Chapter IX: Part II (5)

There, after all, is the rub. A want of hardy self-belief and self-respect,--an unwillingness to face with dignity the actual facts and necessities of our situation in life,--this, after all, is the worst and most dangerous feature of the case. It is the same sort of pride which makes Smilax think he must hire a waiter in white gloves, and get up a circuitous dinner-party on English principles, to entertain a friend from England. Because the friend in England lives in such and such a style, he must make believe for a day that he lives so too, when in fact it is a whirlwind in his domestic establishment equal to a removal or a fire, and threatens the total extinction of Mrs. Smilax. Now there are two principles of hospitality that people are very apt to overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,--something American; and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done, from the oven of the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at that precise and fortunate moment.

I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest, neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise in the morning and despatch your husband, father, and brothers to the farm or wood-lot; you go sociably about chatting with each other, while you skim the milk, make the butter, turn the cheeses. The forenoon is long; it's ten to one that all the so-called morning work is over, and you have leisure for an hour's sewing or reading before it is time to start the dinner-preparations. By two o'clock your house-work is done, and you have the long afternoon for books, needle-work, or drawing,--for perhaps there is among you one with a gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you reads aloud while the others sew, and you manage in that way to keep up with a great deal of reading. I see on your book-shelves Prescott, Macaulay, Irving, besides the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I mistake not, the friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have company, you invite Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea; you have no trouble; they come early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular crony sits with you by your polished stove while you watch the baking of those light biscuits and tea-rusks for which you are so famous, and Mrs. Somebody-else chats with your sister, who is spreading the table with your best china in the best room. When tea is over, there is plenty of volunteering to help you wash your pretty India teacups, and get them back into the cupboard. There is no special fatigue or exertion in all this, though you have taken down the best things and put them back, because you have done all without anxiety or effort, among those who would do precisely the same, if you were their visitors.

But now comes down pretty Mrs. Simmons and her pretty daughter to spend a week with you, and forthwith you are troubled. Your youngest, Fanny, visited them in New York last fall, and tells you of their cook and chambermaid, and the servant in white gloves that waits on table. You say in your soul, "What shall we do? they never can be contented to live as we do; how shall we manage?" And now you long for servants.

This is the very time that you should know that Mrs. Simmons is tired to death of her fine establishment, and weighed down with the task of keeping the peace among her servants. She is a quiet soul, dearly loving her ease, and hating strife; and yet last week she had five quarrels to settle between her invaluable cook and the other members of her staff, because invaluable cook, on the strength of knowing how to get up state-dinners and to manage all sorts of mysteries which her mistress knows nothing about, asserts the usual right of spoiled favorites to insult all her neighbors with impunity, and rule with a rod of iron over the whole house. Anything that is not in the least like her own home and ways of living will be a blessed relief and change to Mrs. Simmons. Your clean, quiet house, your delicate cookery, your cheerful morning tasks, if you will let her follow you about, and sit and talk with you while you are at your work, will all seem a pleasant contrast to her own life. Of course, if it came to the case of offering to change lots in life, she would not do it; but very likely she _thinks_ she would, and sighs over and pities herself, and thinks sentimentally how fortunate you are, how snugly and securely you live, and wishes she were as untrammelled and independent as you. And she is more than half right; for, with her helpless habits, her utter ignorance of the simplest facts concerning the reciprocal relations of milk, eggs, butter, saleratus, soda, and yeast, she is completely the victim and slave of the person she pretends to rule.

Only imagine some of the frequent scenes and rehearsals in her family. After many trials, she at last engages a seamstress who promises to prove a perfect treasure,--neat, dapper, nimble, skilful, and spirited. The very soul of Mrs. Simmons rejoices in heaven. Illusive bliss! The new-comer proves to be no favorite with Madam Cook, and the domestic fates evolve the catastrophe, as follows. First, low murmur of distant thunder in the kitchen; then a day or two of sulky silence, in which the atmosphere seems heavy with an approaching storm. At last comes the climax. The parlor-door flies open during breakfast. Enter seamstress, in tears, followed by Mrs. Cook with a face swollen and red with wrath, who tersely introduces the subject-matter of the drama in a voice trembling with rage.

"Would you be plased, Ma'am, to suit yersilf with another cook? Me week will be up next Tuesday, and I want to be going."

"Why, Bridget, what's the matter?"

"Matter enough, Ma'am! I niver could live with them Cork girls in a house, nor I won't; them as likes the Cork girls is welcome for all me; but it's not for the likes of me to live with them, and she been in the kitchen a-upsettin' of me gravies with her flat-irons and things."

Here bursts in the seamstress with a whirlwind of denial, and the altercation wages fast and furious, and poor, little, delicate Mrs. Simmons stands like a kitten in a thunder-storm in the midst of a regular Irish row.

Cook, of course, is sure of her victory. She knows that a great dinner is to come off Wednesday, and that her mistress has not the smallest idea how to manage it, and that, therefore, whatever happens, she must be conciliated.

Swelling with secret indignation at the tyrant, poor Mrs. Simmons dismisses her seamstress with longing looks. She suited her mistress exactly, but she didn't suit cook!

Now, if Mrs. Simmons had been brought up in early life with the experience that _you_ have, she would be mistress in her own house. She would quietly say to Madam Cook, "If my family-arrangements do not suit you, you can leave. I can see to the dinner myself." And she _could_ do it. Her well-trained muscles would not break down under a little extra work; her skill, adroitness, and perfect familiarity with everything that is to be done would enable her at once to make cooks of any bright girls of good capacity who might still be in her establishment; and, above all, she would feel herself mistress in her own house. This is what would come of an experience in doing her own work as you do. She who can at once put her own trained hand to the machine in any spot where a hand is needed never comes to be the slave of a coarse, vulgar Irish-woman.

So, also, in forming a judgment of what is to be expected of servants in a given time, and what ought to be expected of a given amount of provisions, poor Mrs. Simmons is absolutely at sea. If even for one six months in her life she had been a practical cook, and had really had the charge of the larder, she would not now be haunted, as she constantly is, by an indefinite apprehension of an immense wastefulness, perhaps of the disappearance of provisions through secret channels of relationship and favoritism. She certainly could not be made to believe in the absolute necessity of so many pounds of sugar, quarts of milk, and dozens of eggs, not to mention spices and wine, as are daily required for the accomplishment of Madam Cook's purposes. But though now she does suspect and apprehend, she cannot speak with certainty. She cannot say, "_I_ have made these things. I know exactly what they require. I have done this and that myself, and know it can be done, and done well, in a certain time." It is said that women who have been accustomed to doing their own work become hard mistresses. They are certainly more sure of the ground they stand on,--they are less open to imposition,--they can speak and act in their own houses more as those "having authority," and therefore are less afraid to exact what is justly their due, and less willing to endure impertinence and unfaithfulness. Their general error lies in expecting that any servant ever will do as well for them as they will do for themselves, and that an untrained, undisciplined human being ever _can_ do house-work, or any other work, with the neatness and perfection that a person of trained intelligence can. It has been remarked in our armies that the men of cultivation, though bred in delicate and refined spheres, can bear up under the hardships of camp-life better and longer than rough laborers. The reason is, that an educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it and spare it, as an uneducated mind cannot; and so the college-bred youth brings himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective laborer. Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto, _Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of work which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to sunset.

A lady living in one of our obscure New-England towns, where there were no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city succeeded in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and through the house, that her mistress, a delicate woman, incumbered with the care of young children, began seriously to think that she made more work each day than she performed, and dismissed her. What was now to be done? Fortunately, the daughter of a neighboring farmer was going to be married in six months, and wanted a little ready money for her _trousseau_. The lady was informed that Miss So-and-so would come to her, not as a servant, but as hired "help." She was fain to accept any help with gladness. Forthwith came into the family-circle a tall, well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive, self-respecting, yet not in the least presuming, who sat at the family-table and observed all its decorums with the modest self-possession of a lady. The new-comer took a survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system, matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking, cleaning, rose early, moved deftly, and in a single day the slatternly and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often strikes one in New-England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone. Everything was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in place; the floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always done, and not doing; and every afternoon the young lady sat neatly dressed in her own apartment, either quietly writing letters to her betrothed, or sewing on her bridal outfit. Such is the result of employing those who have been brought up to do their own work. That tall, fine-looking girl, for aught we know, may yet be mistress of a fine house on Fifth Avenue; and if she is, she will, we fear, prove rather an exacting mistress to Irish Biddy and Bridget; but _she_ will never be threatened by her cook and chambermaid, after the first one or two have tried the experiment.

* * * * *

Having written thus far on my article, I laid it aside till evening, when, as usual, I was saluted by the inquiry, "Has papa been writing anything to-day?" and then followed loud petitions to hear it; and so I read as far, reader, as you have.

"Well, papa," said Jennie, "what are you meaning to make out there? Do you really think it would be best for us all to try to go back to that old style of living you describe? After all, you have shown only the dark side of an establishment with servants, and the bright side of the other way of living. Mamma does not have such trouble with her servants; matters have always gone smoothly in our family; and if we are not such wonderful girls as those you describe, yet we may make pretty good housekeepers on the modern system, after all."

"You don't know all the troubles your mamma has had in your day," said my wife. "I have often, in the course of my family-history, seen the day when I have heartily wished for the strength and ability to manage my household matters as my grandmother of notable memory managed hers. But I fear that those remarkable women of the olden times are like the ancient painted glass,--the art of making them is lost; my mother was less than her mother, and I am less than my mother."

"And Marianne and I come out entirely at the little end of the horn," said Jennie, laughing; "yet I wash the breakfast-cups and dust the parlors, and have always fancied myself a notable housekeeper."

"It is just as I told you," I said. "Human nature is always the same. Nobody ever is or does more than circumstances force him to be and do. Those remarkable women of old were made by circumstances. There were, comparatively speaking, no servants to be had, and so children were trained to habits of industry and mechanical adroitness from the cradle, and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor. Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated; and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for 'faculty.' Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with equal niceness in those thoughtful minds. A trained housekeeper knew just how many sticks of hickory of a certain size were required to heat her oven, and how many of each different kind of wood. She knew by a sort of intuition just what kinds of food would yield the most palatable nutriment with the least outlay of accessories in cooking. She knew to a minute the time when each article must go into and be withdrawn from her oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and direct, she could guide an intelligent child through the processes with mathematical certainty. It is impossible, however, that anything but early training and long experience can produce these results, and it is earnestly to be wished that the grandmothers of New England had only written down their experiences for our children; they would have been a mine of maxims and traditions, better than any other traditions of the elders which we know of."

"One thing I know," said Marianne,--"and that is, I wish I had been brought up so, and knew all that I should, and had all the strength and adroitness that those women had. I should not dread to begin housekeeping, as I now do. I should feel myself independent. I should feel that I knew how to direct my servants, and what it was reasonable and proper to expect of them; and then, as you say, I shouldn't be dependent on all their whims and caprices of temper. I dread those household storms, of all things."

Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.

* * * * *

In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements. But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work, whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are, the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work at intervals, but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way, that makes it twice as hard and disagreeable as it need be.

Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do house-work and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants, and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid all that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?

The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all the different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not be quite as cheerful and less expensive a process, if young girls from early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, ironing, rubbing furniture, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all these, and diversified the intervals with spinning on the great and little wheel, never came to need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish motorpathist, which really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor economy to pay servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay operators to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that our grandmothers in a week went over every movement that any gymnast has invented, and went over them to some productive purpose too.

Lastly, my paper will not have been in vain, if those ladies who have learned and practise the invaluable accomplishment of doing their own work will know their own happiness and dignity, and properly value their great acquisition, even though it may have been forced upon them by circumstances.

SHAKSPEARE.

APRIL 23, 1864.

"Who claims our Shakspeare from that realm unknown,
Beyond the storm-vexed islands of the deep,
Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown?
Her twofold Saint's-day let our England keep;
Shall warring aliens share her holy task?"
The Old-World echoes ask.

O land of Shakspeare! ours with all thy past,
Till these last years that make the sea so wide,
Think not the jar of battle's trumpet-blast
Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride
In every noble word thy sons bequeathed
The air our fathers breathed!

War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,
We turn to other days and far-off lands,
Live o'er in dreams the Poet's faded life,
Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands
To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,--
Not his the need, but ours!

We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,--
Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark,
While others only note that day is gone;
For him the Lord of light the curtain rent
That veils the firmament.

The greatest for its greatness is half known,
Stretching beyond our narrow quadrant-lines,--
As in that world of Nature all outgrown
Where Calaveras lifts his awful pines,
And cast from Mariposa's mountain-wall
Nevada's cataracts fall.

Yet heaven's remotest orb is partly ours,
Throbbing its radiance like a beating heart;
In the wide compass of angelic powers
The instinct of the blindworm has its part;
So in God's kingliest creature we behold
The flower our buds infold.

With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name
Stamped once on dust that moved with pulse and breath,
As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame
Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:
We praise not star or sun; in these we see
Thee, Father, only Thee!

Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:
We read, we reverence on this human soul,--
Earth's clearest mirror of the light above,--
Plain as the record on Thy prophet's scroll,
When o'er his page the effluent splendors poured,
Thine own, "Thus saith the Lord!"

This player was a prophet from on high,
Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,
For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by,--
Sidney's fair youth, and Raleigh's ripened age,
Spenser's chaste soul, and his imperial mind
Who taught and shamed mankind.

Therefore we bid our hearts' _Te Deum_ rise,
Nor fear to make Thy worship less divine,
And hear the shouted choral shake the skies,
Counting all glory, power, and wisdom Thine,--
For Thy great gift Thy greater name adore,
And praise Thee evermore!

In this dread hour of Nature's utmost need,
Thanks for these unstained drops of freshening dew!
Oh, while our martyrs fall, our heroes bleed,
Keep us to every sweet remembrance true,
Till from this blood-red sunset springs new-born
Our Nation's second morn!

HOW TO USE VICTORY.

The policy of the nation, since the war began, has been eminently the Anglo-Saxon policy. That is to say, we have not adapted our actions to any preconceived theory, nor to any central idea. From the President downward, every one has done as well as he could in every single day, doubtful, and perhaps indifferent, as to what he should do the next day. This is the method dear to the Anglo-Saxon mind. The English writers acknowledge this; they call it the "practical system," and make an especial boast that it is the method of their theology, their philosophy, their physical science, their manufactures, and their trade. In the language of philosophy, it directs us "to do the duty that comes next us"; in a figure drawn from the card-table, it bids us "follow our hand." The only branch of the Keltic race which adopts it expresses it in the warlike direction, "When you see a head, hit it."

We have no objection to make to this so-called practical system in the present case, if it only be broadly and generously adopted. If it reduce us to a war of posts, to hand-to-mouth finance, and to that wretched bureau-administration which thinks the day's work is done when the day's letters have been opened, docketed, and answered, it becomes, it is true, a very unpractical system, and soon reduces a great state to be a very little one. But if the men who direct any country will, in good faith, enlarge their view every day, from their impressions of yesterday to the new realities of to-day,--if they will rise at once to the new demands of to-day, and meet those demands under the new light of to-day,--all the better is it, undoubtedly, if they are not hampered by traditionary theories, if they are even indifferent as to the consistency of their record, and are, thus, as able as they are willing to work out God's present will with all their power. For it must be that the present light of noonday will guide us better at noonday than any prophecies which we could make at midnight or at dawn.

The country, at this moment, demands this broad and generous use of its great present advantages. In three years of sacrifice we have won extraordinary victories. We have driven back the beach-line of rebellion so that its territory is now two islands, both together of not half the size of the continent which it boasted when it began. We have seen such demonstrations of loyalty and the love of liberty that we dare say that this is to be one free nation, as we never dared say it before the war began. We are on the edge, as we firmly believe, of yet greater victories, both in the field and in the conscience of the nation. The especial demand, then, made on our statesmen, and on that intelligent people which, as it appears, leads the statesmen, instead of being led by them, is, "How shall we use our victories?" We have no longer the right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how to use them.

As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of territory come, for the time, under the military government of the United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad, and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations, as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes, from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in law. A very large number of them--possibly a quarter part of them--are free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first footsteps.

To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions, and many others like them, were not yet fully regarded. Yet they are now the questions of the hour, because they are a part of the great central question, "How will you break down the armed power of the Rebel States?" To maintain the conquered belt between us and our "wayward sisters" as a land of plenty, and not as a desert,--to establish on system the blacks whose masters desert them, or who take refuge within our lines,--and also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and loyal,--these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that Government, to compel it so to determine. The Government may not shake off questions of confiscated lands, pay of negro troops, superintendence of fugitives, and the like, as if they were the unimportant details of a halcyon future. Because this is the moment of impending victory, because that victory should be used on the instant, the Government is bound to attend to such provisions now. It is said, that, when General McClellan landed below Yorktown, now two years ago, the Washington Post-Office had made the complete arrangements for resuming the mail-service to Richmond. Undoubtedly the Post-Office Department was right in such foresight. At the present moment, it is equally right for the Government to be prepared for the immediate use of the victories for which, as we write, we are all hoping.

The experiments which we have had to try, in the care and treatment of liberated blacks, have been tried under very different conditions. When the masters on the Sea Islands escaped from their slaves, leaving but one white man behind them, in the midst of fifteen thousand negroes, those negroes were, in general, in their old familiar homes. They had, indeed, trusted themselves to the tender mercies of the "Yankees" because they would not abandon home. The islands on which they lived were easily protected, and, thanks to the generous foresight of those who early had the charge of them, a body of humane and intelligent superintendents soon appeared, to watch over all their interests. In the District of Columbia, on the other hand, the blacks whom the war first liberated had themselves fled from their masters. They found themselves in cities where every condition of life was different from their old home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases, should be in outward form the same.

But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability. General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana. Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after. He has given us a census of them,--and we have already official returns of their _status_. There seems no reason why what has been done there may not be done anywhere.

In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April, sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these, eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,--Freedom for himself and his race forever." They enlisted, knowing that at that time the Government promised them but ten dollars a month. In view of these facts, we consider the proportion of soldiers, nearly one in eight, extraordinary,--though we are aware that the number includes many who had not lived in those counties, who came into our lines with the purpose of enlisting. These simple figures involve the first feature of the true policy in the "Four-Million question." The war offers the negroes this priceless bounty. Let them fight for it. Let us enlist them, to the last man we can persuade to serve.

"If you do that," says Brazen-Face, "you have left on your hands a horde of starving imbeciles, women, and orphans, to support, from whom you have cruelly separated their able-bodied men." No, Brazen-Face, we have no such thing. In the month of March the Government had to supply rations in the district we have named to only seven thousand eight hundred and fifty persons who were members of the families of these soldiers,--the cost being about one dollar a month for each of them. Now the State of Massachusetts, dear Brazen-Face, supplies "State-aid" to the families of its soldiers; and for this support, in this very city of yours, it pays on the average five times as much in proportion as the United States has to pay for the families of these colored soldiers. Nay, you may even take all the persons relieved by Government in General Butler's district,--the number is sixteen thousand seven hundred and sixteen,--count them all as the families of soldiers, which not one-half of them are, and the whole support which they all receive from Government is not half as much as the families of the same number of soldiers are costing the State of Massachusetts. So much for the expense of this system. There is no money-bounty, and the "family-aid" is but one-fifth of that we pay in the case of our own brothers. The figures in General Saxton's district are as gratifying. We have not the Louisiana statistics at hand. And we have not learned that anybody has attempted any statistics in the District of Columbia, or on the Mississippi River. But this illustration, in two districts where the enlistment of colored troops has been pushed to the very edge of its development, is enough to make out another point in the policy of victory, which is, that the colored soldier is the cheapest soldier whom we have in our lines, though we pay him, as of course we should do, full pay.

How is this cheapness of administration gained? The answer is in the second great principle which belongs to the policy of using our victories. Change the homes of the people as little as possible. The families of negroes in the Virginia district are put upon separate farms as far as possible,--on land, and for crops, as nearly as possible, the same as they were used to. These people are conservative. They are fond of home. They are used to work; and they can take care of themselves. Every inducement is given them, therefore, to establish themselves. Farms of eight or ten acres each from abandoned property are allotted them. Where the Government employs any of them, it employs them only at the same rate as the soldier is paid,--so that, if the negro can earn more than that, he does so, and is urged, as well as permitted to do so. He is not bound to the soil, except by merely temporary agreement. What follows is that he uses the gift of freedom to his own best advantage. "Political freedom," says the philosophical General, "rightly defined, is liberty to work." The negroes in his command show that they understand the definition. And this is the reason why, as we have explained, the "family-relief" costs but one-fifth what it does here in Boston.

"But," says Grunnio, at this point, "how will you protect your ten-acre farms from invidious neighbors, from wandering guerrillas?" We will advise them, dear grumbler, to protect themselves. That is one of the responsibilities which freemen have to take as the price of freedom. In the department of Norfolk, where seventeen thousand blacks are supporting themselves on scattered farms, we believe not a pig has been stolen nor a fence broken down on their little plantations by semi-loyal neighbors, who had, perhaps, none too much sympathy, at the first, with their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first, that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own, and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing itself. It is near our posts, it is true,--not nearer, however, than some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that this system deserves to be pressed much farther. We can see that the farmers on such farms may have to be supplied in part with arms for their defence. They may have to be taught to use them. Without providing depots of supplies for an enemy, however, we believe there might be a regular system of establishing the negro in his own home, on or near the plantation where he was born, which would give us from the beginning the advantages of a settled country, instead of a desert in the regions in the rear of our lines.

These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,--not in poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must maintain their freedom.

More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as you would treat white people."

"What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New Orleans.

"I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive reply.

He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange land,--in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,--we should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to defend them.

The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22, providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the highest wage that offers,--if they find they are not arbitrarily removed from their old homes,--and if the protection of those homes is, in the first instance, intrusted to themselves.

These are the first-fruits of freedom for them. For us they are the legitimate use of victory. It only remains that we shall mildly, but firmly, instruct all officers of the Government that it is time for some policy to be adopted which shall involve such uses of victory. The country will be encouraged, the moment it sees that the freedmen are finding their proper places in the new civilization. The country expects its rulers not to wait for chapters of accidents or for volunteer boards to work out such policy, but themselves to provide the system of administration, and the intelligent men who shall promptly and skilfully avail themselves of every victory.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_History of the Romans under the Empire._ By CHARLES MERIVALE, B. D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth London Edition. With a Copious Analytical Index. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. Vols. I. & II.

People of the last century had a very easy time with their Roman history, and any gentleman could pick up enough of it "in course of his morning's reading" to answer the demands of a lifetime. Men read and believed. They had no more doubt of the existence of Romulus and Remus than of the existence of Fairfax and Cromwell. As to the story of those dropped children being nursed by a she-wolf, had it not been established that wolves did sometimes suckle humanity's young? and why should it be supposed that no lupine nursery had ever existed at the foot of the Palatine Hill? After swallowing the wolf-story, everything else was easy; and the history of the Roman Kings was as gravely received as the history of the Roman Emperors. The Brutus who upset the Tarquins was as much an historical character as the Brutus who assassinated Cæsar and killed himself. Tullia had lived and sinned, just like Messallina. The Horatii were of flesh and blood, like the Triumvirs. So was it with regard to the Empire. The same short work that was made with Regal Rome and the early Republican period was applied to the Imperial age. Julius Cæsar was the destroyer of Roman liberty, and Pompeius was the unlucky champion of his country's constitution. With few exceptions, the Emperors were the greatest moral monsters that ever had lived and reigned. It is true that two or three critical writers had so handled historical subjects as to create some doubts as to the exact correctness of the popular view of Roman history; but those doubts were monopolized by a few scholars, and by no means tended to shake the faith which even the educated classes had in the vulgar view of the actions of the mighty conquering race of antiquity.

But all has been changed. For half a century, learned men have been busily employed in pulling down the edifice of Roman history, until they have unsettled everybody's faith in that history. No one now pretends, seriously, to believe anything that is told of the Romans farther back than the time of Pyrrhus. Clouds and darkness rest over the earlier centuries, and defy penetration. What Sir Thomas Browne says of Egypt is not inapplicable to early Rome. History mumbleth something to the inquirer, "but what it is he heareth not." Not even the story of Curtius now finds believers. He must have been a contractor, who made an enormous fortune at the time of the secession of the plebs, and ruined himself by the operation. So far as relates to early Roman history, want of faith is very natural; for what documents have we to go upon in making up an opinion concerning it? None to speak of. But it is strange, at the first thought, that there should be any difficulty in making up a judgment concerning the history of the last century or two of the Republic, and of the Imperial period. Of those times much that was then written still survives, and many of the works that were familiar to the Romans are even more familiar to the moderns. Yet there is a wide difference of sentiment as to the character of the Roman Revolution, and the objects and the actions of the eminent men who figured in that Revolution are yet in dispute; and the contention is almost as fierce, at times, as it was in the days of Pharsalia and Philippi. There are Pompeians and Cæsarians now, as there were nineteen centuries ago, only that the pen with them is indeed mightier than the sword. Cæsar's case has been reviewed, and the current of opinion is now setting strongly in his favor. Instead of being looked upon as a mere vulgar usurper, who differed from other usurpers only in having a greater stage, and talents proportioned to that stage, he is held up as the man of his times, and as the only man who could fulfil the demands of the crisis that existed after the death of Sulla. According to Mr. Merivale, who is a very moderate Cæsarian, Cæsar was "the true captain and lawgiver and prophet of the age" in which he lived. When such an assertion can be made by an English gentleman of well-balanced mind, we may form some idea of the intensity of that Cæsarism which prevails in fiercer minds, and which is intended to have an effect on contemporary rule. For the controversy which exists relative to the merits of Romans "dead, and turned to clay," is not merely critical and scholastic, but is enlivened by its direct bearing upon living men and contending parties. Cæsarism means Napoleonism. The Bonaparte family is the Julian family of to-day. Napoleon I. stood for the great Julius, and Napoleon III. is the modern (and very Gallic) Cæsar Augustus, the avenger of his ill-used uncle, and the crusher of the Junii and the Crassi, and all the rest of the aristocrats, who overthrew him, and caused his early death. It is not necessary to point out the utter absurdity of this attempt to justify modern despotism by referring to the action of men who lived and acted in the greatest of ancient revolutions; and those men who admire Julius Cæsar, but who are not disposed to see in his conduct a justification of the conduct of living men, object to the French Imperial view of his career. Mommsen, whose admiration of Cæsar is as ardent as his knowledge of Roman history is great, speaks with well-deserved scorn of the efforts that are made to defend contemporary usurpation by misrepresentation of the history of antiquity. One of his remarks is curious, read in connection with that history which daily appears in our journals. Writing before our civil war began, he declared, that, if ever the slaveholding aristocracy of the Southern States of America should bring matters to such a pass as their counterparts in the Rome of Sulla, Cæsarism would be pronounced legitimate there also by the spirit of history,--an observation that derived new interest from the report that General Lee was to be made Dictator of the Confederacy, and Mr. Davis allowed to go into that retirement which is so much admired and so little sought by all politicians. Mommsen, after the remark above quoted, proceeds to say, that, whenever Cæsarism "appears under other social conditions, it is at once a usurpation and a caricature. History, however, will not consent to curtail the honor due to the true Cæsar, because her decision, in the presence of false Cæsars, may give occasion to simplicity to play the fool and to villany to play the rogue. She, too, is a Bible, and if she can as little prevent herself from being misunderstood by the fool and quoted by the Devil, she ought as little to be prejudiced by either." Strong words, but very natural as coming from a learned German who finds his own theory turned to account by the supporters of a house which Germany once helped to overthrow, and which she would gladly aid in overthrowing again. Perhaps Dr. Mommsen will soon have an opportunity to speak more at length of French Cæsarism, for the first two volumes of Napoleon III.'s "Life of Julius Cæsar" are announced as nearly ready for publication, and their appearance cannot fail to be the signal for a battle royal, as few scholars, we presume, will be content to take historical law from an Emperor. The modern master of forty legions will not be as fortunate as Hadrian in finding philosophers disinclined to question his authority in letters; and he may fare even worse at their hands than he fared at those of Mr. Kinglake. The republic of letters is not to be mastered by a _coup d'état_.