The reader may remember the story of that non-committal editor who during the late canvass, desiring to propitiate all his subscribers of both parties, hoisted the ticket of “Gr——­ and ——­n” at the top of his column, thus giving those who took the paper their choice of interpretations between “Grant and Wilson” and “Greeley and Brown.”  A story turning on the same style of point (and probably quite as apocryphal, though the author labels it “historique”) is told of an army officers’ mess in France.  A brother-soldier from a neighboring detachment having come in, and a champenoise having been uncorked in his honor, “Gentlemen,” said the guest, raising his glass, “I am about to propose a toast at once patriotic and political.”  A chorus of hasty ejaculations and of murmurs at once greeted him.  “Yes, gentlemen,” coolly proceeded the orator, “I drink to a thing which—­an object that—­Bah!  I will out with it at once.  It begins with an R and ends with an e.”

“Capital!” whispers a young lieutenant of Bordeaux promotion.  “He proposes the Republique, without offending the old fogies by saying the word.”

“Nonsense!  He means the Radicale,” replies the other, an old captain from Cassel.

“Upon my word,” says a third as he lifts his glass, “our friend must mean la Royaute.”

“I see!” cries a one-legged veteran of Froschweiler:  “we drink to la Revanche.”

In fact, the whole party drank the toast heartily, each interpreting it to his liking.

In the hands of a Swift even so trivial an incident might be made to point a moral on the facility with which alike in theology and politics—­from Athanasian Creed to Cincinnati or Philadelphia Platform—­men comfortably interpret to their own diverse likings some doctrine that “begins with an R and ends with an e,” and swallow it with great unanimity and enthusiasm.

Possibly the death of Mr. Greeley, after a prolonged delirium induced in part by political excitement, may add for Americans some fresh interest to the theory of a paper which just previous to that pathetic event M. Lunier had read before the Paris Academy of Medicine.  The author confessed his statistics to be incomplete, but regarded them as ample for the decisive formulation of the proposition that great political crises tend to increase the number of cases of mental alienation.  The leading point of his elaborate argument appears to be the classification of fresh cases of insanity developed since the beginning of the late French war.  The strongest comparison is one indicating an excess of seven per cent, in the number of such cases, proportioned to the population in the departments conquered and occupied by the Germans, over those which they did not invade.  Finally, M. Lunier reckons the cases of mental alienation induced by the late political and military events in France at from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred.  Politics without war may, it is considered, produce the same results—­results not at all surprising, of course, except as to their extent.  As to this last, if M. Lunier’s figures and deductions be correct, the mental strain of exciting politics is even more destructive than has been generally supposed.