the South would not consent to bear the crushing burden such a war would impose. Constantly, and to some extent justly, as the Federal Government, through its Department of Agriculture, is urging on the South to vary and multiply its agricultural products, the Southern people still rely more and more on the cotton trade with England for all their prosperity. In the event of a war between this country and the United States the cotton famine would be reversed. While we were actively pushing hostilities the Southern planters would be standing still with their cotton unsaleable and valueless, and their negro labourers everywhere asking for the wages that can only be paid when the cotton is sold. We do not believe that General Grant is reckless as a statesman; it is certain that he knows how great a weakness the discontented and starving South would be in the event of war; and therefore we conclude that he has never even contemplated the necessity of resorting to that terrible alternative. His supporters may think of Canada; but he at least thinks of the South; and to the South war with England would be desolation and death, or insurrection and independence.

It is not with any thought that our relations are in real danger of assuming this portentous form that we have referred to this aspect of Southern politics, but merely because no view of the political situation in the United States can be complete without it. The probable course of the domestic politics of the Union is one which will not depend for its solution on foreign war. By the inevitable operation of the Constitution, the power of electing members of the House of Representatives must go with population. Under slavery, the Southern States had representatives in numbers proportioned to the numbers of their free population and three-fifths of the slaves. The article in the Constitution still holds good, but the slaves are now free, and the whole Southern population is therefore counted. The re-apportionment of representatives has been made by the now existing Congress on the basis of the census of 1870; and tho House of Representatives which will be elected in the autumn, and which will assemble on the 4th of March next, will represent the States in very different proportions from the present In order probably to mask in some degree the evident shifting of power westwards, and to prevent any States from greatly losing in the number of their representatives, Congress increased the number of members of the House of Representatives from 243 to 283. Of the forty new members thus gained, twelve Southern States got seventeen, six North-western States got fourteen, three far Western States five; while only four

one.

VOL. CXXXVI. NO. CCLXXVII.

N

of the Eastern States had any gains at all, and those gains amounted only to four, two for Pennsylvania, and two for New Jersey; while a gain of one each in New York and Massachussets was counterbalanced by a loss of one each by New Hampshire and Vermont. The gain to the States whose condition and prospects we have been considering was eleven; and in their dislike of the prohibitory tariff, nearly all the States in which the most marked gains have taken place either are or will be with them. We shall therefore most certainly see before long a very marked progress in the Free-trade movement in the United States. The inevitable shifting of power has, however, been still further slightly masked by a supplementary bill, which has added nine more members to the House of Representatives, raising its numbers from 283 to 292. Of these nine new members, four go to the Southern States of Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, and five to the Northern States of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. This new addition may have but little influence on the Free-trade question; it is, however, so much reduction of the growing influence of the West. Mr. Wells, basing his opinion solely on the political capacity of the people, and on their ability to understand any problem which is really forced upon their attention, gives Protection less than ten years to live. The shifting of power from States which are interested in high tariffs to those States which are peculiarly the victims of such tariffs must expedite the process of its extinction, while it will assure the permanence of a beneficent change.

What the Southern States really want as the guarantee of their prosperity is a more direct trade with the outside world. Their products are wanted in Europe, and European manufactures are needed by them. Shut in behind the Chinese wall of a prohibitory tariff, they cannot derive the profit from foreign intercourse which the world is ready to pour upon them. They have great ports which were formed by nature to be the outlets of their agriculture and the inlets of the conveniences and the luxuries their agricultural products will buy. Their hope of prosperity depends upon the balance of mutual advantage they can strike between their own products and those of other lands. They cannot sell to the world without buying of the world. The monopoly of the cotton market is not given them; it is only put within the reach of their earnest effort. They cannot have it under existing conditions. The falling price of cotton has ever since the close of the war clouded their prospects; but the disastrous effect of the recent rise on their

best and surest customers must have entirely convinced them that the problem of cheap production is the problem of Southern prosperity. We believe that problem will be solved. We have not been able to make this review of the condition and prospects of the Southern States without complete renewal of hope. They have lost much; but they cannot lose their splendid country, their glorious sky, their noble rivers, or their teeming soil. They have not altogether lost their political sagacity; and now that they are fast emerging from their eclipse, they will gradually recover their legitimate influence, if not even their lost ascendency, in Federal politics. Our wish for them is that they may succeed in throwing off the burden of a fiscal policy which is ruinous to their welfare and will be fatal to their future; that they may so far recover their monopoly of the cotton trade as to be able to supply all our looms and spindles with the raw material and to take our products in exchange. The bonds thus woven across the sea will be stronger than those of either race or sympathy; they will be bonds of mutual interest and of a common prosperity, and will be an effectual assurance that between us two there shall be always peace.

ART. VI.-1. Mémoires de Sebastian Joseph de Carvalho et Mélo, Comte d' Oeyras, Marquis de Pombal, Secrétaire d'État et Premier Ministre du Roi de Portugal, Joseph I. 4 vols. 12mo. 1784.

2. Memoirs of the Marquis de Pombal. By JOHN SMITH, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1843.

3. Historia do Reinado de El-Rei D. José e da Administração do Marquez de Pombal. Por SIMÃO JOSÉ DA LUZ SORIANO. 2 vols. 8vo. Lisboa: 1867.

4. Etude historique sur le Marquis de Pombal. Par le Baron ÉDOUARD DE SEPTENVILLE. Bruxelles: 1868. 5. Le Marquis de Pombal, Esquisse de sa Vie publique. Par FRANCISCO LUIZ GOMES, Député aux Cortès de Portugal. Lisbonne: 1869.

6. The Marquis of Pombal. By the COUNT OF CARNota. 2nd Edition, 8vo. London: 1871.

A NATURAL sentiment prompts the Portuguese of the pre

sent generation to revive the history of the remarkable man whose name gives a title to this article. Citizens of a

state which, shorn of those vast continental possessions that alone gave it the consideration it once enjoyed, they may well turn with complacent admiration to the period when the affairs of their country were administered by a statesman who arrested its course down the easy slope of national decline, and who instituted an important policy which was imitated by the ministers of far greater and more powerful nations. The present, too, is the most favourable moment that has yet occurred for a calm and impartial consideration of the public life of this great Minister. Party-spirit in the physical and political atmosphere of Portugal is apt to engender a degree of heat almost unknown to our colder latitude and calmer manners. Hitherto Pombal has been the victim of two opposite sets of biographers and historians. By the one he has been so overpraised as to render his name ridiculous; by the other he has been so fiercely attacked that he is sometimes almost denied the name of a human being. A man who in a nation of devotees made a successful attack upon a powerful religious fraternity, will readily be believed to have drawn upon himself a vast amount of pious hostility; and it is chiefly as the destroyer of the Jesuits that his name escapes the oblivion which completely hides the long array of his predecessors and successors in office.

6

Before beginning our examination of the public life of Pombal, we have a word to say concerning the several works the titles of which stand at the head of this paper. Some of these need not detain us long. The first upon our list, the Mémoires de S. J. Carvalho,' published in French in 1784, not long after the Minister's death, has generally—and with every appearance of probability-been attributed to the Jesuits. From a remark in one of the notes to the first volume (p. 19), it appears that the work had originally been published in Italian, and we possess a copy of it in that language which bears the date of 1781. Though by no means without value as an historical sketch, it is yet so bitterly hostile to the Minister whose career it recounts, that the statements it contains must invariably be received with the greatest caution. The only measures of Pombal which it does not denouncewhich, indeed, it heartily commends as just and wise—are those of his extraordinary commercial and economical policy, which, at the present day, are almost unanimously condemned as vicious in principle and disastrous in result. The bitterness with which the subject of the Mémoires' is assailed is sustained throughout, and, such is the weakness of human nature, on that account perhaps the book will be found to be

by no means unpleasant reading. Mr. Smith's Memoirs of the Marquis of Pombal,' and the Count of Carnota's 'Marquis of Pombal,' are two editions of the same work, the author having received a Portuguese title of nobility in the interval between the publication of the first and second editions. The work is in reality an undiscriminating defence of the Marquis; and though it contains some interesting documents, both public and private, not printed elsewhere, it has no real historical value. Of the work of the Baron de Septenville, the most favourable thing that can be said is that it is printed in very clear type upon excellent paper, and that it contains a good photograph of a well-known portrait of Pombal at the beginning, and an approximately correct* genealogy of the Carvalho family at the end. It throws no light whatever upon the history of Pombal. The remaining works upon our list are of a very different character. That of Senhor da Luz Soriano is, as he tells us in his preface, a kind of preliminary to another work, relating the history of the establishment of the present form of parliamentary government in Portugal. Rightly judging that the efforts of Pombal to break the power of the nobles and destroy the influence of the Church, as well as his attempts, mistaken though they unquestionably were, to improve the commerce of his country, were causes more or less direct of the growth of liberal feeling in Portugal, he considered that the history of Portuguese parliamentary institutions would be incomplete without an account of his administration. His principal authorities were a work called L'Administration du Marquis de Pombal,' a reply to the Mémoires' noticed above, and an anonymous and unpublished life of the statesman written in Portuguese. He has besides made considerable use of hitherto unpublished documents existing in the archives of the various ministries at Lisbon. The work is composed in a painstaking and conscientious manner, but its style is dry and laboured. It is filled with sentences of almost interminable length (not, by the way, an unusual feature of modern Portuguese literature), and as the author is a permanent official in the civil service of his country, it would appear that his literary style had been developed in the frequent composition of abstracts and State papers. He is great upon all questions of historical upholstery, and relates with the zealous accuracy of an anti

* In it he places the Marquis's birth in January instead of in May, and there is a discrepancy of three days between the date of his death as stated in the genealogy and in the text.