is quite compatible with the latter. Nor is there any ground for the idea that the extension of the activities of public bodies must necessarily result in accelerating the approach of the state of economic and moral inertia described by those who anticipate it as "Pauperism." If that were the case, all civilised communities would, indeed, have been hastening to destruction from a time "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." For our fathers had no elementary education, our grandfathers no municipal water, and few lamp-posts; while our great-grandfathers enjoyed the independence derived from the possession of relatively few roads, and those of a character sufficiently bad to offer the most powerful incentives to the energy and self-reliance of the pedestrian. On this theory the citizen of Manchester would be more pauperised than the citizen of London; both would be seriously pauperised compared with the peasant of Connemara; while the wretched inhabitants of German municipalities would be wallowing in a perfect quagmire of perpetual pauperism. Why indeed should one stop here? There have been periods in history in which not only these functions, but the organisation of justice and the equipment of military forces have been left to the bracing activities of private individuals; and an enquiry into the decline and fall of individual independence would, if logically pursued, lead us into dim regions of history far anterior to the Norman Conquest. The origins of modern pauperism, like the origins of modern liberty, are to be sought among "the primeval forests of Germany!"