* * * * * * * * * * * * * * Now had I written the foregoing lines, some hundred or so of pleasant newspaper friends would have accused me of “screaming” out a denunciation of wealth, or of “railing” against society. But as Lecky,--with the King’s “Order of Merit,” appended to his distinguished name,--was the real author of the quotation, I am not without hope that his views may be judged worthy of consideration, even though his works may not be as thoughtfully studied as their excellence merits. It is not I--it was Mr. Lecky, who doubted whether “social morality both in England and America, had not seriously retrograded.” But, if it has so retrograded, there need be very little difficulty in tracing the retrogression to its direct source,--namely, to the carelessness, vanity, extravagance, lack of high principle, and entire lapse of dignity in the women who constitute and lead what is called the Smart Set. These women cannot be termed as of the Aristocracy, for the Aristocracy, (by which term I mean those who are lineally entitled to be considered the actual British nobility, and not the mushroom creations of yesterday), will, more often than not, decline to have anything to do with them. True, there are some “great” ladies, who have deliberately and voluntarily fallen from their high estate in the sight of a scandalised public, and who, by birth and breeding, should assuredly have possessed more pride and self-respect, than to wilfully descend into the mire. But the very fact that these few have so lamentably failed to support the responsibilities of their position, makes it all the sadder for the many good and true women of noble family who endeavour, as best they may, to stem the tide of harmful circumstance, and to show by the retired simplicity and intellectual charm of their own lives, that though society is fast becoming a disordered wilderness of American and South African “scrub,” there yet remains within it a flourishing scion of the brave old English Oak of Honour, guarded by the plain device “Noblesse Oblige.”