political sagacity was not confined to the founders of the political systems of modern Europe. It is found that the human mind is much the same under like conditions in all countries and in all times; and we are approaching gradually to Tennyson's "parliament of man" and "federation of the world." --A sadder story has not been told for a long while than that of the mother and daughter who were excluded from the Shaker settlement at Whitewater, where they had been for fourteen years, and after leaving which, and seeking in vain the means of livelihood, they, in despair, took poison, and died in each other's arms. The sadness is not so much in their death; for to that they were at any time liable; and loving each other fondly, as they manifestly did, in their voluntary death they were not divided. But the mother was at first driven to the Shaker community fourteen years ago, with her little girl, because she had been deserted by the father of her child, to whom she had not been married. She had weakly yielded to the impulse of nature without fortifying herself by a legal claim upon the father of her child, and the world, instead of treating her tenderly and helping her, turned its back upon her and told her that she and the child that she had borne were fit only to starve or to live in a county poor house. After fourteen years of the cold, colorless, and unnatural life of the Shakers, the daughter showed that she was not an abstraction or a forked radish, and behaved like a woman, perhaps not a prudent one, to the young men of the community. She was told that such behavior was only fit for the world's people, and that she and her daughter must go. But the world's people had driven out the mother herself upon something such grounds years before; and now when she came back she was met by the same stony front. Let us not be misunderstood; we are not justifying or even palliating the mother's conduct. We pass that point by without consideration. But the point remains that for an error, which, however great, was in the course of nature, the mother became an outcast, and that for indiscretion, also in the course of nature, on the daughter's part, both afterward were turned away from the Shaker community; and then they found the world so hard, and life in it so bitter, that, although one was still in the prime of life and the other in its early morning, they chose rather death together. They might have been base and unnatural, hard-hearted, malicious, slanderous, revengeful, covetous, grasping, utterly regardless of the happiness and, within the law, of the rights of others, the mother might not have loved her child, the child might not have loved her mother, and yet the world would not have driven them to the Shakers and the Shakers would not have driven them out again into the world to die. It is an old story, we do not hesitate to say an old wrong, of which every man and woman with an unperverted heart admits the cruelty in the abstract, but