curious and inquisitive race on the planet as this of ours. It is true, no doubt, that in one respect we have amended our ways since the days of Mrs. Trollope and Mr. Dickens. We lay in wait no longer for the stranger to find out all about him, but there is a good reason for this: we have created the interviewer and he keeps us quiet in the full assurance that he can do a great deal better than we can and we shall get the whole truth in the next issue of our paper, and it may be a touch of imagination to boot.

It is natural also that every horrible catastrophe should be opened out to the minutest incident in some of our papers with deep headlines, secret and circumstance, not so much that the ends of justice may be served but that the dish of highest seasoning may sell the most papers. It is natural, also, I suppose, that below all these lines there should be papers that minister by letter, press and picture to the vilest and meanest passions of our common nature to the devil that is within us rather than the angel or the man, because there are multitudes in whom the devil is master, who do his dirty bidding and are led captive by him at his will. They prefer such garbage to what is clean and wholesome. It is their dram-drinking, and such papers are the dram-shops of the press, where evil passions are fed that end in crime.

And here I beg not to be misunderstood. I stand for the perfect freedom of the press now and forever, and want to see it frank and fearless about men and things, no matter who gets hurt. I have no sympathy with the mere sentimental squeamishness which would cover things up that ought to be revealed, and here the newspaper often does a work before which the pulpit quails and falls back, coming up at last if it comes at all among the reserves. It can do and has done a fearless work in grappling with public and personal corruption within the past few years. We need such papers and we have them. One paper I have heard spoken of as the Weekly Judgment Day. We have others that do not have to wait a week. They set the great white throne up against these festering evils every morning. I say not one word, then, against a frank and fair discussion of any question, but what I do loathe and condemn is not the freedom but the license which will bare the breast of its own mother if the public will pay to see a cancer. This slime of scandal in the papers that belong to the feet of mud and iron gleaming out of the dark things you cannot transfix with the spear of truth and reality, and be done with them any more than you can transfix sea jelly, and these floods of pictures that poison our youth with lascivious suggestion. This is the mud mingled with iron at the base of this excellent brightness, these marsh lights flitting over rottenness and decay.

And, now, what hope is there that this great power for good and evil will grow better and not worse? That the gold and silver of it will gradually gain on the brass, the iron, and the mud? Well,

this, first of all, is to me the ground of a great hope that the best of our journals are all the time growing better, and winning their way into larger areas of power and of the noblest use. I count it a sign altogether for good that the vast majority of our great papers are perfectly free, and, as I believe, perfectly honest. They want no office or plunder, and will have none; they stand clear of all taint and trust themselves utterly to the honest instincts of the clean American citizen. The best of them see from afar also as men on mountain tops the dawn of a new and better day, when the patriot will supersede the mere politician, or rather when the politician will be a patriot in the purest sense, and so they stand as heralds to encourage us to rise and take our place and begin with the new opportunity. Journals like these are the true leaders of the people, as Mr. Lincoln was a true leader when he waited to hear the tramp of his fellow-citizens behind him, and then marched on with their heart, and mind, and hand to maintain him. It is also true that as the people go the journals, which do not lead but follow, will go. They will do just what they have always done, wheel swiftly into line to save their circulation.

I look for the good to master the evil again in those things that offend the moral, and social, and religious instincts of our people. In all these things and for them all we are more or less responsible. It is our business to see that nothing shall enter our home that defileth or maketh a lie in the shape of a newspaper, to make our convictions known about these things wherever we go, and to court no smile and fear no frown for this from any side. Those who come to look at us from abroad say this is our weak place, this haunting sense of the inquisition of a newspaper that is down on us. I think sometimes there is something in this surmise. It is the most terrible power we know of when it is used to crush a man, but I say that the man who knows his own place, and is sure of his own uprightness, can dare even the newspaper and defy it for the truth and the right, come what may.

Go tell your masters to go ahead and print what they will about me; I defy them and will fight them. One of the bravest men I know said to another, who came to tell him, when the air was thick with scandals, that they had a document in the office which woul! ruin him they would burn for a price, "I defy them! and two hours after the courts open to-morrow I will have them in the dock." It turned out that the man was an impostor, who had come after blackmail. But if it had been just as the scamp said it was, that would have made no matter. There the man stood in the simple integrity of his great spotless life, without fear and without reproach. I believe also, that a great and good newspaper is as sacred in its own way as the Bible. It has something in it of the very present Word of God to man, and the very present word of man to God. The heart-beat of both pulses is in such a paper, the hand of both sets the L. M. VII.-7

type, and the spirit of both reads the proof. The old printer in Norwich, when newspapers were in their infancy, used now and then, when he fell short of matter, to fill his sheet with a chapter from Job. He might have done a great deal worse. But now when the whole world is one neighborhood, the trouble is to find room for the teeming revelations that pour in as the sun belts the world day by day. Nor do I stand with those who condemn anything beyond skimming over our paper, and then tossing it aside. Ă good paper is as true a ministrant to the soul's life as good bread is to the life of the body; and it has become about as indispensable. I feel now and then as if I would like to read a great leader from my paper in the pulpit as a sort of second lesson. The old Scotch minister used to say, I read my paper to see what the Lord is doing in the earth." It was a wise and good saying. That minister prays and praises and preaches best who keeps up the steadiest intimacy with some good paper, because he is taken outside himself for his matter, and finds his heart going out toward the whole living world in supplication and thanksgiving; and that man preaches best who, being well grounded in the old sacred writers, watches this mirror of the passing time, and so brings out of his treasury things new and old. I advocate no exclusive devotion to one book. The Bible is the divine book to me of all the world and all time, and there are other books that are also divine in their own measure, and then a good newspaper makes up the sum, and in its own way is divin also, and all these things work together for good to them that love God, for in them all you find traces of His presence and His grace; and we of all men, we who look every day for the coming of His kingdom, and feel sure every night it has come, should be glad for this revelation of its presence we find in our paper, cleave to it with all loyalty, and do our best to develop its finest powers.

There is one more word. You are in the habit of saying, ministers are only men after all, and we must say the same of editors, and must make a large allowance for them when they do not chime in with our ideas, when we know they are good men and true in their vocation. I know of no position so full of difficulty as this of the conductor of a great journal. His congregation is counted by tens of thousands, and every man of them wants the paper run his way, frets and fumes if it is not so, and writes a scalding letter or gives up his paper. This is all wrong, and a perpetual threat to one of the finest treasures we possess-the freedom of the press. Now, we love free speech in the pulpit and cherish it; we should love it also in the press, so it be clean and sturdy speech, and say with good John James Taylor, I love the truth even when it goes against myself. Now and then I notice some notelet in a paper like this: "I have taken your journal from the first number." It is the proof to me of a certain nobleness, both in the man and the journal. It must be the first condition of the editorship of a great newspaper that the editor

shall see furtner and wider than we do, as it is the first condition of a minister that he shall see deeper and higher; and so it is the sign of a sad limitation in hearers and readers that they should want to narrow all down to their line of vision. "I don't think you quite knew what you were talking about this morning," a banker in the West said once to one of the ablest preachers I ever knew, as they came out of the church. "if I should come to your bank to-morrow morning, and say that of your banking, you would tell me to mind my own business and you would mind yours." And the man was noble enough to say you are right, sir, and I was wrong. There is such a right in this work the editor has to do. If he is a man to tie to he must be a free man within certain large lines, larger most likely than we like to allow, or else the day comes when he is not worth tying to. Of all places in the world to be guarded from a narrow, bigoted and sectarian spirit, I put the editor's sanctum first after the Church. So let us see to it, that we do our share to promote and conserve such freedom, and then the course of the great and good newspaper will be as that of the sun which shineth more and more unto the perfect day, and the whole image will be of shining gold. ROBERT COLLYER.

RECENT TRAVELS IN JAPAN.

1. Japan: Its History, Traditions, and Religions, with the Narrative of a Visit to Jupan in 1879. By Sir E. J. REED, M.P. With Map and Illustrations. London; 1880, 2 vols.

2. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. An Account of Travels on Horseback, chiefly in the Northern Districts of Japan, including Visits to the Aboriginies of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Isé. By ISABELLA BIRD. With Illustrations. London; 1880, 2 vols.

3. The Satsuma Rebellion. An Episode of Modern Japanese History. By AUGUSTUS H. MOUNSEY, F.R.G.S. Maps. London; 1879.

AMONG the most delightful of Japanese legends is the ancient myth of the wrath and appeasement of the Sun goddess, Amaterasu, in which we have, doubtless, the earliest Shinto essay toward some explanation of that still wonder-striking phenomenon-in the eyes of primitive peoples no less awful than marvelous-an eclipse of the sun. Incensed at the rudeness of her younger brother, "Susanoö, the god of the sea, who threw the reeking hide (or carcass) of a piebald horse flayed backwards over her as she sat at her loom, the From-heaven-shining-great-goddess hid herself within a cave, the mouth of which she closed by a huge rock, and left the universe in darkness and distress. To tempt her forth, the eight millions of gods, after a great council held in the bed of the Stream of Heaven,

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(Milky Way) hit upon the following device. One of their number, the goddess Udzumè, was set a-piping sweetly by the mouth of the cave, while hard by its rock-door the god Tajikara (Strong i' th' arms) was placed in ambush. The strains of the pipe, mingled with the Homeric laughter of the gods, who had assembled without to await the result of their stratagem, pleased the Sun-goddess mightily, and thus and otherwise tempted, she pushed the rock door ajar and ventured to peep out. Strong i' th' arms alertly availed himself of the opportunity, and, drawing her out into the open prevented her return by passing behind her the slight but effectual barrier of a rice-straw rope. We are not told that the goddess in any way resented this somewhat irreverent compulsion of her will, or that she was afterwards otherwise than well pleased to resume her place among the sustainers of the universe.

In the leading features of this antique legend we may, without overtasking the imagination, see foreshadowed the recent history of Japan. Irritated and alarmed at the tendencies, real or fancied, of her intercourse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the "Namban " or Southern savages, as Europeans were then termed, from the fact that their ships approached Japan from the South, she withdrew in high dudgeon, more than two hundred years ago, into an almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. The emissaries of the West, from time to time, endeavored, but in vain, to induce her to abandon her seclusion; but it was not until past the middle of the present century that, half-angrily, half-inquisitively, she partially yielded to the blandishments of an American Commodore. The Strong i' th' arms of Western civilization was on the watch; and inexorably, if not ruthlessly, drawn from her isolation, Japan found her retreat cut off by a paper barrier of cross-character treaties. Thus suddenly and only half-willingly confronted with the light, she blinked, struggled, hesitated, but her natural instincts soon resumed their sway, and her rulers are now, apparently, not merely content but eager to run the race with the swiftest in the path of modern progress.

The Revolution, or Restoration, as the Japanese prefer to term it, of 1868 is an unique event in the history of the East, fraught with consequences of incalculable importance to the dense populations whom it has so long been the fashion to regard as obstinately unprogressive. It is not therefore to be wondered at that the nations of the West have during recent years displayed an extraordinary interest in the fortunes of their rejuvenescent and energetic sister. Her history, language, and antiquities, her arts, religions, philosophy, literature and science, have been attentively, even enthusiastically studied, and ample materials now exist in an accessible form, enabling us fairly to understand the past, judge the present, and, to some extent, forecast the future of the great island Empire that divides the broad Pacific from the stormy waters of the China Sea.