of printed words and abstract right against armed wrong; but we do believe in Armstrong's thousand-pounders, in armour-plated ships, rifled cannon, and Whitworth, Mount Storm's, or Enfield rifles, and a dozen other devilish engines.

Consistently with this moral change in us, we find our young men more rough and manly than we were, with less soft, generous, and universal feeling; for we hold it that unless a man has much of the mother in him, he is but imperfect. The grand, generous, and charitable may be sustained by the man's, but they have their birth in the woman's portion of us. As, therefore, our young fellows have become neater, but less finniking, manlier and rougher in their dress, bolder in their bearing, more upright, through drilling and other matters, they have become much less observant towards women and weak persons. They are more tolerant, because they have less earnest faith; but they are much less charitable. They unite greater shrewdness with more vain lavishness in money; but yet they love money more, and venerate its effects more. Money has, in fact, relatively more power than it had. It buys better art and more comfort, and our young fellows know it very well.

In common out-door exercises our young men of to-day are better than they were twelve years ago. This especially applies to townsmen: the countrymen ride now as ever, well up to the hounds, are hardy and bold, ruddy and full of strength, as Englishmen have been for centuries; but it strikes us that intellectually the general run of young men have fallen off. The students of our day have become

examiners and professors, and pretty stiff examination-papers they give their lectures; but we are not speaking of the educated, but of the self-educating classes. How about mechanics' institutes and classes? Do they learn as much as they used? or have they dwindled down to mere song lectures, or joke lectures, or readings and anecdotes? We are sadly afraid that most of these institutes are actual failures, only now and then galvanized into life. For the competitive young men we can only say that they go through a curriculum enough to stifle free thought. What sort of a man is he who gains the five thousand good marks, and wins the topmost place in a competitive examination? Does he ever look at a book again in his life? or does he, when his object is gained, sink back into a strenuous but empty idleness?

With regard to relations-especially female relations—our young men seem to have become rougher and ruder, and, if we are to believe report, woman, with her costly and somewhat unmanageable dress, her trinkets, her prettinesses, and her "little ways," is degenerating into a "bore." They prefer men's society, that is, the society of young men, to that of ladies, and pipes and billiards to conversation which "bores.” On the other hand they are quick enough to perceive that woman is to them not wholly what she was to their grandfathers and fathers, that the world is getting harder to live in, and that woman daily enters into competition with men, and that some women despise man, and vainly talk about equalling, if not surpassing him. The young man of to-day has a shrewd suspicion that much of this is nonsense, but

that the rest of it does not improve the women in their capacity of wives. Nor does he absolutely object that a woman should work for him, any more than an Indian chief objects to be served by his squaw. It will go hard with the young ladies in the future if by any means our young men should add the indifference of a Choctaw Indian to the supreme selfishness taught by modern civilization.

Deference for age, continuance in service, patience, and endurance, seem too to be dying out. We are becoming more hasty, impetuous, shifting, and headlong. We do not now refer to abstract principles. "The age of chivalry," said Burke, "had gone." We no longer look to the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise; and we have ourselves to blame: we have let expediency be our rule. We have bullied little nations, and have been quiet when big America or saucy France has bullied us. We have not aided, as we might have aided, oppressed nationalities; we have, it is true, done a great deal of talking, but have had but little doing; at the same time we have, through the agency of our governing classes, meddled with the Continent without mending it. A firm faith in our own good intentions, and a trust in what was right, would have helped us out of many a difficulty in which we have now got involved. Our young men have heard a great many noble words; but they have seen wrong crowned, villainy successful, spoliation triumphant, patriotism a mere farce; if successful, greeted with a momentary applause, and praised not because it was virtue, but because it was success; if defeated, sneered at and

maligned. This is not the way to breed great men ; for the young may be fired by the words, but they weigh the deeds. Before our young men is a wondrous, but a hard and puzzling future reticent, reliant, and selfish, they are, it seems to us, fitted to solve the problem, and to give way to a better and a nobler generation.

ON THE NATION ONE IS BORN UNTO,

CALLED "JOHN BULL."

HE Saxon race has in its veins a drop of the blood of the Titans: nothing checks it, nothing terrifies it in the conquest of the physical world :

it hurls haughty defiance at Nature, hollows mountains, levels rocks, and exhibits to the world the riches dragged from the bosom of the earth; but this strong-armed race all at once becomes timid, so soon as an attempt is made to tamper with its hereditary customs. We borrow from the excellent work of a French writer, M. Alphonse Esquiros, this description of John Bull. In his papers, contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and since published under the title of The English at Home, our readers will find a very accurate description of our national character. We may at once start by saying that the picture is not always flattering, but that it is drawn with a masterly as well as a friendly hand. Cromwell sitting to his portrait-painter Cooper, the miniature Vandyke, said sternly, "No flattery! paint me with my warts;" and the picture is still to be seen, with the worn, sha