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History and Current Politics.

THE LATE PROFESSOR ALEXANDER JOHNSTON,

JE recall to our readers with sorrow their loss and ours in the untimely death on the 20th of July last of Professor Alexander Johnston of Princeton College. He had been for a few years past a frequent and acceptable contributor to this department of THE CENTURY, and those who have found in his acute discussion of current themes an impulse to deeper interest in contemporary history, and a help to the more accurate knowledge and juster appreciation of the great social and political movements of their fellow-citizens, will find a sad interest in a short account of his work. He was born in Brooklyn forty years ago, on the 29th of April, fitted for college in the preparatory schools of that city, and graduated with the highest honors from Rutgers in the class of 1870. The direction of his studies up to that time was exclusively along the oldfashioned college course, and he excelled in the classics, winning the more important prizes in that department. For the next five years his time was divided between teaching and the study of law, and in 1875 he was admitted to the bar of New Jersey. Not long afterwards he removed to Norwalk, Connecticut, where he founded a classical school, still in existence, and began his literary career. His success as an author brought him in 1884 a call to the chair of jurisprudence and political economy in the College of New Jersey. He carried to his new field enthusiasm and ripe scholarship, the disposition and experience of the teacher, and enjoyed for the short but illustrious remnant of his life such unbroken success and increasing popularity as only genius and goodness can command.

The list of his published works is a long one for a life comparatively so short, and argues not only untiring industry but the possession of the literary gift in a high degree. He wrote for Lalor's "Cyclopædia of Political Science" the articles over his signature on American political history; the article on American history in the American Supplement to the Philadelphia edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica"; "The Genesis of a New England State," No. 12 of the Johns Hopkins Historical Series; edited the three volumes of "Representative American Orations,” and wrote for the periods into which the selections are divided a series of comprehensive and charming summaries; Chapter VII. of Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," that on Political Parties, is by him ; the splendid account of our history in Vol. XXIII. of the "Britannica," itself a volume of perhaps four hundred pages; and several other articles in the same encyclopædia, notably that on Washington, are also from his pen. His separate and independent publications are his well-known "History of American Politics," a school "History of the United States," and the volume on "Connecticut" in the American Commonwealths Series. Much of his most original research, moreover, was printed from time to time in reviews and periodi

cals. All this work is characterized by thoroughness and sincerity. He was the first to correct, and acknowledge, as he discovered them, the few errors in fact or judgment which he made. With such powers it is no wonder that his reputation had crossed the sea, and that the editors of the great "Encyclopædia Britannica” found him the fittest guide for their public as for ours in matters of American history. "The Pall Mall Gazette" playfully remarked, in reviewing the "History of American Politics," that with such a handbook the British editor would thereafter put aside his too wellknown habit of blundering over American politics, and in the absence of a similar guide to the story of English parties disport himself in ignorance of his native land.

It was therefore from the hand of the lawyer, the scholar, the author, the professor, that came the terse, incisive, and intelligent criticisms of current politics which we were happy to lay so often before our readers. Professor Johnston's mind was eminently practical, and his success in the class-room, aside from his gracious manner and warm interest in his pupils, was, we hear, largely due to the concreteness of his teaching. It was his habit to make concise statements of principles and then flood them with a mass of adequate illustrations from the everyday world which enthralled his hearers and fixed his instruction in their mind, showing as it did the immediate value of correct theory. The same characteristics marked his editorial work in this department. He had learned in his studies the basis and development of American institutions, and was therefore little affected by modern sciolism. He valued above all else the old-fashioned idea of personal freedom with its corollary of personal initiative and responsibility, emphasized at all times the essential character of local rights and government, and the subservience of political theory to historical induction. Add to this the high ethical plane on which his mind worked, his keen scent for reforms and judicial appreciation of their value, and we have such an outline of his character as it is permitted a friendly co-worker to draw. It seems to us that the moral of his life is to be found in the words at the head of this notice-the value to a sane, practical mind of the study of history not merely for the construction of a science of politics, but for the formation of sound opinions about daily life and about politics as a discipline and an art.

Disasters.

ONE of the dreadful aspects of such recurring horrors as the flood at Johnstown and the burning of Seattle and Spokane Falls, which, with the hurricane of Samoa, will probably be the extraordinary events of the year's annals, is the easy facility with which, after all, the public mind is disposed to deal with them. The Pennsylvania misfortune seems to have lacked none of the tints necessary for the darkest of pictures. The population of a whole mountain region is put into

imminent peril of life and limb; death carries off about as many as it claimed during any of the great battles of the civil war; and the scenes of pathos or despair, by day and night, from flood and flame, seem to have made our newspapers a mass of harrowing details for the possible instruction of posterity. Apart from the loss of life, the fate of the Northwestern cities seems to have had its own dramatic elements. The region is one where but a few years ago the poet found synonyms for desolation in the long roll of the solitary river, but where the enterprise, industry, and thrift of American men and women have established civilization, have built up new States like magic, and have endowed them with rich and splendid cities whose names are still hardly familiar to the rest of the country. It reads like a mockery of history that the burning of a single city in this new region should already entail losses such as, fifty years ago, constituted the "great fire" of our great commercial city. The popu lar impulse is the same in either case. The response of the popular heart is as instant as electricity. Money, material aid, personal assistance, are hurried to the point of need; for some time no one can think or talk of anything else; a few lessons from the pulpit or the press serve to point a moral of one sort or other; and then the débris is removed and the usual struggle for existence is renewed until, perhaps, it is interrupted by another case of the kind.

And yet there are lessons which should be scored into the popular intelligence by every new case of the kind. One is that we must no longer expect that such calamities, if they are to occur, are likely to be small ones; it is one of the penalties for our growth of population that they are now increasingly likely to be dire misfortunes. The great earthquake of 1811 has left its transient marks in a few swamps and lakes along the Mississippi and in some wild stories of the early settlers; but such an event could not occur in the denser population of our times without reviving and strengthening our memories of the overthrow of Charleston. We see the ancient track plowed by the meteorite through earth and rock: what if such a visitant should have its billet to some great house and distinguished audience in one of our modern cities? It is but in the nature of things that those natural calamities which must be reckoned with as non-preventable and inevitable should nevertheless find more and more shining marks as the surface of the country swarms more thickly with population, industry, and wealth.

But this impossibility of obviating the growing peril of modern life from inevitable natural calamities only adds a keener point to the growing necessity for care in guarding against the results of preventable events. In the case of many of these events responsibility is already fixed and measured by law; but there is still danger enough that the judicial conception of this measure of responsibility will continue to be limited by the smaller facts of the past, and will not grow, as it should, with the growth of the attendant perils. The fool who flings about firebrands and death, and says, "Am I not in sport?" becomes a greater and still greater offender with the passage of every year and the consequent development of more important human interests which may fall indirect victims to his folly. The theory of progressive culpability is one in which

public opinion may furnish the best stimulus for the judicial conscience, so that the law's perception may not stand still, or wait for statutory enactment which is likely to be weighted with obsolete circumstances. But there remain other fields, perhaps of less definite limitation, but of probably greater public importance, in which still greater service may be done by a trained public opinion. If it be admitted, as it surely must be, that both the avoidable and the unavoidable perils to human life and property are increasing with the density of population, that fact should be enough of itself to establish a rising standard of municipal care and forethought. Indeed, the standard should rise faster than population increases, for the dangers increase more rapidly. Why, for example, should that heathen abomination the fire-cracker be tolerated in one of our growing American cities for even a single additional year? The increase of the danger from this source over last year or ten years ago is not merely in the ratio of the intervening growth of population, but very much greater.

It is not enough, then, that public opinion should rest content with public benevolence, or that it should write off its responsibility as the last car-load of supplies is shipped to the scene of disaster. Every such recurrent event is a warning to other centers of population that it is time for public opinion to push the standard of municipal care yet a little higher. In many of our cities there are still hordes of men who lay hungry claim, as political rewards, to offices for whose duties they are not competent. The disasters of this year are a new and louder warning to every such city to bar out such applicants more strenuously, and to announce more definitely and clearly that it can no longer take such risks or afford to permit its offices to serve as political rewards. The question is no longer one of money, or of taxes, or of the formation of an "officeholding class"; it has taken the more fundamental shape of the increased, the immeasurable, extent to which disasters of every grade may be multiplied beyond their natural limits, by incapacity or carelessness in the occupant of even the minor administrative offices of our modern cities. In this and innumerable relations of the kind public opinion may find its most cheering work in the regeneration of our cities; and by raising the standard of municipal management and municipal civil service it may defeat some disasters altogether and reduce and hold down the evils even of those which are inevitable.

A New College for Women.

THERE have been three distinctly marked stages in the higher education of women in America: co-education, pure and simple, first tested at Oberlin, in 1833; then separate colleges for women, in which line Vassar, in 1865, made the first departure; and last the "annex plan, marked by the opening of the Harvard Annex in 1879. In England, on the other hand, the first effort to give collegiate training to women came from colleges open exclusively to women (Queen's, 1848), and in 1869 Girton made the first trial of the annex plan. No important co-educational scheme, as we understand co-education, has been tried in England.

The most popular and widely known women's colleges in England are Newnham and Girton, "annexed"

to the University of Cambridge. That is, the students of these colleges perform the same work as the university men, but in their own college building. There is no co-education such as is in operation at Cornell and Ann Arbor. The Newnham women are satisfied so long as they attain the standard of excellence prescribed by the university, and it is a matter of slight importance to them whether or not they receive instruction at the same hour, and in the same room, with their brothers.

There is unquestionably a prejudice in America against annexes. At the Woman's International Congress at Washington one delegate protested in the following terms: "Those bright, enthusiastic, largeframed, and big-hearted young women of the West, those young women who have in their eyes the distant horizon of their prairie homes, will have nothing to do with annexes. Possibly the prejudice is due wholly to unfortunate associations with the word itself. It is certainly difficult to respect the word in its educational significance, when we have annexes to hotels, to shops, and to ferryboats! The English expression for the objectionable term is "affiliated college," a description certainly more dignified.

A new affiliated college opens in October in New York City. It is new in that it is the first woman's

college situated in the heart of a great city, and, again, it is new in being the first affiliated college whose graduates are entitled to a university degree. The students of Newnham, Girton, Somerville, Lady Margaret, and the Harvard Annex must content themselves with what is called a "degree certificate," testifying that the candidate's scholarship would have entitled her to a degree if she had been a man.

The new college, affiliated to Columbia College, will bear the name Barnard, a name made eminent by one of the most far-sighted and advanced educators of America - the late president of Columbia College. Barnard College is situated at 343 Madison Avenue, five blocks from Columbia College. A student of Barnard College will do the same work as a student of Columbia, will have the same instructors, and will take the same examinations. Barnard College opens with a school of arts only, but in time she hopes to offer the broadest opportunity for scientific training.

The college will receive for the first year a freshman class only; consequently, its first graduates will receive their degrees in 1893. It is to be hoped that Barnard College will meet a support which will enable her to keep ahead of the present movement at Columbia towards encouraging and providing for graduate work.

A View of the Confederacy from the Inside.1

A LETTER FROM JUDGE JOHN A. CAMPBELL, FORMERLY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR, C. S. A.

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FORT PULASKI, GEORGIA, 20th July, 1865. Y DEAR SIR: I learn that you have interfered in my behalf to obtain my release from arrest and confinement. I am obliged by your interposition, and appreciate it the more because that the war has made no change in my feelings toward yourself.

You are aware that I was not a patron or friend of the secession movement. My condemnation of it and my continuance in the Supreme Court were regarded as acts for which there could be no tolerance. When I returned to Alabama in May, 1861, it was to receive coldness, aversion, or contumely from the secession population. I did not agree to recant what I had said, or to explain what I had done; and thus, instead of appeasing my opponents, I aggravated my offense. This was still more aggravated by my opinion that cotton was not king; that privateering would not expel Northern commerce from the ocean, but would affront European opinion, and that privateering and slavery would prevent recognition, and that the war would be long and implacable; that the Northern people were a proud and powerful people that would not endure the supposed insults they have suffered, and that their "pocket nerve" was not their most sensitive nerve. Messrs. Toombs and Benjamin were promising peace before the winter. I had no connection with the Con1 The original of this letter, here printed for the first time, is in the possession of Charles P. Greenough, Esq., of Boston. When Judge Campbell was imprisoned in Fort Pulaski his former associates on the Supreme Bench, Judges Curtis and Nelson, both

federate Government in 1861, nor until the last of October, 1862. General Randolph, whom I scarcely knew, asked me to be Assistant Secretary of War, with an apology for doing so.

The war had then assumed gigantic proportions: confiscation acts and emancipation proclamations, and the administration of government in New Orleans and North Alabama, seemed to place a new face upon the war. It appeared to be a war upon political and civil society and government within the Confederate States.

The Southern country had greatly suffered: I had spent much time with the sick and wounded, and had witnessed bereavement, distress, destitution, suffering, as well as devotion and fortitude. The civil institutions were debilitated. Much of the business and feeling of the country centered in the War Department, and there was a want of some controlling mind in regulating its civil and judicial business. The conscription brought all persons of military age under its jurisdiction; impressments affected property, military domination very often infracted personal liberty and private right. There had been delay and vexation in the transaction of business.

I did not desire a conspicuous place, and every overture to place me in Mr. Davis's cabinet had been discountenanced with emphasis. I declined to go abroad. My wish was to be of use in mitigating the evils there were upon the country. I cannot make you feel how large they were.

wrote to President Johnson, and finally succeeded in getting Judge Campbell released. This letter was written when Judge Campbell learned that Judge Curtis was making efforts in his behalf. The text of the original letter has been carefully followed.- EDITOR.

Mr. Davis were a delusion, and that union was the condition of peace. I had always supposed this to be the case, and had refused all discussions on the subject of negotiation unless that condition was first admitted. I had never regarded a peace on that basis as inadmissible; but, on the contrary, was firmly persuaded that the programme of independence had failed with the loss of the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers, and the coasts of the Carolinas. The change in the conditions of the war by the confiscation acts and proclamation unquestionably prolonged it. When I came from Hampton Roads I recommended the return of our commission or another commission to adjust a peace. I believed that one could be made upon the concession of union and the surrender of slavery, upon suitable arrangements. I so advised my colleagues. I wrote to Governor Graham of North Carolina a careful letter explaining all my views, for exhibition to his brother senators. A committee was raised to wait on Mr. Davis (Graham, Hunter, Orr) and conversations were had with him. This failed. I then wrote a careful review of all the conditions of the military service and of the financial and political state of the country, and recommended a negotiation for peace on the basis of union, as necessary. This was addressed to General Breckinridge. It was submitted to General Lee, and reports from the Commissary-General, Quartermaster-General, and Chief of Ordnance obtained, and the whole placed before Mr. Davis. This led him to ask Congress to repeal their resolution to adjourn. He submitted these in a secret message, without note, comment, or exposition, and at the same time submitted a public message, scolding Congress for delay and inattention and urging a vigorous prosecution of the war and the adoption of the following measures:

1. Suspension of habeas corpus. 2. Organization of militia. 3. To raise $3,000,000 in gol. 4. To impress without cash payments. 5. To modify the law as to the use of detailed men. 6. Arm slaves.

The four last were granted, and could not have affected, and did not affect, our condition in the slightest

measure.

No notice was taken of the secret message. The Congress replied with tartness to the charges as to delays and inattention, and retorted the charges. Gov. ernor Graham was ready with resolutions for negotiations, but the conduct of Mr. Davis indisposed others to consider them.

There seemed to be a superstitious dread of any approach to the one important question of settlement by negotiation. Mr. Davis, with the air of a sage, declared that the Constitution did not allow him to treat for his own suicide. All that he could do would be to receive resolutions and submit them to the sovereign States; that his personal honor did not permit him to take any steps to make such a settlement as was pro. posed. The result is, that each citizen of the Confederacy is making his separate treaty on the basis of President Johnson's merciful amnesty proclamation. I have stated to you the facts. I do not pretend to have done more than to accept conditions that were inexorable, and to endeavor to stop the effusion of blood, and to husband the remnants of the resources that had not been consumed by the war. This I did with more urgency, and a more consistent and definite purpose

than any other, I believe. The idiosyncrasy of one man defeated the design. It would not be proper to speak of Mr. Davis in his present circumstances with any harshness. I do not believe for a moment that he participated in the plot to destroy Mr. Lincoln. His humanity, pride, sense of his own reputation and character, tenacious observance of the rules he esteems important, not to take into account his religious and moral principles of action, forbid me to believe this without strong and direct proof. But he was unfitted to manage a revolution or to conduct an administration. Slow, procrastinating, obstructive, filled with petty scruples and doubts, and wanting in a clear, strong, intrepid judgment, a vigorous resolution, and a generous and selfsacrificing nature, he became in the closing part of the war an incubus and a mischief.

I decided to abide the fate of Richmond- an inevitable fate; General Lee could neither hold it nor move away from it. His ruin was sealed, and with that the fate of the Confederacy. This I stated in the letter referred to; I told the Secretary of War I should remain, and should take an opportunity to see Mr. Lincoln, if possible. I would like to have his authority to do so, but should do so without it.

The United States troops entered Richmond the morning of the 3d of April. The evacuation took place the night previously. There was only wanting a licentious soldiery to make the scene appalling, but the United States soldiers behaved with propriety. There was conflagration, plunder, explosions of arsenals, magazines, gun-boats, and terror and confusion.

Mr. Lincoln came to Richmond the 4th of April. I had an interview with him. I told him that the was was virtually ended, that General Lee could not hold his army together, that the public men in Virgin t would aid him to restore the Union, and that he mig rely on this. I urged him to adopt a course of lenier and moderation-"That when lenity and cruelty p for a kingdom the gentler gamester is the soonest winner"; that I had regarded this war as one between communities, the one contending for independence, the other for continued union; that the successful party in any event should have made his success as little aggravating to the other as possible; that were independence to be won, still a close union was anticipated to be formed. I stated to him my position -that I had remained because I knew that the war was virtually over, and to perform my duty to the country.

It so happened that I was the only person who had occupied any position of prominence that did remain, and so I had to speak for Virginia what would have been more appropriate for a Virginian. I noticed this to Mr. Lincoln.

He concluded to remain until the next morning to have another interview. He made no reply to what I said at this time. The next morning I met him on the Malvern, Mr. G. A. Myers, an established member of the bar of Richmond, going with me, and General Weitzel being present.

Mr. Lincoln had reduced to writing his terms of peace. There were three indispensable conditions: 1. Recognition of the national authority. 2. No cessation of hostilities till this was entirely done. 3. No receding by the Executive in reference to slavery, as