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LORD STANLEY.

will be paid when due; yet the Democrats have thought that their advocacy of fraud afforded the best chance of retrieving their lost popularity; and the Republicans shrank from avowing their honest intentions in plain and unmistakable terms. ted of a sophistical interpretation; and Mr. at the time that the Chicago platform admitIt was pointed out STEVENS has lately informed Congress that payment according to the letter and spirit of the contract meant payment in greenbacks, or the discharge of a promise to pay by a renewed promise. The Republican leader

schools, and the farmers who had left their fields at the call of duty have gladly returned to their proper occupation. The defeat of the Confederates was so complete, and so visibly final, that it was unnecessary to keep on foot a great army to deter the conquered enemy from renewing the war. In the absence of foreign danger or of domestic opposition, the troops were only required for purposes of police; and the fleet, which had been rapidly collected for blockades and for operations on internal waters, was for the greater part dismantled and sold. A year or two ago the army was re-added that, sooner than consent to payment duced to fifty thousand men, and now Congress, in consideration of the re-establishment of civil government in the majority of the Southern States, has reduced the number by two-fifths. Thirty thousand men will not be too many to guard the Indian territories, and the cost of the force will be insignificant. The Americans, amid many political blunders, deserve credit for discovering that, as they are invulnerable, it is not worth their while to load themselves with cumbersome defensive armour. of their soundest arguments for prosecutOne ing the war with the Confederate States was deduced from the obvious necessity of maintaining a standing army if they had consented to recognise the independence of a formidable neighbour.

The vanity of Americans in believing themselves exempt from the consequences of crimes and blunders can alone explain the probable repudiation of a large portion of the national debt. As it is not payable for many years to come, it would be far more profitable to assume for the present that it

in gold, he would vote for SEYMOUR and BLAIR, though he denounces them as rebels. There can be little doubt that Mr. STEVENS and Mr. BUTLER will be followed, in spite of the Chicago platform, by a large section of the party, for a majority of Republicans voted for the shameless project of a ten per cent. tax on the interest of the bonds; and the more decorous Senate, notwithstanding the manly protest of Mr. SUMNER, approved Mr. SHERMAN'S plan for a compulsory reuntary exchange of a higher for a lower duction of interest under pretext of a volrate. The Bill, as amended by the House, restricts the interest on the new issue to 3.65 per cent., although it is absurd to suppose that the holder of a six per cent. Fivecompulsion, to a sacrifice of more than a Twenty bond would submit, except under third of his interest. If repudiation prevails, it will be impossible to contract new loans; and foreigners, with the exception of creditors, have no reason to complain of the voluntary surrender of one of the conditions of American power.

LORD STANLEY announced on Thursday that an agreement binding them mutually to assist he was quite in accord with the American au- the museums of Europe in procuring "casts and thorities and Mr. Seward as to the general prin- copies of national objects for the promotion of ciples which ought to govern our recognition of art." the rights of naturalization. This is comfortable of a treaty, but the articles are suggestions that The agreement is drawn up in the form to hear, and as regards Lord Stanley we can each country should establish a Commission to quite believe that if the question had been sub-secure copies, that all Commissions should inmitted to him during the lowest ebb of the Federal fortunes, he would have come to just the same conclusions. But certainly some of his colleagues have suffered a wonderful inward change and conversion on this class of subjects. From the fall of Richmond, American logic dates most of its persuasive force.

Spectator, 18 July.

THE Princes of most of the Royal families of Europe, including all the five Powers, have signed

terchange, and that the Princes should help. The idea is attributed to the Prince of Wales, and is a very sound one; only we would venture to suggest that as all these highly placed gentle men are subjects, not invested with diplomatic functions and not authorized to bind anybody, they should use terms not quite so strictly diplo matic, and publish their proposals in a form a little less suggestive of State papers.

Spectator, 22 August.

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NOTES ON THE PSALMS, By Albert Barnes, 811 CINCHONA IN JAMAICA,
WESLEYAN CONFERENCE,

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PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION AT THIS OFFICE:

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE II. These very interesting and valuable sketches of Queen Caroline, Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Pope, and other celebrated characters of the time of George II., several of which have already appeared in the LIVING AGE, reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine, will be issued from this office, in book form, as soon as completed.

A HOUSE OF CARDS.

THE BRAMLEIGHS OF BISHOP'S FOLLY, by CHARLES LEVER.
OCCUPATIONS OF A RETIRED LIFE, by EDWARD GARRETT.
PHINEAS FINN, THE IRISH MEMBER, by MR. TROLLOPE.

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From The Spectator.

FIFTY YEARS HENCE.

tury was very like the eighteenth; why should not the twentieth be like the twentyfirst, the nineteenth being as exceptional a cycle as the first?

There is, of course, and can be, no final answer to that question, any more than there can be a final answer to the question what any to-morrow may bring forth; for such final answer could come only from a faculty not belonging to man. There have been stationary periods, and some of them have followed short cycles of advance, and it is no doubt true that we all forget too completely the slowness of human affairs, the time it takes a new creed, or a new idea, or

A PAPER we published last week,* headed "The Concentrated Progress of the World," raises very naturally an oft-mooted question, whether the next fifty years can by possibility witness as great a change, political, social, and material, as the last fifty have seen? Old people who were just of age when Waterloo was fought tell us constantly that we can scarcely imagine the difference in every department of life between 1818 and 1868; in manners, modes of living, means of locomotion, and social tone; and ask if it be possible that an equal difference should exist between 1868 and 1918. Can a new invention to influence mankind. It there be another mechanical discovery equal is probable that Paganism in its classical to steam, an increase of wealth like that in- sense survived in corners of Italy till the troduced by manufactures, a social change tenth century, printing had been invented like the decease of feudalism, a political a hundred years before its result was felt advance in Great Britain like that which has by any large section of mankind, and gunsubstituted for the sovereignty of fifty fami- powder took centuries to kill the practice lies the sway of public opinion? Steam, of wearing armour as a defence. The next the factory, the press, and philanthrophy fifty years may be years marked by almost have all, they say, been born, or at least infinitesimal change, by mere applications have all reached manhood within that pe- of the ideas already in existence; developriod, and they ask if it is possible that other ments, for example, of steam communicapowers, at once so new and so effective, tion without the discovery of any motor should again be discovered by the world. capable of superseding steam, of social Shall we not for the next half-century be changes so gradual as to be almost imperengaged in exhausting their effects, till the ceptible, of political changes which the hisfifty years to come will seem alike to our-torians of the future will scarcely deem selves and our posterity only a somewhat worthy of record. The question refers, tiresome conclusion to the fifty years which have preceded them, till the world has once more in a manner stereotyped itself, and men have again come to believe that that which has been and is shall always be? What is the ground for believing, as most men do believe, that we are only on the threshold of change greater than any we have yet seen, for denying that we may be on the threshold of one of those long lulls, those periods of immutability of which the world has seen and endured so many? What is there in steam, or electricity, or the rise of America, or the spread of Republican and free-thinking opinion which should indicate that new forces will be speedily. at work, that things will change, that we shall not in 1968 be doing very much what we are doing now? Apart from individual influences, the seventeenth cen

* Living Age No. 1267.

however, rather to possibilities than probabilities, and the limit of possibilities is not so easy to fix. Listen to Sir James Simpson, the Edinburgh surgeon, discoursing upon a single division of them, the possibilities discerned as probabilities by mediciners with imagination.

"But that day of revolution will not probably be fully realized till those distant days when physicians —a century or two hence— shall be familiar with the chemistry of most diseases; when they shall know the exact organic poisons that produce them, with all their exact antidotes and eliminatories; when they shall look upon the cure of some maladies as simply a series of chemical problems and formula; when they shall melt down all calculi, necrosed bones, &c., operations; when the bleeding in amputations chemically, and not remove them by surgical and other wounds shall be stemmed not by septic ligatures or stupid needles, but by the simple application of hæmostatic gases or washes; when

master electricity, or discover some other motor the control of which would restore individualism, which could be used, that is, by the solitary worker, without so tremendous a disparity between his strength when alone and his strength when combined with others under a more than military discipline. The discoveries of the last thirty years which have so indefinitely increased the power of men, have but slightly increased the power of each man considered in his

the few wounds then required in surgery shall | Half the human race dies under three, perall be swiftly and immediately healed by the first ishes, that is, uselessly. There is no abintention; when medical men shall be able to solute reason, again, why man should not stay the ravages of tubercle, blot out fevers and inflammations, avert and melt down morbid growths, cure cancer, destroy all morbific organic germs and ferments, annul the deadly influences of malaria and contagions, and by these and various other means markedly lengthen out the average duration of human life; when our hygienic condition and laws shall have been changed by State legislation, so as to forbid all communicable diseases from being communicated, and remove all causes of sickness that are removable; when the rapidly increasing length of human life shall begin to fulfil that ancient proph-heritage by himself. He can when seated ecy, 'the child shall die an hundred years old;' when there shall have been achieved, too, advances in other walks of life, far beyond our present state of progress; when houses shall be built and many other kinds of work performed by machinery, and not by human hands alone; when the crops in these islands shall be increased five or ten fold, and abundance of human food be provided for our increased population by our fields being irrigated by that waste organic refuse of our towns which we now recklessly run off into our rivers and scas; when man shall have invented means of calling down rain at will; when he shall have gained cheaper and better motive-powers than steam; when he shall travel from continent to continent by submarine railways, or by flying and ballooning through

the air."

Sir James is a bit of a poet, but apart from his dream of a grand change in the average duration of human life, a dream connected rather with his theological beliefs than his scientific convictions, there is nothing whatever in those sentences beyond the range of fair scientific conjecture, and they imply a vast change, nothing less than the general healthiness of Western humanity, a disappearance of typhus, and cholera, and scrofula, and many another scourge of the day, as complete and final as that of leprosy, or the Black Death, or scurvy. Why should not one disease vanish as well as another till the human race lives its allotted time in health, perhaps the greatest swift advance that could possibly be made? Any system of hygiene which approached perfection would end infant mortality, and with it the greatest direct loss of power which now checks the progress of humanity.

alone get little out of steam or electricity, and anything which increased his power when alone as much as when in combination would probably change the whole aspect of society, would restore, for example, to the worker what it took from the capitalist. The change would be almost as great as that which in the sixteenth century destroyed the superiority previously exercised by physical strength in battle. Again, we hardly know, we can scarcely guess, where the application of powers already used may end. Suppose it true, as many men of mark in science believe, that the next great step may be in sea-going steamers, that international communication may be accelerated as internal communication has been, that we may yet see New York brought within two days' journey of Liverpool. The probability is that in ten years every social condition now existing in Europe would have ceased to exist, that the millions who toil for others and on whose toil modern society is built would choose to toil for themselves, would precipitate themselves in a rush to which all the movements of mankind have been trifles upon the New World. Suppose the population of Britain and Germany reduced to ten millions each, -a change less in magnitude than that which has occurred in many countries, and those ten millions only retained by advantages as great as the New World can offer, what would all the changes of the past half-century be to that? This may happen, even without any application of Stephenson's great idea, the one idea he never worked out, that if engineers, instead of trying to increase the power applicable to driving

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