scheme. Your grace probably is unaware that
an enormous money-order business is carried on
by the telegraph offices. Thousands upon
thousands of pounds a day are remitted by telegraph
—the amounts being received at one end of the
line and paid at the other. This business, though
it makes no show, is, in the aggregate, far
larger than the petty business of the money-
order offices connected with your grace's
department, the practice of which is universally
complained of as so cumbrous and costly. Does
the Government propose to carry on this business?
If so, on what terms? At present the
Post-office orders are limited to five pounds. The
telegraphic companies place no limits on the
amounts they receive and pay." Now, put
by the side of this wonderful evidence of the
wonderful Chairman of the wonderful Company
who are quite satisfied (no doubt) of his never
taking any notice of the price of its shares, the
following slight facts: The "petty business" of
the Money-order Office amounts to seventeen
millions sterling per annum. Money-orders for
ten pounds can be obtained at all money-order
offices, and the Post-office places no limit to
the number of these orders issued to one
person!

To the objections that State control would be
injurious to invention, or that the transmission
of news by government officials would act
injuriously to the public interest, we have not
replied, because to us they seem too childish and
trivial to need reply. We believe that the
condition of things in which the State was regarded
as a bugbear, is over for ever, and that as has
been justly said by one of the most liberal and
thoughtful of our contemporaries:* "The old
dread of the State is decaying, as men become
convinced that the state is but themselves well
organised; and we do not despair yet of seeing
the counter theory, that 'no monopoly can be
worked for the national benefit except through
the nation,' openly acknowledged by English
statesmen; and the further proposition, that
'the weakness of individuals ought to be
supplemented by the strength of all,' receive, what
it has never had yet, a fair discussion."

*The Spectator, November 23, 1867.

Thoroughly agreeing in these views, and
believing the proposed scheme to be one of very
great national importance, we earnestly
commend its adoption to the House of Commons.

TOWN AND COUNTRY SPARROWS.

WHATEVER the fair Lesbia may have done
in the days of Horace and Macænas, nobody in
our time makes a household pet or a bosom
friend of the sparrow. Nor has he much to
recommend him to affection or familiarity. He
is not beautiful, like the canary; he cannot sing,
like the lark or the nightingale; but only chirp
and twitter in a manner that is not particularly
agreeable; and, unlike the duck, the goose, the
barn-door fowl, or the ortolan, he has no attraction
for the disciples of Brillat Savarin, and
would be scorned as food by the hungriest of
human beings, even by the hippophagists. But,
notwithstanding all these deficiencies, I like the
sparrow. He is brave and lively in his behaviour
to the outer world, and very affectionate
to his mate and little ones in domestic life.
He, moreover, plays his allotted part in the
beneficent scheme of nature, as much as man
does at one end of the great chain and the
animalcule at the other.

There are, according to the great French
Naturalist, Buffon, who somewhat angrily calls
the sparrow an "idle glutton;" no less than
sixty-seven varieties of this well-known bird.
The best known of the sixty-seven—all of them
inhabitants of the old or Eastern hemisphere,
and none of them known except by name in the
Western world—are the house sparrow, the tree
sparrow, and the hedge sparrow; to which I
think should be added the London sparrow.
Unlike the swallow, the cuckoo, and other
migratory birds, the sparrow does not seek a
perpetual spring or summer, by travel to the
sunny south, but stays with us in all seasons.
The severest winter does not drive him away,
though it may sometimes kill him or force
him to desperate straits for a subsistence. All
the year round he twitters in town and country,
and picks up a livelihood as best he can; and
all the year round he multiplies his kind. The
hen produces three broods in the twelve-
month. Next to his fondness for human
neighbourhood—for the sparrow is never found in the
wilderness or in dense forests, but always within
easy flight of the cottager's chimney or the
smoke of city houses—his great characteristics
are amativeness and combativeness—cause and
effect. When he has fixed his affections on the
charmer of his heart, and any other sparrow
presumes even so much as to look at her, or
to utter one loving chirp to distract her attention,
woe betide the interloper, unless he be a
much stronger and fiercer bird than his
antagonist. War is declared immediately, and a
combat ensues, in which, as among men, the
prize falls to the possession of the victor.
"None but the brave deserve the fair," is a
maxim apparently as well understood among
sparrows as it used to be among the preux
chevaliers or knights errant of the olden time,
In his domestic life, as far as man can judge of
him by external appearances, the sparrow is
happy. He and his mate are fond of home,
and if any one wickedly destroys their nest
they indulge in no vain repining, but
immediately set about building another; not like
the waggoner in the fable, asking Jupiter to
help them in their distress, but helping
themselves, as all good birds, and all good people,
ought to do. And if a mischievous farm boy
steals her eggs, Mrs. Sparrow, instead of weeping
disconsolately over her loss, for more than
a very brief period of natural disappointment,
proceeds forthwith to fill up the void thus
created in her domestic circle by the production