Brahmanism of India, and had for its great underlying idea the doctrine of transmigration. It intensified, perhaps, the older notion about the evil of existence itself. The one great good of Buddhism is to find, as speedily as possible, a way out of this conscious existence. It teaches, as we have said, that this can best be done by a course of the severest asceticism. In following out this course, it lays down some good and wholesome laws, as to kindness, justice, truth, but not so much because they are good in themselves, as because they will best pay off the old scores of sin, committed in this life, or in previous modes of existence, and bring the soul to its longed-for rest in eternal sleep.

What is this boasted "Light of Asia?" Where is it, and where has it been shedding its radiance for the last two thousand five hundred years? We are proudly told that Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, lived six hundred years earlier than Christ. Then he has had six hundred years more to establish his dominion in the earth. We know that all the great and strong nations, over the whole face of the earth, the nations exercising dominion and power to-day, are dating their records, Anno Domini 1880. Even the ancient home of Buddhism itself is invaded by Christianity, and dominion, even there, is lodged in Christian hands. To what desperate straits some of our modern scholars are reduced! They have grown up amid the light of Christianity;-they have received their culture from institutions which Christianity has founded;-they have walked in that liberty which is thoroughly unknown, except in lands where Christ has gone "to open the prison doors," and yet they feel called upon, all the while, to slur and disparage the mother that bore them, and sound the praises of some old mother of darkness and superstition. When they are so love-smitten with the ancient religious systems of the East, if they would but go and live under the influences and amid the institutions which these systems have generated, it would at least be consistent. As has already been suggested, there is no good reason for supposing that Gautama, in India, knew of the writings of Moses, or David, or Isaiah, at the time when he was originating his religious system. But there is one broader thought, that may, at least, be suggested. It is not unlikely

that all the great oriental systems of religion and philosophy were, in some sense, lapses from that earlier faith in God, which seems once to have been widely spread around the ancient cradle of the race. There is certainly much to make us believe that the moral and religious condition of China and India, in times quite remote, was far higher and better than in the ages which came after. Ideas derived from the patriarchal period-the old hopes and expectations of the race, while it was yet one with God,-may have flowed down and mingled with the great Asiatic Idolatries.

We have a "Light of Asia," that has not been thus corrupted. It comes in direct succession, through patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, from the days of Abraham. Compared with this, that other "Light of Asia," transmitted to us in Mr. Arnold's poem, is no better than thick darkness.

ARTICLE II.-ANDERSONVILLE.

THE tone in which topics connected with our late civil war are discussed has undergone a great change within a few years. The great body of pen-fighters who came forward on each side as soon as the clashing of swords died away, waging a war fierce though bloodless, resembled the first troops who reached the seat of war, both in abundance of zeal and lack of knowledge. It was impossible for them to write the true history of the war. Nor was it likely that the world would remain long satisfied with two accounts of the same war, in one of which the laurels were all ascribed to the North, and in the other to the South. Even the North itself could not long remain content with its own polemical histories. The desire to know the truth was a motive strong enough to make us look into those so-called histories, coming from the other side, which displayed such an exasperating lack of respect for the victors, always speaking of the Southern armies as handfuls struggling against hordes, and alluding to Grant's glorious victories from the Rapidan to the James as a series of bloody repulses. And, now, we are willing to admit that, in many cases the truth lies at the half-way point between these accounts and those to which we formerly trusted.

Hardly anybody in the North now believes that the war could have been finished by a simple forward march on the part of McClellan after Fair Oaks; no more is the South able to cling to the idea that Lee threw away a similar opportunity at Fredericksburg. Though some questions of the war will doubtless remain disputed till the day of judgment, yet it has been settled by an indisputed verdict that these two "decisive" battles left the situation entirely unchanged. The only possibility which they opened up was that of a pitched battle with very even chances.

So many questions of the war have been settled in about the same way that one gets a strong presumption in favor of a method that professedly proceeds to find the truth by finding

the middle point. Indeed the true history of the war has been gradually elicited by a constant application of the formula Pollard + Lossing 2; but as the terms are not numerical, the striking of this via media involves a careful consideration of testimony and weighing of probabilities.

Many at the North, who would be willing to admit this method of settlement for most of the disputed points of the war, would be unwilling to apply it to Andersonville, maintaining that here we have a case of wholesale murder with no extenuating circumstances. The subject has hardly been touched in the interest of truth, but has always been made a field for crimination and recrimination. The voluminous Report No. 45, made to the 40th Congress by the Committee on the Treatment of Prisoners during the War, is as thoroughly ex parte, though more moderate in its language, as the numer ous narratives of Andersonville which it characterizes as ephemeral literature.

The treatment which the subject received on its unfortunate revival in 1876, in the acrimonious debate between Senators Blaine and Hill, was completely polemical. The elaborate defense of the South, put forth at that time in the Southern Historical Papers, though furnishing, like Report No. 45, a good many facts that will make for a pacific settlement of the question, yet by its animus, made the breach wider than ever. Even now, it is doubtful whether an attempt to strike the via media in this matter would not have to meet the scorn of both parties. For of all topics connected with the war, Andersonville is the one that most stirs the passions.

The mere mention of Fredericksburg or Gettysburg, to be sure, is enough to call forth a tempestuous discussion; but each party feels that it has a well founded claim to inscribe those names with pride on its escutcheon. To have been one of "Pickett's Men" in that immortal repulse at Gettysburg is a glory that men will not willingly relinquish in the South to-day. The laurels being in some sort evenly distributed already, the discussion cannot become so bitter, as when the subject of Andersonville is stirred; for here the charge is that the South is guilty of the great crime of modern warfare. No wonder that the representatives of that short-lived government have

come forward to repel that charge with an indignation that is evidently no counterfeit. They believe their adversaries have been acting on the principle that where much mud is thrown some will stick. They see with anger that damned spot affixed to the robe of the Southern Confederacy, becoming fastened there by repeated assertion, which will pass for history, so that no fuller can whiten it. It will be a long time, then, before anyone will need to apologize for treating of a dead subject when he treats of Andersonville. It is not dead: at the most it only sleepeth.

Perhaps a sufficiently worthy excuse for not letting the subject sleep may be a conviction that the facts which have hitherto been treated polemically may be treated pacifically. There would be a satisfaction not merely in proving that humanity had not yet been capable of such a national crime as that charged upon the South, but also in finding a more rational explanation of Andersonville than the deliberate intention to destroy the prisoners. Magnanimity and love of truth are two very strong inducements calling us to a review of the facts with a view to a readjustment of the blame if the facts demand it.

The residuum of fact, taken apart from the question of blame, seems to be that there was in our war such suffering and mortality of prisoners as to make it in that respect a marked retrograde step in Christian warfare. The conduct of civilized nations has been, on this point, drawing nearer and nearer to fixed principles, so that, latterly, under the guidance of philanthropy and selfishness combined, arrangements have easily been made between the contending parties on each occasion, by which prisoners should, with the least possible suffering, be mutually returned to the ranks of combatants.

The tactics of modern warfare having been directed mainly to the annihilation of large armies by decisive battles, the slaughter of fragments of the hostile army, after the victory had been gained, has came to be regarded as inhuman. But in a war that was a strange mixture of civil and national, singularly wanting in decisive battles and deficient in strategy, we were drawn more or less by force of circumstances to such