And in the eyes of Julian his Paganism was not yet a 'creed outworn,' but one still capable of revealing God in His creatures, by filling the universe with forms of beauty and worship. Perhaps from its very decay it was the better calculated to attract towards itself his hopes in this particular. It was now a decried and discouraged belief, and the new spirituality was in its turn exposed to the corrupting influences which must needs accompany State advancement; an element of danger which, in the case of the Christian Church, Dante

traced back to this very period as its origin :

Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre,
Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote
Che da te prese il primo ricco patre!

Instead of the axe and the faggot Christian professors might now begin to look forward to high places in the political and social world; and it would have been strange if the worldliness which prevailed around them had not made its way into their community also. Even our own patron saint, George of Cappadocia (an acquaintance and correspondent of Julian), is said to have been more intent on his army contracts in bacon than on the

slaying of dragons, actual or metaphorical. This inward deterioration of the Roman character was a disease of old growth, and had long since attracted the attention of moralists as a symptom of national decline. Horace complained in his day of the narrowly practical education which was commonly given to the Roman youth.1 And in Juvenal's time Rome had even abandoned her interest in political matters, and could not be brought to care for anything beyond the most trivial business and enjoyments of the day-panem et Circenses. Julian set himself with all his earnestness to rebuke that delight in small frivolities and worldly gains which had dominion over his time. His Misopogon-full of pungent but kindly banter, playfully directed against the objectless life led by the idle, luxurious, flippant city of Antioch-reminds us of the picture conjured up of old Venice by Robert Browning when listening to a toccata of Galluppi. And he has more gravely recorded in his Casares the scorn which he felt for

that vulgar ambition which was satisfied with imperial pomp and power for their own sakes. Statesman and warrior as he was, and successful in both capacities, he still addressed himself to those duties in the spirit of a philosopher, a hermit, and a devotee. No wonder that the frivolous population of Antioch gibed and flouted at beholding such a phenomenon on the throne of the Cæsars. A Romantiker if you will-certainly so from a Strauss-Antiochian point of view. But such Romantikers have been the salt of the earth in all times.

However, we are debarred from any more positive speculation as to the results actual or possible of

Julian's labours, by the arrow which smote him down on the Persian battle-field in the year 363-his schemes in embryo, and his hopes unfulfilled. It was a figment of later times which told how the mortally wounded Emperor turned his despairing face upwad with the cry, Thou hast conquered, O Galilean! And yet, like many other figments of the same kind, it brings before us with dramatic propriety the situation of the alleged speaker. Julian must have been conscious that his life was all that yet stood between the old system of Paganism and the new powers which threatened its final extinction. C. G. PROWETT.

'Oh, yes : thank you, Mr..' Then you must live. How do you mean to live?'

'My tools are pawned, or I could get work. I have copied for a law stationer sometimes.'

'Can you write, then?' 'Very well; I was educated: my father was a surgeon.'

I trembled to think of this young man's sorrows. Intelligent there was his large white foreheadeducated, born a gentleman, married and lived a pauper-a dead love lying in the attic there-and he now here before me, thin and hungry, yet with one agony overruling that of hunger, how to get Her decently buried out of the damned world.

I wonder if he were better or worse for the fierce purgatory through which he had come faithful from first to last to the faithful dead.

The incident set me a-thinking again about the problem it suggests. I hope no one in England conceals from himself that this problem is one of a seriousness intensifying from day to day. If he does, his is the security of a man sitting on the edge of a cliff, an earthquake rumbling in the distance. The problem, according to the gospel of some social philosophers, is: How are

you to thwart certain strong human instincts so as to prevent them from turning to social and political inconvenience? According to some plain-thinking people like myself, it is: Admitting certain inherent human and naturally right and healthy propensities, can you not devise how to let them play without danger, nay with advantage, to the morality and wealth of the community?

Here were a young man and a young woman drawn together by subtle and puissant influences, which it is as absurd for a philosopher to overlook as for a statesman to despise. You may preach 'prudence,' but you cannot wholly stifle these passions: you may wish the young to be wise, but you must legislate on the known and incontestable fact that the wisdom and prudence you admire are those of the Stoic, not of the ordinary man-are far above their average characteristics -are clearly contrary to the impulse of their nature. Doubtless these two persons might have postponed marriage. So far their conduct would have been satisfactory to Malthus. But unless Malthus were able as well to warrant that they should postpone indulgence-and in how many cases would he agree to warrant that ?-I for one strongly protest that for themselves and for society that which actually hap pened was every way better than the alternative. Give me for hopeful citizenship this sorrowful poor man who has loved and sacrificed with purity, rather than the man successful, with withered virtue and a roué's heart. Give me the pure dead body in the garret there, as a better thing for State and society than-God save us if the other can be limned in words! Nay, I protest that it is needless for those terrible alternatives to be put before the youth and strength of England! Must we legislate for what men might be when we can legislate

for what they are and ought to be?

Some time since, in a little book of mine, I printed a chapter entitled 'Malthus and Man.' Therein an attempt was made to put in a concrete form the very problem now in discussion. In a satirical sheet published every Saturday, which wavers between lively expeditions into the domains of politics or philosophy and playful forays into the region of the demi-monde, a 'Reviewer' minted, at my expense, the epigram that, instead of Malthus and Man,' the chapter should have been called 'Arithmetic and Sentiment,' and he proceeded forthwith to take a scrap of my implied argument and flip it with his whip of ridicule. The remark, like many more coined in the same mint, was more brilliant in the lacquer than true in the metal. I had neither intended nor attempted in that chapter to solve the terrible problem; but I clearly did try to present it in a definite shape, and to show that one solution pressed upon us by philosophers, lady-disquisitionists, and young startling Amberley sophists, was inhuman, immoral, unpractical-and therefore one that must be rejected. That issue the 'Reviewer' carefully avoided to discuss.

What I desired to say in that chapter I may briefly state in a single proposition; and I must needs state it plainly. Men and women will, and we may take it in looking at human society, practically, must, satisfy the instinct for consorting together. Abstinence from marriage generally finds an alternative in illegitimate intercourse. Marriage without progeny involves, in itself, physical injury and moral debasement; and in its effects, as a fact, vitiates society. Let it be understood that I am speaking in the general, and on a broad view of human experience -more from the point of view of

VOL. III.-NO. XVI. NEW SERIES.

practical politics than of religious or philosophic ethics.

Then I say a legislator should legislate in accordance with human instincts in so far as they are healthy and good. This human instinct is admittedly, in its origin, healthy and good, while its repression is admittedly hazardous to morals: therefore you must show an inevitable necessity to warrant your legislating against it. Does this necessity exist?

The 'arithmeticians' so called by the 'Reviewer' have assumed that it does. They point to the undeniable over-population, gendering pauperism and innumerable evilsa cumulative production of nonproducers and dead-weights in the community: they say that there is no legitimate way of disposing of these; and therefore the remedy is to go to the fountain-head, and, just as you would regulate the market for calicoes, or linens, or hardware, stop the production. I suppose I am a sentimentalist' if I wedge into the argument here a remark on the essential difference between the productive instrument in the case of goods and of children? The factory machinery has no soul, or will, or moral nature, to be affected by your operations. It stops at your command, and its voice is dead. But the other is a complicated sensible being, influenced either for good or evil by the check you put upon him. He has impulses which resist your rigid law and coercive power. Therefore the question respecting the latter is not, like the former, a simple one of supply and demand, but a highly complex problem of social and moral and political influences acting on and from certain intellectual and sensitive beings, when you try to force them to cease their inconvenient productiveness.

Bearing in mind that distinction, as one that cuts away any jot of analogy with supply and demand

ΙΙ