expounder of Scripture who shall deduce thence a system of vegetarianism (quite as unlikely doctrines and practices have been deduced from Holy Writ) to his own satisfaction and that of crowds greater than wait on the ministrations of our latest evangelists. Of course then, marshalled to victory by the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” they will soon have a law enacted forbidding to us all beefsteak or mutton-chop! There is, in short, no end to the antics and absurdities that may, nay, that must, arise under the ægis of such a precedent as this law would furnish. We, for our part, fully believe in rendering to Cæsar what belongs to him; but it is the province of the church, representing God upon earth—of religion, in other words—so to dispose man as to enable him to withstand temptation to sin and crime; and the business of the civil power to punish him _for offences committed_, not to remove all temptation to wrongdoing. In short, the law is not held to an impossibility, which this would plainly be, unless the world were made a _tabula rasa_. The assumption, therefore, by the civil law, of the divinely-conferred duty and prerogative of the church would, in any case, be a usurpation, were it even practicable. We shall see that in the case before us, at least, it would be purely impossible to carry out the legal mandate by all the power of the government, were it multiplied a hundred-fold. The heavy tariff on foreign, and the large internal revenue tax on domestic, liquors, necessitated by our civil war, have also been a great inducement to the adulteration of spirits, as well as to the advance of that already too wide-spread practice of cheating the government in matter of revenue, now so common as hardly to be regarded in the light of a moral wrong. Howsoever it may have come about, the fact is that the tone of political morality with us is about as low as it has ever been in any country that the sun shines on. From the Stocking & Leet trial, through the troubles of Tammany’s magnates and the charges of complicity with smugglers pending against some of our most prominent mercantile firms, down to the “crooked whiskey” cases of to-day, as well as the constantly-bandied and the sometimes thoroughly proven charges of bribery against our most highly-placed public men, we see everywhere either a desperate resolution to evade all law, or a serene belief that deception and the withholding of tax and tariff legally due cease to be cheating and swindling when the government is the party of the second part. It is now clearly made out that, since the laying on of high duties and revenue tax, it has cost our government an average of three dollars to collect every two dollars received from that source in the public treasury; while as to the amount of which the government is annually defrauded, no calculation other than an approximate one can, of course, be made, but those whose position gives them the best chance to