Ship of '49. Mr. Harte's hand never loses its cunning, and it is noteworthy how instantly the reviewer, upon opening any new story from him, may recognize the note of competent power, the contrast to any other style that comes to his eye as he goes from book to book. Bret Harte cannot write satisfactorily of anything but California-somehow, in that divine period of young manhood and developing power that it was his fate to pass here, California became stamped with a peculiar freshness and force upon his mind, such as no later environment has been able to rival, though it is probable he would him self have preferred to change the field of his subjects. He cannot write except of California; and he can never make his California a new thing in literature again. It is true, that these later sketches have not all the dramatic force and beauty of the first ones; but it is not deterioration of power, so much as loss of novelty, that lessens the eagerness of the public for them. "An Apostle of the Tules" is more of the old quality than almost any thing the author has lately done; "Sarah Walker" is well told, as everything from him is; and "A Ship of '49" is a very pretty story. There is no one at all who always has described the external aspects of California, sky and shore and sea, plain and mountain, as perfectly as Bret Harte still does. Miss Phelps's little study of an old maid in her own new house by the sea, is very pleasing-sweet and grave, full of feeling, yet serene. It is one of a cheap "Riverside Paper Series," with which Houghton, Mifflin & Co. join at last the procession of those who issue series of cheap paper summer novels. These paper novels appear weekly during the summer months, and thus far maintain a more classical standard than any other series. "Down the Ravine" is exceedingly well done, showing the author almost more at home in writing for children than in other work. The needs of her audience compel her to be less discursive, and less disposed to idealize. It is always a little questionable, however, whether it is best to set children to reading dialect, especially dialect that has any roughness about it. Vain Forebodings 1 is one of Mrs. Wistar's German translations, and is a pleasant story, but containing a somewhat surprising point: for the story is of a benevolent physician, who first cured of insanity a youth upon whom this disaster had fallen, after he had long been predisposed to it, and then allowed his daughter to marry the patient, telling him that his forebodings of insanity as his doom are folly, and his scruples about marrying unnecessary, since all he needs to do to be safe is to exercise due mental self-control. There is, undoubtedly, very much in this view, yet the usual view of the fatal nature of any predisposition to insanity is not to be lightly set aside. F. Anstey, whose "Vice Versa" gave him something of a name for unique invention, has accomplished another successful bit of ingenuity. The Tinted Venus is one of those compositions that make the reader wonder how in the world any one could have thought of such a thing. It is of the class of fiction that must not be commented on too freely, for fear of "spoiling the story" to the reader; so we will only say that it is very ingenious, clever, and amusing, and worth one's while to read if he wishes light reading for a leisure hour. The Waters of Hercules, a rather long novel, in the German style and with German characters, and Uncle Jack and Other Stories,* by Walter Besant, are also both pleasant leisure-hour books-though no one will ever be really any the worse off for not having read them. The chief interest in Mr. Besant's stories (there are three in the book, one of them, "Sir Jocelyn's Cap," decidedly good) is the opportunity they give to note the author's style, unaffected by that of his late colleague. The difference is perceptible. Mr. 1 Vain Forebodings. By E. Oswald. Translated from the German by Mrs. A. L. Wistar. Philadelphia: }. B. Lippincott Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Joseph A. Hofmann. 2 The Tinted Venus. A Farcical Romance. By F. Anstey. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. 8 The Waters of Hercules. New York: Harper & Bros. 1885. 4 Uncle Jack and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Bros. 1885. By Walter Besant. Besant's pleasant humor is perhaps a trifle overdone, and he takes pains in all three stories to express decided disapproval of educated girls and the Oxford examinations. The three remaining novels are scarcely worth reading. She's All the World to Me, and A Nemesis, are English stories, the first one quite dull, in spite of smuggling, shipwrecks, and sensations unnumbered, on the Manx coast; the second one is an agreeable, mildly entertaining, conventional story of the detection of a murder--largely by means of second sight. A New England Conscience is very well meant, but very crude. It is a narration of the religious and other psychological experiences of a country village in New England. This village is Methodist, and therefore should not be produced by the author as a typical New England one; for Methodism is not the character-forming faith of New England. More over, when she sets her Methodist pastor to preaching Election, it is obvious that she is ignorant of her subject. In somewhat She's All the World to Me. By Hall Caine. New York: Harper & Bros. 1885. 2 A Nemesis; or Tinted Vapors. By J. Maclaren Cobban. New York: Appleton & Co. For sale in San Francisco by James T. White. 8 A New England Conscience. By Belle C. Greene. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1885. For sale in San Francisco by Strickland & Pierson, pointless succession we have described to us: first, Desire's mother, insane with religious melancholy, and convinced she is going to hell, with some account of the sermons and prayer-meetings that convinced her; second, the behavior of mothers in the village upon the loss of children, ending with one young mother's suicide upon her baby's grave—this attributed to the tone of preaching in the village, which had failed to convince her of God's love in removing her baby; the successful advent of the faithcure to the village; a Millerite episode in the factory neighborhood; an experience meeting; various theological conversations, ending in the return of the heroine, Desire. to a strong belief in hell, previously abjured, and consequently a burning desire to engage in saving souls therefrom by work as a city missionary; her putting away her lover that she may do this; reaction from the belief in hell and the city missionary work, and final reacceptance of the lover. This medley is not to be taken as a true study of New England life or character, and sounds to us like the first attempt of some bright and inexThis seems the perienced girl at literature. more probable from the superiority of the part that deals with Desire's intercourse with her mother to any of the rest; there is some very genuine tenderness here. ET C. AN Eastern religious weekly is pressing an idea that is new, we think, to print, though not to private conversation; and that is, the endowment of newspapers. The idea is probably to the business mind chimerical; nevertheless, there seems no good reason why it is not both practical and wise. The newspaper, it is said, is the college of the American people; and what would be thought of a college in which the chairs might be filled absolutely without any test of moral or intellectual requirement? in which any horse-jockey or gambler might teach, side by side with the most venerable scholars of the time; and, the payment being by fees in accordance with the acceptability of the things taught, might devote his chair to instruction in cards or in slogging, or his lecture hour to stories of such character as may barely escape the intervention of a not over-strict police, and enjoy a much higher salary than a colleague in the same college, who might be the greatest of American historians, or botanists, or linguists? What would be thought, again, of a college in which it was an open secret that the doctrines taught were sometimes for sale? that the teacher of political economy would instruct his classes in the justice or the injustice of duties on wool, according as the sheepgrowers or the manufacturers bribed him; or that the teacher of geography would make facts as to climate, product, and other qualities of different districts bend to the interest of the railroads in whose pay he was; or that the facts of history were almost avowedly taught in accordance with the interests of the politi cal party from which the teacher expected most. All this under the wing of the college, so that the student who desired to learn the truth had no possible means of knowing which teacher was conscientiously telling it, and which one was the bribed mouth-piece of special interests, save his own penetration. And among those in need of the instructions of a college, such penetration is scarcely to be expected. Yet this is no exaggeration of the present condition of that "American college," the newspaper. Side by side with veracious papers are the most shamelessly mendacious ones; side by side with thoroughly competent editors are hopelessly ignorant boors, pretending to teach with as much confidence as the competent ones; side by side with incorruptible opinions, opinions bought and sold like furniture. Moreover, there is no authority to guarantee the uprightness of the upright paper, and the correctness of the correct one, or to protect them from accusation of venality or ignorance, any more than there is to condemn the venal or ig. norant one. And there are enough to see to it that they shall be abundantly met with such accusation. The wise and discriminating will find out which are managed by knaves. But what a condition of affairs for a college-to be so arranged that only the wisest and most discriminating of its students can be safe against gross false teaching! The vast majority of newspaper readers can not know whether their teacher is trustworthy or not. A more obvious and commonly lamented evil in the present newspaper system is, that it leaves the public unprotected against uncleanliness and low sensationalism. Not only has the vilest-minded man perfect liberty, without passing any examination or obtaining approval of any man, to step into a chair of the newspaper-college, and thence teach what is congenial to him to whoever will take the elective, but much that is vile and shocking intrudes itself into every man's paper, and can hardly be avoided by the most careful skip ping. WITH all this, we are disposed to think he was right who called the newspaper "the college of the American people." Its potency is vast, and reaches more corners than the school-master. Moreover, children and young people nowadays read newspapers a great deal. With the general laxity of household government has come a relaxation of the practice of hiding books and papers away from children; and the reader will be amazed, if he investigates a little, to find how generally the newspapers, with their stories of ugliness and horrors, lie under children's eyes, in most middle-class families. It is really as important to our national character that the newspaper should be intelligent, cleanly, and upright, as that the college should be. THE dangers of an unrestrained press have always been more or less realized, and efforts have been made to meet them by a press censorship. But this involves dangers of its own, and moreover would Moreover, it never be tolerated in this country. It has not been thought un-American to put certain legal restric tions about the professions of law and medicine, and, in part, those of teaching and of civil service. If government may insist that a man must have a decent character and a certain amount of education before he may practice law or medicine, there is nothing monstrous, theoretically, in requiring the same before he may run a paper. But it is doubtful if any such system would work in the case of a calling involving a private property, as a newspaper is (though the regulations for examining pilots and engineers to run boats, which are private property, forms a precedent), and more than doubtful whether it could ever get a chance to try. Nor could the most theoretic literary fellow recommend it with much heart; for the functions of a journalist are so much less specific than those of a lawyer or doctor, that no examination could properly test capacity for them. would be impossible to restrict proprietorship in papers to high-minded, incorruptible, and educated men; and it is on the part of the proprietor, and not the editor, that the mischief comes in. It is for the benefit of the proprietor's pocket, not for his own pleasure, that the editor puts in the account of the murder, the divorce trial, the slogging match; that his leaders change front in a political campaign; that news are edited, and items that might hurt this or that private interest carefully ruled out. The right or wrong of the present very general submission of the editorial pen to the interest of the proprieter, is an ethical question too large to be here discussed: not all editors do so submit it; and the requirement of many papers that they shall, keeps many a highminded young fellow from seeking a chair in the "American college." The fear of loss and impov erishment constrains even the high-minded editor to make the journal an instrument of evil, to satisfy his employer; constrains even the high-minded proprietor to sacrifice the honor of his journal before the threat of powerful interests, or to bid down to low tastes to increase his sales. SUPPOSE private ownership eliminated from any paper by the simple device of an endowment?-an endowment, say, just large enough to insure the existence of the paper, in case it were called to undergo a period of popular hostility or private assault; so that its enlargement and prosperity would still have to depend on its own exertions, and it could not be come sluggish. Suppose it entrusted to a board, with powers of meddling even more limited than those of college boards; its general policy defined by the terms of the endowment, its special course left very free. No one would have any vital interest in getting the purse fuller at any cost; every one would have a great interest in carrying and improving the paper, extending its influence, and increasing its repute. It would be edited in the spirit in which college classes are taught and every one knows the way in which the hearts of college teachers become wrapped up in their work, and the loyalty to the college they acquire. How easily might such a paper take high ground and stand unshaken on it! how promptly might all that was low or unclean be wiped from its columns! how impotently angered abuses might beat against its shield! And if any one says that "people would not read it," he not only underrates people, but forgets that such a paper is in no wise prohibited from drawing to itself the wittiest and most forcible writers, using the greatest enterprise in news collection, and otherwise making itself strong and prosperous, all the better for the consciousness of an impreg⚫ nable fort to fall back on when the heathen rage. WE learn that Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, before her death, gave directions that all her papers, including, certainly, much unpublished manuscript, and, if we are not mistaken, much correspondence, should be burned unread; which duty has been loyally discharged by the friend to whom it was intrusted. How many such holocausts have resulted from the treatment of Hawthorne's and Carlyle's literary remains we shall perhaps never know. The chapter of personal recollections of Mrs. Jackson which we publish this month is by authority of her husband. After an Old Master. Now doe I wishe that I a garden were, Flowred so riche that shee would come to mee, And pluck some litle blossoms, two or three, To decke the frills upon her stomacher. Then, an shee were Love's gentle almener, Neere should shee lacke the goodlie smells, perdie. Of stocks and violets and rosemarie; If I would growe sadd rue and bitter myrre Gold and Silver. EDITOR OVERLAND MONTHLY: The determined opposition of most of the newspapers of this "Golden State " to the gold standard, and their unwillingness to give a fair hearing to their opponents, has induced me to address you, feeling sure that with your wellknown sense of justice, you will not deny an honest advocate of the gold standard a limited space in which to argue his side of the question. The confusion created (often intentionally) by the double standard champions, in discussing financial affairs, by confounding bimetallism with double standard, coin with bullion, money with wealth, etc., etc.; the harsh names which they heap on us poor goldbugs; the prediction of ruin to every nation that does not implicitly believe in their silver doctrine ;-make it difficult to calmly argue the case with them; and I warn these silver enthusiasts that any party using vituperation and prophecy instead of sound arguments, is doomed to final defeat. So many abler pens than mine have discussed the matter, that I do not expect to bring new or original arguments; but I will try to set forth in plain language a subject that should be understood by every man, woman, and child, as it enters into a thousand daily transactions of both rich and poor. The functions of the precious metals (except what is used in the arts) are twofold: firstly, as they serve as standard measures of value; and secondly, as circulating media of exchange, i. e., money. In their first capacity they may be compared to other standard measures; for instance, to the standard measure of length, the yard, or the standard measure of weight, the pound. These standards are clear and simple, are understood by everybody, and cannot be altered or doubled without great inconvenience to the public. Anybody who should propose, in the interest of the public welfare, to have two different yardsticks. one, say, 36 inches in length, the other only 30 inches; or two different pounds, one weighing 16 ounces, and the other 12 ounces, would be looked upon with great suspicion. Suppose that in answer to the suggestion that this would lead to great confusion and uncertainty, without corresponding benefit, this same person should exclaim: "Not at all! Let the United States Congress stipulate by law that the 36-inch yard and the 30-inch yard shall be equal in length, and that the 16-ounce pound shall be equal in weight to the 12-ounce pound, and all will be well." We believe such a person would be considered ripe for the insane asylum. And yet, that is exactly what the advocates of the double standard do say, when we are told that the people need two different standard measures of value: a 4121⁄2 grain silver dollar, now worth about 83 cents gold (by the laws of supply and demand), and a 25 4-5 grain gold dollar, worth 100 cents in the markets of the world; and that Congress can, by law, make the two equal in value. Congress can only keep silver or paper money at par with gold as long as it is willing and able to exchange the same for gold on demand. True, the 4121⁄2 grains of silver have at times been equal in value to 25 grains of gold, and even above it, and one of the San Francisco papers assures us in all earnestness it "will be restored to its old value again." If that well-posted paper had kindly gone a step further, and told us when that time would come, how long silver will remain at the "old value when it gets there, and what that "old value" is, that would certainly have been a great help in settling the pending question. But there's the rub; and even should an international commission undertake to settle the relative value of the precious metals, it would have to adopt one of the metals as a standard by which to measure the other in rearranging this proportion from time to time. Practically, therefore, we will never have more than one standard at a time in any country, and may as well make up our minds whether we prefer the gold or the silver standard. Eventually, of course, trade and wages adapt themselves to any standard; but the first effect of depreciating the standard is to place the laboring and salaried classes at a great disadvantage, as they cannot increase their daily wages or monthly salaries as quickly or as easily as the merchant marks up the price of his goods to correspond with the lower monetary standard. And now comes the question: Why either gold or silver standard? Why not copper, or iron, or even wheat, or anything else? The answer is: that the best standard of value is that article which is least subject to change in value itself. If an article could be found absolutely free from the fluctuations of sup ply and demand, that article would be the ideal standard measure of values. The ideal article of unchangeable value not existing, the most steady article known at different times to different people was selected as standard. In early days we find the sheepskin as standard among the herder nations, and ornamental shells among some roving tribes. Later, metals were selected, because they could be divided, united, and moulded into any desired weight and shape without much trouble or loss. First, iron came into use (as we see by the coins of antiquity), at a time when other metals were too scarce to be considered for general circulation. When iron became more abundant, and consequently less convenient and less steady, copper (or bronze) gradually assumed the duties of a standard; but history has recorded no outcry of the iron men that the copper-bugs were trying to ruin the country. In its turn, copper had to make room for silver, as being the steadiest standard known. And now the time seems to have come when silver is gradually yielding to gold as a standard, for the same reason that caused the change from iron to copper, and from copper to silver. The highly civilized nations of Europe, with the most intricate and extended commercial relations, were the first to recognize these facts, and have accordingly adopted the gold standard. Even the Latin Union, after vainly struggling for a double standard, is practically falling into line. The semi-civilized nations of Asia, with a less complicated system of commerce, are still clinging to a silver standard, while the United States, half-way between the two, is somewhat in the position of our friend in the fable, between the two bundles of hay. The silver men (we mean the honest ones who go in for a silver standard, and not the double standard manipulators) contend, firstly, that gold is not yet sufficiently abundant to serve as a universal standard, and would consequently be cornered by speculators, to the great inconvenience of commerce; and, secondly, that silver has been less subject to fluctuation than gold. These are their only two sound arguments, and, if proved correct, would be strong reasons for adhering to the silver standard at present. But proofs are wanting. The gold-standard countries do not seem to suffer from want of capital, as shown by low interest, nor have they been subjected to any cornering of gold, which would show itself in a rapid fall of prices generally, as compared to prices in silver-standard countries. With our growing international commerce, the larger transactions are more and more balanced by checks, drafts, notes, etc., through the banks and clearing-houses, requiring much less of the precious metals than formerly; while the smaller bargains of every-day life continue to be transacted in silver coins, showing that silver is not "demonetized" in the gold-standard countries (as the silver men assert), but only "destandardized,” and that bimetallism can and does coexist with a single standard. The other point-that of greater steadiness of silver-is hard to prove. The only way to do this, would be to compare the prices of some staple article of consumption in gold and in silver; but as these prices have rarely, if ever, been quoted in both standards at the same period and in the same country, this seems an impossible task. Until these two points are settled, however, the United States should adhere to its gold standard, under which it has grown and prospered without parallel, the standard of our European neighbors, with whom we are in constant and lively commercial intercourse, and not sink back again to the silver standard of China and India. Let us now look at the second function of the precious metals, in their capacity of a circulating medium money; and as I compared the standard of value to other standard measures, so I will now compare "money" to another circulating medium, say, for instance, "the lubricating oil of our machinery." The oil alone can create no power; money alone can create no wealth (who does not remember the story of the ship-wrecked sailor dying of cold and starvation, surrounded by mountains of gold and silver on the desert island ?); but as the oil helps to create power, so the money helps to create wealth. The machine might run without the lubricator, though probably under a very heavy strain; so the commercial machinery might run--in fact, has run--without the circulating medium, money, for many years, in the days of barter and exchange; but it worked clumsily and with much waste. Too much oil, on the other hand, will not benefit the machine; it will run to waste and collect in pools under the engine; and just so will the money run to waste at times where too abundant, and collect in banks and treas uries, a useless pile for the time being, until extende commercial machinery calls for more grease. The rates of interest and exchange are the gauges that show the flow of money and regulate it, preventing too large an accumulation in one place, too great a scarcity in another, for any length of time. The ma terial, size, weight, and shape of the money should be determined by public convenience alone, as well as |