imposing other new conditions, there should be a general agreement to a requirement that an alien seeking his final papers shall give three months' notice in the court from which he asks such papers, so that the case may be inquired into, and opposition made if the facts warrant it. The greatest abuses in naturalization grow out of the absence of such a notice. The aliens are not heard of a single minute before they appear with their witnesses; nobody is prepared to represent the other side, and in a moment the valuable franchise of American citizenship is conferred, practically irrevocable even if fraud or falsehood is subsequently discovered, while a presidential election may have been decided by the votes of a few among the thousands of such aliens.

If the foregoing suggestions for new laws should be found acceptable and should be embodied in legislation, the people and their senators and representatives might perhaps wisely wait a year or more before seriously considering new exclusions of immigrants and more radical limitations of naturalization.

WM. E. CHANDLER.

WRITERS AND SUBJECTS IN THE MARCH FORUM.

CHARLES J. BONAPARTE (Political Corruption in Maryland) was born in Baltimore in 1851. He was graduated at Harvard University in 1871 and at the Harvard Law School in 1874. He is a prominent member of the National Civil Service Association, and has been active in other movements for political reform.

CLARENCE KING (The Education of the Future) was born in Newport, R. I., in 1843, and was graduated at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 1862. For four years he was connected with the geological survey of California. He then made geological surveys for the government over the routes of the Union and Central Pacific railroads. In 1878 he organized the United States Geological Survey, having secured the passage through Congress of the act to establish it. Mr. King is a member of several of the leading scientific societies in this country and in Europe.

E. O. LEECH (Would Free Coinage Bring European Silver Here?) was born in Washington, D. C., about forty-two years ago. He was graduated from the National University of Washington, D. C., and entered the service of the Mint Bureau about 1873. He is now at the head of the bureau. He has frequently appeared in the House before the Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures, and is regarded as authority on all matters pertaining to coinage.

RICHARD P. BLAND (Free Coinage and an Elastic Currency) was born in Kentucky in 1835 and was self-educated. He taught school, studied law, and then settled in Missouri. Later he removed to Nevada, where he practised law and became interested in mining. He returned to Missouri in 1855, and since 1873 he has been a member of Congress from that State. He is the author of the well-known "Bland Bill," passed in the Forty-fourth Congress for the coinage of $2,000,000 in silver per month, and is the most prominent advocate of free silver coinage in this country.

FRANCIS G. PEABODY (A Case of Good City Government) on graduating from Harvard College studied for the Unitarian ministry. After his ordination, he became an instructor at Harvard, where he is now professor of social science. He has also been for several years a preacher to the university. He has devoted much of his life to the study of questions of social reform.

E. P. ALEXANDER (Industrial Progress of the South) was graduated at West Point in 1857 and appointed second lieutenant of the U. S. Engineer Corps. He entered the Confederate army as Captain of Engineers in 1861 and served through the war, being promoted to the rank of Brigadier General of Artillery. Since 1871 he has devoted himself to railroad interests in the South and West. He is the author of a work on "Railway Practice" and various pamphlets and magazine articles on railroad and military subjects. JOHN EARLE (The Study of English) was graduated at Oxford in 1845.

He was ordained for the ministry in 1849. Most of his life has been spent in teaching English at Oxford, in writing on his subject and in editing. Since 1876 he has been professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He has written "The Philology of the English Tongue,” “English Prose: Its Elements, History, and Usage," and other works, and has contributed numerous articles to periodicals.

COURTNAY DE KALB (The Intercontinental Railroad Problem) was born in Virginia in 1861. He is a mining engineer, has travelled much and has lived in Mexico, and in Central and South America, of whose affairs he has been a close student. His writings on South American subjects in "The Nation" and other periodicals have attracted attention both here and abroad, and many of them have been translated into Spanish and republished in South America.

WALTER BESANT (The Work of the British Society of Authors) was born at Portsmouth, England, and was educated at King's College, London, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He is one of the best known of living English novelists. He wrote in collaboration with James Rice many novels. Since the death of Rice, he has written "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," "The Revolt of Man,' Dorothy Forster," and other novels and stories. He is the originator and the chief supporter of the British Society of Authors.

CHARLES BUrr Todd (The Case of the American Author) was born in Connecticut in 1849. He is the author of "A General History of the Burr Family in America," a "History of Redding, Conn.,” “ Life and Letters of Joel Barlow," and "The Story of the City of New York." He has also contributed various articles to the magazines.

COL. ALBERT A. POPE (An Industrial Revolution by Good Roads) was born about forty-five years ago. He joined the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment in 1862 and won by his good service the title of colonel. He was one of the first Americans to become interested in bicycling in this country, and has done as much as any one to make it popular. He founded the company for the manufacture of bicycles well known by his name, and has made a fortune in this industry. He has also devoted much time and money to the improvement of roads.

DAVID SWING (What the American Sunday Should Be) was born in Cincinnati in 1830, and was graduated at Miami University in 1852. He was professor of languages in this university for twelve years; in 1866 he became pastor of a Presbyterian church in Chicago. He was tried for heresy in 1874, and was acquitted. He then withdrew from the Presbyterian Church. He is now independent of denominational relations. Professor Swing has frequently written for reviews and magazines.

WILLIAM E. CHANDLER (Methods of Restricting Immigration) was born in Concord, N. H., in 1835, and was graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1855. He was reporter to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, and later a member of the legislature, serving two terms as speaker. In 1865 he was appointed assistant secretary of the treasury, but resigned after two years. He was appointed secretary of the navy in 1882. He is now serving his second term in the United States Senate.

1

The Forum.

APRIL, 1892.

A REVIEW OF MY OPINIONS.

I SUPPOSE that each man has some special powers and gifts, and that the particular direction which those powers and gifts take in each man's case is a good deal fixed by his general surroundings, by his teachers, by his friends, by the books he reads, by a thousand mere accidents of life over which he may have no control. These things may affect him in different ways. I believe that what a man is, is always largely due to his home surroundings. But they do not always affect him in the same way. One man accepts the tradition of the elders without doubt, or, if he has any doubt, he stifles the doubt. A man of another turn of mind throws aside the tradition of the elders, simply because it is the tradition of the elders. Both act unreasonably; but each acts after his kind. The tradition affects both of them, though in opposite ways.

No such tradition ever came to me in any strong shape. The inherited opinions and feelings of a long line of forefathers must have an effect one way or another; so must the personal opinions and personal character of an immediate parent of any mark. I never had the advantage or disadvantage of either. My parents died in my early childhood; my bringers-up were two generations older than myself. I suspect that this has made my tastes, memories, feelings, and ways of looking at things a little older than those of most men of my time. I was used in childhood and youth to the talk of those with whom the French Revolution was an event of youth and the American War of Independence an event of childhood. The Declaration of. Independ

Copyright, 1891, by the Forum Publishing Company.

ence was put forth forty-seven years before my birth. I have a grandson who stands at about the same distance from Catholic Emancipation. I suspect that Catholic Emancipation will seem to him through life a more distant event than the Declaration of Independence seems

to me.

I suspect also that living mainly with people a great deal older than one's self, as it helps to bring the past somewhat nearer to one, helps also to make one take an early interest in the present; and this, though the persons who exert the influence may be persons of no mark or position, with only an average knowledge of what is going on. Certain it is that I was as a child deeply impressed by many public events and took a keen interest in them, while it strikes me that children in general are not commonly impressed in the same way by the same kind of events in their time. I was, so to speak, introduced both to the present and to the past very early. It was not perhaps done in a very intelligent way; but it was done in some way. I certainly have not kept the impressions of my earliest days, which were for the most part strongly Tory. But I am not sure that it is a bad thing to have been a Tory in childhood. I have the dimmest remembrance of Catholic Emancipation as something very dreadful. But I can remember when George the Fourth was king; I remember the coming in of Lord Grey's ministry in 1830; I vividly remember the great Reform Bill; most vividly of all do I remember the local parliamentary elections in the years 1830, 1831, and 1832. I was very eager then, at the age of from seven to nine years, on behalf of the candidates whom, for the past forty years and more, I should have looked on as the wrong ones. All this I took in from my elders; but I took it in with a warmth of my own. And I went off into regions of my own choosing.

The French Revodeeply struck me.

I took a very early fancy to foreign politics. lution of 1830 was the first foreign event which And from France I went on to dabble in the affairs of Spain and Portugal. Of course I was everywhere on the wrong side, though I am not sure that in Spain it was wholly the wrong side. The cause of Don Carlos came most clearly home to me as the assertion of the local rights of Navarre and the Basque Provinces. I must, without knowing it, have been something of a Home Ruler already. Of course I really knew nothing about foreign politics; but I learned one piece of knowledge that I have kept. I learned boundaries. I used an atlas, Wilkinson's, which showed the map of Europe as it