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thropist as summarily as Mrs. Rush did the American. A family of peasants are led through the horrors attendant upon life in the British slums. The older ones suffer all the horrors of the factory system, the younger are ground down by child labor, and the father is taken for a seaman and flogged by a brutal officer. To make matters worse, one of the victims is a lord, changed in his cradle.

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A less extreme position for the debater is to acknowledge some of the charges against him, but to lay the responsibility for the wrongs on someone else. John W. Page, in his Uncle Robin shows that the evils of slavery, "so glowingly depicted in the Northern romances," so far as they do exist, are for the most part brought upon the slaves by the meddling Northerner. Two negroes are suspected of plotting to run away to the North. They begin by stealing four hams from the next plantation. Their master knows that the man who lost the hams, a New Englander turned planter, will insist that the slaves be tried and hanged for theft. He compromises by selling the boys to a trader. The culprits and their friends and relatives acknowledge that is a just solution. Another planter goes to California on business. He cannot afford to leave his slaves behind, nor can he take them with him, for the wicked Northern-made law forbids slavery in that state. Reluctantly he sells them. Prowling Yankees do great harm by enticing contented slaves to poverty and misery at the North. This novel emphasizes the type of the cold blooded Yankee, who misuses his slaves if he has them, denies employment to the free negro at the North, fleeces the runaway, and permits him to die of neglect. If he owns property in the South he is a staunch advocate of slavery, but only through business motives, for he is essentially a hypocrite.

The Master's House 8 is an ingenious attempt to lay the blame for the evils of slavery upon the overseer class. The atrocities related in its pages are as black as those in Uncle Tom's Cabin, but they are committed in defiance of the better element of the whites, by the brutal slave-trader and overseer. This novel is particularly interesting in its sketch of the effect of slavery

'Page, John W., Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston, 1853.

8 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, The Master's House, a Tale of Southern Life, by Logan, 1854.

upon the mistress. The New England bride, languid, faultfinding and untrained in the management of a plantation, is contrasted with the capable, considerate and energetic Southern matron. The young wife cannot stand the Mississippi climate.. She is so afraid of a black face that she won't even visit her negroes in sickness. She is impossibly fussy about her housekeeping, yet has no notion of cutting out clothes for the field hands or fulfilling any other of the countless duties of the mistress of a large estate. Her busy neighbor is realistically painted. Her practical good humor is a relief from the insipid young misses who languish through the pages of these books.

The best consecutive proof to be found in this whole group is that of Mrs. Hale's Liberia. Sarah Josepha Hale brought to this novel more than fifteen years of active literary life. In her first novel, Northwood, or Life North and South (1827), she had already given some expression to her mild pro-slavery sentiment. By the time she came to write Liberia she had left New England and in Philadelphia she had probably more contact with the Southern viewpoint. Her sentiments are stronger and her manner more assured, Liberia, or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments is, I had almost said, the only decent piece of reasoning presented by the pro-slavery novelists of this period. It is a convincing tract, though as a piece of literature it does not rise above the novels of her Southern fellow-workers. Her support of slavery has an interest from her detachment.

The theme is the inferiority of the negro. A rich planter lies ill. News comes of a slave insurrection. His family remain near him, guarded by the house servents. In gratitude he frees his faithful defenders and places them on a remote plantation. This communistic experiment fails, for all but two or three of the freemen become too lazy even to cut their own firewood. Later the planter frees other slaves who have nursed his children through illness, and sends this second group to Philadelphia. At first they do well in the positions which he has found for them. In time their own improvidence, a season of hard times, and the rowdy mobbing of negroes bring disaster upon this band also. The planter makes a trip to Niagara, where he visits a village of Canadian negroes. The freedmen here are

'Hale, Sarah Josepha, Liberia, or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments, 1853.

not happy. They find the Northern whites unfeeling. Life is hard and cold, especially for the aged. When news of the founding of Liberia reaches Mr. Peyton, he offers to send the industrious survivors of his other two projects to Africa. They are reluctant to try anything more, but finally go. This last experiment is a success. The unsuccessful dependents are deported also and Mr. Peyton is happy in the glowing letters of his former charges. History has disproved the results of Mr. Peyton's experiments. Few would now maintain with Mrs. Hale that the negro who cannot support himself in free America will inevitably succeed in tropic Africa. Her novel deserves commendation, if not for its enduring truth, at least for its sensible and moderate attitude in a time of excessive zeal.

Down the World With Marna

CHARLES B. SHAW

North Carolina College for Women.

There is a commonly accepted belief that no one can attain happiness if, in later life, he dwells far from the loved spot that his infancy knew. "Stuff and poppycock," cry I, "tommyrot and nonesense!"

This theory is, I suspect, a sort of prudential maxim advanced by a generous, kindly world for the delectation and moral support of its mediocrities. There is nothing in such an attitude that savors of courage or virility; nothing that indicates the determined spirit, the will to accomplish. It is not the cry of the man who rises superior to environment or circumstance, who is master of his fate and captain of his soul; not the slogan of the red blood which ventures forth to conquer. Rather is it the whining apology of the pale anaemic who, beaten and ashamed, slinks back, even before the affray has commenced, eager to explain away by some specious argument his want of valor. We find here none of that spirit which drives a man eternally onward to higher and more worthy goals, following ever after the bright-shining gleam of some high resolve. Quite the reverse, indeed-it is an epitome of the narrow-visioned philosophy of over-cautious, stay-at-home mediocrities and failures.

There be some good folk, I grant you, who are content ever to remain within the narrow bounds prescribed by the accidents of birth and upbringing, who have no wish to roam afar seeking what of earth's many beauties they may make their own. There was Charles Lamb, for instance, who was never happy away from the theaters and book stalls of "London-with-themany-sins." Wordsworth, who looked upon the Westmoreland lakes and mountains as his own especial sweethearts, and grew jealous of anyone else that dared venture upon even the most innocent flirtation with them, was another. It may perchance be true, as Mr. Brooks shrewdly suspects in Chimneypot Papers, that he really hated the country and adored the artificiality of town life, but that he found the rent of London lodgings far to exceed his slender poetic purse. I cannot bring

myself to believe it, however, and do earnstly hope that such accursed prosaic heresy is false.

Of such quiet spirits I do not write. But there are othersByron, who gave his life that he might serve Greece; the Shelleys and the Brownings, who found in Italy their charm'd land; Stevenson, who roved from Scotland to America and from Switzerland to the southern islands of the Pacific; Lafcadio Hearn, who lived successively in the Ionian Islands, Wales, Ohio, Louisiana, the French West Indies, and who found happiness at last in far-away Japan-these and many more.

In character and temperament there is much disparity between these various wanderers. Shelley was an erratic, impulsive genius-"a young fool," Stevenson calls him (but he immediately adds, "for God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!"); whereas Stevenson himself was the exact opposite, a careful, conscientious worker. Byron, by the most elastic stretch of one's imagination could not be called a good man; one would not apply to Browning any dissimilar epithet. Despite these fundamental differences, however, there is one quality common to them all-the romantic impulse.

Shall we not say that the words romantic and nomadic are synonomous? Surely, to staid and convention-bound solid. folk-dwellers in Rome-there can be nothing so alluringly romantic as the gypsying life of the wanderers on the winding road to Romany. Travel is one of the few adventurous resources that remains in even the most prosaic epoch. The true romanticist can never be satisfied with the dull round of cares in a prescribed petty portion of the world. He must break away, must seek his diversions among new peoples in far-distant lands. The perils of the sea lure him, and the open road holds him in thrall. The unfamiliar is for us all the picturesque, and it is this picturesque strangeness that the wandering romanticist craves. Whether he seeks it in Greece or in Italy, in the South Sea Islands or in Japan, is a matter of individual preference and an irrelevant consideration. The important factor is the motive which impels him.

Has not the wanderer always been held in reverence? In ancient days the sage made toilsome journeys in search of

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