A CHEERING SIGN.
Very pleasant reading is a California item of court-proceedings going to show that a Mongol still stands within the pale of the law upon the soil of the Golden State. A wanton murder of some Chinese at Chico was judicially avenged by the sentencing of two of the Caucasian participants to twenty-five years' imprisonment, and of a third to the nicely-calculated, if not nicely-adjusted, term of twenty-seven years and a half. Had the unhappy victims been whites, or even blacks, the arithmetic of time would probably not have been drawn on, but summary recourse would have been made to such punishment as eternity could furnish. But we must not be too exacting. Let us be grateful that the criminal law has any shield, be it of the thinnest, for the Chinaman.
Very different is the case when the Celestial ox gores the Yankee bull. Indemnity, swift and condign, does what mortal hand can do to heal the hurt. A Chinese court, upon Chinese soil, is not allowed to try a Chinese for an injury done to the Christian stranger within Chinese gates. Treaties imposed by the strong arm reserve practical jurisdiction to our own representatives; and it is the peers of the alleged sufferer, not the peers of the accused, who virtually try the cause. Similar rules obtain in the other Mongolian empire. We all possess, as still quite a fresh sensation, a memory of the account published a few years since of the committing of harikari by a Japanese official of high social standing, at the bidding of a native court, in atonement of an affront offered to an American officer—how the representatives of the United States were formally invited, in full uniform, to witness the bloody self-immolation of the proud but to the law submissive Mongol; how everything went off en règle, from the theatrical preparation of the stage with seat, sword and red carpet to the climax of decapitation of the culprit by his body-servant; and how our representatives in gilt and blue filed out shocked, but vindicated, and satiated with more than the full measure of justice pressed down and running over.
Harikari has not begun, nor is it likely soon to begin, to thin the ranks of our Californian office-holders. Few die, none resign, and absolutely none are got rid of in that way. They have no treaty-courts to make them afraid. Their lives are their own, and we hope may always be. But we trust, also, that they will accord a like privilege to their neighbors from over the way, and cultivate the impression that life may be dear as well to a man with a lemon complexion, oblique eyes and a pig-tail. As an evidence of a dawning disposition to accept this view we may be permitted to hail with satisfaction the disappearance for twenty-seven years and six months of a Californian who declined adopting it.
E. C. B.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Peru. Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. By E. George Squier, late United States Commissioner to Peru. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Mr. Squier does not give us the date of his explorations in Peru, but he tells us that they occupied him two years, during which he "crossed and recrossed the Cordillera and the Andes from the Pacific to the Amazonian rivers, sleeping in rude Indian huts or on bleak punas in the open air, in hot valleys or among eternal snows, gathering with eager zeal all classes of facts relating to the country, its people, its present and its past." It must not be inferred from this description that he claims the honors of a pioneer or discoverer. Many previous travellers had pursued the same quest, encountered the same hardships and described the same objects. Few of them, however, had enjoyed the same advantages or possessed equal fitness for the task. His previous studies and investigations had familiarized him with the aboriginal history of America and with many of its existing relics; his appointment as commissioner of the United States to Peru for the settlement of some disputed claims gave him facilities which, as a foreigner, he might otherwise have lacked; and his equipments both for personal comfort and for scientific and artistic purposes seem to have been as complete as a single traveller could be expected to provide. The result is a work which, if not actually the ablest, is the most thorough and satisfactory, which the subject has yet called forth. It contrasts in all respects with the latest of its predecessors, Hutchinson's Two Years in Peru, a book of still greater size, but deficient in all the elements of critical and literary power, while replete with pretentiousness and dogmatism. In the narration of his journeys and adventures Mr. Squier is always entertaining; his account of the present condition of the country and the people is instructive, though somewhat meagre; his descriptions of ancient remains, if not always as vivid or even as clear as one might desire, are generally more careful and minute than any that have before been given of them, and are supplemented by admirable views and plans that add greatly to the value and attractiveness of the volume. Finally, while his knowledge and training have well qualified him to form independent judgments, he neither seeks to discredit all previous research nor to support any of the fantastic theories of which American antiquarianism has been so prolific. He was not open to the temptation that leads those who are first in the field to magnify its marvels, and he is equally free from that tendency to belittle them which betrays the desire of later explorers to display their own superior acumen. He makes no attempt to reconstruct the past by piecing together accumulated details and calling to his aid the imaginative faculty, which, in history and science as well as in art, gives form and life to its material. But his conclusions, if general in nature and limited in range, are such as commend themselves to all minds competent to grasp the problems presented and not led astray by prepossessions. He finds the existing relics in Peru substantiating in the main the accounts given by the Spanish writers of its condition at the time of the Conquest, and he finds that condition accordant with the early history of civilization under similar circumstances in other parts of the world. He does not think it necessary, therefore, either to account for the existence of those monuments with the ruins of which the soil is so thickly strewn by an immigration from India or Egypt, nor to reduce them to the proportions and character of the Pueblo remains in New Mexico, in order to prove that America, in contrast with the Eastern continent, has had but one original type of development, and that the lowest. On the contrary, he holds it certain that "the civilization of the ancient Peruvians was indigenous," and he considers it to have passed through several stages, and to have proceeded independently among different races and tribes, culminating at last in the organization of a national polity and a common rule. Under that rule he believes that "the material prosperity of the country was far in advance of what it is now. There were greater facilities of intercourse, a wider agriculture, more manufacture, less pauperism and vice, and—shall I say it?—a purer and more useful religion." With the ruins that throw light upon the "customs, modes of life, and political, social and domestic organization" of "the vanished empire of the Incas," are others that point to a wholly different state of society and an immeasurable antiquity. "Combined with the stupendous and elaborate remains of Tiahuanuco—remains as elaborate and admirable as those of Assyria, of Egypt, Greece or Rome—there are others that are almost exact counterparts of those of Stonehenge, and Carnac in Brittany, to which is assigned the remotest place in monumental history. The rude sun-circles of Sillustani, under the very shadow of some of the most elaborate, and architecturally the most wonderful, works of aboriginal America, are indistinguishable counterparts of the sun-circles of England, Denmark and Tartary." Such evidence, concurrent with that which abounds in more northern regions, points unmistakably to an early development on this continent, similar in character and course, and coeval or anterior in date, to that which has left like indications in so many parts of the Eastern hemisphere. There the records are more scattered and more varied, as from the size and conformation of the continents and the greater diversities of climate we might have expected them to be; and those at least of a later period are, from the nature of the case, more easy of interpretation in the light of legend, tradition and written history. But the general features are intelligible in all, and the revelation which they make is identical. They show the human mind, under like external conditions and with like internal conceptions, advancing on the same line from barbarism to culture; they show a struggle and rivalry of races and tribes, in which one or another shoots forward for a time, and is then outstripped or pushed aside; they show a gradual sifting, blending and consolidation, in which primitive and fortuitous forms of association are superseded by a system presenting the symmetry and composite character of an artificial structure. Everywhere the process is marked by the final predominance of two principles, which stimulate, direct and regulate all the efforts that are made toward artistic expression, industrial science and social organization. For the human mind at this stage all conceptions of Nature may be comprised under the name of religion, and all ideas of order and co-operation under that of monarchical rule. The monuments of this period that have sprung from the united labor of the community all attest the control and supervision of one or both of these powers. Not only do temples and palaces bear this stamp, but all public works of whatever nature testify, by the gigantic results in comparison with the deficient means, to such an authority in those who planned them and such a subordination in those by whom they were executed as cannot be conceived of either under the looser organizations of barbarism or the more equitable arrangements of modern life. The cyclopean walls, the imposing edifices, the subterranean aqueducts, the mountain terraces, of Peru tell the same tale as pyramids and temples, towers and palaces, in Egypt, Assyria or India. The critic who can find in the ruins at Gran Chimu and Pachacamac only "communal houses" inhabited by "groups of families" on the method of the Iroquois, in the vast isolated structures of Tiahuanuco the remains of "an Indian pueblo after the ordinary form," and in the enormous and elaborate fortifications of Cuzco and Ollantay-tambo the works of village communities and petty tribes, is not only bent on the support of a theory at whatever cost of truth and sense, but predetermined, one would say, to hold it as a monopoly. Compared with absurdities of this order, the wildest imaginings of M. Brasseur de Bourbourg are entitled to be ranked with the conjectures of a sane philosophy.
Mr. Squier, as we have seen, gives no countenance to baseless speculations, and the publication of his book has, it is evident, fallen on them as a heavy blow and great discouragement. The preciseness of his details gives a force and authority to both his statements and opinions which cannot easily be evaded or resisted even by those most given to substituting assumptions for evidence and facts. His descriptions of the stone-work of the ancient Peruvians are not likely to suggest to unsophisticated readers an identity of race and institutions with the inhabitants of wigwams. "The joints are all of a precision unknown in our architecture, and not rivalled in the remains of ancient art that had fallen under my notice in Europe. The statement of the old writers, that the accuracy with which the stones of some structures were fitted together was such that it was impossible to introduce the thinnest knife-blade or finest needle between them, may be taken as strictly true. The world has nothing to show in the way of stone-cutting and fitting to surpass the skill and accuracy displayed in the Indian structures of Cuzco. All modern work of the kind there—and there are some fine examples of skill—looks rude and barbarous in comparison." We may imagine the straits to which the advocates of Lo are driven when they point to the absence of mortar or cement of any kind in such walls as a proof of rudeness and ignorance in the builders. But, as Mr. Squier reminds us, Humboldt found a true mortar in the ruins of Pullal and Canuar, in Northern Peru. Humboldt found, too, in the same region the remains of paved roads not inferior to any Roman roads which he had seen in Italy, France or Spain; and though Mr. Squier states that few traces of such roads now exist in the southern part of the country, and infers that they never existed here, since "the modern pathways must follow the ancient lines," and "there is no reason why they should have suffered more from time and the elements in one part of the country than in another," it seems to us impossible to reject in so summary a fashion the testimony of early writers, given, not in mere general terms, but with a minuteness of description rivalling his own. Possibly, the explanation may be found partly in the fact that the roads in one part of the country were generally more ancient than in the other—many of them, as we know, dating from a period anterior to the Inca rule—and partly to the greater devastations wrought by the European conquerors and their descendants in the neighborhood of the capital and on the most frequented routes. In other particulars, such as the size of the Peruvian houses and the existence of windows, Mr. Squier finds the facts to have been understated by Humboldt. Generally, as we have already intimated, he finds full confirmation of the accounts of such writers as Cieza de Leon and Garcilasso de la Vega in those relics which still survive as the surest witnesses of the past, defying the tooth of time, the ravages of violence and the denials and assumptions of a crazy scepticism.
Camp, Court and Siege: A Narrative of Personal Adventure and Observation during Two Wars, 1861-65, 1870-71. By Wickham Hoffman. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Had the third of this book which is devoted to the writer's reminiscences of the late civil convulsion in his own country been omitted or reserved for expansion into a separate publication, the remainder would have had more unity and attractiveness. The latter is by far the more interesting portion. Expanded and fortified by details, references and documents, Major Hoffman's account of his experience as secretary of legation at Paris in the year of the siege might have filled—and may yet be made to fill—an important place among memoirs of its class. His narrative style is clear and pleasant, if never vivid or impressive. It harmonizes with the complexion of truth, and truth is the first thing we ask from the diarist and observer. Our confidence is won by his direct and unambitious way of telling what he saw and shared.
We should think it not improbable that the writer will adopt this course, and use more fully the material which must be at his command for illustrating, from an exceptionally favorable point of view, the fall of the Second Empire and the double fall of its capital. The American legation, under Mr. Washburne, was brought into close relations with the Empire, the Republic and the Commune by means of its delegated character as protector of North German subjects during the war. It was, for that period, much the most notable among the foreign embassies in France. While those of the principal European powers, as for most of the time the French government itself, left the capital, it, with the representatives of two or three minor states, remained at its post. Outside of the very onerous function assumed by it at the request of the German government, it had other great cares and great opportunities for good. These appear to have been encountered and used with remarkable tact and energy. Its display of those qualities has been gratefully acknowledged by its own people, those of Germany and many of the French. At the outbreak of the war thirty thousand Germans were established in Paris. Summary expulsion was decreed against these, and the American minister and his subordinates had the sole charge of applying the meagre funds sent by their own sovereign for mitigating the suffering due to that order. Some thousands, unable to leave or preferring to run all risks, remained throughout the war. This unhappy remnant constantly looked to the American ministry for aid to subsist and to escape violence. Mr. Hoffman ventures to place the banishment of the Germans, for acuteness if not mass of suffering, by the side of the ejection of the Huguenots and the Moors. This exaggeration serves at least to show the impression it made on an eye-witness.
Major Hoffman's remarks on the causes of the moral breakdown of the Empire and of the French army do not help us to much that is novel. He lays more than the usual stress on Ultramontanism as an influence. The death of the archbishop of Paris could have been prevented, he thinks, had the Versailles authorities acted with due promptness and determination; and he avers his belief that the liberalism of that prelate made his death not unacceptable to the Church party represented now by Eugénie and MacMahon. He ascribes fanaticism also to the savior of Paris that was to be—Trochu. Trochu's main hope, he believes, was miraculous interposition. His statement of the extent to which unreasoning panic had possession of both soldiers and citizens supports the idea that supernatural aid only could have saved the city.
The better, and really ruling, traits of the French people are not to be studied in their periods of "Gallic fury." Thus it is that the book before us is an unsafe guide on that point. Six years have rolled away since the revolt of the Commune, the loss of two rich provinces and the imposition of a tribute nearly half as large as the debt of the United States. The evidence given and the effective results shown of patience, perseverance, order, determined good faith, industry and self-control have no parallel in a like period of the history of any modern people.
The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants. By R. I. Dodge. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Here we are favored with a glance through another military lorgnette, but at a scene geographically, socially and politically the antipodes of Paris. Colonel Dodge leads us into the haunts of the original denizens of Western America, and depicts their traits with a hand made facile by long familiarity. At part of the aborigines—and that part obviously most attractive to and most assiduously studied by him—he bids us look through the sights of the rifle or along the dappled double-barrel. At the other he essays, with less success perhaps, to aid us with the eye of the amateur statesman and political economist. The wearers of fur and feather have no moral side. The Indian has. His condition and future are correspondingly complicated. How to shoot him is not the sole and simple question, as it is with his original compatriots except the buffalo. With the latter shaggy and multitudinous creature the fate of the Indian of the Plains is more or less linked. They move together, and may be said to die together. On a map of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi are traced two pairs of reservations. Of one the Yellowstone, and of the other the Arkansas, is the centre. Each pair is composed of a buffalo-range and a group of Indian tribes. The three lines of east-and-west railway separate them, and shoulder to right and left, north and south, the savage and his herds.
Of the enormous numbers of the wild cattle which were once the exclusive property of the Indian we have been accustomed to form but a very inadequate idea. They exceed those which have raised the Tartar into the comparatively high rank of a pastoral nomad. The patriarch or poet Job was a famous cattle-owner, but he was a small dairyman by the side of a Cheyenne or Rickaree chief, and a stampede of a small detachment of buffalo would have run down unnoticed the whole of his live-stock. In the three years 1872-74 four and a half millions of buffalo—considerably more than half as many as all the black cattle in the British Islands—were slaughtered. From this fact may be gathered an impression of the vast provision of human food until lately stored by Nature in a region still marked on modern geographies as a desert. Of the value of this endowment the Indian, with all his improvidence, had some notion. It was a resource he may be said to have husbanded. Of nothing like the wanton and shameful destruction dealt by the whites since the feeding-grounds were made accessible by rail was he ever guilty. He managed his hunts systematically, placed them under the rigid control of a sort of guild known as "dog-soldiers," and allowed to be slain only what were needed for his wants. The buffalo was to him what the cocoa-palm is to the Polynesian; and more, for he needed warm shelter and warm clothing. He cared for it accordingly. It grew around him almost as the cocoa-grove around the hut of the islander. A herd will even now graze quietly for days in the neighborhood of an Indian village of a thousand souls, while an encampment of half a dozen whites disperses it instantly. The whites kill only for the hides, two of which they lose for every one saved in merchantable condition. A very small proportion of the flesh is utilized when the railway happens to be near enough, and within a like limit of territory the bones are collected. In the single year 1874 over ten millions of tons of these were sent East to fertilize the exhausted fields of the Atlantic slope with the refuse riches of the "desert."
No treaties are made with the buffalo. He is swindled by no agents, post-traders or secretaries at war. He addresses no pathetic remonstrances to his Great Father, and expresses no sense of his wrongs by taking scalps or inflicting worse horrors still. School-houses, temperance societies, small-pox and whiskey are not for him. Yet does he move toward annihilation, as we have said, in singularly close lock-step with the Indian. His problem, like the other, is being settled by the settler. Were the red man edible, the parallelism in destiny would be more complete. As it is, the quadruped will disappear before the biped native. Individuals of the latter will be absorbed into the bosom of civilization, as the remnants of the Senecas, the Oneidas and the Pamunkeys have long since been. As a race, the Indians' best hope is euthanasia. Even that is desperately uncertain. The Cherokees, Creeks and Choctaws, with their minor associates in the Indian Territory, are, though not increasing in numbers, living in peace and something like industry. Yet they are at the mercy of any vagabond who should take it into his head to "salt" with gold-dust or silver-ore any ravine in the midst of their country. No law and no army would avail to repel the rush. They would go the way of the Sioux of the Black Hills, and would have only the choice of drifting out of existence on the outskirts of white society or of being washed high and dry over the frontier. Where are the sixty thousand Indians who at the time of the transfer of California were so comfortably coddled under the wing of the missions? They have been the victims of no recorded war, and the agents never had a chance at them. They have gone, however, with a rapidity unexampled anywhere east of the mountains.
Solutions of the Indian problem are endless, and the writer of the book named at the head of these paragraphs has his shy at it. His plan is new chiefly in blaming all round—traders, Quakers, Indians, government and frontiersmen. If we can venture to centralize his invective, we should lay it specially on the heads of the class the Indians term "squaw-men"—the whites who have Indian wives and are established among the lodges. Of these he gives us a conjectural census—a hundred agencies and reservations and ten squaw-men to each. From this thousand are drawn all the interpreters; and not a solitary interpreter, Colonel Dodge insists, can be relied upon. They are, every man of them, in league with the agents and traders against the government and the Indians. The two last named—parties of the first part, as we should style them—never come together and never understand each other. The colonel's cure is remitting the whole thing to army control. But that, we need not say, has been tried, with results by no means brilliant.
For those who have never even seen an annuity distributed to aggravate the muddle with their suggestions would be most presumptuous. It is as little as we can do to abstain. We may venture here only to say a word in mitigation of the deep stain left upon the fair fame of the United States by its management of Indian affairs. The contrast so frequently drawn with the course of things in Canada is not wholly just. It was the French who saved the Canadian Indians from the mere sordid extinction which has befallen most of their southern congeners, as it was the Spaniards who kept the California tribes alive. The natives—or rather the French half-breeds—were made trappers and voyageurs before the English conquest of the province. But for that preparation they might have gone the way of our Indians under Anglo-Saxon pressure. Climate also favored them. Only an infinitesimal fraction of British America is capable of white colonization.
Dropping a theme which bids fair to remain undisposed of, like the disputes of Hogarth's doctors, till the patient is dead, we revert to Colonel Dodge's book, and to those of its pages which it is clear he wrote most en amateur. Soldier and student, he is above all a sportsman. It is delightful to follow him over the plain and (in spirit and untearable trousers) into the chaparral. Anywhere between the Rio Grande, the Missouri and Bridger's Pass he seems to be as much at home as on his own farm. All its live-stock is familiar to him. His sheep are of the big-horn breed; his black cattle, the two varieties of buffalo, mountain and lowland; and his poultry, the prairie-chicken and its relatives. He is both interesting and instructive. The puma and the panther he avers to be distinct species. The prong-horned antelope—the only American species, and now, we believe, assigned by naturalists to a genus of its own—he demonstrates to shed its horns. He describes six species of native grouse; to which if we add two others not found within the limits he describes, we have eight for the United States against two in Great Britain and four for all Europe. His stories of sport and adventure are given with circumstance and animation. Extra spice is thrown in by a moderate infusion of second-hand relations of a more or less imaginative character, which he is careful to separate from the fruit of his own experience and observation. The physical conformation of the country and its climate are described with remarkable distinctness. We do not know a book on the subject that comes up more faithfully to its title.
Books Received.
The Struggle against Absolute Monarchy, 1603-1688: Epochs of English History. By Bertha Meriton Cordery. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
The Tudors and the Reformation, 1485-1603: Epochs of English History. By M. Creighton, M.A. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping. Compiled from Original Recipes. Marysville, Ohio: Buckeye Publishing Co.
University Life in Ancient Athens. By W. W. Capes, M.A. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
The Children of Light. By Rev. William W. Faris. (The Fletcher Prize Essay, 1877.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Reconciliation of Science and Religion. By Alexander Mitchell, LL.D. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Syrian Sunshine. By T. G. Appleton. (Town-and-Country Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The Anonymous Hypothesis of Creation. By James J. Furniss. New York: Charles P. Somerby.
Personal Immortality, and other Papers. By John Oppenheim. New York: Charles P. Somerby.
Harry. By the Author of "Mrs. Jerningham's Journal." New York: MacMillan & Co.
Birds and Poets, with other Papers. By John Burroughs. New York: Hurd & Houghton.
Atlas Essays. Number 2, Biographical and Critical. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.
In the Camargue. By Emily Bowles. (Loring's Tales of the Day.) Boston: Loring.
Eugénie. By B. M. Butt. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Mar's White Witch: A Novel. By G. Douglas. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Table Talk. By A. Bronson Alcott. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Transcriber's Notes
Page [177] dun-colered replaced with dun-colored.
Pages [158-165] Della Scala, Delle Scale, Delle Scala and Della Scale all retained.
Page [189] Eitzgerald corrected to Fitzgerald.