DANGERS.

He admits, however, that

all would depend very largely upon the man or men at the head of it. In the hands of a weak man-still more so in the hands of an unprincipled one-such an influence might work great mischief.

But what are the chances that the man or men at the head of such a combine would be of a character calculated to make the great monopoly a power for good in the land? Is it not probable that Mr. Harmsworth is just the kind of man to be the Napoleon of the new journalistic empire? Mr. Harmsworth has great qualities, but would even Mrs. Harmsworth or any of the Harmsworth family venture to say that he could be safely entrusted with the direction of such a gigantic monopoly with unlimited and irresponsible powers of boycotting and misrepresentation? We know with what dauntless intrepidity Mr. Harmsworth launched this country on the South African War, which he was perfectly certain would be over before Christmas, 1899, and would not entail the loss of 100 lives. Would mankind be in a better position if Mr. Alfred Harmsworth's powers for exciting passion and ignoring and misrepresenting facts should be multiplied by a hundred ? No doubt Mr. Harmsworth would in the end find his way to St. Helena, but before he reached his ultimate destination his road would be marked by many a Moscow, a Leipzig, and a Waterloo.

66 "ALL MEMBERS ONE OF ANOTHER." INTERNATIONALISM BY THE LATE BISHOP OF LONDON. THE Sunday at Home for February publishes an interesting posthumous paper by the late Bishop of London on International Relations. Dr. Creighton says: Peace among nations is only possible when they are conscious of a common object which is of sufficient importance to prevent merely national interests from clashing. The consciousness of a common destiny will alone be strong enough to make nations forego their separate claims. It is by a growing sense of the unity of Christian civilisation, and the identity of its aims-by an increasing readiness to appreciate the different forms which it has assumed and see what each supplies to the general purpose -that good understanding will grow. All may agree about the blessings of peace, and may deplore the horrors of war. But this will not help us much so long as differences arise which war alone can settle. We must strive after a new idea of the nature of those differences. They will always seem large and important so long as each nation is struggling for its own advantage. They will grow smaller and capable of settlement by discussion just in proportion as civilised nations regard themselves as possessors of a common heritage and engaged in a common work, from which all civilised nations equally benefit. Better understanding of one another, the sense of a friendly rivalry in carrying out a common purpose, greater clearness in recognising that purpose, and in seeing how each nation can help towards it-these are things which must be learned if we would promote peace. What is most pressing in the future is that the characteristics of Oriental civilisation should be more generally known amongst European peoples, especially amongst ourselves. It is indeed almost a duty incumbent on every Englishman that he should know the conditions of life in these great dependencies which England rules. Without knowledge there cannot be a due sense of national responsibility, an appreciation of what is possible, a just judgment of passing events. We cannot rid ourselves of the burden of our duty by ignoring parts of t. Our obligations towards the East form a large part of our duty as a nation, and ought to be present with us as a determining element in our judgment about many things. A period of tutelage may be necessary in the case of savage nations, but such tutelage should be as brief as may be, and should leave no rancorous feeling behind.

This can only be achieved if the civilised nations of the West unite more clearly into a confederacy, each having certain qualities which fit it for certain parts of this great task; if the greatness of the work be so fully recognised that it swallows up minor differences by the completeness of its appeal. Then the Western peoples, recognising unity in diversity, may accomplish their mission by carrying into the rest of the world that large spirit of sympathy which has bound themselves together, and which alone can enable them to succeed.

Reading for Town and Country.

THE Circulating Library in connection with this REVIEW was started some five years ago, to enable small towns and villages with no free library to obtain some of the best literature of the day at a very moderate cost. A list of books was carefully selected so as to comprise all branches of literature, both serious and entertaining. The terms upon which they are sent out are as follows:

Series I., boxes of books, containing forty-five to fifty volumes-twenty standard and contemporary novels, ten illustrated magazines and periodicals, and about twenty books of biography, history, travel, and adventure. Terms -A quarterly box of books, 30s. per quarter or £5 a year if paid in advance, a half-yearly box, 50s. halfyearly or £4 10s. if paid in advance.

Series II., cheaper boxes of books, containing sixty volumes, consisting principally of standard works of fiction. Terms :-Half-yearly 30s., or £3 a year.

Series III. and IV. boxes of books, with forty to fortyfive volumes, made up of recent novels and standard works of fiction. Terms :-Quarterly box, £5 per annum if paid in advance, or 30s. per quarter.

Catalogues and further particulars with application form can be obtained on applying to the REVIEW OF REVIEWS CIRCULATING LIBRARY, Temple House, Temple Avenue, E.C.

How to Secure Friends.

THE Correspondence Club affords every opportunity for lonely and isolated people to secure friends in town, country, or abroad. The annual subscription is 10s. 6d., and entitles members to the receipt of Round About, post free by letter rate; the insertion of personality, the forwarding of anonymous letters provided postage is paid, and private introductions. Cheerless lives are brightened by the receipt of correspondence from paper friends, which may or may not lead to intellectual friendship or marriage, as the fates permit. There is at present no simpler method of securing friends than by joining the Correspondence Club, for members are at once permitted to write to hundreds of men and women who, like themselves, lack interest in their lives and seek human comradeship. All particulars will be sent on receipt of stamped, addressed, foolscap envelope by the Conductor, Mowbray House, Norfolk Street, W.C.

"THE HUNDRed Best PictURES" is the title given to a publication emanating from Charles Letts and Co. It is intended to reproduce in seventeen parts one hundred of "the most famous examples of the painter's brush in the history of the world's art." Six pictures are reproduced in each number and loosely fastened in for removal and framing if need be. Opinions will differ as to what pictures constitute "the best hundred," but that is a detail. The six pictures in No. I are very beautifully reproduced in photogravure, and the work bids fair to reflect great credit on the artistic taste of the publishers.

FROM SIX TO FORTY-TWO MILES AN HOUR. IN Feilden's Magazine for January, Mr. George Halliday writes an interesting article upon Marine Engineering and Shipbuilding. He begins by pointing out that from the days of the Phoenicians until the beginning of the nineteenth century no progress had been made in shipbuilding or ship-propulsion. Progress began when William Symington fitted a Watt's engine to drive the steam paddle-wheel of the Charlotte Dundas. Although the boat was propelled at only six miles an hour it marked the beginning of the marine engineering which, at the close of the century, enabled the Viper to reach the record speed of forty-two miles an hour, and the Deutschland to rush across the Atlantic in 5 days 11 hours and 45 minutes. The greatest improvements made were the introduction of iron as a shipbuilding material by John Laird, the use of the screw-propellers and of high pressures of steam. Mr. Halliday tells the story of Dr. Lardner's lecture upon "Transatlantic Steam Navigation" The Great Western had just been built, and the worthy Doctor demonstrated the utter impossibility of crossing the Atlantic under steam alone. said:

He

"Let them take a vessel 1,600 tons, provided with 400 h.p. The vessel must carry a burden of 1,748 tons. He thought it would be a waste of time, under all the circumstances, to say much more to convince them of the inexpediency of attempting a direct voyage to New York, for in this case 2,080 miles was the longest run a steamer could encounter; at the end of that distance she would require a relay of coals. . . . We have as an extreme limit of a steamer's practicable voyage without receiving a relay of coals a run of 2,000 miles." She sailed on April 8th, 1838, taking 850 tons of coal on board, and arrived at full speed in the afternoon of April 23rd, having made the passage in fifteen days, and with 200 tons of coals left in her bunkers.

Increased speed is only acquired by sacrificing more and more room to boilers and machinery. The accompanying diagram brings this fact out very clearly. For profitable running very high speeds are not desirable, but every large line needs one record-breaker at least as a means of advertising itself.

SIR ANDREW CLARKE ON EMPIRE BUILDING. THE DESTINY OF WESTERN AFRICA. SIR ANDREW CLARKE is interviewed by Mr. R. Blathwayt in the February number of Great Thoughts. After describing his work in Malaga, Sir Andrew Clarke says:"We should be happier in our rule on the West Coast-and I speak from experience, for I was out there for some time myself -if we had confined ourselves to pure trading. At present we can only succeed by forced labour, and that always means the deterioration of both English and native. Remember this, that on the West Coast we are only re-occupying ground which was occupied by the powerful and pious influence of the Roman Catholics-I refer to the government of the Portuguese, years ago. They spent money and lives, but failed, and now there remain of their rule only the ruins of convents and old palaces, which you will see crumbling to dust in the jungle, with ceilings painted by Italians. Nature is too strong for the European, and it will be the same with us. Our work in the Hinterland may prolong our stay, but in time it will be handed over to natives, controlled and guided by a half-caste and bastard population of our own race. And awful then will be the condition of West Africa. It will be a solemn warning to England, and an object-lesson on the absolute necessity for firm decision between the true colonisation of our race and the occupying of territory merely for the purposes of money getting." "Without being in the least degree a little Englander, Sir Andrew, don't you think we are too bent on conquest for the mere sake of conquest, and of adding land to land? It appears to me it will tend in the end to weaken our control of our Empire." "Yes, I often think we are enlarging the Empire too rapidly. We are leaving Canada and Australia in a half-completed condition, and are weakening ourselves against some strong self-centred European Power. We are not making half the use we might make of Canada and Australia, and we have trouble untold ahead of us in South Africa. I lay great stress on motive and character. India is ruled by character. Remember this, righteousness exalteth a nation, and still more, because it is wider spread, does it exalt an Empire. It is a great and Imperial question we are called upon at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to consider. We stand often upon the graves of ancient empires, and it should be our mission to gather together their scattered fragments, and form them into the cradle of a new and fair dominion, federated in justice and morality, and which will exceed in usefulness to mankind and in honour to our nation and faith all that has preceded it in the dead and gone days. The responsibility of empire weighs heavily on England in the present day, but that responsibility can be lightened if it be undertaken in the spirit of sympathy and of justice, of love for a conquered race, and with a fixed determination only to act towards them as we would they should act towards us in similar circumstances. Do as you would be done by. That should be the guiding motto and the inspiration of every whole-hearted Empire Maker to-day."

"

(From the Scientific American.)

IN THE PROPHET'S MANTLE.

M. DE BLOWITZ IN A NEW ROLE.

M. DE BLOWITZ contributes to the North American Review for January a very interesting paper, a prophetic speculation as to the Twentieth Century. There is a good deal in it that is not very much to the point, but towards the end of the article he proclaims that electricity is destined to offer to the human race "the penultimate word on the everlasting enigma which mankind has sought to solve." He says:—

It is my conviction that the task of revealing the full meaning of this demiurgic force is to devolve upon the Twentieth Century, and that then, the question solved, the entire problem of existence on this globe will be seen to have been solved as well. The solution of all the problems which are tormenting the human mind is bound up in this one. This solution will

suppress frontiers, change the aims of armies, subject the planetary spaces to the human will, modify altogether the faith of the race, and give in general to the efforts of its intelligence a fresh direction and an object as yet undreamed of.

A CENTURY OF WAR.

He

In

This, however, is only one of his prophecies. believes that the Twentieth Century will witness innumerable and terrible wars throughout the entire globe. He catches glimpses of wars throughout its entire span. the centre of Europe, he repeats his old prophecy that war will break out on the morrow of the death of Francis Joseph. In the more or less general conflict of which M. de Blowitz catches a glimpse, the Kaiser's part will not be one of the least preponderant. As for Russia, he thinks that the will of the Tsar, expressed in the most astonishing and unexpected way, will effect a change. Russia had a Tsar Creator, it had a Tsar Emancipator, it will have a Tsar Liberator. But as the future of Russia escapes every law of logic, M. de Blowitz refrains from indulging further in prophecy.

SOCIAL PARASITISM.

The bulk of his paper is devoted to a dissertation, concerning what he regards as the great and growing evil of modern France-social parasitism, which it is the mission of the Twentieth Century to combat, to repress, and to extirpate. Each régime has left its favourites who were more or less parasitical, and thus to-day over a France which fancies itself democratic there stretches an immense, constantly shifting blotch, this social parasitism, these throngs of individuals always discontented, always with unslaked thirst, always ready to upset existing things on the chance of finding a place or reaping an advantage by a possible upheaval.

Now, alongside the idle and the drones, who have enough to live upon, but who are able to add nothing to their resources, side by side with the twining parasite who climbs up along the social organism, catching in all the interstices of the trellis, and insinuating itself into every depression, where it thrives on the blood and flesh of others, there is also the fruit sec, the poseur, the man who has vague ideas on every subject, the man who cherishes every ambition and appetite and aspiration, the man of universal pretensions, who is always ready with an explanation, always ready to redress everything, and who fancies he has the right to occupy every place and to play any rôle he may fancy.

These three negative social types, the shiftless and idle, the parasite, and the dead-sea fruit, taken together, form the evil which is obstructing the normal social life of France.

HOW TO COMBAT IT.

This malady must be eliminated, or France will perish. Its suppression is the most pressing and serious problem with which the Twentieth Century will have to deal. Mr. Blowitz does not say exactly how it is to be dealt

with, but he makes one practical suggestion, namely, the imposition of an income tax, not as a substitute for other taxes, but as an altogether new and penal impost, the proceeds of which are to be utilised for premiums on emigration for any Frenchman wishing to settle in the colonies, and giving satisfactory guarantees of his capacity to make proper use of the money which will be advanced to him. Parasitism engenders the calculated sterility of women, which, in its turn, is the creator of parasitism. In the new century there must be no more lethargy, but every one must work. It must be the age of universal

toil :

This will prevent neither the struggle among men, nor war, nor conquest, nor hatred; but it will call a halt to the shames and stupidities of the present hour, and prevent here or elsewhere the gangrene from spreading in the social organism, and the advance of universal existence toward the eternal tomb.

After writing this sentence, M. de Blowitz says, “I lay down my pen here, for after all I must fix a limit to this essay." His readers will agree with him. You cannot get much farther than the eternal tomb.

The World was Her Salon.

MADAME DE STAËL takes her place this month in Longman's delightful series, by S. G. Tallentyre, of "Women of the Salons." This is his provisional estimate of that extraordinary woman :

Madame de Staël takes her own generation by storm. She inspires everywhere an enthusiasm of love or hatred. There is no medium. The time is not yet come when she can be regarded with that cold and disinterested eye which is to be supposed to search out truth. Her ample and vivid personality still takes one in possession. Her rush of words, her rush of feeling, her inimitable intellectual daring, her supreme conceit, and her strong passions leave the beholder breathless, astounded, and in a frame of mind essentially unjudicial.

Her

"If

In her bold inconsistency and her marvellous intuitions, she is supremely a woman. She is supremely unwomanly in her amazing egoism and her lust for fame. Take refuge with her from the battle of life without? She is herself a battle. love is a torrent of genercus and undisciplined emotion. she gives herself up to her impetuous nature," says Benjamin Constant, "there is a commotion like a thunderstorm, or an earthquake. Did she but know how to govern herself she could govern the world." That is her whole character summed up in little.

The other Salonnières make their salons their world. It is only this one who has attempted to make the world her salon. It is to be hoped that the writer will publish this series of sketches in book form. It will be a rare combination of personal fascination and of solid historical interest.

Temple Bar for February is an unusually interesting number. Mr. A. Montefiore Brice depicts "St. Helena, Old and New," with an exceptional vividness, and invests that prison-islet with unsuspected attractions. He even suggests that the Boers, when they return to their native veldt, will love to recall the scene of their imprisonment. Mr. H. Vallings recounts the memory of Louis "Stevenson among the Philistines" at Davos, and tells how the invalid novelist was roused by a professor denouncing the emotionalism of English as distinguished from German women, and exclaimed, “This neck is wet with the tears of German women." An effective retort on modern critics of fin de siècle decadence is delivered by a writer who recalls very much the same kind of criticism published exactly a hundred years ago. The new woman" and the "revolting daughter" are shown to have flourished at the close of the eighteenth century!

66

LAST CENTURY'S FICTION:

SURVEYED BY MR. QUILLER-COUCH.

IT is a very interesting sketch of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century which Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch contributes to the Pall Mall Magazine. Only glimpses of his critical estimates of leading names can be given here.

SCOTT.

For Scott, it need hardly be said, he expresses admiration, intense but not unqualified. He says:

Here, at any rate, was a writer who revelled in heroic deeds : and he who understands heroic deeds should understand a hero, and he who understands a hero has grasped something of spiritual truth. But beyond a recital of heroic deeds Scott would not dare. He, who could invent characters by the dozen for our amusement, and unfold character with a master's hand so long as it remained humorous, eccentric, of minor importance, never by any chance admits us to the heart of his heroes, or reveals to us the mainsprings of their heroic action. They have a few necessary and obvious features: they are good-looking, brave, proud, chivalrous, honourable, and it is profitable to be in their company. But they are figures in outline of the real man, the inner man, he tells us nothing, lest it might be taken too seriously. He has left us a Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions; but, apart from their humours, he has not greatly increased men's knowledge of men.

DICKENS.

On Scott followed Byron and Byron with all his faults "did consider man in his relation to the scheme of things." The novelists who "derive from Byron-Lytton and Disraeli-have a sense which Scott never had of man's relations with the visible world around him and the invisible or dimly visible world-'the army of unalterable law-beyond." The estimate of Dickens is high :

It is possible to class Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as failures (though I should dissent): it is not possible, with these in our mind, to deny Dickens the title of Romantic. And in the latter tale he achieved, after a fashion, what his predecessors in romance had failed to achieve. He rose above his own conception of men as bundles of humours, he rose above the spiritual indifference of the Romantics, and he fairly grappled with the soul and inner meaning of an heroic action. In doing so he crossed the Rubicon between phenomenon and idea, between that which appears and that which is, between Jonson's country and Shakespeare's; and if Dickens, greatest of all the tribe of Ben, proved himself an incomplete Shakespeare, this detracts nothing from the honour of the attempt.

THACKERAY.

Of Thackeray we are told

His men and women are drawn from outside, and for inside we have the author's delightful comment. It hovers around the inner springs of action instead of revealing them. . . . At heart he wants to charm, and feeling that his countrymen are easily frightened by ideas, he lets ideas lie, like sleeping dogs.

THE CROWN OF THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.

With Charlotte Brontë the writer finds the spiritual side of romance growing steadily in importance. George Eliot's novels do not shirk ideas, but are profoundly occupied with them. With her "we have passed the end of the Romantic movement in England." "The honour of summing up the movement in one splendid book was reserved not for Emily Brontë," but for Charles Reade in his one great book The Cloister and the Hearth which, "with its wealth of learning, its ringing narrative, its grasp of spiritual truth below all the crowded movement, is at once a masterpiece and a literary marvel."

BALZAC.

Passing to France the writer is confronted first with Balzac, to whose tremendous power he bears willing witness. But, he proceeds, "this great genius is after all but a glorified Man with a Muck-rake, botanising and biologising in the ooze at his feet, never lifting his eyes to that spiritual light towards which the little organisms are pushing purblindly even while they seem to him entirely occupied with devouring one another."

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL NOVEL.

Romance took up the quest of the spiritual first from the side of beauty. The sublimation of real life which appeared in Dumas did make for beauty :

Let the great names which follow Dumas-George Sand, Hugo, Gautier-stand for witness. In Hugo, the most important, the pursuit becomes a conscious one, and the divine side of human life is harped upon with furious energy, until man himself becomes a Titan beside God-nowhere more titanic (or grandiose, if you will) than in Les Misérables, which, taken for all in all, has been the most influential work of fiction in its century.

THE BLIGHT OF SCIENCE.

The scientific movement in the writer's judgment "has rather tended to blight than to inspire" the growth of true fiction :

The notion, rampant until a few years back that Truth must lurk in a test-tube, and the secret of creation in deep-sea mud, will no doubt be found in the end to have made, in a lop-sided, left-handed fashion, for progress. To its credit will stand M. Zola, with his laborious works and his theories; to its discredit, the beautiful works which Daudet in France and ' Björnson in Norway (to name two glaring instances) might have written, but were dissuaded from writing. In England we escaped the scientific fury for long, and met the affliction only when its real insanity had begun to dawn on the rest of the world.

OUR DEBT TO GERMANY

The influence of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, The i.e., the influence of Germany, helped to save us. writer thus acknowledges our debt to our kinsfolk over the sea :

When the time comes to estimate exactly what German influence did for English literature in the nineteenth century, we shall probably find cause to be sorry for much that seemed mighty fine to us in the great Victorian days-the intemperate worship of strength, the demand for originality at any cost, the public consent that any vagaries of language were permissible and even admirable so long as they helped a writer to flaunt his own personality and arrest attention. But we shall also have to reckon that it kept us loyal to philosophy in days when science threatened to invade and break up the deeps. With each discovery we have never lacked, in poetry or in prose fiction, philosophers to hold us from panic.

-AND TO RUSSIA.

Russia as well as Germany came to our rescue :

...

French realism and Russian realism reached us together, or almost together; and by the second the first stood condemned. Zola observed no more carefully than Tolstoi, De Maupassant directed his observation no more exquisitely than Turguéneff; and beside the two Russians the two Frenchmen were no less evidently shallow than muddy. These two men did impres sively and in the sight of Europe uphold, vindicate, and establish the truth that the concern of Fiction is with things spiritual, intimate, deep, not with things material, external, shallow; with interpreting the hearts of men, not with counting their buttons; with ideas not with phenomena: that it uses phenomena, as all arts must use them; but as a means only to arrive at stability, peace and law-or at such glimpses as men may get of eternal law.

A DAILY RUN WHOLLY BY WOMEN. THE story of La Fronde, "a daily paper entirely produced by women," is told in the Young Woman for February by Isabel Brooke-Alder. La Fronde is owned, published, edited, written, managed, set up (but not, we infer, machined) by women, and counts its readers by the hundred thousand.

WHAT SUGGESTED THE IDEA.

This is how the marvel came about :

66

In August, 1896, Madame Durand was the chosen envoy of La Ligue Française at the Women's Congress then being held in Brussels, and it was whilst reading a paper on Woman's Rights before the assembled delegates of the learned societies of all the world that she got her first idea of the scheme which took shape the next year as La Fronde. 'Why not," she thought, "put what I am now saying within the reach of all the women who want to hear it, instead of limiting it just to these selected listeners? Why not print it many times-and cheaply?" And from cheap printing the chain of thought needed but one link to reach "" newspaper," and naturally to extend itself into the proposition "to be run entirely by women." On 9th December, 1897, the first number of La Fronde appeared.

THE EDITRESS-IN-CHIEF.

The originative ego of the paper had her training on the stage and on the press, and is thus described :-

Madame Marguerite Durand, who owns and manages La Fronde, is a blonde, handsome and well-proportioned, still well on the sunny side of middle age. She was at one time on the stage, and becoming a Pensionnaire de la Comédie Française, was entrusted with important parts; but on her marriage she severed her connection with the famous Maison de Molière, and devoted her energies to politics, on which overwhelming topic she contributed a brilliant series of articles to Le Figaro.

HER STAFF.

Madame Durand is assisted in her interesting but arduous work by some of the most intellectual of her compatriots, all of whom give of their best for the benefit of her brilliant enterprise. Her sub-editress is Madame Emmy Fournier, a delightful specimen of the brisk, very feminine, but very up-to-date Parisienne; and amongst her occasional contributors are the following wellknown women :-Madame Alphonse Daudet, Madame Leconte du Nouy, Sarah Bernhardt, Rosalie Rousseil, Augusta Holmes, and Madame Clemence Royet.

From twenty to thirty regular contributors send their best work to Madame Durand, and the staff at the office of her paper consists of twelve members, writers, sub-editors, reporters, etc.

HER OFFICES.

Perhaps the most pleasing novelty connected with La Fronde is the tasteful elegance of its offices. These are located in a five-storey house in the West End of Paris. The writer bears this admiring testimony :

Go where one will in this Temple of Industry, everything is charming, clean, bright, fresh, cheering to a degree; and everybody there is to match, from the doorkeeper who enquires your errand on arrival, to the Proprietress-Editress who sits up aloft in the prettiest sanctum imaginable.

The room in which she presides over the destiny of her paper is far more like an English drawing-room than an editorial "den," with its groups of palms and high vases of flowers, its lace curtains, pictures and open fireplace-everything, in fact, with which a charming woman likes to surround herself when at home. But, for all its grace, there is an air of serious occupation about the apartment which suggests that its owner is there as a business woman.

The waiting-room, which connects with it, is in its way quite as attractive, being furnished as a library.

Any one who knows the dens in which some of the greatest London editors have to manufacture copy will sigh for a feminine French invasion to change littered infernos into paradisos of lettered elegance.

DRESS AND DECORATION.

The fittings of the whole building and its occupants seem to have been designed as a harmony in white and green :

Dainty ladies, some arrayed in the height of fashion, are these industrious scribes, despite the fact that several of them earn every sou they spend. There are a few, however, no less industrious, who prefer more serviceable garb, and one is so entirely regardless of the amenities of feminine attire that she dons the twentieth century's hideous substitute for Rosalind's "doublet and hose!"

On the ground floor is a cosy little buffet, where tea, cakes and wine can be had; a reception room for promiscuous callers, stocked with innumerable books of reference, a copy of everything produced by women authors, and a photograph of every painting or piece of sculpture by women artists since the foundation of La Fronde.

Adjoining it is a large hall, glass roofed and prettily furnished, where Madame Durand holds occasional soirées musicales, and entertains the members of "La Ligue du Droit des Femmes" at their monthly meetings. The same scheme of decoration prevails all over the house-green and white, variously applied.

The composing room, at the top of the house, is not any exception to this pleasing state of things, and the eighteen typesetters look, in their way, just as fresh and generally attractive as their sister-workers on the floors below.

All that appertains to the business of La Fronde-its sale, and the advertisements which it contains-is undertaken by a staff of clerks, whose uniform of dark green cloth dresses with white facings accords to perfection with the decoration of the whole building.

A FEDERATIVE HOME BUILT OF PAPER. THE Wide World for February publishes a charminglywritten and copiously illustrated article on Professor Bickerton's Federative Home at Wainoni, near Christchurch, New Zealand :

Wainoni, it seems, has all the advantages of an excellent club at the cost of a second or third-rate lodging. There is more freedom, greater privacy, and no loneliness-these are its watchwords. The Professor's own house, designed like no other house that anyone ever saw, is the nucleus of the home. Reserving a few rooms for himself and his family, the large drawing-room, the brilliant and lovely conservatory, the diningroom, and the social hall are all shared by the Federators and his own family in common. Everyone uses them alike, and all. receive their friends in them without distinction of caste or rank. The entrance hall is a large conservatory, full of gorgeous flowering plants, palms, and tall tree-ferns from the native bush.

At four o'clock everyone meets in the drawing-room for afternoon tea; but all other meals are more or less "moveable feasts," served from one common kitchen, somewhat in hotel fashion, to suit the different modes of life and habits of the Federators. Each family has its own private apartments, and joint housekeeping is managed by the community. The cost of living federally is undoubtedly far lower than it would be if the Federating families lived each in its own little home. The normal standard of members for such a Federated home is 100.

Professor Bickerton has discovered the art of constructing buildings of tarred brown paper, which, if tarred afresh every two years, will last for half a century :

Not only is the cost of a paper dwelling less than one-fifth of that of the cheapest wooden building, but it is also excellent in case of earthquake-a serious consideration in the northern parts of New Zealand. Paper buildings are also remarkably warm, the paper drying as hard as a board, and there being a space of four inches between the outer and inner walls. The brown paper which is chemically treated perfectly withstands the weathereven the fierce winds which sometimes sweep across the Canterbury Plains. Strange as it may seem, these paper houses have remained tight and dry when wooden houses have let in the

wet.