showed some appreciation of the event. But in the monthly reviews it
passed practically unnoticed. It is true that Darwin was buried in
Westminster Abbey, but even in 1882, twenty-three years after the
publication of the "Origin of Species," evolution was regarded as a
somewhat dubious theorem which respectable people were wise to ignore.

In the monthly reviews we find the same odd mixture of articles apposite
to present problems, and articles utterly out of date. The organisation
of agriculture is a perennial, and Lady Verney's "Peasant Proprietorship
in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John Rae's "Co-operative
Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March, 1882), and Professor
Sedley Taylor's "Profit-Sharing in Agriculture" ("Nineteenth Century,"
October, 1882) show that change in the methods of exploiting the soil is
leaden-footed and lagging.

Problems of another class, centring round "the Family," present much the
same aspect now as they did thirty years ago. In his "Infant Mortality
and Married Women in Factories," Professor Stanley Jevons
("Contemporary," January, 1882) proposes that mothers of children under
three years of age should be excluded from factories, and we are at
present perhaps even farther from general agreement whether any measure
on these lines ought to be adopted.

But when we read the articles on Socialism--more numerous than might be
expected at that early date--we are in another world. Mr. Samuel Smith,
M.P., writing on "Social Reform" in the "Nineteenth Century" for May,
1883, says that: "Our country is still comparatively free from
Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who can
tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of human
wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such