ostentation, but it does not tend toward a crash. It is painful to go slow when we desire to go fast; but the breaking of bones occurs when fortuitous combinations permit us to drive on like Jehu. It may be dull, but it is safe to be dull in the economical world. It is the roaring activity of prosperous times that makes our financial ruin. SOME POINTS ON THE GENERAL CONFERENCE. The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held in Philadelphia last May was in several respects remarkable. It was in the first place a picturesque body for the eye of a moral artist. The “war horses” of older days were there with the sound stentorian neigh which one expects to hear at a camp meeting. Probably there were more of these than in recent sessions of the body. There was William Taylor from everywhere, Ram Chandra Bose from India, and the venerable men of a former generation who are called Trimble and Curry. But the moral picturesqueness of the Conference lay rather in the variety and independence of young Americans from all sections. There was a very lively Bear from Wall Street, a still livelier lay preacher from New Jersey, a choice collection of young pastors from all over Zion, and a sprinkling of college men and newspaper men, bankers, railroad men and physicians, ex-generals, ex-chaplains, and farmers. The face of the body was so variegated and its separate limbs so independent that some spectators said it was not a body at all because it had no community of life and no head. Its independence of traditions and its refusal to be led by anybody added to the picturesqueness of the assembly. Nothing could be thrust down its throat. It threw all the men who successively tried to lead it. It voted with reference to an order of ideas and aspirations which no one can find written down in the press of the denomination. We believe there was but a single caucus, and that was a gathering of the colored delegates. It was a piece of most adroit management. It will probably be the last of that series of caucuses; and if it had been held half a day sooner, it would have defeated its own purpose. The white delegates would have defeated anybody who had asked them to go into a caucus. A very manly and self-respecting independence of dictation or management was in the air.