emptiness and vanity exhibit but the same judgment as is revealed to the discerning mind through every passing hour. And no one can seriously diagnose the condition of the “Suburbans” to-day without seriously considering also the influences of this chosen literature. There is nothing obscene about it, and little that is morally reprehensible. But it is mean and tawdry and debased, representing a tawdry and dusty world. You can see it in illustration. Photographs of the _Englishman’s Home_, showing the products of spectacular sport and silly gambling, falling amid their falling houses, face the picture of a negro on a raised platform pummelling an American, with tier upon tier of white, vacant faces--the Australian spectators--gazing with fierce approval. The reader passes--in such publications--from one frivolity to another. Now it is a woman adventurer on the music-hall stage, now the principal characters in some “sensational” divorce case, now a serial story in which the “bounder” expands himself, and is triumphant in an unreal universe. In the midst of all comes an appeal which, if it were to excite even a limited response, would sweep all this nonsense away, and land in bankruptcy the vast apparatus of newspapers which exploit and encourage the hunger of the suburban crowd. The work of corruption--the word is not too violent--in the matter of frivolous gambling competitions, is a systematic whole, beginning with the papers designed for boys and children. From absorption in these, with occasional rewards of five or ten shillings, a box of paints, or a bicycle, the growing youth passes to the “Limerick,” the picture puzzle, and the missing-word competition. At the end this newspaper world becomes--to its victims--an epitome and mirror of the whole world. Divorced from the ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the open air, absorbed for the bulk of his day in crowded offices adding sums or writing letters, each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilisation, he comes to see no other universe than this--the rejoicing over hired sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the music hall and the Yellow newspaper. Having attained so dolorous a consummation, perhaps the best that can be hoped for him is the advent of that friendly bullet which will terminate his inglorious life. Were this accomplished, the next day his own newspapers, the high priests of his religion, will rejoice over his death, and shamelessly gird at him for being what he is--the faithfullest of worshippers at their shrine.