still opposed, as all previous ministers have been, by a party in the senate.

But for those who look beneath the unruffled surface of things the whole constitution of the state is changed. John Cash, the nominal premier, is its acknowledged sovereign, and a sovereign about as absolute in 1907 as Louis Phillippe the first, of happy memory, would have made himself in 1846 if all his deputies had been sufficiently moderate in their price and equally venal and timid. Middleman Cautious is the real minister and devoted servant of this potentate, and though the opposition is not like that traditionally attributed to College Green, "All one way," the most chimerical of its partisans does not dream of any proximate majority.

This opposition, combining two distinct shades of opinion, embraces two distinct sections, the one presided over by Invective Rabid, and the other by Sir Jasper-in the name of Eustatius Cash.

It is now universally suspected that there are few individuals whose fortune is not at the

mercy of John Cash, but

even the most ab

jectly submissive of his

followers do not

forget that a day of illness may transfer the power thence derived into the hands of the sullen and vindictive Eustatius, and hence the weight of his position, though in open hostility to his father, serves quite as much to keep his party together, as the talent of Sir Jasper, or the fame and daring of Invective Rabid.

It will thus be perceived that Sir Jasper and Middleman Cautious have sunk into second rate importance, and that John Cash, Eustatius, and Invective Rabid stand prominent in the political drama.

John Cash is regarded by the whole people as a despot whose unspeakable yoke is hopelessly imposed upon it during his lifetime. Eustatius is approved by the democrats for his liberal demonstrations, by the oligarchs for the hope which his weakness inspires of some day

seducing from his hands the power they dare not attempt to snatch from the grasp of his astute and energetic father.

Both oligarchs and democrats applaud and extol Invective Rabid as the meet adversary, and uncompromising antagonist of their common enemy. For as a common enemy both the popular aud aristocratic parties now regard him, though both in their successive necessities had invoked the intervention of absolute authority in preference to compromise with each other, herein obeying the instinct which, perhaps to preserve religious and political creeds from fusion, renders them less inimical to adverse extremes, than to those shades of opinion which trench more closely on their own.

Statues of bronze are raised to John Cash on palaces, marts, exchanges, railway-termini, and in the halls of public companies; but the figure of Invective Rabid hangs in rude woodcuts on the poor man's whitewashed walls, or

gesticulates in plaster of Paris, or in terracotta on the image vendor's board.

John Cash, in the popular estimation, now epitomises in his person the wealth and

government of the United Monarchies, and Invective Rabid is looked upon as the patriot" sans peur et sans reproche," whose chivalrous advocacy of the right of the many against the power of the one, alone curbs in some measure its encroachment.

In truth, however, the millionary could undoubtedly both overbear all resistance and reduce his adversary to silence, only that his unerring sagacity teaches him, that a certain licence of speech and of discussion operates as a safety valve to the ebullition of feeling inevitable in a state of society still mindful of its former comparative independence, and he judges his virtual absolutism none the less secure because he allows those whom he governs to pull upon the rein by which he can at will restrain them.

Like many sovereigns who have preceded him -and on the principle of the Scotch Laird who had a son in each camp-John Cash, too, has seen the advantage of having his immediate successor in the opposition, if opposition there must needs be.

He had therefore done nothing originally to discourage this tendency, little suspecting the acrimonious feeling into which it would unnaturally ripen in one whose eventual interests were identical with his own. But six months have both developped and accustomed the world to the hostility of the father and son; and six months have served to habituate it to the final separation of Eustatius and the Lady Calliroë, who more than ever enjoys the confidence and favor of old Cash.

Mrs. Cash is still magnificently absurd, and has always the control of her husband's pursestrings, a privilege to which she owes the brief visits of her son, whose necessities she supplies