, so far as the central doc- trine of love for our fellow-men is concerned, little advance can yet be made beyond what Jesus did. J. Ludewig reviews the current theories of nebulz atoms, spontaneous generation, lan- guage, the senses and brain, etc., to show that it is not needful to explain the world without transcendental reference, but that, on the con- trary, there is ample room in the boundless fields left untenanted by agnosticism for a purposive and independent power above physical nature and outside the brain. But room is not proof, and the chief element of the latter is psychologi- cal, and is found in the impulse toward perfec- tion and in the instinctive and irrepressible belief in something above matter, which, how- ever, cannot be fully defined or proved by the intellect. At certain stages of development be- lief in a future life is also indispensable to good morals, Genesis is a poetic fiction, but is yet almost startlingly in accord with geology. The miracles, and very likely future punishment, must be given up; but the conception of God as a father, of the sanctity and dignity of labor, of universal fraternity, are the essentials of Chris- tianity, are not in conflict with science, and are neither agnostic nor dogmatic, but are a social and personal need. According to Mr. Fitzgerald, God is involved in our self-consciousness; otherwise his existence must be for us unnecessary and contingent. Scepticism is thus due to want of a clear concep- tion of what the typical process of thought really is. Language cannot tell us, for it origi- nates in metaphors of sense, and thought many assume to be radically different. Indeed, despite Hegel’s dictum that philosophic self-conscious- ness is the chief end not only of man, but of the universe, there is nothing we know so little about directly as thought. To attain this notion of generic thought, or of a normal as opposed to an isolated ego, induction must be applied to a wide range of literature and history. By this ‘method of quotation” the author is led to the three “ discoveries ” or ‘‘ novelties” which con- stitute his book: (1) The substance of reason is being. Our power of realizing the necessary in- ferences involved in the facts of feeling, thought, and will measures the quantum of our being. Confidence in reason is ‘‘ faith in the intrinsic power of reason” as the basis of ideation. (2) Imperfection is a cause not of pain, but of the chief joy of life, for it makes love possible, which is the key to duty to both God and man, and is essentially correlative. Love is in no sense self-sacrifice, but self-realization. Only divine love can raise marriage above the plane of selfishness @ deux, with its sense of depressed vitality and loneliness, and make men feel “strong, beautiful, and free.” (3) Morality is action according to our rational nature, revealed in introspection as “ social and divine self-love,” and is measured by the amount of happiness which comes from realization of the ideals of feeling, thought, and will. Mr. Owen’s very able and interesting discussion of scepticism, from Xenophanes to Agrippa, is an attempt to introduce a psychological basis into the history of philosophy. Etymologically, the sceptic is not a denier, but only an inquirer or searcher: he is analytic, dynamic, suspensive, The Nation. has inaugurated every advance, is never opposed to Christianity, but always to undue ecclesiasti- cal development; suspects al] finalities and infal- libility, and derides only the presumption and self-complacency of dogmatists. He is, in short, the true philosopher, who loves the truth for its own sake, does not teach it as an hierophunt watching over and doling out sacred and eso- teric lore with needless pedantic technicalities, but in a way to quicken truthful and ingenuous expression. Scepticism is as diverse as belief, and seems germane to the ‘ storm-and-stress ” period of life. The lower races and minds never feel the impulse to analyze the stock of ready- made ideas and habits; but the better the mind the more uncertainty, and the fuller of embar- rassment and contradiction does the universe appear. Ifa man loves freedom, desires to live in his own philosophical house rather than in one planned by another, and takes the first mo- mentous step toward incredulity of his creed (which is held to the more tenaciously the nar- rower it is), he begins a task the completion of which is one of the greatest labors of man. Be- tween the feeling that he knows nothing (the most disquieting of insights) and the conviction that he can know nothing (the most satisfying philosophic ataraxy) a life of struggle and study may well be spent. In this broad spirit the es- says and conversations between persons repre- senting typical standpoints are carried on in a way which suggests Plato, Berkeley, and Mal- lock by turns, and in a style so agreeable that few who begin the volumes will leave them un- finished. The ablest and most original book on our list is Mr. Graham’s. Respecting the nebular hypo- thesis, such fundamental contradictions are found that it is concluded that at present ‘‘ we know nothing for certain” respecting the origin of the earth or the heavenly bodies. As to the origin of life, it could not have been from another planet by aerolite transportation, nor by creative fiat from nothing conceivable by us. Nor can all matter be regarded as “in a certain sense alive,” as Haeckel says. Despite the failures of observers, spontaneous generation must be re- garded as probable, and even Shakspere may have been “ potential in a fiery cloud.” Perso- nality and consciousness in the Deity are sur- rendered as implying limitation and anthropo- morphism, but a vigorous stand is made for pur- pose as opposed to chance in the universe. God is ultimate reality, and cannot be represented in consciousness any more than the latter can be in terms of plant function. In choosing between personality and consciousness and the countless possible modes of being which are higher and inaccessible to our faculties, we must choose the latter for both deity and our own future life. The old conception of the soul as simple, indi- visible, and entirely dissimilar to the body must be abandoned. Memory does end with death, but annihilation is unknown in nature, and we cannot escape something at least as important and significant as continued consciousness, if that must be abandoned. We can now do little, if anything whatever, to benefit our chances of the best in the hereafter. Ethics, the culmina- tion of all human science, is yet to be written. The moralists of the past had an imperfect knowledge of man. Human life could not be run a day on existing ethical systems. Yet from the joint report of the several sciences now since Darwinism (as important an advance in our knowledge of man’s true place in nature as was made three hundred years ago respecting the position of the earth among the heavenly bodies), it may be inferred what we can know and hope, and should, and perhapscan, do. The only error in this view of man, it is said, is that it leaves no place for great men who have enlarged human 321 nature by revealing new fields of thought, find- ing a new language for the soul in art, wrought out many ways of moral salvation, and made our culture and civilization. In our brief space only very inadequate char acterization can of course be made. Each of the writers cited is intelligent, thoughtful, and well read, to say the least ; approaches his theme from a different direction, and appears to cast an independent vote. Each surrenders much dogma that many still think essential, but each makes concessions which most scientific men are far more willing to grant now than they were ten years ago. Each pleads for more, not less religion, and for a more, not !ess critical and radical science. All, too, plead for the third and higher monism above the old antithesis of idealism and materialism, refer to psychological proofs as final, and to moral needs as impera tive and regulative, urge the need of some kind of purpose at the bottom of the universe, and hold belief to be as great a psychic and a greater moral necessity than knowledge. None of these volumes, save the first and least suggestive, is the work of a specialist, and the candid reader feels no special bias. May we not therefore infer (so far as our method of random selection shows anything at all on so small a basis), that the true and often postulated unity between science and religion, when it emerges, is not to be a sorry syncretism nor a compromise. as we are often told by those whose profession it is to lecture upon this subject, but a union, vital and quick- ening to both alike, the vague and general charac ter of which those who are open to the influen- ces which are now so rapidly recasting our near intellectual future can already dimly discern { GENERAL GORDON'S DIARY. A War Diary of Events in the War of the Great Rebellion, 1863-1865. By George H. Gorden, late Colonel 2d Mass. Infantry, Brigadier- General, etc. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co. Crown S8vo, pp. 457. GENERAL GorRDON’s book purports to be the substance of a diary kept by him during the lat- ter half of the late war, and is part of a series of books intended to cover the writer's experience in the whole of the great struggle. The volume has the merit, which all transcripts of actual ex perience and observation in such atime must have, of preserving for us authentic descriptions of scenes and narratives of events with the ful- ness of detail which cannot otherwise be secured. General Gordon’s service, after the battle of An tietam in September, 1862, was not of a very ex citing character. The occupation of the Virginia Peninsula and Norfolk during the campaigns of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, some months: service upon the Sea Islands, near Charleston, a brief and insignificant campaign in Florida, a few weeks’ service in the lower Mississippi Val- ley and on Mobile Bay, and a return to adminis- trative duties at Norfolk during the closing months of the war, make up the sum of his duties and labors, of which the story is told in these pages. The narrative has an interest of its own which is due to the fact that it deals with out of-the- way places and scenes, and with phases of ex- perience somewhat different from the life of a soldier in important campaigns. The author was brought into constant contact with the women and the old men of the Southern States, whose homes were witbin the advancing lines of our armies. He had to deal with the freed- men, whose new-found liberty was a thing its possessors did not know how to use. The trade in cotton, under permits from the Gov ernment, with all its frauds and demoralization, came more or less under his eye and his jurisdic Te gS ae

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tion, the illicit and contraband trade with the enemy through the lines at Norfolk, which was the scan- dal of Butler’s administration of the Depart- ment of the Jame Here is no lack of interesting historical matter, and we should be grateful that such a record has been preserved. If we could have chosen, would have omitted rather turgid com- ments on the situation from time to time, for they diminish the strength of the picture. In the long conversations with rebellious men and women, the General often figures in the rdle of a prolix lecturer on the duty of loyalty and the enormity of the rebellion, and must have been sadly tedious to the unwilling listeners. With all our sympathy with his sentiments, we could have spared most of the iteration without finding the volume less attractive. But we have hardly the right to be choosers, and these blem- ishes only diminish our thankfulness; they do not overbalance the merits of the book. In another respect, however, the volume calls for severer criticism. More than a hundred pages are devoted to the operations of General Gillmore in the Coast Department of South Carolina, and from beginning to end this part of the diary is full of ccntemptuous sneering at the command- ing It was so manifestly written under the influence of a rooted personal ill-will as to lose most of the effect it would otherwise have as a hostile criticism of Gillmore’s operations be- fore Charleston, by one of his subordinates. Had the author given us a clear, military examina- tion of Gillmore’s plans and operations, pointing out their defects and showing what ought to to accomplish the pur- Sea some officer. have been done in order which an army was sent to the Islands, we should at least have been instructed by intelligent criticism made by a military man onthe spot. Whatwe have is not military criti- cism; it is the daily expression of petulant dislike which carps so coustantly as to provoke reaction in the reader’s mind in favor of the object of it. Perhaps General Gillmore ought to have foreseen that when the pounding of his hundred-pound shot and shell had beaten the walls of Sumter into a sloping earthwork, the fort would be as strong as ever. It is easy to sneer at such ignorance after the fact; but that very bombardment was an important step in the education of the whole world regarding the problem of attack and de- fence of fortifications. thing of the resisting power of earthen parapets, poses for we | and finally it fell to his lot to investigate | We already knew some- | but we did not know that casemated structures | of two or three tiers could be transformed into | earthworks while the garrison held the fort, and saved themselves from great loss, by repairs with | sand-bags which kept pace with the demolition of the masonry. Gillmore is jeered at again because the Con- federates evacuated Forts Wagner and Gregg when the sap had nearly reached the ditch of Wagner. Since it was the object of the siege operations to gain possession of those forts as commanding points upon the Bay of Charleston, it would seem to be matter of congratulation that this was done without the cost of a bloody assault. To have carried Wagner would not necessarily, oreven probably, have captured the garrison, which could have retired to Fort Gregg, and from there have retired again by water. Still, again, the unfortunate affair of General Seymour at Olustee, in Florida, is laid at Gillmore’s door, though he was at Lilton Head. If anything is plain, it is that ‘he causes of that misfortune were on the field cf battle, not at department headquarters, Yct Sey- mour is praised as a brave and skilful officer, though far away, is saddled while Gillmore, with the blame. It may be that the author's implied judgment The Nation. of Gillmore is just ; but the point now made is | that the book before us gives no means of form- | ing a judgment. It is an expression of depre- ciatory opinions, without a summing up of facts supporting them. This is usually called abuse, not criticism, and a military writer should hold himself bound to give intelligible proofs of bad gencralship, and not ask his readers to ac- cept his condemnation of a commander be- cause he reiterates his own dislike or ill-will. The publication of a diary after the death of the writer may be proper when the same publi- cation by the writer himself may not be. In the one case we read with the understanding that we must take opinions recorded at the moment with many grains of allowance; but when a writer prints his own diary he is bound to omit personal disparagement, unless he accompanies it with such fuller marshalling of facts and argu- ment as shall make it evident that he is trying to rise to the level of historical judgment. It is to be regretted that General Gordon does not seem to have appreciated this distinction. Had his book contained a little less or a little more, it would be worthier a place in the permanent his- torical memcirs of the time. Its descriptions are usually lively, often quite vivid, and its abundant stores of incident and anecdote make it easy and entertaining reading. The Fables of La Fontaine. the French by Elizur Wright. with notes, by J. W. M. George Bell & Sons. 1882. La Fontaine and Other French the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, phia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. SomME weeks ago we reviewed a work by Mr. Elizar Wright (the Life of Myron Holley), com- posed in his seventy-seventh year, and now we receive from across the water, as an addition to Bohn’s Standard Library, his earliest literary performance, first published in his thirty-seventh year. Mr. Wright’s complete version of the Fables of La Fontaine appeared in 1841 in an elegant form, thanks to a generous body of sub- scribers, and was followed by a cheap and popu- lar impression, now rarely to be met with, which ran out in a sixth and expurgated edition. It can- not be said, therefore, that in this case the prophet was without honor in his own country, yet no American publisher has thought it worth while to revive what still remains, as Mr. Gibbs says, the best English version of the French classic, even when compared with the late Mr. Thorn- bury’s, made to accompany Doré’s illustrations. The present editor has not only given Mr. Wright's work a beautiful typographical dress, restoring the full text, but has prefixed an interesting account of Mr. Wright himself, including some of the latter’s original fables, which establish his title to be a translator in the same vein, and has added judicious explanatory foot notes. We will only remark further on this head that, but for our absurd protective system, the translator’s countrymen might now enjoy, at a low price, the fruits of the well-deserved honor thus bestowed upon him abroad. Singularly enough, the Rev. Lucas Collins makes not the remotest allusion to attempts to place La Fontaine before English readers. His Translated from A new edition, Gibbs, London: Fabulists. A.M. By Philadel- agreeable little book—one of Mrs. Oliphant’s ‘‘Foreign Classics” series—is interspersed with metrical translations, both from La Fontaine and from the other fabulists treated of. They are possibly, though quoted, his own composi- tion, and at all events exhibit the poetic facility which usually attends a certain degree of culti- vation. They would be called more elegant than Mr, Wright’s, but they cannot have cost one-half the labor, and much of their smoothness they tess 876 to liberties with the French which Mr. Wright seldom allows himself. In general, they lack the terseness and pungency which are the reward of successful adherence to the model ; and if, once in a while, the Englishman hits the mark better than the American, he oftener misses wheu he does not purposely avoid it. Take, for instance, the energetic verse in the ‘‘Animaux malades de la peste” : “Ils ne mouraient pas tous, mais tous étaient frappés.” Mr. Wright straightforwardly renders it thus: owe “They dicd not all, but all were sick”; while Mr. Collins gives this sapless equivalent: “Death day by day to some, sore pains to all.” Still, there is some profit to be derived from contrasting the versions which are common to these two volumes, though Mr. Collins is far from such verbal felicities as Mr. Wright’s ‘‘ Rat- United-States” (peuple rat), and the like. And if forty years have not done much to increase the number of La Fontaine’s English translators, neither have they greatly enlarged the material for his biography. There is very little in Mr. Collins’s sketch which is not to be found in Mr. Wright's. Paris Herself Again in 1878-79. Augustus Sala. 350 illustrations. tion. London: Vizetelly & Co.; By George Sixth edi- New York : Scribner & Welford. 1882. 12mo, pp. xviii.- 538 ’, Mr. SALA spent four months in Paris during the latest Universal Exhibition, and wrote for the Daily Telegraph the letters which, profusely il- lustrated by Cham, Bertall, Lalanne, and other French artists, form the substance of this lively book. We all know Mr. Sala’s style—the rapid, inconsequent, and yet entertaining way in which his thoughts may be said to tumble over each other. We have all been amused by his manner in treating light subjects, and distracted by it when he attempts to write seriously, as in his extraordinary essay on ‘‘ The Genius of Charles Lamb,” prefixed to a part of the Moxon 12mo edition, but soon replaced by a paper from another hand. Fortunate, by the way, is the possessor of that curious essay. Its title is ‘‘ On the Genius of Charles Lamb”; but while it con- tains something upon nearly every other topic in literature, there is nothing in it about the genius of Lamb. These and other of Mr. Sala’s literary peccadilloes have had their reproof in certain quarters, as we learn from his own very frank confessions in the preface to the second edition of the present work, which seems to have been accepted as a sort of propitiation : “The Times, which was good enough to re- view a book of mine called ‘A Journey Due North,’ published twenty years ago, but which subsequently sank into stony silence concerning my writings, gave a graceful notice to ‘ Paris Herself Again.’ Sodid the Atheneum. . . The Saturday Review went out of its way, so it seemed to me, to be appreciative and compli- mentary. What has become of my enemies ? 4 It is a matter of great joy to me to find from the welcome this book has received, not only from the public, but from the reviewers, that at least I have not been making enemies since my last work was published.” There is reason for this book’s success in its fitness of style to the subject. The surface of Paris—the Paris of the boulevard, restaurant, and theatre, the shows of the great Exhibition— these are the natural topics of the rambling newspaper-letter, and Mr. Sala is an accomi- plished and very rambling newspaper-lettcr- writer, Of all writers he is the one who can best whip up the froth of an egg. But, if there is little enough substance in his writing, it is excellent in its way : one feels that this book is to be read purely and wholly for amusement, and without the slightest thought of edifica-

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