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the merchants secretly sympathized with the insurgents (which is quite possible, considering the way in which they have been annoyed and taxed by the local representatives of the Zelaya Government); but whether this be so or not, it is a plain principle of law that payment to a de facto government under a reasonable amount of pressure is good payment. The foreign residents of the coast near Bluefields are anxious to have their status under the law defined, their rights and duties made clear, and protection given to them against threatened violence.

The Spanish Elections

Full returns from the elections for the Spanish Cortes show that, as usual, the Government has secured a heavy majority, and the Silvela Ministry will remain in office, with a strong working force behind it, if it is able to keep its own political followers together. The House of Deputies numbers now 401, having suffered some diminution by the withdrawal of representatives from Cuba. The Government in power in Spain so completely controls the mechanism of elections that it is practically certain of a good round majority; and if that meant what it would mean in England, the Ministry would be practically continuous. But to secure a great majority in the Cortes is by no means to keep it; for no sooner is a new Cortes assembled than it immediately breaks up into small groups, and the Ministry is confronted in a more intense form with the difficulty which confronts a French Ministry-the difficulty of co-ordinating into a workable majority at number of small groups divided upon local and personal questions. It will be fortunate for Spain if Premier Silvela can remain long enough in power to carry out some of the reforms which he seems to have at heart. He is a man of unblemished integrity, of considerable force, and of very liberal and progressive ideas. He can do much for Spain, if Spain will give him the opportunity.

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as compared with the population of the country, but because they represent in an unusual degree its intelligence. In certain sections the bitter famine, commented upon in these columns several weeks ago, has led to local disturbances of a kind which often follow privation and scarcity. There have also been a number of somewhat formidable troubles among the working people. A more significant recent expression of discontent has been among the students of the universities. Russia has done a great deal for education on all lines which do not touch political life. She has attempted the experiment of giving free range to thought except in one or two fields, and with the usual results. These results she is trying to avoid by uniting the interests of the intellect, as represented by the universities, with the suppression of the intellect, as carried out by the Cossack police. A system which permits the police to strike students with whips is not likely to work smoothly if the student has even the rudimentary elements of manhood. Recent outrages

of this kind have brought about a combination of students in the various universities, and it is reported that more than thirty thousand young men have, by expulsion or voluntary withdrawal, left the universities within the past few months. Eight universities have closed their doors, or, rather, the Government has closed their doors; among them those at St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Warsaw. It is reported that the women students intend to follow the example of the men. Unfortunately, the antagonism of the intellectual class in Russia probably means very little as a menace to the Government-it is the military class that counts. As Tourguéneff long ago pointed out, the Russian peasants cannot, in their present stage of development, be organized into a body which would force reforms upon the Government; the commercial class is relatively small and largely made up of Jews; and the nobility, as a whole, is bound by ties of self-interest to the existing order of things. Under these circumstances there is little hope of any important change for the better in Russia until, as the London "Spectator" points out, the military class becomes discontented, or a Czar appears with a genius for reform.

Worse Than Lynching

The Southerner who defends or palliates the burning at the stake in Georgi., with all the savagery which accompanied it, to which we briefly alluded last week, ought to understand the sentiment with which it is universally regarded in all civilized communities. Something can be said in justification of lynch law administered by an improvised committee and with some approximation of form of law, in communities in which either the machinery of law has never been organized or for some reason has broken down. Something can be said in excuse for a mob which, under a sudden impulse of rage or fear, acts without forms of law in instantaneously putting to death a criminal whose crime has excited the uncontrollable passion of the people. But the Georgia mob falls into neither category. Plenty of time had elapsed after the crime, and before the barbaric revenge, for passion to cool and reason to reassert itself. The indescribable horrors of the lynching when it took place were more revolting, not in their cruelty alone, but in their vulgarity, than any which history attributes to the American Indians or the medieval peoples. As if to vulgarize the whole scene beyond compare, an excursion train was run from Atlanta to see the show; criers called the people to come and buy tickets as to a circus; according to the Atlanta "Journal," "hundreds of the best men in Atlanta took the trains; it was the best-humored crowd which ever left the city;" it went to see a scene of barbarity which we dare not venture even to describe; "and though they failed to see the lynching, at least one man in fifty brought away some memento." Traffic in relics of the saints has long been a matter for wonderment in Protestant circles; but we do not recall a case in history before in which relics of a criminal have been treasured as sacred mementos.

To call this act lynching is to honor it. To excuse it as the act of a mob crazed by commingled rage and fear is but to frame an indictment against a community which has no power to control its passions, and which makes commercial profit out of feeding and gratifying them. To tell us that the county where this crime

was perpetrated is inhabited almost wholly by pure-blooded Anglo-Saxons is only to make clear that Americans cannot charge this crime of lawlessness and cruelty to an "ignorant and degraded foreign population." This unspeakable atrocity is a disgrace to Georgia, to America, to the Anglo-Saxon race, to humanity. It would be a greater disgrace than it is if burning words were not uttered in unqualified condemnation of it. The one hopeful sign in this unutterably shameful tragedy was the vain effort of a few brave men in Georgia to prevent it; and all leaders of public opinion should rally to their support and unite in condemning what they attempted to prevent, but in vain.

Oliver Cromwell

It has taken almost three centuries to reach a clear discernment of the character and work of Oliver Cromwell. The process is not yet complete, but the three hundredth anniversary finds that process measurably near completion. It even finds a bust of the Protector in one of the corridors of Westminster Palace; that bust, by a curious coincidence, having been placed in position on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Charles I. The modern comprehension of Cromwell owes much to the fiery energy of Thomas Carlyle in deciphering, rearranging, and interpreting the confused Cromwell letters. Rarely has a portrait of a great spirit been given the world in truer outlines, after a host of distortions and caricatures. The earlier portraitures of Cromwell by ecclesiastical or Tory writers were simply caricatures, and to this day there is a class of Churchmen who seem constitutionally unable to take Cromwell's measure.

In place of the boor which Cromwell was once represented to be, we find a man of excellent birth, breeding, and estate. "I was by birth a gentleman," he told his first Parliament. His family had contributed more than one man of distinction to the public life of England, and its blood flows in the veins of some of the most distinguished modern English families. He had been a student at the Sydney Sussex College at Cambridge, and, although his Latin was far

from elegant, it was sufficiently at his command to enable him to carry on diplomatic conversations in it. He had a natural love of letters and music. He chose as Foreign Secretary to the Council the greatest poet of his time and one of the greatest poets of all times; and the two stand together the one as statesman, the other as poet-as representatives of the Puritan temper and spirit. "In human society," wrote Milton, "there is nothing more pleasing to God, more agreeable to reason, nothing fairer and more useful to the State, than that the worthiest should bear rule." Under Cromwell's direction English education was reorganized and the universities reformed.

"If there was a man in England," wrote Neal, "who excelled in any faculty or science, the Protector would find him out, and reward him according to his merit." It was Cromwell's brother-in-law, the warden of Wadham College, who laid the foundation of what afterward became the Royal Society. The tenderness and gentleness of the great Puritan ruler in his own household is the most beautiful tradition of the stormy time in which he lived. When his favorite daughter, Elizabeth, lay dying at Hampton Court, her father barely interrupted his vigil by her side to transact the necessary public business. Amid all the uncertainty and labor of the Scotch campaign he wrote his wife, "Thou art dearer to me than any other creature: pray for me; truly I do daily for thee, and the dear family."

Cromwell was a Puritan of the Puritans; saturated with the language of the Bible, convinced to the bottom of his soul that salvation comes by faith, and that he was a personal instrument of God for the building up of his kingdom in the world. He was sometimes narrow, arbitrary, and, in Ireland, cannot be acquitted of cruelty; but there is no longer any doubt about his sincerity, nor any question about his great ability; and, at his narrowest, he was far broader than most men of his time. Charles I. created the conditions which made Cromwell necessary. It was Charles's ignorance of the English people, his bigotry, and his entire inability to keep faith either with friends or foes, which gave the Revolution so radical a character. It is certain that, so long as there was any hope of finding common ground

with Charles, Cromwell opposed the King's death. He yielded at last to the necessity the King himself had created; it was impossible to deal with a man who kept his word with neither friend nor foe. It was a choice between personal rule and anarchy, and Cromwell chose to rule personally.

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The framework of the government which he devised has passed away; he probably expected that it would pass, because he was essentially conservative in temper; but, in two or three respects, the lines of policy which he marked out predicted the great lines of English development. He was a thoroughgoing constitutionalist, and his insistence upon what he called fundamentals," or what we should call constitutional guaranteesthose bases of government which are not easy to change, like ordinary laws-showed his statesmanlike instinct. What Cromwell insisted upon, the American colonists, when they came to frame a government, worked out in its fullest form. His position was that of Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson. He was, moreover, a firm believer in freedom of worship, and in this respect he was far in advance both of the Churchmen of his time and of the great body of non-Churchmen. His latest historian, and one of his fairest students, Dr. Gardiner, although giving him, as a representative English man of action, a place beside Shakespeare as a representative man of imagination, declares that he was not a constructive statesman. In the sense that he did not create institutions that have continued in the exact form in which he left them, this criticism is sound; but if to set in motion the streams of influence and tendency which became part of the deepest life of the nation is constructive, then Cromwell was one of the creative statesman in English history. He swept away some of the worst obstacles to the free development of England; he made arbitrary personal rule impossible. Charles II. never dared go beyond a certain line, and when George III. attempted it, it cost him half his empire. Cromwell held aloft the great truth that men have a right to worship according to the dictates of their own consciences, in such a way that England never forgot it, though it was long before she incorporated that principle fully into her organic law.

The Great Reality

One of the most significant developments of modern thought is the steady approach of all kinds of truth-physiologic, psychologic, philosophic-to religious truth. It begins to be apparent that the religious view of life, its occupations, duties, spirit, aim, is after all the inevitable view the view to which men must come when they gain a wide and clear knowledge of their surroundings. The religious conception of man's place and work in the world was long held by many religious people as something which did not become clear through noble living and the worshipful spirit, but was arbitrarily superimposed from heaven, and by unreligious men as a fine but wholly fictitious idea which found no warrant or basis in a study of actual conditions. It now becomes clear that the religious nature is part of the human endowment; that whenever men rise to a certain elevation they inevitably see life from the religious point of view; that Christ did not create the religious faculty, but brought into clear light the reality of the unseen world to which it addresses itself.

A striking illustration of this reinforcement of religious truth by the sciences which rest on observation is furnished by the importance which psychology attaches to that quality of repose which finds its root in faith, and which, although the inspiration of many of the noblest careers in history, has so often been regarded as a noble kind of illusion. Professor James is only one among many psychologists who are preaching the gospel of repose in things and forces invisible, not only for peace of soul but for enrichment and fruitfulness of mind. It is this gospel which, in distorted forms, lies behind most of the new religions which are finding so many followers in these days; and as a sign of reaction from the rigid externalism of the old orthodoxy, with its instinctive shrinking from fresh thought and life, these modern revivals of the old philosophies with which declining Rome consoled or entertained herself are not without promise. But it is more significant that a man of such eminence as Professor James declares that the sovereign remedy for the sterility and waste of anxiety and worry is religious faith: "The turbulent billows of the fret

ful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more important realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth." And he quotes with approval a striking passage from a little work by Brother Lawrence, a Carmelite friar of the seventeenth century, with a title which is a sermon in itself: "The Practice of the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of a Holy Life.” The pious friar, who had learned the secret of serene and fruitful living, after setting forth his determination to live only for the love of God, without reference to his personal fortunes, adds: "I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love Him," and adds, "That since then he had passed his life in perfect liberty and continual joy." Surely never was the highest success in the art of living more adequately expressed; to have perfect liberty and continual joy is to touch the highest reaches of spiritual achievement. These great altitudes, where men breathe an air free from pollution and refresh themselves with the far-reaching beauty of a great landscape, are accessible only to those who bring faith as well as knowledge to their aid. Religion is not the staff of the feeble; it is not the resource of those who deceive themselves with dreams; it is the highest expression of the deepest experience; it is the supreme reality.

The Spectator

The Spectator found himself the other day in a part of New York known to him only by name. Leaving the cars at the corner of an avenue near the East River, he found that he had joined a procession of people. There was an air of desperate earnestness in the movements of some of them, while others moved like driftwood on a river with a slow current, swayed by every passing breeze. Some of the people carried slips of paper which they offered to chance passers-by with evidence of anxiety. It was evident from the gestures and motions that they did not

speak English, and that these slips were directions to be followed. It was a strange crowd, and represented many languages.

The Spectator suddenly realized that the street through which he was passing had been given over to hospitals, medical schools, and nurses' homes. The build ings were all more or less repellent, a cross between a factory and a tenement-house, and suggested the idea of makeshiftsbuildings put to a temporary use until space and money made suitable buildings possible. A cheerful-looking building at the end of the street, a pleasant and restful spot in the midst of the grim ugliness, was the morgue. The Spectator stopped. Cheerful groups of men, women, and children sat on the curb in the sunshine chatting, smoking, thinking not of gloomy things, if the expressions told the truth, with their backs to this building, which is to most of us a chamber of horrors. The Spectator was on his way to the almshouse on Blackwell's Island-going as an observer, a citizen, who had not done his duty. Who of this crowd were going there to find a home? It was impossible to decide from appearances.

Inside the building on the dock was a motley crowd, the human flotsam and jetsam of a great city; officials in uniform, and officials whose badge of authority was that of manner only, with here and there one who in the performing of his duties made occasion for joking, the subjects being the doubly unfortunate who must come, even for a moment, under his care. But, on the whole, the Spectator, as he stood there, felt that human hearts were large and human patience well-nigh inexhaustible.

In the corner of the large, long room stood a young man, a threadbare coat but toned up tight, the lapels crossed over the chest. The thin, collarless neck suggested that not much but the coat covered his body. His hair was brushed with great care, showing a well-rounded head. The man's face was thin, but there was in it a suggestion of refinement. He was the only man in the room whose head was

uncovered, though there must have been a hundred women present. As the door opened a sign evidently to the initiated that the time for the boat to leave was near at hand-this young man stepped up to the officer and presented a piece of paper. When he had gone down the dock, the Spectator asked the officer, "Where is he going?" "To the city alcoholic ward; lost his permit six times; hand shook so he could not hold it. Pretty bad case."

A father, mother, and five children stood close together. The children were very clean, but there was not clothing enough to go round. The ones who had dresses had no petticoats, and coats and vests had parted company; it was evidently. considered too much for the same child to wear both hats and shoes. There was no fear, nor distress, nor anxiety. A great and beneficent government, or unknown something, was going to care for them, somewhere. A piece of paper held by the man was read by an official, who directed this family to the end of the building. The mother gave one more pat to her shiny head, adjusted a bright shawl, and, rounding up the brood, with a questioning glance at her husband, she pushed the children through the door. Not a word was spoken. This was a stranded family of Italians. The Island would solve the immediate problem. The future? That was not here yet.

A woman of sixty, perhaps more, dressed in deep black, a long veil hanging down her back, rose clumsily from a seat by the wall. She gave all her attention to a woman of about thirty-five, very neatly dressed, whose white face had on it such a look of dumb endurance as made the Spectator wrathful against the whole of life. For a moment he wanted to follow the advice given Job. But a man cannot die because a woman's face tells of her life's defeat. The shawl was carefully adjusted, an extra touch was given to the neat bonnet, and the woman in black gave her arm to her companion. They went to a desk and received one slip of paper. They approached the door. The young woman was allowed to pass

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