the other evils unknown in early days and in primitive communities, have come into existence and gained sway throughout the land. These and similar views, according to our observation, characterize what we may without disrespect, and without confining the remark to the rural districts, term the provincial mind, and wherever they exist the ideas of the Civil-Service Reformers are not only not understood or treated as visionary, but are regarded with aversion and distrust as foreign, monstrous and inconsistent with popular freedom and republican government. AN UNFINISHED PAGE OF HISTORY. I can easily understand why educated Americans cross the Atlantic every year in shoals in search of the picturesque; and I can understand, too, all that they say of the relief which ivied ruins and cathedrals and galleries, or any other reminders of past ages, give to their eyes, oppressed so long by our interminable rows of store-box houses, our pasteboard villas, the magnificence of our railway accommodations for Ladies and Gents, and all the general gaseous glitter which betrays how young and how rich we are. But I cannot understand why it is that their eyes, thus trained, should fail to see the exceptional picturesqueness of human life in this country. The live man is surely always more dramatic and suggestive than a house or a costume, provided we have eyes to interpret him; and this people, as no other, are made up of the moving, active deposits and results of world-old civilizations and experiments in living. Outwardly, if you choose, the country is like one of the pretentious houses of its rich citizens--new, smug, complacently commonplace--but within, like the house again, it is filled with rare bits gathered out of every age and country and jumbled together in utter confusion. If you ride down Seventh street in a horse-car, you are in a psychological curio-shop. On one side, very likely, is a Russian Jew just from the Steppes; on the other, a negro with centuries of heathendom and slavery hinting themselves in lip and eye; the driver is a Fenian, with the blood of the Phoenicians in his veins; in front of you is a gentleman with the unmistakable Huguenot nose, and chin; while an almond-eyed pagan, disguised behind moustache and eye-glasses, courteously takes your fare and drops it for you in the Slawson box. Nowhere do all the elements of Tragedy and Comedy play so strange a part as on the dead-level of this American stage. It is because it is so dead a level that we fail to see the part they play--because "furious Goth and fiery Hun" meet, not on the battle-field, but in the horse-car, dropping their cents together in a Slawson box. For example, as to the tragedy.