and one which concerns multitudes of the very best class of
our citizens, to whom we recommend this article for thoughtful perusal.
Its writer has a more thorough acquaintance with life insurance
management than is probably possessed by any other one man in the
country. He _knows_, he does not infer or conjecture, and he has
learned by experience the only way in which to bring life insurance
companies to an effective responsibility. What they are, even when they
are not managed in a manner undeniably fraudulent, has been shown by the
recent investigations at Albany, which brought to light the payment of
salaries and bonuses of monstrous extravagance and the use of proxies by
the thousand on the part of the officers who took these great sums out
of the pockets of clerks and clergymen, widows and orphans. Something
must be done, and that speedily, to correct this abuse even among the
honest companies, and the way to doing it is pointed out in the article
to which we refer.

--Since we prepared our last nebulous notes, General Grant has passed
into private life. The country has accepted the event as a matter of
course; it has elicited very little comment. The end of his
administration was made the occasion of some retrospection and some
criticism, it is true; but that did not, in either case, touch the
subject which presents itself to us in connection with the change which
took place in Washington on the 4th of March. General Grant, by becoming
then a mere private citizen, closed one of the most remarkable careers
in modern history. Men, a very few men, have done more, or been more,
than he has done or has been; but it would be difficult to name a man in
modern times who rose from obscurity to such a height, passed through
such a series of events, held such power, and who passed peaceably, and
in full possession of his health and all his faculties, into an
absolutely powerless and private condition, and all this in sixteen
years. The experiences of Cromwell and Washington were most nearly like
Grant's. But Cromwell fought six years ere he won his crowning victory
at Worcester; and although he was made Lord Protector in 1657, was known
to all England as an able and energetic member of the Long Parliament,
and one of the leaders of the popular party in 1640, seventeen years
before. Washington also saw six years pass from the time when he drew
his sword under the old elm at Cambridge, as Commander-in-Chief of the
colonial