NAWSA SUBJECT FILE Chadwick, John W. THE ENFRANCHISEMENT WOMEN. AN ADDRESS JOHN W. CHADWICK Delivered in Philadelphia, Oct. 27, 1886, At the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Woman's Suffrage Society. PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY. 1886. THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN.* BY JOHN W. CHADWICK. Ladies and gentlemen: In "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" it is said of Capt. Wybrow that he always did what was pleasant and agreeable for him to do, from a sense of duty. I do not know of any city in which it would be more pleasant and agreeable, from any motive whatsoever, to deliver a testimony in behalf of the political enfranchisement of women than your own Philadelphia. Its very name is ominous of such brotherly consideration as may well fill the sisters' hearts with generous and lofty cheer. Moreover, Philadelphia is the city of Lucretia Mott, in naming whom I name only one of an equal company of noble women, only a part of which has "crossed the flood," who in their own persons bring to naught an army of objections that have from time to time been urged against the enfranchisement of women. It is the city in which William Lloyd Garrison first lifted up his voice for the emancipation of the slave, and where Furness took the torch of light from his fraternal hand, never to let it fall. And how *An address before the Pennsylvania Woman's Suffrage Society, in Philadelphia, Oct. 27, 1886. 4 readily does the name of his successor, Joseph May, so dear to me for his own sake, suggest another that is written among the highest on the roll of anti-slavery honor. Never shall I forget with what expressive emphasis he used to speak the names of Lucretia Mott, and Sally Holly and Angelina Grimké, assuring us that if we had ever heard those women speak, we should never doubt again the advisableness of women's speaking in our churches. Last, but not least, in thinking of your city, I always think of a grest company of women who, without notoriety or fame, but with all perfect womanliness and sweetest self-surrender, are doing tasks innumerable of educational and charitable beneficence, which only a few years ago were generally regarded as hardly less of an infringement on the proper sphere of woman than the exercise of her political rights. It is not without a kind of shamefulness that I appear before you in defence of those ideas and those principles with which many of you have been openly identified for many years, and to which you have given an incalculable amount of patient service. I have not been a worker in your often-broken, ever-closing ranks, and of the victories that you have won no smallest part is mine. Not that I have ever doubted the justice of your cause, or failed to sympathize with your endeavors for its promulgation, and it is now twenty years since, in my early ministry in Brooklyn, I set forth in an elaborate lecture "the whole counsel of God" as it was then revealed to me concerning the industrial and educational and political rights of women. It was printed at the time, and I read it over a few days ago, and wondered if I could do better 5 than to bring it here, and read it for the lecture of the day. For one thing, you would have seen, if I had done so, how much was hope and prophecy in 1866 that is now glad fruition. Since then I have never failed, on fit occasions, to witness a good confession, especially in times when in our own community the stress of evil circumstances had caused the hearts of many to wax cold. But I have seldom been upon your platforms, and have never been a member of your organization. I have not even been a diligent reader of your current literature, except at points of special interest, as when I must say, "And thou, too, Brutus!" to some friend long counted on, and found at last with the remonstrants; or, when a scholar of the grade of Francis Parkman, leaving his Jesuits and Indians for a little while, but bringing with his some of their baser manners, has launched an article at you; or, when a Ouida's brief cessation from her habitual nastiness, has given Mrs. Livermore an opportunity to reveal "the ever-womanly" of her own character and spirit in contrast with the roistering mannishness of her opponent. For such remissness I can plead threefold excuse. First, that I could not be more heartily convinced that you are right by any novel presentation of your case, if such were possible. Second, that I had my own special work to do, so arduous and engrossing that it endures no brother near the throne; and third, that with such counsel and defense as you have had, I well might fear to mar their symmetry and diminish their efficiency by some ill-considered word. You know, in Thackeray's "Phillip," how Charlotte, riding in the diligence from Boulogne to Paris, with her baby sister in her arms, hears 6 Philip's boots drumming upon the roof, and when the child stirs in its sleep, says, "Hush! He's there! He's there!" And you know that Plato says there is a child in us that is easily made afraid. Well, then, if ever at any time the child in me has been suddenly wakened by the violent swaying of the Woman Suffrage diligence, and has shown signs of fear and crying, I have said to it, after the manner of Charlotte in the story, "Hush! They are there—Mrs. Livermore, and Mrs. Howe, and Lucy Stone, and Mary Grew, and Mrs. Cheney, and the rest of them! The thing isn't going to upset, and if it does, it won't make any difference;" and the child in me has gone to sleep again, and the diligence has bowled along, through day and night, nearing its happy destination. I'm glad to be a passenger, but now and then I can't help envying those of you who are on the top. I trust, however, that there is some advantage in my coming to you as I do, with you, but not of you; with you in the heart and mind, but not of you in the "glorious dust" of your unwearying, hand-to-hand contention against fearful odds, happily growing every day less disproportionate to your courage and your strength. A poet writes of "truths too vast to see distinct, So deep in them we are." And it may be that some of you are so deep in this cause of the enfranchisement of women that you cannot distinctly see its vast proportions, or what progress it is making, as a soldier cannot in a battle equally with the "red-cloaked clown" who, from some point of safe and comfortable vantage, overlooks the field. I offer myself as a humble contribution to your ability 7 to see yourselves as others see you, the ground you have already won, the strength of your position, the opposing forces, and the change of final victory. "Ring, bells, in unreared steeples, The joy of unborn peoples! Sound, trumpets, far-off blown. Your triumph is our own!" But there are other bells I hear already with forereaching sense—those "Chestnut bells," which are, perhaps, the cruelest invention of the present time. If you were all provided with them, what a general tinkling there would be as I go on with my address! For what aspect is there of this matter which, in the forty years that synchronize with the development of the Woman Question, has eluded scrutiny? If the opponents of enfranchisement had failed of searching out its every weakness, they would have been indebted to its protagonists for many admirable suggestions. No one has ever suggested any possible weakness in the Darwinian theory of Evolution that Darwin did not himself foresee and openly declare. His was that "deliberate intellectual conscientiousness which scorning to take advantage of an incidental weakness, will even help an opponent to develop his strength, in order that none but the real, decisive issue may be tried."* The political enfranchisement of women has not been without its Darwins of this noble disposition. To go no further, in Col. Higginson's "Common-Sense about Women," you will find every imaginable weakness of the Suffrage movement presented with a freedom and a force unparalleled in the literature of the opposition. You will- *James Martineau 8 see, then, how little chance there is that I can furnish you with any facts or arguments that are not familiar to those of you who have been in this conflict from the beginning, or for the last ten or twenty years. I console myself with Emerson's assurance that people are never so happy as when assured of what they know already. If this is so, I can count upon your happiness for the next twenty-five or thirty minutes without any serious misgivings. The Woman Question, considered in its entirety, might be likened unto any army in order of battle. It has its centre and its wings. The centre is Political Enfranchisement; the wings are industrial and educational opportunities for women co-equal with those which men enjoy. Now it will not be denied, I think, that our army has advanced haud passibus equis; that the right wing and the left have left the centre a good way behind; the industrial and educational advance of women has been much greater than her political advancement. Nevertheless, from first to last, the army has been one, and the victories of the parts have been the victories of the whole. The centre has not been weakened by the advance of right wing or the left. It has been greatly strengthened. And there are few, if nay, lovers of the general cause who do not feel that the disproportionate advance of suffrage as compared with industry and education, is an ideal relationship. If disproportion there must be, it had better be of this sort than of any other. It is better for suffrage to lag behind industry and education than for either industry or education to lag behind suffrage, although unquestionably the exercise of the right of suffrage by women would have a tendency 9 tendency to remove many of the hindrances that still bar the way to an industrial and educational opportunity for women co-equal with the opportunity of men. We can at least concede so much to those who think that women should not be allowed to vote until they are "perfect even as their Father in heaven is perfect;" that the larger their industrial freedom and capacity, and the fuller their education opportunities and their use of them, the better qualified will they be for the exercise of their right of suffrage in a just and noble way. In the meantime that principle of which Darwin makes so much in animal structures, "the corellation of growth," and which Paul anticipated long ago-"If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it, and if on member rejoices, all the members rejoice with it,-" is nowhere more conspicuously operative than in the development of womanhood. Industry, Education, Suffrage, like Barbara Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine and their male companion, are all in one boat. Improvement in one direction helps improvement in every other. Every year that suffrage is delayed women are becoming better fitted for its exercise by the enlargement of their industrial and educational spheres. Suffrage pays for this favor in advance. The agitation for it has been more influential than any other intellectual and moral force in bettering the industrial and education condition of women. It would be impossible to find an advocate of woman's suffrage who is not equally an advocate of the fullest possible extension of the industrial and education sphere of womanhood. And the plea for such extension has come very largely and always most effectively from the Woman Suffragists. The advocacy 10 advocacy of others has been "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most natural fear that one thing would lead to another, the inch of industry or education to the ell (I have not dropped an "h") of complete political enfranchisement. It would be quite impossible to overrate the change that has been brought about in the industrial and educational status of women during the last five-and-twenty years. Scores of employments that were monopolized by men in 1861, are now open as freely to women as to men, and tens of thousands of women are engaged in them with honorable advantage. The fear that every woman in a new employment would drive out a man, has not been justified by the result. If men have been driven by hundreds out of certain classes of employment, it has been to be driven into others much better suited to their physical ability, from the desk and counter to the farm and ranch. But for all that has been done, much still remains to do. The range of female industry is still capable of indefinite enlargement, and within the scope of those employments to which women are freely admitted the inequality of wages for the same amount and quality of work furnishes both the political economist and the philanthropist with a problem which is very difficult to solve. Here is undoubted the defect of a quality, the quality of impermanence which belongs to female labor in the mass, because the factor of marriage enters so deeply into it. This factor, the probability of marriage, has certainly an injurious influence on the average character of woman's work beyond the precincts of the home, and the average character of the work of any class is extremely influential in determining the average 11 pay. Nevertheless, the inequality of pay for equal work is often monstrously unjust. Everything will help to remedy it that helps to make the general equality of men and women more assured. Nothing will help so much to make the general equality of men and women more assured as equality in their political status. It follows that the right of suffrage conceded will do much in furtherance of equal pay for equal work. The industrial development of women aids their political enfranchisement in many ways. Every enlargement of the sphere of womanhood makes the ultimate political enlargement a less radical change. We have the ultimate enlargement broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent. Moreover, many of the arguments against woman's suffrage were equally arguments against woman's industrial expansion twenty or thirty years ago. As the event has proved their fallacy in the case of industry the presumption is that it will prove their fallacy in the case of suffrage. Take but a single instance. Surely the argument from woman's natural physical disabilities was much stronger against a free industrial life for her, than against suffrage. Now the event has proved its absolute futility in the case of industry. Men lose more time than women in the employments in which they are engaged together. As the first steamship crossing the Atlantic brought to America the first copies of Dr. Lardner's book proving that an ocean steamship was an absolute impossibility, so our good ship of state goes ploughing on her way to equal industry and education and political rights for men and women, her hold well stuffed with literature, 12 literature, proving beyond peradventure that such a voyage is an absolute impossibility. What funny reading Dr. Lardner's book after the lapse of fifty years, when twice a week a fleet of ocean steamers leaves New York for different parts of Europe! There are scores of books prophetic of the impossibility of equal rights for men and women, in education, industry, and politics, that will be even funnier after an equal lapse of time. Woman's advance along the education line of her ideal development has been hardly less remarkable than her advance along the industrial line. Higher schools and colleges have multiplied and the most venerable universities have at last afforded women opportunity to show that even without the advantages of their instruction they can attain the highest honors which their graduates, as such, are able to command. "When Columbia College makes a Wellesley bachelor of the gentler sex a doctor," writes Geo. Wm. Curtis, "and Yale signalizes her new departure as a university by making a maiden a bachelor, it is useless to call the college that last refuge of conservatism." These are but straws that indicate which way the wind is blowing. Urged by its gathering stress the bark which bears the hope of woman's final conquest for herself of "all that harms not distinctive womanhood" is drawing steadily near and more near to its desired haven. How many prophecies of what woman could or could not do have been shamed by the event. You know the story of the man who criticized the owl. "A bad piece of taxidermy. A live owl never looked like that, never carried himself so. He couldn't do it." All at once the owl changed 13 his position! He wasn't a stuffed owl at all! He was a live owl and could do what he had done and a good deal beside. And the live woman of our time has done already a good many things in industry and education which the sagest critics have declared to be impossible for her. She is not an ornamental fixture, but a living organism. The trouble with the whole business of this criticism on the higher claims of woman is that it is rooted in the old idea of a world finished in six days, not in the new idea of a world which is still in process of creation. The representation of Adam in a miracle-play of the middle age, going across the stage, going to be created, was a capital anticipation of our modern science and philosophy. Man and woman both are on their way to their creation. They are not half finished. They are not much further along than my friend's boots for which he had been waiting long. He went for them again and his boot-maker saw him while he was yet a great way off and ran, and running cried, "Mr. Esterbrook, Mr. Esterbrook, them boots of yours is almost about to be commenced." Certainly what women are industrially, intellectually, politically, is no measure of their possibility. What they are is the resultant of countless disabilities acting upon them through successive centuries. Loose them and let them go, and you will find they are not dead but sleeping, - not too sound to hear the voice that summons them to the full use of every faculty which they possess. There is one intellectual feature of the situation which is even more impressive than the expansion of Woman's educational opportunity. It is the "fruits meet for repentance" 14 on their part who have denied her fitness for the highest intellectual things. Some time ago, there were in Boston, thirty-five women practising medicine with unquestionable success. In many of our cities and our larger towns there are others of their guild. The legal profession has not attracted women, nor has the Ministry, strangely enough, to any considerable degree. The success of some who have adventured on this line has been so great that I wonder that a greater number have not followed their example. To Dr. Johnson a woman's speaking seemed like a dog's standing on his hind legs. The wonder was not, he said, that she could do it so well, but that she could do it at all. But if his bearishness could have been prolonged a century he would long since have ceased to wonder that she can do it well; she has done it well so often that for her to do it so seems just as natural as for her to help or please in any other way. The pulpit, however, has witnessed only the least of her successes. The best of them have been in committee rooms and club-rooms and upon platforms where important charitable and social and educational and religious questions have been discussed, and where man of high repute as public speakers have often wished that they could speak as clearly and as forcibly, as eloquently and as persuasively as Mrs. Wells or Mrs. Spencer or Miss Eastman or Mrs. Lowell, and others whom you know better than anybody else. But it is as a writer even more than as a speaker that woman has of late brought forth intellectual fruit so fair and large that the talk about the intellectual inferiority of women, 15 which was almost "the only wear" twenty and thirty years now seems as antiquated and absurd as a rope-harness or a Navarino bonnet. I have not now in mind the great creative work of a George Eliot and a Mrs. Stowe, or the lesser, of a Mrs. Gaskell or a Mrs. Oliphant. The disabilities of women never have been able to suppress the motions of their creative genius. I have not even in mind the host of women of the same general standing as the "mob of gentlemen who write with ease" in a purely literary way. I have in mind the literary work which is not literature for its own sake, but a vehicle for the discussion of the greatest intellectual and social and political and religious questions of our time. Nothing has been more characteristic than the work of this sort done by women during the last quarter of a century. There are many noble books to witness it, but its best witness is the pages of our great reviews and magazines. In this respect the English periodicals are more distinguished than our own. Often The Nineteenth Century caries the more substantial portions of its freight in women's name, like those of Mrs. Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, Julia Wedgwood, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. How often side by side with the essays and the studies of these women do we find those of bishops and of noble lords, the law-makers of England, which, but for their artificial dignity, the meanest London daily would not publish in its columns ! Now, these phenomena have an important bearing, not only on the educational and practical life of women, but also on their political enfranchisement. For one of the most popular arguments against this has been that woman is 16 a being "inferior to man, but near to angels." But not only is this nonsense put to shame by woman's later intellectual development, suggesting the absurdity of measuring her possible force by any past achievement, but woman's later intellectual work has dealt so largely with questions approximately or absolutely political, and with so much calmness and clearness, that it furnishes a special argument of no little weight for her political enfranchisement. It is a significant fact that here in the United States, where the appointing power of the President is the most important of all immediate political questions, the solid monograph on this subject by Miss Lucy Salmon is by far the ablest and the most exhaustive contribution to it that has yet been made. In comparison with it the Congressional speeches of such weighty men as Hoar and Edmunds seemed but the merest drivel. There is a feature of the employment side of womanhood that is even more suggestive of her political possibilities than her educational and intellectual triumphs. It is the steadily increasing hold of women on the civil service of the government, and upon allied positions of responsibility and trust. In Grant's second term there were already 5,000 women acting as postmasters, and it is presumable that the number has since then been much increased. In the treasury and other national departments we have a relatively greater number of women doing their work with undeniable efficiency. Consider also in how many States women, to whom every electoral privilege and position is denied, except possibly voting on school matters and being voted for on School Committees, 17 have been appointed upon Boards of Charity and Correction, and with what uniformly good results. It is the height of the ridiculous that a woman who has done the work of Mrs. Lowell on the Board of Charities in the State of New York should not be the political equal of the most miserable make object of her official interest and humane regard. "A little deeper and you will find the Emperor." A little deeper and we shall come upon the right and duty of enfranchisement. It is only a step from the position of women in the civil service, and upon Boards of Charity and Correction to their position as voters for School Committees, and school appropriations, and to their service upon Committees as managers of such appropriations. Another step as long would take us to municipal suffrage which the experience of England (so happy that Scotland has now been included in the scheme) commends to our most serious attention and equally to our courage and our faith. Another step of equal length would take us to a universal suffrage that should not be in name only but in deed and truth. But there are those, it seems, who heartily rejoice in both the industrial and educational expansion of the sphere of woman, and even in so much of political expansion of this sphere as is necessary for the inclusion of voting for School Committees and appropriations, and being voted for upon these lines, who are either indifferent to the general political enfranchisement or opposed to it with earnestness and passion. There are even those who have done as much as any for the expansion of women's work and education and her social usefulness, 18 who have exposed themselves in furtherance of these ends to "the oppressor's scorn, the proud man's contumely" and to the malice and contempt of their women, who are hardly less strenuous against the general political enfranchisement of women than they have been for the widening out of her industrial and educational and social life. Here are the bayonet points that thrust the advocates of Woman's Suffrage back on their reserves of courage and conviction. What reasons can they give for the faith that is in them that shall be equal to this new emergency? None, let us say it frankly, none that have not been given over and over again in general advocacy of the cause, or to meet the objections which its more or less trivial and intelligent opponents have brought against it all along. And these are quite enough, seeing that the most noble-minded and generally philanthropic of the new "remonstrants" have not an objection to offer that the less intelligent and earnest have not offered all along. Perhaps it would be safe enough to leave these objections to their own mutual destruction. The first English sparrows that were sent to this country were sent all in one cage. The consequence was even more fatal than when the parrot and the monkey were allowed to entertain each other while the lady of the house went out to do her morning's shopping. They used each other up. There were no sparrows to speak of on the arrival of the cage here in America; only a lot of feathers and a few osseous remains. If the objections to woman's suffrage could be shut up by themselves, we might expect a similar result. For example: Argument A.- It would break up the 19 institution of marriage and the home. Argument B.- Women are dominated by the influence of priest and clergymen. But what influence is more conservative of marriage and the home than that of priest and clergymen? Again: Argument C.- Women could not be made to vote. Argument D - There are too many voters already. Another brace of what Col. Higginson has felicitously called Kilkenny arguments. And still another is, Argument E.- Women will vote just as their husbands tell them to. Argument F.- Women's suffrage will introduce difference, dissension, into families. I do not believe the former of these statements. Must I then believe that latter? No; because the exclusion of women from the ballot is no security against difference. In 1884 almost every intelligent and earnest family was more or less divided against itself. The son-in-law against his mother-in-law was a not unfrequent situation. And doubtless there was some dissension; but that there would have been more if the women could have voted, I do not believe. The passion with which women said, "I wish I could vote," would have found legitimate expression. There are many others of these mutually destructive arguments. There are others of such fragility and feebleness that they go to pieces like a long-buried corpse the moment they are taken into the light of day. There is the sexual argument. But this, as we have seen, is much stronger against industrial than against political equality, and there the event has proved it absolute futility. "Women have all the rights they want." If this is so, what is the meaning of the Woman's Suffrage agitation that has been going on for forty years? "But only a few want 20 it, and the majority ought not to be obliged to vote against their will." If the considerable minority of men who do not care to vote should increase to a majority would that be a sufficient reason for general male disfranchisement? “There is no natural right of suffrage." But this objection applies to men and women equally and leaves the matter of women's voting wholly unaffected. "Women are already overburdened; Why add to their responsibilities?" Well, if they gave as little time to politics as men generally give, the additional responsibility would not be great. But they have now time for many things which if neglected no one would be a sufferer. "But think of a woman's going to the polls." They are less offensive than a crowded horse-car or the gateway of a railroad station. In twenty-two years in Brooklyn I have not seen a semblance of disorder, although in my ward the unterrified are a large majority. The registry is no better than the poll, and my wife went with only last week to register (in a plumber's shop) and she was almost overpowered by the politeness shown to her. Col. Higginson's vision of beauty for ashes" might not at once be realized, but probably the admission of women to the ballot would suggest a somewhat more aesthetic habit in the arrangements of the poll. But these considerations will hardly be appreciated by women who go to the plumber's shop on their own business (almost anything is better than that) or by the women whose friendly visiting takes them into the city's vilest slums. The imagination of the objectors has been extremely fertile in devising possible contingencies of the most dreadful character. There is Dr. Bushnell telling us how much more easily women can disguise 21 disguise themselves than men. They could vote early and often; five or six times a day! One is reminded of Frank Stockton's complete letter-writer, in which he provides for various remote contingencies that are not provided for in the letter-writers generally. For example, "No. 6. From the author of a treatise on molecular sub-division, who has been rejected by the author of a cascarilla-bark-refiner, whose uncle has recently paid sixty-three dollars for repairing a culvert in Indianapolis, to the tailor of a converted Jew on the eastern shore of Maryland, who has requested the loan of a hypodermic syringe." "Never cross a river till you come to it," was Mr. Lincoln's sage advice, which, taken, would have saved the obstructionists of every great reform a world of vain imagination. "Would you like to have your sister Marry a nigger?" How often and how uselessly was that question asked as the anti-slavery fight went on! "would you like for your wife to be a Brooklyn alderman?' is a similar question. I answer, "Yes, decidedly; for that would mean a Board of Aldermen of which no lady would have any cause to be ashamed." But behind every ballot we are told there is a bullet; that is, the right to vote implies military duty. Not necessarily, seeing that out of one thousand clergymen of the military age examined for the army, nine hundred and fifty-four had some disqualifying defect, and they were all legal voters. Perhaps forty-six women out of every thousand could be mustered capable of bearing arms. But every child in arms is there by jeopardy of a mother's life, and in bearing the men who bear arms for their country it has been suggested that women do their part. But they do 22 vastly more than this, as a bright array of Florence Nightingales and Clara Bartons testify by their unspeakable devotion to the wounded and the dying' surely, as indispensable to war, if war there needs must be, as any facing of the enemy's fire or storming of some bristling parapet. But there are objections urged of a less trivial character. One that if it is woman's right to vote it is her privilege to abstain from voting. But every person's right means every other person's duty and it is no one's privilege to abstain from doing that which is the duty of the hour. But "politics are so vile." "Women are" viler" some of the objectors say. "therefore for the sake of the politics keep the women out." And others say, "Would you have women soil their whiteness in this national sewer?" Here is another case of English sparrows or Kilkenny cats. But we do not believe that women are so vile as some of them declare. We decline to accept the judgement of an Ouida as definitive in such a case. Women are not all Ouidas; nor are the majority of them. I have no sentimental persuasion of the general moral superiority of women; I have never argued their enfranchisement upon this ground. But it means something, I suppose, that in the reformatories of Massachusetts there are five times as many boys as girls; in the prisons twice as many men as women; in receipt of charity the same proportion. Take, then, the other horn of the dilemma: It is the privilege of women to abstain from dirty politics. Not if they can help to make them any cleaner than they are. To those who tell, me "The best women do not want to vote," I answer, "Then, by that sign, they are not the 23 best women." The best women must want to vote, because they must want to help their husbands and their brother, their fathers and their sons in the good cause of building up here in America "a righteous nation" whose God is the eternal Truth and Righteousness and Love. Grand words are those of William Gannett: "Not suffrage for women so much as women for suffrage is the hope beyond the hope." . . ."The whole "sex" argument against woman suffrage in low- level politics reads as argument for woman suffrage in high-level politics." Assume that politics are irretrievably corrupt and women may well hesitate to enter into them. But such an assumption is unworthy of any noble person, man or woman. The corruption is not irretrievable and every noble woman, equally with every noble man, will desire to do her part in bettering the bad and bringing in the best; if not by voting then in some other way. "Inexpedient! Yes, forever inexpedient," says a remonstrant who has perhaps a better right to her remonstrance than any other who has lifted up her voice; "forever inexpedient until the highest type of morality and the clearest sense of justice... are reached by all women." But what if men had been obliged to wait for this degree of excellence. Republican government would not have begun to be in 1886. In the exercise of their political functions men have heightened the type of their morality, and clarified their sense of justice. This "None but angels need apply," is like saying to a boy, "You shall not swim till you can swim perfectly," " You shall not play till you can play like Rubenstein," who when asked how he could play the Erl-King so wonderfully, as if a 24 god were thundering at the keys, said, "Simply by practice." By practice women must come into the fulness of political knowledge. They must learn by failure and mistake. There is no other way. "Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet." But in meeting the objections that are urged against the extension of the suffrage to women equally with men, we do not incidentally give all the reasons that we have for the faith that is in us in this new departure. And what are some of those that have not been incidentally hinted at already? First, this: that the phrases which are more dear to us in the political sphere than any others, which express our loftiest political ideals, are phrases that carry along with them the necessity of woman's suffrage if they are not going to be shorn of half their meaning. "Governments owe their just powers to the consent of the governed." Of course anyone who cares to do so can say with Rufus Choate that the phrases of the Declaration of Independence are "glittering generalities." But Wendell Phillips' reply that they are "blazing ubiquities," is also worth remembering, and if government does derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, and as women are the governed equally with men, how but by voting can their consent be given. Then there is the great phrase of Lincoln, which was first Theodore Parker's, "Government of the people, for the people, by the people." It will hardly be denied that women are the people equally with men, and 25 if they are, we have not government by the people till they obtain the franchise. "No taxation without representation." Here is another golden phrase, - the watchword of the war for independence. But women have "virtual representation," it is said. And James Otis answers: "No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and an illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd." And this declaration brings us to the ground on which woman suffrage could easily defend itself if it had no other, the favorite ground of many of its most able advocates, notably that of Col. Higginson, namely, its necessity as a means of self-protection. Virtual representation is an illusion and a snare. No class can safely be permitted to make laws for any other. The history of every modern nation proves the truth of this assertion. We are told what wonderful improvement there has been in woman's legal status. Yes; and the most of it has been extremely recent, and much of it has been directly the result of the woman suffrage agitation. Nevertheless, much still remains to do. In the majority of the United States, married women are denied the ownership of their earnings, and their right to minor children. But the interpretation of the laws is hardly less important than the laws themselves, and their execution is of all the most important. Woman may be no wiser than man, and no better. But they will be wiser for themselves than men can be for them. The instinct of self-preservation is exceeding strong. The instinct of self-protection is a brother instinct of nearly or quite equal strength. But I believe that there is a higher ground 26 than this for the enfranchisement of women. It is that the exercise of political privileges is itself an education. When women vote they will begin to cultivate that much neglected branch of study, - American history; and perhaps they will discover that it is the grandest history ever written. Suffrage will enforce the duty of the educated women to educate the ignorant of their sex. Those who are now remonstrants will be found obedient to this heavenly vision. Once when my little boy was in a pet, I said to him, calling from my study, "Come up here." He remonstrated, saying, "I don't want to." "Well, then," said I, "stay where you are." "No," said he, "I'll come up if I don't want to." And so, I doubt not, the remonstrants against woman's suffrage will come up if they don't want to; come up to the exercise of their right when it is once accorded them; come up to their duty of advancing the general and political education of the women of whose political influence or subservience they are afraid. That the right use of suffrage requires the highest possible intelligence and noblest character,--this is the highest ground of all on which the enfranchisement of women can be urged. Every woman that hath this hope purifieth herself. How can she make herself more wise, more just, more earnest, more sincere, if haply, she may help to bring a nobler wisdom and a higher justice, a grander earnestness and a more absolute sincerity into all civic state and national affairs. "For their sakes I consecrate myself," every true woman that cherishes this hope will say of those whose social circumstances have been less favorable than her own. 27 But the elevation of her sex will not be the highest aim of her ambition. This shall be to make the nation that surpassing good which it can be only through the harmonious co-operation of both men and women for all highest ends. What God hath joined together let not man put asunder. Friends, you have every reason to be encouraged in your faith and work. You have enlisted on your side the splendid advocacy of such a company of men and women of the highest genius and the noblest character as no other great reform has ever had, for all the greatest names of the anti-slavery conflict are yours, with Garrison's and Lincoln's at the head, and you have others with you who were born too late for anti-slavery work. You have also with you hundreds of women all unknown to fame, than whom there are upon this earth none of more womanly gentleness and grace and charm. The successes of municipal suffrage in England, of school suffrage in America in a dozen states, of woman suffrage, pure and simple, in the territories Wyoming and Washington, have reduced to an absurdity a score of prophecies of evil things that were sure to follow if such things were done. The service of women in positions of exalted state and civic trust, and in many thousand national offices upon the civil list, is an argument sor the political enfranchisement of women that increases in its volume and momentum every day, and the industrial and educational advance of women brings their political equity every day more near. The last lines of Longfellow might have been written for these things and we can apply them to them without hesitation, 28 hesitation for he was with you in your generous expectation and your glorious hope: “Out of the shadows of night, The world rolls into light. It is day-break everywhere!” [*The Forum Mar 1894*] LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS The letters of James Russell Lowell have been collected and edited by Prof. Charles Eliot Norton and published in a manner suitable to their intrinsic worth and beauty. Those who go to them expecting any startling revelations, anything essentially different from what had been before made known to us in his collected works (four volumes of poetry and eight of prose), will be disappointed. It should be so; for the revelation of Lowell's character in his books was so noble, so engaging, that, had the revelation of it in his letters been different, the difference must have been for the worse. From first to last, the one impression, inclusive of all the others, that these letters make, is that Lowell the writer and Lowell the man were absolutely one. Between the writer and the man there was no schism, no opposition or discrepancy or inconsistency whatsoever. There is no real and painted fire, but the same reality in either case. There is abundant insincerity in the literary world. It is a fault which did not so much as touch the hem of Lowell's singing-robes or his professor's gown. His friends had testified to this effect; but to read his letters is to know it at first hand. Matt Arnold, as Lowell called him with affectionate familiarity, would have had "wholeness of tissue" in a poet's work. It may have been sometimes lacking in Lowell's, as in Emerson's upon which Arnold animadverted. But Lowell's life and poetry and prose together answered to Arnold's requisition. They were all of one piece. What the man thought and felt and loved in his most personal and private life furnished the substance of his poetical creation and his criticism of men and books. In both alike are the same birds, the same friends, the same ideals of beauty, truth, and good. We knew the man before these books appeared. We know him better now. Because the letters make no essential difference in our judgment of the man, it does not follow that they are superfluous. They deepen the impression that we had before. They furnish numberless illustrations of the wit, the humor, the fancy, the imagination, the tenderness, the humanity, the political conscience, the lofty patriotism, THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM AND OUR LIQUOR TRAFFIC. 113 drinking respectable, it gives it the air of a dangerous practice, and its saloons in time are looked upon as having something of the reformatory element about them. Local-option features are part of the scheme, so that the people may choose at the end of licensing periods- viz. every three years- whether or not the sale of all kinds of liquor shall be suppressed. The Gothenburg system operates educationally; it does not repress by force of law. It is not an ideal to those who look upon every sort of drinking as unfortunate or wrong, but it furnishes the surest path to progress. The true ideal is as far beyond this system as is prohibition maintained by police power, an ideal which will not be attained until the religious and moral nature of man has been so renovated that he will shun all agencies of evil, and make wise use of everything with which he comes in contact. As a means of education toward so lofty a standard, the Scandinavian plan offers superior advantages. Powerful object-lessons awaken the intelligence and move the heart. Here a common meeting-ground has at least been reached where the radical and conservative exponents of temperance may join hands with the simple well-wishers of their race, to unitedly advance a momentous human interest. E.R.L. Gould. The reader will find further information with regard to the Gothenburg system of dealing with the liquor traffic in the following books and articles: "The Gothenburg System of Liquor Traffic," Fifth Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, by E.R.L. Gould. "Report of the Legislative Commission appointed by the Legislature of Massachusetts to Investigate the Workings of the Gothenburg System," prepared by Mr. John Koren, Secretary to the Commission. "Local Option in Norway," by T.M. Wilson: Cassell & Co. "More About the Gothenburg System," by Dr. Sigfrid Wieselgren: Stockholm, P.A. Nordstedt & Söner, 1883. "Brandy and Socialism: The Gothenburg Plan," by John Graham Brooks, in THE FORUM, December, 1892. "Gothenburg and Bergen Public House System," by James Whyte, Secretary of the United Kingdom Alliance. "Liquor Legislation in the United States and Canada," by E.L. Fanshawe: London, Cassell & Co., 1893. 8 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS. 115 to which his poems and his articles had already furnished so many. And while they do not alter, but confirm our previous apprehension of his personality, they add one of capital importance to the known variety of gifts- a gift for writing letters of such brightness and such beauty that they are a permanent addition to one of the most delightful satisfactions which the past affords the present and the coming time. There are those who do not rank Lowell high among the poets. There are those who do not think his prose is good. But the most captious of these will hardly question that as a letter-writer he is entirely satisfactory. We have here none of those essays or sermons which are often put off as letters on the reading world. Such are the letters of Goethe and Schiller to each other. They are magnificent, but they are not-letters. Emerson's letters to Carlyle had often five or six preliminary drafts. Carlyle's to Emerson had never one; and Lowell's, like Carlyle's, are profuse strains of un-premeditated artlessness. And what sometimes hurt his work does not hurt his letters; the humor he could not deny himself in the poem or the essay, and which sometimes marred the unity or dignity of these, is never excessive in the letters, even when, like boys at leap-frog, joke tumbles over joke. And how good it is to have one more letter-writer- and such a letter-writer!- when we have been assured so often that this or that one was the last; that stenography and the penny post had been as fatal to the delightful race as St. Patrick was to the snakes in Ireland! Ours is the happiness of the small boy who discovers one more peanut in the lining of his jacket, when that extension of his pocket has discouraged any further hope. As the first and last impression made by these letters is that of the complete identity of the author and the man, so is it, and quite as distinctly, that the man was at his best, was his true self, only as a poet. To be confident of this, one does not have to be forgetful of the pages elsewhere that reveal the humorist, the scholar, the critic, the publicist, the diplomatist. In respect to one only of these several parts of Lowell's genius do the letters add anything important to our previous knowledge. It was not to be expected that they would do much to heighten our appreciation of the critical faculty which he had shown in various essays, with that on Dante in the lead; or of such writing as that which he furnished on political subjects for "The North American Review" during our civil war, and which many years after climbed to its serenest height in the Birmingham "Democ- 116 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS. “Democracy" and the Chickering Hall "independent in Politics." And it was quite as little to be expected that he could do anything to heighten the impression of his humorous gift, seeing that we had had not only the "Biglow Papers," the first series and the second, but also many other humorous things in prose and verse, and in his most serious essays sudden lapses into humor that declared the irrepressible spontaneity of the gift. But while our appreciation of Lowell's humor has not been heightened in respect to its quality, in respect to its abundance it has been heightened a great deal. We had heard with our ears, and this one and that had told us of its marvelous stream, but now we have the ocular demonstration. Mr. Stedman had said that he would waste more in an evening than other wits could husband in a year, and Judge Hoar has told us how he let his home-brewed stuff waste at the bung whole evenings long. How true their tale, these letters amply show. In some the succession of puns and witticisms and humorous reflections is from end to end without a break. The range is from the wildest nonsense up to the humor that makes good its name, because it makes us "teary round the lashes." More villainous puns than some of these were never perpetrated by a mortal man. The impecuniosity of his early life was full of provocation for his infinite jest. When money was much easier, the wit and fun and humor ran less free. But there never was a time when the secret fountain might not at any moment burst into the light. And yet it was not as humorist that Lowell was his inmost and his utmost self. His published works are evidence of this, and now his letters are fresh proof of it. He is more the poet in their literary form than he is anything else, and he is more the poet in the desires and aspirations they express than he is humorist, or scholar, or critic, or statesman, or reformer. The happiest period of his life was from 1845-1850, when he was writing poetry with such freedom and zest as never at any time before or after. Then, too, he had his fullest consciousness of poetic power, feeling assured that he could win the common heart and make himself a lofty place among the kings of song. The professorship at Harvard, which relieved him from pecuniary anxiety, was dearly bought, because "the poet was tripped up in the professor's gown." This phrase and certain variants of it return so frequently that its serious impact is not to be missed. His constant feeling was that his professor's work was keeping him from his appointed task and his true life and joy. LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS 117 Other things conspired with that in the fifties to make Minerva unwilling; but in the sixties the war-drums brought her back to inspire the second series of "Biglow Papers," and Lowell was himself again. The new inspiration that the war had quickened did not cease when the battle-flags were furled. Other poems followed those which stirred the heart and conscious of the nation in its time of trial, or made us laugh when we were going to cry; and in their creation he renewed the pleasures of his hopeful prime. They assured him that he could do something more than "make a drum of his shell and rattle away" at the head of any patriotic or reformatory march. Either the self-criticism in the "Fable for Critics" in 1848 was entirely true, or it marked the beginning of a deeper love of poetry for her own perfect sake than he had known before. And to that deeper love he was more passionately true as time went on. Its exigency was immense, for it demanded of him something even better than the splendors of the "Commemoration Ode," or that which the death of Agassiz drew from his heart, or that which had Washington for its majestic theme. He was not wanting in a noble self-respect. He dared believe some wider and deeper recognition of his verse would come when he had gone away. What had moved him so strangely must soon or late be shown to have been written "that the thoughts or many hearts might be revealed." But what troubled him much more than any slow response to his message was his consciousness that study and teaching and politics and diplomacy had so warped him from the proper line of his advance that he had not made the most of the gift that was in him. And for the sorrow that his consciousness entailed there was no consolation for him in any of the great successes of his later life, social or diplomatic. He would rather have been the poet which he dared believe he was meant to be, than anything else within the gift of others or the reach of his own powers. In the earliest letters, written when the boy was eight or nine, there is no indication of precocity; but he has already "got quite a library," and publishes his "catalogue of additions" with great satisfaction. His fine clothes delight him even more, and his only attempt at humor gives no sign of his paternity of the coming man. His first college letters, written when he was seventeen, present him to us as a self-conscious bibliomaniac, studying little, reading much, proud of his books not only for their spiritual contents, but also for their fair outsides. The promise of the coming humorist is now distinct 118 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS tinct, but not that of the coming reformer. That his Class Day Poem was a satirical attack on the followers of Emerson and Garrison is generally known, and that a few years later he was himself a Transcendentalist and Abolitionist has been accounted for by the influence of the lovely woman who in 1844 became his wife. Evidently his long engagement and his marriage with Maria White furnished him with the highest moral inspiration. Probably his identification with the Abolitionists would have been less complete if she had never come into his life. But his generous and chivalric temper made it inevitable that he should soon or late be found among the anti-slavery prophets, and his gravitation to the Transcendentalists was as perfectly assured. His acquaintance with Miss White has hardly begun when, a few months after the delivery of his Class Day Poem, he indorsed that precious document with his speedy shame, and in a letter to George B. Loring declared his sympathy with the Abolitionists. Loring was the most fortunate of his early correspondents in the multitude of letters he received, but there came a parting of the ways. The correspondence ceases in 1843, and the wonder is inevitable if Loring had already taken the pro-slavery line which he so diligently followed up to the threshold of emancipation. The Class Poem had to be read by a classmate, because Lowell was undergoing rustication at the time, in the Old Manse at Concord. A suggestion that the fault which led to his rustication was something more serious than neglect of the required course of study is contravened by Professor Norton's statement of the facts. If there was worse than this, it was some boyish peccadillo. The "roaring forties" were the years that Lowell sailed with happiest heart. Then it was "Ho, for a niche and a laurel!" Then he was conscious of his powers, and wrote about them freely to his friends, always in the spirit of noblesse oblige, acknowledging his debt to nature, and resolved to pay the thrifty goddess thanks and use. These were the years when the poetic sap ran the fullest in his veins, and his fruits of song ripened abundantly in the genial air of love and sympathy and reformatory zeal. The letters for these years are full of the creative impulse, the delight of doing well, and the confidence of better things in store. They are also full of wit and humor, fun and nonsense, kindliness and sympathy, manliness and courage, and devotion to a glorious cause. What to do with himself was at once a serious and humorous problem at the start. At first Divinity attracted him; then Law. LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS 119 It is interesting to imagine Lowell as a clergyman. His humorous part would not have failed of due appreciation by the cloth; but whether he could have suppressed it in his sermons as successfully as Dr. Parkman and some others, admits of question. It was a happy day for him when he recognized that letters and not law demanded his whole strength; but this was not until, in 1843, he had published his second volume of poems. His friendliest and fullest correspondence for the next five years was with Charles F. Briggs of "The Broadway Journal," and Sydney Howard Gay of the "Anti-Slavery Standard." His liking for Briggs was very great, and his appreciation of his character is shown in one of the brightest sketches in the "Fable for Critics," - that of Harry Franco. Briggs was the recipient of his confidences anent the "Fable," which was written with all possible hilarity; the last part more slowly than the first, because Briggs had praised this, and praise was "the only thing that made him feel any doubt of himself." That the "Fable" was written to punish Margaret Fuller for her critical attack is an idea that has had industrious circulation. The letters show that the part about her was an after-thought, written quite at the last because Mrs. Lowell thought he ought not to waste the chance to touch Margaret up. Lowell gave the "Fable" to Briggs, not only the manuscript, but the proceeds, whatever they might be. Briggs would have divided them, after the manner of Gaul, into three parts; Page the artist presumably coming in for one, he at this time having a trinitarian identity with Briggs and Lowell. Eventually Briggs got them all, and they were melted down into a little silver plate, which the letters do not mention, but which still preserves the memory of a goodly fellowship. The year 1848 was Lowell's wonderful year, synchronizing with the appearance of the "Biglow Papers," the "Fable," and the "Vision of Sir Launfal." He was writing for "The Anti-Slavery Standard," and his letters to his colleague, Mr. Gay, are collectively the brightest that he ever wrote. He was extremely sympathetic in his letters, - to the grave showing himself grave, and to the less serious and reserved a corresponding disposition. Writing to Gay, in proportion to the emptiness of his purse was the abundance of his wit. His constitution was "still vigorous enough to bear a draft." He was just able to keep his head above water, for there was a hole in his life preserver; but what wind he could raise from Gay made up for leakage and saved him from total immersion. Upon a hint from 120 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS Gay that the committee publishing "The Standard" are going to drop him, he abdicates "with the rapid grace of Richard Cromwell when he sat down on Monk's sword in the Protectoral chair." But the hint was premature, and "it appears that he, an innocent man, has hanged himself in his cell to avoid the opprobrium of public hemp; and now, how are the lacerated feelings of a broken-hearted wife and fatherless daughter to be healed? Still more important - how was his neck to be reset?" There is much more about the "noose-paper" he is writing for, and "the hand of editorship," his temporary suspension, and the "rope enough" and "full swing" he is to have in the future. Life was not all gayety for Lowell in these years, nor were all his troubles such as turned to wit and laughter. Of four children born to him by his first wife, three died before the mother. These sorrows touch his letters, as they touched his poems, with gleams of mournful light, but Mr. Norton has given us freeer access to the gladness of the poet's life than to its sadness, sympathizing with his delicate reserve. It was after the death of Rose in 1850 that he wrote "After the Burial," or what grew to that in 1869. A letter of the time answers to that as face to face in water. There are other particulars in which a complete disclosure of the man is wanting. There is no letter to Curtis, friendly as their relations were, - a circumstance which makes the poetic "Epistle to George William Curtis" all the more precious. Still more important is the lack of any reflection of Lowell's work as Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College, except from his side. For the other, let the reader go to Mr. Barrett Wendell's "Lowell as a Teacher," in his book called "Stelligeri," and also to Lowell's various essays, which have taken up into their substance a great deal from his college lectures, while losing much of their colloquial vivacity. The letters have hardly ever a good word to say for the professor. The chair of that functionary was never an easy-chair for the poet. It robbed him of his hope of being such a poet as in his youth he had meant to be in his maturity. Over and over again he repeats the bitter accusation. But what he did cannot be measured by his vain regrets. The elaborate essay on Dante is sufficient proof of that. And it may be that if his poetical activity had been more exclusive it would not have reached a higher mark. Nevertheless it is delightful, during the war and after it, to find the tide, that had been somewhat slack, making in again, and breaking in such music as that LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS 121 of the new "Biglow Papers," the "Commemoration Ode," "The Cathedral," and the various poems in the volume named, from its leasing poem, "Under the Willows," though this included with new things the meagre harvesting of a dozen years before the war. Lowell never wrote a more characteristic poem than "Under the Willows," and one of the most delightful aspects of the letters is that which reveals his to us in the same character as that poem chows in every line. It is delightful in itself, and it is delightful as assuring us of the reality of Lowell's poetical emotions. His poems of nature are but splendid paraphrases of his habitual satisfaction in her for her own obvious sake, not for any mystery he could pluck out of her, or moral he could tag on her. Take the twenty lines beginning "This willow is as old to me as life," - and what are they but a free translation of his outburst in a letter to Mr. Norton? "How I do love the earth! I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it, and I get rid of that dreadful duty feeling - 'What right have I to be?' - and not a golden-rod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I." This is a very different attitude toward Nature from that of Bryant or Wordsworth, an attitude much more likely than theirs (so much more subjective) to do the most of us good service. This sunny exposure of the poet's mind grew wider as his life turned toward its afternoon and evening hours. His love of nature was a growing love; and this is the more remarkable because it was so frankly sensuous. The same Lowell who wrote "My Garden Acquaintance" is omnipresent in his letters. "By Jove! there's a bluebird warbling, God bless him! 'Tis the best news this many a day." Always the same delight in birds, their singing and their ways. If he had kept a journal of the casual year we might have had a "Lowell's Elmwood," that would have deserved a place with "White's Selborne" on our shelves and in our hearts. It was well for Lowell that his intimacy with Nature grew as time went on, and that his relish of her inconstant moods lost nothing of its edge on the down grade of life. For the man who did so much to increase the happiness of others was not himself one of the happiest. For many readers this will be par excellence the revelation of his letters, though many others will have been prepared for what is 122 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS. now made plain by various previous intimations. After the subsidence of the animal spirits, consciousness of power, and enthusiasm for reform, that marked him to the verge of middle age, one tends to the impression that his life was melancholy rather than cheerful at its base. But this impression does not justify itself in the court of last appeal. Also, poor Yorick! because, being a fellow infinite jest, he had the defect of his excellence, and after those flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a road there was an inevitable reaction after he had gone home to his study and settled down before that hearth on which he allowed the ashes to accumulate year after year. We all know the story of the Neapolitan gentleman who was advised to go, as a cure for his melancholy, to see Carlini, an actor who was convulsing Naples at the time with inextinguishable laughter, and who answered the physician, "I am Carlini." Lowell paid the proverbial penalty of the humorous mind, but his melancholy was compounded of many simples, the bitterest of which was not by any means the habitual reaction from his gayety. In love with health, he was not constituted to bear sickness cheerfully, especially if it came enveloped in some baffling obscurity, as apparently it did more than once. Then, too, the sorrows of his domestic life came to remain with him, and not as transient guests. "Death is a private tutor"—so he wrote a friend—and his lessons were so hard that to learn them perfectly took many silent hours. Another ground of Lowell's sadness was the constant fret of uncongenial work, and the conviction, well or ill advised, that it was robbing him of time and strength for the real business of his life. That he was not doing what he felt he ought to do, and could, with the poetic gift that was in him,—this was the crowning sorrow of his life. But from time to time it was immensely reinforced by public events which were much more discouraging to his sanguine temper than to those blessed ones who, expecting nothing, were not disappointed. In 1850 Lowell was convinced that his reformatory zeal had worked some injury to his poetic faculty, and he resolved to be something less of a reformer and something more of a poet. He had been looking ahead too exclusively; he would look more about him. In "The Nooning," that "song to generations" which he was always meaning to write, but which never got written, he would not even glance at reform. The comment of the humorist on the reformer had, no doubt, something to do with this resolve, but it was one which he could keep only so long as there was no immediate demand LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS. 123 for any encouragement of good endeavor for the common weal, or for any blasting of iniquity. No one entered more heartily than Lowell into the spirit that united the North in 1861 for the preservation of the Union, and no one was more sternly bent to make this coincide with the destruction of slavery. No loftier song of patriotism was ever sung than the "Commemoration Ode," when all he hoped had been achieved. How could a people that had been so exalted unto heaven ever consent again to grovel in the mire of partisan selfishness and private greed? Yet shortly it appeared that they could do these things more grossly than before the ordeal of battle. This woeful disappointment was a source of infinite sorrow to the poet who had seen Satan like lightning fall from heaven, and now found him reensconced as comfortably as ever and with a firmer seat. If Lowell had not hoped so much, believed so much, and sung his hope and his belief so heartily, his shame and indignation would not have been so hot. As it was, he could no otherwise than twist his "gift of words Into a scourge of rough and knotted cords, Unmusical, that whistle as they swing, To leave on shameless backs their purple sting." That meant the terrible poems "Tempora Mutantur," and "The World's Fair, 1876," and in the Agassiz ode the phrase which ought to be restored, for our perpetual warning and rebuke—"the Land of Broken Promise." That meant an outbreak of patriotism of the cheaper sort, which is not "the last refuge of a scoundrel," but the first, to which Lowell's account of the matter must have been absolutely incomprehensible :— "I loved my Country so as only they Who love a mother fit to die for may; I loved her old renown, her stainless fame,— What better proof than that I loathed her shame." That condenses into four imperishable lines one of the most interesting and important of the letters,—that to Mr. Joel Benton, January 19, 1876. If he was saddened by the criticism excited by his political poems, it was because that criticism showed too plainly that the actual state of things was even worse than he had painted it. For he had "put his sarcasm into the mouth of Brother Jonathan, thereby implying, and meaning to imply, that the common-sense of his countrymen was awakening to the facts, and that therefore things were not so desperate as they seemed." 124 LOWELL IN HIS LETTERS. In the same letter, speaking of his critics, he wrote, "These fellows have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?" There is not a line in any of the letters, as there is not in anything he wrote in prose or verse, that does not confirm the spirit of these indignant words. They were written before his political life began - it may be said to have begun with the political poems which the fools and cowards supposed had ruined him forever - and before his long residence in England as our American Minister to the British Court. But they never became less true than they were when written. The only defect in his foreign temper was a too dangerous sensibility to the honor of his country and the respect due to her, from which the innocent sometimes suffered with the guilty. He found many things in England to admire, having eyes in his head and being a poet into the bargain, and he found many friends to love, Mr. Leslie Stephen among the best. But he found nothing to make him less a patriot at home, no bit of earth so dear as that which nourished his own Elmwood trees and vines. The hue and cry upon his recreancy to America were too obviously the spawn of Irish-American politics, the social vulgarity he had repelled, and partisan revenge, to need any additional rebuke at this late day. But, if they needed any, his letters from England and to English friends would furnish it in good measure, pressed down and running over. In no respect do these letters show us Lowell at greater advantage than in the various relations of friendship and affection that enriched his life. He had the warmest heart, the kindest disposition, in the world. There are letters here that must have made the men and women who received them wonder what they had done that God should be so good and give them such a friend. These, with the rest, will give to Lowell's literary work a background of personality that will bring it into clear relief, and make that and him even more dear to the whole English-speaking world than they have been heretofore. JOHN WHITE CHADWICK. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.