the general drift of the calculation is clear.) At first sight, all that looks very well indeed for the prospects of the syndicate; but it ought perhaps to be added that as yet Sir William Ramsay has taken no shares, that he has written to the papers to state that his report was confidential, and that "the process is still in an elementary stage."

There are possibly other reflections which may occur. For the sake of argument, suppose it to be granted that all these calculations of the amount of gold waiting in the sea for a syndicate to extract it are correct. Suppose it to be a fact that somehow there could be obtained from sea-water so many million tons of gold. You are faced by two difficulties,-first, by the mechanical difficulty of getting the grain of gold dry into your hand out of the water; second, by the obvious fact that if you can manage to extract a sufficiently large quantity of gold in a given time-if, that is to say, again purely for the sake of argument, you could in a year double the amount of solid, malleable gold in existence-you would upset the standards by which the value of goods exchanged among the merchant nations is measured. Would that be a good thing to do? But take the mechanical difficulties first. To begin with, granted that from a ton of sea-water you can get a grain of gold. Pump, then, a thousand tons of pure sea-water into a reservoir and begin to treat it. When you have extracted, by whatever treatment, the thousand grains of gold which were floating somewhere in those thousand tons of water, you have dry gold in your hands value two thousand pence, -roughly four guineas, out of which, of course, you have to pay for your labor and part of the initial cost of the plant put up for extraction. Still, after paying that, you remain, for the sake of argument, two guineas in hand. Next, you have to get rid of your now

goldless sea-water, in order to pump in the next thousand tons to be treated. What are you going to do with it? Clearly it would not be the best thing to do to pump it straight back into the sea where it came from; you might, in that case, unless there were racing tides to carry it away (and perhaps to carry it back again next day), pump again into your reservoir water which you had already treated, and which would be therefore goldless. The best thing to do, obviously, would be to run your waste sea-water through a conduit-pipe or by some other method to a distant coast,-you might, for instance, pump it into your reservoir on one side of the Panama Isthmus and pump it out on the other.

Suppose, for a moment, however, that this physical difficulty could be sur mounted, or better, that a much greater secret than this for obtaining gold from sea-water were discovered; suppose that some private individual were able with the utmost secrecy to develop the scheme of a flotilla of ships which should go out simultaneously, each captain armed with the inventor's secret, and which should dip down some kind of magnetic apparatus attracting all the gold in the sea for miles round. Imagine the flotilla secretly returning home, each ship with tons of gold on board; and then imagine the gold supply of the world suddenly doubled, capable of being trebled in a month, quadrupled in two months. What would happen? Would the owner of the flotilla, the inventor of the magnetic apparatus, become amazingly rich? For a time, perhaps; but if his secret were discovered, or if it were known that it was only a chemical secret which stood between wealth and poverty, would he remain rich for long. simply because he could always produce gold to pay for whatever he wanted? He would not, of course. He would probably be assassinated.

since there is always a tendency to believe that secrets can somehow be obtained by killing; but if he were not assassinated, and if the secret leaked out, so that every Government in the world knew how to obtain gold exceedingly cheap, clearly the inventor would become just as poor a man as any one else who possessed merely gold, or paper redeemable by gold. He might as well possess so much sand. If the gold-supply of the world could be multiplied to any extent with absolute ease, and multiplied at irregular intervals, there would be no standard of prices. A quarter of wheat might stand at fifty shillings one day and two hundred and fifty shillings the next day: you might be asked half-a-crown for lunch on Monday and a sovereign for the same lunch on Saturday; you could measure nothing until you discovered a new standard; the gold standard would have disappeared.

But would it be allowed to disappear? the question might be asked. Would there not immediately be an international Convention, called together to make it illegal to collect supplies of The Spectator.

gold of this kind? Could it not be arranged that the sea, at least, should be inviolable, however deeply the earth might be scarred and seamed to get the great thing? True, such a Convention might bring about security of markets in time of peace, though even then there would always be privateers stealing out with magnets, hoping to return undiscovered. But in time of war, if four or five great nations were involved? Then the ships would go out for gold, not one by one, but by all the hundreds which the rich nations could afford. And to what end? To establish, in that last fantastic resort, only this,-the perpetual truth that not by some sudden, easy discovery can any man, or any nation, ever become rich; but that by the calamitous upsetting of an apparently perpetual standard of prices, a new standard must be discovered; that the new standard must involve, not mere ingenuity, but stark labor of body; that "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" is the last test, the ultimate standard, of men's riches.

It is impossible to deal adequately with such a volume as "The Letters of William Stubbs Bishop of Oxford" within the limits of a brief notice. We therefore reprint from the Independent Review, elsewhere in this magazine, Mr. Herbert Paul's review of the book and estimate of the Bishop's character, under the title "Bishops and Historians." But it is not primarily as a bishop or an historian that the writer of these delightful letters, which Mr. W. H. Hutton has edited with excellent discrimination, makes the most abiding impression, but as a man,kind, witty, whimsical, of sincere and stalwart convictions, of simplicity and

strength of character, of warm sympathies and of a most lovable nature. Of this man,-scholar, historian and bishop,-the volume gives us the most intimate glimpses, for the letters are written with perfect unconsciousness and unconcern. They begin with the beginning of his career as "a country parson" at the middle of the last century and come down to within a few days of his death in April, 1901,-the very last letter of all, brief and written with the stress of mortal illness upon him, marked nevertheless by his invincible humor. The book is illustrated with several portraits and is furnished with a full index. E. P. Dutton & Co.

PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

The disorganization of domestic service has so seriously affected home comforts and social life in recent years, that no apology is necessary for dealing again with a subject which has already attracted a considerable amount of attention. Yet in reviewing the domestic situation, the causes of the evil and its possible cure, extremes are to be avoided. The growing unpopularity of domestic service must be taken into account as a new element in the situation by those who maintain that this is but a passing phase of no serious import; while those who foretell in present difficulties the extinction of the servant race, and a further sign of the degeneracy of the English people, will be interested to hear of a domestic crisis of equal magnitude occurring more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Literature of that period abounds with instances of the insolence of English servants, and of their independence of their masters,

whose service they left on the slightest provocation. In some respects the position was worse then than it is now. We are told that "at the entrance of the Law Courts and the Parliament, a host of servants kept up such riotous and licentious confusion that one would think there were no such things as rule or distinction among us," while the custom of sending footmen to keep their masters' places at the play, during the first Act, resulted in such constant disorder in the galleries (where the servants retired and claimed admission free on the arrival of their masters), that they were eventually expelled from Drury Lane Theatre in 1737; not, however, until a riot had taken place in which about twentyfive people were seriously injured, and which the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales was unable to re strain.

The evil was evidently a national one, of sufficient importance to attract

the attention of foreign travellers. A Portuguese who visited England in 1730, thus reviews the situation:

As to the common and menial servants (of London) they have great wages, are well kept and clothed, but are notwithstanding, the plague of almost every house in town. They form themselves into societies, or rather confederacies, contributing to the maintenance of each other when out of place, and if any of them cannot manage the family where they are entertained as they please, immediately they give notice they will be gone. There is no speaking to them, they are above correction.

In a letter to the Spectator of that time, Philo Britannicus writes:

There is one thing in particular, which I wonder you have not touched upon, and that is the general Corruption of Manners in the Servants of Great Britain. I am a Man that have travelled and seen many Nations, but. have for seven Years past resided constantly in London or within twenty miles of it. In this Time I have contracted a numerous Acquaintance among the best Sort of People, and have hardly Found one of them happy in their Servants. This is a matter of great Astonishment to Foreigners and all such as have visited Foreign Countries, especially since we cannot but observe that there is no Part of the World where Servants have those Privileges and Advantages as in England. They have nowhere else such plentiful Diet, large Wages or indulgent Liberty. There is no Place where they labor less, and yet where they are so little respectful, more wasteful, more negligent, or where they so frequently change their Masters.

The writer concludes the letter by asking for "observations that we may know how to treat these Rogues." The Editor in his reply observes that his correspondent's complaints "run wholly upon Men Servants" and traces the evil to "the Custom of giving Board Wages, which leads them to fre

quent Clubs and Taverns or to eat after their Masters and then reserve their Wages for other Occasions." Hence, he observes, it arises

that they are but in a lower Degree what their Masters are and usually affect an imitation of their Manners. It is a common Humor among the retinue of People of quality when they are in their Revels, that is, when they are out of their Masters' Sight, to assume in a humorous Way the Names and Titles of those whose Liveries they

wear.

In this respect we note a continuity of servant custom to the present day, for in large houses, as we are all aware, the domestics still take precedence in the sacred precincts of the housekeeper's room according to the social position of their masters and mistresses.

But historians of that period attrib ute the evil then existing to other causes: notably to the attendance of servants upon their mistresses in the great scenes of fashionable dissipation and to the immunity from arrest for debt enjoyed by servants of Peers equally with their masters, and above all to the system of Vales then prevailing in England. This system had in those days reached exaggerated dimensions, and was a severe tax on those of slender means who, as well as the more opulent, were expected to lavish handsome gifts on the servants of their host in attendance upon them at table. It is said that a foreigner of distinction would spend as much as ten guineas in this way in one evening, and that "no feature of English life seemed more revolting to foreigners than an English entertainment, when the guests, often under the eyes of the host, passed from the drawingroom through a double row of servants, each one of them expecting and receiving his fee." It is this custom, abolished about the middle of the eigh