some outer voice to make them alive. Well, once upon a time I heard this philosopher, your Mr. Ruskin, say that only the most noble, most virtuous, most beautiful young men should be allowed to go to the war; the others, never. And he maintained it—ah! in language from some divine madhouse in heaven. But as to that, it is a great objection that your army is already small. Yet of this I am nearly sure; it is the wrong men who go to gaol. The rogues and thieves should give place to honest men—honest reflective men. Every advantage of that conclusive solitude is lost on blackguard persons and is mostly turned to harm. For them prescribe one, two, three applications of your cat-o'-nine tails——

There is knout like it! said I, intending a severity of retort which I hoped would not be quite lost in the pun.

——and then a piece of bread, a shilling, and dismissal to the most devout repentance that brutish crime is ever acquainted with, repentance in stripes. Imprisonment is wasted on persons of so inferior character. Waste it not, and you will have accommodation for wise men to learn the monk's lesson (did you ever think it all foolishness?) that a little imperious hardship, a time of seclusion with only themselves to talk to themselves, is most improving. For statesmen and reformers it should be an obligation.

And according to your experience what is the general course of the improvement? In what direction does it run?

At best? In sum total? You know me that I am no monk nor lover of monks, but I say to you what the monk would say were he still a man and intelligent. The chief good is rising above petty irritation, petty contentiousness; it is patience with ills that must last long; it is choosing to build out the east wind instead of running at it with a sword.

And, if I remember aright, you never had that sword out of your hand.

From twenty years old to fifty, never out of my hand. But there were excuses—no, but more than excuses; remember that that was another time. Now how different it is, and what satisfaction to have lived to see the change!

And what is the change you are thinking of!

One that I have read of—only he must not flatter himself that he alone could find it out—in some Review articles of an old friend of Vernet's whose portrait is before me now. And then, a little to my distress, but more to my pleasure, he quoted from two or three forgotten papers of mine on the later developments of social humanity, the evolution of goodness in the relations of men to each other, the new, great and rapid extension of brotherly kindness; observations and theories which were welcomed as novel when they were afterwards taken up and enlarged upon by Mr. Kidd in his book on Social Evolution.

For an ancient conspirator and man of the barricades, continued Vernet, by this time pacing the room in the dusk which he would not allow to be disturbed, for a blood-and-iron man who put all his hopes of a better day for his poor devils of fellow-creatures on the smashing of forms and institutions and the substitution of others, I am rather a surprising convert, don't you think? But who could know in those days what was going on in the common stock of mind by—what shall we call it? Before your Darwin brought out his explaining word 'evolution' I should have said that the change came about by a sort of mental chemistry; that it was due to a kind of chemical ferment in the mind, unsuspected till it showed entirely new growths and developments. And even now, you know, I am not quite comfortable with 'evolution' as the word for this sudden spiritual advance into what you call common kindness and more learned persons call 'altruism.' It does not satisfy me, 'evolution.'

But you can say why it doesn't, perhaps.

Nothing, more, I suppose, than the familiar association of 'evolution' with slow degrees and gradual processes. Evolution seems to speak the natural coming-out of certain developments from certain organisms under certain conditions. The change comes, and you see it coming; and you can look back and trace its advance. But here? The human mind has been the same for ages; subject to the same teaching; open to the same persuasions and dissuasions; as quick to see and as keen to think as it is now; and all the while it has been staring on the same cruel scenes of misery and privation: no, but very often worse. And then, presto! there comes a sudden growth of fraternal sentiment all over this field of the human mind; and such a growth that if it goes on, if it goes on straight and well, it will transform the whole world. Transform its economies?—it will change its very aspect. Towns, streets, houses will show the difference; while as to man himself, it will make him another being. For this is neither a physical nor a mere intellectual advance. As for that, indeed, perhaps the intellectual advance hasn't very much farther to go on its own lines, which are independent of morality, or of goodness as I prefer to say: the simple word! Well, do you care if evolution has pretty nearly done with intellect? Would you mind if intellect never made a greater shine? Will your heart break if it never ascends to a higher plane than it has reached already?

Not a bit; if, in time, nobody is without a good working share of what intellect there is amongst us.

No, not a bit! Enough of intellect for the good and happiness of mankind if we evolve no more of it. But this is another thing! This is a spiritual evolution, spiritual advance and development—a very different thing! Mark you, too, that it is not shown in a few amongst millions, but is common, general. And though, as you have said, it may perish at its beginnings, trampled out by war, the terrible war to come may absolutely confirm it. For my part, I don't despair of its surviving and spreading even from the battle-field. It is your own word that not only has the growth of common kindness been more urgent, rapid and general this last hundred years than was ever witnessed before in the whole long history of the world, but it has come out as strongly in making war as in making peace. It is seen in extending to foes a benevolence which not long ago would have been thought ludicrous and even unnatural. Why, then, if that's so, the feeling may be furthered and intensified by the very horrors of the next great war, such horrors as there must be; and—God knows! God knows!—but from this beginning the spiritual nature of man may be destined to rise as far above the rudimentary thing it is yet (I think of a staggering blind puppy) as King Solomon's wits were above an Eskimo's.

Still the same enthusiast, I said to myself, though with so great a difference. But what struck me most was the reverence with which he said God knows! For the coolest Encyclopedist could not have denied the existence of God with a more settled air than did the Vernet of old days.

And yet, so he went on, were the human race to become all-righteous in a fortnight, and to push out angels' wings from its shoulders, every one! every one! all together on Christmas Day, it would still be the Darwinian process. Yes, we must stick to it, that it is evolution, I suppose, and I'm sure it contents me well enough. What matter for the process! And yet do you know what I think?

Lights had now been brought in by the waiter—a waiter who really could not understand why not. But we sat by the open window looking out upon the deepening darkness of the garden, beyond which the river shone