THE strikes and their consequences opened to the American citizen even more subjects for profitable thought than have been liberally pointed out to him in the month of their discussion. Upon the more obvious of these latter, excepting perhaps the great question itself of the existence and adjustment of labor grievances, he has probably made up his mind in some fashion-influenced of course by temperament and tradition, but definitely enough for a working hypothesis, the majority result of which we shall see in votes, the tone of stock-exchanges, and the trend of business. We shall know by the evidence of these whether the confidence gained from the attitude and decisive action of the central government quite balanced the sense of a new danger coming to light in the Populist governors and the California militia; whether the final sharp stand of press and people left the dominant impression, or the local dilatoriness and incapacity. The optimistic opinion will prevail, as it always does, and as on the whole it always should -a pessimistic people is probably as abhorrent to nature as a vacuum; but I believe that this time it will not be a complacent optimism; it seems impossible that some of the dangers we have seen should go neglected, or that such an object-lesson should be forgotten. It is not necessary that the prophecy of Macaulay, which Mr. Gordon quoted in the Senate, should be fulfilledthat the Republic would either lose its civilization by mob law, or in putting down mob law with a strong hand would lose its liberties. After all, there was always plenty of sailing-room between Scylla and Charybdis for a careful pilot. Only, if

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we do not use the advantages of modern civilization to put a search-light on Scylla's rock and buoy out the Charybdis currents, we shall not have the excuses of our primitive forerunners.

As to the main question, probably no reasonable man is disposed to deny that the employment of great aggregations of labor by great aggregations of capital has in it the inevitable possibility of abusesthe wise man would probably add, on both sides; and he would certainly add, not to be entirely settled by any science which altogether ignores the human element in the question. We are in the period of discovery in this matter; just before its great discoverers, let us hope; and everybody is trying it with his nostrums, as medieval doctors did disease before intelligent medicine and hygiene. But surely what the strikes did, if anything, was to add another to the many proofs that no cure can be effected by any systematic interference with the liberty of the individual. It is never safe to dogmatize on what the wisest still hold to be in debate ; but probably it would be the nearest approach to safe dogmatizing to say that only that degree of organizing and combining will ever be permanent or successful, which secures the best opportunity for the individual's development; and the moment it does more and despotizes him, it loses its power and reacts like any other despotism. This is the theory of all successful government; and not all the plans of Socialism or Trades-unionism, when they go beyond it, will ever change the result. There is only one permanent despotism: "Nature is not democratic, nor limited - monarchical, but

despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the pertest of her sons." Whoever forgets that society is an aggregation of individuals, and that you cannot permanently change its insistence on the pursuit of its needs and wishes, or the nature of those needs and wishes, without changing individual human nature by saner and slower processes of education than those of Mr. Debs, seems to be in danger of this "pertness." It is Emerson, of course, who says this about Nature; and in the passage in which it occurs is further this : "Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city; that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion may be voted in or out; that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the state must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen. . . . . and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population that permits it." Probably one could in no way so merit the derision of earnest Populists as to sit in the East and quote Emerson at them; yet surely, even by a Populist this may be read with benefit.

THERE was a hot, close fight in the Board of Education in one of the largest cities of the Union, this year, over the choice of a president, who names the committees, and so largely determines the general policy of the board. The "issue was the relative attention to be paid to what are called "primary" pupils, and to pupils of the "higher" grades. Those who believed that the former should have the greater consideration won the day, and their candidate announced, when he took his seat, that he should do what he could to direct the expenditures for buildings, so that the number of children in each primary class, under the care of one teacher, might be "reduced to sixty." He is regarded in that blessed board of so-called education as a radical, and

his programme was received with appropriate applause or derision by the respective parties. Sixty little ones in one class, in the care of one teacher, who is possibly not more than twenty years old, or long out of the " high" school, and who receives at most $600 a year! In the columns of the paper that reported these curious proceedings, I found an anecdote of a Sunday-school class who designed a banner for their festival, on which was rudely but effectively portrayed a wide-jawed lion, with the legend, "Suffer little children to come unto me." The banner should be presented to this board of education and hung above the president's chair, until, in the evolution of the community, some idea of the function of the public school less ravening and savage shall prevail.

Yet the respectable gentlemen who con stitute this board are not themselves cruel or indifferent, nor are the instructors of various grades who have developed this amazing state of things. Nor are they, in general, ignorant. Many of them I know are honest and faithful business men, giving much time and work without pay to what they consider their duties, or teachers with a real purpose to serve their pupils and a genuine respect for their profession. They are victims of the feeling that the later stages of schooling are more important than the earlier, when, whether we consider the nature and permanence of the influence possible or the number influenced, the exact reverse is, in the public schools at least, the truth.

It is one of the curiosities of democracy, that by far the greater part of the money and effort expended on general instruction should be for the benefit of by far the smaller number. This is not only a glaring anomaly, but it is a gross injustice. Why is it submitted to? Because the greater number are not and cannot well be represented in the governing bodies. No man gets into a board of education who, if he send his children to a public school at all, is obliged to take them out and set them to work at twelve or fifteen years of age. could no more afford to serve in the board than he could afford to keep his children in school. Those who do get in belong to and represent the class to whom "advanced" instruction seems the more impor

He

tant;-which, by the way, goes to show that equality in suffrage does not secure equality in benefit from the common expenditures, and throws some dry light on the probable working of the socialist scheme for compulsory justice, which Professor Sumner, with rather brutal accuracy, calls "making the world over."

WHAT We like to call provincialism is, I suppose, a matter of incorrect perspective. A person dwelling with comparatively few associates, or in a larger community of nearly uniform ideas and habits, judges the world by the standard his experience and observation have supplied, as obviously he must; and the standard being a narrow (not necessarily a low) one, his views are correspondingly narrow. He is, we say, provincial. The essence of his provincialism is his general mistake as to the importance and value of what he sees and thinks, and wherever you find that mistake habitually made you have provincialism.

One of the brightest journalists of Paris recently remarked of the Republic, which through the stress and trial of a score of years has established itself with an apparent solidity and an acknowledged dignity possessed by no French government since the Revolution, that it had become presque Parisienne. This, it would seem, is provincialism of as pure a strain and as unconsciously petty as any province of France could produce. It is a fair counterpart of the traditional Western remark, that "New York would be a great town if it were not so far out of Chicago." And it is curious to remark how this grotesque habit of measuring great things by little things for Paris, great as it is in many ways, some of which your confident Parisien fails to understand, is not so great as France-obtains more noticeably in France than in any other country of intelligence approaching that of the French. It is not a disagreeable habit altogether. There is a grace of sincerity and simplicity about it that redeems the conceit at the bottom of it. Its comparisons are not generally odious. There is an assumption that to call a thing French, or Parisian, or gaulois is to give it the last word of praise; but the corresponding assumption, that not to merit those adjectives is simply not to require

notice at all, is not often put in words. It is implied, but unless you are very sensitive, you incline to ignore the implication rather than to take offence at what is to the Frenchman so inevitable.

This is provincialism, nevertheless, and its root is in a certain slowness of the French mind, nimble enough within its range, but indisposed to extend the range, and doing so only with effort often painful, sometimes amusing, "Le vice de l'indolence," says Jules Simon, "c'est depuis longtemps notre vice national." By which certainly he does not mean that the French are not industrious, but that they move, when they move, with reluctance. By preference and contentedly, they rest in their "huis clos," and measure all things by the measure they are used to, not suspecting how inadequate and inapt it is. To that extent they are provincial.

ANY delusions that may have beset the summer vacationer from the city about the intensity of his own gregarious instincts, are apt to be widely dispelled about this time of year, when, after his month by the sea or in the country, he first strikes a considerable town. It need not be such a very big town, but only a city with the ordinary appliances of city life, with hotels that are real hotels, not summer hotels; with shops, newspapers, and people. It is really pitiable to see the poor creature's satisfaction in finding the commonest appurtenances of urban existence within his reach. The most ordinary sights bear a friendly aspect to him. The members of the Salvation Army that he sees in the streets seem to him like old acquaintances. The cigar-store Indians are his long-lost brothers. The conventional ornaments of the drug stores, the sodawater fountains, and awful instruments, and sponges, and patent medicine boxes that garnish those repositories, seem cheerful and alluring to him, and the familiar drug-store smell rises in his nostrils like the very breath of life. There are barber shops-he can have his locks trimmed; there are saloons-he can quench his thirst; there are bookstores-he can learn what progress literature has made during his absence from the world, and can look at the outsides of the newest books and supply

himself with all the latest magazines. It rejoices him, as he dodges a trolley car, to find his instinct of self-preservation still unimpaired. A bicycler grazes him as he whizzes by, and he swears more in glee than in irritation. Poor degenerate creature that he is, after viewing God's creation for a month, man's poor appliances possess a new charm for him. The visions he had in June of the delights of a life-long communion with nature have faded out, and be rejoices that his lot has been cast in the haunts of men. Even his work, that he had come so to despise, has charms for him again, and he thinks with relief, and even with enthusiasm, of having a desk to return to every morning, and of the set task which is to occupy his active hours and relieve him of the obligation to choose between rival forms of laborious amusement.

Bless the man! Don't imagine that the merits and blisses and attractions which he sees in cities really exist. Don't suppose that the sight of the blue sea or the blue hills is not intrinsically better than any sights he will find in town. It is just a case of cœlum non animum, that's all. He is a bundle of habits like all of us, and it is because he is getting back to his habits that he rejoices. He is a machine, and however it may benefit him now and then to stop for a time and repair his several parts, he is happiest on the whole when he is running, and he runs easiest and most profitably in the place that he has learned to fit. He may pose for a few weeks every year as a human creature, but the truth is that he is a mere appliance, and best off, as his own instincts tell him, in the place where he can best be applied.