they took the ark from the Israelites and carried it into the temple of their god Dagon; and we are told that "on the morrow behold Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the Lord! And they took Dagon and set him in his place again. And when they rose early on the morrow morning, behold Dagon was fallen on his face to the ground, before the ark of the Lord, and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off!"

We easily recognize Fetichism in the intelligent exertion of physical power by that which is inanimate. But ought we not to confess the same in the attribution of holiness to lifeless, material things? This ark not only proved a great pest to the Philistines, its presence causing a most alarming epidemic in every city to which it was carried; but it possessed such an inviolable sanctity that when it was returned to one of the Hebrew towns, above fifty thousand people were struck dead because out of curiosity some of them ventured to look into it! At length David decided to take it to Jerusalem; but the oxen stumbling, Uzzah put up his hand to steady the ark, and was struck dead on the spot, at which David was so filled with dread of the ark's holiness that he let it remain some time longer in the country.

Into the sacred Caaba of the Moslems is builded the yet more sacred stone which from time immemorial has been worshipped. To this temple devout Mohammedans are continually making pilgrimages. That there is something Fetichistic in the homage paid to a place and a thing is sufficiently evident to the unprejudiced. Once that sacred black stone which is supposed to be of meteoric origin, and so literally to have fallen from heaven, was undoubtedly worshipped as a Fetich. The old Fetichism has indeed been greatly modified, but who would say that it does not still exist? Must not much the same judgment be passed upon the extreme veneration of the Jews for their holy and most holy places and things?

The New Testament is not free from Fetichism. There was, at one time, such a furore attending the miracle-working of St. Peter, that, in Jerusalem, "they brought the sick on couches into the street, so that at least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.” The New Testament does not positively say that any were cured by Peter's shadow falling upon them, but it seems to imply it. If Peter's shadow did not cure diseases, at all events Paul's garments did. "From his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs and aprons and the diseases departed from them." It is evident that the people at that time generally believed in such things; for in the history of Jesus we read that a woman who was diseased "came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself, if

may but touch his garment I shall be whole." Here, we must allow that Jesus took a different view of the matter; and it is the one which the reflective are inclined to take of all miracles of healing. He said: "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole." The gross ideas of this woman were not peculiar; for when Jesus was in the land of, Gennesaret, the people of all the country round about "besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment; and as many as touched were made perfectly whole."

IS THE NEGRO NATURALIZED?*

No discussion of this question would be complete that did not include the peculiarity of the freedmen's position in the country which now claims them as her citizens. Until this year they also, as well as every fresh cargo of German and Irish emigrants, have been foreigners in America. As the latter have descended the gangway of the packet, foreigners, so the negro stepped down from the auction-block, or was cast off from the whippingpost, a foreigner. They sung their songs in a strange land; they dropped their tears to nourish the products of an alien soil. They swarmed and hung, isolated, to a single branch of America, touching her only at the narrow point of the value of their physical condition. For all other purposes their life might have been passed in another planet, so bereft of all benefit to the republic was it, so utterly severed from republican help and comfort. Yet when we compare the behavior of these exiles with that of all other races who have been foreign to America, what a sublime plea it makes to our consideration. Observe it for a moment: recall the temper of this suddenly enfranchised people.

For more than fifty years our various industries have acknowledged the impulse which the cultivation of a single crop bestowed. Each bale of cotton reported no drawback of misery as it passed into the circulation of the world, and yet, imbruted lives, without marriage, without education, without wages, without deliberate choice of anything on earth, gave those bales to civilization; lives, stained by forced licentiousness, torn by arbitrary separations, purposely kept on the level of the animal, and only fed that they might work, have yielded without complaint this annual income to the country. A free laborer may count even his tears and be proud to have them consecrate his lowliness; but the tears of all these absentees from a Republic were owned by masters who despised them as they fell. God counted them, but they did not become embittered into a cup of insurrection. When the slave wept, he recalled the pity of Jesus rather than the vengeance of the Lord; and not a single cotton blossom was crushed by his resentment. And when our bayonets penetrated where this lucrative pain lay covered

Continuation of the Article in the February No., entitled "Dangers of our Political Machinery,"

by darkness, the gleam of the steel woke no fierce hope of retaliation; the blood of the slaves rebelled not, athirst for the blood of their master, but they simply came away, each with his little bundle, and said—“You have been long in coming, but we expected you." That was the God for which they prayed and waited. He came to them in the shape of sudden liberation, and yet the master is still alive, hoping that an era of good feeling will save a part of his oppressive ascendancy. Tell me, who behaves the most nobly, the men who were sold and whipped, or the men who hope we will reconstruct his selling and whipping, only in a less obnoxious form? And when these liberated men, after running the gauntlet of our contempt and hesitation, were admitted to the privilege of seeing the American flag wave over them and droop towards the protection of their arms, they were so little used to taking wages that they forgave a Government for employing without paying them, and stormed entrenchments for us as gayly as though we had a pension for their wounded and a marble for their dead. Without a murmur, these representatives of an enforced alienship turned, in the dear name of America, to face the exasperation and brutality of their old oppressors, and at Fort Wagner and Fort Pillow were massacred upon half-pay, yet bequeathed to the survivors no indictment, no hatred against us. Do we say they are too dull to feel the great injustice? A bayonet is sharp enough to find where the nerves run beneath that skin; and they communicated with a brooding and a troubled mind; but the flag, that once kept them animals, kept them patient men. The teacher visits this race with his alphabet, the agent with his labor-system; the old master contemptuously hires him to raise food for a life that is unprofitable to America; base officials cheat and plunder; but everywhere, everywhere, the generous and the selfish are met by this magnificent courtesy, this patient religion of a slaveborn heart. In this transition state of their fortunes, they suffer in many respects more hardly than when peace and plantation fare surrounded them; but they hug their crucifix with smiles, for our flag envelops it. Have we such veneration for the symbol of our own freedom? Perhaps we have; but I can tell you who has not; the man who would leave the master one chance to strip that flag from the freedman's crucifix and wreathe it with the planter's lash again.

The negroes at Port-Royal have not been free four years; but they have a Building Association, and the instinct to own land is strong there, though it may not be so in portions of the States removed from the seaboard. Sergeant Rivers, of Beaufort, is black enough to be despised by every man whose natural disability to become President is shown by his one g too much in spelling negro; but the sergeant's mind is clear, and he uttered one day in his peculiar dialect the theory of a true Republicanism. "Ebery colored man," said he, "will be a slave and feel hisself, till dey can raise him own bale of cotton, and put him own mark on it, and say, Dis is mine!" God speaks that broken tongue. And is there any one whose public or private negligence would leave a chance, a loop-hole, a least risk, for the return of any form of dominion over the body and soul of such a

man

- to put that heart up again in treason's raffles — to subject that opening intelligence to overseers to leave him at the mercy of hostile politicians? Whoever you are, willing to keep your own independence while you let such, a thing be done, I declare that Sergeant Rivers is white compared with you, and is your natural master.

And we delight to have it understood, by the late vote of Congress upon the District Suffrage Bill, that American unity, when confronted by the choice between the voting of all freedmen and the voting of none, says, All. We may prefer to extend a uniform test over the whole land, and invite consistent intelligence to support and defend the ideas which we cherish; but we are less afraid of the ignorance of the freedman than we are of the treason.able temper of his would-be master; and if the dilemma be forced upon the country to choose between the men who have been degraded and the slaveholders who inflicted the degradation, we point to the behavior which consecrated fifty years of suffering, and now welcomes the first year of deliverance, and we say, here is naturalization — here are souls attempered by America's best climate; here are hearts made in her image. Let them take precedence of the men who have denaturalized themselves, and ousted their souls from republican advantages, and who now recur, with fatal proclivity, during every lull of the popular memory, to the habits and practices of an alien caste. Their slaves were not so remote from America as they themselves are this day. I will not compare this behavior of the Freedmen with that which any other race, admitted to the political advantages of this country, has displayed; but I challenge comparison. Never did the temper of an humble and ignorant class of people promise such aggrandizement to a country. They deserve to be stimulated by the test of education. I say, they deserve to be limited by such a test, and saved from the dangers of an undiscriminating privilege. They have earned this consideration of a jealous Republic. Shall we vex the stream of the Sacramento till its drops consent to travel through our currency — shall eagles and half eagles throng through the Golden Gate, coaxed from mountain tunnels by the magic of incessant labor-shall American citizens be in a hurry to separate, by their very life-blood, the ore from the dross of Colorado, to turn the tribute into the commerce of the world, and shall we be reluctant to farm this revenue, to probe this mine, to re-mint this crude preciousness of the Freedmen's behavior? We might as well peel off the tillable surface of our fields and cast it into the barren ocean. The country's future glory is involved in our assiduous preference of the Freedmen's to the traitor's temper. Lightened imposts, liquidated debts, consolidated liberties, lie unmined in the dark bosoms of that race, which has been suddenly annexed, like a fresh element, to America's sun and air. Let the people rise up, with a great impulse of anxiety, strong as the selfish one that sent her sons to California; let there be a pressing opinion to colonize and claim this dusky domain that glitters with the virgin gold, and plant upon it the flag that protects from foreign interference, and warns off the aliens who want to own and to exhaust it. Its speedy contributions are due to the schools, the churches, the resources, the ballot-boxes of America. J. W.

CHRISTMAS in England is the great era of pantomimes. Every theatre lays itself and a vast part of its income out in gorgeous and fascinating plays, which, transplanted from Italy, have only reached their full flower here in dismal London. The domain of Mother Goose and the realms of Faerie, are ransacked for the familiar threads upon which these splendors are to shine. "Tom, Tom the piper's son," plays on his pipe, till the thick walls of some shabby old room dance away, and palatial halls with diamond ornaments, and living fairies for pillars, and chandeliers shine out before the enraptured multitudes. The old lamp of Aladdin gradually expands. into the Lamp of Day, with Apollo and his fiery steeds. At one of these pantomimes, the first scene was that of Old King Coal and his slaves. These slaves were boys and girls dressed and masked as dwarfs, ghouls, demons. I could not help thinking of the poor colliers of the North of England, and fearing that this mask with its grotesque sprites, might be too truly measuring the stature of their souls. And lately I have had the scene recalled by two newspaper articles which I have read. The first was an article in the London Times. In criticizing the efforts of John Bright and others at reforming England, this editorial said: "There is in English Society the conservatism of a thousand years, which has gradually accumulated, just as the heat of distant ages has been stored up in our coal-fields. The national equilibrium is so stable that a movement, almost revolutionary in its character, would only be followed by a slight temporary rocking, sure to be followed by the re-establishment of the old equilibrium." The second is an article upon which I mean to dwell longer; it appeared a few days ago in the Pall Mall Gazette, and is entitled "Coal." This article sets out with the idea that the greatness of England and Coal are convertible facts.

"We are all of us," says this writer, "vaguely aware that coal is an article of vast importance to our individual comfort and our national wealth; but few of us, probably, have realized in any adequate measure how completely it lies at the root of the social welfare, the commercial prosperity, the vivid life, and the political supremacy of Great Britain. It is not too much to say that, more than any other agency, it is the cheapness and abundance of our coal that have made us, as a nation, what we are. If we were not ahead of all other countries in these respects, we should not be ahead of them in other respects to anything like the extent we are. If we do not keep ahead of them in these respects, we shall not keep ahead of them in others materially, at least; and none but statesmen can estimate aright the degree in which social and political depend upon material supremacy.

It is long since wood was a principal article of fuel in England. It can never become so again till England has undergone a social revolution which would almost imply its erasure from the list of States- till half its population shall have dwindled away, and till pastures and corn-fields shall have been replaced by forests. Now and henceforth we must rely upon our coal measures for heat, light, locomotion, manufactures, for our engineering grandeur, for our national defences. Almost all the elements of our comfort, of our affluence, of our activity, of our strength, can be traced back to coal. We light our streets and we warm our houses with coal :