full and profitable manhood or womanhood. But I leave this point, because the other two are amply sufficient to justify what I am pleading for; only saying, that of all pleasures that children have, the purest and the most real are those of country life. For this reason I have animals in abundance, but none in cages, however large. Ducks, chickens, pigeons, dogs, a pony and a cat: with these more even than with trees or flowers children hold communion, and many messages of affectionate remembrances are sent to all by name. Dobbin, Boxer, Woolly, and Tibby are household names in many a poor London dwelling. I have also flowers and fruit, that town children may know how little they cost, how easily grown, and how different in the country from those they see in town.

Third, as showing that the world is not one huge London. This is the chief object I have in view. Others besides myself now recognise the children's right to health; all recognise their right to good schooling. I hope in time an intimate knowledge of Nature will be held to be an indispensable part of their education. It has been said to me that I do them harm by taking them for a few days from poverty to give them a taste of things they cannot hope to have again; that I make them dissatisfied with the lot in which their lives have been cast. It is exactly this latter that I hope to do. To make them discontented without showing them that there is a possible and probable issue to good from their discontent may be wicked; but to show that the world is not one vast London, that the pleasures of Nature are not difficult to get and are certainly not costly, that the pleasures of conventional town life are not the only ones, nor even the best; to open their minds by the actual contact with what in school they only read of, to make them dissatisfied with paltry amusements, often demoralising and seldom elevating, to make them desire to escape from the cramping life, is to do them one of the greatest services I can; and so is it to show them also that there is no real barrier between town and country life, that trees and flowers, fields and birds, are not parts of some charmed circle that can never be entered by any but a fortunate few. The belief that the luxuries or even comforts of life are not attainable by the children of the poor is one that tends to deaden any effort to escape from the thraldom of poverty by giving no hope of success.

There has been much rejoicing that the first scholar' of the London School Board is now a senior wrangler, or something equally honourable, at one of the oldest universities. But this career, successful as it is, speaks only of intellect, and it is urged by some, with much clear appreciation of what education really is, that a few years' foreign travel shall complete the educational outfit of this very hardworking scholar. To the children of the rich formal schoolwork is the least important means of education: why should it be the only means given to the poor, who from the circumstances of

their homes want more rather than less of the means of full education? Variety of scene for the children of the rich; the attic or the kitchen, with the huge brick-walled prison-like school, for the poor; foreign travel for the one, the pavement for the other; cricket and football, with long holidays, for those, pegtop and marbles, with the policeman for inspector and the horses' feet for companions, for these!

The child of a rich man has his independence of judgment and of action fostered by variety of occupations, by school friendships, long holidays, filled with agreeable diversity of scenes and pleasures; to the poor town child school is the only place of education besides the pavement; Nature is known only as something read of in books, of which a glimpse may be occasionally seen at a tea feast, under careful supervision, in a suburban field. To him life is not a bountiful variety of pleasures, but a weary monotony of school and home; at one all work, at the other no play, where he cannot make a noise without being a nuisance or worse. Why he should care to live, what he has to look forward to, is not very clear; and possibly no greater service could be done him than to give him means of spending half his time in more free communion with Nature, that the world should seem to be a something bright and pleasant, and not a dreary aggregation of houses and policemen; that enjoyment should be known as a proper accompaniment of life and not a something unobtainable except by stealth and in more or less unwholesome form.

The benefits of such a modification in the life of poor town children would probably be permanent. Country life, good food, fresh air, would give strong bodies; and this would be much better than doses of quinine and iron combined with semi-starvation of both body and mind. The ills we now only tinker might thus be wholly removed, not by a vastly increased expenditure of money, but by a wiser use of it, giving every poor town child six months of rural life, and thus, besides giving vast enjoyment, replace a sickly crowd by an equal number of sturdy helpful men and women.

No doubt the political economists will be up in arms, or rather would be if there were any chance of this being done, and cry out. against the pauperisation of the whole nation by relieving the parents of the care of their children and encouraging large families. I should be quite prepared to discuss this if there were need. Meanwhile I will merely point out that in a very few years the present generation will have passed away, and the next will be what the life of the children of to-day makes it.

As a practical illustration of the difference between a cramped and a free childhood, I add the following, which has been sent to me :

I was born in the City of London and spent my whole life there, never till I was twenty-five sleeping in any house but the one in which I was born. In my childhood when I played it was in the street, amongst the horses and carts and people, and my play was neither frequent nor hearty. Toys I knew but little of,

Yet my parents were kind, and we had a whole house to live in and plenty to eat. I was fairly intelligent, and at twenty-three gave evidence of this by passing with credit a difficult and comprehensive examination.

At twenty-five I mistook potatoes in a field for cabbages, walked three miles by road rather than cross a field in which were a number of cows, was more afraid of a bull than of a score of ghosts, while a dog threw me into a cold shiver, and I could neither climb a hill nor look down a well. I was never on a horse until I was forty-five, and then I descended from the dangerous eminence at the earliest possible opportunity and with great pleasure.

My career in life has been marked by want of readiness to use opportunities of success, and even more by want of power to appreciate them as opportunities. Now at fifty I am just beginning to see how often I have had such and how entirely I failed to seize them.

My son was also born in London, but after the first two years has lived entirely in the country, and travelled not only about England, but in Wales and in Ireland. He is now nearly seven, and will mount a ladder or climb a tree while I quaver about at its foot; will drive a horse that I am almost afraid to sit behind, and will go into his tub with a dog that I am almost afraid to look at; has as much self-confidence and promptitude at seven as I had at seventeen, and has had in eighty months as much enjoyment and happiness as I had in forty years, though mine has been a life remarkably free from trouble; and has cost not more, probably less, than was spent on my childhood; for it is room and freedom, not money, that children want.

ELIZABETH ROSSITER.

tion.

SCIENTIFIC OPTIMISM.

THE problem of the worth of life faces the inquirer in very different lines of research. It is not only the moralist and the theologian who find themselves involved in the perplexities of the harassing quesThe historian who lets his eye wander over the wide spaces of collective human experience can hardly forbear touching the deeply interesting issue. On another side the man of science, and more particularly the biologist, who surveys the yet wider region of conscious life in the animal kingdom, finds it natural enough to raise. the question whether this mass of sentience is on the whole a good thing, crowning and perfecting nature's handiwork.

There is much that predisposes the biologist to take a favourable view of this aggregate animal life. The very picturesqueness of this play of vital force, rendering it so intensely interesting as an object of study, seems in a sense to justify it. And then, is not the whole region of organic action one great illustration of a controlling order and a skilful contrivance? The naturalist has habitually been impressed with this appearance of design, and so has been wont to expatiate on the wisdom and goodness manifested in the arrangements of creation. Indeed, natural history has, till quite recently at least, served as a kind of nursery garden to optimistic theology, supplying this with its choicest facts and arguments.

There are no doubt some ugly circumstances that very soon force themselves on the attention of the biologist. Animal life as a whole, like human life, has its mystery of evil. The observation of the habits and conditions of life of different groups of animals soon brought to light the appalling fact that the beautiful harmony of organic nature consists to a considerable extent in a perpetual renewal of a certain proportion between destroyer and destroyed, captor and victim. The naturalist, if a man of sympathetic mind, could hardly overlook these obstacles to an easy optimism. Yet for the most part he has been so much under the influence of teleological ideas, that these terrible features of the organic scene have not produced their full effect on his mind.

This customary attitude of the scientific mind in relation to the problems raised by the optimist and the pessimist, is very well illustrated in the case of Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the

distinguished living naturalist. Darwin wrote at the turn of the last century, his Phytologia, to which special reference is here made, appearing in 1800; and he shows the influence of the last century temper. That period was marked by a strange confidence in the glorious destiny of the race, and in the natural and unaided powers of the human mind to solve all the mystery of the universe. Thus it believed itself to be perfectly capable, apart from the artificial light of revelation, of arriving by the natural light of reason at the great truths of religion, and more particularly the existence of a wise and benevolent Creator. And this confidence is evidently shared in by Erasmus Darwin.

The writer's optimism breaks out in a curious chapter of the Phytologia, headed, "The Happiness of Organic Life' (sec. xix. ch. vii.). He begins by frankly admitting the odds against him. He is by no means blind to the dash of fierce cruelty that seems to have got somehow mixed up with the mild benevolence of creation. Indeed, he sets this forth with a grim irony that reminds one of Schopenhauer. Such' (he exclaims) is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words, "Eat, or be eaten!" and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.' The writer, it should be observed, has previously argued that plants as well as animals have sensibility, and so undergo pain when destroyed, a doctrine which clearly includes the seemingly gentle herbivora among the slaughterers.

Yet, though putting the case thus strongly, Darwin very soon satisfies himself that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, 'whatever is is right.' The facility with which the man of science here finds a benevolent idea' wherewith to console himself, reminds the reader of the way in which other writers of the last century, more particularly Hartley and Abraham Tucker, went to work to bolster up the theory of the best possible world. It shows, unmistakably, how deeply the thought of the age was penetrated and coloured by the optimistic temper.

Here is a sample of Darwin's mode of justifying the ways of God to man. He calls attention to the fact that the more vigorous destroy the less vigorous, and adds, that by this contrivance more pleasurable sensation exists in the world, as the organic matter is taken from a state of less irritability and less sensibility, and converted into a greater.' One could wish that the writer had been more full and precise in the statement of this comforting scientific truth. Does he mean that the addition to the pleasure of a cat's existence by the devouring of a mouse, including that of the act itself, more than counterbalances the destruction of the mouse's pleasurable existence, together with the agonies undergone in the act of administering to its devourer's increased efficiency? This seems to be the allimportant point, yet it would be by no means easy to prove this pro