the reader may recall afresh the valuable opinion of an eminent man on the subject of a "licentious press:" "Schools may be erected, East, West, North and South; pupils may be taught and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crowded, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms stalk through the land with giant strides; but while the newspaper press is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year it must and will go back; year by year the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.

"Among the horde of journals published in the state, there are some the reader scarcely need be told, of character and credit. From personal intercourse with accomplished gentlemen connected with publications of this class, I have derived both pleasure and profit. But the name of these is Few, and of the others Legion; and the influence of the good is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.

"Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed and moderate; in the learned professions; at the bar; and on the bench; there is as

there can be, but one opinion with reference to the vicious character of these infamous journals. It is sometimes contended-I will not say strangely, for it is natural to seek excuses for such a disgrace that their influence is not so great as a visitor would suppose. I must be pardoned for saying there is no warrant for this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tend directly to the opposite conclusion. When any man of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America without first groveling down upon the earth and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken by it; or any tie of social decency and honor is held in the least regard; when any man in that Free Country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, without humble reference to a censorship, which for its rampant ignorance and base dishonesty he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when those who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, and dare to set their heels upon and crush it openly, in the sight of all men; then, I will believe that its influence is lessening; and men are returning to their manly senses. But while that press has its evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state, from a president to a postman; while with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature for an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not read at all, so long must its odium be upon the country's head and so long must the evil it works be plainly visible in the Republic."

If Mr. Kipling meant so much as the above by what he sneeringly styles "the grinding tyranny of that thing they call the Press", why did he not animadvert on "the tyranny" of the Press instead of holding a few reporters up to useless ridicule? If history repeats itself, and "the black hand" of trusts is at the throat of our Republic as the institution of slavery in pro-slavery days, when Dickens wrote the above, why did not the master mind of Kipling lay bare to the gaze of the world "the vicious character of these infamous journals" that lay their purchasable service at the feet of this "grinding tyranny", instead of the twaddle of a weakling about newspaper reporters? Would he reform the Press by cudgeling the printer's "devil"?

Again, Mr. Dickens said our "cars are like shabby omnibuses", and that "there is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell!" Mr. Kipling says, "I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to this day I have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without being delayed by accident.” Here Mr. Kipling's narrow view makes itself conspicuous again. While we Americans regret our railway accidents, certainly as much as Mr. Kip

ling, he should not forget that our railway system is so vast and his Great Britain so small that it would already take nearly one acre out of every twenty of her entire island to furnish our one hundred eighty-five thousand miles of railroad even a hundred foot right of way, and that tickets are daily sold in the United States for trips East or West over roads that would five times parallel a road from Dunnet Head to Land's End, the greatest length of the doughty little island. Thus if the most extensive, most inter-related, most systematic railway system the world has yet known does not all move at once, all on time, and in perfect harmony, night and day, regardless of "wind or weather," Mr. Kipling's presentiment tells him an accident has occurred somewhere; but if the great system move on time, he anticipates disas

ter.

Other instances might be given, showing that we, or else our critics have not greatly changed since republican principles first became on these shores a dangerous rival of the Old World monarchies.

In conclusion, we wish to say that a decent regard for the feelings of the better class of Englishmen who have come to make their homes among us, and whom we gladly welcome, and a proper re

gard for the large material interests many nonresident Englishmen have in our country by way of great landed estates, railroads, and mining interests, national, and municipal securities, the large share in our commerce, and the relationship of distinguished families, as well as multitudes of families, unknown to the world-all this, it seems to us, should have restrained Mr. Kipling from the rash and sweeping, but premeditated act of a protracted satire on the people of the greatest republic in the world. Such defamation would have been a discredit to his pen, had the subject of his censure been even the struggling little republic of the Boers in South Africa. Judgment and discretion might have observed many faults indigenous to a comparatively young republic as ours, which, in a spirit of charity, could have been made sufficiently prominent that correction might have been reasonably assured in a measure in time. But the spirit of malevolence secures nothing but a well-earned detestation. In the eyes of the American people, Rudyard Kipling has disgraced himself by the spirit and manner in which he has held us up to the gaze of the world in his "American Notes", and we have nowhere seen a sentence of recantation, a word to palliate, or a syllable to mollify this unjust act. And until sincere amends