It is curious to learn from the French authority whom we quoted on Satarday morning that the United Kingdom heads the list in letter writing with an average of 78 letters per head of popula tion annually. France herself contri-bates only just " third of that number 1 fact, however, which easily " exp! itself," when we remember the thrifty habits of the French and that each letter costa 15 centimes in postage. Yet in England the general complaint is that letter writing is rapidly Uecoming a lost art; and people of a literary turn of mind are sad, and people of a prosaic turn are glad. but, whether in sadness or gladness, we all agree that the present age is producing nothing in the way of letters that will stand comparison with the models of the ages,—the letters to Atticus, those of Pliny the Younger, the letters to Junius, of Byron, of Marjorie Fleming or of Wilkins Micawber. Presumably the French statistician has based his observations on the mere number of missives carried by the post. But even thus we should imagine that the telephone and the tannergram," as it once was called when Gladstone reduced the charge from 1]- to 6d., have proved hard competitors to correspondence. That idea suggests the real explanation of our impatience for letters. We are becoming too mechanical. In the old days a man in London had som proposal to set before a man in Manchester. He sat down and wrote him a long and careful letter; to which he received another equally long and probably more careful thi Londoner was wanting to sell anything) in return. Nowadays if the matter cannot be settled by telephone, the man in London takes the next train northwards, on the principle that more can be settled in two minutes of conversation than in two months of correspondence. Having thus begun to reduce our letters in business we find that the contagion on private life follows italily; and beginning with disinclination to say anything on paper me toon find that we have nothing to say. Out of this unwillingness to exert our imagination arises in due any way; with the consequent desire for having everything done by machinery, for State doles, old age pensions, public ownership of all means of existence, froe beer and professional football matches. In short, as a famous undertaker has said, why live when yon can be comfortably buried for £2. 10s,—to be paid, of course, by the State. But it is a depressing picture, and before we decline 80 far, had we not better get back to Micawber and Marjorie Fleming, even at the risk of a little verbosity on the one side and priggishness on the other February 25.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.