* * * * * In our own day the bounds of imagination are undoubtedly widening. Means of communication, the press, the camera, the decadence of obsolete dogmas, making room for the simple daily truths of morality which have “the dignity of dateless age” and are too hard for the teeth of time--these account in large measure for the fact that the happier half of the world is at last beginning to realise how the other half lives. There is perhaps more divine discontent with things as they are than ever heretofore: this being due, as has been suggested, perhaps as much to the modern aids of imagination as to any inherent increase of sympathy. Science, too, in the form of sociology and economics, adds warrant to the demand for some radical reform of the conditions of life. It teaches that all forms of life are interdependent; that society is thus an organism in more than merely loose analogy; that the classes pay abundantly for the state of the masses: whilst medicine teaches that the tuberculosis, for instance, which slays so many members of the middle and upper classes, is bred by and in the overcrowding of the lower classes, this and many other diseases promising to resist all measures less radical than the abolition of half our current social practice. Hence it is that we hear so much of social reform; and the promises of representatives of many political -isms jostle one another at the gates of our ears. The Anarchist at one extreme, and the Collectivist at the other, with the Individualist and the Socialist somewhere between, offer their panaceas. To me, I confess, they seem little better than the scholastic metaphysicians of old days, like them mistaking words for things, incapable of understanding each other, evading precise definition and using terms which never mean the same thing twice as missiles and weapons of abuse: and, above all, mistaking means for ends.