rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper.  The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French.  The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality.  In a word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels that the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in England; when he goes to America he feels that it is more firm.  And he will hardly find adequate the French explanation, viz., that there is not less vice but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community.

There is another very important sphere of morality in which the general attitude of the United States seems to me very appreciably superior to that of England.  It is that to which St. Paul refers when he says, “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.”  American public sentiment is distinctly ahead of ours in recognising that a life of idleness is wrong in itself, and that the possibility of leading such a life acts most prejudicially on character.  The American answer to the Englishman trying to define what he meant by “gentlemen of leisure” “Ah, we call them tramps in America”—­is not merely a jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle.  Most Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. Bosanquet’s philosophical if somewhat cumbersomely worded definition of legitimate private property, “that things should not come miraculously and be unaffected by your dealings with them, but that you should be in contact with something which in the external world is the definite material representative of yourself” ("Aspects of the Social Problem,” p. 313).  The British gentleman, aware that his dinner does not agree with him unless he has put forth a certain amount of physical energy, reverts to one of the earliest and most primitive forms of work, viz., hunting.  There is a small—­a very small—­class in the United States in the same predicament; but as a rule the worker there is not only more honoured, but also works more in accordance with the spirit of the age.

The general attitude of Americans towards militarism seems to me also superior to ours; and one of the keenest dreads of the best American citizens during a recent wave of jingoism was that of “the reflex influence of militarism upon the national character, the transformation of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers ever ready to take offence, prone to create difficulties, eager to shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity in some other country.”  The spectacle of a section in the United States apparently ready