publishers. They thus simplify the matter completely, and present to the American people the naked issue, Will you pay for what you appropriate? Will you protect our property rights as you protect those of your own authors? Will you render us the justice to which we are entitled by the moral judgment of the civilized world? Mr. Collins wants far more; but, if he has the slightest idea of getting it, we advise him to possess his soul in great patience and abstain from futile flurries, for he will assuredly have to wait a long time before he gets what he wants. POLITICS AGAINST POLITICAL SCIENCE. IT is needless to call attention to Mr. George's vigorous and impressive article which opens this number of the "Monthly," on "The Kearney Agitation in California," as illustrative of the working of American political and social institutions. The name of the writer and the interest of the topic will cause his contribution to be carefully read. Mr. George closes by invoking the scientific spirit and the scientific method in the study of these phenomena, which he thinks demands the serious attention of the most thoughtful men. This appeal is legitimate, and is prompted by the inevitable logic of the situation. There must be a far better general understanding of the working of social forces before anything can be hoped from remedial measures; but we are here confronted at the outset with difficulties of a very forinidable character. One of the chief of these is that the spirit of our politics is radically antiscientific. It is essentially hostile to science because it cultivates systematic misrepresentation, while the first requirement of science is allegiance to truth. Science begins with morality. It implies rectitude of thought, exemp tion from prejudice and passion, and the utmost attainable accuracy in its representations. It is a school-the only school we have-for discipline in truthfulness. Partisan politics, on the contrary-and partisanship is the essence of politics-is a school of deception and falsehood, and all its influences are at war with the fundamental virtue of truthfulness. If it be thought we are going too far in saying that our political institutions educate the people to immorality, we appeal to the highest authority on moral subjects which our country has produced. More than forty years ago Dr. William Ellery Channing gave a lecture in Boston on the subject of self-culture. In speaking of the means of self-improvement open to the people of this nation he refers to politics, or to the influence of our popular institutions in which thereby becomes a means of genarousing the mental activity of citizens eral self-education. But, having turned the customary patriotic compliment to this beneficent action of our form of government, Dr. Channing pauses, as if conscious that he had gone too far, and then proceeds in a very different strain to acknowledge that, as a matter of fact, no such benign result is gained. He declares, on the contrary, that the influence of politics is to produce a widespread demoralization by a subversion of all the cardinal virtues of character. He says: It may be said that I am describing what free institutions ought to do for the character of the individual, not their natural effects; and the objection, I must own, is too true. Our institutions do not cultivate us, as they might and should; and the chief cause of the failure is plain. It is the strength of party spirit; and so blighting is its influence, so fatal to self-culture, that I feel myself bound to warn every man against it who has any desire of improvement. I do not tell you it will destroy your country. It wages a worse war against yourselves. Truth, justice, candor, fair-dealing, sound judgment, self-control, and kind affections, are its natural and perpetual prey. I do not say that you must take no side in politics. The parties which prevail around you differ in character, principles, and spirit, though far less than the exaggeration of pas sion affirms; and, as far as conscience allows, a man should support that which he thinks best. In one respect, however, all parties agree. They all foster that pestilent spirit which I now condemn. In all of them party spirit rages. Associate men together for a common cause, be it good or bad, and array against them a body resolutely pledged to an opposite interest, and a new passion, quite distinct from the original sentiment which brought them together, a fierce, fiery zeal, consisting chiefly of aversion to those who differ from them, is roused within them into fearful activity. Human nature seems incapable of a stronger, more unrelenting passion. It is hard enough for an individual, when contending all alone for an interest or an opinion, to keep down his pride, willfulness, love of victory, anger, and other personal feelings. But let him join a multitude in the same warfare, and, without singular self-control, he receives into his single breast the vehemence, obstinacy, and vindictiveness of all. triumph of his party becomes immeasurably dearer to him than the principle, true or false, which was the original ground of division. The conflict becomes a struggle, not for principle, but for power, for victory; and the desperateness, the wickedness, of such struggles, is the great burden of history. In truth, it matters little what men divide about, whether it be a foot of land or precedence in a procession. Let them but begin to fight for it, and self-will, ill-will, the rage for victory, the dread of mortification and defeat, make the trifle as weighty as a matter of life and death. The Greek or Eastern Empire was shaken to The its foundation by parties which differed only about the merits of charioteers at the amplitheatre. Party spirit is singularly hostile to moral independence. A man, in proportion as he drinks into it, sees, hears, judges by the senses and understandings of his party. He surrenders the freedom of a man, the right of using and speaking his own mind, and echoes the applauses or maledictions with which the leaders or passionate partisans sce fit that the country should ring. On all points parties are to be distrusted; but on no one so much as on the character of opponents. These, if you may trust what you hear, are always men without principle and truth, devoured by selfishness, and thirsting for their own elevation, though on their country's ruin. When I was young, I was accustomed to hear pronounced with abhorrence-almost with execration-the names of men who are now hailed by their former foes as the champions of grand principles, and as worthy of the highest public trusts. This is a dark indictment, but Dr. Channing was a man who weighed his words. He represents partisan politics as a blighting influence, fatal to selfimprovement, hostile to moral independence, and degrading to character. He says that "truth, justice, candor, fair-dealing, sound judgment, self-control, and kind affections, are its natural and perpetual prey." A system the spirit of which makes "truth" its "natural and perpetual prey," it is needless to say, is not favorable to science. Science can not grow, it can not exist, in such an atmosphere. If it be said that Dr. Channing wrote forty years ago, the reply is that forty years have not mended matters. There is, on the contrary, every evidence that party ends are now pursued in this country with more recklessness of falsehood and more shameless unscrupulousness than ever before. That "all is fair in politics"-a maxim that would be scouted in the cock-pit and on the racecourse is not a recent rule; but the bad arts of an inveterate partisanship have been gradually perfected. With our political progress principles are progressively eliminated from politics, and first-class men are driven from the field. More and more it is becoming the function of the people merely to ratify at the polls the proceedings of wire-pullers, plotters, intriguing demagogues, caucusbullies, and convention-desperadoes. It is notorious that our politics has passed into the hands of practiced professionals, who outmanoeuvrestraightforward men, and drive them to the wall. Everything is done by management and under false pretenses. Party excitement is stimulated by stirring up the meanest passions and by plying all the arts of detraction and falsehood. When the campaign opens, the sluices of slander soon run full. Here comes the last "Evening Post," representing the state of things in 1880. In a leader it says: "As generally conducted, our Presidential campaigns are so volcanic out schools is political. As for the colleges, they are more than anything else workshops for the manufacture of politicians; as was sufficiently attested by President Hayes, the other day, when he told them at Yale that the great office holders are mere figure - heads shaped by the institutions where officeholders are made. bursts of passion and prejudice, and, given for the very existence of these are accompanied by such torrents of vulgar calumny, falsehood, and abuse, that they are anything but creditable to our self-respect and tastes. They not only let loose every viler form of uncharitableness and evil-speaking, but they are permitted to absorb the energies of society to such an extent that even commercial activity is arrested, and the best moral and social developments are paralyzed for the time. In these quadrennial saturnalia the participants, for the most part, take leave of their senses, and comport themselves like bedlamites or Mænads." In the national campaign preceding the last, one of the candidates, as we all remember, was constrained to say, "I hardly know whether I am running for the Presidency or the penitentiary." In the last campaign a Presidential candidate received the suffrages of a majority of the people of the United States, but he failed to get the office, and has ever since been hunted with libels and blackened with calumny, until multitudes regard him as a consummate knave, fit only for the State-prison. So rooted and so fortified is this political system which perpetually preys upon truth and justice, corrupts the morals of the nation, and flames out in Kearneyism and kindred scandals of a reckless partisanship which disgrace every State in the Union. But, powerfully intrenched as it is, we believe that this system is destined to be ultimately improved if not renovated. But it will be slow work, and the reform will not proceed from within. Politicians engendered by the system will not transform it. The amending and elevating influences must come from without. Men must be thoroughly freed from the system before they can deal with it efficiently. The first thing needed by the American citizen is to In these vile practices of falsehood gain an independent position for the and detraction the whole country is im- critical study of the institutions of his plicated, for we are a nation of politi- country; and this can only be done by cians. Politics is not only the domi- vigorous individual revolt against party nant subject of thought, but its method domination. The powerful spell of is the dominant method of thinking. partisan influence must be broken beWe have hundreds of colleges and thou- fore men can be qualified to pursue the sands of common schools, multitudinous study of politics by the scientific methnewspapers and countless pulpits, and od, for under the bias of party feeling all, as we say, for the promotion of pub- nothing is seen aright. Personal indelic intelligence and the elevation of pub-pendence of action in political matters, lic morality; but, when election comes, freedom from the trammels of partisanprofessors, teachers, editors, and clergy-ship, is the true preparation for the inmen, all join in "saving their country" by the means which Dr. Channing has so fittingly characterized. Whoever is in the pulpit, the pews are filled with politicians; whoever is editor, the subscribers are politicians; all the instructors in our public schools are political stipendiaries, and politicians dictate the studies. Indeed, the reason telligent investigation of political questions. Multitudes of our best people are already thoroughly disgusted with politics. Thousands will not go to the polls except under pressure of violent campaign excitement. Politicians denounce this as unpatriotic; but there can be no duty to one's country so imperative as rebellion against party culture of families, and upon the intellectual life of individuals. Desirous of still further extending an influence so well approved, Mr. Spencer a year or two ago issued a cheap edition of the book in England, and the American publishers have now wisely imitated his example. machinations and behests. In this growth of Protestantism against the immoral tyranny of the old political church is our hope. Mr. George rightly appeals to the spirit and method of science, applied to political and social affairs, as the great agency of national redemption, and time will show that the appeal is well taken. The great love of intellectual advancement is bound in time to give us a science of to recall the circumstances of its origin; politics grounded in principles of truth, and the more so as thereby some explanainstead of the quackish arts of partition will be afforded of its remarkable insanship, just as certainly as it has given fluence and success. us a science of navigation, agriculture, and chemical manufactures. LITERARY NOTICES. SPENCER'S EDUCATION." CHEAP EDI- EDUCATION: INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, AND THIS little work has now been twenty years before the public, and during that time has gradually made its way to all parts of the civilized world. It has been rendered into the principal languages of Europe, and is well known by complete or partial reproduction in India, China, and Japan. The eminent directors of public education in different countries have taken the initiative in procuring its translation.* The principles it develops have been avowedly followed in numerous instances in shaping the policy of public instruction, and in organizing educational institutions; and it has exerted a strong influence upon the mental and moral We do not propose here to notice the book in the usual manner, as most of our readers are no doubt quite familiar with its contents. But this is a suitable occasion The four parts which compose the volume were originally contributed by Mr. Spencer to several English periodicals from 1854 to 1859. The period in which they were written, 1850 to 1860-from his thirtieth to his fortieth year-was the most fruitful in his intellectual career, and may be characterized as preeminently the creative and constructive decade of his life. It was the time of the rapid development and organization of his great ideas. It was then that he arrived at the conception of evolution as a universal law and the basis of a new philosophy; and that he drew up a detailed plan of the reorganization of knowledge from the new point of view. The period referred to was one of transition, or rather of maturing, for from early years the subject of progress and development in nature and society had taken a strong hold of Mr. Spencer's mind. All his publications during these ten years are colored and pervaded by the dominant conception of evolution. His work took a wide range, chiefly in the form of elaborate articles printed in leading periodicals. Between 1850 and 1860 he published no less than twenty-five of these essays on a great vari ety of subjects elucidating the principles of evolution, and illustrating their biological, social, intellectual, moral, and political applications. A noteworthy illustration of this has come to hand since the present article was put in type. The first part of Spencer's "Education" "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?"-has just been translated into modern Greek by the late Minister of Education in Greece. It is sigAmong the subjects then dealt with, nificant that, while the New World colleges are neglecting and resisting modern knowledge, Mr. Spencer's thoughts were especially and that the traditional ascendancy of ancient clas-powerfully attracted to the working of evosics may be maintained, the Greek authorities, on the old, sacred, classical ground, are modernizing their education upon the principle that, in the hierarchy of knowledges, science is su preme. lutionary law in the sphere of mind. This was a new point of view in mental science. While metaphysicians were confining their studies mainly to mind as an abstraction and in its highest form, Mr. Spencer was drawn to its study in the aspect of growth, and as an endowment of growing organisms. Mind, as conditioned by a nervous substratum and unfolding with it—the genesis of the psychical faculties in all grades of organic manifestation-the law of mental progression from the lowest to the highest animate creatures-these were the problems that absorbed his attention. They were considered in various detached papers, but the subject was also dealt with elaborately and systematically in his treatise on the "Principles of Psychology," published in 1855. Mental phenomena were here first methodically elucidated from the evolution point of view. The development of intelligence was traced upward through the organic series from its lowest rudimental forms through successively higher complications, with the view of determining how the highest forms are produced and the highest intelligence constituted. Ascending from reflex action in the lowest types up through instinct, memory, reason, feelings, and the will, Mr. Spencer then reversed the course of inquiry, and showed by subjective analysis how the highest intelligence may be resolved, step by step, from its most complex into its simplest elements. The work was throughout so original and so closely reasoned as to make an epoch in the advance of mental science; and John Stuart Mill declared it to be "the finest example we possess of the psychological method in its full power." Thus occupied in working out the laws of mental unfolding, it was impossible that Mr. Spencer's thoughts should not have been strongly attracted at this time to the subject of education. Descended from a race of schoolmasters, skillfully taught by his father and uncle on rational principles, and alive to the gross deficiencies of current teaching, he was predisposed to take an interest in all questions of mental cultivation. But the special direction of his studies now forced the subject upon him in a new and most important aspect. Education as a leading out of the faculties is essentially a problem of the growth of the faculties; and no new light could be thrown upon the processes and order of mental evolution without at once and powerfully VOL. XVII.-36 affecting the practice of the art of education. Spencer's "Education," produced at this period, was written from the point of view here indicated. It contains no formal statement of the evolution theory, but it conforms to the main doctrine throughout. The key-note and controlling idea of the book is, that Nature has a method of intellectual, moral, and physical development, which should afford the guiding principles of all teaching. The book is a plea for nature in education, and a protest against tutorial aggression, and meddlesome overdoing on the part of teachers and parents. The chapter on "Intellectual Education," which was written first and published in 1854, treats of school processes in relation to the law of development of the faculties as it takes place naturally. Education is regarded as rightly carried on only when it aids the process of self-development, and it is urged that the course of study in all cases followed should be from the simple to the complex, from the indefinite to the definite, from the concrete to the abstract, and from the empirical to the rational, in harmony with the course of evolution at large. In the chapter on "Moral Education" the subject is again regarded from the point of view of natural development. The general truth here insisted upon is, that the natural rewards and restraints of conduct are those which are most appropriate and effectual in modifying character. The principle contended for is that the moral education of every child should be regarded as an adaptation of its nature to the circumstances of life; and that, to become adapted to these circumstances, it must be allowed to come in contact with them; must be allowed to suffer the pains, and obtain the pleasures, which do, in the order of nature, follow certain kinds of action. "Physical Education" is again an argument from the biological side for the unhindered development of the bodily powers against the artificial restraints and repressions of school regulation; and it maintains that, during the earlier portion of life in which the main thing to be done is to grow and develop, our educational system is much too exacting. The last essay written, "What Knowledge is of Most Worth" (1859), is placed first in |