one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for
vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on the
other is a demagogue, ranting about the tyranny of the
capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be
permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while
thousands of honest folk are in want of necessaries.

Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a
workman who hears his children cry for bread?

I seriously apprehend you will, in some such season of
adversity as I have described, do things that will prevent
prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who
should, in a season of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn,
and thus make the next year not one of scarcity, but of
absolute famine.

There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will
increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh
spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution
is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society
has entered on its downward progress, either civilization or
liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will
seize the reins of government with a strong hand or your
republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was
in the fifth.

Curious that Macaulay's fears for America should not have been felt by
Americans themselves until now. Even to-day, when in some degree the
symptoms he described a half century ago are making their appearance, the
American people is more interested in the situation than alarmed by it;
for the Americans, like the English, rely with confidence upon the
Anglo-Saxon genius for working things out.

AN OPEN ATTITUDE IN STUDYING THE OCCULT.

What Shall the Man of Scientific Mind
Say in the Presence of Apparently
Supernatural Phenomena?

Sir Oliver Lodge, writing in the _Fortnightly Review_ a short time ago,
asserted that every man of science who has seriously undertaken to
investigate the "occult" has ended by believing in it.

This statement, as the Portland _Oregonian_ suggests, may not be so
important as might appear, for comparatively few trained scientists have
ventured into the vague problems of the threshold. The _Oregonian_,
however, proceeds to answer some of the objections commonly made to belief
in spirit communications, and also to defin