ON PLEASURE.—The first means of placing a people beyond the temptations to intemperance is to furnish them with the means of innocent pleasure. By innocent pleasures I mean such as excite moderately; such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused. In every community there _must_ be pleasures, relaxations and means of agreeable excitement; and if innocent ones are not furnished, resort will be had to criminal. Men drink to excess very often to shake off depression, or to satisfy the restless thirst for agreeable excitement, and these motives are excluded in a cheerful community. A gloomy state of society in which there are few innocent recreations, may be expected to abound in drunkenness if opportunities are afforded. The savage drinks to excess because his hours of sobriety are dull and unvaried, because in losing consciousness of his condition and his existence he loses little which he wishes to retain. The laboring classes are most exposed to intemperance, because they have at present few other pleasurable excitements. A man, who, after toil, has resources of blameless recreation is less tempted than other men to seek self-oblivion. He has too many of the pleasures of the man to take up those of the brute. [End of Required Reading for November.] AUTUMN SYMPATHY. By E. G. CHARLESWORTH. The primrose and the violet, The bloom on apricot and peach, The marriage-song of larks in heights, The south wind and the swallow’s nest; All born of spring, I once loved best. But now the dying leaf and flower, The frost wind moaning in the pane, The robin’s plaintive latter song, The early sunset in the west; All born of autumn, I love best. Tell me, my heart, the reason why Thy pulse thus beats with things that die; Is it thine own autumnal sheaves? Is it thine own dead fallen leaves? —_London Sunday Magazine._ REPUBLICAN PROSPECTS IN FRANCE. By JOSEPH REINACH. On the very morrow of Gambetta’s death, and when that catastrophe had been interpreted by the immense majority of European opinion, as also by many Frenchmen, as the certain presage of the approaching triumph of advanced Radicalism—triumph to be followed by violent interior discords that would infallibly bring about the fall of the Republic and the re-establishment either of Empire or of Royalty—I said that these predictions would not be realized, and, moreover, that Gambetta’s death would but serve to hasten the triumph of his political ideas and party. I will cite, word for word, what I wrote at the end of January in a paper that appeared in this Review on February 1: