there will ultimately be a reaction, and people will again go right out to the country, as long as there is any country left. Before discussing these improvements, however, it will be convenient to examine the conveniences, social and sanitary, of the homes of the new age. The greatest convenience of all, no doubt, will be the modification and partial elimination of the domestic servant. There is every reason to believe that the great difficulties of the servant question as at present experienced will solve themselves, forming in part an instance of the moral changes, accompanying material invention but only partly resulting from it, which the new age is certain to experience. It is usual to lay the blame of the unsatisfactory character and atrocious inefficiency of the domestic servants of our own day on the institution of free education. They are much more due to the absence of any education worthy of the name, and to the imperfect civilisation of modern houses. Thirty-five years or so are but an instant in the life of an institution so overwhelmingly more important in its possibilities than any other subject of legislation as State-compelled education of the people. No one appears to have recognised that character-making, which Herbert Spencer called the most important object which can engage the attention of the legislator, is the only true object of education, free or otherwise. When politicians have talked of the necessity of national education, the argument they have used was that Germans are better chemists than we are. When they praised the usefulness of modern languages it was in terms of commercial utility. "Modern languages, in fact" (a recent critic remarked), "make a good bagman." It is inept to despair of free education because free education has produced no very satisfactory results while conceived of as a process of shoving undesired knowledge into the children of the poor. Looking, as everyone not hidebound by pessimism must look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving class when the system of party politics, already beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we have every reason to expect that the true uses of education will be perceived and attained long before the end of the period contemplated when we speak of the new age. And then, one very great factor in the servant question will have been satisfactorily solved, even if other conditions have not conducted us nearly all the way to the solution beforehand.