publishers. They thus simplify the matter completely, and present to the American people the naked issue, Will you pay for what you appropriate? Will you protect our property rights as you protect those of your own authors? Will you render us the justice to which we are entitled by the moral judgment of the civilized world? Mr. Collins wants far more; but, if he has the slightest idea of getting it, we advise him to possess his soul in great patience and abstain from futile flurries, for he will assuredly have to wait a long time before he gets what he wants.
POLITICS AGAINST POLITICAL SCIENCE.
It is needless to call attention to Mr. George's vigorous and impressive article which opens this number of the "Monthly," on "The Kearney Agitation in California," as illustrative of the working of American political and social institutions. The name of the writer and the interest of the topic will cause his contribution to be carefully read. Mr. George closes by invoking the scientific spirit and the scientific method in the study of these phenomena, which he thinks demands the serious attention of the most thoughtful men.
This appeal is legitimate, and is prompted by the inevitable logic of the situation. There must be a far better general understanding of the working of social forces before anything can be hoped from remedial measures; but we are here confronted at the outset with difficulties of a very formidable character. One of the chief of these is that the spirit of our politics is radically antiscientific. It is essentially hostile to science because it cultivates systematic misrepresentation, while the first requirement of science is allegiance to truth. Science begins with morality. It implies rectitude of thought, exemption from prejudice and passion, and the utmost attainable accuracy in its representations. It is a school—the only school we have—for discipline in truthfulness. Partisan politics, on the contrary—and partisanship is the essence of politics—is a school of deception and falsehood, and all its influences are at war with the fundamental virtue of truthfulness. If it be thought we are going too far in saying that our political institutions educate the people to immorality, we appeal to the highest authority on moral subjects which our country has produced.
More than forty years ago Dr. William Ellery Channing gave a lecture in Boston on the subject of self-culture. In speaking of the means of self-improvement open to the people of this nation he refers to politics, or to the influence of our popular institutions in arousing the mental activity of citizens which thereby becomes a means of general self-education. But, having turned the customary patriotic compliment to this beneficent action of our form of government, Dr. Channing pauses, as if conscious that he had gone too far, and then proceeds in a very different strain to acknowledge that, as a matter of fact, no such benign result is gained. He declares, on the contrary, that the influence of politics is to produce a widespread demoralization by a subversion of all the cardinal virtues of character. He says:
