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NOTES OF THE WEEK . TALESOF TO-DAY: INDEFENCE OF SMALL NATIONALITIES. FOREIGNAFFAIRS. By S. Verdad . By C. E. Bechhofer . Unedited Opinions : Compulsion OF MEN AGAIN IMPRESSIONSOF FRENCH PRONUNCIATION. By Alice IRISH Nonsense About IRELAND. By G. Bernard Morning . Shaw . VIEWS AND REVIEWS . WHEREIgnorance IS BLISS. By Verax . REVIEWS . PASTICHE. By J. A. M. A., A. RI. A. . A MODERN DOCUMENT. Edited by Herbert Lawrence LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from John Stafford, ANARTIST’S ?\TOTE-BOOK. By Henry Bishop . Ramiro de Maeztu, T. M. S., A. E. R., Fred A PEASANTAnd Two GENERALS. By Saltikov . H. Auger, E. R. . READERS And WRITERS. By R. H. C. . PRESS CUTTINGS .

did the financiers advise Mr. Lloyd George? Is it not NOTES OF THE WEEK. a fact that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer openly IT would be a wearying and worthless task to attempt expressed the view that the war could not last beyond to follow the lies, half-truths, and utter fallacies for the end of the year, and that financiers made their which Mr. Lloyd George has made himself responsible suggestions accordingly? It is no secret that the within the last few days. His speech in Parliament on unexpectedduration of the war had surprised the last Cabinet May 4 and his additional speech at Conway on May 6 so far back as the spring of 1915, and considerably have been taken by our suborned Press as brilliant upset all their calculations. Mr. Lloyd George himself, examples of the gospel of energy; and the indifference of we affirm without hesitation, was one of the many people individualism appears to reject competent criticism of in possession of detailed facts who held the view, in them with contempt. Yet our “brilliant” and “energetic” August, 1914, that the war would be over in about a and “inspiring” Minister of hiunitions must surely be couple of months. This is not the only argument which hard put to it when he has to say, as at Conway, that might be adduced against Mr. Lloyd George. When compulsion is justifiable because taxes are compulsory. financiers gave advice to the Government in the autumn ‘This argument is common enough in the mouths of 1914, they did so on the assumption that it would not of the Milners, the Carsons, the Chiozza Moneys, and be, necessary for England to overstrain her industrial and the leader-writers of jingo newspapers; but tu hear it commercial muscles in the way she has done. If our from the “leader of the democracy” is something new. rulers had been content to raise an army of two millions, It will be sufficient for us to take a passage or two from at the outside, and to facilitate the carrying on of our Mr. Lloyd George’s speeches and to show from them manufactures and trade as before; or if, when it was how simple a matter it is to misrepresent the present seen that the war would last, they had taken over every situation to an ill-informed populace which depends for industry and financial institution on behalf of the State, its day-to-day instruction upon a number of crooked as they took over the railways, there might be newspapers. somethingto be said in favour of Mr. Lloyd George’s rebuke *** to Mr. Holt. As it is, Mr. Lloyd George is in error In the first place, finance. In replying to Mr. Holt and Mr. Holt is not. Without some very drastic in the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George said it rearrangement of our financial system, it will be was untrue to state that if the war lasted until 1918 we impossiblefor us to carry on the war until 1918 without feeling could not “outstay the course”; that he had himself, effects to which no critic can look forward without when at the Exchequer, consulted financiers who anxiety; and it is useless for a person entirely ignorant assured him that this country could outstay Germany in of the subject, like Mr. Lloyd George, to tell us the financial matters, however long the war lasted, and that contrary. he had himself always taken the view that “this was *** going to be a long war.” Let us check these statements. In the second place, men. Urging the House to pass Mr. Lloyd George was at the Exchequer when the latest Conscription Bill, Mr. Lloyd George said : the war broke out in August 4, 1914; and emergency “Let my hon. friend consider what the position was. financial legislation had to be introduced almost Here is a demand by those responsible for advising us immediately. The proclamation regarding currency and about the conduct of the war that it was essential that bank notes was issued on August 6, and the proclamations we should call up every available man and make him relating to the postponements of payment on ready to go into the field. . . . The Cabinet, having August 6 and 12 and September 3 and 30. The first examined the demand, quite unanimously came to the moratorium notice had to be issued even before England conclusionthat it was an irresistible demand.” This is one declared war on Germany, and is dated August 2. of the most disingenuous statements ever made. The Detailed financial legislation steadily followed throughout demand of the Army Council for men was considered September and October. But under what conditions by a select committee of the Cabinet, and was agreed upon by the Cabinet as a whole. But this demand did infinitely smaller financial an d other responsibilities. not provide for the complete system of compulsion which To state such an absurd proposition is, we take it, to Mr. Lloyd George, as he told his audience on Saturday, answer it for all sensible men. But did not Mr. Lloyd was demanding on his own account since last September. George answer it himself? Of course he did; for it is The course then pursued by Mr. Lloyd George, we make his habit to contradict himself to such an extent that bold to say, was typical of him. Having more or less the collation of statements becomes almost monotonous. agreed with his colleagues as to the compromise On Saturday, two days afterwards, he told his audience suggested, he went behind their backs to the Army Council, at Conway: “We cannot make the same contribution delivered a characteristic Welsh sermon to them, and in men as France, because we have to supply her pressed them to emulate the well-known hero of a with steel, coal, material for , and Dickens novel. In consequence of a series of hurried transports.” A pretty list enough ! WE can well imagine intrigues and parleyings, the Army Council were the Chancellor of the Exchequer of May, 1915, furiously induced to ask for more men than they ever hoped to get ; assailing the Minister of Munitions of May, 1916, when and Lord Northcliffe, acting, as usual, in concert with called upon to make up for his financial deficit in the absence of necessary men. his henchman, redoubled his efforts to secure the rejection *** of a compromise Bill. Hence the introduction of a measure which may do a good deal to make the war In the third place, Labour. Towards the end of his unpopular, and lead, consequently to demands for a speech on Thursday Mr. Lloyd George said there was one thing for which he “had been waiting anxiously,” premature peace. *** and he was “glad that it had not appeared.” This, it seemed, was the suggestion that, “if we took the only This matter of men and money, however, has already been dealt with by Mr. Lloyd George himself. When means which are essential to the purpose of successfully conducting this war there would be trouble among the introducing his last Budget (May, 1915) he took care to labouring classes. I never believed it. ’’ Then followed tell us how thoroughly the questions at issue had to be a tribute to the patriotism of the working classes, in considered : the midst of which we are astonished to read : “I What service can Britain best render to this great combination? She can keep the command of the sea for the object to and protest against this talk about the working Allies. . . . That is the invaluable service which she is classes as if they were not an essential part of our rendering to her Allies, and it is essential to the community. . . . they would win more by liberty than any untimatesuccess of their arms, especially in a long war, other class, and they knew that Prussian domination because the longer the war the more does the command of would hurt them more than any other class in the the sea count. What is the second service Britain could country.” We will not weary readers, as we should render? She could, of course, maintain a great army, assuredly weary ourselves, by recapitulating the insults putting the whole of her population into it exactly as the Continental Powers have done. The third service which Mr. Lloyd George has himself gratuitously flung Britain can render is the service she rendered in the at the working classes during the war. Our recollection, Napoleonic Wars of bearing the main burden of financing we hope, is stronger than that of the Labour the allied countries in their necessary purchases Members in the House of Commons, and we do not outside their own country, more especially for carrying on forget, if they have forgotten, the language used the war, and also helping the Allies with the manufacture by the Minister of Munitions towards their and equipment of munitions of war. Britain can do the constituentsin the earlier stages of thewar-language which first and she can do the third. She can only do the second within limits if she has to do the first and last. earned for him a reception on the Clyde which he is I think that is important. We have raised enormous long likely to remember. The workmen were slackers numbers of men in this country, but I say, speaking nom and drunkards : “We are fighting threeenemies- purely from the point of view of finance, that the time Germany,Austria, and Drink; and the greatest of these is has come when there should be discrimination, so that drink.’’ In the face of language like this, it is not recruiting should not interfere with the output of unamusing to find Mr. Lloyd George complaining, at munitionsof war, and that it should interfere as little as Conway, that he has been subjected to a “cloudy possible with the output of those commodities which we export and which enable us to purchase munitions for discharge of poisonous gas,” apropos of Mr. A. G. ourselves and for our Allies. Gardiner’srecent and rather belated criticism. Who more *** than Mr. Lloyd George himself has done more to poison There is Mr. Lloyd George answered out of his own the political atmosphere of England; to assail friend mouth. Since he made that speech we have had the and enemy with light-minded abuse ; to wheedle and curse Derby scheme, we have had any number of direct alternately the groups with which he deals? Up to enIistments, and we have had the Compulsion Act for August, 1914, Mr. Lloyd George declaimed insincerely single men. Between Mr. Lloyd George’s speech of against the financiers, because it paid him to do so. May, 1915, and May, 1916, we have enlisted nearly Then he crawled to them on his hands and knees, three millions of men: we will vouch for our figures. begged to be forgiven, and urged them to help him to What, then, becomes of the newer arguments which unravel his tangled schemes of taxation when the war Mr. Lloyd George puts forward for our unstinted began. Again, while he was thundering against the applause? Let us take another curious specimen of his moneyed interests, Mr. Lloyd George thrust himself rhetoric. In the House of Commons on Thursday last forward as the combined Moses and Joshua of Labour: he said : “I know all about our financing the Allies, he was not merely to lead Labour out of the House of about shipping, and about the necessity for keeping up Bondage, but into the Promised Land of State Control cur trade. . . If we had summoned to the Colours into the bargain. Twenty months ago the tune was from the British Empire the same proportion of our changed : the financiers were now the saviours of population as France has called to the defence of her Europe, and Labour was turned and rent as a pack of frontiers there would have been twice as many men as drunken rascals who could scarcely be induced to work we have got. I am referring now to Great Britain, the even for overtime money. United Kingdom, and the self-governing Dominions. ” *** Now, excluding India, as Mr. Lloyd George explicitly We are no friends to opportunists at the best of times ; does-and where, in any case, the number of fighting and we profess nothing but open enmity towards this races is limited-the population of our oversea possessions Welsh Caesar who has waited for the outbreak of does not exceed twenty millions, bringing our a world-wide war to throw over every political principle available “reservoir” up to sixty-five or sixty-six to which he formerly did lip-service, and to reveal millions, the population, approximately, of the German himself,incidentally, in his natural character of an impatient Empire;or just slightly less. In other words, Mr. Lloyd and disloyal autocrat. His friends, as Mr. Gardiner George would expect us to put into the field, in proportion said plaintively, had borne with him long; but we have to our population, an even greater number of men borne with him longer still. We may claim for than Germany, with her wonderful organisation and ourselves the barren honour of having discerned Mr. Lloyd George’s character even before the introduction of his lamentable to think that these qualities, as the result of Insurance Bill in 1911-a Bill admittedly drawn after a the lack of the most moderate amount of recognition and Prussian model. We cannot understand how anybody persuasion, have been lost to Sir Douglas Haig’s Army could reconcile this Bill, later an Act and a hated Act, in Flanders, is it not? Let not fanaticism be urged as with professions of liberty and democracy. “I am in a reason for the impossibility of enlisting these men. favour of compulsion now as I was in favour of compulsory The case of India, discontented though India may be, taxation,” said its author, at Conway, “and, if I stands as an example. may say so, compulsory insurance.” ’This was the *** beginning of the breaking point of Mr. Lloyd George’s It is true that the leaders of this movement were relations with Labour. The Insurance Act is still unpractical. They did not realise that a wholly detested, and its author with it. The new industrial reserve, independentIreland, in the present state of Europe and whereby, in practice, skilled workmen and soldiers will considering Ireland’s geographical position, is politically be interchangeable, as in France, is only the logical impossible. But they were not sordid; and there sequence to the control of the working classes postulated was not a single mean feature connected with their in the Insurance Act. To every such criticism as this rising in Dublin and elsewhere. They risked their lives Mr. Lloyd George has invariably responded with a burst in a useless cause, and lost them nobly. A different of windy rhetoric that induces us to remind him of his criticism, unfortunately, has to be applied to some of descent. The later Druids, whose class is said to have the English comments on their action, which are included common wizards and magicians (we might now nothing if not mean and sordid. One comment, in say spell-hinders), made use of two chief symbols : they particular, genuinely meant, is an ironical illustration of the cut the mistletoe from the oak with a golden knife; and attitude of the Government towards rebels of different the gold, no less than their white robes, represented the kinds. Nearly every paper in London called upon the purity of the performance. But they wore a taIisman, authorities to put down the rebellion, because, as it as Pliny tells us, something known as a serpent’s egg, was held, the British Empire was humiliated by the “formed by the poisonous spittle of a great many sight of one of its capital cities in the hands of a mob. serpents twined together, gathered at moonlight, and This lowered the prestige of the Empire, and the rebels afterwardsworn in the bosom.” The manner of Mr. Lloyd deserved condign punishment accordingly. We do not say that this criticism is not justified; but, if its truth George’s eloquence is indeed gilt; but its substance is is assumed, what becomes of other movements which as the poison of asps. *** have lowered the dignity of the Empire to an even greater extent? Which was worse for our dignity and Let us turn to a subject more agreeable than Welsh prestige-the insurgents in command of Dublin, or Sir intrigues. The Sinn Fein rebellion is over and done Edward Carson and his armed men in command, not of with; and we need only remark, with regard to one a single city, but of all Ulster, including Beifast. the aspect of it, that a responsible financial organ like the commercial capital of Ireland? But, if we are talking “Statist” (May 6) urges clemency towards the rebels in of the lowering of dignity and prestige, we must held order that bitter feelings may be modified as far as that the dignity and prestige of the Empire have been practicable. We say rebellion for want of a better word; lowered by men in even more responsible positions than but the connotation is ridiculous as contrasted with the Sir Edward Carson and the unfortunate Mr. actuality. Perhaps five thousand men, but hardly more, MacDonagh. Unquestionably, as we know from every got out of hand for a week, chiefly in Dublin; and the source of information at our disposal, the prestige of whole affair, surely, is likely to arouse more sadness England and of the whole Empire has been all but than indignation. Unquestionably, the leaders of the destroyed by the infamous campaign carried on by one of Sinn Fein movement were inspired by the noblest ideals, our hereditary legislators, Lord Northcliff e. According and they had a political programme which was, in the to Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers, scattered as they are abstract, of some value. Of their economic programme in every direction, and circulating among all classes, less can be said. The movement aimed, apparently, at England since the outbreak of war has shirked every breaking off even trade relations between England and duty which it was hers to fulfil. She has not, according Ireland, and under its regime the railways and banks to this authority, provided men, war material, or ships would have been nationalised. Into the subject of wagery for the mercantile marine; she has always been late, the Sinn Feiners had not entered at all; and, like most dilatory and incompetent; and her affairs have been intellectual Irishmen, they were better poets, orators and managed with criminal carelessness. These views have politicians than economists. The generation that shot been conveyed to all parts of the world; they have been landlords and landlords’ agents in the ’eighties and early quoted against us by our own Allies--and what could ’nineties has had its reward in the form of land purchase well be more humiliating than that?-they have been schemes, drawn up in England, and a powerful system circulated in the United States; they have been used by of co-operation for farmers organised in Ireland by Sir pro-Germans in Bulgaria to induce Bulgaria to join the Horace Plunkett and Mr. G. W. Russell. The Central Powers ; they have been used by pro-Germans in descendants of the landlord-shooters, no doubt, are enjoying Greece and Roumania to keep those countries from the fruits, in an economic sphere, of their fathers’ joiningthe Allies-as they would, if left to themselves. Nor political activity. But the idealistic element was not is Lord Northcliffe the only offender, though by far the satisfied with economics alone, and pursued the most important one. From Hercules to his feet. Sir sentimentaland purely political aim of an independent Luigi Giorgio Chiozza Money has been telling Englishmen Ireland-the “independence, “ we fear, being but vaguely how ill they have done in not furnishing the Allies defined. *** with more men, and for at least six months has been publishing cunningly arranged statistics, hopelessly We hold, nevertheless, that “the Castle”--we know inaccurate, to show how we can provide unlimited men well enough how some Irishmen feel after uttering the and yet go on with our trade. On this point, of course, words-should have provided an outlet for this idealistic all the technical evidence is against him. Nor should energy. It is a striking fact that the Indian Government we omit Mr. Austin Harrison who, after telling us has officially recognised the Moslem League and (“English Review,” April) that he “knows little of the National Congress-never mind if the recognition economics, ” proceeds to lay down dogmatic opinions has had little practical result so far-but that the Irish on intricate economic questions relating to the war- Government has never taken official cognisance of an all to show, of course, that the Government is wrong, intellectual movement which has been conducting a incompetent, etc., etc. If men are to be shot for lowering powerful propaganda under its nose for these ten years. the dignity and prestige of the country, we recommend Newspaper correspondents have commented on the these four gentlemen to be going on with. They “well-set-up officers” who led the insurgents, and on poison the minds of neutrals and of our Allies, and so their “fearlessness and dignified bearing.” It is far they risk nothing. mentionedof late by speakers in positions of authority, as, Foreign Affairs. for example, the Prussian Minister of Agriculture. In spite of the experiments of German chemists it seems By S. Verdad. to be impossible to get artificial manures, and vast THE essence of the German reply to the United States quantities of potatoes which had been meant for the is that the commanders of submarines shall be ordered civilian population in the towns had to be used, with official sanction, for the feeding of cattle and horses. not to torpedo unarmed merchant ships at sight, as Food riots, despite attempts at concealment, have heretofore, on condition that President Wilson uses his become more and more frequent, and there appears to be influence to secure substantial modifications in the greater and greater support for the Socialist minority British blockade. Failing this, one is left to assume, in the Reichstag, not so much on account of the unpopularity the torpedoing of vessels, even the most innocent and of the war as on account of the terrible rise in the those obviously neutral, will proceed as before; and cost of living. The last Board of Trade returns showed the rise in prices in Germany (Berlin) to be about 112 nothing at all is said in the Note with regard to per cent., but in practice it is sure to be much more than merchant ships armed for purely defensive purposes. It this in the purely working-cIass districts. The Government, may be recalled that a definite assurance was given by too, cannot allow the health of the army to Sir Cecil Spring-Rice on behalf of the British Government deteriorate; and it follows, therefore, that the soldiers and that our merchant vessels were armed for defensive sailors have the first claim to such food supplies as are purposes only, and not for purposes of offence, as the available, a fact which is not likely to lessen the enemy alleged. To sum up the German reply in this discontent among the civil population. way does not convey a clear conception of the *** extraordinarylanguage in which it has been drafted. It is But this shortage of food, bad as it must be, is riot at once vague, and, in some cases, almost meaningless, sufficient to justify a protest against the blockade. The but in practically every case arrogant and insulting. The blockade is illegal only in the sense that it is not effective, tone of the Note has brought about a furious outcry juridically speaking, to the extent of covering the against Germany in the American Press, with the exception Baltic; but in every other respect the British Government of those newspapers which are owned or are have kept thoroughly within their legal rights so far as Germany is concerned. The American authorities conductedby German-Americans. have more than once protested against our blockade, *** as I have noted in these pages from time to time; but It should be recognised at once that the German they have done so with a strict regard for American reply has been ingeniously composed, and undoubtedly interests and without reference to the sufferings of the places President Wilson in a rather difficult position. A German civil population. From the point of view of concession of sorts has been offered; and even international law nothing else could have been done. It newspapersand politicians friendly to the Allies have felt would be unprecedented for any ruler to enter upon bound to urge the President to accept the main “diplomatic barter” of the kind suggested in the concession, such as it is, and to reject the conditions Germanreply; and any effort in this direction might well be attaching to it. Clearly, it would be unprecedented for met with a polite snub. It is not advisable to pay too a country to give up its diplomatic independence to the much attention to the reports that the German reply is extent of securing the fulfilment of a demand from an ingenious method of leading President Wilson to another only at the cost of making a demand on a third. discuss peace terms with Great Britain on behalf of our ‘Phis is what some of the American jurists have very enemies while nominally discussing the conditions of the properly called “barter,” and the President could blockade. Undoubtedly, the German ’Government would hardly consent to it. The blockade, as has often beeen be well pleased to come to terms now that the military admitted, has affected American traders greatly, but the efforts of the German, Austrian, Turkish, and Bulgarian negotiations regarding it between the United States and armies have reached their climax. For all practical ourselves have been conducted without reference to any purposes we are dealing with Berlin, and Berlin now owns specific action of the enemy. Furthermore, the Americans Belgium, part of France, Serbia, Poland, and a slice of have always pointed out-and how could they fail Russian territory. But from this month those gains, to do otherwise?-that the British blockade of Germany with occasional backwashes of success, are bound to has never at any time jeopardised the lives of neutrals; become smaller and smaller as the resources of England and the German allegations that it has led to the starvation and Russia increase. There may be a German dash at of women and children come ill from the nation that Russia, or at various points on the lines in the West; cheerfully starved Paris only a generation ago. The but the end is sure. I think I may say with confidence murderous and unexpected violence of German that this journal is not in favour of a premature peace. submarines is very different indeed from a food blockade. *** There is no remedy whatever for the former; but the One point should be noted. The Sinn Fein rising has remedy for the latter is surrender-on the assumption, decidedly changed the views of President Wilson’s of course, that the population of Germany is really advisers with regard to active participation in the war. starving. *** There are in the United States millions of Irish and German-Americans ; and in many important areas these As to the German food supply, it has undoubtedly people predominate overwhelmingly. The Washington been affected by the blockade, and luxuries have authorities have no wish to go to war only to find disappeared, according to the German papers; from all themselvestaken in the flank by an unexpected rising on the tables except those of the very wealthy. All the part of the well-organised Germans and disaffected endeavours of the German Government in the last few Irish. There is no guarantee that, given a declaration months have been directed towards eking out the of war, some such attempt would not be made. Already suppliesof wheat and potatoes available in order to tide the the United States has had a touch of the enemy’s quality country lover until the nest harvest. This, naturally, -the blowing up of munition works, attempts to blow accounted for the efforts made to corner all the up bridges and to destroy canals, all but successful Roumanianwheat supply; efforts which were nullified by attempts to dynamite liners and trains, and, lastly, the purchases of considerable quantities on behalf of this workings of the elaborate system of espionage organised country and France. The dangerous condition of by the German and Austrian Embassies. These are German agriculture, the scarcity of fodder, the difficulty symptoms to which, after Dublin, the American Government of securing labour, and so on, have frequently been is likely to devote considerable attention. Why is it excessive? Unedited Opinions. For two very good reasons. In the first place, it is The Compulsion of Men Again. of such a character that it cannot be taken away. By YOU promised last week to enumerate some further transferring to the governing classes absolute power objections to the establishment of the Conscription of over our lives we surrender, at the same time, the Men without the concurrent establishment of the means of holding them to account for their actions. Conscriptionof Money. Will you begin? How can we, when we have surrendered our power, Certainly. But, first, I must ask you to realise that employ power to recover our power if it should be the form of government under which we live is a misused ? Plainly we cannot. Power thus plutocracy. The rich, merely because they are rich, rule unconditionallytransferred is power absolute. And I tell you the poor, merely because they are poor. Set aside now that, unless by their own free act, our governing every other consideration for the moment, such as the classes will not and cannot be made to restore the so-called democracy of the franchise, of the Press, and personal liberty that existed before Conscription was so on, the fundamental fact of our civilisation is that adopted. Well, that is one witness that their power has a comparatively small class of wealthy people, numbering become excessive. And the other is that no reciprocal at most only a fifth of the population, govern in duty has even nominally been attached to it. every essential respect the comparatively large class of What do you mean by that? the poor, numbering four out of five of the population. Let us suppose that when our governing classes came Until you have realised this fact you have not to the conclusion that the Compulsion of Men would understoodthe letter A of modern politics. be necessary they had found themselves in face of a Well, I think I have realised it. strong people capable of withholding its consent-would Good. Now the next thing for us to agree upon is they not, under those circumstances, have offered proofs that too much power in the hands of this small governing of their disinterestedness in the form either of a solemn class is dangerous both to themselves and to the promise to restore liberty or of an undertaking to make governed. This, of course, is elementary; but I prefer an equivalent sacrifice? But you will observe that that we should make it explicit. Do you agree? neither of these pledges has been made. Their I see that it may be dangerous to the governed; but assumption of additional power has been unconditional ; must it needs be dangerous to the governors as well? no promise has been made to return it; and no equivalent Perhaps not so obviously, but still unmistakably, I sacrifice has been demanded of them. think; for not only is too much power demoralising, You refer, of course, to their sacrifice of Money? but, in the end, its exercise provokes rebellion. Exactly, for to my mind the only acceptable proof Instability, in fact, is a necessary consequence of excessive that the wealthy ruling classes had no intention of power. acquiring excessive power by means of the Conscription But what is the test of excessive power? of Men would have been their voluntary surrender of I should say that power becomes excessive at the an equivalent amount of their economic power. As it moment when it ceases to be responsible; and this is, you can see that they have retained the whole of occurs when it can be exercised without danger to their economic power-for not a of Capital has it self. been surrendered-at the same time that they have For instance ? acquired the new power of compelling personal service. Take the now classic case of Prussia. Prussia In short, our governing classes have immensely stands to Germany in much the same position in strengthened their position by the acquisition of the which the English wealthy classes stand to the English formidable weapon of Compulsion which, together with poor. By dint of crafty statesmanship on the one side, their economic weapon, now makes them invulnerable. and naive stupidity on the other side, Prussia absorbed What do you expect from this re-arrangement of into her own hands all the power of Germany, so that power ? at any given moment within the last thirty years Two consequences as a matter of course: first, an Germany could not, even had she had a mind for it, accession of servility in the governed; and, second, an effectivelydispute the will of Prussia. Prussia, that is, accession of pride in the governors. These appear to could exercise power without the least fear that me to be inevitable. Germanymight hold her to account for it or take it from And how, do you think, will they be manifested? her. Such power was plainly excessive. That this The increased servility of the “people” will be excessive power did not lead to rebellion in Germany is manifestedin two ways: by a growing and general apathy merely a proof of its thoroughness; though I think on the one hand, and by sporadic and local ebullitions that, given time, Germany would in the long run have of revolt on the other. We shall, I think, see fewer rebelled. However, the initiation of the rebellion against large strikes, for example, in the future; but more the excessive power of Prussia had to come from numerous small and violent strikes. The increased without. pride of the ruling classes will be displayed in a pursuit And you parallel the case of Prussia in Germany of foreign and domestic policy with an ever diminishing with the case of the wealthy and the poor in this reference to or consideration for public opinion. Our country ? ruling class, in a word, will become Prussian. I do with the utmost confidence. Mind, however, that I am not saying that the wealthy in this country It is not a pleasant picture. Have you considered have yet reached the position Prussia arrived at in what the outcome may be? Germany. I merely intend to point out that they are From the decline of the spirit and power of the well on the road to it. Until the Franco-German War people I anticipate naturally a decline in the commercial of 1871 Prussia was still only the first among her and every other efficiency of England; for a nation equals in the German Confederation; it was after 1871 cannot be great by its governing class alone. From that Prussia became everything and the other German the excessive power and pride of our ruling classes I kingdoms nothing. Similarly, I would say that until anticipate the inauguration of a Prussian policy of this war the wealthy classes in England were still only blundering and blustering concluding in the fate Prussia the first among equals. After the war . . . ! is now enduring. Exit England. What leads you to forecast this consequence? Oh, drop the curtain-is there no means of avoiding The fact that under. our eyes excessive power is this fate? being given to the governing classes who were already Well, the present war is not yet over. Though before the war quite powerful enough. belated, the Conscription of Capital is even yet not But what form exactly does this gift of excessive impossible. If, even at this eleventh hour, we could power take ? institute the Conscription of Capital as a set-off to the The power we have accorded them to compel men to Conscription of Men, the nation may be saved. Otherwise--. perform personal service, in the name of the nation. to America to maintain the principles of--among other Irish Nonsense About Ireland. illustrious Americans-Abraham Lincoln ! As Lincoln Copyright U.S.A., 1916, by GEORGEBERNARD SHAW. is the most famous Unionist known to history, the Separatist patriots could hardly have made a more [The following article was published in New York and unfortunate selection of a name to conjure with. Dublin on the eve of the Dublin rising. The author Now, as against all this, I venture to ask the Americans has since protested strongly against the shooling of the Dublin leaders, for whom he claims all the of Irish race, and even those Americans who have honours of a war of independence.] to blush for less glorious origins, to keep a firm grip of the following facts :- THERE has come into my hands, from a quarter it was It is now half a century since the most populous and not meant to reach, a certain address “To the Men and productive States of North America, compared to the Women of the Irish Race in America,” which is so least of which Ireland is only a cabbage garden, and a typical of the stuff which gives its title to this article that I feel moved, in the interests of my unfortunate barren one at that, renounced all idea of independence countrymen in Ireland, to offer America a piece of my and isolation, and fought for compulsory combination mind concerning it. As an Irishman I have been with all the other States across the whole continent more familiarwith Irish patriotic rhetoric all my life. Personally desperately than the many Irish soldiers engaged in the I have had no use for it, because I always wanted to conflict had ever fought for separation. During that get things done and not to let myself go For the half century no small nation has been able to maintain satisfaction of my temper and the encouragement of my its independence single-handed : it has had to depend already excessive national self-conceit. I have seen either on express guarantees from the great Powers it going out of fashion with the greatest relief. (that is, the combinations), or on the intense jealousy When something like an Irish national theatre was between those Powers. established in Abbey Street, Dublin, and a genuine Irish In the present war the attack of a huge army of drama began to germinate, I enjoyed the new Irish men of different races, speaking half a dozen different plays because the heroes always brought down the house languages, and estranged by memories of fierce feuds by declaring that they were sick of Ireland, by and persecutions and tyrannies, but combined under the expressing an almost savage boredom at the expense of leadership of the Central Empires, made short work of the old patriots who were usually the fools of the piece national pride, of the spirit of independence, and of when they were not the villains, and, generally, by bitter memories of old hostilities in England, France, damning the romantic Old Ireland up hill and down dale and Russia. These three ancient enemies, any of whom in the most exhilarating fashion. And though this could have swallowed Ireland more easily than Ireland might easily have become as tiresome and insincere a could swallow her own Blasket islands, had to pocket trick as the most obsolete claptrap of the stage Irishmen their nationalism and defend themselves by a combination who, obliged to confess that they have never been of the British Fleet, the French Army, and the in Ireland, call themselves American Gaels, yet it was Russiansteam roller. And even when these immense for the moment a notable step in advance; and it has combinationswere in the field one of them was glad to buy finally straightened itself out in such admirable essays the help of moribund Turkey and immature little on modern Ireland as that recently put forward by a Bulgaria, and the other to offer Italy, in defiance of all genuine Irishman of genius, St. John Ervine, in the nationalist principles, a lodgment in Dalmatia if she guise of a biography of Sir Edward Carson, to whom would come to the rescue. about half a dozen lines are allotted in the course of In the face of these towering facts that blot out the the substantial little volume. heavens with smoke and pile the earth of Europe with The first comment provoked by the appeal “to the dead I invite America to contemplate the spectacle of a men and women of the Irish race in America” is that, few manifesto writing stalwarts from the decimated though it is dated 1916, there is no internal evidence population of a tiny green island at the back of God- that it was not written in 1860 (as, indeed, most of it speed, claiming its national right to confront the world was) except the inevitable allusions to the present war. with its own army, its own fleet, its own tariff, and its In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing own language, which not 5 per cent. of its population these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons could speak or read or write even if they wanted to. nowhere.Their belief that the Irish race not only takes Unless the American climate has the power of totally with it to America the ideas of Athlone, but invincibly destroying the intelligence of the Irish race its members maintains in its new home not only its Irish nationality, will see that if Ireland were cut loose from the British but its Irish ignorance, its Irish parochial narrowness, fleet and army to-morrow she would have to make a its Irish sectarianism, and its Irish conviction that the present of herself the day after to the United States, or Irish are the salt of the earth, and that all other races France, or Germany, or any big Power that would are comparatively barbarous, degraded, sordid, condescendto accept her ; England for preference. irreligious, ungenerous, tyrannical, and treacherous, and Now let me not be supposed to have any lack of that this inferiority is essentially and disgustingly sympathyfor the very natural desire of the Irish, expressed marked in the case of “the English race,” shines by “the clarion voice of the Bishop of Limerick,” to ridiculouslythrough every paragraph in their manifesto. keep out of this war if possible. If I were an Irish Ireland is to be freed from the horrible contamination Bishop I should certainly tell my flock to till their fields of association with England by complete political separation and serve God in peace instead of slaughtering Germans from her. “Ireland looks forward with hope and who also ought to be tilling their fields and serving God confidence to the complete breakdown of British misrule in peace. If I were the Pope I should order every in Ireland as the certain outcome of the present war.” combatant in Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa to lay down “Success for England would mean only additional heavy his arms instantly on pain of excommunication. I should burdens for Ireland and a renewal of strength to her offer the Kaiser his choice between coming to Canossa agelongoppressor and tyrant.” Finally, there is an appeal and going to hell; and I should not hold out the least hope to the President of the French Republic or the Ireland can do for her in return for the indispensable Kings of England and Italy that they had any greater things it can do for Ireland. claim in the eye of heaven to a verdict of justifiable In short, the war is a convincing demonstration of homicide than the Kaiser. the futility of the notion that the Irish and English But does any sane Irishman hope to persuade an peoples are natural enemies. They are, on the American, of Irish or other race, that the French people contrary,natural allies. The whole case for Home Rule were any less desirous to keep out of the trenches than stands on that truth, and the case against it, on the the Irish? Is the Catholic of Bavaria any less contrary, falsehood. If we are natural enemies England entangled in the net of war than the Catholic of must either hold us down or be herself held down by Connaught?On the contrary, he is entangled much more; us. If we are natural allies there is no more ground for he is not, like the Connaught Catholic, exempt from for denying self-government to us than to Australia. conscription. The English volunteer is a volunteer no There is, of course, what the Germans call the Class longer : he is a pressed man; and if he has rushed to the War always with us; but that is a bond of union be- colours more eagerly than the Irishman it is because the tween the workers of all nations, and not a division. If industrial slavery he endured was so much worse than the two countries were separate, the first care of Irish any that the Irish peasant suffers, and the places he statesmen would be to fasten as many tentacles as lives in so much uglier and more revolting to human possible on Great Britain by pooling the wider public instincts than the poorest Irish cabins that still survive services of the two countries, especially the military and the activities of the Irish Local Government Board, naval services, which would crush Ireland to-day if that the billet in St. AIbans or an Salisbury Plain, and they were a separate establishment. That is why it is the trip to Flanders were an adventure as welcome to part of the Home Rule bargain that the English Army him as the separation allowance was to his wife, and- and Fleet shall also be the Irish Army and Fleet. There sometimes-the separation itself to both of them. may come a time when international law may be SO well established that a small nation may be as safe by But you cannot knock into the head of the - itself as a small man already is in the streets of a made Irish patriot that either the grievances or the civilised capital. But that time can come only through virtues of Ireland are to be found in other countries as renunciation of all the poisonous international hatreds well. There have been occasions on which English of which the Irish hatred of England is a relic. There Trade Unionists have sent money to help French, may even come a time when some development of the Belgian, and other foreign workers in their strife for a arts of self-defence, which already enable ten properly living wage. Irish patriots send nothing but demands equipped and trained men to hold their own against a for unlimited sympathy, unlimited admiration, and thousand savages, may enable ten wise men to hold unlimitedPost Office orders. The money that Ireland has their own against a thousand fools. But that time has accepted from America without shame, and without not come yet; and if it ever does it will be a bad job perceptible gratitude, both in domestic remittances and for the Irish patriot if he is still parroting his dreary political subscriptions, is incalculable. litany to St. Patrick and Robert Emmet and the We are the champion mendicants of the world; and Manchester martyrs to be delivered from the wicked when we at last provoke the inevitable hint that Ireland, English. like other countries, is expected to be at least self- As matters now stand this war is just as much supporting, not to say self-respecting, we shall rise up and Ireland’s business as England’s or France’s. A mere denounce our benefactors as the parricidal exterminators victory for British navalism over Prussian militarism might of the Irish race. We have never seen the other side be as great a misfortune as a victory for Prussian of any Irish question : to this day the protective duties militarismover British navalism. But a victory of Western by which England ruined our manufactures are Democracy and Republicanism over Hohenzollernism denounced as an act of pure malignity, and the old notice and Hapsburgocracy, or a stalemate with the Prussian “No Irish need apply’’ as an explosion of racial hatred, and Austrian legions held up hopeless by French and although every other working class in the west of Irish Republican soldiers, even shoulder to shoulder with Europe is educated enough to know that men willing, Britons who think that they never, never, never will be as we Irish are, to take the jobs of other men at wages slaves because they have never been anything else, against which a pig would revolt, are the enemies, not would be a triumph for the principles that have made the merely of the English, but of the human race. United States the most important political combination And now we are told-as if it were something to he in the world, and, through the United States, made the proud of-that “the heart of Ireland is not changed.” Home Rule movement possible in Ireland. It does not occur to the gentlemen who have made this I am under no illusions as to the extent to which announcement, which is fortunately not true, that in modern nominal democracy and republicanism are still that case the sooner it is changed the better. “Deprived leavened by the old tyrannies and the old intolerances. as Ireland is by the Defence of the Realm Act of the I have declared in season and out that the task before right to express any national opinion” is the beginning LIS is not so much the sweeping out of the last monarchs of their depressing declaration. Pray, is England any as the Herculean labour of making Democracy the less deprived of the rights of her people by this democraticand Republicanism republican. It was by devoting reckless Act? Has anything happened in Ireland since my political life to the solution of that problem that the war began, whether in suppressions of papers, I learned to see mere romantic nationalism in its essential arbitrary arrests, excessive sentences without trial, even obsolescence and triviality. There is such a thing secret executions, that can be compared for a moment as Irish freedom, just as there is such a thing as Cork to the abuses of the Act that have occurred in England? butter. But it was by studying foreign butter and And can such abuses be restrained in any other way in tracing its excellence to its source in foreign co-operation either country than by the peoples of the two countries that Sir Horace Plunkett and George Russell, the only making common cause against them instead of, as this two noted Irishmen who have done anything silly document does, accusing “the English” of guile, fundamentalfor Ireland in my time, have kept Cork butter calumny, falsehood, cant, and what not, taunting them sweet. And it is from England and America that the with the very defeats the English papers try to minimise Irish will have to learn what freedom really means. by such headlines as “Heroic Stand by the Dublin Ireland as a nation cannot keep out of the present Fusiliers.” The cry that “England’s Difficulty is Ireland’s conflict except on the plea of utter insignificance. It Opportunity” is raised in the old senseless, spiteful way has yet to be seen whether America will succeed in keeping as a recommendation to stab England in the back when out of it. Be that as it may, the Irishman who she is fighting someone else, and to kick her when she suggests that the right side for any Western democratic is down, instead of in the intelligent and large-minded nation to take is the Prussian side must find some better modern way which sees in England’s difficulty the argument than that the Prussian side happens to be the opportunity of showing her what a friendly alliance with anti-English side. I hope in a second article to make it clear to the Germans of America (since I can hardly was specially trained for the work which he is reach the Germans of Germany) why it is that I do not supposed to be doing, and for which he is paid, on an take their side in this war, though they have taken my average, a year. This characteristic is obvious side very handsomely in my long conflict with Philistinism to the most casual observer. For the rest, it would and barbarism. But if, as I have shown, the choice need a great deal of discernment and penetration to of sides does not now depend on national considerations, determine which of them is the most unworthy of his still less does it depend on personal ones. My present hire. purpose is to show that the Irishmen who can see only For these gentlemen live upon credit, and will not Ireland and England, and see even them only as parties suffer their affairs to be inquired into. They are to a feud, can give no counsel worth attending to in this perpetualbeggars of the question, and past masters of the business. art of evasion. For all straight thrusts they have Ireland, without the least regard to its squabble with subtle parries and smart ripostes. They seldom give England, must group itself in a combination of which the rapier of truth a chance of reaching them. And the real centre is Western republicanism and when, as sometimes happens, the sheer weight of the democraticinternationalism. The present appeal against attack drives them to the wall, they fold their arms, this combination to America would be stupid even if adopt the mien of injured innocence, and in tones of Ireland’s interest and traditions were those of Frederick sacramental solemnity warn the country that the the Great. But as Irish patriotism is by tradition persons who try to elicit from them a plain answer to republican,the appeal is quite beyond patience. The Irish a plain question are acting against the public interest. patriot may demand in desperation whether he is to The truth or untruth of the doubts cast upon their fight shoulder to shoulder with the English Unionists competence is a matter that affects their attitude only and Russian autocrats against the enemies of his as the amount of the liabilities for which he is examined "agelongoppressors” ; but the reply is inexorably Yes. affects the attitude of an insolvent debtor. The greater Adversity makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows. the truth, the greater the injury to their credit, and the The Czar, when this war came upon him, must have greater their anxiety ’to elude examination-in the exclaimed to M. Sazonoff, “Good Heavens ! do you public interest. mean to tell me that I, an absolute Emperor and a Romanoff, am to fight against my imperial cousins the English Ministers do not, in theory, deny the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, who stand with me as public’s right to exercise a supervision over their the representatives of the principle of monarchy in conduct; but they object to its curiosity being pushed to Europe, on the side of this rabble of French and Irish an undue extent. And as they are allowed to be the republicans, this gang of Serbian regicides, this brace sole judges of what constitutes an “undue extent,” of of kings who are so completely in the hands what questions can be answered without detriment to of Parliaments of middle-class lawyers that their own the nation and of what questions cannot be answered, subjects call them india-rubber stamps !” If the Czar the amount of data at our disposal for a correct has to swallow that, even an Irish patriot must not be estimate of the various Ministers’ relative unworthiness is surprised at not having it all his own way. He must, very small at all times, and especially at times like therefore, console himself by considering that, in the these, when the most modest demand for enlighten- words of a deservedly celebrated Irish dramatic poet, ment is met with a monotonous reiteration of the old warning, when the least expression of scepticism by Fate drives us all to find our chiefest good In what we can, and not in what we would. those who “cannot know intimately all the facts” is deprecated as a gross proof of want of patriotism, when we are told, without circumlocution or qualification, that “it is a much less serious attack upon public Where Ignorance Is Bliss. policy to suggest suspicions which have no foundation at all than to suggest suspicions, fears, and misgivings I. which have a foundation.” THE English language, curiously enough, has no name However, there are cases in which the dearth of data for him, except a very narrow one that barely suffices of the sort that would alone satisfy a jury does not to cover a limited portion of his large and many-sided seriously interfere with the possibility of finding a true personality. When he comes forward as a pretender verdict. When we see a cucumber, we require no to medical knowledge and claims to be paid for the evidence on oath to convince us that it was produced privilege of putting us to death, we call him in good by a cucumber-plant. When we see an Administration whose record is an unbroken string of blunders, old native Anglo-Saxon a Quack. But when he makes we are justified in concluding that it consists, his appearance in any other province of ignorance, collectively,of blunderers. And there is no man or woman then we have to go across to France or Italy for a in this country, be their powers of penetration as feeble suitable appellation. At one time we imported the as they may, who, after watching our Administration’s Italian term “Dilettante,” and upon that being worn work since the beginning of the war, will hesitate to threadbare we have replaced it by the French acknowledge that it has done none of those things "Amateur.”Very singular that we should seek abroad a name which it ought to have done, and has left undone very for a being so plainly home-born and home-bred-a being few of those things which it ought not to have done. that proves the genuineness of his title to the English Through all the elaborate hedges erected by its nationality not by registration papers or pedigrees that membersto hide the truth, through all the phrases and may lie, but by the peculiar vigour of his growth in the falsehoods spun by its advocates to veil its misdeeds, English climate and by the exalted position he fills in John Bull has realised at last the melancholy fact that the English social system. Other countries know the he has a Government which does not know how to amateur in art, in science, or in sport. Here his govern. desultory presence is felt in every sphere of life, and Let us glance at some of its accomplishments. most conspicuously in the highest of all-the sphere of It is no new revelation, but simply the repetition of government. an ancient and well-worn platitude, that the world has The English Government, at the moment of writing, never known so extravagant a government as the is said to consist of 23 or 24 Ministers. These gentlemen Government of England. To prove this, it is not differ widely among themselves in the necessary to ransack the archives of the seventeenth circumstancesof their birth, upbringing, social status, and and eighteenth centuries. Ninety years ago Sydney individual temperament. But, with the exception of Smith found to his amazement that English rulers not the two Law Officers of the Crown, they all have this only refrained from practising economy, but actually one negative characteristic in common : none of them despised it; and he pronounced that such an orgy of prodigality must paralyse the industry and mar the No sane Englishman ever acts in any mode but this; fortunes of the most industrious people that ever and if you advised him to act otherwise, he would existed. He calculated that war cost this country consideryou a fit candidate for a lunatic asylum. Indeed, about a minute, which works out at a he is so deeply convinced of the value of specialisation, day. What would his feelings be were he alive to hear that he is prone to regard versatility with distrust and that it costs now thirty-five times as much ! For time to consider the Jack of all trades as master of none. has developed the improvidence of the rulers in indirect It is only when he goes forth to choose managers for the ratio to the industriousness of the ruled ; and no private biggest business he is interested in-the business upon spendthrift can now compete with a public administrator the proper management of which ultimately depends the in the science of making two shillings do the work of very existence of everything he holds dear : his purse, one. his life, his freedom, his family-it is only then that he The War Office authorities a few months ago evinced deliberately abandons his ordinary principle of action. the greatest incredulity when a lady doctor informed It was superfluous to remark that the various them that she equipped a Red Cross unit at an outlay departmentsof the government of a country are far more of The thing was incredible, impossible- complicated in their mechanism than the largest private nay, scandalous and improper: they never paid less concern can be; and that the amount of professional than for a unit. If one had the time to knowledge and skill they require is proportionately descend to picturesque details, one could tell of quantities greater. But John Bull, who is so particular on those of surplus bread and meat daily destroyed in military points where smaller interests are at stake, deems hospitals and camps-of flour produced at Edinburgh professionalknowledge and skill in the government departments and destined for troops quartered at Leith sent thither no: only unnecessary but positively undesirable. via Southampton-of motor- drivers receiving a That the manager of a grocery should be an expert regular supply of nose-bags. grocer, and the manager of a bank a banker, is in John Bull, compelled to retrench his household the nature of things; it is contrary to the nature of expenses, sees with indignation the increasing profusion things that the Minister of War should be an expert of his public servants. They urge upon him to save soldier, or the head of the Board of Trade a merchant, his pence, while they make ducks and drakes of his or the Director of the Education Department a pounds. Were they otherwise efficient, he could bear schoolmaster,or the Chancellor of the Exchequer a financier. his load patiently. But the discontent engendered by To me this anomaly has always seemed such a extravagance is heightened by incompetence. It is superfoetationof folly as the annals of human asininity could notorious that military operations were long hampered not exceed; and once I ventured to approach John by failure to provide the necessary ammunitions, that Bull for an explanation. After listening to my successes were often missed and disasters incurred argument with that patient attention which covers such through pure absentmindedness, that bad plans were funds of obstinacy, he shook his head and said : adopted in preference to good plans, that plans good ‘‘That would never do-never ! Professional in conception were wrecked by incapable execution, knowledgeand experience are very well for underlings. At that at every turn the grit of the men was frustrated by the top we must have men with fresh minds, sir. Your their leaders’ want of grip , t h at miscalculation has been professional man is apt to become too specialised-too the cause of infinitely more calamities than misfortune. groovy. ” John Bull would fain hold the Ministers accountable “So the less a man knows of a particular job the for these errors. The Ministers, in whose eyes their better qualified he is to boss it ! What would you say own credit is much more important than the lives of to a steamship company that put me in command of one their fellow-countrymen, sometimes boldly denied that of its liners? As regards matters marine, I have a any errors were committed, at other times, when all the perfectlyfresh mind. In fact, I may say, without vanity, paltry rags of sophistry and prevarication were rudely that I hardly know the stem from the stern of a boat.” torn off by the force of facts and the truth stood forth in its brute nakedness, they expressed their naive ‘‘You are trifling, sir,” he said severely, and after some reflection added, “You may be right as far as logic "disappointment”at the miscarriage of their good goes; but from a common sense point of view you are intentions,and, more in sorrow than in penitence, shifted the utterly wrong.” burden of responsibility from those to whom it properly belonged-and who, naturally, found it rather cumbersome- It is proper to state that I waive any advantage which on to the broad shoulders of ill-chance. could be derived to any argument from the force of It is painful for me to meddle in a quarrel between a logic as a thing distinct from common sense-indeed, master and his servants, and still more painful to to me, the distinction is quite incomprehensible. But, appear in the remotest degree anxious to defend clients I confess, I should be able to sleep much more peacefully for whose character I have so little respect. But I in a house built by an expert architect-however should be false to my own name if I forbore to point groovy its maker might be and however deficient his out that, blamable as the servants are, the master is work in up-to-date comforts and appliances-than in a anything but free from blame. house built by a man picked up at haphazard, though I In every private business in England, as in every knew him for the most brilliant talker of the age. other country on earth, it is accepted as a self-evident VERAX. axiom that a certain amount of expert skill and (To be continued.) specialisationis necessary to ensure success or, indeed, to escape disaster. No English merchant in his senses MR. Lloyd George would engage a manager who had no knowledge of commerce or a landowner an agent innocent of all O Sophist, thou art victor for a while, acquaintance with agriculture, or a newspaper Thou hast usurped a nobler throne than yet proprietor a hack who had never handled a pen. On the Was worthy of thy schemes ; the sullen fret contrary, before he even thought of appointing the Of an whole nation hast thou stilled with guile So sedulous, so callous ; and that smile candidate to the post, the person concerned would Jocose has conquered, and that huckster’s set demand, as a matter of course, very satisfactory proofs Of limber tricks to break the silver net that the candidate possessed the necessary qualifications Of reason, till expedience run a mile. for it. This is also the practical principle which guides Thou front of brass, while still the Muse in grace John Bull in the choice of a butler, a cook, a solicitor, Doth light responsive flame from our dull clay a tutor, a coachman, or a gardener. Likewise when And mould this world until the latter time, in need of shoes he goes to a shoemaker, when in need Thou shalt be seen from each divergent face For judgment, and the verdict sometime sway, of clothes to a tailor, when in need of physic to a Till this poor sonnet shall thy skill sublime. chemist, and when in need of a coffin to an undertaker. J. A. M. A. themselves-and much better than men can possibly make A Modern Document. them. And at best they must await confirmation by women, who alone can assure us whether our guesses Edited by Herbert Lawrence. partake of truth. §2. The largest generalisation applicable to modern EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION.-When first I met women is that of their industrialism. To Acton Reed, the writer of the following letters, my meditative economists the phenomenon of the impression was of an incarnation of the problem of modern insurgence of women into capitalist industry must women. I had seen her but twice or thrice, and from needs have raised questions concerning both its the brief evasive conversations we had, chiefly in the causes and its effects. How far, it might be presence of a mixed company, it was improbable that asked, was the industrialisation of women preceded by any other conclusion could have been drawn. Amiable, a decline, due to the other causes, in what we were accustomed to regard as the fundamental instincts of tolerant, easy in manners, and with a keen sense of women-the instincts of home-making ? And how far, humour, Acton Reed still gave me a profound again, was this decline of instinct to be accelerated by impression of sadness. There was nothing, it appeared, women’s diversion into industry ? From a philosophical that she would rather do than anything else; and this point of view it might already have appeared to the purposelessness, so alien to her equipment of health, prophetic eye of Ibsen that the same movement that beauty, and good spirits, coloured her whole appearance was predisposing men to the intensification of and gave it that melancholy which was characteristic of industrialismwould, though in a lesser degree, predispose her. On the receipt of the first of her letters here women also. In other words, the capitalist tragedy was preparing its victims, women as well as men, long published,however, I was led to turn my speculations in before it had occasion to make actual use of them. But another direction. Since the writer was disposed to from another point of view the whole movement of make me her confidant, that fact alone seemed to prove women into industry is no more than an unpremeditated that she was not altogether without hope of making and unprepared-for accident. The wages of the man herself understood. What if the classification, ordinarily having fallen in consequence of his competition with accepted, of modern women should fail to include her, machinery, he was no longer able by himself to support a family, but the women of it must go out and earn as and she should appear either unique or an example of a well as himself. This latter explanation, it is obvious, type too rare for common recognition? The first thing, involves of itseIf no profound change in the nature of however, to be done was to obtain her portrait of women. They remain under industrialism exactly what herself, as fully as she could be persuaded to draw it. they essentially were in the days before industrialism. Until that was completed, judgment should be §3. My own reading of the case is that each of the suspended. I therefore, as will be seen in the correspondence foregoing theories contains an aspect of the truth. I here following, set myself to play the part of believe that it is true that certain predispositions, rather the sympathetic listener and the judicious interrogatory, of mind, however, than of nature, were created in in the earnest hope that light and healing would be women by the approach of the latest phase of Capitalism. But I believe that it is no less true that women shed upon the problem, both for my correspondent and in industry are of much the same nature as women out for myself. What measure of success has attended my of it. The transformation of women’s nature under efforts I am pretty well assured. It has been not Capitalism is, in short, in my opinion, a myth. What, inconsiderable, and much more than could have been however, has given ground for such speculations is the hoped. At the same time it would be foolish of me fact that arithmetically and socially the status of to pretend that the problem has been solved, since women, relatively but not absolutely, has definitely time alone can prove it. But that it has been here changed within the last fifty years. Consider, in the first place, the reactions that must certainly arise from fairly stated, I have no doubt; and the statement of the existence in a community of many more women than a case is half the reply. men. Without in the least changing the nature of §1. Before entering upon any discussion of the women or of men, this arithmetical difference alone gives particular case represented by these letters, it may be as rise to a number of problems any one of which might well to summarise the views current at this moment be regarded as pointing to some fundamental change concerning what is called the modern woman. Like in one or the other sex. But any such indication might, in fact, mislead. Or consider, again, the reactions most men who profess an interest in contemporary necessarily arising from the fact of the modern education sociology, I confess to a particular concern, dating of women. Are not these enough to disturb the from the days of Ibsen, in the psychology of women. former balance of the two sexes, especially when it is Ibsen, it may be remembered, believed that the salvation remembered that the advance in men’s education has of the world lay in the hands of workmen and by no means kept pace with the advance in women’s women; each of which classes (if one may so name education? Such relative changes, I hold, are quite them) had, among all classes of the community, alone enough to account for the emergence of women’s an unpredictable future before it. What, given their problemswithout resorting to far-fetched theories of rise to self-consciousness, the workmen might do for fundamentaland absolute change. Nor does their existence modern civilisation was and still is a question for necessarily involve any such fundamental change in the optimiststo speculate upon. Half the hope of the world, future. What we may hope to see is the multiplication at any rate, is in their keeping. But equally it is true and increasing definition of types of women such (or it appears so to many of us) that the other half is as have always existed. It is not, therefore, to new in the keeping of women whose contemporary rise into types that we must look; but to the clearer recognition self-consciousness is even more striking than that of of types hitherto latent or only occasionally the workmen. On the other hand, I must confess, representedby some rare individual. unlike many men who have written upon the subject, §4. That the writer of the following letters belonged that my speculations upon women, and, indeed, the to one or other of the categories of women just speculations of all men upon women, appear to me to indicated--the relatively superfluous or the relatively over- be gropings after truth rather than researches in truth educated-was, as I have said, my first impression. But itself. Large discounts must therefore, in my opinion, the letters themselves, from the earliest of them, be made from the conclusions of any of us. At worst convinced me that I was wrong, and my readers, I think, they are an impertinence, since sooner or later such will agree with me. Of the superfluous woman-the speculations must needs be made by the subjects woman, in short, who wishes to marry and cannot- the characteristics, often most cruelly caricatured in with herself as an object of comparative interest than novels and upon the stage, are familiar. Of not one of with herself as the object of highest value in the world. them had Acton Reed the smallest trace. In the Look over, however, the women of Ibsen and see in presence of men she was at her ease without affectation what respects they differ from the type (if type it be) and without forfeiting her own modesty or men’s here portrayed. Womanly every one of them at heart respect for her as a woman. That characteristic, absent in the ordinary sense of womanliness, their problem is from the superfluous woman, I recalled of Acton Reed to find the man with whom they can be womanly. most vividly when I came to reflect upon her. Their problem, if you like, is that of the relatively over- Moreover, she was in men’s eyes most marriageable, and educated women; or, say, rather, of the women whose might, I believe, have had her choice of a thousand nature has become richer and deeper than that of the men. Nor was it the case that she was what is called men of their acquaintance. The writer of these letters, a blue-stocking. Nothing more absurdly unfitting could on the other hand, appears not to be looking to men be said of her. Though well educated, of native good for salvation. Unsatisfying as they may be to her, she parts, cultivated by reading and study, neither her own imputes neither blame to them nor fault necessarily in opinion of herself, nor her opinion of the men she met, herself. True, she wishes that she were like other ever encouraged her to compare herself favourably with women and could like men as they do; but it is in no men in general. That the men she chanced to meet- quest of men that she goes about the world, and it is many of them highly educated and intellectual-were from no conscious lack of the right kind of men that, not, in her opinion, of much account, did not, in fact, unlike Ibsen’s women, she remains uncontent. Ibsen’s come up to her expectation of what clever men ought women, in a word, would find the solution of their to be, carried with it for her no reflection that she problem in a better man than they had had the fortune herself was more intelligent than any, the least, of to meet. For the problem of the writer of these letters them. On the contrary, she was always disposed to no man would be a solution. credit men with concealing their superiority or, at least, §7. It may be imagined that before coming to my with numbering among themselves, though outside of present conclusion I did not leave untried the her acquaintance, men vastly superior to even the most hypothesesof perversion in its varied forms. With all of intellectual of women. This invariable modesty in these, if I may say so, my studies had made me familiar ; regard to her own ability disposes of the hypothesis that and one by one, considerable misgivings of their she belonged to the type of the over-educated women of inappropriateness notwithstanding, I compared their to-day. characteristics with those of Acton Reed. It is not to §5. Then did she belong to the Marie Bashkirtseff be denied by the reader of the following letters that type? No less decisively than the former was this certain features of perversion are to he found therein; theory shattered by the letters I received. In his but a closer study of the text will dissipate every “Quintessence of Ibsenism,” Mr. Bernard Shaw has suspicion that might be built upon them. Perversion, defined Marie Bashkirtseff as a supreme example of “ where it exists, manifests itself by positive acts or at the womanly woman.” In this he appears to me to least by positive thoughts. These letters, though as be wrong. The “womanly woman” (and there are frank as letters can be, betray no sign of one or the millions of them), though, perhaps, entertaining as other. Quite as confidently would I dismiss the theories passing fancies desires which, if articulated, would rank suggested by certain modern writers who imagine them with Marie Bashkirtseff, differ from her in pre- picturesquely that souls are by nature masculine or cisely the fact that they do not articulate them, and feminine, and may by chance find themselves incarnated would feel a mortal shock if they did. The Russian girl in bodies of the opposite sex; or the theories, equally was not ashamed to confess, she even made it a point untenable, of androgynous natures and of dual of honour to claim, that not one life was enough for personality.Of the signs to be expected from the presence her, nor nine lives at once. Voracity in its extremist of one or other of these phenomena none or only form of inappeasable desire for sensation was seen insignificant traces were to be found in the personality of naked in Marie Bashkirtseff, and distinguished her from the writer of these letters. From any such compounded womanly women as a ravening mania is distinguished nature might be anticipated interior disharmony no less from a healthy appetite. To compare the writer of these than exterior disharmony; and it is to be observed that letters with the writer of the famous diary is to make a contrast rather than a comparison. Much less than the person with whom we are dealing reveals as little even one life appeared to be enough for Acton Reed. of the one as she does a great deal of the other. Her appetite for sensation, so far from being inappeasable, Interior disharmony-by which I mean incompatibility might more truly be said not to exist at all; and with oneself by oneself-Acton Reed knows little or all the imagination of which an imaginative girl is nothing of-no more, at any rate, than all of us who supposed to be capable appeared to be unable to are human experience from time to time. When she is conjure up before her mind anything that she could reach alone and out of the mood of comparison she is out for with much desire. contented.It is only when the comparison of herself with §6 As will be found, the letters themselves contain others is forced upon her that she is moved to discontent, references to Ibsen’s women; and very acutely are they and then with herself alone. I conclude, therefore, there discussed. But it is not for the moment with her that not only were my first impressions of her wrong, own views of Ibsen that I am concerned, but with our but that no less inapplicable were the common classes view of herself. Can she be said to belong to the into which popular research has divided the types of gallery of Ibsen’s portraits or conceivably to have a place the modern woman. in it? I think not. The preoccupation of Ibsen’s §8, There remains to be considered a theory upon women, it is clear, is primarily with men. But the which, for many reasons, most of them discreditable to pre-occupation of Acton Reed is primarily with herself. modern thought, nothing of importance has been said Lest, however, this should prejudice the reader against for many years. Plato, it is well known, gave his her and foreshadow her character as morbidly name to a relation between the sexes which, while intospective, or as selfish, I hasten to explain that neither retaining and intensifying the proper emotions of love- quality attached to her preoccupation with herself, and the celestial Venus-excluded the emotions of the for the reason, as I believe, that at any moment, given vulgar Venus. Platonic love has been the subject of a sufficient cause, her self-preoccupation vanished. ridicule whenever it has been mentioned in public; but Some natures there are, we know, that are so I am still under the impression, first, that Plato was self-centredthat even the greatest events move them only not playing with a mere fancy when he said that men to reflect upon the relation in which they stand to them and women could be lovers without sacrificing to Venus and are affected by them. But Acton Reed was capable Pandemus; and, secondly, that, if they dared own of extraordinary detachment, of extraordinary self- it, many men and many women, even in the present detachment, so that her self-preoccupation was rather civilisation, are secretly and by nature members of this Platonic order. In the face of the historic existence of whole communities {what matters it that they From an Artist’s. Note-book. disguised their choice in a religious garb?) dedicated to pure friendship, in the face of examples of sex-friendship How rare is perfection! Here and there a poem or a recorded in history, bearing all the signs of picture, a symphony, a theory built securely on a rock passion, in the face, again, of the most intimate experience and as stable as a rock ; but how rare ! On the other of some lovers now and at any time--it is a simple piece hand, nothing is so abundantly common among the of tyranny to deny to the affirmation of the reality of works of Nature; it is precisely this divine perfection Platonic love at least the respect due to a sincere belief. which the artist all but in vain labours after, in the And, what is more, it is my conviction that, sooner or sweat of his brow, that Nature, with insolent profusion, hourly pours out and hourly annihilates. later, as women in particular become more articulate, I not only will its reality be rediscovered, but its reality **+ will be reaffirmed. The pressure of public opinion of the uninstructed kind upon every question relating to There are works of art to which might not unjustly be the sexes distorts, we all know, whatever is brought assigned a place among the products of Nature; they under it. It is a Procrustes’ bed that requires every are so sovereignly right and true. A or a flower variation from the popularly normal to be lopped off is not more perfect. A lizard, a bird, a beetle, a fish, or, at any rate, to be denied and concealed. For a toad, a creature happily formed for speed like a variationsreactionary or hostile to culture I, for one, would gazelle, or a creature happily formed for repose like a ask no better treatment. But with an increasing self- tortoise, possess not an elegance of form more sober consciousness in these matters and, hence, a multiplication and discreet. Works inexpressibly beautiful !-the of the varieties of sexual relation, may we not marvels of Chinese ceramics, the paintings of Velazquez expect that the variety known and affirmed by Plato the Fables of La Fontaine, the pastels of Degas, and known since by many another, though usually the sonnets of Heredia. denied, will become a recognised variety carrying *** privilegesproper to its kind, which is exalted, and cease to carry the burden of ridicule or incredulity it now bears? The artist, who, in practising his art, excludes almost §9. As the correspondence hereinafter printed more than he admits from among the abundance of the passed between Acton Reed and myself, one by one, as materials he deals with, who scrupulously picks and I have said, all the old familiar theories upon which my chooses his facts, or his words and colours, does not, studies had been carried on broke down under me; and therefore, fall short in true reverence of Nature, or I was left at the end, as I believe its readers will be, unfaithfully depart from her ways. On the contrary, he with only the theory of a Platonic nature to choose. may be said for this very reason to be treading the more Phrases in the letters occur, whole incidents are closely in her footsteps. Nature herself is continually mentioned,which on a hasty glance seem to dispose even practising selection. In no other manner than by an of this, and to leave the mind a blank for a solution of agelong process of selection and rejection, constantly the problem; but a more penetrating view, a view that maintained, has been built up and has arisen, bit by bit, separates essentials from accidentals, the nature of the the stupendous fabric of the existing world. writer of the letters from her efforts to appear what she *** was not, ,persuades us, I beleive, to accept the theory just mentioned. It is confirmed, moreover, by all of my Whatever is eminently well done, either in art or in recollected personal impressions of her : her imperturbable literature, creates, as it were, the necessity for its existence. amiability, her friendliness to all creatures, her Not the magnitude of a task, but the rightness fairmindedness, her courageous tolerance ; above all, her of it, lends it worth. In the eyes of the true artist a charm. For charm, while it is one of the rarest gifts of thing is vain and frivolous in proportion to the extent human beings, is, at the same time, one of the most in which it falls short of perfection. A cameo he may significant. It certainly cannot co-exist with a variation rate more highly than St. Paul’s. from the normal that is hostile to culture, since to *** assume this would rob us of the very criterion of culture which is the pursuit of charm. Yet of charm, as I have Whatever Art is capable of dealing with, it ennobles. said, the writer of these letters had a high endowment. That is its merit. Art, in this respect, resembles the That she was unaware of this, as also, needless to say, kindly godmother, who, with a stroke of her magic of the Platonic theory into which alone the facts of her wand, transformed the kitchen-wench into a silver- nature, I think, fit, must be apparent to all who read slippered maiden. And this surprising miracle, this her letters. Nowhere is there the smallest indication of wonderful transformation, Art for the most part her awareness of the magic of her personality. Had accomplishesnot by falsifying, not by changing, not by denying she, indeed, been aware of her power or of her own the true and proper character of the object she deals nature surely she would have escaped both many with, but by bestowing upon it the utmost beauty of unpleasant experiences from without and many unpleasant form and of expression that it is capable of, and that, experiences from within. On the one hand, she would as may be said, it in a manner justly calls for and is not have treated so unfittingly the people attracted by patiently awaiting to receive, by due and natural right. her light. And, on the other hand, she would in all *** probability have comforted herself in her reflections upon her unlikeness with others by the thought that her I am emboldened to say a bold thing. The true artist proper associates had not yet appeared, or were still to is the most modest, the least visionary, the most be born. Thus, she could have waited for her friends in practical-minded, and the most sober-souled of men. Nor self-content. can he well be otherwise; and for this reason : he, over §10. I have written of her, I sec, in the past tense. and above all men, desires and seeks after beauty. For But this must be taken to mean no more than that in the cult of beauty, intelligently pursued, teaches ‘my judgment the phase of her life here recorded belongs modesty. It teaches the artist to know precisely what to the past and may be buried with it. For it is he can and what he cannot do. It teaches him to know certainly my hope that she may return from her mission of that out of the vast abundance of things that the world nursing in Egypt with the whole six months or year offers to his delighted apprehension, there exists but between her and her present letters. Thereafter, perhaps, very little that either he or any other man is fitted to put better fortune may be hers. Friends still unknown may his hand to, and, at the same time, deal with successfully. become known to her. May the reader join with the He is taught accordingly, out of his love of present editor in that hope. beauty, to confine himself with a wise humility to just (To be continued.) such things as he can deal with really well, with natural felicity, in a truly masterly fashion; and all that he changed with appetite. He went into the woods, and cannot deal with superlatively well, or that he can deal there were woodcocks there whistling and grouse honking with only moderately well, or not well at all, however and hares running about. “Heavens ! Dinner ! attractive and seemingly good such an order of things dinner !” said the general, beginning to feel faint. might appear, resolutely to eschew. He is taught, in There was nothing to he done; he had to return to a word, as a devout lover of beauty, to be content with the rendezvous with empty hands. He arrived, and little. The true artist, I repeat, is the most modest, the other general was waiting already. the least visionary, the most practical-minded, and the “Well, your excellency, have you got anything?” most sober-souled of men. HENRY BISHOP. “I’ve found an old number of the Moscow Gazette,’* that’s all. “ The two generals lay down again, but they could not sleep for empty stomachs. One began to worry Saltikov’s “Fairy-Tale of a Peasant about who would draw their pensions; the other “ remembered all he had seen in the day-the fruit, the and Two Generals. fish, the woodcocks, grouse and hares. “Your excellency, ” said he, “whoever would have (Translated from the Russian by C. E. Bechhofer.) thought that dinner before it’s cooked flies and swims [ Michael Saltikov, the satirist, was the forerunner and grows on trees?” “Yes," answered the other, “I of Chehov and Evreinov in Russian literature. He is must confess I always thought rolls were born looking also known as “Shchedrin.”] just as they come in with the morning coffee.” “For ONCE upon a time there were two generals. They were instance, it looks as if to eat a partridge you’d have to both light-minded, and so, presto! by a wave of my catch it first and kill it, and skin it and roast it. But wand I carried them off to a desert island. however do you do it?’’ “However do you do it?” The generals had served all their lives in a government repeated the other general, like an echo. department. They had been born and bred and They said no more and again tried to sleep. But grown old in it; consequently they did not understand hunger decisively drove sleep away. Woodcocks, anything. They hardly even knew any words except, turkeys, sucking pigs danced before their eyes, juicy, “Accept the assurance of our best respects.” The lightly browned, with salad and pickled cucumbers. department was dissolved as superfluous, and the generals “I could eat my boots now, I believe,’’ said one were released to their own free will. Remaining on the general. civil list, they settled down in Petersburg in the same “Gloves must be nice, too, when they’ve been worn street; each had a cook and drew a pension. But a long time,” sighed the other general. suddenly they arrived on a desert island, woke up and Suddenly both generals looked at each other ; in their saw they were both lying under one cover. Of course, eyes shone an ominous fire, their teeth chattered, a dull at first they did not understand anything, but began to roar rose from their chests. Slowly they began to converse as if nothing had happened. creep towards one another, and in the twinkling of an “ I had a queer dream this morning, your excellency, ” eye the two fell into a frenzy. Fragments flew, shrieks said one general, “I dreamed I was on a desert island.’’ and sighs resounded; the general that had been a He said this, and suddenly gave a start. And the other writing-master bit off his companion’s medal and general gave a start too. “Heavens ! What’s the swallowed it at a gulp. Then the sight of the flowing matter? Where are we?’’ screamed both generals in blood brought them to their senses. a terrible voice. And they began to feel one another “The power of the Cross be upon us !” they cried to see if it weren’t a dream. But however much they together. “It we go on like this, we shall eat one tried, they had to be convinced of the sad reality. another.’’ Before them on one side spread the sea, on the other “However did we get here? Who is the villain that lay a small mound of earth, and behind this was the has played this trick on us?’) same limitless sea. The generals wept for the first “Your excellency, we must divert ourselves with some time since the closing of the department. They began kind of conversation, or there’ll he murder done,” said to look at each other, and saw that they were in their one general. “ Very well, begin,” answered the other. nightshirts and each one was wearing a medal. “Why is it, do you think, that the sun first rises and “How nice it would be to have coffee now !” said one then sets, and not the other way about?” “You’re a general, but, remembering the incredible thing that queer fellow, your excellency. Don’t you get up first, had happened to them, wept a second time. “Whatever then go to the department and have dinner there, and shall we do?’’ he continued through his tears. “If then go to bed?” “But don’t I first go to bed and we were to write a report about it--but what good dream, and then get up in the morning?” “H’m, yes. would that do?” But, well, when I was in the department, I always put “Look here, your excellency, “ said the second it this way : Now it’s morning, afterwards there’ll he the general, “you go to the east and I’ll go to the west, and afternoon, then we’ll have supper, and then it’ll be to-night we’ll meet again here. Perhaps we shall time for bed.” The memory of supper threw them discoversomething.” They began to look for the east both into low spirits and cut short that conversation at and the west. They remembered how a Chief of Staff the very commencement. had once said: “If you want to find the east, stand One of them began again. “A doctor told me once facing the north, and you get it on your right hand.” that a man could live for a long time on his own juices.” They began to look for the north; they stood so, and “How?” “Like this : Your own juices produce other so, tried all the quarters of the earth, but, as they had juices ; these in their turn produce other juices, and so served all their lives in the department, they did not on, till the juices cease altogether.” “And then?” find anything. “Then you have to take other food.” “Pah !” “Look here, your excellency : you go to the right Indeed, whatever the generals began to discuss and I’ll go to the left; that will be better,” said one perpetually led to a reminder about food, and this still general, who, besides the department, had also been a further provoked their appetites. They decided to stop writing-master in a school for soldiers’ sons, and was talking, and, remembering the number of the “Moscow consequently of superior intelligence. No sooner said Gazette” they had found, eagerly set about reading it. than done. One general went to the right, and saw “Yesterday,” read one general in an agitated voice, trees and all sorts of fruit growing on them. He “the respected Chief of Police at Moscow gave an wanted to get just one apple, but they were all too official dinner. A thousand guests were served with high. He tried to climb the tree--in vain ! He only astounding sumptuousness. The good things of all tore his nightshirt. He came to a river and saw fishes swarming and swarming in it. “If only there were * The principal reactionary organ beloved of all bureaucrats fish like that at home!” he thought, and his very face and generals.--Translator. countries had, as it were, arranged a rendezvous at water, pounded it and pressed it, and by evening the this wonderful feat. There was sturgeon from the cord was ready. With this cord the generals tied the Volga, and that denizen of the Caucasian wilds, the peasant to a tree so that he shouldn’t run away, and lay pheasant, and, a rare dish in the north in February, down to sleep themselves. fresh strawberries -” ‘‘Good heavens, your A day passed and another day. The peasant became excellency,couldn’t you find something else to read?” cried so skilful that he learned to boil soup over the fire in the other general, desperately, and, taking the paper the palm of his hands. Our generals became merrier, from his colleague, began to read as follows :-“A puffier, fuller, and whiter. They began to say that correspondent in Tula writes : Yesterday, on the here they were living with everything provided for occasionof a sturgeon being taken in the river here (an them, and in Petersburg meanwhile their pensions were event which even the oldest inhabitants cannot remember, accumulating and accumulating. all the more as inside the fish was recognised “What do you think, your excellency? Do you think Police-inspector B.), a festival took place in the local the Tower of Babel ever really existed, or is it only a club. The cause of the festivities was brought in on a kind of allegory?” one general happened to say to the huge platter, surrounded by pickled cucumber and holding other at breakfast. “I think, your excellency, that it a piece of parsley in its mouth. Doctor P., who really did exist, because how else can we explain the was on duty for the day, carved it carefully, so that existence of different languages in the world?” every guest received a portion. The sauces were of “And I suppose there was really the Flood too?” great and even capricious variety-” “ Excuse me, your “Of course, because what other explanation is there of excellency, but you don’t seem to have been very careful the existence of antediluvian animals? All the more in your choice of reading,” interrupted the first as the ‘Moscow Gazette’ said-” “Shall we have general, and, snatching away the paper in his turn, he another look at the paper?’’ read :--"Our correspondant in the viatka writes us They found the issue, sat down in the shade, and read that one of the old inhabitants of the town has invented it from cover to cover, what was eaten at Moscow, the following original method of preparing fish-soup : what was eaten at Tula, what was eaten at Kiev, what he takes an eel and flays it alive, and when, from the was eaten at Tver-and it passed off all right; they agony, its liver swells-’’ didn’t feel the slight est unpleasantness. The generals bowed their heads. No matter what . paragraph they turned to, everything was about food. Their own brains rebelled against them, for, however Soon after or late after, anyhow, the generals grew much they tried to drive away the images of beefsteaks, weary. Oftener and oftener they began to recall the all the same these images broke in on them most cooks they had left behind them at Petersburg, and violently. they even wept quietly sometimes. Suddenly inspiration came upon the general that had “What are they doing at home now, your been a writing-master. “HOW would it be, your excellency?”one general asked the other. “Don’t speak excellency,”he said joyfully, “if we found a peasant?” of it, your excellency ! My heart aches all over !” “A peasant?’’ answered the other. “Yes, yes, an ordinary peasant, like any other “It’s very, very nice here, one can’t speak otherwise peasant ! He’d give us a loaf at once, and catch us of it, but still, do you know, it’s a nuisance to be woodcock and fish.” a lamb without a ewe; besides, I wish I had my “H’m, a peasant? But where can we find one, when uniform!” there isn’t a peasant here?” “I should think so. Especially ours !-you’ve only ‘‘Not a peasant? There are peasants everywhere ; to look at the facings and it makes you giddy.” You’ve only got to look for them. They’re sure to hide They began to worry the peasant to take them to themselves somewhere, to try and dodge their work. ” Petersburg, to Petersburg. And what do you think? This thought so enheartened the generals that they It turned out that the peasant knew Petersburg, that jumped up like mad and hurried off to look for a he had been there and seen the pretty sights! peasant. Long they ranged the island without success, “Why, we are Petersburg generals !” cried the but, at last, the sharp smell of dough and bitter mutton generals, rejoicing. “Did you see me?” answered the put them on the track. And there, under a tree, with peasant, “I was the man hanging outside a house in a his belly in the air and his head pillowed on his fist, a box on a string, and painting the walls red, or crawling gigantic peasant was sleeping, dodging his work in the over the roofs like a fly.” And the peasant began most rascally fashion. There was no limit to the to rack his brains how he might please his generals generals’ indignation. “Sleeping, you lazybones !” who honoured him, a good-for-nothing, and did not they shouted at him, “doesn’t your instinct tell you that disdain his peasant labours. He built a kind of boat, there are two generals here dying of hunger? Get something like a dish, so that he could sail it over the to work ! Quick march !” great ocean to Petersburg. The peasant got up and saw at once that the generals “Take care, canaille ! don’t capsize us !” said the were strict. He would have liked to give them the slip, generals, looking at the bark balanced on the waves. but they caught hold of him and wouldn’t let go. And “Be easy, my lords generals ; it isn’t the first time,” he commenced to minister unto them. answered the peasant, and began to prepare for the First of all he climbed a tree and picked ten of the journey. He collected soft swans’ down and laid it in ripest apples for each general, and took one for himself the little boat. He put the generals on board and -a bitter one. Then he dug the earth and got potatoes tucked them in, and, crossing himself, sailed away with from it; he took two pieces of wood, rubbed them them. What terror the generals suffered on the journey together, and lit a fire. Then he made a net of his own from storms and contrary winds, how they scolded the hairs and caught a woodcock. Finally, he made a wicked peasant-this is not to be penned with a pen or huge fire and baked so many different sorts of told in a tale ! But the peasant went on rowing and provisions that the generals even began to think of giving rowing, and fed the generals with herrings. the rogue a bit of them. The generals watched these Here at last are the dear Neva and the Nevski and peasant efforts, and their hearts played merrily. They Petersburg ! The cooks threw up their hands to see both forgot how the day before they had all but died of their generals so full and white, yes, and merry. The hunger, and thought, “What a good thing it is to be generals drank some coffee, ate some fresh rolls, generals-you’re never wholly lost !” dressed themselves in their uniforms, and took a cab “Are you satisfied, my lords generals?” asked the to the treasury. How much money they drew is also peasant lazybones. “Quite, friend, to see your not to be penned with a pen or told in a tale. diligence,” answered the generals. “Will you let me rest Nor were they forgetful of the peasant. They sent now?” “Rest, friend, but plait a cord first.” The him a glass of vodka and a halfpenny: Revel, peasant at once collected wild hemp, damped it with peasant ! Diction.” To read the debate attentively is to enjoy a Readers and Writers. liberal education. Wordsworth’s thesis, as, of course, you know, was that the purest poetry and language In the current “Yale Review,” which remains the best were to be found among the simplest people living in magazine published in America, Professor Hugh the midst of the simplest circumstances. And Walker, in an article upon “Wise Men who have passed Coleridge’scriticism was that Wordsworth himself did not for Fools,” hesitates to add to the names of Steele; find it so. Coleridge then proceeded to elaborate- Goldsmith, and Boswell the name of Lamb. Lamb, it perhaps even to over-elaborate-the principle upon is true, never passed for a fool even with his personal which a good style, whether of poetry or prose, must rest. Search must not be made, he said, either among acquaintances; but as a gentle creature, next door the speech of the educated or in the speech of the among men to a fool, he was certainly ranked by them uneducated for the pure English which it must be the aim and is so by many undiscerning critics to this day. of a writer to discover. ’The educated tend to diverge Professor Hugh Walker’s advocacy-as I have observed from pure English in the direction of the ornate, and the before, I think-of the claims of Lamb as a great critic uneducated in the direction of the bare or the grotesque. is not, therefore, by any means superfluous. The just The writer aiming at perfection will choose the middle appreciation of writers is, indeed, the end of literary way, checking both the ornate and the naive by the single standard from which ’both diverge. And criticism. Lamb, in particular, offers some difficulty to observation,he concludes, is of less value for this work than the young judgment in that, to his “gentleness” and the meditation. There, I think, he distinguishes himself prejudice against it handed down to us by his contemporaries from Wordsworth by leagues of thought and rises to there was added a sense of humour which as the highest rank of literary criticism ever reached in often failed him as justified itself. Lamb could not this country. It is not without significance that resist making poor puns in any company or upon any Coleridgewrote “Aids to Reflection, ” and Wordsworth subject. ’They came into his mind and were stuttered “The Excursion.” The one was fundamentally a out before his judgment had a moment to contemplate thinker, the other fundamentally an observer. One them. The impression thus produced could not fail to descended from thought to things : the other ascended be that of a man whose interests were essentially trivial ; from things to thought. Which of them even in and when, as we know, Lamb thought best of his worst practicewas right may be seen in the result. Wordsworth jokes, the impression was indelible. What would have has not the empyrean reach of Coleridge in his poetry. been best both for his reputation and for his influence All his flights are within sight of earth. And, save for would be to have published himself and his works in its context, his prose is unreadable, while that of two separate parts and under different names. Since Coleridgeis at moments unsurpassed in English. he could not help saying that he preferred babies *** “b-b-boiled,” or writing upon “Roast Pig,” he should have attributed this impish part of his mind to a strict An observation occurs to me, and it shall go down. pseudonym and reserved his proper name for his critical In the last section of “man and Manners” it was essays. As it is, these latter have suffered from the suggested that the perfect manner reveals the man and company they keep, and will continue to do so until nothing else. His class, his circumstances, his they are published separately. A judge of literature profession, in a word, his temporal personality, are all cannot afford to indulge in witticisms. concealed by the absence from his manners of any mark *** derived from them or distinguishing them. Similarly I would say that a pure style in writing reveals nothing For Lamb at his best as a critic, I should choose his but the thoughts and the pure individuality of the essay upon Garrick, which has just been republished with writer. His idiosyncrasies, his class, his education, his sixteen other essays upon Poetry in the Oxford Edititon reading should all be kept out of sight. You should of the World’s Classics. (“English Critical Essays. “ be able to guess at nothing concerning his temporal Oxford Press. IS. 3d.) Struck, as we all must have affairs that he does not mean to tell you. Pure style been, by the banality of the equal association of Garrick is pure mind; and it is for this reason that meditation is with Shakespeare upon Garrick’s tomb in Westminster a surer way to it than observation. Abbey--“ Shakespeare and Garrick, like twin-stars, shall *** shine”-Lamb set himself to expressing what we must all feel, the real inequality of the arts of acting and writing. The mention of Steele in a foregoing note reminds me Nobody, I suppose, seriously considers the actor that I have been re-reading Thackeray’s “English the equal of the writer; and it was probably only upon Humourists.” Thackeray was no critic, but he was a a wave of journalistic emotion that Garrick got into the considerable sentimentalist ; and the pathos of Steele’s Abbey at all. As well honour the executant of character and fortunes naturally draws from him the Beethoven with Beethoven himself, as Garrick with “snivels” he despised when they were the subject of Shakespeare.The one was for a few nights, the other is for a cheerful successful person like Sterne. “Poor Dick all time. Lamb goes further, however, than to Steele,” he says, in an apologia for which Steele would dissociate the two in value. He would dissociate them not have-thanked him, “stumbled and got up again, altogether. Like me, though he was tolerant of acting, and got into jail and out again, and lived and died, he much preferred the reading to the hearing of a great scores of years ago. Peace be with him !” Do you play. How much more subtly one can read a play of feel the tears of patronising pity begin to flow for a Shakespeare than anybody can speak it, or, still less, man who probably enjoyed himself as much as any of act it. A thousand inflections are obvious to the mind us, and had the satisfaction of writing better than that cannot be conveyed either by voice or by gesture. Thackeray ? Contrast this judgment of Steele with Voice and gesture at best must make a selection from Thackeray’s judgment of Sterne-a man whom he could the meanings the writer conveyed; they are one not patronise. He writes to Mr. Gibbs of Sterne’s interpretation only. And at their worst they do no more peccadilloes : “However, on the day Sterne was writing to than adapt-which is to say distort-the play to the Lady P- and going to Miss -’s benefit, he is popular mind. A popular representation of a great play dying in - , his Journal to the Brahmine, can’t eat, is, in a word, a misrepresentation. has the doctor and is in a dreadful way. He wasn’t *** dying but lying, I’m afraid. God help him-a falser arid wickeder man it’s difficult to read of.” Save us Of even more value than Lamb’s essay is the noble if we are to be judged by our exaggerations of controversy contained in the same volume between sentimentality. Save Thackeray first. Wordsworth and Coleridge upon the subject of “Poetic R. H. C. England had not acted with its traditional dishonesty Tales of To-day. and duplicity, it might have stood at the head of a pan- Moslem, pan-human combination which had been By C. E. Bechhofer. formed under Young Turkish auspices in 1912 to oppose II.--In DEFENCE OF Small Nationalities the machinations of Russia in Siam. He need hardly say that a common hatred of Russia was his link with Mr. Raffalovitch reached the room early, but found Mr. Pickthall already waiting. Very soon afterwards Mr. Raffalovich which, with the new anti-Austrian indignation the latter had recently developed, allowed came Mr. Selver. them to co-operate with Mr. Selver and the Crovenes Then Mr. C. H. Norman arrived with a friend, and and Sloatians, who, as everybody in the know knew, did the honours. were, as philosophers and fighting-men, inferior only “Permit me, sirs,” said he, “Mr. Raffalovich to the Turks and the Ukrainians. A common realisation representing the Ukraine ; Mr. Pickthall, representing also that it was England, and England alone, who Turkey ; Mr. Selver, representing the Czechs-” was to blame for all the evil that had ever happened in “And the Croats and Slovenes,” interposed Mr. Europe since the beginning of time-or, rather, since Selver. the most glorious date in civilised history, 1454-was “Allow me, then,” continued Mr. Norman, “to the bond which particularly united them both with the introduce to you all my worthy friend Mr. Kenneth chairman and Mr. Conneagh Og. MacKenzie (‘Conneagh Og,’) Secretary of the Scottish “It was,” concluded Mr. Pickthall, “a vast mistake Royalist Society. Gentlemen, Mr. Conneagh Og, to suppose that Turkey was a small nation. On the representing Scotland !” The five gentlemen bowed to contrary, it was the finest, largest, noblest, happiest, each other, and, with Mr. Norman in the chair, sat cleanest, soberest, jolliest, sweetest, and dearest nation down to business. in all the world, and all the other countries of the world Mr. Norman delivered the presidential address. lived in fear and trembling of it.” (Loud applause.) “Gentlemen,” he said, “as I said in my letter to the Mr. Selver trowed that it was a poor quirk forsooth Sultan of Zanzibar on the 1st of April, 1066, the whole aim of the present corrupt and discredited Government to suppose the Czechs or the Slovenes or the Serbs or the Croatians, or, for that matter, the Croats, were in hac been to abrogate the. rights of small nationalities. any wise inferior to the so-called great nations of Had my advice been followed in 1670 there would have Europe. In no ill-timed spirit of mirth, he could aver been no Fire of London. Had Mr. Justice Jameson that no other national literature had ever produced such allowed my appeal in Chancery (A. m. XVIII, Edw. V, goodly lyrics about stars and violins as had those 3 b. ii, re Norman v. the World) there would never mighty Slav nationalities he had so often made have come into being the present situation and state translationsfrom. “Not even, I ween,” concluded Mr. of affairs. Gentlemen, I think we may say, as I said Selver, “does the Turkish language (which I cannot in my letter to Oliver Cromwell three days before his con) hold such masterpieces as these.” birth, that Sir Edward Grey and his French cook are Mr. Conneagh Og said (and it was pleasant to hear entirely responsible for the unwarranted and him) that, speaking as a man of ordinary common provocativehostility England has shown towards Germany, sense, it seemed to him that this meeting had somewhat both before and after the beginning of the present war. under-estimated its purpose. It was obvious that, far “Our object, I take it, is sufficiently well known to from representing small and weak nationalities, all the all of us to make it unnecessary for me to enlarge upon gentlemen present represented nations of such enormous it here. We stand for the right of small nationalities.” power and vitality that the whole world was intimidated (“Hear, hear ! hear, hear !” and devout exclamations in by them. Speaking for himself, he said that not only Arabic by Mr. Pickthall ) was England conquered three centuries ago by Mr. George Raffalovich now rose to speak. Outlining Scotland, but at this moment it remained a Scottish his ancestry on both sides for twenty-two generations, principality.Parliament, the Civil Service, the Army, the he went on to speak as follows :- Navy, the Bench, the Bar-, medicine, teaching, distilling, “Actually, then, gentlemen, both my ancestors come temperance, and all other branches of national eventually from Ukrainian stock. It would be very service and commerce were in the hands of Scottish extraordinary if they did not, for, as I hope to show men, but England still had the ignorance to claim very shortly (and, under the name of Bedwin Sands,’ authority over Scotland. It was, he gathered, a similar I shall have no hesitation in corroborating it), what is state of affairs to that obtaining in the other parts of the usually known as the ‘Aryan’ race is actually nothing world to which the other gentlemen present had drawn more or less than the Ukrainian people. We are all attention. According to Mr. Raffalovich for example, Ukrainians ; you are allUkrainians-” Russia, Poland, Austria, America, and Canada were “And Serbs and Slovenes, I ween,” said Mr. Selver. really only portions of the Ukrainian Empire. “And Turks, by Allah,” said Mr. Pickthall Similarly,Mr. Pickthall had shown that all Europe, Asia “And Scottish Gaels, gude man,” said Conneagh and Africa were deceitfully striving to wriggle off the Og, in the softest, most musical English. beneficent rule of Turkey. What Mr. Selver, too, had “Agreed, gentlemen, agreed,” said Mr. ‘Raffalovich. said about the Slovations and the Crovenes had gone “But the Ukraine, which, as you know, is the most to his heart, and he hoped he might call them and the civilised, enlightened and mighty race that ever had Czechs-- never been heard of, is now compressed into an area “And the Serbs, ifackins,” said Mr. Selver. little larger than eight times the size of Europe. This, Yes, and the Sairbs-he hoped he might call them gentlemen, is intolerable, and I cannot contradict the scourge of the Central Powers. (“Hear, hear !”) myselftoo often to say so. Here we have a nation, mighty To his mind, it did not matter how often the delegates and triumphant, treading with equal foot the neck of present contradicted themselves and each other, so long the Russian, the Pole and the Austrian, and, gentlemen, as they never wavered in their partisanship of the these persist in calling it a small nationality. nations they stood for and remained constant in an (Cries of “Shame !”) Yes, gentlemen, it is a shame, instinctive common hatred of England as at present a burning, icy shame. I demand that England shall constituted. immediately call upon Russia to acknowledge herself The following resolutions were then put to the not, as she pretends to be, mistress of the Ukraine, but meeting and unanimously approved :- its slave, as all the world knows she really is. I say (I) England shall immediately call upon the rest of this in the full consciousness that what is good for the Europe publicly to acknowledge itself the joint dependency Ukraine is good, and too good, for England.” of the Ukraine, Turkey, the Southern Slavs, and Mr. Pickthall rose to continue the proceedings. He Scotland, and shall be prepared to follow up the request said that he happened to know for certain that, if only by force of arms if necessary. (2) Whatever shall be supposed good for any of the and called mendiant = beggars ?). We settled back to above four nations under any circumstances by its the gateau de riz (cake of rice, our common rice pudding particularpartisan, shall be thought, known and esteemed with custard) oeufs au lait = eggs and milk. Mr. the sole honourable and advantageous procedure for Raymond Duncan hove in sight. “Voila un om !” England also. exclaimed an Englishwoman-not me-and everyone Mr. Norman agreeing that he could wish England glanced galvanically away from Mr. Raymond Duncan, no other fate than this, the meeting broke up in and at her. enthusiasm. *** Homme=man (h silent), if pronounced um, as in rum, the ni very firm, is as near as we English shall easily Impressions of French get to this very French word and all of its order. Um as in ruin is really nearer to the French than ome as in Pronunciation. come, as I have tested by persistent pestering of my French friends, The flattest pronunciation of homme THE phonetic world may as well retire before these as um, m firm, will be leagues nearer to the French impressions : I shall not give way to a single argument in than om. Here is an example for practice. I will phonetics. The pre-war battle against the New Spellers discuss the intermediate words later. saw on their side some of the Greatest Phoneticians in We are men who eat apples. the World. And all they came to was the open confession We are of-the men who eat of-the apples. that they could not pronounce English as finely as Nous sommes des hommes qui mangent des pommes. can a thousand odd of our actors and actresses; for Nou sum dasum kee mahje da pum. they heard no difference between is and iz, tail and tale, Nou : as in you ; not noo-there is no such sound in and so on, not to mention words like young or almighty French. or soul, which require both natural feeling and trained sum: m firm. intelligence to produce. dasum : des as in day; the final s in French is carried Good pronunciation of even one’s own language is on, hard, as in visage, to any word following which largely a question of race. As your race is pure so will your pronunciation be. If you happen to have a poet begins with a vowel or a silent h. among your immediate ancestors your oral valuation of kee : the ee’s resolutely. I give kee, but an Englishman words may be even greater than your capacity to understand who cannot distinguish between qu, which is said, their spirit; no matter-you are a boon to the as in quell, with the lips rounded, and kw which does world nevertheless, a body of rhythm and harmony. not exist in English, though qu is thus rendered in the Get a poet for your ancestor if you can; if not, get a dictionaries-what folly !-this kw, which can only be poet for your descendant. Poets themselves usually said with wide lips as kwell-try q and k separately as pronounce badly, but they transmit superbly. Anyway, a test !-the said Englishman will never say qui never boast of being unable to pronounce English as it anythinglike a Frenchman. is written to-day because this were a flat confession of mahje: ent in verbs is so silent as almost to escape inferiority to people who can so pronounce it, and, also, English ears; the dull e is prolonged, however. But a degrading ingratitude to all the poets who have this word later. Never say maange on any account ! striven to spiritualise our language. da: as in day, said very shortly. *** pum : m firm. It is when one is abroad in Latin countries that Nous sommes des hommes qui mangent des pommes. clumsy English most offends one. The English heard in Nou sum dasum quee mahje da pum. hotel or shop or restaurant is mostly middle-class Just indicating other words of this tone, like bonne= English, an affected roar or shriek of exaggerated maid, donc=then, donnez=give; bonhomme (bunum) = vowels and slurred consonants, and very indignant one old fellow ; honnete (unait) =decent ; let us consider the becomes that foreigners should be led to suppose manner in which, the French speak a sentence. The English such a vulgar-sounding tongue. French language is very smoothly spoken as a rule, *** almost on one note. There is no tonic accent as there But what must not their feelings be when we attempt is chez nous (shay nou)=with us. They do not say as their language ! The French, a most intolerant and we do before we know better: impatient people, hate us quite simply for the horrid way Nous sommes des hommes qui mangent des pommes. we maul their tongue, which is nothing if not well It is all run together as it were. pronounced, for it has very little natural magic. The The best way for us English, with our naturally French have no humour; they have only irony which strong emphasis on nouns and adjectives or any has no connection with magic, fairies and clowns. Yet important word, to get at the French tone is to practise they themselves in speaking English irritate me sentences in French accenting deliberately just those constantly with their imitation of our clumsy speakers. little words which we should naturally glide over. If They say Goo-bai ! Shooger or Shoogah ; Begger or we say Beggah ; rigret ; dimand; mioutiny ; and such horrors. Nous sommes des hommes qui mangent des pommes Poor things, they have been taught in school that the we shall by such practice become infinitely more English speak like this : examine the pronunciation intelligibleand tolerable to our irritable neighbours. given in their standard dictionaries, if you doubt ! By Listen to the newsvendors crying their journals. instinctive vengeance they have lured as to say ongfang, They cry bong, om and fam, so as to have an excuse for detesting “La Liberte, La Presse, Le Bonnet Rouge !” us. In a restaurant you will hear : *** Donnez-moi In carte. (Give me the bill-of-fare.) Om ! Fatal word for us English in France, only Voulez-vous de la viande? (Will you of the meat?) less so than Fam. Of course the French say it all so rapidly that we, Mrs. Raymond Duncan in Greek dress and sandals at first, do riot notice how. We only hear how slovenly passed a restaurant where I was with friends. We our own attempts sound : Donny-moi la carte. Voolly- admired her and settled back to the merlan (whiting: if vous de la viande? Avvy-vous le journal? Say, avez- nobody minds, I will give the English of all French vous le journal? words used-it is nicer to be understood by all readers, Prenez-vous du cafe? do you take coffee? and it is mere snobbery to write as though all English Un sou de pain. One sou of bread. readers know French; besides, how many of us knew (I can’t help here telling a story which is going about from the school-books how to ask in an ordinary restaurant about a certain artist suddenly successful and invited to for nuts and raisons, which are made up in packets dinner in the grand world. Looking over his shoulder he ordered of the footman, or whatever they call him, “Un attacks in this book. For if Machiavelli was a Royalist in sou de pain.”) “Il Principe,” he was a Republican in the “Discorsi” ; It is true that the average Frenchman permits he was not sinister, that is, on the left hand, he was himselfto say “Un sou d’ pain.” But, then, you see, he is ambidextrous, able to fight on both sides. It would be not a very chic person or he wouldn’t be ordering a half- safer to trace the war right back to Lucifer, and to pennyworth of bread. He never, however, says-‘ “un see in his rebellion against God the original objection to sou d’ pain.” Vous me donnerez une sardine, une the reign of universal law. soupe, un roti de veau, une pommes frites, un fromage Apart from this touch of Shakesperean prejudice et un cafe against Machiavelli Mr. Dickinson gives an outline of you tu-me will give a sardine, a soup, a roast of the European system. He shows that the two conflicting veal, a fried potatoes, a cheese and a coffee. (The ideas are Empire and the Balance of Power, and that French, at a restaurant, ask for “a sardine, a roast both of them really arise from the idea of State veal,’’ meaning of course, “a portion of.”) Sovereignty which Machiavelli is erroneously supposed to Avez-vous dejeune? Have you lunched? have invented. He contends that Europe, as an Vous aimez le bifteck bien cuit? You like the steak aggregationof Sovereign States, is living in a state of well done? Nature ; and he examines the available evidence to show Prenez-vous une autre tasse de the? Take you that the fear and suspicion which issue in conflict are another cup of tea? common to all the belligerent parties. He relies to Je bois de la biere. I drink of the beer. a great extent on the dispatches of Belgian Ambassadors, J’aime mieux le vin. I like better the wine. whose reports serve the useful purpose of showing Je n’ ai pas paye l’addition. I not have not paid the how the same action is differently viewed by the persons bill. affected by it. It is a very wise choice, for Belgium, *** as a neutral country, was likely to adopt an impartial After homme, femme = woman; wife may attitude towards the activities of the Great Powers ; and perhaps he mentioned. This extremely difficult word is the Belgian reports from Berlin, from Paris, and from pronouncedfem, the m very firm. There are only about London agree that the menace did not appear on one half a dozen French words which rhyme by letter with side only. I need not quote any of the dispatches given femme, and not one by sound. The helpless phoneticians in Mr. Dickinson’s book; they do justify his contention place it with flamme and telegramme, but try that the fear and suspicion, ambition, pride, and asking for your famme anywhere-they won’t bring you jealousy affected all Governments and all nations, and anything like it. It is, of course, not quite fem either, were fostered by conditions for which all alike were but if you say la fem, m firm, with a generously open responsible. mouth, as though you would like to eat her, everyone The argument is very familiar, although much of the will know that you are talking about lovely woman. I evidence is new; but the question is: “What does it assure you that fam will merely get you disliked. I prove?” Mr. Dickinson thinks that it proves the need have heard an Englishman say it as though it were spelt for a European system in place of what he calls the like fam in English, and it sounded well; but, then, he European anarchy. But what is to be the purpose of had long since conquered his m, and I noticed that he this European system? The substitution of law for pronounced our “cavalry wondrous fine- he had an force in the settlement of disputes. War is an uncommon gift for the shades of tone. anachronism, we know; that is why half the civilised world Alice Morning. jumped at the chance of waging it. The peoples preferred peace in Europe-for forty years; the peoples always do prefer peace and law and order. Look at Dublin! Mr. Dickinson, who notices the growth of Views and Reviews, national feeling in various countries during the last few Europe Uber Alles. years, ought also to have noticed another phenomenon, a decline in respect for law. Dicey has remarked, in his THERE have been many attempts made to discover the “Law of the Constitution” : “Within the last thirty real origin of this war; and many people have been years, there has grown up in England, and, indeed, in named as the real authors of it. Mr. Lowes Dickinson* many other civilised countries, a new doctrine as to blames Machiavelli for it, rather unjustly; for his lawlessness. This novel phenomenon, which perplexes advocacyof State Sovereignty (which Mr. Dickinson regards moralists and statesmen, is that large classes of otherwise as the real cause of the European anarchy) was not respectable persons now hold the belief and act on made until the world-idea of the Catholic Church, the the conviction that it is not only allowable, but even common law and common authority, had lapsed into highly praiseworthy, to break the law of the land if the confusion. It was because Italy was “more enslaved law-breaker is pursuing some end which to him or to than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, her seems to be just and desirable. This view is not more scattered than the Athenians,” that Machiavelli confined to any one class. Many of the English clergy said that she “waits for him who shall yet heal her (a class of men well entitled to respect) have themselves wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering shown no great hesitation in thwarting and breaking of Lombardy, to the swindling and taxing of the Kingdom laws which they held to be opposed to the law of the and of Tuscany, and cleanse those sores that for Church. Passive resisters do not scruple to resist taxes long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God imposed for some object which they condemn. to send some one who shalI deliver her from these Conscientious objectors are doing a good deal to render wrongs and barbarous insolences. It is seen also that ineffective the vaccination laws. The militant she is ready and willing to follow a banner if only some suffragettesglorify lawlessness ; the nobleness of their aim one will raise it.” To say that Machiavelli “wanted justifies in their eyes the hopeless and perverse Italy enslaved, in order that it might be united,” is to illegality of the means by which they hope to obtain votes do an injustice to the memory of this charming idealist. for women. ” When the Papacy had to fight to recover its own It is this phenomenon, a general decline of respect provinces, when every town was a State, and every State for the rule of law, that should enlighten the pacifists was at the mercy of the invader, Machiavelli cannot to their error. There is not manifest a general trend fairly be accused of wanting Italy to be enslaved when of opinion in favour of law as opposed to force; and he called for a man to free the land from the foreigner. even if we imagine that the proposed European system Mr. Dickinson ought not to call Machiavelli a will be, proportionately to any one or any combination of "brilliantand sinister figure”; the phrase is indicative of its members, as powerful to enforce its law as the prejudice, and prejudice particularly Mr. Dickinson SovereignState is against its subjects, we can derive no * “The European Anarchy. ” By G. Lowes Dickinson. assurance of perpetual peace from the assumption. The (Allen and Unwin. 2s. 6d. net.) difficulty of all vast associations (as the history of the Labour movement shows ; see, for instance, the history at each return to the bottom. The Thought of the of the Knights of Labour in America, and of Industrial Actual Present begins to bother about lunch, while the Unionism generally) is to secure loyalty; and an extension Spirit of Eternal Growth instructs the Thought that of Sovereignty from the State to the Continent has Just Been Born in its duties, which seem to consist would only tend to make International Law more remote of turning out the Wicked Thoughts when they invade and less imperative than is the general agreement the upper Chamber. Then the ’Thought of Beauty betweenAllies. Where Empire fails, federation is not begins to rhapsodise about the weather, the Thought likely to succeed; and Burke, in a memorable passage, of the Actual Present decides to eat its sandwiches in has defined the law of Empire. “Who are you that the park, the Thought of the Girl He Loves wonders if should fret and rage, and bite the chains of nature? he will see her to-day, and the Day Dreams Thought Nothing worse happens to you, than does to all nations expatiates on the joyful consequences of such a lucky who have extensive empire; and it happens in all the accident. The debate continues even after he has gone forms into which empire can be thrown. In large to the park, the Thought of Traditional Beliefs objecting bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous to everything, the Thought of Other People’s at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk Suffering making appropriate remarks about the cannot govern Egypt, and Arabia, and Kurdistan, as he tramps; until, at last, everything fades into a riot of governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in the colour, and the Thought of the Girl He Loves says: Crimea and in Algiers which he has at Bomsa and “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” After that, darkness. Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and The objection to all this is that it is not fantastic, huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. it is merely analytic; and analysis and description is He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all ; the work of science, not of art. Apart from the and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority fundamentaldefect that the analysis is not, and cannot by in the centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all any possibility be made, complete on the stage (the his borders. Spain, in her provinces, is, perhaps, not defect is fatal to the scientific pretension), the thoughts so well obeyed as you are in yours. She complies, too; themselves are misrepresented by being presented she submits, she watches times. This is the immutable singly, as though they were self-caused, self-existent, condition, the eternal law, of extensive and detached and self-contained. After all, they were the thoughts empire.” That problem of government remains to of a bank-clerk, and the attempt to present even a perplex all those who wish to extend the rule of law; sample of his thoughts apart from him is bad art as International Law, like domestic law, is easily well as bad science. The thoughts must be interpreted enunciated,but is not so easily enforced. On the analogy of in the terms of the character, as an actor should know; domestic law, International Law could only be successfully the personality must be presented with its activities, enforced when Europe was disarmed; and we are if the purpose of drama is to be served; but we know not yet within hailing distance of the Millennium. nothing of this bank-clerk, in fact, he does not exist A. E. R. even as a relation between his thoughts, which are contiguous, but not connected. The fact that this sort of thing can only be properly done in music ought to be REVIEWS known by now; literature can only drag into detail things that are grouped and co-existent in reality, and The Curse of the Hohenzollern. By Charles Sarolea. (George Allen and Unwin. IS. net.) the sooner Mr. Malleson turns his attention to his The wickedness of kings is an old text, and, to Dr. proper business as a writer, viz., interpretation, and Sarolea, it seems to be all concentrated in the House ceases to analyse and advocate, the sooner his real gift will develop. He is simply wasting his time in trying of Hohenzollern. He makes a clever selection of the most disreputable features of the history of the to make drama do what it cannot do. Hohenzollerndynasty ; and M. Albert Sorel writes an appendix A History of Political Economy. By John Kells on “The Private Morality of the Prussian Kings,” Ingram. (A. and C. Black.) which proves, of course, that it was a public immorality. This is a new and revised edition of Dr. Ingram’s This sort of partisan history is unutterably dull; the famous work, brought up to date by a supplementary reproach of immorality can only be effectively made by chapter written by Prof. William A. Scott; and an a prophet, and Dr. Sarolea is not a prophet. introductory chapter written by Dr. Richard T. Ely. But this sort of history is also irrelevant; we Ingram’s chief service to economics was the making are not at war with Germany because Frederick- human what had been a very dismal science; as a William II married his mistresses, or because the Comtist, he insisted that there is one great science of Hohenzollern dynasty was founded by a money-lender. Sociology, of which Economics is only a chapter. The Exactly what satisfaction Dr. Sarolea derives from study of wealth, he held, could not be isolated, except writing like a washerwoman against an adversary who temporarily and provisionally, from the other social will never reply to his abuse we do not know; but we phenomena; it was essential to keep in view the may remind him that our chief patriotic poet warned connections and interactions of the several sides of human us, during the Boer War, against killing our enemy life. All this is very familiar to us now, because with our mouth. It is a dubious compliment to us to Ingram’s work to that end has been successful; he was suppose that the justice of our case against Germany is certainly one of those who helped to bring about the proved by the turpitude of our enemy, more especially “great thaw” that melted the economic man into as that turpitude is apparent in the history of all humanity. He pleaded for “a human conception of Governments. The chronique scandaleuse should at labour,” insisted, as long ago as 1880, that labour was least be witty; but Dr. Sarolea phrases his history like not a commodity like corn or cotton, told the Trade a scold, and deserves the ducking-stool for his pains. Union Congress at Dublin in that year that “what is really important- for working men is not that a few The Little White Thought : A Fantastic Scrap. should rise out of their class-this sometimes injures the By Miles Malleson (Henderson. 7d net.) class by depriving it of its more energetic members. The This little piece was played at Wyndham’s Theatre truly vital interest is that the whole class should rise in March, 1915, by some students of the Academy of in material comfort and security, and still more in Dramatic Art. The scene is supposed to be inside the intellectual and moral attainments. ” All good, sound mind of a bank-clerk; the dramatis personae are the sentiments, which the Labour movement may still take thoughts that are supposed to pass through his mind to heart; but, unfortunately, he does not seem to have from 12.45 to I o’clock, just before he goes out to understood the part played by the wage-system in the lunch. The Thought of Somebody Else’s Wealth runs production of the phenomena he deplored. It was a up and down steps industriously, muttering figures as defect that, instead of beginning from the Positive it does so, and marking columns by shifting sideways Philosophy, he directed his studies to it as the end, concluded even this volume with the phrase: “- in a word, directing all our resources to the one great Pastiche. end of the conservation and development of Humanity. ” By A. M. A. The present volume is, of course, not a history of economic facts, but of economic theory, beginning with MODERN PRAYER. “ancient times” and ending in a criticism of the Holy and, as yet, invisible One, I salute Thee! Thou unscientific character of the political economy of his own madest Man very badly, but I could not have made him day. It is to be regretted that Prof. Scott’s at all. Since I, Thy creature, am not wholly a fool, I believe that Thou art far less so. Witness, my Maker, supplementarychapter does not indicate the progress of the that I am not superstitious, even about Thee. Thou idea of humanity in political economy; his chapter is art in a great muddle, but we may pull through together, really only a very learned bibliography of economic provided that Thou does not tire of the business. literature up to date. SometimesI myself believe that I shall give it all up, and, as I cannot suppose my brain capable of thinking a Human Concerns. By Claude C. H. Williamson. thought which does not emanate from Thine, it is reasonable (Stockwell.) to conclude that Thou hast moments of doubt about things being worth while. Whatever may happen, the This is a volume of essays dedicated “To Mother responsibility rests with Thee : I do not concern myself With Love.” We are glad to hear that Mr. Williamson therewith. Do as seemeth best! I am sufficiently has a mother, and that he loves her; and we hope interested in Thy works-or, I should say, in Thy methods that she will like these essays. An author ought to -to thank Thee for the wonderful brain which enables have one admiring reader; but usually it is a man’s me to explain not a few of Thy apparent miracles. No foes who are of his own household. He begins with an doubt they are all within my province, for why should anything which concerns me be outside my province ? essay on Mr. G. K. Chesterton, and tells us a number In fact, I draw Thy attention to our Board Meeting of admirable untruths. For example, he says that “the today, where a new Marconi invention is to be discussed. thinnest ice carries him without a crack.” It does not ; May we secure it, and may it soon be installed in every and even if it be pretended that the ice is only a figure Transatlantic liner, and Thine be the Glory ! of speech, it will never be possible to reduce G. K. C. VICE. to a similar state of insubstantiality. Yet Mr. Williamson Half-past eleven ! is evidently determined to make little of much, for I ani alone with a sentimental lie and the shriek of the he subsequently calls G. K. C. “the Bovril of the train. logician” ; and two sentences later says : “In spite of How absolutely she is of her Age! his durable solidity, he seems like the great Gothic I only ani of the Past. I am finished. I am old. I Cathedrals of Cologne or Amiens to absorb into the want around me things which all men have always felt. individuality of the architect. ” Within the compass of No one feels nowadays, save animals and old men. one short paragraph Mr. Williamson proves that I will kill her when she enters. I hate her. She dares too much. Once I was daring. G. K. C. is really a mixture of metaphors. The other They used to call me “ Don’t Care ” and say that “ Don’t essays are of equal merit ; for instance, the author calls Care was hung.” “ I don’t care,” was all my reply. Venice “Queen of the Mediterranean Sea.” We NOW I am old. commendthese essays to the person to whom they are I hate her. dedicated. Shall I burn her, her, me, house and all, while she sleeps ? Divorce As It Might Be. By E. S. P. Haynes. How I hate! (Heffer. 2s. net.) Swine! Pearl! Swine! Pearl! She is coming. I hear her at the door. Why does she trouble ever to return It must be nearly thirty years since Shaw, in the most to an old man’s house? brilliant of his propagandist works, argued that marriage could only be perpetuated by the extension of SUSSES. divorce. The conception of indissoluble marriage was I wanted a servant, and the Master of the Union had allied with the sacramental idea; and the institution of asked me to take one of the women from there; so I went civil marriage, by substituting the idea of contractual up the dull road and chose one, who came next day. She for the idea of sacramental union, was probably the was a sturdy creature, and said that she was thirty-two, most potent force of modern times for the destruction though her pursed lips and restless round eyes gave her the look of a perpetually surprised child. of the idea of indissoluble marriage. Marriage by “ What is your name?” mutual consent entails as its corollary divorce by mutual “ Anne, miss.” consent; and the freedom in this respect now enjoyed “ Oh, I can’t call you Anne because my sister’s name in Russia, Austria, Belgium, Roumania, Norway, is Anne, and it would be awkward !” Portugal, Japan, and Mexico, is naturally the ideal of She laughed a vast laugh, throwing her body almost all those who are working for the reform of the laws to the floor. “ Fancy that, now-and us living so near! Me other of marriage and divorce. That the idea is at present name’s Sussex. They carled me that in me last place, in advance of public opinion in England Mr. Haynes where ’a were housemaid. My word, it do remind me! admits; and devotes most of his pamphlet to a The lady used to scatter in a little dry tea in the pot and consideration either of divorce as it is, or to the various send it in to us from her table. It were that weak, so suggestions that are being made for immediate reform one day ’a goes an’ ’elps meself. She walks in on me, of our divorce law and of divorce court procedure. an’ there ’a were. Wael, neether of us spoke then, but Although, as an idealist, Mr. Haynes hopes for divorce the nest marnin’ ’a named it to ’er. For meself, ’a says, it would a bin unbeknowin’, but the other servants by mutual consent, as a lawyer he is concerned with jes do grumble. Wael do ’a remember ye could a turned the question of the distinctive rights of the child against a carriage-and-pair in that drorin’-room. But ’a’m takin’ its parents, and of the parents against each other. yer toime, miss, though ye ain’t loike me other young lady. She didn’ loike me. She could countingens me, The Dear Departing, By Leonid Andreyev. Translated but that were arl. ‘ Ye’re burnin’ papar’s cumpisite by Julius West. (Henderson. candles,’ says she.’ ” Anne, who is a wretch when she is not an angel, threw This is a welcome addition to Mr. Henderson’s a dusty shoe at Sussex next day. Sussex picked it up ‘‘Plays Worth Reading” series. The little squib is serenely and wiped it on her apron. certainly worth reading, although it is not worth She was clearly born for our house! producing; and it comes as a pleasant relief to the miserable melodramas that our new-born interest in Russian ALICE IN WONDERLAND. literature has unearthed. We hope that this is not the “ Do in money.” only comedy in Russian dramatic literature, and that “ Thirty-three pence, two and ninepence. Thirty-three Mr. Henderson will collect whatever else there may he thirds, eleven pence. Eleven thirty-thirds . . .” “ No, no! Take it away and put it down in figures; of equal or greater merit. that will be clearer.” “33 pence = 2s 33% = 11/33 = 2s + = 2s 12d. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, “ No, no ! The third means a third of a penny or four farthings. Now do it. Three into four!” ON PAYING FOR THE WAR. ‘‘ Three into four, one and three-fourths and a bit.” Sir,-In “ Notes of the Week ” (April 13) I find the “ What bit? There are no bits. It’s all wrong. Take following passages :-” To begin with, we have pointed it away and put it down in figures.” out many times that, if the money exists to be borrowed, “3 4 = o and three farthings. I mean, it exists to be taken.” “ Nobody has been able to make = 2s or, if you like, 2s 12d.” more than the roughest estimate of our wealth ; but there “ Don’t write what you mean in between the figures. is no doubt whatever that millions is well within It’s all wrong. Three into four is one and a third the mark. The transfer, therefore, from private hands to farthings. Now do it. Take it away.” the State of only 10 per cent. of this accumulated wealth “ Three into 4 = one I don’t know how to put would cover the whole of the present Budget, and a further down one-and-a in figures! into four = 10 per cent. would abolish the existing National Debt.” = 2 12. 2 12 + fs. = 2 The real cost of the war is not to be stated or reckoned “ Now look here, it’s all wrong. If I give you thirty- in money. It consists of munitions, ships of war, arms, three and a third pence, how much will you have to buy food, arid clothing for those engaged in the work of sweets ?” destroying; of the sustenance of the people engaged in ‘‘ Yes, please!” transporting these materials. That is the real cost of the war. At the end of the war there will be no less money Inheritance in the world than there was at the beginning-none of it Men stained their bodies in Britain then ; but the blue- will have been destroyed. But there will have been much silver sea and the sky and the rains and the daisy were food consumed unproductively, much iron, steel, copper, no otherwise clad than they are now. There were Gods, and cloth destroyed or dispersed, much life destroyed, our own Gods. Maponos was the most beautiful. He and much compensation-pensions and the like-to be a has gone into the sea now, but then-a-times he had many permanent charge upon the industry of the nation. altars to himself all adorned with wood-dowers. His Let us consider how the war is financed. Having by voice was like a mother-eat’s, and if any voice of animal usage and by law made gold the only real money, national might soften a human being to do its will, this would and international, it never enters our heads or the heads surely be a mother-cat’s voice, plaintive and sensual- of our rulers that labour and its products can be obtained like us English. There was his wife, a proud goddess, otherwise than by buying it for gold. Of course, there is did not know where to run to preserve herself when she not real gold enough for the purpose, but the bankers heard Maponos murmuring in the rich summer days. have persuaded us that their promise to pay gold is Maponos was unfaithful to her, unfaithful . . . there is practicallythe same thing as gold itself, so that there is an no counting . . . count the English dead and alive if almost unlimited supply of ‘‘ money ” to be had for a you want to guess--for be fathered every family of us. consideration. Government therefore borrows this money Whenever a son was born to him he used to take it away -that is, these promises of the banks, these orders on the somewhere, and he would bring it back with a rod fixed banks, to pay gold, and with them pay the manufacturers from its neck to its little base, and it had to grow with and merchants for the goods they supply. In return, that, or die; it never died. Government gives to the lenders its promises to repay, Maponos loved his wife, however. He only put her with interest , the amount borrowed, ‘depending upon its aside at times because she interfered with his other work. power of taxation to enable it to fulfil this obligation. She brought him down at last. Thus the Government obtains that which will purchase Across the sea in the north there was a God with a goods, and the lenders obtain securities upon which they voice like thunder. He spake, arid the earth threw out can raise capital, if they desire, to lend again to the swords. He lifted his arm, and the sea let men go safe Government. in boats. So easily and comfortably are things managed upon the Maponos’ wife arose in a car drawn by wild duck, and established system. But how would Government proceed she alighted where the Thunder-God lay on his elbow, to obtain the money by taxation merely? The total brooding conquests. The masterful goddess struck him income of the country is estimated by statisticians to be roughly upon the shoulder. He looked at her with his about 2,000 million pounds. In many respects it is a light-blue eyes. foolish calculation, meaning whatever you may wish it to “Maponos is more beautiful than thou,” she said. mean, but it will serve for the present purpose. Obviously, “The less slave I to thee, Lady.” if Government were to tax the nation to this amount, it “it is riot solely to the beautiful that I yield.” would take all the year’s income, and we should all “Yield to me, but not as thou yieldest to the beautiful.” starve to death. Rut the proposal in the ‘‘ Notes ” is to “Maponos is worrshipped in a country richer than confiscate this amount of the capital of the country. But thine.’’ capital consists of railways, ships, factories, workshops, “Who shall dispossess him ?” houses, land, and all manner of materials. It consists, “The Boar from the north.” also, of mortgages on these, of shares in foreign and “Thou art bitter.” colonial undertakings. Is Government to appropriate a “Give me back Maponos from these people, and thou tenth of these things, or is to demand the value in shalt have Britain.” money ? Obviously the latter ; in which case the land, “I will send my people to wed his people.’’ factories, and other capital have to be sold or mortgaged. “So ; his people will become harder than he wishes, Where are the buyers, the lenders, to come from ? hard even against him. He makes them long-lived by Will the banks create money for such a purpose? An lore. ” amount equal to the total year’s income being taken, how “I will shorten their lives by war.” is interest to be paid on any advances the banks might “Anything . . . give me back Maponos. You and I be disposed to make? Further, what would be the do not want each other. Cold-marrow ! ” increase in the price of supplies to the Government under ...... such circumstances ? You would have believed her robes to be made of the Picture to yourself a landlord with property valued at sky when the twilight is silvery and when blue space bringing him in a year, confronted with opens here and there and all the rest is silver, and grey, a demand for with the probability of a similar and golden-white which no name may describe : and if demand next year. Who mill buy the portion of the ever you have seen a bush of purple flowers blooming property he has to sell? Will he not have to sell at least against such a sky you will know how Love glimmered worth in order to obtain Who will lend among her robes when she went forth to meet Maponos...... him the money, and at what rate of interest? Picture the manufacturer in a similar plight. What The Norsemen ! Griere knows all about them and portion of his plant-which is his capital-must lie sell, how they slipped along our coasts, and what else supposing he can find a customer? happened. No. Government might conceivably confiscate all capital, ...... but to confiscate a part only must throw the whole The Roar from the north found Maponos, whose wife country into confusion. ever after had her will of the lovely God. You and I- This, however, is not to say that Government could we are a cross between the strong-backed Maponos and not, had it wished, have defrayed the cost of the war the strong-backed Boar, both gone. Love and War! It without borrowing, or with very little. Why, even the was only when the treacherous Norman came that the “ Times ” has allowed a writer to assert that every war rod in our backs softened a bit and we began to get must be paid for as it goes on! Really, the Army cannot paunches, alas ! fight with guns that are to be made next year but one, with shells the supply of which is to be spread over connotesa people possessed of certain marks of temperament, twenty years! They must be there now, and, if they culture, conduct, should one dip his brush in are not there, all the money, real and fictitious, in the Llanystymdwy and paint the Celtic race with the streaky world cannot help the matter. And if they are there, disfigurement ? then they have been made, and the maker has been paid Anthropologists tend to doubt what they call the “Celtic for them-that is to say, he has been fed, clothed, and Myth,” holding that that term stands for no race that housed--and the transaction is properly at an end. That they can discover. But they themselves are not sure what it is not at an end is due to the fact that our Government they mean by “race.” has thought it necessary to mortgage the future labour In the absence of a sufficient number of bones and flints of the workman, instead of paying him outright. of the right kind in the right place-these being essential But how could they have paid him without borrowing data to the anthropoligists--we may seek among the the money ? They could have made the money. living for evidence. As a matter of fact, they have made a hundred millions There are two types of living men in Wales today, in the form of currency notes. Why only this amount? widely separated in temper and mentality as their physical Currency notes circulate just as well as bank notes or appearance is dissimilar. gold. They pay wages and debts ; they are taken in There is the fair, often reddish, tall type we call Celtic; payment of rates and taxes-why only a hundred millions and there is the short, dark type which, for the want of of this money, which costs them practically nothing ? another name, and, in the absence of sufficient evidence There are reasons, of course. In the first place, they against the existence of such a race, we call Iberian. The were not issued without the provision of a redemption former, the “Celt,” is generally of a courageous, frank, fund. It is considered necessary to secure these notes most disconcerting temper. The latter, the Iberian, in by a reserve of some thirty millions in gold and the constant temperamental, and often actual, antagonism to balance. in “ securities.” Why ? Why any redemption the former, sneaky, quiet, deceitful. Anyone knowing fund at all, when the Government has the power to the Welsh people at all intimately can recall the hundred withdrawand cancel them all by taxation? To which all the instances in which he has experienced the evil influence reply that can be made here, just at present, is : Ask the of the latter, and the exhilarating presence of the former. banks. In Wales, at home, the types manage to exist together, But suppose we had a Government of patriots, the the Iberian being in decent subjection to the Celt. But members of which had. the knowledge, the sincerity, and abroad-well ! D. L. G ! That there are neutrals does not the courage necessary for conducting the war (and affairs at all invalidate this contrast. generally) solely for the public benefit, and not for the The general name which the Lloyd Georgian character benefit of a part of the public first; how would they have earns, when the domestic capacity of judging a man by proceeded ? They mould have engraved and printed home-spun standards not vitiated by the worship of currency notes; but they would not have put them in success (Welsh Sais-addoliaeth), is “llech-gi.” circulationthrough the banks. This is the last thing in the The Celtic legends at least reflect a spirit of chivalry, world they would have done. They would hare paid truth, honour. Mr. Lloyd George shows none of this, but, them to tradesmen and merchants in settlement of their on the contrary, a strain of that intellectual and spiritual accounts, to soldiers and workers in the country. They backwardness (which ‘‘A. G. G.” discovered in these would not have had any redemption fund at all; but the latter-days), which me are justified in regarding as the more they issued the more taxation they would have mark of the Aboriginal Iberian agriculturist. imposed, and thus the notes would have gone back to be “Nations descend to meet.” Here, then-with apologies cancelled. The goods would have been supplied, they to Matthew Arnold-the history of D. L. G. would have been paid for outright, and the money taken “- down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, back in taxes. Sly trafficker, the dark Iberian comes.” Does anyone doubt that the notes would haw been (AIterations and italics mine.) T. M. s. accepted just as readily as they are to-day? Does a *** Government note become more valuable, safer, for having passed through the hands of a banker? The knowledge THE PRIMACY OF THINGS. that, with the notes received, rates and taxes could be Sir,--Senor de Maeztu is very obliging. I will not allow him to say what I mean; my meaning is not paid would ensure their circulation and maintain their objectively presented to but ejectively interpreted by him value. in terms of his own experience. Rut his attempts to Rut where would the bankers and financiers have come express my meaning do illuminate quite clearly his own in ? They wouldn’t. There is no doubt whatever that they processes of thought; and it is amusing to discover that would have made trouble for any Government which when he attempts to explain what he means by the presumed to make its own money and circulate it without phrase, “This thing is good,” he wanders into an infinite consulting their interests. That, however, opens up the Senor of “I means,” and the goodness of the thing question of whether the Government controls the banks disappears.If he will read Dr. Boris Sidis on “Normal and or the banks the Government, upon which there may be Abnormal Psychology” he will discover that a various opinions. psychologicalseries differs from a physical series by being finite, But I hope I have shown that the may to meet the war and also that “the links of the psychic process have no expenses is not to attempt to confiscate capital, but to causal necessity.” It is possible, then, at any point of manufacture exchange and taxation money. Senor de Maeztu’s infinite series of repetition to break JOHN STAFFORD. off, although I fully expect that he will go on saying *** “I mean that I mean” for all eternity. I never say : THE OBJECT OF THE WAR. “This thing is good,” not even when I read Senor de Sir,-Your correspondent, Mr. Harry Fowler, has no Maeztu’s productions. Nietzsche, around whom Senor de right to attack me in a letter devoted to prove that this Maeztu flounders without recognition, taught me to ask : is not a war of ideas. I have said in my article, “On the “Good for what?” and to determine goodness by reference Balance of Power,” that this is not a mar of ideas, but to my own activities. “All that is good makes me of Powers fighting against Powers for the sake of more productive,” said Nietzsche; and man is in his moral power. Can he read? There is no other purpose in this judgment as much as he is in every other of his activities. war than that of preventing Germany achieving hegemony. in spite of Senor de Maeztu’s assertion, the grass is not If the Germans win they will be the masters of green; he actually does put the green in the grass, as the world. If they lose this evil will he avoided. No the most elementary knowledge of optics and psychology other reason is necessary to justify the war on the side of would teach him. There is no such thing as green, apart the Allies. All other reasons are not only superfluous, from the mind of the beholder; there is no such‘ thing as but mischievous. Liberty ? Hut what about Russia ? goodness, apart from the purposes of conscious personality. Nationality ? Nut what about Finland, etc. ? Civilisation? The mere school logic that Senor de Maeztu uses On both sides you may find barbarians and men that divides a statement, “this reasoning is final,” into of culture. But if you say that the Allies are fighting two : “this reasoning is final” and that “I judge it to be to prevent Germany realising her will to hegemony, the final,” does not disguise the fact that the validity of both greatest number of pacifist arguments will fall to the statements depends on the person who makes them. This ground, for the pacifists themselves are as opposed to reasoning is not final ; it is elementary. The finality that the dominance of Germany as the rest of mankind-- he attributes to his reasoning is no less the human meaning except the Germans. Ramiro DE MAEZTU. (perhaps I should say “hope”) ejected into his *** reasoning than is his perception that it is really he, and not another, who judged it to be final. It is really true MR. LLOYD GEORGE. that when he says “This thing is good,” he “means that Sir,--Of what race is David Lloyd George? And, given he means . . . nothing” until he has answered the question, a “Celtic” race, or even a racial name which to us “Good for what?” A. E. R. THE LARGER LUNACY. form. In these pornographic days this is much to be Sir,--It is almost too late in the day, I fear, to object grateful for. E. R. to the onward march of the “New Thought” and “New *** Methods” brigade, as typified by your contributor HAMLET’SMYSTERY. “Jonathan,” but I am persuaded to lift up my one small Sii-,--When “R. H. C.” is able to write about Hamlet voice in protest before the final cataclysm. The progress without reference to me I shall be willing to ignore his has been slow, for we English are very dull, and though remarks ; but he cannot reasonably claim a victory without for years well-meant scorn and advising ridicule have been accepting a contest, and I do not intend to present presented to us and our institutions, we are only now him with a victory. I have one reason, and one reason beginning to reform ‘‘as per blue print.” Moreover, we only, for supporting Dr. Ernest Jones’ elaboration of have never had the grace to be thankful for these Freud’s thesis; it is this : that it is the only explanation gratuitous attentions, and, worse still, it has been known known to me of Hamlet’s mystery that fits all the facts. for men to doubt their genuineness or gratuity. The other questions, such as the rarity of the incest In his review of the English lunacy “Jonathan” has motive in Shakespearean or Elizabethan literature, are adopted the popular methods of the writers of “revues.” irrelevant to the case ; “Hamlet” is a rare play turning The opening chorus of houseinaids and housemaids’ knees ; upon an obscure mystery that has puzzled not only the the topical jokes about the politicians ; the during critics for two centuries, but Hamlet himself. It is departures from fashion in costume and speech; the Wall Hamlet who talks of his “mystery”; it is Hamlet who ponders and wonders over his own failure to execute a Street magnate’s advice to the Oxford don; the al fresco purpose that he nowhere criticises but everywhere supper in the fashionable restaurant ; the grimaces accepts as his bounden duty; it is Hamlet who is tortured behind the backs of the fathers of convention, are all worked by his dilatory behaviour, who cannot understand what up and staged in the best traditions of the transatlantic has changed him, in whose soul is played out the tragedy impresarios. of conflicting motives. Vague, general phrases, such as Like a “revue,” however, such a hotch-potch of frivolity “spiritual shock” or the “male hysteria” that “R. H. C.” is only a night out. For daily uses we neglect the housemaid's now claims in support of spiritual shock merely describe knees and scrub the steps; we are too intent on Hamlet’s state as pathological ; they do not define the politics to see the joke; we wear our own clothes and specific cause of the specific aboulia from which Hamlet speak as we are spoken to; we make no mistake about suffered. Wall Street and Oxford; we eat our roast beef and It is one of the ironies of criticism that “R. H. C.,” potatoes as a meal and not an exhibition, and conduct in his attempts to escape from a sexual explanation of ourselves with manners which in the past have marked the Hamlet’s mystery, should have accepted the first casual gentleman. and general sexual explanation that he has read, instead But these, our pride, are “Jonathan’s” scorn. He, seeking of the more definite and precise explanation offered by for conventionality, sees nothing else. Nevertheless, Freud and his confrere. Dr. Somers, of the Manchester as in man so in manners, the fittest survive, and if we Playgoers’ Club, says that Hamlet suffered from “male are dilatory in adopting the up-to-date and throwing hysteria,” and “R. H. C.” quotes this in support of his overboardthe out-of-date, it is perhaps because we imagine case. It is really comical that Freud also said that Hamlet the out-of-date will serve for any date, and that the up-to- suffered from male hysteria. I have not his “Interpretation date is but for to-day. Neither tradition, speed, nor of Dreams” handy, so “R. H. C.” must content efficiency is in itself worshipful, but only desirable according himselfwith this reference from Dr. Jones’ lecture. Dealing to their utility. In protesting against the “innovator with the first soliloquy, he concludes : “To those who for innovations’ ” sake we are actually defending useful have devoted much time to the study of such conditions traditions against futile anarchy. the self-description given here by Hamlet, will be For instance, we should probably go headlong for recognisedas a wonderfully accurate picture of a particular “efficient methods” if me had not heard the profiteers mental state that is often and incorrectly classified under whispering, “It pays.” We should cry aloud for hustling the name of neurasthenia. Hamlet’s state of mind more politics if we could forget the rapidity of the “Insurance accurately corresponds, as Freud has pointed out, with Act,” and the slick suspension of the Habeas Corpus. We that characteristic of a certain form o hysteria.” Far should not employ the traditional coroner, on the from Dr. Somers being opposed to Freud, he agrees with him so far as lie goes; Freud proceeds from the general traditional“accidental death” by means of the traditional’ state of mind to the particular inhibition that distresses razor, if we had any surer means of ascertaining that the Hamlet, and finds the specific cause of that. But the accidental death was not really an innovating type of general state arises from the specific aboulia ; Dr. Jones murder. As “Jonathan” says, our lunacy is the larger ! says : “Analysis of such states always reveals the operative FRED H. AUGER. *** activity of some forgotten group of mental processes, which, on account of their inacceptable nature, have been MR. PARKER’S CAPTURE. ‘repressed’ from the subject’s consciousness. Therefore, Sir,-Mr. J. Bulvar Schwartz is very welcome to all the if Hamlet has been plunged into this abnormal state by thrills he can get out of “Disraeli,” but my sensory organs the news of his mother’s second marriage, it must be having outgrown their aesthetic youth, I regret I because the news has awakened into activity Some cannotbe thrilled so cheaply. slumbering memory, which is so painful that it may not I have no quarrel with Mr. Parker’s theme, though I become conscious. ” do not for a moment subscribe to its “immensity.” I am But what is hysteria? We know that the word is concernedwith its treatment, and when Mr. Schwartz derived froin the Greek “hysteria”-the womb-and the says that Mr. Parker has succeeded “in revivifying the sexual origin of the trouble is affirmed. in the very name great incidents in history,” I can only reply that instead of it. Dr. Hollander, in his “First Signs of Insanity,” of revivifying them, Mr. Parker has so grotesquely falsified says : “Although it is probably true that hysteria has a them that it became necessary to issue an explanatory sexual basis, I ani much more inclined to attribute it leaflet for the benefit of the more educated portion of the to suppression of the instinct in girls of a dreamy nature audience. than to an actual shock.” I do not want to exhaust your Further, Mr. Schwartz states : “His characters interest space with quotations, so I will say that mental specialists agree that hysteria is essentially a disorder of that us highly and we are amused by their wit, which he has part of the nervous system which subserves the emotional assiduously collated” (the italics are mine). Now the nature. That, I think, will suffice to show that assiduous collation of other people’s wit may be very “R. H. c.,” in accepting male hysteria as the explanation praiseworthy, and since Mr. Parker has done it very well, of Hamlet’s mystery, is well on the way to the acceptance he is fully entitled to whatever praise his assiduity merits. of Freud’s more precise, complete, and fundamental Rut we are talking of Dramatic Art and something more diagnosis of the cause of the specific aboulia of Hamlet. than the painstaking collection of bon-mots is surely A. E. R. necessary to the making of a great play. Mr. Schwartz seems to have fallen into the error of supposing that Subscriptions to THE NEW AGE are at the following because a man is an excellent writer of plays, he is therefore rates :- a writer of excellent plays. United Kingdom. Abroad. Mr. Parker’s work has all the merits associated with a conscientious and efficient craftsman, but as creative art One Year ... 28s. ... 30s. six Months ... 14s. ... 15s. it is patently barren. He has never uttered a single thing worth remembering or contributed a single illuminating Three Months ... 7s. ... 7s. 6d. thought or idea to the common stock. All relative to THE NEW AGE should There is one thing, however, which may be set to Mr. be addressed to THE NEW AGE, 38, Cursitor Street Parker’s credit, viz., his wholesomeness of matter and E.C. allowances for unemployment or relative inefficiency, it Press Cuttings. thought best. The above suggestions are put forward tentatively as a THE BIRMINGHAM WORKERS’ EDUCATIONAL basis for serious discussion. If such an arrangement were ASSOCIATION. adopted by agreement in one or two highly organised industries, and were successful, it would spread rapidly to Memorandum of the chief points raised by Mr. Zimmern the other industries. in the latter part of his address to the W.E.A. Conference on “War and Labour,” held on January 15, issued as a It is based on the root principles :- suggested basis for the adjourned discussion, to be held I.-That industry is a form of co-operative national in the University, Edmund Street. service,not a “game of grab.” It is unthinkable that we can or ought to return to 2.-That the most important element in industry is the “pre-war conditions”-to the old state of “Balance of human element : and that the community which shall first Power” in industry, with armaments, piled up by Capital have developed its industrial system on the lines of freedom and Labour on either side, each to neutralise the other. and self-government will have achieved a second and “Militarism” and “Prussianism” are as bail in industrial greater “Industrial Revolution.” life as in international relations. The solution for Man being “an engine whose motive power is a Soul, industry, as for international relations, lies in a Concert, or the force of this very peculiar agent, as an unknown Partnership. quantity, enters into all the political economist’s There are three partners to be considered : (I) Labour; equations,without his knowledge, and falsifies every one of (2) The directing or managing element ; (3) The working their results. The largest quantity of work will not be capital needed for carrying on the business. done by this curious engine for pay, or under pressure, or Ultimately, the question of industrial government will by help of any kind of fuel which may be supplied by the be settled, like the question of political government, in . It will be done only when the motive force, progressive countries, on lines of self-government : the that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought workers in the industry will control the directorate and to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel, namely, by employ the capital. At present Labour does not possess the affections.” (Ruskin, “ Unto This Last,” sec. 6.) the knowledge or experience to do this, nor is it prepared to shoulder the full pecuniary risks involved. The next step of immediate advance lies in introducing the A number of vigorous speeches were delivered on the principle of self-goverment within a limited area, where Labour has special experience-in the workshop This following resolution demanding the Conscription of workshop control would be exercised, not by the men wealth :-“ In view of the indications given by the employed in each shop, but by Labour’s natural organ of Government that it intends to meet the cost of the war democratic government-the Trade Unions. largely by loans, and so placing on the next generation Under this arrangement there would be a charter or the burden of paying the debts incurred by the men and agreement drawn up between the representatives of the women of to-day, this Conference protests against this management of the firm or industry, of the shareholders, injustice, and affirms that as the Government has not and of the Trade Union or Unions concerned. hesitated to Conscript the lives and bodies of men so they What would this charter contain ? What does Trade ought to have no hesitation about conscripting wealth to Union control in the workshop imply ? The following six pay for the war. We therefore urge our I.L.P. Members points among others :- of Parliament to press for measures to be taken to meet our liabilities at once by a graduated tax on capital, a I.-MutuaI agreement between Trade Unions, cessation surcharge on large incomes, earned and unearned, and the of civil mar within the Labour movement. The management increasing of the death duties. The Conference instructs must hand over authority to a small recognised the N.A.C. to at once commence a campaign in the country authority in each case. in advocacy of the conscription of wealth as the only a.--Responsibilty for the weaker, more helpless and equitable means of meeting the financial situation created indifferent workers, including women and unskilled. This by the war.” involves compulsory Trade Unionism. “Free” (i.e, unorganised)Labour would be eliminated, as in the professions. Mr. BEN RILEY, who moved it, said the Party must The charter, which would be enforced by the State, enter the field of reconstruction. Posterity must not be world make it illegal to employ a non-unionist. saddled with the terrible burden of a colossal debt. The 3.--Responsibility for discipline : If present methods of present owners of wealth lacked nothing in luxury whilst discipline are old-fashioned, it would be necessary to they sent the workers to the field of battle. (Hear, hear.) evolve new ones. There would be a new and better In its summer campaign the I.L.P. should carry the cry atmospherein the workshop, but strictness will still be necessary. “Conscript the wealth” to the public, and make the public “Self-governing workshops” have often broken realise who are its real enemies. The way of reconstruction down on this point. lay in conscripting the great incomes and resources of wealth owned by the rich. 4.--Responsibility for output : The Trade Union would (Cheers.) come to an agreement with the management as to the Mr. A. W. HAYCOCK(Stockport), in seconding, said the reasonable output from a given piece of machinery, or the demand to conscript wealth would strike the weakest reasonable number of men required for a given piece of point in the Jingoes’ armour. There should be a scheme work. The methods of securing the output-hours of for the attestation of wealth, and I.L.P. canvassers should labour, etc.-would be left to the Trade Union. go to the homes of the rich and ask how much they were 5.---Responsibility for workmanship : The Trade Union prepared to give. (Applause.) as the responsible authority would have to deal with Mr. R. C. WALLHEAD,in an impassioned speech which questions of craft or industrial education, as the lawyers aroused the Conference to high enthusiasm, said his son and doctors do. Certain “shops” might be set aside as had been called to the colours next Saturday. The men training schools. who took the lives of their sons not only hugged on to 6.--Financial responsibility : At present the worker is their wealth, they had constantly used their power to a hired servant or “wag-e-slave” : he bears none of the exploit the working class still further. (Loud cheers.) These financial responsibility of the work in which he is were the people who demanded the conscription of working- employed. It is the shareholder, or capitalist, who bears the class bodies and talked of fighting until the last drop risk of losses, and consequently feels justified in demanding of blood had been spilled and the last shilling had been corresponding profits. It is suggested that the risk spent ! Whose blood ? Whose shillings ? Ours ! If we should be divided between the management and the Trade were wise we should undertake after the war a campaign Union, and that the shareholder should be given security for the repudiation of the national debt. (Loud cheers.) and a fixed rate of interest (according to the condition of Since the ruling classes of this country, with the ruling the money market). The remainder of the product would classes of other countries, were responsible for the war, he divided, in an agreed proportion, enforceable by law, they should be compelled to lend their money free of between the management and the Trade Union, the latter interest. Let us say to these people, “If you are going having their own accountant and free access to the books. to take our blood, by heaven we will have your money.” The Trade Union would then distribute pay (not wages) (Prolonged applause.)-“Labour Leader” Report of I.L.P. among its members, on whatever principle, and making Conference.