"_peace is assured to Europe for 1887_," and
newspaper correspondents announce that the war alarm is over. Mr.
Frederick Harrison, who is travelling on foot in France, writes that
he has found no one who desires war, and that the people are not even
thinking of it.

What is the popular judgment, or even the judgment of popular leaders
worth upon any great question? The masses of mankind have their
judgments enmeshed and inwoven in a web of mechanical habituality,
compelling them to believe that what is and has been must continue to
be in the future, thus limiting their conceptions to the commonplace.
Their leaders do not rise to nobler conceptions, for if they did not
sympathize with the popular, commonplace conceptions and prejudices
they would not be leaders.

"We deem it safe to assert," says Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten in her
most valuable and interesting "History of Modern Spiritualism," "from
opinions formed upon an extensive and intimate knowledge of both North
and South, and a general understanding of the politics and parties in
both sections, that any settlement of the questions between them by
the sword was never deliberately contemplated, and that the outbreak,
no less than the magnitude and length of the mighty struggle, was all,
humanly speaking, forced on by the logic of events, rather than
through the preconcerted action of either section of the country. We
say this much to demonstrate the truly prophetic character of many of
the visions and communications which circulated amongst the
Spiritualists prior to the opening of the war."

Not only was it prophesied by the Quaker Joseph Hoag thirty years in
advance, but more fully prophesied from the spirit world by the spirit
of Gen. Washington, and again most eloquently predicted through the
lips of Mrs. E. Hardinge Britten in 1860. Yet who among all the
leaders of the people knew anything of these warnings, or was
sufficiently enlightened to have paid them any respect? The petition
of 15,000 Spiritualists was treated with contemptuous ridicule by the
American Senate, and even the demonstrable invention of Morse was
subjected to ridicule in Congress. Congressmen stand on no higher
moral plane than the people who elect them, and it is the moral
faculties that elevate men into the atmosphere of pure truth.

But ah! could we have had a Congress and State Legislatures in 1860,
composed of men sufficiently elevated in sentiment to realize the
state of the nati