~K) NORTH AMERICANf REVIEW. No. CCXVI. JULY, 1867. ART. I. 1. Chapters on Language. By the REV. FRJ~Iuc W. 1?ARRAR, M. A. London: Lougmans, Green, & Co. 1865. l2mo. 2. On the Origin of Language. By HENSLEIGH WEDGWOOD. London: N. Triibner & Co. 1866. 12mo. 3. An Essay on the Origin and Formation of the Romance Languages. By the RT. HON. SIR GEORGE CORNEWALL LEWIS. Second Edition. London: Parker, Son, and Brown. 1862. l2mo. 4. Sail Origine della Lingua Italiana. Dissertazione di CESARE CANTiT. Napoli. 1865. 8vo. 5. Saggio sui Dialetti Gallo-Italici. Di B. BIONDELLI. Mi- lano. 1853. 8vo. 6. Scelta di Curiositd~ Letterarie inedite o rare dat Secolo XIII. al XIX. Bologna. 1861 1866. l8mo. 76 num- bers. 7. Atti della Societ4 Ligure di Storia Patria. Genova. 1858 1866. 4 vols. Royal 8vo. 8. Documenti Inediti riguardanti le due Crociate di San Lu- dovico IX., Re di Francia. Raccolti ed illustrati da LUIGI TOMMASO BELGRANO. Genova. 18591865. 8vo. 9. Codice Diplornatico del Regno di Carlo I. e II. d Angi~. IRaccolti ed annotati per GIUSEPPE DEL GIUDICE. Vol. I. Napoli. 1863. Folio. 10. Pergamene, Codici e Fogli ~Z!artacei di Arbor6a. Rae- colti ed illustrati da PIETRO MARTINI. Cagliari. 18631866. Folio. 8 numbers. VOL. CV.NO. 216. 1 2 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, 11. Collezione di Opere inedite o rare dei primi tre Secoli della Lingua, pubblicata per cura della .Reale Commissione pe Testi di Lingua nelle Provincie deli Emilia. Torino. 1861, 1862. 2 vols. 12mo. 12. Collezione di Opere inedite o rare dei primi tre Secoli della Lingua, pubblicata per cura della Reale Commissione pe Testi di Lingua nella Provincie deli Emilia. (Muni- cipal Codes, Romances of Chivalry, Chronicles, & c.) Bo- logna. 18621866. Vols. I. to XII. 8vo. To common apprehension the art of speaking seems to flow so naturally, or rather spontaneously, from the faculty of speech, that a large proportion, perhaps even a majority, of those who practise it are not conscious that it is an art at all. With them, even the special movements of the lips and tongue and epiglottis, of the larynx, the lungs, the thorax, of the thou- sand muscles, in short, concerned in the formation and modu- lation of articulate sounds, are as involuntary as the process of respiration, which is effected by a part of the same organs; speech is thinking aloud, and, like purely intellectual cogitation, devoid of consciously directed material action. Man must have passed out of the subjective stage of existence, acquired a cer- tain amount of contemplative culture, of power of introspective observation, he must have learned to project himself out- wards as an object, and to make himself his own proper study, before he is able to consider the character of language as an organic mechanism, and to inquire at what point in its pro- cesses instinct yields to invention and nature is merged in art. And this is one of the many cases where the child is wiser than the man; for in the imitation of vocal sounds the infant evi- dently makes a voluntary effort of comparison and repetition, and deliberately experiments on the mode of producing articu- lations. But the sound once acquired, the process by which it was mastered is forgotten, and the adult cannot comprehend speech as an art until he has repeated the experiments of his infancy upon the utterance of vocal elements and syllables, and brought a self-intelligent will to bear upon the various move- ments of the organs employed in pronouncing them. This study requires an effort of attention and of volition analogous 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 8 to that by which we learn to control the action of the involun- tary muscles; for every involuntary muscle may become volun- tary, or rather be made obedient to conscious will, every vol- untary muscle may come again to act, as all muscles primarily - do, spontaneously, at least so far as we can detect any effort of the will to direct them. Many persons move freely the ears, the scalp, and other usually fixed portions of the body. There are well-attested instances of the power of accelerating or re- tarding the beating of the pulse at pleasure; while, on the other hand, a rope-dancer, in his familiar feats, is as little conscious of the action of the will in his limbs as in his balancing-pole. Persons who have never systematically studied the mechan- ism of their own speech doubtless often acquire the pronuncia- tion of a foreign tongue with very little reflective, conscious effort; but an educated man who tries to imitate the sounds of a language ui4rnown to him, soon perceives that his ear must undergo a good deal of training before he can even truly hear those sounds, and that to produce them he must employ organs, or at least muscles, which are either not brought into play at all, or act in a different way, in the pronunciation of his native dialect. The structure and movements of the various organs of articu- lation have been very carefully studied by physiologists and phonologists, and, by the aid of ingenious contrivances, made visible and capable of graphic representation. Philologists have detected laws of development and succession in articula- tion, so that from a given form of a word in a given age we can say with confidence what it must have been at an earlier, what it must become at a later period. These observations, of course, apply exclusively to the ma- terial processes of speech. The sensuous mechanism, the natu- ral history of audible language, is much better understood than its intellectual philosophy; and the obscure question of the re- lation of vocal sounds to the objects, images, emotions, and thoughts expressed by them, or, in other words, of the origin of language, is as unsettled as it was in the days of Aristotle. Many new facts bearing on this point have indeed been discov- ered, and they all, or nearly all, tend in the same direction; that is, to the imitative and the interjectional or ejaculative 4 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, theories, which seem to be necessarily complementary to each other. Farrar and Wedgwood, the ablest advocates of these theories who have written in English, perhaps the ablest who have discussed the subject at all, have made numerous con- verts; but their arguments are rejected as inconclusive by many of the most eminent linguists of our time, who, however, have as yet by no means refuted them, or suggested any more probable theory. Among existing knowledges, the theory and laws of ar- ticulate speech, as systematized by Max Muller and other phi- lologists in the form called too ambitiously perhaps the science of language, has been the last to undergo the process of exposition in untechnical phraseology, or what, in these days of levelling up, is known as popularization, but which, at that recent period when in Europe there was no people, but only kings, lords, priests, and varletry, was half contemptuously styled vulgarization. The lateness of the attempt to bring down to ordinary comprehension, and to make accessible to ordinary facilities of attainment, some acquaintance with the general facts or laws, if that term be insisted on which constitute the body of this science, is in a great degree due to the circumstance just alluded to, that it is, perhaps, the knowledge the conscious application of whose principles is most remote from the uses and demands of ordinary life, and which leaves the faintest traces on the popular touchstone of utility.~~ We say the conscious application of principle; for through all this mysterious life of ours we are acting in obedience to rules of whose form, conditions, and limitations, nay, of whose very existence, we are ignorant. Every man speaks, and he may pronounce well, without any acquaintance with the muscu- lar structure and peculiar functions of the individual organs of articulation, or with the theoretical analysis of vocal sounds; he may strictly conform to the idiom of his native tongue with- out knowing wherein that idiom corresponds to, and wherein it differs from, the philological system of other more or less closely related languages, without even being aware that words are susceptible of division into grammatical classes; he may use a compound word in exact accordance with the primary 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 5 senses of its remote radicals, without having heard that the term ever existed in any simpler or different form. Linguistic science is to the practical use of any given speech what the theory of statics is to walking. There were good pedestrians before it was observed that, when the body is advanced in the act of walking, the line of direction is thrown without the base, and hence every forward movement is the beginning of a fall, the whole process a series of incipient falls, each arrested by a step which serves, not to aid the progress, but only to ex- tend the base of the ambulant machine, and thus avert the catastrophe. But the science of statics has very palpable practical uses. Architects in all ages have doubtless often builded better than they knew, but experience shows that they would have builded better still if they had known more of the scientific principles of stable construction; whereas it has not been observed that persons who occupy themselves with recondite grammatical theory and comparative philology write or speak more forci- bly, more eloquently, or even more accurately than their neigh- bors, who are content with a knowledge of the positive facts which make up the infiexional, syntactical, and lexical system of their native speech. But it is due to our intelligent nature and to the spirit of philosophical inquiry to say, that science is not, and never has been,, cultivated chiefly for the sake of its material or practical ends; for though knowledge is power, it is far more emphati- cally pleasure. Minerva is worshipped rather for her beauty than for her strength. When a brilliant, imaginative theorist or a skilful experimenter has excited attention by a luminous exposition of newly suggested laws, or even of comprehensive facts based on yet unsuspected law, he is at once surrounded by eager disciples, who are attracted by that disinterested cu- riosity which is a natural impulse in every enlightened mind. The discoverer of a principle does not ordinarily invent a machine for its practical application. Even the inventor of the machine does not often reap the pecuniary reward; and the versatile Watt is almost the only recorded instance where the philosopher, the inventor, and the capitalist have been united in the same person. 6 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, Strictly speaking, the highest science must ever be the pos- session of the few, because few are gifted with a natural apti- tude for the comprehension of philosophic principle, or even for the generalization of widely and variously applicable fact; few enjoy the leisure, the opportunity, and the capacity for the persevering and continuous study which is required for the full mastery of any systematized body of unfamiliar truths. Slow, circumstantial, and laborious processes are still the only paths to the remotest limit accessible at a given period in any science. Scholars thus trained are apt to look with unjust disdain upon the attainments of those who have followed shorter avenues, royal roads to the same apparent results, because they hold that exact method and precise knowledge of minor detail, if not more valuable than the results themselves, are yet essen- tial to a full comprehension of them. This is doubtless, in general, true, but it by no means follows that imperfect knowl- edge is worthless; and the distinction in kind, supposed to ex- ist between the science of the philosopher and the empiricism of the layman, is, in most cases, purely imaginary. Scientific men are perpetually confounding what t11iey, above all others, ought clearly to distinguish, law and fact ; and a majority of the propositions enunciated as laws in books of natural and even moral philosophy are barely generalizations of facts of observation, whose rationale is as completely unknown to the Newton as to the most ignorant peasant. The man of science knows more, but it is a mistake to suppose that, in regard to the mass of his attainments, he has an acquaintance with prin- ciples which enables him to know better than other men. His superiority consists, first, in a more orderly, or, if you please, philosophical arrangement; and secondly, in a greater accumu- lation of observed facts. In material science, nothing is a law which is not demonstrably a necessary result of the constitu- tion of matter and the notions of time and space. The num- ber of such laws yet discovered and precisely formulated is ex- tremely small, while that of general, and, so far as we know, even universal facts, is very great. The science of language, so far as it is yet constituted, con- sists almost wholly of facts more or less general in their appli- cation, but not referable to any ascertained necessary law; and 1867.] The Origim of the Italian Language. 7 thus far our knowledge of it belongs rather to the domain of natural than to that of intellectual philosophy. The extension of the boundaries of this science has been greatly facilitated by foreign conquest, by commercial and missionary enterprise, by scientific travel; but the most important contributions to our progress in it have come from a nation which has, until lately, least participated in these operations. It is to the phi- losoph~zing spirit of Germany that we directly or indirectly owe nearly all the advance we have made in recent times in the theoretical knowledge of speech; and there are few Euro- pean peoples who are not more indebted to German than to native scholarship for a better acquaintance with the special history and grammatical structure of their vernacular tongue. German philologists do not generally affect ease of method even to the extent of lightening the mere mechanical diffi- culties of acquiring foreign languages. In their grammars and linguistic treatises, little regard is paid to distinctness of typography, or to such a division of matter into chapter, sec- tion, and paragraph, such a conspicuous arrangement of im- portant words as to catch the eye and facilitate the search for a particular passage or subject; while indexes, and even full tables of contents, are very commonly dispensed with alto- gether. Although, therefore, much has been done in Germany for the accumulation and organization of linguistic knowledge, and for its diffusion among professed scholars, the philosophy of language, as expounded in the literature of that country, has not been made either so accessible or so attractive in form as most other sciences. It is, nevertheless, to a German scholar writing in English that we are indebted for by far the ablest and most successful attempts yet made for the popularization of the principles of linguistic science. Modern philosophers do not assent to the doctrine of Socra- tes, that nothing can be known; but they agree with him in holding, that, for the purpose of mental discipline, the search for knowledge is worth more than knowledge itself. Hence, they do not estimate didactic works simply by the amount of scientific fact, or even principle, which they reveal, but also by 8 The Origin of the Italian Language. the strength and vivacity of the stimulus they administer to the intellect, the impulse they give to the voluntary exercise of the mental powers. Considered from this point of view, the writings of Max Muller, and especially his Lectures on the Science of Language, mark an epoch in the history of linguis- tic literature. With the exception of Lyells Principles of Geology, we are acquainted with no scientific work which has at once excited the interest of so numerous a class of intelli- gent readers, none which, by stimulating enlightened curios- ity, and by clear exposition of the objects and value of a par- ticular study, has contributed so largely to advance the progress of the science whose cultivation it advocates. The two works resemble each other in the genial way in which they clothe with flesh the dry bones of scientific system, in a skilful use of every fact bearing upon those theories that modern research has discovered, and in a breadth of illustration which lays under contribution all collateral knowledges, and attracts the sympathy of every man of liberal culture by appealing to his speciality as, if not a formal ally, at least a kindred discipline. A scientific teacher, who has trained pupils in both continents, has often remarked, that if, in an audience of a hundred, he had secured two or three earnest hearers, the aim of his course was accomplished. Not every reader of Lyells classic volume becomes a geologist, not every listener to Mullers learned and eloquent lectures becomes a linguist, but each of these philos- ophers has founded, or rather richly endowed, an English school of the prophets, which will long rank among the most conspicuous foci of science. In England, in France, and in all th~ Northern Continental nations, the study of comparative grammar has led to a more assiduous cultivation of domestic philology. The etymology, the inflexional system, and the syntax of the languages of those countries have received much elucidation, both from sources considered, not long since, unrelated to all of them, and from the detection of latent affinities between them, which often vividly illustrate obscure points in their significance and history. Without inquiring how far the revived spirit of na- tionality which is one of the most characteristic features of the associate life of our times is the cause or the conse 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 9 quence of the advancement of linguistic and philological knowl- edge, it is certain that patriotism and philology have recipro- cally promoted each other. For investigation into ancient domestic history, which always accompanies the awakening of a new consciousness of national life, an acquaintance with the often half-forgotten dialects in which the local annals are embodied is indispensable. The best materials for the study of these older forms of speech are to be found in ancient laws, contracts, letters, family memorials, and historic ballads, the study of which rarely fails to rekindle patriotic enthusiasm. But man is not a ruminating animal. Nations cannot live wholly on the past. The original modern authorship which the pursuit of medi2eval literatu.re has prompted in Northern and Central Europe often borrows its themes from ancient national story, its illustrations, and in part even its diction, from reminiscences of ancestral life, and is more or less in- spired by a breath of resuscitated animation; but it is never- theless fresh, vivacious, and progressive in spirit. It is only in an inferior degree that corresponding results have yet manifested themselves in the imaginative, the his- torical, or the philological literature of Southern Europe. The lips of no modern Italian bard have been touched by that coal from the altar which kindled the prophetic fire in Whit- tiers heart when he chanted his noblest lay, The Reformer. The backward-looking son of the Latin family has not yet sufficiently learned that the waster is the builder too. Ghostly conservatisms haunt his imagination; and even after his eyes are opened to the hopes of the inevitable future, he still pays a languid worship at the shrine of Pazienza. The movement with which those races are heaving even now, in these days of change, bears more the aspect of a contagious excitement, than of the spontaneous development of a new organic life. In Italy, especially, the influence of France we are not speaking of the political relations between the two countries, nor of the special character of that influence, for any controlling foreign ascendency must always be fatal to the originality and intellectual growth of a people is smothering what might else become a new and higher form of Latin na- tionality. Italy has yet scarcely reflected back a single wave 10 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, of the impulse it has received in so many directions from with- out, and has contributed little or nothing to accelerate the action of the ferment which is leavening the whole earth. There is nothing which can fairly be called a modern school of Italian literature, and but one Italian creative spirit Manzoni has acquired a European celebrity in the present century. But Manzoni is not of this age; he belongs rather to the period in which he has laid the scene of his admirable ro- mance. Nicolini, superior to Manzoni in enlightened patriot- ism and political wisdom, though much inferior in genius, is less remarkable for poetic inspiration and originality of thought than for a clearness of vision which enabled him to see, and a moral courage which emboldened him to utter, truths that few Italian poets have felt, or dared to speak, for centuries. Giusti, the Tuscan satirist and lyrist, emphatically the prophet, the yates sacer, of modern Italy, is, with the exception of Man- zoni, and perhaps Leopardi, the only Italian writer of this century whose works are pervaded with that ambrosial flavor of immortality which gives assurance of perpetual life. Leo- pardi was an eminent philologist; and both Manzoni and Giusti, though not apparently men of much linguistic learning, were most critical students of their own tongue. Giustis dialect, in fact, is so strictly national, or, to speak more accu- rately, provincial, that even Italian strangers, Lombards, Ye- netians, and Piedmontese, find in him many dark sayings hard to be understood, and his familiar letters are published with explanatory notes, for the benefit of non- Toscctni. In the general cultivation of the science of language, the Italians have been behind most other European nations. They have had, and still have, men distinguished by linguistic attain- ment, eminent Egyptologists, as well as Semitic and Sanscrit scholars; but since the creation of the modern school of phi- lology, they have contributed comparatively little to the fur- therance of this branch of knowledge. The old Italic lan- guages, as well as the early history of Rome, have been more thoroughly studied and more ably elucidated by foreign than by native scholars; and the modern Italian and other Romance dialects have by no means received from those who speak them the attention which they merit, both by their intrinsic interest and by their relative importance in the history of speech. 186L] The Origin of the Italian Language. 11 Indeed, we think that the linguistic character of the media3- val Romance dialects has been generally somewhat mistaken, and their value as sources of linguistic instruction, though pointed out by Max MUller, has been popularly much under- rated. It is too commonly assumed that they were speeches exclusively in a state of analysis, resolution, and decay. The fact that the Bildungstrieb, the nisus formativus, and even the synthetic tendency were in them, as in some of the Gothic tongues, always at work, has certainly not been wholly over- looked; but the importance of this fact, as suggesting illustra- tions of the processes by which infiexions were built up in the early stages of speech, has scarcely been fully recognized, ex- cept by the great linguist to whom we have just referred. To an Italian there is apparently no riddle to solve in the affinity between the Latin and his mother tongue, and the very obviousness of a general relation between them is calculated rather to damp than to pique curiosity as to the precise char- acter of that relation. The natural impulse of a classical scholar and all Italians who are educated at all know Latin is to regard all the modern Romance dialects alike as the degenerate progeny of a noble speech, and therefore as possess- ing no history worthy of attention. To this day Italy has no better grammar of her native speech than the old-world Re- gole of Corticelhi, published two hundred years ago; no par- allel grammar of Latin and Italian; no etymologicon compar- able to that of Diez, or even M6nage. The same observations apply, substantially, to the other Romance nations, not, how- ever, including the French, which has too large an infusion of Gothic and Celtic elements to be considered as belonging essentially to the Latin race. The Spanish and Portuguese languages are, very probably, even more closely allied to clas- sical Latin than is the Italian; but the contributions of His- panic scholars to our knowledge of the relations between the old speech and the new, and to the special biography of their native dialects, are almost insignificant. But, notwithstanding the general disinclination of these races to the pursuit of linguistic science, and particularly to really thorough and philosophical research into the primary history of the Romance languages, Italian philologists of for- 12 The Origin of the Italian Language. mer centuries have collected much material for the elucidation of the subject, and we are now at the opening of an era which promises the creation of a new and truly national school of Italian art, literature, and philosophy, as well as of civil and ecclesiastical polity. While Italy was but a geographical expression, the Tuscan dialect was the common that is, public, not familiar language of the provinces. It is now the national tongue. It promises to become the universal pop- ular speech. It is fast ridding itself of cumbrous forms and involutions, and adapting its movements to the new uses and exigencies of modern political and social life. A large and liberal patriotism is supplanting the old municipalism, and that wInch is common to all is assuming a higher place in the affec- tions of the Italian citizen than that which is the possession of but a few. Native philology will absorb a larger share of at- tention, and there will be a natural impulse to connect, by historical research, the breathing speech of the hour with the living tongue, not the dead literature, of ancient Rome. The Italians have long been stigmatized and by none more severely than by their own writers as a characterless race. And yet few European nations have produced within the last half-century more men of iron will and exhaustless energy. None can boast nobler examples of lofty patriotism, self-sacrificing devotion, and the humbler virtues, than Italy~ The quality of physical bravery has been largely developed in recent years, n6t only in men in conspicuous and responsible positions, but in the masses. Moral courage is usually evolved later in the formation of a great national type, and this essen- tial constituent of every virtue, hitherto a comparatively rare trait among the Italians, is beginning to take the place of the hesitancy, doubt, and indecision, formerly characteristic of the people. All the grand characters of modern Italy Europe has no more truly heroic names than Ricasoli and Garibaldi have been tempered in the fires of that broad national pa- triotism which the hope of national unity has made pos- sible, and the new government has no special policy which is not dictated and improved purely by the patriotic idea. Canti~i sighs over the war which the Reformation waged against Latin, and pays a noble, though unconscious tribute 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 18 to the spirit of that great movement, by identifying its cause with that of the enlivening element of modern political pro- gress, and sneering at the narrow patriotism which trans- lated the Bible into the vernacular tongues with the purpose of substituting the idea of nationality for the grand catholic unity of the Middle Ages, a unity which apotheosized pontiffs and princes, but did nothing to inculcate Christian brother- hood, nothing to promote international and domestic peace~ nothing to diffuse popular intelligence or to promote the prac- tice of the social virtues. Before his ink is fairly dry, the Italian government declares its adhesion to the idea of na- tionality by the most radical course of policy, indepen- dence of Rome, absolute divorce of Church and State, and the suppression of the monasteries, which are at once sinks of ig- norance and vice, and strongholds of a hostile power within the boundaries of the state. While doting Rome is fumbling over the old Jesuit Rela- tions to find new Japanese martyrs to canonize, new idols for popular superstition to worship, Italy is raising monuments to the Martin della Libert~ Italiana, and giving honorable sepulture to the bones of the brothers Bandiera, whom the British Postmaster-General, Sir James Graham, betrayed to the Neapolitan executioner. Literary associations and private publishers are printing hitherto inedited manuscripts, or repro- ducing rare early editions. The government is doing something to encourage historical and literary research, and aiding in the publication of the results, and a great number of volumes of more or less valuable philological material have already been issued from the press. Most of them, it is true, date from too late a period to throw much light on the primitive history of the modern Peninsular speech. Some of the more ostentatious of these publications are but monuments of pompous inanity; and the editors of some are aping the silly exclusiveness of English and French bibliomaniac clubbists, in limiting the impres- sions to a very small number of copies, and thus giving the factitious value of rarity to much that has no intrinsic worth. Others, of less pretension, and we take pleasure in partic- ularizing among them the Documenti Inediti riguardanti le due Crociate di San Ludovico IX., now publishing at Genoa 14 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, in a modest octavo, are of much philological as well as historical interest. The Collezioni di Opere inedite o rare, edited by the Commissione pe Testi di Lingua, forms an aus- picious commencement of what promises to compose a very valuable repository. A new series of the Archivio Slorico has been commenced at Florence, and there is evidently a progress in the right direction. Biondelli, in the course of his studies on the Italian local dialects, has revealed many interesting facts, pointed out suggestive analogies, and furnished a very considerable amount of useful data for further scientific elabo- ration. The political and ecclesiastical archives of the Middle Ages in the kingdom of Italy being now open to free research, we may soon expect new and valuable accessions to our liistor- ical and philological knowledge of those eras. The records of Papal Rome still remain closed to profane eyes. Priestcraft never owns its juggles, and therefore the secrets of the Curia Romana will never be voluntarily confessed by its members. But Rome cannot long resist the pressure from without, and light will soon penetrate to the foulest corners and darkest recesses of the pontifical palace. Some, at least, of Giustis visions in Prete Pero will be realized. APPIGIONASI will be written on the walls of the Vatican; and then whatever priest- ly jealousy shall have spared of the documentary matter ac- cumulated in its vaults will become available both for the warning and the instruction of men. Even the plundering and sale of manuscripts from the conventual libraries, which is now going on in Italy, will serve to bring to light some valu- able historical and literary facts, and to rescue from annihila- tion memorials which the monks would have destroyed if they had not been allowed, by the indulgence of the government, an opportunity of stealing them.. In instituting a parallel between the classical Latin and the modern Romance dialects, we possess an advantage which does not exist for similar comparison between older and more re- cent forms of the Gothic tongues. We have the Latin, not indeed in a very primitive, not even in its earliest written form, but we know it as it was in its most advanced stage of grammatical development, in its highest literary culture, in all its catholic variety of application. The. wealth and multifari 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 15 ousness of extant classical literature has preserved to us, in all probability, a very large proportion of its authorized vocabu- lary, exemplifications of all its grammatical forms, and of most of its phraseological combinations. In other words, we have the lexical, inflexional, syntactical, and rhetorical systems com- plete. Hence we may claim to be acquainted with Latin in its utmost capacity, its widest versatility of expression. Besides this, the language has continued, through all the fluctuations of Italian history down to the present day, if not a vernacular, yet what ixiay be called, without a great departure from propri- ety of speech, a living tongue, and thus we have the means of studying its whole power of accommodation to new ideas, new facts, new uses, and, in fine, the entire range of the analogies and the discrepancies between it and the modern dialects of the Latin races. On the other hand, our oldest memorials of a Gothic speech, except a few isolated words, chiefly proper names, date from the fourth century after Christ. These consist of a large part of the New, and insignificant fragments of the Old Testament, a part of a commentary on the Gospel of John, and a few mere scraps of calendars and private contracts, in the Moeso-Gothic language, a dialect of the Low German family, which has ut- terly perished, leaving no progeny, no later phase; for, in the opinion of the ablest German philologists, none of the many modern Teutonic dialects can claim to be descended from the Moeso-Gothic; hence it is an isolated philological organism, having collateral relatives indeed, but, so far as we know, nei- ther progenitors nor posterity. After Ulfilas, four centuries elapsed before a Continental Germanic tongue became the vehi- cle of a literature. From the ninth century, we have important remains, and thenceforward a nearly continuous succession of literary memorials, in various dialects, until the sixteenth century. At this period, the High-German, in substantially its present form, supplanted all the rest, and became the exclusive cultivated tongue of the Germanic nations, unless we include in this appellation the Netherlanders, who write and speak a language nearly allied to the Platt-Deutsch or Low-German dia- lects. The Anglo-Saxon, which was transported to England with the conquerors in the fifth century, appears to have had 16 Tue Origin of the Italian Language. a literature at an earlier period than any of the sister dialects except the Mceso-Gothic, and it is probable that Beowuif existed, at least orally, before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. But we do not know this poem in its primitive recension; and, philologically speaking, we cannot assign to it an earlier date than that of the only manuscript which appears to belong to the eighth century.* With the exception of this Christian r~facimento of a heathen poem or saga, which has doubtless undergone as great gram- matical. as literary modifications, all the oldest Germanic liter- ature we are acquainted with consists of versions or para- phrases of Scripture. There is good reason to believe that, partly from the want of existing examples of composition in the native speech, partly from inexperience in translation, and partly from a desire to secure a strict conformity to the sacred text, the construction and syntax of these monuments were, in a considerable degree, fashioned after those of the Greek and Latin originals. These writings, reverenced as the earliest lit- erary monuments of the speech, and at the same time as the voice of an infallible revelation, became authoritative models to later authors, and consequently a foreign type was impressed upon Germanic philology in the very cradle of its literature. Hence, as literary mediums, the Teutonic dialects are not self- developed, and there is in many cases room for doubt whether a given construction is indigenous or borrowed from an extra- neous source. Besides this, the extant remains of this ancient literature are not sufficiently extensive, or various enough in subject, to have employed more than a small proportion of the vocabulary or of the syntactical and rhetorical combinations of any of the Teutonic languages. Our knowledge of these dia- lects is therefore necessarily very imperfect, and we are far less acquainted with the primitive sources of our own every-day vernacular, or even with the native character of the Germanic dialects a thousand years ago, than we are with the minuti~ of * The traces of Christianity in Beowuif are probably improvements of the original by copyists and editors. It has been argued, from the coincidence of a few names of places, that Beowulf was composed in England. Is it not equally proba- hie that names taken from the localities referred to in the poem were bestowed upon English sites by the Anglo-Saxon immigrants? 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 17 the philology of alien Rome ten centuries earlier. The Ger- manic tongues, then, want what the Romance possess, a central representative, a great common, authoritative, copious, ancient, and unchangeable standard of comparison and typical example. Nor is this all. We do not know in what stage of their history the Moeso-Gothic or other Germanic dialects were re- duced to writing and became mediums of literary effort. We are unable even to say whether they had attained to the ulti- matum of grammatical improvement which the genius of the Gothic family of speech admitted, or whether they had reached that point and again receded from it; in s!iort, whether they were in process of construction or of resolution. Unwritten tongues are much less stable in their forms than the dialects of literature. So far as we know them, they tend to composi- tion, agglutination, multiplication, and discrimination of infiex- ions, especially in the verbs. But to this there must be a limit; and when grammatical refinement has been carried as far as it can go, it is natural that the rigorous observance of its rules should be relaxed, and a reactionary, analytic tendency should manifest itself. As soon as a speech which has lived only in the mouths of a people becomes a written language and pos- sesses a literature, its grammatical progress, its power of self- evolution, is greatly checked, if not completely paralyzed. The formation of a new infiexion in a written dialect, though cer- tainly not impossible, is rare; and letters are equally effectual in retarding the decay of an established grammatical system. In either case, the vocabulary may still increase by importation from abroad, and even by organic derivation and composition; but with respect to the characteristic forms of speech, the legis- lation of Cadmus is almost as inflexible as the laws of the Medes and Persians. The accidence and syntax, once recorded in visible symbols, are substantially unchangeable. Whether it is an evil to a language simply as a literary medium to be- come thus petrified before or some time after it arrives at its highest possible point of grammatical constructiveness, is a question on which opinions may differ; but as a philological study, the more perfected its mechanism, the more instructive it is. Thus the formal apparatus of the Greek language, which VOL. CV. NO. 216. 2 18 The Origin of the Italian Language. was arrested in its movement by the introduction of the alpha- bet when it had either not reached or already passed its struct- ural meridian, is much less valuable as a linguistic discipline than that of the Latin, teres atque rotunda, whose litera- ture commences with the culmination of its grammar. We have observed that most of the recently published mon- uments of mediawal Italian literature date from too recent an era to be of much value in illustrating the early history of the modern Italian dialects. The series of documents now in course of publication under the title of Pergamene, Codici e Fogli Cartacei di Arbor6a, is an exception to this remark; and if the genuineness of the writings embraced in the collection be established, it forms an important contribution to our mate- rials for investigating the true relation between classical Latin and at least one modern Romance dialect. The Carte di Ar- bor~a consist of eight manuscripts, one of which is described as a palimpsest, on parchment, and fifteen on paper, besides twelve letters and other smaller writings of a more or less frag- mentary character, also on paper. They are classed by the editor as Latin, Sardinian, Italian, and Catalan; and with the exception of a poem of sixteen verses stated to be of the time of IDiocletian, their dates range from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Some of them are in prose, some in verse, and they yelate almost exclusively to the history of the island of Sar- dinia. Although it is twenty years since the attention of Ital- ian literati was called to these manuscripts, they do not appear to have been subjected to critical examination by any scholar known to the world as competent to pronounce an authorita- tive opinion on their authenticity, nor indeed have they excited much interest anywhere out of Sardinia. The external evi- dence in support of their genuineness is very unsatisfactory, or rather it may be said there is next to no evidence at all on the subject. They have been produced piecemeal, from time to time since the year 1845, by an ex-monk residing at Cagliari, and sold to different persons, who have presented them to the library of the University of that city. The vendor stated that one of them was discovered among the papers of his family, and that the remainder came from Oristano in the province of Ar- bor6a; but he gave no information respecting the source from 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 19 which they were received. Those who believe the manuscripts to be spurious ascribe the authorship of them to the reverend gentleman himself, a theory certainly creditable to his learn- ing and ingenuity. Those who accept them as authentic more charitably suppose that he came into possession of them by means of that odd and secret Laceda~monian accomplish- ment which the judicious Scriblerus was careful to teach his son; in short, that, instead of forging the manuscripts, he only stole them, the latter offence being esteemed a venial pecca- dillo in comparison with the former, which has become doubly disreputable since the unfortunate experiments of the learned Vella. Media~val scholars are divided in regard to the weight of the diplomatic or paleographical evidence. This is a ques- tion not within our competence; but if we may be permitted to speak on so delicate a point of criticism as this, we should say that we do not discover any such discrepancy between the chi- rography of several of these manuscripts as to convince us that it is impossible they should be the work of one pen. On the contrary, we seem to discover a suspicious resemblance between the handwriting of monuments professedly executed in different centuries. Sardinian arch~ologists, who ought to be the best judges on this point, find the internal evidence, both historical and philological, strong in favor of the genuineness of the doc- uments. Previously announced topographical and historical theories have, as is alleged, received striking confirmation from them; and, on the other hand, many new facts revealed by them have been established by recent researches in archives and other repositories of media3val lore which could not have been accessible to the supposed counterfeiter. Coincidences of both these classes are said to be too numerous to admit of any probable explanation, except the simple theory that the papers are bond fide works of the ages and the authorship to which they lay claim. The only one of these documents respecting which the present writer would venture to speak with any con- fidence, upon a cursory examination, is a letter in the Catalan dialect, bearing date at Sassari on the 28th of February, 1497, enclosing copies of ancient inscriptions existing at Sassari, with drawings of Egyptian antiquities, and a summary of the contents of various Greek and Latin poems inscribed upon the The Origin of the Italian Language. walls of a large subterranean tomb at Torres. The tone of this letter is altogether so modern that it is difficult to belteve that it belongs to the fifteenth century; and there occur in it grammatical constructions which may possibly be characteris- tic of a local dialect, but which we have not met with elsewhere in a pretty extensive study of Catalan prose literature. Upon the whole, we do not think that the genuineness of the Carte di Arbor~a, though an article of faith with all patriotic Sardin- ians, is yet sufficiently made out to entitle them to rank as philological authorities. Besides these various collections of material for illustrating the history of the native language and literature, the awaken- ing interest of Italian scholars in domestic philology has pro- duced some original works in that department which deserve more than a passing remark. We shall devote the remainder of this article to a notice of one of them, and of the theories it discusses. In 1864, the Accademia Pontoniana of Naples propounded the following queries as a theme for a prize essay: What credit are we to allow to the proposition, that Italian is only a corruption of Latin? The essential difference between the two languages. Admitting that Italian is a kind of degenerate Latin, how was the transformation brought about? In fine, what shall we say of the opinion which maintains that Italian was spoken at Rome even while Latin was still a living tongue? All which questions, being first examined, fix the true sources of the Italian language; say whether it is the exclusive patrimony of a single province of the Peninsula; and how far the other provinces, especially those of the South, may claim to possess it. The successful competitor for the prize was Cesare Cantit, who is well known as a voluminous and popular historical writer, and as a conspicuous disciple of one of the sects into which the new Catholic school has already divided itself. Both as a thinker and as an investigator, Cantii is less able and enlightened, we fear we must add less conscientious, than Montalembert. He was educated for the Church, if not actu- ally professed; and though now in secular life, he has never been able so to fold his turban as to hide the tonsure. He 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 21 professes toleration, but his notion of religious liberty is a parody of the political liberty of modern imperialism. The ballot is perfectly free, said a French colonel to his soldiers; but every man who does not vote for the First Consul shall be shot at the head of the regiment to-morrow morning. Full liberty of opinion and of speech shall be granted to the people when they heartily adopt the views of the Ca~sar. Men who accept without question all the doctrines of the Church shall enjoy entire freedom of religious opinion. The historical rea- soning of Cantii is generally of the hysteron-proteron order, even when it is not a begging of the question; but as the inter- ests of the Papacy are not visibly compromised by any suppos- able decision of the problems raised by the Accademia Ponto- niana, he has discussed them in a tone of independence and impartiality not usual with him. In the preliminary part of his essay, which is entitled Dissertazione sull Origine della Lingua Italiana, our au- thor states that there are three conflicting opinions in respect to the origin of the Italian language. First, that through the irruption of the Barbarians the Latin was changed, both lexi- cally and grammatically, to such an extent as to become a new language, which is the modern Italian. This is the system of Castelvetro, Muratori, iRaynonard, and finally of the great philologist, Max MUller. Second, that the present language of the Peninsula is the Latin transformed by the influence of the indigenous dialects of the provinces, into which it was intro- duced by conquest, an opinion maintained by Fauriel, a doctrine, it may be observed, which would apply with equal reason, mutatis mutandis, to the other Romance tongues. Third, that Italian is the ancient Latin vernacular, not changed in substance or in nature, but simply modified by time and accident. This view has lately been espoused by Fuchs, and, to a certain extent, by Littr6, who recognizes in the Neo-Latin tongues the essence of the actual speech of ancient Rome, affected by Germanic influence. (pp. 1, 2.) The proposition which Canti~i undertakes to maintain is, that Italian is only the naturally modified speech of ancient Latium; so that the law of continuity, established by Liebnitz in physics, has been verified in that language; that no solution 22 [July, The Origin of the Italian Language. of continuity was produced by sudden revolutions, but that suc- cessive evolutions reduced the spoken Latin to the modern dia- lect, evolutions conformable to the usual methods by which the human spirit creates, wears out, transforms speech, and therefore similar to the organic processes of other languages. (p. 2.) As Muller has complained that his views on the ques- tion under consideration have been misapprehended by Littr6, and as the authority of both philologists is eminently entitled to respect, it is just to state their conclusions in words in which the former has quoted and adopted the opinions of the latter. I take this opportunity of stating that I never held the opinion as- cribed to me by M. Littrd (Journal des Savants, Avril, 1856; flistoire de Za Langue Fran9aise, 1863, Vol. I. p. 94), with regard to the origin of the Romance languages. My object was to explain certain features of these languages, which I hold would be inexplicable if we looked upon French, Italian, and Spanish merely as secondary developments of Latin. They must be explained, as I tried to show, by the fact that the people in whose minds and mouths these modern dialects grew up were not all Romans or Roman provincials, but tribes thinking in Ger- man and trying to express themselves in Latin. It was this additional disturbing agency to which I endeavored to call attention, without for a moment wishing to deny other more normal and generally admitted agencies which were at work in the formation of the Neo-Latin dia- lects, as much as in all other languages advancing from what has been called a synthetic to an analytic state of grammar. In trying to place this special agency in its proper light, I may have expressed myself somewhat incautiously; but if I had to express again my own view on the origin of the Romance languages, I could not do it more clearly and accurately than in adopting the words of my eminent critic: A mon tour, venant, par la s~rie de ces 6tudes, h moccuper du ddbat ouvert, jy prends une position interm6diaire, pensant que, essentielle- ment, cest la tradition latine qui, domine dans les langues romanes, maisque linvasion germanique leur a portd un rude coup, et que de ce conflit oti elles ont failli succomber, et avec elles la civilisation, ii leur est restd des cicatrices encore apparentes et qui sont, h un certain point de vue ces nuances germaniques signal6es par Max Mtiller. Lectures on the Science of Language, 2d Series, pp. 275, 276, note. The difference between the theory of MUller and Littr6 and that of Cantii may be thus stated. Muller and Littr6 suppose the classical Latin in its incorrect popular form to be the basis 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 23 of all the Romance languages, and they ascribe the general departure of those languages from the Latin type to the dis- turbing influence of the Germanic element. Cantii makes an old unwritten vernacular dialect the basis of modern Ital- ian, and denies to the Gothic invasion any specific transform- ing action distinct in kind or energy from that to which all languages are exposed in the vicissitudes of time and social revolution. To express the distinction more succinctly, and perh~aps at the same time more precisely, we may say that Muller and Littr6 hold the Romance dialects, Italian includ- ed, to have been abnormally developed from classical Latin as popularly spoken under determining Germanic influences; Cantit regards Italian, at least, as normally developed from the lingua rustic a, or vernacular dialect of ancient Latium. Upon general considerations, and without testing the appli- cability of the Miiller-Littr6 theory to this or that particular Romance language, it is not clear that we may not discriminate between them, and admit in one case a controlling influence which we deny to have been exerted in another; for thus far, non coristat that the effects are so nearly identical that they must of necessity be referred to a common cause. Evidence which shows that in the classical ages there existed in Italy an unwritten dialect much resembling the modern Italian, would by no means prove that such dialect ever became current in Spain or in Gaul. There is a certain probability to the con- trary. Colonists do not carry their popular dialects with them. We have substantially but one form of English the gram- matical language, the lingua comune in the United States, and even in all the British American provinces. Castilian is the only dialect of Spanish known in all Spanish America. There is no presumption, therefore, that the lingua rustica ever extended itself beyond the bounds of Italy; and the inva- sion of the Barbarians may have found in the Hispanic and Gallic provinces a material to work upon very different from that which it encountered in the popular speech of Italy. This view of the subject makes it important to observe that, in the passage we have quoted, whichbeing, we believe, Miil- lers latest statement of his opinions must be considered as embodying his maturest conclusions, he has not expressed 24 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, himself on one point with his usual clearness and precision. The people in whose minds and mouths these modern dialects grew up were not all Romans or Roman provincials, but tribes thinking in German and trying to express themselves in Latin. We italicise all in order to draw attention to the discrepancy between the first and last member of this proposition. Now, what is Mullers idea of the ethnological condition of the people in question? Was the relative numerical impor- tance of the native and the foreign element much the same in all the territory which had been occupied by the Latin race? Did the invaders constitute everywhere, or even anywhere, an actual majority of the population? And how far can we de- tect, in the written or the vulgar local dialects of these coun- tries, differences fairly ascribable to a larger or smaller infusion of the foreign element? The importance of these questions, otherwise sufficiently obvious, specially appears from an inter- esting fact noticed by Oantii: Venetia was never invaded by any barbarians. Verona, by all; but their dialects resemble each other much more than the Veronese does that of contigu- ous Brescia, the Brescian that of Bergamo, or the Bergamask that of Milan, all territories barely separated by small streams. In like manner, only a river-course or a mountain ridge divides two languages so very diverse as Tuscan and Bolognese. In a note to this passage, CantiX states the fol- lowing general objections to Mullers theory; and we think it will be admitted that, though by no means a decisive refuta- tion, they are entitled to consideration 1. The Germans were fdw in number as compared with the Italians; for otherwise their native land would have been depopulated, and they would have introduced their vernacular language into their new home. 2. Allowing for the introduction of a few new words, and the impoverishment of grammatical forms, the Italian language, or (not to assume the point under discussion) the medi~val Latin, resembles the Latin, while it varies very widely from the German in both words and construction. 3. The resemblance increases as we go backwards, that is, to the period of the invasion; whereas, the fact would be the contrary, if the invaders had introduced the new dialect. 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 25 4. The Latin accent is generally retained in Italian, and we have nothing of the German rule which attaches the accent to the root, both in derivative and in compound words. This is a change which would naturally have taken place, if Latin had been essentially modified by the speech of the Germans. (p. 76.) The influence of immigration upon languages brought into contact by it may perhaps receive some illustration from what is going on among the German settlers in the United States, who often long remain together in considerable bodies, retaining for many years, more or less exclusively, the use of their native tongue. This is a too interesting and suggestive subject to be quite disregarded as a source of instruction in the study of the present question. We have not the materials for discussing it. We may, however, remark, that the old German immigrants in Pennsylvania, who have continued to use that language for a century in the midst of a nation English by birth and vernacu- lar, have, in trying to express themselves in English, very little affected the dialect of their neighbors, or even carried in- to their own use of a new language many of the characteristic features of the old. On the contrary, you will hear, in the German of that population, many English words and idioms, while their English and that of their neighbors has no German ingredients, except now and then a single word or two, as, for example, through-other, corresponding to the German durch- einander, and the like. In the discussion of his theme, Cantii makes little parade of linguistic knowledge, nor has he collected many new facts bear- ing upon the subject; but he had, on more than one former oc- casion, more or less fully examined the question, and he appears to be acquainted with nearly all the data and arguments which have been adduced by other writers in support or in refutation of the views he espouses. It was impossible, within the limits of an academic memoir of less than two hundred octavo pages, to give an exhaustive sifting of the principal problem and the many collateral questions which are suggested in considering it. The reader will not find in the paper any satisfactory solu- tion of the doubts he may have entertained as to the coexist- ence and specific character of numerous local dialects in Roman 26 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, Italy, or, in other words, as to the question how far the lingua rustica was one or many,any instructive inquiry in what way and to what extent the popular speech of the Peninsula was affected by irruptions of other than Germanic barbarians, or by the military colonies of foreign non-Germanic veterans es- tablished in Italy, any probable explanation of lexical and grammatical coincidences between all the Romance languages, and which cannot be traced either to German or to ancient Latin, classical or rustic. But, with all these deductions, it must be admitted that our author has accomplished nearly all that could be effected in~ so brief a memoir. This essay may be pronounced a learned and able investigation of the his- torical relations of the Italian language, in its spoken and in its written forms, to the literary and the rustic Latin dialects of the classic ages. It is not only the most valuable contribution yet made by an Italian scholar to the primitive history of his native speech, but on the whole, as an argument, more satis- factory than anything known to us on the same subject from a foreign pen. The theory of Oantit involves, or rather consists, of two minor propositions, the burden of the proof of which lies on the affirm- ant: first, that there existed in the classic period a lingua rus- tica grammatically, if not logically, so distinct from the written language, that it deserved to be regarded, not as merely a con- genes of variable vulgar corruptions, but as a different dialect, though collaterally connected with Latin; second, that this lingua rustica still survives in, and is substantially identical with, one or more of the modern Italian dialects. The notices of the ancient rustic or vulgar speech are so few and so scanty in the Latin authors whose works are embraced in our collegiate curriculum, or in the ordinary reading of Ameri- can scholars, that the propositions we have just enunciated will strike most of our readers, perhaps, as little better than mere conjectures, improbable in themselves and almost wholly un- supported by historical testimony. Those, too, who have looked into the somewhat unfamiliar literature of this subject may have been confirmed in this opinion by the authority of the late lamented Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who character- izes as absurd the fancy that the Romance or the Italian 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. existed as the language of the lower orders of ancient Italy in a shape little different from that which they bore in the thir- teenth century, and who observes elsewhere, that there appears to be no evidence whatever for the opinion that the Bomana rustica, or vulgaris, was a language distinct in its forms or roots from the Latin, and spoken by the lower class or the peasants of Italy; still less is there any proof that this lan- guage was the base of the Italian. It cannot be absurd to suppose that what happens to-day, in a particular family of lan- guages, under given conditions, may have happened in the same family centuries ago under similar conditions. Now, by the side of the lingua cornune, the written dialect of Italy, there exist spoken dialects distinct from the written speech in forms and often in roots, and bearing the same relation to the lingua cornune which Cantii supposes to have existed be- tween the lingua rustica and the literary language of ancient Rome. Further, the Italian lingua comune demonstrably p05- sessed, at least six hundred years ago, when it assumed a written form, very nearly the same grammar and the same vocabulary which it possesses at this day; and there existed several other Italian dialects, which, as we have reason to be- lieve, though less fixed than the literary language, or Tus- can, had the same general grammatical and lexical character which they have at present. The comparative immutability of the Tuscan is doubtless due to the fact that it became the standard written language of the Peninsula. Is there anything violently improbable or unreasonable in the supposition that this lingua comune, or some one or more of the other extant Italian dialects, was spoken twelve centuries earlier, in a form recognizable as substantially the same as that they now ex- hibit? We are, indeed, not entitled to assume a fact as true because it is possible, or even, to a certain degree, probable; and there- fore, as we have already said, our author may justly be called upon for his proofs. Sir George Cornewall Lewis denies that there is any evidence whatever of the ancient existence of a Romana rustica, or vulgaris, distinct in its forms or roots from the Latin. But what proof, in nature and amount, is the affirmant of the proposition bound to furnish? Unwritten lan- 28 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, guages leave no literary monuments, possess no formulated and recorded grammatical system. Hence the evidence which could exist on such a point, before the age of critical philology, would necessarily be very scanty. Still, de non existentibus et de non apparentibus eadem est ratio, and therefore some proof must be adduced by those who maintain the affirmative opin- ion. The nature of the proof, it will be admitted, is the same which would be required to establish to a stranger the exist- ence of the modern Bolognese or Milanese; the amount rea- sonably demanded is less, not merely because of the lapse of time, and the notorious indifference of the Romans to all phi- lologies except classical Latin and Greek, but because all lin- guistic presumption is in favor of the multiplication of dialects at early periods of European history. Let us apply these tests to the question, Have there existed in Italy, since the birth of her modern literature, one or more popular, spoken, habitually unwritten dialects, distinct in their forms or roots from the lingua comune, or language of books, of journalism, of official life, of intercourse between na- tive citizens of different provinces? Let us suppose a foreigner possessing just that portion of modern Italian literature which corresponds to the extant literature of Rome, and let his col- lection be as fragmentary and incomplete as is the body of Roman literature which has come down to us. What are the chances that he would find, in his reading, any proof that there is, or ever was, a distinct unwritten dialect popularly spoken by the citizens of Milan, or Bologna, or Venice, or Naples, or Turin? The Secchia Rapita would reveal to him the existence of the Bolognese, and among his odd volumes of Goldoni he might light upon a fragment of a comedy in Venetian. If he possessed the autobiography of Alfieri, he would learn that in the eighteenth century a patois called Piedmontese was spoken at Turin. The Ricordi of Massimo d Azeglio, just now issued from the press, would inform him that this same patois is still current at that city. But D Azeglios style is as colloquial as that of Plautus, and, besides, there has lately been what the French call a recrudescence in the vitality of the dialetto at the old sub-Alpine capital. But how much knowledge of the grammatical or lexical character of those dialects could he 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 29 gather from such sources, and what actual acquaintance have European scholars generally, who know Italian only by the study of its literature in their own country, with the living lingua3 rusticw of the Peninsula? Scholars confined to such sources of information as we have supposed and we have no better on ~ancient Italic philology would be not at all bet.. ter able to show the real being and character of the modern linguw rusticw than we are of the old. It may help to the clearer understanding of the subject if we devote a little space to the consideration of the mutual relations between the spoken and the written languages of Italy, a matter not easy of comprehension to American and English scholars, who use only one form of their native tongue. It is difficult for us to imagine a great poet, an elegant prose-writer, still more a fluent and correct speaker, habitually thinking, talking with. refine4 friends and neighbors, driving bargains, and even making love, in a dialect absolutely without liter- ary culture, and far more remote from the classic form of his native tongue than the language of Birdofredum Sawin is from the English of Macaulay. Yet such is the fact with all Italians excepting Tuscans, and even with them to a greater extent than foreigners usually suppose. Biondelli says: To speak and write Italian, we must learn our own language by long and laborious study, almost as we master Latin and French; and in spite of the affinity between our dialects we are really obliged to translate our local speech into another tongue. In a letter to the editor of ii Borghini, printed in the sixth num- ber of that periodical, Pasquini observes: To turn into Italian a Milanese sentence, the words and the forms must be, in great part, changed. It is not enough to correct the grammar, there must be actual translation. The observation of every foreiguer resident in Italy will confirm these declarations to the fullest extent; and in Pied~ mont and some other provinces, speaking Italian, even with strangers, is avoided as an affectation, French being generally employed instead. The great writers of the fourteenth century, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the chroniclers, adopted the vernacular Tuscan, and wrote as the world around them spoke. The reverence 30 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, entertained for those authors, all of whom acquired a great contemporaneous popularity, led to their too exclusive accept- ance as models of style and diction, and prevented the written language from keeping up with the enrichment and spontane- ous development of the vernacular, which was a natural and necessary consequence of the extension of commerce, of the freedom of thought and inquiry which revived for a time when the anti-Papal schism had diminished the authority of the Church, and of other circumstances which gave a new character to the Italian life of the succeeding century. Hence, while th6 language of books remained in a great degree stationary, the living speech of Tuscany, as well as of the rest of Italy, was undergoing considerable changes; and in the time of the Flor- entine Davanzati, three hundred years ago, the divergence between the word and the letter was already such as to jus- tify the complaint of that excellent writer, that the authors of his time hamstring the language, composing not in our own living tongue, but in the common Italian which is nowhere spoken, but is learned, like the dead languages, by the study of those Florentine writers whose works do not embrace the whole speech, & c. What authorizes us to affirm, what renders it so much as prima facie probable, that a similar relation did not exist be- tween the written and the spoken tongues of even the Roman capital? The usual conversational language of the Italian Bourbons was Neapolitan; the royal family at Turin have always spoken Piedmontese Milanese is the habitual vernac- ular of Mauzoni; every Italian city has its theatres in which dramatic entertainments are constantly given in dialetto, for this is modern Italian for lingua rustica, and the Teatro Meneghino, for the native drama, is the favorite resort of the most refined society of the Lombard capital. These are all undoubted facts, and yet not one of them would be learned from the perusal of such Italian books as are commonly read in other countries. Hence it is fair to argue that the general silence of the Latin classical writers on this point does not even tend to show that the lingua vulgaris was not spoken in the palace of the C~esars, in fact, Quintilian tells us expressly that Augustus used the modern Italian form calda for calida; 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 31 that Livys patavinity was anything more than simply an in- fusion of the idioms of the Paduan household dialect; or that the fabula~ A tellana~, though called Oscan by the foreigner Strabo, were essentially different in diction from the comedy in dialetto of modern Italy. Even the conversational witti- cisms quoted by Cicero and Quintilian, though reported in clas- sical Latin, may have been uttered in the vulgar tongue, for every one who has lived long in Italy has heard jokes, first pro- nounced in Piedmontese or Neapolitan, translated into good set Tuscan by the narrator, or even by the original author in repeating them. The universal prevalence of the Latin language, in its clas- sical form, throughout the Roman Empire, is very generally assumed, but by no means yet proved. Nobody doubts that it was the language of law, of literature, of the administrative action of the government, and that, like the modern Italian, it served as a common medium of communication between the citizens of different parts of the Peninsula who may have habib nally spoken dialects unintelligible to each other. But where is the proof that it ever went further? It certainly did not extirpate Greek or Oscan at Pompeii, though the evidence of the numerous inscriptions hastily scratched or painted on the walls of that city undoubtedly shows that, of the three lan- guages, Latin was the tongue most frequently written. But it does not prove that Latin had become the popular speech; for by just such evidence we might show that Tuscan is the vernacu- lar of Bologna or Turin at this day. You see everywhere on the walls of these towns inscriptions like those at Pompeii, never in dialeuo, but always in the lingua comune, which is certainly not the familiar dialect of either of them. The only difference between the mural writings of Pompeii and of modern provin- cial towns lies in the fact that paper and printing have in a great degree substituted perishable placards for the more per- manent scratched and colored advertisements, electioneering appeals, and the like, at Pompeii. Latin was long the official language, but it never became the spoken tongue, of Byzantium. The French conquerors of the Morea and Attica used French during their occupation of Greece. Ramon Muntaner declares that the goodliest chiv 32 The Origin of the Italian Language. airy in the world was that of the Morea; and they spoke as fair French as at Paris. But what impression did they make on the native speech? What effect did even the Avars and the Bulgarians, who permanently changed almost every geo- graphical name in the Peloponnesus, produce upon Greek? Lewis maintains that the universal prevalence of the Latin language is proved by the use of the word Latin for language generally in old French and Italian. We draw just the con- trary inference from the use of the word as we have met with it; for in most of the examples, especially the earlier ones known to us, Latin evidently means a foreign language. Thus, the birds are said to converse in their Latin. Saracens, and other strangers are noticed as speaking their Latin; and the word latiner, afterwards corrupted to latimer, meant~ not a fluent speaker, but always an interpreter. Further, we are not well enough acquainted with the normal pronunciation of classical Latin to understand how far its or- thography was phonographic. We know from Quintilian and other writers that it had, like French, silent letters, perhaps even syllables, the omission of which in speaking or reading would bring it much nearer to what the lingua rustica is sup- posed to have been, and consequently to modern Italian, than its mere spelling would authorize us to suppose. Suetonius observes that Augustus, like the first Napoleon, did not follow the conventional orthography, but spelt by the ear, writing error commune for error communis, a remark which both proves that the s was silent, and establishes an exact identity, in this particular phrase at least, between the spoken Roman and the modern Italian dialect. Canti~i collects in the eighth section of his paper numerous examples of the same sort, which tend strongly to confirm his views. In the preceding remarks we have dwelt the longer on the argument from analogy, because neither the writer whom we are reviewing, nor, so far as we are aware, other investigators of the question, have availed themselves of it, and because it seems to us an entirely satisfactory refutation of the charge of absurdity and improbability which has been urged against CantiYs general proposition. It certainly shows that the co- existence of a written and of an unwritten dialect, the one 186~.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 33 almost exclusively employed in literature, the other almost as exclusively in speech, is not a new thing in Italy, but a con- stant fact as far back as we can trace the history of her mod- ern dialects. Hence the truth of the theory we are discussing is a question, not of speculative, philological probability, but of evidence in support of what may be considered a fair historical presumption. -Cantiuts thesis, though it logically divides itself into two propositions, does not practically admit of a similar analysis in the citation of its proofs, because the testimony which es- tablishes the ancient use of unclassical words and forms in popular speech shows, at the same time, in most cases, that those words and forms are substantially, if not identically, the same employed at this day in Italian. Who can doubt that the vulgarisms scopare, stopa, sufolo, bellus, caballus, are the same as the similar words now heard every day in Italy? In Ausonius we have testa for caput; ruvido in Pliny the elder; fracidus in Cato; cribellare in Palladius; minare (modern Italian menare, French mener) in Apulcius; jornus and tonus (Italian giorno and tuono) in Seneca; grandire, beneque eve- nire (Italian ingrandire e venir bene) in Cato. Festus says, res minimi pretii, cum dicimus non lletta3 te facio; the Italians say, non ti stimo un ette. Quintilian condemns the adjective possibilis as hardly admissible, and complains that due, tre, cinque, quatiordice, were in common use. St. Jerome informs us that draught-horses were vulgarly called burici (Italian bor- rico); Suetonius, that Augustus deprived a Roman of the con- sular dignity for writing ixi (Italian essi) for ipsi; but, be- sides other solecisms already quoted, the Emperor himself was accustomed to use baceolus (Italian baccello) for stultus. In like manner, we find granarium, jubilare, pansa, bassus, mor- sicare, anca, planuria, sanguisuga, majale, rasores, cloppus, parentes in sense of affines, pisinni (Italian piccini, Span- ish pequei~o, or perhaps pequeiio ni7Lo, negro picaninny) for flu, all carelessly used for the classical terms, or expressly condemned as rustic by the critics. The modern Tuscan peasants are much inclined to dock words, and they go so far as to say, u o a i, dove ho a ire. The Roman rustics did the same, and asked for a loaf in the phrase, da miii pane, which VOL. cv. NO. 216. 3 34 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, is literal Italian for da mihi ilium pane~n. Cicero, as Canti~ observes, had no difficulty in understanding this expression, and never dreamed that it had been learned from the Germans or other barbarians. These are a random selection from the examples cited by our author, and but a small proportion of those which he has so industriously collected; and yet, few as they are, it would require a long search in modern Italian miscellaneous litera- ture to light upon as many specimens of the vocabulary of the living local dialects. Those who are familiar with the Vulgate are aware that it contains many words and phrases which do not occur in clas- sical authors. Canti~ cites several of these, and argues, with force, that as the Vulgate, as well as the earlier translations of the Scriptures, was prepared less for educated Romans, to whom Greek was so familiar that they scarcely required a Latin Bible, than for popular use, it is probable that its depar- tures from classical propriety are adoptions of, or approxima- tions to, the vernacular speech. The solecisms of the Vulgate correspond, in great part, to the idiom of the modern Romance languages; and we think the presumption that they were taken from the popular dialect is stronger than the probability that they were introduced into that dialect from the Latin Scrip- tures. Urbicius, who wrote on the art of war near the close of the fifth century, furnishes a remarkable list of words of military command which correspond nearly with the modern idiom: Silentio mundata implete; Non vos turbatis; Ordinern servate; Bandum sequite; Nemo dimittat bandumn; inirnicos seque. It is true that Urbicius was a comparatively late writer; but words of command are not often changed except with the introduction of new weapons. Soldiers are eminently conser- vative, and hence the technical phrases we have quoted are probably much older than the time of Urbicius. The words apparently belonging to the lingua rustica col- lected by CantZi, Diez, and others, are certainly very far from forming a vocabulary complete enough for the uses of humble life; but they are quite as numerous as we have a~iy right to expect to find in authors who sedulously avoided the use of 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 35 such words. If we come down a few centuries below the clas- sical period, when the Roman culture had perished under the assaults of domestic corruption and foreign invasion, we find a very large number of vocables unknown to the better litera- hire of Rome. It is certainly highly probable that a consider- able part of the vocabulary of Du Cange had floated up from the bottom when the mud-sills of society were disturbed by violence and revolution. But Du Cange seldom cites au- thors older than the seventh century. Quicherat, in his Ad- denda Lexicis Latinis, has n~ less than seven thousand words collected from authors of the declin~ of Roman literature, and who wrote before the barbarous age had commenced. Every presumption is in favor of the supposition that most of these words properly belonged to the Bornana vuigaris, and a great number of them are now extant in the Romance languages. In the present condition of the science of language, philolo- gists would attach more importance to evidence of grammat- ical than of lexical coincidences and discrepancies, as tending to show that the lingua vulgaris was essentially the same as the modern Italian, and essentially different from the classical Latin. The ancient writers naturally quote from the vernac- ular single words oftener than entire propositions, or even phrases, which show the grammatical construction. Hence, the evidence of a substantial inflexional or syntactical difference between the unwritten and the written dialects is neither in kind nor in amount all that could be desired to establish the affirmative of the proposition. There is, nevertheless, a con- siderable amount of testimony on this point. Cantii justly at- taches importance to the declaration of Varro, that the [an- cient] Latins employed only the ablative, which he appears to consider the stem, declension having been introduced from convenience and necessity. Whether the Italian form of the noun was really taken from the ablative, is a disputed point, but at least it generally coincides with it; and in many in- stances expressions condemned by good Latin writers as vul- gar show that the noun was used indeclinably in the ablative form. Our author thus states the characteristic points in which Italian .grammar differs from Latin 36 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, 1. In indicating syntactical relations by prepositions instead of cases, or by substituting pre-positions for the post-positions of agglomerative languages. 2. In preceding the noun by the article, definite or indef- inite. 3. In forming many tenses of the active, and all the tenses of the passive verb, by means of auxiliaries, that is, dropping the form expressive of passion in act (legor), and substituting that of action in effect (ho letto). Numerous examples of these various forms ~f language are cited from ancient authors; and it must be allowed that they occur in the best writers, and often without any note of dis- approbation. But they are most frequent in the Vulgate, and in other works not considered as authorities on questions of Latinity, and they are often condemned by ancient critics. Indeed, however doubtful we may be as to our competence to pronounce categorically upon nice questions of Latin construc- tion, every one who has made that language, in its ~typical form, a familiar possession, feels that such combinations are foreign to the genius of the tongue, violations of symmetry in its architecture, or at least ungraceful colloquialisms. It seems highly probable that they are simply rustic forms, which by negligence or tolerance have been admitted into better society than they could justly lay claim to. These licenses are frequent in proportion to the more or less popular charac- ter of the works in which they occur. They are found oftenest in the comedy, in familiar letters, in the Scriptores Rei Rusti- can, in the Vulgate, in the works of the early Christian writers, in sepulchral and other private inscriptions, or in authors un- known to fame. It is worth noticing, as affording some support to our authors theory, that the Umbrhin a language certainly allied to Latin appears to use many nouns in an indeclinable ablative form, like the Italian. In the Eugubine tables we find pane, capro, porco, bue, atro, ferina, sonito, and even the modern adverb poi for post quarn. The little we know of the other old Italic dialects points in the same direction. In addition to all this testimony and much more of the same kind, for we have offered but a spicilegium of the proofs, 18Th] The Origin of the Italian Language. Canti~t and other advocates of the same opinion cite a great multitude of passages from Roman literature, in which the ex- istence of a distinct spoken dialect is more or less clearly as- serted. In some cases these citations seem to refer to a speech almost radically diverse from the Latin; but in many cases they are as fairly to be interpreted as referring merely to accidental vulgarisms become habitual, as is constantly happening in all languages. iDiez, whose authority on all questions relating to the struc- ture and history of the Romance languages is extremely high, agrees with Cantit in tracing those dialects to the rustic or vul- gar spoken Latin, but he does not believe the latter to have been anything more than a popular colloquial corruption of the classic tongue. We give his views in his own words Six Romance languages claim our attention by their grammatical character or their literary significance; two eastern, Italian and Wal- lachian; two southwestern, Spanish and Portuguese; and two north- westeril, Proven~al and French. They all have their primary and principal source in the Latin. But they are derived, not from the Latin employed in literature, but, as has been often justly argued, from the Roman popular speech, which was used concurrently with classical Latin. Attempts have been made to prove the existence of such a pop- ular dialect by the testimony of the ancients; but its existence is a fact so little needing proof that we should rather be justified in requiring evidence to the contrary, as an exception to the general rule. We~ must, however, be careful not to understand by the term popular speech anything more than is implied by it in other cases; that is, the vulgar vernacular dialect of one and the same language, which consists in a negligent pronunciation of words, in an inclination to the resolution of grammatical forms, in the use of numerous expressions avoided by writers, and in special phrases and constructions. These and no other conclusions are warranted by the testimony and the specimens gathered from the works of ancient authors; at most, we can only admit that the contrast between the dialect of popular discourse and that of literature, on the complete congelation of this latter, a little before the downfall of the Western Empire, manifested itself more conspicuously. If, then, the existence of a popular dialect, that is, of a vulgar form of speech, is, upon general grounds, certain, the derivation of the Romance dialects from this popular speech is not less certain, inasmuch as the written language resting altogether on the past and cultivated only by the higher classes and by writers admitted of no new development or 38 The Origin of the Italian Language. production, while the much more flexible vulgar tongue contained the germ and the susceptibility of a development imposed by time. When at a later period, in consequence of that great event, the German conquest, the ancient culture perished with the higher classes, the pure Latin died of itself. The popular dialect pursued its course the more rapidly, and became at last the fountain from which the Romance lan- guages flowed, though in a form widely different from their original. Grammatik der ]?wnanischen Spracken, VoL I. pp. 3, 4. Diez, it will be seen, agrees with Canti~r in tracing the Ro- mance languages back to the popular dialect of Italy, but he denies to that dialect a lexical or grammatical character dis- tinct from that of the Latin. In short, he holds the lingua rustica, of course, in all its different patois, to be not a collat- eral relative, but a direct descendant of the classical tongue, maimed, debased, corrupted by the clownish ignorance of those who spoke it. This theory, which evidently supposes the Latin to have been at some ancient period the nearly universal language of the Italian people, appears to us to be destitute of historical sup- port, and to be at the same time contrary to all sound presump- tion. The people of Italy were not all of one race, nor in the early ages of Roman history did they employ a common tongue. Doubtless there existed some local, nameless, and forgotten patois, of which, as they were never written, no traces have survived to us. Several of the native dialects, however, had been reduced to writing, and possessed at least a lapidary lit- erature. If these languages were all eradicated by the speech of the Roman conquerors in the brief space between the foun- dation and the downfall of Rome, it is a fact .unparalleled in history and entirely contrary to the ordinary course of nature. The agencies de propaganda lingua must have been infinitely less efficient in the rude, semi-barbarous days of republican Rome, than after the introduction of Christianity, and espe- cially after the invention of printing. But how slow, even in our times, is the process of extirpating a local dialect, and sub- stituting a central, common speech! The Germanic dialects are certainly all much more closely allied to the High-Ger- man, than Umbrian, Oscan, or Etruscan to Latin, and yet how persistently they hold out against the inroads of the loch- 1867.] The Origin of the Italian Language. 39 Deutsch. Bretagne was subdued by Charlemagne a thousand years ago, but a Celtic tongue is still generally spoken in that province. Tuscan has been the sole written language of all Italy for at least five hundred years. It is the spoken dialect nowhere but in Tuscany; and Tuscan, Bolognese, Piedmontese, Neapolitan, Venetian, not to mention many other local forms, certainly differ in inflexion, syntax, and vocabulary more widely than Swedish and Danish, or than Spanish and Por- tuguese. We have already remarked, that we have no proof that Lat- in ever supplanted the native Greek and Oscan at Pompeii. The modern Italian of books, though as universal at Naples as at Florence or Rome, has made little or no impression on the use of Neapolitan; and what evidence have we that Latin ever became any more a national vernacular, than the lingua coinune dItalia the language of literature, of journalism, of the pul- pit, of governmentis to-day? It has never been supposed by any scholar that Bolognese, Venetian, Milanese, and the rest, are corruptions of Tuscan, or in any sense whatever derived from it. Some, indeed, have held, that they are all corruptions of classical Latin, modified by local influences. In our view, it is a far more probable opinion, that they are all descendants of different dialects as old as Latin itself and that their common resemblances are due, first, to a remote pre-historical common origin, and secondly, to the modifying influence of Roman lit- erature, law, and religion. The local origin of the lingua comune, or Tuscan, is a vexed question. On the evidence of early poems written in that dia- lect by Siciliags, it has been argued that it was formed and re- duced to writing in Sicily. But if so, how did it perish in that island, and how did it become the vernacular of Tuscany? Its universality in this latter province is stronger proof than any mere literary evidence can be that it is of strictly indige- nous growth. If it were merely a corruption of Latin, it ought to have originated in Latium, where, if anywhere, Latin was emphatically the mother tongue of the whole people; whereas we have no proof whatever that Latin ever was a popularly spoken dialect in Etruria. Admitting the lingua rustica, if not of Rome itself, at least 40 The Origin of the Italian Language. [July, of Etruria and other more or less remote provinces, to have been a dialect grammatically distinguishable from classical Lat- in, it is easy to see that the continued existence of the latter through the Dark Ages as the only cultivated form, and, what is much more important, as the only possible means of either oral or written general communication between the population of different Italian provinces, and of universal religious instruc- tion, must have exerted a great modifying and harmonizing in- fluence on all the local patois. Hence we may fairly argue that, from the period of the extension of Roman sway beyond the boundaries of Latium to our own times, the provincial tin- gua~ rustica~ of Italy have been converging toward, not di- verging from, a common type. We have thought that we should do a wrong to the author we are reviewing, and weaken an argument to the benefit of which he is entitled, by presenting a complete summary of his course of reasoning, or by introducifig much of his body of evi- dence. We have preferred, therefore, to strengthen, by pre- senting a few independent considerations, the position taken by Cantii in a discussion which we hope scholars interested in the subject will pursue in his own pages. We have felt, too, that we should encumber and embarrass this brief argument by any examination of the applicability of this or that particu- lar theory to the non-Italian Romance dialects. They each de- serve a special, independent examination, and when philology shall have done for Spanish and Portuguese and Catalan, for Wallachian and Romantsch, what Canti~i and his predecessors have done for Italian, we shall be better prepared for the for- mulation and acceptance of definite conclusions, than we can be with only our present means of knowledge. Hispano-Latin is a mine hitherto little wrought. Even Isidore has not been yet turned to the best possible account. The Latin texts of the Aureum Opus Privilegiorurn Regni Valentice, of Capmanys 1k- morias Historicas, of the various collections of Aragonese legis- lation, and of the Espai~a Sagrada, contain numerous words unknown to Pu Cange; and there yet exists in Spain and Por- tugal an immense mass of unedited medheval Latin, which will doubtless yield an abundant harvest to future invesi~igators. In conclusion, although we are not prepared to say that 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 41 Cantii has irrefragably established his whole thesis, it seems to us that he has made out a very strong, if not a conclusive case, as concerns the question whether modern Italian is derived from a spoken or from the classical written language of ancient Italy. There is still room for debate whether the popular speech was, as Canti~i supposes, a distinct dialect of Latin, re- lated to that tongue only as Bolognese, for example, is allied to Tuscan; or, as Diez maintains, merely a vulgar corruption of the language written by all, and spoken by the cultivated classes. In all events, the theory of MUller, which is equally applicable to either conclusion, is both sufficient and indispen- sable as an explanation of Germanic features and Germanic in- gredients found in the Romance languages. ART. II. 1. Die laendliche Verfassung Ruszlands. Ihre Ent- wickelungen und ihre Feststellung in der Gesetzgebung von 1861. Von AUGUST FREIHERRN VON HAXTRAUSEN. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus. 1866. 2. Les Institutions de la Russie depuis les R6formes de lEm- pereur Alexandre IL Par M. 1.-H. ScHNITZLER. Paris: ye Berger-Levrault et Pus. 1866. 3. Sketches of Russian L?fe before and during the Emancipation of the Serfs. Edited by HENRY MORLEY, Professor of English Literature in University College, London. London: Chapman and Hall. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co. 1866. 4. Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Political and Social Sketches of Russia, Greece, and Syria in 186123. By HENRY ARTHUR TILLEY. London: Longman, Green, Roberts, and Green. 1864. ALMOST unnoticed amid the excitement of our threatening calamities came the report, in March, 1861, that Russia had proclaimed emancipation to the serfs within her borders. At that time no one thought of connecting it with our own experi- ence. Two years later our proclamation had gone forth; an- other two years, and it had been ratified by the successful

1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 41 Cantii has irrefragably established his whole thesis, it seems to us that he has made out a very strong, if not a conclusive case, as concerns the question whether modern Italian is derived from a spoken or from the classical written language of ancient Italy. There is still room for debate whether the popular speech was, as Canti~i supposes, a distinct dialect of Latin, re- lated to that tongue only as Bolognese, for example, is allied to Tuscan; or, as Diez maintains, merely a vulgar corruption of the language written by all, and spoken by the cultivated classes. In all events, the theory of MUller, which is equally applicable to either conclusion, is both sufficient and indispen- sable as an explanation of Germanic features and Germanic in- gredients found in the Romance languages. ART. II. 1. Die laendliche Verfassung Ruszlands. Ihre Ent- wickelungen und ihre Feststellung in der Gesetzgebung von 1861. Von AUGUST FREIHERRN VON HAXTRAUSEN. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus. 1866. 2. Les Institutions de la Russie depuis les R6formes de lEm- pereur Alexandre IL Par M. 1.-H. ScHNITZLER. Paris: ye Berger-Levrault et Pus. 1866. 3. Sketches of Russian L?fe before and during the Emancipation of the Serfs. Edited by HENRY MORLEY, Professor of English Literature in University College, London. London: Chapman and Hall. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co. 1866. 4. Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Political and Social Sketches of Russia, Greece, and Syria in 186123. By HENRY ARTHUR TILLEY. London: Longman, Green, Roberts, and Green. 1864. ALMOST unnoticed amid the excitement of our threatening calamities came the report, in March, 1861, that Russia had proclaimed emancipation to the serfs within her borders. At that time no one thought of connecting it with our own experi- ence. Two years later our proclamation had gone forth; an- other two years, and it had been ratified by the successful 42 Sefdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, ending of the war. Tt is interesting, from higher motives than that of curiosity, to look across the waters and watch the work- ing out of a problem similar to ours under a government so diametrically opposite. We welcome, therefore, the recent work of Haxthausen as an accurate and tolerably full account of the Russian legislation on this subject.* Russian serfdom differed from American slavery not only in many details, but in the grand features which everywhere dis- tinguished the feudal institution from the modern form of ser- vitude. The essential principle of the latter is absolute and immediate property in the person. In villanage the title to the person grows out of a title to the soil, and the condition arises naturally in that stage of society through which most nations pass, when the weak are glad to acknowledge the dominion of one strong hand in order to claim its protection against the violence of many. The serfs of Europe were not strangers in a land of their masters, nor barbarians trans- planted to the midst of refinement. On the contrary, they themselves constituted the nation, and their lords were usually the outlanders. Together the two advanced from darkness to light, and, as time went on, they became virtually one and the same people. So long as feudalism lasted, therefore, there was always that in it which checked the tendency of the serf to be- come a mere chattel, and which in the end greatly diminished the difficulties of eman~ipation. A thousand years of such a relation do not so far reduce the human creature to the thing, as the single act of snatching a savage from the shores of Africa on the part of men already civilized. Yet the advantage of this difference is not altogether on one side. Negro slavery is simply a modern growth, that has fastened itself on several nations during the last three centuries. Except in the United States, it has never struck deeply into the body politic, partak ing of and affecting its vitality. Even with us it throve only by circumstances that suddenly favored its extension, and, though of wide influence, had ever been regarded as an excrescence. But in Russia, from the very nature and antiquity of its origin, the serf class underlies the whole fabric of society, and is among * A French translation of these laws appeared in St. Petersburg, and a German translation in Mitau, the capital of Courland, both in 1861. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 43 its primitive and most important elements ; primitive, since the causes that led to its formation lie ten centuries back in history; and important, becanse, at the time of emancipation, the serfs proper numbered over twenty million souls, one third of the whole population. In the existence of serfdom there was nothing peculiar; but why in Russja alone of the countries of Europe did it last to the middle of the nineteenth century? Because this Eastern empire had belonged for many hundred years to Asiatic rather than to European development. Its geographical position re- served for it a destiny distinct from either, whose peculiarity may not yet for generations be fully recognized. It had noth- ing to do with Greece or Rome, nothing with the Roman Church, nothing indeed with Christianity till nearly a thousand years after the death of the founder of our religion. No ruins of an ancient culture crumbled ~n its territory, and no contest was waged there between barbarism and an effete civilization. The circumstances which determined the form and the date of the feudal system in the West were, therefore, mainly wanting here. It had its own subjugatiQus and revolutions; but, com- pared with the chaotic conditions under which the rest of Eu- rope acquired its modern features, its history in general has been a slow but uniform development of original, self-con- tained forces. At the very period when society in France and Germany was shaping itself in the feudal moulds under Charlemagnes successors, Russia is for the first time caught sight of as a definite national organization. When the war- riors of the West were rushing from their homes at the call of religion to deliver the Holy City, the wild Russian hordes had but barely a~cepted the Christian name. The fifteenth century, when the rest of Europe. was throbbing with the strong pulses of modern life, found Russia throwing off a Mongol yoke that had been borne for two hundred years. And it was actu- ally not till the genius of Peter went abroad seeking civiliza- tion with a kind of brute instinct, that his people took their place in the circle of the European nations. No wonder, then, that when~ feudalism was known elsewhere rather by its ves- tiges than its presence, and villanage was either a thing of the past or one whose days were clearly numbered~, in Russia, on 44 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, the contrary, we see it receiving its earliest legal sanction at the end of the sixteenth, and its full confirmation so late as at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As its rise and growth amid these peculiar circumstances are well worth tracing, we will follow llaxthauseu through the short history with which he prefaces his abstract of the emancipation laws. His previ- ous works * have made good his claim to be heard with confi- dence on Russian subjects, though he is much less concise and explicit than his readers could wish. The topic is certainly one which lies mostly beyond the realm of documents and dates; but allowing for this, the impression remains that in his recent Work two or three pieces have been laid together for publication without attention to the jointing. The type of the Russiau national character, we are told with emphasis, is unity of the f.amily, the commune, the race. Our author attributes this directly to the nomadic origin of the people, and sees in their whole subsequent history the uniform development of the double priuciple therein iuvolved, the es- sential unity of the family and the authority of the patriarch. To the former of these is traced the commune system, which pre-emineutly distinguishes the Russian social organization from that of Western Europe: the latter is represented in lineal de- sceut by the attributes of the Czar. Czar and mire t were from the outset, as they are to this day, the objects of the high- est, of almost sacred reverence and affection. The characteris- tic of the nomadic period, and that of gradual settlement which followed, is that everywhere this principle of association pre- vailed, and nowhere did the farm the separate, individual location of the German races come into existence. Large families, a whole kith and kin, occupied a tract of land togeth- er, either cultivating it in corrimon and sharing after harvest the crop, or assigning the temporary usufruct of a portion to each member, while the possession remained vested in the whole. Relics of the former practice, which was doubtless the earlier, may still be found, it is said, among the Servian vil- lages; the latter is that which has lasted to this day. * Especially his Studien ueber die innern Zustaende, das Vo/ksleben and die iaendlicken Einric/itunqen Ruszlands, translated into English, somewhat compressed, by Robert Farie. London: Chapman and hall. 1856. I The word for commune, mire,~~ is the same as that which signifies the kosmos. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 45 When the population became more stable, tradition tells us that a number of tribes united in inviting to a common sover- eignty a small race of Scandinavian origin, the Russo-Yaran- gians, whose leader, Rurik, established his seat of government in Novgorod about A. ID. 862. At this time the Russians make their formal d~but in history. An order of nobility, apparently no more indigenous to Slavic territory than serfdom itself, was the natural and speedy consequence of this adoption of mas- ters. The spirit of rule in that ~ge could assume but one shape in the East as well as in the West, the general shape of feu- dalism, however much details might differ. The presence of a warlike, dominant race among a people comparatively quiet im- plied of necessity grants of land and local chieftainships. After the introduction of Christianity, about A. ID. 1000, the Church also received large endowments; and the number of such grants naturally increased during the two centuries when Rus- sia was split up into contending principalities, and during the next two (A. ID. 1238 1477), when all together lay tributary to the Mongol power. These grants, however, and it is the important fact of this period, did not give actual and hered- itary property in the soil, much less any property in the inhab- itants. The soil of Holy Russia still belonged to the nation; but the national patriarch, the pater populi, had as such the right of assigning its use. His retinue the Boiars of later time constituted a nobility, attached more or less immediately to his person, and received their estates simply as reward for their service. If the service ceased, the reward was supposed to cease. But in that early, rude stage of society, such a tenure could not possibly exist long without giving the nobles, as a practical result, a strong hold on the peasants industry. The captives taken in war, who probably already formed a class of genuine slaves, could furnish but a small part of the services required. The life of battle and conquest would increase the demand and the power of the leaders, and soon supplies must have been collected from the agriculturists for the support of the lord and his host. That a state tax of some kind was imposed by Oleg, Ruriks successor, we learn from Nestor, a monk of the eleventh century, and the oldest Russian chronicler. Such 46 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, a revenue would perhaps go with the grant, or be diverted by the princes to themselves, and its payment would initiate among the people the custom of rendering a return for the land occupied by them, but allotted in fee by their recognized head to another. In some such way the system of rent would gradually arise and prevail. At first rent was paid in natural products, a mode of payment not yet wholly obsolete. Lat- er, a portion of the land was reserved as exclusively the lords, and cultivated for him by the peasants. It is easy to see the tendency of such a relation once thor~. oughly established between noble and peasant. But two pro- cesses were needed to develop full Russian serfdom, the ascriptio gleba~ on the part of the people, the hereditary posses- sion of the estate on the part of the proprietor. Six hundred years elapsed from the appearance of Rurik to the reign of Ivan the Great, who threw off the Mongol yoke, and thus secured Russia to modern Europe almost simultaneously with the capture of Constantinople by the Moslems. The period was amply long enough to confirm the tendency. In 1257 a census was taken to serve as a basis in the collection of the tribute paid to the Tartars. Then the inhabitants of the towns and villages were forbidden to leave without special permission, and the custom sprang up of restricting migration to the be- glftning and end of the agricultural season.* iDuring the time of alien supremacy, while the princes acknowledged no central authority within the country itself, they appear to have asserted with increasing success this control of movement. Each ones resources were evidently in direct proportion to the strength of the population resident in his territory. But when, under the liberator, Ivan III., the Grand Duke of Moscow, the integrity of the empire was restored, or rather was for the first time really attained, these restrictions in a measure fell away. That they had been somewhat firmly established, we infer from hear- ing of a law by which circulation was allowed, but only at a fixed time, after previous warning, and on payment of an emi- gration tax. This seems to have proved practically but a small hindrance to the peoples restlessness. Perhaps, as the national * Quarterly Review, No. 225, 1863, Article on Constitutional Government in Russia. 1867] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 47 feeling revived, when the foreign yoke was lifted, the peasants felt a stirring to shake off the bondage which was settling down on them at home; possibly flight had already become the best refuge from their masters cruelties. So far did they carry their vagrancy, that some districts were half depopulated, and began to go to waste, while others, offering easier support, were over- crowded with settlers. Especially the small estates suffered by the preference of the peasant to live under the protection of the stronger proprietor. Finally, a ukase of Boris Godunoff, in 1592, ordained that all peasants should remain attached to the soit on which they were found on St. Georges day of that year. This edict, though it naturally could not take complete effect at once, is regarded by the people as the burial of their liberty, and St. Georges day is still cursed in the folk-songs as a day of woe. Boris, who was a usurper, had probably hoped by this measure to secure the nobles to his cause. Years of great anarchy ensued, in which one pretender after another grasped at the crown, and the Poles had wellnigh acquired the ascendency over Russian destinies which they have since had to yield over their own. The period of anarchy ended when Michael, the first Czar of the present Romanoff line, was raised to the throne, in 161 A3. But meanwhile the people had taken advantage of the confusion to circulate more freely than ever, to the great ~- jury of agriculture. A terrible famine in 1601 was the con- sequence, and it was found expedient to confirm the recent edict by new enactments. In 1597 a fugitive-serf law author- ized a land proprietor during five years to reclaim a peasant who had abandoned his estate for another; but a few years after it was added that he lost the rigbt if he failed in time of need to furnish the dependant with sufficjent means of support. The final estabfishment of the ascriptio gtcba is referred by some to a ukase of 1610, by others to one of 1626. But both accounts may be doubted. It is seldom that a law marks either the origin or the full completion of a great social rev- olution. Usually it is long subsequent to the one, and some- what anticipates the other. In this case, it is safe to say that the middle of the century, under the influence of increasing order, probably witnessed the general stability of the peasant 48 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, class in the condition of serfage. The effect was of course to subject the agriculturists, still nominally free, to the exactions of the land-owner. The latter could now increase his demands and exercise his power almost at pleasure, while the tenant was by law deprived of the only means of escape. The second process necessary to complete the servitude of the tillers of the soil was not long delayed. From the middle of the fifteenth century, everything had conspired to connect Russia more nearly with the general life of Europe. What influence had previously been exerted upon her from outside had principally come through Byzantine channels. But after the fall of Constantinople, Russia soon felt the force of the strong currents eddying from the West. The nobility had al- ready in part lost its feudal character so far as the claim of the head of the state to their personal service was concerned, and was taking on a modern form in various ranks of civil and military service, when, under Peter the Great, the government began with sudden energy to fashion society anew on Ger- man models. Among the Czars most important measures for developing the resources of the state were two which finally consummated the establishment of serfdom. Hitherto, the estates had not, in the eye of the law, been the actual and hereditary property of the families in which custom had doubt- l~s transmitted them for several generations from father to son. Peter, who felt strongly the need of a standing army, saw the advantage of consolidating old interests by giving legal sanction to what custom had already virtually produced. He therefore presented to the collective nobility the full and transmissible title to their estates; imposing at the same time the obligation of military service on all the peasants. The two measures concurred in throwing more power into the hands of the master; the former, perhaps, principally through the moral violence offered to the old national idea; the latter, by the way in which it was carried into execution. The census made no distinction between the nominally free peasants and the actual slaves whose existence has already been mentioned. It was simply reported, so many peasants belong to such a no- bles estate. When the levy was made, the demand for the proportionate number of recruits was addressed to the lord 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 49 himself, who, charged with the police of his district, could fur- nish house slave or village peasant as he pleased. A third innovation of Peter had a precisely similar effect. The payment of a state tax had become an established prac- tice, and under the Mongol supremacy had assumed a new form, that of money instead of produce. At that time it am pears to have been partly a poll-tax, partly an impost on the land. In 1678, the amount of this land-due was settled by law for each village; but probably, on account of the extortion and dishonesty practised by the collectors under this system, Peter substituted for it a uniform poll-tax, reckoned at eighty copeks for each male. The whole sum, however, due from a village was assessed, not upon the individuals, but upon the joint commune, and its distribution was again left to the propri- etor. In this way, not by a law aimed to produce the effect, but by the general system of the government, all peasants were reduced to one level, and serfage was practically established in Russia. The name itself did not at once appear. Haxthausen speaks doubtingly of an edict of 1700, which is said to recog- nize the fact, but continues: Much later laws first name them [the peasants] serfs, and attempt to regulate their condition. Among the peasants no cry was raised, no voice was heard against the appellation. Nor is this strange, for their actual circumstances remained unchanged; and when later legisla- tion gradually showed some concern for them, and laid greater obligations on their masters, they may have found themselves really better off than during their so-called liberty. Between the series of events that have now been described and the corresponding history in the West, the similarity is great, but the contrast also is great. The origin of the aristoc- racy and the land grants, the increase of the latter under the endeavor of the nobles to throw off control, the nature of the title changing from the personal benefice to the hereditary feud, and the tendency of the constant commotions to depress the freedom of the people, were broad principles alike in both halves of Europe. But though the seeds of feudalism were the same, the soil and the skies were different. In Russia the for- eign lords were not conquemrs, but invited masters; their number was small, and the territory much vaster than that of VOL. CV.NO. 216. 4 50 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, the several members of the Roman Empire, overrun by the numerous German races; the communal organization of the nation gave the people a firmer hold on the soil and their own independence than the individual system of France and Ger- many ; all, facts which would tend to delay the enslavement of the people. Further, certain most important influences before referred to were absent here, the Roman law, the Roman Church, the civilization already extant, which created in the West a more earnest striving for the re-establishment of social order, and greatly hastened the maturity of that form which presently developed itself. That form also contained within itself, in the embryo of the middle class, its own suc- cessor. In Russia, every cause was less concentrated, every movement consequently slower. The authority which had confirmed the power of the master was now more than ever called upon to guard against its abuse. Such restraint had from the oldest time been needful. In the most ancient Russian code (A. D. 1017), cruelty to the peas- ant is forbidden under penalty of a fine. In A. D. 1550, a law against rape and mutilation is found on the statute-book of Ivan IV.; and another which declares that the serfs who pay their legal obrok~ (money-rent) shall be exempt from corv6e ser- vice. Whatever protection the government pretended to afford, it is certain that never were the serfs such mere chattels before the law, never was the idea of human property so predominant in Russia, as during the century that followed Peters death, under the influence of the system he had called into being. It once occurred to Peter that it is a thing which causes tears to flow for men to be sold like cattle, parents to be separated from their children, and husbands and wives from each other~~ but he did not put a stop to the practice. He and his succes- sors did not hesitate to lavish on their favorites the crown do- mains, with the peasants who dwelt on them, and to convert the industry of whole communities from agriculture to manu- factures. Catharine II. extended the ascriplio glebce to Little Russia, which had before been free from the curse. Nor were the private proprietors, from the highest to the lowest, slow to follow the suggestion, that the labor of their serfs belonged absolutely to them, and could be employed and commuted at 188~T.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 51 their pleasure. The peasants were summoned from the field to become house servants sent into mines and factories, leased to contractors, or compelled to hire their own time at heavy prices, and not rarely sold outright. But all this only has- tened the era of freedom. Early in the reign of Alexander I. emancipation was seriously discussed; and in the Baltic provinces, where the population was more than elsewhere German rather than Russian in its origin and feeling, it was actually accomplished with the aid of the proprietors themselves (1816 1819). The latter, however, retained all the land in their own possession, the serfs acquiring only personal freedom, and becoming their tenants; but more recently humanity or expediency has led the nobles to estab- lish loan-funds, by which the peasants are aided in buying their farms. Alexander also renounced the practice of giving away the crown peasants, but in the Western provinces substituted for it one nearly as bad, the te~nporary grant of the crown estates with their population. Under Nicholas, the efforts of his minister, Cancrin, to develop manufactures are said to have had a special influence in hastening emancipation. The no- bility led the way, and both in the cities and on their estates erected factories of all kinds. The rich merchants, a shrewd but uneducated class, followed in their steps. The government nurtured the growing interest with judicious protection. In the course of twenty years thousands of manufacturing estab- lishments were scattered over the country, and the large cities had assumed quite a new aspect. Moscow, earlier the home of the proud Boiars, with a hundred thousand house slaves, was already, in 1843, when llaxthausen visited it, peopled with as manybusy artisans. Agriculture seriously felt the loss of so ma9y strong arms. But a more marked effect was the change in the condition of the serfs thus employed. At home in their own villages, where all were indeed exposed to oppression, the life perhaps of the majority was yet not actually much harder than that of the peasant in other European countries. But those who were now sent from the fields to the factories usually passed from the care of interested masters into the power of contractors and employers, to whom they were simply hired instruments. The proprietors found it much more lucrative to 52 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, hire out their hands and engage others for their own establish- ments. Such a number of abuses, such an increasing mass of social evil, sprang into existence, that the government felt more and more strongly the necessity of grasping the whole subject in order to apply to it some decisive and comprehensive treat- ment. During the reign of Nicholas not less than one hundred and eight edicts in regard to the serfs are said to have been issued. Among them the most important were 1. A prohibition to sell serfs apart from land. 2. A ukase of 1842, which accorded to the owners permission to make legal contracts with their serfs, and thus to change them into tenants paying a fixed rent. The government itself became responsible for the fulfilment of these contracts~ but very few of the nobles availed themselves of the privilege. 3. A system of public loans to needy pro- prietors, who gave in pledge their lands and serfs. On fore- closure of the mortgage the people became crown peasants, and by this means thousands acquired the comparative freedom of that class. 4. Laws authorizing communes, and finally indi- viduals, to buy land at the public sales of the estates of needy proprietors, but under a very restricted right of alienation. 5. The- introduction, or rather the revival, in some of the Western provinces, of Inventories, village statutes that de- fined the relations of the nobles with the peasants. All these alleviations, however, failed to cure the trouble, because they did not really reach it. Nicholas succeeded in correcting certain abuses, but something more than a palliation of the existing system was needed. Alexander II. ascended the throne in March, 1855, and within the month it was announced that serfdom must be abolished. It has been estimated that 325,000,000 acres of the soil of Russia proper were at the time of emancipation in the hands of the nobility, and that their serfs upon this territory numbered about twenty-three millions.* Of the land still belonging to * The official estimate of 1863 (Schnitzler, VoL I. p. 293) gave in the forty-nine provinces of European Russia 22,546,732 serfs; of these 1,382,783 were the dvo- rovyy6, personal serfs, house servants, & c. In Siberia there were only about 4,000 serfs. The crown peasants at the same time numbered 20,050,248. Besides these there was a special class of serfs, comprising those who were regarded as the pri. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 53 the state, more than one half, constituting an area about as large as that owned by the nobles, was occupied by the twenty million crown peasants, who formed the second great class of agriculturists. The rest of the public land was in great part waste and wood. Indeed, of the populated districts probably less than forty per cent was in actual use. Beside the serfs proper and the crown peasants there was a third class, free peasants who lived on their own ground, comprising freed serfs, certain colonists, and the so-called Odnodvortzi * (freeholders of a single manor). These Odnodvortzi seem in part to be of Finnish extraction, the descendants of warriors settled for the protection of the boundaries, in part the impoverished de- scendants of the lower Polish nobility. Their freeholds are so far their own that they may be sold, yet with certain restric- tions in regard to purchasers. Further, the Crim-Tartars, and the Cossacks of Little Russia, the Don, and the Ural, are in- cluded under this head. These hold a portion of their land in individual, a larger portion in joint possession. In order to understand the processes and results of the measures of emancipation adopted by the present Czar, it is important to have a clear idea of the nature of the two largest classes, and of the distinctions between them. I. The Grown Peasants. The communal organization, to which we have already alluded, prevails among the serfs, but is seen in its perfection among the crown peasants, where there is no proprietors will to modify it. Each commune forms a unit, possessing collective rights and regarded as hereditary tenant of the land occupied by it. Without the right of alien- ation, it holds the perpetual usufruct of the same, and for this it pays the crown a money rent (obrok). Woods and pastures are used in common; the arable ground is divided into shares. In this distribution the land is first classified according to its distance from the village, for the houses are almost invaria- vate possession of the Czar and the imperial family. These appanage peasants, numbering 2,070,013, occupied a position between tbe crown peasants and the serfs, in government, taxation, and privilege more closely approximated to the former. They were partially emancipated in 1858, and in 1863 were placed on the same foot. ing with the freed serfs. * Their number in 1838 was calculated at 1,365,886 males. Schnitzler, Vol. I. p.417. 54 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, bly grouped in the Russian rural districts, then, according to the nature or fertility of the soil, into portions as nearly ho- mogeneous as possible. Of each section every adult male or tiaglo * receives by lot a narrow strip, so that the share may consist of several separated pieces. Each commune has its skilful, traditionally educated surveyors, who superintend the whole arrangement, it is said, to the general satisfaction. A new apportionment has usually been made every nine years, or oftener, and was prescribed in each census year. But of late it has been complained of as the black division; and the more common practice now is to reserve a number of lots, which are leased for the common benefit, or assigned, as occa- sion demands, to new members. The arguments for and against this system, that seems so strange to us, have been warmly dis- cussed by the Russian politico-economists. llaxthausen, a de- cided conservative, declares himself unreservedly in its favor. Its principal disadvantage is its bad effect on agriculture. No one cares to manure and improve the land which he must soon give up to another. Its great benefit is its constant provision for the growing generation, by which pauperism is never en- tailed, and the son escapes the consequences of his fathers in- dolence. Among the crown peasants the commune must contain at least fifteen hundred souls, smaller villages uniting to make up the necessary number, as several communes unite to form the canton. The commune assembly consists of elected elders, one from every five households. These elders choose by ballot the village chief, and send a committee from their number to represent the commune in the canton assembly, which exercises a similar right of election in regard to its offi- cers. Each commune and each canton choose also certain men of conscience to decide minor civil and police cases. The commune is responsible for the payment of all public taxes, and for the delivery of its proportionate number of recruits; * The Russian term tiaglo, hearth, signifies an arbitrary unit of laboring force, used as the basis of distribution of the land and taxes. Its amount varies in differ. ent parts from one to three or more males; but usually the idea of a married couple, a man an(l his wife, seems to be at its root. The official unit is the soul, i. e. the male. But on the private estates, and especially where statute labor, not obrok, is rendered, the tiaglo is more generally employed. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 55 and to execute these duties, it has a very extended control over its members, much resembling that of the proprietor over his serfs. The admission or discharge of members, the issue of passes to those who leave their home, corporal punishment up to a certain number of stripes, even the banishment of incor- rigible offenders to Siberia, come within the functions of the assembly. The sum which the crown peasant pays the govern- ment is very moderate. The land-tax proper varies from 2.15 to 2.56 rubles per male. llaxthausen, disclaiming anything like absolute accuracy, however, estimates the average annual amount of all dues, state and commune,* at 7.24 rubles (about $5.50) for every male capable of labor. Till 1844, the pay- ment, except in the Western provinces, was levied as a capita- tion tax, and by its uniformity had become a source of great hardship to the poor. The arrears were every year heaped up enormously, and could only be cancelled by direct remissions. After several previous abatements of this kind, 66,980,537 rubles were remitted between 1826 and 1836, and yet the existing arrears amounted to over 63,000,000. In the Western prov- inces, however, the crown peasants were under a wholly differ- ent administration. There the lands were let out to Polish nobles, and the peasants required to perform statute labor. Though this labor was regulated, the land allotments were not, and, as a consequence, the arendators absorbed all the land they could, cheating the government, and robbing their depend- ants. Through this oppression, the iRussian communal consti- tution, which had never held its own in these border regions against the tendency to individual land tenures, was almost com- pletely abolished, and a class of peasants with little pr no land was increasing. The reforms begun in 1837, under Count Kis- selefs direction, were a noble attempt to execute a great task.t * These consist-of taxes for the administration, the repair of roads, & c. (often paid in work rather than money), for the recruiting and police service, for the cen- tral grain magazines (besides the local stores maintained in every commune hy a contribution in kind as a reserve in case of poor harvests or famine), for the mutual fire insurance (three quarters per cent of the peasants quarters are said to be destroyed yearly by fire), together with the general poll-tax and the special tax of the crown peasant for the use of the public land. t Schnitzler says the reform would have produced great results, si Von efit trouv~ pour lappliquer un personnel suffisant et asscz honu~tc. 56 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, By these measures, a special ministry was created for the care. of the crown domains, a partially new organization introduced, and, what is most important, the poll-taxes have been gradu- ally changed into a more equitable ground rent, based on a sys- tem of registration. In this way a more definite and permanent assignment of the lots has been secured. In the West, it be- came necessary to give a lot to each peasant, and change his corvee to a reduced money rent. Compared with the serfs, this class has evidently enjoyed a high degree of personal freedom. The code of Nicholas de- scribes them as the free, rural population. The equal and temporary land allotment, the low rent, the right to travel and carry on trade or handicraft in all parts of the empire, the democratic management of their public concerns, all this has in it much that is attractive till we encounter the influence of the government officials of the district and province. These authorities have by law only a general supervision over the com~ mune, and are not to interfere in their internal affairs. But, practically, their rapacity has united with the ignorance of the peasants and that of their lower elective magistrates; who can seldom read or write, to produce a degree of oppression greater, according to some authors, than that which the private serfs had to endure. Without the protection of a master to prevent outrage, the crown peasant has had little hope of redress if outrage were committed. The present administration of jus- tice in Russia, says Dolgorukow in his Truth about Russia, speaking, however, before the emancipation, is nothing but a series of briberies with an arbitrary decision to end with. The very extent of the reforms which were undertaken proves the previous existence of very great defects. As to the future status of the crown peasants, the Emperor has decided to make them land-owners on the same principles adopted in the case of the serfs; but the greater necessity of the latter obtained for them the first attention. II. The Serfs. The right to own ones fellow-creatures was, in Russia, the prerogative of the hereditary, and, exceptionally, of the personal nobility. The state regarded the proprietor as the legal representative of his serfs, and imposed on him gen- eral obligations to provide for their maintenance and welfare. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 57 Beggary, for instance, was not permitted the crippled or aged serf; the master was obliged to see to it that the infirm were supported. For the public interests, a sufficient quantity of ground needed to be cultivated; therefore the master had to take care that all the necessary means were supplied, and, on occasion of famine, to find his people food. For a like reason, at the sale or mortgage of an estate, a fixed minimum of land was to be reserved per head for their use. The master was further responsible for all the serfs public dues, whether taxes, fines, or military service. Lastly, he was expected to appear for his serf before the civil tribunals, and was authorized to assist him in certain criminal cases. The commune adminis- tration, doubtless, rendered little personal concern necessary in these matters; but if the proprietor failed to discharge this obligation, he was amenable to various penalties. If a village was falling into ruin through neglect, or was subjected to out- rageous burdens, the governor of the province could put the estate under guardianship, and forbid the interference, or even presence, of the proprietor; and a somewhat similar course was pursued to enforce the payment of public dues. If at a land sale the legal minimum were not reserved, and the deficiency were not in some way made good within a year, the serfs be- came crown peasants, and were settled on the state lands. The serf was not allowed to possess real estate, but with the consent of his master could establish factories, carry on trade, and enter guilds. The law permitted him, also, to buy his freedom; but the price, and thus the privilege, were left to the masters discretion. Well-to-do peasants and artisans who had acquired some capital usually made strong efforts to be- come independent, and often paid hundreds and even thousands of rubles for themselves. It was not an infrequent specula.. lion to buy an estate at a cheap rate in order to extract a profit from the people in this way. Many of the rich merchants of St. Petersburg and Moscow, says Gurowski, are either serfs who have purchased their liberty, or actual serfs paying a nominal obrok to their proprietors. In some such cases the serf was absolutely richer than his owner, whose pride or prin- ciple refused to manumit him. Military service also conferred freedom on the recruit, but the recruits were always selected 58 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, under the masters direction. Further, such crimes on the part of the noble as subjected his property to confiscation con- verted his serfs at the same time into crown peasants. By law the master could not compel a marriage, but, on the other hand, no woman could wed without his permission. In inter- marriage of free peasants and serfs, the children inherited the fathers condition. To leave the estate, and travel, settle, or labor elsewhere, the owners pass was necessary. Fugitive- slave laws were vigorously enforced. The master had juris- diction over the serfs in civil and police, but not in criminal cases. He could either himself inflict punishment, not to the extent of bodily mutilation or danger to life, or could apply to the government and have the offender sent to prison or into the army. For general refractoriness he was able to banish him entirely from his home by giving him up to the state, which was glad thus to obtain settlers for Siberia. Be- fore 1838, the mere wish of the proprietor was sufficient to consign him to such exile. Complaints against the master by the serf, except for certain crimes against the state, were for- bidden by law, under severe penalties. The owner could at will summon field peasants to personal service in the house, or send his house servants to the field, remove them from one estate to another, and, under certain restrictions, apprentice them to strangers. As to the right of sale, the ukase of Nicholas mentioned above, which prohibited the purchase of peasants without land, recognizes thereby the reciprocal idea implied in the ascriptio glebw. Haxthausen says that the statutes on this point, in the General Code of Nich- olas, amount to this, that the purchase of serfs shall take place only on condition that the buyers register the serfs on their own settled estates, (a provision, apparently, that would limit purchase to landed proprietors,) and that the sale of serfs without land at fairs, where they are personally exposed at public auction, and also the sale or transfer of individuals separated from their families, are forbidden. Yet it is very certain that such or similar sales occurred. It is said, that, to evade the law, mock transfers of small land-lots were made.* * Gnrowski, who seems to be quite fearless in rounding his numbers and do. fining his statements, says, in his Russia as It Is, Any noble owning serfs 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 59 The serf had to pay the poll-tax and much the same general dues to state and commune as the crown peasant; but in place of the latters special tax for the use of the public land, the other rendered a much higher tribute to his master. When paid in money, its amount was not fixed by law, but depended on the area of land allowed the serf, and the possibility of earning a living otherwise than by agriculture, in other words, upon the need or pleasure of the proprietor. On the average, it was estimated at fifteen rubles for the tiaglo, or at ten for each male. Haxthausen calculates the whole amount of public and pri- vate dues to have been 17.07 rubles for the serf, while for the crown peasant it was only 7.24. But from the many thou- sands allowed to leave their homes with their masters pass- port and find their support in some more profitable occupation than farming, a higher sum was usually required. The float- ing population of the cities was composed in great part of such serfs. How extortionate the demand at times became, espe- cially on the part of small proprietors, may be judged from a story which Sch6do-Ferroti tells.* His hired coachman, it seems, had a habit of falling asleep on his box. Finally, he discovered that, after working for him all day, the man spent the greater portion of the night in cobbling shoes. An inquiry brought out the confession that, through sickness, ~he was in arrears with his obrok, and was obliged to take this course to avoid being called home to endure the direct persecution of his mistress. She demanded a sum equal to the whole amount of his daily wages. Subsequently, he learned other facts. An estate of one hundred and fifty-six souls, that had furnished its proprietor an income of from five to six thousand rubles (nearly twice Haxthausens average), and the -peasants on which had been considered as in tolerably easy circumstances, was, after his death, divided among his five daughters. From twenty-seven persons who became Mine. D.s property, she must have for every one at least twenty acres of land; and that a serf becomes free if sold without land, or if the buyer does not possess the quantity of land re- quired by law, or if his family is separated from him by sale. He also says, The obrok generally through the whole of Russia, even on the estates of serfs, ~mount~ to $ 10 for each family having a separate communal household. * Premi~oe ttude sur lAvenir de he I?ussie, p. 76. 60 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, succeeded in extracting 3,100 rubles, 2,400 from sixteen men, and, what relatively is a still higher sum, 700 from eleven women. But so uncertain was a nobles income where the tribute was collected in money, that of late the labor system had more and more prevailed, till at the time of emancipation seven tenths of the serfs were thus discharging their obligations. A law dating from the beginning of the century limited the service to three days in the week. But in the short summer season this rule was constantly transgressed. The masters then usually allowed the peasants only the hours absolutely necessary to cultivate their own land, avoiding the law by their power to withhold a portion of this land and grant it. back only on condition of their working for him more than the legal time. The harvest season, when everything with hands was pressed into the fields, was characteristically named the season of woe. In winter, though the three-day limit was usu- ally adhered to, the necessity of carrying the years produce to the distant market renewed, in some districts at least, the summers hardship. Besides this general ordinance, services were also minutely regulated, and varied according to the local methods of agriculture. Mans labor was distinguished from womans, human labor from that of cattle, and rules were adopted for each kind. The fields cultivated for tIAe master were usually separated from those belonging to the peasants. It is estimated that, in the interior provinces, the former claimed, as a rule, one half the arable and from two thirds to three fifths of the remaining land. In those regions where payment was made in money, the noble left nearly all, of course, to the use of the serfs. The size of the single lot differed in every province, often within the districts of one and the same province, and depended partly on the owners will, in part on local customs, determined by the density of the population and the nature of the soil. But the condition of the serfs as prescribed by the law prob- ably suggests a much pleasanter aspect than the actual picture presented. A glance into Mr. Morleys book gives that pic- ture very vividly. Dogs! pigs! was the usual address of an impatient aristocrat. Sons and daughters of dogs! pigs 1867.] Se~fdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 61 and swine! rats and vermin! defilement of mothers! were the terms heard from a lady proprietress. No stick, no work, was the orthodox belief of even humane employers. In one scene a single baron cudgels forty serfs, not his own, who grumble, but are cowed. Witness too, the common treatment of the postilions, who form, in that country of mag- nificent distances and few railroads, a special and unfortunate class of the crown serfs. Tourgueneff well calls it a hide- ous adage which he heard from the lips of one of them, It is only the lazy who dont thrash us. The serfs were not without rights, but within the legal limits the proprietor found ample scope for the exercise of arbitrary power over most of the relations of life. And yet this tells but half the truth. The law carried no guaranty of execution, had no vitality within itself, for the reason that the right of complaint against the master was wholly denied his serf. In the eye of the law he was not a mere chattel, like the negro at the South. But since the law had thus tied its own hands, he was virtually in a state of complete moral and physical depend- ence. The accounts of various authors are as widely apart as North from South-side views of our American slavery. Some use very strong lights, others the heaviest shades, in their de- scriptions. The same virtues and vices, moreover, on which such stress was laid by Southern slaveholders as peculiar to the negro and justifying his servitude, are put forward with al- most equal prominence by the champions of IRussian serfdom. Sheep-like docility, an incomparable sweetness of tem- per, affection for superiors, strong family and religious feel- ing, hospitality, are allowed them; but frivolity, carelessness, and indolence are their special traits. They appear to have sucked in the propensity to steal with their mothers milk,~~ and can only be driven to industry by the whip or the burden of a heavy tribute; while servility abounds, the sentiment of gratitude is almost unknown. According to the author of Russia by a Recent Traveller (1859), the physicians give evidence equally discreditable in regard to the purity of the women. The familiar refrains are also heard, These qual- ities belong by nature to the Russian peasant, and eman- cipation would certainly cause the ruin of a great number 62 Serftlom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, of them. Their friends, without wholly denying the existence of these traits, first diminish the exaggeration, and then justly trace their origin to the slavery itself. llaxthausen is among those who place themselves between extremes. He acknowl- edges the generally unhappy condition of the serf, but ascribes this, not to their attachment to the soil, but to the unlimited power of the masters. Their individual character, and not the law, determined the degree of their misery or happiness. As with us, the number of actual owners was very small. In 1860 it was estimated at 120,197, of whom 35.7 per cent possessed each less than 21 male serfs, and averaged only 7.9. At the other extreme, 1,396 possessed 1,000 males ~r more, and averaged 2,202. The Ch~r6m5tief family alone was credited with from 128,000 to 200,000, among whom were several millionnaires, possessing themselves, it is said, in their mas- ters name, some six or seven hundred serfs. Over 17,000,000 of the whole serf population were owned by about 24,000 no- bles. The smaller proprietors, therefore, who were as a rule the most cruel and extortionate, owned but a very small frac- tion of the twenty-three millions. But absenteeism on the part of the actual proprietors was a prevailing custom; and in such cases Russian overseers seem to have borne the same reputation as the corresponding class in America. To con- clude this sketch of the old r~gime, we can hardly do better than to quote two passages, the first from Tegoborski. In most of the distiicts which have fertile soil, easy and regular communication, and commercial activity, there are to be found among the serfs subjected to the obrok, as well as among those still under the corvee system, well-cultivated fields, stables well filled with cattle, and a degree of comfort not often met with in many countries of Central Europe. * Haxthausen says as much; but it must be remembered that such districts make a small portion of the Russian territory. The other passage is by llaxthausens annotator in St. Pe- tersburg, one thoroughly acquainted with the subject through his own experience. * Commentaries on the Productive Forces of Russia, English Translation, VoL I. p. 227. 1867.] Se?fdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 63 How was it possible for the condition of the serfs to be otherwise than miserable, when we remember that they had no right to bring a charge against their masters? The serfs in the districts where the obrok (payment of dues in money) still prevailed were in the best position. There the peasant had, in fact, the free control of his whole life, if he paid his owner a moderate tax; yet he was by no means secure from the most outrageous extortion. IDid his master die, or sell his estate, then the peasant had everything to fear. With the increase of luxury there arose various speculations on the part of many proprietors, who succeeded in collecting great properties in the following way. Estates, usually in the obrok regions, were bought at auction. The purchase- money was squeezed as quickly as possible by the buyer out of the richest among~ the peasants, and he thus found the estate in his hands without its having cost him a ruble. The obrok for all the serfs was then increased, and the sum thus extracted again employed in new purchases. In this way we have seen original capitals of twenty to thirty thousand rubles turned in the course of fifteen years into colossal possessions. But yet more oppressed were the peasants of those agricul- tural districts, where the corv6e system was in vogue. It may be true that the half of them who had mild, humane, and educated masters were not in a pitiable condition; but the other half were either under the roughest and most uncultivated portion of the small nobility, who re- garded nothing but their own material interests, and abandoned them- selves to the grossest sensuality and passion at the expense of their serfs, or were subject to still more barbarous overseers, who occupied the place of theabsentee proprietors. The master who chose could exercise his power over his serfs in the most shameless way, without limit or restraint; and many of our country nobles who were born and brought up on their estates recall, among the recollections of their child- hood, many deeds of revolting cruelty, which took place almost before their eyes, and were by no means regarded as rare exceptions. Very faint was the voice raised against these outrages by those who had nothing similar on their conscience, and were really full of patriarchal care and tenderness for their dependants. What could limit the abuse, where the proprietor was wholly coarse and uncivilized, where the peasant was deprived by law of the right of complaint, and where public opin- ion did not condemn such deeds? Such in general was the condition of the serfs when Alex- ander II. succeeded to his fathers throne, in March, 1855. He at once announced his intention to undertake the task of emancipation, a task bequeathed him, as he felt, by his 64 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, ancestors, and rendered necessary by the circumstances of the time. His nobles recoiled before the thought of a revolution which would not only deprive them of property, but would destroy the whole social fabric of the nation as it then ex- isted. The measure also, granting its necessity, seemed to admit of two radically different modes of execution: either the immediate and complete rupture of every bond between the serfs and the proprietors, and the direct indemnification of the latter by the state for the lands yielded up by them, a scheme which would involve an immense and dangerous finan- cial operation; or a more gradual liberation, in which the peasants themselves by labor, rent, and purchase should be the principal agents in the process of redemption. Land there was no serious question about this the freedmen must have, or enfranchisement would mean nothing but pauperiza- tion. The latter of the two methods, as we shall see, was that adopted by the government; the nobles, on the other hand, as long as they could, clung almost unanimously to the other, and placed every obstacle in the Emperors way. At last, how- ever, his firmness reduced them to quiet submission and co- operation. His first step was to appoint a secret commission, which assembled in his capital, January 3, 1857, to consider the general question of emancipation. The difficulties of the enterprise, and the consequent responsibility, were not under- rated. The twenty-three million private serfs were distrib- uted over an area equal to half Europe, and their condition had assumed, in almost every province, local peculiarities origi- nating in variety of soil and race, and hardened into custom by centuries of history. It was hopeless to deal with this sub- ject in the usual way. Hitherto it had been the policy of Rus- sian state-craft to divine, discuss, and arbitrate upon the wants of the people within the ministerial sancta, whence the edicts, complete and imperative, issued forth to bind the conduct of the whole series of officials, high and low, far and near. But the detail was in this case too vast, the problem too new, to be thus handled. As its successful solution also would finally depend on its general comprehension, and as for this purpose it must sooner or later be referred to public opinion, it was thought better to enlist and train that opinion by demanding 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 65 its assistance from the outset. Alexander resolved, therefore, to adopt an entirely new procednre. In addition to the secret commission he established in each province a committee of resident nobles to collect all preliminary information and re- port plans for the abolition, at the same time stating for their guidance the leading principles upon which the govern- ment had already determined. Throughout their whole pro- ceedings a careful rein was kept upon these local committees, that they might not turn aside from the course laid down. In order to stimulate the Russian nobility, he also tried to bring the Lithuanian nobles, on whose estates the peasants had already acquired partial independence through the system of inventories introduced by Nicholas, to declare in favor of his intention; and his circular of November 24th, 1857, asserting that they had done so, produced a great sensation and much anxiety. Early in the following year the secret commission in St. Petersburg became the Central Commission for the Empire; and in March, 1859, Redaction Committees were appointed, and divided into three sections, judicial, administrative, and financial, to revise and harmonize the provincial reports. By the labors of these three bodies, the necessary details were col- lected, and the many various theories discussed with the ut- most thoroughness. No opinion that was worth hearing was discarded. Intelligent proprietors, official and non-official, and even commune-starosts and estate overseers were summoned as witnesses or as members to the Redaction Committees. The process, both in the provinces, where forty-eight * com- mittees with 1,377 members were at work, and in St. Peters- burg, went on with great method; and the digested result was constantly appearing in print and circulated among the par- ticipants for their further instruction. Meanwhile several cir- culars were issued to defeat any attempted evasion of the im- pending changes. Many owners, for instance, wished to save their lands by at once voluntarily freeing their~ serfs. After four hundred and seven sessions, in the course of nineteen * Forty-six, says Schnitzler. VOL. cV.NO. 216. 5 66 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, months, the redaction was completed * and finally an impe- rial manifesto, dated February 19, 0. S. (March 3,) 1861, pro- claimed the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, and pro- mulgated a series of seventeen ordinances, embra%~ing all the general and local legislation which was necessary to carry it into effect. These laws may be summed up under three heads 1. Personal freedom and civil rights are conferred on the serfs; the right to make contracts, to own personal and real estate, to sue, be sued, and bear witness before the courts, to change residence and occupation, to engage in trade and manufactures, all under the general laws of the Empire. 2. The perpetual usufruct of their homesteads and of a cer- tain area of land is secured to them, in return for which a cer- tain rent in money or in service is guaranteed to the proprietors. The legal amounts, however, are only binding where no amica- ble arrangement can be agreed upon by the two parties. But in all cases a kind of contract defining these amounts and all the future relations between proprietor and tenant is to be in- troduced on each estate within two years from the date of the edict. During this period the peasants are considered as temporarily bound, or apprenticed. At any time, however, they have the right to buy the homesteads, and permission, conditioned on the proprietors consent, to buy their lands, both at a fixed valuation. The government offers to assist in the purchase. This done, they are released from all obliga- tion to their former owners. 3. A system of administration is organized within the com- mune~ in some degree assimilated to that in use on the crown estates; and officers and tribunals are appointed to carry out the new laws and to arbitrate between the land-owners and their new tenants. The Homestead and Land-Lot. The two most difficult questions which the committees were called on to discuss con- cerned the limits of the homestead and those of the field-lot. As the peasant was authorized to buy the former whenever he * Four-and-twenty thick folio volumes were required for the report of the four years labor of the numerous committees. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 67 might wish, without consulting the proprietors pleasure, it was necessary to define minutely its appurtenances. The village premises include the houses and outbuildings, kitchen gardens, hop and hemp gardens, the pens and watering-places for the cattle, the streets, & c. If the boundaries have never been fixed, a certain maximum of land for a homestead lot is allowed per head, and the lines are to be drawn by mutual agreement, or under the direction of the Arbiter. The principles kept in view in dividing the arable and pasture ground were, to endow the freedmen with as much land as they had needed while serfs for their support, and at the same time to reserve for the proprietors the exclusive possession of a portion of their property. As the amount used by the serfs had varied greatly, however, in different parts of the Empire, it was impossible to attain the end by a single and uniform rule. The method pursued is as follows. The country is divided, according to the nature of the soil, into three zones, and each zone into circuits. To the first zone belongs the soil that is neither black earth nor that of the steppe region; to the sedond and third, respectively, that of the latter two kinds. In each circuit of the first two zones, maximum and minimum limits are established for the portion allowed to each male; within these limits the actual size of the existing allotment is to be maintained. At least one third, however, of all productive land is secured to~ the proprietor, in case such provision does not infringe upon the peasants mini- mum, which equals one third of their maximum. allowance.* But in the third zone, that of the broad steppes, custom had hitherto settled no system, and here the law prescribes a defi- nite allotment for the peasant in each circuit, and fixes the proprietors minimum at one half. The lot therefore varies, to 2 r 30 acres; the average according situation, from 21 to ove for the adult male being 9~ 4 Although the estimate is made * When the serfs are in excess of the land, says Tilley, the pruprietor is re- quired to give up two thirds of his estate and retain one third, the surplus peasants being removed to government land. Ilaxthausens expression lacks fulness, but implies that the proprietor may come off without any land. t 3~ rl& iatines. The d& iatine = 2.7015 acres. This is Schnitzlers statement. Tilley thinks eight acres beside the homestead lot is the average amount. 438 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, upon the number of individuals, the assignment is made to the joint commune, to whose judgment the method of distri- bution is left. By the vote of two thirds of the members and the consent of the proprietor, the land can be divided once for all, and held in perpetuo by the separate families, a ten- ure preferred by the government. Only productive land goes to constitute this grant, iu general, the same that had been before in use. When, under the new regulations, the former area needs to be increased or diminished, the law carefully prescribes what parts must be assigned, or may not be appro- priated, by the owner. Additions are to be near to the village, and contiguous, if possible, to the other commune lands. The law also watches over any exchanges that become necessary in order to consolidate the portion of the peasants in lands distinct and apart from those of the proprietor. The latter may, under certain restrictions, compel the removal of the peasants houses, and demand that a mutual boundary be drawn. But for such measures he must obtain the Arbiters sanction, defray the ex- penses, and pay for the improvements which he forces his ten- ants to abandon. Where the proprietor formerly furnished his serfs with fuel, the delivery must be continued during nine years; its quality and kind, as well as the amount and kind of payment for it, are to ~be determined by the Arbiter accord- ing to local circumstances. The Rent. 1. In Afoney.With equal minuteness are the regulations in regard to the rent laid down. It was a settled principle of the whole legislation to disturb existing customs as little as possible by the new arrangements. The government, therefore, though it strongly favored the obrok system, that by which the masters dues were paid in money, did not summarily abolish the corv~e. service, which was prevailing among at least seven tenths of the serf population. It gave rules for each system. For the obrok estates, it established a fixed rent of twelve, ten, nine, or eight rubles per male, ac- cording to locality. Within twenty-five versts of St. Peters- burg, for instauce, it is twelve rubles per male, but in most parts of the Empire nine is nearer the average. This sum, however, corresponds to the maximum allotment; and a scale was furnished by which the component fractions of the one are 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 69 proportioned to those of the other.* If an estate offer some special advantage or disadvantage for gaining a livelihood, the rent, as also the amount of land in peculiar cases, may be slightly increased or diminished by order of the Provincial Commission, but, if paid wholly in money, is never to exceed the sum formerly required of the serf. The distribution of the rent among the individual members is left to the commune itself; where the land is held permanently by the families, it is assessed, of course, according to the size of the lots. The pay-days, if not settled by amicable agreement, are appointed by the Court of Arbiters, and the proprietor is allowed to re- quire a six months advance. 2. In Labor. On the estates where the peasants render payment in labor, a certain number of days work, viz, forty for a man and thirty for a woman, is fixed as the annual com- pensation for the maximum allotment, and is proportionally diminished for a less amount. Of these, three fifths are to be summer days, two fifths winter days, the former not to exceed twelve hours, the latter nine hours, excluding rest. But, at the option of either peasants or proprietor, a task sys- tem, as prescribed by the Provincial Commission, may be adopted instead of the time rates. The whole number of days required in a half-year from the commune, or respectively from the family, is divided equally among the weeks of the same, and in general not more than one third of the weeks service can be required on any one day. When the people work in com- mon, the proprietor tells the starost ( elder, the chief of the commune), at the beginning of the week, the number of la- borers of each sex wanted, and on what days they must be furnished; the appointment is then made by the commune offi- cers according to the village register, and the summons served by the starost on the evening preceding the work-day, with in- # Throughout the first zone, for instance, for the first d6ciatine of the individuals maximum allotment, one half the maximum obrok is to be paid; for the second, an additional fourth; and the remaining fourth, divided equally among the remain- ing ddciatines, gives the rent to he paid for each of these. Thus, on an estate con- taining 240 males, in a district where the maximum obrok is 10 rubles, and the maximum land-lot 4 ddciatines per head, and the amount of land actually granted the peasants 900 d~ciatines, they pay for the first 240 ddciatines, ~ 5 rubles, 1200 rubles; for the second 240,~ 2t, 600 rubles; for the remaining 420, ~ 14 rubles, 525 rubles: in all 2,325 rubles, or 9.48 per head. TO Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, structions as to the nature of the service. The peasants supply implements and teams, the latter at a fixed rate, one days work with two horses being equivalent to one and a half days of personal labor. In case of sickness, substitutes must be fur- nished by the commune, and a similar but less exacting rule is applied to the separate families. Not only an overseer to represent the proprietor, but some village official in behalf of the peasants, is present in the field during the day. At its close a receipt for service is given to the persons engaged, and registers of performance are kept. To secure the payment of these dues, the law provides that the obrok shall take precedence of all other debts, public or private. For delay, a fine of one per cent a month is added to the amount. Where the commune is collectively responsible, it must pay the arrears of its members, and proceed to enforce repayment on its own account by such methofs as the hiring out of the peasant or one of his family, or the sale of his prop- erty. Should the commune not discharge its obligations, the proprietor appeals to the Arbiter, who is to take such measures as may be necessary ; in extreme cases he deprives the com- mune of part of its land, puts the whole under guardianship, or even surrenders it again temporarily to the masters dispo- sal. Where the land has been shared permanently among the households, it depends on a second agreement between the two parties whether the responsibility for the rent shall also be- come individual. Should it be so decided, the commune direc- tory is still the agent, at the proprietors demand, to exact col- lections. For the first nine years a purchased homestead is exempt from attachment, but subsequently even this may be sold, or revert to the land-owner, to pay the lacking rent. In order to facilitate the speedy purchase of the homestead, over whose acquisition the government watches with great interest, the peasants were allowed, under certain conditions, to change their labor to a money payment after the expiration of the first two years. For this purpose their service, reckoned by the days work, was appraised by the Provincial Commission. A similar right was extended to serfs registered as belonging to certain factories, smelting and salt works. Further, of the whole rent, thus uniformly estimated in money, the law decided 1867.] Selfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 71 what portion should be considered as belonging to the home- stead. The villages were for this purpose classified according to their local advantages; and, of the whole yearly assessment of nine or ten rubles per male, the homestead pays from 1~- to 31 ru in certain cases a little more.* 2 bles, The Nine- Year Law. Another law, beneficent to both par- ties at the introduction of the new system, by preventing in- jurious consequences from the first excitement, obliges the peasants to hold themselves responsible for the whole of the land grant during the first nine years of freedom, except where a commune jointly, or a peasant singly, acquires actual own- ership of a piece of land under certain limitations of size and distance; or when, by mutual consent, a portion is renounced, in which case the diminution must leave an area equal at least to half the legal maximum of the circuit. In a single case this area may be reduced still further; viz, when, by formal agreement between the proprietor and the commune, the latter receives, as an outright gift from the old master, an amount of land equal, the homestead lot included, to one quarter of the maximum; in such case the proprietor obtains nothing from the government, and all former relations with the peas- ants are at once severed4 In order to enforce the responsi- bility for the land, a member is allowed, during these nine - years, to remove from the commune only with the permission of both proprietor and commune assembly; but if the latter give and the former withhold it, appeal may be made to the Arbiter. After the nine years the purchase of the homestead alone is sufficient to authorize a surrender of the remaining land, which in such case reverts, first to the commune, then to the owner; in other cases an emigrant must make some satis- factory arrangement by which his portion of the obrok or the * In March, 1863, when the two years allowed for the introduction of the new system expired, of 112,000 contracts to be drawn up, 102,552 had been signed, and 92,001, representing a male population of 8,364,594, were ready to be carried at once into execution. Out of every 100 peasants, 33.7 per cent remained subject to the c~orcee system, with the reserved privilege of commutation mentioned above; 50.8 per cent adopted the obrok system; and 15.5 per cent bad already become pro- prietors of homestead and land. Schnitzler, Vol. I. pp. 412, 413. t It need hardly be said that but few proprietors adopted this method of settle- ment. 72 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, labor shall in future be discharged. And at all times a peas- ant who wishes to change his residence can do so only on con- dition that he leave behind him no dues unpaid, and no help- less family to be supported at the public expense. The con- sent of the commune which he proposes to enter is also neces- sary, in case he is to share in its land rights. State Taxes. The freed commune, besides its land rent, is also collectively responsible for the state and local taxes; e. g. the general poll-tax, the imposts to defray the expense of the new administration, village schools, roads, etc., those levied to maintain the paupers and orphans, to stock the public provision magazines, and to insure the village against fire and other dis- asters. These are usually to be assessed by the commune assembly according to the size of the lot used or owned by the respective members, and to be collected by the starost or by a special officer elected for the purpose. Payment is to be en- forced as for the obrok. Recruits may be appointed either by lot or by turn on the register, and must be furnished in natura; only in a few border and Crimean districts is a commutation of three hundred rubles -per man allowed. But previous releases from military obligation (Relcrutirungsquittungen) may be bought, as among the crown peasants. Purchase of the Homestead and Lands. The Government Loan. The commune jointly or the peasants singly have the right to buy their homesteads, under the single restriction that at the time of purchase no arrears be due to either state or pro- prietor. But the land is only to be bought with the proprietors consent. In case the price cannot be decided on by mutual agreement, the annual rent is considered as six per cent of the actual value; in other words, the legal price is 16% times the legal obrok, or the years service estimated in money. The sum total for the village is divided among the heads of families by a decree of the assembly confirmed by the proprietor. In communes where the joint usufruct prevails, a peasant who singly buys his portion has to pay one fifth more. But if the government had done no more than bestow this privilege in words, it would have been as unavailable to the serfs as Lin- colns proclamation without the Northern army to the negroes. Few of the peasants could ever command the cash necessary to 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 73 buy their lands; yet, without land as well as homes, they would probably pass from servitude of one kind to that of another. For the present, therefore, the state itself assumes the greater part of the burden. The peasants only, however, those who are discharging their dues in money receive a loan from the government, upon condition, as llaxthausen understands it, that, together with the homestead, they buy either the whole, or at least a certain portion, whose minimum is fixed, of their field lands. In the former case the government advances four fifths, in the latter three quarters of the price, this partly in state bank certificates, partly in government bonds,* which are gradually changed into bank certificates. Should the propri- etor be already indebted to the state, the amount of his debt is deducted from the sum paid, a proceeding which practi- cally reduces the expenses to the government fully one half! Apparently the proprietor has in some degree the right of forcing the purchase on a commune, though not on single individuals; for our author says that, when he does this, he cannot claim the unpaid balance, unless the peasants desire only a portion of their land, in which case they must pay a sum equal to one fifth of the government advance, the propri- etor thus sustaining a loss of one tenth. But where the de- mand comes from the side of the peasants, these must make up the complete price at the time of the transfer. In place of the obrok to their old masters, the peasants then pay yearly to the state treasury six per cent on the advance. This covers the interest on the bank certificates issued to the proprietors, with all incidental expenses, and gradually forms a sinking fund, which, it is estimated, will in forty-nine years extinguish the debt. Proprietors Reserved Rights. While the peasants are in the intermediate state of temporary obligation, the proprietor retains general protective rights over the commune, and a lim- ited supervision of police matters, a degree of authority which enables him to initiate measures for the public or private wel * These bonds, at first very low, afterwards rose in value through foreign specu- lation, and in September, 1863, were worth eighty-seven per cent of their face. Schnitzler says, The government pays half in special certificates bearing 5~ per cent interest, issued in the name of the selling proprietor, and not negotiable; and the other half in negotiable five per cent bonds. (Vol. I. p. 409.) 74 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, fare of the members without placing them in his power for injury. With the commune he deals through the starost. He may also require information about all resolutions of the as- sembly; and if they infringe on his rights, he has ever, like the peasants, the privilege of appealing to the Arbiter. Punishment is no longer to be inflicted by himself, but through the appoint- ed officers, and in accordance with the legal regulations. On obrok estates he is allowed to lease his lands, including the peas- ants assignment, for terms of twelve years; this, however, is not to interfere with the latters right of purchase. But on the other estates, where labor is rendered, such personal service is allowed on no pretext whatever to revert to a tenant. In mort- gages or sale~s, the peasants lands may be included in the transfer only when the estate goes to an hereditary noble; if to a person of another class, at or before the time of transfer the peasants must become proprietors of their portion. In the division of an estate by sale or by inheritance, the single lots permanently held by families may be separated from each other; but in no case may the partition fall within such a lot, or upon the land collectively occupied by the commune. The Western Provinces. The above enactments hold good throughout the larger part of European Russia. But in Lit- tle Russia and the western provinces, those which were for- merly under Polish and Lithuanian rule, there had long existed a different territorial organization, which in some degree af- fected the present changes. In this region, as has been men- tioned, the commune system seems to have been strange to the feelings of the people, perhaps on account of the German neighborhood, and their incorporation with Russia had not eradicated the old practice of hereditary transmission of the family lot. As this had continued for many generations, the lots had become of very different size, and the serfs were in different conditions. Some were mere day-laborers, others had homesteads without fields, others again with the fields but an insufficient supply of cattle, and a fourth class with all three requisites of prosperous husbandry. In the Polish provinces particularly the government had encouraged fixity of tenure, in order to weaken the power of the nobility; and the in- ventories introduced here by Nicholas on the private as well 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 75 as on the crown estates sanctioned by law the existing system, and determined the amount of labor to be paid as rent. The new legislation, therefore, contents itself in general with con- firming the usage thus established. In Little Russia, with- in the limits of maximum and minimum, the allotments are also left unaltered. The men alone need render the corv~e service, and that only in person; for a certain portion of their land, for whose rent the labor of oxen is necessary, is specified as supplementary, and may be resigned at pleasure to the proprietor, contrary to the nine-year rule in Great Russia. The Small Estates. Special provisions were made in favor of the small estates, viz, those that had less than twenty- one male serfs and contained less than a certain area of land. It was here that the evils of Russian serfdom culminated; at the same time it was to their proprietors that the emancipation was likely to prove most disastrous. In the interest of the one party it was expedient to sever the old connection as com- pletely as possible; in that of the other, to furnish immediate aid. On these estates the peasants became individually, not jointly, responsible, and the proprietors were not bound to fur- nish the legal allotment to those previously unsupplied. But such peasants might, at their own request, be transferred to the crown lands, where timber for houses, cattle, implements, and money were gratuitously furnished them by the state, be- sides land and temporary exemption from the usual dues. Further, the peasants provided with land could also, at their request and with the proprietors consent, be disposed of in the same way, in which case their lots would revert to the estate. And finally the proprietor might turn over his peasants with their lands to the crown, and receive in return t6~- times the legal obrok of the district, the people becoming crown peas- ants, and paying at once the usual dues. Should the small proprietor be reduced to great poverty, especially should his property contain less than two thirds the maximum area allowed to this class of estates, he was entitled to still more assistance from the government. The funds assigned for this purpose were distributed among the provinces, and the method of application and conditions of grant were specified. The House Servants. Besides the great mass of agricul 76 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, tural serfs, there were, moreover, several classes whose condi- tion required separate legislation, the most numerous among them that ~f the house servants, or personal serfs ( dvoro- vyye). Part of these may have been the descendants of a genuine slave order, whose probable existence in the early times has been already mentioned. But many peasants had also been removed from their own category to this; for the 520,000 males reported in the census of 1851 had become 725,000 in that of 1858. It was ordered, therefore, that all who had actually occupied and cultivated land before this lat- ter date should be considered as peasants in the application of the new laws. The house servants proper were to remain during the two years of preparation in the masters service, at wages fixed by him, sustaining to him the same relations as before, except that they were to receive chastisement only through the police, and might complain to the Arbiter if abused. Those who were already hiring their own time were not to be deprived of this privilege, and their previous obrok was not to be increased, nor to exceed the maximum of thirty rubles for a man and ten for a woman. At the end of the two years, a free choice of occupation was allowed them, together with temporary exemption from most state taxes. The New Administralion. To correspond to the new status of society, a new administration was needed. The communal principle afforded an admirable basis, one that much light- ened, through self-government, the work of superintendence; to stand between tenant and proprietor a strong and wholl~r novel power had to be created; while the higher control was neces- sarily left, as before, to a tribunal of the ndbility. The lower organization much resembles that already described as existing among the crown peasants. All heads of families that belong to the village or part of a village constituting the commune are memb5s of the assembly. They elect their starost, and such other officials as may be needed, perhaps a tax-collector and a magazine-inspector. The starost, as chief executive and jtidicial magistrate of the commune, carries out the orders of his sup~riors, and exercises the functions Qf a subordinate police judge, his right of punishment being limited to two days im- prisonment or labor, or the fine of one ruble. One large coin- 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 77 mune, or a collection of several not more than twelve versts dis- tant from each other, form the wolost, which, in the eye of the general government, is the lowest administrative unit. It must contain at least three hundred, and, unless a single large village, not more than two thousand males. The wolost and commune officials, with one representative from every ten households, compose its assembly, which, in its turn, elects the Starschina~~ (the wolost mayor), whose appointment, how- ever, must be confirmed by the Arbiter. The Starschina has assistants and a council, and is responsible for the police of the communes under his charge. From and by the peasants in the assembly are elected the four to twelve judges of the wolost court, of whom three at least must be present on the bench at a time. Their jurisdiction extends to suits involving one hundred rubles, or of any amount whatever in cases to be settled by compromise; in criminal cases they may sentence to corporal punishment. It is essentially an informal tribunal to settle as many disputes as possible by accommodation and according to local usages. The compensation of these different officials depends respectively on the two assemblies. Those elected are obliged to serve, except in case of certain specified excuses. During office they enjoy some special immunities. The officer whose name appears most frequently in the new laws is the Arbiter (Friedensvermittler). He belongs to the nobility, of the hereditary class by preference, and during the first three years was to be appointed by the governor of the province, with the approval of the senate. His jurisdiction covers, 1. Disputes between peasants and proprietors, and complaints against commune officials; 2. Ratification of cer- tain acts, e. g. the amicable, agreements between the two par- ties; 3. Declaring in operation the regulations or contract made upon each estate, determination of the boundaries, tem- porary suspension of the starost and starschina from their re- spective posts, and enforcement of the payment of arrears in the obrok; 4. Police control over the house servants and hired employees of the proprietor, who are not subject to the com- mune authorities. The Arbiters of the various districts into which each province is divided constitute together the District Assize Court, under the presidency of the District Marshal of 78 & rfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, Nobility. They receive appeals from the Arbiters decision, and complaints against the wolost officials, and settle the more important and general questions which may arise under the new arrangements. The highest tribunal is the Provincial Commission, which consists of the governor of the province (Gouvernement), aided by three high officials and four propri- etors. Agreements between the peasants and proprietors which require special dispensation of the laws regarding land or rent, must be referred to it; it was also charged with much of the preliminary work, e. g. with organizing the communes into wolosts, and elaborating a scale of wages for the peasants who should change their corv6e service into an obrok. introduction of the New Sy~tem.The Two Years Delay.. The Contracts. The imperial proclamation and the accom- panying orders bear the date of February 19 (0. S.), 1861. The Provincial Commissions, organized in the preceding De- cember, were instructed to proceed at once to their task. Within nine months the formation of the wolosts was to be accomplished, the arbiters and the wolost officers to be chosen and to enter upon their dnties, and each proprietor to report a draft of the regulations to be adopted on his estate, modelled on a scheme drawn up by the Commission. These contracts (chartes r~glementaire& ) were to state the number of peasants, to give an estimate of the land allotted them and of the rent or service due from them, and to define all the relations estab- lished by the new laws between tenant and landlord. They were to be revised by the Arbiter on the spot, and word for word read and discussed in the presence of representatives of the peasants and disinterested witnesses; having received official approval, they were again to be read, and the meaning of each clause separately explained before the whole commune assembly, when, finally, they were declared to be in operation. Three copies were preserved, one by the government, one by the proprietor, one by the peasants themselves. For the full confirmation and introduction of these charters, the period of two years was allowed. Within this time everything was to be placed on its new footing; till then the old order should be maintained within the commune, except that the judicial pow- ers of the proprietor ceased at the end of the nine months, when 186~T.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. T9 the wolost courts received the jurisdiction. In all these pro- ceedings no complaint of past abuse could be preferred by the peasants against their old masters. In the laws which we have thus sketched in mere outline, the general principles catch the eye at once, as well as the scope which their authors intended they should have. A definite result was aimed at, and, so far as possible, distinct and com- plete methods were employed. Doubtless, for such an under- taking they will prove, perhaps have proved, partially inad- equate; but they plainly belong to no half-way legislation. Nothing that can be foreseen is left to accident or to ill-will. The minute adaptation to local circumstances is one of the most remarkable features of the whole attempt, one that of course cannot be represented in an abstract like this. The determination is manifest throughout to place the peasants en- tirely beyond the power of their former owner; and even when the levers by which the movement is to be effected are put in his hands, he himself is placed in such a position that he can hardly use them save in the right direction. Moreover, where good-will exists, it is not frustrated by formality. Almost every provision begins with words which allow to the pro- prietor, within certain restrictions, the alternative of amicable agreement with the freedmen; and Alexander in his manifesto relied upon such agreement to remove the difficulties which the application of rules, however minute, to the thousand-fold variety of local circumstances will unavoidably produce.* The serfs are not only made freemen, but their new condition is thoroughly organized and defended against future attack. But in spite of its far greater magnitude as regards numbers, the task for Russia, at least so far as direct measures can accomplish it, is in reality enviably small as compared with our own. The greater vigor of our national life gives us the advantage in any work of absorption and reconstruction. But in Russia the government has, in the first place, absolute power to ordain the revolution. No state rights there inter- fere with human rights. It adopts, in the second place, as a groundwork of the new social fabric, the untouched foundations * Of the contracts reported in 1863 (vide note, p. 71), nearly one half had been arranged by mutual consent. 80 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, of the old. Even the superstructure is not so much to be re- built as to be converted to new uses. The peasants are freed, and their future life and prosperity insured by a single act. The government simply steps between the owner and the owned, and says to the one: Remain as you are; your serf represented to you the yearly value of his obrok or service, minus the value of the land he used for his support. He shall still represent to you nearly the same worth.* But you must resign two things ; first, your control of his person; second, your control of that land which he actually needs. It turns to the serf and says: Remain where you are. You have now no master but the law. Keep your land also; none shall take it from you. But you must pay a rent to the old landlord, about as much money or labor as you formerly gave him. Should you prefer, however, you may buy your house whenever you like; and your lot also, as soon as the Baron is willing. * What did the serf, or the state for him, really buy, his person or his land Nominally the land; for the house servants and the obrok payers who hired their own time received their freedom gratis at the end of two years. Moreover, nearly all the preliminary reports submitted by the various Provincial Committees began with a preamble to the effect that the nobility renounce forever, without claiming any indemnity, the right of possessing serfs. But if the following considerations are well based, the laud was appraised higher than its actual market value. Haxt. bausen says that one hundred souls represent on the average a property worth 25,000 to 30,000 rubles; i. e. apparently each soul with his proportion of the land was worth 250 to 300 rubles. Dans la plupart des cas les deux valeurs (le terrain mfime et la force des bras qui le cultivent) se balaucent, says Sch~do-Ferroti (Etude, & c., p. 22). According to this, the land alone would average for each soul 125 to 150 rubles in value; whereas the obrok legalized by the emancipation laws (5 to 12 rubles) represents a capital of 133 to 200. Now, when it is remembered that the land which the serf gets is not his proportion of the whole estate, but only of one half to two thirds of the whole (as one third or more is reserved for the proprietor), and that the exceptions to Sch~do-Ferrotis statement are probably very numerous and all on one side, (for some writers say that, compared with the laboring force of an estate, the land was worth but a trifle,) it becomes pretty evident that the vast ma. jority of the peasants pay for their freedom something more than the actual value of the house and lot. This conclusion corresponds to what Morleys author and others say, lam told that the market price of the land is not half the sum usually charged the peasant under the new laws. But, on the other hand, many propri. etors have lost twenty per cent of the appraised values (see p. 73), and all have been compelled to receive their pay in government stocks at a depreciation of twenty to fifty per cent, while during the forty-nine years of free industry which will elapse before the land redeemed from the government will fully belong to the peasants its value will probably rise so much as to make the present appraisal seem very low. 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 81 If without money, the government will help you; in this case you will be tenants of the crown, and your children will in the course of time become full proprietors. It favors certain pre- liminary measures, but, to avoid collision with prevailing cus- toms, does not insist upon them. It empowers, but does not confer, complete independence. It is only imperative in secur- ing personal liberty and the means of continued support. It establishes a democratic self-government in local affairs, and places in direct authority above and within reach of both par- ties an officer ever ready to arbitrate between them. Much, very much, depends on this functionary, it is true; but appar- ently he has already cleared for himself a place in popular estimation that has long been unaccorded to a Russian official, and great hopes are built on his permanent usefulness. It is unsatisfactory to end our inquiry here, to find that at present we can only compare the methods, not the results, of the two nearly simultaneous emancipations, that in the Old World and our own in the New. On the eve before the move- ment, Dolgorukow, Tourgueneff, Sch6do-Ferroti, and others, told us the truth about Russia most abundantly; and their startling revelation of the hollowness and corruption within that huge shell made the European public sceptical as to the possibility of success in the enterprise. But in regard to its actual working we have been able to find only a few facts. In- deed, the most honest official repo,rt could not fairly represent the first stages of such a wide-spread and constantly advancing revolution. Even open-eyed travellers see but what comes under their eyes. The book which Mr. Morley has edited pho- tographs vividly the scene of incoming liberty in a single local- ity, and is written by one who knew the Russian serf by per- sonal contact. Tilleys volume, so far as it has to do with Russia, contains such information as a book-making traveller brings together, more from his reading than his sight-seeing. Schnitzlers is the work of a publicist, and helps us to little or nothing here. But from these and a few scattered sources we draw an indication of what has happened. The voice of the Czar could overcome the reluctance, but not the anxiety, of the nobles, as they looked forward to the ap- proaching enfranchisement. Yet, to their credit, there seems vOL. CV. NO. 216. 6 82 Se~fdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, to be good reason to believe that they gave themselves heartily to the plan when once anElounced, and tried their best to further its design. Alexander in his manifesto bestows words full of praise on their self-sacrifice. The serf regarded and discussed his future lot exactly as one would suppose. His logic had been: God gave our forefathers the land to till; we are the children, the land is ours. The Czar is Gods repre- sentative; him and those whom he sets over us we will serve, but the soil is ours. His words now were: Has not our father, the Czar, God bless him I decreed our freedom, and shall we not soon do what we like, and be freed from the obrok? But the first conclusion was retained, the land is ours and the idea of paying for it in any way was incomprehensible. The common impression seems to have been, that their lords would be pensioned by the Emperor, and removed to the cities. The Butter-week, the Russian carnival, was just over when the village priests read the edict of emancipation at all the altars in the Empire. Emissaries, it is said, had been sent out by the disaffected, and false proclamations circulated to create tumultuous risings among the people, and thus to damage their cause. But only in a few districts remote from the capitals was trouble occasioned. At Kesan, one of the pretenders who have played such a famous r6le in Russian his- tory gave himself out for Alexander II., who had fled to them to escape an insurrection excited by the nobles in St. Peters- burg! He collected around him some fifteen thousand men, who set the law at defiance in the name of the Czar, their per- secuted liberator, and were only put down after bloodshed. In 1862 many owners anticipated the final movement, and nearly all who thus freed their serfs gained by their liberality. Thousands in the central districts crowded to Moscow, and the city for a time swarmed with peasants seeking work and find- ing none. In a late country journey, says Morleys author, I saw them crawling back to their villages, begging their way. Towards the end of this year the laborers struck in some places; crops were lost, and incomes much reduced. Alexander, later, made a tour through several of the principal towns, explaining in person that no more was to be expected; that the serfs cry, Prebavit. (Add to it! More! ) 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 83 must cease; that it was useless to hang back, expecting that the land would be given to them without redemption. During the last two 6r three years a number of towns have been persist.- ently ravaged by incendiary fires. Still, on the whole, (meutes and disturbances have been rare and local, and throughout the Empire the peasants have, as a rule, been accredited with good order during the transition.* In 1864 the writer just quoted revisited the village where he had witnessed the first eventful months of liberty. It had belonged to Count Pomerin, one of the owners who cut the bond at once, and treated his serfs most generously. The change was almost miraculous. It was no longer a straggling village of mud huts, but a thriving town. The people are not like the same beings; ~tnd there is now decided evidence of the rise of a middle class, a class once unknown in such places. Very many of the house ser- vants have become small merchants and pedlers; and the cities have naturally felt the pressure of the great restless tide in the country. Moscow, it is estimated, has added fifty thou- sand to its population. The price of land, as well as of wages, is said to have risen, the latter so much that the ex-pro- prietors find a double reason to condemn emancipation; the peasant holds his labor too high, and at harvest-time, when most needed, is apt to be busy on his own plot. The foreign merchants, on the other hand, are said to bear unanimous wit- ness to the good effects of liberty. How fast the change has advanced may be judged in some de- gree by the following extract from Haxthausen: According to the reports of June 1, 1865, 50.5 per cent of the serfs have become land-owners; with the aid of the government loan, 2,322,369 males; without this aid, 445,459; and through the ukases of March 1, July 30, and November 2 (1863 ?), all the serfs of the nine western provinces, viz. 2,295,026. In all, 5,062,854 males already enjoy full independence, and have no connection with the old proprietors. Of the 2,322,369, how- ever, the accounts have been settled for only 2,148,186; and of the western serfs, for only 1)74,183. The ukases to which these western peasants owe their sudden enfranchisement were * Before emancipation was broached, it is said that, on the average, thirteen prc~- prietors were yearly murdered by their serfs. 84 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, occasioned by the Polish insurrection. Their previous corv6e service was changed to an obrok, and reduced twenty per cent. All obligatory relations to their owners ceased definitely on the 1st of May, 1863. From this date payments were to be made to the district treasury, from which the proprietors should receive their dues till the transfer of the land was concluded. The commissions to whom the rectification of the inventories, had been intrusted were employed to draw up for each estate, at the time of its inspection, the necessary t~ct of purchase. Within the upper strata of society, the fruits of emancipation are much better known. One effect, and that most often re- ferred to, has certainly been to reduce many of the nobilityto poverty, and not a few of the small proprietors, it is said, to actual ruin. But let two facts be remembered in this connec- tion, apart from all questions of right ; that the whole num- ber of proprietors was less than 125,000, so that each ones loss represents the gain of 180 peasants; and that much of this ruin is but the breaking down of a stru~cture utterly decayed before.* From the present data, says Haxthausen, it is easy to estimate the sum total to be expended in the purchase. For the whole of Russia it is about nine hundred to one thou- sand million rubles, of which five hundred millions are already owed by the proprietors to the state loan institutions. There remain, therefore, four hundred to five hundred millions to be actually paid. A second result is the uplifting and regenerating effect which liberty has had upon the whole community. The nobility are the very ones who may experience hereby the greatest benefit, and their changed conditioi~ is the very incitement which spurs them to effort. Having lost their former footing, it becomes imperative with them to secure. another on which to rest their social predominance4 Hence the striving for representative * In 1850 two tifths (44,166) of the estates, representing two thirds (7,107,184 males) of the serfs, were indebted to the banks to the amount of 425,503,061 rubles. From 1856 to 1859 alone, aboul~ 800,000 souls were pledged in this way. Sehnitzier, Vol. I. p. iso. t When Prince Alexis Orlof accepted the presidency of the Central Commission for the emancipation, he did so saying: Russia will no longer be Russia. The nobility, annulled by this measure, will be obliged, in order to reinstate itseW to claim political prerogatives guaranteed by a constitution. 86 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, inapplicability to all existing wants, except those of the mem- bers themselves. Men would sustain enormous wrong, would look on while a drowning man sunk, rather than come and plead guilty rather than stay within reach of the fangs of the law. The effect of such radical changes can hardly be over- estimated; but no sudden cure should be looked for. Far. greater freedom has been allowed the press. The pre- ventive censorship has given way to one more nearly conformed to the French method of suffocation by warning and penalty. The effect of Nicholass death was like touching a hidden spring. The lid of public opinion flew up, and a clatter of editorial tongues, a hubbub of journals, began in the land. It was a new sound in the ears of Russia. Many of them were soon silenced, some losing breath naturally, others by vio- lence. But though Alexander, since the attempt on his life, has grown fearful of the radical spirit he has conjured up, it is hardly possible that even a Russian Czar will try again to impose the silence of death on living lips. Better from above than from below, it is reported, was his constant exhortation to himself while he toiled to free the people from the incubus of their proprietors, and he cannot wholly forget the maxim now, when the cry for freedom is so much nearer his palace walls. Lastly, both Jews and the Protestants in the western prov~inces have now an official protection never before accorded their religion. These changes indicate in some degree the new era which the present Emperor has inaugurated for his country. Peter the Great established its physical connection with the rest of Europe; Alexander has established the moral connection. The barrier is burst from within, which for the last three centuries has kept Russia in a kind of Japanese seclusion, closed to the influence of outside civilization. Whatever be the ultimate fate of the vast conglomerate which bears her name, henceforth as a state she will live nearer the century than she ever has been able to before. Among the future results which a single generation will produce, may be almost certainly predicted the growth of a middle class, and of still another, that of country gentry. Many proprietors, weakened in means, will have to reside on their estates, and betake themselves in person to 80 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, inapplicability to all existing wants, except those of the mem- bers themselves. Men would sustain enormous wrong, would look on while a drowning man sunk, rather than come and plead guilty rather than stay within reach of the fangs of the law. The effect of such radical changes can hardly be over- estimated; but no sudden cure should be looked for. Far. greater freedom has been allowed the press. The pre- ventive censorship has given way to one more nearly conformed to the French method of suffocation by warning and penalty. The effect of Nicholass death was like touching a hidden spring. The lid of public opinion flew up, and a clatter of editorial tongues, a hubbub of journals, began in the land. It was a new sound in the ears of Russia. Many of them were soon silenced, some losing breath naturally, others by vio- lence. But though Alexander, since the attempt on his life, has grown fearful of the radical spirit he has conjured up, it is hardly possible that even a Russian Czar will try again to impose the silence of death on living lips. Better from above than from below, it is reported, was his constant exhortation to himself while he toiled to free the people from the incubus of their proprietors, and he cannot wholly forget the maxim now, when the cry for freedom is so much nearer his palace walls. Lastly, both Jews and the Protestants in the western prov~inces have now an official protection never before accorded their religion. These changes indicate in some degree the new era which the present Emperor has inaugurated for his country. Peter the Great established its physical connection with the rest of Europe; Alexander has established the moral connection. The barrier is burst from within, which for the last three centuries has kept Russia in a kind of Japanese seclusion, closed to the influence of outside civilization. Whatever be the ultimate fate of the vast conglomerate which bears her name, henceforth as a state she will live nearer the century than she ever has been able to before. Among the future results which a single generation will produce, may be almost certainly predicted the growth of a middle class, and of still another, that of country gentry. Many proprietors, weakened in means, will have to reside on their estates, and betake themselves in person to 1867.] Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. 87 agriculture. Education will also extend more widely, and sink more deeply. Already this work, too big to be grappled with at once, has at least been fingered. Fifty millions who can neither read nor write is probably a diminished state- ment of the truth.* Gerebtzov says (La Civilisation en Rus- sie), On an average only one in eight can read and write, in some provinces not one in a hundred reads. Heretofore the instruction of most village children, given by the clergy- man, has been confined to the church liturgy and traditions learnt orally. Nicholas sanctioned the existence of five uni- versities, with three hundred students each. t There are now six, with over 4,600 students, besides a considerable in- crease in the number of gymnasia, and district and parochial schools supported by the state. During the two years of waiting alone (18611863), it is said that the peasants schools increased from 1,955 to 6,666. One element already noticed exists in Russia which will as- suredly prove a valuable auxiliary of safe and steady progress to the mass of the population, however much it must be modi- fied by gradual civilization. The tendency to combine with his fellows seems to be an inborn propensity of the Russian peas- ant. The communal system of land and privilege, as described above, has almost universal sway throughout Great Russia. Where a village is devoted to manufactures rather than agricul- ture, industry assumes in the artel a similar form, is car- ned on in what may be called workiugmens associations and in general a whole village is devoted to a single trade, all are curriers, all weavers, all blacksmiths, etc. It will be most interesting to watch the effect which freedom will have upon this principle; for of all the resemblances which exist between our character and position as a nation and those of Russia, this, so closely connected with democracy, is the most suggestive4 * The statistics of 1865 gave 794,000 pupils in 17,577 educational establishments of all kinds (Poland and Finland not included). Of these, 687,480 were in pri- mary schools; 1 in 86 of the whole population was under instruction; in 1855, only 1 in 151. Schnitzler, Vol. II. pp. 428, 443. t The statement of A. W. l3enne, the author of two interesting articles in the Fortnightly Review for October 15 and November 1, 1865, on the Upper Classes of Society in Russia. But in 1856 there were six universities, with over 4,000 students. Statististical Journal, Vol. XXII. p. 484. ~ Those who wish to learn how far, in times prior to Peters influence, the same 88 Serfdom and the Emancipation Laws in Russia. [July, On the other hand, the great obstacle in the way of advance, besides the universal ignorance of all except the aristocracy;is that which springs from this ignorance, the absence of any public opinion in the Western sense of that term. In IRussia, the eyes of all wait upon the Czar, and the wind changes with the weathercock. That this is so is most curiously shown by the way in which the storm which rose in the interest of lib- eralism at Alexanders coronation, when his intentions were first proclaimed, soon veered against Poland during the late rising in that country; and more lately, since the Emperors fright over the attentat, has blown straight and strong from the opposite quarter of conservatism and autocratic prerogative. It is true, that we can judge only by the expression which is allowed utterance; but the eagerness and multitude of thp voices which cry just as the Ministry gives the sign, reveal how little the nerve and sinew of any real independence which may exist answers as yet to its own will. The present genera- tion of educated men is far too official, by education and per- sonal interest, to cut the tie which unites them to the govern- ment and makes them its facile tools. At the same time, it should be remembered that the accounts usually represent Al- exander II. as a humane rather than a strong-minded monarch, that it is less an individuals act than the force of circum- stances, growing through a hundred years and reacting with enormous pressnre after the restrictive reign of Nicholas, that has brought about the emancipation and its consequences. The statement is one wholly favorable to the future of the cause. If it be the public necessity that has found such utter- ance, and carried its demand in spite of the collective obsta- cles which autocracy, camarilla, nobility, corrnpt administra- tive systems, and all the co~tseryative elements of prestige and property could throw in the way, if the very measures of reform and purification long called for, but almost despaired of, by the selPexiled Russian patriots, stand to-day on the law codes of the Empire, there is surely strong reason to believe that the rule of the one or of the few in Russia is doomed, and drawing to its close. element existed in the upper classes, and produced fruits akin to representative government, will find a valuable article in No. 225 of the Quarterly Review, 1863. Swedenborgs Ontology. 89 ART. 111.I. Emanuel Swedenboro~ his Life and Writings. By WILLIAM WHITE. London. 1867. 2 vols. 8vo. 2. The Divine Attributes; including the Divine Trinity, a Treatise on the Divine Love and Wisdom, and Correspond- ence. By E. SWEDENBORG. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1867. 3. Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell, from Things seen and heard. By E. SWEDENBORG. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin- cott & Co. 1867. THE fundamental problem of Philosophy is the problem of creation. Does our existence really infer a Divine and infinite being, or does it not? This question addresses itself to us now with special emphasis, inasmuch as speculative minds are beginning zealously to inquire whether creation can really be admitted any longer, save in an accommodated sense of the word; whether men of simple faith have not gone too far in professing to see a hand of power in the universe, absolutely distinct from the universe itself. That being can admit either of increase or diminution is scientifically inconceivable, and affronts moreover the truth of the creative infinitude. For if God be infinite, as we necessarily hold him to be in deference to our own finiteness, what shall add to, or take from, the sum of his being? It is indeed obvious that God cannot ~reate or give being to what has being in itself, for this would be contradictory. He can create only what is devoid of being in itself: this is manifest. And yet what is void of being in itself can at best only appear to be. It can be no real, but only a phenomenal existence. Thus the problem of creation is seen to engender many speculative doubts. How reconcile the antagonism of real and phenomenal, of absolute and con- tingent, of which the problem is so full? By the hypothesis of creation, the creature derives all he is from the creator. But the creature is essentially not the creator, is above all things himself a created being, and therefore the utter and exact op- posite of the creator. How then shall the infinite Creator give his finite creature projection, endow him with veritable self- hood or identity, and yet experience no compromise of His own

Swedenborgs Ontology. 89 ART. 111.I. Emanuel Swedenboro~ his Life and Writings. By WILLIAM WHITE. London. 1867. 2 vols. 8vo. 2. The Divine Attributes; including the Divine Trinity, a Treatise on the Divine Love and Wisdom, and Correspond- ence. By E. SWEDENBORG. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1867. 3. Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell, from Things seen and heard. By E. SWEDENBORG. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin- cott & Co. 1867. THE fundamental problem of Philosophy is the problem of creation. Does our existence really infer a Divine and infinite being, or does it not? This question addresses itself to us now with special emphasis, inasmuch as speculative minds are beginning zealously to inquire whether creation can really be admitted any longer, save in an accommodated sense of the word; whether men of simple faith have not gone too far in professing to see a hand of power in the universe, absolutely distinct from the universe itself. That being can admit either of increase or diminution is scientifically inconceivable, and affronts moreover the truth of the creative infinitude. For if God be infinite, as we necessarily hold him to be in deference to our own finiteness, what shall add to, or take from, the sum of his being? It is indeed obvious that God cannot ~reate or give being to what has being in itself, for this would be contradictory. He can create only what is devoid of being in itself: this is manifest. And yet what is void of being in itself can at best only appear to be. It can be no real, but only a phenomenal existence. Thus the problem of creation is seen to engender many speculative doubts. How reconcile the antagonism of real and phenomenal, of absolute and con- tingent, of which the problem is so full? By the hypothesis of creation, the creature derives all he is from the creator. But the creature is essentially not the creator, is above all things himself a created being, and therefore the utter and exact op- posite of the creator. How then shall the infinite Creator give his finite creature projection, endow him with veritable self- hood or identity, and yet experience no compromise of His own 90 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, individuality? Suffice it to say that what has hitherto called itself Philosophy has had so little power fairly to confront these difficulties, let alone solve them, as to have set Kant upon the notion of placating them afresh by the old recipe of Idealism; that is, by the invention of another or noumenal world, the world of things-in-themselves. No doubt this was a new pusillanimity on the part of Philosophy, but what better could the philosopher do? He saw plainly enough that things were phenomenal; but as he did not see that this infirmity attached to them wholly on their subjective or constitutional side, while on their objective or formal side they were infinite and absolute, he was bound to lapse into mere idealism or scepticism, unre- lieved by aught but the dream of a noumenal background. We may smile if we please at the superstitious shifts to which Kants philosophic scepticism reduced him; but after all, Kant was only the legitimate flower of all the inherited culture of the world, the helpless logical outcome of bewil- dered ages of philosophy. Philosophy herself had never dis- criminated the objective or absolute and creative element in knowledge from its subjective or merely contingent and con- stitutional element. And when Kant essayed to make the discrimination, what wonder that he only succeeded in more hopelessly confounding the two, and so adjourning once more the hope of Philosophy to an indefinite future? But Kants failure to vindicate the philosophic truth of creation has only exasperated the intellectual discontent of the world with the cosmological data supplied by the old theologies. Everywhere men of far more tender and reverential make even than Kant are being driven to freshness of thought; and thought, though a remorseless solvent, has no reconstructive power over truth. Mens opinions are being silently modified in fact, whether they will or not. The crudities, the extravagances, the contra- dictions of the old cosmology, now no longer amiable and in- nocent, but aggressive and overbearing, are compelling inquiry into new channels, are making it no longer possible that the notions which satisfied the .fathers shall continue to satisfy the children. A distinctly supernatural creation, once so fondly urged upon our faith, is quite unintelligible to modern culture, because it violates experience or contradicts our observation of Swedenborgs Ontology. 91 nature. Everything we observe in nature derives from a com- mon or universal substance, and is a particular or objective form of such substance. If, then, the objective form of things were an outward or supernatural communication to them, it would no longer be their own form, but their makers. Thus, on the hypothesis of a supernatural creation, every natural object would disclaim a natural genesis; and Nature, con- sequently, as denoting the universal or subjective element in existence, would disappear with the disappearance of her proper forms. Now if Nature, in her most generic or universal mood, return us at best a discouraging answer to the old problem of creation, what answer does she yield in her most specific which is the human or moral form? A still more discouraging one even! In fact, the true motive of the intellectual hostility now formu- lating to the traditional notion of creation, as an objective work of God, as an instantaneous or magical exhibition of the Divine power, as an arbitrary or irrational procedure of the Divine wisdom, is supplied by our moral consciousness, by the irresistible conviction we feel of our personal identity. That moral or personal existence should be outwardly gener- ated, should be created in the sense of having being commu- nicated to it supernaturally, contradicts consciousness. For moral or personal existence is purely conscious or subjective existence, and consciousness or subjectivity is a strictly natural style of existence, and hence disowns all supernatural inter- ference as impertinent. It is preposterous to allege that my consciousness or subjectivity involves any other person than myself, since this would vitiate my personal identity, and hence defeat my possible spiritual individuality or character. If, being what I am conscious of being, namely, a moral or personal existence invested with self-control or the rational ownership of my actions, I yet am not so naturally or of my- self, but by some supernatural or foreign intervention, then obviously I am simply what such intervention determines me to be, and my feeling of selfhood or freedom is grossly illusory.. Thus morality, which is the assertion of a selfhood in man commensurate with all the demands of nature and society upon him, turns out, if too rigidly insisted on, if maintained as a 92 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, Divine finality, or as having not merely a constitutional, but a creative truth, not merely a subjective or phenomenal, but also an objective or real validity, to be essentially atheistic, and drives those who are loyal rather to the inward spirit than the outward letter of revelation to repugn the old maxims of a supernatural creation and providence as furnishing any longer a satisfactory theorem of existence. Faith must reconcile herself to this perilous alternative, if she obstinately persist in making our natural morality super- natural by allowing it a truth irrespective of consciousness, or assigning it any objectivity beyond the evolution of human society or fellowship. It is not its own end, but a strict means to a higher or spiritual evolution of life in our nature; and they accordingly who persist in ignoring this truth must ex- pect to fall intellectually behind the time in which they live. Some concession here is absolutely necessary to save the religious instinct. For men feel a growing obligation to co- ordinate the demands of freedom or personality with the limi- tations of science; and since Kants remorseless criticism stops them off under penalty of accepting his impracticable nou- menal world from postulating any longer an objective being answering to their subjective seeming, they must needs with his successors give the whole question of creation the go-by, in quietly resolving the minor element of the equation into the major, man into God, or making the finite a mere transient experience of the infinite, by means of which that great un- consciousness attains to selfhood. For this is the sum of the ilegelian dialectic,to confound existence with being, or make identity no longer serve individuality, but absorb or swallow it up: so bringing back creation to intellectual chaos, which is naught. We ourselves, in common with most men doubtless, have an instinctive repugnance to these insane logical results; but instinct is not intelligence, and sophistry can be combated only by intelligence. Now, to our mind, nothing so effectually arms the intellect against error, whether it be the error of the sceptic or the error of the fanatic, whether it reflect our prey- alent religious cant or our almost equally prevalent scientific cant, as a due acquaintance and familiarity with the ontological 1867.] Swedenborgs Ontology. 98 principles of Swedenborg. Emanuel Swedenborg, we need not say, is by no means as yet a name to conjure with in polite circles, and, for aught we opine, may never become one. Nevertheless numerous independent students are to be found, who, having been long hopeless of getting to the bottom of our endless controversies, confess that their intellectual doubts have at last been dispersed by the sunshine of his ontology. It would be small praise of Swedenborg to say that he does not, like ilegel, benumb our spiritual instincts, or drown them out in a flood of vainglorious intoxication brought about by an absurd exaltation of the subjective element in life above the objective one. This praise no doubt is true, but much more is true; and that is, that he enlightens the religious conscience, and so gives the intellect a repose which it has lacked through- out history, a repose as natural, and therefore as sane and sweet, as the sleep of infancy. Admire Hegels legerdemain as much as you will, his ability to make light darkness and darkness light in all the field of mans relations to God; but remember also that it is characteristic of the highest truth to be accessible to common minds, and inaccessible only to uplifted ones. Tried by this test, the difference between the two writers is. incomparably in favor of Swedenborg. For example, what a complete darkening of our intellectual optics is operated by ilegels fundamental postulate of the identity of being and thought. Thought and being are identical. Such indeed is the necessary logic of idealism. Now doubtless our faculty of abstract thought is chief among our intellectual faculties; but when it is seriously proposed to build the universe of ex- istence upon a logical abstraction, one must needs draw a very long breath. For thought by itself affords a most inadequate basis even to our own conscious activity;, and when, therefore, our unconscious being is in question, it confesses itself a simply ludicrous hypothesis. But in reality Hegel, in spite of his extreme pretension in that line, never once got within point-blank range of the true problem of ontology; and this because he habitually con- founded being with existence, spirit with nature. By being he never meant being, but alwa5rs existence, the existence we are conscious of; so that when he would grasp the infinite, he; 94 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, fancied he had only to resort to the cheap expedient of eliini- nating the finite. It is precisely as if a man should say: All I need in order to procure myself an intuitive knowledge of my own visage, is not to look at its reflection in the looking- glass. Think the finite away, said ilegel, and the infinite is left on your hands. Yes, provided the infinite is never a posi- five quantity, but only and at most a thought-negation of its own previously thought-negation. But really, if the infinite be this mere negation of its own negation, that is, if being turns out to be identical with nothing, with the absence of mere thing, then we must say, in the first place, that we do not see why any sane person should covet its acquaintance. Being which has been so utterly compromised, and indeed annihi- lated, by its own phenomenal forms, as to be able to reappear only by their disappearance, is scarcely the being which unso- phisticated men will ever be persuaded to deem infinite or crea- tive. But then we must also say, in the second place, let it be true, as Hegel alleges, that being is identical with the absence of thing, we still are at an utter loss to understand how that leaves it identical ~with pure thought. We need not deny that we hold thing and thought to be by any means identical; but we are free to maintain nevertheless that if you actually ab- stract things from thought, you simply render thought itself exanjinate. Thought has no vehicle or body but language, and language owes all its soul or inspiration to things. Abstract things then, and neither thought nor language actually survives. You might as well expect the body to survive its soul. But in truth this metaphysic chatter is the mere wantonness of sense. The infinite is ~o far from being negative of the finite, that it is essentially creative and hence exclusively affirmative of it. The finite indeed is only that inevitable diffraction of itself which the infinite undergoes in the medium or mirror of our sensuous thought, in order so to adapt itself to our dim intelligence. It is accordingly no less absurd for us to postulate a disembodied or unrevealed infinite an in- finite unrobed or unrepresented by the finite than it would be to demand a father unavouched by a child. Tb~e infinite is the sole reality which underlies all finite appearance, and in that tender unobtrusive way makes itself conceivable to our Swedenborgs Ontology. 95 obtuse thought. Should we get any nearer this reality by spurning the gracious investiture through which alone it be- comes appreciable to us? Is a mans intelligence of nature improved, on the whole, by putting out his eyes? If, then, the infinite reveals itself to our nascent understanding only by the finite, i. e. by what we already sensibly know, how much nearer should we come to its knowledge by rejecting such revelation? We who are not infinite cannot know it abso- lutely or in itself, but only as it veils or abates its splendor to the capacity of our tender vision, only as it reproduces itself within our finite lineaments. In a word, our knowledge of it is no way intuitive, but exclusively empirical. Would our chances of realizing such knowledge be advanced, then, by following ilegels counsel, and disowning that apparatus of finite experience by which alone it becomes mirrored to our intelligence? In other words, suppose a man desirous to know what manner of man he is: were it better for him, in that case, to proceed by incontinently smashing his looking-glass, or by devoutly pondering its r~evelations? The question answers itself. The glass may be by no means achromatic; it may return indeed a most refractory reply to the mans interroga.. tory; but nevertheless it is his only method of actually com- passing the information he covets, and in the estimation of all wise men he will stamp himself an incorrigible fool if he breaks it. But the truth is too plain to need argument. There is no antagonism of infinite and finite, except to our foolish regard. On the contrary, there .is the exact harmony or adjustment be- tween them that there is between substance and shadow: the infinite being that which really or absolutely is, and the finite that which actually or contingently appears. The infiflite is the faultless substance which, unseen itself, vivifies all finite existence; the finite is the fallacious shadow which neverthe- less attests that substance. The shadow has no pretension absolutely to be, but only to exist or appear as a necessary projection or image of the substance upon our intellectual retina; and when consequently we wink the shadow out of sight, we do not thereby acuminate our vision, we simply obliterate it. That is to say, we do not thereby approximate 96 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, our silly selves to the infinite, but simply degrade them out of the finite into the void inane of the indefinite. To you who a~e not being, being can become known only as finite or phenomenal existence. If then you abstract the finite, the realm of the phenomenal, you not only miss the infinite sub- stance you seek to know, but also and even the very shadow itself upon which your faculty of knowledge is s~ispended. Such, however, was the abysmal absurdity locked away in Hegels dialectic, which remorselessly confounds infinite form and finite substance, real or objective being, with phenomenal or subjective seeming; that jolly dialectic which turns creation upside down, by converting it from aii orderly procedure of the Divine love and wisdom into a tipsy imbroglio, where what is lowest to thought is made to involve what is highest, and what is highest in its turn to evolve what is lowest: so that God and man, Creator and creature, in place of being eternally individualized or objectified to each others regard, become mutually undiscoverable, being hopelessly swamped to sight in the miserable mush of each others subjective identity. But what is Hegels supreme shame in the eyes of philosophy, namely, his utter unscrupulous abandonment of himself to the inspiration of idealism, will constitute his true distinction to the future historiographer of philosophy. For idealism has been the secret blight of philosophy ever since men began to speculate; and what Hegel has done for philosophy in run- ning idealism into the ground, has been to bring this secret blight to the surface, so exposing it to all eyes, and making it impossible for human fatuity ever to go a step further, in that direction at all events. The correction which Swedenborg brings to this pernicious idealistic bent of the mind consists in the altogether novel light he sheds upon the constitution of consciousness, and particularly upon the fundamental discrimination which that constitution announces between the phenomenal identity of things and their real individuality; between the subjective or merely quantifying element in existence, and its objective or properly qualifying one. The old philosophy was blind to this sharp discrimination in the constitution of existence. It re- garded existence, not as a composite, but as a simple quantity, Swedenborgs Ontology. 97 and consequently sank the spiritual element in things in their natural element, sank what gives them individuality, life, soul, in what gives them identity, existence, body, in short, sank the creative element in existence what causes it absolutely or subjectively to be in its constitutive or generative element, in what causes it phenomenally or subjectively to appear. For example, what was its conception of man? It regarded him simply on his moral side, which presents him as essentially selfish or inveterately objective to himself, and left his spirit- ual possibilities, which present him as essentially social, or spontaneously subject to his neighbor, wholly unrecognized.* In short, it separated him from the face of Deity by all the breadth of nature and all the length of history; and suspended his return upon some purely arbitrary interference exerted by Deity upon the course of nature and the progress of history. Swedenborgs analysis of consciousness stamps these judg- ments as sensuous or immature, and restores man to the inti- mate fellowship of God. Consciousness according to Sweden- borg claims two most disproportionate generative elements ; one subjective, cosmical, passive, organic; the other, objective, human, active, free. The former element gives us fixity or limitation; ident~/les us, so to speak, by relating us to the out- ward and finite, i. e. to nature. The latter element gives us freedom, which is dc-limitation or de-finition; individualizes us, so to speak, by relating us to the inward and infinite, i. e. to Cod. This latter element is absolute and creative, for it gives us potential being before we actually exist or become conscious. The other element is merely phenomenal and con- stitutive, making us exist or go forth to our own consciousness in due cosmical place and order. Now the immense bearing which this analysis of conscious- ness exerts upon cosmological speculation, or the question of creation, becomes at once obvious when we reflect that it utterly inverts the long-established remacy of subject to object in existence, and so demolishes t a blow the sole philo * The best and briefest definition of moral existence is, the alliance of an inward sublect and an outward object; and of spiritual existence, the alliance of an outward suiject and an inward object. Thus in moral existence what is public or universal dominates what is private or individual; whereas in spiritual existence the case is reversed, and the outward serves the inward. VOL. cv. NO. 216. 7 98 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, sophie haunt of idealism or scepticism. The great scientific value of the Critical Philosophy lay in Kants making mauifest the latent malady of the old philosophy by dogmatically affili- ating object to subject, the not-me to the me. His followers only proved themselves to be his too apt disciples, in endeavor- ing to paint and adorn this ghastly disease with the ruddy hues of health, by running philosophy into pure or objective idealism. For if the subjective element in existence alone ident~ies it or gives it universality, then manifestly we cannot allow it also to individualize it or give it unity, without making the being of things purely subjective, and hence denying it any objective reality. Kant is scrupulously logical. He accepts the deliver- ance of sense as final, that the me determines the not-me; that the conscious or phenomenal element in experience controls its unconscious or real one; and hence he cannot help denying any absolute truth to creation. He cannot help maintaining that however much the creator may be, he will at any rate never be able to appear; that however infinite or perfect he may claim to be in himself, that very infinitude must always prevent him incarnating himself in the finite, and consequently forbid any true revelation of his perfection to an imperfect in- telligence. And Mr. Mansel, who is Kants intellectual grand- son, is so tickled with this sceptical fatuity on the part of his sire, as to find in it a new and fascinating base for our religious homage; and he does not hesitate accordingly to argue that the only stable motive to our faith in God is supplied by ignorance, not by knowledge. Swedenborg, we repeat, effectually silences these ravings of philosophic despair by simply rectifying the basis of philoso- phy, or affirming an absolute as well as an empirical element in consciousness, an infinite as well as a finite element in knowl- edge. He provides a real or objective, no less than a phenomenal or subjective, element in existence; an element of unconditional being as well as of conditional seeming; a creative element, in short, no less than a constitutive one. This ab~lute or infinite element in existence is what quabfies the existence, is what gives it natural or generic unity, and so permits it to be objectively individualized as man, horse, tree, stone; while its empirical or finite element merely quant~les it, or gives it Swedenborgs Ontology. 99 specific variety, and so permits it to be subjectively ident f/led as English-man, French-man; race-horse, draught-horse; fruit- tree, forest-tree; sand-stone, lime-stone. Or let us take some artificial existence, say a statue. Now of the two elements which go to make up the statue, one ideal, the other material, one objective or formal, the other subjective or substantial, the latter, according to Swedenborg, finites the statue, fixes it, incorporates it, gives it outward body, and thus identifies it with other existence ; while the former in-finites it, frees it from material bondage, vivifies it, gives it inward soul, and so individualizes it from all other existence. Thus the statue as an ideal form, or on its qualitative side, is absolute and infinite with all its makers absoluteness and infinitude; and it is only as a material substance, or on its quantitative side, that it turns out contingent, finite, infirm. This discrimination, so important in every point of view to the intellect, gives us the key to Swedenborgs ontology, his doctrine of the Lord or Maximus Homo. Swedenborgs cos- mological principles make the natural world a necessary impli- cation of the spiritual, and consequently make the spiritual world the only safe or adequate explication of the natural. In short, his theory of creation assigns a rigidly natural genesis and growth to the spiritual world; and as this theory is sum- marily comprised in his doctrine of the God-Man or Divine Natural Humanity, we shall proceed to test the philosophic worth of this doctrine, by applying it to the problem of our human origin and destiny. But before doing this it may be expedient briefly to recall who and what Swedenborg was, in order to ascertain whether his private history sheds any light upon his dogmatic pre- tensions. It is known to all the world that Swedenborg, for many years before his death, assumed to be an authorized herald of a new and spiritual Divine advent in human nature. Similar assumptions are not infrequent in history, and it cannot be denied that our proper a priori attitude toward them is one of contempt and aversion. But Swedenborgs alleged mission, both as he himself conceived it and as his books represent it, claimed no personal or outward sanction, and accepted no voucher but what it found in every mans unforced delight in 100 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, the truth to which it ministered. He was himself remarkably deficient iu those commanding personal qualities and graces of intellect which attract popular esteem; and we are quite sure that no such insanity ever entered his own guileless heart as to attribute to himself the power of complicating in any manner the existing relations of man and God. Swedenborg, as we learn from his latest and best biographer, Mr. White, whose work is almost a model in its kind, and does emphatic credit both to his intellect and conscience, was born at Stockholm in 1688. His father, who was a Swedish bishop distinguished for learning and piety, christened the infant Emanuel,in order that his name might continually re- mind him of the nearness of God, and of that interior, holy, and mysterious union in which we stand to him. The youth thus devoutly consecrated justified all his fathers hopes, for his entire life was devoted to science, religion, and philosophy. His history, as we find it related by Mr. White, was unmarked by any striking external vicissitudes; and his pursuits were at all times so purely intellectual as to leave personal gossip almost no purchase upon his modest and blameless career. He held the office for many years of Government Assessor of Mines, and appears to have enjoyed friendly and even intimate personal relations with Charles XII., to whose ability as a mathematician his diary affords some interesting testimonies. While he was not professionally active, his days were devoted to study and travel; and by the time he had reached his fiftieth year, his scholarly and scientific repute had been advanced and established by several publications of great interest. We may say generally that the pursuits of science claimed all his attention till he was upwards of fifty years old; that his life and manners were pure and irreproachable, and his intellectual aspirations singularly elevated. To arrive at the knowledge of the soul by the strictest methods of science had always been his hope and endeavor. He conceived that the body, being the fellow of the soul, was in some sort its continuation; and that if he could only penetrate therefore to its purest forms or subtlest essences, he would be sure of touching at last the souls true territory. Long and fruit- less toil had somewhat disenchanted him of this illusion pre Swedenborgs Ontology. 101 viously; but what he calls the opening of his spiritual sight, which event means his becoming acquainted with the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, or the truth of the DIVINE NATURAL HUMANITY, effectually put an end to it, by convincing him that the tie between soul and body, or spirit and letter, is not by any means one of sensible continuity, as from finer to grosser, but one exclusively of rational correspondence, such as obtains between cause and effect. From this moment, accordingly, he abandoned his scientific studies, and applied himself with in- tense zeal to the unfolding of the spiritual sense of the Scrip- tures from things seen and heard in the spiritual world. This internal sense of the Scriptures is very unattractive read- ing to those who care more for entertainment than instruction, and we cannot counsel any one of a merely literary turn to undertake it. But it is full of marrow and fatness to a philosophic curiosity, from the flood of novel light it lets in upon history; its substantial import being, that the history of the Church on earth, which is the history of human develop- ment up to a comparatively recent period, has been only a stupendous symbol, or cover, under which secrets of the widest creative scope and efficacy, issues of the profoundest humani- tary significance, were all the while assiduously transacting. It is fair to suppose, therefore, that our sense of the worth of Swedenborgs spiritual pretensions will be somewhat biassed by the estimate we habitually put upon the Church as an in- strument of human progress. If we suppose Church and State to have been purely accidental determinations of mans history, owning no obligation to his selfish beginnings on the one hand, nor to his social destiny on the other, we shall not probably lend much attention to the information proffered by Swe- denborg. But if we believe with him that the realm of accident, however vast to sense, has absolutely no existence to the reason emancipated from sense, we shall probably regard the Church, and its derivative the State, as claiming a true Divine appointment; and we may find consequently in his ideas of its meaning and history an approximate justification of his claim to spiritual insight. At all events no lower justification of his claim is for a moment admissible to a rational regard. As we have already said, his books are singularly void of liter- 102 ASwedenborgs Ontology. [July, ary fascination. We know of no writer with anything like his intellectual force who is so persistently feeble in point of argu- mentative or persuasive skill. His books teem with the grand- est, the most humane and generous truth; but his reverence for it is so austere and vital, that, like the lover who willingly makes himself of no account beside his mistress, he seems always intent upon effacing himself from sight before its matchless lustre. Certainly the highest truth never encoun- tered a more lowly intellectual homage than it gets in these artless books; never found itself so unostentatiously heralded, so little patronized in a word, or left so completely for its success to its own sheer unadorned majesty. It must be admitted also that the books, upon a superficial survey, repel philosophic as much as literary curiosity, by sug- gesting the notion of an irreconcilable conflict between our conscious or phenomenal freedom and our unconscious or real dependence. To a cursory glance they appear to assert an endless warfare between the interests of our natural morality on the one hand, and of our spiritual destiny on the other. It seems, for example, to be taught by Swedenborg, that human morality serves such important theoretic ends in the economy of creation, that it may even be allowed to render the creature utterly hostile to his creator, or endow him with a faculty of spiritual suicide, and yet itself incur no reproach. In other words, our moral freedom is apparently made to claim such ex- treme consideration at the Divine hands, in consequence of its eminent nses to the spiritual life, as justifies it in absolutely deflecting us, if need be, from the paths of peace, and landing us ultimately in chronic spiritual disaffection to our Maker. Such, no doubt, is the surface aspect of these remarkable books, the aspect they wear to a hasty and prejudiced obser- vation; and if the reality of the case were at all conformable to the appearance, nothing favorable of course would remain to be said, since no sharper affront could well be offered to the creative perfection, than to suppose it baffled by the inveterate imbecility of its own helpless creature. But the reality of the case is by no means answerable to this surface seeming; and it is only from gross inattention to what we may call the authors commanding intellectual doctrine, Swedenborgs Ontology. 103 his doctrine of the Lord or Maximus ilomo, that a contrary impression prevails to the prejudice of his philosophic repute. This doctrine claims, in the estimation of those who discern its profound intellectual significance, to be the veritable apothe- osis of philosophy. What then does the doctrine practically amount to? It amounts, briefly stated, to this: that what we call Nature, meaning by that term the universe of existence, mineral, vegetable, and animal, which seems to us infinite in point of space and eternal in point of time, is yet in itself, or absolutely, void both of infinity and eternity; the former ap- pearance being only a sensible product and correspondence of a relation which the universal heart of man is under to the Divine Love, and the latter, a product and correspondence of the relation which the universe of the human mind is under to the Divine Wisdom. Thus Nature is not in the least what it sensibly purports to be, namely, absolute and independent; but, on the contrary, is at every moment, both in whole and in part, a pure phenomenon or effect of spiritual causes as deep, as contrasted, and yet as united, as Gods infinite love and mans unfathomable want. In short, Swedenborg describes Nature as a perpetual outcome or product in the spbere of sense of an inward supersensuous marriage which is forever growing and forever adjusting itself between creator and crea- ture, between Gods infinite and essential bounty and our in- finite and essential necessity. But these statements are too brief not to require elucidation. Let it be understood, then, first of all, that creation, in Swe- denborgs view, is of necessity a composite, not a simple, movement, inasmuch as it is bound to provide for the creatures subjective existence, no less than his objective being. The creature, in order to be created, in order truly to be, must exist or go forth from the creator; and he can thus exist or go forth only in his own form, of course. Thus creation, or the giving absolute being to things, logically involves a subordinate process of making, which is the giving them phenomenal or conscious form. In fact, upon this strictly incidental process of formation, the entire truth of creation philosophically pivots; for unless the creator be able to give his creature subjective identity (which is natural alienation from, or otherness than, 104 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, himself), he will never succeed in giving him objective individ- uality, which is spiritual oneness with himself. In other words, the creature can enjoy no real or objective conjunction with the creator, save in so far as he shall previously have undergone phenomenal or conscious disjunction with him. His spiritual or specific fellowship with the creator presupposes his natural or genuine inequality with him. In short, the interests of the creatures natural identity dominate those of his spirit- ual individuality to such an extent that he remains absolutely void of being, save in so far as he exists or goes forth in his own proper lineaments. If creation were by possibility the direct act of Divine omnipotence, which men superstitiously deem it to be, in other words, if God could create man magi- cally, i. e. without any necessary implication of man himse~f, without any implication of his mineral, vegetable, and animal nature, then of course creator and creature would be undis- tinguishable, and creation fail to avouch itself. Thus the total truth of creation spiritually regarded hinges upon its being a reflex not a direct, a composite not a simple, a rational not an arbitrary exertion of Divine power, hinges, in short, upon its supplying a subjective and phenomenal development to the creature every way commensurate with, or adequate to, the objective and absolute being he has in the Creator. We may clearly maintain, then, that the truth of creation is wholly contingent upon the truth of the creatures identity. If the creator is able to afford the creature valid selfhood or identity, then creation is philosophically conceivable, otherwise not. All that philosophy needs, in permanent illustration of the creative name, is to rescue the creature subjectively re- garded from the creator, or put his identity upon an inexpug- nable basis. To create or give being to things is no doubt an inscrutable function of the Divine omnipotence, to which our intelligence is incapable of assigning any a priori law or limit. But we are clearly competent to say a posteriori of the things thus created, that they are only in so far as they exist or go forth in their own form. That is to say, they must, in order to their being true creatures of God, not only possess spirit- ual form or objectivity in Him, as the statue has ideal form or objectivity in the genius of the sculptor, or the child moral Swedenborgs Ontology. 105 form and objectivity in the loins of his father, but they must actually go forth from Him, or exist in their own proper sub- stance, in their own constitutional identity, just as the statue exists in the appropriate constitutional substance which the marble gives it, or the child in the proper constitutional linea- ments with which the mother invests it. The legal maxim is, de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio. The philosophic demand is broader. It says, no esse without exis- tere; no reality without corresponding actuality; no soul with- out body; no form without substance; no being without mani- festation; in short, no creation on Gods part save in so far as there is a rigidly constitutional response and reaction on ours. The creative perfection is wholly active; that is to say, God is true creator only to the extent that we in our measure are true creatures. Thus, before creation can be worthy of its name, worthy either of God to claim it or of us to acknowledge it save in a lifeless, traditional way, it implies a subjective ex- perience on our part, an historic evolution or process of forma- tion, by which we become eternally projected from God, or endowed with inalienable self-consciousness, and so qualified for His subsequent spiritual fellowship and converse. In other words, creation is practically and of necessity to our experi- ence a formative or historic process, exhibiting a descent of the Divine nature exactly proportionate to the elevation of the human, and so presenting creator and creature in indissoluble union. This is the inexorable postulate of creation, that the creature be himself, have selfhood or subjective life, a life as distinctively his own as Gods life is distinctively His own. Not only must the creature aspire, instinctively and innocently aspire, to be like God, knowing good and evil, i. e. to be sufficient unto himself, but the creative perfection is bound to ratify that aspiration, and endow its creature with all its own wealth of goodness and wisdom. The aspiration itself is the deepest motion of the Divine spirit within us. It is impossible to be spiritually begotten of God without desiring to be like Him; that is, to be wise and good even as He is, not from constraint or the prompting of expediency, but spontaneous- ly, or from a serene inward delight in goodness and wisdom. Evidently no fellowship between God and our own souls is 106 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, possible until this instinct be appeased; for up to that event all our life will have been only the concealed motion of His spirit in our nature. He alone will have been really living in us, while we ourselves will have only seemed to live, will have been, in fact, mere unconscious masks of His life. Now how shall creation ever be seen to bear this surprising fruit? Prom the nature of the case, creation must be a purely spiritual operation on Gods part, since He alone is, and there is nothing outside of Him whence the creature may be sum- moned. By the hypothesis of creation, God alone is, and the creature exclusively by Him. How is it conceivable, therefore, to our intelligence, that the creature should possess selfhood or subjective identity, without a compromise to that extent of the Divine unity? How is it conceivable that God, the sole being, should Himself create or give being to other existence without impairing to that extent His own infinitude? The creature has no being which he does not derive from the creator; this is obvious. And yet the hypothesis of creation binds us to regard the creator as communicating his own being to another, without any limitation of its fulness. The demand of our intelligence is insatiable, therefore, until it ascertain how these things can be, until it perceive how it is that the creator is able to impart selfhood or moral power to the absolutely dependent offspring of his own hands, the abjectly helpless offspring of his own perfection. By an indomitable instinct, the mind claims to know, and will never rest accordingly until it discover, what it is which validly separates creature from creator, and so permits their subsequent union, not only with- out violence to either interest, but with consummate reciprocal advantage and beatitude to both interests. It is exactly here in giving us light upon this most momentous and most mysterious inquiry that what Sweden- borg calls the opening of his spiritual sight, or his discovery of the spiritual sense of the Scripture, professes to make itself of endless avail. What the literal sense of revelation is, we all know familiarly. We have been too familiar with it, in fact, not to have had our spiritual perceptions some- what overlaid by it. It represents creation as a work of God achieved and accomplished in space and time, and consequently Swedenborgs Onto logy. 107 makes the relation of creator and creature essentially outward and personal. Now the spiritual sense of Scripture as re- ported by Swedenborg is not a new or different literal sense. It is not the least literal, inasmuch as it utterly disowns the obligations of space and time, and claims the exclusive au- thentication of an infinite love and wisdom. In short, by the spiritual or living sense of revelation, Swedenborg means the truth of Gods NATURAL humanity; so that all our natural prepossessions in regard to space and time and persDn confess themselves purely rudimental and educative, the moment we come to acknowledge in Nature and Man an infinite Divine substance. It is true, no doubt, that Swedenborgs doctrine of creation falls, without constraint, into the literal terms of the orthodox dogma of the Incarnation. But then the letter of revelation bears, as he demonstrates, so inverse a relation to its living spirit, that we can get no help but only hindrance, from any attempt to interpret his statements by the light of dogmatic theology. Dogmatic theology is bound hand and foot by the letter of revelation; and the letter of revelation is adapted, says Swedenborg, only to the apprehension of simple or unenlightened men, in order that they may thus be introduced to the acquaintance of interior or higher verities. Again he says, Three things of the literal sense perish, when the spiritual sense of the word is evolving, namely, whatsoever belongs to space, to time, or to person; and still again, In heaven no attention is paid to person, nor the things of person, but to things abstracted from person ; thus angels have no perception of any person whose name is mentioned in the word, but only of his human quality or faculty. Hence he describes those who are in spiritual ideas as never thinking of the Lord from person, because thought determined to person limits and degrades the truth, while thought undetermined to person gives it infinitude; and he adds, that the angels are amazed at the stupidity of Church people, in not suffering themselves to be elevated out of the letter of revelation, and persisting to think carnally, and not spiritually, of the Lord, as of his flesh and blood, and not of his infinite goodness and truth. * * Arcana Celestia, 8705, 5253, 9007; and Apocalypse Explained, 30. 108 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, It is manifestly idle, then, to attempt coercing the large philosophic scope of Swedenborgs doctrine within the dimen- sions of our narrow ecclesiastical dogma. There is as real a contrast and oppugnancy between the two to the intellect, as there is to the stomach between a loaf of bread and a paving- stone. For example, it is vital to the dogmatic view of the Incarnation, to regard it as an event completely included in space and time, but brought about by supernatural power, act- ing in direct contravention of the course of nature. A dogma of this stolid countenance bluffs the intellect off from its wonted activity no less effectually, of course, than a stone taken into the stomach arrests the digestive circulation. With Swe- denborg, on the other hand, the Christian facts utterly refute this supernatural conception of the Divine existence and opera- tion, or reduce it to a superstition, by proving Nature herself, in the very crisis of her outward disorder, to have been in- wardly alive with all Divine order, peace, and power. According to Swedenborg, the birth, the life, the death, the resurrection of Christ were so remote from supernatural contingencies as to confess themselves the consummate flowering of the creative energy in universal nature. No doubt the flower is a very marked phenomenon to the senses, filling the atmosphere with its glory and fragrance. But its total interest to the rational mind turns upon those hidden affinities which, by means of its aspiring stem and its grovelling roots, connect it at once with all that is loftiest and all that is lowliest in universal nature, and so turn the flower itself into a sensuous sign merely or modest emblem of a secret most holy marriage, which is for- ever transacting in aromal depths of being, between the generic, universal, or merely animate substances of the mind, and its specific, unitary, or human forwi. So with the Incarnation. The literal facts have no significance to the spiritual under- standing, save as a natural ultimate and revelation of the true principles of creative order, the order that binds the universe of existence to its source. What are these principles? They are all summed up in the truth of the essential Divine humanily. According to Sweden- borg, God is essential Man; so that creation, instead of being primarily a sensible product of Divine power, or a work ac Swedenborgs Onto logy. 109 complished in space and time, turns out first of all a spiritual achievement of the Divine love and wisdom in all the forms of human nature, and only subordinately to that a thing of physical dimensions. Swedenborg enforces this truth very copiously in the way of illustration, but never in that of ratio- cination. His reason for this abstention is very instructive. Swedenborg distinguishes as no person has ever done between two orders of truth ; truth of being, ontological truth, truths of conscience in short; and truth of seeming, phenomenal truth, truths of science in short. The distinction between these two orders of truth is, that the former is not probable, that is to say, admits of no sensuous proof; while the latter is essentially probable, i. e. capable of being proved by sensuous reasoning. The French proverb says, the true is not always the probable. Now with Swedenborg, the true the supremely true is never the probable, that is, finds no countenance in outward likelihood, but derives all its support from the inward sanction of the heart. Facts which are matter of outward observation or science may be reasoned about to any extent, and legitimately established by reasoning. But truth which is matter of inward experience or conscience owns no such depeudence, and invites no homage but that of a modest, un- ostentatious Yea, yea! Nay, nay! The philosophic ground of this state of things is obvious. For if the case were other- wise, if truth, truths of life, could be reasoned into us, or be made ours by force of persuasion, then belief would no longer be free; that is to say, it would no longer reflect the love of the heart, but control or coerce it. In other words, the truth believed would no longer be the truth we inwardly love and crave, but only that which has most outward prestige or of course o authority to back it. In that event, , ur affections, which ally us with infinitude or God, would be at the n~ercy of our intelligence, which allies us with nature or the finite. And life consequently, instead of being the spontaneous indis- soluble marriage of heart and head which it really is, would confess itself at most their voluntary or chance concubinage. We have no pretension, of course, to decide dogmatically for the reader whether what Swedenborg calls the Divine Natural Humanity be the commanding truth he supposes it to be, or 110 Swedenborgs Ontolog~y. [July, whether it be a mere otiose hypothesis. But we are bound to assist the reader, so far as we are able, to decide these questions for himself; and we cannot do this more effectually than by fixing his attention for a while upon what is involved in the middle term of Swedenborgs proposition, since we are apt to cherish very faulty conceptions of what Nature logically com- prises. Swedenborgs doctrine summarily stated is, that what we call Nature, and suppose to be exactly what it seems, is in truth a thing of strictly human and strictly Divine dimensions both, as being at one and the same moment a just exponent of the creatures essential want or finiteness, and of the Creators essential fulness or infinitude. In other words, where people whose understanding is still controlled by sense, see Nature absolute or unqualified by spirit, Swedenborg, professing to be spiritually enlightened, does not see Nature at all, but only the Lord, or God-Man, carnally hidden indeed, degraded, hu- miliated, crucified under all manner of devout pride and self- seeking, but at the same time spiritually exalted or glorified by a love untainted with selfishness, and a wisdom undimmed by prudence. Manifestly then, in order to do justice to Sweden- borgs doctrine, we must rid ourselves first of all of certain sensuous prejudices we cherish in regard to Nature; and to this aim we shall now for a moment address ourselves. Nature is all that our senses embrace; thus it is whatsoever appears to be. Now the two universals of this phenomenal or apparitional world are space and time; for whatsoever sensibly exists, exists in space and time, or implies extension and dura- tion. Space and time have thus a fixed or absolute status to our senses, so furnishing our spiritual understanding with that firm though dusty earth of fact or knowledge, upon which it may forever ascend into the serene expansive heaven of truth or belief. But now observe: just because space and time, which make up our notion of Nature, are thus absolute to our senses, we are led in the infancy of science, or while the senses still dominate the intellect, to confer upon Nature a logical absoluteness or reality which in truth is wholly fallacious. We habitually ascribe a rational or supersensuous reality to her, as well as a sensible; or regard the universe of space and time, not only as the needful implication of our subjective or con- Swedenborgs Onto logy. 111 scious existence, but as an ample explication also of our objective or unconscious being. And every such conception of the part Nature plays in creation is puerile, and therefore mis- leading or fatal to a spiritual apprehension of truth. This may be seen at a glance. For if you consent to make Nature absolute as well as contingent, that is, if you make it be irrespectively of our intelligence, which you do whenever you reflectively exalt space and time from sensible into rational quantities, then, of course, you disjoin infinite and finite, God and man, Creator and creature, not only phenomenally but really; not only ab intra or in Se, but also and much more ab extra, or by all the literal breadth of Natures extension, and all the literal length of her duration: so swamping spiritual thought in the bottomless mire of materialism. For obviously if you thus operate a real or spiritual disjunction between God and man, you can never hope to bring about that actual or literal conjunction between them which Swedenborg affirms in his doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity, save by hypos- tatizing some preposterous mediator as big as the universe and as ancient as the world. In short, you will be driven in this state of things spiritually to reconcile God and man, or put them at-one, only by inventing a style of personality so egregiously finite or material as consciously to embody in itself all Natures indefinite spaces, and all her indetermi- nate times. Thus, according to Swedenborg, sensuous conceptions of truth the habit we have of estimating appearances as reali- ties are the grand intellectual hindrance we experience to the acknowledgment of a creation in which Creator and creature are spiritually united. Evidently, then, our only mode of exit from the embarrassments which sense entails upon the intellect, is to spurn her authority and renounce her guidance. Now the lustiest affirmation sense makes is to the unconditional validity of space and time, or their existence in se; and this means in- ferentially the integrity of Nature, or the dogma of a physical creation. The great service, accordingly, which Swedeuborg does the intellect is, that he refutes this sensuous dogmatizing by establishing the pure relativity of space and time; so vindi- cating the exclusive truth of the spiritual creation. We defy 112 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, any fair-minded person to read Swedenborg, and still preserve a shred of respect for the dogma of a physical creation. He utterly explodes the assumed basis of the dogma, by demonstrat- ing that space and time are contingencies of a finite or sensibly organized intelligence; hence that Nature, being all made up of space and time, has no rational, but only a sensible objectivity. He demonstrates, in fact, and on the contrary, that Nature rationally regarded is the realm of pure subjectivity, having no other pertinency to the spiritual or objective world than the bodily viscera have to the body, than the shadow has to the substance which projects it, than darkness has to light, or death to life, that is, a strictly reflective pertinency. The true sphere of creation being thus spiritual or inward, it follows, according to Swedenborg, that any doctrine of Nature which proceeds upon the assumption of her finality, or does not con- strue her as a mere constitutional means to a superior creative end, as a mere outward echo or reverberation of the true creative activity in inward realms of being, is simply de- lirious. Swedenborgs doctrine then of the Divine Natural Humanity becomes readily intelligible, if, disowning the empire of sense, we consent to conceive of Nature after a spiritual ma.nner, that is, by reducing her from a principal to a purely accessory part in creation, from a magisterial to a strictly ministerial func- tion. There is not the least reason why I individually should be out of harmony with infinite goodness and truth, except the limitation imposed upon me by nature, in identifying me with my bodily organization, and so individualizing or differencing me from my kind. Make this limitation then the purely sub- jective appearance which it truly is, in place of the objective reality which it truly is not, make it a fact of my natural constitution, and not of my spiritual creation, a fact of my phenomenal consciousness merely, and not of the absolute and infinite being I have in God, and you at once bring me individually into harmony with Gods perfection. Our discordance was never internal or spiritual, was never at best anything but phenomenal, outward, moral, owing to my igno- rance of the laws of creation, or my sensible inexperience of the spiritual world, of which nevertheless I am all the while a Swedenborgs Ontology. 113 virtual denizen. Take away then this fallacious semblance of the truth operated by sense, and we relieve ourselves of the sole impediment which exists to the intellectual approximation and equalization of creator and creature, of infinite and finite, and so are prepared to discern their essential and inviolable unity. Thus the supreme obligation we owe to Philosophy is to drop Nature out of sight as a real or rational quantity intervening between creator and creature, and hiding them from each others regard, and to conceive of her only as an actuality to sense, operating a quasi separation between them, with a view exclu- sively to propitiate and emphasize their real unity. In a word, we are bound no longer to conceive of Nature as she appears to sense, i. e. as utterly independent or unqualified by subjec- tion to Man; but only as she discloses herself to the reason, that is, as rigidly relative to the human soul, and altogether qualified or characterized by the uses she promotes to our spiritual evolution. Certainly we have no right after this to attribute to Sweden- borg an obscure or mystical conception of Nature. Nature bears the same servile relation to the spiritual creation as a mans body bears to his soul, as the material of a house bears to the house itself, or as the substance of a statue bears to its form, namely, a merely quantifying, by no means a qualifying, relation. It fills out the spiritual creation, substantiates it, gives it subjective anchorage, fixity, or identification, incorpo- rates it, in a word, just as the marble incorporates the statue. For the statue is primarily an ideal form, affiliating itself to the artists genius exclusively, and is only derivatively thence a material existence. So I primarily am a spiritual form, that is to say, a form of affection and thought, directly affiliated to the creative love and wisdom; and what my body does is merely to fill out this form, substantiate it, define it to itself give it consciousness, allow it to say me, mine, thee, thine. What my body then does for my spirit specifically, Nature does for the universe of the human mind, or the entire spiritual world; namely, it incorporates it, defines it to itself, gives it phenomenal projection from the creator, and so qualifies it to appreciate and cultivate an absolute conjunction with him. VOL. CV. NO. 216. 8 114 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, My body reveals my soul i. e. reveals the spiritual being I have in God to my own rude and blunt intelligence; and the marble of the statue is an outward revelation of the beauty which exists ideally to the artists brain. So Nature reveals the spiritual universe to itself, mirrors it to its own feeble and struggling intelligence, invests it with outward or sensible lineaments, and, by thus finiting or imprisoning it within the bonds of space and time, stimulates it to react towards its proper freedom or its essential infinitude in God. We cannot too urgently point the readers attention to this masterly vindication of Nature, and the part it plays in creation. Creation, as Swedenborg conceives it, is the marriage in unitary form of creator and creature. For the Divine love and wisdom, as he reports, CANNOT BUT BE AND EXIST in other beings or existences created from itself; and Nature is the necessary ground of such existences, as furnishing them conscious pro- jection from the infinite. But let us throw together a few passages illustrative of his general scheme of thought. It is essential to love not to love itself but others, and to be lovingly united with them; it is also essential to it to be beloved by others, since union is thus effected. The essence of all love consists in union; yea, the life of it, or all that it con- tains of enjoyment, pleasantness, delight, sweetness, beatitude, happiness, felicity. Love consists in my willing what is my own to be anothers, and feeling his delight as my own; this it is to love. But for a man to enjoy his own delight in another, in place of the others delight in him, this is not to love; for in this case he loves himself, while in the other he loves his neigh- bor. These two loves are diametrically opposed; they both indeed are capable of producing union, though the union which self-love produces is only an apparent or outward union, while really or inwardly it is disunion. For in proportion as any one loves another for selfish ends, he afterwards comes to hate him. How can any man of understanding help perceiving this? What sort of love is it for a man to love himself only, and not another than himself, by whom he is beloved again? Clearly no union, but only disunion, results from such love; for union in love supposes reciprocation, and reciprocation does not exist in self alone. Now when this is true of all love, it 1867.] Swedenborgs Ontolog~,. 115 cannot but be infinitely true of the creative love; so that we may conclude that the Divine love caunot help being and ex- isting in others whom it loves and by whom it is beloved. It is not possible, of course, that God can love and be beloved by others who are themselves infinite or divine; because then he would love himself, for the infinite or divine is one. If this infinitude or divinity inhered in others, it would be itself, and God would consequently be self-love, whereof not the least is practicable to him, because it is totally contrary to his es- sence. * In the created universe nothing lives but God-Man alone, or the Lord; and nothing moves but by life from him; and nothing exists but by the sun from him: thus it is a truth that in God we live and move and have our being. j Crea- tion means, what is Divine from inmost to outmost, or from be- ginning to end. For everything which is from the Divine begins from himself, and proceeds in an orderly manner even to the ultimate end, thus through the heavens into the world, and there rests as in its ultimate, for the ultimate of Divine order is cosmical nature. ~ Thus in all true creation the creator is bound, by the fact of his giving absolute being to the creature, to communicate him- self make himself over without stint to the creature; and the creature, in his turn, because he gives phenomenal form or manifestation to the creative power, is bound to absorb the creator in himself, to appropriate him as it were to himself, to reproduce his infinite or stainless love in all manner of finite egotistic form ; so that the more truly the creator alone is, the more truly the creature alone appears. Now in this inev- itable immersion which creation implies of creative being in created form, we have, according to Swedenborg, the origin of Nature. It grows necessarily out of the obligation the creature is under by creation to appropriate the creator, or reproduce him in his own finite lineaments. It overtly consecrates the covert marriage of infinite and finite, creator and creature. By the hypothesis of creation the creator gives sole and absolute being to the creature; and unless therefore the creature rever- berate the communication, or react towards the, creator, the * Divine Love and Wisdom, 4749. ~ Arcana Celestia, 10, 634. I Ibid., 301. 116 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, latter will inevitably swallow him up, or extinguish the faintest possibility of self-consciousness in him. And the only logical reverberation of being is form or appearance. Being is ex- tensive; form is intensive. Being expropriates itself to whatso-. ever is not itself; form impropriates whatsoever is not itself to itself. Thus in the hierarchical marriage of creator and creature which we call creation, the creator yields the creature the primary place by spontaneously assuming himself a second~. ary or servile one; gives him absolute or objective being, in fact, only by stooping himself to the limitations of the created form. Reciprocity is the very essence of marriage. Action and re- action must be equal between the factors; or the marriage unity is of its own nature void. If, accordingly, the creator contribute the element of pure being the absolute or objective element to creation, the creature must needs contribute the element of pure form or appearance, its phenomenal or sub- jective element; for being and form are indissolubly one. It is a necessary implication, then, of the truth of the Divine Natural Humanity, that while the creator gives invisible spiritual being to the creature, the creature in his turn gives natural form gives visible existence to the creator; or, more briefly, while the creator gives reality to the creature, the creature gives phenomenality to the creator. In other words still, we may say, that while the creator supplies the essential or properly creative element in creation, the creature supplies its existential or properly constitutive element, that element of hold-back or resistance without which it could never put on manifestation. Nature is the attestation of this ceaseless give- and-take between creator and creature; the nuptial ring that confirms and consecrates the deathless espousals of infinit& ~ and finite. In spite, therefore, of its fertile and domineering actuality to sense, it is as void of all reality to reason as the shadow of ones person in a glass. It is, in fact, only the out- ward image or shadow of itself which is cast by the inward or spiritual world upon the mirror of our rudimentary intelligence. And inasmuch as the shadow or subjective image of itself which any object projects of necessity reproduces the object in inverse form, so Nature, being the subjective image or shadow of Gods objective and spiritual creation, turns out a sheer in- 1867.] Swedenborgs Ontology. 117 version of spiritual order; exhibits the creators fulness veiled by the creatures want, the creators perfection obscured, and so alone revealed, by the creatures imperfection. Spiritual or creative order affirms the essential unity of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator. Natural or created order must consequently exhibit the contingent or phenomenal oppugnancy of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator; or else furnish no adequate foot- hold or flooring to the spiritual world. Nature is thus, according to Swedenborg, an inevitable impli- cation of the spiritual world, just as substance is inevitably implied in. form, i. e. as serving to give it selfhood or identity. This is her sole function, to confer consciousness upon exist- ence, or give it fixity, by denying it individuality or affirming its community with all other existence. Nature identifies ex- istence or gives it finiteness, while spirit alone individualizes it or gives it infinitude. In truth, nature is a pure spiritual ap- parition, having no reality to the soul, but only to the senses. It exists only to ~ sensibly organized and therefore limited intelligence; and hence, however absolute it appears, it is really all the while nothing whatever but a ratio or mean between a finite and an infinite mind. We as creatures, that is, as finite by constitution, can have, of course, no intuitive, but only a rational, discernment of infinite or uncreated things. We cannot know Divine goodness and truth in a direct or pre- sentative way, but only in an indirect or representative one, that is, only in so far as they abase themselves to our natural level, or accommodate themselves to our nascent sensuous understanding. And Nature is the proper theatre of this stupendous Divine abasement and obscuration,of this need- ful revelation, or veiling-over, of the Divine splendor, in order to adapt it to our gross carnal vision. Throughout her total length and breadth, accordingly, she is a mere correspondence or imagery of what is going on in living or spiritual realms; but a correspondence or imagery which is vital nevertheless to our apprehension of creative order. For the very fact of our creatureship insures that we should have remained forever in- cognizant of the creator, and antipathetic to his perfection, unless he, by condescending to our limitations, or reproducing 118 Swedenborg~s Ontology,i. [July, himself within the intelligible compass of our own nature and history, had gradually emancipated our intelligence, and edu- cated us into living sympathy with his name. Such, concisely stated, are the leading axioms of Sweden- borgs ontology. Creation, spiritually regarded, is the living equation of creator and creature. But in order to the latters attaining to the vital fellowship of the former, he must put on conscious or phenomenal form, must become clearly self- pronounced, that so being made aware, on the one hand, of his own essential and inveterate limitations, he may become quali- fied, on the other, to react spiritually towards the creators infinitude. In other words, creation implies a strictly subordi- nate or incidental realm, a realm of preliminary formation, as we may say, in which the creature comes to self-consciousness, or the conception of himself as a being essentially distinct from, and antagonistic to, his creator. The logic of the case is in- exorable. If creation at its culmination be an exact practical equation of creator and creature, the minus of the latter being rigidly equivalent to the plus of the former, then it incorporates as its needful basis a sphere of experience on the creatures part, in which he may feel himself utterly remote from the creator, and abandoned to his own resources; an empirical sphere of existence, in fine, which may unmistakably identify him with all lower things, and so alienate him from (i. e. make him consciously another than) his creator. Thus creation with Swedenborg, being at its apogee a rigid equation of the crea- tors perfection and the creatures imperfection, necessitates a natural history, or provisional plane of projection upon which the equation may be wrought out to its most definite issues. Creator and creature are terms of an inseparable correlation, so that we can no more imagine a creation to which the one does not furnish its causative element, the other its constitutive element, than we can imagine a child in which father and mother are not coequal factors, the one conferring life or soul, the other existence or body. No doubt their relation is a strictly conjugal one, proceeding upon a hierarchical distribu- tion of the factors; one being head, the other hand; one being object, the other subject; one ruling, the other obeying. But their unity is all the more and none the less assured on this Swedenborgs Ontology. 119 account; for notoriously the truest objective harmony is that which reconciles the intensest subjective diversity. To sum up all that has been said, creation, with Swedenborg, challenges a subject earth, no less than an all-encompassing heaven; a natural constitution or body, no less than a spiritual cause or soul; an experimental or educative sphere for the creature,no less than an absolute one for the creator; a realm of phenomenal freedom or finite reaction on the part of the former, no less than one of real force or infinite action on the part of the latter. In a word, creation means, to Swedenborg, the creatures spiritual evolution in complete harmony with his creators perfection; but if this be true, and certainly Philos- ophy tolerates no lower conception, then obviously creation demands for its own actuality the natural involution of the creator, or his complete unresisting immersion in finite con- ditions. Which is only saying in other words, that creation being a spiritual achievement of creative power within the limits of the created consciousness involves to the creatures experience a rigidly natural generation and growth, with root and stem and flower all complete. And now, having done ample justice to the theoretic princi- ples involved in creation, we should like, if we had room, to pur- sue them into the sphere of their practical operation, as figura- tively exhibited in the history of the church, which culminates on its literal side in the person of Christ, and thence reissues a spiritual form. For the church, according to Swedenborg, is the true theatre of the spiritual creation, though she has never had the least consciousness of her real dignity. But then the church has two aspects, one literal or phenomenal, the other spiritual or real; and these are in inveterate subjective opposi- tion, though they both promote the same objective ends. Thus Swedenborg maintains that the church, under all her corrupt disguises in the letter, has been a strictly providential institu- tion in the earth, promoting the same vital uses to the spiritual economy of mankind that the heart promotes to its physical economy; only as the heart has first a death-bearing office to enact, and then a life-giving one, so the church, as a literal institution, lays hold on hell, while on its spiritual side it al- lies man with Divinity. As the heart attracts to itself the 120 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, vitiated blood of the body, gross, lifeless, blackened with all the foul humors discharged into it through its long circuit, so exactly the church, as the spiritual heart of mankind, attracts to itself by its eminent dignities the most selfish, the most despotic, the most worldly tempers among men. And as the heart, having thus gathered this fluid abomination to its living and generous embrace, makes haste to hand it over to the lungs to be defecated, washed, and renewed for use by contact with the outward. air, so also the church, by welcoming and harnessing every ungodly lust of mens bosoms to the car of its own advancement, manages, in spite of itself, to bring our most hidden iniquities to the surface, uncovers to the broad light of day the abysses of human depravity, and so gradually ventilates them by the purifying breath of the secular con- science, gradually renovates, in fact, and restores to sanity, the corrupt public sentiment of the world, by the healing con- tact of mens unperverted common sense. The entire history of the church indeed, on its literal side, amounts to this, neither less nor more, namely, such an utter abasement of the Divine name to the lowest level of mens carnal pride and concupiscence as begets in the gentile conscience an instinctive contempt and aversion towards all consecrated authority, and leads the common mind continually to associate Gods honor and worship only with the reverence of every individual man, however conventionally degraded. This, we repeat, would be an interesting study to pursue, but our space forbids us doing justice to it here, and we must con- tent ourselves with having illustrated, however feebly, the e~- sential principles which underlie a true ontology. In doing this we have not sought to justify Swedenborg, but rather to have him understood, that so the reader may no longer miscon- ceive his proper intellectual significance, nor attribute to him the altogether odious pretension of being a missionary to the human conscience, or an authority in matters of faith. As a dia-. lectician, his merits are inconsiderable; and it is only as a seer that he prefers the least philosophic claim to our regard. Now the peculiarity of the seer is, that he tells us only what he him- self has seen and heard; and what consequently puts no manner of constraint upon our intelligence, but, on the contrary, Swedenborgs OntologY. 121 authenticates its freest and most critical activity. It is solely in this aspect that Swedenborg presents himself to his reader in all his books. No pretension could be more utterly repugnant to the modest genius of the man, than that of defining the limits of human belief. No line nor word of all his writings can be adduced to prove that he was ever, for a moment, so infatuated by self-conceit as to fancy himself commissioned to found a new church, any more than Columbus was commissioned to found a new earth. He talks very freely, to be sure, of a new church, which is to be the crown and consummation of all past churches just as the flower of a plant is the crown and consummation of its leaf and stalk and roots. But this is no visible, but only a living or spiritual church, wholly unrecog- nized of those who are without it, and knowii only of those who inwardly belong to it. It is, in fact, according to Sweden- borg, that new ai~d everlasting church which alone was founded by Christ and his apostles, but which got itself subsequently overlaid and lost sight of through the dense carnality of its disciples. And the doctrine which he alleges as alone con- sonant with this church is one which makes charity of sole account before God, and faith comparatively of none; which. frees life of its past bondage to routine, or restores good to the supremacy hitherto usurped by truth; which resuscitates, in short, the long-slain but righteous Abel of the heart, and reduces the domineering Cain of the intellect to his cheerful subservience. Thus the new church to Swedenborg s eyes is not any new and more arrogant ecclesiasticism, but that unitary spirit of love love at once Divine and human which has all along lain entombed under the old rituality, but is now at last, by the providential decline of such rituality in mens respect, or its descent into mere historic rubbish, frankly casting off its grave-clothes, and arraying itself in the living lineaments of a beatified brotherhood, fellowship, society of universal man. And his invariable influence upon his reader whenever the reader himself is capable of spiritually discerning the church, or intellectually disavowing every personal claim upon the Divine regard is to render him insensible to all possible doctrinal divergences among men, by teaching him that the 122 Swedenborgs Ontology. [July, fiercest zeal of truth is apt, nay, sure, to be associated with the utmost practical indifference to good. Indeed, the corner- stone of his intellectual polity is, that our beliefs are invari- ably bred in the long run of our affections, and wear their exclusive livery; so that no exactness of intellectual indoctri- nation affords the least pledge of our vital or spiritual sanity. We cannot conclude without recommending again to attention Mr. Whites excellent biography. We differ with him utterly in many of his specific judgments about Swedenborg, notably in what he says of the inferential injustice done by Sweden- borg to woman; and it is clear that his private animosity to the Swedenborgians who, though they be simple enough publicly to advertise themselves as the New Jerusalem, are yet much too sensible in private ever to deem themselves the finished work of God in human nature so long foreshadowed under that mystic name cannot absolve him of his obliga- tions to his authors spotless fame before the world: but his book is still by far the best Life of Swedenborg. We take pleasure, also, in commending to public favor Mr. Lippincotts new and beautiful edition of Swedenborgs writ- ings. The old translations were full of laxities, both of render- ing and interpretation; and these, as we understand, have been carefully amended in the new edition. The paper and press- work of the volumes are strikingly handsome. We owe a word, moreover, to a work which we have re- ceived since we began this article, and whose title we give below.* It is an affectionate, nay, an enthusiastic tribute to Swedenborgs unrecognized merits as a philosopher and man of science, made up of the various eulogistic notices his life and writings have attracted from men of letters. No doubt the world owes it to the memory of its distinguished men to preserve an honest record of its obligations to them; but Swe- denborg would willingly have forgiven it the debt in his own case. We suspect that he would blush crimson if he could once get a sight of Mr. Tafels book, and discover himself to have become the object of so much cheap personal laudation on the part of people who apparently are quite indifferent to * Emanuel Swedenborg as a Philosopher and Man of Science. By Rudolph Leonard Tafel. Chicago: Myers and Chandler. 1867. Swedenborgs Ontology. 123 the oniy claim he himself preferred to mens attention, that, namely, of a spiritual seer. Whatever his scientific and philo- sophic worth may have been to his own eyes, and we may be very sure that it was never very large, nothing can be more certain than that it became utterly obliterated there by the chance which subsequently befell him of an open intercourse with the world of spirits. He at once deserted his scientific pursuits after this event, and never once recurred to their pub- lished memorials as offering the least interest to rational curi- osity; while he affirmed, on the contrary, that the facts of per- sonal experience which he was then undergoing possessed the very highest philosophic and scientific interest, as alone shed- ding a fixed light upon every conceivable problem of mans origin and destiny. In looking somewhat attentively through Mr. Tafels pages, we see no evidence that any of the writers he cites had the least regard for Swedenborg from Sweden- borgs own point of view; while we see abounding evidence of their being disposed to yield him an extravagant personal hom- age, than which, we are persuaded, nothing could be more of- fensive to his own wishes. This petty partisan zeal is carried so far as to beget a very revolting note in one place (page 60), in which two men who honestly thought Swedenborg insane, are reported to have subsequently gone mad themselves with such hilarious satisfaction as leaves no doubt on the readers mind that the reporter really supposed the Divine honor vin- dicated by that shabby catastrophe. If a suspicion of Sweden- borgs sanity were an offence to the gods actually punishable by loss of reason, we know of no hospital large enough to house the victims which would ensue from that judgment within the limits even of our own scant acquaintance. Nothing, indeed, in our opinion can be more logical and salutary for certain minds than a suspicion of Swedenborgs sanity. And cer- tainly nothing could be more ludicrously inapposite to the needs of those who appreciate his real, though incidental, ser- vices to science and philosophy, than a certificate to his merit in those respects would be from the hand of all the technical experts on the planet. 124 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, ART. IV. The Divine Comedy of DANTE ALIGHTERI. Trans- lated by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Boston: Tick- nor and Fields. 1867. 8 vols. Royal Svo. Two years ago last May, when Florence was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her supreme poet, and was thus giving expression to her joy in the freedom and union of Italy, among the contributions to the festival from for- eign lands was a copy of the first volume of the first complete American translation of the Divine Comedy. There can have been few gifts on the occasion more fitted to touch the imagi- nation of one capable of appreciating its significance. It was a testimony of honor to Dante from another world than his, and of sympathy with Italy in her fulfilment of the patriotic longings and counsels of her greatest son. It was a homage paid by the new and modern world to the old; and there was a peculiar fitness in the gift, not alone in its coming from the American poet whose fame has spread widest over Europe, and whose name has long been familiar in Florence, but also in the very character of his work, which, by its scrupu- lous fidelity to the original, and by its intrinsic merits, is to make the Divine Comedy better known to readers in Amer- ica and England than any translation that has preceded it. Dryden, in one of his admirable critical prefaces, says, speak- ing of poetic translation, that to be a thorough translator, a man must be a thorough poet. In the present instance his demand is satisfied. Mr. Longfellows translation is the ma- ture work of a poetic genius, long accustomed to exercise itself not only in original composition, but also in the reproduction of foreign poetry. The felicity of his minor translations has been universally acknowledged, and the same art and taste shown in them are shown in still fuller measure in this version to which he has devoted, with a sense of what was due to the character of his original, the most patient labor, and the ser- vice of his ripest faculties. The appearance of such a work from such a hand naturally excites a fresh interest in the difficult question of poetic trans- lation; and in order to appreciate correctly the intention and

124 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, ART. IV. The Divine Comedy of DANTE ALIGHTERI. Trans- lated by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Boston: Tick- nor and Fields. 1867. 8 vols. Royal Svo. Two years ago last May, when Florence was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her supreme poet, and was thus giving expression to her joy in the freedom and union of Italy, among the contributions to the festival from for- eign lands was a copy of the first volume of the first complete American translation of the Divine Comedy. There can have been few gifts on the occasion more fitted to touch the imagi- nation of one capable of appreciating its significance. It was a testimony of honor to Dante from another world than his, and of sympathy with Italy in her fulfilment of the patriotic longings and counsels of her greatest son. It was a homage paid by the new and modern world to the old; and there was a peculiar fitness in the gift, not alone in its coming from the American poet whose fame has spread widest over Europe, and whose name has long been familiar in Florence, but also in the very character of his work, which, by its scrupu- lous fidelity to the original, and by its intrinsic merits, is to make the Divine Comedy better known to readers in Amer- ica and England than any translation that has preceded it. Dryden, in one of his admirable critical prefaces, says, speak- ing of poetic translation, that to be a thorough translator, a man must be a thorough poet. In the present instance his demand is satisfied. Mr. Longfellows translation is the ma- ture work of a poetic genius, long accustomed to exercise itself not only in original composition, but also in the reproduction of foreign poetry. The felicity of his minor translations has been universally acknowledged, and the same art and taste shown in them are shown in still fuller measure in this version to which he has devoted, with a sense of what was due to the character of his original, the most patient labor, and the ser- vice of his ripest faculties. The appearance of such a work from such a hand naturally excites a fresh interest in the difficult question of poetic trans- lation; and in order to appreciate correctly the intention and 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 125 the achievement of Mr. Longfellow, there is need to understand the principles which have determined him in the choice of his method, and in the mode of rendering which he has pursued. It would hardly have been worth while for him to add another to the fifteen or twenty translations of the Divine Comedy, or of one of its three divisions, which already exist in English, unless it were clear that they all had been made either upon an erroneous method, or, if upon the right method, were defective in execution.* The discussion as to the proper method of translating, and the principles which should guide the translator, is an old one, and the question seems as far from settlement as ever. From the time of the letter of Jerome, De Optimo Genere Interpre- tandi, to Mr. Arnolds lectures On Translating Homer, the subject has engaged the interest of scholars wherever scholar- ship has existed. A history of the various opinions that have been held, and the various rules that have been laid down, would afford curious and entertaining illustrations of the changes and diversities of literary taste and cultivation. The narrative of the contention between the advocates of free and those of lit- eral translation, would be like the story of the battle of the nominalists and the realists. Dante himself has the merit of being among the first to state clearly the fact that a perfect translation of a poem is impossi- ble; that as a work of ~art its original language and form are essential to it. He says in a passage often cited from his Con- vito, Nothing harmonized in the bond of poetry can be trans- ferred from its own tongue to another, without breaking all its sweetness and harmony. Cervantes noted the same fact. In the talk between the curate and the barber in Don Quixotes library, the barber says, I have Boiardo at home, but I can- not understand him. Neither is it anygreat matter whether you do or not, replied the curate; and I could willingly have excused the good captain who translated it that trouble of at- tempting to make him speak Spanish, for he has deprived him of a great deal of his primitive graces ; a misfortune incident * For a list of these translations, and remarks upon several of them, and for some general observations on translating the Divine Comedy, see North American Re. view, No. CCXI., April, 1566, Art. VIII., Dante and his latest English Translators. 126 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, to all those who presume to translate verses, since their utmost wit and industry can never enable them to preserve the native beauties and genius that shine in the original. Sir John Den- ham expressed the same truth with an admirable simile when he said, Poesy is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one language into another it will all evaporate. The substance, the mere meaning of a poem, may be trans- ferred from one language to another, but neither the indefinite and indefinable power over the imagination and the feelings which has its source in the harmonious conjunction of mate- rial, spirit, and form, nor the subtile but intense effect of the associations that belong to words, is to be fully obtained or preserved in any translation. A work of art, as Goethe says, is not like a piece of soft clay, to be moulded at pleasure. A version of a great poem which shall be true to the original in rendering all its qualities, is an achievement beyond human faculties. To the production of the effect of a work of art all its original elements are essential, while the differences inhe- rent in different languages, and in which the differences of race and civilization are embodied, cannot be neutralized or overcome, so that an English Odyssey or Divine Comedy shall be to us what the originals were in their time to the Greeks or the Italians. What, then, may a translator hope to accomplish? He may seek to transfer with fidelity the substance of his original into a new language, with as near a correspondence of form as the genius of language allows; or he may seek to make a poem in his own language, which, so far as his capacity permits, shall reproduce the effect of the original as he feels it, but without exact fidelity to the letter of the work from which he trans- lates. Under these two heads there has been every variety of practice, and every measure of success. The faithful meth- od of translation has often degenerated into a system of liter- alism, to the loss of every poetic quality; while, on the other hand, free translation has often been the name of mere para- phrastic license. No general rules can be laid down for success in either meth od. The best translation must be far from a perfect reproduc- tion, and a good translation of so much of a poem as can be 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 127 translated is no more to be made by rule, than a good style is to be written by rule. Success in the work depends on the genius of the translator. The merit of a free or literal translation, as a translation, consists in the proportion in which it renders the elements of the original. The poetic translations that have been most pop- ular, however, have for the most part widely departed from the simplicity of this principle, and have chosen rather to make poems, more or less excellent as the case might be, adapted to the taste of their contemporaries, than to follow closely the model set before them. Such were the favorite translations of our fathers, Chapmans Homer, Fairfaxs Tasso, Popes Homer, Drydens Virgil. In truth, these were rather substi- tutes for translation than translations. The arbitrary omission in a translation of matter belonging to the original, or the ad- dition of matter not found in it, are privileges which the so- called translators have generally been ready enough to claim. But an illustration from another art may serve to set these processes in their true light. An engraving may be called a translation of a picture. It preserves the lines and the expres- sion of the original, its substance; and it represents in sim- ple light and shade the inimitable, untransferable qualities and effects of tone and color. The thought of the artist is rendered, and so much of the form in which the spirit of his work has embodied itself as it is possible to render in a different medi- um. But no engraver would feel himself warranted, however great his own genius might be, in attempting to improve on the original by the removal from its design of what he might con- sider blemishes, or by the addition to it of new beauties. His duty is not to attempt to supplement the defects inherent in engraving as compared with painting, with features that the original does not possess; but it is to give, so far as his art allows, the exactest representation of the work on which his own is based. A similar rule should guide the translator. The art he prac- tises is in its nature different from that required in the produc- tion of an original composition; and he is bound to recognize its limitations. A mere verbal, word-for-word translation, which pays no regard to the finer qualities of style and diction, 128 Lortgfellow~s Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, of harmony and sweetness, may be compared to a hard outline of a piettire; while a thoroughly faithful translation, faithful alike to the thought and to the manner of expression, and giv- ing as much of the native spirit of poesy as may be secured in the transfusion, may be likened to an engraving by one of the masters of the art. Dryden, indeed, says, in his Preface to Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace: I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such exposi- tions of my authors as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Where I have taken away some of their expressions and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin would not appear so shining in the English. And where I have enlarged them, I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him; or, at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he probably would have written. For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. The critical judgments of IDryden, whom Johnson justly calls the father of English criticism, are unquestionably always deserving of respect; but in this passage he is but inventing an excuse for his own practice, rather than laying down a correct principle. His own practice, in truth, not infrequently leads him into what Cowley, in a defence of a similar prac- tice of his own, judiciously terms a libertine way of ren- dering. There could hardly be a more misleading and fal- lacious rule of translation, than that the translator is to make his author as charming as possibly he can, and to attempt to write in the style in which, were the author living, and of the translators nation, he probably would have written. IDrydens latest follower, in translating Virgil, Professor Conington, one of the best scholars of the present generation, has, however, laid down the same rule in the Preface to his re- cent translation of the IEneid. What is graceful in Latin, 1867.] Longfellows Translatioi~ of the Divine Comedy. 129 he says, will not always be graceful in a translation; and to be graceful is one of the first duties of a translator of the IEneid. And he asserts that the translator should apply a principle of compensation, by strengthening his version in any way best suited to his powers, so long as it be not repugnant to the genius of the original, and trusting that the effect of the whole will be seen to have been cared for, though the claims of the parts may appear to have been neglected. But this again is a translators defence of his own practice; and Mr. Conington, like Dryden, has produced an English neid, of which it may be fairly said, that whatever its merits, (and in each instance they are unquestionably great,) its tone is not Virgilian, while the way of rendering is at times libertine enough. Happily we can set the authority of IDryden himself against his own doctrine and against his own practice. In the Preface to Translations from Ovids Epistles, he says: The sense of an author, generally speaking, is to be .sacred and inviolable. If the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant, it is his character to be so; and if I retrench it, he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied, that he receives advantage by this lopping of his superfluous branches; but I rejoin, that a tr~inslator has no such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no privi- lege to alter features and lineament, under pretence that his picture will look better. Perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact, if the eyes or nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble the original But if, after what I have urged, it be thought by better judges, that the praise of a translation consists in adding new beauties to the piece, thereby to recompense the loss.which it sustains by change of language, I shall be willing to be taught better, and to recant. This diversity of Drydens opinion, as thus expressed on dif- ferent occasions by himself, is but an illustration of the diver- sity of judgment which still obtains among critics generally as to the end of translation and its proper method. Mi. Arnold, in his first lecture On Translating Homer, says: It is dis- puted what aim a translator should propose to himself in deal- ing with his original. Even this preliminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such that voL. cv. NO. 216. 9 130 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. The real original is in this case, it is said, taken as a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our country- men as the original may be conceived to have affected its nat- ural hearers. On the other hand, Mr. Newman, who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, declares that he aims at precisely the opposite; to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be; so that it may never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different ma- terial. The translators first duty, says Mr. Newman, is a historical one, to be faithful. Probably both sides would agree that the translators first duty is to be faithful; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists. Mr. Arnold goes on to say, that he shall not the least con- cern himself with theories of translation as such; but he immediately proceeds ~to state his own theory, that it is the translators business to reproduce the effect of the original; and afterwards, his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of the work he is translating. This is but a vague direction, and it remains vague in spite of Mr. Arnolds efforts to give it definiteness. The effect of a great and sustained poem depends in great measure upon qualities which cannot be translated. It can no more be transferred from one language to another, than the effect of a great picture can be rendered by the best engraving of it. It is in the failure to recognize this truth that the main trouble exists in regard to the work of the translator. Translators have not understood the limits of their art, and, in the attempt to compass the impossible, have confused the whole question of translation, and have been led to form the most futile theories in regard to it. The impossibility of translating effects lies, as we have already said, in the nature of language itself, in the different meanings which corresponding words have acquired in different nations, and in the change which the progress of civilization makes in the ideas which men of one nation, but of 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 131 a different age, associate with the same words. A poem is not simply a pure production of an absolute poetic spirit which remains the same, unchanged and invariable in all places and times. Like all human works, it has historical relations which determine the manifestation even of its most abstract poetic qualities. It has its definite place in the annals of the culture of mankind, and its character is not less historic than poetic. M. Littr6, in a paper upon Dante, in the first volume of his admirable essays upon the History of the French Language, has some excellent remarks upon this point, in speaking of the difficulties which attend the translation of a work belonging to a remote epoch, and especially of those which arise from the difference between a modern and an old tongue. He says: Modern language is more abstract, words are more remote from their roots, have come nearer to playing the simple part of conventional signs, and consequently, if I may use the ex- pression, are less speaking. The very qualities which the language possesses are of little service to it; it can both an- alyze and generalize, but its analysis is too subtile and too advanced, its generalization is too elevated and too scientific, to allow it to accommodate itself easily to archaic thoughts. Human thought such as it was in the time of Homer is not that of the time of Dante; and in like manner that of the time of the Florentine poet is not that of the nineteenth century. Language reflects thought from age to age; its shades vary; and when we bring them side by side, and endeavor to make them correspond, we are struck with the disparity between the ancient and the modern shade To translate an author of heroic antiquity or of the Middle Ages is an undertaking which is complicated by the difference of time. It is es- pecially in translating that we perceive that a writer of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, for example, neither thinks nor expresses himself as we do. At every instant he sur- prises us by his ideas, his turn of thought, his unexpected forms of speech. As long as we believed that there was but one good literary manner, which for us was that of the seven- teenth century, there was but one mode of translation, to render the ancient authors, not such as they were, but such as they should have been, that is, to conform them to that unique 132 Lon~gfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, type of correctness and elegance; but at present, history, in making us understand the necessary relation between times and forms, has brought about a change in taste, and shown us the tradition of types of beauty. Thus the translations in which our fathers delighted displease us, and various ways are tried to satisfy the demand made by the feeling for these old compositions. The change in taste here pointed out by M. Littr6 is also noticed by M. Yaperean in the last volume of his Annie Litteraire. We require to-day, he says, the ideas, the sentiments, the very language of the author, even though the language be brutal, the sentiments odious,.the ideas absurd; formerly a translation was required to give to the ancient author something of our habits of thought and style, in order to assure him a good reception from the public. This difference is due in great part to the advance of criti- cism, and to the application of the historical method to the study of literature. The deepest interest which a work of literary or any other art has for us, is not that which apper- tains to it as an isolated effort of human genius, but that which it possesses as one of a consecutive and allied series of monuments of thought and feeling, and as one of the records of the progress of the race in its slow development from age to age. To understand and appreciate it aright, to recognize its real merit, we require to know it exactly as it is; we desire it not remodelled according to modern ideas, but in its original form, with the qualities incident to it as a product of its own time. We seek the great works of other periods not merely for delight, but for instruction, that we may learn something from them of man, something more than it is their direct purpose to afford. We read Homer and Dante, not only as the greatest of poets, but as men who, in setting forth their thoughts and imaginations, set forth also those by which man- kind were filled and moved at the period at which they com- posed their works. Under the form of the Iliad or the Divine Comedy we seek the heart of man, and, if we cannot read the Greek or the Italian poem, we demand that the translator should give to us, not what a poet in our days might write upon their themes, but the exact substance of what Homer or Dante actually wrote. Popes Homer may still be read, but only by 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 133 the student of Pope, not by the student of Homer; and though Carys translation of the Divine Comedy is far nearer to the original than Popes Iliad or Odyssey, it is still too remote from Dante to furnish what the literary taste of our day requires. The spirit of realism, which is so marked a characteristic of the so-called formative or representative arts in these times, prevails also in literary art. Truth not only to the outer and actual fact, but also to the essence, and to the facts of imagi- nation, is the one thing needful alike in original composition and in the reproduction of the works of other men. There is a wide difference between genuine realism and that literalism which is sometimes mistaken for it, as wide as the differ- ence between truth and fact, between the spirit and the letter; and the good translator is not he that sticks most closely to the letter, but he that gives the meaning of the letter most nearly. Mr. Longfellow has performed his work in full sympathy with this prevailing spirit, and with entire recognition of the force of these distinctions.* His translation is the most faith- ful version of Dante that has ever been made. He is himself too much a poet not to feel that, in one sense, it is impossible to translate a poem; but he is also too much a poet not to feel that sympathy with his author which enables him to transfuse as much as possible of the subtile spirit of poesy into a version of which the first object was to be faithful to the authors meaning. His work is the work of a scholar who is also a poet. Desirous to give to a reader unacquainted with the Italian the means of knowing precisely what Dante wrote, he has followed the track of his master step by step, foot by foot, and has tried, so far as the genius of translation allowed, to show also how Dante wrote. The poem is still a poem in his version, and, though destitute, by necessity, of some of the * Writing thirty years ago in the pages of this journal, and following Goethe in his statement of the two prevailing modes of translation, Mr. Longfellow describes one as that by which we transport ourselves over to the author of a foreign nation, and adopt his situation, his mode of speaking, and his peculiarities, while the other is that by which the author is brought to us in such a manner that we regard him as our own, and it is interesting to find that even at that time he gives in his fall adherence to the former method. 134 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, most beautiful qualifies of the original, it does not fall to charm with its rhythm, as well as to delight and instruct with its thought. To give up the rhyme, that triple bond of sound and sense, which by its indefinable charm brings the soul of the reader into a frame which fits it to feel as well as to understand the poetry, which, like the subtile harmonies of music, quickens the heart, and rouses the imagination, with a sensation of the intimate and intrinsic union of spirit and form, to give up this source of power and delight, which no other poet ever drew from so abundantly as Dante, is indeed to give up what no other devices of art can supply. I give Dante my highest praise, says Mr. Carlyle, when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is, in all senses, genuinely a song. In the very sound of it there is a canto fermo; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terza nina doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt. All this is lost in the version; but no one who knows the scanty resources of English in rhymes as compared with Italian, and no one who is familiar with the English versions in which the translator has endeavored to preserve the triple rhyme, the versions of Cayley, of Thomas, of Ramsay, of Ford, and has studied their effect, will regret that Mr. Longfellow abstained from the impracticable task of triple rhyming. But, adds Mr. Carlyle, the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth and rapt passion and sincerity makes it musical ; go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural har- mony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. And this deeper music is what a translator may render and reproduce, is what Mr. Longfellow has rendered and reproduced. The great risk which the translator runs in seeking to repro- duce the substance rather than the form of his original, is lest he produce a work of erudition rather than of poetry. The avoidance of this danger depends on his own genius, judgment, and feeling. He must have a subtile perception and delicate tact of the unchanging and universal elements of poetry, and of the individual characteristics of his authors style; and his 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 135 perception and tact must be refined by wide and careful study of the qualities of language and of the use of words. With- out these faculties his version may be literal, but it will not be faithful in the highest sense. To render a word in one lan- guage by its etymological equivalent in another, does not al- ways answer; the associations that have become connected with it in one may be so widely different from those which belong to it in the other, that it may possess a wholly diverse significance. The same principle applies to diction and forms of expression as to words; the same forms- in two languages are not the invariable equivalents one of the other. For in- stance, the character of the three opening lines of the third canto of the Inferno would be utterly ruined by a translation into English which should give the precise form of the si va. Per me si va nella citta dolente; Per me si va nell eterno dolore; Per me si va tra la perduta gente. * Truth to the substance of a poem is not to be obtained by pedantic literalness. It is only by a sympathy with the essen- tial spirit of the original, and by capacity to express this sym- pathy in his version, that the translator can attain the end he should have steadily in view. This sympathy will be shown in style. To render Homer as Pope did into heroic verse, or as Mr. Worsley did into the Spenserian stanza, or to render Virgil as Mr. Conington has done into the metre of Mar- mion and The Lord of the Isles, is an indication of a * Mr. Longfellow has rendered these lines with essential truth Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost. An objection has been made to this version on account of the use of the words dolent and dole for dolente and dolore; the Italian possessing greater simplicity and familiarity than their English etymological equivalents. But here the translator doubtless was determined in his choice by the recurrence in the seventeenth line of le genti dolorose, which is properly translated by the people dolorous; and also by the fact that neither grieving nor woful sufficiently expresses the weight and dignity of dolente. Dr. Parsons renders the passage with vigor, but loses the powerful effect of the repetition of the sound and sense of dole, and closes with a line which fails to give the character of the original Through me you reach the city of despair: Through me eternal wretchedness ye find: Through me among perditions race ye fare. 136 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, want of sympathy with the qualities of the style of Homer and of Virgil. The directness and simplicity of Dantes diction require of the translator a like directness and simplicity. The difficulty of preserving these qualities in a rhymed version is such as to make such a version practically impossible; and the sympathy of the translator is shown by his discarding rhyme for the sake of preserving more important elements of style. Mr. Arnold cites the Divina Commedia as one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which have been pro- duced in modern times; and though the phrase is vague, it indicates that this poem is distinguished by a style so marked as to be almost solitary in excellence. The merit of Dantes style is its naturalness. His art is perfect in its truth. What he sees, or feels, or thinks, that he says. There is scarcely a passage in his poem that is obscure in its expression, or per- plexed in diction. The dark passages are dark from the subtlety or remoteness of thought, or from hidden allusion, but never from want of plainness in the words. There is lit- tle contention in regard to the construction of his lines. His subject is almost uniformly grave, and his style corresponds with it in gravity and dignity; but its tones are as various as those of an organ, and his hand sweeps over the keys with a masters power, drawing from each pipe the note which goes to form with the rest the perfect harmony of his majestic compo- sition. In sweetness and grace Dante is as unsurpassed as in force and elevation of expression. The varieties of human passion and feeling from tenderness to wrath, from pity to contempt, from love to hate are reproduced in the changing moods of his verse; and yet over all prevails his intense indi- viduality, so-that a verse of his is stamped as surely with his mint~mark as a verse of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the only other poet who compares with him in universal range and individuality of feeling and of style, that is, in other words) in truth to nature. If the translators diction be forced, involved, or artificial, if his language be quaint, antiquated, or ill-chosen, he fails to translate Dante aright. The various and frequently changing tones of the poem can be reproduced, so far as it is possible to 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 137 reproduce them at all, only by following simply the manner of Dantes expression. Even the order of his words is not to be changed, except when the idiom of the two languages differs, or when another order than that of the original is more natu- ral to the translators tongue, and produces in it an effect of greater simplicity and directness. The translator is as much at fault if he arbitrarily substitutes a form of expression different from that which Dante used, as if he introduced fancies or images of his own in place of those of the poet. But the translators success is not to be achieved by formal fidelity and lip-service: it must finally and absolutely depend on his genuine respect for, and sympathy with, his author, and on his poetic sense, faculty, and culture. It is when judged by this test that the merit of Mr. Longfellows work is most conspicuous. The method of translation which Mr. Longfellow has chosen is free alike from the reproach of pedantic literal- ism and of unfaithful license. In freeing himself from the clog of rhyme, he secures the required ease of expression; and in selecting a verse of the same metre as that of the original, and in keeping himself to the same number of verses, he binds himself to the pregnant conciseness of the poem, and to a close following of its varied tone. His special sympathy and genius guide him with almost unerring truth, and display themselves constantly in the rare felicity of his rendering. The work has been attempted before, in English, after a similar method, by Mr. Pollock, in a translation of the whole poem, and by Mr. W. M. IRossetti, in a translation of its first division. Of these versions we spoke in the article to which we have already referred, On Dante and his latest English Translators. In German the same course was followed by King John of Sax- ony, in the excellent version which he published under the pseudonyme of Philalethes, and more recently by Carl Witte, the most eminent and devoted of living students of Dante. The motives which determined two such thorough scholars to adopt this line-for-line, unrhyn~ed mode of translating, may well be regarded as conclusive as to its being the one best fitted to the German and English tongues. The version of Mr. IRossetti is that with which Mr. Longfel- lows will naturally be compared, since both have been made 138 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, upon the same general plan, and guided by a like theory of the duties of a translator. The number of lines which are identi- cal in both versions is a curious proof of the straightforward simplicity of Dantes style.* Mr. iRossettis, which deserves very high praise for its general vigor and literal closeness, seems to us far behind that of his American competitor in ele- gance as well as substantial fidelity. Mr. Rossetti appears pur- posely to have made his versification crabbed, and he is over- fond of words that may be called uncouth both in the obsolete and current sense of the term. Not seldom we are brought up with verses like these: In the time of the false and lying gods. I come from where I would return unto. Then said: It grieves me more thou st caught me in The misery, & c. I m put so far adown because from out Remember Pier da Medicina, if Mr. IRossetti seems as designedly to have made his verses end abruptly, as Dante prolonged his with the undulation of female rhymes. Mr. Longfellow, like the King of Saxony in his German version, has given more musical motion and lyrical sentiment to his verse by imitating the practice of his original in this respect. Accordingly it should seem as if the one had chosen a dialect more infused with Saxon, and the other with Latin. Yet this will not be found true on examination. Mr. Rossetti is sometimes Latin enough to please Dr. Johnson. For example, at the end of Canto III., he translates Dantes simple La terra lagrimosa diede vento, The tearful country exhalated wind. Mr. Longfellow is far finer: The land of tears gave forth a blast of wind. So in Canto V. Mr. IRossetti translates La hufera infernal che mai non resta Mena gli spirti con la sua rapina Voltando e percotendo li molesta, * It should be remembered that, though Mr. Longfellows Inferno was not published till 1867, a few copies of it, substantially the same, were printed early enough to be sent to the Dante Festival at Florence in May, 1565. The version was completed before the publication of Mr. Ilossettis. It is on a copy of this ear- lier edition that our remark in the text is predicated. 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 139 The infernal hurricane which never rests Driveth the spirits with its virulence; Rotating it molests, and smiting them Mr. Longfellow gives the passage thus The infernal hurricane that never rests Hurtles the spirits onward with its rapine; Whirling them round and smiting, it molests them, which is as close to the sense and far more in the spirit of the original. Both have intensified mena. In the same canto Mr. IRossetti makes Francesca call Dante 0 gracious and benignant animal, thereby not only making her guilty of discourtesy, but losing the pathos of the original word animal. When we remember Francescas femininely regretful allusion to the beila persona che le fu tolta, the words living creature, as Mr. Longfellow has rightly rendered animal, become full of nature and feeling. The word should be Englished in the same way at the begin- ning of the second canto, where both translators give us ani- mals instead, thus seeming, as the word is ordinarily used, to exclude men from those whom the twilight takes from their toils, and losing altogether the antithesis implied by the poet. Mr. Longfellows exquisite taste has saved him from certain oddities in language to which Mr. Rossetti seems prone. We have such phrases as conversing matters, the cruel beast fell suchlike to the earth, Threw it withinside of the greedy tubes (the throats of Cerberus), Oertalcing more of the distressful coast, Crying each other eke their shameful catch, In whom doth avarice custom its excess, Within the lofty fosses on we reached, abovehead of us, what- like, and many more. In Canto XXIX. we have Out of the mouth of each a sinners feet Were in excess (soperchiava). In Canto XXI., Non far sopra la pegola sopercliio, rendered by see There be no surplus of thee oer the pitch. And in Canto XXV., troppa materia becomes extra matter. 140 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, Often Mr. Rossettis oddities arise from a misjudging desire of literal fidelity, as in Canto XXIV., where we read, Which crashes suchlike smitings in revenge, though we can hardly so explain and heavy so As t were that Frederick put them on of straw, where Dante has a simple che. But in spite of Mr. Rossettis anxious fidelity, Mr. Longfel- low is really the more accurate of the two. We may some- times differ with the latter as to the choice he makes between two readings or interpretations; but that he has exactly given the meaning of the Italian, or one of its meanings, we are never in doubt. We cannot say this of Mr. Rossetti. We have not, it is true, examined his translation critically, with a view to this special quality, but enough slips have caught our eye to justify what we have said. For example, he translates the verse, Quinci non passa mai anima bona, From here not ever doth a good soul pass, which is not true to Dantes conception. Good souls might pass from there, as Trajans did. Through here, is the sense of quinci, as where the angel in purgatory says, entrate quinci. So, where he is describing the spirits who were trans- versed, as he oddly calls it, he translates dalle reni by from the reins, though da has here its not unusual meaning of to- ward. His translating provi se sa (VIII. 92) by prove if he know, may be defended, but it is clear to us that sapere is here used in its sense of to be able (can and ken in English show the analogy), and that let him try if he can is much more natural. In the same canto (113, 114), for Ma ei non stette 1k con essi guari Che ciascun dentro a pruova si ricorse, we have But he did not stay with them there for long, For every one ran back a race within, which, to say nothing of the obscurity of the last verse, is not what Dante says. The meaning is, But hardly did he stand with them (i. e. hardly had he arrived) when each gat him in 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 141 as fast as he could. Sometimes his deviations seem merely made to lengthen the verse, as in Canto V., where he trans- lates tignemmo by had to stain; and in Canto VI. has the awkward phrase But when thou art to be in the sweet world, where the original says simply sarai. This would explain his telling us of Erichtho, that she to their bodies was recalling (richiamava) souls, as if she were doing it for the nonce, instead of being wont to do it. But how can he make and they thus Together run in vengeance as in wrath, (which we confess our inability to understand,) out of cosi insieme Alla vendetta vanno come all ira ? Of his surprising whimsy about al giudizio divin passion porta, we shall say nothing. We have no desire. to hunt for flaws in a version which was certainly the best that had ap- peared before Mr. Longfellows, and which in many passages rivals, in some surpasses his. But translations are for the general reader; and, all other considerations apart, Mr. Long- fellows has eminently that merit of readableness which Mr. Rossettis in our opinion as eminently lacks. It is of course impossible to convey by extracts an adequate impression of a work so extended as Mr. Longfellows trans- lation; but we can illustrate, perhaps, some of the qualities which combine to give it its pre-eminence, by taking a few passages from different portions of his volumes. We have spoken of naturalness, simplicity, and directness as essential attributes of a good translation of Dante. Mr. Long- fellows version might be opened at random with the assurance that the page would exhibit these qualities. It would be im- possible to render more exactly the famous episode of Ugolino than it is done in the following powerful verses: Thou hast to know I was Count llJgolino, And this one was Ruggieri the Archbishop; Now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbor. 142 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, That, by effect of his malicious thoughts, Trusting in him I was made prisoner, And after put to death, I need not say; But neertheless what thou canst not have heard, That is to say, how cruel was my death, Hear shalt thou, and shalt know if he has wronged me. A narrow perforation in the mew, Which bears because of me the title of Famine, And in which others still must be locked up, Had shown me through its opening many moons Already, when I dreamed the evil dream Which of the future rent for me the veil. This one appeared to me as lord and master, Hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain For which the Pisans cannot Lucca see. With sleuth-hounds gaunt, and eager, and well trained, Gualandi with Sismondi and Lanfranchi He had sent out before him to the front. After brief course seemed unto me forespent The father and the sons, and with sharp tushes It seemed to me I saw their flanks ripped open. When I before the morrow was awake, Moaning amid their sleep I heard my sons Who with me were, and asking after bread. Cruel indeed art thou, if yet thou grieve not, Thinking of what my heart foreboded me, And weepst thou not, what art thou wont to weep at? They were awake now, and the hour drew nigh At which our food used to be brought to us, And through his dream was each one apprehensive; And I heard locking up the under door Of the horrible tower; whereat without a word I gazed into the faces of my sons. I wept not, I within so turned to stone; They wept; and darling little Anselm mine Said: Thou dost gaze so, father, what doth ail thee? Still not a tear I shed, nor answer made All of that day, nor yet the night thereafter, Until another sun rose on the world. As now a little glimmer made its way Into the dolorous prison, and I saw Upon four faces my own very aspect, Both of my hands in agony I bit; And, thinking that I did it from desire Of eating, on a sudden they uprose, And said they: Father, much less pain t will give us If thou do eat of us; thyself didst clothe us With this poor flesh, and do thou strip it off. 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 143 I calmed me then, not to make them more sad. That day we all were silent, and the next. Ah! obdurate earth, wherefore didst thou not open? When we had come unto the fourth day, Gaddo Threw himself down outstretched before my feet, Saying, My father, why dost thou not help me? And there he died; and, as thou seest me, I saw the three fall one by one, between The fifth day and the sixth; whence I betook me, Already blind, to groping over each, And three days called them after they were dead; Then hunger did what sorrow could not do. Inferno, XXXIII. 13 75. The skill and beauty with which the translator has rendered the softer tones of the poem is not less striking than the vigor and strength of such a passage as that just cited. We quote the opening verses of the twenty-eighth canto of Purgatory, descriptive of the Terresfrial Paradise: Eager already to search in and round The heavenly forest, dense and living-green, Which tempered to the eyes the new-born day, Withouten more delay I left the bank, Taking the level country slowly, slowly Over the soil that everywhere breathes fragrance. A softly-breathing air, that no mutation Had in itself, upon the forehead smote me iNo heavier blow than of a gentle wind, Whereat the branches, lightly tremulous, Did all of them bow downward toward that side Where its first shadow casts the Holy Mountain; Yet not from their upright direction swayed, So that the little birds upon their tops Should leave the practice of each art of theirs; But with full ravishment the hours of prime, Singing, received they in the midst of leaves, That ever bore a burden to their rhymes, Such as from branch to branch goes gathering on Through the pine forest on the shores of Chiassi, When Eolus unlooses the Sirocco. Already my slow steps had carried me Into the ancient wood so far, that I Could not perceive where I had entered it. And lo! my further course a stream cut off, Which towrd the left hand with its little waves Bent down the grass that on its margin sprang. 144 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, All waters that on earth most limpid are Would seem to have within themselves some mixture Compared with that which nothing doth conceal, Although it moves on with a brown, brown current Under the shade perpetual, that never Ray of the sun lets in, nor of the moon. With feet I stayed, and with mine eyes I passed Beyond the rivulet, to look upon The great variety of the fresh may. And there appeared to me (even as appears Suddenly something that doth turn aside Through very wonder every other thought) A lady all alone, who went along Singing and culling floweret after floweret, With which her pathway was all painted over. Ab, beauteous lady, who in rays of love Dost warm thyself, if I may trust to looks, Which the hearts witnesses are wont to be, May the desire come unto thee to draw iNear to this rivers bank, I said to her, So much that I may hear what thou art singing. Thou makest me remember where and what Proserpina that moment was when lost Her mother her, and she herself the Spring. As turns herself, with feet together pressed And to the ground, a lady who is dancing, And hardly puts one foot before the other, On the vermilion and the yellow flowerets She turned towards me, not in other wise Than maiden who her modest eyes casts down; And my entreaties made to be content, So near approaching, that the dulcet sound Came unto me together with its meaning. As soon as she was where the grasses are Bathed by the waters of the beauteous river, To lift her eyes she granted me the boon. I do not think there shone so great a light Under the lids of Venus, when transfixed By her own son, beyond his usual custom! Erect upon the other bank she smiled, Bearing full many colors in her hands, Which that high land produces without seed. It would be difficult to surpass such translation as this; and the more closely it is scrutinized and compared with the origi- nal, the more excellent will it appear. 1867.] Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. 145 Mr. Longfellow has proved that an almost literal rendering is not incompatible with an exquisite poetic charm, and al- though he may in some instances have followed the exact or- der of the Italian phrase too closely for the best effect, his diction is in the main graceful and idiomatic. We would gladly enter into a minute criticism to illustrate these general positions; but there is little need to defend propositions which few readers will be inclined to question, and of the truth of which every page affords proof. Let one instance stand for many. We set the last lines of the thirty-first canto of Purga- tory side by side in the Italian and the English Volgi, Beatrice, volgi gli occhi santi, Era la sua canzone, al tuo fedele Che, per vederti, ha mossi passi tanti. Per grazia fa noi grazia che disvele A lui la bocca tua, si che discerna La seconda bellezza che tu cele. o isplendor di viva luce eterna, Chi pallido si fece sotto 1 ombra Si di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna, Che non paresse aver la mente ingombra, Tentando a render te qual tu paresti Li dove armonizzando ii ciel t adombra, Quando nell aere aperto ti solvesti ? Turn, Beatrice, 0 turn thy holy eyes, Such was their song, unto thy faithful one, Who has to see thee ta~en so many steps. In grace do us the grace that thou unveil Thy face to him, so that he may discern The second beauty which thou dost conceal. O splendor of the living light eternal! Who underneath the shadow of Parnassus Has grown so pale, or drunk so at its cistern, He would not seem to have his mind encumbered Strivingto paint thee as thou didst appear, Where the harmonious heaven oershadowed thee, When in the open air thou didst unveil ? In fine, Mr. Longfellow, in rendering the substance of Dantes poem, has succeeded in giving also so far as art and genius could give it the spirit of Dantes poetry. Fitted for the work as few men ever were, by gifts of nature, by sympathy, by an unrivalled faculty of poetic appreciation, and by long and voL. Cv.No. 216. 10 146 Longfellows Translation of the Divine Comedy. [July, thorough culture, he has brought his matured powers, in their full vigor, to its performance, and has produced an incompara- ble translation, a poem that will take rank among the great English poems. With the increase of general cultivation his work will be more and more highly prized; and it runs no risk of being superseded or supplanted by any more successful achievement for which it must itself have prepared the way. It is a lasting addition to the choicest works of our literature. It will not be surprising, indeed, if many readers who take up these volumes with indefinite expectations, attracted to them by the fame of Dante, and by their anticipation of pleasure from whatever Mr. Longfellow may produce, should experience, as they read, a certain sense of disappointment, and fail to receive the easy gratification for which they looked. But the fault will be in themselves, not in the author or the translator. Their disappointment will arise from their own want of culture, and of consequent ability to appreciate the true merit of the poem. The Divine Comedy is not a book to be popular, in the sense in which the Lady of the Lake, or the Idyls of the King, or Evangeline, is popular. To be understood aright it requires study, and to be appreciated at its real worth it demands of its foreign and modern reader both quickness and breadth of sympathy, by which he may be enabled to enter into thoughts, beliefs, and conditions of feeling remote from his own, and into a life and character unfamiliar to his experience. Without study and without insight he cannot reap the delight and instruction which the poem offers to him who possesses these qualifications for its enjoyment. But to one who has fitted himself by study, and whose nature enables him to reap the profit of his toil, Mr. Longfellows version will be the means by which, while ignorant of the language of the origi- nal, he may enter into aiid take possession as his own of one of those rare works of genius which share with Nature herself in the power to administer vital nutriment to the spirit of man, and to afford continual delight adapted to his various moods. Dante did not write to please alone, but to instruct and to help as well; and in spite of change of time and circumstance and thought, his poem remains, and will remain, of the highest ser- vice to the highest men. 1867.] Longfellows Translation of Ike Divine Comedy. 147 The Notes and illustrations which Mr. Longfellow has ap- pended to his translation form a comment upon the poem such as is not elsewhere to be found. It is not only elucidatory of its obscurities, and explanatory of its allusions, but it is a body of really interesting and valuable remark upon the poet and his poem, collected from a wide field of learning, and the fruit of years of preparation and study. Avoiding controversy upon disputed points, Mr. Longfellow states the grounds of his own interpretation with brevity, and occasionally refers to the bitter disputes of the pugnacious Italian commentators with a hu- morous enjoyment of the extravagant exaggerations of their irascible pens. He does not propose any mystical system of interpretation of the poem, which sullstitutes the jargon of a sect for the simple directness and transparent significance of the poets meaning; but after stating the various interpreta- tions which have been given of the perplexing enigmas and al- legories of some of the cantos, he selects that which seems to afford the most rational explanation, or he leaves his reader to determine for himself, with full knowledge of the case. The notes are full of pleasant learning, set forth with that grace and beauty of style which are characteristic of Mr. Longfel- lows prose; and the long extracts which he gives from Car~ lyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, and other eminent writers, make his comment a thesaurus of the best judgments that exist in Eng- lish concerning the poet and his poem. Out of the much that has been written concerning Dante, much of the best is here preserved. Yet, after reading it all, one who has studied the Divine Comedy, sharing in the least the spirit in which it was written; who has entered into it so far as to understand how truly it became its author to speak of it as the sacred poem To which both heaven and earth have set their hand; who has heard The voices of the city and the sea, The voices of the mountains and the pines, Repeat the song, till the familiar lines Are footpaths for the thought of Italy; and who has drawn from it any part of that nourishment it is able to supply to the will and the intellect ; such a one 148 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, cannot but feel how little worth what is written about Dante possesses, save as it makes him and his works more familiar and better understood. Dante is his own best interpreter; and of the followers of such a master he serves him best who, like Mr. Longfellow, translates him with such fidelity that new proselytes may in their own language hear his wondrous word. ART. V. THE JUDICIARY OF NEW YORK CITY. THE disgraceful character of the municipal government of New York is notorious. The absolute exclusion of all honest men from any practical control of affairs in that city,* and the supremacy in the Common Council of pickpockets, prize-fight- ers, emigrant runners, pimps, and the lowest class of liquor- dealers, are facts which admit of no question. But many re- spectable citizens of New York have been accustomed to con- sole themselves with the belief that at %least one department of the local government remained incorrupt; that the judiciary could still be depended upon; and that, whatever might be the fate of the public at the hands of aldermen, justice was yet impartially administered between man and man. How far this belief is justified by the facts, we shall leave to the judg- ment of our readers, after they have considered the very small portion of those facts which we are able to disclose. The large amount of legal business concentrated in the city of New York has made it necessary to establish in it a consid- erable number of courts, a brief account of which will materi- ally aid those of our readers who do not reside in that city to comprehend the subject. For the sake of brevity, we shall give a merely general statement of the jurisdiction of these * The present Mayor is a gentleman of high character; but he is comparatively powerless. So a few members of the Common Council are honest and nupurchas- able; but they are too few to constitute any check upon the majority, even when a three-fourths vote is required.

148 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, cannot but feel how little worth what is written about Dante possesses, save as it makes him and his works more familiar and better understood. Dante is his own best interpreter; and of the followers of such a master he serves him best who, like Mr. Longfellow, translates him with such fidelity that new proselytes may in their own language hear his wondrous word. ART. V. THE JUDICIARY OF NEW YORK CITY. THE disgraceful character of the municipal government of New York is notorious. The absolute exclusion of all honest men from any practical control of affairs in that city,* and the supremacy in the Common Council of pickpockets, prize-fight- ers, emigrant runners, pimps, and the lowest class of liquor- dealers, are facts which admit of no question. But many re- spectable citizens of New York have been accustomed to con- sole themselves with the belief that at %least one department of the local government remained incorrupt; that the judiciary could still be depended upon; and that, whatever might be the fate of the public at the hands of aldermen, justice was yet impartially administered between man and man. How far this belief is justified by the facts, we shall leave to the judg- ment of our readers, after they have considered the very small portion of those facts which we are able to disclose. The large amount of legal business concentrated in the city of New York has made it necessary to establish in it a consid- erable number of courts, a brief account of which will materi- ally aid those of our readers who do not reside in that city to comprehend the subject. For the sake of brevity, we shall give a merely general statement of the jurisdiction of these * The present Mayor is a gentleman of high character; but he is comparatively powerless. So a few members of the Common Council are honest and nupurchas- able; but they are too few to constitute any check upon the majority, even when a three-fourths vote is required. 1867.] The Judiciary of New York City. 149 courts, not strictly accurate from a lawyers point of view, but sufficiently so for our present purpose. The Supreme Court of the State, which is the highest court of original jurisdiction, consists practically of eight distinct tri- bunals; the State being divided into eight districts, of which the city forms one, and each district electing four judges, ex- cept the city, which, since 1852, has elected five. All litiga- tion beginning in one of these districts is confined to it, as long as the cause remains in the Supreme Court; and none of the twenty-seven judges living outside the district can interfere with the controversy. An appeal lies from the final judgment in a cause to the Court of Appeals, a tribunal of eight judges, representing the whole State; but not an eighth of the actions brought ever reach that court; and almost all questions of practice are decided by the courts below, without the possi- bility of appeal. In addition to the Supreme Court, there are in the city two tribunals of substantially co-ordinate jurisdiction; having cog- nizance of all civil suits in which the defendants reside or are served with process in the city, or in which the subject of the action is properly situated therein. These courts are the Su- perior Court and the Court of Common Pleas, in both of which a great amount of litigation is carried on. The former court now consists of six judges, though from its first organiza- tion in 1828, down to 1849, it had only three members. The latter court is in substance, though not in name or form, the oldest in the State, having been established by the Dutch, in 1653, under a different name. It acquired its present name in 1821, and has consisted of three judges since 1839~ There is also a Marine Court (fitly named, its law being well adapted to marines), with three justices, whose jurisdic- tion is limited to claims of five hundred dollars or less; and eight civil justices, having jurisdiction over actions of less im- portance, within their respective districts, each of which in- cludes two or three wards. The business of proving wills and settling the estates of deceased persons is under the charge of a Surrogate for the county. The criminal courts of the city are the Oyer and Terminer, which is held by a justice of the Supreme Court; the Court of 150 The Judiciary of New York GUy. [July, General Sessions, which is held by the Recorder and the City Judge alternately; the Court of Special Sessions, held by two police justices together; and the Police Justices Courts, held in different districts of the city. The first two courts have ju- risdiction over offences of all kinds, but only try the graver charges of crime, upon which a jury trial is necessary. The other courts have jurisdiction over petty offences, except for the mere purpose of holding prisoners to bail, or committing them to await further action. Since 1846, all these officers have been elected by the peo- ple. The civil and police justices are chosen by small dis- tricts, each containing from two to four wards. The other judges are elected by the city at large. For some years after the introduction of the elective sys- tem, the candidates for the more important judicial offices were, with one or two exceptions, men of high character and respect- able abilities. The first judges elected to the Supreme Court by the city of New York were la*yers of more than ordinary ability, and one of them had already served upon the bench for twenty years. The Superior Court, for ten or twelve years after its reorganization, steadily grew in public esteem, and far out- shone the reputation which it had attained under the old system. The Court of Common Pleas certainly did not retrograde; the Surrogates Court acquired a national fame; and the police and justices courts were but little worse than they had been before, though it must be admitted that they were bad enough. The change for the worse which has since taken place may be attributed chiefly to three causes; namely, the immense in- crease of the foreign population, the amount of patronage at the disposal of the judges, and, singular as it may seem, the attempt of good men to use the judiciary as a means of pro- tection against municipal robbery. The first of these causes, which is indeed the almost insuper- able obstacle to reform in the city government, is a familiar fact which needs no demonstration. The last census showed that there were in the city Th7,4Th foreign-born voters, and only 51,500 native ones. Since then, the naturalizations have been so many, that, if the census were taken again at this time, it would show about 100,000 foreign-born voters to 60,000 native The Judiciary of New York City. 151 ones, or in that proportion. It is not, however, the mere fact that foreigners are thus largely in the majority which makes good government so difficult; nor is it even the unanimity with which they support the Democratic party. Good government is maintained in many districts of the United States in which foreigners are largely predominant; and there are thousands of Democrats in New York who would much prefer honest officials of their own party to dishonest ones. But an im- mense majority of the foreign population of New York are of an ignorant and demoralized class; and their mode of living by no means tends to their improvement. John Wesley wise- ly said that cleanliness was next to godliness; and judged by this standard, thousands of tenement-houses in New York are to the last degree ungodly. It is impossible that such places should be the homes of intelligent and truly patriotic electors. These people are not degraded by poverty, for in fact they are not so poor as are thousands of excellent men in the agricul- tural districts; but they are hopelessly degraded by dirt, foul air, and drink. Accordingly, this immense class, comprising more than two thirds of the foreign voters, not only support Democratic candi- dates, but, as between two Democrats, almost always prefer the worst. It was such men who thrice elected Fernando Wood to the Mayoralty, and have twice sent him to Congress. It was by the votes of this class that Judge Bosworth, a life-long Dem- ocrat, was ejected from the ,Superior Court in 1863, although his opponent did not, in all probability, receive the votes of a thousand respectable men. The most signal illustration of the solidity of this foreign vote, and of its utter indifference to moral considerations, was given in 185T, when two Democrats ran for Mayor. One of them, Daniel F. Tiemann, was sup- ported by honest men as an honest man, known and respected by all the community. The other was Fernando Wood, con- cerning whom it is only necessary to say that no one need fear that he has formed too bad an opinion of the man, and that during the year 185~~ he had shown all his worst traits. Mr. Tiemann was elected by 2,328 majority, which, after correct- ing a manifest error in the tables, was within a hundred votes of the majority of native-born over naturalized voters, accord- 152 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, ing to the census of 1855. That this coincidence was not accidental is demonstrated by the following comparison of the foreign electors, as returned in the census, with the actual vote for Wood, ward by ward 1555. 1857. 1855. 1857. Wards. Naturalized Vote for Wood. Wards. Naturalized Vote for Wood. Voters. Voters. 1 1,425 1,276 12 787 887 2 290 231 13 1,852 1,800 3 694 405 14 1,954 2,357 4 2,459 2,112 15 1292 883 5 1,471 1,349 16 2,173 2,129 6 2,263 2,401 17 3,686 3,765 7 2,649 2,322 18 2,345 2,456 8 1,910 1,871 19 1,460 1,323 9 1,976 1,794 20 3,045 2,834 10 1,476 1,627 21 1,993 1,768 11 3,612 3,269 22 1,889 2,029 Total, 42,701 40,888 The foreign population has largely increased in the past ten years, so that, as we have said, the foreign-born electors com- prise three fifths of the whole number in the city. They are as strongly wedded to their party, and to the worst factions of their party, as ever; while their power is greater than ever. Of this they have given very recent proof, by electing to Con- gress, over another man of the same party, with whom no fault was found, and who had already served one term acceptably to his party, a man notorious in the past as a pugilist and a criminal, and whose entire claim to a reformation of character consisted in his having given up prize-fighting, and become the chief of professional gamblers. It is not surprising that the bench, when subject to the votes of this class, should have become debased as the number of such voters increased. It is perhaps more wonderful that so many respectable judges are still in office. But the weight of the legal profession has been generally thrown upon the right side, and might have overcome the difficulties arising from the character of the electors, had not other causes been at work. The second cause which we have mentioned as injuriously affecting the bench was the amount of patronage at its disposal. This has not only had an evil influence upon the judges already in office, but it has made politicians of the lower grade anxious The Judiciary of New York City. 153 to get in men who would make a positively corrupt use of it. The framers of the Constitution of 1846 took great pains to de- prive the judges of all patronage, and for this purpose abolished all offices to which the courts had formerly made appointments, and forbade the judges of the Supreme Court and Court of Ap- peals from appointing so much as a crier. But of late years, with the increase of population and wealth, there has been a great increase in the number of referable causes; and thus in effect the courts have had full power to appoint their friends to very lucrative positions. Nominally, the legal fees of a referee in an action are three dollars a day; but by the custom of the bar he is allowed five dollars, which sum he charges for every day in which he does anything in a cause, even if he merely adjourns it to another day; while he rarely gives more than two hours at a time to the case. As half the days charged are mere adjournments, arranged by the referees clerk, and the other half consists of very brief sessions, many of which are, by consent, conducted by the clerk, it will be seen that a steady flow of such business would not be unprofitable, even at the usual rates. But in cases of importance, where both parties are anxious to secure the personal attention, care, and good-will of the referee, he can make his own terms; and twenty dollars a session is a common fee. Where it is under- stood that the relations of the referee with the court are such that there is a moral certainty of the confirmation of his re- port, his fees may run even higher. There are, moreover, many references in special proceedings, the fees in which are not limited by any statute; and in such cases a referee on good terms with the court can charge what he pleases, say fifty to one hundred dollars a day. Besides this, the Supreme Court has the appointment of three commissioners whenever a street is to be opened, or any private property to be taken for public use. The work is all done by a clerk, and the commissioners draw pay for a hundred days or so, when in fact all their la- bors have consisted in taking an oath and signing their names once or twice. Of course the same set of men can take charge of a dozen such matters at once, and at the same time carry on any real business that they may have. Receiverships also constitute a valuable subject of judicial patronage; for though 154 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, an honest and faithful receiver has until lately been poorly paid, there is abundant profit to be made by one of a different stamp. A public journal of respectable character recently asserted that, upon the settlement of a certain receivers accounts, the judge demanded half his fees, which amounted to some ten thousand dollars. We do not know what foundation there is for this statement, nor what judge is referred to; but we have known of some fransactions equivalent to this, though carried on in a more indirect way. The third cause of judicial deterioration has arisen from the interference of the bench, at a former period, with the frauds of the Common Council. This interference opened the eyes of the plunderers of the public to the iiecessity of control- ling the civil courts, which they had previously overlooked. In 1863, two worthy and capable judges, both Democrats, were denied a renomination by their party, simply because a noto- rious corruptionist declared that he must and would have one friend on whom he could rely in each of the city courts of record. In 1861, the same man, after making a theatrical dis- play of patriotism and virtue in the nominating convention of his faction, himself proposing the renomination of Messrs. Hoff- man and Woodruff for the Superior Court (two of the ablest and most upright judges in the State), and collecting from them a large contribution for what he represented to be legitimate election expenses, sold them out at the eleventh hour for ten thousand dollars cash, paid by friends of the regular Demo- cratic candidates, and substituted tickets with the names of the latter in place of those which he pretended to support. One of the judges thus elected has procured a seat in the New York Constitutional Convention, and can doubtless give valuable suggestions to his associates upon the advantages of Xan elective judiciary. The utter incompetency of some of the judges brought upon the bench by the system now prevailing in the city of New York, and the mediocre character, to say, the least, of the majority of them, are too well known to be disputed for a mo- ment. The inferiority of the judges to some of the lawyers who practise before them is often painfully evident, not only to the spectators, but to the judges themselves; and the more The Judiciary of New York City. 155 candid of the latter will sometimes openly admit it. But an inferior judge drags down the bar more than he is raised by it; for the arguments of lawyers must be accommodated to the capacity of the court, and learning is too often found to be utterly wasted when bestowed npon the ear of a New York judge. Success at the bar is generally believed and by none more than by lawyers themselves to depend largely upon so- cial influence; and that not, as in England or France, an influ- ence acting upon clients, to induce them to bring business, but acting upon the mind of the judge, and swaying his decision. It is certain that some lawyers can always get an injunction or an attachment, and keep it in force for weeks, without a re- spectable ground for it; that they can obtain or prevent ad- jouruments of their causes to any extent; and that, in short, they can secure every possible favor, even where favors work palpable injustice. Indeed, if a case is at all doubtful, it is hopeless to contest it against certain lawyers before certain judges; and we have known favor go so far, that a shrewd lawyer, having the ear of the court, has been in constant ter- ror lest the latter, by its flagrant partiality for him, should make it impossible to sustain its rulings upon appeal. One practice has become so common in New York as to ex- cite no remark, although it is fatal to real justice. We refer to the custom of judges allowing counsel to make statements concerning their causes out of court, and in the absence of their opponents. One or two judges are in the almost daily habit of listening to these closet arguments; and it is to be feared that most of them tolerate such practices occasionally. It very naturally follows that the judge who will do this is often utterly indifferent to the argument in open court; and it also follows, in not a few cases, that he pledges his decision beforehand. We have known extensive stock speculations to be conducted on the faith of decisions thus promised; and it is not to be wondered at if the judge was strongly sus- pected of having an interest, as he certainly had a friend, in the speculation. This, however, is an extreme case, and we mention it only as an example of the natural fruit of so repre- hensible a practice. The influence of the large classes interested in evil prac 156 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, tices might be expected to bear heavily upon courts so weak and ill-constituted. It must be placed to the honor of the Su- preme Court that it unanimously affirmed the constitutionality of the Excise Law; but the course of a certain judge in an- other court deserves notice, all the more because he is of more than average ability. This law was of course very unpalatable to liquor-dealers of the lower class; for though it was in no sense a prohibitory law, like that of Maine, it made real the previously nominal prohibition of the sale of liquor on Sundays. This restriction is as old as the State itself; but the means provided for its enforcement were never before adequate to the purpose. The new law put sufficient power into hands that were faithful and resolute. The counsel for the liquor-dealers association honestly told his clients that the law was constitu- tional, and could not be successfully contested. Not a single lawyer in New York ventured to utter a contrary opinion for some weeks. But at last a well-known lawyer, being retained by a wealthy brewer, gave it as his opinion that the law could not constitutionally apply to liquor-dealers who had taken out licenses under the old law, until those licenses had run out; on the ground that these licenses were contracts, which the State could not rescind or modify. On this sole ground he applied for an injunction to protect his clients, who had unex- pired licenses under the old law. He never argued or asserted that the new law was unconstitutional as a whole, or in its application to those dealers who had no previous licenses, a class which included nine tenths of all the liquor-dealers in the city. That question was never discussed before the judge at all. Yet he promptly decided, not only that the law was unconstitutional in its application to the vendors already li- censed, but also that it was wholly void. And having thus decided a question never raised before him, without himself assigning a single reason or authority for that decision, he ever after refused to hear any argument upon the point, on the ground that it was already decided! By virtue of this de- cision, he issued some seven hundred injunctions, and com- pletely stopped the operation of the law for six months; at the end of which time the Court of Appeals, in accordance with the opinion of nearly every lawyer in the State, adjudged the law to be valid in every respect. The Judiciary of New York City. 157 The professional gamblers of New York, who are now repre- sented both in Congress and in the State Legislature, have within Fa few years past gained a strong hold upon the courts. Several judges have notoriously attained their offices through the influence of this class, and their indisposition to execute the law against their best friends is not a matter for surprise. The condition to which the highest courts of the city have been reduced can, however, best be realized from a single por- trait, undoubtedly that of one of the worst judges on the bench, (for it is both a pleasure and a duty to say that, what- ever may be thought of their abilities, most of the judges in the three principal courts are of unquestionable integrity,) but a fair example of what all must soon be, if the present system is continued. This man was nominated for the bench against the advice of all the judges, and elected without the support of a dozen respectable lawyers of any party. His knowledge of law from books is confessedly small; but he has a keen perception, and can take in a case with remarkable quickness; so that if a cause is well argued before him, and he listens attentively, without having any bias or prejudice, he can render a decis- ion on the spot with perhaps as much chance of being right as any other judge in the city. This is a great merit, but un- fortunately this is all his merit, and the number of ifs is large, and fearfully important. If he does not decide at once, he will take the papers to his office, and probably never open them until he has forgotten all that was said; and no judge is less fitted to decide upon the strength of his own mere study than he. Besides, there is no security against his hearing an- other argument after he leaves the court, and the last word is likely to leave the most impression upon him. He is, more- over, very impatient of, and inattentive to, a long argument, no matter how necessary. A certain case once came before him, in which nearly two hundred thousand dollars was at stake. The defendant was arrested for the embezzlement of this sum, and eminent counsel were arguing for and against his dis- charge from arrest. The judge listened with such ill-concealed impatience and lack of interest frequently conversing with some friends behind his desk that the counsel repeatedly 158 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, paused, and waited for him to attend to the case. At length he said: Mr. ~,youalways make an admirable brief; had nt you better submit this case, and let me examine the papers and written arguments? It was evident that nothing else could be done, so Mr. , though with some misgivings, for he was opposing the discharge, which if granted would be fatal to his clients chances, was obliged to consent. A few days after- ward, the order of discharge was granted, and the money lost to its lawful owners. Mr. had the satisfaction of receiv- ing back his package of papers in such shape as to afford al- most conclusive evidence that they had never been opened! Frequently the judge cuts short an argument in a less civil way, by deciding against a party before he has fairly stated his case. On such occasions, he is apt to say blandly to a lawyer who persists in talking: You can go on all day, if you like, counsellor; but I have decided this case, and I never take back a decision. Of course he despatches business more promptly than any other judge, and of course he decides the same questions in more diverse ways than any other two judges could manage to do. Accordingly, his associates pay small respect to his decisions. Not long ago, one of his oral opinions being cited as an authority before Judge ,that learned official fixed his gaze upon the advocate, and inquired, with an air of mild surprise, Do you mean to cite Judge s decisions as law? Whereat the whole bar indulged in a suppressed laugh. To dignity the judge does not make the slightest pretension. It is his delight to rouse a laugh by some coarse practical joke, and to brave public opinion by open improprieties. Thus, being offended with some criticism which appeared in the Evening Post, he said in open court that William Cullen Bryant was the most notorious liar in the United States. On another occasion, a paper having published a simple report of his behavior in court, the next day, in the crowded court- room, he took notice of what he called this attack upon him, in language too indecent for repetion. A motion being made before him in 1864, on behalf of one H, he listened neg- ligently until it was stated that Mr. II had been impris- oned by order of the War Department on a charge of fraud; 1867.] The Judiciary of New York City. 159 whereupon the judge literally shouted, What! was he put in jail by those villains down there ? meaning the President and Secretary of War. Receiving an affirmative answer, he immediately granted the motion. We might extend the ac- count of such occurrences to an indefinite length, and might select much more offensive incidents; but in this, as in other respects, prefer to reserve some of our ammunition. The reference business had begun to assume dangerous pro- portions before this judge took his seat; but it was reserved for him to give it the form of a science. In his own office there were gentlemen whom he deemed to have qualifications for this duty superior to all the rest of the bar. He always granted a motion for reference, and always sent the case, if it was worth enough, to one ~of these gentlemen. Remon- strance was vain; even the agreement of all the parties upon other names did not help the matter. The only limitations to this practice were such as were imposed by the jealousy of the other judges, and by repeated amendments of the law, aimed directly at this system. The other judges he sometimes de- fied, and sometimes conciliated by giving a share of the refer- ences to their relatives and friends. The law he evaded by various shifts, but chiefly by making lawyers understand that it was dangerous to object to his nominations. It may easily be supposed that he not only had his standing referees, but also a definite list of receivers, when such officers were needed. The nature of his interest in these appointments has long been the subject of speculation among members of the bar, but only a few are acquainted with facts sufficient to. ena- ble them to form a definite conclusion. Some years ago, one of the foremost lawyers in New York, an eminent member, too, of the party by which all the judges are elected, declared publicly that, in order to secure success before certain judges, it was necessary to employ certain law- yeis having influence with them. Such indeed is a well- known fact, especially with regard to this judge, to whom the circumstances mentioned by the lawyer we have quoted clearly showed that he referred. Not long ago, certain parties having an important affair in litigation were privately notified that, if they wished to succeed before the judge, they must employ two 160 The Judiciary of New York City. [July~ lawyers (neither of them having any claim to the business), at a handsome fee. The partiality of this judge for a certain politician, whose name is synonymous with corruption and treachery, has been manifested by some extraordinary decisions. Several persons who were injured in riots instigated by this man sued him for damages. His counsel, fertile in excuses, delayed the trials for many months, and finally, when the causes came on for trial before a judge from the interior of the State, and all ex- cuses were worn out, the defendant and his counsel deliber- ately absented themselves from court without any excuse at all. Verdicts were taken against him; and he moved before this judge of whom we speak to open his default. Although it clearly appeared that the defendant had purposely allowed his default to be taken, the judge relieved him from it, and ordered costs to be paid to him by the plaintiffs! This was too much for his associates, who, though they held themselves unable to reverse his order, called his attention to the mat- ter of costs, when he stated that this part of the order was a mistake! Quite recently he issued out of court a peremptory manda- mus in favor of the same politician against the Controller of the city, without any notice to the latter; by which the Con- troller was required to sign a most dishonest contract in obe- dience to a vote of the Common Council. Another judge was at the time holding the branch of the court from which alone the mandamus could properly have issued; and he immediately stayed proceedings under it, and finally set it aside, declaring the practice adopted to be grossly irregular, and utterly with- out precedent. The facts which we have thus far stated, bad as they are, are not, however, so bad as others, concerning which our in- formation is direct and explicit, and which, if it appears to be necessary to convince the public of the necessity of a com- plete transformation of the judiciary, we shall disclose on a future occasion. We are not actuated by hostility to a man, but to the system which produces such a man. We have singled him out, only because it would be doing gross injus- tice to most of the other judges to impute such conduct to the The Judiciary of New York City. 161 bench at large. The last public episode in this mans history, however, deserves to be recounted here, because it forcibly illustrates the folly of trusting to revenge as a motive to hon- esty, as well as the ease with which men are deceived by emp- ty professions. In 1866, this judge of whom we have spoken appeared to have set his heart upon exchanging his judicial duties for an office of a more directly lucrative nature; and failing in this, he made loud professions of his disgust with the Ring (as the managing politicians are collectively called), and of his determination to take vengeance upon it. In charging the grand jury, at the opening of one of the circuits, he declared, with perfect truth, that the whole municipal government was utterly rotten, and that nearly every officer under it deserved indictment. He advised the grand jury, however, not to in- dict any one, on the ground that it would be useless to do so; but with a great flourish announced his intention to grant an injunction against the frauds of the Common Council whenever it should be demanded. And he did grant several such injunc- tions in the course of the next two or three months. The innocent public was delighted with this exhibition of judicial courage and incorruptibility. The leading journals raised a chorus of congratulation. And thus a respectable public sentiment was created in favor of a measure intended to make the fortunes of the judge, and of all his hangers~on. A bill was introduced into the Legislature, requiring the Gov- ernor to appoint one of the judges of the court of which this man is a member to hold the special term in chambers, exclu- sively of all the other judges. It was urged upon the ground that the business of that branch of the court could be trans- acted much more rapidly, and with greater uniformity of prac- tice, if permanently intrusted to a single judge, than when taken, as it always had been, by the different judges in suc- cession. The bill was supported by letters from many of the most active practitioners in the city, and was pushed by a powerful lobby, comprising representatives of the best and the worst citizens. Extremes met; and the attorneys of the Citizens Association joined with the most corrupt politicians in helping this bill along. It passed the Legislature, and, VOL. CV. NO. 216. 11 162 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, after some hesitation on his part, was signed by the Governor. Then the candidate, who had of course been known to the ?~hief friends of the bill all along, but whose name had been kept back, made his appearance, and was no other than this same judge. An amazing combination of influences was brought to bear in his favor. The most notorious members of the Ring, and its most bitter opponents, the Citizens Association, the men whose rascalities had made the Associ- ation a necessity, in short, all the rogues, and nine tenths of the honest men who took any part in the matter, were active in the support of this judge. The Governor was assured by all, that the judge had forever broken with the Ring, and would use the tremendous power which this appointment would give him for the extirpation of official dishonesty. So strong was the pressure, and so certain was his appointment considered, that several papers published it as a completed fact, and the majority of its opponents were afraid to say a word against it. One of the great dailies, after publishing a very able editorial condemnatory of the law, and intended to warn the Governor against appointing this judge, lost all its courage upon hearing that the appointment was made, and commended it in warm terms. Indeed, the appointment was substantially determined upon, and would certainly have been made, but for the resolute action of a few gentlemen who knew certain facts to which we have but vaguely referred, and disclosed them to the Governor, who refused to proceed until the matter was cleared up. It is only just to the most influential advocate of the judge to say, that he withdrew his recommendation upon being informed of these facts, of which he was of course una- ware when he lent his influence to the scheme; as indeed were the other respectable gentlemen to whom we have referred. We have spoken of their recommendation of the judge, not with intent to cast a doubt upon their probity, but as illustrat- ing the skill with which this man managed to win a support indispensable to him in approaching so upright an officer as Governor Fenton. The scheme failed, as we have said, and months of elaborate hypocrisy had been wasted. The instant that the judge ascer- tained this, he threw off the mask, and astounded his dupes The Judiciary of New York City. 168 by dissolving the injunctions against municipal frauds which he had previously granted with such zeal; concluding by issu- ing the unprecedented mandamus to which we have before re- ferred. And having owed his defeat in part to the persistent opposition of his associates on the bench, he gave an open manifestation of his spite in a characteristic manner. A law- yer came into chambers while the judge was sitting there, and asked whether a certain other judge was in the inner room, or had been down that day. Judge tartly replied: I dont know anything about him. I dont know anything about any of them. There is a certain class of men I dont want to know anything about. When they come up for an election, then I mean to know something about them. A little later in the day he informed the bar that he had the most unmitigated contempt for all his associate judges, feeling himself their superior, morally, socially, and financially. The feeling of relief, when it was known that the Governor had determined not to make any appointment under the law, was general; many who had recommended Judge being secretly as glad to be saved from him as any one else. For if the plan had been carried out, he would have had nearly as much power in his hands as an Eastern pacha. Property to the amount of twenty million dollars, in the charge of receivers and trustees, lay at his disposal, since he could appoint and remove them at his discretion; and when the funds were placed in the hands of his friends, they could obtain from him, without giving the slightest notice to creditors or other inter- ested parties, orders for the disposition of the funds in any manner that might suit their and his interests.- There would have been no obstinate receivers to refuse fees, or to object to loans without security. This judge alone, of all the court, would have had power to grant or dissolve injunctions, attach- ments, or orders of arrest; to appoint referees; to issue writs of mandamus, habeas corpus, & c. By a little ingenuity in postponing arguments or decisions, he could indefinitely delay appeals from his orders, even where they were appealable. But in a large class of cases, especially in those which involved the most money, no appeal would lie from his decision. Few lawyers could have carried on business for a week after the ~64 The Judiciary of New York City. judge had resolved to crush them; aud it was not doubted by auy one that his enemies would be made to feel his power. Indeed, it has been publicly stated by an opponent of the pro- ject, that he was visited by some of the judges friends, who assured him that, if he would only retract his opposition, he should have a share of the good things arising out of the scheme; telling him further, that arrangements had been made to realize enormous profits and a practical monopoly of the paying business for those who befriended the judge. Our narrative might be greatly extended, if we should insert all the instances of unseasonable and indecent jest- ing, recklessness, and even worse, on the part of this judge, of which we are informed. We have passed over several such instances within our knowledge (as before intimated), and many concerning which we entertain no doubt, but of which legal evidence could be withheld by the parties inter- ested. About two years ago an investigation into various matters connected with the New York Ring was attempted by the Legislature, and it was wonderful to notice how many well-informed parties were detained out of the State by sick- ness as long as the committee remained in session. The sea- son might be unhealthy again, if a new investigation were com- menced; and we therefore prefer to rely upon the testimony of acclimated witnesses. The petty civil courts are not worth an extended review. The nature and value of the justice dispensed by them may be easily inferred from the condition of the superior courts. The salaries of the justices are sufficient to command first- class talent, being larger by far than the salarres of the judges of the highest court in the State. The ignorance, incompe- tency, and pretension of some of these justices may easily be imagined; of their evasions of duty, under the fear of influ- ences which might be brought to bear against their renomina- ~ tion, we could give some strong illustrations; but it is not worth the labor. The criminal courts are universally admitted to be ineffi- cient; and those who know them best do not hesitate to pro- nounce them in the main corrupt. The city has on several occasions been fortunate in .its choice of a Recorder; but for The Judiciary of New York City. 165 years past no confidence has been placed by well-informed men in a majority of the other criminal judges. If we were to relate half the rumors which are afloat, and which are fully credited, too, by the most intelligent and discreet members of the bar, we should draw a picture as appalling as anything to be found in the books of the Prophets Amos and Micah. But we content ourselves with a statement of a few cases of direct bribery of judges not now on the bench, as examples of what has certainly happened in the past, and with such an account of the present and recent condition of things in the criminal courts as might have been gathered by any careful observer. Years ago, the master of a small vessel was indicted for a very brutal assault committed on board. The trial had occu- pied the morning, and was far from its end. The prisoners counsel therefore proposed a recess for lunch, which was agreed to; and he invited the judge to take the meal with him. The invitation was accepted, and the two went to a place where they found a handsome dinner in waiting, and were joined by the accused party, who was of course on bail. The plates were all laid, with the faces downward, and when the judge turned up his plate, to his surprise, and of course to the amazement of his hosts, a hundred-dollar-bill lay on the cloth. Why, what is this? said the astonished judge; and turning to the counsel, he added, This must belong to you, Mr. .~ That gentleman, however, emphatically disclaimed its owner- ship, and refused to touch it, as also did his client. So, after some more efforts on the part of the judge to rid himself of the burden, the counsel advised him to take charge of the money until the real owner should appear; which he conclud- ed to do. Pinner being over, the trial was resumed. It is scarcely necessary to say that the evidence for the prosecution was not convincing to the judicial mind, and that an acquittal was directed. At another period, a certain person was indicted for a crime under a statute requiring the indictment to be found within three years from the commission of the offence. This indict- ment was found on, say, the last day of the month, the crime having been committed on the first day of the next month, three years before. The defendant obtained judgment in his 166 The Judiciary of New York City. favor, on the ground that the time for prosecution had expired; and, by a singular coincidence, on the next day a check for five hundred dollars, drawn by the accused party, was cashed in Wall Street with the indorsement of the judge upon it. Within a much more recent period, a man was indicted for a series of enormous frauds, by which he had made himself wealthy. The indictment was quashed for some informality, and he openly boasted that he knew how to manage the draw- ing of future grand-juries so as to secure himself against any renewal of the indictment, a boast which the failure of all subsequent attempts to indict him seems to justify. We are assured, on the most respectable authority, that the judge re- ceived ten thousand dollars for his decision. To come down to the present time, it is indisputable that most of the justices in charge of criminal business in New York are coarse, profane, uneducated men, knowing nothing of law except what they have picked up in their experience on the bench. One of the best of them was a butcher until he became a police justice; another was formerly a bar-keeper. As a rule, they are excessively conceited and overbearing, and in some cases positively brutal in their demeanor. The officers in attendance naturally take their tone from their superiors, and treat every one who enters the court-room with a rough- ness which makes attendance upon such places ineffably dis- gusting. The reporters who have for years attended the police courts seem never to have thought of presenting any other than the ludicrous side of the events which happen there; but to all who feel compassion for man as man, these scenes have much in them to excite both pity and indignation. A motley herd of human beings are driven in, morning after morning; like so many oxen, and as summarily knocked on the head if they are in the least refractory, and violently pushed forward if their movements are slow. Called up before the justice, if poor and friendless, they are sentenced before they well understand the charge made against them. If they have counsel, it may be generally assumed that he is one of the low persons, miscalled lawyers, who hang about these courts, and that he has stripped them of every cent, or will do so before they are released. The Judiciary of New York City. 167 Perhaps they are committed for further examination; and although the law requires a prompt disposal of such cases, a prisoner unable to meet the ravenous demands of the lawyers, or, as they are more appropriately called, shysters, who have the run of these places and the favor of the magistrates, often lies in jail for weeks unheard. Sometimes a highly respecta- ble man will be kept in durance, at the instance of wealthy enemies, notwithstanding he is abundantly able and willing to give bail. Where the guilty party is wealthy and unscrupulous, and the accuser poor, the position of affairs is reversed. We remem- ber an instance in which a rich but infamous brothel-keeper had terribly beaten one of the poor wretches in her house. The prisoner was on bail, the accuser was detained as a witness. When the case was called, the poor creature came forward, her face all clotted with blood, and her clothes torn to rags, a ghastly spectacle. The counsel for the accused took her aside, and, under the very eyes of the judge, bullied and coaxed her by turns, threatening her with prosecution as a vagrant, and with the revenge of her mistress, until she agreed not to prosecute the case, on condition of her doctors bill (say five or ten dollars) being paid. The counsel then announced to the justice that the complaint was withdrawn. The justice shortly asked the complainant if that was so, to which the poor creature sadly answered that she would not withdraw her complaint if she were not so poor; but as it was, she supposed she could not help herself. The justice harshly replied that he had nothing to do with that. The complaint was dismissed; and the miserable woman was promptly bun- dled out of court by the officers. In each of these courts there are two well-known rings,~~ one of shysters, and the other of professional bail. The latter are always ready to become responsible for prisoners in amounts of from two hundred and fifty to one thousand dol- lars, upon receipt of a fee ranging from ten to fifty dollars. Their risk is almost nominal, for they have a perfect under- standing with the powers that be, and a shrewd method of do- ing business. They often get abundant security from their principal, and in other cases are generally familiar enough The Judiciary of New York City. 168 [July, with his circumstances to feel sure of his appearance. But if they are at all doubtful of this, they can, and often do, surren- dei~ their victim within a few days, or even hours, after pocket- ing his money; and he is obviously without redress. One very flagrant instance of this kind deserves to be mentioned. A rather noted thief, not, however, without some good qualities, was held to bail in one thousand dollars, and all the sureties offered by him were rejected. At length one of the jailers advised him to ask a well-known politician named B to become his surety. B consented, on condition that he should be fully secured, and be paid a fee of fifty dollars. Ac- cordingly, five hundred dollars in cash, and a chattel mortgage for five hundred dollars more, were placed in his hands, and the fee paid. But in a few days he surrendered his unlucky principal, and not only kept the fee, but the five hundred dol- lars besides, returning nothing but the mortgage, and that only after repeated solicitations. It is not surprising that some of these professional bail are known to make ten thousand dollars or more a year out of the business; nor can the world be blamed for suspecting that their profits are divided with some other parties. For it is observed that, when all precautions fail, and parties for whom these men become bail abscond, the amount of the bond is rarely or never collected. The so-called lawyers who secure most of the practice in these courts are generally men of disreputable character, who have an understanding with the officers of the courts and pris- ons, by which the latter receive a commission on business introduced by them. A prisoner, especially if he is such for the first time, is generally unacquainted with any respectable lawyer, and gladly accepts the recommendation of the officer having him in charge. The person thus introduced, after mak- ing a very few inquiries about the case, asks the prisoner, flow much money have you? Usually, of course, the amount is very small, and the next question is, How much can you raise? The answer is, perhaps fifty, perhaps a hun- dred dollars. A hundred dollars! cries the lawyer, con- temptuously; why, I shall have to give that much to the judge, and twenty to the clerk. D it, you must squeeze out The Judiciary of New York City. 169 two hundred and fifty dollars somehow, or you re gone up. The prisoner asks advice of his keeper, and is told that Law- yer knows what he is about, and should be secured at any price. If, after severe pressure, the prisoner declares that he cannot raise the required sum, the lawyer grudgingly ac- cepts whatever he can get. But it must not be supposed that the fees are limited as a rule to two hundred and fifty dollars. These men, whom long experience has made keen in judging of a prisoners means, take all he has, be the same more or less. If he has only ten dollars in the world, they take that, and really make a good fight upon it; if he has five thousand dollars, they will extract it all out of him, if not interfered with, though of course such opportunities are very rare. We will give some illustrations of the various degrees of plunder. The case of Lamirande, the French cashier, is fresh in the public memory. He employed a couple of Tombs lawyers to protect him, who, upon one pretext or another, got nearly twenty thousand dollars out of him, with part of which they purchased his escape from the officers in charge. A certain ingenious criminal, after he had long concealed himself in a neighboring town, where he lived in a style of comparative luxury, was at length arrested, together with all his family, they being accomplices in his crimes. On his way to New York, the officer having him in charge advised him to employ a lawyer at once, and recommended a certain well- known individual, still in active practice, and very influential in some courts, notwithstanding the notoriety of his charac- ter. The prisoner accepted the suggestion, and by the advice of the officer placed all his ready money, amounting to nearly two thousand dollars, in the care of this man, who agreed to attend to his case for one hundred dollars, and to return the rest of the money on demand. After having been in jail for some time, awaiting his trial, he sent to his lawyer for money to pay for extra expenses which he had incurred in making his position comfortable; but to all the messengers the lawyer re- turned a fiat denial of his receipt of any money. The prisoner was compelled to resort to other means of provision, and could obtain them only by selling all his furniture, worth over two thousand dollars, to one of the keepers of the prison, for three 170 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, hundred dollars. Just before his trial came on, the lawyer called upon the prisoner, plausibly excused his own previous conduct, and assured his client that, with fifteen hundred dol- lars in addition to what he had already received, he could bribe the judge to reduce the prisoners sentence to two years im- prisonment, and to let his wife (or mistress) go free. The luckless wretch believed the story, and put a small house, his last remaining property other than a gold watch, into the hands of this man for sale. The house was sold for twelve hundred dollars, perhaps half its value. This man, whom we are ashamed to call a lawyer, pocketed the whole thirty-two hun- dred dollars; and the prisoner and his wife were sentenced the next week to eight and six years imprisonment respectively! We do not mention this case as an instance of corruption in the court, for it is entirely certain that the lawyer never offered the judge a dollar, nor ever meant to do so; but when there are judges with whom the influence of such a man is powerful, it is impossible not to suspect their purity. There is a person doing a large business in the criminal courts who has been repeatedly detected in thus stripping pris- oners of their all, and who has been compelled in some cases to disgorge, but who still pursues the same line of business with great profit. Thus on one occasion he took from a servant- girl two gold watches (stolen, of course), two trunks full of valuable clothing, and twelve dollars in money, which was all she had; and on another occasion squeezed fifty dollars out of the friends of a poor negro, upon promises which he well knew could not be fulfilled. This man, who was the special friend of the bounty-jumpers, and largely engaged in filling up the ranks of the army, by means which we shall presently describe, was not long ago a candidate for a high judicial office, and re- ceived over twenty-five thousand votes in the city, though he failed to be elected. The last two years of the war afforded a magnificent oppor- tunity for making money in a strictly patriotic manner, which the criminal judges and lawyers did not fail to improve. The national armies were thinned, the jails were full, and the boun- ties for enlistment large. How could a judge evince his love of country better than by filling up the ranks of its defenders? The Judiciary of New York City. IT1 How could he more judiciously exercise the prerogative of mercy than by extending it to the misled pickpocket, the erring burglar, or the penitent garroter, upon condition that he should do valiant battle for his adopted land? And if a liberal nation provided, as it did, certain pecuniary inducements for enlist- ment, who shall say that these emoluments could be more fitly disposed of than by appropriating them to the reward of such virtue as we have imagined? To have given them to the recruit himself would have been to reward vice and to waste good money. Accordingly, thousands of men were liberated on condition that they would enlist. Bounties varying from six hundred to fifteen hundred dollars were paid for each man, either by the public, or by private persons hiring substi- tutes; and the recruits themselves were fortunate indeed if they received twenty-five dollars each. The rest was divided between the lawyers who persuaded prisoners to enlist, the judges who released them on that condition, and the officials who passed the recruit and paid the money. It is a common practice of the worst judges to make an oc- casional show of extreme severity, for the purpose of gaining a reputation for Roman firmness, under the cover of which they may let off more dangerous criminals with impunity. A terrific sentence imposed upon some prisoner too poor to em- ploy the right kind of counsel looks well in print; and a few such sentences have been the entire stock in trade of some judges for years. Not long ago, a serious crime was committed by three men, one of whom was a hardened criminal, who had got up the job, and enticed the others into it. All were convicted, but sentence was indefinitely suspended as to the chief offender, while his far less guilty accomplices were sent to the State prison for long terms. The Annual Reports of the Police Commissioners, though very guarded in their language, as befits official communications, nevertheless indicate a decided conviction that the administra- tion of justice in the city is corrupt. The Report of 1865, which was made by a board equally divided in politics, and therefore less open to the charge of partiality than more recent Reports, used this language: In no other such city does the machinery of criminal justice so signally fail to restrain or punish serious 172 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, and capital offences Property is fearfully menaced by fire and robberies; and persons are in startling peril from criminal violence. This lamentable state of things is due, in a great measure, to a tardy and inefficient administration of justice. As our laws and institutions are administered, they do not afford adequate protection to persons or property. Some remedy must be found and applied, or life in the metropolis will drift rapidly towards the condition of barbarism. These words may seem strong to those who are not familiar with the facts; but to those who are, the picture seems so weakly drawn as to appear rather the work of an apologist than of an enemy. We should be sorry to have it thought that the bar of New York is mainly composed of such men as those whom we have described in our account of the police courts. Such is very far from being the case. The majority of the profession are gen- tlemen who will compare favorably with their brethren in any part of the world. But it cannot be denied that the number of disreputable lawyers is very large, and that the profession as a whole take little interest in keeping up the standard of admis- sion, and are far too much afraid of exposing the corruptions of which they are aware. The picture we have drawn is a dark one, yet we have pur- posely understated the evils which exist, ~nd reserved for the present the most damning facts. It is one of the worst signs of the times, that the public have become so accustomed to seeing and hearing of corruption, that the most conclusive evi- dence falls upon deadened ears. If we should describe the calm indifference with which some of our most upright public men listen to such evidence, we should mortally offend them; but so it is: they have become so familiar with the sight of of- ficial dishonesty, that, while maintaining their own integrity, they cannot rouse a feeling of indignation at the depravity of others. We might simply add to this unfortunate insensitive- ness by telling at once all that we know. It may be asked, however, whether we mean to assert that justice is never to be had in New York. We answer, certainly not. In nine cases out of ten, the worst judges in the city de- sire to do justice between the opposing parties. Society would be dissolved, or reduced to desperation, if it were not so. But The Judiciary of New York City. 178 the same thing might be said in favor of Tresilian, Scroggs, and Jeffreys; and aijuost as much is tine of the most venal tribu- nals of the East. We doubt if there ever was a judge. who did not decide a majority of the cases before him according to his conscience. The very same judge whom we have known to extort a fee from one party has been found perfectly im- pregnable to bribery from another. But no person of intelli- gence will imagine that such merits and demerits balance each other. A judge who decides honestly in most cases is like a woman who is virtuous six days in every week. We should insult our readers by offering any argument to prove that the maladministration of justice must have a. demor- alizing effect upon the whole community. That is an inference which the common sense of every man will draw without our aid. But there are some reasons peculiar to a few large cities, and especially applicable to New York, why these abuses should lead to unusually disastrous results; and these it is proper to state. New York, as we have said, contains many more foreigners than natives in its permanent population; and, being the chief port for the debarkation of immigrants, always contains a vast number of transient residents. Nearly all these immigrants are entirely unacquainted with republican government, and utterly unfamiliar with our political ideas. More than half of them have no ideas whatever upon political subjects, further than the vague notions of personal liberty which every human being has by nature. They come to New York to be trained, and receive there the first impressions of democratic institutions. They or their friends furnish the larger part of the business in the petty courts, and they hear the character of these courts discussed at an early day. What must be the effect upon them of hearing justice commonly spoken of as a thing to be bought, of being told by their friends and their counsel that the judge must have a fee? Grant that, in most of the cases in which the fee is paid, it never reaches the judge, yet the moral effect of the act upon the men who pay it is just the same; and when, upon inquiring of honest and well-informed men, they are told that, whatever may have been the fact in their cases, there is no doubt that the judges are corrupted in other instances, the poor fl4 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, defrauded creatures caunot but conclude that democracy means universal corruption. Impressed with this conviction, it is only natural that they should look upon politics as a mere contest for the spoils of office, and use their own votes, as soon as ac- quired, for the most selfish purposes. Again, New York is a place to which thousands of young men come every year from the country. Any large city offers sufficient temptation to wickedness, in the ordinary course of things,in the isolation of the young from home influences, iii evil companions, in the absence of observation and criticism, and in the abundant opportunities for debauchery. But who can estimate the additional impetus to evil which is given by the notorious corruption of public justice? The example of wickedness thus raised to places of honor is itself fearfully damaging to the virtue of young men. But besides this, the clerk who is tempted to dishonesty hears on every side the as- surance that, if he only steals enough, he can buy his discharge from the judge or the jailer; and although, as a general rule, the calculation will fail him, the fact that in many cases it does not fail is enough to tempt hundreds to ruin. It can scarcely be necessary to point out the demoralizing effect of judicial corruption upon the criminal classes of socie- ty. They lea~rn to rely upon the profits of their depredations for immunity; and when justice finally overtakes them, the predominant conviction of their minds is that they are only punished because their money was not enough to satisfy the judge. And although this is often an unjust suspicion, how can they be disabused of it, when they know that money has bought their escape before, and have been assured by their ad- viser that a certain sum, beyond their reach, would do so again? Many of them have paid the required bribe to their lawyer, who has never troubled himself to offer it to the judge; and such men naturally go to prison with hearts full of rage and suspicion, not knowing whom to blame, and therefore cursing the whole world. Such a state of mind makes reform almost impossible, and breeds feelings of revenge which naturally find vent in new crimes. There are some good people who comfort themselves with the belief that the very extremity of corruption to which all the The Judiciary of New York City. 175 public affairs of New York are tending will work its own cure by so disgusting the people as to cause a reaction. But the process which is now going on debauches the public conscience almost as much as it robs the public purse. Every successive reaction is fainter. Efforts were made in 1853, 1857, 1863, and 1865 to stem the current, and each time with less energy, less unity, and less effect. Even the most respectable classes are growing callous. They are satisfied that corruption is in- evitable, and in many instances are only anxious that their party should have its share of the public plunder. We have already referred to the fact that it is thought a matter of course for a judge to listen to ex parte representations. A judge re- cently told a lawyer of our acquaintance, without the least idea of having committed an impropriety, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that the adverse party had visited him privately, to speak about the case, almost daily for months; and his decision bore the plainest marks of the influence of these secret arguments, although no thought of corruption was in the mind of either the party or the judge. By the constant occurrence of such transactions, passing as they do without a word of censure, the conscience of the bench, the bar, and the whole community becomes enervated; and finally the utmost abominations are accepted with a mere shrug of the shoulders or a languid expression of regret. An illustration of this oc- curred very lately within our knowledge. One of the most re- spectable junior members of the bar was endeavoring to secure promotion for a certain judicial officer, when he was informed, upon authority which he could not doubt, that this officer had been guilty of some outrageous acts of plunder. Yet, believing that his own clients would not be endangered, he listened with indifference, and continued to give his support to a man whom he must have believed would make a dishonest use of his judi- cial position, although he himself would have utterly refused to use any corrupt influences. The same story might, in sub- stance be related of older and more eminent lawyers, in whose personal integrity the utmost confidence might justly be placed. The sense of honor in their own affairs is as strong as ever in such men; but the atmosphere in which they live has made them almost insensible to the degradation of public men. They 176 The Judiciary of New York City. [July, have ceased to expect honesty from any man in office; and the lack of that quality in a judge excites no more surprise than the untruthfulness of a servant-girl, or the uncleanliness of a coal-heaver. In all this there is nothing to warrant indiscriminate cen- sure. It is all very well for lawyers in other cities, where no such state of affairs has been known, to say that they would not thus tolerate a degraded bench. Let them consider what they would do, if forced to endure it. Should they denounce and defy the judges? That would be equivalent to renouncing the bar. Should they give up practice? That would be to leave the public wholly at the mercy of unscrupulous men. Do they think that they could practise before such judges as we have described, for ten years continuously, and yet retain to the end as keen a sense of their improprieties as they had at first? If so, they must be more than human.. The bar of New York has struggled against the downward course of things to the last, and is even now generally desirous of reform. But the moral tone of the whole community is inevitably lowered by such an administration of public affairs as New York has long had; and the wonder is that the bar retains so many good qualities, and so much desire for an upright judiciary, as it unquestion- ably does. The Convention which is now revising the Constitution of the State of New York has a most solemn responsibility upon its hands. A large majority of its members undoubtedly favor such a reform of the judicial system as shall restore to the city an honest and efficient judiciary; but they feel justly anxious for the support of their constituents. It would be a grave dis- aster if the reforms proposed by this body should fail at the polls. We shall not indicate to them any particular plan, but would strongly urge that, whatever plan they may adopt, it should be one which shall mctn~festly tend to secure the best men of all parties for judicial office. This is no time to seek for mere party advantages in a matter so vital to the welfare of the State, yet so far removed from national politics. Good men of all political opinions must unite upon this single issue, or the greatest city of America will soon fulfil the gloomy fore- bodings of the Police Commissioners, and sink into hopeless barbarism. 1867.] The Labor Crisis. ART. VI. 1. On the Collection of Revenue. By EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: A. Williams & Co. 1867. 2. Annual Report of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers~, Machinists, Millwrights, Smiths, and Pattern-1~iIiakers for 1866. London. DURING the past year the industry of the four great man- ufacturing countries of the world the United States, Eng- land, France, and Belgium has been in a state bordering on disorganization, owing to incessant strikes amongst the work- men. Trades which have hardly ever struck before, such as the hair-dressers and tailors, have struck now. Even that most ignorant and degraded portion of the European working class, the farm laborers of England, have been seized with the prevailing mania, and, after a slumber of five hundred years, have learnt to combine, and have had the audacity in some districts to ask for a rise in wages, and to refuse to work until they got it. What has made these strikes, too, the more alarming to capitalists is, that the organizations which direct them may now be said to pervade all the more highly civilized countries, and that the employers old device of drawing labor from other places no longer avails him. The railroad and the telegraph have not simply enabled the workman to move about readily in search of employment, they have enabled him to hold his own against the master in the place in which he is. The English Trades Unions after having first brought the skilled labor of their own country under their control, and subjected it to a discipline which, considering by whom it has been devised and put in force, is perhaps the most remarkable social phenom- enon of our day have extended their ramifications to the Continent, and are now in alliance with similar organizations in France and Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, and have held one great conference~~ at Geneva to cement it. The result is, that, when a strike occurs in any of these countries, not only is it no longer possible to put it down by importations of labor from the others, but assistance in money is freely rendered to the sfrikers by the members of the International Associa- tion. An example of this co-operation has been afforded in VOL. cv.No. 216. 12

1867.] The Labor Crisis. ART. VI. 1. On the Collection of Revenue. By EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: A. Williams & Co. 1867. 2. Annual Report of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers~, Machinists, Millwrights, Smiths, and Pattern-1~iIiakers for 1866. London. DURING the past year the industry of the four great man- ufacturing countries of the world the United States, Eng- land, France, and Belgium has been in a state bordering on disorganization, owing to incessant strikes amongst the work- men. Trades which have hardly ever struck before, such as the hair-dressers and tailors, have struck now. Even that most ignorant and degraded portion of the European working class, the farm laborers of England, have been seized with the prevailing mania, and, after a slumber of five hundred years, have learnt to combine, and have had the audacity in some districts to ask for a rise in wages, and to refuse to work until they got it. What has made these strikes, too, the more alarming to capitalists is, that the organizations which direct them may now be said to pervade all the more highly civilized countries, and that the employers old device of drawing labor from other places no longer avails him. The railroad and the telegraph have not simply enabled the workman to move about readily in search of employment, they have enabled him to hold his own against the master in the place in which he is. The English Trades Unions after having first brought the skilled labor of their own country under their control, and subjected it to a discipline which, considering by whom it has been devised and put in force, is perhaps the most remarkable social phenom- enon of our day have extended their ramifications to the Continent, and are now in alliance with similar organizations in France and Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, and have held one great conference~~ at Geneva to cement it. The result is, that, when a strike occurs in any of these countries, not only is it no longer possible to put it down by importations of labor from the others, but assistance in money is freely rendered to the sfrikers by the members of the International Associa- tion. An example of this co-operation has been afforded in VOL. cv.No. 216. 12 178 The Labor Crisis. [July, the case of the London and Paris tailors, who have struck al- most simultaneously, and render each other mutual aid. Europe and America are too far apart, and the conditions of labor in them differ too widely, to render concerted action between European and American workmen possible; but the Trades Unions have, in many of the great branches of industry here, been brought to as high a degree of efficiency as in Eu- rope. Still we doubt whether that perfect discipline which per- vades the English and Continental organizations can be found in America in any of the trades, for the simple reason that in England it is supported by intense class feeling. There the workingman on a strike is not simply a laborer who wants more wages: he is a member of a distinct order in society, engaged in a sort of legal war with the other orders, and he is bound to his fellows, not simply by community of material interest, but by sentiments of caste pride and fidelity. His employer is not simply a capitalist in whose profits he is seeking a larger share: he is the member of a hostile class, which the workman does not only not hope to enter, but which, both in France and England, it is considered mean or traitorous or cowardly for him to desire to enter. This feeling, we need hardly say, does not exist in America. The social line between the laborer and the capitalist is here very faintly drawn. Most successful employers of labor have begun by being laborers themselves; most laborers hope, and may reasonably hope, to become employers. Moreover, there are in the Northern States, out- side the great cities, few barriers of habit, manners, or tra- dition between the artisan and those for whom he works, so that he does not consider himself the member of an or ~ In fact, the idea of an order~~ is either unknown or unfamiliar to him. Strikes, therefore, are in the United States more of matter of busfuess, and less of matter of sen- timent, than in Europe; and the abundance of land, and the multiplicity of openings in various other walks of life which every American finds before him, naturally render him less disposed to submit to very rigid rules of discipline, whether imposed by the master or by his fellows, than the European. In other words, the success of the strike is never a matter of such vital importance to the one as it is to the other. Should The Labor Crisis. 179 the worst come to the worst, he has the prairies behind him, a fact which, however valueless it may be in individual cases, diffuses through every workshop an independence of feeling, a confidence in the future, of which the European knows noth- ing. Besides this, the American working classes are in the enjoyment of political power, and have during the last four or five years shown a disposition to use it to further the ends which in Europe can only be attained through strikes; and this, whether successful or not, naturally leads them to attach less importance to trade combinations. In England the growing power of the Trades Unions, now so great as to overshadow capital, and appear in the eyes of good society a political monster of portentous mien, has caused the issue of a Commission of Inquiry, which is sitting as we write, and taking evidence of leading members of these organizations, as to their character, aims, and mode of working. The testimony has only been published in frag- ments and a series of attempts has been made by the London Times and very unfair attempts the friends of the Trades Unions consider them to base on these fragments charges of tyranny, of violence, and of a desire to bring all capacities down to the same dead-level of reward, in other words, of adopting the worst feature of French communism, and the one most likely to prove injurious to civilization. The first function of the Unions seems to be the placing of the workman on an equality with his master in the matter of contracts, so as to enable him to contract freely; the second, the supply of information to the men in different localities as to the state of trade and the rate of wages in others, so as to aid them in deciding whether they would be justified in demanding a rise, or in accepting a fall, or in changing their place of abode; the third, the relief of sick men, or superannuated men, or men on a strike; and the fourth, the prescription and enforcement of rules as to the manner of performing work. This last is the only one to which real objection has been or can be taken. Amongst these rules is one which forbids piece-work, as tend- ing to overwork and inferior work; another which forbids a strong man or a man of extraordinary capacity from doing more than an average days work, even for a proportionate increase 180 The Labor Crisis. [July, of wages, as tending to his being used as a bell-horse, or standard to which men of inferior capacity would be compelled to work up; another which limits the number of apprentices; and several others, fixing the penalties to be incurred for any violation of the foregoing. A very violent discussion has been raging in England over the morality of the rule which forbids the man of unusual pow- ers from using them for his own personal advantage, either by working over hours, or doing more work than others in the same time. The Unions defend it, unjust as it seems on the surface, as simply the exaction, on behalf of a class, of the species of abnegation which is expected of every roan on behalf of his family or~ at great crises of his country. We do not think it necessary to go into the matter here, because, as we shall try to show hereafter, these organizations are but temporary, and these rules are not likely to last longer than may be necessary to help the working class in its passage from one state of progress to another. Such criticisms of them by English economists as we have seen are evidently based on the idea that the Trades Unions are likely to have a permanent place in the workingmans economical r~gime, and their rules to embody his social creed. But this we consider clearly a mistake. The Trades Unions are but a levy for temporary service, and their rules are but the workiugmans martial law. His true position in the body social secured, there can be hardly a doubt that the Unions will pass away, so that dis- quisitions on the abstract justice of their rules seem to us as much a waste of labor as discussions over the severity of the articles of war. All that can be said for them is, that they are, under present circumstances, necessary, and this is all that need be said. It may help to give some idea of the scale on which the operations of the Unions are conducted, to mention that the largest one, that of the engineers or machinists, numbers 33,600 members, with an annual increase of 2,000 or 3,000. Each member pays one shilling a week. The annual income in 1865 was $434,425, and the reserve fund in bank $700,000. These associations, however, as well as the strikes which are going on all over the world under their auspices, derive their claims to notice rather from what they indicate than from The Labor Crisis. 181 what they have actually accomplished. They indicate very clearly that we are entering upon the last stage in the process by which the working classes have been raised from the condition of slaves into that of freemen, and by which the last vestige of stigma will eventually be removed from the practice of the base mechanic arts. The law of modern social progress, as Professor Maine has pointed out, is the substitution, in nearly all relations of life, of contract for status, but there is no class of the community on which this law has acted more slowly than the working class. In archaic society everybody occupied a status provided for him by the law before he was born, He was either a slave or a Son under Power all or the greater portion of his life; the woman was always the ward of her male relatives. In primitive socie- ties there were, no doubt, free laborers, who worked for their families; but as states grew, and industry spread, and riches accumulated, free laborers disappeared, until it is safe to say that, before the fall of the Roman Empire, nearly all the work of the Roman world was done by slaves, employed either by their owners or by persons to whom their owners hired them out, as negro slaves were so frequently hired out by owners at the South in our own day. Farm laborers, artificers, miners, domestic servants, actors, and even literary men were slaves. The free laborer had literally no place in Roman society. The conversion of the slave into the serf, which was the condition in which he was found at the dawn of modern history, was a great step in advance; but it is only within the present century that the last traces of serfdom have disappeared in Europe. In Russia, until within the last three years, some of the best mechanics were owned, as the Roman mechanics were, by persons who pocketed their wages, or forced them to compound for them; so that it may be said that, although the process begun more than a thousand years ago, it is only within the lifetime of the present generation that the substitution of contract for status has been completed. Nobody is now predestined by law to any calling or condition.~ When he has reached the years of discretion, he can determine what his pursuit shall be. The lives of all of us, of course within the limits prescribed by our circumstances and our capacity, are 182 The Labor Crisis. [July, regulated by contracts of our own making, and not by legal rules or traditions or customs. Probably few, who have not paid very close attention to the social phenomena of onr time, have noticed to what an extent this change is affecting many of the most important relations of modern life. Parents, for instance, retain, and must always retain, the legal right to regulate the conduct of their chil- dren, until the latter attain their majority. But in practice the exercise of this right is undergoing serious modifications. The advocates of implicit, blind obedience are becoming almost as rare as the advocates of corporal punishment. Children are not now expected, as they were expected fifty years ago, to do or not to do things simply because they are told, or because they are children. Most plans of education are based on appeals to the understanding; and parents and teachers think it necessary, whenever it is possible, to give reasons for their orders or decisions, to point out the natural, and not simply the artificial, consequences of obedience or disobedience, and thus to bring the childs own will into play in the regulation of his conduct. In like manner the institution of apprenticeship may almost be said to have disappeared from among us, at least in the form in which our ancestors were familiar with it. Half a century ago a lad, who wanted to learn a trade, was literally forced to become a bondsman for five or seven years. He was made a member of the masters family; his conduct was con- trolled by orders and rules from his rising to his lying down. His earnings belonged to his master, and the trades were not open to him until he had served out his time. He might be beaten or disciplined in any other way short of legal cru- elty that seemed necessary to secure his obedience; and if he ran away he was advertised for, pursued, and brought back, with much the same formalities as a fugitive slave. In fact, advertisements offering rewards for the capture of runaway apprentices were not uncommon in the Northern newspapers sixty years since ; and we know with what earnestness one set of interpreters of the Constitution of the United States have contended that the clause providing for the return of fugitives held to service applied to apprentices, and not to The Labor Crisis. 183 slaves. But apprenticeship of this kind may now be said to be unknown. No lad will accept such a position, and few masters would like to have him work for them on any such terms. As a general rule, apprentices remain apprentices as long as they please ; and in practice the masters claim on their obedience is no stronger than on that of his journeymen. In many trades, too, apprentices cannot now be had on any terms. Young men learn trades when they choose and how they choose. So also in the relations of husband and wife, the tendency of legislation in all modern states of course it is in some more rapid and more perceptible than in others is to reduce marriage to an instrument for the legitimization of children simply, leaving all the relations of husband and wife which are not necessary to this end to be regulated by individual will. The common law had a status ready for the wife, into which she passed the minute the ceremony was over, and which placed both her person and property under the absolute control of her husband. In most European countries the woman is deprived, by custom, to this day, of freedom in choosing her husband; but in all of them there is every day a stronger and stronger movement towards her liberation from all legal incidents of matrimony which are not necessary to prove the paternity of her children and provide for their main- tenance. One of the rights of woman, too, which is most strongly asserted in the prevailing agitation about her con- dition, and one which we have little doubt is rapidly obtaining recognition, is her right, even after marriage, to the control of her person in the matter of child-bearing. We might multiply these illustrations indefinitely. Our proposition is perhaps, however, sufficiently clear, and may be summed up by saying that the tendency, both of legislation and of usage, in modern times, is to release all human beings from obligations imposed by imperative law, and to submit our social relations more and more to the dominion of contract simply. The laborer passed out of the domain of status long ago. He has been in Western Europe, in theory, for several cen- turies, under the rigime of contract; but his circumstances 184 The Labor Crisis. have been such that he has never been really emancipated. He has always been so poor, and so ignorant and helpless, that he has never been able to assume in practice the position which the political economists have persistently assigned to him. A contract, both in law and in political economy, is an agreement entered into by two perfectly free agents, with full knowledge of its nature, and under no compulsion either to refuse it or accept it. When a political economist talks of a thing being regulated by contract, this is the kind of contract he means. When he makes his deductions from his theory of contracts, he invariably assumes that the parties to the contract have really acted freely, under no influence except that of an intelligent self-interest. The laborer has, however, since his emancipation, never been able to be a party to any such con- tract as this. He has, as far back as we can trace his history, been drunken, improvident, ignorant of everything but his trade; living in wretched dens, and working in foul shops, for what economists call natural wages, that is, the wages necessary to keep him and his family alive; breeding with a brutes indifference to the future of his offspring, and always pressing with so many mouths on his means of subsistence, that a weeks idleness meant starvation for himself and his wife and children. The means of locomotion were scant and costly, so that, even if there was better work to be had by changing his place of abode, he could not seek it. But whether it was to be had or not he had no means of learning. We of this generation are so used to cheap postage, the telegraph, and the newspapers, that, although we marvel much over them in our speeches and poems, very few of us realize what the condition of society was when they did not exist, how slight was the intercourse between different localities, and how large- ly the news which passed through the country was composed of travellers gossip, vague, scanty, and unreliable. For all practicable purposes a laborers market, almost down to our own day, was the district in which he lived; and it was so easy for employers to combine, and employers did combine so con- stantly, that in many callings dismissal by one carried with it exclusion from the service of all the others. As if, too, this tremendous power of a comparatively wealthy and intelligent 185 1867.] The Labor Crisis. class over a poor and ignorant one was not sufficient, combi- nations of workmen against employers for any purpose were long prohibited by statute in England; and although this law has been modified, a workmans refusal to fulfil his contract is an offence still punishable criminally before a magistrate, while a masters can only be reached by a civil action for damages. In fact; it has been within a few weeks decided by the Queens Bench, that a mere notice to an employer that, if he did not dismiss a non-Union man, the other workmen would strike, was intimidation under the statute.* To talk of a man in this condition contracting with his employer was an abuse of language. The relation between the two was only contract in a legal sense; in a moral sense it had none of the incidents of a contract; and it is right to add, that, whatever illusions political economists may have cherished about it, the rest of the world has never cherished any whatever. To society at large, the laborer has never been a man who sold so much labor for so much money, and gave full ~value for what he got. He has been a kind of retainer or vassal, who was favo,red by being allowed to work, and from whom the employer was entitled to exact, not simply the service agreed upon, but deference and obedience with regard to the conduct of his whole life. As codes of minor morals, too, are usually framed by the employing class, the laborer * The first legislation which took place on the subject was in the fourteenth century, when attempts were made to check by statute the rise in wages which naturally occurred after the diminution of the population by the black death. The well-known statute of laborers limited the wages which different sorts of laborers were to receive, and made it penal in the men to demand more. This was followed by other statutes, one of which, in the reign of Elizabeth, empowered the county magistrates to fix the rate of wages in given trades from time to time as they thought proper, and this power was not legally abolished till the beginning of the present century. Another statute passed in the reign of Edward VI. forbade all confederacies and promises~ amongst workmen to regulate wages or hours of work; and in the year 1800 a similar statute, of a more elaborate and stringent character, was passed in order to pxovide for the same object. There were besides a great number of statutes prohibiting strikes in particular trades. These enact- ments were known collectively as the Combination Laws, and they remained in force till the year 1s25, causing, as may well be imagined, the utmost irritation and indignation amongst the workmen, and provoking them to enter into secret societies in defiance of the law, and to carry out their objects by every sort of violence to person, to property, and to the public peace. Fell Mall Gazette. 186 The Labor Crisis. [July, was saddled with a variety of duties, which in no way flowed from the nature of the wares he offered for sale. The right of an employer, for instance, to the political support of his work- men, though not recognized on paper, and generally repudiated with indignation at public meetings, is nevertheless secretly held in Europe at least by nine tenths of the capitalist world; and even in America, the common saying about the folly of quarrelling with ones bread and butter is but the ex- pression of a rough popular recognition of the doctrine that, when a man agrees to sell his labor, he agrees by implication to surrender his moral and social independence. Whether this theory of the laborers position be a good or a bad one, we are not now discussing. All that we say is, that it is not the economists theory, or, in other words, that the economists theory of the relations of labor to capital are not supported by the facts of daily life. What I agree to do in order to escape from starvation, or to save my wife and children from starva- tion, or through ignorance of my ability to do anything else, I agree to do under compulsion, just as much as if I agreed to do it with a pistol at my head; and the terms I make under such circumstances are not by any means the measure of my rights, even under the laws of trade. When, therefore, political economists talk of wages as being fixed by the proportion which labor bears to capital at any given time and place, they presuppose a state of things which is purely ideal. The hypothesis on which this law rests is, that the capitalists go in a body to the market-place, where they are met by the laborers, and that there, if the amount of capital seeking profits is found to preponderate over the amount of labor seeking employment, the competition of the capitalists fixes the rate of wages; if, on the other hand, the amount of labor offered is out of proportion to the amount of capital available for its employment, the competition of the laborers fixes the rate. We know, however, that the process is never conducted with this freedom from disturbance; and a very large portion of the distrust of political economy felt by the working classes is due to the assumption of the economists that their processes are capable of as much accuracy as those of the science of mechanics. It is safe to say that, until within a The Labor Crisis. 187 very few years, the rate of wages has, in no European country at least, been regulated in the manner here described. The most powerful regulator, and the only constant one, has been the la- borers ignorance and necessities. He always took what was offered him, and no more was offered him than was necessary to supply him with coarse food and clothing. A striking illustra- tion of the defectiveness of the politico-economical theory on this point has just been afforded in England. A clergyman in Som- ersetshire found the farm laborers in his parish miserably paid, lodged, and fed, and usually ending their days in the workhouse, although they might have had nearly double wages, better treat- ment, and good houses, by moving away half a days journey by railway. So he raised some money and sent some of them off. The light being thus let in, others have followed of their own accord, and the consequence has been that the remnant have had a considerable rise in their wages and great improvement in their treatment. Strikes also, organized by benevolent out- siders, have taken place amongst the same class in other coun- ties, and with a similar result. But these laborers were too ignorant and too degraded to have made any move towards bettering their condition themselves; and it is fair to assert that, for centuries past, the rate of their wages has really been affected but little, if at all, by the demand for labor exist- ing throughout England, or, in other words, with the propor- tion borne by English capital to English labor. It may, in short, be said of the laws of political economy, as is said of the municipal law, vigilantibus non dormientibus subveniunt. Another illustration of the defectiveness of the basis on which political economists sometimes build their theory is afforded by the Irish land question. According to the school of social philosophers of which Mr. Lowe and the London Times may be considered fair mouthpieces, the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland ought to be regulated, as they are regulated in England, by the law of demand and sup- ply. The farmer and the land-owner are, they say, free agents: let them make their contracts to suit themselves. Let the one try to give as little as possible, and the other to get as much as possible, and they will at least come to an under- standing which will fix the rent at the proper level. Now the 188 The Labor Crisis. [July, fact of the matter is, that, until the drain on population brought about by the emigration to America, the choice of the great body of the peasantry in Ireland lay between renting a piece of land and becoming a day-laborer; and a day-laborer in Ire- land was a man who worked in fine weather for a sum barely sufficient to supply him with potatoes, and who in wet weather, in one of the rainiest climates in the world, earned nothing at all. So that on his success in renting a farm on which he could raise his own substance it depended whether he would be sure of shelter and food all the year round, or pass it in a state of semi-starvation, keeping himself and his family alive partly by casual employment and partly by beggary. It must not be forgotten, too, that farmers with capital, such as now do most of the work of cultivation in England, are a class practically unknown in Ireland. When an Irish peasant, therefore, went to bargain with the landlord for a farm, he did not go as the political economists supposed him to go, as a man looking out for an investment, and who, jf he did not like farming, could fall back on consols and wait: he went in the character of a drowning man, and the bargain he made was really a bargain with a boatman to whose gunwale he was clinging for the privilege of being hauled in. If the demands of the boatman were exorbitant, the other party might, it is true, let go his hold, and wait till other boats came up, and thus secure his safety at a price justified by the number of boats in the neighborhood, and the commercial value of his own life; but then drowning men neither act nor think scien- tifically. It appears, then, that, although the emancipation of the laborer in modern times removed all legal bar to his selling his labor in the best market, or, in other words, selling it for such share in the products of labor and capital as the laws of political economy entitled him to, his education and social po- sition have been such, that, in practice, the capitalists in each locality have had a monopoly of his labor. In other words, he has been legally free while socially bound. In books and in lectures he has, it is true, since the rise of political econ- omy, been treated as the equal of the capitalist, and is always spoken of in scientific treatises as simply the vendor of a com The Labor Crisis. 189 modity in open market; but in real life his position has been that of a servant with a fixed status. Now the growth of education amongst the working classes, the increasing variety of employments, the increasing de- mand for labor created by the progress of discovery and invention, and the improvement in the diffusion of news and in the means of locomotion, have naturally opened their eyes to this wide divergence of the facts of their lives from the theory of political economy. They are very willing to admit that the relations of labor and capital ought to be what the economists say they are, that the hiring of a laborer by a capitalist should simply mean the sale of a commodity in open market by one free agent to another. But then, they say, the bargain cannot and does not take place in this way. When a farmer brings his wheat to market, if he thinks the price of- fered too low, he carries the wheat back again to his barn, and waits patiently and comfortably for a rise. If the corn-dealer thinks the price asked by the farmer too high, he goes home, puts up his money, and waits also. After a few days or a few months, during which both parties have lived in perfect comfort, the demand of the public probably makes itself felt with sufficient emphasis to enable them to come together once more and agree upon a price. So also, when the cap- italist goes into the market in quest of labor, if he finds that it costs more than he thinks it ought to cost, or more than he had calculated on paying, he withdraws, or waits, or invests in something else, or seeks labor in some other region; the only inconvenience he suffers being a temporary, and to him prob- ably trifling, loss of returns. When the workman goes into the market with his labor, on the other hand, if he finds wages are lower than he thinks they ought to be, he cannot wait in order to subject them to the test of capitalists competition. He has not the means of remaining idle or seeking employ- ment elsewhere. He may have some savings, but they are all that stand between himself and sickness, or between his fam- ily and his death, and he dares not touch them. His labor all the year round is barely sufficient to support himself and those dependent on him, and a months or a weeks idleness may plunge him in want or in debt. An attempt, on the part of an 190 The Labor Crisis. [July, individual laborer, to bring the capitalist to terms would simply result in a contemptuous dismissal. The laws of political econ- omy no doubt work constantly, but they work slowly; and if the laborer always waited passively for the promised result, he might never see it, or it might find him in the almshouse. It has, therefore, been apparent to the working classes, that, even supposing the economists to state correctly the laws of their science, the workman could not live by them, unless he were by some means raised, in making his bargain, to the mas- ters level, unless he were enabled to treat with the capitalist on a footing of equality, as political economy supposed him to be, but as he was not. It was plain that to this level the indi- vidual workman could not raise himself in the present state of society. The only remedy was combination, the union of a body of workmen large enough, by mutual aid, to support each other in testing the market by waiting, and to subject the em- ployer to something like the same inconvenience in waiting to which the men are subjected. It is only when these conditions are secured, that the politico-economical process for the ascer- taining the true rate of wages begins. The mass of labor is then measured against the mass of capital. The laborers ar- ray themselves on one side, the capitalists on the other, and have a trial of endurance. Whichever can hold out the long- est is decided to be in the right, or allowed to fix the price of labor. A strike, therefore, means simply the concerted organ- ized abstention of the laborers in one trade and one place from work, with the view of ascertaining whether the price they have put on labor or that which the masters have put on it be the correct one, the laborers being supported out of a fund previously accumulated by themselves. They do, in fact, nothing more than all other dealers do every day, withdraw their goods from the market when they think the prices offered lower than the state of trade warrants. But when a farmer stores his corn or a cattle-dealer leaves his oxen in the pas- ture for this reason, economists do not think of abusing him for it, or displaying before his eyes a calculation of the loss he has caused by not converting his wheat or his beef into human muscle, and thus increasing production and promoting human enjoyment. On the contrary, if they do not applaud his course, The Labor Crisis. 191 they call attention with great satisfaction to the way in which his selfish regard for his own interests works for the general good. Of course a strike is a wasteful and clumsy process; but so is war, so is all speculation for a rise. The only excuse for it is, that it is the only means of reaching the desired result. If, when a scarcity is impending, people would only foresee it, and cut down their consumption voluntarily, instead of having econ- omy forced on them by the hoarding of speculators, much labor and waste would be saved. If, when business has been too much expanded, and credit begins to get shaky, business men would voluntarily narrow their undertakings, instead of waiting for the banks to raise their discount and restrict their accommo- dation, the prudent and the careless or chimerical would not suffer together as they now do. i~, in short, human nature were only what it ought to be, the saving in money would be incalculable, for two thirds of our time is really spent in guard- ing against the consequences of folly or stupidity. Strikes are sad sights, for the same reason that armies and courts of jus- tice and jails are sad sights. The more excellent way, and .that to which we believe and trust we are now coming, for the decision of what the rate of wages ought to be, would be for the capitalist to take the laborer into his counting-room, and show him his books, re- veal to him his rate of profit, and prove to him that he could not afford to give more for his labor than he was giving. But this would be a formal acceptance of a theory of the relations between labor and capital which, until very recently, the cap- italist has always scouted. He has maintained, indeed, that the interests of labor and capital are identical, a phrase which, though often used, and by some people regarded as something exceedingly valuable, has about as much practical importance as the statement that honesty is the best policy, or that true happiness comes from virtue. The interests of labor and capital are identical in the long run, and on a great scale; but no capitalist feels them to be so, in his particular case, and on a particular day. He does not go into any business expect- ing to treat the laborer as a partner, and make him share in his prosperity by giving him a proportion of his profits. He ex 192 The Labor Crisis. [July, pects, on the contrary, to make a large portion of his profits by giving the laborer as little for his labor as possible, that is, by taking all the advantage he can, though perhaps not knowingly or designedly, of the laborers ignorance or necessity. It might be said, in the same way, that the interests of the cotton-grower and cotton-manufacturer are identical: so they are in the bug run. It is the interest of the grower that there be plenty of manufacturers, and that they all get high prices for the finished article. It is the int~rest of the manufacturer that there be plenty of growers, and that there be large enough crops, and demand enough for the raw material, to encourage cultivation. But it is the interest of the manufacturer, never- theless, to get his cotton on any particular week at the lowest possible price, without regard to the growers necessities; and for this purpose he uses all the skill and knowledge and power of waiting he may possess. Nevertheless, both grower and the manufacturer are paid out of the same fund. Of course, if the laborers worked for nothing for a year or two, it could be shown that by so doing they not only benefited capital, but benefited themselves, inasmuch as the greater the profits of capital, the more capital will there be hereafter for the employment of labor; and it might also be shown that cap- ital, by bestowing all its profits for a while on labor, and thus stimulating the multiplication of laborers, prepared the way for cheap and abundant labor at some future period. But what is the use of speculations of this sort, except as an exercise for the wits? The real hard fact is, that the interests of capital and labor, in a particular year and in a particular place, are not identical. The capitalist makes all the profit he can out of labor, just as he does out of any other commodity; and the la- borer gives as little labor as he can in return for his wages. For example, it was reported, and we believe with truth, that some of the most extensive manufactories in Rhode Island made over one hundred per cent profit during the years 1864 and 1865. These profits were enormous, so enormous that they were pretty sure not to last. When gains of this kind are to be had in any business, either production is so stimulated as to produce a glut, and cause a falling-off in prices; or so much capital is attracted into the business, that prices are lowered by The Labor Crisis. 193 competition. But neither of these results comes very speedily. It takes a year or two to bring the one, often several years to bring the other. Men cannot and do not withdraw their capi- tal from old channels, and put it into new ones, in a month. They wait and watch and deliberate before they go to work to build factories or put up machinery; and in the mean time those who are already in the business enjoy a practical monopoly; and yet the largeness of their profits makes no difference for the time being to the laborer. ~. It will make a difference to him in the end, because, as capital is attracted to the business, the competition for labor will grow keen, and wages will rise; but the Rhode Island mills might make one hundred per cent for two or three years, and nothing during that interval except a sudden diminution in the number of available laborers would compel the mill-owners to raise wages under the ordinary work- ing of economiC laws. Now it is easy enough to tell the laborer that, the rate~ of wages being regulated by the proportion borne by the number of laborers to the quantity of capital actually engaged in produc- tion, and the capital in this particular business having under- gone no increase, and the number of laborers having undergone no decrease, he is entitled to no rise in his wages, no mat- ter what profits may be. In the days before he knew anything about combination he would have accepted this answer as suffi- cient, and gone on with his toil, while his employers every day received larger and larger dividends, bought gaudier coaches and faster horses, built themselves finer houses, wore finer silks, and drank costlier wine. He would have found himself powerless. Remonstrance would have brough1~ dismissal, and dismissal would have brought starvation. But having learnt to combine, he refuses to accept the capitalists exposition of the laws of his condition. He insists on establishing a relation between wages and profits, not in the long run, but at once. In vain you tell him the capitalist has to provide out of the gains of profitable seasons for the loss of unprofitable seasons, and for the hazards of all seasons. He will reply, that, as the capitalist takes care of himself, so must the laborer; that the laborers capital is his labor, and that he too must make hay while the sun shines, must make provision in days when con voL. cv. NO. 216. 13 194 The Labor Crisis. sumption is brisk, and profits are high, and labor in demand, for days in which consumption will be dull, profits fail, and labor in no demand; that the laborer, it is true, runs no risk which would be considered by a capitalist worth mention, but he risks his all every day he rises. His capacity of earning twenty dollars a week is a very small matter, but it is all he has in the world; and in order to make it as valuable as possible, he creates, by combining with others, an artificial scarcity of the commodity in which he deals ; or to put the matter in an odd, but perfectly true economical light, the laborers unite in dismissing their employer until the latter consents to divide with them a larger share of his gains. Here the Trades Unions step in, and perform a most impor- tant duty, that of deciding when it is proper to strike. In the earlier days of combination, when the workingmen were less intelligent than they are now, strikes of course were frequently made when striking was absolut~ily useless, and when the manufacturer could not afford any advance of wages. The result was enormous loss and vexation to both parties, and of- ten terrible suffering to the laborer. But the managers of the Trades Unions now make it their business, not only to watch and report the rates of wages in different localities, but to watch and report upon the state of trade. They follow the markets with keen, practised eyes, note the demand and sup- ply, and are able to compare cost of production with obtain- able prices with as much accuracy as the manufacturers themselves. The managers know with all but certainty what rate of profits employers in any branch of business are mak- ing, and therefore whether they can or cannot afford, without injury, to pay higher wages; and it is only with permission from head-quarters that strikes are now made, as it is from head-quarters that the supplies of money come to support them. Moreover, and this is a singular illustration of the conservative influence of responsibility, the more powerful the Trades Unions have become, and the larger the sum of money accumulated in their treasury, the smaller has been the number of strikes which have taken place under thi~ir auspices or by their direction. They are very careful not to exact of the capitalist more than his business can bear, or enough to The Labor Crisis. 195 disgust him with it; but they do insist on his admitting the laborer at once to a share in his prosperity, instead of allow- ing the latter to be relegated, as he has been under the r6gime of the pure economists, to the distant period when, production having increased capital, and capital having been invested in the business in question, and the number of laborers not hav- ing changed, and the demand for labor having grown, wages should be duly raised. We think nobody who considers the matter calmly and impartially can help wondering that economists should ex- pect laborers to accept this statement of the law of wages, as a solace for the ills of their condition, one minute after they have discovered what combining can do for them. They have found in this a means clumsy and imperfect, no doubt, but which, as we all see, is every year growing in efficiency of securing for themselves in reality what politi- cal economists have assured them in theory, an identity of interest with the capitalist, or, in other words, a participation in his profits as well as in his losses. At present the laborer does not share in his employers prosperity unless it is long continued, while he suffers from his adversity at once. What he seeks is to share in both instantaneously, whenever they come, and whether they last longer or shorter. Of course the risks of capital are great, but so are its prizes. The success of his business to the capitalist means a fortune; to the laborer, his employers success means simply the continuance of his daily wages. For any marked improvement in his own con- dition he cannot look. No matter how hard he may work, or with how much zeal for his employers interests, he has nothing to hope from it, except the sweet consciousness of his own virtue, and the cold approval of the m,an he has benefited. Most capitalists look forward to retirement from trade after a few years of successful application to business; and even if this expectation be not fully justified, they enjoy throughout their career abundant opportunities for recreation, for travel, and for culture. The laborer, however, as at present situated, in nearly every country in the world, has little to look forward to except a life of constant toil; and even the soberest and most frugal and most highly paid is rarely able to save more than enough The Labor Crisis. [July, 196 to provide for himself in case of illness, or to secure a pittance to his family in case of his death. For books, for amusements, for any of the thousand and one distractions which sweeten the life of the class above him, nothing remains after he has clothed and fed himself and his family. Now to say that this is part of the natural order of things, the result of the working of the laws of political economy, that it has been ordained that the laborer should receive barely enough to live on, though the man who employs him is making one hundred per cent per annum, and that he should always be paid in fixed wages, is to beg the question. This is the theory which nearly all sociologists have until now accepted, but the very object of the present agitation is to try its correctness. How large a number of unchangeable things are only un- changeable because we have never seen anything different, has been pointed out and illustrated by philosophers over and over, and this is peculiarly true of social phenomena. Every day witnesses new discoveries in the sphere of moral duties and relations. We have seen how greatly the relations of master and servant, of parent and children, and of husband and wife, have been changed in the modern world by the growth of individualism. What we have now to see is whether we have reached the last stage of development in these relations, or whether further modifications are still possible. For several hundred years it has been accepted as one of the ultimate facts of political economy, that the laborer must be the servant, in all senses of the term, of the capitalist; but we maintain that that relation was as little determined by natural law as the relation of master and slave. What we have to see is, whether in the future he may not be the partner of the capitalist, and whether the will of the working classes, embodied in custom, may not assume the appearance and force of an economical law, and make, after a while, their participation in profits, and not daily or weekly wages, seem the natural mode of paying for labor. When Co-operation is talked of as a remedy for the troubles between labor and capital, what is almost always meant is the co-operation of laborers with laborers, the capital being bor- rowed or contributed by them, and the work of superintend- The Labor Crisis. 197 ence being done by some of their own number, elected for the purpose. There is little question that this is the form of organization to which labor is tending, and which it will ulti- mately assume; but it may be doubted whether the mass of laborers in any trade are yet in a sufficiently advanced state of culture to say nothing of the material difficulties in their way to render this possible as an immediate substitute for the present state of things. Large capitalists can always carry on business to greater advantage than small capitalists; and there is, we need hardly say, little probability that co-opera- tive associations of workmen will, for a long time to come, be able to muster capital in large enough quantities to compete without disadvantage with such individual manufacturers as are able to secure steady labor. Moreover, the difficulty of obtaining in any association of workmen, possessing the amount of mental and moral discipline now common in that class, the requisite efficiency in general management, must for a long time to come prove serious. It has been overcome in several cases in France and England, but the number of these successes is still comparatively small. The attempts which have been made in this country have usually resulted in the conversion of the enterprise into an ordinary partnership composed of two or three individuals, and the withdrawal of their remaining members, or their falling back into the posi- tion of journeymen. Although, therefore, we look forward to seeing labor eventually organized in co-operative associations, and to seeing all the great accumulations of capital held by these associations,and, what is more and better, to seeing a state of things in which the position of a mere hired laborer, dependent on daily wages, will be occupied only by a very small and insignificant class, and that class composed solely of the vicious and unusually unskilled or unstable, we think the next stage in the progress of labor, and that to which the present agitation is likely to lead us before very long, will be the co-operation of laborers with capitalists, the association of the men with the master as partners, receiving in lieu of wages, or in addition to wages, a share in the profits, after the deduction of a fair, probably a high, interest on that capital, thus sharing his prosperity as well as his misfortune. This, 198 The Labor Crisis. we venture to predict, will be the form of relation between labor and capital which will be witnessed in most manufac- turing countries before very many years have passed. It has already been tried in some English factories with marked success; and although the majority of masters will of course find it very hard to fall into it, inasmuch as it involves the sacrifice of some pride, of some cherished habits, and of some anticipations of profit, which, even if not always real- ized, and if becoming every year more difficult to realize, as anticipations have their value. That it is possible has been proved by one or two experiments in England, where it has saved at least one firm from the ruin which was impending over them from the incessant strikes of their workmen, while since its adoption all has gone on smoothly. In Chicago, also, the experiment is being tried as the result of the confusion brought about by the eight-hour law. The Northwestern Manufacturing Company of that city has effected an arrange- ment by which the capital and good-will of the concern are valued at a certain round sum; on this the company reserves, after deducting taxes and insurance, ten per cent interest; the men are then to receive ordinary wages for an ordinary days labor, the amount to be fixed by the foremen of the several departments of the company, and, besides wages, half the profits of the concern to be distributed amongst them in pro- portion to their wages, the other half being appropriated by the company. If trade should fall off, the number of work- ing hours, and the rate of wages also, are to be proportionate- ly reduced; but nobody is to be discharged for want of work, and if anybody leaves or is discharged for any other reason than want of work, and should be, at the time of his leaving, a stockholder in the company, he is bound to sell his stock to the company, and the company is bound to buy it at cost price and ten per cent per annum additional. The agreement is only made for one year, and of course it may be regarded as simply an experiment. That it may prove successful, and that the example thus set may be imitated all over the country, every friend of human- ity, and, let us add, every friend of the political system of the United States, if the terms be not synonymous, must The Labor Crisis. 199 heartily desire. There is no question and this eight-hour agitation, the Fenian agitation, and the negro confiscation agi- tation at the South prove it that the mental and moral condi- tion of the laboring classes is rapidly becoming in America what it is in Europe, the great social and political question of the day. Fifty years ago, the opportunity still presented itself to the people of the United States of trying an experiment then entirely novel, and the success of which would have been one of the greatest triumphs ever achieved in the field of social science, the experiment of unlimited freedom of trade, of trusting, not in some things only, but in all things, to the sagacity, the foresight, the self-restraint and intelligence of the individual man. As everybody now knows who knows anything at all of the history of social science, amongst the thousand fallacies and superstitions by which the world was ridden in the Mid- dle Ages was the fallacy that money was not only wealth, but the only real wealth; that whatever brought gold into a country enriched it, while nothing else did. From this flowed the delusion that all operations of trade which did not leave behind a large residuum in gold and silver were losing opera- tions, and that therefore in every commercial transaction some- body must lose, that both parties could not be gainers, and that which was the gainer was to be ascertained when the account was closed, b~ seeing which could show most specie as the result. Spain acted on this theory in her management of her magnificent colonial empire in the New World, and flattered herself that she was laying the foundations of endless wealth, when her fleets of galleons unloaded their cargoes of precious metal on her quays. Other nations not having gold-bearing colonies acted on it in their regulations of foreign trade. The governments saw that men, when left to themselves, entered every day into transactions which did not leave behind a re- siduum of specie; that, in the ordinary course of trade, gold left the kingdom almost as much as it flowed into it; and that, in point of fact, the goods of foreigners seemed often to come in in greater volume and value than native goods went out, and the difference they assumed had to be paid in gold. They therefore, perceiving the incompetence of the mass of men to manage their own business, got together knots of statesmen 200 The Labor Crisis. in the different capitals of Europe ; lawyers, to whom the merchant was a vagabond trespassing on the feudal lords domain; priests, to whom trade was but a snare set by the Devil for the unwary; and soldiers, to whom the only use of craftsmen was to equip armies and decorate courts ; and these drew up rules and ordinances informing the subjects what to sell and what to buy, what to manufacture and what not to manufacture, what might leave the kingdom and what might come into it; and they did it with the most perfect sim- plicity and good faith, the most perfect confidence in their own competence. They had no more doubt of the monarchs right to regulate trade, than of his right to regulate worship. The system of interference with commerce and manufactures was but the counterpart, perhaps we should rather say the complement, of the system by which the government pre- scribed what their subjects ought to believe in matters spirit- ual. It would have been absurd for a power which professed to know what church men ought to go to, and in what form of faith the pure truth was to be found, to profess inability to show men how to get rich. It was the most natural thing in the world to come down almost to our own time for an illustration that, when one minister of Louis XIV. was dragooning the llugueiiots into the true Church, another should be teaching the faithful how to weave and spin and dye, what trades to follow and what to avoid. When a government can decide how a man ought to save his soul, of course it knows how he ought to make his fortune. The doctrine that freedom of trade is a good thing, or, in other words, that the work of accumulating wealth is best done by individuals following their own instincts, seems a very simple one; but it is, nevertheless, only eighty years old, and is yet only partially recognized. There is hardly one of the fal- lacies of the Middle Ages which has retained so strong a hold on mens minds as the idea that the government ought to act as director-general of trade and manufactures. One might have expected that it would never have succeeded in cross- ing the Atlantic, that when a new community was founded here, with individual freedom as its very base, it would have been one of the first European fallacies to be laid aside. But 1867.] The Labor Crisis. 201 it nevertheless, unfortunately both for this nation and for all others, did come over, along with religious intolerance, and survived it. The men of the Revolution saw very clearly the advantages of freedom of trade within certain limits, and accordingly established it between the States, thus devoting to it a larger area and a greater variety of soil and climate than have elsewhere ever been won for it, and thus opening what has been unquestionably one of the greatest sources of the na- tional prosperity. But with one of those failures of logic with which political history is filled, and which makes the growth of a science of history seem impossible, they did not see, and the mass of the American public does not see to this day, that what was good for the States between each other might be good for the States between them and foreigners. Every- body acknowledges that, when Massachusetts men trade freely with New York men, both are gainers, and that the establish- ment of custom-houses on the State line would be a great mis- fortune for both. But most people nevertheless, to this hour, imagine that, if Massachusetts men were allowed to trade free- ly with foreigners, the foreigner only would be the gainer, and the Massachusetts man would go on losing and getting into debt as long as the trade lasted, let the foreigner sell ever so cheaply. The dividing political line seems to have some obfus- cating effect on the mind when it comes to deal with this sort of problem. In the case of Canada, the absurdity becomes more apparent, however, than in the case of Europe. If Can- ada were annexed to the United States to-morrow, free trade across the St. Lawrence would be established at once, and to everybodys satisfaction; and it would be universally accepted as self-evident that in the traffic which followed both the peo- ple of the new States and of the old States would profit. But draw the political line, hoist the Stars and Stripes on one side and the Union Jack on the other, and nothing will persuade most of us that, if free trade were permitted, all the profit would not fall to the Canadians and all the loss to the Americans; and yet the political line, of course, exists only in the mind, and has of itself no more real effect on the re- sults of trade than the Milky Way. The Democratic party, it is true, has been, during a portion 202 The Labor Crisis. [July, of its history, a free-trade party; but less from a belief that through freedom of trade lay the straightest road to the ob- ject of all trade, the making of money, than from a dread of centralization and strong government. That free trade should not have been proclaimed by the Colonies from the first hour of their independence, and steadily adhered to ever since as part and parcel of the American system, and that protection should not have been repudiated along with royalty, oligarchy, religious establishments, passports, and all other parts of the paternal system of government, must ever be considered as one of the great misfortunes of our time. This country was, of all, the best adapted to the preaching and the practice of the doctrine. The climate, the soil, the situation, the genius and habits of the people favored it, and its adoption here would have had a force and influence which its adoption in any European country now does not and can- not have. Had England or any other leading European state, two centuries ago, thrown its ports open, the world would, no doubt, have made much more rapid advances both in moral and in material progress. We may be sure that feudal ideas would have died out earlier; the soldiers trade would sooner have fallen in repute, and that of the merchant have sooner risen; the means of intercourse between different countries would have improved more quickly, because intercourse, instead of being regarded as injurious, as it is under the protective sys- tem, would have been regarded as a blessing; good feeling, too, among the nations of the earth would have been promoted, and the growth of standing armies, the great curse and scourge of modern civilization, have been prevented. But now, after five hundred years of meddling, the free-trade policy of England, as an example, produces comparatively little effect. People say, and not unnaturally, that she has only abandoned pro- tection after it has done for her all she wanted it to do. But it is easy enough to show that England has achieved her manufacturing supremacy, not in consequence of, but in spite of, the trammels on her industry. She has, in the first place, the great essential of manufacturing industry, large beds of coal and iron lying side by side; she has, in the next place, a population of extraordinary energy and indepen The Labor Crisis. 203 dence of character. She has a government which, with all its faults and all its affectation of superior economical wis- dom, has been less meddlesome than any other in Europe, and which has paid an amount of respect to individual freedom which in all other parts of Europe has been unknown. Since the termination of the Wars of the Roses, at the close of the fifteenth century, she has been the theatre of only one war. France, Germany, and Italy, during the last three hundred years, have been desolated nearly a dozen times by hostile armies. During the whole of this period no Englishman had seen a foreign soldier in England, or an army in the field, ex- cept during the Revolution of 1642, and the brief raid of 1T45. That the opening of the nineteenth century found England rich as well as free, compared with all Continental nations, was no wonder; the wonder would have been if it had not. But neither in England nor anywhere else was a full op- portunity afforded of seeing what the freedom of the indiVidual could accomplish in the art of growing rich. The first field ever offered on which the experiment could have been fairly tried was this continent. It was blessed with the greatest variety of soil and climate, with the finest ports and harbors, with the greatest extent of inland navigation, with the rich- est supplies of metals, of any country in the world, and had a population singularly daring, hardy, ingenious, and self- reliant, untrammelled by feudal traditions, and with the love of industry and honor of industry instilled into them with their mothers milk. In fact this continent seemed made, and its population born, for the display, for the first time in the history of the world, of the free use of all the human faculties, for the submission of all the, problems of life, social, moral, polit- ical, and economical, to the individual judgment. The oppor- tunity was allowed to slip away; the old European path was entered upon under the influence of the old mediawal mo- tives; the belief that gold was the only wealth; that in trading with the foreigner, unless you sold him more in spe- cie value than he sold you, you lost by the transaction; that, diversity of industry being necessary to sound progress, the di- versity of individual taste, bent, and capacity could not be de- pended upon to produce it; that, manufactures being necessary 204 The Labor Crisis. [July, to make the nation independent of foreigners in time of war, individual energy and sagacity could not be depended on to create them; that a hundred men assembled in Washington, chosen by the chances of a ballot, knew best how each citi- zen ought to invest his capital; and so on, through the whole weary round of mediteval fallacies~ The result was, that the policy of building up manufac- tures, that is, of forcing capital and industry into channels into which they did not naturally flow, by granting partial monopolies, or offering bounties, was deliberately resorted to, in close imitation of European models, until manufactures on a large ~cale were forced rapidly into existence, and society in most of the large towns of the East brought back to the European standard, divided largely into two classes, the one great capitalists, the other day-laborers, living from hand to mouth, thousands of them dependent for their bread and butter, as the phrase goes, upon the will of one person, and condemned to mechanical occupations ii~ whP~h they have no interest, and for wages which are little more than sufficient to support a somewhat cheerless and hopeless life. Agricul- ture has in this way been destroyed in some of the Eastern States, and, what is worse, so has commerce. Touching the effects of protection on New England, Mr. Atkinson says, in the admirable pamphlet the title of which stands at the head of this article I think Boston to-day affords a good illustration of the evils of protection. The conditions of soil, climate, and coast indicated mar- itime pursuits as the province of New England men; and she en- gaged in them chieiy until the South forced a protective tariff upon the country. As this destroyed commerce, New England developed textile manufactures before their time, and then, becoming converted to the doctrine of protection, continued to foster them by the same process. The result is, that a large amount of the capital, and a large amount of the business capacity of Boston, which should have been applied to railroads, steamships, and commerce, has gone into manu- factures; consequently Bo~4on commerce declines, and young men emigrate. Commerce would have employed the young men at home, or in voyages ending at home; but textile manufactures employ only a few treasurers, agents, or commission merchants, and a very large The Labor Crisis. 205 force of operatives or laborers. There are too many young men for the number of places equal to their capacity, and they must migrate. I think the population of New England has not been improved by this forced establishment of textile manufactures. The school of protectionists, of which Mr. Henry C. Carey is the chief, have been betrayed, by their servile swallowing of European ideas, into the assumption that it is necessarily a misfortune for a nation to be exclusively or in the main en- gaged in agricultural pursuits. This theory is based mainly on the comparisons which are to be found in most European works on social science between the town and country popula- tion, a comparison which, as far as regards intelligence, alert- ness, acuteness, and receptivity, is undoubtedly unfavorable to the peasant. But then it is constantly forgotten that the Euro- pean peasant is the product of one thousand years of feudal- ism, that he has never been provided with the means of edu- cation, that, except in Switzerland and Sweden, he has never shared in the government, or had to exercise his mind with politics, and that he has always been, and still is, overpowered by the sense of his own social inferiority. The result is, that the peasant or farmer is, in nearly all European countries, a synonyme for a lout or boor, a stupid, uninteresting, and ser- vile animal, with foresight enough to sow, and greed enough to reap, but without any of the qualities which raise a nation much above the lowest state of civilization. The American farmer has grown up under conditions so widely different, and is himself so different, that generalizations about the in- dustrial or social value of agriculture, based on European facts, are really 6f no value whatever to the American legislator. There has never existed, and does not now exist, a community so far advanced both politically and socially, so well adapted for progress of all kinds, presenting so sure a foundation for a government, and offering so fair a promise of lastin,g order and prosperity, as New England when it was almost wholly agricultural. We believe that there is not now, and will not be until the manufacturing industry has undergone a vast transformation, a greater one than we look for in our time, or even in this age, so good a school as a farming com- munity, tolerably thickly settled, and supplied as no farming 206 The Labor Crisis. [July, community out of America has ever been with the means of education, for the cultivation of that stern, simple, enduring, self-reliant, self-respecting type of character, which must, after all, form the basis of any nation which seeks to do great things, or leave a shining mark in history. Town populations are quick in conception, and quick in action; but, as town pop- ulations now are, or are likely to be, for the support of a political system against the cankers of corruption and of de~ lusion and the blandishments of oligarchy or despotism, and against disasters and dangers of all sorts, give us farmers who have been bred under it, and have learned to love it. In the three great revolutions which have perhaps done most for the preservation of political liberty in the modern world, that of 1642 in England, and those of 1776 and 1860 in this country, it is the agricultural population which has supplied the good cause with its stoutest, most enduring, and in fact, one might almost say, its only defenders; and the reason we take to be this, that, whatever contrivances for the improvement of human character social tr industrial science may still have in reserve, nothing has as yet been devised which gives the average man s