had been unable to reach more than one half; and of the thirteen thousand three hundred and thirty-five members on the rolls of the twenty-four associations, over half should have been stricken off. In 1878, it was claimed that the associations were again full of avowed Democrats, whilst good Republicans, who had an absolute right to become members, were refused admittance, either by direct rejection, or by referring the nominations to committees which never reported; "leaving no course but an appeal to the central committee, which is sure not to act against the henchmen." Elections conducted "with conspicuous unfairunfairness," fraudulent enrollment, arbitrary exclusions, unfair expulsions, and other abuses as bad were the charges brought against the system which to-day controls the Republican party machinery of the great city of New York, by the gentle man who three years before was its warm advocate. Although it was not until 1879 that Mr. Bliss felt bound to demand a reform, yet Mr. Schultz himself asserted, as early as 1876, that the primary had come to be no place for any one but the professional politician; and it was generally admitted even then, and tacitly conceded by those who "ran" the machine themselves, that the district associations were very far from representing the great majority of the party. The Union League Club, assuming to speak for the educated and public - spirited element, resolved that the national convention, in considering candidates for the presidential election of 1876, should avoid selecting any man whose affiliations might suggest a reasonable doubt of the purity of his political methods. That resolution, though couched in the most temperate language, and backed by the highest public opinion of the city and State, gave offense to the arrogant masters of the machine, who would brook no suggestion of interference with their sovereignty; and within ten days these little evening

clubs, at which one tenth of the party assumed to speak with absolute authority for the other nine tenths, answered to their master's call, and all of them returned their quota of delegates to the state convention, pledged to his control. "This," said Mr. Cornell, in his dispatch to Senator Conkling, as one of Cæsar's lieutenants might have reported to his general the crushing of some barbarian revolt, - "this is the answer of the Republicans of New York to the impudent declarations of the Union League Club." But if matters were bad then, they are worse to-day. "Not over one in three of the presidents of the twenty-six Republican associations," said the New York Times, after a recent election of officers, "is a man of ordinary capacity for public affairs, or even of ordinary education; sixteen of the twenty-six hold city, state, or federal office; and of the remaining ten, one is said to have been selected for an office under the general government, and two are mere figure-heads for office-holders behind them. . . . From alderman to judge of the supreme court, no name appears on the party ticket which has not been selected by some of this band of officeholders and office-seekers. They send the delegates who assume to speak for the eighty thousand New York Republicans at a state convention, and save for the casual jurisdiction of the state committee, there is no authority in the party which they cannot set at defiance. Their representatives in the board of aldermen must do their bidding, under penalty of expulsion from the charmed circle. Republican members of the legislature take their cue from them in all matters pertaining to the government of the city. There is no power which has to dispose of public patronage, from the police board or the petty courts to the President of the United States, that cannot be made to feel the pressure of the organizations which regulate at its head the flow of the fountain of political

action in the first city of the United States."

Such is the development of the machine system of political nominations in the metropolis of America. The facts regarding one party are matched by those in another; and in any large city of the United States, a history of the evolution of the caucus from its prototype the "town meeting," of years gone by, consists simply of a wearisome repetition of similar details. In Baltimore it is the Democrats who have "run" their primaries with such shameful indifference to the protests of respectability that the intelligent element of the party have refused to attend and lend their countenance to the fraud and trickery by which the reckless and unscrupulous minority always carry the day. In Philadelphia, again, the Republican professional politicians have engaged for years past in dishonest practices, which the respectable majority have been absolutely powerless to prevent. Again and again the candidate who happened to secure control of the temporary chairman of a convention has, through the latter's aid, succeeded in ousting duly elected delegates by simply referring, under the rules, all questions relating to contested seats to the suitable committee packed in his interests. So that the nomination has come to depend far more upon "fixing" the temporary chairman than upon the mere question of a majority of duly elected delegates. To Philadelphia as well as New York may be applied what Mr. Bliss said in 1879: "It is the constant remark of the henchmen, 'What's the use of his fighting? We've got the inspectors." In Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the primary system operates with precisely similar results; and even in England, if we choose to go abroad for illustrations, the caucus, in the form of the "Birmingham six hundred," or the "Bradford three hundred," comes to the

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same thing, a development of the very abuses under which we labor here. The Birmingham Model," which has been set up in Birmingham, Bradford, the metropolitan boroughs of Marylebone, Southwark, and Greenwich, and in many large towns, either preserves or has developed the essential features of our primary methods. The ward committees elect a general committee, which elects an executive committee, which elects a managing sub-committee. This machine selects candidates for Parliament and the school board. The outand-out party men naturally praise it as an admirable means of massing and centralizing the party power. Mr. Chamberlain's laudation of the system has an oddly familiar sound to American ears, used to the stock arguments of the professional politician, to whom a “scratcher" or a "bolter" is more hateful than the Beast. The success of the liberals in Bradford, he argues, "would have been impossible to any but a strong and united party. . . . The only merit of the caucus is that it has enabled the party to develop its full strength. . . . Since the formation of the association, no man calling himself a liberal has ever been excluded from its meetings, or denied a voice and vote. . . . The only controlling force in our organization is the good sense of its members, who see that if the common cause is to be successful there must be some willingness to keep purely personal preferences in the background, and to subordinate petty details to great principles." But the "discipline" has already begun to tell, and more than one intelligent Englishman has felt the weight of a system which makes as little as possible of his individual voice and vote. No member who has failed of a nomination can offer himself as an independent at the hustings; and the committees already demand that the nominee shall submit his opinions to their dictation. Because of his course on the government education

men who innocently fancy that a numerical majority is any obstacle to a determined minority who know what they want and are bound to get it by hook or by crook. What chance has an honorable man, who would not stoop to the tricks of the machine to secure his ends, with patriotism and perhaps a laudable ambition to distinguish himself in public service as his only motives, against men whose business is to "fix" primaries and "pack" conventions by stuffing ballot boxes and ejecting duly elected delegates? No; the remedy is not to be found at the caucus of to-day. The present primary system is, and so long as it lasts always will be, subject to the control of the worst element in each party. But the patient people have stood it about long enough. We have at last begun to fret against gross misrepresentation. The civil service reform bill was the result of public opinion as expressed in the state elections; it was not left for a national contest to put life into that issue; and in the States where the caucus has been most abused are to be heard those mutterings of discontent which to the observant student of American public affairs mean much. Within a short time the people

SO

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of Pennsylvania have demanded, and secured, laws regulating their primary elections. The people of Maryland have made the same demand, and will get what they ask. The "leaders" on one side of the game of New York politics have begun to hold out offers of reorganization" as a sop to allay the effects of their refusal in the past to permit the passage of such a law, while their opponents have recently been forced by an insistent public opinion to extend the provisions of a local statute controlling primaries in the city of Brooklyn to other cities in the State.

But beyond the enactment of statutes which shall protect the primary as fully as the general election, the people have begun to insist that the State, as well as the nation, shall take its offices out of politics, so as to make it pay as little as possible for the political "worker to "fix" things at the caucus. We are beginning to understand that so long as we allow official patronage to lie at the disposal of this leader or that, as a reward for "controlling his district," for just so long we shall furnish a corruption fund for him to draw upon to pay for the dirty work by which he wins and holds his place.

George Walton Green.

"Plato, anticipating the reviewers, From his Republic banished without pity The Poets."

The Birds of Killingworth.

THE author of three articles recently published, The Poets' Birds (Atlantic Monthly, June, 1882), Foreign Birds and English Poets (Contemporary Review, October, 1882), and Our Birds and their Poets (Harper's Magazine, February, 1883) brings against British poets the charge that they are almost

entirely destitute of that "universal kindliness toward the speechless world," that "sympathy co-extensive with nature," which he "finds common to all the poets of America." This is proved, he says, by their ignorance of ornithology, their injustice to birds, and their general neglect of the bird-world.

For any one to be justified in making this charge, he must himself have a knowledge of ornithology sufficient to enable him to approach accuracy in the

statement of scientific facts, great familiarity with the poets, and a standard of criticism which should be clearly defined in his own mind, and which he should be able to make fairly intelligible to his readers.

An examination of these articles will enable us to judge to what extent the author's statements and opinions are entitled to consideration.

"There are," he says, "known to science more than three thousand species of birds." But Sclater and Salvin make over three thousand and five hundred in the neotropical region alone, including South America, the West Indies, and Central America. And this

is less than half the number represented in the private collection of Count Turati, who recently died in Milan, which consisted of specimens belonging to seven thousand two hundred species (Count Salvadori in The Ibis, October, 1881); while Gray's Hand-List, the latest published (1871), contains the names of over eleven thousand then known to science.

Again, our author says, "The poets have wasted some two thousand exotic birds," and names six that they have "utilized." So, of the more than three thousand known to science, he reckons as belonging to Great Britain about one thousand, or one third of the whole. But the number of British species, according to Harting's Handbook (1872), is only three hundred and ninety-five (including one hundred and thirty-five rare and accidental visitants), or less than one twenty-eighth of the number recorded by Gray. The writer also gives a "complete list," seventy-six in all, of the species of British birds found in the eighty poets "carefully examined" by him. A "curious list" he calls it, and a curious list it is. The very first bird which it contains, the albatross, is not a British bird; nor is the booby; nor are the cock and the peacock, for they are domesticated fowls

of nearly all civilized countries, and are not included by British ornithologists among British birds. "Only seven seabirds," he says; but in his own enumeration he makes ten. After naming seven, and exclaiming, "Such are the ocean-birds of the poets!" he immediately thinks of "sea-mews and seapies." Then he adds: "Not another bird is mentioned!" but soon after remembers the "stormy petrel." But why not also include swans, ducks, and geese, many of which are as really seabirds as loons and cormorants, and some of the gulls? Why not count the sandlark as well as the sea-pie? Both of them are shore-birds, and both sometimes found inland.

According to Newton, Harting, Coues, and others, the order Raptores, birds of prey, contains three families: Vulturida, or Cathartida, vultures; Strigidæ, owls; and Falconida, eagles, the osprey, falcons, hawks, kites, buzzards, and harriers.

Of these three great divisions, the writer classes as birds of prey only one family, the Falconida. In his first article he speaks of the condor and the lammergeyer as "wondrous birds of prey;" but in the next article he declares that vultures are not birds of prey, apparently unaware of the fact that the condor and the lammergeyer are vultures, although they are the most distinguished species of the vulture. family.

In his first article, our author gives a list of the foreign birds of the poets: the ostrich, the bird of paradise, the pelican, the flamingo, the ibis, and the vulture, vulture, six besides cage-birds. The second, being on foreign birds, he revises the list, and adds to it the condor, the humming-bird, the stork, and the crane. Now ibis, vulture, stork, and crane are generic names, and British ornithologists have recorded one or more species of all these birds among the rare or accidental visitants in Great