grotesque pots and pans, to divert our attention from his many monstrosities. Should Dickens live to be read by Americans lapsing into the yellow leaf of a fading civilization, it will be to the accompaniment of many a laugh, a few tears, and an unknown quantity of disgust.

He has held the mirror up to nature; but not as Shakspeare did-to Kings and Beggars, and all between, in a large and royal style-but up to quaint heroes, shabby villains and abnormal children chiefly, atoning for his Puck and Caliban predilection, now and then, by the reflection of an angelic face, or by the head of a Prospero.

Of Thackeray it is more difficult to dispose. Of a more reserved and classical genius, he addresses a smaller and more discerning audience. The author of Vanity Fair could never have become popular in the sense that Dickens is popular. His publications are too intellectual for such general acceptation. The kitchen and the drawing-room enjoy Mr. Weller in common; but the simple nobility of Col. Newcome can only be appreciated by the refined. Nor could Thackeray have achieved the popularity of Bulwer; for with equal culture and superior calibre of mind, he yet continually disturbs the serenity of the optimist, and offends the sensibility of that class upon whose patronage circulating libraries chiefly depend. Choosing satire for his theme, he at once strengthens and weakens himself-strengthens, in so far as he restricts himself to a method in which he greatly excels-to a weapon, in the fatal play of which both the generosity and the terrible power of a great master is evidenced-weakens, in as much as he violates, by this contraction, the proprieties of a life's picture, and maims and vitiates what should have been a healthy and symmetrical genius. That satire is successful, affords proof that human nature is a legitimate subject for its exercise; but that satire should form the chief staple of fictitious literature, is no more proper than that Major Dobbins and Becky Sharp are true pictures of average men and women. We would fain believe that Thackeray possessed power to have written an immortal work; but we dare not pronounce him as having done so, until, Hibernicé, we hear from posterity!

Turning from these great writers, we look across a sea of literary aspirants, but although recognizing many a head encircled with its proper bays, we can discern none that are crowned beforehand (except by a frantic worshiper) with the amaranth diadem. But, softly! Did we say none? Who, then, are those Titans, looming grandly, but somewhat mistily, across the ocean, from the Continent!

Goethe is dead. His fame, poetic, artistic, philosophical, is

the pride of his land. He, the great Critic and Interpreter of Shakspeare, could, doubtless, have created a novel upon the plan and with the power of Shakspeare: but Faust has no counterpart in prose, for Wilhelm Meister is no more a great novel than it is a great steeple!

Victor Hugo is yet alive-and, dissenting vehemently, as sons of Englishmen and Conservatives, from his frequent heresies, we can never take his great work, Les Misérables, into our hands except with profound deference and unaffected emotion. Let men say what they will as to the character of this extraordinary book, it is plainly stamped with the broad seal of genius. Since Shakspeare wrote his Lear, no such moving scenes of passionate humanity have thrilled the hearts of men.

ART. III.—THE TWO ARISTOCRACIES OF AMERICA.

THE term Aristocracy is usually considered only to be strictly applicable to an hereditary nobility. To a class of men entitled to govern, not because of superior wisdom or merit of any kind, nor of superior wealth, but by virtue of blood or descent. Yet the advocates of such an aristocracy contend with great force of argument and powerful array of facts and authorities, that an aristocracy of blood, founded, as such aristocracies always are, on the courage, bearing, wisdom, and wealth of its original members, will furnish better and far safer rulers, than the people at large would ever select. Practically, this difference of opinion between the Democratic and Aristocratic theories of government seems compromised in Europe, by leaving the chief executive department of government to be filled on the principle of hereditary aristocracy of blood, whilst most of the inferior offices, especially the legislative, shall be selected for presumed merit, either directly or indirectly, by the the people.

Such an aristocracy as this has never existed in our America; and no institution is so odious to us, nor so little understood by us. Yet, in the metaphorical sense, we have thousands of aristocracies among us, none the less real, and many of them far more insidious and dangerous because metaphorical. All wealth is hereditary, all a special privilege, and confers actual power-power of the most odious kind-that of commanding the labor of the working classes, without paying for it; for the rich retain their capital, only employing it as a means or instrument to command labor without paying for it. Wherever this process is seen, and can be understood by the

people, it becomes extremely unpopular, as in the case of domestic slavery at the South-and is dubbed in derision aristocracy. No doubt the slaveholders of the South did constitute an aristocracy, and one that united much of hereditary merit, to hereditary descent. They generally controlled the administration of Federal affairs, except when pecuniary advantages were to be had, on which occasions the North predominated. The splendid career of the Republic, its vast expansion, and its rapid increase in wealth and population, attest the merit, the energy, and the wisdom of this ruling power, the slaveholding aristocracy of the South. A more honest and incorruptible set of men never directed the affairs of a nation. They were jealous guardians of the treasury, opponents of heavy taxation, lavish expenditure, and especially of all partial legislation. We never may see their like again. They did not tax, exploit, or in any way make, or seek to make a profit out of the North, but were her best customers, buying her manufactures, with forty per cent. added to their open market value by protective legislation, and selling to her, cheap, corn, wheat, rice, tobacco, cotton, and various other agricultural products and raw materials, cheap, because at their open market value, unprotected by partial legislation. Thus, the North did tax, exploit, and make a profit out of the slaveholding aristocracy. Our only sin was that we did tax, exploit, and make a profit out of the labor of our slaves, commanding their labor, not as capitalists, but as masters. For this sin, if sin it were, the South has suffered most grievously, and, if Radical rule be continued, must in the future suffer still more grievously.

Yet, would the Freedmen but be as quiet, patient, and submissive as free white laborers are elsewhere, we would tax, exploit, and make a larger profit out of their labor by the command which capital gives over that labor, than we ever did by our command as masters, and should, therefore, find "free labor cheaper than slave labor." The Radicals, who never dream of giving white laborers more than the market value of labor, regulated by the cruel, exacting, and grossly dishonest laws of free competition and supply and demand, have, in many instances, compelled employers to pay for negro labor, not its market price or value, but what these Radicals considered its real value-thus making the negroes a privileged class. Gradually and surely, however, negro labor must be brought down to an equal footing with white labor; and then, if we could but keep the negroes quiet and at work, we should be greater aristocrats than ever, and the negroes more degradingly enslaved than ever. But the negro's instinct will reject what the white man's boasted reason tamely and passively submits to.

He does not understand political economy, could not for his life pronounce the words, but feels that the laws of free competition and demand and supply operate as a bitter mockery and crying injustice, and would often starve him, not because his labor was intrinsically less valuable, but because labor was more abundant. When labor ceases to be sufficiently remunerative, white laborers hold meetings, publish windy preambles and resolutions, enter into Trades' Unions, and have strikes. On such occasions negroes will fight outright, seeing no other exodus from their difficulties. We see no better prospect in the future, at least in all of our towns and cities, than a perpetually recurring war of the races. The Southern aristocracy is asphyxiated, if not defunct.

Whilst the chivalry of the North and of Europe, essentially aided by the negroes, were scotching the Southern Hydra, a monster ten times more terrible grew up at the North-East, more rapidly and in grander proportion than Jack's Bean.' The moneyed power,

"Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens, cui lumen ademptum," appeared upon the political arena. A monster, unprincipled, rapacious, cruel, exacting, vulgar, thievish, omnipresent, and almost omnipotent. Now domestic slavery is abolished, and there is no political slavery in America-but slavery to capital such as never existed anywhere in this world before, is grinding down into the dust every laboring man in America. If you doubt it, calculate your taxes, and compare them with the taxes you paid before the war. Are they not ten times as great? Or go to a store and buy the necessaries of life, do they not cost twice as much? If you be a laborer, have your wages risen proportionally? Certainly not! Fifty per cent., in bad money, has been added, perhaps, to your wages, and a hundred per cent. to your expenses. And for whose benefit? Certainly not for that of the Government, or of the people at large, and as certainly for the benefit of the vulgar, vicious, parvenu moneyed aristocracy, that, mushroom-like, have grown up out of the ruin of both North and South. The Federal Government has become a mere agent to collect interest for the Government creditors, and to enact protective tariffs to increase the profits of North-Eastern manufacturers. Politically we are free, but the moneyed aristocracy of the North-East lords it over us of the South and of the North-West, and, indeed, of the whole agricultural and laboring interest, wherever situated, with ten times the cruelty, and twenty times the rapacity, that ever Imperial Russia lorded it over abjectly enslaved Poland. This new aristocracy that has arisen on the ruins of the slave

aristocracy knows no distinctions of race or color; it tyrannizes over and robs them all alike. The National debt belongs to this new aristocracy; most of the State and Corporation debts are due to them; the Banks all over the Union, in great part, are owned by them; so are the Railroads and Canals, and the factories of various manufactures, and the great mercantile interest is theirs. Through all these agencies they tax the agricultural and working interests of the nation. They do not labor, they are non-producers, but tax the whole productive labor of the nation so heavily as to take away from it more than half its products. Are men thus taxed freemen or slaves? What matters it whether you call the man who takes away, under the forms of law, without compensation, half the proceeds of your labor, Master or Fellow-Citizen? Does not North-Eastern capital now tax white labor more heavily than ever masters taxed negro slaves? Is not the new aristocracy of capital situated mostly at the North-East, ten times as rapacious and exacting as ever was the slave aristocracy? Is not the Federal Government in their hands, and do they not employ it as a mere engine to tax, fleece, rob, and exploit the South and the North-West? Have they not ten times the wealth of Croesus, and did they ever labor, did they ever make an honest cent? Is not all their wealth the result of the mere tricks of trade? Like the Faro Banker, they cut, shuffle, and deal the cards, and rob, everybody's pocket, and nobody can understand how.

In way of profits of trade, interest derived from National debt, from State and Corporate debts, and dividends on Stocks, more than two thousand millions of dollars a year is transferred from the pockets of the laboring producers of the North-West and of the South to the capitalists, the idle nonproducers of the North-East. Such is the aristocracy that has succeeded to the slaveholding aristocracy, and that now rules and tyrannizes over the nation. We are the most heavily taxed people upon the face of the earth, and, therefore, the least free. We begin to feel it, but do not see it and understand it.

The North-West and the South, the whole agricultural and laboring interests of the nation, must combine to check the aggressions and mitigate the cruel exactions of North-Eastern fictitious capital, or universal bankruptcy and bloody anarchy will soon ensue. The capital that oppresses us is fictitious; it represents no real values; it has not, and never had, a real existence; 'tis the mere creature of legal construction and of legislative and financial legerdemain. 'Tis a mere power of taxation conferred by law--not property, not wealth, nothing