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find an American publisher-one too, with an especially welldeserved reputation for the excellence of his list of books, lending his name, and with it a certain voucher for merit, to a book that is quite without reason for its existence.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Joan; A Tale. By Rhoda Broughton. 8vo., paper, 75 cents. York: D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Pp. 216. New

Translated into
Folio, pp. 212.

History of the Mexican Railway. By Gustavo Baz and E. L. Gallo. English by George F. Henderson. Illustrated by lithograph plates. Mexico: Gallo & Co. [Mexican Centennial Commission. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Michigan, for the year 1875. From State Agricultural College Library, Michigan.

12mo., cloth, $2.00. Pp. 382. Bos

In the Levant. By Charles Dudley Warner. ton: James R. Osgood & Co. [Porter & Coates, Fridthjof's Saga: A Norse Romance. By Esaias Tegnér. Translated from the Swedish by Thomas A. E. Holcomb and Martha A. Lyon Holcomb. 12mo., cloth, $1.50. Pp. 222. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. [Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. The Centennial Frog and Other Stories. 16mo., cloth, $1.00. Pp. 45. Philadel phia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

The Barton Experiment. By the author of "Helen's Babies." 16m0., paper, 50 cents. Pp. 208. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [J. B. Lippincott & Co. The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. By Charles Duke Yonge. 8vo., cloth. Pp. 473. New York: Harper & Brothers. [J. B. Lippincott & Co. Three Memorial Poems. By James Russell Lowell. 16mo., cloth, $1.25. Pp. 92. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. [Porter & Coates.

Poems by Clement Biddle. With photographs and cuts, 8vo., cloth, $5.50. 115. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Baker.

Pp.

Harold: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. (Author's Edition from advance sheets.) 16mo., cloth, $1.00. Pp. 170. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. [Poiter & Coates.

THE

PENN MONTHLY.

FEBRUARY.

THE MONTH.

HE Conference of diplomatists at Constantinople, in their ne

THE

gotiations with the Sublime Porte, have certainly not been playing a very dignified part. Day after day they met and adjourned without receiving any definite answer to their exceedingly mild proposals for guarantees for the future of the Eastern Christians. They asked not for the autonomy of Bulgaria, but (1) for the organization of a Bulgarian gendarmie after the model of that of Belgium and with a Belgian nucleus, but in the pay of the Turkish Government and wearing its insignia of office; and (2) for the supervision of the appointment of the Governors of the two provinces into which they wished the country divided. They would not exclude the Turkish troops from Bulgaria, but they would confine them to certain localities. And to secure the execution of the agreement, they asked for the power to create an international commission with advisory and supervisory powers. Count Bismarck grew sick of these undignified concessions and parings down. On the 11th he telegraphed his displeasure to the German minister, and forbade him to sign any more such concessions without first telegraphing their text to Berlin. And even the English cabinet telegraphed to the Porte that they were of one mind on the subject, and that Turkey need expect no help from England if she refused these terms.

Yet on the 15th the English representative on behalf of the Conference submitted another ultimatum, in which everything

worth having in the other proposals was passed over in silence; a mixed commission of Turks and Europeans-fox and geesewas proposed; the supervision of the appointment of governors for five years only was asked-and nothing more.

To all this the Porte replied with offer of promises-promisespromises. The paper guarantees of 1856 would be renewed and reduplicated without end, but not one step would the Sultan and his advisers take towards any other sort of guarantee. And as a last resort, they fell back upon their new paper constitution; the Sultan could not consent to such things without consulting the Grand Council,—one hundred and eighty of his creatures, who dare not open their lips except to echo his wishes. This act of the diplomatic farce was played on the eighteenth, and of course the proposals of the Conference were voted down unanimously. The telegraph agents were careful to let us know that a third of the Assembly were Christians, and that the Greek and Armenian patriarchs spoke in favor of repelling the European proposals. But they do not add what they, as being on the spot, know very well, that these exalted dignitaries are appointed to office and removed from it by the Sultan at his pleasure; and that this latter power is very frequently exercised upon small provocation. If we are not mistaken, there are several ex-patriarchs of both churches. yet alive, and meditating on the instability of fortune in monastic cells.

THAT Russia went so far in concession was disappointing, unless it had the purpose of putting Turkey still more clearly in the wrong at the bar of public opinion, and with the foregone certainty that the Porte would concede nothing. It seemed to confirm the rumors that her financial and military condition were not such as to make war easy for her, and that the Government had been holding back the popular enthusiasm not so much from a love of peace as from a sense of its own embarrassments.

Poland too is an embarrassment; she is again "searching for a sword in her sepulchre." An advance upon Russia might set Warsaw in a blaze of insurrection; for the Roman Catholics of Europe, from the Pope down, feel no sympathy with the new crusade, and the Roman Catholics of Poland have but little reason to wish Russia any success. It is thus that the Nemesis of past sins comes down upon men and nations, not in the guilty moments of

their wrong-doing, but in some hour of noble aspirations and purposes, when the hand that was raised to do justice falls in powerlessness, because the Avenger's clutch is on their own throat. Ye shall watch while nations strive With the blood-hounds, die or survive, Drop faint from their jaws,

Or throttle them back into death
And only under your breath

Shall favor the cause.

THE extradition muddle has ended in the only proper way, by England receding from an untenable position, and ordering the re-arrest and surrender of the American criminals whom her judges had discharged from custody. The English affection for smugglers may be a very laudable one-as praiseworthy as Mr. David A. Wells thinks it. But it may be carried too far; and even the sacred interests of those who set American revenue laws at defiance are not to be tenaciously guarded at the cost of exposing all the vaults and strong-boxes of England to the depredations of such as are light of finger and of heel. The course of our Department of State throughout the negotiations has been most admirable; our national dignity has been in safe hands. And we earnestly hope that no modification of the existing Treaty of Extradition will be agreed to, farther than to forbid the punishment of political offenses committed previously.

The example of Spain in surrendering Tweed to the United States in the absence of any Treaty of Extradition, just as President Lincoln surrendered Spanish criminals, had much to do with England's retreat from her false position; but it is well that such a treaty with Spain has now been negotiated.

THIS seems destined to be remembered as a winter of great calamities. In India the famine we spoke of last month, is assuming frightful proportions, and will take rank beside that of a century ago under the administration of Warren Hastings. At home the burning of the Brooklyn theatre is followed, by the utter destruction of an express train on the Lake Shore railroad. About a mile from Ashtabula, Ohio, the railroad crosses the Ashtabula creek at the height of seventy-five feet above the stream. The iron bridge, resting on abutments of solid masonry, had been constructed three

years ago, and was, to all appearance, in as good condition as ever. But it gave way under the weight of two locomotives and two express cars, precipitating everything except the forward locomotive upon the ice. The cars, of course, were soon in a blaze, yet although there was an ample supply of water and of pumping apparatus close at hand, nothing was done to extinguish the flames, so that very few of the nearly two hundred passengers escaped a horrible death. The railroad employees, when asked by persons on the spot why the water was not used, alleged an order by telegraph from the superintendent of the road, but at the coroner's inquest they stoutly denied this.

No reason has yet been discovered for the bridge's giving way. The editor of the Iron Age declares from personal knowledge that its construction was such that even if one or more of the cars had leaped the track, the bumping would not have caused the fracture. Of the structure in general he says: "While not as perfect in its details as some of the bridges since built, it is not one which could be condemned off-hand, nor one with which the intelligent and impartial engineer would have been likely to find fault." He adds: "If a bridge well built of good materials, and nearly, if not exactly correct in its proportions, suddenly and without warning sinks in shapeless ruin under a load which could not have been within many hundreds of tons of the weights which have rolled over it safely during the period of its service, it offers a problem to the engineer which contains some new and important factors. Why may we not expect such a disaster at any moment and on any road? We know there are plenty of cheap, badly-built bridges, which the engineers are watching with anxious fears, and which, to all appearance, only stand by the grace of God. When these fail we are not surprised; but when a bridge like that at Ashtabula fails under the weight of two engines and, at most, two cars, after several years' service under a heavy freight and passenger traffic, we realize how much we have still to learn of the art of bridge building."

The simplest inference, it seems to us, is the unfitness of iron for building bridges, and the wisdom of substituting stone for that material in all such structures. The tenacity of iron under different conditions differs so greatly, that the tests which an iron bridge will sustain under one set of conditions furnish no certainty as to

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