are, in their very essence, "irresponsible," just so far as they are governments at all, and that, practically, they have proved so in every experiment ever made by mankind. The whole American theory of "checks and balances" upon parchment is mere fallaciousness and folly. The only effectual check is that developed individuality of the people which gives significant notice to government that it won't answer to go too far, and which, as it becomes more developed, is sure to dispense with government altogether. The advantages which we enjoy in this country, in this respect, come entirely from the greater practical development of the sovereignty of the individual; from the greater development of the individual, so that that exercise of sovereignty can be endured with less evil result; and from the small quantity of government which we tolerate, not at all, as is supposed, from any superiority in the quality of the article. Government will become unnecessary just so soon as the true principles of the science of society are understood and practically realized. The realization of those principles will begin in their being discovered and promulgated. Hence, as occasion offers, I preach. I expect, at first, to be partially understood, misunderstood, and misrepresented; but the time of that nebulous perception of the subject will pass. Ideas which are true and fundamental, and as destitute of fluctuation or exception as mathematics, will make their way and be accepted. Prejudice will give way to reason, arbitrary institutions to principles, and antagonism to true order and harmony, and the freedom of a rightly-constituted human brotherhood.

Your Correspondent says that I exhibit a sovereign contempt for society. He is certainly mistaken. I am very fond of society, and especially of good society. Society is, however, a word of considerable diversity of significations, and is used by your Correspondent in at least three or four different senses, apparently without the slightest consciousness of confounding them.

I may as well use this word [society] as any other to illustrate a certain tendency on the part of your Correspondent, to which I have already adverted, to a lamentable confusion of ideas and terms, in the midst of the most exuberant and sometimes elegant diction. He begins one of his paragraphe by using society as if it were synonymous with the State, by which I presume he means the organization and machinery of government. In the middle of the same paragraph he defines society to be "the sentiment of fellowship and equality in the human bosom." In the end of the same paragraph he asserts that the "advance of society — this sentiment of fellowship or equality —causes man to look away from governments, and from whatsoever external patronage, and find true help at last in himself"; that is, to resort to the sovereignty of the individual. This last is precisely what I believe. For society in which of these senses is it that I exhibit a “sovereign contempt"? Whose superficiality is it now?

In the very next sentence your Correspondent adds, "society is the sole beneficiary of the arts and sciences, and the individual man becomes partaker of their

benefits only by his identification with it." In which definition is society used here? Is it the government or the State which is the only direct beneficiary of the arts and sciences? Is that what it means? Or is it the "sentiment of fellowship and equality among men" which is the direct beneficiary of the arts and sciences? Or, finally, is it men individualized by "looking away from governments and finding true help in themselves," who are the direct beneficiary, etc., and the individual man only so because he is "one of 'em"? Whose superficiality and utter confusion of ideas is it this time? Words have a tendency to obscurity when no definite ideas are attached to them.

Beauties of style, a certain dashing fluency of utterance, brilliancy of fancy, vague intuitions of floating grandeur, or of sublime truth even, simply or conjointly, don't make a philosopher. Some clearness of intellectual vision, some analysis and knowledge of causes, some exactness in definitions, a certain expansiveness and comprehension of one's whole subject, and even more than all, perhaps, a rigid adherence to the laws of dialectics, by which premises are fearlessly pursued to their natural and inevitable conclusions, lead where they may, are requisite to that end. It is always a misfortune to mistake one's vocation. It is a misfortune, however, which can be partially retrieved at almost any period of life, and we all acquire wisdom by painful experiences. There is some department, I feel certain, in which your Correspondent might excel. As he declines to be patronized, I shall abstain from impertinent suggestions.

Dodge No. 3 is another cuttle-fish plunge into the regions of "the infinite," and, of course, of the indefinite, the accustomed retreat of impracticable theorists. Your Correspondent informs us that, as "ideas are infinite, they admit of no contrast or oppugnancy." I think he must have discovered by this time that there is both "contrast" and "oppugnancy" between his ideas and mine, so far at least as his sublimated conceptions still retain anything of the finite or definite. Into the other region I am willing to follow him when occasion offers, and to examine with the rigorous grasp of modern philosophical criticism your Correspondent's fanciful reproduction of Plato's idealism and of the rose-colored atheism of Spinoza, and to separate for him the legitimate from the illegitimate, the possible from the impossible, in the field of human speculation. At the moment, however, my business lies, and his ought to lie, with the simple questions of practical life relating to marriage and divorce, -the matters under discussion.

The doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual is an absurdity, contends your Correspondent, because man is under a three-fold subjection, in the nature of things; first, "to nature, then to society [in which meaning of the word?], and finally to God." Grant all this be so, does the fact that man must ever remain under a necessary or appropriate subjection to society, -that is, under a certain limitation of the sphere of his activity by the legitimate extension of the spheres of other individuals, — does it follow, I say, that it is an absurdity to inquire and fix scienti

fically what that limit is? Now, this is precisely what we profess to have done, and we give “the sovereignty of every individual to be exercised at his own cost as the result of that investigation. What possible application has the vague generalization of your Correspondent, as a counter-statement to that principle, how true soever his proposition may be.

It is as if I were to ask the opinion of a Swedenborgian of the policy of abolishing the laws for the collection of debts, and he should reply, "Sir, my opinion is that, if you act rightly in the matter, your action must be dictated by an equal union of the divine love and the divine wisdom." I must reply, "Very well, my dear sir, but that is all granted to begin with, and, although it may give you a great air of profound wisdom to repeat it, my question is a practical one. I want to know what, in your judgment, would be the operation of love and wisdom as applied to the case in everyday practical life which I have brought to your attention."

I ask in all sincerity, "What is the scientific limit of man's appropriate freedom as respects society?" and your Correspondent replies, with the solemnity of an owl: Sir, it is frivolous and absurd to ask such a question, because there is an appropriate limit upon man's freedom, and, therefore, man can never be wholly free. And yet your Correspondent has the hardihood to talk of a scientifically constituted society, as if such terms corresponded to any definite ideas in his mind. I want to know whether, in a rightly or scientifically constituted human society, I am to be permitted to read the Protestant Scriptures at Florence; whether I am to be permitted to publish a scientific discovery at Rome; whether I can print my own opinions and views upon general politics at Paris; whether I can travel on a Sunday in Connecticut, etc., etc. I want to know what constitutes an infringement upon the rights of other men, and within what limit I am committing no infringement,—not according to the arbitrary legislation of some petty principality, but according to natural and eternal right? To all this, the answer comes back: Nonsense, man is necessarily subject to society to some extent.

Now, sir, I am fatigued with this sort of infinitude of ideas which never have any "oppugnancy," because, having neither substance nor form, they can produce no shock. I hope your Correspondent will be content to withdraw into that field of pure idealism which is devoid of all “contrasts” and distinctions. It must be laborious to him to inhabit a sphere where definitions and limitations are sometimes necessary to enable us to know what we are talking about. Let him seek his freedom in the broad expanse of the infinite. I, for the present, will endeavor to vindicate some portion of mine by ascertaining the exact limits of encroachment between me and my neighbor, religiously refraining from passing those limits myself, and mildly or forcibly restraining him from doing so,-as I must.

STEPHEN PEARL ANDREWS.

XII.

A PARTHIAN ARROW BY MR. GREELEY.

A HEART-BROKEN MANIAC.-We have just been put in possession of the particulars of a scene of sorrow seldom witnessed. A young lady, of this city, respectably connected and of fair reputation, nearly two years ago became acquainted with a man now residing in this place. The acquaintance soon ripened into a strong attachment, and, finally, love, on her part. Under the promise of marriage, as she says, she was made to yield to his solicitations, and last autumn she gave birth to a child, which lived only two days. He disregarded his promises, avoided and frowned upon her. Here she was deprived of her lover and of her child. She felt that every eye was turned upon her with scorn, - that those who saw her at her work, or met her in the street, knew her disgrace. Day by day, and week by week, her heart sank within her, paleness came to her cheeks, and her frame wasted away, till she is now almost a living skeleton. Wednesday morning she went to work in the mills, as usual, but soon returned, saying that she was sick. In a few hours she was a raving maniac, her reason gone, perhaps forever. Since then she has had a few rational intervals, in one of which she stated that she met that morning the one she calls her betrayer, and he frowned upon her and treated her with contempt. She could bear all the disgrace that attaches to her condition, if he would treat her kindly. But the thought that the one she has loved so dearly, and the one who made her such fair promises, should desert her at this time, and heartlessly and cruelly insult her, is too much for her to bear. Her brothers and friends are borne down with sorrow at her condition. What a picture! It needs no comment of ours. Public opinion will hunt down the heartless villain who betrayed her. - Manchester (N. H.) Mirror.

The above relation provokes some reflection on "the sovereignty of the individual," "the right of every man to do pretty much as he pleases,” etc., which the reader will please follow out for himself.

EDITOR OF THE TRIBUNE.

XIII.

REPLY BY MR. ANDREWS.

The above missile a tergo from my valorous antagonist-after his retreat into the safety of a unilateral contest is suggestive of many things, and might constitute the text for a whole bookful of commentary. It is the usual whine of blear-eyed and inveterate tyranny, gloating over the fact that some one of his victims has got himself, or herself, into a worse fix by disregarding his behests, and attempting an escape from his infernal grip, than he or she was in before. The slave-hunter, amid the baying of his blood-hounds upon the warm scent of the track of an unhappy fugitive, growls out in the same manner his curses upon the inhumanity of the man who has preached freedom to the captive, charging upon him all the horrors of the sickening scene that is about to ensue. Should the friend who has whispered longings after emancipation into the greedy ear of the victim of slavery afterward, through cowardice or selfishness or from any cause overmastering his devotion, shrink from going all lengths in uniting his fortunes with those of the slave,—either by remaining with him in bondage, or taking his full share in the risks of the flight; and, if this desertion should rankle in the breast of the fugitive as the worst torment of his forlorn state, even when sore pressed by the devouring dogs, -the case would be parallel in all ways to the one cited by Mr. Greeley.

Our transcendent philosopher and moralist of the "Tribune" can imply the most withering hatred of the "seducer" and "heartless villain," whom "public opinion" is invoked to “hunt down" for his crime, and whisper no word of rebuke for — nay, aggravate and hound on-that same public opinion in its still more reckless vengeance upon the unfortunate girl herself, by efforts to intensify "all the disgrace that attaches to her condition," which, terrible as it is now, she said, poor creature! she had the fortitude “to bear,” but for the other element in her misery. That other element, the betrayal of her lover, in addition to the insane odium of the public, Mr. Greeley charges upon the "seducer." I charge both one and the other cause of the poor girl's torture and insanity, just as boldly, upon Mr. Greeley himself and the like of him. If the mental phenomena which led to her betrayal by her lover could be investigated, they would be indubitably traced back to the senseless rigors of that same public opinion; so that both causes of the wreck and