uncertain and dishonest ways, making the State unfaithful and unfriendly to her own children and to other nations.' Like Plato, Ruskin would fain have returned to a much simpler social structure, when each country, and even to a great extent each village, was sufficient to itself. He did not show how such a return is possible without blowing up the great towns and their inhabitants; but he quite seriously regarded the Industrial Revolution as a gigantic blunder, and believed that England would never be healthy or happy until what his contemporaries called progress had been somehow swept away with all its works. How this was to be done he hardly considered. Like a true Platonist, he set before his countrymen, in glowing language, the beauty of the eternal Ideas or absolute Values, pleaded that there was no necessary connection between equality of production and equality of remuneration, and instituted various experiments, not all unsuccessful, in restoring the old handicrafts and the temper which inspired them. The problem of mending or ending industrialism, foolishly called capitalism, remains unsolved. Ruskin's own artistic life would have been impossible without the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it; and Morris' exquisite manufactures depended absolutely on the patronage of the capitalists whom he denounced. But the indignation which these Victorian social reformers exhibited had much justification, even after the worst abuses had been partially remedied. A mixture of rapid progress and extreme departmental inefficiency is one of the characteristics of the earlier part of the reign. Lord Justice Bowen has written an instructive sketch of the administration of the Law between 1837 and 1887. There were two systems of judicature, Law and Equity, with a different origin, different procedure, and different rules of right and wrong. One side of Westminster Hall gave judgments which the other side restrained the successful party from enforcing. The bewildered litigant was driven backwards and forwards. Merchants were hindered for months and years from recovering their dues. The fictitious adventures of John Doe and Richard Roe, the legal Gog and Magog, played an important part in trials to recover possession of land. Arrears accumulated year by year. The Court of Chancery was closed to the poor, and was a name of terror to the rich. It was said by a legal writer that 'no man can enter into a Chancery suit with any reasonable hope of being alive at its termination, if he has a determined adversary.' Bowen says that Dickens' pictures of the English law 'contain genuine history.' The horrors of the debtors' prison are well known, and nearly 4000 persons were sometimes arrested for debt in one year. In 1836, 494 persons were condemned to death, though only 34 were hanged. Public executions continued to 1867. If a farmer's gig knocked down a foot passenger in a lonely lane, two persons