burgh, the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, who so strenuously opposed the lowering of the franchise, used the following words, after the Act securing household suffrage had received the sanction of Parliament :"I am most anxious to educate the poorer classes, to qualify men for the power that has passed, and perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. I am also anxious to educate, in a better degree than at present, the higher classes of the country, and that also for political reasons. The time has gone past when the higher classes could hope by any indirect influence, either of property or of coercion of any kind, to direct the course of public affairs. Power has passed out of their hands, and what they do must be done by the influence of superior education and cultivation, by the power of mind over mind, by that sign and signet of the Almighty which never fails to be recognized where it is truly attested." Such, then, according to the view of one of the ablest men in England, will be the effect of the late democratic advance. The higher classes will be compelled to educate themselves more perfectly, in order to retain their influence; while the safety of the state calls for the education of the poorer classes. The dumb millions have now a voice and will make themselves heard. They can no longer be ignored. They cannot be left in the condition of blind Cyclops, with huge force but no light-badly housed and fed, huddled together in the pestiferous courts and lanes of great cities, poisoned with physical and moral pollutions, dying in mute despair, the rights of property having trampled out the rights of man. The new era is full of hope, if it only introduce a searching and honest investigation into the condition of the sunken classes of our modern society.

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The working of democracy in America is at least calming and reassuring to all who fancy that Democracy means spoliation, rapine and murder. In De Tocqueville's great work on Democracy in America"-the profoundest treatise on political philosophy that the nineteenth century has produced-the advantages and disadvantages of Democracy are summed up with judicial impartiality, by one of the keenest observers and most philosophic thinkers. He has shown how a great, wealthy, intelligent nation has grown up under democratic institutions; and how the government of Democracy has been reconciled with respect for property, with deference for rights, with safety to freedom, with respect for law and religion. The great and noble qualities of the American people, whose training has thus been secured, constitute the best of all testimonies in favour of Democracy. Their patriotism, energy, generosity, patience and courage in the hour of peril; their enterprise and self-control; their reverence for law; their great religious and educational institutions, calculated to benefit the whole mass of the people, have secured them the respect and admiration of all impartial and intelligent minds. De Tocqueville has shown that, while Democracy in America has not the romantic features of character which its enthusiastic admirers usually ascribe to it, while it has many drawbacks and defects, and is less favourable than some other forms of government, to the growth of the finer elements of human nature, yet that it has great and roble qualities. Certainly it

has not made a paradise for man in the New World. It cannot, as experience has shown, secure a nation from the horrors of civil war, or the hurricanes of party strife; yet, under its sway, an energetic, moral and religious community has grown into greatness, and gives promise of a mighty future. It does not, by any means, follow that the development of Democracy in England will take republican form, or that it is necessarily hostile to the principle of loyalty to the throne. The day is very distant, and very unlikely ever to arrive, when England will desire to exchange her constitutional monarchy for an elective presidency. But still, the successful working of American Democracy should entirely allay the terrors of those who anticipate from it only the frenzy of a revolution, and should inspire us with hope as we sweep forward into a new, if not a brighter day.

America is important to the world as the country where new ideas on all human affairs are specially welcomed, and obtain a fair field. The boldest experiments, the most audacious theories regarding all subjects of thought, are permitted and even welcomed there, and dis-. cussed with an utter disregard of established systems. The world will be the better for all this. Surely truth and nature are not exhausted surely something better than a reproduction of the past may be looked for on the free soil of America. When we consider the present most unsatisfactory relation between labour and capital in the Old World, can we not conceive of juster laws facilitating co-operative associations, through whose workings the rights of both would be made to blend and harmonize? Might not education, enforced by law, and reaching down to the lowest strata of the community, go far to save from the evils of over population, and to deliver from that pauperism that is gnawing at the vitals of modern society? The present accumulation of the whole land of Great Britain and Ireland, in the hands of a few holders, threatens soon to become so intolerable that the state will be compelled to resume possession of the land for the benefit of the whole community, due compensation, of course, being secured to those in possession. The ideas regarding all such matters, now germinating or bearing fruit in America, will re-act powerfully on Europe, and suggest improved modes of living, sweeter manners, purer laws." In education, America has led the way: her theory, however imperfectly reduced to practice, being, that government should be founded on the intelligence and morality of the whole people. Why; then, should we not willingly give our meed of praise to American intelligence and enterprise?-why should we not cheer her on in her path of progress? All that tends to make her great she owes to the old sea-taming, colonizing Mother. Her glory is the glory of the Saxon race-of the stout hearts that fought at Agincourt, and won at Trafalgar and Inkerman. And if, at some distant day, the star of empire should pass over to the Great Republic, with its boundless territories and inexhaustible resources; and if, in the greatness of the Western giant. the glory of England should pale its fires, still the sceptre would be in the hands of a race owning her as nursing mother, speaking her noble tongue, and proud of that name that can never perish from the records of fame: and even then as now, the words of one

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of America's noblest poets might be wafted from Columbia to Britain:

"All hail! thou noble land—

Our fathers' native soil!

O stretch thy mighty hand,
Gigantic grown by toil,

O'er the vast Atlantic wave to our shore;

For thou, with magic might,

Canst reach to where the light

Of Phoebus travels bright,
The world o'er.

"Though ages long have passed

Since our fathers left their home,

Their pilot in the blast,

O'er untravelled seas to roam

Yet lives the blood of England in our veins;

And shall we not proclaim

That blood of honest fame,

Which no tyranny can tame

By its chains?

A VOLUME might be written on the above caption did time and opportunity permit, but even in a short article it will be our aim to give as much information to the reader as possible in a few words, and on a subject so prolific and sad and interesting to every student of history, especially of the Anglo-Saxon race. No spot of ground of the same area as that of Central Virginia and the environs of Washington has ever been saturated to the same extent with human blood, in the same period of time. Not a day dawned for four long years but during its twenty-four hours, life was violently taken in the rifle pits, on the vidette lines, in the skirmish, or in the whirlwind of battle, and scarce

ly a hill or valley from Fortress Monroe to the Shenandoah valley and from Harrisburgh to the South-side Railroad, where there is not now some evidence of vandalism, rapine, cruelty and of war-worn tracks of malice and fiendish destruction to property and life. This is to be expected in a country that has become the theatre of war, but we know of no land where the besom of vengeance has been so vigorously wielded and so ruthlessly unsparing as in proud and aristocratic Virginia, the supposed home of American chivalry. In 1864 the whole country was one vast scene of ruin. The fences were gone and the landmarks removed. Where forests once stood in primal grandeur are even now forsaken camps. Where crops luxuriated and which were never reaped are now myriads of graves, whose inmates are the stalwart sons of the North or of the Sunny South, but now festering, rotting, and bleaching in the wind, the rain, and the sun of heaven, far away from home, in and on the clay of the "Old Dominion." The evil-omened raven and buzzard were the only living permanent occupants of the harvest-field. The ploughs could be seen halfway stopped in its furrow from which the affrighted husbandman, bond or free, had fled in terror to gather (it might be) his wife and little ones into a place of shelter. Behind him boomed hostile cannon-brayed the hoarse bugle to the charge-clanked the rusty and empty scabbard of the fierce dragoons-rattled the ironed hoof of the war horse-rolled the vibrating muffled sound of the distant but ever approaching drums -shrieked the demon shells in their fierce pathway through the heavens-glittered the accoutrements and bayonets and shotted guns of surging masses of humanity and murmured the multitudinous voices of legions of warriors "as the sound of many waters" panting for the excitement and empty honours of battle. Here the poor son of toil or servitude had ploughed or sowed for himself or for his proud and hard taskmaster, but the Destroyer was mercilessly at his heels. The place that knew him once shall know him no more forever. The verdure of his homestead is turned into dust. The rural retreat has been despoiled and ravaged of its beauty, and the beautiful gardens and fields and magnolia groves are one vast city of the dead—a necropolis-where voracious Mars has burned incense on his gory, reeking and dripping altars. Where love, and youth, and beauty met at trysting hours then met the bearded heroes of many battles and the scarred veterans of many a bloody fray. Where once rattled the photon of luxury laden with the flower of a proud aristocracy, rolled the ponderous wheels of cannon or reeking ambulances. Where once rode the gay bridal cortege making hills and vallies vocal with song and melody and glee, charged fierce and cruel troopers-who like Attalus left desolation in their train. Where hearthstones once shone in the ruddy light of home, with no bloodstains on the domestic hearth and no ruthless invader to darken its door-lintels; nor to sit unbidden by its hospitable fire and unwelcome at its table, were blackened ruins, the monuments of cruelty, sitting solitarily in the midst of desolation. Friends and foes alike have disembowelled the proud State with the long gaunt fingers of rapine, and swept it of every trace of civilization save that of modern warfare. The remorseless

and vengeful waves of pitiless conflict have met, and surged, and dashed and foamed in wild fury over its fair landscape, until the spectator is almost compelled to believe that he is the victim of a hideous nightmare or of some strange phantasm of the brain which time will dispel and

"Like the baseless fabric of a vision

Leave not a wreck behind."

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We are told in classic history that the venerable and noble Trojan Eneas stood in the midst of carnage on the way to Mount Ida as grey dawn began to herald in the day, and saw beneath him Troy in flames, and in the fullness of his heart cried out " Illium fuit.". The proud and noble city has been but shall be no more forever. Virginia was the home of a proud, exclusive and haughty race that scorned the Northern men and women because of their so-called plebeian extraction, and treated the far South with wondrous condescension because of the admixture of the poor white trash." Virginianus sum was to them the same as "Romanus sum" to the Romans, a passport of unusual significance being an undisputed testimony of noble lineage and "blood." They forgot that the pilgrims at Plymouth rock were puritans and that the far South was settled by worthy Englishmen and French Huguenots; but Virginia was at one time a penal colony and their blood has diffused in it the blood of convicts. In all the fearful struggle through which they have passed "They have sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind," for the exclusiveness and hauteur of the Virginian patrician have like his ephemeral glory passed phantomlike away. The sword has cut the Gordian knot. This imperfect glimpse of Virginia in 1864, is not written for effect, nor is it an idle chimera conjured up by a busy brain to fill to plethora the pen of fiction, for our heart was sad as the dreadful panorama passed day after day before our vision, and as we contemplated what might be the probable fate of the tens of thousands of young and old, male and female, who were not to be found near their bleak and barren homes, and who were either in their graves or standing within the rebel lines, or within the walls of some beleaguered city, we felt that every such household would have a history sad, pitiful and inevitable, the recital of whose woes would wring the most obdurate heart. Comfortable, happy, prosperous, peaceful Canada does not know but very imperfectly what are the horrors of war at home. Glory, like a snow-ball, gathers greatness the farther it rolls. The soldier's fame is a guerdon that needs to be at our doors in order to know how hollow is the empty bauble,

"Religion, freedom, vengeance, what you will,

A word's enough, to raise mankind to kill;

Some factious phrase by cunning caught and spread,
That guilt may reign and wolves and worms are fed."

We often grumble because of hard times and failing banks, and fluctuating markets, and commercial panics, and deficient harvests; such make many men misanthropists and miserable, drivelling, imbecile grumblers; but let war ensue, and let the invader cross our borders, and let him for even one short month burn, plunder, murder and de