Igp 1 rm OF THE U N IVER5 ITY or ILLINOIS 808.4 IB 7 5 \ 9 02 , V. 2 Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A * charge is made on all overdue books. University of Illinois Library Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/worldsbestessays02unse_0 ( LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBAKA A REUNION AT THE HOUSE OF AS PASTA. After the Painting by A. Grolleau. UNIVERSITY EDITION Crowned /lhasterpteces OF Xttcrature THAT HAVE ADVANCED CIVILIZATION As Preserved and Presented by Zb e Morin’s 36cst Essa?s From the Earliest Period to the Present Time & DAVID J. BREWER Editor EDWARD A* ALLEN WILLIAM SCHUYLER Associate Editors * TEN VOLUMES VOL. II ST. LOUIS FERD. P. KAISER 1902 TUnfversfti? EMtfott SPECIAL TESTIMONIAL SET Copyright 1900 Copyright 1902 BY FERD. P. KAISER All rights reserved Editor Publisher Ni" THE ADVISORY COUNCIL SIR WALTER BESANT, M. A., F. S. A., Soho Square, London W., England PROFESSOR KUNO FRANCKE, Ph. D., Department of German, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, HIRAM CORSON, A. M., LL. D., Department of English Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y, WILLIAM DRAPER LEWIS, Ph. D., Dean of the Department of Law, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. RICHARD GOTTHEIL, Ph. D., Professor of Oriental Languages, Columbia University, in the City of New York. MRS. LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON, Author <( Swallow Flights,» <( Bed-Time Stories, )} etc. Boston, Mass. WILLIAM VINCENT BYARS, Manager The Valley Press Bureau, St. Louis. F. M. CRUNDEN, A. M., Librarian St. Louis Public Library; President (1890) American Library Association. MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D., Professor of English and Literature, Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. ALCEE FORTIER, Lit. D., Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane University, New Orleans, La. SHELDON JACKSON, D. D., LL. D., Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C. A. MARSHALL ELLIOTT, Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Romance Languages, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A., Professor of English Literature, Columbia University, in the City of New York. CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, Litt. D., Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, Cal. RICHARD JONES, Ph. D., Department of English, vice Austin H. Merrill, deceased, Department of Elocution, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. W. STUART SYMINGTON, Jr., Ph. D., Professor of Romance Languages, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass. . V TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME II LIVED PAGE The Marquis of Beccaria 1735-1793 419 The Prevention of Crime Laws and Human Happiness Against Capital Punishment Beecher, Henry Ward 1813-1887 430 Dream-Culture Bentham, Jeremy 1748-1832 435 Publicity the Sole Remedy for Misrule Property and Poverty Berkeley, George 1685-1753 440 Pleasures, Natural and Fantastical Besant, Sir Walter 1838- 445 With the Wits of the ’Thirties Montaigne’s Method as an Essayist Birrell, Augustine 1850- 454 On Doctor Brown’s Dog-Story Book-Buying Blackie, John Stuart 1809-1895 463 The Love Songs of Scotland Blackstone, Sir William 1723-1780 477 The Professional Soldier in Free Countries Blair, Hugh 1718-1800 483 The Poetry of the Hebrews Taste and Genius VI Blaserna, Pietro Music, Ancient and Modern LIVED 1836- PAGE 49 1 Blind, Karl Wodan and the Wandering Jew 1820- 49 B Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 475- What Is the Highest Happiness ? -525 A. D. 5°4 Bohme, Jacob Paradise The Supersensual Life 1575-1624 508 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount On the Study of History 1678-1751 5 i 3 Bosanquet, Bernard The True Conception of Another World 1848- 5 H Bourget, Paul On the Death of Victor Hugo 1 N 00 t—1 523 Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchinson Getting On in the World 1 LO Cl 00 ►H 52 7 Boyle, Robert On a Glow Worm in a Phial The Possibility of the Resurrection The Knowledge of Nature l627-l69I 535 Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme Gastronomy and the Other Sciences On Death 1755-1826 540 Brooke, Henry What Is a Gentleman ? 1703-1783 00 ■'T i-o Brougham, Henry, Baron Brougham and Vaux The Character of Danton 1778-1868 553 Brown, John l8lO-l882 561 The Death of Thackeray Mary Duff’s Last Half-Crown Rab and the Game Chicken Vll LIVED PAGE Browne, Sir Thomas Religio Medici 1605-1682 574 Browning, Robert Shelley’s Spiritual Life 1812-1889 646 Brunetiere, Ferdinand 1849- 651 The Essential Characteristic of French Literature Bryant, William Cullen A Day in Florence Europe under the Bayonet The Life of Women in Cuba 1794-1878 659 Bryce, James Democracy and Civic Duty , 1838- 666 Buchner, Ludwig Woman’s Brain and Rights 1824- 671 Buckle, Henry Thomas Liberty a Supreme Good 1821-1862 677 Budgell, Eustace The Love Affairs of Will Honeycomb Love after Marriage M. Rigadoon’s Dancing School Modesty and Assurance 1686-1737 685 Bunsen, Christian Karl Josias, Baron von Luther at Worms 1791-1860 698 Burke, Edmund The Principles of Good Taste 1729-1797 705 The Efficient Cause of the Sublime and Beautiful Burlamaqui, Jean Jacques The Principles of Natural Right 1694-1748 747 Burleigh, William Cecil, Baron The Well Ordering of a Man’s Life 1520-1598 752 Burritt, Elihu 1811-1879 757 A Point of Space The Circulation of Matter The Force of Gravity in the Moral World Vlll Burroughs, John The Art of Seeing Things LIVED 1837 - PAGE 763 Burton, Sir Richard Francis Romantic Love and Arab Poetry I82I-I89O 777 Burton, Robert The Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Of Discontents 1577-1640 Devils 784 Bury, Richard de The Mind in Books 1281-1345 790 Butler, Joseph Does God Put Men to the Test ? 1692-1752 793 Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord Art and Nature 1788-1824 800 Caine, Hall Aspects of Shakespeare’s Art 1853- 806 Campbell, Thomas Chatterton’s Life Tragedy 1777-1844 814 Carleton, William 1794-1869 821 A Glimpse of Irish Life FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME II PAGE A Reunion at the House of Aspasia (Photogravure) Frontispiece Henry Ward Beecher (Portrait after His Statue, Photogravure) 430 Napoleon Receiving the Portrait of His Son (Photogravure) 553 Lord George Noel Gordon Byron (Portrait, Photogravure) 800 y 4i9 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA (Cesare Bonesano Marchese di Beccaria) (1735-1793) t is only necessary to read a few clauses of anything the Marquis of Beccaria has written, to feel the commanding power of his great intellect. The reader accustomed to strive with other writers for the privilege of wresting their meaning from their words is so strongly compelled by Beccaria, that, unless he deliberately make up his mind to dissent at the beginning, he will be forced from one irresistible conclusion to another. It is doubt¬ ful if Italy since the time of Cicero, has produced Beccaria’s equal as a master of style and as a thinker in his own field of the philosophy of human action. His eminence in Italian literature is incontestible. He has a faculty of striking out his sentences, complete in thought and ready for separate currency, as if they came from the stamp of a mint, while at the same time each is a part of the sum of a broader thought, and a link in the chain of its demonstration. (< It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them®; . . . <( The ma¬ jority of laws are nothing but privileges, or a tribute paid by all to the convenience of some few®; . . . (< Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in crime is the fear of one man by an¬ other®; . . . (< Would you prevent crimes — then see that enlight¬ enment accompanies liberty®; . . . <( The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its diffusion®; . . . (< the great clash [is] between the errors which are serviceable to a few men of power and the truths which are serviceable to the weak and the many® — in such sentences as these which crowd each other in his pages, we must feel, even when we cannot comprehend, the secret of the power which enabled him so to sway the mind of civilization that within fifty years after the publication of his great work, <( Dei Delitti e Delle Pene® (On Crimes and Punishments), it had influenced for the better the whole course of government in every Caucasian nation of the world, justifying fully in results the calm confidence with which Beccaria had written: (( The voice of the philosopher is feeble against the noise and cries of so many followers of blind cus¬ tom, but the few wise men scattered over the earth will respond from their inmost hearts.® 420 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA Beccaria’s relations to Montesquieu are evident. He seems to have regarded himself as Montesquieu’s pupil, but his intellectual habits are in all things those of the master, — the man of universal sym¬ pathy using a strong intellect as a mode of expression for a soul inspired by the sacred desire of decreasing the suffering of mankind. He was born at Milan in 1735, and educated in the Jesuit College at Parma. His first work as an essayist was done on a small paper called II Caffe, modeled on the Spectator, so that the style and mind of Addison may fairly be assumed as greatly influential in deter¬ mining his intellectual habits. His work on (( Crimes and Punish¬ ments, ® published in 1764, passed through six editions at once and was soon translated into the principal languages of Europe. One of the most radical thinkers of modern times, Beccaria was nevertheless so conservative in his attitude towards existing institutions, and so distrustful of all revolutionary changes, that he was chosen to assist in reforming the Italian Judicial Code, and appointed to a chair of Public Law and Economy which had been founded expressly for him in the Palatine College of Milan. He died in 1793. THE PREVENTION OF CRIMES I t is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the chief aim of every good system of legislation, which is the art of leading men to the greatest possible happiness or to the least possible misery, according to calculation of all the goods and evils of life. But the means hitherto employed for this end are for the most part false and contrary to the end pro¬ posed. It is impossible to reduce the turbulent activity of men to a geometrical harmony without irregularity or confusion. As the constant and most simple laws of nature do not prevent aberrations in the movements of the planets, so, in the infinite and contradictory attractions of pleasure and pain, disturbances and disorder cannot be prevented by human laws. Yet this is the chimera that narrow-minded men pursue, when they have power in their hands. To prohibit a number of indifferent acts is not to prevent the crimes that may arise from them, but it is to create new ones from them; it is to give capricious defini¬ tions of virtue and vice which are proclaimed as eternal and im¬ mutable in their nature. To what should we be reduced if everything had to be forbidden us which might tempt us to a crime ? It would be necessary to deprive a man of the use THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA 421 of his senses. For one motive that drives men to commit a real crime, there are a thousand that drive them to the commission of those indifferent acts which are called crimes by bad laws; and if the likelihood of crimes is proportioned to the number of mo¬ tives to commit them, an increase of the field of crimes is an increase of the likelihood of their commission. The majority of laws are nothing but privileges, or a tribute paid by all to the convenience of some few. Would you prevent crimes ? Then cause the laws to be clear and simple; bring the whole force of a nation to bear on their defense, and suffer no part of it to be busied in overthrowing them. Make the laws to favor not so much classes of men as men themselves. Cause men to fear the laws and the laws alone. Salutary is the fear of the law, but fatal and fertile in crime is the fear of one man by another. Men as slaves are more sensual, more immoral, more cruel than free men; and, while the latter give their minds to the sciences or to the inter¬ ests of their country, setting great objects before themselves as their model, the former, contented with the passing day, seek in the excitement of libertinage a distraction from the nothingness of their existence, and, accustomed to an uncertainty of result in everything, they look upon the results of their crimes as uncer¬ tain too, and so decide in favor of the passion that tempts them. If uncertainty of the laws affects a nation, rendered indolent by its climate, its indolence and stupidity is thereby maintained and increased; if it affects a nation, which though fond of pleasure is also full of energy, it wastes that energy in a number of petty cabals and intrigues which spread distrust in every heart, and make treachery and dissimulation the foundation of prudence. If, again, it affects a courageous and brave nation, the uncer¬ tainty is ultimately destroyed, after many oscillations from liberty to servitude, and from servitude back again to liberty. Would you prevent crimes ? Then see that enlightenment accompanies liberty. The evils that flow from knowledge are in inverse ratio to its diffusion; the benefits directly proportioned to it. A bold impostor, who is never a commonplace man, is adored by an ignorant people, but despised by an enlightened one. Knowledge, by facilitating comparisons between objects and mul¬ tiplying men’s points of view, brings many different notions into contrast, causing them to modify one another all the more easily as the same views and the same difficulties are observed in 422 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA others. In the face of a widely diffused national enlightenment, the calumnies of ignorance are silent, and authority, disarmed of pretexts for its manifestation, trembles; while the rigorous force of the laws remains unshaken, no one of education having any dislike to the clear and useful public compacts which secure the common safety, when he compares the trifling and useless liberty sacrificed by himself with the sum total of all the liberties sacri¬ ficed by others, who without the laws might have been hostile to himself. Whoever has a sensitive soul, when he contemplates a code of well-made laws, and finds that he has only lost the per¬ nicious liberty of injuring others, will feel himself constrained to bless the throne and the monarch that sits upon it. It is not true that the sciences have always been injurious to mankind; when they were so, it was an inevitable evil. The multiplication of the human race over the face of the earth in¬ troduced war, the ruder arts, and the first laws, mere temporary agreements which perished with the necessity that gave rise to them. This was mankind’s primitive philosophy, the few ele¬ ments of which were just, because the indolence and slight wis¬ dom of their framers preserved them from error. But with the multiplication of men there went ever a multiplication of their wants. Stronger and more lasting impressions were, therefore, needed, in order to turn them back from repeated lapses to that primitive state of disunion which each return to it rendered worse. Those primitive delusions, therefore, which peopled the earth with false divinities and created an invisible universe that gov¬ erned our own, conferred a great benefit — I mean a great politi¬ cal benefit — upon humanity. Those men were benefactors of their kind who dared to deceive them and drag them, docile and ignorant, to worship at such altars. By presenting to them ob¬ jects that lay beyond the scope of sense and fled from their grasp the nearer they seemed to approach them,—never despised, be- • cause never well understood,— they concentrated their divided pas¬ sions upon a single object of supreme interest to them. These were the first steps of all the nations that formed themselves out of savage tribes; this was the epoch when larger communi¬ ties were formed, and such was their necessary and perhaps their only bond. I say nothing of that chosen people of God, for whom the most extraordinary miracles and the most signal favors were a substitute for human policy. But as it is the quality of error to fall into infinite subdivisions, so the sciences that grew THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA 423 out of it made of mankind a blind fanatical multitude, which, shut up within a close labyrinth, collides in such confusion, that some sensitive and philosophical minds have regretted to this day the ancient savage state. That is the first epoch in which the sciences or rather scientific opinions are injurious. The second epoch of history consists in the hard and terrible transition from error to truth, from the darkness of ignorance to the light. The great clash between the errors which are serviceable to a few men of power and the truths which are serv¬ iceable to the weak and the many, and the contact and the fer¬ mentation of the passions at such a period aroused, are a source of infinite evils to unhappy humanity. Whoever ponders on the different histories of the world, which after certain intervals of time are so much alike in their principal episodes, will therein frequently observe the sacrifice of a whole generation to the wel¬ fare of succeeding ones, in the painful but necessary transitions from the darkness of ignorance to the light of philosophy, and from despotism to freedom, which result from the sacrifice. But when truth, whose progress at first is slow and afterwards rapid (after men’s minds have calmed down and the fire is quenched that purged a nation of the evils it suffered), sits as the compan¬ ion of kings upon the throne, and is reverenced and worshiped in the parliaments of free governments, who will ever dare assert that the light which enlightens the people is more injurious than darkness, and that acknowledging the true and simple relations of things is pernicious to mankind ? If blind ignorance is less pernicious than confused half¬ knowledge, since the latter adds to the evils of ignorance those of error, which is unavoidable in a narrow view of the limits of truth, the most precious gift that a sovereign c?^ make to him¬ self or to his people is an enlightened man as the trustee and guardian of the sacred laws. Accustomed to see the truth and not to fear it; independent for the most part of the demands of reputation, which are never completely satisfied and put most men’s virtue to a trial; used to consider humanity from higher points of view; such a man regards his own nation as a family of men and of brothers, and the distance between the nobles and the people seems to him so much the less as he has before his mind the larger total of the whole human species. Philosophers acquire wants and interests unknown to the generality of men,— but that one above all others, of not belying in public the prin- 424 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA ciples they have taught in obscurity,— and they gain the habit of loving the truth for its own sake. A selection of such men makes the happiness of a people, but a happiness which is only transitory, unless good laws so increase their number as to lessen the probability, always considerable, of an unfortunate choice. Another way of preventing crimes is to interest the magis. trates who carry out the laws in seeking rather to preserve than to corrupt them. The greater the number of men who compose the magistracy, the less danger will there be of their exercising any undue power over the laws; for venality is more difficult among men who are under the close observation of one another; and their inducement to increase their individual authority dimin¬ ishes in proportion to the smallness of the share of it that can fall to each of them, especially when they compare it with the risk of the attempt. If the sovereign accustoms his subjects, by formalities and pomp, by severe edicts, and by refusal to hear the grievances, whether just or unjust, of the man who thinks himself oppressed, to fear rather the magistrates than the laws, it will be more to the profit of the magistrates than to the gain of private and public security. Another way to prevent crimes is to reward virtue. On this head I notice a general silence in the laws of all nations to this day. If prizes offered by academies to the discoverers of useful truths have caused the multiplication of knowledge and of good books, why should not virtuous actions also be multiplied, by prizes distributed from the munificence of the sovereign ? The money of honor ever remains unexhausted and fruitful in the hands of the legislator who wisely distributes it. Lastly, the surest but most difficult means of preventing crimes is to improve education — a subject too vast for present discussion, and lying beyond the limits of my treatise; a subject, I will also say, too intimately connected with the nature of gov¬ ernment for it ever to be aught but a barren field, only culti¬ vated here and there by a few philosophers, down to the remot¬ est ages of public prosperity. A great man, who enlightens the humanity that persecutes him, has shown in detail the chief educational maxims of real utility to mankind: namely, that it consists less in a barren multiplicity of subjects than in their choice selection; in substituting originals for copies in the moral as in the physical phenomena presented by chance or intention to the fresh minds of youth; in inclining them to virtue by the THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA 425 easy path of feeling; and in deterring them from evil by the sure path of necessity and disadvantage, not by the uncertain method of command, which never obtains more than a simulated and transitory obedience. Complete. From <( Crimes and Punishments.» LAWS AND HUMAN HAPPINESS M en for the most part leave the regulation of their chief con¬ cerns to the prudence of the moment, or to the discretion of those whose interest it is to oppose the wisest laws; such laws, namely, as naturally help to diffuse the benefits of life, and check that tendency they have to accumulate in the hands of a few, which ranges on one side the extreme of power and happiness, and on the other all that is weak and wretched. It is only, therefore, after having passed through a thousand er¬ rors in matters that most nearly touch their lives and liberties, only after weariness of evils that have been suffered to reach a climax, that men are induced to seek a remedy for the abuses which oppress them, and to recognize the clearest truths, which precisely on account of their simplicity escape the notice of ordi¬ nary minds, unaccustomed as they are to analyze things, and apt to receive their impressions from tradition rather than from inquiry. We shall see, if we open histories, that laws, which are or ought to be covenants between free men, have generally been nothing but the instrument of the passions of some few men, or the result of some accidental and temporary necessity. They have never been dictated by an unimpassioned student of human nature, able to concentrate the actions of a multitude of men to a single point of view, and to consider them from that point alone — the greatest happiness divided among tlie greatest num¬ ber. Happy are those few nations which have not waited for the slow movement of human combinations and changes to cause an approach to better things, after intolerable evils, but have has¬ tened the intermediate steps by good laws; and deserving is that philosopher of the gratitude of mankind who had the courage, from the obscurity of his despised study, to scatter abroad among the people the first seeds, so long fruitless, of useful truths. 426 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA The knowledge of the true relations between a sovereign and his subjects and of those between those of different nations; the revival of commerce by the light of philosophical truths, diffused by printing; and the silent international contest of industry, the most humane and the most worthy of rational men — these are the fruits we owe to the enlightenment of this century. But how few have examined and combated the cruelty of punish¬ ments and the irregularities of criminal procedures, a part of legislation so elementary and yet so neglected in almost the whole of Europe; and how few have sought, by a return to first principles, to dissipate the mistakes accumulated by many cen¬ turies, or to mitigate, with at least that force which belongs only to ascertained truths, the excessive caprice of ill-directed power, which has presented up to this time but one long example of lawful and cold-blooded atrocity! And yet the groans of the weak, sacrificed to the cruelty of the ignorant or to the indo¬ lence of the rich; the barbarous tortures, multiplied with a severity as useless as it is prodigal, for crimes either not proved or quite chimerical; the disgusting horrors of a prison, enhanced by that which is the cruelest executioner of the miserable — namely, uncertainty; — these ought to startle those rulers whose function it is to guide the opinion of men’s minds. The immortal Montesquieu has treated cursorily of this matter; and truth, which is indivisible, has forced me to follow the luminous footsteps of this great man; but thinking men, for whom I write, will be able to distinguish my steps from his. Happy shall I esteem myself if, like him, I shall succeed in obtaining the secret gratitude of the unknown and peaceable fol¬ lowers of reason, and if I shall inspire them with that pleasing thrill of emotion with which sensitive minds respond to the ad¬ vocate of the interests of humanity. . * / To#ex$mine and distinguish all the different sorts of crimes and the 'juan'n^ of punishing them would now be our natural task, were it nft that their nature, which varies with the differ¬ ent circumstances of times and places, would compel us to enter upon too vast and wearisome a mass of detail. But it will suf¬ fice to indicate the most general principles and the most perni¬ cious and common errors, in order to undeceive no less those who, from a mistaken love of liberty, would introduce anarchy, than those who would be glad to reduce their fellow-men to the uniform regularity of a convent. t THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA 427 What will be the penalty suitable for such and such crimes ? Is death a penalty really useful and necessary for the security and good order of society ? Are torture and torments just, and do they attain the end which the law aims at ? What is the best way of preventing crimes ? Are the same penalties equally useful in all times ? What influence have they on customs ? These problems deserve to be solved with such geometrical precision as shall suffice to prevail over the clouds of sophistica¬ tion, over seductive eloquence, or timid doubt. Had I no other merit than that of having been the first to make clearer to Italy that which other nations have dared to write and are beginning to practice, I should deem myself fortunate; but if, in maintain¬ ing the rights of men and of invincible truth, I should contribute to rescue from the spasms and agonies of death any unfortunate victim of tyranny or ignorance, both so equally fatal, the bless¬ ings and tears of a single innocent man in the transports of his joy would console me for the contempt of mankind. Complete. From « Crimes and Punishments. w AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT apital punishment is injurious by the example of barbarity it presents. If human passions, or the necessities of war, have taught men to shed one another’s blood, the laws, which are intended to moderate human conduct, ought not to extend the savage example, which in the case of a legal execu¬ tion is all the more baneful in that it is carried out with studied formalities. To me it seems an absurdity that laws, which are the expression of the public will, which abhor and which punish homicide, should themselves commit one; and tha#, to deter citi- zens from private assassination, they should themsdlves order pub¬ lic manslaughter. What are the true and most useful laws ? Are they not those covenants and conditions which all would wish observed and proposed, when the incessant voice of private inter¬ est is hushed or is united with the interest of the public ? What are every man’s feelings about capital punishment ? Let us read them in the gestures of indignation and scorn with which every¬ one looks upon the executioner, who is, after all, an innocent 428 THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA administrator of the public will, a good citizen contributory to- the public welfare, an instrument as necessary for the internal security of a state as brave soldiers are for its external. What, then, is the source of this contradiction; and why is this feeling, in spite of reason, ineradicable in mankind ? Because men in their most secret hearts, that part of them which more than any other still preserves the original form of their first nature, have ever believed that their lives lie at no one’s disposal, save in that of necessity alone, which, with its iron sceptre, rules the universe. What should men think when they see wise magistrates and grave priests of justice with calm indifference causing a crim¬ inal to be dragged by their slow precedure to death; or when they see a judge, while a miserable wretch in the convulsions of his last agonies is awaiting the fatal blow, pass away coldly and unfeelingly, perhaps even with a secret satisfaction in his author¬ ity, to enjoy the comforts and pleasures of life? “Ah,® they will say, <( these laws are but the pretexts of force, and the studied, cruel formalities of justice are but a conventional language, used for the purpose of immolating us with greater safety, like victims destined in sacrifice to the insatiable idol of tyranny. That assas¬ sination which they preach to us as so terrible a misdeed we see nevertheless employed by them without either scruple or passion. Let us profit by the example. A violent death seemed to us a terrible thing in the .descriptions of it that were made to us, but we see it is a matter of a moment. How much less terrible will it be for a man who, not expecting it, is spared all that there is of pain in it.® Such are the fatal arguments employed, if not clearly, at least vaguely, by men disposed to crimes, among whom, as we have seen, the abuse of religion is more potent than religion itself. If I am confronted with the example of almost all ages and almost all nations who have inflicted the punishment of death upon some crimes, I will reply that the example avails nothing before truth, against which there is no prescription of time; and that the history of mankind conveys to us the idea of an immense sea of errors, among which a few truths, confusedly and at long intervals, float on the surface. Human sacrifices were once com¬ mon to almost all nations, yet who for that reason will dare de¬ fend them ? That some few states, and for a short time only, should have abstained from inflicting death, rather favors my argument than otherwise, because such a fact is in keeping with THE MARQUIS OF BECCARIA 429 the lot of all great truths, whose duration is but as the lightning flash in comparison with the long and dark night that envelops mankind. That happy time has not yet arrived when truth, as error has hitherto done, shall belong to the majority of men; and from this universal law of the reign of error those truths alone have hitherto been exempt, which supreme wisdom has seen fit to distinguish from others, by making them the subject of a spe¬ cial revelation. The voice of a philosopher is feeble against the noise and cries of so many followers of blind custom, but the few wise men scattered over the face of the earth will respond to me from their inmost hearts. From <( Crimes and Punishments .» HENRY WARD BEECHER (1813-1887) Ward Beecher’s (< Star Papers }) show the same control musical English which made his sermons and orations ious. They are evidently inspired by a determination to succeed in doing something wholly unlike preaching, and their success in this respect is marked. They are pleasant conversations with the reader on subjects in which all healthy people ought to be interested — books, flowers, the woods,— even <( angleworms, white grubs, and bugs that carry pick and shovel on the head. }) He gossips over these in the most genial and companionable way, and if sometimes he shows the result of ex cathedra habits of teaching, no pupil who is worthy to be well taught will blame him for it. He was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24th, 1813, and died March 8th, 1887, at Brooklyn. As a pulpit orator he ranks with Phillips Brooks whom he surpasses in power of pleasing expression, though surpassed by him in insight. As an essayist, he shows the influence of Addison and Irving, with occasional suggestions of the homely humor of Izaak Walton. DREAM-CULTURE T here is something in the owning of a piece of ground which affects me as did the old ruins of England. I am free to confess that the value of a farm is not chiefly in its crops of cereal grain, its orchards of fruit, and in its herds; but in those larger and more easily reaped harvests of associations, fancies, and dreamy broodings which it begets. From boyhood I have associated classical civic virtues and old heroic integrity with the soil. No one who has peopled his young brain with the fancies of Grecian mythology, but comes to feel a certain magical sanctity for the earth. The very smell of fresh-turned earth brings up as many dreams and visions of the country as sandalwood does of Oriental scenes. At any rate, I feel, in walk¬ ing under these trees and about these slopes, something of that enchantment of the vague and mysterious glimpses of the past,. HE NR V WA RD BEECHER iVH WVi wmmm. fmw-s -4& s&SSssSmsEss mmsfe, pfc SSiSI 22253 w^uiwjitot r:s£££