On the other hand, who can help loving Given o' the Towers--all sweetness, beauty, and light? Only--isn't she really more of a twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself? Truly Victorian, however, are our "slow couple"--Miss Dickenson and Mr. Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards, quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing her to have a romance at this belated hour--her charms faded and gone. But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson's chances for happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were "good gossips," and would always have topics of interest in common. The Pendrift at the end--quite the most fascinating part of the book--tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time sixteen years old. "You know," says the girl, Cis,--who is new and naturally knows things, and can tell her parents,--"you know there is never the slightest reason for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and----" "Shut up, Mouse!" says her father. "What's that striking?"... The young lady says, "Well, I got it all out of a book." One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely's, "out of a book." The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here--that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men. M. H. P. The Economics of Social Insurance Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization--as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.