fied, not only to the moral
improvement, but also to the material prosperity of our land.

Great events are required to inspire a people with great ideas. _Sicut
patribus sit Deus nobis_ is the motto of the city whence the "Atlantic"
goes forth to its readers. Let all who adopt this aspiration remember
for what they ask. God was with our fathers, and sent them hardship,
peril, defeat, that, battling painfully therewith, they might become
great and fruitful men. Not otherwise can He be with us. From the misery
of our civil strife we may educe a future happiness, as well as a
present blessedness. The fierce excitement of physical action has been
contagious to the heart and intellect of the time. Realities have
presented themselves which can be met only by ideas. In the seeming
distant years of our old prosperity, a few men and women sought to
abolish slavery because it oppressed the inferior race; today, the
nation deals with it because it has rendered the superior race
hopelessly violent and corrupt. Of course, there will always be a class
of doubting Thomases ready to deny the presence of any divine leadership
that may not at once be touched and weighed and measured. To the
prototype of these men such tangible evidence as his feeble faith could
accept was not withheld. And those among us who are in like condition
may read M. Cochin's book, and be convinced that a system which to the
common sense of the Christian world seems morally wrong is neither
politically expedient nor materially necessary.

_A Treatise on the Law of Promissory Notes and Bills of Exchange_. By
THEOPHILUS PARSONS, LL.D., Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University,
and Author of Treatises on the Law of Contracts, on the Elements
of Mercantile Law, on Maritime Law, and the Laws of Business for
Business-Men. In Two Volumes. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

We eat and drink paper and live upon paper, is a metaphor which has been
true enough these many years, but we probably appreciate the liveliness
of it just at the present time more thoroughly than ever before.
But even now we realize very imperfectly what a power in the world
paper-money is; for we are apt to think of it only as a circulating
medium in the form of bank-notes, or treasury-notes, or of somebody's
currency which has the merit of making no pretensions to the theoretical
idea of a currency which represents gold, the representative of
everything else. Bills of exchange and promiss