_Comprendre c’est pardonner._ Perhaps so; but we are a very long way from understanding one another as yet. The simple beauty of Free Trade is not recognised; standing armies have increased; potential armies include whole nations, and ingenious persons continue to busy themselves in devising machines for the wiping out of the largest possible number of their fellow-creatures in the briefest possible space of time. In short, it may safely be prophesied that the dawn of universal peace will be deferred until there shall be a common consent to keep the ninth commandment, which is as much as to say that we shall none of us live to see the Greek Kalends. But we are progressing towards the goal, some sanguine people affirm. The movement of the earth, which is spinning through space at the rate of over a thousand miles a minute, is imperceptible to the atoms that crawl upon its surface; the movements of society are hardly to be detected by its component parts, which vanish and are replaced continually. What we do know is that we ourselves are bustling about much more frequently and rapidly than our forefathers did. We have all become more or less of rolling stones; and the moss of ignorance and prejudice is being rubbed off us day by day. It seems natural to assume that this must be so; but, as a matter of fact, is it so? Do Mr. Cook’s excursionists obtain the smallest insight into the habits and character of Continental nations? and do the more ambitious ladies and gentlemen who would scorn to be “personally conducted” anywhere, and who hastily survey mankind from China to Peru every year, bring back with them any notion of what a Chinaman or a Peruvian is like beyond such as might have been gathered from photographs purchased in Regent Street? Steam power has enabled us to see many races of men, but it has made it infinitely more difficult for us to know them. There is, or there formerly was, in use among the Genevese a queer kind of carriage, surrounded on three sides by leathern curtains, in which the occupant sits as in a wagonette, contemplating only that portion of the landscape which directly faces him; and it is narrated that an Englishman once hired one of these conveyances, and, after making the complete circuit of Lake Leman, inquired innocently where it was. The modern English traveller labors under a somewhat similar disadvantage. He spends his holidays abroad. He rubs elbows with the natives in the streets; he gazes at the outside of their houses and at their closed doors; but he has his back turned to them, as it were, the whole time; he is among them, but he is not of them. They are not interested in him. Nor is he ambitious of making their acquaintance. It is not upon them that he depends for society. When his doctor orders him to go south for the winter he has no change to dread or hope for, except a change of scene and climate. Wherever he may go he will be tolerably sure to find a more than sufficient assemblage of his