CURRENT TOPICS. Bribery at Election.-We hear a good deal nowadays about the corrupt practices of politicians, about packed primaries and bought nominations, about false counts and debauched voters. Probably no kind of political corruption is more serious in its moral effect than the use of money in the direct purchase of votes. That a good deal of this takes place at every election of importance there can be little doubt. For all the stringent laws in many of the States upon the subject of bribery, the evil goes on, and rarely is it found out and punished, and still more rarely does a conscience-stricken candidate refuse to perjure himself by taking the oath of office. Indeed, the public conscience seems to be so blunted with reference to all sorts of political corruptions that crimes of this sort are considered venial, and convicted criminals, if they are men who have occupied high places, are promptly pardoned. But our country is not the only one in which corrupt use of money in elections is made. If we may place any reliance upon an article in a recent number of "Blackwood's Magazine," Great Britain, the country whose institutions are most like our own, suffers from this evil much more seriously than we. The well-known conservatism of the "Blackwood" and its strong partisan bias must be taken into account in considering any article in its columns. But while this may guard us against accepting the conclusions which the writer draws from his facts, it will in no wise discredit the facts themselves. The article referred to is entitled "Before and After the Ballot," and its purpose is to show that since the widening of the right of suffrage and the introduction of the secret ballot in place of the open poll, corruption and bribery have not decreased, as the advocates of those measures claimed would be the result, but have rather increased. A return to the old system is urged. Of a canvass and an election under the old system, when candidates freely paid "£5 for a single vote and £10 for a plumper," and "did not feel demoralized by the transaction," the writer gives an exceedingly lively and interesting The candidates and their agents entered into the canvass with the greatest enthusiasm. There was visiting of houses by day, and processions and music and flying banners in great profusion, and then at night speech-making from hotel balconies, and unlimited beer and cakes at the bar. Voters were personally visited, and inducements of a tangible sort were offered to make them true to the principles they had always professed. Money was spent freely, openly; the whole period of the canvass and the election was one of general excitement and festivity. account. But since the ballot all this is sadly changed. The excitement is gone, the brass bands are silent, the cheering is less frequent and less enthusiastic. There are agents still, and all that, but the whole business of election is in different hands and carried on in an entirely different way from of old. To quote: "We have done with nomination days, VOL. XVI.-30 when the candidates had to be pilloried before the mob, fortunate if they were not overwhelmed with rotten eggs and various products of the market-place where the hustings were generally erected, and happy frequently to escape without broken bones. No rival processions now take possession of the High street and keep the town alive by smashing windows and breaking heads. Timid voters are permitted to vote without, on leaving the polling-booth, finding themselves hustled and jostled into a jelly by one of the rival parties. A dull, gloomy, melancholy event is an election under the ballot." Of course, in causing these changes the author admits that the ballot has been a source of good; though still there is in his tone a manifest sympathy with "the good old times" when smashed windows and broken heads and the like pleasing episodes served to relieve the dullness, the gloom, the melancholy of election time. In all other respects the ballot, he maintains, has been the source of unmixed evil. Bribery-and here we come upon the real object of this article—has ceased to be so open and frank as in the old days, but instead of having grown less, as was supposed would result when the voting became secret, has grown to be a monster of enormous proportions. It is no unusual thing now for voters to accept bribes from both sides. The expense of "standing" for Parliament has become so great in many places that only men of the greatest wealth can aspire to the honor. In April, 1880, at Sandwich, Lord Brabourne says the election was not contested because no Conservative could be found willing to pay £5000 on such an uncertainty; yet the constituency his lordship describes as “absolutely pure," the people as a "most honest race of men"; and in this region of Arcadian purity and honesty it seems that Mr. Brassey had spent £25,000 in two elections. Other figures of the same startling character are given. The Englishman must pay a good round sum for the honor of serving his country without salary in Parliament. The voters have principles; oh! of course, but—————— So common and flagrant and notorious has the bribery become in many boroughs, that the Attorney-General has recently introduced into the House of Commons a bill by which it is hoped that the growing evil may be checked. Bribery is to be made a criminal offense; persons convicted of it to be punished with imprisonment; while the legitimate expenses of an election are clearly specified, and many practices common enough now are to be forbidden. Whether this will become a law remains to be seen. It is certainly a matter of the greatest urgency and the greatest importance. In our country we doubt if the corrupt use of money has been so extensive and heinous as it has been in England. Yet we speak under correction. But it is well-known that in close districts and doubtful precincts, in case of an important election, money is freely distributed and votes shamelesly bought. It is not a pleasant thing to think about. It seems hard 466 to believe that men will barter their principles for money. But facts are stubborn things. Many a "pure" and "honest" -these terms taken as above-voter could adopt literally the words of one of Lowell's keenest satires: "I don't believe in princerple, But O, I du in interest." Upon the real purity and honesty of the ballot-box depend the future safety and success of representative government. The public tone should be raised, the public conscience made more sensitive upon this point. Men of character cannot afford in any party exigency to lay aside their moral principles and to wink at corruption. The success or the failure of a party is of small importance as compared with the maintenance of high moral tone and of perfect political probity. The Assassination of the Czar.-The newspapers have given the full and horrible details of the fearful “taking off” of the Autocrat of all the Russias. It cannot be said that the news of his death came as a surprise to the world. At any time within the last two or three years the intelligence would have, been received without causing hardly a ripple of wonder, so many desperate attempts have been made upon his life and so undaunted and determined have been the secret conspirators. And yet for all that his death was anticipated, the announcement of it caused a thrill of dismay and terror in the court circles of royal Europe; Successful crime of every sort, and especially political crime, is contagious. And it is no wonder that Emperor William, of Germany, who has himself so narrowly escaped the assassin's hand on more than one occasion, should have been deeply affected by his brother monarch's frightful death. The killing of the Czar shows clearly enough, that, with the resources which modern science has placed at man's disposal, no ruler can long be safe, no matter what precautions he may take or how excellent his secret police may be or how dreadful his punishments of suspected conspirators, provided a few men and women are resolutely determined upon his death. But in the case of Russia it seems probable that the party to which the Emperor owes his death is neither small nor weak. No one knows how widely spread But it is perfectly well known the Nihilist organization is. that it has been able to attract to itself not only weak and vicious socialists and visionaries, spendthrifts, desperadoes, and unsuccessful malcontents, such as Cicero describes the Catilinarian conspirators to have been, but people high in rank and authority, members even of the Czar's household, and, most wonderful of all, students at the universities and young women of culture and refinement. The distress and discontent of Irish peasants and agitators, the desperation of French communists, the wild theories and the growing influence of German socialists, the murmurs of the republicans of Italy and Spain, the presence of heretical and subversive social doctrines even in our own favored land, are evidences clear enough that throughout our Western civilization there is dangerous friction of labor with capital, of government and law with the governed and the lawrestrained. But in no country has the friction been so great as in Russia. In no country have the fires of social revolt and revolution, hidden though they have been, burned with such intense persistency. The efforts to smother them have only added to their wild energy. In other countries it is highly probable that the social problems will be solved peaceably, that the causes of the friction between classes and of the widespread discontent will be intelligently sought after, and so far as possible removed, without serious outbreak or disturbance, though wild fanatics may now and then lose their heads altogether, and some riotous outburst like that at Pittsburg may occur or some absurd attempt like the recent one to blow up the Lord Mayor's palace may be made. But the condition of things in Russia is such that agitation has no legitimate channels through which to work. The people have had no voice in the counsels of the State, nor have they been allowed to make known their distresses and explain their wants in the press. So it has long been clear to the political observer that the desperate enthusiasm, the fanatical zeal, the martyr spirit of self-abandonment and self-abnegation which have characterized the Nihilists would result in the spilling of royal blood, if not in a reign of terror and absolute social anarchy. It was no feeling of ill-will or hatred toward Alexander II. personally, we may well believe, that actuated the assassins. In aiming a blow at him they struck at the system of which he was the most prominent representative. Now, we have no sympathy with the aims or the methods of the Nihilists so far as we understand them. Their one doctrine is an absorbing hatred of the present constitution of society and government, coupled with an eager and unreasoning passion for destruction. All that civilization and religion and culture and education have accomplished for the amelioration of society and the betterment of man— government and church, law and institutions-everything they would sweep spurningly and scorningly away. Havoc and red ruin their watchword. And what would they give their suffering country after they had wrought the destruction of all that it now has of fair and beautiful? not thought so far as that. Their work is destruction. After they have caused a social chaos, others, whose work shall be construction, they vaguely dream, shall arise, and a new and more beautiful social cosmos shall be their work. But first the terrible cataclysm must come. Ah! they have Of course we do not believe this. To us it seems worse than folly. The world cannot be made better by dooming to destruction all that has already been accomplished in government and religion, in law and morality, with the expectation of establishing upon the ruins so created a new society,-this term used, of course, in the broadest sense. Society is not a creation, it is an evolution. It reaches back for its sources into the dim distance of early times. Everything which has gone before has contributed to it. In a truer sense than it can be said of an individual, it is "the heir of all the ages." And so it seems to us that the Nihilists are upon wrong grounds, and are using false methods, though it may be very possible, whatever the immediate effect may be, that their TABLE-TALK. red-handed agitation will hasten the coming of a better con- But the assassination of Alexander II. seems peculiarly atrocious. No one, since Peter the Great, has done so much for Russia as he. Through his efforts Russia has been drawn into the current of nineteenth-century life and civilization. Raised to the throne when Russia was humiliated by the failure of the Crimean war, the army demoralized, the country without roads or schools or universities, the peasants slaves, he left Russia with the serf free and the land question settled, with universities and schools and railways, with the army in magnificent condition, with the shame of the Crimean war wiped away by the splendid achievements of the late war with Turkey, with the Asiatic boundaries widely extended, and with unheard-of improvements and reforms in the civil administration. That he grew conservative with age, that he had not the courage to follow out his changes and reforms to their He felt, perhaps, that logical conclusion, is no doubt true. the work could not be hastened, while the impatient spirits, excited by the strange new impulses which his innovations had made possible, have been unwilling to await develop. ment along the direction in which he started it, and have madly desired the crushing-out of everything, that an absolutely new beginning, the nature of which they do not characterize, might be made. The vast majority of Russians, it would seem, regarded Alexander II. with affection and enthusiasm. His memory will be cherished by them as the great emancipator and reformer. Whatever else he may have done, to have set free nearly twenty-five million bondsmen entitles him to a prominent and abiding place among the benefactors of mankind. Women's Rights in France. It is interesting to notice that the Women's Rights question is beginning to assume "That disagreeable type, the some importance in France. female orator," as a French correspondent of the Nation, with hardly the proverbial gallantry of his race, puts it, "is likely to become a frightful evil." That may be the Frenchman's way of stating the case, but we feel very sure that multitudes of Americans would severely condemn the use of the epithet "disagreeable," and deny the justice of pronouncing the "female orator," under any probable contingency, "a frightful evil." The women have certainly a right to make themselves heard in public, and the experience of the last few years in our country has shown that the prevailing type of female orator with us at least will compare favorably with the male counterpart. Many of the Frenchwomen are claiming equality not only of civil rights, where no one will gainsay the justice of their claims, but also of political rights, even that of sitting in political assemblies. Of course, the stock objection was made to them that there was one function of the State, namely, military service, which they could not perform. But they reply with great propriety, that the peril and the suffering they incur for the benefit of the State in bringing children into the world more than offset the work and the danger borne in the public defense. What are the sufferings of the camp and the hazard of battle compared with the throes of parturition? The Miss Smiths, of Connecticut, are paralleled by a She not only claimed young and pretty Frenchwoman. political rights, but she refused to pay taxes so long as they were withheld; she even allowed her furniture to be seized. This, of course, produced a sensation, and Mlle. Aubertine Auclerc is regarded as a heroine. The younger Dumas adds strength to the movement by his championship of the cause in a widely-read pamphlet, with the taking title, "Women who Kill and Women who Vote." Many of the women now loudly clamoring for more rights, and denouncing tyrants whom they do not specify, are no doubt fanatics and demagogues, who lend neither dignity nor respectability to the agitation. But they may be simply the forerunners who will prepare the way for those who shall take up the discussion in all candor and sobriety. The question what share women in the future are to take in the State has ceased to be one which can be lightly passed over or cavalierly brushed aside. It demands candid and courteous discussion and a reasonable solution. TABLE-TALK. The Blossom of the Desert.-In the spring the fancies | still be "as the rose"; and there are no thorns toward the In the dreams of the hopeful and expectant of many in the more crowded portions of our country lightly setting sun. turn to thoughts of Western possibilities and prairie homes, emigrant nothing but of a rose-blush tint shall ever occur where they think the struggle for existence will be holiday upon his prospective quarter-section in the wild, free West. For the building of a castle in the air he is an architect of sport. They start forth with eager hope to pluck the blosvast resources; like the witty Sheridan's opponent in som of the desert. They think it will be a rose. They feel sure of it, for are they not to make the great plains "blos- Parliament, he "is indebted to his imagination for his som as a rose"? A full granary in the fall, a herd or a flock facts"; but he seems not to know that many of these "facts" are like Milton's for future marketing, as the result of their summer's toil, will --flowers That never will in other climate grow." He already feels the dignity of his prospective labor on virgin prairie soil. And from the poetic shelf in his library he brings to hand a forgotten volume and reads: "How blest the farmer's simple life! How pure the joy it yields! Far from the world's tempestuous strife, Mrs. Osgood prettily confirms his pastoral conviction that "Labor is life!-'Tis the still water faileth; Keep the watch wound, or the dark rust assaileth." And Morris quickens his hopeful zeal with this bit of rural enthusiasm: "Here, brothers, secure from all turmoil and danger, And in it contentment and happiness find." Yes, as I have seen the discontented townsman, or young countryman, getting into harness to go West and corral fortune within a furrow, he is an enthusiast, a poet. His becomes the language of hope; he lives among the metaphors of the field and the farm-yard. His good wife, too, is earnest to venture absence from friends and trust to luck and hard labor for the promise of a fine estate in a few years. She is a fair scholar, with a taste for books and good clothes. At father's house she even thrummed the piano as interlude to Josiah's bashful words. Why shouldn't she and he gather the roses of great fortune in the garden which old goblin geographers misnamed the "Desert of the West"? Certainly; the old goblin is gone, the new one is come. Doubting the guess-work on Olney's old atlas, they fall in love with the ignis fatuus of the land map and the florid circular of the Wormwood and Gall Railway. It threads the most fertile valleys in the new States of Cornucopia and Lavish Nature. The soil is as deep as corporate avarice. There is an annual rainfall of thirty inches, and a contract has been made with the Future for a gradual increase. The W. and G. does not ask you to accept its own prejudiced statements as to the marvelous fertility of the tracts the Government has generously made over to it, and which | it offers to actual settlers for a mere nothing, and on long time at that. No, the circular is full of such testimonials as the following: 66 MAIZEVILLE, L. N., Dec. 1, 1880. "HENRY SMOOTHFACE, ESQ., "Land Agent for the W. and G. R'y. "DEAR SIR: In March, '79, I settled on a quarter-section of your lands here. I had nothing but a team, wagon, plow, some household traps, a wife, and four babies. I housed the family in a dug-out, and the salubrity of the climate is such that my horses needed no stabling that spring and summer. I turned over in April fifty acres of sod, planted it to corn and potatoes, getting a yield of fifty-four bushels to the acre. That paid for all my land, a fair barn, two cows, an extra team, a flock of sheep, and fed the family a year. I thought that was doing tolerably well. "But in the summer I broke another hundred acres, put it all into crops last spring, and now I feel rich, out of debt, good house up, orchard growing, fine stock, money to lend, and five stacks of wheat still unthreshed. Wheat yielded me 40 bushels to the acre; oats, 90; corn, 110; potatoes, 300. Every acre of your land-grant will do as well. Plenty of fuel along the streams near by, while the winters are very mild. I shall at once take a half-section more. I think sometimes I ought to pay you twice what you ask for the Yours obediently, land. "MAXIMUS YIELDWELL." Jane and Josiah read this unvarnished tale of another's experience, and hasten to pack their trunks and tag them "Westward Ho!" They find the sweetest bliss in ignorance. Yet it were not folly to be wiser. Great expectations, as well as meadows, have their aftermath of disappointing yield. The above "testimonial" is not an unfair excerpt from the reams of printed bait tossed to people of small means by public and private land companies in the West. Nor are the railway corporations worse than that little corporation, one man. Both are human, and make caveat emptor the motto for their sales. Each holds a candle to the good points, and lets the snuff of silence drop on the blemishes. Migration to the woodless plateaus of the West is well, if you are well prepared for it. But the one way speedily to pluck "the blossom of the desert" is to carry with you a plethoric purse. Yet all the summer in Chicago one sees the emigrant trains go forth with many men, women, and children, already hungry, scantily clothed, without a hundred dollars besides their railway tickets, into Western Kansas, Nebraska, or Dakota, and one wonders why they take such pains to be miserable. Often have I watched the "prairie schooner" trailing westward from the Missouri, even late in the frosty autumn, all the household goods beneath its canvas, and a sorry cow haltered in the rear. I have knocked at the slab-doors of such settlers' shanties, sod-houses, and dug-outs. Nothing within their reach "blossomed as the rose." Life there seemed an endless desert, unrelieved by a single oasis. Had Morris ever seen such a settler's cabin, he would have struck from his farm ballad the quoted lines: "We never know want, for we live by our labor, He would, however, have retained very properly the words, We reap what we sow," for the pioneer who has little or nothing to "sow," "reaps" the same. To this class of rash and improvident prairie settlers belong the thousands who suffered dire distress last winter from lack of food and clothing and fuel, who, in many cases, in their efforts to seek relief, were frozen to death, and were entombed by the drifting snow. It was for such that pastors made appeals, and the benevolent-minded formed relief societies. No man with a taste for toiling on his own glebe to support life needs stroll one thousand or two thousand miles to meet his good opportunity. The acres untilled, or halftilled, line many highways in Middle and Eastern States; but it is the greed for much land that is the agricultural curse of our country. Twenty years ago much of Illinois was parceled into great farms; but they have bankrupted their lords, and their men-servants are growing rich on the fragments. The farmer of limited money should limit his land. Thus will he sooner double his money. A garden on the Atlantic outyields a farm at the foot of the Rockies. And the farm forty miles from a locomotive in this age is the barrenness of desolation and delusion! You may dream that it is all your own, but surely you are "working it on shares" with drought and transportation. J. C. A. A Rare Talent.-The faculty of drawing out of persons with whom one is conversing the best there is in thembrighter things even than they suppose themselves capable of-is the rare gift with which Nature has endowed some women. George Eliot was a most charming person in conversation, though she was a woman of few words, because of her intuitive insight into the thoughts of others. A few words would put her into possession, not of what they said, but of what they would fain have said, and she would so improve upon it that ordinary people went away charmed with her who had made them for once at least feel them selves to be wise. Long afterward, perhaps, she would recall to their remembrance the wise or witty things which they could hardly believe themselves to have said, and which they assuredly never would have said but for her quickening influence. This trait recalls two women of an earlier generation, widely known in the society of their time, but whose names now live only through the fame of others-Mrs. Basil Montagu and Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall). Both mother and daughter were brilliant talkers, which George Eliot, it is said, was not, but like her they had the gift of bringing out all that was brightest and wittiest in those with whom they conversed. Like George Eliot, too, they were fond of recalling, at a later day, the bright things which had been said under their stimulating influence, and it is said that they were even addicted to the princely generosity of giving away, to right and left, the pearls and diamonds which had fallen from their own lips. Those whose self-control and generosity have ever been put to the test of hearing some of their own best sayings attributed to another, will best know how to admire these exceptional women. It was Mrs. Montagu, it will be remembered, whose conversation was so pungent that Thackeray and Kinglake used to call her "Our Lady of Bitterness," and under that title she is alluded to in Eothen." L. S. H. The Future of the English Language.-It is interesting to notice how small portions of the earth's surface have been the home-the central hive-of those civilizations and civilizing forces which have been most potent, most extensive, and most wide-reaching in the history of the world. One thinks at once of the Egyptians in the narrow Nile Valley; of the Jews whose land was only from Dan to Beersheba; of the Greeks with their ragged bit of mainland and tiny isles of the sea, "Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung"; of the Romans on their seven hills by famous Tiber stream, and of the mighty influences which emanated from these narrow territories. In modern times, the Anglo-Saxon race, with little England for its home-land, is repeating the story of the older civilizing races. No candid observer will hesitate in the opinion that the Anglo-Saxon race is at the present time doing more for the civilization, the advancement, the development of the world, than any or all other races combined. Anglo-Saxon enterprise is opening Africa, is governing India, is enlightening China and Japan, is settling the islands of the sea. In North America the Anglo-Saxons are already predominant, and their influence is constantly increasing in other parts of the Western world. Wherever English and Americans go they take their language with them. Every Anglo Saxon community becomes an English-speaking centre. There is not a clime in the world where English hymns are not sung and English prayers offered. Hand in hand with the opening of new countries and the establishment of new commercial posts goes the language in which Shakspere wrote and Shelley sung. And when one considers this steady progress in the most distant and diverse parts of the earth and the wonderful rapidity with which the millions of our people are increasing, it does not seem a very foolish or absurd idea to dream of the time when English shall be the language of the world-the universal tongue, or, at any rate, as near that as the world will ever see. Such being the "manifest destiny" of our mother-tongue, it would seem the part of wisdom and common sense to make it more simple and rational in its ways of spelling. The efforts of scholars in this direction should receive the favor and encouragement of all. Everything which facilitates the acquisition of the language will accelerate the rapidity of its conquests. A recent London paper, the Nonconformist, in commenting upon the American census, speaks as follows of the advancement of the English language: 66 The first thing that strikes us is the enormous ratio in which the increase of English-speaking people exceeds that of any other race in the world. It is true that a large proportion of American immigrants are not English, nor even Irish or Welsh. But whether they be German or Italian or Norse, emigrants from Europe find themselves absorbed in a vast federation of communities of which not merely the language, but the traditions, the racial antecedents, the common law, literary inheritance, and, even in a very true sense, the historic memories, are all English. Germans may maintain their newspapers and their 'vereins' of all sorts; they may be aggregated here and there in communities of which German remains for generations the speech of social life. But, after all, the necessities of general commerce and politics and law, of local and State elections, are, in the long run, too strong for them, and they must needs take Hans Breitmann's advice to 'ondoochify themselves,' at least so far as concerns language and political ideas. No one dreams that anything, not even the dreaded deluge of Chinese, can now imperil the undisputed sway of Shakspere's and Milton's language over the vast range of the North American Continent. New Zealand and Australia are equally secured. If one language ever prevails over the Indian Peninsula, it must be English; and everywhere else |