most in danger of is the opposite the divesting place and power of every external symbol of respect, and treating the occupants of high office as deserving no more regard and courtesy than is the due of every man. This slovenliness came into fashion with Jefferson, and has not yet been dissociated in the national mind from a democratic love of equal rights. Hence the raptures with which we used to hear of a President of the United States (now dead and gone) refusing a private room in a railway hotel, performing his ablutions at the public washing place, and drying himself on the public towel. The republics of the old world knew better. They knew that a free goverment can least of all dispense with those outward shows of reverence to the representatives of the people's unity and greatness, which form strong bonds of social unity, while they give color and variety to social life.

THE present session of Congress is the greatest possible contrast to the last. In that, a "fierce Democracie," with a sense of great majorities in the future, and outrageous "frauds" in the past as political capital, met with a resolution to make their enemies. squirm. They adjourned in the same high mood, after a long, picturesque, useless, but highly entertaining session. But they have come together again with the conviction that soft stepping should be the order of the day, until they get a Democrat into the White House, at any rate. Who knows what a vacation may bring forth? Cipher despatches, losses at the polls, misbehaviors in the South, a solid North-these elements disturb the Democratic peace at present. There is a growing conviction among the party leaders that they were over hasty and over confident, and that they will do well to set their house in order.

The indisposition to take up the cipher despatches as a subject of investigation is very natural. They can only make matters worse for themselves by going into that business. Mr. Tilden's declaration that he knew nothing of these villainies is already before the public, and is believed by all who can believe it. It is the very utmost that a Committee of Investigation could produce on the same side. And, luckily for the Democrats, they are under no obligation to make the investigation. Not one of the offenders, principal or secondary, holds any office under the United States.

An investigation cannot be be forced until Mr. Tilden is chosen president. In that event, it will be.

Meanwhile, the session promises to be short, uneventful and business-like. Even the process of reform by refusing to vote the money needed for the business of the government seems to have been dropped, and the saving of time through the evident purpose of the majority to abstain from speeches about Fraud, will leave room for a good deal of business. This session will be as different from the last, as is a country school when the master has stepped out and up the road, from the same school after his return. There is a consciousness of cane, in its most unpleasant relations to human palms, which the honorable gentlemen cannot get out of their minds.

When Mr. Blaine, in 1876, shook "the bloody shirt" in the air, he made the greatest mistake of his political life. That shake cost him the Republican nomination. It alienated from him the large section of the party who were tired of helping carpet-baggers and ignorant negroes to plunder and outrage the South. It brought him into prominence as a crafty politician, who would rather appeal to the prejudices than the reason of his hearers, and who seemed devoid of all magnanimity towards a fallen foe. Mr. Blaine was thus spoken of in these pages at that time; and we look back upon that criticism with satisfaction.

But when Senator Blaine rises in his place in 1878, to call attention to the outrages perpetrated on the colored voters at the South, the people of America rise with him. When he rehearses, in words chosen and guarded, the facts known to every one as to the wholesale robbery of political franchise by terrorization and fraud, every ear is listening. And when he shows that the effect of reconstruction, in connection with such doings, has been to make the white Southerner's vote count for twice or three times as much as that of a northern citizen, he commands such attention as no man has had for a year past. Tempora mutantur. The South cannot lay it to heart too soon. The majority of the American people has distinctly made up its mind that certain measures and acts are intolerable; that no parchment wall will protect them from its hot indignation, any more than that wall could defend slavery. The South should have learnt before this that written compacts about government are made for times of peace and quiet

when things go tolerably well. But when things become intolerable, when justice, the great end of government, is defeated in the name of law, then all conventions are but the green withes that bind a Samson.

If the South will settle with Mr. Blaine and his like in Congress, they will do well. It is not the Blaines who are their danger. It never was the politicians who represented the people's hatred of the wrong of slavery. The cue of the politicians was to go no farther than they could be pushed. It is with what is behind Mr. Blaine, with the popular hatred of wrong, oppression and injustice which stood four years of war without flinching, that they have to deal. And we can assure them that the temper of the last election, which solidified the North, is not the temper of the North today. For it is since those elections, that the huge black, damning atrocity of the elections at the South has been brought into people's notice.

Resumption is not to be interfered with, after all. The point of real resumption, the equality of paper with gold, was reached some fortnight before the date fixed by law. This, we hold, covered everything that was wanted, and would have come without any law on the subject. It is a state of things much easier to maintain than a similar equality will be under the law's operation. For the law provides the exact contrary of what the legislation of every other civilized country seeks. It lays bare the nation's stock of coin to the onslaught of all the selfish speculators in the land, and vests in no one the power to check the outflow of gold in response to their demands. The Bank of England, as that of France, checks excessive outflows by controlling the rate of discount. Thus it stopped, not so long ago, a borrowing operation on the part of our Treasury, by making everybody pay excessive rates for loans. The consequence of these sudden advances is to force large sales, to foreigners, of goods and stocks, and thus turn the tide of gold toward the Bank again. But the Treasury will have no such power. It is to place the whole supply of coin at the mercy of speculators engaged in foreign loans, or in large importations of foreign goods; and this not for this year, or any limited series of years, but throughout all our future. For if the

Secretary and his friends be right, then resumption involves all this, and anything less is repudiation.

The action of the New York banks, refusing to treat silver as interchangeable with other forms of money, is still the subject of hot debate. We are not of those who favored the recoinage of silver at the old standard; we think that the nation could have done better than to attempt to float millions of a debased coinage, although, as everybody knows, there is nothing new in the experiment. It has been tried, and under careful management it has succeeded, notably in France. But when once the nation decided to make the experiment, the margin of option left to the National Banks in the matter was a very narrow one. Institutions incorporated by the government, and invested with valuable franchises by the nation, have not the same choice as have private bankers in such a matter as this. They cannot, with any show of legality, make a discrimination between two forms of money which are equal in the eye of the law. Such a step is altogether inconsistent with their legal position and their national relations, and if we had a Secretary of the Treasury who cared an iota for the national dignity, or for anything but a financial theory, it would never have happened.

The measures of retaliation which have been proposed in Congress, are, for the most part, impracticable. A much shorter and easier way of bringing the New York banks to their senses, would be to abolish a great abuse of our present system. The country banks are at present allowed to keep part of their reserve on deposit in New York, where it only avails to centralize the monetary power of the country, and to facilitate gambling operations. Let Congress repeal the Acts and parts of Acts which allow of this, and require the banks to keep their reserves at home. The effect would be wholesome in every way, for it is just these reserves which make Wall Street so over-confident and insolent. Jeshurun has waxed fat and kicks; put him on a more thinning and cooling diet.

*THE Secretary's critics have been calling attention to the way

* According to the Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Secretary Sherman is reported to have said that "the large coin balances reported as being held on the funding account by National Banks are apparent and not real coin balances." In view of this, would it not be well for Congress to direct Secretary Sherman to report immediately whether any of his other balances be apparent and not real,

in which the sale of bonds was so manipulated as to secure to certain National Banks the use of great sums of government money, without any payment of interest on their part. It will be remembered that we called attention to this last summer, when it was shown, on the authority of the organs of the Treasury, that the whole condition of the money market was seriously altered by this procedure. Judge Kelly called attention to the matter at once, when Congress opened, and succeeded in getting an order for a report of the figures. A report was made, but nothing of it was allowed to transpire, except the statement that it was shown that no bank had more than it was entitled to. Not a fact or figure beyond this reached any of the papers.

More recently, Mr. Abram S. Hewitt has been taking the matter up, and has succeeded in making Mr. Sherman admit the nature of his operations. It seems that banks which subscribed for the new bonds, were allowed to get them simply on the deposit of old ones as security. From the day of their subscription, the banks drew interest on both. When, after the lapse of months, the time for settling came, they either allowed their deposited bonds to settle their subscriptions or they handed in the gold. And the Secretary, with skilful instance on the wrong shape in which the charge was formerly brought, urges that no favoritism was shown to any particular bank, and, therefore, no wrong done to anybody. As to the question between one bank or another, the Secretary may have a clear case. N'importe. It is not as the protector of National Banks that Mr. Sherman holds his high office. It is as the guardian of the interests of the American government, and in that capacity he seems to us to have been guilty of something verging on breach of trust. He has so conducted his sale of the four-per-cents as virtually to place large sums of government money at the disposal of the banks, without exacting any consideration therefor. He has acted, indeed, within the letter of the law, but in the most wasteful and injudicious method which the law allows of. In Mr. Hewitt's words," he has exercised his discretion to the advantage of the banks and not of the government."

As to the motive which has induced this line of action, we believe it was nothing worse than the determination to make the sale of four per cents a success by any and every means the law would