fame, while so conspicuously that of both the soldier and the civilian, was pre-eminently that of the man.

The aspect in which the public contemplate the memory of General Grant has in it an element that is often wanting in respect to great public characters, and which, beyond all else, is charily and sparingly rendered— that of genuine personal respect. Honor, and indeed devotion, is given more freely than this, and even love is less cautious and self-restrained. The qualities of mind and heart that command respect are not always the most showy, though, unhappily, they are often the most difficult to find in the requisite completeness. There must be honor and truthfulness, unselfishness coupled with self-respect, and conscientiousness associated with high resolves. All these characteristics may indeed be found in humble and undistinguished persons; and even there they command respect, and render those who possess them objects of favor. Men instinctively honor them wherever they are detected; and they of whom such qualities may be predicated are sure of the favorable consideration of all right-thinking men; and all who know how to justly estimate men's good-will and true reverence will value genuine respect as the rarest and the most precious tribute. And because all these high qualities are conceded to have been eminently exemplified and illustrated in the life and character of our hero, we may from that ground claim for him the favoritism of the public, as indicated in Macaulay's aphorism. Nor is it necessary for us to vindicate his rightful claim to all of them. The poisoned tongue of detraction has not dared to call in question either his truthfulness or his honor, nor yet his conscientious devotion to his own convictions of right, coupled with a lofty and self-respecting detestation of all impurity, profanity, and .moral coarseness. The meanness of partisan malice, which lives by defiling the purest and best of names, has not dared either to assail the unselfishness of his patriotism or to call in question the elevation and nobility of his purposes. Should some one, by a strange freak of miscalculation, come to lightly estimate Grant's soldierly qualities and to conclude that he was not a statesman, he must still concede and recognize in him the qualities that command respect. And upon these qualities his public renown rests, as upon an immovable foundation; and these less conspicuous but more excellent qualities are necessary to raise even the most admirable characteristics and conditions to their proper eminence. And because the possession of public renown is always a temptation to the harpies of detraction to attempt to defile and destroy it, the defense of true respectability is the only and the sufficient safeguard against such onslaughts. Men who appreciate true excellence like to think well of the public deeds of those whom they have learned to confide in as personally upright and virtuous, for the love of goodness.

It may seem a strange condition of things that one so admired and respected as General Grant certainly had come to be, should also appear as an object of pity; and yet this was his case to an unusual degree. It is not necessary, in this connection, to notice the petty detractions of partisan or personal gossip, since these are the common accompaniments of

exalted public positions; nor yet the rivalries of those who, striving after self-aggrandizement, were willing to discredit the purest and best as a means by which to become possessed of his position; for this, too, must be accepted as a part of the price of public honor. We have more particularly to consider the case of one who, at life's high noon having completed an unparalleled public career, found himself in a condition that both permitted and required him to begin the world anew, but who failed in the attempt, first by the treachery of those whom he trusted, and next by being laid aside by an accident more disastrous than all the fortunes of war; and, last of all, to be brought through protracted and terribly painful sufferings down to death. When General Grant had come home from his wonderful tour round the world, weighted with honors such as have fallen to the lot of few men, he was simply a private citizen without occupation. He was still at the height of his physical and intellectual manhood, apparently with nearly a quarter of a century of active life before him. He now appeared to have at last found the long-coveted opportunities to do something for his family; to engage in social and public enterprises; and to avail himself of the benefits offered by a dignified leisure. That such were his anticipations is well known; and they were honorable to him in view of his relations, his abilities, and his exalted social position: and yet how, at every point, were these reasonable expectations thwarted! How did his property melt away like the hoar-frost! how were the mementoes of his honors given into the hands of strangers, and even a temporary shadow rest upon his good name! And then, just as the darkest of these shadows seemed to be passing away-for neither reproach nor disaster can permanently oppress the good man-the signs of a malignant and incurable disease began to appear; and, through slowlymoving weeks and months the whole world was called to contemplate the illustrious sufferer steadily and surely, in intense and unremitting pain, yet without repining or faint-heartedness, going down to death. The sight of suffering naturally tends to excite pity, and its intensity is somewhat proportioned to not only the pain suffered, but also the greatness of him who suffers; and by all these conditions the tender sympathies and commiseration of the whole people were concentrated about the couch of the dying hero. The nation that had long honored him for his greatness and respected him for his integrity was now deeply moved by a common impulse of pity because of his unequaled sufferings.

THE LABOR PROBLEM IN AMERICA.

A superficial observer, looking back at the relations of labor and capital in this country during the past few years, would be little likely to deduce many elements of encouragement or hope from his forecast of the social and industrial future of the United States. And this may be said, not only because superficial views are apt to be unreliable in themselves, but

because there are certain peculiar economic heresies in America which are almost sure to find their way into careless methods of dealing with the labor problem. One of these has so many appearances in its favor that even foreigners, as a rule, adopt it without hesitation. The broad lines by which the interests of labor and capital seem to be separated; the apparently uncompromising spirit that inspires each in the assertion of principle on the one hand, and of class rights on the other; the pointedness of the language used; the sensitiveness of highly-strung individualities to personal rather than collective grievances; the tendency to attach an exaggerated importance to the interventions of force-all these seem to give a European character to the labor problem in this country, and to involve the working classes of the American continent in a common economic destiny with the toiling millions of the Old World. Yet nothing can be more fallacious than to regard capital and labor as having in the United States the same conditions of mutual relationship and development as the doctrinaires lay down for them in the countries of Europe. True enough it is, that in its broader aspects political economy is universal in its application. But to employ it in support of the assumption that the labor problem is the same on both sides of the Atlantic is to perpetrate the worst kind of heresy. Not only does it present itself in a different way to each of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, but the conceptions upon which its very existence as a social question is based-the conditions that make it possible and rule its changing aspects are alike distinct and diverse in the Old World and the New.

In

Take for illustration the sources of social order and government. In the older countries of Europe society draws its stability, at least in the popular conception, from monarchical institutions that exist independently even of the aristocratic elements that cluster around them-from a small number of favored personalities who rule in most cases without the slightest fiction of responsibility to the people, and who, even when exercising the functions of government side by side with a constitutional assembly, claim prerogatives that have had no popular sanction. this country the forces which maintain social order not only represent the people themselves, but are the actual products of the popular will and consciousness. In Europe the relations of society to the power of the State express a subordination of a peculiarly humiliating kind. They represent that abject tutelage to an absolute authority, and blind submission to an hereditary superiority, which characterized the earliest and most barbarous forms of human government. The real fallacy of Rousseau's "Contrat Social" lay not in the great Frenchman's assumption of an impossible or an unreal relation between governor and governed, but in his selection of the monarchical countries of Europe for the assertion of an original compact between royal and democratic elements for purposes of social order. Such a compact, whether express or only tacit-whether effected in the brief space of a personal covenant or during the secular evolution of an historical era-could not possibly take place, or even be conceived, amid social conditions such as those of the Old World. If

there be any material for the theory of a "social contract" it must be sought in the United States. In this country there is no pretense, not even the slightest, of an absolute authority; nor is there any claim, even by force of acquiescence, to functions of government that may be exercised apart from the people or for an indefinite time. America offers to the world the remarkable spectacle of a population which has not only agreed to be governed, but which regularly provides the machinery of its government. One might point to an act of voluntary surrender not less real or valid because it was not made by document in the presence of a notary public; and yet it is a finer and truer thing to say, that the people of the United States, instead of agreeing to be ruled, govern themselves. Here we leave the ground of the "social contract," and approach that of the ideal state. The significance of this difference in the source of power will be seen all the more clearly when regard is paid to the tendency in old civilizations to rank property on the side of monarchy, and give it the advantage of a special protection. This tendency is seen in the greater severity of penalties for offenses against property as compared with punishments for crimes involving no breach of the rights of possession. It survives in the saying that alleges the existence of one law for the rich and another for the poor. In not a few of the countries of Europe it does actually rob the impecunious classes of much of the protection they ought to enjoy at the hands of the law. Now in the United States this tendency, though formally expressed in inherited legislation, plays no part as a factor in the labor problem. In countries where the power of the ruling class has an existing or an historical foundation in wealth, the favor extended by the law to capital is sometimes carried to the extreme of a conspiracy by legislative forms against the natural rights of whole classes of the people. Of this kind of persecution a striking illustration was afforded in the attempts made to crush incipient trades-unionism in England. Here, fortunately for the labor interest, and not less happily for the personal elements of capital, social conceptions make no distinction between the man who gives work for wages and him who pays wages for work. The so-called independence of American labor is a natural and expressive condemnation of the groveling spirit in which opportunities of toil are so often received by the downtrodden proletariat of European lands. Nor is the nearness of labor to capital in this country confined to the merely social aspects of life. A higher rate of wages-a more intense and healthily chronic dissatisfaction with spheres of toil that only partially engage the worker's powers-a feeling of greater pride and ambition that refuses to be contented with the bottom of the ladder, even should the top offer no superior pecuniary advantage-these are among the causes that in the United States lessen the number of steps which European conditions place between the position of the workman and that of the employer.

Labor in America is further favored by its isolation. In the countries of Europe advantages of locality, should they present themselves, can only in the nature of the case be temporary. The labor markets of con

tiguous populations cannot long maintain a state other than that of completed equilibrium. Most of them occupy the same level, so far as the rate of remuneration for labor is concerned; none of them can hope to have their prospects permanently modified for the better by mere changes in the nature of migrations. It is true that very little international movement of this kind takes place, barriers of language and custom forbidding the transfer to a foreign country of labor that would promptly avail itself of suddenly favorable circumstances on its own and familiar soil. None the less quickly and surely, by the operation of causes well known to political economists, is a temporary increase in the remuneration of labor or the profit of capital brought down to the general level of the European markets. From a "leveling down" tendency of this kind America is saved, first, by the superiority of her natural resources, mediately, by her distance from the Old World. That she will hold this favorable position forever need not be contended. It is being continually undermined by economical forces that, if slow in operation, are irresistible in their effects. The equilibrium which the old countries have established among themselves must inevitably be set up in the end between Europe and the American continent. To this result every emigrantladen ship contributes, bringing an immediate beneficence so far as the effect is contemporary, laying the foundations of economical evil so far as the end is secular and remote. Yet, until these emigration currents cease to flow from the east, American labor must continue to enjoy advantages from which the workman of Europe has been shut out by centuries of competitive exploitation.

Toil on this side of the Atlantic can also claim the added dignity of a complete freedom from the influence of distinctions of class that erect barriers between man and man. In the older civilizations well-defined relations of subordination have not only grown up in the family, but find a greater or less degree of expression in the business and social aspects of life. Now in a new country like ours, where there is, undoubtedly, a connected sequence of inherited traditions based on blood, but where the combinations of the social fabric are new, the family fails to insist upon its relations of subordination with the same harshness as that which characterizes the persistence of those relations in the older societies of Europe. The attitude of capital toward labor is consequently less authoritative and more altruistic. A tacit consciousness of equal rights and privileges robs toil, whether offered or received, of its ancient character as a benefaction. A new country, moreover, favors compromises and adjustments between so-called rival interests. Ideas are not yet crystallized into conceptions; opinions have not hardened into prejudices. Individuality, on the other hand, is less shackled by the influences which in mature countries social masses wield over their single elements; the tendency to gregarious following after agitators paid or unpaid is demonstrably weak. That the combinations of capital in this country are young is an advantage to both of the great interests under discussion. Such combinations in Europe are often the result of long secular accumulations; in too many cases they