situation, are disposed to set aside all such claims. We are inclined to regard our country as the most obvious outlet for the unoccupied talents of our younger kinsfolk, our national honor and prestige as the natural accompaniment of our success and a creditable and convenient resource in foreign travel. We are ready to criticise with equal frankness our local and imperial authorities, our parish council, or the Ministry of the day, while for ourselves we quietly pursue our own professional or devote ourselves to self-culture or to meeting the thousand and one demand s of family and social life. To some of us, indeed, "society" has taken the place of the city and the state, and government and its ministers are only valued so far as they can be made to serve the purposes of social ambition or personal display. It is no doubt a rue instinct which makes us prize government and political organization only so far as they contribute to the life and to the well-being of the community? To take"society" in the limited sense as identical with the state is, of course, a ludicrous travesty of the political ideal. We have all of us now accepted the fact that all classes, except criminals and then, are the old ideas to be applied to the new order? It was easy, you may say, to be a good citizen in a city so small that the things for which he wrought and fought were daily visible to the eyes of every citizen, when service was done not for an unknown multitude or a vague abstraction, but for the neighbors of one's own hearth, the companions of one's everyday walk and conversation, as at Athens or Rome; or when the concentration of power in a few hands, as a Venice or in Republican Rome, gave peculiar zest to the performance of duty and the exercise of privilege. "You call us to be citizen," it may be urged, "but citizens of what city? To be one in five hundred makes existence worth having; even to be one among the thousand is still to count for something, but what is one citizen among millions?" To this cry there are two answers : first, no man can cut himself loose from the society in which he was born and bred, and in which he finds the sphere for his activities, whether he lives as a student or a poet or a man of action and affairs