An old master, and other political essays

by Woodrow Wilson

IV.

It is thus that we are brought to our fourth and last point. We have noted (1) the general forces of democracy which have been sapping old forms of government in all parts of the world; (2) the error of supposing ourselves indebted to those forces for the creation of our government, or in any way connected with them in our origins; and (3) the effect they have nevertheless had upon us as parts of the general influences of the age, as well as by reason of our vast immigration from Europe. What, now, are the new problems which have been prepared for our solution by reason of our growth and of the effects of immigration? They may require as much political capacity for their proper solution as any that confronted the architects of our government.

These problems are chiefly problems of organization and leadership. Were the nation homogeneous, were it composed simply of later generations of the same stock by which our institutions were planted, few adjustments of the old machinery of our politics would, perhaps, be necessary to meet the exigencies of growth. But every added element of variety, particularly every added element of foreign variety, complicates even the simpler questions of politics. The dangers attending that variety which is heterogeneity in so vast an organism as ours are, of course, the dangers of disintegration—nothing less; and it is unwise to think these dangers remote and merely contingent because they are not as yet very menacing. We are conscious of oneness as a nation, of vitality, of strength, of progress; but are we often conscious of common thought in the concrete things of national policy? Does not our legislation wear the features of a vast conglomerate? Are we conscious of any national leadership? Are we not, rather, dimly aware of being pulled in a score of directions by a score of crossing influences, a multitude of contending forces?

This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led; its giant faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can groups of communities. We speak of the sovereignty of the people, but that sovereignty, we know very well, is of a peculiar sort; quite unlike the sovereignty of a king or of a small, easily concerting group of confident men. It is judicial merely, not creative. It passes judgment or gives sanction, but it cannot direct or suggest. It furnishes standards, not policies. Questions of government are infinitely complex questions, and no multitude can of themselves form clear-cut, comprehensive, consistent conclusions touching them. Yet without such conclusions, without single and prompt purposes, government cannot be carried on. Neither legislation nor administration can be done at the ballot box. The people can only accept the governing act of representatives. But the size of the modern democracy necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the shaping of popular judgments in a very different way from that in which it was exercised in former times. “It is said by eminent censors of the press,” said Mr. Bright on one occasion in the House of Commons, “that this debate will yield about thirty hours of talk, and will end in no result. I have observed that all great questions in this country require thirty hours of talk many times repeated before they are settled. There is much shower and much sunshine between the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the harvest, but the harvest is generally reaped after all.” So it must be in all self-governing nations of to-day. They are not a single audience within sound of an orator’s voice, but a thousand audiences. Their actions do not spring from a single thrill of feeling, but from slow conclusions following upon much talk. The talk must gradually percolate through the whole mass. It cannot be sent straight through them so that they are electrified as the pulse is stirred by the call of a trumpet. A score of platforms in every neighborhood must ring with the insistent voice of controversy; and for a few hundreds who hear what is said by the public speakers, many thousands must read of the matter in the newspapers, discuss it interjectionally at the breakfast-table, desultorily in the street-cars, laconically on the streets, dogmatically at dinner; all this with a certain advantage, of course. Through so many stages of consideration passion cannot possibly hold out. It gets chilled by over-exposure. It finds the modern popular state organized for giving and hearing counsel in such a way that those who give it must be careful that it is such counsel as will wear well. Those who hear it handle and examine it enough to test its wearing qualities to the utmost. All this, however, when looked at from another point of view, but illustrates an infinite difficulty of achieving energy and organization. There is a certain peril almost of disintegration attending such phenomena.

Every one now knows familiarly enough how we accomplished the wide aggregations of self-government characteristic of the modern time, how we have articulated governments as vast and yet as whole as continents like our own. The instrumentality has been representation, of which the ancient world knew nothing, and lacking which it always lacked national integration. Because of representation and the railroads to carry representatives to distant capitals, we have been able to rear colossal structures like the government of the United States as easily as the ancients gave political organization to a city; and our great building is as stout as was their little one.

But not until recently have we been able to see the full effects of thus sending men to legislate for us at capitals distant the breadth of a continent. It makes the leaders of our politics, many of them, mere names to our consciousness instead of real persons whom we have seen and heard, and whom we know. We have to accept rumors concerning them, we have to know them through the variously colored accounts of others; we can seldom test our impressions of their sincerity by standing with them face to face. Here certainly the ancient pocket republics had much the advantage of us: in them citizens and leaders were always neighbors; they stood constantly in each other’s presence. Every Athenian knew Themistocles’s manner, and gait, and address, and felt directly the just influence of Aristides. No Athenian of a later period needed to be told of the vanities and fopperies of Alcibiades, any more than the elder generation needed to have described to them the personality of Pericles.

Our separation from our leaders is the greater peril, because democratic government more than any other needs organization in order to escape disintegration; and it can have organization only by full knowledge of its leaders and full confidence in them. Just because it is a vast body to be persuaded, it must know its persuaders; in order to be effective, it must always have choice of men who are impersonated policies. Just because none but the finest mental batteries, with pure metals and unadulterated acids, can send a current through so huge and yet so rare a medium as democratic opinion, it is the more necessary to look to the excellence of these instrumentalities. There is no permanent place in democratic leadership except for him who “hath clean hands and a pure heart.” If other men come temporarily into power among us, it is because we cut our leadership up into so many small parts, and do not subject any one man to the purifying influences of centred responsibility. Never before was consistent leadership so necessary; never before was it necessary to concert measures over areas so vast, to adjust laws to so many interests, to make a compact and intelligible unit out of so many fractions, to maintain a central and dominant force where there are so many forces.

It is a noteworthy fact that the admiration for our institutions which has during the past few years so suddenly grown to large proportions among publicists abroad is almost all of it directed to the restraints we have effected upon the action of government. Sir Henry Maine thought our federal Constitution an admirable reservoir, in which the mighty waters of democracy are held at rest, kept back from free destructive course. Lord Rosebery has wondering praise for the security of our Senate against usurpation of its functions by the House of Representatives. Mr. Goldwin Smith supposes the saving act of organization for a democracy to be the drafting and adoption of a written constitution. Thus it is always the static, never the dynamic, forces of our government which are praised. The greater part of our foreign admirers find our success to consist in the achievement of stable safeguards against hasty or retrogressive action; we are asked to believe that we have succeeded because we have taken Sir Archibald Alison’s advice, and have resisted the infection of revolution by staying quite still.

But, after all, progress is motion, government is action. The waters of democracy are useless in their reservoirs unless they may be used to drive the wheels of policy and administration. Though we be the most law-abiding and law-directed nation in the world, law has not yet attained to such efficacy among us as to frame, or adjust, or administer itself. It may restrain, but it cannot lead us; and I believe that unless we concentrate legislative leadership—leadership, that is, in progressive policy—unless we give leave to our nationality and practice to it by such concentration, we shall sooner or later suffer something like national paralysis in the face of emergencies. We have no one in Congress who stands for the nation. Each man stands but for his part of the nation; and so management and combination, which may be effected in the dark, are given the place that should be held by centred and responsible leadership, which would of necessity work in the focus of the national gaze.

What is the valuable element in monarchy which causes men constantly to turn to it as to an ideal form of government, could it but be kept pure and wise? It is its cohesion, its readiness and power to act, its abounding loyalty to certain concrete things, to certain visible persons, its concerted organization, its perfect model of progressive order. Democracy abounds with vitality; but how shall it combine with its other elements of life and strength this power of the governments that know their own minds and their own aims? We have not yet reached the age when government may be made impersonal.

The only way in which we can preserve our nationality in its integrity and its old-time originative force in the face of growth and imported change is by concentrating it; by putting leaders forward, vested with abundant authority in the conception and execution of policy. There is plenty of the old vitality in our national character to tell, if we will but give it leave. Give it leave, and it will the more impress and mould those who come to us from abroad. I believe that we have not made enough of leadership.

“A people is but the attempt of many

To rise to the completer life of one;

And those who live as models for the mass

Are singly of more value than they all.”

We shall not again have a true national life until we compact it by such legislative leadership as other nations have. But once thus compacted and embodied, our nationality is safe. An acute English historical scholar has said that “the Americans of the United States are a nation because they once obeyed a king;” we shall remain a nation only by obeying leaders.

“Keep but the model safe,

New men will rise to study it.”

V
GOVERNMENT UNDER THE CONSTITUTION

It is by no means wholly to our advantage that our constitutional law is contained in definitive written documents. The fact that it is thus formulated and rendered fixed and definite has seriously misled us, it is to be feared, as to the true function and efficacy of constitutional law. That law is not made more valid by being written, but only more explicit; it is not rendered more sacred, but only more definite and secure. Written constitutions are simply more or less successful generalizations of political experience. Their tone of authority does not at all alter the historical realities and imperative practical conditions of government. They determine forms, utter distinct purposes, set the powers of the State in definite hierarchy; but they do not make the forms they originate workable, or the purposes they utter feasible. All that must depend upon the men who become governors and upon the people over whom they are set in authority. Laws can have no other life than that which is given them by the men who administer and the men who obey them. Constitutional law affords no exception to the rule. The Constitution of the United States, happily, was framed by exceptional men thoroughly schooled in the realities of government. It consists, accordingly, not of principles newly invented, to be put into operation by means of devices originated for the occasion, but of sound pieces of tested experience. It has served its purpose beneficently, not because it was written, but because it has proved itself accordant in every essential part with tried principles of government—principles tested by the race for whose use it was intended, and therefore already embedded in their lives and practices. Its strength will be found, upon analysis, to lie in its definiteness and in its power to restrain rather than in any unusual excellence of its energetic parts. For the right operation of these it has had to depend, like other constitutions, upon the virtue and discretion of the people and their ministers. “The public powers are carefully defined; the mode in which they are to be exercised is fixed; and the amplest securities are taken that none of the more important constitutional arrangements shall be altered without every guarantee of caution and every opportunity for deliberation.... It would seem that, by a wise constitution, democracy may be made nearly as calm as water in a great artificial reservoir.”[D]

[D] Sir Henry Maine: Popular Government (Am. ed.), pp. 110, 111.

We possess, therefore, not a more suitable constitution than other countries, but a constitution which is perfectly definite and which is preserved by very formidable difficulties of amendment against inconsiderate change. The difference between our own case and that of Great Britain upon which we have most reason to congratulate ourselves is that here public opinion has definite criteria for its conservatism; whereas in England it has only shifting and uncertain precedent. In both countries there is the same respect for law. But there is not in England the same certainty as to what the law of the constitution is. We have a fundamental law which is written, and which in its main points is read by all alike in a single accepted sense. There is no more quarrel about its main intent than there is in England about the meaning of Magna Charta. Much of the British constitution, on the contrary, has not the support of even a common statute. It may, in respect of many vital parts of it, be interpreted or understood in half a dozen different ways, and amended by the prevalent understanding. We are not more free than the English; we are only more secure.

The definiteness of our Constitution, nevertheless, apart from its outline of structural arrangements and of the division of functions among the several departments of the government, is negative rather than affirmative. Its very enumeration of the powers of Congress is but a means of indicating very plainly what Congress can not do. It is significant that one of the most important and most highly esteemed of the many legal commentaries on our government should be entitled ‘Constitutional Limitations.’ In expounding the restrictions imposed by fundamental law upon state and federal action, Judge Cooley is allowed to have laid bare the most essential parts of our constitutional system. It was a prime necessity in so complex a structure that bounds should be set to authority. The ‘may-nots’ and the ‘shall-nots’ of our constitutions, consequently, give them their distinctive form and character. The strength which preserves the system is the strength of self-restraint.

And yet here again it must be understood that mere definiteness of legal provision has no saving efficacy of its own. These distinct lines run between power and power will not of their own virtue maintain themselves. It is not in having such a constitution but in obeying it that our advantage lies. The vitality of such provisions consists wholly in the fact that they receive our acquiescence. They rest upon the legal conscience, upon what Mr. Grote would have called the ‘constitutional morality,’ of our race. They are efficient because we are above all things law-abiding. The prohibitions of the law do not assert themselves as taskmasters set over us by some external power. They are of our own devising. We are self-restrained.

This legal conscience manifestly constitutes the only guarantee, for example, of the division of powers between the state and federal governments, that chief arrangement of our constitutional system. The integrity of the powers possessed by the States has from the first depended solely upon the conservatism of the federal courts. State functions have certainly not decayed; but they have been preserved, not by virtue of any forces of self-defence of their own, but because the national government has been vouchsafed the grace of self-restraint. What curtailment their province might suffer has been illustrated in several notable cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States has confirmed to the general government extensive powers of punishing state judicial and executive officers for disobedience to state laws. Although the federal courts have generally held Congress back from aggressions upon the States, they have nevertheless once and again countenanced serious encroachments upon state powers; and their occasional laxity of principle on such points is sufficiently significant of the fact that there is no balance between the state and federal governments, but only the safeguard of a customary ‘constitutional morality’ on the part of the federal courts. The actual encroachments upon state rights which those courts have permitted, under the pressure of strong political interests at critical periods, were not, however, needed to prove the potential supremacy of the federal government. They only showed how that potential supremacy would on occasion become actual supremacy. There is no guarantee but that of conscience that justice will be accorded a suitor when his adversary is both court and opposing litigant. So strong is the instinct of those who administer our governments to keep within the sanction of the law, that even when the last three amendments to the Constitution were being forced upon the southern states by means which were revolutionary the outward forms of the Constitution were observed. It was none the less obvious, however, with what sovereign impunity the national government might act in stripping those forms of their genuineness. As there are times of sorrow or of peril which try men’s souls and lay bare the inner secrets of their characters, so there are times of revolution which act as fire in burning away all but the basic elements of constitutions. It is then, too, that dormant powers awake which are not afterward readily lulled to sleep again.

Such was certainly the effect of the civil war upon the Constitution of the Union. The implying of powers, once cautious, is now become bold and confident. In the discussions now going forward with reference to federal regulation of great corporations, and with reference to federal aid to education, there are scores of writers and speakers who tacitly assume the power of the federal government to act in such matters, for one that urges a constitutional objection. Constitutional objections, before the war habitual, have, it would seem, permanently lost their prominence.

The whole energy of origination under our system rests with Congress. It stands at the front of all government among us; it is the single affirmative voice in national policy. First or last, it determines what is to be done. The President, indeed, appoints officers and negotiates treaties, but he does so subject to the ‘yes’ of the Senate. Congress organizes the executive departments, organizes the army, organizes the navy. It audits, approves, and pays expenses. It conceives and directs all comprehensive policy. All else is negation. The President says ‘no’ in his vetoes; the Supreme Court says ‘no’ in its restraining decisions. And it is as much the law of public opinion as the law of the Constitution that restrains the action of Congress.

It is the habit both of English and American writers to speak of the constitution of Great Britain as if it were ‘writ in water,’ because nothing but the will of Parliament stands between it and revolutionary change. But is there nothing back of the will of Parliament? Parliament dare not go faster than the public thought. There are vast barriers of conservative public opinion to be overrun before a ruinous speed in revolutionary change can be attained. In the last analysis, our own Constitution has no better safeguard. We have, as I have already pointed out, the salient advantage of knowing just what the standards of our Constitution are. They are formulated in a written code, wherein all men may look and read; whereas many of the designs of the British system are to be sought only in a cloud-land of varying individual readings of affairs. From the constitutional student’s point of view, there are, for instance, as many different Houses of Lords as there are writers upon the historical functions of that upper chamber. But the public opinion of Great Britain is no more a juggler of precedents than is the public opinion of this country. Perhaps the absence of a written constitution makes it even less a fancier of logical refinements. The arrangements of the British constitution have, for all their theoretical instability, a very firm and definite standing in the political habit of Englishmen: and the greatest of those arrangements can be done away with only by the extraordinary force of conscious revolution.

It is wholesome to observe how much of our own institutions rests upon the same basis, upon no other foundations than those that are laid in the opinions of the people. It is within the undoubted constitutional power of Congress, for example, to overwhelm the opposition of the Supreme Court upon any question by increasing the number of justices and refusing to confirm any appointments to the new places which do not promise to change the opinion of the court. Once, at least, it was believed that a plan of this sort had been carried deliberately into effect. But we do not think of such a violation of the spirit of the Constitution as possible, simply because we share and contribute to that public opinion which makes such outrages upon constitutional morality impossible by standing ready to curse them. There is a close analogy between this virtual inviolability of the Supreme Court and the integrity hitherto vouchsafed to the English House of Lords. There may be an indefinite creation of peers at any time that a strong ministry chooses to give the sovereign its imperative advice in favor of such a course. It was, doubtless, fear of the final impression that would be made upon public opinion by action so extraordinary, as much as the timely yielding of the Lords upon the question at issue, that held the ministry back from such a measure, on one notable occasion. Hitherto that ancient upper chamber has had in this regard the same protection that shields our federal judiciary.

It is not essentially a different case as between Congress and the Executive. Here, too, at the very centre of the Constitution, Congress stands almost supreme, restrained by public opinion rather than by law. What with the covetous admiration of the presidency recently manifested by some alarmed theorists in England, and the renewed prestige lately given that office by the prominence of the question of civil service reform, it is just now particularly difficult to apply political facts to an analysis of the President’s power. But a clear conception of his real position is for that very reason all the more desirable. While he is a dominant figure in politics would seem to be the best time to scrutinize and understand him.

It is clearly misleading to use the ascendant influence of the President in effecting the objects of civil service reform as an illustration of the constitutional size and weight of his office. The principal part in making administration pure, business-like, and efficient must always, under any conceivable system of government, be taken by the executive. It was certainly taken by the executive in England thirty years ago; and that much in opposition to the will of Parliament. The prominence of our President in administrative reform furnishes no sufficient ground for attributing a singularity of executive influence to the government of this country.

In estimating the actual powers of the President it is no doubt best to begin, as almost all writers in England and America now habitually begin, with a comparison between the executives of the two kindred countries. Whilst Mr. Bagehot has done more than any other thinker to clear up the facts of English constitutional practice, he has also, there is reason to believe, done something toward obscuring those facts. Everybody, for instance, has accepted as wholly true his description of the ministry of the Crown as merely an executive committee of the House of Commons; and yet that description is only partially true. An English cabinet represents, not the Commons only, but also the Crown. Indeed, it is itself ‘the Crown.’ All executive prerogatives are prerogatives which it is within the discretion of the cabinet itself to make free use of. The fact that it is generally the disposition of ministers to defer to the opinion of Parliament in the use of the prerogative, does not make that use the less a privilege strictly beyond the sphere of direct parliamentary control, to be exercised independently of its sanction, even secretly on occasion, when ministers see their way clear to serving the state thereby. “The ministry of the day,” says a perspicacious expounder of the English system,[E] “appears in Parliament, on the one hand, as personating the Crown in the legitimate exercise of its recognized prerogatives; and on the other hand, as the mere agent of Parliament itself, in the discharge of the executive and administrative functions of government cast upon them by law.” Within the province of the prerogative “lie the stirring topics of foreign negotiations, the management of the army and navy, public finance, and, in some important respects, colonial administration.” Very recent English history furnishes abundant and striking evidence of the vitality of the prerogative in these fields in the hands of the gentlemen who “personate the Crown” in Parliament. “No subject has been more eagerly discussed of late,” declares Mr. Amos (page 187), “than that of the province of Parliament in respect of the making of treaties and the declaration of war. No prerogative of the Crown is more undisputed than that of taking the initiative in all negotiations with foreign governments, conducting them throughout, and finally completing them by the signature and ratification of a treaty.... It is a bare fact that during the progress of the British diplomatic movements which terminated in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, or more properly in the Afghan war of that year,”—including the secret treaty by which Turkey ceded Cyprus to England, and England assumed the protectorate of Asia Minor,—“Parliament never had an opportunity of expressing its mind on any one of the important and complicated engagements to which the country was being committed, or upon the policy of the war upon the northwest frontier of India. The subjects were, indeed, over and over again discussed in Parliament, but always subsequent to irreparable action having been taken by the government” (page 188). Had Mr. Amos lived to take his narrative of constitutional affairs beyond 1880, he would have had equally significant instances of ministerial initiative to adduce in the cases of Egypt and Burmah.

[E] Mr. Sheldon Amos: Fifty Years of the English Constitution, page 338.

The unfortunate campaign in the Soudan was the direct outcome of the purchase of the Suez Canal shares by the British government in 1875. The result of that purchase was that “England became pledged in a wholly new and peculiar way to the support of the existing Turkish and Egyptian dominion in Egypt; that large English political interests were rendered subservient to the decisions of local tribunals in a foreign country; and that English diplomatic and political action in Egypt, and indeed in Europe, was trammelled, or at least indirectly influenced, by a narrow commercial interest which could not but weigh, however slightly, upon the apparent purity and simplicity of the motives of the English government.” And yet the binding engagements which involved all this were entered into “despite the absence of all assistance from, or consent of, Parliament.”[F] Such exercises of the prerogatives of the Crown receive additional weight from “the almost recognized right of evolving an army of almost any size from the Indian seed-plot, of using reserve forces without communication to Parliament in advance, and of obtaining large votes of credit for prospective military operations of an indefinite character, the nature of which Parliament is allowed only dimly to surmise” (page 392). The latest evidence of the “almost recognized” character of such rights was the war preparations made by England against Russia in 1885. If to such powers of committing the country irrevocably to far-reaching foreign policies, of inviting or precipitating war, and of using Indian troops without embarrassment from the trammels of the Mutiny Act, there be added the great discretionary functions involved in the administration of colonial affairs, some measure may be obtained of the power wielded by ministers, not as the mere agents of Parliament, but as personating the Crown. Such is in England the independence of action possible to the executive.

[F] Amos, page 384.

As compared with this, the power of the President is insignificant. Of course, as everybody says, he is more powerful than the sovereign of Great Britain. If relative personal power were the principle of etiquette, Mr. Cleveland would certainly not have to lift his hat to the Queen, because the Queen is not the English executive. The prerogatives of the Crown are still much greater than the prerogatives of the presidency; they are exercised, however, not by the wearer of the crown, but by the ministry of the Crown.

As Sir Henry Maine rightly says, the framers of our Constitution, consciously or unconsciously, made the President’s office like the King’s office under the English constitution of their time,—the constitution, namely, of George III., who chose his advisers with or without the assent of Parliament. They took care, however, to pare down the model where it seemed out of measure with the exercise of the people’s liberty. They allowed the President to choose his ministers freely, as George then seemed to have established his right to do; but they made the confirmation of the Senate a necessary condition to his appointments. They vested in him the right of negotiating treaties with foreign governments; but he was not to sign and ratify treaties until he had obtained the sanction of the Senate. That oversight of executive action which Parliament had not yet had the spirit or the inclination to exert, and which it had forfeited its independence by not exerting, was forever secured to our federal upper chamber by the fundamental law. The conditions of mutual confidence and co-operation between executive and legislature now existing in England had not then been developed, and consequently could not be reproduced in this country. The posture and disposition of mutual wariness which were found existing there were made constitutional here by express written provision. In short, the transitional relations of the Crown and Parliament of that day were crystallized in our Constitution, such guarantees of executive good faith and legislative participation in the weightier determinations of government as were lacking in the model being sedulously added in the copy.

The really subordinate position of the presidency is hidden from view partly by that dignity which is imparted to the office by its conspicuous place at the front of a great government, and its security and definiteness of tenure; partly by the independence apparently secured to it by its erection into an entirely distinct and separate ‘branch’ of the government; and partly by those circumstances of our history which have thrust our Presidents forward, during one or two notable periods, as real originators of policy and leaders in affairs. The President has never been powerful, however, except at such times as he has had Congress at his back. While the new government was a-making—and principally because it was a-making—Washington and his secretaries were looked to by Congress for guidance; and during the presidencies of several of Washington’s immediate successors the continued prominence of questions of foreign policy and of financial management kept the officers of the government in a position of semi-leadership. Jackson was masterful with or without right. He entered upon his presidency as he entered upon his campaign in Florida, without asking too curiously for constitutional warrant for what he was to undertake. In the settlement of the southern question Congress went for a time on all-fours with the President. He was powerful because Congress was acquiescent.

But such cases prove rather the usefulness than the strength of the presidency. Congress has, at several very grave crises in national affairs, been seasonably supplied with an energetic leader or agent in the person of the President. At other times, when Congress was in earnest in pushing views not shared by the President, our executives have either been overwhelmed, as Johnson was, or have had to decline upon much humbler services. Their negotiations with foreign governments are as likely to be disapproved as approved; their budgets are cut down like a younger son’s portion; their appointments are censured and their administrations criticised without chance for a counter-hearing. They create nothing. Their veto is neither revisory nor corrective. It is merely obstructive. It is, as I have said, a simple blunt negation, oftentimes necessarily spoken without discrimination against a good bill because of a single bad clause in it. In such a contest between origination and negation origination must always win, or government must stand still.

In England the veto of the Crown has not passed out of use, as is commonly said. It has simply changed its form. It does not exist as an imperative, obstructive ‘No,’ uttered by the sovereign. It has passed over into the privilege of the ministers to throw their party weight, reinforced by their power to dissolve Parliament, against measures of which they disapprove. It is a much-tempered instrument, but for that reason all the more flexible and useful. The old, blunt, antagonistic veto is no longer needed. It is needed here, however, to preserve the presidency from the insignificance of merely administrative functions. Since executive and legislature cannot come into relations of mutual confidence and co-operation, the former must be put in a position to maintain a creditable competition for consideration and dignity.

A clear-headed, methodical, unimaginative President like Mr. Cleveland unaffectedly recognizes the fact that all creating, originating power rests with Congress, and that he can do no more than direct the details of such projects as he finds commended by its legislation. The suggestions of his message he acknowledges to be merely suggestions, which must depend upon public opinion for their weight. If Congress does not regard them, it must reckon with the people, not with him. It is his duty to tell Congress what he thinks concerning the pending questions of the day; it is not his duty to assume any responsibility for the effect produced on Congressmen.

The English have transformed their Crown into a Ministry, and in doing so have recognized both the supremacy of Parliament and the rôle of leadership in legislation properly belonging to a responsible executive. The result has been that they have kept a strong executive without abating either the power or the independence of the representative chamber in respect of its legislative function. We, on the contrary, have left our executive separate, as the Constitution made it; chiefly, it is to be suspected, because the explicit and confident gifts of function contained in that positive instrument have blinded us by their very positiveness to the real subordination of the executive resulting from such a separation. We have supposed that our President was great because his powers were specific, and that our Congress was not supreme because it could not lay its hands directly upon his office and turn him out. In fact, neither the dignity and power of the executive nor the importance of Congress is served by the arrangement. Being held off from authoritative suggestion in legislation, the President becomes, under ordinary circumstances, merely a ministerial officer; whilst Congress, on its part, deprived of such leadership, becomes a legislative mass meeting instead of a responsible co-operating member of a well-organized government. Being under the spell of the Constitution, we have been unable to see the facts which written documents can neither establish nor change.

Singularly enough, there is sharp opposition to the introduction into Congress of any such leadership on the part of the executive as the Ministers of the Crown enjoy in Parliament, on the ground of the increase of power which would accrue as a result to the legislature. It is said that such a change would, by centring party and personal responsibility in Congress, give too great a prominence to legislation; would make Congress the object of too excited an interest on the part of the people. Legislation in Parliament, instead of being piecemeal, tessellated work, such as is made up in Congress of the various fragments contributed by the standing committees, is, under each ministry, a continuous, consistent, coherent whole; and, instead of bearing the sanction of both national parties, is the peculiar policy of only one of them. It is thought that, if such coherence of plan, definiteness and continuity of aim, and sanction of party were to be given the work of Congress, the resulting concentration of popular interest and opinion would carry Congress over all the barriers of the Constitution to an undisputed throne of illimitable power. In short, the potential supremacy of Congress is thought to be kept within bounds, not by the constitutional power of the executive and the judiciary, its co-ordinate branches, but by the intrinsic dulness and confusion of its own proceedings. It cannot make itself interesting enough to be great.

But this is a two-edged argument, which one must needs handle with great caution. It is evidently calculated to destroy every argument constructed on the assumption that it is written laws which are effective to the salvation of our constitutional arrangements; for it is itself constructed on the opposite assumption, that it is the state of popular interest in the nation which balances the forces of the government. It would, too, serve with equal efficacy against any scheme whatever for reforming the present methods of legislation in Congress, with which almost everybody is dissatisfied. Any reform which should tend to give to national legislation that uniform, open, intelligent, and responsible character which it now lacks, would also create that popular interest in the proceedings of Congress which, it is said, would unhinge the Constitution. Democracy is so delicate a form of government that it must break down if given too great facility or efficacy of operation. No one body of men must be suffered to utter the voice of the people, lest that voice become, through it, directly supreme.

The fact of the overtopping power of Congress, however, remains. The houses create all governmental policy, with that wide latitude of ‘political discretion’ in the choice of means which the Supreme Court unstintingly accords them. Congress has often come into conflict with the Supreme Court by attempting to extend the province of the federal government as against the States; but it has seldom, I believe, been brought effectually to book for any alleged exercise of powers as against its directly competing branch, the executive. Having by constitutional grant the last word as to foreign relations, the control of the finances, and even the oversight of executive appointments, Congress exercises what powers of direction and management it pleases, as fulfilling, not as straining, the Constitution. Government lives in the origination, not in the defeat, of measures of government. The President obstructs by means of his ‘No;’ the houses govern by means of their ‘Yes.’ He has killed some policies that are dead; they have given birth to all policies that are alive.

But the measures born in Congress have no common lineage. They have not even a traceable kinship. They are fathered by a score or two of unrelated standing committees: and Congress stands godfather to them all, without discrimination. Congress, in effect, parcels out its great powers amongst groups of its members, and so confuses its plans and obscures all responsibility. It is a leading complaint of Sir Henry Maine’s against the system in England, which is just under his nose, that it confers the preliminary shaping and the initiation of all legislation upon the cabinet, a body which deliberates and resolves in strict secrecy,—and so reminds him, remotely enough, of the Spartan Ephors and the Venetian Council of Ten. He commends, by contrast, that constitution (our own, which he sees at a great distance) which reserves to the legislature itself the origination and drafting of its measures. It is hard for us, who have this commended constitution under our noses, to perceive wherein we have the advantage. British legislation is for the most part originated and shaped by a single committee, acting in secret, whose proposals, when produced, are eagerly debated and freely judged by the sovereign legislative body. Our legislation is framed and initiated by a great many committees, deliberating in secret, whose proposals are seldom debated and only perfunctorily judged by the sovereign legislative body. It is impossible to mistake the position and privileges of the Brutish cabinet, so great and conspicuous and much discussed are they. They simplify the whole British system for men’s comprehension by merely standing at the centre of it. But our own system is simple only in appearance. It is easy to see that our legislature and executive are separate, and that the legislature matures its own measures by means of committees of its own members. But it may readily escape superficial observation that our legislature, instead of being served, is ruled by its committees; that those committees prepare their measures in private; that their number renders their privacy a secure secrecy, by making them too many to be watched, and individually too insignificant to be worth watching; that their division of prerogatives results in a loss, through diffusion, of all actual responsibility; and that their co-ordination leads to such a competition among them for the attention of their respective houses that legislation is rushed, when it is not paralyzed.

It is thus that, whilst all real power is in the hands of Congress, that power is often thrown out of gear and its exercise brought almost to a standstill. The competition of the committees is the clog. Their reports stand in the way of each other, and so the complaint is warranted that Congress can get nothing done. Interests which press for attention in the nation are reported upon by the appropriate committee, perhaps, but the report gets pushed to the wall. Or they are not reported upon. They are brought to the notice of Congress, but they go to a committee which is unfavorable. The progress of legislation depends both upon the fortunes of competing reports and upon the opinions held by particular committees.

The same system of committee government prevails in our state legislatures, and has led to some notable results, which have recently been pointed out in a pamphlet entitled American Constitutions, contributed to the Johns Hopkins series of Studies in History and Political Science by Mr. Horace Davis. In the state legislatures, as in Congress, the origination and control of legislation by standing committees has led to haphazard, incoherent, irresponsible law-making, and to a universal difficulty about getting anything done. The result has been that state legislatures have been falling into disrepute in all quarters. They are despised and mistrusted, and many States have revised their constitutions in order to curtail legislative powers and limit the number and length of legislative sessions. There is in some States an apparent inclination to allow legislators barely time enough to provide moneys for the maintenance of the governments. In some instances necessary powers have been transferred from the legislatures to the courts; in others to the governors. The intent of all such changes is manifest. It is thought safer to entrust power to a law court, performing definite functions under clear laws and in accordance with strict judicial standards, or to a single conspicuous magistrate, who can be watched and cannot escape responsibility for his official acts, than to entrust it to a numerous body which burrows toward its ends in committee-rooms, getting its light through lobbies; and which has a thousand devices for juggling away responsibility, as well as scores of antagonisms wherewith to paralyze itself.

Like fear and distrust have often been felt and expressed of late years concerning Congress, for like reasons. But so far no attempt has been made to restrict either the powers or the time of Congress. Amendments to the Constitution are difficult almost to the point of impossibility, and the few definite schemes nowadays put forward for a revision of the Constitution involve extensions rather than limitations of the powers of Congress. The fact is that, though often quite as exasperating to sober public opinion as any state legislature, Congress is neither so much distrusted nor so deserving of distrust. Its high place and vast sphere in the government of the nation cause its members to be more carefully chosen, and its proceedings to be more closely watched, and frequently controlled by criticism. The whole country has its eyes on Congress, and Congress is aware of the fact. It has both the will and the incentive to be judicious and patriotic. Newspaper editors have constantly to be saying to their readers, ‘Look what our state legislators are doing;’ they seldom have to urge, ‘Look what Congress is doing.’ It cannot, indeed, be watched easily, or to much advantage. It requires a distinct effort to watch it. It has no dramatic contests of party leaders to attract notice. Its methods are so much after the fashion of the game of hide-and-seek that the eye of the ordinary man is quite baffled in trying to understand or follow them, if he try only at leisure moments. But, at the same time, the interests handled by Congress are so vast that at least the newspapers and the business men, if no others, must watch its legislation as best they may. However hard it may be to observe, it is too influential in great affairs to make it safe for the country to give over trying to observe it.

But though Congress may always be watched, and so in a measure controlled, despite its clandestine and confusing methods, those methods must tend to increase the distrust with which Congress is widely regarded; and distrust cannot but enervate, belittle, and corrupt this will-centre of the Constitution. The question is not merely, How shall the methods of Congress be clarified and its ways made purposeful and responsible? There is this greater question at stake: How shall the essential arrangements of the Constitution be preserved? Congress is the purposing, designing, aggressive power of the national government. Disturbing and demoralizing influences in the organism, if there be any, come out from its restless energies. Damaging encroachments upon ground forbidden to the federal government generally originate in measures of its planning. So long as it continues to be governed by unrelated standing committees, and to take its resolves in accordance with no clear plan, no single, definite purpose, so long as what it does continues to be neither evident nor interesting, so long must all its exertions of power be invidious; so long must its competition with the executive or the judiciary seem merely jealous and always underhand: so long must it remain virtually impossible to control it through public opinion. As well ask the stranger in the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange to judge of the proceedings on the floor. As well ask a man who has not time to read all the newspapers in the Union to judge of passing sentiment in all parts of the country. Congress in its composition is the country in miniature. It realizes Hobbes’s definition of liberty as political power divided into small fragments. The standing committees typify the individuals of the nation. Congress is better fitted for counsel than the voters simply because its members are less than four hundred instead of more than ten millions.

It has been impossible to carry out the programme of the Constitution; and, without careful reform, the national legislature will even more dangerously approach the perilous model of a mass meeting. There are several ways in which Congress can be so integrated as to impart to its proceedings system and party responsibility. That may be done by entrusting the preparation and initiation of legislation to a single committee in each house, composed of the leading men of the majority in that house. Such a change would not necessarily affect the present precedents as to the relations between the executive and the legislature. They might still stand stiffly apart. Congress would be integrated and invigorated, however, though the whole system of the government would not be. To integrate that, some common meeting-ground of public consultation must be provided for the executive and the houses. That can be accomplished only by the admission to Congress, in whatever capacity,—whether simply to answer proper questions and to engage in debate, or with the full privileges of membership,—of official representatives of the executive who understand the administration and are interested and able to defend it. Let the tenure of ministers have what disconnection from legislative responsibility may seem necessary to the preservation of the equality of House and Senate, and the separation of administration from legislation; light would at least be thrown upon administration; it would be given the same advantages of public suggestion and unhampered self-defence that Congress, its competitor, has; and Congress would be constrained to apply system and party responsibility to its proceedings.

The establishment in the United States of what is known as ‘ministerial responsibility’ would unquestionably involve some important changes in our constitutional system. I am strongly of the opinion that such changes would not be too great a price to pay for the advantages secured us by such a government. Ministerial responsibility supplies the only conditions which have yet proved efficacious, in the political experience of the world, for vesting recognized leadership in men chosen for their abilities by a natural selection of debate in a sovereign assembly of whose contests the whole country is witness. Such survival of the ablest in debate seems the only process available for selecting leaders under a popular government. The mere fact that such a contest proceeds with such a result is the strongest possible incentive to men of first-rate powers to enter legislative service; and popular governments, more than any other governments, need leaders so placed that, by direct contact with both the legislative and the executive departments of the government, they shall see the problems of government at first hand; and so trained that they shall at the same time be, not mere administrators, but also men of tact and eloquence, fitted to persuade masses of men and to draw about themselves a loyal following.

If we borrowed ministerial responsibility from England, we should, too, unquestionably enjoy an infinite advantage over the English in the use of it. We should sacrifice by its adoption none of that great benefit and security which our federal system derives from a clear enumeration of powers and an inflexible difficulty of amendment. If anything would be definite under cabinet government, responsibility would be definite; and, unless I am totally mistaken in my estimate of the legal conscience of the people of this country,—which seems to me to be the heart of our whole system,—definite responsibility will establish rather than shake those arrangements of our Constitution which are really our own, and to which our national pride properly attaches, namely, the distinct division of powers between the state and federal governments, the slow and solemn formalities of constitutional change, and the interpretative functions of the federal courts. If we are really attached to these principles, the concentration of responsibility in government will doubly insure their preservation. If we are not, they are in danger of destruction in any case.

But we cannot have ministerial responsibility in its fulness under the Constitution as it stands. The most that we can have is distinct legislative responsibility, with or without any connection of co-operation or of mutual confidence between the executive and Congress. To have so much would be an immense gain. Changes made to this end would leave the federal system still an unwieldy mechanism of counteracting forces, still without unity or flexibility; but we should at least have made the very great advance of fastening upon Congress an even more positive form of accountability than now rests upon the President and the courts. Questions of vast importance and infinite delicacy have constantly to be dealt with by Congress; and there is an evident tendency to widen the range of those questions. The grave social and economic problems now thrusting themselves forward, as the result of the tremendous growth and concentration of our population, and the consequent sharp competition for the means of livelihood, indicate that our system is already aging, and that any clumsiness, looseness, or irresponsibility in governmental action must prove a source of grave and increasing peril. There are already commercial heats and political distempers in our body politic which warn of an early necessity for carefully prescribed physic. Under such circumstances, some measure of legislative reform is clearly indispensable. We cannot afford to put up any longer with such legislation as we may happen upon. We must look and plan ahead. We must have legislation which has been definitely forecast in party programmes and explicitly sanctioned by the public voice. Instead of the present arrangements for compromise, piecemeal legislation, we must have coherent plans from recognized party leaders, and means for holding those leaders to a faithful execution of their plans in clear-cut Acts of Congress.

LIST OF VOLUMES OF ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, ART, MUSIC, ETC., PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 743–745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

HENRY ADAMS.

Historical Essays. (12mo, $2.00.)

Contents: Primitive Rights of Women—Captaine John Smith—Harvard College, 1786–1787—Napoleon I. at St. Domingo—The Bank of England Restriction—The Declaration of Paris, 1861—The Legal Tender Act—The New York Gold Conspiracy—The Session, 1869–1870.

“Mr. Adams is thorough in research, exact in statement, judicial in tone, broad of view, picturesque and impressive in description, nervous and expressive in style. His characterizations are terse, pointed, clear.”—New York Tribune.

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD.

Japonica. Illustrated by Robert Blum. (Large 8vo, $3.00.)

“Artistic and handsome. In theme, style, illustrations and manufacture, it will appeal to every refined taste, presenting a most thoughtful and graceful study of the fascinating people among whom the author spent a year.”—Cincinnati Enquirer.

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.

Obiter Dicta, First Series. (16mo, $1.00.)

Contents: Carlyle—On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning’s Poetry—Truth Hunting—Actors—A Rogue’s Memoirs—The Via Media—Falstaff.

“Some admirably written essays, amusing and brilliant. The book is the book of a highly cultivated man, with a real gift of expression, a good deal of humor, a happy fancy.”—Spectator.

Obiter Dicta, Second Series. (16mo, $1.00.)

Contents: Milton—Pope—Johnson—Burke—The Muse of History—Lamb—Emerson—The Office of Literature—Worn Out Types—Cambridge and the Poets—Book-buying.

“Neat, apposite, clever, full of quaint allusions, happy thoughts, and apt, unfamiliar quotations.”—Boston Advertiser.

Res Judicatæ: Papers and Essays. (16mo, $1.00.)

“Whether Mr. Birrell writes of Richardson or Barrow, Gibbon or Newman, he shows himself equally intelligent and appreciative. His wit and audacity are backed by sterling sense and fine taste.”—Chicago Tribune.

Prof. H. H. BOYESEN.

Essays on German Literature. (12mo, $1.50.)

“Prof. Boyesen is cultivated without being pedantic, and serious without being dull. The literature he analyzes and expounds is the literature that has international value.”—Boston Beacon.

W. C. BROWNELL.

French Traits. (12mo, $1.50.)

Contents: The Social Instinct—Morality—Intelligence—Sense and Sentiment—Manners—Women—The Art Instinct—The Provincial Spirit—Democracy—New York after Paris.

“These chapters form a volume of criticism which is sympathetic, intelligent, acute, and contains a great amount of wholesome suggestion.”—Boston Advertiser.

French Art. (12mo, $1.25.)

“Brought to the judgment in this cool and scientific spirit, the whole course of French painting and sculpture, as shown by the masters pre-eminent in each era, is reviewed by a critic as certain of his criticisms as he is capable in forming them.”—Springfield Republican.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

Lectures on the History of Literature. (Now printed for the first time. 12mo, $1.00.)

Summary of Contents: Literature in General—Language, Tradition—The Greeks—The Heroic Ages—Homer—Æschylus to Socrates—The Romans—Middle Ages—Christianity—The Crusades—Dante—The Spaniards—Chivalry—Cervantes—The Germans—Luther—The Origin, Work and Destiny of the English—Shakespeare—Milton—Swift—Hume—Wertherism—The French Revolution—Goethe and his Works.

“Every intelligent American reader will instantly wish to read this book through, and many will say that it is the clearest and wisest and most genuine book that Carlyle ever produced. We could have no work from his hand which embodies more clearly and emphatically his literary opinions than his rapid and graphic survey of the great writers and great literary epochs of the world.”—Boston Herald.

ALICE MORSE EARLE.

The Sabbath in Puritan New England. (12mo, $1.25.)

“She writes with a keen sense of humor, and out of the full stores of adequate knowledge and plentiful explorations among old pamphlets, letters, sermons, and that treasury, not yet run dry in New England, family traditions. The book is as sympathetic as it is bright and humorous.”—The Independent.

China Collecting in America. (with 75 illustrations. Sq. 8vo, $3.00.)

“Her book is full of entertainment, not only for the china hunter and collector, but for all who are interested in early times and manufactures, in the old houses and country people, in the history of America, and the habits and customs of the past.”—New York Observer.

Customs and Fashions in Old New England. (12mo, $1.25.)

Mrs. Earle describes the daily life and habits, the festivals, larder, taverns, modes of travel, peculiarities of courtship, marriages, funerals, the utensils and furniture of the Puritan farm and home, with the same wit, sympathetic feeling, and copious information so marked in her former works.

HENRY T. FINCK.

Chopin, and Other Musical Essays. (12mo, $1.50.)

“Written from abundant knowledge: enlivened by anecdote and touches of enthusiasm, suggestive, stimulating.”—Boston Post.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

The Spanish Story of the Armada, and Other Essays. (12mo, $1.50.)

Contents: The Spanish Story of the Armada—Antonio Perez: An Unsolved Historical Riddle—Saint Teresa—The Templars—The Norway Fjords—Norway Once More.

Short Studies on Great Subjects. (Half leather, 12mo, 4 vols., each $1.50.)

CONTENTS:

Vol. I. The Science of History—Times of Erasmus and Luther—The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character—The Philosophy of Catholicism—A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties—Criticism and the Gospel History—The Book of Job—Spinoza—The Dissolution of Monasteries—England’s Forgotten Worthies—Homer—The Lives of the Saints—Representative Man—Reynard the Fox—The Cat’s Pilgrimage—Fables—Parable of the Bread-fruit Tree—Compensation.

Vol. II. Calvinism—A Bishop of the Twelfth Century—Father Newman on “The Grammar of Assent”—Conditions and Prospects of Protestantism—England and Her Colonies—A Fortnight in Kerry—Reciprocal Duties in State and Subject—The Merchant and His Wife—On Progress—The Colonies Once More—Education—England’s War—The Eastern Question—Scientific Method Applied to History.

Vol. III. Annals of an English Abbey—Revival of Romanism—Sea Studies—Society in Italy in the Last Days of the Roman Republic—Lucian—Divus Caesar—On the Uses of a Landed Gentry—Party Politics—Leaves from a South African Journal.

Vol. IV. The Oxford Counter—Reformation—Life and Times of Thomas Becket—Origen and Celsus—A Cagliostro of the Second Century—Cheneys and the House of Russell—A Siding at a Railway Station.

“All the papers here collected are marked by the qualities which have made Mr. Froude the most popular of living English historians—by skill in argumentative and rhetorical exposition, by felicities of diction, by contagious earnestness, and by the rare power of fusing the results of research in the imagination so as to produce a picture of the past at once exact and vivid.”—N. Y. Sun.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.

Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–1879. (7 vols., 16mo, each $1.00.)

Contents: Vol. I., The Throne and the Prince Consort. The Cabinet and Constitution—Vol. II., Personal and Literary—Vol. III., Historical and Speculative—Vol. IV., Foreign—Vol. V. and VI., Ecclesiastical—Vol. VII., Miscellaneous.

“Not only do these essays cover a long period of time, they also exhibit a very wide range of intellectual effort. Perhaps their most striking feature is the breadth of genuine intellectual sympathy, of which they afford such abundant evidence.”—Nation.

ROBERT GRANT.

The Reflections of a Married Man. (12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.)

“Nothing is more entertaining than to have one’s familiar experiences take objective form; and few experiences are more familiar than those which Mr. Grant here chronicles for us. Altogether Mr. Grant has given us a capital little book, which should easily strike up literary comradeship with ‘The Reveries of a Bachelor.’”—Boston Transcript.

Opinions of a Philosopher. (Illustrated by Reinhart and Smedley. 12mo, cloth, $1.00.)

A sequel to the author’s “Reflections,” relating the experiences through middle life of Fred and Josephine, with equal charm and humor.

E. J. HARDY.

The Business of Life: A Book for Everyone.—How To Be Happy Though Married: Being a Handbook to Marriage—The Five Talents of Woman: A Book for Girls and Women—Manners Makyth Man—The Sunny Days of Youth: A Book for Boys and Young Men. (12mo, each $1.25.)

“The author has a large store of apposite quotations and anecdotes from which he draws with a lavish hand, and he has the art of brightening his pages with a constant play of humor that makes what he says uniformly entertaining.”—Boston Advertiser.

W. E. HENLEY.

Views and Reviews. Essays in Appreciation: Literature. (12mo, $1.00.)

Contents: Dickens—Thackeray—Disraëli—Dumas—Meredith—Byron—Hugo—Heine—Arnold—Rabelais—Shakespeare—Sidney—Walton—Banville—Berlioz—Longfellow—Balzac—Hood—Lever—Congreve—Tolstoï—Fielding, etc., etc.

“Interesting, original, keen and felicitous. His criticism will be found suggestive, cultivated, independent.”—N. Y. Tribune.

J. G. HOLLAND.

Titcomb’s Letters to Young People, Single and Married—Gold-Foil, Hammered from Popular Proverbs—Lessons in Life: A Series of Familiar Essays—Concerning the Jones Family—Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects—Every-Day Topics, First Series, Second Series. (Small 12mo, each, $1.25.)

“Dr. Holland will always find a congenial audience in the homes of culture and refinement. He does not affect the play of the darker and fiercer passions, but delights in the sweet images that cluster around the domestic hearth. He cherishes a strong fellow-feeling with the pure and tranquil life in the modest social circles of the American people, and has thus won his way to the companionship of many friendly hearts.”—N. Y. Tribune.

WILLIAM RALPH INGE.

Society in Rome under the Cæsars. (12mo, $1.25.)

“Every page is brimful of interest. The picture of life in Rome under the Cæsars are graphic and thoroughly intelligible.”—Chicago Herald.

ANDREW LANG.

Essays in Little. (Portrait, 12mo, $1.00.)

Contents: Alexandre Dumas—Mr. Stevenson’s Works—Thomas Haynes Bayly—Théodore de Banville—Homer and the Study of Greek—The Last Fashionable Novel—Thackeray—Dickens—Adventures of Buccaneers—The Sagas—Kingsley—Lever—Poems of Sir Walter Scott—Bunyan—Letter to a Young Journalist—Kipling’s Stories.

“One of the most entertaining and bracing of books. It ought to win every vote and please every class of readers.”—Spectator (London).

Letters to Dead Authors. (16mo, $1.00. Cameo Edition, with etched portrait and four new letters, $1.25.)

Letters to Thackeray—Dickens—Herodotus—Pope—Rabelais—Jane Austen—Isaak Walton—Dumas—Theocritus—Pope—Scott—Shelley—Molière—Burns, etc., etc.

“The book is one of the luxuries of the literary taste. It is meant for the exquisite palate, and is prepared by one of the ‘knowing’ kind. It is an astonishing little volume.”—N. Y. Evening Post.

SIDNEY LANIER.

The English Novel and the Principle of its Development. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

“The critical and analytical portions of his work are always in high key, suggestive, brilliant, rather dogmatic and not free from caprice.... But when all these abatements are made, the lectures remain lofty in tone and full of original inspiration.”—Independent.

The Science of English Verse. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

“It contains much sound practical advice to the makers of verse. The work shows extensive reading and a refined taste both in poetry and in music.”—Nation.

EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN.

Windfalls of Observation. Gathered for the Edification of the Young and the Solace of Others. (12mo, $1.25.)

A collection of brief essays on topics of perennial interest, personal in quality, literary in treatment, shrewd, and dryly humorous, having a decided “Roundabout,” though thoroughly American, flavor.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

French Dramatists of the 19th Century. (New Edition, 8vo, $1.50.)

Contents: Chronology—The Romantic Movement—Hugo—Dumas—Scribe—Augier—Dumas fils—Sardou—Feuillet—Labiche—Meilhac and Halévy—Zola and the Tendencies of French Drama—A Ten Years’ Retrospect: 1881–1891.

“Mr. Matthews writes with authority of the French Stage. Probably no other writer of English has a larger acquaintance with the subject than he. His style is easy and graceful, and the book is delightful reading.”—N. Y. Times.

The Theatres of Paris. (Illustrated. 16mo, $1.25.)

“An interesting, gossipy, yet instructive little book.”—Academy (London).

DONALD G. MITCHELL.

English Lands, Letters and Kings. Vol. I., From Celt to Tudor. Vol. II., From Elizabeth to Anne. (12mo, each $1.50.)

“Crisp, sparkling, delicate, these brief talks about authors, great and small, about kings and queens, schoolmasters and people, whet the taste for more. In ‘Ik Marvel’s’ racy, sweet, delightful prose, we see the benefits of English literature assimilated.”—Literary World.

Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart—Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons. (Cameo Edition, with etching, 16mo, each $1.25.)

“Beautiful examples of the art (of book making). The vein of sentiment in the text is one of which youth never tires.”—The Nation.

Seven Stories with Basement and Attic—Wet Days at Edgewood, with Old Farmers, Old Gardeners and Old Pastorals—Bound Together, A Sheaf of Papers—Out-of-Town Palaces, with Hints for their Improvement—My Farm of Edgewood, A Country Book. (12mo, each $1.25.)

“No American writer since the days of Washington Irving uses the English language as does ‘Ik Marvel.’ His books are as natural as spring flowers, and as refreshing as summer rains.”—Boston Transcript.

GEORGE MOORE.

Impressions and Opinions. (12mo, $1.25.)

“Both instructive and entertaining ... still more interesting is the problem of an English Théâtre Libre, of which Mr. Moore is an ingenious advocate. The four concluding essays, which treat of art and artists, are all excellent.”—Saturday Review (London.)

Modern Painting. (12mo, $2.00.)

The courage, independence, originality, and raciness with which Mr. Moore expressed his opinions on matters relating to the stage and to literature in his “Impressions and Opinions” are equally characteristic of these essays on art topics.

E. MAX MÜLLER.

Chips from a German Workshop. Vol. I., Essays on the Science of Religion—Vol. II., Essays on Mythology, Tradition and Customs—Vol. III., Essays on Literature, Biographies and Antiquities—Vol. IV., Comparative Philology, Mythology, etc.—Vol. V., On Freedom, etc. (5 vols., Crown 8vo, each $2.00.)

“These books afford no end of interesting extracts; ‘chips’ by the cord, that are full both to the intellect and the imagination; but we may refer the curious reader to the volumes themselves. He will find in them a body of combined entertainment and instruction such as has hardly ever been brought together in so compact a form.”—N. Y. Evening Post.

Biographical Essays. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

“Max Müller is the leading authority of the world in Hindoo literature, and his volume on Oriental reformers will be acceptable to scholars and literary people of all classes.”—Chicago Tribune.

THOMAS NELSON PAGE.

The Old South, Essays Social and Political. (12mo, $1.25.)

“They afford delightful glimpses of aspects and conditions of Southern life which few at the North have ever appreciated fully.”—Congregationalist.

AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D.

My Note-Book: Fragmentary Studies in Theology and Subjects Adjacent thereto (12mo, $1.50)—Men and Books; or, Studies in Homiletics (8vo, $2.00)—My Portfolio (12mo, $1.50)—My Study, and Other Essays (12mo, $1.50).

“His great and varied learning, his wide outlook, his profound sympathy with concrete men and women, the lucidity and beauty of his style, and the fertility of his thought, will secure for him a place among the great men of American Congregationalism.”—N. Y. Tribune.

NOAH PORTER, LL.D.

Books and Reading. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.)

“It is distinguished by all the rare acumen, discriminating taste and extensive literary knowledge of the author. The chief departments of literature are reviewed in detail.”—N. Y. Times.

PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D.

Literature and Poetry. (With portrait. 8vo, $3.00.)

“There is a great amount of erudition in the collection, but the style is so simple and direct that the reader does not realize that he is following the travels of a close scholar through many learned volumes in many different languages.”—Chautauquan.

EDMOND SCHERER.

Essays on English Literature. (With portrait. 12mo, $1.50.)

“M. Scherer had a number of great qualities, mental and moral, which rendered him a critic of English literature, in particular, whose views and opinions have not only novelty and freshness, but illumination and instruction for English readers, accustomed to conventional estimates from the English standpoint.”—Literary World.

WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, D.D.

Literary Essays. (8vo, $2.50.)

“They bear the marks of the author’s scholarship, dignity and polish of style, and profound and severe convictions of truth and righteousness as the basis of culture as well as character.”—Chicago Interior.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Across the Plains, with Other Essays and Memories. (12mo, $1.25.)

Contents: Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco—The Old Pacific Capital—Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters—Epilogue to an Inland Voyage—Contribution to the History of Life—Education of an Engineer—The Lantern Bearers—Dreams—Beggars—Letter to a Young Man Proposing to Embrace a Literary Life—A Christmas Sermon.

Memories and Portraits. (12mo, $1.00.)

Contents: Some College Memories—A College Magazine—An Old Scotch Gardener—Memoirs of an Islet—Thomas Stevenson—Talk and Talkers—The Character of Dogs—A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas—A Gossip on Romance—A Humble Remonstrance.

Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers. (12mo, $1.00; Cameo Edition, with etched portrait, $1.25.)

Familiar Studies of Men and Books. (12mo, $1.25.)

“If there are among our readers any lovers of good books to whom Mr. Stevenson is still a stranger, we may advise them to make his acquaintance through either of these collections of essays. The papers are full of the rare individual charm which gives a distinction to the lightest products of his art and fancy. He is a notable writer of good English, who combines in a manner altogether his own the flexibility, freedom, quickness and suggestiveness of contemporary fashions with a grace, dignity, and high-breeding that belong rather to the past.”—N. Y. Tribune.

CHARLES W. STODDARD.

South Sea Idyls. (12mo, $1.50.)

“Neither Loti nor Stevenson has expressed from tropical life the luscious, fruity delicacy, or the rich, wine-like bouquet of these sketches.”—The Independent.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

Under the Evening Lamp. (12mo, $1.25.)

“A very charming volume of gossipy criticism on such poets as Burns, Motherwell and Hartley Coleridge.”—Public Opinion.

HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D.

The Poetry of Tennyson. (New and enlarged Edition, with portrait. 12mo, $2.00.)

Contents: Tennyson’s First Flight—The Palace of Art: Milton and Tennyson—Two Splendid Failures—The Idylls of the King—The Historic Triology—The Bible in Tennyson—Fruit from an Old Tree—On the Study of Tennyson—Chronology—List of Biblical Quotations.

“The two new chapters and the additional chronological matter have greatly enriched the work.”—T. B. Aldrich.

JOHN C. VAN DYKE.

Art for Art’s Sake. (With 24 illustrations. 12mo, $1.50.)

“The clear setting forth of the facts and theories of painting has its advantages in these days when there is so much art analysis that nobody can understand. This essayist deals with the subtleties, but in so doing he illuminates them. Moreover he is very interesting. His book ‘reads itself,’ as the phrase is.”—New York Sun.

BARRETT WENDELL.

Stelligeri, and Other Essays Concerning America. (12mo, $1.25.)

A series of interesting and suggestive papers on historical and literary themes, thoroughly American in spirit.

WOODROW WILSON.

An Old Master, and Other Political Essays. (12mo, $1.00.)

These essays, revealing a fine literary taste, deal in a very human and popular way with some important political problems.

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THE FOREGOING VOLUMES OF ESSAYS ARE FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS, OR WILL BE SENT POSTPAID, ON RECEIPT OF PRICE, BY THE PUBLISHERS, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 743–745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK