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mostly looking to the welfare of his town and state rather than to personal advantage or reward. He accepted many positions upon committees, commissions, boards of control and the like, where his wide knowledge, executive ability and excellent common sense gave him the reputation he most coveted, that of an honorable and useful citizen. He had a decided taste for historical studies and soon began to rescue from error and oblivion the annals of his native town. Four ample and goodly volumes, compiled with scrupulous care from widely scattered and often obscure sources and annotated with judgment and reserve, attest his tireless industry and clear historic sense.

His power of correct inference from few data was quick and strong. He had a rare apprehension of the possible. significance of an isolated fact. He could pick up scattered bits of local history, thrown away by the unthinking, or hidden in musty records and documents, or lurking in forgotten letters, inventories, and casual memoranda, and could recombine these into a consistent mosaic that would picture a long past event, often restoring its true setting of causes and consequences. While this modest annotator and chronicler would by no means have laid claim to the imagination and philosophic insight requisite for an historian in the large sense, there are not a few passages in his writings that show a conception of the past, revivified, clothed with appropriate circumstances and made to appear as the once-present. His vision was true and consistent as far as it went, and he never strained it beyond its powers.

The services performed by Mr. Nourse as a public-spirited citizen, for the benefit of his town and his state, can hardly be estimated at their full value except by his fellow-workers in the various positions of responsibility which he occupied, for he sounded no trumpet before him. In both branches of the state legislature, on the library commission, as trustee of the Worcester Insane Hospital, as member of the state board of charity, on the school committee and the library board of Lancaster-in all these relations, and many more, his courtesy, candor and good sense, his disinterestedness, his unshrinking readiness to do his full share of whatever was to be done, are gratefully remembered and spoken of by all who were associated with him. It is mentioned by the attendants that even the poor demented

patients in the hospital brightened up and smiled at his coming.

His taste was for working societies rather than social clubs, particularly for such as encourage historical research; and he accepted membership in several such organizations. He was elected a member of our body in 1883, and a member of its council in 1901. We of this Society need no reminder of the value of his work or the worth of his character as an associate, and there is no doubt that he in turn enjoyed and prized the intellectual and social privileges of membership with us.

The several impressions made by our friend upon those well acquainted with him at various periods combine to form something like a "composite photograph" of the man, in which certain features are very distinctly marked. For although, as we have seen, he engaged with zeal in a considerable number of quite different activities, his nature, on the whole, was simple, homogeneous and consistent. There seemed few, if any, warring elements in his make-up, and I fancy the case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would have been unintelligible to him. What he was, he was by a decided majority. An associate speaks-I think without exaggeration-of his "intense zeal for righteousness, in the conduct of affairs." In his case, "the child was father of the man." None of his youth was wasted in waywardness, and he was a stranger to dissipation, almost to recreation. Every day was made to count in whatever business he had in hand. He spent little time in hesitation over what to do, and little, I think, in regrets over what he had done. This was not only economy, it was sanity. Though surrounded by books, he was not given to desultory reading, but confined himself mainly to what would contribute to the subject he was studying. No man was ever more scrupulous in verifying his facts; he would go through with microscopic eye a whole edition of any of his published books, pen in hand, correcting minute errors of the press that had escaped the proofreader. He was one of the most industrious and diligent of men. You never found him idle, and seldom vacillating as to the course he had better take. This singleness of purpose was part and parcel of his integrity and probity, and it operated to exclude from his character all insincerity, pre

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tense and affectation. Perhaps it also excluded a degree of geniality and bonhomie from his social intercourse, and imparted at times something of austerity and even acerbity to his manner. Such a person must always be out of his element in any company where compliments and the graceful sinuosities of deportment that we call "social tact" more esteemed than frank truth and sincerity. Our plaindealing friend certainly did not possess, nor did he covet, "those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have." That he sometimes, in fact, went towards the other extreme he probably would not have denied. If he knew a thing was true he did not greatly concern himself as to whether it would be agreeable. The thing he said would never be unfair or unkind as it lay in his own mind, or as it left his lips; but he lacked something of the sympathetic imagination that should follow or rather anticipate, the word or tone and realize how it will strike the other party.

Mr. Nourse was a typical and ideal American citizen with the New England mint-mark upon him. The blood of pilgrim and puritan mingled in his veins, and self-respect, raised to its highest power, gave direction and force to all he did. One felt the appropriateness of his preference for country life, and realized that if the last half-century had produced more men of his stamp we should have witnessed no headlong rush of our population to the cities.

Without the possession of genius; without commanding talents even; with but one signal good fortune in youth, namely, his college course; and but one in later life, his happy home,--our friend was widely respected and loved, and his memory will long be cherished, for a manly character, formed not mainly by gifts of nature, "where every god did seem to set his seal," but rather by pure aims and constant endeavor, ripened and enriched by the elevating influences that flow from the rendering of unselfish public service and from the mutual offices of noble friendships.

For the Council,

E. H. R.

SAMUEL SWETT GREEN.

THE COMMERCIAL PRIMACY OF THE UNITED

STATES.

BY EDMUND A. ENGLER.

A frivolous Paris newspaper finds occasion for amusement in the sculptural decorations of the new Custom House Building in New York:

The ornamentation comprises four gigantic allegorical figures in marble, placed in the four corners of the vast building. These figures symbolize the industrial and commercial situation in the four great quarters of the globe. Asia is represented by an old Oriental apparently at the last gasp.

Africa bows its head, apparently asleep.

Europe is surrounded by symbols of decadence and unmistakably is sick.

Only America stands up in all its robust force, with an air of infinite superiority over its worn-out and anæmic neighbors.

"Truly," says the Paris paper, "he is a facetious Brother Jonathan."

Whether the French joke is warranted by the sculptures in the New York building must be left to the connoisseurs to decide; but one cannot help feeling that this interpretation of them was inspired by a deeper feeling than the sense of the humorous, and may be but another of many expressions which have lately come from foreign sources, of the dread which the young giant of the western hemisphere has inspired in European countries.

Certain it is that the development of the United States in industrial and commercial lines has created alarm abroad, which has only been intensified by the prospect of her growing naval and military prowess. Backed by her

enormous accumulations of wealth, with the productiveness of her soil, the resources of her mines and the genius and superior energy of her rapidly increasing population, and her proven ability to absorb and assimilate the hordes of immigrants which are continually flocking to her shores, the rapid development of the United States is regarded everywhere abroad as a distinct menace.

A year ago in Boston Mr. John A. Hobson, the English economist, in a lecture on the industrial situation in England said:

"The nineteenth century might well stand in history as England's century. She had risen to commercial power greater than any other which the world had seen; her empire extended to one-fifth of the habitable area of the globe; her wealth was unexampled; half the ships on the seas were hers. While Continental Europe was devastated by Napoleonic wars there was peace on her own soil, and this was precisely the period when the powers of coal and iron were becoming recognized and utilized. Both lay together in her borders, and she had the start of all the world in the industrial age. At the close of the century, however, England did not lead the world in the application of steam and electricity as she had led it otherwise two generations ago. England, herself, was flooded with articles. 'made in Germany' as a result of the recent industrial development of Germany, remarkably promoted by wise technical education.

"There was also 'the American invasion'; Rockefeller supplied England with oil; Yerkes gained control of London transportation; Morgan reached out his hand for English steamships. All along the line England was feeling this pressure, which was a cardinal factor in the industrial situation."

How different the tone of this from that of Sydney Smith in 1820, when he wrote in the "Edinburgh Review":

"In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new sub

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