to those who were willing to serve the public at large in pointing out real merit wherever it could be found, and in unmasking pretenders, to whatever rank they might belong. The once all-powerful organ of the Jesuits, the Journal de Trévoux has long ceased to exist, and even to be remembered; the Journal des Savants still holds, after more than two hundred years, that eminent position which was claimed for it by its founder, as the independent advocate of justice and truth. From the Economist, 21st April, THE LESSON OF THE AMERICAN CRISIS FOR ENGLISHMEN. the claim to count them among the electors to be represented. So long as the President showed that these were his ends also, the people, with the remarkable docility of Americans, were willing to let him choose the means, and witnessed his first acts with little annoyance or even agitation. The veto which stopped the Bill consolidating the Freedmen's Bureau was tolerated, not without a certain complacency, and the first thing which aroused suspicion was the wild speech from the steps of the White House, which in opposition to most of our contemporaries we felt compelled to condemn. That speech being made by a halfeducated person to uneducatd persons was perfectly intelligible to the quiet farmers who form the bulk of the American people, and they saw at once that it was an undignified explosion of extreme hatred to the Radicals. Well, the farmers did not WE would recommend those who admire love the Radicals particularly either, but the constitution of the United States, and still they thought them only a little extreme, prefer it to our own, to observe the position and to hear them denounced in this undiginto which it has now brought the machi- nified fashion excited a suspicion which the nery of Government. The central idea of veto placed upon the Civil Rights Bill that arrangement was to entrust legislative changed into certainty. That Bill was power to the representatives of the people perhaps defective as to its machinery, but and of the States, and executive power to the President's Message showed, first, that an individual elected by the whole popula- he did not think the negro ought to be protion, just as the central idea of our own is tected in his civil rights at all; secondly, to unite both functions in the hands of the that he was attached to State rights in an Ministry of the day. After years of com- extreme degree; and thirdly, that as bepromise, a great occasion arises upon which tween North and South he was a Southernthe people and the executive are at direct er at heart. The agitation became exvariance, and instantly the constitution treme, and Mr. Johnson, either irritated comes to a dead lock, and the nation is beyond bearing by the pressure placed on driven to choose between obeying an individ- him, or misled by his Tennessean experiual will — which is despotism, or resisting it ences, or deceived by his ignorance of the - which is neither more nor less than civil North in which he has never lived, and has war. We must premise, as our readers travelled very little, issued without necesgenerally take their news from the sity or provocation a proclamation announcTimes, that upon this matter, as upon all ing the Civil War at an end, thus cutting American subjects since 1860, the Times away not only his own" war power" — the has been misled. It believes that Mr John- useful fiction through which the necessary son, in his recent violent and injudicious dictatorship was exercised, but the power proceedings, has been contending against a of Congress to legislate for public security, small but powerful and unscrupulous fac- and, in fact, making the re-admission of the tion; that the nation is with the President, South a constitutional necessity. Then the and that his action, if a little irregular, ex- people broke with him. So strong was presses the permanent feeling of the coun- the public feeling that it became possible try he rules. It is, however, clear that for the Radicals to use the reserve power of this is not the case. A majority of the the constitution, and pass the Civil Rights people of the North, probably, as we shall Bill in the Conservative branch of the soon show, a very great majority, but cer- Legislature over the President's head by a tainly a very considerable one indeed, are majority of two-thirds. Moreover, that resolutely determined upon two points; majority was less than the majority in the first, that substantial freedom of labour country, many senators saying openly that shall be the universal rule of the Union; they had received distinct orders from the and, secondly, that the South shall either Legislatures of their States to vote against give the negroes the franchise, or abandon the President, but could not conscientiously obey them. Even New York City, the unanimous; and the conflict must, so far as stronghold of democratic feeling, turned appears, last till March, 1869. Of course against Mr. Johnson, and were he to be re- it cannot last so long, for either one side elected to-morrow it is probable he would will yield or one resort to force; but connot obtain a fifth of the popular vote. And stitutionally, there is no provision which yet under circumstances in which a British could bring it to an end. There is, in fact, Ministry would be instantly driven from under the American system, no effective power, the free people of America are pow-representative machinery through which erless. Substantive power belongs up to the nation can carry out its will, while in March, 1869, not to them or to their rep- England, though our President is hereditary resentatives, but to a self-willed individual and irremovable, the action of the people chosen by accident, who is not amenable upon Government is almost dangerously to Congress, who if affected by opinion at direct and swift, becoming often effective, all is affected by that of the half Southern as was seen in the Conspiracy Bill, within Border States, who thinks yielding discred- a very few days. This is, as seems to us, itable, who is legally master of the army, the one grand defect of the American systhe navy, and the civil service, who is by tem; one, too, absolutely irremediable, exposition master of the Legislatures of the cept by an amendment to the Constitution South, and who cannot be removed. The which the President himself can veto, and public feeling has no more power of resolv- which is nearly sure to be vetoed. It was ing itself into action than in Prussia. Con- the defect also of our own Government gress can, no doubt, pass the Civil Rights under the Commonwealth, that government Bill over the President's head, but that is by "Parliament and a Person," which only a declaration. The President must Mr. Carlyle so much admires. The Percarry it out, and he either will not do it, son and Parliament came, after many or will do it ineffectually, while he takes efforts at compromise, into collision, and measures to prevent further legislation from the Constitution went down. In America being of any effect. Congress cannot for- it is probable that the Parliament may win, bid him to withdraw the army or compel but not till a revolution has once more be. him to fill up vacancies in the Freedmen's come imminent. So strongly is this felt Bureau, or keep him from filling the bureau that the last vote on the Civil Rights Bill with Southerners, or in fact from doing was given amid profound emotion, and the anything which Queen and Cabinet togeth- most absurd plans for the employment of er can do in England. If he likes to defy physical force are discussed in provincial them he can, and they have only two con- newspapers. It is this possibility of any stitutional remedies to stop the supplies necessity arising for an appeal to force on or impeach the President. The former ex- behalf of a clear majority which our Conpedient is nearly impossible, as it would stitution prevents. dissolve the army and shake public credit; and the latter can only be attempted after the President has done some decidedly illegal act. It is true that the words of the Constitution, Art. II. sec. 2, are excessively wide, Congress being empowered to elect a President, "in case of his removal from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office;" but there can be little doubt that "inability" was only intended to cover such contingencies as lunacy, paralysis, protracted illness, blindness, or the like, and not mere deficiency in capacity or willingness. Should the President, indeed, assemble the Southern members by themselves, or do any act of that kind, then indeed he might be impeached for treason; but he is a man with great legality of thought, and has the extraordinary reverence of all Americans for the letter of the Constitution. The people can do nothing, could do nothing if Congress were The merits of the actual questions between the President and his Congress are of less importance than the fact of collision; but, on the whole, Congress has the best of it. It is always easy to suggest reasons for not doing things, and the President may be right upon points; but the drift of his action is to annul the decision given on the battle-field, to restore the South to its old supremacy, and to abandon the negro. The country is right in not wishing those things, and Congress in resisting the President's drift expresses a reasonable national resolve. Of course, it often expresses it in a foolish way. Nothing can be in worse taste than speeches like Mr. Wade's, or resolutions like Mr. Stevens'; but the general line of Congress is sound, and that of Mr. Johnson unsound, and it is upon general considerations that nations are sure to act. Lord Palmerston often said very foolish things about foreign policy, but his general line was to protect English interests, to succeed in a struggle if the struggle began, and so the English people understood it; and when in the Crimean war they wanted a man who would win, they elected Lord Palmerston to rule them. From The Saturday Review, April 21. CANADA. record, as if it were something new, the existence of a rational loyalty, and the absence of Yankee proclivities, among the English, French, and even the Irish Inhabitants of Upper and Lower Canada. war. That at one time a considerable party in Canada, though always a minority, was inclined to coquet with the notion of annexation to the United States is as true as that the idea was abandoned as a folly very many years ago; and there are ample reasons to satisfy any intelligent colonist that what was folly then would be madness now. What more than anything else tended to Americanize the Canadians was a suspicion that England had grown indifferent to her colonies, and that a growing and graspMANY circumstances have conspired to ing Power on their immediate frontier render the present a critical period for Cana- would be safer as an associate than as an da and her sister provinces in North Amer- ill-natured neighbour or a possible enemy. ica, and, without attaching too much impor- As suspicion begets suspicion, a correspond. tance to temporary manifestations, it is at ing doubt arose on this side whether the any rate safe to say that every recent indi- colonists were prepared to take their share cation has been favourable to the hopes of in the common burdens of the Empire, in those who anticipate a splendid future for the contingency of an American our American England. The termina- Both suspicions were thoroughly unfounded. tion of the Reciprocity Treaty, and the There may be theoretical politicians in this abortive threats of the American Fenians, country who regard ultimate independence supported as they were by what may be as the goal to which all colonies must tend, called the open connivance of the Wash- but there never has been, and probably ington Government, were conceived in a never will be, an English Government that spirit of spiteful ill-will to British North would be disposed to be slack in the deAmerica; but both the one and the other fence of Canada, whether attacked by Feare not unlikely to foster a sense of self-re- nians marauders or by the whole strength liance on the part of the colonists, combin- of the United States. Those statesmen ed with close co-operation and confidence who have urged most strongly the impossibetween them and this country, which has bility of protecting Canada without the long been the only thing wanting to insure hearty co-operation of her whole populathe progress and prosperity of our Ameri- tion have acknowledged the duty of doing can dependencies. The preparations re- all that Great Britain could do should the cently made to meet the threatened attack emergency arise; and in such an event it by SWEENY and his followers were not needs no prophetic power to foretel that, needed to prove how entirely the old an- if there were any advocates of a less gennexation feeling has disappeared from Can-erous policy, they would be swept away by ada. They have helped, however, to make the impulse of national feeling. If it is more generally known in this country a fact which has long been familiar to all persons who have been acquainted with the course of political opinion in the colony. Unfortunately, a knowledge of what is done and said and thought by our fellow-subjects across the Atlantic is very difficult to gain, The Times and Mr. REUTER, who chronicle the most insignificant movements in the least interesting countries of the world, have scarcely ever a word of information from the finest colonies that England possesses. For a moment the imaginary Fenian invasion has lifted the veil, and telegrams and letters from Special Correspondents duly FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. I. 31 true that the colonists may safely trust England, it is not less true that we may as securely rely upon their patriotism. The sudden muster of 10,000 volunteers on the frontier may not seem a very great matter to those who forget how sparsely Canada is peopled; but the promptitude and zeal with which the call to arms was answered is more significant than the mere strength of the force. How England would act if Fenian threats became realities the colonists may learn, not only from Mr. GLADSTONE'S emphatic language, but from the prompt though quiet preparation already made to counteract possible dangers from this or any other source. To the Canadians, who knew how difficult and almost impracticable a task they had found it to work the legislative union between their own discordant provinces, and, still more, to the maritime colonies, who feared that their little local nationality would be wholly lost and annihilated by union with the Canadas, the small practical hindrances to the project were much more conspicuous than to ourselves, and time was needed to bring them all round to a larger and more statesmanlike view. Events are rapidly hastening this consummation. The abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty must teach the colonies to look to each other and to the sea, rather than to the American frontier, as the natural outlet for their trade; and a desire for mutual free trade will do more than anything else to promote the scheme of Federal union. Already Newfoundland has declared in favour of union. New Brunswick is supposed to be on the eve of rescinding her former adverse vote, and it would then be almost impossible for Nova Scotia to escape conversion to the common cause. The minority in Canada who have opposed the That there are threatening dangers which neglect might magnify it is impossible to doubt, in the face of such a resolution as has been brought forward in the American Congress, in favour of aggression upon the Newfoundland fisheries. It is not, indeed, to be supposed that the Washington Cabinet would openly countenance the policy of forcibly demanding the privileges which they have lost by the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty. Still the subject of the fisheries was always a sore one, and the opportunities now afforded to individuals of embroiling their country in a war are unexampled. The alleged scheme of the Fenians to manufacture a national quarrel by trespassing on the fishing grounds is much more feasible than their absurd project of occupying Canada; and the presence in those waters of two powerful fleets under the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes, though it may prevent actual collisions, is little calculated to improve the feeling of the two countries. All this is very well understood in Canada, and the effect of it has been to make the colonists draw closer than ever to the Mother-country. Nothing now could induce more than a handful of Cana-project seem to have done so almost excludians to favour annexation to the United :States; and it would be strange if it were otherwise. At present they pay such moderate taxes as they themselves think fit; they take up arms readily enough, no doubt, but only at their own will and pleasure; they regulate their own tariffs and obey their own laws. If their allegiance were transferred from England to the United States, they would have their taxation quadrupled at least; they would be subject to unlimited future imposts; their tariff would be settled in the interest of New England manufacturers; and their people would be liable, in the event of war, to a conscription decreed by a Legislature in which they would have but an infinitesimal voice. So long as Canada feels able to keep free from her powerful neighbour, she will strain every nerve to escape the comparative slavery of annexation to the United States. sively from the fear that it might tend rather to premature independence than to a more intimate and cordial union with Great Britain. The apprehension is, we believe, wholly misplaced, though the feeling that prompts it is not one that we can complain of. More co-operation and closer communication with the Mother-country than the mere existence of a Constitutional Governor implies is much desired on the part of many Canadian politicians; and they will probably in the end see, as we do here, that when once the whole of British North America acts through a single agency, it may be possible to establish relations with the Home Government which are quite impracticable so long as four or five provinces wholly independent of each other have to be separately consulted. It is a remarkable and very satisfactory fact, however, that both those who support and those who oppose the scheme of Federation do so because they believe that While the clouds on the horizon have thus they are pursuing the policy most calculated tended to increase the mutual trust of this to strengthen their connection with the Mocountry and Canada, they have not been ther-country. That the Unionists exercise without effect in bringing the smaller mari- the sounder judgment few persons in Entime provinces into closer approximation. gland will doubt, and if external pressure When the scheme of Confederation was shall tend to consummate the scheme, we first propounded, the broad advantages of the policy were so manifest to us that it was difficult to understand the hesitation which a multitude of local causes tended to create. may have much yet for which to thank the impotent malice of the Fenians and the short-sighted commercial spitefulness of American politicians. From the Spectator. GOLDEN LEAVES.* has taken materials which lay ready to his hand, and arranged them on the whole well. It is true, we occasionally find it difficult to see the poetry, or even the sense of some of the poems quoted, as, for instance, in the lines to a "Wild Honeysuckle," by Philip Freneau, when he says: "By Nature's self in white arrayed, She bade thee shun the vulgar eye." We in our ignorance always imagined nature intended wild flowers for the special gratification of vulgar eyes. And we fail to appreciate the sense or beauty of the verses which follow: - "Smit with those charms that must decay, gay The flowers that did in Eden bloom; Unpitying frosts and Autumn's power "From morning suns and evening dews THERE is just now a large and increasing demand for "selections," and there seems little danger of any scarcity of supply. From Beauties of Shakespeare to Sentences from Pious Authors, nothing escapes this ruthless clipping, this intellectual dictation. It were a curious and not uninteresting inquiry to trace the mental condition which finds these extracts so sufficient for its appetite. Is it real want of leisure which induces men hungering for something higher, possibly truer, than the routine of their ordinary occupation, to suck in morsels of thought as the country-born exile of Bethnal Green might delight in the torn petals of a flower? Or is it the mental indolence which gladly accepts a pleasure for which it has been at no pains to dig? Or is the solution a more humiliating one, as we strongly suspect it is, and that these "selections serve as a thin cloak covering much unblushing ignorance? Since it has become the fashion to claim a sort of impertinent familiarity with the name and works of every intellectual giant, and a good many intellectual pigmies too, the thousands to whom the perusal of even one work heavier in matter than a three-volume novel would be an inexpressible bore, get from these "selections" the kind of literary intimacy and pleasure which "Philistines" derive from leaving pieces of pasteboard at the homes of greater names than their own, secure in the comfortable reflection that "they are sure to be out." Of the hundreds who profess a knowledge of Whately, how many outside the purely literary class have got beyond the Select Sentences." Of the thousands who talk of Goethe's convictions, how many know more of them than are revealed in the conversations? Yet while Mr. Hows, we think, might have paused befighting what we believe to be a real evil, fore inserting the production of one who we are not blind to the distinctive merits had learned so little of the first elements of of the different beauties thus carefully from harmony, as not to recognize that there is a time to time arranged, nor do we forget discord in his thought for which no mere that a well fed man may enjoy the morsels versification can atone. Whittier is well we object to see take the place of more sub-represented. "The Brother of Mercy" is stantial fare. In the selection before us Mr. Hows has done his work carefully and zealously. It is not his fault that his Golden Leaves are but tipped with light from the early dawn, that the day has not yet risen upon America which shall give birth to a Shakespeare, a Milton, or a Tennyson. He *Golden Leaves from the American Poets. Col. lected by John W. S. Hows, With an Introductory Essay by Alexander Smith. London: Frederick Warne and Co. 1866. So, again, the Rev. Ralph Hoyt has a poem 66 "The best of all I still have left, My faith, my Bible, and my God." so good, we regret the impossibility of giving it entire, and we will not spoil it by mutilation.. His "Maud Muller," too, is full of simple music and pathos peculiarly its own. A few verses from Emerson are most happily selected, especially the last : — "Oh! when I am safe in my sylvan home, |