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THE

PRINCETON

REVIEW

ISTrCtetr fig Jonas jw. ILitbzs

SIXTIETH YEAR

JULY

WHAT IS EDUCATION? i

BONAMY PRICE, D.C.L., University of Oxford

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT ... 19

Rev. FRANCIS A. HENRY

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER . . 36

E. A. MEREDITH, Toronto

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH 56

ANDREW LANC, Ph. D., London

HENRY JAMES’S NOVELS 68

EDGAR FAWCETT

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS . . 87

Hon. DAVID A. WELLS

2 NASSAU ST., NEW YORK

THREE DOLLARS A YEAR

FIFTY CENTS A NUMBER

JULY, 1883

THE MOST RECENT PHASES OF THE TARIFF QUESTION. ( Second Article. )
DAVID A. WELLS, LL.D., D.C.L.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE. BAYARD TUCKERMAN.

THE ALLEGED CONFLICT OF NATURAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION. GEORGE
P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Yale College.

ON THE EDUCATION OF MINISTERS : A REPLY TO PRESIDENT ELIOT.

Prof. FRANCIS L. PATTON, Princeton Theological Seminary.

RECENT RESEARCHES IN CEREBRAL PHYSIOLOGY. WILLIAM B. SCOTT, Ph.D.,
Princeton College.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN FRANCE AFTER THE DEATH OF
GAMBETTA. EDMOND DE PRESSENSE, Late Member National Assembly.

SEPTEMBER.

“A COLLEGE FETICH.” President PORTER, Yale College.

OUR IRON, WOOLEN, AND SILK INDUSTRIES BEFORE THE TARIFF
COMMISSION. HERBERT PUTNAM.

INCINERATION. Rev. JOHN D. BEUGLESS.

THE ARTIST AS PAINTER. JOHN F. WEIR, N.A.

THE ANTECEDENT PROBABILITIES OF A REVELATION. DAVID J. HILL,
Ph.D., President of Lewisburg University.

RECENT FRENCH FICTION. J. BRANDER MATTHEWS.

NOVEMBER.

THE ABNEGATION OF SELF GOVERNMENT. Hon. THOMAS M. COOLEY, LL.D.
DIVORCE REFORM. LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

TOURGENEFF. BAYARD TUCKERMAN.

THE “FOREIGN COMPETITIVE PAUPER LABOR” ARGUMENT FOR PRO-
TECTION. Hon. DAVID A. WELLS, LL.D., D.C.L.

CURRENCY PROBLEMS. WORTHINGTON C. FORD.

TIIE CRITICAL STUDY OF THE SCRIPTURES. Rev. FRANCIS A. HENRY.

The above volume (three numbers) of the Review for 1883, will be sent to any
address, postage paid, for one dollar and fifty cents.

THE

PRINCETON

REVIEW

35DUc& b» .Jonas 3W. 2 Litres
SIXTIETH YEAR

JULY— DECEMBER

NEW YORK

II 1884

JULY

PAGE

WHAT IS EDUCATION? i

Bonamy Price, D.C.L., University of Oxford

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT ... 19

Rev. Francis A. Henry

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER . . 36

E. A. Meredith, Toronto

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH 56

Andrew Lang, Ph.D., London

HENRY JAMES’S NOVELS 6S

Edgar Fawcett

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS . . S7

Hon. David A. Wells

SEPTEMBER.

WOMEN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY . ... . .105

Francis King Carey

THE LEGAL TENDER DECISION . 123

Worthington C. Ford

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD 133

Rev. James S. Candlish, D.D.

THE TELEGRAPH QUESTION
Prof. David B. King

153

PAGE

THE FIRST LINES OF BIOLOGY 173

John G. Macvicar, LL.D.

GREEK AND A LIBERAL EDUCATION ..... 195

President Noah Porter, Yale College

NOVEMBER.

MAN IN NATURE 219

Sir J. William Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S.

EMERSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION . . 233

Edwin D. Mead

LORD LYTTON 257

Bayard Tuckerman

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS . . 275

Hon. David A. Wells, LL.D.

THE TWO SCHOOLS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY .... 291

Prof. Simon Newcomb, LL.D., F.R.S.

DESCARTES AND THEOLOGY 302

Prof. J. P. Mahaffy, LL.D., Trinity College, Dublin

WOMEN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 324

Francis King Carey

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

EDUCATION, at the present hour, is exciting the profound-
est interest amongst all classes of the people of England.
It is felt to be one of the most important duties imposed on the
social life of the whole nation. Great institutions for educating
have been organized and are at work all over the country. A
vast new province has been added to the public service. Boards
for inspecting and examining have been established. The law
commands all children to be educated. They must spend their
early years at school ; and the efficiency of those schools and the
effects produced on the pupils are tested and recorded by public
inspectors, who send in reports to the chiefs of their depart-
ments. Members of the government, of great official position,
make speeches in London and the counties, proclaiming the im-
portance of education for developing the civilization of the
country. Schools and colleges are being rapidly multiplied all
over the land, so warm is the flame with which patriotism burns
in this most interesting region. Ardent efforts are made on
every side to develop in the young an ever-increasing amount
of mental and, along with it, moral culture. That civilization
means education ; that it has education for its foundation ; that
success in the arts, in trade, in manufacturing, with better and
happier homes for the laboring as for the richer classes, necessarily
implies education, are truths to which the eyes of all England
are more and more directed.

Under circumstances and feelings such as these, the mighty
question comes forward with irresistible force, What is educa-
tion ? What is it that education is called upon to do for the
young? To bestow knowledge stored up in the brain, is the al-
most universal answer. Teachers pour out long lectures of

2

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IV.

highly elaborated knowledge. It is gathered up by memory, and
is reproduced with accuracy to the questioning of masters and
inspectors. Pupils of the higher order are trained to write out
with correctness the beautiful sentences which have fallen from
the master’s lips, and he proudly points out their excellence to
the examiners sent to inquire into his success. This system has
spread widely in every direction ; even universities have been
captivated by the fine compositions and brilliant statements
elicited by their examinations. They point to the splendid com-
positions sent in by candidates for honors, to the multitudes of
elaborate statements in reply to historical inquiries, and they
ask, What results can be finer or more powerfully testify to a
grand education ? But is this the true, the one all-important
answer to the critical question, What is education ? Is memory,
however wide its range and accurate its responses, the very es-
sence of a human being, the root of his civilization? Will the
repetition of a whole book, however excellent the book, by itself
alone prove that the power of thinking has received its highest
development, that the mind has reached the greatest strength of
which nature has made it susceptible ? All knowledge is valu-
able ; yet is the possession of the largest possible stock of knowl-
edge, resting on memory alone, the greatest intellectual force
which the human mind can acquire ? Would the ability to re-
peat correctly every page of an encyclopaedia make the man who
possessed this treasure the most commanding thinker, the most
powerful discoverer of truth, the most vigorous reasoner, the
dominant genius in poetry, statesmanship, or philosophy ? Would
he be the honored judge to whom all his countrymen would ap-
peal with submission for all moral or social difficulties?

It is almost idle to ask such questions ; so glaring is the
absurdity with which they deal, and so steadily is the nation
opening its eyes to the certain truth that it will never learn from
this quarter what education really is. Memory will never gen-
erate the ablest man, great tho the services are which a strong
memory will yield to its possessor. And then there is another
consideration of the gravest moment. At what cost are the
powers of the memory developed ? Vast is its cost of produc-
tion, any intelligent economist would say. The treasure piled
up in the store-house may be enormous ; but how was the accu-

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

3

mulation accomplished ? Those who adopt the memory as their
educational tool are ever exerting greater pressure on their
pupils. The acquisition of knowledge is held to be true educa-
tion ; and the more earnest and noble-minded is the feeling to
rescue the young from ignorance, the stronger will be the effort
to pile up knowledge on the memory, and the more fatal will be
the consequences to the unhappy victims of such a theory of edu-
cation. Additional hours are incessantly demanded for school,
longer and more frequent lectures to be remembered are given,
severer codes of attendance enforced, and thus a mass of over-
education is required under which the brains of countless youth-
ful sufferers sink into pain and often into lunacy.

Public complaints are breaking out on every side. We are
told of “ a widowed mother, praying that her child should not
be forced, for night after night his mind wandered, calling out
fragments of his instruction.” Children are unable to sleep
through school-work. They are forced up to a certain pitch to
pass the inspector, and then the knowledge they have acquired
rolls away like water. Boys and girls are found in hospitals,
suffering under nervous diseases which physicians declare to
have proceeded from overtaxed brains.

But there are more fearful events yet to tell, which have hap-
pened amongst the higher classes of society. The Times of
December 1 1 , 1882, records the physical and mental deterioration
which has fallen on the civil servants of India, described by an
Indian correspondent. It has already awakened official alarm.
“ Since the institution of competitive examinations, out of a
hundred odd civilians nine have died and two forced to retire on
account of physical debility.. Ten more were considered quite
unfit for their work on account of bodily weakness, and eight
have positively become insane. It is this system which is creating
almost a panic here, especially as these cases of insanity are
nearly all crowded up the last few years, during which the
standard of examination has been raised to the highest pitch.
The most anxious scrutiny is now made of each new batch of
young civilians, as landed, and their physical and mental condi-
tion is at once reported to the government.” Is it not humili-
ating to be told that the consequences are such as to have
established the conviction that the seeds of insanity are largely

4

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

sown in their brains, and that a very serious proportion of those
who have come out at the head of the examinations are unques-
tionably laboring under mental disease which will drive them
away from their work ? They will be unable to bear the strain
of the work of those offices which they have been selected to
fill, and for which their studies are designed specially to prepare
them.

And now from what cause does this most sad amount of dis-
aster proceed ? The correspondent of the Times has rightly
stated it : “ The fad of cramming” was the source of all the mis-
chief. To cram is not to teach, neither for the teacher nor the
taught. It has been well said that teaching is a pleasure, but
assuredly cramming is not, and the difference to the pupil is im-
mense. There is no sympathy, no joint action of thought and
feeling between pupil and teacher in cramming. They do not
live together in the same thoughts nor hunt together in the same
field. To cram is simply to load, to pile up as on a cart ; to
summon the memory to gather up certain things and to store
them away till they are called for. It learns knowledge by heart,
it gathers formulas and correct sentences, but it does not dis-
cover knowledge by means of the thinking intelligence of the
pupil’s mind ; and if only memory repeats correctly the words
required, the examiner generally does not care to inquire whether
they have been understood. The right words are on the paper,
and that is enough. Meanwhile it is forgotten that memory is far
severer for the brain than the exercise of intelligence, and thus
the thinking power is struck with paralysis. Here we find the
explanation of the great change for the worse which has come
over education in England. The mode of conducting examina-
tions is the cause of all the mischief. Viva voce has been flung
aside and paper work substituted in its place. Good viva voce
examiners are hard to find, and much work is required of them.
But a still stronger force has made its appearance and has been
energetically at work. Answers on paper produce such beauti-
ful compositions. Long arrays of knowledge are brought up by
the pupil, repeating often with marvellous accuracy what great
writers have said on the subjects treated. Pupils and tutors alike
feel themselves honored by the brilliant exhibitions created by
this process. They point to papers and exclaim, “ What can be

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

5

finer or better?” The masters attach the rewards of the school
to these elaborate manuscripts, the prizes and the scholarships
which cover the young with glory. Parents are charmed with
the excellent results, and spare no efforts to stimulate their
children to get up treasures of information which generate such
brilliant performances on paper and lead up to such rewards.
But how are all these great achievements effected ? By memory,
not by intellectual mastering of the subjects handled. Repeti-
tion by heart is the instrument employed, cramming performs
the work, and the physical and intellectual consequences of
cramming are piled up on the youthful victims. We thus see
that cramming does not supply the answer to the great question,
What is education ?

That answer will be found, not in what the mind contains,
so much as in the state of the mind itself. All education, of
course, involves some amount of knowledge acquired ; the think-
ing faculty cannot be trained except by its action in acquiring
knowledge : but knowledge — that is, words accurately repeated —
by itself alone is not education. True education is the develop-
ment of the thinking power of the human mind, and its mighty
instrument is viva voce , employed partly in examinations, but
with incomparably more power and effect in actual teaching it-
self. The aim and task of education — independently of the
value of the knowledge obtained for moral or any other pur-
poses— is to cultivate the powers of the understanding, to
strengthen and enlarge them, to show how they are to be used
in mastering any subject. It seeks to train the young pupil how
to use his brain, how to determine and examine for himself the
questions put before him, how to handle his mind as a tool, and
thus to realize the very purposes for which that mind was given
him. In a word, to teach him how to think.

Now what is the educational process to be adopted for accom-
plishing this great object of teaching a boy how to think ? Not,
certainly, to set him to read well-written and learned books, to
store up their contents in his memory, and then to pour them
out at examinations. Nor will this great end be reached by
learned addresses from tutors, carefully gathered up in notes
by the pupils and then followed up by examinations which
simply test the attention and the accuracy of the students. This

6

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

is cram — nothing better. Such lectures, indeed, may prove
most valuable, if embodied in an education which is steadily
developing the thinking power and ever imparting to the pupil
a constantly increasing faculty of mastering and making his own
learning set before him by able instructors. The thinking
powers, however, must be awakened before such lectures can pass
out of cramming. We are still summoned to inquire, How is a
boy to be taught how to think ?

The answer is not difficult ; indeed it maybe called obvious :
yet how little is it perceived or valued at the present hour, even
in our most distinguished institutions of education ! Its secret
lies in skilful questioning by the teacher, in power to make the
pupil discover for himself the facts and truths to be gathered up
at each place. The mighty tool of education is that the teacher
and the taught, by the help of viva voce , should be engaged in a
common search ; that they should be living in the same thoughts,
be ever consulting together how to make the discovery they
seek to win. The work of the teacher is to direct the attention
of the student to the facts lying before him, to stimulate his
inquiry into the relations which they bear towards each other,
what difficulties they present, how they are to be cleared away
by thought, what new truths they reveal. To make the pupil
find out for himself the answer to be given to each question, as
it arises, is the very essence of real education. The questions
put by the tutor place the student on the right ground. They
show what he is to try to understand and explain. The several
elements of the subject investigated are placed, one after an-
other, before the pupil’s mind. He is invited to put them to-
gether, and so to discover the lesson, the new knowledge they
convey. Every insight into the subject which he gains as he
moves along is made by the teacher to suggest something still
farther on : the depths of the study are gradually and intelli-
gently reached. The pupil’s mind is ever kept thinking, putting
together, and discovering. The knowledge won is in no small de-
gree his own acquisition, the product of his own intelligence, his
own brain. He is incessantly learning how to use the faculties
with which his mind is endowed, and with their help, guided but
Jiot told by the teacher , to gather up the understanding of the
subject to be explored.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

7

The difference between the method of questioning and cram-
ming is vast indeed. The knowledge ultimately reached may
be the same. The crammer’s book may, nay, generally does,
give the goal to be reached. It is the right knowledge, but it is
simply heaped up on the memory without being mastered and
won by the thought of the learner. It is not his own, and it is
left to disappear. Under the guidance of a questioning and
challenging tutor, each stone of the knowledge sought has been
discovered and handled, and put into the right place of the in-
tellectual structure by the pupil. The subject is understood,
because it has been looked into by an inquiring mind. To re-
member what has been grasped and understood is something
utterly different from summoning the memory to reproduce
a load of knowledge. What we have gathered from our own
observation and comprehend we remember easily. It has be-
come familiar, and familiarity wonderfully lightens the task of
memory. If by any chance the exact statement is missing, a
mind which is at home in the subject and knows how to search
for it recovers it easily. No painful strain, no unhealthy effort,
is needed.

Further, another advantage of immense value must be re-
corded of teaching by viva voce , by questioning. The pupil is
at once placed in the very heart of his subject. The questions
are put by a mind which is master of the subject to be explored.
It leads at once the young intellect, step by step, to the very
core of the subject examined ; side issues, subordinate points,
are passed by for the moment. The inquiry is pursued along
the main road which leads directly to the point where everything
is explained. The matter to be understood is thus firmly grasped.

Great is the power of viva voce in teaching ; greater yet is it
in examinations. It at once compels the pupil to feel that his
only chance of facing his examiner lies in his understanding the
subject. Knowledge will be demanded, of course, and it must
be produced ; but the pupil will know that the value put upon
the knowledge, the marks given for it, will be reckoned on the
basis of the answerer being at home in dealing with the knowl-
edge he is asked for. No viva voce examiner worthy of the name
will be contented with words repeated out of a book. He will
imperatively seek to learn whether the knowledge contained in

8

THE PRIXCE TOX REVIEW.

it will repay the labor spent in acquiring it. The end of all
teaching will be ever kept in view, the insight into the matter
learnt. On the other hand, the feeling of the pupil who has to
encounter an examiner who will take his answer to pieces will
be radically different from that of a student who writes down
unchallenged answers on paper. He knows that he will have to
make his examiner see that he understands. Poor memory will
retire into the second place ; to master the subject will be the
king of his studies.

Even with an examiner who has been also the teacher, the
viva voce method will still be powerful. The student will not
know what turn the examination will take, to what part of it
the examiner will attach most importance, what assumed com-
bination of facts he will have to explain or clear away. Noth-
ing but a thorough mastery of the subject will give him safety,
and that mastery is true education. The institution of viva
voce examinations would at once crush the cramming which is
paralyzing so fast the educational machinery of England.

The Oxford of old days brilliantly exhibited the power and
the transcendent excellence of viva voce examinations. The
viva voce mainly decided the fortunes of the candidates for
honors. They were examined for half a day by men of the
greatest ability in the university. What their views were on
the subjects to be handled was seldom known accurately be-
forehand ; what turn the examination would take was hard to
foresee, until the examiner himself had revealed the state of his
own mind and the character of his own knowledge. Crowds of
undergraduates, whose day of fate was approaching, thronged
the schools to learn what the examiners were, what they
thought on divinity, ethics, history, and other topics, how they
handled the candidates for honors, what they liked and disliked
in their answers. Then — and this was an element of great
significance — the examiners felt that they were themselves
being examined. Tutors and private tutors were eager to
learn what they held, what they laid stress on, by what pro-
cesses they reached the conclusions they expected from the
examined. The intellectual movement hence resulting in the
university was vast, and, to its glory be it said, the system gave
immense impulse to progress. The examiners were almost as

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

9

eager to acquire a distinguished reputation for progressive
learning as the undergraduates were to win brilliant honors.
The whole university was in a state of progress, and that
progress could be measured by the advancing character of the
examinations. As for cram, it was nowhere ; organized, ad-
vancing thinking was met with on every side.

We have now reached the second stage in the process of
education. We have seen that its first and great object is to
teach the young mind how to think, how to make itself master
of any subject which has to be learnt. The question comes to
the front, What are the fields of study which commend them-
selves as the most suitable for making the young pupil an edu-
cated man?

Besides developing power of thought, all education seeks to
acquire knowledge. In the lower classes of life, useful knowl-
edge, knowledge that fits the learner to carry on some special
business from which a livelihood is to be obtained, is the object
most desired. The law here steps in and commands attend-
ance at school for a period more or less long, and prescribes
studies which transcend, more or less widely, what is specifically
required for procuring a livelihood. The conception of a cul-
ture which aims at a development of human character which
transcends mere utility is proclaimed by the programme of
studies. A master endowed with the genius of teaching may
here awaken visions which cause rays of bright illumination to
shine. There are few things more common than the confusion
of thought, the ignorance of first principles, the want of all real
understanding of the business they carry on, to be found in men
of great positions. Good viva voce , in their earlier years, might
have done wonders for them. Then let us look lower down to
the children of the lower classes : take for instance the sons
of agricultural laborers. None more urgently need to earn
their living by work. They are soon called away from school,
yet in the short period of schooling they may be taught to per-
ceive many truths, simple in appearance, but great forces in
fact, which may prove of high value to them in agriculture. A
little boy may easily be made to understand how a plant grows,
how it picks up new substances from the sun and air or under or
from the ground, how it decomposes those substances and ex-

IO

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

tracts from them the parts which they can apply to their own
growth. A simple but very instructive peep may be given him
in chemistry. The perceptions thus gained may easily expand,
as years advance, into real agricultural ability.

A like course with like results may be adopted in other call-
ings, and there can be no doubt that, with a teacher who is
master of viva voce , fundamental principles, full of light for the
future, may be planted as germs in the youthful brain, to grow
and bear fruit as the powers of the mind develop.

We come now to the class of young boys whose education
has not for its aim the imparting of such knowledge as would
fit them for pursuing a particular profession in life. Such edu-
cation is given to youths who intend to become clergymen or
lawyers or to occupy high posts in society. In such education,
as in every other, knowledge must be imparted, but it need not
necessarily be professional knowledge. The making of the man,
the strengthening of his powers, the development of his mind
and character, are the great ends sought in training him to fill
an important station in the world. For the upper classes of
English boys the chief instrument employed for education is
the classics, the Greek and Latin languages in combination with
mathematics and history. Science has lately made its appear-
ance in these regions and is steadily advancing in request.
These are excellent things for the young to learn, but, alas !
they are peculiarly susceptible of cram. A vast amount of
arithmetic may be learnt by rote with little insight into the
real nature of its processes. Indeed it may be hoped that it
will not be thought disrespectful to say of a department of
knowledge so great and so powerful as mathematics that it is
singularly exposed to the danger of being taught by mere
mechanical practice. Lord Derby in a speech made at Derby
records of his studies at Cambridge that “he had been sub-
jected to the weary and unprofitable drudgery of cramming up
a certain quantity of mathematics, anyhow, for the final exami-
nation without which competition for classical honors was not
allowed. He had a lively recollection of the process ; the
only distinct impression which it had left upon his mind
being this, that without that personal experience he should not
have known with what marvellous rapidity knowledge crammed

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

1 1

up for a special purpose and never assimilated is apt to dis-
appear.”

History in our day has a fatal tendency to degenerate into
cram. It is got up by repetition : the limbs of the body lie
about ; the living connection is absent. Dates, lines of kings,
names of battle-fields, are placed heavily on the memory : the
characters of the people, their manner of living, the details of
their civilization, their political constitutions, the quality of
their lives, the tone of their civilization, are little understood.
As to science, we hear of chemistry asserting its right to be
taught : the conception of the forces it deals with, their
modes of action, we are often told, are wholly missing from the
brains of the young. It is not to be denied that these branches
of scientific knowledge may be taught on a different system,
and that the thinking power of the pupils may be successfully
summoned to enter into their essence, what they are and how
they work; but that such teaching is flourishing in England
evidence, we are told, fails to show. They are peculiarly sus-
ceptible of being crammed, and thus labor and thought are
sadly wasted in the operation. A man may be able to count
accurately every yard of distance to the stars, or to reckon up
all the kings, and yet be none the wiser or more efficient for
valuable working thereby. His mind, so far, may be nothing
more than a dictionary.

If such are the dangers which beset the ordinary forms of
education, the question comes home heavily upon us, Which is
the best, the most productive instrument for effecting that con-
fessedly most important function, education ? For value and
power, it may safely be asserted, the study of the Greek and
Latin languages stands pre-eminently the first. Greek, above
all, has no equal in educating force : it is the greatest, the most
productive tool for developing the minds of the young known to
man. The proclamation of this great truth was never more
needed than at the present hour. What is the use, cries many
a parent, of making a boy waste so many years on Greek and
Latin ? Is scholarship, the ability to translate well into English
Greek and Latin authors, the best, the most efficient instrument
for making a youth of marked talent a powerful statesman, an
eminent divine, a distinguished writer, or a great merchant?

12

THE PRINCE TO X RE VIE IP.

“ More can be learnt,” exclaimed Mr. Cobden, “ from a single
number of the Tunes than from all the works of Thucydides” —
of which he had not read a single line.

In reply to such assaults on the teaching of the classics, let us
note in the first place that these educational instruments are lan-
guages, or rather literatures. They place the boy in the closest
contact with countless thoughts of the highest value. Let him
be trained to read Plato and Aristotle with - full appreciation of
their thoughts, or Virgil and ALschylus in lively sympathy with
their emotions : how many ideas he will have acquired, how
many regions of human life, how many portions of his own
mind he will have gained insight into ! Think of what is im-
plied in thoroughly mastering Thucydides and Demosthenes :
how much light will have been shed on human nature, on the
laws of human existence, on the relations of man to man, on the
essence of human life. Down to this very hour the great writers
of Greece are living powers in the world. Plato’s genius is a
force felt by well-nigh every explorer of moral philosophy.
There are few speculations now written on philosophy in which
Plato or his thoughts do not appear.

Then look at Aristotle, one of the most living names known
to the thinking world. Think of his wonderful range of observa-
tion, the multitude of subjects on which he has thrown out in-
valuable suggestions, his profound insight into metaphysics and
poetry, the marvellous accuracy with which he has explained
the elements and the principles of the political life in which
mankind must live. There is not a statesman in the world who,
unless he has mastered what Aristotle has said, might not learn
from him precious lessons as to how to govern nations. Then
think of his researches into political economy: how many
bankers and merchants might not, with great benefit to them-
selves, ask him to tell them what money is, and how it does its
work.

Pass on next to Thucydides. Read the funeral oration
spoken by Pericles in the second year of the Peloponnesian war.
Were the souls, the deep emotions of a great people under the
most trying circumstances which life could well offer, the noble-
ness of their patriotism, their lofty conceptions of duty, their
resolute determination to give their lives to a great future for

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

13

their country, ever pictured with so much power, with so strong
a force of reality? I have known statesmen of both Houses of
Parliament, distinguished orators themselves, declare that to be
told that their speeches recalled to mind that speech of Pericles,
to have their names mentioned in combination with his, to be
the greatest honor they had ever received.

Is it necessary to speak of the poets of Greece, her tragedi-
ans and her comic writers, their brilliancy, their breadth of feel-
ing, the beauty of their words, their pathos and power of touch-
ing human souls? Above all, is not Homer a poet for all time,
a bard whose power to stir, to touch, the spirits of mankind is
appreciated by English lovers of poetry as truly as it was by the
Greeks when its beautiful sounds first reached their ears ?

But yet more can be said of Greek. A distinguished states-
man, Mr. Goschen, declared in a speech, at the opening of
Bristol College, that he had learnt to think in the study of
the Epistle to the Romans. What higher tribute can be
given to any instrument of education — what so high ? Can a
stronger proof be cited, furnished by actual experience, of the
matchless superiority of Greek for the accomplishment of the
all-important work of education ?

Thus, we see, Greek educates by means of the most power-
ful force which can be made to bear upon the young, the great-
ness of the mind with which they are brought in contact, the
power of the writers and their works. A mind of this order
awakens in those who come under its influence many more
ideas than one of lower degree, expresses them with greater
truth, flashes them into lower depths of the spirit of the recipi-
ent, kindles a more fervent enthusiasm, and calls forth a more
ardent imitation. The society of the best and ablest men is a
most powerful education down to the end of life. It never
ceases to train and influence : and if it moulds elderly men, how
much more will it shape youth ? Where can a boy be initiated
in so many things, catch so many vistas, acquire so valuable and
so fruitful a familiarity with many provinces of manly thought,
as in the study of Homer and Sophocles, Aristotle and Plato,
Demosthenes and Thucydides, and, above all, St. Paul ? These
men have been the founders of civilization ; they have hewn
out the road on which nations and individuals are travelling

14

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

still. The Greek type, in the main, is the form of the thought
of modern Europe. Be it repeated, of all instruments of educa-
tion, the best, the most powerful, the most developing is Greek.

It may be said in reply that science would accomplish most
of the objects here described, whilst, on the other hand, it would
enrich the youth with knowledge highly useful, capable of bring-
ing large reward to the pupil himself and to society. Let it be
freely confessed, scientific knowledge is endowed with great ex-
cellence ; the valuable results which flow from it cannot be con-
tested. But as the instrument of education, it falls into a lower
rank ; if employed alone it would leave portions, and those the
most important, of the youth’s nature absolutely undeveloped.
There would be, against a good teacher of Greek, no gain of ex-
pansion of intellect, whilst the youth would be turned out
empty of countless perceptions, destitute of a multitude of in-
sight into things moral, social, and political, bearing on the most
important elements of human life and of his own being. He
might become what was once thought to be not uncommon,
but now happily, it is believed, unknown, a Senior Wrangler in
the calculus, and a child amongst men.

But there is far more to be said yet of the classics as an in-
strument of education. They are dead languages : they cannot
be learnt by speaking. They demand long toil and severe
study : years are consumed in the mastering of them. What !
exclaim many ardent friends of education at the present day,
are young minds, which are in such sore need of instruction, to
be sentenced to spend years on languages which no one speaks,
which are not wanted for the very purpose for which languages
exist? There might be some sense in toiling to acquire French
and German : they express the thoughts and feelings of civil-
ized nations. Familiarity with them may be rapidly acquired,
and equally rapid returns for the time and labor expended in
their acquisition. Of what use is the knowledge of Greek and
Latin? If it is urged that they contain writings of incalculable
value, why not have them translated into modern languages by
expert scholars, and their contents read and studied at once
without the loss of such long portions of human life? Transla-
tions will at once place the thoughts of a Homer and an Aris-
totle before students: why adopt a method which consumes

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

15

such large quantities of time without any call whatever for the
use of the languages as languages?

The answer to this indignant reproach is easy and decisive.
It is precisely in the labor demanded, the time consumed, the
difficulty encountered, that the supreme value of dead lan-
guages lies. The thoughts of great men, discovered by painful
labor and attention in languages to which sound and ear give
no help, are the fiercest enemies of cram and the most power-
ful developers of the faculties of the human brain. Lessons given
in living languages need call for little thought, still less for
translations. There is little labor spent in mastering their mean-
ing : a shallow perception of the meaning generally suffices for
the learner. The faculties of the mind are feebly summoned
to awake and encounter the struggle of understanding. With an
intelligent teacher and a living language much superficial work
may be done, but it gives no guarantee for bringing out thought
in the pupil. He is but feebly summoned to think.

Wholly otherwise is it with education conducted in a dead
language. The difficulty of reaching the sense of the passages,
the obstacles encountered in the process, the efforts of thought,
of perception, of putting the whole sense together, are the
supreme merits of this unrivalled educational tool. In the
first place the meaning of the unknown word has to be ascer-
tained. The dictionary will not often yield its treasure without
a resistance which sometimes is quite formidable. It presents
several meanings to the searcher : which shall he select as being
the right one ? Much more, how is he to come to the conclusion
that it is the right one? He is thus driven to seek the thought
which the great writer intended to express. He must enter
into the mind that framed the sentence ; he must endeavor
from the context to catch the sense intended : and such a search
places him in intimate communion with the great man whose
work he is studying. He must examine minutely every expres-
sion, and explore its relation to its companions in the sentence.
Thus in order to discover, out of several senses given in the
dictionary, that which is the correct one, the very essence of
the intended thought must be found and grasped. Pass on
from a single sentence to many, and then it will be seen how
intimate is the companionship between the writer and the

i6

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IF.

pupil. In a living language the meaning of the single passage
is quickly but cursorily perceived, the mind of the student
passes on without reflection ; there is no labor, no powerful
exertion of thought, but also little development of the pupil’s
intellect. Small has been the education achieved.

Let us now look at the educating power of this process when
it is carried on upon the words of writers of the highest ability.
And it must not be forgotten that one mighty force must always
be supposed to be present — responsibility to a true teacher, to a
mind ever keenly on the watch to make sure that the meaning,
the full meaning, has been apprehended. We must not think
here of written translations sent up to a tutor or an examiner,
unless they are closely looked into with the pupil at his side.
We must place ourselves in the presence of a viva voce lesson
conducted by a teacher who is master of his profession. The
construing youth has failed to catch the right meaning of the
word, or, worse yet, the sense of the whole passage. The error
is pointed out, the badness of the logic imputed to the great
Greek exhibited. The pupil’s eyes are opened to the fatal
fact that he has not mastered the thought written, that he and
his Thucydides are not at one. The teacher will then put into
action that practice which is the mightiest force of the art
of education. He will tell the baffled pupil nothing of what the
right sense is: he will summon him to correct his own mistakes
himself. He will point out the error involved in his own trans-
lation, he will flash before him the absurd meaning which he
inflicts on the great Greek whom he holds in his hand. He
will stimulate the intellect of the youth to correct his blunder,
to make his author speak sense. This is true education. The
pupil will know that he will have to reproduce in English,
faithfully and accurately, what the deep-thinking author has
written, and that if he fail to grasp it he will have to work out
the full meaning under the acute questioning of his tutor and
in the presence of his school-fellows. It is not easy to conceive
a stronger stimulus for effort than such a consciousness; it is
far more impelling than a mere dread of punishment. The final
result will be that the young student will place himself, by his
own mental effort, in full communion with the great epic. And
what is the meaning of this great fact? It is to live in the

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

17

closest intimacy with a literature of the very highest order in
the world. That literature touches life on all its sides. Its
thoughts, its culture, its power of language, its range, its depth
and intellectual force are of the grandest, the most mind-stirring
that ever were produced. And then, let it not ever be forgotten,
if the epistles of Paul, such as that to the Romans, are brought
into action, religion, too, in its inmost essence will be brought
home to the student’s heart and conscience, whilst his intellect
will be called upon for reasoning of the highest order. This is
emphatically to be taught to think, to be developed as a human
being : this is education.

It may be permitted here, it is hoped, to illustrate the
nature and the power of this grand instrument of education,
dead languages, by the practice of one of the greatest teachers
of our age, Dr. Arnold, as illustrated by his pupil and biogra-
pher, Dean Stanley. At its foundation lay the grand principle
that “ it was not knowledge but the means of getting knowledge
which he had to teach.” His whole method was founded on
the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy.
“As a general rule,” continues the Dean, “he never gave infor-
mation except as a kind of reward for an answer. His explana-
tions were as short as possible, as much as would dispose of the
difficulty and no more. His questions were of a kind to call
the attention of the boys to the real point of every subject, to
disclose to them the exact boundaries of their knowledge and
their ignorance, to train them to understand the principles on
which these facts rested. ‘You come here,’ he was wont to
say, ‘ not to read but to learn how to read, how to think for
yourselves : ’ and thus the greater part of his instructions were
interwoven with the process of their own minds. There was a
constant reference to their thoughts, an acknowledgment that,
as far as their information and their power of reasoning could
take them, they ought to have an opinion of their own; a work-
ing, not for but with the class as if they were equally interested
with himself in making out the meaning of the passage before
them ; a constant endeavor to set them right, either by gradually
helping them on to a true answer, or by making the answers of
the more advanced part of the class serve as a medium through
which his instructions might be communicated to the less

1 8

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

advanced. And then the very scantiness with which he occa-
sionally dealt out his knowledge, whilst it often created an
angry feeling of disappointment, left at the same time an im-
pression that the source from which they drew was unexhausted
and unfathomed, and to all that he did say gave twice its origi-
nal value. Intellectually and morally he felt that the teacher
himself ought to be perpetually learning, aye, as every lesson
went on, and by information extracted from his pupils, to be
constantly above the level of his scholars.” What grander con-
ception of what teaching is was ever formed ?

Most powerful was this method when applied to the writ-
ings of such a man as St. Paul. Here the interest in the mean-
ing to be carried away was intense, both in the teacher and the
taught. Every word was felt to be supremely important ; the
meaning of the sentence was often so hard to find, the jealousy
of the one adopted so intense, the temper to challenge and then
to justify so keen. Where will a force be found equal to this
in power of developing thought in the learners, in opening their
eyes to what seeking for truth means; in training them to
handle every tool for discovering it, in elevating them, when
it is found and proved, to a consciousness that they had won a
treasure of incomparable value?

In such a method viva voce reigned supreme. Teacher,
pupil, and the great Greek lived together in one common act
of thinking. Cram was impossible ; it dared not enter. A few
questions to the point would have covered the unhappy utterer
of it with confusion and shame.

Bonamy Price.

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

IT is becoming matter of common remark that a revolution is
sweeping over the religious thought of Christendom, and
to careful observers the phrase does not appear overstrong.
We find convictions long rooted in the general mind unsettled
and wavering, old doctrines once received without a dream of
asking proof called to the bar of free inquiry, and old questions
reopened which were thought to be closed forever by the creeds.
To many it seems that the fountain-light of all their seeing is
going out in darkness ; a sudden storm has torn them from the
moorings of the past, and they feel themselves helplessly adrift
on the flux and reflux of uncertainty. And yet if we compre-
hend the present situation, there is nothing in it to give us
great alarm. It is plain enough that the prevalent confusion of
religious opinion is owing to the changed( conditions wrought by
the rapid intellectual advance of the age. Generation by gene-
ration we have been moving on into a new intellectual world, a
world of wider horizons and profounder harmonies, where the
old systems of theology look strangely out of place. It is not
so much that they are directly attacked by modern thought, but
they are being undermined or overpassed by its movement. Such
a state of things, however, is far from being unexampled. If to-
day Christian belief is passing through a certain crisis in which
it seems likely to undergo a sensible modification ; and if this is
owing to the fact that its present doctrinal formulations have
become obsolete, or out of harmony with the spirit of the age,
such has been the experience of Christianity in more than one
period of its history. It is true that in history cataclysm is rare,
but progress is constant, and revolution is not so different from
evolution as may be supposed ; for it is but a sudden quicken-

20

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IP.

ing of the ordinary pace of Time, which always “ innovateth
greatly, tho quietly and by degrees scarce to be perceived.”
When the progress of the human mind makes some old opinion
obsolete, it may simply die out, and then we speak of the change
as a silent revolution. When the old opinion is identified with
some existing interest, or associated with some cherished truth,
and therefore clung to and defended, the revolution in which it
is repudiated will be more or less violent. But the violence is
something comparatively unimportant ; the essential thing in
any revolution of opinion is the extent of the change it effects.
Revolution with bayonets and bloodshed may be not so effec-
tively revolutionary as the peaceful and gradual change wrought,
as we say, by lapse of time. Thus while to a superficial view
revolution appears only as a destructive movement, whose sole
aim is the overthrow of an existing order, its truer character is
seen in its constructive tendency ; destruction being but an inci-
dent or a condition of its reconstructive work.

The character and course of what we call modern thought is
only appreciated in its relation to the past which gave it birth.
The great intellectual reaction which set in with the close of the
Crusades grew in the sixteenth century to a declared refusal of
unquestioning acceptance of authoritative teaching and a de-
mand for the certitude of personal insight. Yet the result of
the Reformation was not emancipation from authority, but only
the transfer of the old principle to a new throne. The spirit of
intellectual freedom turned, therefore, to the social and political
fields, to scientific research, and in all departments of secular
life it gradually attained ascendency. Hence the Church of
Christ, whose place is in the van of human progress, began to
fall behind and parted company with the world. In the com-
mon opinion reason became opposed to faith, and freethinker
synonymous with unbeliever. The growing influence of scien-
tific training and the extended application of critical methods
have widened the breach between dogmatic orthodoxy and
secular thought, and fanned the mutual antagonism which has
ranged their respective partisans in hostile camps. On the one
hand are the so-called freethinkers, or rationalists, who look
upon the Christianity of the churches at best with contemptuous
indifference ; who regard all religion as the product of an igno-

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

21

rant and superstitious past, and all its teaching with regard to
supramundane concerns as built on assumptions which can never
be scientifically verified. In their efforts and aspirations toward
a better social state they are pure secularists, and in their atti-
tude toward all that lies beyond the grasp of logic pronounced
agnostics. On the other hand are the zealous upholders of
traditional belief, who deem any modification of received doc-
trine a base betrayal of the faith entrusted to their defence.
Their method of meeting established conclusions of science or
criticism is to “ cling tenaciously to the ancient creeds,” and
denounce four fifths of modern learning as infidelity. They
attack “ rationalism” with ardor, seeming to find irrationalism a
satisfactory alternative, and in their bigoted intolerance would
gladly silence by persecution teachings which they cannot over-
throw by argument.

The blind strife of faith and reason can issue in no victory of
any real worth, and the plain needs of this time are calling to
the front a class of religious teachers who feel that they have a
message to deliver other than any rallying-cry of traditionalists
or infidels, and a reconstructive work to do which those self-
confident disputants neither care to attempt nor would be com-
petent to achieve. It is not to be expected that either of the
opposing parties should do justice to the other. Both are under
the ascendency of antecedent prepossessions, and find no co-
gency in any argument but such as supports their foregone con-
clusions. Such eager advocates cannot realize the point of view
from which an opponent’s position appears strong, nor fairly
appreciate the habit of thought which naturally gives rise to the
opinions and sentiments they condemn. But those who stand
between the party that would destroy everything and the party
that would retain everything unchanged find that the principles
each contends for are really not antagonistic, but complemen-
tary ; and while agreeing with neither they can sympathize with
both. The zeal of the traditionalist may be scarcely according
to knowledge, but of its sincerity and earnestness there can be no
question. He cannot but be deeply stirred, for to him the para-
mount interests of human life, all that give it worth or meaning,
are at stake. The revelation of divine truth, he holds, is made
to faith, and not to reason uninspired and uninstructed from on

22

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

high. And the rationalist claims respect at least for his spirit
of intellectual honesty. He is a seeker of truth, and in that
quest reason is his only guide and stay. He cannot accept any-
thing for true which he holds to be unreasonable, or which offers
itself on condition of first laying fetters on the freedom of
thought. The party of religious progress, seeking to maintain
its continuity and the development of truth for the present out
of the truth of the past, make it their endeavor to bring religious
belief into harmony with the requirements of the scientific mind ;
and they are convinced that it is this ministry of reconciliation
which alone can bring peace in our time. Taking this position,
they are the true radicals, for they would effect such a reforma-
tion of religion as shall adapt it to the wider thought and learn-
ing of the age. And they are the true conservatives, for it is
not' they but this revolutionary time that demands a reconstruc-
tion of religious thought, and to meet such demand is the only
possible conservatism.

The advocates of a rational faith have always kept two aims
in view: first, to seek a profounder philosophy of religion in
which all the great spiritual truths which belief only asserts and
which “ reason” declares beyond the reach of scientific certitude
shall be established on a self-sustaining ground ; so that the
content of faith shall be restored to personal consciousness, not
through any submission to authority, but as the result of a rigor-
ous intellectual process, and the ground-ideas of theology shall
no longer be doctrines believed or disbelieved, but truths that are
known. And the second aim is to simplify the necessary creed,
or rather to return to its original simplicity, by distinguishing
between what is essential to Christian faith and what is inessen-
tial and to be left open to individual opinion. It is with this
latter point this paper is concerned. We are told by both the
extreme parties I have spoken of that what is in question be-
tween them is Christianity and its continuance as the religion
of the civilized world. If we ask, What is Christianity? theolo-
gians answer that it is a body of authoritative dogma, derived
from Scripture or tradition and developed by decrees of coun-
cils, confessions of assemblies, and the writings of eminent
divines. The agnostics reply to a similar effect. “ For my part,”
writes Mr. Frederic Harrison, “ I hold Christianity to be what

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

23

is taught in average churches and chapels to the millions of
professing Christians.” And he adds : “ I say it is a very serious
fact when philosophical defenders of religion begin by repudiat-
ing what is taught in average pulpits.” 1 It may be a serious fact,
— for the average pulpit, — but all religious reform and progress is
attended with such repudiation. But the average pulpit-teaching
of the nineteenth century differs from that of the eighteenth,
and both from that of the seventeenth. In every Christian age
the average pulpit reflects the current phases of religious
thought, and therefore cannot furnish a complete or stable
canon of essential Christianity. Indeed Mr. Harrison might
almost as well say that he takes his political economy from
the average newspaper, for political economy has a certain
affinity to Christianity in that it is a body of principles, more
or less settled, whose apprehension is in the growth of social
experience. However, our point is that both sides agree in
identifying Christianity with a current orthodoxy. The tra-
ditionalists suppose that in maintaining certain received doc-
trines with regard to miracles, inspiration of Scripture, divine
grace, the future state, etc., they are defending Christianity ;
and their opponents will have it that if they upset these doc-
trines they abolish Christianity. To believers in a living and
progressive Christianity it means something very different from
this. “ As many as receive Him, to them he gives power
to become sons of God.” That is Christianity : that power
which eighteen centuries ago quickened a knot of Galilean
fishermen into the Church of Christ, and has ever since been
leavening the life of man and leading the civilization of the
world ; a power whose earliest mission was not to the intellect,
but to the heart and conscience of mankind ; working in after-
times now through priesthoods, institutions, and theologies, and
again working in spite of these things — in spite of sacerdotalism
and doctrinal perversions : and whether working by these instru-
ments or against these hindrances, always a spiritual power,
distinct from systems, dogmas, codes, and creeds. With infi-
nite flexibility it adapts itself in every land to the most diverse
forms of thought, the most opposite ways of life, and changes

1 The Nineteenth Century , Oct. 1877.

24

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

its form in every age to meet the changing phases of social
progress and the new conditions of a new environment. With
equal firmness it refuses to be restricted to any rigid definitions
of theology, or any fixed order of ecclesiastical prescription, and
casts off one after another the unyielding systems of belief or
practice which have outlived their usefulness and become fetters
on its advancing feet. This working of a vital force is what we
read in Christian history, and so we learn a true estimate of the
old beliefs which have come down to us. They were the native
growth of their time. They sprang from a soil adapted to pro-
duce them, and were shaped and trained by the pressure of
manifold contemporary influences. They were vigorous and
helpful to men as long as the mental climate in which they took
rise continued unchanged. But now a change has come over
the growing mind of man, and the old formulas are ceasing to
be natural or adequate expressions of our enlarged, enlightened
thought. Stretch them as we may by new interpretations, they
will not cover the needs of the present. They have had their
day. The Gospel did enter in and dwell there, but as in a
tabernacle, not a fixed abiding-place. The system is for an age;
the Gospel too is for that age, but also for all time. Thus the
Gospel is tolerant of all human forms and indifferent to them
all. It makes use of forms, but it transcends formalism. It has
been the life of one system after another ; it cannot be made
into a system itself. Under eveiy human mechanism it is felt
to be a living power, inspiring equally Augustin and Eckhart
and Pascal and Bunyan and Fox. It is a spirit of light and
life in the mind and heart of humanity, quickening every germ
of good and fostering a continual growth in wisdom and right-
eousness. Like the sunshine it is endlessly diffusive, and ready
to take any color if it may work the better with any human
movement or minister more helpfully to any human need. It
breeds in us ever new aspiration and perpetual effort toward im-
provement. It frees us from servile dependence on tradition
and blind idolatry of the past, for it tells us that the Spirit of
Christ is with us now and always to teach us what is best.

I know that the orthodox theologian will be apt to tell me that
all this is sadly loose and vague, a kind of “ rationalizing” that
is most “ unsound while for his part, Mr. Frederic Harrison,

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

25

who holds Christianity to be what is taught in average churches,
might say in his clever way that he has no concern with “ Neo-
Christianity” and takes no interest in" a fantasia with variations
on the orthodox creed.” Yet evidently if one would know what
Christianity really is, the four gospels are a source of surer in-
formation than the Westminster Confession or the teachings of
the average pulpit. For what is Christianity but the religion
which Jesus himself believed and lived by, and what is ortho-
doxy but conformity to the principles he taught by word and
deed ? The Christian churches have given painful thought to
the theories elaborated by doctors and divines ; it seems almost
terrible to find how completely they have ignored the teachings
of that Life which is the Light of men. One church adores the
Infant in his mother’s arms, nestling to her bosom in smiling
ignorance of all human wants and woes. Another kneels before
the Divine Victim, thorn-crowned, pierced and bleeding, mur-
muring from white lips, “ It is finished.” But the Christ of
Gospel history, the Christ between the cradle and the cross, this
preaching, teaching, absolving, and denouncing Christ, witnessing
to the grand simplicities of a spiritual religion and martyred by
the bigotry of orthodox formalists — it seems but yesterday that
we began to see in him a Man as real and living as ourselves,
began to ponder those sayings of his which are the rock-foun-
dation of all human life, and which, tho the heavens vanish as
a vesture that is folded up, can never lose their power or pass
away.

And when we turn to his teaching we find that none is so
utterly informal and unsystematic ; none so abounds in meta-
phor, hyperbole, and paradox. It glows with a passionate in-
tensity not to be translated into plain prosaic statement.1 It is
not to be formulated in dogmatic propositions, and they who
take it literally — as the Roman takes “ This is my Body” — miss
the inwardness which is the key to its constant meaning. “ The

1 “ And some of you shall they cause to be put to death, but not a hair of your
head shall be injured. . . .” “ If any man come to me and hate not his father

and mother and wife and children, he cannot be my disciple. . . .” “ There is no
man that hath left house or father or mother or children for my sake and the
gospel’s, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses and breth-
ren and sisters and mothers and children and lands.”

26

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

words that I speak unto you,” he tells us, “ they are spirit and
they are life. . . He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

All his sayings are left open, free, and fluent for the living heart
of man to grasp and to interpret. Their unity is no after-result
of our system-making; it is the organic unity of life. All grows
out of one root-truth, the fatherhood of God. That is the fun-
damental fact on which the spiritual world is built. Into this
one word, Father, the whole Gospel contracts and coils itself
up ; from this it expands and issues forth. Man is not God’s
creature merely, but his child ; his nature is one in kind with
the nature of his Father; he is not a finite but an infinite being.
To tell us this the Word was made flesh. Scotus had the deeper
insight when he made the end of the Incarnation to be revela-
tion, and not merely redemption as Aquinas taught. “ I am the
Truth,” Christ said. The God who is Man, the Man who is
God by his single personality reveals humanity as divine and
divinity as human. The historic coming of the Son of God in
the Son of Mary reveals his eternal coming in the primal con-
stitution of humanity, and the eternal sonship of mankind to
God. For in him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,
and he is the one true and perfect man. In so far as Christ is
human, man is divine. In so far as Christ has being, the unity
of God and man is a reality. This is the ground of the Incarna-
tion, and only thus is the Incarnation possible. Only through the
essential homogeneity of all spiritual being can the Son of God
be also Son of Man. Remaining at the ante-Christian point of
view, where always between God and man there is a great gulf
fixed, we may indeed accept the Incarnation as a dogma, but
always it must appear a mystery which we cannot hope to under-
stand. For our obstinate preconception makes it a mystery. If
to our thought divinity contradicts humanity, what can we make
of the person of Christ ? To con some blind and barren phrases
about hypostatic union does not lighten our darkness. The
effort to conceive a being half human, half divine ends in hope-
less perplexity. We go from one nature to the other, as if they
lay side by side, loosely tied together. Now in some word or
action Jesus seems all human; nowin some other all divine.
Sometimes he seems too unearthly for our affections ; some-
times too mortal for our worship. He appears too divine to be

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

27

purely human, and yet too human to be quite divine. We say
we believe in a Saviour Christ both God and Man ; but really
he rather seems to be neither God nor man. This mysterious,
elusive personality escapes our mental grasp. We cannot realize
what we think we believe about him, simply because this Christ
of our dualistic fancy is an unreality and never did exist. What
we have to do is to take our stand upon the Incarnation and
look at God and man from thence. Then this baffling mystery
becomes a living truth for us. Then the words of Christ begin
to have for us reality and power : his words to men, “ Be ye
perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect his words to
God, “ The glory which thou gavest me I have given them.” It
was their grasp of the Incarnation as the ground-fact of their
own being that transformed the hearts and minds of the dis-
ciples, and made them speak of their Lord as the “ First born of
many brethren,” and address their converts as “ partakers of
the divine nature,” and exclaim, “ Beloved, now are we the sons
of God. . . ” “ Because we are sons, God sends the spirit of

his Son into our hearts.”

This revelation of fatherhood and sonship is the light and the
interpreter of every spiritual truth. It asserts the principle
which at once underlies and transcends all ethics. Righteous-
ness is the law of human action ; but once the truth of the di-
vinity of human nature is recognized, righteousness changes
from an outward, regulative law to an inward, constitutive law.
It is the law for will because the law of will, the organic law of
the will’s own nature. To act righteously is not to obey a “ stern
lawgiver it is to act according to our will, to follow our strong-
est inclination. Since the spirit which we are is one in nature
with the Spirit whose we are, the service of God is freedom. In
its obedience to God the spirit is the law unto itself ; and auton-
omy, not anarchy, is freedom. Righteousness then goes deeper
than conduct ; it attaches not to doing, but to being ; it is not
the quality of a man’s action, but of the man. And He who came
to reveal ideal manhood is with us always to make it a reality.
He gives us power to become in fact what we are in truth, sons
of God. Other religions begin with sin and sacrifice for sin ; the
Gospel begins with our inborn capacity of likeness to God, of
being perfect as he is perfect ; “ for he that sanctifieth and they

28

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

that are sanctified are all of one.” It works not through a
law of restraint on human nature, but through a law of develop-
ment in human nature, and calls out its latent energies. Christ
changes all compulsion into spontaneity, for he is come not to
give us a new law, but that we might have life and have it more
abundantly. It is this purpose to realize man’s ideal divinity —
as Christ puts it, “That ye may be the children of your Father
in heaven” — that leads to the profound teaching of Love as the
motive and principle of action. Selfishness may have become a
second nature with us, but he who is born again of the spirit
learns that the true nature of man is to love. In altruism is the
fulfilment of individuality, and he who will lose his life shall find
it. It is at once the principle of personal and of social life.
The world that lives by self-interest may take it that to love
one’s neighbor as one’s self is only a high-wrought fancy, but noth-
ing is more certain than that love is the one binding force of
human society. In so far as society does not disintegrate into
atomism, and civilization does not relapse into barbarism, so far
it is actually held together by the power of love. It is the test
of our discipleship to Christ that we love one another; and the
kingdom of God, the true order of social life on earth, is the
fellowship of his disciples, — of those who learn in their sonship
to one heavenly Father their brotherhood as men.

It is impossible to bring out here the depth and fulness of
these Gospel principles I touch upon ; but let us dwell for a mo-
ment on one other by way of illustration, the truth concerning
sin and forgiveness. If true manhood is revealed in the Sinless
Man, it follows that humanity is by nature righteous. To admit
any doctrine of human depravity is to throw away all hope of
human reformation. The water cannot rise higher than its
source. Moreover there can be no talk of redemption, for there
has been no fall. If it is his nature to sin, the sinner is but ful-
filling the law of his being, and from that law he cannot escape.
But then he is no longer a sinner. We cannot blame him for
being what he was made to be : the worm will do his kind.
Thus it is the fact that we are by nature righteous that makes
the guilt of sin, and brands the sinner as false to the humanity
he bears. Here too is the only ground of his restoration. As-
suming righteousness to be our normal state, or health, Christ

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

29

speaks of sinners as “ the sick,” and always he is hopeful of
their recovery, since the natural forces of the soul work to a cure.
As a sick man the sinner needs, not judge and jury, but wise
treatment and fostering care. And so the Friend of Sinners is
the physician of the soul. His panacea was sympathy. While
by his stainless purity he was lifted up, by his sympathy he
drew all men unto him, inspiring the penitence which alone
makes it possible for one to be forgiven. This was the quicken-
ing power that restored the vision of divine truth to the spirit-
ually blind, strengthened the lame to walk in the paths of right-
eousness, brought the deaf to hear the voice of God and the
dumb to speak his praise. And everywhere he went the self-
condemned and outcast followed him, taking heart anew.
Tho it might seem he sometimes came too late, yet the trust-
ing could believe that none was lost beyond his power to save
who was not only the Healer of the sick but the Resurrection
and the Life to those who were dead in trespasses and sins.

In all this Jesus was but “ working the works of the Father.”
As the Apostle writes : “ God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.” The
Gospel bears this simple message to the personal soul : God is
your Father ; and whenever you do wrong and tell him so, he
will always forgive you, as any father forgives his child. And
that forgiveness is not remission of penalty, but remission of sin,
a cleansing from unrighteousness. It lifts from us the burden
that weighs upon the heart, and breaks down the barrier of self-
reproach and fear between us and the Father, and brings us back
to the accord and union with him which is the peace that passeth
understanding. For his fatherhood goes deeper than our sin.
We may wound him, but we cannot change him. We may
shut our hearts from him ; we cannot shut his heart from us.
What a man thinks or what he does cannot annul the relation
in which he has his being. He can make himself a bad son ; he
cannot unmake his sonship. The guiltiest soul is still the soul
of the Father’s child. And tho we may lose our hold upon
this truth, God never does. Always, if we will, our way is open
to return to him. If we confess our sin, we may trust his eternal
faithfulness and justice to forgive and cleanse. There is nowhere
any sinful soul, fancying it has learned too late to long for purity

30

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

and looking on itself as lost, but may hear if it will listen the
Father’s voice, saying, “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are for-
given thee.”

And Christ who tells his followers, “ I do nothing of my-
self ; the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works,” tells
them besides, “ The works that I do ye shall do also.” When
he said, “ The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins,”
he claimed that power on behalf of all his brethren, and de-
clared it a prerogative of the human nature we derive from our
Father in heaven. The remission of sin was the key of the
heavenly kingdom which was founded on the rock of the divine
humanity revealed in Christ. And that key was given into the
hands of each and all ; that power is ours to cultivate 'and ex-
ercise. We read in the New Testament of men confessing their
sins one to another, and forgiving one another as God had for-
given them ; but such a practice has long been one of the world’s
lost arts. In later times when the faith of many had waxed cold,
the fancy arose among the Christians that Jesus had bestowed
this power of absolution on none but a chosen few and their or-
dained successors, and its exercise degenerated into a sacerdotal
rite. But the teaching of the Master is plain : all his disciples
were to forgive. The uplifting of the sinful was no mere func-
tion of an official class, but the work of a spiritual faculty re-
vealed in the human sons of God. For the washing away a
brother’s evil past every one is a priest ; in this we all are
“workers together with God,” and in so far as we are one
with the spirit of the Son of Man we have a real power to ab-
solve and to redeem from sin.

I must leave these suggestions to indicate a distinction of the
utmost importance to bear in mind, — the distinction, namely,
between the Gospel, as a revelation of spiritual truth, and the
Christian religion, as the embodiment of men’s efforts to appre-
hend that truth. Those efforts, it cannot be denied, have been
far from entirely successful ; indeed it almost seems as tho the his-
tory of dogmatic and institutional Christianity were little else
than a record of aberrations from the profound and simple
truths revealed by Christ. The first century had hardly passed
away before the deep thought of God as Father, the conception
of Christ as the Divine Man in whom the mutual relations of

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

31

Father and children are revealed, began to grow dim before men’s
minds. The heart of the Gospel, the eternal unity of human
spirit with the divine, was lost to the faith ; the Christian con-
sciousness returned to the old falsity of the finitude of man, and
the gulf opened again between humanity and God. With the
rapid decadence of the early Greek theology the development of
Christian thought and life passed to the Latin Church, and for a
thousand years there was taught in the name of Christ a religion
which at every point was the distortion or contradiction of his
Gospel.1 Under the shadow of Roman imperialism God the
Father became the absolute and arbitrary Sovereign of the world,
communicating with it from a distance and indirectly, and fix-
ing the spiritual state of men, apart from all reference to personal
character, according to immutable decrees. Again, since man
was in no sense divine, Christ could be in no sense human. A
purely superhuman being who had suddenly come to earth in
the likeness of men had left it as abruptly without effecting any
spiritual result. As Mediator he disappeared, melting into the
general conception of the divine ; and losing the character of
Saviour, assumed more definitely that of Judge, the Rex tre-
mendi majestatis , until the Virgin Mother had to be specially
invoked to appease the wrath of her Son.

I need not recapitulate the mediaeval errors, which in gross
are familiar to us all, but I would call attention to these two
points : first, this Christian paganism was no mere corruption
of a religion once true to the Gospel revelation. It was a cor-
rupt tree which brought forth that evil fruit : corrupt in root as
in branch. Latin Christianity was the natural ripening of false
principles, and no decay of an original excellence ; not only it
perverted, it never apprehended the religion of Christ. And sec-
ondly, while the Reformation effected the emancipation of the
personal soul from ecclesiastical tyranny, it did not touch the
foundations of Latin theology. However divergent in their ap-
plication— as where the Bible rather than the Church was held to
be the medium of divine communications — the principles of
Protestant and Catholic theologies remained the same. The
ground-ideas of Augustin were retained by Calvin, and Augustin’s

1 Compare Prof. Allen’s admirable paper, “ The Theological Renaissance of
the Nineteenth Century Princeton Review, Nov. 1882.

32

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

God, the foreign despot, reappears under another aspect in
Paley’s retired mechanician. The doctrines of this old theology
are at once unchristian in their genesis and antichristian in their
spirit, if we mean by Christianity the teaching of Christ. Con-
sider for instance the doctrine of original sin, which assumes that
Adam’s fall destroyed the essential relation to God in which hu-
manity was constituted and placed it forever >under a ban ; the
doctrine of the Atonement, in which the suffering of an innocent
victim is supposed to placate the offended Majesty of heaven ;
the doctrine of eternal life as an endless future of sensuous bliss,
rather than a spiritual union with God which may be ours here :
of eternal death as an endless future of sensuous pain, and not
rather the state of unrepented sin ; the doctrine of revelation,
not as a living process adapted to the growing mind of man un-
der the guidance of the Spirit of Truth — a process constantly
going on, as real to-day and more clear and full than ever since
the day of Christ — but rather as a deposit of definite instructions
once for all delivered — so that revelation changes its meaning from
“ a making known” to “ that which has been made known” — and
embodied in a rule of faith, to be guarded against all innovation.

It would indeed be idle to inveigh against the past. The be-
lief of Christendom was shaped amid dark days of violence and
barbarism, and the Church could not but share in the ignorancfe
and superstition of its time. It is well to note with Hallam that
“had religion been more pure, it would have been less perma-
nent, and Christianity has been preserved by means of its cor-
ruptions.” It is wonderful to see how the spirit of the Gospel
always takes the world as it finds it and contrives to make it bet-
ter, bringing out of evils and errors some soul of goodness and
truth. Even Mariolatry and Transubstantiation, the pet abomi-
nations of good Protestants, did service in their day to the cause
of Christ ; for they were the best the time allowed. When the
cloud had received Jesus out of men’s sight, and their crude ma-
terialism, which knew no man save after the flesh, had lost even
the memory of his loving manly heart, it was much to find in
the womanly tenderness of Mary some echo of the lost truth
that God is Love. And it was a true instinct that found expres-
sion in the sensuous ritual of the Mass, for it led men to feel
after the absent, silent God if haply they might find him and

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

33

bring him down from above by the hand of the priest, in visible
presence on the altar ; and so, amid all that was material and
gross, there was kept alive some sense of possible communion
through the living Bread with the Sustainer and Nourisher of
their souls.

As in the natural world some hard integument of husk or
shell conceals and protects a growing germ of life until maturity,
so in the divine training of mankind dogmatic errors may encase
a spiritual truth too pure and lofty for an earthly-minded genera-
tion to receive. But when the time comes, the husk breaks open
and the kernel falls. And the time has come for us to think
ourselves loose from the dry abstractions of traditional doctrine,
and take the living truths of the Gospel into the depth of our
intelligence. We must teach a religion not merely certified as
orthodox by due authority, but one which commends itself as
true and carries with it its own authentication. We must show
it to be the one faith for all time, the same yesterday, to-day, and
forever, not because cast in the mould of any one epoch, or nar-
rowed to the notions of any one sect, but because it meets the
special needs of every age, and in its infinite variety makes itself
all things to all men. “ New occasions teach new duties : ” they
who are for “ standing on the old ways” — forgetting that Time,
the great innovator, never stands still — are likely to be left stand-
ing there alone. We cannot shut our eyes to the great defec-
tion from the orthodox churches which is going on. Traditional
dogma has lost its hold upon this generation, and day by day
the young and active-minded are leaving the home of their early
faith. Between the camp of Reason and that of a Faith which
seems no longer reasonable they are halting irresolute. Whither
shall they go? Many, attracted by the clear-cut, positive tenets
of the “ advanced thinkers,” and 'the definite limitations they as-
sign to human knowledge, will join the ranks of the Materialists
who deny every spiritual verity, or of the Agnostics who tell us
that whether there be any such thing as spirit we cannot know
and need not care. Others will find such bald negations dreary
and repellent, and their hearts will turn to the great historic
Church, which, “ e’en with something of a mother’s mind,” would
narcotize the intellect in order to give rest to weary doubters.

The mute cry of this growing multitude, scattered abroad
3

34

THE PRINCETON REVIEW

as sheep having no shepherd, goes up to accuse them of unfaith-
fulness who are accounted stewards of the mysteries of God. It
is because men are taught to identify the Gospel of Christ with
a theological caricature that they are rejecting the one with the
other ; and our wish to help them must be keener if we feel that
it is by us this offence cometh, and that we owe them reparation.
If a thinking man in these days tells me, whether scornfully or
sadly, that he cannot accept the Christian religion, I take him for
one to whom Christianity has been misrepresented, and I say to
him : That which any rational instinct within you bids you reject
is not the Christianity of Christ. You turn impatiently from the
flimsy “ schemes of salvation” spun out of the theological cob-
webs of the past, and you want to hear no more of Christianity.
But you are overhasty in accepting these doctrinal futilities at
their own valuation, and giving credit to their claims. Go
to the fountain-head ; study Christianity in the life and words
of Christ ; measure the teaching of the past or present by
the great spiritual principles he taught, and you will no longer
confound his Gospel with the misapprehensions and perversions
of it that have obtained among men. More than that, you will
find that as long as man is man the Gospel must remain the com-
plete and final truth for human thought and life. The truth that
Christ revealed of man’s sonship to God is still the highest in-
spiration to human righteousness ; his truth of human brother-
hood is still the highest hope of social progress. It is not possi-
ble to leave these truths behind as the race advances. The re-
ligion which has divine manhood for its principle has always a
true ideal to hold up before men, and an endless power to fasci-
nate and attract. If here and there that religion seem to have
failed, in every case you will find the failure traceable to some
deviation from Christ’s principles, or some loss of his spirit. Yet
while we have his Gospel for our light and guide, the path of a
true development is always open to recall our straying feet. And
if with an imperfect or distorted Christianity the world has made
such progress, what may not be expected when we return to the
pure teaching of the Spirit of Christ himself?

For what we have to do to-day is to bring men back to the
faith of the earliest Church, in which Christ was everything and
Christianity as yet nothing. It was not “ Christianity” that ori-

RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

35

ginated the great revolution which is destined to regenerate the
world ; it was Christ. He was a living, loving man before he
was the centre of any doctrinal system. At the outset the
Christian religion was a binding of men’s hearts to Christ. His
entire following was due to the attraction of his person, drawing
to him the men and women whom he made his own forever.
And ever since the sense of personal union with him has been
the source of all that is purest and strongest in human character.
It is this that made men triumph over martyrdom, and made the
mystery of death bright with a satisfying hope : “ We know not
what we shall be, but we know that we shall be like him, for
we shall see him as he is.” Christianity is Christ himself. Its
power in the world has been the power of a perfect human char-
acter to mould the sons of men into the image of the Son of God.
That- power then is with us now. What he was, he is. As he
loved and helped men once, he loves and helps them still. He
is still the Revealer of the Father, the Redeemer of the sinful,
the Giver of eternal life. He has not faded into a reminiscence ;
he is not lost to us in the dim perspective of history ; for we
know him no more after the flesh. Let our Christianity be faith
in Christ, and love of Christ, and allegiance to Christ, and he
will lead us out of the darkness that shadows our time into the
marvellous light of his kingdom — the household and Family of
God which knows no sovereign but the Father, no citizenship
but brotherhood, no law but love.

Francis A. Henry.

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL
CHARACTER.

IN one of the suggestive and curiously learned notes with
which Gibbon relieves and lights up the stately and some-
what sombre pages of his great work, he justly observes, “There
is room for a very interesting work which should lay open the
connection between the languages and manners of nations.” It
is, I think, strange that the interesting work which the great
historian thus foreshadowed should be to-day a literary desidera-
tum : especially strange when we recollect that within the last
quarter of a century the press has teemed with many a volume
on kindred subjects in connection with the philosophy and
science of language : when Grimm, Max Muller, Trench, Far-
rar, and others have shown how fascinating philological studies
can be made when treated in a large and philosophic spirit.
True, the task would require for its adequate treatment no or-
dinary intellectual equipment. The writer should be at once
historian, philologist, and philosopher ; one not only “ in voices
well divulged,” but who, like Ulysses of old, had studied
the manners and the customs of many nations. Indeed the
work would not have been unworthy of the unique powers of
the great historian who suggested it. It would have afforded
ample play for his vast and varied historical lore, his large philo-
logical learning (so much in advance of his time), and his keen
philosophic insight. The writer of the present paper is well
aware that such a work is quite beyond his limited powers. His
be the humble office of putting up, as it were, a finger-post to
indicate the direction of the attractive path of research on
which he cannot hope to travel very far himself.

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 37

It were easy to cite innumerable passages from ancient and
modern writers, from the Roman Seneca to the American Math-
ews, pointing to the intimate connection between the speech
and manners of a people. “ There is indeed,” as the latter
writer truly says, “ a physiognomy in speech as well as in the

face As with individuals, so with nations ; every race

has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and
opinions, its legislation, its manners, its customs, its modes of
religious worship : and the expression of all these is found in its
speech."

But seeing that our field of inquiry is so vast, — the spoken
and written language of a people, — the pertinent question at once
presents itself, In what part of this wide field of language shall
we look for these characteristic words? From what lips are we
most likely to hear the peculiar phrases which best mirror the
mind and manners of a people, and bear most clearly the im-
press of its habits of thought, its mental and moral idiosyncra-
sies— of those qualities, in fact, which differentiate the nation ?
Not in state papers ; not in studied orations ; not in the works
of learned authors. No; the typical words and phrases with
which we are concerned are those which are heard in the street,
the market or the shop : in the places where the people “ most
do congregate.” It is the familiar household words of a people,
their natural utterances in their unrestrained social intercourse —
it is, in short, the common language of the common people — which
furnishes the key to unlock the secrets of the national
character.

These characteristic or typical words may conveniently be
grouped under different heads.

The first group I would style, for lack of a better term, the
dominant or salient words of the national vocabulary. These
dominant words are the words on everybody’s lips : words which
are ever rising to the surface of the stream of common conver-
sation mark the course of the general current of the nation’s
thoughts.

Let us take our first illustration from our cousins across the
line. Brother Jonathan is nothing if he is not “go-ahead.” It
is his favorite phrase ; the epithet by which foreign nations most

33

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IF.

frequently express their admiration for the energetic qualities of
the American people.

Landed for the first time at New York or Boston, when
John Bull hears the words “ Go ahead ” as he enters the omnibus
which takes him to his hotel, he may probably contrast the
phrase with the familiar “All right ” which on such an occasion
he would have heard at home. But he hardly realizes at once
the fact that these two common expressions, “ go ahead ” and
“ all right,” embody, as Dickens observes, the leading character-
istics of the two closely connected yet distinct branches of the
Anglo-Saxon family.

The charming American writer Mathews thinks that Dick-
ens has somewhat exaggerated in dealing with these two expres-
sions as typical of the two peoples. But what does he himself
say? “The phrases are, on the whole, vivid miniatures of John
Bull and his restless brother — the latter of whom sits on the
safety-valve that he may travel faster, pours oil and resin into
the steam-furnaces, leaps from the cars before they have entered
the depot, and who would hardly object to being fired off from
a cannon or in a bombshell, provided there were one chance in
twenty of getting safe to the end of his journey.” We could
hardly have a stronger picture of the reckless impetuosity of the
true American than that contained in the preceding extract from
one of their ablest writers. As this reckless impetuosity is em-
bodied in the phrase “ go ahead,” so the English “ all right ”
embodies admirably the slow, cautious, it may be stolid, con-
servatism of John Bull. Speed is the paramount idea with the
Yankee ; safety, with the Englishman.

The history of the phrase is instructive. As first pro-
pounded by the immortal Crockett, “ Be sure you are right ;
then go ahead,” the maxim was admirable. The sternest mor-
alist could take no exception to it. But in this shape it was too
long and too circumspect for common use, and it soon was
lopped of its troublesome morality and “ whittled down ” (to
use an Americanism) to its present compendious and handy
proportions.

The phrase “ go ahead ” is, as we have said, essentially
American both in its origin and use ; but the English have a very

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. S9

common phrase expressing a very similar mental condition —
“gettingon.” “ Getting on” is for the Englishman what “go
ahead ” is for the American. The frequent use of “ getting
on ” in ordinary English conversation is an evidence of the
earnest desire of the ordinary Englishman to outstrip his neigh-
bor in the race and struggle for place, power, and pelf. He is
never satisfied with the position he occupies, but, like the un-
happy youth in Longfellow’s poem, he must ever mount higher
and higher. Other European nations are not so much plagued
with this restless fever as the English ; while to the Asiatic the
mental condition is utterly strange, if not unintelligible.
“ Why,” asks the Hindoo, “ should a man strive to ‘ get on ’ ?”
He is what he is by the divine arrangement, and why wish it
otherwise ? The self-satisfied Englishman may look with con-
tempt upon the Hindoo for his indolent acquiescence with his
lot ; but John Bull’s happiness would probably not be decreased
if he were content to learn from the despised Hindoo the lesson
of contentment with his lot. The United States has been
with some justice styled the land of the “almighty dollar.”
And assuredly the way in which the sound of the words “ dol-
lars,” “ dollars ” is ceaselessly dinned into one’s ears plainly
shows the important part which the “ dollar” plays in the life of
the American people. In the United States generally, our Eng-
lish word “ servant ” is entirely discarded ; instead of it the word
“ help” is used. The change is significant : the former implies,
while the latter ignores, a difference of social rank between em-
ployer and employed. The former breathes the spirit of the
old feudal days ; the latter, the spirit of modern democratic lib-
erty and equality. Again, the words “ gentleman” and “ lady”
have both of them, as we might a priori anticipate, a much
greater latitude of meaning in the United States than in Eng-
land. In the latter country these words are in ordinary par-
lance restricted to the so-called upper classes of society and
always imply a certain amount of culture and refinement, or, as
we should now say, of “ sweetness and light in the former, the
words as used by the masses are emptied of any such imperti-
nent class distinctions, and one may hear the negro who black-
ens boots at your hotel spoken of as “ the gentleman who does

40

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

the boots,” while his wife the laundress would be hurt if she
were not referred to as “ the lady who does the washing.”

A correspondent of a Western paper describes New York as
being better characterized by intenseness than by any other
word. “You see it,” he writes, “ in everything: in business,
in social life, in pastimes, at the stock board, in the streets — every-
where. The effect of this is seen in the language of the people.
If a man speaks, he must express what he has to say in the
fewest possible words. Hence the curt phrases, the short-cuts
in trains of thought which this pressure on one’s time has
brought into use. All is spoken for short." How many words
would an Englishman take to describe what the American calls
simply the “ telescoping” of a train ?

The words “ reckon,” “ calculate,” “ guess,” “ put up,”
“ balance,” are among the salient or dominant words which
every Englishman must at once remark from their constant use in
the most unexpected and amusing ways in the United States.
They all indicate very unequivocally the commercial and busi-
ness character of the nation.

A single word, it has been said, will often reveal more of the
character of a people than the history of a campaign. Such a
word is the Russian word pikas. This word travellers tell us
is constantly on the lips of the Russian peasant. It means it is
ordered , and the constant and universal use of the word by the
Russian peasant argues his blind and slavish submission to
authority. It may indeed be that in these latter days, when
nihilism is rampant in Russia, and when there would seem to
be a universal uprising of the masses against all constituted au-
thority, the word pikas may not be so frequently on the lips of
the Russian as it used to be. Nihilism is the natural reaction
from a state of “ pikasism.”

I may here call attention to the very significant fact that the
Russian language is said to have no words to express the ideas
of “ justice,” “ liberty,” or “ honor.” Does not the absence of
these three words, taken in connection with the constant pres-
ence of the word pikas , throw a flood of light upon the moral,
social, and political condition of the Russian people?

In modern Greece the word skopos plays the same part

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 41

that pikas does in Russia. It is the dominant word in the
language. “ There is everywhere and in all things,” writes “ The
Roving Englishman,” “ the same want of private honesty and
of public faith. The best men are liars and robbers. They rob
as a provision for their families ; they rob as a duty and a right
and perquisite of office.” “ There is everywhere that infernal
word skopos 1 (meaning want of faith). No man has the smallest
belief in himself or in any one else ; words cease altogether to
be symbols of things.”

There is perhaps no single word which we could find more
characteristic of the English nation than the simple and untrans-
latable Saxon word “ home.” It gives us the key-note of the
English mind and tells of a people who prize, above and beyond
all other blessings, the domestic virtues, family ties, and fireside
enjoyments. In youth and age alike the word “ home” brings
with it to the Englishman the most delightful and hallowed as-
sociations. To him it is as one of our most English poets sings :

“ The resort of love and joy,

Of peace and plenty, when supporting and supported,

Polished friends and dear relations, mingle into bliss.”

The domestic side of the English character is shown again in
the Saxon words “ husband” and “ wife” — words which serve also,
as Trench observes, to remind us of domestic duties. “ What is
husband (house-band) but the band or bond of the house, who
binds and keeps the family together ? And what is wife but the
title of her who is engaged in the web and the woof, the most
ordinary branch of wifely employment when the language was
forming?”

“ Gentleman” is a typical English word. Long may it be so !
Thackeray truly says : “ Wherever the English language is
spoken, there is no man who does not feel and understand and
use the noble word ‘gentleman.’ ” And he adds that there is no
one who better teaches what a gentleman should be than our Eng-
lish Addison. The French have long borrowed the word from
us, and of late years the Germans are endeavoring to naturalize
it in their language.

1 It is not easy to connect the signification of the modern Greek word skopos
with the classical skopos, which means a watchman — a scout ; a mask.

42

THE PRINCE T ON RE VIE W.

“ Duty” is a word which the English are fond of using, and
one which they may be proud to claim as a characteristic one.
Duty is the pole-star by which the Englishman from his youth is
instructed to direct his conduct : the motive which is most con-
stantly urged to animate his courage and inspire his efforts.
The most stirring appeal probably ever addressed to English
hearts was the famous watchword which Nelson passed like an
electric shock through the fleet before the battle of Aboukir:
“ England expects that every man this day will do his duty.”
And one of the most touching, simple, and English epitaphs
ever graven on the tombstone of a hero was that penned for
himself by one of England’s noblest sons: “ Here lies Sir Henry
Lawrence, who tried to do his duty.”

“ Fair play” and “ pluck” are homely Saxon words, racy of
the soil, and eminently characteristic of some of the most ster-
ling qualities of the Englishman. A French military writer says :
“ The Saxon word ‘ pluck ’ expresses admirably the peculiar
characteristic of the indomitable courage of the British soldier.
It means courage, but it means courage united to firmness, to
sang-froid, to a steady resolution which never falters. It is in
fact courage guided by duty and controlled by reason.” What
“pluck” is for the English, dan is for the French. And
the difference between the two words symbolizes the character
of the two nations. Pluck implies “ steady endurance
dlan , brilliant dash. Elan is usually limited to displays
of courage on the field of battle ; whereas pluck may be exhib-
ited in innumerable and diverse fields — by the prize-fighter Tom
Sayers, as with one arm broken he fights on against his giant
adversary, as well as by our gallant countrymen during the In-
dian Mutiny,' of whom Montalembert wrote that, tho alone in
many cases and surrounded by fiends thirsting for their lives,
“ not one of them turned pale in presence of his butchers.”
Gloire is the parent of dlan; while stern “ duty” is the father
of “ pluck.”

The common English saying, “ Fair play is a jewel,” em-
bodies a national sentiment — a sentiment acted upon generally,
whether in international affairs or in the ring. So far as the prize-
ring tends to foster a love of “ fair play,” so far we must admit

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 43

there is a redeeming feature in a practice otherwise altogether
brutal and degrading.

While the Saxon words which I have enumerated, “ home,”
“ duty,” “ gentleman,” “ fair play,” and “ pluck,” continue to
hold the place which they now hold in general estimation in
England, while they are the verba et voces , the spells by which
to quicken the hearts and stir the pulses of his fellow-country-
men, so long no Englishman need despair of the future of his
country.

The genial and whole-souled hospitality of Ireland, which is
said to make a friend of every visitor, finds fitting expression in
the intensity of the Irish welcome, “ Cead mille a failthe.”
Speaking of the Irish twenty-two years ago, Emerson Tennent,
himself an Irishman, wrote : “ A great man, now no more, — the
late Sir Robert Peel, — once said to me that in Ireland, instead of
aiming at what was best and most excellent, everything in the
eyes of the people was ‘ good enough,’ ‘ well enough,’ or ‘ time
enough.’ ” “ In these expressions,” he adds, “ we have an evi-

dence of that lazy contentment, that listless indifference to their
lot, which characterizes the lower classes of Irish in their own
country." The last four words are a very necessary qualification
to the above statement, for it is matter of daily experience
both in this country and in the United States that Irishmen
transplanted to America cast off the indolence which marked
them at home, and often by their industry and intelligence win
honorable positions in the foremost ranks of their adopted coun-
try. They practically contradict the hackneyed school-boy
quotation, “ Ccelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare cur-
runt a fact which ought to encourage British statesmen in
promoting schemes for Irish emigration. During the last few
years several new words have found their way into the Irish na-
tional vocabulary. “ No rent,” “ Land League,” “ home rule,”
have taken the place of “ good enough” and “ well enough,” and
indicate a terrible awakening from their former state of lethargy ;
a change which finds practical expression in the terrible catalogue
of murders, assassinations, and agrarian outrages with which
for many months we have-been so painfully familiar. Just now
there would seem to be a faint gleam of light on Ireland’s dark

44

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

and stormy horizon. Let us hope that there is still enough of
patience and sound sense in Ireland, enough of justice and
statesmanship in England, to find a remedy for a condition of
things which no true Englishman or Irishman can contemplate
without grief and shame. Those who know the Irish best must
admit that they are eminently a devout and religious people.
The phrase “ God be praised,” or “ God’s will be done,” with
which the Irish peasant usually winds up his tale of misery, is
in itself proof of this deep-seated religious instinct of the people.

“ It is said,” writes Mathews, “ the word oftenest on a
Frenchman’s lips is la gloire, and next to that perhaps bril-
lant, brillant. The utility of a feat or achievement in litera-
ture or science, in war or politics, surgery or mechanics, is of
little moment in his eyes unless it also dazzles and excites
surprise. Sir Astley Cooper, the great British surgeon, when
visiting the French capital, was asked by the surgeon en chef
of the Empire how often he had performed some surgical opera-
tion requiring a rare union of dexterity and nerve. He replied
that he had performed thirteen times. “ Ah ! but, monsieur, I
have performed him one hundred and sixty times ! How
many times do you save life?” continued the curious Frenchman.
“ I,” said the Englishman, “ saved eleven out of thirteen. How
many did you save out of one hundred and sixty ?” “ Ah,

monsieur, I lose dem all ; but the operation was very brillant."

The French have been for centuries the masters of the
science of gastronomy, and the proof of this is seen in the
fact that the English and most other modern nations have bor-
rowed from them the names of all save the most ordinary dishes
which they put upon their tables, and in polite society the
present word menu has nearly superseded our vulgar Saxon
“ bill of fare.”

A clever French-Canadian litterateur has pointed out some
of the peculiar phrases in common use among his countrymen
which bespeak their Norman and maritime origin. They em-
bark and disembark from their wagons ; veer about on all occa-
sions, even in church. Instead of going to dress, “ Ils vont se
gr£er,” or to rig themselves out. They \vash their butin , not their
Huge. The last word, butin , he tells us, is still in vogue in

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 45

Normandy (the cunabula of the French-Canadian), and recalls
the freebooting tastes, as the other terms do the sea-going
habits, of the handsomer Norman piratical ancestors of our
peaceful, unmaritime French-Canadians.

Again, our fellow-subjects in the Province of Quebec are emi-
nently religious. Indeed it may well be questioned if the Pope
has in any part of the globe more faithful and devout followers
than the ‘descendants of the French on the banks of the St.
Lawrence. The proof of this is their passion for giving the
names of saints not only to their children but to their towns
and villages. Some of the saints who have thus been made
to stand sponsors for places in Lower Canada have not, I fear,
been quite regularly canonized. For example, we find among
the French habitants the English name “ Somerset” is changed
into Saint Morriset, and “Stanfold” into “Saint Fol" — Saint
Fool !

The next group or class of words which I shall cite as char-
acteristic of a nation are those which are conspicuous by their
absence from the language. In every language there will be
found a greater or lesser number of imported or foreign words
for which the importing language has no equivalent. The exact
ideas which these foreign words embody are not in fact natural
or indigenous to the nation importing them ; and when they do
introduce the ideas, they generally at the same time introduce
the symbols of these ideas. Sometimes these foreign words be-
come after a time naturalized, and pass muster as natives “ to the
manner born.” Sometimes, however, they refuse to change their
character and preserve to the last their alien aspect. These
words are doubly significant ; they point out ideas which are
either wanting altogether, or only imperfectly conceived in one
country and which in the other are clearly recognized and
sharply defined.

The English language, which is essentially composite in its
character, borrows freely from almost every other. Like Augus-
tus of old, she orders up all the world to be taxed “ There is
scarce a tongue on the globe,” says a writer from whom I have
already freely quoted, “ which the absorbing genius of the Anglo-
Saxon has not laid under contribution to enrich the exchequer

46

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV

of her all-conquering speech.” “To say nothing of the Greek,
Latin, and French, which enter so largely into the woof of our
tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Welsh, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American
Indian dialects for many words which we cannot do without.”

Ever since the days of Louis Quatorze, France has been to
a large extent the arbiter elegantiarum , “ the master of ceremo-
nies,” for the rest of Europe. England, in common with the
rest of Christendom, has copied her fashions and adopted her
language, so far as it relates to the usages and customs of re-
fined and fashionable society. Bal, etiquette , mode , convenance,
bon-ton, haut-ton, savoir faire, prestige , blast!, esprit , jeu d' esprit,
betisc, sottise, naivete ', bouderies , espicglerie, sentiment, galanterie,1
are all terms more or less incorporated into our language, and
many of which indicate peculiarities of manner and temper which
the French alone recognize and define. It will be noticed that
a large proportion of the words enumerated have special refer-
ence to conversation ; a fact which indicates, as Madame de
Stael has observed, that “ we are compelled to borrow from these
‘ past masters in the art of conversation ’ the terms they employ
in reference to that art.”

In addition to these terms, we have also borrowed from the
French the names of many of the games of cards or dice in which
gamblers delight, altho it must be admitted that this depart-
ment of our vocabulary has of late been largely enriched by our
cousins across the lines.

There is another imported French word which we may feel
thankful to say expresses an idea not indigenous to English soil:
the word espionage — a word invented, as Dr. Channing tells us,
to designate the infernal machine which Napoleon the First
established Gnder his unprincipled chief of police for the pur-
pose of consolidating his despotism.

This would seem a natural place to refer to the first intrusion
of French or Norman words into our English language, during
the two centuries which immediately followed the Conquest.

1 M. Suard, in his essay. on epistolary style prefixed to the letters of Mine, de
Sevigne, says that the words sentiment and galanterie, which express very dis-
tinct ideas to a Frenchman, cannot be translated into Latin, Italian, or English.

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 47

The readers of “ Ivanhoe” will remember the dialogue between
the swine-herd Gurth and Wamba the jester, in which the mot-
ley fool moralizes sadly on the fact that the ox and the swine
and other animals retain their old Saxon names while in the field
and in care of the Saxon bondsman, but become beef, pork, veal
— Norman words — when they are placed on the tables of their
Norman masters. Again, all titles of rank, as prince, duke, mar-
quis, are Norman, while hind, churl, and boor are Saxon. The
palaces and castles are Norman, but house, home, hearth, are
Saxon. Plain evidence here that the Normans were the con-
querors and the Saxons the conquered. I must not, however,
dwell on this subject, deeply interesting as it is, inasmuch as it
relates rather to the connection between language and history
than between language and manners. For it is emphatically
true that the history of a people, as well as its manners, is writ-
ten in its language.

As we have borrowed thus freely from the French, they in
turn have imported many representative Saxon words for which
their language has no equivalents. Home, comfort, gentleman,
club, partner, sport, jockey, steeple-chase, punch, and beefsteak,
maybe mentioned as among the most noticeable of these Saxon
interlopers. Un vrai gentleman is now a colloquial expression
in France, and un punch , le sport le box , have recently been in-
troduced simultaneously with the things they represent. Un
meeting and il self-government are expressions not uncommon
in French newspapers. “ Nursery,” says a writer in the Pall
Mall Gazette , “is a word which has no French equivalent,
because the thing has no existence there. A Frenchman,
translating an English work of travels, was obliged to paraphrase
nursery as “a room specially appropriated to the children under
the charge of head-nurses .” The English words imported into
the French language seem somehow strange and awkward in
their French companionship, and for the most part they sullenly
refuse to be naturalized.

It is mentioned by Mathews as highly significant of the
French character that they have no word equivalent to “ listener.”
Celui qui ccoute can only be regarded, he says, as an awkward
paraphrase. The inference is irresistible : they are a nation

43

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

of talkers. They rarely indulge in what Sydney Smith once
styled “ flashes of eloquent silence,” and thus “ the Frenchman,
careless whether he is listened to or not, has never recognized
the fact that his language has no name for the person to
whom he chatters.”

Again, it has often been quoted as an instance of the poverty
of the French language that the French had but one word for
love and apply it indifferently to sweethearts and sweetmeats.
In England we carefully distinguish between loving and liking,
and the French word amour is always taken in malain partem.

The unartistic English have been content to borrow from the
aesthetic and artistic Italians many of the Italian words which
are elsewhere cited as characteristics of their natural tastes :
such as gusto , chiara-oscuro, cicerone, virtuoso, dilettante. A
change, however, in the artistic feelings and tastes of the Eng-
lish people is marked by the recent introduction into, and fre-
quent use in, England of the word “ aesthetic.”

“ One of the most formidable obstacles,” says Mathews,
“ which Christian missionaries have encountered in teaching the
doctrines and precepts of the gospel to the heathen has been
the absence from their language of a spiritual and ethical
nomenclature.” For the absence of the nomenclature argues
the absence of any just or adequate ideas on matters spiritual
or moral. The Zulus, according to Bishop Colenso, have an
extraordinary pe7ichant for carrion in a certain stage of decom-
position, “ when it has worms in it, but not too many.” Carrion
in this delectable state is called ubomi. No other word in the
Zulu language excites such strong emotions, and the phrase
“ to eat ubomi" has become with them the synonym for the
highest conceivable felicity, and the unhappy missionary, with
no doubt a terrible feeling of the bathos he was guilty of, could
bethink him of no other word than ubomi to picture to the
Zulu mind the infinite beatitudes of heaven.

The poverty of the languages of savage nations in relation to
spiritual and abstract subjects has been noted. Sometimes their
verbal poverty is of a kind of which they need not feel ashamed.
For example, it is said that the language of the American
Indians (the same is said of the Gaelic) has no words for swear-

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 49

ing. Our red man has borrowed his oaths as well as many of
his other vices from his civilized and Christian white brother.
In connection with this fact, the author of “ Ocean to Ocean”
remarks that “ reverence is a strong trait in the Indian charac-
ter in his uncivilized state and he pertinently asks, “ Is not his
dignity of speech and manner connected with this veneration of
the Deity?”

The next group or class of character-words are those which
express the national ideal of happiness ; the moral qualities
which a nation likes or dislikes ; the actions which they praise
or blame. Take the words nirvana and ubomi : what an amaz-
ing contrast, wide as the poles asunder, between the ideas
signified ! The one the summum bonum of the Buddhist ; the
other the summum bonum of the Zulu. What a moral and in-
tellectual gulf between the subtle, metaphysical Hindoo and
the Zulu epicure in carrion ! How perfectly is this difference
brought out in the two expressions nirvana and ubomi !

A ray of light from a distant star put to the question by the
spectroscope tells us the physical constituents of the heavenly
body from which it parted possibly centuries ago. So a single
word rightly analyzed may spread out before our eyes, as in a
spectrum, the inner moral constituents of the people who used
it possibly ages before.

The words which embody the common national ideal of hap-
piness or enjoyment are, I have stated, specially typical of their
inner life. Contrast, for example, the household Saxon words
“fun” and “ sport” with the dolce far nicnte of the Italian and
the kief of the Turk. How vast the interval between the
Englishman’s ideal of enjoyment and the Turk’s! The English
words “ fun” and “ sport” both imply physical activity ; in the
former there is a strong element of boisterous, heart-easing mirth,
and in the latter a possibility of physical danger : while the
Italian and Turkish words indicate a perfectly passive physical
condition, accompanied possibly in the former with a contem-
plative enjoyment of the beauties of nature or art, and in the
latter with mere dreamy, animal, sensuous bliss. The word
kief, according to the Christian Hadji, Major Burton, an ex-
cellent authority on such a point, “ is the very basis of the Turk-
4

5°

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

ish language and one must reside many years among the
Turks before being able to understand its full significance.

“ The Turks say ‘ Comment va le kief ? ’ as the French, ‘ Comment
va la sante ? ’ ‘ Etes-vous en kief ? ’ as we say ‘ Are you in good

humor? ’ To smoke his hookah, to contemplate a lovely land-
scape, to recline upon a sofa while his eyes follow the move-
ments of a graceful dancing-girl: all this constitutes the kief
of the Turk.” Have we not in this one word an epitome of
Eastern life ?

Contrast again the English word “ comfort” with the French
plaisir'. The former is a true Saxon word which defies trans-
lation, and which both the Germans and the French have bor-
rowed from us. Pleasure ( plaisir ) is fleeting, while comfort is
lasting. Pain follows pleasure, and pleasure is mixed with alloy.
But comfort is that modest form of pleasure which seems to be
exempt from these drawbacks, being at once desirable and with-
out alloy — pleasure, in fact, without the amari aliquid which
generally attends it. Comfort is the aim of the Englishman,
while pleasure is the idol of the French. Lastly, comfort is
usually found at home ; pleasure is sought abroad. Does not
the difference in these two words point to an essential distinc-
tion between the sober, domestic, home-loving Englishman and
the gay Frenchman who lives in and for society?

A Parisian being asked why he did not marry a lady at whose
house he spent most of his time and in whose society he seemed
to take great pleasure, answered that if he married her he should
not know where to pass his evenings.

When an Englishman wishes to commend a friend, he prob-
ably says “ He is a good man” or a “ worthy fellow.” In similar
circumstances a Frenchman would say “ C’est un brave homme;"'
a Yankee, “ He is a smart man and an Italian, “ Un buon di-
avolo.” Each mentions the quality he most esteems. Is it not
plain that moral worth stands highest with the English, courage
with the French, and “smartness,” a quality closely akin to dis-
honesty, with the Yankee? Among the all-conquering Romans
of the Republic, virtus, manliness or courage, was the quality
most prized, as arete , meaning the same thing, was among
the Greeks. In both nations, in their heroic days, courage

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 5 1

was the virtue par excellence , including as it were all others.
Gibbon tells us how this quality of courage declined among the
Romans under the emperors ; and we have already seen how
among their later descendants the modern derivation of virtus —
virtuoso — is utterly emptied of any element of manliness.

In this connection I may quote the remark of Gibbon in his
sketch of the military establishment of the Roman emperors.
After describing the steps taken to secure the valor ( virtus ) of
the troops, he adds: “And yet so sensible were the Romans of
the imperfections of valor without skill and practice, that in
their language the name of an army, exercitus, was borrowed
from the word which signified exercise.” It is in connection
with this word that Gibbon makes the note that I have else-
where cited as the text for the present paper.

There is no more infallible index of the morals of a people
than the terms they usually employ in speaking of good and
bad actions or good and bad men. When bad names are
always given to bad things, and good names to good things ;
when language is not used to gloss over vice but to condemn
it, we may feel assured that the morals of the people are gener-
ally sound. But if, on the contrary, shameful and dishonorable
things are called by honorable names; if in the common con-
versation of the people bad men and bad actions are spoken of,
not in terms of strong and earnest disapprobation, but in deli-
cate and dainty terms of allowance or approval ; if men system-
atically “ put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter,” it requires
no prophet to tell us that that nation has lost its moral sense
and is already far gone in corruption and depravity.

When in France, for example, we find a blackleg called a
chevalier d'industrie ; the most degraded woman, a fille de
joie ; a libertine, homme de bonnes fortunes ; a breach of the
marriage-vow, an inconsequence ; an adulterous intrigue, a liai-
son or galanterie : when the word roud has ceased to be a
term of disgrace and is transformed into a term of friend-
ship, can we doubt that the moral sense of the nation which
has learned so to pervert language has been seared, and that
they have practically ceased to regard the distinction between
right and wrong ? When this is the common language of

52

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IK

society we cannot be surprised to find that men become hypo-
crites of vice rather than of virtue, and that it was actually said
of one of the chartered libertines of the age of Louis Quatorze,
“ II est fanfaron de vices qu’il n’a pas” (He affects vices which
he has not).

The moral and social condition of the Hungarians is indi-
cated in the word by which they describe robbers — “ the poor
people and the standard of morality among the Italians in
the time of the Borgias, by their speaking of the most deadly
poison as the “ powder of succession” — significant of its use in
hastening the exit of those who stood in the path of the im-
patient heir.

Montaigne says, with truth, that this abuse of language is
one of the most powerful instruments of vice. He adds that as
society advances this engine of evil does not lose its power.
“ On the prevention of this abuse or the sustaining of a high
tone of moral feeling by giving harsh names to harsh deeds,
the preservation of the boundaries between virtue and vice
mainly depends.”

Well might the eloquent South in one of his famous ser-
mons descant upon “ The Fatal Imposture and Force of
Words.” “Men conceit,” to quote Bacon’s apothegm, “ that
their reason hath the mastery over their words, but it happens
too that words react and influence the understanding. Words
as a Tartar bow do shoot back upon the intellect of the wisest
and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”

Trench quotes a passage from Coleridge in which he illus-
trates by a noble simile the tremendous power of words over the
intellect of man. “ They are,” he says, “ the wheels of the in-
tellect, but they are such wheels as Ezekiel saw in the vision of
God as he sat among the captives by the river of Cheba.
Whithersoever the spirit was to go the wheels went, and thither
was their spirit to go, for the spirit of the living creatures was
in the wheels also.” It is not, then, too much to say that national
language is not merely the mirror which reflects, but in some
sort the mould which forms, the national character. The lan-
guage of a people has been called “ a moral barometer that
indicates and marks the rise and fall of a nation’s life.” It is

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 53

indeed a very sensitive barometer, and generally gives the first
external indication of the declining morality of a people. But
it is not merely a passive index of corruption ; it becomes in
time an active agent in the work. For as the corrupt manners
corrupt the language, so the corrupt language still further cor-
rupts the manners : and thus the manners and the language
mutually act and react upon each other.

The English people have reason to congratulate themselves
that this moral abuse of words is not general with them. The
blunt and honest Anglo-Saxon is accustomed to call a spade a
spade. Some exceptions to this rule there may be. But they
are exceptions. The name given to a duel, an “ affair of honor,”
may be mentioned as one. There cannot, I think, be a question
that this high-sounding title contributed to make fashionable in
England a custom now happily exploded as being as barbarous
and irrational as the mediaeval ordeal by fire.

The national forms of salutation are the next group of words
or phrases to which I shall refer as indicating the distinctive
genius of a people. This is indeed a particularly striking class,
and more than the others which I have mentioned has attracted
the notice of writers. A priori we should expect to find a
deep significance in these common salutations. What are these
daily salutations but the expression of the feeling with which
the people of this or that country habitually regard one another,
the normal moral attitude in which they stand towards each
other? This common feeling, this normal mental condition, is
crystallized, as it were, in the ordinary forms of salutation.
These salutations are in truth apt illustrations of what has been
happily designated as “ the unconscious metaphysics of lan-
guage.”

This branch of my subject has been so admirably treated by
the writer to whom I have so frequently referred in this article,
Mr. Mathews, that I shall content myself with asking my read-
ers to turn to the pleasant pages of that delightful author if they
wish to understand the full significance of the salutations of the
principal ancient and modern nations.1 When they have done

1 “ The Use and Abuse of Words,” chap. ii.

54

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

so I have no doubt they will think that he is justified in saying
that “ the forms of salutation used by different nations are sat-
urated with their idiosyncrasies and of themselves alone reveal
their respective characters.”

The proverbs of a people are another very important and
attractive group of characteristic national phrases, and would
of themselves furnish material not merely for one but many
goodly volumes. Indeed the proverbs of many nations have
already employed the pens of learned writers. I must content
myself in this paper with merely glancing at this branch of my
subject and mentioning it for the purpose of showing that I have
not altogether overlooked it.

The last group of characteristic words which I shall notice
are the names given to persons and places by different nations.
The names which different nations give to individuals or locali-
ties have not, so far as I know, been studied at all, until very
recently, as a key to the character of the nation ; and yet I
think such an inquiry will be found to throw no little light
upon the feelings and habits and thoughts of the nation amongst
•whom they arise. A recent writer has pointed out that the
great majority of Greek names are derived from (i) the worship
of the gods ; (2) politics ; (3) warfare ; (4) wealth or social dis-
tinction. “ The fondness for those of the last class reveals,” he
says, “ the fact that the love of praise was a ruling passion
among the Greeks.” Again, “ Names expressive of beauty,
strength, joy, and favor are extremely common among the
Greeks, and record the loving wish of parents for the welfare
(and comeliness) of their children.”

I must somewhat abruptly close this very imperfect sketch.
It may serve as an introduction to the subject — a subject vast
and boundless as language itself. The various words and
phrases which I have cited, taken from many different languages,
ancient and modern, are at least enough to establish, and that
was my object, the intimate connection between the most ordi-
nary and simple utterances of a people and their innermost life
and habits of thought and feeling. I should fain hope also that
the characteristic or typical English words which I have cited,
contrasted with the typical words of other languages, may have

NATIONAL LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 55

a tendency to raise rather than to lower our estimate of our
Saxon tongue. Sure am I of this, that the more we study our
mother-tongue, the tongue which Milton and Shakespeare spoke
and wrote, the more shall we learn to regard it as not the least
precious part of our priceless heritage as Englishmen ; not mere-
ly because it is the most perfect instrument for the expression
of human thought which has ever yet been elaborated, but,
more than this, because of the spirit of manliness, honesty, and
truthfulness which animates and pervades it.

E. A. Meredith.

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

THE problems of the mythologist are to account, if he can,
first for the origin and next for the distribution of Myths.
Plainly the myths of men must have their source in certain con-
ditions of the human intellect. That these conditions do not
exist in full force among civilized men is obvious enough, be-
cause men of all civilizations, Egyptian, Hindoo, and Greek,
have been as much puzzled as we modern peoples are to account
for the origin of myths. The mental conditions, therefore,
which naturally and necessarily produce myths must be strange,
on the whole, to civilized men. We are therefore led to ask
whether this mental stage has not existed, and whether it does
not still exist, among the more backward races, savages as we
rather indiscriminately call them. If we do find widely preva-
lent among the lower races a condition of thought which would
necessarily beget the myths of the lower races, and if among
the upper races myths similar in character be traced, the prob-
lem of the mythologist will be partially solved. Myths, or cer-
tain myths, will be the productions of the human mind in the
savage state ; and when these legends occur among civilized races,
they will either be survivals from savagery or narratives bor-
rowed from savages.

Let us apply this system to a single case ; namely, to the
myths concerning the Origin of Death.

Now, it is plain enough that civilized men, in a scientific age,
would never dream of inventing a story to account for so neces-
sary and inevitable an incident as Death. “All men are mor-
tal” is the very type among us of a universal affirmative state-
ment, and how men come to be mortal needs no explanation.
So the case seems to civilized and scientific man. But his own

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

57

children have not attained to his belief in Death. The certainty
and universality of Death do not enter into the thoughts of our
little ones.

“ For in the thought of immortality

Do children play about the flowery meads.”

Now, there are still many tribes of men who practically dis-
believe in Death. To them Death is always a surprise and an
accident, an unnecessary, irrelevant intrusion on the living world.
“ Natural deaths are, by many tribes, regarded as supernatural,”
says Mr. Tylor. These tribes have no conception of Death as
the inevitable, eventual obstruction and cessation of the powers
of the bodily machine ; the stopping of the pulses and processes
of life by violence or decay or disease. To persons who regard
Death thus, his intrusion into the world (for Death, of course,
is thought to be a person) stands in great need of explanation.
That explanation, as usual, is given in myths. But before
studying these widely different myths, let us first establish the
fact that Death really is regarded as something non-natural and
intrusive. The modern savage readily believes in and accounts,
in a scientific way, ior violent deaths. The spear or club breaks
or crushes a hole in a man, and his soul flies out. But the
deaths he disbelieves in are natural deaths. These he is obliged
to explain as produced by some supernatural cause, generally
the action of malevolent spirits impelled by witches. Thus the
savage holds that, violence apart and the action of witches
apart, man would even now be immortal. “ There are rude
races of Australia and South America.” writes Mr. Tylor,
“ whose intense belief in witchcraft has led them to declare that
if men were never bewitched, and never killed by violence, they
would never die at all. Like the Australians, the Africans will
inquire of their dead ‘ what sorcerer slew them by his wicked
arts.’ ” “ The natives,” says Sir George Grey, speaking of the

Australians, “ do not believe that there is such a thing as death
from natural causes.” On the death of an Australian native
from disease, a kind of magical coroner’s inquest is held by the
conjurers of the tribe, and the direction in which the wizard lives
who slew the dead man is ascertained by the movements of
worms and insects. The process is described at full length by

58

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Mr. Brough Smyth in his “ Aborigines of Victoria.” Turning
from Australia to Hindostan, we find that the Puwarrees (ac-
cording to Heber’s narrative) attribute all natural deaths to a
supernatural cause ; namely, witchcraft. That is, the Puwarrees
do not yet believe in the universality and necessity of Death. He
is an intruder brought by magic arts into our living world.
Again, in his “ Ethnology of Bengal,” Dalton tells us that the
Hos (an aboriginal non-Aryan race) are of the same
opinion as the Puwarrees. “ They hold that all disease in men
or animals is attributable to one of two causes : the wrath of
some evil spirit or the spell of some witch or sorcerer. These
superstitions are common to all classes of the population of this
province.” In the New Hebrides disease and death are caused,
as Mr. Codrington found, by tamates, or ghosts. In New Cale-
donia, according to Erskine, death is the result of witchcraft
practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who would be so
wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman ? The Andaman
Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influ-
ence of e reu chaugala , or to jura-win , two spirits of the jungle
and the sea. The death is avenged by the nearest relation of
the deceased, who shoots arrows at the invisible enemy. The
negroes of Central Africa entertain precisely similar ideas about
the non-naturalness of Death. Mr. Duff Macdonald, in his recent
book, “ Africana,” writes : “ Every man who dies what we call a
natural death is really killed by witches.” It is a far cry from
the Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen
north. But so uniform is human nature in the lower races that
the Eskimo precisely agree, as far as theories of Death go, with
the Africans, the aborigines of India, the Andaman Islanders,
the Australians, and the rest. Dr. Rink found that “ sickness
or death coming about in an accidental manner was always at-
tributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether death
on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from
magic.” It is needless to show how these ideas survived into
, civilization. Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen
Elizabeth, was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and
the Australian. The familiar and voluminous records of trials
for witchcraft, whether at Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all
abnormal and unwonted deaths and diseases, in animals or in

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH. S9

men, were explained by our ancestors as the results of super-
natural mischief.

It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to
any extent) that the savage does not regard Death as “ God’s
great ordinance,” universal and inevitable and natural. But,
being curious and inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself,
“ How did this terrible invader first enter a world where he now
appears so often ?” This is, properly speaking, a scientific ques-
tion ; but the savage answers it, not by collecting facts and gene-
ralizing from them, but by inventing a myth. This is his invari-
able habit. Does he want to know why this tree has red berries,
why that animal has brown stripes, why this bird utters its pecu-
liar cry, where fire came from, why a constellation is grouped in
one way or another, why his race of men differs from the whites,
— in all these, and in all other intellectual perplexities, the savage
invents a story to solve the problem. Stories about the
Origin of Death are, therefore, among the commonest fruits of
the savage imagination. As those legends have been produced
to meet the same want by persons in a very similar mental con-
dition, it inevitably follows that they all resemble each other
with considerable closeness. We need not conclude that all the
myths we are about to examine came from a single original
source, or were handed about, with flint arrow-heads, seeds,
shells, beads, and weapons, in the course of savage commerce.
Borrowing of this sort may, or rather must, explain many diffi-
culties as to the diffusion of some myths. But the myths with
which we are concerned now, the myths of the Origin of Death,
might conceivably have been separately developed by simple
and ignorant men seeking to discover an answer to the same
problem.

The Myths of the Origin of Death fall into a few categories.
In many legends of the lower races men are said to have become
subject to mortality because they infringed some mystic prohi-
bition or taboo of the sort which is common among untutored
peoples. The apparently untrammelled Polynesian, or Austra-
lian, or African is really the slave of countless traditions which
forbid him to eat this object or to touch that, or to speak to
such and such a person, or to utter this or that word. Races
in this curious state of ceremonial subjection often account for

6o

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Death as the punishment imposed for breaking some taboo. In
other cases, Death is said to have been caused by a sin of omis-
sion, not of commission. People who have a complicated and
minute ritual (like so many of the lower races) persuade them-
selves that Death burst on the world when some passage of
the ritual was first omitted, or when some custom was first in-
fringed. Yet again, Death is fabled to have first claimed us for
his victims in consequence of the erroneous delivery of a favor-
able message from some powerful supernatural being, or because
of the failure of some enterprise which would have resulted in
the overthrow of Death, or by virtue of a pact or covenant be-
tween Death and the gods. Thus it will be seen that Death is
often (tho by no means invariably) the penalty of infringing a
command, or of indulging in a culpable curiosity. But there are
cases, as we shall see, in which Death, as a tolerably general law,
follows on a mere accident. Some one is accidentally killed,
and this “ gives Death a lead ” (as they say in the hunting-field)
over the fence which had hitherto severed him from the world
of living men. It is to be observed, in this connection, that the
first of men who died is usually regarded as the discoverer of a
hitherto “ unknown country,” the land beyond the grave, to
which all future men must follow him. Bin dir Woor, among
the Australians, was the first man who suffered death, and he
(like Yama in the Vedic myth) became the Columbus of the
new world of the dead.

Let us now exarhine in detail a few of the savage stories of
the Origin of Death. That told by the Australians may be re-
garded with suspicion, as a refraction from a careless hearing of
the narrative in Genesis. The legend printed by Mr. Brough
Smyth was told to Mr. Bulwer by “ a black fellow far from
sharp,” and this black fellow may conceivably have distorted
what his tribe had heard from a missionary. This sort of re-
fraction is not uncommon, and we must always guard ourselves
against being deceived by a savage corruption of a Biblical nar-
rative. Here is the myth, such as it is. “ The first created man
and woman were told ” (by whom we do not learn) “ not to go
near a certain tree in which a bat lived. The bat was not to be
disturbed. One day, however, the woman was gathering fire-
wood, and she went near the tree. The bat flew away, and

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

6l

after that came Death.” More evidently genuine is the follow-
ing legend of how Death “ got a lead ” into the Australian
world. “The child of the first man was wounded. If his par-
ents could heal him, Death would never enter the world. They
failed. Death came.” The wound, in this legend, was inflicted
by a supernatural being. Here Death acts on the principle ce
n'est que le premier pas qui collte, and the premier pas was made
easy for him. We may continue to examine the stories which
account for Death as the result of breaking a taboo. The Ning-
phos of Bengal say they were originally immortal. They were
forbidden to bathe in a certain pool of water. Some one, great-
ly daring, bathed, and, ever since, Ningphos have been subject to
Death. The infringement, aot of a taboo , but of a custom,
caused death in one of the many Melanesian myths on this sub-
ject. Men and women had been practically deathless because
they cast their old skins at certain intervals. But a grand-
mother had a favorite grandchild who failed to recognize her
when she appeared as a young woman in her new skin. With
fatal good-nature the grandmother put on her old skin again,
and instantly men lost the art of skin-shifting, and Death finally
seized them.

The Greek myth of the Origin of Death is the most impor-
tant of those which turn on the breaking of a prohibition. The
story has unfortunately become greatly confused in the various
poetical forms which have reached us. As far as can be ascer-
tained, death was regarded in one early Greek myth as the pun-
ishment of indulgence in forbidden curiosity. Men appear to
have been free from Death before the quarrel between Zeus and
Prometheus. In consequence of this quarrel Hephaestus fa-
shioned a woman out of earth and water, and gave her to Epi-
metheus, the brother of the Titan. Prometheus had forbidden
his brother to accept any gift from the gods, but the bride was
welcomed nevertheless. She brought her magical coffer : this
was opened ; and men who, according to Hesiod, had hitherto
lived exempt from “ maladies that bring down Fate ” were
overwhelmed with the “ diseases that stalk abroad by night and
day.” Now, in Hesiod (Works and Days, 70-100) there is no-
thing said about unholy curiosity. Pandora simply opened her
casket and scattered its fatal contents. But Philodemus assures

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

us that, according to a variant of the myth, it was Epimetheus
who opened the forbidden coffer, whence came Death.

Leaving the myths which turn on the breaking of a taboo ,
and reserving for consideration the New Zealand story, in which
the Origin of Death is the neglect of a ritual process, let us look
at some African myths of the Origin of Death. It is to be ob-
served that in these (as in all the myths of the most backward
races) many of the characters are, not gods, but animals.

The Bushman story lacks the beginning. The mother of
the little Hare was lying dead, but we do not know how she
came to die. The Moon then struck the little Hare on the lip,
cutting it open, and saying, “ Cry loudly, for your mother will
not return, as I do, but is quite dead.” In another version
the Moon promises that the old Hare will return to life, but
the little Hare is sceptical, and is hit in the mouth as before.
The Hottentot myth makes the Moon send the Hare to men
with the message that they will revive as he (the Moon) does.
But the Hare “loses his memory as he runs” (to quote the
French proverb which maybe based on a form of this very tale),
and the messenger brings the tidings that men shall surely die
and never revive. The angry Moon then burns a hole in the
Hare’s mouth. In yet another Hottentot version the Hare’s
failure to deliver the message correctly caused the death of the
Moon’s mother (Bleek, “ Bushman Folklore”).1 In this last
variant we have death as the result of a failure or transgression.
Among the more backward natives of South India (Lewin’s
“ Wild Races of South India”) the serpent is concerned, in a suspi-
cious way, with the Origin of Death. The following legend
might so easily arise from a confused understanding of the Mo-
hammedan or Biblical narrative that it is of little value for our
purpose. At the same time, even if it is only an adaptation, it
shows the characteristics of the adapting mind. God had made
the world, trees, and reptiles, and then set to work to make man
out of clay. A serpent came and devoured the still inanimate

1 The connection between the Moon and the Hare is also found in Sanskrit, in
Mexican, in some of the South-Sea Islands, and in German and Buddhist folk-
lore. Probably what we call “ the Man in the Moon” seemed very like a hare
to various races, roused their curiosity, and provoked explanations in the
shape of myths.

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

63

clay images while God slept. The serpent still comes and bites
us all, and the end is death. If God never slept, there would
be no death. The snake carries us off while God is asleep.
But the oddest part of this myth remains. Not being able al-
ways to keep awake, God made a dog to drive away the snake
by barking. And that is why dogs always howl when men are
at the point of death. Here we have our own rural super-
stition about howling dogs twisted into a South Indian myth
of the Origin of Death. The introduction of Death by a pure
accident recurs in a myth of Central Africa reported by Mr.
Duff Macdonald. There was a time when the man blessed by
Sancho Panza had not yet “ invented sleep.” A woman it was
who came and offered to instruct two men in the still novel art
of sleeping. “ She held the nostrils of one, and he- never awoke
at all,” and since then the art of dying has been facile.

A not unnatural theory of the Origin of Death is illustrated
by a myth from Pentecost Island and a Red Indian myth. In
the legends of very many races we find the attempt to account
for the Origin of Evil by a simple dualistic myth. There were
two brothers who made things ; one made things well, the other
made them ill. In Pentecost Island it was Tagar who made
things well, and he appointed that men should die for five days
only, and live again. But the malevolent Suque caused men
“to die right out.” The Red Indian legend of the same char-
acter is printed in the “Annual Report of the Bureau of Eth-
nology” (1879-80), p. 45. The younger of the Cin-au-av brothers
said, “ When a man dies, send him back in the morning and let
all his friends rejoice.” “Not so,” said the elder; “ the dead
shall return no more.” So the younger brother slew the child
of the elder, and this was the beginning of Death.

There is another and a very quaint myth of the Origin of
Death in Banks Island. At first, in Banks Island, as elsewhere,
men were immortal. The economical results were just what
might have been expected. Property became concentrated in
the hands of the few, — that is, of the first generations, — while
all the younger people were practically paupers. To heal the
disastrous social malady, Qat (the maker of things, who was
more or less a spider) sent for Mate — that is, Death. Death
lived near a volcanic crater of a mountain, where there is now

64

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

a by-way into Hades, or Panoi as the Melanesians call it.
Death came, and went through the empty forms of a funeral
feast for himself. Tangaro the Fool was sent to watch Mate,
and to see by what way he returned to Hades, that men
might avoid that path in future. Now when Mate fled to his
own place, this great fool Tangaro noticed the path, but forgot
which it was and pointed it out to men under the impression
that it was the road to the upper, not the under world. Ever
since that day men have been constrained to follow Mate’s path
to Panoi and the dead. Another myth is somewhat different,
but, like this one, attributes death to the imbecility of Tangaro
the Fool. The New Zealand myth of the Origin of Death is
pretty well known, as Mr. Tylor has seen in it the remnants of
a solar myth, and has given it a “solar” explanation. It is an
audacious thing to differ from so cautious and learned an
anthropologist as Mr. Tylor, but the writer ventures to give his
reasons for dissenting, in this case, from the view of the author
of “ Primitive Culture.” Maui is the great hero of Maori myth-
ology. He was not precisely a god, still less was he one of the
early elemental gods, yet we can scarcely regard him as a man.
He rather answers to one of the race of Titans, and especially to
Prometheus, the son of a Titan. Maui was prematurely born,
and his mother thought the child would be no credit to her
already numerous and promising family. She therefore (as
native women too often did in the South-Sea Islands) tied him
up in her long tresses and tossed him out to sea. The gales
brought him back to shore : one of his grandparents carried
him home, and he became much the most illustrious and suc-
cessful of his household. So far Maui had the luck which so
commonly attends the youngest and least considered child in
folklore and mythology. This feature in his myth may be
a result of the very wide-spread custom of jiingsten Rccht
(Borough English) by which the youngest child is heir, at least,
of the family hearth. Now, unluckily, at the baptism of Maui
(for a pagan form of baptism is a Maori ceremony) his father
omitted some of the Karakias, or ritual utterances proper to be
used on such occasions. This was the fatal original mistake
whence came man’s liability to Death, for hitherto men had
been immortal. So far, what is there “solar” about Maui?

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

Who are the Sun’s brethren, — and Maui had many ? How could
the Sun catch the Sun in a snare, and beat him so as to make him
lame? This was one of Maui’s feats, for he meant to prevent
the Sun from running too fast through the sky. Maui brought
fire, indeed, from the under-world, as Prometheus stole it from
the upper world, but many men and many beasts do as much as
the myths of the world, and it is hard to see how the exploit
gives Maui “a solar character.” Maui invented barbs for hooks,
and other appurtenances of early civilization, with which the
sun has no more to do than with patent safety-matches. His last
feat was to attempt to secure human immortality for ever.
There are various legends on this subject. Some say Maui
noticed that the sun and moon rose again from their daily death,
by virtue of a fountain in Hades (Hine-nui-te-po) where they
bathed. Others say he wished to kill Hine-nui-te-po (conceived
of as a woman) and to carry off her heart. Whatever the reason,
Maui was to be swallowed up in the giant frame of Hades, or
Night, and, if he escaped alive, Death would never have power
over men. He made the desperate adventure, and would have
succeeded but for the folly of one of the birds which accom-
panied him. This little bird, which sings at sunset, burst out
laughing inopportunely, wakened Hine-nui-te-po, and she crushed
to death Maui and all hopes of earthly immortality. Had he
only come forth alive, men would have been deathless. Now,
except that the bird which laughed sings at sunset, what is there
“ solar” in all this? The sun does daily what Maui failed to do,
passes through darkness and death back into light and life.
Not only does the sun daily succeed where Maui failed, but
(Taylor’s “ New Zealand,”) it was his observation of this fact
which encouraged Maui to risk the adventure. If Maui were
the sun, we should all be immortal, for Maui’s ordeal is daily
achieved by the sun. But Mr. Tylor says (“ Primitive Culture,”
i. 336), “ It is seldom that solar characteristics are more distinctly
marked in the several details of a myth than they are here.”
To us the characteristics seem to be precisely the reverse of
solar. Throughout the cycle of Maui he is constantly set in
direct opposition to the sun, and the very point of the final
legend is that what the sun could do Maui could not. Literally
the one common point between Maui and the sun is that the
5

66

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

little bird, the tiwakawaka , which sings at the daily death of
day, sang at the eternal death of Maui. It will very frequently
be found that the “ solar hero” of mythologists is no more solar
than Maui was a photographer!

Without pausing to consider the Tongan myth of the Origin
of Death, we may go on to investigate the legends of the Aryan
races. According to the Satapatha Brahmana, Death was
made, like the gods and other creatures, by a being named
Prajapati. Now of Prajapati, half was mortal, half was im-
mortal. With his mortal half he feared Death, and concealed
himself from Death in earth and water. Death said to the
gods, “ What hath become of him who created us ?” They an-
swered, “ Fearing thee hath he entered the earth.” The gods and
Prajapati now freed themselves from the dominion of Death by
celebrating an enormous number of sacrifices. Death was
chagrined by their escape from the “ nets and clubs” which he
carries in the Aitareya Brahmana. “ As you have escaped me,
so will men also escape,” he grumbled. The gods appeased
him by the promise that, in the body , no man henceforth for ever
should evade Death. “ Every one who is to become immortal
shall do so by first parting with his body.” Among the Aryans
of India, as we have already seen, Death has a protomartyr,
Yama, “ the first of men who reached the River, spying out a
path for many” (Atharva Veda, vi. 283). Here Yama corre-
sponds to Tangaro the Fool, in the myth of the Solomon
Islands. But Yama is not regarded as a maleficent being like
Tangaro. The Rig Veda (x. 14) speaks of him as “ King
Yama, who departed to the mighty streams and sought out a
road for many;” and again, the Atharva Veda names him “the
first of men who died, and the first who departed to the celestial
world.” With him the Blessed Fathers dwell for ever in happi-
ness. Mr. Max Muller, however, takes Yama to be “ a character
suggested by the setting sun,” — a claim which is also put forward,
as we have seen, for the Maori hero Maui. It is Yama, ac-
cording to the Rig Veda, who sends the birds (a pigeon is one
of his messengers) as warnings of approaching death. Among
the Iranian race, Yima appears to have been the counterpart of
the Vedic Yama. He is now King of the Blessed ; originally he
was the first of men over whom Death won his earliest victory.

MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH.

67

With this victory are vaguely connected legends of a serpent
who killed King Yima, in punishment, apparently, of a sin.
But it is hard to trace this myth in any coherent shape among
the sacred books of the Iranian religion.

We have now hastily examined some typical instances of
myths of the Origin of Death. Our point is proved if it be
admitted that such myths would naturally arise only among
races which have not the scientific conception of the nature
and universality of Death. It has been shown that the Death-
myths of savages do correspond with their prevalent concep-
tions of the nature of death, and it is inferred that the similar
myths of Greeks, Hindoos, and Persians are either survivals
from the time when these races were uncivilized, or are examples
of borrowing from uncivilized peoples. This theory of myths
has no real novelty, being precisely that by which Eusebius, in
his “Praeparatio Evangelica,” replied to the various philosophical
and moral theories of the contemporary pagan Greeks. “Your
myths began,” Eusebius argues, “when your ancestors knew
neither law nor civilization. You have never ventured to lay
aside these ancient stories, of which you are now ashamed, as
you show by your various apologetic explanations, none of which
have the advantage of agreeing with each other.” Thus the
ancient Father actually anticipated the latest results of modern
comparative science.

Andrew Lang.

HENRY JAMES’S NOVELS.

IT is nearly ten years since Mr. James gave his first novel to
the world, tho for a considerable period before the pub-
lication of “Roderick Hudson” he had secured a distinct if
limited constituency. His briefer tales had won for him the
praise of those who do not fling their praise broadcast. While
still barely past his twenties he had gained approval of the
sort which many men of genius in literature have died without
receiving ; his work had struck a new if not a loud note, and
those few trained ears which wait for any fine and pure sounds
to pierce the coarser clamors, were not slow in their pleased
recognition. An American novelist was, just then, very much
needed. The great Hawthorne was no more ; Dr. Holmes had
abandoned his witty and unique romances to resume his dulcet
and copious song ; Mr. George William Curtis had wholly failed
to redeem the promise of earlier years, and, instead of either
equalling or excelling his “Trumps,” had mortgaged all the
grace and humor within his command to the pages of a popular
magazine; Bayard Taylor, still living, had once again deserted
fiction for poetry ; Mr. De Forest yet wrote, but with a success
which was for some capricious reason below the gauge of his
marked ability ; Mr. Howells had done no more than lay the
corner-stone of his now assured reputation. And as for Mr.
Bishop, Mr. Julian Hawthorne, Mr. Lathrop, Miss Woolson, and
a few others at present winning laurels of green and seemingly
durable leaf, they had thus far accomplished at best but a tithe of
their existent work. The field was clear for some fresh, decisive
effort, and the new struggler had every reason to count upon
appreciative welcome, provided he should show the right aim
and the truly artistic impulse.

In reviewing the more youthful essays of Mr. James’s talent,

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

69

we are struck with one noteworthy and even singular fact.
Altho a beginner, he had nothing of a beginner’s rawness.
The Galaxy (an excellent and representative magazine, while
it lived and throve) printed two stories of his which he has never
cared to preserve in any future volume, but which, both of
them, show the mature reflection of the man rather than the
boy’s unstudied fervor. Fervor has, indeed, never characterized
the pages of Mr. James’s writing ; an extraordinary personal
sobriety was one of their chief qualities, then as now. But in
“ A Day of Days ” and “ A Light Man ” (two stories taken
somewhat at random from others which he has preferred to for-
get and to have forgotten) was evident the same grave care for
detail, the same calm-poised regard of style, the same attention
to those subtle and wholesome resources of refined pleasure on
the part of his reader, which he has since shown us with so
much wider and stronger effect. If the present article were
more within the province of the biographer, it might be possible
to trace hereditary causes for this remarkable firmness of touch
at a time when the most brilliant strokes of a writer are expect-
ed to carry prompt subsequent proofs of their wayward and
erratic origin. But even then the fact of Mr. James having en-
joyed the valuable company of a father famed for high scholar-
ship and sound literary equipment could scarcely explain his
placid freedom from the faults, the excesses, the vanities, the
extravagances, which are usually so certain an accompaniment
of adolescent striving. And Mr. James had none of these ; he
may at times have sinned on the side of dulness, but it was a
sort of majestic dulness, like the traditional laxity of an author
who has conquered his public and can dignifiedly trifle with
them. We recall another story, entitled “ A Very Extraordi-
nary Case,” in which (tho it must have appeared in The
Atlantic Monthly more than twelve years ago) there was not
a hint of abandon, of vagary, of feeble treatment. It was a tale
of a young man who fell in love with a very beautiful and charm-
ing woman, while suffering from a wound received in the late
civil war. The hero, through the kindness of a lady who had
formerly been his friend, was transported from irksome surround-
ings in New York to commodious and elegant quarters in a man-
sion which adjoined the Hudson. Here he met his fate, and his

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fate pierced him with her lovely glances, thrilled him with her
evasive, baffling, and coy personality. A younger lady had
fascinated, bewildered him, and led her invalid swain to
ponder whether her heart were of wax or adamant. While
he was in this pathetic condition of doubt, he one day put on
her cloak, to attire her for a walk, or a visit, or perhaps a sus-
pected meeting with some unknown rival, and soon afterward
died. This tale was printed long ago, and Mr. James was a
very obscure writer when he printed it ; and yet in it may be
found the same individuality and novelty of treatment which
have been his passwords to distinction.

“ The Passionate Pilgrim” — a brief bit of work, embodying
in exquisite diction the delight and enthusiasm inspired by an
American who sees England for the first time in all her pastoral
yet historic loveliness — has the fault of exaggeration, here and
there ; the dreamy and romantic character of Searle is charged
with too electric and explosive a force of sentiment ; he now
and then passes the sane bound, and resembles one of those
curious cases preserved in the annals of the neurologist : nor
does his tragic end fail to remove from him this morbid element.
But the whole story has an air, a delicacy, a finish quite its own,
and every page is stamped with some telling and memorable fe-
licity. “ The Last of the Valerii ” — which records how a young
Roman noble conceived an hereditary pagan passion for a marble
Juno excavated from the soil of his own garden — distinctly
shows the influence of Hawthorne. Mr. James had not yet es-
caped “ influences” ; he was still under the spell of imitation.
But the narrative is managed with a masterly vigor ; we see the
disciple only in the subject, and not in its treatment. The young
Conte Valerio is presented and described to us with an actual
wizardry of portrayal, and his singular love is so overfilmed by a
tender poetic haze that it wears no trait of repulsion. Clumsy
handling would have made his figure a merely grotesque one ;
but it is handled with the adroit reverse of clumsiness, and be-
fore the curtain is let to fall upon it we feel our sympathies
wakened where to rouse our ridicule would have been by no
means difficult. Another purely imaginative story, and one
bathed in that heavy sinister shadow beloved of him who gave
us “The Twice-Told Tales,” is “The Romance of Certain Old

HENRY JAMES’S NOVELS.

7 1

Clothes.” Its very locale instantly suggests Hawthorne. It is
supposed to happen “ toward the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury,” and “ in the Province of Massachusetts.” Its atmosphere
is finely Colonial ; it is pervaded with a gently murmurous
rhythm, like the hum of an antique spinning-wheel. It tells of
two sisters who both loved the same man. One wins him as a
husband, and afterward dies. She leaves, however, in sacred
charge to her lord, a chest of laces and silk apparel, the most
costly and beautiful in the Province, which he is to faithfully
guard until their infant daughter shall come of age. He swears
to his dying wife that the chest shall remain undisturbed. But
subsequently he weds the second sister, whose vanity hungers
for the concealed treasure. She torments her husband with en-
treaties regarding them, and at length, in a fit of distracted ir-
resolution, he flings her the key of the chest. That evening, on
his return home after several hours of absence, he misses his
wife, and searches for her everywhere throughout the stately old
homestead. He at length finds her upstairs in the dim and
dusky attic, crouched beside the huge chest, whose lid is open.
She has “ fallen backward from a kneeling posture, with one
hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her
heart.” On her limbs he perceives the stiffness of death, and
on her face, where the fading light of the sun strikes it through
a near window, is “ the terror of something more than death.”
The finale of this weird tale runs as follows: “Her lips were

parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony ; and on her bloodless
brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of ten hideous wounds
from two vengeful ghostly hands.”

In such fanciful and lurid work as this it is hard to recognize
the future author of “Daisy Miller” and “An International
Episode.” And yet the breadth between the two classes of ac-
complishment measures, in a certain way, the scope and range
of Mr. James’s capabilities. No author can escape the require-
ments and demands of his time, and that increased age should
make him more sensible and observant of them is usually a
proof of his creative excellence. We speak of a painter’s first,
second, or third “ manner,” and with the novelist it would often
be fair to chronicle similar grades of development. But the
charge so often preferred with heat and even ire against Mr.

72

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IV.

James, to the effect that he wholly lacks poetic imagination and
is a coldly studious realist, would seem to suggest that some of
his critics have by no means made themselves familiar with all
his published writings.

In the same volume as that which we are now considering
may be found three other tales that imply a decidedly French
source of inspiration. “ The Madonna of the Future” com-
memorates the pathetic incident of a poor little crazed American
artist in Florence, who believes himself to be gradually perfect-
ing a marvellous picture of the Virgin, and who has in reality,
after years of feverish toil, done no more than add many weak
brush-strokes to a mournful and worthless daub. The domie'e
of this tale is not new. Mr. James treats it with fascinating
skill, and the quiet splendor of his style was never more potent
than when it is brought to bear upon the “transcendent illusions
and deplorable failure” of his piteous, dream-haunted, maniacal
Theobald. It is all a true, glowing jewel of thought, of feeling,
and of literary execution; its like exists nowhere among the
masterpieces of our language, and we doubt if any language
contains a prose-poem at once so chaste and so rich-tinted, so
imbued with the best energy and yet so mellowed by the softer
and deeper shadings. At the same time, we cannot but recall
that its motive, its idc'e mere , came originally from Balzac, whose
well-known story contains something more than the germ of
Mr. James’s perfect achievement. In the same way “ Eugene
Pickering”and “ Madame de Mauves” are French of origin ; their
tone, their color, reminds us respectively of Turgenieff and Cher-
buliez. In “ Eugene Pickering” we have one of those icy-hearted
women whose merciless coquetries the great dead Russian has
repeatedly chosen to dissect. Madame Blumenthal loves to bind
her victims in the chains of her own witchery and then watch
them struggle. She overflows with a certain sort of sentiment;
she is fond of talking about soul and passion in others, but she
has neither soul nor passion herself. To slightly alter Mr.
James’s own words concerning this fair and dangerous tempt-
ress, she reads his hero’s little story to the end, closes the book
very tenderly, smoothing down the cover, and then, when Pick-
ering is least prepared for so cruel an act, she tosses it into the
dusty limbo of all her old romances. Madame Blumenthal her-

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

73

self is drawn with a bold, firm hand. She seems to have been
prompted by Turgenieff, but only because he has given us
similar glacial feminine types. She is quite different from Ma-
dame de Mauves, who is treated with an equally pitiless expo-
sure. The latter, married to a man whom she has learned
merely to tolerate, and whom she has ample reason to think un-
faithful, receives from him an encouragement to imitate his own
inconstancy. Her placid rebellion takes a most startling shape ;
it recalls Cherbuliez, and for the reason that this keen-sighted
Frenchman is so fond of like surprises in the juxtaposition of his
personages. The story ends with a most bitter surprise. The
wife remains frigidly virtuous, and the husband, thrilled by her
rectitude into a new appreciation, regards her with new eyes.
To put it considerably more coarsely than Mr. James does, M.
de Mauves falls violently in love with his shocked and proper
spouse. But she has nothing except severe scorn to give him
in return. He blows out his brains, one day, in consequence of
her unaltered disdain. The end of it all is hopeless, unsatisfac-
tory, but it is thoroughly consistent with Mr. James’s contempt
for the conventional ficelles of fiction.

This book, “ A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales,” has re-
ceived a more detailed notice than the ordinary reviewer of Mr.
James’s work would be willing to accord it. The volume has
hitherto been praised in journals and magazines, but the atten-
tion there permitted to it has been hasty and inexact. The
book, as it now stands, is remarkable and episodical. There are
few things that approach its collection of brief, pungent nou-
velles. Soberly judged, it is very important ; it is not only des-
tined to live, but it is destined to keep a proud place by reason
of its vital novelty. That it has come to us through foreign
channels is of no consequence ; it is fine, poetic, careful, accurate ;
it resembles nothing in our own letters, as regards actual form.
Hawthorne, Turgenieff, Balzac and Cherbuliez may have helped
to make it, but nothing has been stolen from these high-priests
of fiction except a stray odor of their blazing tripods. Even in
his early efforts Mr. James was no copyist; he may have bor-
rowed, but he has always done so at a high rate of interest,
promptly and thoroughly paid.

“ Roderick Hudson” was the first of his works entitled by its

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size to be considered a novel. It is the history of a young
American sculptor, whose extraordinary feats in simple clay-
modelling win him the admiration and protection of a rich con-
noisseur. Roderick Hudson is sent by Rowland Mallet from an
obscure Massachusetts town to the glow and grandeur of Rome
itself. He possesses the artistic temperament, with all its vir-
tues, charms, inconsistencies and weaknesses. He has an almost
supreme talent, tho one whose exercise and results are de-
pendent upon all sorts of variable caprice. He is noble as a
sculptor ; he makes one or two great statues, which amaze Rome.
But his inspiration leaves him under the stress of a futile love
for a very beautiful and bewildering woman, and he sinks from
glorious ardor into supine cynicism. His history is that of a
wrecked life, a ruined soul, and it has been the history of more
than a single man dowered with grand natural gifts. His genius
becomes his bane and curse rather than his refuge and solace.
Self-control is a sealed book to him. He is very handsome
and proud as a prince. He regards life with a picturesque, un-
conscious arrogance. He wants to wear experience as tho it
were a purple robe, with a very soft lining, to be draped about
his graceful form in whatever folds are most becoming. It turns
out for him, as it turns out for most of us, a crown of thorns, a
spear of anguish. But he will not accept his hurts resignedly ;
he has not the patience to let them heal ; he is forever tearing
off their bandages and making his exasperated moans while they
bleed. He revolts against those iron formulas of acceptance
and toleration, to disobey which is to feed the flame of one’s
own misery with new fagots, day after day. He cries out
against men, women, the world, and he imperiously forgets that
he has expected much from them and is willing to give them
little. He has opportunities for sacrifice, for unselfishness, for
that benignant comfort which springs from resolutely fixing our
eyes upon the needs and torments of others and so gradually
feeling the sting of individual sorrow grow less and less. But
he avails himself of no such wise lenitive. He is wholly desti-
tute of wisdom ; he is all impulse, and it is incessantly the im-
pulse of egotism. He wounds those who love him, and as if by
a divine right, from which commoner mortals are exempted.
His rank in art is among the pure-visioned idealists; he wants

HENRY JAMES'S NO FEES.

7S

to bathe his work in dawn, and make it kindred with the large,
tameless, masterful moods of Nature — with the sea, the stars,
the winds, the mountains. But his moral life is a satire upon
his artistic life. He is like a gallery whose walls are of coarse
stucco but wear the best paintings of Raphael or Velasquez.
His dreams are angelic in their spiritual height and expansion,
but his actualities are earthy and even mean. He is drawn
with consummate subtlety and pathos, and we feel, as we watch
his image rise and round itself before our sight, that the hand
which gave it us has gone to work without a tremor. It is a
conception steeped in irony, but it is branded with a sad, inex-
orable truth. Such men as Roderick Hudson have lived their
lamentable, incomplete lives before now. His woful end is like
the dying radiance of a meteor across a heaven set with calm
and steadfast stars. We realize how others loved him ; we our-
selves love him in spite of all his glaring faults. We deplore his
untimely death as we deplore his wasted career. He might have
been so much, if only the elements were kindlier mixed ! He
embodies a stern and obdurate fact — that those whose brains
receive at birth the divine dowry of peculiar and special favors
too often are predestined,' as if by some tyrannic fatality, to
pay a dark forfeit for the precious boon. So much power is
given to the head, so much weakness to the heart. And both
together, conflicting within one human organization, create a
perpetual surprise, a perpetual puzzle, to him who must bear
about, through his daily dealings with society, this sorry junc-
tion of unreconciled antagonisms.

The other characters in the novel are all striking creations.
They bite into the memory and will not be forgotten. They
are generously described, but they are nevertheless permitted
to speak for themselves after we have been introduced to them,
and in a way that dramatically coincides with their previous
literary portraiture. The placid, worldly-wise, and somewhat
obtuse Rowland Mallet is inimitably conceived ; the home-spun,
maternal, timorous Mrs. Hudson, with her worship for her gifted
son and her limited, rural views of all things, could not easily
be excelled; the repressed, sedate, almost ascetic Mary Garland,
with her sweet maidenly heart in continual secret pulsation of
love for Roderick, who so undervalues its devotion, is securely

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

76

and ably treated ; the wilful, intoxicating Christina Light, with
her almost unparalleled beauty, with so much about her that is
genuine and that all the vicious falsity of her home-surround-
ings cannot quite tarnish and spoil, with her nimble, arch wit,
her disguises, her flashes of daring candor, and her fitful, recur-
rent disgust for the fools, bores and rascals whom she is com-
pelled to meet, merits a prominent place among the author’s
foremost creations. And as for his minor people, Emile Augier
and the younger Dumas, in their brightest comedies, have not
given us better.

Admirable as we find this novel of “Roderick Hudson” in
almost every particular, it did not bring its author anything like
the solid celebrity which soon afterward resulted to him from
“ The American.” That struck a far more popular note, and in-
deed a more authentic one. “ Roderick Hudson” had charmed a
necessarily more limited public, since its truly magnificent ma-
turity of style coexisted with an undoubted subtlety. Its crea-
tive stimulus may be traced rather to Mr. James’s reading than
his observation of life and men. It is a book of great beauty,
great worth, but it is more the book of the poetic-minded scho-
lar than of the artist who studies nature from sentient and
breathing models. “ The American,” on the other hand, was
full of vital experience; its sentences were all chiselled into the
old perfection and its literary portion was faultlessly careful,
but it gave us a wholly new view of Mr. James’s capacities.
Perhaps the surprise shocked us a little, but the shock, after all,
was one of pleasure. Still, it made us feel that the world had
claimed Mr. James for its own, and that he was writing to suit
the demands of his time. He had previously seemed to write
from no such motive, tho when we recall the tales in the
“ Passionate Pilgrim” volume we are disposed toward the be-
lief that they could, on the whole, be better spared than their
author’s later work. That is less supple, less tender, less imagi-
native, but it is, at the same time, more original and character-
istically determinate. “ The American” made its author fa-
mous, and justly. The American himself, Christopher Newman,
is a most happy and strong conception. For a man who has
gained his fortune early in life by the manufacture of wash-tubs,
he is perhaps refined beyond probability. It is highly doubtful

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

77

whether his matrimonial advances toward the haughty and im-
poverished family of the Bellegardes would in actual life have
received any toleration whatever. He would have proved
coarse, vulgar, perhaps even gross. But Mr. James makes his
hero something very different from that. He has never been
less realistic in the painting of a character, and rarely more suc-
cessful. Newman, as we find him, is a most healthful, sunny,
winsome fellow. His self-esteem is prodigious, but never repul-
sive. His Americanism is the most salient thing conceivable,
and Mr. James has managed to render it so by incessantly con-
trasting him with people in every way his opposites. There
are scenes in this book which hold the very soul of the true
modern comedy ; nothing could be more dramatic than the atti-
tude in which Mr. James’s young American millionaire stands
toward the half-ruined race of the Bellegardes, with their historic
ancestry, their overpowering pride, and their keen greed for his
republican dollars. More than once the charge of foreign sym-
pathy has been brought against Mr. James ; he has been called
“ the man without a country he has been blamed and even
sneered at for all sorts of unpatriotic sentiments. But surely in
the wholesome democracy which breathes from Newman we
have no evidence that these accusations are well based. Aris-
tocracy was never made to wear a shabbier front than it wears in
the pages of “ The American.” Old Madame de Bellegarde, stained
with a hideous crime, an unnatural mother and a murderous
wife, who might have been created by Balzac himself, is certain-
ly no shining credit to patrician theories. Her son, Urbain, the
overbearing, bloodless young Marquis, is only a skin-deep gentle-
man, and scarcely even that, while his hare-brained, flighty, and
often amusing little wife would make a very dangerous custo-
dian of any superior family traditions. Beyond doubt Mr. James
has dealt unsparingly enough with these three European per-
sons to acquit himself of unloyal regard for the habitants of his
native shores. But on the other hand he has shaped the poor,
timid, suffering Madame de Cintre with an excessive charity.
He makes her weakness charming, and clothes her in a wistful
serenity that is like the faint odor of some very fragile tho
perfect flower. She could only have existed in Europe — per-
haps, for that matter, only in France itself. The tragedy of her

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lot has a kind of gilt-edged gloom ; it reminds us of the misfor-
tune endured by certain young queens and princesses. It is
astonishing how well she is described, since she is described so
little. And yet we feel the flowing lines of her robe, the undu-
lating elegance of her walk, the gracious urbanity of her smile.
She has been made intentionally shadowy ; her coloring is that
of the pastel or the aquarelle ; and for this reason she is a trifle
unsatisfactory. But we know her to be good and flawlessly
pure, a devote of the church in whose tenets she has been reared,
and a gentle zealot in her strict observance of maternal and fra-
ternal commands.

There is one character in “ The American” which must
not be forgotten ; he is too full of grace, courage and
natural gayety for that ; we mean young Valent.in de
Bellegarde, junior brother of the imperious and frigid Urbain.
He is a modern D’Artagnan ; if Dumas the Elder had drawn him
we are sure that Valentin would have been a soldier of fortune
and rescued captive damsels, riding spurred, booted and plumed
to their relief. As it is, we see him fall rashly in a foolish duel,
and for this reason he suggests even more keenly the gay che-
valier of the French romancist. But he is, after all, considerably
subtler than a D’Artagnan. He knows his Paris well, and it is a
much wickeder and more corrupt Paris, one might venture to
state, than that of Louis Treize. Valentin is thoroughly mod-
ern ; he is taken directly from the French life of the present.

“ The American” was somewhat speedily followed by “ The
Europeans,” a novel for which many new-gained readers waited
with glad expectancy. But “ The Europeans,” while proving
itself anything but a pendant to the author’s previous work
whose name its own so resembled, gave signs of something like
fatigue, and of over-rapid construction as well. It contains some
passages of capable writing, and it is all good literature. But it
is not such good literature as “ The American,” and it will in-
evitably, we think, take a second rank among its author’s works.
It is a story that deals with American soil, and it transports two
of its chief characters from Europe to this country. Mr. James
himself calls it “A Sketch,” and he has been no less wise than
modest in doing so. His success on American soil, so to speak,
has never been his finest success. Not that he is not, in the

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

79

very deepest meaning of the word, an American novelist, but he
necessarily, from continued residence abroad, knows his own
countrypeople the best where he is most in the habit of finding
them ; and it is when he gives their portraits a foreign frame
that we recognize them as most apt and secure of handling.
But the Baroness is undeniably a well-wrought personage. She
is “ line femme qui posscde cent-trente-sept-mille manures de dire
Non, et ' d incommensurables variations pour dire Oui ,” as one of
Mr. James’s most admired authors has long ago put it.

“Daisy Miller” was a far more vivid piece of work, tho con-
siderably briefer. Its success was immediate and phenomenal,
and we suspect that in making us acquainted with this innocent,
unconventional, closely studied type of an American girl abroad
Mr. James did more to familiarize himself with the large reading
public than by anything else he has ever written. The little
tale was discussed in hundreds of households, condemned,
praised, argued over, fervently and often unjustly criticised. It
belongs among its author’s simply clever work ; it shows us his
tact and his talent at their fullest, but it shows us none of his
larger and radiant qualities. It is an acute and exact study,
perfectly free from the satire with which some of its detractors
have declared it to be malevolently brimming. It puts a poor
silly little American girl in a very sorry light, and makes those
of us who are willing to accept unpartisan views of national
faults regret that certain distinctive features of our special civi-
lization should cause our women to be so misunderstood in
other lands. Poor Daisy means no harm ; it is evident to any
attentive and unbiassed eye that Mr. James knows she means
no harm. He has copied rather than created her; she has been
ridiculously educated here, and makes a sad little goose of her-
self there. She is a reproach, an advice, an admonition to us,
as he presents her. But the American sensitiveness largely flew
to arms because of her presentation. It called the author of her
literary being a good many hard names. There is no doubt,
however, that he was merely availing himself of a fresh and
effective subject for strongly naturalistic treatment. But an-
gered America refused to see this, and for successive months
Mr. James, never so widely known till now, was never so widely
rebuked. In “An International Episode” he made us a kind

So

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

of amende, tho probably an unintended one. He drew for us a
young American girl of praiseworthy deportment and stout in-
dependence, who refused to marry an English nobleman. This
story mollified some of his irate critics. Like “ Daisy Miller,”
it belonged among his slighter works, and the comment should
here be made that scarcely any novelist of our time has ap-
proached Mr. James in his power to write a magazine-tale which
could attract hosts of readers and columns of discussion. “An
International Episode” is the finest thing he has done without
placing his characters in a foreign entourage, altho this story ends
in England. It is, however, not so good as “The Pension
Beaurepas,” which has a superb humor and a startling actuality.
In that delightful bit of grouping we believe that Mr. James
once more offended. The remorseless economies and the laugh-
able crudities of certain Americans, met in a Swiss pension, were
esteemed material unfit for manipulation by a leal United States
citizen. But the probable truth is that Mr. James regards his
own country as a much greater affair than some of his aggrieved
critics do. He thinks her quite able to stand a little honest
fault-finding. Thackeray thought the same thing of his English
brothers, about thirty years ago, and awoke even worse resent-
ment for having cherished such opinions. It is a weak common-
wealth which cannot afford to receive a good many stout raps
of merited censure. The really good Americans are very possi-
bly those who pay a candid smile to their own faults and foibles.

Two other shorter works of Mr. James should here be no-
ticed, because they both deal with the same international ques-
tions of difference in breeding, culture, manners, education.
These are “ A Bundle of Letters” and “The Point of View.”
Each is in fact a bundle of letters, and two or three of the
writers are the same in either brochure. “ The Point of View” was
published but a few months ago, and during a time when nearly
every daily newspaper was having its fling of condemnation at
Mr. James’s mighty “ un-Americanism.” But the author made
it singularly plain, in transcribing the supposed correspondence
of these foreigners who have come to visit us and of these fellow-
countrypeople who have returned to us after absence, that he
desired to extenuate nothing nor set down aught in malice —
that he described the impressions of others rather than stood

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

8l

sponsor for their convictions. As well blame a dramatist as a
novelist for the vices and peccadilloes of his men and women.
But even here, where Mr. James had embodied a separate mass
of antipathy or of predilection in each one of his personages,
making this the litera scripta not of himself but of themselves
(individually and successively, one after one), he has been ac-
cused of assailing with wanton slurs his own fair and free land !
The present writer remembers to have seen in a New York
newspaper of good position, not long ago, an almost vitupera-
tive letter in which Mr. James was held up to scorn for having
permitted his “ Point of View” to slander this country at the
expense of Europe. Large quotations were made, as if in a
perfectly honest spirit of corroboration, from one special episto-
lary chapter of this same work. It chanced to be a chapter in
which a particularly provincial Frenchman was imagined as scath-
ing us — as regarding us from his exclusively Gallic point de vue.
But the words, with an amazing lack either of honesty or com-
mon-sense, were quoted as Mr. James's own ! The very next
letter represented a totally opposite sort of writer: he extolled
our institutions of every sort with unstinted enthusiasm ; he
was “ spread-eagle” enough, as we put it here, for a Fourth-of-
July oration ; he scoffed at Europe as a contemptible little sec-
tion of the map in comparison with our glorious and thrice-
blessed expanse of it. And he was just as serious, just as im-
partially permitted by his author to have his own say and to say
it all out, as the feudal-minded enemy of the Stars and Stripes
had been but a page or two before! Yet the person who made
his quarrel with Mr. James entirely omitted this assertive eulo-
gist from mention ! It was taken grandly for a matter of course
that he had written sacred truths, while the sound abuse of us,
clearly indicated as emanating from a wholly different pen, was
coolly copied out as if it had been signed with neither reserva-
tion nor explanation by Mr. James!

“ Confidence” is a novel which contains some good writing,
but it is chiefly of a descriptive, landscape sort. Mr. James takes
us about Europe in company with his various characters, who are
the most nomadic Americans in the world ; we are even led to
think, at times, that he has made them so for the purpose of
telling us where they rest and muse and converse, rather than
6

82

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

of telling us just what and who they are. “ Confidence” is like
one of his fine “Transatlantic Sketches” amplified, with a
thread of story to gleam here and there amid its mellifluous
and rhythmic prose. The story is by no means notable. The
characters are all enigmas for which we find no ultimate key.
They do not seem to live, but rather to talk of living, and
almost merely to play at it. Tho it appeared but recently,
it gives the idea of having been written long ago — before “ The
Passionate Pilgrim” and “ Madame de Mauves” — and of hav-
ing afterward been re-touched, re-polished. It is by no means
so good as “ Gabrielle de Bergerac,” which was printed fully
fifteen years ago, and which better deserves resurrection than
the novelette “ Watch and Ward,” now given us in book-form.
“ Gabrielle de Bergerac” was a lovely picture of French chateau-
life. But “ Confidence” is not a lovely picture of any sort of
life. The more closely we examine it at this later date, the
more assured we feel of its youthful origin. Its psychology is
unfathomable, but not with the profundity of deep insight.
We are prepared to expect certain inevitable things of its men
and women, and they do the precise opposites of these things.
They amaze us, they even irritate us, but they never interest
us. The whole book is curious for its blending of good techni-
cal elaboration with insufficient human exposition.

Chronologically speaking, we should not have left until the
last a novel of Mr. James’s which we have reserved for final
treatment. He has published no small amount of fiction since
he wrote “ The Portrait of a Lady,” and yet this deserves a last
place on the list of his novels. Into this work, as it seems to
us, Mr. James has poured his soul, and given the world some-
thing that it will not soon let die. Four magnificent volumes
now stand recorded to his credit as an author. These are :
“ The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales,” “ Roderick Hudson,”
“ The American,” and “ The Portrait of a Lady.” Much of his
intermediate writing is fine and admirable. But it would have
given him a secondary place in letters, while these four books
just mentioned lift him to a primary, we were about to add a
supreme, place in letters. If he should never put pen to paper
again, his fame is secure and permanent through those four
books alone. And after the most careful consideration of each,

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

83

it appears to us that “ The Portrait of a Lady” is paramount
over the rest. It is the longest thing that he has written, but
it is also the most majestic and unassailable. Its heroine is a
character whose misfortunes are the imperative catastrophes
resultant from her own ideal strivings. Unlike Roderick Hud-
son, Isabel Archer does not recklessly sow the seed of her own
future torments. She makes a pitiable error, but she makes
it in all womanly faith and sincerity. She is a beautiful,
talented, exceptionally lovable girl, and suddenly, at a period
when she desires more than ever before to wrest a fecund and
splendid victory from the usual aridity of life — to ennoble herself
by subjugating herself — to live a power for good and to die
somehow perpetuating such a power — at this very period, we
say, she is lifted from the inertia of longing to the possibility of
achievement. A fortune is left her, in a most unexpected
manner; vistas of new purpose are opened to her; the prospect
is dazzling at first ; she hardly knows what she shall do with
these charming, golden opportunities. She does what nearly
every woman of her personal graces would do under the same
conditions. Out of four suitors (if poor, consumptive Ralph
Touchett may be called a suitor) she selects a man whom she
marries, believing him a paragon of wisdom, virtue, taste, refine-
ment, notability. He is poor, and it is a comfort for her to feel
him so. For this reason he and she shall be yoked, all the more,
in exercise of noble end. Her love, which is a reverence, becomes
a horror of disappointed discovery. The whole novel is a sort of
monumental comment upon the dread uncertainties of matri-
mony. Isabel’s husband, whom she •believed of a spirit equally
lofty and amiable, turns out a frigid self-worshipper, a creature
whose blood is ichor, whose creed is an adoration of les usages ,
whose honor is a brittle veneer of decorum, beneath which beats
a heart as formally regular as the strokes of a well-regulated
clock. He has married her with very much the same motive as
that which might prompt him to buy a new bit of antique
bric-a-brac at slight cost from a shrewd dealer. He is a virtuoso,
a collector, a person who puts immense value upon all ex-
terior things, and he considers life, happiness, matrimony,
womanhood, principle, even divinity itself as an exceedingly

34

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

exterior thing. Isabel’s amazement, her grief, her dismay, her
passionate mutiny, and her final bitter resignation, constitute
the chief substance of this remarkable book. But much more
than this goes to make the book, as a thousand turrets, traceries,
illuminations and sculptures go to make a great result in
architecture. It is a book with a very solid earth beneath it
and a very luminous and profound sky above it. It is rich in
passages of quotable description, and no less rich in characters
of piercing vividness. It contains more than one “portrait of
a lady,” as it contains more than one portrait of a man.
Madame Merle, the perfectly equipped woman of the wrorld,
the charmer, the intrigante, the soft-voiced, soft-moving
diplomatist, and yet (as we feel more than we are really told)
the force for ill, the adulteress, and the arch-hypocrite — Madame
Merle, we say, is incomparably depicted. Again, the dying
Ralph Touchett, with his mixture of the cynic and the humani-
tarian, with his love for Isabel alike so exquisitely concealed
and revealed, with his patience, his outbursts of regret, his
poetry of feeling, his inalienable dignity and manhood, is an
astonishingly striking conception. He exists, to our knowledge,
nowhere else in any pages of fiction. He is the high-tide mark
of what Mr. James can do with a human individuality, and he
represents what Mr. James likes most to do with one. We all
must recognize him if we have lived and thought. As the
author first presents him to us, we involuntarily recall having
seen some one who looked just like him. This may not be true,
but the sensation of having met Ralph Touchett before is none
the less insistent, and proves how marvellous is Mr. James’s
faculty for hitting off with a few airy or rough touches the
physical “points” of his fellow-creatures. “Tall, lean, loosely
and feebly put together,” runs the description of Ralph Touchett,
“ he had an ugly, sickly, witty and charming face, furnished,
but by no means decorated, with a straggling mustache and
whisker. He looked clever and ill — a combination by no means
felicitous; and he wore a brown velvet jacket. He carried
his hands in his pockets, and there was something in the way
he did it that showed the habit was inveterate. His gait had a
shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on his

HENRY JAMES'S NOVELS.

85

legs.” We get to love this poor dying consumptive very dearly
before he dies. He has a great warm heart behind those
wasting lungs. He is a philosopher, but he is also through
and through a man.

But, after all, tho he and Isabel are the two triumphs
of the book, they are merely the crown of a perfect edifice;
all the rest of the structure is of a correspondent excellence.
The demure little Pansy, with her unswerving propriety, her
devout, filial faith, her enormous sense of rule and law and
obedience, is a picture of puritanic simplicity whose tints should
last for other generations than ours. So, too, Lord Warburton,
as regards crisp and potent yet harmonious and secure character-
painting. He is the Liberal English peer to a fault, — with mind
enough to understand that his position is absurd, yet with
inherited pride enough to preserve an unblemished caste.
Quotation, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is a dangerous tempta-
tion. Every page offers abundant chance for it, filled as every
page is with epigram, thought, knowledge of the world, glancing
play of humor, and sportive resilience of fancy.

Mr. James, as we understand, is still in middle life. His
career has thus far been enviably brilliant. He has secured
heed, place and note in England ; he is honorably known
throughout Germany and France. In his own country he has
stimulated eager debate, caused sides to be formed for and
against him, won his lovers and his haters after the manner
of all literary men who have ever risen high above mediocrity.
He has attained much — how much this article has been of
meagre worth if it has not already somewhat plainly shown.
He has put his stamp upon the literature of his age; he has
employed a bewitching, resonant, cultivated style in which to
express, not merely himself, but the best of himself — not merely
his ideas, but his most careful, solid and durable ideas. That
he will give us, in the future years which supposably still await
him, work of even a stouter fibre against oblivion than any which
he has yet produced, is far from improbable. Toward that result
his admirers — and we venture to assert that they are a more
numerous tho more modest clieiitele than some current news-
papers would rather maliciously have us believe — entertain

S6

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

strong and obvious reasons for hope. Fame has rarely crowned
so young a writer with bays of so fine a verdure. But he has
won them, when all is said, very honestly. He bears the palm
because he merits it. Let him merit new honors and these are
sure to reward him. As it is, there is little doubt that he
deserves to-day to be called the first of English-writing novelists.

Edgar Fawcett.

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS.

SECOND ARTICLE.

WITH a view of making as complete as possible the curi-
ous record of the experience of the United States in
taxing distilled spirits, especially in that department of the sub-
ject which relates to the influence of this tax on other industries,
it is proposed to here turn back and ask attention to an example
of no little economic interest and importance which inadvert-
ently was not noticed in its proper connection in the preceding
article, and which illustrates in a remarkable manner the subtle,
diffusive, and often remote and unexpected influence of a tax,
especially when the same is imposed on the processes rather
than the final results of industry.

Before the tax was levied upon distilled spirits in 1862, a
large (and probably the largest) proportion of the vinegar used
in the United States was made from this product, rather than,
as was popularly supposed, from the juice of apples and grapes;
the process of manufacture being substantially to add yeast to
alcohol (low proof-spirits) largely diluted with water, and allow
the mixture to trickle slowly through a cask filled with shavings
of beech-wood. In this way the alcoholic liquor is caused to
present an immensely extended surface to the action of the air,
when oxidation takes place so rapidly that very frequently by
the time the liquor has reached the bottom of the cask it no
longer contains any alcohol, but is entirely converted into vine-
gar. Experience has also shown that vinegar thus manufactured
and with care is always purer and a better preservative of ani-
mal and vegetable food than vinegar manufactured from the
juices of fruits, inasmuch as the latter always contain putresci-

88

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

ble constituents which are rarely fully eliminated by the pro-
cess of fermentation ; and further, that when the use of distilled
spirits at their first cost of production is permissible for the
preparation of vinegar, the product can be sold at a much
cheaper rate than any other competing article : and the desira-
bility of cheapness and purity in the supply of this commodity
at once becomes evident, when it is remembered that the largest
consumption of vinegar in every community is for the pickling
(preservation) of meats, fish, and vegetables. All this business
the war-taxation at once and almost completely broke up. On
the other hand, the manufacture of cider — which was not
specially taxed — received a great stimulus. New orchards were
set out, new nurseries were called into existence, additional
cider-mills were demanded in every apple-section of the country,
and thousands of dollars were invested in this industry where
but a small sum had formerly sufficed. The old fashioned press
also gave place to improved and expensive machinery, and ex-
pensive buildings were erected for conducting the business on a
most extensive scale. According to a statement submitted to
Congress in 1882 by the “ Cider-Vinegar Makers’ Association,”
the number of persons engaged in cider and cider-vinegar
making in the United States at that time was between ten
and twelve thousand, and the amount of capital invested as
aggregating into millions. As the amount of available cider
and wine produced in the most favorable fruit-years is, however,
never sufficient to supply the demand of the country for vinegar,
other and cheaper materials for its manufacture were sought for
and found, but always at the sacrifice of the purity and health-
fulness of the resulting product. Great hopes were for a time
entertained that a fermented syrup made from glucose, or
starch-sugar, would answer, and this material soon came into
extensive use ; but the vinegar made from it was found to
soon putrefy, and its use, after occasioning great losses to pick-
lers and the community, was abandoned. Unscrupulous manu-
facturers also made use of mineral acids for the manufacture of
factitious vinegar ; and as some evidence of the extent to which
such fabrications came into general use, it may be stated that
in 1877 the Board of Health of the District of Columbia con-
demned five car-loads of so-called vinegar sent to Washington

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. 89

from Chicago, analysis showing that the same was little other
than dilute sulphuric acid ; the board further reporting that the
sample analyzed formed part of an invoice of a thousand barrels
which had been brought to that city for sale and consumption
as vinegar.

Under such circumstances, Congress in 1879 made it lawful
for manufacturers of vinegar to separate by a so-called vaporiz-
ing process the alcoholic element of an ordinary distiller’s
“ mash,” and condense the same in water in such a way as to
form a weak mixture, suitable for making vinegar, and yet not
salable as spirits. But the moment this was done, fresh indus-
trial antagonisms arose. Vinegar manufactured from distilled
spirits again made its appearance on the market, and in such
quantities and at such prices that the cider-vinegar makers
claimed it would be no longer possible for them to continue
their business. The latter accordingly, as was to have been ex-
pected, speedily organized themselves into a National Protective
Cider-Makers’ Association, and demanded of Congress, through
petitions and deputations, that the permission granted to vapor-
ize alcohol and use it in the manner described for the manu-
facture of vinegar should be at once repealed, alleging that
the consequence of refusal would be to destroy many millions
of dollars of capital which the original tax-law had caused
to be invested, and (with less of truth) that the fruit-pro-
duction of the country would be checked, and the manufac-
ture and sale of deleterious compounds to serve as vinegar be
encouraged. Very curiously, also, the distillers actively co-ope-
rated as allies of the cider-vinegar makers in asking for a repeal
of the new law, alleging a fear that it would encourage illicit
distillation and consequent frauds on the revenue. That there
were some reasons for such apprehensions could not well be
doubted ; but the real motive influencing the distillers un-
doubtedly was, the fear of losing a limited market for their
products which had come to them through a revival to some
extent of the manufacture of spirit-vinegar, in consequence of
the reduction of the tax on proof-spirits in 1868 from $2 per
proof-gallon to 50 cents, with subsequent changes to 70 and 90
cents in 1872 and 1875 respectively. And the antagonisms thus
inaugurated still exist, and continue to occupy the attention

go

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

of the committees of Congress in a greater or less degree at
almost every session ; the whole history affording a most strik-
ing illustration of the unnatural, unpatriotic, and false view that
has come to be almost universally taken under the leading free
representative government of the earth of the great function of
taxation. The distiller, for example, in the case in question,
asking to have returned to him what he regards as an alienated
right, namely, to levy contribution on every one who desires to
use alcohol in any shape ; the cider-maker, that the tax may be
so fixed as will prevent competition and thereby enable him to
exact a larger profit on the sale of his product ; and, finally, the
spirit-vinegar maker claiming that as he alone occupies a humani-
tarian standpoint, because his product alone is cheap and always
healthful, therefore that the law should be especially framed to
promote and encourage his business ; — each and all speaking, as
is proper, for their own interests ; each and all, as is not proper,
ever ready to promote their interests by fictitious pleas and
averments ; while no one (or but rarely) appears on behalf of
the consumers, who are the great mass of the people, in whose
interests, it is popularly claimed, all laws are enacted. Further-
more, none of the disastrous consequences which it was confi-
dently predicted would ensue if Congress failed to withdraw from
the spirit-vinegar makers the permission to use vaporized spirits
have apparently occurred as the result of such failure. The regu-
lar business of producing distilled spirits goes on as usual.
Farmers have not ceased to plant and care for their orchards ;
cider continues to be manufactured in increasing quantities
when the seasons are propitious ; while the general public have
abundant opportunities to supply themselves with whatever
vinegar they may desire at lower prices than have prevailed
since the breaking out of the war in i860. The Commissioner
of Internal Revenue alone seems warranted in complaining that
through the use of the vaporizing process the facilities for illicit
distillation are increased, and probably taken advantage of, to a
consid_erable extent. Finally, if to any it may seem that this
history has been stated in greater detail than is expedient,
it may be replied that no more important contributions can, in
the opinion of the writer, be made to economic science than
just such records of practical experience; for it is mainly

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS.. 9 1

through the force and teaching of such examples that the
masses can be induced to acknowledge the truth and make the
application of abstract principles.

One of the topics to which the attention of the Revenue
Commission of 1865 was given, was the influence of the greatly
increased cost of distilled spirits in the United States, through
the war-taxation, on their demand for drinking purposes ; and
the testimony of a large number of persons from all sections of
the loyal States — manufacturers and dealers in liquors, United
States revenue officials and others — was taken in reference to
this matter. The opinions expressed were almost unanimously
to the effect that no change in consumption was noted by re-
tailers until after the tax was raised above 60 cents per gal-
lon ; but that when the tax was increased to $2 the reduction
for a time in consumption, especially in the thinly settled sec-
tions of the country, was very noticeable. With the increase of
taxes on whiskey there was also an immediate and very marked
increase in the consumption of beer, the price of which was not
enhanced by taxation to a corresponding extent with that of
spirits. Thus in 1864, with an internal-revenue tax of $1 per
barrel, the assessment was paid on an equivalent of 2,223,000
barrels; in 1865 on 3,657,000; in 1866 on 5,115,000; in 1867 on
3,819,000; while in 1883 the number, as before stated, was 17,-
757,892 barrels.

On the other hand, the testimony of leading retail and pack-
age dealers in liquors in many of the large towns and cities was
generally to the effect that their business in the aggregate was
not diminished by the high rates of taxes imposed on spirits ;
but at the same time all admitted that the demand for the so-
called “ foreign” or “ imported ” liquors (upon which the tariff
rates had been raised to a greater extent than the taxes on do-
mestic spirits) largely diminished ; and also that this loss was
fully made good by an increased sale of American whiskey. In
fact, the great increase at this time in the price of foreign liquors
greatly promoted the sale and use of whiskey in the northern
and eastern sections of the country, and seems to have nation-
alized this liquor as a beverage, and also the term “ Bourbon,”
which then for the first time was, in common parlance (as it ever
since has been), generally given to every variety of American

92

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

whiskey. One prominent retail liquor-dealer of New York tes-
tified before the Commission in 1865 that where during the pre-
ceding two years he had lost a sale of four gallons of “ for-
eign” (?) brandy, he had in the same time gained a sale of
twelve gallons of American whiskey. There was also a general
agreement among the witnesses that one noticeable effect of the
greatly increased cost of spirits through taxation was an in-
crease of adulteration of the cheap liquors that were retailed,
thus debasing the quality of the article that was consumed by
the habitually-intemperate or the physically exhausted among
the poor. One practical illustration in proof of this (contained
in a memorial presented to Congress by the American Wine and
Spirit Society) was, that in i860, when gin was selling, duty paid,
in New York, at 65 cents per gallon, the retailer charged 6
cents a glass; and that the retail price continued the same when
the wholesale price had subsequently advanced to $3.25 per
gallon.

Previous to the war and the taxes, the cheap liquors bought
by the masses in the United States for stimulant or intoxication
were not much adulterated, because there was nothing much
cheaper than the crude proof-spirit itself (costing from 14 to 23
cents per gallon wholesale) which could be used as a material for
adulteration. At the same time, nothing could be much more
deleterious than the American raw spirits (whiskeys) from which
the so-called fusel-oil (amylic alcohol), which is the invariable
accompaniment of its distillation, has not been removed by re-
distillation or by oxidation through standing and atmospheric
exposure.1

Some reliable testimony was also taken illustrative of the
specific consumption of distilled spirits in the United States be-
fore the war. Thus, according to the opinion of those best
conversant with the trade, the quantity of proof spirits re-
quired to meet the demands of New York City and its immedi-

1 While fusel-oil, in itself, is so deleterious that the inhalation of its vapor,
even in minute quantity, is very dangerous, there can be no doubt that it is
almost completely removed from spirits through what is technically called “age-
ing,” or atmospheric oxidation and moderately high temperatures. Under such
circumstances the fusel-oil appears to be naturally converted into innoxious eth-
ers, which give to wines and liquors their delicate “bouquet,” or flavor, which is
so much prized and is so agreeable.

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. 93

ate vicinity in 1862 was from 800 to 1000 barrels daily, or from
twelve to fifteen millions of gallons per annum. Of this amount
one half was set down as directly consumed for drink ; while the
balance, having been converted into alcohol, pure spirits, imita-
tion liquors, medicinal preparations and the like, found a market
elsewhere. According to the testimony of the then Superinten-
dent of Police, the number of places where spirituous liquors
were sold at retail in New York City in 1862 was upwards of
8000 ; and that the quantity sold over the bars of some of
the largest hotels, restaurants, and drinking-saloons was equiva-
lent in each case to a barrel of fifty gallons daily.

The results of investigations made some years ago in Eng-
land, and communicated in a paper read before the Statistical
Society by the Rev. Dawson Burns in 1875/ were to the effect,
that increased taxation upon spirits in Great Britain, and a conse-
quent increase in their price, had always resulted in restricted
consumption ; that the lowering of the rate had, on the other
hand, stimulated consumption ; and that seasons of manufactur-
ing and commercial prosperity and development virtually oper-
ated as a reduction of the rate and of the price. Mr. Burns, in
the paper referred to, also brings out this further interesting
fact; namely, that in 1861 Mr. Gladstone, with a view of induc-
ing a popular consumption of light wines, and in accordance
with the popular theory that light wines, if cheap, would readily
enter into consumption, and by helping to drive out the stronger
liquors would assist in the work of promoting popular sobriety,
largely reduced the duties on imported wines, i.e., from 5s. 9-^d.
to is. per gallon on wines containing less than 26 per cent of
proof-spirits, and 50 per cent on wines more highly alcoholic
but not exceeding 42 per cent of proof-spirits. The result
was a refutation, in a degree, of the popular theory. The
importation and use of imported wines, as was expected, largely
increased ; and altho a taste for the French clarets was par-
tially excited among the British public, the consumption of the
stronger wines of Spain and Portugal — the sherries and the

‘“The Consumption of Intoxicating Liquors at various periods as affected
by the rates of duty imposed upon them,” by the Rev. Dawson Burns, M.A.,
Metropolitan Superintendent of the United Kingdom Alliance. ( Journal of the
Statistical Society of London, vol. xxxviii. 1875.}

94

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

ports — was stimulated in a much greater degree. In the de-
bate, however, which followed the reading of this paper, the
drift of opinion expressed was, that the conclusion of Mr.
Burns, that high duties as a rule reduced the consumption of
spirits in England, was not sustained ; and it was pointed out
by Dr. Farr and others that the consumption of intoxicating
liquors in Great Britain was affected far more by the prosperity
of the country and the rates of wages than by the duties which
had at different times been imposed upon them. And the late
Mr. Dudley Baxter, especially, whose knowledge and judgment
of economic matters are entitled to great respect, maintained
that, as regards the upper and middle classes of Great Britain,
Mr. Gladstone’s legislation in respect to wines had been of most
decided advantage to the cause of temperance ; and that this,
together with the spread and cheapening, by his measures, of
tea and coffee, had been one of the most effectual agencies that
had been adopted in the country for many years for the further-
ance of the object which the advocates of temperance had at
heart. But be this as it may, the whole evidence from the ex-
perience of the United States is, that if the great and rapid in-
crease in the price of distilled spirits, after the year 1863, through
Federal taxation, did for a time and to some extent operate to
diminish their popular consumption, the effect was but tempo-
rary. And such a result, when the habits and character of the
people of the United States are taken into consideration,
ought not to have been unexpected ; and it is to be observed,
furthermore, that it accords entirely with the experience of
Great Britain, as accepted by her leading economists and ex-
pressed in the debate above noticed. For such is the degree of
material abundance in the United States, and so easy has it been
for the masses of its people to obtain what they want in the
nature of food-supplies, that they are notoriously extravagant
and not given to economy in the use of all such materials ; 1

1 The following example in the way of confirmatory evidence on this point,
which has come to the knowledge of the writer while the present article was in
the course of preparation, is so interesting that he cannot forbear submitting it
to the reader.

During the past year, the price of sugars, all over the world, owing to an in-
crease of production has been lower than at any previous time in the history of
commerce; and, in accordance with a well-recognized economic law or axiom,

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. 95

and a rise of price operates less in restricting consumption than
in almost any other country. And as illustrative of this matter,
it is interesting to note the difference in the methods by which
liquors are retailed in the United States and England respec-
tively. Thus in the former, when a drink of distilled spirits is
called for at a public bar, the bottle or decanter is set before the
customer and he helps himself ; in the latter, on the contrary,
every quantity of spirits retailed is measured by the seller, and
accurately proportioned to the price to be received by him. This
custom prevails universally in Great Britain — in the leading hotels
and club-houses as well as with the smallest and lowest retailers ;
and hence the original signification of the term “ dram-shop,” i.e.,
a place where liquor is sold by the fluid drachm or other measure,
but which in the United States has become so perverted in
meaning as to now signify a place where one can drink without
any exact measure, or have as much strong liquor for a common
price as the average consumer would ordinarily desire for one
act of drinking. Besides, as remarked by Mr. Burns in his paper
above referred to, industrial prosperity and full employment of
the masses virtually operate as a reduction of the tax and the
price of spirits ; and such employment and industrial activity
existed in the United States in a high degree from the latter
years of the war down to the era of business and financial dis-

consumption has also noticeably increased. In the United States this increase is
estimated as high as from io to 15 per cent; and, very curiously, has manifested
itself in a greater proportionate demand for the lower grades of refined white
sugars, rather than, as might naturally have been expected, for the best qualities of
refined yellow sugars, which are cheaper. This circumstance attracting the at-
tention of one of the great refiners in the United States, he sought an explana-
tion of it from one of his most intelligent workmen, and in answer received the
following reply: “ There is no difficulty, sir, in explaining it. I give my wife,
for instance, every Monday morning fifty cents to buy sugar for the family for a
week, as I have always done; and she buys the same quantity as before: but
the same money now gives us the same quantity of white sugar that it once did
of the yellow.” Or in other words, the wife, being the judge of the interests and
desires of the family, preferred to take her share of the advantage resulting from
the fall in the price of this essential article of household consumption in an in-
crease in quality (which, by the way, was more apparent to the eye than the taste),
rather than in the form of a larger quantity, for the same price, of the grade which
had before been satisfactory; or than the same quantity and quality as before, and
applied the resulting saving to the purchase of something additional or to an
increase of the family reserve in the savings-bank.

96

T HE PRINCETON REVIEW.

turbance and paralysis in 1873. During all this period, accord-
ingly, the aggregate drinking consumption of distilled and fer-
mented liquors in the United States went on steadily increasing,
or at least keeping pace with the increase of population. With
the advent of bad times in this latter year, some diminution in
the popular use of these commodities might naturally have
been expected ; and during the years 1873 and ’74 there seems
to have been some decrease, or at least no increase ; the decrease
manifesting itself rather in the consumption of fermented liquors
than of distilled spirits : the receipts of internal revenue from
the former, from the tax of $1 per barrel, declining from $8,910,-
823 in 1873 to $8,880,829 in 1874, and $8,743,744 in 1876 ; while
the population continued to increase. But subsequent to 1875-6,
and especially on the recurrence of national prosperity in 1878-9,
the aggregate consumption of spirits and beer in the United
States rapidly increased ; the internal-revenue receipts from dis-
tilled spirits — tax remaining the same — increasing from $56,-

426.000 in 1875-6 to $69,893,000 in 1882-3; and of fermented
liquors from $9,571,000 in 1875-6 to $16,153,920 in 1882-3:
which increments, it will be noted, are in much greater ratio
than any concurrent increase in population.

It is interesting to here also note the changes which have
taken place during the period under consideration in the impor-
tation of champagne, a form of spirituous liquor almost exclu-
sively consumed by the more wealthy portion of our population.
In 1870 the importation was returned at 2,106,000 quarts and
906,788 pints. In 1874, the year following the commencement
of the long commercial and industrial depression, the importa-
tion was 1,615,000 quarts, a decrease of 491,000 ; and 1,688,000
pints, an increase of 782,000. In 1878 the importation was

837.000 quarts, a decrease, as compared with 1874, of 778,000;
and 1,185,000 pints, a decrease of 500,000. In 1880, national
prosperity having returned, the importation was 1,35 1,000 quarts,
an increase, as compared with 1878, of 514,000; and 1,784,000
pints, an increase of 599,000. For the fiscal year 1883 the im-
portations of champagnes were returned at 2,506,092 quarts and
3,927,372 pints or less ; a very large increase over the importa-
tions of any former years.

Finally, considering all the evidence available on this matter

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. 9 7

of the production and consumption of distilled and fermented
liquors in the United States and other countries, one cannot
resist the impression of the small apparent effect which specific
agencies — legislative, societary, and personal — produce in restrict-
ing their consumption as stimulants or for intoxicating purposes.
Excepting, possibly, the recent experience of Great Britain and
certain exceptional periods, the aggregate everywhere goes on
increasing : no matter whether the prices be high or low, in bad
times as well as in good : in the latter because the masses have
the means to indulge their appetites, and in the former because
they think there is a need of stimulants to counteract the ten-
dency of the times to mental depression. The most remarkable
illustration to the contrary is probably to be found in the results
of the labors of Father Mathew in behalf of temperance in Ire-
land in the years 1838-40. Under his influence, the consump-
tion of distilled spirits in Ireland, as indicated by the revenue
returns, fell off more than 40 per cent, and did not materially
increase for many years thereafter. Now, however, the per capita
consumption of Ireland, with a greatly reduced population, is
about the same as it was prior to the temperance agitation in
1838 ; thus indicating that the influence of Father Mathew, tho
resulting in great immediate good, has not been permanent. It
is also to be noted that the reduction in the consumption of
distilled spirits in Ireland which followed Father Mathew’s
work was accompanied by a notably increased consumption of
tea and malt liquors. On the other hand, and as matter of
encouragement to any friends of temperance who may feel a
sense of discouragement at the results of these investiga-
tions, the fact before noticed should be recalled, that while
the production and consumption of distilled spirits in the
United States continually increase and appear very large in
the aggregate, the comparative consumption is undoubtedly
much less than it was forty years ago, — unquestionably very
much less than it was at the commencement of the present
century, — and does not at present tend to increase, but rather
to decrease; and that what is true of the United States appears
to be also true of Great Britain. All available evidence, further-
more, is to the effect that with the increase of civilization, of
facilities for intercommunication, and general consuming power,
7

93

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV

the increased consumption of distilled spirits — taking a term of
years for comparison — has not been by any means as great as
has happened in respect to other commodities of common con-
sumption. Thus, while, according to Mr. Leone Levi, the Brit-
ish economist, the consumption per head of the British people
from 1866 to 1877 of bacon and hams increased 2 77 per cent,
of wheat 94 per cent, of sugar 57 per cent, and of tea 32 per
cent, the consumption of spirits increased only 21 per cent. A
similar conclusion is reached by comparing the estimated per
capita consumption of certain articles of daily consumption by
the population of the city of London in 1843 and 1865. Thus,
in respect to sugar, the increase during this period was from 16.5
lbs. to 41. 1 lbs. ; of tea, from 1.4 lbs. to 3.2 lbs. ; of cocoa, from
0.09 lb. to 1. 1 lbs. ; and of spirits, from 0.87 gallon to only 0.89
gallon. Evidence to the same effect, even more striking and
confirmatory, was also presented by Robert Giffen, Esq., Presi-
dent of the Statistical Society of London, in his inaugural ad-
dress delivered in November, 1883; from which appeared that
the proportion of various imported and excisable commodi-
ties retained for home consumption had increased per head of
the total population of Great Britain during the period from
1840 to 1881 as follows: bacon and hams, from 0.01 lb. to
13.93 lbs.; butter, 1.05 to 6.36; raw sugar, 15.20 to 58.92; rice,
0.90 to 16.32; tobacco, 0.86 to 1.41: while the per capita in-
crease in the consumption of spirits had been from 0.97 gallon
to only 1.08 gallons.

The statistics of German consumption are also reported to
lead to similar conclusions.

It has been a somewhat popular opinion that the great in-
crease in the price of alcoholic liquors, through taxation, since
1863 has induced and increased the consumption of opium
and other drugs in the United States, as substitutes for spirits.
Of this there is no positive proof. There has been a marked
increase in the importations of crude opium into the United
States, and in the importation and domestic manufacture of
morphia, the principal derivative of opium, since i860, but not
greater than what would seem to be warranted by the increase
of population. In i860 the importations of crude opium were
returned at 119,525 lbs., and in 1866 at 180,852 lbs.; and these

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. 99

facts would indicate some basis for the belief of an abnormal
use of this drug during the years of the war. In 1869 the
importation fell off to 90,99 7 lbs., but increased in 1875 to
188,238 lbs., in 1880 to 243,211 lbs., and fell off in 1883 to
229,012 lbs. Supposing the entire opium importation into
the United States for the past year (1883) to be exclusively
used for domestic consumption, certainly this amount is not
large for 53,000,000 people. But all of this import was not
so used ; inasmuch as there is some export of opium and its
derivatives from the United States to the West Indies and
Central and South America; in all which countries the com-
parative consumption of opium is much greater, and the com-
parative consumption of spirits much less, than in the United
States : an illustration of what is now accepted as a cosmic
law, that the use of intoxicating liquors is to a certain extent
dependent on climate. Medical experts have very generally
come to regard the danger in respect to opium consumption
in the United States to be at present almost wholly confined
to the use of morphia ; there being an undoubted tendency
among persons affected with nervous ailments, — more especially
women, — when they feel depressed from various causes, and in
need of some stimulant, to resort to this drug, which, altho
most costly, does not affect the breath like alcohol and can be
easily carried and concealed about the person.

On the other hand, the importation of opium specially prepared
for smoking purposes, which did not exist in 1865, has in latter
years increased enormously; rising from 12,554 lbs. in 1871 to
77,196 lbs. in 1880, and 298,153 lbs. in 1883; paying in the latter
year a customs revenue of nearly two millions of dollars. The
preparation of opium for smoking finds its way into the country
mainly through the port of San Francisco, and its consumption
has hitherto been supposed to be almost wholly restricted to
Chinese residents; but the circumstance that the increase of
import has been of late in a ratio so far in excess of any ratio
of increase in Chinese immigration suggests a probability that
the vice of opium-smoking is finding favor and adoption with
the native American.

Attempts have been made from time to time to estimate the
annual cost to consumers in the United States and other coun-

IOO

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

tries of distilled and fermented liquors used for the purpose of
drink. At the best, these estimates, no matter how carefully
prepared, can but be regarded as approximately accurate, as
the necessary data for forming an opinion cannot be obtained
with exactness. The following statements and inferences re-
specting the cost of such consumption in the United States
may, however, be of some value and interest.

Assuming the present (1883) consumption of distilled spirits
for drinking purposes at about 60,000,000 proof-gallons per
annum,1 the original or first cost of this quantity at 25 cents
per gallon would be only $15,000,000. (The average price of
proof-spirits in Cincinnati, exclusive of the tax, for the year
1882 was 24.9 cents ; for 1883, 23.8 cents.) Adding the internal-
revenue tax of 90 cents per gallon ($54,000,000) and all the addi-
tional taxes which the Federal Government imposes on the
whole business of producing and vending distilled spirits, i.e.
licenses, etc. ($6,410,764), and the first cost would become
further augmented to $75,410,764. (The census return of the
value of the entire product of distilled liquors in the country
for 1880 was $41,063,000.) The returned value of the imports
of spirits, of imitations thereof, and of champagne for 1883 was
$6,906,900, on which the duties collected were $5,593,869; mak-
ing the aggregate first cost of such importations $12,500,769,
and the total first cost of the entire distilled spirit and imported
champagne consumption of the United States for the fiscal year
of 1883 $87,911,533: of which large sum, $66,004,633 accrues
to the internal revenue. It will thus be seen that the Govern-
ment is the largest partner, and has by far the largest interest,
in this business.

The next question of interest and importance is, To what ex-
tent is this aggregate of first market-price or cost, and of the ac-
companying taxation, increased in the process of distribution ?

1 The number of gallons of proof-spirits on which the internal-revenue tax
was paid for the year 1S83 was 76,762,063, of which 75,508,785 gallons were dis-
tilled from grain, molasses, etc., and 1,253,278 gallons from fruit. Of this
aggregate, 7.561,171 gallons were withdrawn from warehouse under the form of
alcohol; which would represent in turn about 14,400,000 gallons of proof-spirits,
and indicate a larger consumption of spirits for industrial and pharmaceutical
purposes than was assumed on page 205 of the first article of this series.

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. lOI

The drift of opinion on the part of those who have discussed this
subject in Great Britain appears to be that it is about doubled.
If we assume this to be the case in the United States, then the
ultimate cost to the consumer of the distilled-spirit and cham-
pagne consumption in this country from the year 1883 would
be $175,823,0 66.

It may here also be mentioned that the value of the still
wines imported into the United States during the fiscal year 1883
(duties included) was returned at $8,827,000.

The present (1884) domestic production and consumption of
fermented liquors — ale, lager-beer, etc. — is probably about 18,500,-
000 barrels, of an average capacity of 31 gallons each ; or an ag-
gregate of 573,500,000 gallons. At an assumed valuation in the
hands of the manufacturer at $6 per barrel, the resulting aggregate
would be $111,000,000. (The returned census valuation of the
malt-liquor product of the United States for 1880 was $101,088,-
000.) The internal-revenue tax of $1 per barrel ($18,500,000), and
an allowance of an equal sum to cover expenses and profits of
distribution to the retailers, would further increase this original
cost as above assumed to $148,000,000. If sold (retailed) to the
consumer at double this sum, the final aggregate figures would
be $296,000,000. For the year 1883 the value of the importa-
tions of ale, beer, and porter — duties included — was returned at
$1,657,178, which to the ultimate consumer may be assumed to
represent an expenditure of at least $3,000,000.

We have then, on the basis of the above figures and estimates,
a present direct annual expenditure on the part of consumers in
the United States of $175,823,000 for distilled spirits (domes-
tic and imported) and of champagne, but exclusive of all still
wines ; and of $299,000,000 for fermented liquors of domestic
and foreign production ; or a total annual aggregate of $474,823,-
000. This result is much less than the estimates that have
been heretofore made, and which have obtained much credence
on the part of the public ; and they are also less in comparison,
as will be directly shown, than the estimates of the cost of simi-
lar consumption generally accepted as correct for Great Britain.
The main element of uncertainty pertaining to all these calcula-
tions is in respect to the extent to which the original or first
cost of the various liquors is enhanced in price on their way to

102

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

the ultimate consumers ; and here, in the absence of much defi-
nite evidence, there is an opportunity for great latitude of
opinion. It is obvious that the price paid for drink varies
greatly according to the circumstances under which it is ob-
tained ; the man buying each glass from a public retailer neces-
sarily paying much more per gallon than the one who takes it
from a cask or bottle at home ; 1 and to accurately ascertain how
final consumption is apportioned in these respects in a nation
of 55,000,000 is clearly an impossibility. It will also be noted
that the above aggregate does not include any estimate of
the cost of the annual consumption of domestic or foreign
wines other than champagne.

But assuming $474,000,000 as the minimum annual cost to
the consumers of distilled and fermented liquors in the United
States at the present time, it will be interesting to compare
this amount with the returned value, according to the census of
1880, of the annual product of certain other leading commodities.
Thus, the returned valuation of cotton manufacturers for 1880
was $210,000,000 ; of woollen goods, $160,000,000; of boots and
shoes, $196,000,000; of agricultural implements, $68,000,000;
of men and women’s clothing, $241,000,000; of iron and steel,
$296,000,000 ; and of lumber planed and sawed, $270,000,000.
The amount of expenditures for public schools in the whole
country, including building and all other expenditures, for 1880,
was also returned at $79,339,814.

This same subject has also attracted much attention of late
years in Great Britain ; and the results of its investigation have
been presented in several elaborate papers to the Statistical
and other economic and scientific societies. The general conclu-

1 Popular estimates of the cost of distilled and fermented liquors to consumers
which have obtained extensive circulation and acceptance fix the retail price of
the former at from $3.78 to §6 per gallon, and of the latter at from $16 to $20
per barrel, or from 50 to 67 cents per gallon.

One ingenious writer has given the following estimate of the number of
drinks represented by the present annual consumption of distilled spirits in the
United States: “ Each gallon contains fifty average drinks; which multiplied by
the total number of gallons consumed for drinking purposes (assumed at 60,000,-
000 for 1883) would give 3,000,000,000 drinks; which would be at the rate of over
54 drinks per annum for each man, woman, and child of the present population,
estimated at 55,000,000.”

OUR EXPERIENCE IN TAXING DISTILLED SPIRITS. I03

sions which seem to be accepted as approximately accurate are :
that the amount paid for the production and distribution of
alcohol in its several forms of spirits, beer, and wines in Great
Britain for the year 1880 was from £120,000,000 ($600,000,000)
to £130,000,000 ($650,000,000), or a sum nearly double the
whole land-rental of the United Kingdom. The actual cost of
the production of the raw materials used in the aggregate manu-
facture of these several products has been estimated at about
£25,000,000, or $125,000,000, and the original cost of the
home products and imports (including the expense of manu-
facturing, but not that of retailing and distribution) at about
£42,000,000 ($210,000,000). According to an estimate presented
to the Statistical Society of London, April, 1882, by Mr. Ste-
phen Bourne, the number of persons employed in producing
the raw materials out of which the alcoholic products annually
consumed in Great Britain are in turn manufactured must ap-
proximate 300,000 in number ; and that nearly 600,000 people
(workers) additional are employed in the subsequent and con-
tingent manufacturing and dispensing processes; or a total of
near 900,000 persons “whose occupation it is to provide the
liquor consumed in the land.” Mr. William Hoyle, an Eng-
lish investigator, who for many years has made this subject a
specialty for discussion and investigation, and who publishes an
annual report and estimates, in a recent communication to the
London Times fixes the expenditure of the British people for
the year 1883 on intoxicating liquors at $627,386,505, a decrease
of $3,870,420 as compared with 1882. Accepting these con-
clusions respecting the annual direct expenditure of the British
people for alcoholic liquors, the estimates above given of the
present annual expenditure of the United States for like pur-
poses would seem by comparison, as before stated, to be too
small. But, on the other hand, it should be borne in mind that
the present wholesale market-price of crude spirits in the United
States, inclusive of the tax, is less than half that charged in
Great Britain ; and that the estimates of expenditure for the
United States as above given do not include the cost of the
consumption of domestic wines: so that, if allowance is made for
these differences, the estimates for the two countries, as above
given, will very closely approximate. But again, it is to be re-

104

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

membered that the population of the United States is at pres-
ent almost one third larger than that of Great Britain. In the
face of such antagonism of results, there would seem therefore
but one thing that could be said in explanation ; and that is,
that the latitude of opinion existing, and which, in the absence
of authentic data, is fully permissible, of the extent to which
the wholesale cost of distilled and fermented liquors is in-
creased in the process of retail distribution, warrants, without
any imputation of inaccuracy, a very great discrepancy of con-
clusion as to the aggregate final cost of spirit consumption.

In the next and concluding article of this series it is pro-
posed to discuss the financial results and moral influences which
have followed the attempt of the United States to obtain a
large revenue through the imposition of high taxes on distilled
spirits.

David A. Wells.

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