LINGERING BARBARISM. 641 



now that a rival has grown up beside it which it never through all 

 time can prevail against. 



While writing this, a pamphlet is sent me by a friend, entitled 

 "Secession Berlin, Julius Springer, 1881," in which the anonymous 

 but certainly very intelligent author questions our political and finan- 

 cial conditions from his point of view. While this pamphlet is highly 

 remarkable, as well for its contents as for its way of expressing them, 

 it is perhaps yet more remarkable for that which it either hints or 

 leaves unsaid I mean, to speak plainly, for its indulgence toward 

 that easy-going confidence with which some of the eminent minds of 

 the past ten years have allowed themselves to believe that the whole 

 nature of mankind is radically changed, because it has walked for a 

 while with a varnished cane instead of a knotty club. I find in it an 

 agreement with my doctrine partly gratifying and partly saddening, 

 since I can hardly understand how an author of so much insight should 

 not long ago have felt the scales drop from his eyes. " Wherever our 

 glance falls," he says, "nothing strikes us but ideas, laws, institutions, 

 that existed a century ago, and yet have been set aside for ten years 

 past or more, by the course of culture and increasing insight. Reac- 

 tion toward restrictions on our trade with foreigners followed by re- 

 strictions on domestic trade ; next, fetters on personal liberty and 

 freedom of action ; then, backward steps to the stern penal codes of 

 past ages, and to the proscriptive and coercive laws of a patriarchal 

 world. The whole contrivance, piece by piece, is borrowed and 

 brought out from the rusty arsenal of the good old times. What- 

 ever is now devised is dug up from the deep and ever-deeper dust of 

 centuries." 



It is even so. Yet it may, perhaps, be said that, with a little less 

 classical and philosophical training, and a little more education in nat- 

 ural science, it would probably earlier have become evident that, even 

 without wishing or intending it, we were taking an active part in this 

 disinterment from the dust of centuries. At all events, it is well that 

 this conviction is now forcing its way : it is only to be hoped that it 

 may gain clearer reality and wider range in those who have won it. 



These things, however, press with light weight in the scales of the 

 future, how lamentable soever they may be in the present. Whether 

 a reactionary law the more or the less be made, whether the secessionists 

 thrive or perish, it is of course a pitiable sign of the times that the 

 student body here roar with apj)lause at their hero gabbler Treitschke, 

 there pledge themselves to the Jewish persecution, and raise dueling 

 squabbles about it a sign hardly compensated for by the indignation 

 with which the cities kick Chaplain Stocker's nauseous double-faced 

 hypocrisy out of doors. But this does not touch the root of the 

 matter, which lies in the training of our youth in increasing waste- 

 paper scribblings and reactionary barbarism. Not much improvement 

 can be hoped for in the present generation ; we may check and repress, 

 VOL. xvni. 41 



