After a few weeks' hunting the squirrel has stolen the hickory nut. Gentlemen in New York hunt out wrong by day and play poker and old sledge at night at Delavan House. It was like the country which had spent six millions of dollars in lawsuits about William Tweed going suddenly into hysterics when it found out that he had stolen a box of steel pens. California is submerged in the grip of a great monopoly; in Kansas United States senators had been involved in charges of bribery; in Connecticut an election to Congress was bought as men might buy a box of strawberries. Last year they were convicted of attempting bribery in Pennsylvania, but the Court of Pardons liberated them with the exception of two judges, who were told that they would be cut off from political preferment for their obstinacy. A Pennsylvania United States senator used to put a price on legislators just as a Kentuckian puts a price on his horse." But it was not legislators alone that Dr. Talmage attacked. He declared that the railways, the common carriers of the country, were tainted by a favouritism which was, in fact, the result of bribery. One company made rebates in its fares to some favoured corporation, as in the case of a petroleum company, which was enabled to control the price of that light all over the world in consequence of a virtual monopoly that was given to it by arrangement with the railway. In the same way merchandise in grain, provisions, and cattle are placed in the hands of a few firms. "How much," asks Dr. Talmage, "did it cost the Elevated Railroad to keep the fare from dropping to five cents from ten cents? I have been told," said he, "three hundred thousand dollars," which is 60,000_l._ "Very seldom does a bill pass through any of our Legislatures if there be no money in it. Sometimes the bribery is in bank bills, sometimes in railroad passes, sometimes in political preferment, sometimes by the monopolies given to the legislators, what are called points, a corner, a flier, a cover, washing the street, salting down, ten up! If you want to know what these are, ask the bribed members at Albany and Harrisburg." Then he goes on, with some truth, to declare that the bribery begins far away behind all this; that it is really with the money subscribed for election expenses that the evil begins its course. "From the big reservoirs of subscribed election expenses the little rills roll down in ten thousand directions, and by the time the great gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential elections are over, the land is drunk with bribery." Perhaps it is quite as well that it is from an American orator and from an American writer such statements and such indictments proceed, rather than from a stranger like myself; but it is very clear that the evil which De Tocqueville indicated long ago has spread rather than diminished, and there is reason to think that it will do so until the public conscience of a great people is aroused to a sense of the