IN the course of the decades of which I am writing, London became the centre of a silent, gradual, irresistible, and altogether welcome revolution. It witnessed the passing away of the Puritan Sabbath and the evolution of the Rational Sunday. So quietly did the change evolve itself that no man could mark the hour or the year of its completion. But the historian of the passing moment, the working journalist of the period affected, had at all events a unique opportunity of noting the events which led to our gradual emergence from the national gloom generated in these islands more than three centuries ago. London in the sixties and early seventies was the saddest and most gloomy capital in Europe. In the morning church bells clanged over empty streets. An expression of misery might be read on the faces of the few hurrying pedestrians. A curious silence pervaded the thoroughfares. At the hours for repairing to church or chapel, sad-faced men and women, and demure little hypocrites of boys and girls in stiff Sunday best, made dutiful marches. After church came the awful midday meal of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and apple tart. The afternoon was usually devoted to sleep. The proletariat as a rule remained in bed until the public-houses opened. Crowds of soddened creatures, suffering yet from the effects of Saturday night’s carousals, clustered round the doors of the gin-palaces, eager to obtain “a hair of the dog that bit them.” When at last the portals did open, a clamorous congregation besieged the bars, and one beheld, perhaps, the origin of the phrase which tells of those who do “a roaring trade.” In the Seven Dials, in Clare Market, across the water in Southwark and Blackfriars, the “pub” proclaimed itself as the most popular institution in all England. It is quite impossible for the younger generation to picture the scenes that were witnessed on Sunday nights just before and just after closing hour at these houses of refreshment. At that time Great Britain might easily have boasted of being the most drunken nation in the world. As the doors of the taverns swung open to admit or to vomit forth a votary, one caught a glimpse of pictures Hogarthian in their stark and shameless debauchery. I can recall even now the gust of hot, pestilent air that issued out, and caught the throat and nose of the passing citizen; the clamorous boom of a hundred excited conversations pierced and punctuated by the shrill declamation and hysterical shriek of women—sometimes suckling their young in the mephitic miasma of a moral hell.