to do the work of men. But it would be superfluous. These things are rapidly passing away from masculine direction: we are confronted with women working out salvation for themselves; we are conscious of a new spirit entering into schemes for futurity, a spirit which is entirely hostile to conventional bogeyisms.

A point for serious reflection is that the women of the aristocratic class stand alone as the only body of women who are not working out salvation for themselves.

We turn to them inquiringly. We find some of them still unconscious of this great and sane development; some of them feebly resenting it; many scoffing at it; some coming helplessly in at the tail of it. The whole conveys a deplorable impression of futility: for these women of the governing class, who must surely still possess the germs of the governing instinct, have shown themselves incapable either of effective assistance or effective resistance.

It looks as though with the final overthrow of the Feudal System feudal women subsided into a more or less general condition of apathetic surrender of the principles which formerly justified their dominion. There entered into them the demons of sloth, self-indulgence, luxury. They lost interest in their people, in themselves. They abdicated pride of place. Spasmodically they continued, it is true, to do many gracious acts, but also they did many things which were not so gracious. Of all the ungracious things they ever did, however, the most impolitic, the most unwise, the most unwomanly was to shriek at the "shrieking sisterhood." For the "shrieking sisterhood" has justified its shrieks and made of theirs an empty babble of idiot sounds. It is much to be feared, and a thing much to be deplored if it be so, that women of the aristocratic class have lost the confidence and the love of the striving masses of women.

For the last twenty years Liberal women have been patiently digging and trenching in hopeful anticipation of the harvest. It is this magnificent spade work which has arrested

the attention and commanded the respect of the men of their side. It is the earnestness of their purpose, the purity of their aims which is reviving a long-forgotten reliance on the mother and the housekeeper; faith in her instinctive wisdom, appreciation of her practice of thrift. Man, encumbered with his assumption of feminine attributes pauses oppressed, irresolute; he seeks for relief: he welcomes and responds to an appeal to his reason, learns to honour woman for her womanliness, ceases to persecute her for her sex.

It is in the year 1906, when we turn from the obsequies of the era of physical force to greet the advancing Spirit of the Christian Creed, that we discover Man making an honest effort, for the first time, to accept his help-meet.

LUCY GARDNER PAGET.

L

A LEAF FROM THE

ADMIRALTY

YING beside me as I write is a yellowed sheet of paper, closely written in a clerkly hand. It looks a slight bit of flotsam to have drifted down the unreturning current of time, yet the unfolding of it suffices to build anew old walls and set ancient ships once more in line of battle. The document is concerned with the claims of twenty soldiers of Captain Barton's company, who had served in his Majesty's ship Antelope, and who clearly had not been paid their due. It is to be hoped that they received their money, as this paper commands; but, whether or no, Captain Barton and his men "home have gone and ta'en their wages" these two hundred years and more, and his Majesty's ship Antelope sails no more the narrow seas. Derby House itself, whence this order went forth-its stately halls and fair gardens are but shadows, trodden by shades; and the men whose names are written here have left signatures, bold or faltering, on a larger page and, their work at the Admiralty being done, have

Launched forth upon an undiscovered sea.

More than twice a hundred years have darkened the paper and dimmed the ink of the stray record beside me, and yet how vital and significant a group is called out of the past by the chance linking of names! Looking at it, one may look no less on the world out of which it came, on the men who set quill to paper on behalf of twenty soldiers of Captain Barton's company, on that 31st day of January in the year 1673.

There are five names in all-the first is a strongly marked signature, with a half-foreign twist to the first and last letters -Rupert, P. Below it, in curious contrast, a tangle of slender lines falls into shape as Monmouth; Latimer, Anglesey, and G. Carteret complete the group. Out of the encroaching dimness look the faces which bent for a long-ago moment over the paper. Derby House stands again for an hour as it stood in the time of the second Charles, a building redeemed to loyal service after many vicissitudes in the days of the Civil War, when the Derby House Committee swayed the fortunes and suggested the movements of the Parliamentary army. Within these walls John Pym, "the Commons King," had held state in death, and from Derby House had gone forth many a letter over which Cromwell bent rugged brows. It is not the place alone which has turned from rebellious uses; for Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey, though now he writes his name beside Rupert and Carteret, yet did his part as surely as Pym's self to doom the Earl of Strafford, the great "Protomartyr" of the Royalists, did it, doubtless, in bitter remembrance of what his father, Viscount Mountnorris, had suffered at Strafford's hands. But Annesley, wise in time, turned with the turning tide, and welcomed Charles II. back to his own, so his work as a Parliament man must be duly forgotten. Anglesey and Latimer do not hold their own to the mind's eye, and even George Carteret falls into the background beside the others in the far-away scene.

The others they have been limned for us by so many a hand and not on canvas alone, though therein Van Dyck and Lely have done their part. From the sweeping line of Clarendon and Dryden's superb brush-stroke to the biting acid of de Grammont and the captious scribbling of Samuel Pepys-they have been depicted by many artists and in many moods. And out of these conflicting records they emerge with a vividness altogether convincing; or does the document itself bear some impress of a long past moment, some hint of what befell on the day it was glanced at and signed?

What if, instead of comparing historian with poet, or setting the eulogies of Evelyn to counterbalance the sneers of Pepys, one should yield to the mood roused by this actual fragment of the past, and seek to look in on the chamber in Derby House, in which, so at least fancy may decide, five high personages are discussing graver matters than the wages of Barton's company?

The room, then, looks garden-ward, towards the Thames, and the Lord High Admiral of England, having signed and flung down the quill, stands gazing out to the river, and in his reverie, it may be, looking on the shipping at its mouth. Prince Rupert, mon Cousin, as the Court calls him in mimicry of the King, wears no unclouded brow in these days of intrigue at home and doubtful alliance on the seas; his sombre eyes and sardonic lips confess to the bitterness with which he looks on his kinsman's Court, on the triumph of that cause to which he has given a life's allegiance. Small wonder that the sight of Rupert's tall figure and worn and haughty countenance brings dismay at times at Derby House as at Whitehall. But there is one at least who does not fear him, and that is the beautiful youth seated at the heavy table, trifling with his quill, forgetful of the business in hand. Monmouth is in the flush of his young comeliness, with his wistful eyes and lips alternately languorous and petulant. He is in the heyday, no less, of his martial achievements: his campaign in the Low Countries, whither Charles had despatched 6000 men to serve in alliance with the French, won golden opinions for the young leader, opinions to be confirmed by that daring attack on the trenches and ramparts of Maestricht which is to win him Louis' diamond-hilted sword and the dearer praise of Turenne. Perhaps it is his early valour-valour to be so shamefully quenched in the dark years to come-which has roused in Prince Rupert a "great reality of affection" towards his young kinsman. Or it may be that Monmouth's ardent Protestantism wakens memories in the older man's mind of the far-away time when he himself, in the brilliance of his early youth, suffered three years of imprisonment for his Protestant