It is impossible to hope that the United States can be an exception to the social law thus established. However pure the motive that may lie at the bottom of a war of aggression, it can not annul the law. The shedding of blood and the seizure of territory produce a callousness of feeling and a perverted view of the rights of others that are certain to turn the hands striking a foreign foe to the work of domestic strife. Already we have seen with what bitterness such men as Prof. Charles Eliot Norton and Mr. Edward Atkinson have been assailed. We have seen, too, how attempts have been made to discredit the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and to show that the Constitution must not be permitted to stand in the way of what has been politely called the fulfillment of the destiny of the United States. We have seen, finally, how proposals for the disfranchisement of American citizens have been listened to in all parts of the country with a toleration that must cause the old abolitionists to turn in their graves. But the spirit thus manifested has not, we may be sure, failed to contribute to the perpetration of the outrages that have shocked every right-minded observer of current events. It is not a difference of kind but only one of degree that separates the slaughter of Spaniards in Cuba and Tagals in Luzon from the slaughter of negroes in the South and the explosion of dynamite under street cars in the North. The inhuman instincts that impel to the one impel to the other. Fragments of Science.