Ces fiers defis aux nations? (_bis_)
Pour nous Francais, oh! quelle gloire,
De montrer au monde dompte,
Que les droits de l'humanite
Sont plus sacres que la victoire!
Plus d'armes, etc.

E.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle,
the Ordeal, Torture. By Henry C. Lea. Third Edition, revised.
Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea.

Many will be tempted to say that this, like the _Decline and Fall_, is one
of the uncriticisable books. Its facts are innumerable, its deductions
simple and inevitable, and its _chevaux-de-frise_ of references bristling
and dense enough to make the keenest, stoutest and best-equipped assailant
think twice before advancing. Nor is there anything controversial in it to
provoke an assault. The author is no polemic. Though he obviously feels
and thinks strongly, he succeeds in attaining impartiality. He even
represses comment until it serves for little more than a cement for his
data. What of argument there is shapes itself mostly from his collation.
The minute and recondite records he throws together, in as much sequence
as the chaotic state of European institutions and society in the Middle
Ages will allow, are left to their own eloquence. And eloquent they are.
Little beyond the citation of them is needed to show the brutality of
chivalry, the selfish cruelty of sacerdotalism, and the wretchedness of
the masses enslaved by political and religious superstition, until Roman
law had a second time, after an interval of a thousand years, effected a
conquest of the Northern barbarians. The work does not confine itself,
historically, to that period nor to Europe, but what excursions are made
outside of that time and country are chiefly in the way of introduction
and conclusion. The moral defects which produce and perpetuate the follies
and abuses discussed by Mr. Lea are confined to no time or race. They are
inherent and abiding, and he takes care not to let us forget that the
struggle to subdue them cannot anywhere or at any time be safely relaxed.
We inherit, with their other possessions, the weaknesses and proclivities
of our ancestors, and we even find some of their specific acts of error
and injustice still imbedded in the institutions under which we live, and
more or less vividly reproduced in the routine of individual, corporate or
public existence. The compurgator slides into the