The great ocean yacht races are described in a manner that is more interesting and more easily understood than such accounts usually

are.

The public attention recently excited by Captain Samuels and the "Dauntless," in the race across the Atlantic, will cause this account of his former exploits in that yacht to be read with renewed interest. The author indulges in a little quiet drollery in his account of the efforts of our Canadian brethren to compete for the famous America cup, with the yacht "Countess," as well as with her equally unfortunate successor in those fruitless efforts. The comparative merits of the deep English cutters and the wide American centre-board vessels are very fairly and intelligently presented. The conclusions concerning them reached by Captain Coffin are worthy of attention, for his experience and good judg ment entitle him to be considered a sound authority on this much discussed subject. He says:

"Nothing can be more stupid than the prejudice, born of ignorance, which has been entertained against centre-board vessels. That they are faster than keel-boats, is beyond a question; that they are handier under canvas and better suited to our shallow harbors, cannot be doubted; and as to the question of safety, the percentage of accident in centre-board craft is so small that it need not be taken into account at all. On the other hand, the deep cutters are not a success; the centre-board boats in good breezes having always proved the most speedy. It has also been proved that this style of yacht is less comfortable than the broad centre-board boats, and not suited to the shallow American harbors. They are, however, very handsome craft, and out of the controversy as to cutter and centre-board has come a compromise between the two extremes, of broad and shallow, and deep and narrow, which is superior to either. The centreboard is retained, but with it is a keel through which it plays; the yacht is made narrower and deeper than of old, the lack of stability due to narrowing the model being made up by outside lead ballast."

Several other matters concerning which there is much difference of opinion are also very clearly treated by the writer,-such as the question of the best rig for yachts. He concludes that the schooner rig is so much handier than any other that it is sure to be preferred for a vessel kept solely for pleasure sailing. But he also expresses the belief that, as racing craft, the day of schooners has passed, on both sides of the Atlantic. On the subject of materials, he thinks that iron or mild steel will finally supersede wood as a building material for pleasure yachts.

Besides Mr. Jaffray's chapter on "Steam Yachts," already referred to in this article, the volume contains a chapter on "The Mayflower and Galatea Contest for the American cup," written by C. E. Clay; also one on "British Yachting," by C. J. C. McAlester. These

serve to give completeness to the work, and are so well supported by tabulated facts as to make it very useful as a book of reference. The wood-cuts are numerous, and are chiefly reproductions of outline drawings of the most famous yachts, by Fred S. Cozzens. They are the best that have ever appeared in any popular treatise on this subject; being faultless in the matter of seamanship, and having great artistic merit, two qualities rarely combined in pictures of vessels. Many of the best of the illustrations are, however, sadly marred by the crowding of irregular patches of printed matter into the sky-space, producing a most incongruous jumble of light sails and heavy text. This is inexcusable in pictures of this character. This unseemly crowding looked badly enough when the chapters composing the book appeared as articles in the limited space of the magazine; but it seems much worse in a volume having such generous proportions as the one under consideration. It is an evidence of the fatal impairment of a nice sense of artistic propriety, caused by the greed for gain in modern magazine publishers, who have in this case deliberately destroyed the breezy atmospheric effect of admirable illustrations, to gain a few squares of text, while they devote page after page of space to absurd advertisements that should never have a place within the covers of a magazine.

HORATIO L. WAIT.

"OLD BULLION.” *

The reader of Mr. Roosevelt's biography of Benton will find the author's opinions on men and things outside of his immediate subject, expressed with great freedom and equal positiveness. Thus, of General Lee he says:

"The world has never seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee; and their leader will undoubtedly rank as, without any exception, the very greatest of all the great captains that the Englishspeaking peoples have brought forth-and this, although the last and chief of his antagonists may himself claim to stand as the full equal of Marlborough and Wellington."

Of General Scott:

"A good general, but otherwise a wholly absurd and flatulent personage." Of General Taylor:

"He was neither a great statesman nor yet a great commander; but he was an able and gallant soldier, a loyal and upright public servant, and a most kindly, honest, and truthful man."

Of General Jackson:

"A very charming English historian of our day has compared Wellington with Washington; it would have been far juster to have compared him

*THOMAS H. BENTON. By Theodore Roosevelt. (American Statesmen Series.) Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

with Andrew Jackson. Both were men of strong, narrow minds and bitter prejudices, with few statesmanlike qualities, who, for brilliant military services, were raised to the highest civil positions in the gift of the state. As a statesman

Wellington may have done less harm than Jackson, for he had less influence; but he has no such great mark to his credit as the old Tennesseean's attitude toward the Nullifiers. If Jackson's election is a proof that the majority is not always right, Wellington's elevation may be taken as showing that the minority, or a fraction thereof, is in its turn quite as likely to be wrong."

Jefferson, he terms a "scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire," who is "constitutionally unable to put a proper value on truthfulness;" President Pierce, "a small politician, of low capacity and mean surroundings, proud to act as the servile tool of men worse than himself but also stronger and abler;" Buchanan, a "timid, shifty, and selfish politician, naturally fond of facing both ways;" Silas Wright, "a typical dough-face' politician.' President Tyler "has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness." President Monroe " was a courteous, high-bred gentleman, of no especial ability, but well fitted to act as presidential figure-head during the politically quiet years of that era of good feeling which lasted from 1816 till 1824." He says of Webster: "There never was any question of Webster's courage; on the occasions when he changed front he was actuated by self-interest and ambition, not by timidity." Of Clay, that he "entirely lacked Taylor's backbone." Of President Van Buren: "The people at large would never have thought of him for President of their own accord." "If he had always governed his actions by a high moral standard he would probably never have been heard of." Of the President of the United States Bank, Biddle, that he "was a man of some ability, but conceited to the last degree, untruthful, and to a certain extent unscrupulous in the use he made of the political influence of the great moneyed institution over which he presided."

Interspersed with the numerous pictures in this gallery are such observations as these:

"The cause of the Abolitionists has had such a halo shed around it by the after course of events, which they themselves in reality did very little to shape, that it has been usual to speak of them with absurdly exaggerated praise. Their courage, and for the most part their sincerity, cannot be too highly spoken of, but their share in abolishing slavery was far less than has commonly been represented. During all the terrible four years that sad, strong, patient Lincoln worked and suffered for the people, he had to dread the influence of the extreme Abolitionists only less than that of the Copperheads. . . Wendell Phillips may be taken as a very good type of the whole. His services against slavery prior to the war should always be remembered with gratitude; but after

the war, and until the day of his death, his position on almost every public question was either mischievous or ridiculous, and usually both."

"New York has always had a low political standard, one or the other of its great party and factional organizations, and often both or all of them, being at all times most unlovely bodies of excessively unwholesome moral tone."

"Political economists have pretty generally agreed that protection is vicious in theory and harmful in practice; but if the majority of the people in interest wish it, and it affects only themselves, there is no earthly reason why they should not be allowed to try the experiment to their heart's content. The trouble is it rarely ever affects only themselves."

It will thus be perceived that Mr. Roosevelt holds the pen of a ready writer, and has a mind as definitely made up as to public men and measures during the period under consideration in his sketch, as Lord Randolph Churchill's upon the affairs of Great Britain.

Thomas Hart Benton was born in North Carolina, March 14, 1782. The death of his father, a lawyer in good standing, left him at an early age to the care of his Virginian mother, who lived to see the son, whose character she did much to mould, one of the foremost statesmen of his country. Naturally studious and fond of reading, Mr. Benton was pursuing his college course at the University of North Carolina, when his mother decided to move to the vicinity of Nashville, Tennessee, where they owned a large tract of land. There, in attending to his great backwoods farm and in pushing the growth of the settlement, Mr. Benton "readily enough turned into a regular frontiersman of the better and richer sort ;" and, says Mr. Roosevelt, though never a vicious and debauched man, he took kindly to the change from the rather austere training of his youth to the savage brawls, the shooting and stabbing affrays, which went to make up the leading features of the social life of the place and epoch, where horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, whiskey drinking, and kindred vices flourished in rank luxuriance. Duelling prevailed, and some years later Benton killed his man,having, as an eye-witness is reported to have said, "looked him to death before he killed him." Such incidents appear to have been so common that Benton's serenity is not shown to have been disturbed by any after reflections upon it. It is related of Jackson that when in his last illness he saw a friend examining a brace of pistols on the mantel-piece, he calmly remarked: "Yes, that's the pistol I killed Dickenson with."

Mr. Benton was admitted to the bar, and practiced his profession for some years in Tennessee, serving also as a member of the legislature; and then removed to Missouri, with which State his name is inseparably connected. He was a typical Western man,

though his large information and really extensive learning and accomplishments gave him a certain superiority among those around him; and there is nothing better in this biography than Mr. Roosevelt's description of the men, and Benton's relation to them, "who, under the shadow of world-old forests, and in the sunlight of the great lonely plains, wrought out the destinies of a nation and a continent," thoroughly appreciating as he did, "that he was helping to shape the future of a country whose wonderful development is the most important feature in the history of the nineteenth century; the non-appreciation of which fact is in itself sufficient utterly to disqualify any American statesman from rising to the front rank."

As a writer, Mr. Benton's reputation will rest mainly upon his "Thirty Years' View," and upon his "Abridgment of the Debates of Congress," which he brought down from 1789 to 1850, in sixteen volumes, an invaluable work, compiled after he had passed the age of seventy-four, and the closing portion dictated in a whisper on his death-bed. As a public man, his fame will be perpetuated by his career in the Senate and House, a career which will impress the reader with deeper admiration the more closely it is examined. Mr. Benton entered the Senate with the State of Missouri, and after thirty years in that body his official life closed with two years in the House, signalized by his vigorous resistance to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, at a time when no "fire-bell in the night was needed to proclaim the impending conflagration. It was in Benton's time that bills to subsidize steamship lines were first passed, and "that the enlarging and abuse of the pension system began, which in our own day threatens to become a really crying evil," and he opposed both sets of measures. "I am a friend to old soldiers," said he, "but not to old speculators," and he pointed out the tendency of carelessly enacted pension bills not to relieve real sufferers but to work in the interest of speculative outsiders.

Mr. Benton defended the presidential power of veto against the fierce attack of Clay-a power which, as Mr. Roosevelt well says, "is among the best features of our government." He advocated the removal of the Indians, and demonstrated that we had paid to them for land purchases five times as much as we gave for Louisiana and about three times as much as we paid for Louisiana, Florida, and California. In relation to Florida at the close of the Seminole war, he insisted that what was then wanted was the armed cultivator to take possession and keep possession, and he exclaimed: "The heart of the Indian sickens when he hears the crowing of the cock, the barking of the dog, the sound of the axe,

and the crack of the rifle. These are the true evidences of the dominion of the white man; these are the proofs that the owner has come and means to stay, and then the Indians feel it to be time for them to go." He attacked Calhoun's proposition for the distribution of the surplus, and showed "the viciousness of a scheme which would degrade every state government into the position of a mendicant, and would allow money to be collected from the citizens with one hand in order to be given back to them with the other." And he succeeded at this time in defeating Clay's land-money distribution bill, in connection with his opposition to which he urged a plan to apply the surplus to the national defence, in which he declared "the whole Union is equally interested; for the country, in all that concerns its defences, is but a unit, and every section is interested in the defence of every other section, and every individual citizen is interested in the defence of the whole population."

He opposed the " Spoils System," and in his "Thirty Years' View" he writes:

"Certainly no individual has a right to an office; no one has an estate or property in a public employment; but when a mere ministerial worker in a subordinate station has learned its duties by experience and approved his fidelity by his conduct, it is an injury to the public service to exchange him for a novice whose only title to the place may be a political badge or partisan service. It is exchanging experience for inexperience, tried ability for untried, and destroying the incentive to good conduct by destroying its reward. . . . It converts elections into scrambles for office, and degrades the government into an office for rewards and punishments; and divides the people of the Union into two adverse parties, each in its turn, and as it becomes dominant, to strip and proscribe the other."

But Mr. Benton was not likely to commit the error attributed by Mr. Roosevelt to the junior Adams, as going altogether too far in his non-partisanship when it came to appointing cabinet and other high officers,

"His views on such points being not only fantastic, but absolutely wrong. The colorless character of his administration was largely due to his having, in his anxiety to avoid blind and unreasoning adherence to party, committed the only less serious fault of paying too little heed to party; for a healthy party spirit is pre-requisite to the performance of effective work in American political life."

Mr. Benton opposed the Wilmot Proviso, as well as Calhoun's famous resolutions declaring that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the territories. As to slavery, he said:

"The incurability of the evil is the greatest objection to the extension of slavery. If it is wrong for the legislator to inflict an evil which can be cured, how much more to inflict one that is incurable, and against the will of the people who are to endure it forever! I quarrel with no one for

deeming slavery a blessing; I deem it an evil, and would neither adopt it nor impose it on others."

Mr. Benton's objections on principle to a tariff for protection, and to internal improvements not justified under the Constitution; his long and sturdy contest for the disposition of the public lands to actual settlers at a small cost; his securing the enactment of the trading road from Missouri through the Indian country to New Mexico; the triumphant passage of the "expunging" resolutions; his then original suggestion that we should send foreign ministers to China, Japan, and Persia, "and even to the Grand Turk"; his early advocacy of the Pacific Railroad; his conviction that the "still formless and unshaped future" inevitably belonged to this nation, and his demand for continental development; his opposition to the Ashburton treaty as surrendering something that belonged to us; his position as to Oregon, Texas, California; his feeling that all the unoccupied land to the Northwest was by right our heritage, for which he was willing to do battle, all these are graphically depicted in these pages. Upon the bill for the settlement of Oregon, he said as to England: "I grant that she will take offence, but that is not the question with me. Has she a right to take offence? That is my question! And this being decided in the negative, I neither fear nor calculate consequences.' Upon the question of the indemnity, he warns France that in the event of a conflict it would have to do with a branch of the same race which "from the days of Agincourt and Crecy, of Blenheim and Ramillies, down to the days of Salamanca and Waterloo, has always known perfectly well how to deal with the impetuous and fiery courage of the French."

And all through his public conduct, like the golden strand of the Queen's Cable, runs the aggressive loyalty which did such service in the contest with the Nullifiers. The following is his own account of what took place in reference to Calhoun's resolutions declaring that the Constitution carried slavery into the territories, proprio vigore:

"Mr. Calhoun said he had expected the support of Mr. Benton as the representative of a slaveholding State.' Mr. Benton answered that it was impossible that he could have expected such a thing. Then,' said Mr. Calhoun, 'I shall know where to find that gentleman.' To which Mr. Benton said: 'I shall be found in the right place, on the side of my country and the Union." answer, given on that day and on the spot, is one of the incidents of his life which Mr. Benton will wish posterity to remember."

This

We had, however, involuntarily placed at the head of this article the nick-name, "Old Bullion," because that appellation occured at once upon the suggestion of Mr. Benton's

name. Though deserving of the remembrance of posterity on other grounds, we think his firmest hold on that remembrance, the " cue that will instantly recall him, will be found in his steady adherence to hard, i. e. honest, money, and the terrific war he waged on its behalf, whether in victory or defeat. He knew well that a metallic currency is of more vital importance to the laboring men and to men of small capital generally than to any of the richer classes. He knew well that a craze for "soft" money works directly in the interest of "the money power," which "its loudmouthed advocates are ostensibly opposing." He predicted the collapse of 1837, and, referring to the Whig proposition to repeal the specie circular and make the notes of the banks receivable for federal dues, said:

"The present bloat in the paper system cannot continue; violent contraction must follow enormous expansion; a scene of distress and suffering must ensue to come of itself out of the present state of things, without being stimulated and helped on by our unwise legislation. . . . I am one of those who promised gold, not paper; I did not join in putting down the Bank of the United States to putting down the currency of a national bank to put up a wilderness of local banks. I did not join in put up a national paper currency of a thousand local banks. I did not strike Cæsar to make Anthony master of Rome."

He did not believe in the issue of treasury notes, but unwillingly supported the bill of 1837 for that purpose on account of the necessities of the situation, in view of the fact that the bill authorized their issue in such a form that they could not become currency. They bore interest; were transferable only by indorsement; were payable at a fixed time; were not reissuable, and were to be cancelled when paid. He championed with especial zeal the great financial measures of the Van Buren administration, providing for an independent treasury and for hard money payments; and he "denounced the doctrine that it was the government's duty to interfere in any way in private business; for, as usual in times of general distress, a good many people had a vague idea that in some way the government ought to step in and relieve them from the consequences of their own folly."

The measures which Clay, as leader of the Whigs, brought forward at the first session after Tyler became President included bills to repeal the sub-treasury act, to establish a bank, and to distribute the proceeds of the public land sales, thus indirectly assuming the debts of the States. Benton fought them all, and neither ultimately remained upon the statute books. The distribution act was absolutely indefensible, and was repealed before it had time to take effect. It is singular that Mr. Clay had always been an enthusiastic advocate of such

a measure. The condition of the treasury becoming very bad, treasury notes with the quality of re-issuability were issued and offered to the creditors of the government in the proportion of two-thirds paper and one-third specie. Mr. Benton says that he determined to resist this, and to make a case for the consideration and judgment of Congress and the country, and to rouse the latter to a general resistance. Accordingly he had a check drawn for a few days' compensation as Senator, and placed it in the hands of a messenger for collection, inscribed, "The hard, or a protest." "The hard" was not delivered; the protest followed (costing $1.75, "paid in the hard"); and Mr. Benton then brought the case before the Senate and the people, in a speech giving a full account of the transaction and resulting in the immediate stopping of the forced tender of paper money.

To no statesman is this country more indebted than to Benton for the maintenance of correct views upon the true function of government in relation to this question of "soft" money, in respect to which Bancroft declares: "No powerful political party ever permanently rested for support on the theory that it is wise and right. No statesman has been thought well of by his kind in a succeeding generation for having been its promotor."

Mr. Benton "was a most loving father," and took the keenest delight in the successes of his son-in-law, Colonel Fremont, and in the assistance rendered him by the courage and judgment of Mrs. Fremont at a trying crisis in her husband's adventurous career. "He was an exceptionally devoted husband." "In public as in private life, he was a man of sensitive purity of character," and his biographer records an instance of the care he took to keep his public acts free from the least suspicion of improper influence. He was counsel when elected to the Senate for a large number of land claimants, who required Congressional action to complete success. He refused to act longer for his clients, or even to designate his successor, so as not only to be quite unbiased in his action as Senator on the subject of the claims, "but not to have, nor to be suspected of having, any personal interest in the fate of any of them."

"He was a faithful friend and a bitter foe; he was vain, proud, utterly fearless, and quite unable to comprehend such emotions as are expressed by the terms despondency and yielding. His abounding vitality and marvellous memory, his indomitable energy and industry, and his tenacious persistency and personal courage, all combined to give him a position and influence such as few American statesmen have ever held. His character grew steadily to the very last; he made better speeches and was better able to face new problems when past three score and ten than in his early youth or middle age. . . . He was sometimes

narrow-minded, and always wilful and passionate; but he was honest and truthful. At all times and in all places he held every good gift he had completely at the service of the American Federal Union." MELVILLE W. FULLER.

RECENT POETRY.*

Mr. Browning's new volume has been before the public for some little time, and has been received with that semi-humorous sort of comment which largely takes the place of serious criticism of his work. It may be admitted that the perversity which carries him with every new volume deeper and deeper into his peculiar mannerisms affords some justification for this treatment at the hands of the reviewer, but it must not be forgotten that he is a very great poet, one of the greatest of the rich period in which his years have fallen, and those qualities which make him great deserve attention no less than those that make him almost unreadable. The "Parleyings" may be described as interviews reversed. The poet has buttonholed "certain people of importance in their day," and has told them in his peculiar way what he thinks of them and their mundane doings. Their own share in the conversation is reduced to a minimum, being about as great as Mr. Caudle's share in the famous parleyings" of which he was the subject or the victim. These interviews are, of course, put to use by the poet in the embodiment of his robustly optimistic philosophy. Whatever may be thought of optimism in general, that of Mr. Browning has nothing of the shallowness that characterizes most current expressions of belief in the essential goodness of things. He makes no effort to reason evil out of existence, but boldly acknowledges its presence, and finds for it a beneficent function.

66

THE HEART OF THE WEED.

& Co.

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin MADRIGALS AND CATCHES. By Frank Dempster Sherman. New York: White, Stokes, & Allen.

THE POEMS OF SIR JOHN SUCKLING. Edited by Frederick A. Stokes. New York: White, Stokes, & Allen.

THE POEMS OF MADAME DE LA MOTHE GUYON. Edited by the Rev. A. Saunders Dyer, M.A. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son.

Bedside POETRY. A Parent's Assistant in Moral Dis. cipline. Compiled by Wendell P. Garrison. Boston: D. Lothrop Co.

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