NEBULÆ.
—We have not yet entered into rivalry with Mexico; and although to those who looked upon our politics during the last two months from the outside only, we have doubtless seemed to be tending toward anarchy, revolution, and pronunciamentos, we were really in no such danger. Teutonic blood and the English language (Anglo-Saxons and Germans are both Teutonic) seem to carry with them a certain steadiness and capacity of common-sense perception which are preventives of great political folly; and although it is not the habit of our politicians to speak very respectfully of each other from the opposite sides of a political canvass, and the conduct of our Representatives at Washington is not always quite so admirable and exemplary as it might be, we do not, in French phrase, "descend into the streets," or raise barricades, or fly at each other's throats unless we mean real revolutionary business. Even then we are apt to go decorously, if not solemnly, about our work, and talk about "the course of human events" and "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind"; we at least did so once, and notwithstanding the great changes that have taken place in our political and social condition, it may be safely assumed that we should do so again. Frothy talk at Washington gives occasion for leading articles which are not always less frothy, and for sensation headings that gladden the eyes of newsboys. The desperate political game played at Washington for the Presidency has had a very bad effect upon our reputation, and has increased the very political demoralization of which it was an outward sign; but it is safe to say that when the most furious politicians there talked revolution they did not "mean business." Both parties stood before the world in a not very admirable light. On the one hand, the Democrats digged a pit and fell into it themselves. The Electoral Commission was their own contrivance; and when they were moved to wrath and denunciation by the decisions against their case, they only showed that they formed the Commission in the supposed certainty that it would decide in their favor. They did not want a tribunal of arbitration, but a decision under the forms of arbitration. On the other hand, the Republicans appeared with changed front on the subject of State sovereignty. No assertion of the purely federative constitution of the Union could equal in force the decision that, fraud or no fraud, Congress should not go behind the electoral certificates of the Governors of the various States. Partisanship was equally binding on both sides. If then all the Republicans on the Commission always voted one way, with like "solidarity" all the Democrats always voted the other. To adopt a phrase attributed to the ex-Confederate General Jubal Early, the seven-spot couldn't take the eight. One result of the struggle, and of the revelations which it brought about, was the remarkable one of the destruction of the prestige of the candidate who came within one electoral vote of the Presidency. It is safe to say that if a new election had been brought about, the Democrats would not have ventured to go into it with Mr. Tilden in nomination.
—The struggle is over, and the uncertainty is past; and now, according to very general anticipations, business ought to revive and prosperity to return. We would gladly believe that such will be the result, but we doubt it. Business will revive, prosperity will return; for the country is rich, never more so, and is daily becoming richer. It is impossible to stop the onward course of a people who have our advantages; but the causes of our present depression lie too deep to be touched by the settlement of a mere party contest. We are suffering from the effects of a political, social, and moral revolution which has been in progress for nearly twenty years, and which the rest of the world has felt hardly less than ourselves. We have suffered the most because on the one hand our financial position is at any time less stable than that of other people, and on the other because we of all have undergone the greatest moral deterioration. We have been brought to that sad condition in which we are afraid to trust each other. So many of us have been playing the part of adventurers, so many have been playing a "confidence game," that confidence is gone in another sense than that in which it is so often said to be wanting. Prosperity will return to our business circles slowly and surely as our moral tone rises, and as business is conducted upon stable principles and upon an honorable basis. We must cease to "swap jackknives" in the shape of railway bonds and unimproved land; we must do more productive work and keep better faith. Hard work and honesty will do more for us than the settlement of the Presidential question, although that will probably do something.
—Thirty-five years ago Charles Dickens, having visited the legislative capital of a great nation, wrote thus about the men that he found there: "I saw in them the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous political machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections, underhanded tamperings with public officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers, shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are like dragons' teeth of yore in everything but sharpness; aiding and abetting of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences—such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction, in its most depraved and unblushing form, stared at me from every corner of the crowded hall." Of what country could he have thus written? Manifestly some "effete monarchy" in the most degraded stage of its decadence.
—The effort to establish carnivals in America is not a very encouraging sign of a healthy moral tone in the public mind. Surely there was never an attempt more superfluous, untimely, or out of place. Not only New York, but the whole country is swarming with thousands of people who are in need of money to buy shelter, food, and clothing; banks of discount, savings banks, trust companies, the very charitable institutions, are brought to ruin and disgrace by fraudulent bankruptcy; and this is the time that is chosen to entice people to playing the fool publicly in the open streets. If ever a Lent should have been kept in the sackcloth of humiliation and the ashes of despair, it is that which has just passed. People who would take part in a carnival now would dance upon the borders of their own open graves. And what do we want of a carnival, even if we were prosperous? Carnivals are not suited to our national traits. They suit the Latin races of the south of Europe; and even among them they are fading away before the light of diffused intelligence and the thoughtfulness that comes of knowledge. To us they are entirely foreign. They do not suit our sober, practical habits of life and thought; and if we attempted them, we should only make ourselves ridiculous by our awkwardness. Festivals of that kind require a volatile people, who at least can practise folly gracefully. We should unite folly with dulness and stupidity. Moreover, such festivals cannot be got up to order anywhere. They are results; they are the growth of centuries. Italians and Frenchmen do not say, Go to! we will have a carnival. The thing belongs to them by inheritance; the memories of it mingle with their earliest recollections. As for us, we might go through a carnival dolefully, as a penance fitting to Lent; but as to enjoying one, except as spectators, to us that is quite impossible. All such festivities are foreign to our nature. We cannot even keep up an interest in "Decoration Day." We revere the memories of our dead; but a ceremonial exhibition of our reverence sits ill upon us. We do not take kindly to public spectacles, and ourselves never appear well in them. As to the sober procession for which the municipal laws in New York compelled the projected masquerade to be changed, it will be, if it is at all, only a means of advertising. That sort of display we take to hugely. It was with difficulty that President Lincoln's obsequies were preserved against the projects of advertisers. We turn the mountains into posters and the hills into sign-posts. If we must do that, let us do it openly and plainly; but a carnival! Fudge!
—We cannot successfully imitate Europeans in their graceful follies; but in their soberer and more practical habits we might well follow their example. A step has been just taken in Germany which is more needed here, and which yet there is hardly any hope that we shall profit by. The union of German apothecaries has addressed a petition to the Federal Council demanding that the secret medicines concocted and advertised by quacks shall be officially tested before they are permitted to be sold. A more creditable and needful step was never taken, or one which was more indicative of enlightenment and high civilization. Quack medicines are on the whole a curse to mankind. They are generally imposed upon the ignorant and credulous by men who care not what harm they do so long as they profit by their business. Many of these medicines—so called—are very injurious, and a still greater proportion of them are entirely useless. The very fact that their composition is kept secret is against them. It is a law absolute among all honorable physicians that no remedial agent shall be kept secret. Such physicians, if in their practice they discover a remedy for any disease, at once make it known to the whole profession. To keep such a discovery secret would be to lose caste, if not to be entirely excluded from honorable professional association and recognition. If such an examination as that proposed in Germany is needed there, here it is required by a tenfold greater necessity. America is the great field of operation for the patent medicine vender. Here he thrives. Here he accumulates huge fortunes if he will only advertise persistently and with sufficient disregard of truth. And his chief victims are women and children. He is one of the pests of our society. We cannot exclude him, or extinguish him entirely; that would interfere with the individual liberty of the citizen; not only of the seller, but of the buyer. If people choose to poison themselves gradually, they insist upon their right to do so unhindered by government action. But at least we might do what the German apothecaries ask to have done, and require as a condition of the granting of a patent for a medicine that it should be tested and its contents officially declared. The effect of such a measure upon the general health would be in the highest degree beneficial; and at least the public would be protected against the fraudulent representations of the majority of patent medicine makers and venders.
—In another matter, church chimes, we have imitated Europe, and not discreetly, and we have had our first check. A certain chime of church bells in Philadelphia became annoying to the people in the neighborhood, who complained to the courts, and obtained an injunction restricting the use of the chimes to certain times of day. Even were this often bell-jangling not the annoyance that it is, the whole American public would owe something to these good Philadelphians simply for the good example of their action in this matter. They were annoyed by some one, the agent of a corporation, who, although he did not commit murder, burglary, or arson, interfered with their comfort and marred their enjoyment of life; and they, like sensible men, instead of putting up with the annoyance after the American fashion, and saying, "Oh, no matter! What can we do to stop it? Let it go!" set themselves to work to see if they couldn't stop it. They tested the question whether a certain number of men might please their taste or their religious fancy at the risk of disturbing and annoying others; and they succeeded. It is to be hoped that the lesson will not be lost in regard not only to the specific annoyance which was the cause of complaint, but all other selfish indulgences by which some men interfere with the rights of others. The law of common sense and justice in such matters is that every man may enjoy himself as he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the enjoyment of their natural rights by others. A man may give his days and nights to ringing chimes so long as they are not heard outside of his own house; but if they are so heard, and they deprive a single person of rest, or even of a quiet enjoyment of life, he has passed the limit of right. A dozen men may like a strong perfume; but they have no right to load the common air with it to the annoyance even of a thirteenth. This matter of ringing church chimes has become somewhat of a religious and sentimental affectation. Chimes have a very pretty effect in literature; and at a distance in the country they are charming. But when they clang daily in the tower of a city church within a few hundred yards of you, they become a great nuisance. Nor is the annoyance they give diminished when the chimer, instead of ringing such changes as are suited to bells, will insist upon playing affettuoso. In fact, all church bells are an annoyance in cities, and a needless one. They were first used to call people to church when there were no clocks, and before watches were heard of. Now, when the humblest apartment has a clock that strikes the hour, "the church-going bell" is entirely superfluous for the object for which it is rung, and is really a great annoyance not only to the sick, but to those who are in health. It is a noisy anachronism which clamors with iron tongue and brazen throat for its own suppression.
—And so at last the marriage of Adelina Patti to the Marquis of Caux has come to its natural end. What could the Marquis or the lady expect? He married her for the money that she earned, and that he might own so charming a celebrity; she accepted him as a husband for his title. Years have passed, and nothing has occurred to bind them more closely. The lady has no children, or any prospect of one; and so there is nothing in the way of a judicial separation on account of incompatibility. It is not necessary to suppose that the distinguished prima donna has actually run away from her husband with a lover; but it would only be natural if there were a man in the distance more to her taste. It is remarkable, by the way, that so great an interest should be taken by Americans in the fortunes of this lady, who, since she has developed her extraordinary talent, has turned her back entirely on this country. She is spoken of here often as an American prima donna. This can only be the result of a very great and an absurd misapprehension. Adelina Patti is an Italian. Her father and mother were both Italians, who could speak hardly a word of English. Her education and habits of life have been entirely Italian. Even if she had been born here by the chance of a professional residence here by her mother, that would not have made her anything else than Italian, more than a like chance residence in Russia or in Turkey would have made her a Russian or a Turk, or than the Irishman's being born in a stable would have made him a horse. When a family emigrates and resides permanently in another country, assuming the life and the habits of that country, and intermarrying there, it changes its nationality, but not otherwise. The eagerness which many Americans show to claim as American everything meritorious in art over whose supposed origin the Stars and Stripes may have been thrown, is a witness to our real native poverty in that respect, which we reveal by the very means by which we would conceal it. And besides all this, Adelina Patti was not even born in this country. She came here from Europe a little girl, with her mother, Katarina Barili-Patti, a prima donna, who, although she had not her daughter's facility of execution and range of voice, sang in the grand style, and who, as a dramatic vocalist, was far beyond la diva, as Adelina is absurdly called. As to her parting company with M. Caux, nothing is more probable than that the restraint—at least external—which belongs to the life of a marquise became too intolerable to her inborn Bohemianism, and that she seeks deliverance not only from an unloved and unloving husband, but from the galling restraints of dull respectability.