new order of things in the
relations of nations to each other. It is but a little while since any
graceless woman who helped a crowned profligate to break the
commandments could light a national quarrel with the taper that sealed
her _billets-doux_ to his equerries and grooms, and kindle it to a war
with the fan that was supposed to hide her blushes. More and more, by
virtue of advancing civilization and easy intercourse between distant
lands, the average common sense and intelligence of the people begin to
reach from nation to nation. Mr. Beecher's visit is the most notable
expression of this movement of national life. It marks the _nisus
formativus_ which begins the organization of that unwritten and only
half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great
underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican
pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The fruit
of Mr. Beecher's visit will ripen in due time, not only in direct
results, but in opening the way to future moral embassies, going forth
unheralded, unsanctioned by State documents, in the simple strength of
Christian manhood, on their errands of truth and peace.

The Devil had got the start of the clergyman, as he very often does,
after all. The wretches who have been for three years pouring their
leperous distilment into the ears of Great Britain had preoccupied the
ground, and were determined to silence the minister, if they could. For
this purpose they looked to the heathen populace of the nominally
Christian British cities. They covered the walls with blood-red
placards, they stimulated the mob by inflammatory appeals, they filled
the air with threats of riot and murder. It was in the midst of scenes
like these that the single, solitary American opened his lips to speak
in behalf of his country.

The danger is now over, and we find it hard to make real to our
imagination the terrors of a mob such as swarms out of the dens of
Liverpool and London. We know well enough in this country what Irish
mobs are: the Old Country exports them to us in pieces, ready to put
together on arriving, as we send houses to California. Ireland is the
country of shillalahs and broken crowns, of Donnybrook fairs, where men
with whiskey in their heads settle their feuds or work off their
sprightliness with the arms of Nature, sometimes aided by the least
dangerous of weapons. But England is the land of prize-fights, of
scientific brutality,