the most leisured moments of the day will be those he passes in the railway carriage.  Once arrived at his office he must plunge into the vortex of business; do battle with a thousand rivalries and competitions; day after day must labour in the same wearisome pursuits, content, perhaps, if at the end of the year he shall have escaped as by a miracle commercial shipwreck.  He will come back to his residence, night after night, a tired man; not pleasantly wearied with pursuits which have exercised his complete powers, but tired to the point of dejection by the narrowness and monotony of his pursuits.  I say he returns to his residence; I scorn to say his home, for the house he rents is merely the barrack where he sleeps.  Of the life that goes on within this house, which is nominally his, he knows nothing.  In its daily ordering, or even in its external features, he has no part.  He has chosen no item of its furniture; he has had no hand in its decoration; he has but paid the tradesmen’s bills.  His children scarcely know him; they are asleep when he goes off in the morning, and asleep when he returns at night; he is to them the strange man who sits at the head of the table once a week and carves the Sunday joint.  It is well for them if they have a mother who possesses gifts of government, sympathy, and patient comprehension, for it is clear that they have no father.  He gets a living, and perhaps in time an ample living; but does he live?

It may be said that this picture is exaggerated; on the contrary, I think it is under-estimated.  I have myself known men whose average daily absence from ‘home’ is twelve hours; they disappear by the eight o’clock morning train, and in times of special business pressure it is not far from midnight when they return.  The trains, cabs, and public vehicles of London convey, day by day, one million three hundred thousand of these homeless men to their employments in the city.  Here and there a wise man may be found who resents this tyranny of suburbanism.  I know a young business man, who also chances to possess domestic instincts, for whom suburbanism grew so intolerable that he took a house in the very heart of London, that he might lunch and dine with his wife at his own table without neglecting his business interests.  He was a wise man, but he is the only one I know.  Counting the time passed at luncheon and dinner, the later departure in the morning, and the earlier arrival at night, he is the clear gainer, day by day, of three to four hours of domestic intercourse.  At the end of the week he has thus added to the credit of his family life four-and-twenty hours; at the end of a year he has enjoyed more than fifty full days of domestic intercourse which would have been forfeited had he continued to live at Surbiton.  He has also saved money, for though the rent he pays in Central London is more than the rent he paid at Surbiton, yet he has saved the expense of his season-ticket, lunches, and occasional dinners at a club or restaurant,