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Young Men in Politics. Geobge S. Boutwell.

The Religion of To-day.

Is Political Economy a Science P Profeasoi- Bonamy Price.

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1880.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. CCLXXIX.

FEBRUARY, 1880.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY.

1. The object of this paper is not speculative and abstract, but
strictly concrete and practical. It is to ascertain what can be, and
what ought to be, the relations of the Church in the nineteenth cen-
tury to the political society of the world in the nineteenth century.

2. These relations must be— (1.) Those of amity ; or (2.) Of op-
position ; or (3.) Of a mixed character — that is, both of amity and
of opposition :

I. First, let us understand what is meant by society, and then
by modern society.

1. By society I mean the state of man, or of human life, in
the natural order apart from faith. It has three degrees of forma-
tion or completeness, namely — (1.) The domestic life ; (2.) The
civil life ; (3.) The political life of a people or nation. Human
society comprehends all these three stages or forms of life. They
may be classed also more briefly as — (1.) Private life ; and (2.)
Public life : the private life containing the domestic and social in
its narrower sense, the public life containing the civil and political.

2. Now, neither mankind as a whole nor any integral portion of
mankind, such as a people, race, or tribe, was ever yet a mere nu-
merical multitude, without head, without social relations, or with-
out authority.

" Nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati" was never
true. There were always relations of inequality, as of parentage,
vol. cxxx. — no. 279. 8

102 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

brotherhood, age, strength, mental and bodily, and therefore of
subjection and authority, which constitute organization.

3. Men were never all equal. The first principle of 1789 is
false, and it is the Trp&rov ^evdoc of the nineteenth century.

4. There never was and there never could be an "original com-
pact." The whole theory is a " chimcera bombitans in vacuo"

5. Mankind was never without organization, and therefore
never without subjection and authority. Every generation of men
reproduces both these elements in the domestic life ; and no civil
or political life is possible without these conditions. It would be
anarchy, and anarchy can not last ; it destroys itself by reaction,
which again reproduces order and authority.

6. Authority, therefore, is an imperishable element in the con-
dition and history of man. Authority is not of human creation.
It is in itself divine. When St. Thomas Aquinas and others say
that authority is given by God immediately to society, and medi-
ately by society to the one or to the many who bear it, he declares
authority to be Oeodorov — that is, from God — and in itself to be a
divine creation. This is the crux of modern society. It claims to
create its own authority — that is, to be its own creator. Such also
is St. Paul's declaration : " Let every soul be subject to higher
powers, for there is no power but of God ; and those that are, are
ordained of God. Therefore, he that resisteth the power, resisteth
the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves
damnation " (Romans xiii. 1, 2).

7. The theory of authority, as created by a delegation from the
people, is therefore false. It is a negation of the truth, and an in-
version of the intellectual and moral order of mankind. The people
or society of men may designate the person, or the family, or the
group of persons who shall bear authority, but they can not create
it ; nor can they, when it is once impersonated, revoke it at their
mere will.

8. Authority, as it exists among men, has for its root either
right or might. It either devolves peacefully from sire to son, or
it emerges from conflict in the hand of the strongest. Might be-
comes right when confirmed by stability and permanence.

9. The authority of pure right is the most perfect, but perhaps it
exists in unbroken devolution only in the sovereignty of the Vicar
of Christ. Might is either the root or the renewal of every other
authority in the world. But authority which begins in might be-
comes rightful in many ways, as in conquest followed by prescrip-

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. 103

tion, by voluntary cession, by immemorial possession, and the
like.

10. But the order which arises from might is better than an-
archy. That a rightful sovereign be overturned is an evil, that
society be overturned is worse. There is a time when loyalty to a
dispossessed prince ceases to be a civic virtue ; and when a legiti-
mate prince can not rightfully attempt to recover his throne by
force. If the attempt be easy of accomplishment, he may attempt
it ; if it be morally impossible, he ought not to attempt it ; if it be
both possible and probable, he and his subjects must use their pru-
dence and self-denial ; if it be possible but not probable, he ought
not to risk civil war, which for an uncertain good brings certain
bloodshed and misery upon his people. A restoration is one more
revolution, which may indeed be made for the welfare of a people,
but not merely for the sake of a person. " lieges propter regna,
non regna propter reges."

11. A revolution is a period of anarchy which can not last.
Order by right or by might will put an end to anarchy, for anarchy
is intrinsically destructive to the society of mankind. It is to soci-
ety what mortal disease is to the body.

12. But society is imperishable. Given man, society by neces-
sity exists. Man out of society is inhuman ; man never so existed.
Society is necessary to man, and not only to his perfection but to his
human formation and development.

13. Historians say that a people is happy which has no history ;
for history is the narrative of wars and revolutions — that is, of the
overthrows of authority and of order, and of the perpetual restora-
tion of both.

14. Society, then, contains all the relations, bonds, and obligations
of human life, domestic, civil, and political, and all the duties and
affections which arise from those relations. Even Cicero could
say, " Omnes omnium charitates patria una complectitur" and St.
Thomas says that the objects of the " Donum Pietatis," or gift of
piety, are "parentes et patria" our parents and our mother-country.

15. From all this I infer that it is the duty of every member of
a commonwealth to use his utmost power to hinder all evil, and to
do all good he can to the state or people to which he belongs. These
are positive and natural duties which he can not fail to discharge
without culpable omission, or rather without a dereliction, and be-
trayal of the highest natural duties, next after those which he owes
immediately to God.

104 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

.< So much for society, roughly and in outline.

II. Next, few words are needed as to the Catholic Church.

1. The Catholic Church is the society of man in the supernatural
order.

2. It is a perfect society in all the sense and extension of the
term. It has authority, subjection, inequality, equality, relations,
bonds, obligations, with all the duties and affections arising from
them. St. Paul's analogy of the body of a man or the human struc-
ture, with its unity of life, its symmetry, sympathy, mutual needs
and reciprocal services of all its members, is not only a metaphor
but a philosophy. If sociology were capable of a scientific sense, it
would be the philosophy of society.

3. As natural society develops man in the natural order, so the
Church perfects man both in the natural and in the supernatural
order.

4. But the Church not only perfects man or individuals, both in
nature and in grace, but it perfects the natural society of man also,
in all its relations of private and public life.

5. The Church elevates, preserves, and perfects the domestic and
public life of natural society. In Athens and in Rome, the two
culminating points of natural civilization, society had almost died
out by the gangrene which had eaten away the domestic and moral
life of men.

6. There is therefore a divine obligation binding the Church to
enter into the most intimate relations with the natural society or
commonwealth of men, or, in other words, with peoples, states, and
civil powers.

7. This is the principle implied in St. Paul's words in the xiii.
chapter of the Epistle to Romans, and in his injunction to Timothy
that prayers " be made for all men, for kings, and for all that are in
high station, that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life " (1 Tim-
othy ii. 1, 2).

8. And this is the cause why the Church has in every age striven
to direct not the life of individual men only, but the collective life
of nations in their organized forms of republics, monarchies, and
empires.

9. So long as the world was heathen, it could only convert indi-
viduals and sanctify households. The state was at war with the
Church ; there was a conflict of laws, and an irreconcilable conflict
of aims and actions. No cooperation could exist between them.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN" SOCIETY. 105

10. As soon as the society of the empire became Christian, the
Church penetrated all its legislative and executive actions. The
temporal power of the Pontiffs is the providential condition under
which the Church has fulfilled its mission to human society.

11. The domestic, civil, and political life of man became Chris-
tian, and the Church enveloped the natural society of man in its
own unity.

12. The union of the two societies was so complete that, as a
whole, every member of the empire was a member of the Church,
and every member of the Church was a member of the empire.
They were concentric, coextensive, and coincident.

13. The civil and ecclesiastical discipline was so coincident and
concurrent that a heretic was " vitandus " — to be avoided by all
citizens as by all Christians. He not only forfeited his civil rights,
but was put beyond the pale and commerce of human society. He
was like the leper in Israel, whom no man could touch without be-
coming legally unclean. No man could give to the heretic fire or
water.

14. When this coincidence ceased in part to exist, Pope Martin
V., in the Council of Constance, relaxed the obligations of avoiding
the inevitable commerce and contact with heretics in civil and po-
litical life. It was lawful to communicate with heretics in all things
except only in religion. " Oommunicatio in sacris " is intrinsically
evil. It involves at least implicit communion in heresy. But out-
side of that circle, which is divine, the faithful could, without cen-
sure, converse and cooperate with their fellow citizens in all lawful
things of the political order.

15. The Church, therefore, continued to hold relations with those
who had departed from the faith, except when nominally excom-
municated, that is by name, in all things outside of the faith itself.

16. But this divergence of the two societies was not any change
on the part of the Church, which by divine guidance is immutable.
It was the falling away of men from the unity of the faith. And
this divergence has extended itself continually for the last three
hundred years.

17. Nevertheless, the Church never withdraws from the state as
such ; which would be to abandon the natural society of man to
its own maladies and mortality.

18. It continues always to save and to uphold it, and, without
taking the contagion, it is in contact with its maladies, to heal them.
For this cause, while it permits the sons of heretics to frequent its

106 THE NORTH AMERICAN' REVIEW.

own schools, it forbids, as Reiffenstuel, Ferraris, and the Canonists
show, Catholic parents to send their sons to the schools of those
who are out of the faith (Ferraris, Bib. Can. Haereticus, s. 19).

19. From this it is inferred —

(1.) That perpetual hostility to the political order of any state
is no duty of the Church, unless such political order should be in-
trinsically anti-Christian or anti-Catholic.

(2.) That indiscriminate opposition to any political order is not
lawful nor reasonable. Order as such is from God. Its disorders,
revolutionary or ant i- Christian, are maladies and transient condi-
tions, which need to be opposed with a specific resistance, while the
political order itself is respected and obeyed.

(3.) That perpetual abstention from exercising the duties of citi-
zens can not be justified.

It is — 1. An abdication of a natural duty.

2. A virtual and inevitable separation of Church and
state, which is condemned in the Syllabus — that is, the
separation of the two societies which God willed should
be united, for the peace of the one and for the perfec-
tion of the other.

20. Therefore, in every society or commonwealth which may be
suffering from temporary anarchy, or revolution, or conquest, or
usurpation, the duty of using all civil powers and privileges still
within reach for the welfare of the people, for the restoration of
authority, and for the maintenance of order, is a Christian and a
Catholic duty.

III. We now come to define what is meant by modern society.

1. Modern society is the old society of the Christian world
mutilated by the character forced upon it by the last three hundred
years :

1.) First, by the so-called Reformation which, wheresoever it
prevailed, destroyed the Catholic unity, and extinguished the Catho-
lic mind of the Christian society.

2.) Secondly, by the principles of 1789, which were not a mere
local formula of French opinion, but a dogmatic theory of revolu-
tion, promulgated by its pretentious authors for all nations. It has
now, in fact, directly and indirectly pervaded the whole political
society of modern Europe.

3.) Thirdly, by the recent international settlement or law which
has admitted the kingdom of Italy with Rome as capital, and there-

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. 107

fore with the usurpation of the rights and sovereignty of the Pon-
tiffs, into the commonwealth of European states ; and, so far as any
jus gentium now survives, into the diplomacy of Europe.

2. Modern society, therefore, is not the natural society of the
world before Christianity, nor is it the society of Christendom when
the two societies were in amity, and coincidence of law and of inten-
tion, but it is the political society of the natural order, fallen from
the unity of faith, communion, and obedience to the divine voice of
the Church, revolutionary in its political creed and practice, and
either in open usurpation, or in culpable connivance at the usurpa-
tion, of the sacred rights and sovereignty of the Vicar of Christ.

IV. From these premises it follows :

1. That the Catholic Church can only partially hold political
relations with such states in Europe as have departed from the
Catholic unity. They have either set up regalism, as in England,
Denmark, and Sweden ; or Csesarism, as in Prussia. In so far as
they have departed from the jurisprudence of Catholic Christen-
dom, they have rendered relations of cooperation impossible. But
the Church can still hold relations with the domestic, social, and
civil life of those countries in all that is of the natural order of
mankind.

2. That the Church can hold no relations with the revolutionary
politics of France and Italy, in so far as they are founded upon the
principles of 1789.

3. But that it can and ought always to hold relations with the
commonwealths of those countries, and of all countries in all
things of the natural order, rejecting only the violations of that
order, and their consequent antagonism to the divine law. In so
far as these states put off their anti-Catholic and anti-Christian at-
titude toward the faith and the Church, in that measure they return
to the state of simple natural society, with which the Church is not
only able but is bound to maintain relations of amity and of co-
operation.

4. It follows further that, in proportion as the civil powers of
any state are under the dominion of an erroneous religion, or of a
schism, or of a royal supremacy, or of an imperial despotism, or of
an anti-Christian revolution, the Church can hold no relations with
them. It can not cooperate with or condone the Lutheran or Cal-
vinistic heresies, or the Anglican schism, or the Thirty-nine Articles
of Queen Elizabeth, or the Four Articles of 1682, or the Organic

108 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

Articles of the first Napoleon, or the Russian Holy Ecclesiastical
Synod, or the Falk laws, and the like. But, under all these, there
lies the commonwealth or natural society in all its domestic, social^
and civil relations. "With this in all the regions of its life and con-
ditions of its welfare the Church sympathizes and cooperates for
the common good — and that because even toward such states as
these the Church has duties, such as (1.) First, to guard and to con-
serve all of Christian faith and morals that still remains in them ;
(2.) Secondly, to minimize all the evils of their legislation or govern-
ment ; and (3.) Thirdly, to recall them by all influences to a better
condition.

5. In proportion as the civil powers release themselves from the
dominion and perversion of the influences which are antagonistic to
the Church and hostile to the faith — in proportion, that is, as the
state returns to its purely and simply natural order — the repulsions
and barriers which made unity and cooperation impossible will cease
to exist, and the Church can then draw its relations more and more
closely and intimately to the national commonwealth. Such is, in
the main, the condition of the Catholic Church in the United States.

6. The best example I know of a commonwealth which has lost
its Catholic perfection, without losing its traditional but imperfect
Christianity, and has at the same time returned in great part to the
natural order— that is, to the truths of natural religion and to the
four cardinal virtues — may be said to be the British Empire, and
especially in some of its more recent colonies. There exists in it
nowhere at this time a penal law in matters of religion. The Catho-
lic Church has all its spiritual liberties ; no man can be molested for
his faith. There exists, so far as I know, no bar to the participation
of Catholics in any of the regions of the national life, domestic, so-
cial, civil, and political, excepting only the Crown and the oflice of
High Chancellor in England. With few exceptions such as the
Divorce Court and the presentation to livings in the Established
Church, and the like, there is, so far as I remember, no branch of
the public life and service of our commonwealth into which a Cath-
olic, with a safe conscience, can not enter. He may sit in Parlia-
ment, he may dispense justice in Westminster Hall, he may serve
and command in the army and the navy, he may hold any civil or
political office under Government, he may partake in the whole world
of finance and commerce. There is nothing outside of the unity of
the faith and of the Church in which a Catholic in the British Em-
pire may not be a citizen and a patriot, as there is nothing within

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. 109

that unity in which, he can yield a hair's breadth without betraying
his fidelity, and deserving the worst of names, or at least that of a
liberal Catholic.

V. 1. If, then, the Church be bound by its divine mission to con-
serve, to consecrate, and to cooperate with the natural society of
man, then the withdrawal of Catholics from the active service of
the commonwealth, and the non-fulfillment of the duties of citizens
and patriots, is a dereliction of duty, and unlawful in itself.

2. In England, so long as penal laws excluded Catholics from
all careers of civil and political life, there was no doubt as to their
duty. Catholics had only to maintain inflexibly their unity of faith.
It is not, perhaps, to be wondered at that they regarded the civil
powers — and the whole nation — as antagonists, with whom they
could hardly hold any relations of amity or of cooperation.

3. Nor is it, perhaps, a wonder that, after the abolition of penal
laws, the same antagonism should continue as a personal sentiment,
and that Catholics should feel no ambition and no desire, perhaps
even no willingness, to enter into the careers of civil and political
life. Such is the feeling of many among the faithful Irish race who
can not forget or forgive.the wrongs of their past history. It is no
wonder, but it is a disaster, for thereby the whole administration of
the commonwealth is left in the hands — I will not say of antago-
nists, but — of their non-Catholic countrymen. The penal laws have
been abolished for half a century, but as yet Catholics are only en-
tering slowly into civil careers, and no Catholic holds any political
office of importance. The whole constituency of England, Scotland,
and Wales, does not return a single Catholic to Parliament. Twenty
years ago Catholics could hardly be induced to sign a petition to
Parliament, or to take part in any public movements even of na-
tional beneficence. This was an unwise abstention, and canceled
their weight in the public action of the country. It was socially
and civilly la politique (Peffacement, which their enemies most de-
sire to perpetuate.

4. In France, inasmuch as the whole population, less only about
one million out of thirty-eight, is nominally Catholic, the public life
of the nation is in the hands of Catholics. Nevertheless, in every
political election the abstention of a large proportion of voters, in-
cluding the peaceful, the unambitious, and the retiring, who are also
for the most part certainly Catholics, has left the effective Govern-
ment of France in the hands of the anti-clerical parties, who are

110 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

also exaggerated republicans, and without faith at least, if they be
not formally anti- Christian. And this evil has been greatly aggra-
vated by the divisions and rivalries among the sections of the Con-
servative party, in which, if anywhere, the sounder Catholic politi-
cians are or ought to be found. The sympathies of Catholics are
rather with monarchy, royal or imperial, than with republicanism ;
but, the Imperialists and Legitimists being divided, the whole con-
trol of the political life of France is left to the Republican party,
which contains within itself an extreme section, subversive of all
relations between the commonwealth of France and the Catholic
Church. It must be borne in mind that the republicanism of
France is not the republicanism of Switzerland, nor of the United
States. If the last outlines of the Catholic tradition of France are
to be preserved in its civil and political order, it can only be done
by a complete union of all the conservative sections against their
direct and natural antagonist, namely the anti-Christian animosity
of French republicanism. While Imperialists and Orleanists and
Legitimists are contending in the vain hope of impossible restora-
tions, the anti-clerical and anti-Christian party is becoming numer-
ous, organized, and dominant. It is at this moment striving for the
supremacy and the lead of the Republican majority in the Chamber
and the Senate, and, this once attained, it will dominate over all
political opposition, and dictate the secularization of all education
from the universities to the primary schools,* the abolition of the
budget of the clergy, including the subvention to the seminaries,
the withdrawal of chaplains from the army and the navy, and the
complete dechristianization of the whole civil and political order
of France. The France of St. Louis would then become, not the
United States of America, which are just and tolerant in religion,
but the France of Voltaire and Rousseau.

But into this subject, which I give only as an illustration, I
will not enter further. I will conclude by reciting the teaching of
Leo XIII. in the Encyclical of 1878. Leo XIII. affirms the divine
origin of authority by drawing out a beautiful analogy of the di-
vine monarchy in the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies : " It is
plain the Church does wisely in impressing upon the people sub-
ject to authority the apostolic precept : ' There is no power but
from God ; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he
that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they

* Since this was written in 1869 the Empire fell, and the Ferry bill has fulfilled
the foresight.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. Ill

that resist purchase to themselves damnation.' And again he ad-
monishes those ' subject by necessity' to be so 'not only for wrath
but also for conscience' sake,' and to render ' to all men their dues ;
tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to
whom fear, honor to whom honor.' For he who created and gov-
erns all things has in his wise providence ordained that all should
occupy their proper places, the lower beneath the middle, and the
middle below the highest. As, therefore, in the heavenly kingdom
itself he has decreed that there should be distinct orders of angels,
some subject to others ; and as in the Church he has instituted va-
rious orders, and diversity of offices, not all being apostles, or doc-
tors, or pastors, so also has he appointed that there should be in
civil society many orders, distinguished by their rank, privileges, and
power ; so that the state, like the Church, should be one body,
comprising many members, some more noble than others, but all
mutually necessary, and all concerned for the common good."

Next he warns all Governments that their peril is in their an-
tagonism to the tradition of Christian civilization, and that their
only way of safety is in renewing their relations with it : " And
therefore, venerable brethren, we, upon whom the government of
the whole Church rests, as at the commencement of our pontificate
we pointed out to the nations and princes exposed to the fury of the
tempest the place of refuge where they might best seek for safety,
now again, moved by the extremity of the impending peril, raise
to them once more our apostolic voice, and entreat them, for the
sake of their own and their people's welfare, to hearken to and obey
the Church, which has done so much to maintain the prosperity of
kingdoms, reminding them that the principles of religion and of
government are so identified, that anything that injures religion
must needs injuriously affect the loyalty of the subject and the
majesty of government. And inasmuch as they must well know
that there is in the Church of Christ a power to avert the plague of
socialism, which is not to be found either in human laws, or in the
rigor of magistrates, or in the force of arms, we exhort them to re-
store that Church to that position of liberty in which she may best
exercise her saving influence for the benefit of all human society.

" But this audacity of perfidious men, which threatens greater
ruin to civil society, and strikes the minds of all with anxious fear,
derives its cause and origin from those poisonous doctrines which,
scattered in former times like corrupt seed among the peoples, have
borne such pestilential fruit in their season. For you, venerable

112 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,

brethren, very well know that the object of the war which ever
since the sixteenth century has been waged by innovators against
the Catholic faith, and which has every day increased in intensity
down to the present time, has been that, by the setting aside of all
revelation, and the subversion of every kind of supernatural order,
an entrance might be cleared for the discoveries, or rather the de-
lirious imaginations of mere reason. This kind of error, which
wrongly usurps the name of reason, as it elicits and sharpens the
desire of superiority, naturally implanted in man, and gives a loose
rein to desires of every kind, has spontaneously penetrated to the
wildest extent not only a multitude of minds, but civil society itself.
Hence it has come to pass that, by a novel impiety, unheard of even
among the heathen nations, states have been constituted without
taking any account of God and of the order established by him ; it
has been, moreover, declared, that public authority derives neither
its principle nor its majesty nor its power of command from God,
but rather from the multitude of the people — which, thinking it-
self absolved from all divine sanction, has determined to acknowl-
edge only those laws which itself has framed according to its own
good pleasure."

5. The social and political evils which are undermining the
Christian society of the world culminate in one master evil, which
again is prolific of all evils ; an evil which reproduces and perpetu-
ates the whole tradition of apostasy from the Christian name. The
state is everywhere claiming the education and formation of men.
Christianity is expelled from that formation. Boys, youths, men,
and nations will, if the Falk laws and the Ferry bills prevail, here-
after grow up in Germany, and France so far as the public laws can
accomplish, without Christian faith or Christian morals. The state
education is the formation of men "without Christ and without
God in the world." And that is the truest description of pagan-
ism. Man without God ends in political Caesarism and the deifica-
tion of the civil power. On this, Leo XIII. says : " The supernatural
verities of faith having been impugned and rejected as if they were
inimical to reason, the Author and Redeemer himself of the human
race has been, insensibly and little by little, forcibly banished from
the universities, the lyceums, the gymnasiums, and from every pub-
lic institution connected with the life of man. Finally, the rewards
and punishments of the future and eternal life being relegated to
oblivion, the ardent desire of happiness has been confined within
the span of this present life. These doctrines having been dissemi-

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. 113

nated far and wide, this so great license of thought and action be-
ing everywhere introduced, it is no wonder that men of the lowest
class, weary of a poor home or workshop, should desire to invade
the palaces and fortunes of the rich ; it is no wonder that there
now exists no tranquillity in public or private life, and that the hu-
man race has nearly reached its lowest depth."

In 1869 — before the opening of the Vatican Council — the fol-
lowing words were written. They still describe the state of Europe
at this day. There is not a Government in Europe, except our own,
that did not use its influence against the Council and the Catholic
Church. There is not a Government at this day, except our own,
which has not a social revolution at its back, urging it on toward
manifest dangers and perhaps toward its ruin :

" A moment's thought will be enough to explain why no civil
Government was invited to attend. What Government, at this day,
professes to be Catholic ? How should any Government which does
not even claim to be Catholic be invited ? What country in Europe,
at this day, recognizes the unity and authority of the Catholic
Church as a part of its public laws ? What country has not, by
royal edicts, or legislative enactments, or revolutionary changes,
abolished the legal status of the Catholic Church within its terri-
tory ? On what plea, then, could they be invited ? As govern-
ments or nations they have by their own act withdrawn themselves
from the unity of the Church. As moral or legal persons they are
Catholic no longer. The faithful, indeed, among their subjects will
be represented in the Council by their pastors ; and their pastors are
not only invited, but obliged to be present. If any separation has
taken place, it is because the civil powers have separated themselves
from the Church. They have created the fact, the Holy See has
only recognized it. The gravity of the fact is not to be denied. It
is strange, that, with the immutability of the Church, and the * prog-
ress,' as it is vaunted, of society before their eyes, men should charge
upon the Church the responsibility of breaking its relations with
society. The Church at one and the same time is accused of immo-
bility and of change. It is not the Church which has departed from
unity, science, liberty ; but society which has departed from Chris-
tianity and from faith. It is said, ' If Christian unity be destroyed,
if science have separated from faith, if liberty choose to reign with-
out religion, a terrible share of the responsibility for these evils
rests upon the men who have represented in the Christian world
unity, faith, and religion.' Does this mean upon the Episcopate,

114 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

Councils, and Pontiffs ? Who, if not these, ' have represented in
the Christian world unity, faith, and religion ' ? Have they, then,
misrepresented these things to the world ? If so, who shall repre-
sent them ? and where, then, is the divine office of the Church ?
The Pontiffs have been for generations lifting up their voice in vain
to warn the Governments of Christendom of the peril of breaking
the bonds which unite civil society to the faith and to the Church.
They have maintained inflexibly, and at great suffering and danger,
their own temporal dominion, not only for the spiritual independence
of the Church, but for the consecration of civil society. But the
Governments of the Christian world would not listen ; and now a Gen-
eral Council meets, and the place where, as at the Lateran, at Flor-
ence, and at Trent, they would have sat, is empty. The tendency
of civil society everywhere is to depart further and further from the
Church. Progress in these days means to advance along the line of
departure from the old Christian order of the world. The civil soci-
ety of Christendom is the offspring of the Christian family, and the
foundation of the Christian family is the sacrament of matrimony.
From this spring domestic and public morals. Most Governments
of Europe have ceased to recognize in marriage anything beyond
the civil contract, and, by legalizing divorce, have broken up the
perpetuity of even that natural contract. With this will surely
perish the morality of society and of homes. A settlement in the
foundations may be slow in sinking, but it brings down all at last.
The civil and political society of Europe is steadily returning to the
mere natural order. The next step in dechristianizing the politi-
cal life of nations is to establish national education without Chris-
tianity. This is systematically aimed at wheresoever the revolution
has its way. This may, before long, be attempted among ourselves.
It is already in operation elsewhere. The Church must then form
its own schools ; and the civil power will first refuse its aid, and
soon its permission, that parents should educate their offspring ex-
cept in state universities and state schools. The period and the
policy of Julian are returning. All this bodes ill for the Church,
but worse for the state. The depression of the moral order of right
and truth is the elevation of the material order of coercion and of
force. The civil powers of the world do not choose this course ;
they only advance in it. There is behind them a power invisible,
which urges them onward in their estrangements from the Church ;
and that unseen power is at work everywhere. It is one, universal,
invisible, but not holy — the true, natural, and implacable enemy of

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND MODERN SOCIETY. 115

the one, visible, universal Church. The anti-Christian societies
are one in aim and operation, even if they be not one in conscious
alliance. And the Governments of the world, some consciously,
others unconsciously, disbelieving the existence of such societies,
and therefore all the more surely under their influence, are being
impelled toward a precipice over which monarchies and law and
the civil order of the Christian society of men will go down to-
gether. It is the policy of the secret societies to engage Govern-
ments in quarrels with Rome. The breach is made, and the revo-
lution enters. The Catholic society of Europe has been weakened,
and wounded, it may be, unto death. The Catholic Church now
stands alone, as in the beginning, in its divine isolation : ' Et nunc
reges intelligite / erudimini quijudicatis terram? There is an abyss
before you, into which thrones and laws and rights and liberties
may sink together. You have to choose between the revolution
and the Church of God. As you choose, so will your lot be. The
General Council gives to the world one more witness for the truths,
laws, and sanctities which include all that is pure, noble, just, vener-
able on earth. It will be an evil day for any state in Europe if it
engage in conflict with the Church of God. ISTo weapon formed
against it ever yet has prospered." *

Henry Edward Cardinal Manning,

Archbishop of Westminster.

* " The (Ecumenical Council and the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff," by Henry
Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. London: Longmans, 1869.

THE THIRD TERM.

The Presidential contest of 1872 had scarcely closed with the
triumphant reelection of General Grant, when a New York news-
paper, of wide circulation and pervading influence, but somewhat
prone to sensational utterances, announced that republican institu-
tions were in imminent peril from the probable election of the same
individual to a third term. It was boldly affirmed that American
liberty could not survive such an experiment.

Of course, the announcement startled that whole body of Demo-
cratic opposition which had bravely followed Seymour and Blair to
ignominious defeat in 1868, and which had cravenly clutched at
the skirts of Horace Greeley in 1872 in the vain hope of being
dragged to victory. It startled a large body of soured Republi-
cans who had failed to secure, or, having secured, had disgraced,
preferment. It startled a larger body of Republicans who, acknowl-
edging the illustrious services of President Grant, yet for personal
or local reasons preferred an early succession of some other indi-
vidual of the same political faith. And it startled a still larger
number of Republicans, who did not expect to find a President
more prudent, more sagacious, or more honest than President Grant
had been, yet who were made to fear that, as no President had ever
been elected for more than two terms, so for some occult reason it
would be unsafe ever to elect one for more than that number of
terms.

Other newspapers echoed the solemn warning of the " Herald."
Political conventions took up the refrain. The senseless clamor
culminated when, on the 15th day of December, 1875, the Honor-
able Mr. Springer, a Democrat from the State of Illinois, presented
to the House of Representatives a resolution in the following words :

Hesolved, That in the opinion of this House the precedent established by
"Washington and other Presidents of the United States, in retiring from the

THE THIRD TERM. 117

Presidential office after their second term, has become, by universal concur-
rence, a part of our republican system of government, and that any departure
from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught
with peril to our free institutions.

The rules of the House were suspended, and the resolution
passed on the very day of its introduction. No less than two hun-
dred and thirty-three votes were recorded in its favor. Only eigh-
teen members voted against it.

That reiterated vociferation accomplished the purpose for which
it was designed. It defeated the renomination of General Grant in
1876.

A political party must be brave and conscientious before it will
venture to stake its hopes of the post-offices upon the reelection of
a President who has been fired at by millions of his countrymen for
four years, and lied at by more millions for eight years. But, when
to the hostility engendered by vilification is added the distrust born
of a popular panic, no matter how groundless, temerity itself would
doubt the availability of the victim.

Still, that resolution remains upon the journals of the House. It
will remain there for ever. We hope posterity will be considerate
enough to remember that we had not quite entered upon the second
century of our national existence when that champion piece of char-
latanry was enacted in the House of Representatives. But, happily,
at the present time the Springer resolution is inoperative. Presi-
dent Hayes can not be elected to a third term, for he has not yet
served a second term. It is true, General Grant still lives, and be
might be elected to a third term. But the Springer resolution does
not forbid that. It only enjoins retirement after a second term.
Grant retired at the end of the second term, in strict accord with
the precedents and the resolution.

That resolution rests upon the bold assumption that patronage
and not principle dominates the electors of the republic ; that the
postmasters are too many for the people ; and that he who controls
appointments for eight years will form a corps of eighty thousand
official janizaries who will easily subjugate six million who have
never been appointed ! But audacity itself has not yet ventured to
suggest that a private citizen is likely to ride down people and post-
masters both, merely because he once controlled appointments.

Since, then, no one can now be hurt or helped by the Springer
resolution, this seems a fortunate time to discuss the merits of that
fulmination. Since the reign of Jeroboam the world has not seen
vol. cxxx. — no. 279. 9

118 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

true believers seduced from the worship of God to that of mere
metallic calves. It is much to be desired that the world may not
again see true republicans scared by a senseless clamor into putting
lighted candles in their caps, after the manner of miners, and going
down into subterranean depths to quarry out a President, while the
foremost man of his age stands upon the mountain-top, upon whom
the eager world has set the seal of primacy.

It is therefore the purpose of this article to show that in those
few lines quoted from the journal of the House of Representatives
are comprised a grave impeachment of the Federal Constitution, a
gross libel upon its framers, a base counterfeit of our political his-
tory, and a wanton insult to our common sense.

The Constitution clearly permits what the resolution so forcibly
condemns. The fundamental law puts no limit to the number of
terms for which the people may elect the same man to the Presi-
dency. And to affirm that it is "unwise," "unpatriotic," and
"perilous to our free institutions" to elect the same man three
times, is simply to impeach the Constitution for sanctioning an act
so malevolent in its tendencies. Moreover, the question of reeligi-
bility was not overlooked by the men who made the Constitution.
It was carefully considered and reconsidered by them. They were
not wanting in sagacity.

No one idea was so prominent or so universal in the Constitu-
tional Convention as this : Presidents must be reeligible Whoever
they might elect, they should have the right to reelect. Whatever
might be the length of a term, there should be no limitation upon
the number of terms. The reason was obvious. Mr. Gouverneur
Morris, the man to whose rare genius, according to Mr. Madison,
we are indebted for the polished style of the Constitution, stated
that reason as tersely as it need be stated. " To forbid reelections,"
he said, " tended to destroy the great motive to good behavior ; the
hope of being rewarded by a reappointment. It was saying to him,
Make hay while the sun shines." Roger Sherman also said : " If he
behaves well, he will be continued. If otherwise, he will be dis-
placed on a succeeding election." Mr. King thought there was
great force in the remark that " he who has proved himself most
fit for an office ought not to be excluded by the Constitution from
holding it." All thought reeligibility essential to a well-ordered
government. But all thought it essential, also, that the executive
and legislative departments of the government should be, as much
as possible, independent of each other. How to secure both that

THE THIRD TERM. 119

independence and reeligibility was a problem which the Conven-
tion found it difficult to solve. The prevailing opinion at the open-
ing of the Convention was, that Congress should elect the President.
And all could see that if Congress elected, and might reelect the
President, he would feel not independent of, but quite dependent
upon, the Legislature. To avoid that dependence, some proposed
to make him ineligible for a second term, while others proposed to
make him elective in some other way than by Congress. But on
the 17th of July, after weeks of debate, the Convention voted
unanimously that the Executive be chosen by the National Legis-
lature. When that had been carried and on the same day, upon
the question of making him reeligible, six States, to wit, Massachu-
setts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Geor-
gia, voted ay, while four States only, to wit, Delaware, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, voted no. By those votes
the Convention deliberately declared that the dependence of the
Executive, although an evil, was a less evil than ineligibility to
more than one term. On the 26th of July that decision was re-
versed. On that day, in the absence of the delegates from Massa-
chusetts, seven States voted for the motion of Colonel George Ma-
son, of Virginia, to make the " Executive to be appointed for seven
years, and be ineligible a second time." In that shape the article
on the Constitution of the Executive went to the Committee of
Detail, and was subsequently reported back by that committee in
these words : " The Executive power of the United States, shall be
vested in a single person. His style shall be ' President of the
United States of America,' and his title shall be 'His Excellency.'
He shall be elected by ballot by the Legislature. He shall hold his
office during a term of seven years ; but shall not be elected a
second time."

"When that clause again came before the Convention for con-
sideration, the struggle was renewed to rescue the choice of the
Executive from the hands of Congress. The struggle was protracted
and somewhat heated. At length the whole subject of the Consti-
tution of the Executive was referred to a committee of one member
from each State. The committee was chosen by ballot, and upon
it, among others less known, were placed Mr. Roger Sherman, Mr.
Rufus King, Mr. Gouverneur Morris, and Mr. James Madison. On
the 4th of September that committee reported a plan for choosing
Presidents and Vice-Presidents by an electoral college. The plan
provided that, if the colleges failed to elect, the choice should de-

120 TEE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

volve upon the Senate. Mr. Sherman explicitly avowed that " the
object of this clause of the report of the committee was to get rid
of the ineligibility which was attached to the mode of election by
the Legislature, and to make the Executive independent of the
Legislature." But the new plan was at once attacked upon the
assumption that the colleges would never elect, and of course the
Senate would always elect, so that the President, instead of being
independent, would be the mere creature of the Senate. After a
long debate, Mr. Rutledge, of South Carolina, moved to postpone
the report of the Committee of Eleven to take up the plan reported
by the Committee of Detail. By that motion the Convention was
called to choose directly between a President to be chosen by the
Legislature for a single term of seven years and a President to be
chosen by the electoral colleges or the Senate, but without limit as
to number of terms. The motion was negatived. Only North and
South Carolina voted for it. With some modifications, the plan of
the Committee of Eleven was made a part of the Constitution, and
the records of that great debate do not preserve the name of a sin-
gle man with judgment so debauched as to object to the reeligibility
of Presidents, if only the choice could be preserved from legislative
control.

The Constitution, as finally agreed to, was not satisfactory
to every member of the Convention. Many refused to sign it.
Among those so refusing were Messrs. Robert Yates and John
Lansing, of New York ; Edmund Randolph, Richard Henry Lee,
and George Mason, of Virginia ; and Elbridge Gerry, of Massachu-
setts. Each one of those distinguished gentlemen has left on record
his reasons for refusing to sign the Constitution. But not one of
them enumerates the reeligibility of the President as an objection
to the instrument. Did the House of Representatives affirm a
" peril to our free institutions " which does not exist, or did those
clear-sighted cavilers, eager as they were to find fault, fail to see a
peril which did exist ?

Again the Constitution was submitted to a critical review, in
the several State Conventions called to consider the question of its
ratification. In Massachusetts, one hundred and sixty-eight mem-
bers voted against ratification. But not one of the whole number
objected to the reeligibility of the President. No such objection
was suggested in the Conventions for Connecticut or New Hamp-
shire. That criticism was made in the Convention of New York.
It was made by Mr. Melancthon Smith, a delegate from Dutchess

THE THIRD TERM. 121

County. He had been a delegate from the State in the Federal
Convention. He was the apostle of the gospel of rotation in office.
He was a consistent one. He urged the rotation not of Presidents
alone, but of Senators and members of the House also. But
Mr. Smith found no second to his idea in that Convention, and
even he seems to have abandoned it. For, when subsequently he
moved his schedule of amendments, the adoption of which he de-
sired to make a condition precedent to ratification, he omitted all
mention of reeligibility.

In the Pennsylvania Convention the objection was not heard of.
One year after Pennsylvania had ratified the Constitution, a large
Convention assembled at Harrisburg, to propose amendments to it.
Twelve different amendments were agreed to. But no limitation
upon reeligibility was even proposed.

The Maryland Convention would not consider amendments ;
would not hear objections. One member after another arose in his
place to say he was sent there " to ratify the proposed Constitution,
not to amend it." They would not allow an amendment to be read
even, but, on the very week they assembled, they voted to ratify
the instrument, by a vote of sixty-three to eleven. Having ratified
the Constitution, in order to pacify its opponents the Convention
appointed a committee of thirteen to consider the subject of amend-
ments. To that committee were submitted thirteen amendments,
to which they agreed, and fifteen which they rejected. But not
among the whole twenty-eight amendments considered can be
found one single word of criticism upon the reeligibility of the
President. The Convention in North Carolina was far less cordial
to the new scheme of government. That Convention not only pro-
posed twenty-six amendments to the text of the Constitution, but
agreed to prefix a bill of rights containing twenty sections. But
not even in North Carolina was a man to be found to object to the
reeligibility of the President. No such man was found in South
Carolina.

One such was found in Virginia, but only one. In the Virginia
Convention the new instrument of government was subjected to the
most searching review, to the most savage analysis. The Conven-
tion was large ; the enemies of the Constitution were numerous and
resolute. They convened on the 2d of June. They did not vote
upon ratification until the 24th. Then seventy-nine out of one hun-
dred and sixty-eight votes were cast against ratification. During
the debate which preceded the vote, every objection which human

122 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

sagacity could detect or human ingenuity could invent had been
urged against it. One man caviled at the reeligibility of the Presi-
dent. Mr. George Mason had been a member of the Federal Con-
vention. He had heard reeligibility declaimed against there, while
the plan was to give the election to Congress. That plan had been
abandoned — had been abandoned, as we have seen, for the avowed
purpose of removing the objection to reflections. Still, Mr. Mason
seemed to think he might arouse some hostility to the Constitution
by an argument against reeligibility. His argument is worth re-
producing, since it is the only one in our literature upon which the
edict of the House can be excused. Mr. Mason said : " The Presi-
dent is elected without rotation. It may be said that a new election
may remove him and place another in his stead. If we judge from
the experience of all other countries, and even our own, we may
conclude that, as the President of the United States may be elected,
so he will. . . . This President will be elected time after time. He
will be continued in office for life. If we wish to change him, the
great powers in Europe will not allow it. . . . It is a great defect
in the Senate that they are not ineligible at the end of six years.
The biennial exclusion of one third of them will have no effect, as
they can be reelected. Some stated time ought to be fixed when
the President ought to be reduced to a private station. I should be
contented that he might be elected for eight years, but I should
wish him to be capable of holding the office only eight years out of
twelve or sixteen"

The Springer resolution is the first echo of George Mason's
speech. But, among all the men who debated the Constitution,
either in the Federal or the several State Conventions, there are
but two who are open to the suspicion of having favored a legal
restriction upon the right to reelect Presidents. Those two are
Melancthon Smith, of New York, and George Mason, of Virginia.
But it should be remembered in exculpation of Smith and Mason
that they were openly trying to defeat the Constitution. They
were opposed to it. They had not sworn to support it. It was not
unnatural that they should raise unreal objections to it. They did
not assault a Constitution they had sworn to support, for the pur-
pose of destroying an imaginary candidate by stabbing through it.

The men who made the Constitution struggled to secure the
reeligibility of Presidents. They surrendered preferences, aban-
doned cherished ideas, and devised new plans, in order to preserve
the right to repeat the elections and prolong the services of able

V

THE THIRD TERM. 123

and upright Presidents. They could hardly have expected that
within a century a generation would appear whose representatives
would dare to proclaim that the exercise of that simple right for
which they sacrificed so much was " unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught
with peril to our free institutions."

The resolution refers to the precedent established by Washing-
ton and other Presidents, in retiring after the second term, and de-
clares that precedent to have become part of our republican system.
But a majority of our Presidents have retired after a first term.
Why should the two-term precedent become a part of our govern-
mental system more than the one-term precedent ? It may be said
that General Washington chose to retire at the end of his second
term. The fact was so ; J)ut it is difficult to see how General
Washington's refusal, in the latter part of the last century, to serve
a third term, should debar the people, in the latter part of this cen-
tury or the next, from choosing a man a third time who will serve.
But if General Washington's personal tastes are equivalent to a con-
stitutional limitation, then the one-term rule should prevail and not
the two-term. He ardently desired to retire at the end of his first
term. He avowed that desire often and earnestly. He assigned
his reasons frankly and repeatedly. His reasons were personal, not
patriotic. He never pretended that he sought retirement to pro-
mote the public welfare, but only to gratify his own feelings. He
said to Mr. Jefferson that " he had, through the whole course of the
war, and most particularly at the close of it, uniformly declared his
resolution to retire from public affairs, and never to act in any pub-
lic office ; that he had retired under that firm resolution ; that the
government, however, which had been formed, being found evident-
ly too inefficacious, and it being supposed that his aid was of some
consequence toward bringing the people to consent to one of suffi-
cient efficacy for their own good, he consented to come into the
Convention, and on the same motive, after much pressing, to take a
part in the new government, and get it under way. That were he
to continue longer, it might give room to say that, having tasted
the sweets of office, he could not do without them ; that he really
felt himself growing old, his bodily health less firm ; his memory,
always bad, becoming worse, and perhaps the other faculties of his
mind showing a decay to others of which he was insensible himself ;
that this apprehension particularly oppressed him : that he found,
moreover, his activity lessened, business therefore more irksome, and
tranquillity and retirement become an irresistible passion."

124 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

His personal wishes were overruled. He consented to a re-
election, and was unanimously reelected. Envious of his overshad-
owing fame ; jealous of his commanding influence with the people ;
fearful that they might again refuse to permit his retirement at the
end of his second term — the hungry pack, who longed to succeed
him, commenced systematically to tear him down. The air was
filled with calumny, with caricature, with lampoons and lies. Par-
tisan malice pursued him with that same hound-like ferocity with
which it pursued President Grant during his second term. He did
not bear it as Grant bore it. No man saw President Grant quail
before the gibes of his enemies or before the guns of his country's
enemies. Washington was stung to the quick by the injustice of
his countrymen. i

Before the first year of his second term was ended, Jefferson
reports that at a Cabinet meeting "the President was much in-
flamed ; got into one of those passions when he can not command
himself ; ran on much on the personal abuse which had been be-
stowed on him ; defied any man on earth to produce one single act
of his, since he had been in the government, which was not done
on the purest motives ; that he had never repented but once the
having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was
every moment since ; that by God he had rather be in his grave
than in his present situation ; that he had rather be on his farm
than to be made emperor of the world ; and yet that they were
charging him with wanting to be a king ! "

Washington, like Grant — the father of his country like the savior
of it — was accused of " CaBsarism." It is not so very strange that
three millions of people just emerged from monarchy should be
jealous of imperial designs. But it is passing strange that forty
millions just swaggering into the second century of freedom should
be scared by so soft a spook !

No one expected to dissuade President Washington from the
retirement he so passionately coveted beyond the expiration of his
second term. He was sixty-one years old when that term com-
menced. He was sixty-five when it ended. The infirmities of
which he complained at sixty were aggravated at sixty-five. He
died before the next term ended. The number of his enemies had
multiplied. Their hate was intensified. Jefferson had left his Cab-
inet. Madison was alienated from him. He had been compelled to
recall Monroe from France. He yearned for rest, and he inflexibly
sought it. Such was the example of our first President.

THE THIRD TERM. 125

"No one asked Mr. Adams to accept a third term. But few asked
him to accept a second. His example, therefore, furnishes no more
sanction to the Springer resolution than does the example of Mr.
Washington.

Mr. Jefferson furnished a precedent more to the purpose. The
Legislatures of several States formally invited him to become a can-
didate for a third term. He as formally declined the invitation.
He stated his reasons for declining as follows : " That I should lay
down my charge at a proper period is as much a duty as to have
borne it faithfully. If some termination to the services of the Chief
Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice,
his office, nominally for years, will, in fact, become for life ; and
history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance. Be-
lieving that a representative government, responsible at short periods
of election, is that which produces the greatest sum of happiness to
mankind, I feel it a duty to do no act which shall essentially impair
that principle ; and I should unwillingly be the person who, disre-
garding the sound precedent set by an illustrious predecessor, should
furnish the first example of prolongation beyond the second term of
office. . . . Truth, also, requires me to add that I am sensible of that
decline which advancing years bring on ; and, feeling their physi-
cal, I ought not to doubt their mental, effect. Happy if I am the
first to perceive and to obey this admonition of nature, and to
solicit a retreat from cares too great for the wearied faculties of
age."

Those reasons are satisfactory. Undoubtedly, every public func-
tionary should lay down his " charge at a proper period." But the
proper period is just as clearly that which suits the public conve-
nience, and not that which suits the convenience of the individual.
History has already exploded the assumption of Mr. Jefferson that,
if the term of service for the Chief Magistrate be not fixed, he will
continue to hold for life. The term of service is not fixed by any
law or any practice, and yet not one half our Chief Magistrates have
in fact been elected even the second time. " A representative gov-
ernment responsible at short periods of election " is undoubtedly
wise, and " that which produces the greatest sum of happiness to
mankind." But the right to elect government agents at short pe-
riods does not involve the necessity of electing new agents at each
recurring period. Elections should be not only periodical but free.
If the people really wished Mr. Jefferson to serve a third term and
he refused to do so, then the election of 1808 was not free but re-

126 THE NORTH AMERICAN' REVIEW.

stricted. The people had not free choice but restricted choice, and
their freedom was impaired by the act of Mr. Jefferson. But Mr.
Jefferson is not exposed to that imputation. He could have assigned
a better reason for declining to serve a third term than any of those
he did assign. That better reason was, that he could not be elected
to a third term ! That fact had been made quite manifest at the
time he declined to be a candidate. Nothing is clearer in history
than that he waited for just that manifestation of public opinion
before he did decline. The Legislature of Vermont first threw his
flag to the breeze on the 5th of November, 1806. More than two
years before his second term expired, the Legislature of Vermont
addressed to Mr. Jefferson a formal invitation to become a candi-
date for a third term. In December following the Legislature of
Georgia joined in that invitation. Maryland did the same in Jan-
uary, 1807. Rhode Island in February, and New York and Penn-
sylvania in March, followed their example.

Mr. Jefferson is known to have been a most diligent correspon-
dent. During all those months he was constantly receiving letters
from individuals, from municipalities, from religious societies and
political organizations. He replied to such promptly, becomingly.
But to the Legislatures of those great States he deigned no reply
for more than a year after the first one addressed him. On De-
cember 4, 1807, the Legislature of New Jersey joined in the invi-
tation of Vermont. Mr. Jefferson determined to wait no longer.
He addressed letters to Vermont, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
declining to be a candidate for reelection. In stating his reasons
for declining, he employed the same terms in each letter. Those
letters bear date the 10th of December, 1807. They were given
to the public in the columns of " The Aurora," at Philadelphia, on
the 19th of the same month. Up to that time no one had heard an
objection to a third term. Seven States had asked Mr. Jefferson to
accept a third term. Nobody had objected to his having another
term because he had already enjoyed two. What he himself
thought of a third term he had diligently concealed from the pub-
lic during the whole agitation. Two days before his letter ap-
peared in " The Aurora," that journal copied from the " Trenton
True American " an article commencing in these words : " Will Mr.
Jefferson consent to serve another term as President ? is a question
which almost every Republican anxiously asks, but which no one
can certainly answer." The States which at that time had declared
for a third term cast sixty-two electoral votes. North Carolina

THE THIRD TERM. 127

subsequently joined the number. North Carolina then gave eleven
votes. That would make the number of electoral votes which had
declared for Mr. Jefferson, seventy-three.

But the States of Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, South
Carolina, and, worst of all, Virginia, where both Jefferson and
Madison had their homes, obstinately refused to join in the Jeffer-
son " boom." They were Republican States, they voted for Madi-
son, and they were accorded fifty-five electoral votes.

Then the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
and Delaware, cast thirty-nine electoral votes. They were Federal
States, not Republican. They voted for Pinckney, and would not
vote for Jefferson or Madison either.

Of course, when it was ascertained that there were thirty-nine
votes which no Republican could secure, and fifty-five Republican
votes which Jefferson could not receive, but Madison could, the
former had excellent reasons for declining a third term for himself.
But he had no reason for declining a third term for all his succes-
sors. When satisfied, after an active canvass of more than thir-
teen months, that the people did not wish to prolong his services
beyond a second term, he did well to recognize the fact. He would
have done better if he had not attempted to frame his disappoint-
ment into a law which should prevent any of his successors from
serving longer than he did.

Since the retirement of Mr. Jefferson there has been no attempt
to renominate a President to a third term. There is ground for
believing that, if Mr. Yan Buren had not secured the succession to
General Jackson, the latter would have been retained another term.
That expedient was discussed at the time. The " Herald," a Demo-
cratic newspaper of Philadelphia, then said :

" The present attitude of Judge White, of Tennessee, appears
rather calculated to produce an impression of division in the Demo-
cratic ranks, of a serious character. But this danger will vanish,
when we reflect that if it should appear formidable, when the
National Convention meet, that body will dissipate it in a few
minutes, by the nomination of Andreio Jackson for a third term •
a measure every way calculated to avert the defeat of the Demo-
cratic party by the Whigs ; and more than justifiable by every
principle involved in the contest of the party, who are fighting for
popular rights and democratic government"

But constitutions, history, precedents, and statesmen have been
misconstrued, before the era of the Springer resolution. Rarely,

128 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

however, has the human understanding been so rudely insulted as
by that strange fulmination.

To tell rational creatures that " free institutions " are imperiled
by the reelection of one who for eight years has proved a faithful
Magistrate, but are insured by the election of one who has never
been proved at all, seems to be the extreme of audacity. That is
to say, that our institutions would have been endangered by the
election of George Washington to a third term, but were preserved
by the election of John Adams ; that is to say, that our republican
system would have been threatened by a third election of James
Madison or Andrew Jackson, but was preserved by the fortunate
election of James Monroe and Martin Yan Buren.

" I have no other lamp by which to guide my feet," said Patrick
Henry, " than the light of experience."

When science fails and revelation is silent, one has no better light
than that. And, if experience teaches anything, it teaches that, the
longer a public servant has been faithful, the surer he is to be faith-
ful. That is as true of the First Magistrate as of any subaltern ; as
true of the head of the nation as of the head of a bureau. The
railway manager who should dismiss a conductor, or the banking
company which should dismiss a cashier who had been faithful for
eight or for eighteen years, upon the presumption that, because he
had been faithful so long, it was unsafe to trust him longer, would
be deemed insane.

It is even more irrational to conclude that one who has for
eight years scrupulously guarded the solemn trusts reposed in an
American President is for that reason to be more distrusted than
a new man.

" Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over many," is the practical wisdom approved by the Saviour.
The Honorable Mr. Springer teaches us that he who has been faith-
ful over all things for eight years should be trusted with nothing
thereafter. The world will make a mistake if it shall turn from
Jesus of Nazareth to follow Mr. Springer, of Illinois.

When the Constitutional Convention had finally agreed to the
plan of a President chosen for four years, and reeligible at the
pleasure of the people, Mr. Alexander Hamilton said : " He liked
the new modification on the whole better than that in the printed
report. In this the President was a monster, elected for seven
years and ineligible afterward ; having great powers in appoint-
ments to office, and continually tempted, by this constitutional dis-

THE THIRD TERM. 129

qualification, to abuse them in order to subvert the government.''
Mr. Springer's resolution resurrects the monster which Hamilton
denounced, and which the Convention with such diligence buried.

Paul taught the Hebrews that without sacrifice there was no
remission of sins. Americans are taught that not even sacrifice
will save a President from rebuke after eight years' service, although
he has been sinless.

Timothy O. Howe.

M. DE LESSEPS AND HIS CANAL.

There appears in the January number of the " Review " a
contribution by M. de Lesseps, to which I feel disposed to reply.
The same ideas have been more elaborated in the " Bulletin du
Canal Interoceanique," published in Paris under his immediate
control. I have not replied, as these articles appeared, from a wil-
lingness that he shall have it all his own way where his language is
spoken, or abroad where he is regarded as especially authorized to
instruct. If he can find in Europe a moneyed support, and partic-
ularly in France, it is not our affair. When he writes in English,
and publishes his ideas in one of the leading periodicals of my
country, he not only invites but challenges a reply.

Months ago we were informed of what he had to say before the
Geographical Society of Paris ; he expressed surprise and even dis-
appointment at finding so little opposition ; it was a regret to him
that he could not secure a controversy on the canal question, and
appeared, as the Irishman is represented at the Donnybrook Fair,
most anxious " to find some gentleman who would do him the favor
to step on the tail of his coat."

Without specially wishing to perform that office, I purpose
pursuing my way quite regardless of other objects than a fair dis-
cussion, and shall confine myself as far as possible — 1. To a review
of the points presented for American consideration ; 2. To some
points he does not present ; 3. To the general merits of the ques-
tion growing out of his presentations. And I beg my readers to
take note — in explanation of my frequent allusions to M. de Les-
seps — that that gentleman's connection with the Panama Canal
enterprise is about all that gives it importance in France.

It is gratifying to see that M. de Lesseps states that our Gov-
ernment for a long series of years has recognized the advantage,

M. DE LESSEPS AND HIS CANAL. 131

and endeavored to promote the knowledge necessary to solve the
possibilities of an interoceanic ship-canal ; this is taking a proper
step. If published in Paris it would appear as a contradiction or a
revelation of what we had been about for the past quarter of a cen-
tury.

On page 3 M. de Lesseps says : " In the examination made of
different projects in the United States, the only plan thought of
has been to make use of inland waters for constructing a maritime
canal, and they have entirely neglected to study the methods by
which they would secure a constant level of sea- water for the pur-
poses of navigation in a channel from one ocean to the other."

This does not comport with M. de Lesseps's opening acknowl-
edgments of the interest taken by our Government and people in
this question ; it is not only at variance with the facts, but what
are known to be the facts to every intelligent American. Such an
averment emanating from him might find believers in France, but
with us will excite either a feeling of ridicule or of indignation.
He states this in the face of his averment that we have spent five
million dollars in making surveys across the isthmuses — in the face
of the presentations to the Congress of our surveys, extending over
the whole regions involved, without the existence of which he would
have suffered the perplexities of M. Drouillet.

The assertion of M. de Lesseps is made in the full knowledge
and possession of a line of levels and best location possible for a
ship-canal across the Isthmus of Panama, carefully made, as he was
informed, by Mr. Menocal in the Congress, without any precon-
ceived height, if at all, above the ocean-level. The summit-level
arrived at was the result of a necessity that was found apparent.

The following extract from the orders of Commander Lull
shows how far M. de Lesseps is in error in his quoted assertion I
am now discussing. His orders were prepared by the Commission,
although signed by the Secretary of the Navy.

Navy Department, Washington, D. C, December 29, 187d.

Sir : Upon the request of the Interoceanic Canal Commission for more
specific information in relation to the Isthmus of Panama, in general in the
vicinity of the line of railroad, you are detailed, and will proceed in the
steamer of January 2d, from ISTew York for Aspinwall, with the party of
officers ordered to report to you.

Your thorough experience in these matters relieves the Department from
preparing minute and contingent instructions. You will, however, obtain
specific information on the following points, viz. :

132 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

1. In relation to water-supply and the points whence it should be drawn
for an interoceanic canal, if constructed upon the Isthmus of Panama.

2. The difficulties that may exist from floods.

3. Actual locations of the most practicable line or lines, with locations of
locks, if the route, upon examination, should render this advisable.

4. Observation as to whatever in the way of material or other conditions
would look to the general question of construction, whether of advantage or
disadvantage.

5. To obtain in advance from the Panama Kailroad Company whatever
information as to levels, Tcnown to be authentic, the company may be disposed
to give you, which may form a basis for your special careful instrumental ex-
amination.

6. By the aid of a tug, and whatever other facilities may be necessary to
enter the Ohepo River, making such examinations of it as may be thought
advisable after inspection. It is suggested, if the near approach of massive
solid ground on both sides of the Ohepo should make it possible by dams to
flood considerable areas and distances for slack-water navigation, that it
might be found practicable in connection with a tunnel of considerable length
to the Gulf of San Bias. If the prosecution of this examination should be
found advisable, put it in such a shape as will not lead to doubts as to relative
practicability.

It was only after a full consideration of all the routes surveyed,
and the belief of the Commission that no others existed equal to
those that had been developed, that it sent in its report of preference
for the Nicaragua route, as the above facts abundantly establish,
notwithstanding the ideas of M. de Lesseps to the contrary.

There is nothing more potent than a grievance. M. de Lesseps
presents one. It is nothing less than that the Congress which he
invoked had not been furnished with all of the means by which the
Commission appointed by the President of the United States had
arrived at a decision respecting the merits of the different routes.
This " exclusively American Commission " was appointed under an
act of Congress to obtain and report upon all necessary information
touching the question of the practicability of an interoceanic ship-
canal across this continent. To enable it to carry out the expressed
objects in the progress of the work, it thought necessary to ask a
personal inspection of the routes by able engineers for its informa-
tion, in order the better to form an opinion as to the relative cost
of execution, over which it was supposed actual lines of location
existed. These inspections were made, and revealed the fact that
the Atrato-Napipi route located by Commander Selfridge was almost
wholly supposititious, and that the Nicaragua route located by

M. BE LES8EP8 AND HIS CANAL. 133

Commander Lull presented all the elements of calculation for an
engineer.

The Commission endeavored in vain to get from or through the
Panama Railroad surveys for a canal, said to have been made by
Colonel Totten. As far as I know, only partial lines were made by
him for that object.

Finding it impossible to get the information otherwise than
through an instrumental survey, the Commission stated to the Presi-
dent of the United States its inability to arrive at a conclusion
without it, and our Government immediately directed its execution
in a manner quite satisfactory to the Commission, by the command-
ing officer and civil engineer who had executed the surveys of the
Nicaragua route, thus obviating a further examination of them for
comparison as to cost of execution.

The Government also directed the making of an actual line of
location via the Atrato-Napipi route by Lieutenant Collins, IT. S.
Navy, a very able and reliable officer, as the results of his surveys
show.

The Commission then examined carefully into all the work done,
and sent to the President its report, journal of proceedings, and cop-
ies of all of the surveys and inspections, upon which it based its
decision. The surveys of the Panama and Atrato routes were pub-
lished especially for and sent by our Government to the Paris Con-
gress. Our Government did not furnish the journal of the Commis-
sion nor the long reports of the engineers sent over the two routes
above named, not as a board, but to give their individual opinions
for the information and guidance of the Commission. The value
of this information was duly acknowledged in their report, of which
copies were furnished the Congress. Has M. de Lesseps a real or
an imaginary grievance? Has the "exclusively American Com-
mission " indulged in ways that are dark, as is inferred ?

In due time I shall revert to his parade of the candor and ingen-
uousness of the Congress considering that subject, in the light of
papers which I think he will agree with me are not to be found even
in the libraries of the Geographical Society of Paris.

There is an old proverb that it is not polite to look a gift-horse
in the mouth. There was no moral obligation on the part of our
Government to furnish M. de Lesseps and his Congress with any
surveys ; there would have been neither reason nor object in using
duplicity. He was furnished with all the information in our posses-
sion, and was at liberty to assign any value to it that he thought
vol. cxxx. — no. 279. 10

134: TEE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

proper. In relation to the cost of these surveys, I wish to correct an
error. He gravely asserts the expenses incurred through making
them was $5,000,000.

In 1870 an appropriation of $40,000 was transferred, which fur-
nished instruments, engineers, draughtsmen, hired labor, extra ra-
tions, shelter-tents, etc., for the Tehuantepec and Nicaragua sur-
veys, and for all those made by Commander Selfridge. The special
expenses necessary for the objects above named for instrumental
surveys of the Panama route by Commander Lull and for the Atra-
to-Napipi route by Lieutenant Collins, amounting to about 810,000,
were met by the navy contingent fund, in great part, at least, very
little of the $40,000 appropriation remaining unexpended.

No expenses were entailed on the Government through the di-
version of vessels of war from their ordinary duties as cruisers to
" special duty " to aid in these surveys. The cost of publication
was defrayed by special appropriations, probably amounting to
$50,000. As M. de Lesseps's statement of the expenditures made
as a consequence of these surveys is preposterous, the public would
be pleased to know the source of his misinformation.

Referring to page 5, we find M. de Lesseps compliments General
Tiirr and others, who formed an initiatory society, of which we
shall know more before the close of this paper. He says, " In that
company I have taken no part whatever."

In April of 1866 a M. Gogorza sought my acquaintance and
informed me that he knew a low line of levels across the Isthmus
of Darien. I expressed my gratification, and was informed that he
sought an interview with General Grant, to lay the whole matter
before him. I replied that I knew General Grant took great inter-
est in that subject, and hoped that I could arrange this as he de-
sired. In short, General Grant sent an officer then on his staff to
see M. Gogorza, who showed partial maps, and finally said that he
was unwilling to give up his great secret, as he would then be quite
in the power of those who were possessed of it. Some years after
I received a note from him, urging haste, without which his precious
information would fall into the hands of Europeans, a calamity that
he was most anxious to prevent. Perhaps somewhat in an Anglo-
Saxon manner I replied that I would have nothing to do with a
mere pretender. I had placed him years before in communication
with General Grant, and he had failed to carry out his expressed
purpose.

During the fall of 1876, after I had prepared a paper which was

M. BE LESSEPS AND HIS CANAL. 135

read October 31st before the Geographical Society of New York,
the Secretary of State presented me a pamphlet by M. Gogorza, who
at length had given the world his great secret. I stated that I had
a personal acquaintance with this individual, and pointed out, by
the height he gave the mouth of the river Paya above the sea-level,
that what was asserted as a fact was a mere fallacy. A foot-note,
read before the Society referred to, exposed the pretension of Go-
gorza. I may as well add that the paper was prepared for the pur-
pose of showing the sufficiency of our information respecting the
Isthmus to controvert the assumptions of M. Drouillet, French engi-
neer, and the first Secretary of the Initiatory Society. He visited
our country to invoke the aid of our learned societies in a " gener-
ous attempt " to explore these (to him) unknown regions, in relation
to which he had vainly endeavored to inform himself for the past
five years, but could not, by reason of the information being entire-
ly contradictory !

In addition to being possessed of "valuable information," M.
Gogorza held a provisionary grant from the Colombian Government.
Hence we see his title to a very considerable share of the proceeds
of the Initiatory Society before alluded to — not resulting, however,
from the benefit derived from his " information," for we find that
Lieutenant Wyse, after all, did agree with me that the Tuyra-Tupisa
route was impossible for a canal, as shown in my paper of Novem-
ber, 1878. Yet he compliments Gogorza on his services, and him-
self visited Bogota twice to secure desired amendments to the con-
cession, which at length were obtained. In reading the papers of
the Initiatory Society, it seems that M. Gogorza was like Esau, not
in the matter of a hairy coat, but in the value that he attached to a
mess of pottage — General Turr, the brother-in-law of Lieutenant
Wyse, supplying (figuratively) the coveted article. The Paris Con-
gress was then called — not, however, until ten days' labor in running
a dozen cross-sections over the levels of the Panama Railroad had
opened up that unknown region, and had established the practicabil-
ity of a ship-canal d niveau, the plans for which received such high
commendations from M. de Lesseps in that august body.

Now the intelligent reader will be prepared to compare the sup-
posed hidden, devious ways of the American Commission with the
interesting and much- vaunted preliminaries to and proceedings in
the Paris Congress, as shown in the " Articles of Agreement of the
International Society for cutting an Interoceanic Canal through
the Isthmus of Darien " (see Appendix).

136 TEE NORTE AMERICAN REVIEW.

Considering M. de Lesseps's apology for us, based on the very
humble ideas held by the American Commission by reason of small
sailing-vessels and rudimentary steamers forming our commercial
marine, and calling at the same time our attention to the grand
dimensions and purposes of steam marine in Europe, it may nat-
urally be supposed that the attention of persons who may interest
themselves in the canal project will be directed to a provision for
the transit of longer vessels, through the construction of sufficient
locks and curves of longer radii. His ideas as to locks and lockage,
however, are very crude, or, to speak with more propriety, his cita-
tion of a lock at Bordeaux as " a vast improvement ; and yet, great
as it is, the Congo, of the Transatlantic line, occupied an hour and a
half in passing it," shows so deplorable a want of efficiency in that
respect that it excites surprise.

In this country, the commerce of which, in the opinion of M. de
Lesseps, is confined to small sailing-vessels and steamers of small or
rudimentary development, a lift-lock is now near completion at St.
Mary's, Michigan, five hundred and fifteen feet in length, sixty feet
width of gate, and eighteen feet lift. The computed time of a
steamer entering into and passing through the lock is eleven minutes.
The constructor is General Weitzel, United States Engineers, who
has been engaged for the past twelve years in constructing and
operating locks of large dimensions. Without intending disparage-
ment to the many able men who attended the Paris Congress, I will
add that, in this department of engineering, he may be regarded as
the equal of any.

M. de Lesseps found, notwithstanding the " information " and
services of M. Gogorza, that only after the researches on the Isth-
mus of Panama " the time had arrived for realizing the wish of
1875, namely, to convene a national congress to which all the
investigations made and all the plans proposed should be sub-
mitted. ... I sent an invitation to all the chambers of commerce
and scientific societies without making any appeal to governments,
and on our sole invitation everybody came." Mr. Menocal and my-
self were ordered by our Government to attend the Congress. We
met many other officers of foreign Governments who occupied the
same position as ourselves. Can any intelligent person believe that
our Government, without invitation or request, sent delegates to
this meeting ?

On May 23d M. de Lesseps addressed the Congress as follows
(p. 638) : " In my belief we should not make a canal with locks at

M. DE LESSEPS AND EIS CANAL. 137

Panama, but a canal at the sea-level ; that is, I believe, the public
opinion of which I am the organ at this moment."

The Congress obligingly conformed to his expressed wishes ; he
was the organ of " public opinion," and he charged himself with the
execution of the work. I am not disposed to reply either affirma-
tively or negatively to the question, " Can any one assert that the
Nicaragua project was not sufficiently examined?" If the Con-
gress and its President are satisfied with the examination, it would
be idle and captious to dissent. If they are satisfied with the de-
cision, we are also ; the question of whether engineering considera-
tions supported the decision is quite another question. M. de Les-
seps presents the case as though there were only an American sup-
port to the canal via Nicaragua, and excuses us for our apparent
want of comprehension of a grand idea. The question has been
discussed in the Society of Civil Engineers of France ; it would be
simply a narrow prejudice not to recognize that body as the equal
of any on the globe.

It is worth while to state with precision the character and attain-
ments of an able civil engineer. He is a man eminently gifted with
a perception of the forces of nature in their varied forms, and is
thoroughly educated in the means and devices which will permit of
using them as far as possible, and, when a question arises of antago-
nizing them, to do so with the greatest economy ; he is thoroughly
an economist, and supports that which is best for any proposed pur-
pose in all its bearings. Like the jurist, he belongs to no land ;
knows no special pleading ; recognizes and sustains only what he
regards the truth under all conditions, and ignores the fact that his
personal interests may suffer thereby. In this connection I may say
no one of the five able engineers, delegates to the Congress from the
Society of Civil Engineers of Paris, supports " public opinion " and
its organ. They and many other eminent French engineers were
absent when the vote was taken, or voted no.

On the 20th of June, in Paris, this Society was addressed by two
of those delegates, M. Cotard and M. Lavalley. After hearing all
this discussion, M. de Lesseps is still pleased to hold up the canal
via Nicaragua as wholly an American idea, that existed in fact only
from a want of comprehension of the grand problem solved by
Wyse and Reclus, the discoverers of the possibilities of Panama.
If any one will take up the journal of the proceedings of that day,
he will not have to suspect why M. de Lesseps is silent in regard
to it.

138 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

The very high and deserved compliments paid to M. Lavalley as
an engineer by M. de Lesseps (see page 637 of the proceedings)
would lead to the supposition that sufficient value would be attached
to his opinion to insure a remembrance that it had been expressed
at length, and was supported by several of the very able engineers
present in the discussion referred to. I submit the question if it is
quite ingenuous to present to the American public the idea that the
Nicaragua project has no other than an American support, when it
has the support of such eminent and able engineers in France ?

It fails to have the support of M. Dauzats, Chief Engineer of the
Suez Canal, who has gained his experience under the tutorage of his
illustrious patron. He has recently written a pamphlet, in which,
by an able and skillful adaptation of a flood that occurred on the
Suez Canal, as a measure of the conditions required on the Isthmus
of Panama, he has, in his belief, settled the feasibility of a canal d
niveau, via Panama. Now, to satisfy the public at large, and espe-
cially in this country, an additional measure is suggested — that of
the relative magnitude of the Suez flood and the one which sub-
merged the Panama Railroad from the 20th to the 29th of November
last, and bearing steadily in mind that the average yearly rainfall
at Panama is one hundred and twenty-four inches, and Suez one
inch and a third.

The " Report of Congress," a beautiful volume of 700 pages, is
declared " a monument of science erected in a fortnight." I have
on a former occasion spoken of the many able men whom I had the
honor to meet in that assemblage ; of its composition as a whole
there are diverse opinions. A pamphlet published in Paris with
the title of " 400,000,000 a l'eau," gives the following :

" Let it be remarked that one half of the Congress were French ;
they had been chosen by the organizers of that assembly ; thirty-four
members belonged to the Geographical or the Commercial Geogra-
phical Society of Paris. What was their competency to decide
between a canal with locks or on a sea-level ? Fourteen other mem-
bers were engineers or assistants of some sort on the Suez Canal.
What was their impartiality between M. de Lesseps and others ?
And, among the others, if one takes count of personal friendships
and of the prestige exercised by a great name, how many more will
remain ? " The writer is a gentleman of character and ability well
known in Paris ; therefore I feel at liberty to give his view.

The objection to Nicaragua, based on the destructive effects of
earthquakes, is best met by the statement that a high, broken arch-

M. BE LE8SEP8 AND EIS CANAL. 139

way of a ruined church in the town of Granada has stood for a
quarter of a century against the action of gravitation even, due to
the tenacity of the cement — a proof as well of the value of this
native product, so essential in large quantities for canal construc-
tion, as that earthquakes in that region may be regarded at least
without alarm. Berghaus's chart has been appealed to as a proof
that the Panama region is not subject to these convulsions, yet on
May 1, 1879, three shocks were so severe as to cause consternation
along the line of railroad, and at least one heavy shock has occurred
this fall. The fact is, the whole Central American region is well
known to be subject to them, with a remote possibility of injury,
the less serious in proportion as the works admit of repair. In this
connection M. Lavalley said, in the discussion before referred to :

" Engineers should not fail to examine all sides of a question.
An objection urged against the construction of locks is the fre-
quency of earthquakes. It is, then, a question to consider the in-
juries which locks would suffer ; they would be simply fissures, and
such accidents as are relatively easily repaired. On the other hand,
it must be asked, what effects these same earthquakes would pro-
duce on a tunnel of forty metres' opening." (At that time the tun-
nel was urged, but abandoned later for an open cut more than three
hundred feet deep, the side-walls almost vertical.) The reader will
naturally ask, What effect would an earthquake have in shaking
down these broken rocks into the canal? In short, the relative
questions are to be considered as remote possibilities. All of the
locks on the Nicaragua Canal, except four, are so planned as to
admit of drawing off the water from them without emptying the
canal, reducing to a minimum the time of delay and the cost of
repair.

The idea expressed by M. de Lesseps in the Congress, that the
Americans could very well afford to pay four times the tolls charged
at Suez, has singularly enough been omitted in the " Review." As
this is an important question, it seems strange indeed that so candid
a man and so disposed to discuss the merits of a canal should have
failed to present so important a subject as the rate of tolls.

Touching the matter of the " Monroe doctrine," I am disposed
to support the opinion of M. de Lesseps. When a European nation
enters into occupation and domination of American territory as
France did under his patron, the late Emperor, during our civil
war, we can properly send a polite diplomatic note that we would
prefer a withdrawal of its forces, as we did on that occasion. It is

140 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

true that, in addition, a force of seventy thousand men under Gen-
eral Sheridan was held on the frontier of Mexico, which may have
been regarded as a substantial backer to the note. M. de Lesseps,
educated in Eastern diplomacy, as he states in making mention of
treasured advice received from Mehemet Ali, will be able to form
an opinion as to the relative values of the diplomatic note and of
the disposable force.

Respecting the able presentation of the voyages of the ships of
Hiram and Solomon to the land of Ophir, of Parnim and Tarshish,
I have nothing to say, or, rather, I will concede all he says, and yet
have to confess, after looking at the matter in all of its practical
bearings respecting the construction of a ship-canal, I am still lost
in the merest conjecture. Sentiment should always be respected ;
it can not be put in a balance and weighed like gold and silver or
precious stones.

M. de Lesseps has so frequently stated that there were fewer
engineering obstacles in the construction of the Suez Canal than on
many of the railroads in France, that I invite attention to that fact
as an answer to his several notes of admiration on page 14 respect-
ing the execution of that work.

He has as frequently said that all the difficulties now urged
against the Panama sea-level canal had been urged against the con-
struction of the Suez Canal, so that it was only necessary to sub-
stitute Panama for Suez, and it was the same old story. So far as
I am aware, no one has suggested that a rainfall of one hundred
and twenty-four inches would at Suez cause great damage without
the use of lockage to a sufficient height to escape the destructive
effects of floods. This physical condition was brought to his notice
as existing at Panama, that is to say, a rainfall one hundred times
that at Suez.

We learn that M. de Lesseps, accompanied (we hope) by the
able engineers " who made plans for ample drainage of the surplus
water of the Chagres River," is now en route to Panama. Had
they arrived at any time between the 20th and 29th of November,
they would have had an opportunity of seeing, in the terse language
of Sir John Hawkshaw, " how those showers behave."

There is an old story of Canute the Dane, who, surrounded by
flatterers, was informed that even the winds and the waves would
obey him. He seated himself on the borders of the rising tide and
commanded it to halt, but it would not ; so, after all, he found it
necessary to leave, somewhat angered, it seems, as he is supposed to

M. DE LESSEPS AND EIS CANAL, 141

have said to his followers, " Base flatterers, God alone can stay the
floods ! "

Soon M. de Lesseps will stand where a recent flood filled not
only the bed of the stream, but the entire valley. Will his genius
provide a remedy ? That the floods come in their might is an in-
exorable fact. The "able engineers" may sing their lullabys to
M. de Lesseps ; he may take up the strain and give it to the world ;
and Mr. Nathan Appleton may tell him that after a lecture in Chi-
cago he will get all the money he requires. Will the moneyed world
join as a chorus, swelling the note to one of triumph of the mighty
forces of man and the insignificance of those of Nature ?

The article under discussion closes with these hopeful words :
" I do not hesitate to declare that the Panama Canal will be easier
to begin, to finish, and to maintain, than the Canal of Suez."

I will assume that the displacement of a shovelful of earth some-
where in the vicinity of the work is not seriously a beginning. In
my view, the raising of the necessary funds is the real beginning of
the work. After the Congress had formally endorsed M. de Lesseps
as the organ of " public opinion," his books were opened with great
eclat in Europe and even in America ; after three days he closed
them and announced that, as the amount subscribed was insufficient,
the subscribers were at liberty to withdraw the money paid in. His
" Bulletin " has been singularly silent respecting the number of shares
of stock taken. I have seen an estimate that it amounted to about
two per cent, of the sum required. In his address in Washington,
Mr. Nathan Appleton expressed the belief that M. de Lesseps would
come to this country after leaving Panama, lecture at Chicago, and
then the money would be obtainable. Without wishing to interfere
with what concerns those gentlemen, it would seem to me that the
place to seek a moneyed support would be where " public opinion "
demanded a canal a niveau — in Paris — where they are both so favor-
ably known.

Respecting the canal d niveau, via Panama, Sir John Hawkshaw
said, " During the construction of a canal at the sea-level, difficul-
ties would arise in providing for drainage, which would affect both
time of execution and cost to an extent that could hardly be ascer-
tained in advance."

These difficulties will not, unhappily, be exorcised. The flood
of November last was several feet higher than was indicated by
Mr. Menocal in the Paris Congress, in relation to which Lieutenant
Reclus asked him if he was " serious." The road-bed of the Panama

142 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,

Railroad is supposed to be located with the view to secure, as far
as possible, immunity from floods, yet the damage sustained, it is
stated in recent dispatches, will certainly cause suspension of traffic
until January 1st, and perhaps until February. How can any per-
son continue to say that the maintenance of the Panama Canal d
niveau would be less difficult than that at Suez, when such a flood
would seem to be sufficient to almost obliterate it throughout one
half of its length, were it now constructed ?

It does not require an engineer to appreciate the power of floods
in the transportation of silt, bowlders, trees, etc., or to make note
of the vast piles accumulated at such points or sections as by reason
of greater width of stream, or from a decreased velocity, favor a
deposit.

There are certain relations of rainfall, difference of levels, char-
acter of bottom and of adjacent lands when submerged, which make
up what is known as the regimen of a stream, to reestablish which,
in its entirety, requires only a sufficient number of floods, whatever
temporary changes man may have effected by dredging.

The silt from the Nile far away makes the maintenance of the
harbor of Port Said a matter of grave consideration ; last year five
hundred and sixty thousand cubic yards had to be dredged from
the outer harbor of that port, yet the character of the high waters
of that stream and the comparatively small descent per mile make
its transporting power very small indeed as compared with the
Chagres.

In addition to the physical difficulties affecting the finishing and
maintenance of the canal, M. de Lesseps seems to have a concession
which would weigh heavily upon the tolls, and it is said that the
Panama Railroad demands and has been promised $14,000,000 in
money and $40,000,000 in canal stock for the road, rolling stock,
and franchise. He can very readily enlighten the public in the
"Bulletin" in this regard, and as to the statement of his counsel,
that the canal will cost 800,000,000 francs, and thus reduce the
profits of the stockholders one half (see Appendix, " Journal of Pro-
ceedings of Initiatory Society").

In the opinion of M. de Lesseps, " sailing-vessels have come to
occupy a very subordinate position in the commerce of the world."
Few pass through the Suez Canal, therefore they are doomed and
will soon disappear. The fact is, sixty per cent, of the English
tonnage between the East and Europe still passes around the Cape
of Good Hope, notwithstanding the existence of the canal, which in

(

M. BE LESSEPS AND EIS CANAL. 143

1878 was used by but twenty-five sailing-vessels. The statistics of
Great Britain indicate that the carrying capacity of her sailing fleet
engaged in foreign commerce is double that of all steam-vessels
similarly employed, and a steady yearly increase of tonnage in sail-
ing-vessels is also shown ; the statistics of the Suez Canal seem also
to show that the tonnage likely to pass through it has reached a
maximum.

As regards the relative merits for sailing-vessels of the Nicara-
gua and Panama lines, the subject has been so often and so thor-
oughly discussed that it hardly admits of further controversy. The
opinion of Commander Maury, expressed in relation to Panama, it
seems to me should be considered in a qualified sense. It was an
expression of the delays that would result to vessels depending
upon sailing-power only, unaided by tugs over very considerable
distances. He said that if an earthquake should rend the continent
asunder at Panama the strait would be unused by sailing-vessels,
from the prevalence of calms in that region. It seems to me that
it would lead to the employment of very many towboats and tow-
age through this region, which in certain directions has less dis-
tance to where winds may be found than in other directions.

The region of Grey town on the Atlantic coast and Brito on the
Pacific are almost exempt from calms. By reason of the winds
favoring both outward and return voyages, sailing-vessels would,
for a long period at least, be the most considerable factor through
the Nicaraguan Canal.

I have endeavored to follow the paper of M. de Lesseps and
point out certain grave errors into which he has fallen, and have
done so with less chagrin, as it may enliven the canal question to
him and in a measure alleviate his disappointment expressed at the
absence of a serious opposition. It has been necessary to allude to
points not presented by him, such as his proposed rate of tolls, and
to discuss some of the general features of the question ; but the in-
telligent reader who has no previous knowledge will be able to form
only a partial and a not very intelligent opinion by reading the
paper of M. de Lesseps and my reply.

Within the past three years I have prepared three papers for
the American Geographical Society of New York, which contain all
the information I possess touching the economy and the possibilities
of an American interoceanic ship-canal.

Daniel Ammen.

Washington, January 1, 1880.

144 THE NORTE AMERICAN REVIEW.

APPENDIX.

Articles of Agreement of the International Society for cutting an Interoceanic
Canal through the Isthmus of Darien, August 19, 1876.

Article I. A mutual society is hereby formed by the subscribers, with
the following objects : 1. To cause to be made by chosen engineers the gen-
eral outline and estimates for an interoceanic canal, without locks or tunnels,
across the Isthmus of Darien, following first and foremost the track indicated
by M. Gogorza.

Art. IV. . . . It is now agreed that after the meeting of delegates from
the Geographical Societies, under the presidency of M. de Lesseps, to take
place at Paris in October, General Ttirr will resign in favor of M. de Lesseps
the presidency of the Board of Directors, then to be elected.

Art. VIII. ... of the six remaining beneficiary shares, two are to be
placed at the disposal of General Turr, and, of the four others, two shall be
allotted to M. Wyse, who will conduct the expedition, and two others are to
be reserved for a purpose known to the persons interested.

Extract from the Proceedings in General Meeting of the International Civil
Society of the Interoceanic Canal, held June 10 and 17, 1879.

The subscribers to the International Civil Society of the Interoceanic
Canal met on the 9th inst., at Rue Mogador. . . .

The President then declared that a quorum of the Society was present,
and pronounced the following words :

" . . . "Whoever, then, builds the canal, our Society will have given the
initiative to the work. We hoped that it would push the execution of the
work under the direction of the illustrious founder of the Suez Canal ; but
M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, who for four years has assisted us with his advice,
has now decided to prosecute in person the realization of this immense enter-
prise, and desires that our Society should concede to him its work and its
interest, only preserving in the company which he is about to form the inter-
est resulting from our share of the capital." . . .

A Member : " Our concession stipulates that, if the route for the canal
through the United States of Colombia is adopted, the share of the conceding
Society shall be ten per cent, of the stock capital raised for building the
canal. It being thought necessary to raise a total capital of eight hundred
million francs, it will be no doubt preferable to restrain the shares to a total
value of four hundred millions. In this case our right would be forty mil-
lions, if we insisted on interpreting the letter of our contract ; but it is evi-
dent that this figure is too large, and that we can not maintain it. ... I am
of opinion, therefore, that our Society should demand fifteen million francs
for its concessions." . . .

After a long discussion, in which all the members of the board of the
conceding Society took part, the sum was fixed definitely between them at
fifteen million francs.

I

M. DE LESSEPS AND HIS CANAL. 145

M. Ferdinand de Lesseps then said : " Your declarations are loyal, and I
take pleasure in telling you so ; but I will be obliged to ask you to make me
a written proposition. I said to General Tiirr : ' If your Society is in a posi-
tion to prosecute the work, I do not seek to interfere, and I retire ; but in
the contrary case, as I shall have all the responsibility, I do not desire
partners in what concerns the subscriptions, nor engagements with any
one.' "...

': Two days after, in answer to our proposition, M. de Lesseps sent us an
opinion, drawn up by his counsel, of which the following is an abstract :

" I. By the terms of this document, M. de Lesseps not only enters into
this negotiation with his name and moral influence, but with a positive deter-
mined right of intervention.

" The act of incorporation of the conceding Society declares that the presi-
dency shall be offered to him ; therefore he might have identified himself
with our Civil Society, in which he, as president, would have had the casting
vote, in case of division.

"His official influence has been, nevertheless, important. Messrs. Wyse
and Keclus undertook the exploration by his advice, and the confidence of
capitalists was stimulated by the certainty that he would put himself at the
head of the enterprise when the moment of execution should arrive. M. de
Lesseps summoned the Congress and brought together the former engineers
of Suez, by whom the technical and statistical problems were solved. The
estimate of probable revenues, on which will be based the appeal to capital,
is the work of the Congress presided over by M. de Lesseps, and the pro-
gramme for the execution of the work will result from the labors of the Con-
gress as much as, if not more than, from the investigations of the Civil Society.
Finally, the vote of the Congress has conferred on M. de Lesseps a new right,
inasmuch as a part of the votes were influenced by the confidence with which
he inspired the electors.

" Supposing that the Society should sell its right, could it do so without
remunerating M. de Lesseps and his colleagues ? If M. de Lesseps claims no-
thing, his refusal to claim can not benefit the Civil Society, and its share-
holders should reckon with M. de Lesseps.

"II. What is the real value of the concession? Ten per cent, of the
capital is reserved to the Civil Society. This capital, taken at the moment of
opening the negotiations for concession, was valued at four hundred million
francs, which would give forty millions to the Society. At present the capi-
tal should reach eight hundred millions, which would make the society's
share eighty millions. But this increase of expense would diminish and not
increase the advantages reserved to the founders of the Society, which in any
case can not be greater than forty million francs.

" The Civil Society, not having fulfilled the obligations which the conces-
sion imposes in compensation for the advantages ceded (since it still remains
to organize the company of execution), has only accomplished the first part
of its work — important, no doubt, but only partial.

" The ten per cent., say forty millions, would be conceded without con-

I

146 THE NORTE AMERICAN REVIEW.

test if the canal were already open for navigation ; but the Society's right in
this claim is only proportionate to the expenses which it has incurred.

" If M. de Lesseps should express his private opinion, he would say that
the cost of the enterprise having been estimated at first at four hundred mil-
lion francs and the share of the Society at forty millions, but the canal cost-
ing ultimately eight hundred millions, and the profits of shareholders dimin-
ishing one half, the share of the privileged beneficiaries should be diminished
in the same ratio, that is, reduced to twenty millions ; and, on the other
hand, the original founders of the Society being exonerated, by their conces-
sion to the company of execution, from a part of the charges equal in im-
portance to those already incurred by them, ten millions should be given to
the original members and the other ten millions reserved to the new mem-
bers, who will have to bear the heavy expenses to be incurred up to the com-
pletion of the maritime canal.

" III. "Whether the figure ultimately accepted by M. de Lesseps be ten or
fifteen millions, the ' opinion ' proposes to reserve, at the time of subscrip-
tion, ten or fifteen millions of stock which shall be allotted to the founders
and members of the Civil Society. This stock shall be credited with dis-
bursements already made by the stockholders, in proportion to such disburse-
ments, and the shares shall be delivered to the beneficiaries on the day on
which they are taken up. This deposit will be a partial but effective repre-
sentation of the guarantee offered by the Civil Society to the new company."

\

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA.

Glancing lately over a column of humorous items in a New
York journal, I was struck by the pithy remark that an Englishman
visiting the United States for the first time " writes up " the whole
country in ten minutes ; whereas a Frenchman compiles a volu-
minous account of American institutions and manners without ever
having visited America at all. The statement may be somewhat
paradoxical ; but, as often happens with paradoxes, it contains a
certain substratum of truth. English travelers on this vast con-
tinent are generally in as desperate a hurry to record in print their
impressions of what they have seen as they have been to gather
such impressions ; and the result of this over-haste in seeing and
writing is, naturally, confusion. In a neighboring republic they
have a story about the agent of an English insurance company who,
once upon a time, was sent out to Mexico to investigate the causes
of a fire, compensation for which was claimed by the insured parties.
He landed at Yera Cruz — in which city the fire had occurred — on
Christmas eve, say in the year 1870. With due diligence he made
his inquiries ; and, these being ended, he was able to avail himself
of a homeward-bound steamer, which left Yera Cruz for Havana
on the 2d of January, 1871. Six weeks after his return to England
he published a brace of very handsome octavo volumes, with the
comprehensive title, " Mexico in 1870-'71." This may be taken, per-
haps, as a fair sample of the practice of " writing up " a country in
ten minutes. I do not say that such a " lightning-express " system
is adopted by all English tourists in the United States. Observant
travelers, thoughtful travelers, patient travelers, conscientious trav-
elers, have come hither time and again from the shores of Great
Britain. It is very probable, for instance, that Mr. Thackeray
could have said, had he so chosen, a great deal that would have
been cogent and pertinent concerning the great country in which

)

148 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

he had been so splendidly received, and the society in the most en-
lightened circles of which he was so cordially welcomed : only, Mr.
Thackeray never chose to say anything whatever on the subject ;
and his silence was judiciously accepted as golden. Had the dream
of his life been realized, and had he obtained a diplomatic appoint-
ment at Washington, the world might have been favored in time
with a conspectus of American society from the pen of William
Makepeace Thackeray as exhaustive and as impartial as the con-
spectus of American politics produced more than forty years since
by Alexis de Tocqueville. As it is, few, I should say, will accuse
Mr. Froude, or Mr. Anthony Trollope, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or
the late Mr. Maguire — although the last-named publicist only dealt
with the condition of the Irish in America — with having " written
up " the United States in ten minutes. On the other hand, I should
be stupidly indifferent to or ignorant of the current literature of
my own country were I not able to recall scores of books pub-
lished in England during the last twenty years and written more
or less on the "ten-minutes" principle. A young English peer
or guardsman arrives here with an indistinct notion that it will
be " awfully jolly " to see some buffalo and grizzly-bear shooting
somewhere out West. Out West he goes, scampering thither and
scampering back ; and directly he is safe again in Pall Mall he, or
his wife — if Nimrod has been fortunate enough to find a spouse who
is a mighty huntress before the Lord, and does not shrink from
accompanying him on his expedition — courts public favor with a
bulky tome, beauteously printed and picturesquely illustrated, with
some such attractive title, it may be, as " Bisons and Bonanzas," or
" Grizzly Bears and Greenbacks," or " Terrapin and the Tariff."
Alliteration's artful aid is invaluable in choosing a title for a book
of travels. Again, a gentleman who thinks that he is a genius,
and whose friends in England have been telling him for years
that he has only to set foot in New York to be at once and
unanimously acclaimed as the greatest of living geniuses, arrives
here per Cunard or White Star steamship with his library or his
scientific lecture, his "entertainment," his panorama, his white
mice, or what not, prepared to have his olfactory organs titil-
lated with any amount of incense, and to make fifty thousand
dollars by a few months' lecturing or " entertaining " tour. Speed-
ily he may discover, to his astonishment and dismay, that the Ameri-
can people have heard little, and that they care less, about him ;
and that at the moment they are far too much occupied by or in-

\

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA. 149

terested in Mr. Edison's discoveries, or the recent sale of New York
Central stock, or Mr. Talmage and his presbytery, or the Maine elec-
tion problem, or the " Frog Opera and Pollywog Chorus," to care
one dime about him or his lecture, his " entertainment," his panora-
ma, or his white mice. The man of genius goes home, minus the fifty
thousand dollars which he had expected to realize, and in dudgeon.
Ere long an opusculum appears from his pen : " Bowery Boys and
Buckwheat Cakes " ; " Wall Street and Waffles " ; " Democracy
and Delmonico's," or the like ; and not unf requently his " ten min-
utes' " impressions of a country which contains more than forty-five
millions of people, and of which his path has covered only a very
few square miles, are colored and disagreeably colored by the feelings
of disappointment not unnaturally excited within his breast by the
failure of the American people to appreciate him, his genius, his
lectures, his panorama, or his white mice, as the case may be. After
all, he may not be, when you come to read between the lines of that
which he has written, a much more untrustworthy traveler than he
who comes to the State with a ponderous budget of letters of intro-
duction to the " first families," who is " put through " and passed
on from agreeable coterie to agreeable coterie, be these fashionable,
literary, artistic, or especially religious coteries ; who lives at the
best clubs and the best restaurants ; who goes out to three or four
balls or receptions, or tea-fights, or prayer-meetings every night ;
who is charmed with everything and everybody that he has met
with, and who goes home to write a book in raptures : picturing
America as a terrestrial paradise, and the Americans as only a lit-
tle lower — if, indeed, they are not a little higher — than the angels.
There is not much to choose, it strikes me, between the unreliability
of too rosily- colored spectacles and of eye-glasses tinted to the hue
of the yellow, jaundice. But perhaps the most objectionable type
of the Englishman who " writes up " the United States in ten min-
utes is the individual who arrives here as the temporary correspon-
dent of a London newspaper. Our journals maintain permanent
correspondents, sometimes regular and sometimes occasional, in the
great transatlantic cities — writers who have been in the country for
years, who have made a careful study of American politics, and
who may claim to possess some substantial knowledge of the good
and evil qualities, the manners and the idiosyncrasies of the nation
among whom they have been for such a length of time domiciled.
But in the midst of these experts there suddenly drops down a gen-
tleman from Fleet Street or the Strand, bristling all over with pre-
vol. cxxx. — uro. 279. 11

150 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

judices, pachydermatous as to what is said about him, and utterly-
indifferent to the pain which the shafts of his ridicule or his misrep-
resentations may inflict on the American epidermis, and bound to
fill so many columns of his newspaper at home, during his short
stay in America, with his " impressions " touching a country and a
people concerning which and whom he knows considerably less than
he does of the political opinions and domestic economy of the sav-
age hill tribes with whom we are fighting in Afghanistan. He may
have just come from Afghanistan, whither he had been sent, from
Zululand or from St. Petersburg or from Constantinople. He does
more harm, probably, during his " ten minutes " than is done by the
mere simpleton and the disappointed genius with the lecture, the
panorama, or the white mice. The simpleton and the showman
wait until they get home before they inflict their books on the
public ; they have some time for reflection, should they happen to
be capable of reflecting ; and they can correct the proofs of what
they have written ere their lucubrations assume the unchangeable
livery of stereotype. The newspaper correspondent sees no proofs,
and has rarely even the patience to read over the manuscript which
falls from his rapid pen. His watch may be lying before him on
the desk at which he is writing, for he is bound to " catch " the
mail which goes out on the following morning. Visitors call to
weary and exasperate him with futile small-talk. So soon as he is
free from their importunities, he must resume his pen ; so many
sides of " copy " must be scribbled over, come what may ; and a few
hours afterward he casts his budget of blunders on the waters of
the Atlantic Ocean, for the printing-press and the world to find the
farrago after eleven days. I am able to speak somewhat feelingly
of the mistakes of which such a correspondent may be guilty, and
somewhat remorsefully of the mischief which he may do if the
newspaper with which he corresponds happens to be one of vast
circulation and great influence, because I have been, myself, the
special correspondent of a great London newspaper for more than
twenty-two years, and have frequently experienced the difficulty of
having to make bricks without straw.

I arrived in the harbor of New York on Wednesday, the 26th of
November, 1879 ; and ere I had been in the city thirty-six hours I
had pledged myself to write a paper on things transatlantic for the
" North American Review." Terminating this article now, on the
morrow of Christmas, I am acutely sensible of the fact that I have been
in the United States of America just one month. During the greater

t

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA, 151

portion of that time I have resided in New York City ; but I have
likewise made brief excursions to Baltimore, to Philadelphia, and to
Washington. In the face of this deliberately candid confession it may
appear to a youthful reader of these pages — or a reader who knows
nothing of me as an English journalist, and may never even have
heard my name pronounced in his life before — that it is an act of
the grossest impertinence on my part to say anything about a coun-
try in which I am, figuratively speaking, a mere babe and suckling.
Most of us have heard the story of the skipper who made this entry
in his log : "Passed Cape Donahoo, twelve miles S. S. E. ; natives
kind and hospitable." When taxed by his owner with the imagi-
native character of this entry, he very fairly pleaded that certain
natives of Cape Donahoo had put off in a canoe and boarded his
craft ; that they had brought him gifts of pigs and plantains ; and
that, as they had not stolen anything nor fish-speared anybody, he
was entitled to laud their kindness and their hospitality. My plea
in extenuation must be analogous to that advanced by the skipper
in the story. Of America in 1879-80 I necessarily know not much
more than the master-mariner knew of Cape Donahoo ; but from a
remote offing there has put forth a canoe teeming with certain mem-
ories of the past — memories of the America which I had excellent
opportunities to study during thirteen months from November, 1863,
to December, 1864. I have been here before, and that is why I am
so venturesome as to head this paper with the title " Now and Then
in America."

I arrived in this country when it was in the midst of a bloody
war, all the more terrible and the more embittered because it was
a war between brethren. Exasperation characterized the combat-
ants on either side ; but in one particular they were agreed —
in that of distrusting the Englishman. At home our own
Lancashire operatives were starving in consequence of the cotton
famine ; our own councils were divided ; Northern and Southern
sympathizers quarreled at dinner-tables, or reviled each other in
print or at public meetings ; Earl Russell, one of the truest and
usefulest Liberals that ever lived, had publicly declared that the
North were fighting " not for Union but for empire " ; and while
the great mass of the intelligent working classes in England un-
deniably believed in the justice of the Northern cause — a cause de-,
fended with all the sturdiness and all the eloquence of John Bright
— it was as undeniably accepted as " the proper thing " in polite
English society to manifest either active or sentimental sympathy

152 THE FORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

for the Confederates. " Maryland ! my Maryland," was a far more
popular ditty in upper-class English drawing-rooms than " John
Brown " ; and the more emotional sections of the lower grades in
the community agreed for once in a while with their superiors in
station. A precisely similar phenomenon has been visible in Eng-
lish politics within the last three years. " Jingoism " — that is to say,
a bellicose hatred of Russia — has been the creed of the aristocracy,
of the military class, and of the state Church ; and has found dis-
ciples as fervent among emotional mobs and half -instructed readers
ox the outpourings of emotional newspapers ; while anti-Jingoism
— that is, a sincere love of peace, and a persistent refusal to believe
that the Emperor Alexander of Russia is an ogre, a vampire, and
the giant Fee-faw-fum, continually smelling the blood of an Eng-
lishman— has been the faith of the English Puritans, as represented
by Mr. Bright, of the majority of the non-conforming religious
communities, represented by Dr. Parker and Mr. Spurgeon, and of
really Liberal peers and members of Parliament, represented by the
Dukes of Argyll and Westminster, the Earl of Rosebery, Sir Charles
Dilke, Sir William Harcourt, and Mr. Forster, and such truly gen-
uine Liberal journals as the " Daily News " and the " Spectator,"
who have not hesitated to denounce Jingoism and " Imperialism,"
and the cutting-your-neighbor's-throat policy, at the risk of being
denounced as " Anglo-Russians," " British Afghans," " St. James's
Hall traitors," and the like, because they have failed to perceive
the expediency of keeping a nation, whose business is peace, manu-
factures, and commerce, in a perpetual war ferment, or the necessity
for shooting so many thousands of Russians, or hanging so many
hundreds of Afghans, in order to keep a Tory Government in Down-
ing Street. From this list of politicians I have designedly excluded
the revered name of Mr. Gladstone, for the reason that I have been
attempting to draw a parallel — and the drawing of a political par-
allel is always a perilous thing — between the conflict of opinions
which divided my country in 1863 and that which distracts it in
1879 ; and Mr. Gladstone's political character and moods of mind
do not lend themselves to the drawing of any parallels whatsoever.
Geometricians know how many kinds of lines there are ; and Wil-
liam Ewart Gladstone may be politically qualified as neither straight
nor curved. He is a mixed line.

I have said enough, perhaps, to show that the position of an
Englishman who came to the United States seventeen or eighteen
years ago was, if he had any sort of " mission," or if he acted in any-

I

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA. 153

thing approaching a public capacity, an extremely invidious one. I
remember forty years ago, when I first went to school in Paris, that
I was constantly and contumeliously reproached by my French
schoolmates with the crimes committed by my country against
France in the year 1815. I used to be held personally responsible,
to the extent of being called opprobrious names, and of having my
hair pulled, my toes trodden upon, and my peg-top confiscated, for
the occupation of Paris by the allied armies, the non-arrival of
Grouchy instead of Blucher on the field of Waterloo, the spoliation
of the art-treasures of the Louvre, and the deportation of Napo-
leon to St. Helena. I was warned that a signal and sanguinary
reparation for these outrages would sooner or later be exacted by
indignant Gaul. Thus in 1863-'64 an Englishman newly landed on
this continent, although he might be courteously and hospitably
received in American society — I remember very well that I was so
received — was continually being reminded of his country's sins of
omission and commission against the Federal Government and
people, and of the imminence of a retributory Nemesis. The ren-
dition of Mason and Slidell, the buccaneering exploits of the Ala-
bama, the blockade-running transactions by which Liverpool was
enriching herself, the alleged subscriptions of British capitalists to
Confederate loans — all these were things which were assumed to lie
heavy on the Englishman's conscience ; all these were taken to be
acts of national malfeasance on our part, for which we should even-
tually have to make reparation. And reparation we did eventually
make ; but that fact did not make the Englishman's position one
whit less uneasy while the strife continued. It might be urged that
the most sensible attitude to be observed by a foreigner under such
circumstances was one of entire neutrality. It was more than dif-
ficult— it was next door to impossible — to be neutral. When Wil-
liam Cobbett, a thorough-going radical, was here in the last years
of the last century, the impossibility of preserving neutrality between
contending parties, and the irritation which he felt at finding his
own country continually attacked, goaded him at last into profes-
sing principles of the highest Toryism, and filling his shop-window
with portraits of George III., his family, and his ministers whom,
nearly so soon as he had got back to England, and had resumed his
thorough-going radical frame of mind again, he proceeded and
continued, during the next thirty years, with unceasing vehemence
to denounce. The neutrality difficulty was sufficient in 1863-'64 to
convert many a genuine English Liberal temporarily resident on

154 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

American soil into a Peter Porcupine. Those English Liberals who
staid at home were in much better case. They could judge the
vexed question from afar off, impartially and philosophically.

Those who can remember from month to month, and from day
to day almost, the social episodes of the most terrific political strug-
gle of the nineteenth century, may not contradict me when I say
that the baleful effects of that struggle were scarcely perceptible on
the surface of society in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. In
Washington you were constrained to remember that a war was going
on, and that it was raging close to the gates of the Federal capital ;
for you could scarcely leave Alexandria ere you found yourselves in
the midst of war ; and you could not travel half a dozen miles with-
out hearing rumors — not dark and distant, but near and articulate
— of guerrillas and " bushwhackers." Washington and Baltimore
again swarmed with the Federal troops, and the hospitals were
crowded with wounded men. The trades of the embalmer and the
maker of artificial limbs and eyes were flourishing ; and the shop-
windows were full of the ghastliest imaginable photographs of
scenes of carnage and rapine. But coming North and East, and es-
pecially to New York, little beyond the holiday-making, the fifing
and drumming, and banner- waving aspects of war were visible. The
sanitary fairs held in aid of the beneficent work carried on among
the Federal troops by the Sanitary Commission were festivals as
brilliant, and were attended by as sparkling an array of feminine
loveliness and elegance, as any that I witnessed lately at the peace-
ful fair of the Seventh Regiment at their armory in Lexington
Avenue. Every day, almost, you heard the sounds of martial music,
or saw the march-past of some regiment of dark-blue -coated volun-
teers, chanting, it might be, in unison, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's
magnificent " Grido di Guerra " — I quote from memory :

" For mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord ;
He is trampling out the vintage where his grapes of wrath are stored ;
I have seen the fitful lightnings of his terrible swift sword —

For God is marching on ! "

This looked like war — bloody, bold, and resolute — in 1863 : but
in the middle of last month I was in Philadelphia ; and I watched
the eight miles and eight hours long parade in honor of General U.
S. Grant. I saw battalions of the old dark-blue-gabardined veterans
of the Grand Army of the Republic, and the old battle-tattered

t

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA. 155

regimental flags ; and, to my mind, the parade of Peace was quite
as glittering and imposing as the parade of War had been seven-
teen years ago ; and (again to my mind) it was a great deal more
satisfactory than the war parade of 1863, because I knew that
nobody was going to be killed ; and I have in my time seen too
much of war, face to face — not as a soldier, who can earn laurels,
and guerdon, and pensions on the tented field, but as a humble
camp-follower and scribe about whom nobody is troubled, should he
happen to get hanged or shot, or to die of fever or dysentery — not
in my inmost heart and soul to hate and loathe war, its dirt and
disease, and squalor and depravity ; its unutterable fertility in an-
guish, its immeasurable wealth of wickedness. Yet " carnage is
God's daughter." The poet has told us so ; the experience of his-
tory has confirmed his dictum ; and the poet, although often and
unjustly calumniated as " an unpractical person," is, in the long run,
generally right.

When I recur to my text of " Now and Then " in America, and
especially when I mark the wonderful increase in the area and the
population of the city of New York which has taken place since
my first visit ; when I reflect that in my time Washington Square
was a considerable way " up town," that Fourteenth Street was as
fashionable as our Eaton Place, Belgravia, and that a few blocks
above the Fifth Avenue Hotel the ultima Thule of patrician New
York was almost reached, my astonishment is considerably lessened
by the remembrance that a corresponding augmentation and devel-
opment have taken place in London and in Paris ; and that we led
tolerably comfortable and luxurious lives in the London of 1863,
when we had no Holborn Yiaduct, no Midland Grand Hotel, no
underground railway, no Northumberland Avenue, no Criterion
Restaurant, and very little South Kensington or West Tyburnia,
and when in Paris we had no new Academy of Music, no Avenue
de F Opera, no Rue du Quatre Septembre, no electric light, and
especially no Atlantic cable in either country. There is more New
York and there are more New-Yorkers now than there were then ;
just as there are more gray hairs in my head and wrinkles on my
face ; but I had plucked out the first gray hair and noticed the
first apparition of crow's-feet before I came hither, and, to my think-
ing, society, or so much of it as existed, enjoyed itself quite as much
then as it does now. The late Mr. A. T. Stewart's marble palace
and his superb picture-gallery were yet to come ; still, there were
private gentlemen and merchant princes in New York who pos-

i

156 . THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

sessed palatial mansions and splendid picture-galleries, in which
you could feast your eyes on the masterpieces of Gerome and Rosa
Bonheur and Meissonier, of Church and Bierstadt, of Crawford
and Powers. Seventeen years ago a dear friend of mine occupied
a suite of rooms in University Building, copious in pictures and
statuary, and old china and bronzes. I see no difference in him —
chiefly, perhaps, because I fail to discern much difference between
my present and my former self, abating some trifling changes con-
nected with the use of spectacles, and disinclination to write edito-
rials after dinner — and I see no difference in his rooms, save that he
has got more pictures, more statuary, more old china, more bronzes,
and enamels, and tazze of jade and malachite. So in particulars, so
in generals. I behold in degree the same New York ; only I behold
it through the large instead of the small end of an opera-glass. I
read of sumptuous entertainments, in the decorations for which so
many hundreds of dollars have been spent in rare flowers, and of the
feasting attendant on which so many more dollars have been paid
to a caterer d la mode ; while the remuneration of the Teutonic
instrumentalists discoursing the dance-music has been on a corre-
sponding scale of magnificence. I read of cohorts of faultlessly
dressed young gentlemen, and of bright bands of beauteous young
ladies, the latter clad in dresses of rainbow hues and with incon-
ceivably gorgeous trimmings, all made either by the world-famous
Worth or by those Franco- American modistes, the Madame Any-
bodies, who have descended upon New York as " the great bird,
the ruche," described by Burton, descended on the plains of Mada-
gascar to batten on the fat of the land, and who, each of them — if
they collect their bills with regularity, and make no bad debts —
ought to realize at least fifty thousand dollars a year. I am told
that each of these sublime ball-dresses costs from one hundred and
fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars. I go to Tiffany's and am
permitted to gaze upon the dazzling gems which are to be worn
in conjunction with the sublime ball-dresses. This pearl necklace,
the obliging assistant tells me, is worth six thousand pounds ster-
ling. This diamond bracelet is cheap at twenty-five thousand dol-
lars. I am pleased but not astounded, not overwhelmed, by the
information — I have seen so many diamonds, so many ball-dresses,
so many grand entertainments, the whole world over, so many years
past. Only there are more pomps and vanities, and more diamonds
and flowers, and suppers and cotillons in the New York of 1879-'80
than there were in the New York of 1 863-' 64. The sailor in the

I

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA. 157

story longed for all the grog and 'baccy in the world, and then —
more 'baccy. And then he woke up from his longing, like Al-
naschar from his dreams, to find that he had nothing at all. Per-
sons of a timid, or a desponding, or a cynical turn of mind are apt
to infer that this continuous and tremendous accretion of luxury
and display, be it in London, in Paris, or in New York, must end in
explosion or in collapse, and ultimately in cataclysm ; but such pes-
simists might do well to remember that metropolitan splendor and
luxury are only phenomenal, and that we have come to attach a
thoroughly abnormal and erroneous signification to the English
rendering of the Greek word 6aiv6fievov, which really and simply
is only the fyvoitcov — a physical thing, plainly manifest, and there-
fore noteworthy.

It may be difficult for the cosmopolitan traveler, when he surveys
the height of luxury which has been attained by affluent and refined
New York, to avoid a comparison between the Empire City of the
United States and the capital of the Russian Empire. Between
New York and St. Petersburg there are, indeed, many remarkable
points of similarity. Both cities are the paradise of foreign singers
and musicians, cooks, confectioners, florists, caterers, and dancing-
masters. The cost of elegant life in Petropolis is on a parity with
that in Manhattan. In both cities the monetary unity represents a
larger value than it does in the older centers of civilization. In
England, that unity is substantially not the pound but the shilling
sterling. In Paris it is the franc. Thus London is, on the whole,
a dearer city than Paris by twenty-five centimes over and above the
franc. We send a pound to a London charity or pay a pound a day
for our parlor at a London hotel. To the same purposes in Paris
we devote twenty francs. It might be argued that in New York
the same theory of expenditure would be represented by a five-dol-
lar piece ; but the American monetary unity is not five dollars, but
one ; and, to a thousand intents and purposes, the purchasing power
of the dollar in New York does not exceed that of the Parisian franc
or the London shilling. In St. Petersburg the unity is the ruble,
which should be worth seventy-five cents, but which maybe assessed
at about fifty. I never make bets, but, did I ever hazard any, I
would confidently wager that living in quiet and undemonstrative
comfort in New York, indulging in no excess, either in the direction
of stately apartments, rare wines, or choice cigars, and hiring a car-
riage only when I absolutely needed one, I should spend every day
nearly twice as much as I should spend in London or Paris, and only

158 THE NORTE AMERICAN REVIEW.

about one third more than I should spend in St. Petersburg. This
question of the relative costliness of life in great capitals is assured-
ly a very important one, although it is often contemptuously neg-
lected as unworthy the attention of serious essayists on political
economy. But, as Mr. Carlyle pointed out long ago, mankind is
very prone to dismiss as trivial and unimportant subjects which are
really of immediate and lasting concern to us all. Take the passion
of sleep, for example. Once at least in the course of every twenty-
four hours on an average, humanity is bound to " assume the hori-
zontal position " and to retain that position for many hours, quite
unconscious of business, pleasure, peace, or war, and "its head full
of the foolishest of thoughts." General and continuous insomnia
for a fortnight would make an end of humanity altogether ; yet we
trouble ourselves very little about the psychology of sleep ; and the
metaphysician has a great deal more to say about the soul, of which
he can know absolutely nothing, than about sleep, and especially
about dreams, concerning which he must have every night in his life
practical and curious experience. So is it in a measure as respects
the cost of our eating and drinking; and I know no more intricate
problem than that of the excessive expensiveness of New York as
compared with that of other great cities. We know why food, with
the single exception of bread, is dear in London. The trade in
meat, fish, poultry and game, fruit and vegetables is mainly in the
hands of wealthy and powerful monopolists ; we are ill supplied
with markets ; almost every article of food which we consume
passes through the hands of and yields a profit to three or four mid-
dlemen before it reaches our mouths. Is this the case to a greater or
to a lesser extent in New York ? I should say, under correction, that
it is not the case ; that is, if I am to place any faith in the published
price-lists of the markets from day to day. Those lists tell me
that meat, fish, poultry, game, fruit, vegetables, and dairy produce
are at least thirty per cent, cheaper in New York than in London ;
yet the retail prices of such articles which the guest at a first-class
hotel or restaurant in New York is called upon to pay are at least
forty per cent, above the charges which would be made for similar
articles in analogous establishments in London. At our most fashion-
able watering-places, for example, Brighton and Scarborough, first-
class board can be obtained at from eight to ten shillings — two to
two and a half dollars — a day ; but, if my American guide-books
and my " Dictionary of New York " are trustworthy authorities,
two dollars and a half here represent only board of a decidedly sec-

NOW AND TEEN IN AMERICA. 159

ond-class character. Again, while I can readily understand that so
long as the American tariff — which I am afraid will outlive Mr.
Thomas Bay ley Potter, M. P., and all save the youngest members
of the Cobden Club — remains the law of the land, imported articles
must be very costly, I am at a loss to comprehend why articles of
common use and manifestly of American manufacture should not
be cheap. In particular am I amazed at the inordinate charges
made for the hire of hackney-carriages. Your horses are plentiful
and strong ; you have as many expert drivers as you want ; you are
becoming the best carriage-builders in the world ; horse-feed is
twenty-five per cent, cheaper with you than with us : why, in the
name of common sense, am I to be forced to pay a dollar — or four
shillings and twopence sterling — for riding over a distance of one
mile ? It is quite true that I may continue to ride in the same cab
for an entire hour, paying no more than one dollar ; but, suppose
that I and my wife are invited to dinner just round the corner or a
few blocks' distance from our residence, and that I do not wish to
expose a lady to the risk of catching cold by tramping over this
space through snow or mud, why should I pay four shillings and
twopence for that which in England I should pay just one shilling
or twenty-five cents for ? You may reply that I am free to take
the street-cars or the Broadway stages, or that I may avail myself
of the facilities of your wonderful elevated railroads. But I defer-
entially reply that I am a foreigner, that I am a stranger in your
city ; that, although you paint the names of your streets on your
corner-lamps — a very admirable system, so far as the night-time is
concerned, and one which we might advantageously adopt in Lon-
don— you do not affix the names of your streets conspicuously at
the corners thereof ; and, finally, I respectfully plead that, if I have
a visit to pay in a certain street and at a certain house, I prefer being
driven in a cab straight up to the door of that house to being landed
from the car or the staircase of an elevated railway-station right in
the middle of the snow or the slush.

I can not dismiss the question of personal expenditure without
noticing one or two more points which may be worthy of remark
and explanation, and which I shall put interrogatively. We have
usually noticed in England that where an article of consumption —
bread always excepted — reaches, through some accidental or some
inevitable circumstance, an excessive price, the tendency of the arti-
cle is to retain that excess in price long after the circumstances
which led to its aggravation in value have been aggravated. Does

160 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

such a rule — for it may fairly be called a rule — obtain here ? When
I came to America in November, 1863, gold was, if I remember aright,
at eighty premium — that is to say, for every hundred dollars of gold
value in my letter of credit my bankers credited me with one hun-
dred and eighty dollars in paper currency. I think that ere I went
away the premium on gold reached one hundred and sixty — I- have
even heard that it once touched one hundred and eighty ; and, as the
rate of gold varied from day to day, so did the prices of articles of
consumption fluctuate. The figures of restaurant tariffs were subject
to continual mutation ; and, until you had the bill of fare before you,
it was impossible to tell how much you would have to pay for your
beefsteak or your mutton-cutlet. So was it with other commodi-
ties. I remember paying as much as three dollars for a pair of best
Dent's (London) kid gloves, but that price to me did not mean
twelve shillings and sixpence sterling. Gold being say at one hun-
dred premium, I only really paid six shillings and threepence for
my gloves — an advance of about thirty per cent, over what I should
have paid in Piccadilly, London ; and I had not the slightest reason
to grumble in this connection, remembering, as I was bound to do,
that the United States revenue was entitled to its toll, and the im-
porter and retailer were entitled to their respective profits. But
on the instant (December, 1879), if I go to a fashionable hosier on
Broadway, New York, and ask him for a pair of the best Dent's
(London) kid gloves, he charges me two dollars, which, at the pres-
ent rate of exchange, means eight shillings and fourpence sterling,
whereas in Piccadilly, London, I can still buy the same gloves at
the old price of four shillings — that is, one dollar. My contention
is, that prices in America have not retained precisely the same swol-
len proportions which they reached when the inflation of the cur-
rency during the war was at its highest, but that they have not
decreased in anything approaching a corresponding ratio with the
gradual equalization of paper currency with gold. Things, owing
to the inevitable circumstances of the war, became dear, and dear
they have remained — not so costly as they once were, but still a
great deal costlier than, according to the doctrines of sound politi-
cal economy, they should be. It may be, again, paradoxical to as-
sert that the prices of commodities are as imitative in their nature
as human beings are. But such seems to be the case, since I note a
marked spirit on the part of native American manufacturers to imi-
tate, so far as they can, the high prices of imported goods.

There are possibly few things more curiously interesting to a

I

NOW AND TEEN IN AMERICA. 161

stranger in America — when that stranger has been in the country
before — than to observe the strong disinclination which is felt by
the people at large to make use in the daily transactions of life of a
metallic currency. Specie payments, we all know, have been re-
sumed ; and the United States Treasury has accumulated an enor-
mous reserve in gold ; but the public still cling with apparent fond-
ness to their old greenbacks, and not only prefer a five-dollar bill to
a five-dollar gold-piece, but (so it strikes me) would much rather
have a one-dollar note than a dollar in silver. I grant that the lat-
ter is, albeit a handsome, somewhat of a cumbrous coin. In Eng-
land we contumeliously call our five-shilling pieces, which are even
more cumbrous specimens of mintage, " cartwheels," and make
haste to change them, whenever we have involuntarily taken them,
for smaller currency ; but when did you ever hear a Frenchman
complain of having a pocketful of five-franc pieces ? And the five-
franc piece is to all intents and purposes your dollar. A Frenchman
has a modified respect for a note of the Bank of France for twenty
francs ; but bills for smaller denominations he utterly loathes— re-
membering the unredeemed assignats of 1793 — and from the bottom
of his soul abhors. In England we admire and revere the five-pound
Bank of England note and its higher denominations ; but an attempt
to force a currency of one-pound notes or of five-shilling notes on
the nation in time of peace would lead to a revolution. No Lon-
doner will have anything to do with an Irish one-pound note, or
for one issued by the few provincial banks which are still author-
ized to emit such securities. We believe only in gold, silver,
and "flimsies," or notes above the value of five pounds. The
American does not seem to care for gold, and he seems to dislike
a silver coinage in the higher denominations intensely. I have
been more than once reminded by American friends to whom I
have mentioned the (to me) puzzling persistence with which printed
promises to pay, instead of solid bullion, are adhered to, that the
public have yet to be educated to the employment of a metallic
currency, and that there are millions of young Americans of both
sexes who until they were fourteen or fifteen years old had never
set eyes on an American gold or silver coin. But I remember to have
read that in the beginning of this century we in England, during
the continuance of our great wars with France, a period of about
fifteen years, were afflicted with an irredeemable paper currency —
never, however, of a lower denomination than twenty shillings, for
we had always plenty of silver, and that the general disfavor with

162 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

which the suspension of cash payments was regarded found its em-
bodiment in a song which obtained immense popularity, and which
began —

" I'd rather have a guinea than a one-pound note."

The resumption of specie payments at the conclusion of the
war was hailed with almost delirious enthusiasm by the public at
large ; and he would be a bold statesman indeed who attempted to
withdraw from circulation that gold which is held sacred among us
and to substitute for it irredeemable paper.

Here I pause, not for lack of materials for further remarks on
" Now and Then in America," but simply through a desire in the
first place not to weary my readers, and in the next place not to be
adjudged guilty of impertinence in dwelling at large on matters with
which, looking at the brief duration of my stay on this continent,
I can have only a very imperfect and superficial acquaintance.

George Augustus Sala.

I

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

The Emancipation Proclamation is the most signal fact in the
Administration of President Lincoln. It marks, indeed, the sharp
and abrupt beginning of " the Great Divide " which, since the up-
heaval produced by the late civil war, has separated the polity and
politics of the ante-bellum period from the polity and politics of the
post-helium, era. No other act of Mr. Lincoln's has been so warmly
praised on the one hand, or so warmly denounced on the other ; and
perhaps it has sometimes been equally misunderstood, in its real na-
ture and bearing, by those who have praised it and those who have
denounced it. The domestic institution against which it was lev-
eled having now passed as finally into the domain of history as the
slavery of Greece and Rome, it would seem that the time has come
when we can review this act of Mr. Lincoln's in the calm light of
reason, without serious disturbance from the illusions of fancy or
the distortions of prejudice.

In order to give precision and definiteness to the inquiry here
undertaken, it seems necessary at the threshold to distinguish the
true purport and operation of the Emancipation Proclamation from
some things with which it is often confounded in popular speech.
In the first place, it is proper to say that the Proclamation, in its
inception and in its motive, had nothing to do with the employment
of slaves as laborers in the army. Fugitive slaves were so employed
long before the utterance of such a manifesto had been contem-
plated, or the thought of it tolerated by the President. Just as
little was the Proclamation a necessary condition precedent to the
enlistment of fugitive slaves as soldiers in the army. Mr. Lincoln
was averse to the employment of negroes as soldiers at the time he
issued the preliminary Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and he
remained in this state of mind until the final edict was issued on
the first of January following. It was not until the 20th of Janu-

164^ THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

ary, 1863, tliat Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, received per-
mission to make an experiment in this direction.

We learn from the diary of Mr. Secretary Chase that at a meet-
ing of the Cabinet held on the 21st of July, 1862, the President
" determined to take some definite steps in respect to military ac-
tion and slavery." A letter from General Hunter having been sub-
mitted, in which he asked for authority to enlist " all loyal persons
without reference to complexion," it appears that Messrs. Stanton,
Seward, and Chase advocated the proposition, and no one in the
Cabinet spoke against it ; but, adds Mr. Chase, " the President ex-
pressed himself as averse to arming negroes." On the next day the
question of arming slaves was again brought up, and Mr. Chase
" advocated it warmly " ; but the President was still unwilling to
adopt this measure, and proposed simply to issue a proclamation
based on the confiscation act of July 17, 1862, "calling on the States
to return to their allegiance, and warning the rebels that the pro-
visions of that act would have full force at the expiration of sixty
days, adding, on his own part, a declaration of his intention to renew
at the next session of Congress his recommendation of compensation
to States adopting the gradual abolishment of slavery, and proclaim-
ing the emancipation of all slaves within States remaining in insur-
rection on the 1st of January, 1863." * So the first intimation made
to the Cabinet of a purpose to proclaim the liberation of slaves in
the insurgent States was made in connection with the President's
avowed opposition to the arming of negroes.

Writing from memory, Mr. Secretary Welles states, in his " His-
tory of Emancipation," that the President, " early in August " — he
thinks it was the 2d of August — submitted to the Cabinet "the
rough draft " of a proclamation to emancipate, after a certain day,
all slaves in States which should then be in rebellion, but that Mr.
Seward argued against the promulgation of such a paper at that
time, " because it would be received and considered as a despairing
cry, a shriek from and for the Administration, rather than for free-
dom." f He further records that the President, impressed with this
view, closed his portfolio, and did not recur to the subject until
after the battle of Antietam, which was fought on the 17th of Sep-
tember.

Writing in his diary under date of August 3d, but referring,
doubtless, to the discussions held in the Cabinet on the previous

* Warden's " Life of Chase," p. 440. f " Galaxy," December, 1872, p. 845.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION ,165

day,* Mr. Chase records that, " for the tenth or twentieth time," he
urged the adoption of a vigorous policy against slavery in the se-
ceded States by " assuring the blacks of freedom on condition of
loyalty, and by organizing the best of them in companies and regi-
ments." He further records that Mr. Seward " expressed himself
in favor of any measures which could be carried into effect without
proclamation, and the President said that he was pretty well cured
of objection to any measure, except want of adaptedness to put down
the rebellion, but did not seem satisfied that the time had come for
the adoption of such a plan as I had proposed." f

On the 22d of August, just one month after Mr. Lincoln had
first opened the subject of emancipation to his Cabinet, he proceeded
to take the whole country into his confidence on the relations of
slavery to the war. On that day he wrote " the Greeley Letter "
— a letter written in reply to an earnest and. importunate appeal in
which, assuming to utter the "Prayer of Twenty Millions," Mr.
Greeley had called on the President, with much truculence of
speech, to issue a proclamation of freedom to all slaves in the Con-
federate States. As this letter was the first as well as the most
pithy and syllogistic public discussion which the President ever
gave to the subject in hand, it seems proper not only to insert it
here in its entirety, but, as a matter of literary curiosity, to reproduce
it in its original form. The following is a f ac-simile of the letter :

/

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^frTzryuz^n*? *S &tj Q*-^. (Ktn**- o^*^ ^Cz^xj c^ujCc^Z^Zu

* The meeting was held on a Saturday, according to Mr. Welles, and the 3d of Au-
gust, 1862, was a Sunday.

f Warden's " Life of Chase," p. 446.
vol. CXXX.--NO. 279. 12

4^*s

tzr^

166 TEE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW^

Pur** &v*cr<s s&j2~J #shp~j ^^a^-^T^CjxL*^/% s&t^feu

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&& (L^i^r f^&^ -fat, OfUL^ &Cr£& f*~r&~

'^-*ts

TEE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 167

/tt*Z*s~ *J />£**£& *lo JUL, fr~&^*^s Jf£*jufg<^

filP^-e-Js l~v£& fcf^Zr <£-£&/ /2*vaw £-v^yj-/&^, jzau£**s

This letter appeared for the first time in the " National Intelli-
gencer " of August 23, 1862.*

* The letter came into my hands from the fact that I was one of the editors of the
" Intelligencer," to which Mr. Lincoln sent it for publication. The omitted passage —

168 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

In his interview with the Representatives of the Border States,
held on the 10th of March, 1862, Mr. Lincoln had said that, as long
as he remained President, the people of Maryland (and therefore of
the other Border States) had nothing to fear for their peculiar do-
mestic institution " either by direct action of the Government or by
indirect action, as through the emancipation of slaves in the District
of Columbia or the confiscation of Southern property " in slaves.
In that same interview, while making a confidential avowal of these
friendly sentiments, he had protested against their public announce-
ment at that juncture, on the ground that "it would force him into
a quarrel with ' the Greeley faction ' before the proper time." He
twice intimated that such a quarrel was impending, but added that
" he did not wish to encounter it before the proper time, nor at all
if it could be avoided." *

It was no more than natural, therefore, that these Representatives,
on the appearance of " the Greeley Letter," should have read be-
tween its lines a supposed indication of the President's purpose to
break with " the Greeley faction " at an early day. They believed
that the President, at the bottom of his heart, was in sympathy
with them, and with their theory of the war. They were not en-
tirely disabused of this impression even after his interview with
them on the 12th of July, when he made a last ineffectual appeal
to them in behalf of " emancipation with compensation to loyal
owners," and when he reenforced his appeal by urging that the
acceptance of such a policy would help to relieve him from " the
pressure" for military emancipation at the South.

The Representatives from the Border States were strengthened
in their delusion by a corresponding delusion of the Radical Repub-
licans,! wno weakly supposed the President at this juncture to be a
nose of wax in the hands of what they called " the pro-slavery fac-
tion." As late as the 10th of September, ten days before the
preliminary Proclamation of emancipation was issued, we find Mr.

" Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more
will be broken " — was erased, with some reluctance, by the President, on the repre-
sentation, made to him by the editors, that it seemed somewhat exceptionable, on
rhetorical grounds, in a paper of such dignity. But it can do no harm, at this late
day, to reveal the homely similitude by which Mr. Lincoln had originally purposed to
reenforce his political warnings.

* McPherson, "Political History," p. 211.

f The word " Radical " throughout this paper is used historically, and not in any
invidious sense. It is the term by which Mr. Lincoln called the " Stalwarts " of that
day, and by which they called themselves.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 169

Chase lamenting in his diary that the President " has yielded so
much to Border State and negrophobic counsels that he now finds
it difficult to arrest his own descent to the most fatal concessions." *
And this impatient insistence of his Radical friends was repaid
by the President with gibes and sneers, as when, for instance, on
this same 10th of September, he taunted Mr. Chase with " the ill-
timed jest " that some one had proposed, in view of the Confederate
invasion of Pennsylvania, which was then believed to be impend-
ing, that he (the President) should issue a proclamation " freeing
all apprentices in that State " — on the ground of military neces-
sity !

It was with a like festive humor that, on the 13th of Septem-
ber, he parried the arguments of the Chicago clergymen who had
come to Washington in order to press for a proclamation of free-
dom. To their representation that the recent military disasters
" were tokens of divine displeasure, calling for new and advanced
action on the part of the President," he shrewdly replied that, if
it was probable that God would reveal his will to others on a
point so intimately connected with the President's duty, it might
be supposed that he would reveal it directly to the President him-
self. To the argument that a proclamation of freedom would
summon additional laborers to help the army, he replied by ask-
ing what reason there was to suppose that such a proclamation
would have more effect than the late law enacted by Congress to
this end ; and, if they should come in multitudes, how, he asked,
could they all be fed ? To the suggestion that the able-bodied
among them might be armed to fight for the Union, he ironically
replied, " If we were to arm them, I fear that in a few weeks the
arms would be in the hands of the rebels." To the plea that eman-
cipation would give a holy motive and a sacred object to the war,
he replied by saying that " we already had an important principle
to rally and unite the people, in the fact that constitutional govern-
ment was at stake — a fundamental idea going down about as deep
as anything."

. It is true that at the close of his interview the President assured
the Chicago committee that he had not " decided against a procla-
mation of liberty to slaves," and that " the subject was on his mind
by day and night more than any other ; " but this statement only
served to bring into bold relief the little faith he then seemed to

* Warden's " Life of Chase," p. 471.

170 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

have in a measure for which, considered as a means to the ends
proposed by its patrons, he could, with all his meditations, find no
good and sufficient reasons. It is true that, on the preceding 22d of
July, Mr. Lincoln had said that he was pretty well cured of objec-
tion to any measure against slavery except " want of adaptedness
to put down the rebellion " ; and now, too, he publicly announced
that he " did not want to issue a document which the whole world
would see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull
against the comet." It is true that he had previously sketched
" the rough draft " of an emancipation proclamation, but he had
put it back in his portfolio on the suggestion of Mr. Seward that
practical measures against slavery could be carried into effect
" without proclamation." It is true that only a few days previously
(" when the rebel army was at Frederick " *) he had registered a
vow in heaven that he would issue a proclamation of emancipation
so soon as the Confederates should be driven out of Maryland ; but
this was the conduct either of a man who, in a perplexing state of
incertitude, resolves his doubts by" throwing a lot in the lap " and
leaving " the whole disposing thereof to be of the Lord," or, as I
prefer to believe, it was that prudent and reverent waiting on Provi-
dence by which the President sought to guard against the danger
of identifying the Proclamation in the popular mind with a panic
cry of despair, in which latter case the hesitation of Mr. Lincoln
only serves to set in a stronger light the significant fact that other
than considerations of military necessity were held to dominate the
situation, for, if they alone had been prevalent, the Proclamation
could never have come more appropriately than when the military
need was greatest.

The proximate and procuring cause of the Proclamation, as I
conceive, is not far to seek. It was issued primarily and chiefly as
a political necessity, and took on the character of a military neces-
sity only because the President had been brought to believe that if
he did not keep the Radical portion of his party at his back he
could not long be sure of keeping an army at the front. He had
begun the conduct of the war on the theory that it was waged for
the restoration of the Union under the Constitution as it was at the
outbreak of the secession movement. He sedulously labored to
keep the war in this line of direction. He publicly deprecated its
degeneration into a remorseless revolutionary struggle. He culti-

* September 6th.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 171

vated every available alliance with the Union men of the Border
States. He sympathized with them in their loyalty, and in the
political theory on which it was based. But the most active and
energetic wing of the Republican party had become, as the war
waxed hotter, more and more hostile to this " Border State theory
of the war," until, in the end, its fiery and impetuous leaders did
not hesitate to threaten him with repudiation as a political chief,
and even began in some cases to hint the expediency of withholding
supplies for the prosecution of the war, unless the President should
remove " pro-slavery generals " from the command of our armies,
and adopt an avowedly antislavery policy in the future conduct of
the war. Thus placed between two stools, and liable between them
to fall to the ground, he determined at last to plant himself firmly
on the stool which promised the surest and safest support.

I am able to state with confidence that Mr. Lincoln gave this
explanation of his changed policy a few days after the preliminary
Proclamation of September 22d had been issued. The Hon. Edward
Stanly, the Military Governor of North Carolina, immediately on
receiving a copy of that paper, hastened to Washington for the
purpose of seeking an authentic and candid explanation of the
grounds on which Mr. Lincoln had based such a sudden and grave
departure from the previous theory of the war. Mr. Stanly had
accepted the post of Military Governor of North Carolina at a great
personal sacrifice, and with a distinct understanding that the war
was to be prosecuted on the same constitutional theory which had
presided over its inception by the Federal Government, and hence
the Proclamation not only took him by surprise, but seemed to him
an act of perfidy. In this view he hastily abandoned his post, and
came to throw up his commission and return to California, where
he had previously resided. Before doing so he sought an audience
with the President — in fact, held several interviews with him — on
the subject, and knowing that, as a public journalist, I was deeply
interested in the matter, he came to report to me the substance of
the President's communications. That substance was recorded in
my diary as follows :

September 27th. — Had a call to-day at the " Intelligencer " office from the
Honorable Edward Stanly, Military Governor of North Carolina. In a long
and interesting conversation Mr. Stanly related to me the substance of several
interviews which he had had with the President respecting the Proclamation
of Freedom. Mr. Stanly said that the President had stated to him that the
Proclamation had become a civil necessity to prevent the Eadicals from openly

172 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

embarrassing the Government in the conduct of the war. The President ex-
pressed the belief that, without the Proclamation for which they had been
clamoring, the Kadicals would take the extreme step in Congress of withhold-
ing supplies for carrying on the war — leaving the whole land in anarchy.
Mr. Lincoln said that he had prayed to the Almighty to save him from this
necessity, adopting the very language of our Saviour, " If it be possible, let this
cup pass from me," but the prayer had not been answered.

As this frank admission, in the length and breadth here given
to it, will doubtless wear an air of novelty to many readers, and
may excite suspicions in some minds with regard to the accuracy of
my chronicle, the faithfulness of Mr. Stanly's report, or the sincer-
ity of Mr. Lincoln in making his statements, it seems proper to
vindicate the authenticity of the record by an appeal to other facts
which abundantly corroborate its truth.

In his interview with the Border State Representatives on the
12th of July, 1862, the President had implored them to relieve him
from the Radical " pressure " by espousing, with him, the policy of
emancipation with compensation. This "pressure," he said, was
even then " threatening a division among those who, united, are
none too strong." On the next day, after the failure of this inter-
view to make any impression on the Border State Representatives,
the President, for the first time, opened the subject of military
emancipation in a private conversation with two members of his
Cabinet — Mr. Seward and Mr. Welles. The President then said,
as Mr. "Welles reports, that emancipation " was forced upon him as
a necessity," " was thrust at him from various quarters," but " had
been driven home to him by the conference of the preceding day." *
On the 28th of the same month he wrote to Mr. Cuthbert Bullitt,
of New Orleans, that it was " a military necessity to have men and
money, and we can not get either in sufficient numbers or amount
if we keep from or drive from our lines slaves coming to them.'''' f
Even at this date, when the enlistment of colored troops was not
meditated, it will be seen that Mr. Lincoln confessed himself
obliged to make concessions to the antislavery sentiment of his
party in order to procure supplies of men and money, and thus
early it was that, as a wary political pilot, he kept his weather eye
fixed on the thickening clouds that rose higher and higher in the
Northern sky — clouds full of muttered wrath against him so long as

* " Galaxy," December, 1872, p. 843.

\ Raymond, " Life and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln," p. 484.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 173

he seemed to hold in leash the thunderbolt they were ready to dis-
charge on slavery. For he prefaced this statement by saying that
what he did and what he omitted about slaves " was done and omitted
on the same military necessity" — the necessity of having men and
money to carry on the war. And the President's apprehensions were
not entirely groundless on this score. As early as in the month of May,
1862, Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, had not hesitated to say
" in writing " that the people of that State had come to " feel it a
heavy draft on their patriotism " that they should be asked " to
help fight rebels " without being allowed " to fire on the enemy's
magazine." And, in the very act of submitting the preliminary
Proclamation of September 22d to the consideration of his Cabinet,
the President avowed that it was issued under the menacing frown
of this " pressure " ; for when Mr. Montgomery Blair argued
against the timeliness of the measure, on the ground that it might
" put the patriotic element of the Border States in jeopardy," and
even " carry those States over to the secessionists," Mr. Lincoln re-
plied that " the difficulty was as great not to act as to act " * — that
is, by not acting in the way proposed he feared a disaffection among
his party friends at the North which would be as dangerous to the
Union as the disaffection likely to be produced by the Proclamation
among the Unionists of the Border States. The President remem-
bered that the Massachusetts Republican Convention, held less than
two weeks before, had omitted to pass a vote of confidence in his
Administration, but had voted that " slavery should be exterminat-
ed." Even the Radical members of his own Cabinet had come to
think of him and to speak of him as a political recreant. On the
12th of September, ten days before the preliminary edict was is-
sued, Mr. Chase wrote of him as follows : " He has already sepa-
rated himself from the great body of the party which elected
him ; distrusts most those who represent its spirit, and waits — for
what?"f

The Proclamation when it came put an end, of course, to all this
" pressure." Indeed, Mr. Chase admitted, when the President read
the paper to his Cabinet, that it went " a step further than he had
ever proposed." He had proposed that each commander of a de-
partment at the South should be instructed to proclaim emancipa-
tion within his district, assuring the blacks of freedom on condition

* " Galaxy," December, 1872, p. 847.
f Warden's " Life of Chase," p. 471.

174 THE NORTE AMERICAN' REVIEW.

of loyalty, and organizing the best of them in companies and regi-
ments.* But Mr. Lincoln promised and threatened that, on the 1st
of January, 1863, " all persons held as slaves within any State, or
designated part of a State, the people whereof should then be in
rebellion against the United States, should be then, thenceforward,
and for ever free " — a declaration which promised the largesse of
freedom alike to the " loyal blacks " who escaped within our lines,
and to the slaves who voluntarily stood by their masters, because
they were unwilling to strike a blow for their own liberty.

If the Proclamation disarmed for a time the bitter opposition of
the Radicals, its other political and practical effects were such as
abundantly justified the long hesitation of the President in issuing
it. It precipitated .a crisis which threatened to divide the friends
of the Union at the North by a new line of cleavage. If Governor
Andrew and his political associates had previously found it a " heavy
draft " on their patriotism to sustain the President in his constitu-
tional theory of the war, it now became a heavy draft on the patri-
otism of conservative Republicans and of war Democrats to sustain
him in his new departure. ~New elective affinities suddenly struck
through the seething mass of public opinion, and led to new politi-
cal formations. A spirit of political giddiness and revolt was shed
upon the people in the loyal States. In the ensuing autumnal elec-
tions the Republican party was defeated in great States like New
York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. When Congress met in Decem-
ber the political signs of the times were full of portents. There
was "uneasiness in the popular mind." The attitude of Europe
toward us was " cold and menacing " where it did not express itself
" in accents of pity " for a people " too blind to surrender a hopeless
cause." These are not my words, but the words of Mr. Lincoln
himself when, one year afterward, he was called to review the po-
litical, civil, and military situation created by the Emancipation
Proclamation. The utterance of the Proclamation, he said, " was
followed by dark and doubtful days." *

The Emancipation Proclamation united the South, where, how-
ever, there was but little room for further consolidation. Leading
citizens in that section who had previously stood aloof from the
war, so long as it was conducted at the South in the name of seces-
sion against the constitutional Government at Washington, now

* Warden's " Life of Chase," pp. 440, 446.

f Raymond, " Life and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln," p. 454.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 175

hastened to give in their adhesion to the Richmond authorities.
In his message of December, 1861, Mr. Lincoln had said that " in
considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrec-
tion," he had been " anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict
for this purpose should not degenerate into a violent and remorse-
less revolutionary struggle. . . . All indispensable means," he added,
" must be employed," but " we should not be in haste to determine
that radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as
well as disloyal, are indispensable." The Emancipation Proclama-
tion was accepted by these halting Unionists at the South as an
indication that the time for " radical and extreme measures " had
come in the judgment of the President, and they acted according-
ly. " For a time," says Mr. Welles, the proclamation " failed to
strengthen the Administration in any section." *

Its effect on the slaves at the South was such as Mr. Lincoln
had predicted in his interview with the Chicago deputation. San-
guine advocates of emancipation by edict of the President had risked
the confident prophecy that it would be followed by a simultaneous
exodus of negroes from the South, and that such an exodus would
end the war by a coup de theatre. As one of them wrote, " The
plow would stand still in the furrow, the ripened grain would
remain unharvested, the cows would not be milked, the dinners
would not be cooked, but one universal hallelujah of glory to God,
echoed from every valley and hill-top of rebeldom, would sound the
speedy doom of treason." * This bubble was pricked by the pen
that wrote the Proclamation.

In all these respects the manifesto was comparatively a failure.
But it accomplished at once the great end to which it was most im-
mediately directed by the President — it consolidated the Republican
party, and made it more intensely than ever " the war-party of the
country." It is true that veteran Republicans, like Thurlow Weed,
shrank in dismay from the measure ; but in the great body of the
party it kindled a new flame of martial enthusiasm, albeit the
" roads " in New England did not " swarm " with volunteer soldiers,
as Governor Andrew had promised and predicted, during the " pres-
sure " period, would be the case, provided the President would allow
them to fight " with God and human nature on their side." The an-
tislavery passions of the North, which had hitherto been kicking in
the traces, were now effectively yoked to the war-chariot of the

* " Galaxy," December, 1872, p. 848.

f " National Intelligencer," July 31, 1862.

176 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

President. The Proclamation lessened for a time the number of his
supporters, but it gave to them almost the compactness of a Mace-
donian phalanx. It put an end to political vacillation and atermoie-
ment. Not that the measure in either matter or form was entirely
satisfactory to the zealots of emancipation, and not that the Presi-
dent, as Lord Lyons wrote to his Government, " had thrown himself
in the arms of the Radicals." While still refusing to walk altogether
in the ways of these extremists, he established such a hold on the
rank and file of the Republican army that they followed him with-
out faltering through the shadow of the dim eclipse which obscured
their fortunes in the autumn of 1862. A year later, after the vic-
tory at Gettysburg and after the fall of Vicksburg, when the shock
of arms on a hundred battle-fields had come to supply the country
with a new set of emotions, Mr. Lincoln was able to say, "We
have the new reckoning."

Doubtless there are those who, on the view here presented, will
tax Mr. Lincoln with undue subserviency to party. But it is only
just to remember that he tried to avoid its necessity, as with strong
crying and tears ; that he was called in his political geometry to
deal with problems, not theorems ; and that he was a tentative states-
man, who groped his way d tdtons, not a doctrinaire. If there be
heroes, as Carlyle conceives them, bathed in the eternal splendors,
and projected out of the eternities into the times and their arenas,
Lincoln did not profess to be of their number.

I pass to consider the force and effect of the Proclamation viewed
in the light of constitutional and of public law. And here, again, it
is necessary to guard against a confusion of ideas. The question
at issue does not concern the right of a belligerent to liberate slaves,
flagrante hello, by military order accompanied with manucaption,
or the right to enlist such liberated slaves in his army, so long as
the war lasts. The employment of colored troops, as has been
shown, did not depend on the Emancipation Proclamation, for the
President was opposed to the arming of negroes when he first em-
barked on his emancipation policy. The questions presented by the
Proclamation of January 1, 1863, in the shape actually given to it
by Mr. Lincoln, are these :

Firstly. Had the President of the United States, in the exercise
of his war powers, a right, under the Constitution and by public
law, to decree, on grounds of military necessity, the emancipation
and perpetual enfranchisement of slaves in the insurgent States and
parts of States ?

TEE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 177

Secondly. Did such proclamation work, by its own vigor, the
immediate, the unconditional, and the perpetual emancipation of all
slaves in the districts affected by it ?

Thirdly. Did such proclamation, working proprio vigorey not
only effect the emancipation of all existing slaves in the insurgent
territory, but, with regard to slaves so liberated, did it extinguish
the status of slavery created by municipal law, insomuch that they
would have remained for ever free, in fact and law, provided the
Constitution and the legal rights and relations of the States under
it had remained, on the return of peace, what they were before the
war?

Unless each and all of these questions can be answered in the
affirmative, the Emancipation Proclamation was not authorized by
the Constitution or by international law, and so far as they must
be answered in the negative it was brutum fulmen. It remains,
then, to make inquiry under each of these heads :

1. As everybody admits that the President, in time of peace and
in the normal exercise of his constitutional prerogatives, had no
power to emancipate slaves, it follows that the right accrued to him,
if at all, from the war powers lodged in his hands by public law
when, as Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, he was engaged
in a life-and-death struggle with insurgents, whose number, power,
and legal description, gave them the character of public enemies.
It is, therefore, to public law, as enfolded in time of war and for
war purposes in the bosom of the Constitution, that we are pri-
marily to look for the authority under which the President as-
sumed to act.

Of international law no less can be said than has been said by
Webster : " If, for the decision of any question, the proper rule is
to be found in the law of nations, that law adheres to the subject.
It follows the subject through, no matter into what place, high or
low. You can not escape the law of nations in a case where it is
applicable. The air of every judicature is full of it. It pervades
the courts of law of the highest character, and the court of pie
poudre, ay, even the constable's court." *

This international law, with all its belligerent rights, was every-
where present as a potent force in the civil war between the United
States and the Confederate States, so soon as that war had assumed
such character and magnitude as to give the United States the same

• * Webster'8 "Works," vol. vi., p. 122.

178 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,

rights and powers which they might exercise in the case of a na-
tional or foreign war, and everybody admits that it assumed that
character after the act of Congress of July 13, 1861. But interna-
tional law, in time of war, is present with its belligerent obligations
as well as with its belligerent rights, and what those obligations are
is matter of definite knowledge so far as they are recognized and
observed in the conduct and jurisprudence of civilized nations.

The law of postliminy, according to which persons -or things
taken by the enemy are restored to their former state when they
come again under the power of the nation to which they formerly
belonged, was anciently held to restore the rights of the owner in
the case of a slave temporarily affranchised by military capture.
And, if it be admitted that, as regards slaves, this fiction of the
Roman law has fallen into desuetude under the present practice of
nations, it is none the less true that the Government of the United
States has earnestly contended, in its intercourse with other nations,
for the substantial principle on which the rule is based. We in-
sisted on restoration or restitution in the case of all slaves emanci-
pated by British commanders in the War of 1812-'15, and the
justice of our claim under the law of nations was conceded by
Great Britain when she signed the Treaty of Ghent, and when, on
the arbitration of Russia, she paid a round sum, by way of indem-
nity, to be distributed among the owners of slaves who had been
despoiled of their slave property.* In the face of a precedent so
set and so adjudicated by these great powers acting under the law
of nations (and one of them subsequently known as the leading
antislavery power of the civilized world), it would seem that, as a
question of law, the first interrogatory must be answered in the
negative. Slaves temporarily captured to weaken the enemy and
to conquer a peace are not lawful prize of war by military pro-
ceedings alone — proclamation, capture, and deportation. The more
fully it be conceded that international law, in time and fact of war,
knows the slave only as a person, the more fully must it be con-
ceded that this law, by purely military measures, can take no cogni-
zance of him as a chattel, either to preserve or to destroy the
master's property right under municipal law. It leaves questions
about the chattel to be settled in another forum, and by another
judicature than the wager of battle.

Nor does it help the matter to say that in a territorial civil war

* Lawrence's " Wheaton," pp. 612, 659.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 179

the Federal Government is clothed with the rights of a constitu-
tional sovereign in addition to those of a belligerent ; for, though
this statement is entirely true, it is not true that both of these juris-
dictions apply at the same time, or that it is lawful to import the
methods and processes of the one into the domain of the other. A
government, for instance, may proceed against armed rebels by the
law of war — killing them in battle if it find them in battle array ;
by public law, confiscating their property ; by sovereign constitu-
tional law, condemning them to death, for treason, after due trial
and conviction. But each of these proceedings moves in a sphere
of its own, and the methods of the one sphere can not be injected
into the sphere of the other. It would, for example, be a shocking
violation of both constitutional and public law to shoot down insur-
gent prisoners of war, in cold blood, because they were " red-handed
traitors," and because they might have been lawfully killed in bat-
tle. The military capture of a slave and the confiscation of the
owner's property rights in him fall under separate jurisdictions, and
they can not both be condensed into the hands of a military com-
mander any more than into the hands of a judge.

2. No principle of public law is clearer than that which rules
the war rights of a belligerent to be correlative and commensurate
only with his war powers. " To extend the rights of military oc-
cupation or the limits of conquest by mere intention, implication, or
proclamation, would be," says Halleck, " establishing a paper con-
quest infinitely more objectionable in its character and effects than
a paper blockade" * It is only so far as and so fast as the conquer-
ing belligerent reclaims " enemy territory " and gets possession of
" enemy property " that his belligerent rights attach to either. And
hence, when Mr. Lincoln, on the 1st of January, 1863, assumed au-
thority, in the name of " military necessity," but without the indis-
pensable occupatio bettica, to emancipate slaves in the territory held
by the enemy, he contravened a fundamental principle of the pub-
lic law — a principle equally applicable to the relations of a territo-
rial civil war and of a foreign war. It is important to observe
that where this principle was guarded by the rights and interests
of foreign nations, as in the case of the Southern ports of entry
while they were under the power of the Confederate authority, it
was sacredly respected by our Government. And in the light of this
doctrine it follows that the second of the questions formulated above

* Halleck, " International Law," chapter xxxii., § 2. Cf . 2 Sprague's " Reports,"
p. 149.

180 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

must also be answered in the negative ; for as to large parts of the
South Mr. Lincoln had no de facto power when he assumed to lib-
erate slaves both de facto and de jure within all the " enemy terri-
tory " at that date.

3. Since the decision of Lord Stowell in the case of the slave
Grace,* it has been an accepted doctrine of jurisprudence that the
slave character of a liberated slave — liberated by residing on free
soil — is redintegrated by the voluntary return of such slave to the
country of the master. Unless, therefore, the Proclamation of Free-
dom is held to have extinguished the status of slavery in the States
and parts of States affected by it, it would have conferred a very
equivocal boon on its beneficiaries. For, unless the municipal law
of slavery were wiped out by the Proclamation, and by conquest
under it, what prevented a reenslavement of such emancipated
blacks as should return to their homes after the war ? And this
fact was made apparent to Mr. Lincoln and to the whole country
as soon as an occasion arose for bringing the matter to a practical
test.

On the 18th of July, 1864, when the famous "peace negotia-
tions " were pending at Niagara Falls between Mr. Greeley and cer-
tain assumed representatives of the Confederate States, Mr. Lincoln
wrote that he would receive and consider " any proposition which
embraced the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole coun-
try, and the abandonment of slavery, and which came by and with
an authority that can control the armies now at war against the
United States." It was seen that the emancipation of individual
slaves, even of all individual slaves in the insurgent States, was
worth nothing without an abandonment of slavery itself — of the
municipal status in which the slave character was radicated, and in
which it might be planted anew by a voluntary return to the slave
soil. It was seen, too, 'that the Proclamation of Freedom, consid-
ered as a military edict addressed to "rebels in arms," had created
a misjoinder of parties as well as a misjoinder of issues, for the
authority which controlled the Confederate armies was not compe-
tent to " abandon slavery " in the insurgent States, though it was
competent to restore " peace and union " by simply desisting from
further hostilities. A misjoinder of issues was also created, for each
State, under the Constitution as it stood, had a right, in the matter
of slavery, to order and control its own domestic institutions accord-

* 2 Haggard's " Reports," p. 94.

TEE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 181

ing to its own judgment exclusively ; and the nation, by the con-
quest of its own territory, " could acquire no new sovereignty, but
merely maintain its previous rights." * The Proclamation proposed
to leave the institution of slavery undisturbed in certain States and
parts of States, while destroying it in certain other States and parts
of States. Hence, on the supposition that the paper was to have full
force and effect after the war, while our civil polity remained the
same, a new distribution of powers as between certain States and
parts of States on the one hand, and the Federal Government on the
other, would have been created by edict of the Executive. f Without
any express change in the constitution of the United States, and with-
out any express change in the constitutions of the insurgent States,
the status of persons on one side of a State line, or even on one side
of a county line, would have depended on municipal law ; on the
other side of such State or county line it would have depended on
a military decree of the President. In this strange mixture of what
Tacitus calls " res dissociabiles — principatum ac libertatem" it
would have been hard to tell where the former ended and the latter
began ; and to suppose that the civil courts, in the ordinary course
of judicial decision, could have recognized such anomalies, while
the rights of the States under the Constitution were still defined by
that instrument, is to suppose that judges decree justice without
law, without rule, and without reason. It is safe, therefore, to say
that the third question above indicated must equally be answered
in the negative.

And even if it be held that the President's want of power to
issue the Proclamation without the accompanying occupatio bellica
and that the consequent want of efficacy in the paper to work
emancipation proprio vigore were cured by actual conquest under
it on the part of the Government, and by actual submission to it on
the part of the seceded States, insomuch that it would have oper-
ated the extinction of the slave status in those States, it still re-
mains none the less clear that, without a change in the Constitution
of the United States prohibiting slavery in the South, the Proclama-
tion must have failed, with the rights of plenary conquest limited
by the Constitution, to insure the perpetual freedom of the slaves
liberated under it ; for what, under the rights still reserved to the
States, would have prevented the future reestablishment of slavery
at the South after the return of peace ?

* 2 Sprague's " Reports," p. 148.
f 2 Hurd, " Law of Freedom and Bondage," p. 787.
vol. cxxx. — no. 279. 13

182 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

Nobody was more quick to perceive or more frank to admit the
legal weakness and insufficiency of the Emancipation Proclamation
than Mr. Lincoln. Determined though he was never to retract the
paper, or by his own act to return to slavery any person who was
declared free by its terms, he saw that, in itself considered, it was
a frail muniment of title to any slave who should claim to be free
by virtue of its vigor alone. And therefore it was that, with a
candor which did him honor, he made no pretense of concealing its
manifold infirmities either from his own eyes or from the eyes of
the people, so soon as Congress proposed, in a way of undoubted
constitutionality and of undoubted efficacy, to put an end to sla-
very everywhere in the Union by an amendment to the Constitution.
Remarking on that amendment at the time of its proposal, he said :
" A question might be raised whether the Proclamation was legally
valid. It might be added that it aided only those who came into
our lines, and that it was inoperative as to those who did not give
themselves up ; or that it would have no effect upon the children
of the slaves born hereafter ; in fact, it could be urged that it did
not meet the evil. But this amendment is a king's cure for all
evils. It winds the whole thing up."*

In the light of these facts, of these principles, and of Mr. Lin-
coln's own admissions, it would seem that the Emancipation Procla-
mation was extra-constitutional — so truly outside of the Constitu-
tion that it required an amendment to the Constitution to bring the
President's engagements and promises inside of the Constitution.
And surely it will not be pretended that the President, even on the
plea of military necessity, has a right to originate amendments to
the Constitution, or to wage war on States until they agree to adopt
amendments of his imposing. This would be to " theorize with
bayonets, and to dogmatize in blood." This would be to make it
competent for the President in time of war to alter the fundamental
law of the land by pronunciamiento — a mode of proceeding which
falls not only outside of the Constitution, but outside of the United
States — into Mexico.

The Proclamation fell also outside of the jural relations of slavery
under international law. Conceding that slaves, in time of war,
are known under international law only as persons, we still have to
hold that, as residents of " enemy territory," the slaves here in ques-
tion were, by the terms of that code, as much " enemies " of the

* Raymond, " Life and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln," p. 646.

TEE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 183

United States as their masters.* But the Proclamation treated
them as friends and allies. In the eye of municipal law, they were
property, and the Proclamation acknowledged them as such in the
act of declaring them free ; but, as such, they were confiscable only
by due process of law, after manucaption ; and, whether they were
confiscated under public law, or under sovereign constitutional law,
would simply depend on the nature and terms of the confiscation
act adopted by Congress. If they were confiscated as "enemy
property " in order to weaken the enemy, the act would fall under
public law. If they were confiscated in order to punish the treason
of their owners, whereof such owners had been duly convicted, the
act would fall under sovereign constitutional law. But the Procla-
mation assumed to confiscate the property rights of the slave-own-
ers without any process of law at all ; and so it fell as much outside
of public law as it fell outside of constitutional law and of munici-
pal law. Nor has any amendment of public law as yet brought
within the sanctions of international jurisprudence the pretension of
a belligerent to alter and abolish, by proclamation, the political and
domestic institutions of a territory within which he has, at the time,
no de facto power. On the contrary, the pretension is traversed by
the latest codifications of international law,f and by the latest pub-
lications of our own State Department. J And hence it is no mat-
ter of surprise that the first international lawyers of the country,
like the Honorable William Beach Lawrence, and the first constitu-
tional lawyers of the country, like the late Benjamin R. Curtis, have
recorded their opinion as jurists against the legality of the Emanci-
pation Proclamation.

Lawyers, as Burke said at the beginning of the American
Revolution, "have their strict rule to go by," and they must
needs be true to their profession, but "the convulsions of a great
empire are not fit matter of discussion under a commission of
Oyer and Terminer." The Emancipation Proclamation did not
draw its breath in the serene atmosphere of law. It was born
in the smoke of battle, and its swaddling-bands were rolled in
blood. It was in every sense of the word a coup diktat, but one
which the nation at first condoned, and then ratified by an

* " In war, all residents of enemy country are enemies." — Chief -Justice Waite
(2 Otto, p. 194), in common with all the authorities.

f Bluntschli, " Das Modern Volkerreehts," p. 306. (Lardy's French version ob-
scures and misinterprets the text of the original on this point.)

% Cadwalader, " Digest," pp. 56, 57, 148, 151.

184 TEE NORTH AMERICAN- REVIEW.

amendment to the Constitution. As Mr. Welles says, " It was a
despotic act in the cause of the Union " — an act, he adds, " almost
revolutionary," and it Was almost and not altogether revolutionary,
simply because it fell short of the practical and legal effects at
which it was nominally aimed. It was, in fact, martial law applied
to a question of politics and of polity ; and of martial law, Sir
Matthew Hale has said that " in truth and reality it is no law at
all, but something indulged." If we would look for its fountain
and source, we must look to an institute which makes small account
of all human conventions and charters — the lex talionis. The
Proclamation was the portentous retaliatory blow of a belligerent
brought to bay in a death-grapple, and who drops his " elder-squirts
charged with rose-water " (the phrase is Mr. Lincoln's), that he may
hurl a monstrous hand-grenade, charged with fulminating powder,
full in the faces of the foe. The phenomenon is as old as the his-
tory of civil war ; and because he saw it was likely to reappear, so
long as human nature remains the same, Thucydides had a presage
that his history of the civil war between Athens and Sparta would
be " a possession for ever." " War," he wrote, " is a violent mas-
ter, and assimilates the tempers of most men to the condition in
which it places them." So Cromwell, in the hour of his political
agony, exclaimed against " the pitiful, beastly notion " that a gov-
ernment was to be " clamored at and blattered at," because it went
beyond law in time of storm and stress.

And there is something worse than a breach of the Constitution.
It is worse to lose the country for which the Constitution was
made ; but, if the defense of the Proclamation can be rested on
this ground, the fact does not require us to teach for doctrine of
law that which is outside of law and against law. Mr. Jefferson
held the Louisiana purchase to be extra-constitutional, but he did
not try to bring it inside of the Constitution by construction. That
he left to others. < It seems a waste of logic to argue the validity
of Mr. Lincoln's edict. It moved above law, in the plane of state-
craft. Not that its author, in so proceeding, moved on the moral
plane of the insurgents. He wrought to save, they to destroy, the
Union. Not that he acted in malice, for, as he protested, the case
" was too vast for malicious dealing." And not that he clearly
foresaw the end of his step from its beginning. The fateful times
in which he acted the foremost part were larger than any of the
men who lived in them, tall and commanding as is the figure of the
benign war President, and the events then moving over the dial of

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 185

history were grander than the statesmen or soldiers who touched

the springs that made them move. It was a day of elemental stir,

and the ground is still quaking beneath our feet, under the throes \ «** *

and convulsions of that great social and political change which was

first definitely foreshadowed to the world by the Emancipation

Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.

James C. Welling.

RECENT ENGLISH BOOKS.

I. Sacred Books of China and India.
II. Machiavelli and his Times.
III. The Home of the Eddas.

i.

Now that the chief religions of the East have become the theme
of frequent allusion and comparison in current literature, it is time
their texts should be accessible to the mass of cultivated persons
through the medium of authentic and literal translation. Not, of
course, that the perusal of a fragment of Vedic or Confucian lit-
erature will enable us to form an independent opinion, but it will
help us to classify, to verify, or to correct our derivative impres-
sions, and to discriminate between the cautious, qualified affirm-
ance of the scholar, and the loose or disingenuous assertions of the
sciolist. If it did no more than to dislodge the misconceptions
which have warped our current notions on these topics, a trust-
worthy and readable version of the leading Oriental classics would
be of signal utility. Some of these fundamental errors have, hith-
erto, proved difficult to extirpate. It is common, for instance, to
hear Confucius spoken of, in popular lectures and polemical writ-
ings, as an inventor or innovator — as if he had propounded a new
scheme of ethics in the sense that Jesus Christ or Mohammed pro-
pounded one. The truth is, that he originated almost nothing,
being, as he said of himself, a transmitter and not a maker. So,
too, we find persons, who would be incapable of blunders in con-
nection with the religious systems of Greece or Rome, referring to
the Zoroastrians as fire-worshipers, whereas the true followers of
Zoroaster abhor that very name. Again, the religious notion of sin is
repeatedly alleged to be wanting in the " Rig- Veda," and important
conclusions are based on this supposed fact ; yet the gradual growth
of the concept of guilt is one of the most interesting lessons of those

REGENT ENGLISH BOOKS. 187

ancient hymns. Those, moreover, who imagine that the Brahmans,
like Roman Catholic priests, keep their sacred books from the peo-
ple, will doubtless profit by the opportunity of reading the many
passages in the Brahmanas, the Sutras, and even in the laws of Manu,
where the duty of learning the Veda by heart is inculcated for every
Hindoo above the grade of Sudra.

The publication of the series of translations projected three years
ago, by Max Mtiller in conjunction with a large number of Oriental
scholars, has at last been begun, and we are now able to forecast
the scope and method of the undertaking. The scheme contem-
plates a conspectus of the six so-called book-religions, exhibiting
the most important writings of the Brahmans, the Buddhists, the
Zoroastrians, the followers of Confucius, of Lao-tze, and of Mo-
hammed. The versions are to be made from the original texts, or,
where good translations exist already, these will be subjected to
careful and competent revision. As regards the principle control-
ling the execution of the work, the capital aim will be a severe lit-
eralness, so far as such a result can be compassed in the case of
texts three thousand years old. Wherever old thought can not be
transmuted into modern speech without violence to one or the other,
our idiom, rather than the truth, is to be sacrificed, and the reader,
therefore, must expect to encounter some ruggedness of expression.
What is of decisive moment, the translators engage to refrain from
those curtailments and embellishments in which the eulogists of
these early literary records have too often indulged themselves. It
will doubtless require an effort to spoil a beautiful sentence by a
few discordant words, which might easily be expunged, but, if they
are there in the original, they must be taken into account, quite as
much as the pointed ears in the beautiful Faun of the Capitol. We
want to know the ancient religions as they really were, not their
wisdom only, but their folly also — in a word, we want the whole
truth, whether it makes for Christianity or for the atheistic philos-
ophy on whose side so many philologists have, more or less avow-
edly, been ranged. In such an arsenal it may be that thinkers of all
schools will find weapons, and certainly all will approve the purpose
and pledge of these translators to suppress nothing and varnish
nothing, however hard it seems to write it down.

Of the initial ventures in this series, two are now before us, the
first being a translation by Max Miiller of the TTpanishads,* which

* Sacred Books of the East, edited by Max Miiller. Vol. I. TJpanishads. Ox-
ford : Clarendon Press.

188 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

are, we need not say, theosophic treatises of superlative interest
and beauty. In no way could the general reader be more happily
introduced to the sacred books of India. Undoubtedly these philo-
sophical expositions are much later in point of time than the hymns
and the liturgical books of the Yeda. They fulfill the educational
function of a catechism and a commentary. They contain the in-
most kernel and vital spirit of the Yeda, being to the Samhitas
and the Brahmanas what the so-called Proverbs of Solomon are to
the Psalms and the Levitical books of the Hebrews. It was for
this reason that Rammohun Roy, the modern Hindoo reformer,
translated the Upanishads in preference to the earlier documents,
pointing out that the adoration of an invisible Supreme Being was
exclusively prescribed by these treatises, and by the so-called Ye-
danta. Another fact will be likely to have more weight with Amer-
ican readers, viz., that one of the most honest thinkers and speakers
of our time, Schopenhauer, has proclaimed his own philosophy to
be powerfully impregnated by the fundamental doctrines of the
Upanishads. He declares the access to this compendium of the
Yedic philosophy the greatest privilege which this century may
claim over previous ages. " How does every line," he writes, " dis-
play its firm, definite, and throughout harmonious meaning ! From
every sentence, deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the
whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. Indian
air surrounds us, and the unborrowed thoughts of kindred spirits.
And oh, how thoroughly is the mind here washed clean of all early,
ingrafted Jewish superstitions, and of all philosophy that cringes
before them ! In the whole world, there is no study so beneficial
and so elevating. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the
solace of my death." Schopenhauer was the last man in the world
to be suspected of any natural predilection for Indian mysticism,
and we know of nothing better calculated than his rapturous lan-
guage about the Upanishads to secure a considerate reception for
these relics of ancient wisdom.

An introduction to the Confucian literature is contributed to
this series by the well-known sinologue, James Legge, in the shape
of a translation of the Shu King, the religious portions of the
Shih King, and the Hsiao King. * Of the five great " Kings "
or classics recognized by his followers we owe but one to Confucius
himself, and this, which he called the " Spring and Autumn " (a

* Sacred Books of the East, edited by Max Miiller. Vol. III. The Shu King,
Shih King, and Hsiao King, translated by James Legge. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

4.

REGENT ENGLISH BOOKS. 189

brief chronicle of the annals of his native state), does not figure in
the present volume. We have, however, in the Hsiao King, or
Classic of Filial Piety, a short, ethical treatise which has come
down to us — not like the historical compend just named, as directly
from the pencil of the sage — but in the form of conversations be-
tween him and a disciple, precisely as the utterances of Socrates
are preserved in Xenophon's " Memorabilia." Merely noting that
this tract is commonly regarded as an attempt to construct a re-
ligion on the basis of the cardinal virtue of filial piety, we pass at
once to the most important work here printed, and that is the book
of historical documents called the Shu, and since the period of the
Han dynasty, when they were officially stamped as classic, the Shu
King. Here we have, not even a compilation, much less a com-
position of Confucius, but a part of the text-books which he had
before his eyes, and to whose exposition he addressed himself with
reverential self-effacement. We can perhaps gain an approximative
idea of the attitude of Confucius, and of the movement to which
he gave a controlling and abiding impulse, by conceiving his epoch
as a kind of Chinese Renaissance. The dynasty of Kau, toward
the close of which he lived, had witnessed the break-up of the old
centralization and all the disintegrating influences of a loosely or-
ganized feudality, which curiously prefigured the state of things
in the Europe of the middle ages. Amid the fast-crumbling ves-
tiges of a superior civilization, men like Confucius looked back
to the laws and precedents, the ethics and the manners belonging
to the powerful and brilliant dynasties of Hsia and Shang, very
much as scholars and thinkers in fifteenth-century Italy fixed their
eyes upon Greek culture and the Roman jurisprudence. To nei-
ther could invention seem other than impertinence, whereas rescue
and reproduction were the paramount duties of the hour. Ac-
cordingly, we find that Confucius made it an invariable rule never
to affirm or relate anything for which he could not adduce some
document of acknowledged authority. Still another analogy may
be noted. It was a profane and not a sacred literature and science
to which the men of the Renaissance turned back for guidance and
enlightenment. Neither did the ancient books of China, to which
Confucius incessantly directed the attention of his disciples, profess
to have been inspired, or to contain what we should call a revela-
tion. In them, as in the surviving records of Greece and Rome, we
find that historians, poets, and legislators wrote — without any claim
to supernatural prompting — as they were moved in their own minds.

190 THE NORTE AMERICAN REVIEW.

In the one case, however, as in the other, the student may fashion
for himself, from the numerous references to religious views and
practices, an outline of the early faith and ritual of the people.

The Shu has come down to us in a mutilated condition, and,
even as it existed in the time of Confucius, it did not profess to offer
a consecutive history of China, but was simply a collection of dis-
connected historical memorials. Its surviving documents are re-
ferred to various dates, ranging from about b. c. 2357 to b. c. 627.
There seems to be no difference of opinion among competent sino-
logues as to the sufficiency of the proof of the composition in very
ancient times of the contents of this classic. Dr. Legge can find
no reason for rejecting the affirmance of the native Chinese scholars
that a compilation of documents began immediately with the in-
vention of written characters, and that the latter event could have
occurred no later than the time of Hwang Ti (b. c. 2697). As is
well known, many of the dates have been verified by the solar
eclipses recorded in the text. It is true that one remarkable piece
of evidence, on which great stress used to be laid, seems for the
present unavailable. We refer to the solar eclipse, mentioned in the
fourth of the Books of Hsia as having occurred in the reign of
Kung Khang. It was discovered by P. Gaubil that such an event
did actually occur in b. c. 2156 (which, according to Chinese chro-
nology, would be the fifth year of that monarch), and was visible at
his capital at 6h- 49' a. m. Subsequently, however, two astronomers
went over these calculations with the help of improved lunar and
solar tables, and found that there was indeed an eclipse on the day
stated, but before the rising of the sun, at the then capital of China.
If, however, the reader will turn to the translation of the ancient
document in this volume, he will find that the particular year is not
mentioned (though it is implied that the event took place early in
the reign), and that nothing whatever is said about the eclipse being
visible at the capital. We need not, therefore, give up the hope
that with the further perfecting of the lunar tables the alleged
eclipse may be identified. The exactness of the date ascribed to
another and still earlier document seems to be indisputably estab-
lished. According to the Chinese historians, the Emperor Yao be-
gan to reign b. c. 2357, and in the so-called " Canon of Yao," with
which the Shu King begins, that personage gives directions to his
astronomers how to determine the equinoxes and solstices. He
names the stars which then culminated at dusk in China at the
equinoctial and solstitial seasons, and European astronomers, com-

REGENT ENGLISH BOOKS. 191

puting backward the places of the constellations, have found in the
directions a sufficient confirmation of the received date for Yao's
accession. It is certain that the directions could not have been
forged in relatively modern times. The precession of the equinoxes
was not known in China until more than twenty-five hundred years
after the time assigned to Yao, so that the culminating stars at the
equinoxes and solstices of his remote period could not have been
computed back scientifically from the epoch of Confucius, when we
know the collection of the Shu existed. Very likely the text in its
present form may not be contemporaneous with the alleged dates,
but its compiler must have had before him ancient records, one of
them containing the facts about the culminating of the stars.

Among the documents here translated, which will be scanned
with peculiar interest, is the so-called "Tribute of Yu," which, if we
could fully credit it, would constitute a sort of domesday-book of
China in the twenty-third century b. c. According to some sino-
logues, we should recognize in the statements of the narrative an
organized exploration and colonization of the outlying parts of the
Chinese world. Another remarkable document is entitled "Lti's
Punishments," and sets forth the Chinese penal code, as it was for-
mulated in the tenth century b. c. At this time the principle of
accepting a money commutation for punishments was first intro-
duced, and this is one of the many signs that the epoch covered by
the feudal dynasty of K&u was a period of decided deterioration
and collapse. In the so-called " Great Plan " we have the original
groundwork of the Confucian philosophy, this treatise — to whose
substance, by the way, a great antiquity is ascribed — dealing at
once with physics, astrology, divination, morals, politics, and re-
ligion. In the " Announcement about Drunkenness " will be found
some curious data bearing on the use of alcoholic compounds in
ancient China. It is a question whether the term Kiu, here em-
ployed, means wine, or beer, or ardent spirits. Dr. Legge, how-
ever, has no doubt that the latter translation is correct. He affirms
that the grape was not introduced into China before the time of
the first Han (b. c. 202), and he can find no evidence that malt
liquors have ever been made there, whereas the process of distilla-
tion from rice is mentioned four centuries after the death of Con-
fucius, and its invention attributed to the twenty-third century.
Another interesting document is called " The Metal-bound Coffer,"
and recounts a pleasing episode in the history of the Kau dynasty.
The hero of the narrative is the Duke of Kau, a name in Chinese

192 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

history only second to that of Confucius. The latter held his
memory in peculiar reverence, and spoke of it as a sign of his own
failing powers, that the Duke of Kau no longer appeared to him in
his dreams.

This version of the Shu is substantially the same as that in
Dr. Legge's large edition of the Chinese classics, although it has
been written out afresh, and with the assistance of a much larger
apparatus of native commentaries. Among the few verbal altera-
tions only one merits notice. This is the substitution of the un-
translated Chinese character Ti (formerly rendered Emperor) when
applied to the ancient monarchs Yao and Shun. Ti was originally
used in the sense of God, but came, it appears, by a process of dei-
fication, to be given to the great names, fabulous and legendary, of
antiquity. The first entirely historical sovereign of China who
used the title of Hwang Ti (august Deity — " uniter of the virtues
of the Hwangs and of the Tis ") was the founder of the revolu-
tionary Khin dynasty, who made a strenuous and wellnigh effectual
attempt to destroy by fire all the documents and expository litera-
ture on which the old order rested. He assumed the title in b. c.
221, when he had subjugated all the vassal states into which the
feudal kingdom of Kau had become divided, and was instituting
the despotic empire that has since subsisted. After the lapse of
two thousand years, it may well be that the title Hwang Ti, ap-
plied by a Chinese to the present Emperor, no longer calls up to his
mind any other idea than that of a human ruler. Like the name
of Kaiser to German ears, it has wholly lost its primitive associa-
tions.

ii.

In the floating impressions which make up the popular concep-
tion of the man, Machiavelli's name is still synonymous with a sin-
ister duplicity, while those who have climbed the hill of learning
high enough to read and remember Macaulay's essay, rather pique
themselves on rejecting the current opinion, and see in the vili-
pended Florentine a well-meaning public servant who, by way of
irony and satire, composed a clever tour de force. It turns out that
the common notion, transmitted as it is from the instinctive repul-
sion of Machiavelli's fellow citizens, is correct, after all. We know
more about the man, and a great deal more about the times, than
could be easily ascertained when Macaulay propounded his ingenious
paradox. It is safe to say that the bulk of documentary evidence
and the whole apparatus of elucidation bearing on the Italian Re-

REGENT ENGLISH BOOKS. 193

naissance have been multiplied a hundred-fold within the past thirty-
years. Burckhardt's book alone, for instance, contains more infor-
mation than could have been gleaned by the most painstaking Eng-
lish student of the last generation, and the works of other original
investigators in the same field almost require a catalogue. Each
has had something to say about Machiavelli, either in deliberate
judgment or in cursory allusion, and a substantial unanimity has
characterized their verdicts. Machiavelli was indeed a bad man,
not because his life was vicious, but because he recognized no duty,
and no beauty in virtue. He was detestable, not so much for any-
thing he did, but for what he pronounced it right to do. In his
practice he moved rather above than below the normal level of his
age, but he fully shared its principles; and, because he did not hesi-
tate to formulate them scientifically, the sins of an epoch are not
unreasonably associated with his name. Even his fellow burghers
of Florence, who could hardly have been shocked by any concrete
instance of depravity, were stung to indignation by the flagrant pur-
port of his doctrines. The men of the Renaissance beheld, so to
speak, their own faces in a mirror, and they recoiled with loathing.
The Church had made a Borgia Pope — that fact it could not efface,
but it could testify to the poignancy of its self-reproach, and its ab-
horrence of the Borgian statecraft, by anathematizing its expounder
and condemning its atrocious formulas to be burned by the com-
mon hangman.

Of Professor Villari's biography * only two volumes have ap-
peared, and they bring us no further than to the time when Machia-
velli ceased to be the Secretary of the Ten — when, in other words,
his official career ended, and his literary achievements began. The
first of these volumes is wholly devoted to a survey of the time,
and, although a version of Burckhardt's book is now accessible to
English readers, this, too, may be commended as an interesting and
admirable picture. In the sketch of Machiavelli's early years, do-
mestic relations, and diplomatic functions, which occupies the sec-
ond volume, we can see that his new biographer is neither accuser
nor apologist. His sober, incisive judgment is no more warped by
a horror of his subject's principles, or, on the other hand, by a sym-
pathetic reaction from the verdict of posterity, than would be that
of a physicist scanning some morbid outgrowth of the animal econ-

* Niccold Machiavelli and his Times, by Professor Pasquale Yillari, translated by
Linda Villari. Vols. I. and II. London : 0. Kegan Paul & Co.

194 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

omy whose ante-natal and environing conditions were exhaustively
known. He has scrutinized his subject's life, his surroundings, and
his writings, in order to know and describe the man precisely as he
was, with all his merits and demerits, his vices and his engaging
qualities. The biographer is not one of those who think a problem-
atic character may be solved by the glib statement that he bore the
imprint of his age and disclosed it in his writings, for, after all, the
capital question is, How came Machiavelli to be the only man of his
time who ventured to formulate principles which, however generally
practiced, were certainly not avowed ? Here we detect the contri-
bution of hereditary proclivities and energies, the pressure of indi-
vidual character. The truth is, that in a century there is space for
many men, many ideas, many different iniquities and different vir-
tues, and it is the nice admeasurement of social and individual fac-
tors, the equation, so to speak, of the epoch and the personality,
which is the business of the historian.

From Professor Villari's appreciation of the graphic dispatches
penned by the subject of these volumes during his diplomatic career,
we can forecast the acumen, the breadth of view, and the candor
with which Machiavelli's literary achievements will, by and by, be
discussed by his present biographer. If he accuses the Florentine
philosopher of wanting a moral sense, he will, no doubt, charge
the fault in some measure on the atmosphere which he breathed,
on an age which knew no sanctions, had lost its standards, and
had not even the cold comfort and slender help derivable from
our inchoate science of altruistic ethics. But he will not exoner-
ate his subject upon that plea. He will recognize, meanwhile, in
Machiavelli a wonderfully agile and penetrating intellect, the habit
of patient and accurate observation, and the command of a sinewy
and pellucid style. It is clear, too, that Professor Villari will give
him his veritable rank as one of the founders of the new historical
method, as one of the first men to discern that social phenomena
must be studied quite apart from theological theories, and that there
are unvarying, omnipresent laws of human action.

in.

It is noteworthy how large an infusion of Scandinavian legend
and rhapsody has entered into the common fund of knowledge,
shared by cultivated persons, through version, or paraphrase, dur-
ing the past quarter of a century. Even those who can not read the

RECENT ENGLISH BOOKS. 195

Skald poetry in the Norse tongue are by this time keenly alive to
the import and the charm of that North-Gothic mythology which
equals in beauty and interest, and in some respects excels, that of
ancient Greece and Rome. Such fragmentary and vagrant acquaint-
ance with a romantic literature needs, however, for due insight and
sympathy, to be localized, so to speak — to be identified with the
place, the scenery, and the atmosphere in which it was evolved.
If we would catch, through the dense and inelastic medium of
translation, some faint and fugitive echo of Scandinavian min-
strels, if we would seize at least the spirit of their song, we must
be able to conceive them in their works and lives, must be helped
to reproduce in fancy " The Home of the Eddas." * It is pre-
cisely this which Mr. Lock has sought to do for us in the record
of his sojourn for twelve full months in Iceland. The distinc-
tive merit of his narrative is not an obvious utility to the future
tourist, although the hints and counsels are minute and copious, nor
the crisp and lively sketches of social intercourse and housekeeping
practiced amid the harsh conditions of an Arctic climate, but the
patience with which it traces myth and legend to their birthplace,
and the felicity with which he detects, beneath the crust of physical
transformation and social decline, the Iceland of the Norse heroic
age. This task of local identification and resurrection he has been
enabled to carry out through his indefatigable industry and fervid
enthusiasm for the persons and the scenes of Scandinavian story.
What was equally essential to success, he is saturated with an eru-
dition which, so far as we can judge, is accurate, and which cer-
tainly infects the reader with a touch of the author's relish.

Interesting and suggestive of profound social metamorphosis is
the author's comparison of ancient with modern Icelandic architec-
ture. All the heathen Scandinavian buildings were of timber, lined
with paneling inside, and the interstices packed with dry moss to
keep out the piercing draughts. These houses were spacious, com-
prising a number of apartments, including a bath-room — to which
there is, at present, no equivalent in Iceland — and all of the rooms
were then provided with fireplaces, the early colonists having no
lack of fuel. Now, on the other hand, recourse is had by builders
to lava-blocks and turf-sods, for, except among the Danish settlers,
and a few government houses, there are not a dozen timber-framed

* The Home of the Eddas, by C. G. W. Lock. London : Sampson Low, Mars-
ton & Co.

196 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

dwellings in the country. The old hall, with its broad spaces and
lofty rafters, has shrunk into a hovel of turf, on whose small stone
hearth a peat-fire is lighted at rare intervals for cooking purposes
alone. To the destruction of the Icelandic woods or shaws, Mr.
Lock, like all other writers on the subject, attributes almost all the
evil that has befallen the island and her sons.

M. W. Hazeltine.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER.

All applications for or information in reference to Advertising: in " THE
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" Great Singers " will be followed shortly by a companion volume, entitled " Later
Great Singers : from Malibran to Titiens."

One vol., 18mo. (Forming No. 48 of Appletons' "New Handy-Volume Se-
ries. ") In paper cover, price, 30 cents ; cloth, 60 cents.

For sale by all booksellers ; or sent, post-paid, to any address in the United States,
on receipt of price.

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, New York.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER.

THE RUSSIAN ARMY,

Campaigns in Turkey in 1877-78.

By F. V. GREENE,

First Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, and lately Military Attache to the U. S.

Legation at St. Petersburg.

One vol., 8vo. Cloth. With Atlas containing 26 Plates of Maps, Plans, etc., printed
(with a few exceptions) in colors. Price, $6.00.

Extract from a Letter of General SHERMAN to Lieutenant GREENE.

" The first part, which treats of the Russian military establishment, ... is, in my
judgment, more comprehensive and satisfactory than any other I have heretofore seen in
print. . . .

"The second part, 'Campaign in Bulgaria,' is, however, the most vital and interesting
to the general reader, because you were on the spot, saw with your own eyes, and there-
fore described localities and events as none can save an eye-witness. . . . These
movements are given with sufficient precision, and with such lifelike reality, that I com-
mend this part especially to the perusal of every gentleman of liberal education. . . .

" The third part, ' Campaign in Armenia,' is evidently compiled by you from authentic
and official sources, is very much condensed, and yet is sufficiently graphic. . . .

" The fourth and last part contains your ' Conclusions,' or lessons established by these
campaigns. To this part, which is purely professional, I shall invite the close study and
attention of our military schools, and of the army generally, as well as the militia and
volunteers of our country, who should keep up with the progress of military science.

" .... In conclusion, I assure you of my perfect satisfaction at the manner in which
you have fulfilled an important public duty.

" Truly your friend,

W. T. Sherman, General."

From Count HEYDEN",

Chief of Staff of the Rnssiau Army.

" It is my agreeable duty to inform you

that the Russian press has been unanimous

in saluting the appearance of your work

with its entire approbation."

From Captain KORWAN,

Professor in the Military School at Metz.

" The German army welcomes your work.
Would you kindly permit me to translate it?
Your permission would enable me to render
a great service to the German army."

OPINIONS OE THE PRESS.

" The work will be invaluable, not only to
professional soldiers, but equally to all readers
who wish to make anything like a close study
of the operations of the war."— N. T. Ev^g Post.

" The wisdom of the WarDepartmentofflcials
in selecting Lieutenant Greene, an officer of en-
gineers, to observe the military operations on
the Russian side in the late war, has been fully
demonstrated by this admirable book, alike val-
uable to the professional soldier and interesting
to the general reader. It is not taking any risks
to predict that Lieutenant Greene's book will be
immediately and widely recognized as one of the
most valuable works of its class, clear and im-
partial as a record of events, and comprehensive
and accurate in its information upon the military
power and organization of Russia." — New York
World.

" The narrative is highly interesting not only
to those who study war as an art, but to all to
whom the study of contemporary history is more
than a pastime, and worthy of serious applica-
tion. Its attractiveness for this wider circle of
readers it owes chiefly to its plain and good style,
its lucidity of statement, and the clearness and
fullness of the maps which accompany it."—
The Nation.

" Lieutenant Greene has shown so much zeal,
intelligence, and energy, that we are glad to see
him honored and rewarded in every way. He
has proved himself to be an intelligent and acute
observer, and what he says has the value of the
most recent observations of warfare upon a large
scale, under the conditions that are rendering
obsolete much that has hitherto been accepted."
— Army and Navy Journal. (She next paok.)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.— (Continued.)

"Although he has not attempted anything
more ambitious than a report, Lieutenant Greene
has made one that should serve as a model to
succeeding writers on military subjects. With-
out going into picturesque details, he has given
us a volume that may be read with interest by
any one, and has made a valuable addition to the
literature of war. His statements are made with
frankness and with justice, and he has avoided
technicalities and made a clear and graphic story
of the Russian campaign in Turkey, that is not
only an honor to himself, but which reflects
credit upon the Government which was wise
enough to choose him for this delicate mission."
— New York Herald.

" The author of the present work is fortunate
in possessing more than one important qualifi-
cation for his difficult task. As an engineer, he
is peculiarly fitted to criticise a conflict in which
intreuchments and siege-works played so promi-
nent a part. As an eye-witness of several of the
leading battles of the war, he has the priceless
advantage of speaking from direct personal ex-

Eerience. As an attache to the St. Petersburg
egation, he has had the opportunity of becom-
ing acquainted with the Russians in peace as
well as sharing their fortunes in war; and in all
these capacities he has unquestionably done his
work well. We heartily commend both the text
and the atlas to any one wishing for a clear idea
of one of the most remarkable conflicts of mod-
ern times." — New York Times.

"The book is sumptuously printed, and is
accompanied by an atlas containing twenty-six
plates, showing all the important situations of
the two armies, the principal passes, and gen-
eral views of the seat of war. Lieutenant Greene
was sent abroad to observe this war as General
McClellan was to report on the Crimean war.
The report of the former can hardly fail to at-
tract as much attention as that of the latter did.
In military circles Greene's book will, in all
probability, long be a text-book, and a source of
constant discussion as well as of instruction to
students of the art of war.''''— Chicago Tribune.

"Lieutenant Greene was a witness of the
principal military operations of the war in Bul-
garia and Roumelia, embracing every phase of
modern warfare ; and the signal ability displayed
in recording these events in the compilation of
this work, the clear, comprehensive, and yet
concise analysis of each progressive step in the
great drama, with the marked absence of any-
thing indicating the personality of the author,
will cause this report to be extensively sought
and read by military men, as well as by the pub-
lic at large." — Baltimore American.

"A painstaking and useful account of the
recent military operations in the Balkan Penin-
sula and in Armenia; . . . with this proviso, that
the writer's leanings seem to us on the wrong
side, we are able to commend the general treat-
ment of the theme." — New York Sun.

"This is certainly one of the most important
contributions to military history which have
appeared for many years. Lieutenant Greene
brings to the task of relating the Russo-Turkisdi
war the advantage of having been present at a

great many of the most important operations,
including the third battle of Plevna, the bloody
actions of Shipka at the end of August, 1877, and
the passage of the Balkans with Gourko's column
in the following winter. He appears to have had
lull access to all the field orders issued, and to
have been on intimate terms with many of the
principal staff officers, and has thus been enabled
to prepare a strictly accurate account of the war
as seen from the Russian side. But to these ad-
vantages his book shows that Mr. Greene adds
the possession of special qualifications for un-
dertaking the office of a military critic and his-
toiian. The work he has now published is a
singularly clear and complete record of the war,
which ought to be carefully studied by every
officer in the British army, for it contains a great
many most important lessons which both our
army and Government would do well to lay to
heart, although, from our usual carelessness in
such matters, it is not to be expected that we
shall do so." — Saturday Beview.

"Possessed of keen powers of observation,
sharpened by a scientific military education,
Lieutenant Greene was well qualified to fill the
honorable position for which he was selected by
the United States Government. His book stamps
him a military historian of the first class. Hav-
ing a thorough grasp of his subject, he marshals
his facts before us with military conciseness,
brushes away the cobwebs of personal achieve-
ments with which other narratives of this war
are clouded, follows the movements of the Kus-
sian armies with painstaking exactness, lays
bare the failings of the commanders, and criti-
cises with no unfriendly yet with an unsparing
hand. To the general reader this work can not
fail to be of interest; but to the military student
it will be simply invaluable. The book is one
which should be in every regimental library." —
The London Times.

" Lieutenant Greene's book is especially ac-
ceptable, as it contains the opinions of one who,
from his nationality and training, may be ex-
pected to take a cosmopolitan view of matters.
He was favorably placed for observing the cam-
paign, on the Russian side, and was qualified to
act as a critic. His book possesses the advan-
tage of being drawn up at leisure, and correct-
ed by Russian official documents."— The Athe-
naeum.

" Based upon official reports, corrected by his
own personal observations of events, and with
the excellent atlas which is iesued separately.
Lieutenant Greene's work deserves to rank as
the text-book of the late Russo-Turkish war. from
the Russian point of view."— Broad Arrow.

" A most valuable, indeed, in some respects,
invaluable treatise. Apart .from the accompany-
ing volume of maps, which, for excellency, sur-
pass any we have ever seen to illustrate a cam-
paign, both in number and in accuracy, Mr.
Greene's work is one of the most valuable
contributions to our military knowledge pub-
lished during the present 'generation. Mr.
Greene has in this work conferred a boon upon
his brother soldiers all over the world, and
shows himself to be one of the foremost military
critics of this our day."— Allen's Indian Mail.

E^T* For sale by all booksellers ; or sent by mail, post-paid, to any address in the
United States, on receipt of price.

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, New York.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER.

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LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.

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HAVE JUST PUBLISHED:
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Progress ai\d Poverty*

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REMEDY. By Henry George. 1 vol., 12mo, 512 pages. Cloth. Price,

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Extract from Introduction.
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The Art of Speecl\.

STUDIES IN POETRY AND PROSE. By L. T. Townsend, D. D., Professor
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Memoirs of Madame de I\emusat

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A Class-Book History of England.

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S £ B

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A NOVEL.

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From the London Athenaeum.

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THE ART JOURNAL

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1880.

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NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Tl\e EmOtiOI\S. By James McCosh, D. D., LL. D., President

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Communism ar\d Socialism in their History and

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The Life ai\d Works of Gilbert Stuart. By

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Brazil : the Air\azons ar\d tl\e Coast. By Herbert

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History of tl\e I\ise of tl\e Huguenots of

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The Letters of Cl\arles Dickens. Edited by his sis-

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The Boy'S FroiSSart. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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Tl\e Serpent-Charmer. A Tale of the Indian Mutiny.
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