NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. iNo. CCXCVI. JULY, 1881. PRESENT ASPECTS OF TIlE INDIAN PROBLEM. THAT the history of our Indian relations presents, in great part, a record of broken treaties, of unjust wars, and of cruel spoliation, is a fact too well known to require proof or to suffer denial. But it is only just to the Government of the United States to say that its treaties with Indian tribes were, as a rule, made in good faith, and that most of our Indian wars were brought on by circumstances for which the Government itself could not fairly be. held responsible. Of the treaties, those were the most important by which the Government guaranteed to Indian tribes certain tracts of land as reservations to be held and occupied by them forever under the protection of the United States, in the place of other lands ceded by the Indians. There is no reason to doubt that in most, if not ali, of such cases, those who conducted Indian affairs on the part of the Government, not anticipating the rapid advance of settlement, sincerely believed in the possibility of maintaining those reservations intact for the Indians, and that, in this respect, while their intentions were honest, their foresight was at fault. There are men still living who spent their younger days near the borders of Indian country in Ohio and Indiana, and it is a well-known fact that, when the Indian Territory was established west of the Mississippi, it was generally thought that the settlements of white men would never crowd into that region, at least not for many generations. Thus were such reservations VOL. CXXXIII..NO. 296. 1 2 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. guaranteed by the Government with the honest belief that the Indians would be secure in their possession, which, as snbsequent events proved, was a gross error of judgment. It is also a fact that most of the Indian wars grew, not from any desire of the Government to disturb the Indians in the terri- torial possessions guaranteed to them, but from the restless and unscrupulous greed of frontiersmen who pushed their settlements and ventures into the Indian country, provoked conflicts with the Indians, and then called for the protection of the Government against the resisting and retaliating Indians, thus involving it in the hostilities which they themselves had begun. It is true that in some instances Indian wars were precipitated by acts of rashness and violence on the part of military men without orders from the Government, while the popular impression that Indian outbreaks were generally caused by the villainy of Government agents, who defrauded and starved the Indians, is substantially unfounded. Such frauds and robberies have no doubt been frequently com- mitted. It has also happened that Indian tribes were exposed to great suffering and actual starvation in consequence of the neglect of Congress to provide the funds necessary to fulfill treaty stipu- lations. But things of this kind resulted but seldom in actual hostilities. To such wrongs the Indians usually submitted with a more enduring patience than they receive credit for, although in some instances, it must be admitted, outrages were committed by Indians without provocation, which resulted in trouble on a large scale. In mentioning these facts, it is not my purpose to hold the Government entirely guiltless of the wrongs inflicted upon the Indians. It has, undoubtedly, sometimes lacked in vigor when Indian tribes needed protection. It has, in many cases, yielded too readily to the pressure of those who wanted to possess them- selves of Indian lands. Still less would I justify some high- handed proceedings on the part of the. Government in moving peaceable Indian tribes from place to place without their consent, trying to rectify old blunders by new acts of injustice. But I desire to point out that by far the larger part of our Indian troubles have sprung from the greedy encroachments of white men upon Indian lands, and that, hostilities being brought about in this manner, in which the Indians uniformly succumbed, old treaties and arrangements were overthrown to be supplanted by new ones of a similar character which eventually led to the PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 3 same results. In the light of events, the policy of assigning to the Indian tribes large tracts of land as permanent reservations, within the limits of which they might continue to roam at pleas- ure, with the expectation that they would never be disturbed thereon, appears as a grand mistake, a natural, perhaps even an unavoidable mistake in times gone by, but a mistake for all that, for that policy failed to take into account the inevitable pressure of rapidly and irresistibly advancing settlement and enterprise. While duly admitting and confessing the injustice done, we must understand the real nature of the difficulty if we mean to solve it. No intelligent man will to-day for a moment entertain the belief that there is still a nook or corner of this country that has the least agricultural or mineral value in it, beyond the reach of progressive civilization. Districts which seemed to be remote wildernesses but a few years ago have been or are now being penetrated by railroads: Montana, Washington Territory, Idaho, and New Mexico are now more easily accessible than Ohio and Indiana were at the beginning of this century, and the same process which resulted in crowding the Indians out of these States has begun and is rapidly going on in those Territories. The settler and miner are beginning, or at least threatening, to invade every Indian reservation that offers any attraction, and it is a well-known fact that the frontiersman almost always looks upon Indian lands as the most valuable in the neighborhood, simply because the Indian occupies them and the white man is excluded from them. From the articles in the newspapers of those remote Territories, it would sometimes appear as if, in the midst of millions of untouched acres, the white people were deprived of the necessary elbow-room as long as there is an Indian in the country. At any rate, the settlers ~nd miners want to seize upon the most valuable tracts first, and they are always inclined to look for them among the lands of the Indians. The fact that wild Indiansand here it is proper to say that when in this discussion Indians are spoken of as wild, and their habits of life as savage, these terms are not used in their extreme sense, but as simply meaning uncivilized, there being of course among them, in that respect, a difference of degrees hold immense tracts of country which, possessed by them, are of no advantage to anybody, while, as is said, thousands upon thousands of white people stand ready to cultivate them and to make them contribute to the national wealth, is always apt 4 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW to make an impression upon minds not accustomed to nice di~ crimination. It is needless to say that the rights of the In~ dians are a matter of very small consideration in the eyes of those who covet their possessions. The. average frontiers- man looks upon the Indian simply as a nuisance that is in his way. There are certainly men among them of humane prin- ciples, but also many whom it would be difficult to convince that it is a crime to kill an Indian, or that to rob an Indian of his lands is not a meritorious act. This pressure grows in volume and intensity as the population increases, until finally, in some way or another, one Indian reservation after another falls into the hands of white settlers. Formerly, when this was accom- plished, the Indians so dispossessed were removed to other vacant places farther westward. Now this expedient is no longer open. The western country is rapidly filling up. A steady stream of immigration is following the railroad lines and then spreading to the right and left. The vacant places still existing are either worthless or will soon be exposed to the same inva- sion. The plains are being occupied by cattle-raisers, the fertile valleys and bottom-lands by agriculturists, the mountains by miners. What is to become of the Indians? In trying to solve this question, we have to keep in view the facts here recited. However we mary deplore the injustice which, these facts have brought, and are still bringing, upon the red men, yet with these facts we have to deal. They are undeniable~ Sound statesmanship caunot disregard them. It is true that the Indian reservations now existing cover a great many millions of acres, containing very valuable tracts of agricultural, grazing, and mineral land; that the area now cultivated, or that can possibly be cultivated by the Indians, is comparatively very small; that by far the larger portion is lying waste. Is it not, in view of the history of more than two centuries, useless to speculate in our minds how these many millions of acres can be preserved in their present state for the Indians to roam upon ?how the greedy push of settlement and enterprise might be permanently checked for the protection of the red mans present possessions, as hunting- grounds upon which, moreover, there is now but very little left to hunt? We are sometimes told that ours is a powerful govern- ment, which might accomplish such things if it would ouly put forth its whole strength. Is this so? The Government is, indeed, strong in some respects, but weak in others. It may be truthfully PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 5 said that the Government has never been intent upon robbing the Indians. It has frequently tried, in good faith, to protect them against encroachment, and almost as frequently it has failed. It Ihas simply yielded to the pressure exercised upon it by the people who were in immediate contact with the Indians. Those in stuthority were, in most cases, drawn or driven into an active participation in conflicts not of their own making. When a collision between Indians and whites had once occurred, no matter who was responsible for it, and when bloody deeds had been committed and an outery about Indian atrocities risen up, our military forces were always found on the side of the white people and against the savage, no matter whether those who gave the orders knew that the savages were originally the victims and not the assailants. Imagine, now, the Government were to pro- claim that, from the many millions of acres at present covered by Indian reservations, white men should forever be excluded, and that the national power should be exerted to that end, what would be the consequence? For some time the Government might succeed in enforcing such a resolution. How long, would depend upon the rapidity with which the western country is occupied by settlers. As the settlements crowd upon the reser- vations, the population thickens, and the demand for larger fields of agricultural and mining enterprise becomes more pressing, the Government may still remain true to its purpose. But will those who are hungry for the Indian lands sit still? It will be easy for the rough and reckless frontiersmen to pick quarrels with the Indians. The speculators, who have their eyes upon every opportunity for gain, will urge them on. The watehful- ness of the Government will, in the long run, be unavailing to prevent collisions. The Indians will retaliate. Settlers cabins will be burned and blood will flow. The conffict once brought on, he white man and the red man will stand against one another, and, in spite of all its good intentions and its sense of justice, the forces of the Government will find themselves engaged on the side of the white man. The Indians will be hunted down at whatever cost. It will simply be a repetition of the old story, and that old story will be eventually repeated whenever there is a large and valuable Indian reservation sur- rounded by white settlements. Unjust, disgraceful1 as this may be, it is not only probable, but almost inevitable. The extension. of our railroad system will only accelerate the catastrophe. 6 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. We are frequently told that the management of Indian affairs in Canada has been more successful than ours in avoiding such confficts. This appears to be true. But, while giving credit to the Canadian authorities for the superiority of their management in some respects, we must not forget that they are working under conditions far less difficult. The number of their Indians is much less, and their unoccupied territory much larger. They have still what may be called an Indian frontierthe white men on one side of the line and the Indians on the other, with vast hunting-grounds visited only by the trapper and far-trader. Their agricultural settlements advance with far less tapidity than ours. There is far less opportunity for encroachment. When in the British possessions agricultural and mining enterprise spreads with the same energy and eagerness as in the United States, when railroads penetrate their Indian coun- try, when aM that is valuable in it becomes thus accessible and tempting to the greed of white men, when game becomes scarce and ceases to furnish snificient sustenance to the In- dians, the Canadian authorities in their management of Indian affairs will find themselves confronted with the same diffi- culties. What does, under such circumstances, wise and humane statesmanship demand? Not that we should close our eyes to existing facts; but that, keeping those facts clearly in view, we should discover among the possibilities that which is most just and best for the Indians. I am profoundly convinced that a stub- born maintenance of the system of large Indian reservations must eventually result in the destruction of the red men, how- ever faithfully the Government may endeavor to protect their rights. It is only a question of time. My reasons for this belief I have given above. What we can and should do is, in general terms, to fit the Indians, as much as possible, for the habits and occupations of civilized life, by work and education; to individ- ualize them in the possession and appreciation of property, by allotting to them lands in severalty, giving them a fee simple title individually to the parcels of land. they cultlvate, inalienable for a certain period, and to obtain their consent to a disposition of that part of their lands which they cannot use, for a fair compen- sation, in such a tanner that they no longer stand in the way of the development of the country as an obstacle, but form part of it and are benefited by it. PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 7 The circumstances surrounding them place before the Indians this stern alternative: extermination or civilization. The thought of exterminating a race, once the only occupant of the soil upon which so many millions of our own people have grown prosper- ous and happy, must be revolting to every American who is not devoid of all sentiments of justice and humanity. To civilize them, which was once only a benevolent fancy, has now become an absolute necessity, if we mean to save them. (Jan Indians be civilized? This question is answered in the negative only by those who do not want to civilize them. My experience in the management of Indian affairs, which enabled me to witness the progress made even among the wildest tribes, conftrms me in the belief that it is not only possible but easy to introduce civilized habits and occupations among Indians, if only the proper means are employed. We are fre- quently told that Indians will not work. Trup, it is difficult to make them work as long as they can live upon hunting. But they will work when their living depends upon it, or when suf- ficient inducements are offered to them. Of this there is an abun- dance of proof. To be sure, as to Indian civilization, we must not expect too rapid progress or the attainment of too lofty a standard. We can certainly not transform them at once into great statesmen, or philosophers, or manufacturers, or merchants; but we can make them small farmers and herders. Some of them show even remarkable aptitude for mercantile pursuits on a small scale. I see no reason why the degree of civilization attained by the Indians in the States of New York, Indiana, Michigan, and some tribes in the Indian Territory, should iiot be attained in the course of time by all. I have no doubt that they can be sufficiently civilized to support themselves, to ma4ntain relations of good neighborship with the people surrounding them, and altogether to cease being a disturbing element in society. The accomplishment of this end, however, will require much con- siderate care and wise guidance. That care and guidance is necessarily the task of the Government which, as to the Indians at least, must exercise paternal functions until they are suf- ficiently advanced to take care of themselves. In this respect, some sincere philanthropists seem inclined to run into a serious error in insisting that first of all things it is necessary to give to the Indian the rights and privileges of American citizenship, to treat him in all respects as a citizen, and 8 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. to relieve him of all restraints to which other American citizens are not subject. I do not intend to go here into a disquisition on the legal status of the Indian, on which elaborate treatises have been written, and learned judicial decisions rendered, without raising it above dispute. The end to be reached is unquestion- ably the gradual absorption of the Indians in the great body of American citizenship. When that is accomplished, then, and only then, the legal status of the Indian will be clearly and finally ftxed. But we should not indulge in the delusion that the problem can be solved by merely conferring upon them rights they do not yet appreciate, and duties they do not yet understand. Those who advocate this seem to think that the Indians are yearn- ing for American citizenship, eager to take it if we will only give it to them. No mistake could be greater. An overwhehning majority of the Indians look at present upon American citizen- ship as a dangerous gift, and but few of the more civilized are willing to accept it when it is attainable. And those who are uncivilized would certainly not know what to do with it if they had it. The mere theoretical endowment of savages with rights which are beyond their understanding and appreciation will, therefore, help them little. They should certainly have that standing in the courts which is necessary for their protection. But full citizenship must be regarded as the terminal, not as the initial, point of their development. The first necessity, therefore, is not at once to give it to them,buttofitthemforit. And to this end, nothing is more indispensable than the protecting and guiding care of the Government during the dangerous period of transition from savage to civilized life. When the wild Indian first turns his face from his old habits toward the ways of the white man, his self-reliance is severely shaken. The pict- uresque and proud hunter and warrior of the plain or the forest gradually ceases to exist. In his new occupations, with his new aims and objects, he feels himself like a child in need of leading- strings. Not clearly knowing where he is to go, he may be led in the right direction, and he may also be led astray. He is apt to accept the vices as well as the virtues and accomplishments of civilization, and the former, perhaps, more readily than the latter. He is as accessible to bad as to good advice or example, and the class of people usually living in the immediate vicinity of Indian camps and reservations is frequently not such as to exercise upon him an elevating influence. He is in danger of becoming a PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 9. drunkard before he has learned to restrain his appetites, and of being tricked out of his property before he is able to appreciate its value. He is overcome by a feeling of helplessness, and he naturally looks to the Great Father to take him by the hand and guide him on. That guiding hand must necessarily be one of authority and power to command confidence and respect. It can be only that of the government which the Indian is accus- tomed to regard as a sort of omuipotence on earth. Everything depends upon the wisdom and justice of that guidance. To fit the Indians for their ultimate absorption in the great body of American citizenship, three things are suggested by com- mon sense as well as philanthropy. 1. That they be taught to work by making work profitable and attractive to them. 2. That they be educated, especially the youth of both sexes. 3. That they be individualized in the possession of property by settlement in severalty with a fee simple title, after which the lands they do not use may be disposed of for general settle- ment and enterprise without danger and with profit to the Indians. This may seem a large programme, strangely in contrast with the old wild life of the Indians, but they are now more disposed than ever before to accept it. Even those of them who have so far been in a great measure living upon the chase, are becoming aware that the game is fast disappearing, and will no longer be sufficient to furuish them a sustenance. In a few years the buffalo will be exterminated, and smaller game is gradually growing scarce except in the more inaccessible mountain regions. The necessity of procuring food in some other way is thus before their eyes. The requests of Indians addressed to the Government for instruction in agriculture, for agri- cultural implements, and for stock cattle, are, in consequence now more frequent and pressing than ever before. A more general desire for the education of their children springs from the same source, and many express a wish for the allotment of farm tracts among them, with the white mans paper, meaning a good, strong title like that held by white men. This progressive movement is, of course, different in degree with different tribes, but it is going on more or less everywhere. The failure of Sitting Bulls attempt to maintain himself and a large number of follow- ers on our northern frontier in the old wild ways of Indian life 10 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. will undoubtedly strengthen the tendency among the wild Indians of the North-west to recognize the situation and to act accord- ingly. The general state of feeling among the red men is there- fore now exceedingly favorable to the civilizing process. Much has already been done in the direction above indicated. The area of land cultivated by Indians is steadily extended, and the quantity and value of their crops show a hopeful increase from year to year. Many Indians are already showing commend- able pride in the product of their labor. Much more, however might be done by the Government to facilitate and encourage this progress, by making larger appropriations for the appoint- ment of men competent to instruct the Indians in agricultural work, and for furnishing them with farming implements. Un- fortunately, members of Congress are frequently more intent upon making a good record in cutting down expenses in the wrong place, than upon providing the necessary money for objects the accomplishment of which would Iinaliy result in real and great economy. It may be remarked, by the way, that the promotion of agricultural work among the Indians is frequently discouraged by well-meaning men who reason upon the theory that in the transition from savage to civilized life, the pastoral state comes before the agricultural, and that the Indians, therefore~ must be made herders before they can be made farmers. This theory is supported by historical precedents. It is true that the transition from the savage state to the pastoral is less violent than that from the savage state directly to the agricultural, but this does not prove that the latter is impossible. Moreover, the former requires certain favorable conditions, one of which is not. ouly the possession of large tracts of grazing land but also of large numbers of cattle; and another is, that the transition, which would necessarily require a considerable time, be not. interfered with by extraneous circumstances. There are only a few isolated instances of Indian tribes having devoted them- selves successfully to the raising of herds and flocks, such as the Navajoes, who have hundreds of thousands of sheep, and manu- facture excellent blankets by hand. Some thrifty Indians on the Pacific coast have raised small herds of cattle, and something more has been done by the so-called civilized tribes in the Indian Territory. The rest of the Indians have only raised ponies. To make all our wild Indians herders, would require the maintenance of the system of l& rge reservations which, as I have shown, will be PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 11 a precarious thing under the pressure of advancing settlement and enterprise. It would further require the distribution among them of large numbers of stock animals. Such distributions have been gradually increased, but even among the tribes best provided for, only to the extent of giving to each family one or two cows, and I see no prospect, with the resources likely to be at the disposal of the Indian service, of carrying this practice much farther than to make it more general among all the tribes. But the possession of a cow or two will not make a man a herder. And even if the number were increased, and the cattle belonging to the members of a tribe were herded together for the purpose of regular cattle-raising, that pursuit would require the constant labor of only a small number of individuals, while, under existing circumstances, it is most desirable, if not absolutely necessary, that all of them, or at least as many as possible, be actively and profit- ably employed, so as to accelerate the civilizing process. To this end it seems indispensable that agricultural work be their principal occupation. But we need not be troubled by any misgivings on this head. The reports of early explorers show that most of our Indian tribes, without having passed through the pastoral state, did cultivate the soil in a rough way and on a small scale when flrst seen by white men, and that subsequently they continued that pursuit to a greater or less extent, even while they were driven from place to place. The promotion of agricultural work among them will therefore only be a revival and development of an old practice. The progress they now make shows how naturally they take to it. And if the Government, as it should, continues to fur- uish them with domestic animals, cattle-raising in a small way may become, not their principal business, but a. proper and valuable addition to their agricultural work. I have no doubt, however, that young Indians may be profitably employed by the cattle- raisers of the West, as mounted herdsmen or cow-boys. If paid reasonable wages, they would probably be found very faithful and efficient in that capacity. Other useful occupations for which the Indians sliow great aptitude have been introduced with promising success. They are now doing a very large part of the freighting of Government goods, such as their own supplies and annuities. Indian freight- ing, on a large scale, was introduced only a very few years ago, at almost all the agencies, especially on this side of the Rocky Mountains, which are not immediately accessible by railroad or 12 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. river. The Indians use their own ponies as draught animals, while the Government furnishes the wagons and harness. The Indians have, by this industry, already earned large sums of money, and proved the most honest and efficient freighters the Government ever had. There is no reason why, in the course of time, they should not be largely engaged by the Government, as well as private parties, in the transportation of other than Indian goods. That Indians can be successfully employed at various kinds of mechanical work, has already been sufficiently tested. A respect- able number of their young men serve as apprentices in the sad- 41cr, blacksmith, shoe-maker, tinsmith, and carpenter shops at the agencies in the West, as well as at the Indian schools, and their proficiency is much commended. The school at Carlisle has been able to furnish considerable quantities of tin-ware, harness, and shoes, all made by Indian labor, and, in some of the saw-mills and grist-mills on the reservations, Indians are employed as machinists with perfect safety. Many Indians who, but a few years ago, did nothing but hunting and fighting, are now engaged in building houses for their families, and, with some instruction and aid on the part of the Government, they are doing reasonably well. Here and there an Indian is found who shows striking ability as a trader. All these things are capable of large and rapid development, if pushed forward and guided with wisdom and energy. All that is said here refers to the so-called wild tribes, such as the Sioux, the Shoshones, Poncas, Cheyeunes, Arrapahoes, Pawnees, etc. The significant point is that, recognizing the change in their situation, Indian men now almost generally accept work as a necessity, while formerly all the drudgery was done by their women. The civilized tribes in the Indian Territory and elsewhere have already proved their capacity for advancement in a greater measure. One of the most important agencies in the civilizing process is, of course, education in schools. The first step was the estab- lishment of day-schools on the reservations for Indian children. The efforts made by the Government in that direction may not always have been efficiently conducted; but it is also certain that, in the nature of things, the result of that system could not be satis- factory. With the exception of a few hours spent in school, the children remained exposed to the influence of their more or less savage home surroundings, and the indulgence of their parents PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 13 greatly interfered with the regularity of their attendance and with the necessary discipline. Boarding-schools at the agencies were then tried, as far as the appropriations made by Congress would permit, adding to the usual elementary education some practical instruction in housework and domestiu industries. The results thus obtained were perceptibly better, but even thebest board- ing-schools located on Indian reservations, in contact with no phase of human life except that of the Indian camp or village, still remain without those conditions of which the work of civil- izing the growing Indian generation stands most in need. The Indian, in order to be civilized, must not only learn how to read and write, but how to live. On most of the Indian reser- vations he lives only among his own kind, excepting the teachers and the few white agency people. He may feel the necessity of changing his mode of life ever so strongly; he may hear of civili- zation ever so much; but as long as he has not with his own eyes seen civiuizationat work, it will remain to him only a vague, shadowy ideaa new-fangled, outlandish contrivance, the objects of which cannot be clearly appreciated by him in detail. He hears that he must accept the white mans way, and, in an indistinct manner, he is impressed with the necessity of doing so. But what is the white mans way? What ends does it serve? What means does it employ? What is necessary to attain it? The teaching in a school on an Indian reservation, in the midst of Indian barbarism, answers these questions only from hearsay. The impressions it thus produces, whether in all things right or in some things wrong, will, in any event, be insufficient to give the mind of the Indian a clear conception of what the white mans way~~ really is. The school on the reservation undoubtedly does some good, but it does not enough. If the Indian is to become civilized, the most efficient method will be to permit him to see and wateh civilization at work in its own atmosphere. In order to learn to live like the white man, he should see and observe how the white man lives in his own surroundings, what he is doing, and what he is doing it for. He should have an opportunity to observe, not by an occasional bewildering glimpse, like the Indians who now and then come to Washington to see the Great Father, but observe with the eye of an interested. party, while being taught to do likewise. Such considerations led the Government, under the last admin- istration, largely to increase the number of Indian pupils at the 14 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Normal School at Hampton, Va., and to establish an institution for the education of Indian children at Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, where the young Indians would no longer be under the iniluence of the Indian camp or village, but in immediate contact with the towns, farms, and factories of civilized people, living and work- ing in the btmosphere of civilization. In these institutions, the Indian children, among whom a large number of tribes are represented, receive the ordinary English education, while there are various shops and a farm for the instruction of the boys, and the girls are kept busy in the kitchen, dining-room, sewing- room, and with other domestic work. In the summer, as many as possible of the boys are placed in the care of intelligent and philanthropic farmers and their families, mostly in Penusyl- vania and New England, where, they find instructive employment in the field and barn-yard. The pupils are, under proper regular tions, permitted to see as much as possible of the country and its inhabitants in the vicinity of the schools. The results gained at these institutions are very striking. The native squalor of the Indian boys and girls rapidly gives way to neat appearance. A new intelligence, lighting up their faces, transforms their expression. Many of them show an astonishing eagerness to learn, quickness of perception, pride of accomplish- ment, and love for their teachers. Visiting the Carlisle school, I saw Indian boys, from ten to fifteen years old, who had arrived only five months before without the least knowledge of the English language, writing down long columns of figures at my dictation, and adding them up without the least mistake in calculation. Almost all submit cheerfully to the discipline imposed upon them. The boys show remarkable proficiency in mechanical and agricultural occupations, and the girls in all kinds of housework. They soon begin to take a lively and intelligent interest in the things they see around them. Most of this success is undoubtedly due to the intelligence, skill, and energy of the principals of those schools, General Armstrong and Captain Pratt, who in an emi- nent degree unite enthusiasm with practical ability. But it is evident that the efforts of the most devoted teachers would be of little avail, did not the pupils possess a corresponding capacity of receiving instruction. A third school of this kind was more recently established on the same plan at Forest Grove, in Oregon, for the education of children of the Indian tribes on the Pacific coast. PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 15 When the Indian pupils have received a sufficient course of schooling, they are sent back to their tribes, to make them- selves practically useful there, and to serve, in their turn, as teachers and examples. We hear sometimes the opinion expressed that the young Indians so educated, when returned to their tribes, will, under the influence of their surroundings, speedily relapse into their old wild habits, and that thus the results of their training will, after all, be lost. Undoubtedly there was good reason for such apprehensions at the time when the Indians had no other conception of their future than an indefinite continuance of their old life as hunters and warriors, when civilized pursuits were not in demand among them, and all influences were adverse to every effort in that direction. Then, an educated Indian necessarily found himself isolated among his people, and his accomplishments were looked upon not only as useless, but as ridiculous. Under such circumstances, of course, he would be apt to relapse. But circumstances have changed since. It is generally known among the Indians that hunting will soon be at an end; that the old mode of life has become untenable, and productive work necessary. Now, knowledge and skill are in immediate demand among them. As long as they expected to live all their lives in tents of buffalo-skin, or of can- vas furnished by the Government, the skill of the carpenter appeared to them useless. But now that they build houses for themselves and stables for their animals, the carpenter supplies an actual want. As long as they had no use for wagons, the wagon-maker was superfluous among them. As long as they raised only a little squaw-corn, and to that end found it suffi- cient to scrateh the soil with their rude hoes, no mending of plows was called for. But since they have engaged more largely in agriculture, and are earning much money by freighting, the man who can repair plows and wagons and hamess has become in their eyes a distinguished being. As long as they expected to live forever separated from the whites, the knowledge of the white mans language, and of reading and writing, was regarded as an unprofitable, and sometimes even a suspicious acquirement. But since the whites are crowding on all sides round their reservations, and the Indians cannot much longer avoid con- tact with them, and want to become like them, the knowledge of the white mans language and of the speaking paper ap- pears in an entirely new light. Even most of the old-fogy 16 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. chiefs, who have clung most tenaciously to their traditional customs, very earnestly desire their children to receive that education for which they feel themselves too old. In one word, knowledge and skill are now in practical requisition among them, and the man who possesses these accomplishments is no longer ridiculed, but looked up to and envied. The young Indian, returning from school, will, under such circumstances, not be isolated in his tribe; for he will be surrounded by some who, having received the same education, are like him, and by a larger number who desire to be like him. It is, therefore, no longer to be apprehended that he will relapse into savage life. He will be a natural helper, teacher, and example to his people. Especial attenfion is given in the Indian schools to the educa- tion of Indian girls, and at Hampton a new building is being erected for that purpose. This is of peculiar importance. The Indian woman has so far been only a beast of burden. The girl, when arrived at maturity, was disposed of like an article of trade. The Indian wife was treated by her husband alter- nately with animal fondness, and with the cruel brutality of the slave-driver. Nothing will be more apt to raise the Indians in the scale of civilization than to stimulate their attachment to per- manent homes, and it is woman that must make the atmosphere and form the attraction of the home. She must be recognized, with affection and respect, as the center of domestic life. If we want the Indians to respect their women, we must lift up the Indian women to respect themselves. This is the purpose and work of education. If we educate the girls of to-day, we educate the mothers of to-morrow, and in educating those mothers we prepare the ground for the education of generations to come. Every effort made in that direction is, therefore, entitled to especial sympathy and encouragement. It is true that the number of Indian children educated at Hampton, Carlisle, and Forest Grove is comparatively small, at present between four and five hundred. And it may be said that it will always remain small in proportion to the whole number of Indian children of school age. But, I have no doubt, even this comparatively small number, when returning to their tribes, will exercise a very perceptible influence in opening new views of life, in encouraging the desire for improvement, and in facilitating the work of the schools at the agencies. This influence will naturally be strengthened in the same measure as the number of PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 17 ~well-educated Indians grows larger. And I see no reason why the Government should not establish many more schools like those at Hampton and Carlisle. It is only a question of money. We are told that it costs little less than a million of dollars to kill an Indian in war. It costs about one hundred and fifty dol- lars a year to educate one at Hampton or Carlisle. If the educa- tion of Indian children saves the country only one small Indian war in the future, it will save money enough to sustain ten schools like Carlisle, with three hundred pupils each, for ten years. To make a liberal appropriation for such a purpose would, there- fore, not only be a philanthropic act, but also the truest and wisest economy. As the third thing necessary for the absorption of the Indians in the great body of American citizenship, I mentioned their individualization in the possession of property by their settlement in severalty upon small farm tracts with a fee simple title. When the Indians are so settled, and have become individual property- owners, holding their farms by the same title under the law by which white men hold theirs, they will feel more readily inclined to part with such of their lanes as they cannot themselves culti- vate, and from which they can derive profit only if they sell them, either in lots or in bulk, for a fair equivalent in money or in annuities. This done, the Indians will occupy no more ground than so many white people; the large reservations will gradually be opened to general settlement and enterprise, and the Indians, with their possessions, will cease to stand in the way of the development of the country. The difficulty which has pro- voked so many encroachments and conflicts will then no longer exist. When the Indians are individual owners of real property, and as individuals enjoy the protection of the laws, their tribal cohesion will necessarily relax, and gradually disappear. They will have advanced an immense step in the direction of the white mans way.~~ Is this plan practicable ~I In this respect we are not entirely without experience. Allotments of farm tracts to Indians and their settlement in severalty have already been attempted under special laws or treaties with a few tribes; in son~ instances, with success; in others, the Indians, when they had acquired individual title to their land, and before they had learned to appreciate its value, were induced to dispose of it, or were tricked out of it by unscrupulous white men, who took advantage of VOL. CXXXIII.NO. 296. 2 18 THE NORTH. AMERICAN REVIEW. their ignorance. They were thus impoverished again, and some of them fell back upon the Government for support. This should be guarded against, as much as it can be, by a legal provision making the title to their farm tracts inalienable for a certain period, say twenty-five years, during which the Indians will have sufficient opportunity to acquire more provident habits, to become somewhat acquainted with the ways of the world, and to learn to take care of themselves. In some cases where the allot- ment of lands in severalty and the granting of patents conveying a fee simple title to Indians was provided for in Indian treaties, the Interior Department under the last administration saw fit to put off the full execution of this provision for the reason that the law did not permit the insertion in the patent of the inalien- ability clause, that without such a clause the Indians would be exposed to the kind of spoliation above mentioned, and that it was hoped Congress would speedily supply that deficiency by the passage of the general Severalty bill, then under discussion. Indeed, without such a clause in the land-patents, it cannot be denied that the conveyance of individual fee simple title to Indians would be a hazardous experiment, except in the case of those most advanced in civilization. The question whether and how far the Indians generally are prepared for so great a change in their habits as their settlement in severalty involves, is certaiuly a very important one. Among those belonging to the five so-called civilized nations in the Indian Territory, opinions on this point are divided. When I visited their Agricultural Fair at Muscogee, two years ago, I found that of the representative men meeting there a minority were in favor, but a strong majority opposed to the division of their lands in severalty. This opposition springs in great part from the timid apprehension of the Indians that the division of their lands would, in the course of time, bring upon them the competition of white men, in which they distrust their ability to hold their own and this feeling is worked upon by the ambitious politicians among them, who aspire to the high offices in their tribes, and who know that the settlement in severalty will be apt eventually t~ break up the tribal organization and to deprive the politicians of their importance. The friends of the severalty policy, on the other hand, I found to be mostly bright, active, and energetic men, some of them full-blood Indians, who trust their own ability to sustain themselves, and are clear-headed enough PRESENT ASPECTS 01? THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 19 to foresee what the ultimate fate of the Indian race must be. Among the wild tribes now beginning to adopt the white ~ way, the idea of settlement in severalty appears more popular in proportion. Appeals to the Government from Indians of that class for the allotment of farm tracts to heads of families and for the white mans paper, have been very frequent of late, and in many instances very urgent. It is not to be assumed, however, that most of those who make such demands have more than a vague conception of what they are asking for, and that all the consequences of their settlement in severalty are entirely clear to their minds. In treating with uncivilize4t Indians we must never forget that their thoughts move within the narrow compass of their traditional notions, and that their understanding of any relations of life beyond that limited horizon are mere ab- stractions to them, and must necessarily be very imperfect. I have become acquainted with several chiefs of so-called wild tribes, who had won a reputation as men of ability, such as Spot- ted Tail, Red Cloud, Chief Joseph, and others, and while I found them to possess considerable shrewdness in the management of their own affairs according to their Indian notions, their grasp of things outside of that circle was extremely uncertain. I may except only Ouray, the late chief of the Ute nation, a man of a comprehensive mind, of large views, appreciating with great clearness not ouly the present situation of his race, but also its future destiny and the measures necessary to save the Indians from destruction and to assimilate them with the white people with whom they have to live. We must not expect them, there- fore, to evolve out of their own consciousness what is best for their salvation. We must in a great measure do the necessary thinking for them, and then in the most humane way possible in- duce them to accept our conclusions. This is in most cases much more easily accomplished than might generally be supposed; for, especialiy in the transition from savage to civilized life, the In- dian looks up with natural respect to the superior wisdom of the Great Father,and, notwithstanding the distrust engendered by frequent deceptions in his intercourse with white men, it is not difficult to win his confidence if he is ouly approached with frankness and evidence of good-will. As to the severalty policy, those of the Indians who have become convinced of the neces- sity of adopting the white mans way~~ are easily made to comprehend the advantage of each mans having his own 20 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. piece of land, and a good title to it. Tlie ulterior conse- quences, as the gradual dissolution of the tribal relations, the disposition to be made of the unused lands for a fair com- pensation, and the opening of the large reservations,these things wili become intelligible and naturally acceptable to them as they go on. More opposition to the severalty policy may be apprehended from the civilized tribes in the Indian Territory, for the reasons above stated, than from those just emerging from a savage condition. But, I have no doubt, that also wili yield in the course of time, as the peculiarities of their situation beuume clearer to thei~ minds. It is only to be hoped that the change of sentiment may come soon, before the pressure of advancing enterprise has forced a conflict, and while the necessary transformation can be effected in peace and good order. It must be kept in mind that the settlement of the Indians in severalty is one of those things for which the Indians and tlie Government are not always permitted to choose their own time. The necessity of immediate action may now and then present itself suddenly. Take the case of the Utes. Living in a country where game was still comparatively abundant down to a recent time, they were less inclined than other wild tribes to recog- nize the necessity of a change in their mode of life. But the press. ure of mining enterprise in the direction of the Ute reservation was great. The impatience of the people of Colorado at the occupation by Indians of the western part of the State gave rea- son for the apprehension of irritations and collisions, and this state of things was aggravated by the occurrence of some dis- turbances at the agency. Under these circumstances, the Interior Departmentthought it advisable, in the autumn of 1879, to dispatch a suitable man as special agent to the Ute country, with instruc- lions to allay the troubles existing at the agency, and to inquire whether steps could be taken to effect the settlement of the Utes in severalty, with any chance of success. While this measure was in preparation, the whole aspect of affairs suddenly changed. Fights and massacres occurred on the Ute reservation, which are still fresh in our memory. The people of Colorado were in a blaze of excitement. The cry, The Utes must go! rang all over the State. We were on the brink of an Indian war at the beginning of winter. That war threatened to involve the whole Ute nation, and to cost us many lives and mi]]ions of money. It PI?ESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PI?OBLEM. 21 would finally have resulted in the destruction of the Ute tribe, or at least a large portion of it,of the innocent with the guilty, at a great sacrifice, on our part, of blood and treasure. It was evident, to every one capable of judging the emergency, that such a calam- ity could be averted only by changing the situation of the Indians. Negotiations were opened, and the Utes agreed to be settled in severalty upon lands designated for that purpose, and to cede to the United States the whole of their reservation, except some small tracts of agricultural and grazing lands, in consideration of certain ample equivalents in various forms. Nobody will pre- tend that the Utes were fully prepared for such a change in their condition. Their chief, Ouray, was probably the only man among them who hada clear conception of the whole extent of that change. But nothing short of it would have saved the Ute tribe from de- struction, and averted a most bloody and expensive conflict. In fact, even after that measure of composition, it required the most watchful management to prevent complications and collisions, and that watchful management will have to be continued for some time, for the danger is by no means over. I cite this as an example to show how, in the conduct of Indian affairs, the necessity of doing certain things without sufficient preparation is sometimes precipitated upon the Govern- ment. Similar complications may arise at any time where the pressure of advancing enterprise upon Indian reservations is very great, and sustained by a numerous and rapidly increasing population, but especially where valuable mineral deposits have been discovered or their discovery is in prospect. There is nothing more dangerous to an Indian reservation than a rich mine. But the repeated invasions of the Indian Territory, as well as many other similar occurrences, have shown clearly enough that the attraction of good agricultural lands is apt to have the same effect, especially when great railroad enterprises are pushing in the same direction. It required, on the part of the Government, the greatest vigilance and energy to frustrate the attempted invasions of the Indian Territory, year after year. But as the endeavors of the Government have not always in similar cases had the same success in the past, they may not always be equally successful in the future, and there is now scarcely a single Indian reservation in the country that will not soon be exposed to the same chances. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to the Indians, as well as to the country 22 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. generally, that a policy be adopted which will secure to them and their descendants the safe possession of snch tracts of land as they can cultivate, and a fair compensation for the rest; and that such a policy be proceeded with before the protection of their present large possessions by the Government becomes too precarious, that is to say, before conflicts are precipitated upon them which the Government is not always able to prevent, and by which they may be in danger of losing their lands, their compen- sation, and even their lives, at the same time. It would undoubt- edly be better if they could be ~arefu]1y prepared for such a change of condition, so that they might clearly appreciate all its reqnirements and the consequences which are to follow. But those intrusted with the management of Indian affairs must not forget that, with regard to some Indian tribes and reservations at least, the matter is pressing; that the Government cannot control circnmstances but is rather apt to be controlled by them, and that it mnst not ouly devise the necessary preparations for the change in the condition of the Indians with forecast and wisdom, but must pnsh them with the greatest possible expe- dition and energy if untoward accidents are to be avoided. It is, therefore, very much to be regretted that the bill anthor- izing and enabling the Interior Department to settle the Indians in severalty wherever practicable, to give them patents, convey- ing a fee simple title to their allotments, inalienable for a certain period, and to dispose of the reservation lands not so allotted with the consent of the Indians and for their benefit, so that they may be opened for general settlement and enterprise, did not become a law at the last session of Congress, or, rather, that snch a law was not enacted years ago. The debate in the Senate on the Severalty bill, last winter, turned on the imperfections of its details. No donbt, such imperfections existed. It would, indeed, be very difficult, if not impossible, to draw np a bill of this kind so perfect in all its details that further experience gathered from its practical application might not suggest some desirable amend- ment. But the essential thing is that opportunity be given to the branch of the Government managing Indian affairs to gather such further experience from the actual experiment, and that opportunity will be given only by the enactment of a law contain- ing the principal features of the plan, and allowing the Ex~cu- tive sufficient latitude in applying it, according to circumstances, wherever the Indians may be prepared for it, or wherever, eveu PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM. 23 without such preparation, the exigencies of the case may demand prompt action. The Executive wili then be able understandingly to recommend amendments in the details of the law, as practical experience may point out their necessity. Certainly, not another session of Congress should be permitted to pass without compre- hensive legislation on this important subject. I am aware that I have not discussed here all points of impor- tance connected with the Indian problem, such, for instance, as the necessity of extending the jurisdiction of the courts over Indian reservations, bringing the red men under the protection as well as the restraints of the law; and the question how the service should be organized to secure to the Indians intelligent, honest, and humane management, etc. It has been my purpose merely to set forth those important points which, in the practical management of Indian affairs, should be steadily kept in view. I will recapitulate them: (1) The greatest danger hanging over the Indian race arises from the fact that, with their large and valuable territorial pos- sessions which are lying waste, they stand in the way of what is commonly called the development of the country. (2) A rational Indian policy wili make it its principal object to avert that danger from the red men, by doing what wili be most beneficial to them, as well as to the whole people: namely, by harmonizing the habits, occupations, and interests of the Indians with that development of the country. (3) To accomplish this object, it is of pressing necessity to set the Indians to work, to educate their youth of both sexes, to make them small proprietors of land, with the right of individ- ual ownership under the protection of the law, and to induce them to make that part of their lands which they do not need for cultivation, profitable to themselves in the only possible way, by selling it at a just rate of compensation, thus opening it to general settlement and enterprise. The policy here outlined is apt to be looked upon with dis- favor by two classes of people: on the one hand, those who think that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and wh~ denounce every recognition of the ~ rights and every desire to pro- mote his advancement in civilization, as sickly sentimentality; and on the other hand, that class of philanthropists who, in their treatment of the Indian question, pay no regard to surrounding circumstances and suspect every policy contemplating a reduction 24 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. of tlie Indian reservations of being a scheme of spoliation and robbery, gotten up by speculators and land-grabbers. With the first class it seems useless to reason. As to the second, they do not themselves believe, if they are sensible, that twenty-five years hence millions of acres of valuable land will, in any part of the country, stili be kept apart as Indian hunting-grounds. The question is, whether the Indians are to be exposed to the danger of hostile collisions, and of being robbed of their lands in consequence, or whether they are to be induced by proper and fair means to sell that which, as long as they keep it, is of no advantage to anybody, but which, as soon as they part with it for a just compensation, will be of great advantage to themselves and their white neighbors alike. No true friend of the Indian wili hesitate to choose the latter line of policy as one in entire accord with substantial justice, humanity, the civilization and welfare of the red men, and the general interests of the country. CARL SCHURZ. THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE AGE. A GREAT many people have not known what to make of the articles in the NORTH A1~u~RJc~ advertising for a new religion, a new standard of truth, and a new morality. It is nnderstood that some weak people ceased to subscribe to the REVIEW because of their supposed irreligious tendency. An editor of an able weekly paper wrote a reply to them, bnt was induced to with- draw it by a wiseacre who persuaded him that they were a sly defense of religion. Most people were curious to know who could have written them, and wondered what was the aim of the author or authors. A newspaper writer of sfrong antip- athies malignantly ascribed them to a college president, who did not take much pains to deny them till he found himself sat- irized, and then could not speak of them with temper. It so happens that I am well acquainted with the writers, who are personal friends of mine own. The oldest used to give occasional lectures in the New England academy in which I was trained. The second was an old pupil of that institution, and often visited it. The third was a fellow-student with me there. It was the full intention of my father to give me an education of the highest order, and I was about to enter the famous uni- versity in our neighborhood when he died. What was I now to do? The farm was a bare, gravelly one, with more rock and stones than soil, requiring much care and yielding little produce. My mother had nothing left her but that farm. I resolved at once to give myself up to her as she gave herself up to me. While my companions went off joyously to the college, I devoted myself to tilling and sowing; and, upon the whole, I do not regret the sacrifice (as I felt it at the time) which I made. I love the old homestead with its fields, its cattle, its horses, and fruit-trees, which I have come to look upon as personal friends. I have

THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE AGE. A GREAT many people have not known what to make of the articles in the NORTH A1~u~RJc~ advertising for a new religion, a new standard of truth, and a new morality. It is nnderstood that some weak people ceased to subscribe to the REVIEW because of their supposed irreligious tendency. An editor of an able weekly paper wrote a reply to them, bnt was induced to with- draw it by a wiseacre who persuaded him that they were a sly defense of religion. Most people were curious to know who could have written them, and wondered what was the aim of the author or authors. A newspaper writer of sfrong antip- athies malignantly ascribed them to a college president, who did not take much pains to deny them till he found himself sat- irized, and then could not speak of them with temper. It so happens that I am well acquainted with the writers, who are personal friends of mine own. The oldest used to give occasional lectures in the New England academy in which I was trained. The second was an old pupil of that institution, and often visited it. The third was a fellow-student with me there. It was the full intention of my father to give me an education of the highest order, and I was about to enter the famous uni- versity in our neighborhood when he died. What was I now to do? The farm was a bare, gravelly one, with more rock and stones than soil, requiring much care and yielding little produce. My mother had nothing left her but that farm. I resolved at once to give myself up to her as she gave herself up to me. While my companions went off joyously to the college, I devoted myself to tilling and sowing; and, upon the whole, I do not regret the sacrifice (as I felt it at the time) which I made. I love the old homestead with its fields, its cattle, its horses, and fruit-trees, which I have come to look upon as personal friends. I have 26 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. persuaded myself that farming is as favorable to independent thinking as the student life down there in that university, with its technical scholarship, its sophistry, and its haughtiness. I find that, with Robert Burns, I love lie daisy and the mouse far more tenderly than these college lads, who handle only dried skele- tons. I can follow the plow and yet be musing all the day long. I have long winter evenings with little to do,and I em ploy them in reading fresh books, lent me by a professor from the college library. The pure air invigorates me, and the aspects of the earth and sky, morning, noon, and evening, of spring and sum- mer, of the fall and the winter, are watched with interest, and are felt through my whole being. I feel as if from my rocky height here I could take a fresher view of life, of the world around me and the world above me, than my former school compan- ions, who are narrowed by the abstractions of learning. Fortunately, I have been able to keep up my friendship with members of the college. They come out one by one or in little groups on the Saturdays, and tell me what they are doing in their intellectual gymnasium, what sort of man the last appointed professor or tutor is, what the latest original work that has appeared, and what the topics discussed in the societies and in the little clubs. I often put on a sort of inquiring Socratic air, and question them as to the worth of what they are learning from these dead or living languages, metaphysical subtleties, and old bones. When the articles appeared in the NORTH AMERICAN, I recog- nized the writers at once. I felt as if I saw their fallacies, and was strongly tempted to answer and expose them, the more so as they were after the tune of the times, and were misleading some of these college youths. I longed excessively to bring the authors together, that we might have a symposinm, at once of bodily and intellectual food. So I asked them to spend a spring afternoon at our farm. I ventured to propose to my mother that she might ask the Agnostics lady to come with him. Her whole nervous frame became intensely strung on the instant. She evidently grew an inch or two taller. I was sure I saw sparks issuing from her eyes; she looked precisely like her ancestress who came over in the Mayflower, and she treated the proposal as indignantly as that ancestress would have treated a mistress of Charles II. I abandoned the proposal on the instant. She wondered what sort of thing a symposium was, and was in doubt about it till I told THE RELIGIOUS GONFLIUTS OF THE AGE. 27 her it was to be after the model of the conferences in the Book of Job. She was only half satisfied, but told me she hoped I would act the part of the young Eliliu, when the older men might be darkening counsel by words without knowledge. The three gentlemen arrived on the appointed day. The Evo- lutionist was advanced in years, with a well-developed but narrow- forehead, of the very opposite pattern to that of Plato, the broad- browed. The Agnostic was thin, with an expression of scorn, like that which sits forever on the face of Voltaire. The New- Light Moralist was stout and burly, and looked as if he wished to enjoy life. My mother provided a well-loaded table, and Igot glimpses of her, with her snow-white apron, guidingor, in fact, servingthe somewhat awkward Irish servant. Our Evolution- ist praised the beef, and remarked that it could not have been so excellent unless it had been developed; upon which I simply remarked that the development of the breed of cattle, so far from being fortuitous, had had a good deal of skill bestowed on it. The Agnostic relished somewhat the flowers and fruit, and I said that I was glad he found a reality. There was wine on the side-table (my mother would not allow it on the dining-table), and the Moralist, as he drank it, denounced the bigoted temperance men who were depriving people of lawful enjoyments. I hinted that the young men down there in the college did need to be guarded against the terrible temptations, either after the method of Mr. Gough or Dr. Crosby. The conversation gradually slid into farming operations and the topics engrossing the adjoining university. After the dinner, we retired to a pleasant, rockyheight, whence we had a distant glimpse of the ocean over which the ancestors of my mother sailed, and of the college buildings, from which, though a good many miles off, we almost felt as if we heard the hum of the recitations. It was agreed, out of courtesy, that, as each of the three writers had enjoyed an opportunity of express- ing his views in fuli, I should answer them each in turn. Two students, who had come out on their Saturday .excursion, joined us. One of them, a scientific, sat with a leer on his eye, wondering at our foolish discussion, and evidently rejoicing that he had a mastodon and a whole host of fossils to go back to. The other, a big-headed fellow, with shaggy brows, listened with intense eagerness, industriously took notes, carried them down with him to his college, and showed them to his professor of 28 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. philosophy and a dozen plodding students, who read them with eyes as wide and as wise as those of owls. The issue of the whole is this article. FIRST ROUNThTHE AGNOSTIC AND THE YANKEE FARMER. As I saw that, in order to any work being done, it was neces- sary to have some posts fixed to which to tie our ropes, I began with the Agnostic. FANMER.I am very anxious to know what Agnosticism is. The word has come into use since I left school. I suppose it is much the same as used to be called Nescience, which, inconsist- ently enough, professes to know that we can know nothing, and~ Nihilism, which proclaims that there is nothing to be known~ which implies that Nihilism is nothing, though that of Russia knows how to kill kings. These systems always seemed to me to be suicidal, that is, self-destructiverepresented by the serpent which swallowed itself, not even leaving its tail behind. AGNoSTIC.There have been a great many able Agnostics from an early date. Gorgias, the sophist philosopher, main- tained that he could demonstrate that nothing exists, that if it exists it is unknowable, and even if knowable is not commu- nicable. All the Greek sophists were virtually Agnostics, as they held that man cannot discover independent truth. I do not claim for the fraternity the absolute skeptics such as Sextus Em- piricus, who refused to run out of the way of carriages coming upon him. These men made a great mistake in denying any- thing; they should have contented themselves with refusing to affirm. We claim Hume, who allowed the existence of only impressions and ideas, without a thing to impress or a thing impressed, and Kant, who admits phenomena in the sense of appearances, with, it may be, things behind which cau never be known, and Sir W. Hamilton, who elaborated a theory to the effect that the knowledge of nothing is the principle or the consummation of all true philosophy. But our living masters are Spencer and Huxley. F~.Then your Agnostics are ignorant men, seeing that they know nothing. AG.The very opposite. The sophists were very intelligent men, teaching the highest class youths of Greece, in thedaysof THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 29 Pericles. Since the defenses of Lewes and Grote appeared, the sophists are placed above Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who were all pretenders to truth which they did not possess. Kant and Hamilton were profound scholars. Huxley, it will be ad- mitted, knows a good bit of biology, and as to Herbert Spencer, he is filled with universal knowledge. FAR.My poor brain is becoming sadly puzzled. These men are evidently very learned, and I am prepared to admire them excessively. I am inclined to say of them what an Irish servant said of his master, who got a flue government office: My mas- ter has got a grand situation; he has nothing to do, and he does it v~ll. AG.That is a caricature of our meaning. F~n.What, then, do you mean when you say, We know nothing? AG.We certainly do not know things. But, as Hume allows, we have impressions, which, when reproduced, become ideas. More philosophically, we have phenomena, appearances, as Kant assumed and Hamilton and Spencer allow. But what reality, what thing is, or things are in these, or beneath these; or above them, no one can tell. FAR.IIi my ignorance and stupidity I always looked on appearances as appearances of somethingas, in fact, things appearing. Even that cloud consists of drops of moisture which, in that rainbow, are tinged by beams of the sun. AG.They exist as appearances. What they have, or whether they have anything besides, we, in our modesty, neither affirm nor deny, for we are not skeptics. FAR.But if the words you use have any meaning, they must have appeared to some one, to you or me, whose existence is thereby implied. AG.You are going too fast. They are appearances to us, who are also appearances, with what reality we know not. FAR.Then we have a vast volume of appearances. I am reminded of what I read in my school-days, of the exclamation of Anacharsis, the Thracian traveler, as he listened to Greek dialectics, Vee quantum nihili! AG.All that Spencer knowsin fact, the whole universe, so far as we can know itconsists of appearances. Science, even that of Newton, is nothing but the classification or arrangement of appearances. 30 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. FAR.But things are arranged according to their qualities, are classified according to their type and structure. These, there- fore, must be known. AG.Yes, known as appearances. FAR.Jf we know them as appearances, they cannot be absolutely unknown. I am become intently bent on finding out (I suppose I dare not say knowing) what we do know, and what we do not know, about these appearances. Lately I was standing by my plow in the field when the horses plunged, and the plow- share was knocked into my leg, which has scarcely yet recovered. What known reality had I there? I suppose I had pain. AG.This may be allowed; it was an impression. It wa~ an appearance, though what the pain was we cannot tell. FA~n.It is useful to have one reality conceded. But I had some other appearances: a couple of plunging horses, a limb torn and bleeding, the wound continuing for weeks, remedies applied, and a healing process. Somehow I believe that these existed just as the pain did, and that the pain was felt by me as a conscious being taking pains to be relieved from it. I believe in the pain- ful measures taken by the surgeon, and the very surgeon himself; in the soothing imparted by my mother, and in my mother as thus soothing me, I feel that I had much the same evidence of all of these. I may aliow you to call them phenomena, but then they are of things appearing. It is utter nonsense to give an abstraction a separate position from the thing appearing. AG.But do you really go so far as to maintain that all appearances are realities? That this white appearance is a ghost risen from the grave? That this sound heard at midnight was the attack of a burglar? That every unexplained event is a miracle? FAR.I crave no such application of my maxim. I do hold that every appearance implies a thing appearing. But we may have to make some inquiries, and exercise judgment in order to determine what the thing appearing is. An appearance literally is an affection of the eye, and this is a reality. There may be need of inquiry, and there may be doubts as to what caused the affection of the eye. I remember of my seeing a white figure in a grove near my fathers house, and of my running into the house and declaring that I had seen a ghost. My father took me by the hand, and we went out to the place, to find that the object was a white sheet thrown out on a tree and being moved by the wind. THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 31 A tree reflected in a smooth pool is a reality; it is light reflected from water, though it is not a tree growing with its crown down- ward. If there be a real appearance, there must be a thing appearing, but we may have to make investigation before we can settle what the thing isill fact, may never be able to find what it is. In particular, the apparent deceptions of the senses are not real deceptions. In looking across an arm of the sea, I see a rock on the other side which I believe to be a mile off; but in sailing toward it I find it three miles away. This is merely a wrong inference, founded on the rule, correct enough in ~rdinary eases, but not applying here. In our common books of science, these mistakes are carefully pointed out, and the veracity of the senses guarded by its beiug shown that the supposed deceptions of the senses are merely wrong inferences made in the rapidity of thinking. AG.But every educated man knows that it has been estab- lished that heredity determines mens dispositions, judgments, and opinions. A mountain range divides a people of one char- acter and religion from those of another, and this because the two peoples are of a different ancestry. Every child is the product, not just of his immediate father and mother, but of his progenitors through indefinite ages. People wonder that this infant, just born, has a pug nose, which neither parent has. But older people can tell you that there was a grandmother who had precisely such a nose. So there are characters which seem to separate from their whole kindred; but if we knew ali the ancestry, we should find that we have ouly a mixture, often incongruous, but sometimes consistent, of the peculiarities of forefathers and foremothers. Judgments thus caused by fate or fortuity are worthless, and we are not sure that there is truth in any of them. In our highest intellectual exercises, we have ouly appearances which, in other circumstances and with other heredi- ties, might appear very different. FAn.We farmers are inclined to attribute much to heredity. We like to have a good breed of horses and cattle; but I prize the mettle of my horses feeding there as a positive and real thing, even though it may have come from their stock. What- ever my ancestors may have been, I have some gifts which I claim as my own, and which I exercise. I have a perception of things, and a power of judging them and reasoning about them. I perceive the horses down there,and know pretty well which is 32 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. a good one. I may have got my power of discernment from my Yankee mother; but it is mine now, and I find I can trust in it. I know things and the relations of things. I inquire into the past and the distant, and can, so far, anticipate the future. If this power has come from heredity, it is a wisely regulated heredity,~quite as much so as that of my horse there, the breed of which has been carefully attended to. I will allow no man to deprive me of this power of judging. I denounce Agnosticism as not only false, but injurious, when it denies me a power of independent thought, and makes me a mere product of circum- stancesan advanced catarrhine monkey, which somehow got the power of speech. He who regards himself, and allows him- self to be regarded, as a beast, will sink toward the beastly state. I prefer dwelling rather on my heavenly origin, and hope thereby to be aided in attaining a heavenly character. AG.Is it possible that a man of sense like you can really credit these fables about an unseen world, which, if it exist, cannot become known to us? FA.n.I now clearly discover what is the kind of truth to which you Agnostics are so opposed. You believe practically in meat and money as at least attractive appearances. It is not of much moment whether you believe in them theoretically or no, as by hereditary instinct you will eat and drink and seek honors and pleasures in life, whether you do or do not acknowledge them to be realities. But when you set aside moral and spiritual real- ities, the existence of God, the authority of a divine law, the immortality of the soul, and a judgment-day, there is no natural inclination making us practically allow these truths to restrain and constrain, to guide and elevate. [At this stage my mother sent us out some fine strawberries, whereon] AG.These must have come from the South, as no fruit is yet ripe in this region of ours. FAR.Good reasoning upon realities known. As the strawberries appeared and the guests rose to receive them, the burly New-Light Moralist easily turned the ghostly Agnostic out of the way as if he were as great a nonentity as he affected to be, and proceeded: THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 33 SECOND ROUND.THE NEW-LIGHT MORALIST AND THE YANKEE IPARXER. MORALIST.We have had enough of this nonsense. I am satis- fied that there axe realities, and I am anxious to have as many of the good things of this world as I can. I believe not only in the reality of the pleasure I have got from the strawberries, but in the excellence of the strawberries, and in the validity of the inference that they must have come from a warmer climate. I acknowledge the force of your arguments against my friend, wlio says we can know nothing. But you can advance no such argu- ments against me. - FARMER.YOu should not be so sure of this. You admit that we have perceptions of the senses external, and I may add inter- nalthat is, self-consciousness. It is possible that we may have equally trustworthy perceptions of higher realities. You put trust in your intellectual perceptions. We have also moral perceptions. Mon.What do you mean by intellectual perceptions? FAR.The perception of the strawberries, and of the validity of the inference That they grew in a warmer climate than this, and all like perception of objects and logical conclusions drawn from them, such as the existence of your friends and their characters. MoR.It is quite in my way to admit all this. It is the result of experience. FAR.But an experience gathered by the intellect, in which, therefore, you trust. MoR.I do not see that you will gain much by my admitting this. FAN.It implies that we can distinguish between truth and error. You will admit that the judge and jury in the court in which you plead can in certain cases tell whether the prisoner is or is not guilty. It is surely conceivable that we should also have moral perceptions to distinguish between good and evil. You beheve that the 4ury did right in finding that servant of yours guilty who stole the hundred dollars. But are you not also sure that what she did was bad? Are you not as sure of this as of the fact that she did the deed and that the judge condemned her? MOR.I see you adhere to the intuitive theory of morals. Yott do not seem to call in the Will of God and Scripture, which I am glad of. YOL. CXXXIII.NO. 296. 3 34 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. F~.It has been shown that virtue is good, not because God wills it, but that He wills it because it is good, such being His holy nature. I am not a college-bred man, and I do not know, nor care, what they call my view. I do not know that I have any theory. But I have a fact of consciousness that both you and I disapprove of certain deeds, and approve of others. In this way, I rise to a law which I find to be the law of God. The two supply a very deep foundation for morality. To which theory do you adhere? MoR.Certailily not to the Will-of-God theory, nor the intui- tive theory. I have a partiality for the utilitarian, or rather the hedonist theory, that we should seek pleasure for ourselves and for others. I believe in both what we now call egoism and altruism. FAR.But you acknowledge that you are not altogether satis- fied with utilitarianism. Can utilitarianism show you why you should seek pleasure not only for yourself, but for others? Natural, that is, inherited, instincts wi]l lead you to seek pleasure for yourself; but why should you labor and suffer for strangers? Mon.To promote the interests of others is often the best means of promoting my own. FAR.If this is all the length your altruism carries you, it is, after all, only a systematic egoismthat is, selfishness. There are cases constantly occurring in which men do not see very clearly how doing good to others will do good to themselves; to stand up, for instance, for a maligned man, when the community upon whose favorable opinion our professional success depends is set against him. When such a creed prevails, we shall have few of those noble deeds of courage and self-sacrifice of which our world is so proud. You see at once that hedonism has no obligation to lay on you to promote another mans pleasure; it cannot show that you ought to do this. In short, it fails to provide a motive for promoting its own end, that of promoting the greatest hap- piness of the greatest number. MoR.I confess I have some difficulty in determining what the greatest number is, and what is their greatest happiness. I have no desire to see slavery restored in this country, but I can- not settle it in my mind whether the colored people have more pleasure in their present than in their former state. But the utilitarians lay down certain regulating principles as to the bene- ficial tendencies of acts. THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 35 FAB.It is all but impossible to calculate tlie precise conse- quences of certain acts, and there is a great risk of miscalculat- ing under the influence of prejudice. As to the general rules laid down by utilitarians, it is often difficult to apply themto say when they apply, or which of them does apply, in a given case. But the grand difficulty of the theory lies in the circum- stance that it holds out no motive to constrain men to attend, in critical emergencies and when under temptations, to the prin- ciples of morals. You do not seem to attach much value to Her- bert Spencers modification of the utilitarian theory. Mou.You misunderstand me. In the end his morality may rule the world. Heredity will then make all men moral. Pain will cease. Men will not then need a moral law. They wili be virtuous as a matter of course, without its being necessary that they should be swayed by love. But development is not yet sufficiently advanced to accomplish this. We who live in the period of struggle often do not know what to do. FAR.J see no evidence that development is fitted to remove either pain or sin from our world. Certainly they both exist at present, and morality should teach us how to act in a state of things in which they abound. But Mr. Spencer has introduced what he calls a rational utilitarianism, which deduces from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recog- nized as laws of conduct, and are to be conformed to, irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery. The old objec- tion applies to this, that it contains no motive to constrain atten- tion to deductions. What does he mean by the laws of life? I am afraid some would not understand them, and many would not feel any obligation to attend to them. MoR.He must mean the great laws of development and heredity, the laws derived from the gathered and inherited expe- rience of ancestors, brute and human. F~u.But that experience is not uniform. Some of our ancestors, among the lower animals and men, have been cruel; some are deceitfuldo, in fact, live by guile; others are sensuaL There is the fierceness of the tiger, the cunning of the fox, and the grossness of the pig. These qualities, it may be supposed, are going down in the descent. Are we to follow these, be- cause they come from our fathers? Or are we to resist and reject 36 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. themor, at least, some of them? If so, it must be from some law separate from and distinct from heredity, above heredity, and to which heredity should yield. Mon.I notice you are always coming back to an intuitive perception of good and evilthat is, conscience. You know that it has been shown that conscience is the product of heredity, and. in that respect is like the other animal propensities, and carries with it no peculiar weight. Darwin has shown that it appears in the lower animals. You may see evidence of it in the look and attitude of the dog, when he has done a deed fitted to please his master, and in his running off, with his tail between his legs, when he has offended. It can carry with it no authority. F~n.It may carry with it as much authority as the intelli- gence which you believe to be also the consolidation of hereditary experience. Your understanding may have been developed, but you are sure it speaks true when it declares that all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that you were once at college, that you are now a lawyer, and that the judge decided the case against your servant. May not your moral nature be equally right in declaring that the deed of the servant was wrong and the sentence of the judge just, and that you are entitled to demand that your clients pay their fees? MoR.I, too, believe this; but this not because of that falli- ble conscience. I decide thus because I see what evil would arise from not punishing my servant, and from allowing those for whom I have labored to pay my fees, or not, as they please. F~n.This is fadling back on utilitarianism, the weakness of which you have exposed. Your account of the nature of con- science in your article is very graphic; but you are evidently laboring under a misapprehension as to its function. You sup- pose that the conscience is the moral law itself, and is to be regarded as infallible; but this is a mistake. Let me explain what I mean by an illustration: My mother has an old clock on the wall, which is now usually silent, but which she sets agoing occasionally, when it sometimes goes too quick and sometimes too slow, and often stops. She believes (I do not) that it came over in the Mayflower. Now, we do not regard this clock, or any other clock, as regulating time, or as settling the length of the day. These are determined for us by the sun. But there are two things that the clock does: it exhibits hours and days, and, when it is in a sound state, it makes them known to us. Pre THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE AGE. 37 cisely analogous is the function of the conscience. It does not constitute the good or make the law. Its perceptions do not render an action, considered in itself, to be either virtuous or vicious. What it does is to reveal the quality to us. It is not my eye which makes the apple-tree before us; it simply makes it known to us. Just as little do the decisions of the conscience constitute the goodness of an action. The tree exists, and truth exists, and moral good exists, whether the conscience or the intel- lect perceives them or no. The moral and intellectual powers are merely the organs through which the good and the true are disclosed. And as the eye may be diseased, so may the con- science, and the intellect, too, become perverted. But the eye implies an object to be seen, and the intellect implies that there is truth; so the conscience implies that there is moral good, which shines up there in the heavens, even when there is (as now) a cloud concealing it. There are standards of truth, as in mathematics, even when the boy makes mistakes in his demon- strations. So there is a moral standard even when men do not attend to it. That standard is not the conscience, but the moral law, which is the law of lovethat is, law and love; the law requiring and regulating love. The conscience may vacillate, and even err; but the moral law is immutable and eternal. Mou.But you make that law too pure and loftyas high and unapproachable as the sun. It frightens the young, and is offensive to all because it is so stiff and rigid. I do not propose to do away with law, but it should accommodate itself to our nature and to circumstances, and admit exceptions. F~n.A military officer cannot exact obedience beyond his own provincecannot, for instance, demand a special religious belief from his soldiers; but in his own domain he cannot allow exceptions to his orders. The magistrate cannot stretch his penalties beyond his own field of property and life; but in his own jurisdiction he cannot allow people to keep one law and break another; to steal, provided he does not murder; to raise a drunken disturbance on the streets, and be guilty of seduction, provided he be honest. If Gods law be holy, just, and good, He must require perfect obedience. What God requires is love under law, and He demands attention to its requirements. Mon.But why place the ideal so high? FAR.It is of vast moment to have a model before every man, and before society, to keep them from falling and to lift them up 38 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. when fallen. Your principles would produce a state of society like that in the time of the Roman Emperors Augustus an4 Tiberius, like that of Louis XV. in France, and like that of Charles II. in England, from which all men, perceiving the evils, turned away with such a terrible revulsion. You object specially to the Sabbath? MoR.Certainly, because so gloomy. FAR.J have always looked on the Sabbath as one of the most beneficent of our institutions. It is so to me, my household, and my horses, obliged to toil all the week. I have observed, too, in my occasional travels, that in France, in Ge~any, and in certain parts of the West in our own country, the people, though well enough educated in the elementary schools, have less intelligence because they have no quiet Sabbath on which to think and keep up their reading. MoR.But we might have all this without making the day so awfully sacred. FAR.The difficulty would be, without a divine sanction, to make people combine as to the time, and to impose and obey the necessary restrictions. The selfish master would insist on labor from his dependents in certain circumstancesthe mer- chant, for instance, when he had pressing lucrative orders. The pleasure-loving would insist on amusements, requiring labors, which, so far from being amusements, imply severe toil from vast multitudes. You may say law should secure the restrictions; but laws, under popular governments, can only be passed where there is a popular sentiment in their favor, and such laws would not be passed in a state of society such as I have pointed to. Besides, even though law might enjoin a day of rest, it could not make men engage in elevating exercisesin short, to remem- ber the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Our forefathers may on some points have been too stern; but their descendants, with their railway traveling, their reading of novels and secular papers, and their theater-going, may be rushing to the opposite and worse extreme. I know a promising young man, from this neighbor- hood, who went into a newspaper office where he had to work the whole Sabbath; he struggled for a time, and then lost all sense of everything spiritual. The Sabbath (like every precept of the law) was made for man by the God who made him, and knows what he needs, and has sot apart this day to give him rest and make him good. THE J~ELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 39 The Evolutionist here interposed. As he had been at one time my preceptor, as his head was all silvered over where it was not bald, and as his manner of late had become more subdued and less dogmatic, I treated him with more respect than I did the younger men. THIRD ROUND.EvOLUTJONIST AND YANKEE FARMER. EvoLuTIoNIsT.I wish you all to understand that I disap- prove of these attempts to undermine morality. I believe them to be injurious to the best interests of the race. FARMER.It may be as well for you to know whither Agnosti- cism is tending, and the consequences which some are drawing from Evolution. Ev.I certainly wish to retain the morality, but to separate it from religion, which I also wish to retain, but in a higher form. FAR.But you must be aware that those who have undermined the religion have, in the very act, shaken the morality. You will have to consider whether the principles of an evolution without a religion, without a God, and without a fixed moral law will not lead, logically and practically, to the low and loose morality which our friend has been recommending, and which you are con- demning. These discussions as to religion and morality will require those who are not to abandon both to build up from the very foundation, when they may find that the same deep princi- ples which bear up morality are guaranteeing the fundamental truths of religion. You know that the great body of Evolution- ists and all Agnostics regard conscience as developed, and the product of circumstances, and therefore having no absolute claim on obedience. What foundation have you left for morality? I am afraid that, like our Moralist here, you will have to advertise for a new ethics, as well as a new religion. Ev.I have always held that we should all promote the gen- eral welfare. I admit the difficulty of the great body of mankind being able or wifling to find what that welfare is or requires. But all men have kind social instincts and a hereditary conscience, and our aim should be to create such a public sentiment as to incline men to what is good. FAR.But, in the case of many, all these .may be counteracted and thwarted by selfishness, by lusts and passions, which need a positive law to lay a restraint on them. I fear that your philoso 40 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW phy tends to weaken these sentimentswhich are, after all, mere aids to virtueas showing that they have no foundation; and you will find it difficult to create, or even keep up, a public feel- ing ready to stand by a high and severe morality. What think you of those renowned writers, male and female, more than once referred to in these articles, who lived as husband or wife with those to whom they were not married? Ev.J regret their conduct. I believe in marriage and monog- amy. Have you had no such illicit intercourse among professing Christians, who managed to keep their acts concealed? FAR.Yes; but we have a moral law which condemns them, and which has created a public sentiment which also condemns them. Remove the law, and the sentiment wili evaporate and disappear, and the practice wili become generallike the keeping of mistresses by kings two hundred years agobecause there is nothing to restrain it. Such conduct on the part of professing Christians is censured severely, and no one is tempted to copy it. But many feel as if your evolutionary ethics utters no such con- demnation, and many may be led to imitate the persons to whom we have referred, because of their genius. It is surely very unwise to separate religion and morality. The moral law in the heart seems to point to a law-giver, and religion gives a motive power to humanity. The great German metaphysician, Kant, showed that the moral reason, whose law he described as the categorical imperative, implied responsibility, a judgment-day, and God as judge; and these are the great truths of natural religion. Ev.I suppose you give up the argument from design. FAn.I do not. As our moral nature demands a law-giver, so our rational nature demands that there be a designer, the cause of the adaptation or design we see everywhere. Ev.Do not understand that I am opposed to religion. I do not wish to deprive you, my young friend, of your faith. I should not like my lovely adopted daughter to give up her prayers and attendance at public worship. But I confess I am not satis- fied with any existing religion. FAR.I believe the answers to your advertisement for a new religion have convinced you that there is no hope of your get- ting a new religion capable of standing a moments scrutiny. Ev.I was sincere in my advertisement. I did wish to have a satisfactory religion. I have usually attended the Unitarian THE RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE A GE. 41 Church, because there was nothing to offend me, while there was nothing to meet my felt wants. It still professes to cling to Scripture, with which it is evidently not consistent. As I can- not live in a vacuum, I am becoming wearied of it. There is evidence that man is everywhere predisposed toward religion. F~u.The evolutionists explain this by heredity. I explain it by the felt needs of man and his rational nature, handed down, it may be, from ancestors. You proceed upon the fact that man has a capacity of judging and deciding; and, acting on it, you condemn the heathen superstitions. On like grounds I argue that man has a moral and spiritual, or rather that these are part of his essential, nature. Ev.But what am I to believe? I am not satisfied with your Scriptures. There are some things in the earlier books which, as Mr. Mill says, are barbaroussuch as the cruel wars and the gross immoralities practiced by persons who are recommended to us as exemplars. I cannot believe in their inspiration. F~u.Better leave the question of plenary inspiration aside till we ascertain whether there is not something superhuman in them. When we have determined this, on good evidence, we may discover some means of accounting for what is evidently human being allowed to remain. The Scriptures often narrate events and picture characters in dark enough colors. But they show us a clear advance, and they give us enough to lift us above the rudeness and vice prevalent in the barbarous ages. Their pre- cepts, sanctioned by God, such as the decalogue, the moral maxims of the prophets, the discourses of Christ, and the epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, have been the main means of promoting thought, science, and civilization in modern Europe and in America. Ev.There are doctrines which I cannot swallow. I do not refer to such high dogmas as Predestination and the Trinity, to which so many of my Unitarian friends object. For the great body of philosophers, including Mr. Mill, have held a doctrine of necessity, a more forbidding doctrine than fore-ordination, which implies something of will in man, and a wise God who governs. If there be a God, which I do not deny, though I am in per- plexity on the whole subject, His nature must be so high and mysterious that I can conceive there should be in it a Trinity, or threefold distinction, as well as an essential unity. But the doc- tine of a blood-atonement I cannot stand; it seems to me so nuworthy of God. 42 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. F~.Many profound thinkers have felt this to be the grand reconciling doctrine of Gods government in a world in which God, represented by His law, is holy, and man is an acknowleged breaker of that law, in which there are both good and evil, both optimism and pessimism. No one knows better than the evolu- tionist that the world has been a scene of contest from the begin- ningfirst a struggle for existence in the animal ages, and now a contest between the evil and the good. In the atonement, God is just and yet the justifier of the ungodly, while the heart of the sinner is won by the manifestation of love. Ev.There is much in Christianity that commends itself to me. In particular, the character of Jesus is so unique; so perfect in purity, in heavenliness, in love, in tenderness and sympathy, that I am obliged to acknowledge that I cannot understand how a Jew, a Galilean, a Nazarene could have conceived, much less fashioned, such a character. F~n.If you only yield to the attractive power of Christ, all will come right with you: you will have a body of consistent and comforting truth to establish you, and a motive to live and Labor, to be good and to do good. By this time the light was failing, and we passed into the house, where we found the evening meal prepared for us. My mother asked me to say grace, and as I did so, the Agnostic gazed into the air, looking on the grace and the air as equally phenomenal; the Moralist, being hungry, fixed his eyes on the food; and the Evolutionist bowed his head reverently and was pained because he could not say amen. Shortly after we parted, each one following his own thoughts, to bear him I know not whither. For myself, I was humbled because I had not done justice to the cause which I tried to sustain, but sure that I was in a more satisfactory state of mind than those abler men who were seeking for truth without finding it. A YANKEE FAN1~iiru. THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. Tm~ element of disinterestedness is nearly gone from our politics. We do not all speak out so bluntly as the Colorado editor, who informed his readers~ that announcements of can- didacy would be inserted at the uniform rate of five dollars, and that all political work would be charged to the person ordering it, unless it was paid for in advance. It would be better, perhaps, if the matter were pnt once for all upon such a simple footing. There was a convention held at Chicago last year at which some millions of words were spoken, and among them there were ten perfectly sincere ones, uttered by a voice from out of the Lone Star: What are we here for if not for the offices? Such is still the power of absolute sincerity over the human mind, that this was the effective speech of the occasion. All is forgotten but the noise of tlie chairmans haunner and this admirable epit- ome of the situation by Mr. OFlanagan. On a certain evening in October last, the writer of these pages was astonished to find himself sitting in the chair- mans seat at what was supposed to be a political meeting. He enjoyed an interesting and a novel experience. The even- ing before, a committee called upon him and invited him (a most unpolitical person) to preside. He did not ask the committee by what gift of prescience they had been enabled to foresee that the assembled multitude would desire him to preside over their deliberations. He accepted the invitation without asking childish questions, aud thus became part of a splendid show! On the evening designated, the town was in a blaze of glory, chiefly generated by the patent campaign torch, supplied on favorable terms by a firm of dealers in the numerous articles which are now described as campaign material ; a business the volume of which ran into the millions last year. A

THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. Tm~ element of disinterestedness is nearly gone from our politics. We do not all speak out so bluntly as the Colorado editor, who informed his readers~ that announcements of can- didacy would be inserted at the uniform rate of five dollars, and that all political work would be charged to the person ordering it, unless it was paid for in advance. It would be better, perhaps, if the matter were pnt once for all upon such a simple footing. There was a convention held at Chicago last year at which some millions of words were spoken, and among them there were ten perfectly sincere ones, uttered by a voice from out of the Lone Star: What are we here for if not for the offices? Such is still the power of absolute sincerity over the human mind, that this was the effective speech of the occasion. All is forgotten but the noise of tlie chairmans haunner and this admirable epit- ome of the situation by Mr. OFlanagan. On a certain evening in October last, the writer of these pages was astonished to find himself sitting in the chair- mans seat at what was supposed to be a political meeting. He enjoyed an interesting and a novel experience. The even- ing before, a committee called upon him and invited him (a most unpolitical person) to preside. He did not ask the committee by what gift of prescience they had been enabled to foresee that the assembled multitude would desire him to preside over their deliberations. He accepted the invitation without asking childish questions, aud thus became part of a splendid show! On the evening designated, the town was in a blaze of glory, chiefly generated by the patent campaign torch, supplied on favorable terms by a firm of dealers in the numerous articles which are now described as campaign material ; a business the volume of which ran into the millions last year. A 44 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. band of music was provided, of course. There was a procession of boys and young men in very showy uniforms. Carriages were in attendance to convey participants from the hotel to the place of meeting, a toilsome journey of almost two hundred yards. The scene presented in the interior of the hail was highly animated and striking: the walls draped with flags, the uniformed boys all seated together, a brilliant parterre of young eyes and glowing color, the clubs of young men wearing rosettes and badges, the band picturesquely placed, the platform well covered with citi- zens. Nothing was wanting to the scene except a good solid back- ground of disinterested audience. The audience was shy. The room would have held a thousand people; but, omitting persons who constituted the attractive force of the occasion, there may have been three hundred genuine auditors. The proceedings, too, had almost every quality except that of spontaneity. The audience had precisely as much voice in deciding what those proceedings should be, as the guests of a wealthy house have in determining the bill of fare at the banquet to which they are invited; as much voice as Roman voters had in the selection of the gladiators and the lions that were to be torn for their amusement in the Coliseum. The chairman, the vice-presidents, and the secretaries were announced, not elected; and, it must be owned, they were provided in ample numbers. The chairman, in his extreme ignorance and childlike lunocence, blurted out the whole truth of the situation. He remarked that his respected Uncle had then in his service one hundred thousand persons, most of whom were capable and well disposed. He was asked, he said, to vote in such a way as to deprive them suddenly, and without cause, of their means of subsistence, and put into their places a hundred thousand other men, unknown and untried. He respectfully declined so to do, and he had now the honor of introducing the orator of the evening. That orator, who was a master in the art of amusing an audience, told two dozen of the most killing anecdotes ever perfected by a hundred repetitions on the stoop of a country store. It was delightful to see the boys laugh at them, and the austere countenances of some of the elderly auditors relax under the genial spell. Here was a costly, elaborate, and highly successful entertain- ment, provided free to all comers. It was a meeting~~ only in the sense in which our other Mr. Barnums Greatest Show on Earth is a meeting. It was a meeting such as a Roman politician THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 45 used to arrange for his constituents, except that it was innocent in every detail. A Roman politician of Ciceros day would write to a friend in an African province: I begin hand-shaking to-morrow for the consulship; send me some lions. At our meeting, no gladiators were mangled; no members of the Young Mens Christian Association were devoured. It was, nevertheless, as much a device for the amusement of the auditors as the stupendous gatherings which Vespasian and Titus contemplated when they built the Coliseum. We begin now to understand that wonderful edifice, which cost as much as a considerable city; for we are ourselves approaching a phase of politics similar to that which the Coliseum completed, andnow commemorates. Ourvoters, like those of Rome, are coming to sit passive, waiting to see which party wili provide the most magnificent and sumptuous shows. Our expenditures for politi- cal purposes are spread over so vast a territory that we cannot reckon up the sum total. If we could, it would startle the world. I think I have seen in Union Square a political display (it were too absurd to cail it a meeting) that cost forty thousand dollars: a tumult of huge bands, volcanoes of fire-works, miles of torch- light procession, and a dozen politicians roaring from the stands to little groups of people. The cost of an ordinary affair of this kind, given by parties before every election, runs up to several thousands of dollars, and most of the expense is incurred for fire and noise. A remarkable circumstance is, that scarcely any of the work done on these occasions is voluntary. All is paid for in some kind of value; generally, in money down. Within the memory of men not very old, the Tammany Society could, com- mand wiling service from the 6tite of the young men of New York on every occasion when hard work was needed. It was once a distinction to young men of position to be the secretary of a ward committee, and such it remained, so long as posts of that kind yielded nothing but honor and satisfaction. So, at least, our elders tell us. We know but too well that that precious element of disinterestedness is now absent from our politics. Perhaps there never was quite so much of it as our old politicians think there was, and it began very early to diminish. At present, in the ninety-fifth year of the Constitution, we are face to face with a state of politics of cx- treme simplicity, of which money is the moti~c, the means, and the end. What was the last presidential election but a contest 46 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. of purses? The longest purse carried the day, and it carried the day because it was the longest. Some innocent readers, perhaps, have wondered why the famous orators who swayed and enter- tained vast multitudes night after night, and day after day, have not been recognized in the distribution of offices. Most of them were paid in cash, from ten dollars a night to a thousand dollars a week. We have outlived the primitive stage of development when an illustrious speaker could feel compensated for splitting his throat by four years of poverty-stricken exile at a foreign capital. I have not a thought of reproach for any of those gentlemen. The laborer is worthy of his reward, and they were laboring honorably in their vocation. I wish merely to state that, in the inevitable working of things, our polities have become a business, in which few take a laborious part unless they are paid for it. The business is extensive and peculiar. It has many branches, and, like other businesses, it cannot be advantageously carried on except by men who possess capital; for our political bosses now engage in operations that require long preparation and large outlay, the result of which is uncertain. They make losses. They also make those losses good. There is a boss in the city of New York. who will take a contract for putting a gentleman into Congress. Pay him so much, say, for example, thirty-five thousand dollars, and you may go to sleep for six weeks, wake up, and find yourself member-elect. One of our city members amuses his friends by relating his interview with this contractor, when the sum we have just mentioned was named as the fair price for the work to be done. Yes, said the boss, I will do the job for thirty-five thousand dollars, and you shall have no further trouble. These may not be the precise words spoken, but that was their substantial meaning. The client expressed surprise at the amount of the fee demanded. By degrees the contractor dropped to fifteen thousand, and there he remained firm, saying that the thing could not be done for less. The candidate discovered, by conducting the canvass himself, that the boss had spoken the truth, for his legitimate and unavoidable expenses did actually amount to more than fifteen thousand dollars. He would have done well to employ the contractor. I have had the pleasure of beholding this child of his era. Blame him not. He has grown out of the circumstances of the THE P0 WEB OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 47 ease. He is a necessity of the situation. We sometimes see innocent creatures, by having too easy access to masses of rich nutriment, bloated to enormous proportions, even past recognition. Such are tlie flies called into being on the wharves wliere sweet-crusted sugar-barrels are landed and lie in rows for many days softening in the sun. Such are the rats in a cheese ship. Such are the hideous things that crawl and swell in the ooze of a slaughter-honse. It is not the fault, but the dreadful calamity, of these creatures that they are where they are, aiLd are able to do what they do. They only do, in a rough and wrong way, the work which we ought to have done in a right and civil- ized way. On just conditions, even Tweed could have been a useful and a faithful servant. He might have served us as dog, not preyed upon us as wolf. In his capacity of wolf, he cost us two or three hundred millions of dollars; when we might have had him as a shaggy, serviceable dog, on strictly reasonable terms: a proper daily bone securely his as long as he earned it, and a snug kennel when his working days were over. We use familiarly this new word, boss. What is a boss? He is simply a man who can get to the polls on election day masses of voters, who care little or nothing for the issues of the cam- paign, and know of them still less. We may have, for example, in one of our cities, five hundred Italians or Poles, strangers in a strange land, scarcely able to use its language, and totally unac- quainted with its politics. One of their number, having some vantage-ground of access to them, assists to get them naturalized, cultivates his influence over them, and acquires, by various arts and devices, the power to dispose of their votes. He, in effect, casts their votes for them, and holds those votes as a commodity to be disposed of for a consideration of some kind. He is a boss. There are as many bosses as there are sets, cliques, and nationali- ties in a city, all subject to the head-central boss of a political party. Nor is bossism confined to large cities. Wherever there is a mass of unassimilated population, there are sure to arise bosses to marshal, wield, and vote it. In virtuous rural districts, there are men who know where to find, and how to deal with, the men whose principles require them to vote for the candidate that pays their poll-tax. I have had, I say, the opportunity of view- ing a boss of national notoriety, as he rode gayly home from Albany in a palace car, surrounded by people who are called 48 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. his friends. He is an improvement on the pugilists and cor- morant-thieves of a remoter period; for America is that blest land of the earth where nothing is as it ought to be, and where everything unceasingly improveseven the boss! The Emerald Isle gave him birth; the streets of New York, education. With- out flattery he may be called a broth of a boy; tall, straight, ruddy, robust. He even looks handsome, as he stands in the middle of the car surrounded by home-returning members and retainers, illiterate as he is, he has evidently studied and long practiced the arts by which personal popularity is created and extended. He nods gracious recognition to individuals in the outer ring, and behaves in all respects like the powerful prince he feels himself to be. In the midst of much talk of unknown pur- port, we hear him say that he would accept no office unless there was plenty of patronage to ~ So many young men, he ex- plains, were devoted to his service that he would not think of taking anything unless it gave him a chance to take care of them.~ There are, in truth, political clubs called by his name. To see that brawny and good-tempered Irishman walking abroad in his district, at a time when politics are active, is to get an idea how the chief of a clan strode his native glen when a marauding expedition was on foot. He lives in a handsome house, too, and has more property to his name than any man has ever yet been able to get by legitimate public service in the United States. Observe him sauntering into a corner grog-shop, which immedi- ately fills with a crowd of his retainers. He treats the whole crowd, except alone the individual who pays the money. He will sometimes pass the whole day and evening in treating his dis- trict, but he takes care not to drink while he is on duty. One of these gentry, it is true, declined an office, of which the salary was fifty dollars a week, on the ground that such a pitiful sum would not pay for his rum and cigars! He meant the rum and cigars he was obliged to give, ex-officio, to his followers. An ordinary mortal could not successfully hold even a second- rate boss-ship. Talent enough has been developed and trained in that vocation to clean the streets of a great city, provided the doing of that was the road to fortune. The boss, as agent and organizer of spoliation, is himself a prey to every minor scoun- drel; for at certain seasons he is in a position that makes it perilous to say No, to any living creature. It requires tact, self- possession, and resources of mind to move about among needy THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 49 people, an embodied Yes, with a pocket full of money, and yet have some of it left after election. An eminent boss lately remarked to an interviewer: It takes years of experience in poli- tics to enable a man to guard himself against strikers, and even then he is not altogether safe. In old times they used to get up target companies and clam-bakes, giving candidates the privilege of paying the bills. They go for solid cash now. Money, money, everywhere in politics; money in prodigal abundanceexcept where it could secure and reward good service to the public: hecatombs for the wolves; precarious and scanty bones for the watch-dogs! That is the spectacle everywhere presented to us. We need not regard the anonymous paragraphs assuring us that it was the last million which carried Indiana. Whenever the word million is mentioned, it is the privilege of reasonable beings to become at once incredulous. But how can we set aside the thrice-printed assertion of the present Secretary of State, that the October election in Maine last year was carried by the application of arguments we could not meet. He meant money. On the other hand, the public was assured that the opposing party flooded the city of Bangor with money. Experienced politicians evidently regarded the contest as a mere trial of management between two individuals, each having the resources of a national party to draw from. Blame, said an angry Republican at the time, had everything he could desire. Money, speakers, everything was placed at his disposal He had but to say what he wanted, and he received it. The State has gone Democratic; Blame alone is to blame, and he cant shift the responsibility. We are all, I fear, so hardened to this tone and style of remark, that we have lost the power to feel what a lapse it is from our ideal of government. Whether we accept Mr. Blaines assertion, or that of his o~ponents, where are we to place in the political system the people of Maine? The critical business, we are told, is to get the vote all in,~ and it was, perhaps, in that department that Mr. Blame was wanting. In the adjacent State of New Hampshire, it is com- puted, four thousand men are brought home every election from distant places to vote where they keep their trunk. They enjoy a free ride from points as distant as Chicago and Mil- waukee. In one of the closely divided localities of that State, we are assured, there is an inn-keeper who is so accommodating as to store away m the garret of his hotel a row of a dozen or so of VOL. CXXXIILNO. 296. 4 50 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. empty trunks, each representing a vote, sure to come from some remote place on the day before election. Two questions must have occurred to non-political persons on learning such facts as are here but slightly indicated: Who furnishes the money for such large expenditures? and, What is the motive of the givers? The sum total is so great as to destroy our claim to possess cheap government. It is doubtful if there has ever been a dearer government than that of the United States, if we reckon politics as one of the items of expenditure. It is not cheap to pay responsible executive officers a precarious pittance per annum, if it costs a million dollars every year or two to change them. It is not cheap to put low-priced men into legislative chambers, if we are also to run a lobby of millionaires. It were useless for a mere disinterested inqnirer to try and compute the cost of the last presidential election, since no record was made of many important items, and those who know them are interested in keeping the secret. From the assembling of the conventions at Chicago and Cincinnati to the day of election in November, the expenditure was continuous and profuse. Who provided the money? There is abundant reason to infer that a large portion of it was contributed by individuals and corporate bodies who had something more than a patriotic interest in the result. We know the men who con- ducted the expenditures. They were not, as a class, holders of offices, nor candidates for office; and it is a thing too obvious that they are not of that rarest order of persons who are capable of prolonged disinterested exertion. There is reason to be- lieve that the Government is coming to be rather an appendage to a circle of wealthy operators than a restraint upon ita circle that desires to keep the Government weak and manageable, that it may be subservient to their purposes. The recent explosion in the Post-office Department at Wash- ington still needs elucidation; but attentive readers of the testimony so far called forth can discern the methods employed. We see a dozen men, after corrupting, by petty gifts and dinners costing from ten to fifty dollars each, a vast number of people, from governors and senators to messengers and porters, make a liberal contribution to the expenses of the campaign, and endeavor to purchase in advance the favor and acquiescence of a candidate for the presidency. They appear to have gained nearly a million dollars by their contracts, and to have poured THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 51 ont half of it in conciliating real and imaginary opposition. If a campaign were running close, sncli men can still afford to add an extra contribution to the party funds. It is highly probable that an important part of the enormons sums spent last year in electing a President came from persons who had similar reasons for their liberality. Some of them, in decent gratitude, should have given money by the million, for they made it by the million; and that, not through corruption, but through the inevitable weakness of watch-dogs underfed and insecure, when set to guard saddles of mutton and rounds of beef. Suppose they refrain from the furtive bite (and most of them do), with what moral force can poor and anxious officials, without hold upon their places, defend the peoples interest against syndicates of bankers I Three years ago, the Government had still some four-per-cent. bonds for sale, which were going off in moderate amounts to legitimate investors, about as rapidly as they could be con- veniently delivered. Suddenly investors are informed that a syn- dicate in New York had taken all that were left, amounting to a hundred and fifty millions of dollars. The Government had no more of them for sale. The press broke into commendation of this fine sfroke of finance; but it did not seem in the least com- mendable to the ordinary investor of hard-earned money, nor to mothers and children who had been advised to invest a too limited inheritance in Government bonds. The almost immediate increase in the value of the hundred and fifty millions was three per cent., so that a handful of men in New York, London, and else- where made a profit of four and a half millions. There was no corruption here. But why this readiness to throw an enormous gain into the laps of men who had already too much, to the dis- advantage of the people of the United States? Members of that syndicate could well afford to come down handsomely when an election was in prospect. Such things inevitably occur in a country where the govern- ment grows weaker, while everything else grows stronger,a country that puts the small man inside the government and leaves the big man outside. Observe what is now taking place in the magnificent prairie lands of the North-west, once the heritage of the people. The secret of Americas rapid development is, that a pioneer could get from five to fifteen good crops from the vir- gin soil of his Government land, with little expense. This has 52 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. been the poor mans opportunity, from the beginning of the coun. trys settlement. It has covered a great part of the western world with thriving towns and populous counties. It has been the magnet of attraction to the stalwart immigrant, who found, on his arrival at his little plot of land, that Nature had deposited upon it, for him, the accumulated richness of a hundred centuries of growth and decay. He had to do little more than scratch the surface, and put in his seed. In seven years the product of that virgin land paid for his farm, built house and barn, fenced fields, planted an orchard, sent for father and mother, and paid a family quota to the school-house and cabinet organ. At present, rich men are skinning the prairies of that virgin wealth, swooping down upon tracts of thirty thousand acres, robbing them of that quality which gave the poor man his chance, and fiI]ing the western world with roving laborers, who work on these prodigious farms in the summer, and starve as best they can through the winter. It was government by lobby that author- ized that. It is really interesting to notice the ease with which enormous amounts of money are got for purposes of waste and plunder, and the extreme difficulty with which just and elevated legislation is accomplished. What citizen of New York, for example, a State upon which Nature has lavished all her gifts in imperial pro- fusion, and which is inhabited by as large a proportion of worthy and public-spirited persons as any other province of equal extent in the worldwhat citizen of New York, I say, has not in his heart accepted the invitation of the Government of Canada to join it in rescuing the shores of Niagara from base disfiguration? No great amount of money would be required: but years pass, and this most obviously right and becoming thing cannot be done. Has the reader seen the new capitol at Albany? Every patriotic son of the Empire State should go upon an expiatory pilgrimage to it, and pass penitential hours in gazing upon its immeasurable iniquities. Whenever I have the pleasure of strolling about beautiful Albany, I am drawn to that accursed and shame- ful heap of spoil as irresistibly as a floating spar is drawn to a huge and dirty iceberg. Two millions were shot into the cellar of it. A writer in the American Cyclopedia, halting at the end of a long calculation, can just find breath enough to gasp: Its ultimate cost can ouly be conjectured. Few cities were more abundantly supplied with public buildings than Albany; but here in the THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 53 midst of them rises this unspeakable pile of stone, so vast that it will require, it is said, two thousand tons of coal a year to keep it warm. The greatest lawgivers and orators the world ever saw, Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Cicero, were not accommodated as honorable members from the Fourth and Sixth wards are accommodated here. The room in which Chatham spoke, in which Burke delivered immortal speeches, in which Fox, Pitt, aud Sheridan debated, to say nothing of the reverberating hall in which Randolph, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and Preston were so often heard, was beggarly compared with the splendid chambers of this enormous interior. There is only one patriotic thing to do with it. It should be taken down, in contrition and humility, by behest of the people whom it dishonors. The materials should be sold to the best advantage for some useful purpose. The ground should be leveled, and the land respectfully given back to the city that presented it. The mere interest of the money wasted upon this capitol would give the city of New York clean sfreets forever. The inquiry is interesting, too, why the American people, who, in private dealings, are as honest as any people in the world, should exhibit moral weakness when they are acting for the public. There are men in public offices who would not take a postage-stamp from a private individual, and yet, as office- holders, they not only have no conscience, but will frankly avow that they have none. I have heard them do so. According to the historian Mommsen, the noble Romans showed the same peculiarity. Writing of the virtuous period of Roman history, 167 B. C., Mommsen says: The conscience of the Romans, other- wise in economic matters so scrupulous, showed, so far as the state was concerned, remarkable laxity; and he quotes, in illustration, the language of Cato, who observed, that he who stole from a private person ended his days in chains and fetters, whilehe who stole from the public ended them in gold and purple. Nevertheless, the turpitude of stealing from the public is far greater than stealing from an individual. Neither the Romans nor the Greeks can teach us much in politics; for their system rested, as ours did till 1861, upon a basis of slavery, and they derived a great part of their revenues from the spoliation of other states. The free citizens, compara- tively few in number, had, both in their position and quality, some- thing of the hereditary noble. Our experiment of government 54 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. by the whole people, for the whole people, is absolutely original, and we entered upon it only twenty years ago. It devolves now upon the American people to create the art of government by the whole people,government by all the mind we have,for the good of all the people equally. We have to do this greatest work of the human race with little aid from precedents. We have made a truly wonderful and hopeful beginning, but only a beginning, and we are still obliged to repeat the words of poor Hamilton, spoken in 1789: The business of Americas happiness is still to be done. We should natu ally look to England for some guidance here. We owe very much indeed to that great country for the exist- ence even of our experiment. But the experience of a tight little island does not throw much ligh upon our continental problem. The people there have little more voice in the selection of govern- ing persons than the people of New York had in the original selection and repeated r~election of Fernando Wood. There appears to be no such thing in the world as the original selection of candidates by a constituency. Perhaps there never will be. Perhaps it is, in the nature of things, impossible. We can say that in a country which has had a Parliament for eight centuries, not one emineflt member of the same was ever selected from the mass of the people and placed in Parliament by a constituency. Forty years ago, the Duke of Newcastles son took a fancy to a young man recently his fellow-student at Oxford; and the Duke, being in want of a member safe to vote on the Tory side, put that younger son of a Liverpool merchant into Parliament, against the will of his constituents, and over the head of a distinguished lawyer of much parliamentary experience. This outrage, as we should style it, gave the illustrious Gladstone to the British empire. Not long after, the good-natured Marquis of Lansdowne read, with very warm approval, an article in the Edinburgh Review, written by another merchants son, T. B. Macaulay. To strengthen the Whig side of the House, the Marquis, by a monstrous abuse of power, gave this young man a seat also. About the same period, Lord Durham, at Lady Blessingtons house in London, was struck with the fluent, incisive ta3k of young Disraeli. It ended with his lordships lifting the young man, by main strength, into Parlia- ment. Palmerston bought his first seat outright, for five thou- sand pounds. The great men of the last century owed their seats to similar influences. Edmund Burke was the private secretary THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 55 of a great lord, and was placed in Parliament by the exertion of that great lords will. It were easy to show, by multiplying instances, that the strength and glory of the British Parliament has been due, in every generation, to similar abuses of power. It was for this reason that the Duke of Wellington, as we see by the last volume of his correspondence, opposed all the reform bills of his time. He perceived that nothing had yet been evolved in Europe capable of doing, with reasonable efficiency, what had been done from the beginning of time by the hereditary principle. He did not say, in so many words, that the art of electing had not yet been created; but this was evidently his opinion. He took it for granted that the abolition of rotten boroughs would I~ll Parliament with rich noodles, to the exclusion of the kind of men who have given to that body much of its efficiency, and all the splendor of its reputation. Make me a constitution, said King Murat to Lord Holland. Lord Holland wisely replied: You might as well ask me to build you a free. That brave old oak, the realm of Britain, has a growth of a thousand years behind it, and it will continue, as we trust, another thousand years, growing, perfecting, rising, in ever closer alliance and friendship with the United States. But we, too, have to attain real strength by the same slow process of growth. We, too, have to meet evils as they come up, and thus, in our own way, and on our own principles, evolve an art which has as yet no existencethe art of getting by deliberate selection the few men at the summit of affairs who naturally belong there. The late Mr. Carlyle said many things which now seem to us mere dyspepsia, but there is one idea, to which he returns again and again in all of his works, which is of immortal value. This idea is, that men can ouly work with success when they work in harmony with unalterable facts. In our governmental affairs, as they stand at this moment, we disregard certain unalterable facts. We have done so, in some degree, from the beginning, but par- ticularly since the public service was suddenly degraded and debauched by Andrew Jackson. Unalterable conditions are now proving too strong for us. One fact of all the life on our planet is, that the strong govern; and this is a fact to which the whole progress of our race is due. In every thousand human beings there are a certain fifty or so who are much abler than the rest. This is equally the case with the apples on a tree, the straw- 56 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. berries on a vine, the ants in a hill, and buffaloes in a herd, as with men in a community. This small fifty or so of the strong will always rule the rest. Let us arrange our government as we will; call it a despotism or a commune; from this fact we can never escape. The world is often blessed by the weak; but it is always governed and owned by the strong. All that the nine hundred and fifty can ever do is to limit the power of the strong a little, and compel them to use it with moderation, and in accordancewith pub- lic law. But the great fact remains forever beyond our altering. Look around: after fifty years of fattening the wolf and starving the dog, we have nearly succeeded in eliminating from public life the natural chiefs of men, who indeeed smile with mild derision at the idea of belonging to it. Government is substantially left to the order of men who are capable of squabbling for patronage; and, in many instances, places of importance are filled by dum- mies. We find it cheaper, said one of those natural chiefs, to put men into the legislature, than to make terms with them after they are in. But do the strong men the less rule us? They govern in and by the lobby. They control railroads. They found and manage huge enterprises. What have they in common with the dirty bar- keepers who fill the places in municipal governments which it was once the reward of a virtuous life-time to possess! They get what they want through the bar-keepers. The lamentable difference is, that the people have no useful and just check upon the capital- ists. Their power is limited only as that of the unhappy Czar of Russia is limitedby the knowledge that men who are pressed beyond endurance have now the means of inflicting a terrible vengeance. Men of native force, acting legitimately within a government, clothed with the might and majesty of law, can hold in due restraint the whole body of the strong, and make it even their pride to serve the many. But you caunot get an empire governed by a parcel of ravenous bosses and precarious clerks. It is, moreover, a very simple but unchangeable fact, that the most legitimate business of politics can ouly be done by a class that has time and money at its command. Three wagon-loads of ~ were bunched in Tainmany Hall last November, and this was but one concluding item of an expenditure continued for six months, and for which the public makes no provision. Who is to do these huge jobs of bunching? In more primitive times THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 57~ and lands, nobilities did all the bunching, or had it done; for they alone had the wagons or the time, and upon them devolved, of simple necessity, the whole burden, hoth of politics and govern- ment. They alone had time to attend to public business. With us, as a rule, in dense communities, only bar-keepers have leisure, and it was they who chiefly managed politics until the prodigious profits of the vocation called into being the political boss. The system of hereditary nobility, with all its abuses and absurdities, was in sufficient harmony with facts to carry the world along, age after age. That system was a necessity to primitive man, for the reason that primitive man did not, and does not, know how to elect his chiefs. In the early ages, it required the whole m- dustry of a nation to maintain a few hundred families in sufficient ease and abundance for civilization to be created, and those fami- lies held the precious charge, as it were, in trust for mankind. Nobilities were long the armed defenders of the community; and, in later periods, by nobilities in state and church, art was sus- tained, science was advanced, mauners were improved, literature was nourished. We can say more even than this: By nobilities the problem of just liberty has been wrought out, so far as it has yet been done. Who extorted Magna Charta? Not a band of anxious peasants. Who resisted Charles I. I It was the noble class who did most that was wise and good in that revolution. Who drew the Habeas Corpus act? An hereditary nobleman. Who expelled James II.? English nobility. Who did most that was wise and humane in the French Revolution? The nobility of France and their immediate circle. The movement began in the chdteau; and, in truth, the peasantry lived so near starvation that they had no thought but to submit. Who began, controlled, and directed the American Revolution? The nobility of the American colonies. Washington, Jefferson, Randolph, and the greater number of their colleagues had the three essential quali- ties of noblemen, namely, native superiority, command of their time, and training in public business. They were as genuine a nobility as ever existed. It belonged to them to take care of the public weal, and they were fitted for this sublime vocation by character, by circumstances, and by practice. American nobility, too, made the Constitution of 1787, and it was the relics of that nobility who started the Government, and brought it on with success and glory for the first forty years. And that small class would still be competent to the task, if we could only have 58 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. remained three millions of planters, farmers, mechanics, fisher- men, and slaves. Shall we doubt, said Dr. Franklin, in the Convention of 1787, finding three or four men in all the United States, with public spirit enough to bear sitting in peaceful council, merely to preside over our civil concerns, and see that our laws are duly executed ~ Dr. Franklin was a great man, bnt he had not the gift of prophecy. He was far from discerning that, before the Consti- tution was a hundred years of age, that small but competent nobility upon which he relied with so much confidence would be swamped and overwhelmed by a torrent of people, and that all the superior intellect of America would find scope in merely growing up with the country. He had been himself a man of leisure at the age of forty-two, and there was a small number of such in all the colonies, down to the time when he delivered his speech recommending that the higher offices of government should be unsalaried. His idea was practically adopted. It has been adhered to ever since, in spite of the altered circumstances of the country; for to give a Seward or an Evarts eight thou- sand dollars a year for being Secretary of State is to get their services for nothing, and charge them thirty thousand dollars a year for the privilege of serving us. The system of gratuitous service worked ill from the begin- ning; and it has worked worse every year since. It has proved to be a system of starving the dog and nourishing the wolf. Hamilton and Jefferson, before they had been twelve months in office, were pining to resign because they could not make their salaries do. They did not say so at the time. Public men often have two reasons for their conduct: one is the reason; and the other is the reason they give. In later writings, both of them avow the fact frankly enough. Aaron Burr was not ruined by his duel; he was ruined through being lured away into public life before he had completed his fortune. I will take the liberty of adducing a more recent and familiar instance, for the purpose of showing where our difficulty lies. We have several times, of late years, seen Mr. George W. Curtis gallantly stand forth in defense Qf principle, in political conventions; and, doubtless, there are many persons in the State of New York who would gladly see him enter public life. What man, indeed, could better serve his State or country, or more worthily THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 59 represent them, than one in whom are united public spirit, high culture, high principle, a distinguished and winning personality? Of all the qualifications of a nobleman, he lacks but one but, alas, that is a fatal lack. He has not the command of his time. He is a member of the most arduous of all professions; for there is no work done in the world which expends vitality so fast as writing for the public. It is a work which is never done. It accompanies a man upon his walks, goes with him to the theater, gets into bed with him, and possesses him in his dreams. If he stoops to kiss his baby, before he has reached the requisite angle, a point occurs to him, and he hangs in mid-air with vacant face and mind distraught. Whats the matter? says Mrs. Emerson, in the middle of the night, hear- ing her husband groping about the room. Nothing, my dear, only an idea! Mr. Curtis, I say, stands up before the people of New York to contend for purer politics, through a civil service which shall tend to make the servants of the public safe, dignified, and honorable fathers of families. What is his reward? To be invited to go all over the country making more speeches of the same kind, abandoning his private duties, relinquishing his career, leaving an Easy Chair vacant, which is an easy-chair only to him. It cannot be. In some way, we have to make it possible for such men as he to give themselves to the public service. The house of Harper and Brothers, who are wise enough to want Mr. Curtis, have known how to make it possible for him to expend his energies and talents in their service; and if the State of New York wants him, the State of New York must outbid the Harpers. This is the decree of eternal justice, which no amount of Fourth of July palaver can alter. In England, when Mr. Cobden was in a simi- lar embarrassment between public and private duty, the liberal party raised four hundred thousand dollars, with which to set him up in business as Public Man. So, also, the Whigs sent Macaulay to India, for the sole purpose of enabling him to secure that fun- damental requisite, the command of his time. We have yet to learn how to do such things as these in a better way. Nor is Mr. Conkling any better off than Mr. Curtis, under our system of starving out the gallant and high-bred dog, and leaving all the rich pickings for the wolf. His profession is less exacting than that of Mr. Curtis, and far more liberally rewarded; but he has had, it is said, at least one escape from death through 60 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. attempting to be public man and private man at the same time. Not long ago, I happened to be in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington when the Senate marched through it, two by two, to join the House of Representatives in their chamber, at the other end of the building. It was painful to see how battered, worn, and shaky many of the Senators were. They had been strong men originally; many of them unusually tall, broad, and~ massive. They were prematurely infirm, the spring gone from their step, the light from their faces, the innocence and joy from their hearts. I could not but think of Thiers, gay and alert at eighty, full of power, lire, and cheerfulness; of Palmerston, prime minister at eighty-four, coming out of his house early in the morning, and taking a spring over the railings, to find out whether he was beginning to grow old; of Wellington, riding after the hounds at fourscore; of Washington, all day in the saddle to the last week of his life; of Jefferson, so erect and jocund at eighty-two; of Chief-Justice Marshall, merrily playing quoits at Richmond when he was past eighty. Those shaky Sen- ators, among whom it has been almost a distinction not to have had a touch of paralysis, are trying to do three things at once~ either of which is a task for a mannamely, statesmanship, politics, and business. The present time is favorable for the consideration of these topics. Recent events, such as the dead-lock in the Senate, the pitiful war of nominations, the vain struggle of New-Yorkers for clean streets, and the mail-contract exposures, must have made it plain to all but politicians, and even to some of them, that the preliminary step toward the development of the art of popular government is to take the public business out of politics! Every disinterested person must now see that the weak point of our present system is the erroneous tenure upon which public office is held. Our next task is to make the watch-dog as sure of his din- ner as the wolf now is, and to make his dinner as good as the wolfs. Better, it could not be; for the wolf riots on the very fat of the land. The task that lies immediately before us is to exalt and protect our servants and legitimate our bosses. The tenure, I repeat, is the first and chief point to be rectified; for a man will serve, not the power that gave him his place, nor. the hand that pays him his wages, but the power that can take his place away! The mode of appointing is imp6rtant; but the conditions of holding are all-important. If the offices were all sold. THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 61 by auction to the highest bidder, we should have a good public service, provided the Government exacted the requisite qualifica.. tions in the purchaser, and gave him a property in his place, which should be forfeited by misconduct alone. No public service in the world has a more spotless record than the notaries of France, who, for four centuries past, have transacted the every- day law business for the French people, at rates which our cheap- est lawyers would despise. Those notaries buy, sell, inherit, and bequeath their places, and have done so for centuries. But the Government imposes three conditions, and performs two duties, all designed to give just protection both to the public and to the notary. The conditions are, that no man can be a licensed notary who has not served a seven-years apprenticeship to the business, and served for one year as chief clerk to a notary. He is also strictly limited as to the fee he can charge for every service. These are the conditions. If the Government stopped there, it would do as we dostarve the dog and fatten the wok. It protects these public servants by limiting their number, and by decreeing that no legal docnment shall have validity unless it is attested by a notary. But all this would not suffice. It remains to protect the public against dish~nesty, as well as against incompetency; and this is done by holding the commission of a notary forfeit upon conviction of breach of tru.st. There you have a service that necessarily fulfils its purpose, because the system secures adequate fitness and supplies adequate motive. In four centuries, no important breach of trust has been committed in France by a member of the notarial guild, in whose custody rests the whole real estate of France, the honor of its families, and the credit of its business men. The tenure is the vital point. Add to the right tenure, the principle of paying the market price for ali the kinds of labor employed, and we shall have a public service that will cease to be a lowering iufiuence in politics, and add one more liberal profes- sion to the resources and the hopes of virtuous families. The strength of a nation is in its families: well-ordered govern- ments favor the multiplication and building up of families. We may just as well have a hundred thousand strong and happy families maintained by the civil service, as half a million anxious office-holders and demoralized office-seekers. One of the most obvious needs of the time is the strengthening of the class between the capitalist and the operativethe middle class, in 62 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. which human nature thrives best and enjoys most. Every one laments the awful, blind power of huge capital run by steam. The most sanguine person must sometimes dread the ever-grow- ing influence of corporations. The only oounterpoise to the dead-weight of wealth is the might of living numbers marshaled by an intellectual nobility. It becomes us, therefore, to nourish and strengthen, in every legitimate way, the professions which give men standing, influence, and independence, without the possession of wealth. Literature might be a career among us: it is robbed of its meager gains because it cannot afford lobby enough at Washington to get an international copyright law. The college professors would naturally be a splendid and beloved portion of a true republican nobility: they are frittered away in numberless petty colleges. Teachers, too, share the debili- tating consequences of a precarious tenure. Worst of all: the public service, the Goverument, the natural and only adequate check upon capitalists and corporations, the only way in which the million can make their power effectual against the miflionaire, the natural career of young ambition, the field for enlightened public spirit,this has become the prey of the political boss. We are going to change all this, and soon. As nobilities have worked out the problem of freedom for us so far, it is noblemen who must still carry it on toward perfection. When I say noble- men, I mean, in particular, men of public spirit who have com- mand of their time. We are beginning to have such a class, and it is beginning to show itself worthily in various directions. It is our singular happiness to live in a country where every good citizen belongs to the aristocracy, and does actually exhibit the traits of character which in older countries are supposed to be peculiar to the privileged orders. It happens, however, that a prodigious number of them are younger eons, who must go out into the world, make a career, and grow up with the country. I call upon the gentlemen of the Manhattan Club to join the gentlemen of the Union League; I urge similar societies in Boston, Phila- delphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other cities, to come to an understanding, and agree upon it as the issue of 1884, to give the public service back to the people, and to make the Government respectable by taking just care of the diguity and the career of the public servants. The candidate has made himself obvious to the whole country. He has shown THE POWER OF PUBLIC PLUNDER. 63 his faith in a rational civil service by introducing it, and main- taining it for years, in a conspicuous public office. We have pampered the wolf long enough; let the dog now have a turn. We have tried the system of organized distrust; let us now see what presidents, governors, and mayors will do for us if they are chosen for one long term without eligibility to a second. Elect a mayor of New York for fifteen years; pay him a two-hundredth part of what Tweed stole per annum, clothe him with adequate power, hold him responsible, surround him with honorable conditions, and circumstances; and, when he has done his work, let us dismiss him to private life as well off as if he had succeeded in the grocery line. Let him retire from office honored and rich. Let Congress build suitable houses for the cabinet and judges, multiply their incomes by four, and no longer permit a Secretary of State to pay for the dinners given to the diplomatic corps, the guests of the nation. Let us in all respects reverse the system introduced by small men for small purposes, and try faithfully that of giving the public servants as f air a chance for distinction and abundance as private business offers. That close observer of men and things, Governor Burnett, of California, expresses once more, in his Recollections of an Old Pioneer,~~ his deliberate conviction that the masses vvill. never permit a sound conservative amen4ment of our theory, except by revolution, which he thinks will occur within the next fifty years. He thinks it probable that several revolutions will be necessary before we get upon a comfortable basis. I hope for better things. The victorious Democratic party of 1800, which saved the country from its first great peril, and ruled the country for twenty-eight years better than any country had ever been ruled before (though that is not saying much), was composed of three ingredients, which still exist among us in the richest pro- fusion, and which can again be united to carry any good meas- ures that are in harmony with the inalienable rights of human nature. Those ingredients were: First, the large, benign, serene Jefferson, and a small circle of kindred philosophers, who, from mere native superiority, from simple nobility of mind, loved the common welfare; next to them, adroit managers, chief of whom in 1800 was Aaron Burr; finally, the masses of the people, absorbed in their private affairs,but open to conviction, and capable of appreciating, after due presentation, any amend THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. ment of our theory which shall be truly ~ These ingredients can again be brought together for a patriotic pur- pose, and the work can be done during the next three years by men of leisure. Let them do their duty, and the masses will never be wanting to theirs. They have never been wanting hitherto. The part of a busy people in republican politics is similar to that of the jury in a court of justice, and it never can be much other than that. The people is master. The verdict of the jury is law; but the proper presentation of the Case devolves on the few. JAMES PARTON. THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATIOTh IT may seem like a truism to assert that the only fund upon which taxation can draw is that made up by the produce of the community, and that to multiply the places at which it is tapped is not to increase its capacity to yield. Yet the manner in which taxation, under our system, is spread over a multitude of subjects, and new subjects are still sought for, suggests the belief of that chief of the eunuchs who thought the weight of an obnoxious poll-tax might be lessened, and his masters revenues at the same time increased, by substituting for the tax on heads a tax upon fingers and toes. But it is probable that the disposition to tax everything sus- ceptible of taxation does not spring so much from the notion that more may thus be obtained, as from the notion that as a matter of justice everything should be taxed. That all species of property shall be equally taxed, is enjoined by many of our State consti- tutions, and that it should be so, at least so far as direct taxation is concerned, is regarded by most of our people as a self-evident truththe idea being that every one should contribute to public expenses in proportion to his means, or, as it is sometimes phrased, that all property, being equally protected by the State, should equally contribute to the expenses of the State. But under no system that any of our legislatures have yet been able to devise is all property equally taxed; nor can it be equally taxed. And if it were possible to even approximate to the equal taxation of all property, this would not be to secure that equality which justice demands. For, as is evident in the case of mortgages, etc., to equally tax all property would infalli- bly be to levy a higher rate of taxation upon some than upon others; and even if the same proportion could be taken from the means of every member of the community, that would VOL. CXXXUI.NO. 296. 5

THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATIOTh IT may seem like a truism to assert that the only fund upon which taxation can draw is that made up by the produce of the community, and that to multiply the places at which it is tapped is not to increase its capacity to yield. Yet the manner in which taxation, under our system, is spread over a multitude of subjects, and new subjects are still sought for, suggests the belief of that chief of the eunuchs who thought the weight of an obnoxious poll-tax might be lessened, and his masters revenues at the same time increased, by substituting for the tax on heads a tax upon fingers and toes. But it is probable that the disposition to tax everything sus- ceptible of taxation does not spring so much from the notion that more may thus be obtained, as from the notion that as a matter of justice everything should be taxed. That all species of property shall be equally taxed, is enjoined by many of our State consti- tutions, and that it should be so, at least so far as direct taxation is concerned, is regarded by most of our people as a self-evident truththe idea being that every one should contribute to public expenses in proportion to his means, or, as it is sometimes phrased, that all property, being equally protected by the State, should equally contribute to the expenses of the State. But under no system that any of our legislatures have yet been able to devise is all property equally taxed; nor can it be equally taxed. And if it were possible to even approximate to the equal taxation of all property, this would not be to secure that equality which justice demands. For, as is evident in the case of mortgages, etc., to equally tax all property would infalli- bly be to levy a higher rate of taxation upon some than upon others; and even if the same proportion could be taken from the means of every member of the community, that would VOL. CXXXUI.NO. 296. 5 66 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. no more conform to the dictates of equality than would the levy upon each of an equal sum; for, as the demand for a sum which would not be felt by the rich man would fall with crushing weight on the poor man, so to take the same propor- tion of their means would be a very different thing to him who has barely enough, and to him who has a large surplus. Quite as fallacious is the idea that all property should be equally taxed, because equally protected. The fact is that all property is not equally protected, cannot be equally protected, and ought not to be equally protected, if by protection anything more is meant than the mere preservation of the peace. The pro- tection of property is not the end, it is only one of the incidents, of goverument. As John Stuart Mill says: The ends of govern- ment are as comprehensive as those of the social union. They consist of all the good and all the immunity from evil which the existence of government can be made, either directly or indi- rectly, to bestow. And to say that government should impar- tially protect and equally tax all property, is like saying that the farmer should bestow the same care upon everything he may find growing in his fields, whether weeds or grain. That there is no obligation to equally tax all property is fully realized in regard to property brought from abroad. No one con- tends for a tariff which should equally tax all such property. The protectionists assert that the leading idea in determining what should be taxed and what not taxed, and the different rates which various imports should bear, ought to be the promotion of the general good by the encouragement and protection of indus- try. Their opponents, on the other hand, do not deny the pro- priety of such exemptions and discriminations. They merely deny that industry can be protected and encouraged by the en- deavor to shield certain classes of producers from foreign com- petition; and, in the enactment of a purely revenue tariff, they would make the same kind of exemptions and discriminations, with a view to the collection of the revenue with the smallest cost and least interterence with trade.. Both parties equally recognize the general good as the true guiding principle in taxation of this kind. Even in internal taxation the same principle is largely recog- nized. On certain businesses and certain manufactures we impose taxes not imposed upon others, on the ground that it is for the public good that such businesses and manufactures should THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATION. 67 be restricted. With similar regard to the public good, we exempt certain species of property from taxation, as cotton factories in Georgia, growing crops in California, property devoted to relig- ious and charitable uses in New York, the bonds of the United States, by Federal law, etc. Evidently this regard for the general good is the true princi- ne of taxation. The more it is examined the more clearly it will be seen that there is no valid reason why we should, in any case, attempt to tax all property. That equality should be the rule and aim of taxation is true, and this for the reason given in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. But equality does not require that all men should be taxed alike, or that all things should be taxed alike. It merely requires that whatever taxes are imposed shall be equally imposed upon the persons or things in like conditions or situations; it merely requires that no citizen shall be given an advantage, or put at a disadvantage, as compared with other citizens. The true purposes of government are well stated in the pre- amble to the Constitution of the United States, as they are in the Declaration of Independence. To insure the general peace, to rromote the general welfare, to secure to each individual the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness these are the proper ends of government, and are therefore the ends which in every scheme of taxation should be kept in mind. As to amount of taxation, there is no principle which imposes any arbitrary limit. Heavy taxation is better for any community than light taxation, if the increased revenue be used in doing by public agencies things which could not be done, or could not be as well and economically done, by private agencies. Taxes could ~be lightened in the city of New York by dispensing with street- lamps and disbanding the police force. But would a reduction in taxation gained in this way be for the benefit of the people of New York and make New York a more desirable place to live in? Or if it should be found that heat and light could be conducted through the streets at public expense and supplied to each house at but a small fraction of the cost of supplying them by individ- ual effort, or that the city railroads could be run at public expense so as to give every one transportation at very much less than it now costs the average resident, the in creased taxation necessary for these purposes would not be increased burden, and in spite of the larger taxation required, New York would become 68 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W a more desirable place to live in. It is a mistake to condemn taxation as bad merely because it is high; it is a mistake to impose by constitutional provision, as in many of our States~ has been advocated, and in some of our States has been done, any restriction upon Lne amount of taxation. A restriction upon the incurring of public indebtedness is another matter. In nothing ia the far-reaching statesmanship of Jefferson more clearly shown than in his proposition that all public obligations should be deemed void after a certain brief terma proposition which he grounds upon the self-evident truth that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living, and that the dead have no control over it, and can give no title to any part of it. But restriction upon public debts is a very different thing from restriction upon the power of taxation, and reasons which urge the one do not apply to the other. Nor is increased taxation necessarily proof of gov ernmental extravagance. Increase in taxation is in the order of social development, for the reason that social development tends- to the doing of things collectively that in a ruder state are done individually, to the giving to government of new functions and the imposing of new duties. Our public schools and libraries and parks, our signal service and fish commissions and agricultural bureaus and grasshopper investigations, are evidences of this. But while no limit can be properly frxed for the amount of taxation, the method of taxation is of supreme importance. A horse may be anchored by fastening to his bridle a weight which he will not feel when carried in a buggy behind him. The best ship may be made utterly unseaworthy by the, bad stowage of a cargo which properly placed would make her the- stiffer and more weatherly. So enterprise may be palsied, industry crushed,. accumulation prevented, and a prosperous country turned into a desert, by taxation which rightly levied would hardly be felt.. Now discarding all idea that there rests upon us any obliga- tion to equally tax all kinds of property, and assuming for our guidance the true rule, that taxation should be levied with a view to the promotion of the general prosperity, the securing of sub- stantial equality, and the recognition of inalienable rights, let us consider upon what species of property it may be best laid. To consider what is included in the category of property is to see the absurdity of saying that all property should be equally taxed. For not to speak of minor differences that arise from application and use, there are commonly included THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATION. 69 imder this term things of essentially different nature. Whatever is recognized by municipal law as subject to ownership is prop- erty. But between things thus classed together are wide differ- ences. In the first place, there are certain of them which have in themselves no value, but are merely the representatives or doubles of property in itself valuable. Such are stocks, bonds, mortgages, promissory notes of all kinds, whether made by indi- viduals or issued by governments to serve as money, solvent debts, book-accounts, etc. These things may be to the individual valuable property, and are correctly included in any estimate of his wealth. But they are no part of the wealth of the community. Their increase does not make the community a whit the richer; and they may be utterly destroyed without the community be- coming a whit the poorer. If I buy a horse, giving my note for the amount, the result of the transaction (supposing me to be solvent) is that the seller gets property to the value of the horse, while I get the horse. But there has been no increase in wealth. To the seller, my note may be qnite as good as the horse, and in estimating his wealth it may be as properly included as the horse; but if the note be destroyed, the community is nothing the poorer, while if the horse break his neck, there is a lessening of the general wealth by one horse. And so, the issuance of bonds by a government, or the watering of stock by a corpora- tion, can in no wise increase the general sum of wealth, nor will any diminution either in the amount or in the selling price of such bonds or stock reduce it. If all the governments of the world were to repudiate their debts to-morrow, an immense amount of property, now carefully guarded, would become waste paper, and thousands of people now rich would be made poor, but the wealth of the human race would not be diminished one iota. These are trisms. Yet so wide-spread and persistent is the notion that all property should be taxed, that they are generally ignored. Nothing is clearer than that when a farmer who wants more capital puts a mortgage on his farm, no new value is thereby created. Yet, in most of our States, both the farm and~ the mortgage are taxed; though so obvious is the double taxatiou that in some of them the clumsy expedient of making an exemp- tion to the debtor is resorted to. But it is manifest that property of this kind is not a fit sub- ject for taxation, and ought not to be considered in making up the assessment rolls. It has, in itself, no value. It is merely the 70 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. representative, or token, of valuethe certificate of ownership, or the obligation to pay value. It either represents other prop- erty, or property yet to be brought into existence. And, as noth- ing real can be drawn from that which is not real, taxation upon property of this kind must ultimately fall, either upon the prop- erty represented, in which case there is double taxation, or upon those whose obligations it expresses, in which case men are taxed, not upon what they own, but upon what they owe; and all cum- brous devices to prevent the unjust effects of such taxation, like other complications of the revenue system, simply give to the stronger and more unscrupulous opportunities of throwing the burden upon the weaker and more conscientious. Property of this kind ought not to be taxed at all. Property in itself valu- able is clearly that with which any wise scheme of taxation should alone deal. To consider the nature of property of this kind is again to see a clear distinction. That distinction is not, as the lawyers have it, between movables and immovables, between personal property and real estate. The true distinction is between prop- erty which is, and property which is not, the result of human labor; or, to use the terms of political economy, between land. and wealth. For, in any precise use of the term, land is not wealth, any more than labor is wealth. Land and labor are the factors of production. Wealth is such result of their union as retains the capacity of ministering to human desire. A lot and. the house which stands upon it are alike property, alike have a tangible value, and are alike classed as real estate. But there are between them the most essential differences. The one is the free gift of Nature, the other the result of human exertion; the one exists from generation to generation, while men come and go; the other is constantly tending to decay, and can only be pre- served by continual exertion. To the one, the right of exclusive possession, which makes it individual property, can, like the right of property in slaves, be traced to nothing but municipal law; to the other, the right of exclusive property springs clearly from those natural relations which are among the primary perceptions of the human mind. Nor are these mere abstract distinctions. They are distinctions of the first importance in determining what should and what should not be taxed. For, keeping in mind the fact that all wealth is the result of human exertion, it is clearly seen that, having in view the promo- THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATION. 71 tion of the general prosperity, it is the height of absurdity to tax wealth for purposes of revenue while there remains, unex- hausted by taxation, any value attaching to land. We may tax land values as much as we please, without in the slightest degree lessening the amount of land, or the capabilities of land, or the inducement to use land. But we cannot tax wealth without les- sening the inducement to the production of wealth, and decreas- ing the amount of wealth. We might take the whole value of land in taxation, so as to make the ownership of land worth noth- ing, and the land would still remain, and be as useful as before. The effect would be to throw land open to users free of price, and thus to increase its capabilities, which are brought out by increased population. But impose anything like such taxation upon wealth, and the inducement to the production of wealth would be gone. Movable wealth would be hidden or carried off, immovable wealth would be suffered to go to decay, and where was prosperity would soon be the silence of desolation. And the reason of this difference is clear. The possession of wealth is the inducement to the exertion necessary to the produc- tion and maintenance of wealth. Men do not work for tl~e pleasure of working, but to get the things their work will give them. And to tax the things that are produced by exertion is to lessen the inducement to exertion. But over and above the ben- efit to the possessor, which is the stimulating motive to the pro- duction of wealth, there is a benefit to the conununity, for no matter how selfish he may be, it is utterly impossible for any one to entirely keep to himself the benefit of any desirable thing he may possess. These diffused benefits when localized give value to land, and this may be taxed without in any wise diminishing the incentive to production. To illustrate: A man builds a fine house or laxge factory in a poorly improved neighborhood. To tax this building and its adjuncts is to make him pay for his enterprise and expenditure to take from him part of his natural reward. But the improve- ment thus made has given new beauty or life to the neighbor- hood, making it a more desirable place than before for the erec- tion of other houses or factories, and additional value is given to land all about. Now to tax improvements is not ouly to deprive of his pi~per reward the man who has made the improvement, but it is to deter others from making similar improvements. But, instead of taxing improvements, to tax these land values is 72 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE IF. to leave the natural inducement to further improvement in full force, and at the same time to keep down an obstacle to further improvement, which, under the present system, improvement itself tends to raise. For the advance of land values which fol- lows improvement, and even the expectation of improvement, makes further improvement more costly. See how unjust and short-sighted is this system. Here is a man who, gathering what little capital he can, and taking his family, starts West to find a place where he can make himself a home. He must travel long distances; for, though he will pass plenty of land nobody is using, it is held at prices too high for him. Finally he will go no further, and selects a place where, since the creation of the world, the soil, so far as we know, has never felt a plowshare. But here, too, in nine cases out of ten, he will find the speculator has been ahead of him, for the specu- lator moves quicker, and has superior means of information to the emigrant. Before he can put this land to the use for which nature intended it, and to which it is for the general good that it should be put, he must make terms with some man who in all probability never saw the land, and never dreamed of using it, and who, it may be, resides in some city, thousands of mites away. In order to get permission to use this land, he must give up a large part of the little capital which is seed-wheat to him, and perhaps in addition mortgage his future labor for years. Still he goes to work: he works himself, and his wife works, and his children workwork like horses, and live in the hardest and dreariest mauner. Such a man deserves encouragement, not dis- couragement; but on him taxation falls with peculiar severity. Almost everything that he has to buygroceries, clothing, tools is largely raised in price by a system of tariff taxation which cannot add to the price of the grain or hogs or cattle that he has to sell. And when the assessor comes around he is taxed on the improvements he has made, although these improvements have added not only to the value of surrounding land, but even to the value of land in distant commercial centers. Not merely this, but, as a general rule, his land, irrespective of the improve- ments, will be assessed at a higher rate than unimproved land. around it, on the ground that productive property~ ought to pay more than unproductive property a principle just the reverse of the correct one, for the man who makes land pro- ductive adds to the general prosperity, while the man who keeps THE COMMON SENSE OF TAXATION. 73 land unproductive stands in the way of the general prosperity, is but a dog-in-the-manger, who prevents others from nsing what he will not use himself. Or, take the case of the railroads. That railroads are a pub- lic benefit no one will dispute. We want more railroads, and want them to reduce their fares and freight. Why then should. we tax them? for taxes upon railroads deter from railroad build- ing, and compel higher charges. Instead of taxing the railroads, is it not clear that we should rather tax the increased value which they give to land? To tax railroads is to check railroad building, to reduce profits, and compel higher rates; to tax the value they give to land is to increase railroad business and per- mit lower rates. The elevated railroads, for instance, have opened to the overcrowded population of New York the wide, vacant spaces of the upper part of the island. But this great public benefit is neutralized by the rise in land values. Because these vacant lots can be reached more cheaply and quickly, their owners demand more for them, and so the public gain in one way is offset in another, while the roads lose the business they would get were not building checked by the high prices de- nianded for lots. The increase of land values, which the ele- vated roads have caused, is not merely no advantage to themit is an injury; and it is clearly a public injury. The elevated rail- roads ought not to be taxed. The more profit they make, with the better conscience can they be asked to still further reduce fares. It is the increased land values which they have created that ought to be taxed, for taxing them will give the public the full benefit of cheap fares. So with railroads everywhere. And so not alone with rail- roads, but with all industrial enterprises. So long as we con- sider that community most prosperous which increases most rapidly in wealth, so long is it the height of absurdity for us to tax wealth in any of its beneficial forms. We should tax what we want to repress, not what we want to encourage. We should. tax that which results from the general prosperity, not that which conduces to it. It is the increase of population, the extension of cultivation, the manufacture of goods, the building of houses and ships and railroads, the accumulation of capital, and the growth of commerce that add to the value of landnot the increase in the value of land that induces the increase of popula- lation and increase of wealth. It is not that the land of Man- 74 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. hattan Island is now worth hundreds of millions where, in the time of the early Dutch settlers, it was only worth dollars, that there are on it now so many more people, and so much more wealth. It is because of the increase of population and the increase of wealth that the value of the land has so much increased. Increase of land values tends of itself to repel population and prevent improvement. And thus the taxation of land values, unlike taxation of other property, does not tend to prevent the increase of wealth, but rather to stimulate it. It is the taking of the golden egg, not the choking of the goose that lays it. Every consideration of policy and ethics squares with this conclusion. The tax upon land values is the most economically perfect of all taxes. It does not raise prices; it maybe collected at least cost, audwith the utmost ease and certainty; it leaves in full strength all the springs of production; and, above all, it con- sorts with the truest equality and the highest justice. For, to take for the common purposes of the connnunity that value which results from the growth of the community, and to free industry and enterprise and thrift from burden and restraint, is to leave to each that which he fairly earns, and to assert the first and most comprehensive of equal rightsthe equal right of all to the land on which, and from which, all must live. Thus it is that the scheme of taxation which conduces to the greatest production is also that which conduces to the fairest distribution, and that in the proper adjustment of taxation lies not merely the possibility of enormously increasing the general wealth, but the solution of these pressing social and political problems which spring from unnatural inequality in the distri- bution of wealth. There is, says M. de Laveleye, in concluding that work in which he shows that the first perceptions of mankind have every- where recognized a most vital distinction between property in land and property which results from labor, there is in human affairs one system which is the best; it is not that system which always exists, otherwise why should we desire to change it; but it is that system which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows it, and wills it; mans duty it is to dis- cover and establish it. HENRY GEORGE. THE COST OF CRUELTY. IN the winter of 1872, an epizo6tic disease made its appear- ance among the horses in New York and in sundry other cities throughout the Unite~l States, producing almost a panic among the human inhabitants. It maybe asserted that, up to that time, the value of the horse was imperfectly comprehended; but an impressive lesson was then given. In the city of New York, it is estimated that two-thirds of all the horses were stricken down with the disease; and all branches of business, all pursuits and pleasures dependent on that animal, were brought almost to a stand-still. For the moment the locomotion of the citys vast population was in great part arrested, the overcrowded public vehicles, few in number, being slowly drawn along by poor, stricken brutes with aching limbs and failing strength: scarcely one of those faithful servants of man was to be seen that di4 not proclaim, by unmistakable signs, its silent agony. The hospitals of the great transportation companies were filled with diseased and dying animals, while without lay the carcasses of the dead victims awaiting removal. The people of this city, State, and country then began to recognize the startling proba- bility of the total retirement of those silent partners from the businesses to which they had devoted their active lives. That many species of the lower animals, and particularly the one most indispensable to manthe horse, habitut~1ly receive a treatment to which the owner would never think of subjecting his insentient and inanimate property, is matter of every-day observation. While the farmers wagon or his plow is carefully protected from winters storms, his rn-used stQck are often exposed to those rude vicissitudes of temperature whose disin- tegrating force not even inorganic nature can withstand. Nor is this singular and heartless inconsistency confined to the less

THE COST OF CRUELTY. IN the winter of 1872, an epizo6tic disease made its appear- ance among the horses in New York and in sundry other cities throughout the Unite~l States, producing almost a panic among the human inhabitants. It maybe asserted that, up to that time, the value of the horse was imperfectly comprehended; but an impressive lesson was then given. In the city of New York, it is estimated that two-thirds of all the horses were stricken down with the disease; and all branches of business, all pursuits and pleasures dependent on that animal, were brought almost to a stand-still. For the moment the locomotion of the citys vast population was in great part arrested, the overcrowded public vehicles, few in number, being slowly drawn along by poor, stricken brutes with aching limbs and failing strength: scarcely one of those faithful servants of man was to be seen that di4 not proclaim, by unmistakable signs, its silent agony. The hospitals of the great transportation companies were filled with diseased and dying animals, while without lay the carcasses of the dead victims awaiting removal. The people of this city, State, and country then began to recognize the startling proba- bility of the total retirement of those silent partners from the businesses to which they had devoted their active lives. That many species of the lower animals, and particularly the one most indispensable to manthe horse, habitut~1ly receive a treatment to which the owner would never think of subjecting his insentient and inanimate property, is matter of every-day observation. While the farmers wagon or his plow is carefully protected from winters storms, his rn-used stQck are often exposed to those rude vicissitudes of temperature whose disin- tegrating force not even inorganic nature can withstand. Nor is this singular and heartless inconsistency confined to the less 76 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. educated tillers of the soil: in the great cities of the world, crucifies no less culpable are practiced continually, and that, too, by the rich, the educated, and the refined. The millionaire mer- chant, inconsiderately submitting his own more enlightened judgment to the ignorance and sellishness of,his indolent groom, permits the furry coat that nature provides for his horses to be clipped off their bodies, under the monstrous and impious pre- tense that their Creator blundered in giving a heavier covering to His creatures on the approach of winter. The gross ignorance of these quacks of the stable passes for oracular wisdom, and men who should know better are not ashamed to give assent to the absurd theory on which the inhuman practice is based, viz.: that by clipping the hair the condensation of the bodys exhala- tions on the surface is prevented, and the bodily heat main- tained! Well, what is the result of this tampering with the laws of Nature? It is invariably shortened life, suffering, and waste of powerand pence. ~ interposes the otherwise considerate beauty, as she languidly looks out of her carriage window on her disfigured animals, how beautiful they are, denuded of their superfluous and ugly coating! It is imperious fashion alone that has warped her judgment. She is herself wrapped in furs, while outside are seated her biped servants, almost smothered in the skins of animals, the uselessness of which is one of the articles of the mens creed! But it requires no expert in physiology to determine the truth or the falsity of this theory of the stable. You have only to go out into the open air, without coat or vest, when the thermometer indicates zero, to put it to the proof. In all probability, ages will have come and gone ere Americans will understand the practical signification of Economy. The vast inheritance of land, liberty, and plenty that they enjoy makes them wasteful of the gifts of Nature, wasteful of the life and strength of the animals which subserve their interest or minister to their enjoyment. Horses are cheaper than ~ once ob- served the manager of one of the great horse-railroad lines of this city; and perhaps that purely financial estimate of the horse best shows how inconsiderable a factor humanity to animals is in our current moral arithmetic. But are men, honorable men, wont to act upon the principle that horses are cheaper than oats? Let facts decide. TIlE COST OF CRUELTY. 77 The writer, several years ago, was led to suspect the existence of an odious traffic, on the discovery of a business connection between a certain grist-mm on the west side of the city, and another mill on the east side, in which plaster of Paris and mar- ble-dust were prepared. The problem of finding out what possi- ble relation could subsist between the two businesses piqued his curiosity, and, after much patient investigation, he learned that in many stables of the city the products of the two concerns were employed as a cheap and satisfying food for horses! The investigation having been pushed still further, with a view to ascertain the life-sustaining qualities of this extraordinary ailment, by examining the stomachs of animals that had lived or rather diedon it, the result proved that, as was to be expected, only the vegetable portion of the mixture had been digested, and that the inorganic portion had assumed the form and compactness of stone balls, many of them of enormous size. I asked for bread, and ye gave me a stone! Some of these calcareous formations are yet to be seen in the Mu- seum of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, through whose intervention a stop was put to This inhuman practice. And observe the inconsistency of men. Among all those who are directly interested in the business of transporting the public from place to place about the city, there is probably not one who would not experience a lively feeling of indignation, were he to see a horse qnivering under the blows of an angry truck-driver; yet the same man will take no shame to himself for his own greater offense, in denying to his faithful servantshis horses that sufficiency of healthful nourishment without which they suffer and die, and even his own pecuniary profits are diminished. The author regrets that in this paper he is unable to give the statistics of live stock in the United States, as compiled for the forthcoming Census Report, and that he can exhibit the loss occasioned by cruelty to animals only by the tables of the census of 1870. In that year, the value of live stock in this country was $1,525,276,457, and we had of Horses 7,145,370 head. Other cattle .13,566,000 hea& Mules and asses. 1,125,415 Sheep 28,477,951 Mitch cows 8,935,332 Swine 25,134,569 Working oxen .1,319,270 78 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. or more than eighty-five millions of animals contributing in one way or another to the daily support and enrichment of the people of this country. Of animal products there were, in the same year, of Butter 600,000,000 pounds. Wool 100,102,000 pounds. Cheese .... 53,000,000 Honey .... 14,700,000 Mi]k 236,000,000 gallons. Beeswax.. 631,000 The animals slaughtered or sold for slaughter were worth $400,000,000, and there were 9,133,000 sides of leather tanned, and 4,185,000 skinstotal value, $13,800,000. Then, our fish- eries, exclusive of the whale fishery, yielded over $11,000,000. Let us now make an approximate valuation of the labor of the horses, mules, asses, and oxen. Of these animals there were ~),610,000, and if we estimate their labor at only fifty cents a day, we have the stupendous total of $4,805,000 as the daily product. But more, much more, remains to be added before we have an adequate idea of our dependence on the lower animals. For instance, we must take account of the number of eggs laid by domestic fowls, also the chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, together with their feathers. Nor must we forget the millions of ~~game~7 annually killed, the slaughter of great herds of buffaloes on the plains and of deer in the forests. What a delusion it is to fancy that we are the sole agents in the work of civilization! What would become of civilization were we only for a single year deprived of the aid afforded us by these inferior creatures? All commerce and agriculture would have to ~be suspended; the farmer could neither till his field nor carry his products to market; in a word, could an earthquake or a deluge be more disastrous in its effects? Now, is it not to be supposed that those who deal in the flesh and blood, the hides and hoofs, of animals broug1~t from a great distance by rail, would use the best appliances to be had to pre- vent deterioration and death? Yet a visit to any cattle.frain proves the erroneousness of such an inference. From the moment when the wretched animals are, by the force of blows, driven into the torture-pens that are to serve as vehicles to convey them to the abattoirs in the East, they know no rest. Seldom is adequate provision made for supplying them with food THE COST OF CRUELTY. 79 ~and water. In short, if the poor brutes have any glimmering o~ reason, they must wonder why they are thus doomed, without being guilty of offense to God or man, to endure such unspeak- able torment. Hardly a cattle-train arrives but it presents cases of .painful death. Horned cattle are found lying on the floors, their limbs crushed, sometimes their bodies flattened out by the tramping of their fellows in misfortune; while among the smaller animalssheep and swinethe mortality from over- crowding, neglect, and inhumanity is greater still. It were an insult to common sense to ask whether such treatment of animals pays. But the laws of Nature cannot be violated with impunity, and the flesh of the abused brute carries to the lips of men, and into their blood, deadly poisons; thus the poor mute slaves are avenged at last. May not the alarming increase of cancers, tinnors, and scrofulous diseases be traced to this disregard of the simplest principles of humanity? For years, the societies founded for the prevention of cruelty to animals have been striving to procure the passage, by Con- gress, of laws which would abate these evils, but all their efforts have been vain, being opposed by the powerful influence of wealthy corporations. Once a delegation from the societies was granted a hearing by the House Committee on Agriculture, but the railroad lobby was opposed to any action in the premises, and the subject was dropped. In the Senate, the Hon. John R. McPherson, of New Jersey, on the 26th of May, 1879, exposed the pecuniary losses, as well as the danger to the public health, resulting from the present mode of transporting cattle. With an experience, he said, and opportunity for observation second to none in this country, I declare the live-stock traffic i~ one long and uninterrupted line of suffering from the West to the East. If the people could have but a glimpse of the scenes which I have witnessed, they would loudly demand of Congress a law so stringent that the repetition of such horrors would be impossible. But no adequate law seems to be attainable; so man and beast must continue to suffer in order to increase the profits of the money kings. One inference would seem to be fully justified, namely, that the profits of the shippers of stock must be enormous to, enable them to bear such losses as are shown in the following table, compiled from divers official reports. 80 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. In 1872, there arrived in Cattle. Sheep. Hogs. Washington 39,400 head. 52,000 head. 31,200 head.. Baltimore 89,748 180,228 303,284 Philadelphia .129,373 627,645 261,549 NewYork 443,437 1,203,059 1,826,686 Albany 104,000 364,000 350,000 Providence 37,000 93,000 100,000 Boston 157,366 412,217 592,727 Total 1,000,324 head. 2,932,149 head. 3,465,446 head. The loss on cattle by shrinkage is variously estimated. Professor Horsford reckons it at about 14 per cent.; the Masss- ehusetts Railroad Commission, at from 10 to 15 per cent.; and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, at 10 per cent. Butchers, drovers, and dealersall of course interested partiesput it at 8 per cent. But, assuming a stand- ard of 8 per cent., let us see what is the commercial result of this phase of barbarity. On the arrival at the Albany stock-yards, the average loss in weight on each ox is 120 pounds-a sum total of 120,038,88~ pounds of beef starved, crushed, goaded, and jolted out of the cattle brought to the above seven cities. According to the estimate of drovers, that the loss on sheep and hogs is 15 pounds a head, the loss on 2,932,149 sheep amounts to 43,982,235 pounds; and on 3,465,446 hogs it is 51,981,690 pounds. Now, estimating the price of beef at 25 cents per pound, the loss from a shrinkage of 120,038,880 pounds would be $30,009,720; a loss of 43,982,235 pounds of mutton, at 17 cents per pound, amounts to $7,476,980; and a loss of 51,981,690 pounds of pork, at 12 cents per po~nd, is $6,237,802. Finally, if we fix the average value of the hides at 65 cents each, the loss in them will be $650,210. Thus we find: Loss in Beef $30,009,720 Mutton 7,476,980 Pork 6,237,802 Hides 650,210 Total $44,374,712 This is the actual yearly loss on but four articles of com- merce entering ouly seven of our markets. What an exhibit of THE COST OF CRUELTY. 81 deliberate crime and waste, which, it seems, cannot be suppressed or even diminished, because of the despotic power of the tyrant of the age we live inKing Railroad! And be it remembered that a large proportion of the decomposing carcasses is converted into human food. I have enumerated only a few of the benefits conferred upon our race by the lower animals. I have made figures, more eloquent than words, tell the value of humanity to these humble servitors of man. That lesson of humanity to the lower animals should be enforced in the counting-house, as well as in the nursery, the school, and the lecture-room, in the courts of justice, and in the pulpit. Above all, we must invoke the potent influence of the Press to advocate pity, mercy, and compassion in all our deal- ings with animals. HENRY BERGH. VOL. CXXXm.NO. 296. 6 A STUDY OF TENNYSON. WHENthe literary history of England in the nineteenth century shall be written, the name of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson will have a higher place among the fathers of its men of genius than that of any other Englishman whom I remember. A man of many accomplishments,if we may credit tradition, which says that he was skilled in poetry, painting, architecture, and. music, as well as mathematics and the classical languages,he was the father of three boys, who now rank among the English poetsone by the divine right of genius, two by the courtesy of criticism. Their names were Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson,Frederick, the elder, being born in or about 1806, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. Carefully educated in the parsonage of their good father,who was rector of Somerby, in Lincolnshire,they were sent in turn to Trinity College, Cam- bridge, where they were pupils of Dr. Whewell, whom the young Thackeray described as the gentleman whose name you whistle, and of whom a more savage wit declared that science was his forte and omniscience his foible. Leigh Hunt characterized the Tennyson family as a nest of nightingales, and he might have added that two of its young fledgelings essayed their first songs side by side in the little provincial town of Louth. Poems by Two Brothers the brothers being Charles and Alfred Tenny- sonwas printed in the spring of 1827. How much or how little attention they attracted, I am not prepared to say; but, judging from the reprint of the volume which contains them, it could not have been much. They certainly deserved none. I have read a great many first volumes of verse, but not one in which there was so little promise as this. It was not so much that it was bad as that it was dull. If it could have been ridi- culed, it might have been read; but its dullness was not of the

A STUDY OF TENNYSON. WHENthe literary history of England in the nineteenth century shall be written, the name of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson will have a higher place among the fathers of its men of genius than that of any other Englishman whom I remember. A man of many accomplishments,if we may credit tradition, which says that he was skilled in poetry, painting, architecture, and. music, as well as mathematics and the classical languages,he was the father of three boys, who now rank among the English poetsone by the divine right of genius, two by the courtesy of criticism. Their names were Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson,Frederick, the elder, being born in or about 1806, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. Carefully educated in the parsonage of their good father,who was rector of Somerby, in Lincolnshire,they were sent in turn to Trinity College, Cam- bridge, where they were pupils of Dr. Whewell, whom the young Thackeray described as the gentleman whose name you whistle, and of whom a more savage wit declared that science was his forte and omniscience his foible. Leigh Hunt characterized the Tennyson family as a nest of nightingales, and he might have added that two of its young fledgelings essayed their first songs side by side in the little provincial town of Louth. Poems by Two Brothers the brothers being Charles and Alfred Tenny- sonwas printed in the spring of 1827. How much or how little attention they attracted, I am not prepared to say; but, judging from the reprint of the volume which contains them, it could not have been much. They certainly deserved none. I have read a great many first volumes of verse, but not one in which there was so little promise as this. It was not so much that it was bad as that it was dull. If it could have been ridi- culed, it might have been read; but its dullness was not of the A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 83 kind that provokes ridicule. It was oppressive, and the more so because it was free from the errors of taste that we look for in young poets. It was irritatingly correct in form and expression, and noticeably ambitious in its choice of subjects. There were attempts to embody such abstractions and emotions as Memory, Remorse, Fancy, Deity, Time, and so on; at tempts to grapple with classical suggestions that hover around the memories of Antony and Cleopatra, Mithridates and Berenice, and Apollonius Rhodius; attempts to discover the poetic phases of Persia, Egypt, Babylon, Hindostan, Greece, Switzerland, and Peru; and an attempt to celebrate Lord Byron, who had died about three years before in the swamps of Missoloughi. That Byron was a favorite with the two brothers was evident from the tone of some of their verses, and from the quotations from his works, with which their pages were besprinkled. As might have been expected from the literary practice of the time, there was a parade of authorities in their mottoes and notes. The names of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Claudian, Sallust, and Cicero, for instance, showed their acquaintance with Latin literature; the names of Milton, Addison, Young, Gray, Beattie, Cowper, flume, and Burke, their acquaintance with English literature; and the names of Racine, Rousseau, Berquin, and Don Manuel de Souza Coutino, their acquaintance with French and Spanish literature. Not one of the hundred and odd poems in the volume rose above mediocrity, or evinced personality. The brothers were as like as two peas. We hear no more of the Tennysons until the following year (1828), when Frederick gained a college prize for a Greek poem, after which he disappeared until 1854, when he published a vol- ume of verse entitled Days and Hours, and was thenceforth lost to critical eyes. Charles and Alfred pnrsued their studies until 1830, when they came before the world again in print, no longer in partnership, as in their first venture, but separately Charles with a little book of sonnets, and Alfred with a little book of lyrical poems. Their claims to the laurel were tiow rec- ognizable, especially the claim of Alfred, who had discovered the genius with which he was endowed, and was cultivating it with infinite pains. His first essays were in blank verse, the laws of which he studied carefully, groping his way through its difficul- ties in a direction of his own. Inspired by Boccaccio, he began to tell The Lovers Tale, but broke down before he finished 84 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. it, the task being beyond his powers, though he would not think so for a long time. He printed two of the three parts of which the fragment then consisted, and finally concluded to sup- press them. The suppression was not so absolute as he intended it to be, for one of his friends, who, boy-like, admired the boys work, distributed several copies of the poem among their com- mon friends, without his knowledge, and thereby perpetuated its existence. When the writer had become famous, piratical re- prints forced him to reprint it himself, fifty-one years after it was written, with a fourth and concluding part, entitled The Gold- en Supper. The Lovers Tale is a remarkable work for a boy of nine- teen, but he was wise, however, in trying to suppress it. The story, what there is of it, lacks substance, the autobiographical form in which it is related destroying any objective interest which its original may have possessed, and supplying nothing in its place except long and overwrought descriptions of emo- tion. It is feverish and unhealthy, and not very intelligible, belonging to the same class of poems as Shelleys Epipsychi- dion. If one can conceive of Romeo masquerading as Hamlet, it will be while reading The Lovers Tale. Its chief defects are its length and want of concentration, and a tendency on the part of the poet to lose himself in the metaphysics of passion. He forfeits our sympathies by demanding too much from them. These defects condoned (if one can condone them), there remains a residuum of poetry which declares itself in the thought and in the expression,in the tone or feeling of the whole, and in the grace and beauty of its details. There is a touch of richness in the diction, which, however, is a little too redundant, and indica- tions of picturesque power, which are full of promise. Careful readers of Tennyson will detect in this boyish work the germs of his later efflorescence of style, here in a felicitous phrase, there in an original turn of thought, and everywhere in a sense of luxury and refinement. If any poet was in his mind while he was writing The Lovers Tale, it was Keats. In the autumn of 1828, while Alfred Tennyson was ponder- ing The Lovers Tale, Arthur Henry Hallam entered Trinity College. He was about two years younger than Tennyson, with the same tastes and aspirations, and they speedily became friends. Poets both, they crossed their spears in a tournament of rhyme in the following year, when the college authorities gave out the theme A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 85 of the next prize poem. Drawing largely in previous years upon illustrious persons and places,Columbus, Boadicea, Wallace, Mohammed, Jerusalem, Rome,~ Pompeii, and Palmyra,and lightly upon the poetic powers of young Macaulay, Praed, and Buiwer, they decided that the time had arrived when Timbuctoo should be celebrated. It was accordingly named as the theme for 1829, and among those who competed for the prize that year were Hallam and Alfred Tennyson. Haliaan chose the terza nina of the Italian poets, the difficulties of which have never been sur- mounted in English poetry, and Tennyson chose blank verse, being the only Cambridge poet who in years had essayed its varied harmonies. Neither can be said to have written a first- class prize-poem, though it may be doubted whether any two poets of their years could have written better upon Timbuctoo. The prize was taken by Tennyson. Dissatisfied, it would seem, with his blank verse, Tennyson returned to his studies in rhyme, of which he had enough on hand in 1830 to fill the little volume of lyrical poems that I have already mentioned. It is not always easy to trace the beginnings and endings of poetic schools, nor the influence which made its early and late masters what they were. Why Spenser, for example, should have been without followers until Hunt and Keats clothed themselves in his singing robes passes conjecture, for he was one of the most exquisite poets that ever lived (Hunt called him the poets poet); but so it was, and for upward of two centuries after his death he was only a Name in the long muster-roll of English singers. He was a book shut up, a fount- ain sealed, until Hunt reproduced the spirit of his luxuriant descriptions, after a manner of his own, with reminiscences of the narrative manner of Marlowe, in his Story of Rimini, and until Keats, always a jealous honorer of Spenser, found in his glowing pages the inspiration of his own early sonnets, and frag- ments of chivalric verse, and of the incomparable Eve of St Agnes. Spenser was the father of Keats, and Keats was the father of Tennyson, the line of succession beginning with The Faerie Queene, and ending (if it has ended) with The Idyls of the King. There was abundant room for a new English poet fifty years ago, when Poems, Chiefly Lyrical were given to the world. Keats had been dead nine, Shelley eight, Bloomfield seven, and Byron six years; and their surviving elders, Wordsworth, Cole- 86 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. ridge, Scott, and Moore were silent, or were singing over their old songs to ears which they charmed no longer. There was a sufficiency of younger and minor versiflers; for Wilson had pub- lished two volumes of metrical compositions, Beddoes a Matlow- esque tragedy, Clare two collections of rural minstrelsy, Proctor four volumes of miscellaneous poetry and a tragedy, and Milman, Croly, Sheil, Knowles, and Miss Mitford a small library of dramatic works for the stage and the closet, bnt nobody was venturesome enough to predict a brilliant future for either. There was no criticism of poetry which might not have been written by Dr. Johnson in his most prosaic moods, and in which the critic did not achieve the wish of Dogberry, and write himself down an ass. Its brutality ought to have been answered by a horse-whip, for it was based on other than literary, generally on political, grounds. It was not because Keats was a bad poet that he was ridiculed by Lockhart and Gifford, but because he was a friend of Hunt, whom they hated because he was not a fellow-Tory, and sought to crush because he was a cockney. It was the misfortune of Tennyson that he reminded Lockhart and Wilson of Keats, and he might have said for his poetry what Keats said for his own, when he was told that it was like Hunts, I am not aware there is anything like Hunt in it, and if there be it is my natural way, and I have something in common with Hunt. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was a remarkable book, if its readers had only had the wit to see it. We have at the begin- ning of the collected editions of Tennysons Poetical Works, about one-half of what it originally contained. A lyrical element appeared in Claribel, the two songs to the Owl, the autum- nal song ( A spirit haunts the years last hours ), and A Dirge~~ ( Now is done thy long day~s work); an element of shadowy emotion appeared in Ode to Memory, and The Dying Swan; an element of poetical portraiture in ~ ~ and ~ an element of Oriental picturesqueness in Recollections of the Arabian Nights~; an element of ballad literature in ~~Oriana~~ and an element of quiet but intense melancholy in ~the study of Shakespeares ]liliariana. The lyrical element was tentative, either because the young poet did not clearly understand it, or because it was beyond his powers. He had mastered none of its secrets, unless the lisping rhymes of Claribel were among the number, though A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 87 there is a feeling for nature in Claribel, of which no poet save Keats ever had a glimpse, and Keats only in the thirty-ninth stanza of his Isabella, in which the ghost of the murdered Loreuzo bewails his shadowy place in nature: I chant alone the holy mass, While little sounds of life are round me swelling, And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, Paining me through. The element of portraiture was faint, for ~ Isabel, and their sisters are not women, but a young poet~s dream of womenabstractions, ideals, much too good For human natures daily food. The oriental element is stronger in Recollections of the Arabian Nights than in any other poem of the kind with which I am acquainted. It is steeped in the lights and shadows of the East, the poetic East, which Byron never sought to reflect in his Corsair, and Bride of Abydos, and which Moore sought in vain to reflect in his Lalla Rookh. It is shot through and through with the splendors of day and night, as they lingered lovingly of old, in the bowers and walks, and little rivers and lakes, that studded the gardens and pleasure-grounds of good Haroun Alraschid. It is a mosaic of jeweled picturesqueness, set in a filigree of purest gold and the finest workmanship. The element of emotion in The Dying Swan and the Ode to Memory struggles to express itself in words, but finding words inadequate, is compelled to express itself in pictures, intimations, and suggestions of landscape, which alternately reveal and con- ceal the burden of the mystery. There is, if I am not mistaken, a reminiscence of Elizabethan methods of verse in the landscape feeling which pervades the Ode to Memory, but I cannot say that it is a happy one, nor that it accomplishes the intention of the poet, which was accomplished for the first time (and for ali time) when he created out of this same landscape feeling the world of dejection in which Mariana moves, lives, and has her being. If there be any woman of Shakespeares of whom we wish to know more than he has told us, it is Mariana, who appears for the first time iu the fourth act of Measure for Measure, 88 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. a wronged and abandoned lady, whose past is left to the imagina- lion. To indicate this past, so far as it can be indicated by a shadowy figure, in a deserted house, surrounded by a dreary landscape, was the task which this young poet set himself, and for which his genius peculiarly fitted him. He performed it admirablyI cannot say perfectly, for there are archaic expres- sions in Mariana which jar upon one, but with a feeling that was never at fault, and that preserved everything in keeping with his main purpose. It was art of a new and profound kind, which he was the first to discover and practice, and which, I think, will never become obsolete. Oriana suggests but falls to repro- duce the spirit of old balladry. It is a variation of the old theme of Fair Helen of ~ of which there are so many versions, with a difference of manner, which is more flowing and descriptive, and the addition of a refrain which seems to wring itself out of the heart of the singer. It is a subtle and more effective study of the Nevermore of Poes Raven, which I have no doubt was suggested by it, and as such I would recommend it to the consideration of young poets,not as some- thing to be imitated but as something to be known. The ~ and The Mermaid are more difficult of classification than the poems I have mentioned. There is, I think, a remote relationship between them and Oriana, and they may be roughly described as romantic fantasies of sea life. I can remem- ber no English poems of the kind before them, and none that have appeared since they were written that are worthy of being ranked beside them, uuless The Forsaken ~ of Mat- thew Arnold be one, and that strikes me as being less poetical, in that it concerns itself with a humanized emotion rather than with the soulless existence of imaginary sea-creatures. Such, in brief, are the characteristics of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, as they remain in the standard editions of Tennyson; their discarded relatives, of which there are thirty, are of inferior interest and workmanship. I find in four the lyrical element I have spoken of, tinged apparently with reminiscences of Beddoes, and possibly of Blake; in another (Nothing will die ), undoubted reminis- cences of Barry Cornwall (caught, I imagine, from his contribu- tions to annuals, for his English Songs were not published until two years later); in another ( The How and the Why ), an anticipation of the transcendental manner of Emerson; and in another ( Hero to Leander), an attempt to handle a classical A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 89~ tlieme unclassically. There is an unsuccessful attempt to handle blank verse once more in The Mystic, and six attempts at son- nets, which are not sonnets. This difficult species of composition was cultivated by Tennyson while at Cambridge with his brother Charles and his friend Haliam, bnt more, it would seem, in emu- lation than becanse he liked it. To say that he surpassed both, is not to say much, for neither rose above commonplace in his quatorzains. Of the twenty examples therof in the Remains of Hallam, there are but five which obey the laws of the Petrarchan sonnet, and those were written in Italy, before he entered Cam- bridge, and in Italian. Of the fifty examples in Charles Tenny- sons first volume (which was published at this time), there is not one, I believe, which answers the definition of a sonnet: he never, in fact, wrote more than three or four sonnets, though the number of his essays, before he died, in the sonnetary direc- tion, fell but little short of that of Petrarch, or Camoi~ns. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical were received with derision and with admiration,with derision by elderly critics, who believed in Pope and Dryden, and with admiration by youthful critics, who believed in Keats. If the genius of Keats had been recog- nized, the genius of Tennyson might have been recognized, also; but, unfortunately for Tennyson, it was not recognized. The clamorous outcry of his personal friends, and the pathetic monody of Shelley,wild words, both, perhaps,wandered here and there, but nowhere effected a lodgment in the public mind. He was so little cared for, ten years after his death, that the woman he had loved thought the kindest act that could be paid his reputation would be to let it rest forever in obscurity. To resemble Keats, however slightly, was to provoke the conven- tional criticism of the time, and Tennyson accordingly provoked itroughly in the person of Wilson, and brutally in the person of Lockhart. Wilson delivered himself ex cathedra. Beginning with an abundance of strong epithets, he grew calm and judicial as he proceeded, and ended with a pat o~a the shoulder. The new poet was the pet of a coterie, who had elevated him to the throne in Little Britain, and had showered sonnets over hia coronation from the most remote parts of the empire, even from Hampstead Hill. He had small power over the common feelings and thoughts of men, and his feebleness was distressing when he appealed to their sympathies. He betrayed a powerful but impotent straining after originality, and an aversion from the 90 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. straightforward and strong simplicity of truth and nature. Some of his effusions were dismal; others were silly. The Merman, for instance, was distinguished for silliness. The poet cut a sorry figure in it, kissing like a cod-fish, and crawling stark naked under the sea. After several pages of this sort of writing, a gentler spirit crept over the redoubtable Christopher. The Ode to Memory was eminently beautiful, with the exception of some nameless mannerisms. The sound was an echo to the sense, and the sense was as sweet as lifes dearest emotion enjoyed in a dream. Every word told in The Deserted House, and the whole was pathetic in its completeness. Mariana was profoundly pathetic, scenery, state, emotion, character, all are in fine keeping. ~ was, perhaps, the most beautiful of the young poets compositions; but his highest achievement was the Recollections of the Arabian Nights. Thus mingling blame and praisewrote John Wilson of Alfred Tenny5on~s first volume. I am not sufficiently versed in the bibliography of Tennyson to say whether his next volume, which was published in 1832, was followed by another volume in 1833, or was reprinted in the latter year, with additions. I shall consider the two publications, then, as substanti~y one, bearing the dates of 1832 and 1833, and compare it with Poems, Chiefly LyricaL To state that it contained more excellences and less defects than that collection, is to state a fact too baldly. The poet had grown, and had changed. He had abandoned the lyrical element, as beyond, or as foreign to, his powers, but he still elnug to the element of female portraiture, which now yielded fewer but richer results. Elca- nore and Margaret~~ are charming studies of ideal women, delicately but distinctly different, and radiant with loveliness and purity. The conception of Eleijuore is the more poetic of the two, and the execution the more impassioned. I feel in the first three strophes the influence of Keats, drawn, perhaps, from his ode To Autumn, and in the swooning emotion of the last strophe, a shadowy reminiscence of the stanza in The Eve of St. Agnes, in which Porphyro grows faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint. The element of melancholy, as interpreted by landscape, re-appears in Mariana in the South, but with less force than in ~ which should have contented Tennyson. The element of old bal A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 91 ladry re-appeared in Fatima, in The Two Sisters, andwith the excess common to most modern revivals of ancient forms in The May Queen, which is notable as the young poets first attempt to interest himself in homely, human themes. It is of a kind that ordinary readers are apt to overrate, and it might have been written by a lesser poet than Tennyson. Not so The Millers Daughter and Lady Clara Vere de Vere, which are not only of a higher kind, but are remarkable as being, if not the first, certainly the most successful and most poetical ventures into the world of modern English life. We have glimpses of this world in the eclogues of Southey, the pastorals of Wordsworth ( The Brothers and Michael ~ the tales of Crabbe and Bloom- field; but it is on its homely side, and over dreary levels of prose. The real and the ideal are exquisitely blended in The Millers Daughter. Flemish in the precision of its details, and Italian in the harmony of its coloring, it combined what was best in each school, and created a third, which was superior to both. It is the celebration of love; not the love of the young, which may, or may not, endure, but the love which has enduredthe love of the old, which grows not old. The instinct of the poet directed him to the impression that he should convey, and his art furnished him with the medium by which he could convey it. The impres- sion was repose, the medium, memory. The Millers Daughter~~ is a delightful poem, superior every way, I think, to Coleridges Love ~ (which is one of the three or four poems upon which his reputation rests), if, indeed, it be not superior to everything of the kind in the language. Lady Clara Vere de Vere, which belongs to the same school of idealized realism, might have been written by Burns, in his most independent mood, if Burns could have written English. It anticipated the Eliiotts and Swains and Mackays, and left them nothing to utter but radical platitudes. That the young poet had been reading in the direction of media,- val romance, and chiefly, it would seem, in Sir Thomas Malorys Mort dArthur, was evident in The Lady of Shalott. I find it difficult to classify this poem, which is remarkable for what it indicated, rather than what it was. If my memory is not at fault, it was the first serious attempt to turn the Arthurian legends to poetic account; at any rate, it was the first serious attempt by any modern English poet. That they figured in the early English dr1~ma is not unlikely. His honor, Justice Shallow (corum, cust- alorum, and ratutorum, too), remembered, in the Second Part of 92 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. King Henry IV., that he was once Sir Dagonet in Arthurs Show, which Baker thinks was probably an interlude, or masque, that actually existed and was popular in Shakespeares time. It was the intention of the young Milton, tradition says, to write an epic about King Arthur; but nothing came of it. T)ryden is also credited with the same intention; but nothing came of it, though he wrote, in his old age, a d.rainatic opera, of which that British worthy was the spectacular hero. Garrick re-introduced him to his countrymen about eighty years later, and they were tempo- rarily kind to him and his scenic surroundings. With the excep- tion of Bishop Percy, who reprinted two Arthurian ballads in hia Reiques, no modern editor sought to revive the memory of good King Arthur, which had slumbered for centuries in the prose of old Sir Thomas Malory. He was known to the contem- poraries of Caxton and Wynkin de Worde, who read his doughty deeds in black-letter, and was not forgotten by their descendants, in the reign of Charles the First. He passed out of literature, however, during the ascendency of the Puritans, when even ideal kings were at a discount, and did not return with the Restoration, which was devoted to the worship of other idols. It was not until the first quarter of the present century that he re-appeared, and found a small body of subjects ready to welcome himedi- tors, like Haslewood and Utterson, who doted on old books because they were old, and students who read, as Lamb pretended to write, for antiquity. To neither of these classes did young Alfred Tennyson belong, nor was his allegiance to be compared with theirs. It was not strong at first, and it concerned itself less with King Arthur than with the personages of his court and realm, one of the mQst shadowy of whom appealed somehow~to his poetic sympathy. The Lady of Shalott, his first Arthurian study, indicates more than it accomplishes. It is not of the~earth, earthy, but of the world of the imagination, where all things are high fantastical. It is as much a dream as The Sensitive Plant~ or The Witeh of Atlas, and it should be read as such, and such only. Its merits are melodiousness and picturesqueness; its defects, general looseness of construction, excessive length, and its refrains, which finally become so provoking as to remind one of Kents threat to Oswald: Goose, if I had you upon Sartun plain, ~d drive ye, cackling, home to Camelot. A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 93 With the media3val element, which so far was experimental -with Tennyson, there was a classical element that overshadowed it. Long absent from English poetry, except in the adumbration of translations, it bourgeoned out in his childhood in Hunts Foliage (1816), and Shelleys noble paraphrases of the so-calied Homeric Hymns (circa 1820), and it flowered magnificently in the Endymion (1818) and Hyperion (1819) of Keats. The genius of each of these poets was impressed npon his classic work, which was thus narrowed in a certain sense to receive it, though not to the same extent as Wordsworths ~ (1814), and Dion(1816), who are only Wordsworth himself in masquerade. With the highest admiration for these poets, I still think that there remained a note of classicism which was truer to its antique spirit than any that they sounded, and that Tennyson discovered it in ~ in The Lotus Eaters. They are two of the most delightful poems - that were ever written, possessing everything that poems should possess, and creating a permanent feeling of loveliness and repose. I know of no blank verse which reminds me of that of (Enone; in its general structure, its musical vari- ations of rhythm, and its verbal finish, it is simply perfect. What may be called a philosophical element struggles ineffectively with the burden of personality imposed upon it in The Palace of Art~~ and what may be called an element of historic and legendary portraiture struggles ineffectively in A Dream of Fair ~ For suggestivenessthe art of hinting description and pure pictorial power, both in dealing with landscape, and with figures, they surpassed anything that Teunyson had yet produced; but they were not interesting, nor have all his revis- ions made them so, for the parts still want fusion, and the whole remains hard and unmalleable. The minor poems in this collec- tion (183233), some twenty in all, of which fourteen, mostly quatorzains, were afterward suppressed, do not call for any special comment. They are well and evenly written, The Death of the Old Year ~ being an effective example of modern balladry, and the lines To J. S. a manly expression of sympathy with the personal grief of a friend. I must mention, however, The Blackbi~~,~~ the first of three poems in the same stanza, which it re-introduced into English poetry. It is a simple octosyllabic stanza of two rhymes, the first line rhyming with the fourth, and the second and third line rhyming together, but it is the most flexible stanza in the language, and in the hands of a master, is capable of yielding 94 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the most diverse effects. It was discovered, I believe, by Ben Jonson, while he was writing the chorus to the second act of his Cataline(1611), where it is set up in sections of two or three stanzas. It was used again by him in An Elegy, in The Underwoods (printed in 1640, but written, of course, before his death in the summer of 1637), and it was used twice by George Sandys, in his Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David (circa 1637), as well as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who died in 1648. From the latter date it disappeared from English poetry ~as com- pletely as the sonnet from the time of Milton to Gray, until it was recovered by Alfred Tennyson nearly two centuries later. What may be called the weak spot of Tennysons poetry at this time certainly the weak spot of A Dream of Fair ~ and The Palace of Art was detected at once by Coleridge, whose poetic judgment was as sure in age as it had been in youth. I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson~s poems which have been sent to me, he remarked to his nephew, Heury Nelson Coleridge ( Table Talk, April 24, 1833), but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is that he has begun to write verses with- out very well understanding what meter is. Even if you write in a known and approved meter, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new meters without considering what meter means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,indeed, without it he can never be a poet in act,is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined meters, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octosyllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of meter, with- out knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by scanning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his ~ That Tennyson resented the snubbing to which his first and second collections of verse had subjected him, was apparent in his squib on crusty~ rusty, musty Christopher, and that he profited by it was evident in his next collection, which was published nine or ten years later. They were years of disappointment, and perhaps bitterness; but they were years of thought and of industry. He made a profound study of the poetic art, and of A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 95 his intellectual capacity, which was tenacious of early impres- sions and intentions. He knew that lie had failed in A Lovers Tale; but he determined to try again in the same direction, and did so, in a second study of passion, the effect of which was to depend upon analysis and not upon narrative. He was not without reputation of a certain sort, despite the critical ridicule which had been showered upon him; for, shortly after the publi- cation of his first collection, he contributed three short poems to The Gem (1831), one being a singular attempt to embody the sorrowful feeling attached to the words, No more ~; another, a copy of Anacreontics,of no value,and a third, A Frag- ment, in blank verse, which reads like an excised passage from ~ Two years later, he contributed two quatorzains to Friendships Offering (1833), and four years afterward he thought well enough of his unfinished emotional study to print a portion of it. It saw the light in The Tribute (l837)a col- lection of miscellaneous unpublished poems, edited by Lord Northampton, for the benefit of the Reverend Edward Smedley, a disabled man of letters, and furnished by the leading poets of the day,Wordsworth, Southey, Landor, Moore, Montgomery, Milman, Joanna Baillie, and such lesser lights as Aubrey de Vere, Mimes, Trench, Afford, Darley, and Bernard Barton. Among these, appeared Alfred Tennyson, ~ who filled seven loosely printed pages with Stanzas. If I were writing the biography of Tennyson, I would copy them here; but as I am not, I content myself with saying that these Stanzas, of which there were sixteen, amounting to one hundred and ten lines, were the first rough draft of what is now the twenty-fourth section of ~ If the history of literature teaches anything, it is that no man can be written up, or written down, except by himself. The praise which should crown his work may be withheld by critics, but ouly for a time; they may delay, but they cannot prevent, reputation, for it does not depend upon them, but upon the world, which in the end is always just. Jeffrey and Gifford passed away, but Wordsworth and Keats remained; Lockhart passed away, but Tennyson remained, and, long before Lockharts death, was acknowledged as the greatest of living English poets. His position was assured in his thirty-third year (1842), when he published his third collection of poems, or, more strictly speak- ing, the collected edition of his poetical works. It was in two vol 96 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W wines, the first of which contained the substance of what he had printed in 1830 and 183233, the second, what he had written since. What the first volume was, I have endeavored to indicate; what the second was, I will state as briefly as I can. To begin with: it was undeniably poetry, and was remarkable for its variety and its finish. The Arthurian element, which struggled with balladry in The Lady of Shalott, was especially triumph- ant in the Morte ~ The classical clement, which was painting in UlEnone, was sculpture in Ulysses. The emo- tional and social elements in The Millers Daughter and Lady Clara Vere de Vere, re-asserted themselves strongly in The Gardeners Daughter,~~ in Dora, and in Locksley Hall. A media3val-rdigious element, not hitherto seen, demanded intel- lectual recognition in St. Simeon Stylites, and won spiritual admiration in St. Agnes and Sir Galahad. The lyrical ele- ment sounded the depths of feeling in the little sea-dirge, Break, break, break. The element of allegory in The Palace of Art, re-appeared in The Yision of Sin. The element of pure poetry, which was radiant in ~~Margaret,~~ Eleanore, and Enone, translated itself from loveliness into the beautiful in The Talk- ing Oak and The Day-Dream. The element of balladry reached perfection in Lady Glare, Edward Gray, and The Lord of Burleigh. What may be called the idyllic element, which was shadowed forth in The Millers Daughter, and was radiant in 4IEnone, was the chief characteristic of The Gar- deners Daughter, Dora, Audley Court, Walking to the Mail, and Godiva. It was a comparatively new element in English poetry, not dating back beyond the last lustrrzm of the last century, unless it may be supposed to have remotely inspired the episode of Crazy Kate in The Task, and the episode of Musidora and Lavinia, in The Seasons. It began, I think, with Coleridge and Wordsworth, with The Picture,~~ This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, The Nightingale, and Frost at Midnight, and with The Brothers and Michael, all excel- lent examples of idyllic intention, but inferior to the idyllic accomplishment of Tennyson, which appears to have been sug- gested by the study of Theocritus. A recent critic sees, or thinks he sees, verbal resemblances to passages in Theocritus and Mos- chus in tEnone,~~ The Lotus Eaters, and Godiva; another critic insists that Ulysses was suggested by the twenty-sixth canto of Dantes Inferno, and a third, who has bestowed a A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 97 good deal of pains to tracking him through the snow of other mens writings, declares that he wears the costumes of Shake- speare, Peele, Heywood, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Dryden, a terrible charge, no doubt, which Dryden himself has summed up: This poet is that poets plagiary, And his a third, till they all end in Homer. If I were disposed to add to this curious but useless erudition, I might say that the refrain of the cradle song in the second book of The Princess was borrowed from a song in Greenes Menaphon(1587); and that the third stanza of the blank verse lyric in the secQnd book of the same poem was borrowed from Hunts Hero and Leander. Let us see how the resemblances look in print: While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. For my lambs, my little ones, Mongst many pretty ones. The casement slowly grows a glimmering square. And when the casement, at the dawn of light, Began to show a square of ghastly white. The idyllic element, which was first perfected in Tennysons third collection, was manifested therein in two methods, or schools, one of which concerned itself with loveliness, the other with homeliness. The finest example of the first, or Italian school, was The Gardeners Daughter, the best example of the second, or Flemish school, was Dora. The Gardeners Daughter~~ is an exquisite poem. It conveys the exact expression that the poet determined to convey,the modesty and warmth of love, the dew on the flowers and the light in the sky, tender- ness, and purity, the joyous recognition of the divine in woman- hood. As art, it is faultless: everything is in keeping, subor- dinated to the final effect, and the tone, or atmosphere, is steeped in beauty. The picturesque talent which wreaked itself in sketches in The Palace of Art becomes here the genius of English land- scape painting, of which Tennyson was henceforth the most finished master. There is no word but perfection which applies to the landscape and figure painting of this incomparable poem, vOL. CxXXIII.NO. 296. 7 98 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. and if there be in all poetry an immortal shape, it is that of the gardeners daughter, holding up the rose-bush which the last nights gale had blown across the walk. A companion piece is the figure of the Lady Godiva, as she disrobes herself in her inmost bower, but it has never seemed to me quite equal to it,if, indeed, it be equal to the more carelessly painted figure of Made- line in the shadows of the stained window in The Eve of St. Agnes. I am not so certain that Dora is a fine example of the Flemish school, as I am that The Gardeners Daughter is a fine example of the Italian school, for I have the feeling that it would have been a better picture if it had been painted in a higher key of color. Audley Court and Walking to the Mail exhibit the characteristics of both schools, and suggest a third, in which, perhaps, they may be harmoniously blended, but as neither attains it, the result is somewhat incongruous. If the last named poem has a prototype in English verse, it will prob- ably be found among Southeys Eclogues, of which seven out of nine are dialogues. We must still go back to Theocritus, however, as the idyllic master of Tennyson. The atmosphere of The Talking Oak is similar to, but richer than, the atmos- phere of The Gardeners Daughter. It is a thoroughly high- bred poem, steeped in ancestral refinement, and radiant with his- toric associations,an embodiment of the grace and glory of English aristocratic life. The Day Dream belongs substan- tially to the same school as The Talking Oak, but the work- manship is more careless, and its general effect less exquisite. Its loose construction, and its want of proportion, strain the art of even dream-poetry. Ulysses is a piece of high Greek art, perfect alike in its strength and its repose. Conceived in dramatic form, it is a representative rather than a dramatic poem, a criticism which applies with equal force to St. Simeon Stylites. My feeling in regard to these poems is, that one rep- resents a Greek, and the other a primitive Christian element, in the persons of Ulysses and St. Simeon Stylites, but does not develop the dramatic personality of either. Ulysses is not dra- matic in the same sense as the Duke of Brownings Last Duchess (1842) ; nor is St. Simeon Stylites dramatic in the same sense as the Bishop in Brownings Tomb at St. Praxeds (1845). Tennysons representative art is general and superficial. Brownings dramatic art is special and profound, betraying idiosyncrasies of which the speaker is not aware. Tennyson A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 99 exhausted the poetic possibilities of the hermit-life of early Chris- tianity in St. Simeon Stylites, and he exhausted the poetic possibilities of the convent and knightly life of mediawal Cathol- icism in St. Agnes and Sir Galahad. For just what they are, nothing can surpass these poems, which are Tennysons first and last efforts of the kind. The classic inspiration of Ulysses moved him, at a later period, to write Tithonus, and, possibly, Lucretius; the idyllic inspiration of The Gardeners Daughter moved him to write The Brook, Aylmers Field, Enoch Arden, and The Sisters; the Arthurian inspiration of the Morte dArthur moved him to write The Idyls of the King; but he was moved no more by the grim inspiration which recalled the old desert saint, nor by the lovely inspiration which recalled the holy nun and the chaste knight. I have summoned up, I believe, the chief elements in the first collected edition of Tennysons poetical writings (1842), and have thus indicated the character of his genius. If he had died when it was published he would have established his claim as a poet, remarkable for variety and excellence, remarkable for method and manner, and remarkable for the perfection of his art. Nearly forty years have passed since then, and he is still remark- able for the same qualities, and for little besides. I do not say that the man of seventy is not larger, intellectually, than the man of thirty, but I do say that intellectually he is the same man. lie has ripened, but he has not changed. The difference between his first and his last volume, or between the best poem in his first and the best poem in his last, between Mariana or Recollec- tions of the Arabian Nights, say, and The Revenge, and The Defence of Lucknow, is not so great as the difference between Keatss Sleep and Poetry and his ~~Hyperion,~~ between Byrons Hours of ~ and his Childe Harold,~~ Shelley~s Queen Mab and his ~ Popes Pastorals and his Moral Epistles,~~ Miltons ~~L~Allegro ~ and his Para- dise Lost, or, to compare great things with small, between Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet and his ~ The power to write The Idyls of the King was contained in the Morte dArthur, and though Elaine~~ and ~ are finer, in a certain sense, than the Morte dArthur, more human and pathetic, they surprised no one who was familiar with the poetry of Tennyson. The Arthurian element which Tennyson was the first to introduce into English poetry, soon became an active 100 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. factor therein. The larger as well as the lesser poets soon added it to their possessions, as Matthew ~nold, in his Tristram and Iseult (circa 1852), William ~Jo~is,in his Defence of Guine- vere(1858), Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Tristram andi Iseult (1878), and, I dare say, many more with whose poetic effusions I am not conversant. It is now the common property of all the English poets. The Idyls of the King must be judged by the idyllic and not the epic standard, for the ten parts of which they consist, though selected with consummate skill from the prolific Arthurian legend, by no means constitute the unity which the true epic demands. Separately, they are exqui- site poems; together, they are averse from fusion. If there is any more delightful reading in the language, I do not know where to look for it; if there is any better blank verse of the narrative order, any subtler poetic art, or any such choice English, I have never seen it. If the brightness and the beauty of The Idyls of the King lack anything, it is shadow, relief, the quality of remoteness, strangeness, mystery, terror, or whatever it is that is the life of Brownings Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came. If, in the fullness of time and the folly of criticism, the origi- nal of The Princess should be sought for, as the originals of some of Shakespeares plays have been, the Farmer of the future will no doubt remember that among his rare books there is a copy of an Abyssinian story called Rasselas, the production of one Dr. Johnson, who was known in his time as a judicious critic. He will remove it from his crowded shelves, and, sittingin his easy-chair, will turn its leaves carefully until his eye lights upon the following passage, which he will transcribe into his study of Tennyson: The princess thought that, of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best; she desired first to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside. In this, he will write triumphantly, we find the prima stamina of The Princess. Nothing of the sort, the idealists will reply; the resemblance is purely accidental. The Princess was not transplanted from Johnsons tedious story, but was the natural growth of the poets own soul, its bright, consum- mate flower. It was his solution of the puzzling problem of woman. No, the profounder idealists will insist, it is a philo- sophic allegory, such as we find in Shakespeares sonnets. and Spensers Colin Clout,a dual allegory of material and spirit- A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 101 nal life, the prince being the body, and the princess the soul, of man! That some such theories as these, particularly the last, may hereafter be entertained by the commentators of Tennyson, is not at all unlikely; they will certainly be entertained if our present race of Shakespeare commentators can contrive to per- petuate their influence. I have no theory in regard to The Princess. I consider it a poetic statement of the difference between the sexes, and as faithful a statement as could be made in prose. I say this under correction of those who have consid- ered the woman question more deeply than I have, and I add (to myself) that I do not in the least care for it. At any rate, it does not enter into my estimate of The Princess, which I read as a poem simply, and which seems to me one of the most delicious poems in the world. I am charmed with it as a story; for, though slight, it does not lack incident; and I am charmed with it as a struggle between the intellect and affection of woman. It accomplishes the intention of the poet, which I have no doubt was a grave one, in the gayest manner imaginable. That this manner does not achieve poetry of a high order, as some main- tain, I shall believe when I believe that the manner of Shake- speare~s comedy does not achieve poetry of a high order, but not before. The prosperity of a jest like this lies in the ear that hears it, the mind that ponders it, the heart that embraces it, not in the jest itself. To place the action of the poem in the past was to give it an interest that could not have been given to it had it been placed in the presentthe interest of the remote and the romantic, and to revive, in another form, the Arthurian spirit which, if it meant anything, meant devotion to woman. A further interest was given to what may be called the medheval back- ground by the modern frame-work in which it was set, and with which it was in effective and harmonious contrast. I know not what fault to find with The Princess. It is an incomparable poem, perfect in its motive, which develops itself, perfect in its p~s, which belong to each other, and perfect in its totality, which is unity. It is happily conceived and joyously sustained; it is flushed with picturesque description, and quickened with melodi- ous movement; and it is enriched, beyond all modern poems, with elegies And quoted odes, and jewels five-words long, That on the stretched forefinger of all Time, Sparkle forever. 102 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. The Princess, which was published in 1847, puzzled Ten- nysons critics, who blundered about it as they had blundered about his second collection, ftfteen years before, though in a dif- ferent way, and in more respectful language. Even Miss Mit- ford, whose taste in general was good, did not know what to make of it. The ~ has fine things, she wrote to Mrs. Browning, in September, 1848, but would certainly not have made a reputation. It is a poem of a hundred and fifty pages, all in blank verse,inclosed within a setting of blank verse also,and the very songs introduced are of the same meter. The story is very unskillfully told, with an entire want of dramatic power, and full of the strangest words, brought in after the strangest fashion. It begins in mockery, and becomes earnest as it goes on; but there are, as I said before,fine things in it. Three years after The Princess, Tennyson published In Memoriam (1850), and five years later, Maud(1855). In 1859, he published the first instaUment of The Idyls of the King (Enid, Vivien, ~ Guinevere); in 1864, Enoch Arden; in 1870, The Window, and the second installment of The Idyls of the ~g(The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, The Passing of Arthur); in 1872, the third installment of The Idyls of the King ( Gareth and Lynette, The Last Tournament); in 1875, ~QueenMary~~ in 1877, Harold; and at the close of the past year (1880), Ballads and Other Poems. The length to which this study has extended leaves me but little space in which to dwell upon these volumes, and happily but little space is needed. I might enumerate again the elements which I have pointed out, but I should not be able to point out many new ones, for they do not exist. I shall say nothing, therefore, of the Arthurian poems, the publication of which covered a period of thirty years (18421872); nor of the later idyllic poems, further than that none seems to me quite equal to The Gardeners Daughter (the effect of Enoch Ar- den and Aylmers Field, for example, being injured by their over-elaboration); nor of the later lyrical poems, for, fine as two or three songs in The Princess are, I do not feel that Tenny- son is a born lyrist, like Burns, or Proctor. I must notice, how- ever, and as briefly as I can, one element of his poetry to which I have not yet called attention, and which may be called, I sup- pose, the meditative element. We had glimpses of it in the Ode to Memory (1830), in the lines To J. S. (1832), and in The A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 103 Two Voices(1842), which may be likened to springs, that rose, and disappeared, and rose again, From old well-heads of haunted rills, And from the hearts of purple hills, increasing in volume and depth until they become a river of thought in In Memoriain. I have mentioned Arthur Henry Hailam as one of Tennysons companions and friends at college. He was a charming lad of seventeen or eighteen, who from childhood had promised to be a remarkable man: his disposition was sweet,his perceptions were clear, and his inclination toward learning was so strong that he was a fair Latinist in his seventh year. He also read French with facility, having acquired it during a tour on the Continent with his parents iii the summer of 1818. Early in the spring of 1820, his tenth year, he was placed in a school at Putney, where he remained nearly two years; and, after another visit to the Continent, he became a pupil of Dr. Hawtrey, assistant master of Eton, of which he afterward became provost, who, two or three years before, had interested himself in the intellectual progress of another Etonian named Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Hailams five years residence at Eton was devoted to the Latin and Greek classics, and to the Elizabethan poets, to whom he was strongly attracted. He joined the Debating Society, as was the custom with young Etonians, and he assisted in the publication of an Eton Miscellany, as Praed had done before him. He had a talent for verse, which developed itself after leaving Eton, during a third visit to the Continent, in which he resided for eight months in Italy, where, like the young Milton, he learned to write Italian sonnets, and to speak the Italian language with a pure Sienese pronunciation. Returning at length to England, he entered Trinity College in the autumn of 1828, as I have already stated, and thus made the acquaintance of Alfred and Charles Tennyson, by whom his poetic ambition was stimulated, and with whom he lived in close personal communion. He wrote a few English sonnets, which were not worse than Charles Tennyson~s; he competed with Alfred Tennyson for the prize poem on Tim- buctoo, and lost it, as we have seen, but he gained a prize for an English essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero, and, in 1831, the first college prize for an English declamation. He took Ihis degree in January, 1832, and returned to London, where he 104 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. began to study the law, at the desire of his father. Already familiar with the Institutes of Justinian, and with Heineccius, he now went through Blackstone and other English authorities, and entered the office of an eminent conveyancer in Lincolns Inn Fields. He did not wholly abandon literature, however, for he wrote at this time a dramatic sketch, in which Raffaele and Fiammetta figure, and translated most of the sonnets in Dantes Vita ~ Never in robust health, he had a severe attack of intermitting fever in the spring of 1833, to recover from the effect of which he made a summer visit to Germany with his father. A wet day between Pesth and Vienna brought back the fever, and with it a sudden rush of blood to the head, which put an instantaneous end to his life. He died on September 15, 1833, and in the following winter his remains were brought to England, and interred in the chancel of Clevedon Church, in Somerset- shire. Such was Arthur Henry Hallam, the friend of Alfred Tennyson, to whom he was soon to be bound by a closer tie than that of friendship, for at the time of his death he was engaged in marriage with one of his sisters. His life was bright and brief, but brief as it was it will be long remembered, for it is embalmed in In ~ In Memoriam differs from every personal poem of which I have any knowledge. It does not start with the advantage pos- sessed by the Vita Nuova of Dante, and the sonnets and can- zons of Petrarch. It was not inspired by a love like that of Dante for Beatrice Portinari, or that of Petrarch for Laura de Sade. It does not celebrate the love of woman, but the friend- ship of manthe friendship of Alfred Tennyson for Arthur Heury Hallam. It has no prototype, unless it be the sonnets of Shakespeare, which are quite as likely to have been exercises of poetic fancy as records of personal feeling. Conjecture has long been busy with the enigmatical Mr. W. H., their alleged onlie begetter. He was William Herbert; he was Henry Wriothesley; he was Queen Elizabeth! There is no end of hypotheses concern- ing this Mr. W. H., and I have mine, which is identical with Byrons hypothesis in regard to Junius: Tis, that what Junius we are wont to call Was really, truly, nobody at all. Dismissing Shakespearewho may, however, have celebrated an actual manas we have dismissed Petrarch and Dante, who cer A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 105 tainly celebrated actual women, we come to Milton, where we find ourselves on solid ground. We know, from Miltons biographers, that Lycidas was written in commemoration of Edward King, a fellow-student at Cambridge, who was drowned while crossing the Irish Channel in the sunimer of 1637; and we welcome the knowledge, since it imparts a reality to the poem which it would not otherwise have possessed. We try, at any rate, to persuade ourselves that this reality exists, and if we fail to do so, it is because we do not make sufficient allowance for the writer, whose genius was scholastic, as well as poetic, and for the poetic manner of his period, which was nothing if not scholastic. Lycidas is an exquisite poem, but it was not the prototype of In Memo- riam. If we demand more reality than we can readily detect in it,if we demand more nature, more truth,we find it in one of Miltons contemporaries, whose reputation was as much greater than his as his genius was less, and who, like himself, was a Cam- bridge man,Cowley, who, in deploring the untimely death of his friend William Harvey, also a Cambridge man, struck out three or four immortal stanzas. I can recali no seventeenth-century poet, after Milton and Cowley, whose elegiac work was other than commonplace, unless it be Dryden, whose lines To the Memory of Mr. Oldham have a genuine ring; and no good elegiac work written in the following century, unless it be found in Tickells poem on the death of Addison. Here is a passage from it which anticipated the feeling of In Memoriam: If eer from me th~ loved memorial part, May shame afflict this alienated heart; Of thee forgetful if I form a song, My lyre be broken, and untuned my tongue, My griefs be doubled, from thy image free, And mirth a torment, unchastised by. thee. One hundred years later, a greater poet than Addison was hymned by a greater poet than Tickell. A young Englishman, who died in his twenty-sixth year, was bewept by another young Englishman, who died in the following year, in his thirtieth year, and who wrote nothing finer than the poem in which he embalmed the memory of his fellow-singer Adonais. Twelve years later, there died another young Englishman, in his twenty-third year, and was bewept by another young Englishman, who was two years his senior, and who has written nothing finer than the poem in which he has embalmed the memory of his friend In 106 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Memoriam. Adonais had its prototype in Bions Epitaph of Adonis, and Lycidas had, if not exactly its prototype, its forerunner, in The Mourning Muse of Thestylis, which is now thought to be the work of Lodowick Brysket, and not of Edmund Spenser. Like all that Milton wrote, it is tesselated with phrases from other poets. In Memoriam ~ had no prototype, and has no equal among the personal poems of the world. One of its merits is the recovery of a measure which was obsolete until it was put forward tentatively in Tennysons second collection of versea measure at once noble and graceful, plastic beyond any other quatrain in the language, and capable of infinite inflections, wind- ing out from and returning in upon itself, like a strain of exqui- site music. Another of its merits is the halo which it casts over suffering, the deep and tender feeling with which it tempers grief, the assured belief in something higher than death, The devotion to something alar From the sphere of our sorrow. I am not philosopher enough to say what system it teaches, if it teaches any; nor theologian enough to say what ethics it teaches, if it teaches any. it is, to me, simply a philosophical statement of grief,a religious statement of hope and consolation. If there be a more devout poem in any language, I have yet to hear of it. I wish that Tennyson had not written Maud, or, if he must write it, I wish that he had not published it. It is,in a certain sense, such a study as he undertook in The Lovers Tale, a study of overmastering passion, which in this instance is steeped through and through with bitterness and morbidness. Locks- ley Hall showed us what he could do in this direction, and surely Locksley Hall was enough. That he was eighteen years over Maud proves tenacity of purpose, but not wisdom of intention: if he had been eighteen hundred years over it he could never have made it a good poem. I wish it could be blotted out of his writings,wish it so heartily that I would even give up the garden song, which is the ouly noble thing in it. We do not want a nineteenth-century Hamlet, and if we did it is not to Tennyson that we should look as his creator. I also wish, for while lam about it I may as well free my mind as notI also wish that Tennyson had not written Queen Mary and Har- old. They do not detract from his reputation, except with the A STUDY OF TENNYSON. 107 unthinking, for good work at one time is not destroyed by bad work at another time, but they add nothing to it. We read them as we read Byrons tragedies, and are impressed by their poetic, but not by their dramatic, quality: all that can be done by sheer force of intellect has been done and the result is disappointment. Tennyson lacks the dramatic faculty, but he possesses a faculty which is sometimes mistaken for it~.the representative faculty. It is present in Ulysses and St. Simeon Stylites. It is also present, in a provincial form, in The Northern Farmer and The Northern Cobbler, which may be clever character studies, but which certainly are not dramatic poems. The Tennyson who wrote them is not the Tennyson who wrote (Enone, The Lotus Eaters, The Day Dream, and The Talking Oak, but a very different man, who is far less sure of his genius, and much more ambitious. He has lost his perception of the beautiful, which he worshiped in youth beyond all the poets of his time, and has consoled himself in age by determined devotion to the character- istic. It is to this grim spirit, this Moloch, that we owe his Northern Cobblers and his ~~Rizpahs,~~ which are poetic in form but without the poetic spirit; are of the Flemish school, and not good art of that school, coarse, repulsive, hateful. Such are the conclusions which I have reached in this imper- fect study of Tennyson, and if the reader will be good enough to gather up the scattered hints that I have dropped therein, and allow these hints to impress him as they have impressed me, he can decide for himself Tennysons place among the English poets. What his qualities are, I have tried to indicate: what posterity will think of them, and of him, our childrens children will decide. R. H. STODDARD. THIE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. AUGUST, 1881. No. 297. Tros Tyriusque mibi nub diecrimirte agetTI~. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 1881. COPYRIGHT BY ALLEN THORNDIKE RICE. 188L

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. No. CCXCVII. AUGUST, 1881. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. RODEnT G. INGERSOLL. JEREMIAH S. BLACK. MR. INGERSOLL In the presence of eternity the mountains are as transient as the clouds. A PROFOUND change has taken place in the world of thought. The pews are trying to set themselves somewhat above the pulpit. The layman discusses theology with the minister, and smiles. Christians excuse themselves for belonging to the church, by denying a part of the creed. The idea is abroad that they who know the most of nature believe the least about the- ology. The sciences are regarded as infidels, and facts as scoffers. Thousands of most excellent people avoid churches, and, with few exceptions, only those attend prayer-meetings who wish to be alone. The pulpit is losing because the people are growing. Of course it is still claimed that we are a Christian people, indebted to something called Christianity for all the progress we have made. There is still a vast difference of opinion as to what Christianity really is, although many warring sects have been discussing that question, with fire and sword, through centuries of creed and crime. Every new sect has been denounced at its birth as illegitimate, as a something born out of orthodox wed- lock, and that should have been allowed to perish on the steps VOL. CXXXHLNO. 297. 8 110 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. where it was found. Of the relative merits of the various denominations, it is sufficient to say that each claims to be right. Among the evangelical churches there is a substantial agreement upon what they consider the fundamental truths of the gospeL These fundamental truths, as I understand them, are: That there is a personal God, the creator of the material universe; that he made man of the dust, and woman from part of the man; that the man and woman were tempted by the devil; that they were turned out of the garden of Eden; that, about fifteen hundred years afterward, Gods patience having been exhausted by the wickedness of mankind, he drowned his children with the exception of eight persons; that afterward he selected from their descendants Abraham, and through him the Jewish people; that he gave laws to these people, and tried to govern them in all things; that he made known his will in many ways; that he wrought a vast number of miracles; that he inspired men to write the Bible; that, in the fullness of time, it having been found impossible to reform mankind, this God came upon earth as a child born of the Virgin Mary; that he lived in Palestine; that he preached for about three years, going from place to place, occasionally raising the dead, curing the blind and the halt; that he was crucifiedfor the crime of blas- phemy, as the Jews supposed, but that, as a matter of fact, he was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of all who might have faith in him; that he was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, where he now is, making intercession for his fol- lowers- that he will forgive the sins of all who believe on him, and that those who do not believe will be consigned to the dun- geons of eternal pain. Theseit may be with the addition of the sacraments of Baptism and the Last Supperconstitute what is generally known as the Christian religion. It is most cheerfully admitted that a vast number of people not only believe these things, but hold them in exceeding rever- ence, and imagine them to be of the utmost importance to mankind. They regard the Bible as the only light that God has given for the guidance of his children; that it is the one star in natures skythe foundation of all morality, of all law, of all order, and of all individual and national progress. They regard it as the only means we have for ascertaining the will of God, the origin of man, and the destiny of the soul. It is needless to inquire into the causes that have led so many people to believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures. In my THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 111 opinion, they were and are mistaken, and the mistake has hin- dered, in countless ways, the civilization of man. The Bible has been the fortress and defense of nearly every crime. No civilized country could r& inact its laws, and in many respects its moral code is abhorrent to every good and tender man. It is admitted that many of its precepts are pure, that many of its laws are wise and just, and that many of its statements are absolutely true. Without desiring to hurt the feelings of anybody, I propose to give a few reasons for thinking that a few passages, at least, in the Old Testament are the product of a barbarous people. In all civilized countries it is not only admitted, but it is passionately asserted, that slavery is and always was a hideous cruu& ; that a war of conquest is simply murder; that polygamy is the enslavement of woman, the degradation of man, and the destruction of home; that nothing is more infamous than the slaughter of decrepit men, of helpless women, and of prattling babes; that captured maidens should not be given to soldiers; that wives should not be stoned to death on account of their religious opinions, and that the death penalty ought not to be infficted for a violation of the Sabbath. We know that there was a time, in the history of almost every nation, when slavery, polygamy, and wars of extermination were regarded as divine institutions; when women were looked upon as beasts of burden, and when, among some people, it was considered the duty of the husband to murder the wife for differing with him on the subject of religion. Nations that entertain these views to-day are regarded as savage, and, probably, with the exception of the South Sea islanders, the Feejees, some citizens of Delaware, and a few tribes in Central Africa, no human beings can be found degraded enough to agree upon these subjects with the Jehovali of the ancient Jews. The ouly evidence we have, or can have, that a nation has ceased to be savage is the fact that it has abandoned these doctrines. To every one,except the the6 logian, it is perfectly easy to account for the mistakes, atrocities, and crimes of the past, by saying that civilization is a slow and painful growth; that the moral perceptions are cultivated through ages of tyranny, of want, of crime, and of heroism; that it requires centuries for man to put out the eyes of self and hold in lofty and in equal poise the scales of justice; that con- science is born of suffering; that mercy is the child of the imagination.of the power to put oneself in the ~ place, and that man advances ouly as he becomes acquainted with 112 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W his surroundings, with the mutual obligations of life, and learns to take advantage of the forces of nature. But the believer in the inspiration of the Bible is compelled to declare that there was a time when slavery was rightwhen men could buy, and women could sell, their babes. He is com- pelled to insist that there was a time when polygamy was the highest form of virtue; when wars of extermination were waged with the sword of mercy; when religious toleration was a crime, and when death was the just penalty for having expressed an honest thought. He must maintain that Jehovah is just as bad now as he was four thousand years ago, or that he was just as good then as he is now, but that human conditions have so changed that slavery, polygamy, religious persecutions, and wars of conquest are now perfectly devilish. Once they were right-once they were commanded by God himself; now, they are prohibited. There has been such a change in the conditions of man that, at the present time, the devil is in favor of slavery, polygamy, religious persecution, and wars of conquest. That is to say, the devil entertains the same opinion to-day that Jehovah held four thousand years ago, but in the meantime Jehovah has remained exactly the samechangeless and incapable of change. We find that other nations beside the Jews had similar laws and ideas; that they believed in and practiced slavery and polygamy, murdered women and children, and exterminated their neighbors to the extent of their power. It is not claimed that they received a revelation. It is admitted that they had no knowledge of the true God. And yet, by a strange coincidence, they practiced the same crimes, of their own motion, that the Jews did by the comm~md of Jehovah. From this it would seem that man can do wrong without a special revelation. It will hardly be claimed, at this day, that the passages in the Bible upholding slavery, polygamy, war, and religious per- secution are evidences of the inspiration of that book. Suppose that there had been nothing in the Old Testament upholding these crimes, would any modern Christian suspect that it was not inspired, on account of the omission? Suppose that there had been nothing in the Old Testament but laws in favor of these crimes, would any intelligent Christian now contend that it was the work of the true God? If the devil had inspired a book, will some believer in the doctrine of inspiration tell us in what respect, on the subjects of slavery, polygamy, war, and THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 113 liberty, it would have ditferea from some parts of the Old Testa- ment? Suppose that we should now discover a Hindu book of equal antiquity with the Old Testament, containing a defense of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious per- secutilon, would we regard it as evidence that the writers were inspired by an infinitely wise and merciful God? As most other nations at that time practiced these crimes, and as the Jews would have practiced them all, even if left to themselves, one can hardly see the necessity of any inspired commands upon these subjects. Is there a believer in the Bible who does not wish that God, amid the thunders and lightuings of Sinai, had distinctly said to Moses that man should not own his fellow- man; that women should not sell their babes; that men should be allowed to think and investigate for themselves, and that the sword should never be unsheathed to shed the blood of honest men? Is there a believer, in the world, who would not be delighted to find that every one of these infamous passages are interpolations, and that the skirts of God were never reddened by the blood of maiden, wife, or babe? Is there a believer who does not regret that God commanded a husband to stone his wife to death for suggesting the worship of the sun or moon? Surely, the light of experience is enough to tell us that slavery is wrong, that polygamy is infamous, and that murder is not a virtue. No one will now contend that it was worth Gods while to impart the information to Moses, or to Joshua, or to anybody else, that the Jewish people might purchase slaves of the heathen, or that it was their duty to exterminate the natives of the Holy Land. The deists have contended that the Old Testament is too cruel and barbarous to be the work of a wise and loving God. To this, the theologians have replied, that nature is just as cruel; that the earthquake, the volcano, the pestilence and storm, are just as savage as the Jewish God; and to my mind this is a perfect answer. Suppose that we knew that after inspired~ men had finished the Bible, the devil got possession of it, and wrote a few passages; what part of the sacred Scriptures would Christians now pick Qut as being probably his work? Which of the following passages would naturally be selected as having been written by the devil Love thy neighbor as thyself, or, Kill all the males among the little ones, and kill every woman; but all the women children keep alive for yourselves~? 114 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. It may be that the best way to illustrate what I have said of the Old Testament is to compare some of the supposed teachings of Jehovah with those of persons who never read an inspired line, and who lived and died without having received the light of revela- tion. Nothing can be more suggestive than a comparison of the ideas of Jehovahthe inspired words of the one claimed to be the infinite God, as recorded in the Biblewith those that have been expressed by men who, all admit, received no help from heaven. In all ages of which any record has been preserved, there have been those who gave their ideas of justice, charity, liberty, love, and law. Now, if the Bible is really the work of God, it should contain the grandest and sublimest truths. It should, in all respects, excel the works of man. Within that book should be found the best and loftiest definitions of justice; the truest con- ceptions of human liberty; the clearest outlines of duty; the tenderest, the highest, and the noblest thoughts,not that the human mind has produced, but that the human mind is capable of receiving. Upon every page should be found the luminous evidence of its divine origin. Unless it contains grander and more wonderful things than man has written, we are not only justified in saying, but we tire compelled to say, that it was written by no being superior to man. It may be said that it is unfair to call attention to certain bad things in the Bible, while the good are not so much as mentioned. To this it may be replied that a divine being would not put bad things in a book. Certainly a being of infinite intelligence, power, and goodness could never fall below the ideal of depraved and ~ man. It will not do, after we find that the Bible upholds what we now call crimes, to say that it is not verbally inspired. If the words are not inspired, what is? It may be said that the thoughts are inspired. But this would include only the thoughts expressed without words. If ideas are inspired, they must be contained in and expressed only by inspired words; that is to say, the arrange- ment of the words, with relation to each other, must have been inspired. For the purpose of this perfect arrangement, the writers, according to the Christian world, were inspired. Were some sculptor inspix~ed of God to make a statue perfect in its every part, we would not say that the marble was inspired, but the statue-the relation of part to part, the married harmony of form and function. The language, the words, take the place of the marble, and it is the arrangement of these words that Chris- THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 115 tians claim to be inspired. If there is one uninspired word,~ that is, one word in the wrong place, or a word that ought not to be there,to that extent the Bible is an uninspired book. The moment it is admitted that some words are not, in their arrangement as to other words, inspired, then, unless with abso- lute certainty these words can be pointed out, a doubt is cast on all the words the book contains. If it was worth Gods while to make a revelation to man at all, it was certainly worth his while to see to it that it was correctly made. He would not have allowed the ideas and mistakes of pretended prophets and designing priests to become so mingled with the original text that it is impossible to tell where he ceased and where the priests and prophets began. Neither will it do to say that God adapted his revelation to the prejudices of mankind. Of course it was necessary for an infinite being to adapt his revelation to the intellectual capacity of man; but why should God confirm a barbarian in his prejudices? Why should he fortify a heathen in his crimes? If a revelation is of any importance whatever, it is to eradicate prejudices from the human mind. It should be a lever with which to raise the human race. Theologians have exhausted their ingenuity in finding excuses for God. It seems to me that they would be better employed in finding excuses for men. They tell us that the Jews were so cruel and ignorant that God was compelled to justify, or nearly to justify, many of their crimes, in order to have any influence with them whatever. They tell us that if he had declared slavery and polygamy to be crimi- nal, the Jews would have refused to receive the ten command- ments. They insist that, under the circumstances, God did the best he could; that his real intention was to lead them along slowly, step by step, so that, in a few hundred years, they would be induced to admit that it was hardly fair to steal a babe from its mothers breast. It has always seemed reasonable that an infinite God ought to have been able to make man grand enough to know, even without a special revelation, that it is not alto- gether right to steal the labor, or the wife, or the child, of another. When the whole question is thoroughly examined, the world wili ~find that Jehovah had the prejudices, the hatreds, and super- stitions of his day. If there is anything of value, it is liberty. Liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of life. Without it the world is a prison and the universe an infinite dungeon. 116 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. If the Bible is really inspired, Jehovah commanded the Jewish people to buy the children of the strangers that sojourned among them, and ordered that the children thus bought should be an inheritance for the children of the Jews, and that they should be bondmen and bondwomen forever. Yet Epictetus, a man to whom no revelation was ever made, a man whose soul followed only the light of nature, and who had never heard of the Jewish God, was great enough to say: Will you not re- member that your servants are by nature your brothers, the children of God? In saying that you have bought them, you look down on the earth, and into the pit, on the wretched law of men long since dead, but you see not the laws of the gods.~~ We find that Jehovah, speaking to his chosen people, assured them that their boudmen and their boudmaids must be of the heathen that were round about them. Of them, said Jehovah, shall ye buy bondmen and boudmaids. And yet Cicero, a pagan, Cicero, who had never been enlightened by reading the Old Testament, had the moral grandeur to declare: They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens, but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever. If the Bible is inspired, Jehovah, God of all worlds, actually said: And if a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished; not- withstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be pun- ished, for he is his money. And yet Zeno, founder of the Stoics, centuries before Christ was born, insisted that no man could be the owner of another, and that the title was bad, whether the slave had become so by conquest, or by purchase. Jehovah ordered a Jewish general to make war, and gave, among others, this command: When the Lord thy God shall drive them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them. And yet Epictetus, whom we have already quoted, gave this marvelous rule for the guidance of human conduct: Live with thy inferiors as thou wouldst have thy superiors live with thee. Is it possible, after all, that a being of infinite goodness and wisdom said: I will heap mischief upon them; I will send mine arrows upon them; they shall be burned with hunger, and devoured with burning heat, and with bitter destruction. I will THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 117 send the tooth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of the dust. The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling, also, with the man of gray hairs; while Seneca, an uninspired Roman, said: The wise man will not pardon any crime that ought to be punished, but he will accomplish, in a nobler way, all that is sought in pardoning. He will spare some and watch over some, because of their youth, and others on account of their ignorance. His clemency will not fall short of justice, but will fullill it per- fectly. Can we believe that God ever said of any one: Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow; let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places; let the extortioner catch all that he hath and let the stranger spoil his labor; let there be none to extend mercy unto him, neither let there be any to favor his fatherless childrenY If he ever said these words, surely he had never heard this line, this strain of music, from the Hindu: Sweet is the lute to those who have not heard the prattle of their own children. Jehovah, from the clouds and darkness of Sinai, said to the Jews: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. - - - Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth gen- eration of them that hate me. Contrast this with the words put by the Hindu in the mouth of Brahma: I am the same to all mankind. They who honestly serve other gods, involuntarily worship me. I am he who partaketh of all worship, and I am the reward of all worshipers. Compare these passages. The first, a dungeon where crawl the things begot of jealous slime the other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with suns. II WAIVING the contradictory statements in the various books of the New Testament; leaving out of the question the history of the manuscripts; saying nothing about the errors in trans- lation and the interpolations made by the fathers; and admit- ting, for the time being, that the books were all written at the 118 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. times claimed, and by the persons whose names they bear, the questions of inspiration, probability, and absurdity still remain. As a rule, where several persons testify to the same transaction, while agreeing in the main points, they will disagree upon many minor things, and such disagreement upon minor matters is gener- ally considered as evidence that the witnesses have not agreed among themselves upon the story they should tell. These differ- ences in statement we account for from the facts that all did not see alike, that all did not have the same opportunity for seeing, and that all had not equally good memories. But when we claim that the witnesses were inspired, we must admit that he who inspired them did know exactly what occurred, and consequently there should be no contradiction, even in the minutest detail. The accounts should be not ouly substantially, but they should be actually, the same. It is impossible to account for any differ- ences, or any contradictions, except from the weaknesses of human nature, and these weaknesses cannot be predicated of divine wis- dom. Why should there be more than one correct account of anything? Why were four gospels necessary? One inspired record of all that happened ought to be enough. One great objection to the Old Testament is the cruelty said to have been commanded by God, but all the cruelties recounted in the Old Testament ceased with death. The vengeance of Jehovah stopped at the portal of the tomb. He never threatened to avenge himself upon the dead; and not one word, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse of Malachi, contains the slightest intimation that God will punish in another world. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the frightful doctrine of eternal pain. It was the teacher of universal benevo- lence who rent the veil between time and eternity, and fixed the horrified gaze of man on the lurid gulfs of hell. Within the breast of non-resistance was coiled the worm that never dies. One great objection to the New Testament is that it bases salvation upon belief. This, at least, is true of the Gospel accord- ing to John, and of many of the epistles. I admit that Matthew never heard of the atonement, and died utterly ignorant of the scheme of salvation. I also admit that Mark never dreamed that it was necessary for a man to be born again; that he knew nothing of the mysterious doctrine of regeneration, and that he never even suspected that it was necessary to believe anything. In the sixteenth chapter of Mark, we are told that He that THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 119 believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but lie that believetli not shall be damned; but this passage has been shown to be an interpolation, and, consequently, not a solitary word is found in the Gospel according to Mark upon the subject of salvation by faith. The same is also true of the Gospel of Luke. It says not one word as to the necessity of believing on Jesus Christ, not one word as to the atonement, not one word upon the scheme of salvation, and not the slightest hint that it is necessary to believe anything here in order to be happy hereafter. And I here take occasion to say, that with most of the teach- ings of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke I most heartily agree. The miraculous parts must, of course, be thrown aside. I admit that the necessity of belief, the atonement, and the scheme of salvation are ~setforthintheGospelofJohn,-a gospel, in my opinion, not written until long after the others. According to the prevailing Christian belief, the Christian religion rests upon the doctrine of the atonement. If this doc- trine is without foundation, if it is repugnant to justice and mercy, the fabric falls. We are told that the first man committed a crime for which all his posterity are responsible,in other words, that we are accountable, and can be justly punished for a sin we never in fact committed. This absurdity was the father of another, namely, that a man can be rewarded for a good action done by another. God, according to the modern theologians, made a law, with the penalty of eternal death for its infraction. All men, they say, have broken that law. In the economy of heaven, this law had to be vindicated. This could be done by damning the whole human race. Through what is known as the atonement, the salvation of a few was made possible. They insist that the lawwhatever that isdemanded the extreme penalty, that justice called for its victims, and that even mercy ceased to plead. Under these circumstances, God, by allowing the inno- cent to suffer, satisfactorily settled with the law, and allowed a few of the guilty to escape. The law was satisfied with this arrangement. To carry out this scheme, God was born as a babe into this world. He grew in stature and increased in knowl- edge. At the age of thirty-three, after having lived a life ifiled with kindness, charity, and nobility, after having practiced every virtue, he was sacrificed as an atonement for man. It is claimed that he actually took our place, and bore our sins and our guilt; that in this way the justice of God was satisfied, and that the 120 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. blood of Christ was an atonement, an expiation, for the sins of all who might believe on him. Under tlie Mosaic dispensation, there was no remission of sin except through the shedding of blood. If a man committed cer- tain sins, lie mnst bring to the priest a lamb, a bullock, a goat, or a pair of turtle-doves. The priest would lay his hands upon the animal, and the sin of the man would be transferred. Then the animal would be killed in the place of the real sinner, and the blood thus shed and sprinkled upon the altar would be an atonement. In this way Jehovah was satisfied. The greater the crime, the greater the sacrificethe more blood, the greater the atonement. There was always a certain ratio between the value of the animal and the enormity of the sin. The most minute directions were given about the killing of these animals, and about the sprinkling of their blood. Every priest became a butcher, and every sanctuary a slaughter-house. Nothing could be more utterly shocking to a refined and loving soul. Noth- ing could have been better calculated to harden the heart than this continual shedding of innocent blood. This terrible system is supposed to have culminated in the sacrifice of Christ. His blood took the place of all other. It is necessary to shed no more. The law at last is satisfied, satiated, surfeited. The idea that God wants blood is at the bottom of the atonement, and rests upon the most fearful savagery. How can sin be trans- ferred from men to animals, and how can the shedding of the blood of animals atone for the sins of men? The Church says that the sinner is in debt to God, and that the obligation is discharged by the Saviour. The best that can possibly be said of such a transaction is, that the debt is trans- ferred, not paid. The truth is, that a sinner is in debt to the person he has injured. If a man injures his neighbor, it is not enough for him to get the forgiveness of God, but he must have the forgiveness of his neighbor. If a man puts his hand in the fire and God forgives him, his hand will smart exactly the same. You must, after all, reap what you sow. No god can give you wheat when you sow tares, and no devil can give you tares when. you sow wheat. There are in nature neither rewards nor punishmentsthere are consequences. The life of Christ is worth its example, its moral force, its heroism of benevolence. To make innocence suffer is the greatest sin; how then is it possible to make the suffering of the innocent a justification for THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 121 the criminal? Why should a man be wifling to let the innocent suffer for him? Does not the willingness show that he is utterly unworthy of the sacrifice? Certainly, no man would be fit for heaven who would consent that an innocent person should suffer for his sin. What would we think of a man who would aliow another to die for a crime that he himself had committed? What would we think of a law that allowed the innocent to take the place of the guilty? Is it possible to vindicate a just law by infficting punishment on the innocent? Would not that be a second violation instead of a vindication? If there was no general atonement until the crucifixion of Christ, what became of the countless millions who died before that time? And it must be remembered that the blood shed by the Jews was not for other nations. Jehovah hated foreigners. The Gentiles were left without forgiveness. What has become of the millions who have died since, without having heard of the atonement? -What becomes of those who have heard but have not believed? It seems to me that the doctrine of the atonement is absurd, unjust, and immoraL Can a law be satis- fied by the execution of the wrong person? When a man com- mits a crime, the law demands his punishment, not that of a substitute and there can be no law, human or divine, that can be satisfied by the punishment of a substitute. Can there be a law that demands that the guilty be rewarded? And yet, to reward the guilty is far nearer justice than to punish the innocent. According to the orthodox theology, there would have been no heaven had no atonement been made. All the children of men would have been cast into hell forever. The old men bowed with grief, the smiling mothers, the sweet babes, the loving maidens, the brave, the tender, and the just, would have been given over to eternal pain. Man, it is claimed, can make no atonement for himself. If he commits one sin, and with that exception lives a life of perfect virtue, still that one sin would remain unexpiated, unatoned, and for that one sin he would be forever lost. To be saved by the goodness of another, to be a redeemed debtor forever, has in it something repugnant to man- hood. We must also remember that Jehovah took special charge of the Jewish people; and we have always been taught that he did so for the purpose of civilizing them. If he had succeeded in civilizing the Jews, he would have made the damnation of the 122 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. entire human race a certainty; because, if the Jews had been a civilized people when Christ appeared,a people whose hearts had not been hardened by the laws and teachings of Jehovah, they would not have crucified him, and, as a consequence, the world would have been lost. If the Jews had believed in relig- ious freedom,in the right of thought and speech,not a human soul could ever have been saved. If, when Christ was on his way to Calvary, some brave, heroic soul had rescued him from the holy mob, lie would not ouly have been eternally damned for his pains, but would have rendered impossible the salvation of any human being; and, except for the crucifixion of her son, the Virgin Mary, if the church is right, would be to-day among the lost. In countless ways the Christian world has endeavored, for nearly two thousand years, to explain the atonement, and every effort has ended in an admission that it cannot be understood, and a declaration that it must be believed. Is it not immoral to teach that man can sin, that he can harden his heart and pollute his soul, and that, by repenting and believing something that he does not comprehend, he can avoid the consequences of his crimes? Has the promise and hope of forgiveness ever pre- vented the commission of a sin? Should men be taught that sin gives happiness here; that they ought to bear the evils of a virtuous life in this world for the sake of joy in the next; that they can repent between the last sin and the last breath; that after repentance every stain of the soul is washed away by the innocent blood of another; that the serpent of regret will not hiss in the ear of memory; that the saved will not even pity the victims of their own crimes; that the goodness of another can be transferred to them; and that sins forgiven cease to affect the unhappy wretches sinned against? Another objection is that a certain belief is necessary to save the soul. It is often asserted that to believe is the only safe way. If you wish to be safe, be honest. Nothing can be safer than that. No matter what his belief may be, no man, even in the hour of death, can regret having been honest. It never can be necessary to throw away your reason to save your soul. A soul without reason is scarcely worth saving. There is no more degrading doctrine than that of mental non-resistance. The soul has a right to defend its castlethe brain, and he who waives that right becomes a serf and slave. Neither can I THE CIII?ISTIAN RELIGION. 123 admit that a man, by doing me an injury, can place me under obligation to do him a service. To render benefits for injuries is to ignore all distinctions between actions. He who treats his friends and enemies alike has neither love nor justice. The idea of non-resistance never occurred to a man with power to protect himself. This doctrine was the child of weakness, born when resistance was impossible. To allow a crime to be committed when you can prevent it, is next to committing the crime your- self. And yet, under the banner of non-resistance, the Church has shed the blood of millions, and in the folds of her sacred vestments have gleamed the daggers of assassination. With her cunning hands she wove the purple for hypocrisy, and placed the crown upon the brow of crime. For a thousand years larceny held the scales of justice, while beggars scorned the princely sons of toil, and ignorant fear denounced the liberty of thought. If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before him, like a panorama, moved the history yet to be. He knew exactly how his words would be interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the fires of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He knew that brave men would laugnish in dungeons, in darkness, filled with pain; that the Church would use instruments of torture, that his followers would appeal to whip and chain. He must have seen the hori- zon of the future red with the flames of the auto da f4. He knew all the creeds that would spring like poison fungi from every text. He saw the sects waging war against each other. He saw thousands of men, under the orders of priests, building dungeons for their fellow-men. He saw them using instruments of pain. He heard the groans, saw the faces white with agony, the tears, the bloodheard the shrieks and sobs of all the moan- ing, martyred multitudes. He knew that commentaries would be written on his words with swords, to be read by the light of fag- ots. He knew that the Inquisition would be born of teachings attributed to him. He saw all the interpolations and falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He knew that above these fields of death, these dungeons, these burnings, for a thousand years would float the dripping banner of the cross. He knew that in his name his followers would trade in human flesh, that cradles would be robbed, and womens breasts unbabed for gold, said yet he died with voiceless lips. Why did he fail to speak? 124 TILE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W Why did lie not tell his disciples, and through them the world, that man should not persecute, for opinions sake, his fell ow-man? Why did he not cry, You shall not persecute in my name; you shall not burn and torment those who differ from you in creed? Why did he not plainly say, I am the Son of God? Why did he not explain the doctrine of the trinity? Why did he not tell the manner of baptism that was pleasing to him? Why did he not say something positive, definite, and satisfactory about another world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven to the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he go dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and to doubt? He came, they tell us, to make a revelation, and what did he reveal? Love thy neighbor as thyself? That was in the Old Testament. Love God with all thy heart? That was in the Old Testament. Return good for evil? That was said by Buddha seven hundred years before he was born. Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you? This was the doctrine of Laotse. Did he come to give a rule of action? Zoroaster had done this long before: Whenever thou art in doubt as to whether an action is good or bad, abstain from it. Did he come to teach us of another world? The immortality of the soul had been taught by Hindus, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans hundreds of years before he was born. Long before, the world had been told by Socrates that: One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we may have suffered from him And Cicero had said: Let us not listen to those who think that we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly: nothing is more praise- worthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive. Is there anything nearer perfect than this from Confucius: For benefits return benefits; for injuries return justice without any admixture of revenge? The dogma of eternal punishment rests upon passages in the New Testament. This infamous belief subverts every idea of justice. Around the angel of immortality the Church has coiled this serpent. A finite being can neither commit an infinite sin, nor a sin ~gainst the infinite. A being of infinite goodness and wisdom has no right, according to the human standard of justice, THE CHI?ISTIAN 1?ELIGION. 125 to create any being destined to suffer eternal pain. A being of infinite wisdom would not create a failure, and surely a man destined to everlasting agony is not a success. How long, according to the universal benevolence of the New Testament, can a man be reasonably punished in the next world for failing to believe something nureasonable in this? Can it be possible that any punishment can endure forever? Suppose that every flake of snow that ever fell was a figure nine, and that the first flake was multiplied by the second, and thai product by the third, and so on to the last flake. And then suppose that this total should be multiplied by every drop of rain that ever fell, calling each drop a figure nine; and that total by each blade of grass that ever helped to weave a carpet for the earth, calling each blade a figure nine; and that again by every grain of sand on every shore, so that the grand total would make - a line of nines so long that it would reqnire millions upon millions of years for light, traveling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles per second, to reach the end. And suppose, further, that each unit in this almost infinite total stood for billions of ages still that vast and almost endless time, measured by all the years beyond, is as one flake, one drop, one leaf, one blade, one grain, compared with all the flakes, and drops, and leaves, and blades, and grains. Upon loves breast the Church has placed the eternal asp. And yet, in the same book in which is taught this most infamous of doctrines, we are assured that The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his wor~~~~ TI. So FAR as we know, man is the author of all books. If a book had been found on the earth by the first man, he might have regarded it as the work of God; but as men were here a good while before any books were found, and as man has pro- duced a great many books, the probability is that the Bible is no exception. Most nations, at the time the Old Testament was written, believed in slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination, and relig- ious persecution; and it is not wonderful that the book contained nothing contrary to such belief. The fact that it was in exact accord with the morality of its time proves that it was not the VOL. CXXXIII.NO. 297. 9 126 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. product of any being superior to man. The inspired writers upheld or established slavery, countenanced polygamy, com- manded wars of extermination, and ordered the slaughter of women and babes. In these respects they were precisely like the uninspired savages by whom they were surrounded. They also taught and commanded religious persecution as a duty, and vis- ited the most trivial offenses with the punishment of death. In these particulars they were in exact accord with their barbarian neighbors. They were utterly ignorant of geology and astron- omy, and knew no more of what had happened than of what would happen; and, so far as accuracy is concerned, their history and prophecy were about equal; in other words, they were just as ignorant as those who lived and died in natures night. Does any Christian believe that if God were to write a book now, he would uphold the crimes commanded in the Old Testa- ment? Has Jehovah improved? Has iufinite mercy become more merciful? Has infinite wisdom intellectually advanced? Will any one claim that the passages upholding slavery have liberated mankind; that we are indebted for our modern homes to the texts that made polygamy a virtue; or that religious liberty found its soil, its light, and rain in the infamous verse wherein the husband is commanded to stone to death the wife for wor- shiping an unknown God? The usual answer to these objections is that no country has ever been civilized without the Bible. The Jews were the only people to whom Jehovah made his will directly known,the only people who had the Old Testa- ment. Other nations were utterly neglected by their Creator. Yet, such was the effect of the Old Testament on the Jews, that they crucified a kind, loving, and perfectly innocent man. They could not have done much worse without a Bible. In the cruci- fixion of Christ, they followed the teachings of his Father. If, as it is now alieged by the theologians, no nation can be civilized without a Bible, certainly God must have known the fact six thousand years ago, as well as the theologians know it now. Why did he not furnish every nation with a Bible? As to the Old Testament, I insist that all the bad passages were written by men; that those passages were not inspired. I insist that a being of infinite goodness never commanded man to enslave his fellow-man, never told a mother to sell her babe, never established polygamy, never ordered one nation to extermi THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 127 nate another, and never told a husband to kill his wife because she suggested the worshiping of some other God. I also insist that the Old Testament would be a much better book with all of these passages left out; and, whatever may be said of the rest, the passages to which attention has been drawn can with vastly more propriety be attributed to a devil than to a god. Take from the New Testament all passages upholding the idea that belief is necessary to salvation; that Christ was offered as an atonement for the sins of the world; that the punishment of the human soul will go on forever; that heaven is the reward of faith, and hell the penalty of honest investigation; take from it all miraculous stories,and I admit that all the good passages are true. If they are true, it makes no difference whether they are inspired or not. Inspiration is ouly necessary to give authority to that which is repugnant to human reason. Ouly that which never happened needs to be substantiated by miracles. The universe is natural. The Church must cease to insist that the passages upholding the institutions of savage men were inspired of God. The dogma of the atonement must be abandoned. Good deeds must take the place of faith. The savagery of eternal punishment must be renounced. Credulity is not a virtue, and investigation is not a crime. Miracles are the children of mendacity. Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, unbroken, sublime, and eternal procession of causes and effects. Reason must be the final arbiter. Inspired books attested by miracles cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. A relig- ion that does not command the respect of the greatest minds will, in a little while, excite the mockery of all. Every civilized man believes in the liberty of thought. Is it possible that God is intolerant? Is an act infamous in man one of the virtues of the Deity? Could there be progress in heaven without intellect- ual liberty? Is the freedom of the future to exist ouly in per- dition? Is it not, after all, barely possible that a man acting like Christ can be saved? Is a man to be eternally rewarded for believing aecording to evidence, without evidence, or against evidence? Are we to be saved because we are good, or because another was virtuous? Is credulity to be winged and crowned, while honest doubt is cliained and damned? Do not misunderstand me. My position is that the cruel passages in the Old Testament are not inspired; that slavery, 128 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious persecution always liave been, are, and forever will be, abliorred and cursed by the honest, the virtuous, and the loving; that the innocent cannot justly suffer for the guilty, and that vicarious vice and vicarious virtue are equally absurd; that eternal punishment is eternal revenge; that only the natural can happen; that miracles prove the dishonesty of the few and the credulity of the many; and that, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, salvation does not depend upon belief, nor the atonement, nor a second ~ but that these gospels are in exact harmony with the declaration of the great Persian Taking the first footstep with the good thought, the second with the good word, and the third with the good deed, I entered paradise. The dogmas of the past no longer reach the level of the high- est thought, nor satisfy the hunger of the heart. While dusty faiths, embalmed and sepulchered in ancient texts, remain the same, the sympathies of men enlarge; the brain no longer kills its young; the happy lips give liberty to honest thoughts; the mental firmament expands and lifts; the broken clouds drift by; the hideous dreams, the foul, misshapen children of the monstrous night, dissolve and fade. ROBERT Cf. INGERSOLL. MR. BLACK. Gratiano speaks an inifuite deal of nothing, more than a~iy man in all Venice: his reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day crc you hind them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.Merchant of Venice. Tin~ request to answer the foregoing paper comes to me, not in the form but with the effect of a challenge, which I cannot decline without seeming to acknowledge that the religion of the civilized world is an absurd superstition, propagated by impostors, professed by hypocrites, and believed only by credulous dupes. But why should I, an unlearned and unauthorized layman, be placed in sucl~i a predicament? The explanatiQn is easy enough. This is no business of the priests. Their prescribed duty is to preach the word, in the full assurance that it Will commend itself to all good and honest hearts by its own manifest veracity and

128 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious persecution always liave been, are, and forever will be, abliorred and cursed by the honest, the virtuous, and the loving; that the innocent cannot justly suffer for the guilty, and that vicarious vice and vicarious virtue are equally absurd; that eternal punishment is eternal revenge; that only the natural can happen; that miracles prove the dishonesty of the few and the credulity of the many; and that, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, salvation does not depend upon belief, nor the atonement, nor a second ~ but that these gospels are in exact harmony with the declaration of the great Persian Taking the first footstep with the good thought, the second with the good word, and the third with the good deed, I entered paradise. The dogmas of the past no longer reach the level of the high- est thought, nor satisfy the hunger of the heart. While dusty faiths, embalmed and sepulchered in ancient texts, remain the same, the sympathies of men enlarge; the brain no longer kills its young; the happy lips give liberty to honest thoughts; the mental firmament expands and lifts; the broken clouds drift by; the hideous dreams, the foul, misshapen children of the monstrous night, dissolve and fade. ROBERT Cf. INGERSOLL. MR. BLACK. Gratiano speaks an inifuite deal of nothing, more than a~iy man in all Venice: his reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day crc you hind them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.Merchant of Venice. Tin~ request to answer the foregoing paper comes to me, not in the form but with the effect of a challenge, which I cannot decline without seeming to acknowledge that the religion of the civilized world is an absurd superstition, propagated by impostors, professed by hypocrites, and believed only by credulous dupes. But why should I, an unlearned and unauthorized layman, be placed in sucl~i a predicament? The explanatiQn is easy enough. This is no business of the priests. Their prescribed duty is to preach the word, in the full assurance that it Will commend itself to all good and honest hearts by its own manifest veracity and THE CHI?ISTIAN 1?ELIGION. 129 tlie singular purity of its precepts. They cannot afford to turn away from their proper work, and leave willing hearers unin- structed, while they wrangle in vain with a predetermined opponent. They were warned to expect slander, indignity, and insult, and these are among the evils which they must not resist. It will be seen that I am assuming no clerical function. I am not out on the forlorn hope of converting Mr. Ingersoll. I am no preacher exhorting a sinner to leave the seat of the scornful and come up to the bench of the penitents. My duty is more analo- gous to that of the policeman who would silence a rude disturber of the congregation, by telling him that his clamor is false and his conduct an offense against public decency. Nor is the Church in any danger which calls for the special vigilance of its servants. Mr. Ingersoll thinks that the rock- fotinded faith of Christendom is giving way before his assaults, but he is grossly mistaken. The Iirst sentence of his essay is a preposterous blunder. It is not true that a profound change has taken place in the world of thought, uniess a more rapid spread of the Gospel and a more faithful observance of its moral princi- ples can be called so. Its truths are everywhere proclaimed with the power of sincere conviction, and accepted with devout rever- ence by uncounted multitudes of all classes. Solemn temples rise to its honor in the great cities; from every hill-top in the country you see the church-spire pointing toward heaven, and on Sunday all the paths that lead to it are crowded with worshipers. In nearly all families, parents teach their children that Christ is God, and his system of morality absolutely perfect. This belief lies so deep in the popular heart that, if every written record of it were destroyed to-day, the memory of millions could reproduce it to-morrow. Its earnestness is proved by its works. Wherever it goes it manifests itself in deeds of practical benevolence. It builds, not churches alone, but almshouses, hospitals, and asy- lums. It shelters the poor, feeds the hungry, visits the sick, consoles the afflicted, provides for the fatherless, comforts the heart of the widow, instructs the ignorant, reforms the vicious, and saves to the uttermost them that are ready to perish. To the common observer, it does not look as if Christianity was making itself ready to be swallowed up by Infidelity. Thus far, at least, the promise has beeu kept that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 130 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. There is, to be sure, a change in the party hostile to religion not a profound change, but a change entirely superficial which consists, not in thought, but merely in modes of expres.. sion and methods of attack. The bad classes of society always hated the doctrine and discipline which reproached their wicked- ness and frightened them by threats of punishment in another world. Aforetime they showed their contempt of divine authority only by their actions; but now, under new leadership, their enmity against God breaks out into articulate blasphemy. They assemble themselves together, they hear with passionate admiration the bold harangue which ridicules and defies the Maker of the universe; fiercely they rage against the Highest, and loudly they laugh, alike at the justice that condemns, and the mercy that offers to pardon them. The orator who relieves them by assurances of impunity, and tells them that no supreme authority has made any law to control them, is applauded to the echo and paid a high price for his congenial labor; he pockets their money, and flatters himself that he is a great power, pro- foundly moving the world of thought. There is another totally false notion expressed in the opening paragraph, namely, that they who know most of nature believe the least about theology. The truth is exactly the other way. The more clearly one sees the grand procession of causes and effects, the more awful his reverence becomes for the author of the sublime and unbroken law which links them together. Not self-conceit and rebellious pride, but unspeakable humility, and a deep sense of the measureless distance between the Crea- tor and the creature, fi]ls the mind of him who looks with a rational spirit upon the works of the All-wise One. The heart of Newton repeats the solemn confession of David: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? At the same time, the lamentable fact must be admitted that a little learning is a dangerous thing~~ to some persons. The sciolist with a mere smattering of physical knowledge is apt to mistake himself for a philosopher, and, swelling with his own importance, he gives out, like Simon Magus, that himself is some great one. His vanity becomes inflamed more and more, until he begins to think he knows all things. He takes every occasion to show his accomplishments by finding fault with the THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 131 works of creation and Providence; and this is an exercise in which he cannot long continue without learning to disbelieve in any Being greater than himself. It was to such a person, and not to the unpretending simpleton, that Solomon applied his often quoted aphorism: The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. These are what Paul refers to as vain babblings and the opposition of science, falsely so called ~; but they are per- fectly powerless to stop or turn aside the great current of human thought on the subject of Christian theology. That majestic stream, supplied from a thousand unfailing fountains, rolls on and will roll forever. Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum. Mr. Ingersoll is not, as some have estimated him, the most formidable enemy that Christianity has encountered since the time of Julian the Apostate. But he stands at the head of living infidels, by merit raised to that bad eminence. His mental organization has the peculiar defects which fit him for such a place. He is all imagination and no discretion. He rises some- times into a region of wild poetry, where he can color everything to suit himself. His motto well expresses the character of his argumentationmountains are as unstable as clouds~~: a fancy is as good as a fact, and a high-sounding period is rather better than a logical demonstration. His inordinate self-confidence makes him at once ferocious and fearless. He was a practical politician before he took the stump against Christianity, and at ali times he has proved his capacity to split the ears of the groundlings,~~ and make the unskillful laugh. The article before us is the least objectionable of ali his productions. Its style is higher, and better suited to the weight of the theme. Here the violence of his fierce invective is moderated; his scurrility gives place to an attempt at sophistry less shocking if not more true; and his coarse jokes are either excluded altogether, or else veiled in the decent obscurity of general terms. Such a paper from such a man, at a time like the present, is not wholly unworthy of a grave contradiction. He makes certain charges which we answer by an explicit denial,and thus an issue is made,upon which, as a pleader would say, we put ourselves upon the country. He avers that a certain something called Christianity is a false faith imposed on the world without evidence; that the facts it pretends to rest on are mere inventions; that its doctrines are pernicious; that 132 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. its requirements are unreasonable; and that its sanctions are crueL I deny all this, and assert, on the contrary, that its doc- trines are divinely revealed; its fundamental facts incontestably proved; its morality perfectly free from all taint of error, and its influence most beneficent upon society in general, and upon all individuals who accept it and make it their rule of action. How shall this be determined? Not by what we cdl divine revelation, for that would be begging the question; not by senti- ment, taste, or temper, for these are as likely to be false as true but by inductive reasoning from evidence, of which the value is to be measured according to those rules of logic which enlightened. and just men everywhere have adopted to guide them in the search for fruth. We can appeal only to that rational love of justice, and that detestation of falsehood, which fair-minded per- sons of good intelligence bring to the consideration of other important subjects when it becomes their duty to decide upon them. In short, I want a decision upon sound judicial principles. Gibson, the great Chief-Justice of Pennsylvania, once said to certain skeptical friends of his: Give Christianity a common- law trial; submit the evidence pro and con to an impartial jury under the direction of a competent court, and the verdict will assuredly be in i~s favor. This deliverance, coming from the most illustrious judge of his time, not at all given to expressions of sentimental piety, and quite incapable of speaking on any sub- ject for mere effect, staggered the unbelief of those who heard it. I did not know him then, except by his great reputation for ability and integrity, but my thoughts were strongly influenced by his authority, and I learned to set a still higher value upon all his opinions when, in after life, I was honored with his close and. intimate friendship. Let Christianity have a trial on Mr. Ingersolls indictment, and give us a decision secnndum allegctta et probata. I will con- fine myself strictly to the record; that is to say, I will meet the accusations contained in this paper, and not those made elsewhere by him or others. His first specification against Christianity is the belief of its disciples that there is a personal God, the creator of the mate- rial universe. If God made the world it was a most stupendous miracle, and all miracles, according to Mr. Ingersolls idea, are the children of mendacity. To a4mit the one great miracle of creation would be an admission that other miracles are at least THE CH1~ISTIAN 1?ELIGION. 133 probable, and that would ruin his whole case. But you cannot catch the leviathan of atheism with a hook. The universe, he says, is naturalit came into being of its own accord; it made its own laws at the start, and afterward improved itself considerably by spontaneous evolution. It would be a mere waste of time and space to enumerate the proofs which show that the universe was created by a pr& xistent and self-conscious Being, of power and wisdom to us inconceivable. Conviction of the fact (miraculous though it be) forces itself on every one whose mental faculties are healthy and tolerably well balanced. The notion that all things owe their origin and their harmonious arrangement to the fortuitous concurrence of atoms is a kind of lunacy which very few men in these days are afflicted with. I hope I may safely assume it as certain that all, or nearly all, who read this page wi]l have sense and reason enough to see for themselves that the plan of the universe could not have been designed without a Designer, or executed without a Maker. But Mr. Ingersoll asserts that, at all events, this material world had not a good and beneficent creator; it is a bad, savage, cruel piece of work, with its pestilences, storms, earthquakes, and volca- noes; and man, with his liabilityto sickn~ss, suffering, and death, is not a success, but, on the contrary, a failure. To defend the Crea- tor of the world against an arraignment so foul as this would be almost as unbecoming as to make the accusation. We have neither jurisdiction nor capacity to rejudge the justice of God. Why man is made to fill this particular place in the scale of creation a little lower than the angels, yet far above the brutes; not pas- siouless and pure, like the former, nor mere machines, like the latter; able to stand, yet free to fall; knowing the right, and accountable for going wrong; gifted with reason, and impelled by self-love to exercise the facultythese are questions on which we may have our speculative opinions, but knowledge is out of our reach. Meantime, we do not discredit our mental independ- ence by taking it for granted that the Supreme Being has done all things well. Our ignorance of the whole scheme makes us poor critics upon the small part that comes within our limited perceptions. Seeming defects in the structure of the world may be its most perfect ornamentall apparent harshness the tender- est of mercies. All discord, harmony not understood, All partial evil, umversal good. - 134 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. But worse errors are imputed to God as moral ruler of the world than those charged against him as creator. He made man badly, but governed him worse; if the Jehovah of the Old Tes- tament was not merely an imaginary being, then, according to Mr. Ingersoll, he was a prejudiced, barbarous, criminal tyrant. We wili see whaf ground he lays, if any, for these outrageous assertions. Mainly, principally, first and most important of all, is the unqualified assertion that the moral code which Jehovah gave to his people is in many respects abhorrent to every good and tender man. Does Mr. Ingersoll know what he is talking about 7 The moral code of the Bible consists of certain immutable rules to govern the conduct of all men, at all times and all places, in their private and personal relations with one another. It is entirely separate and apart from the civil polity, the religious forms, the sanitary provisions, the police regulations, and the system of international law laid down for the special and exclusive observance of the Jewish people. This is a distinction which every intelligent man knows how to make. Has Mr. Ingersoll fallen into the egregious blunder of confounding these things? or, understanding the true sense of his words, is he rash and shameless enough to assert that the moral code of the Bible excites the abhorrence of good men? In fact and in truth, this moral code, which he reviles, instead of being abhorred, is enti- tled to, and has received, the profoundest respect of all honest and sensible persons. The second table of the Decalogue is a perfect compendium of those duties which every man owes to himself, his family, and his neighbor. In a few simple words, which he can commit to memory almost in a minute, it teaches him to purify his heart from covetousness; to live decently, to injure nobody in reputation, person, or property, and to give every one his own. By the poets, the prophets, and the sages of Israel, these great elements are expanded into a volume of minuter rules, so clear, so impressive, and yet so solemn and so lofty, that no pre~xisting system of philosophy can compare with it for a moment. If this vain mortal is not blind with passion, he wili see, upon reflection, that he has attacked the Old Testament precisely where it is most impregnable. Dismissing his groundless charge against the moral code, we come to his strictures on the civil government of the Jews, which he says was so bad and unjust that the Lawgiver by THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 135 whom it was established must have been as savagely cruel as the Creator that made storms and pestilences; and the work of both was more worthy of a devil than a god. His language is recklessly bad, very defective in method, and altogether lacking in precision. But, apart from the ribaldry of it, which I do not feel myself bound to notice, I find four objections to the Jewish constitutionnot more than fourwhich are definite enough to admit of an answer. These relate to the provisions of the Mosaic law on the subjects of (1) Blasphemy and Idolatry; (2) War; (3) Slavery; (4) Polygamy. In these respects he pronounces the Jewish system not only unwise but criminally unjust. Here let me call attention to the difficulty of reasoning about justice with a man who has no acknowledged standard of right and wrong. What is justice? That which accords with law; and the supreme law is the will of God. But I am dealing with an adversary who does not admit that there is a God. Then for him there is no standard at all; one thing is as right as another, and all things are equally wrong. Without a sovereign ruler there is no law, and where there is no law there can be no trans- gression. It is the misfortune of the atheistic theory that it makes the moral world an anarchy; it refers all ethical questions to that confused tribunal where chaos sits as umpire and by decision more embroils the fray. But through the whole of this cloudy paper there runs a vein of presumptuous egoism which says as plainly as words can speak it that the author holds himself to be the ultimate judge of all good and evil; what he approves is right, and what he dislikes is certainly wrong. Of course I concede nothing to a claim like that. I will not admit that the Jewish constitution is a thing to be condemned merely because he curses it. I appeal from his profane malediction to the conscience of men who have ~ rule to judge by. Such persons will readily see that his specific objections to the statesmanship which established the civil government of the Hebrew people are extremely shallow, and do not furnish the shade of an excuse for the indecency of his general abuse. First. He regards the punishments inflicted for blasphemy and idolatry as being immoderately crueL Considering them merely as religious offenses ,as sins against God alone,J agree that civil laws should notice them not at all. But sometimes they affect very injuriously certain social rights which it is the duty of the state to protect. Wantonly to shock the religious feelings 136 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. of your neighbor is a grievous wrong. To utter blasphemy or obscenity in the presence of a Christian woman is hardly better than to strike her in the face. Still, neither policy nor justice requires them to be ranked among the highest crimes in a gov- ernment constituted like ours. But things were wholly different under the Jewish theocracy, where God was the personal head of the state. There blasphemy was a breach of political allegiance; idolatry was an overt act of freason; to worship the gods of the hostile heathen was deserting to the public enemy, and giving him aid and comfort. These are crimes which every independent community has always punished with the utmost rigor. In our own very recent history, they were repressed at the cost of more lives than Judea ever contained at any one time. Mr. Ingersoll not only ignores these considerations, but lie goes the length of calling God a religious persecutor and a tyrant because he does not encourage and reward the service and devotion paid by his enemies to the false gods of the pagan world. He professes to believe that all kinds of worship are equally meritorious, and should meet the same acceptance from the true God. It is almost incredible that such drivel as this should be uttered by anybody. But Mr. Ingersoll not only expresses the thought plainlyhe urges it with the most extrava- gant figures of his florid rhetoric. He quotes the first command- ment, in which Jehovah claims for himself the exclusive worship of His people, and cites, in contrast, the promise put in the mouth of Brahma, that he wili appropriate the worship of all gods to himself, and reward all worshipers alike. These passages being compared, he declares the first a dungeon, where crawl the things begot of jealous slime; the other, great as the domed firmament, inlaid with suns. Why is the living God, whom Christians believe tobe the Lord of liberty and Father of lights, denounced as the keeper of a loathsome dungeon? Because he refuses to encourage and reward the worship of Mammon and Moloch, of Belial and Baal; of Bacchus, with its drunken orgies, and Venus, with its wanton obscenities; the bestial religion which degraded the soul of Egypt and the dark idolatries of alienated Judah, polluted with the moral filth of all the nations round about. Let the reader decide whether this man, entertaining such sentiments and opinions, is fit to be a teacher, or at all likely to lead us in the way we should go. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 137 Second. Under tlie constitution which God provided for the Jews, they had, like every other nation, the war-making power. They could not have lived a day without it. The right to exist implied the right to repel, with all their strength, the opposing force which threatened their destruction. It is true, also, that in the exercise of this power they did not observe those rules of courtesy and humanity which have been adopted in modern times by civilized belligerents. MThy? Because their enemies, being mere savages, did not understand, and would not practice, any rule whatever; and the Jews were bound ex necessi- tate reinot merely justified by the lex talionisto do as their enemies did. In your treatmefit of hostile barbarians, you not only may lawfully, but must necessarily, adopt their mode of warfare. If they come to conquer you, they may be conquered by you; if they give no quarter, they are entitled to none; if the death of your whole population be their purpose, you may defeat it by exterminating theirs. This sufficiently answers the silly talk of atheists and semi-atheists about the warlike wickedness of the Jews. But Mr. Ingersoll positively, and with the emphasis of supreme and all-sufficient authority, declares that a war of conquest is simply ~ He sustains this proposition by no argument founded in principle. He puts sentiment in place of law, and denounces aggressive fighting because it is offensive to his ten- der and refined soul: the atrocity of it is therefore proportioned to the sensibilities of his own heart. He proves war a desperately wicked thing by continually vaunting his own love for small children. Babessweet babesthe prattle of babesare the subjects of his most pathetic eloquence, and his idea of music is embodied in the commonplace expression of a Hindu, that the bite is sweet only to those who have not heard the prattle of their own children. All this is very amiable in him, and the more so, perhaps, as these objects of his affection are the young ones of a race in his opinion miscreated by an evil-working chance. But his philoprogenitiveness proves nothing against Jew or Gentile, seeing that all have it in an equal degree, and those feel it most who make the least parade of it. Certainly it gives him no authority to malign the God who implanted it aiike in the hearts of us all. But I admit that his benevolence becomes peculiar and ultra when it extends to beasts as well as babes. He is struck with horror by the sacrificial solemnities of the Jewish religion. 138 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Tlie killing of those animals was, he says, a terrible system,~7 a shedding of innocent blood, shocking to a refined and sen- sitive soul. There is such a depth of tenderness in this feeling, and such a splendor-of refinement,that I give up without a struggle to the superiority of the man who merely professes it. A carnivorous American, full of beef and mutton, who mourns with indignant sorrow because bulls and goats were killed in Judea three thousand years ago, has reached the climax of sentimental goodness, and should be permitted to dictate on all questions of peace and war. Let Grotius, Vattel, and Puffen- dorf, as well as Moses and the prophets, hide their diminished heads. But to show how inefficacious, for ali practical purposes, a mere sentiment is when substituted for a principle, it is only necessary to recollect that Mr. Ingersoll is himself a warrior who staid not behind the mighty men of his tribe when they gathered themselves together for a war of conquest. He took the lead of a regiment as eager as himself to spoil the Phuistines, and out he went a-coloneing. How many Amale- kites, and Hittites, and Amorites he put to the edge of the sword, how many wives he widowed, or how many mothers he unbabed cannot now be told. I do not even know how many droves of innocent oxen he condemned to the slaughter. But it is certain that his refined and tender soul took great pleasure in the terror, conflagration, blood, and tears with which the war was attended, and in all the hard oppressions which the conquered people were made to suffer afterward. I do not say that the war was either better or worse for his participation and approval. But if his own conduct (for which he professes neither penitence nor shame) was right, it was right on grounds which make it an inexcusable out- rage to call the children of Israel savage criminals for carrying on wars of aggression to save the life of their government. These inconsistencies are the necessary consequence of having no rule of action and no guide for the conscience. When a man throws away the golden metewand of the law which God has provided, and takes the elastic cord of feeling for his measure of right- eousness, you cannot tell from day to day what he will think or do. Third. But Jehovah permitted hi~ chosen people to hold the captives they took in war or purchased from the heathen as serv- ants for life. This was slavery, and Mr. Ingersoll declares that THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 139 in all civilized countries it is not only admitted, but it is pas- sionately asserted, that slavery is, and always was, a hideous crime; therefore he concludes that Jehovah was a criminaL This would be a non sequitur, even if the premises were true. But the premises are false: civilized countries have admitted no such thing. That slavery is a crime, under all circumstances and at all times, is a doctrine first started by the adherents of a political faction in this country, less than forty years ago. They denounced God and Christ for not agreeing with them, in terms very similar to those used here by Mr. Ingersoll. But they did not constitute the civilized world; nor were they, if the truth must be told, a very respectable portion of it. Politically, they were successful; I need not say by what means, or with what effect upon the morals of the country. Doubtless Mr. Ingersoll gets a great advantage by invoking their passions and their interests to his aid, and he knows how to use it. I can only say that, whether American Abolitionism was right or wrong under the circurn- stances in which we were placed, my faith and my reason both assure me that the infallible God proceeded upon good grounds when he authorized slavery in Judea. Subordination of inferiors to superiors is the groundwork of human society. All improve- ment of our race, in this world and the next, must come from obedience to some master better and wiser than ourselves. There can be no question that, when a Jew took a neighboring savage for his bond-servant, incorporated him into his family, tamed him, taught him to work, and gave him a knowledge of the true God, he conferred upon him a most beneficent boon. Fourth. Polygamy is another of his objections to the Mosaic constitution. Strange to say, it is not there. It is neither com- manded nor prohibited; it is only discouraged. If Mr. Ingersoll were a statesman instead of a mcre politician, he would see good and sufficient reasons for the forbearance to legislate directly upon the snbject. It would be improper for me to set them forth here. He knows, probably, that the influence of the Christian Church alone, and without the aid of state enactments, has extirpated this bad feature of Asiatic manners wherever its doctrines were carried. As the Christian faith prevails in any community, in that proportion precisely marriage is consecrated to its true purpose, and all intercourse between the sexes refined and purified. Mr. Ingersoll got his own devotion to the principle of monogamyhis own respect for the highest type of female 140 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. characterhis own belief in the virtue of fidelity to one good wife from the example and precept of his Christian parents. I speak confidently, because these are sentiments which do not grow in the heart of the natural man without being planted. Why, then, does he throw polygamy into the face of the religion which abhors it? Because he is nothing if not political. The Mormons believe in polygamy, and the Mormons are unpopular. They are guilty of having not only many wives but much property, and if a war could be hissed up against them, its fruits might be more gaynefull pilladge than wee doe now conceyve of. It is a cun. ning maneuver, this, of strengthening atheism by enlisting anti- Mormon rapacity against the God of the Christians. I can only protest against the use he would make of these and other political interests. It is not argument; it is mere stump oratory. I think I have repelled ali of Mr. Ingersolls accusations against the Old Testament that are worth noticing, and I might stop here. But I will not~ close upon him without letting him see, at least, some part of the ease on the other side. I do not enumerate in detail the positive proofs which sup- port the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, though they are at hand in great abundance, because the evidence in support of the new dispensation will establish the verity of the oldthe two being so connected together that if one is true the other cannot be false. When Jesus of Nazareth announced himself to be Christ, the Son of God, in Judea, many thousand persons who heard his words and saw his works believed in his divinity without hesita- tion. Since the morning of the creation, no thing has occurred so wonderful as the rapidity with which this religion spread itself abroad. Men who were in the noon of life when Jesus was put to death as a malefactor lived to see him worshiped as God by organized bodies of believers in every province of the Roman empire. In a few more years it took complete possession of the general mind, supplanted all other religions, and wrought a rad- ical change in human society. It did this in the face of obstacles which, according to every human calculation, were insurmount- able. It was antagonized by all the evil propensities, the sensual wickedness, and the vulgar crimes of the multitude, as well as the polished vices of the luxurious classes; and was most vio- lently opposed even by those sentiments and habits of thought which were esteemed virtuous, such as patriotism and military THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 141 heroism. It encountered not only the ignorance and superstition, but the learning and philosophy, the poetry, eloquence, and art of the time. Barbarism and civilization were alike its deadly enemies. The priesthood of every established religion and the authority of every government were arrayed against it. All these, combined together and roused to ferocious hostility, were overcome, not by the enticing words of mans wisdom, but by the simple presentation of a pure and peaceful doctrine, preached by obscure strangers at the daily peril of their lives. Is it Mr. Jngersolls idea that this happened by chance, like the creation of the world? If not, there are but two other ways to account for it: either the evidence by which the Apostles were able to prove the supernatural origin of the gospel was overwhelming and irresistible, or else its propagation was provided for and carried on by the direct aid of the Divine Being himself. Between these two, infidelity may make its own choice. Just here another dilemma presents its horns to our adver- sary. If Christianity was a human fabrication, its authors must have been either good men or bad. It is a moral impossibility. a mere contradiction in termsto say that good, honest, and true men practiced a gross and willful deception upon the world. It is equally incredible that any combination of knaves, however base, would fraudulently concoct a religious system to denounce themselves, and to invoke the curse of God upon their own con- duct. Men that love lies, love not such lies as that. Is there any way out of this difficulty, except by confessing that Chris- tianity is what it purports to bea divine revelation? The acceptance of Christianity by a large portion of the generation contemporary with its Founder and his apostles was, under the circumstances, an adjudication as solemn and authoritative as mortal intelligence could pronounce. The record of that judgment has come down to us, accompanied by the depositions of the principal witnesses. In the course of eighteen centuries many efforts have been made to open the judgment or set it aside on the ground that the evidence was insufficient to support it~ But on every rehearing the wisdom and virtue of mankind have r& affirmed it. And now comes Mr. Ingersoll, to try the experiment 6f aiiother bold, bitter, and fierce re-argument. I will present some of the considerations which would compel me, if I were a judge or juror in the cause, to decide it just as it was decided originally. vOL. CxXXIILNo. 297. 10 142 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. First. There is no good reason to doubt that the statements of the evangelists, as we have them now, are genuine. The mul- tiplication of copies was a sufficient guarantee against any material alteration of the text. Mr. Ingersoll speaks of inter- polations made by the fathers of the Church. All he knows and all he has ever heard on that subject is that some of the innu- merable transcripts contained errors which were discovered and corrected. That simply proves the present integrity of the documents. Second. I call these statements depositions, because they are entitled to that kind of credence which we give to declarations made under oathbut in a much higher degree, for they are more than sworn to. They were made in the immediate prospect of death. Perhaps this would not affect the conscience of an atheist,neither would an oath,b~t these people manifestly believed in a judgment after death, before a God of truth, whose displeasure they feared above all things. Third. The witnesses could not have been mistaken. The nature of the facts precluded the possibility of any delusion about them. For every averment they had the sensible and true avouch of their own eyes~~ and ears. Besides, they were plain- thinking, sober, unimaginative men, who, unlike Mr. Ingersoll, always, under ali circumstances, and especially in the presence of eternity, recognized the difference between mountains and clouds. It is inconceivable how any fact could be proven by evidence more conclusive than the statement of such persons, publicly given and steadfastly persisted in through every kind of perse- cution, imprisonment, and torture to the last agonies of a linger- ing death. Fourth. Apart from these terrible tests, the more ordii~ary claims to credibility arc not wanting. They were men of uniin- peachable character. The most virulent enemies of the cause they spoke and died for have never suggested a reason for doubt- ing their personal honesty. But there is affirmative proof that they and their fellow-disciples were held by those who knew them in the highest estimation for truthfulness. Wherever they made their report it was not ouly believed, but believed with a faith so implicit that thousands were ready at once to seal it with their blood. Fifth. The tone and temper of their narrative impress us with a sentiment of profound respect. It is an artless, unimpas. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 143 sioned, simple story. No argument, no rhetoric, no epithets, no praises of friends, no denunciation of enemies, no attempts at concealment. How strongly these qualities commend the testi- mony of a witness to the confidence of judge and jury is well known to ali who have any experience in such matters. Sixth. The statements made by the evangelists are alike upon every important point, but are different in form and expression, some of them including details which the others omit. These variations make it perfectly certain that there could have been no previous concert between the witnesses, and that each spoke independently of the others, according to his own conscience and from his own knowledge. In considering the testimony of several witnesses to the same transaction, their substantial agreement upon the main facts, with circumstantial differences in the detail, is always regarded as the great characteristic of truth and honesty. There is no rule of evidence more univer- sally adopted than thisnone better sustained by general expe- rience, or more immovably fixed in the good sense of mankind. Mr. Ingersoll, himself, admits the rule and concedes its sound- ness. The logical consequence of that admission is that we are bound to take this evidence as incontestably true. But mark the infatuated perversity with which he seeks to evade it. He says that when we claim that the witnesses were inspired, the rule does not apply, because the witnesses then speak what is known to him who inspired them, and all must speak exactly the same, even to the minutest detail. Mr. Ingersolls notion of an inspired witness is that he is no witness at all, but an irresponsi- ble medium who unconsciously and involuntarily raps out or writes down whatever he is prompted to say. But this is a false assumption, not countenanced or even suggested by anything contained in the Scriptures. The apostles and evangelists are expressly declared to be witnesses, in the proper sense of the word, called and sent to testify the truth according to their knowledge. If they had all told the same story in the same way, without variation, and accounted for its uniformity by declaring that they were inspired, and had spoken without knowing whether their words were true or false, where would have been their claim to credibility? But they testified what they knew; and here comes an infidel critic impugning their testimony because the impress of truth is stamped upon its face. 144 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Seventh. It does not appear that the statements of the evan- gelists were ever denied by any person who pretended to know the facts. Many there were in that age and afterward who resisted the belief that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and only Saviour of man; but his wonderful works, the miraculous purity of his life, the unapproachable loftiness of his doctrines, his trial and condemnation by a judge who pronounced him inno- cent, his patient suffering, his death on the cross, and resurrection from the grave, of these not the faintest contradiction was attempted, if we except the false and feeble story which the elders and chief priests bribed the guard at the tomb to put in circulation. Eighth. What we call the fundamental truths of Christianity consist of great public events which are sufficiently established by history without special proof. The value of mere historical evidence increases according to the importance of the facts in question, their general notoriety, and the magnitude of their visible consequences. Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, and changed the destiny of Europe and America. Nobody would think of calling a witness or even citing an official report to prove it. Julius Ca3sar was assassinated. We do not need to prove that fact like an ordinary murder. He was master of the world, and his death was followed by a war with the conspirators, the battle at Philippi, the quarrel of the vic- torious triumvirs, Actium, and the permanent establishment of imperial government under Augustus. The life and character, the death and resurrection, of Jesus are just as visibly connected with events which even an infidel must admit to be of equal importance. The Church rose and armed herself in righteous- ness for couffict with the powers of darkness; innumerable mul- titudes of the best and wisest rallied to her standard and died in her cause; her enemies employed the coarse and vulgar machinery of human government against her, and her professors were bru- tally murdered in large numbers; her triumph was complete; the gods of Greece and Rome crumbled on their altars; the world was revolutionized and human society was transformed. The course of these events, and a thousand others, which reach down to the present hour, received its first propulsion from the transcendent fact of Christs crucifixion. Moreover, we find the memorial monu- ments of the original truth planted all along the way. The sacra- ments of baptism and the supper constantly point us back to the THE CHRISTIAN IIELIGION. 145 author and finisher of our faith. The mere historical evidence is for these reasons much stronger than what we have for other occurrences which are regarded as undeniable. When to this is added the cumulative evidence given directly and positively by eye-witnesses of irreproachable character, and wholly uncontra- dicted, the proof becomes so strong that the disbelief we hear of seems like a kind of insanity. It is the very error of the moon, Which comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad! From the facts established by this evidence, it follows irresist.. ibly that the Gospel has come to us from God. That silences all reasoning about the wisdom and justice of its doctrines, since it is impossible even to imagine that wrong can be done or com- manded by that Sovereign Being whose wili alone is the ultimate standard of all justice. But Mr. Ingersoll is still dissatisfied. He raises objections as false, fleeting, and baseless as clouds, and insists that they are as stable as the mountains, whose everlasting foundations are laid by the hand of the Almighty. I will compress his propositions into plain words printed in italics, and, taking a look at his misty creations, let them roll away and vanish into air, one after another. Christianity offers eternal salvation as the reward of belief alone. This is a misrepresentation simple and naked. No such doctrine is propounded in the Scriptures, or in the creed of any Christian church. On the contrary, it is distinctly taught that faith avails nothing without repentance, reformation, and newness of life. The mere failure to believe it is punished in hell. I have never known any Christian man or woman to assert this. It is univer- sally agreed that children too young to understand it do not need to believe it. And this exemption extends to adults who have never seen the evidence, or, from weakness of intellect, are inca- pable of weighing it. Lunatics and idiots are not in the least danger, and, for aught I know, this category may, by a stretch of Gods mercy, include minds constitutionally sound, but with fac- ulties so perverted by education, ha bit, or passion that they are incapable of reasoning. I sincerely hope that, upon this or some other principle, Mr. Ingersoll may escape the hell he talks about 146 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. so much. But there is no direct promise to save him in spite of himself. The plan of redemption contains no express covenant to pardon one who rejects it with scorn and hatred. Our hope for him rests upon the infinite compassion of that gracious Being who prayed on the cross for the insulting enemies who nailed him there. The mystery of the second birth is incomprehensible. Christ established a new kingdom in the world, but not of it. Subjects were admitted to the privileges and protection of its government by a process eqmvalent to naturalization. To be born again, or regenerated, is to be naturalized. The words all mean the same thing. Does Mr. Ingersoll want to disgrace his own intellect by pretending that he cannot see this simple analogy? The doctrine of the atonement is absurd, unjust, and immoral. The plan of salvation, or any plan for the rescue of sinners from the legal operation of divine justice, could have been framed only in the councils of the Omniscient. Necessarily its heights and depths are not easily fathomed by finite intelligence. But the greatest, ablest, wisest, and most virtuous men that ever lived have given it their profoundest consideration, and found it to be not ouly authorized by revelation, but theoretically conformed. to their best and highest conceptions of infinite goodness. Never- theless, here is a rash and superficial man, without training or habits of reflection, who, upon a mere glance, declares that it must be abandoned, because it seems to him absurd, unjust,. and immoral. I would not abridge his freedom of thought or speech, and the argumentum ad verecundiam would be lost upon him. Otherwise I might suggest that, when he finds all author- ity, human and divine, against him, he had better speak in a tone less arrogant. lie does not comprehend how justice and mercy can be blended together in the plan of redemption, and ther~fore it cannot be true. A thing is not necessarily false because he does not understand it: he cannot annihilate a principle or a fact by ignoring it. There are many truths in heaven and earth which no man can see through; for instance, the union of mans soul with his body is not only an unknowable but an unimaginable mystery. Is it therefore false that a connection does exist between matter and spirit? How, he asks, can the sufferings of an innocent person satisfy justice for the sins of the guilty? This raises a metaphysical THE GHRISTIAN RELIGION. 147 question, which it is not necessary or possible for me to discuss here. As matter of fact, Christ died that sinners might be recon- ciled to God, and in that sense he died for them; that is, to fur- nish them with the means of averting divine justice, which their crimes had provoked. What, he again asks, would we think of a man who allowed another to die for a crime which he himself had committed? I answer that a man who, by any contrivance, causes his own offense to be visited upon the head of an innocent person is unspeakably depraved. But are Christians guilty of this base- ness because they accept the blessings of an institution which their great benefactor died to establish? Loyalty to the King who has erected a most beneficent government for us at the cost of his lifefidelity to the Master who bought us with his blood is not the fraudulent substitution of an innocent person in place of a criminal. The doctrine of non-resistance, forgiveness of injuries, reconcili- ation with enemies, as taught in the New Testament, is the child of weakness, degrading, and unjust. This is the whole substance of a long, rambling diatribe, as incoherent as a sick mans dream. Christianity does not forbid the necessary defense of civil society, or the proper vindication of personal rights. But to cherish animosity, to thirst for mere revenge, to hoard up wrongs, real or fancied, and lie in wait for the chance of paying them back; to be impatient, unforgiving, malicious, and cruel to all who have crossed usthese diabolical propensities are checked and curbed by the authority and spirit of the Christian religion, and the application of it has converted men from low savages into refined and civilized beings. The punishment of sinners in eternal hell is excessive. The future of the soul is a subject on which we have very dark views. In our present state, the mind takes in no idea except what is conveyed to it through the bodily senses. All our conceptions of the spiritual world are derived from some analogy to material things, and this analogy must necessarily be very remote, because the nature of the subjects compared is so diverse that a close similarity cannot be even supposed. No revelation has lifted the veil between time and eternity; but in shadowy figures we are warned that a very marked distinction will be made between the good and the bad in the next world. Speculative opinions concerning the punishment of the wicked, its nature and durar 148 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W tion, vary with the temper and the imaginations of men. Doubt- less we are many of us in error: but how can Mr. Ingersoll enlighten us? Acknowledging no standard of right and wrong in this world, he can have no theory of rewards and punishments in the next. The deeds done in the body, whether good or evil, are all morally alike in his eyes, and if there be in heaven a con- gregation of the just, he sees no reason why the worst rogue should not be a member of it. It is supposed, however, that man has a soul as well as a body, and that both are subject to certain laws, which cannot be violated without incurring the proper penaltyor consequence, if he likes that word better. If Christ was God, he knew that his followers would persecute and murder men for their opinions; yet he did not forbid it. There is but one way to deal with this accusation, and that is to contradict it flatly. Nothing can be conceived more striking than the prohibition, not ouly of persecution, but of all the pas- sions which lead or incite to it. No follower of Christ indulges in malice even to his enemy without violating the plainest rule of his faith. He cannot love God and hate his brother: if he says he can, St. John pronounces him a liar. The broadest benevolence, universal philanthropy, inexhaustible charity, are inculcated in every line of the New Testament. It is plain that Mr. Ingersoll never read a chapter of it; otherwise he would not have ventured upon this palpable falsification of its doc- trines. Who told him that the devilish spirit of persecution was authorized, or encouraged, or not forbidden, by the Gospel? The person, whoever it was, who imposed upon his trusting igno- rance should be given up to the just reprobation of his fellow- citizens. Christians in modern times carry on wars of detraction and slander against one another. The discussions of theological sub- jects by men who believe in the fundamental doctrines of Christ are singularly free from harshness and abuse. Of course I can- not speak with absolute certainty, but I believe most confidently that there is not in all the religious polemics of this century as much slanderous invective as can be found in any ten lines of Mr. Ingersolls writings. Of course I do not include political preachers among my models of charity and forbearance. They are a mendacious set, but Christianity is no more responsible for their misconduct than if is for the treachery of Judas Iscariot or the wrongs done to Paul by Alexander the coppersmith. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 149 But, says he, Christians have been guilty of wanton and wicked persecution. It is true that some persons, professing Christianity, have violated the fundamental principles of their faith by inflict- ing violent injuries and bloody wrongs upon their fellow-men. But the perpetrators of these outrages were in fact not Chris- tians: they were either hypocrites from the beginning or else base apostatesinfidels or something worsehireling wolves, whose gospel was their maw. Not one of them ever pretended to find a warrant for his conduct in any precept of Christ or any doctrine of his Church. All the wrongs of this nature which history records have been the work of politicians, aided often by priests and ministers who were wiiling to deny their Lord and desert to the enemy, for the sake of their temporal interests. Take the cases most commonly cited and see if this be not a true account of them. The auto da f6 of Spain and Portugal, the burnings at Smithfield, and the whipping of women in Massachusetts, were the outcome of a cruel, false, and antichristian policy. Coligny and his adherents were killed by an order of Charles IX., at the instance of the Guises, who headed a hostile faction, and merely for reasons of state. Louis XIV. revoked the edict of Nantes, and banished the Waldenses under pain of confiscation and death; but this was done on the declared ground that the victims were not safe subjects. The brutal atrocities of Cromwell and the outrages of the Orange lodges against the Irish Catholics were not persecutions by religious people, but movements as purely political as those of the Know-Nothings, Plug-Uglys, and Blood- Tubs of this country. If the Gospel should be blamed for these acts in opposition to its principles, why not also charge it with the cruelties of Nero, or the present persecution of the Jesuits by the infidel republic of France? Christianity is opposed to free& nn of thought. The kingdom of Christ is based upon certain principles, to which it requires the assent of every one who would enter therein. If you are unwilling to own his authority and conform your moral conduct to his laws, you cannot expect that he will admit you to the priv- ileges of his government. But naturalization is not forced upon ~ou if you prefer to be an alien. The Gospel makes the strongest and tenderest appeal to the heart, reason, and conscience of man entreats him to take thought for his own highest interest, and by all its moral influence provokes him to good works; but he is 150 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not constrained by any kind of duress to leave the service or relinquish the wages of sin. Is there anything that savors of tyranny in this? A man of ordinary judgment will say, no. But Mr. Ingersoll thinks it as oppressive as the refusal of Jehovah to reward the worship of demons. The gospel of Christ does not satisfy the hunger of the heart. That depends upon what kind of a heart it is. If it hungers after righteousness, it will surely be filled. It is probable, also, that if it hungers for the ifithy food of a godless philosophy it will get what its appetite demands. That was an expressive phrase which Carlyle used when he called modern infidelity the gospel of dirt. Those who are greedy to swallow it will doubt- less be supplied satisfactorily. Accounts of miracles are always false. Are miracles impossi- ble? No one will say so who opens his eyes to the miracles of creation with which we are surrounded on every hand. You cannot even show that they are a priori improbable. God would be likely to reveal his will to the rational creatures who were required to obey it; he would authenticate in some way the right of prophets and apostles to speak in his name; supernatural power was the broad seal which he affixed to their commission. Prom this it follows that the improbability of a miracle is no greater than the original improbability of a revelation, and that is not improbable at all. Therefore, if the miracles of the New Testament are proved by sufficient evidence, we believe them as we believe any other established fact. They become deniable only when it is shown that the great miracle of making the world was never performed. Accordingly Mr. Ingersoll abol- ishes creation first, and thus clears the way to his dogmatic~ conclusion that all miracles are the children of mendacity. Christianity is pernicious in its moral effect, darkens the mind, narrows the soul, arrests the progress of human society, and hinders civilization. Mr. Ingersoll, as a zealous apostle of the gospel of dirt, must be expected to throw a good deal of mud. But this is too much: it injures himself instead of defiling the object of his assault. When I answer that all we have of virtue, justice, intellectual liberty, moral elevation, refinement, benevolence, and true wisdom came to us from that source which he reviles as the fountain of evil, I am not merely putting one assertion against the other; for I have the advantage, which he has not, of speak- ing what every tolerably well-informed man knows to be true. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 151 Reflect what kind of a world this was when the disciples of Christ undertook to reform it, and compare it with the condition in which their teachings have pnt it. In its mighty metropolis, the center of its intellectual and political power, the best men were addicted to vices so debasing that I could not even allude to them without soiling the paper I write upon. All manner of unprincipled wickedness was practiced in the private life of the whole population without concealment or shame, and the magis- trates were thoroughly and universally corrupt. Benevolence in any shape was altogether unknown. The helpless and the weak got neither justice nor mercy. There was no relief for the poor, no succor for the sick, no refuge for the unfortunate. In all pagan- dom there was not a hospital, asylum, almshouse, or organized charity of any sort. The indifference to human life was literally frightful. The order of a successful leader to assassinate his opponents was always obeyed by his followers with the utmost alacrity and pleasure. It was a special amusement of the popu- lace to witness the shows at which men were compelled to kill one another, to be torn in pieces by wild beasts, or otherwise butchered, to make a Roman holiday. In every province paganism enacted the same cold-blooded cruelties; oppression and robbery ruled supreme; murder went rampaging and red over all the earth. The Church came, and her light penetrated this moral darkness like a new sun. She covered the globe with institutions of mercy, and thousands upon thousands of her disciples devoted themselves exclusively to worka of charity at the sacrifice of every earthly interest. Her earliest adherents were killed without remorsebeheaded, crucified, sawn asunder, thrown to the beasts, or covered with pitch, piled up in great heaps, and slowly burnt to death. But her faith was made perfect through suffering, and the law of love rose in triumph from the ashes of her martyrs. This religion has come down to us through the ages, attended all the way by righteousness, justice, temperance, mercy, transparent truthfulness, exulting hope, and white-winged charity. Never was its influence for good more plainly perceptible than now. It has not converted, purified, and reformed all men, for its first principle is the free- dom of the human will, and there are those who choose to reject it. But to the mass of mankind, directly and indirectly, it has brought uncounted benefits and blessings. Abolish ittake away the restraints which it imposes on evil passionssilence the 152 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W~ admonitions of its preacherslet ali Christians cease their labors of charityblot out from history the records of its heroic benev- olencerepeal the laws it has enacted and the institutions it has built uplet its moral principles be abandoned and all its miracles of light be extinguishedwhat would we come to? I need not answer this question: the experiment has been par.. tially tried. The French nation formaliy renounced Christianity, denied the existence of the Supreme Being, and so satisfied the hunger of the infidel heart for a time. What followed? Uni- versal depravity, garments rolled in blood, fantastic crimes unimagined before, which startled the earth with their sublime atrocity. The American people have and ought to have no special desire to follow that terrible example of guilt and misery. It is impossible to discuss this subject within the limits of a review. No doubt the effort to be short has made me obscure. If Mr. Ingersoll thinks himself wronged, or his doctrines miscon- struted, let him not lay my fault at the door of the Church, or cast his censure on the clergy. Adsum qui feci, in me convertite ferrum. J. S. BLACK. OBSTACLES TO ANNEXATION. IF the checkered career of the tentative Dominion of Canada and a more complete independence of the mother country were fully understood by the student of English colonial history, the tendency, in his opinion, might mean legislative union, but not, necessarily, annexation. We must confess a most positive lean- ing toward the latter as a fail accompli; while, on the other hand, we cannot be ignorant that serious obstacles are to be removed, and threatening dangers are to be avoided, before Canada can become an integral part of the United States. There is one quality that pertains alike to physical, moral, and political forcesthey act in the direction of the least resistance. England will retain the colonies no longer than her own notions of self-interest decide their trade to be profitable. Their market once destroyed by a protective tariff,as in Australia and Canada, no motive of self-interest remains to urge their tarrying for a single hour under the aegis of the British flag. Indeed, their tarrying thenceforth becomes a source of expense, with no offset. Therefore they were long ago invited to loos& the bond and go apart by themselves. The idea of separation became a living entity when KimberleyGladstones former colonial secretary allowed Australia to choose her own commercial policy; and the entity gathered strength when Beaconsfield refused to interfere with Sir John A. Macdonalds will regarding the late M. Letellier and the Canadian tariff. In like manner, the Canadian policy also acts along the line of least resistance. Actual separation is an easy mattereven the London Times admitting that the right of self-government, having been conceded to Canada, cannot now be withdrawn, and the Hon. Robert Lowe confessing the temporary nature of the

OBSTACLES TO ANNEXATION. IF the checkered career of the tentative Dominion of Canada and a more complete independence of the mother country were fully understood by the student of English colonial history, the tendency, in his opinion, might mean legislative union, but not, necessarily, annexation. We must confess a most positive lean- ing toward the latter as a fail accompli; while, on the other hand, we cannot be ignorant that serious obstacles are to be removed, and threatening dangers are to be avoided, before Canada can become an integral part of the United States. There is one quality that pertains alike to physical, moral, and political forcesthey act in the direction of the least resistance. England will retain the colonies no longer than her own notions of self-interest decide their trade to be profitable. Their market once destroyed by a protective tariff,as in Australia and Canada, no motive of self-interest remains to urge their tarrying for a single hour under the aegis of the British flag. Indeed, their tarrying thenceforth becomes a source of expense, with no offset. Therefore they were long ago invited to loos& the bond and go apart by themselves. The idea of separation became a living entity when KimberleyGladstones former colonial secretary allowed Australia to choose her own commercial policy; and the entity gathered strength when Beaconsfield refused to interfere with Sir John A. Macdonalds will regarding the late M. Letellier and the Canadian tariff. In like manner, the Canadian policy also acts along the line of least resistance. Actual separation is an easy mattereven the London Times admitting that the right of self-government, having been conceded to Canada, cannot now be withdrawn, and the Hon. Robert Lowe confessing the temporary nature of the 154 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. union of the Empire with all of the colonies. So slight is the tie with Canadians, that their new commercial policy declares their unwillingness to pay a smali tax upon their business as the price of British connection; while every allusion to their depend- ence upon the power across the sea is met with the most rabid assertions that they are able to stand by themselves without ask- ing favors from anybody. Thus the question arises: Has not the Dominion of Canada run away with its creatorthe Glad- stone government of 1867? For what was first announced by Gladstone, then suffered to pass unchallenged by Beaconsfield, and now once more reiterated by Gladstone,the charm of Cana- dian independence,will it not prove too strong for that senti- ment of loyalty which is so beautiful in theory but so unsatis- factory in practice, although made a more tangible thing by dozens of Sevastopol cannon scattered through the provinces? Jingoism is not popular in the colonies. The opposite of jingoismthe utmost liberty of speech and actionis so far prevalent as to lead Earl Grey to devise some method of saving the Empire intact. He would transform the agents of the various colonies into members of the Privy Council and members of the Committee on Colonial Affairs, such committee to act as a court of oyer and terminer whenever matters regarding the colonies are concerned. And yet, in spite of such a court, Earl Grey declares that England may decline to go on submitting to the burden of colonies that are too independent to conform to the general commercial policy of the Empire. Thus, the more deeply the subject is studied, the more evident does it become that even the slightest of the forces now at work, both in Canada and in Great Britain, must lead to a speedy and total separation. In the days when British troops were still quartered in Montreal, the late DArcy McGee remarked that only three relations were in store for Englands greatest prov- inces :first, a closer connection between themselves; second, annexation; and third, a neutrality guaranteed by a joint agree- ment of the great powers. The first method is the present Dominion, so inadequate to the task it set out to accomplish. The second is a probability of the future; but not without difficulties hereinafter to be considered. The third is absurd in the present state of Canadian independence. The primal form into which the actual independence of Canada first crystallizes will probably be a legislative union. One general OBSTA CLES TO ANNEXATION. 155 parliament will do the work of the many, as now constituted. Provincial legislatures will melt away; the maritime provinces will enjoy a freer intercourse, and the large expenditures for maintenance will be materially reduced. Concentration7 and economy are the order of the day, even more than they were when Scotland and Ireland were united with England in one common parliament. The purse-strings of Canada must lead to this result, even if all other influences go for naught; and the outlines of legislative union will develop despite the opposition of the French element. Indeed, no nationality and no political party will be able to prevent legislative union first and annexation afterward; nor will either of these measures be adopted by any of the existing parties. The fate of the late National party gives a sad warning to any political organization that shall be so rash. Commencing life about the year 1874, it protested against the previous lengths to which both conservatives and reformers carried their warfare. Its advocates strove to serve Canada first by placing the best men in office; and the world, in the meantime, was to improve so constantly that no parties would be necessary in the Canadian, or any other, State. They conserved the present by advocating the ballot and an income franchise, measures that were soon adopted; but while their further projects of reorganizing the Senate, representing minorities, and cutting loose from England were still under discussion, the National party incontinently died, in spite of Goldwin Smith and the Hon. Mr. Blake. Should legislative union come, it will come in spite of the Frenchmans fear that harm will befall his religion or his nationality; and he will consent because he considers it but a steppingstone to a closer union with the United States, a fate which he opposed before the confederation of 1867, but which he now courts because he desires the power with which an American majority is intrusted. This legislative union will come in spite of party protests, because the better men of all parties will see that it is a simple way out of their difficulties, financial and otherwise, a way that even the British North America Act of 1867 provided for; sinee the act in nowise hints that the pres- ent Dominion is more than the best form of government that could be devised at the time. A legislative union, therefore, is but a John the Baptist preaching the gospel of annexation. It may delay actual union 156 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. with the United States for a decade or two; but the irresistible must come to pass. Previous to the year 1873,when hard times came upon the United States,the French of Canada, and their brethren who had crossed the border, were alike animated with a kindly feeling toward the American Republic. Those who Were actual residents were pleased with their adopted country. They were convinced that annexation would give their countrymen the American character which they prized. Realiz- ing that the open advocacy of such a measure would react upon its promoters,possibly on account of an apparent lessen- ing of the clergys infiuence,a club of French Canadians was formed in Chicago in 1870. Branches were established in various other centers of population, the object being simply to inform their countrymen of the benefits that would accrue~ if all of Canada were absorbed into the United States. But alas! as to the Chicago club, the OLeary cow kicked it out of existence when it was barely two weeks old, and the subsequent period of depression made it impossible of resuscitation. First. Looking at the result as inevitable, we are ready to inquire into the conflict of Canadian institutions and customs with the Constitution of the United States, in case the question of admission were to be decided to-day. As a result of these institutions, the matter of finances naturally takes the lead. Time wasand within a decade, toowhen the Canadians only answer to the hint of annexation would be: Canada doesnt propose to help pay the national debt of the United States. That response is no longer given. The colony is on the verge of bankruptcy, through the extravagance of so many Govern- ors, Executive Councils, and unproductive public works. For instance, the Dominionwhich has a population nearly as large as that of the State of New Yorkis saddled with an annual expense of $217,266 for its head officials ; while the various parliaments cost $2,240,000. Add to this the expense of educa- tion, the administration of justice, the collection of customs, interest on the public works, and the result is a total cost to every man, voter or nonwoter, of $27.25 per annum. The St. Lawrence system of canals was originally contracted for $19,~0,0~. The loss for interest charges has been $32,000,- 000; cost of eularging, $30,000,000a total of $91,000,000 for a highway which will aliow the farmers of fllinois to compete with those of Ontario in foreign markets. OBSTA CLES TO ANNEXATION. 157 A glance at the figures will show the constant increase of the Canadian debt: Year Net Debt. Charge on~ Debt. 1867 $75,728,641 $ 1868 75,757,135 5,221,022 1869 75,859,319 5,799,474 1870 78,209,742 5,513,586 1871 77,706,517 6,013,624 1872 82,187,072 6,074,247 1873 99,848,462 5,795,675 1874 108,324,965 6,503,038 1875 116,008,378 7,373,763 1876 124,551,514 7,432,002 1877 133,235,309 7,833,475 1878 140,362,069 8,486,714 1879 147,481,070 8,509,876 1880 153,025,518 8,420,662 Here is a total of over $80,000,000 that has been paid for interest alone since 1867, the date of confederation. Com- mencing with that date, the ordin~ expenditure of the Government has risen from $3,500,000 to $7,000,000; while the total expenditure has increased from $13,500,000 to its present figure, $25,000,000. With the exception of Ontario, every one of the provinces is heavily in debt, and resort must be had to direct taxation, the subsidies from the Domin- ion Government not proving adequate to their maintenance. The consequence is that, in proportion to its resources, the Dominion is more heavily in debt than any solvent State in the American Union. Its financial condition is rapidly growing worse, while that of the United States is materially improving. Beaconsfield, therefore, would have been more correct in his comparison of the two countries (September, 1879), if he had quoted the price of United States bonds in~the London market side by side with the heavy discounts upon loans to the Canadian provinces. The question of Canadian debt is not as easy of settlement now as it was in 1865, when General Bankss bili in the American Con- gress provided these guarantees: The United States assuming Canadian debt to the amount of $85,000,000; guaranteeing $10,000,000 to the Hudsons Bay Company; appropriating $50,000- OOOfor the enlargement of the St. Lawrence canals, and $2,000,000 for the extension of the American system of railways from Ban vOL. CXXXJH.NO. 297. 11 158 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. gor to St. Johns, N. B.tlie Intercolonial Railway and the Cana- dian Pacific Railway to be aided on the same terms as those given to the Northern Pacific Railway by the Act of 1862. If this lib- eral proposition were renewed to-day, it might be accepted. Whenever the matter of finances comes up for adjustment, much skill and mutual forbearance will be required in its solution; for, in its present aspect, it presents one of the most ready arguments why annexation should not immediately take place. Second. Aside from delays of a financial nature, the Canadian idea of popular government must undergo a radical change before the path of union is clearly defined. There is no glitter- ing functionary on this side of the line with the title of Gover- nor-Generalan official who can originate nothing, and therefore can have no policy; who can veto nothing, and therefore can have no actual power. A mere dependent of the Privy Council, the Canadian Governor-General, to use the sententious language of a prominent conservative editor, must do what is told him. This is true, even of Lord Lorne, who is supposed to represent the Queen~~ more completely than any of his predecessors. In spite of his insignificant political duties, the powers of a Gov- ernor-General have full play when parliament is to be opened in state, or the social life of Ottawa is to be maintained. Herein consisted Lord Dufferins popularity; and that he knew enough to eschew politics, we learn from his own lips, just as he was safely freed from the cares of office. During a speech at Belfast (February 22, 1879), he admitted that, although the functions of a colonial executive do not entirely coincide with the attributes of the Crown in England, yet his touch should be so imp~tlpable as to exempt him from all suspicion of a desire to tamper with the privileges of a self-governing body. He should not consider it a compliment to the head of any self-governing community if he were credited with any independent initiative of his own. The real power of the Canadian Government being in the hands of the Premier and his ministers, it is the Canadians boast that this form alone is both popular and responsible. He de- clares the President of the United States and his cabinet to be veritable tyrants, in the old Grecian sense of the word; and he advises that all these officers should be made diredily respon- sible to Congress. This is his idea of true republicanism; and, this accomplished, he would be in favor of uniting the two coun- tries. But if the Canadian protestor would look into the history OBSTA CLES TO ANNEXATION. 159 of his own expensive government by a ministry, he would find that the independence of the Canadian cabinet far exceeds that of the American cabinet. Not one of all the great public incas- urea carried through by the ministry was ever submitted to the Canadian people. County and township councils were erected from district councils; rebellion losses were paid; the Dominion was formed, and reluctant provinces were bought into compli- ance; the canals were enlarged; paper money was sanctioned; and the Pacific Railway was constructed, so far as it lay in Cana- dian power, and a syndicate has been allowed to complete it,a31 of which measures were carried out by the ministry without even consulting the voters at the polls. Indeed, the leading organ of Sir John A. Macdonald does not hesitate to say that the Gov- ernment are the people, while at the same time it decl~aes that the ministry should watch public opinion, and be ready to take any course that may enable them to retain office. The opposition press also declares that all the American constitutions are defect- ive in that the administrations are too independent of the people. (Toronto Globe, February 3, 1880.) Whereas, the fair-minded student of history must confess that stability is more readily conserved where the executive and his advisers move in a sphere of action totally distinct from that of the powers which legislate. In a word, the Canadian has not yet grasped the American, and republi~n, idea of the executive. Nor is the Canadian idea of the upper house a whit more like the American. A group of elderly gentlemen, who have never originated any important measures, save divorce bills, and whose only policy is to be on the popular side, for fear of per- sonal abuse; a majority of whose seventy-eight life members are the appointees of the present Premierthis is the Canadian Senate of to-day. In spite of popular execration, the senators might readily attach themselves to the waning fortunes of the present, or any other Premier; and thus make it possible for a political leader to regain his lost power. No wonder the opposition press demand the abolition of such a useless bodythe ridiculous duplicate of the fast dissolving House of Lords, and the counter- part, in some respects, of the Senate established by the later Napoleon. That the Canadians do not comprehend the scope of the American Senate is not strange; for none of the European nations can offer a substitute that compares with it. Their (Yrown-appointed,~ church-appointed, or hereditary upper houses 160 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W were not founded, like our own, to check hasty legislation on the part of the popular body, to control the designs of an ambitious executive, and to give representation to each of the sovereign States of the American Union. Nowhere else in the world is there a branch of the government that rises to the dignity and political power that characterize the Senate of the United States. The Canadian further objects to the American civil service system, or, rather, lie has made objection in the past, when the Canadian system was better than it is now, and the American system worse. In this connection, it would be instructive to ask how much of the $125,000 annually expended for superannuation is paid to men like the one who confessed to the writer, The Gov- ernment pays me $1000 a year to stay away from my desk. Or we might relate how it was contended by the conservatives that the reformers had introduced the spoils~~ system into the lower provinces. As an offset, Sir John A. Macdonald, on retiring in 1873, increased many salaries and made numerous appoint- ments, by two of which Mr. Tilley became LieutenantGovernor of New Brunswick, and Mr. Crawford LieutenantGovernor of Ontario. In the case of Mr. Crawford, an antecedent promise of the office made it impossible for him, as a member of parliament, to vote independently on a question which the minister con- sidered tantamount to an impeachment. In the case of Mr. Tilley, a member of the Government had a hand in his own appoint- ment. When the reformers attained the coveted power, they gave out that the American system~ was sure to be adopted in Canada; and they acted accordingly. Consequently the report of Sir John, in 1878, was made the occasion of charging the reformers with feathering their own political nests, and also of declaring that a modified American system~ was best adapted to the wants of the Canadian civil service. The Canadian who shuts his eyes to these facts is also ignorant of the fact that, when the Senate of the United States passed into the hands of the Republicans, in 1861, only one of its officers was removed, and that for disloyalty; although we must confess that more recent attempts have not been to its credit. Passing now to the source of all power, the people, we find that the Canadian doubts the good effects of universal suffrage. In his own country, he relates that the elections are carried on with the baliot, qualified by a smali holding of property, save in Manitoba; and from this he argues in favor o~ his own system, OBSTACLES TO ANNEXATION. 161 with its safeguards against bribery. Yet, even with all these precautions, it was possible, in 1873, to behold a minister squeez- ing a corruption fund from a public contractor, and himself enjoying the pleasure and profit of its distribution; while the annals of political turpitude would be incomplete without the testimony regarding the member for Niagara (January, 1879) and the Argenteull election trial (June, 1880). Third. Even after the Canadian prejudice against the Ameri- can form of government is removed, there remains a couffict inter se, each province having a different specimen of law. The more progressive provinces have the English common law; Nova Scotia and Prince Edwards Island retaining the debtors prison, with all the horrors portrayed by Dickens when he limned its antetype in London. The English and statutory criminal law is retained in such provinces as Manitoba and Quebec, which have substituted the code civil de Qu~bec for the old French law. Thus, while each province has control over all questions of property and civil rights, even the residunm of power vested in the Dominion Government does not save it from humiliation. It has been decided that the provincial courts have jurisdiction in relation to the trial of protested Dominion elections; and that the province of Quebec (Dobie case) has the right to amend the original acts of the old province of Canada. As if to increase the confusion of legal tongues, the newly erected Supreme Court appears to have no more power than is vested in the various appellate courts already existing, a fact which was recognized by the Macken- zie government, when it refused to ask an opinion in the Letellier case of 1878. To these we must add the further facts that the criminal law of the Dominion is not yet codified; that evidence of the accused party is still excluded; that a divorce court is yet to be erected; and that parliament is still rejecting the bill allowing marriage with a deceased wifes sister. When we pass from a general glance at the internecine con- filet of Canadian laws to the examination of their practical work- ings, we discover a direct antagonism with the Constitution of the United States. At the time of the conquest, all the religious bodies were protected in their rights and property by a special article in the terms of capitulation. By good management this property has increased to such an extent that, in Montreal, the Sulpicians have taken every square foot on which the lod et vents had not been commuted. Other orders of the same church also 162 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. share in holding the best real estate in the larger citiesall of which is exempt from taxation as church property, although some of it is actually in use for manufacturing purposes. Such remarkable privileges are certainly not in accord with our own Constitution, which premises that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof a prohibition which also means that no one religious body shall enjoy privileges that are denied to all others. In the matter of civil rights, also, there is a most dangerous couffict with our Cohstitution, which provides that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, meaning that all shall share alike in such freedom. Opposed to this is the French law of the province of Quebec, a law that serves ecelesiasticism almost as well as the original patent of Louis XIV. to the hundred partners. The civil power is defied. Bishop Bourget shakes his fist at the British Privy Council, and curses the ground in which Guibord is buried. He declares that every eur~ must advise his parishioners of the part they are to play in politics. When Mgr. Taschereau, arch- bishop of Quebec, issues his mandement to the effect that the church must not interfere in politics, the world applauds the assertion of civil liberty in Quebec; but the applause ceases when a cur6 appears in court, and admits that he did not obey the summons as a witness until he had first received permission from his superior ecclesiastical officer. Time would fail if we should attempt to consider this branch of the subject more in detail. One more example must suffice. The result of an election in Quebec was largely affected by the use of the terrors of the church to control the votes of parish- ioners. The Supreme Court of the Provincea majority belonging to that churchdecided (Charlevois case) that, by threatening voters with spiritual punishment or by denying them the sacrament, the priests were guilty of intimidation and were, therefore, answerable to the civil courts. Thereupon the Bishop of Rimouski issued a pastoral full of abuse toward the judges, and declaring that neither parliament nor the judges were com- petent to interfere. Fortunately for the cause of civil liberty, this attempt to coerce the bench met with an ignominious failure; but the fact that such an attempt was made, shows the unwill- inguess of many Canadian people to accept the American defi- nition of a State as totally independent of a church. OBSTACLES TO ANNEXATION. 163 This point is made clearer by a brief reference to the troubles with the Orangemen. In this same province of Quebec, the legislature of 1878 enacted a law that no religious procession should be aliowed unless the consent of the constituted church authorities was first obtained. Of course the Orangemen are unable to obtain such consent, and consequently they are unable to parade. In fact, they were positively forbidden to do so by Mayor Beaudry, of Montreal, who was in turn sued by an Orange- man, in order to fix the legal status of the organization to which he belonged. The suit still drags its slow length along. To Americans it is evident that all parties have a right to parade if any have the righta question that was settled in the city of New York, on the 12th of July, 1871, in a most emphatic manner. Closely connected with the law of the Dominion and the component provinces are the so-calied public schools. We say so called, for Canada does not appear to have a free school within her borders. Fifty years ago, a bill was passed for the election of trustees in place of the fabriques by the land-holders of each parish. The former system has thus been superseded by a different kind of school policy for each province. The schools of Prince Edwards Island are open to all. Public schools were established in 1871; but, in 1875, separate schools for Roman Catholics were constituted. In Manitoba, the Board of Educa. tion consists of seven Protestants and seven Catholics. Separate schools for Catholics have been provided in Ontario since 1851; and of late they have proved very annoying, because of the archbishops refusal to give an account of the moneys trans- ferred to him. Quebec has a minister of public instruction, assisted by a council of fourteen Catholics and seven Protestants, appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor. The school system is in the hands of the Catholics; but when a Protestant minority in any district becomes sufficiently powerful, dissentient schools are established. The school funds are raised by a taxthe prop- erty being so placed in panels that a Protestant can pay his taxes for dissentient schools, and a Catholic to the regularly con- stituted public schools. The situation is reversed in Ontariothe Catholic minority having the name of separate for their schools. Both the separate and the dissentient schools are guaranteed by a constitutional prohibition to legislate upon such matters. Having thus persisted in a division of the school funds, and, 164 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. in addition thereto, levied a specified suru each week upon each pupil in attendance, how shall the Canadian accept the school of America, absolutely free to all, and sustained by a fund that is not allowed to be divided among the various churches? Fourth. So far as social life in Canada is concerned, there would be many difficulties in the way of annexation. The movement would be opposed by the numerous small officials of the Domin- ion whose future would be uncertain in the States. Compara~ tively great men in a population of five millions become rather insignificant when those five millions are absorbed in a nation of fifty millions. Who can expect that Sir John A. Macdonald will give up his seat in the imperial Privy Council, and his title as well? Or that the other prominent Canadians who were knighted on the sixtieth and sixty-first anniversaries of the Queens birth, will become plain Sam Tilley, Alec Campbell, and so on, just as they were before their decorations were bestowed? Even Mira- beau grumbled when the revolution abolished all titles, and left him plain Citizen Riquetti. In the matter of public displays, also, what havoc will be wrought by annexation! The opening in state of both Dominion and provincial parliaments will become a thing of the past, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario can lay aside his white satin breeches, red coat, and cocked hat, with a plume of many colors. The etiquette that requires one kind of flag for royalty, another for the Governor-General, and a third for the Lieutenant-Governor, must hie away to a more genial clime. The carved coats of the royal arms upon public buildings shall they remain? Or shall the gorgeous red and yellow throne that did duty for the railway receptions of Lorne and Louise exist as a constant though harmless menace to republican insti- tutions? And yet the very social life of the Canadians may be that pivot upon which annexation will turn. Many of their most active business men and publicists are natives of the United States. The Senate has held such Americans as Messrs. Foster and Leonard; the House, Messrs. Currier, Plumb, Holton, Rynal, Miller, Wisner, and Colby; the Cabinet, Messrs. Huntington and Pope. The very founder of the lumber interest was Mr. Philemon Wright, who left Massachusetts eighty years ago for the site of Ottawa; and among his countrymen who have contributed to Canadian greatness in the same line of trade are Messrs. Eddy, OBSTA CLES TO ANNEXATION. 165 Merrill, Bronson, Perley, Baldwin, and Pattee. Then, too, almost every Canadian family has a representative in the United States. How foolish, therefore, is the policy that persists in con- structing railways and canals to avoid contact with the territory of the American republica republic which never had any but the kindliest feeling toward the brethren dwelling north of the boundary line. In spite of Webster and Seward and Greeley, the people of the United States are willing to allow the Canadians time enough to work out their own destiny without let or hindrance; and any ebullitions of spirit that have been shown regarding the Washington treaty or the Halifax award must be considered as merely temporary, and not likely to affect the general result. The movement for annexation, it will be readily inferred, must come from a cordial assent of the Canadians to the breadth and scope of our American institutions. Delays will come, for the reasons above noted, and for the further reason that, which- ever party holds the Government, there will be reluctance to turn it over to the United States; while the party in opposition will still be encouraged by sufficient hope of success to delay any consummation. Hence Lord Dufferin, for Mr. Mackenzie, treated the subject with ridicule; Mr. Mackenzie himself con- tended that it was quite consistent for Canada and the United States to co-exist with different forms of government; and the late Hon. George Brown, in the Toronto ~ denied the exist- ence of an annexation sentiment among the masses, and affirmed that it was confined to some American citizens in our midst, and perhaps a half-score of native disappointed sucklethumbkins. The conservative side of the house is equally positive, and it would sooner think of welcoming Maine into the Dominion than of promoting annexation. Amid such a protest against a political change, the comment of a recent Consul-General to Canada is appropriate: It is like a lady who constantly affirms that she will never marry; but who, in most instances, embraces the first eligible opportunity to do so. That such a step is in contemplation is shown by the more independent portion of the Canadian press. The Hon. James Little also bears this testimony: I have conversed with business men, traders, mechanics, lumberers, real estate owners, lawyers, and others, and have failed to meet with but two who did not strongly express their conviction that annexation is the 166 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. only salvation of the country, and I am fully convinced, if the question was fairly put before the people generally, nine-tenths of them who live by honest industry would take the same view, and rejoice at the change. Why, then, should not the Canadians come, in their own good time? To the southward of their border they see a nation descended, for the most part, like themselves, from Englishmen. They see the younger and more enterprising men hastening from their native land to join these cousins who speak a common mother-tongue. They also see a prosperous people engaged in the laudable task of paying a public debt, while their own debt threatens financial shipwreck. They see a republican form of government consistent and appropriate in all its parts. They see a law of the nation dominating that of the several States; and they see a social equality uncontrolled from across the water. Their own situation in these respects shows no points of advan- tage, but rather the reverse. Even so high an authority as Sir Francis Hincks declares that the question of annexation is one which must not be decided by the majority. Sir Francis may be right, so far as the present temper of the Canadians is con- cerned; but if the logic of history or the doctrine of historical progress~~ is consulted, the lay of the argument is with his oppo- nent, Professor Goldwin Smith, by reason of his clear deductions and his wide acquaintance in either of the two countries. Pro- fessor Smith knowswhat is apparent to every well-informed Americanthat the people of the United States will warmly welcome the Canadians, whenever they have made up their minds to cast in their lot and become an integral part of the American Republic. FREDERIC G. MATHER. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT ll{ NEW YORK. IT is not the purpose of this paper to present the statistics of crime in the city of New York, but to exhibit some of the princi- pal causes of crime which are here in operation, and the inade- quacy of the administration of justice to meet the case. A large city presents the greatest advantages and incitements to deeds of fraud, sensuality, and violence, by the denseness of the population and the facilities of concealment. Temptation is multiplied and the risk of exposure diminished from the same cause. The latter fact draws evil characters to a large city, and the former manu- factures evil characters from among the citizens. But New York is not only a large city, but it is a sea-port, and the princi- pal gate of immigration to the United States. Men of every clime throng its streets, and nearly one-half of its population has no personal or inherited interest in American institutions. The worst elements of European society are constantly brought into this civic caldron,in many cases, the emptyings of aims- houses and prisons. It is no light task to meet this ouset of depravity with the firm hand of order, and make this heteroge- neous mass take on any assimilation to the general constitution of American life. Too much has been said thoughtlessly of the misgovernment of this metropolitan city, where the critics have not considered the peculiar obstacles to social order to which we have referred. The real wonder is that New York is so well governed,that, amid all the antagonisms to public peace which are found in it, it is, on the whole, an orderly city, and offers attractions for residence beyond any other city in the Union. There is far more rowdyism and drunken rioting in Glasgow and Liverpool than in New York; and the streets of New York, which have formed the theme of so much indignation because of their unclean condition, are pure and spotless in comparison with the streets of the cities of Southern Europe. It has become

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT ll{ NEW YORK. IT is not the purpose of this paper to present the statistics of crime in the city of New York, but to exhibit some of the princi- pal causes of crime which are here in operation, and the inade- quacy of the administration of justice to meet the case. A large city presents the greatest advantages and incitements to deeds of fraud, sensuality, and violence, by the denseness of the population and the facilities of concealment. Temptation is multiplied and the risk of exposure diminished from the same cause. The latter fact draws evil characters to a large city, and the former manu- factures evil characters from among the citizens. But New York is not only a large city, but it is a sea-port, and the princi- pal gate of immigration to the United States. Men of every clime throng its streets, and nearly one-half of its population has no personal or inherited interest in American institutions. The worst elements of European society are constantly brought into this civic caldron,in many cases, the emptyings of aims- houses and prisons. It is no light task to meet this ouset of depravity with the firm hand of order, and make this heteroge- neous mass take on any assimilation to the general constitution of American life. Too much has been said thoughtlessly of the misgovernment of this metropolitan city, where the critics have not considered the peculiar obstacles to social order to which we have referred. The real wonder is that New York is so well governed,that, amid all the antagonisms to public peace which are found in it, it is, on the whole, an orderly city, and offers attractions for residence beyond any other city in the Union. There is far more rowdyism and drunken rioting in Glasgow and Liverpool than in New York; and the streets of New York, which have formed the theme of so much indignation because of their unclean condition, are pure and spotless in comparison with the streets of the cities of Southern Europe. It has become 168 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. popular to condemn New York, and to call it a modern Sodom; but nowhere in the world are so many and so mighty agencies in active operation for the material and moral welfare of the com- munity. Churches, hospitals, charity homes, schools, libraries, galleries, benevolent societies, and other forms of gratuitous help to the comfort and welfare of the city, abound, and a general liberality toward all measures tending to elevate the tone of society is very conspicuous. It is, then, with no cynical feel- ing that we endeavor, in this article, to show where effort is still lacking, and where remedies ought speedily to be applied. First. The first cause of crime that any unprejudiced observer will note, if he take any period and examine its police and court records, is the uurestricted sale of distilled liquors. If we omit the regular hotels that actually entertain travelers, we find eight thousand places in New York City where whisky is sold by the drink. In full accord with this fact, we find another, that five- sixths of the inmates of our almshouses and prisons were brought to their present distress by whisky. We notice daily, in the journals, accounts of fights and stabbings in the liquor- saloons, and we read how the murderer first maddens himself with whisky at one of these places, and then is able to use the knife or club. These facts cannot be disputed, and are not dis- puted. Now, these eight thousand drinking-saloons have no legal right to exist. The actual hotel is the only place where spirituous liquors can be legally sold by the drink. The innocent reader will indignantly ask, Why, then, are these eight thousand permitted to continue as fountains of moral poison to the city O?~~ The answer reveals a second cause of crime. & cond. The laws cannot be enforced. The excise commis- sioners have assumed the right to constitute any saloon a hoteL For three years past the citizens have been amused at the practi- cal joke enacted throughout the city, where the proprietor of a drinking-shop fifteen feet square has put up his Hotel sign. Expostulation has been useless; entreaty has been despised; and legal proceedings against the commissioners have proved (through the intricacies of law processes and the admirable assistance these give to rogues) utterly unavailing. If the commissioners wished five dollars a saloon for the favor of a license, they could readily get it and make forty thousand dollars a year, and find this a far better business than attempting to enforce the law. The non- enforcement of law teaches a people to think lightly of law. A CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN NEW YORK. 169 loose execution of the laws will as surely increase the amount of law-breaking as water will seek its leveL The restraint of law is in the knowledge of its certain execution. Remove that knowi- edge,or, rather, replace it with a knowledge that the law will not be executed,and law is worse than no law, for it not only permits crime, but it teaches contempt of all restraining statutes. Third. The apathy of the public is a very large element in this sad condition of things. No one can doubt that the men of New York City who believe in law and order are a great majority. Their own pecuniary interests would make them so believe, even if they had no higher source of inspiration. This majority could cause the laws to be enforced instantly, if they should speak the word. But they will not speak the word. Why? Because they are so busied in their personal affairs that they will not give time to public affairs. They will say God speed to the reformer, and that is the last of it. They wish the city was orderly and law-observing; but for them to give, individually, a day or a dollar to make it so is out of the question. Fourth. The influence of partisan politics is a direct agency in sustaining the whisky colleges, and in staying the enforcement of the laws against them. The men whom both parties send to the legislature at Albany are nominated in these nurseries of crime. There the rank and file of voters congregate. As respectable citizens refuse to take part in politics and lift them to a plane of virtue, the candidates for place and power resort to the lowest characters and their correspondingly low haunts, to obtain their votes. Bargaining and bribery form the warp and woof of this style of political goods. Crime and its punishment are not the themes these statesmen love to ponder; but, rather, themeans and plunder of a party victory. Before we can improve the moral aspect of New York, we must see our good men endowed with public spirit, and votes withheld from every candidate, how- ever straight~ his nomination, who has a doubtful character. Fifth. The dilatoriness of officials in performing the func- tions for which nominally they were elected, and for which actually they are paid, is an evil closely connected with the last cause mentioned. If a party end is to be gained by delay, officials know well how to be polite and put you off. When most of the aldermen of the city are keepers of groggeries, can officials afford to be very prompt in attending to excise cases? Is it not natural in such circumstances for policemen to not 170 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W it, and for police justices to find a flaw in the evidence, and district attorneys to have the calendar too fuli to put the case on? How easy it is to worry out a complainant with postponements, or, still better, to let the accused go off on a hundred dollars straw bail and to lock up the complainant in the House of Detention! The whole executive of the city is bound up indis- solubly with the rum interests, and therefore cannot act honestly against either the groggeries or the crime they generate. Delays in execution of law spring chiefly from this cause, and not from any necessity in crowded calendar or deficient evidence. We have now succinctly given the causes (all closely related) of crime in the city of New York. We may add that, while these causes exist and crime is encouraged, yet the grosser forms of crime, such as murder and burglary, are generally met by a prompt and vigorous action on the part of all the executive authorities. There is in the public mind a desire to punish crime, but a strange unwillingness to prevent it by the execution of the preventive laws. Judges and juries, as well as district attorneys and the police, are ready to overlook or treat lightly the offeuses which bear the relation to the grosser crimes that the bud does to the flower. In this sphere of the lesser law- breaking, political intrigue and bribery have their chosen field. The officer who would not think of avoiding duty in a murder case will unhesitatingly consider a ten-dollar bill an ample reason for neglecting duty in an excise case, and the judge who would take any circumstantial evidence in a burglary case, and charge the jury to regard such evidence, will rule out all circum- stantial evidence in a liquor case, and clear the party who has sold the whiskyillegally, because the witnesses did not themselves drink the whisky! This is the common rule in all the New York courts. This method of procedure, besides being intrinsically wrong and base, shows an utter failure of moral perception on the part of the public authorities. They have no clear and broad view of the character and connections of crime. The man who sold the whisky to the habitual drunkard is to be let off under some tech- nical excuse or with a trifling fine, but the drunkard inflamed by this mans whisky, when he has gone home and cut his wifes throat, is to be hanged. This is the sage discrimination of our magistrates. Moreover, fhese men determine what laws they will enforce and what laws they will not enforce. They make them- selves practically a legislature above the legislature. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN NEW YORK. 171 Some of the facts connected with this loose criminal system (for it is a system) are ludicrous, as well as shameful. For example, a policeman is forbidden by the rules of the commissioners to enter any liquor-saloon, or to touch any liquor. The courts then rule that only those who have entered a liquor-saloon, and tasted the liquor, can give evidence. Consequently, the policemen of the city, who are appointed to watch over the interests of the city, and to detect and arrest law-breakers, are entirely precluded from ever detecting or arresting an illegal whisky-seller. The entire executive arm of the city is paralyzed as respects the vast evil of illegal liquor-selling, and that by a well-understood sys- tematic arrangement on the part of the authorities. The police- man, placed under this system, is speedily demoralized. If he should innocently report a liquor-saloon as a suspicious place he would be reprimanded by the captain, or sent to another pre- cinct. So he soon learns to keep his mouth shut on such sub- jects, and crc long he knows how to stand outside the liquor- saloon, and drink off the glass which the bar-keeper slyly hands him. If a company of citizens, at a great sacrifice of time and money, determine to prosecute any particular case, they meet with impediments from the beginning to the end. As we have seen, if the liquor is not tasted, the evidence is thrown out; if the liquor is tasted, then the taster is a miserable detective, a tempter to law-breaking, and such a ~ evidence ought t~o go for nothing. If, however, after every form of delay and quirk, the case is at last proved, then the district attorney has his chance at worrying out the patience of the complainant, and months may elapse before an indictment is made, and the case brought into the final court. At length, when the trial actually takes place, every trick is used to get a liquor-loving jury, who will decide, not according to the evidence, but according to their sympathies. If the case successfully passes this ordeal, and the man is convicted, he is usually fined a few dollars, which he takes out of his vest pocket, and then goes back to his bar to do it all over again. If, after much reasoning with the judges to show them that fines are of no value in stopping these illegal pro- cedures, the sentence is to a months imprisonment, then you will find the sheriff, instead of taking his prisoner to the penitentiary, where striped clothes and shaved head would have been his lot, kindly permitting him to remain at the city prison, where he need 172 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not afflict his person, but may enjoy his otium with cigars. These are the pleasant experiences of citizens who try to see law enforced against the will of the authorities. Now, it may be asked by the reader, what are the remedies that should be applied to this civic disease? Perhaps an experience of some years in the midst of this evil may qualify us to answer the question, and we commend the answer to the citizens of all large cities. First. Let the citys politics be separated from the countrys politics. Let the question in the city be one of personal fitness, by high moral qualities, for the official station. This may be begun by a man boldly voting for the nominee of the opposite party where he is manifestly the candidate of higher moral character. When many will do this, it can be made a custom, and politicians will learn not to rely on their party lines in our city affairs. Let the newspapers in favor of public morals speak out for this independent style of city voting for local magistrates. This will be the death of machines, and all the corruption they manufacture. It will teach parties to vie with each other in nominating high-minded men, and the city would no more be disgraced by putting low rum-sellers and ignorant rowdies into places of trust and responsibility. Second. Let every citizen take personal interest in the citys welfare. Each citizen should be willing to give both time and money to the common welfare. His very citizenship, with all that it is worth, makes him a debtor to the city so far forth as to give a watchful eye and a helping hand to the enforcement of law. It is a small type of man that says, I pay my taxes and that is enough, and that thus offers to his city only his compulsory aid. Where is the voluntary aid that our city has a moral right to look for? Let a citizen, when he sees a law broken, take the trouble to make a complaint and appear as witness, even though it take several hours of his time from his business or his pleas- ures. Let him see that his own neighborhood is kept free from pollution. Let him encourage others to do likewise, and let him contribute to any approved organization which has for its object the enforcement of law. And when election day arrives, let him see to it that nothing prevents him from casting his vote, and that ouly for honest men. Third. Let each community organize a Society for the Preven- tion of Crime, which, composed of well-known and trnsted citizens, shall have the confidence of the community, andwhich shall use CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN NEW YORK. 173 all diligence to. see that the laws are enforced, and tliat the officers of the law who fail to do their duty are exposed. In every truly democratic community such a vigilance committee (in its literal and simple meaning) should be found, doing nothing in secret, nor acting in the slightest degree extra leges, but letting bad officers know that they are watched, and encouraging good officers, who too often now are forced into a timid position by their evil colleagues. The moral power of a community can thus be concentrated, and be made irresistible. When a citizen looks after a particular disorder, reports it to the authorities, and follows it up with such attention as wili help the officers of justice to procure evidence and obtain conviction, right-minded and upright officers always commend the act, and thank the citizen for giving time and energy to assist them in establishing the order of the city. In like manner, a society which simply helps the officers of the law to detect and punish crime (and so prevent crime) will always be gratefully appre- ciated by upright officials who have the citys interest at heart. The talk of collusion, interference, officiousness, irresponsible power is found to emanate always from the rogues, who see in the vigilance committee a formidable enemy. From the satne source comes the cry of extreme morality against detectives as wicked tempters. The law-breakers are greatly concerned lest the morality of the community should be injured by these volunteer societies. The same virtuous law-breakers declare the register- ing of the names of those who frequent dens of infamy to be a fearful infringement upon personal liberty. These illegal houses are under the ban of the law, and accordingly should be exposed, but it is a crime in the eyes of these critics of Law and Order societies to expose those who, by their constant custom, maintain these sinks of lawlessness and vice. That such nonsense should be soberly considered for a moment by the respectable journals is a reflection on their perspicacity. Every right movement is capable of being perverted in the details of its application. Every officer of the city may levy blackmail. We would not therefore abolish offices, but punish the particular offenders. So a societys agents may prove false, and use blackmailing threats, without affecting the importance of the societys functions. These individual cases of wrong-doing will be found in all things human, but it is ouly the illogical or the designing who can make the destruction of the society a necessary sequitur from this prem vOL. CXXXIILNO. 297. 12 174 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. ise. Surely no just reason can be assigned why, when a house of ill-fame is broken up,a house that has been a festering moral sore in the neighborhood,the public record of the event should not contain the names of A, B, and C, who were found in it as parts of its iniquity. An outcry against this seems to come from the editors, and others who have personal reasons for a profound silence on the part of witnesses on this head. Such a record is no more blackmailing than it is slander. It is a truthful record of a fact in police duty which the public ought to know. One might just as righteously object to the publication of the names of the receivers of stolen goods. It is high time such squeamish- ness should give way to common sense and the demands of the public good. We have pointed out three remedies for our civic disease. We do not believe they would prove a perfect cure; but we are sure they would reduce the amount of crime to very small pro- portions. Some improvements in our laws would greatly help the work of a true reform. Laws that would limit the discretion of excise commissioners, district attorneys, and judges would be most wholesome, and would make justice more certain; for now the uncertainty of punishment adequate to the crime or misde- meanor weakens the force of law. Take away from excise com- missioners the power to determine what applicant has a good moral character, by making twenty of his immediate neighbors responsible for the decision; take away the power of the district attorney to postpone excise cases and other cases of (supposed) petty offenses, by setting apart certain days of each month exclu- sively for such cases; take away the power of judges to let off a defiant law-breaker with a nominal flue, by making imprisonment the ouly punishment for a second offense, and you will have done much to make your reform feasible. The law might, also, rightly allow the complainants expenses to be paid out of the fine, on conviction; for it is hardly fair for a citizen of public spirit to consume his time and attentiou on a case of law-breaking, and then have to pay out of his own pocket the cost of his philan- thropic and patriotic work. A law that would limit the number of places where liquor is sold by the glass, and reduce the eight thousand in New York to one thousand, would be of advantage in many respects, but chiefly that it would permit the officials of the city to have complete surveillance over these dangerous sources of crime. The great number now baffle all watching. GRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN NEW YORK. 175 If our philosophy be right, the treatment of the breach of the excise laws should be most stern and severe. The places where crime is hatched should receive special attention, and every item of the law be fully and faithfully enforced. Instead of this, we find that jnst here the law is a practical nullity, except as a vigilance committee presses it in some particular instances. The police patrolmen, the roundsmen, the sergeants, the captains, the in- spectors, the snperintendent, and the fonr police commissioners, all know that every mm-bar on Broadway and Bowery is open on Snnday, directly against the law. They see the lights within, they hear the clinking of glasses and shonts of revelry, and they observe the ha1itue~s of the places going in by the back door; and yet these guardians of the city and sworn execntors of the law will not lift a finger to stop this lawlessness. We have already considered the reasons why they will not. We mention the fact again, in order to impress upon our readers the importance of effecting a revolution in a pnblic opinion which connives at such neglect of dnty, and of bringing these maunfactories of crime into the foreground for regulation and the exact enforce- ment of law. We have taken New York City as our text, because of that city we have a thorough and accurate knowledge; but the prin- ciples, as well as the facts, will doubtless apply to all the large cities of our country, and hence our article, we trust,~ not have a merely local interest or value. We have not used rhetor- ical appeals, or spread before our readers heart-rending pictures of vice and crime. We wish to arouse something deeper than emotion or sentiment. We wish to convince the reason and estab- lish a firm basis of principle, from which systematic action may be expected to grow. The appeal is to the common sense of citi- zens. We have no patent theory, or radical measure of moral reform to propose; but ask our fellow-citizens to take time to consider this great fundamental question of crime and punish- ment in the community, to see what their duty is in the premises, and TO DO IT. How~uD CRosBy. A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. WASHINGTON, in his message to the Third Congress, said: There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peaceone of the most powerful instruments of our prosperityit must be known at all times that we are ready for war. Madison said: If America should have vessels at all, she should have enough for all the purposes intended; to do her own carrying, to form a school for seamen, laying the founda- tion of a navy, and to be able to support herself against the interference of foreigners. Jefferson, in his famous Report on Commerce, said: Our navigation involves still higher considerations. As a branch of industry, it is valuable but as a resource of defense essen- tial. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear from their land-board, and nothing to desire beyond their present rights. But on the sea-board they are open to injury, and they have there, too, a commerce which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen seamen, and of artisans and establishments in readiness for ship-building. If particular nations grasp at undue shares (of commerce or carrying), and more especially if they seize on the means of the United States to convert them into aliment for their own strength and withdraw them entirely from the support of those to whom they belong, defensive and pro- tecting measures become necessary on the part of the nation whose marine resources are thus invaded, or it will be disarmed of its defense, its productions will be at the mercy of the nation which has possessed itself exclusively of the means of carrying them, and its politics may be influenced by those who command

A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. WASHINGTON, in his message to the Third Congress, said: There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peaceone of the most powerful instruments of our prosperityit must be known at all times that we are ready for war. Madison said: If America should have vessels at all, she should have enough for all the purposes intended; to do her own carrying, to form a school for seamen, laying the founda- tion of a navy, and to be able to support herself against the interference of foreigners. Jefferson, in his famous Report on Commerce, said: Our navigation involves still higher considerations. As a branch of industry, it is valuable but as a resource of defense essen- tial. The position and circumstances of the United States leave them nothing to fear from their land-board, and nothing to desire beyond their present rights. But on the sea-board they are open to injury, and they have there, too, a commerce which must be protected. This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of citizen seamen, and of artisans and establishments in readiness for ship-building. If particular nations grasp at undue shares (of commerce or carrying), and more especially if they seize on the means of the United States to convert them into aliment for their own strength and withdraw them entirely from the support of those to whom they belong, defensive and pro- tecting measures become necessary on the part of the nation whose marine resources are thus invaded, or it will be disarmed of its defense, its productions will be at the mercy of the nation which has possessed itself exclusively of the means of carrying them, and its politics may be influenced by those who command A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 177 its commerce. The carriage of our own commodities, if once established in another channel, cannot be resumed in the moment we desire. If we lose the seamen and artisans whom it now occupies, we lose the present means of marine defense, and time will be requisite to raise up others, when disgrace or losses shall bring home to our feelings the evils of having abandoned them. These are not the words of ship-builders or ship-owners, but of three of the wisest and most far-sighted of our earlier states- men. No one will question their patriotism, nor that they were seeking the best good of their country. The patriotic policy which they laid down was sustained both in our merchant marine and navy until the introduction of steam into the worlds navies. Before that time, when all were alike dependent on wind and sail, no nation excelled ours in skillful and daring enterprise on the sea. It is since that introduction, and more especially since our civil war, that we have lost position, both in our naval power and merchant marine. Our Government appears to have had no settled policy with regard to either great interest, while foreign nations have paid close and increasing attention to both. As for the navy, a make-shift system has been followed. Whenever anything has been done, it has been under the stress of emer- gency, when all was confusion and alarm, and when an attempt was made to break up the Government, and the work of a year must be crowded into three months. The cry, We must do the best we can in the crisis, has often been heard by our people; and when the crisis was over,some sort of means to weather it having been patched up at enormous expense,the same listless, indifferent policy has been again pursued. This course has cost the country many times more millions of dollars than were needed, if properly expended, to have made and maintained for us the most powerful navy and most profitable marine afloat. Yet,when all was done, what was there to show for it? This course has brought us to a condition of which Jeffersons words were only too prophetic. Particular nations have grasped at undue shares of our ocean-carrying; through neglect of pro- tecting measures, we have been disarmed of defense; our products are at the mercy of foreign nations, and our politics have long felt the evils of foreign influence. It is time this was changed. I propose to show our present naval condition, the costly con- sequences of naval weakness in the past, the urgent necessity to 178 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. provide naval protection for the future, and to suggest a plan to provide this protection in the most economical and effective way,a way at once profitable to the Government and promotive of our commerce. The United States has thirteen thousand five hundred miles of coastfronting on two oceans and indented by a thousand harborsto protect. Claiming like protection, also, are a coast marine and trade nearly, if not quite, equal to the entire foreign trade of the country, subject to be cut to pieces or broken up at any moment by a foreign power. I do not need to argue that first duty of government to provide for the proper protection of its people and property against attack on land or sea. As Secre- tary of the Navy Toucey said, in his report for 1860: That we must have a navy for protection and defense; that we must have the means of continuing it in existence, and of employing it; that the duty of providing both has been devolved on the Federal Government, are self-evident propositions. To be able at any time, at short notice, to throw a powerful naval force upon any given point where our interests are threatened, or the lives of American citizens are in jeopardy, is not only a constitutional duty, but one of the safest, most beneficent, and salutary powers that can be intrusted to official hands under a republican form of government. A policy of naval strength is essential to the protection of our coasts and commerce? and of American citizens and their property on the ocean and in distant. countries; to the preservation of peace, the efficiency of negotiation, the general advancement of our commercial interests, the maintenance of our appropriate position among nations, and the prompt vindication of our rights and of the honor of the country. What protection has the United States provided for its coast and coasting trade? Again, our surplus products sent by ship to foreign markets amounted in 1870 to about 2,500,000 tons; in 1880 to over 15,000,- 000 tons, valued at $1,589,472,093; and in 18~), at anything like a proportionate increase, wili be upward of 50,000,000 tons. We have for many years been paying from $70,000,000 to $100,- 000,000 a year in freight money to foreign carriers, are now pay- ing $140,000,000, and this amount must increase proportionately with our exports. Our products are carried almost entirely in foreign bottoms, and are therefore liable at any time to be endangered by foreign complications. Suppose the three nations which are doing the principal part of our carryingEngland, France, and Germanyshould become involved in war. The first thing would be to attack each others ships, and in destroy- A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 179 ing those ships destroy our products. We might then have the unpleasant experience of seeing the privateers of hostile nations lying in wait off Sandy Hook, to prey upon any ship that vent- ured to put out to sea loaded with our cargoes. What means have we to guard this great interest? What redress could national law give us in such a case? What could we do to secure the carrying of our products, having no ships of our own, nor the skilled labor to produce them, and being unable to buy them of England in such emergency? What danger should we then be in, through pursuing a policy of dependence upon foreign carriers and ship-builders? Would we for a moment allow our railroad system of transportation to be subject to such risks and chances? Yet is not the steam-ship line simply the continuation of the trunk line road to market? We cannot be safe unless the w~iole road is equally under our control at all times. Has the United States to-day this control or the power to procure it in case of sudden requirement? In this I have only pointed out what would be our condition if we were not directly involved in the war. I need not comment on what our condition would be if we were a party to it. We have, it is true, a comparatively small amount of tonnage left in the foreign trade. But what protection has Government even for the little that is left? The mention of our navy only excites a smile. We have practically no means of protection whatever for any of these national interests. We could not to- day properly repulse an attack made by the weakest naval power of Europe. To face the fact squarely is the surest way to a remedy. The common answer to statements of fact like these is, I am aware, that we are in no danger of attack; that we are, and shall remain, free from European complications; and that peace will be our perpetual possession. But that is no answer at all. It is a nations duty to guard against the possibility, as well as the probability, of attack. The same answer would doubtless have been given in 1858. In fact, in that year the Secretary of the Navy said: All our past experience has evinced the necessity of an increase of the navy. - . . Although it may be delayed, yet the time will soon come when this policy will be forced upon us under circumstances of great disadvantage, if not voluntarily adopted. The increase asked for was not granted, small as it was; but how soon that prediction was verified, though the 180 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. assault came not from without, but on that land-board which Jef ferson deemed secure. But, aside from our own prospects of war, I have shown that, in a war between foreign nations, we should be the greatest sufferers through the delay and endangering of our products on their way to market. And what does the condi- tion of the great European nations to-day make the more proba- ble, peace or war? The following wili give answer: STANDING ARMIES OF THE LEADING NATIONS. No. enlisted men. Russia France Germany Spain Austria Italy Great Britain BritishIndia, nativesin Britisliservice United States 788,000 471,000 420,000 330,000 296,000 200,000 192,000 123,862 27,976 Total 2,768,838 Annual expense. $144,216,000 100,000,000 92,574,000 49,147,000 50,680,000 37,984,000 83,800,000 100,000,o0o 30,240,000 $694,629,000 STANDING NAVIES OF THE LEADING NATIONS. Yations. Great Britain France Russia Spain Italy United States Germany Austria Brazil Sweden No. officers, seamen, etc. No. ships. 58,800 400 47,500 226 42,169 150 12,048 138 10,800 66 8,250 139 7,365 60 8,014 68 6,184 63 6,141 141 1,451 Total 207,271 Total armies and navies... .2,976,109 Annual ea~pense. $52,935,000 40,799,000 20,000,000 6,536,000 7,544,000 15,022,000 11,165,000 4,600,000 9,994,000 1,353,000 $169,948,000 864,577,000 This shows, then, that the leading nations of the world employ in their standing armies and navies nearly three million * More than one-half this number are tugs, worn-out sailing-vessels, and monitors for harbor defense, as will appear hereafter. Nations. A MILITIA FO1~ THE SEA. 181 men, at an annual expense of over eight hundred and sixty million dollars. If to this were added the amount paid for the maintenance of militia reserves, the cost of arms and implements, of ships and fortifications, the grand total would be more than three thousand millions. Yet this immense preparation for war, with its great expense, originated from the brains of the wisest and greatest statesmen of the various European nations. No wonder the London Times, in view of these things, said of a proposed increase of the German army: What is disturbing in the matter is the vivid revelation it affords of the terrible condition of the armed truce in which Europe exists from day to day. By wisdom and firmness, statesmen may avert a collision of these armed forces, but such an achievement will need incessant vigilance and patience. At such a time, England ought to hold herself as free as possible from all unnecessary entanglements, in order to be able, if necessary, to make her voice heard at some critical moment when the whole course of European his- tory might be hanging in the balance. Far greater issues to the world are now at stake in Europe than in any other quarter of the globe, and, in decid- ing them, England may have a still more beneficent part to play than ever she has yet fulfilled. To play it effectively, she must be strong, and she should be at peace. Suppose this collision were to come to-morrow, what effect would it have on our foreign trade, we having no means to meet the emergency? What effect would it have on the delivery of these fifteen million tons of surplus products which we are send- ing abroad, and on whose quick and safe delivery so largely depend the prosperity and financial security of the country? We, too, need to be strong and at peace. But with our present dependence upon foreign carriers, we should be helpless in case of emergency. We could neither carry nor protect our products, to say nothing of being powerless to take the opportunity that would be offered in part to regain the carrying trade that was taken from us during our civil strife. We could not meet the enormous demand that a foreign war would make upon our products, for want of ships and of means to build them. Wash- iugtons idea was the true onethat we are only prepared for peace when we are prepared for war. If ever nation paid the penalty of non-preparation, this nation paid it in blood and treasure during our civil war. For want of preparation we suffered everything short of the destruction of 182 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. our Government. Our wonderful recuperative power, however, made us soon forget our great losses caused by neglect. What was our naval condition before the war broke out? In 1858 we had above five million tons of sea-going tonnage, and stood second only to England as a commercial power. What navy had we to protect this tonnage? Of steam we had this formidable fleet: Fourteen wooden steamers, eight of them of three thousand tons each, speed not to exceed nine knots; three side-wheel steamers, of no efficiency as war steamers; two tenders, one dispatch-boat. This fleet was scattered. Of sail we had ten ships of tlie line, two of them unseaworthy; ten frigates, only two of them serviceable; twenty sloops, eleven of them useless; and some store-ships. The Secretary of the Navy recommended converting the eight ships of the line into steam frigates, as they were of little value as they were. The importance of speed, he said, could not be too highly estimated. Of two war vessels, equal otherwise, the one having greatest speed would possess a. decisive advantage, and in a contest be most sure to win. Wind could no longer be relied upon in naval warfaresteam was the essential. Yet there was not a fast steam vessel in the whole navy. The Secretary declared it was impossible, with the exist- ing naval force, to give adequate protection to the persons and property of American citizens on laud and sea in all parts of the world. But his appeals for appropriations to rebuild old vessels and build ten new war steamers that were imperatively required, went unheeded. Mr. Toucey did all that one man could to impress upon Con- gress the need of a more powerful navy, in order to maintain our rights and the honor of the country. But practically our naval condition remained little better in 1860 than it was in 1858. What was the result? While in 1860 the Secretary could not get from Congress an appropriation of a million, in a year afterward the Government was spending millions for naval purposes; building ships of green timber, which rotted in many cases before they could be launched; buying ships wherever they could be had at any price, and leaving their place in the carrying trade to be filled by foreign carriers; doing the best that could be done in the rush of an emergency, and paying roundly for it; spending millions where thousands would have gone further if properly expended in time of peace. The following shows the war expenditure for seven years: A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 183 EXPENDITURES OF THE WAR AN]) NAVY DEPARTMENTS.* Years Army. Navy. 1860 $16,472,203 $11,514,650 1861 23,001,531 12,387,157 1862 389,173,562 42,640,353 1863 603,314,412 63,261,235 1864 690,391,049 85,704,963 1865 1,030,690,400 122,617,434 1866 283,154,676 43,285,662 The want of a strong navy to effectively blockade the South- ern coast at the beginning of the contest was our weak point. Had we expended between 1850 and 1860 even the $42,000,000 that were granted in 1862, and to that extent built up a steam navy suitable to our commercial position, we could have closed every Southern port, and, by shutting off the sources of supply, have terminated the war within a year. This was the opinion not only of Secretary Seward, but of other eminent statesmen. A glance at the expenditures subsequent to 1862, as given above, will show somewhat of the financial saving such a termination would have effected. Who can estimate the value of the lives and property that would have been saved in such an event? What did our Government do in its extremity? Probably the best that could have been done at such a time, as I have sa~id. And in what I say of our naval expenditures I am not criticising what was done; I am condemning only the want of preparation, the do-nothing policy that allowed us to reach such a time unpre- pared. The terrible cost and loss were an inevitable result of that neglect. Secretary Welless report, in 1868, shows that the number of vessels built and begun by and for the Government, after the firing on Sumter, was one hundred and seventy-nine, at a total cost of some $80,000,000. Of these about one-half were built in the navy-yards, though the power to create them there came from the private workshops; the rest, together with all the engines, were built in private yards, the Govern- ment, with all its navy-yards, not having the means to build * These enormous sums, it should be remembered, were not gold, but our depreciated currency. Through want of preparation, the Government credit had broken down, and its money during this expenditure was worth only fifty cents on the dollar, so that really double the price was paid for every- thing. Add to this the sum paid by States, counties, and cities to send men to the field, and the immense cost will be seen. 184 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. an iron-clad. The most important war-ships were not finished until after the war was over, and no less than one hundred and twenty of the vessels were not ready for use until 1863 and 1864, long after the contest should have been and would have been ended had our navy possessed even fifty good iron and steam war-vessels in 1861. It was a well-known fact that a great part of these vessels and of our vast naval expenditure were undertaken by the Government, not to crush out the Southern Confederacy, but to meet the emergencies threatening us from other quarters; to serve as precautionary measures against the unfriendly feeling that existed and was growing against us in England and other foreign countries. And great credit is due to the wise and courageous leaders of our Government who took the responsibility of those measures in behalf of the Union. Had they not succeeded, what a spectacle we should present to the world to-day as a divided countrytwo nations fighting per- petually against each others best interests, instead of a prosperous and indivisible Union. In the building of these ships, also, was proven the marvelous energy and ability and resources of our people when called upon to meet a sudden crisis. In addition to the ships built, the Government bought four hundred and ninety-seven ships of all sorts in character, tonnage, and price, at an expense of about forty millions more. It was impossible to stop to consider the fitness of these vessels for anything but the immediate requirements of the nation, nor was it a time to think about expense. It is not strange, therefore, though it is a striking comment on the consequences of not pro- viding proper defense at the proper time, that after the war three hundred and sixty-three of these purchased ships were sold for what could be got for them at public auction, while ninety-seven more were lost, destroyed, or sunk as obstructions during the war, leaving but thirty-seven still in service in 1868. All this was necessary in a war with an enemy that had no navy. What would have been our position if we had been attacked by a nation that had a navy? Whatever there is in our naval record that is unpleasant to reflect upon, was due entirely to a lack of the proper means of naval defense. That should be borne in mind. The glorious deeds of our naval heroes, and the great things done with what resources were obtainable, fill famous chapters of our history that are familiar. A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 185 But it may be said by some that, while our naval condition was so pitiable in 1860, it is far superior to-day, through the navy that was built up duriug the war. Unfortunately, that is not the case; while, if we compare the naval progress we have made since 1860 with the naval progress made by the chief European nations,it will be found that we are far more incompetent and unprepared to meet an attack than we were in 1860. Let us look at the condition of our navy to-day. The one hundred and thirty-nine ships accredited to the United States in the table above make a fictitious showing of strength. What is the character of these ships? According to the navy register of 1879, sixty-seven were steam sea-going vessels of war of all classes; twenty-two were sea-going sailing vessels of war; twenty-four were iron-dads, for coast and harbor defense; two were torpedo vessels, and the remainder were tugs, dispateh-boats, etc. Regarding this fleet, the Naval Committee of the House of Representatives reported as follows: Small as the number of our naval vessels is, as compared with the other navies of the world, in real fighting power the navy is infinitely smaller, and it is time Congress and the country should face the fact and p~rovide the remedy. Going into the details, we find that the sailing ves- sels are old worthies of a past age, only five of them in bare condition for navigation, none of them fit for any war service whatever. Of the twenty-four iron-dads, only fourteen are in condition for effective service, and not one of them carries a rifled gun. This leaves us only the sixty-seven steam vesselsthe navy properto consider. The five first-rates, which were originally fine war-ships, are now classed as obsolete, and practically out of use for war. Of the twenty-seven second-rates, but nine are fit for sea, seven are worthless and to be sold, three are rotten on t~he stocks, the rest are disabled or under repair. Of the twenty- nine third-rates, six are laid up as worthless, six are undergo- ing repair, two are antiquated paddle-wheel steamers, of no naval value; the remaining fifteen are small cruising vessels, none of them of a thousand tons, or able to be effective in a war with a modern naval power. In this whole fleet of steamers, but one has a speed of fourteen knots, three have a speed of thirteen, four a speed of perhaps twelve knots. The rest are slow, large consumers of coal, and furnished with a style of machinery long since discarded by even the merchant marine of the world. No one of them could overhaul an ordinary merchautman. Yet 186 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. speed is the ftrst and indispensable element of success in naval warfare to-day. These figures are all taken from Congressional reports, and are authentic. They show that we have but twenty- four ships of war that could go to sea in ease of attack on us, and that not one of these is a first-rate war-ship; hence, that we have practically no means of naval defense worthy of the name. We are liable to insult, because it is known all over the world that we are not able to repel itthe condition Washington urgently advised the nation to avoid. Our utter naval weakness was made apparent in 1875, when trouble with Spain seemed imminent. Attempt was made to put in shape some of the old iron monitors that were built in a hurry in the midst of our war, and useless as modern war-ships. None of them were capable of making seven knots an hour; but we had nothing else, and must patch up something to make a show. To take care of this navy, which certainly is not strong enough to take care of itself, we have eight navy-yards, valued at one hundred million dollars. It is unquestionably wise to maintain these as a reserve power. But in these yards there are not facili- ties to produce a single iron-clad, nor can the plates required for such a vessel be made in this country; so that, if we wanted to reconstruct our navy to-day, we could not do it without buying the armor plating from Great Britain. Then these yards employ only some three thousand men, while they have capacity for sixty Thousand. It is not our policy to keep a large working force in them while at peace, nor to make them schools to educate skilled mechanics. For these, in case of emergency, the Government Ihas relied upon the private ship-yards and workshops, and it was the sixty thousand workmen called from these private sources that filled the empty navy-yards, and made them of service in the time of our need. How invaluable to our Government then proved this army of mechanics, raised from those practical schools of industry which the policy of the free trade and free ship advo- tate would have shut up, leaving us dependent upon foreigners for the means of defense, instead of having the power within ourselves to produce them. Soldiers and sailors may be obtained at anytime; not so skilled mechanics. They must be trained up, year by year, and no amount of money could procure them, at short notice, for a country that had them not in its workshops. It should be said here, in justice, that our want has never been for trained, brave, and efficient men, whether in command A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 187 or in the ranks. In our navy we have always had men of talent in their profession equal to any who can be named in the naval annals of the world. That we should retain a naval force of so high character and efficiency, with so inadequate a fleet, is a great credit to our nationality. In case of a naval war to-mor- row, we could send into it some of the best naval material, in men, in the world but to send them into it in any wax-ships we possess would be like the blunder of sending the Six Hundred to their death in the charge at Balaklava. Every American recalls with pride the naval achievements in our late war, and in that more especially naval war of 1812, where our naval forces incon- testably proved their superiority, and won for this country such recognition and prestige on the ocean as we could not compel to-day. Our whole naval record from 1775 down is a noble one, making our position now appear but the more unworthy and pitiable by contrast. In view of the facts,which are open to study for all, I think there will be no question that this nation is destitute of a navy adequate either to defend its coast and harbors, its coasting trade, and its flag on the high seas, or to make aggressive war- fare on the commerce of any nation that might attack it. Its condition is lamentable and dangerous, and utterly without excuse in a nation so great, prosperous, and powerful in other ways. The practical question is, How can this condition be changed into what it ought to be in the best and most economical way? Must we maintain a large and expensive navy, as the European nations do, or can the end of protection be secured with less cost? The policy of this Government has always been opposed to the maintenance of a large standing army and navy, to eat up the substance and place a heavy tax on the prosperity of the people. Its land policy has been to maintain the nucleus of an army, and to rely for defense in emergency upon the militia, which is supported by Congress and the States at a comparatively insignificant expense. There is no doubt that our resources are ample under this system, and it is both wise and cheap. The naval policy has been similar, to maintain a small navy. But here the essential difference of conditions has been overlooked. Soldiers can be called out, and volunteers enlisted, and march away at a days notice on the land; but while sailors may be enlisted in plenty, they must have ships in which to go forth to 188 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. battle on the sea. No matter how small the naval force may be, the Government, in order to be safe, must keep up a naval fleet in readiness for action. We have not done this. How can we do it so as to make our naval policy also wise and cheap? In the discussion of this matter of naval defense which has taken place of late years, much has been said about making pro- vision for the safety of our harbors and coast,and it cannot be done too soon,but scarcely anything about inflicting punish- ment upon an enemy. This is, however, one of the most important features of naval power. Look at it a moment, taking Englands position as an example. She cannot raise her own bread, and is dependent upon the outside world for the raw materialexcept coal and ironto keep her factories running and her people employed. She has more money invested in ships and manufact- ure than France, Germany, and ItalyI might almost say the whole of Europetogether. She has to sell five-sixths of the products of her factories in exchange for bread and raw material, consuming only one-sixth at home; and these products are sent to the worlds markets in her ships, which are also carriers, to a great extent, for the other nations. Her road to market is the common highway of all nations, the sea. No blow could be struck at her with so deadly effect as to attack her commerce, for this strikes at her factories. What effect would it have on hersince nations study their own condition as well as their enemys before going to warto know that we had a fleet ready to prey upon her $700,~0,000 worth of shipping? And would not a like knowledge on the part of other nations, also suscept- ible of attack in this way, tend to give this nation strength and dignity? The protection of our harbors is neither a difficult nor a costly problem to solve. This secured, we do not need a great and expensive navy proper, like the European navies. But what ships of war we have should be of the most improved and effective dass. In obtaining these, we have the benefit of the expensive experiments made by the European governments. Experience has proved that the first requisite is speed, which gives a wonder- ful advantage either in attack or retreat. To attain this, a million dollars might be spent on one ship, and though the maximum speed might not be required five times in the ships life, it might be of more value and importance to the nation in a crisis than ten times its cost. One iron-clad of great speed would be more A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 189 effective than three slow ones of the same size and equipment. Fifty ships of this class would, of themselves, make a powerful navy. But, beyond this we need a naval resource, readily within reach, yet costing the Government nothing in time of peace. The question is how we can, in the best and cheapest way, obtain such a resource. I take this opportunity to submit a plan by which I believe we can secure to the nation these important benefits. The plan starts with the construction of one hundred fast iron screw steam-ships, to be divided into five classes. All to be engaged in the foreign trade. 20 of these ships should be of 4000 tons burden, with a speed of 16 knots., 20 of 4000 tons, with a speed of 15 knots. 2Oof 3500 15 2Oof 3000 15 2Oof 2500 15 The last twenty to have a draft of water not exceeding, when loaded, fourteen feet, so as to enter some of our Southern ports. This would make a carrying capacity of 340,000 tons. Each vessel would make a voyage monthly, and, with the back cargo, would be equal to a carrying capacity of 8,160,000 tons per year. Deduct from this 25 per cent., as the vessels may not run fuli, and we should have 6,120,000 tons per year. Add to this our present carrying capacity, and we should have over 8,500,000 tons of commerce. The average price of carrying to foreign markets for several years past has not been less than $7.50 per ton; this would make $63,750,000. Those ships, being fast, would earn in passage money at least $7,000,000, or a total earning of over $70,000,000 yearly. This amount of gold retained in the country and distributed among our own mechan- ics and merchants, would strengthen our financial condition, make money cheaper and consequently lessen the cost of ships, as well as other articles manufactured in this country. The next feature of the plan is, How is this result to be accom- plished? No man will question the fact that England, with her great advantages of cheap labor and cheap capital, commenced such a work as contemplated above about forty years ago, and in that time has expended on mail service, and in opening up VOL. CXXXIII.NO. 297. 13 190 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. new markets which give her the grand position she holds to-day on the ocean, $200,000,000, or an average of $5,000,000 per year, and she yet continues the same wise policy where needed. France is doing this very thing to-day, and even more than England, for she pays a bounty on the building of the ship. And not only have England and France spent enormous sums in this direction, they have also expended millions on great navies to keep the road open for those pioneers of commerce. Indeed, England and France both made a great mistake when planning those vessels of commerce, in not having done it so that in an emergency they could be converted into vessels of war, thereby saving the expense of those great navies. In my plan, I pro- pose to avoid that mistake; for, if our Government will encourage the construction of those ships, this can be done without very much additional cost to the merchant. Suppose our Government were to appropriate each year from three to five million dollars, as might be required, with the objects in view of carrying our mails and opening new markets to our increasing manufactured and agricultural productions, thus guarding against the complications of a European war by having our commerce under our own flag, and building up a steam navy superior to any we have ever had, and equal to any now afloat under any flag. Such a course, I say, with the present cheapness of capital, and the -knowledge that our Government had adopted a similar policy to that of England and France, would inspire such confidence in the minds of our merchants and men of capital that they would furnish the capital for the accomplishment of so grand an object, not merely, perhaps, through any patriotic motive, but from the knowledge that the investment would pay. I know one man from whom one-quarter of the amount needed to construct the whole fleet could be procured at once, on the following basis: The Government to advertisegiving an equal chance to the ship-owners and capitalists of the whole nationfor the building of such steamers, to run on such service for a term of ten years, these ships to conform in speed and tounage to those above clas- sifled, to be built on plans approved by the Government, limit- ing the mail service to a certain amount per mile, according to speed and tounage, to be given to the lowest bidder. The following drawings [pages 191 and 194] represent a ship as a merchantman altered to an iron-clad cruiser. A MILITIA FOB THE SEA. 191 MERCHANT STEAMER. I I I Length over all 416 feet. Beam 44~ ~ Depth 29 Deep-load draft 23 Speed 15 knots. Scale, 120 feet to 1 Inch. 192 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. This alteration, when required, could be made in thirty days; our eight navy-yards doing sixteen, and private yards the rest. The plans are so arranged, by provisions in the original con- struction, that it would not cost the merchant more than $5,000 extra on each ship. They could be taken at any time under charter by the Government, and having the armor plates ready in its own yards, they could be put into service in the time specified. When the vessels are not required for war purposes, the armor could be taken off at not more than $2,000 cost, and the ship again put to her legitimate work. This fleet would give us more and better protection than we ever had from our present or past navy. These one hundred iron-dads, manned by six thousand men, would be the best practical school for Annapolis graduates, giving them such practical knowledge of the harbors of their own and of foreign countries as would be of inestimable value to them and to the nation. One of these four-thousand-ton ships would require a crew of three hundred and fifty men, the others in like proportion. The drawings presented herewith show that the ship would have a belt of steel nine inches thick and nine feet deep, backed by the coal in her bunkers, this proving a great resistance to shot or shell, according to the best authority in the British Navythe present Chief of Naval Construction, Mr. Barnaby. This officer says: Not less interesting is the protection which has been recently devised in England for the merchant ship employed in time of war under the Queens flag. No amount of resistance which an armor-plate could show would give the satisfaction which I have received from the excellent behavior of the simple combination of fuel and thin loose iron sheets. Coal-armor and torpedoes together have given to the fast merchant shipping of England a significance in warfare wholly new. In the place of being helpless wards to be defended, they become active combatantsa strength instead of an embarrass- ment. This idea is utilized to a large extent in the plan proposed. The ship would carry, independent of small arms, torpedoes, ammunition, and provisions for her crew, three thousand tons of coal, which would keep her at sea four months, and with the aid of sails,when great speed is not necessary,very much longer. The boilers and machinery would be placed below the water-line, except a small part of the engine, which is protected, as repre- sented in the drawing, by a steel turret, and the smoke-stack, as shown, is a telescopic pipe, to be lowered when in action. A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 193 The plan in its details might be improved by being referred to a board of naval officers and practical ship-builders and mer- chants, and, if approved, would be entirely consistent with the views of the fonnders of our Government, and with the best interests of the nation at present. Had we possessed fifty, or even twenty-five, such ships at the beginning of our civil war, it is almost beyond doubt that we could have ended it within a year by blockading every port, and driving off such aids as the Shenandoah and Alabama. With all her great navy, England recognizes the value of such a supple- mental fleet, and has encouraged its construction by offering mail compensation. France, after long trying the policy of buying ships from England, as some are urging we ought to do, has seen that the nation that would own ships must build them, and has passed a law giving a bounty for the building of merchant ships. Prince Bismarck, in a memorial to the German Reichstag on the subject of the new French law, said that after many years discussion, and exhaustive inquiry, the French had decided that a whole series of privileges was needed for the French merchant service. He quoted from a memorial of British ship-owners, in which they said: It is no exaggeration to assert that before the expiration of a year, after the promulgation of the French bounties bill, the French merchant service will receive a consid- erable augmentation, and that it will share with England the transport trade of the Atlantic, as also the trade with South America, East India, Australia, and other British colonies. We will not depict the consequences of this. The bounties are said to constitute a compensation for certain burdens and duties imposed upon the respective circles. The recipients, however, view them in the right light, viz., that of State aid, which will enable the French owners speedily to establish and develop a great merchant navy, so that the shipping transport trade may be carried on to a larger extent than hitherto by French vessels, and in order to create for France a powerful navy, which. may prove of effective serrice in time of war. This shows conclusively how such a merchant marine is looked upon as an effective means of defense by the English and French; and Prince Bismarck joins in the view. He continued that it was admitted by all, in the arguments used in France, that the merchant service is the handmaid of all other industries, of agriculture and commerce. On the day when the ~reiglit trade is THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIE W~ MERCHANT STEAMER CONVERTED INTO AN ARMOR-PLATED CRUISER. ~r1~7 i I L2~N7?Yi~t~~ ~~LL] ~.7N NUMBER AND CALIBER OF GUNS: Two 8-inch rifled guns. Two 60-lb. rifled guns. Six 80-lb. Two (ixtling guns. 194 Steel Armor, 9 inches thick, 9 feet deep. A MILITIA FOR THE SEA. 195 given over to foreigners, a mortal blow will be dealt to all the industries of the country. It would be an anomaly, from a national stand-point, to cede the transport trade to industrial rivals. In choosing these to export home products, people are exposing them- selves to all kinds of foul play. Besides,it was the merchant serv- ice, and its captains, that created profitable trade relations with other countries, while it was impossible to regain foreign markets with the aid of foreign agents and negotiations. With regard to mail subsidies to steam-ship lines, the memo- rial says: These enterprises cannot dispense with Government aid, and this has always been afforded in a productive manner, as soon as it was a question of paving the way for our traffic in distant markets. England has given the example of using mail steamers as the pioneers for the creation or expansion of commer- cial relations. It is deserving of serious consideration, whether under the circumstances German shipping and commerce can hope for further prosperous development as against the compe- tition of other nations aided by public funds and assistance. Such is the view of one of the keenest statesmen of Europe as to the importance of a merchant marine to the interests of a coun- try. It is in strange contrast to some writers of the present day in our own land, who say contemptuously that it makes no differ- ence to this nation whether it has any ships or commerce at all. In closing, I want to say that this question of defense is one that concerns the whole nation alike. It ought not to be dealt with as a sectional or a political question, but on its merits purely as a great national interest. If anybody has a better plan than mine to propose, let him propose it. Something ought to be done for our navy at once. The present plan is intended to build up a navy and revive our carrying trade at the same time. Can there be any doubt as to the advantage it would be to this country to have such a fleet of swift steam-ships, in time of peace developing the nations wealth by opening up new markets for our surplus products, and in time of war or in case of emergency, ready with trained American engineers and seamen to defend the nation at its call ~? Such a fleet might well be named the militia of the sea. With it we should possess a mighty safe- guard, worth a million-fold whatever triffing expense it might be to the nation. In a merchant marine of this class, the United States must seek not ouly the promoter of its commerce, but the economical and effective means of its naval defense. JOHN ROACH. ASThONOlVIJUAL OBSERYATO1{IES. AMONG the contributions of public and private munificence to the advance of knowledge, none are more worthy of praise than those which have been devoted to astronomy. Among all the sciences, this is the one which is most completely dependent upon such contributions, because it has the least immediate applica- tion to the welfare of the individuaL Happily, it is also the science of which the results are best adapted to strike the mind, and it has thus kept a position in public estimation which it could hardly have gained if it had depended for success solely upon its application to the practical problems of life. That the means which haye been devoted to its prosecution have not always been expended in a manner which we now see would have been the best, is to be expected from the very nature of the case. Indeed, a large portion of the labor spent in any kind of scientific research is, in a certain sense, wasted, because the very knowledge which shows us how we might have done better has been gained through a long series of fruitless trials. But it is due both to ourselves and the patrons of astronomy that as soon as any knowledge bearing upon the question of the past applica- tion of money to the advance of science is obtained, use should be made of it to point out the mistakes of the past and the lessons for the future. It is now patent to all who have made a wide study of the subject that large amounts have been either wasted or applied in ways not the most effective in the erection and outfit of astronomical observatories. Since Tycho Brahe built his great establishment at Uraniburg, astronomical research has been associated in the public mind with lofty observatories and great telescopes. Whenever a monarch has desired to associate his name with science, he has designed an observatory proportional to the magnitude of his ambition, fitted it out with instruments on a corresponding scale, and then rested in serene satisfaction.

ASThONOlVIJUAL OBSERYATO1{IES. AMONG the contributions of public and private munificence to the advance of knowledge, none are more worthy of praise than those which have been devoted to astronomy. Among all the sciences, this is the one which is most completely dependent upon such contributions, because it has the least immediate applica- tion to the welfare of the individuaL Happily, it is also the science of which the results are best adapted to strike the mind, and it has thus kept a position in public estimation which it could hardly have gained if it had depended for success solely upon its application to the practical problems of life. That the means which haye been devoted to its prosecution have not always been expended in a manner which we now see would have been the best, is to be expected from the very nature of the case. Indeed, a large portion of the labor spent in any kind of scientific research is, in a certain sense, wasted, because the very knowledge which shows us how we might have done better has been gained through a long series of fruitless trials. But it is due both to ourselves and the patrons of astronomy that as soon as any knowledge bearing upon the question of the past applica- tion of money to the advance of science is obtained, use should be made of it to point out the mistakes of the past and the lessons for the future. It is now patent to all who have made a wide study of the subject that large amounts have been either wasted or applied in ways not the most effective in the erection and outfit of astronomical observatories. Since Tycho Brahe built his great establishment at Uraniburg, astronomical research has been associated in the public mind with lofty observatories and great telescopes. Whenever a monarch has desired to associate his name with science, he has designed an observatory proportional to the magnitude of his ambition, fitted it out with instruments on a corresponding scale, and then rested in serene satisfaction. ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORIES. 197 If we measure greatness by cubic yards, then Peter the Great and Le Grand Monarque7~ were the founders of two of the greatest observatories ever built. That of St. Petersburg was completed in 1725, the year of ~ death, and was an edifice of two hun- dred and twenty-five feet front, with central towers one hundred and forty feet high. It had three tiers of galleries on the outside for observation, and was supplied with nearly every instrument known to the astronomers of the time, without reference to the practicability of finding observers to use them. It was nearly destroyed by ifre in 1747, but was partially rebuilt, and now forms part of the building occupied by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The Paris Observatory, built half a century earlier, still stands, its massive walls and arched ceilings reminding one rather of a fortress than of an astronomical institution. Notwithstanding the magnificence of these structures, they have had little essential connection with the progress of astron- omy. It is true that the work done at both establishments takes a prominent place in the history of science, but most of it could have been done equally well under wooden sheds erected for the protection of the instruments from the weather. In recent times, the St. Petersburg Observatory has been found so unsuitable for its purpose that no observation of real value can be made, and its existence has been nearly forgotten. The great building at Paris, though associated with a series of astronomical researches second to none in the world, has really served scarcely any other purpose than those of a physical laboratory, store-house, and offi- ces. The more important observations have always been made in the surrounding garden, or in inexpensive wings or other structures erected for the purpose. With these establishments it will be instructive to compare the Greenwich Observatory. The latter has never won the title of great. It was originally established on the most modest scale, for the special purpose of making such observations as would conduce to the determination of the longitude at sea. Although it has now entered upon its third century, no attempt has ever been made to reconstruct it on a grand scale. Whenever any part of it was found insufficient for its purpose, new rooms were built for the special object in view, and thus it has been growing from the beginning by a process as natural and simple as that of the growth of a tree. Even now, the money value of its structure is less than that of several other public observatories, although 198 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. it eclipses them all in the results of its work. Haeckel lays it down as a general law of research that the amount of original investigation actually prosecuted by a scientific institution is inversely proportional to its magnitude. Although this may be regarded as a humorous exaggeration, it teaches wliat the history of science shows to be a valuable lesson. A glance at the number and work of the astronomical observa- tories of the present time will show how great a waste of means has been suffered in their erection and management. The last volume of the American Ephemeris contains a list of nearly 150 observatories, supposed to be, or to have recently been, in a state of astronomical activity. The number omitted because they have lain inactive it is impossible to estimate; but it is not unlikely that, in this country at least, they are as numerous as those retained. It is safe to say that nearly everything of con- siderable value which has been done by all these establishments could have been better done by two or three well-organized observatories in each of the principal civilized countries. Indeed, if we leave out of account local benefits, such as the distribution of time, the instruction of students, and the entertainment of the public, it will be found that nearly all the astronomical, researches of really permanent value have been made at a very small num- ber of these institutions. The most useful branch of astronomy has hitherto been that which, treating of the positions and motions of the heavenly bodies, is practically applied to the determination of geographical positions on land and at sea. The Greenwich Observatory has, during the past century, been so far the largest contributor in this direction as to give rise to the remark that, if this branch of astronomy were entirely lost, it could be reconstructed from the Greenwich observations alone. During the past twenty years, the four observatories at Green- wich, Pulkowa, Paris, and Washington have been so far the largest contributors to what we may call geometrical astronomy that, in this particular direction, the work of the hundred others, in the northern hemisphere at least, can be regarded only as subsidiary. This remark, it will be understood, applies ouly to that special branch of astronomy which treats of the positions and motions of the heaveuly bodies. The other great branch of the science treats of the aspect and physical constitution of these bodies. It dates from the invention of the telescope, because, without this ASTRONOMItAL OBSERVATORIES. 199 instrument and its accessories, no detailed study of the heavenly bodies is possible. The field open to the telescope has, during the last twenty years, been immensely widened by the introduc- lion of the spectroscope, the ultimate results of which it is scarcely possible to appreciate. Photography has recently been introduced as an accessory to both instruments; but this is not so much an independent instrument of research as a means of recording the results of the spectroscope and telescope. To this branch of the science a great number of observatories, public and private, have duly contributed, but, as we shall presently see, the ratio of results to means is far less than it would have been ha~l their work all been done on a well-organized system. Nearly all great public observatories have hitherto been con- structed for the purpose of pursuing the first branch of the sci- ence,that which concerns itself, so to speak, with the geometry of the heavens. This was naturally the practice before the spec- troscope opened up so new and rich a field. Even now, there is one sound reason for adhering to this practicenamely, that physical investigations, however made, must be the work of indi- viduals, rather than of establishments. There is no need of a great and expensive institution for the prosecution of spectro- scopic observations. The man of genius with imperfect instru- ments will outdo the man of routine in the greatest building, with the most perfect appliances that wealth can supply. The com- bination of qualities which insures success in such endeavors is so rare that it is never safe to count upon securing it. Hence, even now, a great observatory for the prosecution of physical research would be a somewhat hazardous experiment, unless the work it was to do were well mapped out beforehand. Considering the great mass.of observatories devoted to geo- metrical astronomy, the first thing to strike the professional stu- dent of their work is their want of means for a really useful and long-continued activity; and this notwithstanding that their instrumental equipment may be all that could be required. The reason is that their founders have not sufficiently taken into account the fact that the support of astronomers and the publica- tion of observations is necessary to the usefulness of such an establishment, and requires a much larger endowment than the mere outfit of the building. Let us take, for instance, that omni- present and most useful instrument, the meridian circle. Four or five of these instruments, of moderate size, located in good 200 THE NORTH AMERIC~4N REVIEW. climates, properly manned, under skillful superintendence, work- ing in codperation with each otlier, would do everything neces- sary for the department of research to which they are applicable, and a great deal more than is to be expected from all the meridian circles of the world, under the conditions in which they are actu- ally placed. They could, within the first five years, make several independent determinations of the fundamental data of astron~ omy, including the positions and motions of several hundred of the brighter fixed stars. In five years more, they could extend their activity so as to fix the position of every star m the heavens visible to the naked eye; and, during the ten years following, could prepare such a catalogue of telescopic stars as there is no prospect of our seeing during the next half-cent