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any one for a moment suppose that it would become anything but a party question, should there be the smallest possible ground for a difference of opinion? We must not judge the case by what might happen in the first instance, because it is one which constantly tends to grow worse. As we have already shown, the system is one under which precedent is the only recognized law; and, when one party begins by deciding in its own favor, the other will follow whenever it gets a chance, in order to secure equity. We can hardly doubt that the nature of the vote by which the last election was determined operated as a strong incentive on the Democrats of the Forty-fifth Congress to avoid taking any action which might tie their hands at the next election. But why reason about the matter? The manner in which contested elections to Congress are habitually decided shows us exactly how it would be in a similar contest over the Presidency, where the motive for the decision in favor of the party would be incomparably stronger.

In judging the case we must remember that the proposed laws lay down no principles by which Congress is to be governed in reaching a decision, and require from no member a submission of the reasons for his vote. The whole question is one of individual conscience under circumstances in which conscience has no rule to guide it. We must not be understood as founding our objections on the weakness or wickedness of human nature. Men would vote for their party, not because they were bad or unprincipled, but for the simple reason that no law or principle regulating their vote is laid down for their guidance, and it would be a work of supererogation for any one to be better than his neighbors.

Among the bills now under consideration, that of Mr. Bicknell provides that, in the event of a controversy in any State as to the appointment or eligibility of electors, the same may be passed upon by its highest judicial tribunal in accordance with its laws. This proceeding is in perfect agreement with the principles we have laid down, but unfortunately it gives the two Houses of Congress the power to reverse the State decision, and indeed to reject any of the electoral votes it may choose.

Another measure, which fully complies with the required conditions, is that of Mr. Thomas Updegraff. It provides for carrying a case of contested elections into the United States courts. A person claiming the office of President, in opposition to the count declared by Congress, may bring action in the Circuit Court of the United States, and the case may be carried by appeal to the Supreme Court.

It seems completely adapted to carry out the required object, excepting on a single point. As a condition precedent to any such action, one House of Congress must, by resolution, express dissatisfaction with the result of the count. Now, it is not to be expected that, in case both Houses are of the same political complexion, either House will be dissatisfied with the choice of its own candidate. Nor under such circumstances is it likely that the candidate of the other party would be declared elected, unless the case in his favor was so clear as to preclude all doubt. The condition in question, therefore, renders the plan entirely inoperative unless the two Houses are of opposite politics, which is not likely to be the case half the time. We fail to see any sound reason why any candidate, who has received electoral votes and considers himself unlawfully deprived of the office, should not be allowed to sue in the United States courts.

It must always be borne in mind that what is wanted is not simply a legal and political but a moral effect. When a case is decided against one party, we want that party to feel that the decision is based on law, and not on mere force of numbers, because, without this feeling, the proper effect will not be produced. The party thus wronged in his own estimation may submit, but a sore will be left which can not be readily healed. The reason why the decision of the Electoral Commission of 1877 has been demoralizing rather than otherwise is not because it decided in favor of the Louisiana Returning Board, nor because the vote was eight to seven, but it was because the Commission divided on supposed party lines. If two or three Democrats had voted with the Republicans, and vice versa, it would now be very much easier to adopt some plan for the future, even though, at the time, the result had been the same. Under the actual circumstances it is not possible for the Democrats to feel otherwise than that they lost, not because they had the weaker cause, but because they had not the good fortune to get the fifteenth member of the Commission. On the whole, we see no way in which a permanently satisfactory system can be inaugurated except by making every decision of a disputed case a judicial one, to be pronounced by some permanent Court.

SIMON NEWCOMB.

MR. FROUDE'S HISTORICAL METHOD.

HAD Mr. Froude's articles on "Romanism and the Irish Race in the United States" appeared anonymously, they would have been allowed to pass by unheeded, as a very ordinary contribution to anti-Catholic sensational literature. Our ears are so familiar with the outcries and screams of the alarmist that we do not take the trouble to stop to ask him for the grounds of his terror. But, when a literary Englishman condescends to warn us of dangers ahead, we can not but feel the propriety of listening to him with at least apparent seriousness-to such an extent has our intellectual provincialism become a second nature with us. It is pleasant, however, to reflect that an American scholar could not have stooped to the flippant garrulousness of these articles. Polemics of this kind are with us abandoned to the more vulgar sort of men; and it is not without a certain sense of humiliation that I undertake to point out some of the misstatements and fallacies of this popular writer. There is, indeed, no special reason why this should be done at all, other than the very flimsy one furnished by Mr. Froude's name, for, both in his facts and his arguments, he merely treads again the wellbeaten path with which we are all familiar.

A writer's method gives us the truest insight into the value of his work; and Mr. Froude's spontaneity of character does not permit him to conceal from his readers his literary secret. "It often seems to me," he says, "as if history was like a child's box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.' The intellectual frivolousness which permits one to look upon history in this way is incompatible with the love of truth, and there is but a step from arranging facts to falsifying them.

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* "Short Studies," vol. i., "The Science of History," p. 1.

Mr. Froude, in the articles under review, has shown us how he applies this historical method to suit his purpose. "In 1785," he says, "there was one Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, with fifty priests and twelve churches. The Roman Catholic population was French or Spanish. They had neither school, college, convent, nor monastery. They were declining in numbers, or were being absorbed into the preponderating Anglo-Saxon element." Now, in point of fact, there was no Roman Catholic bishop at all in the United States in 1785. There were not fifty priests, and the Catholic population was not French or Spanish. The first bishop was consecrated in 1790; he estimated the number of priests to be about twenty-five, and the forty thousand Catholics then in the country were chiefly Americans, the descendants of the English and Irish Catholic settlers of Maryland. The French had colonized Louisiana, but that was purchased by the United States only in 1803. The American Catholics had no school or convent in 1785, for the simple reason that even in Maryland, where they had first proclaimed the principles of religious liberty, the colonial legislation had made it a crime for a Catholic to teach school or hold public worship; but that their numbers were diminishing is a gratuitous assertion for which there is no evidence. All this is of course unimportant, except as an instance of the way in which Mr. Froude uses his historical letter-box. In the brief passage which I have quoted, we have examples of the triple pseudo-historical process of falsification, invention, and arrangement. We will proceed to a more weighty matter. "Before English rule had established itself in the shape of the policeman," says Mr. Froude, "the numbers of the Celtic race were kept down by internal wars and feuds, and want of food. The Irish annals are a monotonous record of fights among the O's and the Mac's, of farmsteads burned and cattle carried off as spoil.... the people lived like wild animals upon meat and grass; and in Spenser's time the Celtic population scarcely amounted to half a million. . . . All that they were suffering was laid at England's door—and, indeed, in a sense, with justice; for except for us they would never have been alive to suffer."

Mr. Froude wishes to prove that the Irish race would have perished by its own hands had it not been preserved from destruction by English rule; and he does this by telling us that their feuds had been so incessant and bloody that the Celtic population was in Spenser's time reduced to half a million. Now, Spenser lived four hundred years after the invasion of Ireland by the Anglo-Normans, and

the diminished population of his day would show that English rule had been fatal to Ireland. Again, when Mr. Froude says that the Irish population was reduced to half a million in the time of Spenser, he makes an assertion which, as he must know, can not be proved to be true. His authority is Spenser himself, who, in the report which he gave to Queen Elizabeth of the condition of Ireland in 1596, makes this estimate of the population; but his opinions on this subject were based upon conjecture, and he was besides interested in making it appear that the enemies of the Queen were few. But, even in the supposition that he was not far astray, the condition of Ireland was at that time not worse in this respect than that of England. In Spenser's time Sir Edward Coke declared, in the House of Commons, that he, together with Popham, Chief Justice, was employed to take a survey of all the people of England, and that they found them to be nine hundred thousand of all sorts. Ireland then had more than half the population of England, whereas now, after two centuries more of English police protection, it has but a fifth. Mr. Froude has himself elsewhere explained to us the causes which reduced the population of Ireland, and brought the people to live like wild animals on meat and grass. He is speaking of the soldiers of Elizabeth in Spenser's time: "When sent to recover stolen cattle," he says, "or punish a night foray, they came at last to regard the Irish peasants as unpossessed of the common rights of human beings, and shot or strangled them like foxes or jackals. More than once in the reports of officers employed on these services we meet the sickening details of these performances related with a calmness more frightful than the atrocities themselves; young English gentlemen describing expeditions into the mountains to have some killing,' as if a forest was being driven for battue." Again: "She did not conquer Ulster, but she bribed the inferior tribes to rise against the O'Neills. She made use of a piratical colony of Scots, who had settled in Antrim, whom Shan had injured. Sir Henry Sidney ravaged Tyrone and fixed a garrison in Derry." Again: "But she was not content to do the work alone. Against the Irish fighting on their own soil, among bogs and mountains and forests, other allies were more efficient than English soldiers. The Butlers were let loose on their ancient enemies. Every living thing was destroyed by which the insurrection could maintain itself. The corn was burned in the field; the cattle were driven into the camp and slaughtered. The men who could bear arms were out with their chief; the aged and the sick, the women and the little ones,

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