Chapter 17

Of course there was a good deal of excitement over this matter, and all the male inhabitants collected to talk about it. The discussion extended to some similar cases of recent occurrence and soon gave rise to angry disputes. In a very short time pistols and knives were produced, invitations to fight were given, and it seemed that blood would soon be shed. By the interference, however, of some of the older and more influential citizens, quiet was restored, and no one was injured. We were afterward told that there was hardly a man in the crowd who had not lost a father, brother, or near male relative by knife or pistol, either in a supposed fair fight or by foul means.

At that time the hatred of negroes from "free States" was intense, while those from "slave States" were treated kindly and regarded merely as persons of an inferior race.

Some time before our arrival, a steamer belonging to Pittsburg had stopped at Napoleon, and the colored steward went on shore to buy provisions. While bargaining for them he became involved in a quarrel with a white man and struck him. He was instantly seized, and would no doubt have paid for his temerity with his life if some one in the crowd had not exclaimed, "A live nigger's worth twenty dead ones! Let's sell him!" This suggestion was adopted. In a very short time the unfortunate steward was bound, mounted on a swift horse, and hurried away toward the interior of the State. He was guarded by a party of mounted men, and in less than a week's time he was working on a plantation as a slave for life, with no prospect of communicating with his relatives or friends.

One morning the captain of the steamer and I saw a crowd collect, and on approaching it we found a debate going on as to what should be done with a large and well-dressed colored man, evidently under the influence of liquor, who was seated on the ground with his arms and legs bound. He had knocked one white man down and struck several others while they were attempting to secure him. The crowd was undecided whether to give him a good whipping for his offence or to send for his master (who lived on the other side of the river, in Mississippi) and let him inflict the punishment. Finally, the master was sent for. He soon appeared, and stated that he had given his "_boy_" permission to come over to Napoleon, and had also given him money to buy some things he wanted. He was "a good boy," and had never been in trouble before, and if the citizens of Napoleon would forgive him this time he, the master, would guarantee that the boy should never visit Napoleon again. The master also stated he would "stand drinks" for the whole crowd. This gave general satisfaction. The drinks were taken, and the master and his slave were enthusiastically escorted to their dug-out on the shore. Much hand-shaking took place, in which the "boy" participated, and many invitations were given to both to visit Napoleon again; after which they rowed contentedly to their home.

J.A.M.

The Etymology of "Babe."

In the latest English etymological dictionary, that by the Rev. W.W. Skeat, we read under the word _babe_, "Instead of _babe_ being formed from the infantine sound _ba_, it has been modified from _maqui_, probably by infantine influences. _Baby_ is a diminutive form."

_Maqui_ is Early Welsh for _son_, and those to whom Mr. Skeat's modified _maqui_ seems absurd will be pleased to find its absurdity indicated, if not proved, by a Greek author of the sixth century.

The following passage in the seventy-sixth section of Damascius's "Life of Isidorus" has escaped the notice of English etymologists generally:

"Hermias had a son (the elder of his philosopher sons) by Ædesia, and one day, when the child was seven months old, Ædesia was playing with him, as mothers do, calling him _bábion_ and _paidíon_, speaking in diminutives. But Hermias overheard her, and was vexed, and censured these childish diminutives, pronouncing an articulate reprimand.... Now the Syrians, and especially those who dwell in Damascus, call newborn children, and even those that have passed the period of childhood, _bábia_, from the goddess _Babía_, whom they worship."

What is _bábion_ but the English _baby_, what _bábia_ but the English _babies?_ We can hardly suppose that our English words are derived from Syriac words in use fourteen centuries ago, or that the latter were "modified from _maqui_" by "infantine" or other influences. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that they were alike "formed from the infantine sound _ba_," unless we accept Damascius's derivation from _Babía_.

Unfortunately, we know no more concerning this goddess than did the learned John Selden, who, writing two hundred and twenty-odd years ago, "De Dis Syris," says, on page 296 of that work, "I cannot conjecture whether _Babía,_ who seems to have been reverenced among the Syrians as goddess of childhood and youth, is identical with the Syrian Venus or not, and I do not remember to have met with any mention of this deity except in Damascius's Life of Isidorus."

Selden's memory was not at fault: the words _bábion, bábia_, and _Babía_ occur only in the passage above quoted.

In the absence of other evidence than Damascius's own, we may well question whether he has not inverted the etymological relation between the goddess and the babies. Most divinities owe their names to the attributes or functions imputed to them by their worshippers. It seems, therefore, more probable that the Syrian protectress of babies owes her name to the _bábia_ than that they were called _bábia_ in her honor. If, however, we accept Damascius's theory of their relation, what forbids us to conjecture that the goddess's name was itself "formed from the infantine sound _ba_"? In any case, the little domestic scene between the priggish father and the dandling mother is amusing and instructive to parents as well as to etymologists.

S.E.T.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

"The Russian Revolt: its Causes, Condition, and Prospects." By Edmund Noble. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The internal condition of Russia, though a matter of more than speculative interest to its immediate neighbors, is not likely to become what that of France has so often been,--a European question. The institutions of other states will not be endangered by revolutionary proceedings in the dominions of the Czar, nor will any oppression exercised over his subjects be thought to justify foreign intervention. Even Polish insurrections never led to any more active measures on the part of the Western powers than delusive expressions of sympathy and equally vain remonstrances. In these days, not Warsaw, but St. Petersburg, is the centre of disaffection, and the ramifications extend inland, their action stimulated, it may be, to some extent from external sources, but incapable of sending back any impulse in return. Nihilism, being based on the absence, real or supposed, of any political institutions worth preserving in Russia, cannot spread to the discontented populations of other countries. Even German socialism cannot borrow weapons or resources from a nation which has no large proletariat and whose industries are still in their infancy. In the nature of its government, the character of its people, and the problems it is called upon to solve, Russia stands, as she has always stood, alone, neither furnishing examples to other nations nor able, apparently, to copy those which other nations have set. The great peculiarity of the revolutionary movement is not simply that it does not proceed from the mass of the people,--which is a common case enough,--but that it runs counter to their instincts and their needs and rouses not their sympathy but their aversion. The peasants, who constitute four-fifths of the population, have no motive for seeking to overturn the government. Their material condition, since the abolition of serfdom, is superior to that of the Italian peasantry, who enjoy the fullest political rights. As members of the village communities, they hold possession and will ultimately obtain absolute ownership of more than half the soil of the country, excluding the domains of the state. In the same capacity they exercise a degree of local autonomy greater than that which is vested in the communes of France. They are separated from the other classes by differences of education, of habits, and of interests, while the autocracy that rules supreme over all is regarded by them as the protecting power that is to redress their grievances and fulfil all their aspirations. The discontent which has bred so many conspiracies, and which aims at nothing less than the subversion of the monarchy, is confined to a portion of the educated classes, and proceeds from causes that affect only those classes. Among them alone is there any perception of the wide and ever-increasing difference between the Russian system of government and that of every other European country, any craving for the exercise of political rights and the activity of political life, any experience of the restrictions imposed on thought and speech and the obstacles to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and ideas, any consciousness that the corrupt, vexatious, and oppressive bureaucracy by which all affairs are administered is a direct outgrowth of unlimited and irresponsible power. Nor are they united in desiring to destroy, or even to modify, this system. Apart from those who find in it the means of satisfying their personal interests and ambitions, and the larger number in whom indolence and the love of ease stifle all thought and aspiration, there are many who believe, with reason, that the country is not ripe for the adoption of European institutions, that the foundations on which to construct them do not yet exist, and that any attempt to introduce them would lead only to calamitous results; while there is even a large party which contends that, far from needing them, Russia is happily situated in being exempt from the struggles and the storms, the wars of classes and of factions, that have attended the course of Western civilization, and in being left free to work out her own development by original and more peaceful methods. No doubt the great majority of thinking people feel the necessity for some large measures of reform and look forward to the establishment of a constitutional system and the gradual extension of political freedom to the mass of the nation. But there is no evidence that the revolutionary spirit has spread or excited sympathy in any such degree as its audacity, its resoluteness, and the terror created by its sinister achievements have seemed at times to indicate. The active members of the propaganda are almost exclusively young persons, living apart from their families, of scanty means and without conspicuous ability. They belong to the lower ranks of the nobility, the rising _bourgeois_ class, and, above all, that large body of necessitous students, including many of the children of the ill-paid clergy, whom M. Leroy-Beaulieu styles the "intellectual proletariat." Classical studies, German metaphysics, and the scientific theories and discoveries of recent years have had much to do with the fermentation that has led to so many violent explosions, the universities have been the chief _foci_ of agitation, and in the attempts to suppress it the government has laid itself open to the reproach of making war upon learning and seeking to stifle intellectual development.

Such is the view presented by recent French and English writers who have made the condition of Russia a subject of minute investigation. Mr. Noble deals more in generalizations than in details, and sets forth a theory which it is difficult to reconcile with the facts and conclusions derived from other sources. According to him, Russia is, and has been from the first establishment of the imperial rule, in a state of chronic revolt. This revolt is "the protest of eighty millions of people against their continued employment as a barrier in the path of peaceful human progress and national development." "It is not the educated classes alone, but the masses,--peasant and artisan, land-owner and student,--of whose aspirations, at least, it may be said, as it was said of the earliest and freest Russians, '_Neminem ferant imperatorem_.'" Before the rise of the empire "the Russians lived as freemen and happy." They "enjoyed what, in a political sense, we are fairly entitled to regard as the golden age of their national existence." The _veché_, or popular assembly, "was from a picturesque point of view the grandest, from an administrative point of view the simplest, and from a moral point of view the most equitable form of government ever devised by man." The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at all periods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol, or separation of the "Old Believers" from the Orthodox Church, and in the resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great: "in the one as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority and all that it represented." It is admitted that "among the peasants the revolt must long remain in its passive stage.... Yet year by year, partly owing to educational processes, partly owing to propaganda, even the peasants are being won over to the growing battalions of discontent." The autocracy is "doomed." "The forces that undermine it are cumulative and relentless." Its "true policy is to spread its dissolution--after the manner of certain financial operations--over a number of years." "The method of the change is really not of importance. The vital matter is that the reform shall at once concede and practically apply the principle of popular self-government, granting at the same time the fullest rights of free speech and public assembly." Finally, "the Tsar and his advisers" are bidden to "beware," since "the spectacle of this frightfully unequal struggle ... is not lost upon Europe, or even upon America."

The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little attention he may have given to those of Russia in particular. The institutions of Russia differ fundamentally from those of other European states. But the difference lies in historical conditions and development, not in the principles underlying all human society. No people has ever had a permanent government of its own resting solely or chiefly on force. Wherever autocracy has acquired a firm footing, it has done so by suppressing anarchy, establishing order and authority, and securing national unity and independence. Nowhere has it fulfilled these conditions more completely than in Russia. It grew up when the country was lying prostrate under the Tartar domination, and it supplied the impulse and the means by which that yoke was thrown off. It absorbed petty principalities, extinguished their conflicting ambitions, and consolidated their resources; checked the migrations of a nomad population, and brought discordant races under a common rule; repelled invasions to which, in its earlier disintegrated condition, the nation must have succumbed, and built up an empire hardly less remarkable for its cohesion and its strength than for the vastness of its territory. In a word, it performed, more rapidly and thoroughly, the same work which was accomplished by monarchy between the eighth and the fifteenth century in Western Europe. If its methods were more analogous to those of Eastern despotisms than of European sovereignties, if its excesses were unrestrained and its power uncurbed, this is only saying that Russia, instead of sharing in the heritage of Roman civilization and in the mutual intercourse and common discipline through which the Western communities were developed, was cut off from association with its more fortunate kindred and subjected to influences from which they were, for the most part, exempt. To hold up the crude democracy and turbulent assemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that the Russian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifully organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or difficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance,"--all this strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the eighteenth-century _philosophes_ had not yet been dissipated by the French Revolution.

"A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago: A Narrative of Travel and Exploration from 1878 to 1883." By Henry O. Forbes, F.R.G.S. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Although a long succession of naturalists have done their best to familiarize readers with the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, Mr. Forbes's book is full not only of freshly-adjusted and classified facts, but of curious and valuable details of his own discoveries. Even the best-known islands of the group are so inexhaustible in every form of animal and vegetable life that much remains for the patient gleaner after Darwin and Wallace, who found here some of the most striking illustrations of their deductions and theories, It is well known that startling contrasts in the distribution of plants and animals are met with in these islands, even when they lie side by side; and in no other part of the world is the history of mutations of climate, of the law of migrations, and of the changes of sea and land, so open and palpable to the scientific observer. Mr. Forbes's object seems to have been to visit those islands which offer the most striking deviations from the more general type. His earlier explorations were made alone, but during the last eighteen months he was accompanied by a brave woman who came out from England to Batavia to be married to him at the close of 1881. It is painful to read of the deadly ordeals of climate and the excessive discomforts and privations to which this lady was exposed. Her diary, kept at Dilly during her husband's absence, while she was ill, utterly deserted, and in danger of a lonely and agonizing death, makes a singular contrast to the record of Miss Bird and others of her sex who seem to have triumphed over all the vicissitudes possible to women. To the general reader Mr. Forbes's travels in Java, Sumatra, and the Keeling Islands are far more satisfactory than in those less familiar, like Timor and Buru. In the light of the terrible events of 1883, everything connected with the islands lying on either side of the Straits of Sunda is of the highest interest. Those appalling disasters which swept away part of Sumatra and Java and altered the configuration of the whole volcanic group surrounding Krakatoa took place only a few weeks after Mr. and Mrs. Forbes sailed for home. This widespread destruction seemed to the inhabitants the culmination of a series of calamitous years of drought, wet, blight, bovine pestilence, and fever. It was Mr. Forbes's fortune to be in Java during these bad seasons, which, from combined causes, made it impossible for flowers to perfect themselves and fructify. This circumstance was, however, useful to the naturalist, offering him an opportunity for experiments in the fertilization of orchids and other plants. The account of the Dutch cinchona-plantations, which now furnish quinine of the best quality, is full of interest.

Mr. Forbes's visit to the Cocos-Keeling Islands, in the Indian Ocean, cannot be passed over. He was eager to visit a coral-reef, and this atoll, stocked and planted only by the flotsam and jetsam of the seas, the winds, and migrating birds, offers to the naturalist a most delightful study; for here, progressing almost under his eyes, are the phenomena which have made Bermuda and other coral groups. Little as the Keeling Islands seem to offer in the way of secure habitation, they have a population of some hundreds of people, presided over by their energetic proprietor, Mr. Ross, who has planted the atoll thickly with cocoanut palms. Gathering the nuts and expressing the oil is the chief industry of the inhabitants, who are all taught to work and support themselves in some useful way. No money is in circulation on the island: a system of exchange and barter with agents in Batavia for necessary products takes its place. This thriving little community has, however, terrible forces to contend against. Darwin recounts the effects of an earthquake which took place two years before his visit to the islands in 1836; a fierce cyclone brought ruin and devastation in 1862; and in 1876 a terrible experience of cyclone and earthquake almost swept away the whole settlement. This was followed by a most singular phenomenon. "About thirty-six hours after the cyclone," writes Mr. Forbes, "the water on the eastern side of the lagoon was observed to be rising up from below of a dark color. The color was of an inky hue, and its smell 'like that of rotten eggs.' ... Within twenty-four hours every fish, coral, and mollusc in the part impregnated with this discoloring substance--probably hydrosulphuric or carbonic acid died. So great was the number of fish thrown on the beach, that it took three weeks of hard work to bury them in a vast trench dug in the sand." Wherever this water touched the growing coral-reef, it was blighted and killed. Darwin saw similar "patches" of dead coral, and attributed them to some great fall of the tide which had left the insects exposed to the light of the sun. But it is probable that a similar submarine eruption had taken place after the earthquake which preceded his visit to the Keeling Islands in 1836.

"Birds in the Bush." By Bradford Torrey. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.