there are no pedigrees; that family-trees are not the best timber for a frame of government; that truth is no less true because it is spoken through the nose; and that there may be devotion to great principles and national duties among men who have not the air of good society,—­nay, that, in the long run, good society itself is found to consist, not of Grammonts and Chesterfields, but of the men who have been loyal to conviction and duty, and who have had more faith in ideas than in Vanity Fair.  People on both sides of the water may learn something from Mr. Russell’s book, if they read it with open minds, especially the lesson above all others important to the statesman, that even being right is dangerous, if one be not right at the right time and in the right way.

The Results of Emancipation.  By Augustin Cochin, Ex-Maire and Municipal Councillor of Paris.  Translated by Mary L. Booth, Translator of Count De Gasparin’s Works on America, etc.  Boston:  Walker, Wise, & Co.

It is doubtless a little unfashionable to question the all-sufficiency of statistics to the salvation of men or nations.  Nevertheless we believe that their power is of a secondary and derivative character.  The confidence which first leads brave souls to put forth their energies against a giant evil comes through deductive, not inductive, inquiry.  The men and women who have efficiently devoted themselves to awaken the American people to the element of guilt and peril in their national life have seldom been exhaustively acquainted with the facts of slavery or those of emancipation.  Few of them were political economists, or had much concern with scientific relations.  They were persons of emotional organization, and of a delicate moral susceptibility.  It was sufficient for them to know that one God reigned, and that whatever He had caused to be a true political economy must accord with those Christian ethics which command acknowledgment from the human soul.  They wanted no catalogue of abuses to convince them that an institution which began by denying a man all right in his own person was not and could not come to good.  And this fine impressibility of nature, which needs no statistics, when it is combined with genius,—­if we may be pardoned an Hibernicism which almost writes itself,—­may be said to create its own statistics.  Shakspeare needed not to dog murderers, note-book in hand, in order to give in Macbeth a comprehensive summary of their pitiable estate.  It may, indeed, be necessary for physicians to study minutely many special cases of insanity in order to build up by induction the grand generalization of Lear; but he who gave it grasped it entire in an ideal world, and left to less happy natures the task of imitating its august proportions by patiently piling together a thousand facts.  The abolition of slavery must be demanded by the moral instinct of a people before their understanding may be satisfied of its practical fitness and material success.  The evidences in favor of emancipation are useful after the same manner as the evidences of Christianity:  the man whose heart cannot he stirred by the tender appeal of the Gospel shall not be persuaded by the exegetical charming of the most orthodox expositor.