Life — August 2, 1888 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- LIFE: PURITAN MODESTY—ANCIENT AND MODERN. FTER all the Puritans lived their greatest things, and it would be less honor for them to have written them, as some other peoples have done, though the gain to literature might have been more.—W, D. Howets, in Harfer's for August. This accurate judgment is apropos of the specimens of early colonial literature given in the volumes recently com- piled by Mr. Stedman and Miss Hutchinson. It is to be regretted that the same principles in regard to modesty in letters did not descend to the sons of the Puritans, Cer- tainly, throughout the present century, they have devoted a great deal of their intellectual energy to glorifying the deeds of their fathers and contrasting them with those of other branches of the American people, much to the detriment of the latter. In the modern New Englander the faculty of expression has been abnormally developed. It is, perhaps, the result of generations of school teachers, parsons, provincial lawyers, and local politicians, who, in the midst of comparative pov- erty, have exalted the benefit of the “liberty to think,” which to them was synonymous with “liberty to talk.” . . . ~O it has happened that the rest of the United States has come to believe in the supremacy of New England thought and ideas merely because that loquacious people has so persistently asserted it. The smallest fad, or mildest heresy, or strangest fanaticism, which has originated in New England, has immediately attracted to itself a talking and writing constituency which has straightway spread it through- out the country, In this manner, New England ideas ave dominated us. While the great Middle and Southern States were busy creat- ing the material wealth of this country, they modestly allowed New England to blow the trumpets. Even now it is heresy to say it—but we believe it is capable of proof that in our political history the aggressive, intolerant way in which New England ideas have been advanced has caused us some of our greatest troubles, A semi-civilized nation like Brazil has freed its slaves with- out a civil war, and the calm judgment of the generation of Americans which has grown up since our war is that we could have been equally humane and intelligent. The thoroughly reasonable doctrine of States Rights which a republican Supreme Court has declared the law of the land, probably would have been accepted by the old South, but it was driven away from compromise by a wholly unreasonable New England doctrine of centralization. . . * N short, for a century we have quietly taken New Eng- land at her own estimate of herself—which has certainly not been bashfully expressed. We have been “talked out of court.” While granting New England's supremacy in From La Caricature. LE DUEL, Aprés une discussion violente, ils ont échangé leur carte avec l'intention de se pourfendre trés sérieusement. La rencontre arrangée, le rendez-vous pris aux environs de Paris, ils découvrirent mutuellement qu'ils avaient ¢té absurdes; aussi les balles ségarcrent-elles, et aprés une chaleureuse poignée de mains, ils recommencérent une amitié ¢ternelle par un déjeuner exquis. comicbooks.com