although a dense mystery hangs over them as yet. A few points, however, peep out, like the peaks of glaciers over a sea of fog, that may give us a notion how the land lies. We know that Messrs. Barbier and Ozenne, the so-called representatives of a French company which professed to treat for the coal fields in the valley of the Saar before the war, but really functionaries of high position, have suddenly reappeared in Berfin; and although their proceedings have been hitherto surrounded with an impenetrable secrecy, only a childlike simplicity of mind will credit them with no business of a more serious kind than pleasure-seeking. Again, we learn from a reliable source that Count Bismark certainly contemplates as not improbable a journey to Biarritz, in the latter half of this month, when the Emperor will be there. Finally, we hear that quite within the last few days the name of Luxemburg has turned up in diplomatic whispers on divers occasions, in a manner to convey the suspicion of a possible disposition to effect by common consent its transfer to a new allegiance. From the Economist, 8 Sept. THE recent Philadelphia Convention has been characterised by the President, in one of those violent philippics against Congress which have done so much to win him popularity with the broken aristocracy of the South, as likely to prove the greatest Convention since that memorable Convention of State delegates in 1787 which prepared the Constitution of the United States. Prophetic appreciations of the weight and sig nificance of contemporary events are gen erally hazardous, and when proceeding from eager partisans who have a mot ve for hoping and passionately craving that they prove what it is barely possible that they may prove, are worth very little. Mr. Johnson may be right in believing that the Convention which managed to combine the ex-Secessionists who still detest the North in their hearts, the Northern party favourable to secession, and lastly the Northern party which is willing to smooth over difficulties by conceding anything to the South except secession, in a single Convention, basing their ambiguous concord on the letter of the Constitution, will really unite the States shall into one tolerably compact whole again as little liable to fresh rupture as was the Union of 1787. But if he is right in so supposing, the concord which he fondly anticipates must surely be based on the rapid extinction or exile of the negro race; for without that condition the policy which the President and his friends advocate of leaving the South to deal as it will with the freedmen, on the principle of the sacredness of State rights, means of course nothing less than leaving them to rebuild, without the name of slavery, the very same social structure which has just been so rudely overthrown, to foster again into full bloom that totally distinct social and political ideal which led to the recent rupture, and which must lead to a new rupture only the more certainly and rapidly that the late war has brought out into the most conscious and confessed contrast in both North and South the widely opposed conceptions of political honour and duty which the free-soil and the serf system respectively engender. For our own parts we see the clearest indications that whatever may be the immediate result of the Philadelphia compromise on the coming elections, and as a caucus to manage elections no doubt it was a very dexterous bit of electioneering of the short-sighted temporary kind, it will never effect much in the way of cementing a real union between the dissentient States. Such a union to be sound must be based on an assimilation of the social and political ideal of the States to be drawn together. Nothing can be more futile in the eyes of spectators looking on from a distance than the attempt to skin over such wounds as we have recently seen bleeding, without extracting the irritating substance which keeps up the pain and irritation. Sometimes, no doubt, for a time, before radical differences of this kind have come to an open rupture, the purely alleviating and anodyne treatment may be successful in postponing the crisis. But the feud having been once fiercely acknowledged and fought out, as this feud has been, it is a sign of those shallow political insights which are usually characteristic of wire-pullers even to hope that such differences should cease while all the natural causes which produced them and fostered their growth are left almost untouched to bear fresh seed. The truth seems to us to be that the blindest and dullest of all the parties in the United States is that which some of the shrewdest and most cunning of the Republicans, such as Mr. Seward, and Mr. Raymond of the New York Times, have chosen to countenance. Sharing as they do --- - the extreme and if it were not paradoxi- | a new combination. The psuedo-republical to call it so, we would say the fanatical cans think it looks easy to tempt back the -moderation so characteristic of the half- South into Union, and terribly hard to root educated, sober, secular-minded American out the deep-seated cause of disunion, so intelligence, they evidently hope, as they they shut their eyes resolutely to the latter hoped years ago, to humour the South back even though it involve breach of faith to into cordiality, by bidding them see how the only element in the South that has been little they wish to interfere with their "do- always loyal, and try the decoy system mestic institutions." True, the war has which the Philadelphia Convention has just arisen out of those domestic institutions. been inaugurating amidst such universal But then, think the wire-pullers, the war democratic jubilation. has warned the South how far they may go, and that it is useless to attempt to develop these domestic institutions into the groundwork of an independent polity. If they give up all notions of that kind, what does it matter to the Northern States what private iniquities the Southern States are by the exercise of State sovereignty committing? Slavery is abolished, and as for checking the injustice of the Southern tribunals and the Southern legislatures, that would be a gross violation of the sacred principle of State rights; and as for the promise of protection given to the subject race, and the faith which the Government owes to its own former negro soldiers, these are obligations altogether inferior in binding force to those taken under the old Constitution, to let alone each State in the exercise of its divine prerogative. Such is evidently the idea of Mr. Johnson and his new party. That it should be Mr. Johnson's idea is not perhaps very strange or extraordinarily discreditable to him. Educated all his life to think slavery lawful, and inocculated thoroughly with its virus,it was only as a statesman of the Union, and from his firm belief in the greatness of the nation as a whole, that he was induced to sacrifice and oppose slavery. Naturally enough, he cannot see how deep its dissociating tendency goes. Still more naturally he cannot dread it for its own sake, but only for that of the Union. If his views are narrow, prejudiced, vulgar, and somewhat tinged with the ferocity of the fire-eaters against the New England fanatics, as he regards them, we have no reason to wonder at and less to blame him. But his supporters, Messrs. Seward, Raymond, and Co., are far less pardonable. That they do not see that to restore the Union they must extirpate the one root-difference between North and South, even at the cost of years of painful statesmanship and slow legislation, is due less to intellectual than moral causes. The appetite for political compromise among the managers of political sections in America is so keen, that principles vanish like smoke before the vision of The policy of that Convention was as follows: - subsilentio to waive the right gained by Congress under the constitutional amendment to extirpate, by its own action, slavery in the South; to waive the principle laid down in the Civil Rights Act conferring the civil rights of United States citizens on the negroes; to put an end at once to the Freedmen's Bureau, the military institution which represented the negroes in the South and interfered on their behalf whenever the law flagrantly wronged them, all this on condition that the Secessionists in their turn would give up dreams of disunion, resume their loyalty, repudiate their own debt, consent to be taxed for the payment of the debt incurred in conquering them, and speak respectfully of that Federal army by which they were overthrown. That was the programme of the party who managed the recent Philadelphia Convention, and that is the policy of the President, who openly and passionately accuses Congress a far clearer-sighted body than the Convention-of striking at liberty and the Constitution because it has declined to welcome back the South without guarantees for the real as well as nominal abolition of slavery. But is there any presumption, even as matters stand at present, that the President and Convention will prove to be right and the Congress wrong? In our minds the evidence is entirely in the other direction. The Convention was saved by mere excess of skill from complete shipwreck. The ex-party of active rebellion was strong in it; the exparty favourable to that rebellion on the Northern side was strong in it; and had the supporters of either of these parties spoken, the prospects of the Convention as an electioneering caucus would have been absolutely at an end. To restrain the Northerners who had favoured the rebellion—such as Mr. Fernando Wood and Mr. Vallandighamfrom speaking, required the entreaty, the persistent and passionate entreaty, of all the leaders of the Convention. The ex-Secessionists could only be restrained from speaking by suppressing all general debate of all kinds, and making the Convention a mere - SKETCH OF NAPOLEON II. formal meeting to pass a string of resolutions, do not doubt,- for its intelligence though for many of which the Southern delegates slow is sure, — grasp fully, as even the late could not persuade themselves to vote, Congress did rudely and with a coarse prethough they did not express their disgust by liminary sagacity, the nature of the problem open opposition. The whole meeting was it has to solve, and address itself to its soluartificially managed, and, by very skilful tion, undistracted from its duty by Mr. manipulation of questions of order and form, Johnson's violent menaces and Mr. Seward's kept without an opportunity of any real political cunning. exchange of opinions. The Northern compromise party managed everything, and so the loyal, specious-looking resolutions got themselves passed without any open defiance. But how did the South receive the compromise? It burst into savage criticism the next day on the hypocrisy of the loyal resolutions. The leading newspapers distinctly repudiated them. Even the leading newspapers of that party in the North which had formerly favoured secession broke out against the Philadelphia platform. Everything tends to show that the chosen wirepullers of the Convention have been too sharp for substantial success. They have made a hollow and unmeaning truce look like hearty peace. They have made the sullen toleration of Southerners, who only kept silence because they hated Congress worse than the leaders of the Convention, look like hearty alliance and co-operation with their own plans. But the prospect of a new party is in reality chimerical. At the elections Southern delegates will be returned for the express purpose of throwing the burden of the Federal debt in some way off the South,- for expressing the intense Southern hatred towards the Federal armies, and resisting in every way the vote of money for the soldiers of those armies. With such delegates it will be impossible for the Republican Compromise party to act, and so the new combination will probably go to pieces. The truth is that good policy and good faith alike require that this great reconstruction question should not be dealt with as a matter that can be settled by merely appealing to the provisions of the old Constitution. The old Constitution did not recognise the difficulty of two hostile political systems growing up in neighbouring States. Those systems have since grown up, and the more powerful and more noble of the two, the free-soil system, has conquered in the physical struggle. But it cannot stop here. It must assimilate the other and antagonistic system to itself before it can expect peace, amity, union. To do this requires anxious statesmanship, a long protectorate, great fidelity to the negroes so suddenly emancipated, in short a transitional system of longprotracted care. And the North will, we SINCE the recent mediation of the Emperor of the French, which has perhaps saved Austria from total annihilation, there is reason to believe that the desire of France to possess the ashes of the young Prince who was for a few hours Napoleon II., has been acceded to by the Emperor Francis Joseph, and that the mortal remains of the King of Rome will soon be placed beneath the dome of the Invalides, side by side with those of his illustrious father. Thus the great Napoleon and his son, separated by destiny in life, will at last be united in death. Both died in the land of exile, and neither will have found repose upon the soil of France until after many years' sleep far from her shores - one upon a rock-bound island in a distant ocean, and the other in the funereal vault of an Austrian palace. Little is generally known in America of the last years of Napoleon II., and the present moment seems opportune to give a sketch of his brief and melancholy career. Joseph Charles Francis Napoleon, King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt, was born at Paris on the 20th of March, 1811. All the good fairies seemed to have assembled around his cradle, and all appeared to predict for him honors, riches, and power; not one intimated a doubt of his future grandeur and lustre! Yet, despite the happy presages which accompanied his birth, scarcely three years after he came into the world as the heir of Napoleon, the young Prince left France on the 2d of May, 1814, never to return during life. On arriving in the dominions of his grandfather, the Emperor of Austria, his title was suppressed, the name he bore was proscribed, every fact in history which recalled the glory of his father and the humiliation of his enemies was carefully concealed from the child's knowledge, and at seven years of age the son of Napoleon became the Duke of Reichstadt. An Imperial decree, promulgated July 22, 1818, (the 22d of July was also the date so little to prove himself worthy to bear of his death,) conferred upon him the title the name of Napoleon. I remember having of an Austrian Duke, fixed his rank at the often seen, in America, an engraving repreCourt of Vienna, the arms he was to bear, senting him grasping his father's sword and the honors to which he was to be entitled, lamenting his powerlessness to wield the and the position he was to occupy as a mem- weapon which had so long "made all Euber of the Imperial family of Austria. No rope tremble." The phrase attributed to trace of Napoleon was left, and the name him may be apocryphal, as regards the itself was formally suppressed by the strict letter of the expression, but that decree. such were in reality his feelings cannot be doubted for an instant. Afterward, as he grew up and learned what hero had been his father, he suddenly awoke as from a long slumber. When he read in secret the story of Napoleon's immortal campaigns, and comprehended the glory and power to which the genius of his father had attained, it seemed to him that he had all at once entered another world, illumined by the history of gigantic exploits. His mother, a woman whose heart seemed insensible to any ennobling emotion, and who had not the dignity to remain the widow of Napoleon-his mother wept at his bedside, when the fatal moment drew near. "Mother! mother!" he whispered, “I am dying!" "The body completely emaciated; the chest, in proportion to the body, long and narrow; the sternum flattened; the neck wasted." He was interred at Schönbrunn with princely honors, and visitors to his tomb, at the present day, will see upon it a Latin inscription, of which the following is a translation: It was the 22d of July, 1832, and these Then, despite those who surrounded him, were the last words of Napoleon II., expirdespite the incessant watch kept over him, ing in a murmur upon his lips with his last he determined to know all. He obtained breath. Thus died the son of the Great and eagerly devoured every work in which Captain, at the age of twenty-one years. Napoleon's name was mentioned, and final- Six days after his death, on the 28th, a ly, when he realized how great his father port mortem examination of the remains had been, what humiliations had been heaped was made at Schönbrunn. The following upon him, how he had died a tortured prison- is an extract of the medical report: er, the young Prince was filled with an immense hatred of those who had accomplished the banished soldier's long martyrdom. His indignation was also excited against the decree which deprived him of the name which he justly regarded as the most glorious of those he bore, and he immediately and resolutely signified his intention to be called Napoleon. Like his father, he was fond of the profession of arms, but his tall, thin body could not withstand the arduous exercises to which he attempted to school himself. Appointed Colonel of the Gustavus Vasa Regiment, he assumed the active command, took part in every fatiguing ceremony, in all weathers, and no matter how ill he was, or how much his physicians remonstrated. His dreams were of glory. He studied the art of war in the numberless descriptions of his father's battles, either reading them or inducing others to recount them to him with the map of Europe beneath his eye. He would never consent to lie down, except when his feebleness absolutely forced him to do so. He well knew that he must soon die, but he had only one regret in leaving the world, and that was to have done Of Joseph To the eternal memory stadt; He had himself written an epitaph, which he wished placed upon his tomb, but which was rejected. It was brief and to the purpose: Here lies the Son of the Great Napoleon! Paris Cor. N. Y. Times. No. 1167. Fourth Series, No. 28. 13 October, 1866. POETRY: Session of the poets, Aug. 1866, 66. A London Lyric, 96. Nine Weary Miles, 128 NEW BOOKS. PHILIP EARNSCLIFFE, or, the Morals of Mary Fair. A Novel. by Mrs. Edwards, Author of Archie Lovell. American News Co., New York. Mr. WINKFIELD. A Novel. American News Co., New York. VENETIAN LIFE, by Wm. D. Howells. Hurd and Houghton, New York. Some years ago, we published in the Living Age, in successive Nos., a very good Story, called KATE COVENTRY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. This we have now re-printed as a handsome paper-covered book, price 38 cents. sent by mail, postage free. Booksellers supplied on liberal terms. It will be Lately published at this office: ZAIDEE, by Mrs. Oliphant, 75 cents. HALL, 25 cents. MISS MARJORIBANKS, 75 cents. WITCHHAMPTON Oliphant; OUT OF Preparing for Publication at this Office: MADONNA MARY, by M CHARITY; THE VILLAGE ON THE CLIFF; NINA BALгATKA; SIR BROOK FOSBROOKE; THE CLAVERINGS; OLD SIR DOUGLAS, by Mrs. Norton. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second The Complete work 20 50 44 Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. |