-or

merely a disputed ell of real estateelse facts that she can see in closest perspective. Unless this were true she would be more alive to the stress of the present time. The American Revolution was as truly a civil war as the War of Secession in America or the great Cromwellian outbreak of that name in England. George III. thought it the revolt of a dependency. It is a fallacy, however, that has been too long held to imagine that the American colonies proved their right to a separate existence by virtue of their success. The legitimacy of the struggle lay in its character as a fight for equity of rights. New Englishmen happened to have a temper more English than that of their domineering elder brothers on the soil of the old home, and they were more keenly alive to any derogation from their rights. Like the Plaza-Toro family in the Gondoliers they did not "demand until they had first " sought" and "desired" equality of recognition at court with the other portions of the State. When that freedom and equality were denied them by an ignorant and indifferent government, then was born their right to fight to the bitter end. But, of course, the issue of individual existence, beyond that of local self-government, was by no means constitutional or anything but revolutionary. As self-respecting Englishmen their only course was a protracted obstinacy. But the spirit of final compromise which usually stands Englishmen in such good stead forsook at this crisis those who lived at home, and the wrongheadedness of Lord North's government dropped the insolent iron hand of coercion upon a people very much more English than the Englishmen who were then in the majority in Parliament. Had it not been for an estranging sea, too wide to be traversed by the unsympathetic selfish gaze of England, Englishmen would have seen that they were putting their feet upon the necks of brothers, and that it was time to change the character they were playing to that of Sir Giles Fairplay which suits them so much better. Here was an object lesson that one might have thought large enough even for eyes other than English. But it was not learned in America any more than, as we see ample proofs today, it has been learned in England.

As a civil war, the American Revolution was inevitable; as a war of independence, it

was at the time a geographical necessity. The Civil War in America discussed, with the argument of bullets, practically the same question, namely the rights enjoyed by people possessed of local self-government, and the duties incumbent upon them. The right of the South to secession was much more plausible than that of the original colonies of New England to secede. For the national integrity depended originally upon a voluntary compact. The exact nature of State rights and the Union was far less quickly and certainly determinable, and the individual independence of the several states was really an arguable question; whereas that of the colonies was not, until a stupid policy drew a line wider than the ocean between the home island and that part of England in America. Fortunately for both the North and the South in America there were no natural barriers of mountain or dim stretches of vague sea to solve, as with the irony of a fate that puts to scorn all human intervention, a question in which the anxious discussions of men were vain, and their actual warfare impotently sublime and pathetic folly. Marriages of states, obviously, save on the shores of the Adriatic, are made in heaven; at all events not always by the orthodox appointed ministers on earth.

This entire significant episode of history is largely explained by the fact that the characteristic English selfishness got the upper hands of the English habit of compromise almost as characteristic. As has been said before, from the dominance of this principle, which destroyed her insight and injured her sense of perspective, she has suffered much chagrin. That even thus the whole injury she does herself is not told, but that in general this sefishness even distorts her judgment, I lately noted entertainingly illustrated by a mural tablet placed between two nondescript Indians in Westminster Abbey, who hold upon their heads a piece of sculpture erected to the memory of an Hon. Lieut.-Colonel Roger Townshend, killed by a cannonball on the 25th of July, 1759, as he was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderoga. This slab enrolls the Hon. Lieut.Colonel Roger Townshend "with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive and successful war have extended the com

merce, enlarged the dominions, and upheld the majesty of these kingdoms, beyond the idea of any former age. Notwithstanding the internal evidence of the style there is no reason to suppose that the Hon. Lieut.-Colonel Roger Townshend, one of the immortals of this war which upheld the majesty of this British empire beyond the idea of any former age, is a mythical creature or a demigod. For Fort Ticonderoga still stands, the most imposing military ruin in America,

and across its western barracks the sun sets full upon its brown and crumbling stone, now adorned with a truly nineteenth century legend in the staring white letters of somebody's "Stove Polish." This legend attests at all events a certain reality to the cycle of stories clustering about the ruin. But Ticonderoga is not only a monument to American vulgarity, but also a warning to Englishmen of the fatality lurking in their short-sighted selfishness and in the practical lack of perspective I have mentioned. They should see to it that amid the long wash of Australasian seas there arise not another Ticonderoga as significant. For they still have it in their power at this period of rapidly extending intercommunication, when seas no longer divide as they once did in the earlier time when Englishmen in America laid the foundations of their new American state, to seize the event, and, securing for themselves and their posterity a harmonious and federated empire, to seal for all time the issue of the future.

It is a pity that the inflation and boastfulness of which mention has been made, arising partly from a sense of their own deficiencies, should be so rife among Americans, for it is unnecessary. A talent of appreciation is much more natural to the Americans than to the English. But criticism, of course, however much it fulfils its function by being simply a faithful recording of impressions, or as a sympathetic interpretation, is at least the ability to know a good thing when one sees it. Yet the feeling of the courage of one's convictions, while always a moral characteristic in a person of artistic genius or good abilities, unfortunately may exist quite apart from critical insight or intellectual cleverness. The unadulterated strain of English blood in America, and certain other small sections of charming and cultivated people not English, still

possess this steadiness and poise which I have elsewhere called moral inertia, and are quite free from the vulgar "bounce" and boastfulness. But these are no longer the dominant classes in American life. Democratic institutions have tended to their disfranchisement. The remnant, possessing a refined tradition of manners and of culture, and endowed hereditarily with the love of whatsoever things are noble and of good report, comparatively speaking is very small. Not unlike the class of the Faubourg St. Germain in Paris, it lives in as unobtrusive an alienation as possible in the midst of a vast number of good-natured and commonplace vulgarians. Its function is the tending of the vestal fires. It is an aristocracy beyond any question more exclusive than the aristocracy of England. Levites of the arcana of the best in American life, their own self-preservation almost demands their isolation. Their condition is pathetic, were it not so enviable, in the distinction attaching to their sacred obligation of preserving the national records and keeping the fires alight. At times they half believe they prefer the "stinking breath" and the "sweaty nightcap" of the rampant democracy, fast developing in England, to the exasperating habit of gaucherie, manifested in every gesture by people given only to pennies, psalms, or platitudes. For though the gap between the higher and the lower in England is yearly narrowing, still there is a pleasant deference and that habit of respect which leads to ease of living there. In America, the presumptuous familiarity of manner, born usually of the very kindest and most unselfish feelings, is extremely odious, and none the less so for the merit of its origin. American bonhomie seems to be an endeavor to be one thing to all men. This is not at all the same thing as being all things to all men. The Pauline diplomacy is an ideal that neither England nor America has reached. The self-centred indifference of Englishmen is as unfavorable to this ideal as the hearty abandon of indiscriminate intimacy that marks the American type. The Christian conception of the fellowship of mankind and love of one's neighbor has become far riper in America than in England, and it is usually more genuine when it exists. But there is very little of the actual spirit of Christianity in either country. There,

as here, Jesus, whom haters of the Jews with perverse thoughtlessness still prefer to call Christ, is the most discussed, but the least understood, person in history. In America people are often wooed to churches where they are told nine times what Paul said to once what Jesus said, and their attendance is won by theatrical devices which in England would be thought very bad taste indeed. But listeners once won are for the most part more intellectually entertained and spiritually enlightened by the sermon than church-goers in England. Except in the Episcopal denomination so called, which is in America only a sect among others more significant, the same interest does not attach to the rest of the service other than the sermon. But the average ability of New English or even American clergy is in advance of the average ability of the same class in England. In comparison with the stern tutelage of the New English clergy the training and circumstances of clergy in England under the Establishment have been lax. The result has been a stronger moral fibre, but a learning adapted to less humane ends, and in general a deeper but less broad intellectual achievement. "The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies," said Burke, in his speech on conciliation with America, "is a refine ment on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent; and the protestantism of the Protestant religion." The element of life transplanted in the first two centuries beyond the Atlantic was an invigorating principle from the marrow of the English backbone. This protestantism of the Protestant religion gave integrity and vitality of latent energy which assured continuous and, on the whole, healthy development to a people caring less for artistic grace than the grace of God. It was a Puritanisin radically the same that was accountable for the historical life of the Israelites and of the early Greeks. Concerted action and a unanimous and patriotic pride in their own national life, based on sublimity of conceit in their own special god, have characterized all great peoples before their decadence. But the manly English strength of the early New Englishman has largely disappeared. Yet in the advance toward disillusionment, to which every people tends, America placed, geographically speaking, eccentrically off the focal centre

of European influence, has got only to the precipitous edge of the gulf of despair; but that it is even in the neighborhood it is utterly unconscious. The modern American keeps the intellectual expression of his ancestor's faith, and of most of his points of view, but he is not inspired with his indomitable confidence in a vital reality behind the expressions. England has undergone and is now undergoing a disillusionment as revolutionary as that of France, but, as its habit is, it takes the change more decorously. An Englishman never tells all he knows, and much less frequently all he feels. His sanity and reticence in matters of religion, as well as upon all other concerns of importance, should not be allowed to hide the fact of this tremendous and pervasive subterranean change. The cloak of his hypocrisy will in time not far distant cover America. But there it can never so effectually hide the gestures underneath as in England. Perhaps it is because the mantle is so ample and always has been ample, thus affording opportunities of quieter consideration of what will be the best way when changes threaten to adapt oneself to the new order of the time, that England's history has been so continuously expansive along the line of liberty; and that only in rare instances have events come to birth prematurely, or found the larger part of the state unprepared for them. Of this truth the first two centuries of New English history-the most characteristic, as I have elsewhere said, in English historyoffer conspicuous proof. But neither the New England of to-day, nor any body of men in America, can be cited to this end. New England has almost outlived her name. Its boundaries are now holding another race. As democracy advances in England, and other nations more and more rub shoulders against the Englishman on the sacred soil of the paradise of his own patrimony, Englishmen will gradually take the American hue. Still insular, how fast is the Englishman becoming cosmopolitan and democratic; and how sad that he should not realize that his way has before been trodden by the New Englishman. The form which England's worldly wisdom has taken is a perfectly natural result of her geographical position. For some centuries she has sat in the seat of customs. Stormed by the battering of these northern seas, England's rock has risen in the

very highway of the waves of largest international influence. Her reticence, her selfishness, were needed for her self-preservation. Everything, she knew, would come to her in time. Hence her dignity and patience in the best type of her sons, and in her worst the narrow horizon of her mind, her brutal self-sufficiency and coarse pugnacity born of an ignorance always eager to die in order to save its prejudices. No brutality, no coarseness, is so odious as English coarseness. Little of this was transplanted to America, however, to the home of mediocrity and the Common. Always through the centuries the best type of Englishman, both in England and New England, has had visions of the flammantia mania mundi. The calm, slow, conservative Englishman, given to sleeping in Authority, and dreaming of the past, is not the only, though he is the average and the passing, type. There has There has always been a saving few given to the cultivation of variations from the original stock, and the courageous pursuit of deviating and eccentric humors. In the open play of discussion which has been possible in England, how often have. flashes of seminal and illuminating thought been struck out in the interests of Truth, and how rarely elsewhere has the light been brighter! But the flaming bounBut the flaming boundaries of the worlds have scarcely been kenned more resolutely in this island than by single-eyed observers on New English hill-tops, through many a calm long night of the first two centuries of her history. Now things are not quite the same. Eng lishmen, educated wisely for generations in liberty and self reliance, and amid that collection of rights called free institutions, were able in America to work out their own salvation without even the amount of fear and trembling that is prescribed and that one might have thought necessary. Suddenly, however, representatives of races without the habits of self-reliance, and unpractised in the technique of practical government, invade the country, and the first scientific result is a swamping tidal-wave.

It makes a vast difference whether democracy grows up naturally from within or is imported from without as an idea to be engrafted. It makes a large part of the difference, indeed, between France and England, between Eugland and the modern United States, between the first

two centuries of American national life and the last half century of that life. America of the last thirty or forty years bears scarcely any resemblance to the original English New England. She has taken a step from which now there is no going back. She is selling her original birthright for a conglomerate mess of pottage, in which Irish stew, mulligatawny soup, corn-bread, sauer-kraut, and lager beer are staple ingredients. The modern America of the States is entering upon certain social problems absolutely new to it. These problems must be settled by methods for which she will not be able to find any precedent in her English traditions. For her earlier history, indeed almost for the first two centuries of her history, the phenomena with which she had to deal were distinct, definite, what the scientists call isolated, and therefore comparatively simple. The complicated tangle of those that now exist is so very perplexing that she may well tremble at the problem of unravelling them. At the start she was forced for her very life to eject elements of hostility which threatened her existence. Among such the Quakers have a plain tale of intolerance manifested toward them, for instance, to cite in proof. But for the most part during this period in America nothing impeded her growth; and with such blood in her veins, no wonder she succeeded. Liberty, planted in a soil that was unchoked by any weeds of an older time-a growth that in England was deep rooted and feudal-grew to quick maturity. But just for this reason the establishment of national unity and republican government was not quite so remarkable an achievement at the time as to-day they seem. The difficulties of Frenchmen in the solution of their problem, which only to a superficial view can possibly appear the same as the American, and was and is in reality radically different, are worth noting ations passed between the protective and feudal age of Louis XIV. and the Revolution, and meanwhile almost every eminent Frenchman, formerly having thought England barbarian, came to this island of liberty. Voltaire introduced to France Locke, Newton, and Shakespeare. Until Voltaire had got to know England by his travels and friendship," says Cousin, "he was not Voltaire." The effect of these leaders of light was that of an

Two gener

awakening spark. We know the story; but in the flame and the fire many traditions were untouched and many affections went unscorched. They had only disappeared for a time from view in the smoke of the conflagration. In some the love of the old régime, and in others the force of a cowering habit, were here and there asbestos in the fire. "I'd rather be a Stuart bastard than a legitimate Guelph," a friend once said to me. It was a kind of sentiment like this that pervaded France and still is not unknown there. Moreover a people is always impressed by mystery, and cares for what it does not or cannot possess, as well as to recall what the fathers enjoyed in "the good old times." And it is against this host of prejudices, affections, predispositions that liberty has had to make its way in France. A people denied the experience of self government is almost sure to go mad if inflamed with an abstract idea of liberty, equality, fraternity, for which it is not ripe. Constitutional government in England has been self-government in leading-strings. The early colonists in America were largely Englishmen with all the English training who thoroughly believed that under favorable conditions the leading-strings could be snapped. They were perfectly right. But they who have builded the house no longer sit at the head of the table, and all about the board is a motley throng. What is to be the nature of the remaining courses of the banquet or the quality of the after-dinner wine and speeches, he must be either a clever schoolboy or a wise prophet to suggest. Perhaps the deadlock of business recently in the Ameri

can House of Representatives, nominally over the question of a quorum, may indicate to some extent the lines along which data may be collected for the prophetic generalization. The episode was not a pleasant one. It tested nothing, but it revealed weaknesses. It showed among other things how bitter still is sectional prejudice, and how keen still the sense of sovereignty among the Southern States. Moreover, it illustrated on a large scale an important point that Mr. Bagehot was always making, the greater working efficiency of the parliamentary form of government over the presidential in its union of the executive and legislative functions. Is it to be hoped that this American episode is the rapid retrogression that it seems away from the idea of centralization of power, and the delegation of authority to the lower House? A crisis such as this, however, if overcome quietly and calmly settled, must tend to the establishment of government on a more solid basis. The English cabinet, which is simply a governing committee of presumably the most wisely chosen representatives of the dominant party, has made the actual business of government and the legislative will of the party in power almost identical. This is an ideal yet to be attained in the less simple system of the government of the United States. The significance of the present filibustering flutter remains yet to be seen. But it is unfortunate, I admit, to be reminded again and just at this moment of the remark of Count Oxenstiern, "You have have no idea, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed." Fortnightly Review.

*

SOCIAL experiments are not easily tried. The people who are willing to come out from the mass of their fellows and live in the isolation of a new social order. startlingly different from the plan of life of the rest of their contemporaries, are not necessarily the people who are best fitted. to make such an experiment succeed. Those who are ripe for change and novelty are not, in the nature of the case, likely to be most successful with the busi

ness of daily life. It is, therefore, open to the modern Socialist, when he presses his scheme for the reorganization of society on a Communistic basis, to repudiate the several attempts that have been made

*Whether this is a desirable ideal, however, is an important and interesting matter for discussion. No one has written more ably upon this subject than Mr. A. Lawrence Lowill, in his Essays on Government, Boston, 1889.