"Mr. Feldwick told me once that having, while a Catholic, read somewhere that St. Philip of Neri was so distressed at ecstasies that befell him in public that he tried the reading, before saying mass, of books on other than spiritual subjects, to divert the usual current of his thoughts and love, he, Mr. Feldwick, conceived this to be an authorization for him to read romances, speculative books, what not, by way of preparing himself to receive Holy Communion--after which history I never wondered that he had wandered out of the Father's House after the husks of spiritism. But it is very difficult to conceive him responsible. If reading qualified for heaven, how high up would he not be! But he seems rather born to accumulate all manner of heterogeneous information, and to echo the last 'Times' leader, the last clever paper in the 'Contemporary' or 'Fortnightly,' than to live a man's life of independent impression, expression, and will. I always hope that invincible ignorance and invincible prejudice may cover so much!" Anna Hedges and the porcelain widow being gone from London, I should see little of the remaining confederates were it not for "little Malaise." His mother, I am sure, has given me up as a possible disciple. I have never been able to get beyond one suffrage meeting; I couldn't somehow sign my name to a petition that women be eligible pupils for the study of law, and I horrified her greatly by enthusiastic support of a proposition that garroters, wife-beaters, and committers of ruffianly assaults upon women and children be publicly punished with the cat. "So inhumane!" she said. "Such an education of the brutal instincts in the spectators! Surely I did not think what such a sight would be for the young, how much more it would inculcate in them revenge than the gentler virtues. And society was responsible for these criminals. They were what her neglect and their conditions had made them. They should not be punished for what was a misfortune rather than a fault. Our business was to train, develop these people instead of behaving to them as they did to their unfortunate victims." I admitted a trembling hope that something might be done for the humanizing of the next generation of our lowest-down people, but persisted that fear and shame seemed to me the likeliest means to stop the sickening record of cowardly savagery that week after week comes to us from all over England--the crimes of adults past all restraints save forcible ones. One week I kept a list, gathered from two provincial papers and the "Telegraph." Besides a dozen or so of the ordinary cases where a man beats and kicks his wife, and policemen and no onlookers interfere _because_ she's the man's wife, one costermonger had flung his wife under a loaded van; one navvy had gouged out one of his wife's eyes, and threatened, in the police court, "to do for her yet"; another had pounded his wife to a horrible jelly with a flat-iron; another held