difference between civilized
man and his sober savage fellow will be widened. Progress will no longer
be handicapped, and will press forward with accelerated speed. Its path
will cease to be strewn with broken fortunes, happiness and bottles.
Policemen and criminal courts will lose, according to standard
statistics, four-fifths of their occupation. In that proportion the
cause of virtue will gain. Mankind will be four hundred per cent. more
honest and peaceable than before the passage of the whisky-punch bill.
With the public treasury full, and the detective, the juryman and the
shyster existent only in a fossil state, the millennium will have been,
as the phrase runs, discounted.

But we run foul of the inevitable and inexorable _If_. Is the machine
invented that is to do such work? Is it within the reach of any
combination of springs, ratchets and clappers? Is the leviathan of
strong drink to be hooked after that fashion--a bit put in his mouth and
the monster made to draw the car of state? We shall see. The end would
justify much more ponderous and hazardous means, and the chance is worth
taking. Independent of the general blessing to mankind involved in the
punch idea, Virginia proposes in it a special benefit to herself; and
that of course is her chief motive. States so very much in debt as she
is are not prone to quixotic philanthropy. Should this novel form of
taxation assist in paying the interest on her bonds, she will patiently
wait for the secondary, if broader, good accruing to the world at large.
Men, she argues, who are able to indulge in stimulants are able to pay
their debts, and at least their share of the public debt. Each click of
the bell proclaims her adoption of this theory, and at the same time her
anxiety to find some means of satisfying her creditors. If she can
cancel at once her bonds and Barleycorn, so much the better.

E. B.

THE NAUTCH-DANCERS OF INDIA.

The Prince of Wales was severely censured by some of the English
journals for dignifying by his presence the nautch-dancing of India.
These performances are peculiar to the country and its religion, and
constitute so important a part of the marvels of the East that few male
travelers at least fail to witness them. Probably the prince saw no good
reason why he should forego any of the benefits of sightseeing
vouchsafed to the ordinary traveler. Dancing has always been an
important feature of th