gnificance. Because George III.
distributed offices at his pleasure as rewards, and bound the holders to
party services in conformity with his will, the sovereign people is to
do the same. "Rotation in office" having been the means in the
eighteenth century of dispelling political stagnation and checking
jobbery and corruption, it is still the only process for correcting
abuses and getting the public service properly performed. The prime duty
of all good citizens is to emulate the incessant political activity of
their patriotic forefathers, and it is owing solely to a too general
neglect of this duty that ballot-stuffing and machine-running, and all
the other evils unknown in early days and in primitive communities, have
come into existence and gained sway throughout the land. These and
similar views, according to our observation, characterize what we may
without disrespect, and without confining the remark to the rural
districts, term the provincial mind, and wherever they exist the ideas
of the Civil-Service Reformers are not only not understood or treated as
visionary, but are regarded with aversion and distrust as foreign,
monstrous and inconsistent with popular freedom and republican
government.

AN UNFINISHED PAGE OF HISTORY.

I can easily understand why educated Americans cross the Atlantic every
year in shoals in search of the picturesque; and I can understand, too,
all that they say of the relief which ivied ruins and cathedrals and
galleries, or any other reminders of past ages, give to their eyes,
oppressed so long by our interminable rows of store-box houses, our
pasteboard villas, the magnificence of our railway accommodations for
Ladies and Gents, and all the general gaseous glitter which betrays how
young and how rich we are. But I cannot understand why it is that their
eyes, thus trained, should fail to see the exceptional picturesqueness
of human life in this country. The live man is surely always more
dramatic and suggestive than a house or a costume, provided we have eyes
to interpret him; and this people, as no other, are made up of the
moving, active deposits and results of world-old civilizations and
experiments in living.

Outwardly, if you choose, the country is like one of the pretentious
houses of its rich citizens--new, smug, complacently commonplace--but
within, like the house again, it is filled with rare bits gathered out
of every age and country and jumbled together in utter confusion