showed himself still animated by the wisdom which had called Malesherbes and Turgot to his counsels. The Queen Marie Antoinette had given birth to her firstborn; Madame Elizabeth of France was in her eighteenth year, illuminating Versailles with her virginal graces and her angelic piety-that Elizabeth whose bust you see before you, presented by M. Montyon himself, with the inscription 'To Virtue,' of which she seemed the most perfect and touching type. Liberty then seemed to rise up pure and fruitful in Europe as in America, and our ancient royalty to be steeped in a new fountain of youth, popularity, and virtue.

"How many miscalculations, ruins, and disasters, above all, how many crimes and humiliating failures, since these days of generous illusion, of legitimate enthusiasm and blind confidence! How many cruel lessons inflicted upon the noblest aspirations of the human heart! How many motives for not surrendering themselves to the most reasonable hopes except with a salutary humility, but however, without ever abdicating the indissoluble rights of human liberty or banishing to the land of chimeras the noble ambition of governing men by honor and conscience!"

The new comments on America elicited by the war are threefold: first, political speeches; second, newspaper commentaries; and third, treatises deliberately written and published. Of the first, the greater part are unavoidably ephemeral in their influence, and usually called forth by a special phase of the war in its international relations; the second, especially as regards the leading journal in Great Britain and most famous in the world, have sunk to the lowest conceivable level as a medium of authentic information and a mercenary agency; in the third department alone has anything of a complete and permanent interest been introduced; and there are pages of De Gasparin, Laboulaye, Mill, Cairnes, Newman, Cochin, and Martin, which deserve to be enshrined as literary illustrations of Christian liberalism and eloquent loyalty to truth and humanity in the defence and illustration of American liberty, law, and life, in their magnanimous conflict with injustice, degradation, and cruel sacrilege. When Lafayette, nearly half a century ago, received at the hands of the nation in whose behalf he had fought in his youth, the greatest popular ovation ever granted to a hero, he thus alluded to the

Union in one of his replies to the municipal welcomes that greeted his entrance into every city of the land:

"A Union, so essential, not only to the fate of each member of the confederacy, but also to the general fate of mankind, that the least breach of it would be hailed with barbarian joy by a universal warwhoop of European aristocracy and despotism."

It was in reply to this base "war whoop" that the writers we have mentioned, so eloquently and seasonably advocated the cause and character of our nation.

One of the most curious and interesting of the countless subjects which the history of our memorable conflict will yield to future philosophical investigation, will be its literary fruit and record-the bibliography of the war-and of this the foreign contributions will afford some remarkable and brilliant specimens. If to ourselves, as a nation, the war for the Union has been a test of extraordinary scope and intensity -developing a military and scientific genius, a sanitary enterprise, an extent of financial resources, a capacity for self-sacrifice and self-reliance undreamed of in our prior experience; if it has tested personal character and modified social estimates, and tried absolutely the comparative worth and latent force of our institutions and national sentiment, not less has it tested the political magnanimity, the press, the prejudices, the social philosophy, and humane instincts of Europe; and if the crisis has evoked much that is mean and mortifying in the spirit of those old communities in their feelings toward our young republic in the bitter hour when the pangs of a second birth are rending her vitals, so also has it called forth memorable, benign, noble words of cheer and challenge from volunteer champions of America abroad, in the foremost ranks of her best and most honest thinkers, lovers of truth, and representatives of humanity.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY DISCOVERERS AND EXPLORERS.

FROM the time when the existence of this continent was but conjectural to the European mind, and recognized as a fact of nature only in the brain of a poor Genoese mariner, it was looked to, thought of, imagined chiefly in its relation to the Old World, as the completion and resource of her civilization-a new opportunity, a fresh arena. Gold seekers,* indeed, were prompted to gaze hither by mere cupidity, and Columbus nearly lost his long-solicited aid from the Spanish sovereigns by insisting on hereditary privileges of rule and possession in case of success; but the idea that warmed the generous purpose of Isabella was the conversion to Christianity of the heathen tribes of America, and the extension of Catholic rule in the world. No candid thinker can look back upon the period of the discovery without tracing a wonderful combination of events and tendencies of humanity, whereof this land seems the foreordained and inevitable goal and consequence. It cannot appear to the least imaginative and philosophical mind as an accident, that the zeal for maritime discovery should have awakened in Europe simultaneously with the access of new social truth, the sudden progress of

* "Les chercheurs d'or ont commencé, ni voulant qu'or, rien de plus brisant l'homme, Colomb, le meilleur de tous, dans son propre journal, montre cela avec une naïveté terrible, qui d'avance, fait fremir de ce que feront ses successeurs." -MICHELET.

ideas, and the triumph of mechanical genius. With the fifteenth century the "civilization of the sanctuary" overleaped its long exclusive boundaries, and, with the invention of printing, became a normal need and law of humanity; feudalism waned; the Reformation awoke and set free the instinct of faith and moral freedom; and just at this crisis a new world was opened, a fresh sphere afforded. As the idea of "geographical unity "-the conviction that "the globe wanted one of its hemispheres"-was the inspiration of Columbus, so to the eye of the thoughtful observer, an equilibrium of the moral world-a balance to the human universe-was as obvious and imperative a necessity; for the new ideas and the conflict of opinions and interests, and especially the new and absolute self-assertion, incident to the decay of error and the escape from traditional degradation, made it indispensable to the safety of the innovator, the freedom of the thinker, the scope of the dissenter and reformer, to find refuge and audience in a land whose destinies yet lay undeveloped in the wild freedom of nature, and where prowess of mind as well as of animal courage could work into "victorious clearness " the confused problems of an aspiring civilization, and lay the foundation of an eclectic, liberal, and free community of men -" a wider theatre and a new life."

Accordingly, with the progress of time and the accumulation of historical details, with the profound analysis thereof that characterizes modern research-the decline of feudal and ecclesiastical sway in Europe, the Reformation, and the invention of printing are seen to have an intimate relation to and affinity with the discovery of America, in the series of historical events which have resulted in the civilization of the nineteenth century. Nor is this original association of the New and Old World without a vague physical parallel; for it has been a favorite scientific speculation that there was an ancient union or proximity of the two continents-suggested by the fact that the eastern shore of America advances where the opposite shore of Europe recedes. "Firstborn among the continents," says Agassiz, "though so much later in culture and civiliza

tion than some of more recent birth, America, as far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World." "America," says Ritter, "although it repeats the contrasts of the Old World, yet the course of its mountain chains is not from east to west, but from north to south. Its sea coast best endowed with harbors and islands is on the eastern side, and so turned toward the civilization of the Old World. The Gulf Stream, which may be called the great commercial highway of nations, brought both of the continents bordering on the North Atlantic into direct connection. North America was, therefore, destined to be discovered by Europeans, and not by Asiatics. Asia could easily have transferred a part of its population to America, in consequence of the proximity of their shores at Behring's Straits. But the sea coast of North America is so richly furnished with harbors and islands, that it readily attracted European civilization. The gentle slopes of the American continent offered a most favorable field to Europeans, allowing, as they did, civilization to penetrate without obstruction every portion of the land. Nature, too, has shown us, by giving to America river systems which run northward to the numerous groups of islands and peninsulas of the Polar Sea, that America was destined even more than Europe to send civilization to the northern portions of the globe." *

The North American continent extends from the twentyfourth to the forty-ninth degree of north latitude, and from the sixty-sixth to the one hundred and twenty-fourth degree of west longitude: its area is more than five sixths that of Europe, and more than ten times that of Great Britain and France united: there are seven thousand miles of eastern shore line, thirty-four hundred southern and twenty-two hundred western; while the northern lake line is twenty-two hundred miles. Climate, soil, avocation, and productions are, by this affluent space, adapted to the constitution, the character, and the necessity of each European nationality-so that

* "Geographical Studies," by Professor Carl Ritter, of Berlin, translated by W. L. Gage.