characteristic of the Middle Ages. There were a few revenue tariffs at that time, with incidental Protection; but it was, as Fichte says, the age of Cosmopolitanism, Free Trade and Barbarism. Protection, like other thoroughly national branches of policy, came in with the Reformation.

THE retirement of Secretary Bristow, and the dismissal of his principal subordinates, have been well made use of by the Democrats of the House to ventilate the grievances of the Bristow wing of the Republican party. The ex-Secretary himself very properly declined to give any testimony on the subject, since the law expressly and for wise reasons provides that the intercourse between the President and his Cabinet shall be confidential, and he could not even regard the President's request that he give evidence as releasing him from the obligation to silence. When President Grant made that request, he was evidently persuaded that if the whole story were told he would suffer in no way by the telling. All his own connection with the Whisky Ring prosecutions lay behind him as a series of transactions in which he had done his whole duty. The President is a man so defective in imagination and other social qualities, that he cannot see a fact or a group of facts from any other standpoint than his own. And we make no doubt that when Major Bluford Wilson came before the Congressional Committee and told that story from another standpoint, showing that the President had acted to the undue advantage of his friends in the whole matter, no one was more surprised at the bad look of the whole story than Gen. Grant himself. The details, that taken each by themselves seemed so excusable-especially the interference to prevent the acceptance of the confession of some of the culprits in order to convict others, and the communication to Private Secretary Babcock of the Treasury's case against him-probably took another look when read in print, and as part of an indictment of his own conduct. With the great majority of his fellow-citizens the President stands lower than before that evidence was given. But those who have known the man well enough to discern the great limitations which hedge in his really great powers, feel no surprise in seeing that he acted in precisely the way that might have been expected, and without the slightest sense of the blameworthiness of a certain class of blamable acts.

THE acquittal of ex-Secretary Belknap through the failure of more than a third of the Senate to see that an official could be legally impeached after his retirement from office, detracts nothing from the punishment inflicted upon the man, and the emphasis of public opinion in regard to his act. That of Secretary Robeson might have followed, though on grounds quite insufficient, had it not been understood that the Senate would not have consented to an adjournment till the close of his trial. That he could be convicted on the evidence presented, nobody supposes; but some odium would have clung to the Republican majority for acquitting him. The Democrats of the House made their best of the case by giving him a public drubbing on the presentation of the report, which was then quietly buried by a reference.

THE session of Congress just closed, like that of Parliament, has not been remarkable for its success in anything, unless it be succes de scandale. It was naturally expected that the House would pass a great number of measures for the Senate to reject; but the only important dispute between the two bodies has been on the Appropriation Bills, and the House has so far succeeded as to reduce their amount to something over $147,000,000. If experience shows that the government can be carried on for that sum, the House deserves the credit; but if not, then the party it represents will deserve the blame of interfering with the efficiency of all or several branches of the service, chiefly for the sake of political effect. Such economy would be more clearly praiseworthy if those who fixed the amounts voted had the spending of them.

Beyond the voting of appropriations, it is hard to recall what legislation was effected during the session. Some trifling measures in regard to the silver currency were carried through both Houses, but the plan to restore silver to its old place as our national money, failed. The clause in the Resumption Act which fixes the date for the big fight between the Treasury and Wall street, has not been repealed. No measure of any sort in regard to any of the great questions before the country has been adopted. And the traces of its activity which the session has left on the Statute Book are neither numerous nor important.

And yet it has been a session of unusual energy; but the energy has taken other directions than the legislative. It has been great in

investigations; and while there has been a good deal of hunting mares' nests, and while the grand result of proving the Administration a den of thieves has not been reached, yet not a few ugly facts have been ventilated, and the popular detestation of corrupt officials has been supplied with some deserving victims. Over-much energy has also been expended in personal encounters, though these have not been so utterly devoid of public interest as were those in which General Butler and other members of recent Congresses figured. The fight over Mr. Blaine has had in it something of the excitement of such encounters fifty and sixty years back, though Mr. Frye's assault on Gov. Tilden at the very close of the session was in the worst possible taste, and finds no parallel except in Mr. Knott's assault on Mr. Blaine in the absence of the latter, and on the occasion of a compromise report, meant to smooth over the differences between the two gentlemen.

THE stress laid upon the contents of the letters in which the several candidates have accepted their nominations to the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency, strikingly indicates the personal character of the campaign. For once it is believed each party is ready to promise what the people especially want, and then to resist the performance of those promises if successful. Hence the real platforms of the campaign are the utterances not of the conventions but of their nominees, and these are scanned to ascertain what is the candidate's attitude towards the reform question, and what amount of backbone is he likely to exhibit in the resistance to his own party, which will be among his first presidential duties. For the public have lost confidence in either party as a party, and have begun to know that all merely party action-i. e. all action prompted by merely party considerations—is and must be selfish and ignoble. Of the two parties, its distrust of the Democrats is probably more decided and stronger; and some of the earlier doings of the recent session of Congress, as well as the attitude of most of the Democratic leaders toward the Hamburg massacre, has tended to deepen this. Of the two candidates, if they were utterly dissociated from party affiliations, Mr. Tilden would probably command more confidence, as having been much more prominent in our political history, and as having shown himself more of an able and independent man than Mr. Hayes ever

has. The result of the election will probably depend upon the relative preponderance of these two considerations in the public mind.

The letters of acceptance of Messrs. Tilden and Hendricks appeared on the same day, August 5th, being the results of a prolonged conference between the two candidates, who of course felt the ab. surdity of appearing before the public on the same platform, but with hostile declarations on the great financial question. Mr. Tilden's letter is the longest campaign document thus far, and excites natural apprehensions as to the magnitude of his annual messages, should he be the next occupant of the presidential chair. Its three chief topics are Economy, Resumption, and the Civil Service. What he says of the first is chiefly notable for bold assertions as to what has been and can be done, and as committing him to a Free Trade policy, though the terms used are general and at times somewhat vague. On the third topic he calls for a constitutional amendment restricting the President to a single term, and expresses his desire for a system of promotion according to seniority and capacity, such as the English, which would do some good, but not all. Until the office-holder has some legal guarantee that he is in for life, or good behavior, he will always be the political tool of any President who is partizan enough to exert himself in favor of candidates of his own way of thinking; and Mr. Tilden proposes no such guarantee.

Of course Resumption is his great theme, its discussion occupying far more than the mofety of the letter, and bearing the marks of the most careful preparation. It contains, perhaps, no departure from the letter of his earlier declarations, but its spirit is very different. The paper-money people are not held up to public scorn as rogues and repudiationists; on the contrary, the gross sinners against all financial right and law are those wicked hard-money Republicans, who fixed New Year's day of 1879 as the date for resumption, and then did nothing to bring it about. He has evidently no quarrel with those who think that resumption at that date is impossible; nor with the St. Louis platform which demands the repeal of that clause. He dwells on the absurdity of the promise without preparation, and shows that so far as the Treasury's command of coin goes, we are drifting farther, steadily farther, away from the very possibility of resumption. And he is quite well aware that the money of the nation should be elastic in volume even within the year, and also that nothing but the business needs of the nation should determine

its volume. He does not, indeed, tell us exactly how he would effect this, for all his practical proposals seem designed merely to bring paper money up to the level of gold. All this reads as if Mr. Tilden were pleading with the soft money Democrats, "Come now, and let us reason together. Why on earth should you not vote for me? Am I not as handsome as Peter Cooper or Sam Cary?" A nomination opens a hard-money man's eyes to a good many facts he had not seen before.

not see.

But Mr. Tilden not only denounces what has been done and omitted; he has the candor and the courage to tell us what he would do or omit. First, as to gold, he would accumulate it in the Treasury (1) by saving and hoarding part of the national revenue; (2) by the sale of bonds for gold abroad; (3) by checking, in some undefined way, the outflow of gold to foreign marts. How he will both lower the taxes to the minimum needed by a cheap government, as promised in the first part of his letter, and yet hoard the revenue, we do How he will send less gold abroad under a Free Trade system, such as he proposes, than under Protection, is another mystery. The sale of new bonds abroad is of course feasible, provided Mr. Tilden will also give up another plan on which he lays great stress, viz: the reduction of the interest on the whole debt by one per cent. To propose that, and yet go on increasing the amount of the debt, would be absurd. And when Mr. Tilden has accumulated his gold reserve in the Treasury, what security has he that it will stay there, or even in the country? The economic laws which have drained it away from us in past years are not subject to repeal, even by a Democratic Congress. They have their root in the fact that we are an old world in our tastes and wants; a new world in our imperfect development of all the resources which meet and supply those tastes and wants. All the legislation contemplating the redress of this inequality, Mr. Tilden would sweep away on the very eve of its success; he would leave us a nation endowed with the intelligence, the likings, and the desires of London, Paris, and Berlin, but with the industries of Thibet or Canada.

Secondly, as to our paper-money, Mr. Tilden does not use the word "contraction," but seems to hint at it when he deprecates "any measure which affects the public imagination with the fear of an apprehended scarcity" of paper-money. He speaks of either funding the Treasury notes in ordinary bonds, or redeeming them