amusement; and the life of the new race which will be evolved out of these strenuous gnomes who labour in the heart of the city congestions. Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and future is still doubtful. Lady Bell, in her study of such life in a prosperous northern centre, goes near to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city “proletariat” in its present uncertain state. It is a town erected almost in two nights and a day by the demands of the new iron manufacture. Its hundred thousand population are practically all workers. It exists solely for the purpose of translating human energy into material values. Its inhabitants have been sucked in like the draught in its own blast furnaces: from the neighbouring countryside, from the neighbouring townships, from Scotland and Ireland, and places far afield. Round the furnaces there have rapidly heaped together mazes of little two-storeyed cottages. The furnaces, the grey streets, a few public buildings, all set in a background of greyness, in a devastated landscape, under a grey sky--that is the proletarian city. Lady Bell set herself (in her own happy phrase) to reveal what the Iron Trade, which people outside “know but by name, perhaps, as a huge measuring gauge of the national prosperity, is in reality, when translated into terms of human beings.” She takes her readers through the great furnaces and down into the interiors of the little houses. She exhibits the habits, manners, pleasures, and pains of the people. She shows in one chapter the literature patronised by this population; in another the people at work; in another the people at play. Again, she will describe the lives of the children, the lives of the wife and mother, the influences of sickness, accident, or old age. The slave populations who built Babylon, or upon which the Athenian oligarchy which called itself a Democracy essayed philosophy and beauty, remain to-day more as a myth than as a memory. The poverty populations, upon which are built to-day England’s unparalleled accumulation, will stand in the future, with at least a corner of their lives lifted. Such a corner will interpret to a less harassed age a life once peopling these waste places, which will then be but ruins and a memory.