up with undiminished faith in her boy. "But somethin' must er happened— 'twa'n't in 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer to forgit his grandmother. You see it was so very far out west-most to Buffalo I b'lieve it was they went; her folks thought there might be a opening there for him in the bootcherin' business. He'd stayed on the farm so many years he'd kinder lost his chance. He felt he wa'n't very young any more; but he never seemed mor'n half growed up to me-did 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer!" By a little questioning Mandy discovered that this grandson must have been about twenty-five when he passed out of Grammer Great's life, and then she calculated that not long before that very time she had lost her lover. Could it be possible that in the shadowy picture of that starlit parting over the gate the boy and girl were but twenty and twenty-two! After all, the "slow revolving years" are too swift for our mental adjustments, and the lookingglass is a daily recurring surprise. "No," said Grammer Great, yielding to the unexpressed need of apology which she felt in the air, "they couldn't none of 'em be expected to rightly want me any longer when they got a notion 1 couldn't earn my keep no more,they was all so poor, you see. But I guess they'd be surprised to see how I'm a-pickin' up,-now wouldn't they, Mandy?" She cackled with pleasure. and pride in her deeds of prowess. "I kinder keep up along of you, don't I, child?" More and more the permeating unselfishness which made the essential piety of this simple soul and had proved her refuge and defence against the dark spectres of bitterness and despair shone upon Mandy's gloomy retrospections like a light out of heaven. The submission of spirit to life's hardest allotments, the ready love and childlike pleasure with which she received the smallest manifestations of kindness, often, however, without verbal expression, were a daily sermon delivered with quiet force by a quite unconscious preacher. Mandy softened and expanded under the influence, giving herself up to a very passion of serving. It came to be a great joy to her to accompany Grammer Great's faltering footsteps down toward the gateway of death, with all the little loving cares which SO smooth the roughness of that way. How she longed that the task might be lengthened a bit and this late found comradeship have time to ripen before the parting! Grammer Great's mind remained wonderfully clear for several years, and time seemed to have made a kindly pause. The only way in which the mists now and then enveloped her were in thoughts and memories of 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer. More and more his personality seemed to dwell with her, and the impression of an unfinished episode in life's evolution teased her wandering thoughts. Sometimes it would appear in an expression: "When 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer comes home," or "Next time you write to 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer, Mandy, tell him we're waitin' fur him"; or there would be lapses into the sad conviction that after all he must be dead. But she was never sad for long. She had the habit of cheerfulness. Now and then the doctor dropped in, always with the opening greeting, "Well, how's the baby, Mandy?" And the baby was always pleased to see him. He had an incurable habit of shouting his remarks at Grammer Great, which distressed Mandy; but it never troubled the old lady. He had the sensation, he said, of speaking to someone far away in time and space, as she sat shrunk into her big chair like a tiny old elf. "I ain't deef a mite," she would pipe back sweetly, "but I don't mind your hollerin' ef you like to-my second husband always hollered that-a-way!" One day after his brief talk with Grammer Great he called Mandy out to the door with him. "How'd you like to give her up to her children now?" he said, as he pulled the door softly to behind them. "Well, I just wouldn't-and that's how!" answered answered Mandy shortly. "They'll none of 'em ever get a chance to neglect and abuse her again while I live!" The doctor slapped his leg meditatively with his gloves. "Fact is, Mandy," he said, picking his words with suspicious care, "fact is, 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer's been heard from. He's raising a regular roozy to find Grammer Great, and they're after me to know where she is!" Mandy's heart stood still and then gave an angry bound. "Took him quite a spell to get up an interest in it! Let him keep on huntin', and you just keep still!" "I believe he'd been sent word that she died some years ago, and as he hadn't much use for his father's halfsisters, he's never had any communication since with any of his folks till lately, when he heard by chance that his grandmother was still living. He's turned up rich, and now they're all in mortal terror for fear he'll find out how they let her go to the poorhouse." Just then there was a soft shuffling of feet in the entry, and Grammer Great's voice came in a reedy quaver to them where they stood. "Here I be, Mandy, an' it's time we go feed the beasts—you and me!" All that night and the next day the tide of battle rose and fell in Mandy's heart. It was cruel-this last terrible following of fate! To give her this final blessing, and then to force her to renounce it-and voluntarily, too! No, she could not, she would not do it! Events might take their course. Grammer Great was happy where she was, and she would take no steps to alter the poor soul's conditions. And all the time Mandy knew what Grammer Great would have done in her place, without any thought of self! During the next day the old lady was peculiarly clinging and hardly separated from Mandy for a moment. "Sakes alive, what a blessin' a good cup of tea is," she said blissfully at dinner, as she poured it into her saucer to cool. "A body'd ought to be thankful to be able to sense it, now hadn't they?" She leaned back after a deep and refreshing draught, and looked across with her beaming blue eyes at Mandy, sitting opposite, hard pressed with doubt and temptation. "Shall we git at carpet rags or piece at them quilts this afternoon?" she went on. "I'd kinder like to git them quilts done, so we'd both snuggle up under 'em next winter"; and she laughed with a shrill ripple of anticipatory joy. “My, but we do take comfort now, don't we? I wish 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer could just know once how nice I'm fixed!" That night Mandy finished the conflict and concluded a treaty of peace with her good angel. Grammer Great's sweet spirit of renunciation had descended upon her and conquered. "In the morning," said Mandy to herself decisively, "I send word to the poorhouse 't they shall let her folks know where she is!" They were doing up the breakfast dishes together, Mandy standing by the pan and Grammer Great wiping a plate in her lap as she sat by the table, when a man came crunching up the gravel path and knocked at the door. Mandy dried her hands and went to open to the stranger. Grammer Great following slowly after, found them facing each other, the man on the doorstep and Mandy awaiting his message, while the morning sun sent a flood of light down the hallway to where the faltering footsteps came nearer. "Grammer Great," he cried with a choke in his voice, "don't you know your little Ebenezer after so many years?" Grammer Great wavered toward him with both hands out, and with a little satisfied croon that was half a laugh reached up to be gathered in his arms as if he had just come in after a day's work in the hay field. "Lapse of time and change of scene" were dim and unimportant factors to her, and no disguise of hair and close cropped beard turned gray could deceive the eyes of her great love. Mandy stood like one turned to stone. Through all the anguish of this finding that was to be her losing, a terrible and a beautiful recognition had come to her. She knew that the man before her was the Eben Plympton of her youth, and the prairie grave so long mourned over was no more! It all turned out as such things should turn out, not quite as it might have, perhaps, if there had been no parting over the gate some thirty years before, but with enough of romance, and much of the blessing and happiness which come to hearts sorely dis ciplined in sorrow and renunciation when at last they reach their reward. It does not concern us here to know what entanglements or ties had come and gone for 'Zekiel's little Ebenezer. Let it suffice that when he came to seek Grammer Great and found also the love of his youth, he was fancy free. There was a wedding, of course, and the doctor came and drank the health of the bride, shouting gay messages at Grammer Great, and wishing her long life. "I wouldn't wonder-not a mite," piped Grammer Great in high glee, "ef I live to be a hundred! We're a turrible long-lived family!" International arbitration had its origin with the United States, and has found its largest development in connection with our foreign affairs. About half of all the important international difficulties settled in this way have been between the United States on the one side and some foreign nation on the other. It is not strange, then, that the method should be in great favor with us. We are fond of it, as we are of everything American. We are proud of the splendid growth which it has made under our fostering care. It is the American system; it is our settled policy; and we are anxious to have the rest of the world adopt it without delay. Indeed, so great and enthusiastic has our attachment to it become, that our government, inspired by the extraordinary virtue of some of its citizens, has already decided that in certain eventualities it will go to war and employ the whole military power of the nation, on land and sea, in order to enforce this peaceful system on a sister nation. "We will have peace, if we have to fight for it" seems to have passed with us from the region of sentimental expression into that of serious business. I have recently heard it argued seriously on the streets of Boston that this would be a highly righteous act on our part, and would do more to secure the universal adoption of international arbitration than all the varied kinds of peace effort put forth during the last fifty years. Only a few days ago, a poem came to the office of the American Peace Society, asking for publication, written somewhat in the style of "Rally round the flag, boys," calling upon all our citizens to fly, in arms if need be, to the defence of Venezuela against British aggression, and all, as the last line of each stanza said, "In the cause of peaceful arbitration." The advocates of this mode of promoting arbitration, perhaps a majority of them, must be credited with sincerity and with generosity of purpose. It is perfectly evident, however, that a considerable number of them, and those not the least prominent, are simply making American love of arbitration and peace a cloak to cover their silly dislike of Great Britain and, worse still, their selfish desire that the United States may soon have a big war as a means of exhibiting in a striking way her greatness and her supposed superiority to all the rest of the creation. These sonorous "patriots" do not care a farthing whether Great Britain arbitrates her boundary dispute with Venezuela or not; some of them would be very unhappy if she should. The sincere among this class of our citizens reason that, if Great Britain were once soundly thrashed by us for her colonial aggression, she would forthwith change her conduct and henceforth meekly submit all her differences with other countries, weak as well as strong, to arbitration. Other nations seeing this and standing in awe of Uncle Sam's cudgel would quickly follow her example, and the cause of arbitration would be virtually won. Such reasoning as this, which it is difficult to treat seriously, disregards the plainest lessons of history. One of the most serious obstacles against which arbitration has had to make its way has been the animosity between nations laid deep in the national character by wars. This sensitive dislike, created and fed by the cruel deeds of war, works as powerfully with the victor as with the vanquished. Hon. John W. Foster, on his recent visit to the East, got Li Hung Chang to introduce a general arbitration clause into the treaty of peace then about to be made between China and Japan. But the victorious nation, with a touch of haughtiness bred of her success, deliberately rejected it. She was not yet ready to hang up, by a treaty of arbitration, her hungry sword. It would be as difficult to induce Germany as it would be to persuade France to enter into a treaty, either temporary or permanent, by which it should be agreed to submit all the future differences of the two countries to arbitration. Though nearly one hundred important arbitrations have taken place within this century, only one of these, and that hardly an arbitration, has been between these two countries, which a long series of wars has barricaded against each other. The hatred and jealousy which war engenders are everywhere the great obstacle to that confiding international fellowship which expresses itself in the ready arbitration of difficulties. It is in the highest degree preposterous to suppose that a war would promote the very principle which it brutally violates. No check so effectual could be put upon the steady progress of arbitration and of the civilization rooted in justice and liberty, of which it is the expression, as a war between this and the mother country, even if fought on our part in defence of the principle of arbitration. Neither nation would arbitrate with the other as readily afterwards as it does now. The effect on the United States would be even worse than upon Great Britain. We have conquered her in two wars, and, strange to say, she is the only nation with which we ever talk of fighting or have any wish to fight. The dislike of Great Britain in this country is deeper seated and more unyielding than animosity toward our people on her side. It would be easy to show that we have been less willing than she to submit to arbitration the differences between the two countries. When the Behring Sea dispute was first under discussion, there were numbers of people and of newspapers in this country that declared there was nothing to arbitrate, that we ought to yield nothing, but rather go to war and drive her out of the Sea. In the Alabama difficulty our reluctance was still greater. One treaty agreeing to submit the case was rejected by the Senate, and but for the prudence and patience of Mr. Hamilton Fish this greatest of arbitrations would possibly not be on record. Our minister to England in 1869 was as bellicose as the people, and Mr. Fish had finally not only severely to reprimand him but to consent that the President should call him home. The more than thirty disputes which we have settled with other nations with which we have never been at war have cost us less than onefourth the diplomatic contention that thirteen with the mother country have occasioned, and none of the hard words and recrimination. But in spite of the disturbance which the sediment of war has produced between them, other causes have been at work to make these two nations by far the leaders of the world in Christian civilization and in the international arbitration movement attending it. The evil spirit just alluded to has been rendered measurably harmless by the better and nobler spirit which has inspired and led the two nations on. If in the work of humanizing the world the United States has been foremost, it would be difficult to say how much or in what respects. Except in name, our kinsmen on the other side of the sea are as free as we are. The principles for which the Revolution was fought have taken root nearly as deeply there as here. The same systems of religion, education, law, and in large measure of government, both local and national, prevail on both sides of the water. I have said that the system of international arbitration originated with the United States,* and that it has had its development more especially through our country's support. But this is hardly a full or even a fair statement of the case. On the part of the United States the credit of originating the system is due to one man, John Jay, rather than to the nation. The nation's part in the origination was not very creditable. The people of the newly-formed republic, smarting under *This statement must not be interpreted to mean that there had been no isolated cases of international arbitration before the founding of the United States. Three or four such settlements of a really international character, are cited as having taken place about one hundred years earlier. But not until the United States and Great Britain began to settle difficulties in this way did the application of arbitration to international differences enter upon a regular and systematic development. |