ement at a distressing
social phenomenon. The talk which is chuckled over by men who have
daughters of their own is something to make an inexperienced individual
redden. Reverence, nobility, high chivalry, common cleanliness, cannot
flourish in the precincts of the bar, and there is not an honest man who
has studied with adequate opportunities who will deny that the social
glass is too often taken to an accompaniment of sheer uncleanness. Why
have not our moral novelists spoken the plain truth about these things?
We have many hideous pictures of the East-end drinking-bars, and much
reproachful pity is expended on the "residuum;" but the evil that is
eating at the very heart of the nation, the evil that is destroying our
once noble middle-class, finds no assailant and no chronicler. Were it
not for the athletic sports which happily engage the energies of
thousands of young men, our middle-class would degenerate with appalling
rapidity. But, in spite of athletics, the bar claims its holocaust of
manhood year by year, and the professional moralists keep silence on the
matter. Some of them say that they cannot risk hurting the sensibilities
of innocent maidens. What nonsense! Those maidens all have a chance of
becoming the wives of men who have suffered deterioration in the reek
and glare of the bar. How many sorrowing wives are now hiding their
heart-break and striving to lure their loved ones away from the curse of
curses! If the moralists could only look on the mortal pathos of the
letters which I receive, they would see that the maidens about whom
they are so nervous are the very people who should be summoned as allies
in our fight against a universal enemy. If our brave sweet English girls
once learn the nature of the temptations to which their brothers and
lovers are exposed, they will use every force of their pure souls to
save the men whom they can influence from a doom which is death in life.

_May, 1887._

_FRIENDSHIP_.

The memoirs that are now poured into the book-market certainly tend to
breed cynicism in the minds of susceptible persons, for it appears that
to many eminent men and women of our generation friendship was almost an
unknown sentiment. As we read one spiteful paragraph after another, we
begin to wonder whether the living men around us resemble the dead
purveyors of scandal. The fashionable mode of proceeding nowadays is to
leave diaries crammed with sarcasm, give some unhappy friend order