It was dark when we returned to the city. A feeble attempt at illumination was going on in some of the public buildings. Dim lights were hung along some of the walls, and now and then a private house had an extra lamp or two in its windows! We inquired the cause of this miserable imitation of rejoicing, this abortive demonstration. The telegraph had brought the intelligence that to-day an unsuccessful attempt had been made to assassinate the Emperor Alexander. The illumination was thus very satisfactorily and _exactly_ explained. The assassination was attempted by a Polander, and Poland would have madly rejoiced if it had been a success. I was at a loss to know whether the illumination signified joy at the Emperor’s escape from death or joy that his death had been so nearly accomplished. The melancholy exhibition of lights was just enough to suggest the two conflicting sentiments; and if the Russian soldiers and officials and dependants did their duty in hanging out the lamps, the inhabitants of Warsaw almost without exception will go to bed regretting that the shot of the assassin did not lodge in the heart of the Emperor whom they regard as their oppressor. The streets of Warsaw are badly paved; riding in some of them is a protracted punishment. They are badly lighted, and it is not unusual for an ordinance to be in force requiring every one going out after dark to carry a light, under pain of arrest. The first drunken person I saw in the streets of a city on the Continent of Europe was here. In the southern capitals, as of Spain and Italy, and even of France, there was gayety, but not intemperance. I had not been long in the city before I saw a woman lying on the pavement dead drunk. And nobody seemed to heed the spectacle, always and everywhere disgusting as the most shameful exhibition of fallen humanity. They have their favorite vices in the south of Europe, but this of drunkenness is not one of them. The use of wine, light wine, is not the cause of the sobriety of the people, though it is a fact beyond all denial that the wine-growing countries are the most temperate countries in the world. Yet they are not temperate _because_ they have wine to drink. They would be just as temperate, and perhaps more so, if they had no wine. They are temperate because the climate does not invite them to the stimulus of alcohol. That’s all. It is not their virtue, nor their wine, that makes them so. They are not tempted to drink strong drink. As soon as we get into these northern countries we find the people making free use of distilled liquors and getting drunk: and intemperance is the prevailing vice of the clime, as licentiousness is the vice of the south of Europe. Climate is to be considered in all our studies of the habits of a people, and it must be allowed its proper effect when we are estimating the virtues and vices of our fellow-men. Climate is no excuse for wrong-doing, but it helps to know why people fall into one or another class of sins.