If we could remember half the wise saws and moral jingles that nurse and granny taught us in the nursery and not forget to act upon them in after life, what sensible citizens we should be! Some day there will be cinematograph lectures to the young people just leaving the elementary schools, exhibiting not only the real spider, but his many human prototypes, who are lying in wait for the working-class man and woman at every corner of their career. A nature lesson an the smaller tally-man would be far more practical in a city school than a botany lecture on the lesser celandine. Nevertheless, I doubt if it will do much good when it comes about. Human beings are naturally divided into spiders and flies, and of the two the latter really have the best of it. There is not much fun to be had out of a cramped life in a dingy web counting your gains, even if a white waistcoat and a gold chain conceal your evil conscience. At least the fly buzzes round a bit and thinks he is seeing life before he biffs into the web. And no one need care much about the gay young sportsman bachelor variety--except perhaps his sweetheart, and she has a lucky escape, poor thing! But the silly old married fly who gets caught in the web and leaves a young wife and family starving at home, or, worse still, the house-mother fly who rushes into the web just to look at the spider's latest fashions which she knows her old bluebottle cannot afford--these are sad cases. Thomas Carlyle was mightily pleased with himself, I doubt not, when he hit upon that phrase describing his fellow citizens as "The twenty-seven millions, mostly fools." Those last two words are constantly in the mouth of the odd fool in reference to the 26,999,999 other fellows. Still a long life in the County Court compels me to the conclusion that the fool is not extinct; he is, indeed, but too prevalent. Furthermore, the old world saying, "that a fool and his money are soon parted," is, like many another old proverb, a true saying. These being the facts, why does the law side with the inappropriate knave who preys upon the harmless necessary fool? Scientific sociologists will no doubt tell me that if the law were to protect the fool the effect would be to increase and multiply the breed of fools, whereby the human race would become a bigger fool race than already it is. To which my reply would be that the law as it now stands makes the trade of knavery such a lucrative one that the business of it is fast becoming overcrowded, and the best hope of the extinction of the knave seems to lie in the fact that he will soon have to work nearly as hard for his living as the honest man.