What was needed was a body of men like those who made our Constitution; men accustomed to work with their fellows, accustomed to compromise; men who clung to high ideals, but who were imbued with the philosophy which Abraham Lincoln afterwards so strikingly exemplified, and were content to take the best possible where the best absolute could not be secured. This was the spirit of Washington and his associates in one great crisis of our National life, of Lincoln and his associates in the other great crisis. It is the only spirit from which it will ever be possible to secure good results in a free country; and it is the direct negation of Tolstoyism. To minimize the chance of anything but willful misunderstanding, let me repeat that Tolstoy is a great writer, a great novelist; that the unconscious influence of his novels is probably, on the whole, good, even disregarding their standing as works of art; that even as a professional moralist and philosophical adviser of mankind in religious matters he has some excellent theories and on some points develops a noble and elevating teaching; but that taken as a whole, and if generally diffused, his moral and philosophical teachings, so far as they had any influence at all, would have an influence for bad; partly because on certain points they teach downright immorality, but much more because they tend to be both foolish and fantastic, and if logically applied would mean the extinction of humanity in a generation. A Southerner’s View of the South It seems rather queer to go abroad and discover an American author. Two books have appeared in England during the last year or two, named “The Scar” and “The Scourge.” They have been a success, not only in England, but on the Continent; for translations have appeared or are appearing in German, French, and Russian. Yet they are by an American, Mr. Warrington Dawson, of South Carolina; and they deal with localities, questions, and types exclusively and typically American. It is not very creditable to us that this American, writing with unusual power of American scenes and problems, should have an exclusively European audience.