Some of the political friends insist dolefully, a few gleefully, that if certain candidates, laws, economic schemes, or what not, fail of speedy adoption we shall have a revolution. We are even told that the scenes of the French Revolution will be enacted here. We don't believe it for a moment. At any rate, not if Dickens painted a true picture in _A Tale of Two Cities_ because none of the radical ladies of our acquaintance could possibly perform the required knitting. * * * "For no man can be free," writes the author of _The Book of Marjorie_, "unless he despises pain and heat and cold and fatigue, unless those things mean no more to him than the patter of rain outside his room, unless he does succeed in keeping them so outside himself that they never enter at all into the calculations of the thinking part of him. If we can bring up our child like this he will have nothing to fear, because he will know that no real hurt can be done to him except by himself." And in another portion of the book we read, "I should hate for my son to be afraid, because there are so many things that hinder him and check him that he must take into consideration." But we are not at all sure that fear is to be set aside as one of the destructive emotions of mankind. All our fearless ancestors were eaten by ichthyosauri and other ferocious and primitive monsters. Indeed, there would be more ichthyosauri than men in the world to-day if certain of our progenitors had not learned that it is an exceedingly healthful thing at times to run for dear life. Of course, we admit that some fears are ignoble. We shall make no attempt, for instance, to justify our abiding distrust of cows, but the fact remains that a little decent fear is part of the proper portion of man. Man is a weak and pitiful dweller in a violent world and nothing has done so much to sharpen his wits as fear. Probably he found fire because he feared the dark. Surely he instituted law through distrust of his fellows. And fear must have been the first prompting toward religion. Then, too, it seems more than likely that there would never have been a literature but for fear. Primitive peoples liked to hear the stories of great heroes who did mighty deeds because such things served to cheer and inspirit them. Fear of his own frailties made man seek wisdom. To wish a child to grow up without fear is almost to wish him to be devoid of imagination. And more than that, if there was no such thing as fear courage would be without meaning and significance.