1877: "The head of Christendom is orthodox enough. . . . It is the heart, the character, the life that are heterodox, and until these are reached our epidemic will continue and settle down into a national disease, like the goitre in Switzerland and leprosy in Arabia." It is no answer to this charge, urged, be it observed, with most vehemence by the better class of Americans themselves, against the worst; it is no answer to say that the private memoirs of the courts of France and England in the eighteenth century reveal a seething mass of selfish coalitions and profligate cabals, and that for one purely patriotic combination universal history shows ten where personal motives are manifest; or to say that the revelations of the City of Glasgow Bank were more infamous than those of the Erie Railway. The complaint remains that in America those misdemeanours pass with slight reprobation, save from a few satirists, who raise a laugh, and moralists who are accused of being supersensitive. Consequently the criminals escape: Mr. Potter was imprisoned, Mr. Fiske went at large. In no other country is political turpitude so brazen ; in no other are the local judges elected for short dates by popular assemblies; nor elsewhere is the aversion to dignitaries for life-the idea that new men must grapple with new duties-put forward as a pretext for yearly shunting one set of plunderers to make room for another. "Removals," says Mrs. Baker, in Democracy, "were fast and furious, till all Indiana became easy in circumstances." The author or authoress of this scathing work may be a Copperhead (Carrington, the only creditable male American it contains is a Southerner), and its success may be due as much to the pleasure we are said to derive from the misfortunes of our friends, as to its cleverness. The mystery or disgrace remains that the representation of Silas P. Radcliffe as a likely candidate for the highest office of the State seems, in America itself, to have excited no audible burst of indignation. "The bitterest part of all this horrid story," says Mrs. Lee-in her postscript with the sting "is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake," i.e., in declining to unite her fortunes for life with those of an able but boorish mercenary scamp. I have quoted J. P. Nichol's apology for the roughness of the pioneers; but of this other type of Western manners and morals, the worst product of a commercial Plutocracy, he elsewhere writes:-"I know1 not a more disagreeable person-one with whom, in reference to social problems, I should less like to come into contact-than an American Democrat of the present day, belonging to what the French would call the party of the extreme Left. Without the polish of an aristocrat of our own European schools, he has every atom of his pride, his dogmatism, his determination that, come what may, no man shall prevent him from doing what he wills with his own. Deeming, according to a phrase I have heard, that he could

1 This quotation belongs to a later date, when the writer's views both as to our own and foreign politics leant more to the side of Hamilton, and less to that of Jefferson, than formerly.

show his independence best by the declaration that to no man on earth would he touch his hat, he is nevertheless so hopelessly intolerant as to deem it a crime or a scorn to respect the feelings or even the consciences of others. Rising into high places, we sometimes can trace this lowest Democracy as an influence over the councils of the Government. The thoughts of the private ultra-democrat centre, as I have said, in himself; in the thoughts of the political ultra-democrat no nation's rights have a place unless they avow obedience to the principles overshadowed by the "stars and stripes." Spain, Mexico-what rights have States like these? Great Britain is to him an abhorrence, for although we are not a Republic, our power is unquestionable and our people free. Russia is better, for the Czar is an Autocrat after the Democrat's heart, and beneath that throne there is a level as dead as the steppes of Siberia. I have known men of this stamp at one moment vapouring about the oppression of the European peoples, and prepared at the next to denounce you as an incendiary should a blush mantle your forehead at the sight of an accomplished Quadroon lady exposed on the human shambles of New Orleans."

The worst feature of the twenty-five years of American history that have elapsed since the above was written, is the fact that the ultima ratio of rowdyism-the arm of the assassin-has twice nearly appeared to vindicate itself by the attainment of its ends. When-according to one of the most unfortunate provisions of the Constitution-Andrew Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential Chair, it was on the cards that half the hopes arising out of the war of liberation might be frustrated. Booth's successor in villainy, the more wretched Guiteau, seems to have won for the cause of Corruption at least a temporary triumph. I find the following, only the other day, in one of our leading newspapers :—

"The ascent of Mr. Arthur to the Chief Magistracy over the dead body of Mr. Garfield and his declinature or failure to enter on a career of Civil Service reform have led to a revival of hope on the part of such experts in the Boss system' as Mr. Roscoe Conkling and Senator Cameron. . . . It is to be hoped that there will be enough of public spirit, or rather of public interest in politics, in the United States, to achieve another defeat of this detestable political régime, which meant the vesting of all power and patronage in a corrupt Washington ring, whose champions openly avow their belief that the great moneyed men of the railroads and the manufactories and the banks need to have the Government controlled either by their own agents and partners, or by men of their own kind, who are in sympathy with them, and can exchange assistance with them, so that united they can disregard popular clamour as expressed through the newspapers.'

The insolence of Plutocracy surely reaches a climax in this cynical challenge if equalled, it is by the saying attributed to a self-raised oligarch nearer home-" In our Church we want a Bishop; will money do it? I shall make money the Bishop." The danger to Anglo-Saxon

civilisation is no longer anywhere in Aristocracy, but in the habit of yielding to violence that is growing upon our Demagogues, and the dominion of an exclusively Commercial Spirit which, as alien to liberty as to art, cares only for the public welfare as a means to swell the private purse. The danger culminates in America, because this new tyrannic class has fewer rivals: the possibility of making monstrous fortunes by smart strokes is a greater temptation to a more excitable race: wealth accumulates faster in families whose members have neither the culture nor the sense to spend it wisely, and the people are less protected against fraud by the sense of honour that happily lingers along with our despised "dregs of Feudalism."

NOTE D.-PRO-SLAVERY SYMPATHY.

The disastrous sympathy with the rebels in the Civil war which prevailed so widely in England has been mistakenly attributed by Mr. Lowell and others to the aristocratic-it was due more to the commercial spirit. It had its headquarters not in London; but in Liverpool and Glasgow, where the feeling was so strong that hardly one of the few educated men of the church or bar who sided with the North dared to say so, till Richmond fell and Lincoln was murdered. Then they leapt upon platforms, and cried out that they had been with the winners all along. On this question, the following letter of Mr. Ruskin is so eloquently apt that I cannot forbear to quote it :

"SIR-I have not hastened my reply to your last letter, thinking that your space at present would be otherwise occupied; having also my own thoughts busied in various directions, such as you may fancy; yet busied chiefly in a sad wonder, which perhaps you would not fancy. I mourn for Mr. Lincoln, as man should mourn the fate of man, when it is sudden and supreme. I hate regicide as I do populicide-deeply, if frenzied; more deeply, if deliberate. But my wonder is in remembering the tone of the English people and press respecting this man during his life, and in comparing it with their sayings of him in his death. They caricatured and reviled him when his cause was poised in deadly balance-when their praise would have been grateful to him, and their help priceless. They now declare his cause to have been just, when it needs no aid; and his purposes to have been noble, when all human thoughts of them have become vanity, and will never so much as mix their murmurs in his ears with the sentence of the Tribunal which has summoned him to receive a juster praise and tenderer blame than ours."-(From the "Pall Mall Gazette," May 2, 1865.)

NOTE E.-EMERSON AND DARWIN.

The association of those names on page 273 is not intended to convey the impression that the former, in any proper sense, anticipated

the latter. The idea of a progress from lower to higher stages of animal life is prominent in the speculations of Europe from the days of Empedocles to those of Lamarck: but Darwin, in proving and reducing to scientific form what to Emerson and others had been a vague poetic guess, is as much entitled to be considered the discoverer of the law of development, as Newton of the law of gravitation; notwithstanding that Anaximander had, twenty-three centuries before him, built his system of the Universe on the cosmical forces of attraction and repulsion.

NOTE F.-PRACTICAL RELIGION.

It has been said that in America the narrowest sectarianism goes hand in hand with the freest agnosticism, that bigotry and liberality interlace each other in a wonderful and bewildering way. We have found in the works of Emerson, and in the romance of Judd an equally strange juxtaposition of mysticism and common sense. To illustrate further the shrewd practical teaching, almost quaintly minute, that in the same country may accompany the most absurd superstitions, we extract a Mormon sermon, and a comment on the religion of Utah, from the volumes of Mr. Hepworth Dixon:

"Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have been chosen from the world by God, and sent through His grace into this valley of the mountains to help in building up His kingdom. You are faint and weary from your march. Rest, then, for the day, for a second day, should you need it; then rise up and see how you will live. Don't bother yourselves much about your religious duties; you have been chosen for this work, and God will take care of you in it. Be of good cheer. Look about this valley into which you have been called. Your first duty is to learn how to grow a cabbage, and along with this cabbage an onion, a tomato, a sweet potato; then how to feed a pig, to build a house, to plant a garden, to rear cattle, and to bake bread; in one word, your first duty is to live; the next duty-for those who, being Danes, French, Swiss, cannot speak it now-is to learn English, the language of God, the language of the Books of Mormon, the language of these latter days. These things you must do first; the rest will be added to you in proper seasons. God bless you; and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you."

"On its social side, the Mormon Church may be regarded as gay, its ritual as festive. All that the older creeds have nursed in the way of gloom, austerity, bewilderment, despair, is banished from the New Jerusalem. No one fears being damned; no one troubles his soul about fates, free-will, elections, and prevenient grace. A Mormon lives in an atmosphere of trust; for in his eyes heaven lies around him in his glowing lake, in his smiling fields, in his snowy alps. To him the advent of the saints was the Second Coming, and the forming of their

Church a beginning of the reign of God. He feels no dread, he takes no trouble, on account of the future. What is will be; to-morrow like to-day, the next year like the past one-heaven a continuation of the earth, where to each man will be meted out glory and power according to the fulness of his obedience in the present life. The earth, he says, is a Paradise made for enjoyment."

NOTE G.-THE TRIUMPH OF BUFFOONERY.

I rejoice to find in the late George Eliot's Theophrastus Such a few pages which, under the title "Debasing the Moral Currency," are devoted to a salutary denunciation of the mountebankery that threatens to taint literature, to make "the stage" contemptible, and to destroy what remains of popular taste in England as well as in America. “The habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign, not of endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty; the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused inference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing his superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on which he is ignorant and insensible, by being uneasy until he has distorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of being taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage to say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people in the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakespeare (as by some innocent persons the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have known the Divina Commedia, not perhaps excluding all the subtle discourses in the Purgatorio and Paradiso); but there seems a clear prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence, from which he will frantically dance himself free, during the midnight storm; Rosalind and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and shepherdesses; Ophelia, in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of grenadine, will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous attitude of the scissors' in the arms of Laertes."