could be only that one way. take it." I cannot "No," she said, lifting her head, as if he had explained it all to her, "no. You could never do that. I would not have you do that for for all that could happen- for ". she faltered. "Great God!" thought Bayard, "and I cannot even ask her how much she cares - if she could ever learn or try to love me." He felt suddenly a strange weakness. He leaned against a boulder for support, coughing painfully. It seemed to him as if he were inwardly bleeding to death. "Oh!" cried Helen, turning about swiftly and showing her own white face. "You are not well-you suffer. This will not must not - I cannot bear it!" she said bravely, but with a quivering lip. "Give me your arm, Mr. Bayard, and let us get home." par He obeyed her in silence. He felt, in truth, too spent to speak. They got back to the door of the cottage, and Helen led him in. Her father was not in the lor, and her mother had gone to bed. The fire had fallen to embers. Helen motioned him to an easy-chair, and knelt, coaxing the blaze, and throwing on pine wood to start it. She looked so womanly, so gentle, so homelike and lovelike, on her knees in the firelight there, caring for the comfort of the exhausted man, that the sight was more than he could bear. He covered his eyes. "The fire flares so, coming in from the dark," he said. She stepped softly about, and brought him wine and crackers; but he shook his head. "My little tea-urn is packed," she said, smiling, trying to look as if nothing had happened. "I would have made you such a cup of tea as you never tasted!" "Spare me!" he pleaded. "Don't you suppose I know that?" He rose manfully, as soon as he could. She stood in the firelight, looking up. A quiver passed over her delicate chin. He held out his hand. She put her strong, warm clasp within it. "My blessing is n't worth much," he said brokenly, "but for what it isOh, my Love, God go with you!" "And stay with you!" Helen whispered. He laid her hand gently down, and turned away. She heard him shut the door, and walk feebly, coughing, up the avenue. He looked back, once. He saw her standing between the lace curtains, with her arms upraised, and her hand above her eyes, steadily looking out into the dark. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. THE MOUNTAIN RIDE. It was morning upon the mountains where the vapors hung like a veil; So up we sprang to our places, and into the mist we flung, With a whirl of whip, and a laugh on lip, and a quip from the driver's tongue. And the ribbon of road outspun ahead, and the narrowing rock-slopes frowned; Did our wild way lead with a dizzy speed where a torrent leaped with a hiss; Until delight at our forward flight gave way to a brood of fears. But lo! a curve, and a sudden swerve, and the ghosts of fright were gone, Clinton Scollard. THE ELIZABETHAN SEA KINGS. WHEN one thinks of the resounding chorus of gratulations with which the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America was lately heralded to a listening world, it is curious and instructive to notice the sort of comment which that great event called forth upon the occasion of its third centenary, while the independence of the United States was as yet a novel and ill-appreciated fact. In America very little fuss was made. Railroads were as yet unknown, and the era of world's fairs had not begun. Of local celebrations there were two, one held in New York, the other in Boston; and as in 1892, so in 1792, New York followed the Old Style date, the 12th of October, while Boston undertook to correct the date for New Style. The work was bungled, however, and the 23d of October was selected instead of the true date, the 21st. In New York the affair was conducted by the Tammany Society, in Boston by the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose founder, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, delivered a very thoughtful and scholarly address upon the occasion. Both commemorations of the day were extremely quiet and modest. In Europe little heed was paid to America and its discovery, except in France, which had lately participated in our Revolutionary War, and was just embarking upon its own Revolution, so very different in its character and fortunes. Without knowing much about America, the Frenchmen of that day were fond of using it to point a moral and adorn a tale. In 1770 the famous Abbé Raynal had published his Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies, a book in ten volumes, which for a time enjoyed immense popularity. Probably not less than one third of it was written by Diderot, and more than a dozen other writers contributed to its pages; while the abbé, in editing the various chapters and adding more from his own hand, showed himself blissfully ignorant of the need for any such thing as critical judgment in writing history. In an indescribably airy and superficial manner, the narrative flits over the whole vast field of the intercourse of Europeans with the outlying parts of the earth discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama; until, in the last chapter of the last volume, we are suddenly confronted with the question, What is all this worth? Our author answers confidently, Nothing! worse than nothing! The world would have been much better off if America had never been discovered, and the ocean route to Asia had remained unknown! This opinion seems to have been a favorite hobby with the worthy Raynal; for in 1787, in view of the approaching tercentenary, we find him proposing to the Academy of Lyons the offer of a prize of fifty louis for the best essay upon the question whether the discovery of America had been a blessing or a curse to mankind. It was furthermore suggested that the essay should discuss the most practicable methods of increasing the benefits and diminishing the ills that had flowed and continued to flow from that memorable event. The an nouncement of the subject aroused considerable interest, and a few essays were written, but the prize seems never to have been awarded. One of these essays was by the Marquis de Chastellux, who had served in America as majorgeneral in the army of Count Rochambeau. The accomplished author main 66 tains, chiefly on economic grounds, that the discovery has been beneficial to mankind. In one place, mindful of the triumph of the American cause in the grand march upon Yorktown wherein he had himself taken part, he exclaims, "O land of Washington and Franklin, of Hancock and Adams, who could ever wish thee non-existent for them and for us?" To this Baron Grimm replied, "Perhaps he will wish it who reflects that the independence of the United States has cost France nearly two thousand million francs, and is hastening in Europe a revolutionary outbreak which had better be postponed or averted.” 1 To most of the French philosophers, no doubt, Chastellux seemed far too much of an optimist, and the writer who best expressed their sentiments was the Abbé Genty, who published at Orleans, in 1787, an elaborate essay, in two small volumes, entitled The Influence of the Discovery of America upon the Happiness of the Human Race. Genty has no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that the influence has been chiefly for the bad. Think what a slaughter there had been of innocent and high-minded red men by brutal and ruthless whites! for the real horrors described by Las Casas were viewed, a century ago, in the light of Rousseau's droll notions as to the exalted virtues of the noble savage. Think, too, how most of the great European wars since the Peace of Westphalia had grown out of quarrels about colonial empire! Clearly, Columbus had come with a sword, not with an olive branch, and had but opened a new chapter in the long Iliad of human woe. Against such undeniable evils, what benefits could be alleged except the extension of commerce? and that, says Genty, means merely the multiplication of human wants, which is not in itself a thing to be desired. One unqualified benefit, however, Genty and all the other writers upon this 1 Grimm et Diderot, Correspondance Littéraire, xv. 325. subject freely admit: the introduction of quinine into Europe, and its use in averting fevers. That item of therapeutics is the one cheery note in the mournful chorus of disparagement, so long as our attention is confined to the past. In the future, perhaps, better things might be hoped for. Along the Atlantic coast of North America a narrow fringe of English-speaking colonies had lately established their political independence, and succeeded in setting on foot a federal government under the presidency of George Washington. The success of this enterprise might put a new face upon things, and ultimately show that, after all, the discovery of the New World was a blessing to mankind. So says the Abbé Genty in his curious little book, which even to-day is well worth reading. If now, after the lapse of another century, we pause to ask the question why the world was so much more interested in the western hemisphere in 1892 than in 1792, we may fairly say that it was because of the constructive work that had been done here in the interval by men who speak English. Surely, if there were nothing to show but the sort of work in colonization and nation-making that characterized Spanish America under its Old Régime, there would be small reason for celebrating the completion of another century of such work. During the present century, indeed, various parts of Spanish America have begun to take on a fresh political and social life, so that in the future much may be hoped for them. But the ideas and methods which have guided this revival have been largely the ideas and methods of English-speaking people, however imperfectly conceived and reproduced. The whole story of this hemisphere since Genty wrote gives added point to his opinion that its value to mankind would be determined chiefly by what the people of the United States were likely to do. The smile with which one regards the world-historic importance accorded to the discovery of quinine is an index of the feeling that there are broad ways and narrow ways of dealing with such matters. To one looking through a glass of small calibre a great historical problem may resolve itself into a question of food and drugs. Your anti-tobacco fanatic might contend that civilized men would have been much better off had they never become acquainted with the Indian weed. An economist might more reasonably point to potatoes and maizeto say nothing of many other products peculiar to the New World – as acquisitions of which the value can hardly be overestimated. To reckon the importance of a new piece of territory from a survey of its material productions is of course the first and most natural method. Spanish conquerors valued America for its supply of precious metals, and set little store by other things in comparison. But for the discovery of gold mines in 1496 the Spanish colony founded by Columbus in Hispaniola would doubtless have been abandoned. That was but the first step in the finding of gold and silver in enormous quantities, and thenceforth for a long time the Spanish Crown regarded its transatlantic territories as an inexhaustible mine of wealth. But the value of money to mankind depends upon the uses to which it is put; and here it is worth our while to notice the chief use to which Spain applied her American treasure during the sixteenth century. The The relief of the Church from threatening dangers was, in those days, the noblest and most sacred function of wealth. When Columbus aimed his prow westward from the Canaries, in quest of the treasures of Asia, its precious stones, its silk stuffs, its rich shawls and rugs, its corals and dyewoods, its aromatic spices, he expected to acquire vast wealth for the sovereigns who employed him, and no mean fortune for himself. In all negotiations he insisted upon a good round percentage, and could no more be induced to budge from his price than the old Roman Sibyl with her books. Of petty self-seeking and avarice there was probably no more in this than in commercial transactions generally. The wealth thus sought by Columbus was not so much an end as a means. His spirit was that of a crusader, and his aim was, not to discover a new world (an idea which seems never once to have entered his head), but to acquire the means for driving the Turk from Europe and setting free the Holy Sepulchre. Had he been told upon his melancholy deathbed that, instead of finding a quick route to Cathay, he had only discovered a new world, it would probably have added fresh bitterness to death. But if this lofty and ill-understood enthusiast failed in his search for the treasures of Cathay, it was at all events not long before Cortes and Pizarro succeeded in finding the treasures of Mexico and Peru, and the crusading scheme of Columbus descended as a kind of legacy to the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella, the magnanimous but sometimes misguided Charles, the sombre and terrible Philip. It remained a crusading scheme, but, no longer patterned after that of Godfrey and Tancred, it imitated the mad folly which had once extinguished in southern Gaul the most promising civilization of the age. Instead of a Spanish crusade which might have expelled the most worthless and dangerous of barbarians from eastern Europe, it became a Spanish crusade against everything in the shape of political and religious freedom, whether at home or abroad. The year in which Spanish eyes first beheld the carved serpents on Central American temples was the year in which Martin Luther nailed his defiance to the church door at Wittenberg. From the outworn crust of mediævalism the modern spirit of individual freedom and individual responsibility was emerging, and for ninety years all Europe was rent with the convulsions that ensued. In the doubtful struggle Spain engaged herself further and further, until by 1570 she had be gun to sacrifice to it all her energies. Whence did Philip II. get the sinews of war with which he supported Alva and Farnese, and built the Armada called Invincible? Largely from America; partly also from the East Indies, since Portugal and her colonies were seized by Philip in 1580. Thus were the firstfruits of the heroic age of discovery, both to east and to west of Borgia's meridian, devoted to the service of the Church with a vengeance, as one might say, a lurid vengeance withal, and ruthless. By the year 1609, when Spain sullenly retired, baffled and browbeaten, from the Dutch Netherlands, she had taken from America more gold and silver than would to-day be represented by five thousand million dollars, and most of this huge treasure she had employed in maintaining the gibbet for political reformers and the stake for heretics. view of this gruesome fact, Mr. Charles Francis Adams has lately asked the question whether the discovery of America was not, after all, for at least a century, fraught with more evil than benefit to mankind. One certainly cannot help wondering what might have been the immediate result had such an immense revenue been at the disposal of William and Elizabeth rather than Philip. In Such questions are not so simple as they may seem. It is not altogether clear that such a reversal of the conditions from the start would have been of unmixed benefit to the English and Dutch. After the five thousand millions had been scattered to the winds, altering the purchasing power of money in all directions, it was Spain that was impoverished, while her adversaries were growing rich and strong. A century of such unproductive expenditure went far toward completing the industrial ruin of Spain, already begun in the last Moorish wars, and afterward consummated by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Spanish discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if gold were |