of our American cousins! Their quantity of cotton, dollars, industry and resources, I believe to be almost unspeakable; but I can by no means worship the like of these. What great human soul, what great thought, what great noble thing that one could worship, or loyally admire, has yet been produced there? None: the American cousins have yet done none of these things. "What they have done ?" growls Smelfungus, tired of the subject: "They have doubled their population every twenty years. They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest bores ever seen in this world before,―that hitherto is their feat in History!"-And so we leave them, for the present; and cannot predict the success of Democracy, on this side of the Atlantic, from their example. —L. D. P. I.

GOVERNING.

I SAY, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first right of man;' compared with which all other rights are as nothing,-mere superfluities, corollaries which will follow of their own accord out of this; if they be not contradictions to this, and less than nothing! To the wise it is not a privilege; far other indeed. Doubtless, as bringing preservation to their country, it implies preservation of themselves withal; but intrinsically it is the harshest duty a wise man, if he be indeed wise, has laid to his hand. A duty which he would fain enough shirk; which accordingly, in these sad times of doubt and cowardly sloth, he has long everywhere. been endeavouring to reduce to its minimum, and has in fact in most cases nearly escaped altogether.

Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained. By multifarious devices

we have been endeavouring to dispense with governing; and by very superficial speculations, of laissezfaire, supply-and-demand, &c. &c. to persuade ourselves that it is best so. The Real Captain, unless it be some Captain of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable; the Phantasm Captain everywhere very conspicuous. —L. D. P. I.

GOVERNORS.

TELL me what kind of man governs a People, you tell me, with much exactness, what the net sum-total of social worth in that People has for some time been.

-L. D. P. III.

HOW DO MEN RISE IN YOUR SOCIETY?

IN fact this question always rises as the alpha and omega of social questions, What methods the Society has of summoning aloft into the high places, for its help and governance, the wisdom that is born to it in all places, and of course is born chiefly in the more populous or lower places? For this, if you will consider it, expresses the ultimate available result, and net sum-total, of all the efforts, struggles and confused activities that go on in the Society; and determines whether they are true and wise efforts, certain to be victorious, or false and foolish, certain to be futile, and to fall captive and caitiff. How do men rise in your Society? In all Societies, Turkey included, and I suppose Dahomey included, men do rise; but the question of questions always is, What kind of men? Men of noble gifts, or men of ignoble? It is the one or the other; and a life-anddeath inquiry which! For in all places and all times, little as you may heed it, Nature most silently but most inexorably demands that it be the one and not the other. And you need not try to palm an ignoble sham

upon her, and call it noble; for she is a judge. And her penalties, as quiet as she looks, are terrible; amounting to world-earthquakes, to anarchy and death everlasting; and admit of no appeal! -L. D. P. V.

TALENT.

I CONSIDER that every Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it answers this question. With all sublunary entities, this is the question of questions. What talent is born to you? How do you employ that? The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you, of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or wine or herrings or whaleoil, which the Newspapers record with such anxiety every season. This is not quite counted by seasons, therefore the Newspapers are silent: but by generations and centuries, I assure you it becomes amazingly sensible; and surpasses, as Heaven does Earth, all the corn and wine, and whale-oil and California bullion, or any other crop you grow. If that crop cease, the other crops-please to take them also, if you are anxious about them. That once ceasing, we may shut shop; for no other crop whatever will stay with us, nor is worth having if it would.

-L. D. P. IV.

BAD GOVERNMENT.

To be governed by small men is not only a misfortune, but it is a curse and a sin; the effect, and alas the cause also, of all manner of curses and sins. To profess subjection to phantasms, and pretend to accept guidance from fractional parts of tailors, is what Smelfungus in his rude dialect calls it, "a damned lie," and nothing other. A lie which, by long use and wont, we have grown accustomed to, and do not the least feel to be a lie, having spoken and done it continually everywhere for such a long time past;-but has Nature grown

to accept it as a veracity, think you, my friend? Have the Parcæ fallen asleep, because you wanted to make money in the City? Nature at all moments knows well that it is a lie and that, like all lies, it is cursed and damned from the beginning. —L. D. P. IV.

VOX POPULI.

DID you never hear, with the mind's ear as well, that fateful Hebrew Prophecy, I think the fatefulest of all, which sounds daily through the streets, "Ou' clo'! Ou' clo'!"-A certain People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming majority, "Not he; Barabbas, not he! Him, and what he is, and what he deserves, we know well enough: a reviler of the Chief Priests and sacred Chancery wigs; a seditious Heretic, physical-force Chartist, and enemy of his country and mankind: To the gallows and the cross with him! Barabbas is our man; Barabbas, we are for Barabbas!" They got Barabbas :-have you well considered what a fund of purblind obduracy, of opaque flunkyism grown truculent and transcendent; what an eye for the phylacteries, and want of eye for the eternal noblenesses; sordid loyalty to the prosperous Semblances, and hightreason against the Supreme Fact, such a vote betokens in these natures? For it was the consummation of a long series of such; they and their father had long kept voting so. A singular People; who could both produce such divine men, and then could so stone and crucify them; a People terrible from the beginning!—Well, they got Barabbas; and they got, of course, such guidance as Barabbas and the like of him could give them; and, of course, they stumbled ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked way; andand, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad fortune, they prophetically sing "Ou' clo'!" in all the cities of the world. Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of them, and understand their song a little!

-L. D. P. I.

WOTING.

VOTING, never was a divine Apollo, was once a human Bottom the Weaver; and, so long as he continued in the same and sincere state, was worth consulting about several things. But alas, enveloped now in mere stump-oratory, cecity, mutinous imbecility, and sin and misery, he is now an enchanted Weaver,-wooed by the fatuous Queen of constitutional Faëry,—and feels his cheek hairy to the scratch. Beer rules him, and the Infinite of Balderdash; and except as a horse might vote for tares or hard beans, he had better, till he grow wise again, hardly vote at all. —L. D. P. VI.

PREMIER.

BUT truly, in any time, what a strange feeling, enough to alarm a very big Lordship, this: that he, of the size he is, has got to the apex of English affairs! Smallest wrens, we know, by training and the aid of machinery, are capable of many things. For this world abounds. in miraculous combinations, far transcending anything they do at Drury Lane in the melodramatic way. A world which, as solid as it looks, is made all of aerial and even of spiritual stuff; permeated all by incalculable sleeping forces and electricities; and liable to go off, at any time, into the hugest developments, upon at scratch thoughtfully or thoughtlessly given on the right point:-Nay, for every one of us, could not the sputter of a poor pistol-shot shrivel the Immensities together like a burnt scroll, and make the Heavens and the Earth pass away with a great noise? Smallest wrens, and canary-birds of some dexterity, can be trained to handle. lucifer-matches; and have, before now, fired-off whole powder-magazines and parks of artillery. Perhaps without much astonishment to the canary-bird. The canary-bird can hold only its own quantity of astonishment; and may possibly enough retain its presence of mind, were even Doomsday to come. It is on this