d maintaining a healthy
system of graduated and distributed powers, original or conferred,
for the support of domestic order and activity, have cultivated
successfully the field of home politics.

In that the change for the better is certainly vast. It is difficult
for Americans, whose acquaintance with European history is usually
derived from compends, to realize what an incubus of complicated
and conflicting privileges, restrictions and forms has, within the
century, been lifted from the energies of the Old World. The sweeping
reforms in French law are but a small part of what has been done. All
the neighbors of France, from Derry to the Dardanelles, have shared
in the blessing. We may be assisted to an idea of it by turning to the
experience of our own country, whose condition in this regard was
so exceptionally good at the beginning of the period in point. The
constitutions of our States have been repeatedly altered, and they are
now very different in their details from the old colonial charters,
liberal and elastic as these for the most part were. Yet American
innovations are but child's play to those of Europe, which has not
reached the position we held at the beginning, and has a great
deal still to do. In France the people are not trained to local
self-government, but they have an excellent police, and the rights
of person and property are well protected. In Italy, which has only
within a few years ceased to be a mere geographical expression,
municipal rights and the independence of the commune are on a
stronger basis, but the police is bad, though far better than when
the Peninsula was divided among half a dozen powers. Both have but
commenced arming themselves with the chief safeguard of Germany,
popular education. The great fact with them all is, that, despite the
drawbacks of external pressure and large standing armies, they are
at liberty to pursue the path of domestic reform as far as they have
light enough to perceive it or purpose enough to require it.

All this is an immense gain. It reflects itself in the improved social
condition of the people--a result, of course, not wholly due to it.
Crime, though the newspapers make us familiar with more of it than
formerly, has notably diminished. The savage classes of the great
capitals, populous as some of the old kingdoms, are controlled like
a menagerie by its keepers. A residuum of the untamable will always
exist, inaccessible to education or "moral suasio