that system will at once avoid the evils of a restricted moneysupply, secure an approximate par of exchange between gold countries and silver countries, and promote stability of value in the money of the commercial world. They are not inflationists, although, in accordance with their general views regarding the importance of the status, and the evils of disturbing the existing structure of industrial society, they strongly deprecate contraction.

Such are the elements which compose what I have ventured to call the silver party, though there has never been, in truth, any organized party which brought the three classes together. As yet no issue has arisen which has put all these people upon one side.

The free-coinage party, with us, derive a certain strength beyond that warranted by their numbers or character. Their grievance is the ill-considered and unwarrantable demonetization of silver by Congress in 1873. To the average free-silver advocate this Act cannot be explained away; though I do not believe that any fraud was therein committed or intended. The effect of such Act was scarcely apprehended at the time. Some committeeman, or some few committeemen, ran the pen through "the dollar of our fathers," and the thing was done. Few Congressmen outside the committee knew that any vital change was impending.

So completely without observation was this measure passed that it was not for a year or two that the fact of demonetization was popularly known. Then, indeed, public interest in the subject became aroused. The price of silver, which had started out of line on the announcement of the demonetization of the metal by Germany (1873), began to tumble rapidly as that purpose was accomplished, and as the French demand for coinage was more and more checked. The mean annual rate of exchange by weight of silver had been 151⁄2 to one ounce of gold. In 1873 it changed to 15.92; in 1874, to 16.17; in 1875, to 16.58; in 1876, to 17.84, and in July of the latter year to

20.17.

In the session of 1877-8 Congress passed a Bill remonetizing the silver dollar and providing that two million dollars' worth of silver bullion as a minimum, four million dollars' worth as a maximum, should be purchased monthly by the Secretary of the Treasury and coined into dollars of 4121⁄2 grains; and also providing for the calling of an International Monetary Conference. This Bill was vetoed by President Hayes, but was promptly passed over the veto.

From the point of view of a bimetallist, it is to be said of this Bill, that the rehabilitation of the silver dollar was eminently right and just. But the provision for monthly coinage was a most unwise one, so far as the interests of international bimetallists were concerned, and was so regarded in this country and in Europe. The objections to this measure were twofold. First, the ratio between gold and silver in the coinage of the United States-16:1-was not coincident with that of the Latin Union and some countries outside of that league, viz., 15%: 1. In thus coining at a different ratio, this country was not pulling with France and her monetary allies, but, in some degree, away from them. Besides this, the moral effect was to induce grave skepticism as to our motives. The members of the Latin Union might well say: "It is we who have to bear all the brunt; for all the bullion will, under free coinage come to us; for who is going to have silver coined in the United States, where it takes 16 ounces to purchase one ounce of gold, when in Europe he can purchase for 151⁄2 ounces?" On the other hand, if we were to go to the French ratio, upon condition of general free coinage, our continuing to coin several millions a month, at our own ratio, was pure folly. All the dollars so coined would have to be melted and recoined at much expense.

The second reason against the coinage of silver in 1878 was still stronger. By purchasing silver then, we were certain to diminish the pressure upon the European States to undertake

measures for the rehabilitation of that metal. To them our coinage under the Act of February 28, 1878, was a gratuitous gift. We put our fingers into the door and took the squeezing which of right belonged to them. Under these circumstances it is not strange that the Monetary Conference initiated by that Act failed to do anything for silver.

The lapse of time, the large experience of gold monometallism, has not reconciled the world to the demonetization of silver. I believe our people would be practically unanimous in favor of a treaty by which England, France, and the United States, or Germany, France, and the United States, should enter into a monetary alliance, on terms similar to those of the Latin Union. In England there is a steady, though not rapid, movement of public opinion in the same direction.

But we cannot " go it alone," as many of our people propose The Act of 1890 has enormously increased the perils of our situation. The purchase of 54,000,000 ounces of silver bullion a year is a very serious matter. It has given tremendous impetus to the dangerous movement upon which we entered in 1878. It is apparently fast sweeping us to the gulf of silver monometallism. From this there is no escape, except through the concurrence of European nations in setting up a genuine bimetallic system, or through the prompt repeal of this objectionable law. The former way of escape is not likely to be opened to us. It remains to be seen whether the people of the United States have political virtue enough to rescue themselves, their public faith, and their commercial credit from a most compromising and perilous position, to that end defying alike mistaken opinion and the clamors and threats of selfish interests.

THE REFERENDUM. ALBERT RAMALHO.

Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in Revue Générale d'Administration, Paris, February.

O much has been written about the institution of the Referendum, à propos of the attempt to introduce it into Belgium, that many think it a new thing in the world. This is far from being the case. The Referendum existed at Athens and in the republics of the Middle Ages. At Rome the people made the laws, and such is still the case in certain Swiss cantons. In other cantons the people ratify only. It is asked, then, are we inferior to the contemporaries of Demosthenes, to the ancient Romans, to the Italians of the thirteenth century, to the Swiss people?

Certainly not. But the twenty thousand citizens of Athens, of whom about five thousand only ratified the laws and the decrees of the Senate, in the temple of Bacchus, owned four hundred thousand slaves, without political, or even civil, rights, and these slaves looked after the private affairs of Athenian citizens. The most of the free families numbered, or had numbered, among their members senators, archons, magistrates, commanders of galleys. The Athenians were, in reality, a people of functionaries. Below these lived, in the fields or the workshops, another people without history, exclusively occupied with servile labor, and leaving the former at liberty to devote themselves to the noble work of attending to public interests.

It was the same or even more so in Rome, where the noble or rich classes alone carried on public affairs.

The Italian republics of the Middle Ages applied the Referendum to declarations of war and treaties of peace. In the matter of slavery, however, the situation was nearly the same as in the republics of antiquity. Moreover, the Referendum ceased to exist when the interests of the State became more complicated and ceased to be circumscribed by the limit of the needs of a city.

As to Switzerland, it is composed of cantons that are rich (notwithstanding the poverty of some of them), because they have few needs. To protect a neutrality guaranteed by solemn

treaties, militia only is necessary. The taxes are light, and there is no antagonism, either of classes or of great industrial combinations. The majority of the country is composed of small owners of real estate. Switzerland has a privileged situation, which puts the Confederation outside of European conflagrations. This state of things explains, if it does not justify, the Referendum.

In the absence of these favorable conditions, the Referendum is a dangerous institution, the practical use of which would be nearly impossible in most cases. Among modern nations there is a tendency, more and more marked, to group themselves into vast agglomerations of human beings united by a community of language, of institutions, of historical traditions, and which seem less and less disposed to be divided into small cities. In the latter there may be more happiness, but not that feeling of security which gives strength and which has become the most urgent need of contemporary Europe.

The Future of International Arbitration. Every lover of humanity hopes that arbitration will eventually take the place of war in settling differences between nations, and everything bearing on this subject written by acute thinkers is worthy of careful consideration. The French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences has eulogized in its section of Legislation and awarded a prize to a work written by Michel Revon, Doctor of Laws, on "International Arbitration." Doctor Revon is of the opinion that in ten years either a general war will have turned Europe upside down or militarism will be powerless. In this alternative he does not hesitate to declare that war, which formerly had a good reason for existing, has such no longer, and that arbitration, which is making its way more and more, will become in the near future the law. While he claims that arbitration is a reform absolutely necessary and quite possible to bring about, he admits its extreme difficulty. For this reason, after having carefully collected all the facts, after analyzing, classifying, and criticising all the projects heretofore proposed, he puts forward a detailed scheme for international arbitration, not a definitive, perfect, absolute scheme. but founded on considerations very likely to take place in a future, more or less near. Besides considering international arbitration from the triple point of view, of its organization, its competency, and its procedure, he gives a summary of the consequences which will follow such a reform, in moral progress, in economic progress, and especially in juridical progress, that is, by the definite establishment of a state of law, of a federative system, and of peace, not perpetual, but approaching more and more that end so ardently to be desired.Nouvelle Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger, Paris, February.

VERY

SOCIOLOGICAL.

SCHOOL STATISTICS AND MORALS.
COMMISSIONER W. T. HARRIS.

Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in
School Review, Cornell University, April.

VERY justly do theologians claim that religious education is the foundation of the institutions of civilization. But it does not necessarily follow that the school should be an appanage of the Church, or that anything but secular education should be attempted in it.

I think that the most scientific student of social science will admit that the school is no substitute for the Church, and that a nation may possibly exist without a school, but that no nation can exist without a Church. Christianity is for ever narrowing the circle of superstition and increasing the realm of enlightenment.

Right here comes in the first appeal to statistics, and the first attack and defense of the school on the line of moral

influence. It is supposed on the one hand that purely secular instruction in ideas and habits must be anti-religious and, consequently, tend towards vice and crime. On the other hand it is claimed that purely secular instruction reinforces religion, and exerts an influence repressive of vice and crime. Statistics are collated to show that the majority of criminals in our jails have attended school for a longer or shorter period. Statistics are likewise quoted to show that those States which have the oldest and most efficient school systems have the largest number of criminals in their jails and state-prisons. Assertions are made that education merely changes the character of the crime, for example from robbery and theft, the crimes of the illiterate, to forgery and embezzlement or breach of trust, the crimes of those who have had school education. In the collation of statistics made on the census-returns of 1870, by E. D. Mansfield, the returns from prisons and jails of seventeen States, fourteen of which were Western or Middle States, gave an aggregate of 110,538 prisoners, of whom 27,581, or, almost twenty-five per cent., were illiterate or not able to write.

This fact looked serious enough to challenge the good influence claimed for the schools. If school education is adverse to crime, why should not the statistics show that a majority of the prisoners are illiterate ?

At this point the question was modified so as to ask whether a given number of illiterates furnished as many criminals as the same number of persons who could read and write.

In the seventeen States which furnished the twenty-five per cent. of illiterate criminals, according to the census of 1870, four per cent. of the population furnished this twenty-five per cent., and the ninety-six per cent. who could read and write furnished only seventy-five per cent. The illiterates furnished more than six times their quota, while those who could read and write furnished one-fifth less than their quota, and the ratio was as one to eight. A thousand illiterates on an average furnished eight times as many prisoners as the same number who could read and write.

The main point in the interpretation of criminal statistics is to consider the ratio between the number of criminals furnnished by a given number of illiterates as compared with a like number who can read and write.

The question of the prevention and cure of crime is a very complicated one, having many coöperating causes besides that of defect of schooling. But that schooling is a very powerful influence is made probable by these statistics, and it is made certain by considering its nature.

To those who have objected to secular education as tending to fill our jails with educated criminals, the defenders of the schools have pointed significantly to the statistics of religious education among criminals. For instance, in the Detroit jail, in twenty-five years, 37,089 were reported as having religious training, against 2,249 who had had none. In the reports from two hundred jails in the United States with about 55,000 prisoners last year, over one-half reported religious training of prisoners.

The neophyte in statistics would say that the ninety-two per cent. of criminals in Detroit who had received religious instruction, made a bad showing for religious education. But he has omitted his denominator like the bad arithmeticians who have been decrying public education, and comparing numerators without a glance at their denominators.

The religious statistics would read, when the denominators are supplied, somewhat as follows: The ninety-two per cent. of criminals who have had some religious instruction have been furnished by the ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent. of the whole population who have been under religious instruction, while the eight per cent. without previous religious teaching represent the one or two per cent. of their class. And none of the criminals came there through religious teaching, but because they neglected its counsels.

The attack on school education as increasing the number of

be any intelligent questioning of the fact that the duty of the hour is to unite all the forces that acknowledge loyalty to Christ, and march in soldierly order and serried ranks against the common foe?

The toleration of the liquor traffic is the greatest anachronism of the Nineteenth Century, the greatest crime of Christendom, the greatest shame of the Christian Church. Thirteen millions of communicants of the Protestant Christian Church, in this Christian Nation, and this traffic of Hell unchecked. Thirteen million Christian men and women in Protestantism and six million more in the Catholic communion, all helpless and palsied in the presence of this oligarchy of Satan. Nineteen million professing Christians and a hundred thousand Christian ministers, and the saloon has more power in the politics of this country than all the Churches, all the ministers, all the membership, all the colleges and schools of the Nation combined. Could not these millions of Christian people outlaw the liquor traffic if they would? Could they not stop the legal manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages if they would? Could they not prevent the United States Government and every State from having any further complicity with this iniquity by licensing or legalizing it in any form if they would? Beyond question, all this is far within the power and province of the Christian Church.

IV. The pulpit is the legitimate and divinely ordained agency to mass the forces of the Christian Church, and to lead them on to victory in this holy crusade against the liquor traffic.

for this very convenient doctrine of unprincipled politicians who do not like to face the pulpit's opposition. But since the gravest moral questions are involved in the politics of a country like our own, it is treason to truth and to God to demand the silence of the pulpit on these questions.

As a minister, the pastor should be non-partisan, but not non-Christian. But non-partisanship by no means requires the pulpit to be silent on all political questions. On the contrary, the silence of a public man like the minister is rightly construed as decidedly partisan, and is often the most effective form of carrying out party measures.

But are we not in danger of falling into error concerning the relations and duty of the pulpit to political organizations and measures? What law of God, what principle of Christianity, what reasonable requirement of man, demands the silence of the pulpit concerning any man or body of men, any society, or corporation, or organization, whose avowed principles and open conduct vitally affect the interests of society? And what command of Christ, or what principle of ethics, exempts the organization called a political party from the honest consideration, or, if need be, the denunciation of the Christian pulpit? Indeed, the political party, because it makes its appeals for popular support, is more than other organizations the legitimate subject of pulpit discussion.

V. A united pulpit will soon bring a united Church. The Christian forces will be massed, and the legalized traffic in intoxicating drink will be overthrown,

the drunkard-maker, then you ask the pulpit to belittle its own work in the eyes of all manly men by openly confessing its puerility and pusillanimity. Since the saloon is the central source of the crimes and curses and woes of mankind, if the pulpit cannot, or will not antagonize this evil, it may as well abandon its calling and cease its high pretensions.

But how shall this duty be performed? The pulpit must keep before the people the true standard of total abstinence for the individual and total legal prohibition for the traffic.

Undoubtedly, the one difficult aspect in the treatment of the case is the political aspect. We are told by men who think themselves honest that this whole question of temperance and the liquor traffic should be kept out of politics. Very good; but we may as well be told that sin should be kept out of the world. The disagreeable fact is that sin is in the world. The equally resistless fact is that the liquor traffic is in politics, and it is there of its own volition. It is common to charge its presence in politics upon temperance reformers, but this is a mistake. The liquor oligarchy put this question into politics. It did this most naturally, and, considering its own interests only, most wisely.

The liquor question is in politics, and can never be gotten out of politics until the ministry and the Church unite to put it out. And they will never put it out by pious talk nor fervent prayer. In this issue, forced upon us by the enemy, votes, and votes only, give the ultimate decision. The liquor question will never be out of politics until forced out by the ballots of free men, emancipated from party domination.

In order to do this the pulpit has a delicate and difficult, but necessary, duty to perform. Men calling themselves Christians must be made to see that there is no evil of society greater than the saloon, and no duty greater than the destruction of the saloon; that the saloon must be outlawed; that it cannot be outlawed until a majority of voters demand it, and that this necessary majority can never be secured while men slavishly follow the dictum of party managers who recruit the saloon

vote.

But we are told that the pulpit must not meddle with politics. By whose authority, and in whose interest is this saying so flippantly bandied about? Surely the Bible is not sponsor

mainly compiled from material in various foreign magazinearticles. In one of them it states that, according to the Deutsche Rundschau:

"When Germany had won the great victories of 1870, the question was asked in all lands what might be the cause of this success, and the German public school was mentioned as the main factor in the success.'

"To this statement no one will seriously object, but most people will be amused when they hear the sentence which follows: At once all nations set about reforming their schools for the people.'

However, the German author uses the argument in order to say, that if popular education is to continue as it has begun, then popular libraries must be increased both as to numbers and usefulness. He argues that even the conservative elements in England recognize that persons whose education has been enlarged by public libraries are of quicker perceptions and more rapid understanding than those not educated thus. He thinks that the effect of public-library reading will largely affect the results of the coming wars."

The next series concerns itself mainly with statistics to show "what people read." It groups these statistics concerning libraries in different parts of the world, and the result reveals the fact that the reading public is very much the same everywhere.

belong to the class fiction, has been only too often emphasized and looked upon with horror, but it ought not to surprise us. After the labors of the day, people, as a rule, do not sit down to study heavy, scholarly writings. They ask for a lively and quickening book, a good novel, a biography, a record of travels, or a review. This is natural and right. Nobody denies that people are religious and that they conduct themselves after a reasonable and practical philosophy. The manner, however, in which religion and philosophy is presented to the people is unpopular because it tires them. People prefer the works of the great popular writers because they contain both experience and the greatest thoughts popularized. It may safely be said that sensational literature is read only where depraved taste rules, or where nothing better can be had. The English and American public library proves that public reading can be regulated. Reports from St. Louis show how social and ethical works are on the increase. Certain works maintain a definite rate on the list of outloans. Such are some of Dickens's, Scott's, Uncle Tom's Cabin,' Ben Hur,' 'Les Miserables,' 'Vanity Fair,' Marble Faun,' etc. The Boston Public Library published in 1867 the following comparative list of authors according to their popularity with readers: Cooper read 5,460 times against Dickens 4,000, Marryat 3,730, Mrs. Henty 3,380, Scott 2,660, Simms 2,380, Miss Muloch 1,660, Miss Young 1,310. Of youthful writings, Mr. Mayne Reid's and Abbott collections were taken out 4,900-2,220, Franconia books 930, H. C. Andersen 390, Grimm 310. The relative position of poets was as follows: Shakespeare 550, Longfellow 430, Goethe 338, Schiller 262, Kotzebue 220, Tennyson 120. In Bergen, last year, the relative order in which the works of writers were asked for were as follows: Bjórnson, Ibsen, Lie, Kjellanp, Janson, Holberg, Ingemann, Rumohr, Etlar, H. F. Ewald, Bergsón, Andersen, Dodt, Thyregod, Scott, Cooper, Marryat, Dickens, James, Mrs. Stowe, Shakespeare."

R

THE RUSSIANS IN ORIENTAL LITERATURE.*
MAJOR-GENERAL W. F. TYRRELL.

Condensed for the THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in
Academy, London, March.

USSIA looks with a Janus face on the Eastern and Western worlds; to the latter she seems the champion of conservative ideas, to the former she appears as the incarnation of progress. St. Petersburg, the throne of the Ak Pádisháh, or Great White Czar, is the new Mecca towards which the faces of Orientals are now turned. Notices, however, of Russia in the literature of the East are not very common, and the British Museum contains no work on that country in any Oriental language. To the Moslem anything beyond the pale of Islam is unworthy of attention. All the ages before the coming of Mohammed are lumped together as the time of ignorance; and the Powers of Europe are styled "The Seven Infidel Kingdoms of the Farang." The earliest reference to Russia is in the geography of Al Más'údi, entitled "Meadows of Gold and Mines of Silver," compiled towards the end of the tenth century A. D. He describes the Empire of the Khazars (the "Avars" of Gibbon), whose chief city was the Ihl on the Volga. They are now shrunk to an insignificant tribe on the shores of

Khazars, who are reinforced by giants, caught roosting in the trees of the northern forests, and tamed in chains. In the end the Russians are beaten and have to pay a tribute of animals' skins. Nizami calls the Russians Gurba chashm," blue-eyed (lit. cat-eyed), black (karâ) being the epithet used to describe their favorite type of beauty. The fabulous stories of the wars of Alexander the Great with the Russians are accepted as authentic by Moslems and confer quite as much prestige on the Moscovites as do their present power and position. Mohammedans say "Rúm and Rús are old nations; but whoever heard of England or Germany until this present day?" Another Arab geographer, Sharif al Idrisi, describes ar Rússúja at length in his Book. for the Solace of the Enquirer into the Knowledge of the Universe," compiled for his patron, Roger, the Norman King of Sicily, about 1150 A. D. He is followed in most respects by Ibn Khalidán and Mohammed Ibn Batúba, the celebrated Arab traveler (about 1350 A. D.) Chaucer a little later says in his "Story of Cambuscan Bold," "At Sara in the lande of Tartarie,

66

There dwelled a king who worried Russie,"

which seems to disprove Mr. Morfill's assertion that the word Russia was not invented until the seventeenth century. The pious Batúta was much puzzled by the shortness of the northern nights, for he had no sooner finished his sunset-prayer than he had to begin that for the dawn. The songs of the Tartar nomads still bewail the fall of the " strong-walled " city, Kazán, and the fate of their hero, Batyr Tora, in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Similar folk-songs lament the loss of the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Russian victories of Peter, the Pádisháh, are related in the celebrated Persian history, "The World-Conquests of Nádor Shah." The Czars here are uniformly called "Sun-crowned Emperors." Previous to 1740 they were styled by the Turks, Karál, the Slavonic for king. Many Russian words are now adopted into Persian. A straw shows which way the wind blows, and the Oriental mind is profoundly impressed by the might of Russia. An irresistible destiny is leading Japhet to dwell in the tents of Shem, and is replacing the civilization of Islam by a system more in accordance with the improved knowledge and increased needs of our own time.

INSTRUCTION IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES.*

LEON AUCOC.

Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in Annales de l'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, Paris, January-April.

Khazaran. The Russians (Ar-Rús) are recognized by an Arab geographer, who narrates their piratical forays on the shores of the Pontus and on Constantinople. They had 500 ships, each containing 100 men and (about 920 A. D.) traded or ravaged from Spain to the Naphtha country (Baku). He says: "Perhaps those who maintain that the sea of the Khazar is connected with the strait of Constantinople mean by the sea of the Khazar the Mayotis and the Pontus, which is the sea of the Targhiz (Bulgarians and Russians). God knows how this is." He also notices the raids of the Norsemen (about 400 A. H.) whom the Muslims of Spain believed to be a Magian nation, but Al Más'údi supposed to be Russians. The Persian poets-Firdusi in his "Shah Náma" and Nazáma in the "Shikander Náma" -allude to the exploits of the "Prophet-King" Alexander the Great, 'who cleaned the world from the yellow Russians." Seven chapters of Nizami's epic describe the sanguinary conflict between the Emperor of Rúm (Alexander) and the Russian forces under the Kintal (probably Slavonic Káral) of the *From a paper read before the Anglo-Russian Society, London, March 7.

together under the name Social Sciences, a designation which makes it difficult to determine their boundaries. The question as to what place instruction in social and political sciences ought to occupy in higher instruction has been settled in many of the countries of Europe and in the United States in various ways.

The question was discussed at the International Congress of Higher and Secondary Instruction, held at Paris in 1889, the year of the Universal Exposition.

"

Mr. Boutmy made to the Congress a report, in which he attributed the difficulties in the solution of the problem to two causes: one, to the fact that the expression "economic and social sciences has not acquired a well-defined meaning, and that, as a consequence of the general movement of ideas, there is a tendency to include in those sciences everything which is connected with the constitution and development of human societies; the other, that the programmes of higher instruction have in certain countries a suppleness which they * A paper read before the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.