tent than the painful one that some ambitious men have secured public
offices, and even bought their way into legislative bodies, by the
abundancies of their purses united to skill in manipulating partisan
machines. This is a most serious menace to honest popular government. It
is one of the very worst forms of a plutocracy. I often think that if
Webster and Clay and Calhoun and John Quincy Adams and Sumner and some
other giants of a former era could enter the Congressional halls of our
day, they might paraphrase the words of Holy Writ and exclaim: "Take the
money-changers hence, and make not the temple of a nation's legislation
a house of merchandise."

Foreign travel is no longer the novelty that it was once, and many
wealthy folk spend much of their time abroad since the Atlantic Ocean
has been reduced to a ferry. This growth of European travel has brought
its increment of information and culture; but, with new ideas from
abroad, have come also some new notions and usages that were better left
behind. A prohibitory tariff in that direction would "protect" some of
the unostentatiousness of social life that befits a republican people.
No young man or woman, who desires to attain proficience in any
department of scholarship, classical or scientific, need to betake
themselves to the universities of Europe. Those universities have come
to us in the shape of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and our other
most richly endowed institutions of learning for both sexes.

Quite too much of the social life of our country is more artificial than
formerly, and one result is the growing passion for publicity. Plenty of
ambitious people "make their beds in the face of the sun." Many things
are now chronicled in the press that were formerly kept behind the
closed doors of the home. The details of a dinner or a social company at
the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers. I sometimes
think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance
that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship. In the somewhat
primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and
were startled if their heart affairs were on other people's tongues; but
now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement--not
infrequently in the columns of a newspaper! It seems to be forgotten
that an engagement to marry may not always end in a marriage. The usage
of crowned heads abroad is no warrant for the n