are still the fountain of all our political ideas; and our party struggles are not waged about new principles or animated by new watch words, but are fenced and guided by the maxims transmitted by the founders of the republic.  This is our strength and our safeguard against wild experiments, but it is also an impediment to every suggestion of improvement.  It binds us to the letter of tradition, leads us to confound the accidental with the essential, and gives to certain notions and certain words a potency which must be described as an anachronism.  We still use the language of the Revolutionary epoch, recognize no perils but those against which our ancestors had to guard, and put faith in the efficacy of methods that have no longer an object, and of phrases that have lost their original significance.  Because George III. distributed offices at his pleasure as rewards, and bound the holders to party services in conformity with his will, the sovereign people is to do the same.  “Rotation in office” having been the means in the eighteenth century of dispelling political stagnation and checking jobbery and corruption, it is still the only process for correcting abuses and getting the public service properly performed.  The prime duty of all good citizens is to emulate the incessant political activity of their patriotic forefathers, and it is owing solely to a too general neglect of this duty that ballot-stuffing and machine-running, and all the other evils unknown in early days and in primitive communities, have come into existence and gained sway throughout the land.  These and similar views, according to our observation, characterize what we may without disrespect, and without confining the remark to the rural districts, term the provincial mind, and wherever they exist the ideas of the Civil-Service Reformers are not only not understood or treated as visionary, but are regarded with aversion and distrust as foreign, monstrous and inconsistent with popular freedom and republican government.

AN UNFINISHED PAGE OF HISTORY.

I can easily understand why educated Americans cross the Atlantic every year in shoals in search of the picturesque; and I can understand, too, all that they say of the relief which ivied ruins and cathedrals and galleries, or any other reminders of past ages, give to their eyes, oppressed so long by our interminable rows of store-box houses, our pasteboard villas, the magnificence of our railway accommodations for Ladies and Gents, and all the general gaseous glitter which betrays how young and how rich we are.  But I cannot understand why it is that their eyes, thus trained, should fail to see the exceptional picturesqueness of human life in this country.  The live man is surely always more dramatic and suggestive than a house or a costume, provided we have eyes to interpret him; and this people, as no other, are made up of the moving, active deposits and results of world-old civilizations and experiments in living.