NOTES OF THE WEEK . FOREIGN AFFAIRS. By S. Verdad . WAR NOTES. By North Staffs . IN MEMORY OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. By

Marmaduke Pickthall . INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. By c. E. M. J. .

REPRESSION IN THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS.

FORCE OF ARGUMENT. By J. M. Kennedy . T. P. O’LIVERPOOL. By Charles Brookfarmer . LETTERS ABOUT RUSSIA. By C. E. Bechhofer . DRAMA. By John Francis Hope . READERS AND WRITERS. By R. H. C. .

By C. H. Norman .

NOTES OF THE WEEK

IF THE NEW AGE were published for a thousand years and on each word contained in it a sovereign were placed, the sum total of the millennium would be about equal to the amount now being annually spent by the State. This, we are aware, does not make the cost of the war any the more comprehensible; but it does, perhaps, enable us to realise how incomprehensible it is. As a matter of fact, nobody is in a position to deal as a master with the unimaginable amounts invalved. From two to three, from three to five millions a day the cost of the war has risen ; and no Committee of Economy nor any Society of Accountants can do much to regulate or even to reckon it. All we can do is to apply to the unrealisable bulk the principles we apply to the sums within our compass, in the belief that what is true of the part will prove to be true of the whole. Upon no other plan, indeed, is it either safe or even possible to proceed. To give up every maxim we have followed in our daily economics upon the plea that the sums incurred by the war are beyond computation is to abandon ourselves to lunacy. And, on the other hand, we ought not to be deluded into believing that of such indefinite sums anybody-even the mysterious City-has any better

understanding than the humblest citizen who keeps his household accounts.

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Impossible as it may be to realise the amount of five millions a day, it is obvious that even the stupidest of Governments could not continue indefinitely spending at that rate without occasionally wondering where the money was to come from. And in the end it could not but be obvious that its resources are no more than three in number : borrowing, taxing, and taking. But these, again, pre-suppose that money, or the equivalent of money, should exist somewhere; and thus it came about that the Government began to look to the capital, the production and the consumption of the population com- posing its subjects. Now the capital of the United Kingdom, we are told, is some sixteen thousand million pounds, or enough to enable us to carry on war at the present rate for eight years. Our annual income is two thousand millions, which is roughly the cost of the war

THE SALE OF LETTERS. By Harold Massingham A NOTEBOOK. By T. E. Hulme .

VIEWS AND REVIEWS: THE ENERGETIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. By A. E. R. .

REVIEWS . PASTICHE. By C. E. B., Private A. Robertson,

A. E. Watts, P. Selver . CURRENT CANT

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from E. H. Athanas- Arnold F. Toynbee, Ernest Parke, Alice Smith, Constance Brooks, Ernest A. Boyd .

PRESS CUTTINGS

as well; and our annual expenditure has hitherto been about sixteen hundred millions, enabling us to save about four hundred millions a year. So much for the normal situation. But the situation, it is all too clear, is not normal; and these figures must be revised in the light of war. Capital values, we may suppose, remain much about the same; but, on the one hand not only is Production considerably reduced by the withdrawal of men from industry to war and from real production to

war-production ; but, on the other hand, Consumption has increased as well; with this general total effect that on current account we are making a tremendous annual loss, which can be met in one of only two ways-by

confiscating capital or by borrowing on credit. We know what, in fact, -the Government has hitherto done. In the way of confiscation (euphemistically called taxation) it has done, on the whole, very little indeed. A national

expenditure of two thousand millions a year has been decupled while taxes have been only doubled. In the way of borrowing on credit, our fresh loans amount now to twelve hundred millions, and after another year of war will amount to nearly three thousand millions. But how long can this policy of borrowing be continued? There is, after all, a limit to the amount the State can safely undertake to repay at the cost of the coming

generations. Even if the capital value of the United Kingdom were loaned to the State, could the State safely saddle the public with a debt so colossal that the interest on it alone would equal our annual national produc- tion? It assuredly could not. We conclude, there- fore, that if the war continues, some other means than that of borrowing will have to be found of defraying its cost. One or two more dips into the future and the patience of posterity will be exhausted. 'There remain only the outright confiscation of capital or a general reduction of consumption coupled with an increase of production. Let us consider these in turn.

Forewarned of the approaching end to the policy of loans, the Government has for some months applied itself, though without much vigour or intelligence, to the double task of increasing production, on the one hand, and of reducing consumption on the other. In the matter of Production its efforts cannot be said to

have amounted to much. It is handicapped, indeed, by several circumstances. In the first place, the assumed need to enrol a Continental military army has reduced production at a much greater rate than production has been increased by the importation of fresh labour, mostly women’s, into industry. In the second place, the traditional laissez-faire doctrine of the commercial

governing classes has prevented the application of national organisation to the prime industry of agricul- ture. And in the third place, the inveterate

profiteering habits of the nation still allow the most extravagant forms of production to absorb labour without creating wealth. What can be expected of a policy inspired by such errors as these? You would have supposed that, in view of the drain made upon labour-power by the

creation of a vast military army, the utmost pains would be taken to economise the labour that was left, and to organise and apply it in the industries least dispensable to a nation at war. On the contrary, both the organisation-

and the distribution have been left to the usual anarchist-individualist forces that make England a

Bedlam even in times of peace. At this moment no register exists which distinguishes necessary from super- fluous trades; and employers may still engage labour on behalf of production that is a disgrace as well as a waste. Of organisation let agriculture speak. Only one-sixth of the land of the country is under tillage; and not by an acre will this amount be increased while the farmers and

landowners have private control of it. Lord Selborne may wear his knees to the bone in prayer to the farmers; England may get deeper and deeper into the debt of America for food; but as Professor Smiddy has just said, without compulsion the farmers of the country will be content to let us starve so long as on our hunger their profits are maintained. The outlook for increased pro-

production is, it must be said, of the blackest. If we cannot organise agriculture nationally we can organise nothing nation ally.

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Thus met by a brick wall in its attempt to increase Production, the Government turned to the somewhat more congenial task of attempting to reduce Consumption-

As long ago as last June Mr. Asquith and Mr. Bonar Law united to inaugurate a campaign for “rigid economy in personal and household expenditure” ; and this was supplemented by appeals to public bodies of all kinds to economise, and by mild efforts to diminish

consumption by law. What has been the effect? Measured by the returns of imports and exports the consumption of the country has risen rapidly even dur- ing the last few months, the disparity against us being greater between June and September than between March and June. Measured by the shops where the silliest articles of luxury are sold, domestic consumption-

has increased during the same period likewise. What a madness must have fallen upon the nation, however, to make this extravagance possible in the midst of the most costly war ever fought ! Nor does our Press nor do our public men do much to warn the country of the consequences of burning the candle at both ends. The Press, indeed, as we pointed out last week, aid and abet every profiteer who has some foolish fraud to sell by lending its writers to wrap his shady

transactions in credit-for does anybody suppose that, without something else to read, advertisements would be even looked at for their own sake? And public men, such as ours, are too often themselves the proprietors-

of Some fake to be disposed to warn the public seriously against idle buying. Under these circumstances-

with nobody in authority capable of instructing the public what precisely to buy and what precisely not to buy, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the

cheap-jacks of the market-place have it all their own way. Never was there such a rich harvest of un- untutored gulls for them to pluck at. With wages well

diffused, with recklessness in the air, and with nobody to say them Nay concerning any particular thing, our wretched population is at the mercy of the worst scoundrel

drels our commercial system has produced. tion, in short, has become galloping.

Consump-

***

If it were the case that one good debauch would end it all and that we could wake on the morrow of the war and find ourselves minus, it is true, our capital, but in a world that had not changed, the purgation of wealth might even be to the good of our national health. But, as a matter of fact, while we are revel- ling, other countries, America in particular, are prepar- ing themselves to take our place in the world-market. Germany, it is clear, will cease for some years after the war to be the formidable competitor she once was; but America will have acquired both some of the econo- mic strength of Germany and much of our own. Nor are brains wanting in America of the commercial kind to foresee and to prepare for her coming predominance. Only last week it was reported that an American Foreign Trade Corporation has been formed with a capital of ten million pounds, for the sole purpose of exploiting the countries that have hitherto been the preserves of Western Europe. And this Corporation is, we may be sure, the forerunner of many more. Thus we in England shall wake like Rip Van Winkle to dis- cover that not only are we old, but a part of the world has become younger. With our capital diminished, with our opportunities let go by, with fate written upon our foreheads, we shall rise from the dream of con- quering Germany to find that a fresh and an even more powerful commercial rival stands now in Germany’s shoes. That is undoubtedly the prospect before us; and we ask our readers to contemplate it without blink- ing. Can we, it must be asked, face it with habits such as we have formed, with an organisation such as we possess, and with the ideas still current? Not only do we doubt it ourselves; but the evidence is over-

whelming that, without an industrial revolution pre- ceded by a revolution of ideas and perhaps of society, we shall as certainly fail to overcome the new danger as we shall certainly succeed in overcoming the present.

It is disappointing to find that so able, so independent, and so well-informed a set of writers as those respon- sible for the “Round Table” magazine should bring their horses with a gallop up to the fence we have indi- cated, and then suddenly stop short. In the current issue, from which in our ‘‘Press Cuttings” of the present NEW AGE we have made some extracts, we learn that the writers of the “Round Table,” like ourselves, foresee industrial weakness in England after the war and are at pains to devise some remedies against it. Among them is an appeal on behalf of the State (we presume) for the benevolent interest of workmen in methods of ‘ ‘improved production and scientific management-.” And the bait is to be the co-partnership of Labour with Capital. But has the “Round Table” ever considered what the partnership of Labour with Capital would imply to the State, and, hence, to the public? We have seen during the present war what depredations have been made by Capital and Labour dipping alternately into the pockets of national production; what might be expected if the two combined and dipped together? The association of Capital with Labour was indeed one of the very contingencies the earlier speeches of Mr. Lloyd George were designed to protect us against, on the obvious ground that if two combinations in restraint of trade combined, their joint power over us would be quadrupled. What is it but to suggest, however, just this Syndicalism (as we have called it, in contrast with the Syndicalism of Labour alone) to recommend, as the “Round Table’’ does, the partnership of Capital and Labour? The suggestion, we say, is contrary to public policy; and its adoption would be fatal. Better far that Syndicalism should prevail than that Syndicalism should come about. Best of all would it be to nationalise Capital, and to charter all Labour to employ it efficiently. Labour in partnership with the State-that is the proper

next step towards the recovery of England’s place in the world.

We do not know in what proportion the motives of economy, war-production, and fanaticism have entered the regulations of the sale of drink ; but it is pretty clear already that not a tithe of any of them will find satisfaction-

in the result. In the matter of economy, for instance not only has regulation already had no beneficial

effect upon the sums spent in drink, but the contrary has been the case. Reducing the hours during which drink can be obtained no more reduces the thirst for drink than (to adapt a phrase of Lord Salisbury’s) a reduction of the number of beds diminishes the desire to sleep.

Unconditional prohibition of the manufacture or sale of drink during the war is the only means by which its consumption can even be “regulated. ” In the matter of war-production we are of the opinion that, on the whole, the new regulations will have either no effect‘ at all, or a bad effect. It may be true that the “steady men,” as Lord D’Abernon informed a Trade Union deputation bent on abolishing the regulations, were enthusiastically in favour of them; but it is the ‘‘un- steady men” whose work is in question and in jeopardy. The ninety-and-nine may be trusted to look after themselves. Now, is it a fact that this “unsteady” class of worker will produce more in the long run for being driven to confine its thirst to a few hours a day, instead of having it spread over eighteen? We doubt it; and, what is more, we do not feel disposed to bow to the experience of the members of the Central Control Board, containing those unrepresentative Englishmen, Sir William Lever and Mr. Philip Snowden. Even if they are right, England will be disposed to prove them wrong ! As for the gain to fanaticism, we doubt it most of-all. Habits of drinking at home are certainly being formed on all sides with the promise of disastrous results. Our streets may be cleared of drunkenness, but

the price of having our homes converted into public- houses is too high to pay for it.

***

In truth, however, the attempt to reduce consumption by cutting off this little luxury and that little

superfluity is as hopeless as the task undertaken by Mrs. Partington. As Professor Urwick has observed, it is not an economy here and an economy there that can enable us to meet either the cost of the war itself or the cost of the industrial chaos that must follow the war; but what is needed is “a new scheme of life.” We have already suggested more than once that the lesson of the war will not be properly digested until Park Lane is in ruins and Bond Street is in bankruptcy; and this is only the symbol of the transformation in current-

standards of living that the new circumstances will make imperative. Thousands of people are for- going some expenditure upon particular items in the belief that, as soon as the war is over, they can resume their old habits; without reckoning that their best course is to forgo their old standard entirely? It is this, however, that would produce the greatest results both at once and in the future. We strongly advise our readers who have a sense of economy to reduce the frame-work of their lives in preparation for the period

Let them assume, while it is still not the case, that their effective

incomes are reduced by a half; and let them cut their coat according to the new length of cloth. To cherish hopes that, by pinching now, re-expansion will be pos- sible to-morrow, is to lay up disappointment as certain as death. Re-expansion will be impossible; the cost of the war will impoverish England for a whole genera- tion. If the Government is wise, an end will be put to appeals for particular economies ; a new campaign will be begun for the transformation of our standards of living from the complex to the simple. Whole trades, and not merely their products, must be ruth- lessly suppressed as forms of extravagance the nation

of restriction that is inevitably coming

cannot any longer afford. Licences should be required for every existing enterprise, and permits for every new one. Not only should the number of places where drink can be obtained be limited by law, but the number of places where anything can be obtained that is not strictly economic. Only by such drastic sumptuary prohibitions (not mere regulations) shall we succeed in paying our way into the new age of the world.

The conscription of men for the war has proved impossible, as we said it would, in the absence of the con-

current conscription of capital which our wealthy classes were unwilling to allow. At the same time, it may be observed that the voluntary system has stood us in better stead as regards men than as regards capital-

for, on Lord Kitchener’s authority, by March next four million men (as many as we need) will be under arms, while, before March next, Mr. McKenna will need six hundred million pounds of which no sight at present is in reasonable prospect. Thus the urgency of the conscription of men has passed away, thanks to the patriotism of the working classes, while the urgency of the conscription of capital, thanks to the privacy of the wealthy, still remains; That this urgency is real and yet shows no signs of being overcome, surely Mr. McKenna’s appeal to the Trade Unions to forgo further demands for better wages and his appeal for investments-

in the war-loan, are evidence. If the finance of the country has come to this, the Government must be down upon its welts indeed. The position, if it were not disgusting, would be amusing to contemplate. Here we have a small class of people, the wealthiest ever known in the history of the world, owning between them wealth reckoned modestly at sixteen thousand million pounds. On the other side is a large class with nothing but their labour to live on. And in a war against a national enemy the former small class appeal to the latter class to pay the bill not only with their lives, but with the money they do not possess. At the bar of history, when it comes to be written without class bias, the judgment upon our plutocracy will cer- tainly be severe.

The assumptions of the Government deputation that will meet the specially convened Trade Union Congress-

this week, to persuade the workers that their wages are quite high enough, are, moreover, without foundation. It is supposed that because everybody ap- pears to be busy wages must needs be fabulously high. But, in fact, as the figures of the Board of Trade for four and a half million workers show, wages have ad- vanced only 15 per cent.,‘ or much less than half the advance in the cost of living. Nor must it be forgotten that it was in repudiation of the offer made by the Trade Unions to the employers at the outset of the war that even such advances of wages were forced by the men. Had their offer been accepted, not only would prices be limited to their pre-war level, but wages as well. To the infamy of the employing classes, how- ever, the calculation was made that, on the whole, Capital stood to gain most by leaving itself free to raise prices, even at the risk of having wages raised against it, since it was certain that the public would expect prices to be raised, while, at the same time, it would resent every attempt to raise wages. The result we see : prices have risen more than twice the rate of wages, and Capita1 has been justified of its cunning. For the Government now to appeal to the Trade Unions to be content with wages in the leeway of prices is a piece of impertinence. Certainly, if we were the Trade Unions, we should accede to the demand only upon terms as follows : prices should be revised, and, where possible, reduced to their pre-war level; all future profits during the war should be confiscated by the State; industries should be nationalised as fast as

circumstances allowed ; finally, a public promise should be made that the Trade Unions shall become partners with the State in industrial management,

Foreign Affairs. By S. Verdad.

WHEN I wrote in THE NEW AGE last week that we were hardly getting a good return for our money from Some of our Allies-instancing Italy and Russia-I did not

necessarily imply that our friends had no good reason for withholding, if only in appearance, certain aid which they could give us. The statement that we are not getting full value for our money certainly holds good; but there is an answer to the criticism. Let us see, so far as Italy is concerned, precisely what the answer is. We know that after the Italian Government decided to take part in the campaign- by declaring war on Austria, the Italian newspapers, led by the Milan

“Corriere della Sera,’’ which had all along based its views on much broader ground than mere national politics, kept insisting on the necessity for the

establishment of an international War Council, on which representatives of the four great Allied Powers-England

France, Russia, and Italy-would be able to meet regularly, exchange views, and arrange their plans of campaign. It is only within the last few weeks, how- ever, that such a Council has been arranged for, de- spite the fact that the Italians entered the war in May. Yet we may assume that the patriotic Italian news- papers, in demanding a War Council, were not writing without having first assured themselves that their

proposal was one commendable by the Government as well as by their own military critics. The need for a proper Council of War was patent even before May; and it is not impossible that the Italian General Staff, which has conducted its campaign against Austria with the utmost efficiency, may have been able to observe military moves on the part of the earlier Allies which mutual expressions of opinion might have rendered more efficacious.

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If we make this assumption-and there are grounds for it-we shall understand why the Italian newspapers laid such stress upon the importance of an international War Council. The Italians estimate that, by using some eight hundred thousand men, they have been able, not merely to keep nearly a million Austrians at bay for nearly seven months, but to advance into very difficult and well-defended territory and to capture many important strategic positions. Even as I write the news comes that Gorizia is very hard pressed; and with the fall of Gorizia the fall of Tolmino must inevitably follow shortly-the two fortresses may be said to hang together. Only one fortress of any consider- able strength remains, viz., Malborghetto. In seven months, to express this another way, the Italians, even if they have not advanced very far, have a solid achieve- ment to which they may point. The advance has been held; positions won have not had to be given up. There have been no brilliant feats of arms with a barren end-

ending as in the case of Loos, or Neuve Chapelle, or the recent French move in the Champagne district. Every step has been planned in advance; and in this respect I happen to know that the Italian General Staff has pleasantly surprised (or disagreeably surprised, as the case may be) the military authorities of other countries.

Considering, then, the successful work of the Italian Army, we shall be able to appreciate the caution

displayed by its General Staff in refusing to take part in the Allies’ expeditions to the Dardanelles and to Salonika-

The Dardanelles expedition was admittedly a gamble-the expression is Mr. Churchill’s-and the military authorities at Rome preferred to deal with cer- tainties. Similarly, as the Serbian War Minister and

***

Marshal Putnik have openly said, the Allies’ expedition- to Macedonia came a couple of weeks too late to

save Serbia-the Serbian army and artillery were drawn out of danger by skilful tactics; but Serbia was lost. The relatively slow progress of the Bulgarians towards the south is enough to assure us that the forty thousand-

French and twenty thousand British soldiers hurried- to the Balkan front fought well; but sixty thousand

Franco-British troops could avail little against a vast force of Bulgarians-some two hundred thousand-led by thoroughly trained German officers and supplied with every requisite in the way of modern artillery that the Krupp works could provide. There is not much doubt that the Allied troops now in the Balkans will be able to effect a fighting retreat to the neigh-

bourhood of-the coast, and with the reinforcements now being hurried out they will be able to take the offen- sive when the weather becomes favourable. Still, that expedition was a gamble, too; and it was a gamble largely because no proper Council existed for the pose of discussing such gambles before the dice were shaken out of the box. Nor was it necessary-

for the Council to consist only of representatives- of the Great Powers. We know now that the

Serbians, feeling some anxiety regarding the atti- tude about to be assumed by the Sofia Government, wished to take steps to test the neutrality of Bulgaria so far back as last April. ’The measures advocated by King Peter and his advisers were discountenanced by Great Britain and France--that is to say, by M.

Celcasse who relied on Greece’s keeping her treaty engagements with Serbia, and by our own Foreign Office, which assumed that the Bulgarian promises would hold good in fact. But both the Serbians and the ltalians

distrusted the Bulgarians and the Greeks; and events have shown that the Serbians and the Italians were right, and that France and Great Britain were wrong. With the diplomatic and military shortcomings which failed to prevent finally what could have been averted at an early stage I do not propose to deal for the time being

+**

While I maintain, then, that it is true to say that we have not been getting good value for our money from Italy, I am well aware that the fault lies to a great extent with ourselves. It might have been generous heroism on the part of the Italians to join us at the Dardanelles ; but it would have been wasted heroism. The Italian heart might have sent troops to Salonika a few weeks ago ; but the Italian head raised objections which were not without weight. Indeed, if we had consulted the Italian head we should never have found ourselves in our present Balkan dilemma. Nor, again, if we had consulted the Italian General Staff, should we have been at pains to discover maps of Albania in unexpected

places-the British Museum for instance, or the Bibliotheque Nationale. We could have got first-rate modern maps at Rome. It is far from enough to shrug our shoulders and to talk about being taken unawares by the Germans. We were not taken unawares by the Germans. We knew perfectly well that the Germans and the Austrians and the Magyars would fight as one man; and that the German economic grip on the Young Turk Government was quite enough to turn that Government into an active enemy. THE NEW AGE emphasised all these factors, and their causes; for more than four years before the war began ; and the Maxses, the Blumenfelds and Northcliffes apart, there was a large enough number of serious writers among us to emphasise the points raised. It is absurd to think that our men should have been sent to the Dardanelles with- out maps, because there were none; and it is ridiculous that Serbia should have had to share the fate of Belgium and Poland before a proper War. Council could be established. The step has been taken at last; but the summer and autumn were necessary for its accomplish- ment. Father Time may be our ally, but we must not exasperate his feelings.

War Notes. AT the outset of the war the Germans affirmed that our insurmountable difficulty would be the getting of new officers for our new armies. Strange to say, how- ever, our so far insurmountable difficulty has been not this, but the very reverse, namely, the getting rid of our old officers. I do not speak now of the regimental officers, the old regulars, who are soldiers by instinct, and, without exception, the best in the world : but of the Generals and Staff officers. Of these I would say, brutally, that if the Expeditionary Force was designed as a shield, intended to be broken while serving as a shield for new armies in process of formation, it is a pity that it could not be entirely composed of Staff officers and of battalions of generals over a certain age. Of these two different handicaps under which we suffer I propose to consider this week that of the Staff. There can be no doubt whatever that, in the bulk, our Staff work has been execrable, and that we owe to its bad- ness the loss of thousands of lives as well as the pro- longation of the war. At Neuve Chapelle, a t Loos, and at Suvla Bay (where a Staff College Professor was in command), by the common consent of everybody who took part in these engagements, our Staff work was not only bad, it was not far short of a scandal. This is so generally known that one need not go very much into detail about it, but we may consider for a little what happened at Loos. The principal business of a Staff is, of course, to prepare alternative plans, the choice. between which is left to the General. A Staff officer is supposed to know so much about the difficulties of each of the plans he has prepared that he is quite unable to make any decision himself. That direct act has to be made by the General. Apart from this pre-battle work, the principal practical work which the Staff has to accomplish in this war is the organisa- tion of the roads, etc., behind the battle front in such a way that roads are not blocked, that reserves are in positions from where they can be rapidly brought up when required, and that the men can be properly fed after they have advanced. I t is in this work that the Germans excel even the French. The ,bringing up of the reserves on the second day at Neuve Chapelle, for example, was wonderfully managed. This results, as I shall point out later, from the fact that such work in the German army is a specialised career. An officer who specialises in this kind of work devotes himself to that, and to nothing else, almost from the commence- ment of his life in the army. Now how was this sort of work managed for us at Loos? What happened there is now known almost to everybody. The Ger- mans, having full knowledge of the coming French attack in Champagne, withdrew all their reserves from other parts of the front to meet this coming attack. The result was, of course, that the French were definitely held up a t the second line of trenches, and the attack failed to get through. A consequence of this concentration of the German reserves was that, once we had broken through the first line at Loos, we had practically no troops whatever in front of us. Some regiments actually got into Lens itself, while farther north another division got through for miles. Why were these early successes not maintained? Simply on account of atrociously bad Staff work. When the French make an advance, the ground immediately behind the advance is placed under the control of cer- tain regiments who act as police. I received a letter the other day from a French cavalry officer who had fulfilled this function in Champagne. At Loos, as the result of inadequate arrangements of this type, all the roads were blocked up with traffic of various kinds. The men who had made the first advance were without food, many of them for a couple of days. The arrange- ments for bringing up reserves went wrong. As for the division farther north which had advanced so far, although there were several bodies of troops which

could have been sent up to support them, the authorities- chose, of all people, to send a body of Kitchener’s

New Armies who had just arrived from England, who immediately after detraining marched for a day and a half practically without stopping, and who were sent up without any additional rations. The result was, of course, that they gave way and the ground gained had to be abandoned. This is one instance among many of the fatuous policy of sending entirely new troops into action, of which Suvla Bay is another example. I t is not that new troops are less courageous than old. I t it simply that experience has not established in their minds a kind of scale or barometer of what is and what is not bad shelling. I do not wish here to ex- aggerate the consequences of this atrociously bad Staff work. I do not think that we should have accomplished that almost mythical “breaking through” that so many seem to dream of. But we should, at any rate, have gained a very important stretch of country.

How does it come about that our regimental officers are so good and our Staff so bad? Partly, of course, the old tradition, that the Staff is a place of ease. In the second place, the fact that the very qualities which make our regimental officers so good tend to produce the kind of milieu from which a good Staff could not arise spontaneously. Rut are not both these things true of every country and of every army? How does it come about that both France and Germany have good Staffs ?

* * *

Many different reasons could be given for this. The most obvious method is, of course, to point out in detail the methods by which the Staff officers are selected- the extraordinary esprit de corps in a regiment which makes it very difficult for the best men to leave a regiment-

the local interests of a regiment interfering with the general interests of the army; then the fact that sufficient distinction is not made between the Administrative and General Staff, which in reality, of course, ought to be entirely different services; the fact that connection with the regiment still has to be kept, a man doing four years on the Staff and then four years back in the regiment again; while a German Staff officer specialises almost as soon as he leaves the military-

academy, and has nothing to do with regimental life.

One might go on pointing out in detail these differ- ences in system which result in efficient or inefficient Staff officers. But that is not going far enough down to the root of the matter. You get a good system in Germany, a worse system here, as a secondary result of a more fundamental difference which I want to point out. The difference is this, that in the case of France and Germany there is an outside pressure which main- tains almost automatically a good internal organisation, and that this outside pressure is lacking in the case of England. France and Germany have all the time a problem to face, which ensures the existence of an excellence in the Staff which could never have arisen or had continued existence spontaneously without this pressure. Of its own nature no army tends towards intelligence. The popular view in every country of the army as stupid is not entirely justified, but it is a crude expression of something which has a certain basis of fact, which I have already stated but which I may as well repeat-that the kind of qualities which make excellence in a regimental officer do not produce an environment in which the more civilian and more

detached intelligence of the Staff officer is likely to flourish. This natural tendency, as I said, is overcome in France and Germany by the existence of the very serious problem which they both have to face. Both the German and French Staffs have had the advantage during the last forty or fifty years of having their main military problem defined for them by the circumstances of the case. The military problem of Germany was the defeat of France or of France and Russia combined, or,

very, doubtfully, of France and Russia with England as a naval partner. The French military problem was war with Germany. These defined objectives gave to their respective Staffs not only a particular problem to which a solution must be found, but the necessity for a criterion of efficiency in the selection and promotion-

of Staff-officers. The English Staff, on the other hand, have had no such well-defined objective. War might turn out to be with South Africa, or in India, in Egypt, or anywhere on the globe. The Continent

certainly was among the contingent places for the operations- of our General Staff; but never as an inevitability,

still less as an only inevitability. There did not exist in England that pressing necessity which, as it were, insists on the efficiency of the Staff system, when the consequences of inefficiency are so appallingly obvious. The Navy, it should be added, was never tempted to the same fate, for, like the Continental Armies, it, too, had a particular problem, that of clearing the sea of enemy vessels ; and all its organisation was designed to this end. Moreover, the Navy has during the last ten years become more and more efficient as its problem became more and more evident. Only the Army lacked its problem, and dearly we have paid for it.

***

But this special condition of the Army in this country is likely to endure. We are never likely to have the same pressing problem to face that the Continental Powers have. As the outside pressure will probably always be lacking, is our Staff system doomed always, then, to remain inefficient? Cannot some special way be devised for meeting the special situation of this

country? I think it can, and in some spirit of satire I offer it here. Let the Army be divided into two parts, a military and a civilian part, or “regimental” and

“Staff.” The regimental part of our Army is excel- lent. I have no sympathy whatever with democratic attacks on the Army whose main motive is, in reality, social resentment-the desire of one class to get its own back on another and more privileged one. So much do I admire our regimental system that I would allow every colonel to do in practice what he now only dreams

of-that is, never to allow a good man to leave his regiment. I think the regiment should be the whole Army, as we know it. Staff work and, in certain cases, higher command should be entrusted to a new civil service, modelled somewhat on the lines of the Indian Civil Service. There should be no uniforms for these superior officers; they should all wear top-hats. They should have no titles and none of those special privi- leges attached to the soldier as a man doomed to sacri- fice. Such a civil service would, I think, spontaneously

generate in itself a kind of atmosphere and the kind of organisation which make for efficiency along its own narrow lines. NORTH STAFFS.

LET US DRINK. We shall drink to them that sleep.”-CAMPBELL

Yes, I can see you at it, in a room Well-lit and warm high-roofed and soft to the tread,

Satiate and briefly mindful of the tomb With its poor victim of Teutonic lead.

Some unknown notability will rise, Ridiculously solemn, glass a-brim,

And say: “To our dear brethren in the skies.” Dim all our eyes, all glasses still more dim.

‘‘ Life has, of course, good moments--such as this (A glass of sherry we should never spurn),

But where sour brethren are, ’tis perfect bliss- Still, we are glad our lot was-to return.”

Yes, I can see you and can see the dead, Keen-eyed at last for truth, with gentle mirth

Intent. And, having heard, smiling, they said : ‘‘ Strange are our little comrades on the earth.”

PRIVATE A. ROBERTSON, 12th Y. and L.

In Memory of British Statesmanship.

NOTHING in the phenomena produced by ‘the great war is more disquieting, to those who wish for sanity in Europe with a view to lasting peace, than the utter lack of objectivity evinced on this occasion by the very men whose special business is to try to see things in their true perspective. By objectivity I mean the power to view a person, nation or idea apart from one’s own feelings with regard to it, as something having a right to existence since it does exist, and worthy of considera- tion in comparison with any other person, nation or idea. Where would one seek for such impartial vision if not in the universities of modern Europe, which afford a refuge for trained thinkers from the hurly- burly? Yet we have seen a manifesto published by the professors of Germany which, for lack of scientific calm and objectivity, is equalled only by the manifesto which certain English professors published in reply to it. Thus do the professional thinkers of a country, no less than the people and the Government, lose their sense of humour-a homely name for objectivity-in wartime, and become fanatics, doing their utmost to increase’ the evil, striving in their madness to make peace impossible. This gift of objectivity or sense of humour has never been the property of nations, and seldom the property of the rulers of primitive peoples striving fiercely for existence or supremacy. It is un- necessary, it would be a drawback, to a nation borne upon the flood of conquest. But it is exceedingly to be desired in those who have to shape the policy of a nation at the height of power or in its decadence, seeking to preserve by wisdom, cunning or diplomacy an empire coveted alike by friend and foe.

Just as among private individuals a perfect sense of humour-I mean that sense of humour which plays on a man’s self no less than on his neighbours-is

extremely rare ; so among the statesmen, who perform the function of the brain for a whole empire, a per- fect objectivity-that is, the faculty of seeing his own country as other countries see it, no less than that of viewing other countries as they view’ themselves and one another-is the crown of genius. We of England in the past have by good fortune produced several

statesmen who possessed the faculty of seeing other countries clearly in their various relations. But only one British statesman that I know of ever saw the British Empire quite dispassionately in relation to the whole, and he was not by blood an Englishman-Ben- jamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. That is why Dis-

Disraeli’s judgments in the region of foreign affairs were so unerring and, as time has proved, infallible. “He was too imaginative,” say the mediocrities who fol- lowed after him and wrecked his work; “he was not an Englishman and so could never see things as we English see them.” As if the statesman of a mighty empire could be too imaginative! As if average intel- ligent Englishmen-for of such are Disraeli’s successors-

-must of necessity have truer vision than the greatest political genius in all modern history ! Objectivity-

is a quality of the imagination which our present rulers seem to lack most grievously.

0 wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us?

So much that is absurd and inconsequent in the diplomatic- situation would, by, that gift, have been avoided.

We should have perceived before we made the first move towards alliance with Russia. that Greece, Roumania-

and Bulgaria, no less than Turkey, were countries- threatened by the pan-Slavonic movement, that

they loved us only through self-interest, and would cease to love us if we changed our policy. We should have considered before agreeing with Russia finally to destroy the weak, but not quite hopeless, “democratic-

regime in Persia, and allowing the London Press to rejoice over the disappearance of a “toy parliament,” that the said democratic regime was a sincere, if humble, imitation of our own most precious liberties of bygone days; that we have stood for all which that regime inadequately represents for centuries in the opinion of the East, while Russia has stood for the exact opposite. We should never have dreamt of inter- fering with the Muslim Caliphate, because we should have borne in mind our former boast that everyone’s religious prejudices were respected in the British Em- pire. Our rulers would hardly have endorsed Lord Bryce’s description of the Young Turk Government as “a gang of murderers” merely because of a suspicion (which I believe to be conceived on very slight foundation-

that the said Government ordered the extermi- nation of Armenians in the Turkish Empire; because our rulers could not fail to recollect how they them- selves condoned the “systematic extermination” (v. Carnegie report) of Mohammedan populations in Thrace and Macedonia in the winter of 1912-13, and even were so cynical as mildly to congratulate themselves on the event, as simplifying the Moslem question in those regions, and giving hope of an enduring peace. If Christians were allowed to “simplify the Moslem question-

in a certain manner, may not Muslims simplify the Christian question in the same manner when they get the chance? Or is there one standard for Christians-

and another for Muslims? Objectivity is much more common in the East than in the West; nations, like individuals, are there judged by their works, not by their own idea of their intentions or beliefs; and these inconsistencies, which no doubt seem very trifling to a British politician, impress the Oriental as a foul injustice and the outcome of fanaticism. The East preserves our record, and reviews it as a whole. There is no end visible to the absurdities into which this mental

.deficiency of our rulers may lead us. Who knows but that the nation which was filled with horror at the fate of Louvain may yet destroy the precious remnant of the Parthenon! Nothing is too extravagant to be be- lieved in this connection, when flustered mediocrities are in the place of genius.

It is the strength and weakness of our country that the mere machinery of government has grown of late to be of more importance than the men : its strength in peaceful times, since all goes on as usual in spite of party quarrels and the multitude of fools; its weakness at a time like this. The office, not the man who fills the office, has been deemed important. A genius like Disraeli

Disraeli is succeeded by some worthy product of routine, without a vision of the world or an idea worthy of the name. And the public pays the same respect to medio- crity which it paid to genius filling the same office. If mediocrity happens to be of the opposite party, it is certain to be vaunted by half England as superior to genius. And, not being genius, lacking objectivity, it takes itself at the public valuation. It tampers with the work of genius, making the alterations which it deems advisable, and all goes well until the day of trial, when the Empire finds itself not only without a master-mind to guide it, but cut off by the insect-like activities of servile minds from the support of sound tradition, its inheritance from the master-minds of old. The routine of party, the routine of administration, elaborate as it has now become, is not the school for statesmen, since it stifles objectivity.

MARMADUKE PICKTHALL.

International Relations. OF all the societies which are attempting to save the State by good intentions, and abolish war by issuing pamphlets, none is imbued with a more hopeful and ingenuous faith than the Council for the Study of In- ternational Relations.

This important and influential body has blossomed forth from a small band of serious-minded Liberals of

irreproachable views who, before the war, steadfastly believed in all the “right” things, temperance for the working classes, Land Reform, Free Trade, a small Navy, and the amelioration of the poor by means of benevolent legislation. They numbered some of the brightest and most hopeful brains in the country, advo- cated peaceful relations by means of friendly missions to Germany, and nourished a healthy contempt for the

scare-mongering Press, rightly and laudably contrast- ing the violence of its appeals to panic and reaction with the ideals of sanity and progress to which they themselves bore witness. A phrase of Lord Selborne’s, quoted in one of their own pamphlets, fairly accurately represents their attitude on the possibility of war. “All the sensible men were on one side, and all the damned fools were on the other-and, by gad, sir, the damned fools were right.”

The war came and so the sensible men, ignoring the proverb about spilt milk, foregathered and formed the C. S. I. R.

Their view, in brief, was that the war was due to ignorance. The people are ignorant, and the object of their ignorance is Foreign Politics. It was, in fact, because Englishmen knew nothing about German his- tory, Germans nothing about English history, and neither of them anything about their own Foreign Policy, that the war happened.

The onus of producing the war being thus conveniently- laid upon the shoulders of the people, the Council- set itself to educate them With this object it has published and continues to

publish an avalanche of tracts setting forth in lucid and simple terms the objects and consistency of British Foreign Policy, the cynical nepotism of German Foreign Policy, and the crying need that exists for the British public to study both of them, in order that they may thereby confirm, and rest upon the sure founda- tion of historical knowledge and diplomatic truth, that righteously indignant opinion of all things German which they have already obtained superficially through the medium of the Press.

Thus one of the Council’s tracts on the foreign policy af Sir Edward Grey swallowing Persia, Egypt, Morocco, and Agadir in one comprehensive and justificatory-

gulp, concludes by asserting that at no point in the whole course of events can any reproach be

reasonably levelled even by neutrals at Sir Edward Grey’s policy.

As a practical measure people are recommended to buy the pamphlets and tracts of the Council, and cer- tain books carefully selected by the Council.

With the professed object, therefore, of securing strict impartiality of attitude towards the problem of the war, the works of Mr. Brailsford, the Hon.

Bertrand Russell, G. B. Shaw, and other writers of un- fortunate and unpopular tendencies are gravely ex- cluded.

People are then expected, having now become un- biased enough to permit of an exchange of views, to put their minds, carefully doctored by the Council’s literature, at one another in the Council’s study circles.

These circles are to meet informally over coffee and cakes in friends’ houses, since “the whole success of the circle depends upon the members feeling at home,” and are designed to give people an opportunity of mutually informing one another of what the Council has informed them, to wit, the righteousness of the war, the iniquity of Germany, and the truths of European-

policy. By the end of the war and this process, the general

mass of sober English citizens are expected to have attained so profound a knowledge of International

Relations that the weight of their accumulated information will prevent for ever the recurrence of war.

A noble ideal, surely ! But what about carts and the effects of their precedence to horses?

It is true that knowledge is good. It is true that you cannot do anything in a vacuum; as, for instance, take a Conservative club. It is sometimes alleged that Conservatives will never be able successfully to deal with the poor because they don’t know anything about them. Similarly, it may be maintained that a

democracy which aspires to control its relations with other countries should possess some knowledge of the relations it aspires to control. But how can we reasonably

expect to control international relations until we have adjusted internal relations? A man may know every secret of the Kaiser’s ante-chamber; his knowledge-

is useless unless he has abolished the secrets of his own Foreign Office. He may have read the texts of every treaty since 1800, and be acquainted with the ambitions of every nation in Europe !-to what effect unless foreign policy is openly conducted and demo- cratically directed? It is, in fact, no good studying the foreign policies of other nations until you have secured a say in the foreign policy of your own.

It might further occur to minds not so exuberantly hopeful of the all-embracing powers of their own knowledge-

that it is a little difficult to secure an entirely impartial view of so intricate a matter as International Relations by only studying the literature published by one side. It is a commonplace, of course, among advanced Radical thinkers that the anomalies inherent in the system of law and punishment in this country make the judge more guilty than the criminal he condemns.

Without venturing to decide between such nice degrees of guilt, we cannot help being struck by the fact that in the present dispute each nation is its own judge, and each nation is the criminal to the other.

For each verdict pronounced upon German diplomacy by the tracts of the Council, a similar and equally

damning verdict is pronounced upon this country by similar tracts in Germany, although, as the German

counterpart of the Council is doubtless a brand of a Government Office, their tracts are probably more pointed and their facts more cogent. The Council is, in fact, in the pleasant position of being ears to its own mouth. Please note that I am not for one moment hinting that the verdicts and the partialities of the Council are not all the time right, and those of the Germans all the time wrong. All I suggest is that if you insist on donning the juridical ermine and becoming a dispenser of academic judgments and justice in International-

disputes, it is really quite important to read both sides of the dispute you are considering. If the conditions of war preclude access to the literature of the other side, you must just suspend judgment, and not rush in like the Council where the Almighty Himself fears to tread; for He, at least, cannot be said to have put His foot decisively in the breach until He gives the verdict to this side or the other, and even Colonel Maude has not yet asserted that He has done that.

To dogmatise upon a controversial subject without paying any attention to the other side, except in so far as continual allusions to their wickedness and unscrupulousness-

involve, .is simply holding a candle to the bishops. I do not mean to suggest that the books and tracts of the Council are obviously one-sided and unfair.

A show of impartiality is achieved and considerable brilliance and ingenuity of argument characterises some of their more academic works. But it is the brilliance of a well-soaped bald-head; it obscures the subject round which it plays while illuminating the surface.

The big battalions of scholasticism are arrayed-just look at the names on the Council’s Study Committee- for the purpose of duping the people by the names of the writers into swallowing what they have written.

But even supposing that information on much that is at present obscure was abundant, that the Council’s tracts were as fairly written as the material upon which they had to draw was unimpeachable, and that they were as seriously studied and extensively mastered as they deserved. What then? A nation of historians and diplomatists might result-an awful conception, I admit -but of value if it could make its history and guide its diplomacy. That stage is not reached, arid steps to reach it are not yet begun.

Until that stage is reached, all those people who believe that the knowledge that you have a cancer in your

stomach is not the same as the ability to cure it must pronounce the effects of this body as sheer melioristic futility.

The C.S.I.R., with its tracts, its pamphlets, and its spoon-administered history, is typically Liberal in its attempts to divert the minds of the people from direct interference to harmless and empty panaceas.

C. E. M. J.

Repression in the Straits Settlements By C. H. Norman,

ONE of the most lamentable consequences of the Press Censorship and the gagging of the House of Commons has been the complete absence of any discussion on the grave events which have taken place in the Dependencies-

under the control of the Colonial Office or the India Office. One hears now and then reports that there has been a big trial for treason or conspiracy in British India, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, Egypt, and other dependencies. The old procedure of “mov- ing for papers” on such matters seems to have been relegated to that Parliamentary dustbin to which most of the rights and privileges of Englishmen have been

consigned for the duration of the war. What has been really happening in the British Empire since August, 1914, is almost unknown, as the censorship has contrived to keep the people in ignorance of the various

trials, sedition ordinances, and other devices of suppressive legislation, with which the British people are

becoming only too familiar in execution of the policy of defending the liberties of Europe.

A Correspondent in Singapore has been good enough to forward to us the concoctions of the Pro-Consul and the Legislative Council under whose tyranny the

unfortunate people of the Straits Settlements apparently- are compelled to suffer in the silence ordained

during war time. Ordinance No. XII of 1915, issued on August 16, 1915, provided for the establishment of a Reserve Force to the Volunteer Force and for a Civil Guard. In pursuance of this object “every male British subject of pure European descent” between the ages of 18 and 55 must register; and every person between the

ages of 18 and 40, “shall be liable to undergo military training, on due notification by the Governor in the ‘ Gazette. ’ ” The Ordinance provided for the training of the civilian population on principles of compulsion ; but it is not applicable to the Regular Military or Police Forces in the country. The force created by this measure-

is rather of a comic opera character, as we are informed that our correspondent, having put in 50 drills, has had no musketry course at all! There are the usual provisions for the oath of allegiance to King George; but it is to be observed that the oath-taker is not required to pledge himself to obey the orders of his superior officers That was, perhaps, a wise provision as some of the officers in this peculiar Force seem to know more about the manipulations of the rubber market than how to conduct themselves as .officers and gentlemen. There is a clause stating that any person declining to take the oath or declaration shall be liable to fine or imprisonment or both. The Ordinance is being administered in such a way that those recruited

in the Civilian Guard are forced into the Reserve Force where they come under military law enforced by persons entirely removed from the Control Of any Sane individual dual, as sanity appears to have vanished in the Straits Settlements, as elsewhere, since August, 1914- One or two people have declined to take the oath in the

circumstances, and some have refused to submit to any form of service. Threats of prosecution have been held out to them; while one individual has been convicted and informed that he will be deported unless he makes due submission to the Government.

Deplorable as the general state of things is in Britain, we may be thankful that we are not resident in the Straits Settlements, as unwilling participants in the

performances of a man named Arthur Young, who appears to combine the role of Commander-in-Chief and Governor, for one might be moved to inform that gentleman that even the Straits Settlements had no place for any tinpot Cromwells.

Ordinance No. XI, enacted on July 14, 1915, by this person, Arthur Young, and his Legislative Council of

panjandrums in petticoats, provides for the suppression of what are described as seditious publications, which include newspapers, books, pamphlets, sheets of music, maps, charts or plans. One can imagine the solemnity with which Arthur Young examines the music records which are dispatched to the Straits Settlements in order to discover sedition in the German tune of “God Save the King !” “Document,” in this Ordinance, means any painting, drawing, photograph or visible re-

presentation Reflect for a moment on the spectacle of Arthur Young detecting sedition in reproductions of the pictures of certain Hanoverian Kings of England, and recollect that these men are the toilers upon whose shoulders the white man’s burden has fallen ! “Disraeli affection,” it is stated, ‘‘includes disloyalty and all feel-

feelings of enmity.” Surely, the natural charm of Arthur Young must be so disarming that this definition was unnecessary, for who could be so seriously minded as to have “feelings of enmity” against a gentleman who has derived his principles of government from “Alice in Wonderland”? However, Section 3 is such a choice specimen of Governmental humour that it must be set out in full. It should not languish in the far-off Straits

Settlements, as Sir Frederick Smith may get some hints from it : “Any person who prints, publishes, imports either by land or sea” (Arthur Young has missed out the air), “sells, offers €or sale, distributes, or has in his possession any newspaper, book or document, or eny extract from any newspaper or book, or who writes, prepares, or produces any book or document, containing any words, signs, or visible representations which are likely or may have a tendency, directly or indirectly, whether by inference, suggestion, allusion, metaphor, implication, or otherwise : (a) to incite to murder or any act of violence; (b) to seduce any officer, soldier, or sailor from his allegiance or duty; (c) to bring into hatred or contempt the Government established by law in this Colony or the United Kingdom, or in British India, or any other British Possession, or the adminis-

administration of justice in any of such places, or any class or section of his subjects in any of such places, or to excite disaffection towards his Majesty or any of the said

Governments; (d) to put any person in fear or to cause annoyance to him; (e) to encourage or incite any per- son to interfere with the administration of the law or with the maintenance of law and order; (f) to convey any threat of injury to a public servant or any person in whom that public servant is believed to be inte-

rested,” shall be guilty of an offence, and the various articles or publications may be destroyed. Sub-section 2 provides that sub-clause (c) shall not apply to “com-

comments expressing disapproval of the measures of any such Government or of its administrative action, or of the administration of justice, which do not excite or attempt to excite hatred, contempt, or disaffection.’’ The words of this section are eloquent in their

testimony of the state of mind of Arthur Young and his

colleagues. It is almost impossible to regard such men in a serious light; yet what can be the result of measures of this kind but smouldering discontent on every side? Legislation of this character discredits its authors and undermines the morale of the community that submits to it; and a general paralysis of energy is the consequence. That has been the outcome of the much milder Defence of the Realm Regulations in Great Britain.

Section 4 confers this drastic power an Arthur Young : “The Governor in Council may, by order

published in the ‘ Gazette,’ prohibit to be imported or brought into the Colony any newspaper, book, or document ment.” ’This power was exercised by an Order in Council on July 27, when the Governor prohibited these newspapers and books from entering the Straits Settle- ments : “A1 Hilal”; “Comrade”; “A1 Islam”; “Free

Hindustan” ; “Liberty” ; “The History of India,” etc., etc. The author of “Liberty” is not stated; but one may wonder whether it is John Stuart Mill’s famous

pamphlet, which is in bad odour in the British Empire at the present moment.

Section 7 is a similar enactment to Regulation 51a of the Defence of the Realm Regulations empowering a police inspector on the warrant of a magistrate to enter premises and seize any suspected publications therein ; while Section 8 enables parcels of books or documents or

newspapers to be seized in course of post, and provides for the detention of any person bringing impugned.

publications into the Colony. Section 9 permits the Postmaster-General to detain any suspected article in course

of postal transmission. So that the Postmaster- General in the Straits Settlements is authorised by Arthur Young to become a common thief, as the seizure of correspondence is the lowest kind of theft that one can well imagine. The incapacity of Governmental officials to behave as other than cads in time of national stress is well known; though it is not often described in the plain language which such conduct merits. Government officials may in the future recog- nise that Government employ and Government pay are not a moral authorisation for petty blackguardism. That day, however, seems very far off at a period when lying and roguery are the only detectable activities of many Ministers of State and their subordinates.

Section 10 winds up the Ordinance with an assurance that any person guilty of an offence against its terms shall be liable to penal servitude for life or to imprisonment-

not exceeding seven years, or to a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars, or to both penal servitude

and fine or both imprisonment and fine. The Straits Settlements must be a delightful spot to live in at the moment! Cannot you imagine Arthur Young and his confederates solemnly deciding that “We shan’t go home till morning” is music calculated to excite “feel- ings of enmity” against persons who wish to go to bed early, and that the possessor of this odious jingle should be sent to penal servitude for life? “Ta-ra-ra-

boom-de-ay” would be condemned as some mysterious Islamic publication intended to bring his Majesty into hatred and contempt ! One begins to tremble at the possible fate of a subscriber of “The Candid Review,” or THE NEW AGE, in the Straits SettIements. One trusts that Lord Loreburn, or Mr. Winston Churchill, or Lord Courtney, or Mr. T. Gibson Bowles will not place themselves within the jurisdiction of Arthur Young arid his Legislative Councillors. Sir William Butler once wrote something about “pantaloons in putties-

the Councillors of the Straits Settlements might be described as muddlers in mufti, judging by their general proceedings in this unfortunate Colony. We commend this Ordinance to the attention of the House of Commons, and to the Canadian humour of Mr. Bonar Law, in the hope that some scheme map be designed by which Arthur Young and his colleagues could be

transferred to Berlin for the duration of the war, taking their precious Ordinances with them as consolation for the absence of “Punch,” or “Comic Cuts,”

Force of Argument. By J.M. Kennedy.

IN THE NEW AGE “Notes of the Week” (November IS) occurred the following passage :

It is too readily assumed by our amateur diplomatists of the Press that the arguments that convince their silliest readers will serve this country against the

formidable Note just issued against us by the United States. The statesmen of America, however, are not of the calibre of the “largest circulation”; and both they and the statesmen of other neutral countries will require more than to be met with debating points.

The assertion here made is surely susceptible of being applied to general instances as well as to a par- ticular instance. If the arguments used by the newspapers-

for or against any question bear an essential resemblance to one another (no matter what may be the point of view), we have not the Censor to thank. Long before the war began English politicians of all parties and groups adhered to standard arguments when discussing questions of public interest. One could always tell in advance the arguments likely to be used by the various parties for or against Home Rule, the imposition of Tariffs, the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales, or the Insurance Act. So well were writers in the Press able to follow the utterances and even the thoughts of the politicians they supported that experienced newspaper readers were always able to predict what views might be expected when a new question arose. What might well be termed standard comments were inevitably made when the transport workers struck in 1911, when the House of Lords rejected the 1909 Budget, or when the odour of the

Marconi affair penetrated beyond a narrow circle of politicians and made the outside public gasp.

The essential feature of all these standard arguments was that the arguments themselves were non-essential. For example, the main objection to the National In- surance Bill (and Act) was that it was a measure intro- duced with the definite object of enslaving two-thirds of our population, reckoning the men and women in- insured and their dependents. That was the precise

distinction involved in the sudden proposal for making. a cleavage between people earning more than a hundred and sixty pounds a year and people earning less than

that-the latter body including “workmen” earning by skilled labour anything up to two or three hundred a year This slavery argument, nevertheless, was the very argument which the politicians who supported the Act, together with their backers in the Press, were at all times unable to see. The Bill was debated at wearisome length in the House of Commons; but no member, to my knowledge, ever insisted on the most telling argument against it-that it had been planned by Mr. Lloyd George on the model of similar measures in Prussia, that it was not based on English but on

Prussian traditions, and that, in consequence, it was likely to cause a very great amount of ill-feeling. No; that argument was never brought forward in Parlia- ment, and it was impossible to secure a hearing for it in the ordinary Press.

Compare this with the question of the new American Note. In the case of the Insurance Act we were left to the mercies of the politicians; and there was no power on earth which could compel them to answer. It was the Prussian-minded politicians who did the com- pelling, and their powers for this purpose were exer- cised an the working classes of this country. In the other instances referred to-Tariffs, etc.--;it was equally impossible to induce the politicians and the Press to discuss essentials. The essential features of the Tariff agitation, for or against, mattered very much to the business community; but where the interests of

the business community did not happen to coincide with the interests of the politicians, the business

community found itself without a public platform and with- out a voice in the newspapers. In other words, reali- ties had to be discarded simply because the politicians were too timid or too lazy or too stupid to take them into consideration. It is little wonder that the war, if it did not take the country unawares, certainly did take the politicians unawares. The people were able to realise facts; their leaders in Parliament were not. The attitude of the Censorship in concealing news, to take another example, reflects the timidity of the poli- ticians; not at all the timidity of the public, which timidity hardly exists. The periodical panics of the Northcliff e papers reflect the highly-strung nerves of the political gambler who inspires them; they do not reflect the mind of the people.

If the politicians, however, both in war and in peace, can check criticism altogether, or at any rate force it into a definite groove, they cannot deal with the American-

Note in this way. There is, in my judgment, a complete answer to the American Note; and if one of our realists (let me suggest Mr. Gibson Bowles) has not yet found it he will find it eventually. But the politi- cians are not likely to find the answer-at all events, not without advice from outside sources. This is the

advantage of the American Note. The politicians, and the Press supporters of the politicians, cannot gloss it over. It contains essential arguments; they must be answered. You cannot hide the American Note away in a pigeon-hole and pretend it never existed. You cannot decide upon a few vague, stock answers,

impose them upon the public through the Press, and unctuously assume that there is nothing more to be said. That was done in the case of our Education Bills, our annual Army and Navy Estimates, the Insurance-

Act-and, indeed, in the case of every political question of first-class importance raised in this country within the last twenty years. The English bureaucracy had begun to assume the attitude common to all

bureaucracies that act without a motive and without character : the attitude of maintaining silence when awkward questions were asked or awkward arguments were brought forward. I have seen many a protest against the project of National Insurance couched in more restrained language than that used by Mr. Lansing-

and containing, too, even more logically developed arguments. The attention which will have to be given politely to Mr. Lansing and his arguments was never given, even cursorily, to our own people. Mr. Lansing, fortunately, has power to compel a reply. Our own people had and have no such power-which is hardly an argument in favour of our political system or of our

bureaucracy. The only justification for such an attitude on the

part of any governing caste is the complete success of their leadership; and even success of this kind is not so much a justification as an excuse. Success means not merely steering the ship of State through the difficult waters of international politics ; it means keep- ing those on board satisfied with their lot. Can it be said that the English bureaucracy (the war apart) was successful, judged by this elementary standard ? Was the situation in Ireland up to the end of July, 1914, a tribute to its wisdom, its foresight, its subtlety? Or the situation as between ourselves and our oversea

possessions-Australia, for example ; or India, or Canada? Does our present financial situation justify the suppression of criticism? No, to all these questions-

Nobody urges barren discussion, without prin- ciple or aim, such as led, in France, to certain groups being ironically referred to as “les intellectuels. ” Live criticism, based on realities, is another thing

altogether, and we cannot have too much of it. Such criticism is precisely what the politicians detest ; and their newspaper supporters too. It would do both classes good to be forced to read an American Note every week, and to answer it adequately, on pain of being placed in an asylum for the inarticulate.

T. P. O’Liverpool. Lovingly reported by Charles Brookfarmer.

(SCENE : London Irish Regt.’s Concert. Queen’s Hall. Tuesday, November 23. Messrs. John Redmond and T. P. O’Connor take their places. T. P. ogles the Press.) Mr. John Redmond (in Papist cliches describes his

visit to the front) : . . . This blended pathos and pride, this intermixed tragedy and glory . . . the priest . . . the chaplain . . . the religious organisation . . . the Christian brotherhood . . . priests and parsons and clergymen . . .

There the crucifix was standing and the ruined church behind, and all around was ruin, horror and desolation, and, to complete the picture, I was brought to be pre- sented to the King of the Belgians. . . . Ireland . . . priests . . . when liberty, when religion, when civilisation were at stake. (Sits down. Exit half the Press, to T. P. ’s open consternation.)

T. P. (unctuously, with an unnaturally broad Oirish accint) : After thit wonderfully inter-r-restin’ narrative Mr. R-r-redmond his given us of his visit to the front, thit visit which his aroused the greatest intirest in iviry class an’ iviry race of the counthry, Oi think Oi may say, of the Inipire-(cheers)-Oi am a little abashed at followin’ Mr. Redmond, because Oi’m a simple civilian who his niver seen war. (Laughter.) Whin he spoke to the Oirish rigimints, the Germin Tommies were koind enough to give him an audience, with a floyin’-machine. Fortunit’ly they were bad shots, or else there would hiv’ been a vacincy, a disastrous vacincy in the l’ader- ship of the Oirish party. (Sudden uneasiness of Mr. Redmond.) Oi . . . Oi . . . Oi an’ Oirishmin loike me . . . Oi . . . Oi . . Oi . . an ittack by paginism on Chris-

tianity. By a strange miricle, as Mr. Redmond his said, the Cross survived and stood up; Oi regard this as an auspicious hope that against thase dark abysses of war and pagin morality Christianity is goin’ TO WIN ! (Cheers.) I feel thit my conscience and convictions compil me to say thit this war must not be concluded till we have an overwhelmin’ victorEE thit will save the

WORLD from a repitition of sich barbarism. (Cheers.) I place my confirmed an’ unquestionable-er-

unquestioning conviction thit the war will ind in the favour of the Illois in the fact that we hiv min, we hiv munitions, and we hiv risources, and over thim is the great uncon-

unconquerible speerit of the Illois. I hiv confidence thit ours is the just cause, ours is the cause of freedom and of right, and thase causes, though temporilly interrupted, have alwis ultimitly conquered in the history of min- kind. (Cheers.) Till me, ladies and gintlemin, is there a darker or a blacker page in the history of minkind (excep’ one to which I will allude later) thin this wanton butchery of wimmin in Belgium, this butchery of chil-

children this butchery of praysts, and the wanton and brutal attack upon gintle wimmin who had retoired from the ordiniry pleasures of the wor-r-rld to aid the wake an’ sufferin’ of minkind. Anny Oirishman with anny genuine Oirish blood in his veins-(tremendous cheers. T. P., the man with the heart of-sovereigns, blithely repeats the usual “Armenian massacre”, stories.) Eight kundrid thousind Armaynians hiv been massacred ( !). Some of the wimrnin were sold publicly into slavery ( ! !), thousinds of wimmin were butchered ( ! ! !); thousinds of children were thrown into the rivers ( ! ! ! 1). Thit is the crime of Turkey (Cheers.) I im intitled here to- night to declare thit the massacre of these 800,000 Ar-

Armaynians is as much the crime of the Kaiser and the Germins as it is of the Sultan of ‘Turkey.

00000000000000000000000000000000000000-00H, LADIES AND GENTLEMIN, hiv you iver for a long time togither considered what would be the iffect of a Germin dominion? No liberty for anny nation, no liberty for anny man, no liberty for anny creed. But evan now at the frint, Olster rigimints and Doblin rigi- mints are foightin’ soide by soide in a speerit of forget- fulness of riligius differences, and of riligius quarrils.

Leters About Russia. By C. E. Bechhofer.

ANYONE who had the misfortune, as I had, to read all the speeches delivered at the last session of the Duma, must have wondered at the everlasting termination of all debates with the speeches of Kerenski and Ch’heidze, the leaders respectively of the Labour Party and Social Democrats. The discussion might be on the rights of the Jews or on the use of aeroplanes; the list of speeches commenced with Markof and finished up with Kerenski and the Caucasian deputy with the almost unpronouncable name. Kerenski is a glib, erratic young lawyer. His party, the Trudovicks, represents labour in the towns. The Caucasian deputies, of whom there are several, some elected by the pure Caucasians, and one, a Russian, by the many Russian planters in the Caucasus, are Socialists of the “Proletarians of all

countries-unite !” type. When the Duma commissions- upon the army and navy and supplies were

formed, the Socialist parties officially refused to take part in them, until the whole people should be repre- sented on them. Whether this was a hint for universal-

suffrage, I cannot guess, but the critic has my sympathy- who suggested that they should wait until the

whole of mankind and even the animal and vegetable kingdoms were represented. And even that, he said, would be futile in Russia.

You suggest to a sturdy old Russian Liberal that economic power precedes political* power, and he

replies, Yes, certainly, but not in Russia. That long- sighted schemer, Witte, thought the best path to his and Germany’s power the formation of a Duma, and this bold principle of “the bull by the horns, the man by the word,” has effectively staved off any associated movement since the revolution. There was a society, the “Society of Societies,” which in 1905 fought a long struggle with the Constitutional Democrats and the Social Democrats. Consisting of most of the peasants’ and agrarian societies, affiliated to such unions as the Journalists’ and Leather Artisans’, it strenuously opposed the theory of political activity. Its many theories, the children of Michaelovski’s Narod nichestvo, included one of encouraging and develop- ing the activity of the town Artel and rural Mir, a sys- tem of responsible syndicalism that resembles National Guilds. It is not right to say that these partisans adopted the National Guild idea, but it was an obvious development of their views. The Social Democrats de- clared that, if you made a man a member of a pro- ducing community, he ceased to be a revolutionist, and, to further the chimerical Universal Revolution, they

endeavoured to make each peasant a small holder. So, they said, will he be most dissatisfied; in possession of a little property he will desire more-and there’s your

revolutionary. The legislators weathering the 1905 tempest were shrewd. They declared the anti-political “Society of Societies” illegal and, with the willing aid of the Social and Constitutional Democrats, demoralised-

the rural Mirs. I read all his speeches, I heard his conversations, I met him several times, but never could I find what he and his party were achieving towards the Universal Revolution-

At the opening meeting of this Duma, the Ministers- who had listened to all the speeches of the Right

and the Centre parties and of the Kadets, ostentatiously- left the Chamber when Kerenski went to the

rostrum to speak. Just before the Duma was to meet, five of the Social

Democrats were suddenly arrested, tried for saying in private what they had never scrupled to say in public, and, judgment being suspended, were sent to the cold North to await sentence. There they are, I believe, to this day. They send vigorous telegrams now and then to inform the world that they still consider themselves members of the Duma-and so ends the political path to revolution.

The only good phrase of the loquacious session came

The result is Kerenski

indeed from a Social Democrat. He said, unjustly, that the chairman came to the Duma “in dressing- gown and slippers,” and was suspended for a week for his pains. The last Duma, though inglorious in its life, was beautiful in death; but no one suggests that the Progressive Block, which was the apparent cause of its dissolution, had its origin in any but the more

Conservative and nationalist Liberal parties of the House.

Others attribute the dissolution to an even simpler cause. Russia, having been wilfully badly organised for a couple of centuries by the Germans, fell promptly into utter chaos when the war broke out. She, one of the richest lands in the world, was always a borrower, and now, to carry on the war, she wanted money more than ever. If England really loves liberty, said the old Liberals, she will refuse Bark money and the auto- cracy will be compelled through the Duma (“through the Zemstvoes,” said 1) to organise the economics of the country.

The Duma, therefore, was tolerated as a second string to the bow, but, one fine day, following, it is supposed, a telegram from Bark after his conferences with Mr. Lloyd George and the French Treasury, Rodzianko read out with tears the Imperial Ukase

dissolving Parliament indefinitely. A strike immediately broke out on the Petrograd-Moscow railway, but eventually was stopped and held over for the result of the Zemstvo meeting. The day following the disso- lution, Mr. Asquith ,announced in the House of Com- mons that great grants of money and credit were to be made to our Allies. In Russia even the old Liberals-

who are not the most intelligent of men, realised that England could not afford to put Russia in order in the middle of a difficult war. Anglophiles, how- ever, feared lest England had been taken in by the specious tales of M. Bark and his colleagues, but a telegram sent soon after by that gentleman asking when the Duma would again be summoned, and his still protracted stay in London, showed that France and England were not so easily gulled. What the terms are by which Russia got its money can be known only to the principals, but they seem to have worked good already. The Tsar avoids his Germanised, Masonic Court, the patriotic and probably capable Polivanof has been made Minister of War, and even the decrepit, useless, but true old Kuropatkin has been called up from his disgrace.

Even Hvostof, the new Minister of the Interior, a flashy, time-server whom Lord Northcliff e’s “Times” delights to honour, has been made to become almost Liberal in his administration. It is amusing to regard the present activities of this worthy, who, not long ago, became so outrageously corrupt in his governor- ship of Nijni-Novgorod, that the great merchants 01 the province had at last to send a deputation of com- plaint to the Tsar, whereupon he sent in his papers and, choosing a Black Hundred constituency, got him- self voted into the Duma. It is said that his recent re-entry into administrative life is due in part to an anti-German speech and mostly to the influence of a certain new chatterer about Court, who shares with Rasputin the task of entertaining the Empress.

It was really quite time that England should meddle in Russian internal politics. Only a little while ago, a huge collection of copper coins was made in honour of some Allied nonsense, smuggled over the border and sent to Germany to make munitions. That collection-

had the patronage of the police. Until I returned three weeks ago, I thought that

England was still more or less free. At any rate, it has solved the troubles that Russia now suffers, and on the side of liberty. Russians still look to us to help them to freedom, and, supposing we have any left, they will come more and more to seek aid and inspira- tion from us. There is, for instance, a very signifi- cant and promising party in process of formation. It is modelled on the Young Turks (What irony !), but will be neither Masonic, German, nor Semitic in

its foundations. Its first object is the capture of the Army, which, under a system of conscription and martial-

law, is the nearest approach to a preponderating economic force. But when peace comes, it should be the duty of these Young Russians (this name will be heard again !) to concentrate upon the Zemstvo county

organisations and publicly damn the Kadets, the Kerenski skies, and all the political, unpronounceable Caucasian Social Democrats.

What there is of organised labour in that most agricultural of countries is not enamoured even to-day of

politics. The railwaymen bitterly resented the dissolution- of the Duma, not for the loss of it, but as a

contemptuous insult to the army and the people. The last plan I heard from a railwayman was excellent It was to refuse to handle any passenger traffic for some days in order to allow goods trains through to Petrograd from Kiev and MOSCOW, and relieve the famine.

There are three tame deputies in the Duma from the Jews, quite a number from- Poland, the Mahomedans and the Armenians (the most hated people of all who know it). I have even been told that there is an Anarchist deputy.

Drama. By John Francis Hope.

I MUST confess that I have been trying to dodge “The Ware Case” at Wyndham’s. Mr. du Maurier is not the sort of actor whom I would run any risk to see; and the streets are so dark, and the little Zeppelins running about on all fours make them so dangerous, that I really felt justified in staying at home. Be- sides, the advertisement says : “Evening dress op- tional but unfashionable”; and I haven’t got any op- tional but unfashionable evening dress. So on all counts, I decided not to go, although the play was written by a new author, Mr. George Pleydell; and at last the publishers, Messrs. Methuen, have come to my rescue. I know exactly how Mr. du Maurier plays the part; I first saw him many years ago in “Mr. and Mrs. Daventry.” I have seen him many times since, and he hasn’t altered a bit. Even the publishers say that, in this play, he is “adding to his many laurels”; and laurels so closely resemble each other that to see one is to see all. “Semper idem” is his motto; and he will gamble, or get married, or be rejected or a co-respondent or a murderer in exactly the same way. Acting, to him, is not an art of expression, but an opportunity of lounging about in public, smoking and drinking in a theatre in contravention-

of the terms of the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, and turning a wooden face, most curiously carved, to- wards an audience. Luckily, Mr. Pleydell’s play does not require interpretation; and I have lost nothing, not even a night’s rest, by waiting until I could read it.

Mr. Pleydell has written a good stage play; it has been a good stage play for many, many years. Like most people connected with the stage, Mr. Pleydeil crams his work with as many of the effective scenes and situations as can be crammed into four acts. A good situation is never out of place when it is on the stage; and if one is not enough, two or three or a dozen are not too many. As for humour, even the oldest jokes may be used again, and raise a laugh, if they are brushed up a little and the phrasing is turned to dis- guise the signs of wear and tear. It is a fixed prin- ciple in all stage plays that a vice is not the particular result of a particular passion, but is a symptom of a general morbid condition in which a man prefers everything-

that is prohibited. If a man is, for any reason; unfaithful to his wife, he may, according to the morality of the stage, be fairly credited with all other forms of vice and crime. On the other hand, the man who is sexually faithful will also be truthful, and honest in money matters, will not commit murder, and will back only those horses that win; and when the man of all

* ‘E The Ware Case.” By George Pleydell. (Methuen., 2s. net.)

---

the vices dies, the man of all the virtues will marry his charming widow. All that was settled in the year one of the dramatic Era, and Mr. Pleydell does not depart from the theory of his ancestors.

Sir Hubert Ware was unfaithful to his wife during the first year of marriage; she discovered his unfaithfulness-

about the same time that she discovered that Michael Adye loved her and that she loved MichaeI Adye, so she felt justified in objecting to her husband’s immorality. She did object to it vigorously and

persistently; she lived with him for three years to avoid public scandal, and dragged what “ Hubby” Ware called “these extraneous matters” into every conversation-

she had with him. There was no possible excuse for him; he may have sinned in ignorance at first, but not after she had discovered his infidelity. He was thoroughly instructed in the seventh commandment, and could judge from his wife’s conversation how hardly the world judged any laxity in this matter. The fact that he persisted in his infidelity in spite of her

admonitions, and added gambling to his excesses of exterior devotion, shows that he had hardened his heart against stage morality; and might therefore be accused of attempted robbery and wilful murder, and any other crime that might take the moralist’s fancy.

Mr. Pleydell puts a lot into his first act. Lady Ware tells her friend all about her sad trouble, and of her joyful, secret, innocent love for Michael Adye. Being left alone with her husband for a few minutes, she im- proves the occasion with another homily on the seventh commandment ; and the hardened wretch takes advan- tage of her ignorance of money matters to get her to sign a transfer of some of her shares. She is prevented by the arrival of Michael Adye, who, being a K.C., never signs a document without reading it. After read- ing it, he discovers that it is not what Ware pretended that it was, a transfer of Debentures into Ordinary stock, but. a transfer of all her holding to her husband. Conflict between the wicked husband and the wise and virtuous lover, in which the wicked husband is beaten; no Great Western Debentures for him. But as his

extravagance has ruined him, and the place is about to be sold over his head, he must have money somehow so before the end of the act he drowns his wife’s

brother, whose fortune then passes to the wife. That is a fairly complete calendar of crime for a first act.

In the second act, his wife has paid all his debts, in- cluding his debts to “those women,” with the money that came to her on her brother’s death; she has made her husband a liberal allowance, and has become so fond of Adye that she has at last determined to leave her

husband. The vile wretch suggests : “Can’t we start afresh ?” but the wife says that “all sympathy between us is - ”: so they, with Michael and a couple of

lovers go to dinner. They are interrupted by an old friend, the chief of the C.I.D., who has “Hubby” Ware arrested for the murder of his brother-in-law; so the third act is set in the Central Criminal Court. Michael, who would do anything in the world for Lady Ware, is retained by her to defend her husband. Being examined by the man who loves her, by his skill and her own pertinacity she obtains all the sympathy of the Court as a long-suffering but loyal wife; but the evidence that really secures the acquittal of her husband is given by a bookmaker who had only once had to pay out to “Hubby” Ware. In the fourth act, the wife, while still waiting €or the verdict, tells Adye that she has to be “a changed woman after this”; if her husband is acquitted, “this awful suffering of his must be his atone- ment for all that is past.” He is acquitted, and she gives him wine; and when he is well drunk, she tells him that they are going to start afresh. Then it is that he confesses his crime; then it is that Adye calls him “a devil,” and Lady Ware definitely recoils from him into the arms of Michael; and then, with a last dramatic touch, he swallows the poison thoughtfully sent to him by the bookmaker, and dies at once.

I suppose that there are people who can be thrilled

by this sort of stuff, but I must confess that I am not impressed by it. The only novelty that Mr. Pleydell contributes is a subtlety of psychology that is rather strained. Ware could only benefit by the death of his brother-in-law if his wife were willing to use the money to pay his debts; and this flimsy hope is the only alleged motive for the crime. Apart from that, Mr. Pleydell’s characters talk so naturally that the report of their conversation is not very interesting to read.

Readers and Writers MR. J. A. K. THOMSQN’S “The Greek Tradition” (Allen and Unwin. 5s. net), contains a Preface by Professor Gilbert Murray, the mere existence of which is an indication cation of the character of Mr. Thomson’s work. “The Greek Tradition” is scholarly but with something of a shamefaced air, as if obvious scholarship were an offence against democracy. It contains many excellent ideas, but these are expressed often in such journalese that they challenge instead of persuading. Mr. Thomson-

also, like his sponsor, thinks to give a modern meaning to an ancient classic by contemporary illustra- tion. For instance, he links Lucretius with Baudelaire. At the same time he warns us against the historical mis- chief of paraphrasing Cleon as a modern Tory. But what is the difference? To my mind it is the lesser error to parallel Cleon with a Tory than to relate

Baudelaire with Lucretius. The greater values are here in- volved, and are no less mixed. At bottom, however, Mr. Thomson is sound and even illuminating. Of

Herodotus he says newly and excellently that his temper was agnostic and critical. To the charge of callousness brought against Thucydides he replies that Thucydides was undemonstrative but not unemotional-and he proves his case. On the origin of the satyric drama he has something both new and convincing- to say.

* But his best contribution to the subject of his book is

his discussion of the nature of the famous Greek “simplicity- This alone makes his essays well worth

reading. Greek simplicity, he points out, is really one of the most subtle things in the world. It is as far from naive simplicity as from ornateness. Studied simplicity he calls it 3 but the adjective should be uttered under the

breath, for, in truth, the study is and must needs be concealed if the result is to appear simple. The triumphant progress of Greek literature was, in fact, from the obvious learning and art of the earlier hiero-

hierophantic writers to the concealed learning and art of the great age; style, though expressing the same ideas as heretofore, became gradually simpler until it issued in a prose so pellucid that, until you tried it, it appeared only to he common speech. Never before or since has style been so pure. Our own eighteenth century was merely fumbling after it. But we shall attain it in due course, let us hope; brilliant commonsense is the watch-word word.

*** Literary critics must have felt with me a nasty slap in

the face at the police suppression of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow.” ’The book, of course, is

disgusting, and can give nobody’s good taste any delight ; but what are we critics for that, to keep our own

house in order, we must call in the police? The excuse of the police, I take it, is that we are incapable of the

task; and I am afraid that they are right. The co- existence of reviews and advertisements converts many an honest gamekeeper of literature into an abettor of

poachers. But I would still prefer that we be left to our job without humiliating help. Give us time, time, time, and we shall restore taste to its own. Not all the silly reviews of “The Rainbow” were, however, venal. Long after its suppression Mr. de Tunzelmann wrote of it to the “Athenaeum” in this manner : “The book was not pleasant to read, and its unpleasantness increased steadily from start to finish. . . Yet I read it through

with an interest that likewise increased as I read it.” Queer experience, is it not, to find interest increasing with unpleasantness? There are horrid names for such a taste.

*** To the current “Athenaeum” M. Jean Finot contributes- an article advocating an intellectual (or, rather,

belletristic) entente between England, France, and Italy. The Germans, he has confirmed recent research, have really no originality in literature at all, and never had. They have lived by borrowing from other nations. England, France, and Italy, on the other hand, have the honour of sharing every existing literary school between them. These three exhaust letters. Italy is the oldest of the three in culture, which she first re- ceived from antiquity and then passed on to France and to ourselves. Is it not therefore probable that a new entente of the three nations will produce a new Renais- sance? I am hopeful myself, as my readers know, of the possibility of a new Renaissance after the war; but without a fresh antiquity from which to call up and revivify an old spirit, I see no source of novelty in any or all of the three Western cultures. None has any longer so much to give that a pooling of our resources would amount to more than a new fashion. A renaissance-

without a spirit to be reborn is impossible. Once more, I direct the attention of my entente colleagues to Indian literature. If the rediscovery of Greek culture gave us mediaeval and modern Europe, the rediscovery of ancient Indian culture-

will give us the Europe of to-morrow. Nothing else will.

To go back is to go forward.

*** The complete English translation of Stendhal’s

“L’Amour’’ to which I referred last week is published by Messrs. Duckworth at five shillings. From the

translator’s introduction I derive an answer to my question why few of my readers have commented upon the chapters currently published in these columns : as it is in our day so was it in the days of Stendhal him- self ! Of the first edition only about a hundred copies were sold; of the second edition the same number; and a hundred years have had to pass before a complete English translation has been published. A correspon- dent, in a shockingly ill-written letter, takes me to task for being the means of translating Stendhal’s “piffle” for NEW AGE readers. He has not a good word to say for it. On the contrary, I stand by my judgment : the book is one of the classics on the subject, and will never fail of its hundred readers a generation. That the translation has appeared at the right moment goes, of course, without saying, since it first began to appear here. But the reason may be, repeated. Everything points to a coming decline in the spiritual status of women in this country; and it is the most disquieting phenomenon I can observe. Without a restoration of the status of Love, the status of women will decline

irrecoverably. That is why any classic on the subject deserves now to be circulated, and with all speed.

An Appendix gives a brief account of the “Courts of Love’’ which existed in the twelfth century France of chivalry. I have for a long time looked for in- formation on these remarkable social tribunals of taste in conduct, but have looked in vain. Here is a work for one of our numerous compilers and researchers-to dig up and present to us the history of these Courts. With fresh and bewildering problems of the relations of the sexes opening up daily-problems for which both law and convention are ill-adapted, and to which they are slow to adapt themselves-I see in the restora- tion of the mediaeval Courts of Love a possible means of happy solution. Why, instead of hauling each other before the newspapers or calling each other privately over the coals, should not men and women of to-morrow row create for themselves tribunals of honour to which they may submit their grievances for the judgment of their peers? The idea is worth discussion.

R. H. C.

The Sale of Letters. [SCENE: An Auctioneer’s Sate-Room]

AUCTIONEER Now, gentlemen, take your places, please. I am selling a fine assorted variety of lots to- day. Keep the bidding brisk. Cash on delivery. Credit given on the usual security. Now, sir (to his clerk), bring up Lot No, I and just dust him over first. Comb his hair and tie up his bootlaces. He won’t fetch a threepenny bit without. I have pleasure, gentlemen, in introducing Criticism to your notice. Yes, sir, he has come down a bit in the world. But he comes of an illustrious stock, from a family distinguished for three hundred years, in valour, wisdom and dignity.

1ST DEALER : A fig for his family ! What can the man do? He’s so feckless, knock-kneed and dishevelled a fellow, that I warrant he’s only fit for the lightest

task-work. Speak up, my friend, and put up-your price, if you can.

CRITICISM : I am Praise-Universal Praise. There is nothing too mean and paltry but that I will praise it. Lowly in estate and attenuated in body, get me my lungs of brass and I will cry “Hallelujah” to all things that you bid me. I will bring shekels down from heaven with my praise. In a temper so honeyed as mine, there is no place for gall or rancour.

AUCTIONEER : He is quite right, sir. As a domestic servant, I can cordially recommend him. . He is obliging-

dutiful, well-mannered, and obedient. And he minds his Ps and Qs You will find that lie will not presume at all, as so many domestics do nowadays. And, between ourselves, sir, he is not averse to necessary little parlour jobs that some servants find a trifle objec- tionable. He will take it as all in the business. I should suggest he would make a good footman. That resonant voice of his would be serviceable in announcing the guests you are anxious to please at your

receptions. 1ST DEALER : Well, well, I’ll give a sovereign for him,

and see what I can do with him. AUCTIONEER : The next article, gentlemen, is Prose,

of which I have some extra special paying lines. Now, Grasshopper up on to that perch!

2nd DEALER : Who is this daft young flibbertigibbet, with his hatchet face, his pointed nose, his protrud- ing ribs, and his bony limbs? Upon my soul, he is all angles and no curves. He shoots his tongue out at me like a viper. He twitches his arms so spasmodically and wags his head so abruptly, that he is surely either in a perpetual ague, or a marionette fixed to an invisible

string. Ho there! my Jack-o-Lanthorn in a teacup, and what can you do?

THE GRASSHOPPER : He entered the room. He shut the door. He flicked a speck of dust off the mantel- piece. He knocked out the ashes of his pipe. The crepuscule was pregnant with destinies. She bent over a chrysanthemum. She smelt it. She inhaled it. And their love was a little lone child. Aslumber in the wilderness.

AUCTIONEER: You see, sir, in the eyes of my crisp young friend, eternity settles in a rasher of bacon. A casual gesture and the soul is a firmament of flame. Half a minute, sir. He may not be good for the eye- sight, but for a sluggish liver-? No more lethargy after office hours ! As a pick-me-up, he is worth all the drugs in the market.

2nd DEALER : Oh, well, knock him down to me for a five-pound note.

AUCTIONEER : Now, then, Lot 3, enough of these fandangoes ! Prance as you will, but only on the pedestal.

No, gentlemen, it is not so difficult to get the measure of him, as you might suppose. He’s called Prose Empirical and is an indispensable article for salesmen.

He has a style about him that would make the sober planets reel out of their orbits. If any of you have a a large emporium, buy him, and let him cry your goods at the portals. He will so invert his sentences; he will

,

so twist nouns into adverbs and adjectives into exclamation- marks; he will prank out his style with such

frills and ribbons, he will feather it with such inventions of his own that the populace, having no plummet to his meaning, will thereby stand the more in awe of him. So that, thinking you possess the riches of the Orient, they will flock into the stores and buy what you will.

SPECTATOR : Here is the strangest mountebank. He is hung with bells and tassels, which jingle and flutter as he moves. He beats his stomach, so that it resounds like a drum. He has bound his beard with scarlet threads and fastened each fillet to his eyebrows. His hair has wires through it, so that it stands upright. And his hands are covered with metal rings. He is a bogey to frighten children,

PROSE EMPIRICAL : Look you-this piece of cloth at rIgd. the yard 1 This a totality that glistens like the rays of the Trinobantes. At your blouse but stitch it, and the purple linen OF Cambyses (mark ye !) will fade to dun. ’Tis very cloth of very cloth !

200; AUCTIONEER : Going, for 200. Going ! Gone ! On

two conditions, I can turn my hand to anything you please. One is that what you set me to do shall by nature be dull, stupid and commonplace. The second is that I get a thumping commission on it. For I am called Prose Feverish, and, by my neuropathic arts, I can transform the most humdrum thing into a regular epilepsy. At will, my mouth will spout laughter, and my eyes will gush tears. My heart will burn to command-

like a live coal, and my muscles contract to anger, desperation, enthusiasm or frenzy. If I employ the same devices and go through the same motions every time, you mustn’t mind. My vocation naturally imposes a bit of a strain on me.

AUCTIONEER : I think you will agree, sirs, that this article obviously speaks for himself.

4th DEALER : And, as obviously, he’ll be going cheap. Three guineas, and not a penny more.

AUCTIONEER : My last lot in the Prose lines is called Modern Mysticism. He is rather inclined to stoutness, and his figure, it is true, is none too precisely and sharply proportioned. But, then, in so excellent a cook, good or bad looks don’t make any difference. I will, indeed, be quite frank with you, and admit that he is sometimes apt to mix his dishes and put too much flour into all of them. But there’s nobody like him for puddings.

MODERN MYSTICISM (musingly) : The pate de foie gras of Soul-Insubstantiality is not readily digestible. But add thereunto the Cerebos of Eternity and the Divine Collation will be absorbed into the very vital essences.

5th DEALER : All right. I’ll take him for LIOO. But 1 think I’ll keep him to plain proteids.

AUCTION EER : Attention, gentlemen. The next item on the programme is a lady. Her name is Poetry, and she has the best references. She was in her last situa- tion fifteen years, and her mistress (a Duchess) was forced to dismiss her only because she displayed tenta- tive symptoms of an unseemly independence. She had some words with her ladyship about sanity, health, beauty, vision, form, and synthesis, and a Iot of other old-fashioned notions. So, of course, she had to go. But, I assure you, gentlemen, that she knows her place too well to repeat the offence. She is fully aware that that kind of thing does not pay in a well-regulated household. She has told me herself that she is deter- mined to keep this discontented and cantankerous side of her nature in subjection. So that I can recommend her unreservedly as a good general. Permit me to out- line some of the manifold duties she can perform. For normal routine, she is invaluable. She will clean the doorstep, polish the door-knobs, wash up the pots and pans, empty the basins, and scrub the floors with the hest of them ! And, mind you, never a rest, never a murmur, never a flourish! She does it all with a will, as though she liked nothing better, as though there were

1ST DEALER, 50; 2ND DEALER, IOO; 3RD DEALER,

LOT No. 4: Stop that noise and listen to me!

nothing better in the world. Then, again, she is a rare hand at arranging flowers in vases and in making up the beds. She can put sentiment into ordering the ferns, the forget-me-nots, the aspidistras, the lobelias and the geraniums to the best advantage, that you have only to look at them to feel yourself drowsing into the lushest of beds and the most honeyed of dreams. And she will make your pillow so downy, your blankets so woolly, and your sheets so smooth and comfortably tucked, that you will fall into slumber, your thoughts entwined with geraniums, lobelias, aspidistras, forget- me-nots and ferns. And she will do you as much credit outside the house as inside. Perhaps from the effects of overwork, she is, I grant you, rather puny in stature, pinched in flesh, and anaemic in blood. But in- her Sunday- day best, with velvet in her dress, feathers in her hat, and flounces to her petticoat, she will in her Edition de Luxe style more than make up for these deficiencies. Now, gentlemen, A500 at least for this promising lot.

A500; 6TH DEALER, &%o. AUCTIONEER : Going ! gone for jG6oo.

AUCTIONEER : NOW, then, my ’Frisco desperado, the company awaits you. What a sprightly, fantastic fellow it is, to be sure! See, how he darts to the pedestal, like a javelin ! What panther litheness ! What terrier nimbleness! Up, my gallant, and make your bow ! This, gentlemen, is Signor Realistico Norella, a tart snippet of a man, whose wit, if you question-

him,. will, I promise you, gamble and tumble and pirouette among you like a kitten.

IST DEALER : What manner of a man is this grave and reverent Signor who approaches us with such solemnity ? Observe how he turns his eyes upon the floor, this way and that, so that not a particle of dust shall escape him. Why, he has actually picked a bit up and put it in his pocket-book. Look ! he is adding some decimal or other to a long line of figures in it. And, as if he were not bulky enough already, he is wearing the most heavily padded clothes. What is that that you are carrying in your hand, my friend?

THE SIGNOR : My coat-of-arms-arms tertiary, school- cap rampant on three gules baby’s rattle, the whole blazened on a striped field University blazer.

1st DEALER : What are you, and where do you come from ?

THE SIGNOR : I was born in a cradle at Manchester, in Lancashire at 4.35 a.m. on the morning of March 17, 18s.. I was a sensitive, receptive, and precocious

child, and at 4.50 a.m., I vented a sigh of satisfaction. I had made up my mind. I had formulated my inten- tions. I had crystallised my deliberations. I had seen my way clear. I had taken due and proper counsel with myself. I would go to Westborough School. Then I would go to Magdiol College, in the University of Oxbridge-

At 4.60, I called For food. My stomach clamoured for it.

IST DEALER : Thank you: and can you give me any reason why I should purchase you?

. THE SIGNOR : I will tutor your son in the mesmerising faculty. I will teach him to render an exact account of his biographical experiences in one day. Having acquired facility in this direction, he will be instructed to repeat the process at his preparatory school, then at

Westborough School, then at Magdiol College, in the University of Oxbridge. He will then add them all up together. Then he will go to the West End and pilot a poor derelict from the Underworld.

THE SIGNOR : Oh, then, he will go to press.

That’s right. Here he comes ! This lot, gentlemen, is called Popular Novelist. He is, as you perceive, an ingenious contrivance. Made entirely of aluminium to keep him light on his feet. His use? Well, he is a very serviceable-

article, because you can keep him in the house as a sort of general practitioner. No more delays ! No more doctors’ bills! Those pouches hanging from him and

I ST, 2ND, 3RD, and 4TH DEALERS, 6400 ; 5TH DEALER,

My mother was aged. . . .

IST DEALER : And then?

AUCTIONEER (to his clerk) : Press the button. !st DEALER : 30s.

those candles sticking out of him? Well, the pouches are full of patent drug and medicine bottles, and the handles are cranks and levers, which, when manipulated, will apply, through the hands, specific remedies for specific maladies. Turn this one, and he will clap on a mollifying plaster. Are your nerves jaded with business-

Does your system need stimulating? He will rub on this quickening salve and send up your spirits and your dividends. Pull back this crank, and his mouth will spurt a cooling, perfumed spray over your body. And here, gentlemen, is a convenient hypodermic syringe.

POPULAR NOVELIST : Clank ! Clank ! Clank ! 2nd DEALER: Yes, he ought to be useful. L10,ooo

for him. AUCTIONEER: Next lot! This young beau is Mr.

Street Velliers, a cousin of Popular Novelist, and well received in the drawing-rooms and basements of Society Mansions. His office is to be a kind of errand boy. Send him into the streets, and, with a nod here, a beck there, a twitch of his eyelid, and a curve of his lip, he will whisper discreetly in people’s ears. He is a bit

unsavoury to look at, with that shuffle, that oiled hair, and that sallow complexion. But he holds the hat for every whisper, and in a year or two-well, judge for yourselves.

3rd DEALER : I’ll give the same money as my friend

AUCTIONEER: Get back, sir! How many times haven’t I told you you were not for sale?-(To his clerk): Put a label on him and pack him off to the Master. The rascal has already received a commission

from his last purchaser and he is always trying to get more, the sly dog, by getting himself sold to somebody else, as if his new Master were not the best deal he is likely to make! . . . Please excuse the

interruption, gentlemen. The tatterdemalion you just saw bedizened with so many liveries is a fellow called

Carmelist or Carmelsworth or Calmcliffe or Marmelite I forget which. He is a self-made man and has had

a meteoric career-rose straight out of the gutter. And he is a rare conjurer, I can tell you. One of his most famous tricks, when quite young, was to sprinkle the word “English” with a handful of gutter water and to change it into “British.” Well, we have all benefited by that. Of course, after that he was in great de- mand, and has been sold over and over again. Quite recently he was bought by an illustrious Pultocrat (pardon the pun, gentlemen), who is well known ‘here. A solid and excellent business man. Last came Dame Literature, of a tender majesty, of

comely and sober mien, wonderfully proportioned in all her parts. The seas and rivers I saw winding in the palm of her hand ; all the foliage and flowers of the earth waved in the folds of her hair. The race of man had set its lines across her brow; through her eyes flowed all the colours of the past and sent their beams into the future. In the texture of her flesh glowed veins of liquid fire, coiling and forking one within another in transcendental harmony, and truth crouched trembling against her bosom. And, as she stept upon the pedestal, she hid her face in her hands and wept. Nor would the company look upon her be- cause of her nakedness.

-~IO,OOO. . . .

AUCTIONEER : Any bids for this person? DEALERS ALL : What’s the use of her? Where are

her clothes? We can’t very well take her into a re- spectable house.

She’s an extra lot and has unfortunately no testimonials. you might Perhaps stick her on top of the bookshelf, as a kind of ornament.

She ought to he sent out of the country.

another day.

What can she do? AUCTIONEER : Well I hardly know.

Dealers : What, in that costume?

AUCTIONEER : Well, I’ll see what I can do with her. Thank YOU very much, gentlemen.

HAROLD MASSINGHAM.

A Notebook. By T. E.H,

RISK AND ETHICS. Behind the Liberal pacifists’ inca- pacity to understand the importance of war lies probably this fundamental error. Certain historical accidents- security being the first-have made ’it difficult for them to grasp the nature of Risk; not of the incidental kind, but of Risk as an ultimate thing; they cannot take certain entirely relative things for absolute.

This explains two things : more proximately their incapacity to realise the consequences of defeat, and

further back the source of the whole ideology from which this incapacity springs.

First, the proximate effect : They hypostatise their school atlases, and fail to realise that others do not regard Europe as fixed like arithmetic, but wish to change it; not temporarily and minutely, but perma- nently and on the large scale, justifying themselves by talk of dynamic as opposed to static justice. Moreover, regarding democracy, and all the other things for which they care, as grounded in the nature of things, they cannot understand that these can be seriously threat- ened by an arbitrary irrational cause like war. Their inane confidence rises above details, for they never realise that the best things are constructions, full of risk and not inevitable.

As for the ideology: It is based as a rule on a relativist utilitarian ethics. Why ? Because taking relative things for absolute, it has no need of the real absolute., In the shadow of these mountains which are not really mountains, it lives securely and comfortably, finding a sufficient support in a sceptical rationalism. Individuals in a condition of danger, when these pseudo- absolutes melt away into a flux, require once more a real absolute, to enable them to live. While this may be admitted as a fact, it may be explained away by saying : “This occasional and abnormal state requires a temporary but unreal consolation, as men when ill re- quire medicine. It is natural that the sailor should be superstitious, that each ship in Pierre Loti’s ‘Ice- landers’ should carry a Madonna. In a state of flux rafts are required, but not on dry land.” Or they might give as a parallel Pascal’s advice to the sceptic on the remedy for unbelief : “There are people who know the way . . . follow the way by which they began . . . by acting as if they believed . . . taking the holy water, having masses said . . . this will make you believe and deaden your acuteness. ” But this is always misrepresented. It is not pragmatism, you are not to deaden your natural acuteness, but the false and artificial acuteness of an artificial condition. Living in a sceptical atmos- phere, you are in an unnatural attitude which prevents you seeing objective truth. Taking the holy water, the attempt to assume another artificial attitude, will at least break up the first state, and, making your mind a tubula rasa will enable you to see the truth as it is objectively, independent entirely, of your attitudes.

* The same is true of security and ethics. It is not by way of privation that danger makes us believe in abso- lute ethics, but that danger liberates-by making us see the relativity of the things we took to be fixed.

I put forward the contents of this note not as true but as a passage from a false to a true opinion. I at one time thought that the pragmatists, relativists, and humanists were right, and that all the “ideal” sciences, logic, mathema tics, ethics, etc., could all have meaning and validity only, in reference to the human mind; that the laws of thought were the ways in which the human mind had to think, that ethics was the way in which men must behave if they were to live

together, etc. Moreover, since man is the result of a long evolution in which accident must have played a considerable part, there is nothing inevitable about these actual characteristics of the human mind. If the path of’ evolution had been different, the categories which govern our thinking would have been different.

THE EXIT.

I could now give any of the accepted refutations of the falsity of this position; in the matter of logic, for example, those in the first volume of Husserl’s “Logische Untersuchungen.” But as I said at the

beginning, that is not my object in this note. I am only concerned here with a very much smaller matter, the means by which I did actually grope my way out of this error. I began to put the matter to myself in this

way-The human mind is not merely the mind of man, it is mind itself, as it must always be; not human mind but “it.” Take the kind of example a relativist might give: life on a supposed planet of which chlorine formed the surrounding atmosphere. If life could exist under such conditions it would obviously be very different from life as we know it, but if it managed to produce the highest type, the mental characteristics of this type would exactly resemble those of men, for they would be the inevitable characteristics of all mind. Many would admit this in a matter like arithmetic They would probably admit that if the chlorine men thought

arithmetically they would think that “two and two were four,” but I think it would also be true of almost every other side of the mind. It would be true of their ethics and even of their affections. There are certain state- ments about the difference, for example, between such apparently human and relative things as “love” and “sympathy” which would also be absolutely true of the affections of the imaginary men.

To turn back again for a moment to the picture of the “lines” of evolution leading up to man; lines which might have had many different shapes. If you drop lead pellets down a funnel, the paths of each of the pellets will be different, but they all finish up in the same place, the tube to which the funnel narrows; for that is the only exit. In the same way one can say that whatever the lines of evolution that lead up to man might have been, the result would always have been the same, for man is the only exit from the animal world.

These very crude conceptions, constitute, at any rate, a first step away from subjectivism, though they still remain tainted with it. The fact asserted is true, but the explanation given “for it is not human mind but mind itself” is false, having exactly the subjectivism of the Kantian philosophy.

MAN AS A FALLEN ANGEL. That philosopher was called the “melancholy ” who taught that all things are in a flux; and certainly nothing is so de- pressing as incapacity to arrive at a fixed opinion. “If only,” a philosopher might say, “I could for once feel in my own subject, the absolute conviction that

accompanies my belief that Free Trade principles are rubbish. The further away from the centre the subject lies, the solider my conviction seems; and I intensely dislike having a hard circumference-

and a fluid hub.” If one wishes to luxuriate in this feeling, to heighten it artificially, one cannot do better than read through the back numbers of a philosophical review. I remember one occasion, when failing to find an article I was looking for, and depressed by the museum dome, I let myself drift aimlessly through the controversies of three years. When the last ounce of solidity seemed thus to melt away in the universal deliquescence, the thing became a horror, and I had to rescue myself. I drew up a list of antitheses, of perpetual subjects of dispute, on each of which I had convictions, based on a brutal act of assertion, which no argument could touch. These

were solid rock, whatever might be the extent of the flux elsewhere.

*** The first of these assertions was : “There is an abso-

lute difference between men and animals. It is impossible- to completely explain the nature of man, as a

complex development out of the animal world. ” This is perhaps best understood when it is taken

as the crucial instance of a number of parallel assertions- of a similar type; ’assertions which depend on

the answer to this question : “ Can all the phenomena

we are accustomed to call ‘higher’ be explained as complexes of ‘lower’ elements ? ” For the empirical philosophy this is so, and in every subject it tends to pursue the same kind of explanation. All “height” for it, then, is of the type of the

pyramid, a more or less elaborate construction of “lower” elements. For another philosophy, however, the “ higher.” phenomena contain an irreducible

element. As an example, I give the following sentence which I happen to have read to-day in Max Scheler’s

“Phanomenologie der Sympathiegefuhle ” : ‘‘One must entirely exclude all attempts to reduce love and hate to simpler facts or to any complex of such facts.” The difference may be illustrated by a grotesque example. Some years ago, the Reichstag passed a vote of censure on Bethmann-Hollweg, who took no notice of it whatever. This prompted a car- toon in which the Chancellor was represented with both his feet cut neatly off, but still upright, and smiling, being supported by the Kaiser’s hand stretched from a cloud. Is there anything like this in reality? or is the world with which philosophy deals entirely governed by the parliamentary system? (Perhaps the fact that this system, and the empirical philosophy, grew up at the same time has some significance.) For the present, I content myself here with re-asserting that the contrast

between men and animals is the typical example of all these other antitheses. They all stand together.

*** I called the assertion I am discussing, a brutal assertion- in doing so, I was thinking of two things-of the

kind of conviction that attaches to the assertion, and of the manner in which the assertion should be made in face of all “idealist” humbug.

First, as to the conviction-in comparison with the variable opinion which we come to by argument, it seems to belong to another level of certitude altogether.

Psychologically, perhaps, for this reason. A man’s beliefs are made up of two strata, his opinions and what we call his prejudices, so that his whole attitude can be labelled (0 + P). Now, the only men it is possible to convert are those in which the (0) is not consonant with the (P). This disaccord is possible because most men are ignorant of the more central (P), and mistake their accidental opinions for their unchangeable prejudices. By a diffi- cult, but not impossible operation, a man’s own

fundamental prejudices may be laid bare. If he finds the opinions which he falsely took to be final, are not in accord with these prejudices, he may change them. Now to this conviction about the nature of man, no shadow of doubt is attached. It consequently seems to seek out the phenomenon which superficially throw the greatest doubt on it, and so place it in the greatest danger. It seeks out these things, precisely because the assertion of the absolute difference between men and animals in the events which seem most to obliterate that difference, manifests most definitely its own uncom- promising nature. Take the two phenomena often chosen to illustrate the animal nature of man-War and Sex. War is essentially human, and the pacifists falsify its nature when they attempt to reduce it to a development of animals’ struggles for food. And just because man is man, and not an animal, there is, in spite of many common elements, a profound and radical difference between the sexual unions of mankind and of animals.

Secondly, as to the manner in which the assertion should be made in face of “idealist” humbug.

“Idealism” in philosophy, is to a large extent, merely a specious substitute for religion. Being neither religious nor materialist, it depends on an endeavour to combine

incompatible things under cover of a conveniently obscure terminology, thus giving an unreal consolation to men. It is a bastard phenomena, and it is time it was got rid of, and the only way to get rid of it, is to face its plausible rhetoric, by the brutal question, “Is man an extra-natural phenomena or not? Does he differ absolutely from the animal world or not?”

Views and Reviews.

The Energetic Interpretation of History. The Nietzschean doctrine of “ A Yea, a Nay, a

straight line, a goal,” applied to the study of History, has resulted in a pattern that is as complicated as the “ mystical Rose of the mire,” of the evolution of which History is probably the record. From partisan to impartial history, from “ giving the Whig dogs a bad

time” to giving nobody a good time, was an obvious progress ; and impartial history became so dreadfully dull that Carlyle wasted a hurricane of abuse on Dryasdust-

Since then the interpretations of history have been numberless ; the economic interpretation ran con- currently with the biologic, and became as Dryasdust as impartial history. It is not so very long since Mr. Cecil Jane propounded a psychological interpretation of history; and among philosophers the moral inter-

pretation has never lost favour. The simple fact that the ideal History is a Universal History, a record of all that man has ever thought, done, and suffered, and

therefore is capable of proving everything (according to Cardinal Newman’s dictum that “by a judicious selection of facts you can prove anything”), does not diminish the enthusiasm with which every historical reformer approaches his task. Each one is confident that if only his goal be adopted, History will cease to merit the description of Dryasdust; it will become not only

accurately informative, but dynamic, vital, progressive. The point on which they all agree is that the History of every other school of historians is unutterably dull, useless, mere documentation; the point on which they all disagree concerns the method by which these dry bones may be made to live.

Mr. Hugh Taylor is, so far as I know, a new writer on these subjects; and he begins his very interesting essay* in the usual way. Exactly how his conception of History would affect the method of preparing the records he does not make clear, and we need not trouble to surmise; for what he really asks is that his- torians should try to prove the working in history of some principles other than those that they usually con- sider. The method of proof must necessarily remain the same, and the writing be still as dull as it was before. Luckily, his own work is not a History, but an essay in criticism of History and Political Theory, to which the reproach of dullness does not apply. Mr. Taylor’s prime contention is that we can understand the evolution of political system only if we search for the operation of some “unconscious tendency of Nature ” ; and discount heavily the value to the political progress of the race of the conscious and deliberate attempts of man to modify governmental conditions in his own favour. That he should look to “ some modification-

of the Darwinian struggle for existence ” for his clue to this tendency may be understood even from the title of his essay; but that he finds this modification in what he calls a ‘‘ struggle for distinction ” (Nietzsche called it a “ Will to Power ”) could not be discovered without reading the essay.

There is nothing very novel ini this conception; it informs the work of both aristocratic and democratic historians, who say “Yea” and “Nay” to what has been an obvious fact for centuries. But to regard this struggle for distinction as in any way comparable with a natural struggle for existence, with a hypothetical Nature securing the survival of the most distinguished strugglers, adds, I think, confusion to our consideration-

of the subject. If we are to accept the struggle for distinction as a natural tendency by means of which

* “Government by Natural Select Hugh Taylor. (Methuen. 3s. 6d. net.)

natural selection of governors and governments is secured- how are we to regard those forms of government

which Mr. Taylor criticises, which are apparently constructed- to minimise or prevent the struggle for

distinction resulting in the survival of the most distinguished- How did the conception of democracy, with

its denial of the superior fitness of any members of a community for any office in that community, arise if the chief force operative in political evolution is natural selection by means of a struggle for distinction? Even if we regard democracy as a form of artificial selection-

we have yet to be told what natural tendency prompts the denial not only of the struggle for dis- tinction, but of the struggle for existence within the democratic polity. It is an historical fact that demo- do not survive; but what is the natural ten- dency that ensures their disappearance, what is the scientific description of that tendency? On this point, Mr. Taylor is vague, if not entirely silent.

But if natural selection by a struggle for distinction be a fact, it is none the less apparent that it is precisely to artificial selection, to “ those deliberate attempts to modify governmental conditions” whose importance in political evolution he has denied, that Mr. Taylor ap- peals for the proper working of the natural tendency. A natural tendency that cannot achieve its own objects is surely not a determinate cause of progress. If we regard election, for example, as “the recognition of

superiority,” and therefore elect the men whom we re- gard as being the most suitable to govern the country, surely - natural selection has been superseded by con- scious, deliberate election, and the application of Darwinian-

principles to political evolution has been rendered invalid. Apart from this objection, it is un-

fortunately not true that election is a recognition of superiority, unless we limit the meaning of the word “superiority” to ‘‘superiority in electioneering. ” There

is no necessary connection between the power to obtain votes and the ability to govern the country; a good electioneer may be a bad representative, and,, if this be true, the value of election to natural selection of superiority is not clear. The criticism which Mr. Tay- himself directs to the electorate shows quite clearly that an ideal election is required to make the struggle for distinction result in the survival of the fittest to

govern; and ideal elections are hard to obtain. We have only to ask ourselves whether there is any

natural tendency to recognise superiority to see how impossible it is to secure an ideal election. The Plutarchian story of the Athenian democrat who voted for the ostracism of Aristides “because he could not bear to hear everybody call him ‘the Just,’ ” illustrates a natural tendency to recognise superiority that certainly-

does not secure the survival of the most distinguished- Pope Hildebrand dying at Falerno, could

say truly : “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile”; and in that phrase describe a natural tendency that is fatal to the survival of supe- riority. But I need not multiply examples to show that, even in politics, natural selection does not mean the survival of the best except in the tautological sense of “the best fitted to survive,” Survival of the fittest always demands, in politics as elsewhere, adaptation to environment, whatever the environment may be ; and Mr. Taylor has really substituted a Eutopia for the real world of politics to-day. What Tolstoy said of Socialism really demonstrated the futility of relying upon election to secure the “best.” “Socialism,” he said, “would only be possible if the wise and pure were elected. None but the wise and pure can elect the wise and pure. But if everyone were wise and pure, there would be no need of Socialism.” Mr. Taylor’s essay, although by no means satisfactory as a theory of history, contains much illuminating criticism of poli- tical ideas and methods; and, if his suggested ideal of

government is a mere advocacy of Energetics, it serves to provide him with a standard of criticism that

him to clarify the confusion of current political thought. A. E. R.

REVIEWS The Tale of the Armament of Igor, A.D. 1185.

A Russian Historical Epic. Edited and translated by Leonard A. Magnus, LLB. (Oxford University Press. 6s. net.)

The original manuscript of this old Russian poem was purchased with a number of others in 1795 from a

monastery by Count Musin-Pushkin, an enthusiastic collector. - In 1800 he published the text of the poem with a modern Russian version. Both the original manuscript and the bulk of the first printed edition were destroyed at the burning of Moscow. In 1864, however, another copy of the original was discovered among the papers of Catherine 11, and it is on this text that Mr. Magnus has based his present edition.

The Song of Igor has certain features in common with such national epics as Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland. Like them, it is of unknown authorship; like them, it describes legendary or semi-legendary deeds of valour; like them, it mentions persons whose identity is not always easy to trace. It has’ the artless beauty of primitive writings, but it has also much of their obscurity and incoherence. Originally it was printed as continuous prose, and Mr. Baring, in his ‘‘Outlines of Russian Literature,” actually calls it “ a prose epic.” But a fairly reasonable scheme of

versification has been devised for it by Korsch, which has been adopted by Mr. Magnus. Apart from the metrical question, the text itself contains a number of corrupt and unintelligible passages, which have

attracted the usual crowd of commentators with the usual stores of ingenuity. Mr. Magnus, criticising,

conjecturing, emendating with the rest of them, contrives- to fill his pages with the outward signs of erudition-

Now a competent editor of an obscure early Russian text should be equipped with a sound know- ledge of Slav philology in general. It is difficult to credit Mr. Magnus with any such attainment. In his “Concise Grammar of the Russian Language,” for instance, he mentions Moravian among the. Slavonic languages, a statement which does not suggest that he has proceeded far even with the rudiments of the subject. (He might as well say that Yorkshire speech was one of the Germanic languages.) Hence, where he follows other editors he is fairly safe; when he launches forth on speculations of his own, he manages to achieve some highly doubtful conclusions. It would be out of place in this review to stray far beyond the interests of the general reader into the preserves of the special- ist ; one instance must therefore, suffice. On p. 98 Mr. Magnus remarks: “It is curious that the Slavonic

languages with three different words for sleep have no expression for dream, not even such a secondary form as the Latin somniare.” If Mr. Magnus had gone a little closer into the matter, he would not have found it so curious. There is a Czech verb sniti, to dream, from which is derived the expression snilo se mz, I dreamt. Other Slav languages have cognate forms which need not be quoted here.

Apart from the controversial passages (which, for a poem of 770 lines, are relatively numerous) the trans- lation will pass muster. Mr. Magnus obviously has his own ideas about English style. Thus, in the in-

troduction (p. ii), we are told that Pekarski discovered the second copy of the manuscript “while burrowing among the private archives of Catherine II while a little further on (p. iv) reference is made to the “rather sploshy and irregular metre of the ballads.” The lack of critical instinct which the use of these phrases reveals renders the enterprise of Mr. Magnus as a

translator of this dignified old poem all the more daring. It is, therefore, not surprising to find him using such

inappropriate words as, irremediable, potentate, obloquy, contemporary, in his translation. It is also not surprising to come across such a phrase as “seldom did the villeins shout gee-up” (p. 8).

The task of reading the proofs for a book of this nature must have been difficult; it would be unfair to

blame Mr. Magnus severely because his list of errata is incomplete. Here are a few slips which have escaped his notice: eriginal (p. iii), gants (p. xiv), he (p. xxxv) should, according to the Russian text quoted, read we; spervu (p. 120) with one or two words following, is clearly a misreading of a Czech title. Mr. Magnus cannot, of course, be held responsible for the quality of the Russian printing, which, especially in the notes, is not worthy of the publishers.

The Victorians, By Netta Syrett. (Fisher Unwin. 6s.) Miss Netta Syrett offers us a long and elaborate

study of the development of a girl with literary abilities. As subjective history, it is remarkably well done ; although we must say that Miss Syrett has not yet presented her heroine fully. We are told that she is, in suitable circumstances, witty; but Miss Syrett only states the fact without exemplifying it. She is so determined to show the pathos of the situation that she

omits everything that would mitigate the suffering of her heroine; with the consequence that she is represented-

almost constantly in a state of bad temper. Her isolation from all the inferences of culture that she re- quired, the complete lack of understanding of her character and the constant repression of her quite innocent desires by her grandmother, the bullying of Miss Quayle, who believed that a girl with literary gifts could master mathematics and bring glory to the school if she chose, all this is admirably well done, and

constitutes a most formidable indictment of the Victorian ideas of education. But, so far, we have only Miss Syrett’s word for the gifts of her heroine, ’ and they are used by the characters in this book only to provoke the heroine to the exhibition of her most unlovely characteristics. As this is only the first volume of what, we suppose, will be a trilogy, we can

congratulate Miss Syrett on her wonderful fidelity to nature in the development of her heroine She passes through many phases in this volume, from the prison of her home, with an occasional liberation of body and spirit effected by a visit to a woman who did under- stand her (this woman subsequently dies of a most mysterious disease ; her appearance resembling that of Mrs. Skewton in Dombey but without any of the allied symptoms) to the school in North London, where she suffered even worse agonies at the hands of a New Woman. For a time, she drops into a Socialist set, and at least hears of things which, as Wordsworth

would say “God knows, are done in England every day, but, thank God, are never spoken of”; has a London season, and meets- some of the Yellow Book crowd, to her great delight. But all these things pass before her, or over her, provoking an appropriate re- sponse; but they have not, by the time this book ends, been co-ordinated in thought or assimilated into character. The novel which she is supposed to have written, the success of which is the theme of the last chapter, is purely autobiographical ; and Rose Cottingham-

remains a person of some varied experiences and with a reputed literary gift, but not, as yet, a character. We await the next volume with some interest. By the way, Marlowe did not write : “Is this the face that burnt a thousand ships?”

Tuberculosis : A General Account of the Dis- ease, its Forms Treatment, and Prevention. By A. J. Jex-Blake, M.D. (Bell. 2s. 6d. net.)

The author has attempted to give, within the compass of about two hundred pages, a general and detailed

account in simple language of Tuberculosis. The attempt is entirely successful, and, accepting the author’s

premisses, the argument is both clear and accurate The author accepts the germ theory of Tuberculosis; and although alternative theories are considered, it did not fall within the scope of the author’s purpose to deal with them exhaustively. But although the germ theory is postulated, the various treatments based on that theory are subjected to searching scrutiny, and the general conclusion that they all have only an

empirical value is reached, That the scientific cure should lay so far behind the scientifically demonstrated cause of the disease is indeed lamentable; and we begin to wonder whether the scientific demonstration of the cause is indeed as clear as the author believes. If

Tuberculosis is a local infection by germs, instead of a physiological tendency to re-act to any abnormal stimulus by a tuberculous change, it is not easy to see why a positive result of von Pirquet’s tuberculin test on the skin should be regarded as proof of the existence of tuberculosis elsewhere in the body. The author deals much too cursorily with the “demineralisation of the tissues” theory ; and the attribution of the good results obtained by the “remineralisation” treat- ment to “the excellent general advice and dieting” given at the same time (which is the author’s usual method of sceptically regarding all reputed cures) tends only to the invalidation of the germ theory. For of what value is the knowledge of the specific cause if a specific cure cannot be based upon it, if the only cer- tainty of improvement lies in the correction of a general physiological tendency by such general means as rest, fresh air, good food, and freedom from worry? The author repudiates the theory of hereditary predisposition or immunity; but adopts the theory of acquired immu- nity by reaction to slight infections to explain the fact revealed at post-mortem examinations that practically everybody is tuberculous. But whatever we may think of the theoretical structure of the book, the fact that the author insists, first and last, on the value of gene- ral hygienic measures, and describes them, makes this book of real value to the general public. Practically the whole of the second part of the book is of value to the general practitioner, for it resumes a mass of evidence that, in most cases, he has not time to exam- ine for himself. The final chapter on “Prevention” raises again the question of the validity of the author’s theory; for if immunity is only to be obtained by re- action to slight infections, the destruction of the chances of slight infection should result in a diminution of acquired immunity. But theory apart, the book is a clearly written summary of the orthodox

confusion on this subject; and as no townsman, and particularly- no Londoner, can afford to be neglectful of

his health in this connection, the general directions given by the author in clear and simple language may be confidently recommended to his attention.

Cleopatra a Gipsy: A Romance. By Arthur F.

We could have dispensed with the “Introductory” and “Interjectory” chapters of this book, wherein the author relates, unnecessarily and unconvincingly, the untrue story of the origin of his narrative. For the rest, it is a very melodramatic story, set in the period of James the First, of the poor unbefriended youth who subsequently discovers that he is brother to a member of the peerage, the said peer being one of the villains of the story. Until the penultimate chapter, when the wicked lord is shot, Michael is in love with one Mistress Cleeve; but as she is shot at the same time, and Michael is loved by a gipsy, after six or seven years, during which period the gipsy has served in his household without his knowledge, the good Lord Canton marries the gipsy. There is much fighting and chasing throughout the book; but we single out for particular praise the siege of the inn-cellar. A few of the characters are very well portrayed ; Lady Mazard, for instance, and Will Curtice, and even Mr. Sacker- son. But we do not believe in Miraben; and Mr. Wallis’ attempts to portray the different conception of moral values held by the gipsy are very clumsy. But the story bustles its way through many incidents; and we see Spanish mutineers escaping from a court of first instance, and a band of murderous gipsies capturing-

the hero, and are introduced to a company of King’s Players who perform Shakespeare and create riots. It is a novel of substance rather than of style, and is a very good example of its kind.

Wallis. (Sampson Low. 6s.)

Pastiche, ENGLISH OPERA AT THE SHAFTBSBURY.

Hans Breitmann gife ein obera- He write de vords himself;

Frau Garnett’s “ Dostoevshky ” He took down from de shelf,

Dook all de lofely language, Den valked to Vardour Shtreet

Und heard de boets shpeaking, Und den vent home to eat.

Hans Breitmann gife ein obera- Vot ish dot obera now?

Dey dalk soch fonny English, Dey all say ‘( Dee ” und (( Dou.”

De shmoogglers dalk of “duty,” De maids of a ‘(quarrel,”

De shtreet-boys shpeak like brinces, “ Vilt go, knave?” (( Yea, I vill.”

Wittowka, she vos Carmen- I tink she coom from Shpain.

De ghorus valked across de shtage, Bot ron round gvick again!

De scenery vos voonder, De soldiers’ pouts vos fine-

Bot dey vos not English Carmen; HANS BREITMANN, DEY VOS DINE!

C. E;. B.

MANUSCRIPT (Discovered on a Corpse in Bedford Square).

Yes yes yes I am writing this as I creep along. I left Holborn nearly two months ago to find Tavistock Square. After several misdirections I reached Russell Square and was thence directed to take the first to the left and then the third to the right-the left I should say-and then keep straight on. I followed this information but soon arrived in a neighbourhood where both Tavistock Place and Russell Square were unknown. I found the latter again at last and commenced a terrible round of the Square which lasted for three days and nights. At last, exhausted from lack of food and sleep and from foot- soreness consequent on following misdirections I fell in a faint upon the steps of the Imperial Hotel. The porter who picked me up gave me precise directions, but once again I got lost in the obscurity of over there by them trees and then to the left--the right I should say-and then to the right and right again. Only after eighteen terrible hours of agony did I find my way back to him. This time he sent-two lift-boys to aid me. One we lost altogether, but the other in less than three hours led me to Tavistock Place. He said he had been born there and sort of remembered it like. I gave him a five-pound note and he went away. I was met by a disappointment. My friend whom I wanted to see had moved his lodgings to Bedford Square. I cannot describe the agonies I have suffered in the last six weeks. Eight thousand two hundred and ninety-eight times I have been directed into Gordon Square, no less than eighteen thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight times into Woburn Square, two thousand four hundred and twice into Queen’s Square, which is not a square but a triangular oblong, and twenty-five thousand two hundred and seventy-three times into Bloomsbury Square. I have been sent back to Russell Square not less often than nine hundred and seventeen thousand four hundred and thirty times. Once I was frightened by the apparition of New Oxford Street

screaming in my path, and Hart Street often rises up and strikes me as I pass. I have surveyed the British Museum from every possible direction north, north-north- east north-east east-north-east east east-south-east south- east south-south-east to west-north-west north-west and

north-north-west. I am writing this with my own blood. I have met three hundred thousand people who are strangers to this part, one half million and six who knew the way but have forgotten it and advise me to ask some- one else; more than three hundred and eighteen thousand have told me that Bedford Square is somewhere near here, um yes it’s either over there or over there or let me see is it over there well take the first to the left and then the third to the right-the left I should say-and then keep straight on. It is growing very dark. I fear I am going Zeppelinsane. Excuse me, sir, I am saying which is the quickest way to Bedford Square. Oh yes I see thank you the first to the right and then the third to the left-the

right you should say-and then keep straight on. Thank you sir thank you. Here I am at the first to the right. Yes yes yes. The first. Second. Third to the

left-the right I should say-and I am keeping straight on. I have never been here before I think. I see an open place and hear strange voices. It is growing very very dark. They are speaking French. Dites-moi, kind messieurs, what is the name of this place? Bed Bed Bedford-

Square! ! ! ! ! Thank you messieurs thank you. Oh. After two months I have found it. I am shaken with cubisms. A great darkness is coming over me. I can go no further. . . . (Here the manuscript ends with a dying smudge.) C. E. B.

EXPLORATION. One sees, at length, what childhood brought : Grave toys, at first, and secret thought. Soon man’s true heritage appeared, Vast oceans beckoned, vessels steered To isles uncharted. Coral caves Lurked in the windings of the waves. Commerce spread wide. What merchandise, What incorruptible argosies (Fierce pirates baffled every tide Brought back for feasts of Barmecide ! Battles were joined. With axe’s edge, or turn the spike For joy of deftness, untaught yet To shiver at the bayonet. The games men work at, children play. I can see aeroplanes to-day- Then saw them not, could scarcely tell Their outsides, but the metal shell Bowelled with intricate enginery Enclosed me round and bore me high (Farewell to Genies!) through the sky. Next seas divide. In vernal deeps, Where windless vegetation sleeps, Green portholes peer. Who could have told That fathoms deep such gleams unfold Cities, and fishes thread the maze Of dim Venetian waterways, Based in the fundamental sea?

Life, therefore, means exploring. We Shall set more careful sail, and slow Over the main our course will grow. No dreaming. There’s a land, it seems, Where truth is truth and dreams are dreams A world’s behind. Upon the view New seas rise, vague horizons new Beckon. Our canvas shakes in the common breeze, Upon our latest tracks shall burst The far-off magic of the first. Never too long shall winch hang dead Above dead sails, or overhead The stars fade in the sea-mist, never Too long the rock-bound channels sever From far her seas. When trails grow dim O’er the blind waves such charts will swim (Floated, you fancy, from the shore), Rich for ransacking, bright with lore To light forgotten guesses. Say By what enchantment, should you stray Across the desert, just when worst Despair assails and fiercest thirst On the last inch amid the sands New-risen the green oasis stands. Oh, wonder that the world holds still A thrill to pass the ancient thrill! Oh, joy again past hope to feel The tremulous balance of the keel, Ecstatic poise of wings! It seems That truth is truth and dreams are dreams- Dreams that truth lights the torch for, truth That draws from dreams eternal youth.

’Twas good to strike

But though on daylight seas

A. E. WATTS.

FANCY PORTRAIT OF TWO GENTLEMEN, IN WHOSE HANDS THE DESTINY OF THE STATE IS DOUBTLESS

SECURE. Dear Alfred and Horatio, with their papers

Chock-full of sickly balderdash they utter, Are two gorillas cutting clumsy capers

As they proceed in file along the gutter. Dear Alfred slouches on ahead, and gambols ;

By turns he waxes rowdy, gamesome, frantic. Shaggy Horatio ponderously ambles

Behind him, aping every apish antic. P. SELVER.

Current Cant. “The war has opened a window in heaven.”-JOHN

“Patriotic polygamy. ”-GEORGE R. Sims

SANT. -

. “That most susceptible part of the German-his stomach. ”--“Daily Mail. ”

“Now England is awake its manhood insists on using a British shaving stick. ”--LEVER BROTHERS.

“The trouble which is leading to a probable revolution is due to the fact that in certain industries the workers are positively doped with high wages.”-“The Journal of Commerce. ”

‘‘A new type of schoolmaster. Comic papers and musical comedy tunes as a part of education.”-“Weekly Dispatch. ”

If I could play the piano I should spend each Friday afternoon playing to m bairns. I should give them ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band and ‘Hitchy Coo’; then I should play them a Liszt rhapsody and a Chopin waltz.” --A. S. NEIL.

“The ‘Sunday Pictorial’ may justly be described as a miracle. . . . It has already established itself as a national factor, inasmuch as it has become an essential part of that most sacred institution-the British Sunday. ”

-“Daily Mirror. ”

What shall I write about? One hundred and one authors. Money-making recipes. Writers’ brain book. Golden hints.”--“T.P.’s Weekly.”

“The pictures in the ‘ Illustrated Sunday Herald ’ not only fascinate but educate the children.”-“Farrow ’s Bank Gazette.”

--

“Tale-writing for money.

“jt;20,000,000 or ~30,000,000 should be saved by cutting down the amounts paid to our soldiers and their pampered

dependents.”-Lord DEVONPORT.

“Stanton is the candidate for noble Belgium. Stanton is the candidate for pillaged and prostrate Belgium. Stanton is the candidate for stricken and glorious Serbia. Men of Merthyr! the eyes of the United Kingdom, of the Empire, of the whole world are on you!”--Socialist NATIONAL DEFENCE COMMITTEE.

“My admiration for Miss Mordaunt is so unbounded that, in spite of the fact that I believe most critics agree with me, I almost lack the moral courage to put it into

words.”--Gerald GOULD in the “New Statesman.”

“I know of no agency more capable of exercising a more steadying effect upon our minds than the theatre.”

-Mrs. ARTHUR PLAYFAIR.

“You mustn’t talk like that. It’s not true. You mustn’t. It’s false. How dare you? I’m not that kind of blighter. I love you. You’re not my grandmother. You’re my age. , You’re just my own little sweetheart whom I adore. The way you crook your little finger, you are. It’s true . . .”--“Realms of Day,” by HUGH

“The ‘Sunday Pictorial’ may be justly described as the miracle of modern journalism . . . it has published nothing base. ”--“The Sunday Pictorial. ”

“Don’t worry if you think the farmers are making profits. It will encourage greater production and keep gold in this country.”-Mr. W. A. HAVILAND at the “Farmers’ Club.”

DE SELINCOURT.

- “I have made a discovery-a wonderful discovery about

the war. God cannot regenerate the Hun. Our duty is clear-we must extermina exterminate the breed.-Horatio BOT- Tomley

“Sunlight soap upholds our national tradition for quality and efficiency. Use Sunlight soap and peg a Union Jack on your clothes-line every wash-day. The Star.”

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

ENGLAND AND SERBIA. Sir,-In your issue of November 19, under the heading

“A Reminder,” Mr. C. H. Norman is apparently greatly distressed by the action of Great Britain in the matter of helping Serbia, and pretends to be innocent enough to believe that England’s support of Serbia is prompted by chivalrous motives alone.

He quotes in defence of his views Mr. Richard Cobden’s speech in the House of Commons on December 24, 1854, with reference to the Crimean War. This comparison is, in my opinion, absurd. Serbia has rendered invaluable services to her Allies, more especially so at the beginning of this tremendous campaign during the unprepared stage of the Western Powers, by holding on her frontier an immense Austrian army which, had it not been for Serbia, might have disastrously turned the scale in favour of Germany of used elsewhere.

The Allies, while morally bound to help Serbia, were, from a practical point of view, in the dire necessity of stopping or delaying the German advance towards and junction with Turkey. Yet the Allied Diplomacy turned deaf ears to her pitiful cries and incidentally to their own interests. Now, when the sound public opinions of England-

and France compelled their respective Governments to give every possible help to that heroic country, along comes Mr. Norman with his contempt of Serbia and call for prudence based on lessons from the Crimean War.

Mr. Norman will be well advised to remember that in the middle of a life-and-death struggle Great Britain and France could not very well succour a dying nation from a pure and simple humanitarian point of view and detach important and vital forces from their main Armies, had it not been for the fact that in the apparently distant Serbian battlefields the very vital battles shaping- the future trend of the war were to be decided, with a powerful echo on every other front, not excluding the hesitating neutrals.

THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES. Sir,-I have seen in THE NEW AGE of November 25

an article by Mr. Pickthall on a book of mine concerning ‘‘ Armenian Atrocities.” I believe I am in agreement with much that is at the back of Mr. Pickthall’s mind, and I should not have set out to answer him had I not gathered (possibly erroneously), from his introductory words, that he had written his two columns merely on the strength of other reviews, without having handled a copy of the book itself. Lack of acquaintance with the book certainly appears in the course of his criticisms. For instance, ‘‘ the evidence, properly attested, of re- sponsible European eye-witnesses ” is precisely the source of a large part of my narrative, as a glance at the preliminary note on the evidence would have shown ; and if Mr. Pickthall had reached the last chapter, he would have found that I was at pains to distinguish between information which is good evidence and informa- tion that is not, and that when I write ‘‘ abundant news ” I intend to convey exactly the meaning of those words.

Mr. Pickthall’s main argument in condonation of the atrocities is founded on ignorance of the facts. He writes that “the crimes mentioned (presumably in the ‘

Observer ’) are simply the horrors which everyone who knows the East expects in Eastern war.” The crimes mentioned may be so: but the great. concerted crime which I tried to describe in my book was something different and unprecedented. It was organised from above, and carried out through the local officials of the Ottoman Empire-a political measure conceived and executed in cold blood to secure a political object Mr. Pickthall is thinking of the atrocities which break out spontaneously from below, and which are caused. by ignorance and fanaticism. He is quite right in pointing out that this is a phenomenon common to all the East, without distinction of Christian and Muslim. Like him, I have been in close contact with horrors of this kind. especially with a case in which the Christian was the principal sinner in Central and Eastern Crete. But the events of the last eight months in Turkey are of quite another character. If Mr. Pickthall will examine the evidence, he will see that this is so. If he is content to guess what has happened nom on the strength of previous impressions of what has happened before, he is bound to remain in error.

Rut if the Ottoman Government’s scheme for extermination of the Armenian race really had precedent.;

behind it (as it has not). would that make it less atrocious Evil is just evil-that is its “true perspective.’’

You do not see it in a ‘‘ truer perspective ” by reminding

E. H. ATHANASSIADES.

yourself that ‘‘ this kind of thing is what always happens in the East.” Mr. Pickthall implies that, in the East, atrocities may pass; and that is where I really quarrel with him, because he is lending his authority to a very unfortunate but very insidious line of thought. It is

.only too easy to be indifferent to the sufferings of people a long way off, as to those of people long ago; but it is not right to be so-it is a failure in sympathy and

imagination. The sense of this tendency in myself was just what made me emphasise the fact that these Armenian women who suffered were “ Christian women, as

civilised and refined as the women of Western Europe.’’ Mr. Pickthall mentions four classes of Western women, and asks which of these the Armenians resembled. Of course, there were women among the victims who re- sembled them all, and that was precisely my point. The Armenians, class for class, individual for individual, were people like ourselves, and suffered to the same acute degree that we should suffer under similar circumstances. They had just the same capacity for suffering as we, and the agony was no whit deadened “because it all

happened in the East.” Arnold F. TOYNBEE.

LORD HALDANE. Sir,-In your issue of the 18th inst. you say : “We do not

profess to understand . . . the secret motives of the Press that secured Lord Haldane’s resignation in favour of Lord Kitchener when the war broke out.”

May I point out (I) Lord Haldane resigned the War Office to become Lord Chancellor in June, 1912. (2) He was succeeded by Colonel Seely, who resigned in March, 1914, Mr. Asquith assuming office. (3) The war broke out

August 4. 1914. and Lord Kitchener’s appointment was announced on August 6.

To prevent misunderstanding, I may add that I am amongst the increasing number of those who believe it would have been better in the interests of the country if Lord Haldane had returned to the War Office as Secretary of State and Lord Kitchener had remained outside the Cabinet. ERNEST PARKE.

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY. Sir,-In my recent article re women in industry I

advanced the theory that woman’s capacity for mental development renders her capable of organisation along with men, and thus removes the blackleg menace apparently-

attached to her entrance into industry. One of your contributors, Miss Alice Morning;, in reference- to this theory, writes, “ When men shall possess

an organ of perfection, women may possess an organ of thought but hardly before this,” and ridicules the sug- gestion that woman possesses the ‘‘ faculty of thought,” much less exercises it. And, indeed, after reading her article, I must admit that it is a convincing demonstration-

that what she has put forward is, at least, a partial truth. But, in any stray interval when she is not too busily engaged in seeing “a vision of the wonder of thought,” I would entreat her gently to shed the delusion that one addled female head constitutes the female head in general. In my argument I safeguarded my position by stating that “we who have the faculty of thought get our ideas from material conditions ” in order to show that I expected no ideas or mental development from any who did not possess this faculty. But these un- fortunates are the exception and not the rule; so, while Alice Morning is to be complimented on the candour with which she has made clear her own position. it is hardly sporting of her to assume that a personal limita- tion. is a sex limitation. Still, despite the obvious, she displays in her final statement a perspicacity unexcelled even by Old Moore. “You are lacking something, Miss Smith, my friend,” she writes. Inspired utterance, since it is not due to reflection! It is money that I lack! I go into industry in my efforts to fill this financial void. May I suggest with equal friendliness that the same sphere might prove efficacious in filling other voids? Or is she quite determined to wait for the organ of

thought discarded by man on his attainment of the ‘‘ organ of perfection ” ? If so, ’tis an unhappy fate to he for ever destined solely as a recipient of man’s superfluity-

However, after the insistent stress laid upon her mental poverty. it would be wicked to take a mean advantage. so I will wish her the best of luck in con- nection with the ideas she mentions as “in the air.” just as I would wish the very best records for the next- door neigh neighbour’s eramophone.

I will turn to Mr. Rowland Kenney whose sex. per- haps. has ensured the mental equipment necessary to perceive that the boundary line separating industry from

other aspects of the universe is not marked out by a row of saucepans, and that the wage slave at the sewing machine is at one with the wage slave at the spinning machine.

But in considering my reason that woman should be allowed to enter industry by reason of her “capacity for mental development,” Mr. Kenney, too, falls into what I should term an error, were I not sure that it is merely a trick of debate. He assumes my meaning to be that women cannot develop mentally outside industry ; that they can only develop intelligence by providing profits for manufacturers. I did not say so, although I do believe they can develop more intelligence by class

exploitation than by sex exploitation. We have at least a greater relative freedom from an employer than from an owner. What I did say was this : that woman’s ‘( will to live” would force her into industry; that her (‘ capacity for mental development ” renders her just as capable of efficient organisation as man, and no more a blackleg menace. For the National Guildsmen must consider women as a sex incapable of organisation, or they would not make this a purely sex question. If it were merely a matter of competition with the men in industry, they would advocate the exclusion of any new labour, young male labour included, so that the men already engaged could have a fair field and no competition.

Mr. Kenney makes a point about commercial travellers and commission agents going on with Socialist propaganda-

in spite of the knowledge that Collectivism would ruin their jobs. Why not? If I were sure there would be no cotton operatives under industrial ownership, I would push on towards that goal just as keenly--I am not wedded to the cotton industry, I have been at other

jobs--because I should expect to find some other occupation- under the new system. But if commercial travellers,

merely because they are such, were asked to stand aside now and starve until the inauguration of this new system, they would refuse just as emphatically as we women refuse to creep into a corner and die quietly and gracefully-

in order to fit in with the theories of the National Guildsmen. And until the fact is recognised, that we are not so many bundles of merchandise that can be deposited awaiting convenient time of collection, the matter has not been dealt with in a practical way, even from the point of view of the least thoughtful of women.

But I am not going to shelter behind this omission of the National Guildsmen, important though it is. I will come into the open and state clearly that I would still fight against my exclusion from industry-by in- dustry I mean all wage-earning occupations-even if accompanied by some monetary dole. For this reason : when the workers take over the control of industry- whether by means of National Guilds or a Federation of

Labour-I intend to be one of the workers, if possible. I do not choose to be among the dispossessed again, and that is where woman will be if excluded from industry. National Guildsmen, among others, lay down to us that they who hold the economic power hold the real power, that they who own the means of production of the neces- saries of life are top dogs, and, therefore, that private ownership of the means of production means a subject class and a master class. The National Guildsmen are avowedly out to abolish this state of affairs. So am I, but I want to be careful not to abolish a subject class merely to institute a subject sex. And that is what will happen if women are outside industry and industrial ownership is confined solely to men. The men as a sex would own the means of life, and the women as a sex could exist only by favour of the dominant sex, as play- things or slaves, according to the mood of our masters. Frankly, I would rather be a wage slave under the capitalist system, with an opportunity to sell my labour power, than a chattel slave under a system of industrial ownership, with nothing to sell but my sex. It is no use to imagine that the men would not exploit this state of affairs; they would have just the same motive as inspires the capitalist, who may be kindly enough in private life. The capitalist grinds profits out of the workers for the good things these profits will secure to him. So, in a favourable position, would men as such hold women as such in subjection for the reason that, in general, women still constitute the chief pleasure of men, and it would be no slight advantage to have an abundant supply of this pleasure always available, on their own terms.

If women are to have a chance of freedom and develop- ment equal with the men in the new society, they must have an equal share in the ownership of the means-of life. They will lose this by their banishment from in-

dustry, so I take my stand for women in industry and the abolition of sex-bondage along with that of wage- bondage. ALICE Smith

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THE LATE MR. G. W. FOOTE. Sir,-Mr. John Duncan’s opinion of the late Mr. Foote

is of very little consequence to anyone but himself, but his misrepresentations of his aims must not he allowed to pass unchallenged. The chief counts in his indictment seem to be, firstly, that Mr. Foote devoted his energies to attacking superstition instead of the wage-system ; secondly, that he was a Radical and a Pacifist; and, thirdly, that, while attacking the Christian religion, he upheld Christian ethics. If Mr. Duncan still believes that superstition has no influence on the continued main- tenance of the wage-system, I can only recommend him to study the controversy carried on some time ago in your pages by “A. E. R.” and many correspondents. A study of the “Freethinker,” if he will condescend to glance at that obscure journal, will enlighten him on the subject of Mr. Foote’s attitude towards Pacifism and Christian Ethics. His pacifism did not, at any rate, lead him to oppose Britain’s entry into the war and that pacifism is the only pacifism which counts to-day. It is hard to see Mr. Duncan’s point when he inveighs against Mr. Foote’s “Christian” ethics, in view of the fact that the

“Freethinker” was the only paper besides THE New AGE, to take a reasonable attitude during the recent

journalistic attacks on Nietzsche. If I have misunderstood Mr. Duncan’s meaning I can

only apologise for the dull intellect of one of Mr. Foote’s “miserable survivors,” which is incapable of following the lightning movements of Mr. Duncan’s brilliant brain.

CONSTANCE BROOKS. ,* *

IRISH POETRY. Sir,--“ R. H. C.’s ” comment, in your issue of October 28, upon the enthusiasm of Mr. Forrest Reid for W. B.

Yeats is, I think, a true statement of the English case against Irish literature. Your contributor objects to the suggestion of Mr. Reid that Yeats is possibly a greater poet than Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, or Rossetti. As an Irishman interested in the literary development of my country, I have always felt that no greater harm has been done to Irish literature than by those critics who love to institute comparisons of the Shelley versus Yeats

type. Significantly, most of them are English and "London-Irish ” journalists of the genus Robert Lynd-

Forrest Reid-St. John Ervine. I submit that the duty of the Irish critic is to establish

a ratio of values for Anglo-Irish literature. Whether Yeats, or any other Irish poet, is equal or superior to Shelley is a matter which should not concern us very much. If the historian of English literature is interested in such speculations, let him proceed ! For us in Ireland his conclusions will be of secondary importance. Our estimate of Yeats must be made with reference to the literary movement of which his work is part. His rank will be determined by reference to his Irish predecessors and contemporaries, and their common measure will be, not the poetry of England, but the degree of their con- formity to the spirit and tradition of Irish poetry.

Comparative criticism may well assign to Yeats a position other than that to which he is entitled in his own country. Whether he is the Irish counterpart of Shelley can be decided when we have considered the relative value of Shelley’s work in English and Yeats’s in Anglo-Irish literature. Racine is the supreme poet of France, but he does not loom so large, when set beside Dante and Shakespeare, in the history of comparative literature. For the French, however, Racine is

appreciated in terms of national, not international, values. ERNEST A. BOYD.

Press Cuttings “The maldistribution of the national income, which

imbues the working classes with a sense of injury and injustice and leads to so much dangerous friction between Capital and Labour, in turn checks production and so injures the whole nation. With a proper distribution of wealth the greatest possible production must be of equal advantage to all classes. The problem of the better

distribution of the national income is, therefore, one for which some solution, or at least amelioration, is vitally required. ”-“The Round Table.’’

war has reduced the whole of civilised mankind to the habitual mental condition of the wage-earner, who can never be quite certain of his future beyond the end of next week. Well-to-do people find this trying, and are apt to grumble at the prolongation of the strain. Poor people are used to it. In fact‘, the war has brought an alleviation of their position In ordinary times the sense of the uncertainty of their situation is not relieved by any feeling of the importance and dignity of their work. To-day workmen realise that their occupation has a direct bearing on the national well-being, and thousands of men are conscious for the first time in their lives that labour- their labour-is the foundation of the State.”-“The Round Table.”

“The mere suggestion that the methods of compulsory service might be applied in the workshop as in the Army has reawakened suspicions which were first roused by the use of the military in the English and French railway strikes a few years ago. Compulsory enlistment in order to secure enough men to keep our fighting forces at full strength is an expedient which Labour would be readily open to consider; so many men have already gone that the demand for equality of sacrifice is one which finds an echo in thousands of working-class homes ; but military law in the workshop is something which workpeople re- gard as in quite a different category. Unfortunately, the two are associated not only in the minds of their pro- posers but in the actual facts of the case; and herein lies the real crux of the controversy which has arisen.”- “The Round Table.”

“Another factor which has not tended to allay working- class apprehension is the working of the Munition’; Act. As passed, that Act was the result of an agreement arrived at in conference between Mr. Lloyd George and the Trade Union representatives, and it was arranged that Labour should have fair representation both on the Local Committees which were to be responsible for the local organising work under the Act, and on the special tribunals which were to penalise its breaches. In prac- tice, the Act has worked out very differently from what was expected either by its author or by the Trade Union leaders. The Local Committees, having finished their preliminary organising work, have fallen into abeyance, while the Munition Tribunals have suffered in working- class estimation from the fact that the so-called Labour

representative is nominated by Whitehall instead of being representative of local labour opinion. ”-“The Round Table.’’

“The bargain with regard to the restoration of Trade Union customs is equally difficult to carry out. In actual fact the whole of British industry is being reorganised and in some cases revolutionised as a result of the war and the changes in the character of labour. Numerous new machines are being introduced ; machine-tenders are replacing skilled craftsmen ; processes are being improved and speeded up; in a word, the status quo ante is becoming-

ancient history--so much so that it is doubtful if the Trade Unions are even scheduling all the changes as they occur. All this is unavoidable. It is the way of the world. But steady-going Trade Unionists, watching what is taking place and anxious for the future when their labour will be at a discount instead of a premium, do not feel inclined to credit even Mr. Lloyd George with the powers claimed by King Canute to beat back the on- coming tide.”--“The Round Table.”

“After the failure of prolonged efforts to induce the Government to deal with prices, a movement began early

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in the present year among the organised workers for the granting of “war bonuses”-in other words, increases in rates of wages limited to the duration of the war-to meet the increased cost of living. The demand was not based, as it might have been, on the bargaining power of Labour in the unexpectedly powerful position in which the war had placed it, but on the heavy fall in real wages.

Concessions have been made in a number of trades, notably coal-mining, the cotton trade, engineering, the boot and shoe. industry, dock labour, and the postal and railway services. The Board of Trade _estimates that up to the end of September, 1915, 4,500,coo workpeople had had their. wages increased by over &75o,ooo a week. This estimate, which presumably includes young workers many of whom are receiving very much over their normal rate of wages, works out at about 3s. 4d. a head, or, roughly speaking, 15 per cent. Thus, despite its bargain- ing power, Labour has not succeeded in making up half of the increased cost of living, while many of the more helpless sections of the working class have not received any increase in money wages at all.”-“The Round Table. ”

“Every thoughtful working-man realises that great difficulties are looming ahead for the working class after the war. Its growing strength before the war and the strong strategic position it occupied in its earlier stages will be the measure of its economic weakness then. The sudden cessation of war contracts, which are employing several inillions of workers, the demobilisation of the Army, the weakening of the financial resources of the Trade Unions by the loss of contributions from members on war service, the presence in the Labour market of

thousands of new recruits, difficult to organise, imper- fectly trained, yet skilled enough to be available as blacklegs-

seem likely to create a problem such as the working class has never-not even after Waterloo-had to deal with before.”-“The Round Table.”

‘‘Labour will never rise to its full stature in the State, it will never achieve an industrial constitution worthy the name of Democracy, till workmen boldly claim the problems of the working conditions and processes of their industry as their problems, and treat attempts to meet them, whether by improved production or ‘ scientific management ’ or whatever may be the particular sugges- tion, not as something imposed on them from above, but as their own concern, on which they should be consulted as a matter of right and on which they should offer responsible advice, not simply from the point of view of their own personal convenience, but as partners with Capital in the working of the industry and of the

community as a whole. It is not enough for Labour to have the power of Veto, as exercised by the Strike. The people of England controlled the Executive by their power to veto supplies generations before they gained the positive rights of democratic self-government. Something more than blank negation is needed from Labour-a real under- standing of the problems which each industry has to meet and a readiness to confer with and give considered advice to the industrial executive on matters within their com- petence. The more Capital and Labour can be brought together, not simply to strike a ‘ collective bargain ’ over the disposal of the surplus profit, but actually to discuss the problems of the industry or service which is their common concern, the better it will be for Trade Unionism, for British ‘Industry, and for the security and prosperity of the State.”-“The Round Table.”

“The war has made Capital scarce, and in the natural course it will make it dear : the rate of interest is already and is likely to remain unusually high. But what Capital demands and, owing to its international character, can succeed in exacting in interest it will have to yield in taxation. The investing public must realise that it cannot in justice be allowed to enjoy to the full the advantages arising out of its economic position, just as Labour did not enjoy to the full the advantage arising out of the scarcity value of its services. The old easy, affluent days have passed away from this country for long- years ahead. Long may England still remain, what Mr. Lloyd George once described her, ‘the best place in the world for a rich man to live in ’ : but wealth will be asked to contribute in unprecedented measure to the service of the State.”--“The Round Table.”,

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