floundering on the same perilous and baffling sea. Everything comes pat
to a log-book. As endless is the medley of memoranda in blue-books. They
deal, like government itself, with everything. They take up the citizen
on his entry into the cradle, and do not quite drop him at the grave.
How to educate, clothe, feed and doctor him; how to keep him out of
jail, and how, once there, to get him out again with the least possible
moral detriment; how to adjust as lightly as possible to his shoulders
the burden of taxation; how to economize him as food for powder; and how
to free him from the miasm of crowded cities,--are but a small part of
their contents. And the index is growing, if possible, larger, as the
apparatus of government becomes more and more intricate. With such
contributions and credentials do the rulers of the nations enroll
themselves in the guild of authorship. They are proud of them, and
exhibit them in profusion, in whole libraries, rich with gold and the
primary colors.

Expositions, as we have before remarked, come into the same worshipful
guild by right of a special literature they have brought into being.
They come, moreover, into the blue-book range by their bearing upon
certain topics generally assigned to it. It is found, for example, that,
like other great gatherings, they are apt to be followed by a temporary
local increase of crime. The police-records of London show that the
arrests in 1851 outnumbered those of the previous year by 1570, and that
in 1862 the aggregate exceeded by 5043 that of 1861. It will at once
occur that the population of the city was greatly increased on each
occasion, and that the influx of thieves and lawbreakers generally must
have thinned out that class elsewhere, and in that way very probably
reduced, rather than added to, the sum-total of crime, the preventive
arrangements in London having been exceptionally thorough. The drawback
that would consist in an increase of crime is therefore only an apparent