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PEACE CULTURE AND WAR THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER MR. HORACE GREELEY THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN JOHN STUART MILL PANICS THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT R?LE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR CHROMO-CIVILIZATION "THE SHORT-HAIRS" AND "THE SWALLOW-TAILS" JUDGES AND WITNESSES "THE DEBTOR CLASS" COMMENCEMENT ADMONITION "ORGANS" EVIDENCE ABOUT CHARACTER PHYSICAL FORCE IN POLITICS "COURT CIRCLES" LIVING IN EUROPE AND GOING TO IT CARLYLE'S POLITICAL INFLUENCE THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUMMER RESORT SUMMER REST THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES WILL WIMBLES

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS

PEACE

The horrors of war are just now making a deeper impression than ever on the popular mind, owing to the close contact with the battle-field and the hospital into which the railroad and the telegraph and the newspaper have brought the public of all civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so to speak, under every man's and woman's eyes; and, what is perhaps of nearly as much importance, the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the increased complication of the social machine, render the smallest derangement of it anywhere a concern and trouble to all nations. The consequence is that the desire for peace was never so deep as it is now, and the eagerness of all good people to find out some other means of deciding international disputes than mutual killing never so intense.

And yet the unconsciousness of the true nature and difficulties of the problem they are trying to solve, which is displayed by most of those who make the advocacy of peace their special work, is very discouraging. We are far from believing that the incessant and direct appeals to the public conscience on the subject of war are not likely in the long run to produce some effect; but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that the efforts of the special advocates of peace have thus far helped to spread and strengthen the impression that there is no adequate substitute for the sword as an arbiter between nations, or, in other words, to harden the popular heart on the subject of military slaughter. It is certain that, during the last fifty years, the period in which peace societies have been at work, armies have been growing steadily larger, the means of destruction have been multiplying, and wars have been as frequent and as bloody as ever before; and, what is worse, the popular heart goes into war as it has never done in past ages.

The great reason why the more earnest enemies of war have not made more progress toward doing away with it, has been that, from the very outset of their labors down to the present moment, they have devoted themselves mainly to depicting its horrors and to denouncing its cruelty. In other words, they almost invariably approach it from a side with which nations actually engaged in it are just as familiar as anybody, but which has for the moment assumed in their eyes a secondary importance. The peace advocates are constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the combatants only think, and will only think, of the nobleness of dying. To the peace advocates the soldier is always a man going to slaughter his neighbors; to his countrymen he is a man going to lose his life for their sake--that is, to perform the loftiest act of devotion of which a human being is capable. It is not wonderful, then, that the usual effect of appeals for peace made by neutrals is to produce mingled exasperation and amusement among the belligerents. To the great majority of Europeans our civil war was a shocking spectacle, and the persistence of the North in carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and lust of dominion. To the great majority of those engaged in carrying it on the struggle was a holy one, in which it was a blessing to perish. Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears than the taunts and execrations which American wives and mothers heard from the other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands and sons whom they had sent to the battle-field, never thinking at all of their slaying, but thinking solely of their being slain; and very glad indeed that, if death had to come, it should come in such a cause. If we go either to France or Germany to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt them--there is no more question in the German and French mind that French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in fighting, than there was in the most patriotic Northern or Southern home during our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a German or French mother, the light of whose life had gone out at Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow as a great gift of God, would receive an address from New York on the general wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know of--that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible. When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the point of believing that there are objects within its reach for which life were well surrendered, it has reached a region in which the wise saws and modern instances of the philosopher or lawyer cannot touch it, and in which pictures of the misery of war only help to make the martyr's crown seem more glorious.

Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by those who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell upon the folly and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants to stop fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suffering and loss of life, and the destruction of property. The principal effect of this on "the average man" has been to produce the impression that the friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him smile over the earnestness with which everybody looks on his own wars as holy and inevitable, and his neighbors' wars as unnecessary and wicked. Any practical movement to put an end to war must begin far away from the battle-field and its horrors. It must take up and deal with the various influences, social and political, which create and perpetuate the state of mind which makes people ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preaching down war generally are very like general homilies in praise of virtue and denunciation of vice. Everybody agrees with them, but nobody is ever ready to admit their applicability to his particular case. War is, in our time, essentially the people's work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses and sufferings are theirs. All attempts to saddle emperors, kings, and nobles with the responsibility of it may as well be given up from this time forward.

Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation? It is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace, and not after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has gone mad with patriotism and rage. They are, first of all, the preaching in the press and elsewhere of the false and pernicious doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses, and can be made happy by its misery; that the United States, for instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French, German, or English industry. One of the first duties of a peace society is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down wherever they see it, as one of the great promoters of the pride and hardness of heart which make war seem a trifling evil. America can no more gain by French or German ruin than New York can gain by that of Massachusetts. Secondly, there is the mediaeval doctrine that the less commercial intercourse nations carry on with each other the better for both, and that markets won or kept by force are means of gain. There has probably been no more fruitful source of war than this. It has for three centuries desolated the world, and all peace associations should fix on it, wherever they encounter it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly, there is the tendency of the press, which is now the great moulder of public opinion, to take what we may call the pugilist's view of international controversies. The habit of taunting foreign disputants, sneering at the cowardice or weakness of the one who shows any sign of reluctance in drawing the sword, and counting up the possible profit to its own country of one or other being well thrashed, in which it so frequently indulges, has inevitably the effect not only of goading the disputants into hostilities, but of connecting in the popular mind at home the idea of unreadiness or unwillingness to fight with baseness and meanness and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there is the practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in every civilized country steadily adhere, of maintaining, as far as their influence goes, the same notions about national honor which once prevailed about individual "honor"--that is, the notion that it is discreditable to acknowledge one's self in the wrong, and always more becoming to fight than apologize. "The code" has been abandoned in the Northern States and in England in the regulations of the relations of individual men, and a duellist is looked on, if not as a wicked, as a crack-brained person; but in some degree in both of them, and in a great degree in all other countries, it still regulates the mode in which international quarrels are brought to a conclusion.

CULTURE AND WAR

Of course, the quality of the private soldier has in all wars a good deal to do with making or marring the fortunes of commanders; but it is safe to say that no strategists have over owed so much to the quality of their men as the Prussian strategists. Their perfect handling of the great masses which are now manoeuvring in France has been made in large degree possible by the intelligence of the privates. This has been strikingly shown on two or three occasions by the facility with which whole regiments or brigades have been sacrificed in carrying a single position. With ordinary troops, only a certain amount can be deliberately and openly exacted of any one corps. The highest heights of devotion are often beyond their reach. But if it serves the purposes of a Prussian commander to have all the cost of an assault fall on one regiment, he apparently finds not the slightest difficulty in getting it to march to certain destruction, and not blindly as peasants march, but as men of education, who understand the whole thing, but having made it for this occasion their business to die, do it like any other duty of life--not hilariously or enthusiastically or recklessly, but calmly and energetically, as they study or manufacture or plough. They get themselves killed not one particle more than is necessary, but also not one particle less.

Prussia has got the start of all other countries by combining the whole nation in one vast organization for purposes of offence and defence. Hitherto nations have simply subscribed toward the maintenance of armies and concerned themselves little about their internal economy and administration; but the Prussians have converted themselves into an army, and have been enabled to do so solely by subjecting themselves to a long process of elaborate training, which has changed the national character. When reduced to the lowest point of humiliation after the battle of Jena, they went to work and absolutely built up the nation afresh. We may not altogether like the result. To large numbers of people the Prussian type of character is not a pleasing one, nor Prussian society an object of unmixed admiration, and there is something horrible in a whole people's passing their best years learning how to kill. But we cannot get over the fact that the Prussian man is likely to furnish, consciously or unconsciously, the model to other civilized countries, until such time as some other nation has so successfully imitated him as to produce his like.

Let those who believe, as Mr. Wendell Phillips says that he believes, that "the best education a man can get is what he gets in picking up a living," and that universities are humbugs, and that from the newspapers and lyceum lecture the citizen can always get as much information on all subjects, human and divine, as is good for him or the State, take a look at the Prussian soldier as he marches past in his ill-fitting uniform and his leather helmet. First of all, we observe that he smokes a great deal. According to some of us, the "tobacco demon" ought by this time to have left him a thin, puny, hollow-eyed fellow, with trembling knees and palpitating heart and listless gait, with shaking hands and an intense craving for ardent spirits. You perceive, however, that a burlier, broader-shouldered, ruddier, brighter-eyed, and heartier-looking man you never set eyes on; and as he swings along in column, with his rifle, knapsack, seventy rounds of ammunition, blanket, and saucepan, you must confess you cannot help acknowledging that you feel sorry for any equal body of men in the world with which that column may get into "a difficulty." He drinks, too, and drinks a great deal, both of strong beer and strong wine, and has always done so, and all his family friends do it, and have only heard of teetotalism through the newspapers, and, if you asked him to confine himself to water, would look on you as an amiable idiot. Nevertheless, you never see him drunk, nor does his beer produce on him that utterly bemuddling or brain-paralyzing effect which is so powerfully described by our friend Mr. James Parton as produced on him by lager-bier, in that inquiry into the position of "The Coming Man" toward wine, some copies of which, we see, he is trying to distribute among the field-officers. On the contrary, he is, on the whole, a very sober man, and very powerful thinker, and very remarkable scholar. There is no field of human knowledge which he has not been among the first to explore; no heights of speculation which he has not scaled; no problem of the world over which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is the envy of the students of all other countries, and his hatred of sham scholarship and slipshod generalization is intense.

But what with the tobacco and the beer, and the scholarship and his university education, you might naturally infer that he must be a kid-glove soldier, and a little too nice and dreamy and speculative for the actual work of life. But you never were more mistaken. He is leaving behind him some of the finest manufactories and best-tilled fields in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable painter and, as all the world knows, an almost unequalled musician; or if you want proof of his genius for business, look at the speed and regularity with which he and his comrades have transported themselves to the Rhine, and see the perfection of all the arrangements of his regiment. And now, if you think his "bad habits," his daily violations of your notions of propriety, have diminished his power of meeting death calmly--that noblest of products of culture--you have only to follow him up as far as Sedan and see whether he ever flinches; whether you have ever read or heard of a soldier out of whom more marching and fighting and dying, and not flighty, boisterous dying either, could be got.

Now, we can very well understand why people should be unwilling to see the Prussian military system spread into other countries, or even be preserved where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have the men of a whole civilized nation spending so much time out of the flower of their years learning to kill other men; and the lesson to be drawn from the recent Prussian successes is assuredly not that every country ought to have an army like the Prussian army, though we confess that, if great armies must be kept up, there is no better model than the Prussian. The lesson is that, whether you want him for war or peace, there is no way in which you can get so much out of a man as by training him, and training him not in pieces but the whole of him; and that the trained men, other things being equal, are pretty sure in the long run to be the masters of the world.

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS

Take, again, the question of drinking beer and wine. There is a large body of very excellent men in America who, from a long contemplation of the evils wrought by excessive indulgence in intoxicating drinks, have worked themselves up to a state of mind about all use of such drinks which is really discreditable to reasonable beings, leads to the most serious platform excesses, and is perfectly incomprehensible to Continental Europeans. To the former, the drinking even of lager beer connotes, as the logicians say, ever so many other vices--grossness and sensuality of nature, extravagance, indifference to home pleasures, repugnance to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts of religion and morality. To many of them a German workman, and his wife and children, sitting in a beer-garden on a summer's evening, which to European moralists and economists is one of the most pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting spectacle, which calls for the interference of the police. Now, if you go to a beer-garden in Berlin you may, any Sunday afternoon, see doctors of divinity--none of your rationalists--but doctors of real divinity, to whom American theologians go to be taught, doing this very thing, and, what is worse, smoking pipes. An American who applied to this the same course of reasoning which he would apply to a similar scene in America, would simply be guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the whole process would be a model of absurdity.

The truth is that it is almost impossible for anybody to compare one nation with another fairly, unless he possesses complete familiarity with the national life of both, and therefore can distinguish isolated facts from symptomatic facts.

The reason why some of the phenomena of American society which shock foreigners greatly, do not shock even the best Americans so much, is not that the latter have become hardened to them--though this counts for something--but that they know of various counteracting and compensating phenomena which prevent, or are sure to prevent, them in the long run from doing the mischief which they seem to threaten. In other words, they understand the checks and balances of their society as well as its tendencies. Anybody who considers these things will be careful how he denounces people whose manners differ from his own for want of spirituality or morality, and we may add that any historical student engaged in comparing the morality of the age in which he lives with that of any other age which he knows only through chronicles, will do well to exercise the same caution for the same reasons.

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION

Hence any paper which starts on a comic basis alone meets with rivals in all its sober-minded contemporaries, and comes to grief. The difficulty it has to contend with is, in short, very like that which the professional laundress or baker has to contend with, owing to the fact that families are accustomed to do their own washing and bake their own bread. And, indeed, it is not unlike that with which professional writers of all kinds have to contend, owing to the readiness of clergymen, lawyers, and professors to write, while doing something else. An ordinary daily paper supplies, besides its serious disquisitions, fun enough for one average household--sometimes in single jokes, and sometimes in the shape of "sparkle" or "spiciness" in grave articles. Often enough it is very poor stuff, but it amuses people, without turning their attention away from the sober work of life, which is the only way in which the vast body of Americans are willing to be amused. Newspaper comedians have here, what they would not have in London, a chance of letting off a joke once a day, and six or seven jokes a week is more than any comic paper is willing or able to take from any one contributor, partly owing to the need of variety in a paper given wholly to humor, and partly owing to want of space. Anybody, therefore, who has humor for sale finds a readier market among the dailies or magazines, and a far wider circle of readers, than he would in any comic paper.

Neither the Irishman, Scotchman, nor Englishman, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of each other, and measured by the English middle-class standard of propriety, that they become entertaining.

The absence of class distinctions here, too, and the complete democratization of institutions during the last forty years, have destroyed the reverence and sense of mystery by shocking which the European comic paper produces some of its most tickling effects. Gladstone and Disraeli figuring as pugilists in the ring, for instance, diverts the English public, because it gives a very smart blow to the public sense of fitness, and makes a strong impression of absurdity, these two men being to the English public real dignitaries, in the strict sense of the word, and under the strongest obligations to behave properly. But a representation of Grant and Sumner as pugilists would hardly make Americans laugh, because, though absurd, it would not be nearly so absurd, or run counter to any so sharply defined standard of official demeanor. The Lord Chief-Justice playing croquet with a pretty girl owes nearly all its point, as a joke, to the popular awe of him and the mystery which surrounds his mode of life in popular eyes; a picture of Chief-Justice Chase doing the same thing would hardly excite a smile, because everybody knows him, and has known him all his life, and can have access to him at any hour of the night or day. And then it must be borne in mind that Paris and London contain all the famous men of France and England, and anybody who jokes about them is sure of having the whole public for an audience; while the best New York joke falls flat in Boston or Philadelphia, and flatter still in Cincinnati or Chicago, owing to want of acquaintance with the materials of which it is composed.

MR. FROUDE AS A LECTURER

Mr. Froude announced that his object in coming to America was to enlighten the American public as to the true nature of Irish discontent, in such manner that American opinion, acting on Irish opinion, would reconcile the Irish to the English connection, and turn their attention to practical remedies for whatever was wrong in their condition--American opinion being now, in Irish eyes, the court of last resort in all political controversies. It is casting no reflection on the historical or literary value of his lectures to say that Mr. Froude, in proposing to himself any such undertaking, fell into error as to the kind of audience he was likely to command, and as to the nature of the impression he was likely to make. The class of persons who listen to him is one of great intelligence and respectability, but it is a class to which the Irish are not in the habit of listening, and which has already formed as unfavorable opinions about the political character of the Irish as Mr. Froude could wish. He will be surrounded during his whole tour by a public to whose utterances the Irish pay no more attention than to the preachings of Mr. Newdegate or Mr. Whalley, and who have long ago reached, from their observation of the influence of the Irish immigration on American politics, the very conclusions for which Mr. Froude proposes to furnish historical justification. In short, he is addressing people who have either already made up their minds, or whose minds have no value for the purpose of his mission.

On the other hand, he will not reach at all the political class which panders to Irish hatred of England, and, if he does reach it, he will produce no effect on it. Not one speech the less will be uttered, or article the less written, in encouragement of Fenianism in consequence of anything he may say. Indeed, the idea that the Bankses will be more careful in their Congressional reports, or the Coxes or Mortons in their political harangues, either after or before election, in consequence of Mr. Froude's demonstration of the groundlessness of Fenian complaints, is one which to "the men inside politics" must be very amusing.

We think, however, we can safely go a little further than this, and say that however much light he may throw on the troubled waters of Irish history, his deductions will not find a ready acceptance among thinking Americans. The men who will heartily agree with him in believing that the Irish have, on the whole, only received their due, are not, as a rule, fair exponents of the national temper or of the tendencies of the national mind. Those who listened on Friday night last to his picturesque account of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian attempts to pacify Ireland, must have felt in their bones that--in spite of the cheers which greeted some of his own more eloquent and some of his bolder passages, and in particular his dauntless way of dealing with the Drogheda Massacre--his political philosophy was not one which the average American could be got to carry home with him and ponder and embrace. Mr. Froude, it must in justice to him be said, by no means throws all the responsibility of Irish misery on Ireland. He deals out a considerable share of this responsibility to England, but then his mode of apportioning it is one which is completely opposed to most of the fundamental notions of American politics. For instance, his whole treatment of Irish history is permeated by an idea which, whatever marks it may have left on American practice in dealing with the Indians, has no place now in American political philosophy--we mean what is called in English politics "the imperial idea"--the idea, that is, that a strong, bold, and courageous race has a sort of "natural right" to invade the territory of weak, semi-civilized, and distracted races, and undertake the task of governing them by such methods as seem best, and at such cost of life as may be necessary. This idea is a necessary product of English history; it is not likely to disappear in England as long as she possesses such a school for soldiers and statesmen as is furnished by India. Indeed, she could not stay in India without some such theory to support her troops, but it is not one which will find a ready acceptance here. American opinion has, within the last twenty years, run into the very opposite extreme, and now maintains with some tenacity the right even of barbarous communities to be let alone and allowed to work out their own salvation or damnation in their own way. There is little or no faith left in this country in the value of superimposed civilization, or of "superior minds," or of higher organization, while there is a deep suspicion of, or we might say there is deep hostility toward, all claims to rule based on alleged superiority of race or creed or class. We doubt if Mr. Froude could have hit on a more unpalatable mode, or a mode more likely to clash with the prevailing tendencies of American opinion, of defending English rule in Ireland than the argument that, Englishmen being stronger and wiser than Irishmen, Irishmen ought to submit to have themselves governed on English ideas whether they like it or not. He has produced this argument already in England, and it has elicited there a considerable amount of indignant protest. We are forced to say of it here that it is likely to do great mischief, over and above the total defeat of Mr. Froude's object in coming to this country. The Irish in America are more likely to be exasperated by it than the Irish at home, and we feel sure that no native American will ever venture to use it to an Irish audience.

There is one other point to which Mr. Froude's attention ought to be called, as likely seriously to diminish the political weight of his exposition of the causes of Irish discontent. The sole justification of a conquest, even of a conquest achieved over barbarians by a civilized people, is that it supplies good government--that is, protection for life and property. Unless it does this, no picture, however dark, of the discords and disorder and savagery of the conquered can set the conqueror right at the bar of civilized opinion. Therefore, the shocking and carefully darkened pictures of the social and political degradation of the native Irish in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries with which Mr. Froude is furnishing us, are available for English vindication only on the supposition that the invasion, even if it destroyed liberty, brought with it law and order. But according to Mr. Froude's eloquent confession, it brought nothing of the kind.

Queen Elizabeth made the first serious attempt to subjugate Ireland, but she did it, Mr. Froude tells us, with only a handful of English soldiers--who acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans engaged on the queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After three years of this sort of thing, the whole southern portion of the island was reduced, to use Mr. Froude's words, "to a smoking wilderness," men, women, and children having been remorselessly slaughtered; but no attempt whatever was then made to establish either courts or police, or any civil rule of any kind. Society was left in a worse condition than before. Why was this? Because, says Mr. Froude, the English Constitution made no provision for the maintenance of a standing army for any such purpose.

The excuse for not endeavoring to set up an honest and efficient government remained the same in all three cases; the absence of an army, or occupation elsewhere. In other words, the conquest from first to last wanted the only justification which any conquest can have. England found the Irish much in the same stage of social and political progress in which Caesar found the Gauls, destitute of nearly all the elements of political organization; but instead of founding a political system, and maintaining it, she interfered for century after century only to subjugate and lay waste, and set the natives by the ears. Mr. Froude's answer to this is, that if the Irish had been better men they could easily have driven the English out, which is perhaps a good reason for not bestowing much pity on the Irish, but it is not a good reason for telling the Irish they ought not to hate England. No pity can be made welcome which is ostentatiously mingled with contempt. It is quite true, to our minds, that during the last fifty years England has supplied the Irish with a better government than the Irish could provide for themselves within the next century at least.

MR. HORACE GREELEY

There has been something almost tragic about the close of Mr. Greeley's career. After a life of, on the whole, remarkable success and prosperity, he fell finally under the weight of accumulated misfortunes. Nobody who heard him declare that "he accepted the Cincinnati Convention and its consequences," but must be struck by the illustration of what is called "the irony of fate," which nearly everything that occurred afterwards affords. His nomination, from whatever point of view we look at it, was undoubtedly a high honor. The manner in which it was received down to the Baltimore Convention was very flattering. Whether it was a proper thing to "beat Grant" or not, that so large and so shrewd a body of his countrymen should have thought Mr. Greeley the man to do it was a great compliment. It found him, too, in possession of all the influence which the successful pursuit of his own calling could give a man--the most powerful editor in the Union, surrounded by friends and admirers, feared or courted by nearly everybody in public life, and in the full enjoyment of widespread popular confidence in his integrity. In six short months he was well-nigh undone. He had endured a humiliating defeat, which seemed to him to indicate the loss of what was his dearest possession, the affection of the American people; he had lost the weight in public affairs which he had built up by thirty years of labor; he saw his property and, as he thought, that of his friends diminished by the attempt to give him a prize which he had in his own estimation fairly earned, and, though last not least, he found his home invaded by death, and one of the strongest of the ties which bind a man to this earth broken. It would not be wonderful if, under these circumstances, the coldest and toughest of men should lie down and die. But Mr. Greeley was neither cold nor tough. He was keenly sensitive both to praise and blame. The applause of even paltry men gladdened him, and their censure stung him. Moreover, he had that intense longing for reputation as a man of action by which men of the closet are so often torn. In spite of all that his writing brought him in reputation, he writhed under the popular belief that he could do nothing but write, and he spent the flower of his years trying to convince the public that it was mistaken about him. It was to this we owed whatever was ostentatious in his devotion to farming, and in his interest in the manufacturing industry of the country. It was to this, too, that he owed his keen and lifelong desire for office, and, in part at least, his activity in getting offices for other people.

Office-seekers have become in the United States so ridiculous and so contemptible a class, that a man can hardly seek a place in the public service without incurring a certain amount of odium; and perhaps nothing did more damage to Mr. Greeley's reputation than his anxiety to be put in places of trust or dignity. And yet it is doubtful if many men seek office with more respectable motives than his. For pecuniary emolument he cared nothing; but he did pine all his life long for some conspicuous recognition of his capacity for the conduct of affairs, and he never got it. The men who have nominations to bestow either never had confidence enough in his judgment or ability to offer him anything which he would have thought worthy of his expectations when there was the least chance of their choice receiving a popular ratification. They disliked him, as politicians are apt to dislike an editor in the political arena, as a man who, in having a newspaper at his back, is sure not to play their game fairly. The consequence was that he was constantly irritated by finding how purely professional his influence was, or, in other words, what a mortifying disproportion existed between his editorial and his personal power. The first revelation the public had of the bitterness of his disappointment on this score was caused by the publication of the famous Seward letter, and the surprise it caused was perhaps the highest compliment Mr. Greeley ever received. It showed with what success he had prevented his private griefs from affecting his public action, and people are always ready to forgive ambition as an "infirmity of noble minds," even when they do not feel disposed to reward it.

Unfortunately for Mr. Greeley, however, he never could persuade himself that the public was of the same mind as the politicians regarding his personal capacity. He persisted to the last in believing himself the victim of their envy, hatred, and malice, and looking with unabated hope to some opportunity of obtaining a verdict on his merits as a man of action, in which his widespread popularity and his long and laborious teachings would fairly tell. The result of the Cincinnati Convention, which his friends and emissaries from this city went out to prepare, but which perhaps neither he nor they in the beginning ventured to hope for, seemed to promise him at last the crown and consummation of a life's longings, and he received it with almost childlike joy. The election was, therefore, a crushing blow. It was not, perhaps, the failure to get the presidency that was hardest to bear--for this might have been accompanied by such a declaration of his fitness for the presidency as would have sweetened the remainder of his years--it was the contemptuous greatness of his opponent's majority which was killing. It dissipated the illusion of half a lifetime on the one point on which illusions are dearest--a man's exact place in the estimation of his countrymen. Very few--even of those whose fame rests on the most solid foundation of achievement--ever ask to have this ascertained by a positive test without dread or misgiving, or face the test without a strain, which the nerves of old men are often ill fitted to bear. That Mr. Greeley's nerves were unequal to the shock of failure we now know. But it needed no intimate acquaintance with him to see that the card in which he announced, two days after the election, that he would thereafter be a simple editor, would seek office no more, and would confine himself to the production of a candid and judicial-minded paper, must have been written in bitterness of spirit for which this world had no balm.

In addition to the deceptions caused by his editorial influence, Mr. Greeley had others to contend with, more subtle, but not less potent. The position of the editor of a leading daily paper is one which, in our time, is hardly possible for the calmest and most candid man to fill without having his judgment of himself perverted by flattery. Our age is intensely commercial; it is not the dry-goods man or the grain merchant only who has goods for sale, but the poet, the orator, the scholar, the philosopher, and the politician. We are all, in a measure, seeking a market for our wares. What we desire, therefore, above all things, is a good advertising medium, or, in other words, a good means of making known to all the world where our store is and what we have to sell. This means the editor of a daily paper can furnish to anybody he pleases. He is consequently the object of unceasing adulation from a crowd of those who shrink from fighting the slow and doubtful battle of life in the open field, and crave the kindly shelter of editorial plaudits, "puffs," and "mentions." He finds this adulation offered freely, and by all classes and conditions, without the least reference to his character or talents or antecedents. What wonder if it turns the heads of unworthy men, and begets in them some of the vices of despots--their unscrupulousness, their cruelty, and their impudence. What wonder, too, if it should have thrown off his balance a man like Mr. Greeley, whose head was not strong, whose education was imperfect, and whose self-confidence had been fortified by a brave and successful struggle with adversity.

Of his many private virtues, of his kind-heartedness, his generosity, his sympathy with all forms of suffering and anxiety, we do not need to speak. His career, too, has little in it to point any moral that is not already trite and familiar. The only lesson we can gather from it with any clearness is the uncertainty of this world, and all that it contains, and the folly of seeking the presidency. Nobody can hope to follow in his footsteps. He began life as a kind of editor of which he was one of the last specimens, and which will shortly be totally extinct--the editor who fought as the man-at-arms of the party. This kind of work Mr. Greeley did with extraordinary earnestness and vehemence and success--so much success that a modern newspaper finally grew up around him, in spite of him, almost to his surprise, and often to his embarrassment. The changed condition of journalism, the substitution of the critical for the party views of things, he never wholly accepted, and his frequent personal appearance in his columns, under the signature of "H. G." hurling defiance at his enemies or exposing their baseness, showed how stifling he found the changed atmosphere. He was fast falling behind his age when he died. New men, and new issues, and new processes, which he either did not understand at all or only understood imperfectly, crowded upon him. If the dazzling prize of the presidency had not been held before his eyes, we should probably have witnessed his gradual but certain retirement into well-won repose. Those who opposed him most earnestly must now regret sincerely that in his last hours he should have known the bitterness of believing, what was really not true, that the labors of his life, which were largely devoted to good causes, had not met the appreciation they merited at the hands of his countrymen. It is for his own sake, as well as that of the public, greatly to be regretted that he should not have lived until the smoke of the late conflict had cleared away.

THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE KITCHEN

Mr. Froude's attempt to secure from the American public a favorable judgment on the dealings of England with Ireland has had one good result--though we fear only one--in leading to a little closer examination of the real state of American opinion about Irish grievances than it has yet received. He will go back to England with the knowledge--which he evidently did not possess when he came here--that the great body of intelligent Americans care very little about the history of "the six hundred years of wrong," and know even less than they care, and could not be induced, except by a land-grant, or a bounty, or a drawback, to acquaint themselves with it; that those of them who have ever tried to form an opinion on the Anglo-Irish controversy have hardly ever got farther than a loose notion that England had most likely behaved like a bully all through, but that her victim was beyond all question an obstreperous and irreclaimable ruffian, whose ill-treatment must be severely condemned by the moralist, but over whom no sensible man can be expected to weep or sympathize.

As a cook, Bridget is an admitted failure. But cooking is, it is now generally acknowledged, very much an affair of instinct, and this instinct seems to be very strong in some races and very weak in others, though why the French should have it highly developed, and the Irish be almost altogether deprived of it, is a question which would require an essay to itself. No amount of teaching will make a person a good cook who is not himself fond of good food and has not a delicate palate, for it is the palate which must test the value of rules. We may deduce from this the conclusion, which experience justifies, that women are not naturally good cooks. They have had the cookery of the world in their hands for several thousand years, but all the marked advances in the art, and indeed all that can be called the cultivation of it, have been the work of men. Whatever zeal women have displayed in it, and whatever excellence they have achieved in it, have been the result of influences in no way gastronomic, and which we might perhaps call emotional, such as devotion to male relatives, or a desire to minister to the pleasure of men in general. Few or no women cook a dinner in an artistic spirit, and their success in doing it is nearly always the result of affection or loyalty--which is of course tantamount to saying that female cookery as a whole is, and always has been, comparatively poor.

She can make, too, an economical defence of the most powerful kind, to the attacks on her in this line, and it is this: that whether her cooking be bad or good, she offers it without deception or subterfuge, at a fair rate, and without compulsion; that nobody who does not like her dishes need eat them; and that her defects of taste or training can only be fairly made a cause of hatred and abuse when she does work badly, which somebody else is waiting to do better, if she would get out of the way. She has undertaken the task of cooking for the American nation, not of her own motion, but simply and solely because the American nation could find nobody else to do it. She does not, therefore, occupy the position of a broken-down or incompetent artist, but of a volunteer at a fire, or a passer-by when you are lying in the ditch with your leg broken.

As a party to a contract, Bridget's defects are very strongly marked. Her sense of the obligation of contracts is feeble. The reason why this particular vice excites so much odium in her case is, that the inconveniences of her breaches of contract are greater than those of almost any other member of the community. They touch us in our most intimate social relations, and cause us an amount of mental anguish out of all proportion to their real importance. But her spirit about contracts is really that of the entire community in which she lives. Her way of looking at her employer is, we sincerely believe, about the way of looking at him common among all employees. The only real restraint on laborers of any class among us nowadays is the difficulty of finding another place. Whenever it becomes as easy for clerks, draughtsmen, mechanics, and the like to "suit themselves" as it is for cooks or housemaids, we find them as faithless. Native mechanics and seamstresses are just as perfidious as Bridget, but incur less obloquy, because their faithlessness causes less annoyance; but they have no more regard in making their plans for the interest or wishes of their employer than she has, and they all take the "modern view" of the matter. What makes her so fond of change is that she lives in a singularly restless society, in which everybody is engaged in a continual struggle to "better himself"--her master, in nine cases out of ten, setting her an example of dislike to steady industry and slow gains. Moreover, domestic service is a kind of employment which, if not sweetened by personal affection, is extraordinarily full of wear and tear. In it there is no real end to the day, and in small households, the pursuit and oversight, and often the "nagging," of the employer, or, in other words, the presence of an exacting, semi-hostile, and slightly contemptuous person is constant. This and confinement in a half-dark kitchen produce that nervous crisis which sends male mechanics and other male laborers, engaged in monotonous callings, off "on a spree." In Bridget's case it works itself off by a change of place, with a few days of squalid repose among "her own people" in a tenement-house.

As regards her general bearing as a member of a household, she has to contend with three great difficulties--ignorance of civilized domestic life, for which she is no more to blame than Russian moujiks; difference of race and creed on the part of her employer ; and lastly, the strong contempt for domestic service felt and manifested by all that portion of the American population with which she comes in contact, and to which it is her great ambition to assimilate herself. Those who have ever tried the experiment of late years of employing a native American as a servant, have, we believe, before it was over, generally come to look on Bridget as the personification of repose, if not of comfort; and those who have to call on native Americans, even occasionally, for services of a quasi-personal character, such as those of expressmen, hotel clerks, plumbers, we believe are anxious to make their intercourse with these gentlemen as brief as possible. Most expressmen are natives, and are freemen of intelligence and capacity, but they carry your trunk into your hall with the air of convicts doing forced labor for a tyrannical jailer. If the spirit in which they discharge their duties--and they are specimens of a large class--were to make its way into our kitchens, society would go to pieces.

In short, Bridget is the legitimate product of our economical, political, and moral condition. We have called her, in our extremity, to do duties for which she is not trained, and having got her here have surrounded her with influences and ideas which American society has busied itself for fifty years in fostering and spreading, and which, taking hold of persons in her stage of development, work mental and moral ruin. The things which American life and manners preach to her are not patience, sober-mindedness, faithfulness, diligence, and honesty, and eagerness for physical enjoyment. Whenever the sound of the new gospel which is to win the natives back to the ancient and noble ways is heard in the land, it is fair to expect that it will not find her ears wholly closed, and that when the altar of duty is again set up by her employers, she will lay on it attractive beefsteaks, potatoes done to a turn, make libations of delicious soup, and will display remarkable fertility in "sweets," and an extreme fondness for washing, and learn to grow old in one family.

JOHN STUART MILL

Mr. Mill was, in many respects, one of the most singular men ever produced by English society. His father was a prominent member of the small sect or coterie of Benthamites, whose attempts to reform the world, during the whole of the earlier part of the present century, furnished abundant matter for ridicule to the common run of politicians and social philosophers; and this ridicule was heightened, as the years rolled on, by the extraordinary jargon which their master adopted for the communication of his discoveries to the world. The author of the "Defence of Usury," of the "Fragment on Government," and of the "Book of Fallacies," had, however, secured a reputation very early in his career which his subsequent eccentricities could not shake, but the first attempts of his disciples to catch the public ear were not fortunate. Macaulay's smart review of James Mill's book on "Government" gives a very fair expression to the common feeling about them in English literary and political circles during John Stuart's boyhood. About the value of the father's labors as a mental philosopher there are of course a variety of opinions, but he gave two proofs of capacity for the practical work of life which there was no gainsaying. He came to London an obscure man of humble origin, but managed, without ever having been in India, and at a period when authors were held in much less esteem by politicians than they were at a later period, to produce such an impression of his knowledge of Indian affairs, by his elaborate history of that country, on the minds of the Directors of the Company, that they gave him an important office in the India House, and this, too, in spite of the fact that he lived in a circle generally considered visionary--answering, in fact, in some degree to what we call the "long-haired people." Besides this, he himself personally gave his son an education which made him, perhaps, all things considered, the most accomplished man of his age, and without help from the universities or any other institution of learning. The son grew up with a profound reverence for his father as a scholar and thinker, and rarely lost an opportunity of expressing it, though, curiously enough, he began very early to look on Bentham, the head of the school, with a critical eye. The young man's course was, however, still more remarkable than the father's.

Bentham, who was perhaps, in the field of jurisprudence, the most destructive critic that ever appeared, had the merit which in his day was somewhat novel among reformers, and marked him out as something very different from Continental radicals--of being also highly constructive. Indeed, his labors in providing substitutes for what he sought to overthrow are among the most curious, and, we might add, valuable monuments of human industry and ingenuity. His proposed reforms were based, too, on a theory of human nature which differed from that in use among a large number of radicals in our day in being perfectly sound, that is, in perfect accordance with observed facts, as far as it went. But it did not go nearly far enough. It did not embrace the whole of human nature, or even the greater part of it, and for the simple reason, which Mr. Mill himself has pointed out in his analysis of Bentham's character, that its author was almost entirely wanting in sympathy and imagination. A very large proportion of the springs of human action were unknown or incomprehensible to him.

The result was that, although he exerted a powerful influence on English law reform by his exposure of specific abuses, he made little impression on English sociology, properly so called. This was in part due to his narrowness of view, and in part to the absence of an interpreter, none of his followers having attempted to put his wisdom into readable shape, except Dumont, and he only partially and in French. The application of his method to the work of general reform was indeed left to Mr. Mill, who brought to the task an amount of culture to which Bentham could make no claim, and a large share of the sympathy of which there was also so little in Bentham's composition, and a style which, for expository and didactic purposes, has perhaps never been surpassed. Moreover, Mr. Mill lost no time, as most men do, in maturing. He was a full-blown philosopher at twenty-five, and discourses in his earliest essays with almost the same measure, circumspection, and gravity exhibited in the latest of his works, and with all the Benthamite precision and attention to limitations.

He was, however, wanting, as his master was, in imagination, and wanting, too, in what we may call, though not in any bad sense, the animal side of man's nature. He suffered in his treatment of all the questions of the day from excess of culture and deficiency of blood. He understood and allowed for men's errors of judgment and for their ignorance, and for their sloth and indifference; but of appreciation of the force of their passions his speculations contain little sign. For instance, he was the first to point out the fact that the principle of competition, the eager desire to sell, which furnishes the motive power of the English and American social organization, is almost unknown and unfelt among the greater part of mankind, but his remedy for redundancy of population, and his lamentations over "the subjection of women," are those of a recluse or a valetudinarian.

His influence as a political philosopher may be said to have stood highest after the appearance of the "Political Economy." He had, then, perhaps the most remarkable following of hard-headed men which any English philosopher was ever able to show. But the reverence of his disciples waned somewhat rapidly after he began to take a more active part in the treatment of the questions of the day. His "representative government," valuable as it was as a philosophical discussion, offered no solution of the problem then pressing on the public minds in England, which bitter Radicals or Conservatives could consider comforting. The plan of having the number of a man's votes regulated by his calling and intelligence was thoroughly Benthamite. It was as complete and logical as a proposition in Euclid, and in 1825 would have looked attractive; but in 1855 the power of doing this nice work had completely passed out of everybody's hands--indeed, the desire of political perfection had greatly abated. His lofty and eloquent plaints on the decline of social freedom helped to strengthen the charge of want of practicalness, which in our day is so injurious to a man's political influence, and when he entered Parliament, although he disappointed none of those who best understood him, the outside multitude, who had begun to look on him as a prophet, were somewhat chagrined that he was not readier in parrying the thrusts of the trained gladiators of the House of Commons. It was the book on the "Subjection of Women," however, which most shook the allegiance of his more educated followers, because it was marked by the widest departures from his own rules of thinking. It would be impossible to find any justification in his other works for the doctrine that women are inferior to men for the same reason that male serfs are inferior to their masters. His refusal to consider difference of sex as even one probable cause of women's inferiority to men in mental and moral characteristics, was something for which few of his disciples were prepared, or which they ever got over; and indeed his whole treatment of the question of sex showed, in the opinion of many, a constitutional incapacity to deal with the gravest problems of social economy.

This estimate of his own influence and of the importance to metaphysical discussion at the present time of the philosophy he "adopted" is entitled to much more consideration than ought in general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by the ambition, the enthusiasm, the disappointments, or even the modesty of a philosophical thinker. Nevertheless, the far different opinion of his standing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain is undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense which was not so clearly apparent to him. They see clearly that a philosophy of which he was not the founder, and never pretended to be, has gained through his writings a hold, not only on English speculation, but on that of the civilized world, which it did not acquire even in England when it was an especially English philosophy, as it was "in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume."

What, then, is it in Mill's philosophical writings that has given him this eminence as a thinker? Two qualities, we think, very rarely combined: a philosophical style which for clearness and cogency has, perhaps, never been surpassed, and a conscientious painstaking, with a seriousness of conviction, and an earnestness of purpose which did not in general characterize the thinkers whose views he adopted. It was by bringing to the support of doctrines previously regarded as irreligious a truly religious spirit that Mill acquired in part the influence and respect which have given him his eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the word "utility" and the utilitarian doctrine of morals from the ill repute they had, for "the greatest happiness principle" was with him a religious principle. An equally important part of his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness of his early training--the education received from his father's instruction--which, as we have said, has made him truly regarded as the most accomplished of modern dialecticians.

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