course of positive Sociology. But the practical efficacy of the Human Synthesis will not need to wait for this. It is exerting already its influence over masses of men, who conceive of it loosely and feebly perhaps, who are almost blind to its true continuity, but who are able to feel its reality and dominant control. Since it is the real solution of the problems which have lain at the root of so many types of religion, its property is to appear by degrees through the dissolving fragments of other creeds. For a century at least, since the later half of the last century, it has been the real force that has stimulated and disciplined society. As the orthodoxies fail men and the older Churches and societies give way, men fall back instinctively and unconsciously on Humanity, for guidance, for help, for discipline. Humanity has no need to be brought down or revealed to men. It is there amongst them, as it has long been, working and shaping them. It needs only to become familiar and articulate.

What a picture of human life may we not see, as in a vision, under the influence of this vivifying principle!

Underneath all lies the indispensable institution of a universal Education-an education for all, free, open, without conditions, an education which may put the capable artisan on an intellectual level with any other citizen, an education continued long after the childhood or boyhood, until the maturity of manhood, which is now only thought the privilege of the rich. An Education, universal in another sense, that it will be a real training in science, not a mechanical exercise in language, an Education leading up to a practical knowledge of man's history and his social and moral nature.

Whence is such an Education to come, it is said? Whence, but from the sense of social duty, and of social necessity in those who hold the material and intellectual resources of society, the rich and the learned? If the zeal of all the social reformers, the conscience. and public spirit of all the patriotic citizens, the patience of the man of science and the philosopher, the enthusiasm of the missionary, the evangelising spirit of the Christian, all pulled one way, and converged, as they now diverge and counteract each other, what would not result? Now 10,000 pulpits are fulminating against 10,000 newspapers, reviews, and lectures, and the fervour of the socialist reformer is quenched in the cold logic of the anti-social economist, and the crude sense of the practical statesman. Find them a common doctrine, fuse science, religion, socialism, economy, progress, conservatism, in one purpose, and the force of the educating power (now frittered away in internecine combat) would be beyond the reach of thought.

Out of such an educating body (call them philosophers, men of science, lecturers, preachers, priests, or thinkers) would rise up necessarily a spiritual, moralising force. The intellectual activity of a world based on the ever present Image of Humanity, could not rest in Material Science. Its whole intellectual system would converge

6

towards the focus of Man. The Science of Human Nature, as the noblest part of Science, would be the Crown and End of Science; and the noblest faculty of Man would be the subject of the Science of Human Nature. Men of Science' would not mean men who cut up frogs, and resolve nebulæ into new star worlds; but it would primarily mean moralists, social philosophers, historians. Science, philosophy, literature, law, would not be fields for accumulating a fortune, or winning some personal prize: they would be the great functions on which society itself depends.

Nor would this education be an intellectual one alone. It would be a training of the moral nature, of the feelings, of the heart. Women would be the great educators and moral regenerators-none being doomed to struggle in an idle competition in physical force with men, they would form the spirit of the young, become the moral providence of the home, and the moral inspirers of society-presenting in public and in private life the highest standard of spiritual truth. And life in public and private would be continually renewed by a set of institutions and practices that recalled to us its meaning and referred it to its higher purpose.

Enlightened by a systematic and scientific philosophy, moralised and dignified by a constant appeal to duty, man's active life would be set free to devote all its resources to the amelioration of our human lot. Industry would be moderated, inspired, and moralised, until it purged itself of the detestable aim of piling up fortunes and securing personal enjoyments, and set itself to raise the condition of the workers themselves-capital being held in trust as the public instrument of the community, captains of industry feeling themselves as much bound to watch over the welfare of their soldiers, as are captains of arinies in the field. The business of the rich would be to use wealth in the noble spirit of social advancement that the best philosophers have shown in the use of their knowledge, and the best rulers have shown in the use of their power. The incalculable resources of modern civilisation and the boundless ingenuity of modern invention would all be resolutely concentrated, not in the task of scrambling for wealth over the bodies and souls of the creators of wealth, but in an intelligent resolve to mitigate the lot of the toiling masses, and to provide against the consequences of social disorder. A few generations would suffice to make the world forget (as if it were the dark ages) this sordid Battle of Pelf (with its selfhelp and survival of the unfittest) in which we live, until Industry itself passed by an almost unconscious transition into the mere cultivation of Art and Beauty, and work was concentrated in the expression of pure and noble Feeling.

In Humanity human life meets and rests at last. Science and Philosophy by it become human, moral, co-ordinated. Devotion becomes rational and practical. Art becomes religious, social, crea

Politics

tive. Industry becomes beneficent, unselfish, ennobling. become a public duty, not an ignoble game. Education becomes a rational preparation for a true life. Religion becomes the bond of spirits within, and of multitudes without. The People enter upon their true Sovereignty, for their well-being is the grand object and care of society. Women at last receive their due place, for theirs is the largest part in the moral and spiritual guidance of their age. The Past is summed up and expressed in the Present, and the two become the natural parent of the Future. And so the whole human race slowly after centuries puts off the habit of War, as it has put off the habit of slavery, and becomes conscious of the vast Brotherhood whose mission is to people and to improve this Planet.

VOL. IX.-No. 49.

K K

FREDERIC HARRISON.

SMOKE PREVENTION.

Ir is now two hundred and twenty years since John Evelyn called attention to the evils of the smoke of London. In 1661 he published a tractate, with the title: Fumifugium, or, the inconvenience of the Air and smoke of London dissipated, together with some remedies humbly proposed by J. E. Esq. It bears on the title-page a motto from Lucretius:

Carbonumque gravis vis, atque odor insinuatur
Quam facile in cerebrum!

-a truth which all who have to work with their brains now in London will have no difficulty in acknowledging. The book is dedicated to the king, as a lover of noble buildings, gardens, pictures, and all royal magnificence, and his Majesty is appealed to with confidence as one who must needs desire to be freed from the prodigious annoyance, then only beginning seriously to invade the metropolis. But Charles the Second loved other things more than the objects of fine taste, on behalf of which the author of Sylva appealed to him, nor was public opinion then ripe for listening to wise counsels and solemn warnings on such a matter. In vain was it pointed out how the pernicious nuisance could be reformed, and how the whole city, with its great natural advantages, might be made one of the sweetest and most delicious habitations in the world. At that time London had extended but little beyond the boundaries of the City proper, the nobility still dwelt in it, or in the Strand, and there were abundant open spaces about their houses; yet Evelyn complains that the gardens would no longer bear fruit, giving as the reason for this the increase of coal-smoke, and he mentions orchards in Barbican and along the river, which were observed to have a good crop the year in which Newcastle was besieged (1644), because but a small quantity of coals was brought to London that year. He calls the smoke one of the foulest inconveniences and reproaches that can possibly befall so noble and otherwise incomparable a city, and claims that it should be relieved from what renders it less healthy and more offensive, and which darkens and eclipses all its good attributes; and this is nothing else but that hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal.'

Evelyn enumerates among the greatest offenders in causing

smoke, bakehouses, breweries, together with the places in which their trades, requiring fires or furnaces, are carried on, and even specifies a lime-kiln on the Thames in the heart of London. His proposed remedies, it must be confessed, were not very practical, and mainly consisted in recommending the use of wood instead of coal as fuel, and in removing the chief offensive trades to a short distance from London.

What was bad two hundred years ago has become enormously worse in our own times. The area of London has increased to something like one hundred square miles, its inhabitants may be estimated at four millions, and the number of chimneys emitting smoke at probably three or four millions, consuming a vast quantity of coals annually, of which a fourth part is wasted in the shape of smoke. It is certain also that, with modern notions of comfort and desire of greater warmth, more fuel is now burnt in proportion to the number of chimneys and inhabitants than was formerly the case.

It may seem almost superfluous and unnecessary to remind any dweller in, or visitor to London of the manifold evils due to the presence of smoke as it now exists in the metropolis. We see it at its very worst when combined with actual fog in that unholy and unwholesome alliance, so well described by the President of the Royal Society when speaking at the public meeting held at the Mansion House early in last January. But it is always with us, around us, or above us, a constant smoke-curse,' spreading like a baleful pall of darkness across the fair face of heaven, as described in a letter from Sir Frederick Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, which was read upon the same occasion. Even when the lower atmosphere is comparatively clear, and can be breathed without difficulty, the pervading obscurity is felt, and there is the incessant deposit of unconsumed particles of fuel, either in the shape of flakes of falling soot, or in a more minutely divided, but yet more mischievous and insidious form of attack upon all that is most precious to us.

Considerations of life and health must of course take precedence of all others; and here we find, from statistics which cannot be denied or disputed, the fearful havoc made by London fogs upon the wellbeing of the community.

The increase of mortality during the fogs which, more or less, were prevalent in London from November 1879 to February 1880, has been discussed by Dr. Arthur Mitchell, and the results published in the Journal of the Scottish Meteorological Society-and it must never be lost sight of, in dwelling upon them, that the mischief done is not due to the fog alone, which outside of a smoke-laden atmosphere might be innocuous-and that whenever in such accounts we encounter the word fog, it really means fog plus smoke. The increase in the death-rate during this murky and dismal period was indeed frightful. The mortality in the seven weeks ending on the 21st of