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when the seamy' side of wealth and pleasure will be exposed. For some time the ministers who would change habits may fail. It is not until they are able again to lift up the God whose presence is dimly felt, and whose nature is misunderstood, that they will succeed. In the knowledge of God is eternal life. When all know God as the Father who requires rich and poor to be perfect sharers in His gifts of knowledge, beauty, and joy, as well as in His gifts of virtue, forgiveness, and peace, then none will be satisfied until they are at one with Him, and His habit has become their habit.

It may, however, be well here to suggest in a few words what may be done while habits' remain the same' by laws or systems for the relief of poverty.

It would be wise (1) to promote the organisation of unskilled labour. The mass of applicants last winter belonged to this class, and in one report it is distinctly said that the greater number were 'born within the demoralising influence of the intermittent and irregular employment given by the Dock Companies, and who have never been able to rise above their circumstances.' It is in evidence that the wages of these men do not exceed 128. a week on an average in a year. If, by some encouragement, these men could be induced to form a union, and if by some pressure the Docks could be induced to employ a regular gang, much would be gained. The very organisation would be a lesson to these men in self-restraint and in fellowship. The substitution of regular hands at the Docks for those who now, by waiting and scrambling, get a daily ticket, would give to a large number of men the help of settled employment and take away the dependance on chance, which makes many careless. Such a change might be met by a non possumus of the directors, but it is forgotten that to the present system a weightier non possumus would be urged if the labourers could speak as shareholders do speak. A possible loss of profit is not comparable to an actual loss of life, and the labourers do lose life, and more than life, as they scramble for a living that the dividend may be increased.

(2) The helpers of the poor might be more efficiently organised. The ideal of co-operating charity has long hovered over the mischief and waste of competing charity. Up to the present denominational jealousy, or the belief in crotchets, or the self-will which dislikes committees,' has prevented common work. If all who are serving the poor could meet and divide-meet to learn one another's object and divide each to do his own work-there would be a force applied which might remove mountains of difficulty. Abuse would be known, wise remedies would be suggested, and foolish remedies prevented. Indirect means would be brought to the support of direct, and those

2 Prices paid according to the Mansion House report are: Making of shirts, 3d. to 4d. each; making soldiers' leggings, 28. a dozen; making lawn-tennis aprons, elaborately frilled, 5d. a dozen to the sweater, the actual worker getting less.

concerned to reform the land laws, to teach the ignorant, and beautify the ugly, would be recognised as fellow-workers with those. whose object is the abolition of poverty. Money would be amply given, and the high motives of faith and love applied to the reform of character. The ideal is in its fulness impossible until there be a really national Church, in which the denominations will preach their truth, and in which the entire religious life of the nation will be expressed.' Such a Church, extending into every corner of the land and drawing to itself all who love their neighbours, would realise the ideal of co-operative charity, and so order things that no one would be in sorrow whom comfort will relieve, and no one in pain whom help can succour.

(3) Lastly, the qualification for a seat on a board of guardians might be removed and the position opened to working men.3 The action of the poor-law has a very distinct effect on poverty, and intelligent experience is on the side of administration by rule rather than by sentiment. In poor-law unions, where it is known that 'indoors' all that is necessary for life will be provided, but that 'outdoors' nothing will be given, the poor feel they are under a rule which they can understand. They are able to calculate on what will happen in a way which is impossible when giving goes by favour or desert,' and they do not wait and suffer by trusting to a chance. Public opinion, however, does not support such administration, and as public opinion is largely now that of the working men, it is necessary that these men should be admitted on to boards of guardians, where by experience they would learn how impossible it is to adjust relief to desert, and how much less cruel is regular sternness than spasmodic kindness. A carefully and wisely administered poor-law is the best weapon in hand for the troubles to come, and such is impossible without the sympathy of all classes.

By some such means preparation may be made for dealing with poverty, but even these would not be sufficient and would not be in order at a moment of emergency.

If next winter there be great distress, what, it may be asked, can possibly be done? The chief strain must undoubtedly be borne by the poor-law, and the poor-law must follow rules-hard-and-fast lines. The simplest rule is indoor relief for all applicants, and if for able-bodied men the relief take the form of work which is educational, its helpfulness will be obvious. The casual labourer, whose family is given necessary support on condition that he enters the House, may, during his residence, learn something of whitewashing, woodwork, and baking, or, better yet, that habit of regularity which will do much to keep up the home which has been kept together for him.

It might be necessary at the same time to abolish the compounder,' so that the tenant of every tenement might himself pay the rates and feel their burden.

The poor-law can thus help during a time of pressure without any break in its established system. If more is necessary, perhaps the next best form of relief would be an extension of that tried last year by the Whitechapel Committee of the Mansion House Fund. By co-operation with other local authorities the guardians might offer more work at street sweeping, or cleaning-which in poor London is never adequately done-under such conditions of residence or providence as would prevent immigration, but would be free of the degrading associations of the stone-yards. The staff at the disposal of the guardians would enable them to try the experiment more effectively than was possible when a voluntary committee without experience, time, or staff, had to do everything.

By some such plans relief could be afforded to all who belong to what may be called the lowest class; for the assistance of those who could be helped by tools, emigration, or money, the great Friendly societies, the Society for Relief of Distress, and the Charity Organisation Society might act in conjunction. These societies are unsectarian, are already organised and may be developed in power and tenderness to any extent by the addition of members and visitors.

These means and all means which are suggested seem sadly inadequate, and in their very setting forth provoke criticism. There are no effectual means but those which grow in a Christian society. The force which, without striving and crying, without even entering into collision with it, destroyed slavery will also destroy poverty. When rich men, knowing God, realise that life is giving, and when poor men, also knowing God, understand that being is better than having, then there will be none too rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and none too poor to enjoy God's world.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND.

THE genius of each generation chooses instinctively among traditional forms its particular method of expression and the means by which it can most easily influence mankind. It is mainly through the agency of the novel that this end is attained in our portion of the nineteenth century. Forty-two years ago Sainte-Beuve, while singing the requiem of the extraordinarily fertile period that reigned in the intellectual life of France from 1830 to 1840, prophesied that the old forms of art were passing away, and that new ones must arise : "I place my hopes for the future on dramatic literature. In it will be found, I believe, the new development. The theatre, and the theatre alone, can rouse the wearied mind of this generation from its apathy, and give shape and colour to the mental speculations now germinating in men's minds.

The great critic failed to see that the new departure was destined to take place in the domain of novel-writing rather than in the domain of the drama, and that not only would the novelist appropriate much of the influence hitherto wielded by the playwright, but would compel the drama to join issue with the novel, as far as theatrical conventions would allow, in its realism and accuracy of finish. Many novels are now dramatised, and many novelists have become writers of plays. Alexandre Dumas, fils, before he was bitten by the desire to occupy the position of tragic moralist, led the way to naturalism on the stage. Emile Augier and Octave Feuillet have both successfully followed in his footsteps. Until, however, the naturalistic millennium, foretold by the new school, has completely descended upon the intellectual world the novel must depend for its effects on motives very different from those which rule dramatic action. The one evolves its story by describing every shade, every gradation, in surroundings and background which influence its personages, while the other is constrained to catch the attention of the public by colour, movement, sudden contrasts, and anomalous situations. Le Théâtre vit d'exceptions,' and our generation, living at high pressure as it does, likes, in its rare moments of repose, to take its doses of philosophy diluted, and its quota of morality in solution. A transcript of ordinary life, as it passes around it, suits its over-burdened digestion better than exceptional events or abnormal individualities.

It is to France we must look for the highest development of the modern novel. The French intellect is analytic, quick to seize the phantasies and fashions of the hour and give them expression and shape, sensitive to the ridiculous and to the weaker side of human nature, and gifted with an artistic appreciation of form and proportion which permits its imagination to 'vagabond' here and there, yet keeps its work symmetrical and within the limits of probability. The novel on so fruitful a soil has taken every form, socialistic and pathological, pastoral and erudite, political and domestic. No reticence hinders, no moral consideration prevents, the French writer of fiction from touching on any and every subject. Of these classifications, the most arrogant in its pretensions is the so-called Scientific' or Experimental' novel, by which, its exponents tell us, a work of fiction is to be approached like a study in pathology and reduced to the observation of the "Universal Mechanism of Matter"'!

As the science of medicine, they tell us, has emerged, thanks to the experimental method, from a state of empiricism into the definite region of facts, so the study of mental feeling and passion is to he reduced from theory and supposition to a stern deduction from actuality. The high priests of this school of fiction are Zola, the De Goncourts, Guy de Maupassant, and a host of others in our day; Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, a quarter of a century ago. In 1830 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), with the cynicism and materialism that has since distinguished the naturalistic following, gave forth his confession of pessimism and atheism to the world with a crudity and explicitness that offended a public accustomed to the vaporous vagueness of De Musset and Baudelaire. I shall be understood in 1880,' he said, with a shrug of the shoulders, divining, with a shrewd comprehension of human nature, that his theory of fiction was the one destined to rule men's minds in the future. La Chartreuse de Parme and Rouge et Noir, considered by the Moderns' as occupying a foremost position in French literature, were so disregarded at the time of their publication as to induce their author to shake the dust of his ungrateful country off his feet and spend the last years of his life in Italy. Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,' as he caused himself to be called on his tombstone, was only a little in advance of his time. Already young Balzac had entered upon his prodigious work the Comédie Humaine, and had paid a tribute to the memory of his predecessor in an exhaustive article on his literary method. George Sand met the innovator in Italy during her visit to Venice. Being then in the days of her fiery youth, she could not brook his plain speaking, and they parted with indignant words. Before becoming a friend of Flaubert's, she had begun to see the reverse of the medal; though remaining a 'troubadour' to the end of her days, singing ideal and romantic love without regard to science or