rk that those engaged in it are entitled to occasional
holidays. Nature demands it. Whether their stated Sabbath come once in
four years or once in seven, it must come. No wonder that it is apt to
prove too welcome and seductive, and that healthy relaxation should grow
into harmful lethargy, Sunday into "Blue Monday." Examples of that
result are abundant enough to warn us when we need warning. They have
chromoed in brilliantly illuminated text, in all the languages and
alphabets, the maxim about eternal vigilance, and hung it up over our
council-fires and our domestic hearths. We can only venture, perhaps, to
half close our eyes and view it sleepily as through cigar-smoke, or turn
our backs upon it for a little while and go out into a world of other
cares which takes no note of elections, constitutions, statutes or
office-holding. The shorter the interval the less should our enjoyment
of it be marred. Investigations into past elections serve only to
interfere with it, or to assist the newspapers in interfering with it;
and newspapers are our daily food or a part of it. Three-fourths of the
reading-matter in the five or six thousand of them published in the
Union are filled with politics, although the conductors of them, like
the rest of us, are aware that politics are temporarily in eclipse. They
can teach us nothing on that subject, and we want to learn nothing.
Their occupation as trade-journals devoted to the art and science of
government is gone. Other periodicals devoted to a specialty, whether
iron, coal, calico or the Thirty-nine Articles, show judgment and
compassion on their readers when a "slack" time comes by turning
miscellaneous and slipping in choice literary tidbits among their
regular "shop" items. The five thousand should do likewise. If they
will not wholly exclude politics, they might at least sweep political
news and disquisitions into a separate corner of the sheet--say among
the jokes, base-ball accidents and last year's advertisements.

Could our legislators and their chroniclers only convince themselves
that they are _de trop_, that the best they can do just now is to assist
us in cultivating a transitory oblivion of them and their deeds, and
that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty
winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they
cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise
another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum mono