and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government, he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman, and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous, unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.

What stifles Italian imagination and kills the Italian soul is the passion for money; pure acquisitiveness, or avarice, for the desire is to get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the municipality to be divided among the poor, and every one applauded his liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education. And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away from the stories of Mr. Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government, although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to demand minute examination. The powers of Mr. Crawford, however, are limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.

Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these

days; and he speaks of unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the days of the Mayflower pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence' were always at his elbow to keep his reason cabined, cribbed, and confined.

His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and lamentable degree. He speaks of liberi pensatori as the Church elders of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throats for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been without it.

Many passages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice, obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political supporters:

Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted, the fellow would doubtless apply to some one of the opposite party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the whole voting population with him at the next general election to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.

It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then, but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of agricultural interests in his district under the existing Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not find a pretext for adding a single word or correction. They were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under the title of Onward,

Parthenope! The mayor got his decoration and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.

These passages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr. Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book called With the Immortals, marred as it is by the incongruity and impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form as Mr. Mallock's New Republic, or Sir Arthur Helps' Friends in Council, or Christopher North's Noctes Ambrosiano it would have been remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr. Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, François de Valois and Cæsar are too ill-assorted for us to accept them in each other's company, and the idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr. Crawford to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there needed poetic feeling in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century; and the Sirens sing not for him.

Let him appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time and class, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the 'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, constitute the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one, and contain the only hope there is, if

this be but a feeble one, of any attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and cleanliness in political aims.

I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the memory of all those who read his novels.

THE FUR-PULLERS OF SOUTH LONDON

AMONG the dangerous trades' dealt with in the recently issued report of the Royal Commission is included one, of the very nature of which the vast majority of the public are totally ignorant. The fur-pullers of South London are the subject of the following article. The facts here related were obtained by personal investigation— forming a part of a general inquiry into the conditions of women's 'home-work' in South London; and truly, if it is well that light should be thrown on the dark places of the earth, there is no spot to be found where such light is more needed.

The employment of fur-pulling finds its slaves-there is no other word-only among those whose conception of life is strictly limited to keeping body and soul together; to whom a wage of ten shillings a week is wealth unattainable; to whom an eight-hour day is unimaginable. They belong one and all to that most pitiful, most helpless, most hopeless class which is produced by modern industrial conditions-those who acquiesce in starvation of body and soul as the state of life in which they were born, out of which they can never rise, in which they are doomed to die. To them, want and filth and disease are the normal inevitable conditions of existence, against which they lack the will as well as the power to rebel. Mr. Booth has said that they are the despair of those who work among them, 'not so much because they are bad as because their standard is hopelessly low.' They are 'not to be roused to better things, or else the right way to rouse them has not yet been found.'

Of the fur-pullers working in factories we shall have something to say in the latter part of this paper; it is with the home workers, however, that we shall have chiefly to deal.

The area within which our investigation was carried on is a small one from Union Street on the north to the New Kent Road on the south; from Blackfriars Road on the west to Long Lane on the east. This district is the last refuge of the casual worker. Among the inhabitants, the few who have regular employment find it chiefly in that mysterious El Dorado which is always spoken of as 'the other side of the water;' but for the vast mass of the people on that grey south side, the broad sweeping bend of the river forms a