It is curious to find this accusation driven home by just that variety of newspapers which has most completely exploited the nascent hunger of the sedentary boyhood of these classes for the excitements of gambling and adventure. The cheap and sensational Press found here a field ripe for its energies. It attained an immense commercial success from the provision of the stuff which this population demanded. Now the cleverest of its promoters are beginning to be a little alarmed at the results of its handiwork, and to eye with foreboding or with disgust the youth that has been moulded by its ideals. Under the circumstances, resentment at such scolding would appear not unnatural. In a popular play, designed to encourage or to ridicule Volunteering, the creature of this “Yellow Press” was recently revealed in all his vacuous vulgarity; and the “Yellow Press” itself turned in anger to assail its own darling and docile offspring. The retort, indeed, could be final and complete. “We have been nourished,” these could say, “in this unreal world of impudence, nonsense, vicarious sport and gambling. We began with our boys’ papers and guessing competitions. We were insensibly led on to efforts after a pound a week for life by estimating the money in the Bank of England on a certain day, or amassing gain in hundreds of pounds for guessing missing words or the last line of ‘Limericks.’ On the Sabbath, committed by our parents to some such literature as the Sunday Syndicated Press, we found there the same cheery game, smeared with a grease of piety; rewards and prizes here for guessing anagrams on Bible cities, or acrostics representing Kings and Queens of Israel. We were led on to talk and read and chatter about ‘sport,’ in biography of various football heroes, in descriptive reports of football matches, ever deepening in imbecility, until they rivalled the language of the lunatic asylum; stuff that uses its own phraseology, about ‘netting the muddied orange’ and ‘the ubiquitous spheroid,’ and ‘impelling the pill between the uprights.’ Our thoughts and growing interest were sedulously directed away from consideration of any rational or serious universe. We were exhorted to demonstrate patriotism by ‘mafficking,’ and informed that when we fell into the fountain at Trafalgar Square and subsequently embraced a policeman, we were performing a virtuous action. Then we are denounced because this universe of foolishness and frivolity has rendered us utterly unfit to face real things. Our slight world crumbles before such a challenge, as the daylight judges and condemns the scene of a night’s orgie.” “This short, slender, pale man,” says M. Hanotaux of Taine in 1870, “munching his throat lozenges, with squinting grey eyes behind his thick glasses, had at last seen things which astonished him--dying men, flowing blood, burning cities.” Dying men, flowing blood, and burning cities intruded suddenly into a world which is fashioned out of such