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of the total depravity of inanimate objects, which most domestic servants embody in the familiar phrase, 'It came to pieces in my 'and.'

No one can follow up the various forms assumed by this doctrine, as illustrated in private life, without perceiving its one-sided application. The things that we 'cannot help' are always the things that go wrong. Now, this 'heads I win, tails you lose' philosophy is not conclusive to reflecting persons, even where their private affairs form the subject-matter. In politics it is noteworthy that the 'inevitable' is always evoked to defend a primâ facie bad case. The doctrine is as old, far older, than 'politics' itself; early thinkers gave it concrete support from 'astrology,' imputing 'disasters' of a very human origin to the malign conjunctions of heavenly bodies, or locating 'the inevitable' in the mischievous will of some offended deity, or in some fateful power transcending even the divine. In recent times it comes up with a new garb, a new pomp of phraseology. New England Puritanism seems largely responsible for the language of the latest revival, the stern logic of Calvinism tending to transmute Providence into a harder sort of destiny. At any rate, it is significant that the doctrine of