a critical or logical treatment of the subjects deserving reflection more irksome to us in the full sunlight of to-day than it was to those whom we call our benighted ancestors. This is only one form of that supersession of the practice of thinking by the vice commonly called “the reading habit” which is profoundly affecting the intellectual life of our time. Yet as steady thinking was never really common even among the educated, the difference from earlier days is not so correctly described by saying that people think less than formerly, as by noting that while people read more, and while far more people read, the ratio of thinking to reading does not increase either in the individual or in the mass, and may possibly be decreasing. Intelligence and independence of thought have not grown in proportion to the diffusion of knowledge. The number of persons who both read and vote is in England and France more than twenty times as great as it was seventy years ago. The percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage. The persons who constitute that percentage are, and must for the reasons already given continue for some time to be, only a fraction, in some countries a small fraction, of the voting population. But the fraction might be made much larger than it is. The citizens who stand above their fellows in knowledge and mental power ought to set an example, not only by themselves thinking more and thinking harder about public affairs than most of them do, but also by exerting themselves to stimulate and aid their less instructed or more listless neighbours. The voter, it is said, should be independent. Yes. But independence does not mean isolation. He must not commit his personal responsibility to the keeping of another. Yes. But personal responsibility does not mean the vain conceit of knowledge and judgment where knowledge is wanting and judgment is untrained.