great economical law which had been working silently for the advantage of the operatives long before the Black Death had come to perplex and confuse men's minds and disturb their calculations. * * * * * * * Some of us remember when the science of geology was young--and we were young too--we remember how there was a certain romance and fascination about those fearless and richly imaginative theories which explained all the great changes in the crust of the earth by magnificent cataclysms, upheaving, exploding, overwhelming. The crack of doom meant something after all! What had been should be again. Old times had stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself inside out. Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we had to comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting with infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered ages, the great laws working themselves out without haste or any tendency to those picturesque paroxysms which have a certain charm for us in our nonage. When Sociology shall have risen to the dignity of a science--and that day may come--I think she too will be chary of resorting to the cataclysm theory; she and her handmaid History will hardly smile approval upon pretenders who are anxious to discover a single efficient cause for results which a million influences have combined to bring about, or who assume that every new phenomenon must disturb the equilibrium of the world. To take up with theories first in the hope, and sometimes with the determination, that facts shall be found to support them at last, is the vice--I had almost said the crime--of too many of those who now are styled historians. * * * * * * *