s are drawn in one after another, and they fall into
manifold varieties of mischief; agonized parents pray for help;
employers chafe at the carelessness and pre-occupation of their
servants; the dupes sink to ruin unpitied, and still the crowd steps
onward to the gulf of doom. To think that by merely setting certain
noble creatures to exhibit their speed and staunchness, we should have
ended by establishing in our midst a veritable Inferno! Our faith, our
honour, our manhood, our future as a nation, are being sacrificed, and
all because Circe has read her spell over our best and most promising
souls. And our legislators amuse themselves with recriminations! We
foster a horde of bloodsuckers who rear their strength on our weakness
and our vices. Why should a drink-seller be kept in check by his having
to pay for a license, while the ruin-seller needs no license, and is
not even required to pay income tax. If licenses to bet were issued at
very heavy prices, and if a crushing fine were inflicted on any man who
made a book without holding a license, we might stamp out the villainous
small fry who work in corners at all events. But Authority is supreme;
the peer and the plutocrat go on unharmed, while the poor men who copy
follies which do not hurt the rich go right on to the death of the soul.

_April, 1889._

_DISCIPLINE_.

Of the ancestor generally assigned to us by gentlemen who must be
right--because they say so--we have very few records save the odd
scratches found on bones and stones, and the remnants of extremely
frugal meals eaten ages ago. We gather that the revered ancestor hunted
large game with an audacity which must have pleased the Rider Haggard of
ancient days; at any rate, some simple soul certainly scratched the
record of a famous mammoth-fight on a tusk, and we can now see a furious
beast charging upon a pigmy who awaits the onset with a coolness quite
superior to Mr. Quatermain's heroics. That Siberian hunter evidently
went out and tried to make a bag for his own hand, and I have no doubt
that he carried out the principle of individualism until his last
mammoth reduced him to pulp. There is no indication of organization,
and, although the men of the great deltas were able to indulge in
oysters with a freedom which almost makes me regret the advance of
civilization and the decay of Whitstable, yet I cannot trace one record
of an orderly supper-party. This shows how the heathen in his blindness