Mr. Clews tells us that the "Future" of Wall Street is a sealed book; and yet we may allow that "there is such a thing as an accurate prevision of events." Of this kind are eclipses, occultations, and tides of the sea. If the capital of Wall Street has, since the institution was founded, increased more than sixtyfold, as Mr. Clews declares, then we may expect it, according to his philosophy, to increase full sixty times sixty, until the world shall be swallowed up. Then, when Threadneedle and Lombard Streets shall have lost their sceptre; then, when Seneca's forecast of the time to come shall have been fulfilled; then, when Macaulay's New Zealander shall have made his sketch, not only of St. Paul's, but also of the bank of England; then, when _all_ the wealth, and _all_ the power, and _all_ the functions of civil society in the United States shall have been transferred to Wall Street; then, when nothing shall remain to the American people except their squalid huts and the sorrowful reminiscences of a great republic; then, when Wall Street in very truth shall have possessed itself of the earth and consumed mankind,--I suppose that the benevolent owners of the world will found a few libraries, build a few marble mausoleums for themselves, and sally forth to establish a stock exchange in Mars! That done, interplanetary wars may be engendered, bonds on the solar system may be issued and bought at half price, a gold standard of values may be fixed on the basis of the pound sterling good from the sun out to Neptune, and the inhabitants of the worlds, either by arms or by journalism, may become the helots of consolidated wealth enthroned as the governing power of the universe. THE REFORM CLUB'S FEAST OF UNREASON. BY HON. CHARLES A. TOWNE, _Chairman Provisional National Committee Silver Republican Party._ On Saturday evening, April 24, 1897, at the Waldorf Hotel, New York, there was held a political banquet intended as a most impressive function, but which has passed into history as a very ridiculous one. Big with self-complacence and puffed with pride, as it appeared in the brilliant lights and gorgeous appointments of the palatial supper-hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a flaccid and "innocuous desuetude." The "star-eyed goddess" turned her back upon it, the "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the memory of a sad mistake in the mind of every man that assisted at it. Planned as a sort of coronation ceremony, its completed performance unaccountably wore the complexion of belated obsequies irreverently disturbed by the guffaws of the multitude.