"A flock of geese sail softly by,

Which, viewing with expanding eye,

Are quick transformed to graceful swans."

We had, however, hoped to be able to commend the little volume as a good guide-book in rhyme, for the use of our visitors this summer; but found towards the end, several times repeated, the dates of 1580 to 1590,, as the time of the settlement of Pennsylvania under William Penn; whereas, if we have read history aright, William's grandfather was at that time among the possibilities rather than the realities of life. So on the whole we are compelled to say it would have been better if the modesty expressed in the opening lines had been sufficiently strong to have kept the author altogether from "assuming the poet's daring role."

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Poetry for Home and School. Selected and arranged by Anna C. Brackett and Ida M. Eliot. 16mo. Pp. 315. Price $1.25. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1876.

On Fermentation. By P. Schützenberger, Director at the Chemical Laboratory at the Sorbonne. With twenty-eight illustrations. 12mo. cloth. Pp. 331. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

Wych Hazel. A novel. By Susan and Anna Warner. Price $2.00. New York; G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1876.

16mo. Pp. 528.

History of the Civil War in America. By the Count of Paris. Translated with the approval of the author. By Louis F. Tasistro. Edited by Henry Coppee, LL.D. Vol. 2, Pp. 800, with maps. Philadelphia: Joseph H. Coates & Co. 1876.

Village Communities in the East and West, to which are added other Lectures, Addresses and Essays. By Sir Henry Sumner Maine, K. C. S. I., LL. D., F. R. S. 8 vo. cloth. Price $3.50. Pp. 413. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1876.

The Wages Question, a treatise on Wages and the Wages Class. By Francis A. Walker, M. A., Ph. D. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1876. The Historical Jesus of Nazareth. By M. Schlesinger, Ph. D. Pp. 98. Price $1.00 New York: Charles P. Somerby. 1876.

The Hand of Ethelberta. A comedy in chapters. By Thomas Hardy. Leisure Hour Series. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1876.

THE

PENN MONTHLY.

JULY, 1876.

THE

THE MONTH.

'HE dispatches from Constantinople read like a chapter out of that rare old chronicle, Knolles' History of the Turks. A Sultan deposed by his own Pashas-successors of the Janizaries, we may say; his successor taken out of a cellar and invested with the sword of Omar; the suspicious suicide of the ex-Sultan; the sudden assassination of the very authors of the revolution,-all this belongs rather to the fifteenth than to the nineteenth century, to the period of decay, when the best things of the Middle Ages had died out, and the worst had come to the surface. One might have expected that the nightmare of barbarism and misgovernment, which curses some of the fairest countries of Europe, would by this time have disclosed itself in its true colors to Christendom, and alienated from itself all sympathy and support. But these events seem to have given the Turks a new lease of south-eastern Europe. England's refusal to accede to the plan proposed by the Imperial Chancellors, on the old lying but diplomatic plea of giving time for reforms, was followed up by orders to her Mediterranean fleet to report in Turkish waters, and no hint was spared to let Russia know that she would not allow the sovereignty of Turkey to be interfered with. A fleet of English iron-clads is, after all is said, the most formidable thing afloat; and the three Emperors seem to have snatched at the revolution as an excuse for retiring from a position which might involve them in a collision. The diplomatic estimate of England is evi

dently not the same as the newspaper estimate, and her awkward way of drifting into a war without meaning it is too well remembered.

IN the collapse of the imperial triumvirate, Servia evidently holds the key of the position. With Bosnia and Herzogovina in revolt on her right, and Bulgaria on her left, she only needs to take up her march to Constantinople, in order to rally around her all the antiMoslem energies of eastern Europe. Roumania is jealously inert, but then the Roumanians are about the poorest fighting material in that part of the world. The revolt which broke out in Bulgaria on the first of May, at a pre-concerted signal from a secret Committee of Insurrection which has been at work for years past, is of all the recent movements the most threatening to the Porte. It has spread rapidly over the whole province, and the fanatical bands of Circassians who have been let loose upon the people for its suppression, have done the insurgents the service of making all neutrality impossible. The Bulgarians comprise both the most peaceable and the most warlike of the Christians of Turkey; their forces have Servian and Russian officers at their head; and there is every prospect that the Christian populations of European Turkey will soon be involved in a deadly struggle with their Moslem masters. It is not easy to predict the result; for while a Mohammedan government is one of the feeblest and most wretched of instruments for any peaceful purpose, there is a grandeur about Moslem fanaticism, and an Asiatic recklessness of life in its "wars of zeal," which outweigh many disadvantages. And it is perfectly certain that the Turks will not leave Europe without first inflicting on their Christian subjects atrocities of which the riot at Salonica was but a faint foreshadowing.

THE decision reached on the Winslow extradition case, resulting in the discharge of that Boston swindler, and since then of Brent, the Kentucky forger, furnishes another chapter in the long story "How England observes Treaties." It is very certain that if she can afford to have established such a precedent as her interpretation of the Ashburton Treaty, we can. No nation has so much at stake in this matter as England; few so little as America. The interest taken by Americans in most questions of foreign policy is so slight,

that the Administration has not received the credit it deserves for the dignified and straightforward course it has pursued in this connection. And General Grant has never transmitted to Congress a more admirable message than that in which he announces that he will neither make nor receive any more applications for extradition, so far as England is concerned. This puts the wealth of all our great moneyed centres on both sides of the Atlantic at the mercy of any sharper who has wit enough to carry his plunder beyond high water mark; and it remains to be seen which country will suffer the more by this partial outlawry inaugurated by the Disraeli ministry.

Now let the President cover his last days of office with honor, by protecting with his veto the money which we are in honor bound to pay back to Japan, and to England from the Geneva award. Any evasion of our plain duty, to either nation, will be an everlasting disgrace to ourselves; but some such evasion seems likely to be carried through Congress before the session is over. It is true that the money paid over by England in trust for the sufferers by the Alabama and other privateers has been spent by Secretary Bristow in paying the ordinary expenses of our national government; but our credit is still good enough for the retrieval of that act of bad faith before any one is injured. Indeed, we learn that the Secretary has already put upon the market proposals for a loan to replace the fund.

THE strife of parties in France still goes on, in a way that shows that her people have never become truly a nation, in the sense of reaching an agreement on all the great fundamental questions of policy, while lesser issues are left for temporary adjustment. The great gulf of difference between Right and Left sunders the masses of her people; the Church and the Revolution are the two controlling forces of her thinking; and either party would rather accomplish their own ends with foreign help than forego them in deference to the popular will. The Centre, which to-day, as in Louis Phillippe's time, furnishes the working material of government, maintains its position chiefly by an indifference, bred of devotion to material interests, but partly by the influence of English example. But the Centre is strong only in times of exhaustion and indifference; an enthusiastic Centre is an impossibility, and only enthusiastic leaders can permanently carry France

with them. It seems as if the nation, by rejecting the reconciliation of intelligent faith with orderly liberty offered by the Reformation, were condemned to vibrate forever between the two extremes.

The hollowness and insincerity of the compromise now in power is seen in the ceaseless and embittered conflict between the parties on every topic of the day, and the absolute uncertainty on all hands as to what will follow when the time fixed for the expiring of the present lease of power has arrived.

One might see the germ and the hope of better things for France in the great educational scheme announced by the ministry, contemplating an independent university in each of the chief cities. But education is, after all, especially in France, rather an engine for the promulgation of ideas already accepted, and the extension of parties already formed, than for the breaking of new ground in either direction. In France, ever since 1789, it has helped to deepen and intensify the antagonisms of party; and before we look for any great help from that quarter, we are forced to ask, Who shall educate the educators?

BELGIUM, like France, is a country of irreconcilable antagonisms. She made a bad beginning in 1830, when her independence of Hol- · land was secured by mob turbulence, and she was saved by England's patronage from the necessity of earning her place among the nations by those sacrifices which force people to understand the value of that place. Mobs have, therefore, a sort of divine right in Belgium; and the recent elections, which have reduced indeed yet maintained the Ultramontane majority in the Chambers, have been the signal for the "Liberal" outbreaks. The perversity of rural Catholics in voting for clerical candidates has been avenged by smashing the windows of Catholic club-rooms in the cities-this being thought the best way of bringing the less enlightened constituencies at a distance to a better mind.

THE month has been a most exciting period in our political history, and in some sense Mr. Jas. G. Blaine, of Maine, has been the central figure. Ever since his retirement from the Speakership of House, he and his friends have been laboring for his election to the Presidency. He has many qualities calculated to help him to the