we are helpless in the hands of the policeman,
our stout guardian-angel, in a shiny hat and
a blue uniform with white buttons.

QUITE REVOLUTIONARY.

A STAUNCH, thoroughgoing revolutionist
am I, and I have not the least hesitation in
avowing it. Not a Red Republican either,
nor yet a promoter of a general world-
wide Agapemone, with funds, food, and
families in common; nor even a modest,
levelling Five-pointer, according to the standard
of the People's Charter; nor a cool
annexer of reluctant states, by means of
Lynch law and piratical expeditions. I may
be a revolutionist to the backbone nevertheless,
with a firm belief that the welfare of
nations greatly depends on the special form
of revolutionary faith which they entertain.

For revolution means the act of going
round,—but there are various different ways
of revolving. You have seen your groom
clean the wheel of your cab, by tilting it up
and spinning it in the air, after having
washed it well with his mop. If it were to
perform a thousand revolutions in a minute
for a whole day long, like the beet-sugar
whirligigs, it would still remain exactly
where it was,—working hard, but doing
nothing except scattering a small quantity of
dirty water. It would have neither got on
an inch itself, nor have helped others to
advance in the world. It is the pattern of a
busybody, of a laborious fussy idler, who
worries himself and everybody around him
to death, with no other result whatever than
that of possibly sprinkling the bystanders
with a few small spots of very diluted mud.
But the same wheel firmly planted on the
ground, with the vehicle upon it and the
horse before it, by revolving at a much less
phrensied rate, will progress. At the end of
every complete revolution, it will no longer
be exactly where it was before. It has gone
round; but it has also gone forward. Whether
it likes it or not, it has shifted its place,
and has made an advance into the realms of
the future. There is change and the means
of improvement in that wheel, although it
may not be aware of it.

There are also revolutions improperly so
called, wherein the act of going round, instead
of fully completing its orbit, sticks half-way,
or thereabouts. The top of the wheel
descends to the bottom, and remains there,
turning everything belonging to it topsy-
turvy for want of strength or directing
purpose on the part of those who give the
rotatory impulse. Such, in fact, are not revolutions,
but abortions, whose ultimate home
is Limbo. If the young lady at the show in
the fair, who spins a glass of water in a hoop
without spilling a drop, were to check the
movement just at the moment when the
vessel is poised with its bottom upwards, that
imperfect mode of revolution would only get
her ladyship into a mess;—as happens to
everyone else, whether nations or individuals,
who undertake mighty feats and
changes, and then, when the work is just
half-done, lazily put their hands in their
pockets, leaving matters to take their own
course, and get round again as best they
may.

Revolutions, therefore, and revolutionists,
ought to be spoken of with careful discrimination;
because, while some, like the last-
mentioned, may be mischievous and
dangerous, others, belonging to the former class,
are necessary to the prosperity and existence
of society. The earth herself is very revolutionary;
yet no sensible man finds fault with
her for that. She spins on her axle, and
rolls round her orbit, in most obstinate
progressively conservative style, procuring us
thereby a greater variety of produce than the
boldest free-trader ever enumerated on his
tariff, and introducing us to more startling
diversities of scene than the most roving
Englishman would have dared to dream of without
her aid. The blazing sun, in the midst of
the heavens, is even more revolutionary still:
compelling us minor dancing dervishes to
pirouette around him, cycle on epicycle, orb
on orb, all the while dragging us after him,
no one knows whither, through universal
space, with the mere object, if we believe
what wise men tell us, of joining in one vast
celestial round, performed by the combined
totality of things that have been, are, and are
to be created.

Note, too, that all these mighty movements,
—which have made men believe the
universe to be a living thing whose existence
is one continued series of revolutions,—are
most complex and intricate. They are not
like a simple fly-wheel which swings its round
in stately solitude: they are a nice, well-
balanced chronometer, with due compensations
for expanding and contracting metals,
wheel within wheel in reciprocal
action. Break a single tooth of a single
wheel, and your once beautiful watch no
longer serves as a measure of time. Only set
one of Saturn's satellites to spin the wrong
way round his principal, and you put the
solar system out of order. And, to tumble
headlong from heaven to earth, if you compel
one set of men and things to fulfil the offices
for which Nature never intended them, and
to refrain from those for which she has made
them fit, the social machine cannot revolve
steadily; wheel within wheel cannot turn as
it ought, but sooner or later must come to a
dead stop. It is of no use for any political
watch-doctor, any self-sufficient chronometric
charlatan, to say, "It will suit me better for
such a wheel to go in such a way, and for
such other to stop entirely, or, perhaps, to go
double-quick time." He may try the
experiment, but it will fail abruptly. With the
innumerable springs, and chains, and catches,
with which the world's mechanism is constituted,