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catholic clergy generally approved his course.

One of the "great moral ideas" is civil service reform. There are officials who have sat so long, are so acclimated to their seats, their habit has become their nature. It is sad that they should be called upon, or hinted at, to contribute two per cent. of their salaries to the organization that placed them there. Strike, gentlemen! Strike for the green hills of your sires, and give your anxious countrymen a chance. In that post of honor, the private station, among the thousands who would take your places for half your pay, you will have time to reflect that an office "under government" is a bonus and a spoil at all times; that there is no office in which the pay is proportioned to the value of the service rendered; no office but thousands are competent to fill, and tens of thousands willing to attempt. There too you will have leisure to appreciate the grace and ingenuity of the proposition, after the federal offices have been filled for twenty years by republicans, that none should be removed save for cause—save that he is proved an imbecile or a thief. It were not curtissy to presume one of them would lose his tenure except with his life.

In the acts and utterances of the republican fraternity, so far, we fail to find more than the wish for and the profession of "intelligence and moral ideas. The truth is, they do not get this conceit from the results of their political action, but from the fullness and power and glory of the pulpit, the platform and the literary press. We have something to say hereof.

This country should be the paradise of the parvenu, of rawness and ragged edge. Nowhere else do so large and considerable bodies of the people lightly ignore authentic precedents. Some half-wise article appears in a magazine, and lo! with a little puffing, a new genius of affairs. Some old new venture into philosophical fields, and lo! a new illumination—a bonfire on the sands where Pythagoras and Parmenides waded out into the great deep. Now certainly we are a lively lot. The English race, beside us, makes about two jokes per month. The editor of the Police Gazette lately remarked that one never knows how really blank and dismal life is, until one has read a London comic paper. The newspaper men of America are to-day the brightest class of men of the age; they find sermons in stones, books in the brooks, and fun in everything. The secret of this is, they know around all specialties without pretending to be special. But taste, art, religion, all found in the field of philosophy at last; and philosophy is a specialty. Consider:—you do not expect a man, whatever his genius, to find out by himself the weight and orbit of Jupiter, without the ancient records, calculations, and maps of the stars? No one nor twenty lives could achieve them. Astronomers are a limited guild. Philosophers are another guild. Philosophy is not at all what the uninitiated fancy it. Thousands on thousands of intellectual men—many of them popularly eminent in some department of scientific, religious or literary activity, have lived and died without a glimpse of philosophy, liable at any moment of their lives to have been nonplussed and shamed by an expert of inferior natural force, and one too who had yet, perhaps, come to no conclusion of his own. To set an untrained man at once into the thought of Hegel would be to drive him mad in an hour. There are men who can play eight games of chess at once blindfolded, yet cannot carry the weight of Hegel's idea. Even the iron-headed Stirling speaks of it as an "almost insupportable pain. The philosophers of America and Europe know each other pretty well, and know very well indeed that the preachers and lecturers are not of them.

Many to whom this is addressed will have to take it upon trust. But is it not remarkable that the clever Col. Ingersoll, with his humorous but wholly natural skepticism, can so tickle the average audidence that the average preacher can only retort "scoffer! materialist! infidel wit!"? The fact is, the average D.D. of New York is not up to either the culture or the candor of even Ingersoll's skepticism, saying nothing of that enlightenment in the established defense of Jesus which was old to the subtle and bold Fichte a hundred years ago. There is no man statedly preaching in New York to-day who is familiar with the status of philosophic thought, nor one who within the range of this censure will safely say he is. Dr. Osgood was a fairly good scholar of the higher thought, and Dr. Bellows and E. H. Chapin had some times occasion to keep their ideas to themselves. The advance the rest have attained