On Picket Duty.

It is not surprising to hear that Henry George regards Liberty as "cranky." All the defenders of despotism do.

Since European socialists began to circulate their revolutionary literature in hermetically-sealed cans of condensed milk, that heretofore mild and inoffensive commodity has become a greater terror to the "effete monarchies" than dynamics.

"Irish landlordism," says Nasby, "is condensed villainy." So it is. And landlordism of whatever nationality is villainy also, however diluted or rarefied or tempered. The land question is a universal question, and it is confusing to discuss universal questions from national standpoints.

What must the cultured editors who rave about Guiteau think of Walter Savage Landor, more highly cultured than they, who once told N.P. Willis that he had "a purse of five hundred sovereigns always ready to bestow on any one who will rid the earth of a tyrant - even an American president"?

A good illustration of the wantonness with which States spend their subjects money is seen in Queen Victoria's expenditures of $75,000 in sending special missions to Madrid and Dresden to invest the Kings of Spain and Saxony with the Garter. How long do working people intend to pay tribute to an institution which consumes their earnings thus?

The following is the number of socialists expelled from three important towns in Germany: Berlin, 155; Hamburg and environs, 195; Leipzig, 70; total, 420. Most of these have wives, children, and relations dependent upon them for bread. The majority have emigrated to England or America. Four had been previously members of parliament. Their names are Messrs, Fritzeche, Vahlteich, Reimer, and Hasselmann.

Stephen Pearl Andrews, after comparing us to a "drunken man," complains of our discourtesy in calling him God Almighty, - a title, by the way, which we never applied to him. As Dickens's barber says, we must "draw the line somewhere." Mr. Andrews, it would seem, in the matter of opprobrious epithets, draws the line beyond drunkard and this side of God. It is well to be given some idea, in advance, of the stand and of the courtesy to which members of the Pantarchy will be expected to conform.

Liberty, during its brief young life, has received many compliments, from sources high and low, of which it may well be proud; but nothing has pleased us more than the following simple, but significant words from the letter of a lady who has been procuring subscribers in the mines of Pennsylvania. Sending a fresh list of names, she adds: "More miners promise to subscribe, but they have not had steady work this month and are all poor. The paper is a bomb in the mines. Each fortnight for three months I have had the paper read aloud to the men, and it is beginning to tell, as it always will when it and its like reach the people for whom they are written." News like this is of the most cheery sort. When the common people, as our faithful co-worker truly says, begin to appreciate the principles which Liberty stands for, the welcome Social Revolution is at hand. The coming day, all hail!

Force is seldom justifiable as a method of reform, but the impetuous revolutionists who believe in and uses it is much less vitally in error than the wicked hypocrite who pretends to see no distinction between force used in vindication of rights and force used in their violation.

Only one daily paper within our knowledge, the Virginia City "Chronicle," has told the plain truth about the recent Irish convention. These are its words: "The Irish national convention at Chicago did but one thing worthy of notice, or of benefit to Ireland. It subscribed several thousands dollars for the Irish Land League. The resolutions adopted were tame, commonplace, and - not to put to fine a point on it - cowardly. Designedly silent, as the press of the country is, as a whole, on the subject, and timid as was the Chicago convention, the world will soon have to recognize that fact that Ireland is engaged in a struggled to do away with private ownership of the soil."

The mountebank Talmage, preaching against profanity, soberly told his congregation last Sunday of a man who indulged in it while walking on a railroad track. Suddenly a train came along and killed him. The body, when picked up, exhibited neither bruise or scar, death having resulted solely from the cutting out of the man's tongue by the locomotive. How many members of Talmage's church believe this yarn? How many of them believe that Talmage believes it himself? If any, are they not fools? Are not the others hypocrites? On this showing, is not the Tabernacle congregation made up solely of knaves and idiots? Does its moral and intellectual quality differ from those of other Orthodox congregations otherwise than in degree?

It will be remembered that our discussion with Mr. Babcock on the rightfulness of usury led a friend to suspect that Liberty was willing to deny herself by advocating anti-usury law. A subsequent editorial distinguishing between usury as a  civil right and usury as a moral right quieted his fears. The same editorial, however, has led another critic to accuse us of abandoning our anti-usury ground and making legality the standard of morality. Strangely enough, the ideas entertained by this critic on political and economic questions are substantially identical with Liberty's. The sole trouble with him is that, having accustomed himself to write the English language viciously, he is no longer able to understand it when written well. But may we say to him, once for all, that a man has a civil right to take usury from another, provided he can get it with the other's consent in the face of free competition, but that he has no moral right to take it as a commercial transaction in which he pretends to be governed by the true principles of commercial equity; and, consequently, that wealth acquired by usury under a voluntary regime IS the holder's in the sense that no one is entitles to dispossess him of it, but IS NOT the holder's in the sense that he has acquired it, as the usurer now pretends, by giving him an equivalent for it. It is to be hoped that this language will prove intelligible to our critics, but, if it does not, he may continue his criticism without further attention from us.