clasp the invisible projections with its little clinging hands, and all these ferns and sumach, these springs and trickling issues, are mine!

Let me not be puffed up with sudden wealth! Let me rule discreetly among my tenants. Let me see what tribes are mine. There are the black and glossy crickets; the gray crickets; the grasshoppers of every shape and hue; the silent, prudent toad, type of conservative wisdom, wise looking, but slow hopping; the butterflies by day, and the moths and millers by night; all birds, -wrens, sparrows, kingbirds, bluebirds, robins, and those unnamed warblers that make the forests sad with their melancholy whistle. Besides these, who can register the sappers and miners that are always at work in the soil; angle worms, white grubs, and bugs that carry pick and shovel on the head? Who can muster all the mice that nest in the barn or nibble in the stubblefield, and all the beetles that sing bass in the wood's edge to the shrill treble of gnats and myriad mosquitoes? These are all mine!

Are they mine? Is it my eye and hand that mark their paths and circuits? Do they hold their life from me, or do I give them their food in due season? Vastly as my bulk is greater than theirs, am I so much superior that I can despise, or even not admire? Where is the strength of muscle by which I can spring fifty times the length of my body? That grasshopper's thigh lords it over mine. Spring up now in the evening air, and fly towards the lights that wink from yonder hillside! Ten million wings of despised flies and useless insects are mightier than hand or foot of mine. Each mortal thing carries some quality of distinguishing excellence by which it may glory, and say: "In this, I am first in all the world!"

Since the same hand made me that made them, and the same care feeds them that spreads my board, let there be fellowship between us. There is. I have signed articles of peace even with the abdominal spiders, who carry their fleece in their belly, and not on their back. It is agreed that they shall not cross the Danube of my doors, and I, on the other hand, will let them camp down, without wanton disturbance, in my whole domain beside! I, too, am but an insect on a larger scale. Are there not those who tread with unsounding feet through the invisible air, of being so vast, that I seem to them but a mite, a flitting insect? And of capacities so noble and eminent, that all the stores which I could bring of thought and feeling to them would

be but as the communing of a grasshopper with me, or the chirp

of a sparrow?

No. It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant. If such noble shadows fill the realm, it is their nature to condescend and to spread their power abroad for the loving protection of those whose childhood is little, but whose immortal manhood shall yet, through their kind teaching, stand unabashed, and not ashamed, in the very royalty of heaven. Only vulgar natures employ their superiority to task and burden weaker natures. He whose genius and wisdom are but instruments of oppression, however covered and softened with lying names, is the beginning of a monster. The line that divides between the animal and the divine is the line of suffering. The animal, for its own pleasure, inflicts suffering. The divine endures suffering for another's pleasure. Not then when he went up to the proportions of original glory was Christ the greatest; but when he descended, and wore our form, and bore our sins and sorrows, that by his stripes we might be healed!

I have no vicarious mission for these populous insects. But I will at least not despise their littleness, nor trample upon their lives. Yet, how may I spare them? At every step I must needs crush scores, and leave the wounded in my path! Already I have lost my patience with that intolerable fly, and slapped him. out of being, and breathed out fiery vengeance against those mean conspirators that, night and day, suck my blood, hypocritically singing a grace before their meal!

The chief use of a farm, if it be well selected, and of a proper soil, is to lie down upon. Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are the consequence,-of great delights and fancies more than the brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though but a week here, I have lain down more hours and in more places than that hard-working brother of mine in the whole year that he has dwelt here. Strange that industrious lying down should come so naturally to me, and standing up and lazing about after the plow or behind his scythe, so naturally to him! My eyes against his feet! It takes me but a second to run down that eastern slope, across the meadow, over the road, up to that long hillside (which the benevolent Mr. Dorr is so beautifully planting with shrubbery for my sake-blessings on him!), but his feet could not perform the task in less than ten minutes. I can spring

from Gray Lock in the north, through the hazy air, over the wide sixty miles to the dome of the Taconic Mountains in the south, by a simple roll of the eyeball, a mere contraction of a few muscles. Now let any one try it with his feet, and two days would scant suffice! With my head I can sow the ground with glorious harvests; I can build barns, fill them with silky cows and nimble horses; I can pasture a thousand sheep, run innumerable furrows, sow every sort of seed, rear up forests just wherever the eye longs for them, build my house, like Solomon's Temple, without the sound of a hammer. Ah! a mighty worker is the head! These farmers that use the foot and the hand are much to be pitied. I can change my structures every day, without expense. I can enlarge that gem of a lake that lies yonder, twinkling and rippling in the sunlight. I can pile up rocks where they ought to have been found, for landscape effect, and clothe them with the very vines that ought to grow over them. I can transplant every tree that I meet in my rides, and put it near my house without the drooping of a leaf.

But of what use is all this fanciful using of the head? It is a mere waste of precious time!

But, if it give great delight, if it keep the soul awake, sweet thoughts alive and sordid thoughts dead; if it bring one a little out of conceit with hard economies, and penurious reality, and stingy self-conceit; if it be like a bath to the soul, in which it washes away the grime of human contacts, and the sweat and dust of life among selfish, sordid men; if it make the thoughts more supple to climb along the ways where spiritual fruits do grow; and, especially, if it introduce the soul to a fuller conviction of the Great Unseen, and teach it to esteem the visible as less real than things which no eye can see, or hands handle, it will have answered a purpose which is in vain sought among stupid conventionalities.

At any rate, such a discourse of the thoughts with things which are beautiful, and such an opening of the soul to things which are sweet-breathed, will make one joyful at the time, and tranquil thereafter. And if one fully believes that the earth is the Lord's, and that God yet walks among leaves and trees, in the cool of the day, he will not easily be persuaded to cast away the belief that all these vagaries and wild communings are but those of a child in his father's house, and that the secret springs of joy which they open are touched of God!

Complete. From the "Star Papers.»

JEREMY BENTHAM

(1748-1832)

ILLAGED by all the world, he remains always wealthy," Talley. rand said of Bentham; and in quoting the sentence Professor Holland says that "to trace the results of his teachings in England alone would be to write the history of the legislation of half a century." Taking from Beccaria the maxim that all government should be a mode of securing the greatest possible good to the greatest possible number of people, he became a power in his own generation and, through John Stuart Mill, one of the controlling. intellectual forces of the nineteenth century. It is said that "the reading of Dumont's exposition of Bentham's doctrines in the Traité de la Législation' was an epoch in Mill's life, awakening in him an ambition as enthusiastic and impassioned as a young man's first love."

Bentham was born in London, February 15th, 1748. It is said that at "three years old, he read eagerly such works as Rapin's 'History' and began the study of Latin," and that "a year or two later he learned the violin and French conversation." This assertion made by Professor Holland, of Oxford, is no more incredible than is the actual achievement of Bentham's mature intellect, illustrated in the results of his attempts to force England away from feudalism. He lived to be eighty-five years old, dying June 6th, 1832.

M

PUBLICITY THE SOLE REMEDY FOR MISRULE

ISRULE is bad government; it comprehends whatsoever is opposite to good government. A government is good in proportion as it contributes to the greatest happiness of the greatest number; namely, of the members of the community in which it has its place. Rule may therefore come under the denomination of misrule in either of two ways; either by taking for its object the happiness of any other number than the greatest, or by being more or less unsuccessful in its endeavors to contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

No government having anywhere had place that had for its main object any other than the greatest happiness of those among

whom the powers of government have from time to time been shared, all governments that have hitherto had existence have had more or less of bad in them. Of all governments, the worst have uniformly been those in which the powers of government have all of them- been in the hands of one; because in that case such government has had for its object the greatest happiness of that one number; and to that object the happiness of all the other members has of course been made a continual sacrifice.

Considered in its application to assignable individuals, misrule may be termed vexation; the persons considered as the authors of it being persons clothed with power, the vexation may be termed oppression. In so far as from the burden thus imposed benefit in any shape is received by the authors, or by any whom they are in this way disposed to favor, the oppression is depredation.

As to the authors, though to a boundless degree, and in a conspicuous and avowed manner, the only persons whom oppression and thence depredation can have for its authors are those by whom in the state in question the supreme power is possessed; yet to a great and indeterminate amount, not only their several subordinates,- instruments of, and sharers in, that same power,- but the rich in general possess as such, and to an amount rising in proportion to their riches, in addition to that desire which is in all men, the faculty of giving birth to those same evils.

The shapes in which vexation is here attempted to be combated are not all the shapes in which the evil is capable of showing itself; for against these thus taken in the aggregate, security more or less effectual is already in every country taken, and must, therefore, in the country in question, be on the present occasion supposed provided by the existing laws. Calumnies, for example, or personal injuries to mental or personal rights, are among the subjects not here taken on hand, as being of such a nature that the particular remedies here provided are either needless or inapplicable, with relation to them. The only vexations belonging to the present purpose are those which, on those over whom power is exercised, are in a particular manner liable to be inflicted by those by whom the same power is possessed. Meantime, these being the same persons at whose disposal everything is that bears the name of law, to seek to afford, by means