M. Ferdinand de Lesseps then said: "Your declarations are loyal, and I take pleasure in telling you so; but I will be obliged to ask you to make me a written proposition. I said to General Türr: 'If your Society is in a position to prosecute the work, I do not seek to interfere, and I retire; but in the contrary case, as I shall have all the responsibility, I do not desire partners in what concerns the subscriptions, nor engagements with any one.'"

"Two days after, in answer to our proposition, M. de Lesseps sent us an opinion, drawn up by his counsel, of which the following is an abstract:

"I. By the terms of this document, M. de Lesseps not only enters into this negotiation with his name and moral influence, but with a positive determined right of intervention.

"The act of incorporation of the conceding Society declares that the presidency shall be offered to him; therefore he might have identified himself with our Civil Society, in which he, as president, would have had the casting vote, in case of division.

"His official influence has been, nevertheless, important. Messrs. Wyse and Reclus undertook the exploration by his advice, and the confidence of capitalists was stimulated by the certainty that he would put himself at the head of the enterprise when the moment of execution should arrive. M. de Lesseps summoned the Congress and brought together the former engineers of Suez, by whom the technical and statistical problems were solved. The estimate of probable revenues, on which will be based the appeal to capital, is the work of the Congress presided over by M. de Lesseps, and the programme for the execution of the work will result from the labors of the Congress as much as, if not more than, from the investigations of the Civil Society. Finally, the vote of the Congress has conferred on M. de Lesseps a new right, inasmuch as a part of the votes were influenced by the confidence with which he inspired the electors.

"Supposing that the Society should sell its right, could it do so without remunerating M. de Lesseps and his colleagues? If M. de Lesseps claims nothing, his refusal to claim can not benefit the Civil Society, and its shareholders should reckon with M. de Lesseps.

"II. What is the real value of the concession? Ten per cent. of the capital is reserved to the Civil Society. This capital, taken at the moment of opening the negotiations for concession, was valued at four hundred million francs, which would give forty millions to the Society. At present the capital should reach eight hundred millions, which would make the society's share eighty millions. But this increase of expense would diminish and not increase the advantages reserved to the founders of the Society, which in any case can not be greater than forty million francs.

"The Civil Society, not having fulfilled the obligations which the concession imposes in compensation for the advantages ceded (since it still remains to organize the company of execution), has only accomplished the first part of its work-important, no doubt, but only partial.

"The ten per cent., say forty millions, would be conceded without con

test if the canal were already open for navigation; but the Society's right in this claim is only proportionate to the expenses which it has incurred.

"If M. de Lesseps should express his private opinion, he would say that the cost of the enterprise having been estimated at first at four hundred million francs and the share of the Society at forty millions, but the canal costing ultimately eight hundred millions, and the profits of shareholders diminishing one half, the share of the privileged beneficiaries should be diminished in the same ratio, that is, reduced to twenty millions; and, on the other hand, the original founders of the Society being exonerated, by their concession to the company of execution, from a part of the charges equal in importance to those already incurred by them, ten millions should be given to the original members and the other ten millions reserved to the new members, who will have to bear the heavy expenses to be incurred up to the completion of the maritime canal.

"III. Whether the figure ultimately accepted by M. de Lesseps be ten or fifteen millions, the 'opinion' proposes to reserve, at the time of subscription, ten or fifteen millions of stock which shall be allotted to the founders and members of the Civil Society. This stock shall be credited with disbursements already made by the stockholders, in proportion to such disbursements, and the shares shall be delivered to the beneficiaries on the day on which they are taken up. This deposit will be a partial but effective representation of the guarantee offered by the Civil Society to the new company."

NOW AND THEN IN AMERICA.

GLANCING lately over a column of humorous items in a New York journal, I was struck by the pithy remark that an Englishman visiting the United States for the first time "writes up" the whole country in ten minutes; whereas a Frenchman compiles a voluminous account of American institutions and manners without ever having visited America at all. The statement may be somewhat paradoxical; but, as often happens with paradoxes, it contains a certain substratum of truth. English travelers on this vast continent are generally in as desperate a hurry to record in print their impressions of what they have seen as they have been to gather such impressions; and the result of this over-haste in seeing and writing is, naturally, confusion. In a neighboring republic they have a story about the agent of an English insurance company who, once upon a time, was sent out to Mexico to investigate the causes of a fire, compensation for which was claimed by the insured parties. He landed at Vera Cruz-in which city the fire had occurred-on Christmas eve, say in the year 1870. With due diligence he made his inquiries; and, these being ended, he was able to avail himself of a homeward-bound steamer, which left Vera Cruz for Havana on the 2d of January, 1871. Six weeks after his return to England he published a brace of very handsome octavo volumes, with the comprehensive title, "Mexico in 1870-71." This may be taken, perhaps, as a fair sample of the practice of "writing up" a country in ten minutes. I do not say that such a "lightning-express" system is adopted by all English tourists in the United States. Observant travelers, thoughtful travelers, patient travelers, conscientious travelers, have come hither time and again from the shores of Great Britain. It is very probable, for instance, that Mr. Thackeray could have said, had he so chosen, a great deal that would have been cogent and pertinent concerning the great country in which

he had been so splendidly received, and the society in the most enlightened circles of which he was so cordially welcomed: only, Mr. Thackeray never chose to say anything whatever on the subject; and his silence was judiciously accepted as golden. Had the dream of his life been realized, and had he obtained a diplomatic appointment at Washington, the world might have been favored in time with a conspectus of American society from the pen of William Makepeace Thackeray as exhaustive and as impartial as the conspectus of American politics produced more than forty years since by Alexis de Tocqueville. As it is, few, I should say, will accuse Mr. Froude, or Mr. Anthony Trollope, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or the late Mr. Maguire-although the last-named publicist only dealt with the condition of the Irish in America-with having "written up" the United States in ten minutes. On the other hand, I should be stupidly indifferent to or ignorant of the current literature of my own country were I not able to recall scores of books published in England during the last twenty years and written more or less on the "ten-minutes" principle. A young English peer or guardsman arrives here with an indistinct notion that it will be "awfully jolly" to see some buffalo and grizzly-bear shooting somewhere out West. Out West he goes, scampering thither and scampering back; and directly he is safe again in Pall Mall he, or his wife-if Nimrod has been fortunate enough to find a spouse who is a mighty huntress before the Lord, and does not shrink from accompanying him on his expedition-courts public favor with a bulky tome, beauteously printed and picturesquely illustrated, with some such attractive title, it may be, as "Bisons and Bonanzas," or "Grizzly Bears and Greenbacks," or "Terrapin and the Tariff.” Alliteration's artful aid is invaluable in choosing a title for a book of travels. Again, a gentleman who thinks that he is a genius, and whose friends in England have been telling him for years that he has only to set foot in New York to be at once and unanimously acclaimed as the greatest of living geniuses, arrives here per Cunard or White Star steamship with his library or his scientific lecture, his "entertainment," his panorama, his white mice, or what not, prepared to have his olfactory organs titillated with any amount of incense, and to make fifty thousand dollars by a few months' lecturing or "entertaining" tour. Speedily he may discover, to his astonishment and dismay, that the American people have heard little, and that they care less, about him; and that at the moment they are far too much occupied by or in

terested in Mr. Edison's discoveries, or the recent sale of New York Central stock, or Mr. Talmage and his presbytery, or the Maine election problem, or the "Frog Opera and Pollywog Chorus," to care one dime about him or his lecture, his "entertainment," his panorama, or his white mice. The man of genius goes home, minus the fifty thousand dollars which he had expected to realize, and in dudgeon. Ere long an opusculum appears from his pen: "Bowery Boys and Buckwheat Cakes"; "Wall Street and Waffles"; "Democracy and Delmonico's," or the like; and not unfrequently his "ten minutes' " impressions of a country which contains more than forty-five millions of people, and of which his path has covered only a very few square miles, are colored and disagreeably colored by the feelings of disappointment not unnaturally excited within his breast by the failure of the American people to appreciate him, his genius, his lectures, his panorama, or his white mice, as the case may be. After all, he may not be, when you come to read between the lines of that which he has written, a much more untrustworthy traveler than he who comes to the State with a ponderous budget of letters of introduction to the "first families," who is "put through" and passed on from agreeable coterie to agreeable coterie, be these fashionable, literary, artistic, or especially religious coteries; who lives at the best clubs and the best restaurants; who goes out to three or four balls or receptions, or tea-fights, or prayer-meetings every night; who is charmed with everything and everybody that he has met with, and who goes home to write a book in raptures: picturing America as a terrestrial paradise, and the Americans as only a little lower-if, indeed, they are not a little higher-than the angels. There is not much to choose, it strikes me, between the unreliability of too rosily-colored spectacles and of eye-glasses tinted to the hue of the yellow jaundice. But perhaps the most objectionable type of the Englishman who "writes up" the United States in ten minutes is the individual who arrives here as the temporary correspondent of a London newspaper. Our journals maintain permanent correspondents, sometimes regular and sometimes occasional, in the great transatlantic cities-writers who have been in the country for years, who have made a careful study of American politics, and who may claim to possess some substantial knowledge of the good and evil qualities, the manners and the idiosyncrasies of the nation among whom they have been for such a length of time domiciled. But in the midst of these experts there suddenly drops down a gentleman from Fleet Street or the Strand, bristling all over with preVOL. CXXX.-No. 279.

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