But such is ever the way of the world.

When the poet-laureate of England passed away ten years ago, a prize fight in the city of New Orleans was the topic of absorbing interest. Consequently there was unlimited space devoted to the minutest details of the fistic battle between the sluggers; but only a line here and a line there begrudgingly given to the glorious Tennyson, who chanted "The Idylls of the King."

However, these inequalities are often righted in the slow progress of the years.

There is a breeziness of wholesome humor and a tropical luxuriance of style about all the writings of Dr. Mitchell. In both of these salient qualities he was perhaps the legitimate successor of the genial optimist of Sunnyside, who has created the immortal character of Rip Van Winkle.

But the books of Dr. Mitchell which are likely to endure the longest are "Dream Life" and "Reveries of a Bachelor." They were written in the romantic hey-day of early youth, and they are still treasured in many well-selected libraries because of the enduring charm which they possess.

Fare thee well, genial Ik Marvel! Peace to thy spirit in a land whose leaf and flower are fairer even than the rosetints of thy Reveries!

"LA FAYETTE, WE ARE HERE!"

It was a thrilling moment in history;-a moment into which was fused all the varied elements of the drama;—a moment meted to a Shakespeare's power of imaginationwhen, at the grave of the great Paladin of Liberty, an American soldier stood with uncovered head and exclaimed in a sentence which electrified two hemispheres"La Fayette, we are here!" *

It was a moment, freighted with tremendous consequences not only to France but to Europe, and not only to Europe but to Christendom;-a moment into which was packed a millennium;-a moment in which the bloodiest of wars, Humanity's Armageddon, reached its foreordained

*Words of General Pershing.

pivot;-a moment in which poetic justice, full and final, was rendered to a brave and gallant people;-a moment whose exquisite pathos, too deep for tears, was destined never to be forgotten in the memory of man.

"La Fayette, we are here!"

In those four words-worthy to rank with Caesar's laconic message-America redeemed her pledge to France, discharged in full a debt of honor. In those four words she cancelled an obligation which, since Yorktown, had stood unbalanced upon her ledger. In those four words she erased from her escutcheon an ignoble blot. But, like strains of music from some Aeolian harp, they melted into the very heart of weary France and woke an echo of response from all her bleeding valleys.

It was in the darkest hour of our struggle for independence that La Fayette came to us, like a knight of old. Swift as the wind-careless of consequences-he hastened to us, on Liberty's errand. Born not only to riches but to rank, he put everything aside for Freedom. In his own. vessel, he sped to America, to espouse the cause of the colonies and to uphold the arms of Washington. When independence was achieved, he was still on the field of war, to participate in its culminating scenes.

To his grave in France, he carried the scars of battle, received in fighting for our liberties, in what to him was a foreign land. With America's name, his own will be forever linked. On two separate visits to our shores, a grateful people rewarded him with honors. But these were for him, not for France; and, in many a troubled hour, across the seas, she has looked to us in vain. Till now, we have temporized and hesitated; but now, at the head of an invincible army, it is our own knight of chivalry, the heroic General Pershing, who exclaims

"La Fayette, we are here!"

Never was more of magic's spell contained in the utterance of mortal man;—an ocean condensed into a rivulet;— a century distilled into a syllable of time-an Alexandrian library compressed into a few brief accents of a soldier's tongue. Never was an orator more completely the master

of his theme. Never was an ambassador at court more fittingly the spokesman of a people by whom he was accredited. Methinks the spirits of our martyred boys who, from the trenches, have risen to a golden peace beyond the stars, have greeted the great Paladin with the same joyous salutation

"La Fayette, we are here!"

Those words will live and linger. Every wave of the sea, which binds France to America, will be vocal with their music, in all time to come; and every pulse of air, which fills the sky between us, will be fragrant with their sweetness. On the wings of the wind-spiced with the mellow perfumes of Autumn-we send to France this message: To the number of two millions, our boys are already there, to fight for the lilies. But, on the sea, in camp, at a myriad places of enlistment, two million more are coming-coming to join our old ally till the lost provinces of the Rhine are restored; till this cruel war ends in a glorious victory, the glad news of which will ascend to La Fayette's soul in Heaven.

NEW ENGLAND'S TRIBUTE TO SOUTHERN

STATESMANSHIP.

(March 16, 1910.)

Too significant to escape the notice of observant readers was the tribute which Puritan New England paid to the memory of the great nullifier on Saturday (March 12, 1909), when the statue of John C. Calhoun was formally unveiled with impressive ceremonies in Statuary hall, in Washington, District of Columbia.

More emphatically than anything else in years it bespoke an era of the olive branch in American politics.

For, according to most of the historians, John C. Calhoun preached the disruptive philosophy which underlay the doctrine of secession and which resulted in the gigantic cataclysm of 1861.

Among the distinguished New Englanders who took

part in the exercises were Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Representative Samuel W. McCall-both sons of Massachusetts.

They spoke for the commonwealth in which the crusade against African slavery in America was cradled-which produced Charles Sumner and Wendel Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison-which developed the earliest and bitterest antagonism to the so-called "Southern school of statesmanship;" and they spoke in fervent praise of South Carolina's great Calhoun.

It suggested the famous scene in the United States senate in 1830, when Daniel Webster made his celebrated reply to Robert Y. Hayne, on which occasion he spoke of the comradeship which had existed between South Carolina and Massachusetts from the time of the Revolution.

Critics have most savagely assailed Mr. Calhoun for supporting with his keen and subtle powers of logic such a pernicious heresy as the doctrine of nullification.

But the doctrine sprang quite naturally from his viewpoint in regard to state sovereignty; and when we once accept his premises, we can not escape his conclusions.

Moreover, it was in the Hartford convention of 1813 when the second war with England was threatening the commerce of the Puritan commonwealths that the principle of state sovereignty was first coupled with the threat of secession.

Mr. McCall ventures to suggest that it was possibly during Mr. Calhoun's residence in Connecticut that the seed which afterwards bore fruit in this dangerous doctrine of nullification were first planted.

Just read this paragraph. Says Mr. McCall:

"His biographer, Mr. Hunt, tells us that he rarely read poetry, and that when he once essayed to write some verses every stanza began with 'whereas.' His two years spent in Dr. Waddell's school fitted him for the junior class at Yale college, from which, after two more years of study, he graduated. He then took a two years' course in a law school in Connecticut.

"Thus, of six years spent at school, he was for four years in the North. We should expect that his residence there would have affected his views upon the great constitutional question with which he was afterwards identified. And this is not at all unlikely, for the theories that were kindred with nullification were probably as rife at that day in Connecticut as they were in South Carolina. And there is evidence that one of his law teachers was of the opinion in 1804 that the time had arrived for New England to separate from the Union.

"He believed the state to be sovereign. Our history at that time was full of instances, which might serve him as precedents, where the authority of the central government, as against the states, had been questioned. The Virginia resolutions, which had been drawn by Madison, one of the fathers of the constitution; the Kentucky resolutions, which were the work of Jefferson; the proceedings of the Hartford convention, which had been participated in by nearly all of the New England states, gave basis for the claim that the states might nullify an unconstitutional law of the nation."

With respect to Mr. Calhoun's statesmanship, he pronounced the following deliberate judgment:

"In point of intellect and purity of character, he ranks among the very greatest of our statesmen, and, although his name is more conspicuously identified than any other name with the theory of nullification, a theory to which his extraordinary power of logic gave practical force as a political principle, more than once in critical times he devoted himself to the work of preventing a rupture between the central and the state governments and of maintaining the Union. He was throughout his whole life devoted to his native state. His first recollection was of South Carolina as a completely sovereign republic except for the articles of confederation which had little or no binding force. He was nurtured in the idea that his state was his country, and in his political philosophy his primary allegiance was to her,