Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

of the Solid South, that thing of wrought-iron consistency and ox-like stolidity that never trembled under generations of charges, storms and bombardments, and still stands, as firm and stolid as a hickory stump.

A writer in a Georgia newspaper proposes that Presidential electors from the Southern States be elected by the Legislatures without ties. He argues that the West and the North, being commercially natural enemies and both long trained of the Republican party, would soon be seen coming into the electoral college with fingers entangled in each other's hair, while the South, allied with neither, and having a balance of power, could dictate terms. A writer in a South Carolina newspaper suggests, for a further step, that Southern members of Congress abandon the Democratic organisation, balance between parties and factions thereof, and play for the South alone, as Parnell, at the head of the Irish membership in Parliament, balanced between British parties and played for Ireland alone. This plan, which is dubbed Parnellism, has been discussed enough in the South to bring down upon itself the indignation and righteous wrath of certain of the great daily newspapers of the large cities of the North. Scandalised, these authorities virtuously scold and berate the South for her heresy and treason in entertaining such a proposition. Long years the South has been placidly accustomed to that kind of talk from that direction.

The point in common with these plans and opinions, as will have been observed, is, they all assume a South as solidly united hereafter as heretofore.

So long as some negro is not lifted into a dangerous prominence the South cares nothing for office. Down South a man in the service of the federal government floats on the top of the population like a clergyman of the Church of Rome, the popular church of the United States. In a town where there is a federal courthouse the officers of that court walk the streets like tourists, never the intimate factor in the life of the community the officers of the State court are; and the people speak of the two buildings as the United States courthouse' and 'our courthouse.' But to individual Southerners a stipend from the Government may be not unacceptable. President Taft's inclusion of Southerners unstained of the Republican party in his distribution of Presidential patronage gave the South more uneasiness than gratification. 'We shall win if the Republicans do not buy us,' anxiously predicted the wit of Congress, 'Private' John Allen, of Mississippi, of Democratic chances in 1896, and for the last four years loyal Southerners have silently thought, 'We will stand our ground if President Taft does not seduce us with offices.' The South bore in mind comfortingly, how

ever, that there are not enough offices to go around, and she remembered reassuringly how President McKinley, at the beginning of his second term of office, cautiously essayed to break into the exasperatingly Solid South by tentatively holding open to Southerners the way to the pie counter, and the plan did not work. The President was swamped with applications, but those who got appointments carried no votes with them but their own. They were despised in the South, and after President McKinley's death they sank down into the ranks of the black Republicans, beneath the South's notice. The South credited President Taft with the kindliest motives, however, and deplored his colossal ignorance and elephantine stupidity. Not till President Taft accepted the revised tariff did the South begin to suspect him of insincerity and weakness of back; not till his veto of the tariff reform bills of 1911 did the South perceive unmistakably his glaring yellow streak.

The South watched that part of President Taft's spectacular tour of the Union in 1909 that extended through the South, with interest but without hope, for the South no longer hoped of President Taft. Southerners chuckled when the President, at the beginning of his entry of the South, went out of his way to protest that he had not come into the South as a Republican missionary; and they laughed good-naturedly when, near the end of the Southern tour, the President admitted with nervous merriment that Southerners would likely vote in the future as they had always voted. Railway companies made President Taft's stopping-points in the South the excuse for excursion trains with temptingly low rates, and Southerners thronged to gaze at President Taft just as they thronged to gaze at President Roosevelt, just as they might throng to gaze at the devil himself should he advertise a tour of the South in visible body. Thrifty municipal bodies availed themselves of this popular curiosity to turn a few honest dollars. At Columbia, the rebuilt Yankeeburnt capital city of South Carolina, old mother of hot-headed secessionists, the Yankee President Taft was received with tears of joy. The Chamber of Commerce charged ten dollars a plate for the privilege of being a guest at the banquet it tendered the President, and the City Council realised eight hundred dollars by selling the President like a ball player to the agricultural society of the State, then holding its annual fair just outside Columbia's limits. The contract was duly executed, the money paid and the goods delivered; the City Council got its eight hundred dollars, the President made his speech at the fair grounds instead of in the city, and the agricultural society collected fifty cents a head admission fee of the multitude that came to

hear him. American patriotism! Not even in New England or Ohio is it more deeply implanted than in the 'new South.'

Not till after the election of 1908 did the South seem to give up her last hope of eventually sinking her nationality in the body of the American people; not till President Taft began his laughable wooing of the South did Southerners begin to appreciate the strength and importance of their unique position as a separate and entire nationality of the American people. Not yet is there a full appreciation of this strength and importance, but striking are the evidences of an awakening appreciation. When the Senate was haggling and bargaining over the tariff revision, strikingly significant was the action of those Southern Senators, notable among them Bailey of Texas and Tillman of South Carolina, who broke out of Democratic harness and stood openly for their own country alone, defying the wrath of the officious Bryan himself, even intriguing with the Republican chiefs for tariff concessions for the South. Is a breaking up of the Solid South near? Rather Southerners seem to be quietly accepting the sectionalism they protested against so long. The South seems to rejoice now in her consciousness of her separate nationality. There is a nationalism of the Southern people in the United States as distinct as the nationalism of the Irish in the United Kingdom, and becoming as proud as the nationalism of the Magyars and Huns-the oldest people of Europe-in the Austrian Empire; and there is generating a wholly new force in American politics, one that both the great parties will have to reckon with, sooner or later.

Greenville, South Carolina.

DAVID LEWIS DORROH.

3 U

VOL. LXXII-No. 429

RECENT BOOK SALES

AMID an ever-increasing number of centenaries, it is strange that one of the most interesting of all should almost have passed unnoticed the centenary of great book sales. It is still more strange that the death of two men within thirteen months of one another should have had the result of involuntarily commemorating this event.

Just as the Duke of Roxburghe's sale in 1812 stands as the Genesis of modern book collecting, so the Hoe sale in New York and the Huth sale in London may be regarded as its Revelation. Nothing that preceded the Roxburghe sale could compare with it, and it is scarcely possible that two such sales as the Hoe and Huth can take place within the next twenty-five or fifty yearsfor the few remaining great private libraries can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The fashion-as have the opportunities of forming such libraries has passed away from England to the United States. There are hundreds of choice collections of books being formed in England, but these are for the most part special in character and limited to groups of subjects or periods. Bibliomania was never more widespread than it is today, but it is a sane species of bibliomania. The spirit of accumulation such as that possessed by Richard Heber is not quite dead among us. Only during this past season we had an instance of this in the late Mr. C. Letts, a Holborn solicitor, who accumulated some 70,000 or 75,000 volumes, weighing about forty tons, and comprising books, ancient and modern, on almost every conceivable subject. He hired extensive basements in Gray's Inn Road and had them fitted up with bookshelves, and here in his leisure hours he enjoyed his extensive purchases. That this kind of book collecting, however much pleasure it may give to the collector, should result in heavy pecuniary loss goes without saying.

The Duke of Roxburghe, Mr. Huth, and Mr. Hoe were all three remarkable instances of wise collecting, and their sales examples of substantial profits. In most hobbies' the wealthy amateur comes out of the game possibly a wiser and not necessarily a sadder, but nearly always a poorer man. Unfortunately, neither of these three distinguished bibliophiles lived to see their

[ocr errors]

tastes vindicated; but they derived a vast amount of pleasure and intellectual profit out of their absorbing hobby, and each must have known that his estate was not being impoverished. Of each it might be said, as it was said of Gaignat nearly a century and a-half ago Ce curieux si recherché qui se piquoit de n'avoir que des livres uniques.' It may be added that it is nearly always the 'uniques' and 'presque uniques' which in book collecting save the situation and place the balance on the right side of the ledger.

Probably no book-collector on a large scale has ever kept an exact or even an approximate record of his expenditure, and so it is never possible to be accurate in stating the cost of private libraries. In many instances, however, rough estimates have been formed, and in nearly every case the sale of such libraries has resulted in large profits. It will be interesting to give a few examples:

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

On the other hand, instances to the contrary are by no means unknown; for example, Richard Heber is said to have spent 80,000l. on a library which sold for less than 57,000l., but the period of his many sales was unfortunate any time during the last ten or twenty years his books would have produced over a quarter of a million sterling.

Big totals have become so much the order of the day that we cease to be surprised at anything in this line. Yet it will probably surprise even those who follow such matters pretty closely to find how very few English libraries have during the last hundred years passed a 20,000l. limit. Without claiming to be infallible in such a wide survey, I can only find records of sixteen such sales, and these are set out in the following table:

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« VorigeDoorgaan »