guard. The French Revolution was set in motion by the spawn of the sewers. Without the previous environments of France these vermin would have festered and perished in their hiding places. But danger lurks also in a country conditioned like ours, and this danger consists in a mixed popular vote, in party-unions, and in combinations, formed for one object, under altered conditions becoming allied to others, which charlatans, for their own purposes, to borrow a modern political phrase, may 'capture.' By the political laws of natural attraction, the various quasi-political associations tend towards each other, and, like atoms propelled by natural affinities, attract and are attracted, each to its neighbor. The lesser political body gravitates towards the larger, just as cattle herd together in the fields. Every sportsman knows that a stray bunch of the infinite variety of trashy wild ducks invariably will 'decoy to' and light amidst a promiscuous 'rick' of canvas-backs, red-heads, bald-pates, mallards, or black-heads, and all of them will soon unite in one mighty chorus of quack, quack, quack. The frogs observe and are governed by the same law, as their multitudinous self-complacent croaking abundantly proves. There is an analogy between the gravitation of the political masses and the gravitation of matter which no reflecting mind can fail to recognize. Political parties gravitate towards the centre which attracts them by a sort of centripetal force. Tariffism, free-tradeism, monopolism, trustism, socialism, raceism, stateism, landism, laborism, repudiating-amendmentism, public-servantism, and sectionalism,—each and all illustrate the centrifugal force or tendency of their adherents, to recede from the centre which is the Constitution. These knots represent millions of voters. Political philosophers cannot always comprehend the future varied bearings of the ballot-elements. If they did, they could, like astronomers, calculate the time and condition of a political eclipse; their perceptions would grow so large that they might peer into ages of futurity. The grand panorama of American history has not yet been unfolded. There are many factors at work, from the lowest type of the socialistic labor-element, whose weapons are bombs and dynamite, to higher forms, which generate daily literature for the masses,—sincere zealots, no doubt, and therefore the more
