interest in London, and its consequent necessity to sell exchange (silver) on Calcutta. Nor is there any prospect of this debt being paid off; the taxation of the people of India is already excessive, is incapable of increase, and-Earl Mayo, the ill-fated Governorgeneral, said-is the source of much of the wide-spread discontent of the people. British rule has so impoverished the people and reduced them to such idleness by the destruction of their manufactures, that they are not able to support the costly government which has been set over them—a government whose officials are paid high salaries because they are sitting as it were on a powder keg, and who save up those salaries to spend in England, instead of scattering them among the people from whose earnings they are subtracted.

There is just one pleasing fact in the whole situation, viz: the retention of the duties on imported cottons, whose abolition was promised to Manchester, and as good as commanded by the Disraeli Ministry. The Government cannot afford to dispense with the receipts from those duties, so that they must be retained. This, together with the decline of exchange on Calcutta, will give the Bengalee a chance to go on with, the reëstablishment of the cotton industry in India.

ADVICES from Japan inform us that the long-threatened insurrection of the Samurai of Satsuma had broken out, and the conflict between the rebels and the imperial troops had begun. The Samurai are the feudal aristocracy of Japan, the military caste whose members alone could wear two swords, and were supported out of the Treasury. The recent revolution, which restored the rightful authority of the Emperor, led to the destruction of all their privileges, the prohibition of their marks of distinction, and the abolition of their pensions. In most districts the Samurai submitted cheerfully, but in Satsuma the conservative spirit was strongest, and these alterations were fiercely resented. So also was the peaceful policy of the Government, which, by resisting the cry, "On to the Corea!" prevented these soldiers by tradition and profession from pushing their fortunes. Several years ago such an outbreak was feared, and the best informed observers regarded it and its speedy suppression as equally certain events.

It is not wonderful that Japan has to encounter insurrections; the wonderful thing is that they are not more numerous.

There is

no example in the world's history of a nation's relinquishing with such rapidity and unanimity its own traditions and usages, to adopt others from without. It is true there had been a long preparation for the change. The country had fairly got beyond its old institutions, before it began to cast them off. But we fear that much of what it has adopted, has no true root in the national life. As one of the Japanese officials declared in a report to his own government, Japan must become Christian if she is really to appropriate the benefits of Christian civilization. At present she is importing the fruits of that better civilization, without the roots. And of the Christianization of Japan there is no immediate prospect. Educated Japanese, the graduates of European and American Colleges, wearing stove-pipe hats and black coats, are to be seen in the Shinto Temples, practising all the rites of their primæval religion. They have fallen into the mistake, too common among ourselves, of not recognizing the normative influence of religious belief in determining the character of social life and intellectual activity.

THE inauguration of President Hayes seems to be already regarded as having begun a new era in our political history, and if he do not falsify the expectations he has excited by his conduct thus far, he will be remembered as one of the best Presidents we have ever had. In the selection of his Cabinet he made the first great break with bad traditions. He neither accepted his counsellors at the dictation of the party and its representatives, nor, like General Grant, selected them as he would a military staff, on the ground of personal preference. He has neither taken the somebodies who were pointed out to him, nor the nobodies whom he thought he could get on with. He has sought to represent different sections of the country, different types of political conviction among and even outside of his own supporters. Two or three of his selections are comparatively unknown men in a national sense; but Mr. Evarts, the new Secretary of State, Mr. Sherman, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Schurz, Secretary of the Interior, are men of the first eminence in politics; while the others (Mr. Thompson, Secretary of War, Mr. Devens, Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Key, Post-master General, and Mr. McCrary, Attorney-General), are all men with a record behind them, as they have served in Congress or in the Army, or on the bench of their States. The selection of Mr. Key from the ranks of the southern Democrats, and

his acceptance, with the almost unanimous consent of his friends, is of especially good omen for the obliteration of sectional party lines.

Mr. Hayes begins his administration with the extraordinary good. will of his fellow-citizens. Everybody is disposed to look for great things from him, and the first movements of his policy aid in exciting these large expectations. But this very state of public opinion is such as may well excite the apprehensions of himself and his best friends, for it is liable to violent and excessive reactions. Let him make but half a dozen good round blunders, such as his predecessor sometimes served up to us in the course of a month, and he will find his most zealous eulogists becoming his severest censors. As yet he has made none; and yet it must be said that the timber of the cabinet is not equally strong and trustworthy throughout, as was "the Deacon's One Hoss Shay." The new Secretary of the Interior, for instance, is a man of many brilliant qualities and personal excellencies, but he is not a man of any business experience, and therefore has no special fitness for that post. Nor, as a German of the Germans, is he likely to prove himself a very impartial judge in case of disputes between the religious bodies whom the Government has enlisted in the work of Indian management, and their unfriends in the military and the civil services. And this is no trifling matter, for the influence of those bodies is as Mr. Hayes very well knows-one of far greater extent and importance than such men as his new Secretary are apt to suppose, and in a case like this they are more likely to act in unison than is usual with them.

In the matter of Civil Service Reform, the new Administration has begun well. It declares that it will make no removals except for cause shown; that it will try to retain and to promote men of experience in the service of the departments; and that while willing to receive information from Congressmen and others as to the best men for vacancies, it will permit no urging of claims to reward for political services. It recognizes no claims except such as are based upon actual service in the department.

This is the more cheering, as it shows that Mr. Hayes has clearer and more practical notions on this head than those which have been urged on the public during the last ten years by a number of doctrinaires who are represented by the editor of Harper's Weekly.

In their view, the main thing was to get all the people of the United States to pass a competitive examination on various topics, and then to give all the offices, from the headships of departments down, to those who got the highest marks. The truth is, when the two principles of no removal except for good reason, and promotion within each branch of the service, are clearly recognized and established by law, the matter of appointment may safely be left to the Executive. In that case only the responsible heads of departments and bureaus, and the lower clerkships, i. e., the highest and lowest places in the service, will be open to appointments at all. The freedom to appoint the former is necessary to the responsibility of the Administration for its own policy. As to the latter, Mr. Curtis's Boards of Examination might do some service, but they are not really necessary.

One other step towards reform Mr. Hayes and his advisers might very well take. They might get rid of the ornamental figure-heads who pose as responsible for the work of various departments, and give the appointment to the civil servants, now kept in the background, who do the work of the post. There are branches of the Government whose ornamental chiefs have made their names household words throughout the land, but are utterly incompetent to the simplest duties of their posts, and have those duties discharged by persons whom they send off to privacy when distinguished visitors-royal or other come along. There are post offices, the selection of whose nominal heads from among several candidates has been trumpeted over the land as showing the want or the presence of a desire to reform the Civil Service, while it was no secret that the whole work of the office was done by a trusted and well-informed clerk, who held his post under one master after another, and preserved the continuity of the service in the midst of changes. Let these men be brought forward and given the distinction to which they are entitled, and the effect will be to encourage every man in the Service to struggle for that excellence which is seen to be the condition of promotion.

It is, perhaps, too much to ask that when vacancies occur they shall be filled without regard to party, or that in Democratic localities only Democrats be selected for local offices, and a fair division be made of the other offices; and yet Mr. Hayes will have effected no permanent reform by presidential action unless he manages to take the Civil Service as utterly out of politics as the Military and

the Naval Services are. For no sentiment will be created in support of such a revolution so long as the thirty-seven thousand civil servants are all or nearly all in connection with one party. Either a fair division must be effected, or a Constitutional Amendment must be carried forbidding removals except for just cause-the justice to be ascertained in some specified way-and establishing the principle of promotion by seniority.

THE Republican members of Congress, who imperiled Mr. Hayes's claim to the presidential chair rather than concede that there could arise any constitutional question which it was the business of the Executive to decide, take this action of the new President, in asserting that selections and appointments are his business and not theirs, as badly as might be expected. In the Senate there was a good deal of quiet opposition to the nominations for the Cabinet, and only the universal expressions of approval and satisfaction which poured in from every quarter, prevented the rejection of two of them. Mr. Blaine in particular showed great consistency, but little of the wisdom of the statesman, in his attitude towards the President's Southern policy, and he has already reconciled many of his friends to the defeat he sustained at Cincinnati. The Civil Service reform Congressmen cannot meddle with, as it is as yet chiefly a matter of the President's refusing to act. It is a real gain to the abler and better-meaning members of both houses, because it leaves them more time for the discharge of their legitimate duties, and takes from their shoulders a responsibility that should never have been placed there. No man who has been selected for a seat in Congress because of his having anything in him, but has good reason to rejoice that he is no longer errand-boy in ordinary to every constituent who wants an office; and if it once comes to be understood that it is of no use to expect of Congressmen the distribution of patronage, men will be selected for other qualities than their skill in "lobbying" the Executive. But to a very large class of Congressmen the change is a frightful disaster. Their skill as errand-boys, and their nice sense of the variations of political influence at home among those who asked their Congressional influence at Washington, constituted their stock in trade; and now nothing but retirement to private life remains for them, if Mr. Hayes not only carries out these new ideas, but transmits them as an established tradition to his successors. To be sure, they helped to elect Mr.