vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities. He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions there are more greatnesses than one-not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents and the reading of print and handwriting-on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth will be or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part. The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of a conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable in a wordly sense. There is, in short, more truth in its working

for a historian to detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication and suggestion. None of these escape the art of Mr. Henry James. He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range. He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed—that is, beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little place in this world of his creation. Yet it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, everpresent, right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and shadow.

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection offends, by its uncalledfor scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts. And, apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain apparent lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public, which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate, inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels.

His books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible.

JOSEPH CONRAD.

SHALL THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT BE

ENFORCED?

BY EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY.

I.

To the mind of the typical citizen of the North, the enforcement of the terms of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution would represent only an obvious element in an American policy of fair-play.

Interpreting the popular understanding of its language, it is evident that the Amendment does not bestow upon the negro the right to vote. It does not prohibit the restriction of suffrage. It does not refer to the negro, as the negro, at all. It permits restriction. It assumes that the States of the Union may, at their pleasure, deny the suffrage to men, whether white or black, of any description or class. It provides, however, that, when suffrage is arbitrarily restricted, representation shall be restricted also. It declares that no number of the male population shall be "counted out" by the State in making up the body of its electorate and at the same time "counted in" by the State in securing its representation in Congress and in the Electoral College. The language of the Constitution is as follows:

“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and VicePresident of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State."

The general intention of such a provision is obvious enough. The black man was but the immediate occasion of its passage. As first framed, and as first adopted in the House of Representatives, it had specific reference to his political status. Reduction of representation was to be the penalty for any suffrage restriction based upon color. But as the debate proceeded, all direct reference to color was omitted. Restriction itself, no matter what the race or class proscribed, was made the occasion of the penalty. The law might, as a matter of fact, chiefly affect the Southern States; but it was also intended to affect, in principle, every State in which there should be any denial of the ballot to any class or fraction of the voters. A State is therefore free under this Amendment to reserve the ballot to the fewfinally to exclude any element of the voting population—but if it do so it must suffer, proportionately, a loss of congressional and political power.

Such an adjustment of the problem of suffrage involves, moreover, a compact-an equitable distribution of influence-between individuals as well as between States. If Ohio and Massachusetts exclude any specific class from the suffrage, and if the "penalty" of exclusion be accepted by the former and remitted to the latter, then every voter in Massachusetts has a larger representation in Congress, has a larger influence in the election of the President, than a like voter in Ohio. If a Northern State and a Southern State of the same population deny the suffrage to certain classes, and if the Northern State, because of that denial, loses a number of her congressmen and the Southern State loses none, then the Southern voter has a larger representation in Congress and in the Electoral College than the voter of the North. Both the cases cited are hypothetical. They are stated solely as illustrations. As a matter of fact, no attempt has ever been made, in North or South, or against any State or section of the country, to enforce the exact terms of the Amendment. The lifetime of a whole generation has passed since its adoption. Shall its terms be enforced to-day?

The argument in the affirmative may make effective appeal to certain apparent inequalities. Suffrage restriction seems to have eliminated more voters, proportionately, in Maine than in Pennsylvania, and therefore the relative power of Maine is perhaps unfairly great. Suffrage restriction has eliminated more