Do "Yes, aunt. I shall do it. you think I will be false to my troth ?" "Your troth to a Jew is nothing. Father Jerome will tell you so." "I shall not ask Father Jerome. Father Jerome, of course, will condemn me; but I shall not ask him whether or not I am to keep my promise-my solemn promise." "And why not?" Then Nina paused a moment before she answered. But she did answer, and answered with that bold defiant air which at first had disconcerted her aunt. "I will ask no one, aunt Sophie, because I love Anton Trendellsohn, and have told him that I love him." "Pshaw !" "I have nothing more to say, sunt. I thought it right to tell you, and now I will go." She had turned to the door, and had her hand upon the lock when her aunt stopped her. "Wait a moment, Nina. You have had your say; now you must hear me." "I will hear you if you say nothing against him." "I shall say what I please." "Then I will not hear you." Nina again made for the door, but her aunt intercepted her retreat. "Of course you can stop me, aunt, in that way if you choose." "You bold, bad girl!" "You may say what you please about myself." "You are a bold, bad girl?" "Perhaps I am. Father Jerome says we are all bad. And as for boldness, I have to be bold." "You are bold and brazen. Marry a Jew! It is the worst thing a Christian girl could do." "I am not sly. You tell me am bad and bold and brazen.' "So you are." "Very likely. I do not say I am not. But I am not sly. Now, will you let me go, aunt Sophie ?" "Yes, you may go-you may go; but you may not come here again till this thing has been put an end to. Of course I shall see your father and Father Jerome, and your uncle will see the police: You will be locked up, and Anton Trendellsohn will be sent out of Bohemia. This is how it will end. Now you may go." And Nina went her way. Her aunt's threat of seeing her father and the priest was nothing to Nina. It was the natural course for her aunt to take, and a course in opposition to which Nina was prepared to stand her ground firmly. But the allusion to the police did frighten her. She had thought of the power which the law might have over her very often, and had spoken of it in awe to her lover. He had reassured her, explaining to her that, as the law now stood in Austria, no one but her father could prevent her marriage with a Jew, and that he could only do so till she was of age. Now Nina would be twenty-one on the first of the coming month, and therefore would be free, as Anton told her, to do with herself as she pleased. But still there came over her a cold feeling of fear when her aunt spoke to her of the police. The law might give the police no power over her; but was there not a power in the hands of those armed men whom she saw around her on every side, and who were seldom countrymen of her own, over and above the law? Were there not still dark dungeons and steel locks and hard hearts? Though the law might justify her, how would that serve her, if men-if men and women, were determined to persecute her? As she walked home, however, she resolved that dark dungeons and steel locks and hard hearts might do their worst against her. She had set her will upon one thing in this world, and from that one thing no persecution should drive her. They might kill her, perhaps. Yes, they might kill her; and then there would be an end of it. But to that end she would force them to come before she would yield. So much she swore to herself as she walked home on that morning to the Kleinseite. Madame Zamenoy, when Nina left her, sat in solitary consideration for some twenty minutes, and then called for her chief confidant, Lotta Luxa. With many expressions of awe, and with much denunciation of her niece's iniquity, she told to Lotta what she had heard, speaking of Nina as one who was utterly lost and abandoned. Lotta, however, did not express so much indignant surprise as her mistress expected, though she was willing enough to join in abuse against Nina Balatka. "That comes of letting girls go about just as they please among the men," said Lotta. "But a Jew!" said Madame Zamenoy. "If it had been any kind of a Christian, I could understand it." "Trendellsohn has such a hold upon her, and upon her father," said Lotta. "But a Jew. She has been to confession, has she not?" 66 Regularly," said Lotta Luxa. Dear, dear! what a false hypocrite! And at mass?" "Four mornings a-week always." "And to tell me, after it all, that she means to marry a Jew. Of course, Lotta, we must prevent it." "But how? Her father will do whatever she bids him." "Father Jerome would do anything for me." "Father Jerome can do little or nothing if she has the bit between her teeth," said Lotta. "She is as obstinate as a mule when she pleases. She is not like other girls. You cannot frighten her out of anything." "I'll try, at least," said Madame Zamenoy. "Yes, we can try," said Lotta. "Would not the Mayor help us that is, if we were driven to go to that?" "I doubt if he could do anything. He would be afraid to use a high hand. He is Bohemian. The head of the police might do something, if we could get at him." "She might be taken away." "Where could they take her?” asked Lotta. "No; they could not take her anywhere." "Not into a convent-out of the way somewhere in Italy?" "Oh, heaven, no! They are afraid of that sort of thing now. All Prague would know of it, and would talk; and the Jews would be stronger than the priests; and the English people would hear of it, and there would be the very mischief." "The times have come to be very bad, Lotta.” "That's as may be," said Lotta, as though she had her doubts upon the subject. "That's as may be. But it isn't easy to put a young woman away now without her will. Things have changed - partly for the worse, perhaps, and partly for the better, Things are changing every day. My wonder is that he should wish to marry her." "The men think her very pretty. Ziska is mad about her," said Madame Zamenoy. "But Ziska is a calf to Anton Trendellsohn. Anton Trendellsohn has cut his wise teeth. Like them all, he loves his money; and she has not got a kreutzer." "But he has promised to marry her. You may be sure of that." THE study of American politics has a certain fascination for every reflective inhabitant of the British Isles. And not only a fascination, but a personal interest; for who in our older civilisation, who desires to let well alone, and not rush too blindly upon democratic experiments of government, until he sees a little more of the real causes, and more thoroughly understands the issues of the great unended struggle that, with more or less intensity, has arrayed the Americans against each other ever since the Declaration of Independence, first in moral and afterwards in physical contention, can look with apathy on the course of events in that country? We may not always like the Americans; but we never can forget that they are our kindred. We cannot, too, but reflect at times that what they are we might be come; and that they are at worst or best but Anglo-Saxons, freed from the sobering influences of a thousand years of settled government. They possess a boundless continent and boundless liberty. They have no masters but the laws which they make, and the majorities into which they range themselves. They have none of the old grievances which afflict a crowded country or an ancient realm. They have no Established Church for one section to grumble at; no aristocracy to offend another by superi VOL. C.-NO. DCIX. ority of privilege or power. They have none but themselves to blame for any evil that may befall them. They have a fair field for every honest exertion, and the best chances, so far as history records, that were ever offered to an intelligent and energetic race to fulfil the great ends of social and national existence. Have they solved the question of government, of human happiness, of progress, of individual right? Is their liberty a true liberty, or the despotism of a multitude, assuming the forms but not possessing the reality of freedom? And provided the English in the Old World-on the native soil and home of the racewere to become as thoroughly democratic in their political action as their cousins over the water-should we too experience the fate, good or bad as it may prove, of those other Englishmen who have cast themselves adrift from old authority, old associations, old ties, and old principles ? It is questions such as these which give to American politics their abiding though changeful interest. They come home to English statesmen; they appeal to thinkers and to men of business alike, and cannot but have a salutary influence on English history, if our statesmen are wise enough to profit by example, and are not mad enough to Americanise the constitution of Great Britain before they B see whether the Americans will not have to Anglicise theirs in order to save themselves from wars and insurrections, and the despotism that ultimately crowns the evil work of mob-rule and too much liberty. more their countrymen - became disinclined to companionship with the blustering and blatant demagogues of the street, who systematised corruption into a science, and the scheming knaves and penniless The Americans of the highest adventurers of the platform, who class of intellect have never, from made politics their profession and the first establishment of the Union, means of livelihood. The Governbeen very hopeful of the future. ment of each State in the Union, Radicals and doctrinaires at home and the Union itself, was consemay see a bright and glorious des- quently left to second and thirdtiny for Republicanism in the West-rate men, chiefly lawyers without ern World; but the Western World characters or briefs-who, not havitself, as far as its most thoughtful ing sufficient capacity and industry students are concerned, is by no to acquire fame and fortune at the means so certain that Utopia has bar, had either to live on their become so little of a dream as salaries as paid officials and repreobservers on this side of the At- sentatives of the people, or descend lantic, who see the best and know into what seemed to them the nothing of the worst side of the lower, but was in reality the higher great American experiment, are and nobler, sphere of manual willing and many of them anxi- labour. The corruption had, long ous to believe. It was said, more before the civil war, so pervaded than fifty years ago, by Mr. Fisher and permeated the whole political Ames, a noted New England pub- atmosphere, that the best minds in licist, that "the United States America began to despair of the were too large for union, too de- Republic. Military courage was mocratic for liberty, and too sordid proved by the war to be one of the for patriotism." This unfavourable greatest virtues of the Americans; judgment was pronounced without but civic courage-of the kind that reference to the question of negro would have made a man a Hampslavery, which had not then assum- den, if he had been of one school ed proportions sufficiently large to of politics, or a General Monck if he trouble the repose of statesmen and had been of another-was proved, philosophers. The events of the by the same arduous trial, to be last thirty years, and more particu- non-existent, or, at all events, unlarly of the six that commenced discoverable. The highest class of with the election of Mr. Lincoln, Americans-having nothing to gain embittered as they were by a sec- but money, and the importance that tional triumph and the culmina- money bestows are always too tion of the anti-slavery fury, busily engaged in making their forhave confirmed in a remarkable tunes to imitate the example set by manner the severe dictum of this Englishmen of the upper ranks, to far-seeing politician. Year by year, study politics on principle, and since the verdict was rendered, the serve the State for the glory and Union grew larger, the Federal the duty of the work. The excepGovernment more aggressive and tions were chiefly, if not entirely, ambitious, and the people more to be found among the Southern corrupt. Year by year the solid men, who knew the blessings of true liberty-who had read history, who had travelled or resided in England or other parts of Europe, and acquired a refinement of taste and manners superior to that of planters. The Northerners of a corresponding status refused for the most part to lend a helping hand in public affairs, or to incur any responsibilities. They saw a governing mob-were afraid of or despised it-refused to soil themselves by contact with it, and allowed the offered the spectacle of virtuous State machine to run off the rail self-government; and the strangers over a precipice, or into a Slough of Despond, without attempting to avert the catastrophe. All they did was to shrug their shoulders, and express opinions in private, which, if they had had the courage to express in public, might have given a better direction to the national thought, and changed the fortunes of the Republic. This corruption-let it be unequivocally stated-is inherent in all republics founded upon universal suffrage, after the time when society has outlived the agricultural and pastoral, or, as it may be more correctly called, the patriarchal era. Switzerland itself could scarcely remain a republic in the midst of the existing civilisation of Europe, were it not for the jealousies of its neighbours, each of which would willingly absorb and annex it, but is prevented by the certain knowledge that its rivals for possession would resist the attempt. In a new country, where the population is sparse, hard-working, and virtuous; where the landowner or planter lives "under the shadow of his own fig-tree, with none to make him afraid;" where commerce, and more especially that branch of it which may be called petty shopkeeping, with its keen competitions and demoralising influences, is at its minimum; and where the proletaires and dangerous classes of older communities have not made their appearance upon the scene-a republican form of government is not only the best in theory, but the most convenient in practice. In point of fact, it is impossible, for want of material, to establish any other. Such was the American Government in the days of Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and even so late as those of John Quincy Adams-men who were all respectable for their public and private character, and some of them admirable for their genius. In this early period the Republic not born on American soil or trained in American principles, who were permitted to enjoy the right of suffrage, were few in number, and exercised no alien or disturbing influence on the politics of the States. But a change for the worse was at hand. An immense immigration from Ireland and Germany, from the filthy back-slums and overcrowded human ant-hills of Europe, had rushed into America, bringing with them ideas and habits very different from those of the native Americans of English descent. These crowds found no elbow-room in New England-bare, bleak, inhospitable, and thickly peopled; and, neither liking the warm climate of the cotton and sugar States, nor competition in the labour market with negro slaves, they spread themselves over the more fertile middle and western States, or congregated in the cities of the North. By degrees the republican simplicity and purity of the olden time were impaired by this European element, and only remained in their original strength and homogeneity among two very different orders of men-the planters and slave-owners of the South, and the Puritans and slavery-haters of New England. By the time that Andrew Jackson-the first man not moving in the rank or having received the education of a gentleman who was elevated to the Presidency-had assumed office, the United States began to present many of the worst features of European life. As population increased, as men gathered in large cities, as the large cities gave shelter to paupers, thieves, and ruffians, and as the paupers, thieves, and ruffians, standing upon their manhood, claimed and were allowed the right to vote for the election of members of the Legislature and every officer of the State, universal suffrage became but another name for universal_bribery and self-seeking. Before Jackson's time the servants of the State in |