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delight in fools." By fools we must of course understand jesters and merriment-makers; and of them we need say little, save that habitual cheerfulness is of immense use in a state. The great Utopian does not overlook the probability of crime entering into his happy island, because crime goes everywhere; but his method of treating criminals is very much like that very wisely instituted by those who created our ticket-of-leave system. That is, the criminals are reduced to slavery, wherefrom, by a gradual scale of ascension, they rise and emancipate themselves. The enemies of the system are of course at liberty to say that this works better in the regions of the ideal than in the real. We can only say that, whatever prejudices there are against it, a system which returns seventy-five per cent. of reformed and "re-educated" men upon society is very much better than that which would crowd our gaols with hopeless wretches, and force upon the country the immense expense of their maintenance; for the possibility of getting a hopeful prospect of useful work out of criminals is very small.

We must shortly leave this little island, this New Atlantis, set in a mysterious sea, and to which we all wish we could sail, and which, in some shape or another, forms the nucleus, as it were, of many a poet's dream. What a pleasant world it would be were it without crime and sorrow! But the great Ruler has seen otherwise; and perhaps, when Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More grew wiser and less romantic as they grew older, they found out that the gardens of the Hesperides did not bring forth such golden fruit as they thought; nay, that

to pluck the apples of true happiness they must wait until the soul again entered Paradise.

These dreams, these mere imaginings of social reforms, have had great weight in the world. Every now and then a man gets up who fancies that he can reform it. So thought Robert Owen; and his wild attempts in Lanarkshire did a great deal of good, although, as regards his system, it resulted in a miserable failure. Three sects are still up in the world, trying to form out of the angular pieces of society a sort of beautiful mosaic. One is that of the Mormonites, the great bribe to join which is of a nature quite subversive of true happiness; yet the universal industry and equality of Joe Smith's followers have, even with a corrupt centre, done much good, and have rendered a desert a land flowing with milk and honey. The Moravians, the second sect, is very much to be honoured. Nothing, perhaps, nearer to the spirit and practice of a community of early Christians has been practised than their doctrine. Lastly, trying to realize their Utopia without the trouble of children or the ties of marriage, separating the sexes and devoting each to a separate life, meeting only together for the sake of worship, which is performed in a saltatory manner, we have the Shakers. The culmination of their Utopia would, in about one hundred years, leave an entirely empty planet. But in spite of much that is impossible, which is well shown in Hawthorne's capital romance The Blythedale Romance, where he introduces and sketches Brook Farm, a Utopian establishment set up by those curious people, we must own that there is something very great and

generous in the idea, something which shadows forth a grander soul in man; and if the world has not realized the splendid dream, it has yet been greatly benefited by the publication of these crude but beautiful idealogies.

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WAR IN THE WORLD.

|ONTAIGNE, writing, as he very frequently did,

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about himself, drawing his experiences chiefly from his own heart, and telling people exactly what he thought at the moment, naturally does

not let the passing events of the day go by without observation. Thus he tells us how his brother, being second to a gentleman in a duel, and having despatched his man, ran in to part the principals; and thus also he lets us know, incidentally, many curious particulars of the wars of the Guises, and the raids of the free companions in Guienne; and if our great master turns aside for that, we may surely gossip about war itself, and glance at the little and contemptible war—if war can ever be contemptible—which is disturbing Europe, and the very large and unsatisfactory war which is tearing America in pieces. All our tea-table philosophers and softly benevolent thinkers-they who take their "sentiments" from the words of wisdom which surround Maunder's Treasury—are ready to prove by line and rule that war is not a necessity; that it is cruel, rapacious, and

utterly unfit for philosophers, much less Christians, to indulge in; and yet the horrid fact remains-we must and do have war.

This is very unpleasant, especially to those who believe in an immediate millennium; but it is more unpleasant when we concede that the more quiet and dispassionate a thinker is, the less biassed, and the more determined to look upon the question on all sides, the deeper will be his conviction that, if matters proceed as they are now proceeding, we shall soon have a general European war. Whenever it commences it will be a sanguine and a disastrous one. There is Waterloo to be avenged by one people, Solferino and Magenta to be wiped out by another, and a little credit account of Sebastopol to be looked into. Probably we shall find in this result a solution of Mr. Cumming's "Great Tribulation Coming on the Earth;" but we need not go to Daniel and the Revelations to foretell tribulations: they are of that sort which write their advent pretty plainly in political events, in arming and fort-building, in the preparation of fleets, and in the invention of all kinds of model instruments of destruction, all of which are to be noted now, and which are not very comfortable things for a philosopher to contemplate. These, indeed, are the true signs of the times, and those who read them need not be inspired.

We all know that Lord Chesterfield foretold very accurately the French Revolution, simply by looking around at the gaunt and angry faces, and the starvation and tyranny, which were to be seen any day and every day all over France before

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