The solution of the question is that the people must not only govern: it must be fit to govern. To corrupt it with dollars, to drowse it with drink, is only to put off the inevitable day. It were far wiser to help it to educate itself for its functions. For, if the revolutionary economic ideas that are in the air are false, they will destroy themselves. And if they are true, they have got to be realised, and will get themselves realised. No amount of corruption will save society in the long run. Meantime, either let universal suffrage operate honestly, or let it be suspended or abolished. Let even those States which have enfranchised the black man, and which now, in accordance with the deep Machiavellian principle, brazenly revealed by our American, dishonestly render his vote nugatory by a reliable inaccuracy in the counting, withdraw their spurious Christianity. A double standard of morals subtly infects the whole core of the nation. Corruption cannot be localised; it creeps and spreads through all departments of thought and action. To give with the right hand, and take away with the left in exchange for a few dollars, is a manoeuvre unworthy of a great nation. The transaction is fair; let it be above board, let it be lifted into the plane of ethics. To found society upon a farce is to lower those ideals by which, as much as by bread, a nation lives. [Sidenote: The Modern War Farce] The horrors of war seem to have reached the vanishing point in our latest African campaign. The smallness of the English losses is appalling. I do not see the fun of fighting (_i.e._, of paying taxes) if all the spice and relish is to be taken out of the results. I want more blood for my money--hecatombs of corpses. Two men killed in a whole battle? Ridiculous! If I cannot have my war at my own doors, and hear the bands and the cannon I have paid for, I must at least have sensational battle-fields--Actiums and Waterloos and Marengos. What is the use of war if it does not even serve to reduce our surplus population? Soldiering was never so healthy an occupation as to-day; one fights only a few days a year at the utmost, and if the pay is poor, so is that of the scavenger and the engine-driver and the miner, and everybody else who does the dirty work of civilisation, and does it, too, without pomp and circumstance and brass bands and laureates. [Sidenote: Fireworks]