said, they once hitched canoes to walnut trees away above the ’32 mark; but them Indians was such liars.’ The flood of 1885 beat that of 1832 two feet, and the flood of 1887 was nearly seven feet above the old high-water-mark. Averaging the chances, it will not happen again for one hundred years. The river Rhine has a way of rising at the same time with the Ohio, and was higher in 1885 than it had been in two hundred years. There was favoring the Democratic party this year, such a combination of circumstances as that which made an Ohio flood seem a prodigy. The high-water-mark is astounding. The country is still here. There is something to eat, and even to drink. Such a Democratic disaster will not be due again for a generation.” John Russell Young, the brilliant journalist, writing in the Philadelphia _Evening Star_, quoted by the New York _Press_, of November 19th, has his explanation for the defeat ready: “Communities are like men, like women, like children, like dogs. Why do they do it? Why does a man buy wildcat stocks? Why does a woman rave over a bonnet, or marry a student of divinity? Why? Because we are more or less fools, even as the good Lord made us fools, and if we were not fools, it would be a teasing, tiresome world. Why does a boy go to bed as cross as the roaring forties after his Christmas dinner? He has had too much mince pie. The country has had too much mince pie. It kicks. It kicked after Quincy Adams, the best of all Presidents. It kicked after Van Buren, who was as downy as an Angora cat. It kicked after Arthur, whose administration was sunshine. It kicks after Harrison, the radiant, prosperous Government. Too much mince pie! Cleveland comes in because of his medicinal properties. We must take to our herbs now and then.” The practical politicians of the Republican party feel it incumbent upon them to give their version of the great defeat. James S. Clarkson, who, for many years, has been a guiding spirit among Republican leaders, of the late verdict says: “It is an order from the American people for a change in the industrial economic policy of the Government.” He charges that the Republican party has lost strength and votes among the rich and among the people of independent means, who now want cheap labor; also among the workingmen, who have come to believe that free trade will cheapen the expense of living, while the Trades-Unions will still keep up their wages. He says: “The result is not a personal defeat of President Harrison, nor really a defeat of the party. It was a Protection defeat, a repudiation of high tariff, a Republican reverse in a field where it put aside all the nobler issues, and staked everything on economic and mercenary issues.”