THE A WEEKLY REVIEW OF POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND ART No* 748 new seriesVol. IV. No. 11] THURSDAY, JAN. 7, 1908 registered at G.P.O] ONE PENNY CONTENTS. PAGE PAGE NOTES OF THE WEEK . .,. 213 FROM THE LAND OF SHADOWS. By Stanhope of Chester. 221 PENSION DAY. By V. 215 VIOLETTES. By F. S. Flint. 222 THE MAELSTROM. By C. N. L. Shaw. 216 CHESTERTON FACING BOTH WAYS. By G. Bernard Shaw. 222 BOLES. By Maxime Gorki. 223 INDIAN NOTES. By B. K. Das. 216 BOOKS AND PERSONS. By Jacob Tonson.... .,. 224 THE FACT, MAN. By Edgar Jepson. 217 BOOK OF THE WEEK: Charles Lamb. By J. M. Kennedy 225 WHY CHURCHMEN BECOME SOCIALISTS. By Rev. Conrad REVIEWS : The Taxation of the Liquor Trade. 227 Noel. 218 Health, Strength, and Happiness. 228 UNEDITED OPINIONS. -I: By A. R. Orage. 1:: :I: 219 DRAMA: Pinkie and the Fairies. By G. B. :: 1:: 228 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. By E. C. Reed. 220 CORRESPONDENCE. .,. 229 - ALL BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS should be ad- as it is from the heart fibres of the speaker : “Feed its dressed to the Manager, 140, Fleet Street, London. children as freely and as well as it feeds its seagulls.” All EDITORIAL matter should reach the Editor by Saturday Yes, Mr. Shaw and others amongst us who have car- at latest for the following week’s issue, and should be addressed to ried on the fight for this children’s feeding, well may 1 & 2, Took’s Court, Furnival Street, London. we feel brutal to this British people who endures with- ADVERTISEMENTS: The latest time for receiving Ad- out a pang the miseries of its unemployed, the pain and vertisements is first post Monday for the same week’s issue. anguish of its starving children ;-who are in its capital SUBSCRIPTION RATES for England and Abroad: now to be partly fed during some part of the year, and Three months . , . 1S. 9d. for whom holidays are henceforth to mean hunger. Six months . , , 3s. 3d. Why, we ask, should not this chronic suffering appeal Twelve months’ . 6s. 6d. to our reason and our feeling just as readily as some All remittances should be made payable to The NEW AGE PRESS, overwhelming disaster ? It does not, we know. We LTD., and sent to 140, Fleet Street, London. shall be perhaps told that the overwhelming disaster is due to Nature working apart from man and the chronic The circulation of TEE NEW AGE last week was 23,500 copies. misery is due to man working apart from Nature. The powerful and the wealthy have No will to redress the results of their own ill-doings. NOTES OF THE WEEK. * * * Is it not surely a vain thing, a foolish and vain, The havoc wrought in Sicily and Calabria is a strik- To sit down by her, mourn to her, serve her, partake in ing instance of the catastrophic methods of Nature. In the pain ? this year of the Jubilee of the Origin of Species we So must it seem to many amongst us ; empty resound have this dread example of the inadequacy of any Natu- the words in our ears, as we lament with Italy, Mater ral Selection to account for the changes in organisms. Dolorosa, in this hour of tribulation, as we mourn with According to Darwin, “ Natural Selection acts‘ solely her the heaped-up dead, as we sorrow with her, the by accumulating slight, successive, favourable varia- wounded, the hungry, and the homeless, as we grieve tions ; it can only act by short and slow steps “; he also with her, the ruins of the fair cities and the fertile fields. contended that “The struggle for existence is the most And yet it is not altogether a vain thing for they that severe between individuals and varieties of the same “mourn are alive and have years to be ; And life is species. ,’ The earthquake, with its wholesale destruc- good. ” May it not be that those who have nothing to tion, confirms the views of those who hold a quite con- offer but pity help to keep the sorely shaken survivors trary view. We have seen it to be all-devouring, spar- from that sense of utter abandonment? that our feeble ing not those with something more of physical vigour words have been wafted as tidings of a common than their fellows, nor those endowed with greater in- brotherhood? that these broad human sympathies have telligence, nor the more religious, nor the more moral. served, if ever so little, to cheer, and stir to life Italy’s All were alike involved : the old, the mature, the valiant children ? young ; “ Slight favourable variations ” were unavailing -x- * * if disaster were to be escaped. De Vries’s observa- tions on plants had shown us quite new species arising At these moments of acute distress and suffering the by jumps, and in the Italian disaster we have a too whole civilised world possesses for a moment the sense sensational lesson of the often catastrophic, revolution- of kinship. From every quarter help is volunteered, This is seen not only in the and freely given in money, in kind, in labour. The ary ways of Nature. destruction of life, but in the changes that have taken King of Italy and the Queen, we are told, have worked place in the configuration of the land. We shall not untiringly for days without rest, without a thought of say that Nature’s cataclysmic ways are necessary to be personal danger. Russia’s warships and England’s imitated by man, but we may be at least spared homilies have succoured hundreds of wounded. From Canada from France, Germany, money and re- based upon the text Natura non facit Saltum. comes money, * ‘* * lief. We cannot but be struck at the contrast this noble picture presents with the indifference this civi- The Penal Reform League is doing such useful work lised world shows to the distress and suffering that are that we hesitate to pronounce any criticisms upon the chronic in its midst. The hardships of the people in recent alterations it has made in the statement of its this country are ever intolerable, the hunger is as acute objects. We do not want the League to develop into a amongst hundreds of thousands of our people, persist- mere instrument to “ collect information criminological ing through many weary months. We know that our chil- and penalogical. ” Dr. Slaughter, who is responsible dren are starving in our midst. For what should we, for the alterations, belongs to that pseudo-scientific the British people, strive in 1909 it is asked, and there school which spends all its energies in collecting in- comes the reply, almost brutal in its surcharged feeling formation, tabulating results, and making experi- JANUARY 7, 1909 ments on subjects which we know all about. There is should be the prime reason for an insistence by the plenty of evidence regarding the barbaric nature of our Government of the principle of equal wages in all its English prisons ; Oscar Wilde drew attention years ago contracts. We know, as the Report reminds us, that to one very gruesome feature of prison life; persons the employers were averse, maintaining that it would suffering from diarrhea are not allowed out of their deprive women of employment. We understand the cells during many many long hours. This system still nature of this solicitude on the part of the employers obtains. We do not want science in our prisons, but who want cheap labour caring nothing about its dear- despite Dr. Slaughter and his kind we do want organi- ness to the nation. The whole Report, with its worth- sations that will be humanitarian. For heaven’s sake, less recommendations, is a serious waste of public no more statistics ; publish plain statements of the facts money, and the cost should be surcharged to the mem- at first hand and disseminate these facts. Show up the bers of the Government who appointed the Committee. conscious and unconscious brutality of warders, doc- * * 8 tors, chaplains, etc. Socialists, Fabians or otherwise, On January 1 the State commenced to recognise its should join the Society and try to obtain direct access to obligations to those who have helped to make England the prisons, interview the prisoners, go into those foul what it is. On behalf of half a million of men and dens of wickedness, the magistrate’s courts, and see for women over 70 who have received the first instalment of themselves how men and women are being treated. As the 5s. pension we are going to be thankful for small an instance of what is known, read Mr. H. J. B. Mont- mercies, but we shall not forget to ask for more. One gomery’s article, “ The Extinction of the Professional of the resolutions at the Labour Conference is that the Criminal,” in the December number of the “National Old Age Pensions should commence at 55. Provision Review. ” Mr. Montgomery is a member of the League must be made for the huge army of sick and, disabled and writes not as a penalogist but as one who has that our modern industrial system throws on the scrap “undergone a sentence of penal servitude.” Mr. Mont- heap in early life. In too many instances the worker gomery, who knows more about his subject than all the forces himself to go on working when attacked by ill- scientific gentlemen who are ever measuring noses and ness that were he able to afford rest and attention heads and taking thumb impressions, maintains that would not confer any permanent disablement.