drawn away from a morbid contemplation of themselves. But people of leisure, the sort of people for whom Valvedre is written, may have nothing in the circumstances of their outer life to call them away from unprofitable meditation. Science, however, must be acknowledged to offer very much of what they want. The world of which it tells is a world that exists in equal beauty and with equal certainty whatever may be the feelings or the cares of man. Science offers a region where facts only prevail, and where what is once apprehended is never lost. In the religious repentance which, in an English book, would replace the scientific repentance of George Sand, one of the great comforts of the wounded, and desolate, and despairing heart is that it clings to a Being outside itself. In however much humbler and more impure a degree, something of the same feeling strengthens and calms the mind that, weary of the world, begins to occupy itself with nature-with nature, that is, not as seen through the spectacles of man's feel expressly discusses in Valvedre the worth of this kind of transformation, and decides that it is only a passion in another form, and affords no real relief to a mind that is not overtaken by terror, but longs for a relief from the cravings of a spurious appetite for excitement. Whether she is right or wrong is another matter; but it is more important to notice what she accepts, and not what she rejects. This notion of science being the antidote of passion is one not at all familiar to English people. Rare instances in private life may, indeed, be found where a philosophy of the sort has been acted on; but nine people out of ten who would read Valvedre carefully would be obliged to own that the point of the book was one that was new to them, and seemed very paradoxical. Of course good young people who have been brought up to work hard at science may be saved by it from many errors, but so they would have been if their work had been mathematics or Sanskrit. All subjects of hard study bring the benefits which hard study confers; and no study, whether sci-ings, but as it is apart from man, governed entific or not, will keep people right who have nothing else to trust to. But this is quite beside the mark at which George Sand is aiming. The real drift of Valvedre is, that persons who are tired of passion without having been brutalized by it, or who have recoiled from the abyss on the edge of which they have been standing, may find a new life and security in science; and it is worth while to think what it is that she means, and how far what she means is true. The chief reason, we imagine, why science has such a charm for minds like that of George Sand, is that it presents something fixed, external, and impersonal. Those who have felt, and thought, and suffered much, who have listened to the whisperings of fancy, who have loved with a natural and then with a factitious enthusiasm, who have sought in art an aid to sensibility, and have tormented themselves with the mysteries of human existence, get sadly tired, after a time, of the vanity of their pursuits. But where are they to go as a refuge? The subjects of thought most congenial and familiar to them only lead them over the same old path, and back into the barren wishes of their own unsatisfied wishes. Men engaged in active life, and women on whom family cares press with a daily load, are easily by its own laws and full of its own wonders. It is true that there is nothing in science analogous to the active response vouchsafed in religious repentance. It is only something external and apart-it is not something external and apart that returns an answering support. But the mere fact that it has an existence independent of the shifting feelings of a tired and depressed mind gives it an inestimable value to the sufferer. It opens to him a door of escape behind which he can leave his burden of glocmy fancies and vague misgivings. Science has also the great charm of offering a complete cure for vacuity of thought. It gives plenty of work-of work that may be made unceasing, that may easily be made to fill up every hour of the day, and may employ the body as much as the mind. How passionately people long for work-hard, but not too hard, exciting, but not too exciting when the time of weariness and despondency has come with the shade of advancing years, may be learned from the eagerness with which many women in middle age throw themselves into the life of conventual establishments, or take to ministering among the poor. It is true that other employments besides the pursuit of science afford plenty of work. Hour after hour soon slips away in writing a book or painting a picture, but the not entirely abandon t without a sense of work of science is much more varied, and loss and desolation, and who are yet smitten especially of science as George Sand loves with a longing to connect themselves with to picture it. Her scientific hero is a man the ordinary world and to check the taste who passes whole weeks in surveying the for whatever is morbid and extravagant. If unexplored portions of the Alps, who is mak- a rhapsodist wishes to indulge his genius, he ing the most interesting experiments in light, electricity, glaciers and so on, who has a retinue of followers, and a faithful friend with a marvellous knowledge of botany. This is the romance of scientific life. To have a fortune and to despise it, except so far as it enables its possessor to do science on a magnificent scale, is not given to every one. But, in a less degree, the enjoyments of the philosopher of Valvedre are within the reach of all students. Those who take up science as a mental diversion rather than in the hope of making a valuable contribution to the stock of scientific knowledge, have one advantage over those who go to work in a more serious way. They need not confine themselves so closely to the study of details. They can select those portions of the particular science they take up which require locomotion and permit them to enjoy at will the busy idleness of an out-ofdoor philosopher. M. Michelet would probably have had to spend years over the microscope if he had aspired to reveal to the scientific world any new phenomena of insect life. But a smattering of knowledge, and a great amount of pleasant wandering in pleasant places, enabled him to do all he wanted, and to find in insects a new subject for poetical description. His books are perhaps scarcely scientific enough to answer to the ideal of science which George Sand has formed. But they are near enough to sup-inexhaustible accuracy of nature. There is ply a good illustration of what she means, and no one can doubt that the labor spent by their author in preparing to write them must have been a labor of love. There is also in science a mixture of poetry and common sense which may be readily conceived to be very inviting to persons who have long lived in a poetical world, and can cannot rhapsodize more easily on any subject than on the wonders of creation. A poetical writer has also the advantage, in studying science, of portraying a feeling which he is sure is genuine, noble, and spontaneous. The wonders of creation overpower and fascinate the mind that fairly opens itself to the impression they create. A man of science, who expresses with any thing like adequacy the emotions which the marvels disclosed to him naturally awaken, is as sure that he is describing what in all ages must be felt by all men of feeling as the most consummate master of the play and sweep of passion can possibly be. It is easier to be right in delineating the poetical side of science than in analyzing the springs of human action; and although no scientific description is more true than Othello is true as an account of human action under certain circumstances, yet excellence in scientific description requires infinitely less power than is exhibited in Othello. While, therefore, poetical science is not more true than the highest truth of the drama, it is much more within the compass of common minds. And at the same time that science is full of poetry to a poetical mind, it has yet a strong tendency to confine the student within the limits of common sense. Extravagant, vague, and inaccurate language is glaringly out of keeping with the sober realities and an element of the business-like in an occupation so bound up with method and order as scientific investigation, and the neutral tints of business and common sense have an atmosphere of repose that allures those who, like the authoress of Valvedre, have long been accustomed to glaring colors. From The Spectator, 7 Sept. ENGLAND AND THE SOUTHERN STATES. We fear there is no little reason to apprehend that the leading members of the English Government have already under their consideration the propriety of recognizing, early in the autumn, the independence of the Southern States; and that unless some decisive victory and rapid success of the North intervenes, or English opinion declares very strongly against it, this step may be soon taken. The second reinforcement of Canada, which has taken place since Parliament separated, and the language and sympathies of the Government journals, are some indications of this danger. At all events, there is no doubt that it is a question much canvassed in influential quarters, and that the strong desire of the Government to secure Lancashire against a cotton crisis, together with an impression which is widely prevalent in political circles that it would be a great advantage to England to see the power of the United States broken up into fragments, tends to persuade them to adopt it. It is, therefore, exceedingly important that this country should speak out its mind on the subject at once. We have no difficulty, for our own part, in speaking out ours; though we fear that but one of the great Liberal organs-we need hardly say that we allude to the Daily News, the only paper which has done justice to the North throughout this long and painful crisis-will support the same view with any warmth. But from the English people we expect something different. There is, we feel persuaded, a large silent class, who care as much about the slavery cause as their fathers did thirty years ago, and who are not prepared to see England throw her influence hastily into the opposite scale without a protest and a struggle. Whatever our opinion may be as to the chances of the war, we must remember what a premature recognition of the Southern Confederation would, in fact amount to. It would exert a double set of influences; it would be a great moral discouragement to the North, and it would be not only a great encouragement, but a new lease of strength, to the South. Are we prepared that the same Government, which in the coldest terms declined to acknowledge Hungarian independence in 1849, when Hungary was absolutely victorious in a great physical as well as constitutional struggle with Austria-a struggle which might, for any thing we know, not have to be fought over again this year had England then recognized the Hungarian victory, as she ought to have done, and forbidden the unwarrantable intervention of Russia-are we prepared that this same Government, which "knew nothing of Hungary " except as a constituent part of Austria, shall now anticipate the issue of this struggle between the American rebels and their rightful Government, after a contest of little more than half a year, during which there has been no time to organize the really enormous resources of the Free States? If we do this, we shall break our strongest tie with the Free North. An eminent American author has well expressed the disappointment of the Free States in the attitude taken by England in a letter to Lord Shaftesbury : : "It is not to be disguised that one unfortunate result of our American crisis has been a weakening of national confidence in England, and a feeling of great sensitiveness and soreness in our relations with the country. . . . It is not to be disguised that they regard themselves as suddenly abandoned in the very crisis of a battle by the moral forces of those brethren on whom they had relied as undoubtingly as on themselves, and the possibility of whose failure had never entered into their most distant the Government course of the English nacalculations. . . . It is not principally by tion that this class among us feel aggrieved. It is not with that that they principally concern themselves. . . . By false representations and false issues, our friends in England have been blinded to the real significance of the sublime movement which the American nation has just commenced." How will this feeling be increased by any official recognition of the South while yet the contest is-in the mind of the Northern States at least-quite undecided and still hopeful? It may be all very well for English politicians, who get almost all their impressions through the cotton interest in the United States, to say that the struggle has no connection with slavery. The Northern people know that it has. They know, as Mrs. Stowe asserts, that the election of last year hinged entirely on the question of slavery-extension; that the organization of the Republican party was founded on the resolve to pen up slavery within its existing limits; and that it was the triumph of this policy which determined the Slave States to rebel. This is so notorious that no one can dispute it for a moment. The taunt that Mr. Lincoln is not prepared to fight the battle on the issue of emancipation is true. But it is quite as true that he is being compelled to take this line by his supporters, as well as by the force of circumstances; and it is certain that the Northern States would consent to no terms which did not settle the question of slavery-extension at once and forever. Practically, therefore, if we anticipate their defeat, if we paralyze them by giving our verdict in favor of the new Southern power, and sending an ambassador to Montgomery, we shall have gone out of our way to foil the Free States in their first pitched battle against slavery. We did not recognize even the kingdom of Italy while Francis II. held the field against his opponents. We paraded our diplomatic incapacity to comprehend that Hungary had broken loose from Austria; and if here, in a country where no political right has ever been denied to the rebel states, where the only grievance is that, after a long supremacy, they have been outvoted and defeated in their love for the most debasing element in modern civilization, if here we make haste to hail the rising power, New England will be justified in saying that Old England's anti-slavery sympathies are mere hollow sentimental pretences, since she can rest satisfied to stuff her ears with cotton against the cries of the slaves, and to compensate her gentle regret over the new impulse given to slavery by her lively gratification over the paralyzing shock suffered by Democracy. This rupture with the Free States at the very juncture when we can learn most from them and give them heartier sympathy than at any time since their independence, would, to our minds, be a great national calamity. Again, we shall certainly draw much closer our alliance with the "chivalric " South if we are among the first, perhaps the first, to recognize her independence. Is this what the people of England really wish? The crisis seems to be one expressly intended to relieve England of the humiliating obligations under which she lies to an institution wholly abhorrent to all our highest political tendencies. Let us but for a single year develop the cotton resources of India and the other subsidiary free cotton countries, and we should be freed forever from the nightmare with which all thoughtful politicians have been oppressed during the last generation. They have felt, and felt most justly, that to depend for the maintenance of millions on a cotton supply which is the fruit of frightful guilt, is at once a disgrace and a peril-a disgrace, because, as we now see, it restrains the natural drift of our political sympathies; a peril, because the system is so radically corrupt that it may collapse at any moment with a crash. All this they have felt; and if now that the time is come when Providence forces us to look elsewhere,-to turn to a country where we should confer boundless prosperity by our purchases instead of boundless misery, if at such a moment we hug our chains and cannot tear ourselves at any persuasion from our beloved long-staple cotton, then we deserve to be subjected to the same humiliation and peril under which we have so long groaned for another cycle of Egyptian servitude. This, too, we say, would be a great national calamity. Let us remember distinctly what it means. It means the relapse of our national conscience into, first, a toleration,-then, probably a positive approval of slavery. Once let us draw close our relations with an independent South by the ties of a mutually selfish gratitude,— once let us feel committed to the advocacy of that noble and patriotic cause, of which a repudiator is the Washington and slavery is the "corner-stone," and we may be sure that slavery sentiment will fast gain head in England. The generous sympathies of Mr. Gregory, the member for Galway, will soon be shared by numbers of our leading men, and it may not be long before the same country which paid twenty millions sterling to wipe out the blot of slavery upon our colonies will be glad to lend as much to a thriving slave commonwealth for the purpose of making good its frontier against the encroachments of a free republic. Nor will it stop here. No sooner shall we have assisted the South to attain its independence, than new questions of the first importance will come up as to slavery-extension and the slave trade. Mexico and an Anglo-Saxon slave commonwealth can never be peaceable neighbors. The South already intend to absorb Mexico. For twenty years Administration will have deliberately inback their policy has tended in this direction. flicted a greater injury on the cause of freeThe Knights of the Golden Circle are dom than any single generation of Liberals pledged to the attempt. The genius of the can hope to retrieve. slavery cotton-system requires constant enlargement of area, and Mexico is not the state to resist any consistent and well-organFrom The London Review. ized pressure. We shall have soon to face the efforts of the South to absorb Mexico as ENGLISH LAW AND JUSTICE IN INDIA. part of the slave commonwealth, and the A STORY reaches us from Calcutta that same peril which makes us bend before it would be very difficult to believe, if the facts now will bid us bend before it then. We were not placed before us in the unimpeachshall be involved in the meshes of the slav-able form of a report of proceedings in a ery net, and be more sensitive than ever to Court of Justice. As the details unwind the danger of slave insurrections, the men- themselves before us, we read and wonder, aces of Northern abolitionists, in short, the inclined to hope that the printers must have moral necessity of supporting the South made a mistake in laying the scene in a against its Northern foe. country governed by English law. But no; the prosecutor, the defendant, the witnesses, the jury, the judge, are all subjects of Queen Victoria; and the case is reported with such elaboration and minuteness as to prevent all suspicion of its being a hoax. The facts of this very strange story are as follow: And what will be our reward ?-that we shall have a less formidable rival in Disunited than we could ever have in the United States. This is one of those political motives which we can never hear confessed without wondering at the unblushing selfishness of statesmen. It has, we know, a real influence on English thought at the present moment. It is thought that we shall find our advantage in the quarrels of our rivals. Perhaps so; if it be our advantage to fear them less, and to be more than ever in the hands of one of them at least. The South may become to us another Turkey, with far more than the moral complications of Turkish misgovernment. We may drift sooner than we think into a real or fancied necessity for maintaining the integrity of Among other works in Hindostanee, which the South against the North. A weak and came under Mr. Long's notice, as a student unscrupulous ward contrives practically to of contemporary literature, was a play, enimpose a far more galling yoke than a pow-titled, "Nil Durpan; or, the Mirror of Inerful and audacious rival. The Rev. Mr. Long, a missionary of the Established Church of England, has labored in his vocation in India for twenty years, preaching Christianity among the Hindoos, and endeavoring, in order that he might be the better able to understand the peculiar idiosyncracy of the native mind, to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the popular literature current in their own tongue among the race which it was his mission to Christianize. digo Planting," in which the dramatist satirized the life, manners, and oppressive conduct, real or alleged, of the British indigo-planters in India, and held them up to the ridicule or hatred of his countrymen. The reverend gentleman, being struck with this work, not for its beauties or its merits, but for the insight it afforded into the work We are now at the meeting of the ways. If we are wise, we shall stand sedulously aloof from all diplomatic action till the contest is over, and either one combatant is vanquished or the two have made their own terms. But all our moral influence ought to be clearly given to the North, and if the conclusion of the struggle leaves any por-ings of the native mind, and for the light it tion of the Southern States independent, it should be our earnest endeavor to support the Northern States in the policy of sealing up slavery within certain impassible limits, and forever terminating the slave trade. If the moral influence of England is cast into the other scale, we shall say that a Liberal threw upon their prejudices and their grievances, actual or imaginary, translated it carefully, printed it, and transmitted copies to the principal people concerned in the government of India, as well as to a few of the leading philanthropists, men of letters, and journalists of England. The sensitive in |