None the less, Mr. Dabney's paper, which I have since studied carefully, makes the right effort, and it comes as a corrective to the party organs that can see no good in any Bill brought forward by the other side at any time, and particularly so when it chances to be a measure promised vaguely by their own. It is one of the least satisfactory thoughts that come to a reader of the papers that so many men with the gift of expressing themselves well and seeing fairly clearly into things should be so willing to adapt their intellects to the party machine. We are all, of course, born, as the poet says, Liberal or Conservative; but from journalists one expects a rather more complex psychology. We look to journalists to see a little farther not only into the future but also into the past than ordinary persons. Unhappily in England just now, as I remarked to Mr. Dabney, thus incurring his most vitriolic agreement, the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent. Mr. Dabney is by nature a pessimist--so much so that one wonders what he would do if any of the reforms he desires were to come into force. He is one of those eloquent and clear-sighted men who must be in revolt to be articulate and well-directed. He was for a long time leader-writer on a daily paper, but gradually found himself more and more irked by the necessity of expressing not his own views but his editor's. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he retired. The circumstance was recorded in the press in a paragraph in the ordinary way, and the very next day Mr. Dabney received a letter from a stranger asking him to prepare an estimate of the cost of a weekly journal that should represent his own views and contain also a sufficiency of acceptable various matter. He did so, on the most disadvantageous scale that even his pessimism could devise, and the next day he received a cheque for the first year's expenses and instructions to begin at once. Under such unworldly conditions was _The Balance_ born. "You say you left England in 1875," Mr. Dabney began. "Then you are now in a position to observe some very curious developments, for the changes in London alone since that date have been extraordinary. Our whole character seems to have undergone a revolution. We used to be economical, home-keeping: we have become gad-abouts, pleasure-hunters. We pour our money into the hands of entertainers and restaurateurs. Remember, I speak of London. To what extent England resembles London I am not in a position to say. But London becomes daily more hedonistic, more atheistic. Plain living and high thinking are discredited. High living and low thinking have it all to themselves."