Believe me, reader, and do not forget my words when you visit these lands. The sight of La Grande Chartreuse is one of the most powerful emotions here below. To whatever religion you may belong, if your soul can be moved by the thought of the life to come, you will preserve an imperishable remembrance of a night spent in this monastery, and will feel that you are not altogether the same man that you were when you entered its walls.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Les Etats-Unis Contemporains, ou les Mœurs, les Institutions et les Idees depuis la Guerre de la Secession. Par Claudio Jannet. Ouvrage précédé d’une Lettre de M. Le Play. Paris: E. Plon. 1876.
The author of this volume has read carefully and seriously a large number of works, by different American, French, and English writers, devoted to an explanation of the institutions of the United States, and to the history and social condition of the country. He shows also a remarkable acquaintance with the magazines and newspapers of the United States, so far as they bear on the subjects of which he treats. His book, indeed, must have cost him years of assiduous labor.
M. Jannet gives a just and impartial exposition of the laws and political principles of our country, as also of its present social condition. Rarely, if ever, has a foreigner displayed so conscientious a study of all that goes to make up American civilization. He professes to have entered upon his study and his work without any preconceived theory—a profession not unusual with authors, and for the most part, probably, honestly made. It is one thing, however, to profess, another thing to adhere to the profession. Were it possible for authors to adhere strictly to the profession made by M. Jannet, literature and all of which it treats would certainly not suffer therefrom: But he who imagines he has attained to so just and fair a position is the least free from illusion. The position is simply unattainable, and M. Jannet is scarcely to be blamed if he has not quite reached his ideal.
Two classes of authors have written about the United States. The one sees almost everything in couleur de rose, the other in a sombre hue. M. Jannet belongs to the latter class. Throughout his volume he fastens upon every symptom that threatens the existence or the welfare of the republic. As an enumeration of these symptoms it is exact, and its perusal would do no harm to our spread-eagle orators.
M. Jannet has evidently aimed at counterbalancing the influence of writers, French writers particularly, who have exaggerated the good side of American political society. He seems fearful lest their tone of thought should have too great a preponderance in France, and influence its present transition-state too powerfully in the direction of the United States. Whether or not this was called for is not a question for us to consider. The book, regarded as an impartial exposition of the present condition of the United States, resembles the picture of an artist, the background of which is painted with a Preraphaelite exactness, while the foreground is left unfinished, and the whole work, consequently, incomplete. Had the obvious purpose of the book been proclaimed at the beginning, we should have read it with a more favorable eye.
In his last chapter, however, M. Jannet holds out some hope for the future of the American Republic. In our present commercial depression, in the recent success of the Democratic party, in the number of families who have preserved the primitive virtues and customs of our forefathers, and in the progress of Catholicity he sees a ground for this hope, and concludes his work by saying: “Men are everywhere prosperous or unfortunate, according as they observe or despise the divine law. All their free will consists in choosing between these two terms of the problem of life, and all the efforts of the spirit of innovation only break against, without ever being able to destroy, the eternal bounds set by God to the ambitious feebleness of the creature. Therein lies the lesson that the young republic of the New World sends from beyond the ocean and across the mirage of its rapid prosperity to the old nations of Europe, too inclined to believe in the sophisms of the great modern error, and to mistrust their own traditions.”