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woman was an intelligent, God-fearing peasant, who had never succeeded in getting rest for her spirit; but, having fallen in with one of Vinet's books, she was persuaded that, if she could only see him, he would be able to give her the needed guidance. With much difficulty, she got admisIsion to his room. We can fancy the anxious relatives enjoining her to detain him as short a time as possible. But Vinet, when he heard her story, was profoundly interested, and spent the whole day with her, up to the hour of the last stage-coach. The account which the woman gave to her own pastor, on returning home, was interesting. "Well," said the pastor, "have you been able to see him?" "Yes," she replied, "and at last I have found one who has humbled me.” “Humbled you! M. Vinet is not the man to humble any one." "Yes, humbled me, and humbled me profoundly. In contact with his humility and goodness, I felt all my pride give way." Then she told how thoroughly he comprehended her case, how patiently he spent the whole day with her, and all in such a homely way that she felt as if he was her brother. A few days after, Vinet sent her a book newly published, as if she had been one of his chosen friends.

The anxiety of busy men to make up for any little want of attention to persons whom they ought to have known illustrates the same spirit of Christian chivalry. In the correspondence of Dr. Chalmers there is a characteristic letter to the daughter of the late Sir David Brewster, in the following terms:

"19 YORK PLACE, May 28, 1845. "MY DEAR MISS BREWSTER: I can imagine nothing more monstrous than the stupidity into which I fear I must have fallen, if it was really you who sat near the moderator's chair this evening, and on whom I speculated in my own mind for hours as one I ought to have known. It is far the most mortifying instance, though many such have occurred, of my utter want of the organ of individuality; but I never could have fancied it possible that it ever could have happened in the case of one in whom (forgive me for saying it) I feel so much interest. It would comfort me effectually if you would have the goodness to let me know where and when it is that I may have the pleasure of waiting upon you. Ever believe me, my dear madam, yours most affectionately and truly,

"THOMAS CHALMERS."

Of all the instructive instances of busy lives we have, that of our Lord is far the most remarkable. It is only when we pay minute attention to the notices of his labors that we can understand what a crowded life he led. Galilee

alone, through the whole of which he made several circuits, embraced, according to Josephus, two hundred and four towns and villages; and, besides Galilee, we read of his visiting the remote north, at Cæsarea Philippi, the remote northwest, in the coasts of Tyre and Sidon; we know of his passing through Samaria, of his being on the east of Jordan, and of his being often in and near Jerusalem. Throughout every part of this wide district, he not only preached, taught, and healed, but he had numberless collisions with opponents; he lived under a constant apprehension of attack; he carried on the training of the apostles, and in their slowness of heart, forgetfulness, want of faith, and personal strifes, he encountered a serious addition to his burdens, although it would be harsh to suppose that on the whole their company did not cheer and refresh him. The strain on the bodily energies in a life involving so much physical movement and labor must have been very great; the strain on the nervous system where there was so much excitement, and where such vital interests were at stake, must have been even greater. And yet he appears to have gone through all his labor with marvelous calmness and self-possession. From the narrative of his life, nothing is more remote than the air of bustle or hurry; it has, indeed, quite a wonderful aspect as of Oriental calm and leisure. Owing to his systematic way of working, he was always beforehand, always ready. His discourses have a marvelously finished air, as if they had been all matured before they were spoken. His very answers to casual objectors were marvelously clean-cut and finished. He never found himself in a situation in which he was disconcerted, or at a loss how to act. And, in his mind, one thing was never allowed to jostle another, however full it might be of projects, or however burdened with responsibility. The last scenes of his life exemplify this orderliness and business-like composure of mind in a wonderful way. And what we have already adverted to as so chivalrous in busy men, when turning aside to care for others

"The mind at leisure from itself,

To soothe and sympathize,"

was singularly beautiful in him. The farewell discourse, the intercessory prayer, the healing of Malchus, the look turned on Peter, the word to the daughters of Jerusalem, the prayer for his murderers, the promise to the thief, the commending of his mother to the beloved disciplewhat wonderful consideration for others did all these imply, in the midst of his own great agony? How well he knew how to conquer the snares of overwork, and turn everything to the highest ends of life! How wonderfully the divine shines

through the human, without overlaying it in that before. It has its drawbacks and its dangers, unexampled career! but is not without compensations, and even blessings.

We have glanced at some of the phenomena of that busy mode of life which seems to be more common in this age than in most that have gone

W. G. BLAIKIE (Macmillan's Magazine).

WE

THE RESTORATION OF THE JEWS.

were told, a few days ago, that an old project had recently been revived at Constantinople, and that the Porte, despairing of raising money in any ordinary way, had offered to sell Palestine to the Jewish Alliance, of course for cash down, and to allow the restoration of the Jews as a people to their own land. The country would be declared a principality, with a Jewish prince or president, guaranteed against interference so long as a fixed tribute was regularly paid. We did not, and do not, believe the story, which would be most unacceptable to the religious party among Mohammedans, and probably owes its origin to the hopefulness of some students of prophecy among ourselves; but it is constantly revived, and most Englishmen seem unaware of the immense difficulties in the way of any such project. The Jews, it is said, are very rich; they have more than enough people for so small a country; and they would, of course, be most delighted to recover their nationality, and recommence in a revived temple the antique ritual of their worship. Why should they not buy Palestine? We rather doubt, we may remark, en passant, whether the Jews, as a people, are exceptionally rich; whether their six millions, as compared with any other small nation of six millions or less-say, even the Irish or the Belgians are not exceptionally poor. They own no country, to begin with, and the fee-simple of a country is worth many millions a year. Take that away from the English rich, and what proportion of wealth would remain? Half? Then, though the Western Jews are well off and in many families of quite exceptional wealth, the Jewish millions in Poland, Hungary, Russia, and Southeastern Europe are very poor, own in purely agricultural countries scarcely any land, and are not allowed to exercise their remarkable gifts for the smaller commerce, for shopkeeping, and for • money-dealing, with anything like sufficient freedom. There is hunger in Jewish Poland very often. The average income of the Jews of the world must be very small, and their savings wholly incommensurate with the popular notion in England and France of their abounding wealth. We may, however, let that pass. The richer Jews

could, we doubt not, capitalize any revenue the Porte receives from Palestine, and guarantee a yearly backsheesh besides, but it may be strongly doubted whether they would be willing to do anything of the kind. Their leaders are the Jews of the West, and the Jews of the West are not very enthusiastic about anything but their own social claims, and perhaps art, and would, we believe, agree that the possession of their own country would be a great burden to them. They would at once become Judeans as well as Jews— that is, would be aliens in every other country in the world, an immense loss to them, politically and socially. At present, though still singularly separate in many of their feelings and ideas, they are regarded as citizens by the country in which they happen to be born, and can and do rise high in all departments of life; but with a separate nationality they would be regarded as foreigners, and would in no long time be treated as such. There is little prejudice in England and France against foreigners, Germans rising in the one country and Italians in the other. But it would be difficult in England for a foreigner to enter the government, as Sir G. Jessel might now do; or to become a minister in France, as M. Crémieux or M. Fould did; or to lead a great party in the state, as Herr Lasker has done for many years in Germany. The Jews would not be trusted as they are now, and their professions of patriotism, quite true in many countries, more especially in France and Germany, instead of being reckoned in their favor, would be accounted slightly discreditable, as indicating want of proper feeling toward their own land, with its unique history. People do not admire the Greeks very much, but a Greek who hated Greece would be detestable. The Jews even now feel the annoyance of their separateness, and always make it their first claim in any country to be treated as citizens of that country, even submitting to the conscription and accepting commissions without any obvious, or it may be any real, reluctance. To lose this position would be a serious loss, especially in Eastern Europe, for it might involve the loss of civil status altogether. The position of the race in Eastern Europe, broadly stated, is

from the heat. In the most wind-swept provinces of Russia there are Jews by thousands ap

of Calcutta have resided there—that is, under extreme conditions of heat-for a hundred years, and remain not only among the healthiest of the community, but exceptionally fair, far more fair than the Jews of Western Europe, who have grown darker and more sallow in the narrow and squalid quarters to which persecution confined them.

this: that while the peoples are decidedly disposed to persecute the Jews, and the governments are more or less unfriendly, both are re-parently quite acclimatized, while Jewish families luctant, owing to the intellectual influence of the West, to seem to persecute on religious grounds. They prefer to say that the Jews would absorb all national wealth. They could, however, and would, disable the Jews from sitting in the national assemblies, from holding many offices, and from entering some employments, on the ground that they were foreigners; and the West, which still keeps up the exclusion of foreigners in theory, though in practice, no doubt, the principle is waived, could not even seriously remonstrate. No country, it would be said, could be expected to allow a third of its representation, or of its military commissions, or of its magistracy, or even of its public-houses, to be occupied by foreigners, belonging to a state which possibly might be at war with them, or actively hostile to their policy. No doubt the anti-Jewish feeling might die away, but it also might not, and it is exceedingly probable that it would not. There are signs abroad which suggest that the Jews are by no means altogether safe. In America, society has quite recently displayed a sort of loathing for them. Eastern Europe bitterly resents their adhesion to the Mussulman, or rather the Asiatic, cause, and is inclined to rank them rather with the oppressors who are falling, than with the liberated classes who are rising into power. Their success in commerce creates jealousy, and their habit in the East of acting on certain occasions as corporations arouses both dislike and dread, which, in some places, such as Salonica, are not entirely unreasonable. To become aliens-citizens of a state quite separate, yet not European, and not strong enough to extort redress by fleets and armies-would decidedly not improve their position in the world.

But they would depart for their own land? We do not know why they should. They seem to like every country they enter, very rarely abandoning it, except under compulsion, and they are apparently independent of climate. It is probable that during the ages which the race has passed in Ghettos, Jewries, Jew quarters, and the obscure parts of cities and villages, certain liabilities to disease have been eliminated from the Jews, only the exceptionally strong families surviving chronic malaria. It is said they do not die of cholera, and, though that is an illusion, they do live under circumstances in which healthy Yorkshire laborers would die like flies. At all events, they are more independent of climate than any other people, and can live and flourish in the villages on the great Russian plain, which Scotchmen find cold; and in the marshes of Bengal, which many Asiatics pronounce unendurable

They would have little motive in going to Judea, where there are no cities, no business, and no attraction of climate for them; and, even if a strong religious or historic impulse drew them there, they would find endless difficulties. We suppose a government could be organized, though it is remarkable that the nation has no great family in its midst universally accepted as its representative house; and no aristocracy except the reputed descendants of the active section of the Levites. The two great houses of the Jews, in the political sense, the house of David and the Asmoneans, have perished utterly, the last Prince of the Captivity, who was by universal tradition Hebrew, and we think by evidence of the royal line, dying at Cadiz in the sixteenth century, and persecution to a great extent wore down all distinctions of grade, though Jewish families once great in Spain do, we believe, exist. Still a government could be formed, but the difficulty would be a people. Judea is a country which might be prosperous, beautiful, and fertile, if it were "improved" for half a century—that is, if the hills were replanted, if the water supply were renewed, and if the soil were resolutely cultivated and manured; but that is not work to which the modern Jews are adapted. They must number in out-of-the-way places many tillers of the soil, but they are not voluntarily peasants anywhere. We do not know that their writers have ever explained this remarkable change in the habits of a purely agricultural people, but they acknowledge and lament it; and we suppose the truth to be this, that, having no special aptitude for agriculture, and having a special aptitude for other occupations, they have by degrees come to dislike and abandon the one which, whatever we may say of its attractions, has in every country and every age fallen to the least intellectual and ambitious of the community. It is most honorable to plow, but all are more comfortable than the plowman. Be that as it may, the Jews would find the greatest difficulty in becoming a nation of cultivators, and would, we conceive, employ other hands, possibly under some system of semislavery, under which there would, in Palestine, be only room for a very small portion of their numbers, not so many, probably, as there are

Greeks in the present Greece. Even they would find maintenance very difficult, and the development of independent political strength nearly impossible. They might obtain Arab help, and gradually extend themselves but in the existing circumstances of the world a Jewish kingdom or republic on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean, with the desert behind it, and no carrying trade for that trade will go by sea, if the Duke of Sutherland builds railways from now till A. D. 2000-would be a rather feeble and pov

erty-stricken affair, not half so attractive to the
community as the great cities which the North-
ern barbarians, who were savages when the Mac-
cabees were encouraging learning, have built up
in the West. We fear the Jews of England will
prefer London, even in this weather, to the deli-
cious sky of Syria; and that it will not be given
to this age, which has seen so many nations rise
and fall, to witness the restoration of the Jews to
Palestine, and the renewal of the daily sacrifice
on Mount Moriah.
London Spectator.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

particular evening, and to have quietly seen that

A DANGEROUS CLASS IN AUTHORITY. their injunctions were respected. The whole question was between the proprietor and the police, and

T is unnecessary to say that in every community the law provides means for adequately and rightly

I be part the people dealing To have

great respect for law and authority; but then law and authority should also entertain a proper respect for the people. While it is incumbent upon us all to uphold order, it is equally incumbent upon us to uphold the safeguards that protect the liberties of the citizen. We are equally in danger from the excesses of dangerous classes on the one hand and from usurpations of authority on the other; and hence, while right-minded people give support to all necessary regulations and restraints, they should take care that the authority which enforces these regulations and restraints does so within legal limits. In the light of these axioms let us look at an event that occurred in New York recently.

On Saturday evening, January 17th, a number of policemen made a sudden descent, or "raid," as it is called, upon a dance-house in Bleecker Street. All the occupants of the house-proprietor, attendants, dancers, spectators-numbering some three hundred persons, were marched off to various station-houses and locked up for the night. The next morning they were brought before a police-magistrate and most of them fined. It does not appear from the accounts that anything was going on in the dancehouse of a turbulent or legally objectionable character. The house had been opened that evening just as it had been for many evenings successively before, and people had flocked in for the kind of amusement given there. The questions, therefore, that promptly arise are: Upon what ground was this place amenable to law on that particular evening more than upon any other? Upon what warrant or authority was this descent planned and the wholesale arrests made? Was this dance-house legally or illegally open to the public? If it was an illegal place of entertainment, the plain duty of the police would have been to have ordered it closed long before this

gal amusement to remain open a day after its real nature had been discovered was, of course, a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the police. If, however, it was legally open, what right, then, had the police to make a "raid" upon it? Did it by any process shift from legal to illegal ground on that particular night? No such affirmation is made. It is true the house had been complained of as disorderly. As a disorderly house it was certainly amenable to law-that is, on competent testimony a warrant should have been issued, the proprietor arrested, and upon sufficient evidence of the truth of the allegation his license canceled-for it seems that this illegal place had been legally licensed-and, if otherwise amenable to the law, he should have been prosecuted, tried in the court organized for jurisdiction over such offenses, and if found guilty punished according to the statute. Or, in case of a disturbance in the place, it would have been proper for the police to have forced an entrance and arrested all persons found breaking the peace. The means for legal remedy in the case were ample, straightforward, and as plain as day; but the police thought fit to adopt a method that was a greater violation of the law than anything alleged against the proprietor or the inmates. The whole transaction was a high-handed piece of despotism of a kind that should never be tolerated in any self-respecting community. In this wholesale capture every arrest was distinctly illegal, although it is very likely that under a legitimate process some persons could have been held. But the majority were nothing more than idle spectators, allured into a public place by bright lights and the promise of amusement, and some no doubt were ignorant of its reputation. It is doubtless very bad taste to visit a place of this character, but if exhibitions of bad taste are contrary to law some of our churches as well as

dance-houses will have to be closed. Some of the inmates of the Bleecker Street house were very likely no better than they should be-but it is not yet a principle of law that a roomful of people may be arrested and incarcerated because there is a pickpocket among them. As for the persons who fell victims to misused authority on that January night, the worst thing we know of them is their littleness of spirit. They did not seem to know their rights as citizens, but slunk away after paying their fines as if they had been really guilty of some offense.

The submission of the men arrested was deplorable, but the indifference of the general public was worse. Had this dance-house been a reputable place, there would no doubt have been a great explosion of wrath on the part of the people; but, as the principle is the same whether a dance-house or a fashionable club falls a victim to despotism, a lofty public sentiment would make no discrimination between them. We fear, indeed, that, while the public would exhibit indignation in one case, they are disposed to look upon the other as simply a good joke. Their feeling in the matter is wholly personal and social. It is possible, also, that petty acts of despotism on the part of the police do not seem of much importance to many persons. An act of usurpation on the part of the Federal or a State government would doubtless arouse all their spirit, especially if the act had been committed by their political opponents; but police affairs they consider undignified and insignificant, and affecting none but inferior people. And yet the police stand in very intimate relations to us all; and, although to be always living under the likelihood of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment for purely fictitious offenses would not be as serious a form of despotism as that which many communities have endured, it would be intensely galling, and should not be submitted to for a day. But there is a lack, we are sorry to say, of that highspirited intelligence which resents the first encroachment of authority under whatever guise it may come. The cause of this, we suspect, lies in the fact that our people have always been too secure in their liberties to look with alarm upon the small beginnings of despotism. The English people, on the other hand, have wrested their liberties and privileges from unwilling hands after centuries of struggle; nearly every privilege they possess or liberty they enjoy has been won after resistance and by blood. We have had one fierce struggle for political independence; but even then our personal liberties were scarcely at stake, and since then they have seemed so founded on the rocks that, while we give an intellectual assent to the axioms and sentiments that warn us to guard these privileges well, we yet do not feel intensely and deeply in the matter. We are not watchful, jealous of encroachment, quick to insist that while the law must be obeyed the administrators of the law shall be bound by the law. Let us say that if this spirit does not rouse itself, we in the great cities, who have organized formidable means for restraining the dangerous classes, will find that

we have built up a power that may become as dangerous as the evil it has overcome.

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

IT is told of the late Dr. Magendie, the eminent physiologist, that, in closing a series of his lectures at the College of France, he addressed the students of the medical school in the following terms: "Gentlemen, you have learned from my disquisitions, if they have been of any benefit to you, that there is no such thing as a science of medicine, and that the practice of medicine-empirical at the best-must be based upon observation and experiments, many of which are as likely to injure as to help. No doubt, when you go out into the world and begin to practice for yourselves, you will find the recovery of patients apparently consequent upon your efforts; but let me tell you what the agencies really are that coöperate in the cure of disease: nature does much; careful nursing does much; doctors devilish little."

This can hardly have been regarded as encouraging by the young men who were about to enter upon their career as professors of the healing art; but even so scanty a measure of merit can scarcely be conceded to the medical practice of a century or two ago. In the memoirs of Mrs. Delany (reviewed on another page) there are many curious details of life and society in England during the eighteenth century, but none so startling and suggestive as those which reveal the methods and remedies then adopted in the treatment of disease. If these revelations are to be believed-and they are evidently entirely trustworthy-then it must be admitted that the physician should properly have been numbered among the perils of life at that unhappy period with plague, pestilence, and famine.

Mrs. Delany was a member of an ancient and opulent family, and among such families the troubles of an infant began with its birth, for it was the custom of the time not only for mothers not to nurse their own offspring, but to subject them to something which bore a close resemblance to what in our day is called "baby-farming." We read repeatedly of babies being delivered over to farmers' wives for nursing and “bringing up,” and it appears from certain items in Mrs. Delany's narrative that even those who had the reputation of being remarkably good mothers would know hardly anything of their own children until the period of infancy was past. The kind of treatment which such infants received, even when placed under the most favorable conditions, may be inferred from a casual sentence in a letter from Mrs. Granville, mother of Mrs. Delany, which conveys the cheering news that her little grandchild (an infant not yet weaned) was “getting better of its sickness," in proof of which it had just eaten for dinner some "buttered turnips"!

That frequent illnesses should result from such a regimen might naturally be inferred, and, as a matter of fact, children seldom make their appearance in

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