interest to govern and rule in the right way, and twist round the feminine finger.  If women should succeed in reducing or raising—­of course raising—­men to the feminine standard, by feminizing society, literature, the colleges, and all that, would they not turn on their creations—­for even the Bible intimates that women are uncertain and go in search of a Man?  It is this sort of blind instinct of the young man for preserving himself in the world that makes him so inaccessible to the good he might get from the prevailing culture of the leisure class.

THE ADVENT OF CANDOR

Those who are anxious about the fate of Christmas, whether it is not becoming too worldly and too expensive a holiday to be indulged in except by the very poor, mark with pleasure any indications that the true spirit of the day—­brotherhood and self-abnegation and charity—­is infusing itself into modern society.  The sentimental Christmas of thirty years ago could not last; in time the manufactured jollity got to be more tedious and a greater strain on the feelings than any misfortune happening to one’s neighbor.  Even for a day it was very difficult to buzz about in the cheery manner prescribed, and the reaction put human nature in a bad light.  Nor was it much better when gradually the day became one of Great Expectations, and the sweet spirit of it was quenched in worry or soured in disappointment.  It began to take on the aspect of a great lottery, in which one class expected to draw in reverse proportion to what it put in, and another class knew that it would only reap as it had sowed.  The day, blessed in its origin, and meaningless if there is a grain of selfishness in it, was thus likely to become a sort of Clearing-house of all obligations and assume a commercial aspect that took the heart out of it—­like the enormous receptions for paying social debts which take the place of the old-fashioned hospitality.  Everybody knew, meantime, that the spirit of good-will, the grace of universal sympathy, was really growing in the world, and that it was only our awkwardness that, by striving to cram it all for a year into twenty-four hours, made it seem a little farcical.  And everybody knows that when goodness becomes fashionable, goodness is likely to suffer a little.  A virtue overdone falls on t’other side.  And a holiday that takes on such proportions that the Express companies and the Post-office cannot handle it is in danger of a collapse.  In consideration of these things, and because, as has been pointed out year after year, Christmas is becoming a burden, the load of which is looked forward to with apprehension—­and back on with nervous prostration—­fear has been expressed that the dearest of all holidays in Christian lands would have to go again under a sort of Puritan protest, or into a retreat for rest and purification.  We are enabled to announce for the encouragement of the single-minded in this best