Chapter IV (3)

Successful parties in the United States, as in England, have generic rather than specific names. Federalist, Democratic-Republican, Whig, Democratic, and Republican; all represent popular triumphs and administrations of the government. Anti-Masonic, Liberty, American, Free Soil, Greenback, Prohibition, Labor,--these party names represent no partisan victories. In the Cabinet of the first President of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. To each of them Washington submitted the question whether Congress had power to incorporate a bank. Jefferson, believing popular liberty safe only in a strict construction of the Constitution, denied the power to create a bank because no such power is expressed, or is strictly necessary to the exercise of any power expressly granted. Hamilton, believing that a liberal construction of the Constitution was essential to the development of America, answered that Congress had the power, that the power was incidental to the national character of the government. He construed the grant of "necessary" powers in these words: "It is a common mode of expression to say that it was necessary for a government or a person to do this or that thing, when nothing more is intended or understood than that interests of the government or person require or may be promoted by the doing of this or that thing. The imagination can be at no loss for exemplifications on the use of the word in this sense. And it is the true one, in which it is to be understood as used in the Constitution." The Supreme Court, quoting these very words with approval, has adopted Hamilton's construction. With the writing of those two opinions in the Cabinet of Washington, the enduring lines of party division in America were drawn. There ought to be early recognition of the fact, that in case a new party of the people shall be formed, a party determined upon reform of existing abuses and oppressions, upon the suppression of the liquor traffic as we know it, upon the overthrow of every semblance of plutocracy, upon opening to every child of the American democracy an equality of opportunity as yet unknown, resort must be had to those broad, liberal, and constructive constitutional doctrines which the existing Democratic party steadily opposes, and which the Republican party does not sufficiently apply for the benefit of the masses. It is the duty and opportunity of the prohibitionists to make such a party. A party going to Thomas Jefferson for a baptism of Democratic feeling, and content with no sprinkling, and to the school of Hamilton for its constitutionalism, can supplant the Republicans, and only such a party can meet the case of labor. The woollen manufacturers of Massachusetts have just remonstrated against further reduction of the hours of labor unless the reduction be uniform in all the manufacturing States, and they made the significant suggestion that Congress has power to establish uniform hours of labor. Congress does have that power as a part of the power to regulate commerce. The eight-hour day can only come in this country by act of Congress, and the construction that sustains such an act sustains national regulation of the liquor traffic. The general welfare of the Union is involved in each case. American industry is a unit so far as the interests of American homes require the rule of uniformity, and the home life of America is a unit so far as it needs that protection which, in order to be complete, must come from the national authority. I venture to suggest that one thing that has hindered the cementing of the alliance between labor and prohibition, is the tendency of the prohibitionists while recognizing the importance of labor problems to insist that prohibition must come first. The labor men will never go into any party that puts it quite in that way. Is it not sufficient to claim urgency for the prohibition issue, to say that no work should take precedence of prohibition in party performance? I think the time has come when this issue can be taken up by a political party and I recommend a party that shall declare for prohibition with the same emphasis with which the Republican party declared for protection in 1884 and in 1888. I think, however, that the party that carries a bill for national control of the manufacture and traffic in liquors through Congress, to be signed by a President chosen with a knowledge of his prohibition principles, will have to have a good running mate for its prohibition issue. Yet I believe the prohibition plank in the platform of the great progressive party, lineally descending, would be the centre of attraction and of repulsion. I grant that. But the balance will be so kept that multitudes who take, at first at least, a livelier interest in some other measure which also is promoted by party ascendancy, will vote for partisan prohibition because it is the policy of the party of human progress with which they are keeping step.

I refrain from going at length into a discussion of labor issues. Shall prohibitionists come out for State Socialism, shall they pledge themselves to make that economic nationalism which is now only a prophecy and an ideal, a political fact when they came into administration? No political party should do this. But the word socialism is a word of good meaning. It means fraternity, industry upon a Christian basis. In the discussion that impends in this country, concerning the rights and the wrongs of the wage-earners, and concerning the demands for relief, constantly growing louder, of the agricultural producing classes, the question arises in the mind at the outset, whether our policy, state and national, shall be based upon the _laissez faire_ doctrine, the "let alone" principle; or upon the principle of the intervention of public opinion through the agency of government to effect the ends of justice and of aid to the weaker classes whether by regulative laws, or by the assumption by the public (through local, state, or national government, as the nature of the case may require,) of such business or industrial enterprises as are natural monopolies or can be best performed by the people collectively. I say this question arises in the mind at the outset, but after all, it is, I think, not a question requiring much argument in this day of the world; because, although there are some men more busy with their own daily duties than attentive to the world's progress who are apt, from time to time, to raise this question, appealing in favor of the "let alone" principle, it is really a question already decided. The people both in England and in America have grown quite away from _laissez faire_ doctrine, the tendency is strong and constantly increasing in the direction of increase of governmental intervention to redress the social balance. I believe it is impossible that this tendency should be arrested. I believe it would not be in the interest of humanity to arrest it. There is a vast field for individualism, and in that field it is eminently useful. There is a field also for society, for the State. The needs of the people in this country to-day are such, the thought of the masses is advancing so rapidly in the direction indicated that no political party can long hold power that does not accept the socialistic tendency and prudently experiment in that direction. There is, in point of fact, no other possible direction in which society can move, and it cannot stand still. From the necessity for some intervention in aid of the weaker classes against the operation of the laws of demand and supply, it follows that "no class legislation" is not a good cry for a labor party.

The land question should have a distinct recognition as a true reform issue, and while committal to the policy signified by the term single tax, in its entirety, should be avoided, land speculation and monopoly should be condemned as a monstrous evil, and against that evil should be directed such special taxation of land values as will check and ultimately destroy it, without too rudely disturbing existing values.

Government ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and of the anthracite coal mines, should be favored.

Gas, electric lights, and street railroads should be municipalized.

Legislation, reducing gradually and prudently the hours of labor, should be given urgency.

National aid to education, unwisely neglected by the Republicans, is strong with labor, and will be stronger the more it is discussed. Prohibitionists should advocate universal suffrage with universal education.

Educational tests for the suffrage offer too easy a repose for the conservatism of wealth, and to advocate them is to touch the wrong note, that of distrust rather than trust in the masses. Stand with Jefferson for Democracy and education, not for education first and the ballot afterwards. Go to the magnificent oration of Wendell Phillips, "The Scholar in a Republic," for the courage and wisdom to say with that friend of prohibition and labor, that "crime and ignorance have the same right to vote that virtue has.... The right to choose your governor rests on precisely the same foundation as the right to choose your religion." "Thank God for His method of taking bonds of wealth and culture to share all their blessings with the humblest soul He gives to their keeping." "Universal suffrage,--God's church, God's school, God's method of gently binding men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers." All attempts to identify prohibition or labor with free trade should be abandoned.

No large extension of our market for manufactures in Spanish America or in other foreign countries is possible, if we are to reduce hours of labor, abolish child labor, call married women from factory to home, and raise wages in America, regardless of the effect upon the cost of production. Labor reform, the socialistic tendency require a rigid adherence to the protective system. But reliance upon the home market will not only make labor legislation possible, but will be economic wisdom as well, for by education, by suppressing the saloon, by shortening hours, by increasing wages, we can indefinitely increase the capacity of our own people to consume. The McKinley tariff will work out its own salvation; for the friends of labor or prohibition to attack it is a fatal mistake. Prohibition, labor reform, and protection are natural allies, and in the party of the future will be united. Whoever wishes to form a new party for prohibition and for labor, will do well to appropriate rather than discard the historic Republican issues. Let the reformers catch the Republicans bathing and steal their clothes, albeit they already have some garments of their own which are very good. If a Democrat, for the sake of temperance or labor, or any issue, will leave the Democratic party, he has outgrown the constitutional doctrines of that party, and will not cling to its economic theories. If he brings a traditional prejudice in favor of government by the masses rather than by classes, he brings what is needed. When the period of political readjustment, not yet surely begun, is over, the Republican party will have been supplanted by a party inheriting many distinguishing articles of its creed; but the Democratic party will remain as the party of obstruction, claiming descent from Jefferson but not the true representative of the eternal truths with which his name is associated. Around the anti-national idea the ultra-conservatives, the cormorants of society, the panderers to vice, the white-liners of the South will rally. The true Democrats, with a unanimity hitherto unknown, will appreciate the utility of the national idea and will demonstrate that our Constitution was indeed intended "to live and take effect in all successions of ages." The popular party, at once conservative and radical, will demonstrate by its habitual self-restraint, by its scrupulous regard for justice, by the honorable methods which it shall observe and exact, by its prudence in legislation, that the Democracy in the plentitude of its powers, is most truly conservative of all that vast store of good which the past hands down.

SUNDAY AT THE WORLD'S FAIR.

BY WM. H. ARMSTRONG.

The question of closing on Sunday the gates of the World's Fair is one that not only interests our nation but also the nations of the world.

On September 3, eighty members of the National World's Fair Commission, and one hundred members of the Board of Lady Managers, listened to the arguments of representatives of the American Sabbath Union for closing the World's Fair Sundays. The arguments for Sunday closing were presented by Col. Elliott F. Shepard, President of the American Sabbath Union; Rev. Dr. S. F. Scoville, President of Wooster University, Ohio; Rev. T. A. Fenley, Secretary of the Philadelphia Sabbath Association; Gen. O. O. Howard; Col. Alex. F. Bacon; Hon. L. S. Coffin; Rev. F. L. Patton, President of Princeton University; Dr. P. S. Henson of Chicago; and Mrs. T. B. Carse, as the representative of the W. C. T. U.

On reading the addresses and petitions presented by the above named persons, I was surprised to see the diversity of names given to the first day of the week. Some called it "the Sabbath day," others "Sunday," while another class termed it "the _American_ Sabbath"--_none of them having Bible authority for the names given_. This inadvertence might be excused if these gentlemen were not poising as moulders of public thought and teachers of Bible truth, while they are endeavoring to palm off Sunday upon the National Columbian Commission as a "holy day," for which they cannot produce Bible authority.

Nowhere in the Bible can they find any command to keep Sunday as a "holy day," neither can they there find where the Jewish Sabbath was ever changed to the first day of the week--Sunday. This change was made by Constantine's edict, in 321 A.D., which was the first law either ecclesiastical or civil by which the sabbatical observance of Sunday was known to have been ordained. Does anyone claim that Constantine was inspired? The sabbatical observance of Sunday, as prescribed by Constantine, or of "the American Sabbath," as prescribed by statutory law, is yielding obedience to the commandments of man and not of God, and all their advocates are confronted with the Scripture: "But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." Matt. xv. 9.

As Dr. Francis L. Patton, of Princeton University, was the only speaker who attempted to speak on the Biblical aspect of the Sunday question, I shall direct my remarks to him. The doctor is quoted as saying: "The Ten Commandments represent the high water mark of morality. The Jew had contributed the greatest feature of the civilization of the nineteenth century. The Sabbath had become the inheritance of every civilized nation. God had issued His command as to the observance of the Sabbath, and that command was imperative." These words would be more appropriate coming from a Pharisee, but when spoken by a Gentile claiming to be a minister of the New Testament, 2 Cor. iii. 6, they come with bad grace, and are not in harmony with the Scriptures.

The Ten Commandments made on Sinai were delivered to the Jews alone and never were intended for the Gentiles, for Paul said: "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves." Rom. ii. 14. An appeal to the law itself shows that it was always and only addressed to the house of Israel, "to you and your children, to your man servants, and maid servants, and to thy stranger that is within thy gates." It cannot be proven that God ever commanded a Gentile to keep the Sabbath. "The Ten Commandments," says Luther, "do not apply to us Gentiles and Christians, but only to the Jews." "A law," says Grotius, "obliges only those to whom it is given, and to whom the Mosaic law is given, itself declares: 'hear, O Israel.'"

When the Gentiles first began to accept Jesus Christ, we read in Acts xv. that the Apostles, elders, and brethren at Jerusalem wrote them letters as follows: "Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, Ye must be circumcised, and keep the law; to whom we gave no such commandment.... For it seemeth good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if you keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well." Here is freedom for the Gentiles from the Ten Commandments and especially the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, the most valued of the ten.

Romans ii. 14 plainly shows "the Gentiles had not the law," and this constituted a mark of distinction between Jew and Gentile. But had the law been also given to the Gentiles, the Jewish nation would not have been fenced off from the rest of the world by it. The very fact that they were a separate people under the law proves that their code was not a universal law. Paul said: "For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law." Gal. v. 3. This is clear, only the circumcised Jew and proselyte was under the law.

In favor of the Mosaic law, many advocates say that all municipal governments are based upon it; but this only proves that it is not of the Kingdom of Christ, because his kingdom is not of this world. Christ's law is the "ministration of Spirit" "the law of the spirit of life written in the heart." The Sinai law was the "ministration of death" written on stone. Moses' law only gave the knowledge of sin, Christ's law gives a far more exquisite knowledge of sin, and contains the remedy for its removal.

We find, in Matt, xxviii. 18-20, and Mark xvi. 15-20, the final universal commission of Christ, his imperative orders to all teachers and preachers in the Kingdom of God. Everything else is excluded but Christ's Gospel, and _his commands_. They stand out against every form of sin, and they only are to be preached to sinners as a means of conviction and salvation, and to believers as their present rule of life; and to show that he is not subjected to, nor in need of any former code, he announces the fact that "All power is given me in heaven and earth." Here Christ sets up his supreme authority, removes all temporary systems, and demands subjection to _his own gospel and commandments_.

It would have been more appropriate for the members of the American Sabbath Union, in their petitions to the National Columbian Commission, to subscribe themselves "many Israelites," for they preach the law of commandments more than the Spirit of the Lord, which is life and liberty. Paul describes them, viz.: "But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament: which vail is done away in Christ. But even unto this day when Moses is read, the vail is upon their hearts. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away." 2 Cor. iii. 14-16.

Doctor Patton is credited with saying: "If the nation and fair should yield obedience to the fourth commandment they would be in a fair way to the other nine." I wish, while the doctor was speaking, that the Apostle Paul could have stepped in and delivered several of his old sermons such as he delivered to the Galatians who, as Christians, were trying to keep the law of Moses. I select a few of his observations, viz.: "Man is not justified by the works of the law. For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for the just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith; but after faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But if ye be led of the Spirit ye are not under the law." Gal. ii. 16; iii. 10, 11, 12, 24, 25; v. 4, 14, 18.

Paul also tells those "foolish Galatians": "But now, after ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? _Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years._ I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain." Gal. iv. 9-11. I can see how Paul would be also afraid of these Sunday agitators, as they spend much of their time in the observance-worship of days, months, times, and years.

Under the old covenant God's laws were written on tables of stone, while under the new covenant we receive the promise, viz.: "This is the covenant I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them." Heb. x. 16.

All who consider "remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy" applies to them, should keep the day in the exact manner prescribed for the Israelites. There are seventy-seven positive commands from God to the children of Israel regarding the keeping of the Sabbath day holy to Him. Now, I ask what Bible authority has Doctor Patton, or any of the Sabbath day advocates for ignoring or abridging any of these seventy-seven commands? To obey _the law_, no wood or water must be borne; no fire built; no victuals cooked; no domestic animals must be worked, even to drive to the house of worship. To do any of these were a violation of the fourth commandment. Is there a member of the American Sabbath Union who keeps the law for which they are clamoring? These agitators rush to Chicago, with petitions signed by hundreds of thousands, and say: "If the fair is opened Sunday it will force tens of thousands of employees to work Sunday," while their petitioners are forcing hundreds of thousands of their employees to do even extra work in getting up their best dinners for the clergy and visiting brethren on Sunday; this they do though the fourth commandment says: "Thou shalt have no work done," "that thy man servant and thy maid servant-may rest as well as thou." Deut. v. 12-14.

No one can deny the necessity and benefit of man resting one day in seven; but when any set of men attempt to make our legal rest day "a holy day," and prescribe certain modes and forms of rest by demanding that the nation discard their newspapers, conveniences, and amusements--which are means of rest to the majority--because they call them sins if enjoyed on Sunday, it is in order for us to "speak out" and ask these reformers to produce their authority.

No man has the right of dictating to another how he shall rest. What is rest for one man would be an unpleasant strain upon another; to illustrate: The church people, mostly the wealthy class who are not bound with labor's chains, can do as they please, enjoy all the amusements--the ball, theatre, lecture, concert, card-party, etc.,--throughout the week, so when Sunday comes it is a rest for them to ride to church, glide up the aisles, listen to the deep, solemn sounding tones of the organ, glance around at the rich toilets, hear a pleasing short lecture, greet friends, and return home for a _nice_ dinner. The poor laboring man who has none of these things would feel out of place among all that culture, wealth, and luxury, so he must seek other diversions.

The members of the American Sabbath Union remind one of the Scribes and Pharisees, who brought unto Jesus a woman taken in adultery and said unto him: "Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou?" Jesus, totally disregarding Mosaic law, said unto them: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." So we can apply these words of Jesus to "the Sunday agitators"--as law breakers--and say unto them, he that is not breaking any of Moses' laws among you, let him first cast a stone at the managers of the World's Fair.

When Jesus came bringing the light of the new covenant, he showed how unimportant was this question, for we cannot find in the New Testament where he ever recommended anyone to keep the Sabbath day holy. On the contrary, he and his disciples were accused of breaking the Sabbath by the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees.

"The poor we have always with us," and to alleviate as much as possible the misery of the less fortunate is one of the noblest missions of life. From dark, dust-begrimed habitations of a hot city comes a cry whose burden is "Fresh Air." So throw wide open the gates of the World's Fair on Sundays, that the wage worker may find rest and enjoyment; for the rich can rest when they please--the poor must take recreation when they can. Sectism is blinding humanity and turning them from the old pathway to Jesus, the Son of God, who came to save man from his sins. This "one day worship" is not enough, for God claims our services each and every day, as every day is given us by Him. God certainly must be jealous of nations to-day serving Satan six days in the week and then worshipping Sunday (Constantine's law) or Saturday (Moses' law) instead of Him. For their Sunday worship is mostly vain show and pomp, fashioned as a crowd bedecked for a theatrical performance, all of which is forbidden in the Bible (1 Tim. ii. 9-11), which they profess to follow.

TURNING TOWARDS NIRVANA.

BY E. A. ROSS.

It needs no very long stay in Europe to detect a strange drooping of spirit. The rank corn and cotton optimism of the West quickly feels the deep sadness that lurks behind French balls, Prussian parades, and Italian festivals. Europe, when once you pry beneath its surface and find what its people are thinking and feeling, seems cankered and honeycombed with pessimism. You need go but a little way beyond the table d'hote and the guide book to feel the chill of despondency. Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought, politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by which the age records its feelings of disillusionment.

The broad basis of the sadness of Europe to-day is keen political disappointment. Forty years ago everybody hailed the policy of free trade, peace, and international exhibitions as ushering in the era

"When the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of mankind, the Federation of the World."

As if in mockery of these hopes came that terrific relapse of civilization between 1855 and 1870. Then came a pause, and hope might have revived had not the war epoch left behind it a strange and appalling condition.

No one so unfortunate as to live between the Bosphorus and the English Channel can view without dread the course Continental Europe has taken since 1870. The armies have increased until France and Germany alone have over six millions of soldiers. The Great Powers have now three armed men for every two of ten years ago. "Our armaments," says Premier Crispi, "are ruining Europe for the benefit of America." In a paper picked up in a Venetian cafe I read these lines:--

"Throughout Europe we now hear of nothing but smokeless powder
and small bore rifles, heavy ironclads and swift cruisers,
torpedo boats and dynamite guns. Europe seems hastening on to
that time foretold by General Grant when, worn out by a fatal and
ruinous policy, she will bow to the supremacy of peace-loving
America, and learn anew from her the lessons of true
civilization."

Can we wonder that the European despairs? He finds himself aboard a train that seems speeding to sure destruction. Neither pope, nor churches, nor peace societies, nor alliances nor votes, can check its course. Nothing, it seems, can save Europe from the fatal plunge into the abyss of war. A shot on the Alsatian frontier, a plot hatched in a Servian barrack-room, or a riot in the Armenian quarter of Constantinople, may kindle a strife that may last, Von Moltke tells us, for thirty years.

It is true that many alarms have proved false, but then it is the steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the continent, how men fear to face the future. Public speakers dwell upon the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history, archaeology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the past, and delights in _genre_ pictures of the naive olden time, or of life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has heart to probe the next decade, to ask, "Where shall we be in ten years,--in fifty years?" The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the pleasures of the moment with the desperation of doomed men who hear the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old sailor's superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one night he stood on the deck and looked down on the throng of passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or dark presentiment, and as he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying, "There's a corpse on board!"

With the growth of armies has come a gloomier view of life. The vision of the nations "lapped in universal law" has vanished, and the new phrase, "struggle for existence," seems to sum up human history. War has been raised to the dignity of a means of progress and killing has been consecrated by biology. Not long ago three noted men, Count Von Moltke, General Wolseley, and Ex-Minister Phelps, declared it vain to hope for a time when wars should vanish from the earth. In Germany the youth are filled with the brutal cynicism of Prince Bismarck. "Blood and iron does it," said a Berlin divinity student to me. "You can no more stop war than you can stop the thunderbolt when two clouds meet charged with opposite electricities." "No," said another, "Europe has too many people, too much pressure on the boundaries. There must be a war now and then to thin them out."

With loss of faith in moral progress men have lost faith in political progress. The ideals of '48 are _passe_. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles. The imperialism of Bismarck, the foe of popular government and champion of divine right, rules the hour. To the fighting type of society the politics of industrial democracy seem absurd. You cannot set up the hustings in an armed camp of twenty-eight millions. Kings and nobles, rank and privilege, police, spies, and censors--all those hoary abuses that roused the men of '48,--are deemed necessary to a strong military state. They are hallowed by the new phrase of political fatalism "historical continuity."

This drift of thought cannot but lead to a despairing view. Civilization seems to have lost itself in a _cul-de-sac_. Progress has ended in an aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry, intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not really fighting against destiny. Often in his _Culturkampf_ with Ultramontanism has he proved the truth of Gambetta's saying, "_Le clericalism, voila l'ennemi!_"

Science, too, has had its share in disturbing men's minds. Science, during the last twenty years, has been most successful in studying the past. It has traced the origin of institutions and followed the upward path of man. It has lifted the veil of mystery. It says, "See, I can show you how our feelings arose. I will lay bare the root of modesty, of filial piety, sexual love, patriotism, loyalty, justice, honor, aesthetic delight, conscience, religion, fear of God. I will explain the origin of institutions like the household, the church, the state. I will show the rise of prayer, worship, sacrifice, marriage-customs, ceremonies social forms, and laws. Nothing is found mysterious, nothing unique, nothing divine. There is no need of looking for a stream of tendency, an influx from another source, the descent of a new power. The notion of a soul from a spiritual world encysted in customs and feelings developed upon it by nature, is a myth. Man is a formation. The race has accommodated itself to its environment as a stream to its bed. The manifold adaptation of Nature to man is really the adaptation of man to Nature. To marvel at it is as if the cake should marvel at the fit of the dough-pan. Everything in man is the outcome of forces and conditions still present with us. Man and his civilization are held suspended in protoplasm and sunlight. Let but a plague sweep us away to-day, and to-morrow would begin the second evolution of man."

But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities, predispositions, and transmitted taints, atavisms, and reversions. It finds the soul not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits. We are "possessed" not by demons but by the dead. These are in Ibsen's drama the real ghosts which throng our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are followed by the shades of our ancestors who visit us, not with midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with our speech, and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is indeed a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science grinds color for our modern Rembrandts.

The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free. This _I_ is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of consciousness.

It is plain, then, that the swift spread of science has brought men into a new universe. Few there are that can adorn the new home with ornaments saved from the old. For most men the universe which science tells of rises about them unsightly and barn-like, with bare walls and naked rafters, and until art can beautify the walls, and poetry gild the rafters, men will have that appalling feeling of being nowhere at home, that awful sinking as if the bottom were dropping out of all things.

The last great motive to despair is supplied by Indo-German philosophy. Under the headship of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, there has grown up of late a black pessimism rooted in Hindoo thought, and allied to that strange exotic cult of Eastern religions that has enabled Neo-Buddhism to proselyte even in Christian Europe. Its success has been brilliant. In twenty years Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" has reached its tenth German edition, entered all the great languages of Europe, and called forth a vast literature of its own. Thoroughly in touch with modern culture and gifted with a striking style, Hartmann is to-day, perhaps, the best read philosopher on the continent.

Hartmann dwells upon the sorrow inherent in all existence. Happiness, whether expected in one's own life, in an ecstatic life beyond the grave, or in the far future of humanity, is an illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake--a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious. From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit of life--all these exist to bring forth the pessimist. He alone has gained true culture, and reached a rational insight into the emptiness of existence. He alone has rent the veil of Maya and pierced the last illusion. His task is to waken humanity, now tossing on its bed of pain, from the spell of the great alluring world-dream. By showing the vanity of endeavor he is to still the fatal lust for life and bring all men to despair and longing for Nirvana. Thus does he become the true savior of mankind; for at this point the world, obeying the desperate resolve of the human race, will vanish utterly,

"And like the baseless fabric of a dream
Leave not a rack behind."

The pessimistic temper of the age reveals itself in every field where mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly underbidding each other in the attempt to show that life is sadder, or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are insincere. The authors and thinkers themselves have been the first to feel the Zeitgeist. They have written as they have because they have found the melancholy view of life the most fruitful thing in recent culture. They have found it the richest in novelty, surprises, images, scenes, reflections, effects, and sensations. The worthlessness of life is an idea that agrees with science, meets the mood of the age, and fires the imagination of the artist.

The French, Norwegian, and Russian realism of the last decade is the utterance of later pessimism. For the term "realism" describes something more than an art. It describes an ethical view. It means the conviction of Flaubert: "You may fatten the human beast, give him straw up to his belly, and gild his manger; but he remains a brute, say what you will." The realists are filled with the scientific notions of human nature. They base romances on psychology, physiology, or pathology. They study Darwin, and Spencer, and Ribot. They look constantly for the traces of the savage cave-dweller. The great masters,--Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen, Maupassant, Flaubert, Gautier, Loti, Bourget,--as well as their swarms of disciples, are ever on the watch for marks of decadence, or for vestiges of the brute in man's instincts and passions. To the old romanticism of Victor Hugo they oppose blunt truth-telling and remorseless analysis. They spare no illusions. "Love, marriage, family," cries Tolstoi's hero, "are lies, lies, lies!"

This same ethical spirit is shared by realism in art. A painter seeking in the work-house a model for his "job," an actress visiting the hospital to learn how to simulate dying,--these show the modern appetite for the morbid. Modern music, too, does not escape the times' spirit. The sad Titanic works of Wagner, the friend and disciple of Schopenhauer, bear witness to the mystical affinity of music and despair.

Most of our great critics of life,--Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin--have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel of bafflement and despair.

The hastiest glance at recent European poetry shows the prominence of the mystery of pain. Poetry from Byron, Leopardi, and Heine, to Pushkin and Carmen Sylva, Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, has circled about the tragedy of suffering and disenchantment. Even Tennyson sadly asks in a recent poem:--

"What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own
corpse-coffins at last,
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the deeps
of a meaningless Past?"

Since the time of Goethe, poetry has turned from Hellenic to Hindoo sources. Cultured Europe seizes with a strange eagerness on the sublime, dreamy conceptions that underlie Hindoo pantheism--Sansara, the unabiding pain-world; Nirvana world of rest and re-absorption; the deceptive veil of Maya, the wheel of life, the melting bubbles poured from the bowl of Saki, the Brahma fallen from unity and serenity into multiplicity and pain, the illusion of birth and death, the evil of all individual existence, the retreat from life, the euthanasia of the will and the return to non-existence,--these with their rich train of imagery thrill the jaded and _blase_ European with a rare and profound emotion. Besides these spoils, the poet of to-day revels in the results of later metaphysics. The naive balance of pleasure and pain is disturbed. Suffering becomes an almost supernatural fact hid in a halo of mystery, and is not to be blotted out by any quantity of joy. One single pang is enough to condemn the world as worse than nothingness. This inexplicable fact of suffering takes on a mystical meaning, and becomes thereby the pivot of a new faith. And so, as the altar lights of the old worship of sorrow grow dim, there rises the legend of a suffering unconscious.

THE HEART OF THE WOODS.

BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

Twilight fell softly over Beersheba, beautiful Beersheba. It is going into history now with its sad old fancies and its quaint old legends,--its record of happiness and of heartbreak,--those two opposing, yet closely interwoven _inevitables_ which always belong to a summer resort.

But Beersheba is different from the rest, in that the railroads have never found it; and it goes into history a monument to the old days when the wealthy among the southern folk flocked to the mountains, and to Beersheba--queen of the hill country of Tennessee.

The western sky, where it seemed to slope down toward Dan, had turned to gaudy orange; the east was hazy and dimly purple, streaked with long lines of shadow, resembling, in truth, some lives we remember to have noticed, lives that for all the sombre purple were still blotched with the heavier shadows of pain that is never spoken.

It was inexpressibly lonely; true, a cowbell tingled in the distance, and now and then a fox barked in a covert of Dark Hollow, that almost impenetrable jungle that lies along the "Back Bone," a narrow, zigzag ridge stretching from Dan to Beersheba.

Dan, modest little Dan, seven furlongs distant from queenly Beersheba, with its one artistic little house refusing in spite of time and weather, and that more deadly foe, _renters_, to be other than pretty and picturesque, as it nestles like a little gray dove in its nest of cedar and wild pine. A very dreamful place is Dan, dreamful and safe.

Safe, so thought the man leaning upon the low fence that inclosed the old ante-bellum graveyard that was a part of Beersheba also. For in the olden days people came by families and family connections, bringing their servants and carriages. And those who died at Beersheba were left sleeping in the little graveyard--a quiet spot, shut in by old cedars and rustling laurel. A very solemn little resting-place, with the cedars moaning, and the winds soughing, as if in continual lament for the dead left to their care. Among the quiet sleepers was one concerning whom the man leaning upon the fence never tired of thinking, while he made, by instinct it seemed to him, a daily pilgrimage to her grave. It was marked by a long, narrow shaft, exceedingly small at the top. Midway the shaft a heart, chased out of the yellow, moss-stained marble, a heart pierced by a bullet. He had brushed the moss aside long ago to read the quaint yet fascinating inscription:--

"Millicent--April, 1862. 'Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!'"

He had heard the story of the sleeper underneath often, often. It is one of the legends now, of Beersheba. Yet he thought of it with peculiar interest, that twilight time, as he stood leaning upon the low fence while the sun set over Dan. His face, with the after-glow of sunset full upon it, was not a face in keeping with the quiet scene about him. It was not a youthful face, although handsome. Yet the lines upon it were not the lines made by time: a stronger enemy than time had left his mark there. _Dissipation_ was written in the ruddy complexion, the bloated flesh, and the bloodshot eye. The continual movement of the hand feeling along the whitewashed plank, or fingering, unconsciously, the trigger of the loaded rifle, testified, in a dumb way, to the derangement of the nervous system which had been surrendered to that most debasing of all passion, drink. He had sought the invigorating mountains, the safety of isolation, to do for him that which an abused and deadened _will_ refused to do. It is a terrible thing to stand alone with the wreck of one's self. It is worse to set the _Might-Have-Been_ side by side with the _Is_, and know that it is everlastingly too late to alter the colorings of either picture.

His was an _hereditary_ passion, an iniquity of the father visited upon the son. Against such there is no law, and for such no remedy.

He thought bitterly of these things as he stood leaning upon the graveyard fence. His life was a graveyard, a tangle of weeds, a plat of purposes overgrown with rank despair. He had struggled since he could remember. All his life had been one terrible struggle. And now, he knew that it was useless, he understood that the evil was hereditary, and to conquer it, or rather to free himself from it, there was but one alternative. He glanced down at the rifle resting against his knee. He did not intend to endure the torture any very great while longer. He possessed the instincts of a gentleman,--the cravings of a beast. The former had won him something of friends and sympathy,--and love. The latter had cost him all the other had won. For coming across the little graveyard in a straight line with the shadows of the old cedars, her arms full of the greens and tender wild blossoms of the mountain, was the one woman he had loved. She had done her best to "reform" him. The world called it a "reform." If reform meant a new birth, that was the proper name for it, he thought, as he watched her coming down the shadow-line, and tried to think of her as another man's wife; this woman he loved, and who _had_ loved _him_.

He saw her stop beside a little mound, kneel down, and carefully dividing her flowers, place the half of them upon a child's grave. Her face was wet with tears when she arose, and crossing over to the tall, yellow shaft, placed the remainder of the offering at its base. She stood a moment, as if studying the odd inscription. And when she turned away he saw that the tears were gone, and a hopeless patience gave the sweet face a tender beauty.

"'Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!'"

He heard her repeat the melancholy words as she moved away from the old shaft, and opening the gate he waited until she should pass out.

"Donald!"

"I couldn't help it, Alice. You are going away to-morrow; it is the last offence. You will forgive it because it _is_ the last."

"You ought not to follow me in this way, it isn't honorable. See! I have been to put some flowers on my little baby's grave." She glanced back, as she stood, her hand upon the gate, at the little flower-bedecked grave where two months before she had buried her only child.

"You shared your treasures with the other," he said, indicating the tall shaft.

"I always do," said she. "There is something about that grave that touches me with singular pity. I feel as if it were _myself_ who is buried there. I think the girl must have died of a broken heart."

"Have you never heard the story?" said Donald. "I suppose it might be called a broken heart, although the doctors gave it the more agreeable title of '_heart disease_.' It is very well for the world that doctors do not call things by their right name always. Now, if I should be found dead to-morrow morning in my little room at Dan, the doctors would pronounce me a victim of 'apoplexy,' or 'heart failure.' That would be very generous of the doctors so far as _I_ am concerned. But would it not be more generous to struggling humanity to say the truth: 'This man died of _delirium tremens_,--killed himself with whiskey. Now you other sots take warning.'"

"Donald Rives!" the sad eyes, full of unspoken pity, not unmixed with regret, sought his.

"Truth," said Donald. "And truth, Alice, is always best. The world, the sick moral world, cannot be healed with falsehood. But the woman sleeping there--she has a pretty story. Will you wait while I tell it--you are going away to-morrow."

She glanced down the road, dim with the twilight.

"The others are gone on to Dan, to see the moon rise," she said hesitatingly.

"We will follow them there in a moment," said Donald. "I have a fancy for telling you that story."

He laughed, a nervous, mirthless kind of laugh, and slipped his rifle to his other hand.

"She had a lover in the army, you understand. She was waiting here with hundreds of others until 'the cruel war should cease.' One day when there had been a great battle, a messenger came to Beersheba, bringing news for her. He brought a letter, and she came across the little court there at Beersheba, and received it from the messenger's own hand. She tore it open and read the one line written there. Then the white page fluttered to the ground. She placed her hands upon her heart as if the bullet had pierced her. 'Oh, Shiloh! Shiloh!' That was all she said or did. The ball from old Shiloh did its work. The next day they buried her up there under the cedars. The letter had but one line: 'Shot at Shiloh, fatally,' and signed by the captain of the company who had promised to send news of the battle. Just a line; but enough to break a heart. Hearts break easily, sweetheart."

She looked at him with her earnest eyes full of tears.

"Do you think hers broke?" she asked. "I do not. She merely went to him."

"As I should go to you, if you were to die, because I cannot live without you."

"Hush! I am nothing to you now. Only a friend who loves you, and would help you if she could, but she is powerless."