for lying-in women; Multiply your baths and washhouses till there
is no excuse for a dirty person; Educate; Provide day schools for
every proper child, and industrial or reformatory schools for
every improper one; Open advanced High Schools for the best
pupils, and found Scholarships to the Universities; Erect other
schools for technical training; Offer to teach trades and
agriculture to all comers for nothing--you would soon neutralize
your bugbear of trades-unionism; Teach morals, teach science,
teach art, teach them to amuse themselves like men and not like
brutes. In a land so wealthy the programme is not impracticable,
though severe. As the end to be attained is the welfare of
future generations, no good reason could be urged why they should
not contribute towards the cost of it--a better debt to leave to
posterity than the incubus of an irrational war."

Will any sane political practitioner wonder to be told that at
the end of this harangue the smoking-room party broke up, and
that some, as they laughed good-humoredly over Sterling's
egregia, recalled the number of glasses of inspirited seltzer
swallowed by the orator? He was so far in advance of the most
radical reformer that there was no hope of overtaking him for an
era or two: so they determined to fancy they had left him behind.



V.--Party Tactics--and Political Obstructions to Social Reform.

In the Club our hero revelled awhile under the protection of Sir
Charles Sterling, and the petting of peers, Members of
Parliament, and loungers who swarm therein. Certain gentlemen of