legislation and no salaries to its legislators, and has nothing in the way of public lands to give to infant railways, Credit Mobiliers and the like, can afford to spend somewhat generously, perhaps, in keeping up the pomp of Royalty, which is about all that is left of Royalty nowadays.

THE long-lived Assembly has at length yielded up the ghost, after an ante-mortem speech by the Duke d' Audiffret-Pasquier. Its successors, the two new Chambers, will meet some time in March. It can not be doubted that the remarkable victory of the Left in the choice of Senators-for it was especially remarkable in view of the strength of that party in the Assembly-has done much to better the chances of the Republic. The Senators thus chosen sit for life, and must exercise a great influence upon the future of the country. Men are wont to smile at life offices in a country which has been in the habit of turning everything upside down, at least once a generation, and indeed did it no less than ten times within twenty-five years but the present government has some promise of stability, and the oldest Senators have good reason to hope to fill their tenure of these new dignities. France will soon be full of excitement over the choice of Deputies to the lower Chamber. The election will be interesting and of great moment, for no opportunity has been suffered to arise by any of the governments which have existed since 1870, in which the feelings of the people generally could be tested. Propagandists of the Republican idea, who believe in a French Republic, will watch the event with anxious eyes.

SPAIN is always in trouble. The last seems to arise from the fact that the Carlists have erected batteries on the Biscayan coast, with which they belabor everything that comes within range. The London Times, commenting upon the notice which has been given to mariners to give the Spanish shore a wide berth, speaks with some asperity of the indifference of the Alphonsist government to the troubles which its incapacity to end the civil war is causing innocent parties. The powers, it thinks, are habitually lenient towards Spain, and that she presumes upon their kindness it cannot doubt. The article is interesting as following the announcement

recently published of the action of the Cabinet at Washington. "The United States," says the English journal, "might set a good example, by insisting that Cuba be no longer allowed to become the plague instead of the queen of the Antilles." Anxious as all rightminded men must be to see the miserable civil warfare in that island brought to an end, and Spain herself show what some call a "realizing sense" of her own condition as well as her relations to others, the prudent American may perhaps doubt the wisdom of any course which would invite the European powers to take part in a matter so near home as the Cuban question. A strict adherence to the Monroe doctrine has done us always practical good in every crisis, notably in that which arose upon the establishment of Maximilian's Empire; and this, least of all, seems to be the time for a departure from the safe and beaten pathway.

THE end of the Turkish complications cannot yet be safely predicted. Count Andrassy's note has not been received with the best grace by the Porte; and its recommendations, we are given to understand, have not been deemed admissible. The Turk has in him something of that pride with which the Spaniard always assumes to act, as if to-day Spain were the great power of Europe and ruled the Continent, as she did in the times of the Emperor Charles. His pride is no better founded, nor so well, as that of the Castilian; but he clings to it still, when power and prestige, and land and money, one after another, are slipping from him. He no longer dominates the Levant and keeps the frontiers of Eastern Europe in chronic terror. For the last time he has gathered his turbaned hosts about Vienna and vexed the Adriatic with his ships. The tramp of Russian armies has been heard upon his borders. The Balkan, through whose gates he once went forth to conquer, is no longer even a safe wall of defence; and in spite of the jealousy of Christian powers, he trembles in the heart of Constantinople. Whatever may be the end of this present business, whether Herzegovina gain her liberty or not, the Moslem empire draws to an end, if its days be not yet numbered. The Turk in Europe is an anachronism, and these are critical days.

IT is not unlike the common-place, business-like man who controls English foreign affairs to think it well to urge the idea that the

recent purchase of shares of the Suez Canal had no political significance. To him the act no doubt was simply a shrewd business transaction, and had that extent, no more. The present Earl of Derby is honest and sensible, and nothing if not practical. There is no humbug in him. His father would have seen the effect which the announcement that Great Britain had bought the Khedive's shares produced on the public mind, with instant and comprehensive glance. He would have felt quickest of all the patriotic stir in the pulse of England, and whatever the truth might have been, he would hardly have sought an occasion to deny that which men thought must be true because they hoped it was. The whole British Empire has thrilled with patriotic pride to think that England was again about to take her old place in Continental politics, and it would have been as wise to have let men indulge the notion undisturbed. But Lord Derby is practical and utterly without imagination, and he naturally believes that the people ought to regard the transaction as it is and was intended to be a business investment of a safe and promising kind; and not as they hoped it was and it might have been, -a bold and skillful move upon the dangerous but attractive board of European politics. At the same time we are assured that England supports Austria, with some emphasis; and no doubt, whether her more careful statesmen wish it or not, she will make the influence which belongs to her wealth and prestige felt, if the occasion demand it. England may, and often does, take an interested, narrow view of a political question; and if anything could rob her of her courage, it would be her selfishness. This Eastern question, however, touches her interests nearly, and she will hardly stand by a calm or cold spectator. No watchful student of the forces which are likely to bring about its settlement will leave England out of his ken or calculation.

WELL did the Empress of Germany express the truth when she said that the crime of Alexander, or Thomassen, the Bremerhaven murderer, concerned not one country alone, but humanity. It is hard even in these days of calculating crime and wholesale plunder, to imagine that a man would coldly sit down to plan the annihilation of hundreds of innocent men, women and children, for the sake of a few pieces of silver. Investigation has thus far discovered no accomplices, nor

any evidence of how the purpose of this fiend was to be carried out. The whole is conjecture, built on his dying confession; and the thing will go down a mystery, the truth being buried out of view in his dishonored grave. The man was sphynx-like. Even his wife, they say, knew nothing of his family or history, and not a jot of his design. He is described as handsome, well educated and of pleasant manners. But whence he came is as little known as is whither he has gone. He has bequeathed to us, however, a doubt more dreadful even than the tragedy that made him infamous—a doubt so full of horror that it is painful even to hint at it an idea that might paralyse commerce and destroy trade and break the nations into bits. The thought that men exist who could smuggle into ocean steamships a machine to blow them to pieces in mid-ocean is new to most of us. If this dreadful thing had not happened at Bremerhaven, we would have deemed the suggestion of such an idea wicked, and a slander on humanity. But a man has tried to do it for the sake of a little gain; and awful crimes have in them terrible suggestiveness. This creature has done what seemed impossible before. The Atlantic rushing headlong on the rocks of Nova Scotia, the Ville du Havre foundering at sea, the Deutschland thumping into pieces on the English sand-bank, the City of Boston sailing away into eternity, the hidden rock, the treacherous shoal, the impenetrable fog, the raging tempest, winds, waters, fire,-all these things were horrible enough. God has armed the deep with terrors and fenced it about with fear; but this man, so obscure and mysterious, and yet so great in his conception of evil, has been able to add still another peril to the sea.

THE New Year was hailed in this country with noises that would have done honor to an ancient Fourth of July. Everywhere bells were rung, cannons fired and night turned into day. But Philadelphia outdid herself. If infinite clamor and a commotion that drowned the loudest-mouthed bells in the general uproar can be taken as an evidence of patriotism, we are the most patriotic people in this world. Some one might find food for interesting investigation of the relations between noise and love of country, between American Patriotism and the Chinese fire-cracker. If the late Mr. John Adams's often-quoted remark about bells and bonfires be the first great cause, that patriot is much to blame, and would have done

well had he confined his suggestions, as he did at first, to a more solemn, and, to say the least, more rational celebration of national anniversaries. But dreadful to adult ears as is the noise, and dangerous to youthful eyes and fingers as are the fire-works, it must be confessed that there is a chance for something different from harsh criticism in the spectacle of thousands of people, of the three classes into which an acute philosopher divides mankind-men, women and boys,-crowding the streets of a great city at midnight, in the midst of the ringing of bells and illuminations that light up the whole, to greet the coming of the New Year with cheers and rejoicing. To us certainly this new year meant something very different from that which every other has expressed. It comes full of the past, as well of the future. It brings us all that is best of the things that have gone by, as well as a promise of the things that are to come. It is full of hope: a season of sentiment: a year of Jubilee. The Persian verse so often quoted might suggest to us the wisdom of waiting for the end before we spent ourselves in rejoicing; but after all it is far better to hail with bright anticipations the beginning, even if we know well enough they can never be fulfilled.

THE new year suggests the Centennial, the preparations for which are now resounding on every side. The buildings are almost done -so nearly completed, at least, that their readiness in time is now assured. They are everything one could desire. In design attractive, they are better adapted to their purpose than those of any previous exhibition. The practical character of American genius has expressed itself in them unmistakably, and thanks to the hard times, they are economically built. Their situation and surroundings are unsurpassed. They are easy of access by a dozen ways. The Congressmen and others, who were here on the 18th of December, were astonished at what they saw; and well they might be, if the minds of most of them were like that of the intelligent New Yorker who wanted to know but recently, if "the Philadelphians were going to hire buildings," as he "supposed they would, to hold their exhibition in ?" Many of the Commissioners are already here. Sweden, the first to act in the matter and the largest appropriator of money for her share, has been hard at work for some weeks past, her model school-house being two-thirds done. England has built her