ing men to his person, a rare organizing faculty, and plenty of audacity.

His position in Illinois was now such as placed any of its political honors within his easy reach. After serving a short time as its secretary of state, he was appointed judge of its Supreme Court, in which capacity he served three years, and was then, against his will, nominated for representative in Congress. Elected to Congress by the small majority of four hundred, he was re-elected by a majority of nineteen hundred, again reelected by a majority of three thousand, and at about the same time, he was elected a senator of the United States. March 4th, 1847, being then thirty-six years of age, he took his seat in the Senate, and continued to represent Illinois in that body to the close of his life.

His career in Congress presents a strange mixture of good and evil. I believe that he was an incorruptible man, though no one ever had more or better chances to gain money unlawfully. Once, when he was confined to his room by an abscess, he was waited upon by a millionnaire, who offered to give him a deed for two and a half millions of acres of land, now worth twenty millions of dollars, if he would merely give up a certain document.

"I jumped for my crutches," Douglas used to say in telling the story; "he ran from the room, and I gave him a parting blow upon the head."

In these days, when there is so much corruption in politics, and so many rings among politicians and others, it is a pleasure to read a story like this.

At the same time, he was a remarkably expert and successful manager. If any man could get a bill through Congress, he could. He did not care much to shine as a speaker, and, indeed, he did not excel as a speaker in Congress. What he prided himself upon was his skill and success in getting a troublesome measure passed, and in effecting this, he was quite willing that others should have all the glory of openly advocating it. He has been known to spend two years in engineering a bill, devoting most of his time to it, and yet never once speaking

upon it. This was the case with the long series of measures which resulted in the Illinois Central Railroad.

His faults were great and lamentable. Like so many other public men who spend their winters in Washington, he lived too freely and drank too much. If he was a skilful politician; he was sometimes an unscrupulous one, and supported measures for party reasons, which he ought to have opposed for humane and patriotic ones. He said himself that President Polk committed the gigantic crime of "precipitating the country into the Mexican war to avoid the ruin of the Democratic party," and knowing this, he supported him in it. His rapid and uniform success as a politician inflamed his ambition, and he made push after push for the presidency, and finally permitted his party to be divided rather than postpone his hopes. He was in too much of a hurry to be president.

I have been much interested lately in reading his own account of the celebrated scene in Chicago, when he, who had been the favorite of Illinois for twenty years, was hooted for four or five hours for having procured the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. On his way home from Washington he received letters from friends, warning him that if he appeared in Chicago he would be killed. He went, nevertheless, and soon announced his intention to address his fellow-citizens in front of a wellknown public hall.

"When the day arrived," said he, "the flags were hung at half-mast on the shipping in the harbor, and for several hours before the time appointed all the church-bells in the city were tolled, at which signal the mob assembled in a force of about ten thousand. I had forty or fifty men who pretended to be with me privately, but not half a dozen were so openly; they were all afraid. At the appointed hour I repaired to the meeting and went upon the stand, and was greeted by that unearthly yell taught and practised in the Know-Nothing lodges, a howl no man can imitate. I stood and looked at the mob until the howling ceased. When they ceased I commenced by saying :— "I appear before you to-night for the purpose of vindicating the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.'

"Before the sentence was ended the howl began again. When

it ceased I would begin, and as soon as I commenced it was renewed. At times I appealed to their pride, as the champions of free speech, for a hearing; the howling was renewed; at other times I would denounce them as a set of cowards who came armed with bowie-knives and pistols to put down one man, unarmed, afraid to hear the truth spoken, lest there might be some honest men amongst them who would be convinced. At one time I got a hearing for ten or fifteen minutes, and was evidently making an impression upon the crowd, when there marched in from the outside a body of three or four hundred men with red shirts, dressed as sailors, and thoroughly armed, who moved through the crowd immediately in front of the stand, and then peremptorily ordered me to leave it. I stood and looked at them until they ceased yelling, and then denounced them and put them at defiance, and dared them to shoot at an unarmed man. The pistols began to fire all around the outside of the crowd, evidently into the air; eggs and stones were throws at the stand, several of them hitting men that were near me, and for several hours this wild confusion and fury continued. The wonder is that amid that vast excited crowd no one was so far excited or maddened as to fire a ball at me. The stand was crowded with my enemies, reporters, and newspaper men, and this was undoubtedly my best protection. I stood upon the front of the stand, in the midst of that confusion, from eight o'clock in the evening until a quarter past twelve at night, when I suddenly drew my watch from my pocket and looked at it, in front of the crowd, and in a distinct tone of voice said, at an interval of silence, 'It is now Sunday morning, I'll go to church, and you may go to hell!' and I retired amidst the uproar, got into my carriage, and rode to my hotel. The crowd followed the carriage, and came near throwing it off the bridge into the river as we crossed; they had seized it for that purpose, and lifted it, but the driver whipped his horses violently, and dashed through and over them, and went to the Tremont House, where I retired to my room. The mob, at least five thousand, followed, and commenced their howls in Lake Street, fronting my room. The landlord begged me to leave the house, fearing they would burn it up, whereupon I raised my window, walked

out on the balcony, took a good look at them, and told them that the day would come when they would hear me, and then bade them good-night."

It is impossible not to feel some admiration for such nerve as this. The time did come when the people heard him. During the last years of his life he regained much of his former popularity; and when, on the breaking out of the rebellion in 1861, he gave his hand to Abraham Lincoln, and engaged to stand by him in his efforts to save the country, all his errors were instantly forgiven. But his days were numbered. During his herculean labors of the previous year he had sustained himself by deep draughts of whiskey; and his constitution gave way at the very time when a new and nobler career opened up before him.

Douglas grew stout as he advanced in life. When I saw him first, he was standing on the balcony of the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, with his hands in his pockets, a cigar in his mouth, a battered soft hat on his head, and his large face as red as fire. He was the very picture of a western bar-room politician. But when afterwards I saw him nicely dressed, in the Senate Chamber, bustling about among the members, with his papers in his hand, he looked like a gentleman and a man of business.

NICHOLAS COPERNICUS.

COPERNICUS, the son of a Prussian surgeon, was born in 1473, ten years before the birth of Luther, and thirteen years before the discovery of America. Great men appear to come in groups. About the same time were born the man who revolutionized science, the man who reformed religion, the man who added another continent to the known world, and the man who invented printing. So, in later times, Watt, the improver of the steam-engine, Hargrave and Arkwright, the inventors of the spinning machinery, began their experiments almost in the same year.

Of the early years of Copernicus, we only know that he studied his father's profession of medicine, and that he exhibited a singular love of mathematics, which led him naturally to the study of astronomy.

Our word, mathematics, is derived from a Greek word which signifies knowledge; implying that the truths of mathematics are certainties, while the results of other inquiries are questionable; indicating, also, that mathematics is the basis of all the sciences, geography, astronomy, chemistry, and even of history and politics. From its difficulty, as well as from its importance, it has some claim to be considered as knowledge, par excellence. It is the key to knowledge and the test of knowledge; so that nothing in science can be considered established, till it is demonstrated mathematically.

Carlyle says that the best indication in a boy of a superior understanding is a turn for mathematics. When a boy in addition to a decided mathematical gift, possesses also a natural dexterity in handling tools, and an inclination to observe nature,