Francis Lathrop, has had a field at his disposal for the exercise of his charmingly poetic art. The house, delightfully designed no less for comfort than for elegance, and furnished with a sensitive eye to harmony of color and form "all perfect, finished to a finger-nail," is yet seen to be separated from the eager herd of "decorated" houses just by the prominence given by its fair president to the artist's work, which he has made lovely with nothing costlier than his every-day brushes and colors, seasoning these well, however, with a sparkling dash of brains.

In other directions, such as stained glass and embroidery, we shall no doubt do beautiful things when we have got over our infantine delight at our successes, and have come to the sane conclusion that after all the practice of the old men was not so altogether ridiculous as a few callow young men and maidens would persuade themselves and others that it was. When we have passed the point where an overloaded piece of embroidery can be triumphantly declared to be "the most magnificent piece of work, without question, that exists to-day in the world," and when a crowd of silly people are to be found to assent to the praise; when we can hear the kaleidoscopic, inconsequence of the stained glass that is now the rage, rated at its true value, mere gewgaw prettiness, without artistic or intellectual character; and when architects refuse to let the entrances to the houses they design, nay, the whole façade, be ruined by the loss of its most important feature-the expressiveness given by the dark of a window properly glazed-owing to the use of this tiresome "opalescent" glass (one of the silliest fads of the "decorative" school of the day),-when, in fine, we have worked off some of this effervescent delight in our new toys, and have come back to first principles, there can be no doubt we shall see the higher art of our pictures and statues supported by a great perfection in the minor arts. Just now we are overdoing almost everything—

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A Quaker lady nigh.”

And a Quaker room with furniture innocent of carving or mouldings and with one really good picture on the wall would be a relief to-day in the midst of this riot of upholstery.

CLARENCE COOK.

THE MOST RECENT PHASES OF THE TARIFF

QUESTION.

FIRST ARTICLE.

HE second session of the last or Forty-seventh Congress will undoubtedly stand in the fiscal and political history of the United States as marking a transition-period in the sentiment of the country in respect to the tariff question of no little economic and political importance. With the termination of the war and its requirement for vast expenditures, it might naturally have been supposed that the whole of the vast and onerous system of taxation which the war made necessary would have been promptly reconstructed with a view to the entire abandonment or extensive reduction of no small number of its burdens; and in the department of internal revenue this was indeed done, but very slowly. But in the matter of taxes upon imports, from which the largest proportion of the national revenues, and the largest sums ever collected by any nation from such sources, are derived, not only has there been no reduction whatever in the average rates imposed during the war, but on the contrary, and in the case of very many articles, the taxes have been very largely increased. That such a course of fiscal policy, or "the maintenance of war-taxes in time of peace," as it has been fittingly termed, should not fail to encounter some considerable measure of popular disapproval might also have been naturally supposed; for the popular mind, altho knowing little and caring less concerning economic matters, nevertheless moves pretty promptly and directly to the conclusion that there is an intimate connection between high taxes and

an increased cost of living and of production. But, singularly enough, this sentiment of disapproval has, until a very recent period, been comparatively limited. In the first place, the masses, finding it easy, through the great natural resources and rapid development of the country, to obtain employment and a living, and being also naturally disinclined to reason on such subjects, have either allowed themselves to remain indifferent or to be easily persuaded into the acceptance of any opinions or assumptions that might be plausibly urged upon them. While, in the second place, the so-called manufacturing interests of the country, accepting almost universally the proposition that the maintenance of high taxes upon the importation of nearly all foreign products, and the abandonment of all federal taxes upon all similar or competing domestic products, were essential to their prosperity, have through their intelligence, social position, and large command and use of money wielded an influence in behalf of their faith so irresistible, that the prediction has often been expressed that nothing could prevail against it until natural circumstances forced its representatives to radical differences of opinion among themselves.

The business of dissent from the tariff policy of the federal government since the war has therefore been mainly relegated (one meaning of which term is "to banish") to a comparatively few persons, and those mainly clear-headed and enthusiastic young men, who, as has always been the case in every other movement in the world's history for the extension of human liberty, have had but the minimum of personal grievance to complain of, but whose motive and inspiration, impelling to work and sacrifice for the cause they advocated, was simply the love of truth and right, for the truth and right's sake. To men whose opinions about the tariff are controlled mainly by their pocket interests, and indeed to all who have been educated to believe that government-which never has anything in the way of money or property but what it has previously taken from the people-can create national prosperity by arbitrarily taking the result of accumulated labor from one man and arbitrarily giving it to another, such motives appear absurd and incredible; and in default of any other motives that would seem reasonable to those thus reasoning, the hypothesis of

organized corruption and thorough disloyalty to American institutions has been resorted to, proclaimed, and extensively accepted. Hence the statements first made, it is believed, by Horace Greeley and H. C. Carey, and since positively repeated and enlarged upon by such men as W. D. Kelley, Cyrus Hamlin, president of Middlebury College, Vermont, John L. Hayes, late President of the Tariff Commission, and many other lesser lights, that the leaders of the cause of "free trade," "tariff for revenue only," and "free ships," and the repeal of our navigation laws, receive their inspiration and were bought up to do their work through "British gold;" and that organizations for the purpose of raising and disbursing funds for such purposes in the United States-as, for example, the Cob. den Club-regularly existed and were successfully operated in Great Britain. Such statements and assertions up to the present time have seemed too silly to require anything in the way of positive challenge and denial; but when a recurrence to and a general use of them still constitute a marked phase of the current tariff discussion, and seem likely to continue, it may be well to here state, for the special benefit of those whose character and self-respect, in spite of most decided opinions and prejudices, will not allow them to deliberately falsify, first:

That the transmission on the part of any organization or individual in Great Britain or Europe to the United States of money or credit, to the extent of a single dollar, for the purpose of aiding any free trade or anti-protection movement in the latter country is not known to any American representative of such movement to have ever occurred; and the receipt of any such aid by any journal or organization advocating free trade in the United States, or by any person officially connected with such organization, is not only here unqualifiedly denied, but the ability on the part of any one to furnish a scintilla of evidence to the contrary is also here positively challenged and disputed. And secondly, as respects the Cobden Club, which is declared and extensively believed by protectionists to be a foreign propaganda of free trade of wonderful activity, and the organization through which large sums of money are constantly raised and disbursed for influencing public opinion in the United States, the following statements are further submitted. This club was founded in

1866 with the object of encouraging the growth and diffusion of those economic and political principles with which the name of Richard Cobden is associated, and which are also briefly but com. prehensively expressed in the motto which the club has adopted and caused to be engraved upon its seal; namely, "Free Trade, Peace and Good Will among Nations." Altho the headquarters of the Cobden Club are in London, it enrolls among its members nearly all the leading economists and statesmen of Europe: as, for example, Gladstone, Bright, the Duke of Argyle, Sir John Lubbock, Sir Charles Dilke, Robert Giffen, Thomas Brassey, and James Caird, of England; Léon Say, Leroy Beaulieu, Jules Simon, Henri Cernuschi, and Maurice Block, of France; SchulzeDelitzsch and Karl Blind, of Germany; Emilio Castelar, of Spain; Frère Orban and M. Laveleye, of Belgium; Prof. Cossa, Quintine Sella, and Marco Minghetti, of Italy; and in the United States, Pres. Woolsey, Anderson, Gilman, and Gen. Walker; Geo. Bancroft, Edward Atkinson, C. F. Adams, Jacob D. Cox, H. W. Beecher, E. N. Horsford, E. P. Whipple, and Hugh McCulloch; while on the roll of deceased members are found the names of Baron Bunsen, Count Corsi, Léon Gambetta, Michel Chevalier, James A. Garfield, John Stuart Mill, L. F. S. Foster, Charles Sumner, H. W. Longfellow, R. W. Emerson, Samuel Bowles, W. C. Bryant, Francis Lieber, Isaac Sherman, Amasa Walker, Samuel Ruggles, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and others: the name of any one of whom is sufficient proof that no organization in which it was voluntarily, continuously, and sympathetically enrolled, could be anything not in the highest degree honorable and open in all its transactions to public inspection. The receipts and expenditures of the Cobden Club are annually audited and published in detail in the leading journals of England; and its total income for the carrying out of its plans has never been as much in any one year as $15,000; with the single exception of 1881, when a special publication fund of $8860 was contributed, and of which $5140 was appropriated for the publication and distribution of works on "Systems of Land Tenure." From the regular receipts are defrayed the expenses of an annual dinner of the members; the salaries of a secretary and clerk; the expense of medals which the club annually awards for the best essays on any subject connected with political