vertible class). You are put on the track dict can be more dreary; and he is blessed of unexpected analogies, between the da- who can bury himself in old numbers of guerretoype and conscience, for example," Punch," in the paper of yesterday, and or some information about the art and mys- in goody-goody books about cruelty to anitery of rope-making goes before remarks mals. (which may be skipped) about the bondage of bad habits. A man with the habit of reading has a Mahommedan respect for all printed paper. He finds things he is glad to know about in the scraps inserted in the binding of old books. Important facts meet him in the greasy country newspapers which lie on the tables of rural inns. He cannot take up a mouldy octavo on a stall but he learns something from the researches of a forgotten pedant. It is true that the confirmed reader may be missing something else that is worth looking at in human life, while he pores over the productions of the feeble or the mighty minds of old. On the other hand, he has so far the advantage over the mentally dissipated mechanic, that in everything he reads he finds grist for the mill that works up the solid literary vestments of old times into the marketable shoddy which is the raiment of the modern spirit. He is working at his trade, not neglecting it, unless he is one of those misers of reading who keep all they find to themselves. There is not much to be said for the habit of reading when it merely ministers to a man's contempt for people who live their lives in the sun and the wind and are careless of books.

There is this to be said for the habit of reading, that it fills up waste hours as nothing else does, except, perhaps, the refreshment of smoking. A man who can find amusement in any printed trash suffers less than others from long periods of wait ing at railway stations. He exhausts the advertisements, and it is strange if he does not find on the bookstall some sixpenny volume which makes him laugh or wonder. The very cheapest and most trivial literature introduces you to an undreamed of world of readers and writers, about whose intellectual tastes and habits there is no other way of getting information. Who, for example, would know the whole truth about the mental vacuity of people of fashion if he did not, in some forlorn hour and place, read the literature which they love and help to construct? Who could fathom the deeps of popular politics and political economy without aid from the journals of the uninstructed? Their novels are equally strange, and equally reward research. The habit of reading is invaluable, too, when a man is waiting at a dentist's or a doctor's. No hours of waiting for a ver

It is a mistake to suppose that all born bookworms are people who have no interest in practical life, and no power of dealing with men and with circumstances. There never was a more confirmed bookworm than Napoleon, who, for all that, was, it will be allowed, "a man of action." In all his campaigns he carried a travelling library of novels. He had an official in Paris to look after his literary en cas. Just as the life of a servant was devoted to keeping a roast fowl always ready to be eaten, so this literary taster had to supply Napoleon with novels eternally fresh. From Moscow, from Madrid, he kept writing for new novels. He often complained that they were really too bad. He would read a few pages in his travelling carriage, and then throw the dull volumes out of the window, and turn, voracious, to a fresh packet. He projected a miniature travelling edition of all readable French literature, but the publication in the desired form proved too expensive, even for an emperor. This taste for trashy novels was not peculiar to Napoleon. Many men of active minds, even when refined taste is combined with activity, many judges, barristers, scholars, find rest and solace in the very poorest novels. As long as there is a plot, and a narrative, and a mystery, they are content.

The habit of reading is only noxious when it becomes, as it often does among indolent people, a disease. Their mental emptiness produces a morbid hunger; they must forever have a tattling paper in their hands. They can read only literature which deals with known people and with "personalities" and gossip, but of that they are insatiate. They have grafted on malice and idleness the form, but not the essence of the habit of reading. It is a habit which is depriving lecturers in the universities of their office, and which once threatened to silence orators. Fortunately it has been found that the speeches of orators are very useful as texts for the endless flow of printed matter which streams from the literary men. If Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield did not speak there would be nothing to write about, therefore nothing to read, and a serious void in the breakfast hour of respectable, families. Bookworms ought to be anxious to have themselves marked off as a species distinct from mere newspaper worms. There is

From The Pall Mall Gazette.
AN AMERICAN ZOLLVEREIN.

something respectable in the habit of the | nant school of politicians in this country, bookworm, which causes libraries to be then every day expected to be relieved kept up and knowledge to be stored, while from the restraining influence of Lord the devourer of the flying leaves of litera- Palmerston, and to develop its doctrines ture is another creature, a sort of butterfly vigorously under the guidance of Mr. or locust. He is indolent, ignorant, and Gladstone, had announced repeatedly and retains nothing but a confused memory of with energy that if the Canadians wished gossip, with the wrong facts affixed to the to become partners in the republican govwrong names. No honest bookworm ernment of the United States England would willingly share the habit of the news- would not say a word, much less lift a finger, paper devourer; he would rather consort to prevent them. Accordingly, the Ameriwith the depraved mechanic who lives in can project of coercing Canada into an ap a fantastic world of romance. In him preciation of the advantages of joining the there may be the undeveloped germs of Union had something more than fair play. the scholar or poet; but the languid but- Its complete failure was remarkable and terfly who settles on the leaves of the instructive. The Canadians were justly lighter press is generally nothing but a angry, and perhaps a little alarmed. They scandalmonger too lazy to walk and talk set to work at once to secure the political and pursue his profession in the old man- strength without which their neighbors ner of the Backbites and Sneerwells. For might wear them down in detail; and the the worthier habit of reading, Fulke Gre- Confederation Act of 1867 was in truth ville is the best apologist, with his confes- the Canadian retort upon the abrogation sion of the advantage of retiring from of the Reciprocity Treaty. With equal the heavy wheels of fortune" to "the courage, promptitude, and activity they safe society of books and of dead men." proceeded to defend and develop their trade, and they soon found that they had little to fear from the competition of the Americans so long, at least, as the latter bound themselves in the complicated trammels of an illogical and continually changing protective system. The growth SOME interest has been excited by a of Canadian trade in the ten years sucrumor, originating in a letter from the ceeding the confederation of 1867 was American correspondent of the Times, very marked; and the Americans saw that negotiations were likely to be re- their hopes of inducing Canada to enter opened between the government of the the Union by enforcing the threat of United States and the government of the keeping her out in the cold gradually vanDominion of Canada for the settlement of ishing. Those hopes, however, revived as the commercial controversy which has Canada began to suffer from the "hard during the last fourteen years caused much times." The aggregate imports and extrouble and loss to both countries. The ports of the Dominion amounted to $194,statement in this simple and guarded form|000,000 in 1872, and to $218,000,000 in is likely enough to be correct. The Americans are quite shrewd enough to have seen long ago that they committed a grave blunder when they "denounced" the Reciprocity Treaty with Canada in 1864; and they have felt the consequences of that blunder all the more keenly since the period of unhealthy and abnormal prosperity which followed the war came to a sudden end in the crash of 1873. When the Reciprocity Treaty was abrogated the Americans, with characteristic ignorance of Canadian feeling and character, and with equally characteristic self-conceit, were confident that Canada, unable to stand commercially alone and weakened in her political relations by the imperial policy or no-policy then prevailing at home, would throw herself without delay into the arms of the Republic. The domi

1874; in 1875 they fell to $200,000,000,
and in 1876 to $174,000,000. Of course
this decline of trade has caused much
grumbling, and the protectionists have
used it to push their attack upon free-
trade principles and their very limited
acceptance in practice by the government
and parliament of Canada.
Of course,
too, there are many Canadians who see
that if the American market were open to
them they could make a much better fight
for commercial existence. But the United
States are wedded to a protectionist policy;
and there seems very little hope for the
present that any material change will be
made in the American tariff, whatever
may be the vicissitudes of parties at Wash
ington. It is foolish to build upon the
fact -if it be a fact that the Democrats
are by principle and tradition a free-trad

ing party. The late and the present | try would have to be regarded. The corHouse of Representatives, though gov- respondent of the Times is of opinion that erned by a Democratic majority, have "if the Dominion were assured of perfect done nothing to promote free trade.

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