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mount in the politics of the country. The tone of the narrative is judicial in its impartiality, the author scarcely revealing the tendency of his own sympathies, and evidently feeling that the contests and changing sway of parties are signs of political health among the people. A series of appendices to the volume contain the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and tables showing the order of admission of the States, the popular and electoral votes in Presidential elections from 1789 to 1876, the population of the sections from 1790 to 1860, the Congressional representation of the sections from 1790 to 1860, and the population and representation of the sections in 1878.

Mr. Stickney's "A True Republic"* is very different from Mr. Johnston's handbook both in aim and in method of treatment. Mr. Johnston's object is to show what the Republic of the United States actually has been and is; Mr. Stickney's to show what it ought to be. Mr. Johnston contents himself with describing how the national Government and politics came to be what we now find them; Mr. Stickney endeavors to point out the original defects of the Constitution as a practical instrument of government, the mistakes that have been made in working it, and the nature of the reforms that are necessary in order that it may really and fully achieve the important purposes set forth in its preamble. It can not be denied that Mr. Stickney's work is of a type which the great majority of readers regard with a sort of impatience and distrust. Even as an intellectual exercise, few things are more barren than the construction of political Utopias; and at a time when the people seem to be really seeking for purer and more efficient methods of government it is simply substituting a stone for bread to offer them the speculations of an idealist or the word-fabrics of a logician. Mr. Stickney has not allowed himself to forget this for an instant, and the distinctive merit of his work is that from first to last it takes firm hold upon fact-that its criticism is directed to defects which are known and admitted, that it appeals to the experience of the race as recorded in history and not to reasoning from principles, and that the remedies it proposes are, if not always self-evident, at least specific and definite. No one can complain of Mr. Stickney on the ground that he is a "doctrinaire." He confines himself almost too closely to facts and the practical aspects of the various questions raised-for it is sometimes well to show that the lessons which seem to be taught by experience are also comformable to right reasoningand the reforms which he urges are not designed to form an earthly paradise or to inaugurate the millennium, but simply to secure an honest and efficient working government. Moreover, the results aimed at are not such as presuppose a community consisting only of "the good," but are such as may be fairly and reasonably looked for among "the existing people of these United States."

Many details, of course, enter into Mr. Stickney's scheme of constitutional reform; but its main features, to which all others are totally subordinate, are the abolition of political parties and the destruction of politics as a profession. He thinks that nearly all the evils from which the country has suffered or is now suffering have come directly or indirectly from party contests and party government. He admits, of course, that there will necessarily and inevitably be serious differences of opinion among the people about the many vital questions which come before government for adjustment, but he denies that these either require or justify permanent hostile associations, and especially that they require the complex machinery of party as we know it. He holds further that this complex and costly machinery could never have been constructed and would not now hold together for a month but for "the cohesive attraction of public plunder”—in other words, but for the use of public offices as rewards for winning elections. Make the tenure of office permanent during good behavior (that is, as long as the service rendered is honest and efficient), conduct the public business exactly as private business is conducted, abolish all “terms" and "rotation " in office, make competency and efficiency the sole condition of appointment and promotion, and Mr. Stickney thinks that, while the people will continue to divide and combine on essential and living questions as they arise, we shall see no more “campaigns ” fought by rival dynasties of party hacks on factitious "issues" and with deceptive “war-cries."

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Through the greater part of his argument Mr. Stickney easily carries the reader with him; yet it requires but a slight knowledge of political history to see that he greatly underrates the vitality of those differences of opinion and temperament which lie at the root of party divisions. Our own history suffices to prove that he is mistaken in declaring the desire to possess the offices to have been the sole originating cause of our party antagonisms, past and present. The idea of using the government offices as rewards for political services was scarcely heard of until Jackson's Administration, and was not put thoroughly in practice until that of Van Buren; yet the spirit of party has seldom run higher than in those early years of the Union, even Washington complaining (in a letter to Jefferson) that he was assailed "in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." The truth is, that, as Mr. Johnston points out, the question of a strict" or "loose" construction of the Constitution has always been at the root of legitimate national party differences in the United States. As soon as the Constitution was adopted, the Federalists, comprising all those who wanted a "strong" government, endeavored to have it interpreted loosely or broadly, so as to give the Federal Government increased power in various matters of national importance; opposed to them were the Anti-Federal

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A True Republic. By Albert Stickney. New ists, comprising all who saw in a strong central govYork: Harper & Brothers. 16m0, pp. 271. ernment an enemy to liberty, and who insisted that

the Constitution should be construed strictly according to its terms, and that ingenious interpretations of its provisions should not give the Federal Government any further stretch of power. Precisely this conflict has lasted, amid many fluctuations, to our own day, and the succession of parties is complete from Federalists through Whigs to Republicans, and from Anti-Federalists through DemocraticRepublicans to Democrats.

This mistake, as it seems to us, in one of his premises, goes but a little way toward invalidating Mr. Stickney's conclusions, and he is undoubtedly right in thinking that the "machine," as it is called, which has done so much to obscure legitimate party differences, would be irretrievably "smashed" by a permanent tenure of office and appointments solely for competency. It should be said, furthermore, that the interest and instructiveness of Mr. Stickney's book are not conditioned upon the reader's accepting its argument and conclusions in every part. Whether one agrees with him or not, the book can hardly fail to prove both suggestive and helpful; and in these days of political pessimism it is pleasant to find one who, after a sufficiently discouraging survey of popular mistakes and follies, can write as a concluding and culminating conviction: "If these views are sound, men will be convinced by them. If they are not sound, no one will heed them. That is the only question we have to examine-whether these views here urged are sound. If they are, the people will put them in practice."

IN our review a year ago of De Amicis's "Constantinople," we remarked that that book sufficed to place its author in the very foremost rank of descriptive writers; and the impression then received is confirmed and deepened by the recently published "Studies of Paris." * This latter work is the result of a visit to Paris during the Exposition of 1878, and, if much less elaborate than the "Constantinople," furnishes even more striking evidence of the author's versatility of talent. For conveying a vivid and realistic idea of the impression made by Paris upon the mind of the newly arrived stranger, we doubt if anything more effective has even been written than the opening chapter of the volume, entitled "The First Day in Paris." The reader is enabled not merely to divine but to see the varied and splendid spectacle of the most spectacular city in the world; and, with all its apparent confusion and infinite multiplicity of details, the whole composition forms an harmonious and proportioned picture which will be a long time in fading from the reader's imagination. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the great majority of persons would get from a perusal of this chapter a far better conception of what the sights of Paris really are than they would from an actual visit to the city. Equally vivid and realistic, and still

* Studies of Paris. By Edmondo de Amicis. Translated from the Italian by W. W. C. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 16m0, pp. 276.

more brilliant is "A Glance at the Exposition," in dealing with which the author has a better opportunity for displaying the fertility of his imagination and the extent of his knowledge. As a mere description of the Exhibition, this chapter is well worth reading, but perhaps its most valuable feature is the lesson which it teaches of the way in which such a show should be viewed by one who goes to it simply as a sight-seer, and not for practical instruction. We doubt very greatly whether the author carried away with him a solitary item of practically useful knowledge, or could have enumerated the contents of a single department; but he gives an incomparably graphic and picturesque idea of the fantastically brilliant ensemble, of the curious contrasts of the juxtaposed exhibits, and of the way in which the several exhibits summarize the life and character of the peoples that send them. At the end of the volume is another general chapter on Paris, in which the author leaves off description and analyzes with much subtilty and skill the successive states of feeling which Paris generates in the mind of the visitor who stays in the city long enough to throw off the enchantment which comes from the mere novelty and splendor of its spectacles.

Besides these descriptive chapters the volume contains two papers which may be classed as literary or critical-one on Victor Hugo, and the other on Emile Zola, the novelist. The chapter on Zola narrates circumstantially the incidents of a visit paid to him by the author, and is composed largely of personal and biographical details; but it also contains in brief space quite the best analysis of Zola's qualities and characteristics as a writer that we have seen. To appreciate this criticism at its full value it must be read entire, but a few passages almost compel quotation:

You feel the same pleasure [in reading Zola's novels] that you would have in hearing a very blunt man talk, even if he were brutal; a man who expresses, as Othello says, his worst ideas in his worst language, who describes what he sees, repeats what he hears, says what he thinks, and tells what he is, without any regard for any one's feelings, and just as if he were talking to himself—à la

bonne heure! From the very first lines you know with whom you are dealing. The delicate persons retire that is an understood matter; he does not conceal or embellish anything, either sentiments, thoughts, conversations, acts, or places. . . . In the moral order, he unveils in his characters those deepest feelings which are generally profound secrets, and are tremblingly whispered through the window of the confessional. In the material order, he makes us perceive every odor, every flavor, and every contact. In language, he scarcely refrains from those few unpronounceable words which wicked boys iads of characters in novels whom we remember, his stealthily seek in the dictionary. . . . Among the myrremain crowded on one side, and are the largest and most tangible of all. We have not only seen them pass and heard them talk, but have jostled against them, felt their breath, and perceived the odor of their flesh and garments. We have seen the blood circulating under their skins; know in what positions they sleep, what they eat, how they dress and undress; we understand the differences between their temperaments and ours,

their most secret appetites, the most passionate anger of their language; their gestures, grimaces, the spots on their linen, the dirt in their nails, etc. And, like the characters, he impresses upon our minds the places, because he looks at everything with the keen glance which embraces all, and which nothing escapes. In a room already drawn and painted, the light is moved, and he interrupts the story to tell us where it glides, upon what it breaks in the new direction, the ray of the flame, and how the legs of a chair and the hinges of a door gleam in a dark corner. From the description of a shop, he makes us understand that it has just struck twelve, or lacks nearly an hour of sunset. He notes all the shadows, all the spots on the sun, all the shades of color which succeed each other from hour to hour upon the wall; and presents everything with such a marvelous distinctness that, five years after reading, we remember the appearance the upholstery presented about five o'clock in the evening, when the curtains had been drawn, and the effect the appearance produced upon the mind of a person who was seated in the corner of that particular room. He never forgets anything, and gives life to everything, and there is nothing before which his omnipotent pencil stops, neither soiled linen, the appearance of drunken men, dirty flesh, or decayed bodies. ..

...

Among all these, in all these places, the air of which we breathe and in which we see and touch everything, moves a varied crowd of women, corrupt to the marrow, foul-mouthed shopkeepers, cunning bankers, knavish priests, prostitutes, dandies, ruffians, and filth of every kind and shape (among which sometimes appears, like a rara avis, a good man); and between them they all do a little of everything, from the crime of incest (circulating between the penal code and the hospital, and the pawn-shops and tavern), through all the passions and brutish tastes, sunk in the mire up to the chin, in a thick and heavy atmosphere, hardly freshened from time to time by the breath of a lovely affection, and stirred alternately by plebeian sickness and the heart-rending cries of the famished and dying. Yet, despite this, he is a moral writer; one can affirm this resolutely-Emile Zola is one of the most moral novelists of France, and it is really astonishing that any one can doubt this. He makes us perceive the smell of vice, not the perfume; his nude figures are those of the anatomical table, which do not inspire the slightest immoral thought; there is not one of his books, not even the crudest, that does not leave in the soul, pure, firm, and immutable, aversion or scorn for the base passions of which he treats. He is not, like Dumas fils, bound by an unconquerable sympathy to his hideous women, to whom he says "Infamous creatures!" in a loud voice, and "Dear ones" just above his breath. Brutally, pitilessly, and without hypocrisy, he exposes vice, nude, and holds it up to ridicule, standing so far off from it that he does not graze it with his garments. Forced by his hand, it is Vice itself that says, "Detest me and pass by!" His novels, he himself says, are really "moral in action." The scandal which comes from them is only for the eyes and ears. And as he holds back, as a man, from the mire mixed by his pen, so completely does he, as a writer, keep aloof from the characters which he has created.—(Page 180.)

The chapter on Victor Hugo also describes a personal visit, and gives many interesting personal details; but, in spite of numerous passages of acute and penetrating criticism, it is so fulsome in its adulation and so rhapsodical in style that the reader will hardly go through it patiently. Such extrava

gance of homage is about equally discreditable to him who offers and to him who invites and accepts it; and this is entirely apart from the question whether the Continental or the English estimate of Victor Hugo is the correct one.

should provoke controversy was naturally to be exTHAT Mr. Mallock's "Is Life worth Living?" pected, and probably the readers who were most impressed by the power of its dialectics are the very ones who would be most pleased with an adequate and equally skillful rejoinder to it. To answer it, however, in such a way as to break the force of its impression, might well have been constituted the work of some one of the able and influential writers whom Science has at her command, and it is greatly who is apparently so little capable of appreciating to be regretted that the task was assumed by one what the occasion demanded of him as the author of "The Value of Life."* This book is put forth avowedly as "A Reply to 'Is Life worth Living'?" and its author, though refusing to disclose himself, is evidently a Positivist, not in the general sense in which Mr. Mallock uses the term, but in the more restricted one in which it is commonly understood. It is divided into three sections, in the first of which, after some desultory remarks not very relevant to the subject, the author gives what he calls a summary of Mr. Mallock's argument—a summary of which we are compelled to say that it is not only not a fair or adequate summary, but that the reader will not obtain from it even a faint idea of what Mr. Mallock's argument really is. This would be bad enough if it merely signified the incompetency of the author, for he who can not even state an argument correctly, can hardly be expected to controvert convinced that the author had no intention or desire it; but one has to read but a very few pages to be to make a fair summary, and that the object of his book is not so much to refute Mr. Mallock as to discredit him. This purpose is still more evident in the second section, which is almost entirely devoted to showing that Mr. Mallock is a Catholic propagandist in disguise, that if not actually a Jesuit he possesses three out of the four distinctive characteristics

of Jesuits, that he wants to subject the world again to the blight of ecclesiastical despotism, that he is a perverter of the truth and not a seeker after it, and that he "prostrates himself at the feet of a tinsel and plaster Madonna." The entire effort of the author in this portion of his book is to stir up the smoldering fires of Protestant antagonism to Papal pretensions, and to direct against Mr. Mallock whatever may remain of the odium theologicum—an effort which would be explicable if not excusable in an avowedly Protestant writer, but which is in the highest degree discreditable to one who does not hesitate to let it be seen later that he holds Protestantism and Catholicism in about equal scorn.

*The Value of Life. A Reply to Mr. Mallock's Essay "Is Life worth Living?" New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 12mo, pp. 253.

It is only in the third and concluding section of the work that the author really attempts to grapple with his opponent's arguments. Here he makes some undeniably strong points, and in several instances convicts Mr. Mallock of inadequate knowledge of subjects which he treats as if he were perfectly familiar with them; but even here the argument is so confused, so incoherent, and occasionally so obscure, that the most attentive reader finds it difficult to follow it, and almost impossible to estimate its cumulative force. One thing among many others which the author might have learned from Mr. Mallock is the art of orderly arrangement and clear and precise expression. Whatever may be Mr. Mallock's other faults, no reader has the slightest difficulty in following his argument and catching his meaning, while in even the best portions of “The Value of Life" the reader is inclined to doubt whether the worth of the ore is sufficient to repay the labor of extracting it.

To the faults for which the author is alone responsible the printer has added a copious and ingenious assortment of typographical errors, some of which are so remarkable that one is compelled to wonder, first, how they could have been made by the compositor, and, second, how they could have been overlooked by the proof-reader. Some fatality, indeed, seems to have attended the production of the book; and we may say of it in conclusion that nothing would more contribute to deepen the already profound impression made by Mr. Mallock's essay than the idea that this is the only "reply" that can be made to it.

If we were asked to select from recent literature its very best example of the way in which to study a great man and interpret him to the people, we should without hesitation name the monograph on Burke which Mr. Morley has contributed to the series of English Men of Letters."* In it are combined breadth of information, keenness of insight, and nobility of feeling, with something that is less knowledge than wisdom; and the whole finds expression in a style so weighty, opulent, and appropriate, and yet so unobtrusive, that the reader will hardly become aware how much of the charm of the book aside from its instructiveness, comes from the author's mastery as "an artist in words." Even before writing this monograph Mr. Morley had vindicated his right to deal with its subject. A dozen years ago he published a study on Burke which has ever since been a guide and a landmark for students; and his article on Burke in the new edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" has been selected by competent judges as the best of its kind that has appeared thus far in that vast omnium gatherum.

His first essay was, as he says, "almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative"; the present volume differs from it in being biographical rather

*English Men of Letters. Edmund Burke. By John Morley. New York: Harper & Brothers. 12mo, pp. 214.

than critical, though the author has not lost sight of the fact that his task is not merely to tell what Burke did and how he lived, but to interpret his character and define the nature, quality, and value of his work. And, indeed, it is this latter part of his task which Mr. Morley has performed most satisfactorily. Viewed as a succession of external incidents, Burke's life was singularly uneventful; but his character and his works pique the curiosity and baffle the judgment as well as arouse the keenest admiration and interest. His combination of calm judgment and the broadest philosophic ideas with an impetuosity of feeling and a violence of temper which at times seemed like insanity has been regarded simply as one of those inexplicable freaks which Nature sometimes perpetrates in compounding a genius; and the difficulty of explaining why one who stood forth as the champion and advocate of liberty during the American Revolution should, when the French Revolution confronted him, have become its deadliest foe, has been so great that most biographers have solved the problem by assuming that the death of his son had broken down the thin partitions which are supposed to divide great wit from madness. Mr. Morley is the first who has been able to harmonize the apparent contradictions, and to make plain the essential consistency of Burke's character and conduct; and he does this by no strained ingenuity of analysis, but in accordance with our profoundest knowledge of human nature, and by the aid of a more searching and sympathetic study of Burke's writings and speeches than has hitherto been undertaken.

The attempt to quote a characteristic passage from the volume is apt to be baffled by the numbers which clamor for admission, but here is one which is especially worthy of reproduction because it is perhaps the frankest admission that has yet come from a leading English writer of what our own statesmen and historians have always claimed:

It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication of the supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations would have been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional struggle of 1760 to 1783 [in England] would have ended otherwise than it did, but for the failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, and the final establishment of American independence. It was this portentous transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, and which put an end to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of making his will supreme in the Chambers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist victory in the war as the terrible news from Long Island. The struggle which began at Massachusetts. The scene had changed, but the conBrentford, in Middlesex, was continued at Boston, in flicting principles were the same. The War of Independence was virtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke's attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.—(P. 59.)

The absence of an index, which has been all along the greatest defect of the series, is particularly felt in the case of this volume, which contains so many passages to which one would like to be able readily to refer.

SHORTLY after the outbreak of the recent war between Russia and Turkey, Lieutenant F. V. Greene, of the Corps of Engineers, was selected by our War Department to go to the seat of war for the purpose of observing the military operations from the Russian side, and, the better to accomplish this object, was assigned to duty as Military Attaché to the United States Legation at St. Petersburg. Proceeding to St. Petersburg, he readily obtained permission to join the Army of the Danube, whose headquarters he reached on the 5th of August, 1877, and with which he remained throughout the campaign, and until peace was definitively concluded by the treaty of Berlin, in July, 1878. Returning then to his post at the legation in St. Petersburg, he collected the official war reports, and gathered materials for an authoritative description of the Russian military system; and, finally, supplementing the information thus obtained with his own experiences and observations during the campaign, made his official report to the War Department on the conduct of the war. By permission of the Department he now publishes this report in a volume entitled "The Russian Army and its Campaigns in Turkey in 1877-1878";* the text, which makes a large book, being accompanied by an atlas, separately bound and containing twenty-six plates, most of them colored, and all very handsomely engraved.

Defining the scope of the work in his preface, Lieutenant Greene says: "This report aims to give, first, a concise but accurate description of the Russian Army; second, a narrative of the course of the campaigns in Europe and Asia Minor; and, third, a brief discussion of the use of temporary field fortifications in connection with the modern breech-loading musket." That portion of the volume describing the campaign in Bulgaria is much more extensive than either of the other divisions, and is also decidedly more interesting. The author makes very slight literary use of his personal observations, his work being, as he says, a strictly military report addressed to his military superiors; but the advantage of having been actually on the ground is very great even when the technical details of a battle are to be described, and it is doubtless owing to his presence with the army during the Bulgarian campaign that the portion of his work describing that campaign is so much more vivid and real than any other portion. The account of the operations in Asia Minor is an intelligent and instructive compilation from the Russian official reports; but, though it is carefully and clearly written, there is nothing in it that equals in

The Russian Army and its Campaigns in Turkey in 1877-1878. By F. V. Greene, First Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers, U. S. A. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo, pp. 471. Atlas with 26 Plates.

vividness of interest the descriptions of the battles in the Shipka Pass, of the terrible repulse of the Russians at Plevna on September 11, 1877, of the capture of Osman Pasha's army, of the passage of the Balkans in winter by Gourko's column, of the battles near Philippopolis, which shattered Suleiman Pasha's army and drove it into the Rhodope Mountains, and, lastly, of the advance on Constantinople. Lieutenant Greene writes in a clear, direct, and soldierly style, with few attempts at literary ornamentation, and with no straining after effects. His sole aim is evidently to make his meaning clearly understood, and in this he very rarely fails. Military students, in particular, are to be congratulated on having the report disinterred from the public archives.

WHETHER "Haworth's" is a better or a worse novel than "That Lass o' Lowrie's" is a question with which criticism, properly speaking, has nothing to do, but it is a question which is certain to be asked, the more particularly as the scene and circumstances of the two stories are very similar, and the same class of people is dealt with in both. We may say, therefore, that, to our mind, "Haworth's" is in certain respects a marked improvement upon the earlier story, while in others it is as distinctly inferior. Some one has acutely said that a novel is in general pleasing or otherwise in exact proportion to the attractiveness of its leading female character; and it is when judged by this standard that "Haworth's" is most defective. There was something very fascinating about the robust womanhood and the fine nobility of character of the lass of Lowrie's, but Miss Ffrench, who fills the same relative place in the later story, is decidedly repellent, besides being not very intelligible, while Christian Murdoch is merely a skeleton, which the author has not taken the pains to clothe with flesh and blood. The male characters are about equally well drawn in both stories, but the contrasts and divergences of type are more dramatic and more adroitly managed in "Haworth's" than in its predecessor. The minor characters are also about equally good (and they are very good) in both, though the humor of Mr. Briarly in "Haworth's" is both coarser and far less genuine and amusing than that of "Owd Sammy Crowther." The features in which "Haworth's" is superior to 'That Lass o' Lowrie's " are those which pertain to what we may call the structure of the story. The author has made a distinct advance in the artistic quality of her work, and in "Haworth's" the plot is better imagined, the incidents are more skillfully varied and interlinked, the part of the several characters is more clearly defined, and the interest of the story is more continuous and sustained. There is also a gain of self-confidence on the part of the author, and the strokes are laid on with the vigor and rapidity and precision which come from the con

*Haworth's. By Frances Hodgson-Burnett. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 12mo, illustrated, pp.

374.

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