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week in the British Parliament, and a still more eventful one both on the Continent of Europe, and in the United States. We have seen our own Government thrown into a passing minority upon the question of the Income Tax: we have seen a renewed—and for the present an abortive attempt to revive the old Reform Agitation. On the other side of the Channel the discussion of Pope, or No Pope, in the character of a Temporal Prince, is proceeding in a very lively manner. The French Army is being organised into divisions fit for active service, under the command of generals of the highest reputation. The Estimates for our own land-service, on the other hand, are set at a mere trifle short of 15,000,000/. The resistance of Hungary to the authority of Francis-Joseph is gaining strength every day, whilst the forces of the Austrian Empire are collected on the banks of the Mincio, and in the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, ready for a last rush if the war-party should gain the upper-hand but for one dangerous moment. Italian air, at the same time, is becoming purer and purer every day, and more fit for freemen. From the United States we are informed that this crumbling to pieces of the old Confederation, of which Europe is now hearing for the first time, is not any fortuitous circumstance, but the result of a long and painful conspiracy of the Southern against the Northern States. The world is startled in the same way as when men heard, for the first time, that the British Empire in India was in peril, on account of a greased cartridge. Thus also the cause of the Crimean War was said to be a temporary squabble about the keys of a church. Now we hear that the election of a First Magistrate, whose views upon the subject of Slavery are not extreme, and who, in any case, can retain possession of office but for four years, is the pretext for a dissolution of that Great Confederation to which—with all its faults—the friends of liberty and human progress were accustomed to point triumphantly in proof of the capacity of men for self-government.

Abraham Lincoln has been to the Southerners what the greased cartridge was to the Sepoy, or the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to the Czar Nicholas, in his last violent endeavour to carry into effect the most memorable of the clauses in the famous political will and testament which, truly or not, has been attributed to Peter the Great. It has now been proved to conviction, that the anxiety of the Russian to get possession of Constantinople, and the desire of the Sepoy to expel the British from India were not mere momentary outbreaks of feeling, but that, when they bore fruit in action, plans had been steadily matured for many a long year beforehand, and that it was only in the fulness of time that positive operations were begun. In the same way—so at least it is now asserted—the Gulf States have, during the last five presidentships at least, continuously intrigued and conspired for a separation from the Northern States. They have only so long deferred the execution of their designs, because, during that period, political power was in their hands—the presidents were more or less the representatives of their views, and certainly in no case opposed to them. Who would pluck down the ripening pear which must, ere long, be his own? It cannot be said that has been deficient either in events or in discoveries of the highest interest to Englishmen and to mankind.

The points which have been discussed in our own House of Commons may be dismissed with very brief remark, inasmuch as they have been abundantly considered through a long series of years, and upon them men’s minds have been made up either one way or the other. When Sir Robert Peel came back to power for his last term of administration, he claimed his fee for the nostrum which was to set all our political ailments to rights. The fee was the office of. First Minister—the nostrum was the Income Tax. If the British nation would but swallow the specific, a cure would soon follow, and the medicine might be then discontinued. An apparent cure was effected, but the medicine was not discontinued. What with the necessity of driving the morbific ingredient of Protection out of the national blood—what with the hot fever fit of the Russian war—what with the present alarming condition of the Frenchman who lives next door, and from whom the infection has to a certain degree passed upon us, we have been driven to renew and to increase the dose from four years to four years. The British nation—which was no doubt gouty at its extremities when Dr. Peel was called in twenty years ago—is now living upon the financial colchicum of that great physician; nor is there much prospect that we shall be able to leave it off. It has become to us a diet rather than a remedy; it is our food, not our medicine. Under these circumstances, it becomes more and more necessary that the dose to each of us should be graduated according to the strength of his constitution. The drastic potion—which might be serviceable enough to the robust patients whom we will include under a fanciful Schedule A—would be most distressing to another category of invalids whom we will cast into say Schedule D, and absolutely destructive to a set of sickly valetudinarians whom we will throw into a Schedule E. Let each man have his dose according to his vital powers—but not beyond. If the potion were to be administered to us but for a passing occasion, it might have been superfluous to hold out about distinctions of ability to withstand its operations. It is, however, a very different case when we are called upon to make use of it—not once and again—but daily, for the term of our natural lives.

To drop all metaphor—who hopes that any British subject, liable to the Income-Tax, will see the end of it before he is included in other, and more permanent schedules? It follows that although we might have borne an unequal distribution of this impost when it was to endure but for a short and fixed period, we look at this question from another point of view when we feel sure that it is to form a large and permanent ingredient in our financial system. Now, it would require something more than Mr. Gladstone’s nimble intelligence and oratorical power to