make her fall his crime rather than her own sin. Women are to be voters, County Councillors, lawyers, doctors-what not. That is, they are to be given the gravest responsibilities of social and political life, hitherto reserved for men. But they are to be released from the special responsibility which has been theirs ever since society emerged from the rudest savagery; and the preservation of their chastity is no longer their own affair but man's. The hysterical part of the Press stoutly champions the whole cohort of the frail. Pretty adulteresses whose passion for one man leads to the murder of another; hotel adventuresses; the street-walker reeling along, drunk, disorderly, blaspheming; the astute calculator, reckoning up her chances of successful chantage in the future; the calculator, still more astute, who casts up as a sum the amount of sympathy she will win if she demands the mere semblance of a ceremony, knowing how utterly worthless it is in legal fact-all these our screeching Press champions with loud screams of objurgation, mingled with sobs of pity. And old coquettes, whose vices have not yet left them, smooth down their skirts, and say how good and grand these dear leader-writers are, and how shameful it is of those vile men to abuse innocence-such as theirs! This, we believe, is called the New Morality. The name is as topsy-turveycal as the thing. For the most prurient and suggestive of all the Press are those journals which preach this New Morality-those journals which are saturated with the sense of sex as the yellow moss of a bog is saturated with water. The grand old Greek innocence in its undraped unconsciousness has gone in favor of clothed indecency; and the New Morality is of all things modern the most indecent and the least moral. The White Cross Society has no more to do with the white flower of a blameless life" than the strangling bind-weed with the stately lily.

We owe a great deal of our modern topsy-turvey dom to the Press, and the relaxation of our respect for law; quá law, which is so noticeable at the present day, dates from the powers assumed by the omniscient Able Editors of a few penny papers. These Able Editors are the Daniels, the Solomons, the Samuels, the Judahs of their own world and in their own esteem. They know everything, and

they manipulate everything. They not only go behind all motives, and understand the exact strength of the words by which the marionettes of politics and statecraft are made to dance, but they re-try all criminal cases, discard evidence hostile to their opinion, quarrel with the judge's summing-up, dispute the verdict, and if that verdict is for death move heaven and earth to set it aside. They have not been in court, nor heard the evidence, nor seen the manner in which it was given-always so significant. They know nothing but by the bare report, of itself an abstract and not in extenso; but they at once assume that they know more than judge or jury, and that, in their clever hands, the whole thing shall be rearranged. They appeal to the public, and stir up strife and bad passions in their philanthropic endeavor to save some brutal murderer from the gallows. They have no regard for the safety of society, which they endanger by their endeavor to make criminals practically irresponsible. Instead of that strongest of all deterrents-certainty of award-they introduce the elements of chance, hope of reprieve, instability of the law, whereby criminals are encouraged to commit the offence from which the sure and certain award would perhaps scare them. They care nothing for the safety of society, the majesty of justice, the stability of law. After the first sacred duty of selling their papers, the second is the individual-the poor dear murderer who has brutally battered or hacked out the life of his victim ; the fascinating murderess whose fair face is her apology for the most cruel and coldblooded kind of assassination there is. The Home Secretary is besieged with monster petitions which these hysterical Daniels have set on foot. He is forced into the position of a judge unassisted by counsel and with his responsibility unshared by a jury. He is made to feel himself the executioner, if he does not give way. If he does give way, he knows that he is giving one wrench the more to the pillars which support the temple of justice.

These shrieking, Able Editors give their minds and souls to the destruction of responsibility. Men and women may do what they will, but they are not to suffer. The law made for the terror of evil-doers is to be stultified into a mere brutum fulmen, no more; and those who think

differently, and who stand by the cause of social organization, are as likely as not to be hounded through the pages of the hysterical journals as murderers themselves, under the disguise of legality. Every kind of touching detail is brought together to still further weaken the sense of righteous retribution. The murderer is sure to be full of the finest feeling and the tenderest sentiments. Somehow it is be who deserves our sympathy; and the fact of that blood-stained corpse is to be regarded more in the light of an accident than a crime.

The destruction of responsibility which these Able Editors are so diligently striving to compass is nowhere more visible than in their own utterances. The responsibility which they have assumed of weakening that respect for law which is the very corner-stone of national honor and security they throw aside as a mere rag, which righteousness is better without. They are so much more holy than the law. Their flabby humanitarianism, which quivers like so much jelly before the spectacle of retribution, they dignify by the name of Christianity, true civilization, progress. Their cowardice, which dreads pain as the supreme evil, they mask under the pretty veil of sympathy and sensitiveness. They would like to be the providence of murderers and thieves, and not only one but all should sup in Paradise free of charge. That acute commentary about the "penitent thief"—" one was pardoned that no one need despair, but only one that no one should presume"-has no significance for these flabby humanitarians from whose mental rag-bag the shred called the sense of responsibility has been lost. They would let the whole lot go free on earth; and for the flames and pitchforks of a ruder faith would give them the crowns and wedding garments of a more mysti cal. As for those plodding, solid, uninteresting, virtuous folk, they can go to ruin where they will. You see they want chic; and they do no honor to any one but themselves—and their country. When an Able Editor can prance about with a sinner saved, a criminal rescued from the gallows, running by his side and holding on by his stirrups, he has something to show for himself. He gets a reflected glory from the poetic aureole which he has somehow managed to fling about that close-cropped head. But a plain man

who pays his rent and taxes, does not run away with his neighbor's wife, nor put an ounce of lead into his neighbor's bodywho cares about him? He is only an earth-worm, and will never make a butterfly.

Coming down to smaller things-the transition state in which we are-the topsy-turvey dom brought about by the many changes in material conditions that have taken place-finds many a hard nut to crack and niany a queer dilemma to face. One thing is very noticeable in certain country places, more especially those of a show character-the change in the relations between landowners and the public. Fifty years ago that public was composed simply of the known inhabitants of the place, with a handful of well-to-do strangers who had self-respect and knew how to behave. Then all paths were open, all woods were free, all beautiful spots were made public. No precautions were taken to protect the property through which these paths ran, or where these beautiful spots were to be found. None were taken because none were needed. The utmost that was done was to close the gate one day in the year, to keep up the technical right of exclusion. Things are very different now when excursion trains bring down their "cheap trippers" by the thousands

cheap trippers with a keen sense of being out for a lark, full of the prevailing idea of irresponsibility, "caring nothing for nobody," and just as ready to set the gorse and heather on fire as to break down fences, trample down the ripening grass and growing corn, dainage statues and monuments, or pluck up the young firs and larches of the plantation.

The in

Here comes in the hardship. habitants of the place, who have used that property in a manner like their own, and have respected it like their own, are now excluded with the rest of the public-those ephemeral rowdies who come for a day and do mischief that lasts for years. If they are not excluded, then the proprietor suffers in his pocket and estate, and 'Arry's outing levies a tax on the landowner which no man on earth is willing to pay.

All the bitter blood that has been made of late in certain favorite show

places is primarily due to 'Arry and his peculiar methods of enjoying himself. Excursion trains take him for a few shillings to places where he is not known, and

has no fear nor respect. Taught by the Able Editors, who pander to him as the great ultimate of the nation, he, too, throws off the fettering sense of responsi bility, and gambols his fill at another man's cost. Then that other man turns rusty, and so the fight begins-a fight which has more in it than the bare right of a proprictor to close a pathway used for long years on sufferance by the public-a fight on which depend some of the gravest issues of society, and some of its most perplexing problems.

The topsy-turveydom of the hour has touched our servants too, and domestic service, like every thirg else, is undergoing its struggle and transformation. By the multiplication of trades, the greater facilitics of communication, the denser population of the country, and other self evident causes, housekeeping is not what it was even fifty years ago, not to speak of times still more remote. In those remoter times all things were made and done at home, and the mistress and her maids worked in concert together. If the maid was the hand the mistress was the head, and what she did not actively do she ordered and overlooked. The "professional" element was then entirely wanting in domestic service. It was purely personal, and the mistress felt that she had still certain quasi-seigneurial rights, which she used without ceremony. Now all this has gone by the board. The abolition of home manufacture in favor of tradesmen's supplies has relieved the mistress from more than half her former duties and deprived her of more than half her former occupation. It is no longer necessary for her to actively superintend her servants; while, at the same time, the greater luxury of living has necessitated a defter and more accomplished set of officials. Thus, efficient servanthood has come to be a real profession, like any other; and a professor will not brook interference. A cook who knows her business up to the nth will not submit to make her salmis and suprêmes under the eye and interrupted by the futile remonstrances of a young mistress who does not know parsley from chervil. You might as well expect a physician to submit to criticism on his prescriptions. The housemaid who has all the best recipes and methods at her finger ends knows what she has to do, and how she has to do it. She does according to her knowledge; and

if her mistress interferes in what she does not understand, Molly resents that interference just as much as her sister Betty in the kitchen, and both give the lady warningand a bad character to their friends.

When we have come to this state of things we have done with the old order. But as the new is not yet fully established there is the sense of topsy-turvey dom inalienable from a time of transition, and every one is in a state of ferment, of unrest, and dissatisfaction because of it. The mistress clings to her old traditions

the maid asserts the justice of the new arrangement. If you want the feudal spirit, she says in effect if not in words, you must adopt the feudal system. You cannot have professors who are slaves, agents who are instructed enough to undertake responsible offices uncontrolled, and yet of such meekness of mind as to be like little dogs at your heel. It is one thing or the other-the ignorant inferior of whom you are the providence to teach, govern, and command, or the accomplished master and mistress of their craft, who have their living in themselves like any other professionals and who can find twenty houses open to them if yours is shut.

Again, a bit of topsy-turveydom resulting from the greater spread of education and the relaxation of former bonds is in the noisy, blatant, 1ampant Brethren of whatever religious denomination they may please to call themselves. In these present days any one who will sets up as a Teacher. A young plough-boy who got religion the other day joined one of these bands and became a shining light, a plucked brand,

an

uncertificated preacher, a voluntary missionary-anything you like. His seventeen years' inexperience and ignorance taught him everything but modesty. He did not know the Ten Commandments, but he set himself to be the shepherd of straying sheep and the leader of lost souls. Could topsy-turvey dom go further? Indeed, these noisy religionists, with their pretence of organization and grade, make no more an orderly organization, in the essential meaning of fitness, than was the jolly medley which companioned the Abbot of Unreason. But the transitory topsy-turveydom of those medieval, and that older classic form of Saturnalia, was a mere nothing compared to the topsyturvey dom of the present day, when nothing stands where it did. Monarchy, re

ligion, the laws, public opinion, the home, the relations between the sexes, politics, personal habits-nothing is at this moment in a state of stable equilibrium. The revolution in the midst of which we are all whirling and rushing toward some unknown centre is a bloodless one truly, but none the less important. Steam, the printing press, electricity, scientific discoveries, historical researches these have been the great

agents in the place of the tiers état, the guillotine, Robespierre, and Napoleon. But the "scrimmage" now is as perilous as it was just a hundred years ago; and if we have broken new ground we are none the freer from the dangers of unscalable precipices and unfordable rivers, from death and destruction, if we do not look out sharp and walk warily.-New Review.

FROM time to time some senile dilettante awakes from his afternoon snooze, repeating to himself a nursery rhyme he babbled many decades ago, before he began the business of life. That business being now well-nigh at an end for him, he has retired from the fray, and has plenty of time for mild literary pursuits. He begins to think of the meaning of these childish rhymes running in his head ; perhaps he cannot remeinber the exact words. Forthwith he writes to "Notes and Queries," and in due course his communication appears set forth (to his delight) under the title of "Folk lore.' It may be somewhat to the following effect :

"FOLK-LORE.-In my childhood I was taught some verses which yet dwell (though somewhat imperfectly, I fear) in my memory. Feeling uncertain as to the precise words of the last line, and as I am positive that I used

to hear identical verses repeated in other nurseries at the time, I venture to ask for a place in your columns for an inquiry on this subject, in the hope that it may catch the eye of one of those who were children with me,

and that he (or she) may confirm or set right

my version. The lines are as follows:

• Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Hampty Dumpty got a great fall,

All the king's horses and all the king's men Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again.' My difficulty is this. The last line, as I have set it down, is defective in rhythm (the rhyme may pass). Can any one assist me to the right rending?

FOGIUS ANTIQUUS."

"

The letter elicits many others; the discussion is sustained for several months, until it is proved to the satisfaction of all, except unlettered scoffers, that Humpty Dumpty was an Aryan hero whose fame is celebrated in many tongues, whose

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memory is preserved by many and curious customs among different nations. Fogius antiquus" is as agreeably surprised as Molière's M. Jourdain, who found that, withont suspecting it, he had been talking prose all his life.. It had never occurred to him that by his simple inquiry he should enter a province ticketed with the impressive title" Folk-lore."

Folk-lore is a field of liberal proportions, and the labor of those who till it is enlivened by many exciting discoveries; but in discussing certain customs in the following pages it is not proposed to deal with them in a scientific light it is but the plain, every-day aspect of them, as they appear to an ordinary observer of men and women, that will be dealt with.

It might be imagined that in rejecting some customs and adhering to others, sapiens as naturalists with some arrogance man, being a reasoning creature--Homo

Hu

have classified him-would have acted under some intelligent discrimination. There is, however, little trace of any such another, with little apparent regard to motive; he has kept one and flung aside. comfort, convenience, or decorum. man beings, especially those of the gentler gender, being, on the whole, conservative, are generally loath to part with old customs, even those which are irksome or which have lost all significance among new surroundings. Yet they are so capricious that often they allow useful and convenient customs to fall into disuse, and retain those that serve no practical end.

Formerly, for example, it was usual for non-professional gentlemen, living in a town, to have brass plates bearing their names on their front doors. Only two

survivals of this convenient practice linger in the writer's memory-one in London, at the Earl of Warwick's house in St. James's, the other, till recently, in Edinburgh, at the Earl of Wemyss's old town house. When and why did this become discredited among what French novelists delight to write of as le hig-life? Any one who has rung at the wrong door in a London street must have winced before the aggrieved and dignified air of the six feet of broadcloth and plush whom he has disturbed in the study of the "Morning Post." Never, or hardly ever, do the servants in No. 100 know who lives in 99 or 101; and as for the residence of Mr. Riser, Q.C., being known to the footman of Sir Gilbert Grandechose why, the idea has only to be mentioned that its absurdity may be apparent. Whereas another custom which has neither utility, ornament, nor cleanliness to recommend it-that of using servants in livery to load their heads with white powder-threatens to live as long as there are masters and men.

Another instance of putting down a good and convenient custom, and retain ing one which, though harmless and picturesque, serves no useful end whatever, is found in that palace of paradox-the House of Commons. Until recently, so recently that Whips still living (and not only living, but retaining much of that air half-statesman, half-bookmaker which is the accredited exterior of a Whip) shake their heads, and moan, "It never was so dans le temps,"—it used to be an honorable understanding between the two sides that no important division should be taken during the hours sacred to the principal meal of the day. MemMembers were allowed to go home, dress, dine, and sip their claret leisurely, with the perfectly calm mind essential to digestion, and the certainty that if they were back by eleven o'clock, they were doing all that could be reasonably expected of them. All the Whip's concern was that enough members should remain to keep a House. But it is far otherwise now; so much so, that one who entered Parliament not earlier than the general election of 1880 might be at a loss to account for the indignation of an honorable member for one of the northern counties of England, who, one evening last session, was stopped at the door by his Whip, and pressed to

stay and dine. "Dine dine HERE!" he exclaimed, as the flush rose to his brow. 'I have been twenty years in this House, and I've never done that yet. I'm blanked if I begin now!" and out be marched. That understanding of mutual convenience is a thing of the past. Not only must the Government Whips keep a house, but they must keep a majority: there is a party of irreconcilables who, with enviable digestions, and palates which, if not the reverse of fastidious, are subject to admirable discipline, never seem to leave the House, and are always in watch to spring a division when it is at its lowest ebb. No Government has ever yet received a wound, much less a death-blow, during the dinner-hour; it is not possible that any Government ever will: herein, therefore, a return might surely be made to the older and better custom, with increased comfort all round, if the House of Commons would only act like thinking creatures. But perhaps that is too much to expect as things are.

Faithless to tradition as it has been in this respect, how tenaciously the House clings to it in others. Night after night, at the end of business, just as the Speaker leaves the chair, the doorkeeper's stentorian voice echoes through the lobby, "Who goes home?" A needless inquiry, it might seem to the thoughtful stranger in the gallery, who has been instructed that beds are not provided on the premises for members, and observes that preparation is being made for turning out the lights. But that cry was full of meaning to members in the days when Westminster was separated from London by a fair slice of country. It has come down to us from a time when legislators made up little parties for mutual escort homeward, for there were those infesting the green fields and dark lanes gentlemen with strong arms and supple fingers-for whom a Parliament man, short in the wind and round in the waist after the manner of his kind, would have proved a sorry match. The day may come when

the last trappings of oligarchy having been swept away, the Lyon King-at-Arms having been done to death as thoroughly as the griffin and the dodo, when hereditary pensions shall be remembered with the same chastened horror with which we now behold the instruments of torture in the Tower-the stern Radical, seeking