PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS SIXTY YEARS AGO. MR. GEORGE W. SMITH, head of the firm of Smith, Elder and Co., has wisely yielded to what he calls "the friendly pressure" put on him "by a distinguished man of letters from Australia," and has decided to publish his recollections of "some of the incidents of a long and busy life." The first instalment appears in the November Cornhill. Sixty years ago, he tells us, Smith, Elder and Co. carried on business at 65, Cornhill. It" consisted chiefly of an export trade to India and our Colonies," and also of "a small publishing business."

A PEPPERY PIONEER.

This brought the firm into connection with Lieutenant Waghorn, the "pioneer of the Overland Route to India." At that time the long route round the Cape, occupying three or four months, was the only means of communication with India, and Waghorn's scheme for a shorter route across the Isthmus of Suez and through the Red Sea was eagerly welcomed by the commercial world.

The Government being chilly, the lieutenant worked the scheme himself, distributing the cost over the letters thus transmitted. A duplicate draft for £3 or 4 cost the firm £25 for postage! The writer gives an amusing picture of the irascible pioneer :—

:

More than once Waghorn arrived at 65, Cornhill, in the early morning when I was the only member of the staff present. On one occasion he arrived, travel-stained and dirty he had just landed; and without a word of greeting he shouted, "Have you any one here who can run?" I called in a ticket-porter from the street: Waghorn inquired if he could run. "Yes, sir," said the porter, "if I am paid for it." Waghorn handed him a packet and told him to run with it to the Foreign Office. The ticket-porter was stout and scant of breath; running for him was a lost art. Waghorn watched the man waddling down Cornhill; he burst out with a seafaring expletive, not to be repeated here, ran after the porter, seized him by the coat-tails, which he rent halfway up his back, grasped the packet, rolled the unfortunate porter into the gutter, and ran off himself with the dispatches to the Foreign Office. I had to pick the astonished porter from the gutter and pay him handsomely for his damaged coat and outraged feelings in order to save Waghorn from a charge of assault.

HOW MANUSCRIPTS ARE PICKED UP.

Mr. Smith began his adventures as publisher before he was twenty, having had £1,500 assigned him for absolute disposal. His first literary capture was R. H. Horne, author of "The New Spirit of the Age" and "Orion." At the house of one Powell, confidential clerk to the supposed original of Dickens' Cheeryble Brothers, he came on the track of another literary treasure :—

While I waited in Powell's little drawing-room for a few minutes before dinner I took up a neatly written manuscript which was lying on the table, and was reading it when my host entered the room. "Ah," he said, "that doesn't look worth £40, does it? I advanced £40 to Leigh Hunt on the security of that manuscript, and I shall never see my money again." When I was leaving I asked Powell if he would let me have the manuscript if I paid him the £40. He readily assented, and having got from him Leigh Hunt's address, I went off to him to Edwardes Square, Kensington, explained the circumstances under which the manuscript had come into my possession, and asked whether, if I paid him an additional £60, I might have the copyright? "You young prince!" cried Leigh Hunt, in a tone of something like rapture, and the transaction was promptly concluded. The work was Imagination and Fancy." Mr. Smith thus sketches the author :— Leigh Hunt was of tall stature, with sallow, not to say yellow, complexion. His mouth lacked refinement and firmness, but he

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had large expressive eyes. His manner, however, had such fascination that, after he had spoken for five minutes, one forgot

how he looked. He wrote the most charming letters, perfect alike in both form and spirit. I particularly enjoyed the simple old-fashioned suppers to which he frequently invited me.

THE MAN OF LETTERS AND THE MEN OF NOTES.

But business was not the author's strong point. He did not know what to do with "this little bit of paper,” as he described a cheque by Mr. Smith for one or two hundred pounds. Mr. Smith gave him bank notes in place of the cheque

Two days afterwards Leigh Hunt came in a state of great agitation to tell me that his wife had burned them. He had thrown the envelope with the bank-notes inside carelessly down and his wife had flung it into the fire. Leigh Hunt's agitation while on his way to bring this news had not prevented him from purchasing on the road a little statuette of Psyche which he carried, without any paper round it, in his hand. I told him I thought something might be done in the matter; I sent to the bankers and got the numbers of the notes, and then in company with Leigh Hunt went off to the Bank of England. I explained our business and we were shown into a room where three old gentlemen were sitting at tables. They kept us waiting some time, and Leigh Hunt, who had meantime been staring all round the room, at last got up, walked up to one of the staid officials, and addressing him said in wondering tones, "And this is the Bank of England! And do you sit here all day, and never see the green woods and the trees and flowers and the charming country?" Then in tones of remonstrance he demanded, "Are you contented with such a life?" All this time he was holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with his long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure. I fancy I can still see the astonished faces of the three officials.

The incident ended by Leigh Hunt recovering the money. Mr. Smith's further reminiscences will be awaited with much interest.

THE LAST HERMIT OF WARKWORTH.
THE LATE CANON DIXON.

IN the October and November numbers of the Northern Counties Magazine (which surely ought to have been named the Northumberland Magazine, seeing that the other five northern counties are scarcely represented), Miss M. E. Coleridge has an appreciative little notice of the late Canon Dixon.

Those who have read the delightful life of William Morris, by Mr. J. W. Mackail, will probably agree that the most fascinating of its pages are the reminiscences contributed by Canon Dixon, the poet of the Oxford Brotherhood; and those who knew Canon Dixon must have been struck with the resemblance he bore to the portraits of the poet Chaucer.

are

Richard Watson Dixon was the son of a Wesleyan minister. As curate of St. Mary's, Lambeth, he read the service at Morris's wedding. But it is of Dixon the poet that Miss Coleridge writes in the November Magazine. The volumes "Christ's Company," "Odes and Eclogues," "Lyrical Poems," "The Story of Eudocia and her Brothers," "Mano," "Historical Odes," and the little book of selections entitled Songs and Odes." A fitting memorial would be the issue of Canon Dixon's poems complete in one volume. For a number of years before his death he was engaged on a "History of the Church of England," some voiumes of which have been published.

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To the Pall Mall Magazine for November G. Le Grys Norgate contributes an article on the Prima Donnas of the Past-Eleanor Gwynn, Anastasia Robinson, Lavinia Fenton, Mrs. Billington, Madame Pasta, Malibran, Giulia Grisi, Henriette Sontag, Jenny Lind, and others.

COUNT TOLSTOY ON TWO RECENT EVENTS.

1. THE CHINESE QUESTION.

"THE Chinese Lie" is the title of Count Tolstoy's indictment in La Revue et Revue des Revues of the White Man's dealings with the Yellow Man. "On the frontiers of Chinese territories occupied by Europeans," he says, "the great sport is hunting the Celestials." But this is as nothing in comparison with the much greater crime of sending to China missionaries "with a false and lying mission." "Unhappily, the responsibility for this does not lie on Europe alone. America and the rest of the civilised world share in it." The missionaries build hospitals; they take from a Chinese woman her sick child; they heal it and bring it up in the new faith. The mother, too, is converted out of sheer gratitude; the father is faithful to Confucius. Thus the Christian world has made the conquest of a soul, and society has broken the bonds of a happy marriage. Woe to the family torn asunder by fanatical and religious strife! "

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"Let us be frank-brutally frank. We whites only concern ourselves with the vilest sides of public life in China." "Before everything, we must maintain our prestige," is the cry.

"Prestige, what shady, what monstrous acts are committed in thy name! The prestige of the white man in China begins where justice, truth and logic end." We are but reaping the whirlwind of the wind which we sowed. A thousand times have they lied who accused the Empress of lighting the revolutionary fire. We have lit it ourselves.

2.

"THOU SHALT NOT KILL."

"He that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood not be shed" is Count Tolstoy's new version of an old text. The best sovereigns who have fallen by the assassin's hand, such as Alexander II. and King Humbert, were, he says, "guilty of and privy to the murder of thousands who have perished on battle-fields; and as for the inferior kings or emperors, the victims of the wars of which they were the authors are counted even by millions." Kings and Emperors, if they were logical, ought rather to be astonished at the rarity of these crimes (of assassination), considering the continual example of them which they themselves set." Kings, emperors and presidents make organised murder their profession. "And yet they are shocked when one of them is killed."

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Far is it, however, from Count Tolstoy to exonerate the Anarchist who murders one of these professional murderers. But he asks, How is it that Anarchists can invent no better means of improving the lot of humanity than assassination? Le Roi est mort! Vive le Roi! And the world is no better off than before. "The ills of humanity come not from isolated individuals, but from the organisation of society, which makes all dependent on a few, or oftener on one. Such is the lot of a sovereign, that a wise man would see no course open to him but to abdicate at once. Killing a sovereign is like whipping a child which you have spoilt out of all good habits.

Society is kept in place by "the selfishness and folly of men, who barter their freedom and honour for petty material advantages," and they are men in all ranks; therefore in no case must Alexander or Humbert be killed, but we must unite in showing them that they have no right to kill by making war.

Men unable to take this view are "hypnotised." There is but one way to prevent them killing kings and killing each other in war, and that is to rouse them from their torpor. "And that is what I am trying to do by publishing these lines."

LIFE AROUND THE POLES.'

M. DASTRE contributes to the first October number of the Revue des Deux Mondes one of his informing articles on life and all things living in the vast regions which surround both the North and South Poles.

To M. Dastre's mind, the principal interest of Arctic and Antarctic exploration is not the solving of certain scientific problems so much as the study of the animal and vegetable life of the Polar zones. In both Polar regions there are four different variations of the landscape -the main ice-floe, the inland seas, the mainland, and the ocean. In these four spheres is abundant room for the habitation of animals and plants. Of the two Poles, the Antarctic zone is the most simple; it is an immense expanse, perpetually frozen, of which the centre is occupied by a vast continent, and the circumference is girdled with ice which forms the ice-floe. The main continent is covered with a mantle of snow, which drifts round the rocky summits and smooths the sharp angles of the configuration of the soil. The spectacle is that of a colossal glacier which disgorges itself into the sea or on the ice-floe.

REMARKABLE FAUNA AND FLORA.

If this view of the Antarctic continent is correct, the wonder is that any animal or vegetable life should be maintained in so uninhabitable a region. As a matter of fact, however, the ice-floe, at any rate, presents remarkable fauna and flora. The geographical conditions of the Arctic zone are quite different from those of the Antarctic; it is regarded as certain that a deep sea occupies the centre. A characteristic of the Arctic zone is the continuity of the ice-floe with the lands which are not always frozen over; this is a matter of great importance from the point of view of the distribution of animals and plants. The ice-floe is a very poor substitute for the solid earth: it is continually breaking up into crevasses, grinding itself into chasms, and re-uniting, apparently capriciously, but really in obedience to the forces of winds and submarine currents. It follows that the ice-floe can only furnish a very precarious habitation for terrestrial animals, and its fauna is therefore practically a marine one. It is the principal glory of Nansen to have realised the supremely important fact that the ice-floe moves in obedience to definite laws, and that its direction can be pretty accurately foretold.

A FLOATING PRAIRIE.

Curiously

But it is time to pass on to the animals. enough, the ice-floe in the Polar regions rests upon a relatively warm sea, the waters of which are favourable to various forms of submarine life. The depths of the Arctic sea are actually a little warmer if anything than those of the oceans further south. Even under the ice may be found a kind of green moss which exhibits the elementary vegetable life related to the most simple kinds of seaweed. Under the microscope the tiny atoms which make up the whole layer reveal the most beautiful cells and granulations. Light, which is an almost essential condition of vegetable existence, is obtained in summer when the impenetrable layers of frozen snow formed during the winter disappear. Thanks to this curious kind of moss, the ice-floe, in place of a horrible desert, becomes an immense floating prairie, on which a prodigious quantity of little animals find nourishment; these creatures include jelly-fish, molluscs, and crustacea, which, in their turn, furnish food to animals of greater size, such as members of the seal tribe, whales, and various birds. We thus have a chain of organised life depending ultimately upon millions of tiny points of albuminous seaweed.

Pages of moralising and moral statistics could hardly present a more startling and real picture of that Court than the little story of the noble and great woman who, entreated to go to Versailles if only to set a good example there, replied, "The best example I can set is to stay away;" or of that other woman who said that the most difficult post to fill at Court was that of a maid of honour.

Not less characteristic of the time is the criticism and cynicism packed into an epigram of a Court lady :—

the

Blind Madame du Deffand, who was born cynical as she was born bored, when Helvétius was blamed in her hearing for having made selfishness in his great book "On the Mind mainspring of human action, answered, "Bah! he has only betrayed everybody's secret."

Here are other illustrations of the cynical fashion :Even good, homely old Madame Geoffrin, when some one said to her of a notorious liar, "What he says is quite true," responded, "Then why does he say it?"

Montesquieu boldly defined a lord as "a man who sees the king, speaks to the minister, has ancestors, debts, and pensions."

Why do you have so many fools in your Order?" someone asked a Jesuit. "Il nous faut des saints," was the cynic reply. Even the "dumb multitude" could sometimes break out into a bitter smile :

a muff

Was not that a capital story of the two peasants who, meeting the king hunting in winter-time without (manchons) as was the fashion, expressed to a companion his surprise that the monarch did not protect himself from the cold. "He has no need to," said the other. "His hands are always in our pockets." That low-born mot went the round of the most aristocratic circles.

There is more than wit in the saying that follows, as many a wearied hostess will attest :—

The aphorism of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, who spent her whole life entertaining, "Those who come to see me do me honour; those who stay away give me pleasure," pleased her guests, it seems. The mot had a little whip at the end of it which flicked her hearer's interest into new life.

Mr. Tallentyre selects some notable instances of clever repartee. Here is courage as well as wit :

When Bassompierre, ambassador to Madrid, related to the monarch how he had entered that city on a handsome mule, "Oh, oh!" said Louis, with a kingly wit, "what a fine thing to see an ass on a mule !

"Very fine, sire," replied Bassompierre ; " I was representing you!"

The Duc d'Enghien, when but a child, thus retaliated

on his tutors :

When he had committed some childish fault his tutors punished him by making him have his dinner at a little table by himself, "I hope your Highness will feel ashamed of yourself." "Eh! messieurs," replied the child, "it seems to me that you are the sufferers, since you are deprived of the honour of dining with me."

Age could be no less nimble in retort :-

The Fontenelle of the "Plurality of Worlds," for instance, was much more esteemed for his repartees than for his book,

When the Bien Aimé himself complacently said of the Farmers-General-those wicked tax-gatherers, the grasping publicans of old France-that they sustained the State, the Duc d'Ayen had the courage to answer, "Yes, sire, as the rope sustains the criminal."

The Chancellor Maupeou was talking one day to Madame Lapelletier de Beaupré, who had persuaded all her many relatives in State berths to oppose the Chancellor's changes: "It is a great pity, Madame, women mix themselves in affairs they understand no more than geese." "And don't you know," she answered, "it was the geese that saved the Capitol ?"

Yet it was "the Austrian" who dared to classify her French ladies-in-waiting as "Fossils, Frumps, and Lumps." But no brilliance of phrase could conceal the rottenness of life. And the burst-up announced itself in an epigram :

Prudhomme chose in 1789 as his motto for his new "Journal des Révolutions de Paris": "The great only seem great becausewe are on our knees: let us get up.'

These are but a few tit-bits culled from the feast of good things collated by Mr. Tallentyre.

BIG BEN: THE BIGGEST CLOCK IN THE WORLD. SINCE the dynamite outrages very few people have seen the inside of Big Ben. One of those few, however, is Mr. Arthur Birnage, the writer of the most interesting paper in the October Harmsworth. The following are

some of the curious details he has collected :

The hour figures are two feet long, and the minute spaces one foot square. The hour hands are made of gun metal, but the minute hands are tubular and made of copper, and are eleven feet long. The apartments where the dials are fixed have the credit of being "the hottest places in London at night, for about a score of gas jets burn fiercely in a room about four feet wide. The pendulum is just over thirteen feet long, and weighs nearly seven hundred pounds. The hour bell, which gives the clock tower its popular, name of Big Ben, weighs thirteen tons eleven hundredweight.

From first to last Big Ben has cost about £22,000. The clock is wound every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon. "The winding is very hard work and lasts several hours, and the rests which the winders obtain during the times of chiming are gladly welcomed." The cleaner, we are told, finds it a good day's work to get one face of the clock cleaned within working hours.

One of the most interesting parts of the 180 feet high Clock Tower is the room in which the Serjeant-at-Arms shuts up refractory M.P.'s. Bradlaugh was its last occupant, and the room remains exactly as he left it.

IN an interesting interview in the November Humanitarian, the Chinese Minister in London declares each Viceregal province in China to "enjoy perfect Home Rule." He says the people as a whole are not dissatisfied :-" It is the tendency of Confucianism to promote a spirit of contentment; it is your modern civilisation which creates an atmosphere of unrest. The Marquis Ito told me on one occasion that the Japanese were a happy people before the attempted Europeanisation of their country. Our people enjoy absolute equality under the present régime."

THE AMERICAN REVIEW OF REVIEWS. THE November number contains many features of exceptional interest to English readers. I have dealt with one of them, Mr. Donald's paper on Trusts, in another page. But for shortness of space, I should have quoted at length from two excellent papers written by Mr. Abbott, manager of the National Democratic Press Bureau, and by an anonymous writer explaining how the Republican National Committee works for votes. The papers taken together contain just the kind of information which we want to have as to the way in which the printing press is used for political campaigning. The Republicans sent out, it seems, at this election 80,000,000 copies of seventy different documents and eight posters at a cost of £33,000. The utilisation of newspapers for campaign purposes is systematised, with the result that nearly 4,000 newspapers publish the articles and editorials sent out from the Republican head-quarters. The articles are on the most varied subjects: troop transports, a rural free delivery, and sheep in Oregon, but the net result of every one of them is an earnest exhortation to vote the Republican ticket. The Republican campaign text-book is a closely printed, well-bound volume of 456 pages. One of the documents was printed in twelve different languages, namely: English, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Hebrew, Swedish, Bohemian, Polish, Greek, Hungarian, Dutch. It is interesting to note the proportionate use of the different languages in election documents. McKinley's letter of acceptance was translated and published in the following proportions: English, 500, German, 100, Norwegian, 50, Swedish, 50, Bohemian, 20, Polish, 20, Italian and Dutch 10 each. Both these papers are profusely illustrated with cartoons and portraits.

Mr. John Finley describes the political beginnings in Porto Rico. Mr. W. E. Burghardt du Bois gives a pleasant account of the progress of the American negroes, whose exhibit will be found in the Congress Hall at the Paris Exhibition. One of the most interesting articles is that which describes the attempt that the Americans are making to create a Hall of Fame" in the west side of the quadrangle of the New York University of Arts and Sciences, but I hope to refer to this subject again in another issue.

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THE AUSTRALASIAN REVIEW OF REVIEWS. THE Review of Reviews for Australasia is the new title of what was formerly the Australasian Review of Reviews. The September number reproduces from the Cosmopolitan "Dante in Yankee Terms," crediting the discovery of a new humorist to Mr. Brisbane Walker. It is not an honour to be disputed about, but I met Mr. Young and called attention to his work in Chicago seven years ago. An interesting and copiously illustrated paper is to be found in the special Queensland Supplement. It describes the Great Queensland Winter Pleasure Trip. It is written by the Rev. Joseph Berry of Adelaide. From Mr. Berry's descriptions it would seem that Queensland promises to become the Riviera of Australia. The article, however, is much more than a description of the charms of Queensland from the point of view of the tourist. It is a description of the present

SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE.

THE November Scribner's opens with the concluding chapter of Mr. Henry Norman's very excellent account of the Siberian Railway. Now it takes thirty-eight days to go from Vladivostok to Moscow, and part of the journey has to be done by horse power and a very large part by steamer. The uninterrupted railway journey from Moscow to Irkutsk, 3,371 miles, occupies about nine days. Mr. Norman comments on the extremely low fare-only 44.30 dols., including sleeping-car accommodations; and this is for a train practically as luxurious as any in the world, and incomparably superior to the ordinary European or American train." In the eastern stretches of the journey the rate of speed is very low, going down to twelve miles an hour, and Mr. Norman tells us that this speed cannot be greatly increased until new rails are laid. The present weight of the rails is but little over 16lbs. to the foot, about half the weight used on the Pennsylvania road between New York and Philadelphia. Mr. Norman thinks this gigantic enterprise will ultimately cost no less than 500,000,000 dols. "Since the great wall of China, the world has seen no one material undertaking of equal magnitude. That Russia, single-handed, should have conceived it and carried it out makes the imagination falter before her future influence upon the course of events."

Mr. Samuel Parsons, Jr., looking at the Paris Exposition from the standpoint of a landscape artist, says: "We may criticise some of the details, as the French themselves do more than any one else; but we must concede that probably never has such a glorious panorama of artistic life presented itself as in the ensemble at Paris in 1900." The one fundamental criticism Mr. Parsons has to make is the confined area allotted for the exposition; the Paris fair having but 250 acres all told, as against 800 acres occupied by the White City at Chicago.

Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams has a pleasant description of " The Cross Streets of New York"; Mr. J. M. Barrie concludes his serial, "Tommy and Grizel"; and there are short stories by Mr. Henry James and Mary Katherine Lee, the latter being illustrated very daintily

in colour.

THE NATIONAL REVIEW.

THE November issue will doubtless be described as an alarmist number, and the articles quoted elsewhere certainly give good ground for alarm.

THE SCHOOL BOARD MODERATES.

Mr. Wm. C. Bridgeman writes on Moderates and the London School Board. After much criticism of the Progressive régime, and especially of its Evening School policy, which he denounces as a failure, he thus states the aims of the Moderate party :

To preserve what religious instruction now exists.

To protect efficient Voluntary Schools from unfair competition.

To exercise strict economy in the expenses for maintenance. To resist all extravagant proposals for new buildings or alteration of old ones.

To make the school curriculum such as will be most useful to the large majority of children.

To assist in the organisation of Higher Elementary and Secondary Education without usurping functions which may more properly be exercised by other bodies.

To reorganise the Evening Continuation Schools and consider the reimposition of fees.

COLLECTIVISM IN WAR CABLES.

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Mr. Prevost Battersby, war correspondent, writes on his class, and offers a suggestion for the future," which strikes the general reader with some surprise. He advocates "a severance of the correspondent from the telegraph wire." At present the cable has an evil influence on his calling and character. If there be forty correspondents wishing to cable, they are allowed, say, thirty-five words each in the day. Practically the same intelligence is repeated forty times in the meagrest form. The writer would hand over the cable work to the agencies, who might send a really full message, which all newspapers contributing would receive at a tenth or twentieth of the present cost. He adds:

It is a popular delusion that the big dailies welcome the thought of war, since from war very few of them reap an advantage, and many, forced to equal the extravagance of more wealthy competitors, face its prospects with despair.

THE TARIFF STRIFE OF GERMANY AND CANADA. Mr. Ernest Williams waxes wroth over 66 the Sacrifice of Canada" in our modus vivendi with Germany-the temporary substitute for the old commercial treaty which we denounced at the instance of the Dominion. Germany insisted that Canada should not have mostfavoured-nation treatment in this provisional arrangement; and the English Foreign Office yielded to the demand. This is Germany's punishment for Canada's preferential compact with Great Britain. Canada grants Germany most-favoured-nation treatment; but Germany will not reciprocate. Mr. Williams writes to urge that this concession of our Foreign Office to German demands shall not be made permanent in the new treaty. The danger is that other Powers will follow Germany's lead and our other Colonies will be warned not to make preferential arrangements with the mother country. Canada threatens Germany with a tariff war if she persists.

His exceptions would include Asiatics, the physically defective, men in holy orders, and Quakers. Rear-Admiral Fitzgerald contributes an eulogy on the Japanese Navy, ships and men.

THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.

THERE are a number of valuable articles in the November issue which have found notice on previous pages.

FOR THE SCHOOL BOARD ELECTOR.

The Hon. Lyulph Stanley utters a protest against Government attacks on higher elementary schools. It is scarcely of the terse, compact and pungent sort of weapon which we might expect a leader to put into the hands of his supporters on the eve of a School Board Election. It is more of a bleat than a bark. He urges :

The misfortune in connection with this question of higher elementary education is that the Board of Education in the last two or three years has been rapidly drifting into a position of dogged hostility to School Boards, and consequently takes up a position of hostility to all expansion of elementary education."

The Government. .may yet redeem the past by granting to the industrial classes of England what the same classes enjoy in Scotland, the free expansion of the popular school into a higher section wherever there are found scholars ready and willing to stay on. The narrow limitations of the Minute will have to disappear sooner or later.

AN EXPERIMENT WITH STREET CHILDREN.

Mr. Thomas Burke reports the way the Liverpool Corporation has tried to regulate the street trading of children in its streets. A license with conditions attached and revocable by the Watch Committee was made necessary for the juvenile street trader. The Corporation wanted to have the power to stipulate that children of reckless or drunken parents or guardians must live in lodgings approved by the Corporation. This the Home Office refused to grant. Partly in consequence of this inability Mr. Burke says the system has been a failure. He grants elements of good in the cleaning up of the parents' houses prior to police inspection, and in the rule forbidding the licensed children to enter public-houses.

EXIT ARC-LIGHT: ENTER WELSBACH.

A writer calling himself Ex fumo lucem is allowed to announce that the incandescent gas-lights are superseding the electric arc in street-illumination. Berlin and Paris have rejected the arc light and reverted to gas and Welsbach. Liverpool manufactures its own electricity but has lit its streets with the incandescent gas. companies will doubtless be grateful to the writer. A wider public will at any rate appreciate an opening paragraph of his

Gas

Several attempts have been made to fix upon the century some peculiarly distinctive appellation. It has been styled the Age of Steel, the Age of Steam, and so forth; but it might as fairly be called also the Age of Light, inasmuch as it has witnessed the birth and development of one of the boldest conceptions of human mechanical skill and power of organisation-the systematic provision of artificial light in any desired quantity, for any purpose, distributed through every town and available at any hour, for the mere turning of a tap or a button. The dreams of all the Utopians of past ages never compassed any such impressive reality. They never do. The dreams of dreamers remain dreams; while the workers continually endow the race with unexpected boons.

"Fidelis" reiterates his plea for reform within the Catholic Church and says, "there is a very general sense of agreement among a considerable number" of his co-religionists in the direction specified.