Chapter X: Part 10

Let us proceed a step farther, and inquire if there be circumstances, and if so, what circumstances, under which it becomes the right and the duty of Congress to take and cancel the claims in question.

The controlling circumstances which bear upon this case may be thus briefly stated.

1. The Constitution (section 8) confers on Congress certain essential powers: as, to collect taxes, without which no government can be supported.

2. The Constitution (same section) authorizes Congress to "make all laws that shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" these powers.

3. If Congress fail to carry into execution these powers, the Government is set at nought, and anarchy ensues.

4. An insurrection, extending over eleven of the States comprising the Union, now prevails.

5. Because of that insurrection, the essential powers granted to Congress by the Constitution cannot be carried into execution in these eleven States.

6. Because of the resistance offered by these insurrectionary States to constitutional powers, it becomes the duty of Congress to pass all laws that are necessary and proper to enforce these powers.

All this will be conceded; but a question remains. Who is to judge what laws are necessary and proper to carry into execution the powers, expressly granted by the Constitution, which are thus obstructed and defeated?

This question has been determined by the highest legal tribunal of the United States, speaking by the mouth of one who will be acknowledged to have been her most distinguished presiding officer.

In the well-known case of McCulloch against the State of Maryland,[8] Chief-Justice Marshall delivered the decision of the Supreme Court; and by that decision the following principles were established:--

[Footnote 8: February term, 1819. 4 "Wheaton's _Rep._, 316.
Unwilling here to multiply words, I pray reference to the decision
itself.]

1. The construction of the words "necessary and proper" in the above connection. The Chief-Justice says,--

"The term 'necessary' does not import an absolute physical
necessity, so strong that one thing to which another may be termed
necessary cannot exist without that other."

2. As to the degree of the necessity which renders constitutional a law framed to carry a constitutional power into execution, the rule by this decision is,--

"If a certain means to carry into effect any of the powers
expressly given by the Constitution to the Government of the Union
be an appropriate measure, not prohibited by the Constitution, the
degree of its necessity is a question of legislative discretion,
not of judicial cognizance."

3. But still more explicitly is the question answered, who is to be the judge of the appropriateness and necessity of the means to be employed, thus:--

"The Government which has a right to do an act, and has imposed
upon it the duty of performing that act, must, according to the
dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means."

Thus, then, the matter stands. The powers to lay and collect taxes, to exercise authority over forts and arsenals of the United States, to suppress insurrection, and various others equally essential, are expressly given by the Constitution to Congress. It is the right and duty of Congress to carry these powers into effect. In case of obstruction or defeat of existing laws framed to that intent, it is the right and duty of Congress to select such means and pass such additional laws as may be necessary and proper to overcome such obstruction and enforce obedience to such laws. In the selection of the means to effect this constitutional object, Congress is the sole judge of their propriety or necessity. These means must not be prohibited by the Constitution; but whether they are the most prudent or the most effectual means, or in what degree they are necessary, are matters over which the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction. As Chief-Justice Marshall has elsewhere in this decision expressed it, for the Supreme Court to undertake to inquire into the degree of their necessity "would be to pass the line which circumscribes the judicial department and to tread on legislative ground."

There must, of course, be congruity or relevancy between the power to be enforced and the means proposed to enforce it. While Congress is to judge the degree of necessity or propriety of these means, they must not be such as to be devoid of obvious connection with the object to be attained.

In this case, the object to be attained is the enforcement, in the insurrectionary States, of laws without which no government can exist, and the suppression in these States of an insurrection of which the object is the dismemberment of the Union.

But these laws are resisted, and this insurrection prevails, in those States, and in those States only, in which the life-long claims to the service or labor of persons of African descent are held under State laws. In States where slaves are comparatively few, as in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, disaffection only prevails; while in States where the number of slaves approaches or exceeds that of whites, as in South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, insurrection against lawful authority is flagrant and outspoken: the insurrectionary acts of these States being avowedly based on the allegation that Slavery is not safe under the present constitutionally elected President, and that its permanent preservation can be insured by the disruption of the national unity alone.[9]

[Footnote 9: The Secession Ordinance passed the Convention of
South Carolina December 20, 1860. The next day, December 21, the
Convention adopted the "Declaration of Causes" which led to that
Secession. This document declares, as to the non-slaveholding
States, that they have "denounced as sinful the institution of
Slavery"; that they have "united in the election of a man to the
high office of President of the United States whose opinions and
purposes are hostile to Slavery," and who declares that "the
public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course
of ultimate extinction." And it winds up with this
assertion:--"All hope of remedy is rendered vain by the fact that
the public opinion of the North has invested a great political
error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief."

These, first put forth by South Carolina, afterwards indorsed by
each seceding State, are the causes officially declared to have
produced, and which are held to justify, the present
insurrection.]

All this is matter of history. And there would be as much propriety in denying the connection between the sun and the light of day, as that between Slavery and the Rebellion.

There _is_ a question upon which men differ: namely, whether emancipation is the most prudent or the most effectual means to enforce violated law and suppress the insurrectionary movement.

It is my opinion that a majority of the people of the loyal States believe, at this moment, that emancipation is the necessary and proper means to effect the above objects. But whether this opinion be well founded or not is immaterial to the present question. According to Chief-Justice Marshall's decision, when it is the right and duty of the Government to perform an act, (as here to enforce law and suppress insurrection,) it "must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means." If Congress believes, that, in order to enforce law and suppress insurrection, it is necessary and proper to take and cancel all claims to life-long service or labor held in the Slave States, and if claims to service or labor, whether for years or for life, held by one inhabitant of the United States against another, be a species of property not specially exempted by the Constitution from seizure for public use, then an Act of Emancipation is strictly constitutional.

Congress is to be allowed to select the means; Congress is to be the judge of the necessity and propriety of these means: Congress, not the Supreme Court; not even the People in their primary meetings; but the People constitutionally represented in their National Legislature; the People, speaking by the voice of those whom their votes have elected to that Legislature, there to act for them.

If Congress believes that Emancipation is no longer a question of sectional interference, but of national preservation, it has the right to judge, and the constitutional right to act upon that judgment. And if Congress can properly allege, as motive for taking and cancelling a multitude of life-long claims to service, the preservation of the national existence, can a consideration of greater magnitude be imagined for any legislative act?

In proceeding, however, to consummate such a measure, it is evidently most fitting and proper, that, in the preamble to an Act of Emancipation, there should be set forth, lucidly and succinctly, the causes and considerations which impelled to so solemn and momentous an act.

As to the just compensation provided by the Constitution to be paid, when private property is taken for public use, it is here to be remarked,--

1. If, when a minor is drafted, a father or an apprentice-master has no claim against the Government for service lost, it may be argued with some plausibility, that, under similar circumstances of public exigency, a slave-owner has no claim when his slave is freed. But the argument fairly applies only in cases in which a slave is drafted for military service, and returned to slavery when that service terminates. In case of wholesale taking and cancelling of life-long claims to service, a fair construction of the Constitution may be held to require, as a general rule, that just compensation should be made to the claimants.

2. But to Congress, by the Constitution, is expressly given the power to declare the punishment of treason, without any limitation as to the confiscation of personal property, including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released from such service.

3. If, because of the present insurrection, set on foot by claimants of service or labor, such claims, from precariousness of tenure or otherwise, have diminished in market-value, that diminution may be properly taken into account in estimating just compensation.

These various considerations converge to this,--that a Preamble and Act of Emancipation, somewhat in the terms following, may be constitutionally enacted.

_A Bill to emancipate Persons of African Descent held to Service
or Labor in certain of the United States._

Whereas there is now flagrant, in certain of the United States, an
insurrection of proportions so gigantic that there has been
required, to hold it in check, an increase of the army and navy of
the United States to an extent seldom paralleled in the history of
the world;

And whereas, because of the said insurrection, the execution of
the laws for collecting taxes, and of various other laws of the
United States, heretofore enacted by the Congress in the just
exercise of their constitutional powers, has been, for more than
two years past, and still is, obstructed and defeated throughout
the insurrectionary States;

And whereas it is the right and duty of the Congress to make all
laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into
execution the said constitutional powers;

And whereas the said insurrectionary portions of the Union consist
exclusively of States wherein persons of African descent are held
in large numbers to involuntary service or labor,--the white
inhabitants thereof basing their insurrectionary acts upon the
assumption that the security and perpetuation of such involuntary
servitude require the disruption of the national unity, and the
establishment, on a portion of the domain of the United States, of
a separate and independent government;

And whereas a large portion of the said persons of African
descent, so held in servitude, contribute greatly, so long as such
involuntary services are thus exacted from them, to the aid and
comfort of the said insurrectionists, laboring for their behoof on
their fortifications, and for the supply of their commissariat,
and otherwise giving strength and support to various
insurrectionary acts;

And whereas, in an emergency so urgent as that which is now patent
to the world, it is the duty of the Congress to place at the
disposal of the Executive branch of the Government, for the common
defence, the utmost power, civil and military, of the country, and
to employ every means not forbidden by the usages of civilized
warfare, and not in violation of the Constitution, that is placed
within their reach, in order to repress and to bring to a speedy
termination the present protracted and desolating insurrection;

And whereas it appears from the above recitals, that the
existence, throughout certain of the United States, of a
labor-system which recognizes the claims of one race of men to the
involuntary services of another race (always a moral wrong) has
now shown itself to be destructive of the supremacy of the laws,
and a constant menace to the Government, and that the continuance
of such labor-system imminently jeopardizes the integrity of the
Union, and has become incompatible with the domestic tranquillity
of the country;

And whereas it has thus become evident that claims to the
involuntary service or labor of persons of African descent ought
not to be possessed by any inhabitant of the United States, but
should, in the just exercise of the power which inheres in every
independent government to protect itself from destruction by
seizing and destroying any private property of its citizens or
subjects which imperils its own existence, be taken, as for public
use, from their present possessors, and abrogated and
annulled,--just compensation being made to so many of the said
possessors of such claims as may demand it, and as may by their
loyalty be entitled thereto, for the claims so abrogated and
annulled; therefore,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in
Congress assembled, that from and after the ---- day of ---- next
all claims to the services or labor of persons of African descent,
who shall then be held to involuntary service or labor in any of
the States of the Union under the laws thereof, be and the same
are hereby taken by the Government of the United States. And the
said claims are hereby abrogated and annulled. And all persons of
African descent within the United States, who shall, on the
said ---- day of ---- next, be held to involuntary service or
labor, except for crime of which the party shall have been legally
convicted, shall be released and emancipated from such claims in
as full and complete a manner as if the same had never existed;
the said release and emancipation to take effect from and after
the said ---- day of ----, thenceforth and forevermore.

And be it further enacted, that the faith of the United States be
and the same is hereby pledged for the payment of just
compensation to all persons who shall, on the said ---- day
of ----, hold such claims to service or labor; provided, that such
persons shall make application for such compensation in the form
and manner hereinafter prescribed, and provided further, that said
persons shall have been, throughout the present insurrection, and
shall continue to the close of the same, true and loyal to the
Government of the United States, and shall not, directly or
indirectly, have incited to insurrectionary acts, or given aid or
comfort to any persons engaged in the insurrection aforesaid.

[Here should follow provisions in regard to the manner of
application, the mode and rate of compensation, etc.]

It will probably be found that the number of slaves for the remuneration of whose lost services applications will be made by loyal claimants, under such an act, will scarcely reach the number emancipated in 1834 by Great Britain, which was about seven hundred and seventy thousand; and that the sum paid by England to colonial slave-owners, namely about a hundred millions of dollars, (the probable cost of eight weeks war,) will suffice as just compensation for all the services due to loyal claimants thus taken and cancelled.[10]

[Footnote 10: The exact number of slaves emancipated in the British
colonies was 770,390; and the total amount of indemnity was
L19,950,066 sterling.]

An act couched in the terms here proposed could not be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, without a shameless encroachment on legislative ground, nor without a reckless reversal of principles as well established, and of as high authority, as any which form the basis of constitutional law.

Those who demur to the passage of an act which meets the great difficulty before us broadly, effectually, honestly, and in accordance with the dictates of Christianity and civilization, would do well to consider whether, in the progress of this insurrectionary upheaval, we have not reached a point at which there is no prudent alternative left. By the President's Proclamation some three millions of slaves have been already declared free. Sundry laws of Congress have emancipated several hundred thousands more. There remain legally enslaved probably less than three quarters of a million,--chiefly scattered along a narrow border-strip that is coterminous, North and South, with Freedom or Emancipation,--partly dotted in isolated parishes or counties, surrounded by enfranchised slaves. Can we maintain in perpetuity so anomalous a condition of things? Clearly not. At every step embarrassments innumerable obstruct our progress. No industry, no human sagacity, would suffice to determine the ten thousand conflicting questions that must arise out of such a chaos. Must the history of each negro be followed back, so as to determine his _status_, whether slave or free? If negroes emancipated in insurrectionary States are sold as slaves into Border States, or into excepted parishes or counties, can we expect to trace the transaction? If slaves owned in Border States, or in excepted parishes or counties, are sold to loyal men in insurrectionary States, are they still slaves? or do they become free? Are we to admit, or to deny, the constitutionality of Border-State laws, which arrest, and imprison as vagrants, and sell into slavery to pay expenses of arrest and imprisonment, free negro emigrants from insurrectionary States?[11] But why multiply instances? The longer this twilight of groping transition lasts, it will be only confusion the worse confounded.

[Footnote 11: If, hereafter, Attorney-General Bates's decision,
that a free negro is a citizen, be sustained by the Supreme Court,
then, should the question come up before it, the State laws above
referred to will be declared unconstitutional. But meanwhile they
have not been so declared, and are in force.

The negro-excluding laws of Indiana and Illinois are in the same
category.]

We cannot stand still. Shall we recede? We break faith solemnly plighted; we submit, before the world, to base humiliation; we bow down to a system which the voice of all Christendom condemns; we abandon the struggle for nationality, and consent, for ages, perhaps, to a dismembered country. Shall we advance? There is but one path--the plain, truth-lighted, onward path--to victory and to peace.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and Religion in their Relation to Life._ An Essay on the Physics of Creation. By HENRY JAMES. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

Any one tolerably conversant with either the religion or the philosophy of the last twenty-five years, as displayed in the current literature, must have been convinced that both had left their ancient moorings, never again to find them, and were floating about perilously in quest of a new anchorage. We read the "Essays and Reviews" and "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically Examined," and the replications long-drawn-out from High Church and Low, with a decided impression that the combatants are skirmishing on an immense ice-field, which is drifting them all together into other and unknown seas. What cares any man profoundly conscious of the wants both of the intellect and the heart whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not, and if so, whether he was as accomplished a geologist as Professors Buckland and Lyell? Admit that the whole letter of Scripture comes from God, even to the vowel-points, by what laws and methods shall we expound it so as to put an end to the internecine war between Faith and Reason, between Religion and Philosophy?

We say without reserve, that this book of Mr. James's, if we except a small and unpretending treatise by the same author, published a few years since, on the "Nature of Evil," is the first we have met with, in the range of modern religious controversy, which goes to the heart and marrow of the subject.

To see into what straits we had been brought, call to mind the essentials of the Kantian and Scotch philosophies, which have dominated the German and English mind, and partially the French mind, for the last quarter of a century. Kant resolves all our knowledge into the science of phenomena. Our faculties give us nothing but the phenomena of consciousness; and the phenomena of consciousness are not noumenal existence, or existence _in se_. Nor have we any right to reason from phenomena to noumena, or to say that the former authenticate the latter. We know only the Ego. The Non-Ego lies on the other side of a yawning chasm,--if, indeed, there _is_ anything on the other side, which is doubtful. The Ego becomes the centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct. Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism, or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute. He and his disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, and that to attempt such a philosophy leads us into inextricable confusion and self-contradiction.

In thus degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only to deal with the Finite,--in other words, making her the lackey of mere Science,--they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation. Very well,--we are ready to say,--having scourged Philosophy out of the temple, will you please, Gentlemen, to conduct us yourselves towards its hallowed shrine? If Philosophy cannot yield us a knowledge of the Infinite, we take it that Revelation, as you apprehend it, can. We, poor prodigals, have been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a little nourishing food.--The answer we get is, that Revelation does not propose to give us any such fare. Not any more than Philosophy does Revelation disclose to us the Infinite. It only gives us finite conceptions and formulas about the Infinite. The gulf between us and God yawns wide as ever, and is eternal. We must worship still an unknown God, as the heathen did. But we have this consolation,--that we have creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they mean, and under what these philosophers call a "regulative" religion repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

"These be thy gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever can beat.

Mr. James's whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch philosophies, is profound and masterly. He uses two sets of weapons, both of them with admirable skill. One set is awfully destructive. He clears off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy. But, on the whole, Mr. James is right here. If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright, unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,--or if men pretending to hold the keys of knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive. He shows not only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,--science deals with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre for the circumference. This is the glaring fault both of the German and the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and hence they grovel in the Finite, and muddle everything they touch even there. Revelation, on the other hand, does unfold to us a true philosophy of the Infinite. It shows how the Infinite is contained in the Finite, the Absolute in the Relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. Mr. James demonstrates the supreme absurdity of the notion of noumenal existence, or of any created existence which has life _in se_. God alone has life in Himself. All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance. The notion of Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards _in se_, and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions." It is the mother-fallacy," says Mr. James, "which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding." Those familiar with Dr. Mansel's argument will see that he has not the remotest conception of Creation, except as an exploit of God in time and space, or of the Infinite, except as an unbounded aggregation of finites. That God reposed alone through all the past eternities, but roused some day and sent forth a shout, or six successive shouts, and spoke things out of nothing into "noumenal" existence, were absurd enough, to use Mr. James's nervous English, "to nourish a standing army of Tom Paines into annual fatness." The utter childishness of the theological quarrels over the first chapter of Genesis is obvious enough, so long as both parties swamp the spirit in the letter, or deny that the Finite can reveal the Infinite.

Following out his favorite postulate, that God alone has life in Himself, and all things else are only phenomena of life, Mr. James evolves the doctrine of Creation, of Man and Nature, and of Redemption, steering clear alike of the shoals of Atheism and the devouring jaws of Pantheism. In his constructive argument he draws upon the vast wealth of Swedenborg, and herein, as we conceive, he has done a rare service to our literature. Both the popular and ecclesiastical conception of Swedenborg would be ludicrously, if they were not shamefully inadequate. He has been known but little, except as a ghost-seer, or as a Samson grinding painfully in sectarian mills. Mr. James has done something like justice to his broad humanity, and his incomparably profound and exhaustive philosophy. It was Kant who first called him a ghost-seer; but while Kant was doing his best to turn all realities into the ghastliest of spectres, and remove all the underpinning of faith, till the heavens themselves should tumble through, Swedenborg was laying the foundation of all knowledge on the solid floors of Nature, subordinating sense to science, science to philosophy, philosophy to revelation, each serving as the impregnable support of its superior, and all filled and quickened with the life of God, and lighted up with those divine illuminations in whose illustrious morning the first and faintest cock-crowing would scare the ghosts of the Kantian philosophy out of the universe.

We have regarded Mr. James for some time as among the first of American essayists. There are few writers whose thought is more worthy to be spoken, or whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and nobler proportions. The present volume is his crowning work, and he has coined his life-blood into it. But as honest critics we have some grounds of quarrel with him. A man has no right to be obscure who can make words so flexible and luminous as he can. In the present volume, his readers who here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply because he alters the fundamental nomenclature of religion and chiefly Ritualism, and we find only by the most wide-awake searching that he means anything else. Morality means the Selfhood, not social justice, not that which binds the individual in his relations to society and to humanity. Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all divine charities flowing through them. So Swedenborg uses the word morality. See his noble chapter on Charity in the "True Christian Religion." And for ourselves, we have not the least idea of abandoning these honored words either to superstitious formalists or handsome scoundrels.

We have no such respect for the Devil as Mr. James has expressed for him, even when transformed into the gentleman and utilized for beneficent purposes. Nor do we see how the gap in Mr. James's argument is to be closed up, while he avows his belief in the eternity of the hells, and yet holds that we are _ab intra_ the unqualified creations of God. Again, we should take exception to his favorite position, or, rather, the batteries he opens from it, that saints and scoundrels are not different in the sight of God, allowing the sense which alone, of course, he intends, different _in se_.

But the merits of the book, as one of the noblest and profoundest contributions to philosophy which have been produced, are undeniable. Mr. James possesses two qualities in very rare combination, the power of subtile metaphysical analysis and the power of picturesque representation, so that, while he tasks the thinking faculty of his readers to the utmost, he chains their attention by the fascination of his rhetoric. His sturdy honesty is everywhere apparent, and his success the most complete which we have yet witnessed in rescuing Philosophy from her degrading bondage to Sense, and restoring her to the divine service of Revelation.

_The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation._ By SIR CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S., Author of "The Principles of Geology," "Elements of Geology," etc., etc. Illustrated by Wood-Cuts. 8vo. Philadelphia: George W. Childs.

Human bones from time to time have been discovered associated with those of extinct hyenas and cavern-bears, and specimens of them were in the Museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris as long ago as 1829; but there was then a doubt among geologists as to the human bones being coeval with the bones with which they were associated, it being supposed that they might have been washed into crevices of the rocks in which the bone-breccias are found, and there, being incrusted with carbonate of lime, had the false appearance of being as ancient as the fossil bones of extinct animals.

The indefatigable labors of Prestwich, in the basin of the Somme and among the gravel-beds of Picardy, first called the attention of geologists to the fact that works of men's hands were also found in undisturbed alluvial deposits of high antiquity, and he had the honor of bringing to light proofs of the existence of man in Europe in more remote times than had been previously admitted, and of demonstrating the stone age of France. Goss, Hebert, and Lartet followed in the same track, and added many valuable facts, and a host of other laborers in the same field have since appeared. So extensive have been the discoveries of the works of man buried with the bones of the _Elephas primigenius_ and of cavern-bears and extinct hyenas, that we are forced to recognize the fact of the coexistence of man with those ancient animals, for the occurrence of deposits containing the bones of the two cannot any longer be regarded as doubtful; and certainly stone tools fashioned by man have been found so widely spread in the ancient alluviums and deposits of the post-Pliocene age, as to remove all doubt of the fact, and to destroy the objection that they might be local accidents of an equivocal character.

More recently,--namely, within four or five years,--the discovery of the habitations of lost races of men on the borders of the Swiss lakes, and of remains of various articles which those people once used,--tools, weapons, ornaments, bones of animals they fed upon, seeds of plants they cultivated and consumed,--has given a new impetus to these researches into the antiquity of the human race. Borings into the alluvial deposits of the Nile have proved the existence of man in that valley more than thirty thousand years ago, as estimated by the known rate of deposit of the alluvium of the Nile. Considerations as to the origin and spread of languages also seem to require a much greater antiquity for the human race than has been popularly allowed; and geologists have always claimed myriads of years as required for the sedimentary formations of the globe. Sir Charles Lyell, ever an active collector of geological facts, and an excellent writer on the science of Geology, has engaged with his usual zeal in verifying the researches of the French, Swiss, and German geologists, and has written a very readable book on these new revelations concerning the ancient history of the human race. It is the best English presentation of the subject, and is written in a style that every one can read and understand.

We regret, however, that he has abandoned his former views as to the persistency of species, and has adopted Darwin's theory of transmutation and development by variation and natural relation, and must say, after carefully reading his book, that he has not given any geological proofs of the correctness of Darwin's opinions, but, like that distinguished writer, he is obliged to take refuge behind the deficiency of the geological record, and to suppose facts and proofs may hereafter be discovered, when few are now known to favor the new hypothesis. We can see no more reason why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because in all times both children and men have wished to fly. Nor do we think Mr. Wallace's opinion any better founded, that, owing to a dearth of leaves on the lower branches of trees, all the short-necked giraffes died out, and left the long-necked ones to continue the species. This theory reminds us of the "_astronomical expirimint_" proposed by Father Tom to his "_Howliness_" the Pope, of the goose and the turkey-cock picking the stars from the sky. As to the ape-like skull of Engis Cave, and the human skeleton found near Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad forms in skeletons now walking about. To us they are no evidence that the first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin's argument convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes. This question, however, is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse themselves in thus tracing back their ancestry.

To this class of inquirers Sir Charles Lyell's book will furnish food for reflection; and they will see that even so enthusiastic a writer as this new convert to the Darwinian doctrine can furnish but very slender support to it from his geologic lore.

There is much interesting matter in the book besides the generalizations we object to, and enough to render it welcome to the library of any one interested in the study of Geology and of the antiquity of the animal creation.

_Spurgeon's Sermons._ Preached and revised by the Rev. C.H. SPURGEON. Seventh Series. New York: Sheldon and Co.

Spurgeon is emphatically of the earth, earthy. This we say, not as anything against him intellectually or spiritually, but simply as indicating the material ballast, which in this man is grosser and heavier than in most men, pulling forever against his sails, and absolutely forbidding that freer movement of the imagination which usually belongs to minds of a power equal in degree to his. Not that this freedom flows necessarily out of a great degree of mental power, or by any organic law is associated with what we term _genius_. Every one would admit that Luther was a man of genius; yet Luther was in this respect no better off than Spurgeon,--he was as totally destitute of wings, of the possibility of aerial flight. His power we consider to be far higher than that of Spurgeon; but this we argue from the fact, that, although equally with Spurgeon he was excluded from the sovereignty of the air, although he was equally denied both the faculty to create and the capacity to receive subtile speculation, he had what Spurgeon has _not_, an almighty, irresistible _impetus_ in his movements,--movements which, though _centripetal_, forever seeking the earth, and forever trailing their mountain-weight of glory along the line of and through the midst of flesh-and-blood realities, yet never found any impediment in all their course, but swept the ground like a whirlwind. This distinction between Spurgeon and Luther in the matter of _strength_ is an important one; and it is, moreover, a distinction which may easily be derived--even if no other source lay open to us--from a palpable difference between their faces. But the resemblance between these two men as to tendencies and modes of operation is still more important, and especially as helping us to draw the line between two distinct orders of human genius. Upon this resemblance we desire to dwell at some length.

Luther and Spurgeon are both grossly _realistic_. They are both _groundlings_. In their art, they build after the simple, but grand style of the Cyclops; they have no upward reach; with no delicate steppings do they haunt the clouds; because they _will_ not soar, they draw the sky down low about them, and, wrapping themselves about with its thunders and its sunlights, play with these mysteries as with magnificent toys. In them there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human faith. All these maintain their alliance magnetically, by channels seen or unseen, but forever _felt_, with the earth, and, Antaeus-like, from the earth they derive all their peculiar strength as sentiments of the human heart.

How widely different are these men from Bacon, Kant, or Fichte,--or, to compare them more directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer, who, although he was a _realist_, yet had eagles' wings, and was at home on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods! In these latter the movement of imagination is _centrifugal_, it sustains itself in the loftiest altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it finds the materials from which it wreathes its climbing, "cloud-capped" citadels. The opposite order of genius is, as we have previously called it, _centripetal_, gravitating earthward.

Both orders are to be found among those celebrated as pulpit orators,--all, indeed, who have ranked as powers in this department of human effort belonging eminently, nay, we may almost say _exclusively_, to one or the other. If we take Spurgeon, Whitefield, Bunyan, and Luther as representatives of one order, we shall have also representatives of the other in such orators as Jeremy Taylor,--the Shakspeare of the pulpit,--and, though in a very different sort, Henry Ward Beecher. That in which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,--the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are _exhalant_, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought and imagination. In Beecher this ideality is of a _philosophic_ sort. Thought in him is forever dividing and illustrating truth; and that which is his great peculiarity is that he is at the same time so strictly philosophical, even to a metaphysical nicety, and so very popular. We have heard him, in a single discourse, give utterance to so much philosophic truth relating to theology, as, if it were spread out over a dozen sermons by doctors in divinity whom we have also heard, would be capital sufficient to secure a professor's chair in any theological seminary in the country. Yet he is never abundant in analytic statements of truth: these in any one of his sermons are "few"--as they should be--"and far between": the greater portion of his time and the most mighty efforts of his dramatic power being devoted to the irradiation and illustration of these truths. This is the fertility of his genius, that, out of the roots which philosophy furnishes, it can, through its mysterious broodings, bring forth into the breathing warmth of life organisms so delicate and perfect. Here is the secret of his popularity. Jeremy Taylor, without being at all metaphysical, without ever diving down to examine the beginnings of things in Nature or in men's hearts, had an infinitely more fertile imagination, and the result was therefore more various and multiplex; it reached a higher point in the graduated scale of ideality, it was the _afflatus_ of a diviner inspiration, and was more akin to the effects of the most exalted poetry: yet it was of far less value as something which was to operate on men's minds than the result of Beecher's more pointed, more scintillating discourse of reason. The fact is, that both Henry Ward Beecher and Jeremy Taylor must of necessity depend, for any beneficial effects which they may seek to bring about in the lives of their hearers, upon certain _intellectual_ qualities already existing in their audience. Even in order to be appreciated, they must have at least partially educated audiences. Give either of them Whitefield's auditory, and these effects become impossible. Here we come upon the inert masses, which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way upon a thoroughly dead level.

It is just here that the _realistic_ preaching of the Spurgeon school is available, and nothing else is. Here things must be taken just as they are found,--must be taken and presented in their natural coloring, in their roughest shape. Polish the thought here, or let it be anything save the strictest rescript from Nature, and you make it useless for your purposes. Here it is not the crystal that is wanted, but the unshapely boulder. And provided you wield your weapons after a masterly fashion, it matters very little what your manner or style may be as regards the graces of composition; if only a giant, you may be the most unseemly and awkward one of all Joetunheim.

Now these elements of success Spurgeon has in an eminent degree. He deals not simply with realities of the grossest sort, but with those which are forever present to common humanity; he seeks to move men to religious feelings through precisely the same means that they are daily moved by, the same things which daily excite whatever of thought is transacted in their cramped-up world of mind. This is particularly evident in the material structure upon which his sermons proceed.

Preaching from the text, "But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you," he causes the whole matter to be indelibly impressed on their minds by the very mechanical comparison of Perfection, Establishment, Strengthening, and Settling to four sparkling jewels set in the jet-black foil of past suffering. This is just that kind of illustration which his audience craves. It matters not whether he meets this audience through a vague or a transparent medium, provided the vagueness or the transparency be common both to the speaker and his hearers. Nothing, for instance, could have better accomplished the end designed, yet nothing could be more vague, than such an appeal as the following:--"Have ye never on your bed dreamed a dream, when your thoughts roamed at large and a bit was taken from your imagination, when, stretching all your wings, _your soul floated through the Infinite, grouping strange and marvellous things together, so that the dream rolled on in something like supernatural splendor_? But, on a sudden, you were awakened, and you have regretted hours afterwards that the dream was never concluded. _And what is a Christian, if he does not arrive at perfection, but an unfinished dream?_" Now there is nothing more universal among the most unintellectual of the children of earth than just this sort of mystical reverie, thus grand and thus inconclusive, where the mind, moved, perhaps, to this enthusiastic rapture by that infusion of animal force which comes from a hearty dinner, remaining always just in the same place, seems to wheel away, it knows not whither, but seemingly, and as it flatters itself, into the regions of the Infinite. Really there is no mental movement at all,--nothing but an outgoing through the myriad channels of animal sensibility; yet there is always associated, in such minds, with reveries like these a spiritual elevation approaching to inspiration. "Oh," think they, "if the dream might only be completed, _that_ would be the consummation of a divinely spiritual being!" On this association Spurgeon founds a comparison, which, though utterly false when analyzed, is yet no less effective as illustrating the particular idea which he wishes to convey. Such associations, where he cannot correct them, it is the business of the popular preacher to inherit as if they were his own, and to build upon as if they were gospel truths.

Spurgeon, again, is continually indulging in the most startling suppositions, and just those which are most commonly entertained by vulgar minds,--as, for instance, the supposition of some one, himself or some unfortunate hearer, dropping down dead in his chamber. And, in general, he makes abundant use of that apprehension of death, which is far stronger in the uneducated than in the more refined, as a source from which he may gather thunderbolt after thunderbolt with which to startle the indifferent and hardened heart. What matter though the sentiment to which he appeals be a perverted sentiment? what matter how severely wrenched out of its normal channel? if through this tortuous channel something of the divine truth reaches the awakened conscience, then is there hope, that, through divine grace entering with the truth, all these perversions and anomalies of sinful nature may be set right, and the soul again arrive at celestial harmony with the universe.

The method of such preaching is as organic, considering the circumstances, as that of Beecher's preaching. The only difference is, that the latter finds an audience that through intellectual facility is able to follow him in any path; while Spurgeon, on the other hand, finds his audience destitute of any such facilities, yet finds them facile in every direction where he can bring into alliance with his power their emotions or their peculiar modes of mental action.

Nor do the grosser realities of the world, as present ever with the hearer, and as present ever with the preacher, at all disturb the efficiency of human faith: indeed, they form the most beautiful relief upon which faith is ever to be discovered, for thus is that which in its supernatural alliance is entirely heavenly seen shining through the lowest bases of our nature, which in their alliance are everlastingly associated with earth.

_A Treatise on the American Law of Easements and Servitudes._ By EMORY WASHBURN, LL.D. Philadelphia: George W. Childs. pp. 640.

"Easements" is no easy subject for a law-writer. In its development he will be thrown, to a great extent, upon his own resources in collating and unfolding the topics, for the literature upon the subject existing in our own language is so meagre that the form of its presentation has not been cast in any conventional mould. We have heretofore had no American treatise whatever upon the general subject, and the English bar has furnished us only with that of Gale and Whately, which almost wholly ignores the American cases. It is evident, therefore, that it required an original and fresh intellectual effort to gather together the hundreds of adjudications scattered through our various State reports, classify them, compare them, study them, and construct a homogeneous and extensive analysis of their doctrine. This sort of distillation, if we may so speak, from the crude mass, has been most thoroughly performed by the author of the work before us; and the result is, that, instead of merely _making_ a book, he has indeed _written_ one. In reading it, we recall the great authoritative treatises of the profession, such as Abbott on Shipping, or Sugden on Vendors, and we are also the more disgusted with the hotchpots of the "United States Digest," called law-books.

Professor Washburn is fairly before the public as the author of the "Treatise on the American Law of Real Property," and his merits as a writer have thus become so well known as to render any new commendation superfluous. His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying, unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have seen printed, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, in which the text was so shingled over with layers of notes, or the notes were so underpinned by a slight propping of text, that it was difficult to say, in the language of Easements, which was the servient and which the dominant tenement. Our author's volume, we are happy to say, is not thus bifurcated. His law is in his text, and his sources are in his notes.

There is another feature which we dare not overlook, and that is, the hearty conscientiousness with which the writer does his work. He takes nothing at secondhand, but goes straightway to the authorities. It begets confidence in a writer, when he is enabled to say for himself, as the Professor apologetically does in his Preface, "It has been my aim to examine for myself every reported case which bore sufficiently upon the topic under consideration to warrant a reference to it as an authority"; and when we are further told that "the cases thus examined considerably exceed a thousand in number," we may form some conception of the great industry as well as the rare literary honesty of the writer.

The arrangement of the book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes to chapter, section, and placitum.

It would be easy for us to prolong this notice, but we must content ourselves with an earnest commendation of the work to the profession. It is literally indispensable to the general practitioner, not merely because it is the only book which contains the collected law on the subject as administered in this country, but also because, if it had a dozen competitors, its intrinsic value would be all the more fully developed by the comparison.

_The Astronomy of the Bible._ By O.M. MITCHELL, LL.D. 12mo. New York Blakeman & Mason.

This work contains seven Lectures, in which the distinguished and lamented author has undertaken to prove not only that the science of Astronomy does not discredit the inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures, but that it affords many clear evidences that they are a Divine Revelation. The first demonstrates, against the Atheist, the being of God. The second adduces evidence that the God of the universe is the Jehovah of the Bible. The third considers the cosmogony revealed by the present state of astronomy; and the fourth compares the Mosaic account of creation with the theory advanced in the preceding lecture. The fifth is devoted to the ancient and venerable Book of Job with reference to the astronomical allusions it contains. The sixth is on the astronomical miracles of the Bible; and the seventh is on the language of the Bible with reference to astronomy.