"Home! Sweet Home!" Yes. (I am quoting now from my friend, Henry Scott Holland.) That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we have never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their languages by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest British Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn with all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old Home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were at home in the old familiar places, with father and mother in the healthy gladness of their childhood. Ah! "Home! Sweet Home! There's no place like Home." That is what we all repeat, and all believe, and cheer to the echo. And, behind all our British complacency about it, nobody would deny the vital truth that there is in this belief of ours. Whatever tends to make the Home beautiful, attractive, romantic--to associate it with the ideas of pure pleasure and high duty--to connect it not only with all that was happiest but also with all that was best in early years--whatever fulfils these purposes purifies the fountains of national life. A home, to be perfectly a home, should "incorporate tradition, and prolong the reign of the dead." It should animate those who dwell in it to virtue and beneficence by reminding them of what others did, who went before them in the same place and lived amid the same surroundings. XLVII HOSPITALITY