THE SCHOLAR IN POLITICS.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

Inserted by permission of Harper Bros., N. Y.

EVERY educated man is aware of a profound popular distrust of the courage and sagacity of the educated class. "Franklin and

Lincoln are good enough for us," exclaims this jealous scepticism; as if Franklin and Lincoln did not laboriously repair by vigorous study the want of early opportunity. The scholar is denounced as a coward. Humanity falls among thieves, we are told; and the college Levite, the educated Pharisee, passes by on the other side.

"He has broached and

Gentlemen, is this humiliating arraignment true? does the educated class of America deserve this condemnation? Here in America, undoubtedly New England has inspired and moulded our national life. But if New England has led the Union, what has led New England? Her scholarly class. Her educated men. And our Roger Williams gave the keynote. divulged new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates," said Massachusetts, as she banished him. A century later his dangerous opinions had captured Massachusetts. Young Sam Adams, taking his Master's degree at Cambridge, argued that it was lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the State could not otherwise be preserved. Seven years afterwards, Jonathan Mayhew preached in Boston the famous sermon which Thornton called the morning gun of the Revolution, applying to the political situation the principles of Roger Williams. The New England pulpit echoed and re-echoed that morning gun; and twenty-five years later its warning broke into the rattle of musketry at Lexington and Concord and the glorious thunder of Bunker Hill.

It was a son of Harvard, James Otis, who proposed the assembly of an American Congress, without asking the King's leave. It was a son of Yale, John Morin Scott, who declared that if taxa

tion without representation were to be enforced, the Colonies ought to separate from England. I do not forget the Virginian tongueof-flame, Patrick Henry, or the minute-men at Concord. But everywhere they were educated men, who, in the pulpit, on the platform, and through the press, conducted the mighty preliminary argument of the Revolution, and defended liberty, until at last the King surrendered to the people, and educated America had saved constitutional liberty.

Daily the educated class is denounced as impracticable and visionary. But the Constitution of the United States is the work of American scholars; for of the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention, thirty-three were graduates. And the eight leaders of the great debate were all college men.

For nearly a century after, the supreme question of the government was the one which Jefferson had raised: "Is the Union a league or a nation?" That was a debate which devoured every other; and in the tremendous contention, as in the war that followed, was the American scholar recreant and dumb? I do not ask whether the educated or any other class alone maintained the fight. I make no exclusive claim. But was the great battle fought while we and our guild stood passive and hostile by?

The slavery agitation began with the moral appeal; and as in the dawn of the Revolution, educated America spoke in the buglenote of James Otis, so in the anti-slavery agitation, rings out the clear voice of a son of Otis's college, Wendell Phillips. In Congress, the commanding voice for freedom was that of the most learned, experienced, and courageous of American statesmen, the voice of a scholar and an old college professor, John Quincy Adams. The burning words of Whittier scattered the sacred fire; Longfellow and Lowell mingled their songs with his; and Emerson gave to the cause the loftiest scholarly heart in the Union. When the national debate was angriest, while others bowed and bent and broke around him, the form of Charles Sumner stood erect.

"I am only six weeks behind you," said Abraham Lincoln, the Western frontiersman to the New England scholar; and along the path that the scholar blazed in the wild wilderness of civil war, the path of emancipation and the constitutional equality of all citizens, his country followed fast to union, peace, and prosperity.

It would indeed be a sorrowful confession for this day and this assembly to own that experience proves the air of the college to be suffocating to generous thought and heroic action. It is the educated voice of the country which teaches patience in politics, and strengthens the conscience of the individual citizen, by showing that servility to a majority is as degrading as servility to a sultan.

Brethren, here on the old altar of fervid faith and boundless anticipation, let us pledge ourselves once more, that as the courage and energy of educated men fired the morning gun, and led the contest of the Revolution, founded and framed the Union, and purifying it as with fire, have maintained the national life to this hour, so, day by day, we will do our part to lift America above the slough of mercenary politics and the cunning snares of trade, steadily forward toward the shining heights, which the hopes of its nativity foretold.

HYDER ALI'S REVENGE.

BURKE.

1. WHEN at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country, possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals, a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desola

tion, as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection.

2. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the art of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic.

3. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and of which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters of their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that,

when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region.

HAVELOCK'S HIGHLANDERS.

W. BROCK.

THE Highlanders had never fought in that quarter of India before, and their character was unknown to the foe. Their advance has been described by spectators as a beautiful illustration of the power of discipline. With sloped arms and rapid tread, through the broken and heavy lands, and through the well-directed fire of artillery and musketry, linked in their unfaltering lines, they followed their mounted leaders, the mark for many rifles. They did not pause to fire; did not even cheer. No sound from them was heard as that living wall came on and on, to conquer or to die. Now they are near the village; but the enemies occupy every house, and from every point a galling fire is poured on them from the heavy guns. The men lie down till the iron storm passes over. It was but for a moment. The general gave the word, "Rise up! Advance!" and wild cheers rang out from those brave lines, wilder even than their fatal fire within a hundred yards; and the pipes sounded the martial pibroch, heard so often as earth's latest music by dying men. The men sprung up the hill covered by the smoke of their crushing volley, almost with the speed of their own bullets; over, and through all obstacles, the gleaming bayonets advanced. And then followed those moments of personal struggle, not often protracted, when the Mahratta learned, too late for life, the power of the Northern arm. The position was theirs. All that stood between them and the guns fled the field or was cut down. Gen