By the institution, amongst other means, of technical schools and colleges, the mechanical arts can now be learnt at little or no expense by the children of the poor, and organised public bounty is replacing occasional private patronage. Thus not only have the poor an increasing chance of rising into the upper ranks of life, but the upper classes are beginning to regard occupations, at one time beneath their notice, as, after all, most suited to the less bright and capable of their children, so that there is a greater passing up and passing down of the ladder of life than was the case some fifty years ago. The surgeon and medical practitioner were at one time looked down upon and classed with the shopkeepers, and trade in all its branches was viewed as a necessary occupation, but only to be undertaken by the uneducated and unrefined. But nowadays parents are taking what appears to be a more commonsense view of the question. Their sons cannot all of them be landed proprietors, clergymen, lawyers, or soldiers, and they are, therefore, sent to banks and offices and breweries, or may be they are exported to grow oranges or to mind sheep in one of the colonies. Positions in life once looked down upon are now thought better of, for men and women do not speak ill of the positions which may be occupied by their children or by their near relatives. But while it would appear that we are beginning to give fuller play to individual power and industry, no one would be prepared for a moment to assert that these qualities have as yet free scope for their action. Still the tendency has recently been in the direction of a breaking up of the more artificially imposed barriers between class and class, so that wealth and power is more readily accessible to those who were once debarred from all hope of it by birth; while the children of the well-to-do can take up positions which were at one time thought to be quite unworthy of them. This, then, seems to be the tendency of modern democratic effort, but it is very questionable whether the result eventually achievable is one which, if understood, will be very acceptable to the democracy. Class distinctions of a very artificial kind are, undoubtedly, being rapidly destroyed, but only by the reconstruction of others of a most enduring character. The advantages which the future holds out are, as they always have been, to the few and not to the many, for the struggle and competition is still there, and all cannot come in abreast. By a more complete and thorough sifting from all classes of the capable and intelligent, we are forming, and shall continue rapidly to form an aristocracy of real worth and distinction, separated more and more sharply from the masses, as each generation goes by.