in forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor
his interpretation of the fact. No one who reads the book can deny
that the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize in
the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against which no
series of hangings and burnings will finally avail.

VII.

In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universal
implication which will distinguish itself to the observer from the
psychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not as apt as I
should like--evident in some of the interesting books under notice
here. I have tried to say that it is none the less a work of art for
that reason, and I can praise the art of another novel, in which the
same sort of psychologism prevails, though I must confess it a fiction
of the rankest tendenciousness. "Lay Down Your Arms" is the name of
the English version of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die Waffen
Nieder," which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on the
continent of Europe. Its success there has been very great, and I wish
its success on the continent of America could be so great that it might
replace in the hands of our millions the baleful books which have
lately been glorifying bloodshed in the private and public wars of the
past, if not present. The wars which "Lay Down Your Arms" deals with
are not quite immediate, and yet they are not so far off historically,
either. They are the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian
war of 1866, and the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose
personal relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian
lady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of soldiers,
and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with her own, whom
she first marries, makes love to her just before the outbreak of the
war first named, she is as much in love with his soldiership as with
himself. But when the call to arms comes, it strikes to her heart such
a sense of war as she has never known before. He is killed in one of
the battles of Italy, and after a time she marries another soldier, not
such a beau sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who
fights through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from
love of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that he
quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris. There the
third war overtakes him, and in the siege, this A