The monasteries were so entirely the sole centres of civilization that numberless towns owe their origin to them. Scholars came for instruction, and remained for edification; grateful patients settled near the heaven‐ taught physicians who had cured them; peasants clustered round the abbeys for protection, and thus grew towns and villages without number in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Italy. Even America bears to‐ day, in the name of one of her oldest English settlements, and a hereditary representative of intellect—Boston—a memento of the old intellectual supremacy of monasticism. S. Botolph, an Anglo‐Saxon hermit, left his monastery, and settled in a hut on one of the plains of Lincolnshire. Scholars gathered around him, and, despite his remonstrances, set up other huts around his, and the Benedictine monastery of Icanhoe was founded. As time went on, a village sprang up and became a town, and was called Botolphstown. The name was afterwards corrupted and cut down into Boston, and from Boston it was that the founders of New England set sail on their journey to Holland, their first stage on their way to the New World. In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil‐wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor‐seller are the first _citizens_ of the new town. _Quies_ is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it “does not pay”; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called “cramming” than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money‐worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness. Versailles.