people of Stein, who regard them as their most valued heirloom. When the conflicts between the towns and the feudal lords were raging, a plot to deliver Stein into the hands of neighboring nobles was made, several traitorous citizens entering into it. The gate of the city was to be opened to the enemy by them at 2 A.M., the watchword agreed upon being "Noch a Wyl" -"Yet a while." A shoemaker living near the gate overheard the whispered signal and the clatter of arms outside, and rushing to the watchhouse gave the alarm, and so saved the town. "Noch a Wyl" was adopted as the watchword of Stein, and ever since the watchman, as he calls the hour of two, chants "Noch a Wyl, Noch a Wyl."

COPENHAGEN WATCHMAN'S SONG.
EIGHT O'CLOCK.

When darkness blinds the earth,

Light up our house and home. This translation Mr. William Burton gives in his "A Voyage from Leith to Lapland." Speaking of these Copenhagen night-guardians, he says that from eight in the evening until four in the morning, all the year round, they chant a fresh verse at the expiration of each hour. The cadence is generally deep and guttural, but with a peculiar emphasis and tone. From a distance it floats on the still night air with a pleasing and impressive effect. verses are of great antiquity, and were written by one of the Danish bishops. The sheet on which these are printed has an emblematic border, very rudely engraved; in the centre there is a figure

The

In Chili the police consists of two distinct bodies, the one cavalry, the other on foot, and they fulfil the office of watchmen, carrying swords. The police patrol the streets in general, whilst the latter take charge of some particular portion of the city, for which they are responsible. A peculiar system exists in Valparaiso, by which a message may be sent through a watchman from one end of the town to the other, and an answer obtained within fifteen minutes. This is done by means of a loud and shrill whistle carried by the watchmen, the tones of which vary as occasion requires. When all is well the whistle runs as follows:

When they cry the hour they all sing the same tune, but the pitch varies according to the voice:

Viva Chili, Viva Chili,

las diez anda y serena.

In the morning the watchmen add the prayer:

Ave Maria, purissima las cinco y media, the music in no way differing from that of the night-song.

The "chowkeydar" on the frontier of Nepaul is an interesting personality; he perambulates the village at night, giving vent to loud cries or fierce howls, which are echoed by all the neighboring "chowkeydars." The cries are not all unmusical, and the watchman, who is a low caste man, is by no means unpicturesque, with his blue puggara or official badge, and his iron-bound staff. In many Oriental countries the watchman is still a necessity.

Civilization has proved the Juggernaut of much that was artistic and picturesque in bygone days. With steam it has deadened the song of the sailor, the rhythmical chant of the ploughman and the wagoner; and with the policeman's rattle, the introduction of gas and electricity, the watchman and his quaint hour-songs have passed away.

The streets of any great city 'twixt midnight and dawn are now full of life, and as light as day. The watchmen would find no work in these, for the nineteenth century pedestrian does not need to be told in sonorous tones:Two o'clock, a fine night, and all is well. LAURA ALEXANDRINE SMITH.

From The Spectator.

BLOODTHIRST.

We have no word in English to express slaughter-thirst, which is a pity,

1

for it would describe the passion so often found in kings and conquerors much better than bloodthirst. The latter exists, as we shall shortly show, but not often in kings, who, with scarcely an exception, possibly, indeed, with only one exception in history, have, when evil in that way, been animated rather by a passion for destructiveness than by true bloodthirst. The latter was probably upon Ivan the Terrible, when he indulged in his bloodbath at Novogorod, where sixty thousand free citizens are supposed to have fallen under his eyes; but the regular "bloodthirsty" prince is usually only a perfectly callous person who wishes to be finally rid of his enemies in the quickest and easiest way, or who believes that terror is the strongest instrument of government. Indifference to human life can become, and often does become, quite perfect, as when Tilly explained the horrors of the sack of Magdeburg as an indulgence to his soldiers, or when Napoleon, for the amusement of some mistress of a night, sacrificed fifty of his soldiers in an escalade which he knew to be positively futile for any military purpose. Nero probably felt no pleasure in the death of his victims, but only relief at their removal, and if Philip II. had been given to introspection he would have explained his own conduct in dooming the inhabitants of the Low Countries to death as a measure of policy justified by their rebellion and their heresies. If it is true that Charles IX. of France stood on his balcony during the massacre of St. Bartholomew shouting out “Kill! kill!" it is probable that the true bloodthirst had come upon him, the raging desire to take life as a relief to the burning hate within; but his mother, who planned the massacre, was probably free from any impulse of the kind. Her motive was anxiety for her children's dynastic safety, coupled, it may be, with dislike for men in whose religious separateness she had detected, what certainly existed, a deep trace of the revolutionary spirit. Whether in rulers like the French Terrorists there was not also some of the

passion which is always visible in the great poisoners, the thirst for a supreme and sudden exercise of power, may be doubted, but only Carrier can be at all clearly shown to have exulted in bloodshed, or rather in slaughter for its own sake. Nadir Shah, who in northern India piled up columns of heads, and the late shah of Persia, who tore out traysful of eyes, would, we imagine, have declared, and declared truly, that they terrorized from policy, and had no personal pleasure in the death of any man. They would have had no sorrow in the destruction of half the human race, and would have felt about it as little as the Mongol chieftains who proposed to a son of Tchengis Khan to extirpate the people of China and turn their provinces into grassy steppes excellent for feeding horses, but if all the world had been patiently submissive they would have slaughtered no one. It is difficult for modern minds to realize the mental condition of such men, or conceive that they could be free from a devilish lust for blood, but it is quite possible that they felt no more about killing in cold blood than great soldiers of the more brutal type have felt about killing on the field of battle. Such horrors were incidental to their work, and they overlooked them, as Marcus Aurelius or Diocletian overlooked the sufferings of the thousands of Christians whom they doomed to painful deaths. Abd-ulHamid seems, among rulers, to approach a step nearer to the true bloodthirst.

His Armenians are so submissive and such good taxpayers that it is difficult to believe that in sanctioning their massacre he is not influenced by the desire for bloodshed for its own sake; but even he never sees his victims, and can control his appetite when convenient. It is conceivable, too, to those who have studied the history of fanaticism, that he believes himself in some dim way to have the right to slay, that he is really appointed to be what all the sultans call themselves, the Hunkiar, the man-slayer, divinely intrusted with the right and the power to remove all infidels dangerous to Islam.

It seems to the English of to-day an impossible belief, but something like it must have been in the mind of the first Simon de Montfort when he extirpated the Albigenses, and of Alva when he drowned the Low Countries in blood.

The passion of which the word "bloodthirst" is truly descriptive seems to be a kind of temporary mania excited in human beings by killing human beings, and in them only by that act. Animals are free of it. Even the great felidæ, with their ferocity developed by generations of hunger, never display it,-never, for example, attack whole herds for the pleasure of killing beasts which they cannot eat. There is a faint approach to it in the dog who "worries" a flock of sheep, but he does not kill on the spot, and seems at all events to be actuated not by lust of blood or even by the spirit of tyranny, but by an insane desire for a special dainty,-the fat of the sheep's liver. The human being with the bloodthirst on him wants most to kill after he has been killing. Soldiers, otherwise most respectable, have acknowledged the feeling as rising in them after a hardfought day, when many friends have fallen around them, and there are moments in battle when, as the soldiers say, they "see red," and in many armies, perhaps in all, it is difficult for their officers to induce them to give quarter. Killing relieves their burning thirst for vengeance. There are moments in almost every campaign, as all military historians know, when even highly disciplined soldiers seem to lose their reason, when their officers are powerless, and perfectly useless carnage cannot be stopped. The existence of this passion, which no experienced soldier doubts, is the true explanation of the awful slaughter which occurred in some ancient and some Asiatic battles, and of that ghastly incident of warfare amongst savages, their almost constant habit of killing out the wounded. It explains also the devilish excitement and thirst for more slaughter which, as the record of scenes like the St. Bartholomew murders or the murders recently committed

in Constantinople proves, falls upon & crowd which has shed much blood. Many, perhaps a majority, do not feel it, but the ferocious remainder appear to go literally and medically mad, with an impulse which has in it that of the murderer and of the hunter combined, and unless controlled by some form of terror they will go on killing while victims remain to be discovered. A separate passion of bloodshedding arises in them, and tigers would be less cruel, the cruelty-it is one of the strangest of the arcana of human nature-increasing with the absence of resistance. It might, indeed, be possible to hold them partly irresponsible, but for the fact that they can instantly be reduced to order and sanity by appealing to their fears. A few soldiers, a volley, and the wildest mob, mad, literally mad to all appearance with the bloodthirst, will become on the instant reasonable, will take orders, will abandon, and in some instances even regret, its frightful excesses. A whiff of grapeshot would have calmed the French Terrorists at any moment, and a thousand of the Irish constabulary with rifles, would restore the worst mob of Constantinople to comparative sanity in ten minutes. It is because the English as a rule are so free of the bloodthirst that we dare to be so lenient with our mobs, and because the rulers of foreign States know and dread the impulse that they are, as we all think, so much too ready to resort to violent repression. A Southern mob, an Asiatic mob, or an African mob which has once begun to kill cannot be stopped except by an appeal to terror, a grim fact which those who believe in human nature, as we do not, will do well to ponder over. The wild beast latent in man becomes, as we are now seeing every week or so in Turkey, wilder, not tamer, with release from external restraints. If the optimist philosophers were right, all men would be humane, for nothing can be so convenient as humanity; but as a fact there is nothing on earth so cruel as man if once he has broken loose from his fetters of custom, conscience, and social pressure, and

From The Contemporary Review. THE CONSTANTINOPLE MASSACRE. [The following article, though for obvious reasons it cannot be signed, may be taken as thoroughly well-informed.-ED. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.]

It is about two years since the massacre in Sassoon which led England, France, and Russia to intervene in a feeble way for the protection of the Armenians in Turkey. It is just a year since several hundred Armenians were beaten to death by Softas and Zabtieh in the streets of Constantinople. This brought the fleets to the vicinity of the Dardanelles, and after much negotiation brought five small gunboats to Constantinople. Beginning in October at Trebizond, there were massacres and looting in all the principal cities of seven provinces, and a general destruction of villages and rural population in the same provinces. According to the latest estimates, about one hundred thousand were killed, and about half a million reduced to want. The Great Powers did nothing, and, England and Italy excepted, looked on with indifference. Russia entered into a new alliance with the sultan to guarantee the integrity of his empire.

On the Continent the people generally were in sympathy with the policy of the governments and took no interest in the fate of the Christian subjects of the sultan-which naturally confirmed him in his belief that he could treat them as he pleased without fear of Europe. In the spring the Cretans revolted, and in August, through the intervention of the powers, secured all that they asked for in the way of autonomy.

The Armenian revolutionists, encouraged by the outbreaks in Crete, Syria and Macedonia, appealed anew to the Embassies and to the Turkish gov