lovingly of English law with their tongues in their cheeks. With respect to order, the much bepraised handmaiden of law, I do not think that the English get half so much of her as they think they do. She costs them a pretty penny. The up-keep of her police and magistrates and general myrmidons runs the Englishman into some noble taxation; yet where shall you find an English community that is orderly if even an infinitesimal section of it has made up its mind to be otherwise? In London at the present moment there are whole districts which it is not safe for a decently dressed person to traverse even in broad daylight; and these districts are not by any means slum districts, but parts of the metropolis in which lie important arteries of traffic. There is not a square mile of the metropolitan area which does not boast its organised gang of daylight robbers, purse-snatchers, watch-snatchers, and bullies who would beat a man insensible for fourpence, and whose great weapon is the belt. For convenience' sake these people have been grouped together under the term "Hooligan." The police--the far-famed London police--can do nothing with them. They admit that they are ineradicable and irrepressible. The magistrates and the newspapers keep on asseverating that "something must be done." That something apparently consists in the capture of a stray specimen of the tribe, who is forthwith given three months, with perhaps a little whipping thrown in. But hooliganism is a business that continues to flourish like the green bay-tree, and London is no safer to-day than it was in the time of the garotters. As the belt is the weapon of the London robber, and as Hooligan is his name, so we find in all the larger provincial towns gangs of scoundrels with special instruments and slang names of their own. In Lancashire and the Black Country kicking appears to be the favourite method of dealing with the order-loving citizen. In some of the northern towns the knuckle-duster, the sand-bag, and the loaded stick are requisitioned; and in all cases we are told the police are powerless. The fact is, that, on the whole, England cannot be reckoned an orderly country. The "hooligans" and their provincial imitators are just straws that show the way of the wind. When these persons say: "We will do such and such things in contravention of the law," there is practically nothing to stop them. In the same way, when a community determines to run amuck on an occasion of "national rejoicing" (such as the late Mafeking night), or because a strike is in progress, or a charity dinner has been badly served, or the vaccination laws are being enforced, it does so at its own sweet will, and order can be hanged. Once a week, too,--namely, on Saturday nights,--English order, like the free list at the theatres, is entirely suspended. Saturday night is the recognised and inviolable hour of the mob. Throughout the country your flaring English gin-palaces are at their flaringest; the