the Jewish race calls for no rebuke, nor, indeed, for anything, very often, except genuine admiration. It is the impostor, great and little, criminal or merely falsely ambitious, who attracts hostile attention, with some substantial justification, be it confessed. With regard to the small fry of the improper hyphen, there is nothing to be said. Thousands of persons use hyphens who, if they had any sense of proportion or self-respect, would hastily discard such a laughably inconsistent sham. Unless a hyphen expresses the legal joining of two surnames, thus bringing together the pedigrees of two houses, it conveys nothing but _bourgeois_ affectation and impudence. It is a feeble fraud at best, scarcely worth condemning. Different causes bring about the legal use of the hyphen. Sometimes, a rich father-in-law without heirs male directs by his will that his daughter’s husband shall, by Royal License, assume the additional surname, whatever it may be, which becomes extinct at his (the father-in-law’s) death, before or after his (the son-in-law’s) own name. In this way the hyphen comes into being, and the name which would have perished is duly kept alive. At other times, the additional surname of an ancestor, where that ancestor bore a distinguished name, in the maternal line, is revived by process of law on the voluntary initiative of the person desirous of possessing the name. Thus, a person representing in his blood an historic family through, for example, his father’s mother, may by Royal License assume his grandmother’s maiden name, the more justifiably if she was in the nature of an heiress or co-heiress of the house. The name, of course, may be joined to the existing surname, before or after, with a hyphen, or it may be taken alone in substitution for the existing surname. Reference has been made to the freedom with which a man may call himself by any name, without legal formality, and to the equal freedom with which an alien may discard his own name and by deed poll assume the honoured name of a great English house. (Alas, the Royal Licence has been used in at least one glaring instance, too!) It has also been made obvious that such practices should be checked by definite legal means.[25] The countries where conscription is customary are well protected against change of name abuses. Conscription would solve the difficulty here; but there are ways and means of putting down a most iniquitous practice, a criminal practice in its intent, more often than not, by ordinary legislation. Actors and actresses could be exempted because they do not appear to offend in the sense that the impostors condemned in the foregoing remarks offend.