certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched. On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the measureless misery in which these interesting populations were actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate invasion of a country which professed the strongest desire to live in peace with its invaders was at least a rather striking anomaly. Such a course could only be justified by the most gratifying results, and brilliant consequences as yet had not begun to bloom upon the blood-drenched fields of Bulgaria. To see this heavy-burdened, slow-moving Old England making up her mind was an edifying spectacle. It was not over-fanciful to say to one's self, in spite of the difficulties of the problem and the (in a certain sense) evenly-balanced scales, that this was a great crisis in her history, that she stood at the crossing of the ways, and that according as she put forth her right hand or her left would her greatness stand or wane. It was possible to imagine that in her huge, dim, collective consciousness she felt an oppressive sense of moral responsibility, that she too murmured to herself that she was on trial, and that, through the mists of bewilderment and the tumult of party cries, she begged to be enlightened. The sympathetic American to whom I have alluded may be represented at such an hour as making a hundred irresponsible reflections and indulging in all sorts of fantastic visions. If I had not already wandered so far from my theme, I should like to offer a few instances here. Very often it seemed natural to care very little whether England went to war with Russia or not: the interest lay in the moral struggle that was going on within her own limits. Awkward as this moral struggle made her appear, perilously as it seemed to have exposed her to the sarcasm of some of her neighbors--of that compact, cohesive France, for instance, which even yet cannot easily imagine a great country sacrificing the substance of "glory" to the shadow of wisdom--this was the most striking element in the drama into which, as I said just now, the situation had resolved itself. The Liberal party at the present hour is broken, disfigured, demoralized, the mere ghost of its former self. The opposition to the government has been, in many ways, factious and hypercritical: it has been opposition for opposition's sake, and it has met, in part, the fate of such immoralities. But a good part of the cause that it represented appeared at times to be the highest conscience of a civilized country. The aversion to war, the absence of defiance, the disposition to treat the emperor of Russia like a gentleman and a man of his word, the readiness to make concessions, to be conciliatory, even credulous, to try a great many expedients before resorting to the showy argument of the sword,--these various attributes of the peace party offered, of course, ample opportunity to those scoffers at home and abroad who are always prepared to cry out