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and not in the New; that all the old geologic horses died out in the Western World before the era of man? Supposing him right, will not the horse and the sun have to fight the battle out between them? "What the sun could not do with all this vast continent at his disposal," might the horse justly say, "could have been done had I been on the spot. Remember the Venetians, then, O Americans! and set up my pawing image in bronze over the portals of your national St. Mark's!"

Dr. Draper's method of political prophecy is a very simple one. It amounts in substance to this: Given a new State or group of States, run the isothermal lines under which they fall around the globe, then read the history of the nations through which they pass, and you have in essentials the history of the State or States. The July isothermals of 77° and 84° take in the lower tier of our Southern States. We follow the lines across the Atlantic, and strike the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Carthage and Alexandria, and the later Saracen civilization of North Africa, rise assuringly before us. We enter Asia, and pass through the Holy Land, and are still farther delighted, though perhaps a little surprised. We cross the Tigris and Euphrates, and Nineveh and Babylon cheer our future hopes. Then Central Persia, land of poets, with Ispahan, its magnificent capital. Eastward beyond Afghanistan we plunge into the Himalayas, and our road of empire becomes a squirrel-track, and runs up a tree. But this is enough to satisfy any reasonable sectional pride. Why need the South care, should it lose the control of the cotton market? Cotton market! It is in the zone that produces Hannibals as soldiers, Euclids as philosophers, Ptolemys as astronomers, Augustines and Athanasiuses as theologians, Carthages that dispute with Rome the empire of the world, Judaisms and Christianities as religions. Dr. Draper is soon clear out of sight of Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans, of clay-eaters, sand-hillers, and all the yet world-famous productions of this sunny clime. He hears Hafiz singing, and Isaiah prophesying, and Hannibal shouting to his elephant cavalry. He sees the wife of Asdrubal flinging herself into the flames,

and Zenobia of Palmyra fighting the Emperor Aurelian, and Cleopatra sucked by her sweet baby asp rather than grace the triumph of her conqueror, and knows from these facts that the women of our South will be patriotic, belligerent, and death-defying. The least hint of a striking characteristic sets him off, and he beholds the same quality already incarnated in Georgia and Alabama. The Carthaginians were remorselessly cruel to prisoners. We might have anticipated Andersonville from the fact. The climate-engendered passions of man are at the bottom of the phenomenon. Algiers makes even Frenchmen suffocate their enemies in caves. What, we are tempted to ask, made the peasants of frozen Russia bury alive whole companies of French prisoners; made the farnorthern Huron Indians so exquisite in devices of torture for their captives? Questions of this kind we are continually tempted to ask, as we see vast generalizations made on the strength of single picturesque incidents.

It is in this way, as we think, that Dr. Draper injures his cause. Sonora has dells and glades like those of Persia, and the same climate: its literature will be rich in love-songs. The scenery of New Mexico is arid, stern, and forbidding, like that of Palestine; it will reproduce the religious aspirations of Judæa. So thoroughly do these superficial resemblances carry away our author as to lead him into glaring contradictions. In one place he tells us, that the mind of the North contents itself with a few ideas, but fixes itself intently on them; while that of the South is continually prompted to a superfluity of them, with which, however, it deals only superficially. But-while we are striving to cònquer our illusion, that cotton, negroes, and political supremacy, were about the only three ideas of our own South; while our North was crazy over German theology, social science, total abstinence, woman's rights, prison discipline, University reform-we find ourselves suddenly apprised, that the profoundest writers on Theology, Law, Mathematics, Optics, Astronomy, and all the highest branches of human knowledge, were the natural products of this favored zone in the Old World.

The isothermals attest one fact, and one only, - that the degree of heat existing under them does not forbid a civilization brilliant, warlike, learned, and polished. Does not forbid it! That the temperature there existing makes it, as it does the palms and coffee-trees, is another thing. To effect a civilization in this chosen zone, the sun has had to call to his aid the Tyrian, the Roman, the Goth, the Saracen; and even then long lapses intervened of absolute stagnation and death. And this seems the law in every zone. The fierce Scandinavian pirate descends on the northern coast of France. He imparts new life to the race he subjugates, and receives new life in return. His marvellous career begins. He conquers England, lords it all along the Mediterranean, storms the ramparts of Jerusalem. A thousand other mixtures of blood fail. This hits the mark. Innumerable separate influences, that no man can compute, much less foresee, forces their energies on a single point, and we have the grand result. To assert that the sun of Northern France was the sole and single cause were a wild procedure. We can prophesy as rationally that Mount Blanc or Chimborazo will breed Swiss or Quito poets, as that New Mexico will breed Isaiahs and Ezekiels,with the sole advantage in favor of New Mexico, that no man can positively assert of it that it will not, as he can Mount Blanc that it never has inspired a worthy native line.

We regret the more these rash and precipitate generalizions of Dr. Draper, because they so frequently bring supremely important truths in immediate juxtaposition with ill-founded inductions, at which the reason of his reader properly takes offence. He has sketched so admirably the outlines of our national history, has brought so vividly before the mind the vast ranges of climate and production our country embraces, has illustrated so richly the enormous influence exerted by physical agencies on human thought and action, that we hate to have the impression marred. No other book on American history is so calculated to teach important lessons, and lead to sharp observation, wise reflection, as this. Our imaginations are fatally torpid. They rise to only the feeblest conceptions of the vast and varied influ

VOL. LXXXIV. - NEW SERIES, VOL. V. NO. II.

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ences that are moulding our national life, through our northern snows and torrid heats, our enormous river-courses and continental valleys, our wide-ranging deserts and mountains filled with gold and silver, our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It is a good thing to have our attention called to our Persia, our Palestine, our Tartary, our Egypt, our France, our Kamtchatka, if only the analogies be not pushed too far. All this jogs the sluggish imagination, and helps us to realize the real data of the problem, by showing us what varied types of civilization have grown up upon no greater range and diversities of soil and climate than our own. As yet we see but the bare stage on which the great drama is to be enacted. We steam up the Mississippi eighteen hundred miles from the Balize to St. Paul, from the orange-grove and palmetto to the pine and hackmatack, and ninety-hundreths of the shores on either hand are a wilderness. We need to steam in imagination up a river that shall start us from Egypt and land us in Berlin, a river whose banks are sites of a Memphis, an Alexandria, a Naples, a Florence, a Munich, a Dresden, — not to impress us with the idea that we can foresee the reproduction of just such civilizations, but to set our imagination flowing, to help us to rise to the conception of the latent forces that shall modify man buried up in those orange-groves, cane-fields, cypress forests, cotton and tobacco lands, cornfields, meadows sweet with new cut hay along which we are sailing. And so with the lines we may run east and west, carrying us from Atlantic seaports, over the Alleghanies, through lands of hill and dale, across vast alluvial stretches, across vast rolling prairies, across arid deserts, over snow-clad mountain-ranges, on, on, till we look toward Asia over the broad Pacific. These are imaginary journeys through the future which Dr. Draper helps us to take, and which he lights up with vivid distinctness.

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Whatever the solution of the precise causes, physical or metaphysical, that built up antagonistic ideas and antagonistic systems in the North and the South, Dr. Draper's appreciation of the essence of those distinctions—of the political complications they drew on, of the passions and convictions

they engendered, and of the characters they called out into prominence cannot be too highly praised. He has a fine, sympathetic imagination, which enables him to throw himself into the situation and feelings of either party in the great controversy. He sums up, with rare fairness, the honest complaints brought by the one against the other, and comprehends why they were felt to be honest. He helps to make the belligerent sections understand, and so both pity and respect, one another. We anticipate great pleasure and profit in going on with him through the scenes of the war, and heartily commend his first volume to the reading public.

ART. VI.-ON SOME RESULTS OF THE VOLUNTARY SYSTEM, ESPECIALLY IN OUR COUNTRY PARISHES.

WE of this generation are apt to look back, with a certain admiring envy, to the condition of things ecclesiastical half a century ago, when a parish settlement was a life-tenure; when the minister's modest stipend was a pretty certain life-annuity, and the parsonage a secure homestead; when the congregation was made up of the friends of one's youth and the companions of his children; when a ministerial association was a life-long friendship; when the minister's name and memory made the one most sure and permanent thing that marked the character of the town, and his position-farther removed, it is true, from wealth than from poverty-had yet attraction enough to be the goal of ambition, and the honorable reward of merit for a long succession of men of the best scholarship that the country was then able to furnish.

We have heard a great deal of natural lamentation and regret at the passing away of this state of things; and we have consoled ourselves, as best we could, partly by reflecting on the causes that made it inevitable, and partly by considerations of the immense gain, intellectual and moral, which the community has made in other directions. But, while the statements usually made on this subject have contained

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