to our wise
counsel, the tiresome creatures are wasting their time criticizing us.
It is a popular game, this game of school. All that is needful is a
doorstep, a cane, and six other children. The difficulty is the six
other children. Every child wants to be the schoolmaster; they will keep
jumping up, saying it is their turn.

Woman wants to take the stick now, and put man on the doorstep. There
are one or two things she has got to say to him. He is not at all the
man she approves of. He must begin by getting rid of all his natural
desires and propensities; that done, she will take him in hand and make
of him--not a man, but something very much superior.

It would be the best of all possible worlds if everybody would only
follow our advice. I wonder, would Jerusalem have been the cleanly city
it is reported, if, instead of troubling himself concerning his own
twopenny-halfpenny doorstep, each citizen had gone out into the road and
given eloquent lectures to all the other inhabitants on the subject of
sanitation?

We have taken to criticizing the Creator Himself of late. The world is
wrong, we are wrong. If only He had taken our advice, during those first
six days!

Why do I seem to have been scooped out and filled up with lead? Why do
I hate the smell of bacon, and feel that nobody cares for me? It is
because champagne and lobsters have been made wrong.

Why do Edwin and Angelina quarrel? It is because Edwin has been given
a fine, high-spirited nature that will not brook contradiction; while
Angelina, poor girl, has been cursed with contradictory instincts.

Why is excellent Mr. Jones brought down next door to beggary? Mr. Jones
had an income of a thousand a year, secured by the Funds. But there
came along a wicked Company promoter (why are wicked Company promoters
permitted?) with a prospectus, telling good Mr. Jones how to obtain a
hundred per cent. for his money by investing it in some scheme for the
swindling of Mr. Jones's fellow-citizens.

The scheme does not succeed; the people swindled turn out, contrary to
the promise of the prospectus, to be Mr. Jones and his fellow-investors.
Why does Heaven allow these wrongs?

Why does Mrs. Brown leave her husband and children, to run off with the
New Doctor? It is because an ill-advised Creator has given Mrs. Brown
and the New Doctor unduly strong emotions. Neither Mrs. Brown nor the
New Doctor are to be blamed. If any human being be answerable it is,
probably,