troops; indeed my inquiries have clearly indicated that if our men from the districts settled with purely English blood could be made the subject of careful study, we would find that the best Federal soldiers were generally as good as these Confederates.

When first recruited this brigade contained about five thousand men. From the beginning it proved as trustworthy a body of infantry as ever marched or stood in the line of battle. Its military record is too long, too varied, to be even summarized here. I will only note one hundred days of its history in the closing stages of its service. On May 7, 1864, this brigade, then in the army of General Joseph Johnston, marched out of Dalton 1,140 strong, at the beginning of the great retreat upon Atlanta before the army of Sherman. In the subsequent hundred days, or until September 1st, the brigade was almost continuously in action or on the march. In this period the men of the command received 1,860 death or hospital wounds, the dead counted as wounds, and but one wound being counted for each visitation of the hospital. At the end of this time there were less than fifty men who had not been wounded during the hundred days. There were 240 men left for duty, and less than ten men deserted.

A search into the history of warlike exploits has failed to show me any endurance to the worst trials of war surpassing this. We must remember that the men of this command were at each stage of their retreat going farther from their firesides. It is easy for men to bear great trials under circumstances of victory. Soldiers of ordinary goodness will stand several defeats, but to endure the despair which such adverse conditions bring for a hundred days demands a moral and physical patience which, so far as I have learned, has never been excelled in any other army. I doubt not that as satisfactory evidence can be obtained from the records of our Northern

The foregoing considerations, as well as many other points which cannot be traced in this brief study concerning the effects of climatal and social conditions on the American man, have satisfied me

unprejudiced inquirer-that our race is safe upon this continent; that we need have no apprehensions concerning the effect of the existing conditions upon its development.

We may safely presume that the climate and other conditions of our continent, with perhaps the exception of the district about the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic country, are, on the whole, as well fitted for the uses of northern Europeans as any part of the mothercountry. We may reasonably conclude that it suits the whole Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. As to the Latin peoples, the case is not so clear. The Canadian French are doubtless in the main descended from the people of northern France. It is likely that a large part of their blood is derived from the Northmen. There can be no question that, with certain limitations, this population has been thoroughly successful on American soil. The fact that they speak a foreign language, and have been deprived of education, may account for their failure to advance in the intellectual field. They are, however, people of vigorous minds and enduring bodies. They have developed a fecundity now unparalleled in France. They take naturally to laborious occupations, which is a proof of physical vigor. We may therefore consider the northern Frenchman as well fitted to the conditions of northern America. The Latin peoples about the Gulf of Mexico have not been equally successful. The upper class has maintained something of its pristine quality, but the peasant has not taken hold on the soil in a successful way. How much of this failure of the Spanish and French to attain a high development in the region about the Gulf of

Mexico and the Caribbean is due to climate, and how much to the institution of slavery, it is impossible to say.

There remains one important inquiry as to the effect of geographic conditions on the development of races from beyond the sea on the surface within the limits of North America, a question of the utmost importance to our political and social future. We have in this country a very large African population. Within the limits of the United States, the number of people of this blood probably exceeds that of any other stock, save that from the British Isles. As we have previously remarked, this race, on the whole, appears to have remained substantially unchanged by the conditions of the new field. Intellectual contact with the white has doubtless led to a certain development in the general status of the African, but except so far as his blood has been mingled with that of Aryan or Indian people, the bodily form, and in general the moral and mental characteristics, have reLained substantially what they were on the parent continent of this people. There are two questions concerning this race which are of the utmost importance to the future of our nation— indeed, to that of all our own people in North America. The first concerns the natural fecundity of the population, their rate of increase from decade to decade; and the second, the limitations which climate may put upon the extension of the folk.

The rate of increase of the negro has not yet been ascertained. During the conditions of slavery, a satisfactory census was impossible. The slaves were subject to taxation, and the owners had a sinister interest in reducing the numbers which were given to the accounting officers. The census of 1870, the first taken after the overthrow of slavery, partly intentionally or by neglect, served to underestimate the total number of negroes. The next accounting, that of 1880, was careful, and doubtless gave us the first accurate knowledge as to the ratio of this element of our population to those of European blood. It will not be until we obtain returns of the census, which has just been taken, that we shall know whether the negro is more or less

prolific than the white. In case it should appear that in the extreme southern States the negro increases in a greater ratio than the whites, the regions in which this increase is marked have a doubtful future before them, for unless the black population can be quickly lifted to a higher intellectual and moral plane than now characterizes it, those parts of the South will be apt to relapse into barbarism. The advance of the negro to a satisfactory grade in development still depends upon his remaining in close contact with the superior race. If he increases in numbers more rapidly than the whites, he is sure to create massive communities of his own stock in which there can be no certainty as to the maintenance of our race motives.

As to the distribution of the African population in this country, though the evidence is not clear, it seems that the negro is not likely, in the immediate future at least, to extend for any considerable distance beyond the limits in which his race at present is fixed. There is now no distinct movement of the blacks toward the North. The scanty African population in the old non-slaveholding States has mainly accumulated in the cities, and would probably die out were it not for the occasional accessions it receives from the South. Unless the rate of increase of the negroes should be so great as to crowd them from the extreme southern States, we may be pretty sure that this population will remain in good part limited to a small part of our country, to a region which, though not unfitted for the occupation of our race, is the most undesirable part of the country for its development.

Our review of the physiographic conditions which environ our race on this continent makes it tolerably plain that North America is well suited for the development of northern Europeans. We may dismiss the fear that our race is to deteriorate in this country. We may further put aside the notion that we are to be a massive, unvaried people, destitute of those differences which by their reaction bring about the advance of man. It is true that the continent is not divided into the separate areas which have constituted the cradle-lands of the Old World, but it is evident that

the wide diversities in occupation will institute and maintain variations in the character of the people probably in time to be as great as those which in the more natural state of man depended on purely geographic conditions. At present, while the open structure of our social and economic life permits a rapid change in the occupations of men, the effect of industries dependent on physiographic conditions is not much felt; but with the increase and consolidation of our population, we may be sure that vocations will become more hereditary. Men will follow the occupations of the plough, the mine, or the mill from generation to generation, and so the communities will receive the individualized stamp which comes only through ancestral habit.

In the beginning mankind was dependent for culture and diffusion mainÎy upon geographic conditions. Each tribe was environed by rigid customs which fended off its neighbors. The movements were necessarily massive, for they were to result in displacements of pre-existing peoples. Therefore the first stages of man's development resemble, as regards the conditions of increase and diffusion, those of his lowerkindred in the ranks of life. The progress of intellectual capacity has given to certain races a larger measure of control over their circumstances. Still, even in our own centuries, the implantation

of our race in new lands already possessed by men has proved a task of exceeding difficulty. The would-be colonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the eastern coast of America, found something of the difficulty in gaining their foothold which stray plants or animals from one flora or fauna find when they are cast within a foreign field. Even in the present state of their development the most advanced races of men are limited by the climate, and can only dwell where the larger nature permits.

For all that we can foresee of the future, this dependence of man upon the conditions of his environment is of an insuperable nature. The good he wins he secures by obedience to the commands of his mother-earth. Looking back over the history of life upon the earth's surface, the physiographer is forced to the conclusion that its highest estate embodied in the moral and intellectual qualities of man has been, in the main, secured by the geographic variations which have slowly developed through the geological ages. Thus our continents and seas cannot be considered as physical accidents in which, and on which, organic beings have found an ever-perilous resting-place, but as great engines operating in a determined way to secure the advance of life.

man of forty-two or three has not found some difficulty in making the man of thirtyfive or less understand precisely how he looks at things, just because of this line of difference, which means that one of them was a half-grown boy, and the other a child during those years between 1860 and 1865? It is the whole difference between the historic and the reminiscent point of view. Sometimes it seems possible that the boy of fifteen or sixteen may have received a more vivid general impression than the actors themselves, who were busy with detail and even with drudgery, while to him everything was idealized into clear and large outlines-unobscured right and wrong, large issues and no compromises. How with this kind of memory are you going to make the younger man understand just how real the whole of it all is to you? On whichever side of Mason and Dixon's line you lived, there will always seem to him something fanatical in your way of looking at the past, and he will have a certain pity, such as one might have for a person now liberally enough educated who still has lingering in him the bias of some early narrow training. Of course it is infinitely better so; and he has the fuller inheritance in the very thing the war was fought for a country in which sectionalism should be a word almost incomprehensible. All of which does not alter the fact that just behind the actual fighters of the battle comes a generation whose special legacy of memories is a thing not often defined or taken account of, so that thinking over it prompted this writing; a generation who remember as boys the long hot Sunday of Bull Run, when the elders came home from church with grave or scared faces; who went out with an awe much greater than men's into the hushed streets on the day of Lincoln's death. If you are one of them, you will have a feeling not quite like that of either the veterans or your junior, when the country doctorthe quietest now and most professional of men-takes you in a moment of confidence into his study to show you his sword hanging between the pictures of his corps and brigade commanders; you will have something more than the historic sense when the old man in the corner of the clubthey are rare now-takes you home to see the painting of his twenty-one-year old

youngster who was killed in the Wilderness. You did nothing; your generation belongs in a kind of limbo-ce n'est pas magnifique; mais c'était toujours la guerre!

THE art of criticism is such a fine thing that one must regret its present tendency to formulary. It has, I think, such a tendency among us, curiously enough at the very moment when elsewhere-in France, at least it has emancipated itself into the license of a mere record of irresponsible impressions; in England, possibly, it is equally irresponsible, but certainly not impressionist. With us the novel mainly seems to be the victim of this tendency. Our critics-do not inquire too closely who they are-are at the present moment nearly unanimous in their preoccupation with prescribing to the novelist from the old rules of French unity and German objectivity. very well if they were professors in a conservatory where novel-writing was taught; but it savors distinctly rather of pedagogy than of criticism. And though pedagogy may be more important than criticism, it is at any rate a different thing. The great distinction perhaps between the two is that one is mechanical and the other spiritual.

This would be all

Mr. Henry James is just now suffering at the hands of this mechanical and pedagogic criticism. His "The Tragic Muse" is acknowledged by those who are at all up to it to be, if not a masterpiece, a very distinguished accomplishment. But it is objected to on the ground that it lacks unity and objectivity, that it is two disparate and discordant stories in one; that British politics and the stage have nothing in common, and that the work is full of obiter dicta proffered by the author instead of-if they must appear at all, rather than be relegated to some future essay-being put into the mouths of the personages of the novel. It would be interesting to know what Mr. James himself would reply to these objections, which are, of course, as abstractions, familiar to him. But it may be assumed that he would find their source in a lack of imagination, a comfortable repose in the literal, a contentment with formulary, with a contracted view holding out to indolence the deceitful promise of certainty. In point of fact the noticeable thing