in the constant inflow of an ignorant body of foreigners, in the easy good-nature with which the American tolerated abuses, and in the aristocratic character of a civil service as diseased as the rotten borough of English politics,--these dangers rose before him, threatening, alarming. He had lost faith largely in the organic action of parties, chiefly because he saw in them the passive instruments of unscrupulous politicians; and he found the correction of this great evil in the increasing power of a neutral body. He even went so far as to find the only hope of salvation in the action of the Independents. “If the attempt should fail,” the attempt that is to reform the parties from without, “the failure of the experiment of democracy would inevitably follow.” This is not the place to discuss the merits of such a question. What I wish is to show the working of Lowell’s mind on those political subjects which had occupied him from boyhood. He was consistent throughout in holding lightly to any allegiance to party, and in valuing highly the integrity of the individual conscience, and his plea, gathering force as it proceeds, is for such a spirit of devotion to the great ideals of the country as shall compel the union of like-minded patriots in accomplishing the great active reforms that press upon the minds of thoughtful men. “What we want,” he says in conclusion, “is an active class who will insist in season and out of season that we shall have a country ... whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within us by offering us the radiant image of something better and nobler and more enduring than we, of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might almost say the means, to be.” No, Lowell’s last word to his countrymen in domestic politics was not one of despair, however it may have been tinged with a sense of temporary defeat. It was because of his strong love that he was jealous of the honor of his country. The sadness is that of one weary in the fight, but the last note, as in the other instances of his valedictories, was a call to action and the reassertion of his undying faith in his country. Yet, as in the other instances, there is the pathetic note of faith in spite of the evidence of sight.