be a grand thing of course if, as Mr. Ruskin prayed, England would "cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose," and leave "the sands of the Indus and the adamant of Golconda" to "stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave." This would be ever so much finer than opening banks, making railways (which Mr. Ruskin specially detests), and dealing in stocks. But it has nothing to do, good or bad, with the practical exposition of the economic laws of banking and exchange. It is about as effective a refutation of the political economist's doctrines as a tract from the Peace Society denouncing all war would be to a lecture from Von Moltke on the practical science of campaigning. But Mr. Ruskin never saw this, and never was disconcerted. He turned to other missions with the firm conviction that he had finished off political economy, as a clever free-thinking London lady calmly announced a few years back to her friends that she had abolished Christianity. Then Mr. Ruskin condemned mines and factories, railways and engines. With all the same strenuous and ornate eloquence he passed sentence on London pantomimes and "cascades of girls," and the too liberal exposure of "lower limbs" by the young ladies composing those cascades. Nothing is too trivial for the omniscient philosopher, and nothing is too great. The moral government of a nation is decreed by the same voice and on the same principles as those which have prescribed the length of a lady's waist-ribbon and the shape of a door-scraper. The first Napoleon never claimed for himself the divine right of intermeddling with and arranging everything more complacently than does the mild and fragile philosopher of Denmark Hill. Be it observed that his absolute ignorance of a subject never deters Mr. Ruskin from pronouncing prompt judgment upon it. It may be some complicated question of foreign, say of American politics, on which men of good ability, who have mastered all the facts and studied the arguments on both sides, are slow to pronounce. Mr. Ruskin, boldly acknowledging that until this morning he never heard of the subject, settles it out of hand and delivers final judgment. Sometimes his restless impulses and his extravagant way of plunging at conclusions and conjecturing facts lead him into unpleasant predicaments. He delivered a manifesto some years ago upon the brutality of the lower orders of Englishmen, founded on certain extraordinary persecutions inflicted on his friend Thomas Carlyle. Behold Carlyle himself coming out with a letter in which he declares that all these stories of persecution were not only untrue, but were "curiously the reverse of truth." Of course every one knew that Ruskin believed them to be true; that he half heard something, conjectured something else, jumped at a conclusion, and as usual regarded himself as an inspired prophet, compelled by his mission