something respectable in the habit of the bookworm, which causes libraries to be kept up and knowledge to be stored, while the devourer of the flying leaves of literature is another creature, a sort of butterfly or locust. He is indolent, ignorant, and retains nothing but a confused memory of gossip, with the wrong facts affixed to the wrong names. No honest bookworm would willingly share the habit of the newspaper devourer; he would rather consort with the depraved mechanic who lives in a fantastic world of romance. In him there may be the undeveloped germs of the scholar or poet; but the languid butterfly who settles on the leaves of the lighter press is generally nothing but a scandalmonger too lazy to walk and talk and pursue his profession in the old manner of the Backbites and Sneerwells. For the worthier habit of reading, Fulke Greville is the best apologist, with his confession of the advantage of retiring from "the heavy wheels of fortune" to "the safe society of books and of dead men."
AN AMERICAN ZOLLVEREIN.
Some interest has been excited by a rumor, originating in a letter from the American correspondent of the Times, that negotiations were likely to be reopened between the government of the United States and the government of the Dominion of Canada for the settlement of the commercial controversy which has during the last fourteen years caused much trouble and loss to both countries. The statement in this simple and guarded form is likely enough to be correct. The Americans are quite shrewd enough to have seen long ago that they committed a grave blunder when they "denounced" the Reciprocity Treaty with Canada in 1864; and they have felt the consequences of that blunder all the more keenly since the period of unhealthy and abnormal prosperity which followed the war came to a sudden end in the crash of 1873. When the Reciprocity Treaty was abrogated the Americans, with characteristic ignorance of Canadian feeling and character, and with equally characteristic self-conceit, were confident that Canada, unable to stand commercially alone and weakened in her political relations by the imperial policy or no-policy then prevailing at home, would throw herself without delay into the arms of the Republic. The dominant school of politicians in this country, then every day expected to be relieved from the restraining influence of Lord Palmerston, and to develop its doctrines vigorously under the guidance of Mr. Gladstone, had announced repeatedly and with energy that if the Canadians wished to become partners in the republican government of the United States England would not say a word, much less lift a finger, to prevent them. Accordingly, the American project of coercing Canada into an appreciation of the advantages of joining the Union had something more than fair play. Its complete failure was remarkable and instructive. The Canadians were justly angry, and perhaps a little alarmed. They set to work at once to secure the political strength without which their neighbors might wear them down in detail; and the Confederation Act of 1867 was in truth the Canadian retort upon the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty. With equal courage, promptitude, and activity they proceeded to defend and develop their trade, and they soon found that they had little to fear from the competition of the Americans — so long, at least, as the latter bound themselves in the complicated trammels of an illogical and continually changing protective system. The growth of Canadian trade in the ten years succeeding the confederation of 1867 was very marked; and the Americans saw their hopes of inducing Canada to enter the Union by enforcing the threat of keeping her out in the cold gradually vanishing. Those hopes, however, revived as Canada began to suffer from the "hard times." The aggregate imports and exports of the Dominion amounted to $194,000,000 in 1872, and to $218,000,000 in 1874; in 1875 they fell to $200,000,000, and in 1876 to $ 174,000,000. Of course this decline of trade has caused much grumbling, and the protectionists have used it to push their attack upon free-trade principles and their very limited acceptance in practice by the government and parliament of Canada. Of course, too, there are many Canadians who see that if the American market were open to them they could make a much better fight for commercial existence. But the United States are wedded to a protectionist policy; and there seems very little hope for the present that any material change will be made in the American tariff, whatever may be the vicissitudes of parties at Washington. It is foolish to build upon the fact — if it be a fact — that the Democrats are by principle and tradition a free-trad-
