tin wantonly shot General Wirt Adams, the postmaster, a man 69 years of age, and of the highest character. Adams returned Martin's fire and both fell dead in the streets. The young men of the South, who are encouraged by the most influential citizens to resort to murder as an ordinary political agency, will never refrain from using their fatal revolvers for private revenge.

And now so it is that the South which, during more than half a century, dominated the nation by means of slavery and the power which slavery gave, has, after a period of rebellion caused by slavery and a period of reconstruction prolonged by crimes against the freedmen, again seized the reins of government, and has rewarded itself for its rebellion by increased representation in Congress and in the body of electors which chooses a President. The North is supposed to have conquered. The Union is saved in form. The terms of peace, reunion, and reconciliation were the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth, omitting the colored people from the basis of representation in States where they are not allowed to vote; and the Fifteenth, giving to colored citizens the ballot in all elections, State or national. The Thirteenth Amendment alone is in force; theFourteenth and Fifteenth are a dead letter, openly and flagrantly disobeyed. Suffrage at the South for the black man does not, exist; for the white man even it is almost a farce. A few leaders in each State, combining with similar coteries in other States, form an oligarchy which wields the whole political power of the solid South. United with the Democratic Party of the North, who expect to control by corruption or fraud a few northern States, their "plan of campaign" is exactly what it was before 1860. Our later southern masters are not different from those of former years. They are able, always alert, and whenever not opposed are plausible, courteous, and full of kind and patriotic professions; resisted, their gentleness proves like that of tigers; they become fierce and defiant, sometimes brutal.

The North needs to undeceive itself. The South is in the saddle, and it means to stay there. It has the executive branch of the government, it almost controls the legislative, it is reaching forward to the judicial branch. It threatens the manufacturing and all other industries of the North. It means to hold in

its hands the decision of all our national questions, those of foreign policy, tariff, finance, internal improvements, and all expenditures, and to "get even" with the North on account of the temporary ascendency of the latter during the era of rebellion and reconstruction. The South will not again make the mistake of secession. It is easier and safer to rule the nation from the inside. The power which the election of 1884 gave will not be relinquished if murder and fraud at the South, and unlimited corruption and fraud in New York City, can retain it. If another Democratic administration is elected, the northern people will soon realize what the new southern control involves, and will be loaded to the full with the burdens of which our southern masters during the last three years have imposed only a small part.

Will the North consent submissively to a perpetual political control of the country based upon a flagrant disregard and defiance of one of the principal fundamental conditions upon which the war was terminated, and which is now a part of the federal Constitution? Let it be borne in mind-it cannot be too often repeated-that if the Constitution were in force Blaine, instead of Cleveland, would now be President, and the national House would be Republican and in favor of protection, instead of Democratic and in favor of the Mills bill. If the colored citizens could vote, and have their votes counted as cast, the election next fall would, with hardly the form of a contest, be Republican; and on the 4th of March, 1889, Cleveland would surrender the executive power to a Republican President, who would be sustained by a Congress Republican in both branches.

Although in the coming contest the votes of the negro will be unconstitutionally suppressed and the South perhaps solidly Democratic, our southern masters can be defeated if the commercial interests of the country are sufficiently aroused. They will do well to take the alarm. The indifference of the business men of the North to the encroachments of slavery made the war possible, and compelled the expenditure of six thousand millions to preserve the Union. It is better to protect our industries by a contest now, when they are vet undestroyed, than to fight to restore them after they have been stricken down and chains are riveted upon our limbs.

If victory is achieved, the conditions of reconstruction en

forced, obedience to the Constitution in all its parts compelled, and the vote of the northern man, white or black, made equal to that of the southern man, white or black, neither the North nor the South need fear negro supremacy.

Manhood suffrage was first tried immediately after a warmade by the masters to strengthen their hold on their slaveshad resulted in the discomfiture of the former and the freedom of the latter, but had disorganized society. In its reorganization the late masters refused to participate; the freedmen went ahead, and did as well as they could. The failure, if it be such, of the first experiment will not be repeated under new conditions and better auspices. The charge that the two races cannot live side by side in the southern States in political equality, the voters of each race freely participating in all elections, has not been proved. It is a mere clamor raised to excuse the suppres sion of the negro vote in order to obtain partisan power in State and nation. Wherever the experiment of impartial suffrage has been tried with any approach to fairness and good will on the part of the whites, it has been remarkably successful. The colored men are not aggressive; they are docile, well-disposed, and anxious, if allowed to enjoy what they know to be their constitutional rights, to live peacefully with their white neighbors. They submit readily to what is sometimes to them so offensively called the superior intelligence of the whites. They do not seek social equality. They are patient and long-suffering. But they will never permanently abandon the ballot, and whenever they reach the polls they will insist upon their right to vote the Republicanticket if they so wish. Their interests and their desires make them an ever-cager army of seven millions of people seeking their rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. In addition to this pressure, the manhood, the dignity, the self-respect, and the honor of all citizens of the North require that they should compel our modern southern masters to desist from their attempt perpetually to rule, through crimes against the black man and against the Constitution, that country which they wickedly but vainly tried to destroy in order to fasten more firmly the chains of slavery, and to extend its accursed power and influence into the Territories of the Union.

WILLIAM E. CHANDLER.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN MANNERS.

IT happened to the writer, many years ago, to find himself for the first time at a dinner-party of scientific men in London, a dinner of the Royal Society. The next person at the table was an exceedingly clever man, whose manners were, however, very brusque and offensive; who interrupted everybody, gave rude answers, and made himself generally disagreeable. Yet he seemed a person of importance, and was always heard with attention. He was evidently familiar with several branches of science, and I finally got the impression that he must be some leading London physician, whose professional prestige was so great that he could be as boorish as Abernethy if he wished. At last I found an opportunity to ask my immediate host who this curiously offensive personage was, and was told that it was Lord Lyttelton-the fourth lord of that name, who died a few years after this interview. Now, I had long taken an interest in this nobleman, since reading with delight, in boyhood, his Latin translation of one of the poems of his friend Lord Houghton, then Richard M. Milnes; and presently, having the American spirit of conciliation, I told him of the fact, and overcame his evident incredulity by quoting the first verses of the poem, "Olim virgineum perdiderat decus."* After this he softened a very little; for what author, great or small, can be wholly indifferent to a quotation from his own works? But he left on the memory of at least one stranger the picture of the worstmannered man he had ever encountered in what is called good society, at home or abroad.

Not long after, at a dinner-party in Cambridge, England, I sat next to a lady, since well known in literature, who, although she called herself a Liberal, stoutly maintained the importance of an hereditary aristocracy to give a standard of manners; and I * Lord Houghton's "Poems of Many Years." Ed. 1844, p. 86.

modestly demurred, and cited Lord Lyttelton as an alarming example. She set it lightly aside. The Lyttelton bad manners were proverbial." Then I mentioned another peer whom I had lately met, but he was "a recent creation." Still another, in my very limited list of personally inspected noblemen, was “a law lord," that is, one raised to the House of Lords to do the legal duty there; and so on. It made no difference; there was always some excuse, and the blue blood was never at fault. At last, in despair, I quoted some story, then recent, which seemed aimed at one of the royal princes, and here also she was ready with her answer. "They are not Englishmen," she said, "they are Germans,"

The truth is, that no class in the world, probably, is judged so little on its merits as the English upper class. At home it casts a glamour on men's eyes, a glamour so great that Mr. Darwin absolutely believed it physically superior to other classes, although another social observer, Mr. Edward Jenkins, made, a few years since, the remark," Why noble earls should be so ugly is a problem in nature," and this strikes the American visitor to the House of Lords as being nearer the truth. So great is, at any rate, their lingering prestige among Liberals, that a leading London reformer once told me that it was almost essential to the success of a radical meeting to get a lord to preside at it; and I have myself been present at such a gathering in London, when one of the few really good speakers I ever heard in England-a man full of information on the very point at issue, and expressing it admirably-was put down, in that brutal way only seen among Englishmen, through the impatience of the audience to hear a dull and inarticulate lord, who had nothing to say and said it. A class thus situated cannot be judged by what is said about it in its own home; and when it is transplanted it is apt to drift among a class of similar admirers abroad. No doubt there are noblemen in England whose manners a critical American would call high-bred; but it is certain that one may travel a good deal in that country, and even go through a considerable course of London dinner-parties, without having the good luck to encounter a specimen.

But it is not necessary to inspect the upper class of English