SUMMER MEETING. 4f> 



in the higher rauks to cultivate family affection was a oood thing, it 

 was not so among the lower order ; better take them away from those 

 who might deprave them ; and it was highly injurious to trade to stop 

 binding to manufacturers, as it must laise the price of labor and 

 manufactured goods. Then we note on the next page that Sir Peel was 

 a middle English gentleman, who in his autibiography, has properly a 

 spinning jenny as a frontispiece. Oh, shades of justice, indeed ! Must 

 might forever make right f Far more appropriate would a frontispiece 

 of one of these half-starved, over- worked mites of humanity, who toiled 

 that his wealth might swell to millions and given to Hargraves, its 

 original inventor, who died in a workhouse, the spinning jenny, or to 

 Arkwright, who improved it. We can judge men better by their amuse- 

 ments than by their work ; circumstances may control one but not the 

 other. 



In the march of civilization has the goddess of amusements placed 

 her linger upon it, stamping indelibly a nation's history, to be handed 

 down to posterity, perhaps to be forever her disgrace 1 Can Rome's 

 glory at arms ever wipe away the stains of her amusements ? We 

 read them — the fibre of our nineteenth century organism is shocked to 

 the core. What .century did not pat its own back for its virtues. We 

 are not quite correct ; we have not seized all the virtues and left be- 

 hind all the crimes. Besides, crimes pay. Was it not Napoleon who 

 said he got five millions from the love of brandy, and what virtue 

 would pay him as much ? 



I stood one day on the Arch de Triumph in Paris, erected in the 

 honor of Napoleon. It is situated like the hub of a wheel, many streets 

 running to it. I gazed in admiration of the beautiful city, while my 

 mind ran over her turbulent history. I recalled her bloody mobs who 

 swung the dreadful guillotine like a plaything. In the distance water 

 flashed from the exqusite fountain placed where the guillotine once 

 stood, of which some one has poetically said that should its clear 

 waters dash forever it could never wash away the stains of the inno- 

 cent blood. And this clean, beautiful city stands today the pride of 

 the nineteenth century, embued with the spirit of civilization and 

 culture. 



Bat what is that fine building that towers above all around it ? I 

 indicated it to my courier. Oh, that "s where they have bull fights I 

 But America is above this. The blood of the Puritan fathers still 

 throbs in our veins. But stop ! Is the advent of the lowly emigrant, 

 with his unorthodox notions thinning our blood, lowering our standard 

 of amusements, as well as dragging our politics in the mire ? You will 

 probably rarely find a man who has witnessed a prize fight, but the 



