the power of the popular will, or the rights,
diviner than his own, of national life and
independence.

AMERICAN CEMETERIES.

IF I wanted to show the indifference with
which the loss of human life is regarded in
America, whether in peace or war, I should
certainly, if I had the opportunity, go first
and take a walk in an American cemetery before
I began to write and attune my mind to the
subject.

The American cemetery expresses very well
the feelings with which an American regards
death. He considers it as a disagreeable
interruption to business, as a sudden call from
the oyster-cellar, the game at base-ball, from
the 2.40 trotting-match, from the run with
the fire-engine, from the "good time" with
the target company, from the cotton-bales and
the tobacco drying-racks, from the swift steamboat,
and from the railway smoking-room. The
perpetual influx of new emigrants, the urging
onward to new frontiers, the perpetual looking
forward to ideals instead of looking back to
precedents, all prevent life from being thought of
much value in the New World.

Death is not a King of Terror in America;
but rather a mysterious muffled-up stranger, who
quietly leads men from the bar-room and the
cotton "levee" into an unknown country,
where, perhaps, there are no cotton levees, and
no bar-rooms nor cool drinks. That dreadful
silent room with the blinds down, where even
the buzz of a fly sounds so loud and so jarringly,
has less terror in that busy country than here;
even that terrible fixed face, like a mask of wax,
prints itself less deeply on the mind in America
than it does in England. New men in a new
country have not the deep roots in the soil that
men in the old country have, and those roots
ramify over a narrow region. There are few
old people either in America. Young men are
less missed after the first throes of grief.

America, too, is a country of hot-bloods, of
many nomade and turbulent spirits, whose hand
is quick with the revolver and the bowie-knife,
and who spill a man's blood as readily as they
tip over an ice-water jug. In no country
where men go armed, and single combat is
frequent, can life be held dear. The hot feverish
life of business, smoking, travelling, drams, and
"general" fights, cannot afford much time for
reflection. The intense ambition of individuality,
of mental progress, that thoughtful men,
however religious, not unfrequently exhibit in
England, cannot be expected in America.

The frequent accidents on trains and steamboats
also tend to lessen the regard for human
life; as does, still more, the habitual influence
of the climate. In a word, it is not heartlessness
or irreligion, for the Americans are as
tender-hearted and religious as ourselves; but
it is the accident of a new country that makes
individual life less regarded. The young scholar
who dies at college in the moment of success,
dies perhaps as truly mourned as the young
scholar would be if he died at Oxford; yet
the same man shot in a chance fight, or stabbed
by a "Blood Tub" at Baltimore, or a "Dead
Rabbit" of New York, would be regarded,
except by his relatives, as only worthy of a
newspaper paragraph.

Death falls like a sword on the neck of an
American; but the survivors do not stop long
lamenting round his corpse. The next hour
they are as busy as ever round the bales, and
in the jingling sledge, flirting at the Sulphur
Springs, or at the Wide-Awake procession.
There seems no time in the American's life to
waste in grief or mourning. To-morrow there will
be the following notice in the New York Herald:

"On the 13th of June, at No. 4, One Hundred
and Twenty-two Street, much lamented, Mr. Elijah
Specklebury. Friends and relatives intending to
attend the funeral on the 20th will please take notice
that the cars leave the Fulton Ferry for Greenwood
Cemetery at 10.15 A.M., sharp!"

The mourners come, they chat in the cars, the
stifling crape is donned; some one unnoticed,
but real mourner, all but breaks his heart at the
grave's edge. Everybody goes home congratulating
himself at the affair being over, and Mr.
Specklebury is forgotten but by one memory.
The billiard-board, the euker-table, the
political club, know him no more. Other men sit
on the Specklebury office-stool; other mouths
sip the Specklebury claret.

With us death is a solemn and irreparable
fact. The oblong grave is dug, the bell tolled,
the mutes with the crape fire-screens set. The
dreary vault No. X. opens for the coroneted
coffin. The shutters are up at the old shop, all
faces gather blackness, the death is pondered on
as a terrible certainty. The fact is not shirked
nor forgotten, it is insisted on in sermons, and
the grief of it creeps like a chilling miasma into
many a house. Some are sorry for it, others
take it as a warning at their own door. There
is no black yew in a country chuchyard but has
shaken as a big hearse-plume in many a man's
imagination; not a churchyard daisy growing on
a child's grave but has seemed to many a word
of hope rising to comfort the mourner. But
the Americans treat death in a lively, businesslike
way, as a frequent, but disagreeble
occurrence.

The cemetery has quite superseded the churchyard
in America. That wonderful striped building,
the great church, generally known to the
too irreverent rowdies as "the Holy Zebra," has
no real churchyard, at least no enclosure, I
think, devoted to burials. The cemetery,
conducted by a joint-stock company, is a truly
business-like affair. The body can be
forwarded by car, or train, or steamer, at a
stated hour, with safety and with despatch.
The distracted mourner knows just what he has
to pay, and the ground he buys is inalienable.
You get away from the noise of the city—the
smoke in New York is immaterial—and you
leave Mr. Elijah Specklebury quietly asleep
among sun-flowers and Virginian creepers, in a