hy, happy, kindly-treated children than any age since the world
began; that to look back into the domestic history of other times is
to see greater squalor and more suffering.

Why! read the tombstones and monuments in any old English church,
those, I mean, that date from earlier than 1800, and you will see the
history of every family, of even the prosperous county families,
_laced_ with the deaths of infants and children. Nearly half of them
died. Think, too, how stern was the upbringing. And always before
these days it seemed natural to make all but the children of the very
wealthy and very refined, fear and work from their earliest years.
There comes to us too, from these days, beautiful furniture, fine
literature, paintings; but there comes too, much evidence of harsh
whippings, dark imprisonments and hardly a children's book, hardly the
broken vestige of a toy. Bad as things are, they are better--rest
assured--and yet they are still urgently bad. The greater evil of the
past is no reason for contentment with the present. But it is an
earnest for hoping that our efforts, and that Good Will of which they
are a part and outcome, may still go on bearing fruit in perpetually
dwindling misery.

Sec. 4.

It seems to me that the whole spirit and quality of both the evil and
the good of our time, and of the attitude not simply of the Socialist
but of every sane reformer towards these questions, was summarized in
a walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the Thames
Embankment, from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster. We had dined
together and we went there because we thought that with a fitful moon
and clouds adrift, on a night when the air was a crystal air that
gladdened and brightened, that crescent of great buildings and steely,
soft-hurrying water must needs be altogether beautiful. And indeed it
was beautiful; the mysteries and mounting masses of the buildings to
the right of us, the blurs of this coloured light or that, blue-white,
green-white, amber or warmer orange, the rich black archings of
Waterloo Bridge, the rippled lights upon the silent-flowing river, the
lattice of girders and the shifting trains of Charing Cross
Bridge--their funnels pouring a sort of hot-edged moonlight by way of
smoke--and then the sweeping line of lamps, the accelerated run and
diminuendo of the Embankment lamps as one came into sight of
Westminster. The big hotels were very fine, huge swelling shapes of
dun dark-grey and