Everywhere there is a lack of high ideals,--and all the arts suffer severely in consequence. Modern education itself checks and cramps the growth of imaginative originality. The general tendency is unhappily towards the basest forms of materialism, and a large majority of people appear to be smitten with a paralysing apathy concerning everything but the making of money. That art is pursued with a horrible avidity, to the exclusion of every higher and nobler pursuit. Yet it needs very little “imagination” to prophesy what the end of a nation is bound to be when the unbridled fever of avarice once sets in. History has chronicled the ruin of empires from this one cause over and over again for our warning; and as Carlyle said in his stern and strenuous way--“One thing I do know: Never on this earth was the relation of man to man long carried on by cash payment alone. If at any time a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-Demand start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.” Perhaps some will say that Imagination is not a “vanishing gift”--and that Idealism and Romance still exist, at any rate among the Celtic races, and in countries such as Scotland, for instance, the home of so much noble tradition, song and story. I wish I could believe this. But unhappily the proofs are all against it. If the Imaginative Spirit were not decaying in Scotland as elsewhere, should we have seen the wanton and wicked destruction of one of its fairest scenes of natural beauty--the Glen and Fall of Foyers? There, where once the clear beautiful cascade whose praises were sung by Robert Burns, dashed down in its thundering glory among the heather and bracken, there are now felled trees, sorrowful blackened stumps, withering ferns and trampled flowers, dirty car-tracks, and all the indescribable muck which follows in the wake of the merely money-grubbing human microbe. And where once the pulse was quickened to a sane and healthy delight in the grandeur of unspoilt Nature, and the mind was uplifted from sordid cares to high contemplation, we are now asked to buy an aluminium paper-knife for a shilling! Human absurdity can no further go than this. There can be little imagination left in the minds that could have tolerated the building of aluminium works where Foyers once poured music through the glen. And it is instructive to recall the action taken by the Belgian people--who are generally supposed to be very prosaic,--when some of their beautiful scenery on the river Amblève, was threatened with similar destruction. Mustering together, three to four thousand strong, they took a reduced model of the intended factory, burnt it on the spot, and threw its ashes into the river; performing such a terror-striking “carmagnole” of revolt, that the authorities were compelled to prohibit the erection of the proposed works, for fear of a general rising throughout the country. Would that such a protest