ON BEING BORN AWAY FROM HOME.
Reading, the other day, in Mr. Stigand's interesting "Life of Heine," about the young poet's discontent in Germany, about his long desire to quit that country and to live in France, and of his final hegira to Paris, it occurred to me that he might be described, not too fancifully, as having been born away from home. How many have had the same fortune, whether for good or ill. But the happier class is the contrasting one, that of persons who have never suffered from the stress of the migrating instinct; and surely it is a fortunate thing to be born in one's own place, as Lamb was born in London, to grow in the fit soil, to lose no time in striking root. Lamb was the happiest of men in this respect. A true child of the city, he held that London was a better place to be born in than any part of the country. "A garden," he writes to Wordsworth, "was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean boldness and felicity, luckily sinned himself out of it." Forgardenif we readfarmin this passage, we have, perhaps, a statement of the feeling which prompts our own country people, and more and more with successive years, to leave the country and come to the city—to crowd the towns and desert the fields. Lamb says again—and one almost trembles to see him thus defying the "poet of nature" to his face—"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life.... I do not envy you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything." But Wordsworth, the Laker, was quite as clearly born at home as Lamb, the Londoner; and, as we know, he came back to his native hills after no long wanderings, not to quit them again. It is because Lamb hardly wandered at all that he seems so truly autochthonous, so peculiarly a child of the soil. He struck deep root into the intellectual alluvium of London, and until he was fifty years old he suffered nothing from transplantation except when he changed his lodgings or paid his somewhat reluctant visits to friends in the country; and when, at fifty, he ventured away from London, it was no further than to the margin of the city of Paradise—to Enfield, Edmonton—the latter a place which he calls "a little teasing image of a town," where "the country folks do not look like country folks," and where "the very blackguards are degenerate." It was only in London that Lamb's spirit really nourished itself and grew.
And why is it in old countries that the mind seems to strike its most vigorous fibres into the soil, to draw up its most potent juices, bringing to blossom such flowers as Wordsworth's "Poems of Childhood," such pansies as Elia's thoughts? Lamb suggests country images; even though he was of the city, his essays have an outdoor freshness and tenderness. They take us into the open fields, and show us the soft counterchange of shadows and sunlight, bright spaces and pursuing swarths of shade. And where did he learn the longing homesickness of a child for the country? "How I would wake weeping," Elia says, "and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne, in Wiltshire!" Whether in country or city, surely it is in old lands that one gets the fullest home feeling, the complete benefits of soil, and atmosphere, and acquaintance with the various geniuses of the place. Would that we had been Londoners, we say, to know the ancient streets, or Parisians for the sake of the great libraries and of Notre Dame!
That, however, is but a melancholyutinam; there has been no lack of fortunate migrations among people who have been born far away from their fitting homes, and who have found their way thither in course of time. So the "rising young men" of our own colonial days returned to England to make their career; and sometimes we may trace the features of their childhood's "environment" in their developed genius. Our painters, for whom the new country was not yet a quite satisfactory place, displayed perhaps the strongest homing tendency. Copley, West, and Stuart, for instance, all American born, had to seek an older home of art. West returned in youth to England, and Copley in early manhood; there they made their careers, there they lived and died; while Stuart, after passing fifteen years in Europe, came back to settle in America. But none of these artists quite severed himself from his native country. American themes served each of them for some of his best known works: as in Stuart's famous "Washington," West's "Death of General Wolfe," and Copley's first historical picture, so called, the "Youth Rescued from a Shark."4
There, too, was Copley's son, born, like his father, in New England. In 1774 he was taken to London, where he too made his career, a distinguished one; for the Boston boy lived to become Baron Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor. But as the eminent nobleman to be, at the time of his demigration, was but two years old, it is difficult to point out any traits of distinctively American statesmanship in his career.
And that other American nobleman, Count Rumford, of whom Mr. Ellis has recently written the first good biography—his was a notable case of birth away from home. It is a little odd to think of the famous Count Rumford, Franklin's compeer in genius, and born but a few miles from Franklin's birthplace, as plain Benjamin Thompson of North Woburn, Massachusetts. His parents were plain New England people, but he was ambitious, and had a handsome person; he had, too, what his neighbors might have called "uppish" ways; for he pretended to peculiar knowledge, and was always making strange researches and experiments; in short, I fear that he was not quite enough of a democrat to suit his neighbors. There was a distinction about him that they did not like; he was too original in his character and tastes; and consequently he was a marked man in that community. His fortunes seemed well enough, I presume, when, at twenty, he quitted school-teaching to marry a rich widow, thirteen years older than himself, Sarah Rolfe of Concord, New Hampshire; appearing on the wedding day, it is noted, in a splendid scarlet suit, to the astonishment and scandal of the young man's friends. But that was in 1772, and his troubles were not far ahead. At the outbreak of the colonial quarrel he was accused of being a Tory, and charged with disloyalty to the American cause. He protested his innocence in vain. He was arrested, tried—and acquitted; for nothing could be proven against him. Indeed, there was nothing to prove; it was his character that was the real cause of offence to the good people of Concord. They were not tolerant of superiority; and there must have been an intolerable superiority in young Thompson's personal beauty, in his manners, in his passion for study and scientific experiment. In spite of his acquittal, he remainedun homme suspect; and finally the Concord mob visited his house to take their will of him; but he had fled, never to return. Had he not been forewarned, I fear there would never have been any Count Rumford. The patriots of Concord might not have put him to death, but one does not easily make noblemen of persons who have been tarred and feathered. It is better to admit a tradesman now and then, or even a dentist, to the ranks of the nobility, as it has happened to some of our countrymen more recently. Very luckily, then, young Thompson escaped the tar and feathers; at twenty-two he left family, home, and estate, and fled from the Concord mob, never to return. His property was confiscated, and in August, 1775, after having suffered imprisonment as a Tory, he decided to quit the country. One would think that he had sufficient reasons. He wrote thus to his father-in-law: "I am determined," he says, "to seek for thatpeaceandprotectionin foreign lands, and among strangers, which is deny'd me in my native country. I cannot any longer bear the insults that are daily offered me. I cannot bear to be looked upon and treated as theAchanof society." Thompson showed a true instinct for the opportunity in choosing this course. He entered the British service, and thenceforward, says Mr. Ellis, "the rustic youth became the companion of gentlemen of wealth and culture, of scientific philosophers, of the nobility, and of princes." Perhaps it gives a wrong impression to speak of him as a "rustic youth"; for besides a winning address, we are told that he had "a noble and imposing figure," and that he was a natural courtier; so that the familiar story of his rapid promotion is not surprising. Under-Secretary of State at twenty-eight, he was knighted by George III. at thirty; and eight years later, by the pleasure of the King of Bavaria, Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn, Massachusetts, was transformed into Count Rumford, having already taken rank as a European celebrity. But he did not forget his early home and friends, and it is pleasant to find him deriving his title from the name given to Concord by the early settlers—a name, by the way, that these patriots misspelled fromRomford, the village near London whence some of them came.
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the record of a singular experience—that of a bright but untrained New England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly; how she filled her father with consternation by making her best courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without inquiring the prices; how—but I see that thisnaïveyoung woman is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went away from home when she left New England.
As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's genial remark that second marriages are made to illustrate "the triumph of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other; they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers being likely to arise!
Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war, for the opportunity of distinction in affairs. Nor did he have to wait until age, or even until maturity, for verification of the saying of his contemporary, Goethe, about the final fulfilment of the desires of youth. What Hamilton desired in boyhood came to him promptly, almost as by the rubbing of the lamp. We all know the story: how at fifteen he found his way to New Jersey, whence extricating himself he went to Columbia college; and how, while he was there, the Revolutionary war broke out, making the lad drop his books at once to accept his appointment as a major of artillery; and how naturally his career flowed from that initial point. And in our own times Thackeray was another product of a British colony, having been born in Calcutta, and spending the first seven years of his childhood there. I will not venture to say that I trace much colonial influence in his writings. He may have been a true Indian at heart, but his novels are certainly those of a club-man and a Londoner; and none of his essays disclose very much of the Hindoo. Sainte-Claire Deville, again, one of the truest of Frenchmen, was born, like Hamilton, in the Antilles.
But how many have there been who never found a real home, though they sought it painfully and with tears! Byron, the predestinate wanderer, and Rousseau, who never found rest, who complained that his birth was but the beginning of his misfortunes,le premier de mes malheurs—these are types of the less fortunate class. But we need not multiply examples; it is the old story of wandering and homelessness. How often is the homing effort made in vain! One would fancy the air filled with piloting spirits that endeavor to find ways of escape for the languishing body, spirits constantly coming and going between the rock of exile and the far distant home. Sometimes the effort succeeds, as we have seen; and sometimes it fails; the spirit wastes itself in vain endeavor, passes away like the unnoticed melting of a cloud. To spirits thus aspiring, thus failing, life is indeed what old Desportes calls it, a bitter and thorny blossom,une fleur espineuse et poignante. For what is the loss of opportunity but the loss of the soul? and the conscious loss of opportunity may go on for a lifetime, a protracted martyrdom. Take the case of any intelligent exile, some wanderer in the Macerian desert, some refined person unluckily born in Patagonia, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, who no longer craves the most succulent of limpets gathered at the lowest tide: in our own comfort and satisfaction cannot we extend a little compassion to him? Not that I have the least prejudice against Patagonia; but we need some name for the better concentration of our sympathy. The intelligent but discontented Patagonian, then, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of Patagonia, whose ways are not Patagonian ways, he to whom even the most successful popular career in Patagonia would seem a humiliation, because it would associate him with the Patagonian character, and so compromise him before the extra-Patagonian world—his, I say, is not a happy case. His exile must end like other banishments for life—either in escape or in death. For while he lives he must do without spiritual light and heat, without the intellectual climate that he needs.
Do you call this a morbid state of mind in the Patagonian? Well, it may be that he should imitate the repose, the serenity of the limpet; it may be his duty to rest contented with the beach at low tide, with the estate to which he was born; and yet I say that his feeling is not devoid of a certain distinction; it may be, indeed, very blamable, but it is a feeling that is no trait of ignoble natures.
And there is, too, a sanative quality in that feeling. His critical attitude may help the exile to keep before him higher standards, whether in thought or in conduct, whether in his "Hellenizing" or his "Hebraizing" tendencies, as Mr. Arnold calls them, than he might entertain were he living comfortably at the very centre. His privations may thus be more effective than the maceration of the recluse in keeping him in sympathy with culture, with the best things of the mind; and surely that is some compensation for living in Patagonia! There is still another: there is a fortunate exemption for such exiles—fortunate we may safely call it, though it is but a negative beatitude—the exemption from envy. That is worth not a little. In Paris, in London, in Pekin, how many provocatives to envy beset even the philosopher! For in those cities he must see many undeniably superior persons about him—persons superior to himself not only in fortune, but in ability! There, in attainment of all sorts, he meets his rivals; and if he is a real philosopher, he will remember Creon's caution—"not to get the idea fixed in your head that what you say and nothing else is right."5Still, philosopher or not, he will be likely to envy some of the desirable things that he sees; and the fault is perhaps excusable: at any rate an occasional touch of the claw, aneffleurementnow and then of the passion, need not surprise us, even when we do not excuse it, in London or Pekin. But in the Patagonian civilization, however important it may be to the progress of the world, what does such a man find to envy? Surely the higher provocatives to that weakness are not abundant. Hereditary wealth, ancient family dignities, culture, scholarship, imposing genius—these do not surround him, these do not confront him with his inferiority as they do, let us say, in this country. It is we, then, who are the unhappy ones in this respect; but we can understand, at least, the weakness of brethren who may be a little shaken by the contemplation of all the desirable things in which the richer civilizations abound.
Yes, the careers which we may observe from day to day may certainly prove stumbling blocks to some of us. The thriving politician or contractor, for instance, Dives in his barouche, the blooming members of literary cliques, the fashionable clergymen and poets, chorusing gently to feminine audiences, who listen intent, perhaps even "weeping in a rapturous sense of art," as Heine tells us the women of his day wept when they heard the sweet voices of the evirates singing of passion, of
Liebes fehnen,Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss—
Liebes fehnen,Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss—
Liebes fehnen,
Von Lieb' und Liebeserguss—
how admirable are all these characters! These, indeed, are careers to move any but the steadfast mind.
And yet, even in Philistia, it is not every one that will yearn after successes like these. In Philistia, far from the promised land, the exile may yet contemplate without desire all these desirable things, envying neither them nor their possessors. He may even indulge in a saving scorn of them, a scorn of the main achievements, the popular men of the Philistine community; bathing himself in irony as a tonic against the spiritual malaria. Such a man I once knew, a man of Askelon. He lived in that rich city as a recluse, and according to any standard recognized in Askelon, he was not rich. On this text he would sometimes quote delightful old Rutebeuf:
Je ne sai par ou je coumance,Tant ai de matyère abondancePor parleir de ma povretei.
Je ne sai par ou je coumance,Tant ai de matyère abondancePor parleir de ma povretei.
Je ne sai par ou je coumance,
Tant ai de matyère abondance
Por parleir de ma povretei.
Yet this man was not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember, came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it, gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was "a Sunday's child," referring to some superstition not current in that community—and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was really there. But they were legends which would have startled the residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fashionable street in the place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and as we passed slowly before the Greek houses he pronounced, one by one, these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator, Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of our furtive men lives there—one of our men of three letters. We have as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for the palace, did not see the owner.
But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just men even in Askelon—upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon that he should do such a thing—that he, like others, should at any rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better: confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it; he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.
Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic in his notions.
But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career. Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking—Winckelmann and Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry, even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thusserus studiorum, as Horace phrases it—thus unluckily belated in his culture?
All the traits of these migrations of men of genius are interesting, and we may dwell for a moment, though at the risk of some digression, upon Winckelmann's disappointment on his arrival in the city of his desire. It was a pathetic disappointment, but one of a kind not infrequent with sensitive minds. Long detained by poverty in the north, it was not until the age of thirty-eight that he reached Italy; and when at last he arrived in Rome, the longed-for city wore a strange look for him—had an aspect for which he was not prepared. It was there that his emotion broke out as we have seen. We can understand his disappointment if we bear in mind the cruel treatment to which our fancies are commonly subjected at the hands of the fact. How swiftly, how silently, like the irrevocable sequence of images in a dissolving view, our premonitions vanish under the light of the reality! The actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we travel far to see—these dispel at once the preconception; a glance, and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor, familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them with the experience. Let me give a personal instance: I remember framing the distinctest image of the lakes of Killarney from my childhood readings in Peter Parley's veritable histories. There was the cool spring, shaded with bushes, and pouring out abundant waters; and there was the blessed Saint Patrick, standing by the rocky edge of the spring, clasping down the stout lid of an iron-bound chest upon the last of the unhappy serpents of Erin, and saying, "Be aisy, darlints!" just before casting the box into the depths of the lake. It was a pleasant scene, a clear imaginative microcosm; never was a distincter picture in my mind than that of this fancied Killarney. The real Killarney I saw many years after reading those histories of Peter Parley, yet that first vivid picture did not vanish at the sight; the fancied lake held its place against the reality; nay, even at this day, I can call up the two pictures at will, the imagined and the real, and compare the two—the scene of my early fancies with the humorous Celtic saint standing beside the spring and snapping down the lid of his box upon the tail of the last snake, on the one hand, and the broader landscape of reality, in which there were no saints, but many Patricks.
But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him, and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to make that northward journey from which he was never to return.
How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home, Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For years, lingering in his cold city of the north,verdammtes Hamburg, as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to the south:
"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there, and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate not much kinder."
While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized people—the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible fate for a Persian poet that he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"
As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with "Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in 1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where ... the mob exercises its coarse dominion!" Meanwhile, as he tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think that I was better than other people."
Heine reached Paris in his thirty-first year; and never was the city better appreciated and enjoyed than by this young wanderer during the earlier time of his residence there. Everything in it pleased him: the intellectual life, the interest in ideas, not less than the gayety and charm. But he found much pleasure in the courtesy of Parisian manners. Parisian manners were then, as even now, distinguishable from Prussian by the careful observer. "Sweet pineapple odors of politeness!" he says, "how beneficially didst thou console my sick spirit, which had swallowed down in Germany so much tobacco vapor!... Like the melodies of Rossini did the pretty phrases of apology of a Frenchman sound in my ear, who had gently pushed me in the street on the day of my arrival. I was almost frightened at such sweet politeness—I who had been accustomed to boorish German knocks in the ribs without any apology at all." If any one jostled Heine roughly in the street, and made no apology, he would say, "I knew that that man was one of my countrymen."6
But Paris is somewhat more than a city of pleasure; it is a city of opportunity. To many Americans it is a stumbling-block, to many Englishmen foolishness; but Heine was one of the true children of Paris, though wandering at first far from the centre, and he found fitting work there. They were busy as well as joyous years, those that he first spent in that bright capital. O Paris, city of opportunity, how many other of thy children are still wandering far from the centre! Some of them live upon the sierras of Patagonia, some in the stonier streets of Askelon, some inhabit caves in the deserts of Maceria. Living an anchorite's life in German villages, in Pacific colonies, on Cape Cod or Kerguelen's Land, the delicate French spirit wastes itself away. And yet some of these exiles have found their way to that centre of blithe intellectual activity.
Heine was such a one; he spent in Paris the most productive and happy period of his life, the bright interval between his cloudy morning and the shadows that were to gather around him before their time; and how he glowed in the warmth and light of the capital! And while he carried his pleasures to excess, yet he did not go pleasuring like the vulgar. In a valid sense his very extravagances had an intelligible principle in them; one might say that he dissipated himself upon ethical grounds. Yet his were the reasons of a poetic, not of an analytic thinker. The popular religion, he said, has dishonored the flesh; let us restore it to honor. To restore joyousness to modern life, something of the antique innocence to pleasure, to make it reputable as well as delightful, to readjust the conscience of a community which looked upon pleasure as essentially wrong, and yet pursued it, so thinking, at the expense of its conscience, to relieve pleasure somewhat from the ban, to augment, in a word, the permitted happiness of life—that was Heine's aim; that was what he understood by his favorite doctrine of restoring the flesh to honor—la réhabilitation de la chair.
Do you call that an easy creed, a comfortable practice? I will not deny it, but do not let us lose the distinction, the trait by which Heine's doctrine was discriminated from that of some other easy-going apostles. Heine was intellectually sincere; he had a genuine purpose; he did not go to Paris, for instance, as some of our missionaries have gone of late years to Florence and Madrid, with commissions to labor among the "nominal Christians," as they call the Catholic residents of those comfortable capitals, to convert them to the true Christianity of American Protestantism. No; Heine had too much directness, too much intellectual verity for a situation of that sort: his mistakes were honest mistakes, and he paid an honest penalty for them.
And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be much bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching. But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all, and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent toward accurate knowledge, toward dispassionate observation and thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon the homestead of every poet, thefons Baudusiæ splendidior vitro. In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as the greatest poets have done—in meditation, in discipline, in dispassionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact being in any state of society yet established inexorably the reverse—namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had on demand.
But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the asking, and thepropagandaalready existed. "There was a little society of devotees, if I may call them so—Michel Chevalier, Olinde, Enfantin, and others—who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with assiduity to the pleasing cultus—with all the more assiduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that he had been content with a less many-sided experience of pleasure! For he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says:L'hameçon est évident, et néanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra toujours. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments, rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this man's life—of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul; and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of coarse experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with the cup that he pours out.
And his life was spent as wine is poured upon the ground. Heine ended where the ascetics began, in pain, privation, mortification of the flesh; and it was a mortification that had not even the consolation of being the sufferer's own choice, for it was involuntary. Better for him would it have been had he gone out to dwell in the wilderness, as St. Jerome left the Paris of his day, and retired into the desert of Chalcis. For a strange penalty was to be his—one of which the joyous apostle of pleasure could hardly have dreamed before the blow fell. A paralytic touch converted the man of pleasure into a man of pain, his bed a living tomb. No more for ever, for Heine, was there to be any reinstatement of the flesh.
This dark closing period of Heine's life has a fascination about it; it holds the attention like the background of a Rembrandt etching, with its dimly-seen forms that appear to stir in the gloom, ghostly, half-alive; such a contrast there is between his gloomy close and the bright projection of his earlier career. Shall we call his life a failure as regards himself, his personal success and happiness? Upon that point we may not pronounce too confidently. He would have chosen it had the choice been offered him with full knowledge of the alternatives; he would have preferred it to any commonplace existence. There will always be those who hold that such careers as Byron's or Heine's, such fitful careers, with their fierce tempests, their ecstatic sunshine, their "awful brevity," are preferable to any serener life, however long; and least of all may we pity Heine. With what scorn would he look down upon our pity!
Heine's life has a peculiar value for the student of modern life, in that it has what we may call an exemplary interest. For Heine made that costly sacrificial experiment of which the old examples never suffice us; the experiment which each new generation requires anew, in which nature in her wasteful way insists on consuming the finest geniuses. As Byron had attempted just before him, so Heine attempted to think and to live without reserves, to compass the round of sentiment and sensation, to touch the entire range of experience. Like Byron, he could not pass through the fire; he fell, the flame licked him up. And yet, far more truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not, indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant. They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a man."
And Heine and Byron, in giving their lives for us, did what the greatest poets and the strongest men have seldom done. Though they have always suffered, yet for us these have rather toiled than suffered. Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe—what exalted, what demiurgic creations have they bequeathed to us, what power to move, what beauty to ponder with unapproachable longing! But these creations have an awing beauty; they keep an unattainable distance and height. When we consider the lives of these greatest spirits, we find them walking apart in the fastnesses of the hills, pursuing arduous ways where few or none may bear them company. Their paths gain upward upon the heights; they gain so far and high that the tinge of that mountain remoteness falls upon them—an airy distance, a deterring shadow; and if ever their voices seem to say, "Follow us," they have not pointed out the way.
But though Byron and Heine were thus rapt up into the mountain in visions, their daily walk and life were in the world; its dust and soilure cling to them, we see them wavering and going astray. Their very wanderings bring them nearer to us, who sojourn; their desire, their aspiration, their failures make the wiser use of opportunity possible to any of us who may have been born away from home.
Titus Munson Coan.
THE HOME OF MY HEART.
Nothere in the populous town,In the playhouse or mart,Not here in the ways gray and brown,But afar on the green-swelling down,Is the home of my heart.There the hillside slopes down to a dellWhence a streamlet has start;There are woods and sweet grass on the swell,And the south winds and west know it well:'Tis the home of my heart.There's a cottage o'ershadowed by leavesGrowing fairer than art,Where under the low sloping eavesNo false hand the swallow bereaves:'Tis the home of my heart.And there as you gaze down the lea,Where the trees stand apart,Over grassland and woodland may beYou will catch the faint gleam of the seaFrom the home of my heart.And there in the rapturous spring,When the morning rays dartO'er the plain, and the morning birds sing,You may see the most beautiful thingIn the home of my heart;For there at the casement above,Where the rosebushes part,Will blush the fair face of my love:Ah, yes! it is this that will prove'Tis the home of my heart.
Nothere in the populous town,In the playhouse or mart,Not here in the ways gray and brown,But afar on the green-swelling down,Is the home of my heart.
Nothere in the populous town,
In the playhouse or mart,
Not here in the ways gray and brown,
But afar on the green-swelling down,
Is the home of my heart.
There the hillside slopes down to a dellWhence a streamlet has start;There are woods and sweet grass on the swell,And the south winds and west know it well:'Tis the home of my heart.
There the hillside slopes down to a dell
Whence a streamlet has start;
There are woods and sweet grass on the swell,
And the south winds and west know it well:
'Tis the home of my heart.
There's a cottage o'ershadowed by leavesGrowing fairer than art,Where under the low sloping eavesNo false hand the swallow bereaves:'Tis the home of my heart.
There's a cottage o'ershadowed by leaves
Growing fairer than art,
Where under the low sloping eaves
No false hand the swallow bereaves:
'Tis the home of my heart.
And there as you gaze down the lea,Where the trees stand apart,Over grassland and woodland may beYou will catch the faint gleam of the seaFrom the home of my heart.
And there as you gaze down the lea,
Where the trees stand apart,
Over grassland and woodland may be
You will catch the faint gleam of the sea
From the home of my heart.
And there in the rapturous spring,When the morning rays dartO'er the plain, and the morning birds sing,You may see the most beautiful thingIn the home of my heart;
And there in the rapturous spring,
When the morning rays dart
O'er the plain, and the morning birds sing,
You may see the most beautiful thing
In the home of my heart;
For there at the casement above,Where the rosebushes part,Will blush the fair face of my love:Ah, yes! it is this that will prove'Tis the home of my heart.
For there at the casement above,
Where the rosebushes part,
Will blush the fair face of my love:
Ah, yes! it is this that will prove
'Tis the home of my heart.
F. W Bourdillon.
THE SOUTH, HER CONDITION AND NEEDS.
Sir Robert Peel, shortly before his death, said that what he had seen and heard in public life had left upon his mind a prevailing impression of gloom and grief. What impressed the mind of the English statesman so painfully in reference to his own country must be felt correspondingly by Americans who contemplate the South; for its present condition awakens the anxious solicitude of every thoughtful patriot. A brief mention of some of the evils that afflict her may help toward the ascertainment and application of adequate remedies. Let it be premised that this discussion proceeds in no degree from disloyalty to the Government, nor from unwillingness to accept the legitimate consequences of the war.
Betwixt the North and the South there lingers much estrangement. One serious cause of irritation at the South, which seems irremediable, is the distrust with which those who sustained the Confederate States are regarded by a large number of Northern people. Our motives are habitually misrepresented, our purposes misunderstood, our actions perverted, our character maligned. On our conduct have been placed constructions which seem to spring from direst hate or malice. By representative men Southern States are spoken of as outside the Union; and "a solid South" has been the party appeal most efficacious for arousing sectional and vindictive passion. Every Southern citizen who followed his convictions, and affiliated with the 1,640,000 Democrats of the North, is suspected of disloyalty or treason. No protestations of men or parties, no avowals of governors or legislatures, are accepted as sincere unless accompanied by a support of the Republican party. Party platforms, the support of an Abolitionist like Mr. Greeley, organic laws, are regarded as deceptive because the shibboleth of disloyalty and patriotism is "Republicanism." These persistent efforts to brand us as inferiors, to make us unequals as citizens, to coerce the support of an administration and a party, are based upon our unfitness, morally or intellectually, to decide for ourselves what is best for the country's welfare and perpetuity. We are loyal, and patriotic, and honest only when we sing pæans to the Administration and its favorites. Practically the war has been prolonged, and this policy of disunion alienates, embitters, and prohibits the growth of fraternal sentiments. To prevent a complete and durable reconciliation seems the settled policy of a large party. This proscription and ostracism have helped to create a hopelessness as to the future. A nightmare paralyzes our energies.
The South, if conquered, and honestly accepting the results of the war, needed encouragement and material help instead of discriminating injuries. Her condition was deplorable. All wars are destructive of property and production. To the South the war between the States was exhausting to the utmost degree. Its destructiveness is not computable by figures. The numerical inferiority of the army made it necessary to put into the effective military force every available boy and man; and these were thus withdrawn from productive labor. Much of the labor that remained was applied, not to the production of wealth, but to such manufactures as were needful only in war. For four dreadful years, like thetriste nochedescribed by Prescott, with ports closed, and under the imperious necessity of evoking and utilizing every possible warlike agency, this cessation of wealth-producing industry, this drain upon material resources, this decimation of our best men, this waste of capital and exhaustion of the country from the Rio Grande to the Chesapeake bay, continued remorselessly. Superadd the emancipation of 4,000,000 slaves, the sudden extinction of $1,600,000,000 of property, the disorganization of the labor system, the upheaval of society, the "stupendous innovation" upon habits, modes of thought, allegiance, amounting almost to a change of civilization, and it will be easy to see that the South started upon her new career with nothing but genial climate, fertile soil, and brave hearts. Absence of capital, of concentrated wealth, made it necessary to beginde novo. Slavery and profitableness of crops had prevented diversity of pursuits. Agriculture, applied to a few products, was almost our sole occupation. Former habits had disinclined to mechanical pursuits or manual labor, and our towns, since 1865, have been crowded with young men, who have sought in clerkships, agencies, and professions the means of support. These employments, if furnishing remunerative wages, are not wealth-producing, add nothing to capital, and have aggravated the general impoverishment.
These evils have been intensified by vicious legislation and bad government. Federal legislation has been much in the interest of stock-jobbers, speculators, monopolists, so that "corners" have been fostered, and labor has paid heavy and depressing tribute to fatten greedy cormorants. The present system of banking violates the established principles of currency, and is in utter contradiction to what, for a decade, by consent of all parties and financiers, was the policy of the Government. Bad as the system is inherently by injurious legislation, its benefits are secured to a favored class, and by combination with other corporations, notably railroad companies, the business of the country is largely in the control of a few monopolists, who rule and grow rich in spite of the laws of political economy. Promissory notes, printed with pictures on fine paper, have been substituted for the money of the Constitution, and our young people are growing up with the notion that this rag currency is a legitimate measure of value and a legal solvent of debts.
So marked has been this class legislation in the interest of capital, that a Senator of the United States, Mr. Wallace of Pennsylvania, says, "From the beginning of the present Administration down to the adjournment of Congress in August, 1876, every financial statute has had but one purpose, and that purpose to increase the value of the bonded indebtedness of the Government." Statistics show how insecure is business, on what vicious principles it is transacted, and how rapidly property is concentrating in the hands of a few. In 1874 there were 5,830 failures for a total of $155,000,000, and in 1875 the failures increased to 7,740, aggregating a loss of $201,000,000. In both North and South there has been a frightful increase of indebtedness by towns and cities, counties and States—thirty-eight States owe an aggregate of $382,000,000—so that taxpayers groan in purse and spirit, and are deeply concerned to find a way of honest payment.
Taxation has been and is a potent instrument of wrong and corruption. To pay the national debt increased taxation was, of course, necessary and proper, but taxation should have been adjusted to the rights of honest creditors and the lessened pecuniary ability of taxpayers. The Federal and local taxes of the last eleven years, according to high authority, amount to not less than $7,500,000,000. Never in modern times was revenue collected in such a complicated and ruinous manner. Mr. Curtis tells us one-fourth of the revenue is lost in the collection. If the collection and expenditure of revenue be the tests for determining the wisdom of a government, then ours is not "the best the world ever saw."
Extravagant expenditure is closely connected with enormous revenues. Economy of administration is a lost art. Federal expenditure in 1860, exclusive of payment of public debt, was $1.94 per head. In 1870 it was $3.52 per head, and in 1875 $3.38. The $4,500,000,000 of Federal taxes7of the last eleven years have not been exclusively appropriated to reduction of debt and defraying necessary expenditures. Officials have been needlessly multiplied, jobs have been created, peculation is common, and millions have been squandered on contracts made with hungry partisans. Such an exhaustion of national resources is governmental robbery. In the purer days it was a political maxim that no more money was to be taken from the people than was necessary for the constitutional and economical wants of the Government. Large revenues and large expenditures are mutually recreative. Mr. Calhoun, the most sagacious and philosophical statesman of this century, said, in 1839, "I am disposed to regard it as a political maxim in free States, that an impoverished treasury, once in a generation at least, is almost indispensable to the preservation of their institutions and liberty." All experience shows that excessive revenue and large expenditures increase the patronage of the government and corrupt public and private morals. Some palliation may be found in the fact that wars are demoralizing, necessitate much assumption of power, and that our conflict was gigantic; but after all due allowances the corruptions in America must find a parallel in that period of English history when the sovereign was the pensioner of a foreign potentate. The centennial anniversary of our republic finds a record so scandalous that all honest men blush, and the Fourth of July eulogists have to make the humiliating confession of much of vice and shame in our national life, of a decline from the former high standard of political and moral purity, and of the blister of corruption in high places, upon Executive and judiciary, upon laws, and on the acts of prominent officials. (See speeches of Dr. Storrs and Hon. C. F. Adams.)
As cause and consequence of oppressive taxes, and wasteful and corrupt extravagance, I may instance the centripetal tendencies of the Federal Government. The patriot must deprecate the rapid strides toward consolidation. Our government was designed as a government of clearly-defined limitations upon power. It is now practically absolute. In its complex character, a division of powers mutually exclusive betwixt Federal and State governments, "divisibility of sovereignty," as some phrase it, was contemplated. Now the States are provinces dependent on, submissive to, the central head, just as the Colonies were looked upon, prior to our independence, as a species of feudatories for the benefit of the mother country. By popular vote, by elastic constructions or palpable violations of the Constitution, by unprecedented assumptions, our Federal system has been revolutionized. It is the height of absurdity to talk of the restrictions of a written Constitution, when a dominant majority interprets finally that instrument, and there are no remedies to protect against invasion or encroachment.8It is a mere glittering generality to boast of a constitutional republic, if a President can violate the organic law with impunity, or if Congress is restrained in its assumptions only by its own sense of justice. Much recent executive, legislative, and judicial action has tended to absorb State rights and prerogatives. Mr. Boutwell's proposition to remand a State to territorial pupilage would be but the legal enactment and the logical sequence of what has had the enthusiastic approval of a large number of citizens. Encroachments have been so numerous and violent, submission has been so tame, that governors are coolly set aside on the demand of a petty marshal, and legislatures on the bidding of Mr. Jones. Once States were supposed to have the right of eminent domain; to have exclusive control of education, of litigation among its own citizens; to determine the elective franchise; to regulate the relations of parent and child, husband and wife, guardian and ward; but that was in the purer days of the republic, when States were not mere counties, but political communities, with, a large residuum of undelegated powers. The earlier amendments to the Constitution imposed checks and limitations upon the general Government, because of the watchful jealousy on the part of the States of their sovereignty and independence. Following the tendency to centralize, to despotize, the late amendments are in the direction of consolidation, and take away from the States what was once universally regarded as theirexclusiveprerogative in reference to the elective franchise. Now, under amendments and "appropriatelegislation for carrying them into effect," thenationalGovernment can control voting, make a registration of voters, and very soon, if there be no arrest of tyranny, the ballot box will be under the guardianship of Presidential appointees. Federal election laws thus degrade States into petty municipalities and subvert liberty.
Passing from these grievances, applicable to the whole Union, I approach what is to my apprehension the most unmatchable outrage ever inflicted by a civilized people. Some acts, like the partition of Poland, stand out on the pages of history as disgraceful national crimes; but most of them shade into minor offences compared with the crime-breeding, race-endangering, liberty-imperiling savagery of conferring the right of suffrage upon the negroesen masse. In other countries liberty has been not so much a creation as a growth. In conservative England, suffrage has been slowly, temperately enlarged, always preserving restrictions so as not to commit the destinies of the kingdom to an ignorant mob. Giving the elective franchise to the suddenly emancipated negroes, placing the government of States in the hands of such a class, wholly unprepared by education or experience, if not such a repeating crime, would be a farce for the ages. Every person of the least intelligence knows that generally the voting of the negroes is a mere sham. He votes as a machine. He is the tool of the demagogue, the pawn of a political party. That men with no intelligent understanding of rights and duties, unable to read, untrained in political affairs, wholly ignorant of the commonest matters pertaining to government, superstitious, credulous, victims of impostors, paying no capitation tax, should decide upon grave questions of organic or statute law, upon the financial or foreign policy of the country, should control counties, cities, States, is an offence that will stink in the nostrils of coming centuries. What has occurred since the Presidential election is demonstration that both parties at the North regard unlimited negro suffrage as subversive of the principle of reliance upon moral worth and clear intelligence. The presence of the military in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the hurrying to and fro of partisans, the secret conclaves and cabalistic telegrams, the jealous superintendence of the counting of votes, the criminations and recriminations in reference to fraud and intimidation, are the legitimate results of the attempt to sustain a party by such extreme medicine. Our novel experiment of free government cannot endure many more such tests. Prof. Huxley, speaking to Americans during his late visit, said: "You and your descendants have to ascertain whether the great mass of people will hold together under the forms of a republic and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether centralization will get the better without the actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy." It need not take long to work out the problem if the ballot box is to be controlled by ignorance. Sometimes we are lectured to be grateful to the North for its magnanimity toward the South. Legislation does not sustain the self-eulogy. It is alleged that mercy was shown to "rebels and traitors." Passing over thepetitio principiiin the phraseology, a thousand times better it would have been to have hung President, and Cabinet, and every Congressman, and every general, than to have fastened upon us this incurable cancer, eating up the life-blood of the Union.
In the South, the administration of government in some instances has been marked by oppressive tyranny and open corruption. Incompetent and dishonest men have been appointed to positions, and with full knowledge of their wrong doings have been retained to accomplish party ends. This injustice and tyranny have demoralized somewhat our own people. Tyranny always corrupts. A lower standard of morality is first tolerated, and then becomes popular. Lax motives of honor are taking the place of chivalrous integrity. Payment of honest debts is evaded. Grinding poverty has made some unduly covetous of riches. Enormous taxation, selfish and immoral legislation, have partially undermined the foundations of private virtue. The ease and frequency with which the rewards of honest toil are filched away give insecurity to property and take away much of the stimulus to diligent toil. Some have sunk into despair, while others, with more of unsubdued energy, are willing for almost anything to turn up which gives promise or possibility of change.
The South in seeking relief need not delude herself by reliance upon anypartyto reform evils and restore prosperity. Some difficulties are independent of party action, or even political policy, and have their origin in more general causes. A portion of the commercial and financial troubles is probably due to some "wider misadjustment of labor and capital" than can be rectified by one country, and requires broad and sound statesmanship. The Republican party is held together, in part, by the "cohesive power of public plunder," or compacted into unity by distrust or hatred of the South. The Democratic party, as unsound as its antagonist on the vital questions of tariff, currency, finances, and the character of the General Government, has practised the fatal maxim that "to the victors belong the spoils," and, in special localities, has been implicated in corruption. The history of parties in England and the United States shows that any party long in power will become corrupt. To rely upon any party, or the wisdom or sense of justice of any government, for protection of property or guaranty of civil or religious liberty, is to lean upon a broken reed; for rights never enforce themselves, and are soon gone unless sustained by more potent means than the justice or honor of those in power. A President is impotent of himself, soon passes into private life, and is at best but a man.
Alike futile is the notion, sometimes finding audible expression, that an arbitrary government or a monarchy would bring relief. Our fathers, in throwing off a kingly government and setting up a constitutional republic, acted in the full light thrown on popular rights by all preceding history. They did not live in prehistoric or barbaric times, but acted with rare wisdom and patriotism. More sagacious men never planned a government, and blindly and suicidally would we act to prefer or accept a monarchy. The centuries of the past are eloquent with wisdom and plethoric with instructive examples on this subject. God has never given any exclusive rights to special families, and all historical records confirm, with the Scriptures, the folly of choosing a king. How often in such governments is public policy dependent on royal whims, on palace intrigues, on the taste or caprice of the boudoir! Monarchy has been the rule of violence; inequality and centralization are of its essence. The rebellion in England and the French revolution were the long-delayed protests of outraged peoples against ruinous taxation and hurtful tyranny and cankerous corruption. When the disgraceful crimes by men in high places were exposed last year European journals made themselves merry over the corruptions which they alleged were the legitimate outgrowths of democratic institutions. In the first place, our Government is not a democracy, and never was intended to be. Secondly, monarchies are not in a condition to cast the first stone. Italy, Spain, Austria, Russia, and France have had corruption enough to make them blush. As England is held up for our copying, and is less censurable than the others, I cite a few instances from her history. May, in "Constitutional History of England," Vol. I., p. 299 says: "Our Parliamentary history has been tainted with this disgrace of vulgar bribes for political support from the reign of Charles II. far into that of George III." For shamefulness of public life Charles II. stands without a rival. He was a pensioner of the King of France, and applied to his own privy purse large sums of money which had been appropriated by Parliament for carrying on the war. The equipoise designed to be secured in the National Legislature by the House of Commons was defeated because the House was at once dependent and corrupt. Borough nominations, places, pensions, contracts, shares in loans and lotteries, and even pecuniary bribes, secured the ascendency of Crown and Lords in the councils and government of the State. Sunderland, Secretary of State under James II., stipulated to receive 25,000 crowns from the King of France for services to be rendered. Walpole's and Pelham's administrations were notorious for the very audacity of their corruptions. In the reign of Anne Parliamentary corruption was extensive and unblushing. Sir John Trevor, the Speaker, accepted a bribe and did the dirty work of bribing other members. In the reign of George I., during his first Parliament, 271 members held offices, pensions, and sinecures; in the first of George II., 257. In 1776 Lord Chatham accused the ministers of "servility, incapacity, corruption." Macaulay says Lord North's administration was supported by vile and corrupt means, and the King, George III., was not only cognizant of Parliamentary bribery, but advised it and contributed money to it. Although there has been much improvement in the character and purity of the public men, yet as late as 1829 the pension list was above £750,000.
The principle of a representative constitutional republic is right. Much of the evil which afflicts us is the result of a departure from our original system; is an accident rather than essential, and is certainly not to be cured by a monarchical government.
In suggesting some remedies or palliatives for present ills it is not needful to startle by novelties. Truth is generally commonplace, honesty always. A return to justice and right, frugality and economy, as applicable to the body politic and to individual life, a recurrence to fundamental principles, are of prime importance.
As a people we must, if possible, preserve what remains of the Constitution and of the federative system. Sober, honest purpose can reform some abuses. Imperious necessity will compel the North to take effective steps for restoring the violated purity of the Government. If present tendencies are not arrested, liberty will be sacrificed. As the tendency of every government is to excess, a constitution is more or less perfect according as it is full of limitations of authority. The grant and the distribution of public functions should be accompanied with safeguards. Our Federal Constitution cautiously delegates to various public functionaries certain powers of government, defines and limits the powers thus delegated, and reserves to the people of the States their sovereignty over all things not delegated. Our organic law thus seeks to restrain the Government within narrow and prescribed limits, to guard weaker and dissimilar interests against inequality, to interpose efficient checks, to prevent the stronger from oppressing the weaker. Ours is a government under a written compact, andin its purity the best ever devised. The war between the States is much misunderstood. It was a gigantic conflict ofpoliticalideas, a controversy, not for or between dynasties, but on the nature and character and power of the Federal Government. Three things were settled by the war:
1. Emancipation and citizenship of the negroes.
2. The surrender of any claim of resort to secession in case of dispute as to powers of the Government, or as a remedy for violated compact.
3. The recognition of such a person as a citizen of the United States, independent of citizenship in a State.
Besides these, nothing else of a political character was settled, and the second was determined only by the stern arbitrament of war. The right of search was, however, similarly adjusted, and the treaty of peace effected at Ghent, on December 24, 1814, contains no allusion to thecasus belli. There are few, if any, who do not rejoice at the accomplishment of the first. The mode of emancipation was not such as we would have chosen; but as the problem baffled the wisdom of all the statesmen of the past, we may as well be grateful that African slavery no longer exists to perplex and confound patriots and Christians. The opinions of the framers of the Constitution were reversed on these three subjects by the war. All else remains intact, or can be putin statu quo ante bellum. The Constitution was not abolished. No vital principle of the Federal system, State interposition excepted, was destroyed. "The invasions of the Constitution have resulted from administrative abuses," says Governor Jenkins, "and not from structural changes in the government. This distinction should be kept constantly in view. In a complex government like our own let it never be conceded that a power once usurped is thenceforth a power transferred, nor that a right once suppressed is for that cause a right extinguished, nor that a Constitution a thousand times violated becomes a Constitution abolished." The war did not decide that the powers of the Federal Government were indefinite and unlimited. That is subsequent usurpation. The war did not decide that State lines were to be obliterated, State flags torn down, State governments reduced to municipalities, and the elements of civil authority fused into one conglomerate and centralized mass. Whatever may be the fate or the construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they cannot mean the concentration of all power at Washington and the complete control of the States by the general Government. Our Constitution-makers could not have contemplated political irresponsibility; that the minority should be at the mercy of the majority; and that the residuary mass of undelegated powers was to be swallowed up by the delegated. The fathers felt that no body of men could be safely entrusted with unrestrained authority, and they knew that "all restrictions on authority unsustained by an equal antagonist power must for ever prove wholly inefficient in practice." That a mere party majority can rule as they please, is hateful despotism. A majority, unhindered by any rule but their discretion, is anything but free government; for human nature cannot endure unlimited power, and bodies of men are not more discreet in their tyranny than individual tyrants. The distinction between the granting and the executing, the Constitution-making and the law-making power, is to be reaffirmed. The general Government and the States have separate and distinct objects and peculiar interests—"the States, acting separately, representing and protecting the local and peculiar interests, and acting jointly, through one general government, representing and protecting the interests of the whole; and thus perfecting, by an admirable but simple arrangement, the great principle of representation and responsibility, without which no government can be free or just."—VI. Calhoun, 66.
We need civil service reform in the United States, States, and cities, reducing the number, increasing the competency and responsibility of office-holders, and abolishing the pestiferous maxim that to the victors in a party contest belong of right the offices of the country. We need rigid economy, public and private, civic purity, honest administration. To take a citizen's money, except for the just and economical administration of affairs, is governmental robbery. Economy is not possible in Federal, or State, or municipal governments, with high taxes. Men will steal. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Handling large sums of the people's money is a temptation before which many have yielded. "Economy and accountability are virtues without which free and popular governments cannot long endure."
Closely allied is the good old homely virtue of honesty. Under the temptation of loss of property, men have sought to accumulate by any methods and get back to ante-secession pecuniary condition. Public corruption has been contagious. Men contract debts loosely and improvidently, and wipe out easily by bankrupt laws. Tweedism has fastened itself upon elections. False registration, ballot-box stuffing, the machinery and appliances for fraud, are not the exclusive practice of one section or party. "Cheating never thrives." It is as true in politics as in religion that there is no good in sin. It is essentially and always evil. Party is a great tyrant at best, and the caucus system enslaves men, and few have the courage to disobey its edicts and encounter its vengeance; but when party to the terrible enginery of a caucus, controlled by the vulgar and the vicious, adds fraud and bribery, woe be to our republic and to our civilization!
An indispensable factor to the product of the South's upbuilding is the introduction of a more healthful public opinion as a positive element in politics. It ought to be an ever-present and a permanent force in elections and the choice of candidates. Any thing like union of church and State, or the prescribing of a Christian profession as a test for office, is not to be thought of, except to resist the first hint at such a possibility; but such opposition should not prevent moral and Christian men from demanding honesty in officials, fairness and openness in party machinery, and common decency and morality in candidates. In cities, political preferment and success in nominating caucuses are largely the result of party machinery by "pot-house politicians," by grog shops and gambling saloons, and by men not conspicuous for virtue or intelligence. So foul is the atmosphere of party politics, to such dishonoring and degrading practices are applicants for office often reduced, so necessary is it to spend money corruptly and to pension theclaqueursand intriguers and wire-pullers, that the virtuous and patriotic are often disgusted, and many Christians are unwilling to peril spiritual health and life by contact with such impurities. The complications and "trimming" expediences often deter the pure and refined from political associations, and those who control American politics are quite content to dispense with the presence, except at the ballot-box, of those who ought to give tone and direction to public opinion. Moral character, sobriety, decency, chastity, are not the elements of availability in the selection of candidates. Drunkards, profligates, connivers at fraud, plotters, are apparently as acceptable for nomination and election as those whose intelligence and virtues should commend them to public approval. Macaulay has a sentiment which ought to be printed on satin and hung up in every house to be memorized by every voter: "The practice of begging for votes is absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government. The suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked, or to be given, as a personal favor. It is as much for the interests of constituents to choose well as it can be for the interest of a candidate to be chosen.... A man who surrenders his vote to caresses and supplications forgets his duty as much as if he sold it for a bank-note. I hope to see the day when an Englishman (an American) will think it as great an affront to be courted and fawned upon in his capacity of elector as in his capacity of juryman."