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ups, and I hope that defenceless children—little girls in particular—on whom they are educationally inflicted will survive the ordeal of growing up and arrive at a point of emancipated opinion from which they may burn in effigy the author of such a libel on the good old traditions of barbarousness. Think of injecting beneath the tender skin of a little girl of eight or nine years the poison of the cult of self-sacrifice! Enough of that for the future when it is already too late to lead an independent life!

"Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those who possess there is only one certain duty, which is to strip themselves of what they have so as to bring themselves into the condition of the mass that possesses nothing," is the introduction to an argument in which we are nonplussed by assumptions. Having begun so near the end, it seems difficult to stop, and we wonder how America, the land of luxurious automobiles and perfect plumbing, dares welcome enthusiastically one who comes with such destructive utterance on his lips. We descendants of humble Puritans bred on hardships have not yet acquired the arrogance of our unaccustomed predatory state. Through our former necessity for each other conscience has absorbed us, and now, when there is no longer anything to be afraid of, the habit of fear remains. We must arrange between ourselves and the Deity something that will justify a delayed indulgence in the good things, the comfortable things, of the earth. The flesh-pots steam odorously but we dare not begin the feast without a ceremony of propitiation. And so the priest, the professional arbitrator, is ever received with open arms in our midst. If M. Maeterlinck were less gracious of compromise we might not be so ready to take him to our hearts, but he finally disposes of our original obligation by pointing out our disinclination to follow it. "Let us therefore," he advises, "seek other roads than the one direct road—seeing that we have not the strength to travel by it—that which, in the absence of this strength, is able to nourish our conscience." Truly the conscience of the average man is a hardy and promiscuous beast able to subsist on the most meagre fare! And liberating, obliterating optimism, which America struggles to arrive at through religious experiments, patent medicines, and memory courses, has found its inspired exponent.

It must in no wise be supposed that this new religion whose God is relegated to the second place is without persecutors. In fact a