Yet corruption in office, like hypocrisy in religion, has furnished food for mirth ever since King Log and King Stork began their beneficent reigns. Diogenes complained that the people of Athens liked to have the things they should have held most dear pelted with dangerous banter. Kant found precisely the same fault with the French, and even the history of sober England is enlivened by its share of such satiric laughter. “Wood was dear at Newmarket,” said a wit, when Sir Henry Montague received there the white staff which made him Lord High Treasurer of England, for which exalted honor he had paid King James the First full twenty thousand pounds. The jest sounds so light-hearted, so free from any troublesome resentment, that it might have been uttered in America; but it is well to remember that such witticisms pointed unerringly to the tragic downfall of the Stuarts. Indeed, the gayest laugh occasionally rings a death-knell, and so our humorists wield a power which could hardly be entrusted into better hands. “Punch” has the cleanest record of any English journal. It has ever--save for those perverse and wicked slips which cost it the friendship of stouthearted Richard Doyle--allied itself with honor and honesty, and that sane tolerance which is the basis of humor. “Life” has fought an even braver fight, and has been the active champion of all that is helpless and ill-treated, the advocate of all that is honorable and sincere. The little children who crawl, wasted and fever-stricken, through the heated city streets, the animals that pay with prolonged pain for the pleasures of scientific research,--these hapless victims of our advanced civilization find their best friend in this New York comic paper. The girl whose youth and innocence are bartered for wealth in the open markets of matrimony, sees no such vigorous protest against her degradation as in its wholesome pages. It is scant praise to say that “Life” does more to quicken charity, and to purify social corruption than all the religious and ethical journals in the country. This is the natural result of its reaching the proper audience. It has the same beneficent effect that sermons would have if they were preached to the non-church-going people who require them.