be so eager to obtain new business by extending the area of their operations.

Even the humble but not altogether insignificant domestic-servant problem may be reviewed in the light of the tendencies we have been considering. For twenty years, in the case of New Zealand, the population of the ages which in the main supply domestic servants must remain about constant, whereas the population of the ages which supply the demand for service must substantially increase. Moreover, in addition to the attractions of other employments and the increasing disinclination to entering into domestic service, there is another factor tending to diminish the supply of this class of workers. Domestic servants have been largely supplied hitherto from large families. The poor man, with seven or eight or even more children, must perforce send out the elder children to any employment that offers; with a small family of two or three he can afford to keep it round him, or at least to give them some preparation for a more ambitious occupation, and one, if possible, that will permit the family to remain together. Thus as the demand increases the supply is likely to diminish, and the difficulty may become so acute as to do much to modify the manner of life of the servant-employing class.

C. Pearson, in his “National Life and Character,” discussed the probability of the population of the world soon approaching a stationary state, with a large proportion of old men. With an extract from this suggestive work I shall conclude. “What we have to suppose,” he writes, “is that men with the admirable vitality of Newman, Gladstone, Radetzky, Moltke, Bismarck, Littré, Chevreul, and Lesseps will become increasingly common, and that, as, in cases where exact reason is more required than quick insight and promptitude of action or alacrity of eye and ear, the best work is very often done by the old, we may get an increasing average of the best work. We may even conjecture that the predominance of experienced and reflective men in a population—for those between forty-five and ninety might easily come to be more numerous than those between twenty and forty-five—would be an important conservative force balancing the democratic tendency to impulsive change. Increased stability of political order, increased efficiency of exact thought, are possible advantages that cannot be disregarded…. But the most visible effect to the world will probably be the decay of energy. If youth is the season of unrest, when change is welcomed for its own sake and when orderly growth is despised, it is also the brooding-time of speculation, the maturing-time of adventure. Old men are probably best fitted for carrying on the mechanical and routine work of the world, but the artists, the