pathos of appeal in their expressions; some close to the stone, smooth and worn with the kisses of the pilgrims.

Inside the railings kneeled several nuns, dressed according to their different orders, some in black dresses, some in blue, with large, picturesque white lappets framing their faces.

A few yards to the left of the grotto we came upon the miraculous baths, or healing pools. No simple pool this, where the sufferer might wash in the hope of being clean, but several and separate stone tanks, partitioned off into cubicles, and supplied by pipes from the main spring. We entered from an outer room, and found each piscine curtained off with a linen curtain, the water in the tanks intensely clear and sparkling, the atmosphere conveying an indescribable chill even to one clothed as we were for winter. What the effect of such rigor on the diseased and suffering must be, one shuddered to think. So dangerous is it for some diseases, that a special notice over each piscine warns sufferers from these that they bathe at their own risk. Two women were bathing in an adjoining cubicle, and we heard distinctly their groans and prayers as they besought, "Our Lady of Lourdes" for healing, washing not without "strong crying and tears." Save for these, the place was quiet enough, but in summer, in the time of regular pilgrimage, the scene is changed. A crowding, jostling, diseased multitude fills the place, and the water conducted through pipes into these piscines, or pools, is changed only twice a day. It is horrible to think of the diseased and plaguestricken taking turns in the water, vitiated and pestilent as it must be.

Deeply interesting as the place is, there is yet much to jar on one's sense of what is right and fit, as if something sacred had been rudely intruded upon. There is the dazzling white of the pavement, the taps ordered and arranged, the diverted course of the Gave, to allow of the gleaming promenade in front of the grotto, the brilliant buildings towering above us, shops in the distance, one bearing over its entrance in large letters, "Frère de Ber

nadette Soubirous," and a shop almost on the spot where bouquets, candles, statuettes of the Virgin, are made objects of barter, and a disgrace to the place.

We turned from the grotto and ascended the broad steps to the entrances of the churches. There are no less than three literally superposed on the rock, and completely dwarfing the grotto, really magnificent in structure. By force of contrast, the picture rises before us of the simple originator of these vast buildings ending her life in the seclusion of a eonvent, all unwitting in her innocent retirement that she was leaving lasting memorials of herself.

We entered the basilica, which is built above the grotto, and found it literally ablaze with ornamentation and reconnaissances from pilgrims, who thus declared themselves to have been cured by the gracious "Lady of Lourdes." It was consecrated in 1876, bishops and archbishops assisting at the ceremony. The interior consists simply of a nave and side chapels, but the decorations. on the walls are brilliant and dazzling. There are, among the more elaborate tokens, banners in silk and banners in satin, with ornate designs worked upon them. There are medallions, crossed swords, tablets, hearts in silver and gold, models of ships, and among the humbler offerings, frames with wreaths of artificial flowers, sprays of orangeblossom being pathetically prominent.

On one of the walls of the entrances to the Church of the Rosary was a modelled foot, and beneath, the words in French

Cured, and may I use it to Thy glory. Another testified to the cure of a hand.

It was with a sense of relief that we turned our eyes from the gleaming churches and rested them on the green hill just above us. It was a Calvary hill. It was like turning from something earthly, smothered in the world's pomps and trappings, to something spiritually pure. Ascending from the base, and defined against the gray sky, I counted no fewer than nine Calvaries.

On one of these, the outline clearly defined, hung a figure of the Christ. Rude wooden crosses they were, dotting the hill at intervals of a few yards. It was to us infinitely touching to pic ture pilgrims, diseased and disabled, doing penance here, some ascending the hill on bended knees, all imbued in a dim way with the notion that, through personal suffering, the Divine Mother might be propitiated. Impressive, indeed, must be the spectacle of the procession slowly ascending the hill and winding down the other side, chanting as they go.

As to actual and authentic cures the conflict of ideas is somewhat overwhelming. About us, on the one hand, were congregated the evidence and testimonies of innumerable cures. On the other, our own senses, trained to the mode of thought of the nineteenth century, refused to credit the miraculous-refused to believe that diseases had been instantaneously cured, poisoned blood purified, maimed limbs restored to health and soundness. It is true that doctors asserting cases to be incurable were liable to err in their statements, so that what time and nature in due course effected might come to be credited to the miraculous properties of the spring. Then, again, it is natural enough to believe that hysterical affections should yield to the combination of hope and mental stimulus. Faith-healing has had wonders coupled with its name before ever Lourdes sprang into being.

Be that as it may, men, ever prone to believe what they wish to believe, cling to the fact of cures effected. For what will a man not give in exchange for his body? Why should they not be among the fortunate ones? Why should the Virgin not see fit to single them from the multitude seeking her favor? And so they go, year by year, buoyed up by hope, and the pilgrimages of to-day are as crowded as were those of ten and twenty years ago.

That the fathers of the grotto, and the priests and Lourdes generally, have made capital out of Bernadette, the place itself bears witness at every step. It is, so to speak, constructed upon the peasant girl. But it has departed from its first purity and simplicity. It has become twisted and distorted, and artificial, even as the grotto pool has been perverted from its original course. By a strange perversion there have arisen out of the simplicity and purity of Bernadette's faith, traffic and rivalry and competition, earthliness and worldliness, and the general degradation of men's higher natures.

As for Bernadette, she had no wish to share their gains. Probably those divine visions were to her too holy, too sacred, to make mere matters of merchandise. Her humble soul shrank from the notoriety, the publicity, with which the world threatened to overwhelm her. She left the fathers to reap their harvest, and retired to a convent, where she ended her days in seclusion in 1880.-Gentleman's Magazine.

-Sunday Magazine.

To persons whose memory reaches back beyond the days of the Crimean War there are few things more striking in the aspect of public affairs at home than the change in popular sentiment with respect to our colonial empire. I am sure all my contemporaries will agree with me in saying that at the period when the Great Exhibition of 1851 was held in Hyde Park our colonies were commonly regarded as a source of weakness rather than of strength, as a sort of encumbered estate the cost of whose maintenance outweighed the dignity conferred by its possession. The epoch of which I speak coincided with the high-water mark of the Manchester school of politics. In those days we were all more or less convinced that we were entering on a new era of peace, free trade, international goodwill, and universal brotherhood. I am not concerned at present with the consideration how far the "good time coming" sentiment of which the well-nigh forgotten Mr. Charles Mackay was the popular bard was based on anything more solid than sentimental aspirations. I only refer to it as explaining a condition of things under which the Imperial idea was necessarily at a discount. If, as was then commonly believed, we were on the NEW SERIES.--VOL. LXVIII., No. 5.

eve of a commercial millennium, in which moral forces were to supersede physical, or, to cite a cant phrase of the day, in which Captain Pen was to prove stronger than Colonel Sword, it followed logically that Imperial aggrandizement was not an object to commend itself to the approval of any enlightened community.

Moreover, even the few unbelievers in the gospel of Free Trade, Progress, and Peace were not disposed to attach any great importance to our colonies as a factor in our national history. There were then men still playing an active part in public life to whom the American War of Independence was an event within their own recollection. Even the younger generations, to whom the severance of the bonds which formerly united Great Britain to the grandest of her colonies was a tradition only, were imbued with a belief that in the course of nature our other colonies were bound to follow the example of the United States and set up for themselves as soon as they could dispense with the protection of the mother country. This belief was not confined to any one party or any one class of the commonwealth. Tories and Whigs, Aristocrats and Democrats, were at one in regarding our colonial empire as an

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artificial and provisional institution which possessed no element of permanence. The above point of view directed our colonial policy alike under Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell. That policy may best be described as one of indifference. It was accepted as an axiom of statesmanship that our colonies would, one after the other, detach themselves from the parent State, and that the latter would offer no opposition to their assumption of independence. On the contrary, the severance of the colonies from the United Kingdom was held in Downing Street to be "a consummation most devoutly to be wished." I am not saying that among the English statesmen, politicians, and officials of fifty years ago there was any definite desire or distinct purpose to cast loose our possessions beyond the seas which have of late become known as Greater Britain, but I do say that at this period the probability of such a contingency coming to pass was regarded not only without dismay, but with placid satisfaction. The view on this subject then entertained by our governing classes closely resembled that held in most British households with regard to grown-up children. The parents are

well content that their sons should remain at home, but they feel at the same time that the sooner they take wives and get homes of their own the better it will be directly for themselves and indirectly for their fathers and mothers.

It is hardly necessary to say how all this has altered. Whether Imperial Federation will ever become more than a grand idea is a question entirely beyond the scope of the present article. But even those who are least sanguine about the realization of this idea will not dispute the fact that it has taken firm hold of the public mind both in the mother country and in the colonies. Imperial Federation may or may not become an accomplished fact, but the demand for a Greater Britain has already come within the domain of practical politics. The conception of forming an united Empire in which Canada, Australia, South Africa, and all the scattered possessions of England throughout the four quarters of

the globe shall become one_commonwealth under the Union Jack may prove incapable of realization; but the conception is one which no English statesman nowadays can afford to flout, no English party can ignore with safety. For good or for bad, the whole Manchester school of politics has been consigned to the limbo of theories which have been tested by experience and have been found wanting. The causes which have led to this change of public opinion are partly of a material, partly of an industrial, and partly of a sentimental character. Steam, and still more, submarine telegraphy have brought Great Britain and Greater Britain into relations which would have seemed incredible in the days of Cobden and Bright and the Anti-Corn Law League. Every event of public interest which occurs in the British Empire is known practically at one and the same time in every important city, not only of the United Kingdom, but of our colonies. With the aid of the British press, Englishmen at home and Englishmen abroad are brought into close contact with each other, and nowadays the most commonplace of Britons, the man who in bygone years cared for nothing and was proud of caring for nothing beyond his own local interests, cannot but feel a sort of solidarity with his fellow-countrymen beyond the seas, of whose fortunes, successes, failures, he reads perforce the record daily. The press throughout the British Empire might well adopt as its motto, "Homo sum, et nihil humani a me alienum puto," substituting Britannicus and Britannici for homo and humani.

Again, rapidity of communication and reduction of freight, with a consequent increase both of consumers and producers throughout the world, have exposed British commerce to a competition our forefathers never contemplated as possible. Under the protective systems which, with or without reason, find increasing favor in all parts of the world outside the British Isles our old markets are becoming circumscribed, if not closed, to trade. As a necessary result, the value of our colonial markets has increased in popular estimation,

and the British public is awakening to the desirability of consolidating the bonds which unite Great Britain to her colonies. Moreover, increased knowledge and keener interest have rekindled among men of British race the old Imperial fire, which may have smouldered during the predominance of the Manchester school, but which has never died out. With us of the Anglo-Saxon race, as with the Romans of old, there is an innate conviction, sometimes suppressed, but never abandoned, that it is our mission, our manifest destiny, to rule the world. Other nations, to paraphrase the well-known lines, may excel us in arts and graces, but to us is allotted the power to rule. The above conviction, justly or unjustly, is entertained at heart by ninety-nine Britons out of every hundred; this being so, it is intelligible enough that the instinct which has led us to pitch our tents in every part of the world wherever there was money to be made, trade to be developed, or power to be acquired, should have strengthened us in the resolve to hold what we have gained, and to reap the harvest of the crops that we have planted. Such, in my opinion, are the main causes of the outburst of Imperial sentiment which has been the most marked feature of British political history during the closing years of the century now about to be numbered with the past.

Brief as these remarks on the growth of Imperialism in England may be in themselves, they may appear somewhat lengthy in an article whose subject is Imperialism in America. My excuse must be that, in order to understand the Imperialist movement across the Atlantic, it is absolutely essential to appreciate the character of the movement in the mother country. Many years ago, when I first visited the United States, I gave utterance in writing to the apparent paradox that in order to understand England it was necessary to study America. The years that since then have come and gone have only confirmed my belief in this assertion, which may perhaps be expressed more clearly by saying that Great Britain and the United States

are the complements of one another. I should be the last to deny the notable differences between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race under the British Empire and the American Republic. On the contrary, in common with all Englishmen who have been connected by home ties with the United States, and who have lived in close intimacy with Americans, I am, I think, more apt than ordinary Englishmen to attach undue weight to the nuances-I know of no English word with the exact signification of the French-which differentiate the ordinary Englishman from the ordinary American. To the foreigner, as alike in England and America, all men of English-speaking race English-speaking race are habitually denominated Englishmen, and Americans seem the same people. I remember asking M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, after his unsuccessful visit to the States in connection with the Panama Canal, what he thought of the Americans. "Ils sont vos vrais cousins," was his answer. The word cousin has always appeared to me far more appropriate to the relations of England and America than those of brother or sister. Cousins, in as far as my personal observation goes, are not as a rule the best of friends; they are apt to judge each others' defects too hardly, they are prone to take offence, they expect a great deal from their relatives, and are not disposed to give much in return. But, notwithstanding all this, they have common ties, common interests, common memories, common kinship, which they do not and cannot possess with the world outside their own families; and therefore in the long run-to employ a mathematical metaphor-the centripetal forces in their case are always stronger than the centrifugal. I know it will be said that the very large admixture of foreign, and especially of German, blood in the American nationality, has materially modified its Anglo-Saxon character. I doubt, however, the force of this objection. The two branches of our race possess, to an unequal extent, the faculty of assimilation. In our own country, and especially in our large manufacturing