icans brag and are personally disagreeable, melancholy that the progress of the world we are to accept in America as evidence of should be stopped by the wretched fear of degeneracy. The war, so far from destroy- democracy produced by the conflict; meling all that is good in them, is annealing ancholy that eight millions of human beings the hearts of the nation-hardening them, should be encountering death to retain the we fear-but burning out also the dross. slaves whom the twenty millions who fight for them will not enfranchise; most melancholy of all that in the providence of God we who introduced slavery, must, though now free of the stain, bear our share in the consequences of that great crime. There is misery in store for the South and for the North; for the man-stealers and those who have legalized the theft; for the toiling millions of Lancashire, and for those who supply the object of their labor. But among those miseries the greatest of all, the degeneracy of a branch of the Anglo-Saxon race of the only people who amidst many errors and many crimes are still consciously toiling on to a higher future-will assuredly not be found. "But the war can end only in one way. Why not accept the facts, and let the South begone?" Simply because Americans are only Englishmen in their shirt-sleeves, and while a hope remains they cannot give way. Pluck and tenacity, however unreasonable, are not exactly signs of degeneracy. We fought for years to keep colonies which the greatest men among us declared all the time we should be unable to conquer; and though we recognize the folly of our persistence it has not injured our national character. The North is plunging itself in debt? True, and better so than plunge into a system of requisitions which the French tried after exhausting assignats, and without certainly much apparent degeneracy. They are eating up their future. We have one nevertheless, who have bitten just five times as From The Spectator, 19 July. deeply into the cake. America has still not GENERAL MCCLELLAN'S DEFEAT. incurred a larger debt than we contracted to conquer the States, though we had then THERE is to our minds something heroic but half the American population. "She is in the present attitude of the American peodestroying the source of population." It is ple, something of antique grandeur which true the waste of life is most fearful, but it for the hour it is not the fashion to expect must in any case be less than the destruc- of a republic. Every misfortune which could tion caused by the Irish famine-a catastro- befall a people in revolution has in one short phe we have survived, and which too many week fallen upon their heads, and they reof us in our secret hearts do not to this main undismayed. The incapacity of their hour regret. "The Union has surrendered most trusted general has been conclusively its principle, the right of mankind to choose proved. A whole campaign, with its awful their own form of government." That expenditure of blood, and treasure, and grand principle is ours also, but we are not energy, has been, so to speak, thrown away. going to poll India, nor if Ireland rebelled The main army of the Union has sustained to-morrow should we dream of the peaceful a severe, it may be a destructive, defeat. ballot-box. A nation must exist before it The Government, by suppressing news, percan proclaim any principles whatever, and verting information, and, we fear, by conthough we can conceive of a people so loftily scious and wilful falsehood, has done its consistent that they would carry out a grand puny best to convert a check into a fatal principle which visibly involved their own catastrophe. A tax bill, heavy and searchdestruction, that is not a height to which ing beyond all precedent, has been imposed we have attained, nor does it lie in our on men who supposed themselves exempt mouths to charge the Northern people with from taxation. A new campaign, still more failure to reach a standard of virtue from costly, still more deadly to life, and possibly which we ourselves recoil. There are as ineffectual, has been rendered inevitable. enough causes of sadness in this American And still the American people, without a war without charges of degeneracy addressed general, without a statesman, doubting their to the only race who, save ourselves, stand rulers, and almost despairing of their chiefs, up for the right of political freedom. It is abate no jot of heart or hope, are ready to * risk all if only their country may be kept arms, and further levies will press terribly entire, meet defeat by reinforcements, on the supply of labor. But they must, slaughter by fresh levies, and financial dan- from their numbers, be able at least to outger by measures which, though the wise last the foes. A conscription to which the know them to be folly, are intended to dis- South has now had recourse is always more play the height of revolutionary vigor. The deadly than any system of volunteering, beNorth may be utterly wrong in their object, cause it draws the unfit into the ranks, and and are certainly unwise in their means, but a levy en masse, though it fills all gaps, in no other case have Englishmen ever re- drains the country of its reserves. fused the credit due to national vigor, te- To men who have seen a tropical delta, such nacity, and pluck. Had Austria in 1848 an undertaking seems a chimera, unless the displayed but half as much, men would have North has the aid of disciplined and acclimsaid that however excellent the cause of atized troops. They may have that even Hungary might be, there was a capacity for yet if they choose to arm the slaves, and it endurance, found only in these old Houses, is to this end that all these events seem which was of itself a qualification to rule. tending. The answer of General Hunter to Being displayed by Americans, who, like Congress, reported by this mail, is the most Frenchmen, talk through their noses, and, significant fact yet recorded in the struggle like ourselves, are given to extend their He was asked whether he was really arming dominion and believe it a blessing in se, fugitive slaves, and replied that he knew no those high qualities are denounced as ex- such persons, but that he was arming black hibitions of arrogant obstinacy. loyalists who had quitted their traitorous masters, and hoped before the year was over to have forty-eight thousand of them in the field. They were eagerly attending to drill. If Congress, in this supreme hour of the nation, rejects or censures that proposition, then indeed the struggle is over, and the North must either consent to see the Union dissolved or mortgage its future in a struggle without meaning or termination. If, on the other hand, it is accepted, the war will change its character, and the Federal Government will have at its disposal a force requiring no pay save freedom, and no rations save bread and rice, which can camp anywhere without fear, and penetrate anywhere without danger, which cannot hide itself if it would, and which dare not be taken prisoner. A negro army may yet be the solution of the negro question, for discipline would prevent excesses, and the soldiers who have fought faithfully and with success can never be objects of hate to those whom they have protected. The defeat of McClellan presses home once more the alternative he has always rejected—the dismemberment of the United States, or their freedom for all who inhabit them. There is not as yet a sign that the people are tired of the war. The meeting in Cooper's Hall, which was hailed in London as a harbinger of peace, was composed of the Rump of the old pro-slavery politicians, led by Fernando Wood, and addressed by Border State politicians, and, even under these circumstances, did not venture to ask for peace without entire submission. The grim "dourness" which underlies the Teutonic character, German as well as AngloSaxon, is fairly roused; and what of arms, men, and matériel may be required, will assuredly not be lacking. Whether all this devotion will suffice to attain its end is a widely different question. The war, in the first place, has been thrown back for at least another year. A purely agricultural people like the Southerners can remain in arms like a Tartar tribe till the supply of men falls short, but the North will be pressed by many, perhaps by insuperable, difficulties. Their supply of men, it is true, terrible as the drain has been, will probably prove sufficient. They have now called out a million of soldiers, or very nearly one-fifth of the whole population capable of bearing THE DEATH OF BUCKLE, THE HIS- To the Editor of the Times: SIR,-It is my painful duty to announce, not only to his nearer friends and relatives, as I have already done, but also, through you, to the world iuterested in the author of the "History of Civilization in England," the death of Mr. Buckle, on Thursday, the 29th of May, of typhus fever, at Damascus. He had overworked himself, and suddenly felt the effects of it after the publication of his second volume last spring. In October he left England, accompanied by two boys, the sons of a friend, and spent the winter on the Nile. He was so much better that in the beginning of March we left Cairo together for Sinai and Petra. Greatly improved in health by the six weeks in the Desert, he undertook the more fatiguing travelling on horseback through Palestine. Again his ardent temperament, or rather, as I now think, the restlessness of an over-excited nervous system, made him do too much, and, though on the 27th of April he expressed himself as feeling never to have been in better health in his life, he was that day seized with diarrhoea, and afterwards with an attack of sore throat, which detained us at Nazareth for more than a week. He never recovered his Desert strength, and we had to stop a couple of days more than we had proposed at Sidon, and take the earliest, though least interesting, route to Damascus. At the sudden view of that famous plain, on emerging from the rocky defile on the eastern ridge of Antilebanon, he exclaimed, "It is worth more than all the pain and fatigue it has cost me." Alas! how much more it was to cost him. The fatigue again brought on diarrhoea. The quantity of opium prescribed, though small, yet, with his peculiar constitution, produced delirium for about a quarter of an hour, and it was touching to hear him exclaim in the midst of his incoherent utterances, "Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book!" The French medical officer, however, whom he consulted, not only assured him, but myself privately, that there was nothing whatever to fear, only that it would be advisable that he should give up the proposed excursion to Baalbeck and through the Lebanon, and return by the French carriage road to Beyrout. On these assurances, and finding him apparently much better on the 21st, I regret to say I was induced to leave him, and go the long route through the Lebanon alone, in the confident expectation, however, that I should find him waiting me at Beyrout, reinvigorated by the sea air, and ready to proceed on our journey to Greece and Turkey. I need not say how shocked I was to hear at the Consulate yesterday (31st of May) that, on the evening of the day I left Damascus (the 21st), he was seized with typhus fever, sank into an unconscious stupor on the 26th, died, and was buried on the 29th. One thing, I confess, I fear may have hastened the end; he was leeched. But the kindness and attention of our Acting-Consul, Mr. Sandwith, the American Missionary, Mr. Robson, and the American physician, Dr. Barclay, who went up expressly from Beyrout, must be warmly acknowledged. The stimulants applied by the latter had only the effect of producing the partial and very temporary return to consciousness which preceded his decease. Thus, at the early age of thirty-nine, died one whose death, I think, more than the partiality of a friend, makes me consider him a national loss. It is left for us but to hope that he is now enjoying that immortality without the hope of which, as he once said to me with tears in his eyes, "life would be insupportable," and in the more immediate presence, and with deeper knowledge of that God in whom he firmly believed. And so, passing through the ruins of the Christian quarter, outside the walls, on the same day he died, as the sun set over that mountain ridge from which with such delight he had but ten days before-such is the irony of life-gazed on his deathbed, in the small Protestant cemetery, its trees torn up, and its eight or ten tombstones broken by fanatical Mahomedans, he was interred. Mr. Buckle's delicate health as a boy caused him to be taken early from school, and prevented his being sent to college. On the death of his father he succeeded at eighteen to a considerable fortune, but, despising its temptations, he devoted himself to study. His chief recreation was chess, and he could number Loewenthal among the vanquished. He early attracted the notice of such men as Hallam and Bunsen, and gained their esteem as a young man of great promise. With all the comforts and advantages of book collecting and of travelling afforded by fortune, he lived a happy student's life, and had in the course of it but one great grief. As to Mr. Buckle's works, it would be impossible for me to say much without such obtrusion of my own opinions as would be here and now utterly out of place. But this I may say, that the three great theses of his book have never yet been sufficiently or at all considered. Hence, great part of what has been said in the reviews may be true, and yet the book in its pith and marrow stand. These three theses, chiefly to be drawn from the second and fourth chapters, are: 1. Political economy- the science of wealth is the deductive science through which the investigation of natural is connected with that of social phenomena, and thus the way prepared for one universal sci ence. 2. The laws of society are different from those of the individual; and the method of averages, with which has to be compared the mathematical theory of probabilities, is that by which the former are to be investigated. 3. In social phenomena the intellectual, in individual the moral, laws are chiefly or alone to be considered; all moral social changes are thus preceded by intellectual changes. should be glad, so far as his own feelings were concerned, to see the third disproved. And as to that account of the history of civilization in Scotland which, under the misrepresentation of reviews, has been so little welcomed by my own countrymen, I may add that he himself admitted that, for the great and complete historian, the profound moral and religious sympathy of the poet, in which he was wanting, is almost as necessary as the analytical power of the philosopher; and it was his enthusiasm for liberty that made him intolerant of intolerance. Though Mr. Buckle's lamentable death leaves undone not only so much of what he intended, but of what he has prepared elaborate materials for, I am glad to say that his posthumous works may be no less valuable than those which have already appeared. I fear that the outlined essays, "On the Ultimate Causes of the Interest of Money," "On Bacon," (which would have been chiefly an essay on Method,) "On Shakspeare," and "On the Influence of Northern Palestine on the Origin of Christianity," may not be found in a sufficient state of forwardness to be published, as he proposed, collectively with the papers he had contributed to Fraser's Magazine; but great parts of the special "History of Civilization in England" exist ready for publication, and his common-place books, with their immensely varied, yet methodically arranged extracts, will form the most curious, interesting, and valuable collection of materials that has, probably, ever yet been With these three theses might be very clearly shown to be connected all his scientific opinions; as might all his opinions on morals and politics be shown to group themselves about his conception of liberty as non-published as the work of a single English interference. Thus the moral law became merely negative: Do not hurt yourself or others. But, as I have said, how far these views are true, or how far original, cannot here be considered. It may, however, be observed, that, though he held firmly by the second of the above theses, he often said he EARLY RISING. THROUGH my wide window streams the sun, student, and their publication will be accord- I am, Sir, your obedient servant, Beyrout, June 1. Calling the bees to quit their hive, And milkmaids each their own kine hail. Where cheeks grow ruddy, round, and fair. POETRY.-Men of the Northland! 386. Woman's Gift to the War, 386. Robert Burns, 401. Rome and Pekin, 414. SHORT ARTICLES.-An Attempt to Bite, 420. NEW BOOKS. THE MILLENNIUM: the Good Time Coming. With a History of Experiments on the Odic Force. By the Author of Millennial Institutions, The Seventh Vial, and The Theological Mystery. Springfield: Samuel Bowles & Co. [We have not been able to read much of this work. There are two conversations with St. Matthew, but as he had to say Yes or No-and no more, (only answering questions,)—and as he is dismissed after a few answers, we have had little profit from him.] PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. |