Reflections and comments, 1865-1895

.REFLECTIONS AND
COMMENTS

1865-1895

BY

EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1895

t]C
8

COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY
CHARLES SCEIBNER'S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
I AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

TO
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

TO WHOM THE FOUNDATION OF "THE NATION" WAS LARGELY

DUE, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

OF A LONG FRIENDSHIP

THE articles in this volume have appeared in
the Nation during the last thirty years, and are
reprinted almost in chronological order. As a
rule they treat of the principal non-political topics,
both grave and gay, which during that period have
attracted the attention of the American public.
Some slight changes have been made in the text
where lapse of time, or change of circumstances,
seemed to obscure the sense. The concluding
portion of the notice of John Stuart Mill, contain-
ing an appreciation of his philosophy, was written
by Chauncey Wright, of Cambridge, whose early
death twenty years ago was a severe loss to science
as well as to his friends. There is, of course,
always a question whether any collection of this
sort can have permanent value. This I must
leave the reader to answer for himself. I confess
that the publishers' estimate of the articles has had
more to do with their reproduction than my own.

E. L. G.

October, 1895.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PEACE, . 1

CULTURE AND WAH, 11

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS, . . .19

THE " COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION, 29

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER, 40

MR. HORACE GREELEY, 48

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN, . . 56

JOHN STUART MILL, 67

PANICS, . 79

THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM, 96

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES, . . . . 104

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE, 119

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS, 129

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE, . . . . . . .138

THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT, . . . .146

R6LE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS, . . .155
THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, 164

x CONTENTS

PAGE

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR, 173

CHROMO-CIVILIZATION, 192

"THE SHORT-HAIRS" AND "THE SWALLOW-TAILS," . 206

JUDGES AND WITNESSES, 219

" THE DEBTOR CLASS," 227

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION, 235

"ORGANS," 242

EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER, 249

PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS, 257

"COURT CIRCLES," 267

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT, . . . . 275

CARLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE, .... 287

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT, . . . 295

SUMMER REST, 309

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES, . . . . .316

WILL WIMBLES, , 322

BEFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

1865-1895

PEACE

THE horrors of war are just now making a deeper
impression than ever on the popular mind, owing
to the close contact with the battle-field and the
hospital into which the railroad and the telegraph
and the newspaper have brought the public of all
civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so
to speak, under every man's and woman's eyes;
and, what is perhaps of nearly as much importance,
the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the
increased complication of the social machine, ren-
der the smallest derangement of it anywhere a
concern and trouble to all nations. The conse-
quence is that the desire for peace was never so
deep as it is now, and the eagerness of all good
people to find out some other means of deciding
international disputes than mutual killing never
so intense.

And yet the unconsciousness of- the true nature

and difficulties of the problem they are trying to

solve, which is displayed by most of those who

make the advocacy of peace their special work, is

1

2 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

very discouraging. We are far from believing that
the incessant and direct appeals to the public con-
science on the subject of war are not likely in the
long run to produce some effect; but it is very
difficult to resist the conclusion that the efforts of
the special advocates of peace have thus far helped
to spread and strengthen the impression that there
is no adequate substitute for the sword as an ar-
biter between nations, or, in other words, to hard-
en the popular heart on the subject of military
slaughter. It is certain that, during the last fifty
years, the period in which peace societies have
been at work, armies have been growing steadily
larger, the means of destruction have been multi-
plying, and wars have been as frequent and as
bloody as ever before; and, what is worse, the
popular heart goes into war as it has never done
in past ages.

The great reason why the more earnest enemies
of war have not made more progress toward doing
away with it, has been that, from the very outset
of their labors down to the present moment, they
have devoted themselves mainly to depicting
its horrors and to denouncing its cruelty. In
other words, they almost invariably approach
it from a side with which nations actually en-
gaged in it are just as familiar as anybody, but
which has for the moment assumed in their eyes a

PEACE 3

secondary importance. The peace advocates are
constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the
combatants only think, and will only think, of the
nobleness of dying. To the peace advocates the
soldier is always a man going to slaughter his
neighbors ; to his countrymen he is a man going
to lose his life for their sake — that is, to perform
the loftiest act of devotion of which a human
being is capable. It is not wonderful, then, that
the usual effect of appeals for peace made by
neutrals is to produce mingled exasperation and
amusement among the belligerents. To the great
majority of Europeans our civil war was a shock-
ing spectacle, and the persistence of the North in
carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and lust of
dominion. To the great majority of those en-
gaged in carrying it on the struggle was a holy
one, in which it was a blessing to perish. Prob-
ably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears
than the taunts and execrations which American
wives and mothers heard from the other side of
the ocean, heaped on the husbands and sons
whom they had sent to the battle-field, never
thinking at all of their slaying, but thinking solely
of their being slain ; and very glad indeed that, if
death had to come, it should come in such a cause.
If we go either to France or Germany to-day, we
shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If

4 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the accounts we hear be true — and we know of no
reason to doubt them — there is no more question
in the German and French mind that French and
German soldiers are doing their highest duty in
fighting, than there was in the most patriotic
Northern or Southern home during our war ; and
we may guess, therefore, how a German or French
mother, the light of whose life had gone out at
Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow
as a great gift of God, would receive an address
from New York on the general wickedness and
folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is — and it is one of the most suggestive
facts we know of — that the very growth of the
public conscience has helped to make peace some-
what more difficult, war vastly more terrible.
When war was the game of kings and soldiers,
the nations went into it in a half-hearted way, and
sincerely loathed it ; now that war is literally an
outburst of popular feeling, the friend of peace
finds most of his logic powerless. There is little
use in reasoning with a man who is ready to die
on the folly or wickedness of dying. When a
nation has worked itself up to the point of believ-
ing that there are objects within its reach for
which life were well surrendered, it has reached a
region in which the wise saws and modern in-
stances of the philosopher or lawyer cannot touch

PEACE 5

it, and in which pictures of the misery of war only
help to make the martyr's crown seem more glo-
rious.

Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peacp
is well done by those who, amidst the heat and fury
of actual hostilities, dwell upon the folly and cruelty
of them, and appeal to the combatants to stop
fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suf-
fering and loss of life, and the destruction of prop-
erty. The principal effect of this on "the average
man " has been to produce the impression that the
friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him smile
over the earnestness with which everybody looks
on his own wars as holy and inevitable, and his
neighbors' wars as unnecessary and wicked. Any
practical movement to put an end to war must be-
gin far away from the battle-field and its horrors.
It must take up and deal with the various influ-
ences, social and political, which create and per-
petuate the state of mind which makes people
ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preach-
ing down war generally are very like general
homilies in praise of virtue and denunciation of
vice. Everybody agrees with them, but nobody
is ever ready to admit their applicability to his
particular case. War is, in our time, essentially
the people's work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses
and sufferings are theirs. All attempts to saddle

6 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

emperors, kings, and nobles with the responsibil-
ity of it may as well be given up from this time
forward.

Now, what are the agencies which operate in
producing the frame of mind which makes people
ready to go to war on small provocation ? It is at
these the friends of peace must strike, in time of
peace, and not after the cannon has begun to roar
and the country has gone mad with patriotism and
rage. They are, first of all, the preaching in the
press and elsewhere of the false and pernicious
doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses,
and can be made happy by its misery ; that the
United States, for instance, profits in the long run
by the prostration of French, German, or English
industry. One of the first duties of a peace so-
ciety is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down
wherever they see it, as one of the great promoters
of the pride and hardness of heart which make
war seem a trifling evil. America can no more
gain by French or German ruin than New York
can gain by that of Massachusetts. Secondly,
there is the mediaeval doctrine that the less com-
mercial intercourse nations carry on with each
other the better for both, and that markets won or
kept by force are means of gain. There has prob-
ably been no more fruitful source of war than this.
It has for three centuries desolated the world, and

PEACE 7

all peace associations should fix on it, wherever
they encounter it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly,
there is the tendency of the press, which is now
the great moulder of public opinion, to take what
we may call the pugilist's view of international
controversies. The habit of taunting foreign dis-
putants, sneering at the cowardice or weakness of
the one who shows any sign of reluctance in draw-
ing the sword, and counting up the possible profit
to its own country of one or other being well
thrashed, in which it so frequently indulges, has
inevitably the effect not only of goading the dis-
putants into hostilities, but of connecting in the
popular mind at home the idea of unreadiness or
unwillingness to fight with baseness and meanness
and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there is the
practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in
every civilized country steadily adhere, of main-
taining, as far as their influence goes, the same
notions about national honor which once prevailed
about individual "honor" — that is, the notion
that it is discreditable to acknowledge one's self
in the wrong, and always more becoming to fight
than apologize. " The code " has been abandoned
in the Northern States and in England in the regu-
lations of the relations of individual men, and a
duellist is looked on, if not as a wicked, as a crack-
brained person; but in some degree in both of

8 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

them, and in a great degree in all other countries,
it still regulates the mode in which international
quarrels are brought to a conclusion.

Last of all, and most important of all, it is the
duty of peace societies to cherish and exalt the
idea of law as the only true controller of interna-
tional relations, and discourage and denounce their
submission to sentiment. The history of civiliza-
tion is the history of the growth amongst human
beings of the habit of submitting their dealings
with each other to the direction of rules of univer-
sal application, and their withdrawal of them from
the domain of personal feeling. The history of
" international law " is the history of the efforts of
a number of rulers and statesmen to induce nations
to submit themselves to a similar regime — that is,
to substitute precedents and rules based on gener-
al canons of morality and on principles of munici-
pal law, for the dictates of pride, prejudice, and
passion, in their mode of seeking redress of inju-
ries, of interpreting contracts, exchanging services,
and carrying on commercial dealings. Their suc-
cess thus far has been only partial. A nation, even
the most highly civilized, is still, in its relations
with its fellows, in a condition somewhat analogous
to that of the individual savage. It chooses its
friends from whim or fancy, makes enemies
through ignorance or caprice, avenges its wrongs

PEACE 9

in a torrent of rage, or through a cold-blooded
thirst for plunder, and respects rules and usages
only fitfully, and with small attention to the possi-
ble effect of its disregard of them on the general
welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say,
" the mother " — since that is supposed to be, in
this discussion, a term of peculiar potency — who
tries to exert a good influence on public opinion
on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of
man as an economical as well as a moral and relig-
ous truth ; to spread the belief that war between
any two nations is a general calamity to the civil-
ized world ; that it is as unchristian and inhuman
to rouse national combativeness as to rouse indi-
vidual combativeness, as absurd to associate honor
with national wrong-doing as with individual wrong-
doing ; and that peace among nations, as among
individuals, is, and can only be, the product of
general reverence for law and general distrust of
feeling — may rest assured that he or she is doing
far more to bring war to an end than can be done
by the most fervid accounts of the physical suffer-
ing it causes. It will be a sorrowful day for any
people when their men come to consider death on
the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the hu-
man heart will certainly have sadly fallen off when
those who stay at home have neither gratitude nor
admiration for those who shoulder the musket, or

10 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

are impressed less by the consideration that the
soldiers are going to kill others than by the con-
sideration that they are going to die themselves.
There are things worth cherishing even in war;
and the seeds of what is worst in it are sown not
in camps, barracks, or forts, but in public meetings
and newspapers and legislatures and in literature.

CULTURE AND WAB

THE feeling of amazement with which the world
is looking on at the Prussian campaigns comes
not so much from the tremendous display of physi-
cal force they afford — though there is in this
something almost appalling — as from the con-
sciousness which everybody begins to have "that to
put such an engine of destruction as the German
army into operation there must be behind it a
new kind of motive power. It is easy enough for
any government to put its whole male population
under arms, or even to lead them on an emer-
gency to the field. But that an army composed in
the main of men suddenly taken from civil pur-
suits should fight and march, as the Prussian
army is doing, with more than the efficiency of any
veteran troops the world has yet seen, and that
the administrative machinery by which they are
fed, armed, transported, doctored, shrived, and
buried should go like clock-work on the enemy's
soil, and that the people should submit not only
without a murmur, but with enthusiasm, to sacri-

12 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

fices such as have never before been exacted of any
nation except in the very throes of despair, show
that something far more serious has taken place in
Prussia than the transformation of the country
into a camp. In other words, we are not witness-
ing simply a levy en masse, nor yet the mere main-
tenance of an immense force by a military mon-
archy, but the application to military affairs of the
whole intelligence of a nation of great mental and
moral culture. The peculiarity of the Prussian
system does not lie in the size of its armies or the
perfection of its armament, but in the character of
the meft who compose it. All modern armies, ex-
cept Cromwell's " New Model Army " and that of
the United States during the rebellion, have been
composed almost entirely of ignorant peasants
drilled into passive obedience to a small body of
professional soldiers. The Prussian army is the
first, however, to be a perfect reproduction of the
society which sends it to the field. To form it,
all Prussian men lay down their tools or pens or
books, and shoulder muskets. Consequently, its
excellences and defects are those of the commu-
nity at large, and the community at large being
cultivated in a remarkable degree, we get for the
first time in history a real example of the devotion
of mind and training, on a great scale, to the work
of destruction.

CULTURE AND WAR 13

Of course, the quality of the private soldier has
in all wars a good deal to do with making or mar-
ring the fortunes of commanders ; but it is safe to
say that no strategists have ever owed so much to
the quality of their men as the Prussian strategists.
Their perfect handling of the great masses which
are now manoeuvring in France has been made in-
large degree possible by the intelligence of the
privates. This has been strikingly shown on two
or three occasions by the facility with which
whole regiments or brigades have been sacrificed
in carrying a single position. With ordinary
troops, only a certain amount can be deliberately
and openly exacted of any one corps. The high-
est heights of devotion are often beyond their
reach. But if it serves the purposes of a Prussian
commander to have all the cost of an assault fall
on one regiment, he apparently finds not the
slightest difficulty in getting it to march to certain
destruction, and not blindly as peasants march,
but as men of education, who understand the
whole thing, but having made it for this occasion
their business to die, do it like any other duty of
life — not hilariously or enthusiastically or reck-
lessly, but calmly and energetically, as they study
or manufacture or plough. They get themselves
killed not one particle more than is necessary, but
also not one particle less.

14 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

A nation organized in this way is a new phe-
nomenon, and is worth attentive study. It gives
one a glimpse of possibilities in the future of
modern civilization of which few people have
hitherto dreamed, and it must be confessed that
the prospect is not altogether pleasing. We have
been flattering ourselves — in Anglo-Saxondom, at
least — for many years back that all social progress
was to be hereafter in the direction of greater in-
dividualism, and among us, certainly, this view
has derived abundant support from observed facts.
But it is now apparent that there is a tendency at
work, which appears to grow stronger and stronger
every day, toward combination in all the work of
life. It is specially observable in the efforts of
the working classes to better their condition; it
still more observable in the efforts of capital to
fortify itself against them and against the public
at large ; and there is, perhaps, nothing in which
more rapid advances have been made of late years
than in the power of organization. The working
of the great railroads and hotels and manufac-
tories, of the trades unions, of the co-operative
associations, and of the monster armies now main-
tained by three or four powers, are all illustra-
tions of it. The growth of power is, of course, the
result of the growth of intelligence, and it is in the
ratio of the growth of intelligence.

CULTURE AND WAR 15

Prussia has got the start of all other countries by
combining the whole nation in one vast organiza-
tion for purposes of offence and defence. Hitherto
nations have simply subscribed toward the main-
tenance of armies and concerned themselves little
about their internal economy and administration ;
but the Prussians have converted themselves into
an army, and have been enabled to do so solely by
subjecting themselves to a long process of elab-
orate training, which has changed the national
character. When reduced to the lowest point of
humiliation after the battle of Jena, they went to
work and absolutely built up the nation afresh.
We may not altogether like the result. To large
numbers of people the Prussian type of character
is not a pleasing one, nor Prussian society an ob-
ject of unmixed admiration, and there is some-
thing horrible in a whole people's passing their
best years learning how to kill. But we cannot
get over the fact that the Prussian man is like-
ly to furnish, consciously or unconsciously, the
model to other civilized countries, until such time
as some other nation has so successfully imitated
him as to produce his like.

Let those who believe, as Mr. Wendell Phillips
says that he believes, that " the best education a
man can get is what he gets in picking up a liv-
ing," and that universities are humbugs, and that

16 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

from the newspapers and lyceum lecture the citizen
can always get as much information on all sub-
jects, human and divine, as is good for him or the
State, take a look at the Prussian soldier as he
marches past in his ill-fitting uniform and his
leather helmet. First of all, we observe that he
smokes a great deal. According to some of us, the
" tobacco demon " ought by this time to have left
him a thin, puny, hollow-eyed fellow, with trem-
bling knees and palpitating heart and listless gait,
with shaking hands and an intense craving for ar-
dent spirits. You perceive, however, that a burlier,
broader-shouldered, ruddier, brighter-eyed, and
heartier-looking man you never set eyes on ; and
as he swings along in column, with his rifle, knap-
sack, seventy rounds of ammunition, blanket, and
saucepan, you must confess you cannot help ac-
knowledging that you feel sorry for any equal
body of men in the world with which that column
may get into " a difficulty." He drinks, too, and
drinks a great deal, both of strong beer and strong
wine, and has always done so, and all his family
friends do it, and have only heard of teetotalism
through the newspapers, and, if you asked him to
confine himself to water, would look on you as an
amiable idiot. Neverthless, you never see him
drunk, nor does his beer produce on him that utterly
bemuddling or brain-paralyzing effect which is so

CULTURE AND WAR 17

powerfully described by our friend Mr. James
Parton as produced on him by lager-bier, in that
inquiry into the position of " The Coming Man "
toward wine, some copies of which, we see, he is
trying to distribute among the field-officers. On
the contrary, he is, on the whole, a very sober
man, and very powerful thinker, and very remark-
able scholar. There is no field of human knowl-
edge which he has not been among the first to ex-
plore ; no heights of speculation which he has not
scaled ; no problem of the world over which he is
not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness
is the envy of the students of all other countries,
and his hatred of sham scholarship and slipshod
generalization is intense.

But what with the tobacco and the beer, and the
scholarship and his university education, you might
naturally infer that he must be a kid-glove soldier,
and a little too nice and dreamy and speculative
for the actual work of life. But you never were
more mistaken. He is leaving behind him some
of the finest manufactories and best-tilled fields
in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable painter
and, as all the world knows, an almost unequalled
musician ; or if you want proof of his genius for
business, look at the speed and regularity with
which he and his comrades have transported them-
selves to the Rhine, and see the perfection of all
2

18 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the arrangements of his regiment. And now, if
you think his " bad habits," his daily violations of
your notions of propriety, have diminished his
power of meeting death calmly — that noblest of
products of culture — you have only to follow him
up as far as Sedan and see whether he ever
flinches ; whether you have ever read or heard of a
soldier out of whom more marching and fighting
and dying, and not flighty, boisterous dying either,
could be got.

Now, we can very well understand why people
should be unwilling to see the Prussian military
system spread into other countries, or even be pre-
served where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have
the men of a whole civilized nation spending so
much time out of the flower of their years learning
to kill other men ; and the lesson to be drawn from
the recent Prussian successes is assuredly not that
every country ought to have an army like the
Prussian army, though we confess that, if great
armies must be kept up, there is no better model
than the Prussian. The lesson is that, whether
you want him for war or peace, there is no way in
which you can get so much out of a man as by
training him, and training him not in pieces but the
whole of him ; and that the trained men, other things
being equal, are pretty sure in the long run to be the
masters of the world.

THE COMPAEATIVE MOKALITY OF
NATIONS

WE had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of
controversy with the Christian Union as to the
comparative morality of the Prussians and Amer-
icans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness —
meaning by religiousness a disposition " to serve
others and live as in God's sight ; " in other
words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it
drop, from the feeling that the question whether
the Americans or Prussians were the better men
was only a part, and a very small part, of the
larger question. How do we discover which of
any two nations is the purer in its life or in its
aims ? and, is not any judgment we form about it
likely to be very defective, owing to the inevitable
incompleteness of our premises? We are not
now going to try to fix the place of either Prussia
or the United States in the scale of morality, but
to point out some reasons why all comparisons
between them should be made by Americans with
exceeding care and humility. There is hardly

20 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

any field of inquiry in which even the best-in-
formed man is likely to fall into so many errors ;
first, because there is no field in which the vision
is so much affected by prejudices of education
and custom ; and, secondly, because there is none
in which the things we see are so likely to create
erroneous impressions about the things we do not
see. But we may add that it is a field which no
intelligent and sensible man ever explores without
finding his charity greatly stimulated.

Let us give some illustrations of the errors into
which people are apt to fall in it. Count Gas-
parin, a French Protestant, and as spiritually
minded a man as breathed, once talking with an
American friend expressed in strong terms his
sense of the pain it caused him that Mr. Lincoln
should have been at the theatre when he was
killed, not, the friend found, because he objected
in the least to theatre-going, but because it was
the evening of Good Friday— a day which the
Continental Calvinists "keep" with great solem-
nity, but to which American non-episcopal Prot-
estants pay no attention whatever. Count Gas-
parin, on the other hand, would have no hesitation
in taking a ride on Sunday, or going to a public
promenade after church hours, and, from seeing
him there, his American friend would draw de-
ductions just as unfavorable to the Count's relig-

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS 21

ious character as the Count himself drew with
regard to Mr. Lincoln's.

Take, again, the question of drinking beer and
wine. There is a large body of very excellent men
in America who, from a long contemplation of the
evils wrought by excessive indulgence in intoxicat-
ing drinks, have worked themselves up to a state
of mind about all use of such drinks which is
really discreditable to reasonable beings, leads to
the most serious platform excesses, and is per-
fectly incomprehensible to Continental Europeans.
To the former, the drinking even of lager beer
connotes, as the logicians say, ever so many other
vices — grossness and sensuality of nature, extrava-
gance, indifference to home pleasures, repugnance
to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts
of religion and morality. To many of them a Ger-
man workman, and his wife and children, sitting
in a beer-garden on a summer's evening, which to
European moralists and economists is one of the
most pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting
spectacle, which calls for the interference of the
police. Now, if you go to a beer-garden in Berlin
you may, any Sunday afternoon, see doctors of
divinity — none of your rationalists — but doctors
of real divinity, to whom American theologians
go to be taught, doing this very thing, and, what
is worse, smoking pipes. An American who ap-

22 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

plied to this the same course of reasoning which
he would apply to a similar scene in America,
would simply be guilty of outrageous folly. If he
argued from it that the German doctor was selfish,
or did not " live as in the sight of God," the whole
process would be a model of absurdity.

Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from
the American " diligence in business," conclusions
with regard to American character far more un-
complimentary than those the Christian Union has
expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are
not a few religious and moral and cultivated cir-
cles in Europe in which the suggestion that Amer-
icans, as a nation, were characterized by thought-
fulness for others and a sense of God's presence
would be received with derisive laughter, owing to
the application to the phenomena of American so-
ciety of the process of reasoning on which, we fear,
the Union relies. Down to the war, so candid and
perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might
have been included in this class. The earlier
editions of his "Elements of Political Economy"
contained a contemptuous statement that one sex
in America was entirely given up to " dollar-hunt-
ing " and the other to " breeding dollar-hunters."
In other words, he held that the American people
were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he
doubtless based this opinion on that intense appli-

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS 23

cation of the men to commercial and industrial
pursuits which we see all around us, which no
church finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as
its effects are on art and literature, really coexists
with great generosity, sympathy, public spirit, and
ideality.

Take, again, the matter of chastity, on which
the Union touched. We grant at the outset that
wherever you have classes, the women of the lower
class suffer more or less from the men of the upper
class, and anybody who says that seductions, ac-
complished through the effect on female vanity of
the addresses of " superiors in station," while al-
most unknown here, are very numerous in Europe,
would find plenty of facts to support him. But, on
the other hand, an attempt made to persuade a
Frenchman that the familiar intercourse which the
young people of both sexes in this country enjoy
was generally pure, would fail in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred. That it should be pure is op-
posed to all his experience of human nature, both
male and female ; and the result of your argument
with him would be that he would conclude either
that you were an extraordinarily simple person, or
took him for one.

On the other hand, we believe the German, who
thinks nothing of drinking as much wine or beer
as he cares for, draws from the conduct of the

24 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

American young woman whom he sees abroad,
and from what he reads in our papers about
"free love," Indiana divorces, abortion, and what
not, conclusions with regard to American chastity
very different from those of the Union ; and, if you
sought to meet him in discussion, he would over-
whelm you with facts and cases which, looked at
apart from the general tenor of American life and
manners, it would be very hard to dispose of. He
would say, for instance, that we are not, perhaps,
guilty of as many violations of the marriage vows
as Europeans ; but that we make it so light a vow
that, instead of violating it, we get it abrogated,
and then follow our will ; and then he would come
down on us with boarding-house and hotel life,
and other things of the same kind, which might
make us despise him, but would make it a little
difficult to get rid of him.

There is probably no minor point of manners
which does more to create unfavorable impres-
sions of Europeans among the best class of Amer-
icans— morally the best, we mean — than the im-
portance attached by the former to their eating
and drinking ; while there is nothing which does
more to spread in Europe impressions unfavor-
able to American civilization than the indifference
of Americans, and, we may add, as regards the
progressive portion of American society — culti-

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS 25

vated indifference — to the quality of their meals
and the time of eating them. In no European
country is moderate enjoyment of the pleasures
of the table considered incompatible with high
moral aims, or even a sincerely religious char-
acter ; but a man to whom his dinner was of seri-
ous importance would find his position in an
assembly of American reformers very precarious.
The German or Frenchman or Englishman, in-
deed, treats a man's views of food, and his dispo-
sition or indisposition to eat it in company with
his fellows as an indication of his place in civili-
zation. Savages love to eat alone, and it has been
observed in partially civilized communities relaps-
ing into barbarism, that one of the first indica-
tions of their decline was the abandonment of reg-
ular meals on tables, and a tendency on the part
of the individuals to retire to secret places with
their victuals. This is probably a remnant of the
old aboriginal instinct which we still see in do-
mesticated dogs, and was, doubtless, implanted
for the protection of the species in times when
everybody looked on his neighbor's bone with a
hungry eye, and the man with the strong hand
was apt to have the fullest stomach. Accordingly,
there is in Europe, and indeed everywhere, a ten-
dency to regard the growth of a delicacy in eating,
and close attention to the time and manner of

26 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

serving meals and their cookery, and the use of
them as promoters of social intercourse, as an in-
dication of moral as well as material progress.
To a large number of people here, on the other
hand, the bolting of food— ten-minute dinners, for
instance — and general unconsciousness of "what
is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with
serious things. It may be ; but the German love
of food is not necessarily a sign of grossness, and
that " overfed " appearance, of which the Union
spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any
more than leanness or cadaverousness is a sign of
efficiency. There is certainly some power of hard
work in King William's army, and, indeed, we
could hardly point to a better illustration of the
truth, that all the affairs of men, whether political,
social, or religious, depend for their condition
largely on the state of the digestion.

Honesty, by which we mean that class of vir-
tues which Cicero includes in the term bona fides,
has, to a considerable extent, owing, we think, to
the peculiar humanitarian character which the cir-
cumstances of the country have given to the work
of reform, been subordinated in the United States
to brotherly kindness. Now, this right to arrange
the virtues according to a scale of its own, is some-
thing which not only every age, but every nation,
has claimed, and, accordingly, we find that each

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS 27

community, in forming its judgment of a man's
character, gives a different degree of weight to
different features of it. Keeping a mistress would
probably, anywhere in the United States, damage
a man's reputation far more seriously than fraud-
ulent bankruptcy ; while horse-stealing, which in
New England would be a comparatively trifling
offence, out in Montana is a far fouler thing than
murder. But in the European scale, honesty still
occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind,
it is worth any man's while who proposes to pass
judgment on the morality of any foreign country,
to consider what is the impression produced on
foreign opinion about American morality by the
story of the Erie Kailroad, by the career of Fisk,
by the condition of the judicial bench in the com-
mercial capital of the country, by the charges of
corruption brought against such men as Trumbull
and Fessenden at the time of the impeachment
trial ; by the comically prominent and beloved
position which Butler has held for some years in
our best moral circles, and by the condition of the
civil service.

The truth is that it is almost impossible for
anybody to compare one nation with another
fairly, unless he possesses complete familiarity
with the national life of both, and therefore can
distinguish isolated facts from symptomatic facts.

28 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

The reason why some of the phenomena of Amer-
ican society which shock foreigners greatly, do
not shock even the best Americans so much, is not
that the latter have become hardened to them —
though this counts for something — but that they
know of various counteracting and compensating
phenomena which prevent, or are sure to prevent,
them in the long run from doing the mischief
which they seem to threaten. In other words,
they understand the checks and balances of their
society as well as its tendencies. Anybody who
considers these things will be careful how he de-
nounces people whose manners differ from his own
for want of spirituality or morality, and we may
add that any historical student engaged in com-
paring the morality of the age in which he lives
with that of any other age which he knows only
through chronicles, will do well to exercise the
same caution for the same reasons.

THE "COMIC-PAPEK" QUESTION

IT is recorded of a patriotic member of the
Committee of Ways and Means, that after hearing
from the Special Commissioner of the Eevenue an
elaborate and strongly fortified argument which
made a deep impression on the committee in
favor of a reduction of the whiskey tax, on the
ground that the then rate, two dollars a gallon,
could not be collected — he closed the debate, and
carried the majority with him, by declaring that,
for his part, he never would admit that a gov-
ernment which had just suppressed the greatest
rebellion the world ever saw, could not collect
two dollars a gallon on whiskey. A large^ por-
tion of the public approaches the comic-paper
problem in much the same spirit in which this
gentleman approached the whiskey tax. The
country has plenty of humor, and plenty of humor-
ists. It fills whole pages of numerous magazines
and whole columns of numerous newspapers with
really good jokes every month. It supplies great
numbers of orators and lecturers and diners-out

30 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

with " little stories," which, of their kind, cannot
be surpassed. There is probably no country in the
world, too, in which there is so much constantly
going on of the fun which does not need local
knowledge or coloring to be enjoyed, but will bear
exportation, and be recognized as the genuine
article in any English-speaking part of the world.
Moreover, there is in the real American stories an
amount of suggestiveness, a power of "connota-
tion," which cannot be affirmed of those of any
other country. A very large number of them are
real contributions to sociology, and of considerable
value too. Besides all this, the United States
possesses, what no other nation does, several pro-
fessed jesters — that is, men who are not only hu-
morous in the ordinary sense of the term, but
make a business of cracking jokes, and are recog-
nized as persons whose duty it is to take a jocose
view of things. Artemus "Ward, Josh Billings,
and Jfak Twain, and the Eev. P. Y. Nasby, and
one or two others of less note, are a kind of per-
sonages which no other society has produced, and
could in no other society attain equal celebrity.
In fact, when one examines the total annual pro-
duction of jokes in the United States, one who
knows nothing of the past history of the comic-
paper question can hardly avoid the conclusion
that such periodicals would run serious risk of

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION 31

being overwhelmed with "good things" and dy-
ing of plethora. Yet the melancholy fact is that
several — indeed, all that have been started — have
died of inanition ; that is, of the absence of jokes.
The last one says it offered all the great humor-
ists in the country plenty of work, and their own
terms as to pay, and failed to enlist them, and the
chance jokes apparently were neither numerous
enough nor good enough to keep it afloat.

Now what is the cause of this disheartening
state of things ? Why can the United States not
have a comic paper of their own? The answers
to this question vary, though of course not greatly.
They are mostly given in the shape of a history,
with appropriate comments, of the unsuccessful
attempts made to establish comic papers ; one
went down because it did not sympathize with the
liberal and humane movements of the day, and
laughed in the pro-slavery interest; another, be-
cause it never succeeded in getting hold of a good
draughtsman for its engravings ; and another
venture failed, among other mistakes, we are told,
because it made fun of the New York Tribune.
The explanation which finds most general favor
with the public is, that while in England, France,
and Germany " the great dailies " confine them-
selves to the serious treatment of the topics of the
day, and thus leave room for the labors of Punch,

32 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

or Kladderadatsch, or Charivari, in America all
papers do their own joking ; and, if it seems desir-
able to take a comic view of anything or anybody,
take it on the spot in their own columns.

Hence any paper which starts on a comic basis
alone meets with rivals in all its sober-minded con-
temporaries, and comes to grief. The difficulty it
has to contend with is, in short, very like that which
the professional laundress or baker has to contend
with, owing to the fact that families are accus-
tomed to do their own washing and bake their
own bread. And, indeed, it is not unlike that with
which professional writers of all kinds have to
contend, owing to the readiness of clergymen,
lawyers, and professors to write, while doing
something else. An ordinary daily paper supplies,
besides its serious disquisitions, fun enough for
one average household — sometimes in single jokes,
and sometimes in the shape of "sparkle" or
" spiciness " in grave articles. Often enough it is
very poor stuff, but it amuses people, without
turning their attention away from the sober work
of life, which is the only way in which the vast
body of Americans are willing to be amused.
Newspaper comedians have here, what they would
not have in London, a chance of letting off a joke
once a day, and six or seven jokes a week is more
than any comic paper is willing or able to take

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION 33

from any one contributor, partly owing to the need
of variety in a paper given wholly to humor, and
partly owing to want of space. Anybody, there-
fore, who has humor for sale finds a readier mar-
ket among the dailies or magazines, and a far
wider circle of readers, than he would in any comic
paper.

The charge that our comic papers have generally
opposed the friends of liberty and progress — that
is the most intelligent and appreciative portion of
the public — is quite true, but it does not go far to
account for their failure. Punch has done this
steadily ever since its establishment, without seri-
ous injury. No good cause has ever received
much backing from it till it became the cause of
the majority, or indeed has escaped being made
the butt of its ridicule ; and we confess we doubt
whether "the friends of progress," using the term
in what we may call its technical sense, were ever
a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient
love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great
consequence. Most people in the United States
who are very earnestly enlisted in the service of
" a cause " look on all ridicule as " wicked," and
regard with great suspicion anybody who indulges
in it, whether he makes them the object of it or
not. They bore with it, when turned against
slavery, from one or two distinguished humorists,
3

34 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

because its effectiveness was plain ; but we doubt
whether any man who had the knack of seeing
the ludicrous side of things ever really won their
confidence, partly owing to their own natural want
of humor, and partly to their careful cultivation
of a habit of solemnity of mind as the only thing
that can make an " advanced " position really ten-
able, to say nothing of comfortable. The causes
of all successes, as of all failures, in the literary
world are of course various, and no doubt there is
a good deal of truth in all that has been said in
solution of the comic-paper problem. American
humorists of the best class can find something
better or more lucrative to do than writing for a
comic paper ; while the poor American humorists,
like the poor humorists of all countries, are coarse
and vulgar, even where they are not stupid.

But there is one striking difference between
American society and those societies in which
comic papers have succeeded which not only goes
a good way to explain their failure here, but puts
a better face on some of their efforts — such as
their onslaughts on the friends of progress — than
they seem to wear at first sight. To furnish suf-
ficient food for fun to keep a comic paper afloat, a
country must supply a good many strong social
contrasts for the professional joker to play upon,
and must have a large amount of reverence for

THE " COMIC-PAPER " QUESTION 35

social distinctions and dignities for him to shock.
Two -thirds of the zest with which foreign comic
papers are read is due to the fact that they cari-
cature persons or social circles with which the
mass of their readers are not thoroughly familiar,
and whose habits and ways of looking at things
they do not share or only partly share. A good
deal of the fun in Punch, for instance, consists in
making costermongers or cabmen quarrel with the
upper classes, in ridicule of Jeames's attempts to
imitate his master, of Brown's efforts to scrape ac-
quaintance with a peer, of the absurd figure cut by
the " cad " in the hunting-field, and of the folly of
the city clerk in trying to dress and behave like a
guardsman. In short, the point of a great num-
ber of its best jokes is made by bringing different
social strata into sharp comparison. The pecul-
iarities of Irishmen and Scotchmen also furnish
rich materials to the caricaturist. He never tires
of illustrating the blunders and impudence of the
one and the hot patriotism and niggardliness of the
other. The Irish Highlander, who denies, in a
rich brogue, that any Irish are ever admitted into
his regiment, and the cannie burgher from Aber-
deen, who, on his return home from a visit to
London, says it's an " awf u' dear place ; that he
hadna' been twa oors in the toon when bang went
saxpence," are types which raise a laugh all over

36 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the United Kingdom, and all because, again, they
furnish materials for ludicrous contrast which
everybody is capable of appreciating.

Neither the Irishman, Scotchman, nor English-
man, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if
sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of
each other, and measured by the English middle-
class standard of propriety, that they become en-
tertaining.

In a homogeneous society, like that of the United
States, none of this material is to be found. The
New Englander, to be sure, furnishes a type which
differs from the Middle-States man or the South-
erner or Westerner, but none of them differs
enough to make him worth caricaturing. His
speech, his dress, his modes of acting and think-
ing so nearly resemble those of his neighbors in
other . parts of the country that after the comic
writer or draughtsman had done his best or his
worst upon him, it would remain still a little doubt-
ful where the joke came in. The Irishman, and
especially the New York Irish voter, and his sister
Bridget, the cook, have during the past ten years
rendered more or less service as butts for carica-
turists, but they are rapidly wearing put. They are
not many-sided persons at best, and their charac-
teristics have become associated in the American
mind with so much that is uncomfortable and re-

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION 37

pulsive in domestic and political life, that it be-
comes increasingly difficult to get a native to laugh
at them. It must be confessed, too, that the Irish
in America have signally belied the poet's asser-
tion, " Codum non animam mutant qui trans mare
currunt." There is nothing more striking in their
condition than the almost complete disappearance
from their character, at least in its outward mani-
festations, of the vivacity, politeness,, kindliness,
comical blundering impetuosity, and double-sight-
edness, out of which the Irishman of the stage
and Jo Miller's Irishman who made all the bulls
were manufactured in the last century. Of the
other nationalities we need hardly speak, as the
English-speaking public knows little of them,
although the German Jew is perhaps the most
durable material the comic writer has ever worked
on.

The absence of class distinctions here, too, and
the complete democratization of institutions during
the last forty years, have destroyed the reverence
and sense of mystery by shocking which the Euro-
pean comic paper produces some of its most tick-
ling effects. Gladstone and Disraeli figuring as
pugilists in the ring, for instance, diverts the Eng-
lish public, because it gives a very smart blow to
the public sense of fitness, and makes a strong
impression of absurdity, these two men being to

38 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the English public real dignitaries, in the strict
sense of the word, and under the strongest obliga-
tions to behave properly. But a representation of
Grant and Sumner as pugilists would hardly make
Americans laugh, because, though absurd, it would
not be nearly so absurd, or run counter to any so
^sharply denned standard of official demeanor. The
Lord Chief-Justice playing croquet with a pretty
girl owes nearly all its point, as a joke, to the pop-
ular awe of him and the mystery which surrounds
his mode of life in popular eyes ; a picture of Chief-
Justice Chase doing the same thing would hardly
excite a smile, because everybody knows him, and
has known him all his life, and can have access to
him at any hour of the night or day. And then it
must be borne in mind that Paris and London con-
tain all the famous men of France and England, and
anybody who jokes about them is sure of having
the whole public for an audience ; while the best
New York joke falls flat in Boston or Philadelphia,
and flatter still in Cincinnati or Chicago, owing to
want of acquaintance with the materials of which
it is composed.

We might multiply these illustrations indefi-
nitely, but we have probably said enough to show
anyone that the field open to our comic writer is
very much more restricted than that in which his
European rival labors. He has, in short, to seek

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION 39

Ms jokes in character, while the European may
draw largely upon manners, and it is doubtful
whether character will ever supply materials for
a really brilliant weekly comedian. Its points
are not sufficiently salient. The American comic
papers have evidently perceived the value of rever-
ence and of violent contrast for the purposes of
their profession, and this it is wMch leads them so
constantly to select reformers and reform move-
ments as their butts. The earnest man, intensely
occupied with " a cause," comes nearer to standing
in the relation to the popular mind occupied in
England by the aristocrat or statesman than any-
body else in America. The politician is notorious
for his familiarity with all comers, and "the gen-
tleman " has become too insignificant a person to
furnish materials for a contrast ; but the progres-
sive man is sufficiently well known, and sufficiently
stiff in his moral composition, to make it funny to
see him in a humorous tableau.

MR FKOUDE AS A LECTUKEB

MB. FROUDE announced that his object in com-
ing to America was to enlighten the American pub-
lic as to the true nature of Irish discontent, in such
manner that American opinion, acting on Irish
opinion, would reconcile the Irish to the English
connection, and turn their attention to practical
remedies for whatever was wrong in their condi-
tion— American opinion being now, in Irish eyes,
the court of last resort in all political controver-
sies. It is casting no reflection on the historical
or literary value of his lectures to say that Mr.
Froude, in proposing to himself any such under-
taking, fell into error as to the kind of audience
he was likely to command, and as to the nature of
the impression he was likely to make. The class
of persons who listen to him is one of great intel-
ligence and respectability, but it is a class to which
the Irish are not in the habit of listening, and
which has already formed as unfavorable opinions
about the political character of the Irish as Mr.
Froude could wish. He will be surrounded dur-
ing his whole tour by a public to whose utterances

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURES, 41

the Irish pay no more attention than to the preach-
ings of Mr. Newdegate or Mr. Whalley, and who
have long ago reached, from their observation of
the influence of the Irish immigration on Ameri-
can politics, the very conclusions for which Mr.
Froude proposes to furnish historical justification.
In short, he is addressing people who have either
already made up their minds, or whose minds
have no value for the purpose of his mission.

On the other hand, he will not reach at all the
political class which panders to Irish hatred of
England, and, if he does reach it, he will produce
no effect on it. Not one speech the less will be
uttered, or article the less written, in encourage-
ment of Fenianism in consequence of anything he
may say. Indeed, the idea that the Bankses will
be more careful in their Congressional reports, or
the Coxes or Mortons in their political harangues,
either after or before election, in consequence of
Mr. Froude's demonstration of the groundlessness
of Fenian complaints, is one which to " the men
inside politics " must be very amusing.

We think, however, we can safely go a little fur-
ther than this, and say that however much light he
may throw on the troubled waters of Irish history,
his deductions will not find a ready acceptance
among thinking Americans. The men who will
heartily agree with him in believing that the Irish

42 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

have, on the whole, only received their due, are not,
as a rule, fair exponents of the national temper or of
the tendencies of the national mind. Those who
listened on Friday night last to his picturesque
account of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian at-
tempts to pacify Ireland, must have felt in their
bones that — in spite of the cheers which greeted
some of his own more eloquent and some of his
bolder passages, and in particular his dauntless
way of dealing with the Drogheda Massacre — his
political philosophy was not one which the aver-
age American could be got to carry home with him
and ponder and embrace. Mr. Froude, ifc must
in justice to him be said, by no means throws all
the responsibility of Irish misery on Ireland. He
deals out a considerable share of this responsibility
to England, but then his mode of apportioning it
is one which is completely opposed to most of the
fundamental notions of American politics. For
instance, his whole treatment of Irish history is
permeated by an idea which, whatever marks it
may have left on American practice in dealing with
the Indians, has no place now in American polit-
ical philosophy — we mean what is called in Eng-
lish politics " the imperial idea" — the idea, that is,
that a strong, bold, and courageous race has a sort
of " natural*right " to invade the territory of weak,
semi-civilized, and distracted races, and undertake

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER 43

the task of governing them by such methods as
seem best, and at such cost of life as may be neces-
sary. This idea is a necessary product of English
history ; it is not likely to disappear in England as
long as she possesses such a school for soldiers
and statesmen as is furnished by India. Indeed,
she could not stay in India without some such
theory to support her troops, but it is not one
which will find a ready acceptance here. Ameri-
can opinion has, within the last twenty years, run
into the very opposite extreme, and now maintains
with some tenacity the right even of barbarous
communities to be let alone and allowed to work
out their own salvation or damnation in their own
way. There is little or no faith left in this coun-
try in the value of superimposed civilization, or of
" superior minds," or of higher organization, while
there is a deep suspicion of, or we might say there
is deep hostility toward, all claims to rule based
on alleged superiority of race or creed or class.
We doubt if Mr. Froude could have hit on a more
unpalatable mode, or a mode more likely to clash
with the prevailing tendencies of American opin-
ion, of defending English rule in Ireland than the
argument that, Englishmen being stronger >and
wiser than Irishmen, Irishmen ought to submit
to have themselves governed on English ideas
whether they like it or not. He has produced this

44 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

argument already in England, and it has elicited
there a considerable amount of indignant protest.
We are forced to say of it here that it is likely to
do great mischief, over and above the total defeat
of Mr. Froude's object in coming to this country.
The Irish in America are more likely to be exas-
perated by it than the Irish at home, and we feel
sure that no native American will ever venture to
use it to an Irish audience.

There is one other point to which Mr. Froude's
attention ought to be called, as likely seriously to
dimmish the political weight of his exposition of
the causes of Irish discontent. The sole justifica-
tion of a conquest, even of a conquest achieved over
barbarians by a civilized people, is that it supplies
good government — that is, protection for life and
property. Unless it does this, no picture, however
dark, of the discords and disorder and savagery of
the conquered can set the conqueror right at the bar
of civilized opinion. Therefore, the shocking and
carefully darkened pictures of the social and polit-
ical degradation of the native Irish in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries with which
Mr. Froude is furnishing us, are available for Eng-
lish vindication only on the supposition that the
invasion, even if it destroyed liberty, brought with
it law and order. But according to Mr. Froude's
eloquent confession, it brought nothing of the kind.

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER 45

Queen Elizabeth made the first serious attempt to
subjugate Ireland, but she did it, Mr. Froude tells
us, with only a handful of English soldiers — who
acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans engaged on the
queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After
three years of this sort of thing, the whole south-
ern portion of the island was reduced, to use Mr.
Froude's words, " to a smoking wilderness," men,
women, and children having been remorselessly
slaughtered ; but no attempt whatever was then
made to establish either courts or police, or any
civil rule of any kind. Society was left in a worse
condition than before. Why was this ? Because,
says Mr. Froude, the English Constitution made
no provision for the maintenance of a standing
army for any such purpose.

The second attempt 'was made by Cromwell.
He slaughtered the garrisons of Drogheda and
"Wexford, and scattered the armies of the various
Irish factions, but he made no more attempt to
police the island than Elizabeth. The only mode
of establishing order resorted to by the Common-
wealth was the wholesale confiscation of the land,
and its distribution among the officers and soldiers
of the army, the natives of all ages and sexes being
driven into Connaught. The " policing " was then
left to be done by the new settlers, each man with
the strong hand, on his own account. The third

46 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

attempt was made by William III., who also fol-
lowed the Cromwellian plan, and left the island to
be • governed during the following century by the
military adventurers who had entered into posses-
sion of the soil.

The excuse for not endeavoring to set up an
honest and efficient government remained the same
in all three cases ; the absence of an army, or occu-
pation elsewhere. In other words, the conquest
from first to last wanted the only justification which
any conquest can have. England found the Irish
much in the same stage of social and political prog-
ress in which Caesar found the Gauls, destitute of
nearly all the elements of political organization ; but
instead of founding a political system, and main-
taining it, she interfered for century after century
only to subjugate and lay waste, and set the natives
by the ears. Mr. Froude's answer to this is, that if
the Irish had been better men they could easily
have driven the English out, which is perhaps a good
reason for not bestowing much pity on the Irish,
but it is not a good reason for telling the Irish they
ought not to hate England. No pity can be made
welcome which is ostentatiously mingled with con-
tempt. It is quite true, to our minds, that during
the last fifty years England has supplied the Irish
with a better government than the Irish could pro-
vide for themselves within the next century at least.

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER 47

There is no doubt of the substantial value of the
English connection to Ireland now ; but there is
just as little that in the past history of this connec-
tion there is reason enough for Irish suspicion and
dislike. The tenacity of the Irish memory, too, is
one of the great political defects and misfortunes of
the race. Inability to forget past " wrongs " in the
light of present prosperity, is a sure sign of the ab-
sence of the political sense ; and that the Irish are
wanting in the political sense no candid, man can
deny. That they are really still, to a considerable
extent, in the tribal stage of progress, there is little
doubt. But they are surrounded by ideas, and in-
stitutions, and influences which make it useless to
try to raise them out of that stage by the " impe-
rial " method of government, or, in other words, by
trying to persuade them that they have richly de-
served all their misfortunes, and that the best thing
they can do is to let a superior race mould their
destinies. If it were possible for Englishmen to be
a little more patient with their weaknesses, to yield
a little more to the childish vanities and aspirations
which form the nearest approach they have yet
made to a feeling of nationality, and take upon
themselves in word as well as in deed their share of
the horrible burdens of Irish history, it would do
more toward winning them Irish confidence than
anything Americans are ever likely to say.

ME. HOEACE GEEELET

THERE has been something almost tragic about
the close of Mr. Greeley's career. After a life of,
on the whole, remarkable success and prosperity,
he fell finally under the weight of accumulated
misfortunes. Nobody who heard him declare that
"he accepted the Cincinnati Convention and its
consequences," but must be struck by the illustra-
tion of what is called " the irony of fate," which
nearly everything that occurred afterwards affords.
His nomination, from whatever point of view we
look at it, was undoubtedly a high honor. The
manner in which it was received down to the Bal-
timore Convention was very flattering. Whether
it was a proper thing to " beat Grant " or not, that
so large and so shrewd a body of his countrymen
should have thought Mr. Greeley the man to do it
was a great compliment. It found him, too, in
possession of all the influence which the successful
pursuit of his own calling could give a man — the
most powerful editor in the Union, surrounded by
friends and admirers, feared or courted by nearly

MR. HORACE G REE LEY 49

everybody in public life, and in the full enjoyment
of widespread popular confidence in his integrity.
In six short months he was well-nigh undone.
He had endured a humiliating defeat, which
seemed to him to indicate the loss of what was his
dearest possession, the affection of the American
people ; he had lost the weight in public affairs
which he had built up by thirty years of labor ; he
saw his property and, as he thought, that of his
friends diminished by the attempt to give him a
prize which he had in his own estimation fairly
earned, and, though last not least, he found his
home invaded by death, and one of the strongest
of the ties which bind a man to this earth broken.
It would not be wonderful if, under these circum-
stances, the coldest and toughest of men should
lie down and die. But Mr. Greeley was neither
cold nor tough. He was keenly sensitive both to
praise and blame. The applause of even paltry
men gladdened him, and their censure stung him.
Moreover, he had that intense longing for reputa-
tion as a man of action by which men of the closet
are so often torn. In spite of all that his writing
brought him in reputation, he writhed under the
popular belief that he could do nothing but write,
and he spent the flower of his years trying to con-
vince the public that it was mistaken about him.
It was to this we owed whatever was ostentatious
4

50 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

in his devotion to farming, and in his interest in
the manufacturing industry of the country. It was
to this, too, that he owed his keen and lifelong de-
sire for office, and, in part at least, his activity in
getting offices for other people.

Office-seekers have become in the United States
so ridiculous and so contemptible a class, that a
man can hardly seek a place in the public service
without incurring a certain amount of odium ; and
perhaps nothing did more damage to Mr. Greeley's
reputation than his anxiety to be put in places of
trust or dignity. And yet it is doubtful if many
men seek office with more respectable motives than
his. For pecuniary emolument he cared nothing ;
but he did pine all his life long for some conspic-
uous recognition of his capacity for the conduct of
affairs, and he never got it. The men who have
nominations to bestow either never had confidence
enough in his judgment or ability to offer him any-
thing which he would have thought worthy of his
expectations when there was the least chance of
their choice receiving a popular ratification. They
disliked him, as politicians are apt to dislike an
editor in the political arena, as a man who, in hav-
ing a newspaper at his back, is sure not to play
their game fairly. The consequence was that he
was constantly irritated by finding how purely pro-
fessional his influence was, or, in other words,

MR. HORACE ORES LEY 51

what a mortifying disproportion existed between
his editorial and his personal power. The first
revelation the public had of the bitterness of his
disappointment on this score was caused by the
publication of the famous Seward letter, and the
surprise it caused was perhaps the highest compli-
ment Mr. Greeley ever received. It showed with
what success he had prevented his private griefs
from affecting his public action, and people are al-
ways ready to forgive ambition as an " infirmity of
noble minds," even when they do not feel disposed
to reward it.

Unfortunately for Mr. Greeley, however, he
never could persuade himself that the public was
of the same mind as the politicians regarding his
personal capacity. He persisted to the last in be-
lieving himself the victim of their envy, hatred,
and malice, and looking with unabated hope to
some opportunity of obtaining a verdict on his
merits as a man of action, in which his widespread
popularity and his long and laborious teachings
would fairly tell. The result of the Cincinnati
Convention, which his friends and emissaries from
this city went out to prepare, but which perhaps
neither he nor they in the beginning ventured to
hope for, seemed to promise him at last the crown
and consummation of a life's longings, and he re-
ceived it with almost childlike joy. The election

53 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

was, therefore, a crushing blow. It was not, per-
haps, the failure to get the presidency that was
hardest to bear — for this might have been accom-
panied by such a declaration of his fitness for the
presidency as would have sweetened the remainder
of his years — it was the contemptuous greatness
of his opponent's majority which was killing. It
dissipated the illusion of half a lifetime on the one
point on which illusions are dearest — a man's exact
place in the estimation of his countrymen. Very
few — even of those whose fame rests on the most
solid foundation of achievement — ever ask to have
this ascertained by a positive test without dread
or misgiving, or face the test without a strain
which the nerves of old men are often ill fitted to
bear. That Mr. Greeley's nerves were unequal to
the shock of failure we now know. But it needed
no intimate acquaintance with him to see that the
card in which he announced, two days after the
election, that he would thereafter be a simple
editor, would seek office no more, and would con-
fine himself to the production of a candid and
judicial-minded paper, must have been written in
bitterness of spirit for which this world had no
balm.

In addition to the deceptions caused by his
editorial influence, Mr. Greeley had others to con-
tend with, more subtle, but not less potent. The

MR. HORACE G REE LEY 53

position of the editor of a leading daily paper is
one which, in our time, is hardly possible for the
calmest and most candid man to fill without hav-
ing his judgment of himself perverted by flattery.
Our age is intensely commercial ; it is not the dry-
goods man or the grain merchant only who has
goods for sale, but the poet, the orator, the scholar,
the philosopher, and the politician. We are all,
in a measure, seeking a market for our wares.
What we desire, therefore, above all things, is a
good advertising medium, or, in other words, a
good means of making known to all the world
where our store is and what we have to sell. This
means the editor of a daily paper can furnish to
anybody he pleases. He is consequently the ob-
ject of unceasing adulation from a crowd of those
who shrink from fighting the slow and doubtful
battle of life in the open field, and crave the kindly
shelter of editorial plaudits^ " puffs," and " men-
tions." He finds this adulation offered freely, and
by all classes and conditions, without the least
reference to his character or talents or antece-
dents. What wonder if it turns the heads of un-
worthy men, and begets in them some of the vices
of despots — their unscrupulousness, their cruelty,
and their impudence. What wonder, too, if it
should have thrown off his balance a man like Mr.
Greeley, whose head was not strong, whose educa-

54 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

tion was imperfect, and whose self-confidence had
been fortified by a brave and successful struggle
with adversity.

Of his many private virtues, of his kind-hearted-
ness, his generosity, his sympathy with all forms
of suffering and anxiety, we do not need to speak.
His career, too, has little in it to point any moral
that is not already trite and familiar. The only
lesson we can gather from it with any clearness is
the uncertainty of this world, and all that it con-
tains, and the folly of seeking the presidency. No-
body can hope to follow in his footsteps. He began
life as a kind of editor of which he was one of the
last specimens, and which will shortly be totally ex-
tinct— the editor who fought as the man-at-arms
of the party. This kind of work Mr. Greeley did
with extraordinary earnestness and vehemence and
success — so much success that a modern newspaper
finally grew up around him, in spite of him, almost
to his surprise, and often to his embarrassment.
The changed condition of journalism, the substitu-
tion of the critical for the party views of things,
he never wholly accepted, and his frequent per-
sonal appearance in his columns, under the signa-
ture of "H. G.," hurling defiance at his enemies
or exposing their baseness, showed how stifling he
found the changed atmosphere. He was fast fall-
ing behind his age when he died. New men, and

MR. HORACE G REE LEY 55

new issues, and new processes, which he either did
not understand at all or only understood imper-
fectly, crowded upon him. If the dazzling prize
of the presidency had not been held before his
eyes, we should probably have witnessed his grad-
ual but certain retirement into well-won repose.
Those who opposed him most earnestly must now
regret sincerely that in his last hours he should
have known the bitterness of believing, what was
really not true, that the labors of his life, which
were largely devoted to good causes, had not met
the appreciation they merited at the hands of his
countrymen. It is for his own sake, as well as
that of the public, greatly to be regretted that he
should not have lived until the smoke of the late
conflict had cleared away.

THE MOEALS AND MANNEES OF THE
KITCHEN

ME. FROUDE'S attempt to secure from the Ameri-
can public a favorable judgment on the dealings of
England with Ireland has had one good result —
though we fear only one — in leading to a little
closer examination of the real state of American
opinion about Irish grievances than it has yet re-
ceived. He will go back to England with the
knowledge — which he evidently did not possess
when he came here — that the great body of intel-
ligent Americans care very little about the history
of " the six hundred years of wrong," and know
even less than they care, and could not be in-
duced, except by a land-grant, or a bounty, or a
drawback, to acquaint themselves with it ; that
those of them who have ever tried to form an
opinion on the Anglo - Irish controversy have
hardly ever got farther than a loose notion that
England had most likely behaved like a bully all
through, but that her victim was beyond all ques-
tion an obstreperous and irreclaimable ruffian,

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN 57

whose ill-treatment must be severely condemned
by the moralist, but over whom no sensible man
can be expected to weep or sympathize.

The agencies which have helped to form the pop-
ular idea of the English political character are well
known ; those which have helped to deprive the
Irish of American sympathy — and which, if Mr.
Froude had judiciously confined himself to de-
scribing the efforts made by England to promote
Irish well-being now, would probably have made
his lectures very successful — are more obscure.
We ourselves pointed out one of the most promi-
nent, and probably most powerful — the conduct of
the Irish servant-girl in the American kitchen.
To this must of course be added the specimen
of " home rule " to which the country has been
treated in this city ; but we doubt if this latter
has really exercised as much influence on Ameri-
can opinion as some writers try to make out. A
community which has produced Butler, Banks,
Parker, Bullock, Tweed, Tom Fields, Oakey Hall,
Fernando Wood, Barnard, and scores of others
whom we might name, as the results of good Prot-
estant and Anglo-Saxon breeding, cannot really
be greatly shocked by the bad workings of Celtic
blood and Catholic theology in the persons of Pet-
er B. Sweeny, Billy McMullen, Jimmy O'Brien,
Beddy the Blacksmith, or Judge McCunn. It is

58 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

in the kitchen that the Irish iron has entered into
the American soul ; and it is in the kitchen that a
great triumph was prepared for Mr. Froude, had
he been a judicious man. The memory of burned
steaks, of hard-boiled potatoes, of smoked milk,
would have done for him what no state papers, or
records, or correspondence of the illustrious dead
can ever do ; it had prepared the American mind
to believe the very worst he could say of Irish tur-
bulence and disorder. Not one of his auditors but
could find in his own experience of Irish cooking
circumstances which would probably have led him
to accept without question the execution of Silken
Thomas, the massacre of Drogheda, or even the
Penal Laws, as perfectly justifiable exercises of
authority, and would certainly have made it easy
for him to believe that English rule in Ireland at
the present day is beneficent beyond example.

Nevertheless, we are constrained to say that in
our opinion a great deal of the odium which sur-
rounds Bridget, and which has excited so much
prejudice, not only against her countrymen, but
against her ancestors, in American eyes, has a
very insufficient foundation in reason. There are
three characters in which she is the object of pub-
lic suspicion and dislike — (1) as a cook ; (2) as a
party to a contract ; (3) as a member of a house-
hold. The charges made against her in all of

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN 59

these have been summed up in a recent attack on
her in the Atlantic Monthly, as "a lack of every
quality which makes service endurable to the em-
ployer, or a wholesome life for the servant."

And the same article charges her with " proving
herself, in obedience, fidelity, care, and accuracy,
the inferior of every kind of servant known to
modern society." Of course, there is hardly a
family in the country which has not had, in its
own experience, illustrations of the extravagance
of these charges. There is probably nobody who
has long kept servants, who has not had Irish ser-
vants who were obedient, faithful, careful, and
even accurate in a remarkable degree. But then
it must be admitted that this indictment is a toler-
ably fair rendering, if not of the actual facts of the
case, at least of the impression the facts have left
on the mind of the average employer. This im-
pression, however, needs correction, as a few not
very recondite considerations will show.

As a cook, Bridget is an admitted failure. But
cooking is, it is now generally acknowledged, very
much an affair of instinct, and this instinct seems
to be very strong in some races and very weak in
others, though why the French should have it
highly developed, and the Irish be almost alto-
gether deprived of it, is a question which would
require an essay to itself. No amount of teaching

60 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

will make a person a good cook who is not himself
fond of good food and has not a delicate palate,
for it is the palate which must test the value of
rules. We may deduce from this the conclusion,
which experience justifies, that women are not nat-
urally good cooks. They have had the cookery of
the world in their hands for several thousand years,
but all the marked advances in the art, and indeed
all that can be called the cultivation of it, have
been the work of men. Whatever zeal women have
displayed in it, and whatever excellence they have
achieved in it, have been the result of influences
in no way gastronomic, and which we might per-
haps call emotional, such as devotion to male rela-
tives, or a desire to minister to the pleasure of men
in general. Few or no women cook a dinner in an
artistic spirit, and their success in doing it is near-
ly always the result of affection or loyalty — which
is of course tantamount to saying that female
cookery as a whole is, and always has been, com-
paratively poor.

As a proof of this, we may mention the fact —
for fact we think it is — that the art of cooking
among women has declined at any given time or
place — in the Northern States of the Union, for
instance — pari passu with the growth of female
independence. That is, as the habit or love of
ministering to men's tastes has become weaker, the

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN 61

interest in cookery has fallen off. There are no
such cooks among native American women now as
there were fifty years ago ; and passages in foreign
cookery books which assume the existence among
women of strong interest in their husbands' and
brothers' likings, and strong desire to gratify them,
furnish food for merriment in American house-
holds. Bridget, therefore, can plead, first of all,
the general incapacity of women as cooks; and,
secondly, the general falling off in the art under
the influence of the new ideas. It may be that
she ought to cultivate assiduously or with enthusi-
asm a calling which all the other women of the
country ostentatiously despise, but she would be
more than human if she did so. She imitates
American women as closely as she can, and cannot
live on the same soil without imbibing their ideas ;
and unhappily, as in all cases of imitation, vices
are more easily and earlier caught than virtues.

She can make, too, an economical defence of the
most powerful kind, to the attacks on her in this
line, and it is this : that whether her cooking be
bad or good, she offers it without deception or
subterfuge, at a fair rate, and without compulsion ;
that nobody who does not like her dishes need eat
them ; and that her defects of taste or training can
only be fairly made a cause of hatred and abuse
when she does work badly, which somebody else is

62 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

waiting to do better, if she would get out of the
way. She has undertaken the task of cooking for
the American nation, not of her own motion, but
simply and solely because the American nation
could find nobody else to do it. She does not,
therefore, occupy the position of a broken-down or
incompetent artist, but of a volunteer at a fire, or
a passer-by when you are lying in the ditch with
your leg broken.

The plain truth of the matter is, that the whole
native population of the United States has almost
suddenly, and with one accord, refused to perform
for hire any of the services usually called " menial "
or indoor. The men have found other more pro-
ductive fields of industry, and the women, under
the influence of the prevailing theory of life,
have resolved to accept any employment at any
wages sooner than do other people's housework.
The result has been a demand for trained ser-
vants which the whole European continent could
not supply if it would, and which has proved so
intense that it has drawn the peasantry out of
the fields en masse from the one European coun-
try in which the peasantry was sufficiently poor
to be tempted, and spoke or understood the
American language. No such phenomenon has
ever been witnessed before. No country before
has ever refused to do its own " chores," and called

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN 63

in an army of foreigners for the purpose. To com-
plain bitterly of their want of skill is therefore,
under the circumstances, almost puerile, from an
economical point of view; while, to anyone who
looks at the matter as a moralist, it is hard to see
why Bridget, doing the work badly in the kitchen,
is any more a contemptible object than the Amer-
ican sewing-girl killing herself in a garret at three
dollars a week, out of devotion to " the principle
of equality."

As a party to a contract, Bridget's defects are
very strongly marked. Her sense of the obliga-
tion of contracts is feeble. The reason why this
particular vice excites so much odium in her case
is, that the inconveniences of her breaches of con-
tract are greater than those of almost any other
member of the community. They touch us in our
most intimate social relations, and cause us an
amount of mental anguish out of all proportion to
their real importance. But her spirit about con-
tracts is really that of the entire community in
which she lives. Her way of looking at her em-
ployer is, we sincerely believe, about the way of
looking at him common among all employees.
The only real restraint on laborers of any class
among us nowadays is the difficulty of finding
another place. Whenever it becomes as easy for
clerks, draughtsmen, mechanics, and the like to

64 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

" suit themselves " as it is for cooks or housemaids,
we find them as faithless. Native mechanics and
seamstresses are just as perfidious as Bridget, but
incur less obloquy, because their faithlessness
causes less annoyance ; but they have no more re-
gard in making their plans for the interest or
wishes of their employer than she has, and they
all take the " modern view " of the matter. What
makes her so fond of change is that she lives in a
singularly restless society, in which everybody is
engaged in a continual struggle to " better him-
self " — her master, in nine cases out of ten, setting
her an example of dislike to steady industry and
slow gains. Moreover, domestic service is a kind
of employment which, if not sweetened by per-
sonal affection, is extraordinarily full of wear and
tear. In it there is no real end to the day, and in
small households, the pursuit and oversight, and
often the " nagging," of the employer, or, in other
words, the presence of an exacting, semi-hostile,
and slightly contemptuous person is constant.
This and confinement in a half-dark kitchen pro-
duce that nervous crisis which sends male me-
chanics and other male laborers, engaged in mo-
notonous callings, off " on a spree." In Bridget's
case it works itself off by a change of place, with a
few days of squalid repose among " her own peo-
ple " in a tenement-house.

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN 65

As regards her general bearing as a member of
a household, she has to contend with three great
difficulties — ignorance of civilized domestic life,
for which she is no more to blame than Russian
moujiks ; difference of race and creed on the part
of her employer (and this is one which the ser-
vants of no other country have to contend with) ;
and lastly, the strong contempt for domestic ser-
vice felt and manifested by all that portion of the
American population with which she comes in con-
tact, and to which it is her great ambition to as-
similate herself. Those who have ever tried the
experiment of late years of employing a native
American as a servant, have, we believe, before it
was over, generally come to look on Bridget as the
personification of repose, if not of comfort ; and
those who have to call on native Americans, even
occasionally, for services of a quasi-personal char-
acter, such as those of expressmen, hotel clerks,
plumbers, we believe are anxious to make their in-
tercourse with these gentlemen as brief as possi-
ble. Most expressmen are natives, and are free-
men of intelligence and capacity, but they carry
your trunk into your hall with the air of convicts
doing forced labor for a tyrannical jailer. If the
spirit in which they discharge their duties — and
they are specimens of a large class — were to make
its way into our kitchens, society would go to pieces.
5

66 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

In short, Bridget is the legitimate product of
our economical, political, and moral condition.
We have called her, in our extremity, to do duties
for which she is not trained, and having got her
here have surrounded her with influences and
ideas which American society has busied itself for
fifty years in fostering and spreading, and which,
taking hold of persons in her stage of development,
work mental and moral ruin. The things which
American life and manners preach to her are not
patience, sober-mindedness, faithfulness, diligence,
and honesty, and eagerness for physical enjoy-
ment. Whenever the sound of the new gospel
which is to win the natives back to the ancient
and noble ways is heard in the land, it is fair to
expect that it will not find her ears wholly closed,
and that when the altar of duty is again set up by
her employers, she will lay on it attractive beef-
steaks, potatoes done to a turn, make libations of
delicious soup, and will display remarkable fertil-
ity in " sweets," and an extreme fondness for wash-
ing, and learn to grow old in one family.

JOHN STUAKT MILL

MR. MILL was, in many respects, one of the most
singular men ever produced by English society.
His father was a prominent member of the small
sect or coterie of Benthamites, whose attempts to
reform the world, during the whole of the earlier
part of the present century, furnished abundant
matter for ridicule to the common run of politi-
cians and social philosophers ; and this ridicule
was heightened, as the years rolled on, by the ex-
traordinary jargon which their master adopted for
the communication of his discoveries to the world.
The author of the "Defence of Usury," of the
"Fragment on Government," and of the "Book of
Fallacies," had, however, secured a reputation
very early in his career which his subsequent ec-
centricities could not shake, but the first attempts
of his disciples to catch the public ear were not
fortunate. Macaulay's smart review of James
Mill's book on " Government " gives a very fair
expression to the common feeling about them in
English literary and political circles during John

68 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

Stuart's boyhood. About the value of the father's
labors as a mental philosopher there are of course
a variety of opinions, but he gave two proofs of
capacity for the practical work of life which there
was no gainsaying. He canie to London an ob-
scure man of humble origin, but managed, with-
out ever having been in India, and at a period
when authors were held in much less esteem by
politicians than they were at a later period, to pro-
duce such an impression of his knowledge of In-
dian affairs, by his elaborate history of that coun-
try, on the minds of the Directors of the Company,
that they gave him an important office in the In-
dia House, and this, too, in spite of the fact that
he lived in a circle generally considered visionary
— answering, in fact, in some degree to what we
call the "long-haired people." Besides this, he
himself personally gave his son an education which
made him, perhaps, all things considered, the
most accomplished man of his age, and without
help from the universities or any other institution
of learning. The son grew up with a profound
reverence for his father as a scholar and thinker,
and rarely lost an opportunity of expressing it,
though, curiously enough, he began very early to
look on Bentham, the head of the school, with a
critical eye. The young man's course was, how-
ever, still more remarkable than the father's.

JOHN STUART MILL 69

Although brought up in a narrow coterie holding
peculiar and somewhat unpopular opinions, and
displaying, from his first entrance in life, as in-
tense hostility as it was in his nature to feel
against anything, against the English universities
as then organized and conducted, though they
were the centre of English culture and indeed one
might say of intellectual activity, he saw himself,
before he reached middle life, the most potent in-
fluence known to educated Englishmen, and per-
haps that which has most contributed to the late
grave changes in English public opinion on sev-
eral of the leading social and political problems.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that his writings
produced a veritable debacle in the English mind.
The younger generation were a good deal stirred
by Carlyle ; but Carlyle, after all, only woke peo-
ple up, and made them look out of the window to
see what was the matter, after which most of them
went to bed again and slept comfortably. His
cries were rather too inarticulate to furnish any-
thing like a new gospel, and he never took hold
of the intellectual class. But Mill did. The
"Logic" and "Political Economy," as reinforced
and expounded by his earlier essays, were gener-
ally accepted by the younger men as the teach-
ings of a real master, and even those who fully ac-
cepted neither his mental philosophy nor his

70 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

social economy, acknowledged that the day of old
things was passing away under his preaching.
His method, however, as applied to politics, was
not original — in fact, it was Bentham's.

Bentham, who was perhaps, in the field of juris-
prudence, the most destructive critic that ever ap-
peared, had the merit which in his day was some-
what novel among reformers, and marked him out
as something very different from Continental radi-
cals— >of being also highly constructive. Indeed,
his labors in providing substitutes for what he
sought to overthrow are among the most curious,
and, we might add, valuable monuments of human
industry and ingenuity. His proposed reforms
were based, too, on a theory of human nature
which differed from that in use among a large
number of radicals in our day in being perfectly
sound, that is, in perfect accordance with observed
facts, as far as it went. But it did not go nearly
far enough. It did not embrace the whole of hu-
man nature, or even the greater part of it, and for
the simple reason, which Mr. Mill himself has
pointed out in his analysis of Bentham's character,
that its author was almost entirely wanting in
sympathy and imagination. A very large propor-
tion of the springs of human action were unknown
or incomprehensible to him.

The result was that, although he exerted a

JOHN STUART MILL 71

powerful influence on English law reform by his
exposure of specific abuses, he made little impres-
sion on English sociology, properly so called.
This was in part due to his narrowness of view,
and in part to the absence of an interpreter, none
of his followers having attempted to put his wis-
dom into readable shape, except Dumont, and he
only partially and in French. The application of
his method to the work of general reform was in-
deed left to Mr. Mill, who brought to the task an
amount of culture to which Bentham could make
no claim, and a large share of the sympathy of
which there was also so little in Bentham's com-
position, and a style which, for expository and
didactic purposes, has perhaps never been sur-
passed. Moreover, Mr. Mill lost no time, as most
men do, in maturing. He was a full-blown philos-
opher at twenty-five, and discourses in his earliest
essays with almost the same measure, circumspec-
tion, and gravity exhibited in the latest of his
works, and with all the Benthamite precision and
attention to limitations.

He was, however, wanting, as his master was, in
imagination, and wanting, too, in what we may call,
though not in any bad sense, the animal side of
man's nature. He suffered in his treatment of all
the questions of the day from excess of culture and
deficiency of blood. He understood and allowed

72 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

for men's errors of judgment and for their ignor-
ance, and for their sloth and indifference; but of
appreciation of the force of their passions his
speculations contain little sign. For instance, he
was the first to point out the fact that the principle
of competition, the eager desire to sell, which fur-
nishes the motive power of the English and Ameri-
can social organization, is almost unknown and
unfelt among the greater part of mankind, but his
remedy for redundancy of population, and his
lamentations over " the subjection of women," are
those of a recluse or a valetudinarian.

His influence as a political philosopher may be
said to have stood highest after the appearance
of the "Political Economy." He had, then, per-
haps the most remarkable following of hard-headed
men which any English philosopher was ever able
to show. But the reverence of his disciples waned
somewhat rapidly after he began to take a more
active part in the treatment of the questions of
the day. His "representative government," valu-
able as it was as a philosophical discussion, of-
fered no solution of the problem then pressing on
the public minds in England, which bitter Radi-
cals or Conservatives could consider comforting.
The plan of having the number of a man's votes
regulated by his calling and intelligence was
thoroughly Benthamite. It was as complete and

JOHN STUART MILL 73

logical as a proposition in Euclid, and in 1825
would have looked attractive ; but in 1855 the
power of doing this nice work had completely
passed out of everybody's hands — indeed, the
desire of political perfection had greatly abated.
His lofty and eloquent plaints on the decline of
social freedom helped to strengthen the charge
of want of practicalness, which in our day is so
injurious to a man's political influence, and when
he entered Parliament, although he disappointed
none of those who best understood him, the out-
side multitude, who had begun to look on him as
a prophet, were somewhat chagrined that he was
not readier in parrying the thrusts of the trained
gladiators of the House of Commons. It was the
book on the " Subjection of Women," however,
which most shook the allegiance of his more
educated followers, because it was marked by the
widest departures from his own rules of thinking.
It would be impossible to find any justification in
his other works for the doctrine that women are
inferior to men for the same reason that male serfs
are inferior to their masters. His refusal to con-
sider difference of sex as even one probable cause
of women's inferiority to men in mental and moral
characteristics, was something for which few of
his disciples were prepared, or which they ever
got over ; and indeed his whole treatment of the

74 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

question of sex showed, in the opinion of many, a
constitutional incapacity to deal with the gravest
problems of social economy.

The standing of Mr. Mill as a mental philoso-
pher appears to be very differently estimated by
late critics and opponents and by himself, whether
we consider the extent of his influence, or the re-
lations of his doctrines to his nation and time ;
and there is a most singular inversion in these
estimates of what we should naturally expect from
friend and foe — an estimate of Mill's position and
influence by his opponents, which, compared to
his own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example,
Dr. McCosh, a thorough-going opponent, regards
Mill's influence as the most active and effective
philosophical force now alive in Great Britain,
the strongest current of philosophic thought even
at Oxford ; and M. Taine, who some years ago dis-
covered at Oxford that the British nation was not
wanting in "general ideas" or principles in its
modes of thought above the requirements of the
accountant and assayer, found these principles in
a really living English philosophy, which has
brought forth one of M. Taine's most elaborate
critical studies in his work on " Intelligence." In
contrast with these estimates, we have from Mr.
Mill himself the opinion, in a letter to M. Taine,
that his views are not especially English, and that

JOHN STUART MILL 75

they have not been so since the philosophical re-
action in Scotland, Germany, and later in Eng-
land, against Hume ; that when his " System of
Logic " was written he " stood almost alone in his
opinions ; and though they have met with a degree
of sympathy which he by no means expected, we
may still count in England twenty a priori and
spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the
doctrine of Experience."

This estimate of his own influence and of the
importance to metaphysical discussion at the pres-
ent time of the philosophy he " adopted " is en-
titled to much more consideration than ought in
general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by
the ambition, the enthusiasm, the disappointments,
or even the modesty of a philosophical thinker.
Nevertheless, the far different opinion of his stand-
ing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain
is undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense
which was not so clearly apparent to him. They
see clearly that a philosophy of which he was not
the founder, and never pretended to be, has gained
through his writings a hold, not only on English
speculation, but on that of the civilized world,
which it did not acquire even in England when it
was an especially English philosophy, as it was "in
the first half of the eighteenth century, from the
time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume."

76 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

What, then, is it in Mill's philosophical writings
that has given him this eminence as a thinker ?
Two qualities, we think, very rarely combined : a
philosophical style which for clearness and co-
gency has, perhaps, never been surpassed, and a con-
scientious painstaking, with a seriousness of con-
viction, and an earnestness of purpose which did
not in general characterize the thinkers whose
views he adopted. It was by bringing to the sup-
port of doctrines previously regarded as irreligious
a truly religious spirit that Mill acquired in part
the influence and respect which have given him his
eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the
word "utility" and the utilitarian doctrine of
morals from the ill repute they had, for "the
greatest happiness principle " was with him a re-
ligious principle. An equally important part of
his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness
of his early training — the education received from
his father's instruction — which, as we have said,
has made him truly regarded as the most accom-
plished of modern dialecticians.

To these grounds of influence may be added, so
far as his influence on English thought is con-
cerned, the fact that he was not a metaphysician
in a positive fashion, though he dealt largely with
metaphysical topics. He represented the almost
instinctive aversion to metaphysics, as such, which

JOHN STUART MILL 77

has characterized the English since the time of
Newton and Locke, we might also say since the
time of Bacon. Metaphysics, to pass current in
England, has now to be baptized and become part
of the authoritative religious instruction, else it is
foreign and barbarous to the English matter-of-
fact ways of thinking. Mill's " System of Logic "
was not intended as a system of philosophy in the
German, French, or even Scotch sense of the term.
It is not through the a priori establishment or
refutation of highest principles that experiential,
inductive, fact-proven principles of science are re-
garded or tested by the unmetaphysical English
mind. Metaphysical doctrines prevail, it is true, in
England, to the extent, probably, that Mr. Mill esti-
mates— twenty to one of its thinkers holding to
some such views. Yet it would be a misconcep-
tion to suppose these to be products of modern
English thought. They are rather preserves, ta-
booed, interdicted to discussion, not the represen-
tatives of its living thought.

Mr. Mill estimated the worth of contemporary
thinkers in accordance with this almost instinctive
distrust of rational " illumination ; " setting Arch-
bishop Whately, for example, as a thinker, above
Sir W. Hamilton, for his services to philosophy,
on account of " the number of true and valuable
thoughts " which he originated and put into circu-

78 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

lation, not as parts of a system, but as independent
truths of sagacious or painstaking observation and
reflection. It is by such a standard that Mr. Mill
would doubtless wish to be judged, and by it he
would be justly placed above all, or nearly all, of his
contemporaries. Nevertheless, as a conscientious
student of metaphysics he held in far higher es-
teem than is shown in general by English thinkers
the powers peculiar to the metaphysician — the
ability and disposition to follow out into their con-
sequences, and to concatenate in a system the as-
sumption of a priori principles. Descartes, Leib-
nitz, Comte, and, as an exceptional English thinker,
even Mr. Spencer, receive commendation from him
on this account. It is clear, however, that his re-
spect for this talent was of the sort which does not
aspire to imitate what is admired.

PANICS

IT is impossible to see, much less experience, a
financial panic without an almost appalling con-
sciousness that a new and terrible form of danger
and distress has been added in comparatively
recent times to the list of those by which human
life is menaced or perplexed. Any one who stood
on Wall Street, or in the gallery of the Stock Ex-
change last Thursday and Friday and Saturday
(1873), and saw the mad terror, we might almost
say the brute terror like that by which a horse is
devoured who has a pair of broken shafts hanging
to his heels, or a dog flying from a tin saucepan
attached to his tail, with which great crowds of men
rushed to and fro, trying to get rid of their prop-
erty, almost begging people to take it from them
at any price, could hardly avoid feeling that a new
plague had been sent among men ; that there was
an impalpable, invisible force in the air, robbing
them of their wits, of which philosophy had not as
yet dreamt. No dog was ever so much alarmed
by the clatter of the saucepan as hundreds seemed
to be by the possession of really valuable and div-

80 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

idend-paying securities ; and no horse was ever
more reckless in extricating himself from the
debris of a broken carriage than these swarms of
acute and shrewd traders in divesting themselves
of their possessions. Hundreds must really, to
judge by their conduct, have been so confused by
terror and anxiety as to be unable to decide whether
they desired to have or not to have, to be poor or
rich. If a Eoman or a man of the Middle Ages
had been suddenly brought into view of the scene,
he would have concluded without hesitation that a
ruthless invader was coming down the island ; that
his advanced guard was momentarily expected ;
and that anybody found by his forces in posses-
sion of Western Union, or Harlem, or Lake Shore,
or any other paying stock or bond, would be sub-
jected to cruel tortures, if not put to death. For
neither the Eoman nor the Mediaeval could under-
stand a rich man's being terrified by anything but
armed violence. Seneca enumerates as the three
great sources of anxiety in life the fear of want, of
disease, and of oppression by the powerful, and he
pronounces the last the greatest. If he had seen
Wall-Street brokers and bankers last week trying
to get rid of stocks and bonds, he could not of
course have supposed that they were poor or feared
poverty ; he would have judged from their physical
activity that they were in perfect health, so that

PANICS 81

he would have been driven to the conclusion that
some barbarian host, commanded by Sitting Bull
or Ked Cloud, was entering the city, and was
breathing out threatenings and slaughter against
the owners of personal property. If you had tried
to explain to him that there was no conqueror at
the gates, that the fear of violence was almost un-
known in our lives, that each man in that strug-
gling crowd enjoyed an amount of security against
force in all its forms which no Roman Senator
could ever count upon, and that the terror he wit-
nessed was caused by precisely the same agency
as the flight of an army before it has been beaten,
or, in other words, by " panic," he would have gazed
at you in incredulous amazement. He would have
said that panic in an army was caused by the
sudden dissolution of the bonds of discipline, by
each soldier's losing his confidence that his com-
rades and his officers would stand their ground ;
but these traders, he would have added, are not
subject to discipline ; they do not belong to an
organization of any kind ; each buys and sells for
himself ; he has his property there in that tin box,
and if nobody is going to rob him what is frighten-
ing him ? Why is he pale and trembling ? Why
does he run and shout and weep, and ask people
to give him a trifle, only a trifle, for all he pos-
sesses and let him go ?
6

83 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

If you were then to set about explaining to
Seneca that the way the god Pan worked confusion
in our day in the commercial world was by de-
stroying " credit," you would find yourself brought
suddenly face to face with one of the most striking
differences between ancient and modern, or, even as
we have said, mediaeval society. The most promi-
nent and necessary accompaniment or incident of
property in the ancient world was possession.
What a man owned he held. His wealth was in his
farm, or his house, or his granary, or his ships. He
could hardly separate the idea of property from that
of possession, and the state of society strengthened
the association. The frugal man hoarded, and
when he was terrified he buried his money, a
practice to which we owe the preservation of the
greater portion of the old coins now in our collec-
tions. The influence of this sense of insecurity,
of the constant fear of invasion or violence, lasted
long enough in all Continental countries, as Mr.
Bagehot has recently pointed out, to prevent the
establishment of banks of issue until very lately.
The prospect of war was so constantly in men's
minds that no bank could make arrangements for
the run which would surely follow the outbreak of
hostilities, and, in view of this contingency, no-
body would be willing to hold paper promises to
pay in lieu of gold and silver.

PANICS 83

It is therefore in England and America, the two
countries possessing not only most commercial
enterprise, but most security against invasion, that
the paper money has come into earliest and widest
use. To the paper of the banks have been added
the checks and bills of exchange of private individ-
uals, until money proper plays a greatly diminish-
ing part in the operations of commerce. Goods
are exchanged and debts paid by a system of bal-
ancing claims against claims, which really has
almost ceased to rest on money at all. So that a
man may be a very rich man in our day, and have
really nothing to show for his wealth whatever.
You go to his house, and you find nothing but a
lot of shabby furniture. The only thing there
which Seneca would have called wealth is perhaps
his wife's jewels, which would not bring a few
thousand dollars. You think his money must be
in the bank, but you go there with him and find
that all he has there is a page on the ledger bear-
ing his name, with a few figures on it. The bank
bills which you see lying about, and which look a
little like money, are not only not money in the
sense Seneca understood the term, but they do not
represent over a third of what the bank owes to
various people. You go to some safe-deposit
vaults, thinking that it is perhaps there he keeps
his valuables, but all you find is a mass of papers

84 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

signed by Thomas Smith or John Jones, declaring
that he is entitled to so many shares of some far-
off bank, or that some railroad will pay him a cer-
tain sum some thirty years hence. In fact, looked
at with Roman eyes, our millionaire seems to be
possessed of little or nothing, and likely to be
puzzled about his daily bread.

Now, this wonderful change in the character
and incidents of property may be said to be the
work of the last century, and it may be said to
consist in the substitution of an agency wholly
moral for an agency wholly material in the work
of exchange and distribution. For the giving and
receiving of gold and silver we have substituted
neither more nor less than faith in the honesty
and industry and capacity of our fellow-men.
There is hardly one of us who does not literally
live by faith. We lay up fortunes, marry, eat,
drink, travel, and bequeath, almost without ever
handling a cent ; and the best reason which
ninety-nine out of every hundred of us can give
for feeling secure against want, or having the
means of enjoyment or of charity, is not the pos-
session of anything of real value, but his confi-
dence that certain thousands of his fellow-creatures,
whom he has never seen and never expects to see,
scattered, it may be, over the civilized world, will
keep their promises, and do their daily work with

PANICS 85

fidelity and efficiency. This faith is every year
being made to carry a greater and greater load.
The transactions which rest on it increase every
year in magnitude and complexity. It has to ex-
tend itself every year over a larger portion of the
earth's surface, and to include a greater variety of
race and creed and custom. London and Paris
and Berlin and Vienna now tremble when New
York is alarmed. We have, in short, to believe
every year in a greater and greater number of
people, and to depend for our daily bread on
the successful working of vast combinations, in
which human character is, after all, the main ele-
ment.

The consequence is that, when for any reason a
shade of doubt comes over men's minds that the
combination is not working, that the machine is
at some point going to give way, that somebody
is not playing his part fairly, the solid ground
seems to shake under their feet, and we have some
of the phenomena resulting from an earthquake,
and among others blind terror. But to anyone
who understands what this new social force, Credit,
is, and the part it plays in human affairs, the won-
der is, not that it gives way so seldom, but that
it stands so firm ; that these hundreds of millions
of laborers, artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, bank-
ers, and manufacturers hold so firmly from day

86 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

to day the countless engagements into which they
enter, and that each recurring year the result of
the prodigious effort which is now put forth in the
civilized world in the work of production should
be distributed with so much accuracy and honesty,
and, on the whole, with so much wise adjustment
to the value of each man's contributions to civil-
ization.

There is one fact, however, which throws around
credit, as around so many others of the influences
by which our lives are shaped, a frightful mystery.
Its very strength helps to work ruin. The more
we believe in our fellow -toilers, and the more they
do to warrant our belief, the more we encourge
them to work, the more we excite their hopeful-
ness ; and out of this hopefulness come " panics "
and " crashes." Prosperity breeds credit, and
credit stimulates enterprise, and enterprise em-
barks in labors which, about every ten years in
England, and every twenty years in this country,
it is found that the world is not ready to pay for.
Panics have occurred in England in 1797, 1807,
1817, 1826, 1837, 1847, 1857, and there was very
near being a very severe one in 1866. In this coun-
try we have had them in 1815, 1836, 1857, and 1877,
and by panics we do not mean such local whirl-
winds as have desolated Wall Street, but wide-
spread commercial crises, affecting all branches of

PANICS 87

business. This periodicity is ascribed, and with
much plausibility, to the fact that inasmuch as
panics are the result of certain mental conditions,
they recur as soon as the experience of the pre-
viou$ one has lost its influence, or, in other words,
as often as a new generation comes into the man-
agement of affairs, which is about every ten years
in the commercial world both in England and
here. The fact that this country seems to be only
half as liable to them as England, is perhaps due
to the fact that the extent of our resources, and
the greater ratio of increase of population make it
much harder to overdo in the work of production
here than in England, and to this must be added
the greater strength of nerves produced by greater
hopefulness. In spite of the enormous abundance
of British capital and the rashness of the owners
in making investments, there hangs over the Lon-
don money market a timidity and doubtfulness
about the future which is unknown on this side
of the water, and which very slight accidents de-
velop into distrust and terror.

Outside those who are actually engaged in a
financial panic — such as brokers, bankers, mer-
chants and manufacturers, who have loans to pay
or receive, or acceptances falling due, and who are
therefore too busy and too sorely beset to moralize
on it or look at it objectively, as the philosophers

90 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

brokers, and manufacturers, and among the latter
nearly every man is inclined to it with regard to
persons of more means than himself. Moreover,
it would probably astonish us if we knew how
large was the number of those who fancy that their
more well-to-do neighbors, if they do not belong
to the category of millionaires, are living beyond
their means. Every man whose own means are
small, or even moderate, finds himself rather hard
put to it to make both ends meet, and is con-
stantly harassed by desires which he is unable to
gratify. When he sees others gratifying them,
his self-love drives him often unconsciously into
ascribing it to recklessness and improvidence.
Very close people, too, who have a constitutional
repugnance to spending money freely for any
purpose, and especially for purposes of personal
enjoyment, can hardly persuade themselves that
other persons who do so, spend it honestly. And
then behind these come the large army of lovers
of simplicity and frugality on moral and religious
grounds, who believe that material luxury con-
tains a snare for the soul, and that true happiness
and real virtue are not to be found in gilded
saloons. They write to the newspapers denounc-
ing the reluctance of young people to marry on
small incomes, and urging girls to begin life as
their mothers began it, and despise the silly chat-

PANICS 91

ter of those who think luxurious surroundings
more important than the union of hearts.

The occurrence of a panic fills the breasts of all
these with various degrees of rejoicing. They al-
ways take a very dark view of it, and laugh con-
temptuously at those who consider it a "Wall-
Street flurry," or ascribe it to any vice in the cur-
rency or in the banking system. Extravagant
living they believe to be at the bottom of it, and,
like the hard-money men, they are only surprised
that it has not come sooner, and they believe most
firmly that it is going to effect a sort of social rev-
olution, and bring the world more nearly to their
own ideal of what it ought to be. The amount
of " rottenness " which they expect it to reveal is
always enormous, and they look forward to the
exposure and the general coming-down of their
guilty neighbors to "the hard pan" with the
keenest relish. They have long, for instance, been
unable to imagine where the multitude of people
who live in brown-stone houses get the money to
keep them. There was something wrong about it,
they felt satisfied, though they could not tell what,
and when the panic comes they half fancy that
the murder will out, and that there will be a great
migration of fraudulent bankrupts from Fifth Ave-
nue and its neighborhood into tenement-houses
on the East and North Rivers. How Mrs. Smith,

90 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

brokers, and manufacturers, and among the latter
nearly every man is inclined to it with regard to
persons of more means than himself. Moreover,
it would probably astonish us if we knew how
large was the number of those who fancy that their
more well-to-do neighbors, if they do not belong
to the category of millionaires, are living beyond
their means. Every man whose own means are
small, or even moderate, finds himself rather hard
put to it to make both ends meet, and is con-
stantly harassed by desires which he is unable to
gratify. When he sees others gratifying them,
his self-love drives him often unconsciously into
ascribing it to recklessness and improvidence.
Very close people, too, who have a constitutional
repugnance to spending money freely for any
purpose, and especially for purposes of personal
enjoyment, can hardly persuade themselves that
other persons who do so, spend it honestly. And
then behind these come the large army of lovers
of simplicity and frugality on moral and religious
grounds, who believe that material luxury con-
tains a snare for the soul, and that true happiness
and real virtue are not to be found in gilded
saloons. They write to the newspapers denounc-
ing the reluctance of young people to marry on
small incomes, and urging girls to begin life as
their mothers began it, and despise the silly chat-

PANICS 91

ter of those who think luxurious surroundings
more important than the union of hearts.

The occurrence of a panic fills the breasts of all
these with various degrees of rejoicing. They al-
ways take a very dark view of it, and laugh con-
temptuously at those who consider it a "Wall-
Street flurry," or ascribe it to any vice in the cur-
rency or in the banking system. Extravagant
living they believe to be at the bottom of it, and,
like the hard-money men, they are only surprised
that it has not come sooner, and they believe most
firmly that it is going to effect a sort of social rev-
olution, and bring the world more nearly to their
own ideal of what it ought to be. The amount
of " rottenness " which they expect it to reveal is
always enormous, and they look forward to the
exposure and the general coming-down of their
guilty neighbors to "the hard pan" with the
keenest relish. They have long, for instance, been
unable to imagine where the multitude of people
who live in brown-stone houses get the money to
keep them. There was something wrong about it,
they felt satisfied, though they could not tell what,
and when the panic conies they half fancy that
the murder will out, and that there will be a great
migration of fraudulent bankrupts from Fifth Ave-
nue and its neighborhood into tenement-houses
on the East and North Eivers. How Mrs. Smith,

93 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

too, dressed as she did, and where Smith got the
money to take her to Sharon every summer, and
how Jones managed to entertain as he was doing,
have often been puzzling problems, which "the
crash " in the money market is at last going to
solve. It is also highly gratifying to those who
consider yachting a senseless amusement to reflect
that the panic will probably dimmish the number
of yachts, and they even flatter themselves that
it may stop yachting in future, and reduce the
general style of living among rich young men.
" We shall now," they say, " have fewer fast horses,
and less champagne, and less gaudy furniture, and
more honest, hard work, and plain, wholesome
food." They accordingly rejoice in the panic as a
means adopted by Providence to bring a glutton-
ous and ungodly generation to its senses, and lead
it back to that state of things which is known as
" republican simplicity."

The curious thing about this expectation is
that it has survived innumerable disappointments
without apparently losing any of its vigor. It
was strong after 1837, and strong after 1857, and
stronger than ever after 1861. The war was surely,
people said, to bring back the golden age, when all
the men were prudent, sober, and industrious, and
all the women simple, modest, and homekeeping.
The war did nothing of the kind. In fact, it

PANICS 93

left us more extravagant and lavish and self-
indulgent than ever ; yet the ancient and tough
belief in the purifying influence of a stringent
money market still lasts, and is at this moment
cropping out in the moral department of a thou-
sand newspapers.

The belief belongs to what may be called the
cataclysmal theory of progress, which improves
the world by sudden starts, and clings so fondly
to liquor-laws, and has profound faith in specific
remedies for moral and political diseases. What
commercial panics and great national misfortunes
do not do, particular bits of legislation are sure
to do. You put something in the Constitution,
or forbid something, or lose a battle, or have a
'•'shrinkage of values," or have a cholera season,
and forthwith the community turns over a new
leaf, and becomes moral, economical, and sober-
minded. We doubt whether this theory will ever
die out, however much philosophers may preach
against it, or however often facts may refute it,
because it gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of
the deepest longings of the human heart — the
desire which each man feels to have a great deal
of history crowded into his own little day. None
of us can bear to quit the scene without witnessing
the solution of the problems by which his own life
has been vexed or over which he has long labored.

94 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

Indeed a great many men would find ifc impossible
to work with any zeal to bring about results which
would probably not be witnessed until they had
been centuries in the tomb.

We accordingly find that the most eager re-
formers are apt to be those who look for the
triumph of virtue by the close of the current
year. Of all dreams of eager reformers, however,
there is probably none more substantial than that
which looks for a restoration of that vague thing
called "simplicity of manners." Simplicity and
economy are, of course, relative terms. The luxu-
rious gentleman in the fourteenth century lived
in a way which the well-to-do artisan in our own
time would not tolerate ; and when we under-
take to carry people back to ancient ways of
living we find that there is hardly a point short
of barbarism at which we can consistently stop.
A country in which money is easily made and
abounds, will be one in which money will always
be freely spent, and in which personal comfort
and even display will occupy men's and women's
thoughts a great deal. We can no more prevent
this than we can prevent the growth of wealth it-
self ; and our duty is, instead of wasting our breath
in denouncing extravagance, or hailing panics as
purging fires, to do what in us lies to give rich
people more taste, more conscience, more sense of

PANICS 95

responsibility for curable ills, and a keener relish
of the higher forms of pleasure. Extravagance —
or, in other words, the waste of money on sen-
sual enjoyment, the production of hideous furniture
or jewelry, or of barbarous display — has to be
checked not by the preaching of poor people, but
by the rich man's own superiority to these things,
and his own repugnance for them. This repug-
nance can only be inspired by education, whether
that of school and college, or that of a refined and
cultivated social atmosphere. Much would be
done in this direction if public opinion exacted of
the owners of large fortunes that they should give
their sons the best education the country affords ;
or, in other words, send them to college, instead
of setting them up in the dry-goods business or the
grocery business. A man who has made a large
fortune in honest trade or industry has not con-
tributed his share to moral and intellectual inter-
ests by merely making donations. It is his duty,
also, if he leaves children behind him, to see to it,
as far as he can, that they are men who will be an
addition to the general culture and taste of the
nation, and who will stimulate its nobler ambition,
raise its intellectual standard, quicken its love of
excellence in all fields, and deepen its faith in the
value of things not seen.

THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM

OUR readers and those of The Galaxy are famil-
iar with the controversy between Dr. Fitzedward
Hall and Mr. Grant White (November, 1873).
When one comes to inquire what it was all about,
and why Mr. White was led to consider Dr. Hall
a " yahoo of literature," and " a man born without a
sense of decency," one finds himself engaged in an
investigation of great difficulty, but of consider-
able interest. The controversy between these two
gentlemen by no means brings up the problem for
the first time. That verbal criticism, such as Mr.
White has been producing for some time back, is
sure to end, sooner or later, in one or mfere sav-
age quarrels, is one of the most familiar facts of
the literary life of our day. Indeed, so far as our
observation has gone, the rule has no exceptions.
Whenever we see a gentleman, no matter how
great his accomplishments or sweet his temper,
announcing that he is about to write articles or de-
liver lectures on " Words and their Uses," or on
the " English of Every-day Life," or on " Familiar

THE ODIUM PHILOLOQICUM 07

Faults of Conversation," or " Newspaper English,"
or any cognate theme, we feel all but certain that
we shall soon see him engaged in an encounter
with another laborer in the same field, in which
all dignity will be laid aside, and in which, fig-
uratively speaking, clothes, hair, and features will
suffer terribly, and out of which, unless he is very
lucky, he will issue with the gravest imputations
resting on his character in every relation of life.

Now why is it that attempts to get one's fellow-
men to talk correctly, to frame their sentences in
accordance with good usage, and take their words
from the best authors, have this tendency to arouse
some of the worst passions of our nature, and pre-
dispose even eminent philologists — men of dainty
language, and soft manners, and lofty aims — to as-
sail each other in the rough vernacular of the fish-
market and the forecastle? A careless observer
will be apt to say that it is an ordinary result of
disputation ; that when men differ or argue on any
subject they are apt to get angry and indulge in
" personalities." But this is not true. Lawyers,
for instance, live by controversy, and their contro-
versies touch interests of the gravest and most del-
icate character — such as fortune and reputation ;
and yet the spectacle of two lawyers abusing each
other in cold blood, in print, is almost unknown.

Currency and banking are, at certain seasons, sub-

7

93 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

jects of absorbing interest, and, for the last seventy
years, the discussions over them have been numer-
ous and voluminous almost beyond example, and
yet we remember no case in which a bullionist
called a paper-money man bad names, or in which
a friend of free banking accused a restrictionist of
defrauding the poor or defacing tombstones. Pol-
itics, too, home and foreign, is a fertile source of
difference of opinion; and yet gross abuse, on
paper, of each other, by political disputants, dis-
cussing abstract questions having no present rela-
tion to power or pay, are very rare indeed.

It seems, at first blush, as if an examination of
the well-known odium tlieologicum, or the tradi-
tional bitterness which has been apt to charac-
terize controversies about points of doctrine, from
the Middle Ages down to a period within our own
memory, would throw some light on the matter.
But a little consideration will show that there are
special causes for the rancor of theologians for
which word-criticism has no parallel. The odium
theologicum was the natural and inevitable result of
the general belief that the holding of certain opin-
ions was necessary to salvation, and that the forma-
tion of opinions could be wholly regulated by the
will. This belief, pushed to its extreme limits and
embodied in legislation, led to the burning of here-
tics in nearly all Christian countries. When B's

THE ODIUM PIHLOLOOICUtf 99

failure to adopt A's conclusions was by A regarded
as a sign of depravity of nature which would lead
to B's damnation, nothing was more natural than
that when they came into collision in pamphlets
or sermons they should have attributed to each
other the worst motives. A man who was delib-
erately getting himself ready for perdition was not
a person to whom anybody owed courtesy or con-
sideration, or whose arguments, being probably
supplied by Satan, deserved respectful examina-
tion. We accordingly find that as the list of " es-
sential" opinions has become shortened, and as
doubts as to men's responsibility for their opin-
ions have made their way from the world into the
church, theological controversy has lost its acri-
mony and indeed has almost ceased. No theolo-
gian of high standing or character now permits
himself to show bad temper in a doctrinal or her-
meneutical discussion, and a large and increasing
proportion of theologians acknowledge that the
road to heaven is so hard for us all that the less
quarrelling and jostling there is in it, the better
for everybody.

Nor does the odium scientificum, of which we
have now happily but occasional manifestations,
furnish us with any suggestions. Controversy be-
tween scientific men begins to be bitter and fre-
quent, as the field of investigation grows wider

100 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

and the investigation itself grows deeper. But
then this is easily accounted for. All scientific
men of the first rank are engaged in original re-
search— that is, in attempts to discover laws and
phenomena previously unknown. The workers in
all departments are very numerous, and are scat-
tered over various countries, and as one discovery,
however slight, is very apt to help in some de-
gree in the making of another, scientific men are
constantly exposed to having their claims to orig-
inality contested, either as regards priority in point
of time or as regards completeness. Consequently,
they may be said to stand in delicate relations to
each other, and are more than usually sensitive
about the recognition of their achievements by
their brethren — a state of things which, while it
cultivates a very nice sense of honor, leads occa-
sionally to encounters in which free-will seems for
the moment to get the better of law. The differ-
ences of the scientific world, too, are complicated
by the theological bearing of a good deal of scien-
tific discovery and discussion, and many a scientific
man finds himself either compelled to defend him-
self against theologians, or to aid theologians in
bringing an erring brother to reason.

The true source of the odium philologicum is,
we think, to be found in the fact that a man's
speech is apt to be, or to be considered, an indi-

THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM 101

cation of the manner in which he has been bred,
and of the character of the company he keeps.
Criticism of his mode of using words, or his pro-
nunciation, or the manner in which he compounds
his sentences, almost inevitably takes the character
of an attack on his birth, parentage, education, and
social position ; or, in other words, on everything
which he feels most sensitive about or holds most
dear. If you say that his pronunciation is bad, or
that his language is slangy or ill-chosen, you insin-
uate that when he lived at home with his papa and
mamma he was surrounded by bad models, or, in
plain English, that his parents were vulgar or ignor-
ant people ; when you say that he writes bad gram-
mar, or is guilty of glaring solecisms, or displays
want of etymological knowledge, you insinuate that
his education was neglected, or that he has not
associated with correct speakers. Usually, too, you
do all this in the most provoking way by selecting
passages from his writings on which he probably
prided himself, and separating them totally from
the thought of which he was full when he produced
them, and then examining them mechanically, as if
they were algebraic signs, which he used without
knowing what they meant or where they would
bring him out. Nobody stands this process very
long with equanimity, because nobody can be sub-
jected to it without being presented to the public

103 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

somewhat in the light of an ignorant, careless, and
pretentious donkey. Nor will it do to cite your
examples from deceased authors. You cannot do
so without assailing some form of expression which
an eager, listening enemy is himself in the habit
of using, and is waiting for you to take up, and
through which he hopes to bring you to shame.
No man, moreover, can perform the process
without taking on airs which rouse his victim to
madness, because he assumes a position not only
of grammatical, but, as we have said, of social supe-
riority. He says plainly enough, no matter how
polite or scientific he may try to seem, " I was bet-
ter born and bred than you, and acquired these
correct turns of expression, of which you know
nothing, from cultivated relatives ; " or, " I live in
cultivated circles, and am consequently familiar
with the best usage, which you, poor fellow! are
not. I am therefore able to decide this matter
without argument or citations, and your best
course is to take my corrections in silence or with
thankfulness." It is easy to understand how all
interest in orthography, etymology, syntax, and
prosody speedily disappears in a controversy of
this sort, and how the disputants begin to burn
with mutual dislike, and how each longs to inflict
pain and anguish on his opponent, and make him,
no matter by what means, an object of popular

THE ODIUM: PHILOLOGICUM: 103

pity and contempt, and make his parts of speech
odious and ridiculous. The influence of all good
men ought to be directed either to repressing ver-
bal criticism, or restricting indulgence in it to the
family circle or to schools and colleges.

PKOFESSOK HUXLEY'S LECTUKES

BIOLOGISTS like Professor Huxley have, as popu-
lar lecturers, the advantage over scientific men in
other fields, of occupying themselves with what is
to ninety-nine men and women out of a hundred
the most momentous of all problems — the manner
in which life on this globe began, and in which
men and other animals came to be what they are.
The doctrine of evolution as a solution of these
problems, or of one of them, derives additional in-
terest from the fact that in many minds it runs
counter to ideas which a very large proportion of
the population above the age of thirty imbibed
with the earliest and most impressive portion of
their education. Down to 1850 the bulk of intel-
ligent men and women believed that the world, and
all that is therein, originated in the precise manner
described in the first chapter of Genesis, and about
six thousand years ago. Most of the adaptations,
or attempts at adaptation, of what is called the
Mosaic account of the creation, of the chronologi-
cal theories of the geologists and evolutionists by

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 105

theologians and Biblical scholars have been made
within that period, and it may be safely said that
it is only within ten or fifteen years that any clear
knowledge of the " conflict between science and
religion " has reached that portion of the people
who take a lively or, indeed, any interest, in re-
ligious matters. It would not, in fact, be rash to
say that little or nothing is known about this con-
flict to this hour among the great body of Metho-
dists or Catholics, or the evangelical portion of
other denominations, and that their religious out-
look is little, if at all, affected by it. One would
never detect, for instance, in Mr. Moody's preach-
ing, any indication that he had ever heard of any
such conflict, or that the doctrines of the orthodox
Protestant Church had undergone any sensible
modification within a hundred years. Professor
Huxley and men like him, therefore, make their
appearance now not simply as manipulators of a
most interesting subject, but as disturbers of be-
liefs which are widely spread, deeply rooted, and
surrounded by the tenderest and most sacred as-
sociations of human existence.

That under such circumstances he has met with
so little opposition is, on the whole, rather sur-
prising. As far as our observation has gone, no
strong hostility whatever to himself or his teach-
ings has been shown, except in one or two in-

106 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

stances, by either the clergy or the religious press.
Indeed, ministers formed a very prominent and
attentive portion of his audience at the recent
lectures at Chickering Hall. But it has been
made very apparent by the articles and letters
which these lectures have called out in the news-
papers that the religious public has hardly un-
derstood him. The collision between the theolo-
gians and the scientific men has been very slight
among us; and, indeed, the waves of the con-
troversy hardly reached this country until the
storm had passed away in Europe, so that it is
difficult for Americans to appreciate the com-
bative tone of Mr. Huxley's oratory. Of this
difficulty the effect of his substitution of Milton
for Moses as the historian of the creation, on the
night of his first lecture, has furnished an amusing
illustration. The audienco, or at least that portion
of it which was gifted with any sense of humor,
saw the joke and laughed over it heartily. It was
simply a telling rhetorical device, intended to point
a sarcasm directed against the biblical commenta-
tors who have been trying to extract the doctrines
of evolution from the first chapter of Genesis.
But many of the newspapers all over the country
took it up seriously, and the professor must, if he
saw them, have enjoyed mightily the various let-
ters and articles which have endeavored in solemn

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 107

earnest to show that Milton was not justly entitled
to the rank of a scientific expositor, and that it
was a cowardly thing in the lecturer to attack
Moses over Milton's shoulders. Whenever Pro-
fessor Huxley enters on the defence of his science,
as distinguished from the exposition of it, there
are traces in his language of the gaudium certaminis
which has found expression in so many hard-fought
fields in his own country, and which has made him
perhaps the most formidable antagonist, in so far
as dialectics go, that the transcendental philos-
ophers have ever encountered. He is, par excel-
lence, a fighting man, but certainly his pugnacity
diminishes neither his worth nor his capacity.

In many of the comments which his lectures
have called out in the newspapers one meets every
now and then with a curious failure to comprehend
the position which an average non-scientific man
occupies in such a conflict as in now going on over
the doctrines of evolution. Professor Huxley was
very careful not to repeat tho error which de-
livered Professor Tyndall into the hands of the
enemy at Belfast. He expressed no opinion as to
the nature of the causal force which called the
world into existence. He did not profess to know
anything about the sources of life. He conse-
quently did not once place himself on the level
of the theologian or the unscientific spectator.

108 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

What he undertook to do and did was to present
to the audience some specimens of the evidence
by which evolutionists have been led to the con-
clusion that their theory is correct. Now, the mis-
take which a good many newspaper writers — some
of them ministers — have made in passing judg-
ment on the lectures lies in their supposing that
this evidence must be weak and incomplete because
they have not been convinced. There is probably
no more widely diffused fallacy, or one which
works more mischief in all walks of life, than the
notion that it is only those whose business it is to
persuade who need to be trained in the art of proof,
and that those who are to be persuaded need no
process of preparation at all.

The fact is that skill in reasoning is as necessary
on the one side as the other. He cannot be fully
and rightly convinced who does not himself know
how to convince, and no man is competent to
judge in the last resort of the force of an argu-
ment who is not on something like an equality of
knowledge and dialectical skill with the person
using it. This is true in all fields of discussion ;
it is pre-eminently true in scientific fields. Of
course, therefore, the real public of the scientific
man — the public which settles finally whether he
has made out his case — is a small one. Outside
of it there is another and larger one on which his

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 109

reasoning may act with irresistible force ; but just
as the fact that it does so act does not prove that
his hypothesis is true, so also the fact that it has
failed to convince proves nothing against its sound-
ness. In other words, a man's occupying the posi-
tion of a listener does not necessarily clothe him
with the attributes of a judge, and there may be
as much folly and impertinence in his going about
saying, " I do not agree with Huxley; he has not
satisfied me ; he will have to produce more proof
than that before I believe in evolution," as in going
about saying, " I know as much about evolution as
Huxley and could give as good a lecture on it as
he any day." And yet a good many people are
guilty of the one who would blush at the mere
thought of the other.

Another fertile source of confusion in this and
similar controversies is the habit which transcen-
dentalists, theological and other, have of using the
term " truth " in two different senses, the scientific
sense and the religious or spiritual sense. The
scientific man only uses it in one. Truth to him
is something capable of demonstration by some
one of the canons of induction. He knows noth-
ing of any truth which cannot be proved. The
religious man, on the other hand, and especially
the minister, has been bred in the application of
the term to facts of an entirely different order —

110 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

that is, to emotions produced by certain beliefs
which he cannot justify by any arguments, and
about which to him no argument is necessary.
These are the " spiritual truths " which are said to
be perceptible often to the simple-minded and un-
learned, though hidden from the wise and prudent.
Now there is no decently educated religious man
who does not perceive the distinction between
these two kinds of truths, and few who do not
think they keep this distinction in mind when
passing upon the great problems of the origin and
growth of the universe. But, as a matter of fact,
we see the distinction ignored every day. People
go to scientific lectures and read scientific books
with their heads filled with spiritual truths, which
have come they know not whence, and which give
them infinite comfort in all the trjdng passages of
life, and in view of this comfort must, they think,
connect them by invisible lines of communication
with the great Secret of the Universe, toward which
philosophers try to make their way by visible
lines. When, then, they find that the scientific
man's induction makes no impression on this
other truth, and that he cannot dislodge any the-
ory of the growth or government of the world
which has become firmly imbedded in it, they are
apt to conclude that there is something faulty in
his methods, or rash and presumptuous in his

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 111

conclusions. But there is only one course for
the leaders of religious thought to follow in order
to prevent the disastrous confusion which comes
of the sudden and complete break-down of the
moral standards and sanctions by which the
mass of mankind live, and that is to put an end
at once, and gracefully, to the theory that the
spiritual truth which brings the peace which
passeth understanding has any necessary connec-
tion with any theory of the physical universe, or
can be used to refute it or used as a substitute for
it, or is dependent on the authenticity or interpre-
tation of any book. They must not flatter them-
selves because a scientific man here and there
doubts or gainsays, or because some learned theo-
logian is still unconvinced, or because the mental
habits of which faith is born seem to hold their
ground or show signs of revival, that the philosophy
of which Huxley is a master is not slowly but surely
gaining ground. The proofs may not yet be com-
plete, but they grow day by day ; some of the elder
scientific men may scout, but no young ones are ap-
pearing to take their places and preach their creed.
The tide seems sometimes to ebb from month to
month, but it rises from year to year. The true
course of spiritually minded men under these cir-
cumstances is to separate their faith from all theories
of the precise manner in which the world originated,

112 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

or of the length of time it has lasted, as matters, for
their purposes, of little or no moment. The secret
springs of hope and courage from which each of
us draws strength in the great crises of existence
would flow all the same whether life appeared on
the planet ten million or ten thousand years ago,
and whether the present forms of life were the prod-
uct of one day or of many ages. And we doubt
very much whether anyone has ever listened in a
candid and dispassionate frame of mind to the evo-
lutionist's history of the globe without finding that
it had deepened for him the mystery of the universe,
and magnified the Power which stands behind it.

Not the least interesting feature in the discus-
sion about the theory of evolution is the promi-
nent part taken in it by clergymen of various
denominations. There is hardly one of them who,
since Huxley's lectures, has not preached a sermon
bearing on the matter in some way, and several
have made it the topic of special articles or lect-
ures. In fact, we do not think we exaggerate when
we say that three-fourths of all that has been re-
cently said or written about the hypothesis in this
country has been said or written by ministers.
There is no denying that the theory, if true,
does, in appearance at least, militate against the
account of the creation given in the first chapter
of Genesis, or, in other words, against the view of

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 113

the origin of life on the globe which has been held
by the Christian world for seventeen centuries. It
would, therefore, be by no means surprising that
ministers should meet it, either by showing that
the Mosaic account of the creation was really in-
spired— was, in short, the account given by the
Creator himself — or that the modern interpreta-
tions of it were incorrect, and that it was really,
when perfectly understood, easily reconciled with
the conclusions reached of late years by geologists
and biologists. This is the way in which a great
many ministers have hitherto met the evolution-
ists, and for this sort of work they are undoubtedly
fitted by education and experience. If ifc can be
done by anyone, they are the men to do it. If it
be maintained that the biblical account is literally
true, they are more familiar than any other class
of men with the evidence and arguments accumu-
lated by the Church in favor of the inspiration of
the Scriptures ; or if, on the other hand, it be de-
sired to reconcile the Bible with evolution, they
are more familiar than any other class of men with
the exegetical process by which this reconciliation
can be effected. They are specially trained in
ecclesiastical history and tradition, in Greek and
Hebrew religious literature, and in the methods
of interpretation which have been for ages in use
among theologians.
8

114 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

Of late, however, they have shown a decided in-
clination to abandon the purely ecclesiastical ap-
proach to the controversy altogether, and this is
especially remarkable in the discussion now pend-
ing over Huxley. They do not seek to defend the
biblical account of the creation, or to reconcile it
with the theory of the evolutionists. Far from it,
they have come down, in most of the recent cases,
into the scientific arena, and are meeting the men
of science with their own weapons. They tell
Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall that their evi-
dence is imperfect, and their reasoning from it
faulty. Noticing their activity in this new field,
and the marked contrast which this activity pre-
sents to the modesty or indifference of the other
professions — the lawyers and doctors, for instance,
who on general grounds have fully as much reason
to be interested in evolution as the ministers, and
have hitherto been at least as well fitted to discuss
it — we asked ourselves whether it was possible
that, without our knowledge, any change had of
late years been made in the curriculum of the di-
vinity schools or theological seminaries with the
view of fitting ministers to take a prominent part
in the solution of the increasingly important and
startling problems raised by physical science. In
order to satisfy ourselves, we lately turned over
the catalogues of all the principal divinity schools

PROFESSOR HUXLEY1 S LECTURES 115

in the country, to see if any chairs of natural
science had been established, or if candidates for
the ministry had to undergo any compulsory in-
struction in geology or physics, or the higher
mathematics, or biology, or palaeontology, or as-
tronomy, or had to become versed in the methods
of scientific investigation in the laboratory or in
the dissecting-room, or were subjected to any un-
usually severe discipline in the use of the induc-
tive process. Not much to our surprise, we found
nothing of the kind. "We found that, to all appear-
ance, not even the smallest smattering of natural
science in any of its branches is considered neces-
sary to a minister's education ; no astronomy, no
chemistry, no biology, no geology, no higher math-
ematics, no comparative anatomy, and nothing
severe in logic. In fact, of special preparation for
the discussion of such a theme as the origin of
life on the earth, there does not appear to be in
the ordinary course of our divinity schools any
trace.

We then said to ourselves, But ministers are
modest, truthful men ; they would not knowingly
pass themselves off as competent on a subject
with which they were unfitted to deal. They are
no less candid and self-distrustful, for instance,
than lawyers and doctors, and a lawyer or doctor
who ventured to tackle a professed scientist on a

116 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

scientific subject to which he had given no system-
atic study would be laughed at by his professional
brethren, and would suffer from it even in his pro-
fessional reputation, as it would be taken to indi-
cate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps,
then, the training given in the divinity schools,
though it does not touch special fields of science,
is such as to prepare the mind for the work of in-
duction by some course of intellectual gymnastics.
Perhaps, though it does not familiarize a man with
the facts of geology and biology and astronomy,
it so disciplines him in the work of collecting and
arranging facts of any kind, and reasoning from
them, that he will be a master in the art of proof,
and that, in short, though he may not have a
scientific man's knowledge, he will have his mental
habits.

But we found this second supposition as far
from the truth as the first one was. Moreover, the
mental constitution of the young men who choose
the ministry as a profession is not apt to be of a
kind well fitted for scientific investigation. Rev-
erence is one of their prominent characteristics,
and reverence predisposes them to accept things
on authority. They are inclined to seek truth
rather as a means of repose than for its own sake,
and to fancy that it is associated closely with spir-
itual comfort, and that they have secured the truth

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 117

when they feel the comfort. Though, last not least,
they enter the seminary with a strong bias in favor
of one particular theory of the origin of life and of
the history of the race, and their subsequent stud-
ies are marked out and pursued with the set pur-
pose of strengthening this bias and of qualifying
them to defend it and spread it, and of associating
in their minds the doubt or rejection of it with
moral evil. The consequence is that they go forth,
trained not as investigators or inquirers, but as
advocates, charged with the defence against all
comers of a view of the universe which they have
accepted ready-made from teachers. A worse
preparation for scientific pursuits of any kind can
hardly be imagined. The slightest trace of such a
state of mind in a scientific man — that is, of a dis-
position to believe a thing on grounds of feeling
or interest, or with reference to practical conse-
quences, or to jump over gaps in proof in order to
reach pleasant conclusions — discredits him with
his fellows, and throws doubt on his statements.

We are not condemning this state of mind for all
purposes. Indeed, we think the wide-spread preva-
lence of the philosophic way of looking at things
would be in many respects a great misfortune for
the race, and we acknowledge that a rigidly trained
philosopher would be unfit for most of a minis-
ter's functions; but we have only to describe a

118 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

minister's education in order to show his exceed-
ing unreadiness for contentions such as some of his
brethren are carrying on with geologists and phys-
icists and biologists. In fact, there is no educated
calling whose members are not, on the whole, bet-
ter equipped for fighting in scientific fields over
the hypothesis of evolution. Our surprise at see-
ing lawyers and doctors engaged in it would be
very much less justifiable, for a portion at least of
the training received in these professions is of a
scientific cast, and concerns the selection and
classification of facts, while a clergyman's is almost
wholly devoted to the study of the opinions and
sayings of other men. In truth, theology, properly
so called, is a collection of opinions. Nor do these
objections to a clergyman's mingling in scientific
disputes arise out of his belief about the origin
and government of the world per se, because one
does not think of making them to trained religious
philosophers ; for instance, to Principal Dawson
or Mr. St. George Mivart. Some may think or say
that the religious prepossessions of these gentle-
men lessen the weight of their opinions on a cer-
tain class of scientific questions, but no one would
question their right to share in scientific discus-
sions.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

SOME of the letters from clergymen which have
been called out by our article on the part recently
taken by them in scientific discussion maintain
that, although ministers may not be familiar with
the facts of science, many of them are fully compe-
tent to weigh the arguments founded on these
facts put forward by scientific men, and decide
whether they have proved their case or not ; or, in
other words, that we were mistaken in saying that
the theological seminaries did not afford severe
training in the use of the inductive process, and
that it could not be used effectively without knowl-
edge of the matters on which it was used. More
than one of these letters points, in support of
this view, to the answer of the Eev. Dr. Taylor, of
this city, to Professor Huxley's lectures, published
some weeks ago in the Tribune, and we believe the
Tribune presented the author to the public as " a
trained logician."

We have accordingly turned to Dr. Taylor's let-
ter and given it a much more attentive reading

120 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

than we confess we gave it when it first appeared,
for the purpose of seeing whether it was really
true that ministers were such dexterous and
highly taught dialecticians that they could over-
throw a scientific man, even on a subject of which
they knew little or nothing — whether, in short,
they could really treat the question of evolution
algebraically, and, by the mere aid of signs of the
meaning of which they were ignorant, put the
Huxleys and Darwins to confusion. For Dr.
Taylor opens in this way :

"Let it be understood, then, that I have no fault to find
with Mr. Huxley as a discoverer of facts or as an exponent of
comparative anatomy. In both of these respects he is beyond
all praise of mine, and I am ready to sit at his feet ; but when
he begins to reason from the facts which he sets forth, then,
like every other reasoner, he is amenable to the laws of argu-
mentation, and his conclusions are to be tested by the relation
which they bear to the premises which he has advanced, and
by the proof which he furnishes for the premises themselves."

We pass over, as of no consequence for our
present purpose, the various exceptions which he
then takes to Huxley's arrangement of his lectures,
to the tone of his exceptions, and to his mode of
referring to the biblical hypothesis, and come to
what he has to say of Huxley's evidence, which he
truly calls "circumstantial evidence." The first
thing he does is to define circumstantial evidence ;

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 121

but here, at the very outset, we have been sur-
prised to find a logician who conceives himself
capable of overhauling the argumentation of the
masters of science, going to a lawyer to get "a
statement of the principles which regulate the
value of circumstantial evidence." This is a mat-
ter which lay logicians usually have at their fin-
gers' ends, and we have never known one yet who
would not be puzzled by a suggestion that he
should do as Dr. Taylor did — go to a "distin-
guished legal friend" for information as to the
conditions of this kind of proof. For, as we have
more than once pointed out, lawyers, as such, have
no special skill or training in the use of circum-
stantial evidence as scientific men know it — that
is, as evidence which derives all its force from the
laws of the human mind. The circumstantial evi-
dence with which lawyers, qua lawyers, are familiar
under our system of jurisprudence is an artificial
thing created by legislation or custom, with the
object of preventing the minds of the jury — pre-
sumably a body of untrained and unlearned men
— from being confused or led astray. Moreover,
they are only familiar with its use in one very
narrow field — human conduct under one set of
social conditions. For example, a lawyer might
be a very good judge of circumstantial evidence
in America, and a very poor one in India or

122 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

China; might have a keen eye for the probable
or improbable in a New England village, and none
at all in a Prussian barrack.

A familiar illustration of the restrictions on his
experience of it is to be found in the rule which
compels the calling of " experts " when there is a
question as to any point of science or art. "The
words science or art," says Mr. Fitzjames Stephen,
" include all subjects on which a course of special
study or experience is necessary to the formation of
an opinion" and the opinion of such an expert is a
"relevant fact." So that Dr. Taylor's "distin-
guished legal friend," if a good lawyer, would not,
in spite of his proficiency in circumstantial evi-
dence, undertake to dispute with Professor Huxley
about the relation of the anchitherium, hipparion,
and horse ; and if Dr. Taylor offered himself for
examination on such a point he would be laughed
out of court. In none of our courts is the pres-
entation allowed of all the circumstances which
strengthen or weaken a probability.

A lawyer, therefore, though he might not be as
ill fitted for a scientific discussion as a minister,
is, as sucJi, hardly more of an authority on the
force and limits of that portion of scientific proof
which is drawn from simple observation. Dr.
Taylor's consulting one as a final authority as to
the very nature of the argument on which he was

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 123

himself about to sit in judgment is at the outset
a suspicious incident. The definition of circum-
stantial evidence which he got from his legal
friend was this :

" The process of proof by circumstantial evidence consists
in reasoning from such facts as are known or proved, and
thence establishing such as are conjectured to exist. The
process is fatally vicious, first, if any material circumstance
from which we seek to deduce the conclusion depends itself
on conjecture ; and, second, if the known facts are not such
as to exclude to a reasonable degree of certainty every other
hypothesis."

" Now, tried by these two tests," says Dr. Tay-
lor, "the professor's argument was a failure."
Taking this definition as it stands, however, we
think it will not be difficult to show that Dr.
Taylor is not competent to apply the tests, or to
say whether the professor's argument is a failure
or not.

It is hardly necessary to say that all the evi-
dence in our possession or attainable, with regard
to the history of the earth and of animal and veg-
etable life on its surface, is circumstantial evi-
dence. The sciences of geology, palaeontology,
and, to a certain extent, biology are sciences of
observation, and but few of their conclusions can
be reached or tested by experimentation. They
are the result of a collection of facts, observed in

124 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

various places, at various times, and by various
persons, and variously related to other facts ; and
the collection of these facts, and the arrangement
of them, and the formation of a judgment as to
their value both positive and relative, form the
greater portion of the work of a scientific man in
these fields. Professor Huxley's argument, which
Dr. Taylor disposes of so summarily, consists of a
series of inferences from facts so collected and ar-
ranged. They are the things " known or proved,"
on which, as his legal friend truly says, the reason-
ing in the process of proof by circumstantial evi-
dence must rest.

Now, Dr. Taylor, by his own confession, is no
authority in either geology, biology, or palaeontol-
ogy. He has neither collected, observed, nor ex-
perimented in these fields. He does not know
how many facts have been discovered in them,
or what bearing they have on other facts in other
fields. Therefore, he is entirely unable to say
whether Huxley is arguing from things "known
or proved" or not. Moreover, he does not, for
similar reasons, know whether Huxley's process
has been " fatally vitiated " by the dependence of
any " material circumstance " on conjecture, or by
the insufficiency of the " known facts " to exclude
every other hypothesis; for, first, he does not
know what is in geological, biological, or palaeon-

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 125

tological induction a " material circumstance" —
nor does any man know except by prolonged study
and observation — and, second, he does not know
whether "the known or proved facts" are suf-
ficient to exclude every other hypothesis, because
he neither knows what facts are known nor what
is the probative force of such as are known. We
can, however, make Dr. Taylor's position still
clearer by a homely illustration. A wild Indian
will, owing to prolonged observation and great
acuteness of the senses, tell by a simple inspec-
tion of grass or leaf-covered ground, on which a
scholar will perceive nothing unusual whatever,
that a man has recently passed over it. He will
tell whether he was walking or running, whether
he carried a burden, whether he was young or
old, and how long ago and what hour of the day
he went by. He reaches all his conclusions by
circumstantial evidence of precisely the same char-
acter as that used by the geologist, though he
knows nothing about the formal logic or the proc-
ess of induction. Now, what Dr. Taylor would
have us believe is that he can come out of his
study and pass judgment on the Indian's reason-
ing without being able to see one of the " known
facts " on which the reasoning rests, or appreciate
in any degree which of them is material to the
conclusion and which is not, or even to conjecture

136 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

whether, taken together, they exclude the hypoth-
esis that it was not a man but a cow or a dog
which passed over the ground, and not to-day but
yesterday that the marks were made.

Dr. Taylor further on makes a display of this in-
ability to appreciate the logical value of scientific
facts by asking: "Where is the evidence, scien-
tific or other, that there was evolution ? We see
these fossils (those of the horse). Huxley says
they are as they are because the higher evolved
itself out of the lower; we say they are as they
are because God created them in series." To re-
cur to the former illustration, it is as if the Indian
should show Dr. Taylor the marks on which he
relied in his induction, and the doctor should
calmly reply : "I see the marks ; you say they
were made by a man's foot in walking; I, who
have never given any attention to the subject, and
have never been in the woods before, say they
were made by the rain." The fact is that if there
were any weight whatever in this kind of talk — if
no equality of knowledge were necessary between
two disputants — it would enable an ignorant field-
hand to sweep away in one sentence the whole
science of geology and palaeontology, and even
astronomy, and to dispose of every conclusion on
any subject drawn from a skilled and experienced
balancing of probabilities, or nice mathematical

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 127

calculation, by simply saying that he was not sat-
isfied with the proofs.

Dr. Taylor's reasons for believing that the ap-
pearance of fossil horses with a diminishing num-
ber of toes is caused by the creation at separate
periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed
horse are, he says, " personal, philosophical, his-
torical," and he opposes them with the utmost ap-
parent sincerity to Huxley's assertion that " there
can be no scientific evidence" of such creation.
The " personal reason " for believing in successive
creations of sets of horses with a varying number
of toes can, of course, only be the reason so often
urged in ball-room disputation — that "I feel it
must be so ; " the " philosophic reason " can only
be the one with which those who have frequented
the society of metaphysicians are very familiar,
namely, a deduction from some eminent specula-
tor's opinion about the nature of the Supreme
Being, the conclusion being apparently that if the
Creator wished to diminish the number of a
horse's toes, it would not do for him to let one
drop into disuse and so gradually disappear, but
he would have to make a new horse, on a new
design. What Dr. Taylor means by the " histor-
ical reason " we can only conjecture from his say-
ing that it is of the same order as his historical
reason for believing " that the Bible is the "Word

128 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

of God." The historical reason for this, we pre-
sume, is that there are various literary and tra-
ditional proofs that the Old Testament was held
to be the Word of God by the Jewish nation at a
very early period, and was by them transmitted
as such to the modern Christian world, and that
many of the prophecies contained in it have re-
ceived partial or a complete fulfilment. But how
by a process of this kind, partly literary and
partly conjectural, and attended by great difficul-
ties at every step, he would reach a fact of pre-
historic times of so much gravity as creation in
series, we think it would puzzle Dr. Taylor to ex-
plain. Indeed, the mere production in a contro-
versy of this nature of these vague fancies, half
pious, half poetical, conjured up in most cases as
a help to mental peace, by a leading minister in
the character of a logician, is a very remarkable
proof of the extent of those defects in clerical edu-
cation to which we recently called attention.

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS

THE recent address delivered by Professor Tyn-
dall before the British Association at Belfast, in
which he "confessed" that he "prolonged the
vision backward across the boundary of experi-
mental evidence, and discerned in matter the
promise and potency of every quality and form of
life," produced one by no means very surprising
result. Dr. Watts, a professor of theology in the
Presbyterian College in that city, was led by it to
offer to read before the Biological Section of the
Association a paper containing a plan of his own
for the establishment of " peace and co-operation
between science and religion." The paper was,
as might have been expected, declined. The
author then read it before a large body of relig-
ious people, who apparently liked it, and they
passed him a vote of thanks. The whole religious
world, indeed, is greatly excited against both Tyn-
dall and Huxley for their performances on this
occasion, and papers by no means in sympathy
with the religious world — the Pall Mall Gazette, for

130 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

instance — are very severe on them for having " re-
course to a style of oratory and disquisition more
appropriate to the chapel than the lecture-room,"
or, in other words, for using the meetings of the
Association for a sort of propagandism not much
superior in method to that of theological mission-,
aries, and thus challenging the theologians to a
conflict which may make it necessary, in the in-
terest of fair play, to add a theological section to
the Association. Of course, when Professor Tyn-
dall passed " beyond the boundary of experimental
evidence," and began to see with -his "mind's eye"
instead of with the miscroscope and telescope, he
got into a region in which the theologian is not
only more at home than he, but which theology
claims as its exclusive domain, and in which min-
isters look on physicists as intruders.

But then, Dr. Watts 's " plea for peace and co-
operation between science and religion " is one of
many signs that theologians are, in spite of all
that has as yet been said, hardly alive to the exact
nature of the attitude they occupy toward science.
They evidently look upon scientifie men as they
look on a hostile school of theologians — as the
Princeton men look on the Yale men, for instance,
or the New looked on the Old School Presbyteri-
ans, or the Calvinists on the Arminians — that is, as
persons having a common standard of orthodoxy,

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS 131

but differing somewhat in their method of apply-
ing it, and who may, therefore, be induced from
considerations of expediency to suppress all out-
ward marks of divergence and work together har-
moniously for the common end. All schools of
theology seek the glory of God and salvation of
souls, and, this being the case, differences on
points of doctrine do seem trifling and capable of
being put aside.

It is this way of regarding the matter which has
led Dr. Watts to propose an alliance between re-
ligion and science, and which produces the argu-
ments one sometimes sees in defence of Christian-
ity against Positivism, drawn from a consideration
of the services which Christianity has rendered to
the race, and of the gloomy and desolate condition
in which its disappearance would leave the world.
Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the
position of religious prophets or fathers. They
preside over no church or other organization.
They have no power or authority to draft any
creed or articles which will bind anybody else,
or which would have any claims on anybody's
reverence or adhesion. No person, in short, is
authorized to bring science into an alliance with
religion or with anything else. Such " peace and
co-operation" as Dr. Watts proposed would be
peace and co-operation between him and Professor

133 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

Tyndall, or between the theologians and the Brit-
ish Association, but " peace and co-operation be-
tween science and religion " is a term which car-
ries absurdity on its face. Science is simply a
body of facts which lead people familiar with
them to infer the existence of certain laws. How
can it, therefore, be either at peace or war with
anybody, or co-operate with anybody? What
Professor Tyndall might promise would be either
not to discover any more facts, or to discover only
certain classes of facts, or to draw no inferences
from facts which would be unfavorable to Dr.
Watts's theory of the universe ; but the only result
of this would be that Tyndall would lose his place
as a scientific man, and others would go on discov-
ering the facts and drawing the inferences.

In like manner, the supposition that Christianity
can be defended against Positivism on grounds of
expediency implies a singular conception of the
mental operations of those persons who are affected
by Positivist theories, and indeed, we might add,
of the thinking world generally. No man believes
in a religion simply because he thinks it useful,
and therefore no man's real adhesion to the Chris-
tian creed can be secured by showing him how
human happiness would suffer by its extinction.
This argument, if it had any weight at all, would
only induce persons either to pretend to be Chris-

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS 133

tians when they were not, or to refrain from assail-
ing Christianity, or to avoid all inquiries which
might possibly lead to sceptical conclusions. It is
therefore, perhaps, a good argument to address to
believers, because it may induce them to suppress
doubts and avoid lines of thought or social rela-
tions likely to beget doubt ; but it is an utterly fu-
tile argument to address to those who have already
lost their faith. Men believe because they are
convinced ; it is not in their power to believe from
motives of prudence or from public spirit.

However, the complaints of the theologians ex-
cited by |Professor Tyndall's last utterances are
not wholly unreasonable. Science has done noth-
ing hitherto to give it any authority in the region
of the unseen. " Beyond the boundary of experi-
mental evidence " one man's vision is about as
good as another's. It is interesting to know that
Professor Tyndall there " discerns in matter tfce
potency and promise of every quality and form of
life," but only because he is a distinguished man,
who gives much thought to this class of subjects
and occupies a very prominent place in the public
eye. As a basis for belief of any kind, his vision
is of no more value than that of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, who would probably in that region
discern the promise and potency of every form of
life in a supreme and creative intelligence. Scien-

134 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

tific men are continually pushing back the limits
of our knowledge of the material universe. They
have during the last eighty years made an enor-
mous addition to the sum of that knowledge, but
they have not, since Democritus, taken away one
hair's-breadth from the Mystery which lies behind.
In fact, their labors have in many ways deepened
this Mystery. We can appeal confidently to any
candid man to say, for instance, whether Darwin's
theory of the origin of life and the evolution of
species does not make this globe and its inhabi-
tants a problem vastly darker and more inscrutable
than the Mosaic account of the creation. Take,
again, the light thrown on the constitution of the
sun by the spectroscope ; it is a marvellous addition
to our knowledge of our environment, but then,
does it not make our ignorance as to the origin of
the sun seem deeper ? No scientific man pretends
that any success in discovery will ever lead the
human mind beyond the resolution of the number
of laws which now seem to govern phenomena
into a smaller number; but if we reached the
limit of the possible in that direction to-morrow,
we should be as far from the secret of the universe
as ever. When we have all got to the blank wall
which everybody admits lies at the boundary of
experimental evidence, the philosopher will know
no more about what lies beyond than the peasant,

TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS 135

though the peasant will probably do then what he
does now — people it with the creatures of his
imagination. If a philosopher in our day likes to
anticipate that period, and hazards the conjecture
that matter lies beyond, he is welcome to his
guess, but it ought to be understood that it is only
a guess.

The danger to society from the men of science
does not, we imagine, lie in the direction in which
the theologians look for it. We do not think they
need feel particularly troubled by Professor Tyn-
dall's speculations as to the origin of things, for
these speculations are very old, and have, after all,
only a remote connection with human affairs. But
there are signs both in his and Professor Huxley's
methods of popularizing science, and in those of a
good many of their followers, that we may fear the
growth of something in the nature of a scientific
priesthood, who, tempted by the great facilities for
addressing the public which our age affords, and
to which nearly every other profession has fallen
a victim, will no longer confine themselves to their
laboratories and museums and scientific journals,
but serve as " ministers of nature " before great
crowds of persons, for the most part of small
knowledge and limited capacity, on whom their
hints, suggestions, and denunciations will have a
dangerously stimulating effect, particularly as the

136 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

contempt of scientific men for what is called
" literature " — that is, the recorded experience of
the human race and the recorded expression of
human feelings — grows every year stronger, and
exerts more a*nd more influence on the masses.
The number of dabblers in science — of persons
with a slight smattering of chemistry, geology, bot-
any, and so on — too, promises to be largely in-
creased for some time to come by the arrangements
of one sort or another made by colleges and
schools for scientific education ; and though there
is reason to expect from this education a consider-
able improvement in knowledge of the art of rea-
soning, there is also reason to fear a considerable
increase of dogmatic temper, of eagerness for ex-
perimentation in all fields, and of scorn for the
experience of persons who have never worked in
the laboratory or done any deep-sea dredging.
Now, whatever views we may hold as to the value
of science in general and in the long run to the
human race, and in particular its value for pur-
poses of legislation and social economy, which we
are far from denying, there is some risk that lect-
ures like Professor Huxley's at Belfast, dressed
up for promiscuous crowds, and produced with
the polite scorn of infallibility, in which the de-
struction of moral responsibility is broadly hinted
at as one of the probable results of researches in

TTNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS 137

biology, will do great mischief. For what does it
matter, or rather ought it to matter, for social
purposes, in what part of a man's system his con-
science lies, or whether pressure on a particular
portion of the brain may convert him into a thief,
when we know, as of experience, that the establish-
ment of good courts and police turns a robbers'
den into a hive of peaceful industry, and when we
see the wonders which discipline works in an ig-
norant crowd?

THE CHUKCH AND SCIENCE

A CONSIDERABLE body of the graduates of the
Irish Catholic University, including members of
the legal and medical professions, presented a long
and solemn memorial to Cardinal Cullen and the
other Catholic bishops at the late commencement
of that institution, which throws a good deal of
light not only on the vexed question of Catholic
education in Ireland, but on the relations of the
Catholic Church to education everywhere. The
memorial examined in detail the management of
the university, which it pronounces so bad as to
endanger the existence of the college. But what
it most complains of is the all but total absence of
instruction in science. The memorialists say that
the neglect of science by the university has af-
forded a very plausible argument to the enemies of
the university, who never tire of repeating that the
Catholic Church is the enemy of science, and that
she will carry out her usual policy in Ireland with
respect to it ; that " no one can deny that the Irish
Catholics are miserably deficient in scientific edu-

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 139

cation, and that this deficiency is extremely galling
to them ; and, in a commercial sense, involves a
loss to them, while, in an intellectual sense, it in-
volves a positive degradation." They speak re-
gretfully of the secession of Professor Sullivan, to
take the presidency of the Queen's College, Cork,
and declare that " no Irish-Catholic man of science
can be found to take his place." They then go on
to make several astounding charges. The lecture-
list of the university does not include for the fac-
ulty of arts a single professor of the physical or
natural sciences, or the name of a solitary teach-
er in descriptive geometry, geology, zoology, com-
parative anatomy, mineralogy, mining, astronomy,
philology, ethnology, mechanics, electricity, or op-
tics. Of the prizes and exhibitions, the number
offered in classics equals that of those offered in
all other studies put together, while in other uni-
versities the classical prizes do not exceed one-
fourth of the whole. They wind up their melan-
choly recital by declaring that they are determined
that the scientific inferiority of Irish Catholics
shall not last any longer ; and that if they cannot
obtain a scientific education in their own universi-
ties, they will seek it at Trinity or the Queen's
Colleges, or study it for themselves in the works
of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell.
They make one other singular complaint, viz., that

140 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

no provision is made for supplying the lay students
with instruction in theology.

It ought to be said in defence of the cardinal
and the bishops, though the memorialists probably
could not venture to say it, that the church hardly
pretends that the university is an efficient or
complete instrument of education. It has been in
existence, it is true, twenty years, but the main
object of its promoters during this period has
apparently been to harass or frighten the govern-
ment by means of it into granting them an endow-
ment, or giving them control of the Queen's Col-
leges. Had they succeeded in this, they would
doubtless before now have made a show of readi-
ness to afford something in the nature of scientific
instruction, because, as the memorialists remark,
there is no denying " that the physical and nat-
ural sciences have become the chief studies of the
age." But the memorialists must be either very
simple-minded or very ignorant Catholics, if they
suppose that any endowment or any pressure from
public opinion would ever induce the Catholic
hierarchy to undertake to turn out students who
would make a respectable figure among the scien-
tific graduates of other universities, or even hold
their own among the common run of amateur
readers of Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall.
There is no excuse for any misunderstanding as

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 141

regards the policy of the church on this point.
She has never given the slightest encouragement
or sanction to the idea which so many Protestant
divines have of late years embraced, that theology
is a progressive science, capable of continued de-
velopment in the light of newly discovered facts,
and of gradual adaptation to the changing phases
of our knowledge of the physical universe. She
has hundreds of times given out as absolute truth
a certain theory of the origin of man and of the
globe he lives on, and she cannot either abandon
it or encourage any study or habit of mind which
would naturally or probably lead to doubt of the
correctness of this theory, or of the church's au-
thority in enunciating it. In fact, the Pope, who
is now an infallible judge in all matters of faith
and discipline, has, within the last five years, in the
famous " Syllabus " of modern follies, pronounced
damnable and erroneous nearly all the methods
and opinions by which Irish or any other Cath-
olics could escape the deficiency in scientific
knowledge which they say they find so injurious
and so degrading. It is safe to say, therefore,
that a Catholic cannot receive an education which
would fit him to acquire distinction among scien-
tific men in our day, without either incurring ever-
lasting damnation or running the risk of it. Be-
side a danger of this kind, of course, as any priest

142 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

will tell him, commercial loss and social inferior-
ity are small matters.

Of course, if we take the facts of a great many
branches of physical science by themselves, it
would be easy enough to show that a good Catho-
lic might safely accept them. But no man can
reach these facts by investigations of his own, or
hold to them intelligently and fruitfully, without
acquiring intellectual habits and making use of
tests which the church considers signs of a re-
bellious and therefore sinful temper. Moreover,
nobody who has attained the limits of our pres-
ent knowledge in chemistry, geology, comparative
anatomy, ethnography, philology, and mythology
can stand there with closed eyes. He must in-
evitably peer into the void beyond, and would be
more than human if he did not indulge in specu-
lations as to the history of the universe and its
destiny which the church must treat as endanger-
ing his salvation. This ip so well known that one
reads the lamentations of these Catholic laymen
with considerable surprise. They may be fairly
supposed to know something of church history,
and, even if they do not, they must profess some
knowledge of the teaching given by the church in
those universities of other countries which she
controls. She does not encourage the study of
natural science anywhere. Mathematics and as-

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 143

tronomy she looks on with some favor, though we
do not know how the spectroscope may have af-
fected her toward the latter ; and we venture to
assert that these are the only fields of science in
which any Catholic layman attains distinction
without forfeiting his standing in the eyes of the
clergy. We do not now speak of the French, Ital-
ian, and German Catholic laymen who go on with
their investigations without caring whether the
clergy like them or not, and without taking the
trouble to make any formal repudiation of the
church's authority over their intellects. We sim-
ply say there are no pious Catholic scientific men
of any note, and never will be if the Catholic
clergy can help it, and the lamentations of Cath-
olics over the fact are logically absurd.

The legislation which Prussia is now putting
into force on the subject of clerical education is
founded on a candid recognition of the church's
position on this matter. Prince Bismarck is well
aware that in no seminary or college controlled by
priests is there any chance that a young man will
receive the best instruction of the day on the sub-
jects in which the modern world is most interested,
and by which the affairs of the State are most in-
fluenced. He has, therefore, wisely decided that
it is the duty of the State to see that men who still
exert as much power over popular thought as

144 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

priests do, and are to receive State pay as popular
instructors, shall also receive the best obtainable
secular education before being subjected to purely
professional training in the theological seminaries.
The desperation of the fight made against him by
the clergy is due to their well-grounded belief that
in order to get a young man in our time to swal-
low a fair amount of Catholic theology, he must
be caught early and kept close. The warfare
which is raging in Prussia is one which has broken
out in every country in which the government has
formal relations with the church.

The appearance of a mutinous spirit among the
Irish laity, and this not on political but scientific
subjects, shows that the poison has sunk very deep
and is very virulent ; for the Irish laity have been
until now the foremost Catholics in the world in
silence and submissiveness, and there is nothing in
ecclesiastical history which can equal in absurdity
a request, addressed to Cardinal Cullen, that he
would supply them with the kind of teaching
which other men get from Tyndall and Huxley.
With ecclesiastical insubordination arising out of
differences on matters of doctrine or discipline,
such as that manifested by the Old Catholics, it is
comparatively easy to deal. Schismatics can be
excommunicated by an authority which they have
themselves venerated, and from an organization in

THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 145

which they loved to live and would fain have died.
But over wanderers into the fields of science the
church loses all hold. Her weapons are the jest
of the museum and the laboratory, and her lore
the babbling of the ignorant or blind.
10

THE CHUKCH AND GOOD CONDUCT

THE Episcopal Church, at the late Triennial
Convention, took up and determined to make a
more vigorous effort to deal with the problem pre-
sented by the irreligion of the poor and the dis-
honesty of church-members. It is an unfortunate
and, at first sight, somewhat puzzling circumstance,
that so many of the culprits in the late cases of
fraud and defalcation should have been professing
Christians, and in some cases persons of unusual
ecclesiastical activity, and that this activity should
apparently have furnished no check whatever to
the moral descent. It is proposed to meet the
difficulty by more preaching, more prayer, and
greater use of lay assistance in church - work.
There is nothing very new, however, about the
difficulty. There is hardly a year in which it is
not deplored at meetings of church organizations,
and in which solemn promises are not made to de-
vise some mode of keeping church-members up to
their professions, and gathering more of the church-
less working-classes into the fold ; but somehow

THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT 147

there is not much visible progress to be recorded.
The church scandals multiply in spite of pastors
and people, and the workingmen decline to show
themselves at places of worship, although the num-
ber of places of worship and of church-members
steadily increases.

We are sorry not to notice in any of the discus-
sions on the subject a more frank and searching
examination of the reason why religion does not
act more powerfully as a rule of conduct. Until
such an examination is made, and its certain re-
sults boldly faced by church reformers, the church
cannot become any more of a help to right living
than it is now, be this little or much. The first
thing which such an examination would reveal is a
thing which is in everybody's mind and on every-
body's tongue in private, but which is apt to be
evaded or only slightly alluded to at ecclesiasti-
cal synods and conventions — we mean the loss of
faith in the dogmatic part of Christianity. People
do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the
resurrection, and a future state of reward and
punishment at all, or do not believe in them
with the certainty and vividness which are
needed to make faith a constant influence on
man's daily life. They do not believe they will be
damned for sin with the assurance they once did,
and they are consequently indifferent to most of

148 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

what is said to them of the need of repentance.
They do not believe the story of Christ's life and
the theory of his character and attributes given in
the New Testament, or they regard them as merely
a picturesque background to his moral teachings,
about which a Christian may avoid coming to any
positive conclusion.

No man who keeps himself familiar with the
intellectual and scientific movements of the day,
however devout a Christian he may be, likes to
question himself as to his beliefs about these mat-
ters, or would like to have to define accurately
where his faith ended and his doubts began. If
he is assailed in discussion by a sceptic and his
combativeness roused, he will probably proclaim
himself an implicit and literal acceptor of the
gospel narratives; but he will not be able to
maintain this mental attitude alone in his own
room. The effort that has been made by Unitari-
ans and others to meet this difficulty by making
Christ's influence and authority rest on his moral
teachings and example, without the support of a
divine nature or mission or sacrifice, has failed.
The Christian Church cannot be held together as a
great social force by his teaching or example as a
moral philosopher. A church organized on this
theory speedily becomes a lecture association or a
philanthropic club, of about as much aid to con-

THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT 149

duct as Freemasonry. Christ's sermons need the
touch of supernatural authority to make them im-
pressive enough for the work of social regeneration,
and his life was too uneventful and the society in
which he lived too simple, to give his example real
power over the imagination of a modern man who
regards him simply as a social reformer.

This decline of faith in Christian dogma and
history has not, however, produced by any means
a decline in religious sentiment, but it has de-
prived religion of a good deal of its power as a
means of moral discipline. Moral discipline is
acquired mainly by the practice of doing what one
does not like to do, under the influence of mastering
fear or hope. The conquest of one's self, of which
Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the
acquisition of the power of doing easily things to
which one's natural inclinations are opposed ; and
in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully
aided — indeed, we may say, have to be aided — by
tl?3 prospect of reward or punishment. The won-
derful results which are achieved in the army, by
military authority, in inspiring coarse and com-
mon natures with a spirit of the loftiest devotion,
are simply due to the steady application by day
and by night of a punishing and rewarding au-
thority. The loss of this, or its great enfeeble-
ment, undoubtedly has deprived the church of a

150 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

large portion of its means of discipline, and re-
duced it more nearly to the role of a stimulater
and gratifier of certain tender emotions. It con-
tains a large body of persons whose religious life
consists simply of a succession of sensations not
far removed from one's enjoyment of music and
poetry ; and another large body, to whom it fur-
nishes refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-
defined sort in times of sorrow and disappoint-
ment. To these persons the church prayers and
hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field,
but soothing melodies, which give additional zest
to home comforts and luxuries, and make the
sharper demands of a life of the highest integrity
less unbearable. Nay, the case is rather worse
than this. We have little doubt that this senti-
mental religion, as we may call it, in many cases
deceives a man as to his own moral condition, and
hides from him the true character and direction of
the road he is travelling, and furnishes his con-
science with a false bottom. The revelations of
the last few years as to its value as a guide in the
conduct of life have certainly been plain and de-
plorable.

The evil in some degree suggests the remedy,
though we do not mean to say that we know of
any complete remedy. Church-membership ought
to involve discipline of some kind in order to fur-

THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT 151

nish moral aid. It ought, that is to say, to impose
some restraint on people's inclinations, the opera-
tion of which will be visible, and enforced by some
external sanction. If, in short, Christians are to
be regarded as more trustworthy and as living on
a higher moral plane than the rest of the world,
they must furnish stronger evidence of their sin-
cerity than is now exacted from them, in the shape
of plain and open self-denial. The church, in
short, must be an organization held together by
some stronger ties than enjoyment of weekly music
and oratory in a pretty building, and alms-giving
which entails no sacrifice and is often only a
tickler of social vanity. There is in monasticism
a suggestion of the way in which it must retain its
power over men's lives, and be enabled to furnish
them with a certificate of character. Its members
will have to have a good deal of the ascetic about
them, but without any withdrawal from the world.
How to attain this without sacrificing the claims
of art, and denying the legitimacy of honestly ac-
quired material power, and, in fact, restricting in-
dividual freedom to a degree which the habits and
social theories of the day would make very odious,
is the problem to be solved, and, it is, no doubt,
a very tough one. General inculcation of "plain
living" will not solve it, as long as "plain living"
is not defined and the " self-made man " who has

152 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

made a great fortune and spends it lavishly is
held up to the admiration of every school-boy.
The church has been making of late years a gal-
lant effort to provide accommodation for the suc-
cessful, and enable them to be good Christians
without sacrificing any of the good things of this
life, and, in fact, without surrendering anything
they enjoy, or favoring the outside public with
any recognizable proof of their sincerity. We do
not say that this is reprehensible, but it is easy to
see that it has the seeds of a great crop of scandals
in it. Donations in an age of great munificence,
and horror of far-off or unattractive sins, like the
slaveholding of Southerners and the intemperance
of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to
be, accepted as signs of inward and spiritual
grace, and of readiness to scale "the toppling
crags of duty."

The conversion of the working-classes, too, it is
safe to say, will never be accomplished by any
ecclesiastical organization which sells cushioned
pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and
builds million-dollar churches for the accommoda-
tion of one thousand worshippers. The passion
for equality has taken too strong hold of the work-
ingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap
chapels and assistant pastors. He will not seek
salvation in forma pauperis, and thinks the best

THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT 153

talent in the ministerial market not a whit too
good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sin-
cerity of Christians who are not willing to kneel
beside badly dressed persons in prayer on the one
day of the week when prayer is public. In fact, to
fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay
hold of the laboring population a great process of
reconstruction would be necessary. The congrega-
tional system would have to be abandoned or
greatly modified, the common fund made larger
and administered in a different way. There would
have, in short, to be a close approach to the
Roman Catholic organization, and the churches
would have to lose the character of social clubs,
which now makes them so comfortable and attrac-
tive. "Well-to-do Christians would have to sacri-
fice their tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the
expectation of aesthetic pleasure in public worship.
There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral for the
multitude in every city. The practice of the
church would have to be forced up to its own
theory of its character and mission, which would
involve serious collision with some of the most
deeply rooted habits and ideas of modern social
and political life. That there is any immediate
probability of this we do not believe. Until it is
brought about, its members must make up their
minds to have religious professions treated by

154 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

some as but slight guarantees of character, and by
others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this
may be for that large majority to whom they are
an honest expression of sure hopes and noble
aims.

K6LE OF THE UNIVEESITIES IN POL-
ITICS

MB. GALTON, in his work on "Hereditary Gen-
ius," has drawn attention in a striking chapter to
the effect which the systematic destruction and ex-
patriation, by the Inquisition or the religious in-
tolerance of the government, of the leading men of
the nation — its boldest thinkers, most ardent in-
vestigators, most prudent and careful and ingenious
workers, in generation after generation — had in
bringing about the moral and political decline of
the three great Latin countries, France, Spain, and
Italy — a decline of which, in the case of the two
former at least, we have probably not seen the end.
The persons killed or banished amounted only to
a few thousands every year, but they were — no
matter from what rank they came — the flower of
the population : the men whose labor and whose
influence enabled the State to keep its place in the
march of civilization. The picture is very valua-
ble (particularly just now, when there is so great a
disposition to revel in the consciousness of vast

156 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

numbers), as calling attention to the smallness of
the area within which, after all, the sources of na-
tional greatness and progress are to be sought.
The mind which keeps the mass in motion, which
saves and glorifies it, would most probably- if we
could lay bare the secret of national life, be found
in the possession of a very small proportion of the
people, though not in any class in particular —
neither among the rich nor the poor, the learned
nor simple, capitalists nor laborers ; but the ab-
straction of these few from the sum of national
existence, though it would hardly be noticed in the
census, would produce a fatal languor, were the
nation not constantly receiving fresh blood from
other countries.

This element was singled out with considerable
accuracy in France and Spain by religious perse-
cution. It would happily be impossible to devise
any process of selection one-quarter as efficient in
our age or in this country. The one we have been
using for the last twenty years, and on which a
good deal of popular reliance has been placed, is
the accumulation of wealth ; and under this " the
self-made man" — that is, the man who, starting
in life ignorant and poor, has made a large fort-
une, and got control of a great many railroads
and mines and factories — has risen into the front
rank of eminence. The events of the last five

R OLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS 157

years, however, have had a damaging effect on
his reputation, and he now stands as low as his
worst enemies could desire. As he declines, the
man of some kind of training naturally rises ; and
it would be running no great risk to affirm ihat
the popular mind inclines more than it has usually
done to the belief that trained men — that is, men
who have been prepared for their work by teach-
ing on approved methods — are after ^\. the most
valuable possession a country can have, and that
a country is well or ill off in proportion as they
are numerous or the reverse. One does not need
to travel very far from this position to reach the
conclusion that there is probably no way in which
we could strike so deadly a blow at the happiness
and progress of the United States as by sweeping
away, by some process of proscription kept up dur-
ing a few generations, the graduates of the prin-
cipal colleges. In no other way could we make so
great a drain on the reserved force of character,
ambition, and mental culture which constitutes so
large a portion of the national vitality. They
would not be missed at the polls, it is true, and
if they were to run a candidate for the Presidency
to-morrow their vote would excite great merriment
among the politicians ; but if they were got rid of
regularly for forty or fifty years in the manner we
have suggested, and nothing came in from the out-

158 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

side to supply their places, the politicians would
somehow find that they themselves had less public
money to vote or steal, less national aspiration to
trade upon, less national force to direct, less na-
tional dignity to maintain or lose, and that, in fact,
by some mysterious process, they were getting to
be of no more account in the world than their
fellows in Guatemala or Costa Rica.

There will come to the colleges of the United
States during the next fifty years a larger and
larger number of men who either strongly desire
training for themselves or are the sons of men
who are deeply sensible of its advantages, and
therefore are at the head of families which possess
and appreciate the traditions of high civilization,
and would like to live in them and contribute
their share to perpetuating them — and they will
not come from any one portion of the country.
There are, unhappily, " universities " in all parts of
the Union, but there is hardly a doubt that as the
means of communication are improved and cheap-
ened, and as the real nature and value of the uni-
versity education become better understood, the
tendency to use the small local institutions pass-
ing by this name as, what they really are, high
schools, and resort to the half-dozen colleges
which can honestly call themselves universities,
will increase. The demands which modern cult-

ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS 159

lire, owing to the advance of science and research
in every field, now makes on a university, in the
shape of professors, books, apparatus, are so great
that only the largest and wealthiest institutions
can pretend to meet them, and in fact there is
something very like false pretence in the promise
to do so held out to poor students by many of the
smaller colleges. These colleges doubtless do a
certain amount of work very creditably ; but they
are uncandid in saying that they give a university
education, and in issuing diplomas purporting to
be certificates that any such education has either
been sought or received. The idea of maintaining
a university for the sake of the local glory of it is
a form of folly which ought not to be associated
with education in any stage. These considerations
are now felt to be so powerful in other countries
that they threaten the destruction of a whole batch
of universities in Italy which have come down
famous and honored from the Middle Ages and
have sent out twenty generations of students, and
they are causing even the very best of the smaller
universities in Germany, great and efficient as
many of them are, to tremble for their existence.

There is no interest of learning, therefore, which
would not be served by the greater concentration
of the resources of the country as regards univer-
sity education, still less is there any interest of

160 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

society or politics. It is of the last importance
that the class of men from all parts of the country
whom the universities send out into the world
should as far as possible be educated together,
and start on their careers with a common stock of
traditions, tastes, and associations. Much as steam
and the telegraph have done, and will do, to dimin-
ish for administrative purposes the size of the Re-
public, and to simplify the work of government,
they cannot prevent the creation of a certain di-
versity of interests, and even of temperament and
manners, through differences of climate and soil
and productions. There will never come a time
when we shall not have more or less of such folly
as the notion that the South and West need more
money than the East, because they have less capi-
tal, or the struggle of some parts of the country
for a close market against other parts which seek
an open one. Nothing but a reign of knowledge
and wisdom, such as centuries will not bring, will
prevent States on the Gulf or on the Pacific from
fancying that their interests are not identical with
those of the Northern Atlantic, and nothing but
profound modifications in the human constitution
will ever bring the California wheat -raiser into
complete sympathy with the New England shoe-
maker.

The work of our political system for ages to

ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS 161

come will consist largely in keeping these differ-
ences in check; and in doing it, it will need all
the help it can get from social and educational
influences. It ought to be the aim, therefore, of
the larger institutions of learning to offer every
inducement in their power to students from all
parts of the Union, and more especially from the
South, as the region which is most seriously
threatened by barbarism, and in which the sense
of national unity and the hold of national tradi-
tions on the popular mind are now feeblest. We
at the North owe to the civilized men at the South
who are now, no matter what their past faults or
delusions may have been, struggling to save a
large portion of the Union from descent into
heathen darkness and disorder, the utmost help
and consideration. We owe them above all a free
and generous welcome to a share in whatever
means of culture we have at our disposal, and
ought to offer it, as far as is consistent with our
self-respect, in a shape that will not wound theirs.
The question of the manner of doing this came
up incidentally at Harvard the other day, at the
dedication of the great hall erected in memory of
the graduates of the university who died in the
war. The hall is to be used for general college
purposes, for examinations, and some of the cere-
monial of commencement, as well as for dinner, and
11

162 REFLECTIONS ANT) COMMENTS

a portion of the walls is covered with tablets bear-
ing the names of those to whose memory it is ded-
icated. The question whether the building would
keep alive the remembrance of the civil war in any
way in which it is inexpedient to keep it alive,
or in any way which would tend to keep Southern
students away from the university, has been often
asked, and by some answered in the affirmative.
General Devens, who presided at the alumni din-
ner, gave full and sufficient answer to those who
find fault with the rendering of honor on the
Northern side to those who fell in its cause ; but
General Bartlett — who perhaps more than any
man living is qualified to speak for those who died
in the war — uttered, in a burst of unpremeditated
eloquence, at the close of the proceedings, the real
reason why no Southern man need, and we hope
will never, feel hurt by Northern memorials of the
valor and constancy of Northern soldiers. It is
not altogether the cause which ennobles fighting ;
it is the spirit in which men fight ; and no horror
of the objects of the Southern insurrection need
prevent anybody from admiring or lamenting the
gallant men who honestly, loyally, and from a
sense of duty perished in its service. It is not
given to the wisest and best man to choose the
right side ; but the simplest and humblest knows
whether it is his conscience which bids him lay

HOLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES JY POLITICS 163

down his life. And this test may be applied by
each side to all the victims of the late conflict
without diminishing by one particle its faith in
the justice of its own cause. Moreover, as Gen-
eral Bartlett suggested, the view of the nature of
the struggle which is sure to gain ground all over
the country as the years roll on is that it was a
fierce and passionate but inevitable attempt to
settle at any cost a controversy which could be
settled in no other way ; and that all who shared
in it, victors or vanquished, helped to save the
country and establish its government on sure and
lasting foundations. This feeling cannot grow
without bringing forcibly to mind the fact that the
country was saved through the war that virtue
might increase, that freedom might spread and en-
dure, and that knowledge might rule, and not that
politicians might have a treasury to plunder and
marble halls to exchange their vituperation in;
thus uniting the best elements of Northern and
Southern society by the bonds of honest indigna-
tion as well as of noble hopes.

THE HOPKINS UNIYEKSITY

THE Baltimore American, discussing the plan
of the Hopkins University in that city, says : " The
Nation suggests to the Board of Trustees a univer-
sity that would leave Latin, Greek, mathematics,
and the elements of natural science out of its cur-
riculum." This is so great a mistake that we are
at a loss to understand how it could have been
made. The Nation has never suggested anything
of the kind. The university which the Nation has
expressed the hope the trustees would found is
simply a university with such a high standard for
admission on all subjects that the professors would
be saved the necessity of teaching the rudiments
of either Latin, Greek, mathematics, or natural
science ; or, in other words, that the country
would be saved considerable waste of skilled labor.
The reason why we have ventured to expect this
of the Hopkins trustees is that they enjoy the all
but unprecedented advantage of being left in pos-
session of a very large bequest, with complete lib-
erty, within very wide limits, as to the disposition

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 165

of it. In other words, they are to found a univer-
sity with it, but as to the kind of university they
may exercise their discretion.

That this is a very exceptional position every-
body familiar with the history of American col-
leges knows. All the older colleges are bound to
the state, or to certain religious denominations, by
laws or usages or precedents which impose a cer-
tain tolerably fixed character either on the sub-
jects or on the mode of teaching them, or on both.
They have traditions to uphold, or denominational
interests to care for, or political prejudices to sat-
isfy. The newer ones, on the other hand, are apt
to have incurred a bondage even worse still, in
having to carry out the wishes of a founder who,
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, had only a
faint notion of the nature and needs of a university,
and in endowing one sought rather to erect a mon-
ument to his memory than to found a seat of learn-
ing. In so far as he was interested in the curricu-
lum, he probably desired that it should be such
as would satisfy some want which he himself felt,
or thought he felt, in early life, or should diffuse
some social or religious or political crotchet on
which his fancy had secretly fed during his years
of active exertion, and on the success of which he
came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the
best interests of the community were dependent.

166 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-
informed and somewhat eccentric testators in-
creases every year, as the country grows in wealth
and the habit of giving to public objects gains in
strength.

The consequence is that we are threatened with
the spectacle during the coming century of a great
waste of money by well-meaning persons in the
establishment all over the country of institutions
calling themselves " universities," which are either
so feebly equipped as rather to hinder than help
the cause of education, or so completely committed
by their organization to the propagation of certain
social or religious theories as to deserve the appel-
lation of mission stations rather than of colleges.
Education is now an art of exceeding delicacy and
complexity. To master it, so as to have a trust-
worthy opinion as to the relative value of studies
and as to the best mode of pursuing them, and as
to the organization of institutions devoted to the
work of instruction, a man needs both learning
and experience. The giving him money to em-
ploy in his special work, therefore, without leav-
ing him discretion as to the manner in which he
shall use it, is to prepare almost certainly for its
waste in more than one direction. To make the
most of the resources of the country for educa-
tional purposes, it is necessary above all things

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 167

that they should be placed at the disposal of those
who have made education a special study, and who
are free, as we understand the Hopkins trustees to
be, from any special bias or bond, and are ready
or willing to look at the subject from every side.
Their liberty, of course, brings with it great re-
sponsibility— all the greater for the reasons we
have been enumerating.

Now, as to the use which they should make of
this liberty, the Baltimore American fears that if
they found a university of the class sketched by
us some weeks ago, " the people of Maryland
would be greatly disappointed — there would not
be over fifty students," and "there would be a
great outcry against the investment of three and
a half millions of dollars for the benefit of so small
a number." Whether the people of Maryland will
be disappointed or not, depends on the amount
of consideration they give the matter. If they
are satisfied that the foundation of such a univer-
sity as is now talked of is the best use that can
be made of the money, they will not be disap-
pointed, and there will be no " outcry " at all.
Being an intelligent people, they will on reflec-
tion see that the value of a university by no
means depends solely on the proportion borne by
the number of its students to the amount of its
revenues, because, judged in this way — that is, as

168 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

instruments of direct popular benefit — all the uni-
versities in the country might be pronounced fail-
ures. The bulk of the community derives no
direct benefit from them at all. Harvard, for in-
stance, has an endowment of about five million
dollars, we believe, and the total number of the
students is only 1,200, while the population of the
State of Massachusetts is 1,500,000, so that, even
supposing all the students to come from Massa-
chusetts, which they do not, less than one person
in every thousand profits by the university.

The same story might be told of Yale or any other
college. Considered as what are called popular
institutions — that is, institutions from which every-
body can or does derive some calculable, palpable
benefit — the universities of this and every other
country are useless, and there ought on this theory
to be a prodigious " outcry " against them, and they
ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to
exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condi-
tion that they will give a degree, or at least offer
an education, to every male citizen of sound mind.
But nobody takes this view of them. The poor-
est and most ignorant hod-carrier would not hold,
if asked, that because he cannot go to college
there ought to be no colleges. Sensible people in
every country acknowledge that a high education
can in the nature of things be only obtained by a

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 169

very small proportion of the population ; but that
the few who seek it, and can afford to take it,
should get it, and should get it of the best quality,
they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a
public benefit ? The service that Harvard or Yale
renders to the community certainly does not lie
simply in the fact that it qualifies a thousand
young men every year to earn a livelihood. They
would earn a livelihood whether they went to col-
lege or not. The vast majority of men earn a
livelihood without going to college or thinking of
it. Indeed, it is doubted by many persons, and
with much show of reason, whether a man does
not earn it all the more readily for not going to
college at all ; and as regards the work of the
world of all kinds, the great bulk of it is done,
and well done, by persons who have not received a
university education and do not regret it. So that
the benefits which the country derives from the uni-
versities consists mainly in the refining and elevat-
ing influences which they create, in the taste for
study and research which they diffuse, in the social
and political ideals which they frame and hold up
for admiration, in the confidence in the power of
knowledge which they indirectly spread among
the people, and in the small though steady con-
tributions they make to that reverence for " things
not seen " in which the soul of the state may be

170 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

said to lie, and without which it is nothing better
than a factory or an insurance company.

There is nothing novel about the considerations
we are here urging. The problem over which uni-
versity reformers have been laboring in every
country during the past forty years has been, how
to rid the universities, properly so called, of the
care of the feeble, inefficient, and poorly prepared
students, and reserve their teaching for the better-
fitted, older, and more matured ; or, in other words,
how, in the interest both of economy and culture,
to reserve the highest teaching power of the com-
munity for the most promising material. It is
forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a cele-
brated attack on the English universities, then in
a very low condition, in which he laid it down
broadly that the end above all for which endowed
universities ought to exist was "to keep alive
philosophy," leaving "the education of common
minds for the common business of life" for the
most part to private enterprise. This seemed at
the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems
so still ; but it is nevertheless true that ever since
that period universities of the highest class, both
in Europe and in this country, have been working
in that direction — striving, that is to say, either to
sift the applicants for admission, by imposing in-
creasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 171

professors only pupils of the highest grade to work
upon ; or, at all events, if not repelling the ill-fit-
ted, expending all their strength in furnishing the
highest educational advantages to the well-fitted.
In the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing
just the kind of work that the high schools now
do — that is, taking young lads and teaching them
the elements of literature. At the present day they
are throwing this work as far as possible on the
primary schools, and reserving their professors and
libraries and apparatus, as far as the state of the
country and the conditions of their organization
will permit, for those older and more advanced
students who bring to the work of learning both
real ardor and real preparation. A boy has to
know more to get into either of them to-day than
his grandfather knew when he graduated. Never-
theless, with all the efforts they can make after
this true economy of power and resources, there is
in both of them a large amount of waste of labor.
There are men in both of them, and in various
other colleges, much of whose work is almost as
much a misuse of energy and time as if they were
employed so many hours a day in carrying hods of
mortar, simply because they are doing what the
masters of primary schools ought to do, and what
no man at a university ought to be asked to do.
It is a kind of work, too, which, if it have to be

172 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

done in colleges at all, is already abundantly pro-
vided for by endowment. No Maryland youth
who desires to learn a little mathematics, get a
smattering of classics, and some faint notions of
natural science, or even to support himself by man-
ual labor while doing this, will suffer if the Hop-
kins endowment is used for higher work. The
country swarms already with institutions which
meet his needs, and in which be can graduate with
ease to himself and credit to his State. The
trustees of this one will do him and the State and
the whole country most service, therefore, by pro-
viding a place to which, after he has got hold of
the rudiments at some other college, he can come,
if he has the right stuff in him, and pursue to the
end the studies for which all universities should
really be reserved.

THE SOUTH AFTEB THE WAE

September 8, 1877.

HAVING just returned from a few weeks' stay in
Virginia it has occurred to me as probable that
your readers would be interested in hearing how
such changes in Southern manners and tone of
thought and economical outlook as could be noted
in a brief visit strike one who had travelled in
that region before the war had revolutionized it.
It is now twenty years since I spent a winter
traversing the Cotton States on horseback, sleep-
ing at the house which happened to be near-
est when the night caught me. Buchanan had
just been elected ; the friends of slavery, though
anxious, were exultant and defiant, and the pos-
sibility of a separate political future had begun to
take definite shape in the public mind, at least in
the Gulf States. I am unable to compare the
economical condition of that part of the country
at that time with its condition to-day, because

174 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

both slavery and agriculture in Virginia differed
then in many important respects from slavery and
agriculture farther south. But the habits and
modes of thought and feeling bred by slavery
were essentially the same all over the South ; and
I do not think that I shall go far astray in assum-
ing that the changes in these which I have no-
ticed in Virginia would be found to-day in all the
other States.

The first which struck me, and it was a most
agreeable one, was what I may call the emanci-
pation which conversation and social intercourse
with Northerners had undergone. In 1857 the
tone of nearly everybody with whom I came in
contact, however veiled by politeness, was in
some degree irritable and defiant. My host and
I were never long before the evening fire with-
out my finding that he was impatient to talk
about slavery, that he suspected me of disliking
it, and yet that he wished to have me understand
that he did not care, and that nobody at the South
cared two cents what I thought about it, and that it
was a little impertinent in me, who knew so little of
the negro, to have any opinion about it at all. I
was obliged, too, to confess inwardly that there was
a good deal of justification for his bad temper.
There was I, a curious stranger, roving through
his country and eating at his board, and all the

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 175

while secretly or openly criticising or condemn-
ing his relations with his laborers and servants,
and, in fact, the whole scheme of his domestic
life. I was not a pleasant companion, and noth-
ing could make me one, and no matter on what
themes our talk ran, it was colored by our opin-
ions on the institution. He looked at nearly
everything in politics and society from what
might be called the slaveholder's point of view, and
suspected me, on the other hand, of disguising
reprobation of the South and its institutions in
any praise of the North or of France or England
which I might utter. So that there was a certain
acridity and a sense of strong and deep limitations
and reserves in our discussions, somewhat like
those which are felt in the talk of a pious evangel-
ical Protestant with a pious Catholic.

In Yirginia of to-day I was conscious of a curi-
ous change in the atmosphere, as if the windows
of a close room had been suddenly opened. I
found that I was in a country where all things
were debatable, and where I had not to be on the
lookout for susceptibilities. The negro, too, about
whom I used to have to be so careful, with whom
I used to make it a point of honor not to talk pri-
vately or apart from his master when I was stay-
ing on a plantation, was wandering about loose,
as it were, and nobody seemed to care anything

176 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

about him any more than about any poor man. I
found every Southerner I spoke to as ready to dis-
cuss him as to discuss sheep or oxen, to let you
have your own views about him just as you had
them about sheep or oxen. Moreover, I found in-
stead of the stereotyped orthodox view of his place
and capacity which prevailed in 1857, a great va-
riety of opinions about him, mostly depreciatory,
it is true, but still varying in degree as well as in
kind. It is difficult to give anyone who has
never had any experience of the old slave society
an idea of the difference this makes in a stranger's
position at the South. In short, as one South-
erner expressed it to me on my mentioning the
change, " Yes, sir, we have been brought into in-
tellectual and moral relations with the rest of the
civilized world." All subjects are now open at
the South in conversation.

Is this true ? it will probably be asked, with re-
gard to the late war. Can you talk freely about
that? Not exactly; but then the limitations on
your discourse on this point are not peculiar to
the South ; they are such as would be put upon
the discourse of two parties to a bloody contest
in any civilized country among well-bred men or
women. The events of the war you can discuss
freely, but you are hardly at liberty to denounce
Southern soldiers or officers, or accuse them of

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 177

"rebellion," or to assume that they fought for base
or wicked motives. Moreover, in a certain sense,
all Southerners are still "unrepentant rebels."
Doubtless, in view of the result, they will acknowl-
edge that the war was a gigantic mistake ; but I
found that if I sought for an admission that, if it
was all to do over again, they would not fight, I
was touching on a very tender point, and I was
gently but firmly repelled. The reason is plain
enough. In confessing this, they would, they
think, be confessing that their sons and brothers
and fathers had perished miserably in a causeless
struggle on which they ought never to have en-
tered, and this, of course, would look like a slur on
their memory, and their memory is still, after the
lapse of twelve years, very sacred and very dear.
I doubt if many people at the North have an ade-
quate notion of the intensity of the emotions with
which Southerners look back on the war ; and I
mean tender and not revengeful or malignant emo-
tions. The losses of the battle-field were deeply
felt at the North — in many households down to
the very roots of life ; but on the whole they fell
on a large and prosperous population, on a com-
munity which in the very thick of the fray seemed
to be rolling up wealth, which revelled as it fought,
and came out of the battle triumphant, exultant,

and powerful. At the South they swept through a
12

178 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

scanty population with the most searching de-
structiveness, and when all was over they had to be
wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a
society which was wrecked from top to bottom,
and in which all relatives and friends had sunk
together to common perdition. There has been
no other such cataclysm in history. Great states
have been conquered before now, but conquest did
not mean a sudden and desolating social revolu-
tion ; so that to a Southerner the loss of relatives
on the battle-field or in the hospital is associated
with the loss of everything else. A gentleman
told me of his going, at the close of the war, into
a little church in South Carolina on Sunday,
and finding it filled with women, who were all
in black, and who cried during the singing. It
reminded one of the scene in the cathedral at
Leyden, when the people got together to chant a
Te Deum on hearing that the besieging army
was gone ; but, the music suddenly dying out, the
air was filled with the sounds of sobbing. The
Leydeners, however, were weak and half-starved
people, weeping over a great deliverance; these
South Carolinians were weeping before endless
bereavement and hopeless poverty. I doubt
much if any community in the modern world was
ever so ruthlessly brought face to face with what
is sternest and hardest in human life ; and those

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 179

of them wlio have looked at it without flinching
have something which any. of us may envy them.

But then I think it would be a mistake to sup-
pose that Southerners came out of the war simply
sorrowful. At the close, and for some time af-
terward, they undoubtedly felt fiercely and bitter-
ly, and hated while they wept ; and this was the
primal difficulty of reconstruction. Frequently in
conversation I heard some violent speech or act
occurring soon after the war mentioned with the
parenthetical explanation, " You know, I felt very
bitterly at that time." But, then, I have always
heard it from persons who are to-day good-tem-
pered, conciliatory, and hopeful, and desirous of
cultivating good relations with Northerners ; from
which the inference, which so many Northern
politicians find it so hard to swallow, is easy — viz.,
that time produces on Southerners its usual effects.
What Mr. Boutwell and Mr. Blaine would have us
believe is that Southerners are a peculiar breed of
men, on whom time produces no effect whatever,
and who feel about things that happened twenty
years ago just as they feel about things which
happened a month ago.

The fact is, however, that they are in this re-
spect like the rest of the human race. Time has
done for their hearts and heads what it has done
for the old Virginia battle-fields. There was not

180 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

in 1865 a fence standing between the Potomac and
Gordonsville, and but few, if any, undamaged
houses. When I passed Manassas Junction the
other day there was a hospitable-looking tavern
and several houses at the station ; the flowers were
blooming in the yard, and crowds of young men
and women in their Sunday clothes were gathered
from the country around to see a base-ball match,
and a well-tilled and well-fenced and smiling farming
country stretched before my eyes in every direction.
The only trace of the old fights was a rude grave-
yard filled, as a large sign informed us, with " the
Confederate dead." All the rest of the way down
to the springs the road ran through farms which
looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of
war had not rolled over them inside a hundred
years, and it is impossible to talk with the farmers
ten minutes without seeing how thoroughly human
and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is
history — tender, touching, and heroic history if you
will, but having no sort of connection with the
practical life of to-day. Some of us at the North
think their minds are occupied with schemes for
the assassination and spoliation of negroes, and
for a " new rebellion." Their minds are really
occupied with making money, and the farms show
it, and their designs on the negro are confined to
getting him to work for low wages. His wages

THE SO UTH AFTER THE WAR 181

are low — forty cents a day and rations, which cost
ten cents — but he is content with it. I saw negroes
seeking employment at this rate, and glad to get it ;
and in the making of the bargain nothing could be
more commercial, apparently, than the relations of
the parties. They were evidently laborer and em-
ployer to each other, and nothing more.

The state of things on two farms which I visited
may serve as illustrations of the process of regen-
eration which is going on all over Yirginia. They
are two hundred miles apart. On one of two thou-
sand acres there were, before the war, about one
hundred and fifty slaves of all ages. The owner,
at emancipation, put them in wagons and depos-
ited them in Ohio. His successor now works the
plantation with twelve hired men, who see to his
cattle, of which he raises and feeds large herds.
His cultivation is carried on on shares by white ten-
ants. He has an overseer, makes a snug income,
and spends a good part of his winters in Balti-
more and New York. He laughs when you ask him
if he regrets slavery. Nothing would induce him
to take care of one hundred and fifty men, women,
and children, furnishing perhaps thirty able-bodied
men, littering the house with a swarm of lazy ser-
vants, and making heavy drafts on the meat-house
and corn-crib, and running up doctor's bills.

The other was owned at the close of the war by a

182 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

regular "Virginia gentleman," with the usual swarm
of negroes, and who was in debt. He sold it to
an enterprising young farmer from another county,
paid his debts, and retired to a small place, where,
with two or three hired men, he makes a living.
The young farmer, instead of seventy-five slaves,
works it with twelve hands in the busy season and
three in winter, is up at five o'clock in the morn-
ing superintending them himself, raises all raisable
crops, and is as intent on the markets and the ex-
periments made by his neighbors as if he lived in
Illinois or the Carse of Gowrie. He was led by
Colonel Waring's book to try tile-draining, and
made the tiles for the purpose on his own land. He
was so successful that he now manufactures and
sells tiles extensively to others. It would be diffi-
cult to meet at the North or in England two men
with their faces turned away from the old times
more completely than these, more averse from
the old plantation ways ; and, as far as I could
learn or hear, they are fair specimens of the kind
of men who are taking possession of the Old Do-
minion. Their neighbors consist of three classes :
men who had by extraordinary exertions saved
some or all of their land after the war, and had by
borrowing or economizing managed to stock it,
and are now prospering, by dint of close manage-
ment and constant attention, on the Northern plan ;

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 183

young and enterprising men wlio had bought at
low rates from original proprietors whom the war
left hopelessly involved, and too old or incapable
to recover; and a sprinkling of Northern and Eng-
lish immigrants.

n

THE part played by the Virginia springs in the
political and social life of "the States lately in
rebellion," is to a traveller most interesting. The
attraction of these springs to Southerners has been
in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact
that the South has, properly speaking, no other
watering-places. Seaside resorts there are none
worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and
there are but few points of the long, level, dull,
and sandy coast-line which are not more or less
unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even hangs
around the places in Florida now frequented by
Northerners for the sake of the mild winter tem-
perature. But even if the sea-coast were healthy,
-it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers
no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have
got out of order in the lowlands. These naturally
seek the hills for coolness, and they go to the sul-
phur springs of Virginia because the sulphur

184 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

waters are very powerful and efficacious in their
effects on people afflicted with what the doctors
call "hepatic troubles." But then they never
would or could have gone from the Southern sea-
board to places so far off if it had not been for
the inestimable negro. The extent to which he
contributed to the rapid pushing out of the scanty
white population of the slave States to the Missis-
sippi has never, I think, received due attention.
He robbed pioneering, indeed, at the South of
most of the hardship with which it is associated
in the Northern mind — I was going to say dis-
comfort as well as hardship, but this would be
going too far. To the Southern planter, however,
who could go West with a party of stalwart ne-
groes to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and
cooking and washing, the wilderness had but few
of the terrors it presented to the Northern fron-
tiersman. He was speedily provided with a very
tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home
which the taste of a man as well off at the North
would be satisfied with, but a vastly better one
than any new settler in the Northwestern States
ever had. The springs in the Virginia mountains
became popular a century ago, and were greatly
resorted to in much the same way. They were
remote and in the woods, but, owing to slavery,
they swarmed from the very first with servants

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 185

who could not " give notice " if they did not like
the place, or felt lonesome.

The first accommodation at the springs con-
sisted of a circle of log-cabins with a dining-hall
and ball-room in the centre, and this constitutes
the fundamental plan of a spring to this day.
There is now always a hotel in which a consider-
able number of the visitors both sleep and eat,
but the bulk of them, or a very large proportion
of them, still live in the long rows of one-storied
wooden huts, with galleries running along in front
of the doors, which are dignified with the name
of " cottages," but are in reality simply the log-
cabin in the next stage of evolution ; and the
hotel has taken the place of the original dining-
and ball-rooms to which all resorted. In looking
at the cottages, and thinking of the log-cabins
which preceded them, and seeing what rude places
they are, one wonders a little how people could
ever have been, or can now be, induced to leave
comfortable homes for the purpose of spending
long summers in them. But this brings up one
of the marked characteristics of Southern life,
namely, the extent to which nearly all Southern
men and women were led in the slavery days to
associate comfort not with the trimness and or-
der of Northern or English homes, but with an
abundance of service. Well-to-do Northerners

186 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

used to be surprised, in fact, at the amount of
what they would consider discomfort in the way
of rude or unfinished surroundings, hard beds,
poor fare, want of order of all sorts, which even
Southerners in easy circumstances were willing to
put up with; but the explanation lay in the fact
that Southerners placed their luxury in having
plenty of servants at command. All the ladies
had maids and the men " body servants " wherever
they went, and this saved them, even on the frontier,
from a great deal of drudgery and inconvenience.
Even a log-cabin is not a bad place to lodge in if
you have a valet (who cannot leave you) to dress
you, and brush your boots and your clothes, and
light your fire, and bring you ice- water and juleps
and cocktails, and anything else you happen to
think of, who sleeps comfortably in a blanket
across your door. In fact, without this the Vir-
ginia springs could never have become a popu-
lar resort until railroads were opened. People
used to take twenty days in reaching them from
the coast — some in their own carriages with
four horses, and a wagon for the baggage and
" darkies," and some in stages, sleeping in taverns
on the roadside ; but nothing could have made
this practicable or tolerable but the band of ne-
groes by whom they were always accompanied.
This, too, enabled them to make their plans with

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 187

certainty for staying at the springs all summer,
which they could not have done had they been
unable to count on their servants. One gentle-
man, a Charlestonian, telling me his reminiscences
of these long journeys to the springs taken with
his parents in their own carriage, when he was a
boy, said his mother was very delicate and her
health required it. This at the North would have
been a joke, as it would have killed a delicate
woman to go into the woods with hired " help " or
without any service at all.

Partly owing to the efficacy of the waters and
partly to the absence of other Southern watering-
places, the springs became very early the resort
of every Southerner who could afford to leave
home in the summer, and they grew in favor owing
to the peculiarities of Southern society and the
delicate state of Southern relations with the North.
In the first place, at the South people know each
other, and know about each other, in a way of
which the inhabitants of a denser and busier com-
munity have little idea. The number of persons
in Illinois, or Ohio, or Michigan that a New
Yorker knows anything about, or cares to see for
social purposes, is exceedingly small. At the
South everybody with the means to travel has
relatives or friends or acquaintances of longer or
shorter standing, in nearly every Southern State,

188 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

whom it is agreeable for him to meet, and he
knows that they will probably, at some part of the
season or other, appear at the springs. They will
not go North because the North is far away, is, in
a certain sense, a strange community, and before
the war a hostile or critical one. Then, too, the
South abounded or abounds with local notables to
a degree of which we have no idea at the North,
with persons of a certain weight and consequence
in their own State or county, and to whom this
weight and consequence are so agreeable and im-
portant that they cannot bear to part with them
when they go on a journey. They could always
carry them with them to the springs. There every-
body was sure to know their standing, while if
they had gone up North they would be lost in the
crowd and be nobodies, and, before tho war, have
been deprived of the services of their " body ser-
vants" or labored under constant anxiety about
their security.

The springs, too, became, very early, and are
now, a great marrying - place. The "desirable
young men, all riding on horses," as the prophet
called the Assyrian swells, go there in search of
wives, and are pretty sure to find there all the
marriageable young women of the South who can
be said in any sense to be in society. Widows
abound at the springs just now — by which I

TEE SO UTH AFTER THE WAR 189

mean widows who would not object to trying the
chances of matrimony again. I have been told
that, since the war, it is not uncommon for families
whose means are small to make up a purse to send
one attractive youth or maid or forlorn widow to
the springs, in the hope that during the season
they may find the unknown soul which is to com-
plete their destiny, somewhat like the " culture "
donations made to promising people at the North
to enable them to visit Europe. Then, too, to that
very large proportion of the population at the
South who lead during the rest of the year abso-
lutely solitary lives on plantations, the visit to the
springs gives the only society of any kind they
ever see, and the one chance of showing their
clothes and seeing what the other women wear.
In short, I do not believe that any one place of
summer resort serves so many purposes to any
community as the Virginia springs serve to that
of the South, and by the springs I mean that circle
of mineral waters of various kinds which He round
the White Sulphur, and to which the White Sul-
phur acts as a kind of distributing reservoir of
visitors.

As regards the opinions of the very representa-
tive company at the springs on the subject of sla-
very, it seemed, as well as I could get at it, to be
that about one per cent, of the white people re-

190 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

gretted the emancipation ; but this was composed
almost entirely of old persons, who were unable to
accommodate themselves to a new order of things,
and to whom it meant the loss of personal attend-
ance— perhaps the greatest inconvenience which
elderly persons who have been used to valets and
maids can undergo. Many such persons at the
South were really killed by the social changes pro-
duced by the war, as truly as if they had been
struck on the battle-field ; the bewildered resigna-
tion of the survivors is sometimes touching to wit-
ness, and the calamity was generally embittered
by the wholesale flight of the most trusted house-
hold servants, who it was supposed would have
despised freedom even if offered in a gold box by
Phillips, Garrison, and Greeley in person. Telling
one old gentleman who was mourning over the
change that the young men to whom I spoke did
not agree with him, but thought it an excellent
thing, he replied "that those fellows never had
known what domestic comfort was " — meaning that
their experience did not run back beyond 1865.

The traditions of the old system are, however,
unquestionably a better basis for good hotel-keep-
ing than anything we have at the North. The
first condition of excellence in all places of enter-
tainment for man and beast is exactingness on the
part of the public. To be well cared for you must

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR 191

expect it and be used to it, and tliis condition the
Southerners fulfil in a much higher degree than we
do. They look for more attention, and they there-
fore get it ; and the waiter world, partly from habit
and partly, no doubt, from race temperament, ren-
der it with a cheerfulness we are not familiar with
here. But the superiority of manners in all classes
is very striking. One rarely meets a man on a
Virginia road who does not raise or touch his hat,
and this not in a servile way either, but simply as
politeness. The bearing of the men toward each
other generally, too, has the ineffable charm, which
Northern manners are so apt to want, of indicat-
ing a recognition of the fact that even if you are
no better than any other man, you are different,
and that your peculiarities are respectable, and
that you are entitled to a certain amount of defer-
ence for your private tastes and habits. At the
North, on the other hand, manners, even as taught
to children, are apt to concede nothing except that
you have an immortal soul and a middling chance
of salvation, and to avoid anything which is likely
to lead you to forget that you are simply a human
male.

CHEOMO-CIVILIZATION

THE last " statement," it is reasonable to hope,
has been made in the Beecher-Tilton case previ-
ous to the trial at law, and it is safe to say that it
has left the public mind in as unsettled a state as
ever before. People do not know what to believe,
but they do not want to hear any more newspaper
discussion by the principal actors. We are not
going to attempt any analysis or summing-up of
the case at present. It will be time enough to do
that after the dramatis personce have undergone an
examination in court, but we would again warn
our readers against looking for any decisive result
from the legal trial. The expectations on this
point which some of the newspapers and a good
many lawyers are encouraging are in the highest
degree extravagant. The truth is that only a very
small portion of the stuff contained in the various
" statements " can, under the rules of evidence, be
laid before the jury — not, we venture to assert,
more than would fill half a newspaper column in
all. What will be laid before the jury is, in the

CHROMO-CIVILIZATION 193

main, " questions of veracity " between three or
four persons whose credit is already greatly
shaken, or, in other words, the very kind of ques-
tions on which juries are most likely to disagree,
even when the jurymen are entirely unprejudiced.
In the present case they are sure to be prejudiced,
and are sure to be governed, consciously or un-
consciously, in reaching their conclusions by
agencies wholly foreign to the matter in hand,
and are thus very likely to disagree. There are
very few men whose opinions about Mr. Beecher's
guilt or innocence are not influenced by their own
religious and political beliefs, or by their social
antecedents or surroundings. A curious and
somewhat instructive illustration of the way in
which a man's fate in such cases as this may be
affected by considerations having no sort of rela-
tion to the facts, is afforded by the attitude of the
Western press toward the chief actors in the
present scandal. It may be said, roughly, that
while the press east of the Alleghanies has in-
clined in Beecher's favor, the newspapers west of
them have gone somewhat savagely and persist-
ently against him, and have treated Tilton as a
martyr. The cause of such a divergence of views,
considering that both Tilton and Beecher are
Eastern men, is of course somewhat obscure, but
we have no doubt that it is due to a vague feeling
13

\

194 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

prevalent in the West that Tilton's cause is the
democratic one — that is, the cause of the poor,
friendless man against the rich and successful one
—a feeling somewhat like that which in England
enlisted the working-classes in London on the side
of the Tichborne claimant, in defiance of all
reason and evidence, as a poor devil fighting a
hard battle with the high and mighty. One of
the reporters of a Western paper which has made
important contributions to the literature of the
scandal, recently accounted for his support of Til-
ton by declaring that in standing by him he was
" fighting the battle of the Bohemians against
Capital." Another Western paper, in analyzing
the causes of the position taken by the leading
New York papers on Beecher's side, ascribed it to
the social relations of the editors with him, be-
lieving that they met him frequently at dinners
and breakfasts, and found him a jovial companion.
All this would be laughable enough if it did not
show the amount of covert peril — peril against
which no precautions can be taken — to which
every prominent man's character is exposed. The
moment he gets into a scrape of any kind he finds
a host of persons whose enmity he never sus-
pected clamoring to have him thrown to the
beasts " on general grounds " — that is, in virtue of
certain tests adopted by themselves, judged by

CHROHO-CIVILIZATION 195

m

which, apart from the facts of any particular accu-
sation, a man of his kind is unquestionably a bad
fellow. The accusation, in short, furnishes the oc-
casion for destroying him, not necessarily the
reason for it.

In Europe there are already abundant signs that
the scandal will be considered a symptomatic phe-
nomenon— that is, a phenomenon illustrative of
the moral condition of American society generally ;
for it must not be overlooked that, putting aside al-
together the question of Beecher's guilt or inno-
cence, the "statements" furnish sociological rev-
elations of a most singular and instructive kind.
The witnesses, in telling their story, although their
minds are wholly occupied with the proof or dis-
proof of certain propositions, describe ways of liv-
ing, standards of right and wrong, traits of man-
ners, codes of propriety, religious and social ideas,
which, taken together, form social pictures of great
interest and value. Now, if these were really pict-
ures of American society in general, as some
European observers are disposed to conclude, we
do not hesitate to say that the prospects of the
Anglo-Saxon race on this continent would be
somewhat gloomy. But we believe we only ex-
press the sentiment of all parts of the country
when we say that the state of things in Brooklyn
revealed by the charges and countercharges has

196 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

filled the best part of the American people with
nearly as much amazement as if an unknown tribe
worshipping strange gods had been suddenly dis-
covered on Brooklyn Heights. In fact, the actors
in the scandal have the air of persons who are liv-
ing, not more majorum, by rules with which they
are familiar, but like half-civilized people who
have got hold of a code which they do not under-
stand, and the phrases of which they use without
being able to adapt their conduct to it.

We have not space at our command to illustrate
this as fully as we could wish, even if the patience
of our readers would permit of it, but we can per-
haps illustrate sufficiently within a very short com-
pass. We have already spoken of the Oriental ex-
travagance of the language used in the scandal,
which might pass in Persia or Central Arabia,
where wild hyperbole is permitted by the genius
of the language, and where people are accustomed
to it in conversation, understand it perfectly, and
make unconscious allowance for it. Displayed
here in the United States, in a mercantile commu-
nity, and in a tongue characterized by directness
and simplicity, it makes the actors almost entirely
incomprehensible to people outside their own set,
as is shown by the attempts made to explain and
understand the letters in the case. Most of the
critics, both the friendly and hostile, are compelled

CHROMO-CIVILIZATION 197

to treat them as written in a sort of dialect which
has to be read with the aid of commentary, glosses,
and parallels, and accompanied, like the study of
Homer or the Beg- Veda, by a careful examination
of the surroundings of the writers, the conditions
of their birth and education, the usages of the cir-
cle in which they live, and the social and religious
influences by which they have been moulded, and
so on. Their almost entire want of any sense of
necessary connection between facts and written
statements has been strikingly revealed by Moul-
ton's production of various drafts or outlines of
cards, reports, and letters which the actors pro-
posed from time to time to get up and publish for
the purpose of settling their troubles and warding
off exposure by imposing on the public. No sav-
ages could have acted with a more simple-minded
unconsciousness of truth. Moulton, according to
his own story, helped Beecher to publish a lying
card ; got Tilton to procure from his wife a ly-
ing letter; and Tilton concocted a lying report
for the committee, in which he made them express
the highest admiration for himself, his adulter-
ous wife, and her paramour. Here we have a
bit of the machinery of high civilization — a com-
mittee, Avith its investigation and report, used, or
attempted to be used, with just the kind of savage
directness with which a Bongo would use it, when

198 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

once he came to understand it, and found lie could
make it serve some end, and with just as little ref-
erence to the moral aspect of the transaction.

Take, again, Tilton's account of the motives
which governed him in his treatment of his wife
and of Beecher. He is evidently aware that there
are two codes regulating a man's conduct under
such circumstances — one the Christian code and
the other the conventional code of honor, or, as he
calls it, " club-house morality ; " but it soon be-
came clear that he had no distinct conception of
their difference. Having been brought up under
the Christian code, and taught, doubtless, to regard
the term " gentleman " as a name for a heartless
epicurean, he started off by forgiving both Beecher
and his wife, or, as the lawyers say, condoning
their offence ; and he speaks scornfully of the re-
ligious ignorance of the committee in assuming in
their report that there was any offence for which a
Christian was not bound to accept an apology as a
sufficient atonement. The club-house code would,
however, have prescribed the infliction of vengeance
on Beecher by exposing him. Accordingly, Tilton
mixes the two codes up in the most absurd way.
Having, as a Christian, forgiven Beecher, he began,
thirty days after the discovery of the offence, to
expose him as a " gentleman," and kept forgiving
and exposing him continuously through the whole

CHROMO-CIVILIZATION 199

four years, the eclat of such a relation to Beecher
having evidently an irresistible temptation for him.
Finally, when Dr. Bacon called him a " dog," he
threw aside the Christian role altogether and began
assailing his enemy with truly heathen virulence and
vigor. A more curious blending of two conceptions
of duty is not often seen, and it was doubtless due
to the fact that no system of training or culture
had made any impression on the man or gone
more than skin deep. His interview with Beecher,
too, by appointment, at his own house, for the pur-
pose of ascertaining by a comparison of dates and
reference to his wife's diary the probable paternity
of her youngest child, which he describes with the
utmost simplicity, is, we venture to say, an incident
absolutely without precedent, and one which may
safely be pronounced foreign to our civilization.
Whether it really occurred, or Tilton invented it,
it makes him a problem in social philosophy of con-
siderable interest.

Moulton's story, too, furnishes several puzzles of
the same kind. That an English-speaking Protes-
tant married couple in easy circumstances and of
fair education, and belonging to a religious circle,
should not only be aware that their pastor was a
libertine and should be keeping it a secret for him,
but should make his adulteries the subject of con-
versation with him in the family circle, is hardly

200 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

capable of explanation by reference to any known
and acknowledged tendency of our society. But
perhaps the most striking thing in Moulton's role
is that while he appears on the scene as a gentle-
man or " man of the world," who does for honor's
sake what the other actors do from fear of God,
his whole course is a kind of caricature of what a
gentleman under like circumstances would really
do. For instance, he accepts Beecher's confi-
dence, which may have been unavoidable, and be-
trays it by telling various people, from time to
time, of the several incidents of Beecher's troub-
le, which is something of which a weak or loose-
tongued person — vain of the task in which he was
engaged, as it seemed to him, i.e., of keeping the
peace between two great men — might readily be
guilty. But he tells the public of it in perfect
unconsciousness that there was anything discred-
itable in it, as he does of his participation in
the writing of lying letters and cards, and his
passing money over from the adulterer to pacify
the injured husband. In fact, he carries, according
to his own account, his services to Beecher to a
point at which it is very difficult to distinguish
them from those of a pander, maintaining at the
same time relations of the most disgusting con-
fidence with Mrs. Tilton. Finally, too, when great-
ly perplexed as to his course, he goes publicly and

CHROMO-CIVILIZAT10N 201

with eclat for advice to a lawyer, with whom no
gentleman, in the proper sense of the term, could
maintain intimate personal relation or safely con-
sult on a question of honor. The moral insen-
sibility shown in his visit to General Butler is one
of the strange parts of the affairs.

We have, of course, only indicated in the brief-
est way some of the things which may be re-
garded as symptomatic of strange mental and
moral conditions in the circle in which the af-
fair has occurred. The explanation of them in
any way that would generally be considered
satisfactory would be a difficult task. The in-
fluences which bring about a certain state of
manners at any given time or place are always
numerous and generally obscure, but we think
something of this sort may be safely offered in
consideration of the late " goings on " in Brook-
lyn.

In the first place, the newspapers and other
cheap periodicals, and the lyceum lectures and
small colleges, have diffused through the commu-
nity a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge,
a taste for reading and for " art " — that is, a de-
sire to see and own pictures — which, taken to-
gether, pass with a large body of slenderly
equipped persons as " culture," and give them an
unprecedented self-confidence in dealing with all

202 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the problems of life, and raise them in their own
minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher,
greater, or better than themselves. Now, culture,
in the only correct and safe sense of the term, is
the result of a process of discipline, both mental
and moral. It is not a thing that can be picked
up, or that can be got by doing what one pleases.
It cannot be acquired by desultory reading, for in-
stance, or travelling in Europe. It comes of the
protracted exercise of the faculties for given ends,
under restraints of some kind, whether imposed
by one's self or other people. In fact, it might
not improperly be called the art of doing easily
what you don't like to do. It is the breaking-in
of the powers to the service of the will ; and a
man who has got it is not simply a person who
knows a good deal, for he may know very little,
but a man who has obtained an accurate estimate
of his own capacity, and of that of his fellows and
predecessors, who is aware of the nature and ex-
tent of his relations to the world about him, and
who is at the same time capable of using his pow-
ers to the best advantage. In short, the man of
culture is the man who has formed his ideals
through labor and self-denial. To be real, there-
fore, culture ought to affect a man's whole char-
acter and not merely store his memory with facts.
Let us add, too, that it may be got in various

CTIROMO-CIVILIZATION 203

ways, through home influences as well as through
schools or colleges ; through living in a highly or-
ganized society, making imperious demands on
one's time and faculties, as well as through the re-
straints of a severe course of study. A good deal
of it was obtained from the old Calvinistic the-
ology, against which, in the days of its predomi-
nance, the most bumptious youth hit his head at
an early period of his career, and was reduced to
thoughtfulness and self-examination, and forced to
walk in ways that were not always to his liking.

If all this be true, the mischievous effects of the
pseudo-culture of which we have spoken above
may be readily estimated. A society of ignoram-
uses who know they are ignoramuses might lead
a tolerably happy and useful existence, but a soci-
ety of ignoramuses each of whom thinks he is a
Solon would be an approach to Bedlam let loose,
and something analogous to this may really be
seen to-day in some parts of this country. A large
body of persons has arisen, under the influence of
the common schools, magazines, newspapers, and
the rapid acquisition of wealth, who are not only
engaged in enjoying themselves after their fashion,
but who firmly believe that they have reached, in
the matter of social, mental, and moral culture, all
that is attainable or desirable by anybody, and
who, therefore, tackle all the problems of the day

204 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

— men's, women's, and children's rights and duties,
marriage, education, suffrage, life, death, and im-
mortality— with supreme indifference to what any-
body else thinks or has ever thought, and have
their own trumpery prophets, prophetesses, heroes
and heroines, poets, orators, scholars and philoso-
phers, whom they worship with a kind of barbaric
fervor. The result is a kind of mental and moral
chaos, in which many of the fundamental rules of
living, which have been worked out painfully by
thousands of years of bitter human experience,
seem in imminent risk of disappearing totally/'"*** .^
Now, if we said that a specimen of this society
had been unearthed in Brooklyn by the recent
exposures, we should, doubtless to many people,
seem to say a very hard thing, and yet this, with
the allowances and reservations which have of
course to be made for all attempts to describe any-
thing so vague and fleeting as a social state, is
what we do mean to say. That Mr. Beecher's
preaching, falling on such a mass of disorder,
should not have had a more purifying and organ-
izing effect, is due, we think, to the absence from
it of anything in the smallest degree disciplinary,
either in the shape of systematic theology, with its
tests and standards, or of a social code, with its
pains and penalties. What he has most encour-
aged, if we may judge by some of the fruits, is

CHR OMO- CIVILIZA TION 205

vague aspiration and lachrymose sensibility. The
ability to dare and do, the readiness to ask one's
due which comes of readiness to render their due
to others, the profound consciousness of the need
of sound habits to brace and fortify morals, which
are the only true foundation and support of a
healthy civilization, are things which he either has
not preached or which his preaching has only
stifled.

"THE SHOBT-HAIKS" AND "THE SWAL-
LOW-TAILS"

THERE is a story afloat that Mr. John Morrissey
made his appearance, one day during the past
week, in Madison Square, in full evening dress,
including white gloves and cravat, and bearing a
French dictionary under his arm, and that, being
questioned by his friends as to the object of this
display, he replied that he was going to see Mayor
Wickham and ask him for an office in the only
costume in which such an application would have
a chance of success. In other words, he was act-
ing what over in Brooklyn would be called " an
allegory," and which was intended to expose in a
severe and telling way the Mayor's gross partial-
ity, in the use of his patronage, for the well-
dressed and well-educated members of society — a
partiality which Mr. Morrissey and his party con-
sider not only unfair but ridiculous. This demon-
stration, too, was one of the few indications which
have as yet met the public eye of a very real divis-
ion of the Democratic party in this city into two

"SHORT-HAIRS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 207

sets of politicians, known familiarly as "Short-
Hairs " and " Swallow-Tails " — the former com-
prising the rank and file of the voters and the lat-
ter "the property-owners and substantial men,"
who are endeavoring to make Tammany an instru-
ment of reform and to manage the city in the in-
terest of the taxpayers. Mayor Wickham belongs,
it is said, to the latter class, and has given, it
seems, in the eyes of the former, some proofs of a
desire to reserve responsible offices for persons of
some pretensions to gentility, and exhibited some
disfavor for the selections of the " workers " in the
various wards.

But we do not undertake to describe with ac-
curacy the origin or nature of the split ; all we
know is that the Short-Hairs are disgusted, and
that their hostility to the Swallow-Tails is very
bitter, and that when Mr. Morrissey proclaimed, in
the manner we have described, that a man needed
to wear evening dress and to know French in or-
der to get a place, he gave feeble expression to
the rage of the masses. They have, too, concocted
an arrangement which embodies their idea of a
well-administered government, and which consists
in compelling the departments to spend in wages
in each district at least $1.50 for each Democratic
vote cast, and to apportion the appropriations
with strict reference to this rule, the money, of

208 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

course, to go to the nominees of Democratic poli-
ticians. The plan departs from that of the French
national workshops in that it discriminates be-
tween laborers, but in other respects it has all
the characteristics of well-developed Communism.
The way to meet it, according to our venerable
contemporary, the Evening Post, is to have the
taxpayers point out to the voters who are to re-
ceive the money that they (the taxpayers) cannot
well spare it, that they need it for their own use,
and that this mode of administering corporate
funds is condemned by all the leading writers on
government. The Swallow-Tails know so well,
however, with what howls of mingled mirth and
indignation the Short-Hairs would receive such
suggestions that they never make them, but con-
tent themselves with confining the distribution of
the money to the members of their own division
quietly and unostentatiously, as far as lies in
their power, which, we candidly confess, we do
not think is very far.

It would be doing the Short-Hairs injustice,
however, if we allowed the reader to remain under
the impression that the unwillingness to have the
Swallow-Tails monopolize or even have a share of
the office was peculiar to them, or that John Mor-
rissey's protest would be unintelligible anywhere
out of New York. On the contrary, when he

"SHORT-HAIRS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 209

started out with his French dictionary he was giv-
ing expression to a feeling which is to be found
in greater or less intensity in every State in the
Union. The great division of politicians into
Short-Hairs and Swallow-Tails is not confined to
this city. It is found in every city in the country
in which there is much diversity of condition
among the inhabitants. Nor did Morrissey mean
simply to protest against training as a qualifica-
tion for the work of administration, as the Trib-
une assumed in a sharp and incisive lecture
which it read him the other day. We doubt if
any pugilist in his secret heart despises training.
He knows how much depends on it, and as he is
not apt to possess much discriminating power, he
is not likely to mark off any particular class of
work as not needing it. What the Short-Hairs dis-
like in the Swallow-Tails is the feeling of personal
superiority which they imagine them to entertain,
and which they think finds a certain expression in
careful dressing and in the possession of certain
accomplishments. In fact, the Swallow - Tails
whom the New York rough detests and would like
to keep out of public life, belong to the class"
known in Massachusetts as the " White-cravat-
and-daily-bath gentlemen," and which is there
just as unpopular as here, and has even greater

difficulty in getting office there than here.
14

210 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

The line of division in New York is, however,
drawn much lower down. The Massachusetts
Short-Hair is a man of intelligence, of some edu-
cation, who wears a plain black neglige and rum-
pled shirt-front and soft hat, and disregards the
condition of his nails, and takes a warm bath occa-
sionally. The New Yorker, on the other hand,
wears such clothes as he can get, and only bathes in
the hot weather and off the public wharf. If he
has good luck and makes money, either in the pub-
lic service or otherwise, he displays it not in any
richness in his toilet or in greater care of his per-
son, but in the splendor of his jewels. One of his
first purchases is a diamond-pin, which he sticks
in his shirt-front, but he never sees any connec-
tion of an aesthetic kind between the linen and
the pin, and will wear the latter in a very dirty
shirt-front as cheerfully as in a clean one — in fact,
more cheerfully, as he has a vague feeling that by
showing it he atones for or excuses the condition
of the linen. In fact, the Short-Hair view of
dress would be found on examination to be, in
nearly ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, some-
thing of this kind: that the constant care of the
person which produces an impression of neatness
and appropriateness, and makes a man look " gen-
teel," is the expression of a certain state of mind ;
that a man would not take so much trouble to

" SHORT-HAIRS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 211

make himself look different from the ordinary run
of people whom he meets, unless he thought him-
self in some way superior to them, or, in other
words, thought himself a " gentleman " and them
common fellows, and that he therefore fairly de-
serves the hatred of those of whom he thus
openly parades his contempt.

A New York Short-Hair seldom goes farther
than this in his speculations, though he doubtless
has also a vague idea that a well-dressed man is
not so likely to stand by his friends in politics as
a more careless one. In New England, as might
be expected, however, the popular dislike of that
"culte de la personne," as some Frenchman has
called it, which distinguishes " the white-era vat-
and-daily-bath gentleman," has provided itself
with a moral basis. There is there a strong pre-
sumption that the Swallow-Tail is a frivolous per-
son, who bestows on his tailoring, and his linen,
and his bathing, and his manners the time and
attention which the Short-Hair or "plain blunt
man " reserves for reflection on the graver concerns
of life, and especially on the elevation of his fellow-
men, and this presumption even a career of philan-
thropy and the composition of the " Principia "
would not in many minds suffice to overthrow.
We believe it is authentic that General Grant
never got over the impression produced on him by

212 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

seeing that Mr. Motley parted his hair in the mid-
dle, and it is said — and if not true is not unlikely,
—that Mr. E. H. Dana's practice of wearing kid
gloves told heavily against him in his memorable
contest with Butler in the Essex district. We
may all remember, too, the gigantic efforts made
by Mr. Sumner and others in Congress to have
our representatives abroad prohibited from wear-
ing court-dress. What dress they wore was of
course, per se, a matter of no consequence, pro-
vided it was not immodest. The fervor on the sub-
ject was due to the deeply rooted feeling that even
the amount of care for externals exhibited in put-
ting on an embroidered coat or knee-breeches
indicated a light-mindedness against the very ap-
pearance of which the minister of a republic ought
to guard carefully. It is partly to produce the
effect of seriousness of purpose, but mainly to
avoid the appearance of airs of social or mental
superiority, that nearly all skilful politicians dress
with elaborate negligence. In most country dis-
tricts no complaints can be made of men in office
such as the New York Short-Hair makes against
the Swallow-Tail. They fling on their easy -fitting
black clothes in a way that leaves them their whole
time for the study of public affairs and attention
to the wants of their constituents, and at the same
time recalls their humble beginnings.

" SHORT-HAIRS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 213

What strikes one, however, as most curious in the
controversy between the Short-Hairs and the Swal-
low-Tails is the illustration it affords of the rigidity
with which every class or grade in civilization treats
its own social conventions, whatever they may
be, as final, and as having some subtle but neces-
sary connection with morals. When the Indian
squats round the tribal pot in his breech-clout, and
eats his dinner with his dirty paw, he is fully sat-
isfied that he is as well equipped, both as regards
dress and manners, not only as a man need be, but
as a man ought to be. The toilet, the chamber,
and the dinner - table of a plain New England
farmer he treats as wasteful and ridiculous excess,
and if good for anything, good only for plunder.
The farmer, on the other hand, loathes the In-
dian and his ways, and thinks him a filthy beast,
and that he (the farmer) has reached the limits of
the proper as regards clothes and food and per-
sonal habits, and that the city man who puts
greater elaboration into his life is a fribble, who is
to be pitied, if not despised and distrusted. In
short, we can hardly go one step into the contro-
versy without coming on the old question, What
are luxuries and what necessities ? and, as usual,
the majority decides it in the manner that best
suits itself. It may be said without exaggeration
that the progress of civilization has consisted

214 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

largely in the raising of what is called " the stand-
ard of living," or, in other words, the multiplica-
tion of the things deemed necessary for personal
comfort, and, as this raising of the standard has
always been begun by the few, the many have al-
ways fought against it as a sign of selfishness or
affectation until they themselves were able to adopt
it.

The history of the bath furnishes a curious
though tolerably familiar illustration of this. The
practice of bathing disappeared from Western
Europe with the fall of the Roman Empire. The
barbarians where themselves dirty fellows, like the
Indians, and their descendants remained dirty in
spite of the growth of civilization among them,
putting their money, like the Short-Hair, mainly
into jewels and other ornaments. As long as linen
was scarce and dear, changes were, of course, sel-
dom made, and the odor of even " the best society "
was so insupportable that perfumes had to be lav-
ishly used to overcome it. The increased cheap-
ness of linen and more recently of cotton, and the
increased facilities for bathing, have in our own
day made personal cleanliness a common virtue ;
but an occasional bath is still as much as is
thought, through the greater part of the world,
compatible with moral earnestness and high aims.
Of late, indeed within the memory of the pres-

" SIlORT-HAIftS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 215

ent generation, persons mainly belonging to the
wealthier class in England have boldly begun to
bathe every day, and they have finally succeeded in
establishing the rule that a gentleman is bound to
bathe, or " tub," as they call it, everyday, and that
the usage cannot be persistently neglected without
loss of position. Indeed, there are few social cas-
uists in England who would decide, without great
hesitation and anxiety, that any English-speaking
man was a gentleman who did not take a daily
bath. That this view of the matter should be ac-
cepted by the great body of those who would
rather not bathe every day is not to be expected,
nor is it to be wondered at that they should con-
sider it offensive, and that the practice of sponging
one's self in cold water every morning should in
caucuses be looked on as a disqualification for polit-
ical life. There is, of course, a necessary and pro-
voking, though tacit, assumption of superiority in
the display of greater cleanliness than other people
show, just as there is in coming into a room and
finding fault with the closeness of the air in which
other people are sitting comfortably. It is tanta-
mount to saying that what is good enough for them
is not good enough for you, and they always either
openly or secretly resent it.

The popular distrust of the practice of wearing
white cravats in the evening may be traced to the

216 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

same causes. The savage makes no change of
toilet for the evening. He dresses for war and
religious ceremonies, but he goes to a social re-
union or feast in such clothes as he happens to
have on when the invitation finds him. The plain
man of civilized life, under similar circumstances,
puts on a clean shirt and his best suit of clothes.
This suit, among the European peasantry, is apt
to be of simply the same cut and material as the
working suit, or, as it would be called in Brook-
lyn, " the garb of toil." Among Americans, it is a
black suit, like that of a clergyman, and includes a
silk cravat, generally black, but permissibly colored.
The whole matter is, however, one of pure conven-
tion. Now, it has been found of late years a mat-
ter of convenience, and of great convenience espe-
cially to hard-worked men and men of moderate
means who are exposed to the constant social de-
mands of the great cities of the world, to have a
costume in which one can appear on any festive
occasion, great or small, which all, gentle or simple,
are alike expected to wear, which is neither rich nor
gaudy, and in which every man may feel sure that
he is properly dressed ; and the dress fixed on for
this purpose now throughout the civilized world is
the plain suit of black, with the swallow-tailed coat,
commonly called " evening dress."
Nothing can be simpler or less pretentious, or

"SHORT-HAIRS" AND "SWALLOW-TAILS" 217

more democratic. Nobody can add anything to it
or take anything away from it. Many attempts to
modify it have been made during the last thirty
years by leaders of fashion, and they have all failed,
because it meets one of the great wants of human
nature. It is only within the last fifteen years that
it has obtained a firm foothold in American cities.
People looked on it with suspicion, as a sign of some
inward and spiritual naughtiness, and regarded the
frock-coat with its full skirts as the only garment
in which a serious-minded man, with a proper
sense of his origin and destiny, and correct feel-
ings about popular government, could make his
appearance in a lady's parlor. Why, nobody could
•tell, for there was a time, not very far back, when
the frock-coat was itself an innovation. Of late —
that is, within, perhaps, twenty years — the Swallow-
Tails of the world have exchanged the black or
colored for a white cravat, and justify themselves
by saying that it not only looks cleaner, but is
cleaner of necessity than a silk one, and that you
cannot look too clean or fresh about your throat
when you present yourself in a lady's house on a
festive occasion. Nevertheless, the plain, blunt
men are not satisfied. They do not as yet feel
sure as to its meaning. They think it indicates
either over-thoughtfulness about trifles or else a
leaning, slight though it be, toward despotism and

SIS REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

free-trade. They will now all, or nearly all, wear
evening dress with a black cravat, but even those
of them who will consent to put on a white one
do so with a certain shamefacedness and sense of
backsliding, and of treachery to some good cause,
though they do not exactly know which.

JUDGES AND WITNESSES

THE proceedings in the recent Bravo poisoning
case have raised a good deal of discussion in Eng-
land as to the license of counsel in cross-examina-
tion— a question which recent trials in this coun-
try have shown to possess no little interest for us
also. In the Bravo inquest, as in the Tichborne
case and the Beecher trial of the last year, the
cross-examination of the witnesses was pushed
into matters very remotely connected with the is-
sue under trial, so that the general result of the
inquiry was not, as in most cases, the eliciting of a
certain number of facts bearing on the question in
court, but a complete revelation of the whole pri-
vate life of a family, or of a certain part of it, and
even of a whole circle of families. The glaring ex-
posure of matters usually kept close, and not even
talked about, formed in fact the great fascination
of these causes celebres. It was difficult at the
first blush to see how in the Beecher trial Tilton's
eccentric nocturnal habits could have thrown any
light upon the question of Beecher's guilt ; nor in

220 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the Tichborne case was it at all apparent that an an-
swer to the inquiry put to some witness — whether
he had, at some distant period of time, had im-
proper relations with some persons not connected
with the case — could even remotely tend to settle
the claimant's identity. The Pall Hall Gazette,
discussing this kind of cross-examination resorted
to for the purpose of breaking down the credit of a
witness — of " showing him up " to the jury, and
thus inducing them to pay less attention to his
evidence than they otherwise would — has stated
the case in the following manner : " Suppose, it
says, that the legislature of a free country were
some fine morning to pass a law authorizing any-
one who chose to take it into his head to compel
any inhabitant of the country to answer any ques-
tions he might think fit to put with regards to the
other's moral character, his relations with his par-
ents, brothers and sisters, wife and children, his
business affairs, his property, his debts, and in
fact his whole private life, and to do all this with-
out there being any dispute between them or even
any alleged grievance, what would be thought of
such a law? Would it be endured for an in-
stant ? " Now, this, the Pall Matt Gazette con-
tinues, is to-day the law of England. It is just
to this odious tyranny which anyone, by bringing a
suit, can, under the vague and almost unlimited

JUDGES AND WITNESSES 231

power to punish for "contempt of court," force
submission.

The law on this subject is, generally speaking,
the same in the United States as in England, and
this tyranny, if it really exists, weighs upon us as
heavily as it does upon Englishmen. The first
question that suggests itself is whether this is
really a fair statement of law, and, of course, the
Pall Mall Gazette admits that there exist limita-
tions of the right of cross-examination, but it con-
tends that these are so undefined as to amount to
little or nothing in the way of protection. The
authorities contain little on the subject, except
that cross-examination as to credit is allowed to
go very far, and that judges may in their discre-
tion stop it when it goes too far. But judicial dis-
cretion is proverbially an uncertain thing. It
varies not merely with the court, but even in the
same judge it is affected by the state of his
temper, his curiosity, his feeling toward the coun-
sel who is examining, and by thousands of other
things that no one can know anything about or
depend upon. Usually it is easier not to exercise
than to exercise discretion, and the result is that
the right of cross-examination is usually un-
checked, and in most important cases which are
widely reported the right is pushed to lengths
which, with witnesses of any sensibility, amount

223 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

to a process of slow torture. If the right is
abused in England, it is unquestionably abused
here, and probably at the time of the Beecher
trial we should have had complaints about it but
for the fact that in the singular society in which
the parties to that case lives, a craving for noto-
riety had been developed which made any discus-
sion of their private affairs less disagreeable than
it is to most people. But with the great major-
ity of mankind there is nothing more odious than
the extraction, by a sharp, hostile lawyer, from
their own unwilling lips, of the details of their
moral history. There is probably no one in ex-
istence, however good, and however quiet his con-
science may be, who can endure without a shud-
der the thought of every transaction of his past
life being dragged out in a court of justice for the
amusement of a gaping crowd. Exactly how far
the right is abused, and how far the discretionary
powers of courts to limit its abuse accomplish
their end, it is impossible to say, for it is only in
sporadic cases of unusual importance that interest
in the result is strong enough to warrant a lawyer's
going to great length in cross-examination, Usu-
ally, too, it should be said for the credit of the
profession, reputable lawyers shrink from outrag-
ing a witness's sensibility. But after everything is
admitted that can be admitted in favor of the ex-

JUDGES AND WITNESSES 223

isting state of the law, it is impossible to deny
that the door is left very wide open to disgrace-
ful assaults upon credit which inflict serious and
irreparable damage.

The difficulty is not in pointing out the evil,
which is plain enough, but in suggesting a remedy.
The right of cross-examination is one of the most
important instruments provided by the machinery
of our law for the discovery of facts, and on the
credibility of witnesses all cases hinge. The mo-
ment we begin to limit it by fixed rules we enter
on dangerous ground. It might seem as if the
solution of the problem lay in the enactment of a
rule that witnesses should only be cross-examined
as to their general reputation with regard to truth,
and as to the matters involved in the case directly
affecting their credibility; but this would by no
means do. Suppose, for instance, that the suit is a
common action for the purchase-money of a piece
of cloth, and the defendant brings a witness who
swears that he saw the defendant pay the money
to the plaintiff, while the plaintiff has only his own
evidence to rely upon in proof of non-payment;
if, in such case, the plaintiff were merely allowed
to cross-examine the witness directly, he would
in all probability lose the case. The testimony
would be two to one against him, and the story of
the witness as the only disinterested person would

224, REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

probably be believed by the jury. But suppose
that, on cross-examination, it turns out that this
witness can give no good account of his manner of
earning his living or of his place of residence;
that he had been arrested not long before as a
vagrant, and that down to the time of the action
he had no respectable clothes, and that he suddenly
became possessed of some ; that he deserted from
the army immediately after getting his bounty-
money, and so on, there can be little doubt that
his credit with the jury would be much impaired,
and justly so, although no direct evidence of his
being a perjurer had been introduced, and not a
particle of his testimony had been strictly contro-
verted. Everyone who has followed with any care
the evidence taken in celebrated murder trials or
divorce cases knows how frequently a rigid cross-
examination lays bare motives and prejudices on
the part of witnesses which, often without their
knowing it themselves, tend to bias their account
of facts.

The problem, therefore, is to devise some means
by which these benefits of a searching cross-exam-
ination may be retained and yet the abuse got rid
of. The only feasible way of meeting the diffi-
culty yet proposed is that of drawing up a series
of rules or general directions as to evidence which
shall not attempt to prescribe formal limits for

JUDGES AND WITNESSES 225

cross-examination, but shall lay down in explicit
words the general principles which should govern
a judge in such cases. These rules would prac-
tically be a definition of the " discretion "he is
now supposed to exercise. They would, for ex-
ample, direct him not to allow an examination into
matters so remote in time from the case in hand
that they can have no bearing on the credibility
of the witness; not to allow questions to be put
which are plainly malicious and asked for the pur-
pose of irritating the witness ; and not to allow any
examination into transactions which, though they
may have a bearing on the character of a witness,
have none on his credibility, e.g., an inquiry, in a
murder case, of a witness in good standing, as to
domestic difficulties with a deceased wife. It is
not easy to lay down beforehand any rules by
which we can discriminate the kind of evidence as
to transactions involving moral character which
ought not to affect credibility, but every one can
easily imagine instances of such evidence. Gen-
eral directions of the kind we have just suggested
are no more than a formal enunciation of the man-
ner in which the "discretion" of a good judge
would be and is exercised. They do not change
the law, but they remind judges of what they may
forget, and they may be appealed to by a persecut-
ed witness with far more certainty than judicial

15

226 REFLECTION'S AND COMMENTS

" discretion." In the Indian Code, which is prob-
ably the best body of law that the legal reform
movement begun by Bentham in the last century
has yet produced, rules of this kind have been laid
down, and we believe have been found to work
with success.

"THE DEBTOE CLASS"

A WASHINGTON correspondent, describing, the
other day, the motives which animated the major-
ity in Congress in its performances on the cur-
rency question, said, and we believe truly, that most
of the inflationists in that body knew very well what
the evils of paper-money were, so that argument
on that point was wasted on them. But they knew
also that large issues of irredeemable paper would
make it easier for debtors to pay off their cred-
itors, and came to the conclusion that as the num-
ber of debtors in the country was greater than
the number of creditors, it was wise policy for a
politician to curry favor with the former by help-
ing them to cheat the persons who had lent them
money or sold them goods. This explanation of
the conduct of the majority may be a startling and
sad one, but that it is highly probable nobody can
deny. All the debates help to confirm it. In
every speech, made either in opposition to resump-
tion or in favor of inflation, a portion of the com-
munity known as " the debtor class " has appeared

228 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

as the object of the orator's tenderest solicitude.
The great reason for not returning to specie pay-
ments hitherto has been the fear that contraction
would press hard on " the debtor class ; " it is for
" the debtor class " we need more paper " per cap-
ita ; " and indeed, no matter what proposal we
make in the direction of financial reform, we are
met by pictures of the frightful effects which will
be produced by it on the " debtor class." More-
over, in listening to its champions, a foreigner
might conclude that in America debtors either all
live together in a particular part of the country, or
worse, a particular costume, like mediaeval Jews,
and are divided from the rest of the community
by tastes and habits, so that it would be proper
for an American to put " debtor " or " creditor "
on his card as a description of his social status.
He might, too, not unnaturally begin to mourn
over the negligence of the framers of the Constitu-
tion in not recognizing this marked distribution of
American society. Truly, he would say, the debt-
ors ought to have representatives in the Senate
and House to look after their special interests;
these unfortunate and helpless men ought not to be
left to the charitable care of volunteers like Messrs.
Morton, and Logan, and Kelly. The great sham
and pretence with which America has so long
tried to impose on Europe, that there were no

" THE DEBTOR CLASS" 229

classes in the United States, ought at last to be
formally swept away, and proper legal provision
made for the protection of a body of men which
has been in all ages the object of atrocious oppres-
sion, and seems in America, strange to say, to
constitute the larger portion of the community.
In travelling through the country, too, he would
be constantly on the lookout for the debtors. He
would ask in the cities for the " debtors' quarter,"
and when introduced to a gentleman in the cars or
in the hotels, would inquire privately whether he
was a debtor or a creditor, so as to avoid hurting
his feelings by indiscreet allusion to specie or con-
traction. His amazement would be very great on
learning that there was no way of telling whether
an American citizen was either debtor or creditor ;
that the " debtor class " was not to be found, as
such, in any part of the country, or, indeed, any-
where but in the brains of the Logans and Mor-
tons, and was introduced into the debates simply
as a John Doe or Kichard Koe, to give a little
vividness to the speaker's railings against prop-
erty.

Now, as in every civilized society, the vast ma-
jority of the population of this country are in debt,
to some slight degree. It is only paupers, crim-
inals, and lunatics who owe absolutely nothing.
The day -laborer is pretty sure to have a small bill

230 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

at the grocer's, and all his neighbors, in the ascend-
ing grades of commercial respectability, no mat-
ter how prompt and accurate they may be in the
'discharge of their obligations, are sure to owe the
butcher and baker and milkman a greater or less
amount. In fact the conduct of life on a cash
basis would be impossible or intolerable. Of
course, too, there are scattered all over the country
men who owe a great deal of money and to whom
little is due, and whose interest it would be to have
the coinage adulterated. But then the number of
these persons is very small, and they are mostly
great speculators, who pass for rich men, and whose
interests Congress is in reality not in the least de-
sirous of protecting. Poor men, as a rule, are
hardly ever greatly in debt, because nobody will
trust them. We suspect that the number of those
in this city who could borrow fifty dollars without
security would not be found to be over one-twen-
tieth of the population. The persons to whom
loans are made by banks, insurance companies,
and other institutions are almost all men of wealth
or men who have the conduct of great enterprises,
and do not need legislation to help them to take
care of themselves. They are great merchants, or
manufacturers, or brokers, or contractors, or rail-
road-builders. In fact, in so far as the debtors
can be called a class, they form a very small class,

" THE DEBTOR CLASS" 231

and a class of remarkable shrewdness and of enor-
mous power, over whom it is ludicrous for the
Government to exercise a fatherly care.

The bulk of the population in this, as in every
moderately prosperous community in the western
world is composed of creditors. The creditor class,
in other words, contains the great body of the
American people, and any legislation intended to
enable debtors to cheat is aimed at nineteen-twen-
tieths, at the very least, of American citizens.
Any man who remains very long in the position of
a debtor simply, and acquires no footing as a cred-
itor, disappears from the surface of society. Bank-
ruptcy or the house of correction is pretty sure to
overtake him. It would be wellnigh impossible in
this large city or in any other to find a man who
had no pecuniary claims on someone else. The
humblest hod-carrier becomes a creditor every day
after making his first ascent of the ladder, and re-
mains so until Saturday night, and continually re-
places himself in " the creditor class," as long as
life and health remain to him ; and the same
phenomenon presents itself in all fields of industry.
Every sewing-girl and maid-servant is looking for-
ward to a payment of earned money, and has the
strongest interest in knowing for certain what its
purchasing power will be.

All depositors in savings-banks, and their num-

232 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

ber in New York City is greater than that of the
voters, belong to the creditor class ; all holders of
policies of insurances, all owners of government
bonds and State and bank stocks, belong to it
also. The Western farmers and house-owners who
have borrowed money at the East on bond and
mortgage, who probably make as near an approach
to a debtor class as any other body or persons in
the community, and whom Congressional dema-
gogues probably hoped to serve by enabling them
to outwit their creditors, even these are not simply
or mainly debtors. Any man who is carrying on his
business with borrowed money, on which he pays
eight or ten per cent., must be every week putting
other people in debt to him or he would speedily
be ruined. The means of paying those who have
trusted him is acquired by his trusting others.
Either he is selling goods on credit, or entering
into contracts, or rendering services which give him
the position of a creditor, and make it of the last
importance to him that the value of money and
the state of the public mind about money should
not be materially different six months hence from
what they are now.

Of course there is more than one way of defining
the term "self-interest." There is one sense in
which it is used by children, savages, and thieves,
and which makes it mean immediate gratification,

" THE DEBTOR CLASS" 233

and this appears to be the sense in which it is
used by the inflationists in Congress, in consider-
ing what is for the good of those Western men
who owe money at the East. In that sense, it is
a good thing for a man to lie, cheat, steal, and
embezzle whenever it shall appear that by so
doing he will satisfy his appetites or put money
in his pockets. But civilized and commercial,
to say nothing of Christian, society is founded
on the theory that men look forward and expect
to carry on business for several years, and to lay
up money for their old age, and establish their
children in life, and that they recognize the ne-
cessity of self-restraint and loyalty to engage-
ments. The doctrines, on the other hand, which
are preached in Congress about the best mode of
dealing with debts — that is, with other people's
money — have never before been heard in a civil-
ized legislature, or anywhere outside of a council
of buccaneers, and, if acted on by the community,
would produce anarchy. The fact that Morton and
Butler, who preach them and get them embodied
in forms of words called "acts," are legislators,
disguises, but ought not to disguise, the other
fact, that these two men are simply playing the
part of receivers or "fences." There probably
never was a more striking illustration of the im-
morality in which, as it was long ago remarked,

234 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

any principle of government is sure to land people
if pushed to its last extreme, than the theory
which is now urged on our attention — that supe-
riority of numbers will justify fraud ; or, in other
words, that if the number of those who borrow
should happen to be greater than the number of
those who lend, "a vote" is all that is needed to
wipe out the debts, either openly or by payment
in bits of paper or pebbles. Of course, the con-
verse of this would also be true — that if the lend-
ers were in a majority, they would be justified in
reducing the debtors to slavery. If the question
of humanity or brotherhood were raised as an ob-
jection, that, too, could be settled by a ballot. We
laugh at the poor African who consults his wooden
fetish before he takes any step in the business of
his wretched and darkened life ; but when a Cau-
casian demagogue tries to show us that the springs
of justice and truth are to be found in a compar-
ison of ten thousand bits of paper with nine thou-
sand similar bits, we listen with gravity, and are
half inclined to believe that there is something
in it.

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION

IT is quite evident that with the multiplication
of colleges, which is very rapid, it will, before
long, become impossible for the newspapers to
furnish the reports of the proceedings in and
about commencement which they now lay before
their readers with such profuseness. The long
letters describing with wearisome minuteness what
has been described already fifty times will un-
doubtedly before long be given up. So also, we
fancy, will the reports of the " baccalaureate ser-
mons," if these addresses are to retain their value
as pieces of parting advice to young men. There
is nothing in the newspaper literature, on the
whole, less edifying, and sometimes more amus-
ing, than the reporter's precis of pulpit discourses,
so thoroughly does he deprive them of force and
vigor and point, and often of intelligibility. The
ordinary sermon addressed on Sunday to the ordi-
nary congregation deals with a great variety of
topics, and from many different points of view, and
with more or less diversity of method. The bac-

236 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

calaureate sermon, on the other hand, consists,
from the necessity of the case, in the main of
advice to youths at their entrance on life, and the
substance of such discourses can, in the nature of
things, undergo no great change from year to year,
and must be strikingly similar in all the colleges.
Any freshness they may have they must owe to
the rhetorical powers of particular preachers, and
even these cannot greatly vary in dealing with
so familiar a theme. "What the old man has to
say to the young man, the teacher to the pupil,
the father to the son, at the moment when the
gates of the great world are flung open to the col-
lege graduate, has undergone but little modifica-
tion in a thousand years, and has become very
well known to all collegians long before they
take their degree. To make the parting words
of warning and encouragement tell on ears that
are now eager for other and louder sounds, every-
thing that can be done needs to be done to pre-
serve their freshness and their pathos, and cer-
tainly nothing could do as much to deprive them
of both one and the other as hashing them up
annually in a slovenly report as part of the news
of the day.

It is not, however, the advice contained in bac-
calaureate sermons, but all advice to young men,
that needs in our time to be dealt out with great-

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION 237

er circumspection and economy. Authority has
within the last hundred or even fifty years under-
gone a serious loss of power, and this loss of power
has shown itself nowhere more markedly than in
the work of education. It has indeed almost com-
pletely changed the relation of parents and chil-
dren, and teachers and scholars, so that it is now
almost as necessary to prove the reasonableness
and utility of any course of action which is required
of boys as of mature men. Persuasion has, in
other words, taken the place of command, and
there is nobody left whose dictum owes much of its
weight to his years or his office. Boys as well as
their elders now expect advice to be based on per-
sonal experience, and do not listen with any great
seriousness or deference to admonitions the value
of which the utterer has not himself personally
tested.

It follows, therefore, that the persons whom the
young men of our time hear most readily on the
conduct of life are those who have had practical
acquaintance with the difficulties of living up to
the ideals which are so eloquently painted in the
college chapel, and who have found out in their
own persons what it costs to be pure and upright,
and faithful and industrious, and persistent in the
struggle that goes on in the various callings which
lie outside the college walls. For this reason,

238 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

probably, no addresses at commencement have
the value of those which are delivered now and
then by men who have come back for a brief day
to tell the next generation of the way life looks to
those who for years have been wrestling with its
problems, and have had actual experience of the
virtues and defects of that early equipment and
training on which such enormous sums are now
spent in this country. The more advice from this
quarter young men get the better. Nobody can
talk so effectively to them at the moment when
they are about to face the world on their own re-
sponsibility as the lawyers and merchants and
ministers and politicians who have been facing it
for twenty-five or thirty years with all the outward
signs of success. If it were possible for every col-
lege in the country to get one such man at com-
mencement whose powers of expression would do
justice to his experience, and who for this one day
in the year would without fear or favor tell what
he thought about success and about the conditions
of success — about the kind of troubles which beset
men in the callings with which he is most famil-
iar— we should probably soon have a body of ad-
vice so impressive and fruitful that it would serve
the needs and excite the interest of more than one
generation. The young have been told to be good

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION 239

until they have grown weary of hearing it, partic-
ularly as it is always represented to them as a
comparatively simple matter, and when they go
out in the world and find what a hard and complex
thing duty is they are very apt to look back to the
ethical instruction of their college as when in col-
lege they looked back to the admonitions of the
nursery, and return to their alma mater in later
years with much the feeling with which a man
visits a kindly old grandmother.

But commencements certainly draw forth noth-
ing so curious as the newspaper article addressed
to the graduating class, and which now seems to be
a regular part of the summer's editorial work. It
seems to have one object in view, and only one,
and that is preventing th'e graduate from thinking
much of his education and his degree, or supposing
that they will be of any particular use to him in
his entrance on life, or make him any more accept-
able to the community. He is warned that they
will raise him in nobody's estimation, and prove
rather a hinderance than a help to him in getting a
living, and that it will be well for him to begin his
career by trying to forget that he has ever been in
college at all. Not unfrequently the discourse
closes with a suggestion or hint that the best
university is, after all, the office of " a great daily,"

340 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

and that the kindest thing a fond father could do for
a promising boy would be to start him as a local
reporter and make him get his first experience of
life in the collection of " city items." There is in
all this the expression, though in a somewhat
grotesque form, of a widespread popular feeling
that nothing is worthy of the name of education
which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly
and dexterously. Considering with how large a
proportion of the human race the mere feeding
and clothing of the body is the first and hardest of
tasks, there is nothing at all surprising in this
view. But the preservation and growth of civiliza-
tion in any country depends much on the extent
to which it is able out of its surplus production to
provide some at least of ils people with the means
of cherishing and satisfying nobler appetites than
hunger and thirst. The immense sum which is now
spent every year on colleges — misspent though
much of it may be — and the increasing number of
students who throng to them, regardless of the fact
that the training they get may make them at first
feel a little strange and helpless in the fierce strug-
gle for meat and drink, show that the increasing
wealth of the nation is accompanied by an increas-
ing recognition of the fact that life, after all, is not
all living, that there are gains which cannot be en-

COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION 241

tered in any ledger, and that a man may carry
about with him, through a long and it may be out-
wardly unfortunate career, sources of pleasure and
consolation which are none the less precious for
being unsalable and invisible.
16

"OKGANS"

THE untimely decease of the Bepublic, the paper
which was set up some months ago to express in a
semi-official way the views of the Administration
and its immediate adherents on public questions,
has a good deal that is tragic about it, as far as its
principal conductor is concerned. That a man of
as much experience of politics and of newspapers
as Mr. Norvell, the editor, had, should have sup-
posed it possible to start a daily morning paper in
this city at a time when a successful daily is worth
millions, and when there are four already in posses-
sion of the field, without any other claims on popu-
lar attention than its being the mou^h-piece of the
leading politicians of the party in power, and with a
capital which in his dreams only reached $500,000,
and in fact only $40,000, is a curious though sad
illustration of the power of the press over the im-
agination even of persons long familiar with it.
The failure of the enterprise, however distressing
in some of its aspects, is valuable as establishing
more conspicuously and firmly than ever two facts

" ORGANS" 243

I

of considerable importance in relation to journal-
ism. One is, that when politicians so deeply de-
sire an organ as to be willing to set one up for
the exclusive use of the party, it is a sure sign that
the party is in serious danger of extinction. The
other is, that the public mind is so fully made up
that the position of a newspaper ought to be a
judicial one, that all attempts to make a paper
avowedly partisan can only be saved from commer-
cial failure by large capital, extraordinary ability,
and well-established prestige.

" Organs " t«K>k their rise when the sole use of a
newspaper was to communicate intelligence, and
when men in power found it convenient to have a
channel through which they could let out certain
things which they wished to be spread abroad.
Out of this kind of relation to the Government a
small paper, which did not object to the humble
role of a sort of official gazette, from which the
earlier newspapers indeed differed but little, could,
of course, always get a livelihood, and perhaps a
little of the dignity which comes from having or
being supposed to have state secrets to keep. But
the gradual addition to tfce " news-letter " of the
sermon known as a " leader " or " editorial article "
made the relation more and more difficult and
finally impossible. The more pompous, porten-
tous, and prophetic in their character the editor's

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

•

comments on public affairs became, the less dis-
posed was the public to allow him to retain the po-
sition of a pai& agent of the State. It began to feel
toward him as it would have felt toward the town-
crier if he had put on a gown and bands, and insist-
ed on accompanying his announcement of thefts
and losses with homilies on the vanity of life and
the right use of opportunities. The editor had, in
short, to conduct his business in a manner befit-
ting his newly assumed duties as a prophet ; and
to pretend at least that his utterances were wholly
independent and were due simply to a desire for
k the public good, as a prophet's ought to be. It is
NjNr very rare indeed that a government is able to
indite a well-established newspaper of the first
class to act as its organ in the proper sense of
thafe term, except by working on the vanity of ed-
itors. Almost all editors are a little sensitive
abput the imputation of being mere commentators
or critics, and a little desirous of being thought
" practical men," by those engaged in the actual
working of political machinery. The " old editor "
in this country in fact preferred to be thought a
working politician, and liked to use his paper as a
piece of political machinery for producing solid
party gains, and in this way to be received into
the circle of " workers " and " managers " as one
of themselves ; and to retain this position he was

"ORGANS" rr

always willing to " write up " any dew they sug-
gested. His successor, though he cares less about
being " a worker," and is able to secure the attend-
ance of politicians at his office without running
after them, is, nevertheless, more or ]ess flattered
by the confidences of men in power, and it often
takes only a small amount of these confidences to
make him surrender the judicial position and ac-
cept that of an advocate, and stand by them through
thick and thin. But no leading journal has ever
tried this position in our day very long without
being forced out of it by the demand of the public
for impartiality and the consequent difficulty of
avoiding giving offence in official quarters. Ev*L/
administration does things either through its chief
or subordinates which will not bear defence, and
which its judicious friends prefer to pass over in
silence. But a journalist cannot keep silent. The
Government may require him to hold his tongue,
but the reader demands that he shall speak ; and
as the public supplies the sinews of war, and pays
for the prophet's robes, he is sooner or later com-
pelled to break with the Government and to re-
proach it for not listening to the advice of its friends
in time.

Moreover, in a country in which the press is free
and newspapers abound, a party which contains a
majority of the people cannot fail to have the sup-

246 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

port of a large and influential portion of the press.
Its conductors, though prophets, do not wear
camel's hair, nor is their diet locusts and wild
honey. They form part of the community, live
among the voters, and share, to a greater or less
extent, their prejudices and expectations and
sympathies. Every party, therefore, is sure, as long
as it has a strong hold on the public, of having a
strong hold on the press, and of having a consider-
able number of the most influential editors among
its defenders. One of the sure signs that it is
losing its hold on the public is the defection of the
press or its growing lukewarrnness. Newspapers
cannot, perhaps, build a party up or pull one down,
but when you see the newspapers deserting a party
it is all but proof that the agencies which dissolve
a political organization are at work. The success-
ful editors may have no originating power or no
organizing power, and no capacity for legisla-
tion, and may even want the prophetic instinct ;
but a certain intuitive sense of the direction in
which the tide of popular feeling is 'running is the
principal condition of their success, and an anxious
politician may therefore always safely credit them
with possessing it. If they had not had it, their
papers would not have succeeded.

If the incident or its lessons should result in
establishing better relations between political men

" ORGANS" 247

and the press, the sacrifice of the unfortunate pro-
jector of the Republic will, however, be a small price
to pay for a great gain. We do not, as our readers
know, set up to be champions of the press, and
have certainly never shown any disposition to
underrate its defects or shortcomings. But there
is one thing which no candid and careful observer
can avoid seeing, and that is that the press of
the country, as an instrument of discussion and
popular education, has undergone within twenty
years an improvement nothing analogous to which
is to be found in the class of politicians. The
newspapers are now, in the vast majority of cases
in all our leading cities, conducted by men who
are familiar with the leading ideas of our time and
with the latest advances in science and the art, in-
cluding the art of government, and who write under
the influence of these ideas and these advances,
and wffo have consequently got a standard of
efficiency in legislative administration which has
not yet made its way into the political class.
The result ,isr that, after making all possible al-
lowance for the carelessness and recklessness
and dishonesty 6f reporters, and the personal
biases and enmities of editors, the men who car-
ry on the Government, excepting a few experts,
have become objects of criticism on the part of
the daily press, the depreciatory tone of which

248 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

is not wholly unjustifiable or unnatural, and pol-
iticians repay this contempt with a hatred which
is none the less fierce for having no adequate means
of expression.

EVIDENCE ABOUT CHAEACTEE

THERE has been during the week a loud and in-
creasing demand for the application of the legal
process of discovering truth to the Tilton-Beecher
case. People ask that it be carried into court, not
only because all witnesses might thus be com-
pelled to appear and testify, but because apparent-
ly there is, in the minds of many, a peculiar virtue
in " the rules of evidence " used by lawyers. Wit-
nesses examined under these rules are supposed
to receive from them a strong stimulus in veracity
and explicitness, while they at once expose prevar-
ication or concealment. One newspaper eulogist
went so far the other day as to pronounce the
rules the product of the wisdom of all ages, begin-
ning with the Phoenicians and coming down to
our own time. There is, however, only one good
reason that we know of for carrying any attack on
character into court, and that is the obvious one,
that the courts only can compel those who are
supposed to know anything about a matter of liti-
gation to appear and state it. But we do not know

250 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

of any other advantage which can be claimed for a
trial in court, in such a case, over a trial before a
well-selected lay tribunal. " The rules of evidence "
in use in our courts are not, as too many persons
seem to suppose, deductions from the constitution
of the human mind, or, in other words, natural
rules for the discovery of truth under all conditions.
On the contrary, they are a system of artificial
presumptions created for the use of a tribunal of
a somewhat low order of intelligence, and are in-
tended to produce certain well-defined and limited
results, which the law considers generally bene-
ficial. They have, that is to say, grown up for the
use of the jury. The large number of exclusions
which they contain are due simply to a desire to
prevent jurymen's being confused by kinds of tes-
timony which they are not supposed to have learn-
ing or acumen enough to weigh. If anyone will
go into the City Hall and listen to the trial of even
a trifling cause, he will find that the proceedings
consist largely in the attempt of one lawyer to
have certain facts laid before the jury and the at-
tempts of the other to prevent it, the judge sitting
as arbiter between them and applying the rules of
admission and exclusion to each of these facts as it
comes up. If he examines, too, in each instance
what it is that is thus pertinaciously offered and
pertinaciously opposed, he will find that it almost

EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER 251

invariably has something to do with the controversy
before the court — it may be near or more re-
mote— but still something. Consequently it has,
logically, a certain bearing on the case, or is, under
the constitution of the human mind, proper evi-
dence. When the judge says it is irrelevant, he
does not mean that it is logically irrelevant ; he
means that it has been declared irrelevant on certain
grounds of expediency by the system of jurispru-
dence which he administers. He refuses to let ifc go
to the jury because he thinks it would befog them
or turn their attention away from the " legal issue '
or, in other words, from the one little point on
which the law compels the plaintiff and defendant
to concentrate their dispute, in order to render it
triable at all by the peculiar tribunal which the
Anglo-Saxon race has chosen for the protection of
its rights.

It follows that our rules of evidence are un-
known on the European continent and in every
country in which courts are composed of judges
only — that is, of men with special training and
capacity for the work of weighing testimony — or in
which the legal customs have been created by such
courts. There the litigants follow the natural
order, and carry with them before the bench every-
thing that has any relation to the case whatever,
and leave the court to examine it and allow it its

252 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

proper force. Our own changes in the law of evi-
dence are all in this direction. The amount, of ex-
cluded testimony — that is, of testimony with which
we are afraid to trust the jury — has been greatly
diminished during the last few years, and, consid-
ering the growth of popular intelligence, properly
diminished. The tendency of legislation now is
toward letting the jury hear everybody — the plain-
tiff and defendant, the prisoner, the wife, the hus-
band, and the witness with a pecuniary interest in
the result of the trial — and put its own estimate
on what the testimony amounts to. But neverthe-
less, even now, who is there that has ever watched
the preparation of a cause for trial who has not
listenened to lamentations over the difficulty or
impossibility of getting this or that important fact
before the jury, or has not witnessed elaborate
precautions, on one side or another, to prevent
some fact from getting before the jury ? The skill
of a counsel in examining or cross-examining a
witness, for instance, is shown almost as much by
what he avoids bringing out as by what he brings
out, and no witness is allowed to volunteer any
statement lest he should tell something which,
however pertinent in reality, the rules pronounce
inadmissible.

Now, rules of this kind are singularly unsuited
to the conduct of inquiries touching character. It

EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER 253

is true the law provides a process nominally for
the vindication of character, called an action for
libel, but the remedy it supplies is not a vindica-
tion properly so called, but a sum of money as a
kind of penalty on the libeller, not for having
assailed you, but for not having been able to prove
his case under the rules of evidence. In a suit for
libel, too, the parties fight their battle in the strict
legal order — the plaintiff, that is to say, stands
by and challenges the defendant to produce his
proofs, and then fights bitterly through his counsel
to keep out as much of the proof as he can. He
supplies no evidence himself that is not strictly
called for, and proffers no explanation that does
not seem necessary to procure an award of pecun-
iary damages, and takes all the pains possible to
bring confusing influences to bear on the jury.
When we consider, too, that the jury is composed
of men who may be said to be literally called in
from the street, without the slightest regard to
their special qualifications for the conduct of any
inquiry, and that they are apt to represent popular
passions and prejudices in all conspicuous and
exciting cases, we easily see why a trial by a jury,
under the common-law rules of evidence, is not
the process through which a high-minded man
who sought not for " damages," but to keep his
reputation absolutely spotless in the estimation

254 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

of his neighbors, would naturally seek his vindica-
tion.

It cannot be too often said, in these times when
great reputations are so often assailed and so often
perish, that nobody who has not deliberately chosen
the life of a stoical recluse is justified either in re-
fusing to defend his reputation or in defending it
by technical processes if any others are within his
reach. It is, of course, open to any man to say
that he cares nothing for the opinion of man-
kind, and will not take the trouble to influence it
in any manner in regard to himself. But, if he
says so, he is bound not to identify with himself,
in any manner, either great interests or great
causes. If he makes himself the champion of
other people's rights, or the exponent of impor-
tant principles, or has through any power of his
achieved an influence over other people's minds
sufficiently great to make it appear that certain
doctrines or ideas must stand or fall by him, he
has surrendered his freedom in all that regards the
maintenance of his fame.

It is no longer his only to maintain. It has
become, as it were, embodied in popular morality,
been made the basis of popular hopes, and a test
under which popular faith or approval is bestowed
on a great variety of ways and means of living.
Such a man is bound to defend himself from the

EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER 255

instant at which he finds the assaults on him begin
to tell on the public conception of his character.
Dignified reserve is a luxury in which it is not
permitted to him to indulge ; and when he comes
to defend himself, it must not be with the calculat-
ing shrewdness of the strategist or tactician. The
only rules of evidence of which he can claim the
benefit are the laws of the human mind. The
tribunal, too, before which he seeks reparation
should not be what the state supplies only, but the
very best he can reach, and it should, if possible,
be composed of men with no motive for saving
him and with no reason for hating him, and with
such training and experience as may best fit them
for the task of weighing his enemy's charges and
his own excuses and explanations. His course
before such a tribunal, too, should be marked by
ardor rather than by prudence. He should chafe
under delay, clamor for investigation, and invite
scrutiny, and put away from him all advisers
whose experience is likely to incline them to chi-
cane or make them satisfied with a technical vic-
tory. Such men are always dangerous in delicate
cases. He should not wait for his accuser to get
in all his case if the substantial part of it is
already before the court, because his answer ought
not, as in a court of law, to cover the complaint
simply and no more. It ought to contain a plain

256

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

unvarnished tale of the whole transaction, and not
those parts only which the accusation may have
touched, because his object is not only to wrest a
verdict of " not proven " from his judges, but to
satisfy even the timid and sensitive souls whose
faith in their idols is so large a part of their moral
life, not only that he is not guilty, but that he
never even inclined toward guilt.

PHYSICAL FOKCE IN POLITICS

THE late discussion on the possibility or expedi-
ency of maintaining governments at the South
which had no physical force at their disposal has
not failed to attract the attention of the friends
of woman suffrage. They see readily what, in-
deed, most outsiders have seen all along, that the
failure of the numerical majority in certain South-
ern States to hold the power to which the law en-
titled them simply because they were unable or
unwilling to fight, has a very important bearing
on the fitness of women to participate in the prac-
tical work of government, and a well-known writer,
" T. W. H.," in a late number of the Woman's
Journal, endeavors to show that what has hap-
pened at the South is full of encouragement for
the woman suffragists. His argument is in sub-
stance this : You (the opponents) have always
maintained as the great objection to the admission
of women to the franchise, that if women voted,
cases might arise in which the physical force of
the community would be in the hands of one party
17

258 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

and the legal authority in those of the other, and
we should then witness the great scandal of a
majority government unable to execute the laws.
We have just seen at the South, however, that the
possession of physical force is not always suf-
ficient to put the majority even of the male voters
in possession of the Government. In South Caro-
lina and Louisiana the Government has been seized
and successfully held by a minority, in virtue of
their greater intelligence and self-confidence. To
use his own language :

" The present result in South Carolina is not a
triumph of bodily strength over weakness, but, on
the contrary, of brains over bodily strength. And
however this reasoning affects the condition of
South Carolina —which is not here my immediate
question — it certainly affects, in a very important
degree, the argument for woman suffrage. If the
ultimate source of political power is muscle, as is
often maintained, then woman suffrage is illogical ;
but if the ultimate source of political power is, as
the Nation implies, c the intelligence, sagacity, and
the social and political experience of the popula-
tion,' then the claims of women are not impaired.
For we rest our case on the ground that women
equal men on these points, except in regard to po-
litical experience, which is a thing only to be ac-
quired by practice.

PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS 259

" So the showing of the Nation is, on the whole,
favorable to women. It looks in the direction of
Mr. Bagehot's theory, that brains now outweigh
muscle in government. Just in proportion as
man becomes civilized and comes to recognize
laws as habitually binding, does the power of
mere brute force weaken. In a savage state the
ruler of a people must be physically as well as
mentally the strongest ; in a civilized state the
commander-in-chief may be physically the weakest
person in the army. The English military power
is no less powerful for obeying the orders of a
queen. The experience of South Carolina does
not vindicate, but refutes, the theory that muscle
is the ruling power. It shows that an educated
minority is more than a match for an ignorant
majority, even though this be physically stronger.
Whether this forbodes good or evil to South Caro-
lina is not now the question ; but so far as woman
suffrage is concerned, the moral is rather in its
favor than against it."

What is singular in all this is, that the writer
is evidently under the impression that the term
" physical force " in politics means muscle, or, to
put the matter plainly, that the fact that the South
Carolina negroes, who unquestionably surpass the
whites in lifting power, could not hold their own
against them, shows that government has become

360 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

a mere question of brains, and that as women have
plenty of brains, though they can lift very little,
they could perfectly well carry on, or help to carry
on, a government which has only moral force on
its side.

Now, as a matter of fact, there has been no re-
cent change in the meaning attached to " physical
force " in political nomenclature. It does not mean
muscle or weight now, as we see in South Caro-
lina; and it has never meant muscle or weight
since the dawn of civilization. The races and na-
tions which have made civilization and ruled the
world have done so by virtue of their possessing
the very superiority, in a greater or less degree,
which the Carolina whites have shown in their late
struggle with the blacks. The Greeks, the Ro-
mans, the Turks, the English, the French, and the
Germans have all succeeded in government — that
is, in seizing and keeping power — not through
superiority of physical force which consists in
muscle, but through the superiority which con-
sists in the ability to organize and bring into the
field, and reinforce large bodies of men, with the
resolution to kill and be killed in order to have
their own way in disputes. No matter how much
intelligence a people may have, unless they are
able and willing to apply their intelligence to the
art of war, and have the personal courage necessary

PHYSICAL FORGE IN POLITICS 261

to carry out in action the plans of their leaders,
they cannot succeed in politics. Brains are neces-
sary for political success, without doubt, but it
must be brains applied, among other things to the
organization of physical force in fleets and armies.
An " educated minority," as such, is no more a
match for a " physically stronger ignorant major-
ity " than a delicate minister for a pugilist in " con-
dition," unless it can furnish well-equipped and
well-led troops. The Greeks were better educated
than the Romans, but this did not help them. The
Romans of the Empire were vastly more intelligent
and thoughtful than the Barbarians, but they could
not save the Empire. The Italians of the Middle
Ages were the superiors of the French and Ger-
mans in every branch of culture, and yet this did
not prevent Italy being made the shuttlecock of
northern politicians and free-booters. The French
overran Germany in the beginning of the present
century, and the Germans have overrun France
within the last ten years, not in either case owing
to superiority in lifting or boxing, or in literary
" culture," but to superiority in the art of fighting —
that is, of bringing together large bodies of armed
men who will not flinch, and will advance when
ordered on the battle-field.

It is skill in this art which is meant by the
term " physical force " in politics, and it is this

262 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

physical force which lies behind all successful
government. The superiority of the North in
numbers, wealth, machinery, literature, and com-
mon schools would have profited it nothing, and
the American Republic would have disappeared
from the map if it had not been possible, thirty
years ago, to apply a vast amount of intelligence
to the purposes of destruction, and to find large
numbers of men willing to fight under orders. In
quiet times, under a government in which the nu-
merical majority and the intelligence and property
of the community are on the same side, and take
substantially the same views of public polity, and
the display of coercive force, except for ordinary
police purposes, is not called for, we not unnatu-
rally slide readily into the pleasant belief that gov-
ernment is purely a moral agency, and that people
obey the law through admiration of intellectual
power and the dread of being " cornered " in argu-
ment, or of being exposed as selfish or lawless.

Such occurrences as the late civil war and the
recent deadlock at the South are very useful in un-
covering the secret springs of society, and remind-
ing people of the tremendous uncertainties and
responsibilities by which national as well as indi-
vidual life is surrounded, reminding the voter, in
short, that he may not always- be able to discharge
his duty to the country by depositing his ballot in

PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS 263

the box ; that he may have to make the result sure
by putting everything he values in the world at
stake. The poor negroes in South Carolina have
not been deposed simply because they are igno-
rant ; the Russian peasants who fought at Borodino
were grossly ignorant. How many of the Eng-
lish hinds who stood rooted in the soil at Water-
loo could read and write ? The Carolinian major-
ity failed because it did not contain men willing
to fight, or leaders capable of organization for
military purposes, or, in other words, did not pos-
sess what has since the dawn of civilization been
the first and greatest title to political power. The
Carolinian minority did not drive their opponents
out of the offices by simply offering the spectacle
of superior intelligence of self-confidence, but by
the creation of a moral certainty that, if driven to
extremities, they would outdo the Eepublicans in
the marshalling, marching, provisioning, and ma-
noeuvring of riflemen.

If this be true, it will be readily seen that the
lesson of the South Carolina troubles, far from
containing encouragement for the friends of female
suffrage, is full of doubt and difficulty. Those
who believe that women voters would constitute a
new and valuable force in politics must recognize
the possibility that they would at some time or
other constitute the bulk of a majority claiming

364 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the government, and they must also recognize the
probability that the male portion of this majority
would be composed of the milder and less energet-
ic class of men, people with much brains and but
little physical courage, ready to go to the stake for
a conviction, but not ready to shoulder a musket
or assault a redoubt. If under these circumstances
the minority, composed exclusively of men, infe-
rior if you- will, to the majority in the purity of
their motives, the breadth of their culture, and in
capacity for drawing constitutions and laws and
administering charities, should refuse to obey the
majority, and should say that its government was
a ridiculous " fancy " government, administered by
crackbrained people, and likely to endanger prop-
erty and the public credit, and that it must be
abolished, what would the women and their " gen-
tlemen friends" do? They would doubtless re-
monstrate with the recusants and show them the
wickedness of their course, but then the recusants
would be no more moved by this than Wade
Hampton and his people by Mr. Chamberlain's
eloquent and affecting inaugural address. They
would tell the ladies that their intelligence was
doubtless of a high order, and their aims noble,
but that as they were apparently unable to supply
policemen to arrest the persons who disobeyed
their laws, their administration was a farce and its

PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS 265

disappearance called for in the interest of public
safety. Accordingly it would be removed to the
great garret of history, to lie side by side with in-
numerable other disused plans for human improve-
ment.

The cause of much of the misconception about
the part played by physical force in modern so-
ciety now current in reformatory circles is doubt-
less to be found in the disappearance of sporadic
and lawless displays of it, such as, down to a very
recent period, seriously disturbed even the most
civilized communities. The change that has taken
place, however, consists not in the total disuse of
force as a social agency, but in the absorption of all
force by the government, making it so plainly ir-
resistible that the occasions are rare when anything
approaching to organized resistance or defiance of
it is attempted. When it lays its commands on a
man he knows that obedience will, if necessary, be
enforced by an agency of such tremendous power
that he does not think of revolt. But it is not the
high intelligence of those who carry it on that he
bows to ; it is to their ability to crush him like an
egg-shell. Of course, it is not surprising that his
submissiveness should at meetings of philanthro-
pists be ascribed to the establishment of a consen-
sus between his mind and the mind of the law-
giver, or in other words, the subjection of society

266 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

to purely moral influences ; but it is perhaps well
that complications like those of South Carolina
should now and then occur to infuse sobriety into
speculation and explain the machinery of civiliza-
tion.

"COUKT CIRCLES"

THE passionate excitement created in Canada
by the arrival of a daughter of the Queen, and the
prospect of the establishment of " a court " in Ot-
tawa which will have the appearance of a real court
— that is, a court with blood royal in it, instead of
a court held merely by the Queen's legal repre-
sentatives— is a phenomenon of considerable in-
terest. It affords a fresh illustration of that
growth of reverence for royalty which all the best
observers agree has for the last forty years been
going on in England, side by side with the growth
of democratic feeling and opinion in -politics — that
is, the sovereign has more than gained as a social
personage what she has lost as a political person-
age. The less she has had to do with the govern-
ment the more her drawing - rooms have been
crowded, and the more eager have people become
for personal marks of her favor.

The reason of this is not far to seek. It lies
in the enormous increase during that period in
the size of the class which is not engaged in

268 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

that, to the heralds, accursed thing — trade, and has
money enough to bear the expense of "a presen-
tation," and of living or trying to live afterward
in the circle of those who might be invited to
court, or might meet the Prince of Wales at din-
ner. The accumulation of fortunes since the
Queen's accession has been very great, and they
have, however made, come into possession now
of a generation which has never been engaged in
any occupation frowned on by the Lord Cham-
berlain, and which owns estates, or at all events
possesses all outward marks of gentility, when it
has been received by the Queen, and has got into
Burke's Dictionary at the end of an interesting
though perhaps apocryphal genealogy. This re-
ception is the crown of life's struggle, a sort of
certificate that the hero or heroine of it is fit com-
pany for anybody in the world. It is, in fact, a
social graduation. When you get somebody who
is himself a graduate to agree to present you, and
the Lord Chamberlain, after examining your card,
makes no objection to you, he virtually furnishes
you with a sort of diploma which guarantees you
against what may be called authorized snubs.
People may afterward decline your invitations on
the ground that they do not like you, or that your
entertainments bore them, but not on the ground
that your social position is inferior to their own.

"COURT CIRCLES" 269

That the straggle for this diploma in a wealthy
and large society should be great and increasing is
nothing wonderful. The desire for it among the
women especially, to whose charge the creation
and preservation of " position " are mainly com-
mitted, is very deep. It inflames their imagina-
tion in a way which makes husbands ready for
anything in order to get it, and in fact makes it
indispensable to their peace of mind and body
that they should get it as soon as their pecuniary
fortune seems to put it within their reach. Since
the Queen ascended the throne the population has
risen from 20,000,000 to 35,000,000, and the num-
ber of great fortunes and presentable people has
increased in a still greater ratio, and the pressure
on the court has grown correspondingly ; but there
remains after all only one court to gratify the
swarm of new applicants. The colonies, too, have
of late years contributed largely to swell the tide.
Every year London society and the ranks of the
landed gentry are reinforced by returned Austra-
lians and New Zealanders and Cape-of-Good-
Hopers and China and India merchants, who feel
that their hard labors and long exile have left life
empty and joyless until they see the names of their
wives and daughters in the Gazette among the
presentations at a drawing-room or levee.

In the colonies, and especially in Canada, where

270 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

there is so little in the local life to gratify the
imagination, the court shines with a splendor which
the distance only intensifies. To a certain class
of Canadians, who enjoy more frequent oppor-
tunities than the inhabitants of the other great
colonies of renewing or fortifying their love of the
competition of English social life, and of the marks
of success in it, the court, as the fountain of honor,
apart from all political significance, is an object of
almost fierce interest. In England itself the signs
of social distinction are not so much prized. This
kind of Canadian is, in fact, apt to be rather more
of an Englishman than the Englishman himself in
all these things. He imitates and cultivates English
usages with a passion which takes no account of
the restrictions of time or place. It is " the thing "
too in Canadian society, as in the American colony
in Paris, to be much disgusted by the " low Amer-
icans " who invade the Dominion in summer, and
to feel that even the swells of New York and Bos-
ton could achieve much improvement in their man-
ners by faithful observation of the doings in the
Toronto and Ottawa drawing-rooms. .

As far as admiration of courts and a deep de-
sire for court-life and a belief in the saving grace
of contact with royalty can go, therefore, there are
Canadians fully prepared for the establishment of
a court " in their midst." The society of the prov-

"COURT CIRCLES" 271

ince was, in fact, in an imflammable eagerness to
kiss hands, and back out from the presence of
royalty, and perform the various exercises pertain-
ing to admission to court circles, and in a proper
state of Jingo distrust of the wicked Czar and his
minions — which in the Colonies is now one of the
marks of gentility — when the magician, Lord Bea-
consfield, determined to apply the match to it by
sending out a real princess. In spite of his con-
tempt for the " flat-nosed Franks," however, he
can hardly have been prepared for the response
which he elicited. He cannot have designed to
make monarchy and royalty seem ridiculous, and
yet the articles and addresses and ceremonies with
which the new Governor-General and his wife
have been received look as if the Minister had de-
termined, before he died, to have the best laugh of
his farcical career over the barbarians who have
called him in to rule over them. A court is a very
delicate thing, and a strong capacity for enjoying
it does not of itself make good courtiers. In Eng-
land the reasons which prevent a man's being re-
ceived at court — such as active prosecution of the
dry-goods business — are a thousand years old ; in
fact, they may be said to have come down from
the ancient world along with the Boman law.
They have, therefore, a certain natural fitness and
force in the eyes of the natives of that country.

273 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

That is, it seems to " stand to reason " that a
trader should not go to court. Moreover, they can
be enforced in England and still leave an abundant
supply of spotless persons for the purposes of
court society. The court-line is drawn along an
existing and well-marked social division.

In Canada this preparation for court gayeties
does not exist. If the persons soiled by commerce
were to be excluded from the princess's presence,
she would lead a lonely and dismal life, and the
court would be substantially a failure. If, on the
other hand, the court is to be made up exclusive-
ly of rich traders, it will not only excite the fiercest
jealousies and bitterness among those who are
excluded, but it will be very difficult to provide a
rule for passing on claims for presentation when
once the line of official position is passed. But, it
may be said, why not throw all restrictions aside
and admit everybody, as at White House recep-
tions ? Nobody will ask this question who has
mastered even the rudiments of royalty, and we
shall not take the trouble of answering it fully.
We are now discussing the question for the benefit
of persons of some degree of knowledge. Suffice
it to say that any laxity of practice at Ottawa
would do a good deal of damage to the monarchi-
cal principle itself, which, as Mr. Bagehot has
pointed out, owes much of its force and perma-

"COURT CIRCLES" 273

nence even in England to its hold on the imagina-
tion. The princess cannot go back to England
receiving Tom, Dick, and Harry in Canada with-
out a certain loss of prestige both for herself and
her house.

Not the least curious feature of the crisis is the
interest the prospect of a Canadian court has ex-
cited in this country. Our newspapers know what
they are about when they give whole pages to ac-
counts of the voyage and the reception, including
a history of the House of Argyll and a brief sketch
of the feelings of Captain the Duke of Edinburgh,
now on the Halifax Station, over his approaching
meeting with his sister. They recognize the ex-
istence of a deep and abiding curiosity, at least
among the women of our country, about all that
relates to royalty and its doings, in spite of the
labor expended for nearly a century by orators
and editors in showing up the vanity and hollow-
ness of monarchical distinctions. In fact, if the
secrets of American hearts could be revealed, we
fear it would be found that the materials for about
a million of each order of nobility, from dukes
down, exist among us under quiet republican ex-
teriors, and that if a court circle were set up among
us no earthly power could prevent its assuming
unnatural and unmanageable proportions. A
prince like the late Emperor Maximilian, whose
18

S74 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

purse was meagre but whose connection with a
reigning house was unquestioned and close, might
find worse ways of repairing his fortune than set-
ting up an amateur court in some of the Atlantic
cities and charging a moderate fee for presen-
tation, and drawing the line judiciously so as to
keep up the distinction without damaging his
revenues. To prevent cutting remarks on the
members of the circle, however, and too much ridi-
cule of the whole enterprise, he would have to give
the editors high places about his person, and pro-
vide offices for the reporters in his basement. If
the scheme were well organized and did not at-
tempt too much, its value in settling people's
" position," and in giving the worthy their proper
place without the prolonged struggles they now
have sometimes to undergo, would be very great,
and it would enable foreign students of our institu-
tions to pursue successfully certain lines of inquiry
into our manners and customs in which they are
now too often baffled.

LIVING IN EUEOPE AND GOING TO IT

EVERY year a great deal of discussion of the best
mode of spending the summer, and the course of
the people who go to Europe, instead of submit-
ting to the discomfort and extortion of American
hotels, is for the most part greatly commended.
The story told about the hotels and lodging-houses
is the same every year. The food is bad, the rooms
uncomfortable, and the charges high. The fash-
ion, except perhaps at Newport and Beverly, near
Boston, Bar Harbor, and one or two other highly
favored localities, grows stronger and stronger, to
live in the city in the winter and spend the three
hot months in France or England or Switzerland.
Moreover, the accounts which come from Europe
of the increase in the number of American colo-
nists now to be found in every attractive town of
the Continent are not exactly alarming, but they
are sufficient to set people thinking/ The number
of those who pass long years in Europe, educate
their children there, and retain little connection
with America beyond drawing their dividends,

276 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

grows steadily, and as a general rule they are per-
sons whose minds or manners or influence makes
their prolonged absence a sensible loss to our
civilization. Moreover, when they come back,
they find it difficult to stay, and staying is not
made easy for them. People here are a little sus-
picious of them, and are apt to fancy that they
have got out of sympathy with American institu-
tions, and have grown too critical for the rough
processes by which the work of life in America has
in a large degree to be done. They themselves,
on the other hand, besides being soured by the
coldness of their reception, are apt to be disgusted
by the want of finish of all their surroundings, by
the difficulty with which the commoner and coarser
needs are met in this country, and by the reluc-
tance with which allowance is made by legislation
and opinion for the gratification of unusual or un-
popular tastes.

The result is a breach, which is already wide,
and tends to widen, between the class which is
hard at work making its fortune and the class
which has either made its fortune or has got all it
desires, which is the same thing as a fortune.
There is a gre"at deal of work which this latter
would like to do. There is a great deal of the
work of legislation and administration and educa-
tion for which it is eminently fitted, but in which,

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT 277

nevertheless, it has little or 110 chance of sharing,
owing to the loss of the art of winning the confi-
dence of others, and working with others, which is
more easily learned in America than elsewhere, and
which is readily lost by prolonged residence in any
European country, and the absence of which here
makes all other gifts for practical purposes almost
worthless. So that it must be said that the
amount of intellectual and aesthetic culture which
an American acquires in Europe is somewhat
dearly purchased. When he gets home, he is apt
to find it a useless possession, as far as the world
without is concerned, unless he is lucky enough, as
sometimes but not often happens, to drop into
some absorbing occupation or to lose his fortune.
Failing this, he begins that melancholy process of
vibration between the two continents in which an
increasingly large number of persons pass a great
part of their lives, their hearts and affections
being wholly in neither.

The remedy for the mania for living abroad is an
elaborate one, and one needing more time for its
creation. No country retains the hearty B affection
of its educated class which does not feed its imagi-
nation. The more we cultivate men, the higher
their ideals grow in all directions, political and
social, and they like best the places in which these
ideals are most satisfied. The long and varied

278 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

history of older countries offers their citizens a
series of pictures which stimulate patriotism in the
highest degree ; and it will generally be found that
the patriotism and love of home of the cultivated
class is in the ratio of the supply of this kind of
food. They are languid among the Russians, and
among the Germans prior to the late war, as com-
pared to the English and French. In default of
a long history, however, historic incidents are apt
to lose their power on the imagination through
over-use. The jocose view of Washington and of
the Pilgrim Fathers, of Bunker Hill and of the
Fourth of July, already gains ground rapidly
among us, through too great familiarity. When
Professor Tyndall, in one of his lectures here, made
an allusion which he meant to be solemn and im-
pressive, to Plymouth Rock, its triteness drew a
titter from the audience which for a moment con-
founded him.

Unluckily, history cannot be made to order.
It is the product of ages. The proper substi-
tute for it, as well as for the spectacular effects of
monarchy, in new democratic societies, is per-
fection. There is no way in which we can here
kindle the imaginations of the large body of men
and women to whom we are every year giving an
increasingly high education so well as by finish in
the things we undertake to do. Nothing does so

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT 279

much to produce despondency about the republic,
or alienation from republican institutions, among
the young of the present day, as the condition of
the civil service, the poor working of the post-
office and the treasury or the courts, or the help-
lessness of legislators in dealing with the ordinary
every-day problems. The largeness of the country,
and the rapidity of its growth, and the compara-
tively low condition of foreign nations in respect
to freedom, which roused people in Fourth-of- July
orations forty years ago, have, like the historical
reminiscences, lost their magic, and the material
prosperity is now associated in people's minds with
so much moral corruption that the mention of it
produces in some of the best of us a feeling not
far removed from nausea. Nothing will do so
much now to rouse the old enthusiasm as the
spectacle of the pure working of our administra-
tive machinery, of able and independent judges,
a learned and upright bar, a respectable and pu-
rified custom - house, an enlightened and effi-
cient treasury, and a painstaking post-office. The
colleges of the country and the railroads, and in-
deed everything that depends on private enterprise,
are rapidly becoming objects of pride ; but a good
deal needs to be done by the government to pre-
vent its being a source of shame.

Mrs. Stevenson, a Philadelphia lady, the presi-

280 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

dent of the Civic Club in that city, delivered an
address to the club some weeks ago on its work of
reform, in which we find the following passage :

" There seems to exist a mysterious, unwritten
law governing the social organism which causes a
natural and wholesome reaction to take place when-
ever tendencies, perhaps inherent in certain
classes, threaten to become general, and thereby
dangerous to the community. A few years ago,
for instance, with the increasing facilities for for-
eign travel, and the corresponding increase of in-
ternational intercourse, Anglomania had become so
much in vogue as to form an incipient danger to
the true democratic American spirit that consti-
tutes the real strength of our nation. It was fast
becoming a national habit to extol everything Eu-
ropean— from monarchy and its aristocratic insti-
tutions down to the humblest article of dress or of
household use — to the detriment of everything
American ; and from the upper c four hundred '
this habit was fast extending to the upper forty
thousand. But just as our wealthy classes were
beginning to make themselves positively ridiculous
abroad, and almost intolerable at home, a reaction
set in, and upon all sides there sprang up patriotic
associations of a social order — ( Sons and Daugh-
ters of the [Revolution,' * Colonial Dames,' etc.—
which revived proper American self-respect among

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT 281

our people by teaching us to rest our pride, if
pride we must have, where it legitimately should
rest — upon good service rendered to our own coun-

try."

This seems to be a shaft aimed at the practice
of " going to Europe," for the decline of " the true
American spirit " and the growth of Anglomania
are ascribed to the " increasing facilities for foreign
travel " and " the corresponding increase of inter-
national intercourse." If the charge be true, it is
one of the most afflicting ever made, because it
shows that "the true democratic American spirit"
suffers from what the world has hitherto consid-
ered one of the greatest triumphs of modern
science, and one of the greatest blessings conferred
on the race — the enormous improvement in oceanic
steam navigation ; that, in fact, American patriot-
ism is very much like the Catholic faith in the
Middle Ages — something naturally hostile to prog-
ress in the arts.

If, too, the practice of going to Europe be dan-
gerous to American faith and morals, the number
of those who go makes it of immense importance.
There is probably no American who has risen
above very narrow circumstances who does not go
to Europe at least once in his life. There is
hardly a village in the country in which the man
who has succeeded in trade or commerce does not

282 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

announce his success to liis neighbors by a trip to
Europe for himself and his family. There is
hardly a professor, or teacher, or clergyman, or
artist, or author who does not save out of a sal-
ary, however small, in order to make the voyage.
Tired professional or business men make it con-
stantly, under the pretence that it is the only way
they can get " a real holiday." Journalists make
it as the only way of getting out of their heads
such disgusting topics as Croker and Gilroy, and
Hill and Murphy. Kich people make it every
year, or oftener, through mere restlessness. "VVe
are now leaving out of account, of course, immi-
grants born in the Old World, who go back to see
their friends. We are talking of native Ameri-
cans. Of course, all native Americans cannot go,
because, even when they can afford it, they cannot
always get the time. But we venture on the prop-
osition that there is hardly any American "in
this broad land," as members of Congress say,
who, having both time and money, has not gone to
Europe, or does not mean to go some day or other.
So that, if Mrs. Stevenson's account of the moral
effects of the voyage were true, it would show that
the very best portion of our population, the most
moral, the most religious, and the most educated
were constantly exposing themselves by tens of
thousands to most debasing influences.

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT 283

But is it true ? We think not. Americans who
go to Europe with some knowledge of history, of
the fine arts, and of literature, all recognize the
fact that they could not have completed their edu-
cation without going. To such people travel in
Europe is one of the purest and most elevating of
pleasures, for Europe contains the experience of
mankind in nearly every field of human endeavor.
They often, it is true, come back discontented with
America, but out of this discontent have grown
some of our most valuable improvements — libraries,
museums, art-galleries, colleges. What they have
seen in Europe has opened their eyes to the possi-
bilities and shortcomings of their own country.
To take a familiar example, it is travel in Europe
which has done most to stimulate the movement
for municipal reform. It is seeing London and
Paris, and Berlin and Birmingham, which has done
most to wake people up to the horrors of the
Croker-Gilroy rule, and inflame the determination
to end it as a national disgrace. The class of
Americans who do not come back discontented are
usually those who had no education to start with.

" Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll ! "

So, even when standing on the Acropolis at
Athens or in the Tribuna at Florence, they feel

384 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

themselves sadly " out of it." They think long-
ingly of Billy or Jimmy, and the coffee and cakes
of their far Missouri or Arkansas home, and come
back cursing Europe and its contents. No dam-
age is ever done by foreign travel to the " true
democratic American spirit " of this class.

And now as to " Anglomania," a subject to be
handled with as much delicacy as an anarchist
bomb. Anglomania in one form or other is to be
met with in all countries, especially France and
Germany, and has shown itself here and there all
over the Continent ever since the peace of 1815.
The things in which it most imitates the English
are riding, driving, men's clothes, sports in general,
and domestic comfort. The reason is that the Eng-
lish have for two centuries given more attention
to these things than any other people. No other
has so cultivated the horse for pleasure purposes.
No other has devoted so much thought and money
to suitability in dress and to field sports. No
other has brought to such perfection the art of liv-
ing in country houses. In all these things people
who can afford it try to imitate them. We say,
with a full consciousness of the responsibility
which the avowal entails on us, that they do right.
It is well in any art to watch and imitate the man
who has best succeeded in it. The sluggard has
been exhorted even to imitate the ant, and anyone

LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT 285

who wishes to ride or drive well, or dress appro-
priately, or entertain in a country house, ought to
study the way the English do these things, and
follow their example, for anything worth doing
ought to be done well. It is mostly in these
things that Anglomania consists.

Mrs. Stevenson, we fear, exaggerates greatly the
number of Anglomaniacs. A few dozen are as
many as are to be found in any country, and any
government or polity which their presence puts
in peril ought to be overthrown, for assuredly it is
rotten to the core. There is nothing, in fact,
better calculated to make Americans hang their
heads for shame than the list of small things
which one hears from " good Americans," put our
institutions in danger. We remember a good old
publisher, in the days before international copy-
right, who thought we could not much longer
stand the circulation of British novels. Their
ideas, he said, were dangerous to a republic. An
Anglomaniac can hardly turn up his trousers on
Fifth Avenue without eliciting shrieks of alarm
from the American patriot. And yet a more
harmless creature really does not exist.

These matters are worth notice because we are
the only great nation in the world whom people
try to preach into patriotism. The natives of
other countries love their country simply, naturally,

286 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

and for the most part silently, as they love their
mothers and their wives. But to get an American
to do so he has, one would think, to be followed
about by a preacher with a big stick exhorting
him to be a " good American," or he will catch it.
But nobody was ever preached into love of country.
He may be preached into sacrifices in its behalf, but
the springs of love cannot be got at by any system
of persuasion. No man will love his country un-
less he feels it to be lovable ; and it is to making
it lovable that the exertions of those who have
American patriotism in charge should be devoted.
Every Good American may take comfort in the
fact that very few people indeed of any social or
political value who have once lived in America
ever want again to live in Europe, unless they go
for purposes of study or education. For there is
no question that there is no country in the world
in which the atmosphere is so friendly, and in
which one is so sure of sympathy in misfortune, of
acceptance on his own merits independently of
birth or money, and has so many opportunities of
escape from the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, as America. These are the things which,
after all, in the vast majority of cases, win and
hold the human heart ; and a country which has
them can well afford to let its citizens travel, and
even let some of them " be early English if they can."

CAELYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE

THE numerous articles called forth by Carlyle's
" Reminiscences," botli in this country and in Eng-
land, while varying greatly in the proportions in
which they mix their praise and blame, leave no
doubt that there has occurred a very strong re-
vulsion of feeling about him, so strong in England
that we are told that the subscriptions for a pro-
posed memorial to him have almost if not entirely
ceased. The censure which Carlyle's friends are
visiting on Mr. Froude for his indiscretion in
printing the book, though deserved, has done but
little to mitigate the severity of the judgment
passed on the writer himself. In fact, we are in-
clined to believe that Mr. Froude's want of judg-
ment rather helps to deepen the surprise and
disappointment with which the book has been re-
ceived, as affording an additional proof of the
feebleness of Carlyle's own powers in estimating
the people about him. That, after heaping con-
tempt on so many of whom the world has been ac-
customed to think highly, he should have retained

288 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

to the last his confidence in, and respect for, a per-
son capable of dealing his fame such a deadly
blow as Mr. Froude, not unnaturally increases the
irritation with which the public has read his rec-
ollections of his friends and contemporaries.
The " disillusion and disenchantment " worked by
the book, in so far as it affects Carlyle's fame as
a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune, and a very
serious one. What it was he preached when his
preaching first startled the world, but very few
now undertake to say, and these few by no means
agree in their story. His influence, apparently,
was not of the kind which reaches a man through
articulate speech, but rather that which comes
through the blast of a trumpet or the marching
tune of a good band, and fills the heart with a
feeling of capacity for high endeavor, though one
cannot say in what particular field it is to be dis-
played. But though he founded no school and
taught no system of morals, his eminence as a
mere preacher was one of the very valuable posses-
sions of the Anglo-Saxon world, as a sort of stand-
ing protest against the materialistic tendencies of
the age ; and this eminence rested a good deal on
the popular conception of the elevation of his own
character. This conception has undoubtedly,
whether justly or unjustly, been greatly shaken,
if not destroyed, by 'the revelation that invidious

CARLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE 289

comparison between himself and others was al-
most a habit of his life ; that, while preaching pa-
tient endurance, he did not himself endure patiently
even the minor ills of existence ; that, when look-
ing at the fine equipages at Hyde Park Corner,
he had to support himself by " sternly thinking "
— " yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I
am at ; " that his mental attitude during the prep-
aration of most of his books was that of a man
not properly appreciated who was going to cast
pearls before swine ; or, in other words, the atti-
tude of an ordinary literary man burdened with
too much vanity for his powers, and more con-
cerned about the effect his work was likely to
have on his personal fortunes than on the mental
or moral condition of the world. While full of
contempt for sciolists and pretenders and news-
papers, he wrote, and was ready to write, on the
American war without any knowledge of the facts,
and scorned Darwinism without ever bestowing
a thought on it. Carlyle's public were long ago
conscious, as one of his critics has said, that he
canted prodigiously about cant, and talked volu-
minously in praise of silence ; but then it recog-
nized that much repetition has always the air of
cant, and that to persuade men to be silent, as well
as to do anything else, one must talk a great deal.
A prophet has to be diffuse and loud, and often
19

290 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

shrill, and his disciples will always forgive any
number of mistakes in method or manner as long
as they believe that behind the preaching there is
perfect simplicity and self-forgetfulness. That
this belief has been weakened in many minds with
regard to Carlyleby the " Reminiscences " there is
no question, and the consequence of it is that the
Anglo-Saxon world has lost one of its best pos-
sessions ; and it is a kind of possession which no
apologies or explanations, and no proof of Mr.
Fronde's indiscretion, can restore.

There is, however, some compensation in the
catastrophe. If there was nothing positive in Car-
lyle's moral teachings, if nobody could extract
from his earlier utterances anything more definite
than advice to "be up and doing with a heart for
every fate," there was in the political teachings of
his later works something very positive and defi-
nite, and something which he managed to surround
with some of the diviner light of his first arraign-
ments of modern civilization. There is, for in-
stance, nothing in literature more ingenious than the
way in which he presents Cromwell as the apostle of
" truth " during the campaigns in Ireland after the
death of the King. He lets slip no opportunity t>f
setting forth the importance of those military oper-
ations as a means of bringing " truth " to the Irish,
so much so that the reader at last begins to ex-

CARLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE

291

pect the revelation of some formula in which the
Lord-General presented the truth to them. But
long before the end is reached one finds that the
only truth which Cromwell was spreading in Ire-
land was the simple one that anybody who re-
sisted him in arms would probably be knocked on
the head. This collocation of truth and superior-
ity of physical force, and of falsehood and weak-
ness, was, in fact, worked into all Carlyle's writ-
ings of a political character, and did, through his
writings, become a very positive political influence
after the generation which was roused by the first
blasts of his moral trumpet had grown old, or had
passed away. To most men under fifty, in fact,
Carlyle is more known as a very truculent political
philosopher than as a moralist, and most of his
later imitators — Mr. Froude for one — have imi-
tated him rather in preparing the way of the
Strong Man in government, and recommending the
helpless and forlorn to strip for a salutary dozen
on the bare back, than in preaching self-knowledge
or the inner worship of the " veracities."
•% -That the effect of this on English politics has
been bad, and very bad, during the past thirty
years few will deny. It beyond question has had
an evil influence on English opinion both about
Ireland and about India, and about the civil war
in the United States. It had much to do with

293 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

the production of that great scandal, the defence
of Governor Eyre, by nearly the whole of London
society. Nay, we think we are not far wrong in
saying that it did much to prepare the way for
that remarkable episode in English history, the
late administration of Lord Beaconsfield, with its
jingo fever ; its lavish waste of blood and treasure ;
its ferocious assertion of the beauty of national
selfishness ; its contempt for all that portion of the
population of Turkey which was weak and subject
and unhappy. When one contrasts the spirit in
which John Stuart Mill approached all such sub-
jects in his day, his patient pursuit of the facts,
his almost over-earnest efforts to get at the point
of view of those who differed with him, his steady
indifference to his own fame in dealing with all
public questions, and then reads the contemptu-
ous way in which Carlyle disposes of him in the
" Keminiscences," one gets, we were going to say,
an almost painful sense of the contrast between
the influence of the two men on their day and gen-
eration.

In so far as the " Eeminiscences," therefore,
ruin Carlyle as a politician, their publication must
be considered a gain for the English race. The
particular political vice his influence fostered, that
nobody who cannot thrash you in fight is worth
listening to, is, it must be said, a vice peculiar to

CAMLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE 293

the English race. It is only in the Anglo-Saxon
forum that a man of foreign birth and unfamiliar
ways of thinking has to obtain a locus standi by
making himself an object of physical terror. The
story which has lately gone the rounds of the
papers, of Carlyle's discussion with some Irish-
man who got the better of him in an argument in
support of the logical right of the Irish to manage
their own affairs, in which he met his opponent in
the last resort in half-humorous vehemence by in-
forming him that he would cut his throat before he
would let him have his independence, is not a bad
expression of the spirit which has governed Eng-
lish policy in dealing with dependent communi-
ties. There is a certain wisdom and justice in
exacting from every malcontent who asks for great
changes in his condition some strong proof of his
earnestness ; but it is a test which has to be ap-
plied with great discretion, which nations that
have made a great fortune with a strong right hand
are not likely to apply with discretion, and which
is apt to make weakness seem ridiculous as well as
contemptible. The history of English politics for
fifty years at least has been the history of the ef-
forts of the nation to accustom itself to some other
than the English standard of political respectabil-
ity, to familiarize itself with the idea that pacific
people, and poor people, and queer people had

294 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

something to say for themselves, aud were entitled
to a place in the world. To the success of that
effort it is safe to say that Mr. Carlyle's political
writings have been more or less of an obstacle,
and that the destruction of his influence will con-
tribute something to the solution of some of the
more serious pending problems of English politics.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER
RESORT

NOTHING is more remarkable in the history of
American summering than the number of new re-
sorts which are discovered and taken possession of
by " the city people " every year, the rapid increase
in the means of transportation both to the moun-
tains and the sea, and the steady encroachments of
the cottager on the boarder in all the more desir-
able resorts. The growth of the American watering-
place, indeed, now seems to be as much regulated
by law as the growth of asparagus or strawberries,
and is almost as easy to foretell. The place is
usually first discovered by artists in search of
sketches, or by a family of small means in search
of pure air, and milk fresh from the cow, and
liberty — not to say license — in the matter of dress.
Its development then begins by some neighboring
farmer's agreeing to take them to board — a thing
he has never done before, and does now unwill-
ingly, and he is very uncertain what to charge
for it. But at a venture he fixes what seems to him
an enormous sum — say $5 to $7 a week for each

296 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

adult. His ideas about food for city people are,
however, very vague. The only thing about their
tastes of which he feels certain is that what they
seek in the country is, above all things, change,
and that they accordingly do not desire what they
get at home. Accordingly he furnishes them with
a complete set of novelties in the matter of food
and drink, forgetting, however, that they might
have got them at home if they pleased. The tea
and coffee and bread differ from what they are
used to at home simply in being worse. He is,
too, at the seaside, very apt to put them on an ex-
clusively fish diet, in the belief that it is only
people who live by the sea who get fish, and that city
people, weary of meat, must be longing for fish.
The boarders, this first summer, having persuaded
him to take them, are of course too modest to
remonstrate, or even to hint, and go on to the end
eating what is set before them, and pretending
to be thankful, and try to keep up their failing
strength by being a great deal in the open air, and
admiring the scenery. After they leave, he is apt
to be astonished by the amount of cash he finds
himself possessed of, probably more than he ever
handled before at one time, except when he mort-
gaged his farm, and comes to the conclusion that
taking summer boarders is an excellent thing, and
worth cultivating.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT 297

In the next stage he seeks them, and perhaps is
emboldened by the advice of somebody to adver-
tise the place, and try to get hold of some editors
or ministers whose names he can use as references,
and who will talk it up. He soon secures one or
two of each, and they then tell him that his house
is frequented by intellectual or " cultured " people ;
and he becomes more elated and more enterpris-
ing, enlarges the dining-room, adds on a wing, re-
lieves his wife of the cooking by hiring a woman
in the nearest town, and gives more meat and
stronger coffee, and, little by little, grows into a
hotel-keeper, with an office and a register. His
neighbors, startled by his success, follow his ex-
ample, it may be only longo intervallo, and soon the
place becomes a regular " resort," with girls and
boys in white flannel, lawn-tennis (which succeeds
croquet), a livery-stable, stages, an ice-cream store
with a soda-water fountain, a new church, and
with strange names taken out of books for the
neighboring hills and lanes and brooks.

This stage may last for years — in some places it
has been known to last thirty or forty without any
change, beyond the opening of new hotels — and it
becomes marked by crowds of people, who go back
every year in the character of old boarders, get the
best rooms, and are on familiar terms of friendship
with the proprietor and the older waiter - girls.

298 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

But it may be brought to a close, and is now being
brought to a close in scores of American watering-
places, by the appearance of the cottager, who has
become to the boarder what the red squirrel is to
the gray, a ruthless invader and exterminator.
The first cottager is almost always a boarder, so
that there is no means of discovering his approach
and resisting his advances. In nine cases out of
ten he is a simple guest at the farm-house or the
hotel, without any discoverable airs or pretensions,
on whom the scenery has made such an impression
that he quietly buys a lot with a fine view. The
next year he builds a cottage on it, and gradually,
and it may be at first imperceptibly, separates
himself in feeling and in standards from his fellow-
boarders. The year after he is in the cottage, and
the mischief is done. The change has come.
Caste has been established, with all its attendant
evils. The community, once so simple and homo-
geneous, is now divided into two classes, one of
which looks down on the other. More cottages
are built, with trim lawns and private lawn-tennis
grounds, with "shandy-gaff" and "tennis-cup"
concealed on tables in tents. Then the dog-cart
with the groom in buckskin and boots, the Irish
red setter, the saddle-horse with the banged tail,
the phaeton with the two ponies, the young men in
knickerbockers carrying imported racquets, the

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT 299

girls with the banged hair, the club, ostensibly for
newspaper reading, but really for secret gin-fizzes
and soda-cocktails, make their appearance, with
numerous other monarchical excrescences. The
original farmer, whose pristine board was the be-
ginning of all this, has probably by this time sold
enough land to the cottagers to enable him to give
up taking boarders and keeping a hotel, and is able
to stay in bed like a gentleman most of the winter,
and sit on a bench in his shirt-sleeves all summer.
Very soon the boarder, unable to put up with
the growing haughtiness of the cottager, and with
exclusion from his entertainments, withdraws si-
lently and unobtrusively from the scenes he once
enjoyed so much, to seek out another unsophisti-
cated farmer, and begin once more, probably when
well on in life, with hope and strength abated, the
heavy work of opening up another watering-place
and developing its resources. The silent suffering
there is in this process, which may be witnessed
to-day in hundreds of the most beautiful spots in
America, probably none know but those who have
gone through it. In fact, the dislodgment along
our coast and in our mountains of the boarder by
the cottager is to-day the great summer tragedy
of American life. Winter has tragedies of its
own, which may be worse ; but summer has noth-
ing like it, nothing which imposes such a strain on

300 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

character and so severely tests early training.
The worst of it — the pity of it, we might say — is
that this is not the expulsion of the inferior by the
superior race, which is going on in so many parts
of the world, and which Darwin is teaching us to
look upon with equanimity. The boarder is often,
if not generally, the cottager's superior in culture,
in acquirements, and in variety of social expe-
rience. He does not board because he likes the
food, but simply because it enables him to live in
the midst of beautiful scenery. He eats the far-
mer's poor fare contentedly, because he finds it is
sufficient to maintain his sense of natural beauty
and the clearness of all his moral perceptions un-
impaired, and to brace his nerves for the great
battle with evil which he has been carrying on in
the city, and to which he means to return after a
fortnight or a month or six weeks, as the case may
be. We fear, in fact, that very few indeed of our
summer cottages contain half so much noble en-
deavor and power of self-sacrifice as the boarding-
houses they are displacing.

The progress made by the cottager in driving
the boarder away from some of the most attractive
places, both in the hills and on the seaboard, is
very steady. Among these Bar Harbor occupies
a leading position. It was, for fully fifteen years
after its discovery, frequented exclusively by a very

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMED RESORT 301

high order of boarders, and probably has been the
scene of more plain living and high thinking than
any other summer spot on the seacoast. It was,
in fact, remarkable at one time for an almost un-
healthy intellectual stimulation through an exclu-
sively fish diet. But the purity of the air and the
grandeur of the scenery brought a yearly increas-
ing tide of visitors from about 1860 onward. These
visitors were, until about five years ago, almost
exclusively boarders, and the development of the
place as a summer resort was prodigious. The
little houses of the original half farmers, half fish-
ermen, who welcomed, or rather did not welcome,
the first explorers, grew rapidly into little board-
ing-houses, then into big boarding-houses, then
into hotels with registers. Then the hotels grew
larger and larger, and the callings of the steamer
more frequent, until the place became famous
and crowded.

All this while, however, the hold of the boarder
on it remained unshaken. He was monarch of all
he surveyed. No one on the island, except the
landlords, held his head higher. There was one
distinction between boarders, but it was not one
to wound anybody's self-love : some were " meal-
ers," or persons eating in the hotel where they
lodged ; and others were " haul-mealers," or per-
sons who were collected and brought to their food

302 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

in wagons. But this classification produced no
heart-burning. The mealer loved and respected
the haul-mealer, or wished him in Jericho, and
the haul-mealer in like manner the mealer, on
general grounds, like other persons with whom he
came in contact, without any reference to his place
of abode. All were covered by the grand old name
of boarder, and that was enough. A happier,
easier, freer, and more curiously dressed summer
community than Bar Harbor in those early days
was not to be found on our coast.

We do not know exactly when the cottager first
made his appearance on those rugged shores, but
it is certain that his approaches were more insid-
ious than they have ever been anywhere. He did
not proclaim himself all at once. The first cot-
tages were very plain structures, which he cun-
ningly spoke of as " shanties," or " log huts," in
which he simply lodged, and went to the hotels or
neighboring farm-houses for his food in the sim-
ple and unpretending character of a haul-mealer.
For a good while, therefore, he excited neither sus-
picion nor alarm, and the hotel-keepers welcomed
him heartily, and all went on smoothly. Gradu-
ally, however, he threw off all disguise, bought
land at high prices, and began unblushingly to
erect " marine villas " on it, with everything that
the name implies. He has now got possession of

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT 303

all the desirable sites from the Ovens down to the
Great Head, and has surrounded himself with all
the luxuries, just as at Newport. The consequence
is, although the sea and sky and the mountains
and the rocks retain all their charm, the boarder
is no longer happy. He finds himself relegated to
a secondary position. He is abashed when on foot
or in his humble buckboard he meets the haughty
cottager in his dog -cart or victoria. He has
neither dog nor horse, while the cottager has both.
He was once proud of staying at Kodick's or Ly-
man's ; now he begins to be ashamed of it. He
finds that the cottagers, who are the permanent
residents, have a society of their own, in which he
is either not welcome or is a mere outsider. He
finds that the very name of boarder, which he once
wore like a lily, has become a term of inferiority.
Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with
a still lower class, known at Bar Harbor as " the
tourist" — elsewhere called the excursionist — who
comes by the hundred on the steamers in linen
dusters, and is compelled by force of circumstances
to " do " Mount Desert in twenty-four hours, and
therefore enters on his task without shame or
scruple, roams over the cottager's lawn, stares into
his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks
him for a free lunch. The boarder, of course,
looks down on this man, but when both are on the

304 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

road or on the piazza of the hotel how are they to
be distinguished ? They are not, and cannot be.

The worst of it all is, however, that the boarder
finds that the cottager has enclosed some of his
favorite walks. He can no longer get to them
without trespassing or intruding. He can only
look wistfully from the dusty high-road at the spots
on which he probably once " rocked " with the girl
who is now his wife, or chopped logic with profes-
sional or clerical friends, whom " the growth of
the place " has long ago driven to fresh fields and
pastures new. There is something very interest-
ing and touching about these old Mount Deserters
of the first period, between 1860 and 1870, who
fled even before the enlargement of the hotels, and
to whom cottages at Bar Harbor are almost un-
thinkable. One finds them in undeveloped sum-
mer resorts in out-of-the-way places along the
American coast, often on the Alps or in Norway,
or on the Scotch lakes, still tender, and simple,
and unassuming, and cheery, older of course and
generally stouter, but with the memories of the
mountains, and the rocks, and tho islands, of the
poor food, " which made no difference, because the
air was fine," still as fresh as ever, but without a
particle of bitterness. They wander much, but
wander as they may they find no summer resorts
which can have for them the charm of French-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT 305

man's Bay or Newport Mountain, and no vehicle
which touches so many chords in their hearts as
the primeval buckboard, in the days when it could
only be hired as a great favor.

The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pre-
tensions as to territory. His policy, apparently
the old policy of the conqueror everywhere, is to
let the boarder go up the coast and discover the
most attractive resorts, and allow him to report
on them in the newspapers, write poetry about
them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them,
and then pursue him and eradicate him from the
soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes
a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the
boarder there is no denying. He covers it with
beautiful houses ; he converts the scraggy, yellow
pastures into smooth, green lawns ; he fills the
rock crevices with flowers ; he introduces better
food and neater clothing and the latest dodges
in plumbing. But these things are only for the
few — in fact, the very few. An area which sup-
ports a hundred happy boarders will only bring
one cottager to perfection. Moreover, it is im-
possible, no matter how much the country may
flourish, that all Americans who leave the city in
summer should by any effort become cottagers.
The mass of them must always be boarders and
remain boarders, and we would warn the cottagers
20

300 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

that it may become dangerous to push them too
hard and too far. Much farther east or north on
the coast they will not go without turning on their
persecutors. They will not put up with the shores
of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the
season may be. The survival of the fittest is a
great law, and has worked wonders in the animal
world, but it must be remembered that it has to
work in our day in subordination to that greater
law of morality which makes weakness itself a
strong tower of defence.

The future at all our leading seashore places, in
truth, belongs to the Cottager, and it is really use-
less to resist him. His march along the American
coast is nearly as resistless as that of the hordes
who issued from the plains of Scythia to over-
throw the Roman Empire. He moves on all the
" choice sites " without haste, with the calm and
remorselessness of the man who knows that the
morrow is his. He has two tremendous forces at
his back, against which no boarder can stand up.
One is the growing passion, or fashion, if any one
likes to call it so, of Americans to live in their
own houses, both summer and winter. This is
rapidly taking possession of all classes, from the
New England mechanic, who puts up his shanty or
tent on the seashore, to the millionaire who builds
his hundred-thousand dollar villa on his thirty-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT 307

thousand dollar lot. Everybody who can seeks to
be at home all the year round, let the home be
never so small or humble, and the life in it never
so rough. This is a change in the national man-
ners which nobody can regret, but it is a change
from which the boarder must suffer, and which
must cost him much wandering and many tears.
The other is the spread of the love of the seashore
among the vast population of the Mississippi
Valley, whose wealth is becoming great, for whom
long railroad journeys have no terrors, and who
are likely now to send their thousands every year
to compete with the " money kings " of the East
for the best villa sites along the coast. And be it
remembered that although our population doubles
every twenty-five years, our rocky Atlantic shore,
which is what all most love to seek — the sand is
tame and dreary in comparison — remains a fixed
quantity. It only extends from New York to
Eastport, Me., and it only contains a limited
number of building lots. These are now being
rapidly bought up and built on, or held on specu-
lation, and in some places, where land only brought
ten dollars an acre fifteen years ago, are held at
monstrous prices.

To fight against these tendencies is useless.
The wise boarder will not so do, nor waste his
time in bewailing his fate. It is absurd for him

308 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

to expect that long stretches of delightful shore
will be left wild and uninhabited and unimproved,
for him to walk over for three or four weeks every
summer. Not even the Henry George regime
would oust the cottager, for under it he would
simply rent what he owns; a cottager he would
still remain. Finally, the boarder must remember
that though the cottager, like woman, when he is
bad is very bad, when good is delightful. Noth-
ing the American summer has to show can sur-
pass a cottager, and we rejoice to know that the
number of good cottagers every year grows
larger. At his best though he may be stern in
the assertion of his rights of property, there is
no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the
moral earnestness with the want of which the more
austere boarder has been apt to reproach him,
grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made
and his place in order.

SUMMEB BEST

THE question has occurred to a good many, and
has been more than once publicly asked, When
do the people who frequent " Summer Schools "
of philosophy, theology, and the like, which are
now showing themselves at some of the watering-
places, get their rest or vacation? At these
schools both the lecturers or " paper " readers and
the audience are engaged in the same or nearly
the same work as during the rest of the year, and
therefore in summer get no rest. We have been
asked, for instance, whether a clergyman or pro-
fessor who has a period of leisure allotted to him
in summer, in order that he may " recruit," as it is
called, is not guilty of some sort of abuse of con-
fidence, if, instead of amusing himself or lying
fallow, he goes to a Summer School, and passes
several weeks in discussions which, to be profit-
able either to himself or his hearers, must put
some degree of strain on his faculties.

The answer undoubtedly is, that nobody goes to
a Summer School who could get refreshment

310 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

through sheer idleness. One of the greatest mis-
takes of the Middle Ages, and one which has come
down to our own time in education, in theology, and
in medicine, was that all men's needs, both spirit-
ual, mental, and physical, are the same ; and it long
made the world a dreadful place for the excep-
tional or peculiar. In most things we have given
up the theory. It was soonest given up as re-
gards food, because the evidence against it was
there plainest and most overwhelming, in the se-
vere suffering inflicted on some people by things
" disagreeing with them," as it was called, which
others relished and profited by. It has only been
surrendered with regard to children and youths,
however, after a hard struggle. The idea of a
young person being entitled to special treatment
of any kind — that is, having in any respect a
marked individuality — remains to this day odious
to a great many of our theologians and teachers.
It is, however, rapidly making its way, and has
already obtained a secure footing in some of the
colleges. It is the hotels, perhaps, which are
now the strongholds of the old doctrine, and in
which a person who wants what nobody else wants
is considered most odious ; partly, of course, be-
cause he gives extra trouble, but mainly because
he is considered to be given up to a delusion about
himself and his constitution. There is probably

SUMMER REST 311

nothing which excites the anger and contempt of a
summer-hotel clerk more than a request for some-
thing which is not supplied to everybody or which
nobody else asks for. We remember once irritat-
ing a White Mountain hotel-keeper extremelyby
asking to be allowed to ride up Mount Washington
alone, instead of in a party of forty. He not only
refused our request, but he punished us for mak-
ing it by selecting for our use the worst pony in
his stable, and watching us mounting it with a
diabolical sneer.

There is, however, still a good deal of intoler-
ance about people's mode of spending their vaca-
tion. Those who take it by simply sitting still or
lounging with no particular occupation, are more
or less worried by the people who take their rest
actively and with much movement and bustle. So
also the young man who goes off fishing and hunt-
ing, on the other hand, scorns the young man who
hangs about the hotels and plays lawn-tennis, or
goes to picnics with the girls — a rapidly diminish-
ing class, let us add. A correspondent, who takes
a low view of sermons, wrote to us the other day
complaining of some mention which recently ap-
peared in our columns of Mount Desert as a good
place for " tired clergymen," and wished to know
what there was to tire them, seeing that they did
nothing but produce two essays a week, which

312 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

need not be very original. The truth is, however,
that everybody's occupation, including that of the
young man who does nothing at all, does a great
deal to tire him. "What probably tires a minister
most is not the sermons, but his parishioners ; and
we suspect that nine-tenths of the ministers, if
they made a clean breast of it, would confess that
rest to them meant getting away from their parish-
ioners, and not in getting away from the sermons.
Sermon - writing in our day, when the area over
which a preacher may select his subject is so
greatly widened, is probably to a reflective man a
great help and relief, as furnishing what nearly
every student needs to stimulate study — a means
of expression. Sustained solitary thinking is
something of which very few men are capable. To
keep up what is called active-mindedness nearly
everyone needs somebody to talk to. Conversa-
tion with a friend is enough for most, but those
who have more to say find a sermon or a magazine
article just the kind of intellectual stimulus they
need. What probably most wears on a clergy-
man's nerves are his pastoral duties, which do not
consist simply in consoling people in great trials,
but in listening to their fussy accounts of small
ones. Nine-tenths of a minister's patients, like a
doctor's, do not know what is the matter with them,
and consult a physician largely because they take

SUMMER REST 313

comfort in talking to anybody about themselves,
and doctors and clergymen are the only persons
who are bound to listen to them. A professor or
teacher is somewhat similarly situated. His busi-
ness is the most wearing of human occupations —
that of putting knowledge into heads only half
willing to receive it, and persuading a large num-
ber of people to do their duty to whom duty is
odious.

To these men, a Summer School of philosophy
or theology, or anything else, must be repose of the
best sort. It gives light work of the kind they
love, free from all nagging, and in good air and
fine scenery. At such schools, too, one finds uses
for "papers" that no periodical will print, and
which no audience would assemble to listen to in a
city in the busy part of the year, and to many men
an audience of any sort, interested or uninterested,
is a great luxury.

The persons who perhaps find it hardest to get
rest in summer are brokers. Their activity in their
business and the excitement attending it are so
great, that quiet to them, more than to most other
men, is a hell ; so that their vacation is a problem
not easy of solution, except to the rich ones, who
have yachts and horses without limit. Even to
those, every day of a vacation has to be full of
movement and change. An hour not filled by some

314 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS*

sort of activity, spent on a piazza or under a tree,
is to them an hour wasted. A land where it was
always afternoon would be to them the most " odi-
ous section of country " on earth. The story of
one of them, who in Rome lost flesh through pi-
ning for " the corner of Wall and William," is well
known. Such a man finds nearly all summer re-
sorts vanity and vexation of spirit, because none
of them provides excitement. The class known as
financiers, such as presidents of banks and insur-
ance companies, is much better off, because it has
Saratoga. Its members have generally reached
the time of life when men love to sit still, and
when the liver is torpid, and they are generally
men of means, and wear black broadcloth at all
seasons, as being what they have from their youth
considered outward and visible signs of " respect-
ability " in the financial sense. What they need is
a place where they can have their livers roused
without exercise, and this the mineral water does
for them ; where they can see a good deal going
on and many evidences of wealth, without moving
from their chairs ; and where their financial stand-
ing will follow them ; and for this there is perhaps
no place in the country like Saratoga. Newport
has not nearly as much solidity. It is brighter
and gayer and more select, but though it contains
enormous fortunes, a great fortune does not here

SUMMER REST 815

do so much for a man. It has to bear the compe-
tition of youth and beauty and polo and lawn-
tennis. The young man with little besides a polo
pony, an imported racquet, and good looks counts
for a good deal at Newport ; at Saratoga he would
be nobody.

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES

The London Daily News, in the course of an
article on what it calls " International Reproaches,"
refers to the fact that there is much that is " tra-
ditional " m them. It thinks that, both in America
and in France, the qualities and peculiarities at-
tributed to English people are derived, to a great
extent, less from experience than from inherited
tradition. "We hear that Englishmen are rude
to ladies ; that they fail to yield them precedence
at the ticket-offices of steamboats and railway sta-
tions; that they complain of everything that is
given them as food ; that they occupy more than
their share of public conveyances with multitud-
inous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas. They assert
themselves, it would seem, when they have placed
3,000 miles between themselves and their old
home. There is, however, in all these complaints
the ring of old coin." In the same way it says
that the Parisian of the boulevards still believes
the Englishman to be a creature who wears long

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES 317

red whiskers of the mutton-chop species, and
wears a plaid — although, as a matter of fact, the
typical Englishman of to-day does not look like
this at all.

Anyone interested in the matter might make a
very queer collection of types which, having dis-
appeared from actual life, survive in the popular
imagination, and by surviving keep alive interna-
tional prejudice, hostility, suspicion, or distrust,
and which go on doing duty in this way for years
and years, until suddenly some fine day it is dis-
covered that they are out of date and must in fut-
ure be dispensed with. There is, for instance,
our old friend, the stage Irishman. How often
have our hearts been touched by the qualities of
gratitude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friend-
ship, and heroism of this noble creature. No
doubt, there must have been a time when he was
as common in Ireland as he has been in our day in
melodrama. But the Irishman, as he exists in
New York, and as he is described by those who
have seen him at home, is strangely unlike the
type. He is a decidedly practical, hard-headed
man, with a keen eye to the main chance, a con-
siderable fondness for fighting, and a disposition
which we should call the reverse of sentimental.
Harrigan and Hart represent the actual Irishman
in America capitally at their little theatre in

318 REFLECTION'S AND COMMENTS

Broadway, yet the stage Irishman is to multitudes
of Americans a more real creature than the actual
Irishman, and we suppose there is hardly a Demo-
cratic statesman from one end of the country to
the other who has not constantly before his mind
an image of him, by the contemplation of which
he solves many of the knottiest problems of con-
temporary politics.

Then there is the Dundreary Englishman, first-
cousin or lineal descendant of the Englishman so
dear to the French imagination. Dundreary really
represents, as we know very well, when we think
about it, a past type of swell as extinct as the do-
do. It is not common any longer for English
swells to change all their rs to ws, and to spice
their sentences with "aw-aws." "We have num-
bers of them over here every year, but we do not
hear them talk nowadays the once familiar Dun-
dreary language. Yet there is hardly a newspaper
in the United States whose funny man does not
assume for the benefit of his readers that Dun-
dreary is alive, and every now and then reproduce
him with gusto. It is not in Punch that we find
Dundreary, but in the funny department of the
Oshkosh Monitor and the " All Sorts " column of
the Bungtown Clarion. Even Puck contributes to
perpetuate the belief in the continued existence of
Dundreary by devoting a column a week to ob-

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES 319

servations on American society in the Dundreary
dialect, which thirty years ago might have been
decidedly funny.

Punch still has John Bull as a national type ;
but it shows great reserve in the use of him, and
now continually resorts to Britannia as a substi-
tute. Is not this because our old friend John is
now only a survival, a tradition of the past ? The
bluff, stout, honest, red-faced, irascible rural person
— of whom the photographs of John Bright remind
us — has really been supplanted by a more mod-
ern, thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. For
English use the Yankee type of Uncle Sam still
seems to represent America, although it belongs
to the past as much as slavery or the stage-coach.
He would be a bold man who should undertake to
say what the national type is now ; but it is safe
to say that it is not a long, thin, cute Yankee,
dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with brass but-
tons, whittling a stick, and interlarding his conver-
sation with "I swan!" and "I calc'late." If Mr.
Lowell were writing the " Biglow Papers " now,
would " Uncle S." serve his purpose as he did dur-
ing the war? By a merciful dispensation of Provi-
dence, however, Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam
still live on in the imaginations of large masses of
conservative Englishmen, and no doubt enable
many a Tory to people the United States with a

330 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

race as alien from that which actually inhabits it
as Zulus would be.

In the same way it may be possible — to the
Providence that guides the destinies of nations
nothing is impossible — that the rude Englishman
is, as the Daily News suggests, getting to be a
survival. The Daily News' s portrait of him is
fair enough, though it would require Americans
who have suffered from him to do him real justice.
He is, or was, a very rude person, and always
seemed to take great delight in " asserting him-
self " in such a way as to produce as much general
annoyance and discomfort as possible. During
the war he had a brilliant career. He used to
come over and express great surprise at the silly
fuss made about the Constitution and secession,
and profess an entire inability to discover what it
was " all about." If they want to go, he always
said, why don't you let 'em go ? What is the use
of fighting about the meaning of a word in the
dictionary? It was in small things as in great.
When he went into society he dressed to suit him-
self, and not as gentlemen in England or anywhere
else do, thus contriving to exhibit a general con-
tempt for his host and his friends. When his
meek entertainer ventured to offer him some Ameri-
can dish which he did not like, he would frankly
warn his companions against it ; and if he asked

, THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES 321

for sugar in his coffee lie would, in the same out-
spoken way, explain that he always sweetened it
" when it was bad." One of his favorite topics
of conversation was the awful corruption and rot-
tenness of American society and politics, and he
dwelt so much upon this that it often seemed as if
what he was really interested in was to find out
whether the people he was staying with, and being
entertained by, were not themselves, if the truth
were known, rotten to the core.

He was a very rude man, and he did exist. But
is he gone, or going ? Is the time coming when
we shall have to regard him too as a survival,
and admit that the rude Englishman is a creature
of the past? Time and continued international
experience can alone settle this question. There
are, however, bitter memories of past sufferings at
his hands in hundreds of American homes, that
make it better for both countries not to probe the
subject too deeply.

21

WILL WIMBLES

Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a ref-
uge in Tennessee for the large class of young
Englishmen whom he calls " Will Wimbles," after
one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addi-
son's Spectator, is said to be a failure, owing
mainly to the poverty of the land and the remote-
ness of the markets. An acute writer in the Pall
Mall Gazette maintains that there is another and
more potent cause to be found in the quality of the
Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the young
men who are educated in the public schools and
universities, or at least in the public schools, and
are turned out into the world between eighteen
and twenty-one, without any special training what-
ever, but with the manners and instincts of gentle-
men, and with entire willingness to take to any
calling but the lower walks of " trade." The
great body of them are the sons of middle-class
parents — clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small
squires — whose means are very moderate, and who
have to submit to more or less privation in order to

WILL WIMBLES 323

send their sons to the public schools at all. They
do it in order to launch them in the world unmis-
takably in the gentle class, and in order to enable
them to form their first social relations in that
class. Unfortunately, however, as the writer in
the Pall Mall Gazette points out, the tone and tem-
per of the public schools, and their way of looking
at life, are the products of a vague, but none the
less powerful, assumption that every boy is the son
of a man with about five thousand pounds a year.
The whole atmosphere of the school is permeated
with this assumption. The boys' code of manners
is formed in it. Their intercourse with each other
is more or less influenced by it, and they all look
out on the world, up to their last day at school,
with the eyes of youths whose home is a well-
equipped manor-house surrounded by a prosper-
ous estate.

The love of the middle-class Englishman of every
age for this point of view is curiously exemplified
in the social articles, not only in the "society
paper," properly so called, but in the Saturday
Review. The troubles and perplexities and minor
disappointments of life form a favorite topic with
the writer of the " sub-leaders " in this last-named
paper, but they are always of the troubles, per-
plexities, and disappointments of a landed gentle-
man who keeps hunters, and has a stud groorn and

324 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

extensive covers. He hardly ever examines the
state of niind of anyone less well-to-do than a
younger son whose means only allow him to hunt
two days in a week instead of six, and who has to
rely on invitations for his shooting. These and
their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form
the reviewer's entire world, and the only world in
which there are any social phenomena worth dis-
cussion. It is, in other words, a world made up
exclusively of "gentlemen," and of the persons,
male and female, who wait upon them. Its sorrows
are the sorrows of gentlemen, and arise mostly out
of the failure of some amusement, or the loss of
the money with which amusements are provided,
the missing of some social distinction, or the mis-
conduct of "upper servants." It is, however,
really the only world that the English public-
school boy or university man sees, or hears of, or
thinks about while in statu puplllari. This is true,
let his own home be never so modest, or the sacri-
fices made by his father to secure him the fashion-
able curriculum be never so painful. The result is,
of course, that when his " education " is finished,
he is really only prepared for what is technically
called a gentleman's life. He has only thought of
certain employments as possible to him, and all
these are exceedingly hard to get. The manners
of the great bulk of mankind, too, are more or less

WILL WIMBLES 325

repulsive to him, and so is a good deal of the pop-
ular morality. In short, he is turned out a Will
Wimble — or, in other words, a good-hearted, kind-
ly, gentlemanly, honorable fellow, who is, however,
entirely unfitted for the social milieu in which he
must not only live, but make a living.

Mr. Hughes's idea has been that, though he dis-
likes trade, and is a little too nice for it as now
carried on, at least on the retail side, he has an in-
nate liking and readiness for agriculture, and that,
if enabled to till the soil under pleasant, or at least
not too novel, social conditions, he would do it
successfully. Out of this the Rugby, Tenn., ex-
periment has grown, and if it has not actually
failed, as some say, it is certainly too early to pro-
nounce it a success. At all events, the signs that it
is going to fail are numerous. Among them is the
deep disappointment of the settlers, few of whom
probably realized not only the monotony and drud-
gery of labor in the fields — these things can be borne
by men with stout hearts and strong arms — but its
effect in unfitting a man for any kind of amusement.
There has been much delusion on this subject in
this country, where far more is known by the read-
ing class about all kinds of manual labor than is
known in England. The possibility of working
hard in the fields and keeping up at the same time
some process of intellectual culture, has been much

326 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

preached among us both by educational projectors
and social reformers, though nearly every man who
listens to them here knows the effect of physical
toil in the open air in producing sleepiness and
mental inertness. It is not surprising, therefore,
that it should find ready acceptance in England
among people who think ability to bear a hard day
on the moors after grouse, or a long run in the sad-
dle after the hounds, argues capacity to hoe pota-
toes or corn for twelve hours, and settle down in
the evening, after a bath and a good dinner, to
Dante, or "Wallace, or Huxley.

Will Wimbles are much less common among us
than in England. We fortunately have not a
dozen great endowments used in turning them
out, or a large and rich society occupied in spread-
ing the gentlemanly view of life. But they, nev-
ertheless, are more numerous than is altogether
pleasant. The difficulty which our college gradu-
ate experiences in getting room for what the news-
papers call his " bark " on the stream of life, is one
of the standing jokes of our light literature. We
have no schools which take the place of the Eng-
lish public schools in our scheme of education.
But the view of life which prevails in the English
public schools and turns out the Will Wimbles, is
more or less prevalent in our colleges, and tends
to spread as the wealth of the class which sends

WILL WIMBLES 327

its boys to college increases. In other words, col-
leges are to a much greater extent than they used
to be places in which social relations are found,
rather than places of preparation for the active
work of life. This last character, indeed, they
almost wholly lost when they ceased to have
the training of ministers as their main function.
Scarcely any man who can afford it now likes to
refuse his son a college education if the boy wants
it ; but probably not one boy in one thousand can
say, five years after graduating, that he has been
helped by his college education in making his
start in life. It may have been never so useful to
him as a means of moral and intellectual culture,
but it has not helped to adapt him to the environ-
ment in which he has to live and work ; or, in
other words, to a world in which not one man in
a thousand has either the manners or cultivation
of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than
once a week, or eats with a fork.

College education is prevented from suffering as
much from this source in popular estimation in
England as it does here, by the fact that, owing to
the peculiar political traditions of the country,
college-bred men begin life in a large number of
cases in possession of great advantages of other
kinds, such as hereditary wealth. Here they have
almost all to face the world on their own merits,

828 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

and in so far as they face it feebly or unskilfully
their defects are set down in the popular mind to
the fact that they went to college. If the dis-
credit ended here, it would perhaps be of small
consequence. But it may be safely said that the
college graduate is never seen groping about in
a helpless and timid way for "a position," and
shrinking from the turmoil and dirt of some walks
of life, without spreading among the uncultivated
a contempt for culture and increasing their con-
fidence in the rule of thumb. The mere " going to
college " is recognized as a sign of pecuniary ease,
and of a desire for social advancement, but not as
preparation for the kind of work which the bulk of
the community is doing, and thus makes mental
culture seem less desirable, and cultivated men
less potent, especially in politics.

The question is a serious one for all colleges,
and it is not here only, but in England and France,
that it is undergoing grave consideration. In Ger-
many society may be said to have been organized
as an appendage to the universities, but here the
universities are simply appendages to society,
which is continually doubting whether their exist-
ence can be justified.

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Reflections and comments