Our course is clearly the one early announced by our Government, and honorably adhered to,―strict and complete neutrality. been taken by the English press generally, regretted that the writings of others should the people of the North would have under- cause them to be suspected of what they stood those of England, and not believed would abhor. that we hated slavery in word, and America in heart; that we frowned on the South with our brow, but patted it with our hand; that we were more willing to see a power set up on the principle of perpetuating slavery and extending it, than to see the wounds of a great rival honorably healed. These last are the views taken of our present national feelings by the people of the North, and by those of the Continent. This would be a moral condition anything but noble, or estimable; but the Englishman who, with the leading journal for witness, will try to prove us to have worthier motives in a company of foreigners, will find his task a hard one. As to the effect of the conflict on our material interests, we believe that it will be our own fault, if it do not prove to be, ultimately, of incalulable advantage to them. The Morrill Tariff is not a necessary result, but a gratuitous mischief inflicted on themselves and their neighbors by the Northerns. They ask us, "Cannot you let us raise our revenue in our own way?" That is precisely what we are doing and will do; but if we think it is done in a way worthy of dark We find a London journal daily writing in ages and anti-social codes, we ought to say favor of slavery, and many hints elsewhere so. The condition in which we stood as to that we must break the blockade, that is, our supply of cotton, is the opposite extreme ally ourselves with the South to get cotton. from that aimed at by the Morrill Tariff, and Such things we hoped never to hear in Eng- both are unfriendly to peaceful relations. lish air. There did seem one moral point The latter would isolate one nation from gained in our political life, a horror of slav- others, tearing by the coarse hand of selfery; but mere politicians never hold morals sufficiency the unnumbered kindly bands, by as more than makeweights; and now the which Providence, when not thwarted, links guardianship of this principle must rest with nation to nation, in mutual services; so that, men, such as those who first brought it into without a sense of dependence on either side, favor,-men whose politics are all colored but with a strong consciousness of advanby the Christian principles of our duty to tages on both, they may cleave to one anour neighbor, and who believe that a loss by other, and feel that a rupture would be a doing right is greater gain than a profit by calamity. It would leave a nation free at doing wrong. Did England now soil her any moment to turn upon any other, saying, hand by any touch of the accursed thing, she, "I do not care for you, I can live alone!" would sink immeasurably in the eye of the world; and the twenty millions vaunted so often would be quoted, ever hereafter, not as. her highest pride, but as her loudest condemnation. This is the policy which China is rising above, and into which America is sinking. On the other hand, the total dependence of a nation upon a single foreign one for what is, or is deemed to be, a necessary of We not only do not trust professional life, not elsewhere attainable, is a temptapoliticians, but think them a class habitu- tion to bully; and, unless with two people ally unfitted for those feelings and convic- very differently constituted from the Engtions which are worthy of confidence; yet, lish and Americans, must bring war: for the in spite of all that has been written, we be- latter were not the men to forbear from lieve that, on the slavery question, the heart making insulting uses of an advantage, nor of the non-religious, of the merely political, the former the men to endure insult always. population of England is perfectly sound; So far from our necessity being peace with and that were the question put to-morrow, America at any price, that we might have "Shall we join the slavers to secure their cotton, it was cotton from elsewhere at any cotton?" a cry of indignation would be price, that we might have peace with Amerraised throughout the land, while the relig- ica. The incredible short-sightedness of our ious part of the community would be roused statesmen, deserving the blame of the to a man. But none of our statesmen would Manchester men, beyond all they can utter; propose such a course; and it is only to be and the immovable perversity and blind 66 now make them so short-sighted as to rivet that dependence forever. 'We must have cotton," they would say, "even if we break the blockade!" And suppose you broke the blockade, and had cotton, what then? You would thereby say to the South, the most reckless and domineering set of men on this earth, "We are your dependants; we actually cannot live without you; we must give up our honor, our national self-respect, our character before the world, to secure your services." Right happy would the South be; and before any long period you would either be eating the dust of untold humiliations, or at war with the cotton country for which you had sacrificed some of the highest considerations a nation has to value. It may be a hard trial to go through the present transition; but it is only one of those momentary pinches which, with a nation like England, serve to keep energy fresh, by giv avarice of the manufacturers, deserving that | It was short-sighted not to begin it long ago, of the statesmen, have united to leave Eng- parsimonious not to spend great sums upon land, with the finest cotton-fields, and the it, culpable not to improve providential richest mines of labor on earth in her pos- means laid in our own lap. But to intersession, a timid dependant on the stores of rupt the process now would be madness. others. That dependence has been counted The selfishness which made men so shortupon by the South, as their shield in insult-sighted as to be dependent on America, would ing us ;-for be it remembered that all the presidents we have had to complain of were their men ;—and, worse still, as their stay in rebelling against a government favorable to human freedom. It was the weakest point in our national machinery, one that was liable any day to involve us in war without and stagnation within. Statesmen saw it, heard that a little outlay would make India at least yield such supplies as would change America from a self-sufficient master into a useful friend: but they had reasons for doing nothing. Manufacturers heard of it, knew it; but they thought the American supply would last "my day; " and that they could get a better return for their money by investing all in mills at home, than by using a part to develop supplies in India. They were wrong in fact; and totally mistook and misrepresented the lessons of their own boasted science of political economy. Now, in a way more gradual, less disturbing new difficulties to vanquish; and, the ing, than any that could have been foretold, the American supply is stopped. If it continue to be so for some three years, we must suffer, and pay in increased price for cotton a sum which, had it been spent in improving the natural water-ways of India, would have yielded Manchester a higher percentage on the money invested than the best mills ever built; and would have laden Liverpool with cotton grown on British territory, by freemen, every one of whom would use the purchase money, in part, to buy British goods. That sum must now be a sheer loss to us, as utterly so as that spent by America on the war is to it; for it will take as much to open communications as if cotton was cheap. But with all that loss, with all the derangement of trade, the process of opening new, various, and inexhaustible sources of supply is going on, and, as the pinch becomes more felt, will proceed more rapidly. crisis over, with India pouring a tide of cotton upon our shores, beside which what America could send is a driblet, and taking from us an amount of goods greater than three Americas ever will; other sources of supply, British, and not British, open, from the Nile to Essequibo, from Natal to Fiji; and, above all, America herself removed from the dangerous position of a dispenser of our daily bread to the advantageous one of a friend on equal terms, England will have hopes before her which may Providence realize! If the dark flag that is unfurled as the banner of slavery by the right, slavery extended, slavery for all time, is to be known as the flag of a nation,—which may it never be!—let us hope that the last power to recognize it will be that which was the first to give freedom to the slave. From The Examiner. Songs in Many Keys. By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Author of "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." Low, Son, and Co. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. "God of all Nations! Sovereign Lord! And here is a North American loyalist's echo of God Save the Queen, a blessing to Boston. INTERNATIONAL ODE. DR. HOLMES, though not a great is a true poet. Many of his verses-many of those here collected-are too weak to live, though genuine to please in their own day; others will join the divers works in prose and verse that assure to their author long remem-upon England, sung by twelve hundred brance by his countrymen. He has the children at the visit of the Prince of Wales keen sense of the ridiculous that should underlie all true poetic feeling, and some of the best pieces in this pleasant volume are to be found among the comic poems in which it is rich. We will quote one of them next week. To-day let us be reminded by his volume that in the war that now devastates America all is not told of the spirit of the combatants when we read of the swindling of contractors, and the bluster of the Lovejoys. Dr. Holmes has his heart in it, and that a noble heart. Of his poems he says: "Turn o'er these idle leaves. Such toys as Were not unsought for, as, in languid dreams, ness seems Too swollen to hold its lightning from the trees. Yet, in some lull of passion, when at last These calm revolving moons that come and go Turning our months to years, they creep so slow Have brought us rest, the not unwelcome past May flutter to thee through these leaflets, cast On the wild winds that all around us blow." And now with the poetry at least of earnestness he sings this "ARMY HYMN. "O Lord of Hosts! Almighty King! The holy faith that warmed our sires; "Be thou a pillared flame to show The midnight snare, the silent foe; "God bless our Fathers' Land! Protect her Throne! "Father, with loving care "Lord, let War's tempest cease, We add an earnest poem on an English theme: AFTER A LECTURE ON SHELLEY. "One broad, white sail in Spezzia's treacherous bay; On comes the blast; too daring dark, beware! The cloud has clasped her; lo! it melts away; The wide, waste waters, but no sail is there. "Morning: a woman looking on the sea; Midnight: with lamps the long verandah burns; Come, wandering sail, they watch, they burn for thee! Suns come and go, alas! no bark returns. "And feet are thronging on the pebbly sands, And torches flaring in the weedy caves, Where'er the waters lay with icy hands The shapes uplifted from their coral graves. "Vainly they seek; the idle quest is o'er; The coarse, dark women, with their hang- And lean, wild children gather from the shore From The Spectator. THE industry of modern scholarship has so thoroughly ransacked the stores of ancient learning, and has poured so full a light, not merely on the public, but even the domestic, life of our predecessors in the history of civilization, that it perhaps does not often occur to us how many paths of inquiry are still untrodden even by a solitary traveller. In the sense of humor, for instance, we have abundant evidence that the ancients were not deficient; and even if the overwhelming fun of Aristophanes had not been preserved for the delight and admiration of mankind, our consciousness of the uniformity of human nature would be sufficient to assure us of it. Laughter is, after all, the most distinctive characteristic of man: some form of satire is to be found among even the rudest tribes; and it is the natural resource of weakness in a lawless age-a retort of which no bodily strength avails to turn the edge. Literature is not, however, the only means of communieating his ideas to the public which the satirist possesses. So soon as the pictorial art has attained any considerable development, he may address the mind through the medium, not of the ear, but of the eye, with the pencil rather than the pen. Thus it wears an aspect of singularity, that, while we possess the comic literature of antiquity-to a sufficient extent at all events, to let us judge of its quality-we search long, and with scanty results, upon the vases of Greece and among the frescoes of Pompeii, for any trace of that humor which informs the outlines of H. B. or of Leech. We have the comic literature of the ancients, but where is their caricature? This question has recently engaged the attention of M. Champfleury, who has concealed the scantiness of the information which he has been able to collect, with all that airy grace which is the characteristic of a French essayist. In his rashness or his despair, he interrogated even the awful remains of Egyptian art; and has succeeded, as he thinks, in showing that the caricaturist of the Nile, did not respect even the sacred rites of religion or the royal majesty of Rameses. There are, it seems, three papyri in existence of a decidedly humorous character, one in the Royal Library at Turin, one in the British Museum, and another in a private collection in America. In all these, animals -cats, rats, wolves, and lions-are represented as performing human actions, and especially such actions as are the conventional subjects of the hieroglyphical paintings. There is a pleasing group, for instance, frequently repeated on the walls of the Egyption palaces, in which four females are represented as playing respectively on the harp, the lyre, the theorbo, and a sort of double flute. In the Turin papyrus these female figures are metamorphosed into an ass, a lion, a crocodile, and an ape. In the papyrus of the British Museum the rites of religion are travestied-a cat with a flower in its hand offers the sacred funereal offerings to a rat, which, gravely seated in a chair, scents the perfume of an enormous lotus-flower. While, in another place, a lion is represented as playing at chess with a gazelle, the group being an exact copy of one on the walls of the palace of Medinet-Abou, in which Rameses III. is playing this game with one of his wives. And this is all-some two hundred figures of animals on three papyri-while the remains of Egyptian art fill whole galleries in every capital of Europe, and cover acres of wall along the whole course of the mysterious Nile. Either Time has been very capricious in his destruction, or the Egyptian caricaturist was not entirely appreciated by the public of his day. Of the comic art of Greece we possess nothing but a name, but, then, to M. Champfleury a name is everything. He has built the airiest of castles on the few isolated facts that can be gleaned from the ancient writers respecting the genius of Pauson. This painter was the contemporary of Aristophanes, who, besides twice taunting him with poverty, makes the chorus in the Acharnians expressly congratulate the Megarian that " he will no longer be the laughing-stock of the infamous Pauson." About one hundred and twenty years later, Aristotle, in the Poetics, distinguishing, apparently, the idealist, the caricaturist, and the realist from each other, remarks that in imitation one must necessarily represent men as better than they are, as worse than they are, or as they are, and he gives Pauson as an instance of a painter who painted men uglier than they were. These passages may, perhaps, be sufficient to establish that Pauson did draw caricatures, and that the Greeks, therefore, must |