and whom he sought to depose by the agency of Charles VIII. of France and a Council.

Abrupt as was Savonarola's interposition in the outward face of history, his mission was linked with a series of past agencies which had held their place alongside of the world's prevailing impetus, putting in their spoke ever and anon while the wheel of secular selfishness went round. The Mendicant orders had nourished a line of penitence preachers; holy monks who would sometimes shake whole cities and provinces by their appeals. Burckhardt remarks on the difference between the manifestations of early spiritualism on the two sides of the Alps, that the same tempers which in the North took a mystical and intuitive character, went out in expansive practical energy and eloquence in the South. The North,' he says, 'brings 'forth an Imitatio Christ, which works its effects at first only within the walls of convents, but continues them for ages long; the South produces men who make on their fellow'men a colossal impression, but an impression of the moment only. Thus preached, in the fifteenth century, Bernardino da Siena, Alberto da Sarzana, Capistrano, della Marca, Da Lecce, and others. Finally, thus preached Savonarola. No stronger prejudice existed than that against the Men'dicant orders; these men overcame it. The haughty spirit ' of Humanism criticised and contemned; when the preachers raised their voice, Humanism was for the time forgotten out ' of mind.'

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Alexander VI., double dyed in crime, yet refused for some time to listen to the representations of those who urged him to prohibit Savonarola's preaching. He is a holy man,' he said, with something of respectful awe. After a while, however, he counterworked the reformer's already waning influence by sending a rival pulpit orator, Gennazzano, who dealt leniently with the foibles of the rich and great. And, in the end, Alexander satisfied the condemnation urged by Savonarola's enemies, and allowed him to perish in the flames.

When Julius II. succeeded to the Papal throne, the temporary shock to the interests of culture was past. The conscience of his fellow-citizens had not permanently responded to Savonarola's appeal. To Rome his influence had never extended. There, more than ever, classical notions and fancies moulded the intercourse of polished life. The fanatics of the Aristotelian philosophy, who at this time waged an angry war with the Platonizers, were accused of being more incorrigible infidels than their foes. It would seem to have been the Aristotelians chiefly who forced the Olympian myths into the explanation of

Christian mysteries, and even into pulpit harangues. Erasmus reports a sermon which was preached in his hearing before Julius II. and his cardinals, in which the Pope was compared to Jove, the death of Christ to the self-sacrifice of Decius. The identification of God the Father with Jupiter, of God the Son with Apollo, and of the Virgin Mary with Diana, was certainly an allegory of more profane import, as advanced by the Leonine divines, than as suggested by the studious statesman of our day, who has theorised on the hidden instincts of mythology. The only check on the propagation of infidel tenets was the occasional self-assertion of ecclesiastical decorum or alarm, as when the Lateran Council sitting at the time of Leo X.'s accession, decreed the immortality and individuality of the soul to be necessary Christian doctrine; and when the ecclesiastics of Venice made application to the same Pope-vainly howeverto procure the condemnation of the Paduan doctor Pomponazzo, for his atheistic utterances. Such reclamations were not calculated to lessen the dalliance of the cultivated classes with the censured topics. In quel tempo,' says an Italian historian quoted by Ranke, non pareva fosse galantuomo e buon cortegiano colui che de' dogmi della chiesa non aveva qualche 'opinione erronea ed eretica.' Assuredly the whole situation" furnished a suggestive field of thought, when the two German students, Erasmus and Martin Luther, successively made their visits to the headquarters of Christendom-A.D.1506 and A.D. 1512.

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ART. V.-1. The Southern States since the War: 1870-71. By ROBERT SOMERS. London.

2. Revenue of the United States. Official Report of Mr. D. D. WELLS, the Special Commissioner. London.

3. Monthly Reports of the Department of Agriculture. Washington: 1871.

SINCE the close of the long political struggle which succeeded

to the American civil war, the outer world has heard comparatively little of the Southern States. Our knowledge of the interior condition of that great section of the Union comes almost entirely from Northern sources. We look in through the open door of New York or the window of Philadelphia, and get only such a view of what is going on within as it may suit Northern interests to give. Of the political side of reconstruc

tion we have heard enough; of its more important social and commercial aspects hardly anything is known. Yet the problem which the Southern population had to work out-the problem in the solution of which they are still engaged-was one of the greatest and the most interesting ever given to a nation. The civil war left the whole area of the rebellious States strewn with ruins. The Southern people staked everything they had on the desperate venture, and lost the throw. Their social system was destroyed. Their commercial organisation was swept away. Their political constitution was overthrown. Even the material fabric of civilisation in the Southern States the roads, the bridges, the telegraphs, the railways, the public buildings in the chief cities-came out of the struggle in a state of ruin. Everything needed to be reconstructed, even to the very culture of the fields. The world had in the most literal sense been turned upside down. When the war began, the social and political system of the Southern States was strongly organised under the rule of a dominant caste : the political equality of one race founded on the entire subjection of another. The land was owned by a few millions of planters, and was cultivated for them by four millions of slaves. The proprietor of an estate owned not only the soil but the people who lived on it. He had absolute power over them. The men of his own race in the towns and cities were either agents of the planters or idle hangers on, who looked upon labour as a curse which rested on colour, and regarded the white men as divinely appointed rulers of the black. The whole social structure was built on this assumption, and was strong. The whole commercial system was organised in accordance with it, and flourished. To the ruling caste the Southern States were almost a paradise. With a slight element of social danger, and a certain recurrent dissatisfaction as the thought of the vast outer world of free dom came home to the lord even in the midst of his dependents, there was everything that men could desire. They had a predominant position in the politics of the Union, and practically ruled a vast republic whose boast it was to be democratic and free. Their commercial position was above anxiety. A lazy, inefficient, and wasteful culture of a young and fruitful soil produced sufficient crops of cotton, tobacco, and rice to give them all they needed. They had possession of the world's markets. and in return for the products of their soil, and of the labour of their slaves, civilisation put all its luxuries within their reach. The 'gentlemen' of the South thus constituted themselves the aristocracy of the republic; held in scorn and contempt their

mean white brethren in their own cities, and the farmers and traders of the North and West; lived the life of princes at home and of courted visitors abroad; had a monopoly of political office at Washington, and enjoyed over all the world the reputation of an equal monopoly of the breeding, the culture, the gallantry, and the intellectual ability of the Anglo-American race.

The failure of the Confederation shattered this whole social structure as none was ever shattered before. It not only freed the slaves, but it enslaved the masters. It not only ruined the political position of the planters, but destroyed their commercial prosperity. During those years of supreme effort and agony, when the country was first isolated from the outer world and then ravaged by the incursions of a victorious enemy, the labour system became disorganised, the land fell out of cultivation, the railways and roads were broken up, and many of the most prosperous towns were laid in ruins. Mr. Somers, who spent the latter months of 1870 and the early part of 1871 in a tour of intelligent observation in the Southern States, found, even then, that the trail of the war was everywhere visible. In the magnificent valley of the Tennessee, he found burnt-up gin'houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter 'the gable walls only are left standing, and large tracts of once 'cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder, and having in many 'places become impassable, new tracks have to be made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries. Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many "who were once the richest among their fellows have disap'peared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their place.' This unhappy valley is no exception; all over the South the same ruin spread. The commercial ruin was even worse. The mere money loss in the abolition of slavery was four hundred millions sterling, though the loss was one by which civilisation and humanity have gained. The banking capital, estimated at two hundred millions, was, says Mr. Somers, 'swamped in the extinction of all profitable banking business, 'and finally in a residuary flood of worthless Confederate money. The whole insurance capital of the South--probably 'a hundred millions more-also perished. The well-organised 'cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, mills, factories, coal and iron mines, and commercial and industrial establishments, 'built up by private capital, the value of which, in millions of 'pounds sterling cannot be computed,—all sank, and were engulfed in the same wave. Every form of mortgage claim, 'with the exception of two or three proud State stocks, shared

for the time being the fate of the principal, and only now 'crops up amid the subsiding deluge like the stumps of a submerged forest.' But no description of these losses can so powerfully set them forth as the figures of the census returns of the value of property in 1870 as compared with 1860. The valuation of Virginia and West Virginia was 480,800,267 dollars in 1870; it had been 657,021,336 dollars in 1860. South Carolina had diminished in taxable value during the ten years, from 489,319,128 dollars to 174,409,491 dollars. Mississippi stood at a valuation of 509,427,912 dollars in the year before the war, four years after the war it was valued at only 154,635,527. Louisiana fell to about half its former valuation; Florida to less than half; unfortunate Georgia to less than onethird. Mr. David Wells, the late Special Commissioner of Revenue, in his last official report estimates the direct expenditure and loss of property by the Confederate States by reason of the war at 2,700,000,000 dollars. Mr. Wells thus describes the condition in which the South was left:-'In 1865, this sec'tion of our country, which in 1860 represented nearly one-third 'of the entire population, and, omitting the value of the slaves, 'nearly two-sevenths of the aggregate wealth of the nation, 'found itself, as the result of four years of civil war, entirely 'prostrate, without industry, without tools, without money, 'credit, or crops; deprived of local self-government, and to a great extent of all political privileges; the flower of its youth in the hospitals or dead upon the battle-fields; with society disorganised, and starvation imminent or actually present.' To this dark picture one darker line must be added. Southern society was demoralised by defeat. A profound discouragement settled down over the whole surface of the land. Highspirited and chivalrous as it had been, the South might be described at the close of the war, in the language of the prophet, as a nation scattered and peeled, a people terrible from their 'beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden down, 'whose land the rivers have spoiled.'

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The first hope of the South was, that in reconstructing its social, commercial, and political organisation it might be let alone. But the North had made itself the guardian of four millions of liberated negroes, and it could hardly leave its wards to be dealt with by eight millions who were once their masters. The rational and even the obvious course towards the freedmen was that they should receive complete civil rights, and be considered as in a state of pupilage for the exercise of political rights. The Northern distrust of Southern politicians, and, to some extent, the violence which the disappointed