Mr. Wallace, M.P. for East Edinburgh, delivered a clever lecture
on " Cant " to the London Fife Association on Monday at Anderton's Hotel. He derived the word from "chant,"—the sing-song in which beggars whine, as, for instance, "Spare a penny to a poor boy," and dishonest or half-honest people utter the conventional pieties which they do not think for a moment of applying to their own lives. He attacked the cant of the clergy, the cant of the lawyers, the cant of the Members of Parliament, and the cant of gossiping ladies who take an effusive leave of an acquaintance. and then say, "Thank goodness that horrid person is gone at last." Then there was the cant of affected humility and the cant of intellectual fashion, and he ended by asserting that all real improvement depends on "the race of truthful creatures who are the salt of the earth and the one force on which everything like genuine human progress ultimately depends." That is very true, but we should add that there is also a cant of outspokenness, which consists in giving arrogant, and sometimes extravagant, expression to startling, super- ficial, and half-considered opinions.
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