must lose the day. There can be no doubt of that; but the anxiety is about what must happen first. If the young people are what we take them to be, they must have many a misgiving about whether they can, in so hard a position, do and bear everything exactly as they ought, while every movement—every word, even every act of silence—may be of incalculable importance to the people and the country. A more gratuitous calamity than this conflict between the Crown and the Constitution in Prussia has not occurred in our time; and the dread which hangs about it must depress the spirits and perplex the future of all the members of our Royal family who have reached the years of political understanding. The outbreak of Stuart doctrine in the leading State overthrows all anticipations. Nothing can fill the hearts of our dauntless royal race with fear; but all confidence is gone for the time, and all hope of harmony and easy political growth. The Prussian people will hold fast to their constitution; but they will not secure it without a struggle. Whenever there is a convulsion at Berlin, there will be reverberations at Hesse-Darmstadt, as there have been already, by anticipation, at Saxe-Coburg; or at least dust-clouds of perplexity and darkness of doubt. Such are some of the cares of princes; and they have come early upon some in whom we have an interest.
These days, in which thrones are offered to selected princes, remind us of the old ages in which the same thing was done for other reasons: and this again suggests the thought of noble enterprise as a fit aim and occupation for princes who are free to adopt it. There are no Crusades now; for most people, from the prince to the peasant, see that to go and fight “for an idea” in countries where they have no business, is not work for heroes, or sages, or honest men. But there are fine things remaining to be done still. For one example,—what a proud and beneficent achievement it would be for one of our young princes to go out, after due training, to our possessions on the Pacific, and lay, broad and deep, the foundations of a new England in Vancouver Island and British Columbia! That all the requisite conditions of natural wealth, health, and strength exist, there is no real doubt; and there is perhaps no other spot in the Queen’s dominions of such future political importance. The noblest reputation might be gained by any British subject who, duly qualified, should go out in the name, and sustained by the sanction of the country, and there develop the resources of the territory, and be the medium between a growing and rising population and England, and establish another England in the midst of Russian and American settlements, and in full view of the great Asiatic nations, and the island tribes of the Pacific, who look wistfully to us for guidance up the ascent of civilisation. There is no saying how much the fate of the western hemisphere may depend on how we act in regard to that colony of mighty promise; and any prince who should associate his name with its future greatness may be well satisfied with his share of glory. Such enterprises will always lie ready to the hand capable of wielding them; and no prince so qualified to make his mark on the earth and its history can want for a romance at least as interesting as that of Prince Alfred.
A DESTRUCTIVE CAP.
They were all plain elm coffins, and there were nineteen of them. They lay, in the sad afternoon sun of a wintry Sunday, upon a row of trestles, beside a broad, deep grave in a Birmingham churchyard. A little group of mourners clustered round the head of each coffin, sobbing and sighing; and a young clergyman, half-hidden by a mound of sand, read the burial service with evident emotion. On every side, rising right away to the very tops of the gun-manufactories that form the churchyard square, stood a great motionless multitude: thousands there seemed, and yet so silent, that the words “dust to dust,” and the hollow rattle of the handful of earth thrown upon the coffin lids, thrilled through to the outermost of them. I judged, from what I saw, and from a fine stress laid upon certain words in the service by the young clergyman, that the dead were the victims of some accident; and, at the close of the ceremony, I asked a slovenly-looking old artisan standing by me, what had been the cause of it.
“Why,” he replied, without troubling himself to hoist his chin out of his many-folded and untidy neckerchief, or even to raise his eyes to look at me, “it’s them theer caps agen; that’s what it is;” and he doled the words out like a man thinking aloud.
“Caps?” I repeated, inquiringly.
“Aye, caps,” he said, “Ain’t ye heerd ’en the exploge?”
Having but just returned from foreign parts, I had not heard of the “exploge,” and I told him so.
“Well, then,” he said, somewhat irritated, as I thought, at my lack of information, “them nineteen poor creeturs was blowed up in a cap ’factory—that’s what they was; and theer’s thirty or forty moor on ’em in the hospital—that’s what there is. God help ’em! They was nothin’ but women and childer. What I says is, that Goverment ought to be blowed to bits and burned like they was for allowin’ sech things—that’s what I says.”
Without expressing my concurrence in this harrowing sentiment, I ventured to inquire what on earth there was in the mere manufacture of caps to cause such havoc?
Raising his head for the first time since our conversation had begun, and eyeing me with a sleepy look of scorn, the old man paused for a moment or two, by way of convincing me that my ignorance was beneath his contempt, and then put this grimly-ironical question: “D’yow s’ppose they was nightcaps as done it?”
Of course I didn’t.
“Very well, then, they was gun-caps—that’s what they was.”
The logic was irresistible. I at once apologised for my dulness, and again asked him how the accident happened.
“Why, it was done while they was a-primin’.”
“And how did they prime?”
