keeping. The woman who is really to be pitied is the one who has received a purely domestic training, and who, not marrying, is thrown upon her own resources, whether for maintenance or merely for interest and occupation. Domestic science is not a particularly abstruse one, and a woman with a clear and well-trained mind, and the amount of manual dexterity which, acquired in the kindergarten, should be part of the equipment of every child-girl or boy early in life-will find little difficulty in mastering the technical knowledge which she needs. Cookery books are cheap; lectures on domestic science are accessible in many places, and most women have friends able and willing to help them. As a matter of fact, the best housekeepers are usually the women who have received the best all-round education.

It shows, I think, a want of common sense in man to nag, as so many of them still do, at the higher education of women. It is an accomplished fact; and no one who possesses adequate means of judging can fail to be struck with the immense increase in happiness and usefulness which it has brought to the woman of the present day.

Another irritating statement in the above booklet is a repetition of the one that has been so often dinned into our ears by the late Sir Walter Besant, i.e., that any woman who does paid work takes the place of some man, and therefore deprives some other woman of a husband. Even if this statement were true and the fact really amounts to this, that the displaced man will have to take to some more masculine employment instead of the woman's work which he has usurped -we can hardly expect altruism to be carried to such a pitch as to induce its professors to starve in order that some unknown woman may be enabled to marry. Did any one, I wonder, ever hear of such self-sacrifice on the part of a man? We sometimes hear of a man who is unable to marry because he is burdened with helpless sisters. Such a man is really to be pitied, and would not, I think, do anything to prevent his relations from earning their own living through any fear of injury to masculine competitors.

VII.

I do not know if any of Wordsworth's many critics have noticed his want of the colour sense. I do not mean that he was what is called colour-blind; he knew that daffodils were golden, sparrows' eggs blue, and unripe apples green; but he seems to have had a keener appreciation of the beauty of light and shade," the clouds, the mists, the shadows, light of golden suns," than of the delight born of colour; of the browns and purples, greys and greens and orange of the mountain sides; of the tints of the trees, from the new-born green of spring to the dying crimson of autumn; of the rosy gold of the sunset cloudlets and the tender green of the sky.

He does, indeed, speak of "clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky." But the sky is not sapphire; the hard glitter of the jewel bearing no resemblance to the depths of pure colour, apparently self-existent and divorced from form and texture which gives us our one glimpse into infinity. Neither are the clouds "tinctured," i.e., dyed. They are rather bathed in the coloured light which they reflect, becoming grey and cold as it fades away.

Wordsworth's descriptions of scenery have always given me a feeling of loneliness and desolation. It was some time before I discovered that this sensation was due to the absence of colour in his pictures.

KATHARINE ROCHE.

TO SYLVIA

ASKING FOR VERSES ON HER LAST BIRTHDAY

SYLVIA dearest, shut your eyes,

Think it just the fourth of May,
Greening earth and pearly skies
Growing fairer day by day,
Cuckoos calling, swifts a-wing,
Whitsun lilies breathing sweet,
Orchards white with blossoming,
Winter gone in full retreat.

Fancy all is garmented

In its loveliest and best,

And a robin-brighter red

Glowing on his little breast-
Comes and pipes his happy song
(O, so merry every note !)
While the pretty raptures throng
Quickly from his panting throat.

"Joyous maiden" (so he sings),

"May a thousand joys be yours,
Joys that never spread their wings
Long as time or life endures;
God be with you every day,

Guarding you and all you love,

Making every month a May

Till you meet Him there above.

"Still be sweet and good and kind,
As I know you on this morn,
Touching like a fragrant wind

Hearts oppressed and souls forlorn;

Using, as a birdie may,

Mirthfully your grace of song,
So that all shall smile and pray

[44

A

THE ENNOBLING OF LABOUR

Slaves, without the liberty in Christdom-
Martyrs, by the pang without the palm.
—E. B. Browning.

CCORDING to the ancient myth of the Greeks, not only

did the Titan Prometheus defend the puny race of mortals when Zeus would have destroyed it in order to create subjects more befitting his greatness, but he taught men all arts and showered many blessings upon them. Thus we may conclude that the Titan was the first Labour-master and Labourer, and might have been the first great Capitalist had not the angry god on Olympus chained him to a rock to be vulture-gnawed, and so checked his subsequent career for a space in this world. However, that is beside the question. What the story may be brought to illustrate is the very important fact that Labour is "heaven-born," "taught of the gods," that the dignity of labour is a reality, though a somewhat forgotten dignity. We do not pretend for a moment that the Greeks thought so,-far from it, even their greatest Philosopher has called Labour "a naturally servile occupation," but we do contend that Christianity has preached effectively through the centuries by word and example this Dignity of Labour, that to it principally the ennoblement of Labour was due. We may be told, No, it is due to the gradual march of civilization over the globe. Yes, of the civilization born of Christianity, for Christianity first taught the equality of men in the moral order, and it has ever held among its chief tenets, laborare est orare. The serfdom that flourished in Rome's halcyon days or in the civilized cities of Egypt, the like of which, we are told, has never since been beheld, is wholly incompatible with Christianity. Labour viewed from a purely material standpoint is "ignoble drudgery," but Labour inspired with the spirit of Christianity is a thing ennobled in the highest degree. Aristotle, as we have said, deemed it a "naturally servile occupation," and justly so, according to his own mind, for he could not foresee the labour radiant with the beneficent

light of Christianity. It was as the gods of his race and their works, mean, gross, and wholly material. What do the great modern thinkers add to the picture? Let us take Thomas Carlyle, for his enthusiasm on such a point can hardly lead us astray. We read:

Two men I honour and no third. First, the toil-worn craftsman that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard hand, crooked, coarse; wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal as the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too, is the rugged face, all weathertanned, besoiled with its rude intelligence, for it is the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent; for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our conscript on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred !

So far, Carlyle will please us, for his note is true and rings loud and clear in testimony of the sacredness of Labour; but he continues, and with pity we read Materialism in the words :

For in thee, too, lay a god-created form, but it was not to be unfolded: incrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of labour, and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable-daily bread.

Aristotle soared no higher-"servile occupation," mere "bread winning." This is why we have styled the dignity of Labour a forgotten dignity, for Labour as she is preached by many of her modern priests in streets and squares, in halls and schools, in books and pamphlets, is grossly materialistic, a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. From this merely materialistic view of Labour arises Socialism in all its forms, graduated only by the one sole scale of Materialism. Hence we see the virulence of modern Socialism, inasmuch as it is the outcome, according to the mind of an eminent political economist, of the Materialism of the day; and the overthrow of the one means the overthrow of the other.

Descend into the depths of the earth by the rust-worn iron cage of a coal-mine. Scant reward would it be for the begrimed army of human beings there to work with the pick and the shovel, to work between life and death on many a day, and all