and it would be no doubt better, practically, to give each member one vote for every time he has received the necessary quota in the election. But, after all, it is a question whether even this would be just in the long-run. There are comparatively few questions on which members vote from purely party considerations; and these are the only ones on which a member may fairly be said to be acting as an agent for his constituents, carrying out what they had in mind when voting for him. In every thing beyond this, we must choose competent men, and be willing to feel confidence that they will govern well. In State and national affairs the people do little more than decide in favor of a particular line of policy; they do not rule, but choose their rulers.

Then there is Mr. Buckalew's plan, reported with favor by a committee of the United-States Senate; which allows each elector to cast as many votes as there are members to be elected, but to "cumulate" them, if he pleases, upon one or more candidates: thus a voter in this State might divide his thirty-one votes between two, three, or thirty candidates. Either this plan, or the simpler one of allowing each person to vote for only one candidate, but to be wholly untrammelled by considerations of locality, would promise decided reform. For, party-leaders- who are men of cunning, but of very little real ability would be bewildered and helpless when the power of forcing nominations upon the community has been taken away from them; and men of a better type would be found ready to do the legitimate and useful preliminary work of recommending candidates to sections of the States, groups of towns or counties, in proportion to the strength of the parties. We do not care to discuss these plans in detail: on the whole we prefer the last mentioned; but any of them is better than the method under which we are now suffering.

We welcome, therefore, all such discussions as those in the essays before us. Some of the methods it proposes, have, we understand, been actually tried with good results: all of them, no doubt, would give a measure of relief. But we do not believe, however, that any essential and permanent

reform can be brought about, except by depriving the caucus itself of power, So long as the caucus is absolute in a party, so long it will be ruled by the most unscrupulous partisans, and any attempt to replace them by better men can be only partially successful. For overthrowing the power of the caucus, we know no way and have seen no method proposed, except that of Personal Representation. Under this system, the voter is fully protected against unfit nominations, such as now too often disgrace every party. For "bolting"- which is simply the protest of independent conviction against the arbitrary power of the majority would then be no longer either useless or unpopular. It would be recognized as the right of every voter. Suppose, for instance, that in a given State a given party could reasonably expect, by virtue of its strength, to choose five members of congress. It could no longer venture to nominate partly unknown, and unworthy, men; if but one of the five were incompetent, enough voters of the party could agree among themselves to throw him overboard and unite upon a suitable candidate. Thus, the strength of the party would be preserved, and the individuality of the voters respected; while at the same time the caucus and convention would continue to possess all the power which legitimately belongs to them. So long as they exercised their functions with discretion and honesty, they would be followed; when they ceased to do this, their recommendations would be neglected.

It is true that Personal Representation can apply only in cases where a number of persons are to be chosen, especially in the case of legislative bodies. Governors and mayors must still be chosen, as now, by a pure majority vote. But it is in the legislative bodies that the trouble lies: whatever evils may now exist in the election of executive officers would be remedied by improving the character of the Legislatures. Once rid of the rule of small politicians, the people may fairly be left to take care of the rest. No plan, to be sure, will give us a perfect government, or remedy all abuses, so long as human nature is itself imperfect. But a reform in the

part will speedily react upon the whole; and, if we can purify the sources of political action by making it no longer worth the while of greedy adventurers to make politics their profession, we need not fear but that larger concerns will be in good hands.

ART. III.—THE WORLD AND THE SOUL.

We do not invite our readers to inspect any details of human prosperity and adversity, either from the material point of view or from the spiritual. We ask them to generalize the whole subject, and thus grapple, in its extremest dignity, with the problem of true profit and loss, or the world and the soul. In the case of all human beings, that problem lies for ever between the sum of things and the individual self; and every man, as fast as he lives, works out an experimental solution. Can any thing be more becoming to intelligent beings than also to work out a theoretical solution? Thus alone can men learn to live by principle and not at mere random. Gain the world and lose the soul; lose the world and save the soul; lose both the world and the soul; or gain them both, one of these four must be done. Which of them shall it be? In addition to the practical answers given by the different lives of men, let us endeavor to think out a rational answer.

The awful text, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul," has been thundered from the pulpits of Christendom for fifty generations. The mystic horror with which it has been loaded baffles description. Suggesting every form of fear and agony, magnified by the scale of their duration to a terrific incomprehensibility that crushes the very power of emotion, the doctrine it is thought to teach has been the theological incubus of the Christian conscience. To the degree in which it has been believed, that doctrine has sat on mankind for ages, clouding the sun above, darkening the earth below, radi

ating anguish between. By its arbitrary standard of award, decreeing an infinite doom for a finite dereliction, it has depicted a flaming abyss of woe awaiting us, with no way of escape save by a forensic artifice that overthrows the principles of reason and morality. It has thus introduced a distressing contradiction into our natural estimates of merit and blame. This supposed opposition between divine revelation on one side, and human logic and sentiment on the other; this dread looking for the endless perdition of the soul in consequence of too great love for the world, could not but be prolific in discord and misery. Vividly believing the doctrine, who could keep his mind in healthy poise before the appalling illustrations preachers have used to enforce it? - such illustrations as the supposition that if a little bird were once in a million centuries to carry a speck of earth in its bill to some distant star, until the whole globe was thus removed, even then, the victim, writhing in his dungeon of fire, would be no nearer to his release than he was at the beginning!

Although the encroachments of sounder thought have undermined the popular belief in the whole system of ideas on which this superstition rests, it yet has authority enough to make the lives of multitudes of Christians inconsistent and unhappy. So late as the year 1864, the celebrated English scholar and divine, John Henry Newman, made the following deliberate assertion. "It would be better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation, in extremest agony, than that one human being should commit a single venial sin, tell one wilful untruth, or steal one poor farthing." Such an absurd enormity of sentiment no scientific or healthy morality can tolerate for an instant. God evidently thinks differently from John Henry Newman, since he chooses to have myriads of sins constantly committed rather than destroy the great frame of nature. And what a piece of impious arrogance it is for any man thus coolly to assume that a hypothetical figment of his brain is preferable to the actual arrangements of the Omniscient God! The notion is a result of premises fur

nished by morbid dreams of ignorance and superstition. It supposes that the petty folly or wrong of an instant deserves to be repaid in everlasting torture; that God will balance our momentary aberrations of sin with his motionless infinitude of wrath. But in truth it is a blank irrationality thus to take purely relative and evanescent things out of their relations, and match them with the absolute fixtures of the infinite. Anger, unforgivingness, prisons, fetters, scourges, — all such imagery is utterly inapplicable to God, disembodied souls, the free spaces of the immaterial world. A human spirit, after the death of the body, chained in a dungeon of flaming gloom, is a conception wholly incredible to any mind sufficiently informed and unprejudiced to command respect for its judgment. Henceforth, then, be the horrible conceit that the soul which loves the world too keenly must go to a hopeless hell after death, no more regarded. Let no such thing be suggested, but something very different, whenever again we hear those tremendous words, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul!"

Let that text suggest a truer idea. For if God never revengefully hurls us into a lake of brimstone, and then bars all exit, he does by regular methods of nature and grace uphold the unbroken sovereignty of his laws, and constantly bring into our experience the most solemn retributions of good and evil according to our deserts. Although endless condemnation to a torture-house be a fictitious horror; nevertheless, sin and virtue, loss and gain, salvation and perdition, are the supreme realities, of supreme moment to every one of us. It is these with which the impressive language of the text deals. Let us, therefore, for our guidance, try to pluck out the mystery of that language, and set its truth and its morals in a clear light.

First, then, in what sense can any man properly be said, even by a metaphor, to gain the whole world? Money is a symbol for all material goods. It is a talisman commanding the external means for the enjoyment of the uses of the earth. The millionnaire of our time has a servant at his beck who more than realizes the wonders performed