Those who embark in huge adventures must, from the necessity of the case, be urged into competition, and be driven to the strictest exercise of their money-getting wits. Although a benefactor in many cases, yet trade, pushed too far, is enervating to the manliness of a nation, and cruel to the young and the weak. But no social revolution can obviate this: wise political measures, undertaken under the guidance of those who know the necessities of the working classes and the demands of trade, should be adopted and passed; not, indeed, to restrict the freedom of the trader, but to do away with the license which the dazzling prospective of a large fortune too often leads him into. And herein we see the advantage of an aristocracy, which depends upon its territorial grandeur, and upon the antiquity of its birth and the achievements of its ancestors. A millionaire may have achieved his coveted fortune, but he cannot achieve the long list of ancestors, and the free and lofty mind which an absence from all sordid motives of gain can give. The noble, the priest, and the scholar, leaven the mass, whilst they themselves are improved, and, in their turn, taught. Had we no higher orders amongst us, and none to quench the maddening thirst for gold, we should probably lose half our fine feelings, our sympathy and our love for our fellow-man, and degenerate into a sickly crew of masters and work-people, with every kind of chicanery in the upper to grind the lower, and the lower to cheat the upper half of society.

The position and the number of our criminal classes may be reckoned as amongst the barbarities of peace. In the

model states of Plato, Sir Thomas More, and other social reformers, criminals appear only upon paper, and are easily dealt with. Many very excellent people, who dream of a rose-coloured world in which dwell none but good people, are almost pathetically sorry for criminals, and talk as if society was banded against the honest man, and that he was systematically driven into crime. Some foolish novelists have taken up this cuckoo cry; and at the present moment about twenty different cheap novels are issued, in which such men (or rather ruffian brutes) as Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, Blueskin, and others, are painted as heroes, and bold, dashing fellows, full of generosity and high feeling. There can be no more doubt about the rain bringing up a crop of turnips, or a field of wheat, than there is about such books producing a crop of young thieves. In another set of books -for these dirty and licentious fictions proceed only from one or two presses-the fallen and the vicious of the other sex are made heroines. Now, surely, without at all interfering with the political liberty of the press, the writers, publishers, and illustrators of such fictions, or of periodicals containing such fictions, should be prosecuted.

We do not wish to bring back the hard reign of the Puritans. We know well enough that undue severity always rebounds into license; but surely a man who steals from the heart of a boy honesty, and from that of a girl chastity of thought and feeling, and who by his writings leads them to the brink of moral destruction, should be reached by the arm of the law. It is of little use building reformatories, if we

allow the crop of young thieves and rascals who fill them to be perpetually cultivated too. The satires of Swift are terribly scathing, and bitterly and blackly does he paint and describe the state of mankind; but he never could say anything half bitter enough against creatures who quietly allow their young to be mistaught, untaught, misled, and corrupted, and who then complain about the large crop of criminals, and of the sad effects and terrible cost of crime.

GENTLE WORDS.

N some of those wise verses which the Laureate wrote when a very young man, a little more than twenty, indeed, he dared to give advice to a statesman, and it is such advice as statesmen

from age to age may listen to :

"Watch what main currents draw the years;

Cut Prejudice against the grain;

But gentle words are always gain.

Regard the weakness of thy peers."

And if we could but remember that line in italics always to act on it, our passage when out in the world would be considerably smoothed. A young man, however, can hardly look upon his peers and regard their weakness in the quiet, calm, superior way Tennyson tells him to do; and his generally impulsive nature drives him to regard the oldsters amongst whom he moves as earnest, good men, who “ mean well," and not only do that, but think fairly too. Hence he flies into a rage at the careless way in which people speak of important matters; and, not regarding the weakness of his

peers, addresses them with hot words, like Achilles when he This is a sad mistake: when he has done so

scolds Nestor.

he is sorry for it. He had better have treated "his peers" as born fools, for to fools all wise men are tender.

Perhaps, to a sensible man, the most painful feelings of being in the wrong box-a box which almost all of us at one time or another get into-are occasioned by his having been betrayed into using hard words. There is even in that deep a deeper still, and that is, when he has written hard wordswords which he would give all the world, if he had it, to recall, but which remain spoken, or worse, written in black and white.

Fielding, in his wonderful book, wonderful because of its deep insight into human nature, makes a husband and wife, no less than the great Jonathan and his spouse, quarrel, and then very affectionately make it up. This is every-day life, and all very well; but there is a hard word which sticks between them, and the gentleman is ashamed of having used it, and the lady of having endured it. So this comes continually up; it rises like Banquo's ghost, not in agony, but in a very unpleasant fashion. "Why, Mr. Wild,” says the wife, 66 why did you say so-and-so ?" and Mr. Wild, flinging himself out of the room in a fury, makes the quarrel perpetual.

An ill-tempered letter, once sent, will embitter a lifetime. We once saw an old gentleman, with a wise, fine head, calm face, and most benevolent look, but evidently thin-skinned and irascible, beg of a postmaster to return him a letter which he had dropped into the box. To do so, as everybody