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nia!" ("Au revoir!"), which was echoed again and again, The train moved now more quickly. The soldiers shouted, cried and laughed alternately, waving their caps in signal of adieu. "What matters it?" shouted one: "we must all die once." The officers grasped firmly the hands of those yet marching bare-headed by their side along the platform: the lonely women left behind, many of them gray-headed, fell, some of them, senseless on the ground.

Among the long and varied list of reasons assigned for the financial reverses of the past five years, we do not recollect to have discovered the falling off of European immigration. This would appear one of the most obvious and controlling of them all. About a million less have been added from abroad to the population of the Union within that time than the figures of a like number of years immediately preceding caused to be expected. If, according to the prevailing estimate, each individual thus acquired is worth a thousand dollars to the country, its aggregate loss in this way far exceeds the sum sunk in superfluous railways, to which extravagance almost exclusively the custom is to ascribe the revulsion. Eight hundred or a thousand millions of money which the country had under its hands as it were, reckoned among its available assets and used in gauging the immediate future of its industry, suddenly vanished. The direct abstraction from-its resources of so large an item could not fail to be seriously felt. It amounts to the reduction of an average State to a desert condition—to the loss of twice as many pairs of stout hands as were sacrificed in the four years of civil war. The homes marked out for them are desolate, the waste places they would have made to bloom given to the weeds, the industries which craved them paralyzed, and the wealth they were to create cancelled.

Such is undoubtedly the economic aspect of this check to the movement of human freight upon the Atlantic. Viewed from the politico-social side, its effects will not be deemed so unfortunate even by those whose confidence in the assimilative power of our institutions is most unqualified. A million and a half or two millions of matriculates at the great modern political school is quite a liberal allowance for one decade. Twice the number might press heavily on the provision made for adequate tuition. The results of the course upon those who have already graduated, born at home or abroad, are not at all too flattering. In the West, where our European guests most do congregate, notions are discoverable of a very helter-skelter description upon divorce, the "rights of labor," and religion in the public schools—notions which, whether sound or the reverse, clearly need settling rather than additional disturbance. The case is similar in cities and densely-peopled districts at the East, where the same element has especial weight. At the same time, it is difficult to say how far this association of facts is accidental or necessary and significant. The proportion of crotchety agitators among the population of foreign birth we believe to be actually less than among the natives. Certainly, our most mischievous "ringmasters" in partisan politics have been Americans. Immigrants do not usually bring that class of men with them. As to the masses, it can rarely be said that the European peasant, as he reaches our shores, is calculated to demoralize his new neighbors in personal and social habits. He is never intemperate, unless he come from the British Isles, and his tastes and amusements are simple and often refined. We are in the habit of supposing that what inferiority the Briton of the lower classes may labor under in these respects is made up by his superior political information and training to free institutions.

The arrivals on our shores represent so many different nationalities that the faults of each may be balanced by the better traits of others, and that the chances of good qualities overpowering bad in the resultant compound is inferable from the exceptionally favorable conditions of life which draw them so