19 men's Bureau in the South as unconstitu- | inexpressible, injustice and ingratitude of tional, instead of to extend them, the reac- this policy to the loyal freedmen, more than tion which had already set in in manners anything else. When the President speaks was certain to extend to more important with such profound delicacy and tender matters. How terrible such a reaction will ness of the financial rights of the rebellious be only those who have mastered the pres- minority of the population of such a State ent state of things in the South can know. as South Carolina, and shows no regard Wherever United States troops have been whatever for the moral claims of the loyal withdrawn the schoolhouses of the freed- majority, we cannot help noting the grossly men have been burnt. The negroes are arbitrary conceptions of right and justice forced into lawless contracts, and their per- which over-ride the whole nature of upright | sons are habitually outraged. One writer men in a land that professes to return, more from Western Louisiana says that he saw than any other, to the old and 'natural' three freedmen butchered in one day. The standard. But though this is the first and most corrupt and ignorant men ruled where- most obvious aspect of the matter, it is by ever the troops were withdrawn,- men no means the only one, nor probably the who had only two principles on their lips most important. If this attempt to heal hatred to the Yankee, and hatred to the over the wounds of the Union superficially freedman. Nay, it is said that so far as and hastily, in which Mr. Johnson is cancelling the expenditure on the schools going far beyond the advice even of his for freedmen is concerned, and authorizing most trusted military counsellors, in which, the extinction of these beneficent institu- indeed, he is neglecting even the very tions, which the Freedmen's Bureau, under moderate cautions of General Grant, Mr. Lincoln's special impulse had founded, the President is himself personally responsible; and we can quite believe, looking to Mr. Johnson's fanatic attachment to the old democratic formula, and his evident contempt for the welfare of persons so unimportant as negroes, in comparison with the sanctity of the holy principle of State taxation, that it is so. In Louisiana the Freedmen's Bureau had set on foot 300 schools, which were suddenly broken up in November by General Fullerton, the freedmen and discharged coloured soldiers were arrested as vagrants in the streets of New Orleans, and the orphans of freedmen returned to former slave-owners as "apprentices." And for this General Fullerton is now said to plead the direct order of the President. Whether that be true or not, it is certain that to all such iniquities the President is comparatively indifferent, so long as he can hasten the restoration of the old State organizations, and throw all responsibility from the Federal Government on to the shoulders of the Southerners who profess to represent those States. We do not suppose that Mr. Johnson wishes to see any negro suffer. But weigh the lives and dearest liberties of all the three millions of freedmen against the smallest State privileges of the lately recalcitrant whites of the South, and he is unable even to realize that there can be a question as to the relative importance of the opposite causes. Perish Africa and the Africans, rather than the State rights of the most disloyal of Southern States should be withdrawn!that clearly is his feeling. We confess that we feel the glaring, the to be prosecuted, it can have but one result, to foster the seeds of a new and perhaps not very distant repetition of the rebellion which has so recently failed. The abolition of slavery can be of no political use in cementing the Union, unless it is to represent something that affects the whole groundwork and constitution of Southern society, If the spirit of respect for freedom and for individual rights is to be fostered and guarded, and the old slaveowning animus is to be rooted out, then, and then only, will there be an end of danger to the Union from this source. But if all the old spirit of caste is to revive again in even greater strength than before, greater on account of the new jealousy felt of the rights nominally given to the negro, and if the Southern States are to become the scenes of chronic passions, far less ungoverned because far less restrained by law, than those of our own Jamaica planters, then in another ten years Southern society will be in an attitude at least as hostile to the spirit of the free North as it was six years ago; and if its material resources are once more recruited by peace, we do not see how a new collision as fierce as the old, and provoked probably with more cautious statesmanship, is to be averted. If ever that time comes, the North will have to regret even more bitterly than it now does that it trusted the destinies of the Union to the hands of statesmen bred up like Mr. Jefferson Davis, and we fear we must say Mr. Johnson, in habits of thought radically incompatible with true freedom. From the Spectator. ONE SECRET OF AMERICAN BOMBAST. IF President Johnson had happened to take the side of the freedmen instead of the side of their former masters, every paper in England would be laughing by this time at the extraordinary succession of political screams, or we may say yells, of violent and vulgar party feeling with which he amused the crowd on the anniversary of Washington's birthday. As he has taken the other side, the Times assures us that this "memo rable" speech "would not have been un worthy of the great founder of the American Republic." Now, in spite of the deepest aversion for the fundamental injustice on which, as it seems to us, Mr. Johnson's whole political theory is based, we sincerely respect the man, and see in the dignity and self-restraint of his State papers of how much that is large and statesmanlike he is really capable; but on that very account these outbursts of tall talk from a mind clear mates my existence shall be poured out as a fit libation to the union of these States," the description of that imaginary return to idolatrous human sacrifices, and of the immolation of so costly a victim as the President of the United States, drew down thunders of applause from his audience. It was not the applause of amusement at a good joke, such as there might have been in an English crowd if Lord Palmerston, forgetting Lord Shaftesbury and the Record, had ventured to suggest the people's sacrificing him formally on an altar to the British Constitution, but of excitement at the impression produced by a great idea. And in other parts of his speech the President grasped incoherently, and with equal applause, at metaphors quite as wild. When Artemus Ward says that "the earth continues its revolution on its axis subjick to the Constitooshun of the United States," he was more humorous but scarcely more extravagant than this grim old Democrat of Tennessee: -"All the powers combined," he said, "I care not of what character they are, cannot destroy that great instrument, that great charter of freedom; they may seem to succeed for a time, but their attempts will be futile. They might as well undertake to lock up the winds or chain the waves of the ocean and confine them to limits..... They will find that they might as well undertake to introduce a resolution to repeal the laws of gravitation as to keep this Union from being restored. It is just about as feasible to resist the great law of gravitation which binds all to a common centre as that great law which will bring back these States to their regular relations with the Union." Or again:-"Let us stand by the constitution of our fathers, though the heavens themselves may fall. Let us stand by it, though faction may rage; though taunts and jeers may come; though vituperation may come in its most violent character - I will be found standing by the Constitution as the chief rock of our safety, as the palladium of our civil and religious liberty. Yes, let us cling to it as the mariner clings to his last plank when night and tempest close around him" ly capable of self-possession are so much the more remarkable. In Mr. Bancroft we are told that they indicate only the weakness of a dull and pompous man; in Mr. Sumner we are assured that similar rhetoric,- though in Mr. Sumner it is always comparatively polished, is a congenital disease; in Mr. Seward, it is said to be a mere stroke of policy to amuse the crowd; in Mr. George Francis Train it is a cracked brain; in Mr. Stevens it is passionate party spirit; and so there is always an excuse of some sort. But when this sort of high-pressure language escapes from a President of more than common ability and reticence, who is, as it were, the safety valve of the national mind, we cannot but reason that there is something of a general cause at work which predisposes American thought to what seems to us bombastic and inflated expression,and to bombastic and inflated expression somewhat different in kind from that which was popular in our own country eighty or ninety years ago, when Sheridan could do so much with an elaborate and, as it has come down to us, pedantic metaphor taken from a Upas tree, that the House rose in too great excitement after his speech to con- Moreover, if we look at almost any specitinue the pretence of deliberation any longer. men of the granddoquent language so comPresident Johnson's recent speech at Wash-mon in the United States, we shall find ington is full of almost inarticulate shrieks of metaphor. When he proposed that "if his blood were to be shed," - a rhetorical hypothesis contrary to the fact, "let an altar to the Union be erected, and then, if it is necessary, take me and lay me upon it, an the blood that now warms and ani that its highest notes. the sentences in which it rises to a scream, are all on the same theme - -the grandeur of the Union. For example, the Times' correspondent in New York sent us some very amusing specimens in the letter printed last Wednesday. Every one remembers the passage in Dick ens about the American eagle soaring aloft | use of the most violent and figurative exwith a thunderbolt in its beak and an earth- pressions. Even the splendid image sugquake in its claws. This, from the official gested by the conception of "380 widows report of Congress, the Hansard of the and shirt-tail children of the county of United States, is not much less eloquent: Jones ascending," in their "sovereign ca"No, Mr. Speaker, let us proclaim to the pacity" doubtless, shirt-tail though they be, world, and let it go forth, that having con- "before the God of right," is an image inquered the rebellion, having subdued the spired by the orator's profound sense of the rebel army, we are prepared to rule this right of the county of Jones to a popular land and make our people free. And when will of its own. But it is worth noting that that proud old bird of freedom shall soar this orator, who speaks only for a county, across the land, bearing in his beak the quaint and picturesque though he is, is combroad banner of beauty and glory, let all paratively literal and free from metaphor if its stars unfolded to the world proclaim in a we read him by the side of orators who language which will make thrones and ty- speak for States and that orators who speak * rannies tremble to their centres, This is the for States are flat and unimpressive in home of the free!"" We believe it will be their metaphors, as compared with the found that this is almost the only subject on orators who have ascended to the idea of which American oratory is habitually infla- the Union. In proportion to the physical ted, habitually liable to rise into a shriek. expansion of the idea of popular supreIn some cases, it is true that the idea of the macy is the figurative elevation of the elogreatness of the State is the dominant one, quence used. A soaring eagle with banner and has never been merged in the idea of and stars in its beak, is but the rude hierothe Union. And in some it would appear glyphic caught up heartily by clumsy imag that the object of the idolatry has not ex-inations to shadow forth the ubiquity and panded beyond the native county. The glory of the Union. Mr. Johnson's law same amusing letter of the Times' corre- more fundamental and irreversible than the spondent which we have before quoted, contains an amusing illustration. A "mossyback" we suppose to be a politician whose mind is covered with the creeping growths of the old ideas, the political lichens that the revolutionary Thorough' had not succeeded in clearing away. A member of the last State Convention held in Mississippi said, as reported in the papers :-"I am a mossy-back, Sir, and I stand here to-day to represent the county of Jones. People said that the county of Jones seceded from Mississippi. Yes, Sir, we did secede from the Confederacy, and, Sir, we fought them like dogs; we killed them like devils, we buried them like asses. Yea, like asses, Sir! My people down there in the county of Jones did, in their sovereign capacity, secede, and did become mossy-backs. We did fight them like dogs, and kill them like hellions like hellions, I say, Sir. But I didn't come up here to gas, Sir, and I surrender my rights to the floor, Sir, expressing only the one sentiment that I stand up for the county of Jones in general; yes, Sir, I am for Jones all the time. In my suffering county the wails of 380 widowed women and shirt-tail children are ascending before the God of right, and appealing in tears to the powers appointed for relief." Even "the members of the county of Jones," then, seem to have "a sovereign capacity," and it is the fact of their having "a sovereign capacity" which immediately suggests the 6 " law of gravitation, that Constitution of his by which Americans are to stand when the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, and the earth dissolved with burning heat, are again nothing but random efforts to indicate with a few strokes of blazing colour the immensity of the faith which the word "Union conveys to his mind. We fully expect to see before long some American Mansel writing a treatise to show that the idea of the Union belongs to the region of those Infinite and Absolute notions which are beyond the sphere of relative knowledge, to the world of the Unknown and Unknowable, - to which also, by the way, the Confederates were willing to consign it. The American Platonists probably think the idea of the Union to be a reminiscence of a former state of existence; and if the last man were an American, no doubt Hope in lighting "her torch at Nature's funeral pile" would inspire him with an expectation of its immortality, of seeing the New Heavens and the New Earth administered under the old Constitution, and would dispose him to disbelieve that in any literal sense there would be "no more sea," on the ground that the President is declared in that document the Commander of both the Army and Navy of the United States. We may laugh at this sort of superheated intellectual strain, but it is only fair to try and understand it. The Union is the only subject on which it is certain that Ameri vour. can bombast far outdoes the bombast of the of unimaginative men into a spurious atsame climate of education in England. tempt at eloquence which inevitably beAnd we believe it is true that, just as a comes bombast. Nay, we imagine that the drop of water turning into steam at a much striking species of monomania, which we higher temperature than the ordinary boil- observe with so much surprise in connection ing point of water, is indefinitely more with a Constitution about ninety years old, powerful as a motive force than the equiva- is a Darwinian provision for the modification lent whiff of steam at the ordinary boiling of the species in the direction of this ideal point, so the peculiar superheated grandeur destiny. Without a positive instrument of and magnificence attached by Americans to this kind to regard with what seems to us a the idea of the Union, ridiculous as they positive fetish-worship, it would have been seem to us, are capable of exercising a far impossible for a people spread over so wide wider and more efficient motive force than a tract of country, and with such necessariif they were of the ordinary political fer- ly vast chasms between their different noThe truth is that Englishmen, at tions of moral law and politics, to work out least Englishmen outside the working class, such a notion at all. As it is, the social difhave never fully realized how new and ference caused by slavery has all but broken original a conception that of an immense up this Union for ever; and yet the curious continent all united under the same rule, toleration always shown for slavery till it and with the most perfect freedom of inter- did break up the Union, and the moral tolcourse and equality of political condition eration shown for it still when it is politicalbetween all parts of it, is. To us, indeed, ly condemned, is but one token of the vast there is something greater and more exciti- moral conspiracy, as it were, made by ing in the notion of diversity, and of that Americans of all creeds not to take offence competition for influence in which the dif- with each other's modes of thought and life, ferent Governments of Europe are always so long as they were not false to the only engaging. But to an American the Gov- positive external standard of unity. An ernment of the Union really shadows forth elastic unity and voluntary mutual forbearfeebly what we conceive of as the over-ance even as regards moral distinctions, is ruling government of God. We usually the true primary idea of the American believe that that Union is a mere provisional state of things, inferior by its very uniformity, which must break up ultimately into the richer variety of a whole number of differently organized States. But the Americans think of it as representing the true unity of man, as a first approximation And this idea it is which gives its pecutowards making the globe the residence of liar, effort and scream to the political boma single family and a harmonious family too. bast of America. It is an attempt of the They hope to realize a wholly different poli- imagination to reach, as it were, a second tical future from that of Europe, one dis- and wider, though thinner, stratum of patturbed by no great dynastic feuds, embar- riotism, above that to which we give the rassed by no confusion of tongues, yet per- name. It seems always true that as you mitting enough variety for true unity;-in widen the range of your sympathies, and language, variety of dialect, in physical realize less and less the exact objects which nature, variety of climate and scenery, identify with yourself by a sort of enlarged in character, variety of moral gifts and egotism, language tends to become more tastes, in commerce, variety of produc- florid. Even in England the language of tion and manufacture,—in faith, variety of political patriotism is always more florid civilized creed, but none of the variety of than that of domestic affections, and in language which prohibits mutual intercourse America there is this wider and thinner but for hard-worked men, none of the political more excited Union patriotism outside the variety between despotism and liberty, range of the narrower and better realized which inevitably leads to blows, no variety State loyality. All this talk of shedding in moral customs so great as to render one warm blood on he altar of the Union, of part of the country uninhabitable by citi- the American eagle screaming across zens of another. That, we say, is the ideal," common country, and so forth, is the whatever we may think of the indications effort of an inadequate imagination to sweep here and there that it will never be real- the wider upper stratum of political enthuized and it is unquestionably a great ideal, siasm and egotism that is connected with in itself sufficient to excite the imaginations the Federal Union. The idea is really Union:-the idea of popular liberty was secondary to it, and was rather the necessary condition of this vast unity than its regulating principle; and we believe the political ideal of the artisans in this country is not very dissimilar. a 66 great. The effort to express the idea in feline natures, who can when driven to bay symbols is usually imbecile. That word fight terribly, but would rather spring "" common as applied to country is the key secretly but relentlessly on their prey. to it, and naturally enough the metaphors Their attitudes are of course varied accordused are common in two senses- -common ing to the requirements of the story, and to all the Unionist States, and also com- of the few qualities common to all tigers, mon in the sense of" common and unclean." whether fierceness, or treachery, or lust of When Mr. Pogram says, "In the ladies' prey, one is usually made predominant; ordinary, my friends, or in the battle-field, but the central idea is always the same the name of Pogram will be proud to jine a woman beautiful with weird beauty, but you; and may it, my friends, be written on dangerous to every one who approaches my tomb, He was a member of the her, with a will so intensified that crime Congress of his common country, and was ac-produces no remorse, treacherous, greedy, tive in his trust,'" - he cranes at this higher level of patriotism scarcely more ineffectually and absurdly than Mr. Johnson in his talk about the altar and the warm blood. Of recent American statesmen, only Mr. Lincoln seems to us to have kept down all vulgar inflation in his speech on this subject, and that only perhaps because his imagination habitually realized a Power far above that of the Union, in which alone could be the basis of true unity, -a unity therefore rooted in humility, and not in magniloquence or conceit. From the Spectator. TIGRESSES IN LITERATURE.* How did the tigress first make her way into English literature? No novel is now complete, and very few novels are successful, without a specimen of a bad woman of a peculiar kind, hard as steel and as glittering, full of ability, insensible to fear, with the energy of a brigand and a brigand's recklessness of principle. Usually they have some one master passion,-love, or ambition, or the crave for luxury; invariably they are exempt from the weakness, and purposelessness, and sensibility to small external influences which novelists once thought essential to the delineation of the sex. Nine times out of ten they have odd physical peculiarities, green eyes, or violet eyes, or yellow hair, or sinuous figures, or eerie laughs, or unchanging pallor, and these peculiarities help to enslave the victims whom primâ facie one would expect them to repel. They are in fact human tigresses, though with the thirst for blood undeveloped, beings of exquisite form and and devoid of human feeling. Sometimes, "For God's sake, don't go on with this matter!' he said, with an agonized voice, and wringing his hands. I shall be ruined! If I am dismissed a second time, I shall get nothing elsewhere! I have a wife and children all dependent on me! I shall not know where to turn to.' She said afterwards, describing the scene, and said it with great justice, Just as if I had been the cause of his misfortune! Why should he reproach me, poor man? I know,' said he, interpreting this look, ‘I should have thought of this myself. But how could I know? There are people that come nicer indeed than any here as nice as ladies , ladies. It was very foolish- very improper -and I do most humbly ask your pardon. But you will not have me turned out in this way? I am sure you will not be hard on a poor man. I am unworthy of your notice. A word from you,' he added, will do. If you and Mr. Swinton were to go to him and speak earnestly.' Jenny was truly concerned to see this picture of humiliation. What can I dopoor I? I feel for you, indeed I do. Do you suppose they would heed me? It is in Mr. Swinton's hands. You must try him. I don't |