[From the last Edinburgh Review.]
RESPONSIBILITY OF STATESMEN.
IT is of the last moment that all who are, or are likely to be, called to administer the affairs of a free state, should be deeply imbued with the statesmanlike virtues of modesty and caution, and should act under a profound sense of their personal responsibility. It is an awful thing to undertake the government of a great country; and no man can be any way worthy of that high calling who does not from his inmost soul feel it to be so. When we reflect upon the fearful consequences, both to the lives, the material interests, and the moral well-being of thousands, which may ensue from a hasty word, an erroneous judgment, a temporary carelessness, or a lapse of diligence; when we remember that every action of a statesman is pregnant with results which may last for generations after he is gathered to his fathers; that his decisions may, and probably must, affect for good or ill the destinies of future times; that peace or war, crime or virtue, prosperity or adversity, the honor or dishonor of his country, the right or wrong, wise or unwise solution of some of the mightiest problems in the progress of humanity, depend upon the course he may pursue at those critical moments which to ordinary men occur but rarely, but which crowd the daily life of a statesman; the marvel is that men should be forthcoming bold enough to venture on such a task. Now, among public men in England this sense of responsibility is in general adequately felt. It affords an honorable (and in most cases we believe a true) explanation of that singular discrepancy between public men when in and when out of office—that inconsistency between the promise and the performance,—between what the leader of the opposition urges the minister to do, and what the same leader, when minister himself, actually does,—which is so commonly attributed to less reputable motives. The independent member may speculate and criticise at his ease; may see, as he thinks, clearly, and with an undoubting and imperious conviction, what course on this or that question ought to be pursued; may feel so unboundedly confident in the soundness of his views, that he cannot comprehend or pardon the inability of ministers to see as he sees, and to act as he would wish; but as soon as the overwhelming responsibilities of office are his own, as soon as he finds no obstacle to the carrying out of his plans, except such as may arise from the sense that he does so at the risk of his country's welfare and his own reputation—he is seized with a strange diffidence, a new-born modesty, a mistrust of his own judgment which he never felt before; he re-examines, he hesitates, he delays; he brings to bear upon the investigation all the new light which official knowledge has revealed to him; and finds at last that he scruples to do himself what he had not scrupled to insist upon before. So deep-rooted is this sense of responsibility with our countrymen, that whatever parties a crisis of popular feeling might carry into power, we should have comparatively little dread of rash, and no dread of corrupt, conduct on their part; we scarcely know the public man who, when his country's destinies were committed to his charge, could for a moment dream of acting otherwise than with scrupulous integrity, and to the best of his utmost diligence and most cautious judgment,—at all events till the dullness of daily custom had laid his self-vigilance asleep. We are convinced that were Lord Stanhope and Mr. Disraeli to be borne into office by some grotesque freak of fortune, even they would become sobered as by magic, and would astonish all beholders, not by their vagaries, but by their steadiness and discretion. Now, of this wholesome sense of awful responsibility, we see no indications among public men in France. Dumont says, in his "Recollections of Mirabeau," "I have sometimes thought that if you were to stop a hundred men indiscriminately in the streets of Paris and London, and propose to each to undertake the government, ninety-nine of the Londoners would refuse, and ninety-nine of the Parisians would accept. In fact, we find it is only one or two of the more experienced habitués of office who in France ever seem to feel any hesitation. Ordinary deputies, military men, journalists, men of science, accept, with a naive and simple courage, posts for which, except that courage, they possess no single qualification. But this is not the worst; they never hesitate, at their country's risk and cost, to carry out their own favorite schemes to an experiment; in fact, they often seem to value office mainly for that purpose, and to regard their country chiefly as the corpus vile on which the experiment is to be made. To make way for their theories, they relentlessly sweep out of sight the whole past, and never appear to contemplate either the possibility or the parricidal guilt of failure.
[From the New Monthly Magazine.]
THE COW TREE OF SOUTH AMERICA.
MR. Higson met with two species of cow tree, which he states to be abundant in the deep and humid woods of the provinces of Chocó and Popayán. In an extract from his diary, dated Ysconde, May 7, 1822, he gives an account of an excursion he made, about twelve miles up the river, in company with the alcaide and two other gentlemen, in quest of some of these milk trees, one species of which, known to the inhabitants by the name of Popa, yields, during the ascent of the sap, a redundance of a nutritive milky juice, obtained by incisions made into the thick bark which clothes the trunk, and which he describes as of an ash color externally, while the interior is of a clay red. Instinct, or some natural power closely approaching to the reasoning principle, has taught the jaguars, and other wild beasts of the forest, the value of this milk, which they obtain by lacerating the bark with their claws and catching the milk as it flows from the incisions. A similar instinct prevails amongst the hogs that have become wild in the forests of Jamaica, where a species of Rhus, the Rhus Metopium of botanists, grows, the bark of which, on being wounded, yields a resinous juice, possessing many valuable medicinal properties, and among them that of rapidly cicatrizing wounds. How this valuable property was first discovered by the hogs, or by what peculiar interchange of ideas the knowledge of it was communicated by the happy individual who made it to his fellow hogs, is a problem which, in the absence of some porcine historiographer, we have little prospect of solving. But, however this may be, the fact is sufficiently notorious in Jamaica, where the wild hogs, when wounded, seek out one of these trees, which, from the first discoverers of its sanative properties, have been named "Hog Gum Trees," and, abrading the bark with their teeth, rub the wounded part of their bodies against it, so as to coat the wound with a covering of the gummy, or rather gum-resinous fluid, that exudes from the bark. In like manner, as Mr. Higson informs us, the jaguars, instructed in the nutritious properties of the potable juice of the Popa, jump up against the stem, and lacerating the bark with their claws greedily catch the liquid nectar as it issues from the wound. By a strange perverseness of his nature, man, in the pride of his heart and the intoxication of his vanity, spurns this delicious beverage, which speedily fattens all who feed on it, and contents himself with using it, when inspissated by the sun, as a bird-lime to catch parrots; or converting it into a glue, which withstands humidity, by boiling it with the gum of the mangle-tree (Sapium aucuparium?), tempered with wood ashes. Mr. Higson states that they caught plenty of the milk, which was of the consistence of cream, of a bland and sweetish taste, and a somewhat aromatic flavor, and so white as to communicate a tolerably permanent stain wherever it fell; it mixed with spirit, as readily as cow's milk, and made, with the addition of water, a very agreeable and refreshing beverage, of which they drank several tutumos full. They cut down a tree, one of the tallest of the forest, in order to procure specimens, and found the timber white, of a fine grain, and well adapted for boards or shingles. They were about a month too late to obtain the blossoms, which were said to be very showy, but found abundance of fruit, disposed on short foot-stalks in the alæ of the leaves; these were scabrous, and about the size of a nutmeg. The leaves he describes as having very short petioles, hearted at the base, and of a coriaceous consistence, and covered with large semi-globular glands.
Besides the Popa, he speaks of another lactescent tree, called Sandé, the milk of which, though more abundant, is thinner, bluish, like skimmed milk, and not so palatable.
This, inspissated in the sun, acquires the appearance of a black gum, and is so highly valued for its medicinal properties, especially as a topical application in inflammatory affections of the spleen, pleura, and liver, that it fetches a dollar the ounce in the Valle del Cauca. The leaves are described as resembling those of the Chrysophyllum cainito, or broad-leaved star apple, springing from short petioles, ten or twelve inches long, oblong, ovate, pointed, with alternate veins, and ferruginous on the under surface. The locality of the Sandé he does not point out, but says that a third kind of milk tree, the juice of which is potable, grows in the same forests, where it is known by the name of Lyria. This he regards as identical with the cow tree of Caracas, of which Humboldt has given so graphic a description.