his lack is that of
guide-posts. There is no more effectual way of giving a traveler a
vivid impression of the sparsity of settlement in a rural district
than to let him lose his way. Regions which he might otherwise have
fancied to be densely peopled will seem to him strangely depopulated.
In cities, where a hundred people can always be found between any
two streets to tell you your whereabouts, we yet scrupulously post up
signs at every corner; but in the country, where you may travel a mile
before meeting a man or a house, hardly one in five of the junctions
of thoroughfares are marked with guide-boards. This lack is perhaps
more serious in the suburbs of large cities than elsewhere, since in
thinly-settled districts the main road at least is generally easy to
keep. Occasionally the post is a mocker, its painted letters being
suffered to grow so dim with time as not to be decipherable; or
perhaps the board has been carried off by a gale, or else turned the
wrong way by some joker, who relies on the authorities to neglect
the mischief. It would save much time and temper for wayfarers were
guide-boards multiplied fourfold in all parts of the country.

* * * * *

When Von Moltke had conquered France, his first care for the future
was to protect Germany, by the seizure of the French frontier
fortresses, from all danger of successful attack in time to come;
yet at Belfort one gap in the line has been left in the keeping of
France--possibly, like the heel of Achilles, the point at which
a hostile shaft may one day wound the German empire. The Berlin
_Boersenzeitung_, which claims that with Metz, Strasburg, Mayence,
Coblentz and Cologne, and with the enlargement of Ulm and Ingoldstadt
and the new line of Bavarian defence, "Germany has a barrier of
fortresses unequaled in the world," yet admits that the project of
establishing a new German fortress near Mulhouse or Huningue, "so as
to take the place of Belfort," has now been abandoned--a fact which
seems to show that there is one little loophole in the defensive armor
of Germany, otherwise invulnerable.

* * * * *

"A man may steal the livery of Heaven to serve the devil in." It has
always been a favorite device of Napoleonism to dress itself up in the
garb of popular government, and to appropriate the peculiar phrases
of democracy, with a view to confound the distinction between the
sovereign will of one and