Nature nothing shows more rare Life to perfect their shapes abides. In easy air and warm light nursed Bloom prompt wit, love with glamor fraught, And brave but flower-like youth: Like brittle shells, long years immersed, Secreted by toil, conscience, and thought, Are formed art, virtue, truth. The Nation. T. Sturge Moore. THE NEW POLITICAL AMERICA. A great change is brewing in the politics and institutions of America, and this year's Presidential Election is the sign of it. Progress has been working while the political captains have been shouting, and the writing on the wall begins to appear. Its letters are faint, unformed, have no running sense as yet, but ever another flickers into its place, like an advertisement thrown against the skyline. Much dust, much confusion there are, for when a nation stirs, those are the first tokens of the fact. Old forms trail themselves away with the clangor of so many ghosts in chains. They make the greater a noise out of their very emptiness, their debility, their terror of the unknown. Yes, it may be said of the political turmoil in America, This battle fares like the morning's war When dying clouds contend with glowing light. Poetry has little to do with politics anywhere, so let us get to the plain words of an impression such as one brings back from a recent visit to America. One must go there to at all understand what is happening, because only the causes are active and news waits upon effects. Even so, one can only get a general idea and it may be wrong in many details, though guided by talks alike with eminent Americans and with the American "man in the street." He is really the fellow who is making the politicians reconsider their cards. They have kept him at bay for a long time, but he is lifting up his voice and he means it to be heard from Maine to California. has not "arrived," but he is more nearly "arrived" than ever he has been before, and he presses forward, banging almost into the American Constitution, which, more or less, is framed to Не keep him out; or rather, framed with such an intricate nicety that the politicians can engineer it to keep him out. To Americans their Constitution is as the Ark of the Covenant, on which hands must not be laid. That is natural and grateful, and you say so, whereupon you get the confidence: "Some day, of course, we may have to make changes, but not yet." It is like the Negro question, it is consigned to the future; but all the time the masses keep hammering at the door of that ark. Its walls are as strong, no doubt, as those of ancient Jericho, but public opinion in search of something can become a very wonder-working influence. It is this influence which is causing America, deep down in her heart, to ask if all her governing institutions are for the best in a modern world; not, may be, so much the Federal Constitution in itself, as the underworld of barnacles which has grown around it. She has been governing the largest democracy in the world with eighteenth-century machinery, and she begins to feel the toil and imperfectness of the business. When you put your ear to American politics on the spot, it is this cry, this rumble you hear. The curtain is rising on it, but the scene-shifters are so busy with each other's affairs that, in the babble, they almost drown the herald. Of old our novels were completed in three volumes, and surely America is awaiting her third volume. One told of her creation as an independent State, wherein, as before God, all men were born equal. But away in a dark corner slavery was tucked in, perhaps an inevitable thing, as circumstances were, but nevertheless a canker which had to be cut out if America was to live and not be unduly insincere, as the Anglo-Saxon so often is in his po Nature nothing shows more Life to perfect their shap In easy air and warm And brave but flower mersed, Secreted by thought, toil. Are formed art, virt The Nation. |