sions, and all the business classes, and the complicated and delicately adjusted mechanism of that great modern engine called Commerce, it is really not easy to say what legitimate, well managed, and successful business may not be considered to be of "public consequence," or to "affect the community at large," and therefore to be subject to public control.

It is possible, of course, that the Supreme Court has gone no further than would be consistent with a proper theory of society, based upon modern conditions. On that question I shall venture no opinion. But tested by the principles and precedents by which it professes to be guided, its language in this case seems to be singularly inaccurate-a fault not often to be found in its opinions and must inevitably tend to encourage usurpation by legislative majorities. There is indeed some indication of late that the court perceives this, and is disposed to qualify its former doctrine. In a recent case, decided in March, 1890, a statute of Minnesota, enacted in 1887, creating a railroad and warehouse commission, and providing that all charges for transportation "shall be equal and reasonable," and empowering the commission to compel a carrier to adopt such rates as the commission "shall declare to be equal and reasonable," without providing for any hearing before the commission, was held to be unconstitutional, as depriving carriers of their property without due process of law. The question of the reasonableness of the rate charged is said by the court to be " eminently a question for judicial investigation, requiring due process of law for its determination." This is clearly a modification of the doctrine laid down in the warehouse case and the "Granger cases" already referred toso clearly that Mr. Justice Bradley, in a dissenting opinion, declares that it "practically overrules" those cases, in which, he says, the governing principle was that the regulation of such rates, and the determination of their reasonableness, is strictly a legislative prerogative, and not a judicial one. In this case, moreover, the court appears to modify somewhat its former views as to what constitutes the "property" of the

citizen and the "deprivation" which is prohibited by the Constitution except upon compensation and by due process of law; but it has not greatly changed its doctrine concerning the "Police Power" of the State. It leaves wide open still the question as to what business may be subject to public control because of general interest to the community. Indeed, in a still later case, now popularly known as the "Original Package case," three of the Associate Jus tices unite in declaring that "the Police Power includes all measures for the protection of the life, the health, the property, and the welfare of the inhabitants, and for the promotion of good order and the public morals."

Giving full force to the very comprehensive terms used by the Supreme Court, it would be safe to say that the property of the citizen is subject to such control by the public as the latter may be interested to exercise, but hazardous to attempt to define the classes of private property which are or may be

clothed with such a public interest as to justify interference by the government. But for the fact that the Supreme Court must be presumed to understand the language of the country, in both its technical and ordinary acceptation, one might guess with some reason that it had been careless in stating the doctrine in question, and that its opinion in the warehouse case ought not to be taken as a precedent, except in cases where property is devoted to a public service. Within this limitation the doctrine has since been extended to "grist" mills and water-works. In the "Civil Rights cases" it was said by Mr. Justice Harlan to be applicable to places of public amusement, since they are used in a manner to make them of public consequence and affect the community at large; but I am not advised of any case in which it has been applied to clergymen, undertakers, or certain others whose services affect the community.

As to corporate property, courts and legislatures have left small room for discussion. If any stockholder needs to be further admonished of the fact that corporations are but creatures of the people, let him await the next judicial utterance on the subject. It will not be

long delayed; for just now the excellent doctrine of corporate subjection is in the prime of life and asserts itself with frequency and vigor. The president of a well-known railway company recently published an article advocating the purchase and operation of railroads by the government. It was regarded by many as a grim jest; but inasmuch as the government has already assumed so largely the control of their operation, the proposition of the stockholders, that the public should assume also the risk and expense of operating them, is not so obvious a joke as to pass without challenge. It should be observed, however, that the inconsistencies and excesses of the public, in its treatment of this subject, do not necessarily condemn the whole procedure. The old doctrine of the vested rights and sacred charters of corporations was founded on error, and came to be recognized as dangerous to interests far more important than the gains of stockholders. It was time for government to realize that it had no right to abdicate its trust-that it had no power to grant irrevocable privileges, as against the general welfare of the people. At present this newly awakened solicitude for the public weal seems likely to carry us beyond the bounds of temperate action; but it cannot be that we, as a people, shall long ignore the folly of discouraging enterprise, and intimidating capital, by petty restrictions and unjust discriminations. We shall soon cease to regard corporations as the natural foes of good government. We may even come to regard the prevailing hostility to these agents of government as an oblique menace to the State itself especially when expressed by combinations formed and maintained at the expense of the public.

At the time when these words are written, the operations of a great Western railway are suspended because of a "strike;" and this concerted action of an army of employees is based upon the refusal of the railway company to dismiss an efficient but unpopular superintendent. The public, which has been so eager to curb the rights of stockholders, who draw dividends from the business conducted on their capital, is indifferent to the action of these employees who

draw wages for their labor in the same business. If the corporation is held to strict performance of its duty as a public servant, should not its agents, who live upon its business, be held to some account-at least for combinations made to obstruct a public service as a means to satisfy the personal grudge of a few individuals?

There remains but one other right of the citizen, concerning his own property, to be considered. He is permitted to give it away, under certain restrictions. During his lifetime he may bestow it gratis, except that he may not thereby impair the rights of his wife or creditors, or divest it of the burden imposed by the public; and dying, he may dispose of it by will, subject to similar charges, and, in some states, certain statutory rights of children, and succession taxes. Observing these proper conditions, the citizen may give away his property ad libitum; and it has long been a matter of surprise and regret-at least to the impecunious philosopher-that so few avail themselves of this privilege during their lifetime. The records of our courts teem with cases in which the intentions of testators have been defeated by legal technicalities invoked by greedy heirs; and it would seem that this constantly recurring spectacle ought to deter men from confiding their property exclusively to courts for distribution."

One may excuse the merchant who accumulates to gratify a commercial ambition, and uses his millions as fuel for legitimate enterprise, or the man of any class who seeks to assure the comfort of those dependent upon him; but for those men-not a few-who by inheritance or otherwise have acquired wealth far in excess of their proper need or the need of those to whom they owe the debts of kinship, and cling to it for the mere satisfaction of seeing it increase and feeling the sense of ownership, there ought to be no forgiveness on earth. At such men is aimed the last suggestion of this paper-that the right, with reference to his own property, in which the citizen is least restrained, is the right to give it away; and that this right is of all the most precious, to him who sees the just relation of property to human happiness.

F

IRST of all, in broaching the topic assigned me, I must venture upon a little preliminary talk about what is really meant by the term Country House. There are those in these times who would persuade us that all country houses as implying country homes-are going clean out of date. It was only a few weeks back that I fell upon the reading of a three-column article in a great metropolitan journal, which set forth the notion that no sensible, well-cultured person ought in future to entertain any purpose of living in the country, or of going there in any domiciliary way, except for a brief outing in the heats of summer; and this "able" writer blew such a cloud of logical dust in one's eyes as caused the trees and the fields to take on a blurred look, and made an old-fashioned man's love for them seem quite disreputable.

Nevertheless, I count it not altogether

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presumptuous to suppose, and even confidently to believe, that people of considerable parts will continue to establish themselves and their homes in the country, and to wrestle with its disadvantages, through longer or shorter series of years.

It is not of those suburban dwellers that I speak now, who come to the country for their sleepings and their Sundays, but whose interests and engagements hold all their energies to taskwork between the walls of city houses. I can understand how these people, who are shot in grooves back and forth between their city working-places and those outside harbors where they anchor at nightfall, should equip these harbors of refuge with a great many of the coquetries of architecture, and lavish upon them much goodly spoil of horticulture; but it is not of these suburban rests (I had almost said roosts) that I am

I know very many of these summering places are, in these latter years, specially taking on an importance and a fulness of equipment that may even match the city homes of their owners; but if they get every autumn a double fastening of the cupboards, and a padlocking of the gates, and such dispersion of all servitors as forbids any blue pennon drifting from the chimney-tops in winter, and any welcoming bound of the house-dog (if the owner pays visit), they belong only to that category of halfhomes with which we are not now concerned. Among the qualities which mark and differentiate the country house and

grandfathers and mothers (if we have them) upon the wall, and gardens that get their belaboring with the spade as surely as every spring comes. A man may indeed divide his honors, if he have enough, and, like Queen Victoria, equip one home with Tudor ancestors, and sanctify another with the Hanoverian portraits; but barred gates and a summer rioting of weeds on house-paths make a desertion in which a sturdy home sentiment, that ought to lurk in all country houses, cannot grow.

Again, it does not appear to me that the good countryish qualities of house and home are to be measured exactly by distance from cities. Garden sanctities and charms may thrive in the very shadow of town steeples; and I can imagine that the wiser ones of the Fox family took infinite satisfaction in the pretty bosky covers of Holland House long after the tide of London brick and mortar flowed clamorously around its garden walls. Many of the most engaging types of our American country houses were planted on roads that became the streets of bustling towns or of

cities. I recall in this connection that old Longworth homestead which for so many years held its dignified rural quietudes of trees and garden in the midst of the noisy growth of Cincinnati; again, there is the John Bartram house, on the Schuylkill, retaining its country charms of vines and flowers-its birds evenlong after city sounds had drowned their songs. I recall also many a quiet old town along the shores of Long Island Sound, or of the Connecticut River, where broad-faced trim houses of a colonial type, with airy halls and balustrades upon their roofs, are still full of a rural invitingness which is made good by their great gardens in the rear, and by their alleys of boxwood in the front. The interjection on the village street of butcher shops and of telegraph offices does not kill the high country qualities of such homes.

Having thus by this prefatory process of exclusion put out of present range the watering-place houses and those suburban retreats from which occupants change from year to year, we narrow our outlook to those houses, of large or small importance, which make

his alluring city sign-boards so thickly in those days. There are lingerers from that old date to be seen everywhere in our Eastern and Middle States. Who does not know those little, one-story, ununpainted, cube-shaped, wooden houses scattered all along New England shores, from Marblehead to Guilford, on sandy knolls, on the flank of hillsany site was good, if a woodchuck could dig his hole there without being drowned out in storms; the big stone chimney in the middle, cumbrous and mighty with its crude masonry, gave space abreast of it for front "entry" way; on one side a bedroom, on the other the "keeping" room, with a musty smell about it; and behind the chimney the great common room, kitchen, what-not, with its pantry at one end, and possible cramped stair to a loft under the "half-pitch" roof where a helper in harvesting, and -by proper partitioning-girls in their teens, might get a "shake - down" of straw mattress.

There are lordly men in our history, growing in honors year by year, who have had their rearing in such quarters. The shape was sensible, because it was