The belief belongs to what may be called the cataclysmal theory of progress, which improves the world by sudden starts, and clings so fondly to liquor-laws, and has profound faith in specific remedies for moral and political diseases. What commercial panics and great national misfortunes do not do, particular bits of legislation are sure to do. You put something in the Constitution, or forbid something, or lose a battle, or have a "shrinkage of values," or have a cholera season, and forthwith the community turns over a new leaf, and becomes moral, economical, and sober-minded. We doubt whether this theory will ever die out, however much philosophers may preach against it, or however often facts may refute it, because it gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of the deepest longings of the human heart--the desire which each man feels to have a great deal of history crowded into his own little day. None of us can bear to quit the scene without witnessing the solution of the problems by which his own life has been vexed or over which he has long labored. Indeed a great many men would find it impossible to work with any zeal to bring about results which would probably not be witnessed until they had been centuries in the tomb. We accordingly find that the most eager reformers are apt to be those who look for the triumph of virtue by the close of the current year. Of all dreams of eager reformers, however, there is probably none more substantial than that which looks for a restoration of that vague thing called "simplicity of manners." Simplicity and economy are, of course, relative terms. The luxurious gentleman in the fourteenth century lived in a way which the well-to-do artisan in our own time would not tolerate; and when we undertake to carry people back to ancient ways of living we find that there is hardly a point short of barbarism at which we can consistently stop. A country in which money is easily made and abounds, will be one in which money will always be freely spent, and in which personal comfort and even display will occupy men's and women's thoughts a great deal. We can no more prevent this than we can prevent the growth of wealth itself; and our duty is, instead of wasting our breath in denouncing extravagance, or hailing panics as purging fires, to do what in us lies to give rich people more taste, more conscience, more sense of responsibility for curable ills, and a keener relish of the higher forms of pleasure. Extravagance--or, in other words, the waste of money on sensual enjoyment, the production of hideous furniture or jewelry, or of barbarous display--has to be checked not by the preaching of poor people, but by the rich man's own superiority to these things, and his own repugnance for them. This repugnance can only be inspired by education, whether that of school and college, or that of a refined and cultivated social atmosphere. Much would be done in this direction if public opinion