take the oath excited a controversy which now seems incredible. Robert
Louis Stevenson can no longer be adequately described as an
"accomplished writer," and the introduction of female clerks into the
postal service by Mr. Fawcett has ceased to raise alarm lest the
courteous practice of always allowing ladies to be victors in an
argument should perforce be abandoned.

But in September of the same year we find a cloud on the horizon, the
prelude of a coming storm. The Trade Union Congress had just been held
and the leaders of the working classes, with apparently but little
discussion, had passed a resolution asking the Government to institute
an enquiry with a view to relaxing the stringency of Poor Law
administration. This, said the "Spectator," is beginning "to tamper with
natural conditions," "There is no logical halting-place between the
theory that it is the duty of the State to make the poor comfortable,
and socialism."

Another factor in the thought of those days attracted but little
attention in the Press, though there is a long article in the
"Spectator" at the beginning of 1882 on "the ever-increasing wonder" of
that strange faith, "Positivism." It is difficult for the present
generation to realise how large a space in the minds of the young men of
the eighties was occupied by the religion invented by Auguste Comte. Of
this however more must be said on a later page.

But perhaps the most significant feature in the periodical literature of
the time is what it omits. April, 1882, is memorable for the death of
Charles Darwin, incomparably the greatest of nineteenth-century
Englishmen, if greatness be measured by the effects of his work on the
thought of the world. The "Spectator" printed a secondary article which