general triumph of Free Trade with peace and good-will in its train? What has thus caused the shadow to go backward on the dial of opinion? The answer is, in the first place, that the work is done to no small extent, not by the perversion of opinion, but by sheer corruption and the agencies which corruption calls into play. In the second place, the extensions of the franchise, whatever may be thought about them in other respects, have inevitably placed supreme power in the hands of men less enlightened and of narrower view than Turgot, Pitt, Peel, and Cavour. Government has been transferred from intelligence to the masses. With the good of the change we must take the evil, one part of which is the renewed ascendancy in fiscal legislation of the blind cupidity of the Dark Ages.

What are the political effects of the Protective system? First and most obviously, ill-will among nations. You will

not find a Protectionist in the United States who is not anti-British, or a Protectionist organ which is not always railing at England. The weapon constantly used against Free Traders is the charge of being bought with British gold. No doubt Free Traders like Bright and Cobden, who looked too exclusively at the commercial side of things, overrated the influence of commerce as a peace-maker; yet the influence of commerce as a peacemaker is great. It maintained friendship between the English Monarchy and the Commons of Flanders in an age in which the military spirit was most dominant. But whatever doubt there may be touching the power of Free Trade as a minister of good-will, there can be none whatever touching the power of Protectionism as a minister of hatred. The Irish in the United States are Protectionists as a matter of course, though, as British factories are full of Irish workmen, in boycotting British goods the American Irish are boycotting the work of Irish hands. It was stated the other day by a Victorian Colonist that there also the Protective tariff had been carried by the Irish vote. Another effect, as no one can question who knows the United States or Canada, is corruption. All industries pursued by people of the country being equally "home" and equally native," though a few arrogate to themselves the name, what is to decide which industries are to

be picked out for protection and to how much of it each of them is entitled ? What but the Lobby? England had a Lobby perhaps at the time of the railway mania; but commonly she has no Lobby, at least none to compare with the Lobby at Washington. My friend Mr. Bryce, looking on at a Presidential election, was greatly impressed by the spectacle of so many millions of freemen choosing their chief. But did he ask how the choice was determined? It was determined by the money which the manufacturers poured into the doubtful States. Manufacturers, some of them at least, make no secret of the fact. With the Protective tariff a large portion of the corruption. which is at present the curse and shame of the country would probably vanish. There would still remain the offices and the office-seekers; but office-seekers do not command the means of bribery which are commanded by the owners of woollen mills with their profits of twenty per cent. In Canada, under our Protective system, corruption, if it is not more extensive than in the United States, is more open. Here a Prime Minister before an election calls together the protected manufacturers in the parlor of an hotel, receives their contributions to his election fund, and pledges to them in return the commercial policy of the country.

Another consequence to the United States is a loss of unity in the National policy which threatens to become legislative disintegration. The Republic is being broken up into a sort of Polish Diet of locals interests in which each interest has a veto. Every cabbage-ground and potato-plot, to borrow Mr. Butterworth's graphic words, pursues a selfish policy of its own without regard to the general policy of the nation. This growing evil has its source largely in the struggle for Protection. The tendency has shown itself in a marked way in the dealings of the AmeriGovernment with Canada, though sometimes, as it has happened, to our advantage. The threat of Retaliation, for instance, held out by the American Government to coerce us on the Fisheries Question was at once nullified by the interposition of a local interest. National aspiration itself seems to be growing weak compared with the covetous cravings of the local cabbage-grounds and potato-plots. There is no reason for the fear that the

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national unity will be impaired by the mere extension of territory or increase of population. The extension of territory is amply countervailed by the increase of communication, and if three hundred millions of Chinese can hold together under such a government as theirs, surely a hundred millions of Americans can hold together under a government which is highly elastic and allows fair play to local self-development. The only disintegrating force now at work, apart from the Negro question, is commercial antagonism, which is intensified and stimulated by the Protective system.

A revenue tariff there must still be, and one adapted to the circumstances of the country. This qualification must be understood throughout as often as the phrase Free Trade has been used. But to a revenue tariff, if my diagnosis of the situation does not greatly deceive me, the United States are likely soon to come. Let those in England who, in their natural exasperation at the McKinley Bill are tempted to call for measures of retaliation, possess their souls in patience for the present and see what the next Presidential

election will bring forth. For my part, I am not such a purist of Free Trade as to object to retaliation if it will open foreign ports which can be opened by no other means. But it is an ugly sort of remedy; it involves an immediate loss to those who employ it; and in the present case I am sanguine enough to hope that the occasion for its adoption will soon have passed away.

This

P.S.-A formidable movement is just now on foot among the depressed and discontented farmers-Grangers, as they are called-who are demanding chimerical measures of legislative assistance. movement may disturb general politics and upset the balance of parties, especially if it should form a junction with the industrial agitation organized by the Knights of Labor. But, barring this contingency, the general opinion seems to be that the Democrats, who may now be designated as the party of Tariff Reform, will carry the autumn elections for Congress; and this will be the beginning of the end.—Macmillan's Magazine.

UPON first acquaintance, Rome is now like any other large European capital. You thunder into a great, vaulted railway station, lighted by electricity, skirmish with the two or three porters who pester you with their attentions, give up your ticket, assure the civic customs officers that you have neither eggs nor butter in your portmanteau, resign yourself and your luggage to the tender mercies of a carman, and drive through a number of long streets bordered by tall houses and attractive shops. Here and there you see a fountain if it is night, the water scintillates pallidly under the glow of more electric light; if it is day, men and boys sit with their legs dangling about it. Fulllunged urchins din you with entreaties to buy their newspapers--The Tribune, The Voice of Truth, Don Quixote, and so forth. The stiff springs of your car, and the rough paving-stones of the streets, do not lull you into a state of tranquil beatitude such as would befit your entrance into so immortal a city. The crowd thickens; the streets get narrower and narrower, and the houses taller and taller. There is an increasing number of mammoth erections set among the shops, with barred lower windows, and portals as Titanic as the stones of which they are constructed. In England we should regard them as prisons, notwithstanding the scarlet camellias in the gardens beyond their portals. Here they are palaces, and the grandiose old gentlemen with broad shoulders, patriarchal beards, cocked hats, liveries of skyblue or claret color, and long staves with a knob of gold or silver at the top, and who stand gazing from the palatial precincts upon the passers-by with a calmness that would be contemptuous if it were less statuesque--these are merely the doorkeepers of the Roman nobility. From such mansioned streets you pass into others of a more plebeian kind; and so at length you are brought up, with a resounding crack of the whip, at the porch of your hotel, in the heart of Rome. Deferential murmurs and bent heads are the agreeable but somewhat ordinary tokens by which the hotel signifies its welcome to you.

No incident of Roman life need nowadays interfere with the pleasure or the ease

Whether there

of the resident in Rome. be or there be not a Pope in the Vatican, it may be all one to him he will be under none of those queer and troublesome restrictions that formerly oppressed the faithful city during the interval between the death of one Pope and the election of his successor. The gates of the city were then shut an hour after sun-down. Under a penalty of fifty crowns, every one was obliged to burn candles at his bedroom window through the night, and continue this futile sacrifice of tallow until the new Pope was chosen. Barriers were erected here and there in the streets leading to the Vatican, and none could be passed upon any pretext, except by special permission of the Papal Chamberlain and the Chief of the Police. As a yet more portentous touch, the artillerymen of S. Angelo at such a time stood, with lifted brands in their hands, by the side of loaded guns, the muzzles of which were turned point-blank against the city on the other side of the Tiber. Even assuming, as one well may, that there was more cry than possibility of wool in such demonstrations, they were yet famously adapted to alarm the nervous, and send them in hasty flight elsewhere.

Instead of the homage of an entire city to its spiritual and temporal head, nowadays the Roman walls teem with ribald pencillings about the world's Primate. The very pillars of the famous colonnade by S. Peter's testify of the change. "Down with the Pope !" "The priests to the Tiber!" are specimens of the milder and more polite kind of these vituperatory scrawls. Every morning and every night the newspapers lavish some new form of abuse upon his Holiness it may be a paragraph of two lines, with a sting in each word, or a more sounding diatribe a column or two long. The Papal journals respond with equal bitterness. It is profoundly unedifying, and one wonders how it will end. If the Vatican be transplanted root and branch to London, the Roman press will be much at a loss; and any less emphatic migration will fail to protect the Pope.

A hundred years ago, the civilian in Rome who was not a noble was treated with stereotyped indignity. No matter

whether he was lawyer, doctor, professor, schoolmaster, or a citizen of means if he did not clothe himself in the long coat of an Abbé, he was good for nothing except to be taxed. If he could afford to ride in a carriage, he was compelled to paint it black. This is a sample of the humiliations which the old Papacy put upon the middle ranks of men: it feared their intelligence, and so so it persecuted them. But the tables have turned. The most virulent of the Vatican's enemies are now to be found among this very class of doctors and lawyers and professors whose grandsires bowed to the ecclesiastical yoke. And in these days it is the cardinals who drive through the streets in black coaches, drawn by black, long-tailed horses, seeking what solace they may find in the elegant little illuminated breviaries the leaves of which they turn with their jewelled fingers as they jostle amid the throngs which cast spleenful eyes at them. It may be doubted if even the pleb. of Rome (always the Pope's strongest and steadiest card) would, in these days, follow placidly, as of yore, in the wake of those ancient gilded carriages of the Cardinals which were wont, during Conclave time, solemnly to transport their Eminences' dinners to the Vatican; and would, in their hungry moments, be satisfied to smell the steam that escaped from the damask-covered baskets which held the savory dainties.

One's earliest impressions of Rome are confessedly somewhat flat. It is necessary to roam at large in the old city for a week or two before one can in any degree appreciate its allurements. The endless blocks of gigantic, white houses which now cover so much of the historic soil, and absorb so many pleasant antiquarian relics that to our grandsires were objects of pilgrimage and reverence, are a plague to the eyes and like ice to the imagination. It really seems as if the speculative builders of King Humbert's reign have determined to make a clean sweep of all the immortal ruins of the capital. One would hardly be surprised if a motion were introduced into the Italian Parliament for permission to quarry in the Colos. seum once more. Even as building material, the ruin is still worth a fortune. There are many reasons for its removal. It would aid the national Budget to some extent; it would take away the outward

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and visible sign of what was once a scandal upon humanity; and it would leave another acre or two of land available for sale on behalf of the nation as excellent building sites in a convenient part of the city, in constant communication, by train and omnibus, with all the chief gates and thoroughfares."

The absurd thing about this building mania is that the houses fast being "perched upon all these great relics of old time, like a mushroom on a dead oak," find no tenants. The population of Rome has certainly swelled amazingly since Victor Emanuel's day; but the city itself has enlarged upon a scale yet vaster. And so there they stand, these huge, empty hives for the men and women of a future generation! One is almost comforted by the reflection that the financiers who put their money in such miserable ventures have come face to face with ruin as a result of their audacity.

By-and-by, however, one sees through this pretentious modern mantle of Rome. At the outset, perhaps, we clap

Our hands, and cry," Eureka," it is clear, When but some false mirage of ruin rises

near:

for example, the skeleton of a house which the destroying masons have left standing cheek-by-jowl with a bit of a wall of the time of Cato. But soon we learn how to thread the maze, and then, slowly, piece. by piece, one is able to reconstruct the Rome of the past with some contentment to the fancy. It is mortally hard to discover where each of the seven famous hills begins and ends: the houses are so high, and the hills so low, and the valleys between them have been so tampered with by subterranean forces and the depositors of urban rubbish: yet that too is possible after a time; and then the glamour of past ages sets its fascination upon the scene.

Let us see lightly how life goes on in this venerable, chaotic city, whose destinies are now, as never they were, in an active state of transition.

We may assume that it is Lent. The Carnival is over; and a good thing too. A man must be surprisingly fond of old institutions to have an affection for this mournful, spiritless survival of an ancient custom; or he must be gifted with a singular taste for flowers if he likes being