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Cast from her lap, forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born

Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea.

OLIVER W. HOLMES.

Note 31.

PROGRESS AND INVENTION.

THE reason why the race of man moves slowly is because it must move all together. The poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden are always saying to the rich and educated, inarticulately too often, but with a voice which brooks no denying, "If you advance, you must take us with you." It is not the knowledge of the great men, the skill of the great orators, the philosophy of the great sages that make civilization. There are no orators to-day as persuasive as Cicero, no philosophers or wise men greater than Aristotle or Plato. Yet civilization was not of their day, but of ours. The sunlight of knowledge for us has got beyond the hill-tops. The valleys of to-day are not as beautiful as were the hills of yore, but they teem with life and health and verdure. All inventions are subject to the same law. We owe them not to one, but to many. Man has thus far created no greater thing than the steam-engine. With that invention the name of James Watt is synonymous in the popular mind. To him alone that great benefaction

is attributed; just as the grandeur of England under the Puritans is attributed to Cromwell Both ascriptions of praise are false alike. Man did not leap at one bound from the simmering tea-kettle to the roaring steam-engine. From Hero to James Watt were scores of inventors whose names are known, and thousands of whom we know nothing, each struggling for the one step in advance possible to his age and time until after thousands of years the full-grown locomotive, twenty thousand strong, whirls eight hundred thousand men every day, in houses more capacious than Hero lived in, all over a continent of which Hero never dreamed. In inventions each man helps his successor. Had Jacquard never been summoned to Paris by Carnot he might never have seen Vaucanson's machine, and might have spent his life in vain studies for his famous loom. Not only does one invention have to wait upon another, but all inventors have to wait upon the progress of the world. Railroads had to wait until enough men could afford to travel, until men were civilized enough to let them alone. It took a world with myriads of people in it to make the telephone what it is. In James Watt's time and just before, all the inventive minds were intent on the problem of steam. Why was this then and not before? You can see why if you examine the industrial condition of England at that epoch. They had reached the point of progress where only the steam-engine was needed to drag countless wealth out of the bowels of the earth, to make fabrics which should glut the market of the world. Why is it that in America we first reached those wonderful improvements in agricultural implements which have revolutionized the cultivation of the soil? It was because our vast prairies were beyond the hoe and the rake. To-day thousands and thousands of minds are at work on electricity. A hundred years ago you might have counted them with your fingers. A hundred years have made the world rich enough to have electric lights to make their cities blaze with illumination. T. B. REED.

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Note 32.

PROTECTION OF AMERICAN CITIZENS.

It is said by the apologists of British arrogance and American pusillanimity that under the act of Parliament, known as the coercion act, it is lawful for men and women to be arrested, sentenced, and indefinitely imprisoned who have committed no crime, and are charged with none, but who have fallen under the suspicion of the spies and informers of the British Government. We hear these unfortunate captives styled "suspects," not criminals, but "suspects."

They are not alleged to have violated any law, but they are suspected of an intention to discuss those questions, as old as human existence, which involve the scant measure of bread on their poor tables, and the hard beds on which they and their children sleep. The law of sworn accusation, indictment, public trial, and conviction before imprisonment under sentence, has given way to the law of suspicion. There can be no more atrocious system of jurisprudence than this; there can be no blacker crime committed by a Government against its own citizens, or those who happen to sojourn within its barbarous jurisdiction. Tiberius, imprisoning and slaughtering Roman citizens upon suspicions poured into his ears by his infamous parasite, Sejanus, presented not such a spectacle of horror as the British Government in its policy toward Ireland now presents.

The evil-minded tyrant of Rome lived in a darker age than this. He was a heathen; this is the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and near its majestic close. Such an enactment as the coercion act now in operation in Ireland cannot be law at this period of the world; it is the subversion of law; it openly assaults every element of justice, human and divine; it grapples with and seeks to overturn those immutable, eternal, inherent rights of man which are higher and stronger than all the acts of repressive legislation in the entire annals of despotism. If it is claimed that a government has the right to legislate for its own

citizens as it pleases: even this cannot be admitted without qualification. The civilized nations of the earth are not compelled to stand silently by and see one of their number convert itself into a prison or a charnel-house. International law recognizes a point where they may interfere in the interests of humanity. But I am only insisting now that Great Britain shall not be allowed to consign American citizens to chains and death, whatever she may do with her own, by virtue of an act which uproots, overturns, and annihilates every vestige of freedom and law.

I am insisting that when the American, "be he a nativeborn or naturalized citizen," goes abroad in the peaceful pursuit of his own affairs, whether of business or pleasure, the nationality which he carries shall protect him as well from judicial as from clandestine murder; from the illegal acts of foreign governments as well as from the brutal conduct of foreign mobs. Under existing treaties with foreign powers American citizens who happen within their jurisdiction are entitled to the best, not the worst, treatment which these powers can furnish to their own people. Less than this would render our citizenship a delusion and a snare to all who relied upon it in the hour of need.

Let us look this momentous question plainly in the face. We can less afford to ignore it or trifle with it than any other government on the globe. All our interests, traditions, and every sentiment of sacred honor bind us to the most vigilant protection of our citizens wherever they may be and whatever their nativity. The American Republic was established by the united valor and wisdom of the lovers of liberty from all lands. The Frenchman with his gay disregard of danger, the German with his steady courage, the Pole with his high enthusiasm, and the Irishman with all these qualities combined were here in the long and bloody contest for American independence. Lafayette, the beloved of Washington; Hamilton, who rode by his side and assisted to organize the Government; Pulaski, who fell at the head of his legion at Savannah; DeKalb, who died

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upon the field with his sabre wounds in front; Montgomery, who gave up his life in the storm of Quebec; Steuben, the accomplished military organizer; Kosciusko, with his genius and daring; and large numbers of their followers and associates, were born under alien skies and came to the banquet of battle and death because of their love of human freedom. On every battle-plain of the Revolution, from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, the bones of their countrymen have long since crumbled to dust; and at every subsequent period of American history the foreign-born citizen, in council and in field, has been faithful to the common cause for which his ancestry bled.

DANIEL W. VOORHEES.

Note 33.

THE OLD-FASHIONED MAN OF GOD.

(Abridged.)

THE old-fashioned man of God was and still is a tremendous force in the world. We are now living on his virtue, such as we have. We are now directing our children to walk in the paths he cut out for us, though we wander away a good deal ourselves. Strength is necessary; refinement is optional; righteousness and justice are the only foundations, while culture and art are only ornamentation. In the race of life Isaac beats Ishmael, Jacob, Esau. "A short distance the sense is omnipotent,” said a Yankee sage; but for all that the spiritual qualities rule the world and the old Puritans, who feared God and paid attention to conduct, have never been whipped. If the sycophants were too many for him in England, he sailed to Plymouth Rock, waited 150 years, and took his revenge at Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Matthew Arnold fancies Shakespeare on board the Mayflower and insinuates he would have found the Pilgrims uncongenial company and very dull. Perhaps, for Shakespeare was as shrewd in money-making as any Con