to all who are in office by those who would be in. And it is sometimes quoted by the honest citizen, who, in applying to get a letter or to pay taxes, demands that the progress of all other affairs shall be arrested and the services and attentions of all officials present devoted to himself, while the claims of other equally honest citizens be allowed to wait. It is a phrase too frequently fired through the teeth of dogmatic gentlemen, who know nothing of rigid forms in the public service, at patient officials who have spent the better part of their lives in a conscientious discharge of their duties. It must be admitted that there is an "insolence of office," but it is found among those who owe their positions to political influence rather than to merit. A politician who finds himself temporarily in office, as a reward of questionable political services, and who feels that he is liable to removal as soon as his party's or patron's power wanes, and not sooner, may not be expected either to take too much trouble to learn his duties, or to patiently answer questions concerning his office which he does not understand.

A permanent tenure of office may be open to the objection of aristocratic tendences, but it is the aristocracy of merit. The "insolence of office" is most found among ignorant and transitory incumbents, who have neither the ability, the inclination, nor any sufficient encouragement to master the often complicated duties of their temporary places. A Plebeian.

The Decision of Columbia College. EDITOR OVERLAND:

When a good old Methodist divine once asked a despondent and somewhat wayward young convert if he had expected to enter the kingdom of heaven at a bound, he replied, "Ah, no! but by an occasional rebound." So when the good President Barnard tells us that the report of Columbia upon the late petition for admitting women to its privilege is probably "all that the petitioners expected," he might favor the impression that this kingdom of higher education is to be carried for woman by a form

of resilient action, in which, as a rebound from the refusal of '76, the present position is not a discouraging one.

Certainly, if taken in good faith, it does not seem a hopeless one. It is even in the power of some wealthy and benevolent sisters, by further "munificent endowments," to reverse it entirely.

But until large aid comes of this character, the lack of it forms, of course, as unexceptionable an argument against the admission. of women as Columbia could advance. Even the losing parties must admit that poverty is not really disgraceful, though, as Carlyle said of old age, it is very disadvantageous. Hence, if this "great, distinguished, and opulent" institution is not opulent enough to share its benefits with women, who shall blame it?

Neither could it be expected that it would "leap at once" to the advanced position of co-education. The conservative spirit which has so long brooded over it was not to be so easily laid. No one could be surprised that it fortified itself at the outset by an emphatic resolution against admitting women to the regular classes with young men. The favorable verdict of those institutions that have tested such practice, the vigorous logic that connects it with what is strongest and best in the intercourse of the sexes, and above all, the known views and sympathies of the president, could not shake its determination in this direction. And though this has the appearance of a very old prejudice, yet it is claimed to be only a fresh exercise of the best wisdom of the schools. A very remote western paper, indeed, declares that there is no pretense of any new light in this position, and at the very intimation is wickedly "reminded" of the conciliatory judge who approached a case of repeated intemperance with the insinuating question, "What is the new difficulty this time, Joe"; and was rudely awakened by the sturdy reply, "There am no new difficulty in this case, your Honor; it's only the same old drunk.”

But at any rate, whether wisdom new or old controlled the leading resolution of Columbia, the form of co-education it touched

upon was not the one its petitioners were seeking, and assuredly not one to "be expected" at its hands. Perhaps, however, it might have been expected that the concessions it did make would contain something a little more substantial and in the direction of the good sought than yet appears. If a simple course of study, pursued without college aid or instruction, be the best it was able to offer, perhaps woman might have achieved this much with considerably less pains. Probably no one would deny her the right to private study or the adoption of a college curriculum; and an examination in the case, while it might test her education, would hardly further it in the manner she desired. It is doubtful if a very large number of young men would be moved to accomplish a college course under such conditions; and it is rather a refined compliment which assumes that innate ability and genuine love of wisdom are strong enough in woman to sustain her in that which man would rarely undertake.

But it is a form of compliment of which women are becoming a little doubtful as the hollowness of it grows more apparent. Touching special tuition, it is true that Gibbon tells us that "the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous." But the testimony of the ages shows that wonderful things have been accomplished through its agency, both in rich and poor soil; and how well the scholar knows what Columbia's offered crumb left wanting of the true bread, the forcible words of her president can clearly testify:

"There is a great deal," said he, "in being in the atmosphere of special instruction." And then, quoting the famous statement of Agassiz, that a student could learn more in a month's contact with a teacher who was master of his subject than in a year with an instructor who knew but little more than his pupil of the matter in hand, he adds, "And he was right. One of the great advantages to be derived from such teachers as Agassiz or Dana is, that they make a man imbibe the spirit of the professor, and lead him to

original investigations. He tries to teach himself."

Such, then, are the special aids and advantages that woman is seeking, "the elastic spring-boards" by which men have so long leaped up to higher planes of thought and knowledge. And these will eventually be granted women here as elsewhere. And this is, perhaps, the really significant and happy point to dwell upon at this time. The present action of Columbia, whatever immediate good it falls short of, is certainly, as we are told by the far-seeing president, an important movement in the direction of coeducation.

The true kernel of wisdom for woman, then, that seems to be contained in the whole matter, is simply that, reading the signs of the time, she proceed more zealously than ever to prepare herself for her kingdom. The next time she petitions Columbia, its doors will open to her. The present effort, though ending in refusal, has left her farther than she was before, and has called out some of the ablest and most irresistible arguments in behalf of this higher education ever put forth.

But, as is continually set before her, yet with none too deep insistence, the accomplishment of these great ends depends mainly upon woman herself; and it is unfortunate, at least, that she does not more fully realize this. In general, it seems probable that the higher paths will be open to her quite as soon as she shall be ready to enter them. This would be an enlightened age, after all, if the majority of women faithfully availed themselves of the best advantages already allowed them. And though this affords no argument against yielding the fuller light to those prepared for it, yet it should contain a strong plea for more energetic work within the rank and file of the moving forces.

It is due the noble men and women who have so long believed in her, that woman should sustain that faith by more extended effort; that, when the higher gates at length swing open, the women of any fitness to enter may prove the rule, and not the rare and "paragraphed" exceptions.

Irene A. Safford.

LATE events have shown that the educated discussion of public topics in our higher-class periodicals is able to affect legislation. But it is not by direct influence on the legislators. Congress did not pass the Civil Service Bill because those Congressmen who voted for it had been reading Mr. Curtis's and Mr. Godkin's editorials, and had become converted to their views: it was because hundreds and thousands of private voters had been reading them, and were making the opinions they thus learned tell powerfully on elections--as well as because of a turn in political prospects that made the bill a measure of self-protection rather than of self-sacrifice. Therefore let the intelligent editor or magazine-writer be slow to plume himself on the approach of the time when educated opinion will act habitually on legislation. The natural field for the influence of journals is public opinion; and wherever the question is such that the public opinion thus formed can formulate itself in a vote, law-making and law-mending will quickly follow.

A SUBJECT now much discussed in the best journals is the divorce question: not only by serious reviews, statistics, and arguments for Federal laws; even the fiction of the day must be made to yield its contribution to the discussion. The domestic infelicities, the matrimonial mismating that are just now so common a subject or incident in our novels, are seized upon to form texts for editorial comments on the divorce laws. Now the divorce question is certainly one on which a vote can hardly be brought to bear; and as for the influence of all this discussion in making social opinion more rigid, social opinion in the classes chiefly reached by educated discussion is already rigid. All this is no reason why thoughtful persons should not continue to think and write about the difficult question of what is to be done with people who wish to draw back from the marriage contract; to work toward a unanimity of judgment among themselves as to what law ought to do; and to exercise such limited influence on legislation as may be possible. But it is a reason why the moral-drawers should not neglect a far more weighty moral to be drawn from mistakes in marriage than that divorce is a poor remedy: and that is the wellworn wisdom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The reviewers insisted on finding in "A Modern Instance" a tract against divorce; and this in face of the evident fact that the wreck of Marcia's and Halleck's lives was accomplished before there was any divorce in question, and was very slightly affected by that transaction. If the book had been a tract against

anything, it would have been against the social conditions that made such a young man as Hubbard and such a young woman as Marcia, and made them likely to marry. The conditions that made Hubbard are too inherent in many complexities of our society to be easy to base a "What shall we do about it?" on; but it is perfectly easy to see where an ounce of proper bringing-up would have saved Marcia more misery than a pound of divorce laws. No education will take a passionate, jealous temperament out of a woman; but it will guide her in the selection of the man upon whom to stake her happiness. No girl whose parents see to it that she is trained by the rousing of her intellectual appetite, by genuine mental work, by knowledge of and sympathy with the wider interests of her race, by contact as broad as possible with interesting, reasonable people, will drain the whole life of her girlhood into one hot wine, and then go wandering about unoccupied and uninterested in anything else, ready to put the glass into the hand of the first plausible vagabond who presents himself to her untrained, undiscriminating eyes. Undoubtedly, if her mother sees to it that she learns to endure rather than to resent, she may make the best of a bad job; but it is better to train your daughter to choose her husband wisely than to train her to get along well with a bad husband.

THERE is a real work to be wrought upon public sentiment toward the training of boys and girls in its bearing on their choice for life companionship. It cannot well be wrought by direct hammering at the subject, for people are jealous of advice on this point, fearing to see the domain of sentiment encroached upon by cold calculation. In point of fact, the strongest affections are those that are first moved by a real or fancied perception of good qualities; and all that we argue for is such a training for the young person's mind that this perception shall be real and not fancied, and such training for the character as to make it instinctively fastidious, and not ready to be indiscriminately moved to affection. Nor does it seem that the work is likely to be wrought by fiction; for when a novel is written that shows with unusual power the miseries following on a narrow, ignorant girl's unwise marriage, the lesson that people draw from it is never by any chance that such results must be expected to follow from narrowness and ignorance. George Eliot generally took the pains to explain herself on this point: a broader education would have saved Dorothea the blunder of her marriage; a higher ideal of female intellect and wifely companionship would have saved Lydgate the disaster of his; and so on. But it never made any

difference. We have not seen a single review that deduced from "Middlemarch," any more than from "A Modern Instance," such a lesson as, Let young men be educated to expect and demand intellectual companionship from women, instead of regarding it with suspicion and jealousy, and they will not so often find their lives spoiled by an unreasonable, tedious wife; and let young women be educated to estimate men and things rationally, to realize the gravity of the step they take in committing their happiness into any man's hands, and to put themselves into a position—both as regards means of support and sources of happiness-where they shall not be compelled to make a bad marriage rather than none at all. Yet this is the real lesson of almost the whole list of unhappy marriages.

pends on rough observation instead of statistics, can, we believe, be overwhelmingly verified. That is, that while the proportion of marriages among college-bred women is less than among other women, the proportion of unhappy marriages and of marriages only negatively happy among them will be found to be almost incalculably small as compared with those of any other class. The ability to read Latin is not an essential to choosing a good husband and being a good wife; and accordingly, we shall find much the same habit of wise marriage in women for whom the exceptional good fortune of wise and mentally inspiring home and social surrounding has supplied the same habit of living "the intellectual life," of looking at realities and knowing a spade for a spade, that college life alone supplies to those

American Statesmen: Monroe and Jefferson.1 THOMAS JEFFERSON was most fortunate in his life. His boyhood was passed in the midst of the generous social surroundings of the later and best days of the Virginia Colony. With much that was coarse and narrow and reckless, there was still a finetempered manliness and scorn of pettiness among the slavocrats of those days. There was a large way of looking at affairs, and an easy tolerance in religion, which trained the strong men to be leaders on the broad field opened by the Revolutionary War. The social conditions approached nearer to those of an aristocracy than any that have appeared on this continent since. It is true that Washington and Jefferson, the two great Virginians, did not spring from the uppermost ranks of the provincial society. Still they were reared within its influences, and are its best products.

Jefferson's education was completed at the best college of the day, and he made the most of his advantages. He was long enough at the bar to acquire habits of mental precision, and yet not long enough to become the slave of mere precedent. He began early to acquire legislative experience in the House of Burgesses, and when only thirty-two years of age he stepped upon a broader field as a delegate to the Congress of the States. He was immediately recognized as a leader, and the following year received the largest number of votes for membership 1 American Statesmen-Thomas Jefferson, by John T. Morse, Jr.; James Monroe, in his relations to the Public Service during half a century, 1776 to 1826, by Daniel C. Gilman, President of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. For sale by Billings, Harbourne & Co., and A. L. Bancroft & Co., San Francisco.

of the committee to draft a declaration of independence. This honor came mainly from the appreciation of his power in written statement. It could hardly be said that at that time he was esteemed the superior of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, his colleagues on the committee. Jefferson, however, had the happy faculty of saying very well on paper what those about him were thinking of and talking about. Naturally, the drafting of the mo mentous document fell to him, and thus he was again fortunate in that his name is associated, in the popular mind, indissolubly with the great Declaration; while the names of Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, his co-committeemen, are seldom thought of in that connection.

Again, he had the happy fortune to be our minister to France from 1784 to 1789, five years of won derful interest to a man like Jefferson, who always looked closely at the popular currents. He thus had an opportunity to study the premonitory symptoms of the greatest social and political upheaval of modern times. He reappeared on the scene of home politics at a period when the country was beginning to settle into the new lines projected by the Constitution, and when new parties must inevitably arise. Fortunate once more in his opportunities, he was able to found a party, and to be carried by it almost overwhelmingly to the presidency. This party for many years was dominant in Federal affairs, and has shown a tenacity of life under stinging defeat, which bespeaks elements of great future

endurance.

His eight years as Chief Magistrate of the Union expired before the strain of the war with England might have endangered his great popularity. He retired to his farm at an age when repose is grateful; and yet again the good fates smiled upon