the broader walks of English political life. Whatever may be our side in politics, we have no reason to suspect our opponents of directly filling their pockets at the public cost.

brought themselves to forget their party of the chief ward-meetings. I was greatly differences, or rather party names, and to struck by the general hearty enthusiasm work together for the welfare and honor in what was not a party struggle, but an of their common city. The movement honest effort for something above party. was described to me in a way at which I The speaking was vigorous, straightforhave already hinted, as an union of the ward, often in its way eloquent. It was honest men of both parties against the somewhat more personal than we are used rogues of both parties. And such, as far to in England, even at an election. But as I could judge, it really was. I did here again my comparison is perhaps not indeed hear it whispered that such fits of a fair one. As I before said, I know virtue were not uncommon, both in Phil-nothing of English municipal elections, adelphia and elsewhere, that they wrought and the Philadelphian reformers had to some small measure of reform for a year deal with evils which have no parallel in or two, but that in order to keep the ground that had been gained, a continuous effort was needed which men were not willing to make, and that things fell back into their old corrupt state. And it is certainly plain that the man who gains by maintaining corruption is likely to make great habitual efforts to keep up a corrupt system, while the man who opposes it, who gains nothing by opposing it, but who gives up his time, his quiet, and his ordinary business, for the public good, is tempted at every moment to relax his efforts. This failure of continued energy is just what Demosthenes complains of in the Athenians of his day; and experience does seem to show that here is a weak side of democratic government. To keep up under a popular system an administration at once pure and vigorous does call for constant efforts on the part of each citizen which it needs some selfsacrifice to make. The old saying that what is everybody's business is nobody's business becomes true as regards the sounder part of the community. But it follows next that what is everybody's business becomes specially the business of those whose business one would least wish it to be. Yet my Philadelphian friends assured me that they had been steadily at work for ten years, that they had made some way every year, but that this year they had made more way than they had ever made before. The immediate business was to dislodge "bosses" and other corrupt persons from the municipal councils, and to put in their stead men of character and ability, whether Republican or Democratic in politics. And this object, surely one much to be sought for, was, as far as I could see, largely accomplished. I did indeed hear the murmurs of one or two stern Republicans, who could not understand supporting a list which contained any Democratic names. But the other view seemed to be the popular one. I read much of the fugitive election literature, and attended one

A municipal election is of more importance in America than it is in England, because of the large powers, amounting to powers of local legislation, which are vested in the cities. This would seem to be the natural tendency of a federal system. It would indeed be inaccurate to say that the city is to the State what the State is to the Union. For the powers of the city may of course be modified by an act of the State legislature, just as the powers of an English municipal corporation may be modified by an act of Parliament, while no mere act of Congress, nothing short of a constitutional amendment, can touch the powers of a sovereign State. But it is natural for a member of an Union, keeping independent powers by right, to allow to the members of its own body a large amount of local independence, held not of right but of grant. An American city is more thoroughly a commonwealth, it has more of the feelings of a commonwealth, than an English city has. As for the use of the name, we must remember that in the United States every corporate town is called a "city," while, in some States at least, what we should call a market-town bears the legal style of "village." In New England the cities are interlopers. They have largely obscured the older constitution of the towns. The word town in New England does not, as with us, mean a collection of houses, perhaps forming a political community, perhaps not. It means a certain space of the earth's surface, which may or may not contain a town in our sense, but whose inhabitants form a political community in either case. Its assembly is the townmeeting, the survival, or rather revival, of the old Teutonic assembly on the soil of the third England. This primitive insti

tution best keeps its ancient character in | tion in the House of Representatives the country districts and among the spoken of as something quite exceptional, smaller towns in our sense of the word. as an instance of the direct influence of Where a "city" has been incorporated, an upright and noble personal character. the ancient constitution has lost much of I heard part of the trial of his murderer, its importance. It has not been abol- and a strange scene it was. From all ished. In some cases at least the two that I saw and heard and read on the constitutions, of town and city, the Teu- matter, I was led to the conclusion that, tonic primary assembly and the later sys- though some other judges on both sides tem of representative bodies, go on side of the ocean might, simply as being by side in the same place. Each has its stronger men, have managed the trial own range of subjects; but it is the ten- better, yet that the judge who tried it was dency of the newer institution to over- not technically to blame. I gathered that shadow the older. I deeply regret that I he really had no power to stop Guiteau's left America without seeing a New En- interruptions. The constitution provides gland town-meeting with my own eyes. only that the prisoner shall have the "asIt was a thing which I had specially sistance of counsel." Now English counwished to see, if only in order to compare sel, and American counsel too of the it with what I had seen in past years in higher class, would have thrown up their Uri and Appenzell. But when I was first briefs when the prisoner insisted on talkin New England, it was the wrong time of ing himself. But Guiteau's counsel were the year, and my second visit was very not of the higher class; and I speak as a short. I thus unavoidably lost a very layman with trembling-it may be doubtfavorable chance of seeing what I con- ed whether the English usage depends on ceive that the English parish vestry ought anything more than an honorable underto be but is not. And I am not sure that standing. The truth seems to be that some of my New England friends did not no lawgiver in any time or place ever forelook a little black at me, because the im- saw the possibility of such a prisoner as mediate cause of my failure was an old Guiteau, and that therefore there was no standing engagement to a gentleman of law ready made which exactly suited his New York of Democratic principles. case. Again, though the proceedings in the American courts are, in all essential points for wigs and gowns are not essential points-so like our own, yet the arrangements for the distribution of judicial action are very different. In England such a case would have been tried before a judge perhaps more than one judge of the highest class. And till I reached Washington, I took for granted that the judge to whom so important a duty was intrusted was one of the sages of the Supreme Court. I soon found however that _Guiteau_was being tried before a magistrate of greatly inferior rank, answering rather to a recorder or a county court judge among ourselves. The indictment, it may be remarked, did not specify the murder of a president as differing at all from the murder of another man. The slain man was simply James Abram Garfield, being in the peace of God and of the United States." From the pleadings of Guiteau's counsel I carried away one of the choicest fallacies that I ever heard. The prisoner must be mad, because he had shot a president of the United States. Sane people might kill an European king, for European kings were not the choice of their people, and were often their oppressors. But no sane man could wish to harm a president of the

Of "society," in the technical sense, the sense which gives rise to the odd New York phrases of "society woman" and "society girl," I do not suppose that I saw much. I received a great deal of very kind hospitality, and I made many acquaintances which I hope to keep; but at dinners and other receptions, often got up specially for a stranger, you can judge but imperfectly of the way in which people live among themselves. But I seemed to remark, and I have heard the remark from others, that immediate national politics do not form so constant a subject of discourse in America as they do in England. This, I suppose, has something to do with the same set of causes which have given the word "politics" the special and not altogether pleasant meaning which it bears in America. When reached America the immediate mourn ing for the late President was hardly over; before I came away, the natural reaction had begun; some newspapers had begun to speak against his memory. Yet the general conviction seemed very deep that the loss was a real and heavy one, and that the great work of purifying the federal administration had undergone a great check. I always heard Garfield's posi

66 one

United States, the choice of the people. | tution with such changes
The advocate must have underrated the
intelligence even of the black member of
the jury, who must surely have remem-
bered that the liberator of his race died
by the hands of a murderer whom no one
looked on as mad. And it would be
strange if no one of the twelve could go
on to argue that a hereditary king, who
comes to his crown by no fault, indeed by
no act, of his own, need not offend any
one by the mere fact of his accession,
while the accession of an elective magis-
trate must disappoint somebody and com-
monly offends a powerful party.

- very great and important changes beyond doubt as change of circumstances made needful. But as those circumstances have certainly not been changed back again, it is at least not likely that the constitution of America will ever be brought nearer than it now is to the constitution of England, however likely it may be that the constitution of England may some day be brought nearer to the constitution of America. It was therefore with unfeigned wonder that I read the reflections of an English member of Parliament who lately gave the world his impressions of American travel. To the "spoils system" I have already He too was struck with the likeness bereferred. I suppose it has no advocates tween the two systems; but the practical in England, and it seems to be condemned inference which he drew from the likeness by the general right feeling of America, was that the American system might though we may fear that it will be a hard easily be brought into complete conformwork to get rid of a system in which so ity with the English model. The presimany are interested, and in which so dent was so like a king that it would be many more fancy that they some time easy to change him into one; the Senate may be. I must confess that the love of was so like a House of Lords that it office, in the shape which it often takes would be easy to change it into one. It in America, is to me rather hard to un- only needed to bring the hereditary prinderstand. I can understand a man tak ciple into both institutions, and the thing ing a great post, say a foreign legation would be done at once. Yes; only how or a seat in the Cabinet, even with the could the hereditary principle be brought certainty that it must be resigned at the in? Where are the hereditary king and end of four years. I do not understand the hereditary lords to be found? This any one wishing for smaller offices, which ingenious political projector forgot that carry no special dignity or authority, and you cannot call hereditary kings and which must be an interruption to a man's hereditary lords into being by a constituordinary career, whatever that may be. tional amendment. If one could ever be I can understand a man entering the post- tempted to use the ugly and outlandish office, or any other branch of the public word prestige, it would be to explain the service, as the work of his life; I cannot position of such hereditary elements in a understand a man wishing to be a local free State. Where they exist, they cerpostmaster for four years and no longer. tainly have a kind of effect on the mind Yet the number of office-seekers the which can hardly be accounted for by any word has becomingly followed the thing rational principle, and which does savor - in America is very wonderful. of something like sleight-of-hand. Where they exist, their existence is the best argument in their favor, and by virtue of that argument they may go on existing for ages. But you cannot create them at will. A profound truth was uttered by the genealogist who lamented the hard fate of Adam in that he could not possibly employ himself with his own favorite study. And in no time or place would an attempt at creating hereditary offices of any kind seem to be more hopeless than in the United States at the present day. Genealogy is a favorite American study; but it is not studied with any political object. The destiny of the country has gone steadily against the growth of any hereditary traditions. There has been no opportunity, such as there often has been in other commonwealths, for the

One of the points on which I have always tried to insist most strongly is the true historic connection between the constitutions of England and of the United States. It might be a good test of those who have and those who have not made comparative politics a scientific study, to see whether they are most struck by the likenesses or the unlikenesses in the two systems. The close analogy in the apportionment of power among the ele ments of the State is a point of likeness of far more moment even than the difference in the form of the executive, much more than that of the different constitution of the upper house. The American constitution, as I have rather made it my business to preach, is the English consti

growth of ascendency in particular fami- | side; the Union, like all other human lies which might form the kernel of an communities, must look for its trials, its aristocratic body. The first president ups and downs, in the course of its hisand nearly all his most eminent successors left no direct male descendants or no descendants at all. It is only in the family of the second president that anything -like hereditary eminence has been prominent, and the 'two Adamses were just those among the earlier and greater presidents, who failed to obtain re-election. Since their days everything has tended more and more in the opposite direction; every year that the Union has lasted has made such dreams as those of our English legislator more and more utterly vain. When a thing is said to lie "beyond the range of practical politics," it commonly means that it will become the most immediately practical of all questions a few months hence. But one might really use the phrase in safety when dealing with such a scheme as that of changing the elective president into a hereditary king and the elective Senate into a hereditary House of Lords.

toric life. It has indeed had its full share of them already. The other members of the great family may well be proud that the newest, and in extent the vastest, among the independent settlements of their race, has borne, as it has borne, a strain as hard as any community of men was ever called on to go through. And we of the motherland may watch with special interest the fortunes of that branch of our own people on whom so great a calling has been laid. And truly we may rejoice that, with so much to draw them in other ways, that great people still remains in all essential points an English people, more English very often than they themselves know, more English, it may be, sometimes than the kinsfolk whom they left behind in their older home.

EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

From Temple Bar.

ROBIN.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THOSE who, with eyes open, stand lingering on the edge of a precipice, are often surprised at the slight touch which sends them over. Some unexpected drift

some passing gust for a moment draws them nearer, and, already dizzy, they lose their footing before they realize their danger.

I might go on into endless detail in smaller matters, matters many of them of no small interest, on points of language, manners, and the like. But I have per- BY MRS. parr, author of ADAM AND EVE." haps put on record all that is best worth preserving in my impressions of some of the most important points which come home to a traveller in the great English land beyond the ocean. I naturally look at things from my own point of view; let others look at them and speak of them from theirs. To me the past history and present condition of the United States is, before all things, a part of the general history of the Teutonic race, and specially of its English branch. Of that history the destiny, as far as it has already been worked out, of the American commonwealths forms no unimportant part. And their future destiny is undoubtedly the greatest problem in the long story of our race. The union on American soil of so much that is new and so much that is old, above all the unwitting preservation in the new land of so much that is really of the hoariest antiquity in the older world, the transfer of an old people with old institutions to an altogether new world, and that practically a boundless world, supply subjects for speculation deeper perhaps than any earlier stage of the history of our race could have supplied. Like all other human institutions, the political and social condition of the United States has its fair and its dark VOL. XL. 2030

LIVING AGE,

Such a whirlwind had overtaken Jack and Robin, urging them to a step which, even before parting, they began to repent of making. Alas! how few of us dare measure strength with temptation! Secure, as we may think, at every point, there is yet some vulnerable spot by which we may be taken.

Robin, hurrying through the thicket, over the now dried-up brook, and back by the way she had been first led in coming, felt as if flying from something she could not escape. Certain words went sounding in her ears, repeating themselves in her mind, while their meaning eluded her,

"Go away-away with Jack - away from Christopher."

She rang the changes on these three sentences without feeling much affected by either. The numbness which follows