And here I must perforce stop. I have read Burnet's "History of his own Times," and Swift's caustic parody of the "Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish," and have no wish to close my record of the Deans of Wells with an autobiography. The Contemporary Review must be content for once to assume the attitude of the Retrospective.

E. H. PLUMPTRE.

NOTES (1).—I am indebted to my friend Canon J. E. Jackson, Vicar of Leigh Delamere, for some information which was new to me, and which is, I think, sufficiently interesting to find a place here. I was not aware that among the privileges of my predecessors was that of being from time to time summoned to Parliament. In 49 Henry III. (1264) a Parliament was called at Worcester. It consisted of 12 bishops, 5 deans (Wells, Exeter, Salisbury, Lincoln, and York), 102 abbots and priors, and only 23 nobles. Probably the chief object of the Parliament was to obtain a subsidy from the clergy, and deans and archdeacons were summoned that they might both vote, and influence their clergy so that they might pay readily.

In 1299 a Parliament was summoned for a more important purpose. Boniface VIII. had sent a letter to the King of Scotland, asserting that he, as Pope, was the liege lord of that kingdom. Edward I., in consequence, convened a Parliament at Lincoln, and among those summoned were the Deans of Wells, St. Paul's, Chichester, and Lichfield. In this instance writs were also issued-there was, I believe, no precedent for it-to the universities, the King wishing to bring all the learning of his kingdom to support his claim.-Sir HARRIS NICOLAS, Synopsis of the Peerage of England, vol. ii. p. 782.

(2). LADY CHAPEL WINDOWS.-The only additional facts that have come to my knowledge since Part I. was in type are (1) that a "Concise History of the Church of St. Andrew in Wells," by John Davis (1809) speaks of the windows as being filled with stained glass, and that the statement is repeated in Winkle's "Cathedrals" (1838). In neither case, however, is there any mention of the peculiar patchwork character of the glass.

P.S. Since writing the above, more definite and trustworthy information has come to me in a letter from a surviving member of Dean Goodenough's family, who writes as follows::

"I have no recollection of anything being done to the windows from the time my father came to Wells till the work of restoration and alteration of the stalls and screen-work of the choir was done. The east window in the Lady Chapel was then partly restored and partly renewed by Willement, as much of the old glass and designs being incorporated with the new as could be done by him. My impression about the windows is that we used to be told they had been injured-shattered either during the Rebellion, or later in Monmouth's rising-and that the windows were soon after reglazed with the fragments."

I think I must admit that Bishop Law is fairly entitled, in the present state of the evidence, to a verdict of "Not Guilty."

THE

NEGRO QUESTION IN THE

UNITED

STATES.

HE matter that is made the subject of this paper is not to-day

THE

the most prominent, but it is the gravest, in American affairs. It is one upon which of late years, as we might say, much inattention has been carefully bestowed. It has become a dreaded question.

We are not politically indolent. We are dealing courageously with many serious problems. We admit that no nation has yet so shaken wrong and oppression from its skirts that it may safely or honourably sit down in a state of mercantile and æsthetical pre-occupation. And yet the matter that gives us daily the profoundest unrest goes daily by default. The nation's bitter experiences with it in years past, the baffling complications that men more cunning than wise have woven around it, its proneness to swallow up all other questions, and the eruptions of rancour and strife that attend every least sign of its spontaneous re-opening, have made it such a weariness and offence to the great majority, and especially to our commercial impatience, that the public mind in large part eagerly accepts the dangerous comfort of postponement.

What is this question? Superficially it is whether a certain seven millions of the people, one-ninth of the whole, dwelling in and native to the Southern States of the Union, and by law an undifferentiated part of the nation, have or have not the same full measure of the American citizen's rights that they would have were they entirely of European, instead of wholly or partly African descent.

The seven millions concerning whom the question is asked, answer as with one voice that they have not. Millions in the Northern States, and thousands in the Southern, of whites, make the same reply. While other millions of whites, in North and South, respond not so often with a flat contradiction as with a declaration far more

disconcerting. For the "Southerner" speaks truly when he retorts that nowhere in the entire Union, either North or South, are the disadvantages of being a black, or partly black, man confined entirely to the relations of domestic life and private society; but that in every part there is a portion at least of the community that does not claim for, or even willingly yield to the negro, the whole calendar of American rights in the same far-reaching amplitude and sacredness that they do for or to the white man. The Southern white man points to thousands of Northern and Western factories, counting-rooms, schools, hotels, churches, and guilds, and these attest the truth of his counter-charge. Nowhere in the United States is there a whole community from which the black man, after his physical, mental, and moral character have been duly weighed, if they be weighed at all, is not liable to suffer an unexplained discount for mere colour and race, which he would have to suffer publicly in no other country of the enlightened world. This being the fact, then, in varying degrees according to locality, what does it prove? Only that this cannot be the real point of issue between North and South, and that this superficial definition is not the true one.

Putting aside mere differences of degree, the question is not, Are these things so? but, Ought they so to be? To this a large majority in the Northern States from all classes, with a small minority of the Southern whites also from all ranks of life, and the whole seven million blacks irrespective of party leanings, answer-No. On the other hand, a large majority of the whites in the Southern Stateslarge as to the white population of those States, but a very small minority in the nation at large-answer a vehement "Yes; these things should and shall be so."

But how does this small minority maintain itself? It does so owing to the familiar fact that, although by our scheme of government there is a constant appeal to the majority of the whole people, the same scheme provides also for the defence of local interests against rash actions of national majorities by a parallel counter appeal (constantly through its Senate, and at times in other ways) to the majority, not of the people en masse, but of the States in their corporate capacity. Now, a very large minority in the Northern States, whose own private declaration would be against a difference between white men's and other men's rights, nevertheless refuses now, as they refused before the Civil War, to answer with a plain Yes or No, but maintain, with the Southern white-rule party, that whether these things ought so to be or not is a question that every State must be allowed to answer for and to itself alone; thus so altering the voice of the nation when it speaks by States as virtually to nullify that negative answer which would be given by a majority of the whole people. In the Civil Rights Bill the verdict of the

States was once given against all race discrimination in all matters of public rights whatsoever, and for confining it within that true domain-of private choice-to which the judgment of other Christian nations consigns it. But the Civil Rights Bill, never practically effective in the communities whose upper ranks were hostile to it, has lately perished in the national Supreme Court, and the Senate majority that passed it was long ago lost by revolutions in the Southern States. Thus, by a fundamental provision in the national government, intended for the very purpose of protecting the weak from the strong, a small national minority is enabled to withstand the pressure of an immense majority.

Whether this is by a right or wrong use of the provision is an inseparable part of the open question. The weak are protected from the strong, but the still weaker are delivered into the hands of the strong. Seven millions of the nation, mostly poor, ignorant, and degraded, are left for the definition and enjoyment of rights worth more than safety or property to the judgment of some ten other millions of unquestioned intelligence and virtue, but whose intelligence and virtue were not materially less when, with a courage and prowess never surpassed, they drenched their own land with their own blood to keep these darker millions in slavery. However, be it a use or an abuse of the nation's scheme of order, be it right or wrong, this is politically the stronghold of the conservative party in the Southern States; and it is made stronger still, steel-clad and turreted, as it were, with the tremendous advantage of the status quo -that established order of things which, good or bad, until it becomes intolerable to themselves, men will never attack with an energy equal to that with which it is defended.

But political strength is little by itself. The military maxim, that no defences are strong without force enough in them to occupy their line, is true of civil affairs. Entrenchment in the letter of a constitution avails little with the people at large on either side of a question, unless the line of that entrenchment is occupied by a living conviction of being in the right. The most ultra-Southern position on the negro question has an element of strength close akin to this. To be right is the only real necessity; but where is the community that will not make, and defend with treasure and blood, the assumption that what is necessary is right? "Southerners," in the political sense of the term, may sometimes lack a clear, firm-founded belief that they are right; they may have no more than a restless confidence that others are as wrong as they; but they have at least a profound conviction that they are moved by an imminent, unremitting, imperative necessity. Not that this is all; hundreds of thousands of them, incapacitated by this very conviction from falling into sympathy with the best modern thought, have been taught, and

are learning and teaching, not only on the hustings, but in school, in college, at the fireside, through the daily press, in the social circle, and in church, that in their attitude on the negro question they are legally, morally, and entirely right.

Now, specifically, what are these things that the majority of a free nation says ought not to be, while a sectional majority triumphantly maintains they must, will, ought to, and shall be? Give an example of an actual grievance. One commonly esteemed the very least on the list is this: Suppose a man, his wife and their child, decent in person, dress and deportment, but visibly of African or mixed blood, to take passage on a railway train from some city of the Eastern States, as Boston, or of the Western, as Chicago. They will be thrown publicly into company with many others, for an ordinary American railway passenger coach seats fifty persons, and a sleeping car accommodates twenty-five; and they will receive the same treatment from railway employees and passengers, as if, being otherwise just what they are, they were of pure European descent. Only, they will be much less likely than white persons to seek or be offered new acquaintanceships. Arriving in New York, Philadelphia, or any other Northern city, they will easily find accommodation in some hotel of such grade as they would be likely to choose if, exactly as they are, they were white. They may chance upon a house that will refuse, on account of their colour, to receive them; but such action, if made known, will be likely to receive a wide public reprobation, and scant applause even from the press of the Southern States. If the travellers choose to continue their journey through the night they will be free to hire and occupy berths in a sleeping-car and to use all its accessories-basins, towels, pillows, &c.—without the least chance of molestation in act or speech from any one of passengers or employés, let such passengers or employés be from any State of the Union, Northern or Southern.

But on reaching the Southern States the three travellers will find themselves at every turn under special and offensive restrictions laid upon them not for any demerit of person, dress or manners, but solely and avowedly on account of the African tincture in their blood, however slight that may be. They may still be enjoying the comforts of the sleeping-car, by virtue of the ticket bought in a Northern State and not yet fully redeemed. But they will find that while in one Southern State they may still ride in an ordinary first-class railway coach without hindrance, in another they will find themselves turned away from the door of one coach and required to limit themselves to another, equal, it may be, to the first in appointments, and inferior only in the social rank of its occupants. They may protest that in America there are no public distinctions of social rank; but this will avail them nothing. They may object that the passengers in the car