But if a cloud has passed over our relations with India, our domestic policy has brightened. The present Parliament includes fewer avowed Nonconformists than the last. But on ecclesiastical questions it has shown a more liberal spirit than its predecessor. The Burial Acts Amendment Bill has done something to protect the ceremonies connected with the grave against the unseemly intrusion of religious differences. The popish figment of consecration has all but vanished; and those hoary cells of priestly chicanery, our Ecclesiastical Courts, are all but demolished. With the liberal element in the Divorce Bill, we have to reckon the abolition of Ministers' Money' in Ireland. If free churches do not grow as we might expect, the principle of those churches is giving new signs of its vitality, not only in the British Parliament, but through our British Dependencies, from the youngest to the oldest.

OUR EPILOGUE

ON

BOOKS.

LITERATURE.

Kansas. By THOMAS H. GLADSTONE. Routledge.—Mr. Gladstone's Letters on Kansas obtained a world-wide circulation, and a deserved popularity, in the columns of the Times in the winter of last year. They are here reprinted 'with additions and corrections;' and we are glad to welcome them in this form. The new matter is principally derived from two American works, by Mr. William Phillips and Mrs. Robinson respectively, which were not available for the first draught of these graphic and spirited Letters, which, by-the-bye, are now thrown into chapters. A re-arrangement of the whole work would have been a much more important improvement. Its present distribution is anything but judicious. It cannot fail to strike most readers.as odd, to say the least, to find the physical geography and the general description of the country and its population interposed, sandwich fashion, between the two slices of political narrative. This epic style of dashing at once in medias res was doubtless in place when the object was to take by the button-hole the feverish readers of a daily newspaper, who would, of course, never have read a line of a series of epistles opening with a topographical and statistical account of any portion of any planet less interesting than the moon. But in the re-publication this concession to the popular craving for excitement might, with advantage, have been quietly withdrawn. The more natural order certainly is-first the scene, and then the drama.

And a bloody drama it is of which Kansas has been made the theatre! A short time back this fine territory, equalling in extent the area of the British Isles, was scarcely known by name on this continent, and now the world rings with the atrocities by which its infant history has been branded with indelible infamy. So lately as three years ago it could be written that there was not a town or village of whites in either Kansas or Nebraska.' Since then, however, the wave of immigration has been rapidly rolling towards this portion of the Far West. It progressed with the usual seven-league strides of American civilization, and was already ripe for admission into the Union as a State, when the wary South determined to convert it to its purposes. By fair means this could not be, for the population were nearly all free-soilers, and were firmly resolved that their young energies should not be cramped by the paralysis of slavery. At this hour, after all

the spasmodic propagandism of the apostles of bondage, there are probably not fifty slaveholders in the country. Hence, by no constitutional process was it possible for the South to secure the two votes of Kansas in the Senate at Washington. But what should the men of the whip care about constitutional courses? They naturally flung aside all scruples of the kind. Their darling 'domestic institution' was at stake, and, as the proverb runs, needs must when a certain person drives. If to convert these Yankee settlers across the Missouri to their views of the patriarchal beauty of slavery, was rather a hopeless task, there were other ways available of reaching their end, and these they unhesitatingly took. They could organize on their own side of the river gangs of Border Ruffians' to invade the nascent State, seize upon the ballot-boxes, force their spurious votes upon the returning-officers at the point of the bowie-knife and the mouth of the revolver, elect a 'bogus' legislature, and thus secure the enactment of a model code of pro-slavery laws. That, in the pinch of necessity, these tyrants should thus purpose, and thus act, is quite in the spirit of the accursed system which was thus to be bolstered up. But that the Federal authorities should have abetted this abominable plot, this certainly was a painful surprise for those who had fondly clung to the belief in American law and justice. Such, however, was the melancholy fact. Through all the quagmire of this dirty Kansas conspiracy the national flag was trailed. The Washingtons and Jeffersons have strange successors now-a-days, and Soulés and Douglases crawl up the steps of the capitol, whither the eagle was wont to soar. What an idea does it give us of the strange things thrown to the surface by the fermentations of the great democracy, to read the following speech, with which a quondam Vice-President of the United States, and President of the Senate, hounded on the drunken mob of Missouri ruffians, with the Federal troops, we blush to add, at their backs, to the sack of the peaceable and unresisting city of Lawrence, the head-quarters of the free-soilers.

This day we have entered and not one Aboli

'Boys, this day I am a Kickapoo Ranger, by Lawrence, Southern Rights' inscribed on our banners, tionist has dared to fire a gun. No, by, not one! This, boys, is the happiest day of my whole life. We have entered the city, and to-night the Aboli

tionists will learn a Southern lesson that they will remember to the day of their death. And now, boys, we will go in with our highly honourable Jones, and test the strength of that Free-state hotel, and learn (sic) the Emigrant Aid Society that Kansas shall be ours. Boys! ladies should be, and I trust will be, respected by all gentlemen (!); but, by when a woman takes on herself the

garb of a soldier by carrying a Sharpe's rifle, then she is no longer a woman; and, by, treat her for what you find her, and trample her under foot as you would a snake. By come on, boys! Now to your duties to yourselves and your Southern friends! Your duty I know you will do; and if a man or woman dare to stand before you, blow them to

with a chunk of cold lead !'

One shudders to think that this General Atchison would actually have been President had his chief died during his four years' term of office! And he had worthy coadjutors in his infamy: Lecompte, the Chief Justice of the territory, the Jeffries of the campaign; Donald

son, the United States Marshal, and Governor Shannon, all appointed by the President; with Sheriff Jones, the catspaw of the Border Ruffians,' Dr. Stringfellow, the editor of the Squatter Sovereign, their newspaper, and the Reverend Thomas Johnson, Superintendent of the Shawnee Indian Manual Labour School and Mission. This exemplary missionary must have been an invaluable ally, as representing the Christian element of the crusade. He also is a salaried officer of the Washington Government, which in these instances, it seems, departs from the rule of the constitution to afford no State aid to religion. If Mr. Johnson is to be taken as a specimen of the class, it is to be hoped the precedent will not be extensively followed. That he is likely to teach the Shawnees much good, is very questionable; but that they have taught their apostle, or at least his friends, something, is pretty clear from the following horrible example of the level to which white men could sink, for whose banner this meek minister of the religion of love must have furnished the appalling device-GOD AND SLAVERY.

'In one instance, a man belonging to General Atchison's camp made a bet of six dollars against a pair of boots, that he would go out and return with an Abolitionist's scalp within two hours. He went forth on horseback. Before he had gone two miles from Leavenworth on the road to Lawrence, he met a Mr. Hops driving a buggy. Mr. Hops was a gentleman of high respectability, who had come out with his wife, a few days previously, to join her brother, the Rev. Mr. Nute, of Boston, who had for some time been labouring as a minister in Lawrence. The ruffian asked Mr. Hops where he came from. He replied, he was last from Lawrence. Enough! The ruffian drew his revolver, and shot him through the head. As the body fell from the chaise, he dismounted, took his knife, scalped his victim, and then returned to Leavenworth, where, having won his boots, he paraded the streets with the bleeding scalp of the murdered man stuck upon a pole. This was on the 19th of August of last year. Eight days later, when the widow, who had been left at Lawrence sick, was brought down by the Rev. Mr. Nute, in the hope of recovering the body of the murdered husband, the whole party, consisting of about twenty persons in five waggons, was seized, robbed of all they had, and placed in confinement. One was shot the next day for attempting to escape. The widow and one or two others were allowed to depart by steamer, but penniless. A German, incautiously condemning the outrage, was shot; and another saved his life only by precipitate flight.'

Here is another of these Indian massacres perpetrated by the Rev. Mr. Johnson's white disciples, and affording proof that heathen sepoys are not alone accessible to the most fiendish inspirations :

'Of the many acts of infamy,' says our author, which occurred during the short interval between the termination of the Warakusa War and the opening of the second campaign, already described in the early chapters of this volume, I will only refer to one which occurred in January, 1856; this was the murder of Mr. Brown, of Leavenworth. Mr. Brown's offence was, that he had rescued a Freestate man from the hands of a party of ruffians who were about to take his life. Whilst thus acting, a band of Kickapoo Rangers arrived, armed as usual with their rifles and hatchets. A fight of soine hours' duration ensued, notwithstanding that it was night; wounds were given on both sides, and a Pro-slavery man named Cook fell in the encounter. After this, Mr. Brown, returning with seven others to Leavenworth, was again attacked by the company of the Rangers, by whom they were taken prisoners, and carried into a shop at Easton. The captain of the Rangers did his best for a time to protect Mr. Brown. At length, however, he

left him, when the crowd, infuriated by liquor, surrounded their victim, and taking their hatchets, literally hacked him to death. The wound of which he died was a deep hatchet-gash on the side of the head, inflicted by a man named Gibson. Poor Brown lingered long enough after the fatal blow to suffer yet more exquisite refinements of cruelty, whilst the ruthless savages kicked him, jumped upon his fallen body, spat tobacco-juice into his eyes, and barbarously mutilated his body.'

Alas! that Mr. Gladstone should have to add :—

"This murder was again on the right side of politics, and no attempt therefore was made to bring to justice the perpetrators of the foul deed. Many, however, are well known. Some were officers of the law; one of the most refined in cruelty has already been mentioned in these pages as the United States Deputy-Marshal; and others were of 'the most respectable' inhabitants of the place.

It is difficult to believe that, after acts of such enormity, the President declared, in his message on Kansas, that no acts prejudicial to good order have occurred under circumstances to justify the interposition of the Federal Go-vernment.''

We have said that we hail this republication of Mr. Gladstone's powerful and telling Letters, and we do so on the principle on which we should deplore the suppression of Sallust's Jugurthine War, or of the records of the French Reign of Terror. Otherwise, and as a matter of mere sentiment, we might well devoutly wish that this sad page of contemporaneous American history might be withdrawn from the eyes of posterity. The recent infamous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case, affirming, in face of Lord Mansfield's celebrated judgment of 1772, that the framers of the American Constitution, in common with the whole civilized world at the time, denied negroes to be men, proves how tenaciously the slaveholders cling to this threadbare fallacy as a cloak to the nakedness of their cause. But let the sophists beware. With such revelations as this Kansas tragedy before them, mankind may come to repudiate their own right to claim brotherhood with the race.

According to the latest accounts, the Kansas problem was still unsolved. It is cheering to learn, however, that, in spite of the Borderruffianism of the South, the Topeka or Free State Convention stands a good chance of ultimate recognition.

The History of Greece under Othoman and Venetian Domination. By G. FINLAY, LL.D. Blackwood. The Ottoman Empire: the Sultans, the Territory, and the People. Religious Tract Society.-The late war on behalf of the independence of Turkey turned the thoughts of many towards that empire who had almost forgotten its existence, and the sharp look out we were compelled to keep upon the pervivacious Greeks during the struggle directed public attention afresh to those hereditary foes of the Porte. The volumes before us are well-timed appeals to the newly-awakened interest felt in these hostile nations. The Tract Society's publication is a useful compilation, displaying a competent knowledge of the subject, good judgment in the selection of materials, and skill in moulding them into a continuous narrative. The style is popular and pleasing. The historical sketch is necessarily slight and fragmentary, but it is trustworthy so far as it goes, and to the masses, to whom more elaborate productions are inacces-