picture represents a band of blind shampooers on their travels, who, in the midst of a ford, are disputing what direction they shall take when they reach the opposite bank. Begging friars, mishaps of fishermen, blind men leading the blind, jealous women, household dissensions, women excessively dressed, furnish opportunities for the satirical pencil of the Japanese artists, who also publish series of comic pictures, as we do, upon such subjects as "Little Troubles in the Great World," "The Fat Man's Household," "The Thin Man's Household." If these efforts of the Japanese caricaturists do not often possess much power to amuse the outside world, they have one qualification that entitles them to respect--most of them are good-tempered. CHAPTER XVIII. FRENCH CARICATURE. It is inevitable that bad rulers should dread the satiric pencil. Caricature, powerless against an administration that is honest and competent, powerless against a public man who does his duty in his place, is nevertheless a most effective device against arrogance, double-dealing, corruption, cowardice, and iniquity. England, as the French themselves admit, is the native home of political caricature; but not an instance can be named in all its history of caricature injuring a good man or defeating a good measure. A free pencil, too, becomes ever a gayer and a kinder pencil. The measure of freedom which France has occasionally enjoyed during the last ninety years has never lasted long enough to wear off the keen point of the satirist's ridicule; and collectors can tell, by the number and severity of the pictures in a port-folio, just how much freedom Frenchmen possessed when they were produced. It is curious, also, to note that caricatures on the wrong side of great public questions are never excellent. It is doubtful if a bad man with the wealth of an empire at his command could procure the execution of one first-rate caricature hostile to the public good. A despot can never fight this fire with fire, and has no resource but to stamp it out.