tual produce than it can use and pay for_.

"This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is
constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the
national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and
is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the
poverty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy
us the preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the
proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased
from over-study than from the labor of the hands; and it is precisely
in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous
seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between
earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real,
is the most hopelessly irreconcilable."

We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaintance for themselves
with the graphic details with which Riehl follows up this general
statement; but before quitting these admirable volumes, let us say, lest
our inevitable omissions should have left room for a different
conclusion, that Riehl's conservatism is not in the least tinged with the
partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with
the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of
things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. It is
the conservatism of a clear-eyed, practical, but withal large-minded
man--a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epigrams on
democratic doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and
social diseases, and on communistic theories which he regards as "the
despair of the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system," but
nevertheless able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and
reason in every shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far
as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on
the dial because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends
against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day while in
fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the
valley men are stumbling in the twilight.

VI. SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS.

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined
by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them--the
frothy,