The American Commonwealth, by James Bryce (Macmillan & Co.).—The thoughtful citizen of the United States who opens this book from any other motive than mere curiosity will be apt to close it again greatly disappointed. So far as information is concerned, one might as well read a debate of the Senate. If it is from curiosity as to what an Englishman of Professor Bryce's ability and culture may think and say of us that the work is read, then the work will be found of interest. It is so rare for one of Britain's citizens, cultured or uncultured, to care for us, that the novelty alone commands attention. It was surly old Sam Johnson who said to a feminine owner of a parrot, in reply to her query as to whether the loquacious bird did not talk well, "Madam, the wonder is, not that it talks well, but that it talks at all." This great American nation is an object of utter indifference to the people of Europe; and among the so-called upper classes we are under contempt, when noticed, from the rising of the sun to the setting thereof.

Professor Bryce writes of us in a flattering way, but without information. The maze of contradiction that besets him on all sides seems not to have even embarrassed, let alone discouraged, him. Like a locomotive threading its way along a network of rails into a depot, he has his own track and runs smoothly along, as if there were but one, and quite regardless of the many others crossing and recrossing at every rod of progress. Fixing one eye on the central government at Washington and the other on the State governments, he treats us as a people from these two points, and would doubtless be amazed to learn that these political structures not only do not make our government, but are so widely separated from our associations and interests that they might be annihilated to-day without people being aware of their loss, save from the relief of taxation found in their destruction.

One can comprehend the consternation of foreigners at this bold assertion, when we recognize the fact that its avowal will bring forth not only denial, but an expression of disgust from about sixty-five millions of citizens born under and naturalized to this republic of ours. Yet it is truth; and to comprehend it we must remember that a constitution is an agreement or compact, entered into directly or indirectly by the citizens governed, whereby all legislation, executive control, and judicial decisions are to be under the control of, and bound and limited by, certain rules of a general nature clearly stated and set forth in said instrument. Now as the trouble attending constitutional law, as that of every other sort, is not in the law itself, but in its application, the constitution, to be at all available, has to be as simple, general, and limited as possible. The most perfect and practical is a mere declaration of principles that leaves all legislation to the wants, habits, and intelligence of the people. As statutory law is merely public opinion defined and promulgated by a legislature, it follows that the mere declaration of rights found in a charter is continually infringed upon by what may be called the unwritten constitution that grows imperceptibly about us, and is in the end the controlling constitution. Let us give a familiar illustration. There is nothing, for example, in our Constitution that prohibits the people from re-electing a President as often as the people see right to indulge in that process. Yet when ex-President Grant saw fit to demand a third term, he was treated as if he were violating the sacred charter given us by the fathers.

We believe in our Constitution—and go on violating its plainest provisions with utter indifference. We resemble that Southern gentleman who had the Lord's Prayer printed on the head-board of his bed, and who every night and morning rapped on it with his cane to call attention to the ceremony, and said solemnly, "O Lord, them's my sentiments."

We are a nation of phrase-eaters. As we have said before, all the fruit of the tree of knowledge has been canned—duly labelled and stowed away for winter use. There is no people on the face of the earth so given to a reliance on an abiding faith in dogmas. Our safety on earth and our salvation hereafter rest on a belief in dogmas. As a man may be guilty of every crime known to the criminal code and yet save his election through an avowal of belief in certain articles of faith, so we may consider ourselves safe if we abide by certain declarations of political principles. The theological and political avowals of faith may be violated with impunity in practice, yet there is a saving grace in words we fail to appreciate.

The origin of this strange condition is not difficult to find. Our continent was settled from Europe by two classes. One of these, the Puritans, fled from England to escape religious persecution. This persecution consisted in forbidding the theological rebels from openly expressing in prayer, hymn, or pulpit certain dogmas. They braved the perils of the seas and the privations of a howling wilderness that they might open their pious mouths and expand their pious lungs in a vociferous announcement of what they believed of abstract theology. The other class was made up of pirates who sought our continent, mainly south, in search of gold-mines and mythical riches in the hands of barbarians. And so between the two we became a race of phrase-eaters. As the theological dogma was considered good for the soul, a like political dogma was, and is, enough for the body politic. And how this is acted on we learn from the beginning. The Puritans, whose peculiar civilization dominated our nation, fled from persecution, not to establish toleration—for they went to hanging Quakers and Dissenters as soon as they landed in New England. Under this sort of government the lawless spirit of the pirates had full sway, and to-day, if we have a national characteristic, it is that we have more law and less order than any people on earth.

This condition makes us capable of the most extraordinary contradictions. We have, for example, a so-called republic at Washington that is practically a despotism. It is not the despotism of one man or of an oligarchy of men. It is a singularly contrived despotism of office—a bureaucracy that is not only of an irresponsible routine without brains, but enforced by fines, penalties, and heavy taxation. It is so removed from popular control that self-government terminates at the boundary-line of the District of Columbia. The people living under the very shadow of the Capitol are deprived of even the form of government; but practically they are in no worse condition than the citizens of the States. The so-called republic is a heavy, dull, cast-iron, unimpressive concern, slowly moved by public opinion, but utterly insensible to popular political control. We have a President elected every four years. After he is inaugurated he cannot be disturbed for four years except by office-seekers or assassination. We have a Senate representing States, where Delaware or Rhode Island has as much power as New York or Pennsylvania, and its members are returned every six years. The House of Representatives is the one popular body, but its members, returned every two years, are no match for the Senate and Executive, that hold the political patronage which makes and unmakes members of the House.

This, in brief, is our condition politically. There is another significant feature that escapes both native and foreign attention. It is the theory that underlies the foundation of all, and teaches that the sovereignty from which there is no appeal rests in the people. This is a very loose, uncertain, and really helpless affair. The old adage tells us that what is every man's affair is no man's business. We have so multiplied elections that they are almost continuous. This forms party organization, to which the business is intrusted, and again creates a class of professional politicians whose one business in life is politics. It is human nature that they should seek to make their vocation profitable. Here is where money enters; and we have seen the government pass from a mere political structure to a commercial machine dominated by money. The taxes for the support of the government have become enormous, but they make but a trifle to the indirect extortion, based on a pretence of encouraging home industries, which selects such certain unprofitable investments, and taxes the entire population for not only their support but their enrichment. The amount thus collected for the benefit of the few is enormous. It would support the standing armies of all Europe.

One searches in vain through the Constitution to find in letter or spirit any authority for such abuse.

This absurd system of government might work in a small, compact community where all the citizens were known to each other, their offices few, and their interests identical. But with sixty-odd millions scattered over a continent that reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, and with these millions isolated from each other in agricultural pursuits, the system is impossible of practical operation.

This is the philosophy of American politics that Professor Bryce fails to grasp. He devotes his first volume to a consideration of the political structure as given us by its framers, as if such were in power and daily practice. He cannot see that it has gone out of existence as a constitutional government. We have in its stead a government of corporations, with the political machine as an annex and aid.

To understand this we must remember that a government is that active organization which directly affects the citizens' rights to life, liberty, and the uses and benefits of their labor, called property by some, and "the pursuit of happiness" by the Declaration of Independence. How the corporations have come to usurp this power a few statistical facts teach us. We have, for example, a hundred-and-sixty thousand miles of operating railroads. These network the entire land, and have the almost exclusive distribution of all our products. This vast instrument, possessed of sovereignty through the franchise, enters every man's business and pleasure. It is under the control and virtual ownership of less than sixty families.

We have the telegraph, which science gave us as the poor man's post-office, consisting as it does of a pole, a wire, a battery, and a boy, made a luxury for the rich in the monopoly that gives it to one man.

All that one eats, wears, and finds shelter under are, through this same process of corporation monopoly, enhanced in cost for the benefit of the few privileged men who grow rapidly into millionaires, while the masses suffer.

This is our government.

Our readers must not charge us with exaggeration. We have statistics, not to be disputed, as to the existence of the power, and we have high authority for the charge regarding the despotic use of the power. Speaking of the railroad corporations, Messrs. Conkling, Sherman, and Windom said, years since, in their celebrated report to the Senate: "They [the railroad companies] can tax our products at will in a way Congress never dare attempt." Now the fiscal agency found in the power to tax is the highest attribute of sovereignty. Because of the usurpation in a British parliament accomplished in the attempt to tax colonies of Americans without their consent we had the War of Independence. Our fathers marched shoeless, tentless, and in rags under muskets for seven years to vindicate a principle that we surrender to the corporations. "They rise above all control, and are a law unto themselves," said President Garfield. "They rob the producers on one side and the stockholders on the other," cried the late Jeremiah S. Black, "and sit on our highways of commerce as did the robber barons on the rivers of Europe. They make members of the House, purchase seats in the Senate, select for us candidates for the Presidency, and own our courts."

Another attribute of sovereignty, found in furnishing a currency for the people, has been seized on by something over two thousand corporations, called banks, and they can contract or expand to further their own selfish greed or that of their favorites and dependents. For thus favoring themselves they are paid a sum that would have supported the national government previous to the late war.

How this condition affects us every citizen can realize if he will reflect. The writer of this lives in a quiet valley of Ohio. He never would know that a political government exists except for the assessor and collector. His police consists of a revolver, a shot-gun, and four dogs. Wrong-doers may threaten his life, restrain his liberty, enter his stables at night, or his house at any hour, and, so far as government goes, he is his own police.

So much for our political structure. How is it with the corporations? They are with him at all hours. He cannot sell a grain of wheat nor an ounce of meat without their consent and toll. The fuel he burns has its toll, that is an extortion. The clothes he wears, the food he eats, the oil he burns by night, the glass that gives him light by day, the walls that shelter him, the shingles or slate upon the roof—in a word, all that he has to purchase or use, pays an uncalled-for tribute to extortion and monopoly.

The political structure could be annihilated, and the citizen would not know of its disappearance but for the absence of assessor and collector, and for the fact learned from the press.

This is the condition of the dweller in a rural district. The denizen of a town is not much better off. If he comes in contact with the political structure at any point, it is to his injury. He is taxed enormously to drain, pave, and light the streets. The draining is a source of peril to health, the pavements are infamous, while the light only makes darkness visible. So far as the police is concerned, it is a political body, organized and used to further the ends of professional politicians. The citizen is in more peril from the club-inclined police than he is from thieves and ruffians.

A most startling illustration of the subserviency of the political power to the moneyed combinations incorporated to ride, booted and spurred, over popular rights, as Jefferson expressed it, was given by the late tramway strikes at New York. When the conductors and drivers threw up their employment because of the starvation wages and overwork decreed by the combine, thereby putting a stop to all transportation, instead of arresting the presidents and directors, and fetching them into court to show cause why their charter should not be taken from them for a failure to fulfil their duty to the public, the entire police force was taken from duty to the public and put under control of these corporations. The rebellious laborers were clubbed into submission, while for a week New-Yorkers were forced either to walk or to trust their necks to those artfully constructed death-traps called the elevated roads.

We are not siding in this one way or the other. It may be that the laborers were all in the wrong and the corporations right, or the case may have been the reverse. To decide this is precisely what we want in a legal tribunal commanding the respect of the public. This is not to be had. The policeman's club is in the pay and under the control of the corporations, and it decides.

All these comments will be decried as unpatriotic. Patriotism with us is something akin to the love a mother has for a sick or crippled child. We are like beggars on the highways of the world, exhibiting our sores to excite, not pity, but—heaven save the mark!—admiration. Of course we cannot be expected to cure cancers that we boast of.

In the space allotted us for a review it is impossible to do justice to Professor Bryce's entertaining ignorance. His book is an amusing one, not only because the author is clever in his way of expressing himself, but because we take a strange delight in hearing opinions about ourselves and our institutions. In his first introductory sentences the author says: "'What do you think of our institutions?' is the question addressed to the European traveller in the United States by every chance acquaintance." The citizen who puts this question little notes that he is making confession of the melancholy fact that our so-called "institutions" are open to doubt. It is not complimentary to our national character that we hang with breathless interest upon the opinion and judgment of any chance foreigner regarding what we are wont to assert, among ourselves, is simply perfect.

Kady, by Patience Stapleton (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—The fetid realism of recent American fiction—the realism which, fortunately for the honor of human nature, is wholly unreal—has become fatally tiresome from persistent reiteration of one theme. Even the most morbid readers must in time weary of an endless sequence of immoralities, all of the same family, and all whitened with the scales of the same moral leprosy. When the Saxon mind descends to sensualism it becomes merely gross and brutish; for it lacks the airy sprightliness of Latin licentiousness which turns evil to gayety and compels a smile at the corners of the mouth, even while the forehead corrugates into the frown of reprobation. American blood is essentially moral, and when overheated becomes clogged and thickened, producing the antic vagaries of delirium in the oppressed brain. An American cannot be just a little wicked, as a Frenchman can. He must be sound-hearted and clean-thoughted, or he must throw off all pretence to decency and descend into the sheer obscene. This is why American erotic fiction is hysterically immoral and not delicately suggestive, and why, instead of the filmy double entendre, which you can innocently laugh at for its wit, or, with more hardihood, enjoy for its tingling spice, we have the bald, unclothed picture, whose fiery coloring and sharp outline leave no chance for doubt as to its meaning.

When this order of fiction was flung, naked and ogling, into the midst of an astonished public, there was a gasp of surprise and a general halt of indecision; while, like the monkey burned with hot molasses candy, the common countenance was petrified into a curious mixture of horror and delight. Like a hanging, a dissection, or the details of a murder, it has presented a fascination for a large number of minds; but if there were to be a man hanged every day in each of the city squares, it would not be long before people passing by would say to each other, "Pooh! only a hanging! revolting business anyway!" and walk on without so much as a second glance. And so it is, or is getting to be, with that class of fiction which has only the erotic for its cause of being. When volume after volume, issuing from the press, offers as a central point and motive a microscopic analysis of the animal side of human nature, taking for text that all men are libidinous and all women unchaste in various degrees, the ordinary reader, seeking merely for amusement, at length finds himself suffocated in the steam of moral turpitude, and craves for a breath of purer, cleaner air. Such an atmosphere, cold, fresh, and bracing as the winds which blow over the mountain region where its scene is chiefly laid, surrounds this sweetest and most delightful of recent novels, "Kady."

"Kady" is the work of a mind at once refined and vigorous. The author labors at the exposition of no trite moral. There is not a line of preaching in the book, and yet it would be a hardened nature which could rise from reading it, with his heart full of the simple nobility of Abner Clark, and commit a mean action. To recognize the reality of such a character as that of the old pioneer, simple, uneducated, and rude, yet, in the inborn impulses of his nature, nobly delicate, loftily honorable, good in the best and manliest sense—to recognize that such men have lived and do live, is to put aside into the limbo of the vacuous all philosophies of negation and sophistries of pessimism. Abner Clark is unquestionably one of the few grand creations of American fiction. He is religious, but his religion is such that an infidel might respect it. It is the broad and simple creed of love—love, with its concomitants of charity, forgiveness, and wide sympathy. The simple prayer which he offers up over the grave of the artist Harrison's mother is a masterpiece. "An' we who must keep on in the round of toil and trouble need not wish her back, who was so weary with work and pain. The hand that reared these mount'ins, that laid the lake, that colors the sunset sky, is reached down to human creeturs, to the weakest or the strongest, and takes them into His keepin'. There's a dreary life here and a happy life hereafter; ... and there's a home for us all beyond these mount'ins tall."

It is the religion of nature, the simple faith of the patriarchs of old, the belief that finds its strongest support in a noble pantheism, in the love of the Creator's handiwork, in a perception of the Omnipotent in the marvellous grandeur of material beauty. And yet this old man is neither superstitious nor weak. In order to save his young son from moral ruin and the clutches of card-sharpers, he can drink and gamble—aye, and play a game of poker like a bunco-steerer, and beat roguery before its very eyes. This game of poker, by the way, is one of the gems of the book. How the author, whose refinement of mind and heart is visible in every line of the whole story, has been able to study such scenes and such personages as this poker-party and these border roughs to such wonderful purpose, it is hard to understand. The whole incident stands out with the stern light and shadow of Salvator. It is almost brutal in its realism, but is touchingly relieved by the simple remorse of the misguided son and the rugged nobility of his father.

"I come here ternight ter save my boy an' teach him a lesson.... Now git in the boat," said Abner, "and I, a father of sixty, will row his son, a drunkard and a gambler, home."

"Oh, father," sobbed the miserable boy, "I—I never can forgive myself! I will never touch cards again!" At the shore his father laid his hand on Seeley's shoulder. "Seeley, I love ye too well to be mad with ye, but try to take the decent road, an' foller it straight."

The old man's death in the pursuit of his duty, the single word, "Forgive," to his weak and repentant son, the wild grief of his daughter Kady, touch the very centre of true pathos. Kady herself, poor, loving, wild little Kady, half savage and true woman, is a beautiful character. Greatly tempted, misunderstood, slandered, and neglected, she never, by one weak or wilful act, loses the entire sympathy of the reader. As truthful in her character of border heroine as M'liss, Kady is a much more touching and lovable creation, without the occasional repulsive traits of Bret Harte's portraiture. As her father is a true and noble gentleman, despite the accidents of birth and environment, so is his daughter, under her uncouth garb and rude speech, a true and noble woman.

Clopper, with his serene optimism, Leddy, his wife, Miss Pinkham and the cap-border, Levi Bean, Tilford Harrison the egotistical and self-persecuting artist with his miserable family, the Dennisons, Louisy and Emmeline, Madam Ferris, and Aunt Mary—a whole gallery of masterly portraits, are all instinct with life, all painted from evident sittings of originals.

If there be any marked defect in the book it is in the excess of dialect and the thinness of the background of more cultivated life. It is much to say that this book, whose style is chiefly dialect, rarely ceases to charm and never tires. The author, whose pen has so long run in the uncouth speech of this border district, occasionally forgets her own English and drops a rude construction of sentence, or a primitive term into her own lucid phrases. But these slips are rare, and it is almost hypercriticism to notice them.

On all accounts "Kady" is one of the most remarkable books of the time. Purely American, without one taint of animalism though dealing with the most primitive humanity, true, sweet, and yet masculine in its power, it is a work which will take its place in the literature of the country as a model which cannot be too closely studied or too much admired.

'Twixt Love and Law: A novel, by Annie Jenness Miller (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—Literature which neither refreshes, amuses, nor instructs has no proper place in the world of letters; and assuredly that class of literature which enervates the mind and beckons beyond the noon-mark of propriety has no rights which the critic or the moralist is bound to respect. It is a marked characteristic of that order of recent fiction which takes for text the more or less unlawful relations of the sexes, that the style should be punctuated with shrieks, and the movement be a series of hysterical writhings. A woman with keen feelings does not, at every small anticlimax of her existence, perform a hand-spring and somersault as a means of giving vent to her emotions. Neither does she go about with a nose reddened with weeping, exploding in vociferous adjectives as a means of expressing her grief. "To be always and everywhere starved! starved! starved!" wails Mrs. Miller's heroine, as a sort of footnote to a proposal of marriage which she has just declined. "Oh, how cruel it is!" Thereupon "she shivered in the clutch of her despair, and, moaning, threw herself face downward upon the bosom of Mother Earth," very much to the amaze of the rejected suitor, who promptly picks her up and "holds her against his breast." She is intense, superlatively intense. "Her white bosom tossed and rose and fell; the burnished masses of her hair escaped and rioted on the midnight air. 'Spare me! spare me! Alex! Alex! Alex!' Out of the unyielding density of the night a voice of ecstasy breathed her name." A meeting takes place in this "unyielding density" with "Alex," a married man. The heroine being in love with him and he with her, it follows as a necessary element in this class of fiction that the wife should be all that is mean, evil, shrewish, and generally detestable. In such a state of affairs a wife is a difficult problem, a nuisance, and yet very useful; for if there were no wife to interpose her uncomfortable personality between the lovers, there would be no reason for all these meetings in the "unyielding density," no exclamatory passages, no daring escapades along the very verge of the questionable, and, hence, no novel—which, all things considered, might not be so great a misfortune after all. In the course of this story, which includes much outcry, many combats with tempestuous passion, some sacrifices, a trial for attempted murder, and a divorce, the unpleasant marital impediment is comfortably put out of the way, and the lovers are safely married.

"'Twixt Love and Law" is one of those books, "not wicked, but unwise," which, whatever their ostensible moral may be, add to the perplexity and difficulty of social adjustment. Admitting that our marriage and divorce laws are unjust and ineffectual, still, to bring contempt, open or implied, upon the marriage relation, can only impede, not advance, a rational solution of the question. In nine cases out of ten vanity and loose morals are the primary causes of marital unfaithfulness in desire or act. In writing such a book as "'Twixt Love and Law," clever and often brilliant as it is, the author has not used her graceful pen and clear head to the best interests of her sex.