But when all these facilities for an intellectual life have been provided, they will be in danger of being neglected unless the people who are supposed to benefit by them are led to pursue worthy human ideals. The appreciation of the worthy is an inward quality. Here we come to the saving grace of political convictions, the purifying effect of citizen ideals. An immunity from anti-social indulgences depends upon the general diffusion through society of an active desire for social improvement by democratic means. This acts in two ways. It first of all quickens the social conscience and the moral pride of the common man, and it also safeguards him from imitating the vices of the worthless upper classes, which, without the opposition of a strong democratic spirit, become the models for the recreation and amusement of the masses. Hence, turning once more for a moment to consider the causes which have led to the present slackening of moral fibre, I find one of the most important to be the loss of the democratic fervour which characterised the people during about three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The people have lost taste for politics. The generous enthusiasms of 1848 are criticised by the aged youth of our schools to-day as having been over-sentimental and mere dreams. At any rate, they gave us sound literature—Tait’s _Edinburgh Magazine_, Chambers’s _Papers for the People_, Cassell’s _Popular Educator_; they laid the foundations of a most important part of democratic education in the Mechanics’ Institutes; they gave birth to a self-reliant generation of working men. Until citizenship, radiantly setting out towards the splendour of a perfected humanity, attended by a train of the beatitudes which the heart and mind of man have been ever seeking, commands the allegiance and the services of our people, the crowd, obedient to the necessity to worship imposed upon it by its nature, will bow to false gods; and men, obedient to their intellectual promptings to dally occasionally in the temple of Fortuna, will do so in the gross, the only, way which is at present possible for them. EXISTING LEGISLATION By JOHN HAWKE When the intelligent public has become convinced of the existence of a great social evil, it wants to know, in the first place, what laws are in existence which can be applied in remedy of it, and what amendments of the law are needed.