English grange or a small shopkeeper's abode, are wanting among them, and so naturally is the person who turns such rewards to account.

a

But we have not the less assurance in such books as Feuerbach's and others, that there is a deal of crime, and that of an extremely dark character, in Germany. Of the half-dozen or so of eminent murders which have frightened our own country within the past ten years, one was perpetrated by a German we shall soon know whether another also was. But the crimes daily committed among themselves are not blazoned in the face of the world as ours are. I remember once coming in Germany across a very startling phenomenon -one that would be made to ring throughout Europe if it occurred among ourselves. It was in the penitentiary for women at Prague. One of the Sisters of Mercy who tended it spoke much about the kinder morderinn, or child-murderess, as belonging to an important and conspicuous class, and was anxious to know if it was very numerous one in Britain. I found that, of the four hundred women under her charge, a hundred and thirty had been convicted of child-murder-thirty-two and a half per cent. If you told this to a German he would give a careless or incredulous shrug, but would make no inquiry into its truth. This penitentiary, by the way, I found wonderfully clean and well managed by the Sisters of Mercy in charge of it; while the male convict prison, separated from it by a street or two, was such a scene of horrors as one will not realise the existence of within civilised Europe without seeing it. Eleven hundred ruffians are there, under sentences of all periods, without ever getting into the open air. Whenever you enter, you hear the clanging of the fetters with which each man is chained ankle to ankle, and the stench comes upon you like a

poisonous tempest. The crowded hospitals, where filthy diseased creatures lay nearly naked in the stewing heat, might, I believe, have been used as ovens. Of that visit I carried away a very lively reminder in certain minute but very sanguinary animals, who, smelling, as the nursery tale says, "the blood of an Englishman," made a simultaneous rush to taste the refreshing liquid. But that this disgrace exists, and that close beside a model on which it might be improved, are of the class of things about which the German cares and knows nothing so long as he can boast of Duppel over his beer, and fill his shop-windows with glaring prints of big Fatherland extirpating poor little Denmark.

It is at the root of our own political freedom and our greatness that we have all cared for these things-cared more for them than for broad political questions or national triumphs. For the same reason it is that, by our endless talk about them, we permit the world to twit us with our dissipation and our criminality. Yet our volubility has not been without some practical results. There is a use in what seems useless talk. Perhaps if we had in our collection all that has been said and written at social science associations and elsewhere about repression and reformation, and had it analysed and appreciated by some competent critic placed in conditions so far apart from those of the disputants, as to be able to estimate their merits in the general balance of what the mind of man has accomplished, he would pronounce for verdict that he had no previous conception of the amount of twaddle that the human brain could supply or of the preposterousness of the projects it could entertain. But, between words and acts, if we have not exterminated crime we have got the mastery of it. We make it know its place in the presence of virtuous respectability. It is sub

dued and segregated, so that it has little opportunity of mixing with and tainting even the humblest social grade. Your British criminal is in fact a poor-a very poor creature. Both in physical and mental development he is distinctly below the rest of the community. The accomplished housebreakers and subtle swindlers that one hears of in the romance of crime are as rare as other features of high romance are in real humdrum life. The weakness and facility of poorly developed natures are the specialties that enlist men in the ranks of crime in this country. It is other wise elsewhere. M. Bérenger, in his Répression Pénale,' discusses it as a difficulty to be dealt with in France, that there are men of great intelligence, capacity, and energy, who devote their faculties to crime. That in the German social stratification criminality crops out far higher up than in ours, becomes palpable in looking at the contents of a prison in each country. With us a good mechanic is a rarity in such a place. Perhaps in a large prison containing several hundreds of criminals, a dozen may be found who have been trained as shoemakers, carpenters, or masons. The German establishment, on the other hand, is full of accomplished workmen, who, in the new improved prisons, are all set to the performance of their respective functions. It is a fine sight to the philanthropist to behold them exercising their skill and dexterity in the production of furniture and other valuable commodities; but it cannot be very pleasant to live in the apprehension that the people you transact the common business of life with are very likely to become jailbirds. In the great Zellengefängniss at Berlin I saw decorative workers of so eminent a grade as to entitle them to be called artists. They made their cells interesting studios; and, like Raleigh, their prison hours enriched the world.

These accomplished personages, whom the German social philosopher can present as a glorious contrast to the wretched louts-the human funguses-that occupy our prison cells, are raised in the very focus of German education, and the central point whence the State promulgates æsthetics and the influence of fine art. But it is also the seat of that robber government which teaches by example that every act of plunder that can be accomplished with impunity is lawful in international morality. Despite its museums and libraries, and picture and statue galleries, and complex educational machinery, you will not long walk about under the Linden without feeling that you are among a brutal people, whom force alone keeps down. You are among those in every way fitted to be let loose upon an unoffending people, doomed to oppression and pillage-among those who are likely, some day again, to turn upon their masters, and let them see what sort of civilisation they have made.

No person in his senses will say a word in depreciation of the value of education; but even this blessing, like all others, has certain limits to its efficiency, and it is as well to know them. While the State is doing its work through the official schoolmaster, there are other silent teachers in the heart of the social system-teachers normally trained through the barbarism and brutality of centuries, who are also busily at work secretly teaching their own special lessons. There is a world of sad suggestiveness in the disgusting contrivances made into toys for the amusement of children, which you may buy under the Linden. I remember a German toyman coming to a town in Britain, not much celebrated for its morality, and containing a good deal of coarseness. He filled his window, unconsciously I suppose, with the things he found popular at home, but the public mind had

not been trained to them, and he found he had to abandon them in a day or two. All the force-pumping of knowledge into the Prussian will not teach him to wash his skin and breathe fresh air, any more than it will enable him to understand our constitutional safeguards. A great type of social ignorances flourishes marvellously in Germany -the quack doctor. With us he works furtively among the very humblest social elements. Those who never hear of him otherwise will be surprised to find how he plasters the walls of Liverpool and the manufacturing towns. But in Germany he is great and eminent. I found him with a newly started project, which was getting a great run-fichte-nadel Anstalt, or firneedle institution. The ministering priest of such a temple doses you with a concoction of fir-needles, and bathes you in the same, performing certain other incantations. In a country covered with dense pine forests his stock-in-trade is large enough, should his dupes prove sufficiently numerous. Like most people rurally inclined, I delight in the aroma of pine woods in a sunny day; but the hot breath from the caldrons of the Anstalt, as I passed the door, felt sickening. You are told that it cures every disease; and you are not only requested, but perhaps compelled, to

submit to this doctrine. I know of one instance where a very sick lady had fallen into such hands. Her family found that the practitioner, being a medicin Rathsometimes so pronounced as to sound like medicine Rat-could not only carry out his own nostrums, but could put down all competition with them, having the medical command of the district, which he perambulated with uniform and epaulets; and he would have undoubtedly proceeded deliberately with the slaughter of the patient had she not, at considerable risk, been removed out of his

way.

Surely, however, I hear you say, there should be something more genial and pleasant than all this national scolding to be had from a fellow who has been so lucky as to get a run in the Alps. You have reason, as the French say I have said my malison-perhaps too much of it. I have more pleasant things to discourse about, but I shall wait a little before dealing with them, to give opportunity for the escape of the bad humour caused by recent events, and still more recent intercourse with a people among whom the wrongs and cruelties of which they should have been ashamed were continually brought before me as objects of frantic and ridiculous exultation.

IF Tony Butler's success in his new career only depended on his zeal, he would have been a model clerk. Never did any one address himself to a new undertaking with a stronger resolution to comprehend all its details, and conquer all its difficulties. First of all, he desired to show his gratitude to the good fellow who had helped him; and secondly, he was eager to prove, if proven it could be, that he was not utterly incapable of earning his bread, nor one of those hopeless creatures who are doomed from their birth to be a burden to others.

So long as his occupation led him out of doors, conveying orders here and directions there, he got on pretty well. He soon picked up a sort of Italian of his own, intelligible enough to those accustomed to it; and as he was alert, active, and untiring, he looked, at least, a most valuable assistant. Whenever it came to indoor work and the pen, his heart sank within him; he knew that his hour of trial had come, and he had no strength to meet it. He would mistake the letter-book for the ledger or the day-book; and he would make entries in one which should have been in the other, and then, worst of all, erase them, or append an explanation of his blunder that would fill half a page with inscrutable blottedness.

As to payments, he jotted them down anywhere, and in his anxiety to compose confidential letters with due care, he would usually make three or four rough drafts of the matter, quite sufficient to impart the contents to the rest of the office.

Sam M'Gruder bore nobly up under these trials. He sometimes

laughed at the mistakes, did his best to remedy never rebuked them. At last, as he saw that poor Tony's difficulties, instead of diminishing, only increased with time, inasmuch as his despairing himself led him into deeper embarrassments, M'Gruder determined Tony should be entirely employed in journeys and excursions here and there through the countryan occupation, it is but fair to own, invented to afford him employment, rather than necessitated by any demands of the business. Not that Tony had the vaguest suspicion of this. Indeed, he wrote to his mother a letter filled with an account of his active and useful labours. Proud was he, at last, to say that he was no longer eating the bread of idleness. "I am up before dawn, mother, and very often have nothing to eat but a mess of Indian-corn steeped in oil, not unlike what Sir Arthur used to fatten the bullocks with, the whole livelong day; and sometimes I have to visit places there are no roads to; nearly all the villages are on the tops of the mountains ; but, by good-luck, I am never beat by a long walk, and I do my forty miles a-day without minding it.

"If I could only forget the past, dearest mother, or think it nothing but a dream, I'd never quarrel with the life I am now leading; for I have plenty of open air, mountain walking, abundance of time to myself, and rough fellows to deal with, that amuse me; but when I am tramping along with my cigar in my mouth, I can't help thinking of long ago-of the rides at sunset on the sands, and all the hopes and fancies I used to bring home with me, after them. Well! it is over now-just as much done for as if

the time had never been at all; and I suppose, after a while, I'll learn to bear it better, and think, as you often told me, that 'all things are for the best.'

"I feel my own condition more painfully when I come back here, and have to sit a whole evening listening to Sam M'Gruder, talking about Dolly Stewart and the plans about their marriage. The poor fellow is so full of it all, that even the important intelligence I have for him he won't hear, but will say, 'Another time, Tony, another time-let us chat about Dolly.' One thing I'll swear to, she'll have the honestest fellow for her husband that ever stepped, and tell her I said so. Sam would take it very kindly of you, if you could get Dolly to agree to their being married in March. It is the only time he can manage a trip to England, not but, as he says, what ever time Dolly consents to shall be his time.

"He shows me her letters sometimes, and though he is half wild with delight at them, I tell you frankly, mother, they wouldn't satisfy me if I was her lover. She writes more like a creature that was resigned to a hard lot, than one that was about to marry a man she loved. Sam, however, doesn't seem to take this view of her, and so much the better.

"There was one thing in your last letter that puzzled me, and puzzles me still. Why did Dolly ask if I was likely to remain here? The way you put it makes me think that she was deferring the marriage till such time as I was gone. If I really believed this to be the case, I'd go away to-morrow, though I don't know well where to, or what for. But it is hard to understand, since I always thought that Dolly liked me, as certainly I ever did, and still do, her.

Post' all about the 'departure for the Continent, intending to reside some years in Italy.'

"And that is more than I'd do if I owned Lyle Abbey, and had eighteen blood-horses in my stable, and a clipper cutter in the Bay of Curryglass. I suppose the truth is, people never do know when they're well off."

The moral reflection, not arrived at so easily or so rapidly as the reader may imagine, concluded Tony's letter, to which in due time came a long answer from his mother. With the home gossip we shall not burden the reader, nor shall we ask of him to go through the short summary-four close pages-of the Doctor's discourses on the text, "I would ye were hot or cold," two sensations that certainly the mere sight of the exposition occasioned to Tony. We limit ourselves to the words of the postscript.

"I cannot understand Dolly at all, and I am afraid to mislead you as to what you ask. My impression is-but mind it is mere impression

she has grown somewhat out of her old friendship for you. Some stories possibly have represented you in a wrong light, and I half think you may be right, and that she would be less averse to the marriage if she knew you were not to be in the house with them. It was, indeed, only this morning the Doctor said, 'Young married folk should aye learn each other's failings without bystanders to observe them'-a significant hint I thought I would write to you by this post.'

When Tony received his epistle, he was seated in his own room, leisurely engaged in deciphering a paragraph in an Italian newspaper, descriptive of Garibaldi's departure from a little bay near Genoa to his Sicilian expedition.

Nothing short of a letter from his mother could have withdrawn his attention from a description so full of intense interest to him; and partly, indeed, from this cause, and partly from the hard labour of rendering the foreign language, the de