But, however that may be, the informer system will not make them honest men, but will in all probability produce exactly the opposite result. If our system of taxation is so unpopular that the revenues cannot be collected without bribing men to tell the truth; if our officers must be offered rewards beyond their salaries to state the facts; if it is impossible to employ men to discharge their duties honestly, then let us change the system. The moiety system makes the Treasury Department a vast vampire sucking the blood of the people upon shares. Americans detest informers, spies, detectives, turners of State's evidence, eavesdroppers, paid listeners, hypocrites, public smellers, trackers, human hounds and ferrets. They despise men who "suspect" for a living; they hate legal lyers-in-wait and the highwaymen of the law. They abhor the betrayers of friends and those who lead and tempt others to commit a crime in order that they may detect it. In a monarchy, the detective system is a necessity. The great thief has to be sustained by smaller ones.--December 4,1877. ***** LANGUAGE.--Most people imagine that men have always talked; that language is as old as the race; and it is supposed that some language was taught by some mythological god to the first pair. But we now know, if we know anything, that language is a growth; that every word had to be created by man, and that back of every word is some want, some wish, some necessity of the body or mind, and also a genius to embody that want or that wish, to express that thought in some sound that we call a word. At first, the probability is that men uttered sounds of fear, of content, of anger, or happiness. And the probability is that the first sounds or cries expressed such feelings, and these sounds were nouns, adjectives, and verbs. After a time, man began to give his ideas to others by rude pictures, drawings of animals and trees and the various other things with which he could give rude thoughts. At first he would make a picture of the whole animal. Afterward some part of the animal would stand for the whole, and in some of the old picture-writings the curve of the nostril of a horse stands for the animal. This was the shorthand of picture-writing. But it was a long journey to where marks would stand, not for pictures, but for sounds. And then think of the distance still to the alphabet. Then to writing, so that marks took entirely the place of pictures. Then the invention of movable type, and then the press, making it possible to save the wealth of the brain; making it possible for a man to leave not simply his property to his fellow-man, not houses and lands and dollars, but his ideas, his thoughts, his theories, his dreams, the poetry and pathos of his soul. Now each generation is heir to all the past.