and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by no means free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Eastern has not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; the children of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed. (Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the P.L.M. goes much further than these; and I have always held that the one solid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability that its Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after all their iniquities. I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked, all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head, that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesque architecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting to itself all the idle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the unworthy, from every corner of Europe and America. But Monte Carlo didn't make them; it only gathers to its bosom its own chosen children from the places where they are produced--from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St. Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk, begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles with gold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of land-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of all the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace in the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the very best society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. The dukes and the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. The idlest, the cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successful blood-suckers. But to find fault with them only for trying to win one another's ill-gotten gold at a fair and open game of _trente-et-quarante_, with the odds against them, and then to say nothing about the way they came by it, is to make a needless fuss about a trifle of detail, while overlooking the weightiest moral problems of humanity. Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path of his moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should lead him straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little credit either for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at the root of the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on London ground-rents. XVIII. _THE CELTIC FRINGE._ We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.