As helping reform and growing out of it, a reorganization of parties is needed. The present parties have "played out." Parties are essential in republics, but they should represent intelligent patriotism, be organized on practical, living issues, and be vitalized by principles. Who is wise enough to tell what differentiates the Republican and the Democratic parties? What distinctive principles divide them? Who can "locate" the parties on such questions as tariff, currency, expenditure, civil service reform, character of the government, boundary between reserved and delegated powers? Issues like secession and slavery, no longer disputed or doubted, should have no influence in forming or keeping alive parties. Obsolete shibboleths should not alienate those who are otherwise agreed. A party not crystallizing around vital issues, not having "the dignity of contention" for principles, becomes a machine to put up A or put down B. The _ins_ and the _outs_ make now the two centres of the dividing parties, which have become cliques and cabals controlled by caucuses. This is a most opportune season for reorganization of political parties, and a readjustment on broad and living issues. It is wrong to be carrying about the dead corpse of the past. A new generation has grown up since 1860. The spirit of the age is not what it was two decades since. The young men know next to nothing of Whiggery and Democracy. To make secession, or slavery, or the "bloody shirt" a rallying cry, is as absurd as to exhume the embargo or the alien and sedition laws. The inertia of society is great, and men cohere from traditions of the past. The reform bill of 1832 was long delayed in England, in its practical results, because the statesmen of 1832 continued in public life. So now effete parties are kept alive for partisan or patriotic ends by those who seem not to have realized that we are living in a new America. It seems a plain duty to gather up what survives of our constitutional federal republic, of the labors of the past, and with a catholic spirit to combine for reformation of abuses, for national conciliation, for purifying parties, for saving the republic. A party equally of order and of progress, in favor of retrenchment, economy, low taxes, sound currency, civil service reform, preservation of State and of federal honor, strict adherence to the Constitution, keeping federal and State governments within their separate and defined spheres of action, while encountering the hostility of extremists, would rally to its support enough of intelligence and patriotism to repress sectionalism and hate, and bring our lately discordant States into a fraternal union, based on fixed law, mutual toleration and respect, and exact justice. J. L. M. CURRY. THREE PERIODS OF MODERN MUSIC.