navy, and clergymen above all others, felt that if they were not to sink altogether into a lower social position, they must bestir themselves in earnest. They did so bestir themselves; and a few among them, instinctively discerning where the fault lay, combined to correct it and established 'Co-operative Stores.' Never was there a more simple, more timely, more practical, more successful, more wholesome and righteous movement, or one which I incline to believe will approach nearer to a quiet social revolution, and rectify, directly or indirectly, certain symptoms in England's condition that may be safely characterised as unhealthy.

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In the course of the controversy that has arisen out of this movement, many absurd aspersions and not a few thoroughly unjust ones have been vented on both sides; but the irritation of conflicting interests will gradually subside, and the motives to the movement are obviously too strong to be effectually resisted. The truth of the case is in fact too clear, and lies too near the surface to be either concealed or contested. The wealthy, who do not need to spare their shillings or their guineas, but who do wish to have the ordinary transactions of life made smooth and facile, and surrounded by as much beauty and splendour as are attainable, will deal with butchers and grocers who come to their doors for orders and take all trouble off their hands, will give their custom to tailors and dressmakers who suit their tastes, will frequent shops which lie within easy reach, whose plate glass and decorations attract their fancy, and the fashionable locality of whose premises involves high rents, and they will have to pay, and be content to pay, for all these facilities and pleasures; and no one can fairly maintain that the tradesmen who supply their wants in this comfortable fashion are not entitled to be well paid for the expenditure which this fashion involves. Equally, on the other hand, must the more numerous classes with fixed and inadequate incomes, whose peace and respectability in life depend on keeping within these incomes, who must watch and calculate every shilling of expenditure, and who grudge no time or trouble which will enable them

9 We need not enter into these allegations and disputes. Where the ordinary retailers have any foundation for declaring that co-operative establishments are unduly favoured by law, as in escaping the income tax while dividing large profits among their shareholders,—by all means let this inequity be rectified, by treating them as, what in fact they have become, joint-stock companies. But as to the indignation expressed against establishments conducted on the original principle of supplying themselves cheaply by purchasing on a large scale and selling low by selling only for prompt payment, and which make no profits because they reduce their prices as they find the prices they had fixed yield a surplus over their expenses, this indignation is manifestly misapplied; while the outcry against civil servants, naval or military officers, clergymen or others, who give their vacant hours to superintending or auditing these establishments, which are and must be practically managed by paid employés, is too unfounded even to deserve discussion. It is on a par with the objections of those who would prohibit struggling barristers or clerks from devoting their unemployed evenings in writing for the press.

to limit its amount, be permitted to follow their course without being sneered at or reviled. They find thousands of tradesmen ready enough to meet their requirements; and they find, too, that by combination they can attain their ends to the mutual gain of all parties concerned. For this is one of the features of the change of system which is now in progress: the primary producers, makers, and purveyors of the articles of consumption usually obtain more for those articles than they used to do, while the purchasers of them pay less; the difference being that in the transference from the original creator to the ultimate consumer, the articles pass through fewer hands, and in a less costly fashion, and are mulcted therefore in slighter profits. The supernumerary distributors alone will be edged out, and have to find occupation and livelihood elsewhere. The distributors who hold their ground, doing a far larger business and in a more legitimate manner, will make at once more considerable and less questionable gains.

The essence of the whole question lies in these two points :-first, what is practically and usually the difference between the price which the actual consumer or purchaser of any article of food, clothing, or furniture, pays for it, and the share of that price which ultimately reaches the producer—that is, the farmer, the importer, the tailor, the shoemaker, the dressmaker, the upholsterer, and others who among them provide for the hundred wants of our complicated lives?—and secondly, what proportion of this difference is really necessary and legitimate? Few who have not been compelled to go into this inquiry have an adequate notion of how great this difference is, or how small a part of it is genuinely inevitable. I have no intention of entangling myself in interminable controversy by venturing on positive assertions or precise figures. But a few suggestions may induce my readers to believe that I am not very wide of the mark when I express my conviction that if we brought adequate information, sagacity, vigilance, and trouble to bear upon our proceedings, the average expenditure of many of our households might be reduced 25 per cent. at least, without the loss of one single comfort worth retaining. Let any one ascertain from a farmer friend the price which he receives per carcase from the butcher he supplies, or from a Liverpool merchant the price at which his cargoes of dead meat or live bullocks are sold on arrival from America, and compare it with the price the identical butcher or purveyor insists upon charging him for similar qualities of beef or mutton. Or let him, knowing-if a merchant or broker, knowing to his cost-that of late the tea, or the coffee, or the sugar he is in the habit of importing will only fetch in the market 75 per cent. of its price two or three years ago, apply to his family grocer for something like a proportionate reduction in his quarterly bills, and see the curt refusal he will receive, as if the bare proposal was amazing. Or let any man accustomed to deal with an ordinary

West End tailor-not an especially extravagant or fashionable onefind himself obliged by press of losses to inquire what price he really need pay for a substantially equal suit furnished by one a little further east or a little less known, and then calculate the difference in his family expenditure the transfer of his custom in that one item will effect. Or, finally, let him take a little pains, and he will be surprised to find that a pair of boots for which he has been accustomed to pay 358. or 408. in Mayfair without a murmur, can be obtained in quarters scarcely nearer Temple Bar, just as good, quite as lasting, and almost as seemly for 148. or 218., with perhaps no better assignable reason for the difference than that he may learn that the latter article is 'countrymade.' In a word, while the wholesale cost of many articles of general consumption has dropped 25 per cent., how few of us have been able to obtain a reduction of even 10 per cent. from our retail suppliers,at least till it was made clear that the alternative was the transfer of our custom to the Stores.' In conclusion, has not the conviction been gradually forced upon most careful housekeepers dealing with inexpansive incomes of 2,500l. a year or under, that-what with illicit connivance between their servants and their tradespeople in the form of tips,' and laxity as to weight and quantities, and foregoing the righteous claims of ready money, and paying for the nonpayment of slippery fellow-customers, to say nothing of their own idleness and lack of vigilance-they have been in the habit undeniably of simply wasting, through one channel or another, nearly one-fourth of their annual expenditure, which in future they will be resolute to save ?

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Inevitably, in the course of a change from an unhealthy to a thoroughly sound system of dealing between man and man—as in all analogous improvements since our complicated social arrangements grew up-some parties will suffer and find the ground cut from them. All that can be confidently asserted is that they cannot mend matters by opposing what is at once irresistible, righteous, and for the good of the mass of the community. Unquestionably many retail dealers will have to abandon a business which they have rarely found a satisfactory or highly profitable one, or one possible to carry on without resorting to practices more or less questionable. Many more will be driven to change from an unsound and unsafe system to a sound and safe one. Many who are now competitors will find it their interest to be associates instead. Still, numbers of the weaker, and least qualified, and least wanted, will be edged out; but few probably or none whom it is the interest of the community to preserve;-and these will ere long, we may be pretty certain, be absorbed into other avocations.

W. R. GREG.

MRS. CRAVEN AND HER WORK.

THERE is, it will be allowed, much discouragement among artists who claim not only to satisfy but to lead the world. The reaction towards artificial earnestness has left us wearily ready for return to the powdered and patched enlightenment of the Georgian era. But the belief in necessary progress, which is in the very air we breathe, drives imaginative persons to strange attempts at originality. Sceptical of the doings of men and women of medieval times, some of our rising artists in romance seek in pre-Christian models for the nobler expressions of human feeling. Scandinavian or Greek myths are searched for examples of faith and love, and possibly another generation may find on Babylonian cylinders or in cuneiform inscriptions those tales of heroic passion and aspiration which may cause corresponding chords of emotion to vibrate within our nineteenth-century selves. Efforts have been made to worship beauty in the objects that science, physical or social, has made interesting, but the delight in 'casuals,' the joy of Browns and Joneses, are not altogether satisfactory; the loves of the rotifers, or the wars of our arboreal ancestors, are not possible subjects for art. Yet we trust we are not inferior to those who knew how to welcome Cimabue's Madonna to the joyous suburb, or to those who formed Chaucer's world of fair ladies' and their courtiers-not inferior to the great souls whose portraits fill Dante's Divine Comedy, to the accomplished society of the Renaissance, or to the Elizabethan worthies. Surely we still recognise the majesty of passion. Notwithstanding the Philistine withies, Samson feels that he may yet be stirred by the same noble rage and lifted to the same heights of being as heretofore. The compromises of the age of reason,' the gushing reaction that followed, and the discouragement of the actual epoch have not quenched our human sympathy with human emotion. It is true that the emotional part of us has been for long less cultivated than the intellectual faculties. In the Western revolt against mediæval order, love and pity have run to seed. Heroic standards once recognised throughout Christendom have been discredited, and in the decline of religious culture there has been less systematic education of the will and the feelings. Whatever the

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increase of social decency, the tone of men and women in all that concerns passion and emotion has been lowered. Vaguely disliking certain bugbears of the past, those who appeal in literature to our instinctive admiration for heroic feeling no longer choose themes of love and faith within the Christian cycle. Fortunately the personal life of Shakespeare has been veiled, so that English men and women have drunk freely of the fountain of passion in his plays without alarm at their profound Catholicism. It would be hard to overestimate the social service done to the English nation by the large emotion of Juliet and Othello, of Macbeth and Lear. We are practically shut out from Dante's white-lighted universe and from the world of the greater mystics. We only dare to nibble nervously at the Imitation, and we altogether distrust the methods of emotional culture actually used by the great Christian Church. Without the Bible and without Shakespeare we should have no higher examples of human passion than Milton's Adam and Eve, the Roxanas of the Restoration, powdered persons of the reasonable century, bandits of the Regency, and since then fine ladies and gentlemen masquerading in antique dress or lecturing in the newest jargon on the science of the feelings. It is one of many reproaches to the sects which date from the sixteenth century that they neglect the due culture of emotion, for great religions have always taught the uses of noble passion in furthering human advance.

The periods marked by lukewarm faith and piety seem also marked in everyday life, and in the literary pictures of everyday life, by a corresponding flatness of tone in conduct. Periods of religious revival seem coincident with intense expression of all emotion. Without the ardours of the thirteenth century we should hardly have had those glimpses of love's 'rare universe' given us by Dante. Without the religious throb of which Lollardism was the reverse action, would Chaucer have struck so high a note in his descriptions of noble passion and very perfect' gentle life?

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Contemporary with St. Theresa and St. Ignatius the genius of Shakespeare wrought the spirit of his time into those typical forms of human passion which more than all its other productions give English literature its place in human affairs.

The dignified heroes of Corneille and Racine, the true representation of society given by Molière, synchronise with the reasonable saintliness of Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul. And as the religious control of conduct was, by political or by scandalous causes, weakened, whether in Catholic or in Protestant States, it seems as if the power for good of noble passion has been correspondingly lessened. Metaphysical and ethical conundrums, microscopic description, the clash of wordy wit occupy popular literature in epochs of religious ebb, and the emotions decline until they are both in fact and in portrayal but animal instincts.