Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition. It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands. Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family, which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and one must admit, sundry partial set backs.