ebriates visible on a holiday. "Sylvanus Cobb was one of those intoxicated" he observes grimly. Cobb signed the pledge and broke it with refreshing frequency. But rum brought no misfortune. Instead, he was sought out by Robert Bonner, the enterprising publisher of the "New York Ledger," in February, 1856, and was kept on its staff and in affluence ever after. It used to be gossiped about the village that his salary-which Bonner told him to name himself-was $50 a week-an incredible sum in that day, and pretty big now for Norway. The deal was soon made and Sylvanus began to work as never story-teller worked before. What a fountain of romance, tragedy and adventure flowed from his fluent pen! He had a fine, well-rounded style. His "situations" were powerful and his sentiment gratified the soul. No man could write more tenderly or more bravely. Nor did he lack humor; the short tales of the sea were full of it. He used the names of village cronies for his characters, men who later were judges and generals, and all enjoyed the fun it made. been. On the occasion of its third printing in the "Ledger" of 1880, Mr. Bonner wrote: ""The Gunmaker of Moscow' is one of the most popular stories ever printed, and the requests by our readers for re-publication in the 'Ledger' have been so urgent and persistent, that we have concluded to print it again. It was first published in the 'Ledger' twenty-four years ago. Persons who read it then want their children to read it now." Bonner brought Sylvanus to New York, and on Monday, October 27, 1856, he saw "The Gunmaker" disport himself on the stage at the Chambers Street Theater, sitting in Bonner's box. "It was done well," he wrote in his journal. "My own dialogue has been preserved throughout. The house was literally packed to overflowing." Under his contract he was to write a novelette every eight weeks and furnish two short sketches weekly. Surely, he earned his pay, while Bonner became a millionaire. The contract was for five years. It was renewed, altered and the pay increased from time to time, and it lasted unbroken for thirty-one years, or until the willing hand ceased to write. They grew old, happily, together. "No use in grumbling over the inevitable," wrote Bonner to Cobb on the thirtieth anniversary of their coming together, "and I don't think either of us will grumble. That is not our nature." Bonner surely had little enough to grumble at, and died before the "Ledger" petered out, swamped by a flood of new publications. The pen-name of Col. Walter B. Dunlap, which Sylvanus made famous, was signed to one hundred and two "sketches of adventure,” as they were listed, and several long serials. The last of the series was "The Cannibal's Necropolis; Home Again." One can imagine what such a necropolis would be like. Sylvanus the story-teller did not write rubbish. David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby), no mean judge, once described Cobb as "The Walter Scott of America." He was a better writer than Scott in technique and was many pages ahead of him in swiftness of action. Scott's backgrounds were always more important than his stories, with, perhaps, the exception of "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Cobb's imagination never ceased to thrill. Mr. Bonner steered the course of many stories during their voyage together, with helpful hints. He knew the pulse of the "Ledger's" readers. "Can you keep up the interest of "The Queen's Plot,' and continue it four or five weeks more?" he wrote on one occasion. "Mrs. Southworth's (E. D. N.) story is nearly finished and I don't want the two to end about the same time." Evidently Sylvanus failed to keep up the interest, for Bonner wrote a month later, "Try and make the next long story as exciting as possible. The interest in "The Queen's Plot' has fallen off, and I am sorry I asked you to make it longer at the time I did. This is the only time, with the exception when we published "The Mystic Bride' that the circulation ever went down to any extent with your stories in the paper. I don't care what the carpers and critics may say, I believe in the good old thrilling stories, with one of your inimitable heroes-a Ruric. They take, and no mistake.” Becoming prosperous, the storyteller removed from Norway to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where he lived the rest of his life in a fine house, set amid trees and flowers, writing as busily as ever, in a special study built on the roof. He wrote rapidly and with the utmost legibility; never a blot or erasure marred his manuscripts. He kept a ledger account with himself, which recorded one hundred and thirty novelettes and serials, running from 450 to 1000 pages of manuscript each. This, remember, was before the day of the deluging typewriter. To his further credit were thirty "Forest Sketches"; one hundred and two classed as "adventure"; fiftyseven short sea stories; five hundred and seventy-three miscellaneous tales; and two thousand three hundred and five "scraps," as he called them. At the end of thirty years with Bonner, Sylvanus summed up his accomplishments as above and added in his diary: "A good record." It certainly was. Thursday evening, May 19, 1887, he finished what was to be his last tale, writing in his diary for that day: "Wrote a sketch, 'Seaside, Jack's Romance,' pages twenty-one and three quarters, and will now fill up for awhile." An attack of pneumonia in the previous January had left the hardworked man with a weakened heart. It ceased to beat on the afternoon of July 20, 1887. ON PROHIBITIONS The Conflict Between American Law and Customs PHILIP DEXTER HE dispute about prohibition, representative government would Tlike the poor, is always with us. still exist, but as it deprives all legis has produced, along with an intolerable deal of nonsense, some sound thinking. Popular concern with it continues sufficiently to induce publishers and editors to include it in their efforts to benefit their country. The most recent manifestation consists of two magazine articles which, though they do not, perhaps, contribute much to the sum of human wisdom, are of inter est. The remarks of Mr. Johnston in the April CENTURY have the merit of novelty. He undertakes to show that the Eighteenth Amendment is voidable (not void, as the title of his article asserts) upon the demand of Connecticut or Rhode Island, neither of which has ratified it. The ground for this contention is that the Fourth Article of the Constitution guarantees to the several States a republican form of government, and that the amendment has deprived them of it, because the representatives of the people can no longer decide, either in Congress or in the State legislatures, whether the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages shall be permitted. If the amendment had merely conferred upon Congress the power to forbid these, latures of the power to do anything, except enforce the prohibitions of the amendment, Mr. Johnston is of the opinion that government by the people has perished from the earth. It remains for Rhode Island or Connecticut, the only States which have not acquiesced by ratification, to raise the question in the Supreme Court of the United States and procure a judgment that this attempt to destroy republican institutions is without legal validity. There are many sound objections to inserting sumptuary legislation in the Constitution. The inappropriateness of the Eighteenth Amendment to the general plan of government is obvious, except to those who put it there; and the unwisdom of incorporating in the fundamental law a disputed measure of social reform has been abundantly shown. But this effort of Mr. Johnston's is apparently designed to show, not that the amendment is inappropriate to the Constitution, but that it is not lawfully there. The unconstitutionality of a constitutional amendment has been suggested before; not, however, upon the ground that it denies to the States a republican form of government. its consent, of its equal representation in the Senate. No other part of the Constitution is treated by that in strument as inmune from cars by amendment. The Fourth Aride, which contains the guarantee of a republican government, employs no language which suggests that the provisions for amendment do not apply to it. There is nothing to prevent Congress and the necessary number of States from substituting the word "monarchical" in place of "republican" if they saw it so to do. It seems plain that if the Eighteenth Amendment had declared itself to be an amendment of that part of the Fourth Article which guarantees a republican form of government, there could be no successful complaint by any State. The absence of that declaration cannot affect the validity of the amendment. If it does in fact amend any one or more articles it need not say that it does. States of the form of govemment guaranteed to them. The Fifth Article of the Conation tion declares that there sal be a restriction before the year 1808 of the right to import slaves, and that no The magazine article of Dr. FE State shall be deprived without the "Tapah Quarterly" 2nd in approaches the tory shee prohibition in another angle. P. Fairchild is concerned to reiste cerun unsound methods of reasoning which have obscured the subject. He points out that nearly all crimal laws require no enforcement, 20 except against a few criminals, be cause the great majority of people have no intention of violating them, being restrained by "vanity" term taken from the rather illdevised vocabulary of modern sociol ogy. The late William G. Sumner invented a better name for it-the mores, meaning customary behavior which enjoys the moral approval of the tribe. Without disputing about a name, it may be admitted that the statement is correct, as far as it goes. From this basis Dr. Fairchild proceeds to demonstrate that much of the debate about prohibition has been conducted upon erroneous lines, that it is not at all a question of morals but one of social convenience or advantage, that the overworked appeal to personal liberty is nonsense, because all law restricts personal liberty, and that the sole question with respect to prohibition is whether or not there is advantage enough from it to justify the restriction. The failure to enforce any law he repudiates as a test of its value, and he points out that violations of it, even if numerous, can have no effect in creating disrespect for law, but are evidence of a disrespect which antedates the violations. Further, the only guarantee is of a republican form of government. Nothing is said about the substance. It is difficult to imagine the Supreme Court setting aside the Eighteenth Amendment, even if it be true that it infringes in one small particular the power of the people's representatives to legislate. In all other respects the forms of representative government survive. The Supreme Court would probably feel constrained to decide that the Fourth Article could be amended, that it had been amended in due form, and that the amendment did not deprive the Admitting the correctness of his argument it is nevertheless necessary to be on our guard against implications which he, no doubt, does not intend, but which the unwary are likely to assume. When he declares that the law against smuggling furnishes "an almost ideal test case," and when he treats it as parallel to the prohibition law, he omits to mention that there is a marked difference in the nature of the legal mandate, and consequently in the deductions to be drawn from violations. The imposition of duties on imports is entirely different from prohibition. If you want the imported article you may lawfully have it upon payment of duty, but you are not allowed to have the prohibited article at all. Customs duties furnish a good enough example of a law which is constantly broken and which tends to show that the argument, "enforce a law or repeal it" is not always sound; but with respect to the motive of those who break it there is no analogy with prohibition. A far closer parallel is found in the laws forbidding the sale of narcotics. In both cases there is an attempt to prevent people from indulging their appetites, both are restrictions on personal liberty, and both are violated. Why, then, is the law relating to narcotics successful legislation and the prohibition of alcoholic beverages a conspicuous failure? Because in the one case those who are deprived of their liberty are few in number and their reaction against the deprivation is feeble, while in the other case the number of those whose freedom is restricted is large and their resentment is strong. Nobody can imagine the drug laws becoming important in politics, but there is no doubt that prohibition is a factor of some consequence, and that it threatens, in the course of time, to split existing political parties in two. We thus approach an aspect of the question which Dr. Fairchild treats somewhat inadequately, and where his logic, correct as it is, may mislead us into unwarranted deductions. "Granting," says he, "that the law is justified—that is, that the safety and order secured will more than offset the loss of personal liberty—the more people there are who desire to break it the more necessary it is.” One is reminded, on perusing that passage, of the old epigram that logic teaches how to make mistakes correctly. There is no disputing his statement, but how are we to know, with respect to any proposed law, that it will produce more safety and order than it will restrict personal liberty, and how are we to ascertain, with respect to a law in actual force, that it does produce the one to a greater extent than it restricts the other? Nobody, not even a representative of the people, knows as much as that. Nobody can pretend to decide, except by giving free rein to his to his ignorance and prejudice, whether or not the safety and order secured are more valuable than the liberty lost. There are, no doubt, plenty of fanatics, ready and willing to announce a decision, not only with respect to prohibition, but on every other controversial subject; nevertheless those who do not happen to agree with them may be permitted to doubt their competence to do so, because the premise is not susceptible of determination. Many fields of human activity are unsuited to legis |