farmer has been complimented on knowing what sort of farming has money in it. Hence also the panic excited by the outbreak of the rinderpest, and the jealousy with which all ports of entry are guarded to prevent the importation of cattle from infected or suspected districts.

It now remains to be seen whether any sort of agriculture except truck-raising will be discovered to be unsuitable for the British islands, and the land be divided between the market-gardeners and the loom-lords. England has been making long strides towards the abandonment of what was once the occupation of her entire population. At the era of the Reformation, two out of every three of the families living on her soil were engaged in farming; now it is one out of every four. It may be thought that this is because. her population has grown so vast, there is no room for the employment of a large proportion of them within her narrow area, no space for the extension of farming, and no possibility of raising food enough within the island for its inhabitants. On the contrary, there are five million acres of absolutely waste land south of the Tweed, much of it in the best part of the island, and hardly any of it incapable of cultivation. And of the land under cultivation, not one acre in a hundred is tilled with the same thorough application of scientific principle as is needed for the management of a factory, or produces one-half of what it ought to produce. And in nothing is English farming more wasteful than in its stinting to the very utmost the amount of human labor it employs, especially by the prolonged destruction of the small holdings and the substitution of large farms. The rent of lands in the small-farm districts of Belgium are far higher than in England, and the capital invested is twice as much to the acre; yet the Flemish farmer, as a rule, saves half his income. And if the lands now under tillage in England and Wales were cultivated as well as is the wretched mixture of peat and gravel, which passes for soil in East Flanders, they would produce food for forty-seven millions of people. But in that case the dense masses, who have for centuries been crowded into the manufacturing towns, to escape from the slavery of labor on the large farms, would have to be, for the most part, redispersed over the country districts as tenant and freeholders, thus creating anew yeoman and franklin classes, which were once the glory and the strength of England. With this would end England's wretched dependence on foreign harvests for food, and on foreign markets

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for purchasers of her superfluous manufactures. The country would become avтapкn, self-sufficing, and therefore able to take her old place in the politics of the Eastern world. The yard-stick would vanish out of her conscience, and the exhaustion of English coal-fields would cease to be a source of anxiety. So mote it be.

WE suppose that the Republicans who opposed the Electoral Commission Bill and deplored its passage, are expected to acquiesce in the plan since it has secured Mr. Hayes the presidental chair and has not produced some of the bad effects which were feared. For our part we have become more and more deeply dissatisfied with it every day since its passage. The only good effect of it was to give the conservative wing of the Democratic party, that is the Southern and the Eastern Democrats, an opportunity to put their acquiescence in an unpleasant decision upon the ground of keeping faith. But had Senator Ferry claimed his constitutional right to decide the points in dispute, in spite of all the bluster of the Western Democracy, those very conservatives would have sustained the decision. The truth is that the Democratic constituencies of the South and the East have merely a secondary interest in the Presidential question. To secure the control of the State Governments is the primary object of the one; to restore quiet with a view to the revival of business is the chief end which the others have in view. And only the supineness of the acting Vice-President, and the unwillingness of the Senate to retreat from its position that Congress has the right of decision, prevented the constitutional view of the question from being generally accepted. The most practical way out of the difficulty would have been for Mr. Ferry to announce that he intended to exercise the power, and thus give the House an opportunity to sue an injunction against its exercise from the Supreme Court. That he did not do so, was owing to his sharing in the esprit de corps of Congress, the public opinion which takes possession of all who take their seats at the desks in the Capitol, and which upholds the "collective wisdom" of the two Houses as the last tribunal of all questions, the competent reader of all riddles.

The decision of the Florida and the Louisiana questions by a strict party vote, and especially the preliminary decision refusing to receive testimony on any point except the eligibility of individual electors, could not but raise the partisan warmth of the more

warlike Democrats to white heat. That is to say, the only persons who were not ready to accept almost any decision, have been more embittered than they were before. And from their point of view it must seem that they have lost the case because the persons who, by reason of the nature and the dignity of their position, are expected to rise above partisan considerations, and to be free from the partisan temper, have shown themselves no more impartial than so many Congressmen.

This, we say, will be the view taken by these men; not that we think their complaints are in themselves just, or are worthy of attention on any other grounds save this, that it is a misfortune to the nation when its chief legal tribunal comes to be widely regarded as made up of partisans. The tribunal in excluding evidence, decided one of the points which it was, beforehand and by men of both parties, admitted would be open to their decision, and in view of the fact that it had hardly more than a month to do its work, it could, with prudence, reach no other conclusion. It could reach no decision on any point which had not been already adopted by the partisans on one side or the other; none, therefore which would not be open to the stigma of partisanship. But with these matters the good name and repute of the Supreme Court should never have been entangled, except in case of the direst necessity. So long as any other way out of the difficulty existed, it should have been sought and adopted, rather than draggle through the mud of politics the ermine of a body, which is, by its tenure of office, to outlast Congresses and Presidents. A decision on the power of the Vice-President from the same body would have been different matter, for that decision would have been sustained by the unbroken legal tradition of the great jurists, from the authors of the Constitution down to our times.

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In fine, the Electoral Tribunal is a precedent which will lead to dissensions between two departments of the government, a departure from the avowed and manifest sense of the Constitution, a usurpation of the legislature upon the province of the executive, and a disastrous lowering of the prestige of the judiciary in order to bolster up that usurpation. Congress, which was vested with the power to determine the election and qualifications of its own members only, has now constituted itself the judge of the election of the Executive also.

THE Conduct of the Southern Democrats in Congress continues to command the admiration of all patriotic and sensible people. Their votes in the House secured the creation of the new Tribunal, and prevented the hot-heads from hindering the completion of its work by dilatory proceedings on the part of the Democratic majority. Many are disposed to see a way to the burial of the issues. growing out of the war by a reconstruction of parties during the coming Administration, by rallying the Conservative Democrats to the support of President Hayes, and securing them a representation in his Cabinet. The weakest part of this plan is its parentage; it is claimed to have originated with the business part of the community, whose suggestions about politics are generally about as much heeded by the politicians as would be any suggestions from the politicians in regard to the best method of managing mercantile establishments. Yet the suggestion is a good one, for there is no real reason for the perpetuation of the present party lines except the protection of the Southern negro; and if the whites of the South were divided on the old line between Whig and Democrat, and each bidding for the colored vote, there would be no need of extending any national protection to the colored voter. But the new shifting of party lines would not obliterate the real line which has divided our parties from the beginning of the government. We shall always have a centrifugal and a centripetal party,—the former laboring to perpetuate and intensify the distinctions and divisions inherited from colonial times, the other promoting the natural and rightful growth of a loose confederacy into a compact and well organized nation. The victory of this latter party in the recent war, was a victory whose fruits cannot be destroyed. The nation is more thoroughly a nation today than ever before, and the wretched compromises by which the localizing spirit strove to check its growth, are for the most part a dead letter. But the Whigs of the South, such men as Hill of Georgia and Lamar of Mississippi, though nominal Democrats, belong of right to the other party, and their accession to its ranks, if effected by the magnanimous policy of President Hayes, will give our new executive a high claim to the gratitude of all patriotic citizens. It will be the first practical step towards closing the wounds of the war, and really incorporating the Southern States into the Union. Happily, the attitude preserved by our new President towards the South from the issue of his letter of acceptance

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UNTIL quite recently it seemed certain that whichever of the two candidates for the Presidency failed to establish his claim to the executive chair would receive the hearty sympathy of all rightminded men, and might look forward to a more successful candidacy in the not distant future. Had Mr. Tilden's friends made good his claims, this would certainly have been true of Governor Hayes; but since the publication of the despatches exchanged between New York and Oregon by Mr. Tilden's trusted political agents, the case is changed so far as he is concerned, and many even of those who have upheld Mr. Tilden's claims declare that their disappointment in him has softened their disappointment at his defeat. It appears that the money remitted to Oregon by Col. Pelton, a member of Governor Tilden's family, was intended to buy up one of the Republican electors to act along with the Democrat who claimed the right to act, and that a despatch signed Governor was sent to New York, with the words in it, "I will decide every point in favor of the Democrat having the highest number of votes." These despatches were in cipher, but a shrewd Detroiter-following up, we suppose, the hint contained in a story reprinted some years ago in Every Saturday from a London magazine-read this one with the help of a pocket dictionary, and gave the clue to all the rest. What Mr. Tilden will have to say in explanation of all this, no one can say; but in anticipation of all explanations, the public will say that Mr. Tilden has had a great deal too much to explain during his career. His earlier relations to Tweed, the presence of his name on the election circular of 1868, his income tax returns, and other phases of his personal and public life, cannot be left out of sight, when this new scandal comes up for explanation. If his Administration had been managed in the same style, we might have established a special Bureau of Explanations to show that the various crooked-seeming acts of the President were capable of a creditable interpretation. We admire the mother-wit of George III., who, when Bishop Watson presented him with his Apology for Christianity, said his Christianity did not need any apology. And it is well that our next President is to be a man whose life calls for none.