Strength of the Confederate Army at Chickamauga.

On this moot subject an examination of the original returns in the War Department, which I have personally made, shows the following result:

General Bragg's return, 31st of August, 1863, shows under the heading "present for duty," officers and men, 48,998.

This return does not include the divisions of General Breckinridge or General Preston, the brigades of Generals Gregg and McNair, or the reënforcement brought by General Longstreet. The strength of each is accurately given in Confederate official returns. The

total Confederate force available for battle at Chickamauga was as follows:

48,998

..11,716

General Bragg's army, 31st of August, 1863, for duty. Longstreet's command (Hood's and McLaws's divisions), by return of Army of Northern Virginia, 31st of August, 1863, for duty Breckinridge's division, by his official report in “Confederate Reports of Battles," for duty Preston's division, by his official report in "Confederate Reports of Battles," for duty.. Brigades of Gregg and McNair, by General Bushrod Johnson's official report (So. Hist. Soc. Papers, Vol. XIII.), for duty.

Total.

CINCINNATI, O.

3,769

4,509

2,559

.71,551

E. C. Dawes.

TH

Shall Fortunes be Limited by Law?

HE leveling instincts of a democracy are apt to answer the question with an emphatic Yes. The equalization of men in their standing before the law, in their political privileges, in their opportunities in the administrative service of the country, in their educational advantages, and in the position of their sects before the State is apt to find in the eyes of many only its next step in the equalization of wealth, or at least in the prevention of the development of extremes. On the other hand, he who pins his faith to the political power of the State, who believes that the State has the right to regulate property because it makes property possible, has only to be convinced that great fortunes are dangerous to the State to echo the democratic answer with another and as hearty an affirmative. The proposal finds even a more favorable soil in our own country for the reason that our whole political system has been consciously set from the beginning against the development of permanent great fortunes, and that with a success in which we have taken considerable pride. Our legislation has aimed at removing every artificial obstacle to the dispersion of great fortunes: primogeniture has been forbidden; entails have been limited; equal division of the property of intestates has become the legal rule; and the result has been, until comparatively recent years, that "from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves were three generations."

The old rule, however, no longer holds good. Representative fortunes have come to be enormously larger-larger, indeed, than were really conceivable fifty years ago; and this one fact has quite altered most of the conditions of the case. Almost any division of the "large fortune" of a half-century ago gave as a result several small fortunes, usually so small as to have in them no power of recuperation and self increase. But a reasonably equitable division of a fortune of two hundred millions gives at least one fortune whose annual income is so much beyond anything that the heir is at all likely to spend, that its own natural increase will carry the principal up again to its original limit within an ordinary life-time, without any special ability in the owner beyond that of care-taking. The general principle that all the children ought to have a share will no longer suffice to break up and disperse all the fortunes of the republic; the very magnitude of

the estates has already given us some of the phases of a system of primogeniture, from which it had been persistently assumed that we had escaped at the Revolution. An entire escape from all its phases can now be found only in a failure of direct heirs or in the succession of an incorrigible spendthrift. And it is a fact too, to be carefully kept in mind, that the succession of incorrigible spendthrifts is no longer so common as it once was. The larger the estate, the more apt is the heir to be a plain, hard-working young man, who shows more signs of uneasiness at assuming the responsibility of managing the property than of elation over his opportunities of squandering it. Every indication goes to show that our very large fortunes, instead of being dispersed, are to hold their own and even to grow from generation to generation until they reach that natural limit placed by the ability of one person to manage an estate.

It is very natural, then, that those who feel that law and social conditions together have failed in the work which they were considered competent to do should every year have a stronger desire to put new legal limitations on the growth of American fortunes. The dangers of enormous accumulations of wealth in the hands of single persons in a republic, the contrast between the daily income of the "plutocrat" and the amount which the long struggle of a workingman's whole life will bring, the passions aroused by the vulgar display affected by so many of the smaller "large fortunes," are all forces bearing in the same direction. The proposals of prohibitory succession duties on inheritances above a limited amount, of prohibitions of gifts above the same amount, unless to public or charitable uses, or of an income tax rising in percentage with the amount of the income to a prohibitory tax on all incomes above a legal limit, are various forms of a single purpose-that the very rich shall become no richer, and that they shall not be permitted to transmit their present wealth undiminished to an indefinite line of

successors.

It is well, however, to weigh carefully the fact that, in the mass of cases, wealth means the sum of some service done to the public, which would not have been done but for the reward found in the legal permission to accumulate and transmit wealth. He who has retired with a snug fortune has been engaged in a lifelong struggle to provide dry-goods for the public a

cent a yard cheaper than they were before, or to lower freights a tenth of a cent per ton-mile, or to see that the money of bank stock-holders or depositors is loaned to just the persons in the community who will make the best and safest use of it, or to accomplish some one of the public services in which human activity is continually finding its field of operations. We darken many questions hopelessly when we speak, as we always do, of the individual's success in making money, as if he had been engaged in abstracting something from the general pile; there are ugly cases of this kind, but they are the exception, not the rule. He who has "made money" legitimately has done it by leaving the general mass of wealth just so much larger than he found it, by furnishing long years of useful and profitable work to others less well equipped than he for the race of life, and by performing for years some specific service, in addition, to the public at large.

If we acquire the habit of now and then looking at the case from this side, from which we unhappily so seldom look at it, the proposal to put legal limits to the amount of fortunes will take an entirely new aspect. We shall see that we are, in reality, making the definite proposal that our law shall henceforth forbid any citizen to make the world more than so much richer in his life-time, to provide employment for more than a legally limited number of those who need and desire employment, or to be more zealous than the law allows in seeking out commodities or doing any similar service for the general public. Franklin once attempted to reach the common sense of the British public in a pamphlet entitled "Rules for reducing a Great Empire to a Small One." If a second Franklin should address us, must he meet as little success in combating the proposal to put legal limits to the wealth of the country?

If the proposal needed any further illumination, it would be found in the impossibility of limiting the injurious results of its adoption. Human ability is in the habit of taking very fair average care of itself: it persecuted in one city, it will not be slow to seek a refuge and a welcome in another. If New York could place a progressive income-tax on her statute-book prohibiting incomes above a fixed limit, one result would certainly be a diminution of New York incomes; but that would be far from all. The incomes thus limited would rapidly disappear from New York, while Connecticut and New Jersey would show a sudden, surprising, and coincident increase of large incomes. So, if the scheme should be adopted by the whole United States, that country would meet an indefinite dead loss, to the gain of Canada or Europe. Human ability would find its natural refuge and enjoy its natural income somewhere unless the whole world could be united against it as implacably as the Roman Empire used to be against the victim of the Emperor. Until the proposal to limit fortunes by law can be supplemented by a recipe for securing the acquiescence or neutrality of those who are to be most directly affected by it, it must be considered as really outside of the province of discussion. If the great fortune is the result of defiance or prostitution of law, let the law be made to fit the case; but if it is the natural result of human ability, why should it not go on benefiting the community up to the natural limit of human powers of management?

President or King?

DURING the long period through which republicanism stood on the threshold of Europe, knocking for the admission which was peremptorily denied until it was forced through the terrors of the French Revolution, the applicant came in an ill fashion; her name had become synonymous with riot and disorder as an internal condition, and with reckless aggression as an international policy. However urgently the man of republican leanings might deny the accusation, his consciousness that the universal belief of Europe was against him always forced him into an apologetic attitude on this point. And when the issue was at last brought to the arbitrament of force, it was not so much the execution of the king, the massacres of the aristocrats, the overthrow of the Church, on which the AntiJacobin relied to make out his case against the French Republic, but rather the irascibility, the unreasonableness, the proneness to make war on few or no grounds, which must, he declared, always characterize a government controlled by the mob. A republican government in the heart of Europe would be a fire-brand, constantly scattering or threatening destruction; and the natural desire for security from such an infliction was the official reason for the renewed and re-renewed confederation of the kings.

There would seem to be considerable reason, a priori, for doubting this belligerent disposition of republics; it surely cannot require a profound experience in the art of self-government to teach "the mob" that the soldiers and taxes to support war must be its contribution, and to give it a hearty distaste for military glory. If, however, in spite of theory, there is in republicanism anything of this overbearing tendency to aggression upon neighboring nations, who should personify it if not the President of the United States? He is a politician, chosen for but four years to the highest office open by election to man, and conventionally estopped, at least in modern times, from essaying any other line of public preferment after leaving the presidential office. The popularity to be won by successful warfare would go far to give him at least one reëlection; and the obstacles to indefinite reëlection, however strong they have proved in fact, have never been in themselves more than negative. To the observer of 1787, with his preconceived notions of the bellicose temper of a republic, it must have seemed a most probable result that some military adventurer, enticing the country into war, and thus securing for himself one reëlection after another to the presidency, should gradually change the essence of the government until, as in so many other so-called republics, the President should assume the dignity and title of royalty.

No such result has taken place. On the contrary, the history of the United States has shown that the American chief magistrate, however efficient he may be as a leader and manager after war has once begun, is up to that time not only the most pacific of rulers, but the most pacific organ of his own government. Other departments of his government have shown an occasional disposition to fall under the malignant influence of the war-spirit; but the American president (with perhaps the exception of a single case), whether he has been soldier or civilian by profession, has always seemed to feel himself personally and peculiarly

charged with the duty of maintaining peace. In the midst of perfervid orators, legislative statements of grievances, and even intense popular passion, the President has always thrown the whole weight of his party, personal, and official influence into the scale of peace, and, in the last resort, has usually shown no hesitation in arraying his constitutional prerogatives across the path to war, even though he has thus seemed to peril his own political future.

Time would fail for enumerating all the cases in our history where the office of President has been the direct barrier between the United States and war. The first attack upon Washington's popularity came in 1793, when he interfered publicly and successfully to prevent the country from drifting into war as an ally of France against England. Six years afterward, when the country was ready for war against France, when the President's own party was clamorous for it, and when the first tidings of successful sea-fights were already coming in, John Adams flung himself into the breach and secured peace, though he lost the presidency. Bitterly as he disliked the English Government of that day, Jefferson had but one thought when he heard of the Leopard's attack upon the Chesapeake in 1807 — to check the popular disposition to answer the outrage by war, and to first exhaust every possible means of peaceable redress. His successor, Madison, struggled more hopelessly for peace, until it became evident that his political fate was to be that of John Adams, when he at last gave way. So one might go on to find in every administration, even in that which has been held responsible for the Mexican War, new instances of the normal bent of the presidential office towards peace. Some of them may not have been successful in securing peace; in others there may never have been imminent peril of war; each of them has at least served to emphasize anew the intense anxiety of all American presidents for peace.

But, it may very well be said, it is the people, nct the political system, that has made the American office what it has been. The objection has truth, but it is easy to permit it to disguise as important truths on the other side. If the South American president has not always been so peaceful a figure, is even he, after all, any worse than his dynastic rival who, representing Germans, Austrians, or Russians, is concentrating his thoughts on the power of explosives, the bore of rifles, and the number of cartridges which the soldier can carry? There is strong reason to think that even here the elective ruler would show a tendency to peace such as has not been a marked characteristic of hereditary rulers. Even if the present system of European armament were a really popular movement, a king must find provocations to the use of the national armament in circumstances which would seem of comparatively little significance to a president by election. The hereditary ruler, ex vi termini, is limited in the work of ruling by considerations bearing on the family which he represents; his regret at the outbreak of war must be tempered, if the young princes of his house should find in popular applause a substitute for popular election; he breathes a family atmosphere of militarism. He may try to think only of national interests, but his influence will be swayed by other considerations. President Cleveland may be no better, wiser, calmer, or more pacific person than the Emperor VOL. XXXV.-132.

William, but his judgment is free from at least one cloud which must always obscure that of the emperor: in the emperor's eyes, every question of peace and war properly affecting Germany alone must be looked at through the mirage raised by the conventional honor of the house of Hohenzollern; in the eyes of the President, the question is one solely of his country's welfare.

It is but a few months since France passed through the crisis which was to decide whether her coming ruler was to be president, emperor, or king. Was there no significance in the rise of stocks, in the "better feeling" in neighboring capitals, and in the reviving confidence in peace, which followed the election of a president? Sadi-Carnot may cease to be president; the French Republic itself may cease to be for the time; but the "European situation" can never escape from the damning stigma of last December — the consensus of the international armament of crowned heads that a president in France was in so far a pledge of peace. Perhaps, if there were more presidents in Europe, there would be fewer wars and a brighter hope of disarmament. As republicanism spreads more widely over the continent, even while a simulacrum of royalty is still retained, it cannot but become more evident from results that the wars of the past were due to other influences than popular passion. Perhaps, before the process is completed, the people of Europe may for once enjoy the spectacle of a war in which the monopoly of actual fighting is reserved for two of the remaining royal families and their respective officers of hereditary influence. One may be pardoned for believing that these two elements are responsible for more wars in the past than all coming presidents will ever have to apologize for.

Postal Savings Banks.

THOSE who are not brought directly into contact with the savings bank do not always appreciate fully the popular work which is done by the system. In these banks we can see practically that which is not always easy to understand in theory — the close relationship of wages to capital, and the possibility of the conversion of the former into the latter. The savings banks of the United States had, in 1887, some $1,200,000,000 of deposits. Almost all this was the savings of labor, the natural result of high wages and growing ambitions. Saved in dribblets, it would have been spent in dribblets and would have passed out of reckoning without doing the world any service, but for the savings banks' unification of countless little savings into this imposing mass of wealth, this $1,200,000,000. To enable themselves to pay interest on these deposits, the savings banks must in their turn loan them, immediately or mediately, to men who wish to borrow the money for use as business capital. That is, the country's generous treatment of labor, its high wages, the hopes of social advancement which it holds forth, and the desire of saving which springs therefrom, have been profitable, even in the lowest sense of the word; they have added to the active capital of the country some $1,200,000,000 which otherwise would never have existed. But it would be telling far less than half the story to leave it on this low level. This mass of wealth has not only served the country as capital; in a higher politi

cal sense, it has been a pledge of social peace, security, and hope. Those who have saved it are not growing poorer, but richer; they have founded an Anti-Poverty Society of their own. With it, they have put so much the greater interest at stake in the country; while those who have borrowed and are using it have so much the greater respect for those who have saved it. Every savings bank is in its way worth a thousand policemen and several regiments of regular troops, for it builds order on a foundation stronger than force.

This showing of the savings-bank system, however, becomes meager when we begin to realize how small a part of its possible field has been filled. Of the twelve hundred millions of savings just mentioned, nearly eleven hundred millions are the property of New England and the Middle States alone. Indeed, if we except these two sections and California, with her $60,000,000 of savings, the system is practically nonexistent in the remainder of the United States. The rest of our people are still practically ignorant of the powers of the system in transforming wages into capital. And it is for this reason,- for its educational advantages rather than for its superiority to individual banks, it is for the controlling purpose of introducing the system into those sections of the country where it is still practically unknown, that Congress may fairly be called upon to imitate Great Britain's Act of 1861, establishing a system of postal savings banks. Whereever the system is introduced it must commend itself; and then the superiority of banks formed by individual corporators may safely be trusted to hold the Government institutions down to their comparatively narrow

field.

There is one section, however, in which the call for such a step seems almost a national duty, instead of a mere question of expediency. If there is any class of our people who should be encouraged to save,- for the sake of their own welfare, for the sake of the higher respect which the known habit of saving will bring them, for the sake of the social security which will find guarantees therein,—it is the Southern negroes. No other class have a more immediate and urgent need of the savings-bank system than they; no other class see so little of it. Indeed, what they have known of it has rather been calculated to make them distrust it; and for this our national legislation is largely responsible. They have not forgotten, if we have, the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, chartered by Act of Congress of March 3, 1865, which failed in the autumn of 1873 with liabilities of more than $3,000,000. Dealing, as the Act did, with an ignorant and helpless people, the wards of the nation, whose economic future was so largely dependent upon the success of this project, the Act should have been regarded as an act of state rather than a mere charter; and every effort should have been made to give the deposits a character for security as absolute as the pledge of the whole wealth of the country could supply. That was the time for the introduction of the principle of the postal savings-bank system, for reasons of state if for no others; instead, Congress chose to hazard the economic development of the freedmen on the wisdom of random trustees, and the ups and downs of the investments on which that wisdom should decide. In partial compensation for its error of 1865, and for the economic injury thereby done to those whom the nation was

bound to care for, let Congress proceed, by establishing postal savings banks throughout the South, to show the negroes that there is a more excellent way than the Freedman's Savings Bank.

Such Government savings banks have their points of inferiority to corporate banks. In order to establish the system, the Government bonds would still be available as an absolutely secure investment for the postal bank deposits; and those who should deposit their halfdollars or multiples thereof at the money-order offices or postal savings banks would really be buying shares of these Government bonds. Corporate banks loan their deposits directly to be used as capital by the borrowers, while the postal savings bank would act only indirectly, releasing for use as business capital the same amount of money which would otherwise have been invested in Government bonds. In other words, the corporate banks not only inculcate the habit of saving, but add to the business capital of the country more directly than the postal banks. If, then, the proposal were to give the Government the same monopoly of the savings-bank business which it has in the post-office, the proposal would be open to serious objections. No such proposal is meant. On the contrary, it is easy to show that the postal bank can do no more than open the way for the more effective corporate bank. The purchase of Government bonds for postal bank investment, at the current market rates, will net only an interest of less than 3 per cent. on the amount invested — in all probability, not more than 21⁄2 per cent. Even if there were no expenses of management, then the postal bank could not offer more than 21⁄2 per cent. interest on deposits, unless the Government should increase the rate as a gratuity, which would hardly be proposed. There would, however, be expenses of management to be provided for; and in practice the postal bank could hardly offer much more than 2 per cent, interest on deposits. The usual rate of the corpɔrate savings bank is 4 per cent.; so that the corporate bank, when established in a place, would at once drive the postal bank out of competition. It seems evident, therefore, that the postal bank would be no real rival to the private or corporate bank― that it would, in effect, be nothing more than introductory to the present corporate system. It would be a convenience, in a town which had no corporate bank: it would teach the people the virtue of saving, and thus stimulate the desire for a corporate bank; but it would not rival or oust the corporate bank.

The proposal that Congress should establish a system of postal savings banks is not dictated, therefore, by any desire to widen Government functions, or to take out of private hands a work which they can do better than the Government agents can. The present savings banks would continue their work without becoming conscious of any change: it is not likely that a single half-dollar would ever be deposited in the New York City post-office if it were made a postal bank. The advantages would come in carrying the old system into new places, in teaching a whole people a system under which one-fourth of their number already have $1,100,000,000 on deposit.

In a former article we discussed the plan for postal savings banks without any interest at all. The whole question of postal savings banks may have to be de* See this magazine for February, 1886.

ferred, we are well aware, till the merit system in the civil service has been much further extended; and in the present condition of the Treasury there are grave doubts as to what wise disposition could be made of the deposited savings.

George Kennan's Siberian Papers.

THE illustrated papers descriptive of the Siberian experiences of Mr. George Kennan, the author, and Mr. G. A. Frost, the artist, will begin in the May number of THE CENTURY. Their appearance has been deferred on

account of Mr. Kennan's desire to group in preliminary papers - the last of which is printed in the present number-an account of the conditions and events in Russia directly related to the exile system. This system is now to be minutely described and elaborately pictured; and by way of preface to the first illustrated paper Mr. Kennan will, in a brief statement, answer the question as to how he came to enter upon his arduous and somewhat perilous investigations, and why he and his companion were accorded such extraordinary facilities by the Russian Government itself.

dent should be authorized by law to fix the grade of the diplomatic agents sent by our Government to other powers. The change thus proposed would undoubtedly have been in the right direction. If we are ever to have an organized diplomatic service, it will be necessary that the control of the service, or at any rate of most of its details, shall be left to the Executive and the Department of State to a far greater degree than is now done.

The fact, but little commented on, that the present Administration has made but few changes among the secretaries may perhaps be taken to indicate a disposition on its part to prepare the way for an organized diplomatic service. It is time, therefore, that it should be made clear that the management of such a service by the Department of State will be necessary to its successful operation.

The incessant and capricious meddling of Congress in the affairs of the service has been productive of much harm. The abolition, so common in our legislation, of a mission or a secretaryship one year, to be restored the next, has had no effect but to make the holders of these positions unhappy, to disgust and demoralize other members of the service, and to lower our Government in our own eyes and in those of the world. The matters of which the Department has cognizance are of such a delicate nature that it should not be necessary to submit them to the public criticism of several hundred persons, some of whom. will not scruple to make the Government ridiculous if by such action they may gain any advantage for themselves or a little amuse

ment.

But it will not be enough that the control of the diplomats be left to the Executive and the Department. The President and the Secretary of State, however able and patriotic they may be, are not likely to be versed in foreign habits and traditions. The administration of the diplomatic and consular routine should be mainly in the hands of the permanent officers of the Department. These should themselves have had considerable experience of diplomatic and consular life. They should be paid salaries proportionate to the dignity and importance of their duties; and their places should undoubtedly be permanent.

Such a staff of officers would have-partly, at any rate- under their control many important subjects. In the matter of promotions they would give the Secretary requirements of the posts. It may be asked whether under such an administration of the service there would not be room for favoritism. The answer to this is that favoritism in the administration of human affairs is one of the things inevitable. It is possible to devise no system of administering a service in which favoritism will not play a part. Has there been no favoritism under the old system? But the chance that merit will be considered in making promotions is certainly greater if the service is under the control of responsible individuals, open to public criticism, than if the appointment is the work of a vague syndicate of President, Secretary of State, confirming senators, and appropriation committees.

It is easy to perceive that there are many things which could be left to the discretion of a well-organized department which are not fit to be made matters of public discussion. Take such a question, for instance, as the comparative social fitness of men for some post the demands of which are peculiar. This is often a proper subject for consideration. The discrimination in favor of a person with a peculiar gift for distinguished society need not be of an aristocratic nature. It is not necessary that the man promoted upon this ground should be of distinguished connections. The reverse would be the usual case. A talent of this sort is apt to be inborn. It is particularly so in this country, where the man who suits European standards of manners is as likely to come from one set of people, or from one part of the country, as from another. The quality is apt to exist in men of bright intellects. Fine manners and a fine accent are likely to go with fine perceptions. Then the clever fellows learn rapidly. A little experience does wonders if the material is of the right sort.

The Department, of course, would have ample opportunities for knowing the men whose merits it would have to pass upon. Besides having their work before it, it would know them in person. We should, of course, adopt the excellent custom of other countries. In most services a diplomat begins the career by a period of employment in the Foreign Office, and often returns there, either by an exchange with one of the clerks or otherwise.