the common staff of life must be plain wholesome bread. I don't see how anything but plain morals are really possible for the masses. They can be restrained by morality, when manners seem just frills. The masses are too few to count in that kind of an issue."

Scrip resumed: “I'm glad both of you said all that, not only to give me a chance to light a cigar, but to save my saying it. The point is exactly that morality goes about as far as that, and even quite a bit farther. But it doesn't offer a guide to the perplexed, even to the ordinary desirable citizen and worthy neighbor, who, if he does any looking, or reading, or thinking is at times perplexed, despite the Ladies Home Journal. To speak of the limitations of morality doesn't imply that its confines are narrow. But it isn't the whole of even a simple life, as so many pretend or proclaim. The cast-iron view of morality has sunk into the back consciousness, and insists that morality is supreme and always adequate, is all that young people and most old ones should know.

“The need of needs is the recognition that it takes a complicated kit of tools to do the work of the world, and morality is only one of them, though the most indispensable. The limitations of morality may be driven home on its own ground. Morality tells you, among better things, that honesty is the best policy, that it pays to be good, that a kindly man gets on well, that the considerate man succeeds, and so on. Of course you reply that that's a middle-class morality, which is all too true. But I urge that the only thing that can redeem middle-class morality is not more morality of the same type- which is the democratic answer but a finer type of morality, which includes an appeal to manners. Your higher morality will tell you to be honest whether it pays or not, but a minor reason is that the use of honesty, as of Sapolio, is a fine habit. Be honest not only for the higher reasons, but also for the same very helpful reason that you wear clean collars, because clean-collared people are pleasant to deal

with, and in so many respects the right persons to copy. Not that a clean collar of itself will save a neck from hanging if it deserves hanging, but that it is an outward symbol of your standards—an uncertain one of course, and may be a pretense, but better than none. Though we don't wear our hearts on our sleeves, we can't help showing our sensibilities on our cuffs. Godliness with its near neighbor cleanliness is morals plus manners; and that has double power. It's more than the cleanliness; it's the nice aesthetic fitness of things. The aesthetic is a great big slice of life; and it will be a happier and a wiser day when we all admit it and act upon it. But art is long, and time is fleeting.

I

"When you face the facts (which nobody does, because we all wait until the facts turn our way) — the kind man can be too kind, and is likely to be imposed upon dead certain in fact. The fellow who really has more than his share of his own way in the world is the nasty man with the bad temper; people will go almost any length not to stir him up. Mephitis mephitica is one of the most respected of animals. Bad temper ruins more lives than drink. I wish you sociologists would make some Ph.D. give us the correlation of morality with bad temper. have a suspicion that more professedly moral people have it than non-moral (I don't say immoral) people; I mean those not aggressively moral. The chief moralist weapon is reproof; now, scolding, no more than shooting, as I observe it,' ever did anybody any good. I don't mean well mannered correction, but reproof superiorly administered. To the mannerist, scolding, like bad temper, is bad form; he educates so far as he must, by tact, mostly by example. The habit of reproof, he finds, is generally worse than the habit reproved. And furthermore: the moralist tells you that a gentle answer turneth away wrath; the mannerist says it's true, but claims it as a mannerist maxim. Yet candor and insight compel him to admit that a gentle answer sometimes makes the other

fellow madder because you don't seem to be taking his anger seriously. If you really had any case of your own, you would be shouting and flying off the handle yourself. And if not this, then the gentle answer may leave the spoils with the worse cause. For as I observe it, it is often the impertinent question that gets and deserves an impertinent answer. At all events things are never simple when they come my way, in this vale of tears with a bad climate. I confess that when in doubt, and that's about half the time, I turn to manners. Of course I'm handicapped. Being only of Napoleon's height, I find most things out of my reach. I suppose really good people, like tall people, have no serious problems. Well, such is my thesis or my confession; whether I should be proud of it or should be cured of it, you will decide. For next to manners as a guide to the perplexed, I rely upon the Interrupters."

(Cries of "Hear! Hear!" in derision and approval.)

This was not the end of the discussion. In fact we talked long and earnestly. But the trail was lost. A good deal was said of the actual work of morals in an imperfect world, which restored the balance but was not otherwise notable. And I got a chance to point out that only old civilizations, which have worked their spirit into the flesh and blood as well as into the hearth and home of the people, have universal good manners. We shouldn't expect too much of one so young as America. But I was promptly informed that times have changed: what has never been is about to be. Thus drifting, we found ourselves again with Scrip at the helm; but he had changed his course, and was launched on a wider voyage of exploration. He kept on demonstrating the limitations of morality, but the emphasis had changed. There was a good bit of moralizing in it; the text of the closing movement I should call: "The Sin of Literalism."

HERBERT SPENCER

NDER the title The Exploded Quack, some person,

UNDE

we were tempted to say some blackguard, has made, in the May Blackwood's, an attack on Herbert Spencer, of which the knowledge, discrimination and decency are on a par with the title; and they are all on a par with the modesty which leads the writer to set up his individual judgment against those recorded from nearly every eminent man of science of the last half of the last century.

Spencer, like all other men dealing with large subjects, may have been mistaken in many ways, but to call him a quack is to be worse than mistaken, -shamelessly and shamefully mistaken: it is to perpetrate a crime — a criminal libel which could be proved such in court.

One is curious as to what manner of homunculus it can be who does this thing. The bitter animosity of the article suggests a seeking of revenge for a personal slight, while its general qualities suggest the odium theologicum. Yet it sounds more like the shriek of a hysterical woman. Whoever the perpetrator is, the gurgitation in itself is not worthy of notice, but the strange fact that it was permitted to appear in a publication that has had the reputation of Blackwood's, suggests that our readers might not suffer from being reminded of a few facts about Spencer.

Darwin himself, on March 15, 1870, wrote to Lankester:

It has pleased me to see how thoroughly you appreciate (and I do not think that this is general with the men of science) H. Spencer; I suspect that hereafter he will be looked at as by far the greatest living philosopher in England; perhaps equal to any that ever lived.

And he wrote to Spencer (June 10, 1872):

Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear (the number, I fear, are not many) ought to bow the knee to you, and I for one do.

When, in 1866, Spencer issued a notice that the publication of the instalments of his philosophy was to be suspended for lack of support, Lubbock, Mill, Tyndall, Huxley and Busk issued a circular seeking subscribers to "join the undersigned in taking additional copies."

In 1896 upon the publication of the last volume of the Synthetic Philosophy, Spencer was presented with a congratulatory address signed by virtually the eighty names in England that could give such a testimonial most weight, and asking that Spencer "permit us to employ some eminent artist to take your portrait with a view to its being deposited in one of our national collections."

There has been nothing discovered to prove these great men mistaken, yet Homunculus sets up his judgment against them all. The testimonial drives him into wild and uncouth antics which he attributes to "satisfaction" that there were lacking among these signers, Peter Guthrie Tait, William Thomson and John Cook Wilson, whoever he may have been. The absence of the first two names from a list of over eighty is no more than could be accounted for by the men being abroad, or some other accident. The third man probably was not invited to sign. Our ignorance regarding him may be shameful, but it appears to be shared by the editors of the Britannica: for an attempt to dissipate it by consulting their work has been vain. In the midst of Homunculus' antics, however, he shrieks:

Those who had the privilege of being pupils of that remarkable scholar, philosopher, and volunteer, will never forget how he used to pace up and down his room like the proverbial caged lion, while he tore to ribbons the flimsy fabric of the Spencerian ethics and metaphysics, or made game of certain excursionists from Cambridge into the domain of Aristotelian philosophy.