Great
Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial
federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only
bond of union--the crown, and not the English parliament, being the
titular and actual sovereign. Sovereign power over America in the
parliament Franklin never would admit.

It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be
dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland
has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards
it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect
for authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture
of untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has
physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged
country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty
of its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental
constitution, alien in race, temperament, and religion, having
scarcely one point of sympathy with the English.

NOVEL AND SCHOOL

Note the seeming anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the
ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to
fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and
to accept the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be
obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to
come to conclusions on inadequate evidence--a disposition usually due to
one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic
habit.

Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which they are
kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been heard to
"read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books
cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are--the best of
them--only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any
sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken
in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education
is not begun.

The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for
that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond description.

The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any
purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus
encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of no