Chapter XIII (3)

It was a lovely morning in February; the air had already a May softness in it, and the crocuses were bright in the grounds of the Capitol, when Edward and I went to take our favorite walk, and there, in sight of the broad river which is now a world-known name of division, he told me he had made up his mind to leave the army; that there might be fighting, and he could not fight against his own people, whom he believed to be in the right; that he thought it more honorable to resign at that moment than to wait until the hour of need. I could not oppose him, for I knew he thought he was doing his duty. I remembered how different his opinions were from mine, and that his whole system of education had trained him in dissimilar ideas of right from those held in the North. Georgia was his country, for which he lived, and for which he thought he ought to die, if need were. The shackles of inherited prejudices trammelled his spirit, as they might have trammelled the spirit of a wiser man, who could have shaken them off in the end; but my lover was not wide-minded, and had not the clear sight that sees over and beyond these petty lives of ours that are as nothing in the way of a great principle and a God-bidden struggle; his eyes saw only what they had been taught to see--his home, in its greenness and beauty, not the dank soul-malaria, to which, alas! so many of us are acclimated.

He resigned, and his resignation was accepted without delay or difficulty, as were all resignations in those days. The spring began to break in all its glory, and the grass grew green in Virginia, on fields that were trampled and bloody before that battle summer was over. The little wren sang again its song. This year a song of promise--of promise never to be fulfilled!

For the news of Sumter came, and the North rose with a cry, and my heart leaped up within me with a thrill stronger and deeper and more masterful than any mere personal feeling can ever give; a feeling that rules my soul to-day even as it ruled in that first excited hour.

Edward went South, and I let him go alone. I could not, I would not go with him. I had no sympathy, no tenderness, scarcely forgiveness for the men who had brought the evil upon us. We parted lovers, hoping for days of peace, and sure of reunion when those days should come; and every night and every morning I prayed for him; but first I prayed for the safety of my country, and the victory of our cause.

Time crept on. The battle of Bull Run was fought; he was engaged in it, and for many, many days I never knew whether he was living or dead. In the autumn I heard he had been ordered West, and that winter was a time of anxious days and restless nights. I never heard _from_ him, and I did not think it fair to write; occasionally I heard _of_ him through an aunt of his, who lived in Maryland, but she was gall and bitterness itself on the political question, and never let me know anything she could possibly keep from me. So my life passed in fruitless wondering and bitter suspense; I never saw a soldier without thinking of Edward, and my dreams showed him to me wounded, ill, or dying. No; the dead may make their voices heard across the gulf that parts us from them, but not the absent, or his soul would have heard my 'exceeding loud and bitter cry,' and hearing, must have come.

I must not dwell on this. The days rolled on, and spring brightened the air, the grass was green again, the dying hope in my heart revived, and I listened again to the wren's song, and thought it yet promised a summer for my life. But that was the year of the Peninsular campaign, and the dying leaves fell on the graves of our bravest and brightest, and the autumn wind sighed a lamentation in our ears, and our hearts were mourning bitterly for the defeats of the summer, and no less bitterly for the dear-bought glory of Antietam. And winter came again: hope fled with the swallows, and my youth began to leave me.

In the late autumn I went to New York, to pay a visit to a friend. One night I went with my brother to the theatre. The play was stupid, and the _entr'actes_ were long. In the middle of the second act, while some horrible nonsense was being talked upon the stage, I looked around the theatre, and saw no face I had ever seen before, when a lady near me moved her fan, and, a little distance beyond her, I saw--with a start I saw--the face that was never long absent from my thoughts. Changed and older, and brown and bearded; but I knew him; and he knew me, and smiled; and there was no doubt in my mind. I was not even surprised. But to the sickness of sudden joy soon succeeded the sickness of apprehension. What brought him there? And what would be done to him if he were discovered? How could I see him and speak to him? Oh! could it be possible that we might not meet more nearly! I wonder I did not die during that quarter of an hour. I turned and looked at my brother; his eyes were fixed upon the stage, and he was as curiously unmoved as if the world were still steady and firm beneath my feet.

I did not look at Edward again; I feared to betray him; and the green curtain fell, and my brother said, if I did not mind being left alone for a few minutes, he would go. He left me, and Edward came to me, and once more I saw him, and once more I heard his voice. He stayed only one moment, only long enough to make an appointment with me for the next morning, and then he left the theatre. The people around us thought probably that he was a casual acquaintance, if indeed they thought about it at all; and when my brother came back, he found me looking listless and bored, and apologized for having been detained.

I had--and still have, thank God!--a friend in whom I trusted; to her I had recourse, and it was by her help that I was enabled to keep my appointment. Only those who have known the pain of such a parting can ever hope to know the joy of such a meeting. I would like to make the rest of this as short as possible. Edward had run the blockade to see me; he had been to Washington, had stayed there three days, had heard of my absence, obtained my address, and followed me to New York; he had waited until twilight, when he had come to look at the house where I was staying; as he was walking slowly on the opposite side of the street, he had seen me come out with my brother, and had followed us to the theatre. He had trusted to his long beard and the cropping of his curly head as the most effectual disguise, and so far no one had recognized him. The only people who had known of his being in Washington were the friends with whom he stayed, the tailor who had sold him his clothes, who had a son with Stuart's cavalry, and the girl, my old school friend, who had given him my address, whom he went to see in the dusk hours of the afternoon, and who had hospitably received him in the coal cellar--which struck me, at the moment, as an infallible method of arousing suspicion. He wanted me to return with him, or to marry him and follow him by flag of truce; he was sure Providence had made his way smooth on purpose to effect our union. His arguments were perhaps not very logical, but they almost convinced me of what I wished to believe. I was willing to bear the anger of my family, but could not think of again undergoing the wear and tear of separation. I promised to let him know my decision early the next morning; I think I should have gone with him, but that evening we were telegraphed to return to Washington--my father had been stricken down by apoplexy; and my brother and I went home in the night train. Edward knew the reason, for he read my father's death in the morning's newspaper.

Three weeks afterward I had a letter from Edward Mayne by flag of truce; that was the week before Fredericksburg; and then the agony again began. It did not last very long. In the early spring came Chancellorsville, and there Edward was slightly wounded and taken prisoner; he was removed to the hospital at Point Lookout; his aunt went to nurse him, but I did not go; he was doing very well, and I thought it was wiser not. And one day in May--ah! that day!--I was looking out of my window, and I see now the blue sky, the little white clouds, the roses, and the ivied wall that I saw when my mother came in and said Mrs. Daingerfield had come to take me to Edward, who was very ill and anxious to see me. I remember how the blood seemed to sink away from my heart, and for a moment I thought I was going to die; but in another moment I knew that I should live. I was eager and excited, and not unhappy, from that time until the end was at hand.

I had never been in a hospital before, and there was a long ward full of men, who all looked to me as if they were dying, through which I passed to reach the room in which Edward Mayne lay alone. He heard me coming, and, as I opened the door, he raised himself in bed and put out his hand to me....

That night the dreadful pain left him, and his aunt said he seemed brighter and more hopeful; but when the surgeon saw him in the morning, he shook his head. When the sun set, Edward knew that he should never again see its evening glories. Into that dark, still room came a greater than Solomon, and as the dread shadow of his wings fell on my life, I hushed my prayers and tears. We sat and watched and waited; and there came back a feeble strength into the worn frame, and he told us what he wished. He said that perhaps he had been wrong, but he had thought himself right; at least, he had given his life for his faith, and soon, soon he would know all. Then he asked them to leave him alone with me for a little while, and when they came back into the room, nothing remained of him but the cast-off mortality. The sun was rising in the east, but his soul was far beyond it; and the sunlight came in and kissed the quiet pale face, that looked so peaceful and so happy there could be no lamentation over it.

That day came his parole; the parole which we had so exerted ourselves to obtain that he might go home to get well; and now it had found him far beyond the captivity of bar or flesh--a freed spirit, 'gone up on high.'

The kindness of the Government induced us to ask one more favor, which was granted us. They let us take him home to Washington and bury him in the place he had always wished to be buried in; and some Confederate prisoners were given permission to attend his funeral. So he was buried as a soldier should be buried, borne to the grave by his comrades, and mourned by the woman dearest to him. He lies now on the sunniest slope in that green graveyard, where the waters rush near his resting place, and the trees make a shade for the daisies that brighten above him.

He died as the sun rose on the first of June; we buried him early on the morning of the fifth. That night I left Washington, glad that it was to be no longer my place of residence, glad that my family would soon follow me to make another home where I could be stung by no associations. The old house passed into the hands of my elder sister, who is married to a Congressman from the West. But during this winter I have been so often homesick, and this early spring has been so chill and bleak compared with the May days of Washington, that I was fain to come back for a brief hour; and I have chosen to come in these last May days, that the first of June might find me here, true to the memory of the past.

There is nothing left of the old days; the place is changed from what it once was; the streets swarm with soldiers and strange faces; the houses are used by Government, or are dwelt in by strangers; there is scarcely a trace in this Sodom of the Sodom before the flood. No, there is nothing left for me now, of the things I used to know, except the little wren, whose song broke my heart this morning; and there is nothing here for me to care for, except that young grave in Georgetown, whose white cross bears but the initials and the date. I must now try to make myself a new life elsewhere, and to-morrow I go forth, shaking off the dust that soils my garments; hoping for the promise of the rainbow in this storm--and sure of the strength that will not fail me. O world! be better than thy wont to thy poor, weary child! O earth! be kindly to a bruised reed! O hope! thou wilt not leave me till the end--the end for which I wait.

WORD-STILTS

If the reader is so favored as to possess a copy of the 'Comparative Physiognomy' of Dr. James W. Redfield (a work long out of market, and which never had much of a sale), he may find in a chapter concerning the likeness between certain men and parrots some wise remarks on ridiculous eccentricities in literature. 'In inferior minds,' says the Doctor,'the love of originality shows itself in oddity.' 'There is many a sober innovator,' he continues, farther on,' whose delight it is to ponder

'O'er many a volume of forgotten lore,'

that he may not be supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these writers to parrots.

Now it is a well-known peculiarity of parrots that they have a passion for perching themselves in places where they will be on a level with the heads of the superior race whose utterances they imitate. The perch a parrot affects is almost always an altitude of about six feet, or the height of the tallest men. They feel their inferiority keenly if you leave them to hop about on the floor. It occurs to us that nothing could please a parrot more, if it could be, than a pair of stilts on which it could hop comfortably.

The literary parrot, more fortunate than his feathered fellow, finds stilts in words--obsolete words, such as men do not use in common intercourse with their fellows. Modern rhymesters more and more affect this thing. Every day sees some _outre_ old word resurrected from its burial of rubbish, and set in the trochaics and spondees of love songs and sonnets. Dabblers in literature, who would walk unseen, pigmies among a race of giants, get on their word-stilts, and straightway the ear-tickled critics and the unconsciously nose-led public join in paeans of applause. Sage men, who do not exactly see through the thing, nod their heads approvingly, and remark: 'Something in that fellow!' And the delighted ladies, prone as the dear creatures often are to be pleased with jingle that they don't understand, exclaim: 'A'n't he delightful!'

The lamented Professor Alexander once produced a very excellent poem, which contained only words of a single syllable, forcibly illustrating the power of simple language. We should be glad to reproduce it here, by way of contrapose to our own accompanying poem, but cannot now recall it to memory in its completeness. Any child, who could talk as we all talk in our families, could read and understand fully the poem to which I refer. But ask any child to read the lines we have hammered out below, and tell you what they mean! Nay, ask any man to do it, and see if he _can_ do it. Probably not one in a hundred usual readers, could 'read and translate' the word-stilts with which we have trammelled our poetic feet, except with the aid of patient and repeated communion with his English dictionary. There are, however, no words employed here which may not be found in the standard dictionaries of our tongue.

To it:

THE POET INVOKETH HIS MUSE.

Come, ethel muse, with fluxion tip my pen,
For rutilant dignotion would I earn;
As rhetor wise depeint me unto men:
A thing or two I ghess they'll have to learn
Ere they percipience can claim of what I'm up
To, in macrology so very sharp as this;
Off food oxygian hid them come and sup,
Until, from very weariness, they all dehisce.

THE POET SEEKETH THE READER'S FORBEARANCE.

Delitigate me not, O reader mine,
If here you find not all like flies succinous;
My hand is porrect--kindly take't in thine,
While modestly my caput is declinous;
Nor think that I sugescent motives have,
In asking thee to read my chevisance.
I weet it is depectible--but do not rave,
Nor despumate on me with look askance.

Existimation greatly I desire;
'Tis so expetible I have sad fears
That, excandescent, you will not esquire
My meaning; see, I madefy my cheek with tears,
On my bent knees implore forbearance kind;
Be not retose in haught; I know 'tis sad,
But get your Webster down, and you will find
That he's to blame, not I--so don't get mad!

THE POET COMMENCETH TO SING.

The morning dawned. The rorid earth upon,
Old Sol looked down, to do his work siccate,
My sneek I raised to greet the ethe sun,
And sauntering forth passed out my garden gate.
A blithe specht sat on yon declinous tree
Bent on delection to its bark extern;
A merle anear observed (it seemed to me)
The work, in hopes to make owse how to learn.

A drove of kee passed by; I made a stond,
For fast as kee how could my old legs travel?
But--immorigerous brutes!--with feet immund
They seemed to try my broadcloth garb to javel.
The semblance of a mumper then I wore,
Though a faldisdory before I might have graced;
Eftsoons I found, when standing flames before,
The mud to siccate, it was soon erased.

If we should turn our attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow dips' of parrot-poetry.

A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM.

MY DEAR CONTINENTAL:

When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk; high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage, impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively; always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'

Is it not possible that we may be coming to--no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the _enemigos pagados_, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employes (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide--because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his _subscalaneans_, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.

Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:

'J'apercus l'ombre d'un cocher
Tenant l'ombre d'une brosse
Nettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'

Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.

Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.

In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England _help_ to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a _labor famine_ in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.

Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of _assistants_. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers--because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants _do_. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.

But is it altogether a prejudice? Is it not a sound view of that condition of life?

I confess that it has long been a matter of surprise to me that men should be found willing to hire themselves out for domestic service in a country where bread and meat may so easily be obtained in other ways, and where even independent manual labor is so often considered derogatory to the dignity of the native born. To do our dirty work that it disgusts us to do for ourselves, to stand behind our chairs at table, to obey our whims and caprices, to have never a moment they can call their own, to keep down their temper when we lose ours, to be compelled to ask for permission to go out for a walk, seems to me a sad existence even with good food and wages.

The fact is, my dear CONTINENTAL, that the relation between master and servant has to be readjusted to suit the times. Indeed it is readjusting itself. We see the signs, although we may not perceive their significance. Our life is a dream. I use this venerable saying in another sense than the one generally intended by it: I mean that we live half our lives, if not more, in the imagination; and that the imagination of every-day people is a dream made up of feelings brought together from the habits, theories, and prejudices of the past of all lands and all nations of men. The reality that was once in them has long since been out of them; yet these vague and shadowy fancies are all-powerful and govern our actions. So that morally we go about like maskers in the carnival, dressed in the old clothes of our ancestors. With this difference, that most of us do not see how shabby and threadbare they are, and how unsuited to our present wants. And the few who do see this have an inbred fondness for the old romantic rags, and wear some of them in spite of their better judgment. Our moneyed class cling in particular to the dream of an aristocracy, and love to look down upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a _nouveau riche_ and a _parvenu_. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. I have seen an ardent democrat, who had roared equal rights from many a stump, furious with the impertinence of a waiter, whose answer, if it had come from an equal, he would scarcely have noticed. And was not the waiter a man and a fellow voter? What distinction of class have we in this country? It is true that the property qualification we have discarded in our political system we have retained as our test of social position. Indeed, no abstract rights of man can make up the difference between rich and poor. But Fortune is nowhere so blind nor so busy in twirling her wheel; and our two classes are so apt to change places, that frequently the only difference between the master and the footman who stands behind him, is the difference of capital. And Europe is treading the same democratic path as ourselves, limping along after us as fast as her old legs will carry her. The time will come when the class from which we have so long enlisted recruits for our _batteries de cuisine_ will find some other career better suited to their expanded views.

What then? Do you suggest that we may lay a hand upon the colored element, after the example of our honored President? But

'While flares the epaulette like flambeau
On Corporal Cuff and Ensign Sambo,'

can you expect either of these distinguished officers to leave the service of the United States for ours? What with intelligent contrabandism, emancipation, the right of suffrage, and the right to ride in omnibuses, we fear that their domestic usefulness will be sadly impaired.

Oh for machinery! automaton flunkies, requiring only to be wound up and kept oiled! What a housekeeping Utopia! Thomson foreshadowed a home paradise of this kind when he wrote the 'Castle of Indolence:'

'You need but wish, and, instantly obeyed,
Fair ranged the dishes rose and thick the glasses played.'

But as yet invention has furnished no reapers and mowers for within doors. We have only dumb waiters; poor, creaking things, that break and split, like their flesh-and-blood namesakes, and distribute the smell of the kitchen throughout the house. Heine once proposed a society to ameliorate the condition of the rich. He must have meant a model intelligence office. I wish it had been established, for we may all need its aid.

What are we to do when we come to the last of the servants? Darwin says that the _Formica rufescens_ would perish without its slaves; we are almost as dependent as these confederate ants. Our social civilization is based upon servants. Certainly, the refinements of life, as we understand it, could not exist Without them, and it is difficult to see how any business of magnitude could be carried on. Briareus himself could not take care of a large country place, with its stables, barns, horses, cattle, and crops, even if Mrs. B. had the same physical advantages, and was willing to help him. Must we tempt them back by still larger salaries, or increase their social consideration, telling them, as a certain clergyman once said of his order, that 'they are supported, and not hired'?--changing the word help, as we have servant, into household officer or assistant manager, or adopt a Chinese euphemism, such as steward of the table or governor of the kitchen? Fourier does something of this kind; in his system the class names of young scullions are cherubs and seraphs! Or shall we adopt the cooeperative plan of Mill and others, and offer John an interest in the family--say, possibly, the position of resident son-in-law after ten years of honesty, sobriety, and industry--with a seat at table in the mean while? Or must all the work be done by women, and a proprietor have to seal his Biddies _more sanctorum_ in Utah? Or might not poor relations, now confessedly nuisances, be made useful in this way? Some marquis asked Sophie Arnould why she did not discharge her stupid porter? 'I have often thought of it,' she answered, '_mais que voulez vous, c'est mon pere_.'

These resources failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or _phalansteres a la Fourier_, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded pens, as characterless as sheep in the flock, attended upon by waiters, chambermaids, and cooks, who will have a share in the profits, and consequently will be happy to do anything to increase the income of their house.

I see no other remedy, and I offer this great social problem to the serious thoughts of your readers.

Yours ever, G. V.

APHORISMS.--NO. XIII.

It was a frequent exclamation of Herder the Great: 'Oh, my life, that has failed of its ends!' and many of us, no doubt, find ourselves disposed to indulge in the same lament. But it deserves careful attention; no man's life fails of its true end unless through some grievous moral fault of his own.

The true end of life is that we may 'glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.' How this may be attained, as far as outward circumstances or activities are concerned, we can hardly judge for ourselves: but there is one sure test; and that is in the duties of our station. If we honestly perform them, and especially as under the teachings of the gospel of Christ, there can be no real and permanent failure. We shall have done what we were set to do upon the earth; and with this we may well be content.

OUR GREAT AMERICA.

The republican government of the United States, when first originated by the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies, and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.

That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.

We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by _virtue of their intelligence_. It required many centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived, and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it, gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible, and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped civilizations.[A]

[Footnote A: A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a _change of masters_, a voluntary one, no doubt, in those _who had any choice_, and in this sense an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.' Speaking, in another place, of the causes which brought about the decline of Protestantism, etc., Mr. Hallam says: 'We ought to reckon also among the principal causes of this change, those perpetual disputes, those irreconcilable animosities, that bigotry, above all, and persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle--the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their _own_ belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much confidence to invalidate.'

Luther was one of the many reformers who, feeling the necessity of freedom for themselves, never dream of according it to others. His self-hold, his 'me,' was masterful, and led him far astray from the inevitable logic of his perilous position. His 'I-ness' was so supreme that he mistook his own convictions for the truths of the Most High--a common mistake among reformers! He did not feel the sovereignty of man with regard to his fellow man, his positive inalienable right to deal with his God alone in matters of faith and religious conviction. The golden rule of our Master, 'Do as you would be done by,' seems simple and self-evident, and yet it is a late fruit in the garden of human culture. Mr. Roscoe says: 'When Luther was engaged in his opposition to the Church of Rome, he asserted the right of private judgment with the confidence and courage of a martyr. But no sooner had he freed his followers from the chains of papal domination, than he forget other in many respects equally intolerable: and it was the employment of his latter years to counteract the beneficial effects produced by his former labors.'

Any system which saps the foundation of religious liberty, which forces itself between man and his Maker, cannot guarantee to us one of the main objects of all free governments--security in the pursuit of happiness. The Reformation did not give us religious freedom, therefore it did not give or suggest to us our democratic institutions. All that is true and pure in them springs from the very heart of Christianity itself. 'Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.' Much of the manifestation of the philosophy of freedom depends on individual character. Pope Alexander III., A.D. 1167, writes: 'Nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty.' Luther, in 1524, says to the German peasants; 'You wish to emancipate yourselves from slavery, but slavery is as old as the world. Abraham had slaves, and St. Paul established rules for those whom the laws of nations reduced to that state.' Many of our modern priests reecho these sentiments! Guizot says: 'The emancipation of the human mind and _absolute_ monarchy triumphed simultaneously.' The truth is we want a philosophical history of the Reformation, written neither from a Catholic, Protestant, nor infidel point of view, that we may rightly estimate what we lost, what gained in its wild storms. In judging this, we should not quite forget that it was the Catholic Lord Baltimore and Catholic colonists of Maryland who in 1648 first proclaimed on these shores the glorious principle of _universal toleration_, while the Puritans were persecuting in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia. 'Nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,' should be the rule of our souls. Humanity means eternal Progress, and its path is onward.--ED. CON.]

It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did, was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism, which means so much and includes so many vast emprises--establishing for freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so wide and magnificent a dominion.

The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master of Europe--made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth the base and dome of popular government.

The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here, upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.

It was impossible that American society could hold together with this accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the result be for future generations.

Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath.

Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population--the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them--are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes--confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.

We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense. Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North, they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery, and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres--regarding them as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly sacrifices--these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their presence.

That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon. The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes and the clank of chains.

This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only, shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name we bear.

In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people. Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything within the range of possible achievement.

We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a great people. We started on our career with a long background of experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic governments, and her unequal laws--the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved--with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.