LIFE

"While there's Life there's Hope."

VOL. XIX.

MARCH 3d, 1892.

JAM

No. 479. 28 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET, NEW YORK.

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IN one of the February magazines there

was a story by Miss Mary Wilkins about a poor child who had the misfortune to live in the times of the witch excitement in Massachusetts. Her family were accused of witchcraft and carried off to jail, and she was left alone to suffer all childish miseries from fear, loneliness

and starvation, and to die finally from their combined effects. It is a dreadful story, and if you haven't read it already, on no account read it at all, for it will corrode your liver and make your heart as heavy as a lunch-counter doughnut. How Miss Wilkins could bring herself to send out such an engine of literary torment puzzles the intelligence. Indeed, LIFE cannot and never could see how humane writers can bring themselves to turn the sufferings and death of little children to literary account, notwithstanding the notorious truth that most people's hearts soften toward children and can be wrung with less trouble and with less art by literary child murder, than by any other known device of the Enemy.

I

T is a rare pang, though, that does not bring some compensation. Anyone whose misfortune it has been to read Miss Wilkins's inexcusable little tale will remember her picture of "the great minister Cotton Mather" riding by to a witch trial at Salem, and if he brings away any impression except pain and anger, it will be a renewed conviction of the limitations of the usefulness of ministers in regulating matters that pertain to civil government. Our high-minded and eloquent Presbyterian fellow-townsman, Dr. Parkhurst, has been preaching about the awful state of municipal government in New York, and has called the gentlemen who run the city politics some very hard names. Far be it from LIFE to say that its friends of Tammany Hall are not every

thing that our reverend fellow-citizen has called them. Nevertheless, bad as perhaps they are, we are not prepared to assert that if the choice was offered we would not prefer Mr. Croker for City Boss, to Dr. Parkhurst. Mr. Croker and Mayor Grant and their friends have a good deal of power, but New York is a habitable city, still. Whether it would be habitable for the average citizen if Dr. Parkhurst was boss, is a question fitter for discussion than experiment.

ACCORDING to the scriptural theory

which Dr. Parkhurst supports, when

the Creator made the world and put man in it, He put him in the way of learning to distinguish good from evil, and left him free to experiment. One of the weaknesses of the reverend clergy as civil administrators is their apparent impatience of the right to try things. They are constantly asking to have laws passed, and when they get them passed they grumble incessantly because they are not enforced. But the reason they are not enforced usually is that they are made to fit men as

they ought to be, and not as they are.

The Sun wants the District Attorney to have Dr. Parkhurst indicted for calling names at Tammany Hall. Tammany has a talker, too. Let her put the Hon. Bourke Cockran on her platform and invite a few remarks from him upon the scope, value and defects of Presbyterian preaching.

THE polite world has furnished a tremendous example of what a pistol can do toward making home happy. Considered as a domestic implement the pistol has very grave defects. For one thing it makes a noise when it goes off; a noise so loud sometimes that all the world hears it. Besides, there are two ends to it, and when it is used in one's family it is a perplexing question at which end it does the most harm. There were better ways, and a greater man, or one less crazed with passion, would have found one. All the same there is no lack of men and women in the world who may find a useful object-lesson in that poor heap of carrion lately known as M. Abeille.

*

HE State legislature of Mississippi passed a law the other day prohibiting cigarette smoking in public in that state. The same day they passed a resolution inviting Senator Hill to come and address them on some subject. The Mississippi people seem to be particular about their poison, but they show a very curious sort of discrimination. The scriptures say that it is not what enters in at the mouth that makes the mischief, but what goes in at the ear.

BOOKISHNESS

THE CHANCE FOR A PATROTIC NOVEL.

THE flags were flying the other day on all the high buildings in the

city, to signify that it was the birthday of a patriot. It was a beautiful day, and, as the flags fluttered against the blue, solid citizens raised their eyes from the streets, and felt a little tremor in their hearts, especially if they were over forty and recalled what intense emotions the flag stood for when they were in their youth.

But the bulk of the people on the streets were under thirty, and to them the flag is a symbol of merry-makings,- a fetich that clubs and hotels and theatres display on days that are devoted to pleasure. They associate it somehow with picnics of the John J. O'Malley Association, which is organized for spoils; with parades of grizzled veterans who (we have a half-belief) are organized for pension raids; or, with the topmost girl in the closing spectacle of a ballet or comic opera.

The boy from the country has still another association for the flagthe rural cemetery where a score or more of graves are marked with little weather-stained flags that set apart the resting-places of patriots.

Even for him the flag stands for a day of fun, for an incongruous procession where marched all the odd characters of the village, and a hay-wagon covered with bunting in which rode the local beauties, gorgeous in white muslin with red and blue sashes, and carrying wreaths of flowers.

And for old and young alike who read the papers there is somewhere in a cranny of the mind a well-defined idea that the flag nowadays is a symbol of political bluster, and that the modern patriot is the man who goes to Congress "for the glory of the old flag and an appropriation."

THERE is nothing in the fiction or general literature of the decade

to counteract this decay of patriotism as a sentiment. Indeed the men of judgment and education are rather afraid of the sentimental side of it-it has been associated with so much that is unpractical, wrong-headed and hypocritical. When the patriot creeps into our fiction at all, it is to be made fun of, to be shown up as a ludicrous person, or a rather awkward knave. Indeed we cannot recall a single patriotic American novel since the period of war literature. Our novelists would rather analyze the perturbations of the heart of an immature girl, or the rascalities of a "gilded youth," than show us the development of the character of a really patriotic man, who stands in his com

munity for integrity, fidelity, enthusiasm in all things relating to his country, his state, his own town, his home. He is not dead by any means, for almost every hamlet has him in some stage of development. He stands for the best Americanism, and the encouraging thing is that he has the respect and often the admiration of the community in which he lives. That is strong enough proof that the country at large knows real patriotism when it sees it.

But surely it ought to be in our fiction! French, German and Italian novels are permeated with it-for their novelists realize that they are appealing to the strongest passion, but one, in the breast of man. Looked at merely from the side of Art, we ought to have more of it, for it is inspiring, elevating, often dramatic.

Or, to appeal to a lower motive, it is apt to be very successful. Only a few days ago it was announced that a new edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin " had been ordered to the extent of 100,000 copies before the day of publication; and it is well-known that the " Biglow Papers" are the most popular of Mr. Lowell's writings.

And then it is clean, and decent, and manly-and a big-brained

HISTORY OF LITERATURE.

Droch.

By Thomas Carlyle. New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons. Evolution in Science, Philosophy and Art. Lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

Romance of the Willow. By Marie Woodruff-Walker. New York The American News Company.

Shorthand and Typewriting. By D. McKillop. New York: Fowler and Wells Company.

One Evening. Songs Grave and Gay. By Richard Mansfield. London and New York: Novello, Ewer and Company.

Farewell, Love! By Matilde Serao. New York: Minerva Publishing Company.

Barracks, Bivouacks and Battles. By Archibald Forbes, LL.D. London and New York: Macmillan and Company.

Glimpses of Italian Society in the Eighteenth Century. From the "Journey" of Mrs. Piozzi. With an Introduction by the Countess Evelyn Martinenzo Cesaeeseo. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.