pressed, and the popular mind conceived that the deportation of surplus labor would relieve the stagnation of the market. Measures were set on foot to transport the unemployed to the wilds of Canada. When Chalmers was invited to take part in the scheme, he declined, on the ground that he had from principle kept aloof from all general and concerted measures for managing the poor, but he said that he would provide means for the voyage of such parishioners of his as designed to exile themselves.

Nine candidates for expatriation were reported to him; but when these saw that effective arrangements were made to send them across seas, every one of them refused to sail.

Of nothing was Dr. Chalmers more confident than the liveliness and sufficiency of personal sympathy to arrest the descent, into pauperism, when it was not overborne by professional or compulsory relief. He had read in a work of Buxton's an account of the Bristol prison, in which a meagre ration was allowed to convicts, but none to debtors, who must therefore depend on the bounty of relatives or friends for aliment. In that institution outside relief had failed again and again, but no instance was known where a debtor was allowed to endure the pangs of hunger. The criminal inmates were always ready to divide their scant supply with the deserted debtor. "Now carry this back from prisons to parishes," argues the doctor; 66 carry it back to a population who have not undergone the depraving process that conducts to a prison, and a fortiori we may be perfectly confident that there will be no such thing as starvation permitted in any neighborhood, provided that the circumstances of the suffering individual are known."

The general distress of 1816 was severe in the Spitalfield districts of London, and the government hastened to alleviate it. Among the public stores a quantity of children's shoes were found, VOL. LIII. NO. 320.

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and the almoners decided to give these to the most necessitous pupils in the local schools. An examination undertaken for this purpose disclosed the fact that more than seventy orphan children had been received into and supported by the families of poor neighbors.

If their reiteration could make a man's opinions clear, then we must allow Dr. Chalmers' belief that his system, so far from being repressive, substituted more copious as well as more wholesome springs of relief than the misleading and scant ones of Kirk Sessions and of law. He justified his persuasion by his own observation at St. John's.

cer.

A mother and daughter, living in a single room, were slowly dying of canSo pitiable a calamity provoked Chalmers's utmost solicitude. He stationed a lady to observe this afflicted couple, with instructions not to allow them to suffer from want. For a year and a half, when the grave ended their misery, the observer could find no occasion to ask anywhere for assistance. Chalmers thus describes the case : "The exuberant and untired kindness of those who were near, and whose willing contributions of food and of service and of cordials had lighted up a moral sunshine in this habitation of distress, had superseded the necessity of all other aid. Was it right that any legal charity should arrest a process so beautiful?"

In one of the most wretched quarters of Glasgow a widow lost two grown-up children within a day or two of each other. "I remember distinctly," said the doctor, "seeing both the corpses on the same table; it was in my own parish. I always liked to see what amount of kindness came forth spontaneously on such occasions, and I was very much gratified to learn, a few days after, that the immediate neighbors occupying that little alley, or court, had laid together their contributions, and got her completely over her Martinmas difficulties."

Now for the sequel. Knowledge of the widow's trouble came to The Female Society of Glasgow, and it sent a visitor, who gave all that the rules of the organization permitted, which was a crown. The people, observing this movement, concluded that the woman was in competent hands, and abandoned her without further misgiving or concern.

When an outcry was raised against Chalmers's management in the case of a poor weaver, whose family had been attacked by typhus fever, he caused an investigation to be made, and found that the supplies rendered by the neighbors, which he had been afraid to intercept by parochial relief, exceeded in amount ten times all that would have been allowed out of the assessment fund of the city.

The doctor believed that there were innumerable fountains of affection and good-will, ready to burst into action as soon as they were released from the ice of professional or legal charity. Compared with their bounty, the most extortionate taxes and the most opulent societies were niggardly. But both sources of supply did not flow together; the mechanical stifled the spontaneous movement, and hence the overthrow of the former liberated ampler aid for the unfortunate.

If such were Chalmers's view, then it it is evident that he did not object to the most liberal charity, but to the method of its application. Its personal administration by the hands of kindred and neighbors was the safer and better way. In such a case there was no preëxisting fund to stimulate unjustifiable expectations of abundance in the minds of the poor; there was no splendid aggregation of funds to arouse their cupidity, or to tempt them to indolence. When the poor man could depend only upon the good-will of his friends for help in trouble, although it would not fail him, he could not feel that it released him from the necessity for thrift

and prudence. Nor could the recipient of aid bicker with its donors or almoners. The giver did not arm himself with suspicion, nor the taker with clamor and craft. Alms from private hands were received with delicacy and gratitude such as no legal guardians of the poor could excite. They were bestowed upon a knowledge of the beneficiary's character and circumstances such as no professional person could obtain, and when concealment and disguise were not thought of nor practiced. They were in every way wholesome, abundant, and honorable, and to them Chalmers looked to render St. John's parish a demonstration that pauperism was the outcome of bad artifices, and that the lowliest and poorest society left to the promptings of natural instinct would be untainted by this sore evil.

As Chalmers went to St. John's for the sake of a social experiment, for the same reason in four years he left it. The success of his plan was credited to his popularity, or his rare gift of administration.

To show that the scheme was normal and independent of all personal elements, he resigned, and moved to Edinburgh. The parish endured two long vacancies in rapid succession, but the social experiment went on, unaffected by these trials, for fourteen years. Its termination in 1837 does not reflect upon its worth, although it does upon its timeliness.

Its greatest success was met by apathy in the public mind, where the feeling was not hostile. Its promoters could not secure imitators in other parishes, and when social reforms cease to be aggressive they decay. Moreover, the assessment was still imposed upon the inhabitants of St. John's parish, and wrought the impression that they could by no fidelity or achievement extricate themselves from the general system of legal relief or from responsibility for it. Then, further, the disruption of the Kirk, which ended ten years of conflict

S. M. B. Piatt.

WASHINGTON, D. C., April, 1884.

MY DEAR NEPHEW, Four years ago, shortly before the presidential conventions were held, I addressed you a letter containing a number of practical hints of a political nature.1 They were drawn from the commodious and wellfilled storehouse of my own experience, and if, like Dean Swift's servant, you are good at drawing inferences I may have given you all the advice you need on this head; and yet, such is my consuming desire to see your own public career prove a conspicuous success that I am constrained, on the inspiring eve of another of our great quadrennial campaigns, to place a few more suggestions at your service.

Some months ago I made the acquaintance of an intelligent foreigner, who manifested a great deal of curiosity in regard to the workings of party machinery in our republican system. He had traveled extensively in the United States, seen a good many nominations made, and spent a fortnight in Washington while Congress was in session. Finding that I was a veteran American statesman (I heard the landlord tell him I was, while we were cementing our friendship with something hot), he plied me with questions, a good many of which were decidedly leading. First premising that all I had to say was to be regarded as well under the rose, I answered him fully and freely, and the more salient portion of our conversation I now reproduce for your benefit. "I. F.", you will understand, is the short for Intelligent Foreigner, and "Y. U." for Your Uncle.

I. F. Are not the majority of your conventions called to disorder rather 1 See Atlantic Monthly for June, 1880.

than to order? Is not discord the rule, and accord the exception?

Y. U. Decidedly not. An experience extending over well-nigh half a century enables me to assert, without fear of successful contradiction, that generally unanimity and what our newspapers neatly style the best of good feeling prevail at such gatherings of representative Americans. The opening exercises of a convention are commonly inclusive of a resolution referring memorials of the temperance and woman's rights people and cognate combustibles, along with everything else that cannot conveniently be cut and dried beforehand, "to the appropriate committee when appointed," that's the usual phrase. This expe dient goes far to secure the best of good feeling. When the political waters are unusually troubled and troublesome, a brand of sweet parliamentary oil, known as "the previous question," is of great assistance in calming them. Do you follow me?

I. F. You interest and enlighten me exceedingly. Pray proceed.

Y. U. I recall just here a remark of my friend the late lamented Colonel Smith. The colonel is not, perhaps, as well known in foreign political circles as he deserves to be. He once said to me, when this topic was on the carpet, "I regard it of such vital importance that there should be naught but the best of good feeling at a convention that, by Gad, sir, I'll have it, if I have to fetch it with a club." There you have the colonel, a natural born political leader.

I. F. The colonel must have been a statesman who possessed in a marked degree the courage of his convictions.

Y. U. Yes, indeed. And if I say it, who should n't, I myself am of his sort.

I was chairman of our memorable state convention of 1869, and before we got down to business I was reluctantly compelled to make up my committee on contested seats in such a manner as to exclude no fewer than seven well-meaning but impracticable delegates, who this in strictest confidence - had been fairly elected to sit in the convention. You see, I learned, on good authority, that the seven were not assimilative in their nature; that they might take a notion to move to amend the report of the platform committee, or to insist upon their own ideas of a ticket. So I had them thrown out, and seven gentlemen, hastily summoned, whose credentials I myself quietly manufactured while the convention was in recess, were substituted in their place. I may add that I have seldom been called upon to discharge a more painful public duty. But private feeling must be sacrificed to the common party weal.

I. F. Did the result meet your expectations?

Y. U. Well, there was some friction in the convention. Still, we managed to nominate by acclamation the ticket that had been made up in my office ten days before; the platform went through with scarcely a word of dissent; and just before we adjourned, by a vote of one hundred and ten to twenty-four, a resolution was adopted that "it is the unanimous opinion of this body and we point to it with pride - that never did more of the best of good feeling characterize a political gathering of this great commonwealth."

I. F. Isn't that out of the ordinary, -passing a resolution committing a convention to unanimity by a majority vote?

Y. U. It is. I've never resorted to achieving unanimity in that way, except in cases of pressing necessity.

I. F. You were speaking about platforms. Does not an occasional plank that enters into such structures give the

party considerable embarrassment, the temperance or the woman's suffrage plank, for example?

Y. U. Not if you have the right sort of a platform committee. A genuine platform builder is born, not made. One of our American statesmen said of a poet on your side of the sea that "he had nothing to say, but he said it splendidly." A platform builder worthy the name must know how to earn pretty much the same encomium. To illustrate: Just after the war I was called upon, the night before our state convention, by an unusually energetic and accomplished woman. She was the principal of a large and flourishing seminary in one of our leading cities, and brought a good deal of patronage to a close ward which it was very desirable that our party should carry. I realized that it might be possible for her to control a good many votes, if she made up her mind to do so, and naturally was anxious not to offend her. Well, she said to me, "General, here is a resolution that I desire to have inserted in the platform of your convention. The Woman's Suffrage Association, of which I am president, prepared it as expressive of what the members unanimously demand, and I was authorized to present it. Will it go into your platform?" I took the paper she handed me, and found that it read about this way:

Resolved, That this convention is heartily in favor of throwing open suffrage to women upon the same terms that male voters now exercise it.

I made haste to inform her that I would submit the resolution to the platform committee, and that I had no doubt they would give it due consideration. She bowed, and withdrew. Of course I knew that no such plain, direct resolution as that could get through. But I also knew that a delegate with a genius for the task was to be the chairman of the platform. I gave him the resolution, carefully explained the importance