Chapter 21

Only from ourselves have we anything to fear. Self-distrust is more to be dreaded than foreign interference or Rebel despotism. The deportment of Great Britain has become more and more respectful towards us as we have shown ourselves worthy of respect; and even France has of late grown discreetly reticent on the subject of intervention. But it is said the Rebels will arm their slaves. Very well; if they think to save their boat by taking the bottom out, in order to make paddles of it, they are welcome to try the experiment. Are three or four hundred thousand negro soldiers going to accept from their masters the boon of freedom for themselves only, and not demand it for their race? Or think you their gratitude towards those masters is so extraordinary, that they will take arms against their brothers already in the field, and not be liable to commit the slight error of passing over and fighting by their side? In either case, Mr. Davis's proposition, if carried out, is practical abolitionism; and we have yet to learn how a tottering edifice can be rendered any more stable by the removal of its acknowledged "cornerstone." The plan is violently opposed by the slave-owning classes: for, whatever may be proclaimed to the contrary, they have risked this war, and devoted themselves to it, believing it to be a war for the aggrandizement of their peculiar institution; and if that succumbs, where is the gain? Already their new Government has become to them an object of dread and detestation, and they are beginning to look back with regretful hearts to the beneficent Union which they were in such rash haste to destroy. Only the leaders of the Rebellion can hope to gain anything by so perilous an expedient; for Slavery has become with them a secondary consideration,--no doubt Mr. Davis is sincere in asserting this,--and they are now ready to sacrifice it to their private ambition. They are in the position of men who, driven to extremity, will give up everything else in order to preserve their power, and their necks with it. But let us indulge in no useless apprehensions on this point. Such a proposition, seriously entertained by the Richmond Government, is of itself the strongest evidence we could have of the exhaustion of their resources. Every other means has failed, and this is their last resort. We are reminded of that vivid description, in one of Cooper's novels, of an Indian in his canoe drawn into the rapids of Niagara and swept over the falls,--who, in his wild efforts to save himself, continued _paddling in the air_ even after he had passed the verge of the cataract. So the Confederate craft has reached the brink of destruction, and we may now look to see some frantic paddling in their air. Or shall we liken it to Milton's bad angel, flying to his new empire, but dropping into an unexpected "vast vacuity"?

"Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not by ill chance This strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud Instinct with fire and nitre hurried him As many miles aloft."

That "ill chance" has been averted by the last election; and no such "tumultuous cloud" will gather again, to bear up the lost Anarch, if we courageously act our part. The danger now is from our own weakness, not from the enemy's strength.

A great and most important work still remains for us. It is not enough to perform simply the external and obvious duties of the hour. What we would insist on here is the internal and moral work to be done. Men have never yet given full credit to the power of an idea. With faith, ye shall remove mountains. A pebble of truth, in the hand of the shepherd-boy of Israel, is mightier to prevail than the spear like a weaver's beam. How long were the little band of Abolitionists despised! But they were the cutwater of the national ship. With their revolutionary idea, so opposed to the universal prejudice, they succeeded at last in moving the entire country, just as one cog-wheel set against another overcomes its resistance and puts the whole machinery in motion. The rills of thought, shooting from the heights of a few pure and lofty minds, have spread out into this sea of practical Abolitionism which now covers the whole land,--although the sea may be inclined to deny its source. May we, then, charge the pioneers of the Anti-Slavery sentiment with having caused this war? In the same manner we may regard the coming of Christ as being the cause of all the wars and persecutions of Christianity.

If such is the force of earnest conviction, consider what we too may do. We have gone to the polls and voted for the accomplishment of a certain object: far more intelligently than at the beginning of the war, (for few knew then what we were fighting for,) we have met the enemies of our country, and defeated them at the ballot-box. But there is another and no less important vote to be cast. The Twentieth Presidential Election is not the last, even for this year. We are to continue casting our ballots, every day, and day after day,--nay, year after year, if necessary,--to the end. We have had political suffrage; but moral suffrage is now called for. Here woman realizes her rights, so long talked about, and so little understood; here, too, even the intelligent, patriotic boy and girl can exert an influence. We know something of what words can do; but how little we appreciate the power which is behind words! By the wishes of your heart, by the aspirations of your soul, by the energies of your mind and will, you form about you an atmosphere as real as the air you breathe, although, like that, invisible. Not a prayer is lost; not a throb of patriotish goes for nothing; never a wave of impulse dies upon the ethereal deep in which we live and move and have our being. Be filled with the truth as with life itself; let the divine aura exhale from you wherever you move; and thus you may do more to overcome the opposition to our cause than when you deposited your ticket in the box. You may, perhaps, breathe the breath of life into the nostrils of the coldest clay of conservatism you know: for true it is that men not only catch manners, as they do diseases, one from another, but that they catch unconscious inspiration also. Boswell, when absent from London and his hero, acknowledged himself to be empty, vapid; and he became somewhat only when "impregnated with the Johnsonian ether." So the ether of your own earnest, fervent, patriotic character may impregnate the spiritless and help to sustain the brave. Consider, moreover, what an element may be thus generated by the combined hopes and prayers of a whole loyal people! This is the atmosphere which is to sustain the President and his advisers in their work: this, although we may not know it, and although they may be unaware, is the vital breath they need to give them wisdom and power equal to the great crisis; while even the soldiers, in the far-off fields of conflict, shall feel the agitations of this subtile fluid, this life-supporting oxygen, buoying up their hopes, and wafting their banners on to victory.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical._ By JOHN STUART MILL. In Three Volumes. 12mo. Boston: W. V. Spencer.

At a time of deep national emotion, like the present, it is impossible that we Americans should not feel some bias of personal affection in reading the works of those great living Englishmen who have been true to us in the darkest hour. Were it only for his faithful friendship to freedom and to us, Mr. Mill has a right to claim an attentive audience for every word he has ever written; and this collection of his miscellaneous writings, covering a period of thirty years, has a special interest as showing the successive steps by which he has risen to this high attitude of nobleness.

But apart from these special ties, Mr. Mill claims attention as the most advanced of English minds, and the ablest, all things considered, of contemporary English writers. His detached works have long since found a very large American audience,--larger, perhaps, than even their home-circle of readers; and the sort of biographical interest which attaches to a collection of shorter essays--giving, as it does, a glimpse at the training of the writer--will more than compensate for the want of continuity in these volumes, and for the merely local interest which belongs to many of the subjects treated. Church-rates and the English currency have not to us even the interest of heraldry, for that at least can offer pictures of mermaids, and great ingenuity in Latin puns; but, on the other hand, every discussion of the British university-system has a positive value, in the exceedingly crude and undeveloped condition of American collegiate methods. There is the same disparity of interest in the different critical essays. Bentham has hardly exerted an appreciable influence on American thought, and the transitory authority of Coleridge is now merged in more potent agencies; yet when the essays bearing those great names were first printed in the periodical then edited by Mill, they made an era in contemporary English literature, and therefore indirectly modified our own.

Thus, in one way or another, almost all these essays have a value. The style is always clear, always strong, sometimes pointed, seldom brilliant, never graceful; it is the best current sample, indeed, of that good, manly, rather colorless English which belongs naturally to Parliamentary Speeches and Quarterly Reviews. Not being an American, the author may use novel words without the fear of being called provincial; so that _understandable_, _evidentiary_, _desiderate_, _leisured_, and _inamoveability_ stalk at large within his pages. As a controversialist, he is a trifle sharp, but never actually discourteous; and it is pleasant to see that his chivalry makes him gentlest in dealing with the humblest, while his lance rings against the formidable shield of a Cambridge Professor or a Master of Trinity as did that of the disguised Ivanhoe upon the shield of Bois-Guilbert.

The historical essays in this collection are exceedingly admirable, especially the defence of Pericles and the Athenians, in the second paper on Crete's History. In reading the articles upon ethical and philosophical questions, one finds more drawbacks. The profoundest truths can hardly be reached, perhaps, by one who, at the end of his life, as at the beginning, is a sensationalist in metaphysics and a utilitarian in ethics. It is only when dealing with these themes that he seems to show any want of thoroughness: unfairness he never shows. In the closing tract on "Utilitarianism," which the American publishers have added to the English collection, one feels especially this drawback. As the theory of universal selfishness falls so soon as one considers that a man is capable of resigning everything that looks like happiness, and of plunging into apparent misery, because he thinks it right,--so the theory of utilitarianism falls, when one considers that a man is capable of abstaining from an action that would apparently be useful to all around him, from a secret conviction that it is wrong in itself. There are many things which are intrinsically wrong, although, so far as one can see, they would do good to all around. To assassinate a bad neighbor,--to rob a miser and distribute his goods,--to marry Rochester, while his insane wife is living, (for Jane Eyre,)--to put to death an imbecile and uncomfortable grandmother, (for a Feegeean,)--these are actions which are indefensible, though the balance of public advantages might seem greatly in their favor. It is probable that at this moment a great good would be done to this nation and to the world by the death of Jefferson Davis; yet the bare suggestion of his assassination, in the case of Colonel Dahlgren, was received with a universal shudder, and disavowed as an atrocious slander. But Mr. Mill can meet such ethical problems only by reverting to that general principle of Kant, which he elsewhere repudiates: "So act that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law for all rational beings." Mr. Mill says of such instances, "The action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it." But under the rule of utilitarianism, it is the injuriousness itself which should be the principle of classification, and to prove an action innoxious is at once to separate it from that class; so that the objection falls. By his own principles, a murder which would benefit the community is by that very attribute differenced from ordinary and injurious murders, nor can any good argument be found against its commission. The possible bad precedent is at best a possible misapprehension, to be sufficiently averted by concealment, where concealment is practicable.

In dealing with contemporary and practical questions, Mr. Mill shows always pre-eminent ability, with less of the Insular traits than any living Englishman. While there is perhaps no single passage in these volumes so thoroughly grand as his argument for religions freedom in his essay on Liberty,--an argument which the most heretical theologians of either Continent could hardly have put so boldly or so well,--yet through the whole series of essays there runs the same fine strain. He repeatedly renews his clear and irresistible appeal for the equal political rights of the sexes: a point on which there is coming to be but one opinion among the most advanced minds of Europe and America,--a unanimity which, after the more immediate problem of Slavery is disposed of, must erelong bring about some practical application of the principle, in our republican commonwealths. It is interesting to notice in this connection, that Mr. Mill has included with his own essays the celebrated article by his wife, on "The Enfranchisement of Women," and has prefixed to it one of the noblest eulogies ever devoted to any wife by any husband.

He deals with strictly American subjects in the best criticism ever written upon De Tocqueville, where he shows conclusively the error of that great writer, in attributing to democracy, as such, many social phenomena which are equally observable under the English monarchy. These volumes also include--what the English edition of 1859 of course did not contain--the later essays on "The Contest in America," "The Slave Power," and "Non-Intervention." In treating of Slavery and of the War, the author rarely commits an error; in dealing with other American questions, he is sometimes misled by defective information, and cites gravely, with the prelude, "It is admitted," or "It is understood," statements which have their sole origin in the haste of travellers or in the croaking of disappointed egotists. The government of the majority does not end in tyranny: cultivated Americans are not cowards: the best heads are not excluded from public life: free schools do not tend to stifle free thought, but infinitely to multiply it: individuality of character is not checked, but healthily trained, by political equality. Six months in this country would do more to disabuse Mr. Mill, in these matters, than years of mere reading; and it is a positive injury to his large ideas that he should not take the opportunity of testing them on the only soil where they are being put in practice. Whenever he shall come, his welcome is secure. In the mean time, all that we Americans can do to testify to his deserts is to reprint his writings beautifully, as these are printed,--and to read them universally, as these will be read.

_Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities._ Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission. With an Appendix, containing the Testimony. Printed by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Philadelphia.

That uniform thoroughness and accuracy which have marked all that has been done by the Sanitary Commission, not in the field alone, but in the committee-room and the printing-office, were never better shown than in this Report. It attempts something which, unless done thoroughly, was not worth doing; since, on a subject which appeals so strongly to the feelings, mere generalities and gossip do more harm than good. It is the work of a special Commission of Inquiry, composed of three physicians, (Drs. Mott, Delafield, and Wallace,) two lawyers, (Messrs. Wilkins and Hare,)and one clergyman (Mr. Walden). This commission has performed a great amount of labor, and has digested its result into a form so systematic as to be logically irresistible. The facts on which the statement rests are a large body of evidence, taken under oath, from prisoners of both armies, and confirmed by the admissions, carefully collated, of the Rebel press. The conclusion is, that, in the Southern prisons, "tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged."

The next step is to fix the responsibility for all these horrors. All theories of apology--as that the sufferings were accidental or exceptional, or that, badly as our soldiers may have fared, the Rebel soldiers fared little better--are taken up and conclusively refuted, the last-named with especial thoroughness. The inevitable inference drawn by the Commission is, that these inhumanities were "designedly inflicted on the part of the Rebel Government," and were _not_ "due to causes which such authorities could not control."

The immediate preparation of this able report is understood to be due to the Rev. Treadwell Walden, an Episcopal clergyman of Philadelphia, not unknown to the readers of the "Atlantic." His present work will be the permanent authority for the facts which it records, and will justify to future generations the suggestion with which it ends, that these cruelties are the legitimate working of a form of government which takes human slavery for its basis. The record of such a government is fitly written in these pages: it is as appropriate as is, for a king of Dahomey, his funeral pyramid of skulls.

_Freedom of Mind in Willing_; or, Every Being that Wills a Creative First Cause. By ROWLAND G. HAZARD. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 455.

The State of Rhode Island is the most metaphysically inclined of all the sisterhood, not excepting South Carolina. A superficial observer or a passing traveller might take just the opposite view of her tendencies. The stranger who should complete a cycle of sumptuous suppers in Providence, or spend but a day or two in Newport at the height of the season, might conclude that Matter with its most substantial appliances, or Fashion with her most fascinating excitements, had combined to exclude all thoughts of the spiritual from the few square miles over which this least of the States holds dominion. Should he leave the two capitals of luxurious wealth and giddy fashion and seek for the haunts of Philosophy among the quiet nooks which her few valleys and her splendid sea-coast afford, he might judge that meditation had been effectually frightened from them all, for nowhere can he escape the whir of countless spindles and the clash of thousands of looms.

But inferences like these may not be trusted, as history demonstrates. The most admirable of modern treatises in the subtile science, that masterpiece of speculation in matter and style, "The Minute Philosopher" of Bishop Berkeley, was composed in Rhode Island, and the place is still indicated where the musing metaphysician is said to have written the greater portion of the work. That Berkeley's genius did not abandon the region, when he left it, is manifest from the direction taken by the late Judge Durfee, whose "Pan-Idea," if it cannot be accepted as in all respects a satisfactory theory of the relations of the spiritual universe, may be safely taken as an indication of the lofty and daring Platonism of the ingenious author. The anonymous author of "Language by a Heteroscian" is another thinker of somewhat similar tastes. If common report do not greatly err, it is the same thinker who in the volume before us solicits the attention of the philosophic world to his views of the Will. It adds greatly to the interest of the volume itself, in our view, and we trust will do so in the view of our readers, to know that he is no studious recluse nor professional philosopher, but active, shrewd, and keen-sighted, both in his mills, when at home in a fitly named valley, and upon Change, when in Boston or New York.

Surely Roger Williams, that boldest of idealists, did not live in vain, in that he not only set apart the State which he founded as a place of refuge for all persons given to free and daring speculation, but made it a kind of Prospero's Isle, that should never cease to be haunted by some metaphysical spell.

The appearance of such a work from such a source is of itself most refreshing, as an indication that a life of earnest devotion to material pursuits is not inconsistent with an ardent appreciation of the surpassing importance of speculative inquiries. One such example as this is enough to refute the oft-repeated assertion that in America all philosophy must of course give way before the absorbing interest in the pursuit of wealth. A few years since we chanced to send a copy of an American edition of Plato's "Phaedo" to a German Professor. "_Eine wirkliche Erscheinung_," was his reply in acknowledgment, "to see an edition of a work of Plato from America." What would be his amazement at receiving a copy of a disquisition on the Will written by an American mill-owner!

It is still more refreshing to find the author so sincere and so earnest an advocate of the elevating tendency of philosophical studies. There is a charming simplicity in the words with which his Preface is concluded:--"Whatever opinion may be formed of the success or failure of any effort to elucidate this subject, I trust it will be admitted that the arguments I have presented at least _tend_ to show that the investigation may open more elevated and more elevating views of our position and our powers, and may reveal new modes of influencing our own intellectual and moral character, and thus have a more immediate, direct, and practical bearing on the progress of our race in virtue and happiness than any inquiry in physical science." Such testimony, coupled with the impression made by his argument, is most gratifying, not only in consideration of the source from which it comes, but also as contrasted with the course of so much of the speculative philosophy of the day, towards Materialism in Psychology, Necessarianism in Morals, Naturalism in Philosophy, and Pantheism in Theology.