Of course I know that Rousseau’s _Confessions_, Amiel’s _Journal_ and Marie Bashkirtseff’s _Diary_ have all been declared carefully worked out artifices. And admitting all the wonderful things that scheming man can perform, I still maintain that there are a few things that life and nature will continue to work out in the old, old way. I appeal to those who have tried both plans, whether it is not easier to tell the truth than to concoct a lie. And I assiduously maintain that if the case is to be tried by a jury of great men, that the shocking facts will serve the end far better than sugared half-truth. When Richard Le Gallienne tells us of the birth of his baby and for weeks before how White Soul was sure she should die; and Marie Bashkirtseff makes painstaking note of the size of her hips and the development of her bust; and poor Amiel bewails the fate of eating breakfast facing an empty chair; and Rousseau explains the delicate sensations and smells that swept over him on opening his wardrobe and finding smocks and petticoats hanging in careless negligence amid his man’s clothes; and all those other pathetic, foolish, charming, irrelevant bits of prattle, one is convinced of the author’s honesty. No thorough-going literary man, hot for success, would leave such stuff in; he would as soon think of using a flesh brush on the public street; these are his own private affairs—his good sense would have forbade. A good lie for its own sake is ever pleasing to honest men, but a patched up record never. And when such small men as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell can write immortal books, the moral for the rest of us is that a little honesty is not a dangerous thing. And so I swing back to the place of beginning and say that while even a sham confession may be interesting to hoi polloi, yet to secure an endorsement from such minds as that of Emerson, George Eliot and Walt Whitman the confession must be genuine. ELBERT HUBBARD. THE SOCIAL SPOTTER. “Why don’t the young folks marry?” continues, in the intervals of other jeremiad problems, to puzzle the good people who call themselves publicists, having a brevet authority to set everything right in the world. It is assumed that if the young people would only marry up to the full proportion, most of the ills that afflict an over-civilized and over-sensitized society would cure themselves. The young people would have something else to do besides “dabbling in the fount of fictive tears” and inventing new wants. The old ones would suffice, when multiplied in kind after the usual fashion.