(From Country Life.) THERE was a sound of men's voices singing, calls and cries, laughter and the ringing of a bell; everyone went to the windows. Through the new green leaves one could see in the road a little group of men and girls and children ; some of the men wore oilskins and sou'westers. There was a big cart, a coal cart, with its forepart tricked out to look like the bow of a life-boat, and a small blue motor car, driven by a fair-haired boy in yellow oilskins, had run up a mast with a flapping lugsail and on it the letters R.N.L.I. Men and girls passed in and out of sunny front gardens rattling collecting boxes and held them up to windows where laughing faces had looked out. It was a tiny carnival, quickly over, but it left a picture in the mind, and the thought —making one not sad, but grave—of how much life for us all owes to just such a heart-whole acceptance of the personal side of benevolence, such readiness to accept the conviction that to help is everybody's business.

The very value of what they were doing gave one pause. Surely this service is one that should be the respon- sibility of the Government ? It should not wait for its continuance on private benevolence. What has a drowning man to do with carnival ? And the second wave of thought carried one farther. This, in common with all the greatest of the agencies that humanity has erected for the relief of suffering, must remain a personal matter, for no Government department could carry on their work as it is carried on now. One has only to think of what the life-boat service achieves to know that any such change must cripple it..