The same thing, unhappily, cannot yet be said of the foreign dominions of either France or Russia. The French are naturally conquerors rather than colonists, and, having once subjugated Algeria, trouble themselves very little about the condition of the natives. Russia, again, deems it politic to keep her vassals as ignorant and dependent as possible, forgetting that this very ignorance makes them liable to be stirred up to rebellion and massacre by tricks which any educated man would despise.* Neither in Asiatic Russia nor in northern Africa is there any established system of education, the few schools which exist being wholly due to the self-sacrificing energy of a handful of missionaries. Popular journals are unknown, and the masses have absolutely no recognized political existence whatever.

But even this evil must sooner or later find its remedy. France and Russia will discover that it is easier to govern men than to coerce brutes, and that they must follow the example of their neighbor if they do not wish the latter to outstrip them. Prejudice and superstition will vanish with the ignorance which produced them, and the world may yet see the noble spectacle of a civilized East officered by civilized Orientals, and learning from western Christianity other and better lessons than those of theft, falsehood, and intoxication.

Since the above was written, the sudden and formidable assertion of Afghan strength which (till the victory of Dec. 23d restored the balance of fortune) threatened the safety of Gen. Roberts' whole army, has fairly committed England, for the first time in 127 years, to a policy of avowed aggression. Warren Hastings butchered the Afghans because the King of Oude gave him $2,000,000 to do so; Lord Beaconsfield butchers them for the crime of defending their own country. The first phase of creation is destruction, but this fact cannot excuse the wanton destroyer. "It must needs be that offences come; but woe unto that man by whom they come."

*The formidable riot of 1871, at Kette-Kurgan, in Central Asia, was caused by a report that vaccination was intended to mark the people for military service.

ART. IX.-A SOUTHERNER'S ESTIMATE OF THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS.

If the American system of government be indeed the best that human wisdom has devised; and if the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson be the true philosophy; and if, again, the apothegm, "Truth is mighty and will prevail," be a fact as well as a phrase, Stephen A. Douglas is destined to fill a lofty and prominent niche in the Temple of Republican Liberty. He was not appreciated at his full value by most of his contemporaries: even many of his associates did not know and rightly estimate his real worth. Posterity, it is believed, will more justly weigh and appreciate him. He was far more than the mere politician; he was a philosophic statesman at the age of twenty-five. All the elements of statemanship were mixed in him in ample, rare and harmonious union; and they matured earlier in him than in any other American statesman-Hamilton, his political antipode, alone excepted.

The convictions of his young manhood were those of his riper years time, reflection, experience mellowed, but did not rot, the fruit. Biographical annals may be searched in vain for a more consistent and conservative public life than that exhibited by his record of eighteen consecutive years of conspicuous and brilliant service in the Federal Legislature. In faith, feeling and forecast, he was the same man, when, in 1861, he died a senator, that he was in 1843, when he was first elected a member of the House of Representatives. If the principles he espoused and maintained so earnestly, so steadfastly, with so much power of argument and illustration, be true, the fact of his uniform and unfaltering adherence thereto, through evil and through good report, establishes his

title to the rank we have assigned him-not a mere politician, but a mature statesman. The contrast between the two classes is admirably drawn in Hillard's celebrated eulogy of Webster: "The difference between them is like the difference between the artist and the mechanic. The statesman starts with original principles, and is propelled by a self-derived impulse. The politician has his course to choose, and puts himself in a position to make the best use of the forces which lie outside of him. The statesman's genius sometimes fails in reaching its proper sphere, from the want of the politician's faculty; and, on the other hand, the politician's intellectual poverty is never fully apprehended till he has contrived to attain an elevation which belongs only to the statesman. The statesman is often called upon to oppose popular opinion, and never is his attitude nobler than when so doing; but the sagacity of the politician is shown in seeing, a little before the rest of the world, how the stream of popular feeling is about to turn, and so throwing himself upon it, as to seem to be guiding it, while he is only propelled by it. A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician."

Jefferson was the veritable archetype of Douglas-the Gamaliel at whose feet he was brought up. Nor does the disciple do discredit to the master. The copy is an enlarged reflex of the original, intensified somewhat, by the altered circumstances of the times: still, all the lines and features, all the shades and colorings of the original, are plainly visible— boldly and distinctly marked-in the copy. The difference was of degree, not in kind. Jefferson was a pioneer democrat; Douglas was a progressive democrat. Both were earnest men, of deep and honest convictions, of indomitable will, of high civil courage, of wonderful sagacity in judging of men, of almost prophetic ken in predicting events from their causes, and of that rare social power, called, in the cant of the day, "personal magnetism," which asserted itself in all circles and which avouched its presence and potency in the pervading influence they wielded over those that approached them. They were born party leaders-Agamemnons in state-craft. Each had studied and interpreted man as the individual;

each had weighed him as a constituent of society; each had measured and apportioned his importance as a factor of government; and the conclusion each arrived at was unfailing faith in the honesty of the masses and their capacity to govern themselves. They both felt, with all of martyr-conviction, that "the great soul of the universe is just," and that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." They were thorough democrats, "after that most straitest sect" which believes man is better fitted to rule himself than to govern his neighbor; and hence their unfaltering adherence to the doctrine of local self-government. Either would have gone to the stake sooner than renounce it.

No American statesman, of so meagre academical opportunities, without the adventitious aids of wealth, influential friends, family prestige or powerful connections, ever sprang so suddenly and so conspicuously into the blaze of honorable public notoriety as did Judge Douglas-unless there be a solitary exception, perhaps, in the case of Mr. Clay. Douglas, scarcely warm in the toga virilis-had not been a resident of Illinois eighteen months, nor a lawyer twelve months, before he was elected, by the general assembly, Attorney-General of the State. Within a year thereafter, we find him the youngest, the ablest and the most influential member of her legislature; within two years after, Register of the Land Office at Springfield, under presidential appointment; and, before attaining eligible age, the democratic nominee for Congress. All the fair fields of civic trust and honor, so tempting to young ambition, seem to have demanded his service; nor was any one allowed to monopolize, or retain him long. In December, 1840, he was elected Secretary of State; two months later he was Judge of the Supreme Court of the State; two years afterward, he was elected member of the United States House of Representatives; four years after, he was chosen United States Senator, an office which he filled by consecutive elections until his death-a brilliant series of civic promotions more varied and rapid than any other to be found in our political annals. Twice he met with defeat before the people; once, in his first contest (for Congress)

when, by sheer quibble and practical fraud, he was "counted out" by five votes in a poll of over thirty-six thousand; and again, in the last he ever made (for President), when he was defeated through the insensate dissensions and divisions in the ranks of his own party. Then he was slain in the house of his friends -another Acteon killed by his own hounds; and that, too, when he had given no offence to Diana.

The Americanism of Douglas was at once intense and catholic. He felt a more joyous pride in being an American citizen than the old Romans experienced in being called Roman citizens. He gloried in our system of government. He esteemed it the best in theory ever devised; and he believed its practical operation, if faithfully and wisely directed, the easiest of control, and the safest and surest means whereby to attain the true ends of civil government—those ends being, preservation of order, protection of property, and the securing the greatest good to the greatest number without doing injury or injustice to any. He had full faith in the efficacy of the American system to accomplish these results. It made him a propagandist-a propagandist as full of courage as Luther, and as full of zeal as Ignatius Loyola. Among the bright dreams of his young and ardent manhood was the "Vision Beatific" of an ocean-bound republic: among the darling hopes of his maturer years was to see our free institutions spread all over the continent-the stars on the flag numbered by hundreds instead of scores. The one he lived to see; of the other, he "died without the sight". perhaps without the hope.

Mr. Douglas was, ab imo pectore, a patriot-sincere, zealous, devoted. His unselfish love of country was an active emotion and a sentiment. He loved his whole country

-as much of pride as of tenderness mingling in the passion. He was proud of her traditions, of her history, of her achievements in arts and in arms, of her grand triumphs in the cause of man; and he saw, or thought he saw, in her future, unrivalled opportunities of greater glory-possibilities of a national grandeur more splendid than was ever wrought or seen by man. It was simply impossible, therefore, that he