self-government, but they have an excellent police, and the rights
of person and property are well protected. In Italy, which has only
within a few years ceased to be a mere geographical expression,
municipal rights and the independence of the commune are on a
stronger basis, but the police is bad, though far better than when
the Peninsula was divided among half a dozen powers. Both have but
commenced arming themselves with the chief safeguard of Germany,
popular education. The great fact with them all is, that, despite the
drawbacks of external pressure and large standing armies, they are
at liberty to pursue the path of domestic reform as far as they have
light enough to perceive it or purpose enough to require it.

All this is an immense gain. It reflects itself in the improved social
condition of the people--a result, of course, not wholly due to it.
Crime, though the newspapers make us familiar with more of it than
formerly, has notably diminished. The savage classes of the great
capitals, populous as some of the old kingdoms, are controlled like
a menagerie by its keepers. A residuum of the untamable will always
exist, inaccessible to education or "moral suasion," and amenable only
to force. This force seems sufficiently supplied by the baton of the
constable, and we may hope that even in volcanic Paris an eruption
of barricades will henceforth cease, unless simply as a somewhat
flamboyant expression of political sentiment, the gamin throwing up
paving-stones and omnibuses as the independent British voter throws
up his hat at the hustings. But it will not do to expect too much from
any ameliorating cause or chain of causes. Race-characteristics cannot
be annihilated. Man is an animal, and the Parisian turbulent. The
Commune has done its worst probably, and the Internationale, which
threatened at one time to loom up as a modern Vehmgericht, has
subsided. Whatever may hereafter come of such slumbering perils, the