Ancient history is forever indispensable to the speculative historian.
The ground of its value is the very fact of its antiquity; by which
we mean, not simply distance in time, but distance as the result of
separate construction,--distance as between two systems of reality, each
orbicularly distinct from the other. One system--that with which our
destiny is concurrent--is still flying its rounds in space; the other
has whirled itself out of space, and through a maze of scattered myths
and records, into human remembrances. This latter system, though
hermetically sealed to the realities of outward existence, still, and
by this very exclusion from all practical uses, becomes of paramount
interest to the philosophic historian; indeed, it is only because the
shadowy planets of the ancient cycle still repeat their revolutions
in human thought, that the philosophy of history is at all possible.
Philosophy, in its ideal pretensions, frequently forgets its material
conditions: it claims for itself the power of constructing wholes in
thought where only parts have been given in reality, as if, dispensing
with material supports, it could bridge over a chasm in Nature. And so
it seems to do, but so in fact it never does; it never builds but on
models; it never in any system gives ideal completeness, until a real
completeness is furnished, either through this system or some other that
is analogous. There can, therefore, be no speculative anticipation in
history, save as it makes its way into the blank future along the line
of diagrams furnished by the past; the splendid composition, in our
thoughts, of realities as yet undeveloped, is set up in the skeleton
types left us of realities that not only have themselves been
accomplished, but which belong to a system that is concluded.
Else,--if the philosophy of history does not thus depend upon some sort
of _real_ conclusions for its _notional_ ones,--why is it that no such
philosophy existed, even in name, among the ancients? It may be said
that some prevailing practical motive is necessary to the existence of
philosophy in any field, and that no such motive was present to the
ancient mind in this particular field of history. Admitted; yet this
does not at all disturb our position. No motive would have sufficed for
so grand an aim, short of a sublime consciousness regarding the destiny
of the human race. But whence was this consciousness to be derived?
To the ancient mind, the development of the human drama, considered
strictly as human, moved within narrow boundaries; traced backward
through a number of generations so limited that they might be counted on
one's fingers, the human _personae_, did not absolutely disappear, but
they emerged again, and in a precedent cycle, only as divinities. The
consciousness of human destiny was thus elevated by infinite grades, but
not of this destiny _as_ human, as depending for its splendors upon the
human will. It was an exaltation that consisted in the sacrifice of
humanity. No definite records existed through which any previous cycle
of human events could be translated into thought; and in default of a
human, there was substituted a divine cycle. From this mythologic past
of the ancients was reflected upon their present every-day existence a
peculiar glory; but it was not the glory of humanity. To celestial or
infernal powers were attributed the motives and impulses out of which
their life was developed, not to the human will. The future, as a matter
of course, partook of this divine investment; so that history to the
ancients was something which in either direction was lost in mystery,
not a system to be philosophically analyzed, or to be based on
principles of any sort. It is true that in the time of Herodotus, when
nations, hitherto insulated, came to know each other better, an interest
began to be awakened in history as resting upon a human basis; but this
is to be accounted for only by the fact, that each nation coming in
contact with another received from it the record of a development
differing from its own in the details of outward circumstances, yet
similar in certain general features; and in some cases, as in that of
Egypt, there was presented an historic _epos_ anterior in time. But
in no case were furnished hints so suggestive as those which ancient
history furnishes to us, nor any which would answer the purposes of
philosophy; in no case was there presented a completed arch, but only
antecedent parts of a structure yet in suspense respecting its own
conclusion. Fate uncourteously insisted upon making her disclosures by
separate instalments; she would advance nothing at any rate of discount.
What, therefore, was the ancient philosopher to do? His reflections
concerning the past must of necessity be partial; how much more would
his anticipations of the future fail of anything like demonstrative
certitude!
We moderns, on the other hand, are eminently fortunate, because within
the cycle of our thoughts revolves the entire _epos_ of the ancient
world. Here there is the element of _completeness_: it is our privilege
to look upon the final _tableau_ before the curtain falls, to have
gathered in the concluding no less than the prelusive signals, to have
seen where the last stone in the arch bottoms upon a real basis. Let it
be that to us it is a drama of shadows; yet are none of the prominent
features lost; indeed, they are rather magnified by the distance; our
actors upon the ancient _proscenium_ walk in buskins and look upon us
out of masks whose significance has been intensified by remoteness
in time. This view of the case yields an ample refutation of those
arguments frequently adduced of late, in certain quarters, to prove
the inutility of classical studies. Thus, it is urged, that, in
every department of human knowledge, we transcend the most splendid
acquirements of the ancients, and therefore that it is so much time
wasted which we devote towards keeping up an acquaintance with
antiquity. But how is it that we so far overtop the ancients? Simply by
preserving our conscious connection with them, just as manhood towers
above childhood through the remembered experiences of childhood. As an
evidence of this, we need only note the sudden impulse which modern
civilization received through the revival of ancient literature. As it
is by resolving into constellations the _nebulae_, disconnected from the
earth by vast intervals of space, that we conjecture the awful magnitude
of the universe, so do we conjecture the magnitude of human life by
resolving into distinct shapes the nebulous mist of antiquity separated
from us by vast intervals in time. The profoundest lessons, such as are
heeded by the race, such as are universally intelligible, have this
obliquity of origin. Thus, in the distractions of the present, no relief
is found through compensatory consolations from the present; but we turn
to the figures of the past,--figures caught in the mind, and held fixed,
as in bas-relief,--figures in the attitude of antagonistic strife or of
sublime rest,--figures that master our intellects as can none from the
tumultuous present, (excepting the present of dreams,) and that out of
their eternal repose anticipate for us contingencies that do not yet
exist, but are representatively typified through such as have existed
and passed away.
It is a fact well ascertained in physical geography, that the New World
and the Old stand over against each other, not merely as antipodal
opposites, but so corresponding in outline that a promontory in one is
met by a gulf in the other, and sinuous seas by outstanding continents,
(so that over against the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is opposed the
projection of Western Africa,) as if the gods had, in the registry of
some important covenant, rent the earth in twain for indentures. In this
way, also, do the two great hemispheres of Time stand opposed; so that,
from the shaping of the ancient, we may anticipate even the undeveloped
conformation of the modern: in place of the direct reality, which is of
necessity wanting, we have the next best thing to guide us even in our
most perilous coastings, namely, its well-defined _analogue_ in the
remote past.
Thus, considering merely this _analogism_, might one have prophetically
announced, even in the generations immediately succeeding to Christ,
when Christianity bade fair to become a world-power in a new
civilization, that here, indeed, was a new planting of Mysteries, which,
although infinitely transcending them in fulness and meaning, were
yet the counterparts of mysteries which had hitherto swayed the human
heart,--but that, pure and holy as were these mysteries, they should
yet, in their human connections, share the vicissitudes of the
old,--that, like them, they should march through tribulations on to
triumph,--that, like them, once having triumphed and become a recognized
source of power, they should be linked with hierarchical delusions and
the degradations of despotism,--that, like them, too, in some future
generation, they should, through the protesting intellect, be uplifted
from these delusions and degradations. Thus, also, and following the
same guidance, might our prophet have foretold the _political_ shapings
of the newly emerging hemisphere of Christendom. He would thus, through
a precise analogy in ancient history, have anticipated the conjunction
of principles so novel in their operation as were those of Christianity
with the new races, then lying in wait along the skirts of the Roman
Empire, and biding their time. From a necessity already demonstrated in
the ancient world, he would have foreseen the necessity of Feudalism for
the modern, as following inevitably in the train of barbarian conquest,
the recurrence of which had been distinctly foreshadowed. In connection
with the Protestantism of intellect in religious matters, he would have
anticipated a similar movement in politics; he would have prefigured the
conflict that was to be renewed between the many and the few for
power; and if by some miracle his material vision could have been made
coextensive in space with the scope which was possible for him in
thought, if he could have followed the sails of Columbus across the
Atlantic, then, in connection with the transference of European
civilization to the New World, and foreseeing the revulsion in habits
and institutions that must follow such local separation, he might
have indicated the arena which _representatively_ was to stand for
Christendom, and in which, if anywhere, the great problem of human
freedom should be solved, either by a success so grand that the very
reflex of its splendor should illumine the universal heart of man, or by
a failure so overwhelming and disastrous that the ruinous impulse should
be communicated with the crushing effect of a thunderbolt through the
whole structure of Christian civilization.
Standing, as we do, face to face with the crisis in which this problem
is to be solved, and through one part or the other of the alternative
just stated, it is evident, from what has already been said, that no
light can so fully illustrate the position and its contingencies as that
which reaches us from antiquity, and through analogies such as we have
hinted at in the preceding paragraphs.
In the first place, in order properly to understand the specific analogy
which we now proceed to develop and apply to the case in hand, it is
absolutely necessary that the reader should fix Hellas in his mind's eye
as the counterpart of Christendom. Let it be understood, then, that all
that preceded Hellenism in the ancient world was but the vestibule of
its magnificent temple, and that the sole function of the Roman Empire,
which came afterwards, was to tide the world over from Hellenic
realities to the more sublime realities of Christianity. The mighty
deeds of Egyptian conquerors, the imperial splendors of Persian
dynasties,--these were but miniature gems that gilded the corridors and
archways in the _propylaea_ of ancient civilization; and on the other
side, the brilliancy of the Caesars was not that of an original sun in
the heavens, since, in one half of their course, they did but reflect
the sunset glories of Greece, and, in the other, the rising glories of
Christianity. From Macedonia, then, in the North, southward to the sea,
and from the heroic age to the Battle of Pydna, (168 B.C.,) extended, in
space and time, the original and peculiar splendors of antiquity.
But two of the Hellenic States were consecrated to a _special_ office of
glory. These two were Athens and Sparta; and the sublime mission which
it was allotted them to fulfil in history was this, that they,
within limited boundaries, should concentrate all ante-Christian
excellence,--that these two States, opposite in their whole character,
should, through the conflict between their antagonistic elements, test
the strength and worthiness of ante-Christian principles. Precisely in
the same relation to Christendom stands America, with her two opposite
types of civilization arrayed against each other in mortal conflict.
Here must be tested the merits of modern civilization, just as in
Peloponnesus and Attica were tested those of the old; here, too, must
be tested the strength even of Christianity as a practical power in
the political world. Where Ionic and Doric Greece stood twenty-three
centuries ago, stand today the Northern and Southern sections of this
country; they hold between them, as did their Hellenic prototypes, the
heritage of laborious ages, and to their eyes alone have the slowly
growing fruits of time seemed ready, from very ripeness, to fall into
the lap of man. In either case, Hellenic or American, we look upon
generations totally different in circumstance from those which came
before them,--generations, freed not only from the despotic tutelage of
Nature, (from whom they exact tribute, instead of, as formerly, paying
it to her,) but also from the still more galling tutelage of ignorance
and of the social necessities imposed by ignorance,--generations which,
in either the ancient or modern instance, stand representatively for
the whole race, and by necessity, since they only could fairly be said,
unimpeded by external conditions, perfectly to represent themselves. It
matters not whether we take the particular generation contemporary with
Pericles or with President Lincoln (his modern _redivivus_); each stands
illustrious as the last reach upward of the towering civilizations that
respectively pushed them to this eminence; the highest point is in each
case reached, and all that remains is to make this sublime elevation
tenable for the race universally, so that, instead of the pyramidal
mountain, we shall have the widely extended _plateau_.
Here we will anticipate a question which the reader, we imagine, is
already about to put. He will readily admit that Greece, in her palmiest
era, politically, grasped, in form and conception at least, the highest
ideal of rational liberty; but why, he will ask, was not this divine
boon made universally available? Why was it not extended to Persia, and
to the Asiatic hosts that for security hid themselves in the folds of
her garments? why not to the dwellers on the Nile? Why was it that it
was not even retained by Greece herself? The truth is, that no sooner
was the golden fleece in the hands of the adventurers that had sought it
so zealously than it was rent by their discords. Elements of barbarism
had run uncurbed alongside of intellectual and artistic refinements.
Mingled with high-minded heroes were a set of treacherous Iscariots.
But why, it will naturally be asked, had there not been _hitherto_ some
outbreak of these discordant elements? That question is easily answered,
if we consider that up to this time there had existed certain external
elements, which, by arousing incessantly the patriotic feelings of all
Greece against hostilities from without, had administered an opiate to
the Cerberus of domestic strife. The terrible storm was maturing its
thunderbolts treacherously and in subterranean chambers; but its
mutterings were effectually silenced by the more audible thunderings
that burst across the Aegean from the Persian throne. Treachery was
lulled to sleep, while the nobler sentiment which united Greece against
Asiatic despotism was perpetually stung into activity in the popular
heart, and inspired the utterances of eloquence. Thus it might not
have been, if Greece had first come within hail of Persia through the
ordinary commerce of peace; since, in that case, after receiving from
the latter her treacherous gifts, her voluptuous effeminacies, she would
easily have fallen into the vast net-work that already trammelled all
Asia, and would then, through her own entanglement, include the whole
world. But it was not in peace that they met. The first question put to
Hellas by her Oriental neighbor was in effect this:--Are you willing,
without going to the trouble of subjecting the matter to the test of
actual conflict, to consider yourself as having been whipped? This,
it must be confessed, was a shivering introduction to the world for
Greece,--something like a Lacedaemonian baptism,--but it stood her
in good stead. Like the dip in the Styx, it insured immortality. The
menaces of despotism, coming from the East, gave birth to the impulses
of freedom in the West; and the latter sustained themselves at a more
exalted height, in proportion as the former were backed by substantial
support. Subtract anything from that deafening chorus of slaves which
follows in the train of Xerxes, and we must by the same amount take
from the paeans of aspiring Greece. Abolish the outlying provinces that
acknowledge a forced allegiance to the Persian monarch, or turn out of
their course the tributary streams that from every part of Asia swell
the current of Eastern barbarism, and there arises the necessity, also,
of circumscribing within narrower limits the glories of the Western
civilization. Against the dangers of external invasion, against all the
menaces of barbarians, Greece was secure through the forces which by
opposition were developed in herself,--and for so long a period was she
secure against herself. But the very rapidity and decisiveness of her
triumphs over the barbarian cut this period short, and cut short also
the rising column of Hellenic power. At the same time that Cimon
is finishing up the fleet of Persia, Pericles is preparing for the
culmination of Greece. In all this there seemed nothing final; from the
serenity of the Grecian sky, and from the summer silence which inwrapt
her statues and Pentelic colonnades, there was heralded the promise of a
ceaseless aeon of splendor. Resting from one mighty effort, and, in the
moment of rest, clothing herself in the majesty of beauty, Hellas
yet seemed ready to burst forth out of this rest into an effort more
gigantic, to be followed by a more memorable rest as the reflex of a
destiny more nearly consummated. But in this promise there was the
very hollowness of deception. Just because the intense strain against
external barbarism had relaxed, those elements which common necessity
had made tributary to success and triumph began to suffer dissolution;
each separate interest became a prominent centre of a distinct political
crystallization; and it was in this way that certain elements of
barbarism, inherent in Spartan civilization, now for the first time
arrayed it in direct opposition to the Athenian. It was this defection,
on the part of Sparta, from the cause of freedom, which cut the world
off from those benefits that it was in the power of Greece to confer.
Athens, whatever other faults she may have had, stood ready to extend
these benefits. As she alone had awakened for herself an echo of
Hellenic victory in her world of Art, so was she alone prepared, through
a world-wide extension of this victory over slavery, to multiply
the intellectual reflexes of so splendid a triumph; hers it was to
disenthrall and illuminate the world. And here, where she had a right to
look for the coöperation of all Greece, as hitherto, was she thwarted;
here, holding the van in a procession of triumph, which, as carrying
forward a glorious disinthralment into Asia and into Egypt, and as
outfacing the most inveterate of all despotisms, should far out-rival
the fabled procession of Dionysus,--here was she not merely hindered by
the _vis inertias_ of her southern neighbor, but was actually stopped in
her movement by a newly revealed force of opposition, was flanked by an
ancient ally, now turned traitor, in the summertime of a most auspicious
peace; and in her efforts to disembarrass herself of this enemy in the
rear, were her energies totally exhausted.
A position precisely similar, in its main features, does Republican
America hold to-day. She has established her own freedom against all
European intrusion; and in her efforts to do this she arrived at
political union as an indispensable necessity, and merged all separate
interests in a common one. That interest, already vindicated for
herself, has become world-wide in its meaning; so that, in virtue
of what she has accomplished in the cause of freedom, she takes an
authoritative position of leadership in modern civilization. And what
is it that hinders the fulfilment of her exalted mission? She, too, has
been flanked in her march by a traitor within her own borders;
against her, and doing violence to her high office, are opposed the
backward-tending elements of barbarism, which, if not immediately
neutralized, if not summarily crushed, will drag her to the lowest
stages of weakness and exhaustion.
A very minute parallel might be, drawn between the opposing
civilizations that are to-day in this country contending for the mastery
and those which were engaged in a similar conflict in the days of
Pericles. New England would be found to be the Attica of America; while,
on the other hand, the Southrons would most exactly correspond to the
ancient Lacedaemonians. As the Cavaliers who first settled Virginia
helped on the Puritan exodus, so did the Dorians that settled Sparta,
through the tumult of their overwhelming invasion, drive the Ionians
from their old homes to the barren wastes of Attica,--barren as compared
with the fertile valleys of the Eurotas, just as New England would be
considered sterile when contrasted with Virginia or the Valley of the
Mississippi. Like the Ionian Greeks, the "Yankees" stand before the
world as the recognized advocates and supporters of a pure democracy.
The descendants of the Cavaliers, on the contrary, join hands, as did
the ancient Dorians, in favor of an oligarchy, and of an oligarchy, too,
based on the institution of slavery. Upon this difference rested the
political dissensions of Greece, as do now those of our own country. The
negro plays no more important part in the difference between the North
and South than did the Helot in the contests between the Spartans and
the Athenians. It is not in either case the simple fact of human slavery
which necessitates the civil strife, but it is the radical opposition
between _a government that is founded upon slavery_ and one which is
not. The Athenians had slaves; and so, for that matter, might New
England have to-day: yet, for all that, the civil strife would have been
inevitable, because both in Greece and America this strife evidently
arises out of the conflict between the interests of an oligarchy based
upon slavery and a democracy in which slavery, if it exists at all,
exists as a mere accident that may be dispensed with without any radical
social revolution. Slavery, as opposed to divine law or to abstract
justice, never has brought, nor ever will bring, two countries into
conflict with each other; but slavery made indispensable as _a peculiar
institution_, as an organized fact, as a fundamental social necessity,
_must_ come into conflict with the totally opposite institutions of
democracy, and that not because it is merely or nominally slavery,
but because it is a political organ modifying the entire structure of
government. Slavery, as it existed in Athens, slavery, as it existed
formerly in the Northern States, was in everything, except its name and
accidents, consistent with democracy; and, in either case, to dispense
with the institution was to introduce no radical change, but only to do
away with the name and accidents.[A]
[Footnote A: Here, however, the reader must understand that the infernal
system of slave-stealing is left entirely out of the account.]
In Sparta, or in the South, the case was far otherwise. Here, slavery
existed in its strict severity; it came into being in connection with
material conditions,--that is, in connection with a soil especially
favorable to agriculture,--and it maintained its existence by reason of
its fitness, its indispensableness, to certain social conditions; it
could not, therefore, be changed or annulled without running counter
both to the inveterate tendencies of Nature and the still more
inveterate tendencies of habit. This difference between the two estates
of slavery is evident also from the fact, that, while, in the one case,
the law would admit of no emancipation, in the other, the emancipation
was effected legally, either in the lump, as in New England, or by
instalments, as in Athens; and in the latter State we must remember that
the process was rendered the more easy and natural by the fact that the
slaves were, in the first instance, generally prisoners taken in war,
and not unfrequently stood upon the same social level, before their
capture, with their captors, while in Sparta the slaves were taken as a
subject race, and held as inferiors.
Much glory has been given to Lacedaemon on the score of her martial
merits. To ourselves this glory seems rather her shame, since these
merits are inseparable from her grand political mistake. We might as
justly exalt Feudalism on the ground of its military establishment,
which, after all, we must admit to be an absolute necessity in the
system. To the Spartan oligarchy it was equally necessary that the whole
State should exist perpetually under martial law. In the first place, it
was necessary, if for nothing else, for the intimidation of the Helots,
who were continually watching their opportunity for insurrection, as is
shown in that memorable attempt made in connection with the Messenian
War. It was, moreover, necessary for a government not strong by sea
to extend its boundaries by military conquest; for by each successive
conquest a possible enemy is actually forced into subjection, and made
to contribute to the central power which subdues it.
Indeed, it is true that every feature of the State polity which that
old rascal Lycurgus gave to Sparta must be considered and judged in
connection with this grand martial establishment, upon which the
Lacedaemonian oligarchy was based, and through which the nefarious
attempt to establish oligarchies in all the rest of the world was
supported. The establishment itself was barbarous, and could not
possibly have thrived under the art-loving, home-protecting eye of the
Athenian Pallas. All domestic sanctities were rudely invaded, and even
the infant's privilege to live depended upon its martial promise; the
aspirations of religion were levelled down into sympathy with the most
brutal enthusiasm, as afterwards happened in the case of Rome; the very
idea of Beauty was demolished, and with it all that was sacred in human
nature, and all hope of progress. The whole State was sacred to the idea
of Military Despotism.
Thus it happened that Sparta, from her first introduction in history to
her exit, was at a stand-still in whatever involved anything higher than
brute force. In this respect she differed from Athens as much as the
South at this day differs from the North, and from precisely the same
causes, the principal of which, in each case, was barbarism,--barbarism
deliberately organized, and maintained in conscious preference to
intellectual refinement.
And yet it is remarkable that both Lacedaemon and the South, as compared
with their respective rivals, started in life at an immense advantage,
and seemingly with a far more auspicious prospect before them. The early
Virginian turned up his nose at Plymouth as a very despicable affair,
and wondered that the Puritans did not set sail _en masse_ for the
Bahamas. Gorgeous were the descriptions of Virginia sent home by some of
the first settlers, in which lions and tigers, and a whole menagerie
of tropical animals, came in for no small share of wonder; and, as an
offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were
drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,--and even that which was
the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the
abundance of fish in the sea, was, as respects the revenue derived from
it, made an especial subject of derision. Thus, doubtless, did the
ancient Peloponnesian look upon Attica in the small beginnings of
her infinite growth; he had exactly the same topics for his
ridicule,--sterility, fishery, and all; and just as in the case of the
South, was the laugh in the end turned against himself. But to the very
last there was one stinging jest on the lips of the Spartan,--the very
same which the modern slaveholder flings with so great gusto against the
unfortunate Yankee,--and that was Athenian cupidity. The ancient and the
modern jester are alike condemned on their own indictment, since upon
cupidity the most petulant, upon cupidity the most voracious in its
greedy demands, rested the whole Spartan polity, as does the system of
slaveholding in the South. The Spartan, like the Southern planter, might
protest that money was of no consequence whatever, that to him it was
only so much iron,--but why? Only because that, by the satisfaction of
a cupidity more profound, he was able to dispense with the ordinary
necessities of an honest democrat.
In peace, Sparta was a nonentity; in the resources which enrich and
glorify the time of peace she was a bankrupt. Fine arts or education she
had none: these centred in Athens. These were elements of progress, and
could no more be tolerated in Peloponnesus than in our Gulf States.
Taking our Southern civilization or that of Lacedaemon, we must say of
each that it is thoroughly brutalized; we may challenge either to show
us a single master-piece of intellect, whether in the way of analysis or
of construction,--but none can they show.
Even in a military sense, the forces which Democracy could marshal,
either in ancient Greece or in modern America, were more than a match
for the corresponding oligarchical factions. Athens, like New England,
was a commercial centre, and therefore a prominent naval power; and this
naval prominence, in each instance, was so great as to give a decisive
superiority over a non-commercial rival. Sparta used her influence and
power to establish oligarchic institutions in the various provinces
of Greece, which generally corresponded to our Territories,--in which
latter the South has, with an equally unworthy zeal, been for several
years seeking to establish her peculiar institutions. Epidamnus proved
a Grecian Kansas. As in our own country, the hostile factions refrained
from war as long as human nature would allow; but, once engaged in
it, it became a vital struggle, that could be terminated only by the
exhaustion of one of the parties.
Athens was the stronger: why, then, did she not conquer her rival? With
equal pertinence we might ask, Why have not we, who are the stronger,
subjugated the South? The answer to both questions is the same.
Political prejudice overmasters patriotism. Neither ourselves nor the
ancient Athenians appear to have the remotest idea of the importance of
the cause for which we are contending. To us, as to them, the avenue
to future glory lies through the blood-red path of war, of desperate,
unrelenting war. Nothing else, no compromise, no negotiations of any
sort, would suffice. This the Athenians never realized; this _we_ do not
seem to understand. Among ourselves, as among them, the peace-party--a
party in direct sympathy with the aims and purposes of the
enemy--blusters and intrigues. President Lincoln meets with the same
embarrassments in connection with this party that Pericles met in his
campaigns against Sparta: it was his coming into power that precipitated
the violence of war; his determined action against all sympathizers
with the enemy draws down upon him the intensified wrath of these
sympathizers; the generals whom he sends into the field, if, like
Alcibiades, they are characterized by any spirit in their undertakings,
are trammelled with political entanglements and rendered useless, while
some slow, half-brained Nicias, with no heart in the cause, is placed at
the head of expeditions that result only in defeat.
There is the same diffusiveness connected with our military plans which
characterized the operations of the Athenians against Sparta. We do not
make the special advantage which we have over the South through our
naval superiority available against her special vulnerability. We
intimidate her, as Pericles did the Peloponnesians, by circumnavigating
her territories with a great display of our naval power; we effect a
few landings upon her coasts; but all these invasions lead to no grand
results, they do not subdue our armed enemy. What with these errors
in the general conduct of the war, and the lack of energy which
characterizes every part, our prospects of ultimate success are fast
being ruined. Unless some change be quickly effected, unless political
sentiment can be made to give place to the original enthusiasm with
which we commenced the war, and this enthusiasm be embodied in military
enterprise, our case is a hopeless one. One the other hand, if things go
on as they have been going on, the political opposition to the war will
rise to such a height as to overturn the Administration, and in its
place install those who are desirous of a reconstruction of the Union on
a Southern basis. The same errors on the part of Athens led to just
this result in Greece; an oligarchy came at last to rule even over the
democratic city itself. The consequence was the downfall of Greece, and
in her ruin was demonstrated the failure of ancient civilization. In
a like event, nothing could save us, nothing could save modern
civilization, from the same disastrous ruin.
The barbarism which at successive intervals in history has swept
southward over Asia was, at the least, something fresher and better than
that which it displaced. The Gothic barbarians were, in very truth,
the scourges of God to the inferior and more despicable barbarians of
Southern Europe. The former exemplified a barbarism unconscious of
itself, and carrying in its very rudeness the hope of the world; and the
more complete and overwhelming its revolutions, the more glorious the
promise involved in them. But, from the establishment over a continent
of a system so deliberately barbarous that it dares to array its brutal
features against the sunlight of this nineteenth century, that it dares
even to oppose itself, with a distinct confession of its base purposes,
against the only free, beneficent, and hope-giving government in the
world,--from the triumph of such a system and over such a government
there is not the shadow of a hope, but rather the widest possible field
for dismal apprehension. From this barbarism we have everything to fear;
and the only way to successfully oppose it is through the movements
of war. Only through a triumph gained in the battle-field, and held
decisive for all future time, can we, as a nation, make our way out
of the fatal entanglements of this present time into the bright and
glorious heritage of the future.
* * * * *
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_My Diary, North and South_. By W.H. RUSSELL. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham,
pp. xxii., 602.
Plutarch, as a patriotic Boeotian, felt called on to write a tract
concerning the malice of Herodotus in having told some unpleasant truths
about the Thebans; and many of our countrymen have shown themselves as
Boeotian, at least, if not as patriotic, in their diatribes against Mr.
Russell, who is certainly very far from being an Herodotus, least of all
in that winning simplicity of style which made him so dangerous in
the eyes of Plutarch. It was foolish to take Mr. Russell at his own
valuation, to elevate a clever Irish reporter of the London "Times" into
a representative of England; but it was still more foolish, in attacking
him, to mistake violence for force, and sensible people will be apt to
think that there must have been some truth in criticisms which were
resented with such unreasoning clamor. It is only too easy to force the
growth of those national antipathies which ripen the seeds of danger
and calamity to mankind; for there are few minds that are not capacious
enough for a prejudice, and it has sometimes seemed as if, in our hasty
resentment of the littlenesses of Englishmen, we were in danger of
forgetting the greatness of England. A nation risks nothing in being
underrated; the real peril is in underrating and misunderstanding a
rival who may at any moment become an antagonist,--who will almost
certainly become such, if we do our best to help him in it. Especially
in judging the qualities of a people, we should be careful to take our
measure by the highest, and not the lowest, types it has shown itself
capable of producing. In moments of alarm, danger, or suffering, a
nation is apt to relapse into that intellectual and moral condition of
Mob from which it has slowly struggled upward; and this is especially
true in an age of newspapers, where Cleon finds his way to every
breakfast-table. It is her mob side that England has been showing us
lately; but this should not blind us to the fact that in the long run
the character of a nation tends more and more to assimilate itself to
that ideal typified in its wisest thinkers and best citizens. In the
qualities which historians and poets love to attribute to their country,
national tendencies and aspirations are more or loss consciously
represented; these qualities the nation will by-and-by learn to
attribute to itself, until, becoming gradually traditional, they will at
length realize themselves as active principles. The selfish clamor of
Liverpool merchants, who see a rival in New York, and of London bankers
who have dipped into Confederate stock, should not lead us to conclude,
with M. Albert Blanc, that the foreign policy of England is nothing
more or less than _une haine de commerçants et d'industriels, haine
implacable et inflexible comme les chiffres_.[A]
[Footnote A: _Mémoires et Correspondence de_ J. DE MAISTRE, p. 92.]
Mr. Russell's book purports to be, and probably is in substance, the
diary from which he made up his letters to the London "Times"; and it
is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy
sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather
head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of
"the leading journal of Europe." When we learn, as we do from this
"Diary," what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his
own devices,--that he does not know the difference between _would_ and
_should_, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he
believes _in petto_ to mean _in miniature_, uses _protagonist_ with as
vague a notion of its sense as Mrs. Malaprop had of her derangement of
epitaphs, and then recall to mind the comparative correctness of Mr.
Russell's correspondence in point of style, we conceive a hearty respect
for the proof-reader in Printing-House Square. We should hardly have
noticed these trifles, except that Mr. Russell has a weakness for
displaying the cheap jewelry of what we may call _lingo_, and that he is
rather fond of criticizing the dialect and accent of persons who were
indiscreet enough to trust him with their confidences. There is one
respect, however, in which the matter has more importance,--in its
bearing on our estimate of Mr. Russell as a trustworthy reporter of what
he saw and heard. Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the
whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty; so
that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning,
and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant,
we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind,
which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer
and reporter. We say this with no intention of imputing any wilful
misstatements to Mr. Russell, but as something to be borne in mind while
reading his record of private conversations. A scrupulous fidelity is
absolutely essential, where the whole meaning may depend on a tone of
voice or the use of one word instead of another. Any one accustomed to
the study of dialects will understand what we mean, if he compare
Mr. Olmsted's extracts from his diary with Mr. Russell's. The latter
represents himself as constantly hearing the word _Britisher_
used seriously and in good faith, and remarks expressly on an odd
pronunciation of _Europe_ with the accent on the last syllable, which be
noticed in Mr. Seward among others. Mr. Russell's memory is at fault.
What he heard was _Európean_; and _Britisher_ is not, and never was, an
Americanism.
We do not, however, mean to doubt the general truthfulness of Mr.
Russell's reports. We find nothing in his book which leads us to modify
the opinion we expressed of him more than a year ago.[B] We still think
him "a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate
observer." We still believe that his "strictures, if rightly taken, may
do us infinite service." But we must enter our earnest protest against
a violation of hospitality and confidence, which, if it became common,
would render all society impossible. Any lively man might write a
readable and salable book by _exploiting_ his acquaintances; but such a
proceeding would be looked upon by all right-minded people as an offence
similar in kind, if not in degree, to the publication of private
letters. A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in
a foreign country should always know two things,--_what_ he is, and
_where_ he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even
Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking
of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a
great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all.
we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a
hundred and fifty years after his death.
[Footnote B: _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. VIII., p. 765.]
One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr.
Russell's book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after
the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one
on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as
he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see
countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall
pay his travelling-charges. The object which men formerly proposed to
themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out
something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way
either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,--and they treated of
manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and
impartiality of naturalists: They did not conclude things to be
necessarily worse because they were different. A modern Tom Coryat,
instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would
find some excuse for thinking the Italians a _nasty_ people because they
used it. In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a traveller
was to discover (or where that failed, to invent) all that he possibly
can to the disadvantage of the country he visits; and he is so
scrupulous a censor of individual manners that he has no eyes left for
national characteristics. Another striking difference between the older
traveller and his modern successor is that the observer and the object
to be observed seem to have reversed their relations to each other, so
that the man, with his sensations, prejudices, and annoyances, fills up
the greater part of the book, while the foreign country becomes merely
incidental, a sort of canvas, on which his own portrait is to be painted
for the instruction of his readers. Pliny used to say that something was
to be learned from the worst book; and accordingly let us be thankful to
the voyagers of the last thirty years that they have taught us where
we can get the toughest steak and the coldest coffee which this world
offers to the diligent seeker after wisdom, and have made us intimately
acquainted with the peculiarities of the fleas, if with those of none
of the other dwellers in every corner of the globe. Such interesting
particulars, to be sure, may claim a kind of classic authority in
Horace's journey to Brundusium; but perhaps a gnat or a frog that kept
Horace awake may fairly assume a greater historical importance than
would be granted to similar tormentors of Brown, Jones, and Robinson.
Were it not for Mr. Olmsted, we should conclude the Arthur-Young type of
traveller to be extinct, and that people go abroad merely for an excuse
to write about themselves,--it is so much easier to write a clever book
than a solid one. The plan of Montaigne, who wrote his travels round
himself without stirring beyond his library, was as much wiser and
cheaper as the result was more entertaining.
But, apart from the self-consciousness and impertinence which detract so
much from the value of most recent books of travel, it may be doubted
whether, since the French Revolution gave birth to the Caliban of
Democracy, there has been a tourist without political bias toward one
side or the other; and now that the "Special Correspondent" has been
invented, whose business it is to be one-sided, if possible, and at all
events entertaining, the last hope of rational information from anywhere
would seem to be cut off. And of all travellers, the Englishman is apt
to be the worst. What Fuller said of him two centuries ago is still in
the main true,--that, "though some years abroad, he is never out of
England." He carries with him an ideal England, made up of all that is
good, great, refined, and, above all, "in easy circumstances," by which
to measure the short-comings of other less-favored nations. He may have
dined contentedly for years at the "Cock" or the "Mitre," but he must go
first to Paris or New York to be astonished at dirt or to miss napkins.
He may have been the life-long victim of the London _cabby_, but he
first becomes aware of extortion as he struggles with the porters of
Avignon or the hackmen of Jersey City. We are not finding fault with
this insularity as a feature of national character,--on the contrary,
we rather like it, for the first business of an Englishman is to be
an Englishman, and we wish that Americanism were as common among
Americans,--but, since no man can see more than is in his own mind, it
is a somewhat dangerous quality in a traveller. Moreover, the Englishman
in America is at a double disadvantage; for his understanding the
language leads him to think that everything is easy to understand, while
at the same time he cannot help looking on every divergence of manners
or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same
tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse
then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might
almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability,"
and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels
upward,--of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to
endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most
comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which
has only to enjoy and not to endure them. The travels of an average
Englishman are generally little more than a "Why, bless me, you don't
say so! how very extraordinary!" in two volumes octavo.
Mr. Russell is only an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow
the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists. In
range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr.
Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope
soon to see published in a collected form; but he had opportunities,
especially in the Seceding States, such as did not fall, and
indeed could not have fallen, to the lot of any other man. As the
representative of an English journal, he was welcomed by the South,
eager to show him its best side; as a foreigner, his impressions were
fresh and vivid; and his report of the condition of things there is the
only even presumably trustworthy one we have had since the beginning of
the Rebellion. The New England States, he tells us, he did not visit;
but that does not prevent his speaking glibly of their "bloody-minded
and serious people," and of the "frigid intellectuality" of Boston,
about both of which he knows as little as of Juvenal. This should serve
to put us on our guard against some of his other generalizations,
which may be based on premises as purely theoretic. But it is not in
generalizations that Mr. Russell is strong, nor, to do him justice, does
he often indulge in them,--always excepting, of course, the _ex officio_
one which he owes his employers, and which he was sent out to find
arguments for, that the Union is irrevocably split asunder. It is as a
reporter that he has had his training, and it is as a reporter that he
is valuable. Quick to catch impressions, and from among them to single
out the _taking_ parts, his sketches of what he saw and heard, if
without any high artistic merit, have a coarse truth that will make them
of worth to the future student of these times. They are all the better
that Mr. Russell was unable, from the nature of the case, to elaborate
and _Timesify_ them.
The first half of the book is both the most interesting and the most
valuable,--the second half being so largely made up of personal
grievances (which, if Mr. Russell had not the dignity to despise them,
he might at least have been wise enough to be silent about) as to be
tedious in comparison. We regret that Mr. Russell should have been
subjected to so many personal indignities for having written what we
believe to have been as impartial an account of what he saw of the
panic-rout which followed the Battle of Manassas as any one could have
written under the same conditions,--though we doubt if the correspondent
of a French newspaper would come off much better, under like
circumstances, in England. It is not beyond the memory of man that the
Duke of Wellington himself was pelted in London. But we are surprised
that Mr. Russell should have so far misapprehended his position, should
have so readily learned to look upon himself as an ambassador, (we
believe the "Times" is not yet recognized by our Government as anything
more than a belligerent power,) as to consider it a hardship that he was
not allowed to accompany General McClellan's army to the Peninsula.
He seems to have thought that every thing happens in America, as La
Rochefoucauld said of France. We are sorry that he was not permitted
to go, for he would have helped us to some clearer understanding of a
campaign about whose conduct and results there seems to be plenty of
passionate misjudgment and very little real knowledge. But when should
we hear the last of the vulgar presumption of an American reporter who
should try to hitch himself in the same way to the staff of a British
army?
Mr. Russell's testimony to the ill effects of slavery is as emphatic, if
not so circumstantial, as that of Mr. Olmsted. It is of the more weight
as coming from a man who saw the system under its least repulsive
aspect. His report also of what he heard from some of the chief plotters
in the Secession conspiracy as to their plans and theories is very
instructive, and deserves special attention now that their allies in the
Free States are beginning to raise their heads again. We have always
believed, and our impression is strengthened by Mr. Russell's testimony,
that the Southern leaders originally intended nothing more than a _coup
d'état_, which, by the help of their fellow-conspirators at the North,
was to put them in possession of the Government. It is plain, also, from
what Mr. Russell tells us, that the movers of the slaveholding treason
reckoned confidently on aid from abroad, especially from England;
and this may help Englishmen to understand that the sensitiveness of
Northern people and statesmen to the open sympathy which the Rebellion
received from the leading journals and public men of Great Britain was
not so unreasonable as they have been taught to regard it. Cousins of
England, we feel inclined to say, remember that there is nothing so hard
to bear as contempt; that there may be patriotism where there are no
pedigrees; that family-trees are not the best timber for a frame of
government; that truth is no less true because it is spoken through the
nose; and that there may be devotion to great principles and national
duties among men who have not the air of good society,--nay, that, in
the long run, good society itself is found to consist, not of Grammonts
and Chesterfields, but of the men who have been loyal to conviction and
duty, and who have had more faith in ideas than in Vanity Fair. People
on both sides of the water may learn something from Mr. Russell's book,
if they read it with open minds, especially the lesson above all others
important to the statesman, that even being right is dangerous, if one
be not right at the right time and in the right way.
_The Results of Emancipation_. By Augustin Cochin, Ex-Maire and
Municipal Councillor of Paris. Translated by Mary L. Booth, Translator
of Count De Gasparin's Works on America, etc. Boston: Walker, Wise, &
Co.
It is doubtless a little unfashionable to question the all-sufficiency
of statistics to the salvation of men or nations. Nevertheless we
believe that their power is of a secondary and derivative character. The
confidence which first leads brave souls to put forth their energies
against a giant evil comes through deductive, not inductive, inquiry.
The men and women who have efficiently devoted themselves to awaken the
American people to the element of guilt and peril in their national life
have seldom been exhaustively acquainted with the facts of slavery or
those of emancipation. Few of them were political economists, or had
much concern with scientific relations. They were persons of emotional
organization, and of a delicate moral susceptibility. It was sufficient
for them to know that one God reigned, and that whatever He had caused
to be a true political economy must accord with those Christian ethics
which command acknowledgment from the human soul. They wanted no
catalogue of abuses to convince them that an institution which began by
denying a man all right in his own person was not and could not come to
good. And this fine impressibility of nature, which needs no statistics,
when it is combined with genius,--if we may be pardoned an Hibernicism
which almost writes itself,--may be said to create its own statistics.
Shakspeare needed not to dog murderers, note-book in hand, in order to
give in Macbeth a comprehensive summary of their pitiable estate. It
may, indeed, be necessary for physicians to study minutely many
special cases of insanity in order to build up by induction the grand
generalization of Lear; but he who gave it grasped it entire in an ideal
world, and left to less happy natures the task of imitating its august
proportions by patiently piling together a thousand facts. The abolition
of slavery must be demanded by the moral instinct of a people before
their understanding may be satisfied of its practical fitness and
material success. The evidences in favor of emancipation are useful
after the same manner as the evidences of Christianity: the man whose
heart cannot he stirred by the tender appeal of the Gospel shall not be
persuaded by the exegetical charming of the most orthodox expositor.
But now that circumstances have caused loyal American citizens to think
upon slavery, and to mark with a quickened moral perception its enormous
usurpations, there could be no publication more timely than this volume
by M. Cochin. To be sure, all illustration of the results of this
legalized injustice, derived from a past experience, must be tame to
those who stand face to face with the gigantic conspiracy in which it
has concentrated its venom, and from which it must stagger to its doom.
The familiar proverb which declares that the gods make mad those whom
they would destroy has a significance not always considered. For when a
man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which
never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly
revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are
disclosed as few imagined to exist. During the last two years, while our
Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters'
insurrection, few of us could probe and pry about among details of
lesser villanies than those pertinent to the day. And so it is fortunate
that M. Cochin now comes to address a people instinctively grasping at
the principle which may give them peace, and to offer them his calm and
thorough investigation of the material basis whereon that principle may
surely rest.
"L'Abolition de l'Esclavage," of which the first volume is translated
under the title at the head of this notice, was published in 1861. It is
a diligent study of official and other testimony bearing upon slavery
and emancipation. M. Cochin had access to the unpublished records
of every ministry in Europe, and gives his evidence with scientific
precision. He has faithfully detailed the effects of liberating the
slaves in the colonies of France and England, as well as in those of
Denmark, Sweden, and Holland. By an admirable clearness of arrangement,
and a certain _netieté_ of statement, the reader retains an impression
of the experience in slavery and its abolition which each colony
represents. That no disturbance should follow emancipation, we apprehend
that no one, who believes in the moral government of the world, can
seriously expect. Ceasing to persist in sin frees neither man nor nation
from the penalty it entails. But the distressing consequences of any
social upheaval make a far greater impression upon the common mind than
the familiar evils of the condition from which the community emerges.
The amount of suffering which must temporarily follow an act of justice
long delayed is always over-estimated. Many half-measures for the public
safety, many blunders easy to be avoided, produce the derangement
of affairs which the enemies of human freedom are never tired of
proclaiming. It is the merit of M. Cochin to separate that penalty of
wrong which it is impossible to extinguish from the disastrous results
of causes peculiar to the politics of a given nation, or to the private
character of its officers. He certainly shows that production and
commerce have not been annihilated by the abolition of slavery, while
the moral condition of both races has been manifestly improved.
Recognizing the immutable laws which are potent in the life of nations,
M. Cochin touches upon the remote antecedents of slavery as well as the
immediate antecedents of emancipation. His results are divided into
groups, material, economical, and moral; thus the reader may easily
systematize the information of the book. There are practical lessons in
relation to the great deed to which our nation has been called that
may well be laid to heart. The insurrection of San Domingo preceded
emancipation, and was due to the absurd law of the Constituent Assembly
which gave the same privileges to freemen of every color and every
degree of education and capacity. While we recognize the negro as a man,
let us remember that the time for recognizing him as a citizen is not
yet. We must also mark the importance of paying with promptness the
indemnity to the master, in order that the greater part of it may pass
in the form of wages into the hands of the servant. Forewarned of
mistakes in the methods of emancipation, which other nations deplore, we
encounter the question with many important aids to its solution.
M. Cochin, though not a Protestant like Count de Gasparin, writes in a
similar spirit of fervent Christian belief. In the second volume of
his work, which we trust will soon appear in America, the relation of
Christianity to slavery is powerfully discussed. The Catholic Church
is shown to oppose this crime against humanity, and the Pope, as if to
indorse the conclusion, has conferred an order of knighthood upon the
author since the publication of his book. It is worth while to note that
the most logical and effective assailants of slavery that these last
years have produced have been devout Catholics,--Augustin Cochin in
France, and Orestes A. Brownson in America. And while we think that it
will require a goodly amount of special pleading to clear either the
Catholic Church or most Protestant sects from former complicity
with this iniquity, we heartily rejoice that those liberal men who
intelligently encourage and direct the noblest instinct of the time are
the exclusive possession of no form of religious belief. From every
ritual of worship, from every variety of speculative creed, earnest
minds have reached the same practical ground of labor for the freedom
of man. Such minds realize that Christianity can approximate its
exact application only as the machinery of human society is rightly
comprehended. The Gospel, acting through the church, the meeting-house,
the lecture-room, and the press, is demanding the redemption of master
and slave from the mutual curse of their relation. Every affliction and
struggle of this civil war may be sanctified, not only to the moral
improvement, but also to the material prosperity of our land.
Great events are required to inspire a people with great ideas. _Sicut
patribus sit Deus nobis_ is the motto of the city whence the "Atlantic"
goes forth to its readers. Let all who adopt this aspiration remember
for what they ask. God was with our fathers, and sent them hardship,
peril, defeat, that, battling painfully therewith, they might become
great and fruitful men. Not otherwise can He be with us. From the misery
of our civil strife we may educe a future happiness, as well as a
present blessedness. The fierce excitement of physical action has been
contagious to the heart and intellect of the time. Realities have
presented themselves which can be met only by ideas. In the seeming
distant years of our old prosperity, a few men and women sought to
abolish slavery because it oppressed the inferior race; today, the
nation deals with it because it has rendered the superior race
hopelessly violent and corrupt. Of course, there will always be a class
of doubting Thomases ready to deny the presence of any divine leadership
that may not at once be touched and weighed and measured. To the
prototype of these men such tangible evidence as his feeble faith could
accept was not withheld. And those among us who are in like condition
may read M. Cochin's book, and be convinced that a system which to the
common sense of the Christian world seems morally wrong is neither
politically expedient nor materially necessary.
_A Treatise on the Law of Promissory Notes and Bills of Exchange_. By
THEOPHILUS PARSONS, LL.D., Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University,
and Author of Treatises on the Law of Contracts, on the Elements
of Mercantile Law, on Maritime Law, and the Laws of Business for
Business-Men. In Two Volumes. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
We eat and drink paper and live upon paper, is a metaphor which has been
true enough these many years, but we probably appreciate the liveliness
of it just at the present time more thoroughly than ever before.
But even now we realize very imperfectly what a power in the world
paper-money is; for we are apt to think of it only as a circulating
medium in the form of bank-notes, or treasury-notes, or of somebody's
currency which has the merit of making no pretensions to the theoretical
idea of a currency which represents gold, the representative of
everything else. Bills of exchange and promissory notes are instruments
quite as indispensable to modern commerce and civilization; and when
the necessities of an enlarged commercial intercourse, some five or six
hundred years ago, first led to the use of paper as a representative
of money, it was in the form of bills of exchange. All the absolute
requirements of social life and of commerce among the ancient Greeks and
Romans were satisfied by the use of the precious metals as money, though
the want of new facilities and new instruments of commercial exchange
must have been constantly experienced. Cicero, writing to his friend
Atticus, when he was about to send his son to Athens, inquires whether
he can have credit upon Athens for what money his son may have occasion
for, or whether the young man must carry it with him in specie. Cicero
desired to accomplish what is now effected by a negotiable bill of
exchange; and if such instruments had been in use, he would have gone to
the forum and purchased a bill on Athens for the requisite amount. But
as it was, though he may possibly have found some one at Rome who had
money owing to him by some one at Athens, and may have arranged with
this Roman creditor that this debt should be paid to his son at Athens
by the debtor there, it is quite certain that no instrument answering to
our negotiable bill of exchange was used in the transaction.
Though the discovery or invention of bills of exchange cannot be
ascribed with certainty to any precise period, they are for the first
time unmistakably referred to in laws of the commercial nations of
Southern Europe in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and they
probably came into frequent use soon after that time. Perhaps the
earliest bill of exchange of which we have an authentic copy is one made
at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and which approaches pretty
nearly to the form now in use. A translation of the instrument from the
Italian. in which it was written, is as follows:--
"Francisco de Prato and Company at Barcelona. In the name of God, Amen.
The 28th day of April, 1404. Pay by this first of exchange at usance to
Pietro Gilberto and Pietro Olivo one thousand scuti at ten shillings
Barcelona money per scuto, which thousand scuti are in exchange with
Giovanni Colombo at twenty-two grosses per scuto, and place to our
account; and Christ keep you." "ANTONIO QUARTI SAB. DI BRUGIS."
For this curious relic of commercial history we are indebted to the fact
that the mercantile company upon which the bill was drawn failed to
pay it, whereupon the parties fell into a dispute about the matter of
damages, and the magistrates of Bruges wrote to those of Barcelona,
setting forth this bill with the facts of the case, and requesting
information upon the usage respecting bills of exchange in their city.
A bill drawn in England about the year 1500 bears less resemblance to
the form now used, and instead of commencing and ending with the devout
expressions of the Italian bill, it has the formal words, "Be it known
to all M'e y't I," etc., and "hereto I bynde me myn executours and all
my Goodis, wheresoever they may be founde, in Wytnesse whereof I have
written and sealyed this Byll, the X Day of," etc. It was made payable
to a person named, "or to the Bringer of this Byll."
Bills of exchange were first used only for the benefit of a specified
payee, but it was not long before the element of negotiability was
added to foreign bills, which, thus perfected, became at once the
indispensable instruments of commerce which they now are. The
negotiability of inland bills and of promissory notes was not recognized
till long afterwards. In England, inland bills were not used in any form
till about the middle of the seventeenth century; and Lord Holt, in a
case reported half a century later, said he remembered the time when
actions upon inland bills first began. Indeed, the earliest case in
which foreign bills of exchange are mentioned in the English Reports is
as late as the first year of the reign of James I., though they appear
to have been known to the courts in the preceding reign of Elizabeth,
for there are extant precedents of declarations upon them of that
period. The earliest reported case of an inland bill occurs in 1663. It
appears that the negotiability of promissory notes was a matter of doubt
with the Court of Queen's Bench as late as 1702. The court seem to have
felt very little confidence in their own opinion upon the question; for
Chief Justice Holt, after urging his opinion against the negotiability
of such instruments, took occasion to speak with two or three of the
most famous merchants in London, as to the consequences it was alleged
would follow from obstructing their negotiability; and on another day he
says that they had told him it was very frequent with them to make such
notes, and that they looked upon them as bills of exchange, and that
they had been used a matter of thirty years, and were frequently
transferred and indorsed as bills of exchange. In 1704 Parliament put an
end to the dispute between Lord Holt and the merchants by recognizing
the negotiable qualities of promissory notes which now belong to them.
The law of promissory notes and bills of exchange is thus seen to be of
very recent origin. In the early part of the seventeenth century there
was a single reported case in the English language in this department
of legal learning; now these volumes of Professor Parsons present us an
array of more than ten thousand oases decided in the highest courts of
England and America, and a great majority of these are cases that have
occurred within the present century, if not within the last quarter of a
century. Though the subject is apparently a simple one, it has presented
a multitude of questions for the consideration of the courts, many of
which it has taxed their highest wisdom to rightly solve.
A new book in any department of the law has one merit, if it is worth
anything at all,--and that is, the merit of presenting the latest
conclusions of the courts upon the topics treated of. In the department
of the law treated of by the work now under notice, this merit is one of
special consideration, for it has hardly reached its full development,
and some of its important rules are hardly settled. In this treatise
Professor Parsons has taken much pains to present the law just as
judicial determinations and legislative enactments have left it up to
the period of publication. But this work has merits which will last
after its newness is gone. It is comprehensive in its plan, embracing
the discussion of many points in the law of negotiable paper which are
not referred to in other treatises upon the subject. In style, the text
of the work is written with a clearness and grace which often give it
all the pleasantness of a finished essay, if one chooses to read
on without allowing his attention to be called off by the frequent
references to the notes. The notes occupy much space, and give very full
discussions of the more important points, with quotations from the most
important decisions. They are printed in a smaller type, and the
author is thereby enabled to give much more matter in his work than he
otherwise could. A logical arrangement of the subject-matter in chapters
which are subdivided into numerous sections, each treating of a separate
topic, which is tersely expressed in a heading to it, makes it very
easy for one to find the statement or discussion of any point which he
desires to investigate. This admirable mode of arrangement and division
of the subject is a characteristic of all the legal treatises of
Professor Parsons, and our own experience is that it is much easier
to find what we want in his works than in any others that we have had
occasion to use or refer to. The usefulness of a law-book depends also
very much upon its index; and the completeness and accuracy of this part
of the work are noticeable in this as well as in the other treatises of
the author.
In our examination of the work we had marked several chapters, with the
intention of making special reference to them: the first chapters of the
work, for the precision and clearness with which the essential elements
of bills and notes are defined and explained; the chapter on Checks, for
presenting the most complete statement which we have of the law upon
that important topic; the chapters upon Action and Evidence, for giving
in a systematic form much matter which is of the greatest use to the
practitioner, but which the textbooks have generally left him to pick up
as best he may, or have presented in a brief and unsatisfactory manner;
and other chapters for still other features of excellence. But we have
not space for further comment. These volumes are the result of a truly
vast amount of labor, and we are confident that they will be received by
the profession, by students, and by business-men with a hearty gratitude
to the author for the service he has done them in writing this new work.
There is a short Appendix, containing a reprint of the provisions of the
Stamp Act of the United States in relation to bills, notes, letters of
credit, drafts, orders, and checks; together with an examination of some
of the questions which the statute suggests.
The mechanical execution of these volumes is very superior.
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