whose condition in this regard was so exceptionally good at the beginning of the period in point.  The constitutions of our States have been repeatedly altered, and they are now very different in their details from the old colonial charters, liberal and elastic as these for the most part were.  Yet American innovations are but child’s play to those of Europe, which has not reached the position we held at the beginning, and has a great deal still to do.  In France the people are not trained to local self-government, but they have an excellent police, and the rights of person and property are well protected.  In Italy, which has only within a few years ceased to be a mere geographical expression, municipal rights and the independence of the commune are on a stronger basis, but the police is bad, though far better than when the Peninsula was divided among half a dozen powers.  Both have but commenced arming themselves with the chief safeguard of Germany, popular education.  The great fact with them all is, that, despite the drawbacks of external pressure and large standing armies, they are at liberty to pursue the path of domestic reform as far as they have light enough to perceive it or purpose enough to require it.

All this is an immense gain.  It reflects itself in the improved social condition of the people—­a result, of course, not wholly due to it.  Crime, though the newspapers make us familiar with more of it than formerly, has notably diminished.  The savage classes of the great capitals, populous as some of the old kingdoms, are controlled like a menagerie by its keepers.  A residuum of the untamable will always exist, inaccessible to education or “moral suasion,” and amenable only to force.  This force seems sufficiently supplied by the baton of the constable, and we may hope that even in volcanic Paris an eruption of barricades will henceforth cease, unless simply as a somewhat flamboyant expression of political sentiment, the gamin throwing up paving-stones and omnibuses as the independent British voter throws up his hat at the hustings.  But it will not do to expect too much from any ameliorating cause or chain of causes.  Race-characteristics cannot be annihilated.  Man is an animal, and the Parisian turbulent.  The Commune has done its worst probably, and the Internationale, which threatened at one time to loom up as a modern Vehmgericht, has subsided.  Whatever may hereafter come of such slumbering perils, the beneficent forces which so largely repress and reduce them are none the less real.

The marked advance of the masses in physical well-being is a great—­some would say the greatest—­item in social profit and loss.  Food is everywhere better in quality and more regular in supply.  The English record of the corn-market for six centuries shows a remarkable alteration in favor of steadiness in price.  The uncertainties of the seasons are discounted or neutralized by the average struck by increased variety of products and multiplied sources