THE ETHICS AND ESTHETICS OF COUNTRY LIFE.
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and keeps pace with the march of events, well and good; where it fails to do this there will be agitation until right and justice are recognized, whether it be under the formulas of a written constitution or as the outgrowth of some far-fetched precedent. The worst danger is in the tardiness of legislators in comprehending the temper of the times.
The limits of the occasion forbid more than an allusion to the present tendencies of nationality. National aid to education has recently scored a victory, and he who imagines that any backward step will be taken is a novice in political history. The intelligence of the people is the brain of the nation, and a federal system of education must be the next innovation.
The postal savings bank must also come sooner or later. The recent panic, like those that have gone before, has demonstrated the need of secure financial institutions. The post-office is already doing the work of bank exchange. Let it double its blessings by becoming a bank of deposit, encouraging every laboring man who can save a dollar to become a capitalist, and enabling the government to receive its loans from its own citizens, instead of foreign syndicates.
Federal control of the railroad and the telegraph is a question that must be met in the near future. Around these gigantic corporations most of our great labor troubles seem to revolve. Some of the states have tried, but in vain, to solve the problems growing out of these institutions. The result has only proved the futility of a state attempting to grapple with questions of national magnitude. Doubtless there are other measures which will be elevated to the plane of national powers questions growing out of the labor and capital problem, temperance, the marriage relation, and the basis of taxation.
Gradually, but surely, has the jurisdiction of the nation become enlarged until public policy has almost grown to be the criterion of constitutional power. Even now the enunciation of state rights is met with derision in the house of its friends. "Centralization," that bete noir of the Anti-Federalists, has become an unwritten amendment to our Magna Charta, whether for better or for worse. If the rights of the states are less respected than formerly, let us rejoice that the rights of the people are held more sacred. God help the Reactionist!
THE ETHICS AND ESTHETICS OF COUNTRY LIFE.
MARY GILMORE, Modern Literature Department, LAWRENCE, KANSAS.
EVERY object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul." All the forms of nature have individual symmetry and grace, and all these are moral, for the ethical and aesthetical co-exist; the one incarnating the other. A leaf, a forest, the landscape, a sunbeam, a cloud, the sky awaken in man a desire for the beautiful and "hint or thunder to him the laws of right or wrong and echo the Ten Commandments." No man can associate with these divine objects without himself in some degree becoming divine.
Country life in its loveliness satisfies with a mixture of corporal benefit. To
the body and mind cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and smoke of the street, sees the sky, the fields, the woods, and is a man again. These noblest scenes of earth, in part, lose their charm it is true, over those who are ever with them, but their subtile moulding influence can not be escaped- The infinity of the heavens above, and beneath the waters with reflected skies for their basins, the broad expanse of undulating fields, all imbue the beholder with a breadth and depth of nature that afford him a true,