never felt before; he re-examines, he hesitates, he delays; he brings to bear upon the investigation all the new light which official knowledge has revealed to him; and finds at last that he scruples to do himself what he had not scrupled to insist upon before. So deep-rooted is this sense of responsibility with our countrymen, that whatever parties a crisis of popular feeling might carry into power, we should have comparatively little dread of rash, and no dread of corrupt, conduct on their part; we scarcely know the public man who, when his country's destinies were committed to his charge, could for a moment dream of acting otherwise than with scrupulous integrity, and to the best of his utmost diligence and most cautious judgment,--at all events till the dullness of daily custom had laid his self-vigilance asleep. We are convinced that were Lord Stanhope and Mr. Disraeli to be borne into office by some grotesque freak of fortune, even they would become sobered as by magic, and would astonish all beholders, not by their vagaries, but by their steadiness and discretion. Now, of this wholesome sense of awful responsibility, we see no indications among public men in France. Dumont says, in his "Recollections of Mirabeau," "I have sometimes thought that if you were to stop a hundred men indiscriminately in the streets of Paris and London, and propose to each to undertake the government, ninety-nine of the Londoners would refuse, and ninety-nine of the Parisians would accept." In fact, we find it is only one or two of the more experienced _habitués_ of office who in France ever seem to feel any hesitation. Ordinary deputies, military men, journalists, men of science, accept, with a _naive_ and simple courage, posts for which, except that courage, they possess no single qualification. But this is not the worst; they never hesitate, at their country's risk and cost, to carry out their own favorite schemes to an experiment; in fact, they often seem to value office mainly for that purpose, and to regard their country chiefly as the _corpus vile_ on which the experiment is to be made. To make way for their theories, they relentlessly sweep out of sight the whole past, and never appear to contemplate either the possibility or the parricidal guilt of failure. [From the New Monthly Magazine.] THE COW TREE OF SOUTH AMERICA.