bet, and that (confidentially speaking) things are not likely to go right now, until that same alphabetical sign shall again rule in the political zodiac. We are led to believe that during the last forty years, while Clay, Calhoun and Webster, with the rest of the incapables, imagined themselves to be influencing the destiny of the nation, but were really working with weak hands and knew not what they did, Mr. Seward and the Adamses, and a few like them, were serenely breathing the upper air of statesmanship and love of country, and were really steering the bark which its blind pilots would have shipwrecked!

It is hard to fathom the depths of celestial minds, and yet it seems to us that standing by the grave of Seward, even an Adams, or any other superior being, might have seen things rise before him which did not, altogether, warrant exultation. When the band of patriots and seers whom Seward led so long began their labors of deliverance, no purer, happier or more united people than our own had ever thanked God for his mercies. What are we now? Through seas of fraternal blood we have waded to discord, hatred and corruption. One section is the tyrant of the other, and oppresses it chiefly to plunder. Great commonwealth's have been crushed into ruined and wretched dependencies. State governments are overturned by the drunken rescripts of Federal judges and kept down by the bayonets of Federal soldiers. The old landmarks of the Constitution have been swept away by violence or fraudulent construction; the Habeas Corpus has passed into contempt; the Executive has been lifted above the law; the Judiciary has become in turns the tool of power and the echo of the mob; the Legislature has sunk down into the pit, a despicable, unclean thing. Every aspiration of the people and their rulers has been lowered, and their very springs of thought and action seem nearer and nearer, every day, to the sources of shame. In the eyes of the world abroad the typical American citizen is little better than a swindler, and the national type is a compound of giant and pickpocket. And what have the Sewards and Adamses given us in exchange for what they have taken away — for the peace and good will, the good name, the mutual confidence and affection we have lost- for the homes they have made desolate and the bloody graves they have filled? Is it power and wealth—if these, indeed, were any compensation? Is it population, trade, empire? Not so. These have come in spite of them, from ordinary causes, and under all the depressing and repressive influences of war and debt and iniquitous, purchased legislation. Their only glory is that they have "enlarged the area of human freedom" and "stricken the manacles, etc., etc., from the slave." But what does this really mean fustian and cant apart? It means that they have emancipated the slaves and set them above their masters, to do the work of their deliverers. It means that they have humiliated the Southern white man and subordinated him to the black, in order to get money and keep power through his disgrace. It means that they have made the negro their own tool and victim instead of the servant that he was of others. It means that in their judgment they have elevated republican institutions to their utmost height and developed them in their utmost splendor, by giving the dominant suffrage of the Republic to the most ignorant, most brutal and most degraded of its population. It means that they have dragged their country through the most fearful strife which history records, in order that the negro may constitutionally elbow the white man in the street-cars and hotels, and grin in the galleries of Congress, while his patrons are twining round their brows the garlands of the Crédit Mobilier. For aught we know, people of the turn of mind of Mr. Adams may be proud of this, and may think - in their high planes of thought-that they have consecrated the monument and memory of Mr. Seward by telling of his near relation to it all. And yet it seems to us it might have been a lesson and a warning to the orator, had he remembered, that after doing these wonderful and glorious things, his Pericles had died, a melancholy

765 exile from the power he loved, while the drones of his hive were rioting in the honey he had gathered for his winter's store. There is hardly to be found a moral more impressive than that of Mr. Seward's latter days, neglected and deserted as he was in his old age, and forced to seek in travel and excitement, almost till his dying hour, a refuge from the bitterness of isolation, and food for the hunger of his restless vanity and his distempered and disappointed ambition. It would require more than the rhetoric of Mr. Adams to satisfy the world, that in the weary moments of that enforced and repining banishment, his hero had no tormenting memories. It is hard to believe that his years of prostituted power; his "higher law"; his "little bell"; his wholesale usurpations and petty tyrannies; his mean revenges; his spies and his bastilles came never back to startle him. But whether Mr. Adams thought of this -"the primal eldest curse upon his head or not-and in the atmosphere of the State House at Albany he might well have forgotten there was such a thing as conscience - he certainly did not forget that the reward of the labors of Seward was the nomination of Lincoln and Grant, and the reward of his own was the nomination of Grant and Greeley. These two irrepressible facts might have suggested to him the necessity of modifying some of his conclusions. Either the party which he glorifies was not, as he makes it, the concrete wisdom and patriotism of the nation, or the discarded "statesmen tioned did not embody, as he thinks, the patriotism and wisdom of their we have menparty. There was or is, obviously, a mistake somewhere. abiding confidence in the people which Mr. Adams shared with Mr. With the Seward, we are surprised that he did not accept their verdict for himself and his hero, and stay at home with his panegyric. For our own part, we agree with the Republican party that Lincoln, not Seward, was its appropriate Pericles. If, however, Mr. Adams, being classical, feels bound to have a Greek name, we suggest Dionysius the younger, of Syracuse, in the stead of the great Athenian. Dionysius, like Seward, was both tyrant and pedagogue. The parallel would have been a little closer perhaps, if, like Seward, he had had the advantage of being pedagogue first. There is no knowing how it might have developed his capabilities to have begun with small boys.

THE SOCIETY FOR THE EDUCATION OF SOUTHERN GIRLS.

'TWAS not in the storm of the battle,
'Twas not 'mid the smoke of the guns,
Nor where the sharp musketry's rattle
Dealt death to the best of our sons.

'Twas not when the pride and the glory
Of victory fired each eye:

'Twas when all that is bright in our story
Was furled with our banner, to die.

Then the voices of women revealing
Truth, tenderness, pity, and love,

Through the darkness which veiled us came stealing,
Like an anthem from angels above.

Bringing hope to those bowed by disaster,

When nor compass, nor guide, we could see;

Ringing out the sweet words of the Master :
"Let the little ones come unto Me."

J. B. A.

IT is a question whether Secretary Fish's silver-service tribute to the Geneva arbitrators, graceful and gracious as it certainly is, will quite suffice to save our good name from the aspersions it is become familiar with just now in Europe. We are happy indeed in being able to show that we have not a monopoly of the rogues and rascals - - official and other - who are making such commotion in the financial pot; but we are not so happy in creating the belief that we have a majority of those honest and decorous representatives who really embellish a nation. This is partly our misfortune, but a good deal of it nevertheless is distinctly our fault. We cannot conceal from ourselves, and à fortiori are unable to conceal from our censorious critics in Europe, that it is our national foible to make complete divorce between a man's public and private character, so that, if he be smart, shrewd, politic, prominent, and "sound on the goose," we do not concern ourselves whether he is angel or devil in other respects. Thus we sometimes seem to choose rogues rather than honest folk for our patronage, and are supposed to found the preference upon the instincts of hearts and manners naturally depraved. This works us incalculable hurt with the good people abroad, who have come to look upon us as a nation of swindlers among whom honest men are diamonds that do not shine, having no light to reflect. The absurdity of any such notion (in view of our enormously ramified business relations, nearly all of it on credit, the basis of which is good faith and mutual confidence) does not strike the European mind quite so forcibly as it does ours, for the reason that our friends and cousins abroad have a muddle-headed sort of idea that dog has no appetite for dog, and, where all are sharpers together, the knavery of one neutralises the knavery of another, and so another guess sort of business is built up, in which the rogues, mutually consenting to abstain from plundering each other, unite to plunder the foreigner. It is certain that our late history has helped to induce our beery-brained British cousins to suppose that the Warren-Horton-Bidwell forgeries were no more than an outcrop of the national propensity. They knew-as the Briton knows most keenly, in the pocket about Schenck and the "Emma" mine; they had heard of our Crédit Mobilier, of Caldwell and Pomeroy and the Pattersons — Arcades ambo and Cameron; they had read of perjury à la Colfax, and gerrymandering à la Morton, and brother-in-lawing à la Louisiana and Casey; and we can scarcely find fault with them if they jumped to the conclusion that the Bidwell-Warren party were simply attachés of the railroad, or the stock-board, or "ring" swindlers, who to keep their hands in while Gould or Fish found successors, or during the interregnum between Boss Tweed and Boss Murphy, had come over to teach the Londoners how we do business here in New York.

It is very certain that Monsieur Gauldrée Boilleau's exceedingly lame plea in the Memphis and El Paso Railroad case before the Court in Paris lately, was heard with patience chiefly upon the ground that his moral notions had become confused and obfuscate by his long residence in this country; and that Messieurs Paradis, Lissignol, Poupinel and Crampon were rather pitied than blamed because their confederacy with General Fremont had got them into such a deplorable scrape. Nobody in Paris believes that these poor devils would have turned forgers and rogues had not the job been put up for them and the tempting bait dangled before their eyes by those professional swindlers, the Americans. The applause with which Lissignol's explanation was received was very significant, and we must confess, utterly humiliating to us. "I have ascertained," said he, "that there is none, not the least species of morality in America"; and thereupon all the court and spectators laughed approvingly. "This affair," he continued, "must not be examined as if it were a French business; we are in America, and unfortunately I confess it now Americans in general must be extremely distrusted, even members of the Congress and the most eminent men of the

country." This, it must be remembered, was a shrewd rogue's plea on the eve of conviction, in arrest of judgment and extenuation of criminality. The French people, as they heard it, remembered the French arms scandal, in which "even members of Congress and the most eminent men of the country" were compromised, and it is not to be wondered at that they wagged their heads approvingly.

Mr. Gathorne Hardy's motion in the British House of Commons is a fitting sequel to and commentary upon the patience if not complacency with which we heard Butler's magniloquent boasts of the way we came it over John Bull in the Geneva settlement of the Alabama Treaty. When nobody trusts us either nationally or individually, it is natural for those who deal with us to suspect saving clauses and loopholes in our most innocent contracts, and doubles entendres in our most simple treaties. This sort of thing makes effectual diplomacy more difficult for us than for any other people in the world, except the Chinese; and they have more trouble than we simply and solely because they are supposed to have added something of our occidental subtlety to their original oriental guile.

A few more such speeches in high quarters as President Grant's recent inaugural, and we shall come to be the Ishmaelites of the world. Of course we who know that the President did not comprehend the meaning of the words he used, do not dream of such a thing as utterly disregarding the comity of nations and adopting a policy of wholesale annexation and Stategrabbing whenever the popular voice calls for it. But in Europe a President's inaugural is thought to signify as much as a Queen's speech or an Emperor's address, and the language in which President Grant spoke of his manifest-destiny programme, and absolutely ignored the notion that anybody was to be consulted in the premises outside of the American people and their controlling majority, has caused a deeper disgust for our government among foreign powers than perhaps any other single expression that ever emanated from an official source. If anything could check the spread of Republicanism, it would be faith in the opinion of President Grant that under that dispensation all the world will finally come to speak "Americanese" and to be ruled by Radical majorities such as that which gave power to the C. M. Forty-Second Congress.

IT is well known that in many localities throughout the Southern and Middle States (notably near Camden, South Carolina), great numbers of Indian arrow-heads, tomahawks, etc., are, or were, found lying loosely upon the surface, or thrown up by the ploughshare from the light sandy soil of river-bottom lands. During the writer's childhood - i. e. some twenty years ago immense numbers of these relics were picked up by the negro children, following the plough like a flock of blackbirds in "Osnaburg" shirts, the togae pickaninnium of "the days that are no more "- on his maternal grandfather's estate, on the left bank of the Rapid Ann River, just below the village of Germanna - - a place rendered trebly historic by the blood spilled there in the wars of three successive centuries. The pickaninnies would bring their "Injun bonarrer-heads " (bow and arrow heads) and tomahawks to the great house, receive some trifling reward therefor, and away to look for more. Many of these relics were of great beauty, the tomahawks being, in some instances, exquisitely polished, while the arrow-heads were often of a most crystalline quartz, or white flint, transparent as the pellucid water of "Old Indian Spring that flows hard by, and beautifully reflecting the prismatic colors. Many diverse theories of battles, cities, favorite huntinggrounds, and the like, were put forward to account for their presence there in such immense numbers, Mr. Wm. B. Rogers, then the distinguished Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Virginia, even deigning to interest himself in the matter. Howbeit, these hypotheses were all felt to be unsatisfactory; until, while seeking the relics one day, a certain

person whom, as the immortal Marshall Baylis, of bumptious memory, would say, "modesty forbids me to name "— was struck by two notable facts, which being put together, in the style of the antiquarians, "threw a flood of light" upon the whole matter, and solved the problem. The first fact was, that precisely the same kinds of stone from which the weapons were wrought, abounded, in pieces of every size from a boulder to a grain of sand, exactly where the weapons were found. The second fact was, that among the hundreds, nay, thousands of such relics, not a single perfect, unbroken one, fit for use, was ever discovered: some essential part was always wanting; from shoulder, point or edge, neck or socket, a fragment had been broken off. Can any one fail to catch the inference? It was here, where the material abounded, the Indian armorers came to make their rude weapons of stone. Laboriously, but deftly handling the poor tools that nature gave him, patiently smiting one stone with another, the poor fellow would look, at last, with pride and exultation on the beautiful, keen and taper weapon - result of many days of painful labor. 'Tis nearly finished: only a stroke or two, and it will be complete - perfect as skill can make it. Crack! the last stone falls, the work is spoiled! Maybe there are some aboriginal “cuss words" of agglutinative construction thrown about promiscuously on this occasion; but at any rate, he casts aside the now useless bit of flint, and with the stoical patience of his race, goes for" another.

66

THOSE doleful philosophers who see nothing good in the present age, do not give due attention to the growth of brotherly feeling, especially in the marts of commerce. There no man loses sight of his fellow-man (if the latter is a customer), and no man is indifferent to the general welfare of society; because society contains any quantity of customers, either existent or in embryo. The most expensive agencies are employed to keep the traders in the great centres informed, or as they say "posted," concerning the status, financial, moral (as affecting the financial), and intellectual (ditto), of all their brother traders within the circumference. A careful history of the possible buyer is made up, and the one fact evolved — if he is to be an actual buyer-relates to the quantity of money he may have in possession or prospect. Then the possible seller, with gushing affection, propounds to himself the important question: "How can I get it?" Here we have, at once, the fulfilment of the requirement of the second table of the moral law: that tender solicitude wherewith one is enjoined to watch over the interests of one's neighbor, is immediately manifested; because the anxiety with which we may conserve another's welfare is measured by the care one bestows upon one's own. If my neighbor possesses property which may one day be legally mine, how earnestly do I watch lest some (other) one should break through and steal!