chises or contracts of any kind are to be secured from a community, we find leading citizens in the ring to rob their own neighbors, managers of corporations bribing law-makers, lawyers for pay helping their clients to bribe safely, jurors refusing to render just verdicts. These men-bribers of voters, voters who are bribed, bribers of aldermen and legislators, and aldermen and legislators who are bribed, men who secure control of law-making bodies and have laws passed which enable them to steal from their neighbors, men who have laws non-enforced and break laws regulating saloons, gambling houses, and, in short, all men who pervert and befoul the sources of law-these men we have called Enemies of the Republic. They are worse they are enemies of the human race. They are destroyers of a people. They are murderers of a civilization.

In other words, it is Mr. McClure's opinion that the terrible increase of life-taking in America is due to the spirit of lawlessness encouraged in the nation by the men who, in order to make private fortunes, bribe, directly or indirectly, the police and the legislative bodies, or ensure, by means of bribery and intimidation, that their creatures shall be chosen for offices of public trust. In our belief, Mr. McClure is right. The whole history of mankind shows that you cannot be virtuous in water-tight compartments. Just as no man can say to himself: "I will do a corrupt [or immoral, or unworthy] act just once, or only in this department of my life, and in all other cases I will be a good citizen and a good man," so no nation can tolerate corruption or wrongdoing in one portion of the national life and imagine that the evil will go no further. He who pays bribes to obtain some consideration from a public body or a public official, who takes hush-money or receives a secret commission in order that this or that rich man or company may have his will against

the law of the land, is, in truth, a sharer in the iniquity of the murders and homicides which disgrace his country. Such corruption is less sensational, but not in reality less criminal, than murder. There can be no greater crime than to poison the stream at the fountain-head.

It remains for the American people to apply the remedy to this new evil, as so often in the past they have applied remedies to national crimes. The first thing is to awaken the conscience of the nation. We are glad to see that it is the intention of the conductors of McClure's Magazine to unmask, in a coming series of articles, the men who are corrupting the public and private life of the United States. Public opinion is still an immense factor for good in the United States, and, Heaven be praised, the printing press is still free in America. The corrupt millionaire may be able to buy a Municipality, a State Legislature, a Police Commissioner, or a Court of Justice. He may be able to ruin, and so silence, any politician, or even any preacher or College Professor, who dares to oppose his schemes. But even the richest multi-millionaire cannot buy all the printing presses in the United States. When every other opponent is drugged, gagged, or bought, the printing press can still speak. But it will not, of course, be enough merely to expose in the Press those who use their wealth corruptly. The American people must reform their institutions in such a way that they cannot be captured by the tyrants who now use money as in the old days they used armed force. Το accomplish this the first thing needful is to strengthen the American Courts of Justice, and to give the Judges something of the weight and authority in public life that they have in England. We do not for a moment suggest that the State Judges are, as a whole, corrupt, for we are well aware that, with

very few exceptions, they are men who could no more be bribed than could our own Judges. But as a rule, or at any rate in a vast number of cases, they are not men of sufficient power and standing in the community to do their duty as it ought to be done. The posts they occupy are too poorly paid to attract the best intellects in the country, and human nature being what it is, poorly paid and socially and intellectually insignificant men will not stand up sufficiently to the forces of wealth and influence. We venture to say that if American Judges had the standing and prestige which belong to our Judges, the rich men (needless to say, only a minority of the wealthy classes in America) who now use their money to corrupt public officials and public bodies would find themselves in jail either for contempt of Court, or for some open breach of a positive law. Rich men dare not openly defy the law in England as they do in America. The actual statute law in America is more than sufficient to put down corruption. It is its administration that is at fault. We know how difficult, owing to the State system, it will be to give greater weight and authority to the Judicature in the ordinary The Spectator.

State Courts of the United States. Till this is done, however, no attempt to purify American life can be really and permanently successful. Further, it is absolutely necessary that not merely in the cities, but throughout the country, there should be a large, wellpaid, and efficient police force, and that this police force should be made to recognize that its duties are quite as much preventative as punitive. The American people do not at present realize that it is as much their business to prevent crime taking place as to arrest the criminal after a crime has been committed.

We fear, as we have suggested above, that our endorsement of Mr. McClure's article will be represented by interested people as an attack upon America by "unfriendly, supercilious, and hypocritical Englishmen." We must take the risk of this, however, content to feel that if we have done something, however little, to awaken American public opinion on a vital matter, we shall have deserved well of the Republic. We would rather be "howled down" for a season as anti-American than join in a conspiracy of silence on a question which concerns the welfare of the whole Anglo-Saxon world.

Messrs. Duckworth & Co. announce "Italian Medals," by Cornelius von Fabriczy, translated by Mrs. Gustavus W. Hamilton, with forty-one plates and with notes by G. F. Hill, of the Coins and Medals Department in the British Museum.

The piquant character of the biography which Catherine Bearne names

"A Daughter of the Revolution" will be inferred as soon as the reader realizes that its subject is Laura Permon, wife of General Junot and duchess of Abrantes, and that its incidents are largely drawn from her well-known "Memoirs." On terms of easy familiarity with the whole Bonaparte family from her earliest childhood, and married at sixteen to one of Napoleon's

most distinguished leaders, Madame Junot's recollections were full of intimate disclosures of the Emperor's private life, and Mrs. Bearne's volume of four hundred pages contains not a few of the most realistic. Twenty engravings, many of them portraits, add to its attractiveness. E. P. Dutton & Co.

The celebration of the quarter-centenary of John Knox's birthday this year promises a number of new and more or less popular biographies of the Reformer. The question of whether Knox was really born in 1505 does not, however, appear to have been definitely settled. Dr. Hay Fleming, who is preparing an elaborate biography, brings forward evidence to prove that Knox was born in 1515; and there is certainly some ground for the belief that the older biographers, in fixing upon 1505, have confused the Reformer with another John Knox. It is rumored that an eminent historian meditates the presentation of Knox from the Roman Catholic point of view. In support of that presentation bonâ fide Jesuit documents preserved in the Vatican will be quoted.

In his monographs on "Historic Highways of America" Mr. Archer Butler Hulbert has reached the story of the great American canals, and the thirteenth volume of his series is devoted to the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, and the Pennsylvania canal. With these he includes a sketch of the development of the two great railway routes which follow these canals, the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania systems. The story of the Potomac Company, and its successor, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company is especially interesting because this enterprise grew out of plans devised by Washington, and Mr. Hulbert is

able to quote from a journal which Washington wrote in 1784 recording a journey over this route, which has not been before published. There are six or seven maps and other illustrations. The Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland.

The gentle art of verse-making cannot justly be said to have become wholly out-of-date when from one of our minor poets,-and, by the way, who are our major poets now?-comes a collection of verse of such rare and delicate quality as is found between the pretty covers of Florence Earle Coates' "Mine and Thine" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) Much of it has appeared in the leading magazines, and some bits of it,-for example the poem beginning "Had Henley died"-attracted no little attention when first printed. Sincere sentiment, warm sympathy, love of nature, of childhood and of country, high aspiration and delicate fancy all find expression in the volume, and through all is a pervasive note of sweetness and spontaneity. "A Little Minister," "Socrates," "Betrothal," "Nature," "Joan of Arc" and a dozen others offer themselves temptingly for quotation, but space admits only of this, "Motherless.":

He was so small, so very small,

That since she ceased to care, 'Twas easy just to pass him by, Forgetting he was there;

But though too slight a thing he seemed

Of interest to be,One heart had loved him with a love As boundless as the sea.

He was so poor, so very poor,

That now, since she had died, He seemed a tiny threadbare coat With nothing much inside; But, ah! a treasure he concealed, And asked of none relief:

His shabby little bosom hid

A mighty, grown-up grief.

The

Disraeli has not yet been awarded the fruits of his work as a man of letters. Here and there, notably by Sir Leslie Stephen, tribute has been paid, but no place has been assigned to him by Mr. John Morley among English Men of Letters, nor by Professor Eric Robertson among Great Writers. general mass of readers who, so far as concerns works of real literary merit, are undoubtedly swayed by authority, noticing the general neglect, incline to relegate to a secondary place the books in question. In this case, however, it is not necessary to combat opposition or adverse criticism, so much as to present the claims of the novels to be ranked as literature worthy to be enrolled among the classics of the language.

The neglect of Disraeli's writings may be in part due to the fact that most people think it is below the dignity of a statesman, or of any man following what is called a "serious" profession, to compose works of fiction. Certainly, many do not yet understand that the man who writes novels may be a very

wise man; they do not realize that accurately to portray human nature, and to present pictures of life, is not only a most worthy but also a most difficult task, requiring for its performance an intelligence far above the average, acute powers of observation, and a keen sense of humor. Indeed, there are still some-happily, fewer and fewer every year-who sneer at novels and regard them as works of supererogation, all unknowing of the opportunity they throw away to learn something of the nature and habits of their fellow-creatures. For, surely, the great novelist is the observer, sounding the depths while others glance at the surface, and examining the mysteries of life, while others are content to overlook even the obvious. Those who dabble in ink often wade deep in human nature; and, apart from all else, every good novel indirectly teaches humanity, humility, and a deeper understanding of the heart.

Be the cause what it may, by the vast majority Disraeli is regarded as a statesman who wrote novels. The al