less in the State Legislature, deeply as these may affect the well-being of the community, the laws under which they and their children are to live. But this lack of interest in public affairs has a deeper and far more reaching consequence. Everybody's business is nobody's business. In a community really democratic there are no natural leaders; none bound by rank, station, and recognized primacy, to originate resistance; none too strong to be crushed by the animosity of a Fiske or a Gould, or grievously wronged by a corrupt corporation like that of New York, a dishonest political organization like Tammany Hall, or a powerful Tramway or Railway Company. The consequence is, that not only the individual citizen, but a whole community submits to high-handed oppression, to administrative and judicial corruption, to impudent usurpation and flagrant illegalities, such as the greatest of English corporations would never dream of attempting. Perhaps the most oppressive and insolent exactions, to which living Englishmen have as yet submitted, are those of the Water Companies of London; but the offenders have repeatedly been resisted and brought to justice; and it is in London alone, the one English city which lacks natural leaders and protectors, which is too large for any citizen or body of citizens--save that great City Corporation which English Radicalism has marked for destruction--to speak and act in its name, that the Water Companies would have been endured for five years. Even in London, no such high-handed interference with the rights of property and the comfort of families, as the Elevated Railways of New York, with their uncompensated destruction of individual privacy and comfort throughout many of the wealthiest streets of the first city in the Union, would have been obviously and utterly impossible. The tolerance of Democracy for what seem to English ideas the grossest form of oppression--oppression systematic and legal, arbitrary power and class privilege, formally embodied in the law and made a fundamental principle of government--is illustrated by that clause of the Code Napoleon, which exempts the whole bureaucracy of France from civil or criminal liability. No official can be prosecuted, no redress sought at law for the abuse of powers the most extensive, affecting every man's daily life--powers which enable their holder to harass and almost ruin individuals and communities at his pleasure--save by permission of the Council of State, a body of officials inclined of course to believe and to shield its subordinates. This law has been sustained by each successive Government that has seized the reins of centralized power; nor are we aware that any serious effort has been made to repeal it.