Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/776

756 questions are dealt with. The assertion of principles and the advocacy of measures must continue to be indispensable, and there cannot fail to be differences of opinion; but partisan ethics demands denial as well as affirmation, and denial as a matter of policy. It provides for opposition, and of course dreads acquiescence and agreement. As a work of dealing with serious questions, this policy cannot continue to command respect. Indeed, there is already a growing disgust in the community at the emptiness and futility and humbug of political partisanship. Men of honest purposes and fair discrimination will not go to the polls to vote unless overborne and swept along by a factitious excitement. We are told that good men should attend primary meetings, so as to rescue politics from the corrupt hands into which it has fallen. But it is a grave question whether it has not fallen into such hands by the necessary laws of partisanship. What is the chance of a plain, honest man, accustomed to open dealing, in a caucus or convention against the skilled intriguers, the practised wire-pullers, and the disciplined managers, who fill the air with their cries of "reform," and outdo everybody in their zeal to purify politics? The stealthy, long-headed calculator beats the man of inexperience at every tack and turn; and party politics is peculiarly the field where craft, manoeuvre, and strategy, have their unhindered way. This is being increasingly recognized, and there is coming with it a deepening distrust of partisan agency. To get everything decent out of politics as quickly as possible is now the open demand. Courts, schools, prisons—all the important agencies of society—must, it is admitted, be taken out of politics, if their purity and efficiency are to be maintained; and even the chief office-holder of the nation heads a crusade to get all the officeholders of the country out of politics.

Citizens may be expected to imitate this good example, and more and more get out of politics themselves.

luck of successful research seems now with the astronomers. Last month we announced the brilliant discovery of oxygen in the atmosphere of the sun by Prof. Henry Draper; and we have now to chronicle the equally brilliant discovery of two satellites of Mars by Prof. Asaph Hall, of the Naval Observatory at Washington; and also of a third moon of Mars discovered ten days later by Profs. Henry Draper and E. H. Holden at the private observatory of the Drapers, at Hastings-on-the-Hudson. We publish an interesting article, by Prof. Daniel Kirkwood, on "Mars and his Satellites," giving an account of the growth of our knowledge of the planet and the particulars of Prof. Hall's discovery of his moons.

As Prof. Kirkwood remarks, the question whether Mars had a satellite, which has now been so remarkably resolved, has long interested astronomers. How they have regarded it may be illustrated by the following passage from the third edition of Mr. Chambers's admirable "Hand-book of Descriptive Astronomy," published this year: