tinued Nathan, fastening his looks upon the amazed chief, "you slew them all! And he that was the husband and father was the Shawnees' friend, the friend even of Wenonga!"

"The white-men are dogs and robbers!" said the chief: "the Quakel was my brother; but I killed him. I am an Indian-I love white-man's blood. My people have soft hearts; they cried for the Quakel: but I am a warrior with no heart. I killed them: their scalps are hanging to my fire-post! I am not sorry; I am not afraid."

The eyes of the prisoner followed the Indian's hand, as he pointed, with savage triumph, to the shrivelled scalps which had once crowned the heads of childhood and innocence, and then sank to the floor, while his whole frame shivered as with an ague-fit.

"My brother is a great medicine-man," iterated the chief: "he shall show me the Jibbenainosay, or he shall die."

"The chief lies!" cried Nathan, with a sudden and taunting laugh: "he can talk big things to a prisoner, but he fears the Jibbenainosay! "I am a chief and warrior: I will fight the white-man's devil!" "The warrior shall see him then," said the captive, with extraordinary fire. "Cut me loose from my bonds, and I will bring him before the chief."

And as he spoke, he thrust out his legs, inviting the stroke of the axe upon the thongs that bound his ankles.

But this was a favor which, stupid or mad as he was, Wenonga besitated to grant.

"The chief!" cried Nathan, with a laugh of scorn, "would stand face to face with the Jibbenainosay, and yet fears to loose a naked prisoner!" The taunt produced its effect. The axe fell upon the thong, and Nathan leaped to his feet. He extended his wrists. The Indian hesitated again. "The chief shall see the Jibbenainosay!" cried Nathan; and the cord was cut. The prisoner turned quickly round; and while his eyes fastened with a wild but joyous glare upon his jailer's, a laugh that would have become the jaws of a hyena lighted up his visage, and sounded from his lips. "Look!" he cried, "thee has thee wish! Thee sees the destroyer of thee race,―ay, murdering villain, the destroyer of thee people, and theeself!"

And with that, leaping upon the astounded chief with rather the rancorous ferocity of a wolf than the enmity of a human being, and clutching him by the throat with one hand, while with the other he tore the iron tomahawk from his grasp, he bore him to the earth, clinging to him as he fell, and using the wrested weapon with such furious haste and skill that, before they had yet reached the ground, he had buried it in the Indian's brain. Another stroke, and another, he gave with the same murderous activity and force; and Wenonga trod the path

to the spirit-land, bearing the same gory evidences of the unrelenting and successful vengeance of the white-man that his children and grand-children had borne before him.

"Ay, dog, thee dies at last! at last I have caught thee!"

With these words, Nathan, leaving the shattered skull, dashed the tomahawk into the Indian's chest, snatched the scalping-knife from the belt, and with one grinding sweep of the blade, and one fierce jerk of his arm, the gray scalp-lock of the warrior was torn from the dishonored head. The last proof of the slayer's ferocity was not given until he had twice, with his utmost strength, drawn the knife over the dead man's breast, dividing skin, cartilage, and even bone, before it, so sharp was the blade and so powerful the hand that urged it.

Then, leaping to his feet, and snatching from the post the bundle of withered scalps-the locks and ringlets of his own murdered family,which he spread a moment before his eyes with one hand, while the other extended, as if to contrast the two prizes together, the reeking scalp-lock of the murderer, he sprang through the door of the lodge, and fled from the village; but not until he had, in the insane fury of the moment, given forth a wild, ear-piercing yell, that spoke the triumph, the exulting transport, of long-baffled but never-dying revenge. The wild whoop, thus rising in the depth and stillness of the night, startled many a wakeful warrior and timorous mother from their repose. But such sounds in a disorderly hamlet of barbarians were too common to create alarm or uneasiness; and the wary and the timid again betook themselves to their dreams, leaving the corse of their chief to stiffen on the floor of his own wigwam.

Drestes Augustus Brownson.

BORN in Stockbridge, Vt., 1803. DIED at Detroit, Mich., 1876.

SOME PRACTICAL DEMOCRACY.

[The Convert. 1857.]

DEMOCRATIC government that leaves untouched all the social inequalities, or inequalities of condition, which obtain in all countries, always struck me as an absurdity; and I have seen no reason to change my opinions on that point. The political history of my own country tends to confirm them. In 1840 I had not wholly ceased to believe it possible to introduce such changes into our social and economical arrangements

as would give to the political equality asserted by American Democracy a practical significance. I have got bravely over that since.

I took, in regard to society, even as late as 1840, the Democratic premises as true and unquestionable. They were given me by the public sentiment of my country. I had taken them in with my mother's milk, and had never thought of inquiring whether they were tenable or not. I took them as my political and social starting-point, or principium, and sought simply to harmonize government and society with them. If I erred, it was in common with my Democratic countrymen, and I differed from them only in seeking what they did not seek, to be consistent in error. Democratic government was defended on the ground that it recognized and maintained the equality of all men, and was opposed to the system of privilege, class, or castes. It asserted equality as a natural right, and assumed that the introduction and maintenance of equality between man and man is desirable, and essential to the moral, intellectual, and physical well-being of mankind on earth. Taking this, without examination, to be true, I concluded very reasonably that we ought to conform society to it; and that whatever in society is repugnant to it, and tends to prevent its practical realization, is wrong, and should be warred against. My countrymen did not understand me, because they were not in the habit of generalizing their own views, and testing them by the light of first principles. They could reason well enough on particulars, or in particular instances, but not as to the whole of their political and social ideas. They could accept incongruous ideas, and felt no inconvenience in supporting anomalies and inconsistencies. They could defend with equal earnestness perfect equality in theory, and the grossest inequality in practice, and call it common sense. I could not do that. Either conform your practice, I said, to your theory, or your theory to your practice. Be Democrats socially, or do not claim to be so politically. Alas! I did not know then that men act from habit, prejudice, routine, passion, caprice, rather than from reason; and that, of all people in the world, Englishmen and Americans are the least disturbed by incongruities, inconsistencies, inconsequences, and anomalies-although I was beginning to suspect it.

Starting from the Democratic theory of man and society, I contended that the great, the mother evil of modern society was the separation of capital and labor; or the fact that one class of the community owns the funds, and another and a distinct class is compelled to perform the labor of production. The consequence of this system is, that owners of capital enrich themselves at the expense of the owners of labor. The system of money wages, the modern system, is more profitable to the owners of capital than the slave-system is to the slave-masters, and hardly less oppressive to the laborer. The wages, as a general rule, are never suffi

cient to enable the laborer to place himself on an equal footing with the capitalist. Capital will always command the lion's share of the proceeds. This is seen in the fact that, while they who command capital grow rich, the laborer by his simple wages at best only obtains a bare subsistence. The whole class of simple laborers are poor, and in general unable to procure by their wages more than the bare necessaries of life. This is a necessary result of the system. The capitalist employs labor that he may grow rich or richer; the laborer sells his labor that he may not die. of hunger, he, his wife, and little ones; and as the urgency of guarding against hunger is always stronger than that of growing rich or richer, the capitalist holds the laborer at his mercy, and has over him, whether called a slave or a freeman, the power of life and death.

An examination into the actual condition of the laboring classes in all countries, especially in Great Britain and the United States, where the modern industrial and commercial system is carried farthest, proves this reasoning to be correct. Poor men may indeed become rich, but not by the simple wages of unskilled labor. They never do become rich, except by availing themselves in some way of the labors of others. Dependent on wages alone, the laborer remains always poor, and shut out from nearly all the advantages of society. In what are called prosperous times he may, by working early and late, and with all his might, retain enough of the proceeds of his labor to save him from actual want; but in what are called "hard times," it is not so, and cases of actual suffering for want of the necessaries of life, nay, of actual starvation, even in our own country, are no rare occurrences. It would be difficult to estimate the amount of actual suffering endured by the honest and virtuous poor in every one of our larger towns and cities, and which neither private nor public charity can reach.

The evil does not stop here. The system elevates the middling class to wealth, often men who began life with poverty. A poor man, or a man of small means in the beginning, become rich by trade, speculation, or the successful exploitation of labor, is often a greater calamity to society than a wealthy man reduced to poverty. An old established nobility, with gentle manners, refined tastes, chivalrous feelings, surrounded by the prestige of rank, and endeared by the memory of heroic deeds or lofty civic virtues, is endurable, nay respectable, and not without compensating advantages to society in general, for its rank and privileges. But the upstart, the novus homo, with all the vulgar tastes and habits, ignorance and coarseness, of the class from which he has sprung, and nothing of the class into which he fancies he has risen but its wealth, is intolerable, and widely mischievous. He has nothing to sustain him. but his money, and what money can purchase. He enters upon a career of lavish expenditure, and aids to introduce an expensive and luxurious

style of living, destructive of genuine simplicity of manners, and of private and social morals. Moral worth and intellectual superiority count for nothing. Men, to be of any account in their town or city, must be rich, at least appear to be rich. The slow gains of patient toil and honest industry no longer suffice. There is in all classes an impatience to be rich. The most daring and reckless speculations are resorted to, and when honest means fail, dishonest, nay, criminal, means are adopted. The man of a moderate income cannot live within his means. His wife and daughters must have the house new-furnished, or a new house taken up town, and must dress so as to vie with the wives and daughters of the millionnaires of Fifth Avenue. Nobody is contented to appear what he is, or to enjoy life in the state in which he finds himself. All are striving to be, or to appear, what they are not, to work their way up to a higher social stratum, and hence society becomes hollow, a sham, a lie.

Between the master and the slave, between the lord and the serf, there often grow up pleasant personal relations and attachments; there is personal intercourse, kindness, affability, protection on the one side, respect and gratitude on the other, which partially compensates for the superiority of the one and the inferiority of the other; but the modern system of wages allows very little of all this: the capitalist and the workman belong to different species, and have little personal intercourse. The agent or man of business pays the workman his wages, and there ends the responsibility of the employer. The laborer has no further claim on him, and he may want and starve, or sicken and die-it is his own affair, with which the employer has nothing to do. Hence the relation between the two classes becomes mercenary, hard, and a matter of arithmetic. The one class become proud, haughty, cold, supercilious, contemptuous, or at best superbly indifferent, looking upon their laborers as appendages of their steam-engines, their spinning-jennies, or their power-looms, with far less of esteem and affection than they bestow on their favorite dogs or horses; the other class become envious, discontented, resentful, hostile, laboring under a sense of injustice, and waiting only the opportunity to right themselves. The equality of love, of affection, cannot come in to make amends for the inequality of property and condition.

To remedy these evils, I proposed to abolish the distinction between capitalists and laborers, employer and employed, by having every man an owner of the funds as well as the labor of production, and thus making it possible for every man to labor on a capital of his own, and to receive according to his works. Undoubtedly, my plan would have broken up the whole modern commercial system, prostrated all the great industries, or what I called the factory system, and thrown the mass of the people back on the land to get their living by agricultural and mechanical pursuits. I knew this well enough, but this was one of the results I