rdance with her husband's will, gave 30,000 francs to
the 'Bureau de Bienfaisance' of the city, the income thereof to be
applied, under the supervision of three commissioners, to encouraging
habits of thrift among the apprentices of Lille. Two hundred bank-books
of five francs each are annually given to apprentices in the first two
years of their apprenticeship, and the rest of the income is to be given
in prizes each year to those of the bank-book holders who shall be shown
to have been the most careful and thrifty in managing the results of
their labour during the year.

A law passed in 1874, before the 'true Republicans' of Gambetta and
Ferry came into power, provides for a medical inspection and record of
newly-born children, and this law puts infants, whenever it may be found
necessary, under proper hygienic conditions. It has been nowhere so
energetically carried out as in the Nord. Of course, such a law as this
flies directly in the face of the great gospel of the 'survival of the
fittest.' But though that gospel was introduced to Paris on the stage as
one of the curiosities of the Centennial Exposition of 1889, it has made
little progress as yet in Catholic France. Even at the theatres in
Paris, I am glad to say, the popular instinct still regulates the
_queue_ on principles quite inconsistent with the Darwinian maxims of
'every man for himself,' and 'the devil take the hindmost.' It will be
an evil day for invalids and cripples bitten with the drama when the
'struggle for life' comes to be logically developed into the right of
the strongest men to get first to the ticket office!

Throughout the Department of the Nord, primary schools exist for the
children who are taken in charge at their birth by public benevolence,
and those to whom they are confided are obliged to see that the children
attend these schools from the age of six to the age of twelve years.

Under the influence of the Church acting upon the naturally sociable and
gregarious temperament of the Flemish race, mutual aid societies have
become very numerous of late years in the Nord. A hundred and fifty-two
such societies now exist in the arrondissement of Lille alone. These
numbered, in 1888, 7,249 honorary members and 35,270 paying members, and
their assets were stated at about 3,000,000 francs. Only 3,649 women,
however, were enrolled on their lists. Is this a confirmation, I wonder,
of the theory entertained by Mr. Emerson and other philosophers