to cut off the branches of the evil, rather than to strike at the root. The root of the mischief is want of security of tenure. Offices refilled every four years will always be full of incapable men, and the men who get the appointments will always be tempted to seek the shortest ways of filling their pockets before their brief tenure expires. And so long as a change of Administration endangers of ficial position, politicians will labor (openly or secretly) for the victory of their party, and will exercise a vast and undesirable influence upon the politics of the country. And at the same time. the virulence and the expensiveness of our presidential elections will not be abated so long as the result of the choice is the immediate disposal of a vast number of places to the political class. In fine, nothing but a Constitutional Amendment making the term of office for life or good behavior, and a law of Congress, pensioning all who have served a given period, and requiring promotion by seniority in all but "staff" offices unless for reasons. shown, will effect any permanent amendment of the system.

Mr. Hayes's Civil Service Reform has been briefly summed up as meaning the removal of undue congressional influence in the matter of appointments. But it is an essentially shallow and unstatesmanlike view which sees the root evil in congressional influence. A Congressman is, at least, as much entitled to consideration in the matter of appointments as any other citizen; if his selection to represent his fellow citizens mean anything, he is entitled to more. It is true that, as matters now stand, there are behind every congressman a large body of professional politicians, to whom he owes his nomination, and who expect to be recompensed by appointments. But so long as the present system of arbitrary and wholesale removal from office exists, professional politicians will stand around waiting; and the only change effected by the new plan will be in concentrating in the hands of the President and the heads of departments a vast power for evil, which is now rendered comparatively harmless by a wider distribution. Permanence of tenure and promotion within the departments, would so reduce the number and the value of appointments, as to make it a matter of small importance to the Congressman whether he was consulted or

not.

Nor do we see what right the President has to proclaim that the officials of the United States shall not occupy positions in any of

the voluntary organizations and committees for the management of politics. A man renounces no rights of a citizen in becoming an office-holder, and all experience shows that "self-denying ordinances" of this sort have been invariably productive of unforeseen mischief. What we do need is such a reform as will make the office-holder just as zealous about politics as any other citizen and no more; which will leave him free to devote his leisure and his money to the service of the party if he pleases, but will set him free from all necessity of doing more than he pleases.

Summa. Mr. Hayes and his Cabinet have taken hold of this thing by the wrong handle. And that they have done so is but one part of a very much larger mistake they have been making. They seem to think the Executive is the Government of the United States, and that what it decides on doing can be done without anybody's help.

THE Free Traders of New York, it is announced, are very much dissatisfied with the efforts of Mr. Morrison, of Illinois, to secure a revision of the Tariff in a Free Trade sense, and are determined to be ahead of him at the next Congress by preparing a plan of their own. Now, it may seem as if this were none of our affair; but we do protest against this mean spirit of depreciation, which has made Mr. Morrison its victim. In the first place, he is the only genuine Free Trader before the American public. He actually believes his theories, actually says what he means, and has again and again asked Congress to endorse the principle at stake, instead of trying to humbug the public by plans which can be represented as halfway Protection to one constituency, and whole Free Trade to another. In the second place, he has a just right to this proud preeminence, for he represents the only unanimously Free Trade constituency in these United States. It is ten years since we visited the highly favored district-commonly called Egypt-of which Mr. Morrison is the political miniature or embodiment; but from all the indications of progress we saw, it must be much the same to-day as it was then. A rich and rolling soil, the very finest wheat and fruit lands in the Valley of the Mississippi, but pestered with two of the worst plagues that can infest any country-dense ignorance and dense malaria. Its people are chiefly "poor whites"

from the South; and they live by scratching the high and dry places of their soil, wear homespun, and spend little money-except for whisky, which they do not always distil privately. It is the region of the Hard-Shell Baptists and similar sects, who will excommunicate a member if he join a Sunday-school, or sign the Temperance pledge. The school system is conducted on the principle of hiring the teacher who asks the least pay, and (except on the line of the railroads, in Randolph county-otherwise called Goshen and among the Germans who are spreading down from St. Louis,) the darkness is such as might be felt. That community will never quarrel with such a representative; it is just the district to choose for its congressman a man of the most advanced and enlightened views in political economy. And lastly, Mr. Morrison evidently stands en rapport with the very fountain head of Free Trade inspiration-Sheffield. The little plans and proposals of his tariff, as well as those proposed by Mr. David A. Wells at an earlier date, were known to the English iron men earlier even than to Congress itself. Why this jealousy of our Western Free Trader then? Is not his bosom also open to the inspiration of great cosmopolitan ideas?

We may add that the recent organization of the Associated Industries of the country, which already embraces one hundred and sixty large firms, may be taken as evidence that the Protectionists are studying the same question from another side, and do not mean to be taken unprepared. The names of the principal officers (President, Henry C. Carey, LL.D: Vice-Presidents, Gen. Robert Patterson and Hon. Morton McMichael, LL.D.) show that they mean to organize on no merely partisan basis, but intend to make their appeal to men of all parties, who are interested in the industrial development of their country.

THE

THE USE OF ALCOHOL IN DIET.

HERE is no substance except the barest necessaries of life which affects more deeply our whole social system than alcohol. Its effects on a large scale concern the jurist, legislator, moralist, reformer, physician and physiologist, while in private life there are few who do not have occasion to ask or answer, in a more or less distinct form, some of the questions touched upon in this paper; but while all are thoroughly agreed as to the enormous evils attending its habitual and excessive use, views differ widely as to its action in smaller quantity, and are represented on the one extreme, theoretically, by the rabid "Temperance" lecturer, and on the other, practically, by the so-called "moderate" drinker.

The teetotaler ignorantly represents, or willfully misrepresents, alcohol as an unmitigated poison, entirely foreign to the organism and to be at once rejected. The habitual user thereof, and in fact many persons who would strongly condemn its habitual use, seem to consider it a sort of concentrated nutriment or bottled up strength and vitality.

Is alcohol a food? Dr. Edmunds,' an English advocate of total abstinence, gives the following definition of a food which will serve our purpose.

"A food is that, which being innocent in relation to the tissues of the body, is a digestible and absorbable substance that can be oxidized in the body and decomposed in such a way as to give up to the body the forces which it contains."

(A) That alcohol is absorbable and absorbed needs no extended proof. It has been found chemically in substance, in the blood, and in the excretions, and it cannot be found except in very small quantity in the feces.

That it can be and always is oxidized or in some way decomposed in the body, can be just as clearly demonstrated, although statements lending support to the contrary view have proved so useful to lecturers and writers, and are apparently regarded by them as so essential to their argument, that they are most reluctantly abandoned even on the presentation of the strongest possible evidence on the other side.

1 The Medical Use of Alcohol; and Stimulants for Women. Jas. Edmunds, M. D. M. R. C. P. L., M. R. C. S. New York: National Temperance Society Publication House, 58 Reade st.

Liebig's original view, accepted without careful examination, assigned to alcohol a place among the other hydrocarbons, like them to be burnt up into carbonic acid and water; burnt up, that is, in the body with the same final result as if burnt in a lamp, but more slowly and perhaps with more intermediate stages. This theory, however, was subverted by another, proposed by Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy, and, as it appeared at first sight, sustained by their experiments.

They found by a delicate qualitative test (chromic acid and sulphuric acid) that alcohol, soon after it was taken, made its re-appearance in the secretions of the kidneys and the lungs. The amount, however, thus obtained was, even according to their own estimates, entirely insufficient to account for the quantity taken; but not deterred by this fact, they assumed that a great amount of alcohol was lost during the chemical process necessary for its separation, and, further, that this elimination went on for a long period after the ingestion, long enough, according to them, to get rid of the whole of it.

They accordingly stated that alcohol left the system, “ en totalité et en nature," and consequently could not be a food.

The examinations which this doctrine has undergone at the hands of various experimenters are too numerous to be described here. It has been shown by many of them that it is possible so to conduct experiments that the loss shall be small, and calculable within certain limits of error. Results have been arrived at by several different chemical procedures, some of which I have myself, in a rough way, repeated, from which it appears that the amount of alcohol gotten rid of by all the secretions together is an exceedingly small percentage of the amount taken, not more when the dose is moderate, than one or two per cent., and usually less than this. When the amount taken is large, and narcotism is produced, the amount eliminated increases both absolutely and relatively, but even the largest proportion ever demonstrated by accurate chemical analysis (Subbotin), the animals used being so confined that all excreta were completely retained for analysis, and the doses of alcohol given simply enormous in proportion to the size of the animals, leaves considerably the larger part of the dose still to be accounted for; that is, retained in the body or excreted under some other form than that of alcohol.

Twenty-five per cent. will cover the largest excretion ever de