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 I'l
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN: 
 
 STUDIES, LITERARY AND 
 POLITICAL.
 
 THE 
 
 DAY'S BURDEN: 
 
 STUDIES, LITERARY 
 AND POLITICAL. 
 
 T. M. KETTLE, M.P. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
 ADELPHI TERRACE 
 1910 
 
 [AH Righls Reserved]
 
 TO Mr WIFE. 
 
 " A^ot the sea, only, wrecks the hopes of men. 
 Look deeper, there is shipwreck everywhere " ; 
 So mourned the exquisite Romanes rich despair. 
 Too high in death for that ignoble pen. 
 Nero, his zorecker, is amply wrecked since then. 
 And all that Rome''s a whif of charriel air ; 
 But to subdue Petronius^ mal-de-mer 
 Have we found drugs F I pray you, What P and 
 
 When P 
 Shipwreck, one grieves to say, retains its vogue : 
 Or let the keel win on in stouter fashion. 
 And look ! your golden lie of Tir-na-n'Og 
 Is sunset and zvaste waters, chill and ashen — 
 Faith lasts P Nay, since I knew your yielded 
 
 eyes, 
 I am content with sight . . . of Paradise.
 
 APOLOGY 
 
 The papers collected here have, for the most part, 
 already appeared in various journals and reviews. 
 I am indebted to the courtesy of the Morning 
 Leader, the New Ireland Review, the Fortnightly 
 Review and Messrs. Maunsel & Co., for leave 
 to re-publish them. In all cases there has been 
 a good deal of revision and re-writing, and an 
 attempt has been made to impress a certain 
 unity on the constituent materials such as may 
 reasonably be looked for in anything that calls 
 itself a book. The study of Otto Effertz appears 
 for the first time, and is, indeed, as far as I 
 know, the only account that has yet been given 
 in English of that bizarre but brilliant pioneer. 
 Topical articles on Egyptian Nationalism and 
 International Socialism have been included 
 because they give a glimpse of movements 
 which, so far as one can judge, are certain to 
 endure, and of leaders whose influence is likely 
 to grow rather than to diminish in the immediate 
 future. 
 
 For title I have ventured to use The Day's 
 Burden because that seems to me to be the 
 most characteristic thing about the day, and
 
 ^^ii APOLOGY 
 
 because all these essays are concerned with 
 " problems" — economic, political, and literary. 
 To anyone who, glancing at the foreign names 
 which recur in these pages, asks with a sniff of 
 contempt, " What has all this got to do with 
 Ireland ? " I do not know what reply to make. 
 Something like this, perhaps : Ireland, a small 
 nation is, none the less, large enough to contain 
 all the complexities of the twentieth century. 
 Tliere is no ecstasy and no agony of the modern 
 soul remote from her experience ; there is none 
 of all the difficulties which beset men, eager to 
 build at last a wise and stable society, that she 
 has not encountered. In some of them she has 
 even been the forerunner of the world. If this 
 generation has, for its first task, the recovery of 
 the old Ireland, it has, for its second, the dis- 
 covery of the new Europe. Ireland awaits her 
 Goethe — but in Ireland he must not be a 
 Pagan — who \nll one day arise to teach her 
 that while a strong people has its own self for 
 centre, it has the universe for circumference. 
 All cultures belong to a nation that has once 
 taken sure hold of its own culture. A national 
 literature that seeks to found itself in isolation 
 from the general life of humanity can only 
 produce the pale and waxen growths of a plant 
 isolated from the sunhght. In gaining her own 
 soul Ireland will gain the whole world. Till that 
 Goethe is born, and the new fabric begins to ri?e 
 under his inspiration, we must go on shovelling 
 together our trivial heaps of sand and rubble.
 
 APOLOGY ix 
 
 That is all I would dare to say in placation 
 oi the contemptuous sniff. Originality is a 
 toy that no goddess left in my cradle. My 
 cnly programme for Ireland consists, in equal 
 parts, of Home Rule and the Ten Command- 
 ments. My only counsel to Ireland is, that 
 in order to become deeply Irish, she must become 
 European. 
 
 October, 1910.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Apology vii 
 
 The Philosophy of Politics 3 
 
 On Crossing the Irish Sea 25 
 
 Otto Effertz : Gentleman Socialist . 33 
 
 On Written Constitutions 61 
 
 Body v. Soul : For the Plaintiff, 
 
 Francis Thompson 69 
 
 Reveries of Assize 85 
 
 A New Way of Misunderstanding 
 
 Hamlet 93 
 
 Young Egypt iii 
 
 The Fatigue of Anatole France 119 
 
 International Socialists 135 
 
 A Frenchman's Ireland 143 
 
 Reason in Rhyme 155 
 
 On Saying Good-Bye 161
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
 POLITICS
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
 POLITICS* 
 
 ^ t ^HE subject I have chosen for my paper is 
 almost an insult to your intelligence. I 
 could occupy the whole time at my disposal by 
 merely reading you a list of writers who have 
 devoted themselves to the establishment of a 
 science of politics, and among them you would 
 find, from Aristotle downwards, the masters and 
 shapers of human thought. What then must 
 you think of the audacity of an attempt, with the 
 inadequate time and the infinitely inadequate 
 resources at my command, to give some account 
 not merely of political science but of the philo- 
 sophical ideas on which it rests ? I know, 
 however, that I can count on your indulgence. 
 And I would ask you to accept the title of this 
 paper in a large and charitable way, and to 
 forgive its pretentiousness. 
 
 It does seem to me that a political society 
 like this is under the obUgation of taking an 
 
 * Presidential Address before the Young Ireland 
 Branch of the United Irish League, December, 1905.
 
 4 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 occasional bath in the sea of fundamental ideas. 
 Practical people regard such a proceeding, it 
 must be admitted, with extreme distrust. If one 
 desires an early and extensive unpopularity there 
 is no surer way to it than to insist on analysing 
 received principles. Our mothers, you will 
 remember, used to have the strangest objection 
 to our taking their watches to pieces. They 
 rather doubted our competence to put the 
 springs and wheels together again. Society 
 experiences much the same state of mind with 
 regard to the attempt to reduce it to terms of 
 mere reason. Society is right, but it is only the 
 nineteenth century that has made its attitude 
 possible. It needed a long development of 
 psychological and historical study to make us 
 understand that reason is but one faculty of a 
 many-facultied being ; that the forces which used 
 to be brusquely dismissed as mere sentiment, 
 mere instinct, mere enthusiasm, are inseparable 
 elements of human nature. We have come to 
 realise, in a word, that life is in comparably vaster, 
 more various, and more complex than any 
 theory of it. I dwell on this because it has a 
 special bearing on our subject. In approaching 
 political science we must remember that it does 
 not profess to reproduce the rich detail of life in 
 society, but stands to it rather as a chart to an 
 ocean or a mathematical formula to the path of a 
 planet. Still, if reason has abandoned the 
 tyranny which it once aimed at, its call can none 
 the less be denied. We must render ourselves
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 5 
 
 some rational account of the forces by which and 
 among which we hve. Among the greatest of 
 these is the society, the political framework, in 
 which we are born and in which our lives are cast. 
 Call yourself a non-politician as loudly as you 
 choose, you will never succeed in ignoring 
 politics ; therefore of necessity an attempt must 
 be made to understa,nd them. What is the 
 object of politics, what we are justified in 
 expecting it to do and what it cannot do, what 
 part it should play in the life of the individual 
 modern man, and what is the temper in which 
 a wise man will approach it — these are questions 
 neither remote nor abstract, but questions that 
 come knocking at your door and mine, and that 
 have to be answered. All I can hope to do to- 
 night is to suggest, in a random and completely 
 undogmatic fashion, points of view from which 
 politics may be regarded, and principles by 
 which the efficiency of institutions may be 
 tested. 
 
 When we speak of politics as a science we must 
 remember that the word is used with a difference. 
 The characteristic note of a natural science is its 
 ability to predict with mathematical accuracy. 
 Such prophetic power cannot be attributed to 
 politics. The stupendous complexity of the 
 subject-matter, the endless chain of action and 
 interaction make it impossible to gather all the 
 data necessary for certainty. And then that 
 unpredictable element called free-will is con- 
 stantly interloping to upset the logic of your
 
 6 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 determinist drama. Still there are large 
 principles \\hich. seem to approach the certainty 
 of physical laws. One can find a ready illustra- 
 tion in what we very properly heard a great deal 
 about at the Convention the other day, the need 
 for unity. That without unity — of action, of 
 course, for absolute unity of thought and feeling 
 we neither can have, nor should demand — a 
 political party must be ineffective is surely just 
 as certain as any law of chemistry or physics ? 
 The principle it embodies is one implicit in the 
 constitution of every state, namely, that the will 
 of the majority of duly chosen representatives 
 must, as regards action, prevail over the will 
 of the minority. Deny th.it principle and you 
 cannot pass a single legislative Act ; you 
 cannot levy a single tax. In the long history 
 of English insolence there is hardly anything else 
 so insolent as Mr. Balfour's demand with regard 
 to our University Question. He said, you will 
 remember, th^t no Bill could be introduced to 
 realise this reform unless there was absolute 
 unanimity among all interested parties in Ireland. 
 Had he applied that maxim consistently to 
 English political life, to political life anywhere, 
 the result would be that no government could 
 continue for twelve hours. In proclaiming it 
 Mr. Balfour was proclaiming himself an 
 Anarchist. This principle, then, that the will of 
 the majority, registered in the due forms and 
 under the due safeguards of individual freedom, 
 must prevail over the will of the minority affords
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 7 
 
 a good example of the sort of established law we 
 can hope for in political science, 
 
 I pass on to the fundamental question : What 
 is the object of politics ? Politics in its largest 
 sense includes the whole control and manage- 
 ment of public affairs by the government in 
 power, together with the whole process of 
 agitation by which the masses of people not in 
 power seek to influence and alter the conduct of 
 things. Now, if you look in the text- books you 
 will find that the object of government is order. 
 But what is the object of order ? That is a 
 point which ought to be considered by the 
 inflamed gentlemen from the West of Ireland 
 who write letters signed " A Disgusted Loyalist " 
 to the Irish Times demanding the vindication of 
 what they call " law and order." Law and order 
 are not absolutes, but merely means to an end. 
 To mistake them for ends in themselves is to 
 regard the shell as the important element in the 
 Qgg, the fence as the important element in the 
 field. The cry of " Order for Order's sake " is 
 as ruinously foolish as that of art for art's sake, or 
 money for money's sake. It is for the sake of 
 humanity that all these must exist. Behind order 
 there is life, and it is only in so far as it tends to 
 increase the sum and improve the quality of life 
 that any system of government or scheme of 
 positive law is ethically justifiable. If you 
 analyse the rights commonly regarded as essential 
 and inalienable — the right to property, to 
 personal safety, to marriage — ^you will find ''.s the
 
 8 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 common source of them all this right to life. 
 And by life I mean not merely physical existence, 
 but that rich human existence which can be had 
 only in community, that sort of life which 
 Edmund Burke had in mind when he described 
 the State as " a partnership in all science, a 
 partnership in all art, a partnership in every 
 virtue, and in all perfection." 
 
 You will say, perhaps, that this test of govern- 
 ment — Does it forward life F — ^is vague. Life, 
 even in the biological sense, has not been defined. 
 That is perfectly true. But we do not demand, 
 as I have said, in politics the mapped-out 
 mathematical certainty of natural science. The 
 average man possesses a sufficiently clear notion 
 for practical purposes of the conditions that 
 make life desirable, beautiful, and worthy to be 
 lived. A government is good or bad, the order 
 it maintains is the discipline of liberty or that of 
 oppression, in so far as it promotes or hinders the 
 wide diffusion of these conditions. I think you 
 will find this test of life a helpfvJ one in your 
 attempt to gather together in some binding idea 
 the currents of effort that make up contemporary 
 Ireland. Somebody has compared the role of a 
 general idea to that of a magnet. If you bring a 
 magnet into contact with a glass plate on which 
 there is a confused mass of iron filings it 
 immediately strains and sets them into regular 
 and beautiful patterns. The filings represent 
 the chaos of concrete facts that experience brings 
 thronging in on us, and the magnetic idea that
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 9 
 
 makes them intelligible, as it has created them, 
 is that of life. It is the one justificatory word on 
 the tongues of the emigrants as they stream 
 down to the ships. They " want to see life." 
 By no mere accident is it that the Gaelic League 
 which started with language has gathered round 
 it games, singing, dancing, and all the arts of 
 friendly intercourse. These all stand for life, 
 joyously realising itself under benign conditions. 
 It has been said that all government exists to 
 hang a fowl before the Sunday fire of every 
 peasant. Dancing is less necessary than eating, 
 and more beautiful. It represents the free 
 energy of a life that has not merely withstood 
 but has conquered the hostility of external 
 circumstances, and you will understand the 
 sense in which I say that all contemporary 
 Irish movements exist in order to set a boy and 
 a girl dancing at a Sunday ceilidh. 
 
 Analyse the agitation to break up the grass- 
 ranches and to give the land to the people and 
 to the plough and you will find that it rests on 
 two assumptions — not very daring assumptions ! 
 The first is that the life of a human being is more 
 precious and worthier to be forwarded by the 
 State than that of a bullock. The second is 
 that if an individual persists in so using the 
 property which society allows him to control, as to 
 base his personal comfort and prosperity on 
 the misery and degradation of others, while a 
 cleaner way of living is open to him, then 
 society has both the right and the duty to break
 
 lo THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 his selfish monopoly.* For he has declared war 
 on society, and has violated the obligations of 
 the social bond. 
 
 This test of life changes our attitude towards 
 positive law in general. Take the common 
 description of life that it is a " continuous 
 adjustment of internal to external relations " 
 and apply it to human society, and, in its light, 
 law loses its old iron absoluteness. It shows 
 itself not as something fixed and immutable, but 
 as an imperfect transcript of the moral conditions 
 necessary to safeguard life, changing continually 
 with these conditions. Ethical principles are, 
 
 * Cf. Naudet, Premiers Principes de Sociologie Catho- 
 lique. Bloud et Cie, Paris, 1904. P. 31. " The Canon 
 Law, as the great historian Janssen tells us, regarded 
 property as a fief granted by God. This doctrine, 
 founded on Scripture, involves the evident consequence 
 that the owner of property is responsible before God 
 for the use to which he puts his property. He must not 
 use it after his mere caprice ; and the Popes as guardians 
 of the law of justice have more than once asserted this 
 principle against owners who had disregarded it. Thus 
 we find Clement IV., in the thirteenth century, giving 
 permission to any stranger to break up the third part of 
 an estate which the owner persistently refused to till. 
 Sixtus IV., in the fifteenth century, decrees that ' power 
 is given in future and always to all and each to till and 
 sow in the territory of Rome and the patrimony of St. 
 Peter, in Tuscany as well as on the littoral of Campania, 
 at the usual and proper times, one third of the uncultivated 
 lands, to be chosen at will, whoever the landlord should 
 be . . . .' It was held sufficient to have asked the land- 
 lord for leave to enter on the lands, even though this 
 leave had been refused." Naudet cites Clement VII., Pius 
 VI. and Pius VII. as having confirmed and renewed this 
 insistence on the social duties of property.
 
 •PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS ii 
 
 of course, invariable ; but the formal enactments 
 in which they are imperfectly embodied form a 
 system, developing, as we hope, towards a fuller 
 realisation. It is the thought-climate, called in 
 a large way evolution, and so characteristic of the 
 nineteenth century, that has given us this new 
 point of view. We have applied it to some 
 pretensions of the law courts and seen them 
 wither up ; we might also extend it to some of 
 the commonplaces of popular thought. There is 
 not, I suppose, a more insistent and widespread 
 demand with regard to Irish questions than that 
 they should be " finally " settled. But once 
 grasp the idea of a state as a living, developing 
 organism, and this expectation of finality is seen 
 to be a pure illusion. Popular thought is never 
 altogether wrong, and of course there is an 
 obvious sense in which, for example, a compre- 
 hensive measure of Home Rule might be regarded 
 as a " final " settlement of our political status. 
 Still, even in this case, the notion is illusory and 
 misleading. Life is growth ; growth is change ; 
 and the one thing of which Vv'e are certain is that 
 society must keep moving on. Freedom is a 
 battle and a marLh. It has many bivouacs, but 
 no barracks. You remember the counsel given 
 by the serving-man in the heroic tale to 
 Diarmuid and Grainne. " In the place where 
 you catch your food you must not cook it, 
 and in the place where you cook it you must 
 not eat it, and in the place where you eat it 
 you must not sleep : " On society an anal-
 
 12 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 ogous doom — if you call it a doom — has been 
 pronounced. 
 
 I have dwelt on this illusion of finality because 
 one sees it everywhere producing a dogmatic 
 conservatism, a feeling of things done and done 
 with, than which there is no greater obstacle to 
 progress. You go to a statesman and say — " This 
 problem of the Congested Districts is terribly 
 pressing. You must bring in legislation to deal 
 with it." Then he looks up his statute-book 
 and says — " Congested Districts ! Oh, that 
 question is settled; we passed an Act in 1891." 
 It is much the same as if you were to say to a 
 starving man — " Dinner ! Oh, you had a dinner 
 two months ago." 
 
 The object of politics then is order, and the 
 object of order is to increase the sum and improve 
 the quality of human life. What, we may next 
 ask, is the drift of current opinion as to the means 
 that should be used and the psychological forces 
 that must be put in harness in order to this end ? 
 In other words, what political ideas has the 
 experience of the wonderful nineteenth century 
 left most clearly defined ? There can be but 
 little dispute as to the answer. The two 
 supreme facts, the two shaping forces of the 
 nineteenth century were Nationality and 
 Democracy — the latter come in direct lineage 
 from the French Revolution, the former brought 
 first to full self-consciousness by the reaction 
 against the abstract cosmopolitanism of '89. 
 Look to Irish history and you will see at once
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 13 
 
 that these have been the shaping forces of the 
 last century of her life. But look elsewhere and 
 you will see the same ; you will see that in this 
 as in so many other things Ireland has been in 
 the main stream of European history. The 
 opinion of an Irish Nationalist may be suspect. 
 I appeal therefore to the authority of Professor 
 Bury, formerly of Trinity College, now Regius 
 Professor of History at Cambridge. He is 
 speaking of the impulse given to historical 
 studies by the upsurging of national feeling, for, 
 of course, a nation is before all things a spiritual 
 principle whose source and charter is to be 
 found in history. 
 
 " The saying," he writes, " that the name of 
 hope is remembrance was vividly illustrated, on a 
 vast scale, by the spirit of resurgent nationality 
 which you know has governed, as one of the most 
 puissant forces, the political course of the last 
 century and is still unexhausted. When the 
 peoples, inspired by the national idea, were 
 stirred to mould their destinies anew, and 
 looking back with longing to the more distant 
 past based on it their claims for independence or 
 for unity, history was one of the most effective 
 weapons in their armouries ; and consequently 
 a powerful motive was supplied to historical 
 investigation." * 
 
 * Bury. An Inaugural Lecture, 1903. P. 13. That 
 great master of common sense and uncommon sanctity, 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, has his lesson for modern Im- 
 perialism — " It belongs to the study of politics to know
 
 14 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 In Belgium, in Italy, in Hungary, in Germany, 
 in Norway, in Poland, in Ireland, nationality has 
 been the great formative and disruptive impulse 
 of the nineteenth century. Whatever gloomy 
 mood we may fall into in the struggle for autonmy 
 we have certainly no justification for feeling 
 lonely ! There was a school of political philo- 
 sophy — it stUl lifts here and there an antique 
 voice — which, when it had called nationality a 
 mere sentiment, thought that it had dismissed it 
 from the arena of practical affairs. That habit of 
 mind may have been excusable in the eighteenth 
 century, but we understand things better now. 
 We realise life in its concrete richness and man 
 as a complex of remembrances, instincts, intui- 
 tions, and emotional needs. The historical 
 studies of the last century, the Romantic Move- 
 ment, and the vast development of psychology, 
 both in formal studies and in art of every kind, 
 especially the novel, have rehabilitated that vast 
 area of consciousness which used to be dismissed 
 
 how great should be the mag-nitude of a state and 
 whether it should embrace men of one or many races ; 
 for the greatness of a state should be such that the 
 fertility of its land is sufficient to ils noeds, and that it 
 should be able to repel violent enemies. For it ought 
 rather to be founded of one race ; some oneness of 
 nationality, involving the same manners and customs, 
 is that which brings about friendship among citizens 
 because of their likeness : whence states that were 
 made up of divers nations, by reason of the dissensions 
 that they had because of the diversity of their customs, 
 were destroyed, since one party joined with the enemy 
 for hatred of the other parly." — Cf. H. C. O'Neill, A^ew 
 Things and Old in St. Tho7nas Aquinas.
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 15 
 
 as " sentiment." There was a time when man 
 was conceived as an avaricious machine. If you 
 found anything in your mind other than 
 calculating selfishness you were outside the pale 
 of humanity. But now nobody need be ashamed 
 to admit that he detects himself in an occasional 
 generous impulse. Louis Kossuth was saying 
 the other day that " it is in active national 
 sentiment not in political forms that we are to 
 look for the secret of government." And there 
 is not a Foreign OfBce in Europe but recognises 
 that where there is an historic nationality, 
 unexpressed so far in the form of a visible state, 
 there is a contradiction of human nature which 
 cannot last. You will not ask me to analyse the 
 idea of Nationality. It has been discussed in this 
 country for the last nine or ten years with an 
 earnestness amounting often to fury, and nearly 
 everything has been said. " The nation," says 
 Anstole France, in a fine phrase, " is a communion 
 of memories and of hopes." You may well find 
 its source in that need for self-realisation which 
 is also, in one view, the source of all individual 
 morality. But that is a notion drawn from 
 German metaphysics, and metaphysics, if we are 
 to believe all we read in our weekly papers, is 
 the unforgivable sin. But this I will say, that 
 if you read any one of the treatises on politics, 
 read at Oxford and Cambridge by the young 
 gentlemen who afterwards come over to dragoon 
 us, you will find that there is not in the most 
 exacting of them a single test of nationality
 
 1 6 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 which Ireland does not satisfy. A distinctive 
 language, a characteristic national temperament 
 and outlook on life, a history, a sentiment of 
 unity in the present, common memories, common 
 interests, a geographical area large enough to 
 constitute an independent state — is there a 
 single one of these elements that we do not 
 possess ? If you go even further and examine 
 the conditions demanded by these English 
 writers to justify rebellion or disruption, adding 
 to what has been said as to the satisfaction of 
 national sentiment, this — I quote from 
 Sidgwick — " Some serious oppression or mis- 
 government, some unjust sacrifice or grossly 
 incompetent management of their interests, or 
 some persistent and harsh opposition to their 
 legitimate desires," you will find on the 
 principles of these English writers themselves 
 that an Irish War of Independence would be 
 to-day justifiable if it were possible. 
 
 Side by side with nationality stands democracy. 
 It is impossible to define democracy ; it is a 
 principle still unrealised, an unfinished process. 
 It has been described as " that form of social 
 organisation which tends to develop to the 
 maximum the conscience and the responsibility 
 of the individual citizen." This description 
 lays stress on the central characteristic of 
 democracy, the belief in individuality and the 
 endeavour to foster it. To the feudalistic 
 governing mind the citizen, or rather I should 
 say the "subject," was an item, a something
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 17 
 
 little better than a chattel, committed to the care 
 of those whom, as the old jurists said, Providence 
 had placed over him. The placing had, as a 
 matter of fact, been done by the luck of circum- 
 stances. If a man had the wisdom to be born 
 well, he sat on the necks of the masses ; if he were 
 born badly, his own neck suffered for it. Such a 
 tyranny as this, even if it were beneficent, could 
 not live in the atmosphere of the modern world. 
 We have discovered that nobody is wise enough 
 or pure enough to bear the temptation of 
 uncontrolled power, and we are endeavouring 
 as far as possible to remove such occasions of sin. 
 The democratic spirit may be said to be more or 
 less expressible in two propositions. The first is 
 that government should rest on the active consent 
 of the governed. It is this right and necessity of 
 human nature that has been behind the demand 
 for representative institutions from the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century to the end, from the 
 Paris barricades of 1830 and the English Reform 
 Bill of 1832 to the Russian Revolution and the 
 Women Suffrage movement. The second thesis 
 of democracy is, roughly, that any one self-support- 
 ing and law-abiding citizen is, on the average, as 
 well qualified as another for the work of govern- 
 ment. I should prefer to put it that no citizen, or 
 section of citizens, is as likely to conduct the 
 government for the general benefit as the whole 
 body of citizens acting in concert. Wherever there 
 is a privileged class there is corruption, and a cult 
 of sectional to the disregard of wider interests.
 
 1 8 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Democracy will, of course, have its governing 
 classes, but they will not be fortressed about 
 vvith unbreachable privileges. If we now tiirn 
 to Irish history it is easy to see that it is a passage 
 from feudalism to democracy. Thus, when 
 Mr. Michael Davitt came to write the story of the 
 Land War, he inevitably called it The Fall of 
 Feudalism in Ireland. Under the same title you 
 might gather every stream of agitation, every Act 
 that could be in any sense called beneficial, from 
 the Abolition of Tithes and Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion to the Local Government Act. They are 
 all parts of a process which is shifting the centre 
 of power from privileged, arbitrary classes to 
 responsible, representative classes. It is signifi- 
 cant also that in that question most remote from 
 current politics, higher education, Democracy 
 has been taken for the pillar of light. Every- 
 where the demand is for a democratic University ; 
 and we mean by that not only that the fees must 
 be low but that the civic fervour of the institution 
 must be high, and that it must be a centre of 
 creative democratic thought. 
 
 To speak of politics is necessarily to speak of 
 education, at least of education in citizenship. 
 A few words must suffice. Public opinion in this 
 country has made up its mind that its schools 
 shall be places in which love and reverence for 
 the motherland shall be fostered. Democracy 
 \\dll teach in its schools, as well, love and reverence 
 for the State. It is the fashion to disbelieve in 
 the practical value of ideas and enthusiasms, but
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 19 
 
 a democratised Ireland will understand human 
 nature better. The chief channel of instruction 
 will naturally be history, modern history. The 
 complete neglect of this is the scandal of English 
 education. History is not only the true 
 scientific method of approach to social problems, 
 it is the very substance of citizenship. 
 
 " It is of vital importance," writes Professor 
 Bury, " for citizens to have a true knowledge of 
 the past and to see it in a dry light in order that 
 their influence on the present and future may 
 be exerted in right directions. . . ." 
 
 And he adds — 
 
 " It seems inevitable that, as this truth is more 
 fully and widely though slowly realised, the place 
 which history occupies in national education will 
 grow larger and larger." 
 
 " In France, in Germany, in America," writes 
 the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, Mr. 
 Firth, " nineteenth century history, national 
 and European, has a permanent place in historical 
 studies. It is not considered unfit for teaching 
 or unworthy of study ; nor is it held that historical 
 teachers or students are incapable of studying it 
 vdthout displays of party feeling." * 
 
 So much for what I believe to be the two main 
 ideas explanatory of contemporary Ireland as of 
 Europe in general. One word seems to be neces- 
 sary as to the limitations of politics. Politics is 
 the science of order : it cannot take the place of 
 
 * C. H. Firth. A Plea for the Historical Teaching 
 oj History. P. 17.
 
 20 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the other human activities, but can only keep 
 them in their places. Extravagant demands are 
 sometimes made on politicians, especially in 
 Ireland. Because they are described as " repre- 
 sentative," people expect to find incarnate in 
 them the whole national life from the making of 
 shirts to the making of poetry. But politics, as 
 such, is just as much a specialised activity as brick- 
 laying. It is not co-extensive with life ; there 
 are vast areas of private life into which it would 
 be tyranny for it to intrude. It does not claim, 
 and you cannot ask it to make shirts or poetry. 
 Its duty is to provide the conditions in which the 
 greatest number of citizens can live happily, 
 whether by making shirts or by making sonnets. 
 In what spirit should one approach the actual 
 work of politics ? I speak only for myself, but 
 I think that one should take enthusiasm for the 
 driving force and irony as a refuge against the 
 inevitable disappointments. " What I need 
 to realise," says Spencer, " is how infinitesimal 
 is the importance of anything I can do, and how 
 infinitely important it is that I should do it." 
 Might not a politician choose a worse motto than 
 that ? Disillusionment is so commonly the 
 fifth act of political agitation, mainly because of 
 the illusive finality upon which I have touched. 
 But a wise man soon grows disillusioned of 
 disillusionment. The first lilac freshness of life 
 will, indeed, never return. The graves are 
 sealed, and no hand w^ill open them to give us 
 back dead comrades or dead dreams. As we
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 21 
 
 look out on the burdened march of humanity, 
 as we look in on the leashed but straining passions 
 of our unpurified hearts, we can but bow our 
 heads and accept the discipline of pessimism. 
 Bricriu must have his hour as well as CuchuUin. 
 But the cynical mood is one that can be resisted. 
 Cynicism, however excusable in literature, is in 
 life the last treachery, the irredeemable defeat. 
 Politics, let us remember, is the province not of 
 the second-best, as has been said, but of the 
 second worst. We must be content, or try to 
 be content, with little. But we must continue 
 loyal to the instinct that makes us hope much ; 
 we must believe in all the Utopias. 
 
 If you engage in politics in Ireland, and if 
 conditions remain as they are, certain other 
 points must be remembered. You would do well 
 to study the novitiate through which an idea 
 passes before it becomes a law. It arises out of 
 the misery, and contains in it the salvation of a 
 countryside ; the State welcomes it with a 
 policeman's baton. It recovers ; the State puts 
 it in jail, on a plank bed, and feeds it on skiUy. 
 It becomes articulate in Parliament ; a statesman 
 from the moral altitude of j^5,ooo a year 
 denounces it as the devilish device of a hired 
 demagogue. It grows old, almost obsolete, no 
 longer adequate ; the statesman steals it, embodies 
 it in an Act, and goes down to British history 
 as a daring reformer. From your own side also 
 there will be something to be borne. If you 
 cannot agree with a colleague as to tactics, even
 
 22 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 though they be but minor tactics, he may found 
 a paper, or write a letter, or a lyric, denouncing 
 you to*" 'posterity as a traitor, red-handed with 
 your country's blood. I see no help for it 
 except to take these things as mere bye-play, 
 decorative flourishes on the text of politics. 
 After all there is the two-edged sword that will 
 never fail you, wdth enthusiasm for one of its 
 edges and irony for the other. However mired 
 and weedy be the current of life there will be 
 always joy and loyalty enough left to keep you 
 unwavering in the faith that politics is not as it 
 seems in clouded moments, a mere gabble and 
 squabble of selfish interests, but that it is the 
 State in action. And the State is the name by 
 which we call the great human conspiracy against 
 hunger and cold, against loneliness and ignorance ; 
 the State is the foster-mother and warden of the 
 arts, of love, of comradeship, of all that redeems 
 from despair that strange adventure which we 
 call human life.
 
 ON CROSSING THE 
 IRISH SEA
 
 ON CROSSING THE 
 IRISH SEA 
 
 /^EOGRAPHY is a prudent science: but 
 ^^^ one day she will take risks, even the risk 
 of being interesting. She wall hang about the 
 naked games and gaunt outline of places their due 
 garment of romance. When that time comes 
 it is not a scientist but a poet that will be chosen 
 to evoke the spirits of hatred and tragedy, of 
 malice and despair, of irony and disillusion which 
 move, with unpausing haste but with no rest, 
 over the waters of the Irish Sea. 
 
 Yet there is no outer thing that should awaken 
 such a mood. It is a bright, even a radiant day 
 as we clear the harbour, which in English is the 
 King's Town, but in Irish the Fort of Laoire. 
 The sunlight as it falls is shattered into a manifold 
 glitter of diamonds. The soft purples and cloudy 
 greys of the Wicklow hills shepherd you into the 
 fold of dreams. " A pleasant land of drowsihead," 
 as the first James Thomson would have called 
 it, with the formal romanticism of his formal 
 century. A vision before which the soul might 
 well forget its anguish, and remember only its 
 
 25
 
 26 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 aspirations. But over it there is a shadow not 
 of the sun's casting, the shadow of history. 
 
 A chapter of the New Geography may very 
 well open somewhat after this fashion : Ireland 
 is a small but insuppressible island half an hour 
 nearer the sunset than Great Britain. From 
 Great Britain it is separated by the Irish Sea, 
 the Act of Union, and the perorations of the 
 Tory party. The political philosophy of the last 
 of these is even shallower than the physical basin 
 of the first. Ireland is discovered from time to 
 time by valiant journalists, mostly of a sensitive 
 temperament. Their accounts vary. Ireland is, 
 however, admitted by all to be unprogressive : 
 as witness, when it is half-past twelve in London 
 it is only five minutes past twelve in Dublin. 
 
 The people of Ireland are universally described 
 as absolutely incapable of united action. At the 
 same time the political machine is so mon- 
 strously efficient as to suppress all individual 
 freedom. Observers are agreed that the Irish 
 exhibit no tenacity of purpose or stability of 
 character. Indeed, Froude explained the failure 
 of Celtic Ireland to develop a native drama by 
 this circumstance. No Irishman — he argued — 
 has sufficient consistency of character to carry 
 him through five acts : and you cannot put a 
 man into a play if he insists on becoming some- 
 body else at the end of every Act. Infirm of 
 purpose and frail of ethical fibre as she is — and 
 all her impartial enemies concur as to the fact — 
 Ireland has for seven centuries withstood the
 
 CROSSING THE IRISH SEA 27 
 
 impact of the strongest nation in Western 
 Europe. 
 
 Ireland has been finally conquered at least 
 three times ; she has died in the last ditch re- 
 peatedly ; she has been a convict in the dock, 
 a corpse on the dissecting-table, a street-dog 
 yapping at the heels of Empire, a geographical 
 expression, a misty memory. And with an 
 obtuseness to the logic of facts which one can only 
 call mulish, she still answers "Adsum." Her in- 
 terdicted flag still floats at the mast-head, and, 
 brooding over the symbol, she still keeps building 
 an impossible future on an imaginary past. 
 English parties in turn wipe her for ever off the 
 slate of practical politics. She remains wiped off 
 for a year or two ; but as the sands slip by, the 
 sand-built policies crumble and collapse. New 
 battalions loom up to the right wing or the left ; 
 and the Tory Press remembers the phrase of the 
 Confederate General who saw victory suddenly 
 snatched out of his hands by Meagher's Brigade : 
 " There comes that damned green flag again ! " 
 All this might seem a matter of racial pride, 
 and a sign of racial strength. But any Unionist 
 can see with half an eye — and people are 
 Unionists precisely because they have only half 
 an eye to see with — that it is mere obstinacy. 
 It is motived by the same folly which leads a 
 man to waste his substance in litigation in order 
 that he may live for all time as a leading case. 
 Ireland clamours incessantly for Home Rule ; 
 she wants to sit in her own armchair by her own
 
 28 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 fireside and mind her own business. But the very- 
 iteration of this demand is, to any well-con- 
 ditioned mind, conclusive proof that it is not 
 sincere. 
 
 The unbroken triumph of the same program 
 at election after election shows it to be the watch- 
 word of a purely artificial agitation. To give 
 Ireland what she asks for would clearly be to 
 promote discontent and disloyalty. In view of 
 the peril of foreign assault and invasion it is an 
 indispensable part of military tactics that Great 
 Britain and Ireland should be enemies, not friends. 
 Unless Irish members of Parliament were com- 
 pelled to settle the question of English education, 
 and English members of Parliament compelled 
 to settle the question of Irish land tenure, the 
 whole fabric of civilisation would be com- 
 promised. 
 
 It may very well be that Ireland, as a result, is 
 the spectre at the banquet of Empire. But was 
 a banquet ever dramatically complete without a 
 spectre ? Lord Castlereagh's Act of Union must 
 be upheld, so much wiser is it to tie the parts of 
 an Empire together with a thread of formal law 
 rather than to let them grow together in the 
 organic unity which joins the main branch of a 
 tree to the trunk. To be sure, Home Rule does 
 not involve the repeal even of Lord Castlereagh's 
 Act of Union, but it is the duty of every loyal 
 citizen to pretend that it means complete 
 separation. To tell the truth would shame the 
 devil, and where would Imperialism be without
 
 CROSSING THE IRISH SEA 29 
 
 the devil ? As between England and Ireland, 
 therefore, 
 
 Let wisdom, friendship, peace, and commerce die, 
 But leave us still the politician's lie. 
 
 These are, perhaps, unpardonable thoughts. 
 It would be better to go and sit in the smoking- 
 room, or move about amid the lively bustle 
 of lawyers, legislators, cattle-dealers, golfers, 
 journalists, bat-eved tourists, and hawk-eyed 
 commercial travellers who are doing their 
 valiant best to annex the Irish Sea in the interest 
 of that most greedy of all the Imperialisms, the 
 Commonplace. 
 
 They are doing their best, but they are not 
 succeeding. It was Uhland, I think, who paid 
 the Rhine boatman a double fare because he 
 had carried, unknowingly, the ghost of a dead 
 comrade. The Company would be rich, indeed, 
 if all the ghosts that hurry restlessly back and 
 forward across the Irish Sea were amenable to the 
 ticket-office ! Strongbow, the first filibuster, 
 with MacMurrough, the first traitor ; Kildare, 
 the masterful earl ; Shane O'Neill going in 
 saifron pride to greet Elizabeth as a king greets 
 a queen ; Sarsfield passing to exile and death 
 in France ; the highwaymen-bishops of the 
 eighteenth century ; Castlereagh, O'Connell, 
 Balfour, Parnell . . . the very names are an 
 epic and a litany of desolation. 
 
 But the deck is beginning to experiment in 
 positions other than the horizontal. The grey,
 
 30 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 cold, sliding treachery of the sea comes out 
 through the surface brightness. One wonders 
 if the sea that gives empires may not take them 
 suddenly back. At all events, I am going to be 
 sea-sick. It wiU be another argument for Home 
 Rule. " The Channel," said Grattan, using the 
 English name for the Irish Sea, " forbids union, 
 as the ocean forbids separation." One should be 
 glad to be sea-sick in assertion of so slashing an 
 epigram. To-night there will be the million 
 globes of London to look at, gleaming through 
 the fog like monstrous and sinister oranges in 
 some garden of life and death. To-morrow 
 afternoon we shall be in the House of Commons 
 supping full of old calumnies and hatreds. 
 But when is Ireland going to have her chance ? 
 When will voyagers, leaning on the deck-rail, 
 catch the first purple glimpse of Wicklow with 
 eyes innocent of political passion ? 
 1909.
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ : 
 GENTLEMAN SOCIALIST
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ : 
 GENTLEMAN SOCIALIST* 
 
 TJOOKS have their fates ; and it can only be 
 -^ an unhappy fate that has prevented Otto 
 EfTertz' Les Antagonismes Economiques from 
 achieving a brilliant position in the literature 
 of Socialism. It is by no means his first appear- 
 ance, and he is very far from being a raw 
 revolutionary. As long ago as 1888 he made 
 public his novel and characteristic thought in 
 Arbeit Und Boden. The book was tendered as a 
 thesis, Effertz tells us, to every University in 
 Germany, and was rejected not sans phrase, but 
 on the contrary with many phrases of violent 
 and even scurrilous contempt by them all. The 
 Social Democrats were no better pleased with a 
 writer who claimed to have shattered Marxism 
 with a single tap of his new hammer, and none 
 of their journals so much as reviewed Arbeit 
 Und Boden. But, on the other hand, Adere 
 writing in Conrad's great HandwOrterbuch der 
 Staatswissenschaften, hailed Effertz as one of the 
 
 * Les Antagonis7nes Econotniques. Otto Effertz. 
 Paris, Giard et Briire. 
 
 :^2>
 
 34 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 few theorists of Socialism of whom the Economics 
 of the future must take account. M. Charles 
 Andler, who contributes a preface to Les 
 Aiitagonismes, lectured on him in Paris. M. 
 Adolphe Landry, whose text-book is as widely 
 used by students in France and Switzerland as 
 that of Gide, ranks him consistently as the peer 
 of Marshall, Schmoller and Phihpovich. Never- 
 theless, he hastens to add, this original German 
 is practically unknown, and his work has been 
 treated with contemptuous silence. Effertz 
 himself seems to ascribe some of his ill-fortune 
 to the fact that his first book was written in 
 German, which is a local dialect. French is the 
 international language of science ; he will, there- 
 fore, with the aid of M. Landry, pubhsh himself 
 in French, and appeal to an international jury. 
 The new departure does not seem to have suc- 
 ceeded. Effertz has been neither condemned nor 
 commended by that part of the jury which sits 
 in these countries. His book, although issued 
 so long ago as 1906, seems hardly to have reached 
 us. Reach us some day it must, and to bridge 
 over the interval that separates us from a more 
 competent performance of the task I venture to 
 give an outline of the ideas of this strong, subtle 
 and adventurous thinker. 
 
 Effertz is a SociaHst, but^he wears his red rie 
 with a difference. He is a SociaHst because 
 Sociahsm is the only form of economic organisa- 
 tion that will allow him to be a gentleman. His 
 theory holds out to humanity the promise not
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 35 
 
 of a more abundant table, but of more delicate 
 table-manners. Remembering a fact which, we 
 are seldom suffered to forget — the existence, 
 namely, of Mr. Bernard Shaw — one does not go 
 so far as to signaHse the haughtiness and daintiness 
 of Effertz as representing a new mood in the mind 
 of SociaHsm. But there is a wide gulf between 
 the two. What to Mr. Shaw is but an elfish 
 epigram, flung with wicked exuberance at 
 Suburbia, is to Effertz a basal belief, an ultimate 
 dogma, a burning passion. Under the stress of 
 its attack many familiar lines of interpretation 
 and of defence must be abandoned. Socialism, 
 many of us had found comfort in saying, is a 
 mirage of hunger. It is the economic science, 
 or rather the economic poetry of the poor. It 
 is the visioned. Fortunate Islands of the disin- 
 herited. It is the Sociology of anemia and defeat. 
 If the material life of humanity is, in Kropotkin's 
 phrase, the conquest of bread, then popular 
 Socialism is the wail of those who have been 
 shouldered out of the market-place with their 
 baskets unfilled. In the philosophy of certain of 
 our unstrung capitalists it is something even 
 worse. It is the Satanic demand that stones 
 should be changed into bread, in order to sustain 
 a population swarming beyond all bounds of 
 prudence and self-control. " You are pauperised 
 by the capitalistic regime," cried out Marx in 
 effect to the proletariat. " In the name of the 
 bread of which you are defrauded. Workers of 
 all countries, Unite ! " To Effertz this hunger- 
 
 B 2
 
 36 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Socialism, as one may call it, is at once unworthy 
 and unscientific. Not by bread alone do men 
 live, but by culture and freedom — freedom, above 
 all, to speak the truth. He stands for a social 
 ideal of four dimensions ; for to Liberie, Egalite, 
 Fraternite he has added another watchvv^ord, 
 more strident and exacting than any of these, 
 Dignite. His case against individualism is not 
 that it breaks the bodies of the poor with famine, 
 but that it defiles the souls of all men, the rich 
 as well as the poor. Like the aged lion in the 
 fable he suffers not so much from the pain as 
 from the indignity of the donkey's kick. More- 
 over, he insists, with a touch of passion, popular 
 SociaHsm is dishonest in the prospect which it 
 holds out of illimitable han^ests drawn from an 
 earth so limited both in area and in fertility. 
 His system of Pono-Physiocratic Socialism 
 assuredly does not mean food for all under any 
 circumstances of increase. It offers no unbroken 
 round of banquets, fit for Sybaris. Humanity, 
 however wisely and scientifically organised, will 
 find itself caught perpetually between the Scylla 
 of restrained reproduction and the Charybdis 
 of starvation. But if SociaHsm does not promise 
 a junketting Utopia, what, then, does it promise ? 
 It promises, in the horoscope of Effertz, a world 
 in which men, while declining to be angels, will 
 be able to be gentlemen. Liberty — that is to 
 say, mere personal liberty — already approximates 
 to its maximum in modern countries ; under this 
 rubric communised States \'\ill have no new
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 37 
 
 revelation to expound. Equality cannot but 
 widen and greaten with the growing abundance 
 of " goods of culture " the biens de culture 
 which he sets in such antithetical contrast 
 to the biens d'ali??ientation. The general 
 " aristocratisation " of the forms of social life 
 will bring new kingdoms under the sway of 
 Fraternity. When we are all aristocrats it will 
 be easy for us all to be brothers. " But 
 the great glory of Pono-Physiocratic Socialism 
 will centre in the complete abolition of all the 
 indignities of the present system. A man will 
 no longer be compelled to accept the servilities, 
 the brutalities, the lies, the frauds, the 
 treacheries, the whole mass of defilements and 
 degradations which swarm in the heart of our 
 capitalistic society, and which are forced on every 
 member of it under the penalty of starvation for 
 himself and his family." The rich will be re- 
 deemed from that sense of insecurity which, 
 more even, and far more, than the appetite for 
 actual enjoyment, is the impulse behind their 
 unquiet Hves. The worker, with trained hands 
 eager to produce wealth for the commodity of 
 his fellows, will no longer stand at the factory- 
 gate begging work as an alms. The employer 
 wlU be free, as now he is not free, not to exploit 
 Ids employes. The shopkeeper will be free, as 
 now he is not free, not to lie and cheat. We 
 shall be able at last to cancel that dictum of 
 Cicero's which is now the universal charter of 
 the business community ! Nihil enim proficiunt
 
 38 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 mstitores if si nisi admodum mentiantur. " It is 
 commonly said," writes Effertz in the last of 
 his six hundred vibrating pages, " that the social 
 question is a belly-question, or, in more aesthetic 
 language, a knife-and-fork question. When 
 people preach Socialism they make their appeal 
 to the famishing and the tatterdemalions. The 
 world is agreed that a rich man can be a Socialist 
 only out of condescension, or political ambition, 
 or ethical aspiration, or simply, as a joke, but 
 never on grounds of personal interest. To accept 
 this view is to understand very poorly the essence 
 of Socialism. Bread and the promise of bread, 
 there you have the weakest point of Socialism ! 
 Socialism is before all else a question of culture 
 and dignity. When we preach Socialism it is to 
 the dignity of mankind that we must primarily 
 appeal. Gentlemen of all countries, Unite ! 
 
 Such is the ethos and inspiration of this 
 strange book. If Effertz brings a new temper 
 to Socialism, he also brmgs a new theory. He 
 himself is indeed urgent to disclaim all originality ; 
 his only gift is that of fertilising the neglected 
 commonplaces of Economics. The professors of 
 that science have not understood the value of 
 their analyses ; like Balaam's ass they speak great 
 words without understanding what they speak. 
 They have a Cyclopean power to quarry huge 
 blocks of stone, but the lyre of Apollo does not 
 sound among them to uprear the walls of Troy. 
 The fundamental truths of economic science 
 are as old as Petty and Bernouilli : they are ex-
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 39 
 
 pounded in every rudimentary manual of the 
 subject. But there is a curious flaw in such 
 expositions. The basal laws and problems are 
 formulated indeed, but not " sacramentally," 
 not in sede materiae. This flaw Effertz will 
 correct, and therein lies his sole originality. 
 His only other novelty is a novelty of arrange- 
 ment. He introduces into Sociology the drama- 
 turgical principle. The fact of antagonism of 
 interest between individual and individual, 
 between the individual and society, between 
 the present and the future, being ultimate, we 
 shall do well to cast our treatment of it into the 
 literary form most appropriate to such an order 
 of reality. This is obviously the drama, for the 
 essential note of drama is the conflict of wills. 
 The first section of such a Sociology will corre- 
 spond to the Intrigue, the delineation of interests. 
 The second will exhibit as Catastrophe the clash 
 in actual life of one economic interest with 
 another. In the third section, analogous to the 
 Intermediate Chorus, the writer will proceed to 
 an ethical criticism of a conflict, the economic 
 mechanism of which has thus been exhibited. 
 This merges into the Denouement, a discussion of 
 the legal and political arrangements by which 
 the lesion of higher interests may as far as possible 
 be avoided ; and our drama of humanity cul- 
 minates in the Final Chorus, with a summary of 
 those antagonisms which enquiry shows to be 
 irreconcilable, and lamentations over the in- 
 curable evils of life. The five divisions may 
 
 c
 
 40 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 be rendered into more usual nomenclature as the 
 sciences of Pure Economics and Applied Econo- 
 mics, the arts of agitation and of statesmanship, 
 with a finale of philosophy. The adequate hand- 
 ling of this five-fold analysis gives ample play to 
 the rich and subtle mind of Effertz. Matha- 
 matician, psychologist, pioneer, dandy, and ad- 
 mirable classicist, he has a sense of style and a 
 feeling for literature unequalled by any German 
 thinker since Schopenhauer. Differential equa- 
 tions rub shoulders with dashing epigrams. We 
 plod with difficult steps through pages of curves 
 and graphs, and then suddenly the wilderness of 
 X and y blossoms like the rose. Effertz is, as I 
 have said, classical in his literary loyalties ; and 
 nothing could exceed the wicked delight with 
 which he shows us all political economy lying 
 folded up in a couplet of Goethe or in three 
 threadbare hexameters of Horace. A copious 
 creator of new terms, he invents one to charac- 
 terise himself. It is the custom of authors to 
 publish books in order to educate others : he 
 publishes, however, solely to educate himself. 
 He is, in scientific matters, a pure egosofhe, who 
 expounds his thought in order that it may be 
 criticised and thereby made perfect. And if he 
 refuses to influence opinion he is even more 
 urgent to repel the notion that his theory can 
 lead to revolutionary action. University pro- 
 fessors — whose attitude towards burning 
 questions is ever that of a cat towards hot 
 soup — have ignored him because they believed
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 41 
 
 that a writer who laid such emphasis on the 
 disharmonies and antagonisms of economic life 
 must necessarily be a disturber of the peace. 
 Such an idea is absurd. Effertz has a particular 
 aversion and contempt for bombs and barricades. 
 " It is only a partial knowledge of social antago- 
 nisms that can lead men to desire a revolution. 
 The best way to make revolutions unpopular, 
 and to create a sedative temper of reform, is to 
 furnish a complete picture of these antagonisms." 
 An agitator who has heard of only a single 
 " class-war " is in danger of believing that the 
 source of this class-war may be swept away for 
 ever, and humanity definitively redeemed with 
 the flame and fanfare of one great upheaval. 
 It is an illusion that still exists, and that must 
 be banished. What can be more potent to 
 banish it than a Sociology which exhibits 
 economic disharmony not as an isolated and 
 destructible fortress of privilege, but as a vast 
 labyrinth co-extensive with society ? For men 
 who respect their intellects only one honourable 
 path is open, the path of peaceful reform. 
 
 After such an overture the fundamental ideas 
 of Eflfertz must seem bare and simple. His 
 system is characterised by M. Andler as the most 
 vigorous attempt ever made to constitute a 
 science of Pure Economics. By this term he 
 understands the analysis and interpretation of 
 those economic facts which exist independently 
 not alone of the special juridical system of any 
 state, but also of the processes of exchange.
 
 42 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Denuded then to its ultimate skeleton, economic 
 life manifests itself as a drama, which, like the 
 French stage, has its " eternal triangle." Land, 
 labour, and consumption are the three apex- 
 points about which all economies function, be 
 they primitive or advanced. The collaboration 
 of labour with land to produce a utility is the 
 foundation of all systems. Every good contains 
 a certain quantity of labour and a certain 
 quantity of land, but no good contains anything 
 else. In the metaphor of Petty labour is the 
 father, and land is the mother of all wealth. 
 This analysis of production is, we may agree with 
 Effertz, the most worn and battered common- 
 place of all the text-books. Eveiy theorist has 
 seen it, but hardly one has consistently believed 
 it. To anybody who grasps it steadily the dictum 
 on which Marx builds his whole system comes 
 as an amazing counter-sense. " If, then, we 
 leave out of consideration the use-value of 
 commodities," writes Marx in the indispensable 
 first chapter of Das Kafital, '* they have only one 
 common property left, that of being products 
 of labour." 
 
 Marxian Socialism is by this principle, the 
 Ponocratic illusion, involved in strange absur- 
 dities. It would, for instance, necessitate the 
 exchange of three or four bullocks for one good 
 book ; since the " labour certificates," which are 
 to be the measure of exchange, would show that 
 the named quantities of these ver)- diverse pro- 
 ducts embodied equal quantities of labour.
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 43 
 
 The ratio between literature and beef might 
 indeed be even more favourable to the former 
 on the score of the superior skill of the labour 
 concerned. Obviously commodities have another 
 common property ; each of them embodies a 
 certain quantity of land. In any given . process 
 of consumption — say that of bread — we bite the 
 dust in an unsuspected sense, we are veritable 
 eaters of earth. And the earth bemg very far 
 from infinite this fact is of dominant importance 
 in all economies, Effertz confesses with surprise 
 that for once literature fails him. While every 
 language has a phrase like manger du travail or 
 manger de la sueur in currency, he cannot find 
 either in the verses of the learned or in the 
 proverbs of the people any locution such as 
 manger de la terre. He coins it forthwith, with 
 an explanation which affords such a good example 
 of what one may term the conscientious nastiness 
 of his science that it ought to be quoted here in 
 its more or less decent veil of French. " Pour 
 eviter les malentendus grossiers, je dois faire 
 remarquer que si je dis ' manger de la sueur, de 
 la terre,' je ne parle pas en chimiste ; je ne 
 parle pas de geophagie, et je ne fais pas allusion 
 k la sueur materielle qui est mclangce chimique- 
 ment avec presque toutes les denrees coloniales. 
 je parle en economiste et je pense a cette sueur 
 et a cette terre qui sont renfermees metaphysique- 
 ment dans les biens." 
 
 The relation of the three elements engaged 
 may be expressed in mathematical or pseudo-
 
 44 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 mathematical form. The final unknowns, 
 
 positive and negative, of economic calculation 
 
 are x = the utilities consumed by an individual 
 
 in the unit of time, and y = the labour expended 
 
 by the individual in the unit of time in the 
 
 acquisition of these utilities. In calculating the 
 
 curves, in which he forecasts the future of 
 
 mankind, Effertz employs an armoury of some 
 
 forty auxiliary symbols. On the technical side 
 
 they constitute, indeed, so large a part of his 
 
 work that his use of them ought to be illustrated. 
 
 Designating, then, by w the utility of a good, 
 
 by a the quantity of labour, and by h the quantity 
 
 of land embodied in it, we are able to formulate 
 
 an absolute value, not dependent on any special 
 
 regime or even on exchange. This absolute value 
 
 varies with the quotient, satisfaction : sacrifice. 
 
 The producti\dty of any exploitation, or more 
 
 generally of any form of economic organisation 
 
 being represented by />, we arrive forthwith at 
 
 w 
 the formula /> = — j—,. To maximise />, by 
 
 weighting a and h with appropriate coefficients, 
 and by understanding the psychological deter- 
 minants of w, is the task laid upon all future 
 governments. In discussing further the relation 
 of a and h, Effertz makes his sole claim to 
 originaHty. He has introduced two new prin- 
 ciples into Sociology, the principle of conflict 
 and the principle of incitation. Passing by the 
 first of these for a moment, I shall try to explain 
 the second. All previous economists have treated
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 45 
 
 the two factors of production as co-operating 
 forces, the resultant of which is represented by 
 a diagonal. But in point of fact, Effertz argues, 
 the true relation is that of an inciting factor, 
 labour, to an incited factor, land ; and the 
 economy which results corresponds not to the 
 diagonal of the parallelogram of forces, but to 
 what he styles a decrochement. One who is not 
 an initiate in the Higher Mathematics had best 
 seek refuge in the original " La production est 
 le proces par lequel I'incitant travail decroche 
 une valeur d'usage en incitant de la terre." The 
 whip, he says, in a deliberately ludicrous 
 image, is the inciting, the cab-horse the incited 
 factor : you may manage with a smaller horse by 
 using a larger whip ; but no extension of the whip, 
 even to infinity, will compensate for the total 
 disappearance of the horse. This novel ter- 
 minology and the mathemical exercises by 
 which it is supplemented are not much dwelt 
 upon by M. Landry. But it is difficult to see 
 how any specialist in Mathematical Economics 
 can, with due regard to his own competence, 
 ignore the first section of Les Antagonismes. 
 The third of the primordial elements w, or the 
 utility of goods, has for Effertz found its final 
 formulation in Daniel Bernouilli's De Mensura 
 Sortis, published in 1738, Bernouilli's law con- 
 tains for him all the truth and none of the con- 
 fusion of the " marginal utihty " theory of the 
 Austrians. Analogous to the law of Weber and 
 Fechner in Psycho-Physics, it asserts that the
 
 46 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 subjective satisfaction produced by the objective 
 consumption of a given quantity of any good is in 
 inverse ratio to the quantity of the good ah'eady 
 consumed. Furnished with this key to the 
 variation of needs and desires, and with the co- 
 elHcients representng skill, fertility and the like 
 which qualify a and h in any concrete case, 
 Effert^ undertakes rather vainly to make his 
 equations as accurate as those of Physics. Before 
 passing from his elaborate analysis of exchange 
 one ought, perhaps, to signalise the invention of 
 the term monoone, or monoony, to designate a 
 form of unilateral competition, which is the 
 obverse of monopoly, and is almost as common. 
 One seller confronting many buyers gives us a 
 phenomenon of monopoly, one buyer confronting 
 many sellers gives us a phenomenon of monoony. 
 For the rest it is, perhaps, enough to say that in 
 Pure Economics Etfertz touches no question that 
 he docs not freshen ; his discussions cast novel, 
 though perhaps distorting, lights on the whole 
 sub-structure of the science. 
 
 Every good is, as all economists have noted, 
 a synthesis of labour with land, but the propor- 
 tions in which these elements are combined vary 
 over a verv wide range. On closer scrutiny 
 there emerges a fact which controls the whole 
 future of humanit}-, whether under Socialism or 
 under Individualism. h is this : generally 
 speaking those goods which require for their 
 production much land and comparatively little 
 labour are articles of food, biens iV alimentation,
 
 OTTO KFFFRTZ 47 
 
 and those vvhicii require much hibour and oin- 
 paratively little land are instruments of tuhurc 
 or luxury, biens de luxe ou de culture. An 
 instance already cited will serve here also- the 
 contrast, namely, between bullock and b(K)k9. 
 
 The variations of the quotient involve many 
 
 important consequences. 'J'he first of these is 
 enunciated by KfFcrf/. in what he calls the non- 
 transformability or non-interchangeability of 
 forms of production. Any given form of 
 production, that is to say, cannot in general be 
 transformed into any other, but only on condi- 
 tion that the quotient b : a oi the two is approxi- 
 mately the same. Eifert/C in his exposition 
 distinguishes, but not quite clearly, between 
 quantitative and qualitative variations of the 
 land engaged in production. Judas, he points 
 out, gave utterance to very feeble though very 
 popular Economics in complaining that the 
 precious ointment had not been converted into 
 food for the poor. In this case the absurdity is 
 obvious. Under our system of exchange you can 
 substitute one commodity for another, and 
 transfer the sin, if there be a sin, of luxury to 
 somebody else; but by no chrematistic magic 
 can you transform the first product into some- 
 thing so different in nature as the second. The 
 more plausible fallacy, however, is that which 
 regards, not products, but branches of production 
 as interchangeable. This illusion beclouds the 
 prophetic vision alike of the iVIalthusian pessi-
 
 48 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 mists and the Socialistic optimists. The former 
 imagine that when the pressure of over-popula- 
 tion begins, every other branch of production 
 will be transformed into the production of food, 
 and that consequently the debacle to which 
 mankind, increasing at its present rate, is in their 
 view irredeemably committed will have famine 
 only as its last phase. All culture, all luxury will 
 have been thrown to the wolves before their 
 fangs come abreast of the sleigh. The reply of 
 Effertz is that if such a crisis is to come, it will 
 not end but begin with hunger. The one 
 category of goods of which there need never be a 
 scarcity is that category which demands a great 
 deal of labour, but little land — namely, goods 
 of culture. The Socialists also, when confronted 
 with a famihar criticism, reply in terms of the 
 same fundamental error. Under your Socialism, 
 says a critic, suppose that I call to your com- 
 munistic store with a bunch of labour-notes and 
 ask for a bottle of bock. They have no bock, but 
 they offer me a copy of Marx, of which there is 
 a superabundance ! What then ? Nothing 
 simpler, reply the Sociahsts. You write to the 
 Minister of Production, Department of Trans- 
 formations : he gives instructions to divert some 
 labour from printing and publishing to agriculture 
 and brewing ; and next season there will be no 
 shortage of bock. But No ! says Effertz, you are 
 working on a groundless assumption. You can 
 transform a production of Das Kapital into one 
 of Harmonies Economiques, or one of bock into
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 49 
 
 one of milk or cider. But you cannot transmute 
 a production, in which very little land and a great 
 deal of labour are required, into one that demands 
 very little labour but a great deal of land. 
 Ponocratic Socialism will discover in such a 
 juncture, that by founding its currency solely on 
 one of the primordial elements, it has exhausted 
 the other, it will have eaten up imprudently its 
 whole allowance of land. 
 
 In this reiterated sentence we come upon 
 EfTertz' reason for positing antagonism of 
 interest as an ultimate and unchangeable factor 
 in human society. Homo homini lupus is the law 
 that emerges from every analysis of consumption. 
 Who touches this book, said Whitman, touches a 
 man. But with Effertz to eat a potato is to eat 
 a man, or at least the potential existence of a 
 man. He finds remorse and embarassment 
 mixed as ingredients in every plate of soup. " I 
 cannot get rid of the thought that in eating I 
 am destroying one of my fellows. I say to my- 
 self, indeed, that not to eat would be to destroy 
 myself, and that I am worth as much as another. 
 But I eat it with disgust, as if I had found a 
 hair in it." Labour we must also consume, and 
 so far forth every consumer is forced to 
 " exploit " somebody. But at least there need 
 be no remorse if one pays his score by furnishing 
 to society as much productive labour as he con- 
 sumes. In the world in which we hve this is a 
 difiicult counsel. So many pleasant com- 
 modities, so many lucrative productions are
 
 50 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 possible to us only on condition that others shall 
 be given over to death, servitude, or dishonour. 
 You accept, for instance, the Arab proverb that 
 the Earthly Paradise is to be found on horseback. 
 But since a horse consumes as much earth as 
 would sustain three men, to keep a horse is to 
 murder a family, to keep a stable is to maintain a 
 sort of perpetual massacre. Nor is it to be 
 supposed that this sombre halo attaches only to 
 articles of luxury. Fishers must, indeed, be 
 drowned in order that a rich woman may wear 
 a rope of pearls, but fishers must also be drowned 
 in order that a beggar may eat a herring. The 
 shop-girl, who wears imitation lace, and the 
 duchess, who wears real lace, condemn some of 
 their sisters to slavery and exploitation with the 
 same ruthless certainty. As for dishonour, 
 society has grown itself a very rhinoceros hide of 
 hypocrisies to protect us from the edged and 
 miserable facts which cannot be denied. You 
 must not let your right hand know what your 
 left hand does, nor whisper in your drawing- 
 room what you thunder in your office. Public 
 opinion agrees to equate honour with income, 
 and to employ between friends the suaver 
 synonym. There is a nice gradation in these 
 things : — 
 
 Mein Sohn, o lern das Leben kennen ! 
 Gar vornehm ist es Schnaps zu brennen ; 
 Bedenklich schon ihn zu verkaiifen, 
 Und g-anz-erbarmlich ihn zu — saufen. 
 
 If there is, however, a certain ultimate antago-
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 51 
 
 nism, woven into the fabric of reality, there are 
 many secondary antagonisms which result merely 
 from the property basis on which contemporary 
 societies agree to stand. In his social pathology 
 Effertz proceeds, in his own characteristic way, 
 upon certain ideas of Rodbertus. Like the latter 
 he finds the main source and cause of economic 
 disharmonies in the almost universal clash 
 between rentabilite and froductivite. Under our 
 regime of exchange the production of com- 
 modities is governed not by the needs of men, 
 but by the fluctuations of the market. The indi- 
 vidual producer obtains his maximum income in 
 many cases not by maximising but, on the contrary, 
 by restricting production. The earlier strategy 
 of the speculator in this regard was brutal and 
 elementary : it consisted in the material destruc- 
 tion of products. The lesson taught by the 
 Sibyl — namely, that a monopolist can exact the 
 same price for three as for twelve articles — was 
 well learned by Rome, The manipulation of the 
 grain market, by the burning of superabundant 
 supplies, was so commonly practised as to evoke 
 legislation providing severe penalties for this 
 crimen dardanariatus, as it was named after 
 Dardanarius, its inventor. The Middle Ages 
 found themselves still confronted by the 
 dardanarius, and burned him alive when occasion 
 offered ; and Effertz asserts that even to-day 
 in the East the rice market, and in certain Dutch 
 colonies the spice market, are subject to the same 
 gross and barbaric methods. Modern specula-
 
 52 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 tion is more subtle and more effective : it under- 
 stands how to hold back, and hold up supplies, 
 without destroying them. No consumer can 
 stretch out a hand without coming against one 
 mesh or another of the network of quasi- 
 dardanariatus in which it has enveloped the 
 world. This is the deepest disharmony, but 
 there are many others. Present is at war with 
 future : the wasteful technique of American 
 agriculture, for instance, maximises production 
 for one generation, but leaves an exhausted soil 
 to the next. There is a war between true interest 
 and imaginary interest, even for a man who has 
 deliberately chosen egotism for his guide : even 
 on his own low plane he is continually deluded by 
 our chrematistic, modern habit of mind. Every 
 man, labouring under higher ideals, bears about 
 in his soul a far fiercer war between the economic 
 and the gamic virtues. He has two soul-sides, one 
 to cheat, exploit, and subjugate the world with 
 in order that the other may shower luxury and 
 advancement on his household. The only varia- 
 tion is between that struggle in which the object 
 is destruction, and that in which the object is 
 domination. Competition between one em- 
 ployer and another, or one worker and another 
 within the same trade, supplies an example of 
 the first. Its motto is : Des einen Brod ist des 
 anderen Tod, bread to one man is death to 
 another. Conflicts between a capitalist and a 
 labour syndicate exemplify the second. The 
 watchword in this case is : Des einen Brod ist des
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 53 
 
 anderen Noth, one man's plenty is another man's 
 famine. In one or other of these forms the fact 
 of antagonism is written in a flaming and sinister 
 scribble over the whole map of our modern 
 economy. The masters of that economy, snifhng 
 the gold coins in their palms, echo the Caesar's 
 non olet. But that is a judgment of chemistry, 
 not of ethics. To a mind once shaken out of our 
 habitual, dogmatic drowse all money appears 
 tainted, every sovereign stinks. We have created 
 a civilisation of great and cruel splendour, and 
 written over its gate : No gentleman need apply. 
 Out of this base labyrinth there is only one 
 clew that can be safely followed, that of Pono- 
 Physiocratic Socialism. The weakness of popular 
 Socialism by no means lies in its supposed inability 
 to maintain production at the maximum. In 
 comparison with our present industrial system 
 it offers a clear superiority, consequent on the 
 removal of all conflict between rentabilite and 
 productivite, between lucrative and productive 
 exploitation. The true and fatal flaw is to be 
 found in the proposed mechanism of exchange. 
 This flaw is now for the first time removed. The 
 impossibility of the Marxian labour-certificates 
 having been demonstrated, Effertz proceeds to 
 outline what Andler styles a bimetallism of land 
 and labour. Under this system all articles are 
 to be double-ticketed, so as to show their cost 
 in land and their cost in labour ; and no article 
 is to be sold in exchange for wage-certificates of 
 one kind only. In issuing land certificates,
 
 54 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 which are, so to say, a free bonus given to the 
 worker in addition to his labour-certificates, the 
 State will keep steadily before its mind the terri- 
 torial area at its command, and will be able to 
 control the increase of population and to avert 
 famine. It will be able further, without invading 
 the personal hberty of the citizens, to impel their 
 labour, as the need may be, towards production 
 for the sake of culture or production for the sake 
 of sustenance. The general effect will be to 
 equahse the distribution of the necessaries of 
 physical life. This will provide — in accordance 
 with the only defensible statement of the 
 materialistic interpretation of history — the 
 negative conditions of culture. Its positive 
 reality and richness and the actual distribution 
 of biens de culture will foUow a law determined by 
 the genius and ideals of individual intellects. 
 On the material side Pono-Physiocratic Sociahsm 
 will give equality to the equal, on the mental side 
 it will give inequahty to the unequal. This 
 accords with all our experience. Even in present 
 conditions a capitalist consumes little more land 
 than a workman : like Napoleon he can dine only 
 once in the day. His main consumption is 
 labour, his main motive is ostentation, his main 
 instrument of acquisition is mere money and the 
 chrematistic illusion. His psychology differs 
 organically from that of the workman. " The 
 worker perishes when he no longer has soup to eat. 
 The capitalist perishes when he no longer has 
 Sevres ware in which to offer soup to his
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 55 
 
 parasites." Under the system of Effertz both of 
 them will have soup, since all men need soup ; as 
 for the Sevres, it can only be acquired by a 
 citizen who is able to supply society with labour 
 as skilled and intellectual as that which produced 
 it. A larger hope for all unfolds itself in the 
 consideration that in a progressive nation, while 
 the curve of goods of sustenance no sooner 
 climbs to its maximum than it is dragged down 
 again by growing weight of population, the 
 curve of goods of culture ought to maintain a 
 continuous ascent approximating to a straight 
 line. Therein lies the rule of hfe of the honour- 
 able, and the ambition of the wise. The luxury 
 of a Lassalle, little though it may dim the 
 brilliance of that splendid and reckless spirit, 
 compromises the whole cause of Socialism. If 
 you would be master of the future you must 
 rather choose for your pattern Spinoza, who 
 built his great basilica of metaphysics on two- 
 pence a day. 
 
 Effertz, with an amiable weakness not infre- 
 quent among his countrymen, admits that he 
 may well be regarded as the Kant of Sociology. 
 As Kant opened a new path between dogmatism 
 and scepticism by posing sacramentally and 
 in sede materiae the question of the Hmits of 
 attainable human knowledge, so Eifertz, by 
 posing in the same solemn fashion the question of 
 the Hmits of attainable human happiness, opens a 
 new path between optimism and pessimism. 
 He founds the Critical School of Sociology. The 
 
 D
 
 $6 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 fashion in which he answers his own question has 
 already been indicated. But in believing himself 
 to be impartial he is deeply wrong : his place is 
 with the pessimists. No other judgment is 
 possible to any one who has toiled through the 
 grey, chill, and intricate galleries of his thought. 
 In his vision, even the hght counterfeits a gloom. 
 Asking with Faust : Was kann die Welt mir wohl 
 gewahren ? he answers with Faust ! Enthehren 
 sollst du, sollst enthehren. With Schiller he 
 declares that hfe is error and illusion, and that 
 only in death do we lay hold on reahty. 
 " Humboldt writes somewhere that the greatest 
 happiness possible to any human being is to be 
 born an imbecile, since only an imbecile can Hve 
 without coming to understand the truth of 
 things. This observation holds good in general, 
 but it is specially apphcable to the study of 
 society. Those who have lifted the veil of 
 sociological truth, those who have eaten the 
 fruit of the tree of Sociology, can never again be 
 happy. A veil was thrown over the image of 
 Sais, because that image represented — ^Truth." 
 It would be easy, and quite true, to say that the 
 pessimism of Effertz results from a mistake of fact, 
 taken too seriously. High authorities can be cited 
 to show that the menace of famine, which 
 obsesses him, is so remote as not properly to enter 
 into the present thought of humanity. It would 
 be easy, and quite idle, to observ^e that the man 
 who analyses is lost, and that the only counsel of 
 happiness is to feel feeHngs and enjoy enjoyments.
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 57 
 
 Optimism and pessimism are, perhaps, primary- 
 colours of mind, positive and negative polarities 
 which we can only accept without under- 
 standing. They are, it may be, the day and 
 the night of the human spirit, established for an 
 eternal contrast and counterchange ; and Effertz 
 fulfils the destiny of a man born under the sun's 
 eclipse. Optimist or pessimist matters little in 
 a life marshalled under the trumpet of duty : your 
 emotions are your own, and you are free to feel 
 that all the problems that beset us are insoluble 
 on condition that you help to solve them. To 
 this task Eflfertz has bent a strong and subtle 
 mind. While he has not made Socialism more 
 tolerable he has at least made it more acute, and 
 his contribution to Pure Economics possesses a 
 high value, not at all dependent on his practical 
 creed. Les Antagonismes with its keen sense of 
 the fundamental, its harsh courage, its store of 
 rich and strange observation, cannot fail to 
 count for something, nor can any economist afford 
 to pass by in complete silence the system of Otto 
 Effertz, Gentleman Sociahst. 
 1910.
 
 ON WRITTEN 
 CONSTITUTIONS
 
 ON WRITTEN 
 CONSTITUTIONS 
 
 I agree that it is most unfortunate that we should 
 have to introduce at any time a written provision into 
 an unwritten constitution. (Hear, hear). — Mr. Haldane 
 in the House of Commons. 
 
 TV/TR- haldane is a formidable rather than 
 a popular speaker, an authority but not 
 an inspiration. It is, of course, a question of 
 personality. He looks like a composite photo- 
 graph of six German philosophers, with a varnish 
 of Renan, and that is not a had beginning. But 
 that singular voice of his which comes piping 
 out of rotundity is too thin, light, and meta- 
 physical ever to be a trumpet of democracy. 
 It is in vain that all men concede him the aureole 
 of omniscience. It is in vain that the House 
 rejoices to see in his radiant presence a refutation 
 of the epigram in which Ecclesiastes declares 
 that increase of knowledge means increase of 
 sorrow. He stirs the imagination to pleasant 
 pictures. To me, he is always some friar of the 
 Ingoldsby Legends lilting black-letter Statutes 
 and Gothic ideologies to the music of a penny 
 whistle. 
 
 6i
 
 62 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 But with all that blithe omniscience, he remains 
 formidable rather than eflFective. His speech of 
 the other night, from which the sentence at the 
 head of this column is quoted, ran counter to 
 the sense of his own party. It was delivered 
 with a sort of taut rectitude, and received in, 
 what is called, courteous silence. But that 
 particular sentence was greeted, as it always is 
 greeted in the House of Commons, with a regular 
 musketry-rattle of " Hear, hears." It seems to 
 me not inapt to the times to analyse these 
 " Hear, hears." 
 
 This prejudice against written constitutions is, 
 beyond doubt, one of the best-established super- 
 stitions of English politics. Every law student, 
 nurtured on that masterpiece of romance, 
 Dicey'? Law of the Constitution, has in his 
 day written essays in praise of the spontaneous 
 and elastic system under which we are supposed 
 to live. He has been taught to believe that every 
 Continental jurist looks with emy and despair 
 from his own miserable paper-guarantees of 
 freedom to this organic body which has grown 
 with the growth, and strengthened with the 
 strength of the British nation. And somehow 
 it is suggested that, as Lohengrin had to dis- 
 appear on being forced to give his name and 
 address, so the magic of the English constitution 
 would disappear if it were written down. Hence 
 these " Hear, hears." 
 
 Now I wish to submit, and by no means 
 respectfully, that this traditional view is little
 
 WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS 63 
 
 better than stately nonsense. Continental 
 jurists do not envy England. They say : 
 " Truly, my friend, the British constitution 
 would, without doubt, be admirable. But, 
 alas ! it does not exist." The writing down of 
 custom and practice is not a misfortune, but a 
 most happy achievement. And in dealing with 
 England you are dealing not with an unwritten, 
 but with a badly written, constitution. This 
 last point demonstrates itself. How do you go 
 about to prove the provisions of your unwritten 
 Constitution ? By an appeal to Magna Charta. 
 But Magna Charta is a document, not a custom. 
 By an appeal to the " Indemnity of Parliament " 
 of 1407, to the Resolution of 1640, to the Resolu- 
 tion of 1671, to the Resolution of 1678. These 
 are strange elements to appear in an unwritten 
 constitution. Take away the scribe, the 
 Commons clerk, and the printer, and neither 
 Indemnity nor Resolution would exist or operate 
 to-day. 
 
 The amusing truth is that this myth of an 
 unwritten English constitution, with its whole 
 virtue residing in the fact that it was unwritten, 
 was invented by an Irishman. Edmund Burke 
 invented it because it happened to give him a good 
 debating-point against the French Revolution. 
 But why should our radical legatees of the French 
 Revolution cling to it as tenderly as to a memory 
 of their childhood ? They ought, on the contrary, 
 to say : " Since so much has been written, let us 
 write the rest, and write it clearly."
 
 64 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 One has no difficulty in believing that Simon 
 de Montfort had a certain weakness for unwritten 
 constitutions, but that was only because, in all 
 probability Simon de Montfort did not him- 
 self write or read with anyjcomfort. But the 
 whole colour of the times has changed. Writing, 
 which in those far-off days was the special magic 
 of a small caste, is the common form of modern 
 democracy. Before the Print Age, to rely on 
 documents rather than on custom would have 
 been esoteric. Since the Print Age, to rely on 
 custom rather than on documents is mere 
 antiquarian pedantry. 
 
 The two opposite mistakes have this in 
 common : they are, both of them, modes of 
 keeping government separated from the dust, 
 the tumult, and the heartiness of common life. 
 That is the aim of Toryism ; and Tory constitu- 
 tionalists like Mr. Dicey are singing in the key of 
 their policy when they sing the praises of tacit 
 agreements, accepted conventions, and the other 
 elements of unwritten constitutions. But when 
 Mr. Haldane joins the chorus, he is, I submit, 
 engaging in high treason against those two born 
 Progressives, the pen and the printing-press. 
 The pen in old days was the jousting lance ; the 
 Press in these days is the armoured Dreadnought 
 of Radicalism. 
 
 There is nothing peculiarly English in this 
 dread of documents. It is a characteristic of all 
 primitive societies. You have one form of the 
 superstition in the Arab who expects to be cured —
 
 WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS 65 
 
 and often is cured ! — by rolling a piece of paper 
 with a doctor's prescription on it up into a ball 
 and swallowing it. You have another in the 
 contemporary farmer who cannot be induced to 
 keep accounts. He prefers to work on an un- 
 written constitution, " like his father before 
 him." The result is that when he gets to the 
 Bankruptcy Covirt he has to go without even 
 the poor consolation enjoyed by the rest of us — 
 namely, an exact knowledge of how he got there. 
 Within the field of law itself the whole movement 
 is from ciistom and the spoken word to Statute 
 and the written word. If not, why is it that 
 when you have made a contract over the tele- 
 phone you immediately dictate a letter 
 embodying its terms, and send it off by the 
 evening post ? 
 
 The same thing holds true of industry and 
 commerce. Everywhere the formula, the 
 diagram, the blue drawing, the visible, written, 
 permanent word have triumphed. In commerce, 
 to take an example from history, Venice owed 
 her greatness partly, no doubt, to geography, 
 but largely also to book-keeping. Venice held 
 the Golden East in fee because her merchants 
 were the first to abandon the old unwritten 
 constitution of hand-to-mouth trading in favour 
 of double-entry book-keeping. Her flaming 
 pageant, in which life and art mingled their 
 frontiers inseparably, was organised by the 
 glorious clerks who wrote down her accounts in 
 a large, legible hand. The splendour of Titian
 
 66 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 was nothing more than the flowering of a 
 ledger. 
 
 Toryism has imaged the vague, unwritten 
 regime, which is its opportunity, as a natural 
 and organic growth. But change the image. 
 Say instead that it is like music-hall patter, made 
 up as one goes along. Say that it is like an 
 extempore speech, and that extempore speeches 
 are always bad. Say that it is, so far, the mere 
 nebula and protoplasm of freedom to which 
 this age must give clear articulation and definite 
 form. All the tides are flowing in that direction. 
 Within the last ten years England has made 
 constitutions for Australia, for the Transvaal, 
 for the Orange River, for United South Africa. 
 It is time that she made a Constitution for 
 herself, guarding liberty with a quantitative 
 formula. And that will help us all to join in 
 making a Constitution for Ireland. 
 1910.
 
 BODY V. SOUL
 
 BODY V, SOUL 
 
 For the Plaintiff : Francis Thompson 
 
 "PRANCIS THOMPSON is known to us as 
 perhaps the most wastefully abundant 
 imagination of the present day. He has taken 
 the sun for patron, and all his poetry welters 
 with the sun's fervour and fecundity. They are 
 in his very style and wordy vesture, that imperial 
 style of his into which he has adopted purple 
 Latinities as aptly as the Church has adopted 
 the stateliness of the Roman paenula. But we 
 must be on our guard against liis splendours ; 
 we must not let them betray us into construing 
 his work as mere literature. One fears that some 
 delusion of the kind has captured many of those 
 who praise him. They have praised him as a lord 
 of language, a tyrant of images, and it has hardly 
 occurred to them to search out the spirit behind 
 the grandiose ceremonial. It is possible, it is 
 even certain, that many readers of such a poem 
 as The Hound of Heaven have exulted in its tidal 
 flux without taking it to mean anything in 
 particular. But that is not the colour of the 
 poet's own mind. He has never spoken for the 
 69
 
 70 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 sake of speaking, but always because he had some- 
 thing to say. " What, after all," says Brunetiere, 
 " is poetry but a metaphysic made manifest 
 through sensible images ? " Great poetry surely 
 is ; if not a criticism, it is a vision of life, of the 
 structure and basal laws of life. When a man's 
 eyes have been once opened the common day 
 flames and vibrates with bladed chariots. The 
 most insignificant object or experience stands 
 vested \^ith endless relations, or rather there is 
 nothing that can any longer be called insignificant. 
 The lightest caprice of love has its metaphysical 
 implications, and to salute a primrose is to pro- 
 claim a philosophy. W'e all understand this, or 
 at least our wise memories do, in their choice of 
 what to reject and what to retain. That poetry 
 alone lives in us which is so great that it has 
 forgotten to be poetic. W^e think of its sincerity, 
 its absolute truth, or what other word we grasp 
 at to describe what cannot be described, not of 
 its technical deftness or even mastery. A some- 
 thing has come upon and transmuted it, it shines 
 with the light of glorification. Francis Thompson 
 has always understood this. Painting the veil of 
 life with colours dipped out of the rising and the 
 setting of the sun, he has knowm that nothing 
 was of any account save what lay behind the 
 veil, the spiritual interpretation that can never 
 be wholly expressed. Earth and all the business 
 of earth have been to him at once a spectacle and 
 a sacrament. His work belongs less to literature 
 than to mysticism. Do we not think of it as of
 
 BODY V. SOUL 71 
 
 something essentially hieratic, full of costly 
 spices, brought out of the East, of figured 
 chasubles, and full of the mysteries of grace ? 
 
 It was necessary to bring all this back to mind 
 in order to induce the mood in which the little 
 book before us must be considered.* For it is 
 no casual bye-product of the writer's mind, 
 as might possibly be suspected from its appear- 
 ance in a series, very aptly called " The Science 
 of Life Series." It is thorough Thompson. 
 The author has simply picked out a certain drift 
 of thought which lies implicit in all his poetry, 
 and supported it by instances and considerations 
 drawn from many quarters. Such a prosifying 
 of intuitions has an interest quite apart from its 
 subject matter. It helps to dispel the notion that 
 poetry comes irresponsibly out of the air, and 
 not reflectively out of the stuff of everyday ; 
 and it shows the supreme reasonableness, the 
 gross commonsense, of mysticism. But we must 
 not stray aside, though it were, like the Crusaders, 
 to capture Constantinople. The book is simply 
 a brief study of the terms prescribed by ascetical 
 tradition to keep the peace between those ally- 
 enemies, Soul and Body, with a plea for a new 
 Concordat to meet new conditions. Mr. 
 Thompson is on the side of the body ; in the 
 interests of the spirit itself he demands a more 
 
 * Health and Holiness. A Study of the Relations 
 between Brother Ass, the Body, and his Rider, the 
 Soul. By Francis Thompson. Burns and Oates. is. 
 and 28. 
 
 £
 
 72 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 clement regime and never did cause rejoice in 
 an abler advocate. He has the incommunicable 
 gift of the phrase, the phrase that is like a key- 
 stone to knit together fabrics of experience, like 
 a cavalry-charge to drive an argument home. 
 The task of summarising him is therefore ex- 
 tremely difhcult, and I shall try to do no more 
 than convey in general terms the point of view 
 from which he justifies and ennobles Brother Ass. 
 In so far as he pleads for a mildening of the 
 discipline of the religious orders we have no 
 concern to follow him. Some have already 
 relaxed, others are in the train of relaxing their 
 first austerity ; and there must always be some 
 that will preserve it to be a refuge for those 
 virile and passionate souls who thirst for brimmed 
 measures of expiation, and are able to bear them. 
 " The weltering problem of secular religion," 
 is, as the writer says, quite enough for us. Take 
 the unheroic, modern man, with all his aches 
 and pains, and ask what is religion to make of 
 him. What ascesis must be adopted so as to 
 make him an instrument capable of divine 
 melodies ? 
 
 For the soul is to the body, as the breath is to the 
 
 flute, 
 Both togfether make the music, either marr«d and all 
 
 is mute. 
 
 And first,'^how does thisTmodern body stand in its 
 internal self ? Surely, as Mr. Thompson says, 
 it is " an etiolated body of death." The nerves
 
 BODY V. SOUL 73 
 
 of the twentieth century have gone bankrupt. 
 Life has become too elaborate and too exacting 
 for them ; they have gone down under the iron 
 rod of erudition and the whip of practical labour. 
 The age's characteristic cry is the cry of disease. 
 Men go about making public confession of their 
 ailments, or, delivered from them, gather dis- 
 ciples to the gospel of the perfect digestion. 
 Patent medicines are invested by their sellers 
 with an all-sufficiency that would have made 
 Paracelsus blush for his modesty. Commissions 
 are appointed to enquire into Physical Degenera- 
 tion. The army authorities cry out that it is 
 impossible to find recruits who are even good 
 enough to be food for powder. Schools for 
 Physical Culture multiply, in England at least, 
 with a rapidity which illustrates, as even the 
 three hundred religious sects did not, that great 
 people's genius for dissension. No alert man has 
 time to consider anything, save what he shall 
 eat and what he shall drink, and wherewith 
 he shall be clothed. We go about creepily con- 
 scious of the iniquities of our livers, and of the 
 freaks of our subliminal selves. For alike from 
 the physical side and from the mental come 
 physicians, Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, Will- 
 Developers, Faith-Healers — it is beyond human 
 power to name the innumerable brood. 
 There is an association in America, whose 
 members are pledged to spend an hour every 
 week wishing fellow-members good health and 
 good fortune. The annual subscription is only
 
 74 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 a dollar, and this will be returned if within a 
 year one does feel appreciably better, and obtain 
 a " rise." 
 
 It is a Danse Macabre, with an interfusion of 
 the crudest farce. But it is difficult to find much 
 relief in the humorous mask of it. That mask 
 drops off, and abandons us to something not far 
 from terror. Cerebral physiology, psychiatry as 
 it is pursued, not in shiUing treatises, but in the 
 schools, begins to disclose more fuUy the inter- 
 relations of mind and body ; and the awful 
 delicacy of the instrument on which we play, 
 its complex falhbility comes near overwhelming 
 us. It is something we have read about in the 
 text-books, how " a brain-fever changed a 
 straight-walking youth into a flagitious and 
 unprincipled wastrel. And recently," adds Mr. 
 Thompson, " we had the medicaUy-reported 
 case of a model lad, who, after an illness, proved 
 a liar and a pilferer," Or it is somebody we 
 have known, flaming, impetuous, who was 
 pushing on by forced marches to his goal ; and 
 then his outraged body turned traitor, and the 
 world had come to an end for him. The brain 
 has become the theatre of a tragedy which is 
 continually renewed. " How remote we are," 
 cries out Guyau in his poignant speech " from 
 the naive perception of the primitive world 
 which located the soul in the breast, or, it may 
 be, even in the stomach ! It is, as we know, the 
 brain that thinks, it is the brain that suffers, it 
 is the brain that throbs with the torment of the
 
 BODY V. SOUL 75 
 
 Unknown, it is the brain that is signed with the 
 sacred wound of the Ideal, it is the brain that 
 quivers under the beak of the winged and ra- 
 vening intellect. In the mountains of Tartary 
 the traveller sometimes sees a strange animal leap 
 panting by in the greyness of the dawn. The 
 great eyes, strained wide with suffering, are 
 those of an antelope ; but as the hoofs thud by, 
 the ground beneath trembling like a heart in 
 agony, two huge wings are seen wildly beating to 
 and fro above the head which they seem to lift 
 up and on. The antelope dashes madly down 
 the winding valley, leaving a red trail on the 
 rocks, staggers, falls, and the two great wings 
 soar up from the antlers, disclosing the eagle 
 which, with talons sunk deep in the skull, had 
 been devouring the brain and the life of the 
 antelope." The parable would come with a 
 familiar air to Mr. Thompson, for it is obvious 
 that either from great sympathy or from sharp 
 experience he knows all these secrets of the 
 prison-house. He is cognisant of lives that have 
 become a dread Rosary in which there are only 
 sorrowful mysteries. Has not he himself written 
 of one who 
 
 Paced the places infamous to tell, 
 
 Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes ? 
 
 He comes in this book to write of these things 
 in plain prose, to consider how they can be 
 wrought up into religion, and whether sanctity 
 may not have in it a tonic quality. The demand
 
 -jS THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 which he makes of the life, whether of the saint 
 or of the rest of us, is simply that it shall live. 
 " Holiness energises. The commonest of common 
 taunts is that of ' idle monks,' ' lazy saints,' and 
 the like. But, most contrary to that superficial 
 taunt, a holy man was never yet an idle man 
 . . . . and a saintly could never be an effete 
 world." But I could not do justice to his 
 thought without quoting in full those proud, 
 trumpet-pages, in which he celebrates the 
 " incidental greatness " of the saints when they 
 turned half- disdainfully to secular pursuits — the 
 lyric majesty of the Prophets, the Confessions of 
 Augustine, the Hymn to the Sun of St. Francis 
 of Assisi, the incomparable prose of St, Francis 
 de Sales. The problem with us all, then, is to 
 evoke from the federation of body and soul the 
 fullest stream of energy, and to turn it to the 
 highest ends ; and to do this we must respect 
 the laws and the limitations of both. The body 
 is like a wick immersed in the oU of the spirit — 
 it was Heine's image — and " though the oil can 
 immensely energise and prolong the life of the 
 wick, it is on that corporeal wick, after all, that 
 the flame of active energy depends." How then 
 is our end to be accompHshed ? 
 
 Not by the heroic maceration of the first or 
 the middle ages. The ascesis of these days, 
 transmitted to us in the discipline of the Orders, 
 was framed for men of robuster mould and un- 
 speakably less sensitive nerves. Their obstacle 
 was that of opulence ; they served God, as they
 
 BODY V. SOUL jj 
 
 forswore Him, with wasteful thoroughness. Our 
 obstacle is that of poverty. Our ancestors put 
 out their follies at compound interest and we are 
 reaping the harvest. The human frame has, 
 Mr. Thompson believes, under this burden and 
 under the complications of modern life suffered 
 a radical diminution of sheer vital power. No 
 faculty has increased except the faculty of 
 suffering, for in the elaboration of its nerves it 
 has become, as it were, soaked in mind. It cries 
 out not for a curb against the excess of its 
 passions, but for the energy to be passionate 
 at all. '' Merely to front existence, for some, 
 is a surrender of self, a choice of ineludibly 
 rigorous abnegation." Surely then we must 
 treat our bodies after another fashion than that 
 of old if we are to make them fit receptacles 
 for sanctity ? Mr. Thompson thinks so, and he 
 has discovered a wise director of souls, the late 
 Archbishop Porter, S.J., who thought wdth him. 
 " Better to eat meat on Good Friday," writes 
 the Archbishop, " than to live in war with every 
 one about us. I fear much you do not take 
 enough food and rest. You stand in need of 
 both, and it is not wise to starve yourself into 
 misery." And he prescribes Vichy and Carlsbad 
 against a visitation of evil thoughts. It is an 
 ascesis no less than the other, and no less difficult. 
 We must study to take our bodies with that 
 shrewd and half humorous gravity which we 
 find in nearly all the wise, and to rule by obeying 
 them. " That the demon could have been
 
 78 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 purged from Saul by medicinal draughts," 
 writes Mr. Thompson in a sentence worthy of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, " were a supposition too 
 much in the manner of the Higher Criticism." 
 But Dryden tells us that whenever " he had a 
 poem to write " — divine tradesman — he chose 
 that method of depurating his spirit. It is 
 hardly a point to dwell on. But let us put an 
 end to the old boycott of the body. Let us be 
 tender and thrifty of its forces. In the strange 
 commerce of spirit and matter, a holiday, 
 prudently taken, may be not only better than a 
 half-done duty, but better even than a wandering 
 prayer. 
 
 Such is the drift of Health and Holiness, and 
 no one who has any appreciation of the grounds 
 on which it rests will be likely to dispute the 
 conclusion. As against the practice of certain 
 Orders it may be a necessary protest ; and there 
 is no head of a convent or college (so long 
 engaged in the great Intermediate conspiracy) 
 but will profit by reading it. We laymen must 
 look to ourselves, and the Church, as we know 
 her, is amply indulgent. She does not debihtate 
 us with fasts and penances. What is of far 
 deeper interest than these special applications 
 of it is the noble philosophy which glimpses 
 through the book. The temper of Plotinus, 
 who was so shamed of his body that he always 
 refused to disclose the date or place of his birth, 
 possesses, of course, a relative truth, but it has 
 been far too dominant within the Church. We
 
 BODY V. SOUL 79 
 
 have forgotten that the Scholastics built 
 psychology on the compositum humanum, the 
 dual unit of soul and body. We have forgotten 
 that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, 
 or remembered it only at catechism time. But 
 so it is, and in the light of this interpretation the 
 trivialities of every-day shine with an unsuspected 
 poetry. It is an interpretation confirmed by all 
 our fairest instincts. Most of us have had 
 moments when sensations of which we are 
 commonly a little ashamed lost their supposed 
 grossness, when a cup of milk drunk among the 
 mountains had in it a lyric ecstasy, and the 
 least spiritual of the senses was transfused with 
 spirit. I do not speak of those experiences which 
 Coventry Patmore touched with the rapture of 
 his vision ; but in his poem To the Body the whole 
 essence of Health and Holiness is to be found. As 
 men come back to the simplicities of life their 
 minds grow more habitable to thoughts like 
 these. The growing nausea of cities, the desire 
 to live in the nearer intimacy of air and earth, the 
 yearning for physical health, of which I have 
 spoken, are all symptoms of a veritable rehabili- 
 tation of the body. What could be more 
 appropriate than that a poet should come at this 
 moment to confirm the indispensable truth amid 
 many extravagances, and to Christianise what 
 otherwise tends to the most naive Paganism ? 
 
 Mr. Thompson has his vision of the future. 
 " The remedy for modern lassitude of body, for 
 modern weakness of will, is Holiness. . . .
 
 8o THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Of the potency, magisterial, benevolent, even 
 tyrannous, which goes forth from the spirit on 
 the body, we have but young knowledge. 
 Nevertheless, it is in rapid act of blossoming. 
 Hypnotism, faith-healing, radium — all these, of 
 such seeming multiple divergence, are really 
 concentrating their rays upon a common centre. 
 When that centre is divined, we shall have 
 scientific witness, demonstrated certification, to 
 the commerce between body and spirit, the 
 regality of will over matter. . . . Then 
 vail lie open the truth which now we can merely 
 point to by plausibilities, and fortify by instances, 
 that sanctity is medicinal, Holiness a healer. . , . 
 Health, I have well-nigh said, is Holiness. What 
 if Hohness be Health ? . . ." Have we not 
 all a forecast of some such perfect marriage of 
 soul and body, in which the two will be no more 
 at war than thought with word ? It is vouch- 
 safed to us here and there in a gracious example, 
 some saint whose every action is ordered with a 
 divine courtesy, some lady who seems to Hve to 
 an ever-sounding, interior music. Perhaps it is 
 a dream of the glorified rather than of the 
 earthly body ; but let us hear the poets when 
 they describe it, lest we should not recognise our 
 inheritance when it comes to us. 
 
 It is curious to compare Francis Thompson's 
 vision with that of Guyau, most spiritual of 
 evolutionists. " Pleasure, even physical pleasure 
 growing more and more deHcate, and mingling 
 ■with moral ideas, will become more and more
 
 BODY V. SOUL 8 1 
 
 esthetic ; we see as the ideal term of evolution a 
 race to which every pleasure will be beautiful, 
 every agreeable action artistic. We should then 
 be like those instruments, which are so amply 
 sonorous, that it is impossible to touch them 
 without evoking a sound of musical value ; the 
 lightest stimulus would set in vibration the 
 depths of our moral life. . . . Art will no 
 longer stand severed from life ; our consciousness 
 will have grown so vast and so delicate as to be 
 ever alert to the harmony of life, and all our 
 pleasures will bear the sacred seal of beauty." 
 
 They are alike ideals ; but they help in very 
 different ways to keep alive in us that curiosity 
 which is the seed of the future, and to remind 
 us that man, if not in this life perfectible, is 
 capable of endless progress. The superiority of 
 the Catholic poet is that he reinforces the natural 
 will by waters falling an infinite height from the 
 infinite ocean of Spirit. He has two worlds 
 against one. If we place our Fortunate Islands 
 solely within the walls of space and time, they 
 will dissolve into a mocking dream ; for there 
 will always be pain that no wisdom can assuage. 
 They must lie on the edge of the horizon with 
 the glimmer of a strange sea about their shores, 
 and their mountain peaks hidden among the 
 clouds. 
 
 1905.
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 
 
 TT is the last day of the Winter Assizes. If 
 you want a metaphor to drape it in, you may 
 call it the punitive clearing-house of Society. 
 The cheques of crime come in, with sinister 
 crinklings and rustlings, to receive the cancelling 
 stamp which announces that in six months or 
 twenty years — or, it may be, three weeks, with 
 a hempen halter at the end — the criminal will 
 have cleared his account with the State. He 
 may then begin anew . . . if he be sufficiently 
 alive. There is no tragic strain in the air as the 
 sentenced prisoners pass out of the dock to lose 
 their freedom, their clothes, their tobacco, and 
 their names for the stated period. They do not, 
 as that young reporter racing over the last page 
 of his flimsy is sure to write, " appear to realise 
 their position." They are only the raw material 
 of tragedy. They have never, like you and me, 
 read Gorky in bad English. They have not par- 
 ticipated in the revival of Greek drama ; nor even, 
 with the aid of a free pass, studied the free 
 passions of the Stage Society. 
 
 So placed, you would, doubtless, gather about 
 you the purple folds of a sorrow so terrible as to 
 swallow up all remembrance of its cause, and I 
 85
 
 86 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 would mimic wicked marquises who went to the 
 tumbrils with a fine phrase and an incomparable 
 gesture. But the Enemy of Society now in the 
 dock, in course of receiving seven years, is prob- 
 ably wondering under his yellow and scrubby 
 face how the skilly will taste, and whether they 
 will wash him very hard in jail. 
 
 Seven or eight days in an Assize Court help 
 one to understand the anarchist and his attitude 
 towards crime. The theorists of Anarchism pro- 
 pose to sweep away the whole traditional, minute 
 machinery of penal law, and leave the criminal 
 to the spontaneous justice of his neighbours. 
 It may be that the neighbours will lynch a child- 
 beater, and, shrouding their faces before a 
 supreme anguish, will let a man who has killed 
 go free. They will take a human, not a juridical 
 view of things. But be that as it may, one does 
 feel intensely that these legal forms and moulds 
 are too narrow, too icily definite, too blank 
 to psychology to contain the passionate chaos 
 of life that is poured into them. Think of the 
 colossal pretensions of this courthouse — this drab 
 granite building, with the unwashed mud on its 
 pavements, and the susurrus of crowds that sweat 
 and chatter about it ! It is a temple to the 
 Problem of Evil. It is a temple to the Problem 
 of Evidence. It is a Temple to the Mystery 
 of Death. And when you have uttered these 
 three words you have called up the whole moral, 
 intellectual, and metaphysical life of humanity. 
 
 If it were not contempt of court you would
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 87 
 
 rise up and cry out to all these actors — judge, 
 jury, counsel, prisoner, policemen — that the 
 tragic halo is about their heads. You would 
 recall them to the bitter greatness which they 
 seem to have forgotten. Sad-robed priests — ^if 
 your vision could be made fact — would chant 
 prayers around the smoke of consecrated censers 
 in the Doric portico of this Temple of Fear. 
 And the prisoner, sinner and victim at once, 
 would go to his doom covered with pity as with 
 sacrificial garlands. 
 
 You may be quite certain that none of these 
 things will happen. There is no provision made 
 for them in Stephens' Digest of the Criminal 
 Law, or in Archbold on Evidence. To imagine 
 them is to welcome the decadence. But then, as 
 you look up at the bench, your eye is caught by 
 a veritable, decadent touch — the judge's Howers. 
 I do not know whether it is part of the ritual or 
 not, but I have never been at a Criminal Assizes 
 without seeing that incongruous bunch of 
 flowers — this time they are ragged, white 
 chrysanthemums in a vase of blue china — beside 
 the inkpot in which the judicial pen is dipped as 
 it takes notes of the evidence or records the 
 conviction. It reminds one of Baudelaire's 
 Fleurs du Mai, Blossoms of Sin. 
 
 But, after all, you may expect anything of the 
 judge. He is a wild symbolist. He wears 
 scarlet to manifest the wrath of the law, and 
 ermine for the purity of the law — a spotted 
 purity, to guess from the specimen before us —
 
 88 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 and a black cap by times for the gloom of death. 
 Probably there is some guarded mystery in the 
 number of curls in his wig of white horse-hair. 
 And the policemen — it is in Ireland, but crime 
 is as cosmopolitan as money ! — are admirable 
 studies in silver and jet ; especially the district 
 inspectors, with their braided hussar- jackets and 
 the gleam of chains and brooch-buckles upon 
 them. It seems an artistic impertinence that 
 crime should lift its shaggy head against so many 
 perfumed people, dressed out in such splendid 
 raiment. But great as are the virtues of uniform, 
 they do not quite reach to the total extinction 
 of evil. 
 
 You had a sense of utter futility as you listened 
 to the steady, infinitesimal drip of evidence. 
 It was like the nagging and pecking patter of 
 thin rain on a hat. It proved everything with 
 absolute conclusiveness except the moral guilt of 
 the prisoner. You have the same sense of the 
 emptiness of criminology as a pale, sensitive face 
 appears above the spikes of the dock. He might 
 be a poet, an Assisi peasant turned saint, but 
 certainly there is no signature of crime in his 
 visage. As a matter of fact, he stabbed a neigh- 
 bour to death because of a difference of opinion 
 as to the rate of wages in North Carolina. It 
 seems a poor reason enough. To act like that 
 is to take truth too heavily, and life too lightly. 
 Besides, there are plenty of things to quarrel 
 about at home without going to Carolina, North 
 or South.
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 89 
 
 How did the prisoner come to do it ? You 
 can see that he is as puzzled to answer the 
 question as anybody else. He stands in the 
 dock clasping and unclasping the fingers of that 
 horrible right hand which held the knife. It 
 seems to him a foreign body : it is surely not his ? 
 The late Mr. Browning, perhaps, could explain 
 it. After all, if any truth is of any importance, 
 every truth is of infinite importance. And 
 think of the monstrous spectacle before Heaven 
 of this dead man riding easily about the country 
 sowing stories two dollars a week wrong as to the 
 rate of wages in North Carolina ! How many 
 destinies he might misshape with his eight-and- 
 fourpenny error ! Well, he will propagate no 
 more economic blunders. And his slayer will 
 wear the yellow and arrowed jacket for ten years 
 to come. But will that give back the dead 
 disputant to the sunlight or to his wife ? 
 
 The courthouse is somehow growing too small. 
 Your brain is growing too small. The world itself 
 is too small for these explosive and shattering 
 speculations. The judge is doing his best ; 
 everybody is doing his best ; even Mr. Gladstone 
 who undertakes in his Borstal repair-shops to 
 patch up a moral personality, as good as new, for 
 all and divers his Majesty's subjects in prison. 
 If the thing is to be done at all it must be done 
 after this fashion. 
 
 -Certainly, one has no substitute to offer for 
 this Judaeo-Roman-English criminal law, and, 
 perhaps, equally criminal civilisation. Still, one
 
 90 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 is conscious of a vague protest against it all. 
 In crime, in moral evil, the veiled destinies have 
 set mankind a problem too hard to understand, 
 too heavy to endure. For my part, I can only 
 fall back on the serpent and the apple, and an 
 obscure something which, as my Penny Catechism 
 says, " darkened our understanding, weakened 
 our will, and left in us a strong inclination to 
 evil." 
 
 1909.
 
 A NEW WAY 
 OF MISUNDERSTANDING 
 HAMLET
 
 A NEW WAY 
 
 OF MISUNDERSTANDING 
 
 HAMLET 
 
 "XX/'HAT one felt most painfully at Mr. 
 ^ ^ Harvey's recent performance of Hamlet 
 was the artistic bankruptcy of the play. Of course 
 no decent citizen confessed his boredom, because 
 Shakespeare is the keystone of the conventions, 
 a " national asset " as is said in England. But 
 if art means freshness, words with raw, vivid 
 sensation behind them, surprise and an element 
 of strangeness ? And what else does it mean ? 
 Already a hundred years ago the humane Charles 
 Lamb was able to write that all the shining things 
 in the play had been " so handled and pawed by 
 declamatory boys and men " that for him they 
 were " perfect dead members." And since then ! 
 The great Law of Ennui has vindicated itself 
 even against Shakespeare. He has been mummi- 
 fied into an orthodoxy. He is a field for anti- 
 quarians, a proud heritage, an excuse for sump- 
 tuous scenery, but as an artist in the strict sense 
 he hardly exists. Only one thing can restore 
 him, a prolonged bath of oblivion. If he is to 
 93
 
 94 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 be brought to life again he must be redeemed 
 from his immortality, which will be better than 
 to redeem his house from the Americans. 
 Societies must be started to destroy his works, 
 at all events to lose them for a hundred and fifty 
 years, and so make it possible for unborn happier 
 generations to come to him as to a fresh and 
 breathing phenomenon. Failing that he must 
 be excluded from all school and university 
 courses, and forbidden under heavy penalties 
 to any one not having attained his majority. 
 
 The pity is that, with the calamity of so long 
 life, he should not have the happiness to be 
 understood. The inky Dane, in especial, has had 
 as evil fortune in this regard as if he had walked 
 the actual earth and devoted himself to politics. 
 Critic after critic has arisen to misrepresent him, 
 and this secular misrepresentation has so crept 
 into the empire of our imagination that direct 
 vision of the plav is impossible. Tieck's Hamlet 
 we know, and Goethe's and Coleridge's and Mr. 
 Tree's and Mr. Harvey's, but Shakespeare's 
 Hamlet no man knows. Shakespeare's Hamlet, 
 as a painful matter of fact, no man can ever 
 know. We know how much sub-meaning and 
 personal colour the same set of words takes on 
 in different minds, and that these are never 
 exactly what they were in the creator's mind. 
 And then in Hamlet there is the added barrier 
 of Elizabethan English, and the fact that 
 Shakespeare is as topical as a pantomime. What 
 each of us does is to construct a private under-
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 95 
 
 standing of Hamlet (which is certain to be a 
 misunderstanding) out of materials furnished 
 conjointly by ourselves, Shakespeare, a cloud of 
 critics, and the actor who happens to be concrete 
 before our eyes at the moment ; and it is in 
 confession of this, and not as a poor paradox, 
 that the title of this paper has been devised. 
 
 The points I wish modestly to put forward 
 here will be most intelligible as a comment on 
 the popular reading. That reading has one 
 merit at least, that of simplicity. According to 
 it the plastic principle of the play, or rather the 
 flaw that suffers it to stream down its ruinous 
 course, is a vice of character — Hamlet's 
 " inability to act." It is Goethe's " oak planted 
 in a costly vase which should have only borne 
 pleasant flowers " ; it is Coleridge's " man living 
 in meditation, called upon to act by every 
 motive, human and divine, but the great object 
 of whose life is defeated by continually resolving 
 to do, yet doing nothing but resolve." These 
 are the phrases that have captured the general 
 mind, and flowed like a mist over the outlines of 
 the play. But consider for a moment. 
 Remembering Goethe's paltry performance — 
 thanks to his superculture — in the liberation of 
 Germany, and the lamentable life story of 
 Coleridge, who can doubt that we have here not 
 so much the poet's imagination as that of his 
 critics ? Quicquid recipitur secundum moduni 
 recipientis, we get out of things what we bring to 
 them ; and I submit that the apocalypse of
 
 96 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 moral insufficiency discerned by these two 
 eminent minds in Hamlet was brought with 
 them in the satchels of their conscience. They 
 are simply making General Confessions at the ex- 
 pense of the unfortunate Prince. Let us analyse 
 this interpretation popularised by them. The 
 kernel of it is this. It demands in the place of 
 Hamlet a crude, gory, gullible, instantaneous 
 savage who not only believes in ghosts but 
 lacks even the elementary savage's knowledge 
 that there are evil as well as good ghosts, and 
 whose will is hung on a hair-trigger dischargeable 
 by the airiest impulse and subject to no restraint, 
 moral or prudential. The commercial blandness 
 with which people talk of Hamlet's " plain duty " 
 makes one wonder if they recognise such a thing 
 as plain morality. The " removal " of an uncle 
 without due process of law and on the unsup- 
 ported statement of an unsubpoenable ghost ; 
 the \vido\\ing of a mother and her casting-off 
 as unspeakably vile, are treated as enterprises 
 about which a man has no right to hesitate or 
 even to feel unhappy. Because, meshed about 
 with murder, adultery, usurpation, espionage, 
 hypocrisy, and all other natural horrors, rein- 
 forced by the still greater horror of the super- 
 natural, because in these cheerful conditions 
 Hamlet is healthy-minded enough to grow 
 " thought-sick," he is marked down as one 
 " unstable as water." What be'walders most of 
 all is that there lurks in the popular view (and 
 I appeal to the general experience) a vague con-
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET: 97 
 
 viction that if Hamlet had only shown himself 
 morally-fibrous enough, all the blood and tears 
 would somehow have been averted and the 
 curtain would fall on a serene Denmark. 
 
 I do not deny that a tragedy derived from 
 superculture and a feeble will would be admir- 
 able. Indeed if it be wanted it can be found in 
 the purest essence in Turgeneff's Rudin. But I 
 submit that this is not the true ethos of Hamlet. 
 I submit that Hamlet, so far from being the most 
 " internal " of Shakespeare's plays, is nearly the 
 most " external," and has for plastic principle 
 not character but that veiled force which we call 
 destiny. What, in fine, is it but a tale of justice, 
 bloodily executed through what seem "accidental 
 judgments, casual slaughters " ? Such indeed 
 was the reading of the Prince himself : — 
 
 " Heaven hath pleased it so 
 To punish me with this, and this with me, 
 That I must be their scourge and minister." 
 
 The problem is set wholly from the outside. 
 It is not a product of Hamlet's superculture, 
 but of the sin of his uncle and the lesser sin of 
 his mother, and it is a problem so overwhelming 
 that, however it be handled and by whatever 
 type of character, it must issue in abundant 
 tears and blood. What is claimed here for 
 Hamlet's solution is, that it is the only one 
 justified by the character of the evidence and 
 the practical means at his command, and that, 
 above all, it is justified by results. The destinies
 
 98 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 approve and aid him, and when the curtain 
 falls on a terrible harvest of horror we feel, 
 nevertheless, a deep appeasement. The agony 
 of Hamlet is over, the due ransom of sin has been 
 paid with Hves guilty and innocent, and with 
 the inearthing of much moral refuse, the world 
 sweeps into pure air again. The roll of 
 Fortinbras' drums is not so much the irony as the 
 recuperative force of Hfe, lingering with praise 
 over the body of him who has made recuperation 
 possible. 
 
 This is a point which must not be ignored : the 
 play ends, thanks to Hamlet's course of action, 
 in absolutely the best way in which it could end. 
 The king, of course, was due to the sword. But 
 surely Gertrude also is better out of the world 
 than in it ? Had she lived there was nothing but 
 the gnawing of the worm, shame and remorse, 
 or perhaps — and the closet scene shows her 
 capable of it — the triumph of the fouler part of 
 her, and the pursuit of her son with hatred and 
 vengeance. Does anybody drop tears over 
 Laertes, that polished cutter of throats i' the 
 church ? There remain Polonius and Ophelia. 
 The comic side of Polonius is always played 
 with such over-emphasis as to hide the dangerous 
 side of him. His complicity in the murder of the 
 elder Hamlet may be disputed, although it is 
 not easy otherwise to explain his overweening 
 influence with Claudius. He certainly con- 
 spired with the latter in his usurpation, and we 
 cannot say what is the bound to his falseness.
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLE7 gg 
 
 Suppose he had not been slain behind the arras, 
 but had lived to carry his tale to Claudius, what 
 course of action would he have counselled ? 
 Like son, like father ; his plan would have 
 differed from the poisoned rapier only in being, 
 perhaps, a little more politic. Polonius helps to 
 remind us that we may have comic murderers, 
 just as the Burghleys and other contemporary 
 statesmen show that we may have pious 
 murderers. As for Ophelia, she is one of those 
 who are organised for unhappiness. Hamlet's 
 disgust with life is so violent, just and incurable 
 that the old magic of their love can never return, 
 and his straits are such that, however he acts, 
 enough misery will be produced to dethrone her 
 frail reason. 
 
 I have submitted also that the evidence in 
 Hamlet's possession never reaches that daylight 
 certainty which justifies private vengeance. 
 If Shakespeare had intended to exhibit a mind 
 which is at once absolutely sure of itself and 
 incapable of action, would he not have brought 
 the murder to light by the agency of some 
 courtier who had secretly witnessed it ? In fact 
 the ghost is the one great blot and uncombining 
 ingredient in the play. Had Shakespeare pre- 
 served the mental climate of the original story 
 the ghost might perhaps have been tolerated, 
 but he is quite out of joint with so thorough a 
 modern as Hamlet. He complicates the whole 
 action, and steeps it in incongruity. Hamlet's 
 desire to have more relative grounds than the
 
 loo THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 word of this visitant in whom it is impossible to 
 believe fully except during his actual presence is 
 in the highest degree natural. He therefore 
 tries the experiment of the play, and fails. 
 What he had hoped was to provoke Claudius to 
 " proclaim his malefaction " in the ear of the 
 court, for the case that has to be built up is one 
 that will convince not only Hamlet, but also the 
 pubHc at large. What really is provoked ? A 
 temporary indisposition which can be explained 
 away in two sentences the next day. It may 
 convince Hamlet, but it certainly would not 
 secure his acquittal before a jury. 
 
 But even supposing him to be justifiably 
 certain, has he the practical means to kill 
 Claudius without, by the same act, surrendering 
 himself to death ? Claudius was popular enough 
 to override Hamlet's claims and have himself 
 chosen king. In that office he had shown com- 
 petence, his relations with England and Norway 
 being most excellent. He had a levy of three 
 thousand men in the immediate neighbourhood of 
 the court whom he kept in good humour by 
 frequent carousals. His courtiers were so loyal 
 that the Court-play apparently awoke not the 
 least suspicion or hostihty in a single one of them, 
 and that, even after Laertes' confession of his 
 treachery, when Hamlet plunges his rapier into 
 Claudius, they shriek " Treason ! Treason ! " and 
 would no doubt have cut the young prince down 
 were that not plainly superfluous. As against 
 this, Hamlet is a student, just come home, super-
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET loi 
 
 intelligent and a hater of bores and shams. His 
 opinion of the masquerade of royalty may be 
 gathered from that one remark of his : " Let's to 
 the Court ! for, by my fay, I cannot reason." 
 He applies his literary criticism to every-day 
 conversation, and analyses received platitudes 
 with the most ruthless candour. To crown all, he 
 is a Temperance Pioneer ! In short, the situation 
 is such that no one would have much chance of 
 organising support enough to oust Claudius, but 
 that Hamlet, by the sheer force of his superiori- 
 ties, has no chance at all. Of course it is always 
 possible for him to slay the king and sacrifice his 
 own life to his vengeance. But that would be 
 something worse even than " hire and salary," 
 and he has no enthusiasm for dying. Many 
 people assume that he has, but in fact lie is 
 philosopher enough to be afraid of death. True, 
 like every man of high intellect, he has moments 
 of moral nausea, when he almost thinks that the 
 best thing is not to be born, the next best to leave 
 life as quickly as may be. But he recoils from the 
 invisible event ; above all, he never caresses the 
 idea of suicide. The great " to be or not to be " 
 monologue, sometimes interpreted in this sense, 
 is really the precise opposite. It is rather an 
 admonition to himself to defy death which he 
 sees to be probably bound up with his revenge, 
 and not to suffer his great enterprise, to be 
 turned away by the fear of death. In short he 
 never is absolutely certain of the facts of the 
 crime, nur in a position to punish it with safety
 
 I02 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 to himself. And, although Shakespeare cannot 
 amend this latter circumstance, he does amend 
 the former, and with exquisite dramatic courtesy 
 allows Hamlet full evidence of the king's guilt 
 of another murder before calling his retributive 
 sword into action. 
 
 What counts against Hamlet in popular estima- 
 tion is his continual self-reproach. But this 
 springs just from his exacting ideal of action, for 
 he would shorten a straight line to reach his end. 
 Religious biography will furnish a parallel ; it is 
 not among the actual sinners that we find self- 
 contempt and a consciousness of the unforgive- 
 able sin, but among the Bunyans and the Saint 
 Alphonsus Ligouris. There is another motive 
 behind Hamlet's outbursts. He is not certain 
 enough to act, but his tense and tortured mind 
 must find relief, and words are not irrevocable. 
 But after the emotional debauch of his mono- 
 logues, the lucid judgment returns, with its 
 questionings and firm grasp of difficulties. 
 Hamlet is compromised also by the speculative 
 embroideries which his mind works over the 
 drab stuff of experience. People think with 
 Horatio that it is " to inquire too curiously " 
 to find the dust of Alexander stopping a beer- 
 barrel. But is it ? Is not Hamlet rather the 
 avid intellect, which must needs think out of 
 things everything that is to be found in them ? 
 " Hamlet's obstacles are internal." He cer- 
 tainly has internal obstacles. He is hampered 
 by conscience, natural affection, an exquisite
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET: 103 
 
 taste and a capacity for metaphysics ; very grave 
 obstacles, if what is desired is immediate blood- 
 shed. Some critics hold that Shakespeare wrote 
 Hamlet to purge his countrymen of these 
 qualities which he perceived spreading, to the 
 infinite prejudice of Elizabethan Jingoism. It 
 may be so, and I am free to confess that, as far as 
 public policy goes, his countrymen have reformed 
 them indifferently. But it is just because of 
 these failings that Hamlet possesses human 
 significance. Without them, he might be very 
 interesting from the point of view of a tiger, 
 but he would never have touched and troubled 
 our imagination. As it is, we think of him as 
 the noble and courtly prince who passes through 
 life, annotating it with a gloss of melancholy 
 speculation that has been absorbed into the mind 
 of Europe, and who so confronts it practically 
 that the destinies adopt him for their minister, 
 and, through him, draw, out of unexampled 
 horrors, justice and even a certain terrible peace.* 
 As a perhaps tedious supplement, I submit 
 that the character of Horatio has been as favour- 
 
 * The only sustainable charge that can be made 
 agfainst Hamlet is one of over-hasty action — with 
 regfard, I mean, to Rosencranz and Guildenstern. He 
 sent them to death without anything like decisive 
 proof of their complicity in the design to have him 
 executed in England. There is nothing to show that 
 they knew the contents of the original commission; 
 indeed the contrary is established by their continuing 
 their journey after losing Hamlet. Most people will 
 however, accept the latter's justification of himself as 
 satisfactory. 
 
 G
 
 104 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 ably, as that of Hamlet has been unfavourably, 
 misunderstood. He enjoys the reputation of 
 being the strong, silent, truly virile man, held 
 up in contrast to the gustv and barren meta- 
 physician. In support of this there can be 
 produced just a single speech of Hamlet's : 
 against it there is the whole of Horatio's words 
 and actions. The eulogy, Hke so many other 
 passages, has, however, never been construed in 
 its dramatic context. It is spoken, be it 
 remembered, immediately before the play, when 
 Hamlet is tense with the most terrible expecta- 
 tion. He is about to probe the King's conscience 
 to the quick, and naturally wants corroboration 
 of his own prejudiced eyes, and perhaps assistance 
 in the scene that may follow. In order to induce 
 the deplorable Horatio to render even this petty 
 service it is necessary to flatter him, and the 
 exaggerated courtesy, natural to Hamlet — as in 
 the reception of Rosencranz and Guildenstern — 
 combines with his immediate need to produce 
 superlatives. His own fine taste rebels against 
 them, and, as is known, he concludes mth 
 " something too much of this ! " (Were I a 
 German I would suggest that these words are an 
 amending note of Shakespeare on the MS., 
 which he is known to have been revising, that he 
 meant to recast the lines, and that his private 
 note has been interpolated into Hamlet's speech.) 
 \^^at, as a matter of fact, is Horatio's record in 
 the play ? He is at Elsinore two months before 
 he thinks it worth while to call on his old friend
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 105 
 
 Hamlet, although he knows the latter to be in the 
 most grievous trouble. At the first appearance 
 of the ghost he has not wit enough to address it 
 in Latin, although that is what he was brought 
 there for by Marcellus. At the second appear- 
 ance he is not able even to tell Hamlet the time, 
 and later is guilty of a much grosser ineptitude. 
 Marcellus urges him to come on after the Prince 
 and the ghost. " Oh ! " says Horatio, 
 " Heaven will direct it ! " and his delegation of 
 his duty to Providence has to be crushed by 
 Marcellus' " Nay, let's follow him." At what 
 stage he comes to know of the King's crime is 
 not clear, but he certainly possesses all Hamlet's 
 knowledge of it after the Court Play. And what 
 does this strong silent man do ? Organise a 
 party, as Laertes found friends to organise one, 
 to execute vengeance against Claudius? By no 
 means. He has nothing better to say than that 
 he very well noted the King and that Hamlet 
 ought to rhyme the quatrain in which his frenzy 
 extravagates. Afterwards, when the Prince is 
 sent to England under the most sinister circum- 
 stances, does the good Horatio make an attempt 
 either to accompany or to liberate him ? As a 
 matter of fact he lies conscientiously low, and 
 cultivates the best relations with Claudius. His 
 next opportunity is at Hamlet's relation of his 
 escape from the death intended for him in 
 England. Horatio has indeed the grace to admire 
 Hamlet's superior firmness of character — " Why, 
 what a king is this ! " — but he does his best to
 
 io6 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 cancel this hy sympathetic tears over Rosencranz 
 and Guildenstern. Before the duel he ad- 
 ministers draughts of discouragement and 
 superstition, and he has not the sense to see that 
 Laertes' rapier is unbated. In fact from begin- 
 ning to end he is a wandering ineptitude who 
 has never a single suggestion, and whose speech 
 consists mainly of " Ay, my Lords," " That is 
 most certain," " Is it possible," and other 
 helpful phrases. At the last he has one good 
 impulse to finish the poisoned cup, but the 
 dying Hamlet intervenes, and Horatio addresses 
 himself to funeral orations which are certainly 
 much more after his heart. He is prayed merely 
 to absent himself from fehcity awhile, but we 
 may be sure that he does not construe the last as 
 the emphatic word, but stands in as an echo to 
 Fortinbras and absents himself as long as 
 possible. And this is the strong silent man after 
 whom Hamlet should have modelled himself ! 
 In truth he compares poorly with Osric, who 
 was at any rate a stylist. 
 
 I cannot abstain from a word on Hamlet as an 
 art critic. His theory that the stage should hold 
 the mirror up to nature is of course absurd, at 
 least as far as gesture and outer expression of 
 emotion goes. I refer rather to his employment 
 of art as an oblique moral inquisition — a most 
 remarkable anticipation of what Browning has to 
 say in the Epilogue of " The Ring and the 
 Book ; " and to his delightful prophetic criticism 
 of the two great achievements of the modern
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET: 107 
 
 theatre — the musical comedy and the problem 
 play. Polonius has grown impatient at the 
 length of the fine epic passage recited by the 
 players ; Hamlet turns on him with his unfor- 
 gettable " Oh, he must have a jig or a tale of 
 bawdy, or he falls asleep." 
 1905.
 
 YOUNG EGYPT
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 
 
 Geneva, September, 1909. 
 
 T^HE Congress of the Jeunesse Egyptienne 
 -*■ is over. The Rue Bartholomy is no 
 longer splashed with the crimson and scarlet of 
 the tarbouch which one learns is the correct 
 term for what we more naturally call the fez. 
 And as one sits by the lake shore, drowsed with 
 the dim and misted beauty of the Swiss Septem- 
 ber, there are no grave, dark faces, no star and 
 crescent favours, no cataracts of vowelled Arabic 
 to force one back again to the dusty duties of 
 political conflict. 
 
 All this is to say that the Congress, as a 
 spectacle, was brilliant and picturesque. The 
 Jeunesse Egyptienne is, to a large extent, a 
 jeunesse doree. It is also a movement of 
 intellectuals. The great body of the delegates 
 were students — students in law, medicine, or 
 arts — who thronged here from Lyons, Paris, 
 Dijon, Oxford. The President, M. Mohamed 
 Fahmy, is a " free professor " of Mahometan 
 law at the University of Geneva, Hamed El 
 Alaily, who read perhaps the most brilliant 
 paper at the Congress, " A Plea for a Con-
 
 112 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 structive Policy," is at Oxford, and carries 
 about him a curious sense at once of the fine 
 essence of Oxford and the fine essence of that 
 Arab culture which gave us Avicenna and 
 Averroes. M. Loutli Goumah, who swept 
 the Congress off its feet on the second day with 
 a passionate reply to Mr. Keir Hardie, entertains 
 me in the evening with a lecture on Eastern 
 lyrical poetry. When Egypt is free he assures 
 me with a smile that he will at last have time 
 to complete a criticism of German philosophy 
 from the Arabic point of view. 
 
 Decidedly whatever you may call the Young 
 Egyptians, you cannot call them uneducated 
 or irresponsible. On the contrary, they manifest 
 every sign of wealth, culture, knowledge of 
 the world, and a courtesy suave beyond expres- 
 sion. There is a wide range of racial types, 
 from the noble Arabian profile to something that 
 seems almost Ethiopian. In social intercourse 
 one is impressed by the fact that they have all 
 gone to a good tradition for their manners and 
 to a good tailor for their clothes. One is im- 
 pressed still more by the evidences of firmness 
 of character. Hardly any of them touches 
 wine. Most of them do not seem to smoke. 
 " You see," says one of the non-smokers, 
 " tobacco darkens the complexion. And, mon 
 Dieu ! am I not dark enough already ? " 
 
 Whether this abstinence has any religious 
 sanction at the present day is a matter difficult 
 to determine. One hardly thinks so ; and yet
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 113 
 
 I have a picture of a stout and amiable pasha 
 at the Congress slipping his Rosary Beads 
 through his fingers with incredible industry, 
 with a murmur for each bead of " Allah ! " 
 
 For the moment there is one binding idea, 
 and only one, dominant in the assembly, and 
 that is not a religious but a political idea. Three 
 parties are represented, grading down from 
 fierce extremists to somewhat timid reformers, 
 but let a speaker fling out the cry of " Egypt 
 for the Egyptians " and Conservative hands 
 clap as loudly as Radical hands to a fusillade 
 of " Tres biens " and " Bravos." The Congress 
 is inspired by a sincere passion for nationality. 
 It has no hatred for England except in so far 
 as Egypt cannot belong at the same time to 
 the EngHsh and to the Egyptians, 
 
 And here I must signalise the dramatic 
 moment of the proceedings. Just as every 
 picture has its centre of repose, so every assembly 
 has its centre of tension. At Geneva this 
 central point was found when M. Loutfi Goumah 
 leaped to his feet to reply to some things that 
 Mr. Keir Hardie had said, and to other things 
 which he had not said. " Mr, Hardie has 
 spoken of helping us to achieve ' some effective 
 form of self-government.' We do not want 
 ' some effective form of self-government,' 
 Egypt demands a free constitution, flowing to 
 her not from the British Parliament but from 
 her own monarch, the Khedive. Mr. Hardie 
 promises to ask questions in the House of
 
 114 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Commons. What sort of questions ? He will 
 ask whether Cairo has a good drainage system, 
 and whether the water is drinkable in Alexandria. 
 But we want fundamental questions about 
 fundamental matters. We want him to ask 
 what is to be the date of the evacuation." 
 
 My duty is not to appraise, but merely to 
 chronicle facts, and without discussing the 
 strange interpretation which exhibited Mr. 
 Hardie as a Conservative, I have only to say that 
 as M. Goumah proceeded with his speech, the 
 tides of passion rose higher and higher in the 
 Congress, and that he resumed his chair amid 
 a tumult of cheers. Crimson tarbouches bobbed 
 their way to the platform, and groups of students 
 flung themselves on the orator, embracing him, 
 and kissing his hands. " The Mazzini of 
 Egypt ! " shouted somebody beside me in the 
 crowd. 
 
 Undoubtedly he is one of the men of the 
 future. Small and spare, with a drooping 
 moustache, he throbs with such intense energy 
 that you expect to see electric sparks leap out 
 of his gesturing figure. He speaks French, 
 English, and Arabic with the same fluent 
 precision. He has the gift of epigram, and, unlike 
 his compatriots, a quick sense of humour. With 
 Hamed El Alaily, and Mohamed Fahmy — this 
 latter a strking figure with countless centuries 
 of Oriental shrewdness in his face — he con- 
 stitutes the pivot around which this new move- 
 ment will revolve.
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 115 
 
 Opinions differ, and hopes will be disappointed, 
 but for my part I regard this second Congress 
 as opening a new epoch in the Egyptian 
 Nationalist movement. The actual work of 
 the three days, including the foundation of a 
 new propagandist journal and the initiation of 
 a system of free national schools in Egypt, has 
 already been recorded in the newspapers. I am 
 concerned only to give some faint sense of the 
 tone and atmosphere of the Congress. It was 
 alive in every fibre. The paper.< read, although 
 somewhat too encyclopaedic for the occasion, 
 were the work of cultured men. The few 
 differences as to details merely lent relief to the 
 keenness and enthusiasm of the assembly. And 
 with all this there was behind the whole pro- 
 gramme a sincere desire for peace. The so- 
 called " violence " of the speeches consisted 
 merely in saying what every Englishman has 
 heartily said with Simon De Montfort, and 
 Hampden, and Locke, and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 Much has happened since the Geneva Congress. 
 That Tartuffe-Tartarin, Colonel Roosevelt, has 
 trailed the Stars and Stripes in the foulest mud 
 of Imperialism. M. Briand has forbidden the 
 Congress of 19 10 to meet in Paris, and, thereby, 
 proclaimed the nothingness of France in inter- 
 national politics. The Suez Canal affair has 
 on the one hand, unified national feeling in 
 Egypt, and, on the other, has provoked British
 
 ii6 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Imperialists to a fresh campaign in favour of 
 annexation. The problem has grown more 
 acute, and at the same time more soluble. 
 The Canal is the difficulty. Bvit if the Canal 
 be definitely neutralised, on terms fair to Egypt 
 and England alike, what pretext will then remain 
 for the maintenance of the occupation ?
 
 THE FATIGUE OF 
 ANATOLE FRANCE
 
 THE FATIGUE 
 OF ANATOLE FRANCE* 
 
 T^HE autumn of M. Anatole France is 
 -^ coloured by the one vanity of human 
 existence against which his soul had not hitherto 
 adventured : he has become popular. " My 
 last years," Schopenhauer used to say, " bring 
 me roses, but they are white roses." It may be 
 that tliere is a like pallor in the coronals which 
 have of late been showered so abundantly on 
 the great French master of irony, tenderness, 
 and despair. It may be that he experiences 
 but a sombre consolation at seeing his radiant 
 and incomparable prose rendered, with many 
 refractions, into EngHsh. But at all events 
 he has achieved notoriety. Certain of his 
 phrases — poison in crystal cups or ambrosia 
 of the gods in vinegar-vials ; who shall say ? — 
 have been finally adopted into the gold currency 
 of literature. The man himself is no longer 
 a veiled prophet. The famous bust in which 
 he looks out over an Hebraic nose between a 
 stiff imperial and what seems to be a loose forage 
 
 * L'lle des Pmgouins. Les Contes de Jacques 
 Tournehioche. By Anatole France, 1908 
 
 119 H
 
 120 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 cap, his passed through Europe, nt least in 
 photogravure. The book-reader of Brixton has 
 been impelled as urgently as the bookseller of 
 his own Quai Malaquais to guess at the secret 
 behind that ridged and ambiguous mask. The 
 face, some of his interpreters have said, is that 
 of a Benedictin narquois. Rather is it the face 
 of a soldier ready to die for a flag in which he 
 does not entirely believe, on condition, be it 
 understood, that he shall not be asked to die 
 in a tragic or, as one might say, in a muady 
 fashion. He looks out at you like a veteran 
 of the lost cause of intellect, to w^hose soul the 
 trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and 
 vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, 
 but who thinks that a wise man may be permitted 
 to hearten himself up in evil days with an 
 anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais. 
 M. France has achieved notoriety, but hardly 
 happiness. If Ulle des Pi?igouins has been one 
 of the best discussed volumes of late years, it is 
 none the less a bulletin of fatigue, which notifies 
 us of the burial of yet another illusion. The 
 book, indeed, seems intended as the last chapter 
 of a period. In it Anatole France, savant, 
 stylist, and Olympian, pronounces with affection 
 and contempt a funeral discourse over Anatole 
 France, republican, Socialist, and Dreyfusard. 
 The man of letters lays aside, with smiling 
 sadness, the sword of a fighting publicist, and 
 an interesting case of dual personality comes to 
 an end. The Socialists are naturally in despair.
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 121 
 
 At least one critic, belonging^^to that party, 
 confesses that he has long entertained doubts 
 not merely about the stability of M. France, 
 but even about his sales, and thinks it probable 
 that an edition of one of his books nowadays 
 means only two hundred copies. But had not 
 his greatest interpreter, George Brandes, foreseen 
 the present reversion to type, as one may call 
 it ? " It may be," wrote Brandes, after hearing 
 the master speak at a Socialist meeting in the 
 Paris Trocadero in 1904, " that as the popular 
 orator — a career for which he was not intended 
 by nature — he has proclaimed himself rather 
 more strongly convinced than he is in his inmost 
 soul." Had not Doctor Trublet in UHistoire 
 Comique separated himself for ever from the 
 " advanced " thinkers who believe that 
 republicanism is the final truth of politics, and 
 that by the apphcation of this truth the human 
 race is infinitely perfectible ? "My business," 
 says Trublet, " is to comfort men and console" 
 them. How can one comfort or console anybody 
 without lying ? " It was not that M. France 
 refused to make sacrifices to the will to believe 
 in pohtical Utopias. On the contrary, he went 
 so far as to write an introduction to the collected 
 speeches of M. Emile Combes, and even, it was 
 said, to read the novels of M. Zola. Having 
 thus acquired a firm faith in humanity, he was 
 at pains to record it in the course of a speech 
 on Renan. " Lentement, mais toujours, 
 I'humanite ri^-alise les reves des .sages." That
 
 122 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 was in 1903. In 1908, having come to under- 
 stand that the process of realisation is as slow 
 as the movement of a glacier and as tortuous 
 as the way of an eagle in the air, he returns to 
 the orbit of his temperament. His futility 
 on Blessed Jeanne d'Arc laid aside, he contributes 
 an introduction to the memoirs of Mademoiselle 
 Loie Fuller, a danger, and pubhshes Penguin 
 Island and Les ConUs de Jacques Journebroche. 
 
 Ulle des Pingouins is to all intents a comic 
 history of France, The narrative is introduced 
 by a characteristic preface, in which the author 
 of so many brilliant reconstructions of the past 
 denies, and not for the first time, the possibility 
 of any history, serious or comic. He consults 
 the masters of palaeography, but they indignantly 
 decline to be called historians. Who has ever 
 detected them in an attempt to distil the 
 scantiest trickle of life or truth from a document ? 
 That is an enterprise which may attract vain 
 and imaginative persons, but for their part they 
 work in the spirit of positive science. They 
 confine themselves to verifiable facts — that is 
 to say, to texts — and refuse to be tempted into 
 the fantastic world of ideas. It is possible to be 
 certain about the shape of words, but not about 
 their significance. M. France passes on to 
 the recognised historians, who are shocked to 
 find that he proposes to write an original history. 
 An original historian, they assure him, is the 
 object of universal distrust and contempt. 
 History may very well be the lie agreed upon j
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 123 
 
 the great point is that it is agreed upon. Readers 
 of history do not Hke to be surprised ; they look 
 to find only the stupidities with which they are 
 already familiar, and regard any novel suggestion 
 as an affront to some cherished belief. The 
 historian must therefore be on his guard against 
 originahty. He must also be respectful towards 
 established institutions, and, on these two 
 conditions, success is within his grasp. Fortified 
 by these counsels M. France proceeds, in much 
 humility of spirit, to narrate the story of the 
 island of Alca, from its beginnings in hagiography 
 to its ending in dynamite. There is little need 
 to set out here in any detail the substance of the 
 book. The title is easily explained. The old 
 saint Mael, a missionary of deep faith but 
 defective eyesight, is transported to the Arctic 
 regions in a miraculous stone trough. There, 
 mistaking a colony of penguins for men and 
 philosophers, he pronounces the formula of 
 baptism over them, and creates a theological 
 impasse which can only be relieved by the actvial 
 transformation of the penguins into human 
 shape. The island is then towed by Saint 
 Mael to the coast of Brittany, and there under the 
 name of Penguinia, or Alca, it enters the comity 
 of civilisation. It evolves through the customary 
 stages, inventing in turns clothes — a suggestion 
 of the devil — individual property, a royal 
 dynasty, a patron saint, and the taxation of the 
 weak for the benefit of the strong. These 
 matters afford obvious scope for the subtle and
 
 124 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 perverse spirit of M. France. The pages on the 
 origin of property are not only powerful but 
 even passionate : his heart is for the moment 
 engaged in the writing. A chapter on the 
 mediaeval art of Penguinia gives him an oppor- 
 tunity to parody, with deHghtful maHce, the 
 Enghsh theorists of the pre-RaphaeHte move- 
 ment. But it must be confessed that the first 
 half of the book languishes on the perilous 
 edge of dulness. The serene improprieties with 
 which M. France annotates his Lives of the 
 Saints, mingling, as one might say, the odour 
 of the smoke-room with the odour of sanctity, 
 are very Latin, but not very amusing. M. 
 France himself seems to perceive that his grasp 
 on his material is weakening : he makes an 
 abrupt plunge from the Renaissance into modern 
 history, and his sprightliness is at once restored. 
 The second part, comprising more than half 
 the entire volume, is a continuation and con- 
 clusion of the novels which have been published 
 since 1897 under the general title of Histoire 
 Contemporaine. The cometarv career of 
 Boulanger and the Drevfus Affaire are recon- 
 structed with incomparable verve. Every phrase 
 tells, every figure moves in the glow of supreme 
 comedy. The Visire Ministry, which was carried 
 into office by the reaction in favour of Dreyfus, 
 " declared itself prudently progressive. Paul 
 Visire and his colleagues were eager for reforms, 
 and it was only in order to avoid compromising 
 the prospect of these reforms that they refrained
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 125 
 
 from proposing them. For they were deep 
 poHticians, and they knew that to propose a 
 reform is to compromise it." From history 
 we pass on to prophecy. The fate of the 
 Clemenceau Ministry, plunged ultimately by 
 rich Jews, reckless journalists, and the intrigues 
 of one Madame Ceres into an irreparable war, 
 is somewhat vaguely outlined ; and in a last 
 chapter we are permitted to see M. France's 
 vision of the future. It is not a very cheerful 
 vision. The continued concentration of industry 
 has evolved a society of but two classes, 
 millionaires and employees. The millionaire 
 type exhibits the physical characteristics of Mr. 
 Rockefeller developed to the last limit of possi- 
 bility. Drier of body, thinner of lip, and 
 yellower of complexion than the old Spanish 
 monks, they cultivate a mysticism and even an 
 asceticism of opulence. Living in their offices 
 on eggs and milk, they have no intercourse with 
 the world save through the medium of an 
 electric button : they steadily amass wealth of 
 which they no longer see even the metallic 
 symbols, and acquire infinite means for the 
 satisfaction of desires which they no longer 
 experience. The material constituents of this 
 world of the future are monstrous and tentacular 
 cities, temples of " slaughterous industry, 
 infamous speculation, hideous luxury, and a 
 colossal uniformity of ugliness." Such a society 
 cannot be reformed ; it can only be destroyed. 
 And under the shattering logic of dynamite,
 
 126 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 or rather of an explosive to which dynamite is 
 as the crackle of a schoolboy's squib, the world 
 of clerks and capitalists dissolves. An entire 
 civilisation is effaced, and wild horses pasture 
 on the site of the capital of Alca. Then the 
 story of civilisation begins anew, the story 
 without an end. The hunter comes, and after 
 him, in a dreary cycle, the shepherd, the tiller 
 of the soil, the weaver of wool, the worker in 
 iron. The effaced civilisation is, with infinite 
 labour, rebuilt. Once more we are in a world of 
 millionaires and employees, of monstrous and 
 tentacular cities. . . . The thing that has 
 been is the thing that shall be, and the achieve- 
 ment of the future will be as that of the past. 
 The epitaph of generations unborn will be that 
 which has been written upon the tombstones of 
 generations forgotten. " They were born, they 
 suffered, ",hey died." It is the Eternal Return 
 of ancient philosophy, in a garment more sombre 
 than any of which the ancients ever dreamed. 
 It is less an Eternal Return, than an eternal and 
 infinitely monotonous tautology. 
 
 Such is the wisdom to which Anatole France 
 has come, after wandering for ten years in the 
 desert of politics. One recalls the circumstances 
 under which he came to appear in the role of a 
 publicist. The year 1897 witnessed his election 
 to the Immortals ; it also witnessed the publica- 
 tion of the first two volumes of his Histoire 
 Contemforaine. Until that year he had not 
 descended from his tower of ivory to discover
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 127 
 
 the actual world. In his candidature for the 
 Academy he was regarded as a Conservative, 
 and was opposed to Ferdinand Fabre, a writer 
 notorious for his hostility to the Church. There 
 is no need to suggest a corrupt silence on his 
 part, or a sinister coincidence ; but the truth 
 is that once safely installed in the chair vacated 
 by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, he began to exhibit 
 an active interest in politics. He put his head 
 out of the window, discovered the Dreyfus 
 Affaire, and took his stand with the Socialists. 
 He revised his judgments, even in matters of 
 literature. Zola, whose " disgusting celebrity " 
 he had declined to envy, and of whom he had 
 written that no man had " so exerted himself 
 to abase humanity, and to deny everything that 
 is good and right," became for him not only a 
 valiant citizen, bvit even a great novelist, " whose 
 harping has raised up a spacious city of the ideal." 
 In the interval M. France has had a wider 
 experience of politics ; he has rubbed intimate 
 shoulders with the prophets of progress, and has 
 watched the flux of events and the transforma- 
 tions of men. It would be unjust to say that 
 Penguin Island is a recantation of his democratic 
 and socialistic utterances. He is still the son of 
 the Revolution, and there is a tremor of sincere 
 passion in his voice as he tells us of the grimed 
 and hungry workers who swarm out in times 
 of Royalist aggression to defend the Republic — 
 the Republic which nevertheless is to them a 
 symbol of hope merely and not of fulfilment.
 
 128 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 He proclaims not the bankruptcy of Socialism, 
 but rather the emptiness of politics as such. 
 It is impossible not to identify France with his 
 own Bidault-Coquille, the student of asteroids. 
 Bidault-Coquille had come down from the 
 old fire-escape, from which he was accustomed 
 to observe the heavens, in order to fight 
 for the eternal principles of justice which 
 he took to be involved in the Affaire Pyrot 
 or Dreyfus. He found himself in alliance 
 with hysterical adventuresses, ambitious generals, 
 vain journalists, and the St. Pauls of Socialism, 
 eager for Utopia, but also eager for portfolios. 
 Justice is triumphant, but the triumph is clouded 
 with meanness, and he returns to his asteroids, 
 disillusioned, and disillusioned most of all with 
 regard to his own motives. " Go back to your 
 fire-escape and your stars," he says to himself, 
 " but go back in humility of spirit. You 
 thought to yourself, ' I will step down into the 
 streets and show mvself a noble and valiant 
 citizen. Then I shall be able to repose calmly 
 in the esteem of my contemporaries and the 
 approval of history.' But you have not even 
 suffered for conscience sake ; for with the 
 decay of belief and character your countrymen 
 have become incapable of that savagery which 
 once lent a tragic greatness to the conflict of 
 ideas. Now that you have buried your illusions ; 
 now that you know how hard it is to redress 
 injustice and how one must be ever beginning 
 anew, you are going back to your asteroids.
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 129 
 
 Go back then ! but go back in humility of 
 spirit." 
 
 The conclusion was inevitable, and rightly 
 considered it casts no sort of discredit upon 
 politics. It is no doubt useful that parliament- 
 men should be credulous of their power to 
 create by Statute a new heaven and a new earth. 
 It is perhaps excusable that Socialism should 
 believe in the infinite perfectibility of the 
 human race. But it is necessary that the world 
 of culture should retain its sense of limitation. 
 Humanity must at all costs refuse to be satisfied 
 with itself. If progress belongs at all to the 
 sphere of real things and of good things, its 
 future depends on those who rise up to question 
 its reality. Faust cannot be redeemed except 
 by the serviceable hostility of Mephistopheles. 
 Anatole France is a scandal and a stumbling- 
 block to many serious minds. Of the deep 
 waters of religion he has never tasted ; he is 
 a sense short, or, as the psychologists say, he 
 has a blind spot on his soul. But that much 
 said, is it not wise to remember that Ecclesiastes 
 also is among the prophets ? Is not the whole 
 Christian conception of life rooted in pessimism, 
 as becomes a philosophy expressive of a world 
 in which the ideal can never quite overcome 
 the crumbling incoherence of matter ? May 
 we not say of all good causes what Arnold said 
 only of the proud and defeated Celts : " They 
 went down to battle but they always fell ? " 
 Behind politics there is economics ; behind
 
 130 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 economics there is philosophy ; and when it 
 comes to a philosophy of values, optimism, with 
 regard to our present plane of experience, can 
 only be regarded as an attractive form of mental 
 disease. 
 
 A comparison of Ulle des Pingouins with 
 Gulliver^s Travels is obvious, although not 
 perhaps very illuminating. M. France is suave 
 where Swift is barbaric ; he is dainty where 
 Swift is foul ; but it is none the less true that 
 Swift's disbelief in humanity was childlike and 
 elementary compared with that which hints 
 itself through Penguin Island. Between the two 
 there is the tropical forest of Romanticism with 
 its splendid and noxious blooms ; there is the 
 unplumbed, salt, estranging sea of all who have 
 praised death rather than life, from Leopardi 
 and Schopenhauer to D'Annunzio and Hardy. 
 What then ? " The life of a people," writes one 
 of the mythical sages quoted in this book, " is 
 a succession of misfortunes, crimes, and 
 stupidities. This is true of the Penguin nation 
 as of all others. But with that reserve made, 
 their history is admirable from beginning to 
 end." There is a certain malice in the phrasing, 
 but who that has lived and suffered would 
 challenge its substance of truth ? Reason and 
 justice constitute, no doubt, the elements of a 
 pure science, but it is a science of very imperfect 
 application to the concrete world. M. France 
 has had the courage of his discouragement. 
 He has but repeated in terms of politics what
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 131 
 
 he had already said in terms of art and erudition, 
 of passion and philosophy — namely, that the 
 eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear with 
 hearing. Even more than Bourget, and 
 precisely because his touch is lighter than 
 Bourget's, and because he imagines that his 
 rapier is that of an enemy, he continues the 
 tradition of that Latin and Catholic pessimism 
 which is so indispensable a propsedeutic to any 
 valorous religion. We have heard of a tyranny 
 which was tempered by chansons. A pessimism, 
 stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, 
 as a thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a 
 type of spiritual life far from contemptible. 
 A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of 
 consummate prose, is an attitude and an achieve- 
 ment that will help many men to bear with more 
 resignation the burden of our century. If 
 there be inexcusable flippancies, and there are 
 many in Ulle des Pingouins, they belong, perhaps, 
 for the most part to that temperamental heritage 
 of Latinism which we barbarians have never 
 been able to understand. For the rest, the 
 book is merely an indication that the cobbler 
 is about to return to his last. After ten years 
 of politics Anatole France is fatigued, but by 
 expressing he has banished his fatigue. Two 
 lines of development seem now to be open 
 to him, and, unhappily, one of them is that 
 jacilis decensus which his master Renan chose 
 in his old age. Les Contes de Jacques Tourne- 
 hroche — a volume with curious red and gold
 
 132 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 and blue and gold illustrations by Leon 
 Lebegue — seems to indicate a declension towards 
 the lower level of his temperament. It is enough 
 to say of this collection of stories that it is by 
 turns graceful, mediocre, and abject, and that 
 there is not a characteristic turn of phrase or a 
 memorable idea in it from beginning to end. 
 The other mood in which M. France may elect 
 to cast the books that he has yet to write — he 
 is sixty-five — is that which gave us the tender- 
 ness of Le Livre de Mon Ami, and the spacious 
 sadness of the best pages of Le Jardin d'Eficure. 
 M. France will not spend his last years, as 
 Taine did, " reading Marcus Aureiius as a sort 
 of hturgical exercise." Epicure of emotions 
 that he is, and that was Brunetiere's judgment 
 against him, he will act on taste and not on any 
 principle. That he will choose his own road 
 is certain ; let us hope that this man, whose 
 every page if not a European event (and what 
 page now is ?) is at least a shining masterpiece 
 of style, will choose the high road.
 
 INTERNATIONAL 
 SOCIALISTS
 
 INTERNATIONAL 
 SOCIALISTS 
 
 Stuttgart, SepUmher^ 1907- 
 T MERELY strayed into Stuttgart. The 
 -*• high peaks of the Dolomites, and the 
 higher prices of Salzburg — Salt City, without 
 the Lake — have faded into history. The Munich 
 Alp-tourists, who had lain back, limply 
 mountainous, in the corners, showing in the 
 flame of their faces and their peeling skins 
 the brand of glacier-sunshine, have " steiged " 
 heavily out of their native city, where pictures 
 and potations will soon undo the severities of 
 the holiday season. You have passed Augsburg, 
 where somebody confessed his insuperable 
 objections to Confession. You have drunk a 
 crowded and unseemly beer at Ulm. And you 
 are in Stuttgart. . . . 
 
 The Congress is going on in the Liederhalle, 
 a combined restaurant and concert-hall. As 
 one sits here in the garden, under an absolute 
 stillness of chestnuts and acacias, it is hard to 
 imagine so much of life as there is in the un- 
 distinguished building. Two or three delegates 
 walk up and down, smoking and meditating. A 
 135 I
 
 136 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 door-keeper leans on the bar counter, under 
 red-and-black and red-and-yellow streamers, 
 and drinks cool, dark beer. A far-from-tidy 
 Fraulein crunches her leisurely way across the 
 gravel to take your order. Another has fallen 
 asleep, her head leaned back against a beech 
 trunk. In the lines of her face there comes out, 
 as often in sleep, a certain forlornness, a sense 
 of defeated dreams. It is a commentary. There 
 are brown and twisted leaves on the gravel ; 
 and on state-creeds and state-crafts, too, there 
 comes the inevitable autumn. 
 
 But in which of all the Utopias, smouldering 
 in certain fierce eyes that met yours to-day in 
 Stuttgart, will there be no stain of the burden 
 and sorrow of women ? If one never got tired, 
 one would always be with the revolutionaries, 
 the re-makers, with Fourier, and Kropotkin. But 
 the soul's energy is straitly limited ; and with 
 weariness there comes the need for compromise, 
 for " machines," for repetition, for routine. 
 Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom. 
 
 Those who read the papers know fairly well 
 the resolutions, or, rather, theses, to which the 
 Congress said "Aye." To an actual spectator 
 the dominant note was that of realism. Here 
 and there the vague music of a passionate revolt 
 and an impossible redemption broke out, as when 
 Rosa Luxemburg, clutching her plaid shawl, 
 called up the bloody ghosts of Russian comrades 
 in judgment on the weak " good-sense " of the 
 Congress. But most of the speakers submitted
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 137 
 
 to the strict discipline of fact. Kautsky opposed 
 the demand for the legal establishment of a 
 minimum wage. A powerful argument was led 
 to show that if you establish a minimum wage 
 it tends to operate as a maximum. " Yes ! " 
 said Ellenbogen, of Austria. " Theoretically 
 your position is a strong one. Ten years ago 
 I should have voted for it. But since then we 
 have made the experiment in practice. A 
 minimum wage of four francs a day has been 
 established in Zurich, and it has not operated as a 
 maximum." 
 
 The Swiss delegates accepted the statement 
 of fact, and at once the Congress swung over 
 to the side of Ellenbogen. " Practical ! " cried 
 Vaillant. " You are practical enough. Our 
 programme was once a gospel of enthusiasm. 
 Now it is a party machine, a war-chest, a game 
 of tactics." 
 
 In effect this was the dominant tone. The 
 only vote that rang in discord with it was that 
 in favour of the resolution condemning the whole 
 work of colonisation as intrinsically and 
 irredeemably bad. This decision was a genuine 
 surprise. Bebel, VoUmar, Bernstein, the English 
 and Americans, all declared against it, but it 
 was, nevertheless, carried. An analysis of the 
 majority drew attention to another characteristic 
 of the Congress — the dominance of the national 
 idea. Bebel and Bernstein were sufficiently clear 
 on this point. The constitution of the Congress 
 was based on a recognition of it. In the old
 
 138 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 International which was created by Marx, and 
 afterwards, with the teeth of Bakunin, ate Marx 
 up, you had thorough, abstract internationahsm. 
 The workers were affihated directly with the 
 central committee. But with the Congress of 
 1907 they were affiliated only through the 
 medium of their national organisations. 
 
 This raises another question. What w'ill be 
 the binding-power and practical value of the 
 Stuttgart resolutions ? Are not those who claim 
 that a complete synthesis of nationalism and 
 internationalism has been effected a little 
 premature ? Colonisation and colonies stank 
 in the nostrils of the Stuttgart Congress. But 
 will Mr. Ramsay Macdonald in the House of 
 Commons and Herr Bebel in the Reichstag act 
 upon that decision ? 
 
 As a spectacle, a masque of personalities, the 
 Congress lives in one's memory. It may be a 
 superficial point of view, but it was irresistible. 
 The marvellous interpreters ! Whenever anyone 
 speaks they must speak, and they have spoken 
 for five days without growing hoarse. 
 
 Of course, there were complaints. Vaillant 
 complained ; Vandervelde ascribed the feud 
 between the Labour Party and the S. D. F. to 
 the difficulty of rendering " Klassenkampf " in 
 English. Quelch was verbally mistranslated, 
 before being geographically translated. And 
 there was the Indian Princess. 
 
 Hyndman has a long beard, which is a con- 
 siderable dramatic asset. One still sees him
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 139 
 
 shaking his hands and shouting at Singer, who — 
 large, broad, and with a sHght air of the police 
 official — swings the Presidential bell back and 
 forth, to the horror and final collapse of all 
 ears. And Herve, standing on the table so that 
 all the world might see him, voting for the 
 majority's anti-militarist resolution " with both 
 hands." It must not be thought that the 
 proceedings were in the least tumultuous. 
 They were vehement, but then there is always the 
 House of Commons. By the way, everybody 
 smoked at will in the hall, and one saw many 
 delegates drinking beer at their tables. 
 
 Is there a definite. Socialist way of dressing ? 
 The red tie has long since gone over to 
 museums and to popular novels. The fluid felt 
 hat is not at all universal. Does anything 
 remain ? Well, there is Herve, in a curious 
 tunic buttoned tight up to the throat, and 
 trousers which bag in an unprecedented way as 
 he hurries along, gesticulating with his knees. 
 But there is no exclusive. Socialist dress. 
 
 " Do you think," I asked a newspaper man 
 in the Hotel Royal — the English delegates were 
 having a concert there, and you heard the 
 chorus rolled heavily out through their door — 
 
 Let cowards flinch, and traitors fear, 
 We'll keep the Red Flag flying here — 
 
 " do you think that the Congress has been of 
 much use ? " "It will do more to guarantee
 
 140 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the peace of the world," he said, " than twenty- 
 Hague Conferences. If everybody could afford 
 to travel, there would be no wars. People 
 would discover their neighbours to be so remark- 
 ably human. Besides, I am grateful to Stuttgart 
 for not taking it out of us. At the Hague I paid 
 j/^22 a month for two rooms in a private house. 
 The Brazilian delegation left their hotel because 
 they were charged ^34 a day for four rooms. 
 Peace hath its voracities no less redoubtable 
 than war." 
 
 I cannot better his words. Stuttgart did not 
 raise its prices. And when you had swept away 
 preconceptions and prejudices, you found Inter- 
 national Socialism unexpectedly human — human, 
 above all, in its fundamental mistake.
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S 
 IRELAND 
 
 I
 
 I 
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S 
 IRELAND* 
 
 TT is the French that have come closest to the 
 ^ secret of Ireland. De Beaumont, that great 
 pupil of De Tocqueville, in 1839, Cardinal 
 Perraud in 1869, painted our national life with 
 the authoritative brush of masters. In addition 
 to these we have had an unbroken line of studies, 
 sketches, and monographs in which Daryl, 
 Bechaux, Le Roz, Fournier, Schindler, Potez, 
 Filon, Flach, De Lavergne, and a cloud of other 
 witnesses have said their word. Edouard Rod 
 shaped the personal tragedy of Parnell into a 
 novel ; and in one of his most recent stories 
 Paul Bourget has shuddered at the dresses of 
 fashionable Dublin, and yielded with lyrical 
 abandon to the drowsy and purple magic of the 
 Western lotus-land. M. Paul-Dubois finds one- 
 half of the explanation of this old alliance in 
 history, and the other in likeness of blood and 
 
 * This study appears as the Introduction to the 
 English version of L IrJande Con/evtporaine, bv M. Paul- 
 Dubois, published under the title of Contemporary 
 /rf/a«rf (Maunsel & Co., Dublin. New Edition. 3s. 6d. 
 net.) 
 
 143
 
 144 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 temperament. In exchange for the swords of the 
 Wild Geese, France sent us back priests, or at 
 least the learning that turned Irish bovs into 
 priests. She sent too, in later and not less 
 disastrous years, Hoche and Humbert ; and both 
 nations have good memories, and until a very 
 little while ago they shared a common hatred. 
 The Irish mind is, moreover, like the French, 
 " lucid, vigorous and positive," though less 
 methodical, since it never had the happiness to 
 undergo the Latin discipline. France and 
 Ireland have been made to understand each 
 other. 
 
 M. Paul-Dubois, then, has the advantage of 
 temperamental sympathy, wise forerunners, 
 and a long tradition. He had, further, the 
 advantage of language, for it is perhaps only in 
 French that Sociology can become scientific 
 without ceasing to be human. His personal 
 equipment is of the first order. Son of the late 
 President of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, 
 son-in-law of the great Taine, and himself one 
 of the chief officials of the Cour des Comptes, 
 he is a member of the group which Brunetiere's 
 erudite enthusiasm gathered round the Revue des 
 Deux Monies. Was it not Taine who originated 
 the phrase " well-documented," and made it 
 the touchstone of all books deahng with social or 
 historical science ? At all events it is in that 
 spirit of thoroughness that M. Paul-Dubois has 
 wished to write. The extent of his reading may 
 be gathered from the references in his foot-
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 145 
 
 notes. He paid more than one visit to Ireland, 
 and had he but met some member of the Irish 
 party — of which he writes with a harshness that 
 is constantly in contradiction with itself — he 
 might fairly claim to have met everybody. The 
 Irish reader of his book may not be in entire 
 agreement with his conclusions. To someone 
 armed with special knowledge on this subject, 
 his exposition may seem inadequate; to someone 
 moved by special passion on that subject, his 
 criticism may even prove an irritant ; but, when 
 all is said, his five hundred crowded pages 
 represent the attempt of a mind, at once 
 scientific and imaginative, to see Ireland steadily, 
 and to see it whole. If it is comforting to be 
 understood, it is also of some profit to be mis- 
 understood in a friendly way. M. Paul-Dubois 
 confesses on our behalf no sins that someone or 
 other has not already shouted from the house- 
 tops. Whatever he may have to say of the 
 internal Hfe of Ireland, his verdict on the inter- 
 national issue is given clearly and definitely for 
 Ireland and against England. His voice is 
 raised for the Gaelic League, and against linguistic 
 Imperialism ; for the ploughed field, and against 
 the grazing ranch ; for Home Rule, and against 
 the Act of Union. One may wish to enter a 
 caveat against this or that contention, but the 
 book is founded not on prejudice, or unreasoned 
 feeling, or raw idealism, but on a broad 
 colligation of facts ; and, with all reserves made, 
 I believe that it will in due time take rank with
 
 146 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the great studies of modern communities like 
 Bodley's "France" and Miinsterberg's "The 
 Americans." 
 
 WTiat, then, is the Irish Question as seen hy this 
 sociologist, so inspired and so equipped ? It is 
 " an extreme case of social pathology," an 
 instance of the phenomenon called arrested 
 development. It is to history that one naturally 
 turns for proof and illustration of this thesis ; 
 and if, as a great Shakespearean critic has said, 
 tragedy is simply waste, the history of Ireland 
 as it passes before us in M. Paul-Dubois' Intro- 
 duction, marshalled in sombre and picturesque 
 lines, is essential tragedy indeed. It matters 
 nothing whether we approach it in the spirit of 
 those who desire revenge or of those who desire 
 reconstruction : the impression is the same. A 
 civilisation shaken by Norse invasion before it 
 had quite ripened ; swept by Anglo-Norman 
 invasion before it had quite recovered ; a people 
 plunged in an unimaginable chaos of races, 
 rehgions, ideas, appetites, and provincialisms ; 
 brayed in the mortar without emerging as a 
 consoHdated whole ; tenacious of the national 
 idea, but unable to bring it to triumph ; riven 
 and pillaged by invasion without being con- 
 quered — how could such a people find leisure to 
 grow up, or such a civilisation realise its full 
 potentialities of development and discipline ? 
 There are writers who would have us burn our 
 Irish Histories. But the historical method 
 imposes itself, not out of political passion, but
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 147 
 
 by a mere scientific necessity, upon all students 
 of contemporary social, or, indeed, spiritual 
 problems. What is no doubt important is that 
 the past should be studied by the social reformer 
 not for its own sake but for the sake of the present, 
 and from the point of view of the present. It 
 is by this purpose that M. Paul-Dubois has been 
 guided in his masterly Historical Introduction ; 
 and I do not know of any summary of the same 
 length which traces the forces of current Irish 
 life so clearly to their origins, and sets the fabric 
 of fact, by which we are to-day confronted, in 
 such true and vivid perspective. But over and 
 beyond that, his Introduction possesses the 
 interest of literature. The period since the 
 Union has never been outHned with more 
 telling or more human touches. O'Connell, 
 the inventor of that " constitutional agitation " 
 which is now the prime weapon of all democracies, 
 passes away leaving " a great memory but not a 
 great party." Young Ireland affords us the 
 supreme instance of the antithetical tempera- 
 ments ever to be found in Nationalist politics : 
 Davis, the reformer, inspired by love of Ireland, 
 and Mitchel, the revolutionist, inspired by 
 hatred of England. And so through Famine 
 and Fenian ism we come down to the brilliant 
 feebleness of Butt and the icy passion of Parnell, 
 who " had more followers than friends," and to 
 the struggle of the Gaelic Renaissance for 
 " psychological Home Rule." 
 
 For this is, in last analysis, what M. Paul-Dubois
 
 148 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 takes to be the deep malady of Ireland : She has 
 not gained the whole world, but she has come 
 perilously near losing her own soul. A certain 
 laxity of will, a certain mystical scepticism in 
 face of the material world, an eloquence which, 
 in depicting Utopias, exhausts the energy that 
 might better be spent in creating them, a 
 continual tendency to fall back on the alibi of 
 the inner life, make Ireland the Hamlet, or still 
 more, the Rudin of the nations. Is this to say 
 that she is unfit for modern, economic civiHsa- 
 tion ? By no means, M. Paul-Dubois, having 
 sounded every weakness and surveyed every 
 difhculty, ends with the belief that the forces of 
 re-growth will prevail over the process of decay ; 
 and that although Ireland's last cards are now 
 on the table, she is capable, if she plays them 
 well, not only of preserving an ancient people 
 but of creating a new civihsation. 
 
 What is the path to this achievement ? First 
 of all, under the present regime, England is the 
 enemy. If Ireland is to realise herself, she 
 must become mistress of her own hearth, her 
 own purse, and her own cupboard. She does 
 assuredly stand in urgent need of peace from 
 politics, and so far her Unionist critics are right. 
 There is indubitably a deep sense in which a 
 nation's life begins where her politics end. 
 People speak as if the outcrj^ against ParHamen- 
 tarianism were a novel and a unique thing. 
 But, fifty years ago, Marx taught all realists to 
 crack the shells of political formulas and parties
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 149 
 
 and judge them by the moral and economic 
 kernel within. To-day you can pick up any- 
 where in Paris or Brussels half-a-dozen 
 pamphlets called " The Crisis of Parliamen- 
 tarianism," " The Absurdity of Parliamen- 
 tarianism," or " The End of Parliamentarianism." 
 But that peace from the purely political struggle, 
 which is so indispensable if Ireland is to develop 
 character and create material wealth, can come 
 to her only as a result of political autonomy. 
 Until autonomy is won — carrying with it a 
 re-adjustment of taxation — " on the cause must 
 go." And the politicians who keep it going, 
 whatever their special party or tactics, are 
 playing the part of economic realists quite as 
 effectively as any worker on the land or at the 
 loom. 
 
 M. Paul-Dubois naturally devotes many 
 chapters to the Land Question. He rightly 
 treats it as a complexus of three questions — the 
 tenure, the distribution, and the use of the land. 
 The first two are being solved, in a fashion, at the 
 cost of Irish taxes, and by the pledging of Irish 
 rates, by the Estates Commissioners and the Con- 
 gested Districts Board. Landlordism is dying, 
 and dying meanly, " its last thought being of a 
 bargain to be made." The edifice of Feudalism is 
 being dismantled at a cost that raises a very real 
 menace of national bankruptcy, but at all events 
 the grim walls are coming down. But while the 
 liberation of the Irish countryside from landlord- 
 ism was necessary, it is not sufficient. The farmer
 
 150 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 must learn to use his land productively ; and so 
 there must be a great development of agricultural 
 education, leading up to a general system of 
 " mixed farming." The Department of Agricul- 
 ture must therefore be a prime concern of a 
 self-governing Ireland. He must learn to 
 combine ; and in this respect, at least as regards 
 the small holders. Co-operation possesses the secret 
 of the future. He must come free of the egoism 
 and pessimism which have remained in his blood 
 since the Great Famine ; and nothing can expel 
 these except the singing and dancing GaeHc 
 League. But, even with all this accomplished, 
 he will stiU be a snake-strangled Laocoon until 
 he has in some wise reformed and mastered his 
 Railways and Banks, 
 
 When we turn to the industrial condition of 
 the country we find, since the Union, a steady 
 degeneration of economic tissue. Population 
 doubles between 1800 and 1 841, but manufacture 
 decays. The cotton workers of Belfast fall in 
 number within that period from 27,000 to 
 12,000; and the factory hands of Dublin from 
 4,938 to 682. The consumption of luxuries, an 
 excellent test of wealth, shows an immediate 
 decline, tobacco falling in thirty years by 37 
 per cent, and wine by 47 per cent. Loss of 
 trade follows loss of the flag. London, having 
 become the political centre of gravity of Ireland, 
 tends also to become her financial and commercial 
 centre of gravity. There is a diminution of the 
 productive, and a great increase of the parasitic
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 151 
 
 classes. The home market slips away from the 
 home manufacturer ; a sort of mania of exchange 
 takes possession of the country ; and she imports 
 much that she might produce at home, and ex- 
 ports much that she might consume at home, 
 paying ruinous tribute on both processes to the 
 Shylocks of transit. It is a situation too sadly 
 familiar to us all. M. Paul-Dubois' remedy, too, 
 is familiar ; it is the programme of the men of 
 1779 ^^'^ o^ ^^^ Industrial Pioneers of to-day. 
 Use at home as many as you need of the things 
 that are made at home, and make at home as many 
 as possible of the things that are used at home. 
 He neither anticipates nor desires any notable 
 development of industry on the great scale, but 
 looks for the prosperity of Ireland to progressive 
 agriculture, and the smaller rural industries that 
 come naturally to cluster around it. 
 
 Such is, in bare outline, the diagnosis of 
 Ireland made by this detached and sympathetic 
 student. He touches upon many other subjects, 
 upon that of Clericalism and Anti-Clericalism, 
 with particular delicacy and insight. One may 
 regret that, with his French experience, he does 
 not discuss such problems as that now rising very 
 definitely on the poUtical horizon : Does 
 Ireland stand to gain or to lose by Protection ? 
 One may find a fault of Une or of colour here and 
 there, or chance on an irritating phrase. But on 
 the whole and as a whole this is the best book 
 that has been written in recent years on the 
 problems of Ireland. The meaner journalism 
 
 K
 
 152 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 may seek in it for nothing better than party- 
 capital. But the worker in any Irish movement, 
 who possesses the supreme wisdom of humiUty, 
 and who had rather be bettered than flattered, 
 will be glad to have seen himself in M. Paul- 
 Dubois' mirror. His last message is one of hope. 
 He may, as his Conclusion shows, have under- 
 rated the resolution of Ireland to secure integral 
 Home Rule — a National Government being a 
 delicate and intricate machine which cannot be 
 set working in halves. He may, by times, have 
 seemed to forget that there are many kinds of 
 Conciliation, that, for instance, an infallible 
 method of con ciUa ting a tiger is to aUow oneself 
 to be devoured. But, as between us and our 
 rulers, he gives his verdict, on the evidence, for 
 Ireland and against England. And he fore- 
 shadows a possible unification of all progressive 
 parties on the Irish side, a tacit Concordat under 
 which, on the sole condition that the national 
 idea be not submerged or the national flag 
 lowered in surrender, all progressive parties 
 would come to regard themselves as but different 
 regiments of the same Army of Advance. May 
 that hope come true !
 
 REASON IN RHYME
 
 REASON IN RHYME 
 
 VX7"HY should all the bad verse be on the side 
 * of the Act of Union ? That question 
 forced itself on us all with fresh insistence this 
 Summer when Mr. William Watson published, 
 in Our leading Unionist daily, an Ode entitled 
 Ireland Once More, in which he seemed to 
 recant his old advocacy of the cause of freedom. 
 The following reply appeared in the Evening 
 telegraph under the title of Too Much Watson, 
 on the day following Mr. Watson's poem. 
 It is now submitted as an answer to the question 
 with which this note begins. One should, 
 perhaps, add by way of introduction that Mr. 
 Watson counselled us, in the best tone of retro- 
 spective sympathy, to forget the past, burn our 
 national title-deeds, and throw our destiny 
 in the hotchpot of Empire. Mr. Watson, 
 in old days, was a specialist in the damnation of 
 Abdul the Damned. His Ode will be found in 
 the Irish Times of July 15, 19 10. 
 
 Will Watson, of the still unanchored art ; 
 What random gust, what overwhelming sea 
 Has riven you apart 
 
 From us, and from the flagship of the free ? 
 155
 
 156 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 You whose rich phrase, and vibrant, wont to be 
 Trumpet and drum of onset and attack ; 
 Who, when of Abdul's ways you stooped to 
 
 sing, _ 
 Would give us just the dire, full-throated 
 
 thing ; 
 Now, when that much-damned man has got 
 
 the sack. 
 You change your tune, and make to pipe us 
 
 back 
 From honour, and the task of Liberty ! 
 Why argue, though ? The plain position is 
 Your are mistaken in your premises. 
 You blind your sight uith hot, emotional 
 
 mists, 
 Your way of thought is greatly too morose 
 And moist and lachrymose. 
 For us, a muddled State's last realists. 
 We Irish, to be brief. 
 Are nowise grievers for the sake of grief. 
 I pray you, dry those sympathetic tears, 
 They rust the will ; and, Will, your nation's 
 
 sin 
 Is no dead shame, meet to be covered in. 
 But a live fact that sears. 
 Cancel the past ? Soothly when it befalls 
 That ye amend the present, and are just. 
 - Go knock your head on Dublin Castle walls : 
 Are they irrelevant, historic dust. 
 Or a hard present-tense ? 
 Searchtthrough the large print of the Statute 
 
 B8ok
 
 REASON IN RHYME 157 
 
 For your much-valued Lords' benevolence, 
 
 And, swept in vision westward, snatch a look 
 
 At that dim land, where hunger claims to be 
 
 The honoured guest in every family ; 
 
 And the slain sun writes, in a scribble of shame, 
 
 The word of utter Hell, Clanricarde's name. 
 
 Go South and North ; 
 
 Weep if you will along the dismal quays, 
 
 Watching the unreturning ships go forth 
 
 To fling our seed of strength and hope and 
 
 worth 
 In far, untributary ways. 
 And then the soul is something — at least in 
 
 verse. 
 Ours, poet, is to be a thing of straw, 
 A stained numb thing, that sits without the 
 
 law 
 Of yours, great master of the universe ? 
 Most nobly planned ! But, Watson, there's 
 
 a text — 
 Done in stout English in King James's reign — 
 Which says that souls are not to be annexed, 
 Not for the whole world's gain. 
 Cancel the past ! Why, yes ! We, too, have 
 
 thought 
 Of conflict crowned and drowned in olives of 
 
 peace ; 
 But when Cuchullin and Ferdiadh fought 
 There lacked no pride of warrior courtesies 
 And so must this fight end. 
 Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease : 
 Free, we are free to be your friend.
 
 158 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 And when you make your banquet, and we 
 
 come, 
 Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, 
 Closing a battle, not forgetting it. 
 With not a name to hide. 
 This mate and mother of valiant " rebels " 
 
 dead 
 Must come with all her history on her head. 
 We keep the past for pride : 
 No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb : 
 No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers. 
 No rudest man who died 
 To tear your flag down in the bitter years, 
 But shall have praise, and three times thrice 
 
 again. 
 When at that table men shall drink \^ith men.
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE 
 
 T^HE smell of the sea, so raw and stringent 
 in a landsman's nostrils, brings thoughts 
 with it and a strange spume of memories. To 
 me it brings a perception of what people mean 
 when they toss in the air that dusty adjective, 
 " cynical." A cynic is a man who, finding 
 himself, for all striving, incurably sad from the lips 
 in, sets himself to be incorrigibly gay from the 
 lips out. It is a triumph of will over tempera- 
 ment, a way of courage, and, by times, even a 
 way of nobleness. 
 
 So it appears to me at least with the wash of the 
 river about the bratthng boat. But why should 
 cables and gangways, cranes and the throb of 
 steam, waved white handkerchiefs and all that 
 apparatus of adieu, set anyone framing definitions 
 of " cynicism " ? It is because a dead French- 
 man, who had not wit enough even to keep 
 himself from being forgotten, a cynic as they 
 say, one Brizeux, murmurs to himself in one of 
 his comedies as I murmur to myself every time I 
 leave Ireland : " Do not cry out against la 
 fatrie. Your native land after all will give you 
 the two most exquisite pleasures of your life, that 
 i6i
 
 1 62 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 of leaving her and that of coming back." He left 
 many other sharp sentences along his way, but 
 I only remember that of Cecile after she had 
 transferred her affections. " And to think that 
 six months ago I loved Alphonse ! Mon Dieu ! 
 How he has changed ! " 
 
 There are no taxis in my native city of Dublin. 
 But the depressed jarvey who drove me to the 
 North Wall knows that they are coming. He 
 starts already in his dreams at the hoot of their 
 horns. You cannot stand against science, he 
 says : look at Corbett, and Tommy Burns, and 
 Johnson. A man can't get bread at it nowadays, 
 although, of course, " when a body meets a 
 free-spoken, free-handed gentleman like yourself, 
 sir ; none o' these mane divils that'd be re- 
 sthrictin' you to your legal fare, mind you. . . ." 
 The electric trams were bad enough, but this 
 other would be the end. The Merrion Square 
 doctors were good friends of the poor man, would 
 think nothing of taking your car for two or three 
 hours and leaving a sovereign in your palm, but 
 first one got a motor and now they all have 
 motors. What is one to say ? 
 
 A member of Parliament ought to be a 
 minister of consolation, at all events in matters 
 of livelihood. All that occurs to me to tell my 
 driver is that he is an element in an interesting 
 transition in the organisation of transport. The 
 domestication of horses created him and his 
 tribe, the domestication of petrol is in course 
 of blotting them out. Mr. Galsworthy will write
 
 SAYING GOOD-BYE 163 
 
 a play on the subject and make us quiver un- 
 helpfully ; and there is always the workhouse 
 coffin to look to, and an absolutely gratuitous 
 burial. Meantime, he had better be rehearsing 
 his adieus. But it seems hardly worth while 
 dropping that oil into his wounds. There will, 
 one fears, be more hunger than dignity in his 
 leave-taking. Semi-starvation, mitigated by a 
 gay heart and an incessant tongue, will take him, 
 and not gently, by the hand, and show him the 
 Way Out. And by way of monument he shall 
 have, perhaps, the one-ten millionth part of a 
 paragraph in some economic history that will be 
 written by some sociologist of Teutonic ex- 
 traction. 
 
 An old woman, once questioned by a journalist, 
 declared that the only bothersome thing about 
 walking was that the miles began at the wrong 
 end. Kant, who could talk to Time and Space 
 like an equal, is dead, and so nobody will ever 
 know what the old lady meant. I record the 
 observation here merely because it sounds so 
 horribly intelligent. 
 
 But there is a constant heart-break in travel 
 which comes from this that every departure is a 
 sort of geographical suicide. To live anywhere 
 even for an hour or a day is to become inwoven 
 into a manifold tissue, material and spiritual. 
 You cannot pluck yourself suddenly out without 
 carrying a fringe of destruction, and it is your 
 own personality that dies in every snapped fibre. 
 Philosophers have thought of the soul as a
 
 164 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 spiritus — a rapid gust of breath blown along the 
 worlds and quickly dissipated. In truth our 
 conscious life is like a white drift of fog that leaves 
 a vestige of itself clinging to every object that 
 it passes. It is a sustained good-bye. I cannot 
 reach any thought except by leaving another. 
 Even so common and kindly an experience as 
 dinner is not exempt from this spiritual succes- 
 sion duty : your coffee is bitter with the unspoken 
 adieus of the soup, and the fish, and the fowl, and 
 the roast over whose graves you have marched 
 to fulfilment. Life is a cheap table d'hote in a 
 rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the 
 phtes before you have had enough of anything. 
 
 We were bewildered at school to be told that 
 w^alking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in 
 a far more significant way, a perpetual dying. 
 Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit 
 of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, 
 as they call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of 
 Haffilet, over corpses piled up in such abundance 
 as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, 
 but let us not praise him on wrong grounds. 
 His strength lies not in his leaning out to new 
 things — that may be mere curiosity — but in his 
 power to abandon old things. All his courage is 
 a courage of adieus. 
 
 The romance of travel appealed to many in 
 old days, and now, after menace of extinction, 
 it has been conclusively restored by the Tariff 
 Reform deputations. Others were light enough 
 to think that no one can travel without striking
 
 SAYING GOOD-BYE 165 
 
 one day upon the path of wisdom. But this 
 cannot altogether be granted. We Leinstermen 
 used to hit off the idealism of distance in a 
 proverb : " All the cows in Connaught have 
 long horns." Clarence Mangan was of the same 
 mind : 
 
 Moor, Eg-yptian, Persian, Turk, and Roman 
 Tread one common downhill path of doom : 
 
 Everywhere the v.'ord is man and woman, 
 Everywhere the old sad sins find room. 
 
 But Brizeux cuts deeper when he shows that 
 the true value of going away is that it enables one 
 to come back. I once knew a man who was com- 
 missioned by a railway company to write a 
 booklet on the attractions of certain towns, 
 among others, Xyz. He produced this page : 
 " Attractions of Xyz. Print here in large type 
 all the trains by which it is possible to leave 
 Xyz." He was a native of it, and in such a light 
 must one's native place sometimes appear. You 
 burn to break the monotone with a great shout, 
 to shake its trivial dust off your feet, to strain 
 to yours the throbbing bosom of life, to mix 
 brooks and stars and art and love and youth into 
 one crashing orchestra of experience. And then, 
 when yovi have taken this wide way, you find 
 yourself burning to come back to that native place 
 of yours where, as you now remember, the water 
 was more cordial than wine, and the women 
 sweeter than angels. 
 
 There is only one journey, as it seems to me.
 
 i66 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 in this inweaving of parables and facts, in vvliich 
 we attain our ideal of going away and going 
 home at the same time. Death, normally 
 encountered, has all the attractions of suicide 
 without any of its horrors. The old woman when 
 she comes to that road will find the miles begin- 
 ning at the right end. We shall all bid our 
 first real adieu to those brother-gaolers of ours, 
 Time and Space ; and though the handkerchiefs 
 flutter, no lack of courage will have power to 
 cheat or defeat us. " However amusing the 
 comedy may have been," wrote Pascal, " there 
 is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter 
 a little dust on your face ; and then all is over 
 for ever." Blood there may be, but blood does 
 not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of 
 humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we 
 may have good lines and a timely exit ; but, fine 
 or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting 
 word into its two significant halves, a Dieu. 
 Since life has been a constant slipping from one 
 good-bye into another, why should we fear that 
 sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its fore- 
 runners ? 
 
 1910.
 
 
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