same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted; almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know, in Little Women, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna provided for Amy by Aunt March's Catholic maid. And even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy the quasi-oratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott's day, people were reading, without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of "escaped" nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright-and that Elsie Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these are documents.

There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modern child ever quite recovers from the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott's time, German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of reform, too, is hot upon the pages. "Temperance"-remember Charlie's unlucky glass of

champagne, and Laurie's promise to Meg on her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of lemonade. "Woman Suffrage"-recall the discussions alluded to in "The Pickwick Portfolio," and the fate of the few scoffers in co-educational Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists; and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more prehistoric than historic.

In the minds of Miss Alcott's world, there is still a lively distrust of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott's characters look a little askance at all foreigners-except German professors. There is no prophecy of the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house than go into business, like "Stuffy" and his kind. "I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord"-it would hardly over-emphasize Demi's so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter

desirability of the publisher's own office, where, as he says, great men go in and out, with respect. And to complete the evidence-the books do not lack the note of New English austerity, though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or, if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public passion for philanthropy, for education, and what-not-in the books, after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim with sentiment, Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so empty of emotion.

Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander - a New Englander of the villages, I mean-will admit that the New English are singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after Little Women, to any one of Mrs. Ewing's or Mrs. Molesworth's stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth's heroines all were, by Walter Crane! The real "old-fashioned girl" was not Polly Milton, but Griselda, in The Cuckoo

Clock. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot― as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages is familiar, too, with the passion for "education"; a passion that, I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering with the term "idiomatic." One or two of Mr. Churchill's novels have preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family, that a book- "any old" book — is sacred. We scoff heartily at the parvenu whose books are bound without first being printed; but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems to us quite so good.

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for discriminating against some of the playmates their children would ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without indirection, "I do not wish you to play with the butcher's little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school

class makes no difference whatever." But the real New England mother never does. She must manage it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations would be some sort of proof that butchers' little girls were apt to be naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss • Alcott's books were brought up like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father for religion's sake. Of course we all had to read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss Alcott's world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it! I have not done more than indicate Miss