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tian charity. We have already proof of this in public benevolence, which seems, at great expense, to have sterilized the field which private benevolence had fertilized. Beware, lest, instead of inspiring patrons and capitalists, industrial societies and industrial managers, to fulfill their social duty in a larger sense, the arbitrary intervention of the state does not dissuade or discourage them from it! Symptoms of such discouragement are already beginning to appear in France. We, in fact, slander ourselves when we represent that private initiative has been sterile in this sphere. Not so; on the contrary, it is one of the domains in which our end of the century has deserved the most from France and mankind. I want no better evidence of this than the group of social economy, or, as it was justly styled, "of social peace," in our Universal Exposition of 1889, where were represented in fifteen sections: remuneration for labor and participation in benefits; cooperative associations for production; professional syndicates; apprenticeship and patronage societies; mutual aid societies; superannuation and pension funds; accident and life assurance; co-operative consumers' associations; co-operative credit associations; workmen's houses; workmen's circles and people's societies; social hygiene and temperance societies; societies for the protection of children; and national institutions. These fifteen sections of social economy prove by actual specimens that men of means are not insensible to the ills of the working classes, and that our society has not waited for the urging of the state before it occupied itself with questions of interest to working-men. The greater part of the works, foundations, associations, and social enterprises to which awards were made in 1889 were relatively recent, some of them entirely new. They have been tending for several years past to make a rapid advance. Heaven prevent the intervention of the state which is threatened, inflicting a fatal blow on all these creations of private initiative! The state has a heavy hand, not to call it a paw. It often unwittingly crushes what it touches. There is something depressing and stifling in administrative regulation; may it not for a long time yet put the brakes upon a movement from which so much is promised!—Selected and translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.

 

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The emigration of the English agricultural population into the towns is attributed by Mr. T. E. Kebbel, among other causes, to the dullness of village life. The old feasts, the fairs, and the games have for the most part disappeared. Thus, while there is vastly more cricket played in England than fifty years ago, it is not played by the same class. In the old day-long matches on the village greens, the elevens were mostly made up of laborers. They are so no longer.