only to find the most noted evangelists preferring to work in regular church edifices rather than in places of easy resort by the thoughtless crowd of wonder-seekers.  But not all these doings have been foolish or mistaken:  some of them have been most hopeful signs, and the next century will find excellent work in the church-building of our day.  The Gothic and Queen Anne revivals, at their best, have promoted even more than the old-time honesty in the use of sound and sincere building-material; and not a few of our newer churches prove that our ecclesiastical architects have something more to show than experiments in fanciful “revivals” that are such only in name.  We shall continue to do well so long as we worthily perpetuate the best material lesson taught by our grandfathers’ temples—­the lesson of downright honesty of construction and of a union between the spirit of worship and its local habitation.

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

WILL DEMOCRACY TOLERATE A PERMANENT CLASS OF NATIONAL OFFICE-HOLDERS?

It is no doubt a public misfortune that so much of that thoughtful patriotism which, both on account of its culture and its independence, must always be valuable to the country, should have been wasted, for some time past, upon what are apparently narrow and unpractical, if not radically unsound, propositions of reform in the civil service.  There is unquestionably need of reform in that direction:  it would be too much to presume that in the generally imperfect state of man his methods of civil government would attain perfection; but it must be questioned whether the subject has been approached from the right direction and upon the side of the popular sympathy and understanding.  At this time propositions of civil-service reform have not even the recognition, much less the comprehension, of the mass of the people.  Their importance, their limitations, their possibilities, have never been demonstrated:  no commanding intellectual authority has ever taken up the subject and worked it out before the eyes of the people as a problem of our national politics.  It remains a question of the closet, a merely speculative proposition as to the science of government.

What, then, are the metes and bounds of this reform?  How much is demanded?  How much is practicable?

Not attempting a full answer to all of these questions, and intending no dogmatic treatment of any, let us give them a brief consideration from the point of view afforded by the democratic system upon which the whole political fabric of the United States is established.  We are to look at our civil-service reform from that side.  Whatever in it may be feasible, that much must be a work in accord with the popular feeling.  It may be set down at the outset, as the first principle of the problem, that any practicable plan of organizing the public service of the United States must not only be founded upon the general consent of the people, but must also have, in its actual operation, their continual, easy and direct participation.  Any scheme, no matter by what thoughtful patriot suggested, no matter upon what model shaped, no matter from what experience of other countries deduced, which does not possess these essential features can never be worth the serious attention of any one who expects to accomplish practical and enduring results.