It is easy to draw dramatic pictures of the demoralisation of American politics; but there is more significance surely for thoughtful men in the returns, which show that the candidacy of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Logan has cut down the plurality of the Republican party in “moral” Massachusetts from more than fifty thousand to ten thousand votes; in Illinois, from over forty thousand to fifteen thousand; in Michigan, from more than fifty thousand to barely two thousand; in Ohio, from more than thirty thousand to eleven thousand. It has made the Democratic Governor of New York President by an electoral majority of 37 votes and a popular plurality of about 400,000 votes. Less is to be learned of the deep and lasting currents of popular thought and feeling in the United States from an elaborate study of the absurd abominations of Republican “Reconstruction” at the South than from the handwriting of fire on the polling-places of the Empire State which illuminated the Belshazzar’s Feast of Mr. Blaine’s “millionaires” on the eve of the Presidential Election of 1884! * * * * * In a certain sense, President Cleveland will occupy a position not unlike that of President Lincoln at the outset of his first Presidency. But the task of the Democratic chief magistrate who goes to Washington with a great historical party at his back, to restore the well-understood metes and bounds of the Federal authority over thirty-eight free and independent States will be a less troublesome and in its immediate results ought to be an infinitely more benign and grateful task, than that of the reluctant war dictator who found himself, against all his expectations, driven by angry sections, with a mixed and undisciplined mob of placemen, of monopolists, and of philanthropists behind him, into cutting with the sword the Gordian knot of slavery, at the risk of severing with it forever the golden bands of the Union, and those “mystic chords of memory” of which he spoke with such a wistful pathos in his inaugural address. Some points of resemblance may be found, too, between the personal histories of Lincoln and of Cleveland. Like Mr. Lincoln, Governor Cleveland comes of an old American stock. His family name smacks of Yorkshire, and his direct ancestors established themselves in Massachusetts nearly two hundred years ago. One of the family, a Cambridge man, and a clergyman of the Anglican Church, died at Philadelphia under the roof of his friend Benjamin Franklin twenty years before the American Revolution. Another, who sat in the Legislature of Connecticut, and who was a minister of the Independents, is remembered as an early advocate in that “land of steady habits” of the abolition of African slavery, and this at a time when the worthy citizens of Massachusetts thought it expedient to keep the Bay State clear of negro blood by ordaining in their organic law that any African “not a subject of our faithful ally