country co-operative stores need not cross the Channel for their supplies. The best Irish wholesale houses are a credit to the commercial enterprise of the country.

In the initiation of local co-operation, advice should also be furnished locally by an inspector who should have a sound knowledge of the principles of co-operative distribution. He should also be conversant with the forms of organisation under the Limited Liability Acts, for these forms must be rigidly observed.

Another difficulty which combination in the process of organisation will overcome is the appointment of proper managers. On this success is largely dependent, and I do not think the right class of men could be easily found by local boards of directors. One store I know of in a most suitable district broke down because the originator appointed a highly educated private tutor to the management, and this squire was a very intelligent man who would never have made the mistake of entrusting to a shopkeeper by trade the education of his sons.

The central body would also be able to judge whether the districts in which it was proposed to open co-operative stores were suitable for the purpose. It is of vital importance that the first experiments should be a success, and as such should give the system a favourable reputation. Therefore, quiet localities whose trade would insure a sufficiently large turn-over to pay a good manager should first be chosen. It would be a mistake to begin in the very poorest districts, or where the present shopkeepers have so much political influence that the store would have to be guarded by the constabulary, and the manager clothed in a coat of mail.

I shall elaborate no further. I believe there are no difficulties in the situation which cannot be overcome by earnest work on the lines I have laid down. But in suggesting that a central advisory Board can compensate for local inexperience, I do not wish to give the impression that the local workers will have nothing to do. Their work will be very difficult and cannot be delegated to others. They must master the true economy of their scheme and conduct it through all opposition and discouragement. Moreover, all temptation to bonus the institution, and carry it thus over its early troubles must be strenuously resisted; giving either in money or kind should be strictly prohibited. It would be wrong not only on the ground of artificial help, but open to the charge of unfair competition with local traders. The only exception is in favour of time and thought, and what little money is required for organisation and maintenance of the system. Possibly, too, money might be advanced in some cases to enable poor people anxious to derive full benefit from the undertaking to buy a share in the company, which should, of course, have a low money denomination. Nor can objection be taken to

loans discreetly made to enable those anxious to join the movement to discharge the debts that bind them to poverty.

I am sure it is the fear of a killing opposition from local shopkeepers, and partly, too, sympathy for them, that has induced the charitable so long to leave bad alone; but as a matter of fact the small shopkeepers do not grow rich. Their exorbitant charges do not mean high profits, but very much the reverse. Damaged and inferior stock cheaply bought in the first instance is further deteriorated by frequent handling and taxed by successive owners, each with an eye to the possibility of bad debts in the end--the consumer paying a heavy insurance to them all. The high cost of distribution among the poor represents simply a large margin of waste, and it is this margin upon which the North-countrymen have worked out the improvement of their condition, and on which, following their example, we ought to be able to work out an improvement in the condition of the Irish poor.

For there is in Ireland no lack of private almsgiving, but much need for organisation of charitable work. The modern principles of economic charity are little understood, and much is wasted in bonused clothing clubs and coal funds, Christmas distributions and the like, which break down owing to the exigencies of the givers just when they are most needed. An army of able-bodied tramps is daily kept on the roads by the rich, who overlook the nightly tax upon the goodnatured poor which their liberality inflicts. But all this indicates. that a real active sympathy is at the command of any movement which strikes at the roots of Irish poverty.

To give definiteness of aim to those who will undertake the work I advocate, let their object in each district be to enable the poor man to get for, say, sixteen shillings what before cost a pound. Not by a gift of four shillings, but by a saving of waste to that amount. And if the rules to be laid down are strictly observed, the poor man in the process will have abandoned a system of indebtedness which he cannot afford and will have had an education in business and providence with practical illustrations at every meal. Surely this object is worth an effort, and the man who succeeds will have proved himself a better citizen than he who can boast that he has made two blades of grass grow where one grew before.

HORACE CURZON PLUNKETT.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET.

TWELVE years have already passed away since Millet died. During that time his fame has been growing steadily. Step by step the ground has been won. To-day the triumph is complete, and France, so long indifferent, pays the dead painter a homage which she denied him in his life-time. Last summer, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts opened its doors to an exhibition of his works, and all Paris crowded to see these long-despised and reviled pictures. Many of the most famous were missing. Le Semeur,' 'La Grande Tondeuse,' 'La Femme aux Seaux' have crossed the seas to adorn museums in America, where Millet was long ago appreciated. Others are in England and Belgium. But the Angelus,' most eloquent and touching of rural scenes, and 'Les Glaneuses,' perhaps the grandest of all his pictures, were there. So too were 'L'Homme à la Houe' and 'L'Homme à la Veste,' and the young 'Bergère,' and many other equally representative works, while in the pastels we recognised the finest and most intimate expression of the painter's thought. In spite of the ever-widening gulf which divides the art of Millet from that of contemporary France, the exhibition proved a great popular success. The critics, those éternels aboyeurs who worried poor Millet's life with their unceasing recriminations, were loud in their acclamations. The very papers which once denounced him as a painter of crétins and savages, a socialist and a demagogue, helped to swell the chorus of praise, and every Frenchman was proud to think of Millet as his countryman.

Before long, a statue reared out of the proceeds of the exhibition will stand in the market-place of Cherbourg, and the great peasant will look down on the green fields of his northern home and the wild seas which he loved so well. So the long injustice of his life is repaired and Millet at length receives his due.

But amid all the shouting and rejoicing, among the festal show of banners and mottoes and immortelles with which France delights to honour her mighty dead, it was impossible not to look back and recall the pitiful tale of the man's life, the sad story of hungry days and sleepless nights, of cruel attacks and cold neglect which embittered his whole existence and made him curse the day when he was born. In these days, when every one thinks and paints as he pleases, it is difficult to realise the fierceness of the outcry which, forty years ago,

met any departure from the beaten track in art as in other fields of knowledge. Yet here in England the same storm was aroused when Mr. Holman Hunt and his companions dared to raise their protest against false and conventional ideals. Different as their practice was from that of Millet, they took their stand on the same ground. Their efforts were alike founded on a firm conviction' that it is at first better, and finally more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they are, than as they are not.'

'Truth,' said Mr. Ruskin, whom, more fortunate in this than Millet, they had for their apostle, 'Truth is the vital power of the whole school, Truth its armour, Truth its war-word.' 'Paint things as you see them,' cried Rossetti, as they actually happen, not as they are set down in academic rules.' Go to Nature for your impressions,' said Millet, 'it is there, close at hand, that beauty lies; all you find there is proper to be expressed, if only your aim is high enough.'

But such rank heresy as this was not to be endured, least of all in Paris, where the traditions of the schools reigned supreme. And because the young peasant who came to Paris with his idées toutes faites sur l'art was in advance of his age, because he dared think for himself and was resolved at all hazards to paint in his own way, he found himself treated as an outcast and alien, and drained the cup of sorrow and loneliness to the dregs.

To-day critics and journalists are unanimous in their desire to bury the past in oblivion. Let us forget his sufferings,' they cry with one accord, and only think of his glory.' But the story of Millet's life deserves to be remembered. The record may be sad, but it is also noble and inspiring, and on the whole we may count him less an object for our pity than many whose lives have been spent in happier conditions. His sufferings saddened his days and shortened the number of his years, but they did not crush his spirit or weaken the message he had to give. He worked in obedience to a deep and unchanging conviction, and clung in his darkest hours. with despairing tenacity to the principles for which he had ventured. all. There lies the truth,' he said one evening, as, leaning on his garden fence, he watched the sun go down in a flame of fire over the plain, 'let us fight for it.'

And so he fought and died, and the truth conquered.

I.

Fortunately for posterity the life of Millet has been written by a friend who knew him intimately during the latter half of his career, and who had heard the tale of his early years from the painter's own lips. That friend, we all know, was Alfred Sensier, who, dying himself before the labour of love was ended, left his task to be finished by M. Paul Mantz. From the faithful and loving record which we

owe to their joint work, most of the following biographical details are borrowed.

The story of Millet's youth is more than commonly interesting and instructive. For the circumstances of his birth and childhood had a remarkable share in shaping the bent of his genius. To the early training of his peasant home he owed the strength of his character and convictions, to the country scenes in which he was born and bred the inspiration which governed his whole career. 'Oh, how I belong to my native soil!' he wrote in 1871, when, three years before his death, he paid his last visit to Normandy-and no truer word was ever spoken.

He was born on the 4th of October, 1814, in a hamlet in the parish of Gréville, a few miles west of Cherbourg, close to the cape of La Hague. The district has a special interest for Englishmen as the cradle of some of our oldest families, and many of these Norman villages still bear the names of the barons who followed the Conqueror to England. It is a wild and rugged coast, bristling with granite rocks and needles, stern and desolate to the sailor's eye, but pleasant and fruitful enough inland, a country of rolling down and breezy moorland, where quaint old church towers stand on the hill-tops and low houses cluster together among woods and apple-orchards and plots of emerald grass in the sheltered valleys. Even now the people are a primitive race, living on their own fields and spinning their own flax. Much more was this the case seventy years ago, when, in the troubled times at the end of Napoleon's wars, Jean-François Millet first saw the light. The house where he was born is standing still in the little village street, and we can look down across the fields where he sowed and reaped, to the wide stretch of sea and the far horizons which filled his young mind with dreams.

Here, after the patriarchal fashion of the place, three generations lived under the same roof. Jean-Louis, the painter's father, is described as a tall, slight man, with soft black eyes and long dark hair. A singularly refined and gentle soul, he loved music, taught the village choir, and wrote out chants in a hand worthy of a mediæval scribe. There was a good deal of art about him, although his life was spent in tilling his fields. He modelled in clay, shaped flowers and animals out of wood, and would often take up a blade of grass and say to his son, 'Look, how fine!' Or, pointing to a cottage in the hollow of the downs, he would remark, 'That house half-buried in the fields is good; it seems to me it ought to be drawn that way.' His wife, Aimée Henry du Perron, belonged to an old yeoman race which had known better days, and was a hard-working, pious, and loving woman whose time and thoughts were divided between her household and the field labour which she shared with her husband. But it was the grandmother, Louise du Jumelin, who played the chief part in the painter's earliest recollections. She it was who rocked and sang him to sleep, whose face he could remember in the high white linen