"Let me put my hands upon you," screamed Kirchoff; "and I will show you how to dog and harass an innocent man." He shook his fists in Mayer's face, who, getting out of patience, turned suddenly around and walked to the door and opened it. There instantly walked in a short, fat, middle-aged woman, with a small red face and a small sharp eye. She carried her bare arms folded before her, and occasionally slapped them with her hands. Upon the top of her head were a pair of black flouncing feathers, which danced up and down at every step. She fixed her eye upon the ceiling at the further end of the room, and walked straight to the middle of the floor and stood still. "Madame Kirchoff!" shouted her hus band. "The same,” replied she in German, without removing her gaze from the ceiling. “Now, Kirchoff," said Mayer, "here is the wife you ran away from. She came in the vessel which brought to you and all the Germans in the city the news of your good luck. They tell me that she ruled you at home, and she came to hunt you up and take you back in order to make you pay something for deluding her into marriage with you. Is that true, Madame Kirchoff?" "Every word," responded the woman. "Then take him away," said Mayer. Kirchoff's knees shook under him. All his courage had vanished, and he looked woebegone. His wife advanced and seized him. by the arm and began to march him off. "Stop! is all this true?" demanded Krömer; "are you really married, and is this woman here your wife, friend Baum? And is your true name Kirchoff; and are you being carried off?" "Yes, I expect so," replied Kirchoff. "Then you have deceived me," said Krömer; "but," he added reproachfully, "I hope God will bless you, after all." "I hope he will," replied Kirchoff. Then he disappeared in the clutch of madame. "Now," said Mayer to Krömer, “there is a difficulty removed, and now all is plain. Margaret and I have arranged matters between us; and as I know you look at affairs in their substantial lights, I have the pleasure to say that to-day I was selected as leader in the orchestra of the new Opera-House, at the best salary paid to any musical man in the country. My overture has been splendidly received, and I am to be President of the Conservatory." Krömer listened attentively. "I will think it over," said he ; morrow." แ come to The next day Mayer presented himself. Krömer's face was wreathed in smiles. "Mayer, my friend, you have won my approbation. I have counted up your various incomes and emoluments, and I calculate they surpass Margaret's by a considerable amount. I will make it even at some future time, though I cannot say precisely when. thus arrange our business. I am told that there are other features which are only attended to by the parties themselves. You can now proceed with those. Here is Margaret." We Margaret held a fan, for the day was warm, and Mayer advanced, and they both disappeared behind it, but came to light again in an instant, blushing. THE SCHOLAR IN POLITICS. A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS. I WISH, under favor of your patience, to depart a little from the accepted custom of the occasion. I venture to ask you, on this high-day of the Dartmouth year, to abandon scholastic themes for the hour, and pass to the broader plane of public affairs. The topic has not, indeed, been always thought grateful to academic ears. The scholar has Delivered before the United Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. Also, in substance, before the Societies of Amherst College and the Alumni of Miami University. been assumed to dwell apart, and to consecrate himself to higher than every-day affairs. He was to do noble thinking; he was to rule in the realm of ideas; he was to adorn the learned professions. But I am emboldened to a more practical discussion of duties more vital, by an address delivered before these very societies, perhaps in this very building, by an American scholar and thinker, who, while yet flourishing among us in his green and honored old age, has been translated before his time, but not before his "The desert, to our American Walhalla. The time is convenient. We are at the placid ebb of what, a year ago, was our angry flood-tide. There surged about us then too heavy a sea of passion. The recurrent national mania, the paroxysm of the Presidency, was upon us. Grant a tyrant, Greeley a traitor; these were the crazy shibboleths of the hour. Believe either and lustily proclaim it, and you had a certain following and support. Calmly disbelieve both, and you would better have a care,-the people were not in this great crisis to be mocked by time-servers who concealed only to betray! Few serious, considerate words got a hearing. It was the quadrennial national craze. Well, it is all happily over. The vanquished live to fight another day, and meantime do not find their condition quite intolerable. The victors-perhaps it will not be considered partisan if I venture to suggest that as they contemplate the fruit of their labors, after all they do not feel quite so happy as they expected. It is a good time for victors and vanquished alike to turn aside from the personalities which necessarily transfuse yet infinitely degrade such contests, and consider their abstract duty as citizens. students who confined their talk to Tennyson and society. The other day a man whose name is held in honor throughout the country, for his generous gifts to the higher education of our time, bemoaned his misfortune about his son. He had wanted to set the boy up in business as a banker; but the perverse fellow had gone into politics, and, when last heard from, had actually taken a seat in the Legislature. The good man looked upon that son of his hope as lost to him, and almost regarded the family name as disgraced! To wrest statutes for the protection of rogues, and wield technicalities to aid the escape of assassins,-that is respectable, for is it not a part of the noble profession of the Law? To spend your time applying remedies whose value every year makes you more doubtful of, for diseases whose real nature every year makes you more uncertain about,-that is respectable, for it is a recog nized feature, Dr. Holmes would say a main feature, of the foremost of the humane pursuits. To spend days and nights in stealthy scheming to persuade your neighbor to buy your Pacific Mail on the belief that its increasing value is not yet recognized, while you secretly know it to be worthless and are only anxious to unload it on him before the final crash comes,-that is eminently honorable, for it is one of the recognized methods of shrewd business management adopted as essential by well-nigh every speculator who does a thriving trade anywhere in the United States, or, for that matter, in Christendom. To devote like attention to the honest and economical administration of the affairs of the whole community, to strive for equal laws and exact justice among your fellows, to seek a public policy that shall promote alike the interests of the citizen and the greatness of the Nation,-it has long been one of the snobbish freaks of the most highly educated classes in our Democratic community to hold the pursuit whereof these are the legitimate ends a business too degrading for gentlemen and scholars. Is it an exaggeration to assume that this duty is the very highest-those of religion alone excepted-of all that can possibly press upon you? I know very well the snobbish idea to the contrary,--every man knows it, who has ever passed a week within college walls. It has been the habit of the educated classes, the custom of colleges, an effect of the atmosphere, to foster only sentiments of pity, or worse, for the man of let- Yet the same people have always reversed ters who so far forgot himself as to stoop to their judgments when they got far enough politics. In many a New England college it away from the politician to see him. They has at times been somehow felt as involving know little of the Philadelphia banker who a loss of caste to display a marked tendency periled his private fortune in carrying the Govto political discussions; and more than one ernment through the war of the Revolution, luckless undergraduate, whose fervid disputa--the very name of Robert Morris scarcely tions about the Kansas-Nebraska bill or the rights of Freedom against Slavery in the Territories disturbed the scholastic air, never fully attained the standing of those wiser conveys a suggestion to-day to the average reader; but the fame of the politician whom he named for Secretary of the Treasury widens with the generations, till Alexander Hamilton is recognized throughout the world as one of the few first-rate men of his century-as perhaps the one supremely great actor and thinker whom this continent in the eighteenth century produced. The men of respectable pursuits--the mere physicians, lawyers, bankers, gentlemen, and scholars of that time, how do they rate now in the estimate of our fastidious friends who despise politics and politicians, by the side of the lad of eighteen who used to desert their worshipful company to write political pamphlets, or share in local political struggles? Illinois has had many shrewd, far-seeing men through the half-century of her history,-profound jurists, accomplished scholars, incomparable men of business,-the miraculous work of whose hands is to-day the wonder of the whole country. Thousands of them have rated through most of their lives; in the estimate of this politics-despising aristocracy, far above the lank, uncouth Springfield lawyer who couldn't mind his business and keep out of politics, and who was always getting beaten in politics. But how they all fade out of sight, in the splendid fame of the MartyrPresident! Respectability mourned long and sore over the promising Cincinnati lawyer who threw himself away on fugitive-slave cases and futile attempts to organize political parties on humanitarian ideas, and could only get recognition from negroes for his pains; yet this same respectability mourns again, and just as sincerely as the whole country besides, at the open grave of the great Chief-Justice. We are all of us ready enough to honor the politician, like the prophet,-when we have got through stoning and come to know him. And after all it is very natural, this low opinion of politics in the abstract. A pursuit is certain to be long judged by the average character of the men who follow it; and the average character of your ward politician cannot be drawn in attractive colors. He is nearly sure to be a demagogue. He is apt to take liberties with the truth. He is in great danger of taking liberties with the public purse-if he can get a chance. Good or bad himself, he is reasonably certain to be often figuring in what seem to be bad situations. There can be no question about the bad company he keeps-especially when he belongs to the opposition. Generally he is apt to seem a politician in that bad sense which, as one of our essayists has pointed out, has actually degraded the meaning of the word from which the name is derived, and led us to look upon a politic man as merely a cunning man, largely endowed with caution instead of conscience. Of this average bar-room manager, this township wire-puller or ward demagogue, you shall use no word of disapproval which we cannot all heartily re-echo. It is precisely because the men whose duties and whose interests demand from them an active participation in political affairs have fastidiously ignored duty and interest alike, that, in the common mind, politician has come to mean "officeseeker;" and the "Man Inside Politics," whom The Nation is so fond of satirizing, is universally understood to be a man professing an anxiety for the good of the country or the good of the party-in his mind convertible terms-in order that he may the more conveniently fill his pockets. It is at once the weakness of our form of government and the shame of our intelligent classes, that the demagogue, at the outset, has the advantage, and that the office-seekers mainly give the impulse to political movements. It is a bad impulse. They are a bad set who give it, and a not much better set who, in Congress, and especially in State legislatures and small elective offices in great cities, constitute the average outcome. The fastidious father who wants his college-bred son to keep out of politics is altogether right, if he means by politics only this vulgar struggle of vulgar men through vulgar means for petty offices and plethoric but questionable gains. Looking only at such agencies, and such results, we may well marvel at the national prosperity, and fall back in our bewilderment upon Heinrich Heine's witty adaptation of Boccaccio's wicked epigram for an explanation: "The same fact may be offered in support of a republic as of religion;-it exists, in spite of its ministers!" Yet where is the government that does better? Where is the government that does so well? And no matter whether it does well or ill,-paint our politics as black as you will,-all the more I say you make it the duty of better men, in their own interest, to enter in and take possession. What I wish then, first of all, to insist upon, is the essential worth, nobility, primacy indeed of the liberal pursuit of politics. It is simply the highest, the most dignified, the most important of all earthly objects of human study. Next to the relation of man to his Maker, there is nothing so deserving his best attention as his relation to his fellow men. The welfare of the community is always more important than the welfare of any individual, or number of individuals; and the welfare of the community is the highest object of the science of politics. The course and current of men in masses,-that is the most exalted of human studies, and that is the study of the politician. To help individuals is the business of the learned professions. To do the same for communities is the business of politics. To aid in developing a single career may task the best efforts of the teacher. To shape the policy of a nation, to fix the fate of generations,-is this not as much higher as the heavens are high above the earth? Make the actual politician as despicable as you may, but the business of politics remains the highest of human concerns. for hobbies which they might try to persuade no scholarship. On issues like that the people needed no intellectual leadership. (On questions that involve learning and study, the better educated may lead; where an honest conscience is sufficient, they will lead themselves, and lead--as for fifteen years they did their leaders. The Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby solemnly observed to me, the other day, that he no longer There is a special reason why, in our took any interest in politics. He will do betcountry and time, it should more than ever ter, by and by-he is one of the improving command the best abilities of our best men. kind; but in that he stands as a type for the That reason, in a word, is that the age of the whole race of the sentimentalists. And yet sentimental in politics has passed. We our politics seem to me to offer more now than have ceased to conduct campaigns on fine ever before to fascinate the intellect and tax feelings. Emotional politics went out with the best culture of the time. To hate slavthe war. I Instead of questions about God-ery, to love the flag,-that, happily, required given rights and bursts of pathos over the claim of every being God created to the free air of heaven, and thrills at the unfurling of the flag, we have serious reasoning as to the effect on national prosperity of putting a duty of a fourth of one per cent. ad valorem on imported pig-iron; or the power of compelling railroads to carry passengers for three cents a mile, and freight in proportion, without reference to the number of times you have to break bulk.All this is but a change that we see in all our institutions, that is in the times. Even the undergraduates about us have felt it. Ten or fifteen years ago, the staple subject here for reading and talk, outside study hours, was English poetry and fiction. Now it is English science. Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, have usurped the places of Tennyson and Browning, and Matthew Arnold and Dickens. The age itself has changed, and the politics change with it. We are no longer sentimental; we have mines to develop instead of fugitive slaves to fight over; Congressmen to watch instead of United States marshals; the percentage on our funded debt to calculate instead of a percentage for a draft; Pacific railroads to inspect instead of army corps. Naturally the sentimentalists die hard.. They have had an easy and a powerful sway over the national feeling, and they do not surrender it without a struggle. It was a great principle on which they rode into public esteem. Ever since thee have been hunting Nowadays the would-be leaders are bewailing the lack of "great issues." They seem to me to mistake the case. The issues are greater than ever-only now they demand thought instead of feeling. It is no longer a case of inspiring sentiment about the Godgiven right of the black man to the free air of heaven; it is the knottier problem of keeping the free black man from stealing the State of South Carolina bankrupt, or from uniting with his inferiors among the white men transiently resident in Louisiana, to fan into fresh flame the hates of the civil war, and thus prolong its ruin. The black man's right to his child-that was a claim if needed no ghost from college walls to enforce : the Congo as a legislator,-there is a problem to tax the coming Cavour or Bismarck of our country--a problem, indeed, that might well demand for its solution some new Plato, or Bacon, or Montesquieu. Here then is the special claim of the country upon her scholars. Now more than ever before she has need for, and therefore the right to demand the best service of her best-trained men. Anybody could understand sentimental politics; it takes thought and training, and all the scholarship you can get for it to master the more difficult issues of this more critical time. On mere questions of justice to the enslaved or loyalty to the flag, there was no fear of the people; with or without the active co-operation of their best-taught men, they were sure to take the right course. But the issues that are now upon us are as grave and more complicated. How to efface the scars of a civil war; how to preserve safe relations between slaves suddenly made citizens and masters suddenly made paupers; how to repair the financial waste of an inflated currency and an enormous debt; how best to adjust the burdens of an exhausted revenue to the needs of struggling industries; how to protect labor from capital, and how to control the corporations that absorb and dominate both,—these are problems worthy the best thought of our best-trained thinkers, and in handling them a government of the people has the right to the aid of the finest culture and highest intellectual power that people has been able to develop. It is not an aid in the way of office-holding that is here meant-though that too may be a duty. Rather it is that continuous, thoughtful care which every man gives to his private affairs and the State has the right to claim for its affairs from every worthy citizen. And therefore it is that I have made bold to ask your attention to your duty, as scholars, to become politicians-a duty as explicit as any taught by these professors, as commanding as any enforced from the sacred desk,a duty indeed as sacred, as absolute, as continuous as any enjoined in the decalogue. We deplore the evils of politics. Our tastes are offended by their turmoil, our morals outraged by their deceit and dishonesty. They are coarse, they are vulgar, they are demoralizing, they are degrading. It is all true; and all the more it is your duty to go into politics! The man who complained of his termagant wife that there was no living with her or without her, was the exact type of the American scholar who stands outside the political arena, daintily sniffing at the odors of the struggle and wondering how he can get beyond their reach. That is just what he cannot do. He can shirk his part, and entail upon himself, his friends, and his descendants an added misfortune; but one of two things is imperative: he must bear the ills of politics yearly grow ing more corrupt and unbearable through his neglect, or he must take hold to make them better. He must suffer the errors of an ignorant policy, or he must help to shape a VOL. VI.-39 wise policy. He must permit the less intelligent to govern, or he must bring intelligence to the affairs of government. Prince Albert, in a moment of unprincely frankness, said of his own country, "Representative government is on trial.” There was tremendous uproar at the audacious arraignment: to this day men call it an unlucky speech. But was he wrong? How has representative government worked in New York? When you read of the Ring, and remembered that, year after year, it swept the city by majorities which, after all allowances for fraud, were still overwhelming, did you reckon representative government there much better than a riot, or the cholera ? Consider the condition of Louisiana to-day, or of Arkansas, or of South Carolina. Is it the favored citizen of either of those favored examples of the beneficent working of representative government who can afford to throw stones at Prince Albert's modest suggestion that the system is on trial? You know Carlyle's analysis of representative government: "If, of ten men, nine are recognized as fools, which is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a ballot box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men?" Of course the superficial answer to this extravagance is "Educate the other nine." But it is an unsatisfactory answer. You cannot always educate them. They are not always willing to take education if you have the power to give it. They have not always the ability to receive it, however willing they may be to take, and able you may be to give. At the best it is a remedy for the next generation, not for the one in which, for us and ours, representative government must succeed or fail. Herbert Spencer has a better answer, and it is one that deserves special note in a consideration of American politics by American scholars: "Those who elaborate new truths, and teach them to their fellows, are nowadays the real rulers, the unacknowledged legislators, the virtual kings. When the dicta of the thinker cannot get established in law until after a long battle of opinion--when they have to prove their fitness for the time by conquering time, we have a guarantee that no great changes which are ill-considered or premature can be brought about." Mr. There, then, is our hope. With the scholars of the land rests the real control of its democratic representative government. If the thinkers are doing their duty, they are the real rulers. But they fail in their high place, and are false to the country that claims their |