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in front of the palaces stood stately black bulls, and on the wooden platforms fakirs and holy men were establishing themselves for the day. Bugles were blaring in the temples, and the drone of drums boomed for rites and secret sacrifices in dim, impenetrable shrines where only the priest might go. There, as in Levitical days, atonement was made by the blood of goats and sheep, while the people purified themselves by the river-bank; and he would indeed be a bigot who should say that the spirit which inspired this early hour of cleansing and sacrifice mounted no higher than to the deaf ears of Siva, cobracrowned, or Hanuman, the lord of apes, or Ganesha, with his elephant head.

THE BURNING GHAT

THERE was plague in the city, so our young Brahman told us, and he recognized a friend whose sister had died during the night waiting at the burning ghat. On the steps leading down into the water were lying three or four of those swathed and tranquil burdens that had been borne there to be bathed for the last time in the cleansing flood. Gay of color were the cerements in which they were wrapped-pink and yellow and dazzling blue. They were like flowers that had been plucked, and were laid there to drink of the coolness of the water. Even as we came opposite, the bearers lifted one of them, all cool and dripping, from the river, and laid it, the slim, small figure, so quiet, so content, on a half-built pyre. Brushwood and fagots were built over it, and at head and foot and sides the fire was applied. A Brahman directed the rites, and once, as the flames mounted and aspired, the brother, who was watching, clutched at his heart as there appeared for a moment, at the top of the pyre, a girl's face, with closed eyes, and mouth that seemed to smile; then the radiant veil of flame shrouded it again. The smoke rose in gray whorls and streamers against the stainless and tender blue of the sky, and still the brother watched, quiet again and composed: he had given only that one sign to show that he loved her whose ashes now lay among the charred and smoldering logs. Or rather it was only for the moment that, thinking of days of childhood and dawns by the riverside, he forgot that it was not

she who had been consumed in the flames of the pyre. Then he remembered again, and looking up from the pyre to the dazzling river, he saw there on our boat his friend, the Brahman, and smiled to him.

For half an hour we watched with him till all was over. Then such wood as was still unburned was saved for future use, but the ashes were swept together and given to the keeping of the sacred Ganges. There was only a handful of them, and an eddy of the swift-flowing river caught them and mingled them with blooms of marigold and rose-petals that floated there. Swiftly and gaily they circled, then shot out again from the shadow into the dazzling stream, and were absorbed into it like motes in a sunbeam. Never have I been present at a scene so simple, so true, so radiant with moral beauty. To the mourner, that lonely, quiet boy, to the priest, to the burners, and to all the gay crowd that prayed and were cleansed that morning in sun and water, death was as natural as life; purified and freed, the soul escaped from the discarded body, of which it had need no longer, and for the rest there was the fire that rose skyward beside the holy river, and the sacred Ganges, pellucid, unpollutable.

The pearliness of dawn had hardened into the crystal of day, and the sun had drunk up the blue veils of river mist, before we landed again. The hour of joyful ablution, of early sacrifice and prayer, of souls set free and bodies purified by water and fire, was over, and the breeze of morning fainted in the brazen sky. The fakirs and holy men had seated themselves beneath their straw umbrellas, and begun another day of immobile contemplation ; the grave, black bulls wandered into the shade of palaces; the shrines were decked afresh with garlands of flowers; and the cleansed crowd, their devotions over, trooped back up the river-bank with shining brass water-pots and bundles of washed linen. Cornices and columns of the temples echoed to the cooings of the pigeons that patrolled there, and companies of swifts cut airy circles above the river. But still within the temple the drums beat and the conchs sounded, and all day long the Ganges, redeemer and cleanser, flowed by, carrying the ashes of the dead, and the jasmine and marigolds, the offerings of the living.

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STUDY FOR THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL AT WASHINGTON

The site of the memorial is near the banks of the Potomac, on the axis of the Washington Monument and the Capitol, at the end of the avenue planned to be two miles long and three hundred feet wide. The interior of the memorial will contain a statue of Lincoln and memorials of two of his most notable speeches, the Gettys

burg Address and the Second Inaugural.

EVEN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S SOCIAL IDEALS

BY ROSE STRUNSKY

VEN in the most cursory review of Abraham Lincoln's life it becomes evident that there was something beyond mere patriotism which inspired him in his efforts to maintain the integrity of the United States. His significance to-day comes from a deeper cause than the "saving of the Union." It lies in the social ideals he represented, and which animated his acts. They are the beacon-lights by which the average American is trying to guide his political course to-day.

Two conceptions were clear in Lincoln's mind when he undertook the war. One, that the Union, based on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, carried out successfully the American

ideal of government, equal economic opportunity for all, which is the basis of American freedom; and, second, that that freedom could not be maintained by a division of the Union. "Physically speaking," he said, "we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them."

Lincoln said this in his first Inaugural Address in 1861, and he acted upon this idea immediately on his accession to power. The West, which was half Southern, and which understood the nature of the Southerner better than the East, readily agreed with him. The East, even the most Republican East, could not quite see this one

ness of the Union. They had ever before their eyes the outlines of state constitutions and state borders, of their school geographies and histories. They had never known the long, flowing rivers and wide. valleys of the West, with the result that they theorized and "believed" in States' rights almost as much as the South. At the time of the war the South urged this belief as a casus belli, and the North happened to repudiate it. It never could have been a principle strong enough either to prevent war or to cause war. Both the South and the North had certain purposes in going to war, which were far deeper and more vital than the abstract legal theory that the States had a constitutional right to secede from the Union. To hide their main purpose, the slaveholders successfully swept the South with the cry of "rights." Especially did this cry succeed with the youth, who from adventure rushed to the front at the first bugle-call. "We disbelieved in slavery," they said, "but we fight for States' rights."

There was so much reiteration of the statement that the war was being fought to maintain the principle of States' rights that historians writing soon after give it as one of its causes; but the men who undertook the war understood the facts far better.

It was not the right to secede that was questioned, but the purpose of secession, the kind of government which was to be formed after this right had been gained. No American statesman-not Jefferson, not even Hamilton, not Lincoln-ever disclaimed the right of the people to revolt. Lincoln went so far as to reaffirm this principle in his first Inaugural Address, when he was speaking to a country already at fever-heat over the problems before it. It was patent to the men of the time that a civil war was being attempted, and secession only cloaked an attack of a reactionary class in the Union against the people. and their government.

The war was not fought, therefore, on the abstract principle as to whether the South had a right to form its own institutions or not, but over the institutions themselves. It was a struggle between conflicting economic interests, and though it was apparently a war of the sections, it was in the fullest sense a civil war. It was a clash over the control of the ma

chinery of one and the same government, and not a mere sectional struggle.

No one understood this more quickly and more fully than Lincoln, the best and truest representative of the West. The East was not so quick to see it, and the South showed a far greater hostility to Lincoln, the candidate of the West, than they showed against Seward, his Eastern rival. Over and over again Lincoln said, "There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary-line upon which to divide." The West, he said, belonged not to one State or to another, but to the nation as a whole. This rich region must have egress to the ocean, it must be allowed to develop its resources, it must follow out its natural destiny, which was that of a region peopled by individual small landholders. "It is the great body of the Republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it."

Emerson, who did not have to be as politic as Lincoln, could express the truth more bluntly-that the Federal Government was put on the defensive. After two years of struggle, he came to see that the battle-field would have been as large with secession permitted as it was with secession fought. "If we had consented to a peaceable secession of the rebels," he said, "the divided sentiment of the Border States made peaceable secession impossible, and the slaves on the border, wherever the border might be, were an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire. Give the Confederacy New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, and they would have demanded St. Louis and Baltimore. Give them these, and they would have insisted on Washington. Give them Washington, and they would have assumed the army and navy and, through these, Philadelphia, New York, and BosIt looks as if the battle-field would have been at least as large in that event as it is now."

ton.

The truth of this became evident during the war, when the South fostered a Northwestern Confederacy, which was ultimately to join with it. By its acts it accepted the idea of a civil war as well as the North, and by its attacks upon the National Government was the first to force the struggle in that direction. In one sense the war was the French Revolution of America, with the difference that here it was the aristocrat, the great land

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