as unprofitable as any other wasters. A plumber is not a useful or admirable creature because he plumbs (if he plumbs ignorantly or dishonestly he is often either a manslayer or a murderer), but because he plumbs well, and saves the community from danger and damp, disease, and fire and water. Makers of useless machinemade ornaments are, however "horny-handed," really "anti-social persons," baneful to the community as far as their bad work goes; more baneful, possibly, than the consumers of these bad articles, quite as baneful as the entrepreneurs who employ them. We practical English " spend millions on machine-made ornaments, and so-called art which is not art. Every furniture-maker's shop is crowded with badly-made, badly-ornamented stuff which ought never to have been made, and would never be sold if people only took the trouble to try and understand the difference between real art and sham art; if they only knew so much as that a machine can only copy, it cannot make or create a beautiful thing at all. The hand of man, worked by the brain of man, is needed for that. A Windsor chair is an honest piece of work, acceptable; the pieces of the wretched "drawing-room suite" the women are so proud to put in their front parlours are vile to look at, and degrading to live with. The wax flowers you see in the front windows of "respectable artisans'" houses, and the detestable 'painted vases" they set on their chimney-pieces, "mantels" they call them, are horrible to look at, and pure waste to make. They do not please the eye; they merely puff up a silly and anti-social conceit. They are symbols of snobbery. The dreadful waste on sham art and bad ornament is bad and anti-progressive. People who cheat themselves into liking, or pretending to like, bad art are blind to good art, blind to natural beauty, and cannot understand what true art is. This is a degrading state to be in for any person or set of persons.

We must not be deceived by words. We talk of "doing well" when we only mean "getting rich," which is a very different thing in many cases. The only good institutions are those that do good work; the only good work done is that which produces good results, whether they be direct, as the ploughman's, or navvy's, or sailor's; or indirect, as the policeman, or the schoolmaster, or the teacher of good art, or the writer of books that are worth reading. A man is no better or wiser than others by reason of his position or lack of position, but by reason of his stronger body, wiser head, better skill, greater endurance, keener courage. Knowledge teaches a community to breed better children, to bring them up better, to employ them better, to encourage them to behave better, and work better, and play better, and in their turn breed children who shall have better chances than themselves-not necessarily better chances to grow rich or to become idle, but better chances to become honourable, wise, strongbodied and strong-brained able men and women. system of government, no set of formulas, can save a state unless the people who work the system or formulas are wise, and honest, and healthy. A nation with too large a proportion of stunted, unhealthy, besotted, irritable, excitable, ignorant, vain, self-indulgent persons cannot endure in the worldstruggle. It must and ought to be swept away, and the sooner the better. What we call Nature does not indulge in sentimental pity; she puts her failures out of their pain as quickly as she can. She does not keep idiot asylums.

No

In the competition for trade that is upon us, nay, in the very "struggle for life," we can only hold our own by greater physical and intellectual power. We must put ourselves in training; we must throw off the "anti-social" habits that hinder our efficiency; we must beware of the quack mixtures of the demagogue and the superstition-monger, and

accept only what satisfies trained reason. We must put off Sentimentality, which means the wholesome feeling for humanity gone rancid and turbid and unwholesome, and is an expensive and dangerous folly. We must take deliberate and calm judgments, and we must look ahead.

The record of progress in this little book is largely the record of the success of men who with honest material objects worked in many ways wisely and prosperously, and made England the richest place on earth; but this is not all, it is the record also of a great sacrifice, a sacrifice of health and happiness and vitality—a needless sacrifice offered up to Mammon. The English people, never by any plague, or famine, or war, suffered such a deadly blow at its vitality as by the establishment of the factory system without the proper safeguards. Napoleon's wars crippled France (though not as badly as his legislation), but the factory system threatened to sap the very existence of our people, because those who could have helped it (both employers and employed) at that time were too greedy, too ignorant, and too callous to understand the full evil they were doing, and the governing classes above them too foolish to see that the remedy must be swiftly applied.

Ignorance and the blindness caused by greed are deadly enemies that we can only meet by knowledge and by honesty. And it must be remembered, though it is often forgotten, that the acquisition of knowledge does not mean book-learning, which is only a very little part of it. It is no good reading a book without understanding it, and no good understanding it unless one profits by it, and makes the principle or the piece of wisdom or fact a part of our mental store, ready for use when the proper times comes. A man may be book-learned and very ignorant..

Mr. Beard's book should make his readers think; that is what he wants them to do. The good teacher does not

teach things, he tries to make his pupils teach them. selves by honest thinking. No one really knows a thing that he has not mastered for himself. Here in this little volume is matter for thought, for further inquiry, for bringing a man into touch with big and important branches of knowledge. Such primers are useful; they help one through the hard beginnings of the subjects; they show one how to go on and master the thing by one's self. They give one admitted results, and show one the consequences suspected or ascertained. They work the mind.

There is a time, perhaps, when ignorance may be tolerated, but this is emphatically not the time. We have to set our house in order, as everyone knows who has a grain of sense left, but it cannot be done unless we choose the right men to do our political and economic work, trust them wisely, back them wisely, and resolve not only that the nation, but every town, every village, every workshop, and every house be made healthier, be better managed, and the causes that check progress and security be done away with. We cannot afford to sit down and rub our bellies and think how fat we are. Disease and crime can be tackled, and would be if we were in earnest. It requires probably less effort to keep ourselves and our children healthy and out of the dock than to save money and leave it to fools, or buy an annuity, and it is a great deal more necessary to the nation. It is not a sin to break some old Hebrew tabu that has no utility left in it, but it is a sin to be diseased when you can be healthy, to be ignorant when you can, at a little trouble, learn the truth of a matter, to be dishonest when you can, at the cost of a little effort, speak and act truly. Adulteration, again, is criminal and vile in all its aspects and results, and/ honest men will have nothing to do with it. It is one of the worst symptoms in the body social when adulterations and shams are tolerated. Adulteration

is simply a low and vile form of larceny practised treacherously by persons who pretend to be respectable (like the bakers and brewers who poison their customers by the careless use of adulterants) upon persons who are often unable to detect or avoid the deceit and injury.

The reading of good books without thinking things out is a mere debauching amusement, and reading for pastime is not a respectable thing, when it is pushed to extremes, at all, any more than over-eating or overdrinking. The "habit of reading" is no better than the "habit of snuffing," unless the reading which the habitué does is good reading-reading that gives noble pleasure or that helps directly to progress, mental or physical, or trains one to practical ends. Waste of time is not only folly, but it is anti-progressive and means degeneration, just as waste of money over bad or foolish things, or waste of work over ugly shams or false ornaments or dishonest productions of any kind.

One of the most useful things a teacher can do is to help beginners to the right books. There is no use, but much weary, useless toil, in the reading of the wrong books. Every scholar knows the fearful count of hours spent in looking through foolish books in the hope of finding something pertinent. All books about books, and the miserable compilations made at second-hand by second-rate men, should be avoided. Read Adam Smith himself; it will take a little time. Don't be persuaded to use an analysis " or "epitome" of Adam Smith instead, it is only waste of time; it will not do instead of Adam Smith himself. And if you come to fancy it will, you are in the wrong groove. Never be afraid of big books by big men. One can remember and assimilate them far better and easier than any analysis.

This little book seems to me to have in its plain pages and its straightforward substance a good deal of food for thought, a good deal that is worth remem