Neil's wife went home and she looked at the songs, and that night a number of people chanced to come in, and they had a great céilidh1 round the fire, and to pass the time she showed them the work of Angus; and when they read the songs and saw the difference there was between them and the man that made them, they had such a merry night as they had not had for a long time. It so chanced that Angus himself went that night to see Neil, and when he came to the door he heard such roars of laughter that he stood a moment on the threshold, and as he stood he heard a lad reading a song he had made about courage in a storm, and all shouting with mirth as they listened. He turned and went home, and his wife gave a cry at the sight of him. "Woman," he cried, "what have you done? Was I not low down before, and now you have given my songs to Neil's wife and the people are making a mock of me?" She had never seen such a look upon him or heard such a tone from him, and she began to cry. "Angus! Angus!" said she, "do not be angry. I did it for the best." Angus sat down on the settle. He did not say a word more, for he understood at once how it was, and how he was the last that should blame her. After this the children of the island got hold of the songs and made fun with them, and the thing burned into the very soul of Angus Auchenbrae, though he could only guess what things were said, and he prayed Heaven that he might get the courage to do one brave deed, though it should cost him his life. To take the slur from his name was better, he had come to think, than life itself. Time went on and things were as they had been, till one year in the first of spring the nephew of a man 1 Gossip or visit. living near Auchenbrae came home with illness upon him. The uncle, who was named Sandy, took him in and did the best he could for him; but that was not much, for he was an old bachelor, very poor, and living alone in a house with only one room. At first no one knew what the trouble was, but before long it was found to be the black small-pox, which is worst of all, and the greatest panic went like a blaze through the whole island. To make matters worse, a great gale of wind rose that very day, so that it was impossible to take a boat across to the mainland for a doctor or assistance of any kind. The people of Dorn, who were so courageous in other ways, had such dread of any pestilence that they would sooner go before the mouths of loaded guns than face it. He was thought brave who would bring food within speaking distance of Sandy's house. Men did this for two days, and at their call Sandy would come out; but the third there came no answer to their shoutings, and the food lay on the hillock where it had been placed, and the door was not opened. It was evident that Sandy had himself taken the sickness. The waves between the island and the mainland rose like mountains. The panic increased, and every one declared that it was death to the one who would enter Sandy's house. If the thing spread, all knew there would be no stay to it, for in the crowded. houses of Dorn such pestilence is almost always death. "Better," whispered some, whose children clung about their knees, "that one old useless man should die, than that young and old should perish together." So the day went past, and the food lay on the hillock, and the door was fast shut, and no smoke rose from the chimney. All that day Angus Auchenbrae went in a cold sweat of fear thinking of the black small-pox. In the evening he called his family together and told them he was going to pass the night in Sandy's house. "No human being," said he in a shaking voice, "will perish almost within sight of my door without so much as a cup of cold water." His wife and children could hardly believe their ears. They were horrorstricken, and besought him with tears and cries to turn from his purpose. He would not do that, however, but began giving them directions about what they were to do. Then his wife turned on him hotly and told him it was a great sin that a man with a wife and family should take this upon him. "Are there not others?" she cried. "It is death, Angus; will you make me a widow and your children fatherless?" Angus Auchenbrae hung his head and looked no hero, but he could not give in to her. "It is better," he said at last, trembling, "that you should be the widow of a man who has had courage, than the wife of one who has none." "Have you that in your mind?" she cried, and declared she thought nothing of it; and all entreated him to remain, for now they thought the one great fault nothing in comparison to Angus himself. But Angus knew very well that they were wrong. "The boys are now old enough to work the croft," said he, and he brought out the little bag with his money in it and gave it to his wife; and when nothing would move him, all came with him, weeping and beseeching and lamenting, to the hillock beside the plague-stricken house that looked already like a house of the dead. He told them what they were to do, and how they were to bring food and water and peats to the hillock every morning, but on no account to come nearer, and if there was death in the house he arranged to make a sign. He went away, and his knees shook, and at the door he turned and looked on the windy sky and the bushes blown back and forwards in the storm, and the dark forms of his wife and children crouching on the edge of the brae. He took a step towards them, then he turned again and went in. After a while he came out and made the sign. All the night long the man who had no courage sat between the living and the dead. They were terrible to look upon, and he thought that before long he would be like them. Fear struggled with him, so that he thought the Evil One himself was trying to overcome him. In the morning men's voices came above the storm, and Angus went out to the door. There was a coffin at a little distance, and the men called to him. They would come no nearer. He went and took it in, and laid the lad in it-for it was the nephew who was dead-and then he dragged it out again. It took him a long while to do this alone, and all the time they waited the men of Dorn looked at each other with strange faces, and spoke under their breaths of Angus Auchenbrae. All day the children sat on the edge of the hill and watched the house, and when the smoke rose thick and dark the foolish little ones ran home to their mother crying out that he was alive yet, for he was putting peats upon the fire. But the mother shook her head and wept. "It is death," she said. "When a person is afraid, it is always death." The next day Angus came out to the hillock, and the third day he came out, and the fourth; but on the fourth day the children saw that he came slowly, and that when he went back with the food his steps tottered. "It is coming on him at last," they said, and burst out crying. "If he does not come out to-morrow," said the mother with a set look, "I must go to the house my. self." She began rocking the cradle. "What has he brought on us?" she said despairingly. But that evening the storm went so far down that the men of Dorn were able to take a boat over to the mainland, and late in the night they came back with a doctor and a nurse. These went boldly into the house, and the news they brought out was that Sandy was past the worst of the trouble, but that Angus was stricken down with it. "There is but one brave man in Dorn," said the doctor to every one he met, "and it will be a pity if he dies." In a day or two another nurse came, and now one slept every night in the end of Angus Auchenbrae's house; and now, too, all the mainland had the story, and the man who had no courage was called the Brave Man of Dorn, as if there was no other. The pestilence lay upon him heavily, and the black wings of Death seemed to be stretched over the house from day to day. In the first of each morning his wife met the nurse upon the hillock, and each morning there was the same answer to her questions, till at last one day she saw a change in the woman's face as she came towards her. "It is death at last?" she said trembling. "No!" said the other, "it is life." Angus's wife would not believe her. Though she would not, it was indeed life, and the day came at last when Angus, leaning on a stick, walked home to his own house. He had been a bonny man before, but the sickness had left such a trace on him that he was no longer bonny, and his children looked on him with a kind of awe, as if he had been a stranger. "Do you know what they call you?" said one of Blackwood's Magazine. But the little ones after a while, coming up to him. "They call you 'Gaisgeach'The Courageous One." "Hush! hush!" said the mother, looking very proud. "Little ones shouldn't be speaking." After this a most surprising thing happened to Angus Auchenbrae. It was only gradually he came to know it, and he thought at first it could be no less than a miracle. Fear left him. When danger came by sea or land he was no longer weak; he no longer shivered and shook, but was able to battle with it as others did. He was a man at last like other men. He could hardly believe it himself, but so it was. From the day he came out of Sandy's house he was a man with courage. He held up his head, and though the marks were on his face, there was no one in the island who ever mocked him again. And before long he had the offer of a share in a fishing-boat. This was not all. The war came on in a few months, and the lads of the island who had plenty of courage for fighting went away for soldiers, and on the morning they left-marching gloriously with a piper before them -they came round purposely by Auchenbrae singing the stirring songs of battle. When he heard them, the man who had been without courage gave a great start, and stood listening in joy and amazement. His wife put her apron to her eyes and laughed with pleasure and pride. "What will Neil's wife say now, I wonder?" said she. For the thing that had seemed impossible had come to pass, and the men of Dorn were away to the peril and the glory singing the songs of Angus Auchenbrae. Lydia Miller Mackay. THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN. inquiry into the conditions of child and female labor throughout the country; but thanks to the Constitution, the Federal Government, while it may inquire, is debarred from going further. He discusses with approval the imposition of a tax on incomes, but he admits that such a tax has been declared unconstitutional once and may be again. President Roosevelt, for whom there is a right and a wrong in everything, and who can hardly conceive of a proposition having more than two sides to it, is a preacher by necessity. But if on its philosophical side his Message of last Tuesday had an almost automatic familiarity of manner, its matter, the programme it outlined and the suggestions embodied in it, were for the most part as novel as It is, however, altogether the conthey were striking. We refer less to cern of Americans and of no one else any specific proposal, though his ad- if their Constitution — socially, indusvocacy of an inheritance tax marks trially and politically-shows signs the beginning of a revolution in the of breaking down. But it is a matter social finance of the United States, of world-wide moment if it also fails than to the general tone of his message. internationally. That it does so fail Never before has a President is by far the most important item in strongly emphasized the inadequacies the President's bill of complaints. He of an eighteenth-century Constitution acknowledges in so many words that, in the face of twentieth-century con- as things are at present, it is imditions, and his insistence is all the possible for the Federal Government more significant for being in a measure to "protect aliens in the rights secured oblique and unconscious, an inference to them under solemn treaties which from his main thesis rather than the are the law of the land." Such an thesis itself, touched upon and recog- admission seems to us to establish benized but nowhere elaborated. Let us yond question that in one most vital take some examples: The President branch of its foreign relations the wishes to regulate the great corpora- United States Government is little tions by legislation analogous to our more than a phantom Government. It Company Laws, but without an amend- is now officially admitted that, if any ment to the Constitution he doubts State in the American Union makes up whether such legislation is possible. He its mind to defy or ignore a treaty to advocates a national marriage and di- which the United States has put its vorce law; the Constitution forbids it. seal, the Federal Government is helpHe urges Congress to pass an eight- less to compel obedience. In everyhours Bill; the Constitution limits its thing that relates to the rights and application to those engaged in inter- privileges of aliens in the United State commerce — that is, to the railway States, the national Government, by employees. He points out the neces- its own confession, is not an organic sity of developing technical instruction and responsible whole. It may enter in industries and agriculture along into treaties, but it cannot enforce broad and uniform lines, but he has them; its authority may at any moto confess that the Constitution leaves ment, and with entire impunity, be set such matters wholly to the whims of at naught by any town or State in individual States. He pleads for an the Commonwealth; outside the dis trict of Columbia its writ does not run. Students of the American Constitution and of American history have long known this to be the fact. The point is no new one; nearly every country in Europe has had occasion to argue it out with the United States Government; but it has been reserved for the Japanese to bring home to Americans its chaotic and humiliating consequences, and to extort from an American President the first clear and official admission both of the national duty in the matter and of the national inability to fulfill that duty. That unquestionably is something, but no one who is really acquainted with the workings of the American Constitution I will think it much. It is our deliberate judgment that before treaties can be made "the supreme law of the land," in the ordinary, the effective, the European sense of the words, the American Constitution will have to be unimaginably remodelled. At present the provisions of a treaty have no more than the validity of an Act of Congress. A treaty may be negotiated, and an Act of Congress a year later may override every one of its clauses. A treaty may be declared unconstitutional, and therefore null and void, by the Supreme Court. In assenting to a treaty the Federal Government may as easily exceed its Constitutional prerogatives as in passing any ordinary legislative measure. It cannot do by treaty what it is forbidden to do by the Constitution; and no international fact which could be proved to be an invasion of the reserved rights of the States or to be in any way inconsistent with the Constitution, would be worth the paper it was written on. And that of course enormously expands the area of possible complications. It is not only that the execution of a treaty against the determination of a single recalcitrant State is impossible under the American system by any means short of civil war. It is also that its very validity, its right to be a treaty at all, may at any time be called into question. We see no way in which these fundamental defects can be remedied; but until they are remedied it is obvious that to speak of the United States Government is from the international standpoint to speak of something that scarcely exists. Its But the difficulty with Japan over the education of Japanese children in San Francisco raises other than merely Constitutional questions. The Pacific coast is a hot-bed of anti-Orientalism. It carries to its highest pitch of virulence that hatred and contempt of the darker races which is almost an American instinct. Its position exposes it to the full tide of Asiatic immigration. It suffers most and benefits most by the opening and development of the Far East, but what it gains commercially it is determined not to lose either socially or economically. business and politics are dominated by trade-unionism, and the sentiment of the pioneer of colonial times towards the Red man not only animates the Californian's attitude towards the Yellow man, but is intensified by his panic terror of being undersold and degraded to the economic level of his thrifty and tireless competitors. The same hostility, due to the same causes and finding expression in the same ways that led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, is now being turned against the Japanese; and no one can doubt that the separation of Orientals in schools apart from American children is the first gun in a campaign that will not cease until the immigration of Japanese coolies and artisans into the United States is peremptorily forbidden. That is the Californian programme. Is it impossible that it should become the American programme? The country is awakening from its old heedless con |
