The Portland daily press., 1880-09-21

| INC EnSlisn crown was much nearer the Stu
arts grasp than it was thirty years later. Scot
land might have been the Pretender's had all
his friends had the courage of the earl of Mar
and the eight thousand Highland gentlemen
who rallied round him. Edinburgh Castle
would undoubtedly have been taken had not
the men who were to escalade it tarried so long
in tavern that while they were '.powdering
| their hair" their confederates under the fort
ress grew weary of waiting, and the rendez-
vous was reached too late. But for that puire-
| ris erigui jdcta of the jovia consprators all
Scotland might have been King James's, and
Northumberland and the North of England
| would have risen in force. In that ten min
utes King James lost his crown and was
doomed TO die French pensioner at St., Ger
| MAINS Prince Charlie to attempt to regain IL
| under less favorable circumstances and Cardi-
| nal York to end the hapless Stuart line amid
the wealth OF song and story which their mis-
fortunes have evoked. Had Give succeeded
| in his attempted suicide, would not the Eng
ish and the French have changed places In
India? II Lord John Russell had not shown
| an unwonted firmness when Louis Philippe
was displaying suspicious anxiety about "pri-
l ority OF discovery" at the antipodes, would our
l coionlsts nave been enjoying to-day that peace
which the absence even of such amiable neigh
bors as the French affords them? Suppose
| might or the Prussians' had not come at
| Waterloo, what would have been the result
| albeit Wellington always declared that he new
| er expressed his longing for either?
War clouds have burst, and millions of
| stout men have been slain owing to the verest
l triffes The cropping of Louis Wis chin
| brought on three centuries of bloodshed, and
sarcastic remark of Frederick the Great on
Elizabeth Petrovna OF Russia, reused that vir-
tuous empress to take such a vigorous part in
the seven years war that at one time Prussia
seemed well-nigh stricken unto death. Even
Catherine II II.-profoundly suspicious of Pots
| dam after the. scandal about Queen Eliza
I beth carefully examined her husbands cor
| respondencs before she concluded an alliance
| with the royal letter-writer. Perhaps had she
found Frederick II. condoling with Peter ILL.,,
| Europe might have been spared much misery
| and undismembered Poland been,yet in exist
| tence to hold the balance between the north
ern empires. Nor have we been much wiser
| in our generation. The fourth Caffre war be-
| gan about a stolen hatchet and the cutting
| down of a flagstaff at the Bay Of Islands in
| volved us in the wretched Maori troubles. The
l Crimean war ostensibly arose out Of the dis
| puted ownership of church key, and as late
as 1854, some men who were considered wise
enough to sit in Parliament were ready to
lives In order to settle the ownership of some
| long-legged hogs in the Falkland Islands.
Porkers, indeed, have among good Chris
I tians been always tetiremo cdusa
4eN Il is hardly forty years since
| the Texan Republic because an irate citizen
had shot the trespassing pigs Of the French
ambassador. As it was, he prevented the
Lone Star sovereignty from floating their Eu-
| ropean loan, and thus the king and the pigs
combined hastened the annexation Of Texas
to the United States. The battle Of the Nile
| was turning point in history. But it could
never have been fought had not Nelson's fleet
been permitted to revictual at Syracuse, and
into Syracuse it could never have gone had
not the wife of the English ambassador at
Naples been accidentally aware that King
Ferdinand was very foolish, and his Queen
very much the reverse. States before now have
been ceded through the accidents Of ignorance.
The Dutch are said to have "jockeyed'' us out
of Malacca in exchange for Java by represent
ing on the map, which our smple-minded en-
voys took for granted, the ono territory
as large and the other as small i and among
the most firmly rooted traditions Of American
diplomacy is one which represents the English
commissioner as agreeing to the surrender of
Oregon because country in which a salmon
| does not rise to the fly cannot be worth much. "
Laws have been altered through accident be-
| fore the queens printers boy forgot to deliver
Lord Beaconsfelds amendment to a bill
Many years ago the Georgia Legislature put
tax of $40 on "all jackasses, lawyers and doc
tors" 1t was originally only intended to sp-
ply to the first, but was finally imposed on the
two latter also, in order to tickle the grim
humor of an old planter who held the casting
vote in the Assembly.
But if trifes have determined the fate of
| laws and nations, accidents equally small have
caused men to follow pursuits the result of
culture and civilization. Father Malebranchs
devoted himself to philosophy after reading
Descartes's "L'Homme"; Cowley became a
poet owing to his perusal of Sponsors "Faerie
Queen" and Sir Joshua Reynolds had never
thought of painting until Richardson's Urea
| tise'' fell into his hands. Corneille showed no
liking for any literature except the law until
he fell in love and felt himself compelled to
tell the lady so in poetry; and Mol isre might
| have remained making tapestry had not his
| grandmother nettled his pride by wishing that
| he could be an actor like Monrose. Balboa
might never have discovered the Pacific had
he not been unsuccessful as shopkeeper in
Hispaniola, and found it necessary to flee to
| the mainland concealed from his creditors in
a cask on board Encisco's vessel; and it is GER
tain that had Cortes become a well-briefed
| lawyer in Salamanca, he would never have
| lived to proudly tell Charles V. that he had
| given him more provinces than his father had
| left him cities. Ignatius Loyola was soldier
| and the Order of Jesuits might never have
| been founded had he not accidentally beguiled
| the tedium of inaction necessitated by wound
| with reading The Lives OF the Saints" Glib
| bon determined to write his famous work after
| listening to the monks singing vespers in the
/ Temple of Jupiter at Rome; and La Fontaine
| was stimulated to cultivate literature after
hearing some verses of Malherbe. Men of sci
| ence have often been "made" by accidents as
seemingly trihing. We shall not repeat the
well-worn tale about the apple which set New
/ ton upon the track of his great discovery, for
the tale is extremely mythical; but it is true
that Flamsteed took to astronomy after having
| accidentally read Sacrobosco's "De Spharia," :"
| Pennant to natural history after seeing Will
| loughby's book on birds, Bonnet to the obser-
/ vation of insects after studying Reamur, and
| DIR. Franklin always attributed the bent of his
| scientific genius to De Foes Essay ON Pro-
| jects." Faraday might have remained jour
| neyman bookbinder had not kindly Mr.. Dance
| invited him to hear Sir Humphrey Davy Ice
ture, and Vaucanson only took to studying the
| mechanism of clocks in order to beguile the
| weary hours which he had to pass while at
| tending his mother at confession.
| Nor is it less true that great moral and polit-
| ical revolutions have taken place which might
| often have been avoided by the observance of
trifes. Guicciardini-for whose veracity Isaac
| Disraeli vouches-has left it on record that so
| terrified was Martin Luther when the Emperor
| Charles V. put him under "the ban'' that had
| he then received some preferment he would
| have "renounced his errors" But the threat
ening words of Cardinal San Sisto, the apostol-
| ic legate, threw him into such despair that he
did not care, after the insu is he had received,
| to make an effort to save himself Franklin,
| in like manner, was so annoyed at the tone
| which Lord Granville assumed toward him
that it is believed that the interview entirely
altered the conciliatory views with which the
/ agent for the colony Of Pennsylvania came TO
| England, and fastened, if it did not precipi--
| tate, the final explosion. In studying the
! chronicles Of nations, we see only the broad,
prominent events, but not the secret springs
| which are all the time modifying and moving
the actors even more powerfully. We can read
the dispatches concerning the English share in
| the Greco-Turkish war, but the Blue Book
/ contains no reference to the go 1t, Ned, F"
1 which, scrawled in the corner OF the Duke Of
Clarence's dispatch, is said to have determined
| the battle of Navarino. The shelves Of our
libraries are laden with books labelled history.
But in reality real history still remains to be
written, for the older the world is growing the
sf sn ..nls. s.xA1N 60 nit ~
/ Walpole when he told his son Horace that af-
| ter having been for half a century engaged in
| making the materials for them, three-fourths
| of the written chronicles were lies not worth
| reading.-London Standard.