not have been spoken in a drawing-room, and in spite of the rigorous exclusion of tobacco, there was no lack of young men. I question whether it would be possible to see the like in any exclusive gathering, either of the classes or the masses. The club is as prosperous financially, I am glad to hear, as it is socially, having a reserve fund of some £600, while the subscriptions are very moderate. No doubt the political and industrial atmosphere is dark with heavy clouds both’ at home and abroad; but I do begin to think that this white lining of a truer and fuller blending of our people than has ever been known before in England, or anywhere else, is going to do more than compensate for whatever troubles may be in store for us from wars or other convulsions, and that we shall be in time to meet them as a united people. Then let us pray that come it may-- As come it will for a’ that-- That man to man, the warld o’er, Shall brithers be for a’ that. The “Victoria,” New Cut. Of all the healthy signs of real social progress in this remarkable age, I know of none more striking, or, I will add, more thankworthy in a small way, than the contrast of the present condition of the big People’s Theatre in Southwark with that which middle-aged men can remember. Probably many of my readers who in the fifties and sixties held it to be part of the whole duty of man to attend the University boat-race at Putney, or the Oxford and Cambridge match at Lord’s, will be able to call up in their memories the “Vic.” of those days. For my own part, I always felt that the big costermonger’s theatre suffered unfairly in reputation--as many folk and places before it have done--for the casual notice of a man of genius. “Give us the Charter,” Charles Kingsley makes his tailor-hero exclaim in 1848, “and we’ll send workmen into Parliament who shall find out whether something better can’t be put in the way of the boys and girls in London who live by theft and prostitution, than the tender mercies of the Victoria.” I do not pretend to anything more than a casual acquaintance with the “Vic.” in those days; but my memory would not bear out Parson Lot in denouncing it as “a licensed pit of darkness.”, That description would far better designate the Cider Cellars, the Coal Hole, and other fashionable resorts on the north side of the Thames, in which a working man’s fustian jacket and corduroys were never seen. I should say that one evening spent at Evans’s in those days, or at the mock Court (the judge and jury) presided over by Baron Nicholson, as that rotund old cynic was called, would have done any youngster far more harm than half a dozen at the “Vic.” At the one you might sit smoking cigars and drinking champagne, if you were fool enough, and hear everything that was sacred and decent slily or openly ridiculed and travestied, in the company of M.P.’s, barristers, and others, all well-dressed people.