In writing this I do not in any sense hold a brief for the past as against the present, but in contrasting these different phases of life one is bound to acknowledge that we have lost a few things which would have been well worth preserving. We have gained untold social advantages, but we have in too many cases lost the priceless treasure of individual contentment; we have gained a great many things that have been labelled with the sacred name of freedom, but only too often to bow down to false notions of respectability; we have been emancipated as communities from the brutal display of sport and pastimes which have been referred to in the earlier part of these pages, but in too many cases only to substitute a more subtle form of gambling about names of things printed in the newspapers, without any such excuse for the interest taken as our forefathers had in the excitement which was actually before their eyes; we have gained untold advantage in the spread of knowledge, and the means of access to a wealth of intellectual treasures such as our forefathers never dreamed of, but have too often allowed our reading tastes to degenerate into nothing more solid than the newspaper and a few literary _bon-bons_. There has been both a levelling up and a levelling down in the matter of education, for it is doubtful whether tradesmen and others called middle-class people are so well educated--I mean so thoroughly educated, for they know more things but fewer things well--as men were a generation ago, if we consider education on the abstract and intellectual side. We are perhaps a little too apt to think that there is nothing for us of to-day, but to bless our stars that we were born in the 19th century; yet if we who carry "the torch of experience lighted at the ashes of past delusions" have escaped from the mists and the shadows along the way which our grandfathers toiled, the responsibility for bettering their work is all the greater.