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goes, or only snatches at in secret; yet this play usefully calls out the budding instincts of her womanhood, and strengthens these through exercise. Why are our boys not taught to reverence sex distinctions? I see no reason for not telling them distinctly that a sister's love of dolls arises from the difference of sex; it shows her tender, gentle nature, and points to future fitness to fulfil the sacred duties of a mother. If elders took a tone like this boys would soon cease to molest a little sister, and a foundation would be laid in character for right relations between men and women. As it is, what better dare we expect from lads whose ideal heroines are of the Morgiana class, than that they should feel contempt for play that is not wild and savage in its character.

But even our best guides in the great work of education make grave mistakes in this important matter. One of the most learned of these guides says: "Predatory pursuit excites us from the earliest years, and any incidents embodying it will waken up the feelings, and exercise the imagination in a bloodthirsty chase; thus enlivening the dull and dreary exercise of learning to read and spell." * Therefore, this high authority approves of making a child's first reading-lesson sensationalabout a cat and rat; or he suggests that a mouse would be better, as a cat's torturing play with a mouse before eating it comes within the range of the child's own experience, and is to him "one of the rarest treats." Is this not atrocious? The child has an emotional as well as an intellectual nature. Are we deliberately to sacrifice the former to the latter? Are we to teach him to read at the expense of fostering and strengthening his anti-social, predatory, savage instincts? If all we aim at is to make our children keen and clever in commercial competition, this method may be wise; but if our object is to carefully develop all the impulses on which must rest the strength and worth of men, then, certainly, the method is altogether wrong.

It is our ignorance of the supreme importance of social conditions in the building up of character that so misleads us. Favourable conditions are an all-powerful factor in the making of a noble human being. We want our children to be something more than Bodos, Santáls, or than gentle Arafuras; and we possess the means to make them highly cultured; but before high culture we must put, as of still greater value, all the virtues *"Education as a Science," by Alexander Bain, LL.D., p. 244. † Ibid., p. 246.

that the Arafuras show; and from the history of these uncultured savages, and the fact that they have risen to a moral state that puts our boasted civilization to shame, we ought to learn this lesson:-The surroundings of our race in childhood and youth are full of adverse influences, and character is daily suffering injury that direct moral teaching will never rectify.

We have to search for and discern what all these adverse influences are, and to control them, or cast them out.

CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSITIONAL NATURE OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS.

The Ascidian throws away its tail and its eye, and sinks into a quiescent state of inferiority. . . . We are as a race more fortunate than our ruined cousins the degenerate Ascidians. For to us it is possible to ascertain what will conduce to our higher development, what will favour our degeneration."-Professor E. RAY LANKESTER, F.R.S.

THE doctrine of evolution is calculated to produce a twofold effect upon the human mind. It is capable of giving intellectual clearness and emotional beneficence. To do this, however, it must be thoroughly understood and logically applied to our present social state. It must be regarded as explanatory of things as they are, and prophetic of things as they will be, and should be.

When the doctrine is so regarded and applied, the evolutionist no longer feels despairing in face of a society, whose perplexing miseries and many-sided evils had hitherto overwhelmed him. A flood of light enters the field of human action. He perceives the social forces that are at work amidst apparent confusion. He apprehends their approximate causes or antecedents, and he sees that in the enlightened intellect of man there lies latent power, not to overcome, but to direct and control these forces.

This knowledge alters his emotional state. Anger and disgust are undermined. They die away, and into their place is born sympathy, beneficence; for, however great may be the wrong-doing of humanity, individuals are not to blame. An individual is good or bad according to the conditions of his birth, the method of his education, the circumstances of his life; and by alteration of these objective phenomena (under the ruling of an enlightened and persistent reason) the subjective phenomena of individual human nature and of social

relations will be redeemed, and raised to nobler ends and purer morality.

At the present stage of social evolution the militant qualities of human nature are everywhere prominent, and disfigure our civilization. We have lively predatory instincts, keen pursuit of gain, treachery, cunning, gross injustice, brutal selfishness, rampant in our midst.

Individuals of the highest type, those who are by nature good and gentle, are inwardly grieved and outwardly buffeted, by the perpetual outcome of vicious, uncivilized tendencies. If ignorant of the great doctrine of evolution, they are certain to feel despairing of the immediate future, and regretful of the past. They sigh for the "good old times," when, as they fancy, work was conscientiously done, not scamped as it is now; when the necessaries of life were pure and unadulterated; when servants were less exacting and more honest; when wages were not perpetually rising; when labourers were not discontented; when children were not rebellious; when doctors were less required; when lawyers did not charge exorbitantly; and when comfort and ease were more abundant, and far more liberally enjoyed.

Of these "good old times" we shall presently speak, but what I would here point out to my reader is, that whilst with the good and gentle this state of mind only begets despondency and a measure of whining, thousands of human beings of a different type are thrown by it into anger, jealousy, or some other turbulent emotion. In society at every point one comes across either passive discontent, or active indignation, accompanied by the intellectual conviction that some individual or individuals must be to blame for the unsatisfactory state of our industrial and social life.

A few days ago a grocer's assistant charged a lady customer a price for candles above the market value. The lady remonstrated, remarking, "at the co-operative store the price is so and so." The grocer immediately stepped forward, and explained that he had lowered the whole of his prices to the level of the store's, but that as yet his shop lads were apt to make mistakes. "Probably," said the lady, "had the prices been raised, not lowered, the lads would better apprehend the change." Her irony gave no offence. The man at once became confidential and communicative. "These abominable stores," he said, "threaten to drive honest tradesmen like me out of the field. It is all the fault of clergymen and lawyers." "Indeed!

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how so?" the lady asked. "These men," he replied, are clever and idle. They do uncommonly little work themselves, and charge enormously for the little they do. There is no other class so eager to buy cheap, and they have set their wits to work and invented these horrible stores, where they buy cheaply to the ruin of such men as me. The lawyers," he went on, "are the worse men of the two. Their own work is perfectly useless. If two men quarrel about a bit of money, the lawyer may settle the dispute; but he pockets the whole of the money and calls it his fees!" Well, well," said the lady, “if no lawyer existed, at least you must allow that the men would fight about the money, and very probably homicide would be the result. Surely bloodshed is a worse evil than the loss of money."

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The grocer's condition of mind is extremely common in the present day. Men ignorant of evolution, and pressed upon by social changes that make the struggle for existence severe, and too often overwhelming, have a vague sense of injustice done them. They reason quite illogically, each one from his own centre of difficulty, and are alike in cherishing a spirit of vindictiveness, a readiness to strike out in any direction that prejudice or bias may prompt.

This grocer is certain to make church disestablishment a vital point in his political creed. His dislike to the clergy, and his hatred of co-operative stores, aided by faulty logic, will become dynamic force in his exercise of the franchise.

I am of course aware of the general opinion that education is the panacea for ignorant vindictiveness, and every other social evil. With State education made compulsory, progress, it is argued, must necessarily be rapid. It may be so-but progress in what? Will it be progress in all the benign influences of a happy civilization?

I venture to assert that the first effect of education upon the masses is naturally to increase the general sensibility to the many disabilities of their lot.

Hitherto the great working-class of this country has borne a strong resemblance to the patient, toiling Issachar crouching down as a strong ass between two burdens, and bowing his shoulder to bear; but, as education throws into activity the massive brain, Issachar will no longer crouch. He shakes off his submissive lethargy, his passive contentment with a meagre, squalid existence. He demands, with a growing consciousness of strength, and a growing irritation of feeling, why, to the poor