troubles arising from the constant accession of new raw material before the old was welded into shape.  There is nothing in the present evils of America to lead us to despair of the Republic, if only we let a legitimate imagination place us on a view-point sufficiently distant and sufficiently high to enable us to look backwards and forwards over long stretches of time, and lose the effect of small roughnesses in the foreground.  Even M. de Tocqueville exaggerated the evils existing when he wrote his famous work, and forecast catastrophes that have never arisen and seem daily less and less likely ever to arise.  Let it be enough for the present that America has worked out “a rough average happiness for the million,” that the great masses of the people have attained a by no means despicable amount of independence and comfort.  Those who are apt to think that the comfort of the crowd must mean the ennui of the cultured may safely be reminded of Obermann’s saying, that no individual life can (or ought to) be happy passee au milieu des generations qui souffrent. This source of unhappiness, at any rate, is less potent in the United States than elsewhere.  It is only natural that material prosperity should come more quickly than emancipation from ignorance, as Professor Norton has noted in a masterly, though perhaps characteristically pessimistic, article in the Forum for February, 1896.  It may, too, be true, as the same writer remarks, that the common school system of America does little “to quicken the imagination, to refine and elevate the moral intelligence;” and the remark is valuable as a note of warning.  But it may well be asked whether the American school system is in this respect unfavourably distinguished from that of any other country; and it must not be forgotten that even instruction in ordinary topics stimulates the soil for more valuable growths.  The methods of the Salvation Army do not appeal to the dilettante; but it is more than possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagination has been touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude appeal of trombones out of tune and the sight of poke-bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will be more intelligent and susceptible human beings than the grandchildren of the chawbacon whose mental horizon has been bounded by the bottom of his pewter mug.

Those who think for themselves will naturally make more mistakes than those who carefully follow the dictates of a competent authority; but there are other counterbalancing advantages which bring the enterprising mistake-maker more speedily to the goal than his impeccable rival.  The poet might almost have sung “’Tis better to have erred and learned than never to have erred at all.”  The intellectual monopoly of England is, perhaps, even more dangerous than the material.  The monastic societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too apt to insist on certain forms of knowledge, and to think that real