The Galaxy, May, 1877 Part 27

Dr. Watson F. Quinby of Wilmington has written an odd pamphlet on mongrelism in races. His belief is that population tends to become h.o.m.ogeneous, but this is not an averaging process. When two races mingle and intermarry, the mongrel product does not exhibit the balanced characteristics of both, but the traits of the higher race are absorbed and hid in those of the lower. Asia, he says, "was formerly powerful, with white peoples all along its northern and eastern borders, and far into the interior. But they first enslaved the black race, then mingled their blood, and have finally become merged in them." The resulting mongrel people always lacks the intellectual force necessary to maintain the civilization of the higher. Arts decline and national decay sets in.

In this way is explained the existence of n.o.ble ruins among inefficient and barbarous nations, who practise a much ruder style of architecture.

The Mexicans are the type of this retrogression. Dr. Quinby predicts for them an increasing decline until Aztec civilization is restored. If the Doctor's theories could be established, there are enthusiastic ethnologists who would not hesitate to say that the Mexicans could not be put to a better use than this. Shut them up and compel them to breed themselves back into Aztecs! Dr. Quinby's speculations are, to a great extent, based on studies of language, and of lingual affinities he is a bold, not to say reckless, expounder. Some of his work reads as if Mark Twain had turned philologist. For instance:

"Eighty miles from the mouth of the Indus was a place called Hingliz. The people of this part celebrate the festival of Bhavani on the first day of May, when their custom is to erect a pole in the field and adorn it with pendants and garlands. They also celebrate another festival on the last day of March, called Huli (Phulee), when they amuse themselves by sending one another on foolish errands. _All this has a very Hinglish look(!)._ This is probably the place where the Hinglish people came from, for though the Romans called themselves angles, they call themselves English."

To explore libraries, to sift out from ma.s.ses of irrelevant matter what alone is of value to the naval student, to subject the poetical descriptions of great battles to the cold eye of professional criticism, and to give the results in a condensed, well written, and interesting form, is the task Commodore Parker has a.s.sumed, and so far as the volume under consideration is concerned[11]--the first of a series--the task has been well and faithfully performed. The amount of labor involved is immense! The author pa.s.ses rapidly over the navies of antiquity for the reason, probably, that we are more familiar with that history than with the naval history of a period nearer to us both in time and relationship. What schoolboy has not read of Xerxes sitting in his golden chair overlooking the Piraeus and the galleys of his immense fleet strung along the coast of Attica as far as the eye could reach?

He counted them at break of day, But when the sun set where were they?

[11] "_The Fleets of the World._" By Commodore FOXHALL A. PARKER, United States Navy. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Such was Salamis.

When his narrative reaches the navies of the Italian republics of the middle ages, however, our author seems all aglow with love of his theme, and well he may be! Venice, in her day of glory, possessed the finest navy of the times. Captain Pantero Pantera, writing of it in 1614, speaks with enthusiastic admiration of its fine a.r.s.enals, numerous stores, and numbers of workmen on permanent pay. These things, he says, were always most "carefully attended to by the republic of Venice, which indeed in this respect not only equals, but excels all the naval powers of the Mediterranean." There is so much of romance and poetry, indeed, in connection with the naval history of Venice, that it requires a cool head and steady hand to steer along the courses of sober truth; but that truth we must not be surprised to find, in that clime of sunshine and beauty, often out-vieing the wildest efforts of fiction. Very similar is the history of the sister republic of Genoa. Unfortunately these lovely sisters were great rivals, and during wars which covered a period of about one hundred and thirty years wasted each other's strength and resources without achieving a particle of good to either. As a judgment, it would almost seem, for such stupendous and long-continued folly, the seeds of destruction were planted without their own bosoms. Both attained the pinnacle of earthly glory, but from both issued forth a wanderer who was destined in time to set his seal upon the fate of his native city. The Genoese Columbus, followed by the Venetian Cabot, led the way to the great western continent which, by diverting the course of trade and commerce from its old channels, caused the loss of wealth and the final decay of the Italian republic. The spirit of discovery once aroused, other navigators followed, and Vasco da Gama, by opening the road to the East Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, so injured the trade of Venice with the east as to render her downfall inevitable.

But the history of the old sea kings of the north, and the tracing of their line of descent through old England to the hardy seaman of New England, is still more interesting to our naval students.

The Vikings--"sons of the fiords"--were undoubtedly the most arrant pirates of all history. They were the dread of all Europe. "A furore Normanorum librera nos Domine," prayed the Church throughout Christendom. Many of these piratical princes became, through habitual success, so devoted to their calling that they never extinguished it, but rather gloried in pa.s.sing their lives on board their ships. It was their fond boast that they never reposed under an immovable roof, nor drank their beer in peace by their fireside, and the ships in which they had led their wild and adventurous lives formed in death their sepulchre. Pa.s.sing over the discovery of North America by Eric the Red (about 700 B.C.), we may come at once to Harold Harf.a.gra--Harold the Fairhaired, or Harold Fairfax, a name so well represented to-day in our own navy. Having made himself master of all Norway, the restless young spirits of the realm took themselves off on one of their accustomed expeditions. Led by a youth named Rollo, son of the celebrated sea-rover Jarl Ragnvald, they ascended the Seine and laid siege to Paris. So successful were these Normans that Charles the Simple ceded to Rollo that part of Neustria since called Normandy. By the terms of the treaty, Charles was to give his daughter Gisele in marriage to Rollo, together with the province of Normandy, provided he would do homage, and embrace the Christian religion. To do homage was to kiss the feet of the king.

All that the st.u.r.dy Rollo could be prevailed upon to do, however, was to place his hand in that of the king, and to depute one of his followers to do homage for him. The gentleman to whom this duty was a.s.signed raised the king's foot so high that his majesty was thrown upon his back; whereupon the rude Normans burst out laughing, so little respect for royalty had these wild rovers of the sea. Two hundred years later the descendants of these same Normans achieved the Conquest of England.

They became by the heat of much and continued contest and attrition gradually fused, with the Angles and the Saxons, already inhabitants of the island, into the modern Englishman and his representative on the sh.o.r.es of New England.

This volume not only shows the reader--the general as well as professional reader--the large scope embraced in a proper study of history, but it also demonstrates that naval archaeology is not a mere idle amus.e.m.e.nt, suited to the elegant leisure of the scholar. It has a great and practical value, enabling an officer to understand his own profession the more thoroughly in all its branches. Commodore Parker has conferred a material benefit on his profession by the valuable contribution he has made to its literature. He has, moreover, by his straightforward narration, pleasant style, and copious ill.u.s.trations from standard authorities, rendered agreeable and entertaining to the general reader what otherwise might have proved technical, and of too special a character.

Mr. Perkins's book[12] almost disarms criticism by its very character, for it is impossible to make a selection of books that is at the same time limited in size and adapted to diverse and contrary necessities.

Private libraries want the best books, public libraries the books most called for by the general and often undiscriminating public. "The Best Reading" contains the t.i.tles of about ten thousand books, and as that is less than half the number printed every year, the work is confessedly incomplete from whatever point of view we look at it. Still it is useful to librarians, of whom there are several hundred inexperienced ones in the country, and to professional essayists, or magazine writers, a cla.s.s that must contain thousands of persons. With every allowance for unavoidable imperfections, we think Mr. Perkins can revise the list with advantage, taking out some obsolete writers and putting in some new ones in their place--Herbert Spencer for example.

[12] "_The Best Reading_: Hints on the Selection of Books, on the Formation of Libraries, Public and Private, on Courses of Reading," etc. With a Cla.s.sified Bibliography. By FREDERICK BEECHER PERKINS. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Both Mr. Loftie's "Plea for Art in the House" and the Misses Garrett's advice on "House Decoration"[13] belong to the best kind of works on the very important subject of cultivating good taste in the furniture of the home. They are very direct and clear, and their authors are entirely competent to instruct us all on this subject. Especially are they free from what we consider to be the worst fault a book of this kind can show, an obtrusive pretension to superior taste. It is a great mistake to suppose that we can elevate people by showing them that we consider ourselves far above them in taste and judgment; but this mistake is not unfrequently made. That may be the fact, but if there is no evidence of it but a patronizing treatment of others, there is little hope that much good will be done. Both these books are free from that error, and Mr.

Loftie especially takes his readers into a survey of a good many branches of decorative art, exhibiting a familiar acquaintance with them all, talking alternately of the blunders and successes of collectors, real and would-be, and all with a natural enthusiasm and freedom from superciliousness. The Garrett sisters also give a great number of valuable suggestions and some very taking ill.u.s.trations of tasteful decoration. We wish they had given less of their work to criticism of the conventional London house and more to the description of what is good. So far as we are acquainted with books of this cla.s.s, they abound in two faults, discursiveness and inordinate discussion of bad models.

Artistic house decoration is a technical art, and must be taught like all other arts--by the exhibition of good precedents. Strictly speaking, there can be no theories in matters of taste. All the so-called laws or canons of taste are obtained by observing what has been well done. From that we may learn what is well doing, and the educated taste produces good work. There is nothing in art so implicit as the surveyor's dependence upon the law of magnetic attraction. The notes of a survey well made to-day can be given to a surveyor a century hence, and he will bring the lines out to within half an inch, and put his hand upon each boundary mark that has been made. But it is not so in art. In all the reconstructions of ancient Grecian buildings not one has been rebuilt.

Neither the Madeleine nor the Valhalla repeat the art of the Parthenon, however faithfully they repeat its form and measurements. Good taste is a thing that no French surveyor can secure with any refinement whatever of the metric system. But still there is a soil in which this plant can be grown, and that soil is the collective evidences of good taste in the past. Let us have a book so full of good ill.u.s.trations that didactic instruction shall not be needed.

[13] "_A Plea for Art in the House._" By W. J. LOFTIE, F. S. A.

Porter & Coates, Philadelphia. (Art at Home Series.)

"_Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting Woodwork and Furniture._" By RHODA and AGNES GARRETT. Porter & Coates, Philadelphia. (Art at Home Series.)

NEBULae.

--Our discussion of life insurance management, in this part of "The Galaxy," was but preliminary to the thorough article upon the subject which we present to our readers in this number. It is a subject of great importance, and one which concerns mult.i.tudes of the very best cla.s.s of our citizens, to whom we recommend this article for thoughtful perusal.

Its writer has a more thorough acquaintance with life insurance management than is probably possessed by any other one man in the country. He _knows_, he does not infer or conjecture, and he has learned by experience the only way in which to bring life insurance companies to an effective responsibility. What they are, even when they are not managed in a manner undeniably fraudulent, has been shown by the recent investigations at Albany, which brought to light the payment of salaries and bonuses of monstrous extravagance and the use of proxies by the thousand on the part of the officers who took these great sums out of the pockets of clerks and clergymen, widows and orphans. Something must be done, and that speedily, to correct this abuse even among the honest companies, and the way to doing it is pointed out in the article to which we refer.

--Since we prepared our last nebulous notes, General Grant has pa.s.sed into private life. The country has accepted the event as a matter of course; it has elicited very little comment. The end of his administration was made the occasion of some retrospection and some criticism, it is true; but that did not, in either case, touch the subject which presents itself to us in connection with the change which took place in Washington on the 4th of March. General Grant, by becoming then a mere private citizen, closed one of the most remarkable careers in modern history. Men, a very few men, have done more, or been more, than he has done or has been; but it would be difficult to name a man in modern times who rose from obscurity to such a height, pa.s.sed through such a series of events, held such power, and who pa.s.sed peaceably, and in full possession of his health and all his faculties, into an absolutely powerless and private condition, and all this in sixteen years. The experiences of Cromwell and Washington were most nearly like Grant's. But Cromwell fought six years ere he won his crowning victory at Worcester; and although he was made Lord Protector in 1657, was known to all England as an able and energetic member of the Long Parliament, and one of the leaders of the popular party in 1640, seventeen years before. Washington also saw six years pa.s.s from the time when he drew his sword under the old elm at Cambridge, as Commander-in-Chief of the colonial forces, to that when he received Lord Cornwallis's at the surrender of Yorktown; and, made President in 1789, he retired in 1797, twenty-three years after he took command. But he was a prominent citizen of Virginia thirty-five years before that date, and was nominated deputy to the colonial congress in 1774. The position of our retiring President was very different, and his career was briefer and more crowded with events. In March, 1861, except his old West Point comrades and his few personal acquaintances, there were probably not twenty people in the country who knew of the existence of ex-brevet Captain Grant, U.S.A.

Three years saw him the victor in hard-fought fields, in which the forces on either side more than trebled all that ever Cromwell or Washington commanded, and in 1864 he became General-in-Chief of the immense army of one of the great powers of the world; one year more saw him absolute victor, and the saviour of the Union. Four years pa.s.sed, and he voluntarily laid down his sword and his supreme military command, to become President of the United States, doing so because he was regarded as the only man who could save in peace what he won in war. At the end of four years, he received, like Washington and Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln, the honor of a reelection, and three years later he seemed likely to have the unprecedented distinction of an election to a third term. Now, although we may not say there is none so poor to do him honor, he is entirely without position, military or civil, and it is certainly true that many a mousing politician has far more influence than the victor of Appomatox and he who was once dreaded by many people, and looked to by others without dread, as the coming "man on horseback."

--Such a career in these days was possible only in this country, and here it will probably be impossible hereafter. Of civil war we have, we may be sure, seen the last, as it was really the first, that was ever fought on our soil. And indeed it was big enough to suffice for our share of that sort of thing for ever. That we shall ever be called upon to wage war with a foreign foe is in the extremest degree improbable. No other power wants any of our territory, at the price, at least, which it would cost to get it; and we have taken all that we want from other people. Cuba, if we get it--the advantage of which is not clear to all minds--we shall get by purchase. We shall, therefore, it would seem, never be so greatly indebted again to a successful general. In case we should be so, and he should be one of General Sherman's successors, it may be reasonably doubted if, with General Grant's experience before his eyes, he will give up the a.s.sured life position of General-in-Chief for the temporary honors and troubles of the Presidential chair. It is not necessary to be a blind admirer of General Grant, or a member of the party which made him twice President, to do him the justice of admitting that his resignation of the office which he won with such eclat, and held with such general honor, the world over, was a sacrifice to the good of the Union for which he fought. He had for life a position equally honorable with that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and more striking in its distinction. He had no superior but the President of the United States; not a certain man, but the inc.u.mbent of the office for the time being. He might, and probably would, have seen a succession of such men rise, and pa.s.s into powerless privacy, while he maintained his high position. He gave up this permanent distinction, with its well-a.s.sured emoluments, at what we must admit that he regarded as the call of duty, of patriotism. And now he is, so to speak, a n.o.body.

Admitting all the errors that have been charged against him--and he doubtless committed many--admitting even that the party which he represented is hostile to the best interests of the country (we do not say that it is so, for we speak for no party and in no political interest in these pages)--the spectacle of the pa.s.sage of such a man into absolute public insignificance, without any public care or public thought for his future, is a very impressive one, and one not in all respects admirable. As his career was possible only in this country, so also was the close of it. The government, the people of no other great nation, would drop a man who had done what he did, and held the positions which he held, into an unprovided, obscure future, putting him off, like an old shoe. Once the victorious commander of an army of half a million of men, a man whose name was in the mouths of all the civilized world, for eight years the ruler, with more than kingly power, of a nation of forty millions, and a country which stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and which covered the temperate zone in a continent, he has been remitted again, as far as the nation is concerned, into his former unimportance, we cannot say obscurity, to live a private life upon a very moderate competence. It may be right that this should be so; but none the less is the spectacle one of great interest and significance; all the more is his brief career one of the most remarkable in the history of civilized peoples.

--General Grant's successor seems to be in earnest upon one subject, in his apparent purpose in regard to which he must have the hearty approval of good men of all parties--civil service reform. In this there is no doubt that General Grant himself was at first quite as earnest. But the Republican politicians were too much for him; his own military habits of thought and his devotion to his personal friends also led him to adopt a course of action in this respect inconsistent with the purpose which he first avowed in regard to it; and the great and much needed reform still remains to be worked out. After all, the princ.i.p.al point, the great good, to be attained is the suppression of office-seeking as a sort of business, the extinction of office-seekers as a cla.s.s. Our politics are sadly in need of purification. The corruption which disgraces our Government in the eyes of all good men at home and abroad taints both parties. In this respect there is nothing to choose between them. Now nothing would tend so much to better our condition in this respect as the absolute removal from the arena of political strife of the tens of thousands of minor offices at the disposal of the party in possession of the Government. Let them no longer be the prizes of victory at the polls, and the men who now make politics a trade would find their occupation gone, and they would no longer concern themselves much about nominations and elections. The political affairs of the country would then naturally fall into the hands of the honest, intelligent, and thrifty men who now have little influence upon them. Let it be once understood that, whatever party is in power, no man in office, except those directly around the President, is to be removed except for incompetence, neglect, or malversation, and the first great step will have been taken toward our political regeneration. Nor is its influence upon politics the only great benefit which would thus be secured. The existence of a great body of men who are withholding themselves from the ordinary business and work of life in the hope that something will turn up in politics which will enable them to live, and perhaps to get money in irregular ways, by office-holding, is demoralizing. It tends to make and to keep in existence a body of shiftless men who otherwise would be obliged to turn their attention to mechanics, to trade, to agriculture.

It helps to increase our too great tendency to speculative and unstable habits of life. It is bad in every way. As to the particular method by which the much-needed change is to be brought about there may be various opinions; but among sensible and decent men there is none as to the prime necessity of the extinction of office-seeking. In whatever he may do to effect this the new President will have the best wishes even of the greater number of those who cast their votes against him.

--From civil service to domestic service is a great leap; but there is this likeness between the two, that both, in this country at least, are in a deplorable condition of inefficiency. And as to domestic service, the complaints of householders in England are hardly less loud and grievous than those which go up daily in America. In both countries there is a great cry for provision for unemployed women; and yet in both countries the procurement of women capable and willing to give good household work in return for good wages seems to vibrate between the not remote points of difficulty and impossibility. Disorder, dirt, waste, and cooking which is only the destruction of good viands by reducing them to an unpalatable and indigestible condition are, according to all accounts, the lot of all housekeepers whose means do not enable them to procure the most skilful and highly trained domestic servants. In England a strange remedy has been proposed, adopted in a measure, and thus far with success. It is the introduction of what are called, even in England, "lady helps." There is something amusing in seeing our cousins, who used to sneer at the Yankee phrase "helps," and also at the Yankee help herself, who would not be regarded (unwisely it may be) as a servant, turn in despair to the word and the thing as the only relief in their domestic perplexity. The scheme was first proposed by Mrs. Crayshaw, of Cyfarthfa Castle, the wife of one of the wealthiest iron masters in England. Considering the fact, known to everybody there, that there were thousands of poor gentlewomen--that is, of women born and bred in the comparatively wealthy and cultivated cla.s.ses--who were absolutely penniless, living in want, in suffering, or in a pitiful and oppressive dependence, she thought that many of these women would be willing to enter domestic service under certain conditions. She made inquiries; she was encouraged; and she set herself to work to effect what promises to be a great and beneficent reform.

The conditions which she exacted for her _protegees_ were that they should have comfortable and separate rooms, that they should be called upon to do none of the rough work, like scrubbing, for example, or boot-cleaning (although they were responsible for its being well done), and that they should be treated with personal respect. They were to be called "lady helps." She started her project only about two years ago; and although it was met at first with incredulity and with ridicule, already it is so successful that although the applicants for such employment are many, she cannot supply the demand by housekeepers for her helpful ladies. For it is found that these ladies give what is wanted, intelligent, conscientious service. They are truthful; they can be trusted; they learn easily; they work well; they are quiet, pleasant in manner; and, strange to say, they are cheerful. To the last one other of her conditions may contribute largely. They are to be hired only in couples, so that they have companionship of their own sort.

What will be the end of all this who can tell? The prospect, however, is cheering to that cla.s.s of householders who have not large means and who yet require faithful, well-trained, intelligent domestic servants for their daily comfort, and no less to a large cla.s.s of respectable and educated women, who may find under the new domestic regime a refuge from the woes of extremest poverty--poverty which presses the more hardly upon them because they are educated and respectable. There is nothing in itself degrading in the performance of domestic labor; quite the contrary. No woman who is worthy of her s.e.x hesitates to perform it for her husband, her children, or herself, or feels in the least degraded thereby, or is so regarded by her acquaintances. The feeling against performing it for others is a mere prejudice born of custom, of fashion. Let it once be understood that no woman loses the respect of others or need diminish her own by doing it for others as a means of livelihood, and the ranks of lady helps will be crowded.

--In ill.u.s.tration and in furtherance of Mrs. Crayshaw's truly, and, it would seem, wisely benevolent scheme, a little book has just been published in England, and reprinted in this country. It is by Mrs.

Warren, who is the writer of some half a dozen excellent hand-books of household management. It professes to tell the story of the troubles of a small household, that of a professional man, whose wife is reduced to despair by the incompetence, the neglect, the wastefulness, the untruthfulness, and the dishonesty of the servants, who come to her one after another, each worse than the other. The causes of complaint are exactly those from which American housewives suffer. Depending upon her servants, whose deficiencies she is incapable of supplying herself, she is sometimes unable to give her husband a wholesome meal, decently served; and this preys upon her to such a degree that when he happens to be kept away she fancies that he remains away voluntarily because his home is unattractive. In her despair she proposes a "lady help" to him.

He scouts the suggestion. The thing is impossible, ridiculous. She practises a pious deceit upon him; gets a lady help surrept.i.tiously into the house, and keeps her out of sight until order, and cleanliness, and good dinners have subdued him into a proper frame of mind to receive with meek acquiescence the announcement of the origin of this beneficent change. Then all goes on happily. Money is saved, comfort supplants wretchedness and confusion, and domestic life becomes enjoyable upon a small income. It must be admitted that the auth.o.r.ess has it all her own way. The lady help is a paragon. She is the niece of a distinguished man of science, well bred, highly educated, self-respecting, but humble and modest, kind-hearted, and without the least pride or false shame. She is an angel of goodness to the under servant, who does the coa.r.s.e work of the house, and teaches her as if she were her younger sister. She herself, although invited into the parlor and to sit at the family table, prefers to remain in the kitchen, which she brings into such a condition of neatness and order that it is a sort of little culinary palace. Plainly such women cannot be always looked for in "lady helps,"

and, moreover, there is this difficulty: If it should get about, as it surely would, that such a paragon of womanhood and housekeeping skill was to be found, if she had only moderate personal attraction, the kitchen over which she "presided" would be besieged by an army of bachelors, among whom it would be quite out of the order of nature that there should not be one that would victoriously carry her captive and put her in a parlor somewhere, with "helps," lady or other, to do her bidding.

--A story quoted by Mrs. Warren in ill.u.s.tration of the imperfect apprehension and confused memory of many people, particularly those of the cla.s.s from which servants usually come, is too good to be pa.s.sed by.

The Rev. Dr. McLeod relates in his journal that he once received from two intending communicants the following replies to the following questions:

Who led the children of Israel out of Egypt?--Eve.

Who was Eve?--The mother of G.o.d.

What death did Christ die? [After a long time came the answer]--He was hanged on a tree.

What did they do with the body?--Laid it in a manger.

What did Christ do for sinners?--Gave his Son.

Do you know of any wonderful works that Christ did?--Made the World in six days.

Any others?--Buried Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

What became of them afterwards?--Angels took them to Abraham's bosom.

What had Christ to do with that?--He took Abraham.