Apart from size, tortoises all look very much the same; mostly shell, and an unvarying, somewhat expressionless countenance — when it emerges. However, a recent correspondence in The Times has drawn attention to the range of individuality possessed by these creatures. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley are now famous characters, and the tortoise who nibbles the tennis shoes of visitors; then there is one who thrives on a diet of ground bones, another who has his shell brightened with furniture polish. Some are surly, but many recognize with pleasure their masters and mistresses. Once you know them, almost all betray different characteristics. Antony and Cleopatra in the garden at Blackfriars have quite distinct ways of their own, but watching them this morning it struck me that they have very much in common, after all; that were they just entirely different substances we should never distinguish them from the pansies they have savaged; that, in short, the idea of a tortoise covers them almost as completely as their shell does.

Unconsciously and lazily, I was thinking my way across the ground of the disputes on the nature of universals which occupied the early middle ages; but I was led to reflect that the problem is still very much to the point. If Gerbert and Roscelin thought of it in terms of logical forms, and I was considering it in regard to the realness of tortoiseness, a present and urgent interest applies to the matter of human conduct.

The change which Spain has undergone since the fall of the Monarchy three years ago can hardly be appreciated except by those who were well acquainted with the work of the Dictatorship previous to the establishment of the Republic. Out of the debris of the centuries-old Monarchy a new Spain is born with new ideals and a new spirit. The old traditional institutions which routine had rendered feebler with the passage of time, have in the end been overthrown and are now being superseded by new organizations with fresh energy and a new vitality. The destructive work of the Republic has been severe; but it had become necessary. The Agrarian Reform framed by the Socialists and passed by the first Cortes in 1932 was a marvellous piece of communistic propaganda. Its aim was to deprive the nobility and the big landowners of their immense property, much of which was cultivated indifferently or not at all, and to distribute it amongst the workers, and, in some cases, to consider it as a common property of the workers. This plan was put into practice for a time until the new Cortes after November 19th, 1933, revoked it, with the result that the country is in such a state that reform cannot be delayed any longer.

The religious question has similarly been discussed warmly by all the political parties, and one is glad to be able to say that the Spanish Catholics have endured an unpleasant though fruitful ordeal.

To attempt the biography, however modest, of a public man, and an ecclesiastic at that, during his lifetime, or a( least during his tenure of office, is, for obvious reasons, no easy task. Mr. Dingle, who, we are told on the wrapper, is ‘a publicist of wide experience.’ has had the courage to attempt the task on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of the Cardinal of Westminster, and he has laid English-speaking Catholics under a debt of gratitude.

One need not be suspected of flattery for saying that the general feeling of English Catholics towards their leader in these past thirty years is one of filial veneration and genuine affection. To the younger generation he is synonymous with the history of the Church in this country as they have known it, whilst in the longer memories of their fathers he is justly appraised as the successor of three great men, and in some respects as one Lo whom it has been given to surpass their work. Multi congregaverunt divitias . . . the treasures of Catholic England, so warily and carefully brought out from their hiding holes by Wiseman and Manning and Vaughan, have been freely opened to a more universal appeal and a greater place in the nation's life under the beneficent rule of the present Archbishop of Westminster.

Providence gives to each age the pastors it needs—or deserves—and with the final close of what may be called the mentality of the Penal Times in England, and the beginning of an age of expansion and of Catholic Action, there has come to the See of Westminster and to the effective leadership of the Church one eminently fitted to that period of fuller development.