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clearly enough the discomforts of Bank holiday, and are by no means so delighted with the institution as unobservant people might imagine. I remember once asking a worthy little shopman one Easter Tuesday how he had enjoyed his holiday. His reply was unconsciously pathetic-'I didn't go nowhere. My aunt died lately, and that give me an excuse, so I stayed in the back parlour with a book.' The phrasing was so curious that I noted it down at the time, and it throws a lurid light on the way the respectable lower class look on Bank holiday. One wonders how many other men had looked in vain that Easter Monday for an excuse' to stay out of the crowd and the dust in the back parlour with a book. I suspect not a few of them would have gladly sacrificed an aunt for the purpose. For without that aunt it would be impossible for any man to stay at home on Easter Monday. It would be bad form,' or whatever the shopman calls it. You might as well ask the lady in the suburbs not to go to the seaside in August (an institution which has many of the disadvantages of Bank holiday itself), or the lady in Society' to stay in town after the season, as expect the poor man to stay at home without a valid excuse on Easter Monday. Custom is stronger than law, and it would be as much as his social position was worth not to do as his neighbours were doing. His wife would never allow it for a moment, and if she did all his neighbours' wives would make her life a burden with their sneers. Such is the tyranny of Bank holiday.

Again, in the last week of December last I asked another respectable tradesman how he had enjoyed the previous Boxing day. He replied with tempered enthusiasm, and added disgustedly, 'I went out for a walk in the evening, but one man in every four was drunk."

My readers may protest that these two men must have been exceptional, and that the average holiday-maker would have returned very different answers. But this is by no means the case. They were ordinary people of the lower class, not conspicuous either in intelligence or anything else above their fellows. But even if they were it does not affect the argument against Bank holidays. For if the State is to ordain compulsory public holidays at all it may just as well make them to suit the respectable poor as the disreputable rowdy, and I maintain that the present arrangement pleases nobody save the riffraff of our streets, the vicious, the extravagant, or the drunken.

That Bank holidays are an immense source of thriftlessness and extravagance can be shown at once, and is known already to any one who takes an interest in the question. The common boast of the Bank holiday crowd returning from its Hampstead or its Margate sands is, I went out this morning with two pound ten in my pocket > (or whatever sum you will) and now I haven't a penny.' This is considered a matter for congratulation, and indeed it is held to be a slur on good-fellowship and conviviality if the holiday-keeper returns home

with sixpence to bless himself. The distinguished thing to do is to save money during the preceding three months, and then 'blue' it all on Easter Monday, and unhappily that kind of distinction' is almost invariably attained. If a man or woman is not entirely penniless before the end of the day, the peccant shilling or half-crown remaining is indignantly devoted by the owner to drinks all round, in order to wipe out the stigma.

It is difficult to believe that so detestably silly a custom can, in their sober moments, be regarded with favour by the great mass of the lower classes. There must surely be a certain number of thrifty housewives and sensible husbands who, when they recall the expensive discomfort of their day in a railway carriage or a public-house, curse the institution which gives an opportunity for such stupid and pointless extravagance. Of course it may be urged that they need not comply with so ridiculous a custom, and the Pharisee may argue that people who are foolish enough to do so deserve to suffer for their folly. But this is an untenable position; for even if one were disposed to allow that the uneducated and the thriftless must go to the devil their own way, that would not justify the state in continuing to maintain an institution which, among other vices, encouraged such a vicious absurdity.

I think I have succeeded in showing, if demonstration was needed, that Bank holiday is the periodical excuse for drunkenness and extravagance. I have also shown that by some of the poorer classes at least it is not even regarded as enjoyable. But in order to strengthen the latter position it seems worth while to prove that a priori, and quite without the evidence of experience, one would have expected Bank holiday to be unpopular with all the respectable poor. It is a favourite delusion of the upper and upper middle classes that exclusiveness is the peculiar privilege of themselves. Believing as they do that fashion and convention exist among them alone, instead of being equally despotic in their different forms in the factory and the shop, they imagine that the poor have no social distinctions. The steady clerk and the raffish 'Arry, the burglar and the artisan, are to them all members of one great body styled 'the lower classes,' in which no grades or degrees exist. The incredible foolishness of such an idea would not be worth insisting on if it were not necessary for the true understanding of the Bank holiday question. The truth is, the distinction between the respectable and orderly poor and the drunken, cursing rabble of our Bank holidays is at least as great as the distinction between 'Society' and the suburbs. There is a large class of quiet, well-behaved clerks, artisans, and so on, who dislike the noisy, liquorish mobs of Easter Monday quite as cordially as even we can. But this fact seems never to have occurred to our legislators when the great idea of 'rest and recreation for the people' brought forth Bank holidays. It was

imagined that all the people' were alike, and would be delighted to all turn out together and enjoy themselves. The result of such a theory might have been foreseen. The people,' being anything but the homogeneous mass pictured by our legislators, are divided into at least two camps, and one, the thriftless, intoxicated mob, utterly destroys the pleasure of the other, which may be called the 'poor but decent.' And so four times a year the orderly and quietloving portion of Englishmen are given over by law, tied and bound, to the tender mercies of the 'Arry and the larrikin, and are supposed to be grateful to the paternal Government which has exerted itself so powerfully on their behalf.

That Bank holiday as at present constituted could never have been an enjoyable function, even if everybody took the pledge and cultivated good manners to-morrow, must be obvious to any rational being. England is too full to make it possible for anything to be done by everybody at the same time with comfort. We cannot even all go to and from our offices in the City at the same hour without converting the Underground Railway into a pandemonium. 'Society' cannot all migrate simultaneously to its shooting in Scotland without making the luxurious northern railways a penance to travel on, while the suburbs cannot migrate en masse to the sea-side in August without raising the prices of lodgings and cramming the trains to suffocation. It is impossible for mankind to do things in droves without suffering for it. If everybody did things at different times we should all get twice the value out of life, and London would not be a wilderness at one time of the year and overcrowded at another. But this, unhappily, is impossible. Man is a gregarious animal, and as the school holidays must take place in August the parents' holiday must take place in August too.

But though the August holidays suffer inevitably under this inconvenience it may be open to question whether Bank holidays need suffer from it also. Is it absolutely necessary that everybody's Bank holiday should fall on the same day? That is the real problem. As at present arranged, with the crowd and bustle and dust that must inevitably accompany it, it could never be a source of pleasure to quiet, orderly people, even if the whole of the English people became total abstainers. The impossibility is a physical one. But would it be possible to alter the present arrangement and spread the four public holidays over other days in the year? This seems the only conceivable solution of the difficulty, and this solution, unhappily, seems hardly practicable.

I have not space here to discuss this matter at length, but one or two forms, which the proposed alteration might take, may be briefly considered. We might divide up our poorer classes by trades, and assign different days to each trade for its holiday. Thus there would be a Tinkers' Bank holiday, a Tailors' Bank holiday, and so on. But

there are probably practical difficulties in the way of such an arrangement, and it would certainly produce a rather complicated calendar even if the world in general were willing to put up with the inconvenience of such a plan. On the other hand the state might abolish the present fixed Bank holidays, and, instead of ordaining others in their place, might content itself with enacting that every employé could claim from his employer four separate days of holiday not less than two months apart during the year, to be enjoyed by him without loss of pay. But this would probably be found extremely inconvenient by many employers. If, however, either of these schemes or any similar scheme were feasible, it would, by doing away with the unmanageable crowds to which we are now accustomed on those days, make them far more enjoyable to the respectable poor.

If, on the other hand—and it may well be so-no scheme can be devised which will meet the situation, then let Parliament frankly admit its blunder and abolish Bank holidays altogether. The present system pleases no one whom it was intended to please, and is a source of vice and extravagance. To excuse that vice and extravagance on the ground that 'Bank holiday comes but four times a year' is ridiculous. The institution has been tried. It has signally and disastrously failed. If we cannot amend it we had better abolish it altogether.

ST. JOHN E. C. HANKIN.

SKATING ON ARTIFICIAL ICE

MANY people are under the impression that artificial ice is not ice at all, also that the water of which it is made is charged with unwholesome chemicals. Without betraying secrets by mentioning the various processes of freezing in use at the different rinks, I may state that the ice, which is generally a few inches in thickness, is made of pure water taken from the mains of the waterworks company. It rests upon a perfectly level foundation. Carefully prepared and insulated upon this floor are some four or five miles of pipes, through which a non-congealing liquid is caused to circulate. This non-congealing liquid is cooled down to a very low temperature, and the floor and pipes are covered with water (from the mains), which is cooled down until it eventually freezes into solid ice.

Between each session, after the ice has been cut up by skaters, the surface is scraped by a heavily weighted scraper drawn by men, or, as at Princes Skating Club, by a pony shod with leather boots. It is then swept and rewatered to make a smooth surface. There are about six miles of pipes under the ice at the above-named club. The cooling agent with which they are filled may be one of the various volatile liquids; but ammonia or carbonic acid is the agent chiefly used now.

In London all the machinery is securely isolated from the rinks, and not erected behind a large sheet of transparent glass, as in Paris.

One of the many advantages we gain from having ice-rinks in our midst is that skaters from all parts of the world are brought together, and we have an opportunity of judging the merits of American, Swedish, French, and German skaters.

The difference of style between the best English skaters and those of other nations consists in the absence of all unnecessary movement with the former, and the exaggerated and theatrical attitudes of the latter. The members of the English skating clubs allow no movement of arm or leg which can be avoided. The closer the arms are kept to the side and the nearer the legs are to each other, the more finished the skater; and in the English clubs at St. Moritz and other Swiss resorts this rigidity of body and limb is compulsory. But the stiffness and want of grace so often noticeable on members of the English skating clubs are entirely absent from