n one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make
the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest
room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the
woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never
touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this
splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised
it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are
compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree
of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men
and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous
cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a
sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of
a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of
audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in
feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which
is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the
heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely
inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are
they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling
their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring
because it is chaste.

But for the greater number of us it has been necessary to come down to
the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less
the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us
rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which
has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without
danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe
penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged in
_ad libitum_ by our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing
the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they
precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day
of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible
to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the
arrival of a new hungry and wailing member--above all at a time when it
was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to
import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser