regulations, the rough of the slum snaps his fingers without fear at all regulations.  If one of the bad boys from the “rookeries” does go to school, he soon learns that he may take his own way.  If he is foul-mouthed, thievish, indecent, or insolent, and is promptly punished, he drags his teacher into a police-court, and the sentimentalists secure a conviction.  No one can tell the kind of anarchy that reigns in some parts of England excepting men who dwell amidst it; and, to make matters worse, a set of men who may perhaps be charitably reckoned as insane have framed a Parliamentary measure which may render any teacher who controls a young rough liable at once to one hundred pounds fine or six months’ imprisonment.  This is no flight of inventive humour on our part; it is plain fact which may probably be seen in action as law before twelve months are over.

Tyranny I abhor, cruelty I abhor—­above all, cruelty to children.  But we are threatened at one pole of the State-world with a tyranny of factioneers who cultivate rudeness and rowdyism as a science, while at the other pole we are threatened with the uncontrolled tyranny of the “residuum.”  We must return to our common sense; the middle-classes must make themselves heard, and we must teach the wild spirits who aim at wrecking all order that safety depends upon the submission of all to the expressed will of the majority.  Debate is free enough—­too free—­and no man is ever neglected ultimately if he has anything rational to say, so that a minority has great power; but, when once a law is made, it must be obeyed.  England is mainly sound; our movement is chiefly to the good; but this senseless pampering of loutishness in high and low places is a bad symptom which tends to such consequences as can be understood only by those who have learned to know the secret places.  If it is not checked—­if anarchists, young and old, are not taught that they must obey or suffer—­there is nothing ahead but tumult, heart-burning, and wreck.

March, 1889.

BAD COMPANY.

There has been much talk about the insensate youth who boasted that he had squandered half-a-million on the Turf in a year.  The marvellous journalists who frequent betting resorts printed hundreds of paragraphs every week explaining the wretched boy’s extravagances—­how he lost ten thousand pounds in one evening at cards; how he lost five thousand on one pigeon-shooting match; how he kept fifty racehorses in training; how he made little presents of jewelry to all and sundry of his friends; how he gaily lost fifteen thousand on a single race, though he might have saved himself had he chosen; how he never would wear the same shirt twice.  Dear boy!  Every day those whose duty compels them to read newspapers were forced to see such nauseous stuff, so that a lad’s private business became public property, and no secret was made of matters which were a subject for grief and scorn.  Hundreds of grown men stood by and saw that boy lose a fortune