things. Politics in a couple of hundred years past has learned to dispense with many iron bands wherewith it formerly restrained men from wrong-doing; and silken bands have taken the places of the iron ones, bands which rather attract men towards the good than rudely repel them from the bad.. Many political restraints have been spiritualized into religious ones which appear not upon the statute-books, but are unconscious records on the heart. In the view of philosophy, a thousand Atlantic cables and Pacific Railroads would not have contributed cause for so earnest self-gratulation as was afforded by this one feature in our recent political convulsion. Who will find words to express his sorrowful surprise at that total absence of philosophic insight into the age which has resulted in those hundreds of laws recently promulgated by the reigning body in the United States; laws which, if from no other cause at least from sheer multiplicity, are wholly at variance with the genius of the time and of the people, laws which have resulted in such a mass of crime and hatred and bitterness as even the four terrible years of war had entirely failed to bring about?' And so, to return from this digression, politics has really spiritualized itself, has lost many of its physical complexities, and has etherealized. Let politics now. purge itself of war., This is a material prop. Politics does not need it. Politics is at variance with the genius of the age until an international court of some sort is established. Some small but cheerful signs exist that this will be so, and that war will die. It was a strange circumstance that only two days ago The London Times, which has long been a mouthpiece through which a people has sounded the praise of its pluck, avowed itself uncompromisingly opposed to a war which certainly had more color of right than any war in which England ever engaged, and proceeded to refer not even angrily but only sorrowfully to the taunts which a previous expression of such peaceful opinion had elicited from foreign journals. And in Germany, Richter swears that war is the relic of barbarism. And here and there are the Quakers. And perhaps, after two thousand years of coquettish blindness, the world will at length open its eyes and read what Christ said and did anent war. It is time now, lastly, to speak of religion. Here one finds a wonderful etherealizing process. See how the Church has purified itself of the State, for instance. The union of Church and State threw both of them into the falsest of attitudes; it puffed up the State with a dignity far above its deserving, and it degraded the Church to a station utterly beneath it-necessarily, in order to bring them upon common ground, where they might unite. Any compromise between these two is simply ruinous to both., And so it is well that the Church has lost, or is losing, all temporal dominions and powers, whether these appear as territorial appanages of a Pope, as livings in the gift of a bishop, as Spanish Inquisitions, as Puritanical burnings of witches, as physical crusades in behalf of whatever religious order. Every time that religion has shaken itself free of an inquisition, of a persecution, of an intolerance, of any such material irrelevancy, she has signalized the event by rising and floating, and shining splendidly and expanding gloriously. If this theory which has been enunciated be true, if material things constantly tend to spiritualize themselves into analogous forms, then will political changes tend to convert themselves quickly into their spiritual analogues, religious changes. And this, after so much of retrospect, brings me to devote some small space to prospect. The French revolution, along with a thousand spiritual changes, exhibits a "Vie de Jésus ;" the English revolution proceeds, accompanied by an "Ecce Homo;" the American revolution leaves a religion so unsettled as to be called Mormonism, Free Love, Oneida-ism, Spiritualism, English Church Catholicism, and a thousand other names denoting a thousand other disintegrated parts of the Church. What do these things, as events so small, as indications so great, signify? Are they not the little hissing lightnings out of a great and as yet unseen cloud? In a word, as the era just now closed was an era of political revolution, will not the era just now opening be an era of religious revolution?, ) 1867. 3 II San Antonio de Bexar IF peculiarities were quills, San Antonio de Bexar would be a rare porcupine. Over all the round of aspects in which a thoughtful mind may view a city, it bristles with striking idiosyncrasies and bizarre contrasts. Its history, population, climate, location, architecture, soil, water, customs, costumes, horses, cattle, all attract the stranger's attention, either by force of intrinsic singularity or of odd juxtapositions. It was a puling infant for a century and a quarter, yet has grown to a pretty vigorous youth in a quarter of a century; its inhabitants are so varied that the "go slow" directions over its bridges are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches held in four; the thermometer, the barometer, the vane, the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives; it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome, untilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, like Mardi Gras on the austere brink of Lent; it has no Sunday laws, and that day finds its bar-rooms and billiard-saloons as freely open and as fully attended as its churches; its buildings, ranging from the Mexican jacal to the San Fernando Cathedral, represent all the progressive stages of man's architectural progress in edifices of mud, of wood, of stone, of iron, and of sundry combinations of those materials; its soil is in wet weather an inky-black cement, but in dry a floury-white powder; it is built along both banks of two limpid streams, yet it drinks rain-water collected in cisterns; its horses and mules are from Lilliput, while its oxen are from Brobdingnag. San Antonio de Bexar, Texas, had its birth in 1715. It was, indeed, born before its time, in consequence of a sudden fright into which its mother-Spain was thrown by the menacing activities of certain Frenchmen, who, upon other occasions besides this one, were in those days very much what immortal Mrs. Gamp has declared to Mrs. Harris "these steam-ingines is in our business," - a frequent cause of the premature development of projects. For Spain had not intended to allow any settlements, as yet, in that part of her province of the New Philippines which embraced what is now called Texas. In the then situation of her affairs, this policy was not without some reasons to support it. She had valuable possessions in New Mexico: between these possessions and the French settlements to the eastward, intervened an enormous breadth of country, whose obstacles against intruders, appalling enough in themselves, were yet magnified by the shadowy terrors that haunt an known land. Why not fortify her New Mexican silvermines with these sextuple barriers, droughts, deserts, mountains, rivers, savages, and nameless fears? Surely, if inclosure could be made impregnable, this would seem to be so; and accordingly the Spanish Government had finally determined, in 1694, not to revive the feeble posts and missions which had been established four |