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 confess what could in no other way be extorted from them." Here is a positive statement. Toland died in 1722. Whence did Toland derive this? From his imagination only. Then Rowe quotes him as his authority for attributing to the logan stones this function of delivering oracular judgments. Appeal was wont to be made to a line in Ossian as a support

for the theory, but since Ossian has been proved to be a fraud antiquaries are chary of referring to him. There are some really fine logan rocks on Dartmoor. Perhaps the largest is one above the West Okement, which I remember seeing many years ago, when a boy, rolling in a strong wind like a boat at sea. That on Rippon Tor measures 16½ feet in length, and is about 4½ feet in thickness and nearly the same in breadth. It still logs, but not so well as formerly, owing to mischievous interference with it.

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 , J., concurring significant.” Ibid.  finds in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984), a “clear” rule permitting contributory liability for copyright infringement based on distribution of a product only when the product “will be used almost exclusively to infringe copyrights.” Post, at 957. But cf. Sony, 464 U.S., at 442 (recognizing “copyright holder’s legitimate demand for effective—not merely symbolic—protection”). Sony, as I read it, contains no clear, near-exclusivity test. Nor have Courts of Appeals unanimously recognized ’s clear rule. Compare A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1021 (CA9 2001) (“[E]vidence of actual knowledge of specific acts of infringement is required to hold a computer system operator liable for contributory copyright infringement.”), with In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, 334 F.3d 643, 649–650 (CA7 2003) (“[W]hen a supplier is offering a product or service that has noninfringing as well as infringing uses, some estimate of the respective magnitudes of these uses is necessary for a finding of contributory infringement. … But the balancing of costs and benefits is necessary only in a case in which substantial noninfringing uses, present or prospective, are demonstrated.”). See also Matthew Bender & Co., Inc. v. West Pub. Co., 158 F.3d 693, 707 (CA2 1998) (“The Supreme Court applied [the Sony] test to prevent copyright holders from leveraging the copyrights in their original work to control distribution of … products that might be used incidentally for infringement, but that had substantial noninfringing uses. … The same rationale applies here [to products] that have substantial, predominant and noninfringing uses as tools for research and citation.”). All Members of the Court agree, moreover, that “the Court of Appeals misapplied Sony,” at least to the extent it read that decision to limit “secondary liability” to a hardly ever category, “quite beyond the circumstances to which the case applied.” Ante, at 933. Further development was left for later days and cases.

The Ninth Circuit went astray, I will endeavor to explain, when that court granted summary judgment to Grokster and StreamCast on the charge of contributory liability based on distribution of their software products. Relying on its earlier opinion in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (CA9 2001), the Court of Appeals held that “if substantial noninfringing use was shown, the copyright owner would be required to show that the defendant had reasonable knowledge of specific infringing files.” 380 F.3d 1154, 1161 (CA9 2004). “A careful examination of the record,” the


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 may be useful to examine two related limitations on the strong-property-rights vision of the legislative enactments to date: first, the judge-made principle that creators may affirmatively renounce their own rights under copyright, and second, the introduction of licensing instruments that aim to effectuate such partial or total abandonments of copyright interests by authors.

2. Abandonment of Copyright
Before the Copyright Act of 1976, an author could effectively abandon copyright protection for a work and place it in the public domain by publishing without a valid copyright notice or by failing to renew the copyright after the expiration of the initial twenty-eight-year term of protection. The 1976 Act substantially weakened the former alternative (by allowing authors to cure defective notices) and eliminated the latter alternative altogether (by creating a unitary copyright term lacking any renewal requirement). The BCIA, in turn, eliminated mandatory notice entirely. As a result, U.S. copyright law now supplies no clear statutory path for placing a work in the public domain during the author’s lifetime. Under the present statute, copyright rights attach automatically the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, and nothing in the statute provides for the possible loss of those rights during the lifetime of the author or for seventy years thereafter. This is in marked contrast to the Patent Act, which provides a number of avenues whereby inventions may enter the public domain.

At first glance, the doctrine of copyright abandonment seems to fill the gap. The courts have, for more than a century, stated that copyright owners

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text: United States Statutes at Large/Volume 6/3rd Congress/1st Session/Chapter 60


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"'Tis over now, and I must fly! This odious sight I cannot bear— The crime, the rage, the misery, That meet my vision ev'rywhere! To some obscure retreat I'll go, Far from abuses, vice, and woe. The wicked knaves who've cross'd my path, I'll visit with my studied wrath.

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2 the law," and He expressly commanded His followers to recognise the official authority of the "Scribes and Pharisees" who "sate in Moses’ seat." To the canonical Scriptures of His nation Christ was accustomed to turn for the sustenance of His own religious life, for the elucidation of His teaching, and for the proof of His claims. From the Founder Himself, therefore, the Christian Church inherited a reverential attitude towards the system of Israel.

It follows that the starting-point of every attempt to appraise the teaching of Christ must be an examination of the doctrine and practice of the Jewish Church to which He belonged. Underlying the Gospels everywhere is the current Judaism of the time; the maxims of Christ pre-suppose both a theology and a morality, and they can only then be justly appreciated when they are considered in connection with the complete mass of ecclesiastical doctrine and practice which they confirmed, or disallowed, or corrected. This

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 and over a large area of the national life of Protestant societies, earnestly followed. Now it is threatened, not with deliberate rejection, for never were the tributes to its excellence so many or so ardent, but threatened with the silent contempt of universal neglect, with a ceremonious exclusion from the public system of national education, with a practical rejection in the interest of a religious literature more favourable to reviving clericalist ambitions.

Yet the New Testament remains the best of all securities for the sanctity of marriage and the purity of social life. Of the influence of the modern State, which may be said in some sense to have emerged at the Reformation, we must speak in the next chapter, when it will be necessary to draw into some agreement the lines of thought which have been pursued, and to indicate the way of Christian duty with regard to the vital interest of marriage under the conditions of modern life.

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 The mediæval Church soon found itself compelled to tolerate much that violated its exalted doctrine. A vast system of ecclesiastical dispensations was elaborated, by means of which a working harmony was effected between an unyielding theory and a lax practice. Bishop Creighton did not speak excessively when he described the mediæval system as "a mass of fictions or dispensations and subterfuges." Perhaps there was an element of fitness in the fact that the English Reformation had its first occasion in a matrimonial conflict, for in no part of the ecclesiastical system was the discrepancy between the official doctrine and the official practice more sharply exhibited.

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 to marry unbelievers. It is certain that mixed marriages have been frequent in all ages since the first; nevertheless, I must needs hold that the apostle's solemn warnings have their first and most evident relevance to the case of the most intimate of all unions, and that mixed marriages must be justified on other grounds than those of the ambiguity of Scripture.

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 looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."

Is it not plain that marriage, contracted under such a conception of purity, has a security and a greatness, which are quite absent from so mechanical a notion of its obligation as that which breathes through the Mosaic rules?

The teaching of Christ, then, is rather implicit in the Gospel than specifically set down in pronouncements. He adopts the prophetic reading of the Jewish law, and leaves His disciples to correlate that reading with the knowledge of God which they received from His example and His teachings. The Christian doctrine of marriage must give free expression to the "mind of Christ" as unfolded in the Gospel; and just in measure as the Gospel is truly appreciated will that doctrine be satisfying and permanent.

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 Here is a good list of colors for practical work. The first eight are enough for every purpose; but add, if you wish, purple and orange. Moist colors in pans are best. There are many different kinds of red, green, blue and brown paints; and as you may be puzzled and not know what to get, the names of the best hues of these particular colors are also given. The most useful paints in this list are yellow ochre, light red, Vandyke brown and Payne’s gray. Learn to work with them, use them often and see the beautiful effects they produce. Delicate tints are made with thin washes of yellow ochre and light red. Vandyke brown makes a variety of pleasing tints.

Use the bright colors sparingly.

You do not need a black paint. Payne's gray with either brown, blue, crimson or green gives rich dark tones. Payne’s gray is also useful in shadows and shading other colors. For the different kinds of greens, mix yellow ochre, blue or brown with Hooker’s green. Use thin washes of light red and blue for the gray of distances and clouds.


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 FATE FAULTS As said, the old hermit of Prague. . . "That that is, is." | author = | work = Twelfth Night. | place = Act IV. Sc. 2. (Referring to Jerome, called "The Hermit of Camaldoli," in Tuscany.) Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme! Who shall presume to prophesy their date, Where nought is certain save the uncertainty of fate? Horace and James Smith—Rejected Addresses. By Lord Cui Bono. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 265 }}


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 296 FREEDOM FRIENDS

O, nur eine freie Seele wird nicht alt. Oh, only a free soul will never grow old! Jean Paul Richter—Titan. Zykel 140. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 296 }}

 * 1) Friends ##

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No friend's a friend till [he shall] prove a friend. | author = Beaumont and Fletcher | work = The Faithful Friends. Actm. Sc. 3. L. 50. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = Friends | page = 296 }}


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 290 FORTUNE FORTUNE


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 FOX FRANCE Che sovente addivien che'l saggio e'l forte. Fabro a se steaao e di beata sorte. They make their fortune who are stout and wise, Wit rules the heavens, discretion guides the skies. Tasso—Gerusalemme. X. 20. | author = | work = | place = | note = | topic = | page = 293 }}

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278 I deny that any man can state accurately what was done by the people, in establishing the present Constitution, and then state accurately what the people, or any part of them, must now do to get rid of its obligations, without stating an undeniable case of the overthrow of government. I admit, of course, that the people may, if they choose, overthrow the government. But, then, that is revolution. The doctrine now contended for is, that, by nullification, or secession, the obligations and authority of the government may be set aside or rejected, without revolution. But that is what I deny; and what I say is, that no man can state the case with historical accuracy, and in constitutional language, without showing that the honorable gentleman's right, as asserted in his conclusion, is a revolutionary right merely; that it does not and cannot exist under the Constitution, or agreeably to the Constitution, but can come into existence only when the Constitution is overthrown. This is the reason, Sir, which makes it necessary to abandon the use of constitutional language for a new vocabulary, and to substitute, in the place of plain historical facts, a series of assumptions. This is the reason why it is necessary to give new names to things, to speak of the Constitution, not as a constitution, but as a compact, and of the ratifications by the people, not as ratifications, but as acts of accession.

Sir, I intend to hold the gentleman to the written record. In the discussion of a constitutional question, I intend to impose upon him the restraints of constitutional language. The people have ordained a Constitution; can they reject it without revolution? They have established a form of government; can they overthrow it without revolution? These are the true questions.

Allow me now, Mr. President, to inquire further into the extent of the propositions contained in the resolutions, and their necessary consequences.

Where sovereign communities are parties, there is no essential difference between a compact, a confederation, and a league. They all equally rest on the plighted faith of the sovereign party. A league, or confederacy, is but a subsisting or continuing treaty.

The gentleman's resolutions, then, affirm, in effect, that these twenty-four United States are held together only by a subsisting treaty, resting for its fulfilment and continuance on no inherent power of its own, but on the plighted faith of each State; or, in other words, that our Union is but a league; and, as a consequence from this proposition, they further affirm that, as sovereigns are subject to no superior power, the States must judge, each for itself, of any alleged violation of the league; and if such violation be supposed to have occurred, each may adopt any mode or measure of redress which it shall think proper.

Other consequences naturally follow, too, from the main proposition. If a league between sovereign powers have no limitation as to the time of its duration, and contain nothing making it perpetual, it subsists only during the good pleasure of the parties, although no violation be complained of. If, in the opinion of either party, it be violated, such party may say that he will no longer fulfil its obligations on his part, but will consider the whole league or compact at an end, although it might be one of its stipulations that it should be perpetual. Upon this principle, the Congress of the United States, in 1798, declared null and void the treaty of alliance between the United States and France, though it professed to be a perpetual alliance.

If the violation of the league be accompanied with serious injuries, the suffering party, being sole judge of his own mode and measure of redress, has a right to indemnify himself by reprisals on the offending members of the league; and reprisals, if the circumstances of the case require it, may be followed by direct, avowed, and public war.

The necessary import of the resolution, therefore, is, that the United States are connected only by a league; that it is in the good pleasure of every


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 294 FRAUD FREEDOM


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Rh State to decide how long she will choose to remain a member of this league; that any State may determine the extent of her own obligations under it, and accept or reject what shall be decided by the whole; that she may also determine whether her rights have been violated, what is the extent of the injury done her, and what mode and measure of redress her wrongs may make it fit and expedient for her to adopt. The result of the whole is, that any State may secede at pleasure; that any State may resist a law which she herself may choose to say exceeds the power of Congress; and that, as a sovereign power, she may redress her own grievances, by her own arm, at her own discretion. She may make reprisals; she may cruise against the property of other members of the league; she may authorize captures, and make open war.

If, Sir, this be our political condition, it is time the people of the United States understood it. Let us look for a moment to the practical consequences of these opinions. One State, holding an embargo law unconstitutional, may declare her opinion, and withdraw from the Union. She secedes. Another, forming and expressing the same judgment on a law laying duties on imports, may withdraw also. She secedes. And as, in her opinion, money has been taken out of the pockets of her citizens illegally, under pretence of this law, and as she has power to redress their wrongs, she may demand satisfaction; and, if refused, she may take it with a strong hand. The gentleman has himself pronounced the collection of duties, under existing laws, to be nothing but robbery. Robbers, of course, may be rightfully dispossessed of the fruits of their flagitious crimes; and therefore, reprisals, impositions on the commerce of other States, foreign alliances against them, or open war, are all modes of redress justly open to the discretion and choice of South Carolina; for she is to judge of her own rights, and to seek satisfaction for her own wrongs, in her own way.

But, Sir, a third State is of opinion, not only that these laws of imposts are constitutional, but that it is the absolute duty of Congress to pass and to maintain such laws; and that, by omitting to pass and maintain them, its constitutional obligations would be grossly disregarded. She herself relinquished the power of protection, she might allege, and allege truly, and gave it up to Congress, on the faith that Congress would exercise it. If Congress now refuse to exercise it. Congress does, as she may insist, break the condition of the grant, and thus manifestly violate the Constitution; and for this violation of the Constitution, she may threaten to secede also. Virginia may secede, and hold the fortresses in the Chesapeake. The Western States may secede, and take to their own use the public lands. Louisiana may secede, if she choose, form a foreign alliance, and hold the mouth of the Mississippi. If one State may secede, ten may do so, twenty may do so, twenty-three may do so. Sir, as these secessions go on, one after another, what is to constitute the United States? Whose will be the army? Whose the navy? Who will pay the debts? Who fulfil the public treaties? Who perform the constitutional guaranties? Who govern this District and the Territories? Who retain the public property?

Mr. President, every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed; they spring up to annoy and startle us only from its grave.

The Constitution does not provide for events which must be preceded by its own destruction. , therefore, since it must bring these consequences with it, is, and is equally. What is revolution? Why, Sir, that is revolution which overturns, or controls, or successfully resists, the existing public authority; that which arrests the exercise of the supreme power; that which introduces a new paramount authority into the rule of the State. Now, Sir, this is the precise object of nullification.


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280 It attempts to supersede the supreme legislative authority. It arrests the arm of the executive magistrate. It interrupts the exercise of the accustomed judicial power. Under the name of an ordinance, it declares null and void, within the State, all the revenue laws of the United States. Is not this revolutionary? Sir, so soon as this ordinance shall be carried into effect, a revolution will have commenced in South Carolina. She will have thrown off the authority to which her citizens have heretofore been subject. She will have declared her own opinions and her own will to be above the laws and above the power of those who are intrusted with their administration. If she makes good these declarations, she is revolutionized. As to her, it is as distinctly a change of the supreme power as the American Revolution of 1776. That revolution did not subvert government in all its forms. It did not subvert local laws and municipal administrations. It only threw off the dominion of a power claiming to be superior, and to have a right, in many important respects, to exercise legislative authority. Thinking this authority to have been usurped or abused, the American Colonies, now the United States, bade it defiance, and freed themselves from it by means of a revolution. But that revolution left them with their own municipal laws still, and the forms of local government. If Carolina now shall effectually resist the laws of Congress; if she shall be her own judge, take her remedy into her own hands, obey the laws of the Union when she pleases and disobey them when she pleases, she will relieve herself from a paramount power as distinctly as the American Colonies did the same thing in 1776. In other words, she will achieve, as to herself, a revolution.

But, Sir, while practical nullification in South Carolina would be, as to herself, actual and distinct revolution, its necessary tendency must also be to spread revolution, and to break up the Constitution, as to all the other States. It strikes a deadly blow at the vital principle of the whole Union. To allow State resistance to the laws of Congress to be rightful and proper, to admit nullification in some States, and yet not expect to see a dismemberment of the entire government, appears to me the wildest illusion, and the most extravagant folly. The gentleman seems not conscious of the direction or the rapidity of his own course. The current of his opinions sweeps him along, ha knows not whither. To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop half-way down. In the one case, as in the other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss below, were it not that that abyss has no discovered bottom.

Nullification, if successful, arrests the power of the law, absolves citizens from their duty, subverts the foundation both of protection and obedience, dispenses with oaths and obligations of allegiance, and elevates another authority to supreme command. Is not this revolution? And it raises to supreme command four-and-twenty distinct powers, each professing to be under a general government, and yet each setting its laws at defiance at pleasure. Is not this anarchy, as well as revolution? Sir, the Constitution of the United States was received as a whole, and for the whole country. If it cannot stand altogether, it cannot stand in parts; and if the laws cannot be executed everywhere, they cannot long be executed anywhere. The gentleman very well knows that all duties and imposts must be uniform throughout the country. He knows that we cannot have one rule or one law for South Carolina, and another for other States. He must see, therefore, and does see, and every man sees, that the only alternative is a repeal of the laws throughout the whole Union, or their execution in Carolina as well as elsewhere. And this repeal is demanded because a single State interposes her veto, and threatens resistance! The result of the gentleman's opinion, or


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Rh rather the very text of his doctrine, is, that no act of Congress can bind all the States, the constitutionality of which is not admitted by all; or, in other words, that no single State is bound, against its own dissent, by a law of imposts. This is precisely the evil experienced under the old Confederation, and for remedy of which this Constitution was adopted. The leading object in establishing this government, an object forced on the country by the condition of the times and the absolute necessity of the law, was to give to Congress power to lay and collect imposts without the consent of particular States. The Revolutionary debt remained unpaid; the national treasury was bankrupt; the country was destitute of credit; Congress issued its requisitions on the States, and the States neglected them; there was no power of coercion but war, Congress could not lay imposts, or other taxes, by its own authority; the whole general government, therefore, was little more than a name. The Articles of Confederation, as to purposes of revenue and finance, were nearly a dead letter. The country sought to escape from this condition, at once feeble and disgraceful, by constituting a government which should have power, of itself, to lay duties and taxes, and to pay the public debt, and provide for the general welfare; and to lay these duties and taxes in all the States, without asking the consent of the State governments. This was the very power on which the new Constitution was to depend for all its ability to do good; and without it, it can be no government, now or at any time. Yet, Sir, it is precisely against this power, so absolutely indispensable to the very being of the government, that South Carolina directs her ordinance. She attacks the government in its authority to raise revenue, the very mainspring of the whole system; and if she succeed, every movement of that system must inevitably cease. It is of no avail that she declares that she does not resist the law as a revenue law, but as a law for protecting manufactures. It is a revenue law; it is the very law by force of which the revenue is collected; if it be arrested in any State, the revenue ceases in that State; it is, in a word, the sole reliance of the government for the means of maintaining itself and performing its duties.

Mr. President, the alleged right of a State to decide constitutional questions for herself necessarily leads to force, because other States must have the same right, and because different States will decide differently; and when these questions arise between States, if there be no superior power, they can be decided only by the law of force. On entering into the Union, the people of each State gave up a part of their own power to make laws for themselves, in consideration, that, as to common objects, they should have a part in making laws for other States. In other words, the people of all the States agreed to create a common government, to be conducted by common counsels. Pennsylvania, for example, yielded the right of laying imposts in her own ports, in consideration that the new government, in which she was to have a share, should possess the power of laying imposts on all the States. If South Carolina now refuses to submit to this power, she breaks the condition on which other States entered into the Union. She partakes of the common counsels, and therein assists to bind others, while she refuses to be bound herself. It makes no difference in the case, whether she does all this without reason or pretext, or whether she sets up as a reason, that, in her judgment, the acts complained of are unconstitutional. In the judgment of other States, they are not so. It is nothing to them that she offers some reason or some apology for her conduct, if it be one which they do not admit. It is not to be expected that any State will violate her duty without some plausible pretext. That would be too rash a defiance of the opinion of mankind. But if it be a pretext which lies in her own breast, if it be no more than an opinion which she says she has formed, how can other States be satisfied with this? How can they allow her to be judge of her own


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282 obligations? Or, if she may judge of her obligations, may they not judge of their rights also? May not the twenty-three entertain an opinion as well as the twenty-fourth? And if it be their right, in their own opinion, as expressed in the common council, to enforce the law against her, how is she to say that her right and her opinion are to be every thing, and their right and their opinion nothing?

Mr. President, if we are to receive the Constitution as the text, and then to lay down in its margin the contradictory commentaries which have been, and which may be, made by different States, the whole page would be a polyglot indeed. It would speak with as many tongues as the builders of Babel, and in dialects as much confused, and mutually as unintelligible. The very instance now before us presents a practical illustration. The law of the last session is declared unconstitutional in South Carolina, and obedience to it is refused. In other States, it is admitted to be strictly constitutional. You walk over the limit of its authority, therefore, when you pass a State line. On one side it is law, on the other side a nullity; and yet it is passed by a common government, having the same authority in all the States.

Such, Sir, are the inevitable results of this doctrine. Beginning with the original error, that the Constitution of the United States is nothing but a compact between sovereign States; asserting, in the next step, that each State has a right to be its own sole judge of the extent of its own obligations, and consequently of the constitutionality of laws of Congress; and, in the next, that it may oppose whatever it sees fit to declare unconstitutional, and that it decides for itself on the mode and measure of redress,—the argument arrives at once at the conclusion, that what a State dissents from, it may nullify; what it opposes, it may oppose by force; what it decides for itself, it may execute by its own power; and that, in short, it is itself supreme over the legislation of Congress, and supreme over the decisions of the national judicature; supreme over the constitution of the country, supreme over the supreme law of the land. However it seeks to protect itself against these plain inferences, by saying that an unconstitutional law is no law, and that it only opposes such laws as are unconstitutional, yet this does not in the slightest degree vary the result; since it insists on deciding this question for itself; and, in opposition to reason and argument, in opposition to practice and experience, in opposition to the judgment of others, having an equal right to judge, it says, only, "Such is my opinion, and my opinion shall be my law, and I will support it by my own strong hand. I denounce the law; I declare it unconstitutional; that is enough; it shall not be executed. Men in arms are ready to resist its execution. An attempt to enforce it shall cover the land with blood. Elsewhere it may be binding; but here it is trampled underfoot."

This, Sir, is practical nullification.

And now, Sir, against all these theories and opinions, I maintain,—

1. That the Constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacities; but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals.

2. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that nothing can dissolve them but revolution; and that, consequently, there can be no such thing as secession without revolution.

3. That there is a supreme law, consisting of the Constitution of the United States, and acts of Congress passed in pursuance of it, and treaties; and that, in cases not capable of assuming the character of a suit in law or equity, Congress must judge of, and finally interpret, this supreme law so often as it has occasion to pass acts of legislation; and in cases capable of assuming, and actually assuming, the character of a suit, the Supreme Court of the United States is the final interpreter.

4. That an attempt by a State to


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Rh, annul, or nullify an act of Congress, or to arrest its operation within her limits, on the ground that, in her opinion, such law is unconstitutional, is a direct usurpation on the just powers of the general government, and on the equal rights of other States; a plain violation of the Constitution, and a proceeding essentially revolutionary in its character and tendency.

Whether the Constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the instrument itself. We all agree that it is an instrument which has been in some way clothed with power. We all admit that it speaks with authority. The first question then is, What does it say of itself? What does it purport to be? Does it style itself a league, confederacy, or compact between sovereign States? It is to be remembered, Sir, that the Constitution began to speak only after its adoption. Until it was ratified by nine States, it was but a proposal, the mere draught of an instrument. It was like a deed drawn, but not executed. The Convention had framed it; sent it to Congress, then sitting under the Confederation; Congress had transmitted it to the State legislatures; and by these last it was laid before conventions of the people in the several States. All this while it was inoperative paper. It had received no stamp of authority, no sanction; it spoke no language. But when ratified by the people in their respective conventions, then it had a voice, and spoke authentically. Every word in it had then received the sanction of the popular will, and was to be received as the expression of that will. What the Constitution says of itself, therefore, is as conclusive as what it says on any other point. Does it call itself a "compact"? Certainly not. It uses the word compact but once, and that is when it declares that the States shall enter into no compact. Does it call itself a "league," a "confederacy," a "subsisting treaty between the States"? Certainly not. There is not a particle of such language in all its pages. But it declares itself a. What is a constitution? Certainly not a league, compact, or confederacy, but a fundamental law. That fundamental regulation which determines the manner in which the public authority is to be executed, is what forms the constitution of a state. Those primary rules which concern the body itself, and the very being of the political society, the form of government, and the manner in which power is to be exercised,—all, in a word, which form together the constitution of a state,—these are the fundamental laws. This, Sir, is the language of the public writers. But do we need to be informed, in this country, what a constitution is? Is it not an idea perfectly familiar, definite, and well settled? We are at no loss to understand what is meant by the constitution of one of the States; and the Constitution of the United States speaks of itself as being an instrument of the same nature. It says this Constitution shall be the law of the land, anything in any State constitution to the contrary notwithstanding. And it speaks of itself, too, in plain contradistinction from a confederation; for it says that all debts contracted, and all engagements entered into, by the United States, shall be as valid under this Constitution as under the Confederation. It does not say, as valid under this compact, or this league, or this confederation, as under the former confederation, but as valid under this Constitution.

This, then, Sir, is declared to be a constitution. A constitution is the fundamental law of the state; and this is expressly declared to be the supreme law. It is as if the people had said, "We prescribe this fundamental law," or "this supreme law," for they do say that they establish this Constitution, and that it shall be the supreme law. They say that they ordain and establish, it. Now, Sir, what is the common application of these words? We do not speak of ordaining leagues and compacts. If this was intended to be a compact or league, and the States to be parties to it, why was it not so said? Why is there


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My interest in things pertaining to both West Virginia and Virginia is due largely to the fact that I was reared and educated in the former state and born of parents who, like all true Virginians, never forgot the latter, the state of their nativity. Quite early in my college career I began to inquire about the causes of the dismemberment of the "Old Dominion." I then planned to write a monograph upon the "Formation of West Virginia." But a casual search into the preliminaries for this study soon convinced me that they were probably more important than the subject upon which I proposed to write. Accordingly I gave up my original plan for a more difficult undertaking, the study of sectionalism in Virginia during the ante-bellum period. As it would require volumes to present every detail of this subject, I have restricted this monograph mainly to the political differences.

Neither pains nor time have been spared to obtain accurate and exhaustive information. In addition to the suggestions and information kindly given me by scores of old men, who remember the last years of the ante-bellum period, I have tried to obtain, by travel and otherwise, a thorough knowledge of the geography of both Virginia and West Virginia. Besides, I have made research in person in the Department of Archives and History, at Charleston, W. Va., in the Virginia State Library, at Richmond, in the Library of


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vi the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, at Madison, and in the Congressional Library. But my chief sources of information have been the legislative documents of Virginia and West Virginia and the public prints. I realize fully the treachery of such sources as the last named, but, all things considered, they are the best that are available for a study of this nature.

The first eight chapters of this study were offered and accepted for my Doctor's dissertation at the University of Wisconsin in 1908. For suggestions, criticism, and the care with which he has read my manuscript I am especially indebted to Dr. Ulrich B. Phillips, of New Orleans, La. My acknowledgments and thanks are also due to Dr. F. J. Turner, of Madison, Wis.; to Dr. W. E. Dodd, of Chicago, Ill.; to Dr. W. L. Fleming, of Baton Rouge, La., and to Mr. Virgil A. Lewis, of Charleston, W. Va. To the many others who have assisted me in various ways, I can here extend only a sweeping expression of thanks.

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September 6, 1909


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Rh These glances now his rage inflame, At what he loved before; And as the image makes the same, He's angered more and more.

Whene'er his angry fist he shakes, Or wry and hateful faces makes, The image, aping ev'ry whim, Repeats the same bad thoughts to him.

Enraged at insults so extreme, At last he bursts out in a scream.

His mother coming wiped his face, And gave her child a kind embrace; Consol'd his wrath and gently show'd How 'twas those insults were bestowed.

"For, if you smile," she said, "'tis plain, The image will smile back again. Extend your arms for an embrace, And 'twill not make an angry face. You see, whatever you may do, The image does the same to you."

So in the world at large 'twill be; 'Tis your own image there you'll see.

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84 Only because I'd upright be, I've got the whole world's enmity! Every man, and child, and beast— Yes ev'ry little bird, By hate and envy stirr'd, Do make of me their scand'lous feast. Oh base ingratitude! To treat one thus who is so good. How little I am understood! They'll yet regret what they have done; But only when I'm dead and gone." Thus in hypochondriac strain, A grasshopper did once complain. O'er the world's wrongs he seem'd to groan, While thinking of himself alone. A comrade said,—"Holla, my dear! How did you come by that idea? Why not enjoy these fields in peace? They yield for you their rich increase. Let the world go, And all is woe. What is't to you, I'd like to know? 'Tis bad and always will be so. You cannot shape it to your view By all that you may say or do. Besides, my friend, where can you find A world more suited to your mind? And as to having this world's spite, I think you are mistaken quite. It is a fancy, or perchance

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32  While you, my brother, are a flat, And serve him merely as a cat. The real secret of success, In cunning lies, not usefulness. If you would prosper here below, Play tricks and let your duties go!"

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36 For do you not, from yonder bogs, Hear the loud discord of those frogs, Who drown my music by their din, With which mine own cannot begin? Before their mastery I yield, And must forever quit the field." "Nay," said the shepherd, "that's the way To give those croakers their full sway. To silence you is what they want, And strive to do it by that rant. When I am hearing your sweet airs, I'm not e'en conscious then of theirs."

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38 In woods retir'd he pass'd his days, Far from the crowd's accustom'd ways. But in this solitude, Where nothing trivial might intrude, He would at times quite jovial be, And laugh out loud and merrily. At length one day two Grecians came, Attracted by his laughing fame, And in amazement wish'd to know How any mortal living so, Could laugh. "How can you laugh, Mysone," They ask'd, "since you live all alone?" "That is the very reason why I laugh," was his reply.

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*
Very soon this trio became a quartette. Another man to whom life was known, and who to the habit of business owed that forbearance, that knowledge, that mass of observation, that shrewdness, and that talent for conversation which the soldier, the doctor and the curé owed to experience of souls, sick people and a profession—the justice of the peace sniffed the pleasures of these evenings and sought the doctor’s society. Before becoming justice of the peace at Nemours, Monsieur Bongrand had been solicitor for ten years at Melun, where he pleaded himself, according to the custom of towns where there is no bar. Becoming a widower at forty-five, he still felt too active to be idle; so he had applied for the justiceship of the peace of Nemours, which was vacant some months before the doctor’s instalment. The Keeper of the Seals is always glad to find practitioners, and especially people who are well off, to hold this important magistracy. Monsieur Bongrand lived modestly at Nemours upon the fifteen hundred francs from his post, and was thus able to devote his income to his son, who was reading for the bar at Paris, while studying jurisprudence under the famous solicitor Derville. Father Bongrand somewhat resembled an old retired head-clerk; he had a face that was not so much pale


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 as turned pale, upon which business, disappointments and disgust have left their traces, wrinkled with thought and also with the continual contraction customary with people who are obliged not to repeat everything; but it was often illuminated by those smiles which are peculiar to those men who alternately believe everything or nothing, accustomed to hear and see everything without surprise, to pierce the mysteries that self-interest unfolds at the bottom of all hearts. Under his hair, less white than faded, waving back over his head, he had a shrewd forehead whose yellow color harmonized with the threads of his scanty hair. His puckered face gave him all the more resemblance to a fox as his nose was short and pointed. Out of his wide mouth, like that of great talkers, he spurted white sparks which made his conversation so showery, that Goupil wickedly said: “One wants an umbrella to listen to him,” or else: “Judgments à la justice de paix are raining.” Behind his spectacles his eyes looked sharp; but, if he took them off, his dulled glance seemed simple. Although he was gay, almost jovial even, he always gave himself by his bearing, a little too much the look of an important man. He nearly always held his hands in his breeches pockets, and only removed them to secure his spectacles with an almost mocking movement which seemed to announce a shrewd observation or some victorious argument. His gestures, loquacity and innocent affectations betrayed the former provincial solicitor; but these


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 slight faults only existed on the surface; he redeemed them by an acquired good nature which a strict moralist would call the indulgence natural to superiority. If he were a little fox-like, he was also considered deeply cunning, without being dishonest. His artfulness was the game of perspicacity. But are not those people called cunning who foresee a result and protect themselves from the traps that are laid for them? The justice of the peace loved whist, a game that the captain and the doctor knew, and which the curé learnt in a very short time.

This little company became an oasis in Minoret’s salon. The Nemours doctor, who was not wanting in education or good breeding, and who honored Minoret as one of the celebrities in medicine, had free access; but his work and fatigue, which obliged him to retire early in order to rise early, prevented him from being as regular as were the doctor’s three friends. The reunion of these five superior persons, the only ones in Nemours who had sufficient general information to understand each other, explains old Minoret’s feeling of repulsion for his heirs; if he had to leave them his fortune, he could hardly admit them into his society. Whether the postmaster, the clerk and the collector understood these distinctions, or whether they were reassured by their uncle’s loyalty and benefaction, to his great satisfaction they ceased visiting him. And so the four old whist and backgammon-players, seven or eight months after the doctor’s installation at Nemours, formed a compact, exclusive society,


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 which was for each like an unexpected, autumn fraternity, the delights were only the better enjoyed. In Ursule, this family of chosen spirits had a child adopted by each according to his tastes; the curé thought about the soul, the justice of the peace constituted himself the guardian, the soldier promised himself to become the tutor; and, as for Minoret, he was at once father, mother and physician.

After having become acclimatized, the old man resumed his habits and regulated his life as it is regulated in the depths of all the provinces. On account of Ursule, he never received anyone in the morning, and he never invited anyone to dine; his friends could arrive about six in the evening and stay until midnight. The first comers used to find the papers on the salon table and would read them whilst waiting for the others, or they would sometimes go to meet the doctor if he were out walking. These quiet habits were not only necessary to old age, but with the old gentleman were wisely and deeply calculated to prevent his happiness from being disturbed by the anxious curiosity of his heirs or by the tittle-tattle of the small towns. He would make no concessions to that fickle goddess, public opinion, whose tyranny, one of France’s misfortunes, was setting itself up and making a very province of our country. And so, from the time the child was weaned and could walk, he sent away the cook that his niece, Madame Minoret-Levrault, had given him, through discovering that she told the postmistress of all that went on in his house.


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 Little Ursule’s wet-nurse, the widow of a poor workman with no other than his Christian name and who came from Bougival, had lost her last child when it was six months old, just when the doctor, touched by her distress and knowing her to be an honest good creature, took her as wet-nurse. Penniless, from La Bresse, where her family lived in want, Antoinette Patris, widow of Pierre surnamed De Bougival, attached herself naturally to Ursule as foster mothers attach themselves to their nurslings when they keep them. This blind maternal affection increased with domestic devotion. Anticipating the doctor’s intentions, La Bougival secretly learned to cook, became clean and handy and fell into the old man’s ways. She took particular care of the furniture and the rooms, and, in short, was indefatigable. The doctor not only wanted to keep his private life sacred, but moreover he had reasons for concealing the knowledge of his business from his heirs. So, from the second year of his establishment, he had no one in the house but La Bougival, upon whose discretion he could absolutely depend, and he disguised his real motives under the all-powerful reason of economy. To the great content of his heirs, he became stingy. Without wheedling and by the sole influence of her solicitude and devotion, La Bougival, just forty-three at the time this drama commences, was housekeeper to the doctor and his protégée, the hinge upon which all in the house turned, in short, the trusted servant. They had called her La Bougival


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 from the recognized impossibility of applying her Christian name of Antoinette to her person, for names and figures obey the laws of harmony.

The doctor’s avarice was no mere empty word, but there was an object in it. From 1817, he cut off two newspapers and stopped subscribing to his periodicals. His yearly expenditure, that all Nemours could reckon, never exceeded eighteen hundred francs a year. Like all old men, his needs in linen, booting and clothes were almost nothing. Every six months, he made a journey to Paris, doubtless to receive and himself invest his income. During fifteen years, he did not say one word that related to his affairs. His trust in Bongrand came very late; it was only after the Revolution of 1830, that he unfolded his schemes to him. Such were the only things in the doctor’s life then known to the bourgeoisie and his heirs. As to his political opinions, as his house tax was only one hundred francs, he mixed himself up in nothing, and scouted Royalist and Liberal subscriptions alike. His known horror for parsons and his deism were so averse to manifestations, that he turned out of doors a commercial traveler sent by his great-nephew Désiré Minoret-Levrault to sell him a Curé Meslier and the Discours by General Foy. Such mistaken tolerance seemed unaccountable to the Liberals of Nemours.

The doctor’s three collateral heirs, Minoret-Levrault and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Massin-Levrault junior, Monsieur and Madame Crémière-Crémière—whom we will call simply Crémière,


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 Massin, and Minoret, since these distinctions between namesakes are only necessary in Gâtinais,—these three families, too busy to create a new centre, visited one another as they do in all small towns. The postmaster used to give a big dinner on his son’s birthday, a ball at the Carnival, and another on the anniversaries of his wedding, when he invited all the bourgeoisie of Nemours. The tax-gatherer also summoned his relations and friends twice a year. The clerk of the justice of the peace, “too poor” he said, “to rush into such extravagances,” lived in a very small way in a house in the middle of the Grand’Rue, part of which, the ground floor, was let to his sister, directress of the post-office, another of the doctor’s kindnesses. However, during the year, these three heirs or their wives met in the town, out walking, in the market in the morning, on their doorsteps, or, on Sundays, after mass, in the square, as just now; so that they used to see each other every day. Now, for the last three years particularly, the doctor’s age, his avarice and his fortune warranted allusions or direct remarks referring to the inheritance, which ended by spreading from place to place and making the doctor and his heirs equally far-famed. For six months past, not a week went by without the friends or neighbors of the Minoret heirs speaking to them, with secret envy, “of the day when the old man’s eyes being closed, his coffers would open.”

“It’s no use Doctor Minoret being a doctor and settling with death, God only is eternal,” said one.


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 “Bah! he will bury us all; he is in better health than we are,” replied the heir hypocritically.

“Well, if it is not you, your children will always inherit, unless that little Ursule—”

“He will not leave all to her.”

Ursule, according to Madame Massin’s anticipations, was the bête-noire of the heirs, their sword of Damocles, and this remark, “Bah! those that live will see!” Madame Crémière’s favorite conclusion, was enough to show that they wished her more harm than good.

The tax-gatherer and the clerk, both poor compared to the postmaster, had often, by way of conversation, estimated the doctor’s inheritance. Whilst walking along the canal or on the road, if they saw their uncle coming, they would look at each other piteously.

“No doubt he has kept some elixir of long life for himself,” one would say.

“He has made a compact with the devil,” the other would reply.

“He ought to favor both of us, because that fat Minoret does not want anything.”

“Ah! Minoret has a son who will squander lots of money!”

“What do you reckon the doctor’s fortune to be?” the clerk asked the financier.

“At the end of twelve years, twelve thousand francs saved every year gives one hundred and forty-four thousand francs, and the compound interest produces at least one hundred thousand francs; but,


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 as he must have made several good speculations through the advice of his notary at Paris, and that, up to 1822, he must have invested at eight and at seven and a half in the State, the old man now turns over about four hundred thousand francs, besides his fourteen thousand francs income from the five per cents, now at one hundred and sixteen. If he were to die to-morrow without favoring Ursule, he would then leave us seven to eight hundred thousand francs, besides his house and furniture.”

“Well then, one hundred thousand to Minoret, one hundred thousand to the little one, and to each of us three hundred; that would be just.”

“Ah! that would fit us nicely.”

“If he did that,” cried Massin, “I would sell my clerkship, and I would buy a fine estate; I should try to become judge at Fontainebleau, and I should be deputy.”

“As for me, I should buy a stockbroker’s business,” said the tax-gatherer.

“Unfortunately, this little girl he has on his arm, and the curé have hemmed him in so well, that we can do nothing with him.”

“After all, we are always quite sure that he will leave nothing to the Church.”

Everyone can now understand what a fright the heirs were in at seeing their uncle going to mass. Everyone is intelligent enough to imagine any injury to self-interest. Interest constitutes the peasant’s mind as it does that of the diplomatist, and, on this footing, the simplest outwardly may perhaps


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 be the strongest. And so this terrible argument: “If little Ursule has the power to thrust her protector into the lap of the Church, she would certainly be able to make him give her the inheritance,” flashed in letters of fire across the mind of the most obtuse of the heirs. The postmaster had forgotten the enigma contained in his son’s letter, to hurry to the market place; for, if the doctor was in the church to read the ordinary of the mass, it was a question of losing two hundred and fifty thousand francs. It must be confessed, the fears of the heirs appealed to the strongest and most legitimate of social sentiments, family interest.

“Well, Monsieur Minoret,” said the Mayor—once a miller who had become a Royalist, a Levrault-Crémière,—“when the devil was old, the devil a monk would be. They say your uncle is one of us.”

“Better late than never, cousin,” replied the postmaster, trying to conceal his vexation.

“How he would laugh,” he said, “if we were disappointed! He would be capable of marrying his son to that damned girl, whom may the devil enfold with his tail!” cried Crémière, shaking his fists, and pointing to the mayor under the porch.

“What is the matter with father Crémière?” said the butcher of Nemours, the eldest son of a Levrault-Levrault. “Is he not pleased to see his uncle going the way of Paradise?”

“Who would ever have believed it?” said the clerk.


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 “Ah! one must never say: ‘Fountain, I will not drink of your water,’” replied the notary, who, seeing the group from afar, left his wife and let her go alone to church.

“Now see, Monsieur Dionis,” said Crémière, taking the notary by the arm, “what would you advise us to do under these circumstances?”

“I would advise you,” said the notary, addressing the heirs, “to go to bed and get up at your usual hours, to eat your soup before it grows cold, to put your feet in your slippers, your hats upon your heads, in short, to continue your manner of life exactly as if nothing had happened.”

“You are not comforting,” said Massin, giving him the look of a crony.

In spite of his small stature and embonpoint, and in spite of his coarse, squat face, Crémière Dionis was as sharp as a bristle. To make money, he had secretly entered into partnership with Massin, whom he doubtless told of the straitened peasants and the patches of ground to be devoured. These two men thus picked out their business, letting no good thing escape them, and sharing the profits on this mortgage usury, which hinders, but does not stop the influence of the peasants over the soil. And so, it was not so much for Minoret the postmaster, or Crémière the tax-collector, as for the sake of his friend the clerk that Dionis took so keen an interest in the doctor’s inheritance. Massin’s share, sooner or later was to swell the capital with which the two partners operated in the district.


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 “We will try to find out through Monsieur Bongrand where this blow comes from,” replied the notary in a low voice whilst cautioning Massin to keep close.

“But what are you doing here, Minoret?” suddenly cried a little woman, bursting into the group in the middle of which the postmaster looked like a tower, “you do not know where Désiré is and there you stay planted on your legs gossiping when I thought you were on horseback!—Good-morning, mesdames and messieurs.”

This thin, pale, fair little woman, dressed in a white print gown with large chocolate-colored flowers, with an embroidered lace-trimmed cap, and wearing a little green shawl over her flat shoulders, was the postmistress who made the roughest postilions, servants and carters tremble; who kept the cash-box and the books, and managed the household with a finger and a glance, according to the popular expression of the neighbors. Like all true housewives, she wore no jewels. She did not believe, so she said, in tinsel and gewgaws; she pinned her faith to what was solid, and in spite of the fête, kept on her black apron, in the pockets of which jangled a bunch of keys. Her squeaking voice grated upon the drum of the ear. Notwithstanding the tender blue of her eyes, her severe glance was in obvious harmony with the thin lips of a pursed-up mouth, with a high, bulging and extremely imperious forehead. Sharp as was the glance of the eye, still sharper were the gestures and words. “Zélie, obliged to


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 have a will for two, had always had enough for three,” Goupil used to say, and he called attention to the successive reigns of three tidy young postilions, each of whom had been set up by Zélie after seven years’ service. And so the malicious clerk called them Postilion I., Postilion II. and Postilion III. But the small amount of influence exercised by these young men in the house, and their perfect obedience proved that Zélie had been purely and simply interested in steady, good fellows.

“Well then, Zélie loves zeal,” replied the clerk to those who made such remarks to him.

This scandal was very improbable. Ever since the birth of her son, whom she had nursed herself without anyone being able to tell how, the postmistress had thought of nothing but increasing her fortune, and applied herself unceasingly to the management of her immense establishment. To steal a truss of straw or two or three bushels of oats, to deceive Zélie in the most complicated accounts was an impossibility although she wrote like a cat and knew no more arithmetic than addition and subtraction. She never went out except to measure her hay, her aftermaths and her oats; then she would send her husband to the harvest and her postilions to the binding, telling them, within a hundred pounds, the quantity that such and such a meadow should yield. Although she was the soul of that great fat body called Minoret-Levrault, and although she led him by the end of that absurdly turned-up


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 nose, she used to experience frights, which more or less, always agitate tamers of wild beasts. And so she would constantly fly into rages before him, and the postilions knew, by the scoldings Minoret gave them, when he had been quarreling with his wife, for the fury rebounded on them. La Minoret was also as clever as she was mercenary. All over the town in more than one household this remark used to be made: “Where would Minoret be without his wife!”

“When you know what has happened,” replied the Master of Nemours, “you yourself will be exasperated.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Ursule has taken Doctor Minoret to mass.”

Zélie Levrault’s pupils dilated, she stood for a moment, yellow with anger, said, “I must see it to believe it!” and dashed into the church. The mass had got as far as the Elevation of the Host Befriended by the general meditation, La Minoret was then able to look into each row of chairs and benches, whilst proceeding along the chapels until she came to Ursule’s place, where she saw the old man, bareheaded, beside her.

By recalling the faces of Barbé-Marbois, Boissy d’Anglas, Morellet, Helvétius and Frederick the Great, you will at once have an exact picture of the head of Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of these famous persons. These heads, as if struck from the same coin, for they adapt themselves to medals, present a severe and almost


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 puritanical profile, cold coloring, mathematical proportions, a certain narrowness in the almost concise face, keen eyes and serious mouths, something aristocratic, less in the sentiment than in the habits, more in the ideas than in the character. All have high foreheads, but with a sloping at the top, which betrays a materialistic tendency. You will find these chief characteristics of head and likeness of face in the portraits of all the encyclopedists, the orators of the Gironde, and the men of that time whose religious beliefs were almost nil, who called themselves deists and were atheists. The deist is an atheist without his obligations. Old Minoret had this sort of a forehead, but furrowed with wrinkles, and which acquired a kind of naïveté from the way in which his silvery hair, drawn back like that of a woman at her toilette, curled in light tufts over his black coat, for he was obstinately dressed, as in his youth, in black silk stockings, gold buckled shoes, paduasoy breeches, a white waistcoat crossed by the black ribbon, and a black coat decorated with the red rosette. This distinguished head, whose cold whiteness was softened by the yellow tones of old age, was in the full light of a window. Just when the postmistress arrived, the doctor’s blue eyes, with moistened lids and softened outlines, were fixed upon the altar; a new conviction gave them a new expression. His spectacles marked the place at which he had left off reading in his prayerbook. With his arms crossed on his chest, this tall, gaunt old man, standing in an attitude expressive


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 of the omnipotence of his faculties and something immovable in his faith, never ceased contemplating the altar with a humble look, revived by hope, refusing to look at his nephew’s wife, planted almost in front of him as if to reproach him with this return to God.

Seeing all eyes turning upon her, Zélie hastened out, and returned to the market-place less precipitately than she had entered the church; she counted on this inheritance, and the inheritance was becoming problematical. She found the clerk, the tax-collector and their wives even more dismayed than before; Goupil had delighted in teasing them.

“We cannot talk over our affairs in the marketplace and before all the town,” said the postmistress; “come to my house. You will not be in the way, Monsieur Dionis,” she said to the notary.

In this way, the probable disinheriting of the Massins, the Crémières and the postmaster was to be the talk of the country.

Just as the heirs and the notary were about to cross the square on their way to the post-house, the sound of a diligence arriving full tilt at the office, which was a few steps from the church, at the top of the Grand’Rue, made a tremendous noise.

“Bless my soul! I am like you, Minoret, I am forgetting Désiré,” said Zélie. “Let us go and see him get down; he is almost a barrister, and it is a matter that concerns him.”

The arrival of a stage coach is always a distraction; but, when it is late, some incident is to be


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 expected; and so the crowd moved in front of the Dueler.

“There is Désiré!” was the universal cry.

Désiré, at once the tyrant and boon companion of Nemours, always set the town in a flutter by his visits. His presence roused up the young people, by whom he was liked, and with whom he was open-handed; but his amusements were so much dreaded, that more than one family rejoiced to see him go off to study and read for the bar at Paris. Désiré Minoret—a thin young man, slender and fair like his mother, from whom he got his blue eyes and pale complexion—smiled out of the window at the crowd, and jumped out lightly to kiss his mother. A slight sketch of this boy will prove how pleased Zélie was at seeing him.

The student wore thin boots, white trousers of some English material with patent leather straps, a handsome fashionable tie even more beautifully tied, a stylish fancy waistcoat, and in this waistcoat pocket, a flat watch with a hanging chain, and lastly, a short frockcoat of blue cloth and a gray hat; but the gold buttons of the waistcoat and the ring worn outside the violet-colored kid gloves betrayed the parvenu. He carried a cane with a chased gold knob.

“You will lose your watch,” said his mother, kissing him.

“It is done on purpose,” he replied, submitting to his father’s embrace.

“Well, cousin, you will soon be a barrister?” said Massin.


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 “I shall take the oath at the re-opening,” he said, answering the friendly greetings from the crowd.

“Then we shall have some fun?” said Goupil shaking his hand.

“Ah! there you are, old monkey,” replied Désiré.

“You still take out a license for argument after your argument for a license,” retorted the clerk, mortified at being treated so familiarly before so many people.

“What! he tells him to hold his tongue?” Madame Crémière asked her husband.

“You know what I brought, Cabirolle!” cried Désiré to the old violet-hued, pimple-faced guard, “have it all taken to the house.”

“The perspiration is streaming off your horses,” said the harsh Zélie to Cabirolle; “have you no better sense than to drive them like that? You are more stupid than they are!”

“But Monsieur Désiré wanted to arrive as quickly as possible, in order to relieve your anxiety—”

“But, as there was no accident, why risk losing your horses?” she rejoined.

The recognition of friends, the good-mornings, the outbursts of the young people around Désiré, all the incidents of the arrival and the account of the accident which had caused the delay, took so much time that the band of heirs, with the addition of their friends, arrived in the market-place just as mass was ended. By chance, which indulges in everything, Désiré saw Ursule under the church porch as he was passing, and he stopped, stupefied by her


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 beauty. The young lawyer’s movement necessarily stopped his parents’ progress.

Obliged, by giving her arm to her godfather, to hold her prayer-book in her right hand and her umbrella in the other, Ursule was then displaying the innate grace that graceful women show in performing all the fastidious details belonging to a woman’s charming calling. If thought is revealed as a whole, it must be admitted that this demeanor expressed a divine simplicity. Ursule was dressed in a white muslin gown cut like a dressing-gown trimmed at various points with blue bows. The tippet, edged with ribbon to match run through a wide hem, and tied with bows similar to those on the dress, gave glimpses of the beauty of her bust. The charming tone of her ivory-white neck was set off by all the blue, the disguise of all blondes. Her blue sash with long floating ends outlined a flat, apparently flexible waist, one of the most alluring charms of the sex. She wore a rice-straw hat, simply trimmed with ribbons to match her dress, with the strings tied under the chin, which, whilst it relieved the extreme whiteness of the hat, in no way destroyed that of her beautiful fair complexion. On each side of Ursule’s face, which seemed to lend itself naturally to a headdress à la Berthe, were big smooth plaits of fine fair hair with little tresses which caught the eye with their thousand glistening projections. Her gray eyes, at once gentle and proud, harmonized with a well-shaped forehead. A pink color diffusing her cheeks like a cloud, animated her


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 regular but not insipid face, for Nature, by some rare privilege, had given her both purity of line and of physiognomy. The dignity of her life betrayed itself in the admirable harmony between her features, movements and the general expression of her person, which might have served as a model for Trust or Modesty. Her health, although brilliant, did not break out coarsely, so she had a distinguished appearance. Under her light-colored gloves, one might guess at her pretty hands. Her slender, arched feet were delicately shod in bronze kid shoes fringed with brown silk. Her blue sash, distended by a little flat watch and her blue purse with golden tassels, attracted the eyes of all the women.

“He has given her a new watch!” said Madame Crémière, squeezing her husband’s arm.

“What! is that Ursule?” cried Désiré, “I never should have recognized her.”

“Well, my dear uncle, you are causing a sensation,” said the postmaster, pointing to the whole town drawn up in two lines on each side of the old man’s path, “everyone wants to see you.”

“Is it the Abbé Chaperon or Mademoiselle Ursule who has converted you, uncle?” said Massin with jesuitical obsequiousness, bowing to the doctor and his protégée.

“It is Ursule,” said the old man dryly, walking all the time like a man beset.

Even if the evening before, whilst finishing his whist with Ursule, the doctor of Nemours and


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 Bongrand, at these words said by the old man, “Tomorrow I shall go to mass!” the justice of the peace had not replied, “Your heirs will sleep no more!” it would have needed only a single glance from the shrewd, clear-sighted doctor to penetrate the frame of mind of his heirs at sight of their faces. Zélie’s irruption into the church, her look that the doctor caught, this assembly of all the parties concerned, in the market-place, and the expression of their eyes as they saw Ursule, all betrayed renewed hatred and sordid fears.

“This is your doing, mademoiselle!” resumed Madame Crémière, also interposing with a humble curtsey. “A miracle costs you nothing.”

“He belongs to God, madame,” replied Ursule.

“Oh! God!” cried Minoret-Levrault, “my father-in-law used to say that He served as a cloak for many a horse.”

“He had the opinions of a horse-dealer,” said the doctor severely.

“Well,” said Minoret to his wife and son, “are you not going to greet my uncle?”

“I could not control myself before this demure-looking chit,” cried Zélie, carrying off her son.

“You would do well, uncle,” said Madame Massin, “not to go to church without a little black velvet cap, the church is very damp.”

“Bah! my niece,” said the old man, looking at those who accompanied him, “the sooner I am laid to rest, the sooner you will dance.”

He continued walking the whole time, dragging


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 Ursule with him, and seemed so hurried, that they were left alone.

“Why did you speak so harshly to them? It is not right,” said Ursule, shaking his arm rebelliously.

“Before, as after my entry into religion, my hatred will be the same for all hypocrites. I have done good to them all, I have asked no gratitude from them; but not one of those people sent you a flower on your birthday, the only day I celebrate.”

At a fairly long distance from the doctor and Ursule, Madame de Portenduère was dragging herself along apparently overcome with grief. She belonged to that class of old women whose dress revives the spirit of the last century, who wear violet gowns, with flat sleeves and cut in a fashion which is only seen in the portraits of Madame Lebrun; they wear black lace mantles, and old-fashioned hats in keeping with their slow, solemn step; one would think they were always walking with their hoops, and that they still felt them round them, like those who have had an arm cut off sometimes move the hand that is lost; their long, pale faces, with great bruised eyes, and withered foreheads are not without a certain melancholy grace, in spite of the towering hair and flattened curls; they wrap their faces up in old laces that refuse any longer to wave about the cheeks; but all these ruins are overruled by an incredible dignity of manner and looks. This old lady’s wrinkled, red eyes told plainly enough that she had been crying during mass. She was going along like a person in trouble, and seemed


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 to be expecting someone, for she turned round. Now, Madame de Portenduère turning round was as serious an act as that of Doctor Minoret’s conversion.

“Whom does Madame de Portenduère want?” said Madame Massin, rejoining the heirs, who were petrified by the old man’s answers.

“She is looking for the curé,” said the notary Dionis, who struck his forehead like a man overcome by some recollection or a forgotten idea, “I have something to tell you all, and the inheritance is saved! Let us go and breakfast happily with Madame Minoret.”

It may be imagined with what eagerness the heirs followed the notary to the post-house. Goupil accompanied his friend, arm-in-arm, whispering to him with a hideous smile:

“There are some gay women.”

“What do I care?” replied the son of the family, shrugging his shoulders, “I am madly in love with Florine, the most heavenly creature in the world.”

“And who is Florine?” asked Goupil. “I care for you too much to let you be bamboozled by any creatures.”

“Florine is the famous Nathan’s passion, and my folly is useless, for she has positively refused to marry me.”

“Women who are foolish with their bodies are often wise in their heads,” said Goupil.

“If only you could see her, you would not make use of such expressions,” said Désiré languishingly.

“If I saw you blighting your future for what can


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 be but a whim,” rejoined Goupil with an earnestness that would have deceived even Bongrand, “I would go and crush that doll as Varney crushes Amy Robsart in Kenilworth! Your wife ought to be a D’Aiglemont, or a Mademoiselle du Rouvre, and help you to become a deputy. My future is mortgaged to yours and I shall not let you commit blunders.”

“I am rich enough to be content with happiness,” replied Désiré.

“Well, what are you plotting there?” said Zélie to Goupil, hailing the two friends who were standing in the middle of her enormous yard.

The doctor disappeared into the Rue des Bourgeois, and reached, as nimbly as any young man, the house where, during the week, the strange event had come to pass which was then disturbing the whole town of Nemours, and which needs some explanation to elucidate this story and the notary’s communication to the heirs.


text: Index:Boots and Saddles.djvu

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Rh sanction of His divine authority to the prophetic teaching, and inaugurates an epoch of moral progress under the control of His Gospel, which, by slow but advancing stages, would raise the institution of marriage to an altitude of purity and moral power which neither the Jewish nation nor the ancient world could imagine.

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Rh Fables of Florian11.jpg

Throughout all Greece 'twas known That Mysone lived alone— That he lov'd wisdom for herself; Was free from trouble as from pelf; Content and easy, without strife, Reflecting on the things of life.

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Rh

Two farmer-boys, genteel and bright, Who in ill-doing took delight (For they were by their father spoil’d), Were seeking nests the garden round. A brood of partridges they found, And in their joy went nearly wild. The fledglings scatter far and near Under the impulse of their fear,

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text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ball, Peter


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Rh

One day a young rhinoceros Thus address'd the dromedary:— "Can you, my friend, explain to us      Why our fortunes so much vary—

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text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ball, Robert


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Rh

His wondrous plumes the peacock spread, And was admir'd by other birds;

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Rh

By what strange chance I do not know, But on a time it happened so— A miser to the market went, And a small sum for apples spent.

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54

A young ape one day found a nut, Which straight into his mouth he put, And set his teeth on't for a bite. He tried it o'er and o'er again,

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78 There is a large one in the Teign, above Fingle Bridge, that can also be made to roll with the application of a little strength.

The Rugglestone, near Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, measures 22 feet by 14 feet in one part, and 19 feet by 17 feet in another, and is 5 feet 6 inches in mean thickness. Its computed weight is 110 tons, whereas the celebrated logan in Cornwall weighs 90 tons. This stone is poised upon two points.

Roos Tor, which the Ordnance surveyors playfully render Rolls Tor, possessed two logan stones, but quarrymen have destroyed one, together with the fine mass of rock on which it stood. Near it lay a huge menhir, never removed till these depredators broke it up. I give an illustration of the head of the tor with its two logans, taken in 1852; one alone remains. On Black Tor, near the road from Princetown to Plymouth, is a small logan, with a rock basin on the top, and with a projection like a handle. It can be made to oscillate without difficulty. A small logan is near the stone rows on Challacombe in the miners' workings. Its existence is purely accidental. Another is near a collection of hut circles on the slope of Combeshead Tor.

The rock basins are numerous; they are hollow pans formed on the surface of granite slabs by the action of wind and water, assisted by particles of grit set in rotation by the wind. "That this rude and primitive species of basin formed part of the apparatus of Druidism there can be little doubt," says Mr. Rowe, "but the specific purpose for which they were designed is not clear." Josbroke

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 pronounces rock basins to be "cavities cut in the surface of a rock, supposed for reservoirs, to preserve the rain or dew in its original purity, for the religious uses of the Druids."

All this assertion must be put aside. The bowls are excavated by natural agencies, and there is not a scrap of evidence to show that they were put to superstitious or any other use. The largest is on Caistor Rock, and this has been railed round, as

sheep floundered in and got drowned, or could not get out again. Mis Tor has a fine basin, called " The Devil's Frying-pan."

These basins may be seen in all stages of growth on the tops of the tors.

The tolmen is either a holed stone or a rock supported in such a manner as to preserve it from falling, and supposed to have been used as an apparatus of ordeal, by requiring those accused of a crime to creep through the orifice.

Holed stones have unquestionably been employed for the purpose of taking oaths and sealing

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, the hands being passed through an opening and clasped. And certainly S. Wilfrid's needle, in the crypt under Ripon Minster, was made use of as a test to try whether a maiden accused of incontinency was guilty or not. There is, however, no well-defined tolmen on Dartmoor that can be pronounced to be artificial. A holed stone in the Teign was pierced by the action of the water, and a suspended rock at an incline on Staple Tor, called by Mrs. Bray and Mr. Rowe a tolmen, is a natural production also. It is, of course, possible that stones thus poised may have been employed for the purpose, but we have no evidence that those on Dartmoor were so used.

Of rocks supported at one end by a small stone there are plenty. There is a good one on Yar Tor, above Dartmeet.

The old school of antiquaries started with a theory, and then sought for illustrations to fit into their theories, and took facts and distorted them to serve their purpose, or saw proofs where no proofs existed. The new school accumulates statistics and piles up facts, and then only endeavours to work out a plausible theory to account for the facts laboriously collected and registered. It never starts with a theory, but applies practices in savage life still in use to explain the customs of prehistoric men, who lived on the same cultural level as the savages of the present day.

One word of caution must be given relative to the Druids, who are credited with so much. It is true that there were Druids in Britain and in Ireland,

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Rh but they were the schamans, or medicine-men, of the earlier Ivernian race, who maintained their repute among the conquering Celts, and their representatives at the present day are the white witches who practise on the credulity of our villagers.

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 CHAPTER VI.

DEAD MEN'S DUST

NE of the most striking experiences of an explorer of Dartmoor is the coming upon great cairns in the most remote and inaccessible parts of that waste. Not a lone hill surrounded by bogs is without its great mound of earth or pile of stones over some dead man. In the howling wilderness about Cranmere Pool, where are no traces of human habitation, there lie the dead. On every rise above the swamps and fathomless morasses of Fox Tor, there they are scattered thick. Almost always the dead were conveyed to the tops of hills, or placed on the brows of elevations far away from the settlements of the living.

Why was this?

Because prehistoric men were in fear of their dead people.

I remember, in 1860, riding across the central desert of Iceland, and coming about midnight, when

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Test
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Rh the summer sun was just dipped below the polar sea, on a solitary cairn among pools of frozen water and amidst illimitable tracts of volcanic ash. My guide told me it was the grave of one Glamr, who had so haunted the farms in the Vatnsdal that the people of the valley had combined to dig him up and transport the corpse almost a day's journey into the central desert, where they cut off his head, and buried the body in a sitting posture with his own skull as his throne, an indignity which the ghost was likely to so resent as never to venture to show again.

The heathen Icelander, on the death of a father in the family, was removed by the anxious heir to the estate in an ingenious manner. The wall of the house behind the bed was broken through, and the corpse drawn out of doors by that way, and then the opening was hastily repaired. He was then hurried off to his grave. The heir was so afraid lest the venerable party should saunter home again and reclaim his property, that the father was carried forth in this peculiar manner in order to bewilder him and make him find a difficulty in returning.

A strip of black cloth an inch and a half in width, stitched round the sleeve—that is the final, or perhaps penultimate relic (for it may dwindle further to a black thread) of the usage of wearing mourning on the decease of a relative.

The usage is one that commends itself to us as an outward and visible sign of the inward sentiment of bereavement, and not one in ten thousand who adopt mourning has any idea that it ever possessed a signification of another sort. And yet the

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84 of general custom of—mourning fashions— leads us to the inexorable conclusion that in its inception the practice had quite a different signification from that now attributed to it, nay more, that it is solely because its primitive meaning has been absolutely forgotten, and an entirely novel significance given to it, that mourning is still employed after a death.

Look back through the telescope of anthropology at our ancestors in their naked savagery after a death, and we see them daub themselves with soot mingled with tallow. When the savage assumed clothes and became a civilised man, he replaced the fat and lampblack with black cloth, and this black cloth has descended to us in the nineteenth century as the customary and intelligible trappings of woe.

The Chinaman when in a condition of bereavement assumes white garments, and we may be pretty certain that his barbarous ancestor, like the Andaman Islander of the present day, pipe-clayed his naked body after the decease and funeral of a relative. In Egypt yellow was the symbol of sorrow for a death, and that points back to the ancestral nude Egyptian having smeared himself with yellow ochre.

Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile white obtained on the death of its princes. Herrera states that the last time white was thus employed was in 1498 on the death of Prince John. This use of white indicates chalk or pipe-clay as the daub affected by the ancestors of the house of Castile in primeval time as a badge of bereavement.

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Rh Various explanations have been offered to account for the variance of colour. White has been supposed to denote purity—and to this day white gloves and hatbands and scarves are employed at the funeral of a young girl.

Yellow has been supposed to symbolise that death is the end of human hopes, because falling leaves are sere; black is taken as the privation of light; and purple or violet also affected as a blending of joy with sorrow. Christian moralists have declaimed against black as heathen, as denoting an aspect of death devoid of hope, and gradually purple is taking its place in the trappings of the hearse, if not of the mourners, and the pall is now very generally violet.

But these explanations are after-thoughts, and an attempt to give reason for the divergence of usage which might satisfy: they are really no explanations at all. The usage goes back to a period when there were no such refinements of thought. If violet or purple has been traditional, it is so merely because the ancestral Briton stained himself with woad on the death of a relative.

The pipe-clay, lampblack, yellow ochre, and woad of the primeval mourners must be brought into range with a whole series of other mourning usages, and then the result is something of an "eye-opener." It reveals a condition of mind and an aspect of death that cause not a little surprise and amusement. It is one of the most astonishing, and, perhaps, shocking traits of barbarous life, that death revolutionises completely the feelings of the survivors towards their deceased husbands, wives, parents, and other relatives.

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86 A married couple may have been sincerely attached to each other so long as the vital spark was twinkling, but the moment it is extinguished the dead partner becomes, not a sadly sweet reminiscence, but an object of the liveliest terror to the survivor. He or she does everything that ingenuity can suggest to get himself or herself out of all association in body and spirit with the late lamented. Death is held to be thoroughly demoralising to the deceased. However exemplary a person he or she may have been in life, after death the ghost is little less than a plaguing, spiteful spirit.

There is in the savage no tender clinging to the remembrance of the loved one; he is transformed into a terrible bugbear, who must be evaded and avoided by every contrivance conceivable. This is due, doubtless, mainly to the inability of the uncultivated mind to discriminate between what is seen waking from what presents itself in phantasy to the dreaming head. After a funeral it is natural enough for the mourners to dream of the dead, and they at once conclude that they have been visited by his revenant. After a funeral feast—a great gorging of pork or beef—it is very natural that the sense of oppression and pain felt should be associated with the dear departed, and should translate itself into the idea that he has come from his grave to sit on the chests of those who have bewailed him.

Moreover, the savage associates the idea of desolation, death, discomfort, with the condition of the soul after death, and believes that the ghosts do all they can to return to their former haunts and associates

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 The hand that wore thee smooth is cold, and spins No more. Debility press'd hard around The seat of life, and terrors fill'd her brain; Nor causeless terrors: Giants grim and bold. Three mighty ones she fear'd to meet; they came— , and, all came: The last had dropp'd his club, yet fancy made Him formidable; and when Death beheld Her tribulation, he fulfill'd his task, And to her trembling hand and heart, at once. Cried, ' Spin no more!' Thou then wert left half fill'd With this soft downy fleece, such as she wound Through all her days ! She who could spin so well! Half fill'd wert thou, half finish'd when she died. Half finish'd! 'tis the motto of the world! We spin vain threads, and dream, and strive, and die, With sillier things than Spindles in our hands. Then feeling, as I do, resistlessly, The bias set upon my soul for verse. Oh ! should Old Age still find my brain at work, And Death, o'er some poor fragment striding, cry, "Hold! spin no more ;" grant Heav'n, that purity Of thought and texture may assimilate That fragment unto thee, in usefulness. In strength, and snowy innocence. Then shall The village school-mistress shine brighter through The exit of her boy ; and both shall live. And virtue triumph too, and virtue's tears, Like Heav'n's pure blessings, fall upon her grave.


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Rh for the sake of the warmth and food, the shelter of the huts, and the entertainment of the society of their fellows. But the living men and women are not at all eager to receive the ghosts into the family circle, and they accordingly adopt all kinds of "dodges," expedients to prevent the departed from making these irksome and undesired visits.

The Venerable Bede tells us that Laurence, Archbishop of Canterbury, resolved on flying from England because he was hopeless of effecting any good under the successor of Ethelbert, King of Kent. The night before he fled he slept on the floor of the church, and dreamed that S. Peter cudgelled him soundly for resolving to abandon his sacred charge. In the morning he awoke stiff and full of aches and pains. Turned into modern language we should say that Archbishop Laurence was attacked with rheumatism on account of his having slept on the cold stones of the church. His mind had been troubled before he went to sleep with doubts whether he was doing right in abandoning his duty, and very naturally this trouble of conscience coloured his dream and gave to his rheumatic twinges the complexion they assumed in his mind.

Now Archbishop Laurence regarded the Prince of the Apostles in precisely the light in which a savage views his deceased relatives and ancestors. He associates his maladies, his pains, with them, if he should happen to dream of them. If, however, when in pain, he dreams of a living person, then he holds that this living person has cast a magical spell over him.

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text: Pacchiarotto/Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper