fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment, or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no “stake in the country,” and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects--on his decease--are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but an infinitesimal proportion of its capital. In such surroundings and despite such drawbacks, there labours a hardy race of men, whose efforts, in skill, perseverance, and indefatigable industry, have earned them supremacy in the markets of the world. It is an industrial order in transition, evidently being swept forward by forces beyond individual control, to a condition in the future which would be almost inconceivable to the present. It is a population of weekly wage-earners which has struggled out of servitude into independence, but which still remains goaded into activity by fear--not of the lash of the overseer, but of the grim and implacable forces of hunger and cold. Slavery, Serfdom, Poverty: these, says the author of the _Nemesis of Nations_, form three stages in the changing condition of the social basis of civilisation. “Poverty” is the foundation of the present industrial order. It is a poverty which is removed, for the most part, from actual lack of physical necessities, though it is always never far distant from such a privation. It is rather “industrialism”--the “proletariat”--a state of human affairs for which we have in English no defining title. In working it provides others with leisure, and the complex and refining influences which leisure can bring. It works in the city aggregations, always twisting threads, or clanging machinery, or stoking effectual fires. Its products post o’er land and ocean without rest--swinging steel bridges over the rivers of East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics. What is the meaning of it all? What is the end of it all? We cannot tell the meaning outside; the future of a world when the “iron age” has become triumphant, and man, a midget, controlling by his intelligence huge and ponderable forces, will be lost in the labyrinths of his enormous machines. Certain forms of American activity on the shores of Lake Michigan, or in the devastated North-East of Pennsylvania, provide sufficient forecast of such a future. Nor can we tell the meaning (as it were) inside: in the lives of those two differentiated classes which the modern industrial life is daily creating; the life of those who enjoy, on the one hand, in Pleasure Cities, in all branches of eager and sometimes morbid