enough of charities. It wants respect and consideration. We desire no longer to be legislated for, it says, we want to be legislated with. Why do you never come to see me but you bring me something? asks the sensitive and poor seamstress. Do you always give some charity to your friends? I want companionship, and not cold pieces; I want to be treated like a human being who has nerves and feelings, and tears too, and as much interest in the sunset, and in the birth of Christ, perhaps, as you. And the mass of uncared for ignorance and brutality, finding a voice at length, bitterly repels the condescensions of charity; you have your culture, your libraries, your fine houses, your church, your religion, and your God, too; let us alone, we want none of them. In the bear pit at Berne, the occupants, who are the wards of the city, have had meat thrown to them daily for I know not how long, but they are not tamed by this charity, and would probably eat up any careless person who fell into their clutches, without apology. Do not impute to me Quixotic notions with regard to the duties of men and women of culture, or think that I undervalue the difficulties in the way, the fastidiousness on the one side, or the jealousies on the other, It is by no means easy to an active participant to define the drift of his own age; but I seem to see plainly that unless the culture of the age finds means to diffuse itself, working downward and reconciling antagonisms by a commonness of thought and feeling and aim in life, society must more and more separate itself into jarring classes, with mutual misunderstandings and hatred and war. To suggest remedies is much more difficult than to see evils; but the comprehension of dangers is the first step towards mastering them. The problem of our own time-the reconciliation of the interests of classes-is as yet very illy defined. This great movement of labor, for instance, does not know definitely what it wants, and those who are spectators do not know what their relations are to it. The first thing to be done is for them to try to understand each other. One class sees that the other has lighter or at least different labor, opportunities of travel, a more liberal supply of the luxuries of life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the beautiful, the immaterial. Looking only at external conditions, it concludes that all it needs to come into this better place is wealth, and so it organizes war upon the rich, and it makes demands of freedom from toil and of compensation which it is in no man's power to give it, and which would not, if granted over and over again, lift it into that condition it desires. It is a tale in the Gulistan, that a king placed his son with a preceptor, and said,-"This is your son; educate him in the same manner as your own." The preceptor took pains with him for a year, but without success, whilst his own sons were completed in learning and accomplishments. The king reproved the preceptor, and said,-“You have broken your promise, and not acted faithfully." He replied,-“O king, the education was the same, but the capacities are different. Although silver and gold are produced from a stone, yet these metals are not to be found in every stone. The star Canopus shines all over the world, but the scented leather comes only from Yemen." "Tis an absolute, and, as it were, a divine perfection," says Montaigne, "for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being. We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside." But nevertheless it becomes a necessity for us to understand the wishes of those who demand a change of condition, and it is necessary that they should understand the compensations as well as the limitations of every condition. The dervish congratulated himself that although the only monument of his grave would be a brick, he should at the last day arrive at and enter the gate of Paradise, before the king had got from under the heavy stones of his costly tomb. Nothing will bring us into this desirable mutual understanding except sympathy and personal contact. Laws will not do it; institutions of charity and relief will not do it. We must believe, for one thing, that the graces of culture will not be thrown away if exercised among the humblest and the least cultured; it is found out that flowers are often more welcome in the squalid tenementhouses of Boston than loaves of bread. It is difficult to say exactly how culture can extend its influence into places uncongenial and to people indifferent to it, but I will try and illustrate what I mean, by an example or two. Criminals in this country, when the law took hold of them, used to be turned over to the care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime than with the criminal, or at least to those who were almost as coarse in feeling and as brutal in speech as their charges. There have been some changes of late years in the care of criminals, but does public opinion yet everywhere demand that I jailers and prison-keepers and executioners of the penal law should be men of refinement, of high character, of any degree of culture? I do not know any class more needing the best direct personal influence of the best civilization than,the criminal. The problem of its proper treatment and reformation is one of the most pressing, and it needs practically the aid of our best men and women. should have great hope of any prison establishment at the head of which was a gentleman of fine education, the purest tastes, the most elevated morality and lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also will and the power of command. I do not know what might not be done for the viciously inclined and the transgressors, if they could come under the influence of refined men and women. And yet you know that a boy or a girl may be arrested for crime, and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to warden, and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment, and never once see any man or woman, officially, who has tastes, or sympathies, or aspirations much above that vulgar level whence the criminals came. Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good enough to take charge of prison birds. accomplishments of liberal learning and rare opportunities, and looks upon the intellectual poverty of the world without a wish to relieve it. "As often as I have been among men," says Seneca, "I have returned less a man.” And Thomas à Kempis declared that "the greatest saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to live to God in secret." The Christian philosophy was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance with the teaching and practice of Jesus of Nazareth. The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and the delights of learning. He must make himself more felt in the material life of this country. I am aware that it is said that the culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and more decorous animality of the more fortunate. out entering directly upon the consideration of this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the influence upon our present and probable future of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary opportunities of this still new land. With The American grows and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. The apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great cities to The age is merciful and abounds in charities; houses of refuge for poor women, societies for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation of the lost. It is willing to pay liberally for their support, and to hire ministers and distributors of its benefactions. But it is beginning to see that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy brotherly feeling. The most encouraging thing I have seen lately is an experiment in one of our cities. In the thick of the town the ladies of the city have furnished and opened a reading-wards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. room, sewing-room, conversation-room, or what not, where young girls, who work for a living and have no opportunity for any culture, at home or elsewhere, may spend their evenings. They meet there always some of the ladies I have spoken of, whose unostentatious duty and pleasure it is to pass the evening with them, in reading or music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of the courtesies of life in conversation. Whatever grace and kindness and refinement of manner they carry there, I do not suppose is wasted. These are some of the ways in which culture can serve men. And I take it that one of the chief evidences of our progress in this century is the recognition of the truth that there is no selfishness so supreme --not even that in the possession of wealthas that which retires into itself with all the If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We shall excel the English when we have as long prac tice as they. I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the immortal thirst of the country. We take, indeed, strong hold of the earth; we absorb its fatness. When Leicester entertained Elizabeth at Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetually at twelve, the hour of feasting. It is always dinner-time in America. I do not know how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a quarter section. He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish and a handful of olives. The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied. He is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He is temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws not more of his life from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky. He would never build a Pacific railway, nor write an hundred volumes of commentary on the Scriptures; but he is an example of how little a man actually needs of the gross products of the earth. I suppose that life was never fuller in certain ways than it is here in America. If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough. A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on what one American family consumes and wastes. The revenue required for the wardrobe of one woman of fashion would suffice to convert the inhabitants of I know not how many square miles in Africa. It absorbs the income of a province to bring up a baby. We riot in prodigality, we vie with each other in material accumulation and expense. Our thoughts are mainly on how to increase the products of the world, and get them into our own possession. I think this gross material tendency is strong in America, and more likely to get the mastery over the spiritual and the intellectual here than elsewhere, because of our exhaustless resources. Let us not mistake the nature of a real civilization, nor suppose we have it because we can convert crude iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport ourselves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall refine our carnal tastes so as to be satisfied at dinner with the tongues of ortolans and the breasts of singing-birds. Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have the charms of conversation interfered with. By comparison, music was to him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society the ideal must be the banishment of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued experiment of history-the end of a civilization in a polished materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness. I am sure that the scholar, trained to "plain living and high thinking," knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and not in the refinement and accumulation of the material. The word culture is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower. You would expect spurious culture to stand aloof from common life, as it does, to extend its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion a mere cultus, to construct for its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the inhabitants dress becomingly, and where there are no Communists. Culture, like fine manners, is not always the result of wealth or position. When monsigneur the archbishop makes his rare tour through the Swiss mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him with boorish impudence, but strew his stony path with flowers, and receive him with joyous but modest sincerity. When the Russian Prince made his landing in America the determined staring of a bevy of accomplished American women nearly swept the young man off the deck of the vessel. One cannot but respect that tremulous sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to shrink from staring at the moon when she heard there was a man in it. The materialistic drift of this age, that is, its devotion to material development, is frequently deplored. I suppose it is like all other ages in that respect, but there appears to be a more determined demand for change of condition than ever before, and a deeper movement for equalization. Here in America this is, in great part, a movement for merely physical or material equalization. The idea seems to be well-nigh universal that the millennium is to come by a great deal less work and a great deal more pay. It seems to me that the millennium is to come by an infusion into all society of a truer culture, which is neither of poverty nor of wealth, but is the beautiful fruit of the development of the higher part of man's nature. And the thought I wish to leave with you, as scholars and men who can command the best culture, is that it is all needed to shape and control the strong growth of material development here, to guide the blind instincts of the mass of men who are struggling for a freer place and a breath of fresh air; that you cannot stand aloof in a class isolation; that your power is in a personal sympathy with the humanity which is ignorant but discontented; and that the question which the man with the spade asks about the use of your culture to him, is a menace. THE CANOE:-HOW TO BUILD AND HOW TO MANAGE IT. CANOES IN GENERAL. HEINRICH HEINE, when contemplating a monograph on the "Feet of the Women of Göttingen," announced that he should discuss, first, "feet in general;" second, "feet among the ancients;" third, the "feet of elephants;" and fourth, the "feet of the women of Göttingen." In discussing the modern cruising canoe, it will be necessary to speak of canoes in general, and of canoes among the early imitators of Macgregor, whose first canoe, though now only ten years old, represents the extreme antiquity of the modern canoe. At the outset, disabuse your mind of the idea that the civilized canoe has any possible resemblance to the birch or savage canoe except in name. It is true that both are paddled. So, in point of fact, is the sidewheel steamboat; but neither the steamboat nor the civilized canoe is therefore properly to be classed with the savage canoe. Indeed, the canoe with which this treatise is concerned is not a canoe at all, but a cheap and portable yacht; derived remotely from the savage canoe, but resembling it rather less than Mr. Darwin resembles his ancestral аре. The canoe is a solution of the problem "to find a vessel perfectly adapted for one person to cruise in." Now the man who proposes to travel alone from New York to the Thousand Islands, by way of the Hudson River and Lake Champlain, wants a boat in which he can sleep and carry provisions and stores; which can be propelled by sails when there is an available wind, or by the paddle-which is easier to handle than the oar-when the sails cannot be used. It must also be light enough to be taken out of the water and dragged over short land portages by a single pair of hands,-or else his cruise must be abandoned, or he must call on the casual countrymen for help. The ordinary sail-boat will not answer these demands, for the reason that it is so heavy that a yoke of oxen is required to drag it out of the water. The Whitehall rowboat is also too heavy to be dragged over the shortest portage by one or even two men. Moreover the row-boat has no cabin in which to sleep, can carry but little sail, and must be rowed-instead of paddled— when there is no wind. Neither the sailboat nor the row-boat will then answer the purpose of the solitary voyager. The canoe, however, will perfectly meet his demands. It is so light that he can carry it under one arm; it has ample cabin accommodation; it can be sailed or paddled, and it is a better sea-boat than the best metallic surf-boat ever yet built. Compare this commodious, handy little craft with the birch or dug-out canoe of the savage, and you see at once that it has really nothing in common with that moist, unpleasant, and dangerous affair. CANOES AMONG THE ANCIENTS. The canoe and by that term will hereafter be meant only the civilized clinkerbuilt canoe-yacht--may be said to have been invented by Mr. J. Macgregor, an English barrister (doubtless of Scottish origin), and the author of several books describing the voyages made in his canoe, the Rob Roy. Strictly speaking, Mr. Macgregor is the man who made the canoe a success, just as Fulton made the steamboat a success; and hence he, like Fulton, is entitled to be called an inventor, though canoes and steamboats were designed and built before either Macgregor or Fulton troubled themselves with paddles or paddle-wheels. The pattern of the Rob Roy, the first successful cruising canoe, has been so greatly improved upon that it may now be considered practically obsolete. Its dimensions are given here, however, partly because they may please the fancy of the conservative canoeist, and partly as a matter of interest to the antiquarian. Dimensions of Rob Roy No. 1: Length, 15 feet; beam, 2 feet 4 inches; depth, 9 inches; keel, 1 inch; draught, 3 inches; weight, 80 pounds. The original Rob Roy was built of oak with a cedar deck, and rigged with a spritsail set on a five-foot mast. Her midship section was nearly semicircular, so that she was excessively crank. Moreover she had no sheer, and hence would run her nose under water when there was any sea on. The well-hole, in which the canoeist sat, was elliptical in form, and fifty-four inches in length by twenty in breadth. It was a feat, second only in difficulty to the contortions of a professional trapeze gymnast, to "go below" at night in this canoe. Yet ticklish, uncomfortable, and heavy as she was, Mr. Macgregor traveled hundreds of miles in her on the rivers of Germany, diffusing cheerfulness and evangelical tracts wherever he went. The latest of Mr. Macgregor's canoes, the Rob Roy No 4, in which he made a cruise down the Jordan a year or two ago, was somewhat of an improvement on the first Rob Roy. Its dimensions were as follows: Length, 14 feet; beam, 2 feet 2 inches; depth, I foot. It was built of the same materials as the first Rob Roy, but the well-hole was larger, and the weight was eight pounds less. Still it was crank, heavy, uncomfortable, and a poor sailer. It represents, however, the best model of the Rob Roy type-a type of canoe which is, as has already been said, greatly inferior to later models. The republication in this country of Mr. Macgregor's books has given the Rob Roy an unfortunate notoriety: unfortunate, because the young American who wishes a canoe is very apt to build or import a Rob Roy, with which he is sure to become greatly discontented, and in consequence bitterly prejudiced against the canoe in any form. There are other poor canoes besides those of the Rob Roy class, the least objectionable of which is the Ringleader type. These should be known only to be shunned, and the young canoeist should build or buy no canoe but one which is constructed upon the general model of Mr. Baden-Powell's Nautilus No. 3. THE PERFECT CANOE. Mr. Baden-Powell is an English gentleman, who has invented a canoe that for cruising purposes may be considered perfect. This canoe is known in England as the Nautilus canoe, and, from the model of the third Nautilus built by the inventor, the New York Canoe Club has built, with slight modifications-chief among which is the straight stern-post-its entire fleet. The Rob Roy had but little "bearings," no sheer, and no water-tight compartments. The Nautilus has two water-tight compartments sufficiently large to float her and her owner, even when the canoe is full of water. She has plenty of "bearings," and hence can carry a heavy press of sail. Her immense sheer keeps her dry when running before the wind, and makes her self-righting when capsized. She has abundant cabin room, and, when built of white cedar, weighs only about fifty-seven pounds. No better canoe could be desired. The dimensions of this canoe, when intended for a canoeist under five feet ten inches in height, and weighing one hundred and sixty pounds or less, are as follows: Length, 14 feet; beam, at bottom of topstreak, 2 feet 4 inches; depth amidships, from top of top-streak to bottom of keel, 10 inches; height of stem-post above level of keel, 1 foot 10 inches; height of sternpost, foot 7 inches; camber, 2 inches; depth of keel, 1 inch. By reference to accompanying diagrams, the model of the canoe will be more easily understood. It is, as has been already said, a clinker-built boat. Fig.1 From A to B, 14 feet; C to D, 10 inches; A to E, 1 foot 10 inches; B to F, I foot 7 inches. Fig. 2. Beam amidships at bottom of top-streak, 2 feet 4 inches; beam at mast-hole, 2 feet; beam at dandy-mast hole, I foot 8 inches. B and b are water-tight bulkheads; S is a movable bulkhead which can be taken out at night to increase the cabin accommodations. The octagonal figure in the middle of the boat is the well-hole in which the canoeist sits, and is provided with hatches at each end, moving upon hinges. From A to b, 3 feet 5 inches; F to B, 4 feet; F to M, 4 feet 3 inches; A to m, 3 feet 7 inches; length of well-hole, 5 feet; greatest breadth of well-hole, I foot 8 inches; depth of hatch-combing, 1 inch. |