suburban England. But where this “struggle to live” has passed into a “struggle to attain,” the verdict is less enthusiastic. For that struggle to attain too often means absorption in ignoble standards, and an existence coming more and more to occupy a world of “make-believe.” When the family is in a position of assured comfort or of affluence, the houses ample stuccoed or pseudo-Georgian edifices, and the breadwinners in posts of established security in the commercial or financial houses of the city, the atmosphere often becomes stifling and difficult. It may be that such a condition is in itself unsuitable to mankind in the life of so uncertain and transitory a world: that existence which is occupied with sedentary labour in an artificially constructed aggregation of human beings herded in the same narrow grooves, is an existence of necessity carrying with it the seeds of futility and decay. Certainly the two chief accusations against the product of such an existence would be of an imperfect standard of value about the things which exist, and of a lack of demand for the existence of things at present unattained. It is a wrong estimate of the significance--of rank, of birth, of wealth, of various material accumulations--which produces the more desolating ingredients of suburban life. Listen to the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed for the suburban mind; you will often find endless chatter about the King, the Court, and the doings of a designated “Society”; personal paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic, which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. This is the explanation of the so-called “snobbery” of the suburbs. Here is curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,--for the suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation’s energy,--but energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless activities; “random and meaningless sociabilities” which neither hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel’s mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the great causes of the world.