This was the first of a series of popular laws on the freedom of partnerships and societies, and of provident institutions. At the moment when the unforeseen provocation of Prussia surprised him in the midst of his peaceful labors, he was contemplating the institution of a national pension fund for indigent old age.

The young German Emperor is to be congratulated because, inspired by these illustrious examples, he has turned his thoughts, now that he has done so much for the barracks, to the cottage and the workshop, and has conceived the worthy ambition of showing himself to the eyes of his people and of all Europe in another character than that of a recruiting sergeant or an inspector of troops.

His action, moreover, is as politic as it is generous. Henceforward nations, armed with universal suffrage, careless of oldworld legends about the right Divine, will grow more and more conscious of the power they wield, and ever more ready to use it. The social basis on which thrones repose is agitated by constant upheavals; and kings, if they would not be engulfed, are forced to become Caesars, that is, tribunes of the people.

The German Emperor demands the crown of the Cæsars. If the German nation accords it to him he will in truth have founded his Empire. Otherwise it is but an accidental creation of the chances of war, which a similar hazard may sweep away.

But the Emperor, not content with being merely the benevolent legislator of his own Empire, seeks to become the representative of popular interests and aspirations in all countries, and convokes a congress of plenipotentiaries of a new species, to deliberate not on the distribution of kingdoms and the delimitation of frontiers, but on the conditions to be observed in workshops and factories, and on the relations between capital and labor.

We cannot think that the policy which is his by tradition and choice can permit him to play with success the part of an

international legislator. For at the present day the German Emperor is the representative of two survivals of a more barbarous time-the system of Protection, and the right of conquest.

In spite of all the evidence already accumulated, which coming events will soon confirm afresh, he believes that a nation grows rich by surrounding itself with a wall of prohibitory duties on imports; and by his example he is striving to subject trade to the absurd conditions from which it was delivered, to the great benefit of civilization, by Cobden, Bastiat, Michel Chevalier, and Say. These economists have shown us that "by isolation prosperous nations harm each other; that by freedom of exchange prosperous nations help each other;" that a country cannot long remain rich while its neighbors are poor; that general comfort is the result of individual well-being; that, except the moderate duties rendered necessary by fiscal reasons, no artificial obstacle should hinder the natural movement created by God Himself, which constitutes a law of the world.

Germany, imitating the democratic selfishness of America, declares these maxims false, and refuses to obey them. She will learn to regret her decision when overtaken by the poverty which must succeed her ephemeral prosperity.

The German Emperor is not only the representative of the system of Protection; he embodies the allied principle which, however, is yet more retrograde, the principle of conquest. France and England had, by different methods, made the recognition of the liberty of peoples and nationalities an avowed principle of international law. It seemed generally admitted that the lot of a given country should be decided in future according to the will of its inhabitants; that peoples should no longer be regarded as property to be won or lost at the point of the bayonet; that they are independent, inviolable, and indestructible.

Germany, which once, like France and England, professed these principles, has disavowed them since her attack on Denmark and the seizure of the Danish duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. She has laid it down as a maxim that the strongest has always and everywhere the right of appropriating the territory which suits him and, in the popular phrase, rounds off his own

property. Germany has since applied this revived mediæval policy to Alsace and Lorraine. The German Government detains Frenchmen in those provinces against their will, unvaryingly and openly manifested during twenty years; oppressing, harassing, and torturing them with far more cruelty than the Austrians displayed in Venice and Milan. How can the oppressor of nations become their liberator? The Berlin Conference can only give expression to wishes and formulate theories. These wishes and theories must, before they can take effect, be embodied in laws by the Legislature of each individual country. Is it likely that the deputies of the Chamber will be favorably inclined by arguments drawn from the result of a Berlin vote on the proposal of the oppressor of our brothers of Alsace and Lorraine ?

The oppressive policy of which the German Emperor is the representative has a further effect than to render co-operation with France a moral impossibility; it is the most serious material obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the working classes. It causes a yearly increase in the taxes; while the finances of the country are burdened by expenditure which yields no return for the outlay, and by the rise in the price of necessaries and of all things indispensable to the material well-being of the laborer.

This "Militarism" had already appeared before the Revolution, and Montesquieu had indicated its dangers in prophetic words. "A new disease," he said, "has overspread Europe; it has attacked our princes, and has made them enroll an inordinate number of troops. It has its crises, and it is of necessity contagious. Each monarch keeps under arms as many soldiers as he could possibly raise if his people were in danger of extermination; and this effort of each to out-do the other is what men call peace. Soon, as the result of having so many soldiers, we shall have nothing but soldiers."

Prussia, by the substitution of armed nations for the former small armies of soldiers by professiou-another lapse into barbarism has rendered it impossible to lighten labor of the heavy burdens which weigh it down. Socialism is the consequence and the punishment of this revival

of the policy of conquest which has led to such a fearful extension of the military system.

The Germany of Kant, of Goethe, of Beethoven, was like a grand cathedral within whose peaceful walls stood a number of altars where sacred light was shed from lamps of gold. The Germany of the Emperor William is a vast barrack in which the sound of trumpets and of the drilling of recruits drowns the grand voice of the German people chanting melodious hymns to its ideal.

Such is the incurable, organic disease against which the German people has to strive. Expedients such as the Conference cannot prevail against it; it is not enough to be strong, it is also necessary to be just. When the Neapolitan would hurl a terrible curse at his enemy he wishes he may gain the prize in the lottery-for he knows that the man who wins stakes again, and that he who plays long ends by losing. Success is sometimes the most terrible punishment of iniquity. It will not be long before Germany affords a striking demonstration of the fact. Before undertaking to advise others, she would do well to look at home and entertain ideas of a more generous, more moral, more upright, and juster nature.

In conclusion, the edicts are worthy of praise and deserve to succeed; the Conference is an incoherent experiment and will not succeed. Let the Emperor abandon his economical errors and his arbitrary rule over peoples to whom it is odious; let him curb his military ardor and place to the credit of the laboring class the amount so saved on the army estimates; then he will acquire the right to address a philanthropic appeal to the nations, and to inaugurate social concord in Europe. But while he offers the olive branch with one hand, holding a naked sword in the other, while he talks of mitigating suffering and continues to inflict it, while he persists in an unjust policy, it is not possible to believe in the sincerity of his efforts towards social equity; his intentions will be suspected, his professions regarded as hypocritical, and those who help him to produce scenic effects, the mechanism of which is not clear to the public, will be considered, on the most charitable supposition, as his dupes.-New Review.

In the year 1633 the peasants of Oberammergau, a village in Bavaria, being stricken with a pestilence, or, according to another account, threatened with loss of livelihood through a disease of the flax which stopped all the spindles, vowed to God to publicly perform the "Passion of the Saviour every ten years if their calamities were removed. Thereupon the plague was stayed, and, in fulfilment of the vow, the play was performed until the end of the last century, when it was prohibited by Montgelas, a reforming statesman, who told the peasants that hearing sermons on the Passion was better than parading the Saviour on a stage. But the simple folk secured an audience of the king and pleaded their broken vow, so that the minister's prohibition was repealed on condition that the play was recast to suit modern ideas.

In 1811 it was once more performed in the churchyard, and in following decades in the village meadow till 1850, when a permanent theatre was erected. The performances in 1870 were interrupted by summons of certain of the players-Joseph Mair, who took the part of Christ, among them to the ranks when the FrancoGerman war broke out; but happily they were all spared to resume their parts in 1871. The performances take place this year at intervals from Whitsuntide to the end of September, and the fact that the play is the lineal, and well-nigh the sole worthy, descendant-for the puppetshows, the Christmas mummings, and other doggerel survivals, are of kindred ancestry of the curious group of Miracle Plays, Mysteries, and Moralities, which preceded the secular drama in our own and other countries, may give special interest to a brief account of the originals. The materials from which our knowledge of English Miracle Plays, including under this common term plays founded on incidents in the lives of saints and plays founded on Scripture narratives, is derived, are fragmentary and scanty compared with those extant on the Continent. But they are copious enough to make their digest into a few pages difficult, and therefore any reference to the sacred plays

of other countries, notably of France, their special birthplace and home, whence they were imported among us, probably by French ecclesiastics, must be omitted. There is, however, no essential difference between between our English plays and their foreign variants. Neither can more than bare allusion be made to the Moralities, which were of allegorical type, abstract qualities being personified, as, e. g., when a play setting forth the goodness of the Lord's Prayer was played in the city of York, in which play all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn, and the virtues were held up to praise. Sometimes the two species of plays were blended, as when Justice, Mercy, Peace, and Death appear on the stage with historical characters.

Although the early Church extinguished the drama, its new birth was connected with the offices of religion. The origin of the plays, as literary works, is probably to be found in the metrical paraphrases of Scripture, with which quaint and absurd legends were fused, and by which a knowledge of the events recorded in, and of the doctrines deduced from, the Bible was spread among the people. The dramatic element in these metrical versions, of which Cadmon's (temp. vii. cent.) is the oldest, naturally led to their recital with some degree of action, and to their passage into more dramatic form, until the Sacred Play became a recognized agent of popular instruction, and a refreshing diversion to the monastic and conventual life.

Hase remarks that from the time of Gregory the Great the Mass itself became an almost dramatic celebration of the world-tragedy of Golgotha. It embraced the whole scale of religious emotion, from the mournful cry of the Miserere to the jubilee of the Gloria in Excelsis. And both Klein and Ward agree that the germ of the Miracle Play, as an acted drama, is to be found in the liturgy of the Mass, the symbolic processes in which exhibit a dramatic progression. In the pantomimical element in the gestures of the priest, the epical in the lessons read, the lyrical in the antiphonal singing, and subsequent

ly in the addition of tableaux vivantsliving pictures of scenes from New Testament history-as early as the fifth century, the way was prepared for the public performance of sacred plays, of which the clergy were the actors and the church was the scene.

The plays were originally written in Latin, then afterward rendered into Norman-French to adapt them for exhibition before the court, and finally into the vulgar tongue for the amusement and instruction of the people, although concerning this there had been hesitation, for in the British Museum MS. of the Chester Plays it is said that the author "was thrice at Rome before he could obtain leave of the Pope to have them in the English tongue.' But the happy result of their translation into the vernacular is that they are rich storehouses of local dialects and customs of the time. They are, alike in form and spirit, for the most part in keeping with the dignity and seriousness of their subjects. There is no lack of reverence; the characters are skilfully and sympathetically treated, and the authors, with true insight, availed themselves--as an example or two to be presently cited will show-of certain incidents as vehicles of harmless mirth. They at least succeeded in their main purpose in making the spectacles channels of popular instruction in the leading truths of the Christian religion in days when the Bible was a sealed book, except to the clergy.

That these remained the sole actors for a considerable period is shown by the retention of the stage directions in Latin; but the control of the plays gradually passed into lay hands as their performance was tranferred from the churches to the public thoroughfares, when we find the trading guilds, which were also religious fraternities, taking the lead. Each craft undertook the expenses of production of one of the plays of each series, employing lay pens to alter and adapt as occasion demanded, and entrusting both plays and properties, choice of "moste connyng, discrete and able" actors, as well as the rehearsals, to an official. Each guild had its patron saint, whose festival-day became the occasion for pageants in which a Miracle Play connected with events in his life was performed, first in the guild-hall and then in the streets. Although there was in Catholic England no lack of festivals,

the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi by Pope Urban IV. in 1264 gave an impetus to the performance of the plays. The importance into which that festival grew led the guilds to observe it as a common feast-day, and to make the procession of the symbols of the Mystery of the Incarnation, although independent of them, the occasion of performing a series of plays, beginning with the "Creation" and ending with "Doomsday. Some of the plays, as, e. g., those dealing with the Nativity, were performed at their appropriate seasons. Actors and audience were astir early, since the entire series was presented between sunrise and sunset; Euery player," says the Mayor of York in his proclamation, "shall be redy in his pagiannt at convenyant tyme, that is to say, at the mydhowre betwix iiijth and pth of the cloke in the mornynge, and then all oyer pageantz fast following ilk one after oyer as yer course is without tarieng.' The records of the plays, of which performances took place in all parts of England, show that they were assigned as nearly as possible in harmony with the business of the crafts. Thus we find that the Shipwrights played the "Building of the Ark;" the "Fysshers and Marynars (at Chester, the water-carriers), "the Flood;" the Goldsmiths, the "Adoration of the Magi;" the Vintners, the "Miracle of Cana ;" the Bakers, the "Last Supper ;" and the Pinners and Painters, the Crucifixion."

With the exception of a few isolated specimens, most of which have been printed, the English Miracle Plays are comprised in four series, known respectively as the York, the Chester, the Ĉoventry, and the Towneley. The York series consists of forty-eight plays, written in Northern English dialect, and the manuscript, which is doubtless a copy of a much older original, is assigned to the middle of the fourteenth century. The Chester series, which contains twenty-five plays, has been assigned to the middle of the thirteenth century, but experts now place it at the end of the fourteenth century. The age of the Coventry series, comprising forty-two plays, is fixed by the date 1468 on the manuscript: and the Towneley series, which has much in common with the York collection, is referred to the close of the fifteenth century. It comprises thirty-two plays, five of which

are almost literal copies of corresponding plays in the York manuscript.

The feature common to the four series is their grouping of the leading events narrated in the Bible into a consecutive whole, but with manifold differences, both in the less important parts and in the proportion of plays based on legends outside the canonical books. For example, the popular mediæval legend of the "Fall of Lucifer," which has great prominence given to it in the Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem written early in the four teenth century, and of which Milton makes effective use in Paradise Lost, is the subject of a play in the York and Chester series, but is absent from the Coventry and Towneley. The Coventry series has no plays founded on the apocryphal books of the Old Testament, but has several founded on those of the New Testament; while in the Chester series, only one play, based on the legend of Christ's Descent into Hell, has its source in the apocryphal writings.

As hinted already, when the plays were rendered into the vulgar tongue, a good many extraneous elements were introduced, according to the skill and humor of the transcribing adapter, and according to the audience whose appetite had to be whetted. Thus the Chester "Banes" (a word retained in our marriage bans or banns) tell how Done Rondall, "monke of the Abay,"

In pagentes set fourth apparently to all eyne, The Olde and Neue Testament with livelye comforth,

Interminglinge therewith, onely to make sporte,

Some thinges not warranted by any writt, Which to gladd the hearers he woulde men to

take yt.

In the Miracle Play of "St. Nicholas," written by Hilarius, an English monk of the twelfth century, the conversation of pot-house gamblers is the mirth-provoking incident. In a yet earlier play, by the nun Hrosvitha, the persecutor of three virgin-martyrs is represented as stricken with madness, and as embracing drippingpans and all kinds of cooking utensils, till his own soldiers, taking him for a devil, maltreat him. In the Towneley series, Cain brawls and bullies his hind like a coarse Yorkshire farmer; Noah's wife (as also in the York and Chester series) is a termagant, and the quarrels between the

couple are full of comic dialogue. In the play of the "Angels and the Shepherds," where the materials are slender, advantage is seized on to introduce abundance of rustic realism. In the York series Judas is ridiculed by a porter; Pilate outwits a squire, who sells a plot of land for thirty pieces of silver paid to the traitor, and who gives up the deeds without securing the money. In many of the plays in which the devil is a character he appears only to be laughed at. The anachronisms and classical allusions are amusing, as when Noah's wife swears by Christ, by the Virgin Mary, and by St. John; Pharaoh and Cæsar Augustus by "Mahoune," and Balak by Mars; when Herod asks his council what they find "in Vyrgyll, in Homere," concerning the birth of Christ, and promises to make one of his councillors Pope; and when the Sibyl prophesies before Octavius of Jesus and the Judgment. Touches of current life and usage here and there stand out amid the ancient story: the carpenter's tools and measurements used by Noah, as well as those employed at the Crucifixion; the bitter-cold weather at the Nativity, telling of a truly northern Christmas; the quaint offerings of the shepherds when they repair to

Bedleme" to give the Divine babe a "lytylle spruse cofer," a ball, and a bottle; the ruin of the poor by murrain; the drinking between Pilate and his wife; the excellent representation of a heavy manual Crucifixion. Illustrative, too, of English job by a set of rough workmen in the customs and forms of justice are the bor rowing of the town beast; Judas offering himself as bondman in his remorse; the mortgage of a property, raising money by "wedde-sette" or pledge; and the trial scene in certain plays, in which Pilate "in Parlament playne" vindicates the course of law in a way that would commend itself to the learned author of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, and puts down the malice of the accuser, Caiaphas, and the pursuer Annas (cf. York Mystery Plays, Introd. by Miss Toulmin Smith, lvii.). The accountbooks of the several guilds show that the actors were paid according to the length of their parts and 66 business, "not according to their dignity. Thus, in a play setting forth the Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus, the impersonators of Herod and Caiaphas received 3s. 4d. each, of An