their opponents. In this state of things it is hard to get trustworthy information. The main practical question is, when the military power of the Republic shall be invoked, and how far it shall be used. If the State governments come to understand that they can have the Federal troops as a police whenever they are in trouble, if they but cast their request in the form required by the Constitution, they will lose the habit and capacity of exercising State government at all. The spectacle of the bayonets of a different dynasty in the legislative halls, judicial chambers, and voting-rooms of a State, though that dynasty be our own and of which we are citizens, officers, and subjects, is not and should never become an agreeable or a tolerable spectacle. We have seen those bayonets used in Kanzas to force a slave constitution upon an antislavery people, and in Boston to draw chains around the State court-house and enforce the surrender of a fugitive slave, for which the marshal was abundantly able to provide, while the police of the city and the militia of the State were abundantly able to preserve peace; but we had hoped that such things were the natural results of the rule of the slave power and would pass away with it. In England no part of the regular army is permitted to remain within a certain distance of the voting-places, or to stand guard over deliberative assemblies; and when the Chartists were to march, as they proclaimed, by tens of thousands to the House of Commons to present their revolutionary petition, the Duke of Wellington, in whose hands the preservation of the public peace was placed, while he lined the streets with a special police of the best citizens, organized for the purpose, did not permit a soldier of the regular army to be seen, although they were so stationed that they could be brought in at the last, if the procession had ended in a mob, and all civil methods of repression had failed. This was a tribute to the liberty-loving instincts of the masses of the English people. Our people should never deaden these instincts, and to that end our rulers should respect them to the utmost. If a case arises where the despatch of Federal troops to a State of the Union to take any part whatever in its internal affairs is necessary, it is. the duty of the civil authority, which always commands them in chief, to see that their instructions are such that they cannot err. It must be remembered that the officers of our army are gentlemen whose education, from the time they enter West Point, has been exclusively and technically military. They are not trained in the atmosphere nor used to the habits which generate or follow civil ideas, and in the army are not permitted to hold civil or political office, while the instances of civilians of mature age entering the army are very rare. Indeed, our officers, as a class, are more purely military in their ideas and habits than are those of most of the armies of Europe, certainly more so than those of England, where men pass with ease and frequency to and fro between civil and military life and employments. It should be the rule that the ring of sabres and the flash of bayonets should not be seen or heard in halls consecrated to civil legislation or to the voting by a free people. The army should only be called in to preserve the peace and suppress insurrection when the civil authorities fail. If, to preserve peace, it is necessary for troops to take possession of court-houses or legislative halls or voting-booths, they must understand that it is no part of their duty to discriminate between the rights of one and another class of claimants to seats in the legislature and upon the bench, or to the right of casting votes. Disputed claims to seats or votes are entirely civil matters, and must be passed upon by civil authorities only; and it is essential that claimants shall be admitted to be personally present in the assembly to which they claim membership. The soldier's first idea is to obey orders, and he looks to some one to give them. Relying on this, the first to gain possession of the seat of authority order out their opponents, and the soldier blindly executes the order. We do not mean to speak of any particular cases past, but of the natural and necessary results of military interference, if it is not most strictly preserved and guarded. The uneasiness of thinking men, not blinded by partisanship, arises from the fear that the military may be needlessly called for and used beyond their just functions. But there is one conviction we hope will be always foremost in the minds and hearts of the American people. It is that we owe our first duty to the subject race which we have emancipated. The promise of this nation that they shall have freedom and civil and political equality is the most sacred promise we ever made. It is the most sublime and touching act in our history. Nothing can so much disgrace us as to violate it, or palter with it in a double sense. There is danger that this may be done. They are the weaker race in every respect. The whites do not need protection against them, while the blacks do need the vigilance and power of men wiser and stronger than themselves, to protect their rights. The line of conduct is difficult to trace, in advance and in the abstract, and still more so, to be followed out in actual operation. The Republic must keep faith with the negro. For this, force — civil certainly, military possibly-must be used. The Republic must also respect the right of the States to manage their internal affairs, and to furnish their own police and militia for the preservation of order. It ought also to allow the white men of the South, who still furnish far the greater part of its education, its influence in the commonwealth, and its political capacity, to attempt to regain their control of affairs, irrespective of their having been once rebels; but they must understand that no part of the pecuniary consequences of their rebellion is to be shifted to the shoulders of the Republic. Violations of the Constitution or laws of Congress are individual acts, to be prevented or punished by civil methods, not to be mixed up with party politics, and to be regarded irrespective of race or former condition of master or slave, loyalty or disloyalty. All these considerations make the duty of those in office difficult of determination and execution; still the duty is one which can be performed, and there are some things which will make its performance easier. It is something towards peace to satisfy both classes at the South that the government of the United States is not a machine, run mostly in the interests of office-holders, and of such office-holders as we cannot always call on them to respect. In this view the Civil-Service Reform will be a great peacemaker. It will bes till further in the service of peace if each class is made to understand that it is not regarded as purchasable material, — purchasable, we mean, not grossly, by money, but by political promises. It is obvious from this line of remark that we consider a great deal to depend upon the personal character and political purposes of the President, his counsellors, and the party leaders in Congress. If their will is in the right direction, there will be a way found, though it may be narrow and hard; if their will is not in consonance with these principles, they will doubtless find the broad road open, and tempting before them. RICHARD H. Dana, Jr. Ir is a common remark that, since the publication of "Adam Bede," the appearance of a new work by George Eliot is welcomed, not as an ordinary literary incident, but as an important literary event. Accordingly "Daniel Deronda" has been, during the past season, the one book which has attracted all classes of readers, which has been the subject of general comment, and which has elicited criticisms as diverse as the different points of view from which it has been surveyed. During the serial publication of the novel there was manifested as little disposition to deny the reality as the originality of the leading character; for he took a strong hold on the sympathies of readers: questions as to what he would do next, and whether he would marry Mirah or Gwendolen, were warmly, sometimes fiercely, debated; and to judge from the tone of the disputants, he appeared to be a much more real personage to them than Mr. Tilden or Mr. Hayes. The notion of assailing him as a reflecting puppet, a sort of personified meditativeness, has sprung up since the almost universal disappointment at the unanticipated conclusion of the story, a conclusion which many readers have resented as though it were a personal grievance or affront. It would, however, seem that no embodied abstraction could have thus become the object of such intense personal interest; and the vexation at the dénouement is the strongest of all proofs that the character has the reality which marks all great imaginative creations. - In classifying works of fiction, the general rule is to discriminate between novels of incident and novels of character; between novels in which the main interest is in what the persons do, and novels in which the main interest is in what the persons are. "Daniel Deronda" is a novel both of incident and character; and, in addition, it exhibits a wealth of subtle, deep, and comprehensive thought altogether unexampled among the novels of the time. One feels in reading, rereading, and studying the book that, in *Daniel Deronda. By GEORGE ELIOT. New York: Harper & Brothers. 2 vols. 12mo. respect to mere largeness of intellect, it is unmatched among the works of the most distinguished novelists of the century. Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray may excel George Eliot in their special departments of fiction; but if we apply the intellectual test, and ask which of the four has mastered most thoroughly the knowledge and advanced thought of the age, the judgment of all cultivated persons would be given unreservedly in favor of the author of "Daniel Deronda." In sobriety, breadth, and massiveness of understanding, in familiar acquaintance with the latest demonstrated truths of physical, historical, economic, and intellectual science, and in the capacity to use these truths as materials for a philosophy of nature and human nature, this woman is the acknowledged peer of such men as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Leaving out of view the peculiar powers which make the great novelist, and fastening our attention on the understanding alone, it is obvious that George Eliot might hold, in one corner of her broad brain, all that portion of Scott's intellect which dealt with the philosophy of history as distinguished from its picturesqueness; in another corner, all that part of the intellect of Dickens which, in dealing with political economy, was prone to substitute benevolent sentiments for inexorable laws; and in still another corner, all that portion of the intellect of Thackeray which penetrated beneath the social shams he pitilessly satirized to the principles which make society possible. It is difficult to conceive of either of these eminent masters of characterization as adequately treating any subject requiring great powers of analysis and generalization; but a thoroughly reasoned treatise on ethics, politics, social science, or the philosophy of history from the pen of George Eliot would excite no surprise at all, as her intellect is plainly competent to such a task. This general largeness of mind, this tranquil grasp of the outlying problems of human life and human destiny, distinguishes her from all the other novelists of the age; for she not only looks at things and into things, but she looks through things to the laws of life they illustrate and by which they are governed. She dispels that pleasant illusion, fondled by most writers of fiction, that the individual is dominant in human affairs, and gets what he desires if he has the energy to struggle for it. The pitiless laws of existence, which are independent of human wish or will, and which crush all who oppose their action, she |