problems left unsettled by the revolution of 1848 will once more present themselves for solution. We cannot see that France is likely to approach them in a better temper than then. The Provisional Government of February had faults enough to answer for, but there was an elevation of aim about its efforts which, we fear, would have no counterpart in a provisional Government formed to-day. Those who think that the Empire can be displaced without a revolution, or that revolution when it comes will be found to have lost all its terrors, are likely we fear, to find themselves grievously disappointed. they did not agree so marvellously with the conspicuous facts of the war. The French have been not only disastrously outnumbered, but their armies have falien ludicrously short of their nominal strength. Every one who knows anything of the war knows that of the 750,000 men whom the French Army should have numbered on a war footing, barely 400,000 fighting soldiers were to be found in France before the great defeats. And if this policy of embezzling the £80 paid by every French conscript as substitute-money, has been largely pursued in some regiments, there can be little doubt that it has spread more or less throughout the whole French Army. It is a "real cause," i.e., one proved to exist, and also one adequate to produce the remarkable effects which have been produced; hence, we may fairly assume it as one of the most probable of all the hypotheses accounting for the French failure. That the same cause, gross corruption, was at work in the Commissariat department and the departments regulating the supply of Chassepôts, every one knows. Everywhere the French Army has been starved to enrich individuals. A REMARKABLE letter in the Daily News of last Saturday-the Daily News, by the way, has been by far the richest in correspondence of value, correspondence with nuggets of fact in it, since the war began, -seems to afford the real key to the explanation of the gigantic failures of the French This is the more serious a lesson to us, Army. The writer was told by two graziers because pecuniary corruption is the very of Picardy, as a matter within their own root of the greatest and most menacing evils knowledge, that in a very considerable num- in every Anglo-Saxon society. It caused a ber of instances which they could specify the great proportion of the disasters in the Crimilitary authorities had got only 1,800 men mea. It caused enormous waste and many in a full regiment, instead of 3,000, though disasters in the American Civil War. It there were 3,000 names on the rolls. The still causes the greatest possible political modus operandi was this. Fourteen or fif- evils in American society. It was certainly teen years ago, private societies undertook at the root of the monstrous waste of our to find substitutes for such of those drawn Abyssinian campaign, where the published in the conscription as could pay for a sub- evidence goes to show, for instance, that a stitute. While this was so, those societies good million sterling was wasted on mules received the conscripts' money, and as it never wanted, or at least never used; was, of course, the interest of the Army that "Consuls and Vice-Consuls received authorities to get the full number of men, huge commissions for a few weeks' serthe men were always provided. But since vice in procuring mules," we quote the law has required the money paid by from Allen's Indian Mail of the 23rd those who can pay for substitutes to be paid August, that "a large batch of camdirectly into the military chest, it has be- els was bought at Suez the day after come the interest of those who control the Magdala was known to have fallen;" and military chest to pocket the money and put generally, that several millions were wasted sham soldiers on the rolls. These graziers on what was known to be useless to the exof Picardy told the Daily News' correspond-pedition, for the gain of various classes and ent that they could point out many compa- individuals. Unless there be some early nies which nominally consisted of 100 men, and severe check to this sort of canker at and could only muster 30, and as we have said before, they maintained that the average French regiments could not muster much above half their nominal strength. Now, individual statements of this kind, made as they only could be made, from personal knowledge of a few selected cases, would be utterly worthless as evidence, if the heart of all great organizations, the Germans, who seem at present to be almost completely free from the temptation to corruption, will not only become the masters of Europe, but deserve to be so. No nation can confess more plainly its complete unworthiness to be held as of any great account in the political counsels of the world, than by giving evidence that its average citizens, those whose opinions build up the public life of the State, -value their own private interests so far more highly than the public interest, that they will cheat the State to serve themselves. It is quite certain that people of this kind do not deserve to belong to a State which exercises a wide control in foreign affairs, and that they take the surest possible means to undermine the very foundations of the controlling power. A temperate, frugal, and laborious Germany, in which every man really honoured the State as the true organ of what they call with so much love the "Fatherland," would have every right to what it would certainly soon gain, - a predominant influence in Western Europe, if its only rivals were a selfishly and unscrupulously mercantile Great Britain, a false and gasconading France, and an intriguing, wily, pliant Italy. There is no such thing as a great State built up out of a people that is not great. If any sort of corruption pervades public morality, this dry-rot must attack, and sooner or later, as now in France, go far towards ruining the State. But there is undoubtedly in the present day a very large amount of political corruption which does not imply anything like as great an extent of personal corruption as it would if the same deceptions were practised on private persons; and it is to the extinction of this that we look most hopefully, for when once the morality of a whole nation has become consciously indifferent to the obligations of sincerity and honesty, inveighing against these sins is as unprofitable as the most unprofitable of all the exercises of the pulpit. No Englishman, however, can doubt that there is a great deal of political corruption which does not imply any equivalent amount of personal corruption, and so far, perhaps, a remedy is possible. Surely there is hope of teaching people, teaching children as a part of their ordinary school education, that instead of its being less wrong to cheat a corporation or a public department than it is to cheat an individual, it is, if you can weigh guilt against guilt, a great deal more so? The thinkers of old time used to say that every moral rule was magnified a hundredfold in relation to the State; and it is only the unreality attaching to the State in modern times, the comparative difficulty in realizing the definite wrong inflicted, in seeing exactly who really suffers for your meanness when you cheat a board, or a corporation, or a Government department, that makes it otherwise now. Yet what can illustrate the old axiom better than such disasters as those from which France is now suffering? Is not every peculation which robbed a single regiment of its full strength now written out, as it were, in the flaming letters of burning towns and desolated plains? Is not every little cheat by which the Army was deprived of Chassepôts for which the price had been paid, or the Commissariat defrauded of what was essential to the health and comfort of the soldiery, magnified now into the sort of treason which brings whole nations into mourning and provinces into subjection to a foreign yoke? If such lessons as the disasters of the Crimea and of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 will not teach how unlimited is the consequence of every immorality committed against the State, how rapidly the infection of sins against the State, or against any molecule of the State, spreads till all its strength is undermined, and it is left a mere name for a rope of sand, what moral lesson can be taught at all? We cannot but believe that it would be quite easy to diffuse a tone of morality in which cheating the State would be regarded as the next thing to blasphemy, - in fact, as cheating of an infinitely deeper dye, instead of a less guilty kind, than the cheating of individuals. So far, of course, as the mere dishonesty is concerned, there is no choice between cheating an individual and cheating a community. But so far as the consequences go, every man feels that stealing from a poor man is worse than stealing from a rich to the same extent, and that a theft which ruins is worse than a theft the effect of which is hardly perceived. Is it impossible to teach children that stealing from the State is the stealing which ruins, is the stealing from the poor man whose wages form the revenue of the State, — that stealing from a corporation is stealing health and happiness from the population over whose health and happiness that corporation is the sole guardian, that stealing from the army is stealing from the poor men who guard England, that stealing even from the Treasury is stealing from the resources by which the poor combine to procure for themselves a good government, - that stealing from any department of the State is the wilful introduction of a most contagious disease which ends in death? One would think nothing easier than to make it evident, even to children, that the peculiar defencelessness of the State, in the deficiency among its guardians of that vivid self-interest which protects private interests, adds, like the helplessness of the blind man against those who would plunder him, a new ignominy to any fraud committed upon it. And if with this be combined the im mense area over which fraud against the public interests spreads, if it spreads at all, and the terrible destruction it breeds, one would suppose it quite possible to sow anew in the public the ancient feeling that any sin of this kind against the organ of the people is really more guilty, instead of less so, than a like sin against an individual. In truth, the religious feeling which substitutes God for the object of every guilty action, great or small, while it has done a great deal to strengthen private morality, has done a good deal also to weaken relatively the springs of public morality, by rendering those who have no religious feeling, comparatively indifferent to all offences which are not on the face of them productive of immediate pain and suffering. Many a man who would not for his life rob a widow or an orphan, will think nothing of robbing a department. Surely it is possible to introduce into elementary schools enough explanation of the result to innumerable more helpless persons than widows and orphans, of robbing departments, the fearful result, too, in the way of making widows and orphans, to inspire all men who have any vestige of moral feeling at all with a certain sense that the State is far more sacred than any individual, that it really represents the strength and shield of millions of individuals, who will be not only less happy, but less noble, less honourable, less just, less generous beings, if the State be once turned to ignoble uses by selfish and vulgar men. From The Economist. THE LOSSES OF GERMANY. WE question if Englishmen are even yet aware of the immensity of the effort made by Germany, or of the extent to which she has staked her future prosperity upon this war. She has not, it is true, made a levée en masse - no nation ever did or could do that, not even the South in the last year of the American war, for she had still the blacks with whom to plough and reap, - but she has placed in arms, in actual regiments marching or ready to march, her entire youth, all persons between twenty-one and twenty-six, physically competent to bear arms. It is asserted, and we see no reason for doubting, that 1,200,000 youths of every class in Germany, from the King's eldest son to the meanest peasant, is engaged in the war either in front or in reserve — a real reserve, be it remembered, immediately ready for action; and quite 200,000 more must be engaged in manufacturing, collecting, and forwarding supplies. The disturbance of ordinary life caused by such a movement must be almost incalculable. We hear of it most from the country districts, because the war began in harvest-time, but the disorganization must be much greater in the cities, where the youth are in much greater proportion. The cities are full of immigrants. The drain must, and as we know from a hundred accounts does, involve a partial suspension of energy in all factories, foundries, banks, shops, and city establishments of every kind, in all universities, in all mines, and in all but the most necessary operations of agriculture: and much of this paralysis must continue for some years. The lads just coming on will not begin to be available till 1874, for they must serve their three years in the army, which by that year will be completely renewed, and they will not be really of use till 1876, as they will need at least two years to acquire the necessary knowledge. So far as the soldiers now drawn away fail to return there will be a permanent gap in German life continuing for nearly half a century. There will always be so many less of competent persons of such and such an age in every class from peasants to princes. How great this gap may be cannot as yet be ascertained, the Germans publishing no hospital returns, but in the very best event it cannot be less than a sixth of the whole body employed-200,000 men; it may very well be a fourth-300,000 men; and in the event of defeat, or of a pestilence breaking out, it may very well be half, or 600,000 men. Russia lost more than that in the Crimean War. Moreover, this loss includes an enormously disproportionate number of the highly educated classes. The death-rate among officers is almost incredibly high, quite double the proper proportion, and as the Prussian officers are indistinguishable by dress, this must arise from extra forwardress, in which they would be imitated by the educated in the ranks. The deaths from wounds would be larger too in this class; while the deaths from disease, from bad food, and from fatigue, would be incomparably greater among them than among the hardier peasantry. The harsh though efficient policy which refuses tents in the field, kills these men off in thousands, while they and they only feel greatly the weight they are compelled to carry. Taking all these circumstances into consideration, it is not an exaggeration to say that Germany will lose a third, perhaps a half, of her cultivated youth, an immeasurable loss even to a people among whom every man has some tinc ture of instruction. The whole remainder, | transmitting their cultivation to their debesides, will come back less powerful men scendants. and less fit for the work of life- war, if it does not demoralize, making all other work seem insipid. So far clearly war is an unmixed evil, and it must be remembered that the great compensations so often claimed for war really Nor is this all. The severe military or- belong exclusively to discipline. That milganization of Germany has modified all hab- itary service improves the physique is cerits until it has become unusual for men to tain. That when an entire nation is trained marry until they have served out their term, it improves the morale is very probable. and usual to marry shortly after, and the loss That it increases incalculably the capacity therefore falls almost exclusively among the for strict organization, that is, diminishes potential bridegrooms of Germany. We incalculably the temptation to waste labour, can make the effect of this clear in a mo- may be granted, though we think reasoners ment by taking an extreme case. Suppose on that side claim too much. But then all the whole army to perish, there would be- those advantages are due to discipline, not tween 1870 and 1874 be no youthful mar- to the war for which it is a preparation, the riages at all, and probably two millions less latter only undoing much of the effect of children born into the world- a difference the previous training. Troops always which would be felt for generations. Even emerge from a war less healthy, less orgaas it is, the difference will in all probability nized, less moral, than their discipline had be sufficient to arrest the tide of German made them when they entered it. The noemigration, and thus to exert a marked in- tion that war hardens men, that old camfluence upon the prosperity of the United paigners live long, is probably a mere deluStates, who gain almost the whole benefit sion, arising from the fact that war acts as a of this outpouring of strong persons ready process of selection, and only spares the to labour hard. The general effect of the tough, whose toughness is then attributed to war, therefore, will be to diminish consid- the war which has only revealed its existerably and at once the population of Ger- ence. No race of Western Europe, trained many, to restrict its increase still more con- to sleep under cover, can sleep without siderably, and to inflict the heaviest propor- cover for a month under severe rains withtion of both these losses upon the cultivated out suffering, and the soldiers of this war, classes, who have at all times in a country we may rely upon it, will die early. of subdivided properties much difficulty in Ir must be confessed that at the present time England presents to the civilized world a spectacle which is less sublime than ridiculous. She is fully prepared to "speak out her instincts," but finds that people are too busy sharpening their swords and cutting each other's throats to listen to her. She has therefore wisely left off scolding and advising, and is now engaged in rubbing her spectacles. She can hardly believe her eyes. She sees in the German army an engine of destruction such as the world has never seen before. A new first-class nation has arisen with a new first-class army, and she is beginning to realize the truth that if she herself intends to be a first-class nation, as of old, she must conform to the new standard, and adopt the latest fashion in armour. It is a sore trial to be thus rudely awakened by Young Europe from dreams of efficiency, economy, competitive examinations and marriage with our deceased wife's sister. Pall Mall Gazette. WE asked why the Norfolk Island Pine, Araucaria excelsa, a conservatory plant with us, was made to do duty for the Chili pine, A. imbricata; and we are told in reply that there is a fine specimen of the latter at Dropmore, which is quite true. It is equally true that the artist has drawn A. excelsa, and not A. imbricata; unless, indeed, the same line of defence be adopted as in the case of the man who sold rooks for pheasants, and who, when taxed with it, replied, - Appelez-les comme vous voudrez, des corbeaux s'il vous plait; moi, je les appelle des faisans." Athenæum. NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second " The Complete Work, Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10. |