Mr. Dillwyn and others have been doing their best of late to stir the public mind upon this matter, and some recent reports in the newspapers may have materially helped them. But the Home Secretary, I see, has gracefully deferred enquiry to the more convenient season which, from the time of Felix downwards, has been found difficult to secure again. It is easier, probably, to make a great flourish of fireworks in the way of foreign politics,--and with much blowing of the trumpet to restore Great Britain to her former post among the nations, which some of us never could see how or when she had forfeited; and the very deference paid her in this Cyprian business seems to show that she had not,--than to deal with a home-problem like this, which falls so fatally within the province of our old friend the Circumlocution Office, and involves so great a variety of 'British interests' of a peculiar and individual kind. Interests, did I say? Indeed it does, for it involves the liberties and lives of every one of us. It is all very well to plume ourselves upon our charters and our immunities, and to bless those Northern stars of ours that we are not as other men are. But the case of Vera Vasilovitch (if that was her name), over which we jubilated so much at the expense of the benighted Russians, implies no greater danger than these evil lunacy laws. Once in their grasp it is a hard matter, indeed to get out of it. Cowards at the best, all of us, we are all of us afraid of the very name of 'madness' more than of anything else; and in that fear lies the security of the present system against any attack that may be made upon it.