to organize, and sent back to the fireside and cradles. The republic swept away from them the last vestige of political power, and gave them nothing in the place of their lost social kingdom. They were forced to speak with hushed voices in hidden coteries. Of these there were always a few, but their prestige was gone. “There is one thing which is not French,” said Napoleon; “it is that a woman can do as she pleases.” And he proceeded straightway to give point to his theory by exiling the ablest woman in France and silencing all the rest. We are apt to take high moral ground on the frivolity of these women, and to pride ourselves on our superiority because we have such a serious way of amusing ourselves--so serious, indeed, that we forget there can be anything so questionable as frivolity about it. To be sure, the clubs are free from many of the faults of the salons. They do not put social conventions in the place of principles, nor substitute an esthetic conscience for an ethical one; nor do they drift at all in the direction of moral laxity. A movement of the intellect, too, which has its roots in the character is more likely to last than one that hangs on the suffrage of those it was meant to please and glorify. But we have the same mental unrest, the same thirst for excitement, the same feverish activity, the same indisposition to stay at home with our thoughts. A fever of the intellect may be preferable to a fever of the senses, and less harmful as an epidemic, but it tends equally toward exhaustion and disintegration. It is not so much a question of morals as a question of balance. The modern fashion, however, of doing everything, even to thinking, in masses, is not altogether due to a fever of the intellect, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Much of it is doubtless due to a genuine love of knowledge, much of it to a haunting desire to be doing something in the outside world, though the thing done be possibly not at all worth the doing; but a great deal of it is due to a sort of hyperæsthesia of the social sentiment, or the mental restlessness that betrays a lack of poise and depth in the character. We call it the spirit of the age--the innocent phantom which has to bear the burden of most of our sins, and is gathering so resistless a force that the strongest and wisest are swept along, despite themselves, in its accelerating course. But the spirit of the age is only the sum of individual forces. It needs only a sufficient number of wise counter-forces to temper and modify it. VI