tter
faith. Hard work and honesty will do more for us than the settlement of
the Presidential question, although that will probably do something.

* * * * *

--THIRTY-FIVE years ago Charles Dickens, having visited the legislative
capital of a great nation, wrote thus about the men that he found
there: "I saw in them the wheels that move the meanest perversion of
virtuous political machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.
Despicable trickery at elections, underhanded tamperings with public
officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents with scurrilous newspapers
for shields, and hired pens for daggers, shameful trucklings to
mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is that every day and
week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are like
dragons' teeth of yore in everything but sharpness; aiding and abetting
of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions
of all its good influences--such things as these, and in a word,
Dishonest Faction, in its most depraved and unblushing form, stared at
me from every corner of the crowded hall." Of what country could he
have thus written? Manifestly some "effete monarchy" in the most
degraded stage of its decadence.

* * * * *

--THE effort to establish carnivals in America is not a very
encouraging sign of a healthy moral tone in the public mind. Surely
there was never an attempt more superfluous, untimely, or out of place.
Not only New York, but the whole country is swarming with thousands of
people who are in need of money to buy shelter, food, and clothing;
banks of discount, savings banks, trust companies, the very charitable
institutions, are brought to ruin and disgrace by fraudulent
bankruptcy; and this is the time that is chosen to entice people to
playing the fool publicly in the open streets. If ever a Lent should
have been kept in the sackcloth of humiliation and the ashes of
despair, it is that which has just passed. People who would take part
in a carnival now would dance upon the borders of their own open
graves. And what do we want of a carnival, even if we were prosperous?
Carnivals are not suited to our national traits. They suit the Latin
races of the south of Europe; and even among them they are fading away
before the light of diffused intelligence and the thoughtfulness that
comes of knowledge. To us they are entirely foreign. They do