practice; he could not organise the crusade he had preached; everything he did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as soon as he had to do anything further than speak; a few days or even hours of cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power; the omnipotent Jove of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. The only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which aimed at destruction; for the work of destruction is brief and sharp; it needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most unbridled when let loose; its own action as it proceeds kindles into a conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, as it is the highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking Omnipotence of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development; it is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite in nature to the slow building up of a world and the slow evolution of its life-energy as hell is to heaven. The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck even the less mature minds of Limanora forcibly as soon as vast schemes of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Hitherto orator had neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle and indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had before been able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at the street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence, could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers, none so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all the work of devastation before them that these new vast political schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at their best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed to control or even guide; it swept past them through institutions and sections of the community that they specially favoured; and at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its undiscriminating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, not one of them but skulked away in fear, unable to face the task of building up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in, the silent,