is that the American government has incurred obligations to the Filipinos, to the foreign residents of the islands, and to Europe, by the destruction of the Spanish government in the Philippines, from which obligations it cannot shrink without loss of honor and of the respect of the civilized world. Having overthrown one government we are morally bound to set up another. With the expiring gasp of Spanish authority the sovereignty of this subject people, with all its responsibilities, passed to this nation as the fee in lands passes at death from the ancestor to his heir. This argument is captivating to one who wishes to approve of what his government is doing. It is the balm which salves the consciences of many who feel within them that the policy adopted was and is injurious to our interests and unjust to the Americans themselves. It assumes that when Dewey sunk the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor he irrevocably accomplished three things: he destroyed Spanish rule in the islands, he made American wards of the inhabitants, and in consequence of these two achievements he imposed upon the American people a burden the weight and extent of which no man can measure. While the firing of Dewey's guns, "heard around the world," freed the Filipinos from Spanish domination, it at the same time robbed the American people of their freedom to pursue in their own way, by their own methods, their own true and substantial happiness. That victory, according to the argument so confidently and yet so thoughtlessly advanced, chained American destiny irretrievably to the car of fate, leaving to us no choice of action, no right to care for our own interests. The instant the Filipino ceased to be the subject of Spanish tyranny, the proud American citizen became the perpetual servant of the Filipino, bound by an inexorable obligation, at no matter how terrible a cost to himself or how great a sacrifice of his own welfare, to conquer, to subdue, to govern, to tutor, to guide, direct, and civilize, in short to "benevolently assimilate" his charge.

From this burden he may not shrink, no matter how long the struggle or how stupendous the loss in life and treasure. He "dare not stoop to less." If this argument be sound, if this obligation be not fanciful, but real, then the freedom of America was lost when the battle of Ma

nila Bay was won. A nation deprived of its liberty of action where its own interests and the welfare of its own citizens are concerned can in no sense be free. It can make no difference that by its own free-will its liberty of action was cast aside. The individual who voluntarily incurs an irredeemable obligation has forever mortgaged his energies to his obligee and just so far belongs to him. Freedom consists in the power of acting by choice. One may be born an individual's bondman, or one born free may make himself a bondman to circumstance. In either case he is not free.

Did, however, the American people lose their right to seek their own good by the destruction of the Spanish fleet? Is this assumed obligation real, or is the war which we are waging a gratuitous waste of American lives and money? It is submitted that no such obligation on our part exists; that we never were under obligation, as a nation, to become permanently responsible for peace and order in the Philippines; and that while the difficulties of the situation have been immeasurably increased by the conduct of hostilities, our own obligations can be fully met, our own interests be best subserved, and our national honor be preserved, by withdrawing as soon as possible from this mad attempt to thrust our advantages upon a people who, by resisting, show that they could not appreciate or make use of them.

Let

It is clear that we are not in duty bound to give all the world the benefit of our rule, for we are not powerful enough to do so if we would. In the abstract we are no more charged with the task of preserving Luzon and the neighboring islands from anarchy and revolution, or from arbitrary government, than of preserving Hayti, Venezuela, or Central America, at our very doors, from the same evils. us consider this matter free from mawkish sentimentalism. Let us abandon the hysteria which belongs to a religious crusade. Let us dismiss all lingering notions of the duellist's code of honor. Let us candidly face the facts that honor cannot be achieved in a war begun in dishonor; that self-respect or the respect of others is never lost by the frank recognition of a mistake or the prompt reparation of a wrong. Let us view it as Americans from an American standpoint and apply the test of American well-being. What special claim on us have the foreign residents

of the Philippines? They located their interests there, relying, perhaps, on the protection of the Spanish government. That government, according to our official declaration, by its abuse and inhumanity forfeited its right to rule. Such was the ostensible ground of our interference at all in the struggle between Spain and her colonies. Granted the fact of this abuse and brutality, then the downfall of the government which fostered it was the inevitable decree of fate. Not being responsible for the condition, we could not be held responsible for its natural consequence. The destruction of this government was therefore one of the accidents, or rather sequences of life to which those affected must submit, as to the result of an earthquake, a cyclone, or a tidal wave. The system perished, not by our act, but by its own inherent moral rottenness. If, however, our nation was the instrument of precipitating the final catastrophe, there was indeed imposed on us a duty to those whose error of judgment had led them to cast their lot with the miscalled Spanish government of the Philippines.

It

There is, on this point, no dispute with the adherents of the "duty" theory. But what was the nature, the extent of that duty? Does it require us to substitute ourselves for the Spaniards as the protectors of these foreigners living on soil foreign to us as well as to them? Assuredly not. Our duty to these commercial adventurers was clear and simple. can be plainly stated. It was to afford to them protection from the vengeance of the natives, who regarded them as their oppressors, until they should have opportunity to decide whether they would seek safety in removal or would take their chance with the new, untried forces which aspired to rule. We should have given timely notice of our intended withdrawal of protection, and then, with dignity, come home. Our moral duty to the foreign inhabitants of the Philippines extended and still extends no further than this. There is no rational basis for claiming more. These people could have looked and still can look to their own governments for protection. One may talk grandly and theorize learnedly about our duty to the foreign residents of the Spanish archipelago, but there can be but one conclusion if we "set a plain man's com

subject of a European monarch or of an Asiatic despot who plants himself outside our dominions. We are not bound to follow him, in subjection to his whim or caprice, on his course around the globe whenever he may find native rule distasteful to his monarchically trained sensibilities, even though we shall have incidentally aided in establishing that native government. American democracy has a far grander, more glorious mission than this. The United States government has no moral right to pledge the lives and substance of its own citizens to ensure to a few foreigners a chance to live indefinitely in the Philippines or elsewhere under American rule. If these people prefer the American system it is their privilege, generously extended, to come to our shores and live under our flag. Here they will find the protection they ask; here our duty to them will begin and will be abundantly discharged.

There is as little difficulty in measuring our national obligations to the native Filipinos. Having accepted their assistance in defeating Spain we were bound not to make a treaty of peace which would force them back to Spanish misrule. Here our obligation ceased, excepting as we owe duties to the Armenians or any other oppressed people. So far as we were concerned it was for them to try their hand at government and abide the result as did our neighbors, Mexico and the Spanish South American colonies. If internal disorder should have followed, we might recall our Chicago and Cleveland riots and extend to them our fraternal sympathy and appreciative good will.

There may be sound reasons for our government's so-called imperialist policy which is rapidly committing this Republic to a career of costly militarism. If there are such reasons, by all means let them be given to the public. But let the deceitful cry of duty and of honor cease. It tends to silence protest and to quiet consciences disturbed by tales of glorious slaughter of our misguided foes. If our course can be vindicated by man's reason addressed to man, let us have this justification, to whose logical force we must all yield. But let us have an end to this cowardly shrinking behind the plea that we are helplessly bound to "destiny," and blindly guided, we know not whither, by the hands of a bloodthirsty god.

N

UTCRACK NIGHT was the most popu

lar in all the year among the youth of the "North Countrie" of Britain. Nuts were distributed with lavish hand and cracked and eaten in abundance, besides being made to decide the fate of many a lad and lassie. In the words of Burns,

The auld guidewife's weel-hoordit nits
Are round and round divided.
And mony lads' and lassies' fates
Are there that night decided:
Some kindle, couthie, side by side,
And burn thegither trimly;
Some start awa' wi' saucy pride,
And jump out-owre the chimly
Fu' high that night."

The nuts were placed in the hot ashes or along the bar of a grate, and when they burned peacefully side by side the happy fate of the couple was assured; should one or both of them crack and jump away the thoughts of a successful courtship might as well be abandoned.

Not satisfied with nut-cracking, the pulling of the kail was also a part of the evening's sport. With closed eyes the young people made a raid on the goodman's kail stalks, that perhaps had been allowed to stand for this very purpose. Upon the nature of the stalk pulled depended the appearance and disposition of the mate for life. Should a stalk be well formed and straight the finder was considered fortunate, especially if a quantity of earth clung to the roots, which indicated that a goodly amount of earthly goods was to accompany the union. If, however, the stalk was crooked and runty, the finder was mortified at the thought of being mated for life with a crooked stick "; and was doubly mortified should the pith of the kail taste bitter instead of sweet, as that was a sure indication of a disagreeable disposition.

Other spells more weird by far were tried that night. Why should they not be, when that was the night of all the year that spirits walked abroad and fairies were most bold? Not only did disembodied spirits make free with the rights of earth, but well-regulated spirits still occupying human tenements of clay manifested a disposition to leave their habitation for the space of time it would take to appear to their future mate whose Hallowe'en spells called them forth.

Dire were the consequences attending some of these spells. The imagination or

a practical joke sometimes caused the "spierer" of fortune a shock that was lifelong in its effect. Among these spells was that of eating an apple at midnight before a looking-glass, which was practised by some maidens with the expectation of seeing the appearance of the future husband looking over their shoulder in the glass. Burns writes:

"Wee Jenny to her granny says,
Will ye go wi' me, granny?

I'll eat the apple at the glass
I gat frae Uncle Johnny.'

Her granny indignantly puffs her pipe and responds,—

"Ye little skelpie-limner's face!
I daur ye try sic sportin',
As seek the foul thief ony place,
For him to spae your fortune:
Nae doubt but ye may get a sight!
Great cause ye have to fear it ;
For mony a ane has gotten a fright,
And lived and died deleerit
On sic a night."

No doubt "wee Jenny" was frightened from seeking to cast her fortune for that night, but by the space of another year she would be more bold and anxious.

Presumably it was the same « Uncle Johnny" a bachelor of long standing-that presented the looking-glass to Jennie, who tried that night in vain to change his fate by endeavoring with closed eyes to stick his finger in the dish containing clear water, or even in the dish of colored water, but who for the third time picked the empty dish, thus indicating that neither maid nor widow was to fall to his lot. The result is comically set forth by Burns: "In order, on the clean hearth-stane, The luggies three were ranged. And every time great care was ta'en To see them duly changed: Auld Uncle John, who wedlock's joys Sin Mar's year did desire, Because he gat the toom dish thrice, He heaved them on the fire In wrath that night."

Younger men, more bold than Uncle Johnny, tried charms that took more courage. Sowing hemp-seed and harrowing it in with whatever utensil came handiest was done alone by the brave. While harrowing it in he repeated the words—

"Hemp seed, I saw thee, hemp-seed, I saw thee, And her that is to be my true love Come after me and draw thee."

On looking over his left shoulder he saw the appearance of the one he was to marry in the attitude of pulling hemp.

"Whistled up Lord Lenox' march
To keep his courage cheerie."

Almost before the charm had time to work he hears a "squeak" and "gruntle≫ that causes him to peep over his shoulder, the effect being that

"He roared a horrid murder-shout
In dreadfu' desperation!

And young and auld cam rinnin' out
And hear the sad narration:
He swore 'twas haltin' Jean M'Craw,
Or crook-backed Merran Humphie,
Till, stop-she trotted through them a’—
And wha was it but Grumphie *
Asteer that neght!"

Fighting Jamie was fain to hide his

head at home after the sad joke played on him by the innocent pig.

Few carried to a successful issue their Hallowe'en spells. The maiden who was brave enough to steal out to the kiln and throw in a skein of yarn, a loose thread of which she retained in her hand and wound over an old skein, was sure to drop the yarn and fly with all speed to the house if, when she neared the end of the skein, it was caught and held, as she hoped and expected it would be. She should have held to the yarn and asked "Who holds?" when an answer would have come from the depths of the kiln giving the full name of her future husband.

The observance of All-Hallowe'en is dying out in Great Britain. It never was observed properly in the United States. As belief in superstitions died out the spells that had been practised gave place to practical jokes, and Hallowe'en came to mean merely a license to destroy property and annoy peaceable citizens.

In some places dipping for apples, burning nuts, and pulling cabbage stalks are still observed, but the Nutcrack Night of Burns's time has disappeared for ever. Emma Seevers Jones.

KENT, O.

C

ICERO, in the second book of his "De

Legibus," states that Epimenides, on leaving Athens, told its inhabitants to erect on the Areopagus two unhewn stones as altars to Outrage and Shamelessness. They were to look on those personified attributes as the demons who had vexed their city, and whom they must entreat never again to trouble them. What Epimenides counselled the Athenians, certain critics, ever since the first appearance of "Leaves of Grass," have been counselling the Fathers in the Republic of Letters, and assuring the reading world that in Walt Whitman outrage and shamelessness, in theme, style, and literary treatment, were monumental, and that so to brand his poetry was the first duty of the literary man. But as Eschylus says, in his "Agamemnon":

"One outrage done of old

Is wont to breed another outrage still,
Sporting its youth in human miseries

At once, or whensoe'er the fixed time comes." *The pig.

Once that time of outrage came when on March 1, 1882, Oliver Stevens, District Attorney of Boston, acting under instruction from a Mr. Marston, then Attorney General of Massachusetts, sent an official letter to the publishing house of Osgood & Co., saying that he intended to institute suit against "Leaves of Grass " and for its suppression, which threat was duly carried out, much to the amazement of mankind ever since. But these officials have their successors: they still live: some on Beacon Street, some in the Bowery, occasionally one even in Paternoster Row and many other places than bookstalls; and every now and then they rush to attack as did the soldiers of Minucius against Hannibal at Cannæ, only to expose their supreme egotism and provoke humiliating defeat.

"They deride you," said some to the philosopher Diogenes, to which he replied, "I am not derided," accounting, as Plutarch observed, those only to be ridiculed who feel the ridicule and are

discomposed at it. In the same spirit, and uncomplainingly then and always, Whitman has replied to his fiercest mockers and assailants, as in the prose addenda to the last edition of "Leaves of Grass," entitled "A Backward Glance o'er Travelled Roads," and which every reader of Whitman would do well to read before venturing further upon the author's writings. Listen to his passionless defence, so full of the calm self-reliance and sweet charity which characterized his whole life.

"That I have not gained the acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future,

'Still lives the song, though Regnar dies;' that from a worldly and business point of view < Leaves of Grass' has been worse than a failure; that public criticism on the book and myself as author of it yet shows marked anger and contempt more than anything else; and that solely for publishing it I have been the object of two or three pretty serious official buffetings,is all probably no more than I ought to have expected. I had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. As fulfilled, or partially fulfilled, the best comfort of the whole business is that, unstopped and unwarped by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely in my own way, and put it unerringly on record, the value thereof to be decided by time. »

And then he adds:

«The profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the intellect or supply something polished and interesting, nor even to depict great passions or persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuyed for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant the great pride of man in himself. I depict uncompromisingly my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and æsthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days (1850-1880 A. D.), and of current America,- and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive scheme than any hitherto poem or book."

And this he has done, and to-day "Leaves of Grass" is the greatest incarnation since the Gospel of St. John. As one reads it he hears the voice Daniel

heard in Babylon when he wrote: "And there came and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me." It is the life not only of a strong, healthy, cosmopolitan soul, dwelling in and interpreting the meaning of life, individual and social, in these United States of a given period; but it is also the life of a hero, such as Whitman was.- of one who laid down his physical life in the hospitals about Washington in his ministrations to our wounded soldiers, and who never swerved from his purpose to write and act as a man and American, though his resolve took him by the lonely road of continued isolation, poverty, and even obloquy to the end. Indeed he comes with a gospel and a life nearer in many respects to that of the Nazarene than any other of his era. No wonder men loved him and followed him as a loving friend wherever he lived. "He could not be hid; " and all the places in which he dwelt bear witness to the fact that "the good gray poet" possessed in his life what is most plain and powerful in his verse,—the soul and spirit of Love, to whose dominion he bowed, and whose empire by pen and life, in Fraternity, Good Hope, and Content, he promoted.

"Poetry," wrote Wordsworth in his Observations prefixed to his Lyrical Ballads, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." And he adds, "Some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written.» These words of a master justly exalt this vehicle of expression, and at the same time display its affinities. Metre and rhyme are but the accidents of real poetry, and by no means its central part and stem, as the Biblical poems and parts of Heine and Ruskin bear witness. That Whitman was not a verse-maker in an artistic sense must not be made the reason for his rejection from the field of poetry any more than "Joe" Wheeler's lack of West Point manners should debar him from the title of a military general. But, studied aright, Whitman is always poetic, even in his prose, and the very titles of his poems have more in them of poetic genius and suggestion than some whole volumes of verse. Forms and set styles do not deceive the truly educated reader. There is a set order of the cultivated garden, but a far more interest