their being? At the outside, three; in
reality, two: to work, to love and to have children.

At this hour neither men nor women will work. The strain is taken off,
the bow relaxed. At the same time they must have money, that they may
spend it; for as always happens in moments of reaction, the
simplest way of expressing high spirits and a sense of ease is
wild expenditure. So wages must be high, and because wages are high
everything is dear. There are no houses, and there will be none; there
can be no marriages, and there will be none; there will be no milk for
children, so there will be no children. How long are such things to
go on? Just so long as we disregard the laws of our being. We began to
neglect them long before the war, and they must be learned again. We
must learn first what they are, and next, how to keep them.

Now the education of men is another text; but for women there can be
little doubt but that the prime educationary in the laws of being is
domestic service. You can be ribald about it. That is easy. But where
else is a girl to learn how to keep house? And if she does not learn
how to be a mother, as indeed she may, poor dear, she gets to know
very much of what to do when she becomes one.

So I hope to see a soberer generation of girls return to a profession
which they have always adorned, for the schooling of which their
husbands and children shall rise up and call them blessed.

POETRY AND THE MODE

A good friend of mine, poet and scholar, was recently approached by
the President, or other kind of head of a Working Men's Association,
for a paper. A party of them was to visit Oxford, where, after an
inspection, there should be a feast, and after the feast, it was
hoped, a paper from my friend--upon Addison. The occasion was not to
be denied: I don't doubt that he was equal to it. I wish that I had
heard him; I wish also that I had seen him; for he had determined on
a happy way of illustrating and pointing his discourse. He had the
notion of providing himself with a full-bottomed wig, a Ramillies; at
the right moment he was to clothe the head of the President with
it; and--Bless thee, Bottom, how art thou translated! In that woolly
panoply, if one could not allow for _Cato_ and the balanced antitheses
of the grand manner, or condone rhetoric infinitely remote from life
past, present or to come--well, one would never understand Addison, or
forgive him. This, for instance:--

CATO (_loq