THE ARENA.

No. XXIV.

NOVEMBER, 1891.

CONTENTS.

A PARADISE OF GAMBLERS.

BY EDGAR FAWCETT.

Many religious journals throughout the country have poured eulogies upon the pious head of our Postmaster General because of his raid against all letters bearing the least uncanny relation to that abhorred criminal body, the Louisiana Lottery. In one sense this action is not ill-advised; the national laws against gambling are distinct, and even if they were unjust their existence would be no excuse for their infringement. The highly moral action of Mr. Wanamaker, however, happening as it does at a time when his own relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion. As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which of late it has become the fashion to revile, devises its chief gains in a much less faulty manner. For such disbursements as one dollar, two dollars, five dollars, a good deal of golden expectancy and anticipation can be enjoyed, and there is no confirmed proof whatever that the citizens who are rash enough to expend these massive amounts have ever been swindled at the monthly New Orleans drawings. Indeed, they have ample proof, if they care to sift it, that somebody in Maine, or Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally, unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings—really more dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one, “Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don’t choose drink only as much as you want in me, and if you don’t choose to enter me at all, avoid me forever and a day”—then the iniquity of the whole organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The “prohibition extremists” are like lawyers who can never make their case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal, and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it sprang.

He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To realize in its full glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after he has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty broker—perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it requires a number of croupiers instead of one. He will see that these croupiers are in most cases men whose names posterity will hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists, and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy, afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a proxy in his soiled and desperate hand—an instrument almost as illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners’ native slums.[1]

The neophyte in speculators’ creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of “the street.” He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives, and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of “Black Friday,” an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides, resulted from this infamous “corner” wrought by a league of miserly zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon harden his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well soil the glory of Lexington or Bunker Hill by brooding over the pangs of those who were its victims. All great victories necessitate bloodshed. It is not every man who can wrest vast wealth from the turmoils of a “Black Friday.” … And so, after turning the pages of a revolting chronicle, all of which teem with calamity to the many and plethoric gain to the bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The “margin,” beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful buyer. “Pools,” open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. “Points” are given by one operator to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much and fears it too little. Its hideous vulgarity has ceased to shock him. Its “bulls,” with their often audacious purchases of stock for which they do not pay but out of whose random fluctuations in value they expect to reap thousands from the “bears,” who sell in a like blind, betting-ring fashion; its devices of “spreads,” and of “straddles,” which are combinations of “puts” and “calls” whereby the purchaser limits his loss and at the same time suits the chances of his winning to those of vacillant prices themselves; its unblushing compromises on the part of debtors with creditors, fifty cents on the dollar being frequently paid by bankrupts to the extent of one, two, or three hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism, have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their drastic and sinister spells. When he “starts out for himself,” as he is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate success is enormously doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought, as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great success with him, if he achieves it, will be—what? An almost Titanic power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up $12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest stock-exchange dealing—money notoriously not his own. He may desire to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted and unlawfully imprisoned because he published in his paper the truth about Wall Street trickery and villany, or which sandbagged Dorman B. Eaton in the streets of New York for having fought with legal weapons of honest denunciation that malodorous craft of a compact between incarnate kleptomania in finance and the unspeakable “boss” burglar of Tammany Ring.

But needless are further details of those abominations on which our rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount. If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this web, out of perjuries and robberies. Its fibres must mean the heart-strings torn from many a deluded stockholder’s breast, and the morning dew that glitters on it must be the tears of widows and orphans. The laws of a great republic are the foliage (alas, of a tree not too sturdy!) on which its devilish meshes are wrought! There is no exaggeration in stating that the financial history of the past three decades in America has been one of peerless turpitude. Rome under the dying glories of the empire scarcely parallels its knavish gluttonies of illegal seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all this infectious train of outrages against a patient people—one that presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries over seas in which to-day a Crédit Mobilier, a Pacific Railroad atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square or the Place de la Concorde howl with savage tumult.

But let us return to our would-be Wall Street magnate. Suppose he has not the “grit” or the “go” (or whatever it would be termed in that classic purlieu so noted for elegance of every-day rhetoric) either to crown himself with the tarnished crown of a monetary “king” or even to hold a gilt-edged but scandal-reeking portfolio at the footstool of some such reigning tyrant. In this case he may join the great rank-and-file of those whose pockets have become irremediably voided and who seldom refer to Wall Street unless with muttered curses while dragging out maimed careers in various far less feverish pursuits; or he may, on the other hand, drift into that humble crowd of petty brokers (“curb-stone” or domiciled) whose incomes vary from fifteen hundred to as many thousands a year, and who pass hours each day in envy, whether secret or open, of the dignitaries towering above them. As one of these inferior persons his existence will continue, no doubt, until he changes it for the tomb: and meanwhile what sort of an existence has it been? All the finer human aims have appealed to him as pearls appeal to swine. He has, perhaps, possessed faculties which might have allowed him to shine ably and yet honorably in the state or national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a stolid indifference to all known motors of mental betterment.

It is not in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are lilies that toil and spin (“tiger” lilies, one might term them, in remembrance of the old gambler-slang about faro and roulette); but their industries, however distinct, are what the political economists would call those of non-productive consumers. They are active drones, to speak with paradox, in the great hive of human energy. Like all gamesters, all men who live by the turning of the dice-box, they have a devil-may-care demeanor, now and then rather sharply peppered with wit, though wit not always avoidant of the obscene. For the most part, they are as ignorant of the large onward push of human thought as if they were farmers in some remote county of Arkansas. And yet they affect, at all times, an amusing omniscience. To “know it all” is a phrase beloved as sarcasm by their nimble vernacular, and though this (like “Come off!” and “Look here, what are you giving us?”) is a form of speech incessantly on their lips, one is prone sometimes to reflect how amazing is the meagreness of real knowledge which their “knowing it all” piteously represents. They are sometimes keen sportsmen, but a good many scamps, dolts, and cads are that. Their acquaintance with contemporary literature could be summed up by stating that if you should ask an average number of their class whether he had read the last novel of Mr. James, he might pull his moustache (the Wall Street man usually has a moustache, and often a symmetric and well-tended one) desiring to learn whether you had reference or no to G. P. R. James, of the “two horse-men” celebrity. Their ignorance, however, is not equal to their self-sufficiency. Almost whenever the average Wall Street man goes into good society he makes himself more pronounced there by his assurance than his culture. Of the latter quality he has so little that the best clubs of which he is a member tolerate rather than accept him. In most cases he is deplorably curt of speech and brusque of deportment. Suavity, repose, that kindliness which is the very marrow and pith of high-breeding, shock you in his manners as acutely by their absence as if they were rents in his waistcoat or gapes in his boot-leather. The “bluff,” impudence, and swagger of the Stock Exchange cling to him in society like burrs to the hair of horse or dog. He would be far more endurable, this socially rampant and ubiquitous Wall Street man, if he revealed the least shred of respect for those ideas and faiths on which his hard, cold course of living has necessarily trampled rough-hooved. He is so bright and intelligent, as a rule, that you wonder why he is so phenomenally vulgar. But his brightness and intelligence are of the quality, nearly always, that throws into hysteric giggles the “summer girl” on piazzas of third-rate hotels. Ordinarily, too, he has not the faintest conception of how deeply and darkly he bores people who would live apart from him, from his bejewelled and supercilious wife (her pretty head always goes an inch further backward when “Tom” or “Dick” has “made a strike in stocks”), and from the French maid, with her frilled cap, whom his children gabble to in their grammarless American-French, but whose unctuous idioms are Sanscrit alike to madame and himself.

Conceive that you or I shall wish to talk with the ordinary Wall Street man, on the piazza of his watering-place hotel, on the deck of his record-breaking steamer. (When he goes to Europe, which he incessantly does, he invariably takes a record-breaking steamer in preference to all others.) What does he know? What can he tell us? Politics? He reproduces, if he be a Republican, the last tirade of his favorite newspaper in behalf of protection and Mr. Blaine. If he be a Democrat he will spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn’t like it “for a cent”; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson or Longfellow—he forgets which) called “Beautiful Snow.” That “fetched him,” and “laid over” any other verse he recollects.

Here, let us insist, is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were, with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better. His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he will have his defenders—interested ones, of course. We may pluck the cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is too often the saucepan on which we cook our criticisms; and when these are done to a turn we cast the vessel into a dust-bin, trying with mighty valor of volition to forget that it even exists as old iron.

Never was more blatant humbug aired than that about our “brilliant” Wall Street financiers. Their “brilliancy” is merely a repulsive egotism in one of its worst forms,—that of cupidity. They are like misers with longer, quicker, and more sinewy fingers than other misers, in the gathering together of dollars. Their shrewdness may be exceptional, but a quality which consists half in accurate guessing and half in bullying defiance is hardly worthy of the name. As for their “nerve” and “coolness,” these are not endowments that in such connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. “Jim” Fisk had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels and money. The so-called “great men” of Wall Street are foes of society—foes merciless and malign. Their “generalship,” their “Napoleonic” attributes are terms coined by people of their own damaging class, people with low motives, with even brutish morals. It is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares and Penates hideous little gods carved by their own misanthropy from the harsh granite of self-worship. Every new conspiracy to amass millions through wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling, in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big gambler’s treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.

But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were, with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it. Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds; forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public crimes.

Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be held remarkable, perhaps even unique,—as an age of violent contrasts, violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial tinge. There are men among us—and men of august intellects, too—who urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume, if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall Street, its air foul with the mephitic exhalations that rise from dead and rotting principle. When the state is corrupt, and large bodies of its citizens are not only corrupt but wholly scornful of every fraternal and philanthropic purpose as well,—when communities like this of Wall Street, cold-blooded, shameless, injurious, are bowed to as powers, instead of being shunned as pests, then the ideals of such men as Karl Marx and his disciples loom distant and indefinite on the horizon of the future. Tritest of metaphors though it may be, all civilization is a garden, and in this garden of our own western tillage Wall Street towers to-day like a colossal weed, with roots deep-plunging into a soil they desiccate and de-fertilize. When and whose will be the extirpating hand?

Here dawns a question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some coming Œdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge—the conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion—will dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself headlong into the sea!

PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE—WHICH?

BY HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, M. C.

The advocates of free trade in this country at the present time are very unlike Emerson’s “fine young Oxford gentlemen” who said “there was nothing new, and nothing true, and no matter.” They not only believe their pet doctrine to be true, but they seem to assume that it is also new. They further treat it as if it were an exact science and a great moral question as well. Unwarranted assumptions merely confuse and this question of national economic policy is too important to be clouded with confusions. It is worth while, therefore, to look at these assumptions one by one and try, before attempting any discussion of the tariff, to clear the ground from cant and to see the question exactly as it is.

In the first place, the question of free trade or protection is in no sense a moral one. Free traders are prone to forget that their great prophet, Adam Smith, drew this distinction very plainly at the outset. He wrote two important works. One of them all the world has read. It is called “The Wealth of Nations,” deals with the selfish interests of mankind, and embodies the author’s political economy. The other is an equally elaborate work entitled “The Moral Sentiments.” It is the complement of “The Wealth of Nations,” which is devoted to the selfish side of human nature and the world at large has found no trouble in forgetting it. Adam Smith himself was under no confusion of mind as to his subject when he wrote about political economy. He knew that he was dealing with questions of a selfish character, of an enlightened selfishness, no doubt, but none the less questions of self-interest. He never for a moment thought of putting his political economy on a plane of pure morality.

When the great political movement toward free trade began in England, it was largely a movement of the middle classes and of the industrial interests of Great Britain. The great middle class of England, which furnishes the backbone and sinew of the nation, is essentially a moral class, and in appealing to it the political leader is always tempted to put forward the moral aspect of his theme, even if he has to twist his argument and his facts to find one. The manufacturers of England believed that free trade would be profitable, but it soothed them to be assured that the system was also highly moral. It is to the Manchester School, therefore, that we owe the attempt to give to the entire free trade system a moral coloring for which the narrower question of the repeal of the corn laws afforded an opportunity. Our own free traders for the most part are devout followers of the Manchester School, and take all their teachings and practices with little discrimination. They are essentially imitative. The anti-corn law agitators pointed their arguments by exhibiting loaves of bread of different sizes, and so our free traders, during a campaign, have gone about in carts and held up pairs of trousers, a more humorous if less intelligent form of object lesson. They attempt, too, in like fashion, to give the weight of morality to their doctrines. Unfortunately for them, inasmuch as everyone likes to be moral at some one’s else expense, their position is untenable. Adam Smith’s distinction was a broad and sound one; and deeply important as political economy and questions of tariff are, they are in no sense matters of morals. They are purely questions of self-interest, of profit and loss, and can be decided properly on these grounds alone.

In the second place, the assumption made tacitly, at least, if not avowedly, that political economy is an exact science is wholly misleading. Political economy covers a wide range of subjects of which the tariff is only one; but in none of its branches is it an exact science. Modern investigation has, no doubt, revealed certain economic laws which we may fairly say operate with reasonable certainty, but this is a very different proposition from that which would make the conclusions of economists in all directions as absolute as those of mathematicians. Political economy, in fact, does not differ greatly in this respect from history, because both deal with subjects where the conditions and sympathies of men and women play a large part, and where human passions are deeply engaged. In fields like these, where the personal equation of humanity plays a controlling part, it is absurd to attempt to argue as if we were dealing with a mathematical formula. There may be a philosophy of political economy as there is of history; there may be scientific methods of dealing with it and certain economic laws, subject to many exceptions, which we may consider to be established, but nevertheless it is as far from being an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the precious system must meet every possible objection and not merely those devised by its framers. In discussing a question of political economy, therefore, it is well to bear in mind that we are handling a subject where new facts are always entering in to modify old conclusions, and where there are many conditions, the effect of which it is impossible to calculate.

In the third place, the ardent tariff reformer at the present moment always discourses upon his subject as if he had some perfectly new truth to lay before the world from which it would be as impossible to differ, unless one was illiterate or corrupt, as from the conclusion of Galileo in regard to the movement of the earth. In one of our recent political campaigns I quoted an argument of Hamilton’s in favor of protection from his famous Report of Manufactures. Thereupon one of my opponents in a public speech, referring to this quotation, said it would be as sensible to adopt Hamilton’s views on the tariff as to go back to stage coaches simply because those vehicles were the means of conveyance in Hamilton’s time. I could not help wondering what my learned opponent would have thought if I had retorted that, by parity of reasoning, we ought to reject the “Wealth of Nations” because Adam Smith flourished a little earlier than Hamilton, and stage coaches were used in his day also. The simple truth is that there is nothing very new to-day in the question of free trade or protection. The subject is one which has been under consideration for some time. It has received great developments in the last hundred years, and is still so far from the last word that it is safest not to be too dogmatic about it.

In this matter of the tariff, then, we have before us a question which is not new, which is not moral, but which deals simply with matters of self-interest according to the dictates of an enlightened selfishness. What is the condition of the question of free trade to-day in its practical aspect? Fifty years ago, roughly speaking, the movement for it in England became successful, and the English people abandoned a protective tariff which they had maintained for some centuries and adopted the free trade tariff which they have to-day. The latter system has had a thorough trial in England under the most favorable circumstances. If there is any country in the world which, by its situation, its history and its condition, is adapted for free trade, England is that country. If free trade, therefore, is the certain and enormous benefit which its advocates assert, and if it is the only true system for nations to adopt, its history in England ought to prove the truth of these propositions. How near has free trade come to performing all that its original promoters claimed in its behalf? How brilliant has been its success in practise? One thing at least is certain: it has not been such an overwhelming and glittering success as to convince any other civilized nation of its merits. England stands alone to-day, as she has stood for the last fifty years, the one free trade nation in the world. Possibly England of all the nations may be right and everybody else may be wrong, but there is, at least, a division of opinion so respectable that we may assume, with all due reverence for our free trade friends, that there are two sides to this question as to many others.

Let us look for a moment at some of the early promises. Free trade, according to its originators, was to usher in an era of peace and good-will. It was, in its extension, to put an end to wars. It has certainly not brought peace to England, which has had a petty war of some sort on her hands almost every year since the free trade gospel was preached. I do not mean to say that this is in the least due to free trade, but it is quite obvious that free trade did not stop fighting. The prosperity of England has, of course, been undeniably great, and it has been especially great among the vast industrial and manufacturing interests which supported the free trade policy. Possibly they have thriven better under this system than they would have done under the old one, but this must remain mere speculation, and as we know that some protected countries have prospered as much if not more than England, the prosperity argument has little weight. There are, however, other fields where we need not rely on conjecture. Has free trade been an unquestionable benefit not merely to the industrial but to all classes in England? It certainly has not put an end to strikes, for strikes have never been more frequent anywhere than they have been in Great Britain of late years. It does not seem to have perceptibly diminished poverty, if we may judge from such recent books as “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” and “Through Darkest England.” The state of Ireland has not been indicative of a healing and life-giving prosperity. In a word the great problems of labor, of poverty, and of over-population seem as severe in free trade England as in protective countries. Free trade again does not seem to have prevented the rise of trusts and syndicates, nor to have stopped the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands. In other words, there is no evidence that free trade has had any effect on the most serious questions of the day, which touch the welfare of the great masses of the people. All that can be said is that the manufacturing and industrial interests of Great Britain seem to have thriven under it. For a system which arrogates to itself absolute truth, this is a meagre showing.

Free trade has not demonstrated its infallibility in the single country where it has been tried. The question, therefore, for the people of the United States is, whether under their conditions it is well to make the change which England made nearly fifty years ago, and to adopt a system of which the success has been doubtful in its chosen field. In order to decide the question intelligently we must put aside all vague confusions about an exact science which will work the same results everywhere because it operates under an immutable law. Even if free trade had been a brilliant and conclusive success in England, of which there is no proof, does it follow that it would be a better system for us? We have, to begin with, in our possession, instead of a small island a continent capable of almost every variety of natural production and mechanical industry. This is also a new country and a young country. We have been developing our resources rapidly for the last hundred years, but they are still not fully developed. The policy of the United States, although with many fluctuations, has been in the main to develop all our natural and mechanical opportunities to their fullest extent. The free trader is always ready with the terse statement that, “You cannot make yourself rich by taxing yourself,” followed by a freshly humorous allusion to lifting one’s self by one’s boot-straps. He then feels that he has met the case. If political economy and the financial policy of nations were as simple as this argument seems to imply, life would be an easier thing both for nations and individuals. Unluckily the problems of mankind which engage their interests and passions cannot be solved by cheap aphorisms. The statement of the free trader about taxing yourself in order to grow rich has a final and conclusive sound, but it is simply sound. There are, for example, plenty of towns in New England which have built factories and relieved certain persons from taxation in order to secure their capital and industry, and the additional population and the increased taxes which have thus come to the town have made it rich or at least richer than it was before. It is quite possible to adjust taxes or to offer bounties or premiums in such a way as to add to the aggregate wealth of the community.

The free trader’s question is not really pertinent. The point is not whether you will tax yourself in order to grow rich, but whether you will so frame your tax laws and so raise your revenues as to discriminate in favor of your own production and your own wages against the production and wages of other countries, or whether, on the other hand, you will let everything strictly alone and leave the country to come out the best way it can. The general policy of the United States has been to give encouragement to the domestic producer and manufacturer, and maintenance to high rates of wages, by laying duties in such a way as to discriminate in their favor against those outside. The result, speaking broadly, has been to put the United States as a competitor into countless lines of new industries. The effect of the competition of the United States, added to that already existing in the rest of the world, has been to reduce the world’s prices in the products of those industries according to the well-known laws of competition. Hence comes the lowering of prices to the consumer in protected articles, a fact which is the cause of much satiric laughter to the free trader because he can neither deny nor explain it.

The practical question now before the people of the United States is twofold: shall we protect new and nascent industries, and shall we continue to guard existing industries and existing rates of wages against an undue competition? John Stuart Mill admits the soundness of the former policy, and with that admission protectionists may be content. In fact, it may be doubted whether any intelligent man would argue to-day that it would have been wiser for the United States never to have built up any industries, but to have remained a purely agricultural community, dependent on Europe for everything in the way of manufacture. I think we may assume that the wisdom of protecting nascent industries in a country with such capacities and resources as the United States can hardly be questioned.

Nevertheless, the most hotly contested feature of the McKinley bill was that which continued the policy of protecting nascent industries in certain products, and notably that of the manufacture of tin plate. If the protection of nascent industries at the beginning of this century was a sound policy, then it is a sound policy to industries of that description to-day. Whether we have tin mines or not (and it now appears that we have) there is no reason on the surface why we should not buy our Straits tin and manufacture tin plate as well as England. Some Democratic newspapers appear to have an idea that the tin mines of Cornwall and Wales make a monopoly in this direction for England. They forget that to-day the tin used by England comes chiefly from the Straits, and she can buy it there on no better terms than the United States. If the policy of protection to nascent industries is sound, then the tariff of 1890 is sound in this direction, and we should seek its results in the new industries which have been started since it became a law.

In the second branch, the question of whether we should continue protection to industries already established is one largely of degree and of discretion. Where a removal of the duty would mean either a heavy reduction of wages or a stopping of existing industries with the rise of prices consequent upon the withdrawal of the United States from the world’s competition, then the removal of the duty would be a misfortune. It would be a misfortune not only to the industry which was ruined and to the wage earners who were reduced to idleness or poverty, but it would be an injury to the consumer because it would in a short time raise the price of the world’s production diminished by our withdrawal. In industries where no such results could possibly be feared, or where the production of the article is not possible in the United States, it would certainly be wise to remove duties, and this has been the purpose of the protectionists and of the Republican party.

The policy of protection has received its most recent expression in this country in the tariff of 1890. It is a truism that no tariff bill, whether passed by free traders or protectionists, can hope to be perfect. It is sure to have defects in detail and some inequalities. The McKinley bill was not exempt from error, but the question for the people to decide now is whether it is well to abandon the protective policy and substitute that of free trade. In 1888 the cry was that we must get rid of the surplus revenue and that that necessity made a revision of the tariff imperative. The Republican party since it has been in power has taken two hundred and forty-six millions of the accumulated surplus and paid off the bonded indebtedness of the country to that amount. It has also, by the removal of the duty on sugar and other articles, reduced the annual surplus revenue some fifty or sixty millions. The danger from the surplus, therefore (and it was a very real danger), is at an end. No party need be called upon now to dispose of the annual surplus which was taking so many millions out of the channels of trade. The question between the parties and before the country on this issue is very much simpler than it was. It is whether we shall repeal the tariff of 1890, abandon the protective system and take up free trade, or whether we shall maintain the protective system, making such amendments to the law as may from time to time seem necessary.

I have tried to state the general argument upon the question of free trade or protection in its broadest way. It only remains to bring forward so far as possible the facts which show, in part at least, the results of the tariff of 1890, for upon those results as a whole its justification or condemnation must rest. It is important to know first whether the new industries which the McKinley bill was designed to encourage have begun to start, and second, whether the bill has had the disastrous effect in raising prices which was so loudly asserted and prophesied by its opponents at the last election.

I will give first a table showing comparative prices before and after the tariff of 1890 of some of the cotton fabrics most commonly used. They are all protected industries and ought to have been advanced in price if any part of the assertions made by the advocates of free trade during the last campaign were true.

PRICES OF PRINT GOODS SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE MCKINLEY TARIFF PASSED COMPARED WITH THEIR PRESENT PRICES.

BLEACHED SHIRTINGS AND SUITINGS.

GINGHAMS AND WASH FABRICS.

I give now a table comparing the market quotations for 1890 of the articles which enter most largely into the cost of living, with those for the same period in 1891:—

If the articles given in the foregoing table be classified we find the following results as to the rise and fall of prices before and after the tariff of 1890.

From these tables it is obvious that there has been, in the first place, no general rise of prices such as was confidently predicted by the panic-mongers of last year. On the contrary, the large majority of prices show a downward tendency. But more important than this is the fact made obvious by these tables that the price of the protected product has not risen. The foreign goods have advanced in some instances and been shut out in consequence, but domestic goods have taken their places, the price being kept down by domestic competition. In a word these tables prove that except for the enormous reduction in the cost of sugar, the new tariff has had but slight effect if any on the course of prices of the necessaries of life, and that the statements of the free traders as to a general rise of prices was entirely false.

The following extract is from a letter from one of the largest wholesale clothing firms in Boston. It tells its own story:—

“In reply to yours of the 10th inst., would say that we sold clothing in every grade in August, 1891, at fully 10 per cent. less in prices than in August, 1886; for instance, a cassimere suit sold then for $12.00 which we sell now for $10.50, and one sold for $13.50 and we sell the same now for $12.00. An overcoat sold then for $11.50 which we sell now for $10.00. Another grade sold then for $16.50 and sells for $15.00 now. This difference will run through all grades in proportion to prices. The difference in prices between August, 1890, and ‘91, is very little, if any; less rather than more in ‘91.”

As to the development of manufacturing under the McKinley bill I will quote first the opinion of a disinterested witness. The British Consular General at New York, in his report of May 8, 1891, speaks as follows:—

“Influenced by the new and higher duties afforded for the benefit of American manufacturing interests, new life has been imparted to the cotton, worsted, woollen, and knit underwear industry. Everywhere, especially in the Southern States, new textile mills have been going up with surprising activity, and all the old corporations have been operated on full time….

“As a rule, all the cotton mills have had a year of unusual activity. The production has been of larger volume than in any previous year, and the goods have found a ready sale generally but at comparatively low prices, considering the high prices which prevailed during the first six months of the year for cotton. Market prices, except in a few cases, did not vary with the price of cotton. Opening generally at low rates, cotton goods have been steady, the home and export demand being sufficient to absorb the supply of all standard and staple makers of brown, bleached, and colored goods, if we except printing cloths and calicoes….

“The worsted goods industry has been marked by fresh life since the new tariff has, to a great extent, cut off the importation of the lowest grades of such goods. All the old factories have started up, and are making goods on safe orders; and new mills are being erected by European and British capitalists with a view to manufacturing a finer class of dress goods, etc., than ever before has been produced in this country. The woollen goods industry, apart from ladies’ cloths, does not show any perceptible signs of improvement, but keeps on a slow, steady gait, apart from carpetings and woollen underwear. Both of the latter industries have been unusually busy during the last six months at fairly profitable prices.”

To give a complete list of the new industries started since the passage of the McKinley bill would be impossible, and would occupy more space than The Arena could spare. I give, therefore, a partial list compiled from the Boston Commercial Bulletin, and covering only the first three months after the passage of the law, that is, from Oct. 1, 1890. These are the months most unfavorable to the bill, but the statistics show what the growth of new and old industries has been under the tariff of 1890 in three months, and indicate what the future increase is likely to be.

SHOES AND LEATHER.

Shoe factory at Portsmouth, Va.

Tannery and horse collar manufactory at Demorest, Ga.

Shoe factory building by the town of Ayer to cost $15,000.

White Bros, new tannery at Lowell for finishing fine upper leather.

Towle’s new shoe factory at Northwood, N. H.

New shoe factory at Natick, Mass.

New shoe factory at Beverly, Mass.

New shoe factory at Salisbury, N. C.

Voltaire Electric Shoe Co., of Manchester, N. H. (Capital, $50,000.)

New factory at Ellsworth, Me.

New factory at Sherman, Me.

New factory at Whitman, Mass., for Commonwealth Shoe Co.

New factory at East Pepperell, Mass. (Employs over 700 hands.)

Manhattan Rubber Shoe Co., at New York. (Capital, $50,000.)

Crocker Harness Co., of Tisbury, Mass. (Capital, $77,000.)

COTTON.

Mutual Land & Mfg. Co., at Durham, N. C. (Capital, $280,000.)

Stock company (capital, $250,000) to erect cotton mill, at Fort Worth, Texas.

Cabot Cotton Mfg. Co., at Brunswick, Me. (70,000 spindles.)

Shirt factory at Milford, Del. (To employ 30 women.)

New mill at New Bedford, Mass., for the manufacture of fine yarn, on account of the high tariff on this grade of goods.

New mill at Dallas, Texas. (15,000 spindles.)

New cotton mill at Monroe, La. (Capital, $200,000.)

New mill at Austin, Texas, to cost $500,000.

Cotton factory at New Iberia, Ky.

Stock company (capital, $500,000) at Atlanta, Ga., to work the fibre of the cotton stalk into warp for cotton bales.

New cotton factory at Abbeville, S. C.

New cotton factory at Summit, Miss.

Jean pants and cotton sack factory, at Louisiana State Penitentiary.

New cotton mill at Moosup, Conn.

New cotton mill at Wolfboro, N. H. (Capital, $800,000.)

Bagging mills at Sherman, Texas.

Cotton batting factory at Columbia, S. C. (Capital, $40,000.)

Cotton mill at Greenville, Tenn.

Cotton tie factory at Selma, Ala.

WOOLLEN.

Harvey’s carpet mills at Philadelphia, Pa.

Arlington mills at Lawrence. (Worsted—500 hands.)

Knitting mills at Cohoes, N. Y.

Knitting mills at Bennington, Vt. (75 hands.)

Woollen mill at Barre Plains near Worcester. (Fancy Cassimeres.)

Crescent yarn and knitting mills at New Orleans, La. (Capital, $75,000. Capacity 500 dozen of hose per day.)

Wytheville Woollen & Knitting Co. at Wytheville, W. Va. (Capital, $30,000.)

Yarn factory at Athens, S. C.

Coat factory at Ellsworth, Me. (Employs 75 to 100 hands.)

Woollen mills at Lynchburg, Va.

Woollen manufactory at Philadelphia, Pa.

Knitting mill (200 x 90) at Cohoes, N. Y.

Woollen factory at Worcester, Mass.

Knitting mill at Raleigh, N. C. ($25,000.)

Knitting mill at Pittsboro, N. C.

Cotton and woollen yarns at Catonsville, Md. (Capital, $10,000.)

Yarn factory at Lambert’s Point, Va. (Capital, $25,000.)

New factories of the Merrimack Coat and Glove Co., at Waban, N. H.

Knitting mill at Rockton, N. Y.

Yarn manufactory at Winsted, Conn.

Worsted manufactory at Woonsocket, R. I.

POTTERY AND GLASS.

Chattanooga Pottery Co. Pottery mills at Millville, Tenn.

Glass factory to manufacture glass jars and bottles at Middletown, Indiana.

Window glass factory at Baltimore, Md.

Glass manufactory at Fostoria, Ohio. (125 persons operate 12 pots.)

Parmenter Mfg. Co. at East Brockfield, Mass. (Capital, $250,000.)

Glass manufactory at Grand Rapids, Mich.

American Union Bottle Co. Glass works at Woodbury, N. J.

A. Busch Glass Works at St. Louis, Mo.

Large glass plant at Denver, Col., by Chicago parties. (To employ between 300 and 400 men.)

Diamond Plate Glass Co., at Kokomo, Indiana. (Capacity, 5,500 ft. per day.)

New green glass factory at Alton, Ills. (To employ 425 men.)

Union Glass Co. at Malaga, N. J. (Capital, $100,000.)

Window Glass Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa. (Capital, $100,000.)

Window glass factory at Millville, N. J.

Glass manufactory at North Baltimore, Md. (Optical goods.)

PAPER AND PULP.

New paper mill at Newport and Sunapee, N. H.

Otis Falls Pulp Co. at Livermore Falls, Me.

Mill for the manufacture of glazed hardware paper at Hemington, Conn.

Girvins Falls Pulp Co. of Concord, N. H. (Capital, $40,000.)

Paper mill at Manchester, Col.

New pulp mill at Howland, Me.

New pulp mill at Saxon, Wis.

New paper mill at Orono, Mo.

Large paper mill at Reading, Pa.

Brookside Paper Mill at Manchester, Conn.

Paper box factory at Richmond, Va. (Cost $7,000.)

Eureka Paper Mill Co. at Lower Oswego Falls, N. Y.

Shattuck & Babcock Co. of Depue, Wis. (Capital, $500,000.)

Pulp mill at Huntsville, Ala., by American Fibre Co. of New York. (Capital $80,000.)

IRON AND STEEL.

Liberty Iron Co., at Columbia Furnace, Va. (Capital, $50,000.)

Basic steel plant, at Roanoke, Va. (Capital, $750,000. Capacity, 200 tons per day.)

Ashland Steel Co., at Ashland, Ky. (400 tons finished steel per day.)

Tredegar Steel Works, at Tredegar, Ala. (100 tons per day.)

Pennsylvania Steel Co., of Philadelphia. (Large ship building plant at Sparrow Point, on Chesapeake Bay.)

Pittsburg Malleable Iron Co., of Pittsburg, Pa. (Capital, $25,000.)

Beaver Tube Co., of Wheeling, W. Va. (Capital, $1,000,000.)

$1,000,000 stock company at Wheeling, W. Va., to develop coal and iron mines, etc.

New plant at Morristown, Tenn.

Iron furnace at Winston, N. C., by Washington and Philadelphia parties.

Buda Iron Works, of Buda, Ill. (Capital, $24,000. Railroad supplies and architectural iron work.)

Simonds Manufacturing Co., of Pennsylvania. (Iron and steel. Capital, $50,000.)

Iron City Milling Co., of Pittsburg, Pa. (Capital, $50,000.)

One hundred and twenty-five ton blast furnace, at Covington, Va.

Iron works at Jaspar, Tenn. (Capital, $30,000.)

Planing mill at Jaspar, Tenn. (Capital, $10,000.)

METAL WORKING.

Peninsular Metal Works, of Detroit, Mich. (Capital, $100,000.)

Iron and brass foundry at Easton, Md.

Tinware factory at Petersburgh, Va.

Steel Edge Japanning & Tinning Co., at Medway, Mass. (Factory 800 x 60 feet.)

Horsch Aluminium Plating Co., of Chicago, Ill. (Capital, $5,000,000.)

Tin plate manufactory at Chicago, Ill.

MACHINERY AND HARDWARE.

Lynn Lasting Machine Co., at Saco, Me. (Capital, $50,000.)

Tin plate mill at Chattanooga, Tenn.

New plow factory at West Lynchburg, Va.

Machine works for Edison Electric Co., at Cohoes, N. H.

Haywood Foundry Co., at Portland, Me. (Capital, $150,000.)

Larrabee Machinery Co., at Bath, Me. (Capital, $250,000.)

Manufactory of mowers at Macon, Ga. (Capital, $50,000.)

Cooking stove manufactory at Blacksburg, S. C.

Nail, horse-shoe, and cotton tie factory at Iron Gate, Va.

Iron foundry and stove works at Ivanhoe, Va.

Wire fence factory at Bedford City, Va.

Nail mill and rolling mill with 28 puddling furnaces at Buena Vista, Va.

Car works by Boston capitalists at Beaumont, Texas. (Capital, $500,000.)

Car works plant at Goshen, Va.

Car works plant at Lynchburg, Va.

Nail mill at Morristown, Tenn.

Machine and iron works at Blacksburg, S. C. (Capital, $120,000.)

Eureka Safe & Lock Co. at Covington, Ky. (Capital, $50,000.)

Agricultural implements factory at Buchanan, Va. (Capital, $50,000.)

Tin can and pressed tinware factory at Canton, Md.

New hosiery factory at Charlotte, N. C.

$10,000 chair factory and $25,000 foundry and machine shop at Attalla, Ala.

Iron foundry and machine shops at Bristol, Tenn. (Capital, $25,000.)

Large skate factory at Nashua, N. H.

Stove Foundry & Machine Co. in Llano, Texas. (Cost, $100,000.)

Safety Package Co., at Baltimore, Md. (Capital, $1,000,000. To manufacture safes, locks, etc.)

Stove foundry at Salem, Va. (Cost $20,000. Capital, $60,000.)

Locomotive works plant at Chattanooga, Tenn. (Capital, $500,000.)

Fulton Machine Co., at Syracuse, N. Y. (Capital, $33,000.)

Chicago Machine Carving & Mfg. Co., at Chicago, Ill. (Capital, $50,000. To manufacture interior decorations, mouldings, etc.)

Standard Elevator Co., of Chicago, Ill. (Capital, $300,000.)

Wire nail mill at Salem, Va. (To employ over 100 men.)

TIN PLATE.

The following firms are manufacturing tin-plate, or building new mills or additions to old ones for that purpose.

Demmler & Co., Philadelphia.

Coates & Co., Baltimore.

Fleming & Hamilton, Pittsburg.

Wallace, Banfield & Co., Irondale, Ohio.

Jennings Bros. & Co., Pittsburg.

Niedringhaus, St. Louis.

There is one other charge which was freely made against the tariff of 1890, that deserves a brief answer. It was said that the McKinley bill would stop trade with other countries, and that it raised duties “all along the line.”

A plain tale from the “Statement of Foreign Commerce and Immigration,” published by the Treasury Department for June, 1891, puts this accusation down very summarily.

BISMARCK IN THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT.

BY EMILIO CASTELAR.

I cannot pardon the historian Bancroft, loved and admired by all, for having one day, blinded by the splendors of a certain illustrious person’s career, compared an institution like the new German empire with such an institution as the secular American Republic. The impersonal character of the latter and the personal character of the former place the two governments in radical contrast. In America the nation is supreme—in Germany, the emperor. In the former the saviour of the negroes—redeemer and martyr—perished almost at the beginning of his labors. His death did not delay for one second the emancipation of the slave which had been decreed by the will of the nation, immovable in its determinations, through which its forms and personifications are moved and removed. In America the President in the full exercise of his functions is liable to indictment in a criminal court; he is nevertheless universally obeyed, not on account of his personality and still less on account of his personal prestige, but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south. Prussia was constituted in such a manner that its territory became an intrenched camp, and its people a nation in arms. Nations, even though they be republican, which find it necessary to organize themselves on a military model, ultimately relinquish their parliamentary institutions and adopt a Cæsarian character and aspect. Greece conquered the East under Alexander; Rome extended her empire throughout the world under Cæsar; France, after her victories over the united kings, and the expedition to Egypt under Bonaparte, forfeited her parliament and the republic to deliver herself over to the emperor and the empire. Consequently the terms emperor and commander-in-chief appear to be the synonyms in all languages. And by virtue of this synonymy of words the Emperor of Germany exercises over his subjects a power very analogous to that which a general exercises over his soldiers. Bismarck should have known this. And knowing this truth—intelligible to far less penetrating minds than his—Bismarck should in his colossal enterprise have given less prominence to the emperor and more to Germany. He did precisely the contrary of what he should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a Prussian monarch grounds his authority on two enormous powers, the dignity of head of the State, and that of head of the Church. The autocratic character native to the imperial dynasties of Austria is greatly limited by the diversity of races subjected to their dominion and to the indispensable assemblies of the diet around his imperial majesty.

But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times, defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task, grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided in his days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences. Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner’s operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Caldéron by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians; a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove, as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of the oracle of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of Œdipus with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor. There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Cæsar should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Cæsar are embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and extend throughout futurity.

II.

Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas, and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead. The enormous corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa, made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, “To Govern After Death” (Reinar Despues de Morir). All that he could do, when already ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who was not consulted in these declarations, which might be said to have descended from heaven on the wings of the angel of death. Bismarck went to and fro among the doctors, who naturally refused to declare the terrible disease mortal, and prepared to vanquish the moribund will of Frederick and the British notions of his widow, fearing that when the last breath of the imperial life had ceased the whole policy of Germany would have to be changed, as a scene in a theatre must be changed if it has been hissed. It was certain that there was as great a difference between the ideas of the Emperor William I. and those of Frederick III., separated by so brief a space, as between those of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Emperor Frederick II., his successor, after the long period of two hundred years had changed the capital features of the Middle Ages; the first was an unalloyed Catholic, notwithstanding his dissidences with the Guelph cities, and even with the Pope a stern Cæsar, like the good Roman Cæsars in time of war and defence, a veritable orthodox crusader, whose piety was concealed as in a colossal mountain whence he awaited the reconquest of outraged Jerusalem by the Christians; whereas the second was an almost Pantheistic poet and philosopher, whose Catholicity was mingled with Orientalism, who was equally given to the discussion of theological and of scientific questions, who followed the crusades in fulfilment of an hereditary tradition, who penetrated into the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by virtue of an extraordinary covenant with the infidel, and whose own beliefs were so cosmopolitan that they brought down a sentence of excommunication upon himself and of interdiction upon his kingdom. To Pope Innocent III., the former typified the Catholic emperor of the Middle Ages; Frederick II. appeared to him very much the same as in our days the Lutheran emperor appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil, and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded the arm and head of his iron Chancellor the title of arm and head connatural with the Cæsarian institution. I know of no statesman in history who has given, under analogous circumstances, such proof of want of foresight as was given by Bismarck, comprehensible only if the body could assume the authority of the will, as did his, and if the intelligence could disappear, as did his, in an hydropic and unquenchable desire for power. Frederick, holding progressive ideas opposed to those of Bismarck and of William, would have greatly considered public opinion, and on account of that consideration would have perhaps respected, till the hour of his death, the Pilot, who, dejected by the new direction of public government, inferred that irreparable evil must result therefrom. When Maurice of Saxony trod on the heels of Charles V., whom he had defeated at Innsbruck, he was asked why he did not capture so rich a booty, and replied: “Where should I find a cage large enough for such a big bird?” Assuredly the conscience and mind of such a parliamentarian and philosopher as was Frederick III., must have addressed to him a similar question when he inwardly meditated sacrificing the Chancellor’s person and prescinding his power: “Where should I find a place outside the government for such a man, who would struggle under bolts and chains, making the whole state tremble in sympathy with his own agitation?” The experience and talent of Frederick, together with his respect for public opinion, led him to retain Bismarck at his post, subject only to some slight restrictions. But the Chancellor, in his shortsightedness, filled young William’s head with absolutist ideas; spurred and excited him to display impatience with his poor father; and when thus nurtured, his ward opened his mouth to satisfy his appetite, he swallowed up the Chancellor as a wild beast devours a keeper.

It was the hand of Providence!

III.

The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck’s native ideas, which persisted in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the damned in “Dante’s Inferno,” with his head turned backwards by destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William, in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis of ‘48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive society. The world cannot understand that he should have been perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation, revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire; and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles, foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: “You may be content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen of a free country.” Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by the help of his kings—quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca, just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II. persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D. Rodrigo Caldéron, William II. has morally beheaded Bismarck, without any other motive than his imperial caprice. Sic volo, sic jubeo. So now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey? Quæ te dementia cæpit? When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the theatrical style of an Italian artiste, suitable to his tragical disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases, suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated, yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates’ lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas, represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm, ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.

IV.

In few statesmen has it been seen so clearly as in the case of the Chancellor that no great man can make himself greater than a great idea. Opposed to the Germanic union in the commencement of its creative period, at the time of the revolution of ‘48, he accepted it much later, not so much of his own initiative and free will as in obedience to the teachings of unpleasant experiences. Between his anti-union and almost feudal speeches which softened the disaster of Olmutz, and his conversion, more than fourteen years ensued, the whole space of time which extended from the dawn of the revolution to the triumph of Italy. In that conversion lay the veritable glory of his life, and he proved therein, by successive and tardy gradations, that he could tenaciously avail himself of his courage, and lead up to the triumph of the newly created and loved project with marvellous art. The policy developed against Austria at Frankfort by its snares, by its traps, by its deceits, and by its tricks, exhibited him to history as a prodigy of cunning and foresight, in whom the enthusiasm of a living sentiment was associated with computations of consummate dexterity. His embassy to Paris and to St. Petersburg, where he united against Austria persons so opposed to concord as Napoleon and Alexander, each for his own part determined to do nothing which might increase the power of Germany, surpassed in cleverness everything ever achieved in celebrated combinations by such diplomats as Talleyrand and Metternich, the two illustrious models of political strategy. The inclusion of Austria in the incidents of the duchies of the River Elbe and the jugglery done with the territory acquired with its direct assent, in addition to the preparation of the final stroke for the presidency of the Germanic federation, by means of a war prepared with cunning stealth and carried out with rapid triumph, are among the greatest feats for which praises and deifications are due to him and which testify to his merit. I cannot forget that to his efforts we owe the ruin of Austrian despotism, and of Napoleonic Cæsarism; the re-establishment of Hungarian independence; the return of Italy’s long lost provinces to her bosom; the end of the Pope’s temporal power, and the fortunate occasion of the new birth of the republic in France. In his schemes Bismarck forwarded a higher ideal of progress and, consciously or unconsciously, he—than whom nobody was ever more inspired by motives and triumphant in his undertakings—has served the universal interests of the democracy. But he has achieved his undeniable victories by means and procedures which have not fitted him for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force, either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy, deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy with the former we call duplicity of character, treaties made by stealth, midnight conspiracies, imposition of taxes not voted by parliament, levies arbitrarily decreed by the executive without authorization and even without consultation as in Asia, the right of conquest practised in the light of reason, violent annexations which dismembered one nation for the glory of another—such is the sum total of fatal traditions which Bismarck now solicits to be allowed to continue by means of free discussion, and in the bosom of open parliament. Palmerston and Gortchakoff cannot hop in the same bag. The minion of a Czar and the representative of a nation cannot be united in one and the same person. What programme can Bismarck develop to his colleagues which will have the moral character of necessary work? Moreover, the divine word called human eloquence descends only on the lips of that apostleship which redeems a nation from slavery and impels it forward. You could not understand Daniel defending the kings of Babylon, Demosthenes defending Philip, Cicero defending Mark Antony, O’Connell defending the landlords of Ireland, and Vergniaud or Mirabeau defending the absolute kings of France. If Bismarck accepts the liberal and tolerant policy of to-day, will he not thereby countenance the emperor who has ridiculed him and Caprivi who has audaciously seated himself in that exalted position from which Bismarck thought never to fall before his death? The great man is a poor appraiser of ideas, accepting them from every quarter whence they blow to him if only they will fill his sails and propel his bark; but he will never understand what mischief he could work to his enemies by opposing a programme of advanced democratic reform to the imperial programme whose fixity resembles the rigidity of death. But what liberty can he invoke—he who has disavowed and injured all liberties? Not personal liberty—abused and trampled on constantly by his menials; not commercial liberty, sold for thirty pieces of silver after the Germanic Zollverein had brought great wealth to Prussia; not religious liberty, placed in grave danger by complacency with anti-Jewish preachers and by the May laws; not scientific liberty, after having persecuted every department of science—even history—and invested the state with full power to enforce the teaching of official doctrines everywhere and by everybody; not industrial liberty, wasted away by the regulation of labor which has transformed the workshops into garrisons, and made of the workmen an army. What remains for him to do? He has absolutely no resource at his disposal with which to undertake a campaign of active opposition. In social questions nothing is more worn out and useless than his pontifical socialism. This species of abortion has lately resulted in advancing the parturition of increased aspirations of the laborers, and as every kind of abortion leaves the womb which bears it, has done so violently. His law for the insurance of workmen, though dating only from ‘82, is already tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck’s system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest against such indignities being possible in the country. Even his foreign policy can scarcely be justified; however skilful may have been the diplomatic and military preparations which led to his first triumph, it has proved a perplexed and confused policy since his final triumph. The Chancellor had no other alternative than to come to an agreement either with France and England against Russia, or else with Russia against France and England. To come to an arrangement with France against Russia necessitated the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine; to come to an understanding with Russia, it was necessary to permit the Russians to enter Constantinople. By these perplexities which shut out all hope of retaliation from France, thus exciting its colonial appetite, and which opened to Russia the path to the Bosphorus in a final eastern war, detaining her for a time in St. Stephens and preparing the two Bulgarias for an Austrian protectorate, Bismarck could have extricated himself from danger from both Russia and France when the bonds of the Triple Alliance were loosened at Rome by the fall of Crispi, and at Vienna by the Treaty of Commerce. We have not spoken of the Chancellor as an argonaut, of the Chancellor as a colonizer. All that he has been able to do, after having given occasion for enormous difficulties with Australia and England, with the United States and Spain, placing himself and placing us in danger of war for the Carolines, has been to break poor unlucky Emin Pasha’s backbone, and to barter the protectorate of Zanzibar for the sponge known as Heligoland. And may thanks be given to William II. and to Caprivi for having, at such small cost, got over the difficulties of the Socialist laws of his home policy, and the colonial entanglements of his foreign policy. Bismarck may believe an old admirer of his personality and of his genius, though an adversary of his policy, and of the government dependent on that policy. Society, like nature, devours everything that it does not need. The death of William I., the Cæsar; the death of Roon, the organizer; the death of Moltke, the strategist, all say to him that the species of men to which he belongs is fading out and becoming extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment of God and of history.

THE DOUBTERS AND THE DOGMATISTS.

BY PROF. JAMES T. BIXBY, PH.D.

An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England not long ago characterized the present age as pre-eminently the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took up book, or magazine, or sermon, he was confronted with some form of it.

This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The modern mind is thoroughly wide awake and has quite thrown off the leading-strings of ancient timidity. It looks all questions in the face and demands to be shown the real facts in every realm. All the traditions of history, the laws of science, the principles of morals are overhauled, and the foundations on which they rest relentlessly probed. And our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be summoned before its bar; no council nor conclave too sacred to be asked for its credentials; no pope or Scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority. In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad; almost every morning breeze brings us some new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth-hounds of orthodoxy, as they scent some new trail of infidelity; and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from shore to shore.

As we look around the ecclesiastical horizon, we find agitation and controversy on all sides. In one denomination, it is the question of the salvation of the heathen; in another, that of the virgin birth of Christ and the apostolic succession; in a third, it is the invasion of doubt as to the eternal torment of the wicked; in a fourth, the evidential value of the miracles; in a fifth, the grand questions included under the higher criticism of the Scriptures and the relative authority of reason and the Bible. In Congregational, Episcopalian, Baptist, Universalist, and Presbyterian folds, it is the same, everywhere some heresy to be disciplined, some doubt to be suppressed, some doctrinal battle hotly waged.

To the greater part of the Church, this epidemic of scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins; and they consider the only proper thing to do with it, is to follow the advice of the Bishop of London, some years ago, and fling doubt away as you would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes near it.

Others, on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hail it with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theological Götterdæmerung, the downfall of all divine powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition, to give place to the naked facts of scientific materialism.

What estimate, then, shall we put on this tendency?

In the first place we must recognize that it is a serious condition; that it is no momentary eddy, but a permanent turn in the current of the human mind. Humanity is looking religion square in the face, without any band over its eyes, in a way it never has before; and when humanity once gets its eyes open to such questions,—it is in vain to try to close them, before the questions have been thoroughly examined. Certainly, Protestantism cannot call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle with Rome the right of private judgment, which started the modern mind upon this high quest; and Protestantism is therefore bound in logic and honor to see it through to the end, whatever that end may be.

And in the next place, I believe that quest will end in good. Why the champions of faith should regard doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instrument in God’s hand, is something I do not understand. If doubt humbles the Church and acts as a thorn in its flesh, may not such chastening be providential, quite as much as the things which puff it up? As Luther well expressed it, “We say to our Lord, that if he will have his church, he must keep it, for we cannot. And if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven.” As Attila was the scourge of God to the Roman world, when God needed to clear that empire out of the way, as he built his new Christendom, so may not doubt be the scourge of God to the easy-going, sleepy, too credulous piety of to-day, which gulps down all the husks of faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel?

Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise the sweet fruit of true religion.

There are times when careful investigation is rightly called for. When doubting Thomas demanded to see the print of the nails, and touch and handle the flesh of the risen Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the great marvel was a wise and commendable one; one for which all subsequent generations of Christians are deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence, or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant who refuses to entertain any question about the seaworthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the Atlantic undocked and unexamined, piously trusting her to the Lord? Shall we commend him? or not rather charge him with culpable negligence? And what we say of such a merchant seems to me just what we should say of the Christian who refuses to investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in politics, in law, we demand what business the dead hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse? Why should the dead hand of an Augustine or Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why should these mediæval glimpses of truth be given the right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we ourselves can see and speaking forth what we can hear of heavenly truth?

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation has brought us up to a higher outlook, where we see the true relations of things better than before. In all other branches, God has given us new light, so that we discern things more as they really are. Science has risen by making a ladder of its earlier errors and by treading them under foot, reaching to higher truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages; and Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that the churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to receive whatever new light God may grant them to-day, and with the potent clarifying processes of reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided judgment.

But to the modern devotees of dogma, any subjection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems shocking. The forefront of Dr. Briggs’ recent offending, for which he is about to be formally tried as a heretic, is that he admits errors in the Bible and gives reason (by which he means, as he explains, not merely the understanding, but also the conscience and the religious instinct in man), a conjoint place with the Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the attainment of divine truth. To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who knows the laws of human nature, to every scholar who knows the actual history of the Bible, these positions seem only self-evident. That in the Scriptures there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradictions and inconsistencies between different books and chapters,—these are facts of observation which every Biblical student knows full well. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that the Bible was given originally by infallible divine dictation, yet the men who wrote down the message were fallible; the men who copied it were fallible; the men who translated it (some of it twice over, first from Hebrew to Greek, and then from Greek to English) were fallible; and the editors, who from the scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched together our present text, were most fallible. And when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him, how can he understand it, except by using his own reason and judgment? Instruments, again, most fallible.

How is it possible, then, to get Bible-truth independently of the reason or in entire exemption from error? The only way would be to say, that not only was the Bible verbally inspired, but all its authors, copyists, editors, and pious readers were also infallibly inspired. As in the old Hindoo account of how the world was supported, the earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the defender of the faith was asked what, then, did the tortoise rest on, he sought to save himself in his quandary, by roundly asserting that “it was tortoise all the way down”;—so the defender of the infallibility of the Scripture has to take refuge in “inspiration all the way down.” But if this be so, ought not the modern scripture editors and revisers, translators and Biblical professors also to be inspired, as much as those of King James’ day or the printers at the Bible house? And thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdum of this argument, this result: that Tischendorff, and Koenen, and the Hebrew professors, among whom Doctor Briggs is a foremost authority, while accused of heresy are really themselves the very channels of infallible inspiration.

The sincere investigators into the character of the Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with exalting human reason above the word of God. But as soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor Swing or a Mr. MacQueary corroborates his interpretation by the Scripture itself, or Doctor Briggs shows his views to be sustained by history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of both nature and the Bible, then the ground is shifted, and it is maintained that it is not a question whether the views are true, but whether they conform to the creed; that the Catechism is not to be judged by the Bible or the facts in the case, but Bible and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the Confession; and if they do not agree with this, then heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The question is not whether the water of truth be found, but whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the Church’s label glued firmly upon it. The pretext for the charge of heresy against these eminent Biblical scholars is that they are undermining the Bible; but in conducting the trial, prosecutors themselves refuse to abide by the testimony of the Scriptures to decide the matter and erect above them soul creed or catechism.

But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came these creeds and catechisms themselves? What else was their origin than out of the reason of man; out of the brains of scholars, as they in former years criticised and interpreted the same Scripture, and nature, and laws of God? And these scholars of the past were quite as fallible, quite as partisan, and far less well informed than our scholars to-day. Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who exalt the reason of man above the word of God, forbidding us to listen to the more direct voice of God in our own soul; forbidding us to decipher the revelations which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks, and tree, and animal structure, and even frowning upon that profounder study of the Scripture called the higher criticism, but bidding us accept, in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council or assembly of former generations.

There have undoubtedly been periods when the doubt with which the Church had to deal was mainly frivolous or carnal; a passionate rebellion of the worldly nature, attacking the essential truths of religion. But such is not the nature of the doubt which is at present occupying the public eye; such is not the doubt most characteristic of our generation. It proceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire for more solid foundations; for the attainment of the naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident of the great intellectual awakening of our century. As the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its week-day explorations of the history of Rome, or the myths of Greece, or the religious ideas of Buddha or Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the Christian dogmas under new influences. It will necessarily demand what better evidence the law of Moses or the creed of Nicea has than the law of Mana or the text of the Zendavesta? The scepticism of our age is not so much directed against the great truths of religion as against the man-made dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found manifested among the throng of young men gathered at our most progressive University,—Harvard. But Dr. Lyman Abbot, after several weeks’ association with the students there, and a careful study of their states of mind, not long ago testified, that “if they are sceptical, it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or church formularies for a life of devotion.” Now to call such a state of mind irreligious or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The real infidels are they who reject the revelation which God is making us continually in the widening light of modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical lynching, condemn, before trial, the sincere, painstaking, and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ, who are so earnestly seeking after truth, because the results of their learned researches do not agree with the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants: “If it be heresy to say that rationalists, like Martineau, have found God in the reason, and Roman Catholics, like Newman, have found God in the Church, I rejoice in such heresy, and I do not hesitate to say that I have less doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude such noble men,—so pure, so grand, the ornaments of Great Britain and the prophets of the age,—from the kingdom of God.”

Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no sins; they are not irreligious. But surely they do vex the Church. What shall the Church do about them? In the first place, we should not try to suppress them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath their heads and go to sleep again, and dream. They have got their eyes wide open and they are determined to know whether those sweet visions which they had on faith’s pillow are any more than illusions. Nor will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a creed of three hundred or fifteen hundred year’s antiquity recited to them. The modern intellects that have taken Homer to pieces, and excavated Agamemnon’s tomb, and unwound the mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, that have weighed the stars and chained the lightnings, are not to be awed by any old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They demand the facts in the case; fresh manna to satisfy their heart hunger; the solid realities of personal experience. No. It is too late to-day for the churchmen to play the part of Mrs. Partington, and sweep back the Atlantic tide of modern thought with their little ecclesiastical broom. The old ramparts are broken through and we must give the flood its course. The only spirit to meet it in is that of frankness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk’s scruples against eating animal food were futile (inasmuch as in every glass of water he drank he swallowed millions of little living creatures), smashed the microscope for answer, as if that altered at all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters in Christendom quite as foolish in their efforts to smash the microscope of higher criticism, or the telescope of evolution, and suppress the testimony which nature, and reason, and scholarship every day present afresh?

Let us, therefore, give liberty, yes, even sympathy, to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the great problems of religion.

And secondly, let us be honest with them, and not claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more precise and absolute knowledge about divine and heavenly things than we have. One of the great causes of modern doubt is, unquestionably, the excessive claims that theology has made. It has not been content with preaching the simple truths necessary to a good life; that we have a Maker to whom we are responsible,—a divine Friend to help us, a divine voice within to teach us right and wrong; that in the life that is to follow this, each shall be judged according to his deeds, and that in the apostles and prophets, especially the spotless life of Jesus, we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up before us for our imitation; a revelation of moral and religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The Church has not been content with these almost self-evident truths; but it must go on, to make most absolute assertions about God’s foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre-existence of Christ,—things not only vague and inconsistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things are bound up in one great theological system, and poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either take all or none; and so (soon coming face to face with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the religious history of the great sceptics,—the Voltaires, the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines,—and you will see that the origin of their scepticism has almost always been in a reaction from the excessive assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too fine spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself responsible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.

Let the Church, then, be honest, and claim no more than it ought. Let it respect and encourage honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The Church itself should say to the inquirer: You are unfaithful to your God if you go not where He, by the candle of the Lord (i. e., the reason and conscience he has placed within you), leads you. And when a man in this reverent and sincere spirit pursues the path of doubt, how often does he find it circling around again toward faith and conducting him to the Mount of Zion! The true remedy for scepticism is deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bottom a cry of the deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that Spirit whose name is truth, whose word is love.

You remember, perhaps, the story of the climber among the Alps, who, having stepped off a precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of anticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath, only a few inches below his feet. So when we resign ourselves to God’s hand, our fall, be it little or be it great, lands us gently in the everlasting arms that are ever underneath.

Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt, or to follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul-struggle, your faith shall come forth stronger and calmer. And do not hesitate to proclaim your new convictions when they have become convictions. Such is the encouragement and sympathy that the Church should give the candid questioner.

On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to be precipitate in publishing his doubt. Let him wait till it has become more than a doubt; till it has become a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he inflicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, commands caution and firm conviction that our new view is something more than a passing caprice of the mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is sure of this, then let him no longer silence his highest thoughts.

Again, the Church is justified in cautioning the doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt. There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in disbelieving than in believing; and if your opinions have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute for the old, you are doing your neighbor a poor service in taking away from him any superstition, however illogical, that sustains his heart and strengthens his virtue.

And further, let me say, I would dislike very much to have you contented with doubt. Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the ground, but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable half-way shelter in the journey of life; but a very cold home in which to settle down as the end of that journey.

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly touched, or our mind satisfied, we believe. It is each soul’s positive faith, however unconventional or perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains its hope, that incites its effort, that supports it through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, faith in a higher law than that of human creeds; in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our own sense of justice and consistency, than in any manuscript or print.

The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on every human soul.

She is right who sings:—

“There is no unbelief;

And day by day, and night by night, unconsciously

The heart lives by that faith the lips deny,—

God knows the why.”

Finally, and most important of all, let us not worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opinions of men; but look rather to their spiritual condition. The church ought to think less of creed and more of character. The essence of faith lies not in correct conclusions upon doctrinal points; but in righteousness, and love, and trustful submission to God’s will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, let me cite good orthodox authority. I might quote Bishop Thirlwall, of the Church of England, in his judgment concerning Colenso’s attack upon the accuracy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, that “this story, nay, the whole history of the Jewish people, has no more to do with our faith as Christians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of three.” Or I might quote Canon Farrar’s weighty words, in a recent article in the Christian World, upon the true test of religion. “The real question,” he declares, “to ask about any form of religious belief, is: Does it kindle the fire of love? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, nobler? Does it run through the whole society like a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and base, selfish and impure? If it stands that test it is no heresy.” That answers the question as aptly as it does manfully. And to the same effect is the noble sermon of Dr. Heber Newton a few weeks ago, in which he subordinated the question of the denominational fold to the higher interests of the Christian flock; and that notable saying of Dr. MacIlvaine’s at the Presbyterian Presbytery the other day, when, quoting the admission of one evangelical minister, that it was the Unitarian Martineau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, “You must first find God in your soul before you can find Him elsewhere.” Yes, the prime and essential thing is to find God in the soul; to worship him in spirit, by a pure conscience, a loyal will, a heart full of devotion to God’s righteousness and love to all our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And what have Calvin’s five points, or the composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin birth of Christ to do with such worship? If a man likes to believe them, very well. But if he cannot honestly credit them, why should we shut the doors of the church against him and threaten him with excommunication? Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on his disciples? Not at all. Look all through the Sermon on the Mount, study the Golden Rule, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions Jesus lays down in his picture of the last judgment as the conditions of approval by the heavenly Judge, and see if you find anything there about the infallibility of Scripture, or the Apostolic succession, or the Deity of Christ, or any other of the dogmas on account of which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics. How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian denominations wrought up to a white heat over such dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism, and pauperism, and immorality of our great metropolis is passed over with indifference.

Sunday after Sunday, the Christian pulpit complains that the great masses of the people keep away from their communion tables and do not even darken their doors.

Does not the fault really lie in the folly—I may almost say sin,—of demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas five-barred gates through which alone there is any admission to heaven?

If we wish the Church to regain its hold on thinking men it must simplify and curtail its creeds; it must recognize that the love of God is not measured by the narrowness of human prejudice, and that God’s arms are open to receive every honest searcher after truth. Let him come with all his doubts, provided he comes with a pure heart and brings forth the fruits of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend that it is necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries of God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wickedness for a man honestly to hold a conviction different from the conventional standard; but let us respect one another’s independent search and judgment of truth. True faith consists not in any special theory of God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit to touch His spirit, and the diffusing of whatever grace or gift we have received from Him in generous good-will amongst our fellows.

If the Christian Church is to go forward successfully again in the power and spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as “the way, the truth, and the life,” it must make that way and life its guiding truth. It must aim constantly at greater simplicity in its teaching, and a broader, more fraternal co-operation in Christian work. Its motto should be the motto of the early Church, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Then shall a new and grander career open before its upward footsteps.

THE SIOUX FALLS DIVORCE COLONY AND SOME NOTED COLONISTS.

BY JAMES REALF, JR.

The thriving city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has recently been pitchforked into unjust notoriety by certain irresponsible correspondents of certain sensational and habitually inveracious newspapers that infest New York and Chicago. It has been represented as having an easy divorce mill that constantly grinds out divorces of a more or less bogus nature. This is fundamentally false. The laws of South Dakota are liberal, but they are strictly interpreted. These unscrupulous newspapers, whom it is unnecessary to name, have gone still further in their distortion of truth, dissemination of error and attempted degradation of the high and noble calling of journalism. They have made false and unwarranted statements about the laws of the Dakotas and of the United States generally on the subject of divorce. Nor is this all in their race for a temporary and unsubstantial circulation,—they have maligned certain unfortunate and meritorious women and men, and added insult to injury by publishing bogus portraits of beautiful ladies whose misfortunes should have provoked respectful sympathy rather than coarse insinuation and vulgar ridicule. Because these women were prominent in what has been termed the Divorce Colony of Sioux Falls, either from social rank in their former spheres, or by reason of the legal peculiarities enmeshing their cases, they are legitimate subjects for honest journalistic treatment, and some of them, triumphing over the natural shrinkingness of their sex, for the sake of truth and for the sake of other women who may need examples and incitements to achieve freedom from dishonoring marriages, are perfectly willing to sacrifice their own personal desires for obscurity and have their lives and their cases properly presented. I have even prevailed on a few to permit the use of their photographs to add to the personal interest of this article.

The case of greatest interest, perhaps, because it has a transatlantic notoriety, is that of Eva Lylyan Lynch-Blosse, an English lady, who came to Sioux Falls early last winter and attracted almost instantly the respectful attention of the citizens. Not because she was a strikingly beautiful woman, for a student of statues might find some faults in her features, but because out of the shy, violet eyes a high, indomitable spirit occasionally gleamed and a stray flash from them, combined with her radiant freshness of complexion and perfect grace of figure and of carriage, would light up the common sordid streets of the common masculine mind and turn them, for the nonce, into vistas of imagination.

Some persons, passing us, inspire the thought: There goes a being with a strange life-history, or full of great capacities, moral or mental. Such was, undoubtedly, the chief component of her charm, felt equally by the grave and learned lawyer, ex-Judge Garland, who conducted her case, and by the street-loungers who respectfully hastened to make way for her passage. It was the high character that radiated from her, scorning the conventionalities that conspire to belittle her sex, determined to be free and not afraid of being a pioneer in baffling the barbarism of her native laws. A singular story hers, that demands to be told in full, since it is full of inspiration to oppressed womanhood everywhere.

The daughter of an English clergyman, she married at seventeen Lieut. Edward Falconer Lynch-Blosse, an Irishman of good family, but bad habits. In a few months this girl-wife discovered not only that she had mistaken for affection what was merely the gratified vanity of a boarding-school miss when wooed by a good-looking uniform, but that there was absolutely nothing in the nature of the animated uniform on which even respect could be built. Active brutality was soon begun by the lieutenant. Simple adultery not being a sufficient amusement for his hours of ease, he tried to compel his refined and delicate wife to receive his paid paramours as her associates; and on her demurring, he became mad with indignation and proceeded to discipline her, according to the Englishman’s time-honored right of violence. As a minor but very embarrassing matter to a sensitive woman, he plunged into debt and forced her to contend with and pacify his duns out of her private fortune, and even worried her into an attempt to raise money for him by pledging her annuity, though, luckily, no Jew in London was plucky enough to take a long risk on the life of the wife of so brutal a husband. This daily inferno of disgust and terror the woman endured for three years, for the barbarous English law requires the woman, not the man, to prove extreme cruelty besides adultery; and cruelty is often not so easy to prove, for Englishmen, as a rule, do not beat their wives on the housetops. It is generally a strictly boudoir performance, with locked doors and the rabble excluded, as befits the solemnity of such a marital right. At last, owing to the lieutenant’s culpable carelessness in castigation, she was able to go to court with plenty of provable cruelty. But here again the barbarous English law stepped in and said: “This is all very true, but wait a bit. You shall have a decree nisi,” which meant that she must wait six months and then a certain musty, overpaid, and underworked humbug, styled the Queen’s Proctor, after hobnobbing with an attorney-general, would, if his dinner agreed with him, confirm the decree and make it final. During this suspense the ineffably mean uniform that had been masquerading as a man was visited by an idea, and wrote a letter to Mrs. Lynch-Blosse depicting himself as on the brink of starvation and consumption, and begging for some money. The woman’s pity was aroused. She had once fancied for a brief while, with the undeveloped heart of girlhood, that she liked this empty, tinkling symbol of a man. She wrote him a kind letter enclosing the money. It takes but little imagination to understand what such a creature would do with the cash; that he would hasten to celebrate the success of his cunning by a revel at which he could brag to some loose companion how neatly he had cheated a generous and noble woman. But he did something more, almost inconceivable in its baseness; he took that letter to the Queen’s Proctor and showed it to that archive of centuried insapience as a proof that there had been collusion in the case, that his wife and he were really on good terms, and that he was anxious to regain her. The Proctor took his word, and without going into the case further, when the six months were up, refused to confirm the decree. And then her friends said: “You had better give up. England has decided that you cannot be free.” And her lawyers said: “Even with fresh evidence it would be foolish to re-open the fight. The action of the Queen’s Proctor is so insurmountable.” But the woman said to herself: “Though England has decided that I must be a slave, nevertheless I will be free.” Meantime Lieutenant Lynch-Blosse, after endeavoring to blacken his wife’s character in his regiment, and getting soundly thrashed for his pains, eloped with a light-headed Scotch peeress whose husband, Lord Torphichen, promptly obtained a divorce, with the custody of his children, and the elopers fled the kingdom, leaving a small army of swindled tradesmen who are still exceedingly anxious to discover their whereabouts. When last heard of, the ex-uniform was living in Chicago under an alias, and he will probably remain one of the many English ornaments of this country, for the same English law that permits a man to castigate his wife in moderation is excessively severe if he swindles tradesmen.

Mrs. Lynch-Blosse obtained her Dakotan divorce on the ground of adultery, the evidence being the record of the Scotch suit of Lord Torphichen against Lady Torphichen, otherwise styled the Right Hon. Ellen Frances Gordon, and apart from the wrongs, the beauty, and the pioneer courage of Mrs. Lynch-Blosse, picturesque as they made it, her case possesses profound interest to the legal mind. It adds to the weight of such cases as except to the old rule of domicile (Ditson v. Ditson, 4 R. I., 87; Harding v. Alden, 9 Mo. 140; Hollister v. Hollister, 6 Pa. St., 449; Derby v. Derby, 14 Ill. App., 645) by showing that where a husband is guilty of such conduct as would entitle even to a limited divorce, the wife is at liberty to establish a separate jurisdictional domicile. Moreover, Mrs. Lynch-Blosse might have obtained a divorce on grounds less strong than she did, for a divorce good at the place of domicile will be sustained in England, though the same grounds would have been insufficient to obtain it there. (Harvey v. Farnie, L. R. 8 App. Cas. 43; Turner v. Thompson, L. R., 13 P. D. 37.) Of this law, probably, comity of nations is the chief component. Those who admire moral courage and feel a glow of indignation at the fact that, in order to secure her natural right to own herself, a woman in the closing years of the nineteenth century has to spend thousands of dollars, travel thousands of miles, and sojourn among strangers, may be glad to know that since her freedom she has married an English gentleman of high character, and is living restfully in a charming little cottage on the banks of what Macaulay calls, in his picturesque way, “the river of the ten thousand masts.” The great, feverous heart of London throbs near.

Another very interesting personage in the Sioux Falls Divorce Colony, is Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr., now living in a cosy cottage on the fashionable avenue with her sister, Miss Nevins, her son, James G. Blaine, 3d, and her maids. When Marie Nevins, piquantly pretty, witty, and accomplished, made a stolen match with the ungreat son of one of America’s greatest political figures, she little dreamed what the hands of the Fates—who are sometimes the Furies—were spinning for her; yet she wears her robes of sorrow with some of that grace of patience which comes to her sex like an instinct born of centuried servitude. How her husband ever fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman’s heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine’s infelicities has been carefully hidden from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be friends have now and then busied themselves with starting absurd rumors, as if for the fun of contradicting them; for instance, a precious yarn spun lately to the effect that Mrs. Blaine, senior, looked down on her daughter-in-law as not aristocratic enough to have married a Blaine. How intrinsically absurd is such an idea in connection with a family as close to what Lincoln called “the plain people”—and as really proud of so being—as that of the famous Republican leader! Blaine is a man so thoroughly democratic that only a very stupid enemy of his could have invented such a piece of self-convicting nonsense; for if aristocracy entered into the question, Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr., could make a better showing than her spouse, since, if it confers any quasi-patent of nobility in this country to have a distinguished father, it must give a larger halo of social splendor to have a distinguished grandfather, etc., etc. Now, Mrs. Blaine, Jr., had a grandsire who was a power in his day, a forceful, brilliant man, Samuel Medary, who was successively governor of three States, Ohio, Kansas, and Minnesota. Mrs. Blaine, Jr., apart from her marital misfortunes, deserves much sympathy for her physical fate. Just lately her leg was broken again and her surgeons fear that her lameness must be perpetual. Yet the talk about her going on the stage has some basis, and no one who ever talked with her, and enjoyed the prismatic play of her facial expression and the flexions of her vibrant voice, could doubt her fitness for certain popular rôles. Nor need her lameness defeat her of success. A play of mingled pathos and humor could be written for a lame heroine. One excellent writer has offered to do it, and Hamlin Garland could do it excellently. Balzac in his marvellous book, “The Alkahest,” declares that she is blest among women, who, having some great bodily defect, nevertheless wins a man’s affections, for she never loses her hold on them, and it might very easily be the same with a lame actress and the affections of the public.

As to Mrs. Blaine’s case an immense interest is felt, an interest which lies not alone in the points of law. Mrs. Blaine, Jr., is a Catholic, and her example in taking this step contrary to the custom of her church is likely to be fruitful. It is a pretty safe prophecy that the next Pope will see the advisability of returning to the policy of the church prevalent before the Council of Trent, and will allow a wiser freedom to his spiritual subjects in this matter of divorce. Hearts were created before creeds, and the primal laws of God still possess, and exert in emergencies, their ancient vigor of eminent domain.

It is noticeable that nearly all the women in the colony have children, and nearly all are women of unusual grace or beauty, or mental gift—sometimes all three in one.

A very interesting person occasionally seen on the streets with a little golden-haired boy is Mrs. Mina Hubbard, formerly of Redbank, N. J. She has one of those olive, oval faces so often met in the south of Spain, and she has a voice whose beauty and volume are equally impressive. One day in the cosy, dozy little Methodist Church last summer she happened to join in the singing, and several pious nappers were sweetly startled from their theologic dreams. After that event there was such a marked increase in the masculine attendance that the lady’s modesty took fright, and she refrained from the pleasure of church-going. When I asked her if she had lost her fondness for Methodism and music, she replied archly: “Oh, no! I am extremely fond of going to church and hearing good congregational music, but I can restrain myself.”

Hon. Thomas D. Worrall, M. D., who has recently obtained a divorce and now lives in Sioux Falls, is another person of note. Born in England sixty-five years ago, he came to America young, moved to Boston and achieved reputation as an anti-slavery orator, even when the peerless Phillips was in his first blaze. Then he went to Colorado, was a member of the territorial legislature, and wrote his name largely and honorably on her early annals. Horace Greeley, who liked him heartily, persuaded him next to accept a professorship in New York in the American College of Medicine. Two years later, going to New Orleans, he became a member of the famous Warmouth Legislature, and as sanitary physician to New Orleans, added to his world-wide host of friends. While in England, in 1873, his lectures on the resources of the Mississippi Valley attracted wide attention, and he was greeted on his return by an ovation in the New Orleans Academy of Music. Colorado again claimed him for seven happy, industrious years, marked by an eloquent defence of the Denver Mining Exposition, for which they presented him with a cabinet of minerals that, according to experts, is intrinsically worth $5,000, though it would take vastly more to buy it from a man so covetous of honor. Removing to Washington, he published a curious little book called “Slander and Defamation of Character.”

Sickness came to this learned and benevolent man, and he went to London for treatment, but famous surgeons, after operating, could give him no hope, and he came back to his adopted country to die. To his amazement he found his home broken up, his valuable furniture sold, his wife gone. “The mystery of the case,” he has said, “is that my wife and I never had the least falling out. Her desertion of me in my old age and supposed last illness was like lightning out of a clear sky. The thought came to me, ‘Dying man that I am, it will be sweet to die free.’” He then came West and settled in Sioux Falls, and either the invigorating climate, or the inspiration of freedom, or the shock of his wife’s desertion (for in some diseases a sudden shock delays or defeats death by effecting an electric change in the bodily currents setting restward) have worked a marvellous change, for to-day this amiable and accomplished old man is the picture of health and vital power.