oppression; but time only will tell whether, after all, the Central Pacific Railroad Company has not been successful at all the points which it wished to carry. A significant indication how little real hold the antimonopoly cry has upon the body of voters is shown in the relatively small vote received by Mr. John T. Doyle. He undoubtedly has the clearest insight into the rationale of the relations of transportation corporations to the public, and painted most vividly and persistently the vicious practices of the overland roads, especially in the development of the specialcontract system: and yet at the outcome he was credited with only a beggarly array of suffrages. If opposition to the railroad is in this State the "burning question" that it was alleged to be by party managers, we should have seen evidences of decisive opinions among the people, in the sharp questioning of the antecedents and present relations to the monopoly of the men who were candidates for Railroad Commissioners and members of the State Board of Equalization. It is true, the latter body has been shorn of much of its potency in railroad affairs by the decision of the United States Circuit Court in the San Mateo County case. Still, as there is a possibility of a reversal of the decision in the near future by the appellate court, it is manifest that the railroad has even yet a strong interest in the makeup of the State Board.

There is undoubtedly a very decided body of opinion and feeling in the State that the overland roads unjustly discriminate, and in many instances oppress, in their freight rates; but more than all, there is the somewhat vague but still ever-present feeling that the great monopoly controls and moves and overshadows all our industrial life. It is, perhaps, not so much a question of the particular offenses it has committed, as the uncomfortable conviction that it has an immense reserve of power which it can at any moment precipitate upon any local community, or any corporate enterprise, or any individual. This state of mind, in an American community, furnishes the groundwork for continued conflict. The despotism of democracy, like that of the monarchy, demands that all social and economical forces shall be its subjects. Hence, in California as elsewhere, the people are groping about to find some way of controlling the great corporate monopolies. But of all possible schemes, that of a commission of three men elected upon a general ticket, who shall have plenary powers over railroads, is beyond question the most idiotic. Already the people of this State have lost all faith in it. No deep interest can be excited in a political contest which involves the mere question of the personnel of the commission. If you put millions of money and the dearest interests of a vast number of persons on one side, and three such men as are likely to be evolved from a political convention upon the other, is it rational to expect any other outcome than the abortive one already exhibited by the railroad commission? The truth is,

that the causes which brought about the political revolution were in the general dissatisfaction with all the aspects of the political situation; weariness with the men who have since Garfield's death again assumed control, and especially disgust with their methods, their rapacity, their smallness.

FROM all sections of the country, the indications point to the demand for new party issues, and possibly new parties. There are two questions that will have to be settled: the one is the reform of the civil service, both national, State, and municipal; the other the tariff modifications; and incidentally to the latter, the whole range of questions touching the internal revenue, banking, and transportation.

Upon the first-civil service reform-there is so general and growing a sentiment that it cannot be said to form as yet the subject of an issue. In order to become so, the movement may have to advance a step farther; that is, after there is reached a consensus that it is a good thing, the real struggle may arise over the methods of accomplishing this good thing; and here the secret enemies of the movement may shelter themselves behind opposition to asserted impracticable schemes of reform, and in effect wage a bitter warfare against reform itself.

Free trade and protection will be sure to come up. Just now and for many years the country has been so prosperous that it makes little difference what system we work under. But a general economical crisis would precipitate the discussion and settlement of the question at once. It is very likely to be true, that, as Mr. Wells predicts, it will not be seriously taken in hand until there is a crisis.

The Democrats, however, must do something before 1884, in the direction of a reduction in taxation and a modification of the tariff, otherwise the people will turn upon them as they have upon the Republicans. They must also present some practical legislation upon civil service reform, or they will forfeit the newly inspired confidence.

The attitude of the public mind is that of watchfulness and expectation. The bulk of the voters do not care a straw by what name a party suppresses "bossism," political assessments, excessive appropriations for internal improvements, trickery and fraud in primaries and conventions, and a badly balanced, oppressive system of internal taxation and tariff laws. It is just now in such a condition that it will insist upon good works rather than professions of faith.

HERBERT SPENCER has just returned home, after making a hurried visit, and incidentally, by means of a newspaper reporter and an after-dinner speech, dropping a few criticisms upon our facial expression, our professional politicians and their following, our easygoing readiness in putting up with small trespasses upon our personal rights, and the baleful effects of our tendency to overwork. A little before him

Freeman the historian, was in our midst. He remained longer and looked more widely, and he also told us what he thinks, especially how nearly we are like our British cousins, and how archaic and not to be despised is much of our speech that our purists have been trying to get rid of. In the last number of the "Century," Henry James, Jr., has commenced to give us his thoughts upon American society. It is true, his contribution, "The Point of View," purports to be a series of letters giving the thoughts of an American girl and her mother, of a member of parliament, of a French savant, and of two or three others, male and female; yet they are unmistakably Mr. James's personal opinions. Mr. James is a type of a curious body of people-of a class that has differentiated itself within the last twenty-five years, the Europeanized Americans; men and women of more or less wealth, who either stay permanently abroad, or constantly flit back and forth; who secretly despise their own country, and yet have found no place in the Old World systems. Of all our critics, the people of this uncertain genus are the most unsparing.

The latest notable addition to the literature of observation in the United States is the article on "Some Aspects of American Public Life," by the brilliant author of the "Holy Roman Empire." in the November number of the "Fortriguy Review." Mr. Bryce has none of that condescension of the foreigner which James Russell Lowell has shown up so well. He devotes himself more particularly to discussing our party methods, what may be called the machinery of our political parties, and shows that he has studied us very carefully upon that side. Where he evinces more than common penetration is in perceiving the true relations of the party managers to the mass of the people; how their despotism extends, after all, only to the smaller officers, but does not control in the greater ones or broad state questions. He explains very clearly why it is that politics are different in England and the United States; how with us "the political life of the country is not the main or central current of its life, but seems a kind of side channel encumbered by weeds and bushes." He further understands, what so many of his countrymen do not, that the normal working of our institutions is to be seen in the villages, counties, and towns of the interior, and not in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

It is curious to note that, as we are becoming indifferent to English opinion, we are being more conscientiously written up by Britons. Twenty years ago we were over-sensitive as to what they

said of us. We are now passing rapidly to the other extreme. It may be, that when the English writer-tourist shall have reached absolute impartiality, we will have become utterly indifferent to his praise or blame.

IT has been proposed in the board of freeholders that the new charter of this city shall not authorize any of the school fund to be used to make the kindergarten a part of the public-school system. The kindergarten picks up out of the street the neglected, harshly treated, half-fed, half-clothed, unwashed, and uncombed prattling child or sturdy youngster, whose greatest knowledge of language is of slang and profanity; goes with it to its drunken mother, down in the slums of filth and vice; gets her permission to take the little waif up to the garden; there washes its face, and covers up its rags with a clean apron, and teaches it how to play, as children ought to play, lovingly and sweetly, with its companions; tells it what truth is, of which it had never heard; day after day develops in its pliant mind the germ of good that had never been able to sprout up through the cold and pestilential soil that covered it; fills its hopeful heart with happy dreams of some day becoming a respectable man, or, if a girl, of being a soft and gentle woman like the teacher; and thus molding and training it until it is six years old, then hands it over to the primary department of the public school for text-book tuition.

Six years is the minimum age at which pupils are admitted into the primary departments of the public schools. Shut out from opportunity of any moral or mental instruction, thousands of those under six are left to street life, until, when they reach the prescribed age, they have lost the good and developed the bad that were innate. It is a higher duty of society to prevent crime than it is to punish it. The former is ennobling and beneficial to the race, the latter merely vindicative and deterrent. There are twelve hundred of these little rescued moral starvelings now being cared for and made happy and good in fifteen kindergartens in San Francisco. these, all excepting two are supported by charity, the exceptions being those on Union and Jackson Streets, which are attached to the primary schools there. So favorable have been the results of the two mentioned, that it is proposed to add a kindergarten to each of the primary schools. The fruits of such a union would be worth far more to society than is the advanced instruction of the highest departments, in the languages and mathematics.

Of

A Breeze from the Woods.1

The

IT was the custom of THE CALIFORNIAN to review no books issued by its own company. While these books remained very few in number there were reasons that made this the best course; but as they become more numerous it will be impossible to pass them over, and the OVERLAND will in this respect depart from the custom of its predecessor. issue of a second edition of Mr. Bartlett's "Breeze from the Woods" makes a peculiarly favor able starting point for reviews of our own books. The first edition of this collection of essays, published three years ago, was only a private edition, in which the author, yielding to importunate solicitation, put into permanent form his OVERLAND essays for circulation merely among private friends. Although the book was not before the public-or, perhaps, rather because it was not-it was thought well to review it in a contributed article to THE CALIFORNIAN of February, 1880. As the author was writing to his readers of a book that the majority of them could not get possession of, this review consisted largely of long extracts from the essays. Like all pure literature, which gives the reviewer nothing to say as to the soundness of its facts or opinions, Mr. Bartlett's essays can hardly be described to those who have not seen them, except by extracts. views usually fall into two classes by the broad distinction we have just suggested: they are written for those who have not read the book, to give them an idea what sort of book it is, and whether they had better read it; or they are written as comment and criticism on a book that it is assumed the reader, as

Re

a matter of course, knows all about. As all the essays contained in the first edition of "A Breeze from the Woods" were published in the OVERLAND, and the two that have been added in this second edition, ("The Homestead by the Sea," and "Suburban Etchings") in THE CALIFORNIAN, it is fair to assume that a goodly proportion of readers-although the book is barely upon the market-are already acquainted with these delightful, wandering soliloquies, and to review accordingly.

As essayist, Mr. Bartlett stands almost alone on this coast. There has been much good sketch-writing here some of it almost unequaled; there is good criticism; and what might be called the critical or philosophical essay is not wanting; essays of information, or that sort compounded of description and information, in which Mr. Muir is pre-eminent, have already been well done here: but as to that essay

1 A Breeze from the Woods. By W. C. Bartlett, San Francisco: The California Publishing Co. 1883.

that is more like entertaining talk frozen into permanency, it would be hard to get together a volume as large as that under review by collecting all of even approximately equal merit that has ever been written on this coast by all other writers put together. The pure essay is always a rare product in a new country; for it is a sort of flower that, like some of our wild lilies, seeming to be the effortless and evanescent product of a season, blossoms only from deep-planted bulbs that have for many years gathered to themselves thickening scales, stationary and undisturbed, sheltered from attack under gravelly strata that defy the small burrowing of jack-knife or trowel, and almost call for pick-ax. So it is generally in the undisturbed surroundings of a ripe literary circle, where entertaining talk is the habit, that some one puts the very best of the talk- -or of the habit of thought that makes such talk possible-into essays. The real difficulty of the essay, the reason why it looks so easy and is so hard, is that it is surface-writing, but a surface that implies an underlying depth of much heavy effort. Wherever a good essay is written that grazes along the crests of thoughts, of observations of humanity, of enjoyment of nature, there has been somewhere-in the author, in the elements that produced him, or in both-much profundity of mental and emotional work, much of

that friction between minds that so takes off the dull surface of provincialism that you will find a man who has never stirred from his native village, and yet has the provincial accent less than another who has been three times around the world: such a fund of familiarity with life must be inherited or acquired before one can ramble over his domain in the indo

lent, vagrant fashion of a good essay. The light suggestion of thought, the humorous glance of expression, is clever by virtue of hinting all the time of something more that had to be known, or thought, or felt, or appreciated, before that light thing could be said. Further: the capacity to notice and care for little things, in nature and in human relations, and to see the subtly amusing side of them, is one of the most characteristic accents of high civilization-of genuine education. The low-class mind craves sensation, and takes no interest in small matters of leaf and wind, and little tricks of dog nature or human nature; and for humor, it perceives only the ludicrous. The middle-class mind is serious, and dull toward fine shades and distinctions; it sees life in broad divisions, theological, or social, or literary; its fingers are strong, but too clumsy to get hold of the charm and the significance in complete life of the little things-still less of those impalpable, far-reaching relations that constitute the humorous. Ignorant men there have

been who loved the woods, and knew all the little ways of nature; but if we made them write down their thoughts about it all, we should find their appreciation lame; for it is only the sophisticated man who can appreciate not merely nature, but nature and all her relations to life.

It is these two closely related traits-the appreciation of little things, especially in their humorous bearing, and the love of nature—that make the charm of the essays under review. It has been said that they suggest Thoreau. There is a touch of Thoreau, of John Burroughs, of John Muir, in the attitude toward nature: she speaks in the same voice to this author as to them; but there the resemblance ceases. They are students of nature: he is a lookeron. There is far more suggestion of Charles Dudley Warner, who cares more for humanity and less for inanimate nature, and is much more a humorist, yet, on the whole, occupies the same position of amused on-looker at all the quaint little things that fill up the chinks of life. For, with all his love of nature, with all his preaching about shaking off the dust of daily life, our author does not care for nature apart from humanity: it is the human nature in dogs and wild-cats that makes them interesting to him; every paragraph about a tree or a breaker twists itself round like a Boston street to reflections on human life. These essays bear all the air of a casual and careless committing to paper of a busy man's odd-minute or vacation chains of mental action-of spontaneous mental action, hardly to be called thought. They are occasionally too rambling, too careless and casual; but for the most part the reader is well willing

to ramble too.

College Verses.1

It is common enough to laugh at undergraduate literary work as the greenest of unripe fruit, and it is probably true that no one but the professor who has to inspect the essays ever wades through college prose unless it be a very phenomenal piece of work.

This is not saying that undergraduate prosewriting is not occasionally sounder in thought and method than much popular magazine writing; but the young fellow, among his books and his awakening sense of the larger regions of thought, is not capable of addressing anything of value to a picked audience, and does not know how to adapt himself to the taste and secure the interest of a mixed one. The pupil air is in all he writes; the essay bears about it a sort of expectancy of the teacher's correcting pencil. One may find an exception, but as a rule it would hardly be worth while to offer undergraduate prose for publication in our leading maga zines.

But undergraduate poetry is a different matter. There have been a good many poems written in 1 College Verses. Berkeley, Cal. Compiled by the Berkeleyan Company. San Francisco: The California Publishing Co. 1883.

college that are quite up to magazine standard. Almost all great poets wrote some poems worth preserving before they left college; and, on the other hand, many a man has, during that blessed time of life, written a few good poems that he could never equal afterward. It is a very good time for poetry. writing. Lacks in the matter of critical taste there will be, but the youthful vigor of emotion is at that time combined with intellectual eagerness in due proportion for poetry, as it rarely is in the later life of any but men of scholarly pursuits.

We speak only of colleges of high literary standard. In any others, the lack of critical taste outweighs all the advantages of youth. Accordingly, it is only three or four of our oldest colleges-notably Harvard and Yale-that have had material for creditable collections of poems. It is, therefore, a most remarkable thing that we should have before us a very creditable collection from our own new and struggling university. One fact of significance as to the causes of its excellence is found in the time covered by the poems. There are only a few scattering poems written before the entrance of the class of '78; and, as a matter of fact, it was with the entrance of this class that the whole English department was reorganized on a plane rare among American colleges. That this should result in an era of poetrywriting is no more wonderful than that Agassiz's sojourn at Harvard produced a crop of naturalists. The grade of literary work in the Berkeley college papers and at commencements has showed the same excellence, altogether disproportionate to the rank of the college in many other respects. It is therefore no surprise to its friends on this coast to find the students issuing a little volume of some fifty or sixty poems, none of which are puerile, a few of which are up to the better grade of magazine poetry, and a number of which are as good as the worst that the leading magazines of the country print. In fact, more than half a dozen Berkeley undergraduate poems have already found harborage in "The Century," "Lippincott's," and THE CALIFORNIAN. A glance down the table of contents suggests another cause. Berkeley is what is colloquially termed a "coeducation college," and the ten per cent. of young women in its membership have written fifty per cent. of the poetry. As to the quality of the feminine compared with the masculine poems, the best and the worst in the book are masculine. There is a tendency in the girls' poems to group themselves along a line of fair medium excellence.

Several names among the classes now for some years graduated will be recognized by our readers as among the rising lights of our own contributing

When those hard-handed Argonauts of old,

To river's mouth and launched into the cold,
Damp airs of ocean; silent all did hold

Their oars, looking to seaward; and did stand
Lifting their glad brown faces to be fanned
By the sea wind. Then their sails fold by fold
They loosed; and lay and breathed the salty breeze.
So when down song's tumultuous flood I sped,
By fairy realms, and holds of sovereign might,
And hoisted sail in old King Homer's seas,

I felt the foam-chilled breeze about my head:
I breathed and breathe it still with deep delight.

This has the real Keats spirit, to our mind, with out being an imitation. "Milton" by Chas. S. Greene, '80, "George Eliot," by Edmund C. Sanford, '83, "Through Rose of Dawn," by Seddie E. Anderson, '78, and "O Patient, Noble Heart," by Alice E. Pratt, '81, are the other most notable of the fourteen sonnets. We notice among the sonnets one, "No Mystery," that comes only under the broader definition of a sonnet, and has not the fourteen lines. In the other poems of a grave cast the quality does not, except in the best two or three, range as high as in the sonnets. The best of these two or three is undoubtedly the opening poem "Hope," again by a member of the class of '78, lost by early death, Annie H. Shinn. "The Master," by the same author, "The Royal Wine," by Alice E. Pratt, '81, "Mountain Rest," by Lucy Mooar, '80, "The New and the Old," by C. H. Shinn, '74, "The Real and the Ideal," by Mary R. Stearns, '76, are the best of the other poems in this class. The songs, as songs can be, are perhaps more striking at less expense of ability. The initial one, "At Sunset," by Jane Barry, '81, we quote:

At sunset, hark, a low deep sound
Is borne across the placid bay,
And through the hills, and far around
In echoes faint, it dies away.
A boom-the sunset gun
Is fired; the day is done;
The purple shadows coming on
Are deepening in the west.

And homeward turns each white-spread sail,
As flies a wild bird to its nest;
The stir of day on hill, in vale,
In busy city, thronged and pressed,
Is dying with the light.
The last rays linger bright
On far-off clouds, and holy night
Descends, with welcome rest.

Two translations, "The Fatherland," by Seddie E. Anderson, and "Wurmlingen Chapel," by Jane Barry, are about as good as translations can be. There is not one among the sonnets that might not appear in any magazine without discredit. Among the other poems there are a good many that are not really worth preserving, but still are good for youth

"Hours of Idleness," or in "Published in 1830 and omitted from later editions," is probably comparing the very best of one man with the very worst of another, it still implies that the very lowest point touched by the poetry these young fellows are sending out is decidedly above much that comes into every reviewer's hands from people old enough to know better. We congratulate the college on this very creditable book, which contains much that should certainly not be let die, and nothing that it need be ashamed of. It is a pretty volume,

significantly adorned with wild oats, and brought

out with evident reference to the gift season.

Doctor Zay.1

It is curious to see the characteristic figures of a society filing out of fiction as one epoch passes away, and the new ones filing in. The new class rarely slips in gradually and unperceived, individual by individual, but comes in a party, drawing all eyes to the simultaneous entrance of half a dozen. Thus the magazines blossomed out a few years ago with a profusion of "American Girls Abroad”; and now a step farther into new and unexplored regions of modern womanhood brings into fiction a group of "woman doctors." Charles Reade evolved from his own

mind what he imagined a woman doctor would be like or, at least, what would be a striking and picturesque figure for a woman doctor; Mr. Howells turned to account his penetrating acquaintance with the vacillating, unreasoning, earnest type of women, in imagining a woman of that sort in the position of a doctor; and now, passing over a tendency beginning to appear in short stories toward the same situation, we find a more serious attempt than either of these to handle the same problem in fiction—and this time by a woman. In beginning her story of "Doctor Zay," Miss Phelps published a note from Mr. Howells, explaining the purely fortuitous nature of the coincidence by which their two stories, appearing so nearly together, treated of the same subject; but there is, in reality, no parallelism between "Doctor Breen's Practice" and "Doctor Zay." Mr. Howells takes pains to avow-what the discriminating reader will amply indorse-that his is no study of the general problem of sex and doctoring; it is simply a study of human nature. That Grace Breen had not the making of a doctor in her proves no more, pro or con, than if Mr. Howells had made a study of the struggles and failure to make a doctor of himself of some youth by nature unfit. That the unwillingness to depend on one's self as a final resort in serious emergency is pre-eminently a feminine trait, still

1 Doctor Zay. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1882. For sale by Billings, Harbourne & Co.