confined to one portion of the building, and ultimately extinguished, leaving nothing but blackened walls and roofless rooms, charred and dripping, as an evidence of their late presence. I must say, the New York fire department is a model, and the cool way in which the firemen go to work, one well worthy of imitation.

In the land of wooden nutmegs one certainly looks for deception and frauds in trade, but I was not prepared for the extent of adulteration which characterises American productions. You cannot purchase a single article of domestic manufacture which is what it is supposed to be; and I should say the worst days in England before the Adulteration Acts were passed, were not so bad as the United States in the year 1881. It seems to me that everyone cheats everyone else, in his haste to get rich.

Legs are very impressive to a stranger in America. I called upon a gentleman shortly after my arrival, and found him and his clerks smoking round the stove in his office. He greeted me courteously and kindly, and began a chat on things in general. He was clear-headed and reasonable, but his position with his chair tilted back, as he conversed, and his legs upon his desk, to say nothing of the occasional use of an extemporised spittoon, were too much for my insular gravity. A bachelor friend of mine, who studies the comfort of his guests, has a row of slippers fastened along the sides of his sitting-room so that the legs may be elevated to the proper height with perfect comfort.

Just now, the commercial world of New York is agitated by the telegraph monopoly brought about by certain capitalists, who were not content with owning half the railways in the States. These gentlemen whose property is colossal, are greater despots than many European sovereigns have the credit of being. I fancy Oliver Goldsmith was not far from the truth when he said, "a republic was the best for the rich, a monarchy for the rest of society." Happily England does not yet possess a Gould or a Vanderbilt; and I believe Throgmorton Street is a shade purer than Wall Street.

The more sequestered parts of New England still retain many of the sayings and manners of their puritan forefathers. To be sure, a man is not now punished by a fine for kissing his wife on the Sabbath, but there are some relics of the old spirit left still. For instance, the Maine liquor law is advocated in many places and indeed has been adopted in several districts, with the result, however, of the liquor saloons being better patronised than before, and with little attempt at concealment.

Amongst genuine Americans, and indeed with five people out of six one meets with, the feeling against the Irish is far more bitter than with us. I do not believe the nation as a body has a particle of real sympathy with the so-called struggle for Liberty which Mr. Parnell and his deluded followers indulge in.

The Irishmen here are known by their fruits, and are bitterly judged thereby. We need never think that any but Irish Americans encourage Irish agitations

C. E. G.

THE STUDY OF HISTORY.

IN listening to a discussion, either public or private, upon some social or national question, between men of average or even of superior intelligence, nothing is more apparent to an impartial observer, than the contracted view generally taken, or the fragmentary nature of the knowledge of facts by which diverse opinions are supported. While it is considered necessary in regard to chemistry, metallurgy, and the arts incident to civilised life, that special training and systematised knowledge should be obtained before the individual is entitled to practice or to teach them; -it is strange that in reference to social or national questions of the greatest delicacy and importance, the ill-informed tyro, the partially informed enthusiast or partisan are often held to have mastered the subject. The lack of information is made up by excess of zeal, sometimes of passion or of prejudice; and so, judgment, "mocked with imperial names," is dragged at the wheels of the triumphal car of the feeling or the fury of the hour.

This unfortunate state of things is clearly seen by Professor Huxley; and in his Address at the opening of the Birmingham Science College, founded and endowed by Sir Josiah Mason, October 1, 1880, the great Scientist expressed the following remarkable views:

"If the evils which are inseparable from the good of political liberty are to be checked; if the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of selfrestraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political as they now deal with scientific questions; to be ashamed of undue haste and partisan prejudice in the one case as in the other; and to believe that the machinery of society is at least as delicate as that of a spinning-jenny, and not more likely to be improved by the meddling of those who have not taken the trouble to master the principles of its action."

It would be a misuse of such an argument as this to infer from it that because the majority of men are unable or unwilling to give a long and patient study to historical and political questions, therefore they should be debarred, or should abstain from exercising any judgment or influence upon them. Such a proposal would, if it were possible to carry it out, only increase the evil which it would seek to cure; because, even the excited and partisan interest in public questions, ignorant and shortsighted though it be, is some degrees better than a confirmed apathy in the popular mind upon such subjects. But, what it is desirable to enforce is this, that there are great principles underlying the

movements of men and of nations, of which political convulsions are but the effects; and that there is an unseen connection between apparently distant and dissimilar phenomena, which forbids any one political fact being taken as standing by itself; and which forbids any statesman or any sensible person from shaping a policy concerning it, until its connection and meaning have been discovered.

It was no doubt intended by the late Charles Dickens to be a keen satire on many writers of History, when he had fixed up in his library a number of wooden backs of books, elegantly bound, with the words, "History of England" stamped upon them. When you went to take them, you found the bindings were shams; and all the explanation vouchsafed to the inquirer, was that given by the devices on the backs below the title: "The Axe & Block"-" The Sword & Fetters”—“ The Thumb Screw, and many other Instruments of Torture"-with many emblems besides, sufficently explained the Novelist's conception of History, such as he had read it. The jest is no doubt deserved by both writers and readers of history, who never look at the facts below the surface, and who never strive to learn a lesson from the procession of events as it is passing by. But, after all, it is a Novelist's idea, and shows how far the work of fiction must necessarily be from the work of the philosopher. The object of the successful novelist is to delight his readers, to awaken their sympathies, but to save them the trouble of thought. The object of the philosoper of history is, on the contrary, to arouse thought; to compare events; to show the identity of great political movements; to disentangle the shifting and complex threads of diverse policies on a given question; to compel the reader to regard historical circumstances as chiefly of value in showing what is going on within the society to which they relate.

Such a mode of studying history, certainly, will deprive it of some of those attractions which have made the pages of one class of modern historians rival in their fascination and interest the productions of the novelist himself. None would desire to spare Macaulay and his school of historical portrait and scene-painting, for such history is of far more value than the novel, and tends to vitalise the past to many minds, as well as to prepare them for severer studies. But, if the study of history is to be sound and thorough; if the principles which have led to all real progress in the past are to be evolved from the crude mass of facts, and to be applied to the policy of the present, the student of history must quit these flowery but bewildering paths, and strike a direct philosophic course with steady mental discipline. He must leave the gossiping chronicler to linger over the events, while he seeks to ascertain their causes. He must watch the action and inter-action of great powers and policies; noting in the day of apparent greatness the errors which will infallibly bring about a fall.

While, however, this plan of study may seem to require the discipline of history to be stern and solitary; while such a mental course may promise only to be cheerless and forbidding; it will none the less surely afford a healthy intellectual training, but it will constantly throw forward a

calm and steady light on the history and politics of to-day. The watchful habit of mind constantly engaged in comparing the varying fortunes of great nations or classes, will render the individual alert to seize points of resemblance; to detect when different principles seem to be bringing about a like result; to separate real from apparent progress; unity from military cohesion; liberty from license; self-help from tutelage; national discipline from indulgence; and to distinguish the crude application of cruder theories from that balanced and practised regard of all the circumstances of a given crisis in which true statesmanship consists.

It is, in fact, only by such a comprehensive study of the past, that we can secure a calm view of matters now passing before us; and upon which, in his degree, every man in a free country is at intervals called upon to decide. Every historical position or political question, as it is moving before the public eye, is coloured in its aspect by the passions or the prejudices of the hour. Every man views it from his own mental standpoint; and, like the shield of the knight of old, it is white or black to him, according to the direction from which he approaches the subject of his thought. This is sure to be the case increasingly, if great questions come upon men or nations unawares; and if their minds are not prepared by previous training to judge aright concerning them. I have said increasingly, because every extension of franchise brings in a new and unknown force into the politics of the country in which it is given. This force is a power for good or for evil, in proportion as it is intelligently or ignorantly exercised. It can only be exercised intelligently on public questions when all action in regard to the future is regulated by wisdom, derived from a study of the past.

As an instance, what can be more profitable for an Englishman than to compare the history of his own country with that of a neighbouring nation, France, in order to ascertain wherein the great difference of its position and prospects consists? If the student regards the great towns of France in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, he will find that they were more powerful and free than those of our own country. Three centuries later, and all that power had disappeared; while in England the same civic communities had steadily increased their power and influence in the government of the country? How was this? It will be found that while in France the three estates, the crown, the noble, and the commoner, were usually at war with each other, more or less declared; in England the commoners, while they obtained their charters from the King, always united with the lords and barons of the district to maintain what they had won from royalty, and thus grew stronger with them, the nobles aiding the commoners to reduce the undue power and privilege of royalty; while, eventually, the commoners were strong enough to curtail any undue privileges of hereditary rank. But, in France, the barons and cities were at perpetual strife. The Crown, therefore, made use of the barons to reduce, and finally to destroy the liberty and influence of the great towns. When this was done, the power of the aristocracy was in its turn destroyed by the Crown itself, until Louis XIV. could truly say: