shameful, or portentous, seems strangely barren and bloodless set down in naked words. Yet the mountain peak that tops the great ranges is but a shoulder over its neighbor, though it may be the apex of a continent. A misconstrued word has caused the spilling of the blood of millions; the needle-point of a stiletto has severed kingdoms. Between temptation and consequence there is but little space, yet it is deep and wide enough for all the poison in the tongues of all the world's serpents. To-day, a simple peasant, humble, gentle, is an insignificant atom in the great Russian Empire, and Nicholas is the supreme ruler of rulers. To-morrow, by a simple swing of an arm a bomb is thrown, and the peasant is the one human being in all the world; the face of Russia is changed, and Nicholas—is not.
The first crime of Amalgamated is a matter of mathematics. It involved plain fraud and misrepresentation, the insertion of a bogus subscription and the disruption of solemn pledges, but the commission of it was nothing more than a matter of arrangement between two men, one the master of the greatest of all business organizations, and the other the