appendicitis, complaints of the brain, nerves, and stomach, we retort with the revelation of our warfare against disease, maintained with a devotion and a determination unparalleled in all the past. If we have Atheisms, here are all our Churches; if Social Maladies, our Social Reformers. That any future estimate should associate us even in thought with the dying days of Rome or the delirium of the medieval twilight seems to us a proposition obviously incredible. We have to remember, however, in such an estimate, that each generation stands in the roll-book of the centuries, not as it appears to itself, but as it appears to observers gazing, as from a distance, over a gulf of time. What records will survive, what evidence of existence, when all the pleasantness and amenity of little, comfortable, satisfied people have vanished over the limits of the world? Imagine, for example, the twentieth century interpreted to the twenty-fifth by its popular newspapers: to-day, more certainly than its popular drama, the abstract and chronicle of the time. England seen through the medium of its Sunday Press--the Press which to seven out of ten of its present inhabitants represents the sole picture they possess of the world outside their local lives--takes upon itself an appearance of violence and madness. Men and women knife each other in the dark. Children are foully butchered by unknown assailants. Suicides sprinkle every page:--now that a girl may die with another woman’s husband; now that a family may escape the hell of unemployment; now simply for weariness, because the whole effort of life has lost significance and crumbled into dust and ashes. The most insistent noise which reverberates through their pages is the clicking of the huge machine of English justice, as couples once married in affection are torn apart, or a long procession of murderers, thieves, absconding solicitors, fraudulent company promoters, are swept away into the cold silence of the penal prison. The supply seems never to run short. The various Courts are in continuous sitting, and yet never overtake the work so bountifully provided. Itinerant justices are even compelled to journey round the countryside, arresting their courses at the principal towns, in order more speedily to deal with the continuous parade of brutality, outrage, and unnatural crime. Is it possible, one can imagine the future historian demanding, that any one could have been in those days altogether sane? as he pictures the decent wayfarer stealing furtively through labyrinthine ways lest ruffians should spring upon him in the dark, clutching his difficult savings for fear that they should be snatched from him; with the terror of poverty yawning before him, against which no prudence can guard, in cities visibly given up to the dominion of lust and greed. All this is in England: with a Sunday Press, if liberally providing the salt and flavour which so many