because of a supposed moral lapse which had nothing whatever to do with the main purpose of his life.

It would be just as logical to go and burn all the great pictures of an inimitable artist, just because it was discovered that he hebdomadally got drunk, or that he kept a mistress.

All this prudish assertion of morality is simply the donning of the mask of our national false modesty.

The case of Lord Byron drew from Lord Macaulay a paragraph which has become immortal and which is as true now as on the day it was penned :

"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly, some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the high standard of morals established in England with the Parisian laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more."

We have transcribed this paragraph because it puts most forcibly the cruel way in which our popular indignation works, when our popular false modesty is supposed to have received a shock. English morality is always much more that of assertion than of performance. We are always striving to interfere in our neighbour's business, just as politically we often seek to be arbitrary in the affairs of other nations or with native tribes in distant lands whose territories we are anxious to annex for commercial purposes, and which we mask under the plea of spreading a knowledge of the Bible.

Whatever faults Shelley may have had, he was neither a dissolute nor an immoral man, yet we ostracised him, and practically condemned him without a fair hearing.

Lord Byron we drove into exile and broke his heart, and after

he died at thirty-six we tried to atone by slobbering over his remains.

Lord Nelson was maligned; but he was too near to our commercial interests, too necessary to our purposes of national defence for us to proceed against him to our usual length.

At the same time two of the morally worst kings that ever sat upon thrones came to rule over us, George III. and George IV. What is it in our national character that leads us to wink at the vices of a king, or a prince, while a great artist or a great politician we are so ready to punish?

Our scapegoats are generally selected from those who are powerless to retaliate.

A man in a position of established power is left alone, but a man who has made himself, or who has formed a great party, is virulently attacked.

This is what happened in the case of Sir Chas. Dilke. His case was no worse than scores of others. But, because it got into the Divorce Court, and became a public scandal, politicians who were his opponents, and political parties and their representatives, proceeded to, in the most dastardly fashion, make political capital out of it. Those desirous of finding a motive for political hatred seize upon an entirely irrelevant moral lapse, and use it as a reason for party rancour. Does not this indicate a certain cur-like propensity in the English character? It is not straight-forward.

The following passage from an article in The Westminster Review for January, 1899, indicates the remarkable power which the accumulated false modesty of the country has in blinding the eyes, and blunting the sense, of justice.

“That his career came to a premature and almost tragic conclusion was not owing to any mistakes of a political kind. It was owing to the weaknessand such a truly human weakness!-of a lonely and sensitive man, who, in accepting the devotion of a woman's life, forgot that his power of defying political foes had not rendered him proof against the more insidious antagonism of a shocked society. As Achilles had his vulnerable point, so Charles Stewart Parnell, moving proudly and independently in a solitary world of his own, forgot that England is a country in which a man or woman may break every one of the ten commandments except that which is usually spoken of as the seventh."

And yet those who have probed the depths of social life in England know that this commandment is broken almost systemati

cally in all grades of life (that of the clergy not excepted), and that the enormous band of prostitutes in London and the provinces are chiefly kept out of reach of absolute starvation by the payments of married men. The adultery of Englishmen is more filthy than any because it is, as a rule, devoid of all passion of sentiment. When an instance occurs that is redeemed by a genuine feeling of love, a soul-engrossing passion which, however mistaken, cannot be degrading--for all real love is ennobling-the brutality of the Englishman has no fellow feeling for it, no respect for it: he simply denounces it in the name of his "shoddy" morality. Even, otherwise, great Englishmen give their lip-service to this affected sentiment, so that we find Mr. Gladstone saying in 1887:

-

"Had Parnell lived, and had there been no divorce proceedings, I do solemnly believe there would be a Parliament in Ireland now."

One may ask in the name of reason what there was in even a guilty passion, which belongs to the life of the heart, that it should render abortive the noble efforts of a great political career?

The truth is that the greatest crime which anybody can be guilty of in this country (greater even than that of being poor and friendless) is to be found out.

In the eyes of our religious and social humbugs it is not so much the immorality that matters, as the public exhibition of it.

VII.

We have now to consider two special cases which illustrate, the one, our social injustice, the other, our legal injustice in dealing with matters which arise out of ill-regulated or ill-advised passions.

We allude to the not yet forgotten case of Colonel Baker, and the more recent cruel treatment of Lieutenant Wark.

It will be remembered that Colonel Baker, who was generally acknowledged to be one of the most capable officers in our army was accused by a young lady of trying to take liberties with her in a railway carriage. Had the lady been a minor actress, a ballet girl, a barmaid, or an ordinary work-girl, English prudery would have refused to believe in the possibility of her virtue; but it so happened that she was well-to-do and had friends. It appeared that after she had entered into conversation with the Colonel for

some time, something occurred to frighten her, or she chose to take fright, and she got out on to the footboard of the carriage. A parson in another compartment came to her rescue, and supported her at the trial with his evidence. With an English jury this no doubt had undue weight. The most damning evidence against Colonel Baker was that when the railway officials were called upon to hand him over to the police, his dress was discovered to be disordered.

Public indignation over this case was ridiculously exaggerated. Violent letters from prudes of both sexes appeared in most of the journals.

Granting that Colonel Baker had been led into mistaking the character of the woman he made such advances to, one would have thought the ordinary punishment of a term of imprisonment would have met the case. But no! Colonel Baker was cashiered from the Service, ostracised from all society, and driven into exile for the rest of his life. Notwithstanding which he distinguished himself in foreign service, in the East, in the most brilliant manner, which may be fairly taken as a proof that he was not actuated in his misdeed by any such callous motives as animate the thousands of heartless seductions and desertions which annually occur in this country.

Now for the case of Lieutenant Wark. Here we have an instance of a perfectly natural and human passion leading to results which would never have taken place had it not been for the fearful underlying influences, in our social condition, of the pitiless virtuous woman on the one hand, and the false modest religious purist on the other.

A man writes letters to his beloved perhaps too openly expressing the secret intensities of passionate love; they are spoken of as "filthy and disgusting." This is just on a parallel with the description of a candid, scientific, physiological and medical work as "obscene." These are simply misused words, expressing false conceptions of what does not exist. Neither the passionate feelings, nor the physical acts of love can be spoken of as "filthy or disgusting." Nothing is filthy, but what is unnatural, nothing is obscene but what is spoken of in a wrong sense. How believers in a Personal God can talk about feelings, organs, and functions

being filthy which are the inspiration and creation of God himself passes all bounds of credence in a reasonable and logical mind.

If such perversion of ideas is the outcome of religion we fail to see how such religion can make for honesty.

Westermarck in his History of Human Marriage suggests that the curious notion of the impurity of sexual connection (which has obtained from the earliest ages) may have arisen from a primal horror of incest which naturally sprang up in the close family relations inevitable in small nomadic tribes.

If social morality is to drive poor trembling women to the desperation of resorting to violent methods of destroying the beautiful natural results of a beautiful and purifying passion, then we say such social morality is not only cruel, but abortive of any results that can strengthen the dignity of the human race.

What intrinsic difference can there be between the same acts done with a ceremony of marriage, or without it. There may be a certain difference in the expediency of doing them, or of the honourable right to do them; but the quality of the acts themselves remains the same.

Yet an innocent man is convicted of a crime, of which all the tangible evidence proves him innocent, and yet on the presumptive evidence of certain letters he is accounted guilty of conspiring to do an ill deed which the whole tenor of his conduct proves him to have wished to avoid.

Because he was true and loyal to the partner of his love his career is ruined, and he is sent to prison for three years, simply because he refused, by a single act of sudden repudiation, to avoid sharing the consequences resulting to a lady who had loved him "not wisely but too well." And worse than all, he having been cashiered the service, his wife and children are left destitute, and his brother officers have to subscribe for their support.

Lieutenant Wark is a martyr: 1st. to the despair of a woman who feared social ostracism; 2nd. to the false modest humbug of a social custom which tolerates, under the cloak of marriage, not only prostitution, but adultery, if accompanied with the condonation of a complacent husband.

Poor Miss Yates was simply one victim more added to the sad, endless, roll of women who have been scourged by the pitiless,