There was no other person in South Carolina better fitted than this nominee for the rôle of arousing white sentiment and of convincing Northern opinion of the liberal intentions of his party. He was the wealthy scion of an illustrious and aristocratic house in a state of strong aristocratic tradition. His association with the Confederacy as ranking officer from South Carolina and sometime chief of cavalry, in the moment of defeat, made him dear to the hearts of a people who cherished so passionately the memory of the Lost Cause. He was a man of handsome physique, a born leader of men without military training, and filled with enthusiasm for the cause he was to champion. He always cherished a sincere love for the black man in the rôle of the menial; he had opposed Secession and was ready to boast the fact that he had early advocated Southern acquiescence in the recent amendments to the constitution of the United States giving the negro full civil rights. But for his moderating influence the plans of the South Carolina revolutionists might have failed.

Yet Hampton was by no means possessed of those full qualities of genius with which his uncritical admirers have endowed him. He was a most ordinary speaker with little variety of utterance, and possessed of the failings of a country squirenarrow education and sincere bigotry. Like the Julius Cæsar of Shakespeare his was a name and personality to conjure with; others possessed of less reputation and more powers of understanding and action were destined to supplement his work by the use of qualities that he did not possess. In the opinion of W. B. Ball and Tillman he went to his grave absurdly believing that his power of eloquence had converted enough negroes to secure his election. He did not possess those qualities which would in a less turbulent commonwealth have made him a worthy opponent of Chamberlain, the brilliant and erudite orator.39

Let us turn now from the sequence of Democratic events to a consideration of a second convention of the Republicans in

For laudatory estimates of Hampton, see Du Bose and Ramage, Sewanee Review, vol. X, p. 364; McClure's Recollections of Half a Century, pp. 406-414; a volumn of newspaper clippings in the Charleston Library. Excepting the frank criticisms of Tillman in Reminiscences of the Campaign of 1876, the writer depends for his critical estimate of Hampton on the verbal authority of those who know him.

1876, which met in Columbia, September 12. Chamberlain's nomination, in spite of the News and Courier's ostensible desire that he join the Democrats, and the repugnance of the Republicans for his reforming proclivities, was, by force of the bloody riot of Hamburg and the consequent radical crystalization of racial antipathies, a foregone conclusion. The opposition was led by Elliott, who put in nomination as Chamberlain's opponent T. C. Dunn. Once more the force of Chamberlain's oratory made personal victory signal: he was nominated by a vote of eighty-eight to thirty-five along with a ticket of corrupt Republicans for whom he still cherished antipathies. Black sentiment was firmly behind the entire ticket. A platform demanding reform, protesting against white interference at Republican meetings, and endorsing Grant's administration was adopted.40

40 N. and C., Sept. 13-16; Allen, 304-5.

Herbert Spencer: The Man and His Age

L. L. BERNARD

The University of Minnesota

Very rarely, if at all, has the world changed so much in one century as in the hundred years since Herbert Spencer first saw the light in the little quiet town of Derby. As he says, in his early childhood the streams of England still ran pure and the air was reasonably free from the smoke and fumes of factory and furnace. There were quiet places in the countryside where he might cast his hook and line with expectation of due reward. But scarcely had he passed his teens until the bustle and roar of industry had drowned out the rural voices in his native villages, and agricultural and yeoman England was no more. Spencer himself, still in his twenties, helped as an engineer to survey and build the railroads which replaced, among others, the old stage coach on which, at the age of thirteen, he took his memorable trip to visit his uncle near Bath. By the age of thirty he found himself entangled in the controversies of the parliamentary commissions created to bring order out of the confused and overgrown transportation systems. Earlier still he entered willingly into the lists of political controversy on the side of those who struggled for the ballot and for civil reforms. He championed the newly rising movement for suffrage and rights of women, and was an early protagonist for freedom of thinking in religious matters. For his pains in this cause he won the title of "antichrist" from a clergyman who held public prayer in a hotel at which both were stopping, for the purpose of driving out Spencer's evil spirit.

But so rapid was the progress of these liberal movements, which he championed so enthusiastically in the first third of his eighty-four years, that they passed him by, and in his age he either repudiated them or viewed them with misgivings for the future. What was at first the promise of democracy, later became the menace of socialism and a stagnant, regimented world. His early championship of freedom in the development of personality for women, and of thought for all, was

transformed into doubts as to the limits of human wisdom, and fears for the disintegration of the accumulated values and controls in civilization under the constant bombardment of a destructive criticism. In his last years he looked with kindness upon an aristocratic society, and, although he resented the criticism from an American contemporary-Mr. Henry George- he found a pleasant companionship with members of the nobility and men of wealth whose kind he had formerly despised as parasites and exploiters. He even paid public acknowledgment to the value of institutional religion as a most powerful, perhaps the most successful, agency for social control and conservation. But for himself, he was not able to find final comfort and restful illusionment in religious faith: for his highly critical mind had too long been active in beating to pieces the idols of tradition and custom. Such was in large measure the tragedy of the great intellect of Spencer, that it had helped to create an intellectual Frankenstein which in his later years after the progress of events had moved beyond him-frightened him, and yet had so disillusioned him that he could find no peace by turning like Newman to the bosom of the church, or like Arnold to a calm faith in things as they are. At the end Spencer described himself as at once the most conservative and the most radical of men, which meant that he had seen a vision of surpassing promise, but his disillusionment from the study of men and democracy had left him without hope that it could ever be realized.

Spencer's education represents one of the great experiments of the world, of which all too little has been said. In the conventional sense he was not educated at all. Aside from some rather desultory schooling in classes, but little pressed because of his delicate health, almost all his training was by tutor, either in his father's or his uncle's families, or through his own efforts and studies. Of the languages he learned almost nothing, scarcely pausing with Latin and Greek, and acquiring only an imperfect reading knowledge of French after he had gone up to London and come in contact with Miss Evans' interests in French philosophy and sociology. Consequently the modern literatures were closed to him, which was less of a catastrophe for him than it might have been, in view

of the fact that throughout the greater portion of his life he read little anyway. Although he wrote some of the clearest and best balanced prose in the English language, which one may read for sheer pleasure, regardless of the thought, he never made any formal study of English, not even as a basis for his essay on Style.

It was rather in the method of his education that he had such an exceptional experience. He was trained in the problem method from infancy. His father, who gave his best thought early and late to his training, would take him on walks to bring him into direct contact with nature, not only for the sake of developing an aesthetic appreciation in him, but even more to stimulate his curiosity as to cause and effect in natural phenomena. This method of causal interpretation was also applied by his father with equally marked effect in mathematics and the sciences, in which both father and son were particularly interested. Spencer never did acquire a liking for the mere assembling of facts, and later in his life the factual type of mind became genuinely repulsive to him. Nor was his mind congested and impeded with a lot of conventional but useless "cultural" material drawn from the classics, the mythologies, the organized gossip about literary men and artists, the scandals and ambitions of kings, and the other small talk of education, which ruins so many naturally good minds by producing intellectual stasis, and developing an aesthetic attitude at the expense of the rational. Thanks to his father's persistent training and his own later habits, there perhaps never lived a philosopher more enthusiastically bent upon explaining the phenomena which he actually observed, rather than the mass of accumulated testimony and opinion about it.

His tremendous reputation throughout the world in the latter part of the nineteenth century-for his fame spread even to the orient, with the result that at one stage of Japan's national awakening he became something of a patron saint in philosophy to her people—was due primarily to his vigorous method of intellectual attack. It gave him an altogether undeserved advantage over his contemporaries: for, while they amassed data from which they more or less hesitatingly drew conclusions which have not been quickly overturned, he rushed