It is a singular thing that any but the most light-headed portion of the community should fall into the second fallacy which the speaker mentioned--that national glory and power can take the place of national character. A nation requires a true heart, an honest self-consciousness, just as much as an individual, and time will avenge national misdoings just as surely as it will those of individuals. No numbers, nor any amount of huzzaing or factitious enthusiasm, can make a vicious policy safe. You may win victories with chariots and horsemen, but to enjoy the fruits of peace there must be a dominant love of justice, and that is what war does not tend to promote. It is also very true, as the speaker said, that there are not many _new_ duties to be learned in this age of the world. There is enough of moral truth taught in old Hesiod’s Works and Days to make any society now existing a good deal better than it is. When people talk of new duties they generally mean some new harum-scarum enterprise. The old duty would be good enough if they would only consider it closely and follow it faithfully. The Rev. Mr. Berle has spoken words in season; and it would be well if all who are like minded would unceasingly proclaim the same doctrines, if perchance they may sink into the heart of the masses, and give to this great people a public policy founded on righteousness and the love of peace. _A HUMILIATING SITUATION._ “How far, O Catiline, when all is said and done, are you going to abuse our patience?” So said the great Roman orator on a certain famous occasion. Our Catiline is no individual man; it is the party system which has inflicted on us the Puerto Rican disgrace. It was obvious to the common sense of every one that, having laid our hands on the island of Puerto Rico, there was no decent course to take save to make it, for all practical purposes, an integral portion of the Union. We had cut it off from the market it enjoyed in Spain, and left it to contend with the hostile tariffs of other countries--were we going, in addition to that, to make it a stranger to the land that had seized it, and subject its products to our own high scale of duties? The President, in his message to Congress, conceiving the proposition to be almost self-evident, had declared that it was “our plain duty to abolish all customs tariffs between the United States and Puerto Rico, and give her products free access to our markets.” So thought nearly every disinterested citizen, and yet what have we since seen? The President, terrorized by the cry of party unity in danger, repudiates his former emphatic declaration, and gives his approval to a measure which virtually makes our unfortunate possession a foreign country. With the “free access to our markets” which the President had promised, the island would have entered on a new career of prosperity; but with its leading industries weighed down under an impost of fifteen per cent,