Irreverence is the vulgar American vice. And vulgar vice is so rapid in its generalizations, that contempt for one commandment soon dethrones the decalogue. The world expresses surprise that our returning soldiers are generally law-abiding, gentlymannered citizens. But service in a good regiment is a liberal education in all the brave, grand, loyal principles of duty. The soldier learns to obey, and to enforce authority, because he finds subordination to be the necessary part of every link in an endless chain of power.

A year of such iron discipline, in a normal camp, as the Prussian citizen cheerfully and patriotically undergoes, would teach the American citizen something of the majesty of the people, as the law-making power. Connivance at a breach of law is as insulting to the offended authority as is association with an officer under arrest. The degradation of the public mind in this regard curiously appears in the fact, that while we arrest the mere spectators at a gaming-table, as parties to an offence, we permit every citizen with impunity to tempt, by money and frenzied and frenzied prayers, the illicit vendor

of liquor to break the law.

It is not surprising, with such loose notions about mutual responsibility for participation in a breach of statute law, that the temperance question

should be unprofitably hustled about by two bodies of reformers; one of which, permitting all men to patronize and tempt, would only punish the tempted vendor; and the other of which would dam the ever-flowing cataract of human appetite, without leaving the smallest sluiceway for the waters. The People, as a law-making, law-enforcing power, is not yet sensible of its own sacred majesty.

Nor will it be a sacred sovereign power in the sense that our fathers intended, until the voting armed majority shall be invested with the interests of property and character as well as with life and liberty; this contented and virtuous majority electing and supporting fully paid officials; these officials enforcing the will of the people by the aid of a very highly paid police, who, being freed from political obligation to any unpaid servants of the public, see, hear, remember, and report.

The first century of our national experiment is nearly closed. Society, so prosperous in many ways, is filled with the discontented. Some of these are war-worn men, whose very quietness of manner is formidable because it indicates the subordination of weak individual impulse to the irresistible movement in mass. These men, without

alliances of family or home,

because they are too

poor to contract them, are bound to other men,

stern as themselves, by ties of years and battle blood, which is thicker than water. Their hearts throb with memories of personal valor which thrill the workshops and the fields. Constitutions are as weak as withes before the throes of Agonistes in his discontent. As a conservative power, these men have saved the life of the nation. As a destructive element, they can imperil it. Make them conservative by a just division of profits, or by the necessary legislation to start them in co-operative partnerships.

Let the State in its own factories raise wages to the just point, where, if the capitalist can comfortably live, a poorer republican citizen can live in comfort and hope also. Compel these men to be honest in their labor as an equivalent for justice and honesty in wages. These soldiers will obey the law. Use their equality against the discontent of the vicious and improvident when the evil day shall come. The national glory is a common bond of sympathy. The flag is not more loved and honored in the high street where trumpets sound, than in dark lanes where some anxious daughter of the people-too poor to leave her needle even for an hour—gives a glance of tearful triumph at her treasures to-day, the flaxen lock of her patriot son, and the coat with its once crimson stain, her beloved Red, White, and Blue.

A strong government founded on consent is possible, if we are practically, unselfishly grateful for the Declaration of Independence. The life of the immortal words, uttered on the field of Gettysburg with the inspiration of Isaiah, is their glow of consecration. Only in this spirit of consecration, by yielding some portion of our individual liberty and prosperity to the necessity of making the armed and voting mass conservative, can we approach the Ideal Republic, the ultimate government of the world, the strongest government out of Heaven,- that highest social organism of virtue, wisdom, and power, the type and image of God himself, — law-enacting, law-obeying, consentient mankind.