All this but confirms the fact that though age succeeds age, human nature remains unchanged, and the world wags on much in the old way. “A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet” is equally true to-day as it was in wise old Solomon’s time, and as it will be always. In certain ways improvements take place, manners and customs change along with changing circumstances, but deep down “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” and self is ever uppermost. Education advances and with it general knowledge increases, but this only gives a more or less thin veneer; the hearts and lives of men remain the same, they still work for self and ill-gotten gains, though as they rise in station and become more ‘educated,’ they become all the more dangerous, as they can obtain their spoils more quietly and insidiously. King Solomon seems to have had a varied experience which gave him an intimate knowledge of most things, and he was never more correct than when he said, “He that giveth to the rich shall surely come to want.” And not from his own fault, but that the rich, having obtained all the poor man has to give, cannot bear to think he may possibly say, with apparent truth, that he has helped them, and given them such and such things, so they persecute him who befriended them and bring him to such a pass, that if ever he should be so indiscreet as to hint at any obligation on their part, he would but draw to himself the ridicule and unbelief of his hearers, and from the rich man, the good-humoured, patronising smile of light amusement, as though the statement were too ridiculously funny to be other than a joke; for is it within the bounds of possibility to think that the mouse was believed when it returned to its nest, and told to its loving, trusting friends the story of how it alone had set free the mighty lion. Although everything is now in the hands of the state, and there is little need to be rich when there can be no open oppression, which is one of the chief advantages accruing from riches, there are still the old faults and vanities exposed by Solomon underlying every phase and walk of life. The poorer serve the wealthy in the hope of being helped to riches, losing sight of the fact that they would then be in little better position, for in the semi-commonwealth of the present day the rich man is, morally, no more wealthy than the poor, as he must spend all his riches according to his position. All the same, beautiful as is the present state of things in theory, in actual practice the same envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness existing thousands of years ago, still flourish in ghastly virility. The workmen employed on the _Regina_ were, one after another, left by the curious to go their own way totally disregarded, and they could not understand it, for it never entered their guileless brains that they had been opened like oysters and, like the empty shells, flung aside.