WOMAN.

'The homestead privilege will largely increase immigration. Now, besides the money brought here by immigrants, the Census proves that the average annual value of the labor of Massachusettsper capitawas, in 1860, $220 for each man, woman, and child, independent of the gains of commerce—very large, but not given. Assuming that of the immigrants at an average annual value of only $100 each, or less than thirty-three cents a day, it would make, in ten years, at the rate of 100,000 each year, the following aggregate:1styear100,000 = 10,000,0002d"200,000 = 20,000,0003d"300,000 = 30,000,0004th"400,000 = 40,000,0005th"500,000 = 50,000,0006th"600,000 = 60,000,0007th"700,000 = 70,000,0008th"800,000 = 80,000,0009th"900,000 = 90,000,00010th"1,000,000 = 100,000,000—————Total, $550,000,000'In this table the labor of all immigrants each year is properly added to those arriving the succeeding year, so as to make the aggregate the last year 1,000,000. This would make the value of the labor of this million of immigrants in ten years, $550,000,000, independent of the annual accumulation of capital, and the labor of the children of the immigrants (born here) after the first ten years, which, with their descendants, would go on constantly increasing.'But, by the official returns (p. 14, Census), the number of alien immigrants to the United States, from December, 1850, to December, 1860, was 2,598,216, or an annual average of 260,000.'The effect, then, of this immigration, on the basis of the last table, upon the increase of national wealth, was as follows:1styear260,000 = 26,000,0002d"520,000 = 52,000,0003d"780,000 = 78,000,0004th"1,040,000 = 104,000,0005th"1,300,000 = 130,000,0006th"1,560,000 = 156,000,0007th"1,820,000 = 182,000,0008th"2,080,000 = 208,000,0009th"2,340,000 = 234,000,00010th"2,600,000 = 260,000,000—————Total, $1,430,000,000'Thus, the value of the labor of the immigrants, from 1850 to 1860, was $1,430,000,000, making no allowance for the accumulation of capital, by annual reinvestment, nor for the naturalincrease of this population, amounting, by the Census, in ten years, to about twenty-four per cent. This addition to our wealth, by the labor of the children, in the first ten years, would be small; but in the second and each succeeding decade, when we count children, and their descendants, it would be large and constantly augmenting. But the Census shows that our wealth increases each ten years at the rate of 126.45 per cent. (Census Table 35.) Now, then, take our increase of wealth, in consequence of immigration, as before stated, and compound it at the rate of 126.45 per cent. every ten years, and the result is largely over $3,000,000,000 in 1870, and over $7,000,000,000 in 1880, independent of the effect of any immigration succeeding 1860. If these results are astonishing, we must remember that immigration here is augmented population, and that it is population and labor that create wealth. Capital, indeed, is but the accumulation of labor. Immigration, then, from 1850 to 1860, added to our national products a sum more than double our whole debt on the 1st of July last, and augmenting in a ratio much more rapid than its increase, and thus enabling us to bear the war expenses.'

1styear100,000 = 10,000,0002d"200,000 = 20,000,0003d"300,000 = 30,000,0004th"400,000 = 40,000,0005th"500,000 = 50,000,0006th"600,000 = 60,000,0007th"700,000 = 70,000,0008th"800,000 = 80,000,0009th"900,000 = 90,000,00010th"1,000,000 = 100,000,000—————Total, $550,000,000

'In this table the labor of all immigrants each year is properly added to those arriving the succeeding year, so as to make the aggregate the last year 1,000,000. This would make the value of the labor of this million of immigrants in ten years, $550,000,000, independent of the annual accumulation of capital, and the labor of the children of the immigrants (born here) after the first ten years, which, with their descendants, would go on constantly increasing.

'But, by the official returns (p. 14, Census), the number of alien immigrants to the United States, from December, 1850, to December, 1860, was 2,598,216, or an annual average of 260,000.

'The effect, then, of this immigration, on the basis of the last table, upon the increase of national wealth, was as follows:

1styear260,000 = 26,000,0002d"520,000 = 52,000,0003d"780,000 = 78,000,0004th"1,040,000 = 104,000,0005th"1,300,000 = 130,000,0006th"1,560,000 = 156,000,0007th"1,820,000 = 182,000,0008th"2,080,000 = 208,000,0009th"2,340,000 = 234,000,00010th"2,600,000 = 260,000,000—————Total, $1,430,000,000

'Thus, the value of the labor of the immigrants, from 1850 to 1860, was $1,430,000,000, making no allowance for the accumulation of capital, by annual reinvestment, nor for the naturalincrease of this population, amounting, by the Census, in ten years, to about twenty-four per cent. This addition to our wealth, by the labor of the children, in the first ten years, would be small; but in the second and each succeeding decade, when we count children, and their descendants, it would be large and constantly augmenting. But the Census shows that our wealth increases each ten years at the rate of 126.45 per cent. (Census Table 35.) Now, then, take our increase of wealth, in consequence of immigration, as before stated, and compound it at the rate of 126.45 per cent. every ten years, and the result is largely over $3,000,000,000 in 1870, and over $7,000,000,000 in 1880, independent of the effect of any immigration succeeding 1860. If these results are astonishing, we must remember that immigration here is augmented population, and that it is population and labor that create wealth. Capital, indeed, is but the accumulation of labor. Immigration, then, from 1850 to 1860, added to our national products a sum more than double our whole debt on the 1st of July last, and augmenting in a ratio much more rapid than its increase, and thus enabling us to bear the war expenses.'

As the homestead privilege must largely increase immigration, and add especially to the cultivation of our soil, it will contribute vastly to increase our population, wealth, and power, and augment our revenues from duties and taxes.

As this domain is extended over fifteen States and all the Territories, the completion of these enlarged canals, embracing so large a portion of them, would be most advantageous to all, and the inducement to immigration would greatly increase, and immigration must soon flow in from Europe in an augmented volume. Indeed, when these facts are generally known in Europe, the desire of small renters, and of the working classes, to own a farm, and cultivate their own lands here, must bring thousands to our shores, even during the war. But it will be mainly when the rebellion shall have been crushed, the power of the Government vindicated, its authority fully reëstablished, and slavery extinguished, so as to make labor honorable everywhere throughout our country, and freedom universal, that this immigration will surge upon our shores. When we shall have maintained the Union unbroken against foreign and domestic enemies, and proved that a republic is as powerful in war as it is benign in peace, and especially that thepeoplewill rush to the ranks to crush even the most gigantic rebellion, and that they will not only bear arms, but taxes, for such a purpose, the prophets of evil, who have so often proclaimed our Government anorganised anarchy, will lose their power to delude the people of Europe. And when that people learn the truth, and the vast privileges offered them by the Homestead Bill, there will be an exodus from Europe to our country, unprecedented since the discovery of America. The wounds inflicted by the war will then soon be healed, and European immigrants, cultivating here their own farms, and truly loyal to this free and paternal Government, from which they will have received this precious gift of a farm for each, will take the place of the rebels, who shall have fled the country. We have seen that the total cost of our railroads and canals, up to this date, was $1,335,285,569, and I have estimated the probable cost of these enlarged works as not exceeding one tenth of this sum, or $133,528,556. Let us now examine that question. We have seen that our 4,650 miles of canals cost $132,000,000, being $28,387 per mile, or less, by $8,395 per mile, than our railroads. It will be recollected that a large number of miles of these canals have already the requisite depth of seven feet, and width of seventy, and need only an enlargement of their locks. It appears, however, by the returns, that the Erie canal, the Grand Junction, Champlain canal, and the Black River, Chemung, Chenango, and Oswego, in all 528 miles, are all seven feet deep, and seventy feet wide, and cost $83,494 per mile, while theaverage cost ofallour canals, varying from forty to seventy-five feet in width, and from four to ten in depth, was $28,387 per mile. Assuming $28,000 per mile as the average cost of the canals requiring enlargement, and $83,000 that of those per mile having already the requisite dimensions, the difference would be $55,000 per mile, as the average cost of those needing increased dimensions.

The estimated cost, then, would stand as follows:

598 miles New York canals, enlargement of locks$5,980,000Enlarging dimensions, etc., of 1,696 miles, at $55,000 per mile93,280,000—————Total,$99,260,000

The conjectural estimate heretofore made by me was $133,528,556, or one tenth the cost of our existing railroads and canals, and exceeding, by $1,528,556, the cost of all our present 4,650 miles of canal. Deduct this from the above $133,528,556, leaves $34,268,556, to be applied to improving the St. Clair flats, the Mississippi river, deepening its mouth, and for the ship canal round the Falls of Niagara.

No estimate is now presented of the cost of the canal from Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, because that requires the coöperation of Canada.

The railroads of our country would increase their business, with our augmented wealth and population, especially in the transportation of passengers and merchandise. They would also obtain iron cheaper for rails, boilers, and engines, timber for cars, breadstuffs and provisions for supplies, and coal or wood for their locomotives.

Great, however, as would be the effect of these works in augmenting our commerce, wealth, and population, their results in consolidating and perpetuating our Union would be still more important. When the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, and all their tributaries, arterializing the great valley, shall be united by the proposed routes with the lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Chesapeake, and Albemarle, what sacrilegious hand could be raised against such a Union? We should have no more rebellions. We should hear no more of North, South, East, and West, for all would be linked together by a unity of commerce and interests. Our Union would become a social, moral, geographical, political, and commercial necessity, and no State would risk by secession the benefit of participating in its commerce. We should be a homogeneous people, and slavery would disappear before the march of civilization, and of free schools, free labor, free soil, free lakes, rivers, and canals. It is the absence of such a system (aided by slavery),drawing the West and Southwest, by a supposed superior attraction, to the Gulf, that has led the Southwest into this rebellion. But with slavery extinguished, with freedom strengthening labor's hand, with education elevating the soul and enlightening the understanding, and with such communications uniting all our great lakes and rivers, East and West, all crowned with nourishing towns and mighty cities, with cultured fields and smiling harvests, exchanging their own products and fabrics, and those of the world, by flying cars and rushing steamers, revolt or disunion would be impossible. Strike down every barrier that separates the business of the North and East from that of the South and West, and you render dissolution impossible. In commerce, we would be a unit, drawing to us, by the irresistible attraction of interest, intercourse, and trade, the whole valley of the lakes and St. Lawrence. Whom God had united by geography, by race, by language, commerce, and interest, political institutions could not long keep asunder. Of all foreign nations, those which would derive the greatest advantagesfrom such an union would be England and France, the two governments which a wicked pro-slavery rebellion invites to attempt our destruction. With such a commerce, and with slavery extinguished, we would have the Union, not as it was, but as our fathers intended it should be, when they founded this great and free republic. We should soon attain the highest civilization, and enjoy the greatest happiness of which our race is capable. So long as slavery existed here, and we were divided into States cherishing, and States abhorring the institution, so long as free and forced labor were thus antagonized, we could scarcely be said to have a real Union, or to exist truly as a nation. Slavery loomed up like a black mountain, dividing us. Slavery kept us always on the verge of civil war, with hostility to liberty, education, and progress, and menacing for half a century the life of the republic. The question then was not, Will any measure, or any construction of the constitution, benefit the nation? but, Will it weaken or strengthen slavery? All that was good, or great, or national, was opposed by slavery—science, literature, the improvement of rivers and harbors, homesteads for the West, defences and navies for the East. American ocean steamers were sacrificed to foreign subsidies, and all aid was refused to canals or railroads, including that to the Pacific, although essential to the national unity. Slavery was attempted to be forced on Kansas, first by violence and invasion, and then by fraud, and theforgery of a constitution. Defeated in Kansas by the voice of the people, slavery then took the question from the people, and promulgated its last platform in 1860, by which all the Territories, nearly equal in area to the States, were to be subjected foreveras Territoriesto slavery, although opposed by the overwhelming voice of their people. Slavery was nationalized, and freedom limited and circumscribed with the evident intent soon to strangle it in all the States, and spread forced labor over the continent, from the North to Cape Horn. Failing in the election, slavery then assailed the vital principle of the republic, the rule of the majority, and inaugurated the rebellion. Slavery kept perjured traitors for months in the cabinet and the two Houses of Congress, to aid in the overthrow of the Government. Then was formed a constitution avowedly based on slavery, setting it up as an idol to be worshipped, and upon whose barbaric altars is now being poured out the sacrificial blood of freemen. But it will fail, for the curse of God and man is upon it. And when the rebellion is crushed, and slavery extinguished, we shall emerge from this contest strengthened, purified, exalted. We shall march to the step and music of a redeemed humanity, and a regenerated Union. We shall feel a new inspiration, and breathe an air in which slavery and every form of oppression must perish.

Standing upon these friendly shores, in a land which abolished slavery in the twelfth century, and surrounded by a people devoted to our welfare, looking westward, along the path of empire, across the Atlantic, to my own beloved country, these are my views of her glorious destiny, when the twin hydras of slavery and rebellion are crushed forever.

If our Irish adopted citizens could only hear, as I now do, the condemnation of slavery and of this revolt, by the Irish people; if they could hear them, as I do, quote the electric words of their renowned Curran against slavery, and in favor ofuniversal emancipation; if they could listen, as they repeated the still bolder and scathing denunciations of their great orator, O'Connell, as he trampled on the dehumanizing system of chattel slavery, they would scorn the advice of the traitor leaders, who, under the false guise of Democracy, but in hostility to all its principles, would now lure them, by the syren cry of peace,into the destruction of the Union, which guards their rights, and protects their interests.

The convention now assembled at Chicago, can do much to inaugurate a new era of civilization, freedom, and progress, by aiding in giving to the nation these great interior routes of commerce and intercourse, in the centre of which your great city will hold the urn, as the long-divorced waters of the lakes and the Mississippi are again commingled, and the Union linked together by the imperishable bonds of commerce, interest, and affection.

The ever-present phenomenon of revolution bears two forms. They may be discrete or concrete, but they are two—ideas, movement,—cause, result—force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent his orders along the lines.

Revolutions go by periods. Are they possibly controlled or influenced in these years by the stellar affinities of the north pole? Is that capricious functionary leading up to Casseopeia, in this cycle, or Andromeda, that we find ourselves turning from great Hercules, fiery Bootes, and even neglecting the shining majesty of belted, sworded Orion, to consider woman? I have not consulted the astronomers. The stars of the heavens are in their places. Male and female, the groups come to us in winter and retire in summer: their faint splendors fall down upon our harvest nights, and then give way to the more august retinue of the wintry solstice. The boreal pivot, whose journal is the awful, compact blue, may, for aught I know, be hobnobbing at this moment with the most masculine of starry masculinities. But if it be, it is in little sympathy with the magnetic pole of human thought, whose fine point turns unwaveringly in these days of many revolutions to woman as the centre and leader of the grandest of them all.

A great storm overtook an ancient navigator of the Ægean. He called on his gods, he importuned them, but the waves rolled and raged the more angrily the more he prayed. 'Neptune, wilt thou not save me?' 'Go below,' was the uncourteous answer, and, as with a great blow struck by the hand of the busy deity, the vessel was suddenly suspended midway between the surface and the depths of the waters. What a peaceful spot she had reached! The astonished mariner looked around him in wonder more than gratitude. 'Good deity,' said he, taking breath, 'I prayed not to be saved thusfromthe storm, butinit. Return me to the upper world, I beseech thee, and let me do my stroke in its battle.'

Storms have swept over the ages as winds over the blue Ægean, and woman, shrinking from their blasts and the agitations that have followed them, has prayed to her gods, and been suspended between the depths of man's depravity and the heights of his achievements, around whose wintry peaks winds of ambition have roared, storms of vaulting self-love have gathered, tempests of passion have contended in angry and fierce strife. To brighten the heights they assailed each one, to clear the lofty airs embracingthem. They shine now where clouds were wont to hover; sunshine steeps the rugged declivities where mists of ages hung their impenetrable folds, paths invite where unknown, forbidding fastnesses repelled even daring feet, and thus the stormy career of conflict is vindicated in its results. The dove testifies a certain divinity in the Doing which has produced it.

But that still region where the more timid life has nestled undaring, unadventured, shrinking from the struggle and the strife above, recoiling from the seething foulness below—what have we in this dreamland inhabited by woman? And wherefore the earnest turning thitherward, in our day, of so many brave, so many earnest, so many sad, so many yearning, aspiring eyes? Wherefore the restlessness, wherefore the groans of imprisonment here, wherefore the passionate longings, the resolute, deep, inextinguishable purpose of escape? Make way, O propitious gods; I can no longer be savedfromthis struggle of life, butthroughit. This mariner must be brought to the surface, or the waters will be parted before her by the conquering power in her own soul, and she will present herself there unaided. But not in the fierce spirit of a combatant, not as a conqueror—only as one moved by divine purpose to reach andtakeher place, to touch and accomplish her work.

What are the qualities of this new soldier in the field of human struggle? Whence comes and whither goes she?

These inquiries point us to the ideas of the Woman Revolution—its Movements will be deductions from them.

Man knows neither woman nor her whence or whither. He acknowledges her a Mystery from his earliest acquaintance with her to the present day. Whatever his conquests over the hidden and the mysterious elsewhere in nature, here is a mystery that confronts him whenever he turns hither—nay, that grows by his attempts at mastering it. The permanently mysterious is only that which exceeds us, and we study this but to learn how widely its embracing horizon can spread as we advance. Thus the woman of the nineteenth century is an incomparably greater mystery to man than was her sister of the ninth. Scientific conquests do but touch the periphery of her being; they explore her nature so far as it is of common quality and powers with the nature of man and of the feminine animals, and would perhaps do more wisely if they stopped dumb before what lies beyond and above these levels. For beyond, man reads but to misread—studies but to vex and confuse himself, and—shall I say it?—learns to sneer at rather than to reverence what baffles his inquiries. Does this statement seem harsh? Is it doubted? See its truth. The only science (so called) which undertakes a study of woman does not inspire its student with an increased respect for her. As a class, medical men, above that of other men, are perhaps less chivalrous than blacksmiths. Lucky is she and lucky are they if it be not diminished instead. For, assuming man as the standard, the corporeal functions, which absolutely elevate her in the scale of development, being added to all that he possesses, and constituting her corporeal womanhood, are seen by this student only as disabilities from which he is happily exempt (as if a disability could come into any life but through the door of an ability); and her larger measure of the divine attributes, faith, hope, and love—love, as compassion and as maternity—are seen as simple weaknesses to which he is happily superior.

The greatness of man's individuality lies in his power over the external; that of woman's is interior, central, as the sun to our planets, which roll through common fields of space, breathe a common ether, share a common light and warmth, but know not that ether, that light, that warmth, whence theirs flows out to them. Central, potent, commanding, superior to laws which alternately move and still their currents—nay, being in themselves those very laws—this hidden power is never touched by them, is shared by them only in fixed measure, beyond which drafts upon it are protested as inexorably as turn the wheels of fate in producing a midge or a mastodon.

The greater includes the less, said the first Mathematician. It is no more true of the geometer's space and the philosopher's matter than of the physiologist's functional power. Apply the axiom to the functional quantity of the feminine and masculine, and it will be seen which includes which, and why man, in all the pride of his highest achievements, is obliged to confess himself defeated, when, as an investigator, he addresses himself to the solution of the problem of womanhood. Her individualizing attributes make in her life a kingdom of her own. Possessing every function and power which man possesses, either in identity or equivalent—the faculties, capacities, and functions common to both differing only comparatively in each from their degree in the other, the masculine being confessedly the lighter side of the balance, when the higher and finer attributes are in the scale—woman has above them all her own unique life, which man can learn only as a student and spectator, the depths of which all his penetration does not enable him to explore, the secrets of which his consciousness can never report. From and through the powers and attributes which centre herein, come those experiences, perceptions—those faiths, hopes, trusts, yearnings, aspirations, loves, which ray out to man that purer and divine light without which he soon stumbles and falls—that warmth without which his life becomes a wintry waste—that harmony without which he is an instrument played at will by the cunning fiend of discord and selfishness—that purity without whose sweet, cleansing current flowing over and around him he is soon mired in the sloughs of appetite, or swamped in the unclean sinks of sensualism—that steadfast holding to things above, without which he soon drops down to grovel along the earth—that unwavering faith and that utter trust in good which keeps alive and warm in the heart of humanity its noblest ideals.

Thus the Cross of the feminine life embodies the idea of the revolution in its favor: revolution, which, above all its wars, national or civil, its struggles for or against freedom, above all its discoveries in the world of matter and of force, above all its inventions, its new arts and its improved old arts, its philanthropies, its religious agitations, is destined to command for the nineteenth century the respect of the coming ages. Dion's star upon its forehead, already the dim and distant future diaphaned in its light, comes up to cheer our waiting, wandering eyes.

It is only woman who can state woman. The unknown quantity falls not within the terms of any equation to which man can reduce her. Master, teacher of all other lessons in nature, here he must be the taught. Leader of all other movements, here he must be follower. Greater must not only include, it must conduct less.

Whence?

Out of the peaceful, still waters below: no longer stay possible there. Thevis vitæoverruling thevis inertia, we take up the line of march. Fold the napkin away from your eyes, O daughter of the ages, and behold, there lies your road—a throng already pressing their way where you thought you were alone. Upward, as well by the universal as by the special law of the case. Many a tearful eye turned backward to the land we are leaving—land beloved by woman, though stained with oppression, darkened by slavery, impoverished by lack of action, dwarfed in its proportions, devious in many of its loveliest lines—some of its sweetest paths leading those who set feet ofinnocent trust in them down to hell at last; beloved despite all, because the heart of the traveller is tender and loving; cherished, because her repressed soul is timid and doubting. We have lacked light, freedom, space for action and growth, yet are there pleasant places there. All these are now before us. Dry your tears, O tender souls, suppress your sighs, stifle your groans. Let us press forward in courage and hope. Forty years, it may be, in the wilderness, but deliverance at last. The gentle cloud will be over us by day, the path of duty will shine as a fire upon us by night.

Farewell, then, Africa, land of despot and victim; farewell, Asia, land of satrap and slave; farewell, Europe, land of monarch and subject: welcome, broad, varied, exhaustless New World, spreading inviting fields before longing eyes that falter while they gaze.

Whither?

Two thoughts naturally result from this new attitude: first, to go straight to the kingdom already laid out and well beaten into paths by man; second, to be so polite when arrived there as to accept him, his life, power, work, as standards to which it were wisest that we conform ourselves with all expedient haste, and thus blot out as speedily as may be the woman world—let its existence be remembered only as an evil escaped, a humiliation left behind forever. Has not its narrowness shamed us, its poverty of action cramped and starved the capacities we begin to feel unfolding in us—has not its peace made us seem cowards while we lingered in it, and will not its imperishable purity bear transplantation, and bloom in perennial beauty on the wider fields to which we are hastening?

We touch the borders of the promised land. Weary and spirit-sore, less from the travel than the bitter experiences which prompted it, we yearn for the hospitable welcome due to a stranger, a helper arrived in due season. We are come, O potentate. Open wide the glad gates that shall receive us. Is not this the Canaan which we but ask to divide with thee?—a goodly land, and a prosperous, which it were joyful to go in and possess. But the heathen inhabitant thereof turns his back upon us, shuts his gates, closes his doors, ascends his throne, takes up his sceptre, and waving it before our astonished eyes, says: 'This is my own kingdom. I have created it from a wilderness to suit my own life, not another. It cannot be shared; nobody, not you, my mother, my wife, sister, daughter—not even you, most beloved, cherished, worshipped woman, shall divide it with me. No admittance except on business.'

What to do in such an unexpected emergency!—such behavior, with all sorts of personal and external power to back it, to say nothing of those proverbial fractions of law, nine out of ten of which instantly convert themselves into an adamantine cement, binding his to him, so that indeed it were a critical piece of practice to essay their sundering, forNature is in the union, and she is high to be overreached, deep to be undermined, strong to be defeated, compact and wary to be foiled.

Sit down, then, a beggar at the border of man's realm, craving permission to enter and share it with him? Essay to conquer an entrance? And when once within, whether by courtesy or conquest, what then? Competition with that stronger physique, that ruggeder life, that loves the wrestle with external hindrances which I love not, and am inferior for, did I love them? An equal part in that career with one who is exempt from the offices that absorb the half of my full lifetime, and require the best powers of every sort that I possess?

Surely, here, with this body and this constitution rivalling that body and that constitution, I am doomed to an inferiority more slavish and scarcely less painful than that I have left behind. For identity of career, identityof powers. Nature does nothing inductively; does not fit the parts of her scheme to each other experimentally; works at the centre, in the sublime repose of certainty, and lets facts, experiences, possibilities at the circumference take care of themselves. She has made man to dominate this kingdom which he calls his, else should I have had my share in it from the first. Wherein she has differed me from him, she has also differed my real kingdom from his. To stop him, I require as much and no more than man possesses. What is over in kind would place me in false relations with the objective; what is more in degree would imperil my subjective peace—what is less would try me by the measure another is made for, and leave me in the shadow projected by him. Nor would the standards which prevail here harmonize with my spiritual more happily than the activities with my corporeal nature. Could I work for outward success only, or chiefly, subordinating aspiration to what stifles aspiration? Would riches satisfy me? Would actual power over men, ecclesiastical, civil, or social? Could I live for ambition, and sit down unapproved of my better life to enjoy its achievements? Would the acquisition of knowledge and its employment as a means of worldly power, distinction, and advantage satisfy the inner hunger which longs for the truth, the light, the harmony of highest heavens? In short, would so much of the flesh as I could gratify, so much of the world as I could conquer, so much devil's service as I could cover up with any patched robe of decency, drawn tight, stretched to its utmost reach, satisfy me? Truly not. Not here then is Beulah, and I must journey on.

Again, whither? This time whither my own nature leads. I have learned this by experience, that leadership for me lies not without, but within myself. So much is gained, and now once more for movement. Gather up the effects—all that we have brought with us out of the past: it will find use. For woman has been woman so far as she has been anything, and the aromas of that high estate have hung and still hang about her. Bear them along. The finest effluence of her life in the first century of our era, as in this last, was love. Mary then bore the Christ; other Mary's loved him. Woman was first in his life, and last in it. When the bearded magi adored, she loved; she was the illustrator of his teachings, the repository of his hopes for their future realization. Bring all those memories, visions, yearnings, trusts, faiths—dreams of the good, never yet seen but by the inner sight of the woman-soul,—along, and let us set out for Beulah. Its blooming fields and fair mountains lie dim but sweet on the distant horizon. We will go over and possess them—a kingdom of our own. Why have we waited so long in bondage and darkness? Why submitted to the heaped-up wrongs of the ages? Patience very excellent: once admit the idea of a scheme, and some parts must necessarily arrive in the afternoon. Development presupposes the delay or withholding of things not yet developed. By the law of climax, these are not the unimportant parts. Woman's sovereignty has been long deferred, because of the preparation necessary for it. A John the Baptist must precede the Christ in the wilderness. Fiends robed and sceptred, once reigned over fiends clothed in skins and armed with broadsword and battle axe. To-day agentleman, orgentlewoman can sit secure on any throne of Christendom. While we congratulate ourselves, let us not deny that the Tamerlanes, the Alarics, the Napoleons have had their share in the intermediate work of preparation.

Not always, as it seems to us, do the swiftest and clearest methods find favor with these hard-pressed worthies, but rather such methods as they can employ; and in time, as we see, the work gets done.

Take our planet in the condition in which its first proprietor found it on his arrival, and you will see that the improvements would be a heavy item in transactions with a real-estate broker for it. Liberal governments established—Canton, Paris, London, New York built—grain fields, mills, patent offices, world's fairs, electric telegraphs, ocean steamers, iron-clads, Central Park, show a long road travelled, and much rough, terrible, fearful work done by the way—work which has developed a condition for the exercise of the fine sovereignty of woman's pure, gentle, loving, harmonious nature—road which leads by divine intention to her empire. If the hand which has opened it has been red at times, let us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the Thermopylæ—if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf, when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages—to whose harvest we are drawing nigh.

The sceptre of Supreme Use on the earth is to the hand that is sovereign for that use. In its day every other power is subordinate to that, for it is the nature of sovereignty to be unitary, whether lodged in an idea or a person. It is because of this that personal sovereignty has been indispensable to human progress. Nothing could reign over the strong, undeveloped, turbulent brute life of the early and middle ages but the tremendous will and self-love of a man great according to his time—Charlemagne, Peter of Russia, Henry of Navarre.

And shall we complain that a development is slow which began with a Soudanese, a Papuan, and gives us now a Ruskin and an Emerson—that a career is tedious which opened, if you please, on Ararat, and has trailed its waxing splendors up to the Free American States—the libraries, the art galleries, the penetrating humanities which characterize the nineteenth century? For one, I cannot. Beulah has stood adjourned from Eden till now—wisely, needfully adjourned; and woman will enter its boundaries gratefully and gracefully, as a queen waited for and desired: grateful for the gift to the One who gave it in the Great Distribution—graceful in the reception of a right from him whose ages of struggle have made smooth her road to it.

What will she be therein? What will her life be? I close my eyes to the Actual around me, and I see her in that high land whose plains spread above the mountain peaks that surround us here. I see a creature whom the poets have sung, the artists have painted and chiselled, and the common heart of mankind has longed for, prayed for, and, in its hours of high communion, has trusted and believed in with the utter faith of a child in its mother's love. I see a being whom the pure, divine Imagination, the eye of God dimmed in man, has foreseen.

I see her not a dream—not an airy form haunting the unreal walks of night, to vanish when cockcrow recalls us to the cares of household life, the fields of labor, the paths of effort. No, but an enduring, very real, very practical embodiment of the poet's ideal, with new powers and relations illustrating its harmony in and fitness for the world that is purified and sanctified by its presence. There to my eye

'Her shape arises:She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever;The gross and soiled she moves among do not make her gross and soiled;She knows the thoughts as she passes—nothing is concealed from her;She is none the less considerate or friendly therefore;She is the best beloved—it is without exception—she has no reason to fear, and she does not fear;Oaths, quarrels, hiccupped songs, proposals, smutty expressions, are idle to her as she passes;She is silent—she is possessed of herself—they do not offend her;She receive them as the laws of nature receives them—she is strong;She, too, is a law of nature—there is no law stronger than she is.'

I look beneath, the ethereal drapery of qualities in which the prophetic imagination has clothed her, and central to them all I find a new phenomenon—the latest of the ages—True womanhood. From this proceeds the veiled glory hitherto seen but by poet's eye—not far hence to be felt and known of all. For it is no longer the vision of a distant and dim land, separated from this actual present by a fathomless abyss. Out of the yawning chasm that has divided that from this there rise to-day, clear, shining, visible to open eyes, the everlasting pillars of truth, which will shortly bridge it and make broad the road thither, so that neither he who walks straight with exact step between the pales of science, nor he outside wending, heedless, with wide-wandering eyes and feet who stumbles along, shall miss it.

A being planted above man, taking root where he blooms, in the pure affections, flowering in the high airs which he dreams of but sees not, or sees only in moments of inspiration from her—a being, who, more complex on her physical side, is therefore more affluent on her spiritual—who, from the established premises of science, demands not new, but the very largest deductions to reach the borders of her life—a being whose support with the earth-life is widened and strengthened by each added organ, function, susceptibility—whose divine support is opened, established, confirmed in increased degrees over man's by each womanly inlet to the spiritual nature—I see such a being irradiating the future years and paths of my race, and my soul grows strong and glad at the sight. In her the self-love of man is replaced by love; ambition pales its ineffectual fires in the light of that pure, undying flame of aspiration which her soul feeds; patriotism, ashamed of its narrowness, unfolds shining pinions over humanity, and becomes philanthropy; pleasure retreats in her wornout, patched-up harlequin robes; and happiness, pure, clean, bright from the sweet inner chambers of the soul, takes her place.

Life acknowledges a higher fealty. With the new sovereign, new aims, new standards, new methods for the improvement of humanity.

Under the masculine dynasty we have had force, organization, investigation, discovery, experiment—methods violent, harsh, selfish, slow, confused, chaotic: a magnanimous career at intervals spanning the wide weltering strife, as a bow the stormy heavens; noble deeds, not a few, shining out of the darkness here and there; real victory crowning the crests of the rolling sea now and then, and casting where they have shone long shadows over the waters darkened with selfish contention around them. Power under this reign has been applied to the multiplication of external resources, means, opportunities for the race. It has clothed the earth with them in forms so numerous, so varied—so good, so bad, so indifferent—so noble, so mean—so rich, so poor—so high, so low, that the most active memory of the longest life fails to furnish the catalogue of them. It professes human good; it cultivates personal good, family good, community good, or, at the largest, national good. But whatever the stature it attains, its methods are through external appeals to the soul—influences from without. Its common theology steadily refused for eighteen hundred years to credit the union of the divine with the human in the soul of mankind. Its deductive intellect is blind to truth till her presence is proved by facts—as if we would hale an archangel, with the shining light of the upper world yet flowing adown him, before the police magistrate, and swear the butchers and the newsboys on thequestion of identity. Its Art is timid, thin, and self-distrusting, because the Ideal is flouted as worthy only of women, dreamers, and liberal ministers—the silver wing of imagination is rarely loosed but to be soon folded in humiliation before the reproof of the exacting senses. Its statesmanship is smart, crafty, treacherous, because it cherishes a state, a nation, rather than humanity. Its jurisprudence is a gigantic, vigilant detective, dealing with a population of suspects. Its physical methods only are uniformly clear, honorable, straight-forward though. Even these in times and places might be nobler, more open; but it fights well, labors well, cultivates well, invents well, manufactures well, because in these it is dealing chiefly between its native elements, force and matter;—but being characteristically inductive, it cannot deal liberally with human nature, lacking the ideal of it, the faith in it, the reverence for it which are the only sustaining root of such behavior toward it.

Under the new sovereignty, the methods, like the power employing them, will have their nearest relations with the interior life. They will draw helps from the outward; and here the glory of man as a creator of conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions which establish and confirm true relations between the soul and its helps. It is greatest to create the soul to be divine—with helps, or in spite of hindrances. The first is eminently the office of the masculine. The second is shared between it and the feminine, with a preponderance to the latter; and the last belongs so exclusively to woman, that the day of its doing is necessarily the day of her sovereignty.

The divine, artistic, harmonious creation of the human spirit in the divine, artistic, harmonious human body, this is the grand function of the feminine era. For this it is that woman has those special finer endowments which in all ages have distinguished her from man, and foreshown a higher life for her in some future—some Beulah, visible to eyes that could o'ershoot the bounds of the passing age. Wanting this power, preparing the day of its advent, John Baptist has toiled, sweated, groaned, fumed, devastated in his wilderness, to touch its hither border at last in this pregnant nineteenth century. Age of revolution—age of wonders!—of which the very greatest are, I think, the beginnings we already see of settlement here. As a question, that of woman is not an old one. There can be no Woman Question among any people till it is advanced enough to ask for better methods than man's. When this stage is reached, life is ripe for the advent of woman—it appeals to her to come forward. It prepares better conditions, that it may invite her—opens fields, that it may engage her powers—seeks to clothe her in a real dignity, of which she has before worn rather the semblance than itself. Society, obeying the higher view of her, enacts new laws for her enlargement, modifies or sets aside social canons which restricted and warped and suppressed her, and begins with these movements to find itself enriched by the presence of finer influences; led upward to more exalted standards, penetrated with a subtler humane sentiment than it before knew.

Yet with all these movements in her favor, woman, bone of man's bone, remains a bone of contention to him, till nature, read truly and trusted reverently, is allowed to lead him as a little child by the hand and show him woman's real kingdom. He must not look on it with a timid or a grudging eye. AChinese mandarin in California, becoming acquainted with the fact that American women could read and write and be trusted with accounts, replied, with a warning shake of the head, 'If he readee, writee, by and by he lickee all the men.' Does this apprehension possibly extend beyond the Celestial Empire? It will not be expressed, I know, but there is much unexpressed feeling which is none the less real for its silence.

'Every woman is an embodied revolution, now-a-days,' said a lank, grumbling dyspeptic, while the autumn leaves of '62 yet hung in bright profusion on the bordering forests of the Hudson. 'If you had said every woman is in these days an embodied revelation,' was the superb reply, 'you would have done both truth and my sex more even justice.' Man must not fear woman, for whatever nature designed for her is not only inevitable, but is his only means of salvation. He need not fear her, for she is the daughter of nature, so full of loyalty and filial devotion to her mother, that no wide or continued departure from her designs is possible. He will not fear her when he is religious enough to feel that each natural revolution is a step in the march upward, ordered in its season as calmly and inexorably as were the secondary rocks laid down when the primary had been prepared for receiving them, as the nebulous vapor is consolidated into a planet or sun, or the morning-glory brought forth of its sown seed. He will be comforted, too, by remembering that natural revolution does never dethrone. It only enthrones above the present ruler. Work out your kingdom. Define and fill its bounds and metes, and never will usurper's foot print its soil. No invasion of your sovereignty is possible. The magnetisms of the universe hold you there, and every other being outside—an infallible police, bent on the protection of your rights, charged to secure them to you without so much as a flaw in their finest edges. Nature knows your kingdom, and charges all yet unsettled parties to go aside. But in the coming cycles she will develop others above it.

The wheel revolves. You can only remain at the summit by its standing still. It is not your degradation, but another's glory, that is sought. Open your eyes to the scheme: look adown its vistas of grandeur, and at every step taken above you, you will sing, Hosanna! We also rise by your ascent.

Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity. ByHorace Welby. New York: James S. Gregory.

A very suggestive book, full of manifold and curious research. The author, in his preface, says: 'It has been undertaken with the view of concentrating within its focus the views and opinions of some of the leading writers of the present day, and, by placing them before the reader in a popular form and setting, adapt them for a larger class than would be likely to consult the authorities themselves whence the substance of this volume has been derived. In virtue of the Scriptural character of the subjects, the rewards will be a special blessing on those who read and understand them; the interpretations and inferences, in many instances, being the deductions of men venerated for their piety and learning in ministering the most precious of all knowledge—the inestimable comfort of the hope that is in us.'

The work which the author proposed to himself has been well done. A single glance at the index would be sufficient to assure the reader of the great variety of subjects embraced in these carefully selected extracts. Although from so many different sources, a unity of subject gives them unity of interest. The book contains a valuable array of the best thoughts, impressions, and beliefs of the most distinguished minds on the phenomena of life, death, and futurity.

The Fairy Book. The best Popular Fairy Stories selected and rendered anew. By the Author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' &c. &c. New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square. 1863.

The name of Miss Mulock is sufficient guarantee that the little ones will find abundance of entertainment, and no harmful matter in the pretty 'Fairy Book' published by Harper & Brothers. The tales are well selected and well told. Bits of quaint humor are interspersed through the narratives, increasing their interest to both old and young, and lightening the labor of the 'reader out' by many a pleasant smile. Mothers cannot fail to find this judicious collection an assistance in their labors, and an agreeable addition to the library of their young people.

Letters from Italy and Switzerland. ByFelix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Translated from the German byLady Wallace, with a Biographical Notice byJulie de Marguerittes. Published by Frederick Leypoldt, Philadelphia. 1863. For sale by F. W. Christern, 763 Broadway, New York, and A. K. Loring, 319 Washington Street, Boston.

Again are we indebted to Mr. Leypoldt for a delightful book, a truthful record of feeling from the hand of a man noted for purity of life, scholarship, and an enviable reputation in the world of music. The letters are such as we should expect from the character of Mendelssohn's compositions—pure, elegant, fanciful, flowing, serious, and dignified, but without the passionate intensity, the soul-searching pathos and energy characterizing spirits deeply acquainted with the bitterest griefs incident to humanity, griefs arising either from without or within. Rich, handsome, and happily married, he was not exposed to the many privations and trials generally pertaining to artist life; his amiable character drew round him many friends, and his wealth enabled him to bring out his works during his own lifetime, and thus make them known under the most favorable auspices. He was indeed, as Goethe said of him, 'born on a lucky day.' The translation is beautifully executed, and we hope the tasteful little volume may receive a substantial welcome from our reading public.

Lilian. Published by Ticknor & Fields, Boston. For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York.

This is a novel of considerable ability. The story is exciting and interesting, the scenes varied, the descriptions vivid, and thedenouement well imagined and sustained. There are no dull pages in the book. There is much to praise, but something also to regret. There is a want of calm, of continuity in the style. The sentences are short and closely cut, falling upon the ear more like the broken rattling of hailstones than the full flowing music of a strong deep river. Such a style, introduced at proper intervals and in appropriate positions, is frequently very effective; but, when long continued, it grows wearisome and monotonous. As our late writers are much given to it, they should be on their guard lest it become anationalcharacteristic.

Out-Door Papers. ByThomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York.

The articles contained in this book are: Saints and their Bodies; Physical Courage; A Letter to a Dyspeptic; The Murder of the Innocents; Barbarism and Civilization; Gymnastics; A New Counterblast; The Health of Our Girls; April Days; My Out-Door Study; Water Lilies; The Life of Birds; The Procession of the Flowers; Snow.

This work was received by us too late to give it, in our July number, that meed of attention and praise so justly its due. Fortunately it requires no words from us to introduce it to notice; some of its articles, having been already published in theAtlantic Monthly, are already known to and valued by some of the highest minds among us. The book is written by an ardent admirer but close observer of nature, and is full of tender traceries, of rainbow-hued fancies, and marked by the keen insight of a glowing and far-reaching imagination. The chapter on 'Snow' is one of the most exquisite things ever written, pure, chaste, and delicately cut as the starry crystals it so lovingly commemorates. Nor is the 'Procession of the Flowers' less admirable. In all their simple loveliness they rise from earth, and bloom before us as we read. Writers of such high finish, such delicate perceptions of beauty as T. W. Higginson, are seldom characterized by great originality—his expletives and imagery are as original as tender and beautiful. His illustrations are never morbid, but ever strong and healthful. If he be, as we have been informed he is, the Colonel Higginson now acting in the service of his country, Heaven preserve the life of the patriot, poet, and scholar—for such men are jewels in our national crown of glory!

Mr. Higginson says: 'If, in the simple process of writing, one could physically impart to his page the fragrance of this spray of azalea beside me, what a wonder it would seem!—and yet one ought to be able, by the mere use of language, to supply to every reader the total of that white, honeyed, trailing sweetness which summer insects haunt and the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect is not in language, but in men. There is no conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful as words—none so graceful, none so perfumed. It is possible to dream of combinations of syllables so delicious that all the dawning and decay of summer cannot rival their perfection, nor winter's stainless white and azure match their purity and their charm. To write them, were it possible, would be to take rank with nature; nor is there any other method, even by music, for human art to reach so high.'

To this very height of human art has Mr. Higginson, in the article from which the above is a quotation, himself attained!

In the Tropics. By a Settler in Santo Domingo. With an Introductory Notice byRichard B. Kimball, Author of 'St. Leger,' 'Undercurrents,' &c. Carleton, publisher. 1863.

A 'Settler in Santo Domingo' has given us a good book—a fresh, wholesome, and evidently truthful narrative of his every-day experience in the tropics. It is a book eminentlysui generis, reminding one of Robinson Crusoe or Dana's 'Two Years before the Mast.' There is a gentle earnestness, a mild yet positive concentration of purpose about it, that enlists our sympathies from the start. The young farmer's mind is on his work. We suspect he has capacities outside of his cornfield and yuca patch, but to this point in the record before us he gives no clue. He is a farmer, and nothing else. The bright-winged birds flit and gleam and twitter in the evergreen woods about him, but his hand is on the plough and his ear drinks in only the music of his panting team. From his window, looking eastward, he sees the advance beams of the sun flung across the savanna: he takes the hint, and hurries out to look after his young plantains. Atnight the sea keeps up its everlasting chant by the side of hispalenca, and the pure stars watch over his humble roof; yet, unconscious of both, he sleeps on the calm deep sleep appointed as the best recompense of honest toil.

The author of 'In the Tropics' is a young man born and reared on a farm in the interior of the State of New York, who was afterward condemned to what seemed to him the perpetual servitude of a clerk's life in the city. Weary and heart-sick he yearns for a better existence. Not little Nell beseeching her grandfather to leave the dark rooms and melancholy houses of her abhorrence, and go out into the open country and sleep in fields and under trees and have the sun and wind upon their faces, has a more intense loathing of the dull, artificial routine of town life than he. His escape is easily managed, and his transition to the cheerful freedom of a widely different career is so speedy and so satisfying that he is in no mood to dwell upon the monotonous past. We get an estimate of the bondage from which he has fled by the tone of pleasant surprise and buoyant gratitude with which he welcomes the commonest gifts of mother nature. He is as impressible as a schoolboy let loose for the long vacation.

There is a vein of loving trustfulness pervading his narrative that is really touching. Our young, vigorous, and hearty settler, glorying in his privilege to struggle, achieve, and conquer difficulties, is too proud to be ashamed of his dependence on Him who appointed the planets to their courses, and is not unmindful of a sparrow's fall. How fine and delicately tender is this retrospective glance at the close of his monthly record for April!

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