vation and decay. It ceased to be fashionable to join personally in these spasmodic but active pastimes. The populace thronged to them in thousands, but only to pay for the privilege of witnessing as lazy spectators recreations which were fondly called national. Some of these exhibitions were more than merely effeminate: active corruption was added in allurements to drunkenness, and in a factious partisanship which sometimes blew up to brutal assaults on the umpires of the game, and was always a fertile source of gambling. In their amusements, as in their wars, Britons ceased to play a personal part, finding a substitute for the vigorous sports of their fathers in the force and address of well-paid mercenaries, which in a more strenuous age would have rebuked the insolent softness of those who pampered them.

Personal force and military hardihood were the price which Britain paid for cheap imported food; the other cheap commodities in which the people delighted were purchased at a no less ruinous rate. In every department of social life the tendency of this age was the same, leading to the concentration of every industry into huge establishments controlled by a few heads, and succeeding, by the preponderance of their resources, in underselling the enterprises of small private traders. The Londoner of this period bought his food, his clothing, his furniture, his books and newspapers, his very tobacco, from companies, stores,

and

amalgamations, which counted the volume of their traffic by millions and their profits by hundreds of thousands of pounds, their emporia by scores, and their employees by thousands. The tradesmen of the preceding generation were thankful to become the managers and the shopwalkers of their inflated supplanters, and earned a livelihood by disposing of goods for their masters at a third of the price they had formerly asked and obtained for themselves. The plausible sophistries of political economy celebrated the commercial revolution as a triumph of the division of labour; but its moral effect on the people was as far-reaching as it was pernicious. Commercial power, hitherto divided with an approach to equality among a thousand merchants, now rested with a few groups, who absorbed and magnified the profits due to the labours of their subordinates. On these the status of inferiority, without responsibility or opportunity, worked its necessary effect: they no longer possessed that vigour of character which is nourished by the consciousness of selfdependence and the habit of individual judgment. When, as became ever more frequent, a great business was in the control of a limited company, the rigour of subordination verged upon the hopelessness of serfdom. The clerk of a personal employer might aspire for a partnership, and confidently demand humanity; but the servant of a body of directors sighed in vain for a position

either of authority or of reasonable comfort. In this organisation of business, the peculiar product of the Victorian age, the sense of responsibility slipped from the directors as from the directed: it was not their concern, so they argued, if employees were underpaid or the public cheated; all that was done was in the name and the interests of the shareholders. These, in their turn, passing back their consciences to the directors, were satisfied to cloak their vicarious wickedness with a convenient ignorance.

While the fires of ambition were extinguished in the breasts of the lower, and the voice of conscience silenced among the higher, circles of commerce, a particular corruption was reserved for the consumers. The wives of artisans and labourers had hitherto looked to their own industry for the clothing of themselves and their children,-as the smaller conveniences of the slender household had been made in moments of leisure by the labour of the husband. The

new methods of trading cheapened everything, and especially clothing, to a price within the compass of the poorest; but in doing so it rudely broke the tie which bound the lower classes to their homes. The wife, who had been wont to pass the evening in the manufacture of garments for her children, now bought them at some great emporium; and, emancipated at once from the necessity of work and the practice of frugality, devoted the evenings to idle gossip

or empty frivolity. On her trivial excursions she would be accompanied by her young children, which exposed their delicate immaturity to cold at the hours when it should have been fortified by sleep. The husband and father, no longer finding in his home the companionship craved by his brief hours of relaxation, sought it with better success at one of the gaudy publichouses, whose lights at the corner of every street attested the vices and the misfortunes of the poor. The happy home of the British plebeian passed from a reality to a proverb and from a proverb to a fable, and the fair picture of the past gave place to a blur of drunkenness, indolence, and disease.

The prevailing deterioration, which did not overlook the lowest, fastened greedily upon the highest ranks of the population. The Court, as a standard of polite manners, had almost ceased to exist. The retired life of the venerable Victoria during her later years left the leadership of fashion vacant, and the landed nobility was too impoverished, as well as too proud, to struggle for the vicegerency. The field of so-called society was left open to any adventurer with the effrontery to usurp it. Thus arose an inner circle of fashion, or, to call it by its contemporary and more appropriate name, of smartness, based neither upon birth nor elegance of manners, nor even invariably upon wealth, but rather upon a bold and clever arrogance, and supported in the general estimation mainly

by brazen advertisement. An aristocracy of birth may be unintelligent, but it has usually fixed and sustained a high standard of deportment and, within certain limitations, of conduct. But a society like that of London, where the loudest voice was the most eagerly listened to, was immediately fatal to every canon of propriety and good taste. In effrontery of demeanour, in licence of speech, in gaudiness of dress, in the very use of paints and cosmetics, the English women of fashion drifted farther and farther from their fathers' modest ideal of a lady; till at length there was not wanting the final scandal of women with honest reputations studying and imitating, with a too easy fidelity, the costumes and allurements of the most notorious French courtesans.

The love of letters might have been expected to oppose a barrier to the all-conquering vulgarity of the age. It was diffused over every class of society; the commonest labourers had acquired a taste for reading: Tennyson and Hall Caine were the theme of dissertations in the mining centres of the north and the pulpits of dissenting chapels. Never had books been so abundantly published or so widely read; the general average of literary merit had never been so high; but this age of mediocrity passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition. With the vast increase of readers promoted by the spread of elementary

education, the social standing, as the monetary rewards, of authorship increased in equal proportion; but this cause, while it lowered the standard of taste, at once inflamed the cupidity and diverted the ambitions of men of letters; and what once had been a single-minded devotion degenerated into a trade, pursued rather for its accidental emoluments than for its intrinsic charm. The rates of pay of novelists were quoted by the agents like the prices of stock on the Exchange, or the chances of a horse-race; and he who, by economising his genius, might have been a master, squandered his stores in profuse over-production. With the plethora of books came a surfeit of commentaries on work which juster canons would have left to the revision of posterity. A cloud of critics, of anthologists, and of log-rollers darkened the face of letters, and upon the decline of genius soon followed the corruption of taste. The last outrage upon the language of Shakespeare and Fielding was a swarm of periodical leaflets concocted of illiterate novelettes, unmeaning statistics, American jests, and infantile puzzles: they were consumed in prodigious quantities by the lower orders, and, by ruining the business of those who purveyed sincere if not masterly compositions, contributed more than any other cause to the debasement and final extinction of English letters.

With the proud spirit of empire sunk into the narrow greed of the shareholder; with physical force at its ebb, sports

corrupted, and martial spirit tamed; with domestic business so organised that it stifled individuality and fostered dishonest miserliness among traders, and invited the depravity of customers; with elegant manners and polite letters a tasteless echo of the half-forgotten past the British Empire entered upon the twentieth century under the gloomiest auspices. To the acuter eyes of succeeding generations that gloom is heightened by the reflection that the mutterings of the coming earthquake were all unheard by contemporaries; that they prided themselves on the greatness of their dominion, and hugged the specious perfection of their civilisation. Yet decline was already accomplished and irremediable, and fall was but too surely impending. The fair city still stood,

but men were wanting within it. Vulgarity, mediocrity, and cheapness had warped and stunted the most generous natures. The minds of all were reduced to the same level, the high spirit of empire evaporated, and little interests, with sordid emotions, inspired every soul. Civilisation had completed its work in the suppression of the individual, and the British, the most virile of barbarians, the most forward and energetic of mankind, were dissipated by their very virtues as the first to experience the dire results of its consummation. The diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard; Britain was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies, and the puny breed awaited only the onset of the first crisis to become the woeful patient of defeat and ruin.

THE sunset hour had come as I passed up the narrow track that skirted the river - bank, with a mob of villagers at my heels,-old men who had seen many strange things in the wild days before the coming of the white men, dull peasants who seemed too stolid and stupid to have ever seen anything at all, and swaggering youngsters, grown learned in the mysteries of reading and writing, fresh from our schools, and prepared at a moment's notice to teach the wisest of the village elders the only proper manner in which an egg may be sucked. rabble which every Malay village spews up nowadays when one chances to visit it is always composed of these elements, the old men, whose wisdom is their own, and of its kind deep and wide; the middle-aged tillers of the soil, who have no wisdom and desire none; the men of the younger generation, whose knowledge is borrowed and is extraordinarily imperfect of its kind.

The

The glaring Eastern sun, sinking to its rest, blazed full

-The Curse of Kehama.

in my eyes, dazzling me, and thus I saw but dimly the figure that crossed the path in front of me, heading for the running water on my right. Silhouetted blackly against the burning disc in the west, it appeared to be the form of a woman, bowed nearly double beneath the weight of a burden slung in a cloth across her back-a burden far too heavy for her strength. This, alas! is a sight only too common in Asiatic lands; for if man must idle, women must work as well as weep until at last the time comes for the long, long sleep, under the spear-blades of the lalang and the love - grass, in some shady nook in the little peaceful village burial-ground. Therefore I took no special notice of the figure moving painfully athwart the sun-glare ahead of me, until my arm was violently seized by the headman who was walking just behind me.

"Have a care, Tuan," he cried. "Have a care. It is Mînah and her man. It is the sickness that is not good, the evil sickness. Go not nigh to