department, civil and military, and driven to every shift, even to foreign enlistment and subsidy, to put on foot an army of a hundred thousand men.  What an opportunity for sermonizing on the failure of representative government!  In that war England lost much of her old prestige in the eyes of the world, and felt that she had lost it.  But nothing would have been more unphilosophical than to have assumed that England was degenerate or decrepit.  It was only that her training had been for so long exclusively mechanical and peaceful.  The terrible, but glorious, experience of the Indian Rebellion showed that Englishmen still possessed in as full measure as ever those noble characteristics on which they justly pride themselves, and of which a nation of kindred blood would be the last to deny them the praise.  When the heroic qualities found their occasion, they were not wanting.

We do not say this as unduly sensitive to the unfriendly, often insulting and always unwise, criticisms of a large proportion of the press and the public men of England.  In ordinary times we could afford to receive them with a good-natured smile.  The zeal of certain new converts to Adam Smith in behalf of the free-trade principles whose cross they have assumed, their hatred and contempt for all heretics to what is their doxy and therefore according to Dean Swift orthodoxy, and the naive unconsciousness with which they measure and weigh the moral qualities of other nations by the yards of cotton or tons of manufactured iron which they consume for the benefit of Manchester and Sheffield, are certainly as comic as anything in Aristophanes.  The madness of the philosopher who deemed himself personally answerable for the obliquity of the ecliptic has more than its match in the sense of responsibility shown by British journalists for the good conduct of the rest of mankind.  All other kingdoms, potentates, and powers would seem to be minors or lunatics, and they the divinely appointed guardians under bonds to see that their unhappy wards do no harm to themselves or others.  We confess, that, in reading the “Times,” we have been sometimes unable to suppress a feeling of humorous pity for the young man who does the leading articles, and who finds himself, fresh from Oxford or Cambridge and the writing of Latin verses, called suddenly to the autocracy of the Universe.  We must pardon a little to the imperii novitas, to the necessity of having universal misinformation always on tap in his inkstand.  He summons emperors, kings, ministers, even whole nations, to the inexorable blackboard.  His is the great normal school of philosophy, statesmanship, political economy, taste, and deportment.  He must help Cavour to a knowledge of Italy, teach Napoleon to appreciate the peculiarities of French character, interpret the American Constitution for Mr. Lincoln.  He holds himself directly accountable to heaven and earth, alike for the right solution of the Papal Question and for the costume of his countrymen