Great events are required to inspire a people with great ideas. Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis is the motto of the city whence the “Atlantic” goes forth to its readers.  Let all who adopt this aspiration remember for what they ask.  God was with our fathers, and sent them hardship, peril, defeat, that, battling painfully therewith, they might become great and fruitful men.  Not otherwise can He be with us.  From the misery of our civil strife we may educe a future happiness, as well as a present blessedness.  The fierce excitement of physical action has been contagious to the heart and intellect of the time.  Realities have presented themselves which can be met only by ideas.  In the seeming distant years of our old prosperity, a few men and women sought to abolish slavery because it oppressed the inferior race; today, the nation deals with it because it has rendered the superior race hopelessly violent and corrupt.  Of course, there will always be a class of doubting Thomases ready to deny the presence of any divine leadership that may not at once be touched and weighed and measured.  To the prototype of these men such tangible evidence as his feeble faith could accept was not withheld.  And those among us who are in like condition may read M. Cochin’s book, and be convinced that a system which to the common sense of the Christian world seems morally wrong is neither politically expedient nor materially necessary.

A Treatise on the Law of Promissory Notes and Bills of Exchange.  By THEOPHILUS PARSONS, LL.D., Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University, and Author of Treatises on the Law of Contracts, on the Elements of Mercantile Law, on Maritime Law, and the Laws of Business for Business-Men.  In Two Volumes.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

We eat and drink paper and live upon paper, is a metaphor which has been true enough these many years, but we probably appreciate the liveliness of it just at the present time more thoroughly than ever before.  But even now we realize very imperfectly what a power in the world paper-money is; for we are apt to think of it only as a circulating medium in the form of bank-notes, or treasury-notes, or of somebody’s currency which has the merit of making no pretensions to the theoretical idea of a currency which represents gold, the representative of everything else.  Bills of exchange and promissory notes are instruments quite as indispensable to modern commerce and civilization; and when the necessities of an enlarged commercial intercourse, some five or six hundred years ago, first led to the use of paper as a representative of money, it was in the form of bills of exchange.  All the absolute requirements of social life and of commerce among the ancient Greeks and Romans were satisfied by the use of the precious metals as money, though the want of new facilities and new instruments of commercial exchange must have been constantly experienced.  Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, when he was