ank imbecility, your acts in exposing the
essential knavery of our phenomenal humbugs are beautiful and full of
goodness and wisdom. And your worst, in the face of all jibes, is so
incomparably superior to those of the "great statesmen" that they may
be esteemed actually respectable. When the two parties had become
Leaderless Mobs, because even their fictions or absurd issues had
reached a common point, then arose the people in the might of their
Leaderless Mob, and turned the river into the Augean stables. Who is
it anyhow of the "magnetic" tribe that may cast the first stone at the
"haystack"? They simply broke party shackles and struck boldly for
justice,--blindly it may be--as well it should be, because they could
not well hit amiss. In this scramble and hurly-burly where is the
"statesman" who can point to any similar act of his own in behalf of
his fellow-man? Their most arrant follies at least are not mean
compared to the "issues" as made up by our "great statesmen" of a
little higher tax, or a little lower tax, or a frequent change in the
money standard of the country.

It is time for intelligent men to tire of all this burlesque of
politics and this solemn joke of calling it "great statesmanship,"
that is breeding these ungainly toadies--squat and warty. A country is
great only as her political institutions are good and wise--not merely
when it is strong in numbers, large in acres, and swarming with
politicians and parasites that are worshipped as great and good
statesmen. That is not the kind of greatness of country that I hanker
for very seriously. I would wish a better education for our children
than we have had--one that would cure them of this disease of
ignorance in politics, worship of demagogy and admiration of that
cheap and nasty politics that is our national disease, and that is
making on our body politic abhorrent warts and angry sores. The
mistaken fanatics who are striving to put "God in the Constitution"
are not to blame; they are the offspring of this growing paternalism,
this fetich worship, this public education by these relays of "great
statesmen."

MADAME BLAVATSKY AT ADYAR.

BY MONCURE D. CONWAY.

When Madame Blavatsky was on her way to found the Theosophical Society
in India, I met her in London, at the house of an American
family,--devout spiritualists. She had a reputation for picking up
teapots from under her chair, and our hostess seemed somewhat
disappointed that she did