less than now; but this theory of the duty owing to the worker is as yet foolishness and a stumbling-block, and we see no signs of any very near change.

If there was any relation in which we should expect to find the sentiment of duty most powerfully developed, it would be in that of parents towards their children. But here again that terrible mildew of selfishness has crept over the blossom and the fruit. Few parents care to make the lives of their children really beautiful and good for themselves and their future; most regard their offspring as mere playthings for the first years, and so much plastic material after, given into their hands for their own pleasure only. Not whether the system of upbringing is best for the child but whether it is most convenient for themselves-that is the chief thought, confessed or concealed, of the mass of parents. If they are poor they keep their little ones from school to help in the work of life while too young to bear the strain; if they are rich they bring them up at home, with a perfunctory kind of education, that they may make the house lively. Or they send them to school years too early, and while still needing nursery care, because they are bored by them at home. A boy may have a passionate desire for art, for music, for specialized work of any kind, but his desire is ignored, put aside as impracticable, not because it is impracticable but because the parents have wishes with which the best future of their son has nothing to do. The son belongs to them, not to himself; and a born sailor chained to a desk, an artist sent to count notes at a bank, a clergyman whose métier was in the barrack-yard and the paradeground, are things of every day occurrence. For lives that have been wisely ordered, we may count double the number of those which have been wrecked by the arbitrariness of parental direction, simply because that direction has not been founded on a sense of duty to the child, but on self-will. We may say what we like about the strength of instincts, but we cannot forget that all instincts have their contradictory "doubles," and that self-love and self-will are more likely to lead astray than parental affection-without an awakened principle of duty-is likely to lead straight.

How few too, care to educate with real liberality. If we are sane, we must all confess to ourselves that we have prejudices-" imperfect sympathies" in the negative-which we cannot defend. We hold them as plus fort que moi probably; but we confess that we cannot subdue them, not maintain that we do not possess them. Yet, if we hold also the doctrine of duty we will not teach them to our children. But most of us being essentially undutiful, do teach them and with vigour. One man forbids his children to learn French because he dislikes the Emperor or Gambetta, or because he thinks Lamartine sickly, or Balzac immoral. Another forbids them to learn German because he fears Bismarck, dislikes the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, and has a vague dread of neologism. Italian is tabooed to one because the Italian women are not as the English and speak of natural things without blushing; and Spanish is anathema

to the other, because the Spaniards are cruel to animals and not trustworthy as narrators. Whether such index expurgatorius is doing the best kind of duty by the children involved, is not the question. It is so much sacrifice to prejudice; and prejudice is a god that demands costly sacrifices. We can see the same kind of folly in our neighbours, but we do not care to see it in ourselves; that old story of the mote and the beam holding as good now as it did in the days of Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate. It may be A's duty to suppress his special prejudices, but it is not mine. The French are a fine gallant people, their literature is rich, and their language will take you all over Europe; of course the little A's ought to learn it; but German is not necessary. The Germans smoke and drink beer, and their theological press is accursed. Take any example we like-and this is of course the merest indication, by no means meant as an absolute detail the result is always the same :-Yours is prejudice, but mine is a righteous indignation, and I am justified in bearing testimony through my children's intellectual loss.

Of landlords to tenants there are many who are up to high-water mark, as society has ruled it; but of those who go beyond, we can affirm but little! Rent is the landlord's alpha of self-reporting duty, and his omega of what duty others owe to him. The richest man will not give a superior cottage for a lower rate than the conventional standard of per centage, though he may be liberal in the matter of repairs and put in a few ornamental touches like plums in the pudding. If he does this he does more than his neighbours; and his kudos from those he obliges is scarcely in proportion to his blame from his fellow proprietors with whom he is contrasted. Or if a landed proprietor, say in the Highlands, wishes to make a deer-forest where he has now sheep-farms, does he give a thought of duty to the families he dispossesses? or if he does, does that thought delay or arrest him? Surely not! The doctrine that he may do what he likes with his own goes far before the unwritten code of the proprietor's duty to the cottiers on his estate; and whether he evicts whole hamlets to turn farms into forests, which pay him better, or takes down his labourers' cottages on his land, thus forcing the men to walk many miles daily to their work, he is equally at peace with himself, equally ignorant that though, in his legal right, he is morally, utterly, and profoundly wrong, the higher law, the law of duty, has not made itself manifest to him and he lives on the lower level where he is at home.

Landlords who keep game that injure the crops but afford sport to a few friends-who regard the life of a fox as of more importance than the well-being of a family-are also certainly justified by custom and the common law in doing what they like with their own; but they too are on that lower level of morality where duty is not known and consideration for others has no harbourage. Who, however, is the prophet that can speak to them and say "Thou art the man," so that they shall hear and give heed? The law allows; and so far as we have gone yet, we cannot get men to see that duty can forbid what the law freely grants. This is

one of the stumbling-blocks of English life and character. The lawabiding people is not always the duty-doing people; and we have been forced to recognise this of late by an amount of personal legislation entirely foreign to the genius of the nation, but forced on the government by the absence of all sense of duty in those with influence and power. Where the law does not enter we have infamous combinations, as in the price of coals and the like; and though our system at the present time may be tendering to grandmotherliness and an irritating personality, yet we may thank our want of duty in our dealings with each other as the cause which has brought down the ferule on our pates.

Law-abiding, truly; but not always content with the statutes we obey; and those based on the duty we owe our neighbour ever more or less unpopular. Many people regard it as an infamy-a tyranny-that they should be called on to pay the new school-rate for example, and say that, although rich, they have no obligations to the poor. These are the people who may be heard wishing that the poor rates did not exist, and that charity was voluntary, as heretofore. There is something in this, if all people would be charitable; for the personality of almsgiving is precious to the giver. But, on the other hand, it is a grand thing to recognise as a law the duty of keeping the poor, and that the rich ought to give of their wealth for the sustenance of those who need. And, as a rule, those object to the rate who would not give a farthing in voluntary offering, nor unless under compulsion. If they recognised the support of the poor as a duty they would not object to its legislation; but to lay stress on the imimpulse, which as things are does nothing beyond legal obligation, is eloquent of what would be were that legal obligation destroyed. Unless indeed men are like children, and pettishly refuse to do what they might because they are compelled to do what they ought.

In fact the rule of duty is not the rule of the present. We prefer expediency to truth, and the old savage fighting for beef and buffalo has translated itself into taking advantage of the fluctuations of the money market and the glut of labour. The duty to one's neighbour as taught by Christ, who we say was God, is not only imperative but denied; and those few who would reduce it to practice are condemned as revolutionists or derided as fanatics. "We have the right to do what we like with our own." We do not get beyond this; and we commend the society which by its stability makes our selfishness possible and profitable. The men who look beyond and above, and who do the absolute right, irrespective of law and unimpelled by obligation, are still as scarce as ever: as scarce as the righteous men in days of old when faith was wanting and knowledge of the true God was not. Time however is kind; and with time comes growth, and by growth fruits.

E. L. L.

225

The Old Love.

I.

You love me, only me. Do I not know?
If I were gone your life would be no more
Than his who, hungering on a rocky shore,
Shipwrecked, alone, observes the ebb and flow
Of hopeless ocean widening forth below,

And is remembering all that was before.
Dear, I believe it, at your strong heart's core
I am the life; no need to tell me so.

And yet-Ah husband, though I be more fair,

More worth your love, and though you loved her not, (Else must you have some different, deeper, name

For loving me) dimly I seem aware,

As though you conned old stories long forgot,
Those days are with you-hers-before I came.

II.

The mountain traveller, joyous on his way,
Looks on the vale he left and calls it fair,
Then counts with pride how far he is from there,
And still ascends. And when my fancies stray,
Pleased with light memories of a bygone day,

I would not have again the things that were.
I breathe their thought like fragrance in the air

Of flowers I gathered in my childish play.

And thou, my very soul, can it touch thee

If I remember her or I forget?

Does the sun ask if the white stars be set?

Yes, I recall, shall many times, maybe,

Recall the dear old boyish days again,

The dear old boyish passion. Love, what then?

VOL. XXVIII.NO. 164.

AUGUSTA WEBSTER. 11.

Zelda's Fortune.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GREEN-ROOM.

HE failure of the ener

getic search of the police after Aaron deseo Goldrick reflected less discredit upon their ve intelligence than lookers-on supposed. As there had been no inquest, much necessary evidence had never been brought to light. Lucas had kept back as much as possible for Mdlle. Leczinska's sake, and Carol for his own, so that the only connecting link between the great theatrical manager they were looking w for and the vagrant Aspen gipsy, whom they were not looking for, was

A to the squint of which bortfort they had never been

told. So it happened,

unfortunately for justice, that his solitary undisguisable mark stood Aaron in good stead. It would never have occurred even to a second Vidocq that a man with such a note of identification about him could be a man of whom no such note had ever been reported.

Some part of his security, however, was no doubt due to Aaron's own cunning. He knew that every sea-port and every exit from London would be watched, so it was clearly his safest policy to remain among the streets until time enough had passed to make everybody sure that he had not escaped. He had plenty of money about him for immediate needs: