misery for years, for a lifetime, or sudden and irretrievable ruin. Slowly, and amid infinite suffering, this harvest of the South African, the Kaffir market insanity is now being reaped, as that of more than one Australasian and American rage of speculative abandon has been again and again during the present generation. Is the disease thus indicated incurable—a disease whose course is invariable, whose end is profit, wealth perhaps, to one in a quarter of a million among the players, and to all the others various gradations of loss, from a few pounds disbursed in exchange for wisdom-fraught experience to complete ruin and social degradation? Yes, I believe it to be incurable, especially in a society constructed with such all-pervading artificiality as ours. One’s first impulse is to cast unmitigated censure upon the gambler; but that also would be unjust. The motives of mankind are mixed always, and at the beginning the impulse which starts the speculator in shares on his downward course is oftener than not at least half laudable, is at the worst the product of a man’s surroundings, of the vanities of life by which he may be lured. Constituted, moreover, as the social economy of modern England is, the great bulk of our fellow-citizens have no assured foothold in the land of their birth. They toil without hope, and see only privation or absolute want at the end of the day’s work—be it long, be it short. Essentially we are a nation of nomads, uprooted from the soil, and with no assured hold on the means of existence, speaking of the mass, beyond what the weekly wage or yearly salary furnishes. What more natural, one may say inevitable, than that this divorcement should generate in a vigorous race a hunger after security, a craving for some refuge, some shield against the uncertainties of existence, a way of escape, perhaps, from the irksomeness of individual surroundings, the tyranny of a hard taskmaster, the caprices of employers, whose power over all beneath them is too often almost that of life and death. By their surroundings, by the circumscribed horizon of their life, the minds of many men are prepared for the tempter who comes to them with the promise of deliverance by means of a successful gamble on the Stock Exchange. Others, again, are moved merely by vanity, by false standards of social wellbeing, by jealous emulation of those who may seem richer than they are, for is not the possession of money our one standard of “wealth” and wellbeing? To all such, once the plunge is taken, degeneration comes. A habit is established, and may become a craze, a passion, a lust that in time will devour all that is best in the heart and intellect.