makes so many comfortable persons doubt whether life is worth living, when beyond a doubt it is they who are not worthy of life. But quite apart from this spurious melancholy, there is a genuine mood of sadness found in all literatures, and felt at times by all thoughtful people, which, in its due place and proportion, is as real as the contrary mood of joy. It is, in a vast majority of cases, a matter of mood rather than of fixed belief; for everyone has his dark mood as well as his bright. Why, then, should the dark mood be so sedulously discountenanced, as if it came direct from the source of all evil? So long as it be genuine, we shall do well to pay heed to it. It stands for something; it is part of us, and it is not to be arbitrarily set aside.

It is this recurrent spirit of sadness, rather than any reasoned philosophy of pessimism, that inspires the finer portion of James Thomson's writings, more especially the sublime melancholy of his verse; and it is this that I think is not without interest even for those whose social creed is entirely the reverse of pessimistic. It is this spirit that animates the presiding figure of his poetical masterpiece, "the Melencolia that transcends all wit."

VOL. IX.

Thus has the artist copied her, and thus
Surrounded to expound her form sublime,
Her fate heroic and calamitous;

Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time,
Unvanquished in defeat and desolation,
Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration

Of the day setting on her baffled prime.

Baffled and beaten back she works on still,
Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
Sustained by her indomitable will:

The hand shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
Till Death, the friend-foe, piercing with his sabre
That mighty heart of hearts, ends bitter war.

K

Or take, as another instance, these wonderful stanzas in the poem "To our Ladies of Death":

O sweetest Sister, and sole Patron Saint

Of all the humble eremites who flee

From out life's crowded tumult, stunned and faint,
To seek a stern and lone tranquillity

In Libyan wastes of time: my hopeless life
With famished yearning craveth rest from strife;
Therefore, thou Restful One, I call on Thee!

Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;

Down, down, far-hidden in thy duskiest cave;
While all the clamorous years above me sweep
Unheard, or like the voice of seas that rave
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.

Should poetry such as this be depressing in its effect on the mind? To me it seems that it ought not to be so, but rather (in its right sphere and relation) a means of enlightenment and strength. For whatever the subject and moral of a poem may be, there is nothing saddening in Art, provided the form and treatment be adequate; we are not weakened, but strengthened, by any genuine revelation of feeling, so long as it be worthily expressed.

And, after all, the humane spirit, which is the motive power of all true schemes of reform, is, by its very essence, independent of belief in what is commonly called “success.” We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance-it rests for other minds and other hands than ours-but we can at least be assured that we

have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take. This is not pessimism, but it is a philosophy which is indebted in some measure to the "pessimistic" school of thought, of which the author of "The City of Dreadful Night" is a leading example.

HENRY S. SALT.

LAWLESSNESS ON THE BENCH

"The intention of the Legislature should be constantly observed." -Letter to Magistrates by Sir William Harcourt, Bart., M.P.

I.

FOR several years the Humanitarian League has drawn the attention of the authorities and the public to the "extrajudicial" floggings inflicted by order of certain magistrates, paid and unpaid, on youthful male offenders in cases where the birch cannot legally be ordered; and it has been pointed out that the pressure put on the parents to induce or force them to sanction a punishment which the magistrates have no power to inflict is a flagrant evasion both of the spirit and of the letter of the law. As the statute gives no authority for any bargain-making between magistrate and parent, the Home Office has been appealed to again and again to stop such glaring outrages; but it appears that while it does not defend or maintain the legality of the procedure, it is either unwilling or afraid to interfere.

It must be obvious that the matter cannot be allowed to remain in the anomalous, and, indeed, absurd, position revealed in the prevaricative statements which the present Home Secretary and his predecessors have made in answer to the numerous questions which have been addressed to them from time to time in the House of Commons. The servants and premises of the public, as well as the official time, are being used for a private purpose; moreover, the liberty of the subject, as well as the integrity of our laws, is involved to a dangerous extent. Something must be done to stop

all such impudent evasions of the law, and its administrators must be taught the importance of keeping within the strict limits imposed by the statute, and more particularly in the case of juvenile delinquents, whose legal rights may often, in consequence of their defenceless position, be disregarded with impunity.

The Legislature has deliberately withheld its sanction from sentences of this sort in the case of certain youthful criminals on the ground of age, or the nature of the offence; but there is little use in this exemption* if the authorities stand by with folded arms while the magistrates openly contravene the express intention of Parliament and defy the law-makers by a clear evasion of the restrictions enjoined. The precedent is one which concerns everybody, and may be followed everywhere if passed over without opposition or protest.

However, it is much to be hoped that the head of the English Criminal Judiciary will, in this respect, take a higher view of his responsibility than the Home Secretary,† and by inditing a sharp admonition to those magistrates who adopt this course, will enforce the observance, not the evasion, of the law. Hence the following memorial, which was sent to the Lord Chancellor on June 26, 1908:

"We, the Committee of the Criminal Law and Prison Reform Department of the Humanitarian League, desire to call your lordship's attention to the course adopted by certain magistrates in London and elsewhere for evading the age-limit imposed by the statute on their power of sentencing juvenile offenders to be punished with the birch-rod.

*Only boys, so far, have been subjected to these “extra-judicial" proceedings, but I need hardly say that the parent's consent to flogging a girl might be extracted by the same means as his consent to the flogging of a boy who is over the legal age.

It was confidently prophesied that a Liberal Home Secretary would do better than Mr. Akers Douglas, a prophecy which has been falsified. If Sir William Harcourt was at the top of the tree (always excepting Sir G. C. Lewis) in the Criminal Department of the Home Office, is not Mr. Herbert Gladstone at the very bottom?