It is a great luxury to find ourselves and the country in the midst of what Marshal MacMahon might style a quadrennate, and to be at the neutral and central point from which a much-vexed people can look both ways for a Presidential election. The contest of two years ago is over, and that of two years hence not near enough to beget mentionable worry. This equator of partisanship, lying midway between the two polls, is a happy medium of repose. The trade-winds of party passion blow from both sides fiercely toward it, but fail to break its calm. The average American—even the average professional American politician—possesses his soul in patience. He looks forward to no revolution, and, when he thinks of the matter at all, is entirely certain that the night of the first Tuesday in November, 1880, will bring nothing more tremendous than the usual hubbub among the telegraph-operators, the reporters and the haunters of the clubs and leagues. He doubts the due abnormal succession of the Presidents as little as he does that of the British kings, and a great deal less than he does that of some of the continental monarchs, to say nothing of the French ruler, whose septennate happens also to be within about two years of its close.
So pleasant it is to be at leisure to bestow attention on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without thought of the usually engrossing machinery so painfully and minutely contrived for facilitating our advance to those ends! To forget the means and for once look at the object; to ignore the strife for free government, and be placidly and contentedly free; to shut our eyes on eternal vigilance, and realize that we have paid that price and have the receipt in our pockets; to intermit our nursing of the tree and enjoy the fruit; to feel that life in a republic is not necessarily and always "the fever called living,"—such is, for the present interval, our lot. Self-government is such very hard work that those engaged in it are entitled to occasional holidays. Nature demands it. Whether their stated Sabbath come once in four years or once in seven, it must come. No wonder that it is apt to prove too welcome and seductive, and that healthy relaxation should grow into harmful lethargy, Sunday into "Blue Monday." Examples of that result are abundant enough to warn us when we need warning. They have chromoed in brilliantly illuminated text, in all the languages and alphabets, the maxim about eternal vigilance, and hung it up over our council-fires and our domestic hearths. We can only venture, perhaps, to half close our eyes and view it sleepily as through cigar-smoke, or turn our backs upon it for a little while and go out into a world of other cares which takes no note of elections, constitutions, statutes or office-holding. The shorter the interval the less should our enjoyment of it be marred. Investigations into past elections serve only to interfere with it, or to assist the newspapers in interfering with it; and newspapers are our daily food or a part of it. Three-fourths of the reading-matter in the five or six thousand of them published in the Union are filled with politics, although the conductors of them, like the rest of us, are aware that politics are temporarily in eclipse. They can teach us nothing on that subject, and we want to learn nothing. Their occupation as trade-journals devoted to the art and science of government is gone. Other periodicals devoted to a specialty, whether iron, coal, calico or the Thirty-nine Articles, show judgment and compassion on their readers when a "slack" time comes by turning miscellaneous and slipping in choice literary tidbits among their regular "shop" items. The five thousand should do likewise. If they will not wholly exclude politics, they might at least sweep political news and disquisitions into a separate corner of the sheet—say among the jokes, base-ball accidents and last year's advertisements.
Could our legislators and their chroniclers only convince themselves that they are de trop, that the best they can do just now is to assist us in cultivating a transitory oblivion of them and their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand a good deal.
We sometimes think it must have been a vast relief to the Poles when partition came and the three powers for good and all put an end to their perpetually recurring agony of electing a king. To the masses of the people, who were serfs, and had no more the right of suffrage or any other attribute of liberty than their cattle, we have no doubt it was so. Only by the small minority of privileged and fussy nobles, who went armed to the hall of election, ready to silence effectually any troublesome minority-man who should undertake to defeat their choice with his veto, could the loss of the wonted excitement have been seriously felt. That it was a relief to the neighboring nations, whose peace was constantly compromised by the recurrence of Poland's stormy call for a new king, is certain enough. The change threw a few very worthy men out of business—the Kosciuskos, Pulaskis, Czartoriskis, etc.—but it did away with a much larger number who were standing nuisances, and it left the surplus energy of many more to seek more legitimate and profitable paths. Of course the fate of the Poles, prosperous though their country is beyond anything dreamed of in the days of its nominal independence, is not enviable to us. It were to be wished that they had been cured of the regular—or irregular—spasms of selecting a chief without losing their national autonomy. What we remark is, that the strain of that convulsion was greater than they or their neighbors could bear, and that all concerned, with the trifling exceptions named, must have breathed freer and deeper when it was put an end to.
E.C.B.
CONJUGAL DISCORDS.
The weaknesses and follies of woman are a theme on which men, from the sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources of masculine merriment or abuse. What housekeeper ever complained of an aching back or of nervous irritation without being scolded by her "lord" for some extra work she had done in beautifying the home? Men never seem to learn that women, as a rule, cannot find life endurable in the atmosphere of dust and disorder which characterizes bachelor housekeeping, and which seldom disturbs the equanimity of the masculine mind in the least. Men and women are so different in their tastes and ways that there must always be discord and unhappiness in the household until the sexes give over trying to change or remodel those tastes and ways, and learn to respect them. Men must accept as inevitable the fact that women to be happy must have artistic, or at least dainty and cozy, environments; and women must learn to preserve their souls in quiet when men spill their tobacco and ashes over the carpets and tables, for probably no man ever lived who could fill a pipe, even from a wash-tub, without scattering the tobacco over the premises.
That the sexes will give over trying to reform each other does not seem likely to happen very soon. Indeed, one might be pardoned for believing that matrimony is specially adapted to develop all the imperfections and meannesses of human character, and that even of those matches that are made in heaven the devil arranges all the subsequent conditions. There is hardly a pure and innocent delight that unmarried women enjoy which they can carry into that blissful world bounded by the marriage-ring. One of those delights is that of squandering a little money, which is merely the equivalent of man's spending it as he likes, without accounting to any one. Few wives can do this and not be subjected to the humiliation of hearing the husband say, "My dear, are you not a little extravagant? Is all that money gone that I gave you last week?"
Men and women seem incapacitated, in the very nature of things, from understanding each other. While mutually enamored they meet as upon a bridge—a Bridge of Sighs perhaps: break this, and they are for ever separated as by an impassable gulf. Leaving aside entirely the enamored state, do men as a rule seek the society of women and prefer it to that of men? The thriving clubs, the billiard- and drinking-saloons, and the other resorts of men common all over the civilized world, seem very like a negative answer to the question. In savage life we know that the sexes do not hunt or fish or do any work together. In our modern drawing-rooms most men confess themselves "bored." They long to get away to their clubs or some other resort of their fellows. When husbands spend their evenings at home, if no one happens to call it is not common for them to enter into long and exhilarating conversations with their wives. To be sure, wives are too often ignorant of the subjects that interest intelligent men; still, not more ignorant than before marriage, when the one bridge upon which they could meet was unbroken. Then conversation never flagged: it was ever new and entrancing. Both talked pure nonsense, while having the art of "kissing full sense into empty words." On the other hand, it is, I think, quite a defensible proposition, despite the inferences to the contrary drawn from the failure of the Women's Hotel, that women enjoy conversation with women more than with men when there is no possible question of gallantry or flirtation; and, finally, that the recognition of the fact that men and women are not by nature in sympathetic accord, but only attracted through the law of compensation or opposites, will do more than all other things combined to make them study each other's natures and to respect sexual biases and characteristics, the motive for that study being, of course, the consummation of the ideal marriage, where man and woman set themselves together "like perfect music unto noble words."
M.H.