attention of the country was fixed upon the incumbent of the White House, and he was made to realize that, if the bill should become a law, the country would hold him alone more responsible than both branches of Congress together.

Primarily, of course, it is to the Constitution, which created a single Executive and invested him with a qualified negative upon legislation, that we owe our escape from the Pauper Pension Bill folly and from the vicious Texas Seed Bill precedent, for without these provisions the measures would inevitably have become laws. But the constitutional possibility of thus defeating the schemes would have been of no avail if the man who enjoyed this power had not employed it. The President of the United States as an official possessed the prerogative of vetoing the bills, but it was Grover Cleveland the man who exercised a veto power which the President of the United States need not have employed, and which many another man in the place would not have employed.

In concluding his discussion of the Executive depart ment, Story declares his conviction that "it will be found impossible to withhold from this part of the Constitution a tribute of profound respect, if not of the liveliest admiration," but he adds that in order to realize public expectation it is essential that the man who occupies the office be "one who shall forget his own interests and remember that he represents, not a party, but the whole nation." If he had consulted his own interests in a narrow personal sense, Mr. Cleveland would have signed the pension bill. It is notorious that self-interest was a potent motive with the average senator and representative who supported it. "The soldier vote" was supposed to be behind the measure, and in all the States north of the Potomac only three congressmen out of both parties in both Houses were recorded against it. As the representative of a party solely, Mr. Cleveland would have signed the bill. Democratic congressmen insisted that a veto would hurt the prospects of the Democracy in Indiana and other close States where it wants to gain votes.

But Mr. Cleveland examined the bill with great care, and became convinced that it was a thoroughly bad measure. He perceived that "the race after the pensions offered by this bill would not only stimulate weakness and pretended incapacity for labor, but put a further premium on dishonesty and mendacity." He believed that "the probable increase of expense would be almost appalling." He held that the measure would "have the effect of disappointing the expectation of the people, and their desire and hope for relief from war taxation in time of peace." He concluded that the interests of the whole nation required him to withhold his approval.

The Texas Seed Bill called for no such display of moral courage as the pension issue, but it offered an opportunity, no less striking, for enforcing a similar lesson, which Mr. Cleveland is to be commended for improving. The pension bill proposed to assist, through the Federal government, those old soldiers in the North "who are willing to be objects of simple charity and to gain a place upon the pension roll through alleged dependence." The seed bill proposed to relieve, through the Federal government, some suffering farmers in a Southern State. It was more than a chance coincidence that the two bills were in the President's

hands at the same time. They represented a long-growing tendency, which was fast coming to pervade both sections of the country, and which needed to be reprobated in a way that would impress both sections. The twin vetoes served this purpose almost ideally. Their force was strengthened by Mr. Cleveland's use in the later message of a most telling phrase, one destined to a long and useful life: "The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people."

Mr. Cleveland has made some unpardonable errors and committed some grievous faults since he became President, but he has gone far to atone for them by the manly way in which he met the responsibility that a demagogic Congress devolved upon him in these measures of legislation. The great danger which threatened this nation when Congress met for its last session was the drift toward paternalism, the disposition to seek aid from the Federal treasury, the decay of the ancient American spirit of self-reliance. That this danger has already so largely vanished is due chiefly to Mr. Cleveland's wise and courageous use of the veto power in behalf of what he so well calls "the sturdiness of our national character."

The Nation's Recent Debt to the South.

THE North fought to save the Union because it believed that it would be better for all the States, South and North alike, that they should continue for all time one nation. The Union was preserved, and for years its members have again stood upon an equality in the government of the country. Southern men who vainly sought by force of arms to establish the right of secession have sat in Congress beside Northern men who shared in overthrowing that claim on the field of battle. They have voted together for generous pensions to soldiers of the Union army, and an ex-officer of the Confederate service now presides over the Executive Department which includes the Pension Bureau, while the present head of that Bureau was an officer on the Union side.

The vote in the House on passing the Pauper Pension Bill over the veto brought into strong relief the advantage which the North already reaps from having the South back in the Union. While the measure was in the President's hands, many old Union soldiers, Republicans as well as Democrats, besought him to disapprove it. "It originated with claim agents and professional pension-seekers," wrote a western Massachusetts veteran, "and is not the cry or plea of the great body of veterans." "I constantly meet with soldiers, privates as well as officers, who repel with deep feeling the assumption that they desire more money in return for the purely patriotic service they gave the country," wrote General J. D. Cox, of Ohio, a Repub lican ex-governor, in urging Mr. Cleveland not to approve the bill. "I think the President justified in vetoing such a bill as this," said General Joshua L. Chamberlain, of Maine, another Republican ex-governor," and believe he will be supported by the sentiment of the country." No candid person who watched the expression of public opinion can doubt that the President's course in this matter was approved by the sober

second thought of the North, including the great mass of self-respecting and self-reliant veterans themselves. The President was not only "supported by the sentiment of the country," as General Chamberlain predicted he would be, but his veto was sustained by Congress. It was, however, only through the votes of "the States lately in rebellion" that the action of Congress was made to conform with the sentiment of the country. This is rendered plain at a glance by the following summary of the vote on passing the bill over the veto:

From the eleven seceding States.
From the rest of the country..

Total vote...

Yeas. Nays. 7 71 168 54

In other words, if the question whether the President's veto should stand had been submitted to the representatives of those States only which adhered to the Union, Mr. Cleveland would have been overruled, more than three to one, and a bill would have become a law which, in the opinion of such a Union soldier as General Chamberlain, "offers an incentive to fraudulent claims, which degrade the deserving, and to too ready a resort to a plea of dependency, demoralizing to manliness." That there were cast on the right side twenty-four more votes than were necessary to sustain the veto was due to the fact that the States which sought to secede from the Union joined in deciding the issue. "The only cry they [the great body of veterans] have now," said the western Massachusetts soldier from whose letter to the President we have quoted, “is that you will spare them the honor of having served their country because they loved her, and not as mere bounty and pension seekers." That honor has been spared the Northern soldiers, but only through the help of Southern representatives, many of whom fought against them a quarter of a century ago.

In a broad and elevated view it may well be doubted whether history has ever recorded a sweeter triumph for the victors in a righteous cause than men like General Cox and General Chamberlain have thus lived to witness. They fought to keep the South in the Union, and they have survived to see the honor of the Northern soldier preserved from the taint which demagogues and claim-agents would have cast upon it through the votes of the Southern men in Congress.

Looking back over the history of the nation, we can now see that the civil war was inescapable. The view of the Constitution in which the South had been educated rendered an attempt at secession inevitable, and as Webster said in his famous 7th of March speech, "peaceable secession is an utter impossibility." Or, as Lincoln put it in his second inaugural: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. ." That the time would come when the South would rejoice that the war ended as it did, and when the North would find itself indebted to the South for efficient help in securing the good government of the reunited nation, was also inevitable; but it might well have been expected that it would not come till after the generation which fought the war had passed from the stage. Less than a quarter of a century, however, has sufficed. The New South frankly confesses its satisfaction with the issue

of the struggle for secession; the New North has now been brought to realize its indebtedness to the South for indispensable help in maintaining good government. Such champions of the Union cause twenty-five years ago as General Bragg of Wisconsin, Colonel Morrison of Illinois, General Warner of Ohio, and Mr. Curtin, the "War Governor" of Pennsylvania, spoke in defense of the President's veto during the debate in the House, and at its conclusion the veto was sustained, in part through the votes given by men like them from the North, but chiefly through the votes of men who came from the States which once sought to disrupt the Union. Fair-minded Northern men thus see that they owe to the South this arrest of the pension craze and of the alarming drift toward paternalism which the Pauper Pension Bill typified. The confession of this indebtedness is the epitaph upon the grave of sectionalism in American politics.

The Problem of Government by Guilds.

AN "Open Letter," on another page, grapples with the problem of municipal reform in a courageous fashion. It is not to be wondered at that thoughtful men, confronting the extravagances and abuses that seem to have intrenched themselves in most of our city governments, and observing that the dispersion of one swarm of the vermin that infest our city-halls and court-houses only makes room for another and hungrier swarm, should be reaching out after some radical reforms in the methods of government. They are not at all mistaken in supposing that the case is becoming critical; they are justified in bestowing upon it patient and anxious thought. The typical citizen is too much inclined to exult over the material gains of a "triumphant democracy," and to ignore the chronic villainy of his city government.

It is a little curious that this New York merchant, pondering the question of municipal government, should have hit upon the same device as that which the great German philosopher, Hermann Lotze, has been proposing. Lotze deplores the haste and passion with which "the antiquated forms of companies, guilds, and corporations were swept away in the rush of the revolutionary movements that ushered in "the modern era," and declares that they ought to have been transformed, not abolished. The most essential fault of modern society is, he declares, “its low estimation of the corporate element." "Of course," he argues, "we do not want to go back to corporations for the subsistence of which we can find no even plausible reason, in order to accumulate privileges for which there is still less any conceivable rightful claim; but on the one hand, a living bond between those who are really connected would maintain the discipline which we so greatly need, but which yet we cannot enforce by means of general laws; on the other hand, such combinations, representing partly the most important callings (agriculture, manufactures, commerce, art, and science), partly the special local interests of different districts, would form the true unities, the representatives of which, by equilibration of the interests of each, would cover the wants of the whole."

Can it be true that the medieval communities held, in these ancient craft-guilds and fraternities, a form of social organization which it was unwise to destroy, and to which we would do well to return? Wise or unwise,

their destruction was inevitable. Not merely for the economical reason that they obstructed the free movement of labor from one occupation to another, but still more for the political reason that they furnished no soil in which the sentiment of nationality could take root, they must have been abolished. The "notion of a citizen of the State," of which Lotze speaks rather slightingly, but which is the one great conception of modern times, needed to be planted and nurtured in the minds of men. When the member of the guild found himself the citizen of the State, his horizon was widened, and his thoughts were enlarged. There was reason then, underneath the rashness and passion which Lotze deplores, and by which the guilds were destroyed. Reason there almost always is, even in the blind fury of the populace. Wickliffe denounced the guilds, and Bacon stigmatized them as "fraternities of evil." It was the Zeit Geist who said that they must go, and they went. But it is not at all certain that they may not return. Many customs, fashions, social forms have been pushed aside by one age and taken up by another. The organization of government by guilds was obstructive to liberty five hundred years ago, but it might be conservative of liberty to-day. At any rate the prop. osition is worth considering.

Two of the reasons urged by our correspondent for this reform seem to be cogent. That it would break the connection between municipal government and national politics, and that it would give all classes of the people a voice in the municipal government, seems probable. Both these results are greatly to be desired. The root of most of the evils of city government is in partisan politics and in the mischiefs which either accompany or flow therefrom. It is doubtful whether city politics will ever be permanently divorced from national politics unless some such radical reorganization as is here suggested can be effected; and it is pretty certain that until municipal government can be separated from national politics, the vilest elements of our cities will generally bear rule. Doubtless under the plan proposed, the machine politicians would make strenuous attempts to capture the several guilds; nevertheless the desire of each guild to be represented by its ablest men, and to secure by this means the protection of its own interests, would greatly interfere with the schemes of the office-seekers.

The other result promised the fair representation of every class of citizens in the city government-is equally desirable, and under such a plan it would probably be secured. The enormous preponderance of some classes in our municipal councils is now notorious; and there are large classes, and these the most intelligent and capable of government, that are now rarely represented in these councils. Any scheme which would bring them into an active participation in the management of municipal affairs deserves to be patiently studied.

It is almost certain that a city council, chosen according to this plan, would be incomparably superior, intellectually and morally, to those which are usually found in our council chambers.

Several practical difficulties suggest themselves. The classification of the voters might not be easily accomplished. In the smaller cities, especially, it would not be possible to give to each separate trade its representatives, for the number of trades and professions is

great, and the number of those practicing some of these trades and professions is small. It would be necessary, therefore, to combine those of several different, though related, vocations into one guild-as, for example, the metal-workers might include blacksmiths, tinsmiths, boiler-makers, etc.; and the guild of instruction the clergy, the teachers, the authors, etc. The arrangement of these classes would be attended with some difficulty; nevertheless, the problem is not hopeless.

The serious question is whether the representatives of these guilds would act unitedly for the public welfare, or whether their devotion to the interests of their several classes would not lead them to sacrifice the interests of society. Would the feeling that Lotze curiously deprecates, the sentiment of loyalty to the state or the municipality, be strong enough to hold in check the class feeling to which the system makes direct appeal? Could these representatives of guilds and classes agree together to promote the general good of the community? The danger would be that those who now give up to party what was meant for mankind would then make the same debasing surrender to the interests of their guild. The misery of that state into which we are now fallen results from the fact that public spirit is overborne by private greed and party passion; would not the same causes continue to operate under every possible form of political organization? In a government by guilds the obvious method by which these evil tendencies could find expression would be the device that is known among the politicians as logrolling. There might be combinations among guilds, by which some would help others and receive help in return, at the expense of the rest. It is scarcely necessary to say that this kind of abuse is prevalent under existing conditions. Everybody knows the way in which appropriations for internal improvements are secured in Congress and the way in which the tariff is adjusted. Something of the same nature often oc curs in municipal governments. There is log-rolling in the interest of wards, as well as of States and sections. The only question is whether this organization of government by guilds would not foster these corrupt and selfish methods. Obviously, the guilds whose numbers would be largest and whose interests are most closely related the various guilds of wage-laborersmight, by combination, control the government. It is possible that they could do as much now, if they knew their power, and there are signs of such an issue; but the adoption of the scheme which we are considering would offer new facilities for an enterprise of this nature.

Under any form of political organization selfish men will behave selfishly; but there are some political methods that offer larger opportunity and more encourage. ment than others for the exercise of the virtues of public spirit and patriotism; and the question to be determined is whether the organization by guilds would have this effect. Some of the more obvious objections have been suggested above, rather for the sake of eliciting discussion than with the design of pronouncing against the measure. In fact, the discussion of any branch of this subject cannot fail to do good, as it will call attention to the crying evils that exist. But there is a more immediate and practical reform now "in sight," which we shall discuss in a future number.

Food.

FEW of those who toil for moderate returns will take exception to Mr. Edward Atkinson's conclusion, that half the cost of living is the price of materials for food; their grocers and butchers have long since convinced them of that. But the reader who prides himself upon sometimes being thoughtful must be able to recall certain discouraging moments in his early housekeeping days, when ignorance of the laws of nutrition and the economy of foods had led him into extravagance and waste; perhaps he is quite aware that ignorance and extravagance and waste followed his purchases home to his kitchen and his table, and there became not only a drain upon his modest purse but a sapper of his health and vitality. Very probably, too, he in time ceased to grow thoughtful over the subject, and continued to walk the path his ignorance trod out. There seemed no other path. Now make our supposed buyer not a reader, and not thoughtful, and only a common laborer, his purse not merely modest, but well nigh empty, and you have come face to face with the portentous problem of the hour.

Some one has, in effect, said that certain forms of religious doctrine bore thorns and bitter fruit, and not rose leaves and sweetness, for the simple reason that their founders' digestive organs were impaired. We

may neither agree nor disagree with this, but if we were to become prophetic, and were to call it a truth of coming generations, that our civilization came to its downfall through the neglect of its wise men to teach its poor how to live, we would not be treading entirely upon air. For what can we expect in the future from the sons and daughters of men and women who starve while we in ignorance lay waste the fruits of the earth? We are glad to know of the site of ancient Troy and the presence of sodium in the stars, but to make plenty where want now cries for bread, to teach the poor to live well on the half of what they now starve upon, to shame anarchy with universal sweet bread and strength-giving foods,-we might with advantage barter many of our boasted wonders for this.

No one has gone so far upon this road as Professor Atwater, of the Wesleyan University, Middletown, whose series on "The Chemistry of Foods and Nutrition" is begun in this number. He has studied food and nutrition as no other student in this country has studied it. He has had one of the rewards of patient endeavor, inasmuch as his success is beyond all question. What he has found no one can afford to ignore. His discoveries are like the discovery of a new foodproducing earth, since he can teach us to double the value of this.

WH

City Government by Guilds.

WHAT is the cause of the failure of municipal government in our larger cities? It is useless to disguise the fact that it has failed. In most of the cities government is becoming corrupt, inefficient, burdensome to an intolerable degree. It cannot be that the majority of the people wish to have it so. Doubtless the root of the evil is the indifference and neglect of the honest citizens; yet the question arises whether the present forms of municipal organization do not discourage and prevent the active participation of the best citizens, and whether other methods might not secure this desirable result.

Our present methods of nomination for office were devised when we were a rural people, and they still answer very well for that portion of our population. But we are rapidly changing the character of our social life, and concentrating our population in commercial and industrial centers; and these social changes make a change in our political methods indispensable.

If the political unit of a democratic government must always be a geographical one, and if we must always vote by wards or districts for municipal officers, then the voters are almost certain to range themselves according to party lines, and national politics will complicate and disturb municipal elections.

Is there not a better way? Would it not be possible to group the people of New York by occupations, and allow them then, by guilds, to elect their representatives to the city council? Some of our citizens have now their trades-unions. Might not the whole city be organized into trades-unions, to each of which representation VOL. XXXIV.— 23.

in the city government should be allowed in proportion to its membership?

The census enumerates the males of lawful age according to their vocation. These might be grouped into one hundred guilds, more or less, and each allowed one or two or three representatives in a city council, which council should elect a mayor with full power to appoint and remove heads of departments. This council should also make appropriations and frame city ordinances. There should be a guild hall, where all elections should be held. Each guild should have allotted to it one or two days in the year for its meetings and one day for its election. If the membership were so large as to cause delay at a single ballot-box, the list of members might be divided alphabetically,— A to G;- H to N, etc.,- and thus several ballot-boxes might be brought into use. The records of each guild could be kept at the guild hall. Each guild should control its own membership and canvass its own elections.

It seems to me that such a method of electing a city government would shut out partisanship, and give to the very lowest classes an opportunity not now enjoyed to exercise their right of suffrage intelligently. Can we expect a man who cannot read to judge wisely of the qualifications of the candidates nominated for the office of mayor? He does know his fellows, and of his companions he can select the best. Have we not expected too much of our humble voters? Could not a man see one step ahead of him who could not see from the bottom to the top of the political ladder?

This method of voting would emancipate the lower classes from the domination of professional politicians.

The 'longshoremen would no longer be mere retainers of some shyster lawyer or rum-seller, but would have the privilege and the duty of selecting one or more of their own class to represent their craft and its interests. The entire guild would watch the official course and conduct of its representatives and hold them to account. But what, in the meantime, has become of their quondam leader, the lawyer? He has retired to his own guild and dropped to the bottom, helpless and harmless. The rum-seller, too, in his own guild would have a voice in the selection of one of its members to represent its interests; but never more could that fraternity alone have the whole city council under its control.

A man's associates, whether he is professional man, merchant, or artisan, are more likely to know what his qualifications are than are his neighbors, residing in the same ward. The voter in the city knows very few of his neighbors. Geographical divisions are, therefore, purely artificial; it would be better to sweep them away, and substitute for them the existing lines of social organization. In a word, let us take men as we find them, already harnessed in business or occupation, and require them thus grouped to perform their political duties, instead of calling on them once a year on election day to break ranks, scatter, and vote as a mob.

NEW YORK, Feb. 5th, 1887.

John D. Cutter.

Toynbee Hall, London.

AN INTERESTING SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.

ONE of the most interesting features of London of to-day is the work of the "West End" among the poor of the "East End," and chiefly in this the University settlement housed at Toynbee Hall, Commercial Road, Whitechapel, next to that center of working religion, St. Jude's Church. The Rev. Samuel A. Barnett, rector of St. Jude's, whose name is known to all students of charity organization, is also senior warden of Toynbee Hall, and his assistant, the Rev. T. C. Gardiner, is sub-warden. With them are fifteen or twenty men, most of them graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, some of them busy in the city, others men of leisure and wealth,— all of them giving more or less of their time to the work of making the lives of the East End poor more wholesome and beautiful than they could be without such help.

The hall is named after Arnold Toynbee, one of the scholars of Balliol College, Oxford, who had interested himself deeply in social questions, and through whose efforts in great part the Coöperative Congress was invited to Oxford in 1881. He was a reader in political economy in his college and its bursar or business man, so that he had both a theoretical and practical knowledge of economics, and his interest in the subject was therefore two-sided. When Henry George's lectures attracted so much attention in England, Toynbee thought that some features or results of them should be counteracted, and he therefore arranged to give two lectures at St. Andrew's Hall, London, in which he discussed the betterment of the condition of the working classes from his point of view. The audience, I was told, was a curiously mixed one, containing a good many from the social stratum to which Toynbee belonged, as well as the

workingmen hearers whom he particularly invited; and among the latter there was a decided undercurrent of criticism and not a little interpellation of the speaker. In the course of the lectures he had confessed that his own class was largely responsible for the discontent among the working classes, and he said frankly that the evil would not come to an end until "we" were willing to live for and if necessary to die for "you." He was frail; the lectures had excited him greatly; and at the close of the last he fell back in his chair fainting. He was taken to the house of friends in the country, and there died. His sudden end threw a halo of pathos upon his lectures and his work, and when the University men decided to start this colony in London the buildings became a memorial to him. His family is well known in London for its devotion to philanthropic work, and several of his brothers and sisters are still active in the work to which he gave his life.

Toynbee Hall had its actual origin in Oxford. In the spring of 1884, a few months after Toynbee's death, Mr. Barnett read a paper at a small meeting in St. John's College, in which he shadowed forth his idea of what a colony of University men might do for industrial centers such as East London. The paper, though read to a small knot of men, was published and soon won its way, and a small group of University men made an experiment in associated life at a disused public-house, under Mr. Barnett's guidance and help, when the success of the experiment justified a permanent home. The friends of Arnold Toynbee, who had been anxious to erect some memorial of his work and enthusiastic self-devotion, provided most of the funds for a lecturehall, and the cost of the rest of the buildings was defrayed by a company formed for this purpose, which raised about £10,000 on the security of the freehold land, bearing interest at 41⁄2 per cent. Toynbee Hall, while a memorial to Arnold Toynbee, is also a monument to Samuel A. Barnett, whose ideas it embodies.

One enters from the Commercial Road through the ordinary English gateway into a sort of quadrangle, on one side of which is the residence part of Toynbee Hall, and on the other a lecture-hall which is filled nearly every evening for some purpose or other with East End people. This latter building is also used as a general headquarters for organized charity in the district, including, for instance, the office of the Beaumont Trust, from which the People's Palace, prophesied in Kingsley's "Alton Locke," and made almost real in Walter Besant's "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," is now rising into solid fact. The East London Antiquarian Society, the Adam Smith Club, the Toynbee Natural History Society, the Education Reform League, the Pupil Teachers' Debating Society, the Toynbee Shakespeare Club, the Students' Union, and still other organizations, hold their meetings in Toynbee Hall or in St. Jude's school next door. The hall is as beautiful a club-house as one would wish at the West End itself, and certainly no more charming host could be found through Belgravia and Mayfair than the junior warden. Each man has his room or suite of rooms, as he would have at college, and the charming drawing-room, with comfortable and cozy furniture and beautiful adornments, forms a general gathering-place for the club-men and their guests. We had "afternoon tea" there, in strange contrast with the surroundings of poverty and squalor in the