  A party is reported in Ohio claiming to organize C. L. S. C. local circles, taking collections, etc. Now be it known that no agents for such purposes are appointed by the Chautauqua authorities. Such self-appointed agents are likely to be swindlers. Our workers render their services voluntarily. We appoint no agents. General Gordon’s proclamation of freedom for slave-holding and slave-dealing in the Soudan has created a great surprise. It is even suggested that his religious enthusiasm has toppled over into insanity. Perhaps we can not hope to understand the case. But we need not misunderstand the facts. Slavery was never practically abolished in that country. Even in Egypt it continues to exist. General Gordon has not reËstablished slavery. Starting from that fact, we may easily reach the inference that the heroic and simple-minded Gordon has merely done away with one of the pretexts by means of which corrupt Egyptian officials plundered the natives. Slavery can not be abolished by slave-traders, and their ways of enforcing any law which naturally renders it odious and despicable. John Ruskin is not always exactly level with common sense, but perhaps he is nearly right in saying “Never buy a copy of a picture. It is never a true copy.” It would probably be much wiser in people who pay considerable sums for copies of old paintings if they spent their money upon inferior original works by living artists. We have come to a place where the tide should turn in favor of our own young artists; and we believe the turn in the tide is not far ahead. The weather prophets have let us alone this winter. But on the Pacific coast a sidewalk philosopher has tried to explain the cold weather of the sunset slope. He says that an earthquake off the coast of Japan has filled up the Straits of Sunda, and so diverted the warm current that should flow to the coast of Oregon. This is an improvement upon the last prophet, who regulated the weather astrologically—by studying the positions of the stars. The new man comes back to the earth and is chiefly at fault in his facts. We welcome him in the room of the astrologer of last year. “Ruined by speculation.” They have to keep that “head” standing in the newspaper offices. The last case which has fallen under eye is that of a bank in Philadelphia, whose manager speculated in tin. When a bank fails, or a trustee betrays a trust, we always ask: “What did he speculate in?” The story is trite. We know of nothing better to write than the laconic advice of General Clinton B. Fisk: “Don’t!” Sir James Caird was part of a commission to study the causes of the great famine in India in 1876-7, and has written a book on the subject. The trouble of course is that the farmers are poor, their methods bad, and that population keeps ahead of the food supply. One mode of relief is emigration. This reminds us that Charles Kingsley, who studied the Hindoo laborers in the West Indies, wrote very enthusiastically of their qualities. Will the Hindoos come into our own South, and what will come of it? In the West Indies, Kingsley says that negro and Hindoo lived and worked together peacefully. We may not like it, but that side of the world is top-heavy with humanity, and steam will go on distributing the people among the less crowded nations. What is money worth in this country? The discussions at Washington, and the prices of government bonds, seem to show that it is worth between two and three per cent., and there is not much doubt that a hundred-year government bond bearing only two per cent. would sell at par. An incident in New York City confirms this opinion. A recent call for bids on city bonds bearing three per cent. interest, and payable in five years or thirty, at the will of the city, was answered by bids for six times the amount required at from par up to 103?. If short New York threes are at a premium, a long government two would be worth par. Why, then, it will be asked, do we pay from six to ten per cent. in different parts of the country? The answer is that risk and superintendence of short loans makes the difference. The real value of money is found by taking for a measure long loans, in which there is absolutely no risk. The Times of New York expresses the opinion that thirty-year threes of that city would sell at 115. A correspondent of the New York Evening Post furnishes some interesting incidents in the life of Joel Barlow, the father of American epic poetry. Redding, Conn., was the early home of Barlow, and the visitor is shown the house in which the poet constructed his commencement poem in 1778. It is said that Barlow’s one romance was a common one among college students. He fell in love with a sweet girl whom he privately married soon after graduation. He served as a chaplain in the Continental army, but at Redding he is best remembered as the promoter of several industrial enterprises designed to promote the welfare of the town. Barlow was not a great father of our epic, but his sons have, perhaps, not greatly surpassed him. The enthusiasm of science, in alliance with the passion of boys for killing birds, is making trouble in Massachusetts. The taxidermists want birds to stuff, and average boys want to slay birds. The law is loose, and any boy can get a license to kill birds in the service of science. The dead birds are oftener eaten than stuffed. The song birds and insectivorous birds are rapidly diminishing. Of course the boys rob the nests of the birds and kill the young in the nests. There is a period in a boy’s life when he loves such work. Maine has abolished the system of licensing taxidermists, in consequence of the wholesale slaughter of birds that went on under that system. There is no doubt that the tobacco habit, or any other bad habit, can be more easily overcome with the aid of prayer than Congress is struggling with a foreign copyright bill. The bill is a bungling one and really opens the American market to free trade in books. This may be desirable, but it is well to keep distinct measures in different baskets. The free book question belongs in the tariff bill. International copyright means putting a foreign author on a level with the home author. We ought to do it without delay, but we need not confer any favors on foreign publishers in a copyright bill. We have international patent-right, but we did not think it necessary when we protected the foreign inventor to put the foreign maker of the inventor’s machines under shelter of the “Free List.” John Bright is still the most vigorous handler of a rhetorical club in all England. In the course of the great debate, last month, in the House of Commons, the Tories of high birth were badly represented by two or three orators of their rank. Mr. Bright crushed them fine by saying that “the brothers and sons of dukes use language more virulent, more coarse, more offensive and more ungentlemanly than is heard from a lower rank of speakers.” We suspect that the sentence is the reporter’s, not Bright’s; but the rebuke which he administered made a sensation which reminded Englishmen of the days when he described the political “Cave of Adullam” and its inhabitants. The Prussian Chamber of Deputies recently debated the question of dueling, especially in the universities. A critical member began it by complaining of the idleness, drinking, gaming and dueling of the students. The curiosity which the debate brought to light is the fact that though dueling is forbidden by law, it has powerful friends in the Chamber and the government. Germany has forbidden the barbaric custom; but young Germans grow up in the belief that dueling is manly, and their seniors remember that they had the same disease in the universities. The German people are very sensitive to foreign criticism on this point; and probably the other civilized nations will by and by ridicule German dueling out of existence. Curiosities of speech are always interesting, and it is a delightful business for grammatical people to scold their neighbors. The New York Tribune has had a bout with a few score correspondents on the duties of the neuter verb between subject and predicate; which must it agree with? The Tribune says with the real subject; the other folks say there are two subjects, and that the verb must agree with the last. All the malcontents quote “The wages of sin is death.” The Tribune has three or four answers; its best is that death is the true subject; its second best is that wages used to be singular. In “The Contributors’ Club” of the Atlantic Monthly, another class of errors is discussed, such as the dropping of h in which and when, a common thing in and around New York, and the suppression of r in many words. The English say lud, we say lawd. While just touching this interesting topic we call attention to a Meadville eccentricity. It is the rising inflection at the end of questions, such as, “Is he sick?” Can any reader tell us whether this locution (or rather inflection) is a localism only? There is a lamentably large number of illiterates in the United States. Let us reduce the number as fast as possible. But let us stop assuming that the spelling book will rub the Decalogue into the conscience. Our immediate troubles and dangers come from literates who are as bright as lightning, and almost as destructive. We shall not get moral education by way of the spelling book. The statistical proof that we do is defective. We may count up the illiterate rogues in prison with much satisfaction, if we forget that the literate rogues are too smart to be caught and caged. Moral character does not result from intellectual training. Thirty years ago we had this straight, and taught that an educated bad man was a much more dangerous beast than an uneducated bad man. A few kind-hearted people have for several years conducted a crusade against horse-shoes. They claim that the horse-shoe is a piece of unprofitable cruelty. They furnish examples and drive their own horses unshod. Among their examples is this: “In Africa, a horse working in a post-cart does, barefoot, over hard ground, twenty-four miles in two hours.” One view is that our horse-shoeing bill would pay off the national debt in a few generations. It is rather remarkable that these reformers do not receive more attention. We hope they will soon get the general ear; hence this note. President Eliot, of Harvard, in a recent address, makes a suggestion which is likely to arrest attention. The clergy are likely to have a monopoly of classical education, perhaps of liberal education, if present tendencies are not overcome. One of these tendencies is to give candidates for the ministry a monopoly of Greek study in colleges. President Eliot thinks that increased and more thorough study of English may help in resisting the tendency toward purely mechanical education. English study of a thorough sort requires and promotes classical study. We add our thought that real liberal education is a fruit of study after the school-boy discipline, and that a classical revival and an English literature revival are both clear possibilities of the Chautauquan organization and methods. The most thorough study, with the best helps, is within the plan of our university. Salmi Morse was last year at this time struggling to exhibit his “Passion Play” in New York. The religious feeling of the country won a conspicuous victory in defeating the purpose of Mr. Morse. Near the end of last month the dramatist drowned himself in the East river, and an actress whose relations to him were questionable, is trying to gain notoriety by a theory that a rejected suitor of hers murdered Mr. Morse. There are a dozen good morals in the story. Frederick Douglas having at 70 married a white wife, the public has had to listen to a great many homilies on the general subject of inter-marriage among races. We are not about to add another to the long list of sociological essays. We suggest two things: First, it is best to leave the whole matter to individuals. Therefore, the laws which forbid marriage between whites and blacks should be repealed. Second, the real evil—if there be one—is scarcely touched by the prohibitive laws. As Mr. Douglas puts it: It is permitted to white men to beget children by dark-skinned mothers, provided they do not marry these mothers of their copper-colored children. The nobler of two ignoble white men—the one who marries the black mother of his children—should be left in peace until we can invent some means of punishing the ignoble wretch who does not marry her. The former is a very rare man; the growing lights in the African face show us that the other men are numerous. Everybody has heard of the “Great Eastern” steamship, an eighth of a mile long and thirty feet under water. The great ship was a failure, and after an unsuccessful pursuit of genteel occupations for many years, she has gone to Gibraltar to be used as a coal hulk. If any sailor ever loved this leviathan, he The honors paid to the dead Arctic explorers in New York, on Washington’s birthday, lost none of their significance by the association. The flags were at the peak in honor of the father of his country, in the morning; in the afternoon they dropped to half-mast in memorial mourning for the heroes of the ill-fated “Jeannette.” To young eyes seeing both memorial honors, the spectacle must have been inspiring—as showing that the paths to glory are still open to heroic souls. The booming guns, the wistful and reverent throngs, the military tramping along the streets, all had the same cheering lesson. We do not measure men or honor them by success; for utter failure heroically faced we have the funeral pageant and the historic record. We are not at all interested in the North Pole. We soberly think the Arctic exploration business a foolhardy one. But we forget our indifference, and our sober judgment, when we meet the cold corpses of those who have vainly fought the cruel North—and say, “Well done; like heroes you died; like heroes you shall be buried.” In the graduating list published in the February Chautauquan, the name “J. Van Alstyne,” from New Jersey, should be Wm. L. Van Alstyne, Jr.; also the name Emily Hancock, which appears under New York, should be under Indiana, and “Mrs. John Romeo,” of New York, should read Mrs. John Romer. A correspondent kindly calls our attention to two errors in The Chautauquan for February. We “stand corrected.” Whittier’s birthday comes on December seventeenth, instead of the sixteenth, as stated on page 302, and there are thirty-eight states in the Union, not thirty-nine. decorative line
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