Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/47

 complainingly the querulous repinings which now came from the broken-spirited defeated man.

One winter afternoon, as the rain was falling drearily in the cheerless streets of Sacramento, Barnard lay a-dying. He had quite loosed his hold on life and was drifting out into the dim sea beyond. He rallied and returned; fix ing his fading eyes upon his tearful wife, he difficultly said: "They will make diamonds yet; I may come back and tell them how to prepare the materials; but you shall have the secret now. Take of carbonic acid." The jaw fell, and his cherished secret died with the baffled Diamond Maker of Sacramento.

N this world there are no quarrels I so bitter as the quarrels between brothers, no feuds so uncompromising as family feuds. Kinsfolk are proverbiably the worst neighbors, and it is often said that particular individuals are too much alike to agree. This has been the case in all ages of the world.

Three thousand years ago, in the land near to the cradle of the human race, there was strife "between the herdmen of Abram's cattle and the herdmen of Lot's cattle," which increased in bitterness until one of the brothers said to the other: "Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me. If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left." And so the families divided the one from the other.

The world is as full of this malignant spirit now as it was in the days of the Patriarchs, and nations seem to be even more under its influence than families. Those nations which, by similarity of institutions or consanguinity, ought to be the best of friends, prove against every rule of reason to be the worst of enemies; while on the other hand, those who are most remote in geographical position, or which are governed by the most antagonistic systems, appear, on the surface at least, to be the closest kin,

We Americans are proud of our Anglo-Saxon blood and origin. We claim as our own the laws, the traditions, the poetry, and the romance of Britian. These are our inheritance as much as they are the inheritance of the veriest Cockney, born within the sound of Bow bells. Yet we dread and fear the power of our kindred of that nation, and with a strange anomaly, look with trusting confidence to the Muscovite despotism, of all the powers of Europe, for sympathy and neighborly love. And this confidence appears, at least on the surface, to be justified by the whole experience of the nation's life. Among all the disappointments which showered upon the loyal people of America during the four years between the fall of Fort Sumter and the capture of Richmond, scarcely one was more unexpected than the circumstance that the public opinion of all of the world, sufficiently enlightened to be of consequence, was enlisted in behalf of the enemies of our country. And this, aggravated by the obvious fact that the nearer to ourselves in civilization and in consanguinity, the more pronounced was the judgment, the more decided the repugnance to our cause. That which in Austria and in Spain was simply passive deprecation, in France and Belgium grew to be outspoken opposition, and in England and Scotland