Chapter III (2)

Not so, however, with the stranger phenomenon to be discerned inextricably connected with this anomaly, but not, apparently, naturally and inevitably flowing from it. That the denial of his natural and civil rights to the laborer who sows and reaps the harvests of the Southern country should be avenged upon his enslaver in the scanty yielding of the earth, and in the unthrift, the vices, and the wretchedness which are the only crops that spring spontaneously from soil blasted by slavery, is nothing strange. It is only the statement of the truism in moral and in political economy, that true prosperity can never grow up from wrong and wickedness. That pauperism, and ignorance, and vice, that reckless habits, and debasing customs, and barbarous manners should come of an organized degradation of labor, and of cruelty and injustice crystallized into an institution, is an inevitable necessity, and strictly according to the nature of things. But that the stronger half of the nation should suffer the weaker to rule over it in virtue of its weakness, that the richer region should submit to the political tyranny of its impoverished moiety because of that very poverty, is indeed a marvel and a mystery. That the intelligent, educated, and civilized portion of a race should consent to the sway of their ignorant, illiterate, and barbarian companions in the commonwealth, and this by reason of that uncouth barbarism, is an astonishment, and should be a hissing to all beholders everywhere. It would be so to ourselves, were we not so used to the fact, had it not so grown into our essence and ingrained itself with our nature as to seem a vital organism of our being. Of all the anomalies in morals and in politics which the history of civilized man affords, this is surely the most abnormous and the most unreasonable.

The entire history of the United States is but the record of the evidence of this fact. What event in our annals is there that Slavery has not set her brand upon it to mark it as her own? In the very moment of the nation's birth, like the evil fairy of the nursery tale, she was present to curse it with her fatal words. The spell then wound up has gone on increasing in power, until the scanty formulas which seemed in those days of infancy as if they would fade out of the parchment into which they had been foisted, and leave no trace that they ever were, have blotted out all beside, and statesmen and judges read nothing there but the awful and all-pervading name of Slavery. Once intrenched among the institutions of the country, this baleful power has advanced from one position to another, never losing ground, but establishing itself at each successive point more impregnably than before, until it has us at an advantage that encourages it to demand the surrender of our rights, our self-respect, and our honor. What was once whispered in the secret chamber of council is now proclaimed upon the housetops; what was once done by indirection and guile is now carried with the high hand, in the face of day, at the mouth of the cannon and by the edge of the sabre of the nation. Doctrines and designs which a few years since could find no mouthpiece out of a bar-room, or the piratical den of a filibuster, are now clothed with power by the authentic response of the bench of our highest judicatory, and obsequiously iterated from the oracular recesses of the National Palace.

And the events which now fill the scene are but due successors in the train that has swept over the stage ever since the nineteenth century opened the procession with the purchase of Louisiana. The acquisition of that vast territory, important as it was in a national point of view,--but coveted by the South mainly as the fruitful mother of slave-holding States, and for the precedent it established, that the Constitution was a barrier only to what should impede, never to what might promote, the interests of Slavery,--was the first great stride she made as she stalked to her design. The admission of Missouri as a slaveholding State, granted after a struggle that shook American society to the centre, and then only on the memorable promises now broken to the ear as well as to the hope, was the next vantage-ground seized and maintained. The nearly contemporary purchase of Florida, though in design and in effect as revolutionary an action as that of Louisiana, excited comparatively little opposition. It was but the following up of an acknowledged victory by the Slave Power. The long and bloody wars in her miserable swamps, waged against the humanity of savages that gave shelter to the fugitives from her tyranny,--slave-hunts, merely, on a national scale and at the common expense,--followed next in the march of events. Then Texas loomed in the distance, and, after years of gradual approach and covert advances, was first wrested from Mexico. Slavery next indissolubly chained to her, and then, by a _coup d'etat_ of astonishing impudence, was added, by a flourish of John Tyler's pen, in the very article of his political dissolution, to "the Area of Freedom!" Next came the war with Mexico, lying in its pretences, bloody in its conduct, triumphant in its results, for it won vast regions suitable for Slavery now, and taught the way to win larger conquests when her ever-hungry maw should crave them. What need to recount the Fugitive-Slave Bill, and the other "Compromises" of 1850? or to recite the base repeal of the Missouri Compromise, showing the slaveholder's regard for promises to be as sacred as that of a pettifogger for justice or of a dicer for an oath? or to point to the plains of Kansas, red with the blood of her sons and blackened with the cinders of her towns, while the President of the United States held the sword of the nation at her throat to compel her to submission?

Success, perpetual and transcendent, such as has always waited on Slavery in all her attempts to mould the history of the country and to compel the course of its events to do her bidding, naturally excites a measure of curiosity if not of admiration, in the mind of every observer. Have the slave-owners thus gone on from victory to victory and from strength to strength by reason of their multitude, of their wealth, of their public services, of their intelligence, of their wisdom, of their genius, or of their virtue? Success in gigantic crime sometimes implies a strength and energy which compel a kind of respect even from those that hate it most. The right supremacy of the power that thus sways our destiny clearly does not reside in the overwhelming numbers of those that bear rule. The entire sum of all who have any direct connection with Slavery, as owners or hirers, is less than THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND,--not half as many as the inhabitants of the single city of New York! And yet even this number exaggerates the numerical force of the dominant element in our affairs. To approximate to the true result, it would be fair to strike from the gross sum those owning or employing less than ten slaves, in order to arrive at the number of slave-owners who really compose the ruling influence of the nation. This would leave but a small fraction over NINETY THOUSAND, men, women, and children, owning slaves enough to unite them in a common interest. And from this should be deducted the women and minors, actually owning slaves in their own right, but who have no voice in public affairs. These taken away, and the absentees flying to Europe or the North from the moral contaminations and material discomforts inseparable from Slavery, and not much more than FIFTY THOUSAND voting men will remain to represent this mighty and all-controlling power!--a fact as astounding as it is incontrovertible.

Oligarchies are nothing new in the history of the world. The government of the many by the few is the rule, and not the exception, in the politics of the times that have been and of those that now are. But the concentration of the power that determines the policy, makes the laws, and appoints the ministers of a mighty nation, in the hands of less than the five-hundredth part of its members, is an improvement on the essence of the elder aristocracies; while the usurpation of the title of the Model Republic and of the Pattern Democracy, under which we offer ourselves to the admiration and imitation of less happy nations, is certainly a refinement on their nomenclature.

This prerogative of power, too, is elsewhere conceded by the multitude to their rulers generally for some especial fitness, real or imaginary, for the office they have assumed. Some services of their own or of their ancestors to the state, some superiority, natural or acquired, of parts or skill, at least some specialty of high culture and elegant breeding, a quick sense of honor, a jealousy of insult to the public, an impatience of personal stain,--some or all of these qualities, appealing to the gratitude or to the imagination of the masses, have usually been supposed to inhere in the class they permit to rule over them. By virtue of some or all of these things, its members have had allowed to them their privileges and their precedency, their rights of exemption and of preeminence, their voice potential in the councils of the state, and their claim to be foremost in its defence in the hour of its danger. Some ray of imagination there is, which, falling on the knightly shields and heraldic devices that symbolize their conceded superiority, at least dazzles the eyes and delights the fancy of the crowd, so as to blind them to the inhering vices and essential fallacies of the Order to whose will they bow.

But no such consolations of delusion remain to us, as we stand face to face with the Power which holds our destinies in its hand. None of these blear illusions can cheat our eyes with any such false presentments. No antiquity hallows, no public services consecrate, no gifts of lofty culture adorn, no graces of noble breeding embellish the coarse and sordid oligarchy that gives law to us. And in the blighting shadow of Slavery letters die and art cannot live. What book has the South ever given to the libraries of the world? What work of art has she ever added to its galleries? What artist has she produced that did not instinctively fly, like Allston, to regions in which genius could breathe and art was possible? What statesman has she reared, since Jefferson died and Madison ceased to write, save those intrepid discoverers who have taught that Slavery is the corner-stone of republican institutions, and the vital element of Freedom herself? What divine, excepting the godly men whose theologic skill has attained to the doctrine that Slavery is of the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? What moralist, besides those ethic doctors who teach that it is according to the Divine Justice that the stronger race should strip the weaker of every civil, social, and moral right? The unrighteous partiality, extorted by the threats of Carolina and Georgia in 1788, which gives them a disproportionate representation because of their property in men, and the unity of interest which makes them always act in behalf of Slavery as one man, have made them thus omnipotent. The North, distracted by a thousand interests, has always been at the mercy of whatever barbarian chief in the capital could throw his slave whip into the trembling scale of party. The government having been always, since this century began, at least, the creature and the tool of the slaveholders, the whole patronage of the nation, and the treasury filled chiefly by Northern commerce, have been at their command to help manipulate and mould plastic Northern consciences into practicable shapes. When the slave interest, consisting, at its own largest account of itself, of less than THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND souls, has _thirty_ members of the Senate, while the free-labor interest, consisting of at least TWENTY-FOUR MILLIONS, SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND souls, has but _thirty-two_, and when the former has a delegation of some score of members to represent its slaves in the House, besides its own fair proportion, can we marvel that it has achieved the mastery over us, which is written in black and bloody characters on so many pages of our history?

Such having been the absolute sway Slavery has exercised over the facts of our history, what has been its influence upon the characters of the men with whom it has had to do? Of all the productions of a nation, its men are what prove its quality the most surely. How have the men of America stood this test? Have those in the high places, they who have been called to wait at the altar before all the people, maintained the dignity of character and secured the general reverence which marked and waited upon their predecessors in the days of our small things? The population of the United States has multiplied itself nearly tenfold, while its wealth has increased in a still greater proportion, since the peace of 'Eighty-Three. Have the Representative Men of the nation been made or maintained great and magnanimous, too? Or is that other anomaly, which has so perplexed the curious foreigner, an admitted fact, that in proportion as the country has waxed great and powerful, its public men have dwindled from giants in the last century to dwarfs in this? Alas, to ask the question is to answer it. Compare Franklin, and Adams, and Jay, met at Paris to negotiate the treaty of peace which was to seal the recognition of their country as an equal sister in the family of nations, with Buchanan, and Soule, and Mason, convened at Ostend to plot the larceny of Cuba! Sages and lawgivers, consulting for the welfare of a world and a race, on the one hand, and buccaneers conspiring for the pillage of a sugar-island on the other!

What men, too, did not Washington and Adams call around them in the Cabinet!--how representative of great ideas! how historical! how immortal! How many of our readers can name the names of their successors of the present day? Inflated obscurities, bloated insignificances, who knows or cares whence they came or what they are? We know whose bidding they were appointed to obey, and what manner of work they are ready to perform. And shall we dare extend our profane comparisons even higher than the Cabinet? Shall we bring the shadowy majesty of Washington's august idea alongside the microscopic realities of to-day? Let us be more merciful, and take our departure from the middle term between the Old and the New, occupied by Andrew Jackson, whose iron will and doggedness of purpose give definite character, if not awful dignity, to his image. In his time, the Slave Power, though always the secret spring which set events in motion, began to let its workings be seen more openly than ever before. And from his time forward, what a graduated line of still diminishing shadows have glided successively through the portals of the White House! From Van Buren to Tyler, from Tyler to Polk, from Polk to Fillmore, from Fillmore to Pierce! "Fine by degrees and beautifully less," until it at last reached the vanishing point!

The baleful influence thus ever shed by Slavery on our national history and our public men has not yet spent its malignant forces. It has, indeed, reached a height which a few years ago it was thought the wildest fanaticism to predict; but its fatal power will not be stayed in the mid-sweep of its career. The Ordinance of 1787 torn to shreds and scattered to the winds,--the line drawn in 1820, which the slaveholders plighted their faith Slavery should never overstep, insolently as well as infamously obliterated,--Slavery presiding in the Cabinet, seated on the Supreme Bench, absolute in the halls of Congress,--no man can say what shape its next aggression may not take to itself. A direct attack on the freedom of the press and the liberty of speech at the North, where alone either exists, were no more incredible than the later insolences of its tyranny. The battle not yet over in Kansas, for the compulsory establishment of Slavery there by the interposition of the Federal arm, will be renewed in every Territory as it is ripening into a State. Already warning voices are heard in the air, presaging such a conflict in Oregon. Parasites everywhere instinctively feel that a zeal for the establishment of Slavery where it has been abolished, or its introduction where it had been prohibited, is the highest recommendation to the Executive favor. The rehabilitation of the African slave-trade is seriously proposed and will be furiously urged, and nothing can hinder its accomplishment but its interference with the domestic manufactures of the breeding Slave States. The pirate Walker is already mustering his forces for another incursion into Nicaragua, and rumors are rife that General Houston designs wresting yet another Texas from Mexico. Mighty events are at hand, even at the door; and the mission of them all will be to fix Slavery firmly and forever on the throne of this nation.

Is the success of this conspiracy to be final and eternal? Are the States which name themselves, in simplicity or in irony, the Free States, to be always the satrapies of a central power like this? Are we forever to submit to be cheated out of our national rights by an oligarchy as despicable as it is detestable, because it clothes itself in the forms of democracy, and allows us the ceremonies of choice, the name of power, and the permission to register the edicts of the sovereign? We, who broke the sceptre of King George, and set our feet on the supremacy of the British Parliament, surrender ourselves, bound hand and foot in bonds of our own weaving, into the hands of the slaveholding Philistines! We, who scorned the rule of the aristocracy of English acres, submit without a murmur, or with an ineffectual resistance, to the aristocracy of American flesh and blood! Is our spirit effectually broken? is the brand of meanness and compromise burnt in uneffaceably upon our souls? and are we never to be roused, by any indignities, to fervent resentment and effectual resistance? The answer to these grave questions lies with ourselves alone. One hundred thousand, or three hundred thousand men, however crafty and unscrupulous, cannot forever keep under their rule more than twenty millions, as much their superiors in wealth and intelligence as in numbers, except by their own consent. If the growing millions are to be driven with cartwhips along the pathway of their history by the dwindling thousands, they have none to blame for it but themselves. If they like to have their laws framed and expounded, their presidents appointed, their foreign policy dictated, their domestic interests tampered with, their war and peace made for them, their national fame and personal honor tarnished, and the lie given to all their boastings before the old despotisms, by this insignificant fraction of their number,--scarcely visible to the naked eye in the assembly of the whole people,--none can gainsay or resist their pleasure.

But will the many always thus submit themselves to the domination of the few? We believe that the days of this ignominious subjection are already numbered. Signs in heaven and on earth tell us that one of those movements has begun to be felt in the Northern mind, which perplex tyrannies everywhere with the fear of change. The insults and wrongs so long heaped upon the North by the South begin to be felt. The torpid giant moves uneasily beneath his mountain-load of indignities. The people of the North begin to feel that they support a government for the benefit of their natural enemies; for, of all antipathies, that of slave labor to free is the most deadly and irreconcilable. There never was a time when the relations of the North and the South, as complicated by Slavery, were so well understood and so deeply resented as now. In fields, in farmhouses, and in workshops, there is a spirit aroused which can never be laid or exorcised till it has done its task. We see its work in the great uprising of the Free States against the Slave States in the late national election. Though trickery and corruption cheated it of its end, the thunder of its protest struck terror into the hearts of the tyrants. We hear its echo, as it comes back from the Slave States themselves, in the exceeding bitter cry of the whites for deliverance from the bondage which the slavery of the blacks has brought upon them also. We discern the confession of its might in the very extravagances and violences of the Slave Power. It is its conscious and admitted weakness that has made Texas and Mexico and Cuba, and our own Northwestern territory, necessary to be devoured. It is desperation, and not strength, that has made the bludgeon and the bowie-knife integral parts of the national legislation. It has the American Government, the American Press, and the American Church, in its national organizations, on its side; but the Humanity and the Christianity of the Nation and the World abhor and execrate it. They that be against it are more than they that be for it.

It rages, for its time is short. And its rage is the fiercer because of the symptoms of rebellion against its despotism which it discerns among the white men of the South, who from poverty or from principle have no share in its sway. When we speak of the South as distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black slaves themselves. This unhappy class of our countrymen are the first to feel the blight which Slavery spreads around it, because they are the nearest to its noxious power. The subjects of no European despotism are under a closer _espionage,_ or a more organized system of terrorism, than are they. The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of, employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church, and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the country. Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy. Professor Hedrick, in North Carolina, ventures to utter a preference for the Northern candidate in the last presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State. Mr. Underwood, of Virginia, dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and made to be so happy.

That such a tyranny should excite an antagonistic spirit of resistance is inevitable from the constitution of man and the character of God. The sporadic cases of protest and of resistance to the slaveholding aristocracy, which lift themselves occasionally above the dead level of the surrounding despotism, are representative cases. They stand for much more than their single selves. They prove that there is a wide-spread spirit of discontent, informing great regions of the slave-land, which must one day find or force an opportunity of making itself heard and felt. This we have just seen in the great movement in Missouri, the very nursing-mother of Border-Ruffianism itself, which narrowly missed making Emancipation the policy of the majority of the voters there. Such a result is the product of no sudden culture. It must have been long and slowly growing up. And how could it be otherwise? There must be intelligence enough among the non-slaveholding whites to see the difference there is between themselves and persons of the same condition in the Free States. Why can they have no free schools? Why is it necessary that a missionary society be formed at the North to furnish them with such ministers as the slave-master can approve? Why can they not support their own ministers, and have a Gospel of Free Labor preached to them, if they choose? Why are they hindered from taking such newspapers as they please? Why are they subjected to a censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them? Why is it that the value of acres increases in a geometrical ratio, as they stretch away towards the North Star from the frontier of Slavery? These questions must suggest their sufficient answer to thousands of hearts, and be preparing the way for the insurrection of which the slaveholders stand in the deadliest fear,--that of the whites at their gates, who can do with them and their institutions what seems to them good, when once they know their power, and choose to put it forth. The unity of interest of the non-slaveholders of the South with the people of the Free States is perfect, and it must one day combine them in a unity of action.

The exact time when the millions of the North and of the South shall rise upon this puny mastership, and snatch from its hands the control of their own affairs, we cannot tell,--nor yet the authentic shape which that righteous insurrection will take unto itself. But we know that when the great body of any nation is thoroughly aroused, and fully in earnest to abate a mischief or to right a wrong, nothing can resist its energy or defeat its purpose. It will provide the way, when its will is once thoroughly excited. Men look out upon the world they live in, and it seems as if a change for the better were hopeless and impossible. The great statesmen, the eminent divines, the reverend judges, the learned lawyers, the wealthy landholders and merchants are all leagued together to repel innovation. But the earth still moves in its orbit around the sun; decay and change and death pursue their inevitable course; the child is born and grows up; the strong man grows old and dies; the law of flux and efflux never ceases, and lo! ere men are aware of it, all things have become new. Fresh eyes look upon the world, and it is changed. Where are now Calhoun, and Clay, and Webster? Where will shortly be Cass, and Buchanan, and Benton, and their like? Vanished from the stage of affairs, if not from the face of Nature. Who are to take their places? God knows. But we know that the school in which men are now in training for the arena is very different from the one which formed the past and passing generations of politicians. Great ideas are abroad, challenging the encounter of youth. Angels wrestle with the men of this generation, as with the Patriarch of old, and it is our own fault if a blessing be not extorted ere they take their flight. Principles, like those which in the earlier days of the republic elevated men into statesmen, are now again in the field, chasing the policies which have dwarfed their sons into politicians. These things are portentous of change,--perhaps sudden, but, however delayed, inevitable.

And this change, whatever the outward shape in which it may incarnate itself, in the fulness of time, will come of changed ideas, opinions, and feelings in the general mind and heart. All institutions, even those of the oldest of despotisms, exist by the permission and consent of those who live under them. Change the ideas of the thronging multitudes by the banks of the Neva, or on the shores of the Bosphorus, and they will be changed into Republicans and Christians in the twinkling of an eye. Not merely the Kingdom of Heaven, but the kingdoms of this world, are within us. Ideas are their substance; institutions and customs but the shadows they cast into the visible sphere. Mould the substance anew, and the projected shadow must represent the altered shape within. Hence the dread despots feel, and none more than the petty despots of the plantation, of whatever may throw the light of intelligence across the mental sight of their slaves. Men endure the ills they have, either because they think them blessings, or because they fear lest, should they seek to fly them, it might be to others that they know not of. The present Bonaparte holds France in a chain because she is willing that he should. Let her but breathe upon the padlock, and, like that in the fable, it will fade into air, and he and his dynasty will vanish with it. So the people of the North submit to the domination of the South because they are used to it, and are doubtful as to what may replace it. Whenever the millions, North and South, whom Slavery grinds under her heel, shall be resolutely minded that her usurpation shall cease, it will disappear, and forever. As soon as the stone is thrown the giant will die, and men will marvel that they endured him so long. But this can only come to pass by virtue of a change yet to be wrought in the hearts and minds of men. Ideas everywhere are royal;--here they are imperial. It is the great office of genius, and eloquence, and sacred function, and conspicuous station, and personal influence to herald their approach and to prepare the way before them, that they may assert their state and give holy laws to the listening nation. Thus a glorious form and pressure may be given to the coming age. Thus the ideal of a true republic, of a government of laws made and executed by the people, of which bards have sung and prophets dreamed, and for which martyrs have suffered and heroes died, may yet be possible to us, and the great experiment of this Western World be indeed a Model, instead of a Warning to the nations.

MY PORTRAIT GALLERY.

Oft round my hall of portraiture I gaze,
By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy,
From stainless quarries of deep-buried days.
There, as I muse in soothing melancholy,
Your faces glow in more than mortal youth,
Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly,--
The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden.
Ah, never master that drew mortal breath
Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death,
Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden!
Thou paintest that which struggled here below
Half understood, or understood for woe,
And, with a sweet forewarning,
Mak'st round the sacred front an aureole glow
Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning.

LITERARY NOTICES.

_Homoeopathic Domestic Physician_, etc., etc. By J. H. PULTE, M.D., Author of "Woman's Medical Guide," etc. Twenty-fourth thousand. Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, & Co. London: James Epps, 170, Piccadilly, 1857.

Of course the reader understands the following notice to be written by a venerable practitioner, who carries a gold-headed cane, and does not believe in any medical authority later than Sydenham. Listen to him, then, and remember that if anything in the way of answer, or remonstrance, or controversial advertisement is sent to the head-quarters of this periodical, it will go directly into the basket, which, entering, a manuscript leaves all hope behind. The "old salts" of the "Atlantic" do not go for non-committal and neutrality, or any of that kind of nonsense. Our oracle with the gold stick must have the ground to himself, or keep his wisdom for another set of readers. A quarrel between "Senex" and "Fairplay" would be amusing, but expensive. We have no space for it; and the old gentleman, though he can use his cane smartly for one of his age, positively declines the game of single-stick. Hear him.

--The book mentioned above lies before us with its valves open, helpless as an oyster on its shell, inviting the critical pungent, the professional acid, and the judicial impaling trident. We will be merciful. This fat little literary mollusk is well-conditioned, of fair aspect, and seemingly good of its kind. Twenty-four thousand individuals,--we have its title-page as authority,--more or less lineal descendants of Solomon, have become the fortunate possessors of this plethoric guide to earthly immortality. They might have done worse; for the work is well printed, well arranged, and typographically creditable to the great publishing-house which honors Cincinnati by its intelligent enterprise. The purchasers have done very wisely in buying a book which will not hurt their eyes. Mr. Otis Clapp, bibliopolist, has the work, and will be pleased to supply it to an indefinite number of the family above referred to.

--Men live in the immediate neighborhood of a great menagerie, the doors of which are always open. The beasts of prey that come out are called diseases. They feed upon us, and between their teeth we must all pass sooner or later,--all but a few, who are otherwise taken care of. When these animals attack a man, most of them give him a scratch or a bite, and let him go. Some hold on a little while; some are carried about for weeks or months, until the carrier drops down, or they drop off. By and by one is sure to come along that drags down the strongest, and makes an end of him.

Most people know little or nothing of these beasts, until all at once they find themselves attacked by one of them. They are therefore liable to be frightened by those that are not dangerous, and careless with those that are destructive. They do not know what will soothe, and what will exasperate them. They do not even know the dens of many of them, though they are close to their own dwellings.

A physician is one that has lived among these beasts, and studied their aspects and habits. He knows them all well, and looks them in the face, and lays his hand on their backs daily. They seem, as it were, to know him, and to greet him with such _risus sardonicus_ as they can muster. He knows that his friends and himself have all got to be eaten up at last by them, and his friends have the same belief. Yet they want him near them at all times, and with them when they are set upon by any of these their natural enemies. He goes, knowing pretty well what he can do and what he cannot.

He can talk to them in a quiet and sensible way about these terrible beings, concerning which they are so ignorant, and liable to harbor such foolish fancies. He can frighten away some of the lesser kind of animals with certain ill-smelling preparations he carries about him. Once in a while he can draw the teeth of some of the biggest, or throttle them. He can point out their dens, and so keep many from falling into their jaws.

This is a great deal to promise or perform, but it is not all that is expected of him. Sick people are very apt to be both fools and cowards. Many of them confess the fact in the frankest possible way. If you doubt it, ask the next dentist about the wisdom and courage of average manhood under the dispensation of a bad tooth. As a tooth is to a liver, so are the dentists' patients to the doctors', in the want of the two excellences above mentioned.

Those not over-wise human beings called patients are frequently a little unreasonable. They come with a small scratch, which Nature will heal very nicely in a few days, and insist on its being closed at once with some kind of joiner's glue. They want their little coughs cured, so that they may breathe at their ease, when they have no lungs left that are worth mentioning. They would have called in Luke the physician to John the Baptist, when his head was in the charger, and asked for a balsam that would cure cuts. This kind of thing cannot be done. But it is very profitable to lie about it, and say that it can be done. The people who make a business of this lying, and profiting by it, are called quacks.

--But as patients wish to believe in all manner of "cures," and as all doctors love to believe in the power of their remedies and as nothing is more open to self-deception than medical experience, the whole matter of therapeutics has always been made a great deal more of than the case would justify. It has been an inflated currency,--fifty pretences on paper, to one fact of true, ringing metal.

Many of the older books are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men's bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence. Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,--wise man, philosopher, revered of cures for the most formidable diseases, many of them of this fantastic character, that disease should seem to have been a thing that one could turn off at will, like gas or water in our houses. Only there were rather too many specifics in those days. For if one has "an excellent approved remedy" that never fails, it seems unnecessary to print a list of twenty others for the same purpose. This is wanton excess; it is gilding the golden pill, and throwing fresh perfume on the Mistura Assafoetidae.

As the observation of nature has extended, and as mankind have approached the state of only _semi_-barbarism in which they now exist, there has been an improvement. The materia medica has been weeded; much that was worthless and revolting has been thrown overboard; simplicity has been introduced into prescriptions; and the whole business of _drugging_ the sick has undergone a most salutary reform. The great fact has been practically recognized, that the movements of life in disease obey laws which, under the circumstances, are on the whole salutary, and only require a limited and occasional interference by any special disturbing agents. The list of specifics has been reduced to a very brief catalogue, and the delusion which had exaggerated the power of drugging for so many generations has been tempered down by sound and systematic observation.

Homoeopathy came, and with one harlequin bound leaped out of its century backwards into the region of quagmires and fogs and mirages, from which true medical science was painfully emerging. All the trumpery of exploded pharmacopoeias was revived under new names. Even the domain of the loathsome has been recently invaded, and simpletons are told in the book before us to swallow serpents' poison; nay, it is said that the _pediculis capitis_ is actually prescribed in infusion,--hunted down in his capillary forest, and transferred to the digestive organs of those he once fed upon.

It falsely alleged one axiom as the basis of existing medical practice, namely, _Contraria contrarues curantur_,--"Contraries are cured by contraries." No such principle was ever acted upon, exclusively, as the basis of medical practice. The man who does not admit it as _one_ of the principles of practice would, on _medical_ principles, refuse a drop of cold water to cool the tongue of Dives in fiery torments. The only unconditional principle ever recognized by medical science has been, that diseases are to be treated by the remedies that experience shows to be useful. The universal use of both _cold_ and _hot_ external and internal remedies in various inflammatory states puts the garrote at once on the babbling throat of the senseless assertion of the homaeopathists, and stultifies for all time the nickname "allopathy."

It falsely alleged a second axiom, _Similia similibus curantur_,--"Like is cured by like,"--as the basis of its own practice; for it does not keep to any such rule, as every page of the book before us abundantly shows.

It subjected credulous mankind to the last of indignities, in forcing it to listen to that doctrine of infinitesimals and potencies which is at once the most epigrammatic of paradoxes, and the crowning exploit of pseudo-scientific audacity.

It proceeded to prove itself true by juggling statistics; some of the most famous of which, we may remark, are very well shown up by Professor Worthington Hooker, in a recent essay. And having done all these things, it sat down in the shadow of a brazen bust of its founder, and invited mankind to join in the Barmecide feast it had spread on the coffin of Science; who, however, proved not to have been buried in it,--indeed, not to have been buried at all.

Of course, it had, and has, a certain success. Its infinitesimal treatment being a nullity, patients are never hurt by drugs, _when it is adhered to_. It pleases the imagination. It is image-worship, relic-wearing, holy-water-sprinkling, transferred from the spiritual world to that of the body. Poets accept it; sensitive and spiritual women become sisters of charity in its service. It does not offend the palate, and so spares the nursery those scenes of single combat in which infants were wont to yield at length to the pressure of the spoon and the imminence of asphyxia. It gives the ignorant, who have such an inveterate itch for dabbling in physic, a book and a doll's medicine-chest, and lets them play doctors and doctresses without fear of having to call in the coroner. And just so long as unskilful and untaught people cannot tell coincidences from cause and effect in medical practice,--which to do, the wise and experienced know how difficult!--so long it will have plenty of "facts" to fall back upon. Who can blame a man for being satisfied with the argument, "I was ill, and am well,--great is Hahnemann!"? Only this argument serves all impostors and impositions. It is not of much value, but it is irresistible, and therefore quackery is immortal.

Homaeopathy is one of its many phases; the most imaginative, the most elegant, and, it is fair to say, the least noxious in its direct agencies. "It is melancholy,"--we use the recent words of the world-honored physician of the Queen's household, Sir John Forbes,--"to be forced to make admissions in favor of a system so utterly false and despicable as Homaeopathy." Yet we must own that it may have been indirectly useful, as the older farce of the weapon ointment certainly was, in teaching medical practitioners to place more reliance upon nature. Most scientific men see through its deceptions at a glance. It may be practised by shrewd men and by honest ones; rarely, it must be feared, by those who are both shrewd and honest. As a psychological experiment on the weakness of cultivated minds, it is the best trick of the century.

--Here the old gentleman took his cane and walked out to cool himself.

FOREIGN.

It is an old remark of Lessing, often repeated, but nevertheless true, that Frenchmen, as a general rule, are sadly deficient in the mental powers suited to _objective_ observation, and therefore eminently disqualified for reliable reports of travels. Among the host of French writing travellers or travelling writers, on whatever foreign countries, there have always been very few who looked at foreign countries, nations, institutions, and achievements, with anything like fairness of judgment and capacity of understanding. For an average Frenchman, Moliere's renowned juxtaposition of

"Paris, la cour, le monde, l'univers,"

is a gospel down to this day; and no country can so justly complain of being constantly misunderstood and misrepresented by French tourists as ours. The more difficult it is for a Frenchman not to glance through colored spectacles from the Palais Royal at whatever does not belong to "the Great Nation," the more praise those few of them deserve who give to the world correct and impartial impressions of travel and reliable ethnological works.

Such is the case with two works which we are glad to recommend to our readers. The first is

_La Norwege_, par LOUIS ENAULT. Paris: Hachette. 1857.

Norway, though a member of the European family, with a population once so influential in the world's history, is comparatively the least known of all civilized countries to the world at large, and what little we know of it is of a very recent date,--Stephens's and Leopold von Buch's works being not much more than a quarter of a century old, while Bayard Taylor's lively sketches in the "New York Tribune" are almost wet still, and not yet complete. The latter and M. Enault's book, when compared with each other, leave not the slightest doubt that each observes carefully and conscientiously in his own way, that both possess peculiar gifts for studying and describing correctly what there is worth studying and describing in this _terra incognita_, and that we can rely on both. Mr. Taylor is more picturesque, lively, fascinating, and drastic; M. Enault more thorough, quiet, and reserved in the expression of his opinions. The parts seem to be interchanged,--the Frenchman exhibiting more of the Anglo-Saxon, the American more of the French genius; but both confirm each other's statements admirably, and should be read side by side. If our readers wish to make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the laws and institutions, with the statistical, economical, and geographical facts, the society and manners, the later history and future prospects of Norway, they will find here a work trustworthy in every respect.

_Les Anglais et l'Inde_, avec Notes, Pieces justificatives et Tableaux statistiques, par E. DE VALBEZEN. Paris. 1857.

This is no narrative of travel, though evidently written by one who has been for a considerable time an eyewitness of Indian affairs, and by a man of acute mind and quick and comprehensive perception, thoroughly versed in the history and condition of India. It is a treatise on all those topics bearing upon the present political, social, and commercial state of things there, beginning with the exposition of the English governmental institutions there existing, describing the country, its productions and resources, its various populations, its social relations, its agriculture, commerce, and wealth, and concluding with statistical and other documents in support of the author's statements. It gives a nearly systematical and complete picture of Indian affairs, enabling the reader to understand the present situation of the country and its foreign rulers, and to form a judgment on all corresponding topics. The style is classical, though somewhat concise and epigrammatic, giving proof everywhere of a mind that forms its own conclusions and takes independent, statesmanlike views. The author refrains from obtruding his own opinions on the reader, leaving things to speak for themselves. He is not ostensibly antagonistic to the English, as we should expect from a true Frenchman,--is no cordial hater of "_perfide Albion_." You cannot, from his book, with any show of reason, infer that he is a Jesuit, a French missionary, a merchant, a governmental employe, or a simple traveller; but you feel instinctively that he is wide-awake, shrewd, and reserved, and that you may trust his reports in the main. He refers, for proof of his statements, mostly to English documents, and does not try to preoccupy your mind. Particularly noteworthy is what he says of the political economy of India; he controverts effectively the prevailing opinion that it is the richest country in the world,--showing its real poverty, in spite of its great natural resources, and the almost hopeless task of improving these resources. For the American merchant this is a very readable book, warning him to refrain from too hastily investing his capital and enterprise in Indian commerce,--India being the most insecure of all countries for foreign commercial undertakings; and in general, there are so many entirely new and startling revelations in it, that, to any one interested in Indian matters, it well repays reading.

_Histoire de la Revolution Francaise_, (1789-1799,) Par THEOD. H. BARRAU. Paris: Hachette. 1857.

We cannot vouch that we have here a new, original history of this important epoch, based on an independent study of historical sources; but it is the very first history of the French Revolution we have known, not written in a partisan spirit, and bent on falsifying the facts in order to make political capital or to flatter national prejudices. It bears no evidence of any tendency whatever,--perhaps only because, with its more than five hundred pages, it is too short for that.

_Histoire de France au XVI. Siecle_, par MICHELET. Tom. 10. _Henri IV. et Richelieu_.

Michelet is too well known as a truly Republican historiographer and truly humane and noble writer, and the former volumes of this history have been too long before the public, to require for this volume a particular recommendation. It begins with the last _decade_ of the sixteenth century, and concludes with the year 1626. We are no particular admirers of Michelet's historical style and method of delineation, but we acknowledge his sense of historical justice, his unprejudiced mind, and his Republicanism, even when treating a subject so delicate, and so dear to Frenchmen, as Henry IV. Doing justice to whatever was really admirable in the character of this much beloved king, he overthrows a good many superstitious ideas current concerning him even down to our days. He shows that the Utopian, though benevolent project, ascribed to Henry, of establishing an everlasting peace by revising the map of Europe and constituting a political equilibrium between the several European powers, never in fact existed in the king's mind, nor even in Sully's, whom he equally divests of much unfounded glory and fictitious greatness. No doubt, but for his fickleness and inconsistency, Henry could have done a good deal toward realizing such ideas and reforming European politics; but it is saying too much for Henry's influence on the popular opinions of Europe, to affirm, what Michelet gives us to understand, that he could have combined the nations of Europe against all their depraved rulers together.

_La Liberte_, par EMILE DE GIRARDIN. Paris. 1857.

This book contains a discussion between the author and M. de Lourdoueix, ex-editor of the "Gazette de France," written in the form of letters, on the various topics connected with the notion of Liberty. Girardin is, no doubt, the most genial of all living French writers on Socialism and Politics. He belongs neither to the fanatical school of Communists and Social Equalizers by force and "_par ordre da Mufti_," nor to the class of pliable tools of Imperial or Royal Autocracy. He is the only writer who, in the face of the prevailing restrictions upon the press in France, dares to speak out his whole mind, and to preach the Age of Reason in Politics and in the Social System. He is full of new ideas, which should, we think, be very attractive to American readers; and it is, indeed, strange that his writings are so little read and reviewed on this side of the ocean. His ideas on general education, on the total extinction of authority or government, on the abolition of public punishments of every kind, on the doing away with standing armies, war, and tyranny, and on making the State a great Assurance Company against all imaginable misfortunes and their consequences, are a fair index of the best philosophemes of the European mind since the last Revolution. We do not say that we approve every one of his issues and conclusions, but we insist most earnestly, that this book and similar ones, bearing testimony to what the political and social thinkers of the day in Europe are revolving in their minds, should be read and reviewed under the light of American institutions and ideas. The reader enjoys in the present book the great advantage of seeing the ideas of the Social Reformers discussed _pro_ and _contra_,--M. Lourdoueix being their obstinate adversary.

_Memoires de M. Joseph Prudhomme_, par HENRI MONNIER. 2 vols. Paris. 1857.

This is not what is commonly called _memoires_,--to wit, historical recollections modified by the subjective impressions of eyewitnesses to the past; it is rather a novel or romance in the form of _memoires_, ridiculing the predominant _bourgeoisie_ of the Old World, and sketching the whole life of a _bourgeois_, from infancy to green old age. For readers, who, through travel in Europe and acquaintance with French literature and tastes, are enabled to understand the many nice allusions contained in this novel, it is a very entertaining book.

1. _Kraft und Stoff_. By G. BUeCHNER. Fourth edition. 1857.

2. _Materie und Geist_. By the same. 1857.