itself to be to both races, and as it would continue to prove itself if not disturbed by the fell spirit of Abolition.' The relation now existing in the slave-holding States,' he repeated, instead of being an evil is a good—a positive good.' He took what he called 'high ground.' With the ordinary relations between capital and labour, and the ordinary apportionment of the fruits of labour between them, he confidently compared the direct, simple, and patriarchal mode in which, under the industrial system of the Southern States, the labour of the African was commanded by the European.' He declared, with a daring which, when we consider what was going on in the Southern plantations, rises to heroism, that in few countries was so much left to the labourer and so little exacted from him.' Nor were the blessings of slavery, according to him, confined to the industrial sphere; it formed the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.' In an advanced stage of civilisation there had always been a conflict between labour and capital; from this conflict the slave-owning States were free. But they had only just entered on the stage in which the excellence of their political institutions was to be tested; justice would be done them by the next generation.

It is difficult to understand how an intellect so acute as that of Calhoun can have missed, if it did really miss, the patent fact that the conflict between labour and capital, instead of being unknown in the South, prevailed there in its direst form, and manifested its existence in hideous slave codes, devised not only to shackle the movements, but to depress the intelligence of the slave; in a system of police which amounted to a standing reign of terror; and in the fears of slave insurrection, which, notwithstanding these dreadful precautions, continually haunted the mind of the slave-owner and, as President Buchanan once complained, made it impossible for the Southern matrons to sleep in peace. Nor is it less difficult to understand how any man not besotted by local prejudice, after seeing another state of society,. could have looked on the state of society in the South and pronounced it very good. In that invaluable work of Mr. Olmsted which has preserved for us a faithful and lively picture of the South before the war, we see how profound was the barbarism which lay beneath the slightly polished surface of a community made up of luxurious and spendthrift planters, mean whites' who combined the lowest degradation, both intellectual and economical, with the insolence of a privileged race, and embruted slaves. Industry was hopelessly unprogressive, and could never rise, even in agriculture, above the tillage which exhausts the soil. The indispensable condition of economical progress, as Mr. Von Holst truly says, is a thriving middle class, which at the South did not exist, and could not have existed without breaking up the social and political system. Even material improvements, such as railways and telegraphs, were as much as the

system could bear, though Calhoun, who had been educated at the North, was in favour of their introduction. Hospitality, for which the Southern gentleman was renowned, is an easy virtue when it is practised with the fruits of another's toil. Freedom from manual labour usually brings with it refinement of a certain kind, but it was observed that beneath the graceful exterior of the Southern ladies there was a strain of inhumanity such as cannot fail to be engendered in the mistresses of slaves. It is needless to say what effect the exercise of tyranny from the cradle must have upon the temper of the young. Calhoun and all the chivalry reproached the North with avarice, and it did not seem to them avaricious to work slaves to death for their own profit any more than to a robber knight of the Middle Ages it seemed avaricious to plunder burghers. The apostleship of Calhoun, however, was thoroughly successful. His creed, preached in language forcible and impressive by its logical precision, though somewhat hard and dry, took full possession of the Southern mind. Satisfied by him of the holiness of its cause, slavery fought and conquered at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. High was the exultation on the Federal side when, the conquering armies of the North having entered Charleston, the banner of the Union was waved in triumph over the great marble slab on which slavery had carved, as a sufficient epitaph, the name of Calhoun.

When Calhoun instigated South Carolina to exercise her sovereign power by nullifying a Federal tariff, he might seem to have been merely raising again the banner which had been raised by Jefferson and his allies in the Kentucky Resolutions, and on which the very word 'Nullification' had been inscribed. But Jefferson's State Right was democratic resistance to Federal centralisation; Calhoun's State Right was Southern separation. It appears that so early as 1828 the plan of a slave-owning confederacy had found favour with many Southern politicians. Calhoun seems always to have clung to the Union, and to have been long even in resigning his own ambitious hope of becoming its President; but his sense of the division between the two geographical groups of States, with their antagonistic spirit and interests, more and more gained the ascendency in his mind. He had advanced far on the road to secession when he proposed to hold a convention of the Southern States, which should extort justice for slavery by closing the Southern ports to Northern vessels. His last proposal was a double Presidency, which, preposterous in itself, clearly pointed to a division of the Confederation. Calhoun was no fire-eater; he knew how to oppose the headlong violence of the fire-eaters; he was in his way a statesman, with the power of reflection and of foresight, perhaps even with a mournful insight into the contents of the book of fate. This lends to his career a tragic interest, to which full justice is done by Mr. Von Holst. From the Nullification dispute he came off really victorious, since the Compromise tariff was a real concession,

while the Force Bill, by which it was accompanied, was nothing but empty thunder. He prepared the way for a greater though still temporary triumph of the dark power which he served. Down to 1861 that power ruled the Union under the form of a democratic party made up of the slave-owners, their congenial allies the selfish plutocrats of the North, the Irish, and the low populace of the Northern cities. Then came the inevitable catastrophe. To upbraid slavery, as some of these writers do, with its folly in not having remained quiet and abstained from provoking the North seems hardly reasonable. It was not in the character of a slave-owner to remain quiet. Nor did the North remain quiet; pricked in its conscience by the fugitive slave law and galled by the reproaches of the civilised world, it could not leave the accursed thing alone. The best excuse for Southern violence is to be found in the language of some of those Northern philanthropists, such as Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, who hated the slave-owner fully as much as they loved the slave. After reading Sumner's speeches we can hardly be surprised, however much we may be shocked, at the treatment which he received from the infuriated Brookes.2

For a generation or more after the Revolution the United States, though they were a republic, were hardly a democracy. The people allowed power to be exercised for them by the highly educated class, to which they had been accustomed to look up, content with electing their rulers out of that circle. But in time they grew jealous of the ascendency of intelligence, suspicious of its designs, and desirous of exercising power themselves. A multitude can exercise power and trample down hated superiorities only by concentrating its force in a man, who thus becomes a demagogue despot. The man in America was Andrew Jackson, who has found an excellent biographer in Professor Sumner, and whose name marks the advent of thoroughgoing democracy and at the same time a sinister epoch in American politics and administration. Jackson was certainly

well chosen as a leader of the masses' against 'the classes.' Quincy and Adams called him an unlettered barbarian. His want of literature, though it would have done him no good, might not have done him much harm. Lincoln was unlettered, yet he governed well. But Lincoln was not a barbarian. The Tennessean was a barbarian to the core; the furious passions which sometimes choked his utterance, and the almost insane egotism which made him fancy that everyone who crossed his will must be the blackest of villains, were not under the restraint of moral civilisation. That is the simplest account of his character and conduct. He first appears upon the scene as a member of Congress from Tennessee, with his hair tied

2 Specimens of Sumner's style may be seen in Professor Alexander Johnson's American Orations, which forms a very useful adjunct to the Lives of American Statesmen. The orations are selected on account of their political importance, with which, however, oratorical merit argely coincides.

behind in an eel-skin and elf locks hanging down his face, voting against a tribute of honour to Washington. For a commercial and industrial nation the Americans are singularly apt to be dazzled by military glory. In England, though she is an old war Power, military glory has made only one Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, who, it must be remembered, was no mere fighter of battles but a great administrator and diplomatist, and in his dealings with the provisional governments of the Peninsula had even proved himself a sagacious politician. In America military glory, unaccompanied by any other qualification, has made four Presidents-Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, and Grant-besides bestowing nominations on Scott, M'Clellan, and Hancock, not to mention cases like those of Pierce and Fremont, in which it has been a make-weight. Jackson had won the hearts of the people by what is called his brilliant victory at New Orleans, a victory in which his loss in killed and wounded was sixteen, and which would have been almost equally brilliant if Pakenham's unfortunate troops had been led into the Mississippi. He had strengthened his hold on popular admiration by a series of international outrages of the most savage kind. On an irresistible tide of enthusiasm, after a campaign marked by an interchange of the most ferocious personalities, Old Hickory' was borne into supreme power. He made his triumphal entry into Washington with an enormous mob largely composed of office-seekers who had worked for him in the campaign. An eye-witness has described the sight as very like the inundation of the Northern barbarians into Rome, except that in this case the tumultuous tide, instead of coming from the North, came from the West and the South.' Strange faces,' says the same narrator, 'filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear defiance on its brow.' The city, and especially the lobbies, swarmed with Jacksonian editors. On the morning of the inauguration the neighbourhood of the Capitol was an agitated sea of heads, and it was necessary to repress the surging crowd by stretching a ship's cable across the flight of steps. After the inauguration came a reception. There was orange punch by barrelfuls, but as the waiters opened the door a rush was made; the glasses were broken, the pails of liquor were upset, and the semblance of order could be restored only by carrying tubs of punch into the garden to draw off the crowd from the rooms. Men stood in muddy boots on the damaskcovered chairs to get a sight of the President. The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant,' says Judge Story, who was glad to escape from the scene.

6

The upsetting of pails of punch and the spoiling of damask by dirty boots were, however, small matters. Now was proclaimed by the lips of Marcy the fell maxim that to the victors belong the spoils.' Jefferson had done something in this way, but Jackson now turned out two thousand civil servants without any pretence of

cause simply to reward the followers of his camp. He had, it seems, before his elevation vehemently denounced the practice; but it is idle to upbraid a fickle barbarian with inconsistency. The administration was of course degraded and demoralised; nothing indeed could have prevented an administrative anarchy and a postal chaos except that wonderful versatility which enables the American to be merchant, soldier, financier, civil servant, postmaster, collector of a port, and, if need be, preacher in one revolving moon. Nor was the effect upon the character and efficiency of the administration the worst part of the spoils system. The worst was the birth of a vast swarm of place-hunting parasites, who, instead of living by honest industry, make it their aim to live upon the public. The practice of paying members of legislatures has the same tendency, and if Mr. Gladstone could introduce it in England, as he is evidently inclined to do, would almost certainly produce the desired effect by clearing public life of disinterested and independent men. Civil service reform, for which the country is indebted in a great degree to the patriotic courage and energy of Mr. George William Curtis, is still in a struggling state, though President Cleveland has honestly carried it forward as far as the exigencies of party would permit. It has to encounter not only the love of patronage, which grows stronger the less there is of principle to hold a party together, but the democratic jealousy of any office which is even apparently held by a tenure other than the immediate will of the sovereign people. Aristocracy is the great bugbear of democracies, and everything is aristocracy which has any independent existence. Together with the Spoils system came, in its full perfection, the party Machine, with its apparatus of caucuses and wirepullers, with the swarm of political imps who work it, and with its inevitable concomitant the habitual use of fraud in elections. Now for the first time was thoroughly developed in America that system which, under the beneficent auspices of Mr. Schnadhorst and his chief, is being introduced in England, and which, as American experience shows, drives the best citizens from public life and makes politics the vilest of trades. To the same epoch apparently may be traced the enslavement of the press to the uses of organism,' whereby conscientious journalism is suppressed, as the conscience of public men is suppressed by the caucus. The centre of this evil was in the seat of the demagogic despotism which issued through Government organs its ukases to its partisans. Now, too, blossoms forth in full life the principle, so essential to the perfection of mob, or rather of caucus government, that the representative is a mere delegate, bound always to vote as the local wirepuller, in the name of the constituency, bids him, or to resign.

Jefferson and the democrats had always been watching with Robespierrean suspiciousness for the advent of a king, or, as Jefferson