began in which every human being did not count for what he was worth in all that was achieved by his nature and his race. It is true that when we look at any small section of humanity, such as we know and can watch, we see such individuality of action, such selfishness of purpose, that it almost seems the vagary of an enthusiast to insist that all this swarming crowd of creatures has a unity from which no one can emancipate himself, an individuality which makes and will make out of the selfishness of each a happiness for all greater than communism ever dreamed.* Out of this complex individuality has come all human progress. Out of the great mass of each nation has come all national progress. It is not the leaders and foremost men which make a nation; it is the nation which makes the leaders. If human progress had been more a matter of leadership we should be in Utopia to-day. War would have ceased long ago, and perhaps government by the people would have become automatic in all its branches. The pathway of time is strewn with the failures of leaders. Kosciusko, skilful soldier, great general, hero of two continents, died an exile in a foreign land. The eloquence of the greatest orator of all time, thundered in vain against the march of Philip. Thomas Wentworth, "the one supremely able man the king bad," died on the scaffold. Kosciusko would not have died in exile if his country had been with him. Demosthenes would have saved Greece had Greece been willing to be saved. The Earl of Strafford extorting, even in his failure, the admiration of his foes, would have been the great figure of English story had England been going his way. But England was going another way, and the Earl of Strafford, supreme ability and all, went down like the bulrush before the rising Nile. T. B. REED.

*This selection may end here.

HOW THEY SAVED THE COLORS AT ISANDULA. 195

HOW THEY SAVED THE COLORS AT ISANDULA.

"SAVE the colors!" shrieks a dying voice, and lo! Two horsemen breast the raging ranks, and go. (In thy sacred list, O Fame!

Keep each dear and noble name!)

See, they flash upon the foe,

Fierce as flame;

And one undaunted form

Lifts a British banner, warm

With the blood rain, and the storm of Isandula!

"Save the colors!" and amidst a flood of foes, At gallop, sword in hand, each horseman goes. Around the steeds they stride

Cling devils crimson-dyed.

But God! through butchering blows

How they ride!

Their horses' hooves are red

With blood of dying and dead,

Trampled down beneath their tread, at Isandula!

"Save the colors!" They are saved; and side by side The horsemen swim a raging river's tide.

They are safe: they are alone;

But one, without a groan,

And tottering filmy-eyed,

Drops like a stone:

And before his comrade true

Can reach his side, he too

Falls smitten through and through at Isandula!

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Note 84.

THE CHARM OF INCOMPLETENESS.

HUMAN nature, we say, is developed by the advance of civilization. Man civilized is man carried along toward his completion. True civilization does not make man something else than man. It makes his manhood more complete. It gives him no new powers of thought or action. It sets free the powers that belong to him as man. In general,

But

men have believed that civilization was an advance. always, alongside of this opinion, there has run a more or less distinct remonstrance; and civilization has seemed to some to mean deterioration. A certain freshness, freeness, breadth, spontaneousness, has seemed to make the savage a completer man than he who had been trained in many arts, and evolved through a complicated history.

There is surely meaning, as there is deep pathos, in the way in which men have always looked back from the heights of the highest culture, and felt that they had lost something in the progress, longed for some charm of youth which the race remembered, but found no longer in itself. The boy grows up to be a man, and as he ripens he becomes more manly but who is not aware of that strange sense of loss which haunts the ripening man? With all he has come to there is something he has left behind. How full the Bible is of this idea. The New Jerusalem, with which it ends, is greater and better than the garden which blooms at its beginning. The whole story is of an education and a progress and yet all through the Bible runs a tender and live regret for that lost, imperfect manhood of Eden. Better things may come in the great future, but it seems as if there were something gone in the great past that never could come back. There is no thought of going back. The true completion of humanity always in the Bible lies before, and not behind and yet the flaming sword of Genesis always seems to shut man out from a tree of life which he never can forget, even while he presses forward to the com

COMMUNISTIC SOCIALISM.

197

pleter tree of never-failing fruit which grows by the side of the river of the water of life in the Apocalypse.

It would seem, then, as if this truth were very general, that in every development there is a sense of loss as well as gain. The flower opening into its full luxuriance has no longer the folded beauty of the bud. The summer with its splendor has lost the fascinating mystery of spring-time. The family of grown-up men remembers almost with regret the crude dreams that filled the old house with romance when the men were boys. The reasonable faith to which the thinker has attained, cannot forget the glow of vague emotion with which faith began. The enthusiast, devoted to and filled out by his cause, misses the light and careless life he used to live. It is not that the progress is repented, nor that the higher standard is disowned. Rather it seems to be a certain ineradicable charm that belongs to incompleteness, inherent in its consciousness of promise and of hope, which lingers even when the promise has been fulfilled and the hope attained.

PHILLIPS BROOKS.

Note 85.

COMMUNISTIC SOCIALISM.

(Abridged.)

TO-DAY there is not in our language, nor in any language, a more hateful word than Communism. In Paris, in Berlin, in Chicago, it meant, and still it means, wages without work, arson, assassination, anarchy. In this shape of it, the instant duty of society, without taking a second breath, is to smite it with the swiftness and fury of lightning. Incorrigible tramps, packing and prowling around together demanding the best from door to door, camping in farmers' barns, smashing farmers' machines, insulting decent men, and terrifying women and children on public roads, should not expect to be reasoned with. Mad wretches, whose hands smoke with blood, cannot be put out of the way too

soon nor to far. The preachers of this santanic crusade against capital are not, of course, to be silenced. Where free speech has a genealogy running so much further back than our separate existence as a nation, this planting dragon's teeth is not, I suppose, to be stopped. But wild mobs, wrecking railway trains, and sacking our cities, are a kind of crop that cannot be mowed down too close.

Even such barbarities must not provoke us to be despisers of history. Communism, in its essential genius, is not new, is not contemptible, is not abominable. It is a tradition, a philosophy, a gospel. As related to the tenure of landed. property, it is one of the oldest traditions of the race. As a philosophy, it deals with those social and civil problems, in regard to which mankind have always been most divided and most at fault. Its gospel, to be sure, has no God in it: only humanity, the fraternity of the fatherless but it preaches social regeneration, and promises a millennium.

How Russia shall deal with her Communism; is a Russian question. How Germany shall deal with hers, is a German question. How we shall deal with ours, is our question, which may have to be answered sooner, and answered more sharply, than perhaps we think.

Red-handed Communism would stand no chance here. We have in the United States three millions of land-owners, firmly grasping the continent. They will not be robbed of their acres. They are not to be frightened into hiring men whose services they do not need. Other shots may be heard round the world, besides those fired by Massachusetts' farmers at Concord bridge, shots fired next time in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. I will risk our farmers. No French engineering could barricade a prairie: no German bullets shoot off the nation's head.

Labor and Capital, from opposing camps, are moving on toward one another: to meet, I hope and believe, as Esau and Jacob met amongst the mountains of Gilead, to be reconciled: but, it may be to meet as Pompey and Cæsar met at Pharsalia. I confess I expect no Cæsar. I find on