This mention of Abraham Lincoln suggests some retrospection. I remember that when, sixteen years ago, in 1915, our national debt was all finally paid off, great exultation was felt. In a Fourth-of-July oration at Omaha, the speaker, a young colored lawyer, referring to the civil war of 1861-65, as so largely adding to the national debt, said that his grandfather was one of the first men of color who ever sat in the Senate of the United States. Now, there are eight colored Senators, and fifteen members of the House. Of direct African descent also, are the Governor of Louisiana, and the Mayor of the city of Richmond, Virginia; the immediate predecessor of the latter having been a member of one of the oldest historical cavalier families of that State. The general officer in command at West Point, too, is a colored gentleman, of excellent reputation and qualifications. All prejudice of race, in fact, has now very much disappeared, and is looked back upon as a preposterous error of the past. Indian members of Congress number this session at least seven--two Senators, Cherokees, and five members of the House from the two new States formed from what was once the Indian Territory. The white population of those States is also well represented in the Senate and in the House. We learn that the United States of South America are at present holding their eighth biennial Congress at Lima, Peru. Brazil continues friendly; but the people of that nation still treasure the traditions and usages of their Empire. The constitutional limitations of Brazil, nevertheless, make it imperial only in name and form; it is as liberal as was the government of Great Britain in the latter days of its monarchy. * * * * * We thought it a great deal for the English people, twenty-five years ago, to abolish the place of the House of Lords in their government; or even, before that, so completely to disestablish the once powerful Church of England. But the monarchy! What seemed so permanent as that? Who would have thought, fifty years ago, in good Queen Victoria's reign, that some persons then living might come to know of her throne being as vacant, nay, as utterly overturned, as the Palace of the Cæsars! It is one evidence of the old conservatism of the British nation, so terribly shattered now, that the rank, titles, and estates of the nobility are still left to them; with the qualification, that the eldest son is entitled by law to only twice the share of each of the other heirs of the estate; and the whole of any property may be sequestered, by legal process, for debt.