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THE
NORTH AMERICAN
REVIEW.
RE-ESTABLISHED BY ALLEN THORNDIKE RIOE.
EDITED BY LLOYD BRYCE.
Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur.
NEW YORK: No. 3 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET
Copyright, 1892, by LLOYD BRYCE. All rights reserved.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW,
No. CCCCXXVIII.
JULY, 1892.
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE?
THE QUESTION OF THE CONFERENCE.
BY SENATOR STEWART, OF NEVADA ; REPRESENTATIVE WILLIAM M. SPRINGER, OF ILLINOIS, CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS; SENATOR H. 0. HANSBOROUGH, OF NORTH DAKOTA ; REPRESENTATIVE R. P. BLAND, OF MIS SOURI ; AND REPRESENTATIVE JOHN DALZELL, OF PENN SYLVANIA.
SENATOR STEWART :
THE inadequate supply of gold creates alarm. The increas ing purchasing power of money is destruction to the debtor. Fear of universal bankruptcy or repudiation disturbs the repose of the Shylocks. Falling prices discourage enterprise.
The demonetization of silver narrowed the basis of the circu lating medium of the commercial world fully one-half. The use of gold alone for final payment reduces silver to credit money, the same as paper. Demonetization of silver forces ruinous com petition to obtain gold, enhances the value of the metal, and re duces the price of property and services. The leading nations of the commercial world compel payment in gold. There is not gold enough for all. Only the fittest can survive.
Austria shrinks from the contest to resume payment in gold. The recent demand that she should buy $200,000,000 of gold for the purpose in hand could not be resisted, but the attempt to carry it into effect threatened the bankruptcy of the other creditors of the gold combination. They have given Austria a respite while VOL. CLV. — NO. 428. 1
Copyright, 1892, by LLOYD BRYCK. All rights reserved.
Copyright, 1892, by LLOYD BRYCE. All rights reserved.
NORTH AMERIN REVIEW.
No. CCCCXXVIII.
JULY, 1892.
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE?
THE QUESTION OF THE CONFERENCE.
BY SENATOR STEWART, OF NEVADA ; REPRESENTATIVE WILLIAM M. SPRINGER, OF ILLINOIS, CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS; SENATOR H. C. HANSBOROUGH, OF NORTH DAKOTA ; REPRESENTATIVE R. P. BLAND, OF MIS SOURI ; AND REPRESENTATIVE JOHN DALZELL, OF PENN SYLVANIA.
SENATOR STEWART :
THE inadequate supply of gold creates alarm. The increas ing purchasing power of money is destruction to the debtor. Fear of universal bankruptcy or repudiation disturbs the repose of the Shylocks. Falling prices discourage enterprise.
The demonetization of silver narrowed the basis of the circu lating medium of the commercial world fully one-half. The use of gold alone for final payment reduces silver to credit money, the same as paper. Demonetization of silver forces ruinous com petition to obtain gold, enhances the value of the metal, and re duces the price of property and services. The leading nations of the commercial world compel payment in gold. There is not gold enough for all. Only the fittest can survive.
Austria shrinks from the contest to resume pa}^ment in gold. The recent demand that she should buy $200,000,000 of gold for the purpose in hand could not be resisted, but the attempt to carry it into effect threatened the bankruptcy of the other creditors of the gold combination. They have given Austria a respite while VOL. CLV. — NO. 428. 1
Copyright, 1892, by LLOYD BRYCE. All rights reserved.
2 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
they enforce payment from weak debtors, reduce credits, and en- large their securities. When that is done Austria must buy over five per cent, of the gold of the world at whatever cost it may require. Nothing but determined opposition can prevent the gold combination from continuing to exact harder terms until the power of resistance is exhausted, the narrow gold basis established throughout the world, and all men made tributary to the wealth and power of the controllers of gold.
It is natural for politicians to depend upon the gods of avarice for support. They endure with fortitude injustice to the people while the instruments of that injustice are concealed. The fear of detection and the irritation which extortion creates are their only restraints. When rebellion is threatened, party leaders seek refuge in falsehood and subterfuge. The devoted and most faith ful agents of the gold-trust in political life dare not confess that they are in favor of the destruction of silver as money; but they ostentatiously declare themselves bimetallists while they secretly conspire to destroy the money function of silver. Their success in deceiving the people by false promises has inspired them with contempt for the intelligence of the masses.
The device of an international monetary conference has been the most successful fraud. Of the two conferences, one was held in 1878, the other in 1881. Both secured the object designed — delay. A general election is pending in Great Britain and in the United States. The silver question is a disturbing element in both countries. Another conference is proposed. Any evidence that side-tracking the silver question is not the only result intended would be gratifying.
It would be interesting to know by what authority of law the conference will be held. Has any government to be represented signified, by proper authority, that its mints will be opened to the free coinage of silver upon any conditions whatever ? Why are all the preliminary negotiations relating to the proposed confer ence confined within the golden circle ? What questions are to be discussed ? Is the United States further to be humiliated by submitting its right to coin money according to the constitution to a European conference of money-lenders ?
The United States demonetized silver six months in advance of any government of continental Europe. The suggestion that the legislation of 1873 was secured by fraud, d,oes not alter the,
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE? 3
case. The fact that the United States took the lead in that robbery is undisputed. Why should not this government lead in restoring the money function to silver ?
The only question which affords an excuse for an interna tional agreement is the ratio. A- common ratio between the gold and the silver coins of the commercial nations might facili tate exchanges. But why call a conference for that purpose until the countries to participate therein have decided to open their mints to the coinage of silver for depositors of bullion ? When the several governments have agreed to coin silver, a common ratio for such coinage will be readily established. The interest of all concerned will require that ratio to be about 15J of silver to 1 of gold.
The silver coin of the United States contains more silver in proportion to the gold in the gold coin than the silver coin of any other country in the world, except Mexico. Our ratio is 16 of silver to 1 of gold. The ratio in Europe is 15J of silver to 1 of gold, and the ratio of India is about 15 of silver to 1 of gold. Europe has about $1,100,000,000 of silver coin. She would lose over 3 per cent., or something over, $33,000,000, by recoining her legal-tender silver at our ratio. India has about $900, 000, 000 of silver coin. She would lose about 7 per cent., or about $63,000,000, by recoining it at our ratio. We have about $500,000,000 of silver coin, which, if recoined on the European ratio, would give us a gain of about 3 per cent., amounting to about $15,000,000. There is about $3,900,000,000 of silver coin in the world.
Any increase in the quantity of silver in the coinage as compared with gold would decrease the volume of silver coin. If a ratio of twenty to one should be established for the recoinage of $3,900,- 000,000 of silver, it would involve a loss of more than $1,000,000,- 000. Fifteen and one-half to one is about the natural ratio. As nearly as can be ascertained, the weight of the stock of silver of the world is about fifteen and one-half times the weight of the gold. Besides, any considerable increase in the weight of silver coin would make it too heavy and inconvenient for use. No honest bimetallist would consent to a change of the present ratio of the United States, except to adopt the European ratio of fifteen and a half to one.
Whatever international ratio might be established,, the parity
4 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
of the two metals would be maintained at that ratio. Neither gold nor silver would then be the standard for measurement of value, but the dollar, the franc, or the pound, would be the unit of account and the standard. The fact that the money unit was manufactured of gold or of silver would make no difference. The material required to make a dollar, whether it were silver or gold, would have the same commercial value, and that is why the free and unlimited coinage of both gold and silver has always main tained the parity in value of the two metals at the ratio estab lished by law.
I do not desire to impugn the motives of the administration in its efforts for a monetary conference. I hope it is not playing into the hands of the gold combination. But secrecy is not a badge of honesty. The character of the delegates will furnish much light. Any man who argues that silver is a burden to be unloaded on some other country, and not a blessing to be coined into money in this country, is an enemy of free coinage. The appointment of such a man will be evidence of bad faith.
WM. M. STEWART.
REPRESENTATIVE SPRINGER :
THE silver question will not down. The House of Represen tatives at Washington spent weeks in its discussion, and the Senate has taken it up, to the exclusion of the tariff and all other subjects. The President has called an international conference to secure, if possible, an international agreement in reference to silver coinage.
The only international agreement in reference to gold and silver coins which has been entered into heretofore, is known as the Latin Union. It took effect August 1, 1866. The nations which entered into this union at that time were France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland ; but Greece and Eoumania entered the association in April, 1867. This union was for the purpose of regulating " the weight, title, form and circulation of their gold and silver coins." The ratio of full legal tender of silver and gold was fixed at one of gold to fifteen and a half of silver.
The contracting governments bound themselves not to coin, or permit to be coined, any gold or silver pieces other than those provided for in the treaty. The gold coins were pieces contain ing 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 francs., and the silver coins were to be
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE? 5
of the denomination of one, two and five francs, and of twenty and fifty centimes. The silver coins were to be of full legal- tender to the amount of fifty francs between individuals of the State in which they were issued, but the nation issuing them was to receive them to any amount. It was agreed that the amount of silver coins of the one and two-franc pieces and the twenty and fifty-centime pieces should be limited to an amount not exceeding six francs to each inhabitant. Coins already in circulation were to be maintained in proportions fixed in the treaty.
This treaty of 1865 was to remain in force until January 1, 1880. If not repealed it was to continue in force for an addi tional fifteen years, and so on until repealed.
A supplementary treaty was entered into by the same nations in 1874, by which the coinage of five-franc pieces was limited for that year in each government to a given amount, and a similar limitation was made for 1875 and 1876 ; and in 1877 the coinage of five-franc pieces was suspended except as to Italy. In 1878 the same nations renewed their monetary treaty. The govern ments of Spain, Holland, Russia, and the Central and South American States, have established the same ratio between gold and silver — that of 1 to 15J.
In Great Britain the ratio of limited coinage is that of 1 to 14.28, in Germany the ratio is that of 1 to 13.957. In Mexico the full legal- tender ratio of the coinage is that of 1 to 16J-. In the United States the ratio is that of 1 to 16. In Japan it is 1 to 16.16 ; in India it is 1 to 15.
The ratio between gold and silver adopted by the various na tions differs so little that a uniform ratio could be established with but little inconvenience. Now that the ratio of the Latin Union has been adopted by so many of the leading nations of the earth, it is not unreasonable to insist that that ratio should be ac cepted by other nations.
An international agreement fixing this ratio, if adopted by the United States, England, Germany and Mexico, in addition to the nations which have already adopted it, would secure in a very short time a universal acquiescence in this ratio. In that event the United Statas could recoin all its silver pieces and make a profit by the operation. On every 15^- ounces of silver in the new coins the government would receive a bonus of one-half ounce. Our dollar would then be equal to five francs of the Latin Union.
6 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
A limited agreement of this kind would greatly facilitate commer cial transactions, and simplify and unify the coinage of all nations entering into the agreement. If a limited agreement of this kind could be made and put into practical operation, there is every reason to believe that more liberal provisions looking to a larger use of silver could be secured in the future. In the course of time free and unlimited coinage would, in all probability, be adopted by the leading commercial nations. Those who desire to accomplish free coinage must realize that complete success cannot be expected immediately. There is so much prejudice or misap prehension on the subject that international agreements establish ing fixed ratios and uniform and unlimited coinage will be entered upon, if at all, with great hesitation. This fact, however, should not deter those who desire the utilization of both metals to the greatest extent possible from favoring every effort to bring about international monetary conferences. If complete success is not at first accomplished, partial success may be ; and partial success, to the extent of securing the provisions of the Latin Union for all great commercial nations, is attainable and may be secured at the first conference which may be held.
. It is evident that, unless earnest effort is made, no agreement can be secured ; and, as an advocate of bimetallism, I favor every reasonable effort that can be put forth, which looks to the greater utilization of both metals. I favor especially an international monetary congress, to be held in the United States at the earliest time practicable ; and any and all conferences whose object it may be to secure the cooperation of the great commercial nations in
this matter.
WILIJAM M. SPRINGER.
SENATOR HANSBROUGH:
WHEN" the civilized nations of the world shall have been placed upon an equality with each other as to a monetary medium, the political patents now running upon the use of such expres sions as "gold bugs" and "silver kings" will have expired, and bimetallism will prevail.
What is needed, in my opinion, is an established relationship between gold and silver — say 16 to 1 in all the gold-union nations, with the positive understanding that such relationship is not to be disturbed except by the unanimous consent of the interested
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE 9 7
powers. An international monetary agreement is the only means by which this result can be reached.
For fifty years, at least, there has been a strong tendency to wards what may be termed a universal currency. The effects of the operations of the old colonial and subsequent State-banking systems may be cited in confirmation of this proposition. In co lonial times the paper-currency pound sterling in Virginia, Ken tucky, Alabama, and Florida, was worth $3.33, while New York currency was worth but $2.50. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland the value of the paper pound was $2.70, while in the current issues of the " realms " of Georgia and South Carolina it was worth $4.20. The inequality in subsidiary currency was proportionately great. Then came the State-bank ing system, with its ' ' wild-cat " issues, and the ludicrous at tempts of a dozen State legislatures to deal with the currency question, each after its own original plan.
The commercial bonds are much closer between the civilized nations of the earth at the present time than they were between the States of the Union a hundred years ago, and therefore the argument in favor of an international money with a uniform ratio is much stronger. The superiority of national management of the finances over State management has long been recognized and admitted. The efficacy of international management must be apparent to all.
Statute laws in one country fixing the value of a money metal that circulates and has a different coinage value in another must result in financial and commercial confusion to both. The com mercial disasters and business uncertainties so prevalent in the United States during the days of independent State-bank money is sues may be taken as a fair example of what may be expected if the great nations of the earth continue to pursue independent policies with respect to the ratio and fineness of their respective metallic moneys or to the use of the product of their respective mines.
It was not so much the fear that silver would become dan gerously cheap, owing to the increased production, the discovery of new mines and the improved methods of mining and smelting, that caused the European nations to begin the hoarding of gold by adopting the gold standard and closing their mints to the white metal, as it was their apprehension that the United States was about to adopt the silver standard on its own account. This fact
8 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
is fairly illustrated in recent trade statistics. For the nine months ending March 31, 1892, the balance of trade in merchandise was $209,373,803 in our favor. Logically, $209,373,803 in money should have come back to us from the purchasing nations, but as a matter of fact we received but $13,253,765 in actual money. The difference of $193,120,038 consisted chiefly of American securities which the foreigner preferred to part with rather than give up his gold, which he believes will go to a premium should the United States venture, alone, upon free coinage of silver. That he would also ship his silver to this country is proven by the fact that while the silver bullion act of 1890 (the present law) was under discus sion and in process of enactment by the Fifty-first Congress our imports of silver were greater than our exports by $8,000,000.
It is contended by the advocates of a free silver coinage law for the United States alone that "the people want more money," i. e., a greater per capita circulation. There is some truth in this seductive and " catching " argument. If the per capita circulation of the world should be increased — and it will be increased when the gold-union nations adopt bimetallism, which they eventually must do — the people ivould have more money. On the other hand, should the United States, by act of Congress, obligate itself to pay $1.29 per ounce for silver, which is now worth but 90 cents per ounce in the markets of the world, our per capita circulation, while it would be increased to a slight extent by rea son of the free coinage of silver, would be decreased by the exact amount of gold that must inevitably take itself abroad to do ser vice among the nations now operating upon the gold standard. In the face of the fact that during the past two and a half years we have exported $320,000,000 of merchandise in excess of the amount imported and should therefore have received that amount of money from our foreign customers, we have also exported $75,000,000 of gold in excess of our gold imports ; in all $395,000,000 in wealth sent abroad in the regular course of trade, for which there *is no return — an amount equal to about $6 per capita of our population, which is quite as much as would have been added to our money circulation had we purchased and coined, at $1.29 per ounce, the entire world's output of silver for the same period. This per capita circulation question will admit of considerable investigation. It is one thing to make money and another to keep it.
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE? 9
Gold and silver have been the money mediums of the people for thousands of years ; so will they ever remain. They cannot and should not be retired, — neither of them. International regu lation is the true remedy. The present financial evils are not peculiar to any particular nation ; they exist in all. There is sufficient gold and silver in the world to furnish the basis of a healthy international money circulation. The necessity for in flation does not exist.
It seems to be the settled policy of this country at this time, and of other countries as well, that there shall be an international conference to consider the money question, not from the narrow standpoint of sectional or community interests, but upon the broader plane of international benefit, which will be lasting in its effects. The object to be attained is to secure an agreement in favor of bimetallism in all the countries represented ; no othei conclusion can be reached. International free coinage of both gold and silver is the end in view ; nothing less will be accepted as a final settlement of the question. A failure on the part of the Conference to recommend this as the common policy, or the failure of the conferring powers to recognize such recommenda tion by prompt and appropriate legislation, would simply relegate the whole question back to individual governments to be dealt with as a matter of local concern ; and the result, especially in the United States, is easily foretold. Unlimited free coinage of sil ver, with such ratio or other regulations as the extremists might determine upon, would be authorized by law. One enthusiastic free-coinage advocate has said that the ratio should be 10 to 1 ; it has not been below 14.14 to 1 in two hundred years.
I have no doubt that the President will appoint as representa tives of the United States in the forthcoming Conference gentle men of distinguished ability and conservative judgment. There is no reason why the representatives of other nations taking part in the Conference should not be equally distinguished and con servative, and as all shades of opinion on financial questions are likely to be represented there is every probability that a satisfac tory solution will be reached. H 0 HANSBROUGH.
REPRESENTATIVE BLAND :
WHERE the double or bimetallic standard exists or is contem plated, the question of the ratio is of vital importance.
1 0 THE NORTH AMERICAN RE VIEW.
There is no disagreement upon the proposition that this ratio shall have reference to the relative commercial or exchange value of the two metals. The commercial or exchange value being con trolled by the laws of different nations, the ratio established by the various governments where gold and silver are coined at a fixed ratio must be considered as the ultimate controlling factor in agreeing upon the ratio. Measures to the end of reaching this ratio enter at this time largely into the discussion. Informed readers need not be reminded of the fact that, for nearly one hun dred years, the commercial or exchange value of gold and silver Avas at about the ratio of 1 of gold to 15^ of silver, or that the ratio adopted by France in 1803 was one pound of gold to fifteen and one-half pounds of silver the world over. So long as France main tained an open mint for the free coinage and exchange of these two metals at the ratio of 15-J- to 1, this ratio was the absolute regu lator of the exchange value of the two metals till in 1875, for rea sons well known and to be hereinafter referred to, France sus pended the free coinage of silver.
This country and Germany having previously, in 1873, sus pended the coinage of silver, there were no longer any open mints of any great metallic power to take the place of France in the free exchange of gold aud silver at a fixed ratio. England has been upon the single gold standard since 1816. A very brief historical review of our own currency laws and of those of the other nations named is essential to a fair and intelligent understanding of this matter.
One hundred years ago this country, by the act of April 2, 1792, adopted the double or bimetallic standard. Section 9 of this act provided for the dollar as follows : " Dollars or units each to be of the value of the Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain 371T\ grains of pure or 416 grains of standard silver." This is the dollar we now coin, the pure silver of which has never been changed. The changing of the alloy ac counts for our dollar of 412£ grains of standard silver. This Spanish milled dollar had been current in the colonies, and was still our principal coin when the first mint act was passed.
On a test of these coins current it was found that they con tained on the average about 371J grains of pure silver ; hence this was fixed upon as the most equitable standard.
The silver dollar being established for the unit of value, the gold coins were to conform to the silver unit at the ratio of 15 to
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE 9 H
1 as provided in Sec. 11 of the act as follows : " That the propor tional value of gold to silver in all coins which, by law, shall be current as money in the United States, shall be as 15 to 1, accord ing to quantity in weight of pure gold and pure silver. That is to say, every 15 pounds weight of pure silver shall be of equal value, in all payments, with one pound weight of pure gold, and so in proportion as to any greater or less quantities of the respect ive metals/'
Eleven years later France decreed the bimetallic standard at the ratio of 15^ to 1, thus giving to gold a value relative to silver greater than our ratio. France at that time being a greater nation commercially than ours, and her mints being contiguous to the nations of the old world, she was enabled to fix the value of the two metals at her ratio, and the facts of history show beyond dis pute that the two metals remained practically at this ratio the world over so long as France continued the free coinage of botli metals, or until 1875, when she discontinued the free coinage of silver, as before stated. During this period Germany had changed from the single gold standard to the silver standard, and again from the single silver standard to the gold standard. Alarmed at the demonetization of silver in this country and in Germany in 1873, France broke the bimetallic par by discon tinuing the free coinage of silver. Had France continued the unlimited coinage of silver, there is no question or doubt that silver and gold the world over would be interchangeable to-day at the ratio of 15^ to 1.
It is then clear that our government is primarily responsible for the present silver situation. We took the lead in the de monetization of the metal and must take the lead in its restora tion. By the laws of 1834 and 1837 our ratio was changed from 15 to 1 to 15 98-100ths, or 16 to 1; it was really the amount of gold in the dollar that was changed and not the silver in the sil ver dollar, thus giving a higher value to gold at our mints than the French 15^ to 1. It is said this was done for the purpose of at tracting gold hither to aid in supplanting the national bank-note; gold being more convenient for payment in large transactions than silver, it would more readily take the place of bank-notes. Had our statesmen at that time hit upon our present device of gold and silver notes, bank paper could have been displaced by the silver certificates as is now being done by us. The fact, how-
12 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
ever, that we changed our ratio in 1834 and 1837. and the further fact that Germany changed from the gold to the silver standard in 1857, made no perceptible impression upon the effects of the French bimetallic law.
The two metals still retained their relative commercial value at about 15 J- to 1, thus conclusively proving that so long as one of the great metallic powers of the world kept open mints for the coinage of both metals at a ratio approximating the relative amount of the two metals per weight existing as money in the world, an open mint for the coinage and exchange of the two metals at such rates was all-powerful as a regulator of the relative value of these two money metals. In the light of this historical fact, why deny that the United States, the greatest nation in the world, the greatest metallic power in the world, may by her open mints successfully take the place of France in monetary history, and by open mints become the practical regulator of the relative value of these two money metals ? In reality we are a republic consisting of forty-four sovereign States, with territory sufficient for four or five more independent States, with a population of sixty-five million people, and increasing at the rate of over one million annually, with the probability of reaching nearly one hundred millions of people before the boy now born can legally cast his first ballot.
We have a territory of three million square miles. The single State of Texas is larger in area than the whole of France. The intelligence of the people and the vast resources and productive power of the country have no parallel in history. All things considered, we are greater in resources and progressive de velopment than France, England and Germany combined. Cm- pressing monetary needs demand a volume of money that cannot be compared to these over-developed countries of the old world.
Standing among the nations of the world as a giant among pygmies, why should we ask the aid or advice of baby England, baby Germany, or lilliputian France, in establishing for our selves a bimetallic system based upon the ratio, or nearly upon the ratio, at which France successfully maintained the bimetallic par for over seventy years and up to the day of her hasty action of dis continuing free coinage of silver.
In adopting a ratio for ourselves, or by concurrent action of other nations, the ratio of 15-J, or our own ratio of 16, should be
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE ? 13
selected. First, Because it is the ratio, or it approaches the ratio, that has existed in the commercial world for centuries, and at which the coined gold and coined silver of the nations circulate at par in the countries where coined. Secondly, This is about the aver age ratio at which the nations of the world coin gold and silver into legal-tender money. Thirdly, It is near the relative amount in weight of the existing coined stock of the two metals.
The director of the mint gives the amount of gold money in the world at $3,711,845,000, of silver at $3,939,578,000. Of this amount in silver he estimates $544,166,000 to be subsidiary or limited tender. This estimate is made upon the nominal value of the silver coins at the ratio or coin ing value of silver in the different countries where the stocks of silver money exist. Hence the average of full legal-ten der for silver would be about 15-J in weight of silver to 1 of gold. The limited-tender or fractional silver would be about 14 of silver to 1 of gold, so that it is apparent that the amount of silver money in the world is about 15J times as great for weight of metals as that of gold. If we take the product of gold from 1873 to 1891 as shown by the director of the mint last winter in hearings before our Coinage Committee of the House of Repre sentatives, we find the product of gold in fine ounces to be about 98,606,925, and that of silver to be 1,512,174,000 in fine ounces. This shows a ratio of production per weight in fine ounces of about 15^ of silver to 1 of gold. The facts above sho\v that of the gold and silver money throughout the world the ratio per weight of metal is about 15J to 1. The product from 1873 to the present time is about 15^- ounces of silver to 1 of gold — so that 15-J seems to be near the natural ratio.
The fact that for the last four or five years the annual product of silver at this ratio has been greater than the product of gold does not militate against the argument. A series of years should be taken. The mines may in a short time show a greater product of gold than of silver. Even the occurrence of a disproportional product of one or the other of these metals for a series of years, as, for instance, of gold in excess of silver during the large output of California and Australia, fails to disturb the par of 15J. The annual product constitutes too small a per cent, of the vast stock of the metals on hand to cause any perceptible fluctuations in values.
The equity of contracts the world over demands 15| or 16 as
14 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
the ratio, since the coined silver money of the world rests at about these rates, and debts of the world were and are contracted to be paid on this basis: it would be a robbery of debtors to demand more silver in the dollar. It would be unjust to debtors as well as to the welfare of future generations to limit the monetary functions of silver by increasing the amount of silver in the dollar.
To first demonetize silver for the purpose of precipitating a rise in gold as compared with silver,, and to seize upon this flagrant wrong as an excuse for readjusting the ratio in the interest of the money-lenders of the present and the Shylocks of the future ought not to be tolerated.
The late Secretary Windom, on page 73 of his report for 1887, well remarks in this connection : " The paramount objection to this plan, however, is that it would have a decided tendency to prevent any rise in the value of silver. Seizing it at its present low price, the law would in effect declare that it must remain there forever, so far as its uses for coinage are concerned."
R. P. BLAND.
REPRESENTATIVE DALZELL :
IF THE leading monetary powers of the world shall enter into an agreement for the coining of both silver and gold without re striction, and for making them severally, or jointly, full legal- tender for the payment of all debts, the practical business ques tion is, Avhat shall be the ratio ?
The question of the relations of the precious metals to each other and to commerce is recognized as a difficult one, about which it is wise not to hazard any too positive opinion.
The question as to an international ratio is very different from the question as to a ratio for the establishment of bimetallism in one country alone. In the determination of the latter question, the existing gold price of silver would be a material factor, while in the determination of the former it is not of so much importance.
Prior to 1873 the commercial ratio of silver to gold maintained a remarkable uniformity. Up to that year from the beginning of the Christian era the points of variance were at the one ex treme 14.40 of silver to 1 of gold, and at the other 16.25 of silver to 1 of gold. From the time when France, in 1803, began the free coinage of gold and silver at a ratio of 15| to 1,
WHAT SHALL THE RATIO BE? 15
until 1873, when silver was demonetized by Germany, and its coinage restricted by the Latin Union, the relative value of gold and silver in use in Europe did not vary appreciably from the ratio fixed by French law.
In the United States the legal ratio was fixed at first at 15 to 1, and subsequently at 16 to 1. But in 1873 a change ensued. Between thai date and the present the relative commercial value of silver to gold has varied from 15.92 to 1 in the former year to 20.92 to 1 in 1891.
"The great underlying cause of the decline in the price of silver," says Mr. Leech, Director of the Mint, " has been very accurately and concisely summed up in the report of the Royal Commission on Gold and Silver, 1888 :
" The action of the Latin Union in 1873 broke the link between silver and gold which had kept the former, as measured by the latter, constant at about the legal ratio ; and when this link was broken, the silver market was open to the influences of all the factors which go to effect the price of a com modity. These factors happen, since 1873, to have operated in the direction of a fall in the gold price of that metal."
It would appear, then, that the practical fixity of the relative value of gold and silver at a ratio of 15J to 1 from 1803 to 1873 • was due principally to legislation, and that the separation of the metals thereafter in relative value was likewise due in largest part to legislation. The proposition that an international agree ment shall be made to reestablish bimetallism is a practical con cession to that effect, since its purpose is to restore, if possible, the "broken link."
The link that bound gold and silver together as money was a law (or an agreement equivalent thereto) that the coinage of both should be free at a fixed ratio of 15£ to 1. The action that broke that link, and destroyed that heretofore existing monetary equili brium between the metals, was the repeal in practice of the operation of that law. Would not a re-enactment of the law in its entirety by international agreement restore the link and with it the old-time monetary situation ? In other words, is not either the French or the American ratio— a ratio heretofore proven practicable of maintenance by experience — the true one to be re turned to ?
If it be assumed that the relative value of the two metals de pends more than anything else on their value for the purposes of money as fixed by law it would seem that the strongest argu-
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ment exists for the adoption of one or other of these ratios. All the world's experience has demonstrated that the true ratio lies some where in the neighborhood of the French or the American, and between them there is not any fundamental difference. If the choice be limited to these two the French ratio would seem to be preferable.
The demonetization of silver did not take from the* world's cir culation the silver coinage. Silver has been coined since and at the same ratio. It is estimated that there are, in round num bers, $1,000,000,000 of European silver in use as money at the ratio of 15| to 1. The report of the Secretary of the Treasury shows our stock of silver to have been on Nov. 1, 1891, $539,241, 624, coined or to be coined at the ratio of 16 to 1.
Now, bimetallism is a desideratum because of the growing need of money in the world's constantly increasing commerce. Any change in the ratio towards cheapening the gold price of silver must result in contraction of the world's currency and defeat to that extent the object sought to be obtained by an international conference. The adoption of the ratio of 16 to 1, instead of 15£ to 1 for instance, would make a difference of 3 per cent, in the aggregate of European silver ; that is to say, the European stock when recoined, as it would have to be, would lose from its aggre gate currency value $33,000,000, and there would be the cost of recoinage in addition.
The adoption of the ratio of 15^ to 1, on the other hand, would be, ipso facto, a remonetization of the entire European stock of silver. True, the adoption of this ratio would necessitate the recoinage of the American stock, but the margin between its legal ratio 16 to 1, and the French ratio 15J to 1, amounting to 3 per cent., would suffice to pay the cost of recoinage.
As the United States are the largest silver producers in the world, it goes without saying that the French ratio would suit their material interests better than the ratio now in use by them selves. The objections that could be urged to any particular ratio that may be suggested may be conceded to be numerous; in other words, bimetallism can only be established internationally in the face of opposition and by mutual concessions on the part of its friends; but it is to be hoped that such concessions maybe made and that the cause may triumph at whatever figure the ratio
may be fixed.
JOHN DALZELL.
LYNCH LAW IN THE SOUTH.
BY THE HON. FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
THE frequent and increasing resort to lynch law in our Southern States, in dealing with alleged offences by negroes, marked as it is by features of cruelty which might well shock the sensibility of the most benighted savage, will not fail to attract the attention and animadversion of visitors to the World's Colum bian Exposition.
Think of an American woman, in this year of grace 1892, mingling with a howling mob, and with her own hand applying the torch to the fagots around the body of a negro condemned to death without a trial, and without judge or jury, as was done only a few weeks ago in the so-called civilized State of Arkansas.
When all lawful remedies for the prevention of crime have been employed and have failed ; when criminals administer the law in the interest of crime ; when the government has become a foul and damning conspiracy against the welfare of society ; when men guilty of the most infamous crimes are permitted to escape with impunity ; when there is no longer any reasonable ground upon which to base a hope of reformation, there is at least an apology for the application of lynch law ; but, even in this extremity, it must be regarded as an effort to neutralize one poison by the em ployment of another. Certain it is that in no tolerable condition of society can lynch law be excused or defended. Its presence is either an evidence of governmental depravity, or of a demoralized state of society. It is generally in the hands of the worst class of men in the community, and is enacted under the most degrading and blinding influences. To break down the doors of jails, wrench off the iron bars of the cells, and in the dark hours of midnight drag out alleged criminals, and to shoot, hang, or burn them to death, requires preparation imparted by copious vot. CLV. — m>. 428. 2
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draughts of whiskey, which leave the actors without inclination or ability to judge of the guilt or innocence of the victims of their wrath.
The consensus of opinion in the early days of California per mitted a vigilance committee,, composed of respectable men, to hang a lot of thieves, thugs, gamblers and cut-throats ; but it may now be fairly doubted whether even this example has not been an injury rather than a benefit to society, since it has been made the excuse for other uprisings of the people where there was no such justification as existed in California. But, granting that there may be instances where a sudden and spontaneous uprising of the populace may properly set aside the ordinary processes of the law for the punishment of crime and the preservation of society, it must still be admitted that there is, in. the nature of the act itself, the essence of a crime more far-reaching, dangerous, and deadly than the crime it is intended to punish. Lynch law violates all of those merciful maxims of law and order which experience has shown to be wise and necessary for the pro tection of liberty, the security of the citizen, and the maintenance of justice for the whole people. It violates the principle which requires, for the conviction of crime, that a man shall be con fronted in open court by his accusers. It violates the principle that it is better that ten guilty men shall escape than that one innocent man shall be punished. It violates the rule that pre sumes innocence until guilt is'proven. . It compels the accused to prove his innocence and denies him a reasonable doubt in his favor. It simply constitutes itself not a court of trial, but a court of exe cution. It comes to its work in a storm of passion and thirsting for human blood, ready to shoot, stab, or burn its victim, who is denied a word of entreaty or explanation. Like the gods of the heathen these mobs have eyes, but see not, ears, but hear not, and they rush to their work of death as pitilessly as the tiger rushes upon his prey.
Some of us are old enough to remember the storm of dis pleasure that came up from all the regions of slavery against William H. Seward for the utterance of an idea of a higher law than the law of slavery. Then the South stood up stoutly for the authority and binding force of the regularly-enacted laws, including even the infamous Fugitive Slave Law. It took to itself credit for being the conservative element in our govern-
LYNCH LAW IN THE SOUTH. 19
ment, but to-day it is the bold defender of the usurpations of the mob, and its territory, in many parts, has become the theatre of lawless violence against a defenceless people. In the argu ments in its defence, however, there is quite observable a slight degree of respect for the opinion of mankind and a disposition to conciliate that opinion. The crime which these usurpers of courts, laws, and juries, profess to punish is the most revolting and shocking of any this side of murder. This they know is their best excuse, and it appeals at once and promptly to a prej udice which prevails at the North as well as the South. Hence we have for any act of lawless violence the same excuse, an out rage by a negro upon some white woman. It is a notable fact, also, that it is not with them the immorality or the enormity of the crime itself that arouses popular wrath, but the emphasis is put upon the race and color of the parties to it. Here, and not there, is the ground of indignation and abhorrenee. The appeal is not to the moral sense, but to the well-known hatred of one class towards another. It is an appeal that not only stops the ears and darkens the minds of Southern men, but it palliates the crime of lawless violence in the eyes of Northern men. The de vice is used with skill and effect, and the question of guilt or in nocence becomes unimportant in the fierce tumult of popular passion.
For two hundred years or more, white men have in the South committed this offence against black women, and the fact has excited little attention, even at the North, except among aboli tionists ; which circumstance demonstrates that the horror now excited is not for the crime itself, but that it is based upon the reversal of colors in the participants. Yet this apology, rightly considered, utterly fails to palliate the crime of lynch law. For if the charge against the negro is true, with the evidence of his guilt overwhelming, as is usually asserted, there could be no rational doubt of his certain punishment by the ordinary processes of the law. Thus the very argument in defence of the mob proves the criminal ity of the mob. If in any case there could be shown an element of doubt of the certain lawful conviction and punishment of the accused, there might be admitted some excuse for this lawless method of administering justice. But for no such doubt is there any contention. No decent white man in the South will pretend that in that region there could be impannelled a jury, black,
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white, or mixed, which would in case of proof of the deed allow a guilty negro to escape condign punishment.
Whatever may be said of their weakness when required to hold a white man or a rich man, the meshes of the law are cer tainly always strong enough to hold and punish a poor man or a negro. In this case there is neither color to blind, money to cor rupt, nor powerful friends to influence court or jury against the claims of justice. All the presumptions of law and society are against the negro. In the days of slavery he was presumed to be a slave, even if free, and his word was never taken against that of a white man. To be accused was to be condemned, and the same spirit prevails to-day. This state of opinion at the South not only assures by law the punishment of black men, but enables white men to escape punishment by assuming the color of the negro in order to commit crime. It is often asserted that all negroes look alike, and it is only necessary to bring one of the class into the presence of an accuser to have him at once identi fied as the criminal.
In apologizing for lynch law, Bishop Fitzgerald, of the Metho dist Church South, says that the crime alleged against the negro makes him an outlaw, and he goes on to complain of the North that it does not more fully sympathize with the South in its efforts to protect the purity of Southern women. The answer to the first proposition of the learned and pious Bishop is that no man is an outlaw unless declared to be such by some competent authority. It is not left to a lawless mob to determine whether a man is inside or outside the protection of the law. It is not for a dozen men or for a hundred men, constituting themselves a mob, to say whether or not Bishop Fitzgerald is an outlaw. We have courts, juries and governors to determine that question, and it is a shame to the South that it holds in its bosom a Bishop of the Church of Christ who could thus apologize for the subversion of all law. As to the sympathy of the North, there never was a time when it was more fully with the Southern people than now.
The distressing circumstances in this revival of lynch law in different parts of the South is, that it shows that prejudice and hatred have increased in bitterness with the increasing interval be tween the time of slavery and now. I have been frequently asked to explain this phase of our national problem. I explain it on
LYNCH LAW IN THE SOUTH. 21
the same principle by which resistance to the course of a ship is create d and increased in proportion to her speed. The resistance met by the negro is to me evidence that he is making progress. The Jew is hated in Russia, because he is thrifty. The China man is hated in California because he is industrious and success ful. The negro meets no resistance when on a downward course. It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence, and manly char acter that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution. The men lynched at Memphis were murdered because they were prosperous. They were doing a business which a white firm de sired to do, — hence the mob and hence the murder. When the negro is degraded and ignorant he conforms to a popular standard of what a negro should be. When he shakes off his rags and wretchedness and presumes to be a man, and a man among men, he contradicts this popular standard and becomes an offence to his surroundings. He can, at the South, ride in a first-class car as a servant, as an appendage to a white man, but is not allowed to ride in his quality of manhood alone. So ex treme is the bitterness of this prejudice that several States have passed laws making it a crime for a conductor to allow a colored man, however respectable, to ride in the same car with white men unless in the manner above stated.
To the question, What is to be the solution of this race hatred and persecution ? I have two answers, one of hope and one of fear. There may come at the South satiety even in the appetite for blood. When a wall is raised to a height inconsistent with the law of gravitation, it will fall. The South is not all a wilderness. There are good men and good women there who will sooner or later make themselves heard and felt. No people can long en dure the shame and disgrace of lynch law. The South, which has been compelled to keep step with the music of the Union, will also be compelled to keep step with the music of the nineteenth century, which is preeminently a century of enlightenment and progress. The grand moral forces of this century no barbarism can withstand. They met serfdom in Russia, and it fell before them. They will meet our barbarism against color, and it will fall before them. I am the more encouraged in this belief be cause, in various parts of the North, and especially in the State of Massachusetts, where fifty years ago there existed the same pro scription which at the present time prevails in the South, all men
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are now treated as equals before the law and are accorded the same civil rights.
I, however, freely confess that the present prospect has for me a gloomy side. When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind. It is evident to my mind that the negro will not always rest a passive subject to the violence and bloodshed by which he is now pursued. If neither law nor public sentiment shall come to his relief, he will devise methods of his own. It should be remembered that the negro is a man, and that in point of intelligence he is not what he was a hundred years ago. Whatever may be said of his failure to acquire wealth, it cannot be denied that he has made decided progress in the ac quisition of knowledge ; and he is a poor student of the natural history of civilization who does not see that the mental energies of this race, newly awakened and set in motion, must continue to advance. Character, with its moral influence ; knowledge, with its power ; and wealth, with its respectability, are possible to it as well as to other races of men. In arguing upon what will be the action of the negro in case he continues to be the victim of lynch law I accept the statement often made in his disparage ment, that he is an imitative being ; that he will do what he sees other men do. He has already shown this facility, and he illus trates it all the way from the prize ring to the pulpit ; from the plow to the professor's chair. The voice of nature, not less than the Book of books, teaches us that oppression can make even a wise man mad, and in such case the responsibility for madness will not rest upon the man but upon the oppression to which he is subjected.
How can the South hope to teach the negro the sacredness of human life while it cheapens it and profanes it by the atrocities of mob law ? The stream cannot rise higher than its source. The morality of the negro will reach no higher point than the mo rality and religion that surround him. He reads of what is being done in the world in resentment of oppression and needs no teacher to make him understand what he reads. In warning the South that it may place too much reliance upon the cowardice of the negro, I am not advocating violence by the negro, but point ing out the dangerous tendency of his constant persecution. The negro was not a coward at Bunker Hill ; he was not a coward in Haiti ; he was not a coward in the late war for the Union ; he
LYNCH LAW IN THE SOUTH. %$
was not a coward at Harper's Ferry, with John Brown ; and care should be taken against goading him to acts of desperation by continuing to punish him for heinous crimes of which he is not legally convicted.
I do not deny that the negro may, in some instances, be guilty of the peculiar crime so often imputed to him. There are bad men among them, as there are bad men among all other varieties of the human family, but I contend that there is a good reason to question these lynch-law reports on this point. The crime imputed to the negro is one most easily imputed and most difficult to disprove, and yet it is one that the negro is least likely to commit. It is a crime for the commission of which opportunity is required, and no more convenient one was ever offered to any class of persons than was possessed by the negroes of the South during the War of the Rebellion.
There were then left in their custody and in their power the wives and the daughters, the mothers and the sisters of the rebels, and during all that period no instance can be cited of an outrage committed by a negro upon the person of any white woman. The crime is a new one for the negro, so new that a doubt may be reasonably entertained that he has learned it to any such extent as his accusers would have us believe. A nation is not born in a day. It is said that the leopard cannot change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, and it may be as truly said that the character of a people, established by long years of consistent life and testimony, cannot be very suddenly reversed. It is improbable that this peaceful and inoffensive class has suddenly and all at once be come changed into a class of the most daring and repulsive crim inals.
Now, where rests the responsibility for the lynch law preva lent in the South ? It is evident that it is not entirely with the ignorant mob. The men who break open jails and with bloody .hands destroy human life are not alone responsible. These are not the men who make public sentiment. They are simply the hangmen, not the court, judge, or jury. They simply obey the public sentiment of the South, the sentiment created by wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit. A change in public sentiment can be easily effected by these forces when ever they shall elect to make the effort. Let the press and the
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
pulpit of the South unite their power against the cruelty, dis grace and shame that is settling like a mantle of fire upon these lynch-law States, and lynch law itself will soon cease to exist.
Nor is the South alone responsible for this burning shame and menace to our free institutions. Wherever contempt of race pre vails, whether against African, Indian, or Mongolian, countenance and support are given to the present peculiar treatment of the negro in the South. The finger of scorn at the North is correl- lated to the dagger of the assassin at the South. The sin against the negro is both sectional and national, and until the voice of the North shall be heard in emphatic condemnation and wither ing reproach against these continued ruthless mob-law murders, it will remain equally involved with the South in this common crime.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
LADY JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY.
BY W. H. MALLOCK, AUTHOR OF " THE NEW REPUBLIC," " IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ?" " A ROMANCE OF THE NINE TEENTH CENTURY," ETC.
LADY JEUNE'S account of London society which appeared in this REVIEW not long ago was read by the society criticised with a great deal of attention ; also it is needless to say with much dif ference of opinion. Some exalted in its accuracy, others were* in- indignant at its distortion. And in a certain sense both parties were right. The justice of Lady Jeune's remarks taken sepa rately can perhaps be denied by no one, but there are many fac tors in the case which she omitted altogether to consider, and thus though her details were right the effect of the whole was wrong. What, therefore, I propose to do is to supplement what she said rather than contradict it, and to alter her facts in no other way than by adding to them.
The condition of society at any given period is a subject which for many people is always full of attraction. It unites the charms of gossip with the charms of philosophy, and makes the latter lit to appear at a dinner table. To deplore the corruption of morals is often as pleasant as to add to it, and a sense of how bad our habitual companions are agreeably heightens our sense of how good we should like to be. In addition, however, to those to whom these remarks apply there are two classes of people who regard the subject in question in ways singularly different, both from this and from one another. The classes I speak of are composed of serious persons who contemplate society from a social or intellec tual distance ; and some of them think its condition a subject too frivolous for discussion, while it seems to others to be fraught with the fate of empires. Both views are wrong. Taken by itself the condition of society is neither. It has more significance than
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is guessed by the one class, and not half the general importance that is so solemnly attributed to it by the other. I will at once explain briefly what I mean by these statements. I shall deal with them more fully a little further on.
The condition of society then, even as seen by the superficial observer, is significant as showing what men and women are under circumstances which all their contemporaries would share if they possibly could, and it is thus a brief abstract and chronicle of the tendencies and ambitions of the time ; but it has not, taken by itself, the importance which certain people attribute to it, because it is not in itself the cause of its own condition. Its condition is due to causes which influence the entire community ; and the effects of these, as seen in the aristocratic and fashionable world, must be studied in connection with their effects on other ranks and classes.
These wider considerations have been omitted by Lady Jeune; and her facts, for that reason, are robbed of their right signifi cance. My purpose being to supply her omissions, I must begin by recapitulating her facts. Put briefly, they are these : Compared with what it was fifty years ago London society has become a vast and heterogeneous body. It was once composed mainly of peers and country gentlemen, most of them having long, and many of them genuine, pedigrees. At all events it was full of the exclusiveness that comes of respect for birth. But now this lim ited body has been broken into and swollen by a mixed multi tude from the manufacturing and financial classes, together with a crowd of celebrities who are nothing if not celebrated. One re sult of this change has been the destruction of social comfort ; but a far greater evil than the destruction of comfort is the fol lowing : The enlargement of society has made social life not so much an enjoyment as a competition ; and the competition is based upon two things, of which wealth is the first and notoriety is the second, the second being largely achieved by an ostenta tious use of the first. Thus smartness, fashion, distinction — the prizes of social life — are offered for sale at an auction where the bids are made in luxury. The result is that luxury becomes ex cessive and assumes — which is worse — an excessive importance in the mind. In itself this state of things is sufficiently corrupting. It leads to mercenary marriages, it lowers ideals and standards, it condemns women to lives of fevered idleness, in which with
LADY JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY. 27
the best will in the world they can hardly discover duty, and in which consequently pleasure is the only object. Women give the tone to society as they have done since the days of Eve ; and the men, though physically masculine and hardy enough, are in volved by the women in a vortex of moral effeminacy.
But the evils which arise naturally from the state of affairs described have been adventitiously aggravated by the influence of certain individuals who have exaggerated them in their own lives, and, owing to their personal position, have exhibited them to the world as things to be admired and imitated. These individuals form what is called the " smart set," and, partly owing to their own strict attention to business and partly owing to the distin guished patronage they enjoy, the pursuit of pleasure as mas tered and practised by themselves has come gradually to be ac cepted by society at large as the daily duty of fashionable and self-respecting man. In this smart set so fierce is the competition for the externals of smartness, for the superficial brilliance of life, that young and handsome wives, without any pretence of affection, willingly attach themselves to admirers for diamonds, for clothes, for horses, and even for bare money, on which last the husbands discreetly flourish, whilst fashion consecrates the transaction with a genial though tacit benediction, and the only party who is ever deceived is the lover. Of him his friends good naturedly say " Caveat emptor." These manners and morals which at present represent fashion are copied and sometimes caricatured by that numerous and opulent class whose ambition is to be fashionable. They are gradually becoming a serious danger to the country, and are undermining our social fabric "as surely and certainly as they did that of ancient Rome."
Such is the general tenor of Lady Jeune's complaint. A few of her facts may perhaps be too strongly stated, but, for ar gument's sake, let us take them as she puts them. Having, how ever, made this concession, what I desire to point out is that they are calculated, if taken by themselves, to produce an impression in many ways quite misleading.
In the first place, when talking about London society Lady Jeune omits to define what society is. An exact definition is in deed not possible, but it is easy to arrive at one that will be accu rate enough for our purpose. Whatever progress democracy may have made in England the tradition of society is still aristocratic.
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Its nucleus consists still of our old landed families, the most im portant of which enjoy high titular rank. In former days it was almost entirely composed of such persons, and even to-day it in cludes only such others as are in touch with them. What then is the extent of this body numerically ? An answer of some sort is given in the well-known phrase the " upper ten thousand," but however approximately accurate this phrase may be if regarded as a synonym for the upper classes generally, as a synonym for the society in London it is immensely beyond the mark. Let a garden party be given by the most popular and distinguished hostess, I do not say to ten thousand, but even to five thous and people, and it is certain that the faces of those unknown to fashion would bewilder and scandalize by their number the eyes of those known to it. Still perhaps we shall not be far wrong, if we say for the purpose of a general discussion like the present that London society consists of some five thousand per sons. If it consists of more, what I am about to say will have still more weight.
Now, five thousand persons, though a mere handful as com pared to the nation, are an immense number when considered as a single society ; and it is perfectly obvious that, in a certain sense, they cannot possibly form a single society at all, but merely a loose federation of many. Let us consider a school like Eton, or a university like Oxford, communities which number only a thousand persons and two thousand. We know how absurd it would be to regard even these smaller bodies as consisting of boys and youths all intimate or even all acquainted with one another, or sharing the same pursuits, tastes, or principles. On the con trary, we know that they consist of numerous cliques, each pre senting us with some different type of living— the frivolous, the serious, the hardy, the effeminate, the literary, the sporting, the religious, and the profligate. Each community, in fact, is an epitome of human nature, and reproduces under a special set of cir cumstances the diversities that are found under others everywhere and in all classes. The same is the case with society. It is common to speak of the high morality of the middle class, and perhaps it is the voice of it- **•«! "ection that is most frequently heard, but the middle class has its profligates just as much as society has, the only difference being that their profligacy excites less notice. Gambling is often spoken of as an aristocratic vice. If it is a
LADY JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY. 29
vice at all it is a democratic vice in exactly the same proportion. There are Puritan peers and profligate sons of Methodists. So, too, in every class is to be found a section of its members with the temperament, the tastes, and the talents which in society result in smartness. The most brilliant vaurien who ever ruined him self on the turf is merely an edition de luxe of Hogarth's " Idle Apprentice." It is very important that we should bear this in mind. Smartness, though it takes its most brilliant form in so ciety, is not characteristic of society in any special sense, but exists in society because society represents human nature. The " smart set," in fact, is not a class but a clique, and it is entirely dependent not on the birth of its members, but on their char acter. Two sisters are grinding at a mill. One is taken by the "smart set," the other left. A "smart set," therefore, and an aristocratic class are two distinct things, and the condition of the first is no index to that of the second.
It is, however, impossible to deny that any set which is recog nized as being the smartest has an influence, whether for good or for evil, over multitudes who do not belong to it. And the fact is perfectly intelligible. Smartness, whatever people may say to the contrary, requires personal qualities of by no means a com mon order. Mere wealth is not enough ; there must be the knowledge of how to use it. A fastidious taste is desirable, a cer tain amount of taste is essential. Grace, beauty, bonhomie, wit, and humor, and the indefinable art of giving brightness to the passing moment — all these qualities go to the production of " smartness, " and a set in which they are wanting could never be called "smart," no matter how exalted might be the position of its leader. Smartness, in fact, represents the perfection of superficial living, and it has a natural, one may indeed say a legitimate, influence over persons of a certain temperament in all ranks. If, then, " smartness " is for the time being allied with anything like depravity and debasing luxury, Lady Jeune is per fectly right in considering the fact deplorable.
But here comes the point on which I am anxious to insist. Whatever may be the peculiar sins of contemporary " smartness," be they great or little, they are by no means confined to the smart set or its imitators, but are due to causes which influence every rank, and which should be sought for in history rather than in fashionable memoirs.
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On the most important of these causes Lady Jeune hardly touches, and that is the growth in this country of commercial wealth. At the beginning of the century two-thirds of the wealth that paid income tax was derived from land. Now, three- fourths of it is derived from commerce, And yet the landed in come itself has within that period doubled. The landed income has increased by some seventy millions. The commercial income has increasod by four hundred and fifty millions. Let us take a shorter period, and we shall be able to speak more in detail and present this extraordinary change more vividly to the imagina tion. During the bhirty years that followed the opening of the first great exhibition in London — that is between 1851 and 1880 —fifty new families came into being with incomes averaging ninety thousand a year ; four hundred new families with incomes averaging twenty thousand a year ; a thousand new families with incomes averaging seven thousand a year ; fifteen hundred with incomes averaging four thousand ; two thousand with incomes averaging two thousand, and seven thousand with incomes aver aging fifteen hundred. We thus arrive at a total of about twelve thousand families. I have not before me the figures of the last ten years, but there is every reason to believe that the same process is continued, and this period will accordingly give us some four thousand families more. Four and a half persons are allowed on an average to a family, and thus we arrive at a body of some seventy-two thousand persons, all belonging to families who have at least fifteen hundred a year. This calculation is really far under the mark, because the vast wealth represented by railways and many other forms of investment is not included in it. But here we have a body the aggregate income of which is something like eighty millions a year — a sum equal, roughly speaking, to three times the landed income of all our peers and country gentlemen at the time of the first exhibition. This body, this nation, one may say, of wealthy familes, is entirely the crea tion of the past forty years. It is as new a feature in our national life as a volcanic mountain would be suddenly shooting up in Belgravia.
The parent of this body is commerce and manufacture, stimu lated by scientific invention. The makers of the new wealth have been producers and multipliers of luxuries, and their families have been the principal consumers of them. Luxuries of a cer-
LADY JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY. 31
tain kind the aristocracy have always enjoyed and demanded ; but the modern increase of luxury is due entirely to the middle classes, and the utmost the aristocracy do is to avail themselves of the pick of it. Let us take, for instance, the one matter of hotels and travelling. Who support the monster hotels of London, with their gilded saloons, their marble staircases, and their vast cellars, or the similar establishments to be found all over the country ? Not the aristocracy, not society, though members of society may take advantage of them and give certain of them a cachet. What supports them, what has called them into exist ence is the new middle class.
Who, again, support the trains de luxe to the Riviera ? Society may patronize them, but society does not support them. It could not supply a tithe of the travellers requisite to make them pay. What supports them is the opulent middle class. If, then, the luxury of society has increased during the past fifty years — and, as some say, scandalously increased — the luxury of other classes has increased to a far greater degree. And so far is the first from being the cause of the second, that the second is the cause of the first. Luxuries multiply as the means of producing them are perfected. The means of producing them can be perfected only when there is a growing demand, and the growth of the demand is a middle-class growth essentially. If a smart house of to-day is more luxurious than a smart house fifty years ago, this is mainly because, owing to this middle class demand, there are incalculably more objects and appliances of luxury in the market. If society only, for instance, used the electric light, we may — employing an Irish figure of speech — say, confidently, that there would be no electric light to use. Electric-lighting companies are supported by the fashionable world, no doubt, but they are supported mainly by wealth, which is entirely outside fashion. And with modern luxury generally the case is just the same. For a further illustra tion, let us go back to travelling. Any one who would now travel luxuriously in the East can do so best by a tourist agency. Tourist agencies are now patronized by the most distinguished sections of society, but their original patrons were exclusively the middle classes, and the luxuries of Eastern travel which society now en joys, and which have been almost forced upon it, are altogether a middle class creation, of which society has availed itself only after a long delay, and not without a period of protest.
32 THE NOR TH AMERICAN RE VIE W.
So far then as luxury is concerned, the most luxurious smart society merely exhibits a phenomenon which is to be found every where, and results from causes affecting all classes similarly. Let us now turn from its luxury to its alleged moral laxity. Lady Jeune mentions three causes as combining, in addition to its luxury, to produce this, — influential example, idleness, and the decay of religious belief. Now as to one of these causes, namely influen tial example, it may be responsible for a good deal, but the cir cumstances of the society on which it operates are responsible for still more. We will therefore put this factor in the case aside, and consider merely luxury, idleness, and the decay of religious belief. Here again we shall see that society in its moral just as in its material condition exhibits the result of influences not pecul iar to itself and not even originating in itself. How this holds good of luxury we have seen already ; how it holds good of idle ness a moment's reflection will show us.
Idleness, as Lady Jeune says, is the vice of our women rather than of our men, and it vitiates the men principally through the women. But women in society, especially the smartest women, have countless occupations, no matter how frivolous. The women to whom actual idleness, or a difficulty in finding occupa tion,' is principally a source of danger, are not the women pointed at in Lady Jeune's criticism. There is more idleness in the opu lent classes outside than there is in society itself ; whilst as to the decline of religious belief, not only is it a fact not con fined to smart society, but it is certain that the smart society neither originated it nor is responsible for it. The decline of religious belief so marked in the present century is directly due to scientific and historical discovery. It originated in the library and the study, not amongst the flowers of the ball room. And if the morals of " smart" society suffer from it, they suffer in com mon with the morals of a section of every class in the nation.
There is, however, this to be said : Whatever may be the re sult on social life of all these modern influences, though smart society may not be in itself responsible for them, yet in smart society they come, as it were, to a head ; but they do so for a reason very different from that which is popularly supposed. They do so, not from any exaggeration or corruption of the aris tocratic principle, but from the growth of the democratic princi ple. All aristocracies, if they do not rest on war, rest on wealth,
LADY JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY. 33
but they differ from plutocracies in these two fundamental points — that their wealth is permanent in families and that it is associated with political power. It is to the first that they owe their refinement, to the second that they owe their character. Power means duty, or, at all events, energetic activity; whilst the respect for birth as birth, even in the wealthiest society, tem pers the value of mere wealth as such by the consideration it in« sures for the numbers of individuals who are poor. But for an aristocracy to exist in this condition it must not only be the most powerful body in the country, it must also be the most wealthy body. And up to a comparatively recent time the landed aristoc- cracy in England was so. It is so now no longer. A new class is arisen, generated by the vapor of the steam engine, which has first rivalled and then eclipsed it in wealth, and first rivalled and then eclipsed it in power. The new class, however, lacked one thing. It lacked the refinement, the tone, the position, which alone make wealth and power socially desirable; and these could only be got by receiving them from the hands of the aristocracy through a kind of apostolic ordination.
In England, as in all other countries, great wealth, if it has only remained long enough in a family always, ultimately, lifted its possessors into the aristocratic rank. Indeed in coun tries where aristocracies remain most exclusive this is merely a sign that new fortunes are not frequently made. The England of this century differs from the England of the last, not in the fact that the possession of a great fortune raises its possessor so cially, but in the fact that new great fortunes are incalculably more numerous. The career of the banking family of the Childes with their stately abode at Osterley and their distinguished alli ances, would satisfy the most aspiring financial family of to-day. The only difference is that where formerly there was one Childe there are now whole families of children. And the result of this difference is, no doubt, socially very great. When new families enter a society slowly they are absorbed by that society and in no way change it. But when numbers of new families are entering it at the same time, all anxious for the most intimate and eager welcome, they all try to outdo one another in displaying their recommendations, which consist in their wealth and in the lux uries their wealth can buy. They put themselves entirely at the service of the society which they wish to enter ; partly in the way VOL. CLV. — NO. 428. 3
34 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
of entertainments competitive in their charm or luxury, partly in the way of fortunes to be had for the matrimonial asking.
Now of all kinds of life to which great wealth is essential, that to which it is most essential is the " smart " life. It is therefore towards the " smart set " that the new wealth gravitates and in which its presence and influence is most obvious. This new wealth is so enormous and employed with so much savoir vivre, that its possessors not only equal in the arts of living those whom they wish to conciliate, but far outdo them ; and this is now more the case than ever, when almost all landed fortunes have shrunk, and the great houses of London give large entertainments rarely. Thus new wealth — wealth independent of birth — has a power now that it did not have formerly, in that it gives a standard of living to smart society, instead of taking a standard from it ; nor does this apply to material luxury merely ; it applies to the fact that this new wealth, unlike landed wealth, has no recognized duties, and tends to make its possessors pleasure-seeking citizens of the world, rather than rulers and leaders of their own particular coun try.
But whatever the change thus wrought may be, the causes of it are to be sought in these wide movements I have indicated, far more than in the conduct and example of special individuals. Aristocracies have often been corrupted and from various causes, but if English smart society has any special moral maladies to-day those specific causes are not aristocratic but democratic, and no class is free from them.
And this brings me back to what I said at the beginning, that the public importance of the morals of a fashionable society, though great, may be easily exaggerated. Lady Jeune talks of the society of Rome being undermined by its luxury, as though it and the empire perished in some sudden catastrophe ; she for gets that the luxury and the Empire of Rome both took a long time dying, if, indeed, the former be dead yet ; she forgets that Theodora flourished five hundred years after Nero. The fact is, th?t when an aristocracy falls after it has grown corrupt and lux urious, its fall is due, not to its corruption, but to some common cause which has produced both. The French Revolution was due not to bad morals but to bad farming, not to the fact that the nobles had too much money, but that the country at large was prevented from producing enough of it. Still if the morals of
LAD Y JEUNE ON LONDON SOCIETY. 35
any prominent set were ever calculated to have a general influence, they are more likely to have it now than at any former time ; and here again is the result of the democratic spirit.
Such being the case, however, it is important to dwell on a fact which Lady Jeune has indeed mentioned, but to which she has hardly given sufficient prominence. " Smartness " is a word which bears different meanings outside society and in it. When the general public sees an account of a party at which all the guests were persons of the highest rank, or at least belonging to families of notorious distinction and antiquity, the general public would speak of this party as " smart ; " but society itself uses the word in a far narrower sense, and the majority of persons to whom the general public would naturally apply the name would in all probability repudiate any claim to it. Few things indeed surprise Americans more than to learn, as they do learn when they study our society on the spot, how many of the wealthiest, the most il lustrious, the most powerful of our old families, boasting the loftiest titles and the most renowned names, mix with the " smart set " only in the most accidental way, neither by taste, habit nor desire, in any way belonging to it.
" Smartness," as I have said before, is the result, not of birth, but of personal temperament, just as yachting is ; and we may say of the devotees of the first, as we may say of the devotees of the second, that what please's them may make many of their rela tions sick. ISTo doubt the " smart set " is surrounded by a body of devoted and unsuccessful imitators, but of all sections of society this is the least distinguished. I have said that (t smartness " is the perfection of superficial living, and that it cannot exist with out many fascinating qualities ; if then " smartness " be allied at the present moment, as Lady Jeune maintains, with a relaxation or depravation of morals, the wonder is, not that its influence should be so great, but that it should be so small. Lady Jeune herself admits that the section of society in which "rank, birth, and vast possessions " fill their possessors with a sense of their re sponsibilities, in which private life is decorous, and public duties are faithfully discharged, is larger and more important than the section in which decorum and responsibility are forgotten. Lady Jeune, I say, admits this. My only complaint is that she does not state the fact with sufficient relative emphasis. One fact, however, she does state clearly, though she does not point out its
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significance. She says that this section of society " represents the power of resistance which alone can withstand the demoral izing influence of contemporary smartness." This is really say ing, whether she meant to say so or no, that just as the demoral ization of to-day is the result of the growth of the democratic element, so the power of resistance is to be found in the survival of the aristocratic.
That aristocracies are or have been stricter in their private morality than other classes, I do not say for a moment, nor do I say that the aristocratic element need always have the tendency ascribed to it in the present instance. Lady Jeune is dealing and I am dealing with the events and facts of one special period only. Her point is, not that society is bad, but that in certain specific ways it is worse than it was thirty or forty years ago ; and just as she implies that it is the aristocratic element which resists this change, I have endeavored to point out in detail that it is the democratic element which has promoted it. And by the demo cratic element I mean no particular politicians or agitators, or school of politics, but those great economic movements, and those great intellectual movements which lie behind and under all these, and are affecting the lives of all countries and of all classes simultaneously.
W. H. MALLOCK.
THE NEEDS OF THE NEW NOETHWEST.
BY HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA,
MANY of the citizens of the country living east of the Alle- ghanies have but a faint conception of the growth and develop ment that have taken place in the last quarter of a century beyond the Mississippi Eiver. They have read startling accounts of the marvellous changes occurring in the West. Some of the stories told have been more or less exaggerated — a good many overdrawn to such an extent as to savor of absolute misrepresentation. Eastern people have loaned their money to aid in the develop ment of the Northwest, with profit, as a rule ; rarely with loss. In this manner they have gained some idea of what has taken place in this part of the world. Merchants and manufacturers, too, have sold their wares to their Western customers, and there are other interests of a commercial kind linking the two together and spreading information as to the character and scope of the growth and prosperity of this favored region.
Before suggesting the material needs of this rapidly develop ing community, permit me to briefly call attention to the results that have been attained within a little less than thirty years. The writer of this article came to Minnesota as a boy in 1861. At that date there was not a railroad in the State. St. Paul was a town containing about 8,000 people, and Minneapolis, pos sessed of a magnificent water-power, had not attained the import ance of her sister city. Duluth lived in the imagination. The entire western and northern part of Minnesota, and the two States known as the Dakotas, were given over to the Indians, with here and there a white settler. The farming lands adjacent to the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers were fairly well taken up, the grain finding an outlet by water connection to railroads extend ing across Wisconsin and Illinois. The invasion of the pine for ests of Northern Minnesota by venturesome lumbermen was beginning. All of the vast territory lying beyond the Missouri River, including the rich mineral lands of Montana, and the
38 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
timber and farming lands on the eastern side of Washington, awaited settlement.
The changes have been so rapid as to almost make us marvel at the origin of the power that wrought them. Transportation facili ties now extend across the entire country. The Twin Cities num ber nearly 400,000 people. Duluth is one of the great primary wheat markets of the world. The farm lands of Minnesota and the two Dakotas produced something like one hundred and fifty million bushels of wheat last year. Montana is now a great sil ver and copper-producing State. In addition, its wide ranges offer inducements and opportunities for enlarged traffic in cattle and sheep. Idaho is rich in minerals, while Washington fairly teems with great crops of grain and wonderful forests of timber which are now coming into use.
In this age of iron — this age of the development of the forces of electricity, of steam — we are borne along with the stream, and few pause to contemplate what has occurred in so short a time in the northwesterly States lying next to the British boundary. It is marvellous. It is only when confronted with the facts that we are impressed with the almost dynamic force that has been ex pended to attain such wonderful results. We halt for a breath ing place and ask the question, t{ What are the needs of the new Northwest for its continued material prosperity ? Its progress has been remarkable ; what of its future ? "
Primarily the strength of a community lies in the char acter, the force, and the intelligence of its citizens. Let encouragement be given to all well-disposed, law-abiding, thrifty emigrants to come to this new country and settle here, prepared to become Americans. Keep out, by the force of legislation, every individual tainted with communism, anarchism, or the like. The continued importation of an element not in har mony with the ideas of the Eepublic is a source of danger to the future of the country, and should be summarily stopped. The Northwest will not be benefited by becoming a dumping-ground for the refuse population of the countries of Southern Europe. Our immigration laws need revising to pro tect the new States from the evils that are likely to come upon them through the indiscriminate and faulty enactments now in orce.
A community of the highest order, prosperous, intelligent and
THE NEEDS OF THE NEW NORTHWEST. 39
law-abiding, cannot result from elements made up of people ban ished from their native lands for crime, pauperism, or general worthlessness. The men who laid the foundation for the future growth and success of this new country do not desire the work that has been accomplished in the past to be endangered in the future by the admission of the discordant portions of society whose mission is to destroy rather than build up.
Millions of arable acres await the plow. Unseen wealth, in the foi m of gold, silver, and iron, is lying hidden. Vast forests, as yet unknown to the axe of the pioneer, are ready to succumb to the relentless march of events. The avenues to wealth are many and varied. Let them be traversed by the man who is in accord with the citizenship of the Eepublic, and who loves and respects the law. Let education flourish to the greatest extent. The university, the common and the high school are essential to a full and complete system of education. The intelligence of the masses is a necessary adjunct to the permanency of free institutions. The State should provide liberally for its children in this direction as a means necessary to its own safety.
Where the ballot is absolutely free, with practically no restric tion, it is requisite that every voter should be educated sufficiently to understand the meaning and the force of the privileges granted to him by reason of his citizenship. With education must neces sarily follow the ability to reason and to discriminate as to what is good or bad for the community.
The Northwestern States have provided bountifully through grants of land, taxation, etc., for a broad and liberal system of education. It is a safeguard against the evils that are likely to arise from intrusting the voting franchise to the ignorant and lawless.
The opportunities for the use of new capital for the develop ment of latent industries are almost limitless. Mines are to be opened, cities to be built up, and farms to be tilled, while manu facturing interests of many kinds are ready for the capitalist. Railroads are still needed in some localities.
It is easy enough to hold out glittering allurements to the older sections of the East to send their surplus earnings to this new country, but some assurances must be given that the capital sent will not be discriminated against by local legislation. The laws should be so framed as to deal out equal justice and protec-
40 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
*
tion to all. There has been an effort in some of the North western States to enact legislation unfavorable to those with capital residing without the borders of the State. This idea is essentially unfair as well as entirely impolitic. The new North west needs the help of older and richer communities for its suc cessful development, and it is the height of folly to build a wall of unjust legislation about this new country and thereby prac tically prohibit needed money from finding its way to us. Let our laws be so wrought as to bear equally and fairly upon capital, whether it be our own or that of our neighbor.
Another need of this new country is that every intelligent citizen shall interest himself in public affairs. In many localities there is a disposition upon the part of too many men of character and standing to shirk their duty and leave the administration of the public welfare to any one who is willing to look after it. The result is much that is bad and indifferent in government. This is entirely wrong ; and if a standard of high citizenship is to be developed in the Northwest, coupled with a prosperous and intel ligent community, every man, whatever his calling or station in life, must do his share of public duty.
I might suggest other needs, and there are many that I have not even touched upon ; but the prescribed limits of this article forbid.
The Northwestern States comprise a limitless empire of future greatness. The infusion and commingling of the blood of the best of different nationalities, with the advantages of climate and locality, coupled with the natural sources of wealth so abundant, may evolve, as, indeed, they should, the finest kind of American men and women. It will be, after all, a question of utilizing these various forces. The opportunities are vast, and it will rest with the individual to say whether the best results shall be accom plished.
Let the citizens of the new Northwest see to it that laws humane and just be enacted, and that educational and civilizing influences are guarded and fostered.. Let them look to it that her people, as individuals, are amply protected in their homes and in their vocations ; that industries, manufactories, and corporate enterprises are heartily encouraged, yet firmly held, within those limits beyond which they become oppressive, and the future we hope for is assured to us,
WILLI IM R. MEREIAM.
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT.
I. THE DUTY OF FIGHTING CIVIL CORRUPTION.
BY THE RIGHT EEV. WILLIAM CROSWELL BISHOP OF ALBANY.
" THE duties of the clergy towards their parishioners in political matters " is a large subject to be treated briefly, all the more so because the putting of the word duties in the plural means that it covers more points than one.
That the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world is a state ment, which contains an inherent and perpetual law of that Kingdom, and lays down, I think, a characteristic feature of the Church. Like the individual Christian, the Church is to be in the world but not of it ; but in it as leaven, salt, light, to quicken, sweeten and brighten it ; and in both instances there is a danger always of the two extremes, too entire withdrawal from, and too complete mingling with, the world. It is in the golden mean between these two that all duties lie ; and the mean is not the cowardly compromise of an afterthought, but the original way, which men have left, to run to one or another extreme.
Making application of this general statement to the particular instance, I must for a moment pause to define political matters. It is a noble word degraded sadly, this word politics. It has in it the thought of the old pride, such as that for Jerusalem, for Rome, for Athens, even for Tarsus, which has not only adorned the great cities of the world, but has made the great citizens. It goes higher even than that, as it involves St. Augustine's splendid plea for the Ci vitas Dei; and reminds us that the Church of God on earth is type and threshold of the golden-streeted city, the heavenly Jerusalem. Dragged in the mire of to-day by the self ishness of men and the unscrupulousness of parties, there is a high and holy element in political matters, about which the clergy have grave duties to discharge.
42 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
We are smarting to-day in the Capital City and in this great State, because of an utter confusion in the minds of men be tween questions which involve eternal principles of right, truth, morality, righteousness, manhood, citizenship, statesmanship, and the law of God ; and the passing, changing, petty, local questions and concerns about which men may honestly differ and disagree.
I believe the first duty of the clergy to their parishioners in political matters is to teach men to draw these distinctions.
There are many reasons why the Lord's Day and the Lord's House should be kept free from the heated atmosphere of polit ical denunciations and discussions. Both the place and the day are sanctuaries, places of refuge, of refreshment, of rest from the toil and stir of platforms and parties ; and while the occasion may arise when religion should make its scourge of small cords, and utter burning words of righteous indignation against the cruelty and corruption of " wickedness in high places/' there is always danger of the disastrous results that came to the Israelites who brought the Ark of God into the battlefield of the Philis tines. But when political parties take up moral questions in im moral ways, it is not political preaching to denounce the immo rality ; and when immoralities are threatened in political action, it is the duty of the clergy, who are the guardians of morality, to warn their people of the danger.
Let two or three instances point the argument. When it is known that moral issues are at stake in an election, I think the clergy ought to warn the people that they should secure if possi ble the nomination of men in their own particular party who are known to hold strong and positive convictions on the right side of those questions ; and if a party nominates unprincipled and unsafe men, the votes of honest Christian people should be with held from them, no matter what the party demands may be. For in this way only can partisan leaders be taught to feel that they have no right to apply the modern thumb-screw of a caucus to the great issues and principles of righteousness and truth.
A very striking illustration is furnished by recent events in one of the Southern States. The Louisiana lottery question en tered largely into the last elections there. It contained in it a mercenary element, namely, as to taxation; from which the citizens of the State were largely relieved by the blood money which the
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT. 43
treasury of that State had no scruple in receiving. Certainly no faithful teacher could fail to press home to the consciences of his people the root-evil of this accursed sin, which lies under the very strongest token of Divine displeasure since ever the soldiers mocked the misery of the Divine Saviour, by gambling under the Cross.
Nearer home, two instances have pressed in on my mind very strongly. In the Assembly of the State of New York this year two bills were introduced, dealing with matters of vital importance ; two great principles of morality and religion — the so-called Excise Law and the miscalled " Freedom of Worship " bill. They were both in troduced and dealt with as party measures ; the one avowedly in the interest of the liquor dealers, whom it was supposed to restrict ; and the other plainly in the interest of the Roman Catholic effort to use the State money, for the maintenance of their religious teaching. It is nothing to the point that persistent efforts re moved two or three of the grosser outrages of the bill for the pro motion of intemperance, and emasculated the other bill by taking out the words which authorized the State " to provide for " (which certainly meant to pay for) certain religious services. The bills in their worst or better estate dealt with great questions of prin ciple. They were first defeated, and then carried, in the Assem bly. How ? A few politicians, desiring to secure votes for the passage of their own bills creating a water commission and changing the inspectors of a town election, bought the votes of op ponents to these measures by withholding their own votes from these two bills ; and when this nefarious trade was accomplished, they turned their votes over bodily in favor of the bills which they had just before voted against ! It i« not merely the imbecile inconsist ency of voting two ways upon the same question within ten days ; not merely the treachery of condemning and then commending the principles which the bills involved ; but the wickedness of dealing with a question of principle and of party policy as though they were upon the same level.
Does not the duty of the clergy to their parishioners in politi cal matters lie just here ? Because a question is made political, it does not necessarily follow that it ceases to be a question of principle ; and politics, in the modern degradation of the word — that is to say, party interests and personal advantages — must be left out when a great principle is at stake.
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I think we ought to teach our people that gambling is a sin ; that intemperance must be prevented, as far as possible by law, and punished ; that the Lord's Day must be kept holy, at least by abstinence from work and the removal of the opportunities for sin ; that freedom of worship means not allowing the State to provide for the support of any particular religious system. I am inclined to go further even than this, since it has been demon strated in the State of New York at any rate, that, in order to secure their own interests, liquor dealers will elect politicians who will pander to their wishes and bow to their dictation. I am inclined to think that the clergy would be wise to begin an effort to wipe out all excise legislation from the Statute Books .; and to keep, only in the Penal Code, enactments which would punish drunkenness and the makers of it, the violation of Sunday, and the grosser evils of the liquor trade. It pays the modern politician to keep up saloons, in order to secure the support of their frequenters, and to extort money from them for election purposes. I believe the number of saloons is due to this more than to the number of drinkers. Political saloons and saloon politics are the curse of our legislation. If it cannot be removed in any other way, let us remove liquor from politics, and politics from liquor, by ceasing to legislate on the question at all.
Deeper and farther down, because not touching questions that are merely of the day, lies the tremendous duty upon every man who is charged with the cure of souls perpetually to impress upon people, — sometimes with the voice of one who cries in the wilder ness in denunciation of sin, and sometimes with the tenderer ap peal that holds up the splendid standards of the Gospel and character of Christ, — the great principles of purity, righteous ness, truth, manhood, and the courage of convictions, as against the cowardice of mere expediency, cost whatever the maintenance of these principles may. WM. CROSWELL DOAKE,
Bishop of Albany.
II. THE PREACHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
BY BISHOP WILLARD F. MALLALIEU.
IT WILL help us to a correct understanding of the duties of the clergy towards their parishioners, in political matters, if we con-
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT. 45
sider what is properly meant by the word politics. Certainly we do not mean the dishonest, artful schemes and tricks, the frauds that are sometimes resorted to by unprincipled men to se cure honor, official position, and financial emolument, either for themselves or friends. Such conduct is everywhere and always worthy of the severest condemnation. No self-respecting and God-fearing preacher will ever have anything to do with such men and methods except to hold them up to the scorn and contempt and abhorrence of all real patriots, of all good and true men.
The proper signification of the word " politics " is expressed in the following terms : It is <{ the science of government, that part of ethics that has to do with the regulation and government of a nation or State, the preservation of its safety, peace and prosperity ; the defence of its existence and rights against foreign domination or conquest, the augmentation of its strength and re sources, and the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals." Politics thus defined does not differ essentially from patriotism. It is the duty of every patriot to know the principles upon which his gov ernment is founded, to know about the laws and their administra tion, to care for the peace and prosperity of all the people, to an tagonize every enemy and every malign influence that may arise from with out or within, to protect the people in the untram melled exercise of every proper and legitimate right, and to pro mote in every possible way the intelligence and morality of each individual.
It is inevitable that communities, and the nation, should be divided into parties. It will happen sometimes that such parties differ only in matters of minor importance, and the greatest object that either seeks is the control of affairs for the sake of the official honors and profit. Or it may be that parties are divided on questions that are purely and only financial, and upon which the ablest and most experienced statesmen and financiers are not agreed. Or again, it may be that parties are divided in regard to the details of administration concerning the necessity of which all are agreed. In all such cases there is no exigency which requires, or ordinarily would justify, the intervention of the clergy.
But it has often happened in the history of nations that great
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moral, and social, and religious questions have confronted the people. At such critical times it is not only the privilege, but it is the imperative duty of the clergy to take a decided and active part in forming public opinion and shaping the action of the people.
Such certainly was the course pursued by the priesthood and the prophets under the Mosaic economy ; Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and many others condemned or approved both laws and rulers as they antagonized, or harmonized with, the plans and purposes and laws of the Almighty. Braver men than some of these old prophets never lived. The Ahabs and Jezebels and their unholy and unpatriotic practices were fearlessly con demned. Jesus, the sublime and supreme model for all preachers, denounced in severest terms the scribes and pharisees, the rulers of his people, and held their practices up to the light of day as worthy only of the scorn of all good men. Paul and Peter and John, with multitudes of their immediate successors, followed closely the example of the Master. Huss, Savanarola, Martin Luther, and John Knox were as much political agitators and rev olutionists as they were religious reformers. The sound of Lu ther's hammer nailing his ninety-five theses upon the heavy oak door of the old church at Wittemberg has never ceased to rever berate, and it is heard to-day wherever shackles are broken and yokes are riven, and wherever the strongholds and bastiles of tyranny and slavery are thrown down by the delivered peoples. It was heard in the clash of arms that emancipated our fathers in the War of the Revolution, and heard again in the awful thunders of that vaster conflict that brought deliverance to four millions of our outraged fellow men.
Neither of these struggles would have been entered upon had it not been for the patriotic, political action of the clergy. True, not all the clergy were agreed, for in the old times there were some who were so utterly Tory in their sentiments that all their influence was on the wrong side as regards human liberty ; and, in these recent times, there were also some who claimed to believe that the abominations and infamies of slavery were providential, and that the institution itself was divine and must continue to endure.
The preachers of New England made the Revolution possible. Away back as early as 1G33 there was a Thursday lectureship
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT. 47
established in Boston by the Rev. John Cotton, which continued for more than two hundred years. It was especially designed for the discussion of social and political subjects by the clergy. It was for one hundred and fifty years most emphatically a nursery of liberal, progressive, revolutionary opinions and ideas. Such dis tinguished divines as Tucker, Parsons, Hitchcock, Langdon, Mayhew, Stillman, Cooper, Payson, Gordon, Howard and many others were developed and broadened in this school of patriotism. A few brief extracts will show the temper and thought of these men and their relation to the vast and far-reaching political ques tions of the times in which they lived. In the preface to a ser mon preached in Boston June 30, 1750, by J. Mayhew, occurs this passage :
" God be thanked ! one may in any part of the British dominions speak freely — if a decent regard be paid to those in authority — both of government and religion, and even give some broad hints that he is engaged on the side of liberty, the Bible, and common sense, in opposition to tyranny, priest craft, and nonsense — without being in danger either of the Bastille or the Inquisition,— though there will always be some interested politicians, con tracted bigots, and hypercritical zealots for a party, to take offence at such freedom. Their censure is praise, their praise is infamy."
And in the same sermon :
"It is evident that the affairs of civil government may properly fall under a moral and religious consideration — at least, so far forth as it relates to the general nature and end of magistracy, and to the ground and extent of that submission which persons of a private character ought to yield to those who are vested with authority. This must be allowed by all who ac knowledge the divine original of Christianity."
The same bold speaker added in a note to the sermon :
" No civil rulers are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are in consistent with the commands of God. No government is to be submitted to at the expense of that which is the sole end of all government, the com mon good and safety of society. The only reason of the institution of civil government, and the only rational ground of submission to it, is the com mon safety and utility. If, therefore, in any case, the common safety and utility would not be promoted by submission to government, but the con trary, there is no ground or motion for obedience and submission, but for the contrary."
In an election sermon preached by Samuel Cooke, May 30, 1770, are these utterances :
" I trust on this occasion I may, without offence, plead the cause of our African slaves, and humbly propose the pursuit of some effectual measures at least to prevent the further importation of them. Difficulties insuper able, I apprehend, prevent an adequate remedy for what is past. Let the
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time past more than suffice wherein we, the patrons of liberty, have dishon ored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish. Ethiopia has long stretched out her hands to us. Let not sordid gain, acquired by the merchandise of slaves and the souls of men, harden our hearts against her piteous moans. When God ariseth and and when he visiteth what shall we answer ? May it be the glory of this province, of this respectable General Assembly, and, we could wish, of this session, to lead in the cause of the oppressed. This will avert the impend ing vengeance of Heaven, procure you the blessing of multitudes of your fellow men ready to perish, be highly approved of our common Father, who is no respecter of persons, and, we trust, an example which would excite the highest attention of our sister colonies."
Samuel Langdon, President of Harvard College, spoke thus in an election sermon, May 31, 1775 :
" If the great servants of the public forget their duty, betray their trust, and sell their country, or make war against the most valuable rights and privileges of the people, reason and justice require that they should be dis carded, and others appointed in their room, without any regard to formal resignations of their forfeited powers."
On May 29, 1776, Samuel West delivered an election sermon, in which these opinions are given :
" The authority of a tyrant is of itself null and void. No body of men can justly and lawfully authorize any person to tyrannize over and enslave his fellow creatures, or do anything contrary to equity and goodness. As magistrates have no authority but what they derive from the people, when ever they act contrary to the public good, and pursue measures destructive of the peace and safety of the community, they forfeit their right to govern the people."
The preacher, if he be worthy of his profession, is called of God to the performance of the most solemn and important duties. The pulpit is the coign of vantage. All that the tribune is to the statesman, the platform to the lecturer, the chair to the pro fessor, the pulpit is, and even more, to the preacher. The preacher is so identified with the pulpit that it is easy to so per sonify the pulpit that when we come to speak of politics and the pulpit we mean politics and the preacher. The preacher is al ways a man before he enters upon the discharge of the functions of his high and holy office. No inherent right of manhood is necessarily given up by the preacher. This is equally true of his citizenship. The preacher would be derelict to the plainest re quirements of duty should he refuse to share the obligations and privileges which rest upon all his fellow citizens. There may be
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT. 49
exemption for some few of the minor responsibilities, but the essential ones are never really laid aside, much less ignored.
There are four principal requisites which especially go to make up a genuine preacher. First of all he must be a teacher of the people; and this involves the idea that he shall have a well-trained mind, that he shall be scholarly in his tastes and habits, and that he shall have abundant stores of knowledge. He must know men and things. He must be familiar with the past, alive to all present interests, and thoughtful concerning the future. Noth ing that really affects the material, intellectual, or spiritual wel fare of man must be outside of his range of thought and intelli gent and comprehensive study. This will certainly bring him into intimate contact with living men, and will involve him in the affairs that interest his fellow men — and so connect politics and the pulpit.
The preacher must also be an example to all who come within the range of his influence. He is taken as an example whether he will or not. His example will be either harmful or helpful, as the case may be. His example is not limited by his public devo tions and pulpit ministrations, nor by the tone of his voice, the expression of his countenance, or the style of his dress. His ex ample has to do with private and public goodness. What is right and proper for the most blameless man to do in private and in public should be the standard of conduct on the part of the preacher. This principle will apply to his personal conduct every where ; he must be a gentleman without fear and without re proach, sensitive and sensible to the last degree where honor and integrity are involved. If he is to be an example in all things, he will of necessity find himself within the realm of politics, and here he must illustrate the highest type of patriotism, loyalty and righteousness.
Again, the preacher must be a leader, for if he fails in this respect the world has but very little use for him. His superior opportunities for the best culture place upon him the duty of leadership. If he has not the wisdom, nor the courage, nor the high spirit of consecration necessary for this, he will receive but very slight honor either from God or man. And this means much more than leadership in things that are purely intellectual or spiritual. It means that the preacher should have clear, definite, well-considered opinions on all matters that concern the safety, VOL. CLV. — NO, 428. 4
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welfare, and progress of the people. Nor will it be enough that he has these opinions and keeps them to himself. He must de clare himself ; his voice must ring out in defiance of a vicious public opinion ; he must set forth and reiterate his convictions without fear or favor. The great lack of humanity in all the past, and even now, is in. the right kind of leaders. When all others fail, it should be known that the preacher walks in the way of righteousness, and that it will be safe to follow where he leads.
Furthermore, the preacher should be a reformer. There has been no time of which we have any record on the pages of his tory where there have not been abuses. In every age there have been wrongs inflicted upon the weak by the hand of power. In every age there have been, and, even now, there are in svery land, the down-trodden and the oppressed, the helpless victims of in justice. There is as yet no land where the pure and holy princi ples of the Gospel of the Son of God thoroughly prevail, where they perfectly permeate and leaven the masses so that all are se cure in the possession and enjoyment of all their rights. The preacher, if he is true to his Master, will take his place among those who toil most earnestly and persistently for the amelioration of the condition of all who suffer from whatever cause. No preacher has any right to be a fanatic, or a visionary, or an im practicable. The foolishness of many so-called reformers consists in frantic and futile attempts to accomplish the impossible. The right way is to give careful thought to the evils that afflict society, then find out the remedy, then do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, howsoever small it may be, until the remedy is applied and the evil removed. The text book of the preacher is the Bible. Every genuine reform that has ever blessed humanity has its germinal principle in the Bible. The Book of God, the Book of Humanity, the Bible, is full of reformations and revolutions, and every one of them if wisely inaugurated and pros ecuted must be a source of blessing to the human race. If the preacher knows the Bible, if he follows its teachings, he will be a reformer, and constantly will he be found in the work of uplift ing the weak, while at the same time he smites with all the power God has given him every outrage and every villany. He will follow the example of Jesus and Paul, the two greatest reformers the world has ever known, and fearlessly stand for truth and jus-
POLITICS AND THE PULPIT. 51
tice, no matter what the consequences 'may be to himself. The world needs
" Preachers like Woolman,
Or like those who bore The faith of Wesley
To this western shore,
And deemed no convert genuine till he broke Alike his servant's and the devil's yoke."
In these times in which we live there is as much need that preacn- ers should be teachers, examples, leaders and reformers, as at any time in the history of Christianity or of the world. There are a thousand questions in which they need not especially concern themselves, and about which they need not discourse. But there are others which affect the intellectual and moral development of the people, and others still which are related in morals to the perpetuity of our free institutions, and others which are vital to the religious liberties and rights of the nation. The questions in either case need not be specified in detail ; every intelligent person can enumerate and classify them. Concerning the first it is not expected that the clergy will undertake to instruct or con trol the people who may attend upon their ministrations. In regard to the second, every sensible, loyal, progressive American citizen holds firmly to the opinion that each preacher should wisely and at proper times discuss these all-important matters, and in the light of God's Word set forth the claims of duty, and by the highest moral persuasions incite and inspire all to its faithful performance. Any preacher who neglects so to do fails to answer the reasonable expectations of the people. He may not excuse himself with the vain plea that his congregation is made up of different parties, nor the still more worthless plea that he must not mix religion and politics. If he really loves God, if he loves his country, if he loves humanity, he must consider and discuss the great underlying principles that are essential to the continuance of good government and to the peace and prosperity of the country. He must condemn all moral and political wrongs, no matter how venerable, or respectable, or powerful, utterly regardless of what party may be responsible for their existence or continuance. He must voice the cry of the outraged and down -trodden of this and every other land. He must be the great-hearted champion of all the friendless and helpless.
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He must strike down with the whole strength of his indig nant manhood any giant evil that dares to threaten the high, and holy, and chivalrous hopes of all good people in behalf of pure homes and heaven-exalted native land.
Such political preachers will always be in demand, and will challenge the love and the confidence of the best, and bravest, and of all true patriots. Politics and religion, when both are what they should be, will blend harmoniously, and together bless and uplift the people, and at the same time render strong and per manent all that is most excellent in our social life and civil in- stifntions.
WILLARD F. MALLALIEU.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST.
PAKT I.
BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.
IN" AN unique variety of directions the great Civil War evoked the ready, versatile aptitude of the American citizen ; in none more remarkably than with regard to the superior military com mands. By the defection of the great majority of the senior offi cers of the regular army, the North was left almost entirely denuded of available professional soldiers in the higher grades conversant with commands or experienced in war in the superior capacities. In the modern armies of the old world, high com mands were then, as they still are, restricted to officers of long graduated military experience following on a technical profes sional education. Thanks to the comprehensive and thorough training of West Point, the officerhood of the army of the United States possessed a professional training of unequalled theoretical and practical efficiency and range. The seniors who went South carried with them in the nature of things the greater proportion of higher professional experience ; but by reason of the national idiosyncracy combined with the justifiable self-confidence im parted by the West Point training, the comparative lack of experience in superior positions had singularly little if any ad verse influence. There are two kinds of experience — the experi ence of routine, and the experience of initiative, resource, and decision. It was experience of the latter type which the North ern captains and majors, promoted by leaps and bounds to high commands, matched and assimilated with their West Point teach ings in their swift advance ; and a couple of campaigns made them truer veterans in the soldierly sense of the word than any amount of unwarlike longevity could have done.
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But the national aptitude was exemplified yet more saliently in the rapid yet thoroughly justified rise to high commands of men whom the outbreak of the war found innocent, or all but in nocent, of any military training or experience. Sickles's first commission was signed in June, 1861, but he was a corps-com mander at Chancellorsville, and it was with the intuition of a true tactician that at Gettysburg he was resolute to place his corps in that Peach Orchard position, his tenure of which balked Lee's desire to occupy it to advantage with his artillery and Longstreet's infantry. He left a limb there, but none of his alert versatility ; when last I saw him he was vigorously indoctrinating Castelar and Figueras into the methods of " running" the newborn and short-lived Spanish republic. Blair was a civilian politician until the outbreak of the war, but he commanded the Eighteenth Corps with credit in Sherman's Atlanta campaign. Logan, it is true, had served as a volunteer -in Mexico, but that service was a mere incident in the civilian career which was interrupted by the Civil War, throughout which he fought with great distinction and, in Sherman's phrase, " nobly sustained his reputation " in the com mand of the Army of the Tennessee before Atlanta after the fall of the lamented McPherson.
Yet another strange military phenomenon did this war pre sent. The chief of staff of all men in an army is the man on whom devolves the most arduous, wide-ranging, technical, and responsible duties ; his professional knowledge is expected to be all but universal, his experience profound, his military judgment prompt and ripe. Among famous chiefs of staff have been G-neisenau, Berthier, Soult, Jomini, Mansfield, Moltke, Voghts- Retz, Blumenthal, Stiele, all educated and trained soldiers, con versant, practically and theoretically, with the art of war. Among the chiefs of staff in the Union armies Humphreys and Webb were educated soldiers of exceptional professional ability ; Marcy, of the domestic, if not nepotic, type of chief of staff, was at all events a graduate of West Point and had seen frontier service. But Eawlins, Garfield, and Butterfield were destitute of any mili tary education or training, having been pure civilians until the beginning of the war. Such experience as they possessed had come to them in the rough-and-ready school of active war fare, yet each filled the exceptionally onerous part of chief of staff to a great army in the field, and against none of those
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 55
quasi-extempore specialists has the most censorious critic adven tured a charge of inefficiency.
That phase of aptitude for the art military which is capable of developing itself in true and far-seeing conception of strategical considerations of the higher order, is an attribute of singular rarity. It is intuitive ; the possessor of it may live and die un aware of the endowment, unless circumstances occur which evoke its exercise. No assiduity of study or practice will earn it in its fullest for the man whom nature has not gifted, while it may reveal itself almost by surprise in one who is unaware that Clause- witz and Hamley have written a line, and who has never witnessed the setting of a squadron in the field. The warrior illuminated with this spark of natural genius is the great commander of his age— he is an Alexander, a Caesar, a Frederick, a Napoleon. In the civilian possessor it may lie wholly obscured and dormant ; while, again, it has irradiated and inspired a Eienzi, a Luther, a Loyola. Eeady-witted, many-sided, zealous and ardent as were the soldiers of the Union alike professional and volunteer, it can not be maintained that in the early days of the Civil War any one of them gave manifestation that heaven had endowed him with the gift of a strategic genius. But the attribute was present in the rich mental equipment of the great civilian whom the wisdom of Providence placed at the head of the State in that time of trouble. It is the object of the present writer to elucidate the fact that Abraham Lincoln was gifted with the faculty of intuitive strategic perception in a degree which, by reason of the multiplic ity of other eminent qualities which adorned the character of that illustrious man, has not received adequate recognition at the hands of his countrymen. It is with natural diffidence that a foreigner ventures to undertake this task ; but the doing of it has been long on his mind, and a well-intentioned effort cannot be taken as an impertinence.
It is quite improbable that his experience as a captain of mounted volunteers in the Black Hawk War should have awak ened in Lincoln any consciousness of his possession of strategic aptitude. His biographers * tell us that during McClelland ill ness in December, 1861, the President " gave himself night and day to the study of the military situation. He read a large number of strategical works. He held long conferences with
* Nicolay and Hay, Vol. 5, p. 155.
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eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by his special knowledge and the keen intelligence of his questions/' But five months earlier, in the midst of the dismay and the dis organization resulting from the d'eldde of Bull Kun, without the benefit of the study of " strategical works," and independently of the counsels of " eminent generals and admirals," Lincoln had com posed a memorandum defining the military policy <tud measures which in his judgment were the lessons of the reverse just in curred. The whole of this document, wise and far-seeing as were its terms, need not be quoted. Its various clauses enjoin refrain- ment for the time from offensive operations, the maintenance of the existing positions, and the sedulous organization of the new levies into methodized and disciplined armies. Those matters specified, the President set down the following pregnant injunc tion :
" When the foregoing shall have been substantially attended to : Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg be seized and permanentlv held, with an open line from Washington to Manassas, and an open line from Harper's Ferry to Strasburg —the military men to find the way of doing these things."
If Lincoln had never written another sentence, these lines would evince his possession of an accurate mental coup d'ceil, and an instinctive discernment of strategic points of profound im portance at once in a military and a political sense. What was the obvious military policy of the North ? Of course its dominant purpose was to put down the rebellion. But as regarded the line of the Potomac there were peculiar conditions, some natural, some artificial, indeed, but none the less stringent, which inter posed themselves to the complication of the main problem.
The National Capital stood on the very outer edge of Union territory. The Shenandoah Valley was for the South a protected avenue leading northward into the rear of Washington and straight towards the heart of the most fertile provinces of the Union. The conviction of many wise Southerners may have been right — and that conviction has been warmly supported by Colonel Chesney — that invasions of Northern territory by Southern armies were de plorable mistakes ; ^and that, quite apart from military results, it was throwing away a great political advantage to reduce what should have been a purely defensive struggle for rights to the lower level of aggressive fighting for retaliation and mastery. Be
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 57
this as it may, it would appear unquestionable that the primary duty of the North, a duty coming in front of that ulterior duty of reducing the South to submission, was to take measures for securing its own soil from outrage, and its capital from insult. In a war between hostile nations invasion is reckoned a triumph for the invader and a humiliation to the invaded ; how much more cogent are those ascriptions in such a contest as that which the North was waging against the South ? Nor, indeed, to the former were the sentimental humiliation and the injuries inflicted on the population of the territory overrun all the despite and damage that invasion by the latter might involve ; on the invading bayon ets until the catastrophe of Gettysburg there hovered the con tingency of the recognition of the South by the European powers.
Such considerations, when Johnston's foreposts were within sight of the Capitol, and when McDowell's raw levies had degen erated into a mob, must have been vitally present in Lincoln's mind when he wrote the injunction which is quoted above. Be fore the strong man armed should go forth again to the battle, he would take precautions for the keeping of his own house. The President's directions in this regard betoken a singular insight. Had he been a practical soldier he would probably have specified the occupation of an intermediate strategic point in front of Salem at the apex of the salient bend made by the Manassas Gap Railroad, to divide the long interval between the positions at Manassas and at Strasburg ; and perhaps rather than in the lat ter vicinity he would have located the position in the Shenandoah Valley somewhere about midway between Strasburg and Cedar- ville, so as to cover the Manassas and Chester gaps and the Luray road down the Massanutten Valley, as well as the great pike traversing the main valley.
It is not too much to say that those three positions, strongly fortified and adequately armed for permanent occupation, capable each of holding 10,000 to 15,000 men, would have protected Union territory from invasion from the lower Potomac on the east to the North Mountains range on the west, and would have mitigated if not dispelled the chronic anxiety for the protection of the National Capital, which for years clogged the enterprise of the Northern forces in the eastern section of the theatre of war. Had those fortress camps been created, strong for defence and possessing important potentialities of offence, one or other of
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them would have been in the path of a hostile army moving upon Washington by whatever line of advance, since that army neither could have afforded to mask the obstacle, nor could have passed it unregarded, leaving its own communications in peril. Con sider what those positions would have affected, averted, ob structed. The pestilent guerillas of Loudoun and Fauquier would have been cowed. The rich region of the lower Shenandoah would have been alienated from Confederate uses and its produce been at the service of the North. In face of the barrier which the Strasburg position would have presented, Jackson's campaign of May-June, 1862, the prescribed scheme of which was "to press the enemy at Harper's Ferry, threaten invasion into Maryland, and an attempt on Washington, and thus make the most ener getic diversion possible," could not have been prosecuted, and probably would never have been enjoined ; McDowell would have joined the Army of the Potomac, and the Peninsular campaign might have had another issue.
Had there been entrenched positions at Salem and Manassas there would have been no second Bull Run, since neither Jackson nor Longstreet would have ventured through Thoroughfare Gap, having the Salem position on flank and in rear, and since the Manassas position would have covered Pope's depot of supplies and have afforded his army a protective gathering-point, to assail which would have been rash, and to turn which would have been reckless. Had there been no second Bull Run Lee would not have adventured his Maryland campaign. But, even assuming Pope to have been crushed, if the positions indicated by Lincoln had existed Lee would assuredly have thought twice before moving into Maryland, leaving them in his rear on his lines of communi cation. Long admits that the unexpected discovery of a garrison in Harper's Ferry paralyzed the execution of his chief's ulterior designs pending the reduction of that place, which fell by a coup tie main. These designs Lee would scarcely have entertained in the full knowledge of the potential influence of those positions which he must have possessed had they existed — places too strong to be attempted by a coup de main. He would have found them formidable if not insurmountable obstacles to the prosecution of the campaign in Pennsylvania to which he directed himself after the victory of Chancellorsville. During his great opponent's long- drawn-out movement athwart Virginia, Hooker could find or
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 59
make no opportunity for acting on Lincoln's quaintly-put sug gestion : " If the head of Lee's army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it at Fredericksburg, the animal must be very slim some where. Could you not break him ? " Pleasanton, indeed, claimed to have enforced on Lee the valley route to the Potomac instead of that to the eastward of the Blue Ridge. But on either line Lee would have found one of the fortress camps enjoined by Lincoln in his memorandum of June 1861, had effect been given to its requirement. From either or from both positions the " animal " in its slirnness would have run risk of damage, although scarcely that of severance ; they would have been too strong to be taken without regular approaches and seige artillery, one or other of them would have threatened Lee's communica tions whatever line they could have followed, %and he must have left a division to observe the menacing one, a weakening of force he could ill afford.
Finally, there can be little question that if there had been a strongly entrenched position in the vicinity of Strasburg, Early, in the summer of 1864, would never have seen the lower valley, far less have fought on the Monocacy and fluttered the Volscians of the Washingtonian Corioli. For in that case Hunter, withdraw ing from his stroke at Lynchburg, would have made shift to re tire on that position down the valley instead of diverging as he did into the Kanawha region, in default of support short of the Potomac.
None of those entrenched positions was ever constructed. In no case was there any material hindrance. For the work to be done east of Manassas Gap there was available the interval be tween Johnston's withdrawal from before Washington in March and Pope's retreat in the end of August, 1862. Throughout the winter of 1861-62 Jackson never had more than 4,000 men in the Shenandoah Valley, and if during that time Johnston's presence at Manassas had contributed to deter from construction work in the Strasburg vicinity, the interval between Jackson's retire ment after Kernstown and his re-descent on Banks more than a month later, would have sufficed for the work. Why the Presi dent's injunction was not impetrated, I know not ; nor does its non-fulfilment in any degree affect the argument for Lincoln's strategic discernment based upon its terms.
It cannot be denied that McClellan, notwithstanding the de-
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fects of his military idiosyncracy, was a scientific officer of ex ceptional capacity. There is no evidence whether or not he knew of Lincoln's memorandum, but the following extract from that melancholy publication, " McClellan's Own Story/' is a re markable tribute, conscious or unconscious, to the President's strategic prescience as illustrated in the memorandum quoted above :
" The instructions I gave (before leaving for the Peninsula) were to the effect that Manassas Junction should be strongly entrenched .... and that General Banks should put the mass of his force there . . . . ; the railroad from Washington to Manassas, and thence to Strasburg, to be at once put in running order, and protected by blockhouses .... a force to be strongly entrenched at or near the point where the railroad crosses the Shenandoah, Chester Gap to be also occupied by a detachment well en trenched. . . . Under the arrangement the immediate approaches to Washington would be covered by a strong force well entrenched and able to fallback on the city if overpowered; while if the enemy advanced down the Shenandoah the force entrenched at Strasburg would be able to hold him in check until assistance could reach it by rail from Manassas. If these measures had been carried into effect Jackson's subsequent advance down the Shenandoah would have been impracticable .... and, again, with Manassas entrenched as I directed, Pope would have had a secure base of operations from which to manoeuvre, and the result of his campaign might have been very different."
One paragraph of Lincoln's memorandum written immediately after the Bull Run disaster has been quoted and its strategic po tentialities elucidated. There followed it another paragraph which, as strengthening the argument for the President's possession of instinctive strategic perception, is not less worthy of notice. It runs thus : " This done/' — viz., the things enjoined in a previous paragraph — "a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis; and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee."
Commodore Davis occupied Memphis within a year after this sentence was penned ; but it was not until fifteen months later that Burnside marched into Knoxville, and the staunch loyalists of East Tennessee had to suffer and endure for several months longer before they were able to call themselves once more entirely free. Yet before the blood of the first pitched battle of the war was dry the President was illustrating by the precept just quoted his full and anxious consciousness, not less of the strategic than "of the political importance of the occupation of East Tennessee by the Union arms ; for the hill country of East Tennessee, with the northwestern section of North Carolina, was a re-entering wedge
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 61
of loyal unionism penetrating the vitals of the Confederacy. It was traversed by the railway line which constituted the main link of connection between the eastern and the western and southwest ern railroad systems of the rebel power — a line the dislocation of which would entail on that power the most serious mischief. "A glance at the map," write Lincoln's most recent biographers,* "and a study of attendant circumstances, can leave no doubt that it was entirely possible to have seized and held the mountain re gion of East Tennessee, and that such an occupation would have been a severance of the rebel Confederacy almost as complete and damaging to its military strength as the opening of the Missis sippi ."
In the end of September, 1861, the President followed up his curt precept of July with a more detailed and specific direction. " I wish/' he wrote, (< a movement made to seize and hold a point on the railroad connecting Virginia and Tennessee, near the mountain pass called Cumberland Gap." After an accurate sum mary of the military situation on either side in and about the region such an advance would traverse, he expresses his intention that it and McClellan's projected movement in the coast region should be made simultaneously. While preparations were in course, the vigilant defensive was to be maintained. When all should be ready, he directs that Sherman, remaining immobile in his position southward of Louisville, should simply " hold" his adversary, Buckner, " while all [the troops] at Cincinnati and all at Louisville, wth all on the line, concentrate rapidly at Lexing ton, and thence [march] to Thomas's camp [at Camp Dick Rob inson, on the way to Cumberland Gap], joining him, and the whole [move] thence upon the Gap." Recognizing the existing difficul ties of transport, the indefatigable man introduced into his mes sage to Congress, in the beginning of December, 1861, a recom mendation, "as a military measure," of the construction of a strategic railway, from the most advisable point on the existing sys tem, across eastern Kentucky into East Tennessee ; an operation which, if carried out, would probably have shortened the war. He inspired McClellan, promoted per saltum to the command of the army of the United States, with the zeal for the military occupation of East Tennessee which burned in himself ; and that chief kept impressing on Buell, whom he had commissioned to
*Nicolay and Hay, Vol. V., p. 73.
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the service, his conviction that "strategical and political consider ations alike render a prompt movement in force on East Tennessee imperative." How Buell, disregarding his commanding officer's strenuous representations and the President's trenchant comment that he "would rather have a point on the railroad south of the Cumberland Gap than Nashville, because it cuts a great artery of the enemy's communication, which Nashville does not," — how Buell,! repeat, took his own stiff, refractory way — are not those things written in the chronicles of the perturbed period ? But that Buell was self-willed and contumacious cannot obscure the recognition of Lincoln's prompt and shrewd perception, and of his anxious prosecution of correct strategical objects and methods having for their result the military and political utilization of the East Tennessee region.
For seven long months, from the disaster of Bull Eun until the beg^ining of March, 1862, the Union underwent a period of grievous Humiliation. Within sight of the dome of the National Capitol stood the outposts of a rebel army, whose cannon com manded the lower Potomac, and the mass of which held an en trenched position within a couple of easy marches from the Washington defences. Against this degrading situation, long endured with exemplary patience, the nation and its head at length began to chafe ; and in the beginning of December, 1861, Lincoln handed to the military chief whom already he was gradu ally finding out, a memorandum outlining an operation having for its object the dislodgement of Johnston from his insolent posi tion at Manassas. Its terms, slightly condensed, are as follows (the figures were furnished by McClellan) :
" Suppose that 50,000 of the troops southwest of the river (Potomac) move forward and menace the enemy at Centreville. That 21,000, being the remainder of the available force now there move rapidly to the crossing of the Occoquan by the road through Alexandria towards Richmond ; there to be joined by the 33,000 men now being the whole movable force from north east of the river, which, having been landed from the Potomac just below the mouth of the Occoquan, should move by land up the south side [right bank] ' of that stream to the crossing point indicated ' [where the two bodies should unite] ; and then the whole move together by the road thence, to Brentville and beyond to the [Orange and Alexandria] railroad just south of its crossing at Broad Run, the railroad bridges having been previously de stroyed by a cavalry detachment sent forward in advance."
In so far as it concerned " grand strategy" — the correct recogni tion of the point at which it was imper^ive to strike — this memoran-
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 63
dum is unexceptionable ; in the practical strategic detail which consisted in the effective direction of troops on that decisive point, it is perhaps less happy. The expressed conviction of General McDowell, it is true, cannot be disregarded, that the result of a movement in force on both flanks of the enemy must result in a battle in which the Northern forces would be victorious. Every respect is due to the opinion of that good and honest soldier. But it is unquestionable that the project as outlined involved in full measure the proverbial risks and uncertainties of a combined movement engaged in with raw troops in an unfamiliar country, complicated by unascertained obstacles and imperfect intercom munication, and thus liable to the contingency of failure to accomplish simultaneous cooperation. If, indeed, that simulta neous cooperation came off deftly, then certainly Johnston would have found himself in that disagreeable predicament which German soldiers knew by the term, "In der taktischen Mitte." But if the Northern forces had failed to keep punctual tryst, then, and yet more fully, had he taken the prompt offensive, would Johnston have been in the enjoyment of the beneficent phase of interior lines. Nearly of equal strength as he was to each of the proposed Northern contingents, his opportunities of timely information, his divers alternatives of action, and his possession of an entrenched position from which to sally and into which to retire, seemed to bring it within the bounds of possibility that the rebel general might still have been at Manassas after having sent both of the Federal bodies back to their lines in discomfiture.
After keeping the President's memorandum for some ten days, McClellan returned it with the unceremoniously curt observation: " Information received recently leads me to believe that the enemy could meet us with nearly equal forces ; and I have now my mind actively turned towards another plan of campaign that I do not think at all anticipated by the enemy, nor by many of our own people."
So far as I can discover, this is McClellan's first allusion to the project of a campaign against Richmond from a base on the Chesapeake. There is no hint of such a scheme in his wide-rang ing memorandum of August 2 ; its tenor, indeed, is rather to the contrary. So late, indeed, as the end of November he inti mated that the "crushing defeat" of the rebel army "at Manassas " was the great object to be accomplished ; and that
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the advance upon it " should not be postponed beyond November 25." Lincoln's proposal was simply an echo of the national feeling and anxiety put into definite shape. McOlellan was not a fighting general ; shall we greatly err in putting forward the suggestion, that, since he began to perceive he would be squarely forced to go against Johnston if he had no other feasible alterna tive to substitute, he invented the Chesapeake project during those ten days as a plausible evasion of an unpalatable compulsion ? But, so it may be replied, cc&lum non animam mutant — McClellan must have laid his account with having some fighting from his Chesapeake base, and was not deterred by this prospect from pen etrating to the vicinity of Richmond: what, then, justifies the surmise that it was a repugnance to fighting which deterred him from trying conclusions with Johnston at Manassas ? The clear answer to this is that McClellan was just as reluctant to fight in the Peninsula and before Richmond as he was in front of Wash ington ; and this for the same baseless reason. He did not fight Johnston at Manassas because he believed, or affected to believe, that his adversary could oppose 150,000 men to his own 100,000. It was simply the logical sequence that he should not fight when he found himself before Richmond with 100,000 men whom he called 85,000, while in his imagination the adversary standing over against him was 200,000 strong.*
When one speaks of fighting, it is of course offensive battles, . or defensive battles accepted deliberately, not on compulsion but with a strategic object, which are meant. The stubborn and bloody conflicts sustained in front of Richmond by the staunch and gallant Army of the Potomac were all fought on the compulsory defensive, and the discomfiture of that brave host was wholly wrought by its chief's studied declinature of the timely initia tive. At no one of those battles was he present in person save during a part of Malvern Hill. If Williamsburg is to be styled an offensive battle, McClellan was miles in the rear until late in the afternoon of the second day's fighting; and when he did arrive, he characteristically proceeded to convert what offensive there had been into the passive defensive, an attitude which naturally resulted in the nocturnal withdrawal of the enemy. The only two offensive battles fought by McClellan he . engaged in after he had seen the cards in his adversary's hand.
* <( McClellan's Own Story," p. 392.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 65
There are three types of commander : he who both organizes and fights ; he who can fight but cannot organize ; he who has a superlative gift for organization, but cannot fight. McClellan was a commander of the last type.
The military situation in Washington, in January 1862, was one of extreme tension. The President, who by the constitution was commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States, supported by the voice of the nation and the counsel of wise and disinterested generals, had pronounced for a direct ad vance from the Washington base. McClellan, on the other hand, who was General in Chief of the army of the United States, was set on a counter project of a movement on Richmond by the lower Chesapeake. Which of these two powers was to prevail ? For the time, at least, it seemed that the head of the State was resolved to assert to the uttermost the courage of his convictions. Of his own unaided instance he issued a "General War Order" — corresponding in effect to the "General Idea" for a campaign with which soldiers are familiar — directing that on a day named (February 22) there should begin a simultaneous general move ment of the land and sea forces of the Union against the insur gent forces ; specifying in detail the several commands which should take part in this great operation ; and enacting that all civil and military officers, including the general in chief, were to be "severally held to their strict and full responsibility for prompt execution of this order." The date for action which it specified was probably premature, but apart from this detail, the full significance of this order seems, in a strategic sense, to de serve greater recognition than has ever been accorded to it. To Grant, in his promotion to the command of the Union armies, has been credited the earliest realization of the inadequate results obtained by the disconnected and inharmonious action of the va rious commands ; and his altered method of a " simultaneous movement all along the line" — his " design to work all parts of the army together, and somewhat towards a common centre " — has always been held, and justly so, an evidence of his genius for " grand strategy." But Lincoln, pure civilian .as he was, by his order of January 27, 1862, had anticipated the gifted and prac tised soldier by more than two years in the appreciation of the advantages of concerted action towards a common purpose.
Following naturally on his " General War Order," there was VOL. CLV.— NO. 428. 5
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issued by the President to General McClellan a "Special War Order" — the " Special Idea " of the soldier — commanding that the Army of the Potomac, after due provision for the safety of Washington, should move out with the object of " seizing and occupying a point on the railroad southwest ward of Manassas Junction, the advance to begin on or bef >re February 22." It is to be noted that the risky strategy of the December memorandum was now abandoned in favor of the better policy of undivided forces directed on a truer objective.
These " War Orders " were definite, deliberate, ard mo mentous deliverances, sternly enjoining obedience on ail whom they concerned, specifically on the General-in-Chief. Yet three days after the issue of the "Special Order," Lincoln was writing thus to McClellan : " You and I have distinct and different plans for a movement of the Army of the Potomac. ... If you will give me satisfactory answers to the following questions I shall gladly yield my plan to yours." The questions need not be quoted ; in effect they ask in what respects the Chesapeake plan was superior to the Manassas plan. McClelland reply was volum inous, plausible, and full of ingenious special pleading. Could McClellan have fought as well as he wrote, he would have taken rank among the great commanders.
It seems obvious, however, that the question at issue was not in any possible sense one of alternative or competition between Manassas and the lower Chesapeake, seeing that in the nature of things, not less for the national self-respect than as a military necessity, Johnston had to be conclusively dislodged before the other adventure could be gone upon. It appears extraordinary that neither the President nor the council of war of general officers of the Army of the Potomac convened by McClellan at the President's instance should have given expression to any con- ciousness of the obligatory character of this sequence of enter prises. It was almost as if in regard to this all-important point the masterfulness of MeClellan had hypnotized President and gen erals into blindness. The majority of the council voted in favor of tfie Chesapeake project simpliciter. Keyes followed suit on condition of the previous reduction of the Confederate batteries commanding the Potomac ; no voice among eight concurrents was raised to stipulate for the prior molestation of Johnston. The President, having sacrificed his own convictions and gone counter
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A STRATEGIST. 67
to the feeling of the nation, had no reservations in his support of McClellan's plan save that the security of Washington should be insured, and that the Potomac should be freed from the domi nance of the rebel batteries. As for McClellan, certainly he had no intention of driving the Confederate army from the vicinity of the National Capital, and so little did he regard the inconven ience and humiliation of the blockade of the Potomac by rebel batteries that it was with great reluctance he made preparations to obey the positive orders for the dislodgement, nor was he ashamed to have the rendezvous at Annapolis of the transport for his projected expedition.
So far as molestation at McClellan's hands was concerned, Johnston's outposts might have watched, or, indeed, hurried, the embarkation of McClelland final detail. If McClellan's all-but- accomplished attempt had succeeded, to leave "Washington gar risoned by a few thousand efficients, the stars and bars might have been seen in Pennsylvania Avenue. In such an event, even on the absurd assumption that Richmond was to the Confederacy what Washington was to the Union, the prompt "swapping of Queens," to use Lee's later phrase, was by no means assured when a half share in the transaction was on McClellan's hands. Had Johnston found Washington too hard a nut to crack, he might never theless well have held the attempt worth making ; and with his command of railroads, and his knowledge, to quote himself, that " McClellan seems not to value time especially," he might fairly have laid his account with reaching Richmond in advance of that commander after having failed to occupy Washington.
Johnston's withdrawal from Manassas in early March was not, as McClellan and his supporters maintained, because of his discovery of the Chesapeake scheme. In his memoirs the Con federate commander specifically states that his retirement was wholly due to the apprehension that the Federal army was pre paring to move through Maryland under cover of the Potomac, and cross the river to the mouth of the Potomac Creek, where it would be at least two days' marches nearer Richmond than was the Army of Northern Virginia on Bull Run. But for this incon trovertible evidence it would be incredible that Johnston should have known nothing of McClellan's plan of campaign until the preparations were all but complete, when it is remembered that Stanton had publicly advertised for transports in the middle of
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February, and that the ports of preparation and assemblage were full of Southern sympathizers. The underground telegraph in those early days must have worked badly.
ARCH»- FORBES.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE.
BY SIK J. WILLIAM DAWSON.
II.
THE remarkable record of the early distribution of the sons of Noah ( ' ' Toledoth " of the sons of Noah), in Genesis X., may be regarded, relatively to most of the nations it refers to, as a scrap of prehistoric lore of the most intensely interesting character. From the old ' ' Phaleg " of Bochart to the recent commentaries of Delitzch and other German scholars, it has received a ho^t of more or less conjectural explanations ; and while all agree in ex tolling its value and importance as a " Beginning of History," nothing can be more various than the views taken of it. Only in the light of the recent discoveries and researches already referred to can we arrive at a clear conception of its import; but with these and some common sense we may hope to be more fortunate than the older interpreters. It is necessary, however, to explain here that, for want of a little scientific precision, many modern archaeologists still fail in their interpretations. They tell us that the Toledoth are not properly " ethnological," but rather " ethno graphical," and that we are to regard the document as referring, not to the genealogical affiliations of nations, but to their acci dental geographical positions at the time of the record.
Now this is precisely what the writer, with a sure scientific instinct, carefully guards against, and explicitly informs us he did not intend. He tells us that he gives the ee generations of the sons of Noah " and their descendants, and at the ends of the three lists relating to these sons he is careful to say that he has given them ' ' in their lands, each according to his language, after their families, in their nations," or the formula is slightly varied into " after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, in their nations/' Lastly, in the conclusion of the whole table he reiter ates, " These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, after their nations." All these statements, let it be observed, are acknowledged to be parts of one (Elohistic) document. It is clear, therefore, that the writer intends us to
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understand that the determining elements of his classification are neither physical characters nor accidents of geographical distri bution,, but descent and original language — two primary and scientific grounds of classification, and which common sense requires us to adhere to in interpreting the document, whose value will depend on the certainty with which the writer could ascertain facts as to these criteria : criteria which are, of course, less open to the observation of later inquirers,, who may find difficulty in ascertaining either descent or original language, and in default of these may be obliged to resort to other grounds of classification.
It may be said, however, that if taken in the sense obviously intended by the writer, the list will not correspond with the facts. If so, so much the worse for it. A few data have, however, to be taken into the account in order to give this early writer fair play.
1. The record has nothing to do with antediluvian peoples or with survivors of the deluge other than the sons of Noah, if there were any such. Therefore, those ethnologists who are sceptical as to the historical deluge, and who postulate an uninterrupted advance of man through long ages of semi-bestial brutality, have nothing in common with our narrator, and cannot possibly believe his statements.
2. The document does not profess to be a series of ethnolog ical inferences from the present or ancient characters of different nations, but an actual historical statement of the known migra tions of men from a common centre in Shinar, the Sumir of the Chaldeans.
3. It relates only to the primary distribution of men from their alleged centre, over certain districts of Western Asia, Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, and does not profess to know any thing of their subsequent migrations or history.
4. It is thus not responsible for those later, even if very ancient, changes which displaced one race by another or obliged one race to move on by the pressure of another, nor for any changes of language or mixtures of races which may have occurred in these movements.
5. It affirms nothing as to the physical characters of the races referred to, except as they may be inferred from heredity, but it implies some resemblance in language between the derivatives of the same stock, and this, be it observed, notwithstanding the
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. 71
added narrative of the confusion of tongues at Babel,* which the narrator does not regard as interfering with the fact of lang uages originally forming a few branches proceeding from a com mon stock.
6. If we ask what our narrator supposed to be the original or Noachic tongue, we might infer from his three lines of descent, and from the locality of the dispersion and the episode of Nimrod's prehistoric kingdom, that the primitive lang uage of Ohaldea would be the original stem ; and this we now know from authentic written records to have been an agglutinate language of the type usually known as Turanian, and more closely allied to the Tartar and Chinese tongues than to other kinds of speech. It would follow that what we now call Semitic and Aryan or Japhetic forms of speech must, in the view of our ancient authority, date from the sequelae of the great " conf usion of tongues."
These points being premised, we can clear away the fogs which have been gathered around this little luminous spot in the early history of the world, and can trace at least the principal ethnic lines of radiation from it. Though the writer gives us three main branches of affiliation of the children of Noah, he really refers to six principal lines of migration, three of them belonging to that multifarious progeny of Ham, in which he seems to include both the Turanian and Negroid types of our or dinary classifications, as well as some of the brown and yellow races.
One of the lines of affiliation of Ham leads eastward and is not traced ; but if the Cushite people who are said to have gone up the Pison to the land which in earlier antediluvian times was that of " gold and bedolach and shoham stone," that is along the fertile valley of Susiana, were those primitive people preceding the Elamites of history who are said to have spoken an agglutin ate language, f then we have at least one stage of this migration.
* Held by some to belong to another (Jahvistic) document, but certainly incor porated by the early editor.
t Sayce, (" Hibbert lectures ") and Bagster's " Records of the Past." Inscriptions of Cyrus published in the last volume of the latter appear to set at rest the vexed questions relating to early Elam. It would seem that in the earliest times Cushitea and Semitic Elamites contended for the fertile plains and the mountains east of the Tigris, and were finally subjugated by Japhetic Medes and Persians. Thus this region first formed a part of the Cushite Nimrodic empire (Gen. II., 11, X., 8) ; it then became the seat of a conquering Elamite power (Gen. XIV., 1 to 4); and was finally a central part of the Medo-Persian empire. All this agrees with the Bible and the inscriptions, as well as in the main with Herodotus.
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A second line leads west to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, to Egypt and to North Africa. A third passes so nth westward through Southern Arabia and across the Ked Sea into interior Africa. To the sons of Japhet are ascribed two lines of migra tion, one through Asia Minor and the northern coasts of the Mediterranean ; another northwest, around the Black Sea. The Semites would seem to have been a less wandering people at the first, but subsequently to have encroached on and mingled with the Hamites, and especially on that western line of migration leading to the Mediterranean. All this can be gathered from un disputed national names in the several lines of migration above sketched, without touching on the more obscure and doubtful names or referring to tribes which remained near the original centre. We must, however, inquire a little more particularly into the movements bearing on Palestine and Egypt.
So far as the writer in Genesis is informed, he does not seem to be aware of any sons of Japhet having colonized Palestine or Egypt. It was only in the later reflux of population that the sons of Javan gained a foothold in these regions. They were both colonized primarily by Hamites and subsequently intruded on by Semites.
Here a little prehistoric interlude noted by the writer, or by an author whom he quotes, gives a valuable clue not often at tended to. The oldest son of Ham, Gush, begat Nimrod, the mighty hunter and prehistoric conquerer, who organized the first empire in that Euphratean plain which subsequently became the nucleus of the Babylonian and Assyrian power. The site of his kingdom cannot be doubted, for cities well known in historic times, Babel, Erech, Accad., and Galneh were included in it, as well as probably Nineveh. The first point which I wish to make in this connection is that we cannot suppose this to have been a Semitic empire. Its nucleus must have been composed of Nim- rod's tribal connections, who were Hamites and presumably Cushites. He is, indeed, said to have gone into or invaded the land of Ashur, and, if by this is meant the Semitic Ashur, he must have been hostile to these people, as indeed the Chaldeans were in later times. The next point to be noted is that the Nim- rodic empire must have originated at a time when the Gushites were still strong on the Lower Euphrates, and before that great movement of these people which carried them across Arabia to
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. 73
the Upper Nile and ultimately caused the name Gush or Kesh to be almost exclusively applied to the Ethiopians of Africa. Now is this history, or mere legend ?
The answer of archaeology is not doubtful. We have in the earliest monuments of Chaldea evidence that there was a pre-Sem- itic population, to whom, indeed, it is believed that the Semites who invaded the country owed much of their civilization. A recent writer has said that "outside of the Bible we know nothing of Nimrod," but others see a trace of him in the legend ary hero of Chaldean tradition, Gisdubar or Gingamos, while others think that, as Na-marod, he may be the original of Mero- dach, the tutelary god of Babylon. Independently of this, there was certainly an early Chaldean and " Turanian " empire, which must have had some founder, whatever his name, and which was not Semitic or Aryan, and therefore what an early writer would call Hamitic. Further, our author traces from this region the great Cushite line of migration, which includes such well-known names as Seba, Sabta, Sheba and Dedan, into Arabia on the way to Africa. Here the Egyptian monuments take up the tale, and inform us of a South Arabian and East African people, the people of Pun or Punt, represented as like to themselves and to the Kesh or Ethiopians, and who thus correspond to the Arabian Cushites of Genesis. In accordance with this the Abyssinian of to-day is scarcely distinguishable from the old Punites as repre sented on the Egyptian monuments.*
Thus the primitive Cushite kingdom and one of the great lines of Cushite migration are established by ancient monuments. Let it be further observed that, as represented in Egypt, these primitive Ethiopians were not black, but of a reddish or brownish color, like the Egyptians themselves, and that their migration ex plains the resemblance of the customs and religion of early Egypt to those of Babylonia, and the ascription by the Egyptians of the origin of their gods to the land of Pun.
The remaining sons of Ham, Mizraim, Put and Canaan, are not mentioned in connection with the old Mmrodic kingdom, and seem to have moved westward at a very early period. They were already " in the land," and apparently constituted a con siderable citizen population before the migration of Abraham.
* The recent discoveries of Glaser with reference to the early civilization of Southern Arabia also bear on this point.
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Mizraim represents the twin populations of the Delta and Lower Egypt, and the Tel-el-Amarna tablets inform us that long before the time of Moses Mitzor was the ordinary name of Egypt, while we know that its early population was closely allied in features and language to the Oushites.
Canaan* heads a central line of migration, and Sidon and Cheth are said to have been his leading sons. The first represents the Phoenician maritime power of Northern Syria, the second that great nation known to the Egyptians as Kheta and to the Assyrians as Khatti, whose territory extended from Oarchemish on the Euphrates through the great plain of Ooele-Syria to Hebron in Southern Palestine and not improbably into the Delta. They were a people whose language was allied to that of Cushite Chal- dea,f whose features were of a coarser type than those of their more southern confreres, and who, according to the Egyptian annals, were closely allied with the Amorites, Jebusites and other people identified with Canaan in the Old Testament. The Cheta, at one time known only as the sons of Heth in the old Testament, may be said in our time to have experienced a sudden resurrec tion, and now bulk so largely in the minds of archaeologists that their importance is in danger of being exaggerated.
A significant note is added : " Afterwards were the families of the Canaanites scattered abroad." How could this be ? Their line of migration and settlement led directly to the great sea, and was hemmed in by that of the Japhetites on the north and of the Cushites on the south; but they made the sea their highway, and soon there was no coast from end to end of the Mediterranean and far along the European and African shores of the Atlantic that was not familiar with the Phoenician Canaanite. But it may be said these Phoenicians were a Semitic people. They certainly spoke a Semitic language allied to the Hebrew, but what right have we to attribute Semitic languages solely to the descendants of the Biblical Shem ? Even if these languages originated with them they may have spread to other peoples, as we know they replaced the old Turanian speech of Babylonia, just as the Arabic has extinguished other languages in Egypt itself. In whatever way the Phoenicians acquired a Semitic tongue, in
* Canaan with our old historian is the name of a man, hut it came to designate first the " low country " or coast region of Western Palestine and then the whole of Palestine.
t Conder and others call it Turanian.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. 75
physical character they were not Semitic, but closely allied to the Hittites, the Philistines, and the people of Mitzor or Egypt. The Egyptian sculptures prove this, and the celebrated Capuan bust of Hannibal reminds us of the features of the old Hyksos kings of Egypt, who were no doubt of Hamite or Turanian stock.
This is a fair summary of the testimony of the writer of Genesis tenth, as compared with the general evidence of history and archaeology. But we have something further to learn from what may be called the fossil remains of prehistoric peoples as em bodied in the Egyptian monuments, which are conversant with all the nations around the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
The Egyptians divided the nations known to them into four groups, of which they have given us several representations in tombs and public buildings. One of these consisted of their own race. The other three were as - follows : (1) Southern peoples mostly of dark complexions, ranging from light brown to black. These included the Cushites, Punites, and negroes. (2) Western peoples mostly of fair complexions inhabiting the islands and northern coasts of the Mediterranean, the " Hanebu" or chiefs of the north or of the isles, with some populations of North Africa, the so-called white Lybians and Maxyans. (3) Northern or northeastern peoples, or those of Syria and the neighboring parts of Western Asia, Amorites, Hittites, Edomites, Arabs, etc., usually represented as of yellowish complexion.
The first of these divisions evidently corresponds with the line of Cushite migration of Genesis, extending from Shinar through Southern Arabia, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and of which the negroes are apparently degraded members pushed in advance of the others, while the populations of Pun and Kesh, the southern Arabians and their relatives in Africa, closely resemble, as figured in the monuments, the Egyptians themselves.
The second group of the Egyptian classification represents those so-called Aryan peoples of Europe and its islands, and parts of Northern Africa, of whom the Greeks are a typical race, and who in Genesis are said to have possessed the "Isles of the Gentiles ; " though in the wave of "migration from the east they were in many places preceded by non- Aryan races, Pelasgians, Iberians, etc., possibly wandering Hamitic tribes, while they were also invaded by that scattering abroad of the Phoenician Canaanites referred to in Genesis. They are represented in the
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monuments as people with European features, fair complexions, and sometimes fair hair and blue eyes.
The third group is the most varied of the whole, because its seat in Syria was a meeting-place of many tribes. Its most ancient members, the Phoenicians and allied nations, were, according to the monuments, men resembling the Egyptian and Cushite type, and these, no doubt, were those pre-Semitic and pre-historic na tions of Canaan referred to in the remarkable notes regarding the Emim, Zuzim, etc., in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, which may be regarded as a foot-note to the Toledoth of Genesis tenth. These aborigines were invaded by men of different types. First, we find in the monuments that the Amorites of the Pales tine hills were a fair people with somewhat European features like some of the present populations of the Lebanon, When re turning over the Lebanon in 1884 we met a large company of men with camels and donkeys carrying merchandise. They were fair- complexioned and with brown hair, and from their features I might have supposed they were Scottish Highlanders. I was told they were Druses, and they were evidently much like, as are in deed many of the modern fellaheen of the Palestine hills, the Amar as they are pictured in Egypt. These white peoples, though reckoned in the Bible as Karaites, may have had a mixture of Aryan blood. It is to be noted here that the Amorite chiefs, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre, named as confederate with Abraham, have non-Semitic names.
A later inroad was that of the Hittites, evidently a people having affinity with the Philistines and Egyptians, but whose chiefs and nobles seem to have been of Tartar blood, like the modern Turks. The names of their kings seem also to have been non-Semitic. Later, the great westward migration of Sem itic peoples, to which that of Abraham himself belongs, not only introduced the Israelites but many nations of Semitic or mixed blood, the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, etc., whom we find figuring in the Egyptian monuments as yellow or brownish people with a Jewish style of features, and all of whom, as mentioned above, would be known to the Egyptians and Canaanites as " Hebrews." *
Thus the monuments confirm the Jewish record, and the con-
*This is independent of the question whether we regard the name Eber as that of an ancestor, or merely of men from beyond the Euphrates.
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fusion which some ethnologists have introduced into the matter arises from their applying in an arbitrary manner the special tests of physical and philological characteristics, and neglecting to dis tinguish the primary migrations of men from subsequent intru sions.
Another singular point of agreement is that, just as in Egypt we find men civilized from the first, so we find elsewhere. In Egypt writing and literature date from before the time of Abraham. In like manner we have no monumental evidence of any time when the Accadian people of Babylonia were destitute of writing and science, and we now find that there were learned scribes in all the cities of Canaan, and that the Phoenicians and Southern Arabians knew their alphabet ages before Moses, while even the Greeks seem to have known alphabetic writing long before the Mosaic age.* These men, in short, were descendants of the survivors of the Noachian Deluge, and therefore civilized from the first ; and though we have no certain evidence of letters before the flood, except the statement of the author of the Babylonian deluge tablets, that Noah hid written archives at Sippara before going into the ark, yet it is quite certain that men who could build Noah's ship are not unworthy ancestors of the Phoenician seamen, who probably launched their barks on the Mediterranean before the death of Noah himself. Thus whatever value we may attach to the record in Genesis, we cannot refuse to admit that it is thoroughly con sistent with itself and with the testimony of the oldest monu ments of Asia and Africa, as it is also with the evidence of the geological changes of the Pleistocene and early modern epoch.
In like manner the Egyptian inscriptions of the conquests of Thothmes III. give us a pre-Mosaic record of Palestinian geogra phy corresponding with that of the Hebrew conquest, and the pictures of sieges coincide with the excavations of Petrie at La- chish in restoring those Canaanite towns, ' ' walled up to heaven ", which excited the fear of the Israelites. Neither can we scoff at the illiteracy of men who were carrying on diplomatic correspon dence in written despatches before Genesis itself was compiled. Nor can we doubt the military prowess of these people, their chariot forces, their sculptured idols and images, their wealth of gold and silver, their agricultural and artistic skill. All these
* Petrie " Illahun, Kahun & Garob," 189k
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are amply proved by the monuments of the Egyptians and the Hittites.*
Palestine thus presents a pre-historic past parallel with the earlier years of Egypt. It has however a still earlier period, for in Palestine we have evidence of the existence of man long before the dispersion of the sons of Noah. To appreciate this evidence, we must go back, as in the case of Egypt, to the pre-human period. All along the coast of Palestine, from Jaffa to the northern limit of old Phoenicia, the geological traveller sees evi dence of a recent submergence, in the occurrence of sandstone, gravel, and limestone with shells and other marine remains of species still living in the Mediterranean. These are the relics of that Pleistocene submergence already referred to, in which the Nile Valley was an arm of the sea and Africa was an island. No evidence has been found of the residence of man in Palestine in this period, when, as the sea washed the very bases of the hills, and the plains were under water, it was certainly not very well suited to his abode. The climate was also probably more severe than at present and the glaciers of Lebanon must have extended nearly to the sea. This was the time of the so-called glacial period in Western Europe.
This, however, was succeeded by that post-glacial period in which, as already explained, the area of the Mediterranean was much smaller than at present and the land encroached far upon the bed of the sea. This, the second continental period, is that in which man makes his first undoubted appearance in Europe, and we have evidence of the same kind in Syria.
One of the most interesting localities proving this is the pass of Nahr el Kelb, north of Beyrout, which I had an opportunity in 1884 of studying, f At this place remains of ancient caverns exist, at present 100 feet above the sea level, but which must have been cut by the waves at the time of the Pleistocene depression, and which in the succeeding elevation were probably raised to several hundred feet higher than their present position. In the
*Bliss, in the quarterly statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for April, 1892, figures many interesting objects found in the lower or Amorite stratum of the Mound of Tell el Hesy (Dachisch). We have here a bronze battle axe and heads of javelins that may have been used against the soldiers of Joshua, and axes and pot tery of equally early date, along with multitudes of flint flakes, arrow-heads, etc., used at this early timo. Ic is to be hoped that the further exploration of this site may yield yet more interesting results,
tThey were previously described io part by Tristram and by Lartet.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. 79
stalagmite deposited by the dripping of water in these caves are imbedded multitudes of broken bones and teeth of large animals, and flint flakes used as knives by the aboriginal people.
That the occupancy of these caves is very ancient is proved by the fact that the old Egyptian conquerors, who cut a road for themselves over these precipices before the Exodus, seem to have found them in the same state as at present, while farther south ancient Syrian tombs are excavated in similar bone breccias. But there is better evidence than this. The bones and teeth in these caves belong not to the animals which have inhabited the Lebanon in historic times, but to creatures like the hairy rhi noceros and the bison, now extinct, which could not have lived in this region since the comparatively modern period in which the Mediterranean resumed its dominion over that great plain between Phoenicia and Cyprus, which we know had been submerged long before the first migrations of the Hamites into Phoenicia, even before the entrance of those comparatively rude tribes which seem to have inhabited the country before the Phceni* cian colonization.* Unfortunately no burials of these early men have yet been found, and perhaps the Lebanon caves were only their summer sojourns on hunting expeditions. They were, how ever, probably of the same stock with the races (the Cro-Magnon and Canstadt) of the so-called mammoth age in western Europe, who have left similar remains. Thus we can carry man in the Lebanon back to that absolutely prehistoric age which preceded the Noachian Deluge and the dispersion of the Noachidaa. f
If in imagination we suppose ourselves to visit the caves of the Nahr el Kelb pass, when they were inhabited by these early men, we should find them to be tall muscular people, clothed in skins, armed with flint-tipped javelins and flint hatchets, and cooking the animals caught in the chase in the mouths of their caves. They were probably examples of the ruder and less civilized mem bers of that powerful and energetic antediluvian population which had apparently perfected so many arts, and the remains of whose more advanced communities are now buried in the silt of the sea bottom. If we looked out westward on what is now the Mediter ranean, we should see a wide wooded or grassy plain as far as eye
* Some of these tribes also lived in caves, as that of Ant Elias, but the animals they consumed are those now living in the Lebanon.
t Dawson, Trans. Viet. Institute, May. 1884, also " Modern Science in Bible Lands."
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could reach, and perhaps might discern vast herds of elephant, rhinoceros and bison wandering over these plains in their annual migrations. Possibly on the far margin of the land we might see the smoke of antediluvian towns long ago deeply submerged in the sea.
The great diluvial catastrophe, which closed this period and finally introduced the present geographical conditions, is that which we know as the historical deluge, and the old peoples of the age of the mammoth and rhinoceros were antediluvians and must have perished from the earth before the earliest migration of the Beni Noah.
Putting together the results referred to in the preceding pages, we may restore the prehistoric ages of the eastern Mediter ranean under the following statements*
1. In the period immediately preceding human occupancy, the land of Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia participated in the great pleistocene depression, accompanied by a rigorous climate.
2. The next stage was one of continental elevation, in which the borders of the Mediterranean were dry land, and vast plains in this basin, and even in the western Atlantic, were open to human migration. In this age palasocosmic men took up their abode all over western Asia, Europe, and northern Africa, and probably occupied broad lands since submerged. At this period the region was inhabited by the mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, and other large animals now altogether or locally extinct.
3. This age was terminated by a great submergence, accom panied with vast destruction of animal and human life, and of com paratively short duration, corresponding to the historical deluge.
4. From this depression the more limited continents of the modern period were elevated, and man again overspread them from his primitive seats in the Euphratean region, as recorded in the tenth chapter of Genesis.
5. In this early migration the Biblical Hamites, forming one of the groups of men vaguely known as Turanian, first spread themselves over Palestine and Egypt, and founded the early Phoe nician, Canaanite, Mizraimite, and Cushite tribes and nations.
6. In early historic times Semitic peoples, Hebrews and others, from the East, and Mongoloid peoples from the North, migrated into Palestine and dominated and mixed with the primitive tribes, finally penetrating into Egypt and establishing there the dominion
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. gl
known as that of the Hyksos. The historical Moabites, Ammo nites, Ishmaelites, and Hittites were peoples of this character, having a substratum of Hamite blood with aristocracies of Semitic or Tartar origin.
In looking back over the preceding pages I find that I have dilated at some length on a few points and have merely glanced at others, perhaps equally important, while the- space at command has been insufficient to enable me to present much evidence that might have been adduced. I believe, however, that the conclu sions advanced are correct up to the present state of knowledge, and that the tendency of discovery is to confirm and extend them.
It will be observed that while archaeological evidence tends to illustrate and corroborate that wonderful collection of early historical documents contained in the Book of Genesis, and to prove their great antiquity, on the other hand these documents prove to be the most precious sources of information as to the antediluvian age, the great flood, the earliest dispersion of men, the old Nimrodic empire, the connections of Asiatic and African civilization, and other matters connected with the origins of the oldest nations, respecting which we have little other written history.
We thus learn that, relatively to Bible history, there is no pre historic age, since it carries us back beyond the deluge to the origin of man, so that we might properly restrict this term in its narrower signification to those parts of the world not covered by this primitive history. It is true that a tide of criticism hostile to the integrity of Genesis has been rising for some years ; but it seems to beat vainly against a solid rock, and the ebb has now evidently set in. The battle of historical and linguistic criticism may indeed rage for a time over the history and date of the Mo saic law, but in so far as Genesis is concerned it has been practi cally decided by scientific exploration.
Professor Sayce, one of the best authorities on these subjects, well remarks in a recent paper:* "The time has now come for confronting the conclusions of the ' higher criticism/ so far as it applies te the books of the Old Testament, with the ascertained results of modern oriental research. The amount of certain knowledge now possessed by the Egyptologist and Assyriologist would be surprising to those who are not specialists
* Expository Times, October, 1891. VOL. CLV.— NO. 428. 6
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in these branches, while the discovery of the Tel-el-Amarna tab lets (and we may add the geological and topographical facts daily accumulating) have poured a flood of light upon the ancient world which is. at once startling and revolutionary. As in the case of Greek history, so too in the case of Israelitish history, the time of critical demolition is at an end, and it is time for the archaeologist to restore the fallen edifice." Or perhaps we should rather say — the edifice has not fallen, but merely requires the removal of the learned rubbish in which it has been buried, in order to restore its pristine utility and beauty.
Since writing the preceding pages I have met with a remark able paper by Mr. Horatio Hale, in the " Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada."* It is one which should commend itself to the study of every Biblical scholar and archaeologist ; but is contained in a periodical which perhaps meets the eyes of few of them. In this paper he maintains the importance of language as a ground of anthropological classification, and then uses his wide knowledge of the languages of American aborigines, and other rude races, to show that the grammatical complexity and logical perfection of these languages implies a high intel lectual capacity in their original framers, and that where such complex and perfect languages are spoken by very rude tribes like the Australian aborigines, they originated with cultivated and intellectual peoples, — in the case of the Australian, with the civilized primitive Dravidians of India. He thus shows that languages, like alphabets, have undergone a process of degradation, so that those of modern times are less perfect exponents of thought than those which preceded them, and that primitive man in his earliest state must have been endowed with as high intellectual powers as any of his descendants.
On similar grounds he shows that it is not in the outlying barbarous races that we are to look for truly primitive man, since here we have merely degraded types, and that the primitive centres of man and language must have been in the old historic lands of Western Asia and Northern Africa. On this view the time necessary for the development of the arts of civilization and of extensive colonization would not be great. " In five centuries a single human pair planted in a fertile oasis might have given origin to a people of five hundred thousand souls, numerous
*Vol. IX., Section II., 1891.
PREHISTORIC TIMES IN EGYPT AND PALESTINE. 83
enough to have sent out emigrations to the nearest inviting lands." The same lapse of time would have sufficed to develop agricul ture, to domesticate animals, and to make some progress in archi tectural and other arts of life. He quotes the remarkable passage of Keclus* as to the agency of woman in the inventions of early art, and shows that this accords with more modern experi ence among the less civilized nations. It is obvious that all this tends to bring scientific anthropology into the closest relation with the old Biblical history, though Hale, in deference, perhaps, to modern prejudices, does not refer to this.
In the passage quoted by Hale, Reclus says : " It is to woman that mankind owes all that has made us men." Following this hint of the ingenious French writer, we may imagine the first man and woman inhabiting some fertile region, rich in fruits and other natural products, and subsisting at first on the uncultivated bounty of nature. With the birth of their first child, perhaps before, would come the need of shelter either in some dry cavern or booth of poles and leaves or bark, carpeted perhaps with moss or boughs of pine. This would be the first "home," with the woman for its housekeeper. We may imagine the man bringing to it the lamb or kid whose dam he had killed, and the woman, with motherly instinct, pitying the little orphan and training it to be a domestic pet, the first of tamed animals. She, too, would store grain, seeds and berries for domestic use, and some of these germinating would produce patches of grain, or shrubs, or fruit trees around the hut. Noticing these and protecting them, she would be the first gardener and orchardist. The woman and her children might add to the cultivated plants or domesticated quad rupeds and birds ; and the man would be induced, in the inter vals of hunting and fishing, to guard, protect and fence them.
When the boys grew up, to one of them might be assigned the care of the sheep and goats, to the other the culture of the little farm, while they might aid their father in erecting a better and more artistic habitation, the first attempt at architecture, and in introducing artificial irrigation to render their field more fertile. Is not this little romance of M. Elie Eeclus perfectly in harmony with the old familiar story in Genesis, and also with the most recent results of modern science ?
J. WILLIAM DAWSON.
*" Primitive Folk" (Contemporary Science Series), p. 68.
THE USE OF CATHEDRALS.
BY THE VERY REV. THE DEAN OF ST. PAUI/S, LONDON.
PEOPLE sometimes ask, Of what use are cathedrals ? Why expend a large sum in erecting a magnificent building, and in endowing those who are to minister in it, when the same amount of money might erect a number of churches where they are much wanted, and at the same timo make provision for the clergymen who would be placed in charge of them ? I wish to answer this question.
In doing so, it is desirable to distinguish between the advan tages which the building brings along with it and the benefits to be derived by the clerics who are placed in charge of it from the position secured by the cathedral. The cathedral itself has practi cally furthered the same grc.. end in every age of the church, only such changes being required aj the alterations in the musical and 8Bsthetic taste of the day may suggest, whilst the duties of its guardians demand much more extended and thoughtful adaptation to the wants of the time. In England cathedrals have suffered seriously in the past from its being taken for granted that the re quirements for members of the chapters are as completely crys tallized as are the demands for the services to be celebrated within the cathedral walls.
It may be well to speak first of the benefits to be derived from the building itself, and the kind of service which the existence of such a building demands. In speaking of a cathedral I wish it to be understood that I am not thinking of makeshift buildings which are sometimes called by that name, and which may have their use for a time of transition and preparation for something better, but of cathedrals such as are found in England and on the continent, which are amongst the most beautiful, if they are not the most beautiful specimens of architecture to be found upon earth.
THE USE OF CATHEDRALS. 85
It is obvious that the existence of such a building adds dignity and external importance to the religious body to which it belongs. It speaks of artistic skill, devotion, and the interests of religion and self-sacrifice ; it seems to recognize the warning contained in the message to God's first people in Haggai (I., 4.): f( Is it time for you, 0 ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste." For when private houses are magnificent and the churches are mean, it seems as though what pertained to this life was everything, and that which was to help and prepare for the next were nothing ; and though it is quite true that the Almighty dwelleth not in temples made with hands, and despiseth not the poorest and simplest structure when that is all that the wor shippers can offer, it is quite another thing when nothing is too good or costly that is intended for self, nothing too cheap or un becoming that is designed for the worship of God.
The advantage just named is not the only one derived from a stately building. We are all influenced, often involuntarily, by our surroundings. We learn to be reverent when those around us are reverent. We are assisted in lifting up our hearts to Heaven when we see others showing their sense of the value and impor tance of what appertains to the preparation for a home there, by making costly sacrifice to help them to realize it; when we are invited to join in services which exceed in beauty and devotional feeling anything that is to be found elsewhere. Moreover, it is no slight advantage for an historic church to show by outward cre dentials its connection with the past ages in which it has existed. Then a cathedral is diocesan, not parochial ; it is the seat of the bishop, and in times of excitement, when party spirit is apt to find a place even in clerical circles, it is a neutral ground where all can meet without feeling compromised, which would not be the case if those called upon to take part in an ecclesiastical gathering were as sembled in a church whose members took a prominent part on one side or the other. Moreover, the greater size of a cathedral permits much larger numbers to meet within its walls. In some of our English cathedrals important synods have been held, whilst in St. PauFs, London, the nation by its representatives has seemed to be gathered to return thanks for some memorable triumph over their enemies, as during the Wars of the Roses and the wars on the continent, when in the reigns of Queen Anne and George II. signal victories were won. Besides this there
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have been held within the same solemn walls such solemn thanks givings as when George III. recovered from the distressing malady with which he was visited, and more recently when the present Prince of Wales was restored to health after his life had been all but despaired of.
This suggests the next great benefit a cathedral ought to con fer, to which I would call attention. Its services ought to present a standard of excellence to the diocese. The musical arrange ments ought to be superior to what can be found elsewhere, and the best preachers in the diocese should be heard from its pulpit. The teaching of music, and especially of singing, has become much more popular among the English-speaking races than it used to be. Comparatively few children are allowed to grow up without some instruction in singing, and consequently there is a much greater demand for good music than there used to be. It would be a discredit to those responsible for the religious education of the people if all the good music of the country were to be found in secular assemblies, at the opera, or at concerts, and none of it were dedicated to the service of Almighty God. Parish churches, at all events in England, are seldom able to provide the most per fect musical services : these should be looked for in cathedrals, which thus come to be looked upon as centres from which there proceeds a stimulating power to elevate the musical arrangements of churches within their limits. Moreover, if from time to time the choirs of the various churches were gathered within the cathedral walls for choral festivals or other great occasions, they would be encouraged to make greater efforts for improvement and would be assisted in doing so. Then practical improvement will be found to go hand in hand with advance in the theory and science of music. Genius is encouraged to take bolder flights and to make greater efforts when there is a certainty of sympa thetic supporters ; whilst, in the absence of these, it can scarcely be expected that great musical composers will appear. It is also to be expected that the character of the popular music will be more reverent and restrained when it is nurtured by ecclesiastical assemblies than when it is under the sole control of gatherings of a different kind.
The benefits conferred by cathedrals of which I have hitherto spoken are, or ought to be, common to all ages of the church. Of course the manner in which the services are celebrated will vary
THE USE OF CATHEDRALS. 87
from time to time in accordance with the prevalent feeling of the age ; but there will be much greater and more fundamental dif ferences in the kind of work required from the officers of the cathedral. For some time these glorious buildings in England, and possibly elsewhere, were not valued as they ought to be, be cause there had been no readjustment of the duties required from those placed in charge of them. The original responsibilities of the prebendaries had been materially altered. Instead of being required to preach the gospel to a still heathen people living upon or near to their prebends, or upon the estates of the dean and chapter, they were comfortably beneficed wherever some good patron had placed them; whilst the residentiary canons had ceased to give exclusive attention to the incessant round of services in the cathedral, which at one time prevailed, and spent the larger por tion of each year on some pleasant cure which they held with their canonry. The consequence was that there was a low, crystallized view of the duties of members of cathedral bodies in England, the dignified positions they occupied being regarded by those holding them as little more than sinecures ; and those who had the bestowing of such positions not infrequently still further favored them by nominating to them men who were in capable of raising their religious tone or influence. What ought to have been done was to adapt the work of the dean and canons to the requirements of the time, which would have been done if patrons and clergy had seriously considered what was best for the church, and had thought less of their own convenience.
In all projects for reviving cathedral life, or establishing a cathedral system, it is a matter of the utmost importance to de termine in what way the deans and canons can be made most useful in elevating the religious standard of the diocese, in furthering the development of its institutions, and in keeping in vigorous life the various organizations which are at work in the different parishes. The weakness of the parochial system is that it has a tendency to foster the feeling in the heart of each incumbent that his parish is the church, that its wants are all-important, those that are outside it are of secondary moment; and whilst his energies are concentrated with self-denying force upon minister ing to whatever may tend to its spiritual or temporal improve ment, there is less care and interest than there ought to be for the other parts of the same spiritual body. No doubt this is
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partly a natural feeling arising from the interest which every learned man takes in his own work, but it is fostered to a great degree by the isolation in which the clergy often find themselves. The cathedral is to the diocese what the heart is to the body, and as the stream of life wells forth from the heart to the extremities, so from the cathedral a stream of living influence and power should flow to every parish in the diocese. The bishop, from his seat of authority, has to order and govern the diocese ; the dean and the canons from their position should be his fellow helpers by being channels of influence and friendly advisers of the parochial clergy and codperators with them.
It may be well to mention some of the methods in which they can carry out this object. ~ They can make the cathedral the seat of a