tion in Massachusetts, but makes those rights more secure throughout the Nation.

Progress in the South

The trend of public opinion in any community is to be determined by the utterances of those who show themselves natural leaders. There are always men in every epoch and in every State who devote all their energies to resisting changes in public sentiment. They are sometimes unable to perceive a revolution even when it has occurred. Their whole force is devoted to reiterating ancient prejudices in new forms, and to hopeless endeavors to turn back the shadow on the sun-dial. Such men no more indicate the course of events than the rock in the bed of a river, which vainly attempts to stay the current that foams and frets itself against the obstacle, indicates that the river is without movement.

It is not always easy to determine who are the leaders whose utterances indicate the tendency of public opinion. There are, however, a few signs not to be mistaken. Such a leader never cuts himself off from the past or ignores the conditions of the present; whatever hopes he may entertain for the future, he expects to evolve that future out of the present and the past. On the other hand, such a leader never anchors himself to the past or refuses to recognize the needs of his own generation and the genera tion yet to come. He does not always represent a majority, but he always represents an increasing number. He is not always an optimist, but there is always some tone of expectation and hopefulness in his utterances. He always looks forward to a larger and better future, and does what in him lies to lead his countrymen to see the promised land and to move toward it. It is by the utterances of such men as these, not by the speeches of those who repeat in new forms the sentiments if not the prejudices of olden time, that the Nation should judge the direction in which the Southern States are moving.

Our readers will perhaps recall the report which we gave last week of an interview with the Hon. John B. Knox, of Alabama, and will not be surprised at the following

letter received from him. It is the more significant because it was not written for

publication, although we have obtained. his consent to publish it. It illustrates the type of utterance which we have described above, and indicates, if not the sentiment of the majority of the Southern people to-day, the direction in which that sentiment is moving and what that sentiment will be in a near to-morrow:

Constitutional Convention Chamber, Montgomery, Ala., June 3 1901. I take the liberty of sending you a copy of my remarks made upon the occasion of my accepting the position of President of the Constitutional Convention of Alabama. Since making these remarks I have been gratified Club of Brooklyn, where you discuss the social to read your remarks before the Get Together

and industrial betterment of the South, and to discover that we are not very far apart in our views.

I do not believe that our Convention will favor denying to the negro his opportunity to vote by qualifying himself for the duties the right imposes. We of the South believe that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, admitting as they did to the privilege of voting so large a number of ignorant and unqualified citizens wholly unfit for it, was the mistake of the nineteenth century, and it has been our purpose to free ourselves of the menace imposed by this large mass of ignorant voters; but I think it is our duty, and that we will extend to these people the right to vote, so soon as they qualify themselves, by education or otherwise, for the responsibilities of the privilege of the franchise."

The Northern people have, with great philanthropy and generosity, contributed, as you say, the sum of thirty millions of dollars for the education of the negro. What is not so well known is the fact that the South has furnished one hundred and twenty millions of dollars for the education of the negro. We have no intention of discontinuing this provision for his education; on the contrary, I venture to say that our purpose is to increase of this Convention to allow the black man to it, and, in my judgment, it will be the sentiment stand on the same footing as the white man, after a certain limit of, say, two to five years, and after the negro shall have become possessed of the qualifications which will justify the extension to him of the right to vote. Many negroes, of course, are now qualified and will be entitled to vote under any Constitution we may make.

In my judgment, the provisions made by the States of North and South Carolina and Louisiana, where they refer to the right of suffrage, are largely misunderstood or misconstrued. True, each State has adopted a provision ing, but in each of these States this right is allowing illiterate whites the privilege of vot limited to those who register within a few years from the time the Constitution goes into effect, and, when this time shall have expired, all will stand on an equal basis, and the privileges of the ballot will be granted to those only who, through the possession of either the educa

tional or property qualification, are worthy of being charged with the responsible duties of citizenship; and like provisions are to be found in the Constitutions of Massachusetts and other Northern States.

Yours very truly,

JOHN B. KNOX. We agree absolutely with Mr. Knox in thinking that the imposition of universal suffrage upon the Southern States was a serious mistake. We think that it would be no less serious a mistake were the South ern States to endeavor to exclude the negro from the suffrage, merely because he is a negro.

This would be a mistake because it would be an injustice, and injustice is always a mistake. But provisions for excluding the shiftless, the vicious, and the ignorant from suffrage are entirely legitimate. Ideally, restrictions on the suffrage should be imposed on white and black alike; but political results are rarely ideal results, nor can we think it strange that the white voters are unwilling to disfranchise themselves in an endeavor to disfranchise shiftless and ignorant negro voters. Whatever injustice is effected by a temporary distinction between colored and white citizens in the suffrage laws is not of so serious a character as to call for heroic resistance, if Mr. Knox is right, and, after a limit of from two to five years, voting is to be allowed to black and white on equal terms.

An equally striking illustration of the progress of public opinion in the South is furnished by a very remarkable address delivered by the Hon. Emory Speer, United States Judge in Georgia, on the 18th of June, at the centennial exercises of the University of Georgia at Athens. This address ought to be printed in pamphlet form and widely circulated both North and South. It is too long and too carefully wrought out to be epitomized in a paragraph, but it accepts in full the doctrine that new days bring with them new duties, and meets with courage the question, "What effort shall the trained ministry and genuine patriotism of these Southern States play in this great drama of New America?" It emphasizes the conjunction of the new and the old in its statement that "there is a New South, it is true, but the Old South is here," and, in a paragraph which we quote rather to illustrate the spirit than the doctrine of the address, it calls on the Southern peo

ple to declare and maintain their independence of purely party traditions:

The theory of our Constitution is that every American citizen is sovereign. How long shall these sovereigns quiver under the party lash? Shall we forever support a measure because it is said to be to the party's interest, or shall we inquire, in the words of Henry Clay, "Is the measure right? Will it conduce to the general happiness, to the elevation of National character?" Shall we forever vote without regard to the character or capacity of a candidate because he has secured a party nomination, or shall we again recur to the test of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of Democracy, "Is he honest, is he capable, is he faithful to the Constitution?" We are sovereigns, it is when shall the king enjoy his own again! true, but are we not sovereigns in exile? Oh, Here the old English strain saturated with the principles of individual freedom and popular sovereignty is preserved in all of its pristine purity. If this be, and it must be, an average Southern audience, more than ninety-nine per cent. of my hearers are lineally descended from sages or patriots of the Revolution, whose heroism and constancy made the Nation possible. If the roll of this mighty gathering should be called, almost every name might be found in the register of births and deaths in the parish churches of the British Isles. Southern men of the homogeneous American stock Iwere the chief architects who builded the Nation. The eloquence of a Southern man in the House of Burgesses in Virginia stirred the spirit of resistance to the tyranny of the British Ministry. A Southern man drafted the Declaration of Independence. A Southern man led the armies of the Revolution, presided over the convention that framed the Constitution, and was the first President of the United States, and, after the organization of the Government, save for one term, for more than thirty-six years Southern men occupied the chair of the Executive. A Southern man was the Chief Justice who found the Constitution a skeleton, and whose majestic decisions clothed and vitalized it with life and beauty. A Southern man was that farsighted political philosopher who added the territory to the westward of the Mississippi, comprising the States of Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, Idaho, the Indian Territory, and Oklahoma, to the beauteous sisterhood which now forms the fairest and most hopeful government on which the sun has ever shone. A Southern man, contributed by our own beloved Georgia, that incomparable diplomat John Forsyth, added to the Union the peninsula of Florida, an empire in itself. A Southern man announced to the Holy Alliance, then in all the insolent flush of its power, that we should consider any attempt on its part to extend its system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. This was the Monroe Doctrine. It was a Southern President who, in the language of a modern

historian, "put fire into those few momentous, though moderate, sentences and made them glow like the writing at Belshazzar's feast." It was a Southern President who annexed to the Union the great empire of Texas, and who crowned the standards of our victorious armies by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, completing and expanding the symmetry of our system by the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and that magnificent domain now comprehended in the great State of California. Thus it is seen, save in the purchase of Alaska and the recent acquisitions, every step of American expansion has been accomplished under the administration of Southern Presidents. Such were the principles of Southern men, such their effective, constructive statesmanship, such their conceptions of National power, when Southern men thought for themselves. How long now shall we surrender our own conceptions of our own interests, our own convictions upon the wisest policies of the Nation in internal affairs, our views of that world policy which the country must pursue to insure the salvation of the

South and of the Union?

We are far from saying that Judge Speer and Mr. Knox express the sentiment of the present majority in the Southern States. We do not know whether they do or not; and we do not greatly care whether they do or not. They express the sentiment of the thoughtful men in the South, of an increasing number of men in the South, of the certain majority in the South of the future. With these men and such as these, the men of progress in the North should ally themselves, working together without prejudice, without suspicion, without sectional hostility, to a common endthe triumph of justice and equal rights within the borders of our present country, and the extension of good government, founded on justice and equal rights, wherever our political dominion or our political influence extends.

The Civil War in Fiction

It is now a full generation since the great struggle between the North and the South ended and a new era of peace and good will began in this country. During this period of more than a third of a century the material, educational, and intellectual progress of the country has been without precedent in its earlier history, and the significance of the reconciliation between the two great sections was not exaggerated by Dr. Washington Gladden when he called it a moral miracle. That

struggle grew very largely, although not entirely, out of mutual misunderstanding and ignorance. The Old North did not understand the Old South, and the Old South understood the Old North as little. The two sections, divided as they were by divergent conceptions of the nature of the Government and also by the slavery question, might have settled their difficulties without appeal to the final decision of war if each had understood clearly the spirit and aim of the other. However this may be, it is certainly true that the misconceptions of the earlier times have very largely passed away; that the South has begun to understand the spirit of the North, and the North to comprehend the position and the problems of the South. Neither section can understand the other without sympathetic interpretation based upon knowledge.

It is therefore an interesting and perhaps very significant sign of the times. that the novelists, North and South, are beginning to deal freely with this period; it indicates that the heat has passed, that the tremendous passions have died away, and that in a true perspective, both of time and of feeling, the old discussion can be treated dispassionately and frankly. During the past twelve months a number of serious and interesting novels have dealt with different stages and phases of this great debate.

Mr. Thomas Nelson Page's "Red Rock," published a little earlier, is a solid contribution to the knowledge of the period which followed the war, and which was for the South in certain respects its most disastrous epoch. In that book the Virginia novelist has told a story of misgovernment, with its consequent injustice and misery, which no Northern man can read without

a profound sense of humiliation. It is,

therefore, a story which every Northern man ought to read, if he wishes to know the outcome of the tragic death of Mr. Lincoln and the unfortunate transference of the whole question of Reconstruction from the plane of statesmanship where Mr. Lincoln would have kept it to the arena of bitter partisanship.

A book of an entirely different character, written by a fresh hand, dealing with the initial stages of the great struggle, is Mr. Morgan Bates's "Martin Brook," which bears the imprint of Messrs. Harper &

Brothers. In a series of vigorously drawn sketches the novelist traces the career of a young lawyer in the central part of New York, who becomes, in the face of his interests and as the result of a deep movement of conscience, an abolitionist, and devotes his life to the awakening of the conscience of the people about him. Notwithstanding some obvious defects due to the inexperience of the writer, the story discloses feeling for life and a fresh and vigorous touch.

A book of a different character, far removed in atmosphere and aim from the work of Mr. Page or Mr. Bates, is "Stringtown on the Pike," which bears the imprint of Messrs Dodd, Mead & Co., and which presents the ante-war period from the standpoint of a Kentucky Unionist, and is pervaded throughout with the atmosphere of negro superstition-a story full of defects and painfully overloaded with dialect, but unique in its study of a certain. side of negro life.

Mr. Henry Borland's "Passing of the Cavalier" takes the reader back to Virginia and carries him again into the Reconstruction period, portraying with considerable graphic skill the experiences of a young Virginian of the aristocratic class, who at the close of the war attempts to rebuild the shattered fortunes of his family on the historic estate on which they have always lived. The story is one of pathetic and even tragic interest, and, although devoid of any unusual quality of art, is valuable for the very clear and interesting study of local conditions which it presents.

Mr.

One of the most important of all these studies of a great and dramatic period is Mr. Winston Churchill's "The Crisis," which bears the imprint of the Macmillan Company, and which must rank among the foremost books of the year. Churchill is fond of large canvases; in this story, as in "Richard Carvel," he paints over a large surface and with a free and vigorous hand. The story has a historic background, for Mr. Churchill has the historic as well as the dramatic impulse. It was a very happy thought to lay the scene of this tale in St. Louis, a city not only at the heart of the continent, but a city marking the confluence of two great streams of emigration from the North and the South. This city became, for that reason, the stage on

which several acts of the Civil War were played. The descendants of Richard Carvel meet in St. Louis the descendants of a New England Puritan of equally good birth and breeding, and the two types are drawn with great skill and sympathy. A great deal more has been said about the Southern gentleman than about the Puritan gentleman, and the charm of the cavalier has been sung by the poets, described by the novelists, and felt by the entire country. The Puritan gentleman has not received as much attention, but he is quite as fine if a somewhat less picturesque figure. In "The Crisis" he appears at his best-self-contained, highminded, courageous to a degree, possessed of lofty courtesy, and with that fine respect for woman which is the chief charm of his rival. It was a fine dramatic instinct to bring these two types together and to show them in contrast.

The location of the story in St. Louis also makes it possible for Mr. Churchill to make the daring experiment of introducing as dramatis persone Mr. Lincoln, General Grant, General Sherman, and other well-known figures of the period. No more realistic and sympathetic study of Mr. Lincoln has been made than that which is presented in this book, and the figure grows upon the reader as he passes from chapter to chapter. The interest in Lincoln's rare personality steadily deepens as one perceives underneath his homeliness the elements of power and of nobility in his character, and culminates in the last scene in the White House. No finer interpretation of Lincoln's spirit has ever been made than that which Mr. Churchill makes in the few words which he puts into Lincoln's mouth in his interview with Virginia Carvel. This story, like the other novels in this group, is not without its defects, but it has elements of originality and power, and it is, above all, profoundly interesting. It possesses the great quality of interpreting American life from an intelligent American point of view-a process very much rarer than most people think. The book would be an admirable one to put into the hands of a foreigner in order to place him at the point of view from which our society can be understood. Under all the homeliness, simplicity, the lack of form, and the apparent slovenliness of many types of

character which appear in this story, Mr. Churchill has had the spiritual discernment to discover real force, ingrained integrity, the capacity for recognizing opportunity and dealing with it-the noble spiritual possibilities of the genuine and characteristic American type. To say this of "The Crisis" is to rank it among serious and worthy books and to predict for it a long success.

phrase "Jesus Christ his only Son ;" and in that phrase there is nothing to indicate whether the framers of it intended to imply a metaphysical or a moral relation. The probability is that they did not intend to imply anything at all on that subject; probably the question did not even present itself to them.

This, we are persuaded, is the mental state of most devout Christians. Our correspondent says he thinks that in holding to what he calls "the metaphysical unity" of Jesus Christ with the

Christ

We give considerable space to a correspondent on another page who writes concerning what is generally called the divinity but sometimes the deity of Jesus Christ. We do not doubt that he supposes that his adoration of Jesus Christ is the result of his intellectual hypothesis concerning the metaphysical relation of Jesus Christ to the Father. But we think that he has mistaken cause for effect. No doubt his experience of adoration and his intellectual philosophy are closely connected; but, in our judgment, the intellectual conception is a product of the adoration, not the adoration a product of the intellectual conception.

Certainly this is the general law of progression. The creed follows the experience and grows out of it. The child loves and honors and obeys his mother long before he forms any philosophy of filial obligation. The philosophy of filial obligation grows out of the child's love and honor and obedience for his parents. The disciples followed Christ, loved him, honored him, obeyed him, before they formed any opinion concerning his Messiahship. There is little to indicate that even then they formed any clear conception of his divinity, still less of his deity. The question of his relationship to the Father appears to have come in for consideration by the Church with the intermingling of Greek philosophy with Christian experience. The Apostles' Creed, though not a creed of the Apostles, is undoubtedly the oldest of all church creeds, and the Apostles' Creed says nothing about the question of the relation between the Father and Jesus Christ, except as something on that subject is implied in the

think that the words would mean anything to the majority of Christians. They neither believe nor disbelieve in the "metaphysical unity;" it has no relation to either their thought or their feeling. It is a phrase that belongs wholly in the realm of scholastic theology. The thought which it suggests to our correspondent is not a thought which has entered into the minds of most laymen and laywomen. Their faith is made, so to speak, of other stuff; it is an experience of adoring love, not a definition of abstract relationship between two personalities.

We approach, we think most devout Christians approach, and it appears to us that the New Testament approaches the subject from an entirely different point of view from that of our correspondent. The New Testament concerns itself, and we think most Christians rightly concern themselves, not with attempted definitions of the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Infinite and the Eternal, but with the relationship between Jesus Christ and man. This relationship is made, if not absolutely, at least relatively clear; this is all we need to know; if hypotheses on the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Infinite Father are not among the hidden things which belong to God, if this is not one of the subjects which intellectual modesty admonishes us to leave unsolved, it is at least a theme on which wisdom is by no means essential to the highest and best spiritual life. If it were, the highest and best spiritual life would of necessity be reserved for men of trained intellects; and Christ himself is authority for saying that this is not the case.

The first thing which the Gospels make perfectly clear is that ordinary men can