we rushed off again under the swinging | country, lined with handsome houses, as heavens. And who can tell of the horrors fine as any you might see in Fifth Avenue, of the grit! When we awoke in the early New York. Between these lie the acres dawn we found our pillows and everything of neat white and green wooden houses, about us covered with a thick layer of this where the workmen are located. pleasant substance, and we had to call to "We have been to see an elevator, a huge mind the successful enterprise of Benzoni wooden tower where grain is stored. We and Layard before we had the courage to watched the cars backed under its great attempt to arise. With much persever- archway, and the yellow loads shovelled ance and more patience we performed our out into a trough, and whisked up over simple toilet; the only position in which our heads in little buckets fastened on a this could be done, owing to the shaking strap; this unloading went on at the rate of the cars, was by kneeling on your shelf, of ten trucks in five minutes. Then we your head firmly pressed against the roof mounted hundreds of steps to the top of above. This over, we staggered to the the tower, where we found the little rear of the car and washed our faces in buckets hard at work tilting the grain in the never-failing ice-water. Soon our a yellow stream into huge bins. Here mattrasses, pillows, and curtains disap- it is weighed. From these bins it is peared, and we were seated once more on poured through wide tubes into the vessels our red velvet cushions, the windows open, and the sweet fresh air pouring in, and the wide green ocean lying like a kindly future before us, mysterious in the dim, tender lights, blue, grey, and gold, of

sunrise.

"After breakfast our Montana friend joined us with the morning paper, and on the rolling prairies, four thousand miles away from Paris, we read the words of Jules Favre, uttered twelve hours ago, declaring for the deposition of the Emperor and the Republic of France. 'There's Chicago!' said our companion, in the midst of the war-talk which followed. We sped on, past acres of level ground covered with one-storeyed wooden houses, past immense lumber yards, machine-shops, gas-works, and through streets and across railways, and pulled up at last in a big, dusty, dark, wood-built, barn-like station. There on the platform stood our friends whom last we had seen in a London drawing-room-looking bright, fresh, and handsome as if there were no such things as dust and cinder-grit and impossible

toilets!

lying at the wharf below, twenty minutes being sufficient to give out a cargo of eighteen thousand bushels. We were told that the elevator we were in had stored in the last twelve months twenty millions of bushels of grain. And these golden seeds, which have waved in the sunshine over the generous soil of Wisconsin, Iowa, or Illinois, mostly go to help to make a penny roll, to be bought by a ragged street Arab in some small shop of a dirty alley in Seven Dials.

"And now we have seen the great river of the West. As we stood upon the platform of the cars, suddenly among the trees we saw, glinting and glancing in the sunlight, the waters of the Mississippi, and soon afterwards we began to lumber over the high tresselwork bridge that is built on three islands, and spans the wide flood; but rather seems as you move across it to rise straight out of the water, and hold you without railing or protection of any kind just above the rushing river. Later on we took an exciting walk across the huge rafts that lay at the water's edge, the logs waiting to be "And now we have been for some days carried into the large wooden saw-mill, in this wonderful city, this child of the which we were told was the largest in the present, growing up on the most approved United States, and which we visited next systems. Everywhere I am struck with morning. There we saw the great trunks the perfectness of the arrangements. The of trees that had flourished in Canadian streets remind me of Paris, so evenly forests, and had floated hundreds of miles paved, so clean, and so broad, with wide down the river, drawn up as if by sidewalks and rows of trees; the pave-magic from the water, and relentlessly ment is of wood, and the carriage rolls pushed into the jaws of a great monster, over it with delightful ease and quiet. whence they reissued in a few moments There are handsome shops and warehouses transformed into white planks, to be sent built of stone and marble, ornamented off by trains that waited below to all the with pillars and cornices and French roofs. surrounding States. There are monster hotels, theatres, concert-halls, art galleries, and long boulevards going out for miles towards the

"But our sail at sunset upon the great river! My memory of it is that we moved on noiselessly in molten gold, and that we

came to a fairy island where the trees are certainly not told, is how in this emerwere wreathed with heavy festoons of gency national and social life goes on at creepers; where there were red and pur-all. What all of us mean by life is not ple and yellow flowers bending at the the exceptional circumstances which war water's edge and reflecting themselves into brings with it, but the inner daily existdouble beauty; and where splendid but-ence of the population. We want to be terflies flitted about in the sunshine that informed how the social machine labours flickered and glinted through the trees. and pants, and yet somehow does not altoThe beauty was enough to carry one out gether break down. We should like to of oneself, and out of the world almost. know more about the administrative arThen the sunlight faded away like the rangements which are made, or which smile from a beautiful face, and we turned have shaped themselves, to meet condiour boat, and were borne swiftly homeward tions without precedent, unforeseen, and by the tremendous current." incapable of being provided against or provided for. Now, to take the case of ordinary Englishmen, for whose information, we suppose, Special Correspondents write; as a matter of fact they know but little of the domestic constitution of another country. We travel in France, or take a holiday in Paris, but we have too much to do to inform ourselves of the common institutions and life of the French people. The theatres, the boulevards, the galleries and museums, pictures and statues, and café life attracts us. We go to Paris for amusement, not for instruction in dull statistics, or to learn the social Somehow

From The Saturday Review. WHAT "OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT” DOES NOT TELL US.

there is a system going on which, differing we dare say, but how we do not much care, from our own, produces much the same results. But now we have to realize how France gets on with its heart paralysed, what Paris is when isolated from the whole body politic; and reasonably enough, if we want to guess out how things are there, we begin to speculate how things would be here with us in England and London under similar circumstances.

We have often had occasion to complain, and others have echoed our complaint, that "Our Own Correspondents" tell us a great deal which is not worth telling, and much that is not fit to tell, about the details of the war. We have had more than enough of what is disgusting, and at least enough of mere gossip and organization of the country. foolish personal detail. It requires no great stretch of imagination to picture for ourselves that roughing at the outposts is unpleasant, or that junketing at head-quarters is an agreeable change. To describe graphically the drawing of champagne corks, or the difficulties about get a horse and carriage or to photograph the interior of a Parisian cockney's villa after it has been occupied by the Prussians, fills a column, many columns, but scarcely adds to our knowledge. We now venture to complete our bill of complaint against It is curious, but it seems to be a fact, "Our Own," and after having noted that with all the contemporaneous mewhat they have done and are doing which moirs, private diaries and letters, and they might as well have left undone, we biographies and State papers, which have proceed to point out some of their short- from time to time been published, we comings and deficiencies. France gener- know so very little how France got on ally, and Paris in particular, presents at during the great Revolution. During the this moment, and has for some weeks pre- Reign of Terror we have been told that sented, a phenomenon not only of special the salons were kept open, and that the interest, but absolutely without precedent intercourses of society were maintained; in political and national history. There is but we do not know how the courts of a remarkable combination and concurrence justice and of police discharged functions of two sets of circumstances. The coun-without which all would be chaos, how the try, or at least a great portion of it, is taxes were levied, if levied at all, how the subjected to a successful invasion, and the daily circulation of the State's life was country is also without a Government. kept up. It is so now. It is absurd to Either of these conditions of national life, imagine that there is no hitch and break, or life in death, may have occurred before; no solution of continuity, in the national but in their simultaneous occurrence con- life of France. We do know that there is sists the special interest of the hour. a forced currency, and we do know that Now what we want to know, and what we what passes for a Government finds the

means of spending an enormous sum of ample, must have been annihilated. What money; but where the money or credit, we have to picture is London with all the or whatever it is that is in use, comes masons, bricklayers, carpenters, painters, from, we do not know. We know that and "amalgamated trades" out of work; France is not altogether in a state of an- not merely the shipbuilding of East Lonarchy; but whether there are public writs, don annihilated and we know what or in whose name judicial proceedings run, came of that- but all trades stopped; all whether ordinary processes and suits are the producers of articles of Paris, and all carried on just as they were three months the smart shopkeepers and shopkeepers' ago, we can only conjecture. What be- staffs, at one blow struck down. No doubt comes of appeals - if there is, as there there are compensations. All the six hunmust be, an appellate system-there may dred thousand soldiers, or so-called solbe many acquainted with the French sys- diers, who are employed in the defense of tem who can tell us; but ordinary Eng- the city receive pay and rations. A vast lishmen, who only think that England cut deal of new and exceptional work, and off from London and Westminster would with work wages, supplied by the Governpresent a very strange spectacle, are ment, fills up some gaps in the labourmerely puzzled by thinking about it. market. Defences are thrown up. M. The monetary circulation again, and all Gambetta informs us that guns are daily the banking and all bill transactions, the cast, and an immense amount of ammuniebb and flow of bullion inside the Bank of tion produced, in Paris. Men who were France and nobody knows where the behind the counter and at work in the facBank is at this moment is a huge and tories are doing garrison work, and are inexplicable riddle to us. The national paid for it; tailors and women and millirevenues, customs and such dues, are of ners have perhaps their hands full of unicourse somehow collected; but if the capi- forms and necessaries for the defence. tal no longer exists practically, though the But the amount of labour absorbed by seat of government has been transferred Government employment cannot reach to Tours, to whom is the money for- one-tenth of the ordinary trade of the capwarded, and how is it that the whole ma- ital of France. Judging from what we all chinery of the State is not stopped, when know of the working-classes of London, it offices, archives, clerks, boards, depart- is certain that, after making the most amments, officials, and centralization cease to ple allowance for the exceptional employbe? How should we get on without the ment which the siege affords, there must Stamp Office, Somerset House, the Cus- be thousands and thousands of bread-wintom House, the Bank, the Courts at ners, as they are called, in Paris, who earn Westminster? The Ministers and a few no wages because there are no wages to officials, if London were invested, could earn. Factory hands must be dismissed establish themselves at Manchester, and when the factories cease to work; domesa Parliament might meet, as it has met tic servants must be dismissed when before, at Oxford; but how could the bus- households are broken up or reduced to iness of the country go on without the short commons. If the workman life in central machinery for carrying on the France is, as it must be, much the same as ways and means? And yet, as it seems, it is in England, what a vast horde of men or at any rate as far as we are told, there must be who merely earn their there is no fatal hitch. Of all wonders, twenty or thirty francs a week, and spend the political we mean the interna- it every week in rent and across the countional political-condition of France at this moment is to an ordinary Englishman the most wonderful.

ter for the ordinary necessaries of meat, drink, and clothing? How do they contrive to live without wages? There can And when we come to the details of ac- be no credit given; we do not hear that tual life it might be well if the pictur- Paris has relapsed into a state of barter, esque chroniclers who tell us enough and which however, would be of little use, seeto spare about the uniforms of the Mo- ing that the ouvriers having nothing to biles, and the alternate fits of gaiety and barter. We are told that Government sullenness on the boulevards, would en- has fixed the price of flour and meat, but lighten us on the daily life in Paris in a state we do not hear that Government has of siege. Of one broad aspect of life in Paris issued five-franc pieces to pay for the we do not want any assurance. Business meat and the flour. And how all the peoand manufactures and trade must be at an ple in Paris who have not a twenty-franc end; and, with trade, wages must have piece -we were just going to say a Naceased to be. The building-trade, for ex-poleon-manage to get food we are not

And no nation was ever so lavish of this kind of reasoning in the mouths of its chieftains as the French, who now have to These are commonplace maxims, doubtpay the penalty of many a wanton indul- less-though, from the angry passion gence in it. The proclamations and which the exploits of French francs-tireurs despatches of the First Napoleon may be on the one side and the retaliation exerconsulted with advantage as a perfect cised by German soldiers or near th manual of the audacious fallacy which cite, not only in the natugaged in proceeds on the assumption that the the strife, but in neut oservers also, speaker is in the right, and therefore that it would seem as if they were very easily ordinary rules of morality are nullified or forgotten. But there is one particular in reversed as between him and his opponent. which their application is, so to speak, In Calabria, the Tyrol, Spain, Russia, his novel, and requires very close watching language was always the same: a short from those who are clear-minded enough shrift, with as little as might be of prelim- to see through the smoke and tumult of inary inquiry, for the civilian who had the hour. The two irreconcilable princislain or resisted a French soldier. There ples the opposition of which we have was no affectation of regret, no endeavour pointed out arose and have been as yet