about such things. But again here, street. Put the bridge there, and you

while giving further facts, one has to keep the sense that in America there is an attitude towards it all which prevents these "pothouse politics," as Emerson called them, from being quite as corrupting outside their own limits as one would think. At the lowest we find the people who think their votes to be some property for sale; and at the highest you find the two comic papers in New York, Puck and Judge, coming out after the presidential election with this sort of tone: "Well, the political season is over; there are new games up, and other business, the Chicago Exhibition, for instance; come and make that a success." Politics is a business.

can tell your government that we business men will contribute so much to the next election or bribery fund. And the government member answers: "It is your interest to vote for the government; if you return opposition candidates the government will do nothing for the roads and bridges of your town or of your county." In fact, one minister is defeated, and in his public speech he openly threatens the county which had rejected him, and then offers to another constituency to do everything for them, and declares to his new county, so we are told, that the old one may go to the devil. Nobody seems astonished at this. It is a game; your county played against the government, Still it does excite surprise to find played to be in, in fact, and it is out. men of ability leaving the better outside That is all. So when the House of world for local politics. For one would Assembly meets there is a floating popthink either of two spurs were neces-ulation of those members who want to sary to drive them there the love of be influential in forming a new governa cause, or at least the ambition to succeed in one, or private gain. The latter is often a delusion, perhaps always; for men do not seem agreed that these politicians actually put the money in their own pockets; and for the cause, such facts as are given in this article are those acknowledged by everybody.

The explanation may perhaps be found in the words Milton puts into the mouth of Satan :

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell. For we find men crippled with debt all the rest of their lives from the sums they have spent on these elections. To be elected means some sort of power; it means the dispensing, though indirectly, of government patronage in their constituencies; it is gratifying to be appealed to for the promise of your help in getting a bridge made near our

ment. They are known to be in this unpledged, uncommitted state; but the only difficulty they have is for each to know when the others will combine to strike the blow. If it be that they have any blow they think right to strike, then they are much maligned by the whole of their little world in which not one believer in them can be found.

A paying game somehow or other, that is what Canadians think their poltone of their talk about them in private. itics, according to the almost unvaried The better sort of young man, in the age of possible high thoughts on all the framework of the land, will probably tell you, if he is not yet a political agent, that he does not care which way an election goes, that it makes no matter to him. It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which this disbelief prevails, in local politics especially.

W. F. STOCKLEY.

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away,

Saw other webs and others rise for aye Which kept her prisoned till her hair was hoary.

Those songs half sung that yet were all divine

That woke Romance, the queen, to reign afresh

THE HALF OF LIFE GONE. and the seasons have gone by THE days have slain the days, And brought me the summer again, and here on the grass I lie As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong. Wide lies the mead as of old,

Had been but preludes from that lyre of and the river is creeping along

By the side of the elm-clad bank

thine, Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced that turns its weedy stream; the mesh

And grey o'er its hither lip

Spun by the wizard who compels the the quivering rushes gleam.

flesh,

There is work in the mead as of old;

But lets the poet see how heaven can shine. they are eager at winning the hay,

II.

"LIFE, THE KHAN."

Then said Hasan: "Most mighty, in very sooth,
O Khan, is the breath of long-descended Khans."
The Flying Donkey of the Ruby Hills.
O "LIFE, the Khan!"-in old Ceylon,
they say,

The lords would kneel before their dying
king

Obsequious to his will in everything Till thou, Death's deathless foe! hadst moved away,

When came a charioteer who dragged the clay,

Head downwards, chained upon a car a-swing,

Through crowds all-hushed to woman sing,

"Behold, ye men, your lord of day!"1

יי!

O "Life, the Khan!'

corpse along,

hear a

yester

While every sun sets bright

and begets a fairer day.

The forks shine white in the sun
round the yellow red-wheeled wain
Where the mountain of hay grows fast;
and now from out of the lane

Comes the ox-team drawing another,
And thump, thump, goes the farmer's nag
comes the bailiff and the beer,
o'er the narrow bridge of the weir.
and though the swallows flit
High up and light are the clouds,
So high o'er the sunlit earth,
they are well a part of it,
And so, though high over them,
are the wings of the wandering herne;
doth the fair sky quiver and burn ;
In measureless depths above him
The dear sun floods the land
as the morning falls toward noon,
And a little wind is awake

while trailed the in the best of the latter June.
They are busy winning the hay,

Sweeping the streets with flesh thou and the life and the picture they make,

madest fair

1 Two Mohammedan travellers- -names unknown - who visited Ceylon in the middle of the ninth

century, the manuscript account of whose travels was discovered in the library of M. le Comte de Seignelay about one hundred and seventy years ago, tell this striking story.

If I were as once I was,

I should deem it made for my sake:
For here if one need not work
is a place for happy rest,

While one's thought wends over the world
north, south, and east and west.

WILLIAM MORRIS.

From The Contemporary Review.
OF THE CIVILIZED
WORLD.'

THE PROSPECTS

THERE is a distinction in kind between predictions which refer to a remote future, and which are necessarily, if not professedly, more or less arbitrary, and those which profess to in

quickly awaken the reader's respect; and he will be impressed by the keenness and originality of observation, the philosophic calmness, the apparent dis interestedness and openness of mind, with which tendencies are traced and author touches upon all the things that And the probable results indicated. A prophecy of the latter class, if it re-liefs as to the unseen world and the life concern us most closely upon our belates to social history, is a criticism of life. The Bible prophecies, according to the truer view of them which now

fer what soon will be from what now is.

husband and wife and of parents and beyond the grave, upon the relations of trained armies and volunteers, upon children, upon town and country, upon poetry and art, upon science and industrial invention:

Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

prevails, are of this nature. They paint, indeed, imaginative scenes of ultimate glory; but for the most part they express the liveliest interest in the present, and declare what, under the divine purpose and law, the present is about to bring forth in the future. Such a Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. prophecy pronounces judgment upon But what will probably most astonish existing tendencies, and serves both the reader is the success with which for a warning and for an encourage- Mr. Pearson conceals any interest he ment. No philosophy of causation will may feel as a fellow-man in human drive out of the heads of living men doings and fortunes. There is somethe belief that they can do something thing abnormal in the dispassionate to guide the course of things, and so coolness with which he reports upon to modify the future. Men have always the world and the downward way on been accustomed to assume, and they which it is going-a coolness which will go on assuming, that they can set the impatience of his readers may be themselves against a tendency which tempted to resent as cynical. Almost they believe to be dangerous, and give the only sign of warmth is in the ansupport by their endeavors to one that gry bitterness of the remarks on the promises to lead to good. Some of those who are most convinced that the future is a necessary consequence to be developed out of the present, and most sure about manifest destiny, happen to be at the same time most earnest and importunate in denouncing what they consider to be hurtful habits and move- of his fellow-men unhappy; but the ments, and in urging their fellow-men to adopt and favor those which they judge to be beneficial. A forecast of the future which shows genuine insight is not only interesting to intellectual curiosity, but it can scarcely fail to have some moral influence.

Churches" and theology, though some other antipathies may be guessed. We cannot help wondering what purpose the author had in writing the book ; we feel as we read that so serious a thinker must have had some purpose besides that of making a good many

object he had in view is not apparent. He gives us a dismal prospect, and he writes as if he held a brief for discouragement; but here and there he suggests that it does not much signify. He gives us leave to reject his forecast if we please, on the ground that rational forecasts have often turned out mistaken. Where he does refer to the effect which his prophecies may have upon his readers' minds, his language is curiously confused, and we speculate

No one, I think, can read Mr. C. H. Pearson's recent book without being in an unusual degree excited and disquieted by it. The extraordinary range of knowledge exhibited in it must 1 National Life and Character: a Forecast. By in vain as to what he can really mean. Thus at the close of chapter i. he says

Charles H. Pearson.

our pride of place will be humiliated. . . We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside, by people whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be, that the changes have been inevitable. It has been our work to organize and create, to carry peace and law and order over the world, that others may enter in and enjoy. Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have passed away before that day arrives.

when the higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but

that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to abide the

issue, if we stand erect before the eternal

calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress (p. 344). Here, again, "we" are evidently our descendants. "Eternal" is always an impressive word, but why is it applied either to the calm or to the unrest? The unrest, at all events, was not eternal, for it will have been superseded by the calm; and the calm at any moment can scarcely be more than a stage in fathers are not happily described as the progress of decay ad non esse. Our having cheerfully faced unrest, whether eternal or temporary; it should rather be said of them that, sustained by faith in Divine Providence, and animated by themselves into the struggle of their hope of a better future, they threw time, and were a part of its "unrest." issue, has a good old sound; but what To do our work in life, and abide the is the work of life to be, when people will ask nothing from the day but to live, when they know of no Taskmaster

If we, who will have passed away, are to wake, it will be presumably in the persons of our descendants. For whom, then, will the consolation be? For us, to whose pain the author allows no better name than that of injured casteOur consolation is, that we feeling ? shall not see, except in prevision, the melancholy condition to which our humane endeavors, aided by opportune eircumstances, are bringing the world. The deluge will be after our time. This is a consolation which I should suppose to be hardly worth offering. But it is about as satisfactory as that which our descendants will have, in the reflection that the changes were inevitable. This who sets them their work and takes stoical acquiescence in the inevitable is account of its performance, when they the solitary moral attitude which Mr. see clearly that any good efforts which Pearson suggests to his readers. But can he really think that he is offering things worse, when "the savor of vathey might put forth would only make them consolation? I should suggest cant lives will go up to God from every for this purpose the reflection: "We home"? (p. 338). I could willingly bedid our best; it is not our fault, but lieve that our author secretly intended Nature's." Still stranger is the passage to suggest to his readers an unspoken which concludes the volume. The author seems to feel that he must say of us" to say, "These depressing progalternative; that he would wish “some something in the way of moral reflecnostics are not easy to refute; it looks tion; but he has nothing to say, and he does not shrink from saying that noth-world; but it will be better to resist the as if decay may be coming upon our ing in curiously unmeaning phrases :—

When Christianity began to appear grotesque and incredible, men reconciled them selves to the change by belief in an age of reason, of enlightenment, of progress. It is now more than probable that our science, our civilization, our great and real advance in the practice of government, are only bringing us nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the world,

coming evil with all our might than to stare blankly at it, or to acquiesce cheerfully in it; we have still enough of faith and hope at the back of our minds and the bottom of our hearts to give us courage to die fighting."

It seems possible that Mr. Pearson may have been vexed by the cheerful anticipations of those who believe in