culties great. The slow but ominous transfer of power from superior to inferior types of men, as shown in city councils, legislatures, and Congress, has told with withering effect on the growth of true political ability. Debased as our politics are, they do not invite, and hardly even admit, the higher and stronger faculties to a part in them. Liberal education is robbed of its best continuance and consummation, in so far as it is shut out from that noblest field of human effort, the direction of affairs of state; that career of combined thought and action where all the forces of the mind are called forth, and of which the objects and results are to those of the average American politician what the discoveries and inventions of applied science are to the legerdemain of a street juggler. The professions still remain open, and in these comparatively limited fields the results are good. Literature offers another field; but here the temptation is powerful to write or speak down to the level of that vast average of education which makes the largest returns in profit and celebrity. The best literature we have has followed the natural law and sprung up in two or three places where educated intelligence had reached a point high enough to promise it a favorable hearing. For the rest, our writers address themselves to an audience so much accustomed to light food that they have no stomach for the strong. The public demand has its effect, too, on the pulpit. It is pleasanter to tell the hearer what he likes to hear than to tell him what he needs; and the love of popularity is not confined to the laity.

From one point of view, the higher education is of no great use among us. It is not necessary to make a millionaire, a party leader, such as our party leaders are, or a popular preacher or writer. So little is it needed for such purposes, that the country is full of so-called "practical men," who cry out against it in scorn. Yet, from a true point of view, it is of supreme use and necessity, and a deep responsibility rests on those who direct it. What shall be its aims? Literature, scholarship, and physical science, are all of importance; but, considered in themselves, their place is subordinate, for they cannot alone meet the requirements of the times. It has been said that liberal culture tends to separate men from the nation at large, and form them into a class apart; and, without doubt, this is to a certain degree true of the merely æsthetic, literary, or scholastic culture. What we most need is a broad and masculine education, bearing on questions of society

and government; not repelling from active life, but preparing for it and impelling toward it. The discipline of the university. should be a training for the arena; and, within the past few years, no little progress has been made in this direction.

Some half a century ago, a few devoted men began what seemed a desperate crusade against a tremendous national evil. American slavery has now passed into history. It died a death of violence, to our shame be it said; for the nation had not virtue, temperance, and wisdom enough, to abolish it peacefully and harmlessly; but it is dead. We would not compare the agitation against it to the far more complex and less animating movement by which alone our present evils can be met and checked. Conviction and enthusiasm, with very little besides, served the purpose of the abolition agitators. Their appeal was to sentiment and conscience, not to reason; and their work demanded a kind of men very different from those demanded by the work of political regeneration. The champion of the new reform will need no whit less enthusiasm, but it must be tempered with judgment and armed with knowledge. One idea will not serve him. He must have many, all tending to one end; an integrity that can neither be tempted nor ensnared, and a courage that nothing can shake.

Here, then, is a career worthy of the best, and demanding the best, for none but they can grapple with the complicated mischiefs of our politics. Those gallant youths, and others such as they, who were so ready to lay down life for their country, may here find a strife more difficult, and not less honorable. If there is virtue in them for an effort so arduous, then it is folly to despair. If a depraved political system sets them aside in favor of meaner men, and denies them the career to which the best interests of the nation call them, then let them attack this depraved system, and, in so doing, make a career of their own. The low politician is not a noble foe, but he is strong and dangerous enough to make it manly to fight him; and the cause of his adversary is the cause of the people, did they but know it; or at least of that part of the people that is worth the name. No doubt, the strife is strangely unequal; for on one side are ranged all the forces of self-interest, always present and always active; and on the other only duty and patriotism. But if the virtue and reason of the nation can be as well organized as its folly and knavery are or

ganized to-day, a new hope will rise upon us, and they who can achieve such a result will not lack their reward. The "literary feller" may yet make himself a practical force, and, in presence of the public opinion which he has evoked, the scurvy crew who delight to gibe at him may be compelled to disguise themselves in garments of unwonted decency.

It is in the cities that the diseases of the body politic are gathered to a head, and it is here that the need of attacking them is most urgent. Here the dangerous classes are most numerous and strong, and the effects of flinging the suffrage to the mob are most disastrous. Here the barbarism that we have armed and organized stands ready to overwhelm us. Our cities have become a prey. Where the carcass is, the vultures gather together. The industrious are taxed to feed the idle, and offices are distributed to perpetuate abuses and keep knaves in power. Some of our city councils, where every ward sends its representatives, each according to its nature, offer a curious and instructive spectacle; for here one sees men of mind and character striving for honest government under vast and ever-increasing difficulties, mingled with vicious boors in whose faces brute, knave, and fool, contend which shall write his mark most vilely.

The theory of inalienable rights becomes an outrage to justice and common-sense, when it hands over great municipal corporations, the property of those who hold stock in them, to the keeping of greedy and irresponsible crowds controlled by adventurers as reckless as themselves, whose object is nothing but plunder. But the question is not one of politics; it is one of business, and political rights, inalienable or otherwise, are not in any true sense involved in it. The city which can so reorganize itself that those who supply the means of supporting it shall have the chief control over their expenditure, will lead the way in abolishing an anomaly as ridiculous as it is odious, and give an impulse to its own prosperity which will impel other cities to follow its example. That better class of citizens who have abandoned civic affairs in disgust, will gradually return and acquire in municipal administration a training which may avail them afterward in wider fields. The reform of cities would be a long and hopeful step toward the reform of the States and the nation. FRANCIS PARKMAN.

II.

INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS OF THE UNITED
STATES.

THE obligations which every state is under to every other state are determined by those general principles which the community of civilized nations have adopted by usage or consent, express or implied, as the rules governing their relations. They are, of course, in all cases modified by the conventional stipulations which may exist between any two or more of them. The law of nations, as accepted by any state, becomes a part of its municipal institutions; and when a portion of a country secedes or separates itself from the other parts, forming a new state or independent community, it must be understood to retain the rules which the whole country had recognized in its international relations. This is emphatically so as regards treaties in which the other contracting parties have an interest.

When we assumed our place among the nations of the world, England, though she had had many treaties in which a different rule prevailed, regarded as the consuetudinary law the doctrine of the Consolato del Mare, which gave immunity to neutral property on board of an enemy's ship, but confiscated the property of an enemy on board a neutral ship. Indeed, it was not long before the war of the American Revolution that the rule according immunity to enemy's property in neutral vessels came into vogue, it being advocated by Hubner, the champion of the rights of neutrals, whose book, "De la Saisie des Batimens Neutres," appeared in 1759; while Vattel's work, published about the same period, was the vade-mecum of international law, both for Englishmen and Americans, till the appearance of Wheaton's "Elements." Vattel maintained that, "if we find enemy's effects on board a neutral ship, we seize them by the right of war.”*

* I have now before me an edition in English of Vattel, printed in Northampton,

Though our prize tribunals followed, during the Revolutionary War, the rules of the British court of admiralty, the treaty of 1778 adopted, as between us and France, the rule that free ships should make free goods; and no treaty has been concluded by the United States adopting a different principle, except that of 1794 with Great Britain, which expired before the War of 1812. The maxim "free ships free goods" has, however, been attached to different rules respecting the property of neutrals in enemy's vessels. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that the treaty of 1795 with Spain, which made "free ships free goods," did not necessarily carry with it the maxim, "enemy ships enemy goods." The embarrassments arising from a different rule as to the two belligerents, when one of the contracting parties is at war with a third power and the other neutral, induced, in 1819, a change in the treaty, to the effect that the flag of the neutral should only cover the property of an enemy whose government acknowledged the principle. The rule thus modified has since been applied in our treaties with the American states, and in other cases.

It was before the recognition. of our independence by the mother-country that the famous declaration of armed neutrality, bearing date the 20th of February, 1780, was issued by the Empress of Russia. The terms of it, as communicated to the courts of London, Versailles, and Madrid, were:

1. That all neutral vessels may freely trade from one port to another, and upon the coasts of nations at war.

2. That the goods belonging to the subjects of the powers at war shall be free in neutral vessels, except contraband articles.*

3. That the empress, as to contraband goods, bound herself by what is mentioned in the tenth and eleventh articles of her treaty of 1766 with Great Britain, extending these obligations to all powers at war.†

4. That, to determine what is meant by the blockade of a port, Massachusetts, in 1805, which was used as a class-book in the sophomore class of Columbia College in 1815.

* It may be noted that the "declaration " is silent as to neutral goods in enemy's ships.

The treaty restricts contraband to munitions of war, such as cannon, mortars, etc., as enumerated therein, none of which, except selles et brides, belong even to the category of articles ancipitis usus.