PW!« -^■r'' OQ ui a C3 TO RICHAKD BUTLER EDITOR OP THE 'EEFEEEE' Dear Mr. Butleb, UJ ,<« When ' Merlin ' died it was right that a ' Vanoc ' >- should succeed him, for in Arthurian legend Vanoc was DC . , ■< Merlin s son. You invited me to join the Kound Table— why, I know not. But I do know that every opinion, syllable and comma in this book (except the Dedication) has been the subject of earnest consideration between us. Where we have differed, and I have had my way, I generally found afterwards that you were right. In any case it would not be playing the game to ask the public to j_3 road this book without telling them that to your taste, ex- y pcrience, judgment and heart I owe more than can be expressed in this tribute to our^ friendship. Yours sincerely, ARNOLD WHITE. 112818 CONTENTS IN THE OPEN PAOE The Feeling fok Flowees .... 1 The Mystery op Birds ..... 10 The Law that Lasts . . . . .19 The Open Window ...... 28 The Medicine of Spring ..... 36 A Dream of a Forest ..... 45 The Call from the Wild .... 63 THE WAY OF LIFE The Inevitable ...... 61 Playing the Game 69 The Lust of Conversion ..... 78 Mrs. Grundy's Place ..... 87 The Mainspring of Action .... 95 Concerning Friendship ..... 101 Foresight . . , . . . .110 Fine Writing 117 Words 126 THE UNSEEN Behind the Veil 135 Multiple Personality ..... 143 The Great Idea 150 The Call of the Unseen .... 159 The Religion of the Irreligious . . . 167 THE PROBLEM OF CENTRAL EUROPE What the Editors didn't see .... 177 Smith and Armageddon 186 As Others see Us 194 viii CONTENTS THE ENIGMAS OF DAILY LIFE page Friendship ....... 203 CotTRAGE 211 Stibpkisb 219 QlJAKRELS 227 Home . 235 Manner 242 Illusions ....... 249 What is Luck ? 256 What is Fame ? 263 EUGENICS The Sterilisation of the Unfit . . . 273 Race Culture 282 Concerning Health ...... 290 For Public Safety 299 SOCIALISM The Silent Forces ...... 307 The Real Aim of Socialism . . . .315 WOMEN Concerning Spinsterhood .... 323 The Mending of Marriage .... 330 ON HIS MAJESTY'S SERVICE Clear Thinking ...... 339 Education ....... 346 Humanitarian Humbug ..... 355 The Green Sphinx and the Sea . . . 363 The Sentinel of Empire .... 373 The British Constitution — Why smash it ? .381 Work 390 Australia ....... 398 Index 405 THE YIEAV8 OF 'YANOC AN ENGLISHMAN'S OUTLOOK IN THE OPEN THE FEELING FOR FLOWERS Why is it that many people wlio write about flowers gush about flowers ? lu the wide range of our animate and inanimate envu'onment nothing lends itself less to emotional treatment than flowers. Their aloofness discourages preciosity of language. Their beauty, so easily marred, attaches us to them ; but the precision with which they fill their place in the scheme of things, and the mystery that connects them with life, serve rather to em- phasise floral indifference to man than to justify his attitudes over them. Our loyalty is to the race, not to individual flowers. Nevertheless, the amorist who lives and works for . them is sensible of a dim personality in flowers. Even a glimmering of intelligence can be discerned. Some of them are greedy ; openly enjoy the search for food ; others, fastidious as a Madagascar cat or a humming-bkd, are tempted by no dainties ^i: 2 IN THE OPEN and recognise no responsibility for a dividend of blossom and scent in return for the investment of diligence and care. But they feel. The more venerable trees of the forest, nine hundred years old, fling their arms about in the equinoctials and visibly suffer from sad old age. During spells of cold rain and hailstorms the invincible cheeriness and elasticity of flower nature are conspicuous. To listen to the talk of garden-lovers in the train, at the club, and in country houses, one would think that the severity of the usual July ruins the gardens of England. Dogged pessimism on weather con- ditions is always the dominant note in communities concerned with the soil. In bad summers I am more struck by the ruthless contempt of Nature for the beauty she creates and by the unconquerable resilience of the roses and the rock and herbaceous border plants than by the defects of the flowers themselves. Between the showers the roses rise to the occasion. Buds of the cart-horse Druski or the kitchenmaid Caroline Testout seem rotted by rain. Outer petals peel off in sopped decay, yet an hour's sun opens the flowers and presents as fair a seeming as though the summer were really summer. A Japanese iris of my acquaintance, more like an orchid than an iris, attracted the attention of the learned in such matters, not on account of its beauty, but because the poise of an iris stem was obviously in the mind of the eleventh-century Japanese artist who painted the precious and little known kakemono of Saints ascending to the Most High. This well-loved iris came into bloom one fine morning. In an hour a hailstorm, perforat- ing her lilac petals, destroyed the flawer. Eou: MY MAUVE MAIDEN 3 another year we shall not see its like again. The weird beauty and untimely death of my mauve maiden from the Far East excited the same primitive passion of resentment against the wanton destruction of a work of art as more learned men feel, or say they feel, about arson in the Alexandrian library. The flowers of England are most appreciated by travellers, explorers, soldiers on frontier duty, and sailors on active service. Many a British subaltern, watch-keeping lieutenant, and pioneer throughout the British Empire is almost willing to swap jobs with an agricultural labourer at home. The scenes that linger longest in the memory of exiles are the girls and the gardens of England. ' What do they know of England who only England know ? ' When you live in an atmosphere with a temperature of 120 degrees in the shade, where it rains perpetu- ally, or where you are marooned with fearsome creeping things in a gritty desert shut off fi'om the rest of the world by a river in flood four miles broad ; or where you have to sleep on a roof in the fierce nights of the sultry season, with a pistol between your knees or under your pillow, with a sentry at the bottom of the steps to exclude the enterprising ghazi, who wishes to slit your wizen or to steal your only rifle, then the flower gardens of England come back as a setting to the memories of English girls. When the mosquito bites and sings, flies round for an appetite, and, sizzling, bites again, you appreciate the English restfulness, green orderliness, and fragrant homelikeness of English garden siglits and scents. Would that I could send a basket of roses and a glimpse of the dim, B 2 4 IN THE OPEN blue goodness of my dolpliin flowers to all wlio by land and sea are working for Empire ! I am thinking of the engine rooms of His Majesty's ships in the Persian Gulf. Shakespeare always speaks of May where we speak of June. In the lovable days of Elizabeth the Calendar had not yet been put forward. Bacon and Shakespeare both write of English flowers and gardens at a time when May lasted twelve days longer. It is difficult for English flower- lovers to appreciate seasons and conditions ' down under ' — at the Cape, in Australia, in the far-off Falkland Islands, and in the Patagonian end of South America. The first fierce bursts of winter rain have fallen there. Winter approaches in the swaying pines ; the squall brings a murmur from the sea. The feeling of sadness envelops forest, field, and garden of the South. The blooms of the long autumn have faded. The freesias, daft'odils, narcissus, and lilies have not yet forced their way through the earth. Here and there the scarlet of the hibiscus or purple petals of a stray and lingering flower remind the South Afi'ican and the Australian garden-lover of the feast that has vanished. Long-tailed finks with tufts on their cheery heads cluster and flutter round the fading plants . on the brook side. Rotting leaves and fungi speak of winter, while the dead leaves crackle in the wind and sun, scudding before the southerly gale fresh from Antarctic ice. The intelligent despotism of man in the garden approaches the indifference of Nature. In the gardening papers it is the custom to give weekly BEOTHEK LEATHEE-JACKET 5 seasonable advice as to the conduct of operations in the garden. To-day, I am advised that dande- lions should be promptly eradicated by thrusting an iron skewer dipped in sulphuric acid into the heart of each plant, and that lawns infested with the leather-] acket grub should be given to good rolling late every evening. The grubs come to the surface at night, and the roller will crush them ! I know nothing whatever about the feelings, ambitions, or regrets of the dandelion, but observe with interest its secular struggle with the fescues, clovers, and other constituents of an orderly and orthodox lawn. For all I know, a dandelion may suffer the agonies of Marie Antoinette on the guillotine when it is transfixed with an iron skewer thoughtfully dipped in sulphuric acid ; and as to the leather-jackets who take their exercise and eat the air in the cool of the evening, like the inhabitants of Calcutta or Colombo, the use of the garden- roller during their period of recreation and refresh- ment is a despotism of intelligence and ironmongery. The living creatures who survive the massacre of their relations by the garden-roller might say with Shylock : Hath not a leather- jacket eyes ? Hath not a leather-jacket organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? . . . Warmed and cooled by the same wmter and summer as the gardener is ? If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you poison us, clo we not die ? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villainy man teaches the leather-jacket he will execute ; may even better the instruction. Who knows that some day the dandelion and the leather- jacket may not get from the gardener a bit of their own back ? 6 IN THE OPEN In a Buddhist country where Buddhism was practised more or less, as Christianity is practised in Mayfair— that is, by those who afford themselves the luxury of faith^the sanctity of life always receives the tribute of verbal recognition. When Buddhist wood craftsmen are told o£E to fell and burn a tract of forest, before the fire-stick is applied they sing a canticle addressed to the living things sheltering among the fallen trees. These are besought in verse to escape before the fire takes them, and are told of the danger that awaits them if they are deaf to the warning of the woodman. When the fire is applied to the fallen timber, the snakes, monkeys, deer, cheetahs, and creeping things of every kind emerge in such numbers that it is clear that they pay more attention to a puff of smoke than to a hundred prayers. So do we. The advice given by Amateur Gardening is sound advice. If it is not wrong to make a lawn or to grow flowers it must be right to catch and to crush the leather-jackets and to murder the dande- lions by the most efficient and rapid means possible. We are drifting into a phase of hysterical sentimentalism in the continual cry raised for ' fair play ' to every noxious entity, from rats to moenads, that plagues mankind. We are told that ' fair play ' requires that woman should have the vote — that subject may be left alone here — but the use of the term ' fair play ' as a fetish applies to wire- worms, leather-jackets, and other enemies of flowers as much as to murderers, hooligans, sparrows, barrel-organs, political spin- sters, tall hats, and motor-horns. In the conduct of flowers there is not a sign of ' fair play,' FAIR PLAY 7 but the pursuit of expediency is exhibited by them every day in every month of the year. It is expedient, says Nature, that plants, animals, and men should either adapt themselves to their environment or perish. For two or three years I have watched a struggle between foxgloves and azalias of good pedigree interspersed with auratum lilies as stately and comely as a bevy of debutantes at a Drawing Room. The plebeian digitalis has it all its own way. Foxgloves triumph over lilies and azalias as Japan triumphed over Russia. This fierce rivalry is one of the interesting features of gardening, Man has to be evoked to kill rivals of the favoured flower, to procure elbow-room, and to preserve an existence that would perish but for the exotic conditions created for the harem of flowers in favour with the Sultan man. Fair play in a garden means a garden of groundsel, thistles, foxgloves, buttercups, dandelions, and leather- jackets. Why give fair play to pests ? Our duty is to massacre, not to protect our enemies. In the modern garden, as m politics, the tendency is to eliminate Nature. We infect the modem flower with congenital disease. To increase its size we rob it of its perfume. We render its existence aud perfections dependent on stimulants — the floral equivalents of cocaine, strychnine, and alcohol. No wonder carnations split, hollyhocks are leafless, and sweet-peas are sterile as a decadent matron. As the vessels crossing the Atlantic become larger and larger, our flowers are being goaded to increase in size. A carnation that mimics a cabbage and a scentless rose scarcely distinguishable from a tree peonies are monstrosities. There is no viitu(i 8 IN THE OPEN in size. The ideal flower is perfection in form, fragrance, colour, toucli, poise, and health. I can even imagine the flower from which proceeds a harmony, the forest music everyone hears and no one talks about. The race of flowers in our country has suffered from two sets of enemies — the gardener who is ignorant, conceited, and greedy, and the wealthy customer of the gardener, who buys a garden as he buys a buttonhole for his coat, and as he expects to buy ready-made brute force to secure his safety on the outbreak of the next war. The tyrant gardener or nurseryman has inflicted upon England three diseases — vegetable leprosy, vege- table cancer, and vegetable gout. The leprosy is lobelia, the cancer is calceolaria, and the gout is geranium. Combinations of these three botanical horrors in straight lines are repeated in millions of little gardens that might be beautiful if their owners would give their iudividuality free play and actmg on Touchstone's principle — ' take that that no man else will.' There is a just cry raised on the subject of the training and registration of hospital nurses. Good gardens need good gardeners, as hospitals need good nurses. Good gardens, moreover, lead to the formation of character, the establishment of health, and the inspiration of the true principles of life. Why should not gardeners be registered or have a ' Who 's Who ' of their own to show that they have had a training of the greatest of all the arts except the arts of war and love ! Gardening and war are alike — both need the exercise of constant GARDEN WISDOM 9 imagination. Any puslifiil ignoramus nowadays may call himself a ' landscape gardener ' without risking the interference of the police or the loss of his personal liberty. The charlatan sets up in business and depraves the taste of a neighbourhood by selling lobelia, calceolaria, and geraniums by the thousand dozen. The new principles I want to see established in the systematic growth of flowers are found in Nature. In Nature there is no straight line. Except in the stately homes of England, straight lines in the garden should be as exceptional as in the forest, on the surface of the sea, or in the sky. Secondly, flowers should be massed on a level with your eye, not dumped in diaper pattern beds on the ground. Silhouetted figures, in colour mass, are the most effective. Thhxlly, groups of colour, blended and arranged, not single speci- mens of individual flowers, is the right way to make the most of the garden that you love. But we o3ly skim the surface of flower lore. The struggle for life among flowers, though curbed by man's interference, is as intense in garden as in jungle. Among flowers are to be foiuid no leisured classes, no democratic shibboleths about rights unearned, or the paramount wisdom of numbers. Kill or be killed is the rule. Weeds in the tropics are flowers in England, and though it is long since a new plant like tea, tobacco, the vine, cinchona, opium, or the potato affected masses of mankind, at any moment a new vegetable may be discovered which will influence our destiny by changing our habits. Whenever we touch life we touch the mystery of mysteries ; and in a garden we touch life in its most mysterious face — beauty. THE MYSTERY OF BIRDS On the night of tlie full moon the silent swoop of a brown owl across a forest path set me a-thinking that we humans are a selfish crew. We seek knowledge about animals not because we love them but because we love ourselves. If we only unravel their secrets of origin, structure, and life we in- crease our knowledge of our noble selves. When we wish to fly our study is a blend of bird-mimicry and applied mathematics. We glorify Grahame- White — but have seldom a word for the albatross. The late Professor de Morgan said that ' anybody who knew all about anything knew all about everything.' Tennyson said the same thing more pleasantly. If we only knew everything about brown owls we should go far to understand the mystery of our own inexplicable existence. Not- withstanding the innumerable books that have been written on birds, we know little about them. Our ignorance is immense. The theories of one generation are upset by the next. Conclusions of Darv/in in the nineteenth century are questioned by Pycraft in the twentieth with the sanction of Sir Ray Lankester. Still, birds remain the most mysterious creatures in the world except man, since tliey are at home in three elements ; enjoy a blood temperature from two to ten degrees higher MOAS AND MEN 11 than mammals ; and seem more capable than beasts or insects of supplying man with hints as to the true method of securing the endurance of his race. If the National Service LeagTie di'opped Carthage and her doom and sought to inculcate wisdom among the people on the subject of preparing for war by setting forth the fate of flightless birds, people who are deaf to the teachings of ancient history might respond to the teaching of natural history. When birds lose the use of their wings because food is abundant and on the ground, and peace reigns owing to the absence of enemies, flight soon becomes impossible because flight is unnecessary. Wingless birds like the moa were ' in favour of peace,' but they vanished, notwith- standing the conditions of Eden, when carnivorous animals were introduced who dined and breakfasted regularlji on fat moas. Had the moas only received a respite of time they might perhaps have adapted themselves to the changed conditions caused by the presence of moa-eating animals ; but, like the Carthaginians, they abandoned their defences and perished before an invasion of carnivores. Legions of birds have died out like the Labrador duck, the big cormorant of Behring Island, and the giant flightless moa of New Zealand, who perished because they were not in harmony with the con- ditions of their world. The Carthaginians, fat and flightless, became extinct, as wc British will be- come extinct if we suffer the decay of faculty by disuse. My stealthy brown owl in the forest dusk, like an unscrupulous company promoter, seeking whom 12 IN THE OPEN he may devour without attracting attention, stands in folklore as the bird of wisdom. Yet the owl shares with the vulture and other obscene birds, though not to so great a degree, unpopularity with man. In many lands the owl is supposed to bring ill-luck. A terrible railway accident in France, where an express train telescoped an excursion train and wrecked a station, was attributed by some who imagine themselves to be behind the scenes of nature to the gift of an owl the previous week to one of the victims. In India the owl is the bird of evil omen. These noiseless nocturnal fliers are not credited with the gift of song, yet Liza Lehmann's exquisite ' Owl Song ' suggests the contrary. The singing of birds stands almost alone among natural phenomena, for birds are the only creatures that really sing besides man. I have heard singing fish in the Tropics and the musical notes of many insects. In Japan a singing insect is a commoner possession of people of taste than a toy Pom in England ; but let that pass. Birds endear themselves to us not only by the out- put of the singing-box at the base of their wind- pipes, but also by the immense variety of their notes. In some books about birds the ostrich is described as wanting in a vocal organ. The writers have evidently never slept, or tried to sleep, on the veld when ostriches were about. Had they done so they might have heard the booming roar of the cock ostrich, indistinguishable from the lion's nocturnal note except by experienced hunters. Land birds chirp, roar, boom, scream, chatter, croak, gabble, coo, bark, laugh, mock, trill, sing, and talk. The sea birds' song is as melancholy as the ocean that BIEDS' SONG 13 tosses below when they float on the western gale. We know no more why birds sing than we know how birds fly. Parrots, mynahs, starlings talk, and bullfinches pipe tunes correctly ; but the long- drawn phrases of the thrush or the melody of the blackbird, more excellent than the nightingale, is a mystery of mysteries. The unbidden expres- sion of emotional energy in bird songs stirs some- thing below the surface of the hidden sea of feeling in man. Do our voices or do any of our modes of expression or activity appeal to the subconscious self of birds as their songs appeal to us ? From the birds' point of view there is nothing nice or nasty. Yet in our egotism we shudder at the sight of an aasvogel plunging his bare neck in the putrid carcass of a dead ox, though we vibrate with pleasure at the sight of the jewelled humming-bird performing the same operation in the chalice of a tropic flower. Though birds are a synonym for grace, daintiness, and melody, they are greedier than pigs — if pigs are greedy, which I doubt. A wren of my acquaintance made two hundred and thirty journeys in one day between her nest and the garden. The best artificial nest is the artificial woodpecker's abode which has, fortunately for bird- lovers, been imported into this country. Mr. Eric Parker says that the wryneck supplies its young with five hundred and thirty-seven meals daily. No pig can eat his own weight in twenty-four hours, but it is calculated that the daily diet of wrens, robins, and thrushes is often hea\aer than themselves. The digestive process in birds being 14 IN THE OPEN • more rapid than that of mammals enables them to enjoy pleasm'es of the table to an extent undreamed of in stye or byre or by any human Amphitryon. Still, no bird or pig can safely be described as ' greedy,' because there is no evidence to show that he eats more than is good for him. A bird's desires may be Gargantuan even when a few drops of the nectar from a flower subdue his appetite ; but whether he eats his weight in worms, gorges on decayed camel, or sips honey while poised like a gem invisibly suspended in the air, the pre- sumption is that he eats just what experience tells him is right. The marauding owl's habit of swallo\ving a mouse whole may be a proof of her wisdom, as the process saves her from lingering over the pleasures of the table, thus enabling her to devote far longer periods of time to digestive reflection than is the rule with the children of men with their tliirty-two bites. A mere glance at the food habits of birds would take up the whole of this book, but we cannot pass by the strange alteration in the habits of our old friend the kea of New Zealand, once a fruit-eating bird, which developed an alarming fondness for the fat and flesh of U^dng sheep. The kea is a parrot which is credited with a taste for sheep's kidneys. It is doubtful whether he ever really grabs this tit-bit, but at all events he kills the sheep in the attempt, and plays an important part in the pastoral fife of the Uon-hearted people who offered to Britain a gift of two Dreadnoughts. When man under- takes to regulate the balance of nature he enters a terra incognita. I have seen in South Africa, after a nine months' drought, thousands and THE FOOLISHNESS OF OWLS 15 thousands of bleating and dying lambs unable to obtain milk fi'om their mothers. Upon these feeble lambs raptorial birds descend. Fattened by illimitable rations, the vultures mate freely, and next breeding season produce large clutches of eggs. Within two years birds of prey have so increased that young children are no longer safe from their attack. Twenty years ago the North of England and the South of Scotland were infested with voles. Agricultural science was exhausted in the attempt to deal with them, and the best ally of the farmers received no subsidy from a Government Department. The owl and the kestrel multiplied and made short work of the mice. Abundant food, however, developed the fecund- ity and the folly of the bhd of wisdom. Owls that were content to lay in ordinary season from four to ei|ht eggs began to produce twelve or thirteen, and not only were the number of eggs in a clutch increased, but two broods a year were produced. These improvident owls acted as though a chance windfall of mice were an annual income. When the mice disappeared it is probable that a good deal of suffering existed among unemployed owls driven to subsistence on a normal supply of food which was wholly insufficient to maintain the owls brought into existence by the plague of voles. Supporters of the * right to work,' to eat, and to breed might take heed of the parable contained in the lesson of the owls and voles of North Britain in 1890-1892. From the quarrels of birds the man in the cloth cap may also learn something. I heard it stated the other day that young robins murdered their fathers. For patricide there is no 16 IN THE OPEN word in the Chinese code of penology, because no Chinaman can conceive a crime so frightful as the murder of a father by a son. Robins, how- ever, do not share the Chinese prejudice against patricide. On the contrary, the young cock robin, when past the hobbledehoy age and contemplating his own establishment in life, finds the presence of his father in the nest a dis- tinct inconvenience. Friction, accordingly, is set up ; quarrels, no longer confined to chirping alter- cation, assume the form of a physical struggle. At the end of June a common sight is a rough-and- tumble between father and son robins, in which the elder does not always prevail. If the fight is one of a series we may presume that the old gentleman at times succumbs to the jiu-jitsu prowess of his off- spring, and the true reply to the inquiry as to ' Who Killed Cock-Robin ? ' is the revelation of a family scandal. Hypocrisy in bu'ds repeats the hypocrisy of man. The duplicity or diplomacy of the devout and the confusion between holiness and hypocrisy are not confined to humanity. In the curlew's limping wing and the cuckoo's parasitic egg we see the operation of a law against which the most enlightened human jurists have legislated in vain. The broad facts about the cuckoo are well known. When the egg is hatched by the dupe along with her own eggs a tragedy takes place. Fired by the over-mastering passion for fife, the foundhng murders its foster-brothers and sisters while they are yet blind and naked. Using the beak as a lever the little robin, who might have lived happily to kill its own father and annex the family nest, is UNFAITHFUL PIGEONS 17 dumped over tlie side, aud dies Like an English soldier who has served his country — from hunger and exposure in the friendless street. The little murderer prospers. Without haste or rest he kills in turn each of his foster-brethren, and then developing a more than swinish appetite contrives to inspire his foster-parents with unnatural afiec- tion. They satisfy in patience the unspeakable and illimitable appetite of the fledgUng criminal. I repeat that we know little about birds. Do they talk ? How do they exchange thought ? A breeder of poultry tells me that so long as chickens hatched out by incubators are isolated they have no fear of man. The introduction, however, of one hen from outside lluddenly alters the demeanour of the fledglings. The innocent creatures develop fear of man, exercise caution, and show clearly that they have learnt something from the hen about man which is not to his credit. Can it be that Henry the Fourth's saying about ' a fowl in the pot ' reaches the poultry farm through the conversation of Dame Partlet ? The case of pigeons is also one in point. I have been told all my life that the pigeon is monogamous. To my personal knowledge a fantail has no more morals than a decadent Pasha or a man about town. He flirts ; is unfaithful to his spouse. He ' carries on ' with magpie pigeons, and then turns upon the object of his temporary affections exactly like a well-dressed apache. A cock fantail is a callous and dissipated vivciir, and yet the virtues of birds excel the virtues of our noble selves. They have the best of all — cheeriness. As mothers they match good women. Courage is theirs. They are 18 IN THE OPEN capable of friendship. Unlike bats, they never get drunk, like the fljang foxes ; and, lastly, they have the ' homing instinct,' a sixth and subtle sense that raises them into another dimension. Man's hom- ing instinct is suppressed by the struggle in the great cities, but he still speaks of going to his Long Home. THE LAW THAT LASTS The phantom of spring is upon us. It was winter yesterday, and winter may return to-morrow. The deUght of the open is returning. Each recur- ring spring we are reminded of the undiscovered mysteries of Ufe. Why do some of our faculties endure and improve while others fade and pass away ? Judgment, for instance, increases in efficiency ; imagination decays. The enjoyment of Nature's conjuring increases every spring. Her implements are few and famiUar, but her sleight- of-hand never fails. She never needs to do the trick over again. From the invisible and in- audible bacteria in the soil to the warm April rains, perceptible to three senses out of five, Nature's apparatus never goes wTong from bad work. I was looking this morning at the early bulbous irises. With their reticulated purples they furnish a winter excitement. In the fill-dyke and rigour of February they reveal in the open the glories of the orchid without its political and capitalist associations. Nobody is insensible to the healing influence of the open ? In plain air, unless the cloud canopy refuses to break, the Infinite is insistent, whispering of things that no gross ear can hear, and revealing to disappointed men beauties forgotten and hopes yesterday undreamed. 20 IN THE OPEN Hunting, yacliting, shooting, cycling, motoring, tent life, caravaning, and gardening have had their effect on British character. Men who ride to hounds learn much more than the technique of a sport. Observation, a quick eye, judgment and sympathy with his horse, and a number of other qualities are required from anyone before he is a good man in the field. From the bridge of a battleship I have seen a hunting landsman pick up torpedo-boats ' lying doggo ' at night before the look-out man saw them. Yachtsmen may save England in the next naval war. The Highland chiefs of the last generation, after a hard day on the moors, rolled themselves in their plaids and slept out on the heather to be on the spot at sum-ise. If you can brown your skin nerves vanish. The atmosphere of the Law Courts accounts for, but does not excuse, the pre- judice of open-air Englishmen against gentlemen of the long robe, who muster many good sports- men among them. Sunbeams are good for old bones and young. Hot baths and constant shade multiply emotion and increase fads and fragility. Yet life in the open is becoming the expensive luxury of the few. Spring must have been the season when Yorick, on his knees, prayed, ' Eternal Fountain of Happi- ness, be thou my witness that I would not travel to Brussels unless Eliza went along with me did the road lead me towards heaven.' The heart will always say too much. People in love, or hungiy, or in fear, lift the curtain of the soul. In the open they reveal themselves as they really are — down to the bed-rock of the subconscious self. As the HALF WISDOM 21 pressure of life increases with tlie growth of men's business and desire we become less open and more cautious ; less like Yorick and more like Machia- velli. An aged solicitor in large practice who has cultivated through life a fine, breezy, frank manner, concealing the while all trace of feeling or intention, is a type of the product of our century's conditions. AVe all prefer midshipmen to solicitors. We know for certain that what the average good man says is not quite what the average good man thinks. The sense of jeopardy that checks gar- rulity in one man engenders deception in people of a lower order. Everyone knows folk who cannot run straight and who dread the open as cats fear cold water. If they have to pass from A. to B. the last thing that occurs to them is to go straight to B. TraveUing round all the letters of the alphabet, they seek on leaving A., with Kedskin cunning, to cover their devious tracks. These are they who assassinate the characters of friends with deft calumny — the moral apaches. Yet Bismarck held that the highest diplomacy is open frankness. Wo may be friendly with an educated apache for a score of years. Suddenly an occasion arises when interests clash or the fondled memory of a fancied slight may be revenged. In the dark a blow is struck between one's shoulders. The victim is left writhing, unable to retaliate, ignorant of the quarter whence the assault was delivered, and conscious only that the iron has entered his soul. With young men duelling was formerly an equitable method of dealing with those addicted to the use of the social stiletto. But the stabbed-in-the-dark are neither all young nor all 22 IN THE OPEN men. What about women ? When honour is wounded and character traduced no verdict can annul and no damages condone the injury inflicted. The payment of a sum of money to repair that which money cannot mend is a form of solatium which the manly man will not accept. If the duel is obsolete the libel action is useless. To get your enemy into a Court of Law is a question of cash, and is not always equivalent to getting him into the open. A poor plaintiff, libelled by a wealthy defendant, perhaps the representative of a powerful interest at bay, willing to spend all the money necessary to secure the liighest talent at the Bar, may find in Court that legality may be satisfied and injustice wrought. In such cases one is reminded of the cabman's disclaimer of knowledge as to the whereabouts of the Courts of Justice, though he is willing to take a shilling to drive his fare to the Courts of Law. What is wanted is an improvement, not only on the duel, but also on the apparatus of law which settles nothing where wounded honour is concerned. It ought not to be difficult to establish Courts of Honour where citizens could arrange their differences of that kind without the burden of hiring the paraphernalia of the law. The practice of malicious libel will only be abated when libellers are brought cheaply into the open. After times of great trouble the tame and sheltered symmetry of familiar beauty spots is apt to pall. Then comes the call of the wild and the desire to know Nature unmanicured. Savages and children are the most interesting people , in the world. Raw natives would despise, if they EUKOPE AND ASIA 23 understood them, the ideals of the Incorporated Law Society or of the dignified politicians whose ideals do not exactly lie in the open. One of the lessons Asia is teaching Europe is the lesson of the Gobi Desert ; the lesson of the Tundras ; the lesson of the Tibetan Mountains ; and the lesson of the Great Pamirs. The ■ wise men of Asia, from time immemorial, have sought wisdom in the open. Fussy, complacent, and materialist Europe has distilled her wisdom behind closed doors, sheltered from the rains and storm, lighted by flame of candle, gas, or filament. Asia lives in the open ; Europe, in slum, villa, or palace. Europeans are not all street dwellers, but the balance between the cities and the countryside of our own * Continent leans towards the men who extort her crimson secrets from Nature for utilitarian reasons — first, last, and all the time. Life in the open means systematic bodily exercise, which is the mark of the highest as well as of the lowest civilisation. Discipline of the body is the natural antidote to the vices of slaves — i.e. gluttony, guzzling, sloth, dirt. Among the poorest of the poor who take the open road is the professional tramp whose self-respect may prevent him from working, but binds him over to habits of personal cleanliness. In such a tramp's kit is always to be found a piece of soap. Among the casual labourers who drift into the neighbourhood of the Thames-side docks many who have followed the open road for years are careful about their personal appearance. They never sink too low in the world to provide them- selves with a razor and a cake of soap. 24 IN THE OPEN Systematic bodily exercise and personal clean- liness, in the absence of tlie servile vices, lead to freedom, which means the right to do — as well as the right to abstain from doing. Agricultural and pastoral communities, especially in the neighbour- hood of mountains, are patriotic. That is why the loss of agriculture to any country means the loss of things too fine to pass through the statistical department of the Customs. The self-indulgence of the cloistered and the sedentary is suffused with a flabby humanitarianism that has no parallel in Nature. Capacity for emotion and for pity is compatible v/ith the exercise of habitual cruelty and systematic gratification of passion. Pietistic exaltation and unmanliness are as common in con- junction as are coal and iron in Northumberland, or diamonds and blue clay in Griqualand West. Religion learned in the open stimulates our energy towards great enterprises, discourages barren introspection, and teaches the eternal truth that the first duty of man is to be manly, not womanish or childish ; that the first duty of woman is to be womanly, not maimish or infantile ; and that the best thing that a child can be is to be childlike, not aping oldsters, writmg precociously to news- papers or belonging to Leagues, whether of Little Liberals or Tiny Tories, The four things that make a great life are a great inspiration, a great cause, a great battle, and a great victory. Given thesethmgs, then, the gospel of rest may be preached and plans and specifications given out for building the altar of repose. The sign of grace and health that comes from living in the open is to be interested in things. Nobody in the world is so consummate a bore as the worn-out, life-weary man of the HAFIZ 25 world who lias seen everything, exhausted every- thing, who loathes life, who is sick from satiety, and has ceased to take interest in aught but his own murmurs and scowls. To be interesting one must be interested ; to be interested one must live in the open — always in the soul, generally in the mind : as much as may be in the body. No man is really sound who has not a large circle of human beings whom he finds interesting. Beginning early the practice of life in the open, one may find before the end of middle age that life becomes ever more interestmg ; that so far from childhood or vouth being the one period of joy, maturity, even old age, is the best end of existence, provided one has taken no wrong turnings and is free from the commonest causes of suicide — money troubles, repulsive relations, incurable disease, or irreparable disappointment. Even these are assuaged with the cheery habit one gains sub-Jove. The Persian Hafiz, whowas not a teetotaler, showed the spirit of the poet-sportsman who lives in the open in telling us not to grieve because we do not understand life's mystery. When Hafiz went on to say that behind the veil is concealed many a delight, he expressed the feelings of all men who remain sanguine after deep experience of life. When the wheel of Time revolves in the direction contrary to our desire we are too often inclined to imagine that the end of all things has come, the certainty being, notwithstanding, that in the roulette of life there are as many runs of red-letter days as of black. Hope is always at the bottom of Pandora's box. Hopelessness and pessimism are marks of 26 IN THE OPEN ill-breediiig. People who are game to the back- boue, who never despair, who never say die, have learned the secret from contact with the Infinite, and the Infinite is the open. Whoever has lived on the veld, in the jungle, in the ' Never-Never ' country, in the solitudes of Greater Britain's magnificent distances, or on any of her ten thousand islands will bear witness that the constant presence of great virgin momitains, of untrodden plain, of sea that rarely reflects a sail, imparts a sense of august mystery. For years in solitude I lived in sight of a mountain that seemed big with a message it could never deliver. Inarticulate, it yet longed to speak, I was deaf to its message ; it was blind to my loneliness. The mountain rose over tangled forest whereon rested each morning a canopy of cloud. The more I watched the moods of the mountain the less I understood. Struck by lightning, swept by the fierce monsoon, baked under a brazen sky in the blaze of a burning sun, the mountain daily did what it had done for millions of years before and what it is doing now. BewUdered always are the minds of men on the relation between material things and spiiitual things, which are quite as real to those who Live in the open as the things they touch and taste and see. It is by no casual coincidence that the great movement of the Boy Scouts originated with a soldier. The best fighting men are those who have been engaged all their lives in \\T:estiiig her secrets from Nature and in learning to translate her hiero- glyphics. The signals of mountain and sea can be B.-P. 27 ' taken in.' Baden-Powell has read tliem. They are written on his soul. The Boy Scouts movement is the result. The motto ' Be Prepared ' is good for all time and all ages. No intellectual astuteness, no vulgar ambition, no manoeuvring for advance- ment could have taught B.-P. how to launch the avalanche of education that England so sorely needs. It will yet consolidate in glacial perma- nence. The Boy Scouts movement is more than medicine for the mind ; more than exercise for the body. To give self-reliance without conceit, to teach lads to be manly without being prigs, and to impart religion without cant, is the great deed of a great man^who has ' taken in ' the message of the mountain. It is not given to any generation to recognise its own greatness. To lean against a mountain is to lose all sense of size. Distance is required to see the symmetry of greatness, whether in men or in mountains. Both are learned only in the open. THE OPEN WINDOW In the meridian of his manhood Disraeli said that health was eveiything. ' Sanitas, sanitas, omnia sanitas ' was the saying of a Hebrew seer who understood the British people better than they understand themselves. Devout Christians declare incessantly, ' There is no health in us.' Well-to-do folk commanding the best doctors perform their annual ' cures ' with the regularity and devotion of a religious rite. Some highly-placed personages perform this rite twice yearly, besides practising the week-end habit when at work. The importance attached to health and the fact that ill-health is common is shown by the advertisements in popular magazines. In the Strand Magazine for this month there are ninety-two advertisements relating to hygiene and health. Doctors and druggist shops are so many as to demonstrate the inability or unwillingness of the medical profession to keep us well. As regards wage-earners, practically the whole of the programme of social reform relates to health— for, after all, old age is a disease, with its thickened arteries and settled melancholy. The unfed are also unwell. Where all the ill- health comes from is another story. A physician on the staff of one of our largest London hospitals tells me that seventy-three per cent, of the diseases THE INFAMY OF ILL-HEALTH 29 treated by liimself and his colleagues were prevent- able by a change in the habits of the patients. How much disease that now seems unavoidable can be rooted out like leprosy, paranghi, or putrid typhus can only be conjectured. - Consumption could be exterminated within a few years if the nation were as much in earnest in abolishing tuberculosis in man as in cattle. The late Sir Albert Pell, whose sturdy personality left its mark on Ms generation, described how the cattle on a thousand hills were slaughtered to save the lives of the rest. This is a broad hint to man. Ill-health, hke* noxious bacteria, is generally diffused, warps many lives, and stunts the careers of many whose failure in life is attributed to any but the right cause. It was given in evidence before the Koyal Commission for the Housing of the Poor that a higher average of life has been bought at the price of a lower average of health, and thus the custom has arisen of regarding disease as misfortune, not as discreditable to the suft'erer, his rulers, or his ancestors. The arguments of the advocates of non-contributory Old-Age Pensions, drawn from New Zealand, are significant, inasmuch as they do not dwell on the essential difference between a small community in good health, with sunshine, room, and fresh air for all, and a large community, hungry, crowded, and sad. Recently, it is true, much has been done to preach the gospel of fi'csli air, but it has not yet reached the masses. The only speech in the Convention Parliament ever made by Sir Isaac Newton was worthy of the wisdom and erudition of the Kelvin of the seven- teenth century. He said : ' Mr. Speaker, I move 30 IN THE OPEN that tlie windows be opened.' Never again did Sir Isaac address the listening Senate, but his speech has come down to these days as an example of prescience and sense. A Parliamentary suc- cessor of Newton — Sir Philip Magnus, M.P. — once gave notice to ask the Prime Minister : — ' Whether, having regard to the prevalence of influenza among members of the House of Com- mons, he will reconsider the advisablenoss of a daily adjournment of the House for a half-hour between the hours of seven and nine in the evening, with a view to the better ventilation of the House by the admission of fresh air through opened windows.' Parliament is the brain and will of the Empire. If Parliamentary brains are clouded with sewage gas and carbonic acid, and the arterial systems of members of Parliament choked by stinted oxygen, it stands to reason that the decisions of the House would be tinged with the views of irritable and querulous invalids. The value of fresh air seems to be revealed only to the elect. Queen Victoria's example to her people of living much in the open air was a legacy of inestimable worth. It is one that has been seized on by the doctors in the Nordracht treatment of pulmonary diseases which, when extended to other diseases, may yet drive the hospitals out of great cities and destroy the therapeutic delusion of the British pharmacopoeia, which schedules all the drugs known to science and declares the appropriate dose for adults and children. In prescribing opium, for example, the practitioner is told the quantity of the drug suitable for ' an adult,' althougJi opium is a sedative, a stimulant, SANGRADO 31 or an aplirodisiac, according to tlie idiosyncrasy of the body in wliich it is exhibited. When we consider the prevalence of low vitality, our surprise is diminished when we remember that accurate means for ascertaining the temperature of the blood have only been generally adopted during two decades. Think what this implies. It signifies an empiricism in the treatment of disease scarcely less than that which prevailed during mediaeval times. According to a French authority, even those of us who live normally healthy lives are liable to the attacks of awesJJme diseases from the cradle to the grave. The infant surmounts the fever after vaccination only to face the convulsions of teething. Measles, whooping cough, and other ailments dog his footsteps to the age of sixteen, when the cha nces are he will suffer from an irritated spine. According to our Frenchman, as he leaves boyhood behind him, vice is added to disease ; at twenty-six he is sleepless ; at thirty the pangs of indigestion assail him ; between forty-five and sixty his sight, his hair, and his teeth leave him a ' sheer hulk,' with impaired hearing and poor appetite. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal for many years have made our flesh creep with the appalling consequence of indulgence in simple things. Sugar, strawberries, tea, distilled water, and preserved ginger are alleged to guarantee early graves. Diseases, like foods, have their fashions. To-day the talk of the country houses is appendicitis, partridges, and impropriety ; though appendicitis at last shows signs of unpopidarity. My object, however, is not so much to call attention to our 32 IN THE OPEN universal ill-healtli and little ease, but to suggest methods of improving it. First and foremost, tlie network of machinery for dealing with health, from hospitals to golf, touches every citizen. We are tied and bound with the chain of our infirmities, but we ought to be tied and bound together to get improved health. All must gain and nobody can lose by victory over disease. Everyone is sorry for the children, and the children's charities and hospitals are, therefore, sustained by sentiment to an extent which finds no parallel in the treatment of adults whether in or out of hospital. A larger sympathy and a wider view would lead us not only to band together as the serfs of infirmity, but would revolutionise our relations with medical men. Everyone of us at some time or another in his life has felt that his best friend in the world was his doctor, his surgeon, or his nurse ; and probably there is also universal experience to the effect that medical science is limited to a greater extent than wise physicians allow us to suppose. A fi-iend of mine, wealthy and eccentric, had a grudge against Harley Street ; he took his revenge in a curious fashion. He simulated symptoms from which he was not suffering, and consulted eight specialists who diagnosed and prescribed for eight separate diseases, none of which had any existence except in the imaginations of the experts. Everyone with wide experience of doctors has been struck with the great variety of views that prevail when consulted separately and the pheno- menal unanimity that prevails when called together in consultation. The use of Latin and hiero- glyphics in the menu of drugs to be swallowed by WISE PHYSICIANS 33 patients from Cape Town to the North Cape is one of the last blockhouses of mediaeval empiricism. Latin should be abandoned for English. No patient is so dishked by medical men as the man who knows, or thinks he knows, all about his disease. At the same time, it is impossible to suffer for months or years from an ailment without learning a good deal about it. The late Empress Frederick knew, when she ceased to be Empress, more about throat disease than the average prac- titioner. Bone-setters and other practitioners of what medicos term ' quackery ' have given relief to sufferers where orthodox medical science has failed. All this points to a wider outlook for the heads of the profession, and greater understanding and larger sympathy for doctors' Hmitations and difficulties on the part of the public. To compare a great thing with a small, the relations of a doctor to a patient in one aspect are practically those of a plumber to an inhabited house ; both are paid only when the pipes are out of order. The noblest and most unselfish of all the professions — medicine — is followed by men who, as a rule, do not practise it mainly for personal profit. The majority permit a patient to contract bad debts to an extent allowed in no other profession. The silent generosity of physicians is notorious ; still, there are others, and enough of them to set us thinking whether the Chinese method of pa}nng doctors is not the right one — to fee them while we remain in health. Plumbers — an excellent set of men — are notoriously subject to the temptation of leaving their job, when completed, in such a state that the need for another job is assured. Is 34 IN THE OPEN it possible that some doctors treat some patients in like manner ? Pipes and patients are sometimes annuities. If doctors were paid during healtli there would be little temptation to order cream and curagoa to allay the before-breakfast symptoms of ladies who play Bridge till three in the morning and outrage every known principle of hygiene. Irnagine the plain speaking the public would receive if the remuneration of physicians depended not on disease, but on health. They would become a profession of Abernethies. What is now moderation would be deemed excess ; because the interests of doctors would be enlisted in procuring a higher average of health. A higher average of health means — more food and Uquor for some people, less for others. The improvement in national health that would follow means lower rates and taxes and increased general efficiency. The beginning of efficiency is physical health, without that all work is overstrain, and overstrain is a gold mine for distillers and cocaine-mongers. The monastic ideal of mortifying the flesh that the spirit may shine is out of tune with a healthy world. No sane person believes that scourged and cloistered man is the highest standard of the human race. The Greeks disproved the ascetic ideal by showing the way to mental heights, unclimbed before or since, as the reward of the cult of beauty and strength. To those who object that it is too late in the day to readjust the relations of man to medicine the rejoinder is obvious, the end of a nation is near at hand when it ceases to think that it is worth while to do things as well as possible. THE VIRTUE OF HEALTH 35 Entluisiasm and sympathy are the driving forces of the world. The lofty indifference which is the hall-mark of some of our leaders saps the life out of effort like a maggot at the root. Efficiency is not a catch-word, but a watch- word, for it is based on character, and works unconsciously, whether in peeling an apple, writing a Blue Book, or operating for appendicitis. Euskin said : ' Every increase of noble enthusiasm in your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon the work of your hands.' Even more important than Temperance Reform, Old-Age Pensions, or ham- stringing the Church of England, ruining brewers or expelling landlords, is national health, for it matters to England everything, not whether Kings and Cabinets are capable, but whether coal-miners, farm labourers, and washerwomen do their work well and happily. The highest and rarest form of patriotism is to regard oneself as representative of the nation at all times and in all places. To be worthy of England is to be efficient ; to be efficient is to be healthy, and, therefore, patriotism in Ministers or in miners, in millionaires or in the little people, consists largely in being healthy and in using vote and influence in helping other people to be healthy and happy. D 2 THE MEDICINE OF SPRING The furious fecundity of bird, beast, and plaut is noticeable — more especially when tbe sunbeams are late. Ceres is as ferocious as Bellona, The life-making process is not leisurely ; tbe new generation is being bustled pell-mell into a fighting world. Operations of spring are mostly visible before other people are astir ; and much as I admire Mr. Willett's Daylight Bill, if it reaches the Statute Book it will deprive the early-rising brigade of our solitary joys. A long course of early rising teaches two things : (1) that a high moral tone is incompatible with an average temperature exceeding seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit, or less than thirty-six degrees in the shade ; and (2) that the effect of the sun on the soul is illimitable. For six months we see httle sun ; the acerbity of politicians, educationists, and theologians is, perhaps, the result. Sun worship is instinctive and universal. For six thousand years mankind has used similar means in widely separated countries to observe and revere the rising of the Sim. Dynasties disappear, nations flit across the stage like the film of a cinematograph, but the rising sun inspired the creation of the noble build- ings of Babylon, the temples of the Aztecs, the ruins of Zimbabwe, the Great Pyramid, Stone- HODSON AND THE BEES 37 henge, the Parsee Towers of Silence, and the twin rocks rising from the Japanese Sea, where the da\vn is worshipped. In the English equinoctials, when the free west wind is giving the Channel Fleet and the fishermen of our coasts a stirring time, Dame Nature is working overtime, like a modiste in May. Why do we regard Nature as feminine ? Who can see a womanly trait about her ? There is no impulse, no shadow of turning, no pity, fatigue, temper, raldshness, inconsequence, or favouritism about Nature. Productive she is, but her productivity is that of an unscrupulous and capable manu- facturer with a hard heart and a good digestion rather than that of a fond and fruitful mother who prefers the cripple or the fool of the family to the other children. Nature is cold, calculating, and efficient. Hodson's assassination of the sons of the old King of Delhi was a policy that is annually repeated by bees in every hive in the world, and for the same reason — to prevent a disputed succession. Yet people mistake the object of the masculine force that makes life orderly by dealing out death wholesale, and knows nothing of diplomacy, compromise, or mercy. The savagery and ill-temper of the tit rival the same characteristics in the black rhinoceros. Tie twenty half-cocoanuts on a tree in the sunshine and see if this is not true. When Frog he would a-woomg go, the majority of the resultant tadpoles may adopt the epitaph of the infant who died aged three weeks : It is so soon that I am done for, T wonder what T was begun for. 112818 38 IN THE OPEN How many liundreds of millions of seeds decay in a beech wood of five hundred acres ? Yet the shade of the beech tree is the pleasantest of all and is lacking in many a spot over-sunned. Nature, whom we call ' she,' is not thrifty. At sunrise in early spring mornings you watch the subterranean struggle for the reproduction of colour and form, and encounter the melancholy that ever haunts the trail of perfect beauty. The onlooker perceives only the dynamic forces of two passions — the desire to live and the desire to kill — passions which have their parallels in the mental sphere by the double desire to propagate opinion and to destroy error ; desires which are only less keen than the physical craving to perpetuate our species. In this world it is often the business of the wise to annul the efforts of the good because the latter do not rise early enough in the morning to see that the virile beauty of Nature is due to ruthless, relentless and remorseless assistance given to the fit in order to exterminate or sterilise the unfit. Civilised weeds which we call flowers, after diet, artificial pollination, and raised temperature have enlarged their petals, lengthened their pistils, or altered their colour, effectively teach the lessons of life. None of us can elude the avarice of Nature, who requires and exacts usury to the last doit, whoever starves or whoever feasts. Philan- thropists' schemes are futile and abortive, and their career is constantly strewed with wreck and ruin because, their benevolent interferences for the removal of existing evils are based on super- ficial study, and shirking of the class-room that PURPOSE IN NATURE 39 Nature always keeps open. The extent and severity of human misery are so enormous and the roots have penetrated the subsoil so deeply that few people with warm hearts can con- template suffering calmly. Their blood boils ; their righteous wrath produces braiii storms creditable to morality but fatal to judgment. Rebels against fact, people who imitate the human tenderness of Abou ben Adhem, who loved his fellows, are sad disturbers of human intelligence in the sphere of government. The sorrows and wrongs from which great cities suffer are never successfully encountered at a stroke. Poverty is not to be abolished by an orator. » Nature corrects distemper or disease, not by the exercise of sudden omnipotence, but by a process which, however stern, is efficient and beneficent in the long run. For good and evil. Nature, as the spring teaches us, works by seeds, germs, and processes, not by gallant and dramatic coups. When man copies Nature's methods he is successful. Gardeners of to-day are hunting for a yellow sweet-pea, as Dutchmen spent fortunes in the quest of a black tulip. The discoverer of a yellow sweet-pea will make a small fortune, and among the devices now being used to accomplish the desired end none is more in- teresting than the discovery that nitrogen may be artificially obtained from the air, and that benign bacteria can be induced to colonise nodules in the rootlets of the leguminous family to which the sweet-pea belongs. ^Vhe^ these bacteria acclimatise, the sweet-pea or the lupin grows more rapidly and produces a larger and a sweeter 40 IN THE OPEN flower. Infinite patience, inexorable i?esoive, tin- biassed judgment, and irresistible force are Nature's methods. Nature, like ^ Napoleon, favours the flank method of attack, is careless of symptoms, and teaches us to shun the method of direct enactment as a cure of evils visible to all. Hence the coldest tempers belong generally in politics and philanthropy to the deepest thinkers, the safest guides, and the most successful adminis- trators. Frederick the Great said that if he wanted to ruin a province he would appoint a Professor as governor. But so long as the Pro- fessor is hard-hearted he cannot do much harm. Tender-hearted statesmen are more to be dreaded than Professors, perhaps even more than despots or adventurers. Cabinet Ministers who aspire to be both worthy and successful administrators must borrow some of the sublime and impassive calm with which Nature regards the lingering miseries and the slow progress of the world. The futility of tenderness in the sphere of government is exemplified in Parliament. In the House of Lords the Earl of Camperdown once called attention to the afl"airs in the Island of Vatersay. The island is the property of Lady Gordon Cathcart, a landowner who has dis- charged her duties in the highest and most dignified form ; but high character is immaterial to this case. Vatersay was coveted by certain crofters, who raided and seized the property, which they still hold. The microbe of filibustering, hav- ing flourished in Ireland, has leaped the Channel, and finds a host in the Islands and Highlands of Scotland. The situation created by the crofters' LADY CATHCAET'S CASE 41 seizure of Vatersay is inconvenient to rulers who ignore tlie unseen foundations of human' society. The Lord Advocate, who is responsible"* for law and order in Scotland, does not interfere, and, since lawlessness is contagious, official condonation of filibustering can have but one result. The contagion has already begun to spread, and has extended actually to an estate owned by the Government. Deep sympathy is felt by right-thinking men for the sufferings of the crofters and their families. Tender-hearted statesmen are in office. The dUemma is cruel. On the one side is the thankless but elementary gduty of enforcing law and order with the incidental disadvantage of losing the crofter vote ; on the other is the desire of warm- hearted men to avoid harsh treatment of a brave peasantry with large families of braw callants and blue-eyed lassies clamom'ing for porridge. As no gardener worth his salt permits blackbirds to steal black currants whatever young birds may be nestling at home, so no civilised Govern- ment can allow the crofters to seize Lady Gordon Cathcart's property. The sanctity of ownership in Vatersay is neither greater nor less than that of the contents of Hunt and Roskell's window in Bond Street or the furniture of the room in which you, kind reader, peruse this argument. A year ago it was only necessary to apply physical force to the eviction of raiders of one property ; now there are two ; soon there will be four. Is it an exaggeration to say that in this world it is the business of the wise to counteract the efforts of the good ? Ministers may be good but not wise. 42 IN THE OPEN The misery of the crofters is acute, but the miseries that follow lawlessness are immeasurably greater. There are two other subjects now before Parlia- ment and the public upon which light may be thrown by the study of Nature in the early hours. Mr. John Burns's Town Planning and Housing Bill is in strict harmony with the teachings of the spring. It does not attempt to accomplish at a stroke the work that will require a generation to carry through, but it does introduce law and order into the creation of new homes where English children are born and will grow up. The houses of the masses are unbeautiful, unhealthy, and joyless, and this not from malignity or avarice in the majority of cases, but from our inveterate national habit of muddling through and letting things slide. The German plan of town extensions and suburb building imitates that of the bees. The hexagonal cells of the hive contain no bee slums ; each dwelling is fit for the shelter of efficient bees. Slum landlords and jerrybuilders are unknown among bees, wasps, or ants ; and the existence of a home-wrrecking bird criminal, like the cuckoo, is so mysterious an exception to the general rule of Nature as to emphasise the perfection of the housing arrangements enforced by instinct on dumb creatures, as they are called, though nobody knows whether their conversation does not excel our own. If the laws of Nature in their fierceness and scope are distinctly masculine, the minute adaptation of means to ends, attention to detail, and inexhaust- ible capacity for sacrifice is distinctly feminine. TERTULLIAN'S WOMAN 43 In the campaign which women are now conducting they follow the methods of Nature, and therefore will succeed. People who can investigate truth closely and judge it fairly are seldom those who are willing to die for a faith or a cause. Tertullian was needlessly violent when he said, ' Woman, thou art the gate of Hell,' but Tertullian was willing to die for his scholastic nonsense, and was therefore a greater force than a greater philosopher. The women to-day are acting as though they were ready to die for their opinions. It may be that they see only a little way- — that they see that little clearly and think that they see all. It may be that they see only one side and are confident that there is no other ; they are so positive in their belief in their cause that many of them have encountered martyrdom, thereby complying with one of the conditions of success taught us by Nature — willingness to die. Fanaticism is neces- sary to the success of every creed. If all men had been deep thinkers, William, Lord Kussell, would never have died on the scaii'old nor Cranmer at the stake. The success of the women's move- ment was assured from the time they began to suffer, and success will be reached, not when they get the vote, but when the votes of their repre- sentatives have secured in the interests of humanity readjustment of the sex question, reform of the marriage laws, and consultation with women on all matters relating to home, children, property, and public morals. The fact that I am opposed to women suffrage is immaterial. I see it coming, and impartial analysis reveals the reason. Women have begun to study Nature. That is to say, tlioy copy the male in using tooth and clnw. Tlie 44 IN THE OPEN Talmud tells us that : ' Iron breaks stone. ; fire melts iron ; water extinguishes fire ; the clouds drink up the water ; the storm dispels the clouds ; man withstands the storm ; fear unmans man ; wine dispels fear ; sleep overcomes wine ; and death is the master of sleep.' Nature reveals all but the conquest of death. That is another story. A DREAM OF A FOREST When macliinery under Cobdenism has disin- herited an inconvenient crowd of unemployed, a Royal Commission seeks a solution of the problem in resort to forestry. Mowgli's mouth would have watered at the Report of the Royal Commission on Afforestatioi^ in the United Kingdom. The Commissioners were not originally set to work on the problem of how to end unemployment by planting trees. They were appointed to consider quite a different subject — Coastal Erosion. When the Unemployed question loomed ahead our rulers bethought themselves of the usual device of mandarins in a difficulty — a Royal Commission. To escape the need for appointing a new Com- mission, the trusty and well-beloved Erosion authorities, with an addition of six new members, were directed to^ inquire into the practicability of a State System of.Forestry, with special reference to the unemployed, who are chiefly townsmen. The question was not only difficult, it was insoluble. ) Nevertheless, the Commissioners answer the question by cheerfully proposing an expenditure of four hundred and fifty-five millions sterling, which in eighty years' time should be represented by property worth five bundled and sixty-two million pounds, or about one hundred and seven 46 IN THE OPEN million pounds in excess of the total cost involved in its creation. The amount is prodigious, but it would be a cheap price to pay for the abolition of poverty, and, in any case, we are set a-thinking about trees and woodlands and the sad case of the disinherited workless. Englishmen keep a soft place in their hearts for fisher-folk and foresters. The death of the Hull trawlers from Rojdestvenski's guns excited the public to a paroxysm of indigna- tion, which would never have been forthcoming had the slaughtered men been solicitors, itinerant musicians, expert witnesses, bailiffs, or tax- collectors. Had the Russian Admiral slain English woodsmen, the national anger and sorrow would have been little less. Robin Hood was a bandit, but, being a forester, his memory is still dear to each new generation of boys. Robin Hood is the ' dearest, darlingest ' hero in most nurseries. The English character, however, unlike the German, has received little permanent impress from the woods, yet a love of ' forest peace ' Ungers deep down in the complex personality of the modern English. To the German, ' waldesruh ' is a national gift. Teuton blood flows from forest ancestors. Inherited from a race born and bred in the vast woods which once covered the North of Europe, Teuton taste for sylviculture is undying. The sea rather than the woods has moulded the English character, yet the chorus of approval with which the Socialistic proposals of the Royal Commission have been received by nearly the whole of the Press is a tribute to the fact that the fascination of forests still lingers among the dwellers in great cities. Woods, like those of Earl Bathurst at Cirencester, WOODS 47 the Marquis of Bath at Longleat, the Earl of Carnarvon at Highclere, or the Earl of Yarborough at Brooldesby, of Savernake Forest on the Marquis of Ailesbury's late estate, or the Earl of Leicester's Norfolk property, are among the stateliest possessions owned by man. Gardens fade, houses decay or are burnt down. The life of the best appointed yacht is a few years. Diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and pearls are kept under lock and key, and cause as much anxiety as pleasure to their owners. A forest of well- grown timber is beautiful every day in the year, and possesses character of its own so subtle and elusive as to feed the imagination and inspire the soul of the hardest and the gentlest of mankind. But with all our instinctive love for forestry we know little about it. Even British architects have little knowledge of woodland lore. One instance of this may be gathered from a paragraph which recently appeared in the Times : ' A Nottingham manufactory burnt out to the top from a fire originating in the second storey ; but, although the floor lay a yard thick in hot clinkers and melted machinery, the fire did not get downstairs because the floors were of poplar.' Considering the London County Council requires staircases in workshops, &c., to be of teak, this is a case where authorities with better knowledge would use their influence for the floors to be of English poplar, which would create a demand for a timber which is now almost a drug in the market. Poplar wood only is used for railway brakes. Germans and French are a long way ahead of us in forest lore. 48 IN THE OPEN Every woodland has character of its own. Great trees, like great men, shed the comforting assurance of stability and continuity of purpose, and are always interesting. In the stillest night of mid- summer the woods are never silent, the listener may hear the stealthy crack of stirring timber in the living tree. Oaks that crack on the sultry nights continue to crack creepily centuries after men have sawn them asunder and converted them into settles, wardrobes, deed-boxes, tables, and chairs. Does anybody know why old furniture cracks in the long night as though it were talking with relations hewn from the same tree 1 The moods of the forest are infinite. During the tempests that rage in October and December I watch great trees fling their arms through the air as though writhing in pain. Long study of sylvan moods in many lands leaves the impression that trees suffer in storm and stress, or at least that they are not wholly unconscious, as dwellers in houses are wont to think. Fauns and fairies, pixies, elves, trolls, and Robin Goodfellows still linger in the shadow of our English trees. The instinct of trees is animal. Near a country house on the east coast, built on the site of an old monastery, seven ancient cedars shade a portion of the lawn. That these reverend vegetables retain intelligent desire to survive is proved by the following fact : On one side of the lawn is a broad walk where it is the annual custom to place large tubs filled with good soil in which hydrangeas, aloes, and pampas grass are planted. These tubs are pierced with holes for drainage pin-poses, and every year the rootlets of the cunning, unscrupulous AN OLD OAK 49 cedars discover the holes and rob the plants of their rations. If the cedars neither smell nor see good soil in a perforated tub, how do they manage each succeeding summer to gain a dainty meal ? To fall in love with trees is as simple as falling in love with maids, and the passion once formed never dies. Trees are like men — it takes all sorts to make their world. Elms are treacherous as Black Hand murderers from their habit of shedding a branch as a lobster sheds a claw. Many a good man has been murdered by an elm. Immemorial elms, moreover, cofhn the white man, but, although praised by the poets and flattered by the painters, they are doubtful friends. Not so the oak, the beech, the fir, and^the birch. Tens of thousands of oaks, about eighty or ninety years ago, were planted by our grandfathers to build the battleships of this century. Brought into the world for one purpose, these oaks find themselves superseded. Wooden walls are memories, but they may yet have their revenge in the future. Krupp's steel may be super- seded by a new material at present undreamed of by the chemist which will excel the armoured plates of the new Toneraire as armoured plating exceeds the strength and resistance of the oaken Temeraire of Turner's picture. The oak at its best is unique, or, as a great London newspaper put it the other day, ' one of the most unique things ' in Nature, as though there were degrees in the unique. In a forest I know is a veteran oak. Its bark is in folds reticulated like the wrinkles of an aged peasant face. The stem of the tree suggests that at one time the wood was liquid and was poured into its present mould, and, as the children say, 50 IN THE OPEN ' struck so,' like cooling lava or tlie ripples on sea sand fossilised a million ages back. Behind tliis old oak tree a forester's fire raises a column of blue smoke. The blue is heavenly blue — the blue of the sky or of southern sea in the sunshine. Beside the crackling sticks reclines a man in worn velveteens. Bread-and-cheese and a kipper grilled over his cheer- ful fire form a meal more delicious than the freak banquets of jaded ' multis ' in New York. He would not change his lot with the Lord Mayor, for his billet is one of the few remaining posts in old England where work is joy. All the morning he has been ferreting rabbits, so as to give the young sapUngs a chance to live. Pheasants he loves. But rabbits are vermin. Rabbits live for six months and eat one halfpenny a day — seven-and-sixpence each. Rabbits eat twenty million pounds' worth of woodlands and crop annually, and account for much of our backwardness in forestry. The forester envies no man, but mankind in the streets may well envy him. Tlie sun in winter picks out the beauties of oak, beech, and birch with dis- criminating touch. In the summer you may but guess the texture of the stems of the trees, but the clear, bright light of winter lays bare the secrets of beauty that are hidden during three out of the four seasons. The beech after two hundred years, for instance, resembles nothing so much as an elephant's hide — I mean the jungle elephant, wild and free, not the groomed specimens in the Zoological Gardens. Pollarded beeches of great age have a ' gollywog ' appearance, as discovered by Mr. Houghton Towneley in his remarkable camera studies of the forest. It might be thought that expert photographers could portray at any time FOEEST PKIM^VAL 51 the character of tree land. As a matter of fact, there are but three or four days in the year when it is possible to record forest scenery as it really is. When branches are bare, actinic rays are weak ; when they are strong, leaves exclude the light and prevent the making of a good picture. Forest primaeval is irresistible. The unexpected and incredible linger there in the twentieth century. I have seen a woodsman in the tropics strike one blow with his axe in a tree apparently sound. When the axe was withdrawn a stream of water spurted out with a force sufficient to knock a strong man dow^n, and the flow continued for over an hour. The tree was of hard wood, some eighty or ninety feet high in stem, and hollow throughout. A column of water had been waiting an outlet for an unknown number of years. I have seen a tree fall as a cylinder of forty feet of solid honey and wax deposited by generations of bees. Forest fires, like burning cities, are unimaginably grand. In the Nilgherrv Hills and in the mountain zone of Ceylon it is the habit of planters to fell forest by the square mile and to leave the fallen timber to dry. In the. middle of the hot season the ' burn ' takes place, and on a still day the column of fire and smoke rises straight into the upper air, there forming a cumulus cloud of purest white like Kin- chinginga. The Buddhists in those parts on the occasion of a forest fire call upon all living creatures to escape, but many of them die, notwithstanding the warning given them by the followers of the great Lord Buddha. e The dangers of the nation are increased by some e2 52 IN THE OPEN clieap newspapers printed on paper manufactured from the pulp of clieap wood. Forests are felled to make cheap reputations for cheap politicians, and a fool's paradise is created in which the simple souls among us live and do not thrive. I am honoured by an ever-growing correspondence with Frontiersmen as familiar with the silences of forest and the teaching of the plain as we with the din of the street. These men write from all parts of the world, and their letters unfailingly show states- manlike appreciation of the pitfalls and dangers that beset their Mother Country. They preach from the same text. They have graduated in the same University — the open air. They deplore the bogus education inflicted on the people by pedants and the lamentable failure of our great public schools to turn out men with the knowledge wanted in Greater Britain. It is beyond reasonable question that forestry, like shoemaking, theology, or war, needs careful study of a kind that unem- ployed townsmen do not possess and amateurs never acquire. Unemployed rural labourers in the winter may profitably be employed in planta- tion work ; but if practical foresters are allowed to decide the character of their labour they will reject the class for whom the Afforestation scheme is designed. No ' monkeying ' is possible with trees intended to flourish. Civilisation rests on field and forest ; never on cities or the higgling of the market. THE CALL FROM THE WILD Each century suffers from the defects of its qualities. In the eighteenth century hygiene was little understood. Decisions to engage in war were made by statesmen who ate enormous quantities of meat and drank freely of strong ale and loaded port. Their digestions were impau'ed by undue consumption of salted food, and the irritability caused by such a diet perhaps led to unnecessary wars. Then, as now, a general election was termed an appeal to the country, though fresh air was feared like the plague, and the humours generated in unventilated rooms were reflected in the unbalanced opinions of politicians and writers who are still reckoned as monuments of wisdom. In those days events like the ' jump- ing ' of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria and the Bulgarian Declaration of Independence would have led to instant war. Statesmen then were not compelled to live with their ears to the ground, and therefore they acted from impulse more often than is practicable nowadays. The methods of the Earl of Chatham differ from the methods of Sir Edward Grey, but the policy is the same, albeit the task of the Foreign Secretary to-day is harder than that of the first Pitt. A century ago the sudden and simultaneous fractiu'c of a solemn 54 IN THE OPEN International Treaty by three great powers would have mobilised our army in the twinkling of an eye. Our ancestors would not have stayed to inquire whether Potsdam was manipulating puppets in Vienna and at Tirnova. Ding-dong was the order of the day when wars were thought out on British beef and port wine. We are more cautious now, both as to diet and diplomacy. In the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson's Gargantuan appetite and his dislike of the country were responsible for his parochial prejudices as ' a true born Englishman/ not only against foreign countries, but against Ireland and Scotland. ' Young America ' was his hete-noire. In 1778 Johnson said, ' I am willing to love all mankind except an American,' and he called them ' rascals, robbers, and pirates,' exclaiming ' I would burn and destroy them.' Intemperance in meat and drink, want of ozone and exercise, are responsible for some of the decisions of Ministers in the eighteenth century which swelled the National Debt, upon which we still pay interest. If the eighteenth century was full blooded, plethoric, fiercely impulsive, and irascible, the twentieth century is anaemic, placid, and finical. Nothing matters now. The note of the twentieth century is a tendency to compromise or arbitrate on things impossible of settlement except by fighting, to shirk the graver issues of life, to drift with the stream, and to shout with the bigger crowd. The atmosphere of great cities, with its excess of carbonic acid and deficiency of ozone, indirectly influences the formation of an artificial public opinion. Nearly all the editors and chief BILIOUS SOCIALISM 55 writers of the newspapers that create and reflect public opinion live in cities, or at most breathe suburban air during a portion of the twenty-four hours. Of nature uncontaminated they know little, and the result is shown in the luxuriant growth of ideas that depend for existence on the intellectual soil of cities. Were a census taken of the Socialists of Ejigland, Ireland, and Scotland, it would probably be found that ninety out of a hundred are townsmen who waste no time in thinking about Nature. Socialism is bilious from want of fresh air. People who live theii' lives in the open are individualists, because the principles of natural selection are incessantly forced on their attention. Four million peasants of France, the Irish peasantry, and the few small freeholders who still linger in England are the bitterest opponents of collectivism for the same reason that the birds of the air, with one criminal exception, adopt the family as the unit of bird life, and build, discover, or inherit their nests. Birds, like men, have their housing problem. Under the rule of modern forestry all the old trees are felled in order to make room for the growth of timber with a higher cash value. Old and decayed trees are used by birds of the greatest importance to agriculture and forestry. When the old decayed trees are removed for utilitarian reasons the natural nesting-places of useful birds breeding in holes become rarer and rarer. Of all the nesting-holes used by the smaller birds a prime favourite is a deserted or unin- habited woodpecker hole. The synchronous discovery of a vacant woodpecker nest is often 56 IN THE OPEN the signal for a struggle between rivals of equal strength. Careful study of the subject by Baron von Berlepsch, an authority on artificial nests, induced him to imitate woodpecker holes and to fix two thousand of them on the woods of his estate. Two years ago the Forest of Hainich, which surrounded the Baron's home woods, was stripped entirely bare by the larvae of a little moth. Baron von Berlepsch's wood was un- touched ; it actually stood out among the remaining woods like a green oasis. At a distance of a little more than a quarter of a mile further traces of the plague of larvae were apparent, and at a distance of half a mile it was in full force, showing the radius of protection obtained by the solution of the birds' housing problem. The abundant use of scientific nesting-boxes in the Prussian woods is an object-lesson to mankind of what may be done to protect life and pioperty by the provision of suitable homes for men. England's want is not old-age pensions for in- capables, but pure air. It is true you cannot live on fresh air, but you cannot think sanely or have a healthy body without it. How many travellers who have slept out of doors do not look back with amazement to the extraordinary sense of health and well-being that was the result of slumbers in the open ? The South African AVar taught thousands the secret of Pan. The bedroom of the future will contain a window the size of one of the walls, and it is a puzzle to know why the promoters of the garden cities have not seen the necessity of taking proper steps to revolutionise the sleeping habits of the British PAN'S SECEET 57 public. Cottagers in the country and slum- dwellers alike dread night air almost as much as the irritable, beef-eating, port-wine drinking statesmen of the eighteenth century. Some doctors still forbid .open windows in cases of pneumonia, when twice-breathed air is killing the panting patient. Queen Victoria conferred few greater benefits upon her people than by setting them an example of eating and working in the open air. Every house should have a broad verandah, for there are few days in a year when it is impossible to eat, sleep, or work in the open air for at least some portion of the twenty-four hours. Since the proclamation was made at the dawn of the Christian era that the great Pan was dead his worshippers have dwindled, and the fear of death and of pain has increased among the dwellers in the great cities. Fear of death scarcely exists among Asiatics, because, living in the open air, their religion and their experience tell them that death and life are ever entwined in a sti'uggle for mastery ; that the victor of to-day is the corpse of to-morrow. Under Asiatic skies death is regarded as no less benign than birth, and the Man with the Scythe, as the German Ballad says, ' is not wild ' or to be feared as an enemy. The fear of death is a w^holesome incentive to exertion, although the Chancellor of the Excliequer declares that the State can do something to protect men from poverty arising from misconduct ; which, being translated, is a preference for piracy rather than the production of wealth. This notion of the ' State ' (which is nothing but you and me) mothering people who are already doomed 58 IN THE OPEN is streetcraft, not statecraft. Tlie world is now guided by the lawyers, who are trained to believe what they want to believe, and are therefore the most efficient of blind guides to people who don't mind being led into the ditch so long as the word ' ditch ' is not mentioned. Countrymen — worshippers of Pan — have been the world's greatest leaders. Abraham Lincoln's University was not the Law Courts, but the forest ; and Kruger, who could scarcely spell, more than held his own in diplomacy, and for force of character compared well with the finest flower of Balliol or the states- men of Berlin and of London. The overwhelming political influence of the towns, though a corrective to the selfishness of the land-owning oligarchy which preceded it, is fraught with new peril. The country and not the town is the force that really tells in the grip of empire. The majority of our leaders being townsmen, necessarily acquire their knowledge of Nature from books or from superficial and fleeting observation. For five months in every year Nature is represented in the towns only by fog, rain, and snow, and the necessity for fires. Seventy-seven per cent, of the governed who are dwellers in streets have no chance of meditating on the rigid processes of natural law. Its existence, being forgotten by the multitude, is ignored by their rulers. They ignore the inexorable conditions of survival, the consequences of error in meddling with the buzz-saw of Nature, and the substitution of fleeting impulse for enduring principle. The great God Pan sometimes startled travellers CLUB OPINION 59 by suddenly appearing to them, whence comes the phrase ' panic fear/ The undue ascendency of townspeople in the councils of the nation produces conditions favourable to panics. Panics about war, finance, disease, and politics come only to people ignorant of Pan. The remedy, though not simple, is known. It is nothing less than recourse to the opinions of those whose judgments are not enfeebled by the unnatural conditions of town life. A popular belief among townsmen is that countrymen are simple, easily deceived, and prone to credulity. The reverse is the fact. Om- kinsmen in the provinces and the outlying parts of the empire have clearer vision than those who live in the centre of things, not because they are endowed with greater intellects or more powerfid imaginations, but because they are removed from the mephitic influence of the great city. Who attaches the slightest weight to what is called club opinion ? The clubs are always wrong. Efficient naval men and military men acquire good judgment because their activities are necessarily carried on much in the open air, and they are compelled by professional conditions to look at things as thfty are. The abler the soldier the more clearly he faces truth ; the gTeater the admiral the more clearly he penetrates the design of his unseen enemy. Townsmen rarely face unpleasant facts. The slaughter of men in battle by land or sea is murder committed in the interest of a nation. The science of war tells us the conditions imder which such murder can be committed japidly and with impunity. There is no morality in war or international relations, and no more chivalry between nations 60 IN THE OPEN than between climbing plants growing in tlie same patch of jungle. There is nothing more cruel than kindness, nothing more merciless than mercy in war. and yet townsmen yelp for humanity, thus prolonging war and multiplying wounds, disease, and death in war. Political townsmen invented the idea of camps for enemy's women and children in time of war, thereby prolonging indefinitely untold miseries and slaughtering more children and women than would have perished otherwise. The Jewish Jahveh refused permission to the defeated enemy to recuperate. Women, children, cattle, crops, and men were to be destroyed — true mercy for the fittest to survive. Townsmen have introduced the sentiments of humanity and love into war, and to-day sentiment is triumphant, although the struggle for existence ignores sentiment, and will ignore it during the next war, which will be won by the nation that most closely adheres to the example of Nature. The goods and chattels of men who breed children unfit for war, and who believe that they are inspired by sentiments of love and benevolence in the struggle for existence, will fall into the hands of those who recognise that war is not a game, but a case of your life or mine. Countrymen are the most valuable human element in national life, becaiise they are normally in training, and because the open air imparts a sobriety of judgment and sense in action which is denied to those who are led by men who persuade themselves that, having acquired the art of splitting hairs, imagine they thus become the pets of Nature. THE WAY OF LIFE THE INEVITABLE From too much love of living. From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life Hves for ever ; That dead men lise up never ; That even tlie weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Resentment against the inevitable is too common to be unnatural. The impotent despairing grief of women wounded in their affections protests vigorously against the scheme of life that brings them pain. A motlier losing an only child broods over the burning injustice of owning a cliikl whom to love is inevitable, whose suffering is long and irremediable, and then of removing it for ever at the moment when it is held most dear. The separation of death is resented. But is such separation absolute or inevitable ? Will our friend- ships outlast life ? Ascetics — even Englisli ascetics — so train their souls and keep their bodies under, that they hear voices and see sights other ears are too gross to hear and other eyes too dulled to 62 THE WAY OF LIFE see. These Western yogis feel and see the lost one : invisible, inaudible, intangible to other mortals. How naturally we turn from the thronged streets and the full city to be alone with the Alone, for the same reason that the sailor, after serving through a commission in the tropics, on seeing once more the clouded sky of Britain thanked his Maker that there were ' no more of them damn'd blue skies.' To satisfy the longing for the open is the only medicine, except work, for the surfeit of fellow- creatureS that comes from the pressure of contact with them. One brings away from those vast crowds a general sense of the inevitableness of things, of the folly of trying to dodge fate, to outwit destiny, or to turn by a hair's breadth the operation of the forces that surround us. Nevertheless, life in the open teaches us to fight against the inevitable while there is breath in the body, to refuse to be hypnotised by fate. Standing under one of the great oaks in the forest near my home, I was thinking of the crowds and wondering how things inevitable differed in kind from things avoidable, and how to distinguish the two. At that moment a plump young cock pheasant almost at my feet began to slither swiftly through the dead bracken. Ashe scooted away the sun gleamed on his burnished neck feathers like one of the old German beakers made of multi-coloured crystal. The bird evidently had his own view of things to be avoided. I was one of them. Every wild creature with experience of man tries to avoid him because he is a death- dealer. Though death is certain to all it is not certain to any here and now. Fear of the death A COLLISION GS that is inevitable is all but universal, and the wonder is that such orders as the Victoria Cross and the Maria Theresa suffice to persuade men to risk antedating inevitable death. The Order of Maria Theresa is coveted by Austrian officers because it is only conferred for successful deeds of daring, without authority or against authority, but where failure means death for disobeying orders. Nelson deserved it at Copenhagen, Rhodes at the Matoppos, and Fisher at the Admiraltv. When the seemingly inevitable happens in matters of death or of love the bitterest thought of all is a suspicion that perhaps it was not inevit- able. Admiral Tryon miscalculated the number of cables between the two divisions of his fleet manoeuvring off the Syrian coast. Collision be- came inevitable in consequence of the evolution as ordered — unless the captain of a certain battleship, in his turn, ordered something to be done which he did not order to be done. Collision then became inevitable. Sorrow for the loss of H.M.S. Victoria is greater because the collision was not inevitable until the last phase of the evolution. Calamities like the sinking of H.M.S. Victoria do not come under the heading of the inevitable, nor is there any reason but the natural pessimism of overstrained humanity why the term ' inevit- able ' should be applied exclusively to disagreeable things. There is no reason why joy should not be as certain as death. When a man and a woman meet too late or too early in life to comply with the 64 THE WAY OF LIFE conditions imposed by tlie existing system of family life the ensuing tragedy is generally described as ' inevitable.' Pythagorean glamour is thrown over the irregular combination of two roving souls. They themselves are apt to think of lawless bliss as fate. ' Fate willed it.' That is the whine of the weak when condoning surrender to the freaks of destiny. Few loves are inevitable. In practice love is largely under control of the wall. Cases of the grande passion that bring immortality to lovers are few and far between in our scrappy epoch. I have heard of two cases in twenty years — that is, of a love where everything is risked and the world well lost by a man and by a woman for joy that is not impaired by time, disaster, satiety, poverty, or wealth. In our day if people do not love much they love often. Under the plea of the ' inevit- able ' they change the beloved object with the frequency of poultry. Crowded cities disorder the affections. Country mice love each other more heartily than town mice, and when they hate they hate more bitterly. Seamen and countrymen insensibly absorb from the open air the perspective of the inevitable. One of the points in which the townsman is better off than the countryman is his disrespect for power and his knowledge that things are rarely what they seem. The countryman is suspicious, but drifts under the sway of the inevitable. He accepts Nature's drafts at their face value. The currency is some- times debased. The inevitable is not flaunted before the townsman. He has chances and changes in life which are not ground out by the mills of God in Nature, but by the fantastic moods of markets and merchants. DOWN WITH PESSIMISTS 65 I have been specially led to consider the subject of inevitability by hearing the view expressed by so many people on the subject of the future of this country. Unless I am hopelessly out of touch with the thought of thoughtful people a general belief exists that this country's downfall is * inevitable.' That is the view, not of one or two, but of the majority of the clearest minds known to me. Notwithstanding the gravity of the evidence cited to warrant despair, I differ. That the destruction of this country is not inevit- able and can well be avoided is capable of demon- stration. Let us admit the worst. The emigration of men with small fortunes of a few thousand pounds is too general to be healthy. The decay of national physique is ominous. The continued sale of English securities and the investment abroad of every penny resulting from such sales is a fact that tells against the prospects of a country fed with foreign food paid for by foreign trade. The destruction of private property in land and the loss of security hitherto given by the State to the owners of land marks degeneration in the capacity of the ruling caste. This degeneration must be paid for by the nation. Still, there is nothing ' inevitable ' in the continuance of the policy that results in national degeneration. It can be reversed, and will be reversed when fresh air is introduced into public life as Khodes let in fresh air to Cape politics. When it is found, as it will be found, that the Budget clauses directed against the undeveloped land of dukes do not touch the great ground landlords of London but strike at the struggling builders of the suburbs, an outcry will be raised by working men who are reduced 66 THE WAY OF LIFE to penury by the ruining of master builders. Whatever may happen to him, a politician who shoots at a ducal pheasant and hits a suburban sparrow is not likely to be trusted long with the Exchequer gun. The swing of the pendulum has begun. People begin to see that vindictive laws directed against one class disorder the body of the nation. They do not all see it, but some already do see it. Their number is increasing. Nor can I find any real justification for the general belief among thoughtful wealthy people that the country is doomed owing to the spread of class hatred and to the union of religion with cujDidity. Admitting that there is a revolutionary feeling in the air, both in town and country, there is no reason why the revolutionary spirit should ripen into rebelHon, nor why the predicted use of physical force should be inevitable. All we want is to wake up and pull up. The discontent and insurgency that exist among the rural population are quite intelligible. The contrast between the luxury of country houses and the penury of country cottages on all but the best managed estates appeals vividly to a population that has received for forty years an education teaching them to express their discontent but giving them no training in patience, in patriotism, in the relations between cause and effect, or between marriage and food supply. In some parts of the country where the peasantry are indigenous, tradition has handed down from father to son the belief that the land has been taken from them. Land that is commonable — not common land — THE LABOUEEE'S WIFE 67 has undoubtedly been absorbed into private ownership by the wealthy, and there is, therefore, a certain substratum of reason for the dull, shapeless and implacable resentment felt by agi'icultural labourers against farmers and owners of land. Of the labourer's passion to own a bit of land for his very own there is no doubt. The owner of a farm in the Midlands who divided it for sale into eighteen holdings had five hundred applications within a few days of his intention becoming known. I cannot see on either side in politics any vigorous signs of statesmen gTasping the fact of land-love or of doing anything practical to gratify it honestly and healthily. To confiscate the land of A. and give it to B. in return for a State rent does not gratify B.'s sense of ownership and does destroy the stabihty of society by making A, an emigrant or an insurgent. Imagine yourself the wife of a rural labourer with five children. She never gets an hour to herself from one end of the year to another. Her Ufe is one continual toil of fret and grinding labour. It is natural that she should resent the soft lives of the fine ladies who whirl past her hidden, like the yashmaked ladies of a pasha, in motor- veils. It is natural that she and her out-of-door husband should hearken to the city-bred charlatans who tell them that the squire and the duke are respon- sible for poverty, and that the squire's acres and the ducal parks and farms are theirs by right and shall be given to them when the dukes and squires are taxed out of existence. If equality does not harm me, why, as Walt Whitman wrote, should not the others ' be given the same chances and f2 68 THE WAY OF LIFE riglits as myself as if it were not indispensable to my own riglits that others possess the same ' ? Whether the better things or the worse are inevitable depends mainly on the fibre of your will- power. People talk about universal flight being ' inevitable,' scarcely remembering that vast and almost innumerable discoveries and improvements are necessary before that object can be obtained, each of them depending on the will, imagination, and skill of individual human beings perhaps unborn. Nothing is inevitable that depends on men to bring it about. Minute alteration in the composition of the air would stop the inevitable in every department of life. The comet experts, as they call themselves, have told us that the tail cannot touch the earth, and if it did touch it no hurt to man or beast would follow. How do they know ? The more we know how little we know, the less use is there for such words as impossible, in- exorable, and inevitable. PLAYING THE GAME As seen by other nutioiis, as they beUeve them- selves to be, and as they really are, the British are three different peoples. Dry-nursed by Nature, the inhabitants of these islands have moulded their character and their destiny under happier con- ditions than are enjoyed by any other country in the world. Leisure sufficient to gladden their lives with sport was the consequence of these cojiditions. Britain's position on the North Sea is similar to that of Plymouth breakwater to the inhabitants of the Three Towns. Nobody can enter or leave Plymouth Sound without passing the breakwater, either at one end or the other. Nobody can leave Northern Europe by sea without passing under the guns of Britain. Our soil, climate, and minerals are exceptional. How good the English climate is nobody knows who has not lived abroad. The absence of scorpions, red ants, and mosquitoes is a boon the value of which is only appreciated after sojourn in the Tropics. Our east wind, which engenders short temper, also hardens the race and enables it to earn an average income of forty pounds per head against seventeen pounds per head of the inhabitants of the greatest milit;ny country. Newspaper oi>inioji is Itirgely the creation of people 70 THE WAY OF LIFE who avoid the English winter, making an annual practice of seeking gentler climates during the less agreeable months of the year. What the cumu- lative effect may be on the stamina of those who shirk the English winter nobody knows ; but if the endurance .of hardness is essential to the forma- tion of fine character British habitues of the Riviera, Orotava, Funchal, and Cairo are suffici- ently de- Anglicised to disquahfy them as types of English thought and character. Rich people are cosmopolitan. The wealthy of all races belong to one community, and are often detached from the people to whom they belong. To judge fairly of typical English life and thought we shall not go far wrong if we remember Napoleon's saying that his military success was due to his ' j)oor gentlemen.' The quality of England's poor gentle- men is exhibited in the ward-rooms of the navy; in the mess-rooms of the line regiments and of the scientific branches of the army ; in the bungalows of Lidia, West Africa, the shacks of Canada, and on the stoeps of the Cape ; and also in the quarters of the Metropolitan police. The services in questio3i are unique and have one thing in common — they are the product of a sport-loving country. In England there is no higher term of praise than to speak of a man as a ' sportsman,' or to describe conduct as ' sportsmanlike.' Sport is not a bad religion. The genuine sportsmim is intent on the game, not victory ; on the goal, not the prize ; on the spirit of the game, not the result. Are not these qualities spiritual ? English sport boasts of ancient lineage, aiid the worship of games by playing them seriously has trained the THE ARGOT OF SPORT 71 bodies and minds of generations of Englishmen, and has trahied them well. The extent to which sport enters into an Englishman's soul is shown in his vocabulary and by colouring his outlook on public and private affairs. If war is the sport of kings the English are kingly, for war is a sport to them, and they even learn its rules by the ' War Game.' The late Lord SaUsbury was jiot consciously a sportsman, but he used the language of sport when he wished to be understood by the man in the street. He told his country- men not that they had made a mistake in the Crimean War but that they ' had put their money on the wrong horse.' In our naval discussions the odds for and against our chances with a foreign power are described in the language of the rhig. Lord Rosebery's love of racing almost reconciled the Opposition to his Premiership, and when Mr. Roosevelt searches the world over for shikaris he picks Mr. Selous and Sir Alfred Pease — English sportsmen of the best. The idiom of the national game suffuses our speech. A dirty trick is 'not cricket.' To accomplish a diffi- cult feat single-handed is to do a thing ' off one's own bat.' When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman died and Mr. As(}uith reigned in his stead the commonest phrase in print and conversation was ' a good change in the bowling.' In the army a man never ' consults a doctor ' he gets himself ' vetted.' To ' take it in his stride ' is the equivalent of doing a thing easily. ' To buck up ' is a phrase that has passed into the terminology of war and peace. The Americans use the phraseology of minmg, pork-packing, of wheat growing, and of railway 72 THE WAY OF LIFE administration in the same way as we use the language of sport. The hostility of the average Englishman to Woman's Suffrage is the unexpressed belief that the majority of women are not sportsmanlike ; that they see nothing contrary to right conduct in taking advantages which would disqualify them under the rules of the Rugby Union, the Amateur Athletic Association, the Amateur Boxing Associa- tion, and the M.C.C. Women must overcome a solid mass of masculine suspicion as to ' not playing the game ' before they rule us. The lady who obtained entrance to the House of Commons by pledging herself to refrain from doing that which she afterwards did illustrated the habit of the feminine mind to which men object. She was proud of her cunning and her duplicity ; boasted of it. Ugh ! That sport develops a parasitical fungus of bad characters is undeniable, but nine people out of ten feel safer with a sportsman than with a professional philanthropist, if money is in question. Wiseacres tell us that the existence of twelve hundred golf links in the United Kingdom agamst sixty-three in Germany explains the shortage of Dreadnoughts. Rubbish ! Fair play compels one to remember that victories in the past have generally been won against heavy odds. Nelson took a sportmg chance in attacking a numerically superior fleet at Trafalgar, and if the spirit of Nelson survives in the modern fleet we pay a poor compliment to the navy by breaking into a cold perspiration at the prospect of England's fleet PLAYING THE GAME 73 being less than twice as strong as that of a foreign power. Since only numbers can annihilate, it is right to provide numbers ; but, after all, a little more of the sportsman's spirit in political affairs would save England from the humiliating scares which dog the footsteps of all administrations. Frenchmen shoot little birds, Germans of the Junker class hmit the wild boar, Spaniards are devoted to bull-fighting, and Russians love bear- shooting, but all the sports of all the nations combined are but child's play compared with the part played for centuries by sport in our national existence. Young countries are too busy breaking the soil, creatmg communications, and defending themselves from savages, like the men of Natal and the Cape, to concentrate themselves on sport. Pecksniff and Gradgrind, accordhigly, draw un- favourable comparisons between the English and the rest of the world. Grappling with the raw material of Nature forms character and compels every citizen of young nations to ' play the game.' In an old country the necessity for heroic deeds, for strong physical exercise to win meat by killing things has passed away. But the sacred lamp is kept alive by love of sport in the hearts of the English. Naval officers succeed or fail in their careers largely according to the sincerity of their sporting instincts. Every gun-room in the fleet is a collection of young sportsmen in the making. From the age of thirteen they learn to ' play the game.' Wh»>n our educational system is reformed as the Prussian system was reformed after Jena, to meet national necessities, we shall see an 74 THE WAY OF LIFE extension, not a diminution, of the spirit of true sportsmanship. But why wait for a naval Jena ? The gravest defect of our elementary schools is the omission of the character-forming element which already moulds the cadets of the hunting and shooting families. The British working man, in spite of his leaders, is naturally a sportsman, and in spite of great temptations and evil influences he remains a sportsman at heart. I do not know the printer who sets up this type, but I would rather have him alongside me in a light place than any foreigner of the same class. Over- whelming proof of the true sporting spirit was given by the reserve during the Boer war. No power on earth could have compelled reservists to join the colours had they passively resisted, but the unanimous opinion that not to ' play the game ' is a dirty trick, pervades all classes of society. The vast power of the stewards of the Jockey Club rests on no other foundation. They may ruin socially any man, however high his rank. Although the club is self-elected and a strict oligarchy, from their decision there is no appeal ; they rule with a rod of iron, and their severity is accepted as the unwritten law of the land. The High Court has rightly never consented to give redress to a victim under Jockey Club laAV. The element of sport which enters organically into the English character accounts for some of the antipathy with which England is regarded by foreigners and some Colonists, and the indifference with which their dislike is received by Enghshmen. Americans, other than the intellectuals and the LOED CURZON'S DICTUM 75 wealthy, dislike us, not merely because the Irish have carried Anglophobia to the States, but because the manner of Englishmen unconsciously exhales indititerence to American opinion. Nothing strikes an Englishman visiting the United States for the first time more than the universal curiosity to know his opinion about things American. The average Londoner and the rural population of England do not care a row of pins what foreigners think of our country. It does not consciously concern them. Foreigners resent the indifference of the English sportsmen, who, so long as they are themselves conscious of ' playing the game,' don't care — in Lord Palmerston's phrase — ' a twopenny dam ' for the rest of the civilised world. The efEect of this sportsmanlike indifference to any point of view other than English is seen in its most dramatic form in the plains of India. With the exception of a few Anglicised chieftains, the two hundred races in our great dependency are not sportsmanlike, and do not understand English sportsmanship. The Kumar College and the Moslem College at Aligurh for the training of the sons of Indian nobles are architectural expressions by the rulers of India of their belief that training in sport is essential to the character of leaders of men. When Lord Curzon addressed the Convocation of Calcutta University on the subject of truthfulness and other virtues, he claimed, as the representative of a sportsmanlike nation, that ' the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception. ... In your epics truth will often be extolled as a virtue, but quite as often it is attended with some 76 THE WAY OF LIFE qualification, and very often praise is given to successful deception practised with honest aim/ The Babu, with or without a University degree, is disliked and despised because he is no sportsman. Macaulay is mainly responsible for the prevalence of the belief that the Bengali is a coward, but fear of death is unknown in the Ganges Valley. It is universal in the pleasant valley of the Thames. When the Chairman of the Plague Committee was murdered at Poona, together with a young officer who happened to be with him, the youth who conceived the deed was sentenced to death. He said to the Judge, ' You may hang me to- morrow, but my soul wiU at once pass into another body, and in sixteen years it will be fighting against the English again.' That is the fine spirit of the jungle, not the fine spirit of the playing field. The assassin was neither sportsman nor fanatic. Were England to abandon her task in India we should be succeeded within a few months by one of three powers — Germany, Russia, or Japan, perhaps by all three after a struggle for the prize. Not one of the three races is sportsmanlike, and whatever may be the defects of British rule in India it is just, and, like Dr. Temple at Rugby, if the British raj is ' a beast ' it is ' a just beast.' What other Power in the world has sent Governors of the type of Sir Thomas Munro, to whose memory in India a temple bell still rings a special chime ? To Munro's statue Hindu women to this day in passing drop their burden of grass or of rice and bow their heads. English sport has produced a caste of ruling men of the Munro type who INDIA AND SPOET 77 govern twenty-two per cent, of the inhabitants of the globe and occupy more than one-fifth of the earth's surface. Only two occupations matter much to Asiatics — the growth of food and the worship of God. If the Indian Civil Service, doing neither, is disliked, it is also misunderstood, and taking one thing with another, the denunciations of sport of which we hear so much would seem to be based on a misunderstanding of its true bearing on the English character. To ' play the game ' is to hold the Empire. THE LUST OF CONVERSION Desire to perpetuate tlie species and desire to spread opinion are the two wildest forces in human nature. Because of them, ferocity governs the rela- tions of man to woman, and the region of thought is invaded by the energies of the zealous. Desire to continue the race is the root-cause of modern war. Intolerance of rival creeds began the con- flicts of mediaeval Europe. Passionate attachment to the faith that is in us compels the assumption that we are right, and declares that those who differ from us are not only wrong but wicked. Many people pass through life imder the belief that they are doing the will of God when they merely gratify their own inclinations by spreading their own opinions. They preach and proclaim under the belief that to them divine wisdom is revealed; that hostile criticism of their views is therefore not only a sign of disordered intellect but also of wilful immorality. They say, ' Thus saith the Lord ! ' when all that happens is the garrulity of a fool who prates from a pulpit. Everybody is either missionary or convert. Each of us is an unconverted heathen to those who have what they are pleased to call ' Light.' Every P. & 0. or Union Castle liner that carries white passengers DEATH AND FAITH 79 to Africa or Asia is a missionary ship. Natives of India judge tlie Englishman's rehgion not by what missionaries say, but by the conduct and opinions of those of the dominant race who are outside the mission field. Fanatical endeavour to spread truth is curiously restricted to subjects like theo- logy, upon which nothing can be proved by syllo- gism and where the evidence pro and con. is outside the plane of three dimensions. Nobody ever heard of man or woman dying for the cause of arithmetic or giving a body to be burned for the bhiomial theorem. Nevertheless, arithmetic has added more to the happiness and well-being of races who originally could count only on the fingers of one hand, than orthodox views on the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. The process of exact thought as expressed in the science of numbers is oi^en to no contradiction by sane minds. Eternal Punishment or Eternal Bliss cannot be expressed in terms intelligible to a mind incapable of abstract ideas. The multiplication table, however, may be accepted or rejected by all intelligent humanity ; but those who reject it after due examination find themselves relegated to a class apart with whom it is unprofitable to consort. Religious ideas, being incapable of exact proof, are savagely con- troversial, and the competition of rival creeds is therefore a wmnowing process where the faith for which men most willingly die enjoys an advantage over creeds for which nobody will suffer the ampu- tation of a toe. The controversialist who will die for his creed, however vile the creed, will make more converts than the most orthodox clergyman who only consents to enjoy his benefice and give no trouble to his ecclesiastical superiors. 80 THE WAY OF LIFE In this coimtry exist three virile phases of religious opinion — the Roman Catholic, the Jewish, and the Nonconformist. The Church of England, with her beauty of tradition, the security of her endowments, the dignity of her cathedrals, the learning of her bishops and priests, and the charm of her women, clings to a languid and nebulous creed. She has not ceased to exert her influence over the nation, but her influence recedes as the years roll on. No longer do the dignitaries of Anglicanism exert the power that was wielded by their predecessors. Less and less do the masses of the people or their representatives look to the leaders of the Anglican Church for guidance in time of national crisis, for the resolution of their spiritual doubts, or to appease soul-hunger. Nevertheless, the Church of England is a missionary body that undertakes not only spiritual care of every soul not in actual communion with another form of faith, but claims to be a militant missionary Church throughout the world. I have lately read the report of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts — a report full of interest no less for what it contains than for what it omits. At a meeting in support of the Pan-Anglican movement last year T heard an English bishop promise that when the Pan- Anglican assembly was dispersed the Church of England would attack the problem of Moham- medan conversion. Nobody smiled ; nobody seemed to mark the extravagance or the unreality of the claim. Converts to Mohammedanism flock to the Green Banner more rapidly than converts to the Cross, and when Islam makes a convert he SLACKNESS 81 is filled with pride and imbned with a sense of superiority to the infidel, especially when the convert is a negro and the infidel a white man. I cannot discover in the correspondence of Church- men or in Anglican newspapers, whether High or Low, the slightest recognition of the fact that the spiritual forces now ruling the world relegate the Church of England to a lower place than she occupied in the past. Until that church is again poor and persecuted she will continue to degenerate. In former days the prelates of England were leaders of thought. In the critical division in the House of Lords on the Budget Bill, with three exceptions the bishops abstained from voting, thus advertismg the fact that the Church of England is ' safe ' but renounces advisory functions in a moment of national crisis. This is paralysis, not statesmanship. The concession to the Church of Eome made with general consent in respect to the King's Declaration gave something to Roman Catholics and took away something from the Church of Eng- land. In declaring simply that he is a Protestant the King uses a form of words repugnant to the large section of the Church of England repudiating Protestantism. Thus Rome and Nonconformity gain. With the exception of allegiance to the Vatican, many of the English clergy are Roman Catholic in all but name. To them the Mass is a reality, not a superstitious observance. They believe passionately in the mission of the church being to restore England to the faith as it was in pre-Rcformation days. Divisions in the church of England are as wide and as deep as any that G 82 THE WAY OF LIFE exist outside, yet in the report of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel the Bishop of Rangoon, Dr. Knight, in pleading for trained laymen in the missionary field, declares that for lack of such men he had seen our ' church in four important centres compelled to hand over our children to the " secular " teaching of Government schools, to the defective gospel of Nonconformists, or the unreformed teaching of our Roman Catholic brethren.' Should not the Church of England convert the ' unreformed ' Church of Rome, the ' defective ' Nonconformists and English Jews before she attacks the creeds of Asia ? With thousands of English children annually relapsing into illiteracy, with heathenism rampant throughout the land, with revolution smouldering in the villages, in the mines, and on the northern railways, there is surely more urgent work for the church at home than abroad. Yet the conversion of the Jews is seriously undertaken by English zealots. The process of converting Jews to Christianity is costly and hopeless. It is a dainty form of anti-Semitism adopted by modern Chris- tendom. Judaism is proud. It seeks no converts. When a Jew embraces Christianity he loses caste, is severed from his nearest and dearest relations, and often loses the means of earning a living. Nearly a score of societies for the conversion of Jews are mere conduit pipes for the payment of insincere and needy proselytes. The London Society for pro- moting Christianity among the Jews was founded more than a hundred years ago. Considering the vast sums that have been spent by twenty societies on Jewish conversion, and considering the extreme JEWISH CONVERTS 83 poverty of the Jewish masses* the successful resistance which, as a race, they have offered to the aggressive allurements of Jewish missions is a tribute to the fibre and sincerity of the Hebrew race. Most of the persons concerned in converting the Jews work from the puxest motives, but the literature on the subject is pathetic, both in the ignorance it displays and in the credulity it suggests. There appears to be an impression that Hebrew is the vernacular language of the Jews. No less than one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year is spent on the conversion of the Children of the Dispersion, although not a penny is expended on the conversion of unckcumcised Unitarians, whose creed is that of the Jews, minus the pride of race. Judaism is a force as much beyond the reach of endowed and established Anglicanism as Islam, Rome, or the Free Church Council. Is there a Jewish question ? It is plausibly argued that there is not one in the sense that we speak of the Single Chamber question, the North Sea question, or Home Ride. United silently in their greatest interests, the Jews differ from each other even in essentials. There is no Jewnsh Party in Parliament in the sense that there is a Catholic Party, a Nonconformist Party, or a Labour Party. Candidates for Parliamentary honours, it is true, appeal to the Jewish vote, but it is doubtful, except in the case of a co-religionist, whether Jewish electors vote more solidly than other people. A common fallacy among people who dislike the Jews is belief in the existence of Jewish solidarity. In countries where they enjoy freedom the Jews are no more compacted by creed than other races. 84 THE WAY OF LIFE When, however, persecution distils the race in- stinct Jewish soUdarity is developed by the sense of jeopardy, just as Anglo-Saxon solidarity would follow open menace from a new Genghis Khan. The antipathy between Jew and Gentile is due to three causes : The Jew is racially among the purest of mankind ; the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celt is one of a pot-pourri of races. Secondly, the Jew, with all the defects of his qualities, is more temper- ate, more thrifty, and more long suffering than the average consumer of pork and beer. This objection to the Jew is found in every Gentile school, where the lad who obeys the rules and tries to get on is less popular than tlie dashing dare-devil-spendthrift- sportsmanlike lad. That the Jew is a sportsman is both affirmed and denied. Sir William Harcourt once thought to pulverise me in a discussion on the Jewish tendency to sedentary pursuits by suddenly repeating from memory a list of Hebrew prize- fighters who had won fame in the King. Jewish owners are notoriously successful on the Turf. The Stock Exchange, a sporting institution, is jjre- dominantly Jewish. In most forms of sport, except yachting, exploration, mountaineering, and aviation, Jews are well in front, yet to the alleged absence of their sportsmanship is attributable much of the unpopularity they encounter. The money spent by the twenty societies organ- ised and maintained for the purpose of converting Jews to Christianity would be better spent in imparting Hebrew virtues to the children of heathen Gentiles. The arrogance and assumption that lead good men to spend vast sums on the CHILD LOVE 85 conversion of races like tlie Jews or tlie Japanese is a sign of megalomania. We liave more to learn from the Jews and other Asiatics than to teach them. I often wish that some of the Asiatic races would organise an effective mission for the con- version of the English to an understanding of the conditions of human life. So long as we spend two hundred thousand a year on a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children at home we are in no case to undertake the spiritual conversion of black, brown, or yellow people who are kind to their kiddies without the threat of prosecution. The last annual report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board on Infant and Child Mortality in England and Wales disqualifies the people of England from undertaking the conversion of other races. In the colhery villages of Durham it is not uncommon for four or more houses to use the same privy midden. According to Dr. Johnstone's report on the sanitary circumstances of the Rural District of Easington, the conditions prevailing there would sicken an average Basuto. The Jews need no society to compel them not to abuse, starve or strike their children. Early and improvident marriage, improper feeding, dirty and overcrowded houses, insanitary surroundings, the use of artificial foods, alcoholism, syphilis, and the employment of expectant mothers outside the home are producing a race that is not accurately described b}^ the term Luperial. No Jewish mother works during her time of trouble. One out of three English Christian deaths at all ages occurs under five years of age. Infant mortality is the most sensitive index we possess 86 THE WAY OF LIFE of the coudition of any nation. Our infant death- rate is 109 per thousand births. A sum of two hundred million pounds sterling is required to deal with the housing question. Over £120,000,000 have been spent on foreign missions. The condition of the counties of Glamorgan and of Durham renders the unasked advice so freely tendered to other races on theological questions an advertisement of national hypocrisy. Who can doubt that the Great Day of Reckoning is at hand ? That the neglect of the people's health, education, and conditions of life is at last coming home to the ruling classes ? Politics too long has been a game. In the politics of the futiu-e, missionary efforts will not be directed towards the ends of the earth or the Children of Israel. Missiou?, like charity, begin at home, at least, until the Missioners agree about the Message. MES. GRUNDY'S PLACE Poets have it that love is what makes the world go round. Love, no doubt, is a lubricant ; and so is the perfect climate. Love and the perfect climate are not in it with cant and convention for lubri- cating human afiairs. Cant is what really makes the world go round. What is cant ? It may be roughly defined as hypocrisy, peculiar forms of speech, partisan vocabularies, shibboleths of sect, popular cries, affectations of piety, politics, art, literature, patriotism, war, commerce, medicine, philanthropy, health, riches, horticulture, and travel. Mrs. Grundy is the high priestess of cant in its useful form. Nobody knows how much we owe to Mrs. Grundy for keeping civilised society sweet. I adore Mrs. Grundy. Why the Suffragists have never claimed for her a statue passes under- standing. She better deserves a pedestal than most great men ; Mrs. Grundy has donejor woman what Colonel Bogey has done for golf. Foreigners are unanimous in attributing to ua cant as our national failing. If our foreign friends are right in their diagnosis of our national character we ought to be very much obliged to them, for John Stuart Mill said that he did not know how a public writer can be more usefully employed than in telling 88 THE WAY OF LIFE his countrymen their faults. John Stuart Mill pin- pricked the public a good deal himself after hound- ing Governor Eyre into retirement. People do not like being told their faults by their relations, they prefer to hear ghastly truths from strangers. Foreigners are in the position of posterity, and nobody is angry with posterity because it will believe that the men and women of the Victorian era were infernal hypocrites, and that we, ourselves, are steeped in hypocrisy. Mr. Rowland Prothero, in his sunny book on France, has touched with a deft hand on the racial differences between Gaul and Briton. The French remain children all their lives — -not, of course, children in intellect and heart, but children in their frank enjoyment of the little things of life and in their outspoken expression of the emotions that sway them for the moment. A well-brought-up Briton looks on all expression of emotion as bad form, and the suppression of feeling in crisis or storm as the dominant sign of breeding. The Briton shares with his Japanese ally this faculty of simulated indifference, and an ad- mirable thing it is when self-control does not sink into cant. Mastery of emotion among the leaders of the people greatly increases the force of conven- tion and cant. Convention is a form of tyranny against which the best minds always rebel in their hot youth. The power of keeping a tight rein over oneself is so generally admired that the dislike of a ' scene ' in family and social life has at last reached the point of absurdity. It is now a greater social crime to tell a man that he is a liar, when he is a liar, than to tell a lie. A lie may be good form ; a ' scene ' — MES. -GEUNDY 89 never. Mrs. CTrundy exercises more influence on twentieth-century men and women than Moses, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and St. Athanasius. In early Victorian days Mrs. Grundy Avas stronger than ever she was before or since. In the days of Eliza- beth Mrs. Grundy scarcely existed. At any social gathering under a British roof between 1837 and 1901, the Lady in ' Comus,' who spoke divinely on the subject of chastity, would have been requested to leave the room. It is not so very long since un- married girls were not allowed to ride in a hansom with a man. The consumption of a cigarette by an Early Victorian matron was as unthinkable as Calpurnia with a whisky-and-soda or Joan of Arc doubling no trumps at three in the morning. When Rome was at her zenith it was the convention that wine should not be drunk by ladies, a convention that now seems absurd, but probably not more absurd than some of oiu* still surviving sex conven- tions will appear to posterity. Consider, for instance, the inherent absiu'dity of the current economic con- vention of paying a woman, because she is a woman, less than a man for doing precisely the same work. The conventions and cant that still linger in the marriage laws of England will stamp this age as frankly barbarian in a.d. 2008. If a penniless scoundrel lives on his wife, poisons her existence, and pays for his infidelities with her money, he has only to refi-ain from violence to extort from her his own terms if she desires a separation. There is nothing else in history but the fight between freedom and tyranny, and Mrs. Grundy, with all her efficiency in the advancement of virtue, is responsible for prolonging the tyrannies of kings, 90 THE WAY OF LIFE of priests, of force, of ignorance, and of society. The tyranny of the masses is a form of tyranny from which Mrs. Grundy holds aloof. The humble do not cant. Priestly and kingly tyranny has gone, the tyranny of industriaUsm is tottering, but the greatest tyranny of all lingers in an old-established and complex civilisation that has drifted from one century to the next water-logged with custom. Whoever thinks sanely on the facts of life passes through three stages — boundless resentment against the tyranny of life, fervent efforts to deal with times that are out of joint, and the discovery that all that can be done, even by the best and the strongest, is to look upwards and to follow the general move- ment towards the light. The reign of convention has borne hardly on women, but there is a multitude no less deserv- ing of release from the shackles of cantankerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century convention. I refer to the host of clerks and wage-earners, and of workmen under the orders of foremen promoted from the ranks. In the days of Merrie England the relations between the classes were genial. Gentle and simple met in friendly rivalry of games on the village green on Sunday afternoons. Cruelty, brutality, and lust existed then as now, but when the Thames flowed clear at London Bridge there was a blithe spirit on the face of the land. Colour existed in humble life — or it could not have been ' Merrie England.' For three days I have been watching the faces of the people hurrying to and fro in the streets of the great city ; nearly all of them are sad. Anxiety and care brood over them like the Angel of Death. There is no need for this THE SECRET OF DISCIPLINE 91 pervading unhappiness ; for, although I do not belieA^e that people can be legislated by Parliament either into virtue or into joy, it is in the power of every employer either to blast or to brighten the evils of his subordinates. Industrialism has always lacked courtesy to the employed, since Mr. Cobden's godless gospel of buying in the cheapest market became the national policy, and ' Get on or Get out ' the hustler's creed. The highest form of dis- cipline is one which exacts willingly the most strenuous labours from those subject to it. In the working of guns, cither in a smart battery of the Royal Artillery or in the turret of a first-class battleship, you find ideal discipline. It draws out the men's wilhng best. Wherever the shooting is exceptionally good, afloat or ashore, the responsible officer is always respected and almost invariably liked or loved by his men. It is within my personal knowledge that much of the unhappiness and desertion in the Navy and Army is due to callous and dommeering methods of giving orders, a relic of the eighteenth- century convention wliich is happily at last dis- appearing. In the industrial and commercial worlds and in domestic service the adoptioji of sunnier methods of command would produce better work and staunch many tears. Tyranny in the office, in the workshop, in the factory, on the railway, and in the mine is a large factor in the in- crease of Socialism, and insurrection against existing social organisation. Cross-grained, perverse, and bullying methods of administratio)i are a mere convention and a form of cant that will disappear when employers discover that courtesy pays 92 THE WAY OP LIFE handsomely aud that a kind word often means more than a rise in salary. Carlyle was guilty of hasty generalisation when he defined cant as organised hypocrisy. The essence of hypocrisy is pretending to be what you are not. Cant comes to us with our mother's milk, or with the sterilised, humanised, medicated product of the hygienic dairies which replaces it. Modern education both at the public schools and the miiversities is largely founded on centuries of didactic cant which now fills no useful purpose in the struggle for life. The result of Oxford and Cambridge cant is a formalism glittering but shallow, which, dispensing with the culture of observation and the ability to draw just inferences from facts, kills originality in all but the ablest minds. There is no more useful weapon in the battle of life than to be a good judge of evidence, and above all to appreciate clearly the difference between allegation and proof. Few men, unless trained in the law, make a serious study of the principles of evidence, and in the education of girls it is omitted altogether. Such a trial as that of the recent Druce claim to the property of the Duke of Portland should be impossible in a country that has had universal education for nearly forty years, and it will be impossible ten years hence. The Druce trial was the result of cant, pure and simple, for which our obsolescent legal system was mainly responsible. Cant knows nothing of dogma, but may be defined as a sly affectation of superior good- ness. Catholic Ireland, Kepublican France, reac- tionary Spain, and sombre Russia are comparatively free from cant, and it may be conjectured that our THE FLAG OF BRITAIN 93 national cant is the result of centuries of peace, coupled with the occasional ascendency of that form of Protestantism whose conscience is satisfied by the sacrifice of others. We have seen the energies of the House of Commons devoted to moralising the nation. The nation does not like being moralised by anybody. The Noncon- formist Conscience establishes a Catholic university in Ireland after having attempted the spoliation of church property and the suppression of Anglican principles in England. Yes — the charm of the best and the humblest classes is that they have no cnnt. Matthew Arnold was right in his lunge at Philistia. The people who drink, fight, ill-treat their wives, and offend men of taste in every direction do not cant, and the reason why the power of Mrs. Grundy is waning is because the barbarians are coming into power. Cant no longer carries opinion with it, and cant in politics is getting at last the worst of it. We hoist the flag of England over the Houses of Parliament and the ships that coal the American fleet in the Pacific strike it at sunset ; but our rulers forbid the Union Jack to be hoisted over Irish schools because, forsooth, they allege it to be a party symbol in Erin. I do not remember a worse example than this of the cant of patriotism since the retrocession of the Transvaal was justified on the plea that it was the act of a proud, Imperial nation, conscious of military strength, but burning with love of justice and humanity. If the flag of England is the national emblem, it should be hoisted over every school in the Empire or the school should be closed. 94 THE WAY OF LIFE A few days ago a fine-looking fellow came to me for help and advice. He was a Scotch, gardener who had lived with one duke as head gardener for five years and with another for four years. When his second master died he lost his place, and, having six children, could not get another. He applied for a vacancy on the estate of a certaui earl who has distinguished himself by the delivery of eloquent speeches on the subject of healthy children and the duty of encouraging settlement on the land. Wh en , at the last moment, the noble earl broke off negotia- tions with my gardener friend because of the six fine hostages he had given to fortune, his lordship indulged in that form of cant which is the raw material of bloody revolution. The man is now a red Socialist, who has burned his Biole, and works as a casual labourer. I observe in patriotic, religious, and in certain Colonial newspapers advertisements for gard^eners, coachmen, butlers, keepers, and other servants ' without encumbrances.' The last two words are constructive incentives to race-suicide, and are, therefore, contrary to public policy. They indicate the survival of cant in its most pernicious form under the protection of Mrs. Grundy. If we are the sum of what we do and the national character is true to itself, these advertisements with ' no en- cumbrances ' in them will be barred by public opinion. If rich men make England the purgatory of the poor, the poor of the Empire will say with Cromwell, the brewer and lover of horse-racing, ' Be gone and make place for better men.' THE MAINSPRING OF ACTION Campbell's poem is unread to-day. Two stilted lines, ' Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell. And Freedom sliriek'd — as Kosciusko fell ! ' are remembered, the rest is forgotten. Freedom didn't shriek, and there was plenty of hope left in the world when Kosciusko fell. Poet Campbell, as the Babu would call him, failed in his eulogy of hope. No pulse was ever quickened five beats a minute by any passage in ' The Pleasures of Hope,' and yet hope is the salt of life. Like nitrogen in the material world, it is indispensable to healthy existence. With brain workers, whose ganglions are healthy, hope never dies. At a garden-party, where there was a fortune-teller in a tent, I heard a cliild gleefully cry, ' Great-grandpapa is going to have liis fortune told.' The old gentle- man was hale and sound, but at ninety-one presumably the world had little left for him in the way of pleasant sui-prise. Well did the ancients place hope at the bottom of Pandora's box, for there is nothing that tells character more unerringly than the revelation of hope or exhibition of despair in time of trouble. From the boy who hopes that he may make a good score at cricket to the general who hopes to win an impending battle, or the states- man who bridles at the thought of an admiring 96 THE WAY OF LIFE posterity, reasoned hope depends on pluck, fore- sight, judgment, and luck. The admiral who wrote to the papers the other day protesting against night manoeuvres without lights probably hoped that his country would win the next naval war against an enemy who practises night manoeuvres with dowsed Hghts and takes risks as they come. This admiral hopes on insecure foundation, and is a warning to deter, not an example to imitate. Temperaments are either hopeful or despairing. Asia is hopeless. Europe, outside the Celtic fringe, sanguine. Londoners are notoriously hopeful. Stories of the cockney soldier's cheeriness, un- quenchable by disaster during war, would fill a book. A Whitechapel trooper, during the dark days of the Boer war, shouted, as he rode laughing out of camp with his detachment to what was believed to be certain death, ' So long, sonny ; meet you on the Judgment Day.' An hour later he lay dead — shot through the brain. Life in London is more gloomy than Londoners are aware. The earth is paved. A canopy of fog or cloud is so usual that a fine day is discussed as would be the visit of a bird of paradise to Tottenham Court Road. The cheeriness of Londoners is due to the unconscious habit of looking on the bright side of things — a habit engendered in spite of monotony of occupation and Avant of light and air. No cheerier soul exists than a London cabman or a factory girl, and yet their hard, melancholy and monotonous occupations warrant habitual gloom. Members of the St. George's Society, who wear a red rose in honour of our patron saint at a time when the rose is not in bloom, listen yearly to speeches from public men HOPE AND DESPAIR 97 about the achievements of the English race ; but not one of those orators, I believe, has ever lodged a claim in respect of the invincible hopefrdness which distinguishes the English. The Irish are brave, quick, imaginative, and versatile, but they are not hopeful. They are a sad and moody people, perhaps because, as Disraeli said in his memorable letter to the Duke of Abercorn, they live ' con- tiguous to a melancholy ocean.' The Celtic races lack hopefulness also because their quick imaginations lead them to set their hearts on the unobtainable, and therefore to make a certainty of disappointment. To see an English- man at his best, watch him in a ' tight place.' Every line of Kipling's books reflects the hopeful- ness of the race of wliich he is the Laureate. When a Frenchman complained in the eighteenth century that the English did not know when they were beaten he was paying an unconscious tribute to a temperament which enables men to perceive a gleam of light in the darkest sky. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who ought to understand his own countrymen, has often dwelt on the melancholy of Irishmen like Mr. Dillon, who, devoting themselves to the rescue of a race they imagine to be down- trodden, seek to set up an independent nation within cannon-shot of the British coast. The only way to keep hopeful is to have realisable ideals. Judging by recent events, a peerage would seem to constitute the secret goal of many lives which would otherwise be judged by their contemporaries as indifferent to things they passionately covet. In private life nothing is more desirable than the H 98 THE WAY OF LIFE cultivation of hope. Everybody knows Mrs. Gummidge shivering in July for dread of January's slush ; they live in constant apprehension of evils that rarely arrive. Nine-tenths of their troubles are the creation of an imagination which suspects an enemy behind each door and peoples every empty cupboard with a brace of skeletons. If fine, the weather is going to be wet ; if wet, the rain wiU never cease. The Gummidges suffer from pain more acutely than other people, and they destroy happi- ness as the fumes of nitric acid kill lilies in a hot- house. In discussing the phases of hope it is interesting to recall that Nelson's original signal used the word ' confides ' instead of ' expects,' showing that he knew and trusted the men of his command and that the element of doubt implied by mere hope was absent from his mind. The substitu- tion of ' expects ' for ' confides ' elicited the cynical remark of a foreigner that, whereas the word ' ex- pects ' may mean either ' hopes for ' or ' thinks probable,' Nelson ' hoped ' that his men would do their duty, but did not consider it probable that they would. Nelson's own word ' confides ' was the better. The man in public or private Ufe with the faculty of hope atrophied is like a fungus that infects not only soil but air. The cheery stoicism which Matthew Ai'nold attributed to English aristo- cracy as its dominant characteristic is nothing more than the cultivation of hope under all circumstances and at all times. Hope culture is certainly part of a liberal education and is within everyone's reach. Any fool can be a pessimist. Great men are optimists. Those who have dissipated their force by tlirowing the reins of passion on to the neck HOPE ON 99 of desire are invariably pessimists. Poets like Verlaine and painters like tlie Belgian madman Wiertz, whose pictures haunt my memory like an evil dream, are admired by degenerates and per- verts who are themselves without hope. Yerlaine's consumption of absinthe disqualified him from commenting acceptably on the career of a black- beetle, because he had lost hope, yet some of the cleverest young minds of the day find in him, in Oscar Wilde, in Aubrey Beardsley, and in other exponents of iridescent decadence that primacy in letters and in art which in healthier days was given to the full-blooded, cheery stories of Rabelais or the sun-tanned beggar children and full-bosomed maidens of Murillo. Kipling's type of the ' five-meal meat fed men with children nine and ten ' is better than all the poets who declare that they find life brief, vain, and full of despair, with eternal night only as alterna- tive. Corporal punishment for children is prob- ably bad for them, but if I had a child I would rather cane it for exhibiting despair than for steal- ing apples, maltreating a fly, or tying a tin can to the cat's tail. The unparalleled number of sur- renders in the Boer war was contrary to the history of our race, and no explanation that has hitherto been forthcoming is satisfactory. Everyone of those surrenders — Nicholson's Nek was the worst case — was preceded by a loss of hope among Staff officers attributable to defective education of character. Officers and men were not trained to hope. The Staff College has no professor of Hope. There were, however, cases of another kind that never reached the newspapers. People who do not h2 100 THE WAY OP LIFE know the facts sneer at the Brigade of Guards and the affectations and dandyism of the subalterns. The Brigade of Guards, however, contrive to educate all ranks into a proper sense of hope. A subaltern of one of the Household regiments was sent by rail in charge of a small detachment. Dispatched to a point north of the Transvaal, in the middle of the night the train was derailed, the British troops were compelled to alight, and the subaltern found the cold muzzle of a mauser rifle pressed against his forehead, with the question sharply asked, ' Do you surrender ? If not you are a dead man.' The lad simply replied, ' His Majesty's Guards do not surrender.' The next moment the top of his head Avas blown off. That soldier boy had learnt how to hope in a hopeless situation, and thus to justify hope for any race capable of producing such men as he. CONCEENING FKIENDSHIP A LONE hand is the most difficult to play. and is generally a losing game, but a tortoise with genius for friendship will distance the fleetest hare. The former may get a lift on a friend's back while the hare is being chopped by a stray hound. A friendship that endures ' until hell freezes ' is a synonym rather for the relations of Rhodes and Dr. Jameson than for those of David and Jonathan. In ancient or modern friendship nothing is more perfect than the relations that existed between Cecil Rhodes and a late Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. A streak of the unexpected appears on every page of the story, but the friendship was never broken even by bolts from the blue. Events that would have severed the relations between ordinary men seem to have strengthened rather than impaired the harmony between Rhodes and Jameson. When Rhodes took Jameson from his great lucrative practice in Kimberley and sent him into the veld to negotiate the impossible with an irredeemable savage, the friendship between them was already impregnable. And so it proved later on. Jameson upset Rhodes's apple-cart without damage to their friendship. Rhodes left his friend no money. Jameson did not need it, but he inherited a finer 102 THE WAY OF LIFE legacy than money in tlie Rhodesian idea, wliich lias been faithfully nurtured and is now finally established by Jameson. Friendship between the two men was essential to the unification of South Africa. The story is a splendid example of what can be done by two great souls standing by each other through thick and thin. As friendship is the tap-root of sane politics, hatred is the soil of anarchy. Friendships are rare in modern fife, especially in pontics. Men no longer trust each other as they did. We are all cautious. The modern Caesar's confidence in Brutus up-to-date is incom- plete. A faithless friend may be a bitter foe but, as an opponent, is never so dangerous as the man who is staunch to the convictions of his manhood and to friendships declared. Friendship among rulers is of the nature that compels one class of people to hang together if they would not hang separately. Yet no country can be well governed by men who lack friendship for each other, since the friendship of citizens is the ideal of the State. Men incapable of friendship, either for their country or for each other, are incapable of ruling. Successful combina- tion in party politics is possible only through the cement of common antipathies, for the sordid side of Party quickly takes the bloom from the character of all but the noblest and best. I have often observed the gradual deterioration of friends who have entered the House of Commons in the decay of their capacity for friendship. The habit of living in an atmosphere where injuring opponents THE DUST OF POLITICS 103 by making the worse appear the better reason produces the same effect upon the character as the fumes of lead glaze or dust from the grinding of files has on the lungs of the workers. There is no reason why friends should wilt in the air of politics ; but how many glorious friendships have been formed at the universities only to be severed when the friends at last found themselves side by side in public life ? If on the same side, they are rivals ; if opposed, they are sometimes foes. The fumes of party are injurious to manliness and integrity as they are favourable to the development of suspicion, envy, and malice. The two chief ingredients of friendship are not essential to love or politics — truth and tenderness. A certain type familiar to all of us is the man whose worst enemy is himself. Such a man generally possesses inexhaustible capacity for pleasant acquaintanceship, but, failing to face the facts about himself, he is unable to be true to others. What I want from my friend before everything, therefore, is truth — not a selection of disagreeable truths, but the knowledge that whatever he says or leaves unsaid, does or leaves undone, is the knowledge that the motive of every act and the intention of every word is to enlighten and to help, not to mislead or to baffle me. All of us live our lives under a mask. We are natural only when alone. Everyone we meet needs to be humoured and handled. Rudeness is but the peeping of the elemental brute — reversion to the Stone Age. This is the reason why nice children are irresistible before they have learnt the lapidary's art on truth and fact. A true friendship is like the new tunnel 104 THE WAY OF LIFE cut through the Andes — a work of time which, once accomplished, opens up illimitable oppor- tunity to isolated souls, marooned Like Cliili and Peru between the highest mountains and the deepest ocean. Love may be revealed with a flash. Friendship never. The tunnel must be cut with care. There is no such loneliness as the solitude of the crowded land where millions are deaf, dumb, and bHnd to each other ; where despair sobs unnoticed, and the mystery of life and pain is insupportable ; where the Polar cold of indifference sears human nature like frost that blisters and kills. We all want friendship, but are too cautious to give as we desire to receive. I have been reading Mr. Arthur Humphrey's delightful volume, ' Friendship and Love from the Philosophers,' and fail to discover in any of them except Emerson an appreciation of the organic fact of our century that one half of friendship is integrity, the other half tenderness. Friendship built up from common toil, danger, antipathy, ideal, or suffering can only reach full development provided the friends are true to truth yet tender to each other's faiUngs and desires. The candid friend was damned by Canning, and we may leave it at that. Friendships are rarer than formerly because there is less time to cultivate them, and the typist to whom a modern David dictates his script is an effective check on the expression of his finest feelings towards Jonathan. Bogus friendsliips are as plenti- ful as blackberries under the ruling convention that nobody says what he feels, and that all expression of feehng is ' bad form.' At a public dinner recently Mr. Balfoiir and Mr. Lloyd George CODLIN AND SHOKT 105 exchanged adjectival felicities about the extreme value each placed upon the friendship of the other. To listen to Mr. Balfour, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a phoenix of culture and charm compared with whom the Admirable Crichton was an unlettered boor ; and to hear Mr. Lloyd George, one would gather that he preferred the society of Mr. Balfour to that of his nearest and dearest friend. Exhibitions of friendship between professional politicians on opposite sides sicken me. If Mr. Lloyd George is, as his supporter Lord Ribblesdale declares him to be, ' half pantaloon, half highwayman,' the affectation of a friendship for Mr. George of Wales is disloyalty to St. George of England. A system that treats patriotism in poHtics as a game is doomed. Politics is not a game to the Irish Nationalist, nor to the Labour Party in or out of the House of Commons, nor to the Socialists in any land. Until statesmen treat men whom they themselves describe as liars, or as the enemies of their country, as ineligible for private friendship, politicians will continue to earn the con- tempt of the country. The simulation of friend- ship is seen at its worst in the drawing-room arena of politics. Commerce under modern conditions is war, and the average business man acts on the principle that there is and can be no more friendship in business than in war. The whole trade of politics consists in persuading the majority of the people that you are a better friend of theirs than the man on the other side. Why should the vital interests of the country be inexpressible in any other terms but those of Codlin and Short ? 106 THE WAY OF LIFE Mr. Eowland Protliero has described tlie tricks, devices, loquacity, and insincerities of tlie Government land policy. To enable the President of the Board of Agriculture to pose as the friend of the people, the Duke of Bedford was invited to play the part of money-grabber and raise the rents on the Thorney Estate (which was won from the bottom of the North Sea by brave men with faith in themselves and their country) before sale to the Government. In order to save his face the Minister flinched from raising the rents himself, desiring to gain the bogus reputation of being a friend of the people. Tenderness and truth are the inexorable conditions of friendship no less in public than in private life. That is why tiger- hunting with Tartuffe and the politics of Pecksniff are dangerous to their companions and unprofitable to themselves. It pays to go straight, but a man who goes straight because it pays is never straight. Capacity for friendship is the determinant of a man's destiny and worth. I knew a labouring lad who attained eminence on the cinder-path owing to the coaching of a young draper's assistant, who devoted his evenings and mornings to the physical development of his friend. After seeing his pupil win a good Marathon race, the young draper was taken ill and died, an event that almost unhinged the mind of his fleet-footed friend. From that day forward the latter refused to run again in public as the only tribute he could pay to the memory of his trainer and friend, and as a protest against the tyranny of Fate. Not very "wise, you will say, but such traits of friendship are refreshing to the looker-on in days when fiction, not friendship, is the main factor in human affairs. INTEENATIONAL BUSHIDO 107 International friendship, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms. Friendsliip means trutli and tenderness, generosity and sacrifice. States- men and diplomatists are agents paid to do the best they can for their own country, not for another, hence the association of deception with diplomacy. Yet there exist races capable of friendship. The Japanese is not one of them ; the French are capable of chivalrous friendship. Wherever ideas reign friendship is possible, but where ideas are regarded as undesirable by one of the parties, inter- national fi'iendship may be what is called ' a working friendship ' — i.e. one where both sides have something to gain from alliance but where there is no element of tenderness about it. The friendship of Britain for Japan, for instance, is a psychological phenomenon — it is impossible to say there is nothing in common between the two peoples, but their outlook on life is wholly different. An Englishman reasons from A to B, from B to C, and while he is reasoning the other end of the alphabet is out of sight. The Japanese samurai thinks out his problem from A to Z, and then thinks backward up to the starting-point — for him there is no ' muddling through." He is either prodigi- ously successful owing to his foresight and resolve or fails hideously because things are different to what he planned them to be. The code of honour, of chivalry, of friendship, of humanity clustered under the name of bushido is nearer to the accepted creed of an English gentleman than anything on the planet ; but bushido has no international status and it is not so common in Japan as formerly. "When treaties cease to be profitable they cease to be kept, since no statesman is justified in 108 THE WAY OP LIFE sacrificing Ms own country to the interests of another. In oiir relations with Ireland, for instance, our great-grandfathers undertook to maintain the Irish representation at the standard of a hundred and one M.P/s. Under the Japanese standard of honour a hundred and one — they are now a hundred and three — Irish Members would continue to sit to the end of time, but no great-grandfathers can be permitted to bind the country to its own hurt, therefore the reduction of Irish representation will in due time be carried by statesmen who will be roundly denounced as treaty breakers. Our friendship with Japan, which was undertaken to cheapen the defence of India, is already producing unforeseen results. Friendship moulds character. Japan teaches her English fi'iend that modern Europe lays too much stress on sexual love as the motive power of human actions. Partnership in material interests alone never created an enduring friendship. The high culture of Japan's best self is a greater contribution to the welfare of Britain than any military assistance we are likely to get from her in Calcutta or the Khyber Pass. Tolerance for everyone's belief is one of the fundamental principles of the Christian religion, yet sectarian intolerance in our country has every- thing to learn from the truly catholic and reveren- tial rites of Shinto. No difference of race, of religion, or of culture presents any real obstacle to the development of intimacy with the East. Chris- tianity is an Eastern, not a Western, religion. In true friendship patronage finds no place, and the new Lord Salisbury's remark that ' England grants but does not seek alliances ' did much harm THE THIRST OF THE SOUL 109 among silent Asiatics as proud as the Cecils and with longer pedigrees. Arrogant vanity is repul- sive in men and nations, and the name that clings to us of being a ' perfidious ' people is due to the snobbish arrogance with which we exchange a policy of ' splendid isolation ' for one of ententes and alliances in the hope of leaning cheaply on a flattered, but inferior friend. We must give as much as we get if we want friendships. Of all the desires that trouble us as we sweep through space on this puzzling planet none is stronger than the thirst for friendship ; no pleasure more complete than when that thirst is slaked. FORESIGHT The platitudes of Bacon and Cowley about God making the first garden and Cain making the first town are pointless, because real enjoyment of a fair garden involves contact with the heart-beat of a great city. The garden-lover who is nothing else is intellectually as vegetable as the things he grows, just as the man who lives over his office ui the City and thinks of nothing but business destroys capacity for high afiairs as surely as if he injected cocaine or were a prey to the subtle joys of bhang. To think calmly and clearly, a garden to potter in is more necessary than an office, a telephone, or writing materials to a man of business. It is true that many good men of business are without gardens, but when the physically unfit and the alien immigrant are satisfied with pensions, one may hope that, after the inevitable swdng of the pendu- lum, provision of ' Universal Gardens for Efficient Workers ' may become as telling and as victorious a cry as the Big Loaf was in 1905. Writers who think in a garden contract the habit of imputing benevolence to their readers. The charm of Charles Waterton's writings is due not merely to his love of tropical scenery and his loathing for the Hanoverian rat, but because on almost every page he addresses the book-buying public in terms of GAEDEN FOEESIGHT 111 affection. Your London writers are not addicted to this habit. They never let themselves go. They never truckle to the ' kind reader.' The quiet emotion produced by the purple patches in a gardening career is essential to a simple style and to the tranquil affection that should exist between writer and reader. Kind reader, have you ever spent an English winter in a little garden that you love, where the sounds and the stillness, the scents and the sights, differ no less from Fleet Street than from the pleasaunce of a great estate ? True philosophy requires foresight, and foresight flomishes in the environment of a cottage, a little tract of land, and as much of the simple life as the average sensual man can endure. In winter the simple life is cold, and, after heavy rains, damp, but in fine or frosty weather foresight grows like a weed in the little comitry garden, and, inspiring the dullard and the weary, binds them over to be better than them- selves. In garden life foresight is medicine for the mind. Lecky once said to me that nobody was ashamed of saying that he had immensely enjoyed a farce, but that no persons of refinement plume themselves publicly on enjoyment of tripe, or mutton chop. Still, the comparison of two uncomparablcs, however odious, is a pursuit that mankind, since he was created in the original garden, has per- sistently made. A wise and wicked man said that nobody en- joyed a garden thoroughly miless old and selfish. There is a dash of sense in this piece of flippancy, but the pleasure of a garden in January springs 112 THE WAY OF LIFE • not from gratification of tlie Ego, but from tlie con- trast between the struggle for life and the har- monious competition of rich colours and the scent of honey and spice in myriad forms striving to break through an earth blockaded by Jack Frost. With foresight gardening sates most of the primal passions except revenge. Are you a gambler ? No one knows when some forgotten or despised root may prove a feast of beauty and delight. It is re- corded that a humble gardener, on discarding a set of disappointing violet roots, threw them on a rubbish heap. Next year appeared violets so large and beautiful, and with such subtle and unearthly perfume, that they were the envy of kings, princes, dukes, and American souvenir- hunters. This violet is named ' Princess of Wales.' Good gardens are like Christmas Numbers of illustrated papers. Plans for the beauty of the whole effect must be made months before they are realised. Efficient editors of the Christmas Numbers set their merry men to work on snow, holly, wassail bowls, mistletoe, dainty girls and love in the season when roses bloom. In like manner when flowers are considered pictorially, November is the month when imagination labours to create the colour-schemes of July, August, and September. The analogy between garden mastership and British statecraft is closer than that existing between gardeners and the editors of the Christmas Numbers. The Duke of Welling- ton had the true gardening instinct when he GARDEN STATECRAFT 113 said that the best general was the officer who could tell most accurately what was on the other side of the hill. In the garden of the British Empire the head gardeners are addicted to the habit of allowing the winter season of international rest to slip away without making provision for the dog-days of war, when the earth is iron and the skies are brass, and it is too late to till the soil. It was thus that Argentina, Morocco, Madeira, and other lost possessions of England passed into alien hands ; it was thus that Gordon was done to death at Khartoum. Australia lies at the mercy of any Pacific power that obtains control of Pacific waters and can muster a force of two or three divisions of trained troops to attack her. In the next ten years the importance of the Pacific and of Jamaica will be quadrupled, and nothing is more certain than the new scramble for coaUng stations which will take place between the naval powers determined to control Pacific trade. How would a statesman act under those circumstances if he were a good gardener ? He would review the situation, not from a party point of view, but with the object of presenting a good colour-scheme — red is the British colour — in 1915. We know that Japan and America are for the moment our friends ; that England could not with safety detach more than a third of her fleet to the Pacific ; and that neither the AustraUan nor the Canadian electorate yet appreciates the laws of sea power. Let us see how garden lore illuminates the position. Gardeners acquainted with the customs and life prejudices of rhododendrons know that the one thing to remem- ber about them is, not so much that they love peat, as that they loathe lime. 114 THE WAY OF LIFE There is a mountain of diiierence in the distinc- tion. An efficient plant that is a Hme-hater stands on a totally different footing from one that is a peat-lover. Australians and Canadians love the Old Country as rhododendrons love peat, but the young democracies hate Asiatic immigration even more than they love the Empire, just as rhododendrons hate lime more than they love peat. Gardening thus suppHes a clue to the treatment of the Pacific question. We cannot enjoy the incongruous advantages of permanent alUance with a Mongohan power, and, at the same time, expect Australian contributions to the British empire's fleet, any more than we can expect the Glory of the Snow to bloom alongside the tree heliotrope. In other words, 1915, when the Anglo-Japanese AUiance ends by effluxion of time, is a date which should be inscribed in large figures on the wall of the council chamber of the head gardeners of empire. Whatsoever a cabinet soweth that shall its suc- cessor reap. Lord Eosebery — he possesses three lovely gardens — has had too little credit for the Uganda Railway, but he was a skilful , horticul- turist when, fourteen years ago, he provided, under the British flag, a reserve garden in North Central Africa for the British Indian subjects of the king. Some people delay planting their bulbs and their herbaceous borders until the eleventh hour ; others wait until after twelve o'clock has struck, when it is too late to obtain any results from lavish expendi- ture of money and labour. There is no recipe for turning December into June, but much may still be done to consolidate the nation if the qualities and climates of June AGEICULTUKE 115 and December are recognised early and used well. Since we know that unhealthy shrubs are denied blossoms, and that only the fittest perennials should receive old-age pensions of bone meal, leaf mould, and canary guano, so a wise people will never lose sight of the importance of fostering efiiciency and encouraging enterprise while pensioning invalids and supporting the veterans of labour. No brains are required for despair, and, after all, signs are not wanting that a gardener's foresight and imagination are really at work in the governing class — I include the Labour Party in this description. There is little division of opinion, for example, as to the abstract importance of encouraging settlement on the land and of increasing the attractiveness of country life. What we want is action. That the Small Holdings Act, subject to some future modification as to ownership, is a step in the right direction nobody doubts who has watched the magical effect of sunshine and sweat on a town population restored to the country. The thii'd generation of the Jewish population of Kherson, planted on the soil by the Emperor Nicholas, lost all the characteristics of the Ghetto, including the money-lending propensity. It may be too late to make a nation of gardeners and agriculturists of Britons ; but, after all, home agriculture is more important to the great cities than to the villages, the moorlands, the woodside, and the farm. Agriculture, unlike commerce, is more than a money-making pursuit. It is a health-giving pur- suit, especially to children, and therefore is the base of national defence. The Admiralty may prepare I2 116 THE WAY OF LIFE sliips for next year, but no Cabinet that looks forward can do better than organise stamina for the people by encouraging the interests that live on land. The labourer may then become a skilled artisan in plant life, the farmer a scientific foreman of industry, and the landowners, who for eight hundred years have supplied the demand for men with leisure, ability, and patriotism, may yet reconcile the masses and the classes. The most efficient type of men in the future, as was the first, will thus possess the best of all instincts — the gardener's foresight. i FINE WRITING Belshazzar was terrified at tlie handwriting on the wall because the mystery of its origin added force to menace. Words that tell are generally of the nature of the handwriting on the wall — tersely anonymous. Colonel Stofiel's ' Rapports Militaires Ecrits de Berlin/ addressed to a French Belshazzar, lacking mystery, were neglected. Re-reading Stoffel's words nearly half a century after they were Avritten their dignity and -their prescience seem to me to deserve another fate. Stoffel's words remain as a monument of wise counsel rejected. He warned his country against poHticians without ideals ; against a legislature in which lawyers hid their inefficiency under fine words, and simulated anxiety for the country's interest, but were always more ready to speak than to do. Shelley and Carlyle both hated the cant of fine words. Carlyle dubbed it ' a double-distilled lie.' Shelley described solemn and sounding phrases which seem to convey much but mean little as words ' that are the proxies of absent thoughts, and, like other proxies, add nothing to argument while they turn the scales of decision.' Yet a 118 THE WAY OP LIFE large number of words used in our speech and written in our newspapers is necessary cant. Out- spoken people are ' impossible.' George the Third could see nothing to admire in Shakespeare's plays, and said so. Sincerity was one of Farmer George's best points, but the subjects of his great-great- grandson no longer hint their dislike to pigmies. How many people prefer a variety show to the legitimate drama but fear to say so ? We all address acquaintances and relations whom we dishke with formulse of endearment. Did we conduct all our correspondence from the Palace of Truth we should probably not be on speaking terms with ten people at the end of the year. Everyone with a large correspondence is bored to extinction with the flummery of praise and blame he is compelled to wade through. Much of it is insincere ; more exaggerated. Suppose one sends a wedding present, under the corvee of custom the dictionary is racked for words to express gratitude unfelt. The words ' thank you ' convey all that is necessary, yet they are never used. A present of salt-cellars seems to require three pages of notepaper. The better the present the longer the letter — a circum- stance that reminds one of a clergyman who, when invited to say grace before dinner, always began with ' Bountiful Jehovah ' if he saw champagne glasses on the table, but expressed his gratitude to the Deity in more measured terms in the presence of claret. Literary men are as prone to insincerity in the conventions of words as the rest of the world. Excellent as the average leading article undoubtedly is the amount of fine writing, exaggeration, and i MR. POTT 119 undue emphasis found in it is an outrage. Many times in my life I happen to have been on the spot when something happened wliich was written about in the papers at home. Never do I remember the event being described in its true proportions — it was either exaggerated or behttled. No event, as a rule, is so important or so highly coloured as it is represented to be in the Press. The ingenuity of able minds is concentrated on the creation of dramatic situations from drab and shapeless stuff. If the three daily leaders in the Times were signed they would probably carry httle weight for the first year or two. At the end of that time one or two writers would emerge into reputation. Others would fail. Like the handwriting on the waU, the Times leaders derive most of their force from the mystery of their origin. Personality alone tells in journalism as in war. King's Speeches are always lifeless when they have no soul. Fine writing you may alw^ays know by its absence of ideas. When Mr. Pott writes about ' ouj worthless and reptile contemporary ' we recognise Mr. Pott. We have just passed through an orgy of fine speech and fine writing, and may soon, alas ! have another where the sentiments and the language of patriotism or revolution will be simulated and denounced in words that fall dead as they pour from the lips. The pretence of zeal, of indignation, and of horror, when the speaker is known to be indifferent to the whole matter so long as he gains his end, is more commonly detected than of yore. The House of Commons is becoming a byword for rhetoric and inefficiency. 120 THE WAY OF LIFE The House of Commons is generally regarded as needing more drastic reform than the House of Lords, with all its defects. But who says so ? People are tired of the affectation of virtue and philanthropy on the one side or of the monopoly of patriotism on the other. Seneca, like our pious politicians of to-day, discoursed finely on the joys of abstemiousness, contentment, and philosophy. But he amassed in four years a fortune of tlu:ee hundred millions of sesterces. When Seneca wrote his Essay on Poverty he had his tongue in his cheek. Among the furniture in his house were five hundred citrus tables which cost as much as five thousand pounds apiece. Seneca was an apostle of purity, but he ' carried on ' with Julia and another lady, besides imparting to Nero a knowledge of things about which no Roman Emperor ought to have known anything. Seneca wrote finely on clemency, but he drafted the letter in which Nero justified matricide to the Senate. And the late Dean Farrar includes this canting humbug among his ' Seekers after God ' ! Oh ! these words, how they cheat us into beliefs that things are not what they are I Pious phraseo- logy breeds the cant of unbelief. The pet phrases, cant terms, and hackneyed texts which are used over and over again, when all their meaning has evaporated, are fuel for the bonfire of beliefs in the unseen. And belief survives. Look at the calm assumption of the quasi-religious sectarian press that one party is the party of the poor, and that they, and they only, interpret the spirit of the New Testament and can satisfy the needs of the masses. A Scrunt is reported to have stated in a sermon OILING THE RAZOR 121 that if Christ were alive He would be a Radical, and that a vote for the Radicals was a vote for the Founder of our religion. The friends of the poor are they who deny that the voice of the mob is the voice of God. The enemies of the poor are they who utter the base coinage of words that flatter, demoraUse and corrupt the poor. He who teUs manual labourers that they are magnificent fellows who are shamefully treated by the wicked rich does but oil the razor with which the poor cut their own throats. No more searching touchstone of culture exists than the avoidance of loose and inaccurate words. I take a case at random. A daily journal with a distinctive literary flavour describes a collision between a Belfast dredger and a steamer under the heading, ' Twenty men rescued from a watery grave.' Why not ' maritime mausoleum,' if you must use fine language ? A sea grave is not a ' watery ' grave, but a water grave. The primary meaning of 'watery ' is ' thin,' ' liquid,' ' like water.' The secondary meaning is ' tasteless,' or ' insipid.' Another meaning is ' wet,' or ' abounding with water.' ' Watery grave ' should be no less taboo than ' devouring element,' Such an enchantment is there in words that the masses are believed to like being ushered to destruction so long as they are praised and acclaimed — a proof of the empire of words over things. The masses like to believe that the rich are wicked, and that they, being poor, are therefore good. But only tell them the truth, and they respect you if you toll them the truth with com-tesy. The most benevolent institution, were it called ' Star Chamber,' ' Ship Money,' or " Hungry 122 THE WAY OF LIFE Forties,' would be rejected, not for what it is, but for what the name suggests. The greatest leaders of sect and party are therefore those who provide their followers with a good cry. Disraeli was inimitable. ' Plundering and blundering ' was a charge that applies to all Governments, but the cunning Hebrew had the wit to affix that label to the coat-tails of his Anglican opponent. Party cries are talisman.«. When the great ideas of humanity were being evoked by quick and logical France, Pitt put back the clock in England and burked Burke by cuckoo cries about ' thrones and altars.' To nick a passion with a lucky word is a triumph of genius. The 7not de Camhronne will live when Waterloo is looked on as a tribal squabble between dead races. In the United States ' The Irresponsible Conflict,' ' The Plumed Knight,' and ' Crucified on a Cross of Gold ' swept through the land like prairie fires. In the religious world phrases govern the multitude as Caligula governed Kome. On the Protestant side what good and what evil has not been wrought by the word ' Reformation,' which was not an event, but a process extending over centuries ? In recent years ' Free Church ' and ' Broad Church ' have exercised incalculable influence over men's minds and hearts. Political doctrines that survive also owe their existence to the coinage of a happy phrase to advertise the opposition as offensive. To per- suade people of the beauty and charm of their own side is the aim of statesmen who are merely adroit word-coiners. In the socialist paper Justice I note the advertisement of a genius who sells ' Red SENNACHERIB AND SWAYTHLING 123 Flag butter scotch,' which he commends to the SociaUst public by marrying a popular succade to the revolutionary symbol. ' Eed Flag butter scotch ' may be good or bad, but the association of the mud, blood, and agony of street-fighting with an amalgam of treacle, butter, and sugar marks the domination of words over things. Melodious words attract, and harsh sounds repel unjustly, especially proper names. The poets of the Lake school — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey — chose the banks of the Susquehanna for the site of their pantisocracy, not because they knew anything about it, but because it had a pretty name. The desire for pretty names affects the gravest and the wisest. Lord Chesterfield told an ambassador named Bubb he could never succeed. Lord Swaythling was born Montagu Samuel. By turning the name round he became in due time Sir Samuel Montagu, and chose the name of a Saxon village for his posterity, though his ancestors had rolled back the hosts of Senna- cherib from the walls of Jerusalem. After the partition of Poland the rulers of Prussia required Jews settled in Germany to adopt proper names. The pleasanter names, such as Hirsch, Baum, Holtzler, were given to those who paid for them. Nomenclature as unprintable as that adopted by some of the Kaffirs in the Kimberlcy or Johannes- burg mines were allotted to the unfortunate remainder. At one time ' Damfool ' was not uncommon as a Kaffir name. The Jew of Buda Pesth is as ardent a Hungarian as the Magyar, and he changes accordingly his name from the Semitic to a Magyar form. Pleasant names are 124 THE WAY OF LIFE credentials for life. No liero of the name of Bodger, Puttie, or Scrunt would have better chance of survival than ambassadors named Bubb. Who with a name like Tupper could hope to gain acceptance as a poet ? Yet some of Tupper's work was better than that of minor poets who have won fame of a sort. The last word is eagerly desired by disputants, albeit the last word in family circles is as dangerous as an infernal machine. ' To have words ' or to use ' language ' implies heated words and bad language. The conduct of family quarrels is an art on which there is much to be said, but were all wisdom potted in a sentence it would be : ' Part in silence ; do not bicker ; never write clever letters.' Family quarrels, like a fish-bone in the throat or the wait-a-bit thorn, penetrate deeper as time passes. For the mastery of words, power not to use them, as well as the art to bend them to your will, is indispensable. Philanthropists who thunder hate from the pulpits of reform have not learned the magic of silence. In the use of words there is a besotting intoxication compelling in its diabolical force when applied to the antipathies and sus- picions that lie always near the surface. The effect of suggestion to the multitude by words is being investigated. It is not yet understood. Nobody can doubt that assassination by poison was in- creased in Italy by the use of the word ' assisted,' which minimised the crime by covering it with a mantle of respectability. As civilisation advances its invariable tendency is to coin pleasant names for horrid things. The word ' lie ' is almost for- bidden in this country, though to be a confirmed. GENTLE PLEBEIANS 125 habitual and expert liar is a lesser social crime than to describe a liar by that name. The Athenians concealed national deterioration by- softening the true meanings of words. The quality of an act is tested best by the touchstone of plain Saxon. No word is more misused than the word ' gentle- man.' Originally it meant that a man belonged to a gens or noble family. Since the gens, however, possessed, as a rule, money and leisiu'e, all people with leisure and money came to be spoken of as ' gentlemen.' Opidence and idleness, however, are unfavourable soil for the growth of qualities associated with the name of ' gentleman,' and people are puzzled accordingly by the existence of infamous gentry and of gentle plebeians. Nobody could deny that the Irish peasant is a gentleman. The conclusion of the matter is that in all things we prefer men and women who have learned the right use of words. WORDS If thoughts are things, as Mirabeau said, words are wings. A friend of mine who has sat in Parliament for twenty years invariably defeats with ease opponents more cultured and capable than himself, but has never yet succeeded in conveying in his speeches to his constituents so distinct a meaning as the howl of the hyaena or the song of the cock chaffinch, a bird that repeats his monologue two hundred times a day. Animals think, but we have no proof that any noise made by them expresses either an abstraction or a generalisation — two properties that characterise intelligent speech but are always absent from barbarian chatter. The tongue-click of the Hottentot and the burr of the aboriginal Patagonian express their desires as accurately as English used by Porson or Bentley — word spinners. The idea conveyed to the mind of a Bushman by a couple of clicks may be, and probably is, clearer than the idea conveyed to the most cultured European by many a word of three letters. Ideas of im- measurable infinity and power conveyed by the word ' God ' are beyond the utmost range of our capacity, yet, in the absence of a sense which is apparently enjoyed by some insects, many TARIFF AND TRAFFIC 127 birds, and most animals, man is dependent on words, written or spoken, for practically every- thing that protects him from isolation and impotence. The vocabulary of an agricultural labourer in one English county is estimated at about eight hundred and sixty words against the sixteen or seventeen thousand labels used by Shakespeare in addressing his portmanteau of fame to its destination down the corridor of time. The limitations of a mind with only eight or nine hundred words on deposit in the bank of memory are unintelligible to people in the plane of four thousand on current account. At the late election, Tariff Reform was sometimes opposed under the belief that ' Tariff ' and ' Traffic ' were the same word and meant the same thing. Motor-cars being politically unpopular as evidence of wealth and as a danger to the little folk addicted to the fascinating game of ' last across the road,' ' Tariff Reform ' was understood to mean the aboUtion of motors. When the Irish question was before the country in the election of 1892 many labourers voted against the Unionists because they believed that party to consist of people who were in favour of the workhouse system of relief commonly known in parishes which have pooled their resources as ' the Union.' There is less reason for surprise at such examples of a rustic faihng to understand the meaning of words than at the Foreign Office official who, in the Coronation year, wrote to the Kansas Legis- lature thanking it for its ' loyal and dutiful address,' the Foreign Office being firmly convinced^that Kansas was a Canadian town. * Kansas ' should 128 THE WAY OF LIFE surely convey a clearer idea to a bureaucrat than ' Tarifi ' to Hodge or ' Union ' to a pauper's mind. Interpretation of language is responsible for most of the quarrels, altercations, disputes, differences, feuds, affrays, and broils that occur in public and private life. In the exudation of verbal sepia the greatest expert was Mr. Gladstone. His perception of the differences between things essentially identical was a form of genius that procured him the dishke of straightforward people. Mr. Gladstone would never admit that Gordon was ' hemmed in ' ; he declared that he was only ' smTounded.' He objected to the war in Egypt, for which he was responsible, being called a war ; it was ' warhke operations.' As the years rolled on and old age came over him, Mr. Gladstone's force was obscuj-ed in the cloud of words which surrounded him like insects round a dying camel in the desert. With the right people words are necromancy. The power of vibrating the ether that separates the minds of a multitude from the speaker's mind depends on something more than intellectual capacity. The essence of the art is sincerity and the power to feel, see and express truth. The reason why fluency in articles, sermons, and speeches often disgusts is the instinctive perception of their insincerity. Forensic skill in the use of words often triumphs, but when the speaker is sincere the humblest vocabulary and the plainest pro- vincialism reach the hearts of his hearers, when the trained advocate, whose experience is acquired under hire, leaves his audience cold. DE. JOHNSON 129 Joseph Cowen, of Newcastle, with his strong Northumbrian burr, was probably the best all- round speaker of the last forty years. His sincerity was incandescent, and was expressed in language quarried from the English classics. Sincerity in the use of words means mastery of their meaning ; therefore toil. Do we grasp our own meaning ? Even the experts forget that words are labels for things unseen. A Yankee judge in the Middle West once defined murder as follows : ' Gentlemen of the jury — murder is when a man is murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is — murder.' Dr. Johnson had no definite idea of the meaning of the word ' network.' He defined it as ' anytliing reticulated or decussed at equal distances with interstices between the inter-sections.' I prefer the child's definition of a circle : ' A round hole with a line round it.' Child and lexicographer ran a dead-heat in the race for a definition. In ' Johnson's Dictionary ' ' brimstone ' was defined as ' sulphur,' but on turning to ' sulphur ' we are told tliat it is ' brim- stone.' Was it a joke when Sidney Smith explained that an archdeacon was a dignitary of the Church who exercised archidiaconal functions, and that the latter were the functions exercised by an archdeacon, who is a dignitary of the Church ? The fact is that omniscience is needed for the exact definition of the words we use. Think of the chemical and mathematical knowledge in three languages required for the true definition of such words as ' gas,' ' acid,' ' stress,' or ' resist- ance.' Think of the political and historical knowledge required for the definition of ' people.' 130 THE WAY OF LIFE ' freedom/ ' right,' ' patriot/ ' windbag/ or ' financier.' Words are pools communicating with the ocean of time, space, and eternity. Some of them lie a long way inland and seem isolated ; others are on the shore of the miplumbed sea. Such words as ' idea,' ' life,' ' hope,' ' affinity,' ' inertia,' ' sacrifice,' and ' mystery ' are labels on the treasure-chests that contain the legacies of humanity. They pass current like bank-notes, with all the risks of forgery to which paper currency is exposed. The biggest ideas are expressed in the simplest language, a fact which men whose trade is in words rarely remember. Keats quivered with pleasure at the deft use of words, such as Spenser's ' Sea-shouldering whale.' The love of ornate words is not restricted to Indian Babus enamelled with a cracked coating of Western culture. The Pawnee word for ' tooth ' is ' khotsiakatatkhusua.' The word for ' tongue ' in another Indian dialect has twenty-two letters. The Mexicans and the Welsh run a neck-and-neck race for supremacy in long, compo- site words. A Mexican priest is addressed as ' Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzui.' A faggot is ' tlatlatlalpistiteutli.' A Mexican lover when he wants a kiss asks for a ' teteimamiquilitzli ' — a Frenchman who records this fact justly remarks that by the time one has pronounced the word one has earned the thing. Meaningless words were never so well illustrated as by the result of a bet between the French dramatist Labiche and a friend as to the extent of the nonsense that a Parisian audience could be induced to accept from a master of declamatory patriotism. The WOMEN'S WOEDS 131 following verse was successfully declaimed to a Parisian audience. It was followed by thunders of applause : La Lachete ne vaut pas la vaillance, Mille revel's ne valent pas un succes, La France sera toujours la France : — Et les Fran9ais seront toujours les Fran§ai3. The use of meaningless words or of words to which half meanings are attached indicates a backward or arrested state of social or political civilisation. Two words dear to the hearts of women — ' think ' and ' nice ' — are to me odious as a roast fox stulTed with tobacco and basted with train-oil. Nine times out of ten when a woman says ' I thought ' she has had no evidence either way, and therefore no material for arriving at a conclusion. She advertises the fact that whatever mental process was gone through she did not ' think.' Thought is the result of mental exercise. What she means, of course, is that she ' hoped,' ' sur- mised,' or ' conjectured,' not that she has exercised her judgment. In woman's mouth the word ' nice ' has multi- plied its meaning lilve the Hanoverian rat until it is employed to characterise anything from a blouse to the prospect of meeting one's friends in heaven ; from a cricket match to a long letter ; from a sub-lieutenant or a sale to the sunset glow in the African desert. ' Genteel ' and ' patronise ' are equally loathly. Why is it that some words repel like polecats ? Since Pope's day the meaning of ' nice ' has been lost — ' the nice conduct of a clouded cane ' is correct, since the evolution of k2 132 THE WAY OF LIFE the significance of the word from ' fastidious ' to ' dainty ' and ' delicious ' was interrupted by the dictum that 'a nice man is a man of nasty ideas.' The satirist of the eighteenth century was too himgry for paradox to perceive that he was murdering a nice EngUsh word. Whatever the cost of cloth and velvet, no man can be called well-dressed whose clothes do not fit him. No wordster is worthy who does not fit his thoughts to words as completely as though his thoughts were melted and poured into moulds. It was said of Gladstone that he could deliver a Queen's speech extempore or dictate offhand an article for the Quarterly Review. Intended as a compliment, the statement was derogatory. Facility of word flow is inconsistent with true art. Logorrhsea is disease like any other involuntary dribble. Words that bite and sting remain with us because they are hewn with blood and sweat, not poured from a water-pot through the fine rose of a ' liberal ' education. Gladstone, with his marvellous mind, frame, and experience, struggled in a sea of words all his life. He was never their master and has not left a phrase that lives. Nelson graduated in the school of the Open, and left behind him a score of imperishable phrases. ' Damn our enemies ! Bless our friends ! Amen, Amen, Amen.' ' I am not such a hypocrite as to bless them that hate us [the English] ; or, if a man strike me on the cheek to turn the other. No ; knock him down, by God ! ' ' Nations, like individuals, are to be won more by acts of kindness than cruelty.' ' Political courage is as THE LITTLE LANGUAGE 133 necessary as military courage.' ' Only numbers can annihilate.' ' In sea affairs nothing is im- possible and nothing improbable.' ' Nothing is sure in a sea fight.' We have improved since the days when all women were ' nymphs ' ; when the March gales did not blow, but ' Boreas ' ruled the roost. Tea and cofiee were never so described. All wine was ' rosy,' sleep ' balmy,' and the sun described by his name as seldom as modern reporters write the word ' football.' The passionate outpourings of the soul when moved to its depths are expressed for the most part in monosyllables. Men in their agony say 'Hell!' 'God!' 'Christ!' They think too quickly to appeal to the powers of good and evil otherwise than tersely. In the crisis of life all the great words are the little ones. ' A boy,' says the doctor, when Bonaparte's mother asks the inevitable question, her trouble being over. ' Yes ' or ' No ' is the maiden's answer that makes earth heaven or purgatory to a lover. After the long vigil round the bed of the dying, ' All is over ' announces the end. Byron, whom the Russians prefer to Shakespeare because Pushkine copied him, spoke of the ' earliest words ' of children as one of the sweeter things of life. I refer elsewhere to the ' little language ' of families. Letters from all parts of the world have reached me telling of the freemasonry between members of the same family established by the ' little language ' they spoke in common. Nearly all these letters referred to the fact that the ' little language ' was derived from words mis- pronounced by the yomiger children, repeated by 134 THE WAY OF LIFE the elder, and added permanently to the family dialect. What a volume of meaning is condensed into these little words ! The ' Hear, hear ! ' of the House of Commons runs through a gamut of meaning — admiration, contempt, acquiescence, and wrath are equally expressed, according to the mood of the House. Foreign alliances are temporary ; the union of language is eternal. You may quarrel with your relations, but your relations speak your language when the quarrel is over. The flag without the language is no tie. The only natural ally we can gain is another country speaking the same language as ourselves. Friendship with our bloodsmen beyond sea is a plant fertilised by our common language. The British Empire, the friendship of Ireland, and the peace of the Anglo-Saxons are mainly a question of words. THE UNSEEN BEHIND THE VEIL When Professor Haeckel of Jena said in his heart, ' There is no God,' he wrote ' The Eiddle of the Universe ' to prove it. When Mr. William Thomas Stead knew that the dead returned, he wrote an article in the Fortnightly Review to prove it. Knowledge is of three kinds. There is the knowledge we carry about with us ready to hand, which can be uncorked and decanted for consump- tion at will ; there is the knowledge that we do not carry in our mental portmanteau, but which is accessible through books, conversation, study, travel, inquiry, and observation ; and there is a third kind of knowledge, neither ready to hand nor obtainable by known means, yet often claimed by those who do not possess it, though inaccessible under the three dimensions conditioning our present existence. This mystery-knowledge relates to the unseen, to the future life, to the powers of the soul, to the existence of a Master Mind — to the solution of the Riddle of the Universe. I know nothing ; but it is possible that if I think honestly millions think with mo, and therefore straight- forwardness and humility in handling the occult 136 THE UNSEEN may find an echo in tlie heart of readers who know more than myself. I have once seen a ghost, but then, having not broken fast for sixteen hours, I prefer to attribute the apparition to unemployed gastric juice rather than to divine revelation. I share the keen interest exhibited in things unseen, albeit English opinion is as insensitive to occult influences as to new ideas. It responds sluggishly to demands on the spiritual faculties. In the churches there is lack of clear thinking. From many pulpits congregations were told that the victims in the last earthquake catastrophe were ' launched into eternity.' It stands to reason that, what- ever happened to us before we were born, the time when we are launched into eternity as sentient beings is when we draw our first breath, not our last. If we live after death, then there is no solution of continuity. Personality goes on, and eternity exists for us now as truly as after death. Evidently that is the general view of mankind ; for if there is no God, no Architect, no sur- vival, no ordered evolution towards efficiency and betterment, no ghosts, angels, devils, elementals, spirits, or magic — then all the churches, chapels, synagogues, temples, cathedrals, mosques, pan- theons, pagodas, joss-houses, dagobas, topes, and ju-ju places are as futile as the priests, cardinals, primates, prelates, deans, presbyters, canons, rectors, curates, deacons, missionaries, revivalists, monks, nuns, novices, rabbis, mollahs, ulema, imaums, hadjis, dervishes, fakirs. Brahmins, gurus, bonzes, lamas, medicine-men, and the other spiritual advisers of mankind. DE. ASTLEY'S CASE 137 The majority of these spiritual advisers are quite as cocksure as Professor Haeckel and nearly as cocksure as Mr, Stead that they only know la vraie verite. Most of us are unable to accept any of them as infallible, not even those who specialise on omniscience, but we reverence the creed and the teacher which produce the best results expressed in terms of conduct for themselves and happiness for others. The vast apparatus for communication with the unseen which exists in all parts of the world must supply some useful purpose or it could never have endured. Marshal Oyama belongs to a race where faith in the unseen happens to be synonymous with patriotism. He was asked the secret of Japanese success in the late war. ' Discipline,' said he, ' teaches us how to fight, religion how to die,' It is certain that whether Shintoism, Islam, or Christianity be the inspiring cause, a nation with faith in the unseen will excel in peace and war any nation purely materialistic. Disbelief in the unseen is no badge of distinction. Pigs are said to see the wind. The hungry curiosity of the public concerning forces beyond the ken of ascertained law was shown in the case of the alleged apparition of Dr. Astley, the absent Vicar of East Rudham, King's Lynn. It will be remembered that Dr. Astley was injured in a railway accident near Algiers on December 16, and that on December 26 his apparition was seen by three residents at the vicarage outside his study window, and that the figure reappeared on the evening of December 26 and was again seen by the housekeeper. Con- fident testimonv as to the facts was met as 138 THE UNSEEN usual by destructive criticism from confident and aggressive sceptics. Until the case is tried before a competent judge under the rules of evidence with assessors, it is impossible for the average man to know whether Dr. Astlev's apparition is real or whether the witnesses, under hallucination, imagined the image painted on their retina. During the last few years the topography of the brain has been mapped out as accurately as the topography of the globe, but within the small compass of our skulls is also unexplored territory. Modern surgery has rendered the anatomy of the brain common knowledge to those interested in the subject, but anatomy of the brain and knowledge of the localities where corporeal activities originate throw no light on the nature of thought. Experts there are who say that radio-activity is a realm full of promise in the direction of discovering the true nature of thought. They may be right, but one hesitates to believe them without evidence of a kind intelligible to a special jury. When the glacial epoch broke up, weather prophets, had they existed, if they were wise, would have hesitated to declare what the climate was going to be in the British Isles. Such primitive weather prophets, if they were heady and unwise, would have been as cocksure as Mr. Stead on the one hand or Professor Haeckel on the other. The first principles of the nature of thought are not only in doubt, they are unknown, although we observe that mind-force is capable of acting either malignantly or benignly on ourselves and on others. So much we know, but how it is that thought emerges from nothingness, becomes something, and produces FALSE TEETH 139 effects is the mystery of mysteries. A man called in the doctors to perform an operation because he said he had swallowed his false teeth. The Rontgen apparatus showed that he was mistaken. There were no teeth. The symptoms, however, con- vinced experienced doctors that he had swallowed his teeth until they proved by X rays that he had not done so. The patient knew nothing of the effects that would be produced by a set of false teeth in his stomach, yet he reproduced those effects, and the symptoms were only removed by suggesting to the man after an anaesthetic had been administered that the teeth had been removed. The symptoms then subsided. What is a thought ? A thing ? Of the benign effects of healthy auto- suggestion there is ample evidence, while the effects of ill-will, hate, malignity, and the desire for revenge are recorded in the folklore of all nations. Primitive man, white, brown, yellow, or red, has shown a singular unanimity in the nature of his beliefs as to the contents of the unseen world, and the beliefs of primitive man pervade Bond Street to-day, if we may judge by the palmists' shops. E\il spirits were ever seeking to do harm to primitive man ; good spirits, to exert their power on his behalf. Primitive man is always more intent on averting the wrath of the evil spirits than on pleasing the good. Mr. R. Campbell Thompson in his recent book on ' Semitic Magic ' has developed a new and interesting theory con- cerning the Atonement Sacrifices. Orthodox theo- logians declare Atonement is At-one-ment, or the establishment of a living bond between the wor- shippers and their God. Mr. Campbell Thompson 140 THE UNSEEN regards the atoning sacrifices of the primitive systems of magic as due to the necessity of driving the mischief-making devil into isolation or a place where the malign influence can be con- trolled. The case of the Gadarene swine is adduced as one in which mischief- making devils were isolated and placed under control in the same manner as static electricity in Leyden jars. That being accompUshed, the new receptacles — the swine — could be safely destroyed. Huxley broke a lance over what he called the ' Gadarene affair,' but he did not shine in the discussion. In his story ' The Nemesis of Fire,' Mr. Black- wood describes the elementals — the active forces behind the elements. An elemental is impersonal, but can be used by sensitive persons for purposes of their own, either for good or evil, just as practical men can use steam and electricity to destroy or benefit their fellow-men. These elementals are the basis of all magic. It is the motive behind the elementals that determines whether they are angels to help or curses to destroy, since they are subject to the directing will of the mind behind them. Of the existence or limitations of elemental angels or devils we know nothing. In January 1909 the devout in a hundred coun- tries have given to prayer a complete week. The scheme was intended to demonstrate to the popu- lation of the globe the importance and the effici- ency of prayer. It is a sign of the times that one of the leaders of the movement, the Rev. F. B. Meyer, recognises the telepathic efiect of thousands of people concentrating their desires on obtaining PEAYEE 141 one object. Mr. Meyer already claims for the Evangelical Alliance prayer system tlie diminution of the evils of the Chinese opium traffic, the Congo horrors, and other troubles afflicting the world. Prayer is offered up for universal peace. One answer to this prayer might be general recognition that ' Heaven helps them that help themselves,' and that organised preparation for war with the splendid qualities engendered by an intelligent and general system of discipline is the most effectual answer to the fervent prayers of righteous men for universal peace. That habitual prayerfulness affects the personality of those who offer prayer is a fact within the experience of thousands, just as the habit of cursing and the constant use of tropical language over events small and great have also their effect. Many years ago Professor Huxley challenged the Evangelical world to prove the efficacy of prayer by concentrating their petitions on the recovery of patients in a particular hospital. The challenge was not accepted, but for the late George Miiller's success in procuring funds for his vast Bristol Orphanage work there is evidence the validity of which is not to be gainsaid. Mliller never adver- tised and never asked for money, but in his case prayer was invariably followed by voluntary gifts sufficient to provide for many thousands of desolate orphans, and this over a long course of years. Of the limitations of prayer we know nothing. During the Lancashire cotton famine prayer meet- ings were held to entreat Heaven for a supply of the raw material so much needed. At one of these meetings an operative prayed with great fervour for new supplies of cotton, ending with the words, 142 THE UNSEEN ' But, oh, Lord, not Surat, for Thou knowest Surat is short in the staple/ If the legitimate sphere of prayer were unUmited, prayers against earth- quakes, which seem to the average intelligence like praying that water may run up hill, would become general in the seismic area. Even if the law governing earthquakes is impregnable to human entreaty addressed to the First Cause, there would seem nothing immoral in praying that if earth- quakes must occur their operation might be transferred to territory where they would do the least harm. Consider, for instance, what would be the effect had the earthquake which desolated SicHy occurred in the Balkan Peninsula as a con- sequence of prayer by the Evangelical Alliance. The great war which threatens to involve the civiUsed world might then be avoided. But human experience is against the efficacy of prayer directed against the operation of natm'al law. Axe-heads do not float. Earthquakes wi'eck populous cities with the same indifference as they alter the level of uninhabited deserts. Yet wise men neither deny the existence of a First Cause nor that the world behind the veil may be more real than our own. The insane, who are treated in the East as inspired, declare that we mortals are the phantoms and that realities are unseen. Probably the insane are right. MULTIPLE PERSONALITY Recent discovery in multiple personalities is understood by those who have followed the brain researches of Dr. Mercier, Sir John Tweedy, Dr. Albert Wilson, M.D., Dr. G. A. Watson, Dr. J. S. Bolton, Dr. C. Lloyd Tuckey, Dr. Robert Jones, and Dr. Mott ; together with the results of the investigations of Gregor Mendel, the Abbot of Briinn, and of Dr. Archdale Reid, in heredity. The mind and personality Icnown as the Ego, which is character and individuality, can be resolved into minor personaUties, good and bad, dependent on the texture and condition of the body that is their host. Each of us has three nervous systems. The lowest is the sympathetic system, which man shares with animals. The second system consists of the spinal nerves, which govern movements of body and limb. This represents the fighting battalions of the army in the front. The third system is the brain, which represents the general staff, or thinldng department, of the Army. These three systems are interwoven. Injury to one disables all. Dr. Ferrier and others have mapped the surface of the brain as the Department of the Hydrographer of the Navy has mapped 144 THE UNSEEN the ocean. The areas of sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and motion are as well known as the Channel Islands or the Caribbean Sea. This outer surface of the brain, called the cortex, con- tains the nerve cells which form the organic basis of mind. It is the scene of recent and promising discovery. Man and brute alike possess five distinct layers of nerve cells, and man differs from brute mainly in the relatively large space allotted to what is called the pyramidal layer. Idiots possess shallow pyramidal layers. Blood supply to the brain is regulated by the sympathetic nerves, but the supply may be adulterated or poisoned by alcohol, gout, morphia, the air of crowded cities or lack of food. If the pyramidal layer is poisoned or defective, character and conduct are affected, and the original Ego is displaced by a new personality — sometimes by more than one. In the case of Mary Barnes, which I shall presently describe, no fewer than ten distinct and separate personalities were revealed. Paralysis or loss of function affects any section of the brain territory where the blood is blocked. That blocking may easily occur is easy to mider- stand when we remember that blood corpuscles can only pass in single file along the finer capillaries. They are but the three-thousandth part of an inch in diameter, and there is probably a still finer circulation that eludes the best microscope and the keenest eye. Bearing in mind the effect of blood circulation in a coarse surface like the skin — as in blushing or nervous blotches on the neck or face— it is plain that so delicate an organ as the brain may exhibit a great variety of mental MABY BARNES 145 symptoms according to its nourishment by the commissariat department — the sympathetic system. There has probably been no such case as that of Mary Barnes, even in the Middle Ages. Dr. Albert Wilson, who had charge of the case, calls the differ- ent sub-personalities B 1 to B 10. If the normal state of Mary Barnes was A, her abnormal condition was B. There were ten abnormal states, each different from the others. B 1 was a condition of acute mania, with the dread of snakes. B 2 was a simple uneducated child. As B 3 she could read and write and had better physical health than in the other personalities. B 4 was a deaf mute. B 4 came on after prolonged catalepsy, but sometimes passed ofE quite suddenly, changing to B 2. When rolling on the floor in the state of B 2 crying with toothache, after being relieved of the pain by the extraction of the molar she became the normal A, and was greatly surprised at the blood and gap in her jaw, and asked how it was, since (as Mary Barnes) she had never felt any toothache. A (Mary Barnes) was unconscious of B's physical suffering. The B 5 personality appeared only on one occasion. B 6 was an important personality, which after two years remained constant, all other personalities disappearing. Under the seventh personality, B 7, she called herself ' Adjuice Uneza.' She had a clear memory of small events of early childhood, but subsequent life history was obliterated. B 7 could neither stand nor walk. We know that in some cases of senile decay the memories of ancient childhood stand out clearly. Dr. Wilson suggests that B 7 corresponds to this 146 THE UNSEEN brain change of senility, owing to tlie more super- ficial cortical layers being weakened or paralysed while the deeper layers with earlier memories are stimulated. As B 8 she was known as ' Tom's darling,' but on October 10 ' Tom's darling ' gradually left and a new personality arrived, B 9. The transition occupied a whole day. She said that she had no name, did not know Dr. Wilson, wrote and spoke backwards like B 2, developed a tendency to kleptomania, which she defended on the prmciples of modern Socialism. She said : ' If people do not give you things, why, nick it. Quite right, too.' After remaining for some weeks as B 9 she awoke as B 1, or a maniacal state, and passed through a cycle of changes from B 1 to B 2. The last and final change to sub-stage B 10 revealed a blind imbecile — apathetic, deaf, stupid. It was remarkable that while Mary Barnes (the normal A) could never draw at all, the blind personality B 10 could draw admirably. She drew with much skill the fashion plates or pictures seen in the illustrated papers. Her absolute blindness was proved by placing a book between her eyes and the paper. The cases of Mary Barnes and others show that multiple personality and crime are closely related, that the recorded phenomena of double or multiple consciousness are far commoner than is generally supposed, and that all of us, especially the leisured classes, are potential criminals. In the days of Nelson and Bonaparte we were a plethoric and full-blooded people. In 1807 thought was slow, the pulse was hard, living was plain and plentiful. To-day we fly to Scotland in eight hours, whereas OVEESTRAIN 147 our forefathers required three days' coaching or a week in the saddle to reach Edinburgh. Fifty years of stimulating, tinned and frozen food, easy travel, and constant strain have made us an asthenic people. Our pulse is soft and compressible. The type of disease has changed. Mental instability is no longer rare — it infects large masses of the people. NatiU'e having no favourites, we experienced in the Boer war the effect of the cerebral changes that have altered our racial characteristics. We all live constantly under overstrain, and what is called ' overstrain ' among the well-to-do is insanity or crime among those less fortunately circumstanced. The label of ' overstrain ' among the leisured classes is held to excuse acts which bring persons of another rank to Bow Street. Remedy there is none until the law is enriched with the knowledge of scientific penology, which involves knowledge of the recent discoveries in the pyramidal region of the brain. What the French term ' recidiviste ' is a standing indictment against the existing criminal law, because the habitual criminal is no more amenable to reform by punishment than a blind man for inability to read small type. Neglect of this fact is killing the race. Lunacy and poverty increase, while degeneracy and crime elude the control of the Home Office and the Local Govern- ment Board. Luxury and over-indulgence produce lethargy and inefficiency in Government depart- ments. In Parliament we perceive the effects of disordered capillaries in the brains of popular statesmen. Neglect of the poor and helpless, and erroneous theories of education, have brought us l2 148 THE UNSEEN to a condition of perilous decay which is not the punishment of an offended Providence, but the logical consequence of breaking immutable l^w. Since oiu- only hope of salvation is return to healthy conditions, and since the latest discoveries in connexion with the pyramidal layer of the brain lay bare the secrets of moral and intellectual health, it is time that England renewed her allegi- ance to those natural laws of morals and physique which were better observed when England built up her power— and which are, in fact, the efficiency code of the Decalogue. A few days ago I was present at a meeting of sixty brain specialists to hear a paper read by Dr. Albert Wilson, illustrated by the presence of released criminals, including murderers, burglars, and convicts of thirty years' experience of penal servitude. These men gave their evidence, and replied to cross-examination by the specialists present in such a manner as to substantiate Dr. Wilson's main position — i.e. that sterilisation of the unfit has now become one condition of national survival. Scientific medical innovators usually meet with frank and hostile criticism. The medical profession generally supports Dr. Wilson, whose silent laboiirs for twenty years, are only given to the world after prolonged research. Criminology, penology, child education, and poor law legislation will be recast if investigations into the pjrramidal layer of the human brain are accepted by the public as they are already accepted by cerebral specialists. No longer will hundreds of prisoners who are mentally weak be left at large to breed, rape, or steal. They will be collected PERVERTS AND INVERTS 149 into liomes, asylums, or islands, and the contradic- tory term ' criminal lunatic,' as applying to them, will be abandoned in favoiu- of the term ' irresponsi- ble unfit,' for whom the only sane treatment is segregation for life or neutralisation. The unstable and neurotic rich will shortly be diagnosed as belonging to the same criminal class as those poorer unfortunates whose multiple personalities lead them into ' crime.' ' Perverts,' the active wrong-doers, and ' inverts,' the passive wrong-doers or ' born tired,' are both the victims of defective brains. Compulsory measures are required to deal with rich and poor, and the conclusion of the whole matter is that while the Socialist is right in objecting to see rich and poor ' inverts ' treated on different methods, society in its own interests must recognise that the true criminal is the pure socialist who regards all earthly possessions as common stock to be grabbed for the unfit by fair means or foul. Burglars and illicit financiers are of the same typB, and require identical treatment for perverted cortex, since brain trouble has now reached a stage when neither revenge nor reform is the goal of scientific penology, but the preservation of society by compulsory obedience to the laws of Moses. This is not ' black materialism,' but plain Bible-teaching sustained by the latest science and research. THE GKEAT IDEA I SPENT half a day in Paris lately in hunting for the publisher of Admiral Eeveillere's work, ' Christian- isme et Autarchie.' Hachette, the Boulevards, and the Rue St. Honore knew nothing of the naval sage of Brest, but in the mean streets near St. Sulpice, after half a dozen failures, I stood at the counter of a little bookshop, and, asking for the works of Contre-Amiral Reveillere, got them. The Admiral died at Brest last year. He was a great character, and wrote twenty-seven volumes mainly on one idea — Autarchie or self-control, self-government, and the love of humanity, shown by honouring God and running straight. Having now read some of his works, I should not be surprised if his contributions to the literature of religion keep his memory green. Certainly he throws new light on the good side of modern Christianity, which is constantly abused. He held that, though France is neither Protestant nor Catholic, under various philosophic and religious forms the French are self-governing Christians. He held that Christ having proclaimed the Brotherhood of Man, the applications of science such as steam and electricity are harnessed to the Great Idea, He held that Jupiter Depredator responds to the THE STING OF DEATH 151 Roman ideal, and that the God of Battles, as claimed by the Germans, the French, the English, and by the American Senate after Santiago, is only Mars under another name. And, lastly, he held that if yon are good to your fellow-creatures you cannot but believe in the goodness and impartiality of the First Cause, and that of all the Miracles of Jesus the greatest was the creation of faith in the goodness of God. In view of Europe's relations with Asia, especially ours with India, where rehgion and life are almost convertible terms, fresh light thrown on the ostensible Creed of Christendom is a service to Europe. The Sting of Death is almost unknown to vegetarian Asiatics. Of all the difficulties with which the British are faced, among the chief are Asiatic indifference to the mystery of death and Asiatic refusal to adjust their scheme of life to our Western doctrine of the will to live. During the struggle with the Boers our views of war were changed by the Boer practice of retiring — Anglice, running away — when nothing was to be gained but honour, in the English sense, by holding their ground. Fear of death, which is mated and mastered in the heart of the British soldier by the greater fear of seeming to be afraid, was superseded in the Boer mind by the desire to win. No Eastern fanatic ever laid down his life more readily than thousands and thousands of British soldiers and sailors for the honour of their regiments and their ships, their country and their Sovereign. Still, the fear of death is a factor of great strength in the civil and military economy of the British 152 THE UNSEEN Isles, But for the general desire to prolong this life, suicide would seriously diminish the population as faith retires into the backgxound. We who belong to that half of the world that is ignorant of how the other half lives do not suspect the exist- ence of tragedy and suffering at our doors sufficient to explain such wholesale self-destruction. In the points of difference between East and West there is none that sunders them more effectually than their antithetic outlook on Hfe. From the Atlantic to the Caucasus the average man wants to have a good time here and now. From the Caucasus to the Pacific the average man is patient, long-suft'ering, fatalistic, and endowed with a longer view and a larger outlook than those of the masses pent in the tenement houses, charity shelters, and casual wards of the Western world. The average Asiatic Uves in his religion. His every act is religious. The spirit of life being in his food, he bares his head as a mark of respect to the Giver, never as a conventional observance of the proprieties. When he dies he is under no apprehension as to whether he survives. Life with him is not a period of existence for a few decades. It is one stage on a journey of ilUmitable length. Death is the Tent-Pitcher. Whether the Asiatic believes in the subtle immensities of panthe- ' istic theology, in the philosophic quietism of Buddhism and its sects, or in the Prophet of Islam, he is not like the beasts that perish. Survival after death is to him as real as terrestrial existence. He hates, he loves, he works, and he idles without affecting destiny. It is written. In trans- 'migration he may rise like Indur in the scale of THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 153 life. Or he may descend. But survival is sure, and the sense of survival colours his character and directs his point of view from the dawn of intelligence to the day of death. The average Briton is also taught in youth the tenets of reUgion. If he enjoys the benefits of a liberal education the evidences of Christianity are compulsorily acquired under the penalty of losing certain social advantages. Salvation he knows to be a term applied to that deHverance which Christ procured for mankind by saving them from their sins. The Sacraments of Baptism and the Supper of the Lord are not merely signs of profession whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not Christian ; they are of the nature of military oaths of allegiance similar to the oath taken by the Roman soldiers. In baptism a Christian engages, and in the Lord's Supper the Christian renews the engagement to fight manfully under the banner of Christ and ' to continue His faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end.' If a member of the Church of England, the Christian is taught the Sacramental virtue of Holy Order where- by a ministry ordained by Bishops is descended in an unbroken chain from the Apostles. To the Christian the Books of the Old and New Testament are said to comprise the Sacred Canon or Rule of Faith. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion which contain the Symbol, Creed, or Confession of Faith of the Church of England, which were drawn up at the time of the Reformation with immediate references to what were held to be Romish and sectarian errors, are subscribed to by the clergy of the Established Church. Thous;]i differing 154 THE UNSEEN in organic details from the Anglican Cliiirch, the Roman Catholics, the Protestant Dissenters, the Greek Church and the Russian branch of the Greek Church hold substantially the same Creed as the Church of England so far as regards the Unity of God, the Divine Origin of Christ, the Atonement for Sin, Survival after Death, and the different destinations of the good man and of the wicked. Although all forms of the Christian faith have produced the noblest characters possible under the limitations of human nature, it is not surprising that the Western Churches have made no headway against the current of Asiatic con- victions. But the indirect effects of Christianity have profoundly influenced Asia, and especially India, no less than the rest of the world. Two articles of entrancing interest appeared lately in the Fortnightly Review — ' Why I am not a Christian,' by P. Vencata Rao, and ' Why I am a Christian,' by the Rev. Dr. Fairbairn. The impression left on the reader's mind is that while the spirit of Christianity is conspicuous in the gentle, courteous and scholarly contribution of Mr. Vancata Rao, Christianity is unfortunate in her champion. Having more than once ' sat under ' the Rev. Dr. Fairbairn — he is, or was, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford — I am not surprised at his failure to meet Mr. Vancata Rao's dissection of the inconsistencies, contradictions, paradoxes, and errors of people who call themselves Christian, and of the writings which set forth the Creed of the Christian. A professorial spirit per- meates the argument and leaves the impression of a schoolmaster's displeasure with an underbred CASTE 155 pupil. His final sentence denouncing caste — ' that there is no single doctrine that is so offensive to the spirit of the West or to the religion which has created it ' — is a sample of the unreality, not of Christianity, but of the ' arguments ' used by apologists for Christianity as they pervert it. Caste is as strongly established in England as in India ; but while in India indelible, in England caste is in a state of flux. Dr. Fairbairn himself, by the use of the letters signifying that he is a Doctor of Divinity, and, therefore, belonging to a caste apart, is an advertisement of the existence of caste in Christianity. Mr. Vancata Rao says that he is not a Christian because the evidences are contradictory, garbled, or mythical. Dr. Fairbairn is at a loss to understand why Mr. Vancata Rao is not a Christian, but he contributes no material for his conversion. Were I an Asiatic I should not like to say that Dr. Fairbairn's arguments would prevent me from becoming a Christian, but I should think so. The truth of Christianity is not proved by theology. The tree is known by its fruit. The evil lives of professing Christians or the incompatibility of John's Gospel with that of Mark is no more proof of falsity than a mistake in arithmetic or a fraudulent senior wrangler are demonstrations that mathematics is a myth. Christendom is split up into so many divisions that the sum of its achievements can be claimed by none. Protestants who take their name from their diSerences with Rome rarely compute the contribution of the elder branch of the Christian Church to the betterment of the world. Catholics never praise Protestantism. 156 THE UNSEEN Jesuits in Protestant countries are known only as subtle and ambitious servants of Rome, econo- mical in truth, and associated with the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Protestants ignore the historic fact that Jesuits have for centuries nobly toiled and sufiered martyrdom in every climate to spread the Light as they knew it. I myself have seen them at work in their exile : cultured gentlemen abandoning everything that makes life pleasant to teach children and train adults in the arts of civihsation. The Jesuits may have done harm as well as good, but in reckoning the influence of Christianity there is no section of Christendom, whether the Society of Jesus or the smallest sect of Nonconformists, which has not given in the service of man undeniable proof that the inspiration of Christ is reality. Were all the Biblical miracles — and a miracle is nothing but the unexplained — proved untrue, two miracles remain which have stood unchallenged for nearly two thousand years, and are attested by countless lives of to-day. The first miracle was the conception of the Brotherhood of Man appearing in the Roman Empire and taking root in such a reign as that of Tiberius. The second was the idea of the struggle for the life of others which accompanied it. Anyone knowing the intellectual and moral state of the Roman Empire under Tiberius and Caligula recognises that the authenticity of the floating of the axe-head or the turning water into wine is unimportant compared with the miraculous birth of the Great Idea which did actually change the face of the world in the teeth of Roman luxury and Paganism. Constancy CHEIST IN INDIA 157 to ideal is fanaticism to tliose who do not understand it, and, though most Christians fall short, there has never been a time for twenty centuries when the Great Idea of Christ has lacked the driving power of spirits eager not merely to die, but to live for others. The Christianity of Christ differs widely from the form in which the rituals and the sacraments of Christendom present it, but, as Renan says, ' Two thousand years after His death He is a thousand times more loved and followed than when He was alive/ The influence of Christ's teaching on the Poor Law, on the prisoner, on the child, on the English administration of India, is no negligible factor. The Great Idea imparts hope by changing men within, by giving brothers to those who lack friends in the battle of life. The reUgions of Asia offer no present redress for misfortune in this world. Mr. Vencata Rao himself admits his obligation to the missionaries. He has doubtless witnessed the coming of a white teacher to the people in a backward tract, where is gathered together a group of pupils under no better shelter than a banian tree. He has seen the villagers take a pride in the teaching of their children and watched the setting up of a mat hut for a school-house. And he has seen the birth of new life in India as the partial result of such teaching. India has had the benefit of the hospitals which Christianity invented. The Church of England which teaches Christ's message of mercy wherever Englishmen assemble and meet together is fitly represented by noble lives, not a few, wlio carry from English villages the kindliness and culture of Christian homes. 158 THE UNSEEN I shall never forget the impression made on my mind by the monument erected near Kherson in honour of John Howard, the philanthropist of Bedford. The great work of Howard's lifetime was his indomitable sense of duty, his devout faith and steadfast will. This Christian man was rewarded by a tribute from the Russian Govern- ment when the Russian people were all but barbarian. In the pitiless gloom of the Plain of Stepanovka, a few miles north of Kherson, the self-denying labours of Howard are commemorated on his tomb. I can recall no instance of an Asiatic so inflamed with the service of man as to dive into foreign dungeons, plunge into the infection of foreign hospitals, or attend to the neglected, and alleviate the distress of all men in all countries. Certainly we have no such monu- ment to an Asiatic in England. I know of none in Europe. Howard's work was the embodiment of the Great Idea. It exemplifies the difference between the religion of the West and the creeds of the East. THE CALL OF THE UNSEEN That no essential relation exists between religion and conduct is borne out by the history of mankind from David to Mr. Eockfeller. Religious people may think and speak differently, but they act much the same as the people who are not professedly reUgious. They specialise on the canons of conduct. By differentiating in sins they create varying stand- ards of behaviour. Scandal and unchastity are graded as eqiial, according to Moses. The Puritan code, however, condones backbiting but denounces as ' immorality ' the breach of the Seventh Command- ment. Asiatics exist in a religious atmosphere, but the Oriental standard of truth is unintelligible to the Western mind. Breaches of the Seventh Command- ment, though specially obnoxious to those whose minds derive a peculiar character fi'om unceasing contemplation of eternal interests, are not unusual among those successors of the Puritans, whose emotions are stimulated rather than controlled by their creed. Intensity of feeUng on religion docs not always tend to make men tranquil on every other subject. The conviction that forgiveness is always available for repenting sinners tends to encourage, if it does not engender, mole-eyed morality. Never- theless, the loftiest conception of which the human mind is capable is the creed of Christendom. Sprung 160 THE UNSEEN from a Jewish particularism developed under the iron military rule of Imperial Rome, Christianity is itself a prodigy greater than the miracles recorded in the Gospels. That the fundamental doctrine of Christianity — i.e. that all men and women are brothers and sisters, being the children of a common Father ; and that self-denial, not ' get on or get out,' is the secret of happiness — should have come from Judea and Rome — the one the embodiment of materialism, the other of physical force — is, to my mind, more wonderful than the miraculous draught of fishes or the floating of the axe-head. At all events, Christianity is a fact. Being brethren, Christianity teaches us that we owe goodwill to each other, and that meekness, self-sacrifice, renunciation, forgive- ness, generosity, humility, and purity are the reigning forces. To the most complex, as to the simplest soul, the presentation of God the Father as set forth in the New Testament is a theme that fascinates and attracts. There we have an ideal intelligible to children which requires merely to be universally accepted in order to abolish strife and the cost of strife. Navies, armies, police. Intelligence Departments, judges, solicitors, and nine-tenths of the hospitals and the medical fraternity would disappear if the inhabitants of the earth accepted as law the Sermon on the Mount. But mankind rejects it. A thousand times more loved and venerated two thousand years after His death than when Christianity began, Christ's teaching is no nearer acceptance by rulers and peoples than by the Senate and people of Rome or the rabbis and financiers of Israel. Despite ameliorations of life CHKIST AND STATECEAFT 161 indisputably due to Christianity, we Westerns have even receded in one essential feature of elementary morality. In the government of the British Empire homage is paid to Christ's teaching at the expense of national efficiency. The brutality of Eome was the honest expression of elemental facts. Imagine, for example, how the Romans would have treated such a moral question as treatment of private property at sea in time of war. Rome never stooped to the pretence that she considered other interests than her own. She would have been scorned by the Mediterranean Powers had she simulated concern for the welfare or suffering of the Carthaginians. One advantage of the straightforward selfishness of Rome and of modern Germany is that nothing is left to the imagination. The second Boer war was the direct result of the affectation of magnanimity when we were bent on economy and the avoidance of expensive hostilities. One of our rulers intimately concerned in the question of the still unratified Declaration of London said to me : 'Of course what these fellows decide and sign means nothing to us ; we shall do exactly what we have done in past wars.' This is almost word for word what Pitt said when blamed for the abandon- ment of Port Mahon : ' We shall take it again when we want it ; we have always taken it before.' The desire to combine the incongruous advantages of national gain and an international reputation for Christianity leads us into untenable positions. We wish to enjoy the prestige of unselfish virtue by negotiating witli Europe as a Christian, peace-loving nation ; and then, when war breaks out, we wish M 162 THE UNSEEN to enjoy the advantage of the pagan thoroughness that gave us Empu'e. The metamorphosis of the gentle and ascetic Christianity of Christ into the languid and sensuous religiosity of modern Europe is of the nature of compromise between irrecon- cilables. Everyone is conscious of the increase of tolerance, of moderation of language, love of flowers, hate of prize-fights, of consideration for animals and for each other, and of the growing aversion from violence in sj)eech or act. How far that change is due to religion, and how far it is the result of the perception that the modified form of self-denial which we call ' compromise ' is the secret of national survival is scarcely in doubt. Anti- social acts generally described as ' crimes ' which do not involve resort to violence are increasing. Forgery, arson for insurance purposes, the indmgence of the senses, especially the abandonment of the early Christian standard of chastity and the sanctity of the marriage tie, are on the increase, notwithstanding the popularity of compromise. A recent report by the heads of the Baptist Community in Wales on the immorality of the Sunday-schools in the Principality and of wealthy members of that Church is a telling comment of the separateness of the domain of religion from the sphere of conduct. A strongly worded protest recently appeared in the Press over the name of a baronet who had himself undergone twelve months' imprisonment for infraction of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Inflamed with consciousness of the imperfections of other people, the baronet in question was obviously and sincerely ixnconscious of his own disqualification as a moral censor in matters NAPOLEON'S RELIGION 163 of horse-racing. The cases of the Welsh Baptists and of the erring baronet., though conspicuous examples of the absence of relation between religion and conduct, are not exceptional. As one inquhes at Berlin to know what the Germans have to say about chemistry, one resorts to records of Napoleon to know what that master mind thought about any subject relating to human nature. Eeligious liberty was as dear to him as civil liberty. Napoleon desired to establish universal liberty of conscience to enable people to follow any route to heaven that might please them, but he supported rehgion because it helped him in the task of ruUng, not because it raised morality. Napoleon wanted Catholics, Pro- testants, Mohammedans, and Jews to be equal, but the policy favoured by the gTeatest of the sons of men was not faith in the Unseen or in the purity of his own conduct. Napoleon was not immoral ; he was non-moral, as a thunderstorm is non-moral. Napoleon and all the greatest men in history beheved in God because man is hm-led into hfe wondering whence he comes, who he is, where he is going. Anyone perceiving these staring and elementary mysteries, though driven towards reUgion, is not necessarily driven from sin. David was an ' average sensual man,' but lie cried out of the depths in language which still speaks for the human heart in extremity. Diane de Poitiers sang the De Profundis to the tune of a dance. In his dying moments Richard Hooker found comfort in the same passages as Diane de Poitiers. Mr. R. E. Prothero, in a book that frontiersmen especially should read, ' The Psalms in Human Life,' tells us how the crowds of armed peasants in Brittany and m9. 164 THE UNSEEN La Vendee, fired by ardour of a cliildlike faith, knelt at the feet of their prescribed and hunted priests and sang under the sky and woods, ' Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, Lord.' David and the Vendeean peasants alike illustrate the truth that religious feeling in its intensest form does not necessarily entail good conduct. David, like the Pharisaical protester, was guilty of conduct which would have disqualified him from public life in these days, and the Vendeeans who fought as the allies of Russia and Austria against their own countrymen in the Revolution fought against Russia and Austria when Bonaparte seized power under the Empu'e. Religion is always changing its form. In the lifetime of this generation religion has perceptibly changed both in form and substance. So has conduct ; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Had he lived in Mary's reign, Mr. Campbell, of the City Temple, would have been burned. In George the Third's reign a purser was flogged round the Fleet for professing much the same beliefs as those now preached by Mr. Campbell. The evolution of religion is as continuous and as variable in its phases as the evolution of fashion or pleasure, and canons of conduct are equally variable. Nobody now counts who gets drunk. Without visibly affect- ing the elemental conditions of life, the work and play of the world are being slowly influenced by unseen forces. Napoleon in exile would have believed any religion as true had it only existed from the commencement of the world, but he refused to confess, even when asked by the Pope, on the ground that he could not pretend to believe all that was then taught by Rome. Of the two great DISSIDENCE 165 branches of the Christian Church in Europe, it were invidious to declare which exerts the greater influence in favour of good morals. The Catholic religion is attractive because it touches our imagination and stirs the soul. Catholic countries, where faith is strong, hold the virtue of women in higher esteem than Protestant countries. According to statistics, Ireland is ten times more chaste than Scotland. Scotland is ten times more Sabbatarian and thrifty than Ireland. The Protestant religion appeals to the reason and suffers from the drawback of a negative creed and a dissonant note. Protest, dissent, or refusal to conform as the essence and foundation of a creed are denied the highest stimulus to good conduct. The soul is short-circuited by antipathies. To govern conduct belief must be positive. I do not refrain from theft because I disbelieve in Papal Infallibility, nor do I give my body to be burned because I deny the authority of the Nonconformist Conscience. Antipathies govern men more than sympathies. Hatred of Papists, not the love of Christ, is the spirit that feeds the lamp of Protes- tantism in the North of Ireland. Hatred of the Church of England, not devotion to their Divine Redeemer, is the spirit of political dissent. Still, under all forms of Christianity the loftiest characters and the saintUest souls are found. The probabiUty is that these would have led saintly lives whatever their creed or under whatever sun they had been born. Consolation and repose of the soul, hope for the unhappy, help in time of trouble, joy in reverses — these are the things desired from the practice of religion. They do not necessarily imply improved conduct. 166 THE UNSEEN The maze i.s not without a plan. The greatest problem of our time is the development of character in the British Empire, which means, in effect, the solution of the grave issues that have arisen in India, in Egypt, and in the North Sea. If we were to do unto others as we would have them do unto as we should recognise that our rule in India is disliked and in Egypt is resented, not because we are wicked but because we are foreigners. The conquest of India balanced the loss of America and brought us vast outlets for our energ}'', while forming the character that only comes from doing difficult things well. The sea of dark men incurably hostile to our rule who patiently await the breaking of our power, and the hosts of white men who wait impatiently for British succession, do more to associate the British with noble and unselfish conduct than the theological tenets of aU of the Churches. If it is easy to be religioTis on a pound a week it is difficult not to be religious in mutinies, in sieges, and in storms. In periods of strain the lower appetites are cowed under the instinctive grasp of realities, the perception of inscrutable and uncontrollable forces, and the selfish desire to be on the side of Omnipotence. The essence of true religion is not so much obedience to an arbitrary decree promulgated from Sinai, from Mecca, or by the Yogis of the Himalayas, as self- surrender to the law of efficiency which runs through the universe. Struggle for the life of others is action on a higher plane than struggle for personal gain, and is the clue to the mystery of pain. Not- withstanding, therefore, the hypocritical element in British administration and national life, let us go on fumbUng towards the light. THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS London, Paris, New York, and the other great pleasure cities of the Western World are haunted with desire to fathom the unknown energies by which we are surrounded, to master their laws, and especially to understand the forces hidden in man. False mediums, charlatan healers, diviners, and pseudo-scientific cures crowd the magazines and newspapers with costly advertisements. Bond Street and Broadway rents are not too high for the palmists, crystal -gazers, fortune-tellers, witches, and wizards who, for a consideration, will bare the future to solvent clients. This cloud of false witnesses has overshadowed the researches of men Uke Sir Wilham Crookes — one of the rare and original intellects of our era — Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Morsielli, Lombroso, Camille Flam- marion, and of American savants not a few, who have steadily refused to bow the knee to scientific prejudice against psychical research and who stand four square to the winds of bigotry and ignorance. Girding at the occult is still a mark of intellectual superiority among a school of scientists whose blend of arrogance and ignorance is mediasval sacerdotalism decked in the garb and using the jargon of the twentieth century. 168 THE UNSEEN With the excej)tiou of nomadic tribes, or races like the Zulus, whose ancestry was nomadic, all nations contain a preponderance of those whose desire to survive this life is so strong that survival in some form is part of their creed. Pure material- ists are rare, because the facts of life with which all are confronted forbid the acceptance of the theory that humans are as the beasts that perish — if they do perish. Inequalities, disappointments, sorrows, and cares are so general among mankind that the only hypothesis on which a world without compensation for suffering can be explained is that it is the result of a wager between two drunken devils after dinner as to which of them could construct the most sorrow-laden planet and then people it with the most hopeless and most quarrel- some nations. Without compensation hereafter for what is endured by the majority of the proletariate, the condition of the human race is an unthinkable crime of unspeakable horror. Twelve millions of hungry and ill-clad people in the United Kingdom alone outside the workhouses, the asylums, and the hospitals, cry aloud for redress here or hereafter. Thrust into existence without being consulted as to whether the environment and heredity provided for them make Hfe worth living, a growing number of individuals, with high qualities of mind, resort to suicide for escape from what they never sought. The instinct of self-preservation is relaxing because existence too often yields nothing to preserve, and imagination uncovers nothing to be desii-ed. We never know the inner life of a man because he alone knows what he has done, and therefore we cannot SUICIDE 169 enter into liis motives. Not long ago a man committed suicide because his wife liad twins. One cannot conceive the birth of twins being sufficient motive to any person whose pjrramidal layer, being healthy, enabled him to exercise the power of choice. We can only conclude that his will was suddenly reduced to serfdom by an emotion his ego was impotent to control. As population increases with a corresponding pressure on nerves and will power, emigration by suicide becomes an intelligent act. Society suffers little from suicides because the irresponsibihty of preserving the race only applies to its best speci- mens, and race suicide on a large scale, owing to the unwillingness of comfortable women to bear and suckle children, stultifies the usual verdict pro- nounced by juries on suicides, that they are the result of insanity. If they are insane, society is insane. Suicides are the hopeless. Fear of death is peculiar to the West. Orientals know no fear of the hereafter. Some Asiatics possess the power of dying at a time foretold by themselves. I have known two such cases when hopeless men simply announced the date and hour of their own deaths, which took place punctually at the time predicted. Was this suicide ? Years ago I had the chance of saving a stately old Hindu, a man of high caste, from insult and ill- treatment. Food was offered him, whicli he would not toucli ; slielter he accepted. In the morning he visited my bungalow, and used language which sought to convey an idea for which there is no word in any tongue between Suez and Tokyo — gratitude. 170 THE UNSEEN In the terminology of Asia ' Thank you ' does not exist, yet the idea of justice and benevolence, of which gratitude consists, is better known under the Kising than the Setting Sun. The old man was by way of being a Mahatma, and was supposed to have the faculty of foretelling events. At all events, as a token of gratitude, he foretold all events of importance which have since happened to me except one ; I am expecting that ; indeed its shadow approaching can be seen on the horizon. Since meeting that Brahmin — and other experi- ences — involuntary respect to Asia, whence come all reUgions, and to the occult, was the natural result. Occult, it should be remembered, denotes the untraceable rather than the unknown, and is a term for processes and influences the existence of which is known, but their mode of operation is below the surface, and is not exposed to observation of the average sensual man. The late Mr. Frederick H. Balfour gave to the world not long ago the result of recent experiments at Florence which, like the doubtful phenomena observed in the case of Eusapia Paladino, and recorded in the ' Annals of Psychical Science,' illustrate pointedly the difierence between the occult and that which is merely hidden Uke radium in the Mont Cenis Tunnel, or the banket formation in the deep levels on the Eand. A series of seances was held in the Palazzina Castelli, at which five persons assisted. After meeting for several months, a presence made itself known, and announced itself as a Patagonian Mage, who came under the sea by a journey which consumed a month. ' Absurd,' you say, ' on the face of it.' Bead on. THE OVA OF ACTIONS 171 On the physical plane what the Mage wanted came to him without his seeking it ; in the astral plane he had to seek for it, and things came. The astral plane he continued, had four dimensions of space, and every movement a man made and every thought in his mind left an indelible trace in the atmosphere, just as when a man on the physical plane puts his hand into soft wax and leaves an impression on it. In answer to further questions, he assured his hearers that everything we do leaves a trace — figures that may be repre- sented and interpreted as symbols in which one may see the events of one's Ufe. Every mark is a symbol and every symbol a thought. Here, I conceive, is the statement of a truth which is in harmony with the message of the Great Teacher of mankhid. No impulse is too fleeting, no word too light to be freighted with the cargo of eternal destiny. The period of incubation may be prolonged, but the germs are never sterile. In the Tropics during the season of drought certain fish and insects totally disappear and become as apparently extinct as the apteryx of Mauritius or the moa of New Zealand. When the first warm rains of the monsoon awaken the sleeping energies of earth, the microscopic eggs of insects and tiny spawn of fish or leeches lurking invisible in the burnt-up bottoms of evaporated lakes leap suddenly into lusty life. The fertilising rain gives them the environment needed for their activity and the perfection for which they have tarried. Not otherwise is it with the ova of our thoughts, words, and deeds. Each of them leaves an indelible trace ; ripens to imperishable fruit. 172 THE UNSEEN It is this doctrine of ' trace ' that gives to pahn- istry its title to claim the discovery of the tem- perament and character. A gesture is an act ; the harvest of an act is a habit ; the harvest of habit is character ; the harvest of character is destiny. Palmistry in some forms has been credited and practised by men of intellectual distinction from times of great antiquity. What- ever may be the doubts as to the determination of the future or the knowledge of the past from lines on the hand, there is no doubt that temperament and character are truly revealed not only by the hand and the face, but by the body in whole or part to anyone who will take the trouble to master the operation of cause and effect. Brah- mins have practised palmistry for thousands of years and possess an ancient literature on the subject which ought to be Englished. Marie Lenor- mand's prediction of Napoleon's downfall stands as the chief historical achievement of palmistry in the nineteenth century. That prediction was made in 1814. The truth of palmistry rests mainly on the doctrine of ' trace.' Watch the hand of a speaker, whether on the platform or in a private conversa- tion in w^hich he is deeply interested. Note the clenching of the fingers in obedience to the message conveyed from the emotional cells of the brain. Each gesture of his hand stretching or finger clenching deepens or smooths innumerable lines and leaves indelible traces of character and, therefore, of destiny. Character and desthiy are largely affected by the temperamental element of personality received - at birth which clings to us DR. CHARCOT 173 through life from mfaiicy to senility, and which, like a sound patent, when once received is ' peculiar to ourselves and new.' This element of personality has a physical basis. The law of our being is that the body is but a fraction of the mind, and that since physics and metaphysics are territories with no buffer state between them, there is no room for surprise in being told that no scientist can say how the physical ends or begins. The existence of an aura, or spirit force, sur- rounding the body like an atmosphere, in some cases, at all events, can be proved as a physical fact. On entering the presence of another person the instinct of liking or antipathy, especially in women, is immediate, irresistible, and cannot be accounted for by any formula contained in educa- tional or medical handbooks. The late Dr. Charcot investigated this thoroughly. Being in charge of La Salpetriere, the great Paris hospital for the nervous diseases of women, he enjoyed an unrivalled field for the investigation of mental phenomena revealed by super-sensitive females amenable to hypnotic suggestion. Out of about eight hundred cases in the Salpetriere Dr. Charcot selected seventy for special observation. Of these seventy, three or four developed sensitiveness to the presence of others of such delicacy that in one case the phenomena would have been incredible to me had I not myself witnessed them. The girl in question was thrown into a cataleptic state by Charcot's glance. While in this condition she was blindfolded and placed in a chair facing the light. In her cataleptic state ordinary consciousness was lost, the subject rendering implicit obedience 174 THE UNSEEN to the operator. On mtroducing a stranger silently into the room by a door opposite the wiadow, the girl became sensitive to the new pre- sence at a distance of fifteen or sixteen feet. On the stranger approaching the back of the chair to within a space of seven feet the subject exhibited marks either of intense antipathy or of pleasm"e at the presence of a welcome object. I entered the thickly-carpeted room barefooted, and when within the zone of susceptibility was immediately detected by the girl's sixth sense, the detection being accompanied by marks of the strongest antipathy. Perspiration rolled from the patient's forehead. She trembled visibly, and piteously entreated Dr. Charcot to end the ordeal. Not wishing to pain the girl by continuing an experiment so obviously painful, I retired, but not until I had two or three times approached the chair in which she sat blindfold. In each case my silent action was followed by increased symptoms of alarmed disquiet and horror. Subsequently I witnessed the demeanour of this remarkable girl with regard to other individuals brought into the room where she was in a hypnotic state. In one instance, also that of an Englishman, the patient discovered as much delight as in my case she had displayed antipathy. The result of Charcot's exhaustive experiments was to show that we are enveloped by an atmosphere of influence emanating from ourselves. It is itself percipient and is capable of transmitting impressions to other brain cells. There seems to be little doubt that the dimensions of this personal atmosphere or aura vary in difierent individuals. In persons wTapped up in DE. FELL 175 themselves or engaged in trivial or unworthy pursuits the aura is minute and leaves no sense of individuality on others. I do not like you, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell is an eighteenth-century mode of expressing the scientific fact that the writer's aura and that of Dr. Fell were antipathetic. Saunterers in the labyrinth of the occult are baffled by meeting dead walls at every turn. Still, there is a chie that yet may lead to the mastery of the forces hidden in man. Each individual possesses a personality. Families are distin- guished by qualities peculiar to themselves. So with tribes, nations, empires. WTiat is this atmos- phere that distinguishes one person or one crowd from another person or another crowd ? It is terra incognita, truly, but it is there, and it has never been the subject of consistent and prolonged scientific analysis. When the Indian was lost he answered, ' Wigwam lost, not Indian ; Indian here.' Mankind is not lost. We believe in the existence of a ' wigwam,' but we do not know where it is, and we can never hope to discover its place until we join hands and seek diligently till we find it. In the religion of the irreligious is the hope of the future. There is true religion among sportsmen, actors, and providers of other folks' pleasures, as well as in the churches bound by ironclad creeds that tell of joys that are not joys, which if obtainable are not desirable. The wish to survive and the strugale for the life of others are the two ' pointers ' by which humanity can 176 THE UNSEEN steer a sure course tlirous;li the unknown sea. On the whole, through eight centuries of our rough island story England's survival is due to this combination of occult ideals. It is the aura of Empire. Material empires have perished without one exception. The spirit of the people who have I civilised Egypt, resuscitated Asia, and colonised America and Australia is governed by influences which no science explains. The cult of the occult and the religion of the irreligious are the hope of the hopeless. THE PROBLEM OF CENTRAL EUROPE WHAT THE EDITORS DIDN'T SEE Warmed witli good Rhine wine and glad with ' delicatessen,' two score British editors have looked upon a prepared and selected bit of the German Fatherland. They have seen that it is good. Half Germany was unseen, but the editors are right in their appreciation of all Germany. Humanity has produced no higher standard of organised force, intellect, and well- being, although Nature has stinted Germany in the building materials of Empire. Her coasts are shallow, her harbours few ; much of her soil is poor, and though rivers, forests, and mines abound, outlet to the world without lies through foreign territory or the North Sea. England, not Germany, was Nature's favourite when the world was made. Partiality to Britain was part of the cosmic plan. Wealth and Empire came easOy to England, because her ocean site intercepted the commerce of the world, and with iron ore inserted alongside her coal measures, the world's carrying trade and the Great Silent Navy followed as matters of course. Luck in the geographical lottery rather N 178 EUKOPE'S PEOBLEM than genius, or intention made us what we are. For trade and defence our island is the pick of the planet. Half Germany never forgets it— the half the editors did not see. Half Germany regards England much as a consummate card- player out of luck looks on a bad performer who holds the four aces and three kings. Since Waterloo Germany has won unity and wealth by three wars prepared for in every detail ; wars that were the result of design. England blundered into the Crimean War, from which she got nothing but practice and a warning, while the Boer war — our greatest effort in a hundred years — was the price of refusal to prepare for inevitable struggle. No matter what mistakes we made, something always happened to save Britain from the consequences of neglect or error. We ought to have lost India in 1857 according to the rules of the game. From Egypt we attempted to abscond, but by comparativefy slight expenditure in life and money the valley of the Nile might have been British in all but name. We neglected the Navy, and for a time were at the mercy of unfriendly Powers. They let us alone diu-ing the period of our weakness. The German General Staff, which is the thinking department for all Germany, and represents the fighting men — that is, half the nation — wonders at Eng- lish luck ; wonders whether it will change, and wonders whether the cards held by England will ever become a German ' hand.' The German General Staff and their chief, the Kaiser, are subject to the imperious commands THE GEKMAN CRADLE 179 of a despotic power from wliicli there is no appeal, and who must be obeyed at all costs. The com- mands laid upon the Staff by this despotic authority haunt the thoughts of German statesmen. It was never explained to the British editors why they were the guests of Germany. The Kaiser, von Bulow, and Admiral Tirpitz did not tell them that the invitation was issued in the interests of the unseen authority that rules German policy. This force that dictates foreign policy to the Emperor consists of the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed babies smiling in a million cradles. Next year the million will be joined by another million, and the year after by a third million. Unless the case of these infants is met and provided for by expan- sion, explosion is the only alternative, since educa- tion and empty stomachs are the raw material of revolution. The redundant cradle is the Dictator of Germany. Bureaucrats are its obedient servants. The British editors saw the tranquil prosperity of the Fatherland ; the volcanic force that exists below the surface they did not see. In war with Denmark, Austria, and France, the German Michael found an antidote for intolerable pain. The pressure is becoming unbearable once more. Germany has no colonies. Every year a million babies are added to the population, for whom food, shelter, and careers must be found. Remember, the editors did not see the million babies. Russia has Siberia ; France, a rich soil and a stationary or dwindling population ; America, ample room to expand ; Japan, the whole Far East ; Britain, her own Empire. Germany, the greatest military Power, has no place under her n2 180 EUROPE'S PROBLEM own flag outside her borders where Germans can live and thrive. Between Germany and the world lies the breakwater of Britain, six hundred miles in length, rich in harbours, and protected by a fleet which the German General Staff has recently reported to the Emperor as nearly four times stronger than the German navy. Whatever may be said about the German Emperor, there is no doubt that he understands the needs of his country and that he represents the aspirations and desires of modern Germany. He knows that no Hague Conferences, journalistic jaunts, or flagons of good Rhine wine will affect the history of the world unless food and careers are provided for the children in German nurseries. The Emperor is the Father of his people. English- men who desire peace with Germany will not secure it by sacrificing the babies in British bassinettes to infants in German cradles. Germany wants that which England possesses. Britain wants to be left alone. Starting in the race for Empire eighty years before Germany began, England, if vigilant and alert, can never be overtaken. The choicest territories in temperate climates either fly the red ensign or are settled sparsely by English-speaking people. The world is divided up. There are no more claims to peg out. Therefore German expansion means dis- placing other occupants. The seizure of Schleswig- Holstein and Alsace and Lorraine was inspired not by glory but by bread-and-butter. Food, not dynasties or religion, dictates German policy. The babies of the Fatherland arranged the German marriage with the Queen of Holland. Denmark, THE GEEMAN HOPE 181 Austria, and France were struck down, Kiau- Chau seized, the Kiel Canal built, and is now being deepened, the Triple Alliance formed, Press absolutism established, and a navy constructed on borrowed money with feverish energy. Until the cobbler-captain of Kopenick revealed to Germany the habit of blind obedience, which has entered into her flesh and blood, the world scarcely appreciated the despotism of the German cradles to which they cheerfully submit. Is it surprising that the rulers of Germany look ahead ? Organisation can be carried no fm'ther. Educational, industrial, commercial, and military systems are all under the care of the German General Staff, whose peace strategy was not exposed to the intelligent gaze of the junketed British editors. German foreign policy is compulsory, and English- men are blind if they will not face the facts. Germany attempted expansion in Brazil, but was warned off by the United States ; in China she holds an isolated post subject to the pleasure of England and Jajian. Expansion on her Eastern fi'ontier at the expense of Russia would cost more than she would gain. Westwards expansion is too expensive while the British Fleet keeps the German Army out of Paris. Southwards, the cauldron of race hatred boils furiously, and the demise of the Austrian Crown is as likely to shatter as to strengthen the Empire of the Pan-Germans. There remain Holland and England. Both have colonies. The absorption of Holland is a process that began ten years ago, but it is one thing to arrange commercial union with the Dutch and another to establish torpedo nests 182 EUEOPE'S PEOBLEM and naval stations within one hundred and fifty miles of Sheerness. Admiral von Tii-pitz has confidently reported to his august master that in the present state of the two navies war with England would be disastrous to Germany. The Kaiser is his own First Lord. Versatile as a smart journalist, the Kaiser appre- ciates the dangers of isolation, and has once more put the helm of the State ' hard over.' The policy formerly pursued by Bismarck with Denmark, Austria, and France is the identical policy now in force against England. It was revealed to intelligent observers by the Kruger telegram. When the Kaiser claimed to be 'Admiral of the Atlantic,' in a signal to the Czar, he had not discovered the failure of his own naval policy. The Dreadnought and her sisters originated the new German civility, as the Emperor has read Captain Mahan on Sea Power and is his pupil. Tempera- mentally optimist, the Kaiser knows neither disappointment nor dejection, and he has stated that despondency expressed with regard to the German Empire (' leichsverdrossenheit') always worries him whenever he hears it. Like most sanguine people, he is an immense talker, and sometimes talks indiscreetly. To Americans at Kiel the Kaiser and his brother. Prince Henry of Prussia, have each spoken about England without reserve and without compliments. I myself have heard the Emperor dwell on the contrast between the potentialities of the British Empire and the scant wisdom with which His Majesty considers that we are governed. English THE RIDDLE OF PEACE 183 blood in his veins, however, gives the Emperor so liberal an allowance of common sense that whatever he may say or write about ' mailed fist/ ' Admiral of the Atlantic,' or Dr. Jameson, he plays no monkey tricks with gunpowder. If he does not love England, he appreciates the British navy too much to embark on a German Jameson Raid. But the Kaiser has watched England drifting and torpid like a sick whale about to strand in shallow water, and has lived to see the creature recover vitality sufficient to place itself beyond the reach of German harpoons. Time is needed to create a new German navy ; to deepen and widen the Kiel Canal ; and word has gone forth from Potsdam that the English be lulled with fair speech, and that neither Junkerdom nor the Press shall express their inward feelings about John Bull. The British editors were invited to Germany in order that, seeing the peaceful half of the German nation, they should qualify as missionaries of Anglo-German friendship which can never really exist so long as Germany wishes to acquire British trade and territory. The Emperor's advisers revised the list of newspaper guests ; and in one case, the invitation already issued was revoked by the German Embassy. The journalists were certified as safe by the Kaiser's hand. I was invited, and my invitation was revoked with Prussian thoroughness. I knew why. Peace is not the result of good men's prayers. It is the equilibrium of great forces. The British Navy, if strong, maintains peace automatically. Weakened by neglect, ignorance, or corruption, it invites attack. The seven Dreadnoughts that 184 EUROPE'S PROBLEM were afloat before one foreign Dreadnought left the slips were better guarantees of peace with Germany than all the resolutions of the Hague Conference, or all the pious wishes of worthy men, who forget that war — ceaseless and compulsory — is the condition of spiritual, mental and material existence. Peace is the greatest boon that England can possess, but if we want it we must pay the price. Unemployed, underpaid, and half-fed workmen in Germany to-day are few. In England they are many. It is bad strategy to leave thirteen million Britons on the verge of hunger. You cannot look for patriotism from men who want food. Increased employment is essential if England is to hold her own at Armageddon. The German tariff and German education are the chief reasons why Germany is strong and prosperous. England pays part of the cost of the German navy and excludes no goods from the British market. The price of peace is an overwhelming navy and effi- cient army in which quality of all its units is the first consideration, a people trained to arms, a blunt but consummate diplomacy and, there- fore, reorganised finance. John Bull and Michael may become cronies only on the condition that John Bull's arrangements are such that either war or peace will leave him indifferent to Michael's moods. The British editors have left Germany under the impression that Anglophobia is confined to a small section of the scatter-brains and hot-heads who do not really count. They are mistaken. The Emperor has said so. The swollen ambitions of the Pan-Germanic Party, which has been OUR WARNING 185 muzzled for a month, belong to half Germany. A million of them belong to the German Navy League. Another still more powerful group is ceaselessly engaged in promoting the absorption of Austria, Switzerland, and Holland, so that one foot of the German Colossus may be planted at Trieste and the other at Amsterdam. England is theu- Carthage ; ' Delenda est Carthago ' their motto ; Britain's Colonies and India their Golconda. Who can blame them ? The Rhine ceases to be German at the point when it becomes valuable. The day war is declared with England 840 German steamships will be captm-ed at sea. What can we do then ? The Pan-Germanic Party is flesh and blood, and, acting on the knowledge that successful aggression is still the price of German existence, it has given to England full and fair warning of what she may expect. SMITH AND ARMAGEDDON A TYPICAL middle-class family consists of Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, young Mr. Smith, Miss Smith, and two or three Httle Smiths. Mr. Smith is getting on in years; he has lived a life of moderate toil, and looks forward to repose rather than to excitement in his declining days. He cannot remember the Crimean War or the Mutiny, but he has heard his parents speak of them as national events that happened a long way off and were very sad. Mr. Smith is too old to join the Territorials, even if he cared to do so, tliough since the Boer war he thinks volunteering a good thing for young men. It does not occur to him that citizen soldiership to-day differs materially from other occupations. In Mr. Smith's opinion, rifle-shooting is a healthy pastime, and Lord Roberts deserves all the support he can get from people whose tastes lie in that direction. Mr. Smith has partial faith in Mr. Balfour, for has not Mr. Balfour told him that the invasion of England is impossible ? Mr. Smith does not particularly like the French, or, indeed, any foreigners ; and if the French are to get another thrashing from the Germans, Mr. Smith does not go so far as to say ' serve them right,' but neither does he see why he should be taxed or inconvenienced by the troubles YOUNG ME. SMITH 187 of a neighbouring country. The fact is that, beyond the opportunities of a tripper, he knows nothing of any country but his own. Mr. Smith is content to receive his opinions from Mr. Balfour and his protection from the Navy. Mrs. Smith is not fond of ' newspaper subjects,' and, being somewhat nervous, changes the conversation when it drifts towards the subject of war. Mrs. Smith greatly disliked the Boer war. She did not understand the details, but she knows that many fine young men were killed and that the income- tax was high. One of her neighbours lost his business ; another his son. Mrs. Smith has a kindly heart, and was horrified at the deaths of nearly half a million horses and mules used up in the Boer war. She is opposed to war because it is cruel, and does not want to hear anything about it — at all events, anything that will keep her awake at night. Young Mr. Smith is engaged from nine till half- past five in the City. He has abandoned stamp collecting, he is secretary of his cycle club, loves a quiet game of billiards, and is much addicted to watching football. He reads the Daily Mail religiously, and is strongly in favour of a powerful Navy, but he has no intention of offering himself as a Territorial soldier, because he has neither time to spare for the defence of a country that Mr. Balfour says is in no danger nor taste for military study. When young Mr. Smith's employer sug- gested that tilings should be made easy for him if he joined Mr. Haldane's ' Terriers,' he preferred not to take his annual holiday in camp. Miss Smith is slightly advanced, and regards humanity 188 EUROPE'S PEOBLEM from a wider standpoint than that of her parents or of her brother. Miss Smith is not greatly- attracted by her brother's football and billiard friends, but she has read ' A Crown of Wild Olive/ and believes herself to be an advanced thinker of the type that is mystified by Socialism. So far as Miss Smith has any opinion on war it is unfavour- able, not on the ground that war is unchristian, as the clergyman said last Sunday, or because it is cruel, as darling mother thinks. Miss Smith is opposed to war because people whose minds are up-to-date are mostly in favour of peace, and her dear little misty soul can see no reason why up-to- date people should be in the wrong. Besides, Miss Smith's acquaintance with the officer caste is almost wholly confined to novels, and fiction does not inflame her imagination. Besides the Smiths there are the Browns and the Joneses. Though the incomes of both families are small, for generations the Browns have been connected with the Army and the Joneses with the Navy. In their social circle it is understood that the Browns and the Joneses belong to a fighting race. They uphold the honour of the country, support Lord Koberts, belong to the Navy League, keep Trafalgar Day by a pilgrimage to the Square, and are firmly convinced that under the Eadicals the country has gone to the bad. England has always had her Browns and her Joneses, and the indiflierence of her Smiths to its defenders in time of peace has ever been the subject of unfavourable comment in the Services. There is nothing new in the present state of affairs. When Hawke defeated the French Admiral HAWKE 189 Conflaus in 1759 the country plunged into its usual cold fit, the wretched sailors were neglected, and a voice from the forgotten Fleet thus expressed the state of the case : When Hawke did bang Mouseer Conflans, You sent us beef and beer, But now he 's beat we 've nought to eat, Since you have nought to fear. One thing, however, is new — our impending danger is greater than it has been since 1588. We have often been in danger from France, Spain, and Eussia, but we have never yet had to face a scientific combination of Central Europe, and unless we can awaken Mr. Smith and enlist the sweet influences of Mrs. Smith and her charming daughter to bring pressure to bear upon young Mr. Smith, he may continue to give ' three ofi the red ' precedence over national defence. A public indifferent to national danger will be awakened neither by abuse nor by sensationahsm ; but then, unfortunately, the most moderate European mishap to the Navy or Army of England would be worse than anything the wildest sensationalist would venture to predict. In the Boer war our countrymen quickly perceived that the choice lay between victory and national collapse. If a European war breaks out to-morrow the same choice will be presented, for it is a condition of British existence that in European war victory must be unchallenged and complete. Unlike France, defeat for England is for all time. Mr. Smith does not quite understand. There is much to be said for Smith's indifference — at least up to the present time. To-day and 190 EUKOPE'S PKOBLEM to-day only is given England for slumber. Poli- ticians do not confide in Mr. Smith. Politics and Smith, are sundered. The possession of great power is usually steadying in its effect on the ruling caste. Even in the ignoble struggle of party politics we see that the wild eloquence of a free lance is generally followed by sobriety and judgment in office. Insane rulers are almost unknown among the white races. Great wealth is also sobering in its efiect, and, although vanity, fantasies, and vice govern a few modern millionaires, it is remarkable that, with one exception, we cannot call to mind a single instance of great wealth being deUberately employed to injure mankind. The case in point is that of an American whose mental development is abnormal. This gentleman conceived a violent hatred against a certain Continental country and for many years spent large sums of money in the endeavoiu' to involve the object of his hatred in war. In the Chancelleries this case is well known. The German Emperor has repeatedly referred to the fact in those airy conversations which he has now renounced. The Teuton alliance gives to one man the power to somid the trumpet that begins the great war of the world. Impulsiveness and garrulity are not necessarily signs of weakness, but they are qualities that indicate defective judgment, and when the starting-lever of war machinery is in the hand of one impulsive, volatile and talkative engineer, Europe should be prepared for trouble. . The order for ' full steam ahead ' may perhaps'' be given inadvertently. Mr. Smith does not grasp this fact Austria was in no mood to be chided by JULES SIMON 191 armyless Englaucl for snatchmg a territory and breaking a treaty. Germany is in no mood to be outmanoeuvred, and she is bent on making ' Deutscliland iiber Alles ' her motto. France, Russia, and England resent and condenm conduct which Germany approves. A brawl in an obscure Moroccan port was within an ace of fixing the date for Armageddon. France, however, recognised in time that the appetite of double-headed eagles is inflamed and not subdued by the dainties of con- cession. Moreover, France was supported by her old enemy, England, who, seeing the European artichoke being consumed leaf by leaf, joins France, not because she loves her, but because she consults her own safety. Our rulers deserve credit for their decision to support France, because the bulk of their supporters distrust the soldier, are filled with horror at armaments, and still rely ingenuously on moral suasion and pacific gestures as opposed to organisation, discipline, and arms as the correct means of maintaining peace. In 1870 a magnificent speech in favour of peace was delivered by M. Jules Simon. Amid thunders of applause M. Simon concluded his peroration with the words, ' Cannon, thy reign is ended.' General Ducrot, the French commander atStrasburg, and Colonel Stoffel, the military attache of France at her Berlin Embassy, had been as unceasmg as Lord Roberts in their warnings to their comitry. On July 1, 1870, M. Simon's famous measure for the reduction of armaments was carried through the Chamber. Sixteen days later war was declared, and within two months the house of the cannon- hating M. Simon, in Paris, was under the fire 192 EUEOPE'S PROBLEM of German guns. Europe is now — forty years later — divided into two great camps. The group- ing of the smaller Powers and of Italy is not yet settled. The Triple Alliance is not one that compels any of the parties both to defensive and ofiensive action. The obligations entered into by Germany, Austria, and Italy consist exclusively of united action in the event of aggression against any one of them. The Triple Alliance is defensive and military ; it is not an offensive alliance, and it does not include any conditions as to the use of naval power. In the event of war in the Mediterranean Italy is pre- vented by her understanding with this country from giving naval aid to Germany or Austria. The people have never heard of these facts. It is still an open question whether the Italians will not be found on the side of France, Kussia, and England. If the Italian partner in the Triple Alliance is restive or discontented, at aU events the houses of HohenzoUern and Hapsburg have now amalgamated their resources and stand four square to the world. They seek a Turkish alliance. The brilliant prescience of Bismarck's statesmanship in ending the Austrian War of 1866 is now apparent. From the North Sea to the Adriatic is an armed camp where seven million soldiers are trained and led to battle in the German language. A word may set in motion this avalanche of armed men. Nevertheless, in his own country the English soldier is still scarcely more respected than the Chinese soldier in his country. The man who kept the flag flying in Ladysmith unveiled a memorial to the men of the Middlesex Regiment A HINT TO MISS SMITH 193 who died in the Boer war. After the ceremony was over, the old Field-Marshal found his way to the railway station. I saw him. He wore miiform. Standmg at the ticket-office, Sir George White, V.C, waited patiently to receive his change, when a yomig man addressed him as follows : ' 'Urry up, old slow coach, 'urry i;p, don't keep us wyting 'ere all dy.' In time of danger and in time of war God and the soldier we alike adore, The danger over and our honour righted, God is forgot, the soldier slighted. Smiles from a pretty girl, a five-and-twenty break at bil hards, ten cigarettes while watching a football match are so attractive to a certain class of modern young men that the fact that the country is in no great safety fails to interest them. When the girls of England do their duty, smiles and kisses will be reserved for the men who do theirs. Per- haps Miss Smith will make a note ? AS OTHEES SEE US We are not a spiritual people. ' Botany in the Desert of Sahara is more easily studied/ said a Hindu, ' than rehgion in England.' Beliefs we have in plenty ; some of us, faith ; faith in Eng- land's destiny, in fair-play, and in the resolve never to become ' the conscript appendage ' of any power or combination of powers. Clenched antagonisms divide Europe into two parts. One of them, always our rival, is secretly our foe. In the other camp are great powers compacted by common danger. Yesterday France and Russia were opposed to British poUcy and interests. To- day they need the friendship of England to save them from humiliation by the new Charlemagne. But what do these Powers think of us in their heart of hearts ? Our nearest neighbour gave birth to modern Europe by exploding the ideas of medise- valism. France, through the Corsican, taught Germany the key to power. England also owes much to France for brilhant thought, for lessons in the graces of life, and for loyal comradeship in our common peril. French opinion 'of us is important. The Gaul is puzzled by the deference paid in Britain to appear- ances. 'Cant,' our. word for pretence, is adopted CANT 195 l)y the French. Our French critic sees cant in episodes of Enghsh history which many of us regard as moral triumphs. Cant is seen by Frenchmen in truculent and genial EUzabethans like Drake, in the murder of Mary Stuart, in the execution of Charles the First, in the soured Presbyterianism of Scotland, in the treatment of Nelson's Lady Hamilton, in the exile of Byron and Shelley, and in the ruin of Parnell. To the British these episodes are the triumph of morals. In French eyes they are sheer hypocrisies. France saw cant in our enmity to Abdul Hamid for his treatment of the Armenian and Macedonian ' Christians,' when our interests would have suggested that, like the retention of Heligoland (Lord Salisbury notwithstanding), the cultivation of Turkish friendship would have strengthened our position and have increased the happiness of our friends and ourselves. Frenchmen cannot understand why we nag at Belgium about the Congo when the aUenation of Belgium may lead to the absorption of the Low Countries by Germany vnth the consent of theii inhabitants. France is vulnerable on her Belgian frontiei', and she cannot understand why England does not see that if Belgium is hostile to Britain on the Congo she is hostile on the Scheldt and the Meuse. If British cant alienates Belgium from England, Belgium is also driven away from France, and France dislikes that. Pro-Germans are a strong party in Belgium, and the vulnerability of Liege and the half-hearted fortifications of Antwerp imply more to France than to England. In the con- tradiction between the policy of our Admiralty 196 EUKOPE'S PROBLEM and that of our War Office Frenclinien see nothing but illogical folly. The Admiralty is so certain that invasion is impossible that the landward defences of Portsmouth, Devonport, and Chatham have been abandoned ; our three great naval fortresses have been converted into open towns. So certain, however, is the Army Council that there will be a landing that it is spending four million pounds a year, not to prevent invasion, but to render invasion as little harmful as untrained volun- teers can make it. The French do not appreci- ate our strategy. Peace is essential to its success. In English literature and art the cultured Frenchman sees the influence of his own ' im- mortals.' To him George Meredith is an English Mallarme. To him J. M. Barrie is the child of Balzac, and Swinburne is a British Victor Hugo. The Eoyal Academy is held to be but a pale reflection of the Salon and British art a long way behind French art. With their congenital aver- sion from hypocrisies which fill so large a part in British social and poUtical Ufe, our neighbours are unable to survey their EngUsh friends with affec- tionate complacency. England may be necessary to them, but the perfidy of Albion is a legend long in dying, and, seeing the immense price which Germany is able and willing to pay for the detach- ment of France from England, it might be worth our while to consider and to examine the reason why the best Frenchmen mistrust our habit of pseudo-sentiment in pubUc affairs. One British institution, however — the country- house — is adored by our impressionable neighbours. THE COUNTEY-HOUSE 197 They sorrowfully admit that from their cha- teaux and villas de banlieue the atmosphere of our country-house life is absent. Stately forests, wide and sweeping meadows, lakes and stags, crenellated battlements, finials and mansard-roofs — these do not make a country-house. Luxury everywhere, in the kitchen, stables, garage, and gardens — Dutch, Italian, and Japanese ; in the rock garden and the garden of herbaceous borders, — is found in the country-house life of England. But luxury's twin sister in English country life is the simphcity of home hfe. Freedom from ' entertainment,' liberty to do as you please ; the genial family Hfe that pervades the English country- house is appreciated enviously by our French critics. An English gentleman may be formaUst as the German is ceremonious and the Frenchman polite, but in his house in the country the EngUsh- man sheds his formalism and is seen to advantage in a way unapproached by Teuton, Gaul, or Slav. The German view of England and Enghshmen is neither \dndictive nor malignant. The con- spicuous characteristic of modern German opinion is envy pointed with scorn. The German Emperor summed up the opinion of his subjects regarding the British Empire when he said : ' In the course of my reading 1 have never met the record of such boundless potentialities as those of the British Empire or of rulers who were more indifferent to their utilisation.' The German Emperor has read history to some purpose. He will never repeat Napoleon's error of valuing England's military and naval capacity so low that he never thought it worth wliil(> to concentrate the forces 198 EUROPE'S PROBLEM of France on England. The best Germans do not dislike tlie best English, but they wish to succeed to their place in the sun. Teuton envy, mingled with contempt, is attributable to two causes. In the struggle for Ufe Germany, like Rome, has dis- carded international morality and has resorted to physical science for the development of her resources and for the organisation of aggression. Modern Germany is the outcome of the non- moral scientific spirit. England has not yet emerged from the dominion of rule-of -thumb, and the genuine Puritan element, and the country- houses and parsonages are still the two strongest fibres in our whole fabric. Germany in her greatest effort — the new navy — was not hampered by the existence of ancient traditions, vested interests, and inveterate habits. The German navy, like the Japanese, being without traditions, was created without hindrance on the most approved system after scientific in- vestigation. The British navy, hampered with the noble traditions of wooden walls and un- scientific Puritanism, finds the process of evolu- tion prolonged and painful. The German navy started with an organised general staff on scientific lines. The intellectual co-ordination of the State services is accomplished in Germany by the con- centration of the highest intellects on thinking out the innumerable conditions of war, including peace strategy and the disposition of the fleets. The English system, on the other hand, whether in a department store, a mail company, a gigantic tea business, or the navy, favours the develop- ment of a one-man show, because ' devil take the LORD FISHER 199 hindmost ' is our rule. Mucli of our trouble in the navy to-day is due to rapid changes under an executive consisting practically of one remarkable man. The Germans respect and admire the British navy, but they feel more contempt than envy for our one-man system, though appreciating Lord Fisher to an extent which would greatly surprise his English assailants. The assistance necessary for the organisation of victory is invisible to German eyes. The squabbling in Parliament about four ships or eight is incomprehensible to the trained German mind except on the hypothesis that England is half hearted over a problem of defence that cannot be muddled through. When Germany sees that the man in the street, a play or the popular Press, not Ministers or a general staff, is the authority that determines the strength of the fleet their envy is not diminished nor is their scorn abated. Much can be said in support of the German view. The British navy is too big for a one-man show. When I listen to curs that yap and snarl at the heels of the silent head of the silent navy I am reminded of the attacks on Earl St. Vincent when First Lord a hundred years ago. St. Vincent had not to wait for posterity to justify his action in econo- mising the resources of the State so as to secuje full value for the taxes taken from the people. German opinion of Lord Fisher differs widely from that of the National Revieiv or the Morning Post, although German hopes are nourished and German cupidity is inflamed by the absence of a general staff of the Royal navy — a measure which has been urged by son\e of us for many years. To give a concrete 200 EUROPE'S PEOBLEM example of the work required of a general staff I will take the case of Heligoland. The island was surrendered to Germany by Lord Salisbury without consulting the Lords of the Admiralty. In the event of war the recovery of HeUgoland before or immediately on the outbreak of hostihties is conceivably desirable, since the island forms a convenient base for submarines. What officer or officers in the Admiralty are responsible for working out the problem of the recapture of Heligoland under the alternative and varying conditions of a coup de main before war breaks out, immediately on the outbreak of war, or the more difficult operations involved were the expedi- tion postponed to a later date ? The German opinion of English naval efficiency cannot but be affected by the fact that the cost of the Admiralty's Intelligence Department has not kept pace either with the size of the fleet or with the novel com- plexity of naval problems. Our Teuton critics are quick to note the noxious vitality of such ideas as do enter the English mind ; neither does the reluctance with which those ideas are abandoned after their utility has gone escape them. The blue water school, for instance, is a picturesque phrase denoting the opinion that the safety of these islands is ensured by an adequate navy against any power with access to blue water. France, Spain, and the United States were blue water powers fought to a standstill on the open ocean, in the Mediterranean, or in the Indian seas. The North Sea problem is not a blue water problem, not because the waves of the North Sea are drab and not blue, but because Germany is barred from BLUE WATEE AND DEAB 201 blue water by England. Never in our history have we bad to face so vast a problem. The doctrine of the blue water school is efiective against France, Spain, or the United States. It is not effective against the naval power of Germany. A new English school of thought steeped in the scientij&c spirit, regarding the North Sea as a slumbering volcano that must burst into eruption before we can safely abandon oujselves to repose, is more necessary than Dreadnoughts. More ominous than the speeding up of German Dread- noughts is the scientific imagination of the German general staff. For the timely provision of nitric acid, the ingredient mainly required for high- power explosives, Germany has subsidised Nor- wegian water-power plants for the manufacture of nitrogen to the extent of two million pounds sterhng. In time of peace the nitrogen distilled from the air by the waterfalls of Norway will fertilise the fields of the Fatherland. If war breaks out, not nitrates but nitric acid will be the product of the German investment. The pre- science of the Teuton is the outcome of a system that does not depend on one man's vigilance. If the English provide for the supply of nitric acid during the next war one man's vigilance will do it. Is this safe 1 The English believe that the British Empire, under Providence, is the greatest instrument for good that the world has ever seen. Who outside the Empire agrees with that view ? Docs India or the myriad opinions that go to make up Indian opinion ? Do the Irish ? Do the Americans, the Germans, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Russians, or 202 EUEOPE'S PROBLEM the French ? Such evidence as exists points to a contrary conclusion. Our isolation, though splen- did, isstill complete except so far as the interests of France, Eussia, and the great colonies lead them to desire to maintain the British Empire. At first sight it may seem that the British Empire will be consolidated by the arms of Japan in the next war. Will it ? No madder folly was ever committed. What of Indian and colonial opinion ? In South Africa the question of Indian trading will enter on a new phase when the union is complete. Imagine an army of Indian workers landing in Northumberland or in Lancashire and working as operatives at a quarter of the wages paid to English artisans. Our trade unions would forbid the landing of Indians in Lancashire or else- where, and they would fight for protection against cheap labour, if necessary, with other weapons than pen and ink. This is exactly what is taking place in South Africa, Austraha, and Western Canada. India is the English title to empire. In India the great colonies have no direct interest. Eather the reverse. A successful war would not solve a terrible problem which is thoroughly under- stood by the British beyond seas, although scarcely thought of by Parliament or the electorate here. It presents England to her kinsmen abroad in a different aspect from that in which she appears to herself. We shall solve it when the time comes by sticking fast to the men of our own blood, but we shall not solve it if we ignore the settled opinions of interested onlookers; THE ENIGMAS OF DAILY LIFE FRIENDSHIP The first condition of enduring friendship is equality. Friendships may be sundered by many things; never by time. Unequal friendships are born dying. A warm-hearted millionaire con- tracted a deep hldng for a poor man, and was always trying to supply him with sometlung that he lacked. At first strong Uking was mutual, but the impossibiUty of reciprocating the favours showered upon the poor man ate into his soul. When the poor man touchily refused a present of £500 sent him by his Mecsenas the friendship ended. Lack of equahty is the reason why friendship is rare between men and women. It is uncommon because men can and do forget their sex ; women seldom. The more charming a woman is the more she remembers she is a woman. The best and the bravest of men may accept as a compliment the assurance that he is womanly in heart, perception, refinement, tact, or sympathy ; but no woman hkes to be told that she is mannish or even manly, although nothing is more certain (so far as anything can be certain which is undemonstrable) than the existence of 204 LIFE'B ENIGMAS sex of soul as well as of sex of body. Some women have a man's nature in a female's form, and some men are arrant femininity in a frock-coat. Never- theless, friendsHp may exist even between young men and young women, provided there is com- munity in suffering, in tastes, or in mutual pursuits. Such friendships, however, are apt to break down imder the stress of a more vital force. The woman capable of being a true ' pal ' to a man is rare, and' I notice that women with genuine capacity for friendship have generally been through the fire. Men prefer men to women for friends, because between them there is a sense of equahty that is absent from all their relations with the opposite sex. Men, moreover, disliking the way women treat women, confide in each other with knowledge that their confidence is more hkely to be respected than when they entrust their secrets to a woman. The sense of honour among men, their antipathy to fidgets and agitation about trifles, provides a larger stock of the raw material of friendship between men than that with which nature has provided the other sex. No friendships are sweeter than those made at school and carried along through life. Naval friendships might form the subject of a great bpok yet to be written. Comrades of yesterday in the Britannia, or of to-day at Osborne, contract their friendships in the atmosphere of ideal equahty, all of them being subject to a standard of physical and intellectual fitness below which no lad can fall without leaving the navy. Regimental friendship has been the motif of a hundred plays, a thousand books, and ten thousand short stories. In the professions and COMRADESHIP 205 in business, notwithstanding tlie fellowship of the trade union feeling and of common interests, the pressure of competition is so real that friendships formed mth rivals in the struggle for life grow in unkindly soil. Good comradeship requires imagination and unselfishness as well as equality. Given these ingredients, the via dolorosa of life is lightened and the dusty road enlivened with song and story by those who share ' the jug beneath the bough.' Clubbable men are members of a repubUc in which all are equal, and where friendships may last for generations between men who do not know each other at home and never meet outside the club. The House of Commons is another happy hunting- ground for friendships, because all members are equal, and a man who yesterday in Trafalgar Square or on Tower Hill was denouncing the upper classes widens his outlook on life by playing the part of David to a Jonathan who is the son of a Tory duke. The late Charles Bradlaugh's nature was wonderfully softened and strengthened in the later years of his life by the friendships he formed with millionaires and aristocrats in the House of Commons. A methodist parson wrote of him after twenty years of friendship : ' I liked him from the first — I loved him at the last.' That friendships exist between animals, and between plants or flowers, everyone with a stable or a garden is aware. Two of the drawbacks to the supersession of the horse by the automobile is that no cat ever becomes attached to any motor- car, and in the event of its owner being be- leaguered in a besieged city he cannot cut a 206 LIFE'S ENIGMAS steak from the tyres of his auto or boil it dov/n into chevril. EquaUty of friendship between nations is as essential as between individuals. The friendship of Russia for Montenegro, of England for Nepal, of the United States for the Philippines, of Germany for Turkey or Italy, is not real friendship, because there is no equaUty. International friendships succeed only when there is community of interest and something Hke equality of contribution to the common stock. This is why friendship with England and France may well be permanent in spite of seven hundred years of warfare. Animated by a common object, we desire the same thing — peace. In no part of France or England is the entente better understood than in Brittany and Devonshire, because for centuries the best warrant officers and bluejackets of the two navies have been Breton or Devonian. The traditions of the French maritime population as the wolves of the sea consisted mainly of stirring episodes in the story of the struggle with England. Since the Norman Conquest two dozen wars have been waged between England and France, and for several centuries war broke out in the Channel on an average every thirty years. During that period French senti- ment has been generally hostile to England, and British phlegm reciprocated French antipathy. When a Central European power recently menaced the peace of the world the interests of France and England were found to be identical, and a friendly understanding on terms of equality was the obvious way to preserve tranquillity. For years the British fleet has kept foreign troops out of OUE ENTENTES 207 Paris. The Frencli army at the back of the British fleet makes the Territorial experiment possible. The only danger to be feared in the entente is that, in the desire to strengthen it, English- men and Frenchmen may attempt to simulate qualities they do not possess or disclaim con- victions deeply rooted in their characters. M. Yves Guyot and other leading Frenchmen plead for a formal alliance ; others have expressed the strongest wish that the White City should be opened on Sunday so that a large number of Frencli people, who would otherwise be prevented, might be able to visit it. To enter into a formal alliance with France is as contrary to our historic policy as Sunday opening is contrary to our settled habits. We do not propose to our French friends to adopt Sunday closing. The English Sunday has drawbacks that leap to the eye ; its advantages, though invisible, are rooted in national character and habit. British friendship with Asiatic peoples are not artificial, but there is no cordiality on either side. Inscrutable as the Sphinx, we do not really know Japan. According to Western notions Japan is a higher race in 1910 than she was in 1858. The West is surely wrong, because evolutionary law does not bustle, hustle or effect so quick a change in half a century. The advance of the Japanese does not consist in a sudden increase of brain- power or of moral worth and capacity. All that has happened is that certain Western mechanical appHances and methods of man-slaying by sea and land have been found as useful in the Far East as in Europe. By these changes of method Japan has greatly developed its resources, and has waged 208 LIFE'S ENIGMAS a not unsuccessful war with a great power that had less perfectly assimilated the lessons of Western experience. The Marquis Ito said that ' as long as Japan merely led the Eastern world in arts and manners she was regarded as barbarian, and only when she had shown her capacity for killing men as successfully as Christians was she treated as a civilised power/ Even five-and- twenty years ago the Japanese were looked upon as our inferiors, or much as the average Englishman looks upon the Chinese to-day. If an offensive and defensive alliance with Japan is justified by the equality of the two nations, there is no resisting the conclusion that the Chinese are also oiir equals. To contract a friendship with the Chinese race, based on mutual respect and confidence, is an end well within the domain of high politics. The fact that China has been more deliberate than Japan in her acceptance of Western ideas is no proof of inferiority to Japan or disqualification for friendship with Britain. The first construction of railways in England was opposed almost as vigor- ously as in China. Automobiles on the high roads were delayed seventy years by the mandarin spirit of British officialism and privilege. The University of Oxford for many years opposed the introduction of a railway to its precincts. Lancashire arose in riot against the spinning-jenny, and hostility towards labour-saving appliances is not unknown in select labour circles of England to-day. In the reign of Charles the First China was as civilised as the England of the Stuarts, and more civilised than the Russia of Peter the Great. Professor Huxley declared that he knew of no reason for CHINA 209 suspecting that the average Englishman of his day was sensibly different from those that Shake- speare knew and drew. In the belief of that clear thinker, the physical, intellectual and moral quali- ties of Englishmen have remained substantially the same for the last four or five centuries, in spite of the vast changes that have taken place in our civilisation since Katharine of Aragon was divorced. If Huxley were living he would probably agree with more modern investigators that such physical and moral changes as have occurred mark deterioration rather than advance in the innate quahties of the race, due to four- fifths of the people being huddled together in streets. It is not much more than two hundred years since European civilisation began to move ahead of Chinese civilisation — a pregnant fact when we remember that two hundred years is a short period in the history of a dominant race and one almost negligible from the point of view of the evolution of mankind. The invention of turbines, proportional representation, wireless telegraphy, and party goverment may or may not be evidence of British racial superiority, but the impartial onlooker might find some of the existing features of Chinese civilisation as admirable as our own, and better suited to the peoples of the Far East. Chinese taxation is light, in spite of ' squeezes,' and the social organisatipn of the agricultural village population is better than that of Wiltshire. Before many years have passed China will be a powerful friend or a dangerous foe ; she is waking from hor lethargy, and it is too late to regard her 210 LIFE'S ENIGMAS with a blend of contempt, cupidity, and amuse- ment. We have no monopoly of courage, culture, or virtue. If England and China are to be friends there will be a commerce of ideas and an inter- change of something more than cottons, machinery, tea, and dry goods. Friendship between all classes is even more advantageous to the British race than friendship with France or China. To attack the capitalist, the brewer, the parson, or the peer, because he is not something else, is but shortsighted policy. The greatest statesman of the day would be one who convinced the nation that the classes and the masses are one, and that all that seriously injures the former is fatal to many of the latter. Since neither taxation nor injustice can be confined to compartments, the welding in friendship of all who belong to the British race is more profitable than the most successful jehad inspired and launched by the gospel of hate. COURAGE Willingness to risk life, reputation, or fortune for a cause is admired — in Europe. In Asia the point of view towards valour differs from ours. The same may be said of the Boers. When necessity arose, they were the bravest of the brave. The Boers, like some Asiatic races, had pondered over the principles that govern success in battle, and, having no War Office to confuse details with essentials, withheld admiration from feats which thrilled the blood of the British. Some of the best of our own fighting generals agree with the Boers, and wish to apply a utilitarian philosophy to war, although Jeremy Bentham, the apostle of utilitarianism, never vexed his soul with tactics or strategy. Viewed from that standpoint, the Balaclava Charge, which thrills us still, was folly. It could not succeed, and the courage displayed in the charge neither justified the order nor condoned the mistake. Even the Victoria Cross, which ten years ago was accepted in this country as an incentive to miUtary efficiency, is now regarded with misgivings by the best chiefs of the Army. Were the reader to buy a dozen coloured picture postcards representing the deeds that won the Cross, and to submit them to com- petent military authority, it is probable he would p2 212 LIFE'S ENIGMAS be told that in almost every case the hero is drawn in the act of weakening his own side. I lately submitted twenty of these V.C. pictures to a famous General. He declared that every one of the twenty men who thus received the Victoria Cross for personal gallantry deserved not reward, but punishment. The courage required in modern war, although greater than that necessary when weapons were simpler and when nerve-shattering high explosives were non-existent, is a different and a larger courage. A man who runs out of the fighting line to carry a wounded comrade to the rear is a fine fellow. To remain in the fighting line if his own side are hard pressed is of greater service to his country, and one more dangerous, though less profitable, than retirement to the rear with a wounded man. A new V.C. Order is required which should be conferred on those who are Very Cautious in the country's interests, not in their own. The sublimest form of courage is that which combines both the physical and the moral elements. Holding on under difficult circumstances, whether as a fighting man or as a civilian, exacts from iiuman nature higher com'age than the performance of a brilliant feat in the presence of comrades, under the spur of enthusiasm and with the chance of fame. In this kind of courage, which Napoleon has declared to be the best of all, women excel. Much is heard about the timidity of women, because they are more susceptible than men to sudden noises or horrible sights. Many women are panicked at things that a boy might laugh at. Yet these same women in their daily lives are MOTHERS' COURAGE 213 exposed to conditions requiring sustained courage of a kind of whicli few men are capable. Consider tlie case of the lady mother of a large family where no servant is kept. Ibsen has dealt with the tragedies of ordinary women's lives, but no poet has yet drawn the grand figure of the mother of English children who does her duty. From the time her first child is born until the last leaves home for good she knows no holiday. Day and night, Sunday and week-day, the history of her life is the story of a struggle for the life of others. She wins no Orders and she makes no money. Except in sleep, she is never off duty. This drama of sustained courage exists in thou- sands of homes and attracts no notice, although few men could equal it and no man can strike a loftier ideal. Every man born into the world entered it during the deadly peril of a woman — peril as real as any risk incurred by seamen gunners or the Infantry of the Line. We men are too ready to take for granted the heroism of woman, not only during her time of motherhood, but while she is enduring the deadly monotony entailed by maternity. We hear much of the sameness of factory life and the torment of tasks repeated day after day. The best mothers get no evenings ofE nor even a half-day on Sundays, but there is no Press campaign waged on their behalf, and no Parliamentary enthusiasm for lightening their work. A little fi-ontier action was lately fought in the Ultman Khel Valley. In describing the defence of a ruined tower by a few Ghazis, a correspondent cables : ' These brave fanatics stayed in the 214 LIFE'S ENIGMAS tower firing till they died.' These fanatics ' stayed in the tower ' because their education had taught them that death was better than surrender. That their staunchness was due to their religion is immaterial. A faith that is taught so successfully that men will die for it in a tower from which they might retreat and save themselves may not lead to success in war with the British Empire, but is magnificent. The coddling process in our educa- tional system has gone too far. It may not be desirable to train English lads to be Ghazis and fanatics, but schoolboys are pampered to the point of absurdity. At some schools it is difiicult for the children of well-to-do parents to learn endurance. The object of all education is the formation of character. If there is no practice in bearing pain, there is no real education. Affliction, vexation, unhappiness, misery, are the lot of us all, and unless the Territorial or commercial twig is bent young it breaks under burdens that a well- trained sapling will endure. Egotism and melan- choly in only children are notorious, because doting parents and friends administer to them unwholesome homage from the cradle to the altar. Unselfishness and quiet endva-ance of pain are the solid foundations of great character. Hope and cheerfulness are the superstructures, and the reason why public-school men are cheery under hard knocks in after life is because they learnt at school that there was no place in the universe for them unless they ' played the game.* Human nature does not change with the increase of national wealth, and the laws of character are exactly what they were when Adam ' went back ' on a woman, or when Peter was guilty of an act of treachery THE, FLOATS AT KIEL 215 that would have secured his expulsion from any decent club. In the stormy days ahead the Empire will require every Briton to rise superior to difficulties and to bear privation with willing- ness, if not with joy. We coddle our children to expect somebody else to die for their country. When people have everything they want, whether boys or girls, men or women, they begin to believe they are the centre of the imiverse. Dr. Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, once said that he once saw a youngster with a fly in his eye, which a mother and three sisters were trying to extract. One minute's endurance of pain was all that was neces- sary ; but the boy had no grit, and had to be sent five miles in a carriage to a doctor to get an anaesthetic. We shall not hold India for another thirty years unless the endurance of Englishmen is a matter of course, not a matter of discussion. Kobustness of fibre in our young people, whether in the Council schools or at Eton and Winchester, is more essential to the maintenance of the Flag than its display on the anniversary of Queen Victoria's birthday. Empire Day is a splendid idea, because it depends on the awakening of a new sense of duty to the State. When patriotism is real, strong natures are apt to maintain silence about it. For the same reason they don't chatter about their religion, their love, or any other cause for which they are willing to die. Lord Meath, Lord Ampthill, and the other leaders of the move- ment have done well to remuid the race that duty, not rights, is the watchword of the British Raj. All who celebrate Empire Day should remember that outside the entrance to Kiel Harbour there 216 LIFE'S ENIGMAS are a large number of floats. If the visitor inquires for wliat purposes these floats are wanted, he is told that they are for landing troops. Well ! floats are not required for conveying German troops into Russia, Poland, Austria, Italy, France, Holland, or Belgium. Those floats may carry something to harden the British. One of the pluckiest men I ever knew was to the day of his death regarded by his intimate friends as an ordinary sort of person without one spark of heroism. Feelmg unwell, he consulted a specialist, who delivered the same verdict as that depicted in Mr. Collier's picture ' The Verdict.' The condemned man was told that a serious opera- tion was immediately necessary, that it was un- likely that the operation would succeed, and that he would die within six months if the operation were not performed. Without saying a word to his wife, the condemned man arranged for the opera- tion, and, with a smiling face, took his family to the theatre the night before he entered a nursing home. He died next day under the knife, leaving his affairs in perfect order. A letter to his wife was found explaining that the course he had adopted was the one that saved her from all pain that was not inevitable, as if he had lingered in agony for six months his death was equally certain, but the anguish caused to those he left behind him would be greater. There is a kind of suffering in civil life which is commoner than is generally supposed, which in the majority of cases is ended promptly when the situation is faced with courage. I refer to people COURAGE IN COMMERCE 217 who are blackmailed. Their uunibers iucrease with the growth of alien immigration, of sham educa- tion, and of the love of ease. Whatever the con- sequences, it is invariably a sound rule to resist blackmail. A distinguished officer committed an indiscretion m early life. Fiercely ambitious, and fearing the loss of his career, he paid blackmail for years to an alien who made a handsome income by suborning servants to betray their employers. The exactions of the blackmailer at last became insupportable, and my friend hesitated between blowing out his brains and facing exposure. Fortmiately, he told his trouble to one who could take a dispassionate view of the situation. Within an hour the blackmailer was told to do his worst, and the trouble ended. When a man or woman is blackmailed the chances are that they can rid themselves of their persecutor only by courage. Whether courage is decaying or not it is certain that the average civilian has no less need for pluck and endurance than the average fighting man. In a world where war is the condition of peace and progress, intrepidity is necessary to existence. Commerce is war. Is there any successful business man in London or Manchester who has not re- peatedly taken his life into his hands before he gained the position he now holds ? Many men who have won their way to the front in business deserve a commercial Victoria Cross for the services they have rendered to the State by their courage and endurance. Great manufacturers, con- tractors, merchants, stock-brokers, solicitors, and surgeons are monuments of courage directed to the attainment of wise ends. The courageous 218 LIFE'S ENIGMAS politician unfortunately is not always the wise one, and courage in politics is rare and leads to the commission of the unpardonable sin — independence of thought and judgment. Parliamentary courage is at a low ebb, and the white feather is its badge. SURPRISE The essence of surprise is tlie absence of calculation or expectation. We are surprised at what was unexpected ; we are astonislied at, or stunned by, what is beyond our intelligence. People are taken by surprise ; they are struck with astonish- ment. We are surprised at a legacy, astonished at a ghost. The scalding hot chocolate vanilla souffle enclosed in an aromatic envelope of ice, the well-known * omelette surprise/ is a dish which, when first tasted, appeals to senses other than material ones, A bad oyster, a corked bottle of wine, is an unpleasant surprise. An incident which recently happened is an example of another kind of surprise. The executors of a lady who had lived all her long life in a venerable mansion, inherited from her grand- father, opened up certain bricked bins in the wine-cellar. From a bin of port dated 1790 a vinous bonanza was expected by the executors. It turned out to be thin, souj, and undrinkable. Similar disappointment followed the opening of a bin containing sherry. A cask of whisky, however, turned out to be the finest liqueur the expert present had tasted. But the surprise of the day was a bin labelled ' Elderberry.' This modest beverage, over a hundred years old, had become a delicious 220 LIFE'S ENIGMAS liqueur, but one entirely unknown to the trade. A British wine, bottled for a century and delicious, was indeed a surprise. Pleasant or painful, surprises always interest us. Interestingness is the element lacking in the lives of the majority. Highly-strung women, especially when chained to the grille of ' the daily round and common task,' desire that something should happen, even if of a disagreeable character, to aerate the stagnation of the Sargasso Sea of domesticity crowded with hulls of derelict hopes. Domestic surprises are more often acceptable than distress- ing. For instance, the phenomenon of the ugly duckling in family life is not uncommon, and is a fi'uitful source of gladsome surprise. An ugly duckling's relations are usually the last to perceive the swansdown of genius. In these days of freedom for women the number of cygnets who are mistaken for ugly ducklings is increasing. At a recent exhibition of the Royal Academy a picture painted by a girl whose friends had ridiculed her one talent was hung ' on the line.' But the plumes of the cygnet grew apace, and one fine May morning the family breakfast-table was enlivened by an Academy catalogue in which the name of the daughter of the house appeared as the painter of a ' picture of the year.' Judicious reticence, the handmaid of surprise, heightened its effect on her incredulous kinsfolk. I remember an Oxford lad who had been taunted by his people with indolence and self-indulgence. Stung by their reproaches, he concentrated will-power on success in the Schools while affecting the debonair existence which had brought down on him parental reproof and set SUKPEISE IN HUMOUR 221 sisterly tears a-flowing. He swept tlie board with his successes, and, like the girl painter, allowed the critics on the hearth to discover from the Times his high place in the Honours list. I know of a dinner-party where the conversation turned on the prevalence of suicide. A. Harley Street surgeon commented on the extraordinary ignorance of anatomy exhibited by the majority of people who destroyed themselves. ' To cut one's throat properly, this is the place where the knife should be used,' said the popular surgeon, placing two fingers on his jugular vein. Shortly afterwards the service at table unaccountably dragged. The butler's absence from the room was the cause, and when the man was sent for he was found lying dead on his bed with his throat neatly cut in a workman- like style on the exact plan of the Harley Street specialist. People talk much too freely before servants, especially foreign servants. Intelligence and education enable unscrupulous domestics to arrange sharp surprises for employers and their guests. A flourishing blackmailing industry de- pends mainly on traffic in the organised revelations of subsidised servants. Children, being elementals, are mines of ore rich in surprises. The child's definition of ' salt ' as ' that which makes potatoes taste bad when you do not eat it with ' is a triple shock in grammar, botany, and gastronomy. American wit, or what is conventionally accepted as wit, is based on the sudden and the unexpected. ' He was rude to the gunsmith's wife, and the handles of his coffin were of solid silver,' is a Phila- delphiau variant of the original chestnut. Animals are surprised as well as mon. One hot Sunday I 222 LIFE'S ENIGMAS was conveyed in a fly fi'om my hotel in Brighton to the Devil's Dyke. The horse was weary, long in the tooth, and obviously brooding over the uncon- genial task of dragging men uphill in a ramshackle fly. Fifty yards ahead a beggar boy suddenly materialised the idea of standing on his head. The dejected horse, though requiring a constant whip to keep him at a foot's pace, suddenly reared in an agony of fear, turned sharply round, and, like a steed possessed, broke the shafts and sprinted back towards Brighton. He was surprised. One never can tell how little or how much the dumb creatures understand. There is one thing about them, however, that when in a wild state they are not easy to surprise after they have made man's acquaintance. The beasts in Yellowstone Park and in the Uganda reservations, like the wild ducks in the sanctuaries in the Highlands, are as ' shock- ingly tame ' as Alexander Selkirk's creatures, but outside such sanctuaries, except in remote places like Spitzbergen, birds and animals know the meaning of a gun as well as man. One often hears new- comers in forest, jungle, or veldt parts say, ' I wish I had brought my gun.' The would-be shot does not understand that if he had brought his weapon he would have seen no game, as animals and birds know a barrel from an umbrella as well as he does. Among ' bed-books ' the hundred and fifty-one volumes of the ' Annual Kegister ' are bad to beat. The Parliamentary debates, for instance, are con- cisely and conveniently given, while the crimes, trials, and peccadillos of our race for a century and a half are reported mth a zest admirably adapted for ME. COBDEN'S SUEPRISE 22B a secluded person in a recumbent posture. Dip- ping at random into this well of information, which has maintained the fine traditions and purity of style originally given to it by Edmund Burke, the reader meets with many surprises. One of them is that in controversies on current questions of the day, if for once I may diffidently generahse, minori- ties are often right, but as often wrong, even in questions that are treated as settled for ever and a day. Another siu'prise, to me at least, is the almost invariable failiu-e of the prophets and the experts who are regarded by their contemporaries as unimpeachable authorities to ' come off ' in their predictions. The experts generally prove to be in the wrong, and the defeated minorities as often seem to be in the right in their respective anticipations of the results of legislation on subjects so widely different as the Abolition of the Corn Laws, Jewish Emanci- pation, and the purchase of the Suez Canal by Lord Beaconsfield. In the forties, Mr. Cobden, for instance, positively assured the agricultural interests that they would always enjoy a protective tariff of at least ten shillings per quarter of wheat, because freight from the United States was then seventeen shillings per quarter. Freight is now three shillings a quarter, and for half a century the production of home-grown food has been unhealthily arrested because Mr. Cobden and his friends were not smart enough to anticipate four-cylinder engmes, turbuies, and the Suez Canal, and were cocksure about the future. A genume surprise for out-and-out Free Traders is provided in the ' Annual Register ' for 1849. Nmety-nme Free 224 LIFE'S ENIGMAS Traders out of a hundred believe to-day that after the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, and after the duty fell from sixteen shillings to four shillings, and then to one shilluig a quarter of four hundred and eighty pounds, the price of bread went down. Wheat, however, actually rose in 1847 after the repeal, and the loaf which averaged eightpence half- penny per four pounds under the Protective Act of 1828 reached a shilling in 1847 and tenpence half- penny in the Crimean War under Free Trade. The future is more obscure than the political Isaiahs would have us believe. In predicting the outlook for Britain on any given subject, the wisdom of the learned is as foolishness. Lord Palmerston, with the best engineering advice, opposed the con- struction of the Suez Canal both on financial and political grounds. The miion of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean has immensely increased the financial and political importance of the British Empire, and has compelled both poHtical parties to maintain such a navy that the strategical points in the world — the Shetland Islands, Dover Straits, Gibraltar, Aden, the Cape, Smgapore, Hongkong, Sydney Harbour, and Esquimault— fiy the Union Jack, although we still have no army to speak of. When I hear of the societies and leagues for de- stroying rats, flies, wasps, mosquitoes, and sparrows, with the accompaniment of sanguine estimates as to the benign results to follow, I look confidently for surprises. I wonder what concealed wheel in the engine-room of Nature, now at rest, will be set in motion by interference with existing mechanism and how the balance of power in bird or insect life will be disturbed. Acclimatisation has produced FAEADAY 225 many surprises to pastoralists, farmers, and gardeners. The history of the rabbit pest of Australia and the surprising results of some of the antidotes that have been tried teach us a lesson on the fate awaiting those who meddle with the buzz- saw of Nature without understandmg. To rid ourselves of the mosquito and the common house- fly is such an obvious advantage that until we find that the devil we know is actually replaced by a stronger and more repulsive devil, hitherto a stranger, it may be reasonable to proceed with the process of killing creatures unpleasant to man. But it is well to remember that when we exterminate wolves or flies, and when we transfer plants, animals, or men from one latitude in one hemis- phere to another latitude in this or the other hemis- sphere, we set in motion hidden machinery which nobody understaiids and produce effects which the wisest cannot anticipate. I only plead for modesty in anticipation of benign results, not that the rats or the iiies should survive. The liistory of invention, like that of acclimat- isation or attempted extermmation, is a record of surprise. Invention is not creation but the with- drawal of a curtain hiding something that was always there. In his impatented discovery of induced electricity comprehendmg and explaining a vast variety of phenomena, Michael Faraday opened the gate of fame and fortune to thousands of inventors, but he himself goes down to posterity not as an inventor but as the responsible author of the greatest crop of surprises of the nineteenth century. "We have as yet only touched the fringe of an illimitable and untrodden territory which Q 226 LIFE'S ENIGMAS awaits the footsteps of new pioneers of science. What is more probable than an adaptation and cheapening of forces that wiU dispel our social storm clouds and end the current political contro- versies of our day, which we now regard as so important ? A new Faraday even in our time might so co-ordinate existing natural phenomena as to dissolve the great cities as places of residence. Nothing is more certain than surprise in human affairs except the continuity and efficiency of the natural laws by which we are conditioned. For that reason the proposal to plump down one hundred million pounds for the construction of new warships on existing specifications strikes me as one lacking in scientific imagination. International relations are the nursery of sur- prise. QUARRELS Bickerings and disputes about trifles are com- monest among weak men, women, children, the aging, and the sickly. Quarrelling is a form of occupation for the leisured ; it is a pastime with those who have nothing else to do. Of all the quarrels that embitter Ufe, family quarrels are the most hopeless. It has been shrewdly said that family discord is the indirect expression of a desire for a perfect understanding. Bacon, who took all knowledge as his province, wrote about anger and about revenge ; on the subject of family quarrels he was silent. Too much is taken for granted about family affection. The laws of Nature are changeless — one of them is the separa- tion of mammalian families at or before matiuity. The insm-rection of female sociahsts against family life is often the result of tyranny they have experi- enced in their homes. Among other advantages a relation is a person who may take liberties or say rude things with impunity. The relationship between mother and child is natural and eternal, and the protectorship of the bread-winner, when he is also the father, should carry with it reasonable predominance in the family. There is no reason, however, beyond natural or acquired affection and liking, why families should cling together after q2 228 LIFE'S ENIGMAS maturity when they find incessant contact to be a source of continuous and rasping pain. Daughters of the well-to-do middle-classes, inadequately em- ployed, stinted in food for reason and affection, are driven by the emptiness of their lives into the culti- vation of the gentle art of poisoning each other's existence. There is nothing more in kinship to create affection between collateral or even blood relations than between strangers, except that no friend is quite so charming as a relation who is also a fiiend. On the other hand, antipathetic kinsfolk are like a burr under one's saddle. We were not consulted as to the character and temperament of our relations. We found ourselves thrust into this world, claimed by a sept or clan which we had not chosen and which we possibly dislike when we know it. To love other folk because it is our duty to love them is as unthinlc- able as compulsory belief. Affection and faith are the ordered products of reason and inference. It is often the best and most charming people who get on with everybody but their own relations, and the reason why they cannot bring themselves to like their kith is because they resent the insolence of kinship as naturally as they shrink from the im- pertinence of strangers. Confusion reigns in many minds as to the duty of generous forgiveness of injuries. They confound personal resentment and disapprobation of what is wrong, whether it is done to them or anybody else. A man who has cheated or insulted you, or a woman who has slandered you, Avhether a relation or a stranger, is neither more nor less a cheat, a FAMILY JAES 229 slanderer, or a boor because you are the victim. In tliat light the intercourse of relations ought to be viewed, except that of parents and children. When kinsfolk take liberties, or dispense with the courtesies of life, it is absurd to choose such people as associates or to treat them as if they had done nothing wrong. Untold suffering is caused by false generosity in families where the habitations are too small to allow of separate lives. Arch- bishop Whateley, whose j udgment was as sound as his heart was good, said that the duty of Christian forgiveness does not require you to look upon in- justice or any other fault as if it were nothing wrong at all, merely because it was you that had been wronged. The French motto applies : d corsaire, corsaire et demi, when the pirate of your happiness is a relation. Nelson's philosophy, of which I speak later on, if applied to family life, by diminishing rudeness and putting a stop to the taking of liberties, would increase the cheerfulness of the nation, because patriarchal life is now as extinct as Mr. Carnegie's diplodocus, and some defence is needed against the insolence of kinship. Family peace is the result of an equilibrium of forces. In managing quarrels with strangers it is always a good rule to remember that persons with opposite dispositions require different treatment. There is one kind of disputant often met, touchy and choleric yet kindly. He has something of the character of the dog which never bites another dog who lies down in the mud. This kind of man is readily calmed by an expression of regret. Another not unusual type of character is suspicious of your motive if you generously admit yourself to be in the 230 LIFE'S ENIGMAS wrong ; he believes that he is wronged more deeply than he had at first supposed, and can only be pacified by a stout defence. He resembles the nettle which hurts least when pressed hard. The best rule of all, save one, in quarrelling, is never to play your best cards first, since quarrels without anger are rare — and the man who is not angry is thrice armed, especially when he gets his blow in first. For some reasons the abolition of duelling is a mistake. Insolent and offensive language is now too frequently indulged in with impunity. Finally, for families and nations the best rule of all is never to take liberties yom-self and never to allow liberties to be taken with you, and to remember that self- defence is still a noble art although fisticuffs are out of date. When we turn to public and international affairs we find the same rules apply as in family life. We are all members one of another. There are only two methods of dealing with other nations — Nelson's and a late Premier's. Nelson and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had little in common. In character, training, and outlook on life they were as unlike as possible, yet both won respect and affection by means diametrically opposite. The late Prime Minister loved peace sincerely — passionately. His kind heart and capacious mind were engaged during life in arranging differences, in stamping out the embers of dispute. When he reached the highest place in the Empire he endea- voured to adjust international quarrels by a sug- gestion of general disarmament. The fact that Europe, Asia, and the United States turned a deaf ear to Sir Henry's well-meaning proposals does not NELSON'S TOUCH 281 alter tlie fact that he loved peace well enough to brave the smiles of statesmen who are not cynics in order to secm*e it. He put every Chancellerie on the alert, endeavoming to penetrate the new and mysterious design of perfidious Albion. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's life, unlike Nelson's, was an embodiment of the seventh beatitude, but he never hit on the secret of enduring peace. Nelson's ele- mental philosophy seems shocking in these days of false sentiment. Given in his own words, when, idoUsed by the Fleet, he was already the darling of the nation, it was : ' Damn our enemies ! Bless our friends ! Amen, amen, amen. I am not such a hypocrite as to bless them that hate us, or if a man strike me on the cheek to turn the other. No ; knock him down, by God.' Nelson, like Dr. Johnson, was a good hater, but he wrote a month earlier than the letter quoted above : ' In my opinion nations, like indi\dduals, are to be won more by acts of kindness than cruelty.' My last citation from the anthology of Nelsonic philosophy was written about the same time as the letter last quoted. ' I hate your pen-and-ink men,' he said ; ' a fleet of British ships of war are the best negotiators in Europe. They always speak to be understood, and generally gain their point ; their arguments carry conviction to the breasts of our enemies.' Nelson's watchword, be it remembered, was ' Touch and Take,' a maxim that would have been abhorrent to the genial and peace loving statesman who has gone to his rest. Nelson's philosophy, backed by Pitt, however, gave us seventy years of peace and a start in the race for empire. The 232 LIFE'S ENIGMAS aversion of the late Premier from quarrelling in any form reveals a sunny and lovable character of dis- tinct value in tlie transaction of national affairs when confined to its proper sphere. Needless war is the inevitable result of exposing undefended wealth, and when a nation open to robbery from following saintly but unpractical ideals is robbed, then, too late, the Nelson touch is seen to be the surer way of peace. The difference between Nelson and C.-B. was not one of temperament ; it was one of experience. War is the settlement of inter- national quarrel. Nelson knew what war was. Neither the late Premier nor the majority of us know anything about war. Officers and men of both Services who do know what war means agi'ee with Nelson. For many centuries we British have settled our quarrels with other nations in places below the horizon and beyond the sea. International quarrels hitherto have not inter- rupted our national games. Cricket, football, bridge, and motoring suffered no check by our most recent experience of war. No EngHshman's ear has heard the shrieks of his daughters struggling in the grip of armed men drunk mth slaughter and wild with lust. No English farmer has seen his unreaped crops trampled down or rotting in the winter's rain. Our churches have never been packed with groan- ing wounded without bandages, nurses, chloroform, surgeons, or iodoform. Gangrene and enteric on war scale are unknown in tliis country. A national quarrel settled in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex would be more terrible than the worst moments of Mukden or Spion Kop, for Manchuria and Natal were sparsely populated and permanent buildings few. WHAT WAB MEANS 233 Our country is cramped and crowded, our buildings are solid ; in half an hour more material damage would be done than could be repaired in twenty- months ; a lyddite shell would devastate two acres of inhabited buildings ; our cities are naked ; our railways are not designed for war purposes ; our high roads are winding and more favourable to an enemy than to us ; our food supply is precarious, and depends for its continuance on the money that can be made out of it. An international quarrel, though none of our seeking, fought out on this soil, may be forced on us within four years. If we were beaten we should lose more than hfe : w^e should lose our national honour, because the nation con- quered on its own soil loses that which cannot be recovered except by reprisals which the foe can easily prevent for at least a century. France is prosperous and rich ; she has recovered the wealth she lost in 1870, but my French friends tell me that not only among the fighting men and the gentry, but among all thinking people who love the land they Hve in, there is something missing in France. In the words of Gambetta, they never speak about it, but they are always thinking, think- ing, thinking. Of all causes for international strife the most insane is the provocation of a determined and armed nation by substituting phrases of good- will for strenuous preparation. Flaunt Aveakness, and you invite attack. Twice in our national history have foreigners compelled our statesmen to appeal to the whole country for military support in a national quarrel. Once Cromwell did it ; once Pitt. Now ]\Ir. Haldanc has done it again. All honour to him for making the appeal, but, alas ! 234 LIFE'S ENIGMAS he has made an appeal doomed to faihire because he ignores equally the lessons of history, common sense, and the habits of his countrymen. In 1803 there were 379,000 volunteers in Great Britain and 70,000 in Ireland. Mr. Windham then pointed out that Mr. Addington ' has not only not provided an army, but has rendered it impossible that an Army should be provided.' This is exactly what Mr. Haldane has done. He has provided a force that cannot fight until it is trained, although no enemy will consent to postpone his blow at our heart in order to give us time to train our citizen troops. And this force, such as it is, contains a large proportion of -willing and brave men, who, from no fault of their own, cannot fulfil the obliga- tions which they have unwittingly accepted. The Bill creating this army was passed through Parlia- ment by closure. International quarrels in these days are less the result of pride, ignorance, or ambition than necessity, and necessity knows no international law. HOME The best words in all tongues are untranslatable. ' Home ' is one of them. The Latin races know it not. To ' come home ' is a Saxon saying, with a different note to the ire domum of Cicero or the chez nous of modern Gaul. Home means more to the Northern races than to the inhabitants of summer lands, because the inclemency of the weather and the severity of the struggle with Nature drive them indoors for shelter, feasting, recreation, and repose. Home, cemetery, and quiet are all words derived from the same Sanscrit root — meaning rest. Good climates mean an alfresco existence. Dining at the cafe under the trees is pleasant, but habitual absence fi'om the roof-tree except for sleep is bad for family affection. Our German, Scandinavian, Icelandic, and Dutch kin understand English love of home and home life because they share it. Homesickness, home- keeping, homeless, home-made, homewards are words that convey ideas to the colonising British which are Chaldee to the Latins from Calais to Cadiz. The Latins love their own land no less than we, and their strong dislike of emigration is a racial trait, but the difference between ' my home ' and chez moi is a real difference. 236 LIFE'S ENIGMAS As the inevitable development of the woman's movement approaches in the form of revolutionary- attack on men in authority, I note a distinct hardening of public opinion against the feminists, not owing to lack of appreciation of their courage and sacrifices, but because they outrage an indeUble instinct of the English people — respect for home Hfe. Deep down in his heart the average Briton asks himself on every proposed social and pohticai • change : How does this touch my home ? He holds that the poUcy of the political feminists leads straight to the breaking up of homes — the first condition of the aboUtion of private property. As the unemployed become quickly unemployable, so are the unenjoyed women who join forces with thorough-going Sociahsts as unenjoyable as crowing hens to Chanticleer. Having given due warning to the community that Suffragettes are indifierent to the sanctity of home life, the fact will never be forgotten unless, during the brief interval of a Red triumph, the Communists ignore the eternal barrier between male and female. We shall then not wait long for the new Cromwell to restore the home. Revolution alone will enable females to rule. Home requires a man at the head. When sailors and soldiers foregather on the mess deck and in barracks, songs about mother and home fetch tears and cheers more easily than ballads in praise of women's charms. His mother's grave is easily the favourite chanty of Jack afloat. Homesickness is happily rife in Navy and Army. Men will never fight to a finish for a State lunch- counter and a pubUc creche. Our lads in blue THE ' LITTLE LANGUAGE ' 237 and drab spend thousands of pounds from their scanty pay on cuiios for the old folk at home. ' Same as mother makes it ' is a standard of culinary excellence traded on by pushful purveyors of the people's food. The extraordinary fondness for home among the Northern races is revealed in times of popular excitement and in war. ' What will they think at home ? ' is the stimulus of explorers and of fighting men all the world over, be it ' ever so humble.' A girl whose idea of happi- ness is the possession of a Directoire dress and a feather boa, and who looks to music-halls, skating rinks, and excursions for recreation, ignorant of cook- ing and all housewifely lore, may make the worst of wives. She may feed her man on ready-made food, scraps, and ' faggots ' ; but after the babies arrive, notwithstanding constant disease and high infant mortality, the affection of the youngsters for their home — and such a home — is still ineradicable. Many a united Enghsh family links itself together by the invention and use of a ' Uttle language ' of its own. Swift and Stella, as every- one knows, coined a dialect which they called their ' Uttle language.' Faulty articulations of infancy are eagerly caught up and repeated by the elder children and preserved, like pot-pourri, for use in the family circle. When the nestlings fly to other homes, often in distant lands, and them- selves become parents and grandparents, memories of the ' Uttle language ' linger in bungalows and shacks and are recaUed in the verandahs and stoeps of four continents. Sweet memories of home, uninteUigible to strangers, are thus preserved between kinsfolk at a time of Ufe when the growth 238 LIFE'S ENIGMAS of sentiment is slow and its life precarious. Smart women adopt as slang tlie ' little language ' of the home. The word ' comfy,' for instance, in a child's mouth is pretty, but when used by the brazen matron of forty, with her skin-foods and her corset cinched like the pack of a transport mule on the Andes, is repulsive. The argot of smart society and the ' Souls ' is rank plagiarism from the ' bright lexicon ' of the home. When England reforms herself, her awakened respect for the threatened institution of the home will prevent the exposure of child-bearing women to the hardships and struggles of industrial Hfe. But to-day, as may be seen anywhere in Lancashire, where husbands and wives both leave home daily for the factory, and the children are entrusted to old crones during the dayUght hours, love of home still lingers long in the hearts of lads and lasses whithersoever they wander. The absence of all stock jokes about the mother is negative testimony to the value placed by the British on the principal member of the family. Round the subjects of paternity, of sisters, brothers, uncles, and aunts, not to speak of mothers-in-law, cluster vast literatures of gibe. In the stately homes of England the passion of family hfe burns no less fiercely than in the slums. Opinions may differ as to the desirability of pre- serving the stately homes of England. That they can be destroyed as easily as wasp nests, were the nation unanimous, is undeniable ; but as a middle- class man who has seen something of the working of the system so loudly denounced by those who ENGLAND'S HOME LIFE 239 know little or nothing about it at home or abroad, I regard the gradual disappearance of the stately homes of England as an irreparable national calamity. National life implies international relations. Kepublican countries suffer continually and griev- ously from the want of capable people with hereditary training to represent them abroad. When the first Lord AmpthUl and Sir Edward Malet were Ambassadors in Berlin our relations with Germany were less formal and more satis- factory than to-day. The absence of a diplomatic service and a governing caste in the United States has proved a serious drawback to American diplomacy. To till vines effectively three gener- ations of experience are needed. To govern well comes more easily to those who have heard national affairs talked of at breakfast since they left off pinafores. In the amusing struggle between the Kaiser and the British Admiralty as to what Admiral should be Senior Officer at the Hudson celebrations in New York, the fact that Sir Edward Seymour belonged to an ancient House and acquainted from childhood \vith the traditions of how to manage ceremonial was an advantage that should not be underrated. The spirit that gives to the British officer not only obedience, but the affection of his men, is not the product of Sandhurst, of Osborne, or of Dart- mouth. It is the product of home. 'Rankers' are not liked in the ranks. On the good home life of England the Empire rests. Home-lovers arc individualists. Free 240 LIFE'S ENIGMAS lunch-counters in phalansteries instead of break- fast, dinner, and tea in houses is a plan not con- sonant with the spirit of the English race ; nor is the appointment of swarms of officials to regulate, check and pry into the lives of citizens at home congenial to the instincts of the English people. The British workman may authorise his delegates to pledge him at the Trade Union Congress to the most outrageous schemes of Socialism. He may vote from bravado for a Victor Grayson. But in his home, in his public-house, in his amusements, in his betting, in his heart of hearts he is an individualist through and through, because the abolition of home life, which would hit him first of all, is a necessary antecedent to the realisation of the Socialist ideal. With her vast experience the Roman Church sees the incompatibility of Home and Socialism. A few English Churchmen have been infected with the crapulent folly known as Christian Socialism, and many Nonconformists have, alas ! abandoned the teachings of the New Testament for the gospel of hate. Socialism and the home do not mix. Socialist leaders contend for equal remuneration to all, ignoring the unalterable fact that inequality of service implies inequaUty of reward. The most drastic form of despotism is bureaucracy, and to all appearance the electors are not yet awake to the danger of fastening round their necks for all time the iron collar of bureaucracy by raising the executive above Parliamentary control. I noticed during the discussion of the Town Planning and Housing Bill, which makes the Local Government Board as omnipotent and inaccessible as Jupiter, THE BIT MORE 241 nobody seemed to appreciate the illimitable depths of corruption that are made possible by the existence of a squeezable Minister uncontrolled by Parliament. So long as you have family life there is a strong motive to acquire and to in- crease private property. Everyone with a family wants a bit more than he has got. MANNER Manner is merely tlie handling of life, and since the goodwill of others is often necessary to exist- ence few people allow themselves to be natural, because to be natural is to be rude and to be rude is to fail. Artifice is seen in the bedside manner of the doctor ; in the oiliness of the shop -walker ; in the yearning sanctity of certain of the clergy ; in the modesty of prize-winners, whether as owning a Derby favourite or as the winner of an honourable mention for broad beans at a village show. A prima donna conversing about a rival, the verger of a newly-erected provincial cathedral, a suburban agnostic conscious of the limitations of district orthodoxy, and the sexagenarian Brigadier of Terri- torials, who, measuring forty-seven inches round the waist, cannot go on active service, also exhibit mannerisms dictated by the wish to succeed and survive. A Viceroy of India, who was supposed to model his vivacious behaviour on that of his French friends, was described by a caustic com- petition-wallah as having the manners of an organ- grinder with the morals of a monkey. Lord Lytton's critic sacrificed truth to epigram, but he touched bed-rock by implying that ebullient Gallicisms are not good manners in a Englishman. The Irish peasantry seem to cultivate better DIPLOMATS 243 manners and better potatoes than are found else- where within the perimeter of the Empire. Irish- men are natural, self-respecting, imaginative, and sunny people ; four ingredients of good manners. Accurate, punctual, or peace-loving, the Irish peasant never was and never will be, but he has the manners of a gentleman who is a born fighter, and whose heart in the coming war may not, perhaps, be found on our side. Whether Irish manners maintain their high level may be doubt- ful ; but it is certain that our own manners do not improve, and there is little sign of improvement since a British Minister with no army behind him invited the French nation to mend theirs. I do not observe that Winchester men enjoy any advantage in after-life from nurture under the Wykhamist motto. ' Manners makyth man ' because manners being the right handling of life, experts manoeuvre more successfully than bunglers. For that reason it is always interesting to watch diplomatists in private life. No professional diplo- matist by any effort ever acquires such distinction of manner as naval or military officers. The reason is obvious. Diplomatists mix much with women and with men who look on intrigue, manoeuvre, and finesse as their chief weapons. They are seldom natural. The result is that an aroma of insincerity lingers in the diplomatic atmosphere, a fact of which diplomats are aware. I knew a successful and self-conscious ambassador who laid himself out to acquire a bluff, hearty manner, meant to be typical of John Bull. This gentleman practised before a glass — so it was said — the contortions of anger which he usefully learned to simulate on occasion. r2 244 LIFE'S ENIGMAS It must be admitted that tlie Foreign Office manner has improved of late years. After a spell of insufferable arrogance, reform has penetrated its sacred portals, and the ' F.O.' now reflects to the foreigner and to the public something of the frank com'tesy, sincerity, determination, and business ability which are characteristic of the better classes of Englishmen. The best of our ambassadors, like the late Lord Pauncefote or Sir Gerard Lowther, are truthful before they are polished, and succeed better than those who are polished before they are truthful. In society the remark is often made of the theatrical profession that its members never forget themselves or their art for a moment. Their gestures, the modulation of voice, the pose of the head, are exactly what they con- sider the best models of style and manner ought to be. Diplomatists and actors are rarely in repose because, on or off the stage, they are evei conscious of an audience. Decay in manners is due to the want of compul- sory education in character, the spread of socialism, and the management of the feminist movement by women too much in a hurry to remember that bad manners may lose something moie than votes. The strain of modern life prevents the formation of those habits of stately courtesy which still abound among Asiatics and in countries where the price of insult is death. The brusqueness and irre- verence of modern children may be partly due to a false reading of English history, but it is certainly the consequence of decay of faith and ideals. If there is nothing worth dying for, nothing is worth politeness except for gain. Children are taught KING AETHUK'S TABLE 245 that tlieir parents cannot do too miicli for them, and that those who brought them into the world are their humble servants bound to do good hoping for nothing again. What used to be called ' pretty manners ' are out of date. The modern ideal more nearly approaches that of the managers of American athletes than the school of Sir Charles Grandison. There is no reason why all children should not, for their own sakes, be taught the elements of good manners. Consideration for other people and other nations is truly a difficult lesson to teach when the sights and sounds of great cities outrage every finer sense. The most chivalrous of the Knights of the Eound Table would find it hard to be civil when splashed with mud by a motor-'bus, poisoned by its fumes, and deafened by the agonising noise of ill- adjusted machinery. The herding of the people in overcrowded cities is unfavourable to good manners. Women are no longer courteously treated as of yore. It is no answer to say that they have themselves to thank. As a rule they are not free agents, they are driven by necessity into competition with men, and, having underbid the men who no longer marry them, they are hustled in the trams and morning trains by male competitors in the struggle for life. Insensitiveness within and without is the note of modern England. Solitary strong nations and men are quarrelsome with impunity. Solitude deprives nations and men of comparison with others, and of discovering unfavourable truths about themselves. Rivalry among equals encourages courtesy ; solitude nour- ishes egotism. The bad manners for which philoso- phers are notorious are due to their habit of seclusion and the inordinate sense of importance 246 LIFE'S ENIGMAS they acquire in isolation. Philosophic nations are therefore apt to acquire a bad manner, especially when philosophy is combined with great military strength. But all this only leads up to a matter in which international manners will determine national destiny. Elsewhere I have given reasons why Britain will shortly be attacked by Germany — ^not from lust for power or unholy aggrandisement, but because the completed organisation of the German Empire has brought into the world an educated proletariat increasing at the rate of a milhon soujs a year for whom no provision exists. I have no part with those who denounce Prussia as ' a bandit power,' and see in the crouch which Germany is now making before her spring on us an attitude unworthy of the greatest military nation. But the action of England towards Germany is akin to that of a bird fascinated by a great ophidian ; fluttering its wings, uttering little cries, but drawuig ever nearer the circumference of that circle within which is doom. That is bad manners towards our ancestors when we remember what they have done for us. The ominous feature about our unemployed question is the pretext on which the leaders of the predatory socialists are demanding ' rifles for the people,' ostensibly for use against a foreign power, but really to obtain socialist control of British taxation and administration. The essence of pre- datory socialism is anti-patriotism, and yet the British press seems to think that the Social Demo- cratic Federation has suddenly become a patriotic THE UNEMPLOYED 247 body. Our German friends understand the situa- tion. From personal knowledge, and with a full sense of responsibility, I tell the public that the rifles asked for by the Social Democrats are for civil war — not to repel foreign invasion. Are Mr. Hyndman's followers asking leave to fight under the existing War Office military law ? The first strategical necessity, therefore, is for the British Grovernment to handle the unemployed question intelligently. The question is pressing, and no doles of money will meet it. We only stimulate socialism by subsidising paupers under political pressure. The danger-point of distress may be avoided by taking in hand at once the Dreadnoughts and destroyers required to maintain the two-power standard and by organising the able-bodied unemployed into a military force on intelligent lines. By this I mean a high standard of military efficiency, and proper payment for officers and men with the reform of military law and the expulsion from the War Office of the military schemers who have brought England to the edge of the precipice. Strengthening of the army and navy is not enough ; we must strengthen the nation. To deal with the unemployed question immediate reform of the tariff is necessary, and, though it will not touch distress caused by excess or by idleness, it will at least enable our rulers to pre- vent the respectable poor who are descending to Avernus to reject the Dead Sea fruit of a godless and predatory socialism, and to range themselves in the coming conflict on the side of all that is worthy in our national life. Lastly, the organisa- tion of safety must be our own doing. Neither allies nor colonies will help us to maintain an 248 LIFE'S ENIGMAS empire of whicli we are not worthy. Our engage- ments are world-wide ; our obligations irrevocable. We are trifled witb by our rulers because tbey do not act on wliat tbey know to be the truth- — i.e. that Germans have no power over the policy of their government, and that the necessities of the German Empire require the downfall of England. Good manners require that an English Ministry should be loyal to its salt, and international good manners can only be maintained whUe England is wary, strong and ready. ILLUSIONS To recognise illusions as surely as the pigs of Perigord point to truffles beneath the soil one needs be both maid and man. Indeed, to plumb the depths of illusion one should be sexless, so that passion shall never distort judgment ; and also epicene, to sec both sides of humanity. The heart of a child, a veteran's experience, the quickness of the man of action, and the tenderness of a cloistered nun are but few of the clues to the labyrinth of illusion that encompasses us. We lived our early years steeped in illusion. I met a boy in the forest to-day. He was in another world. He asked me if I saw the air ' thick with arrows.' He was a Red Indian. I heard a child the other day severely corrected for speaking of her doll as having broken its leg. The up-to-date mother, who found it her duty to fell the jungle of illusion which is the loved retreat of childhood, said, ' Not really, my dear ; it was a pretended fracture, my child.' The campaign started on the fairies by the new educationists is as merciless as the ten- year feud between the Hargis and Coclcrill factions in Kentucky, or the Sicilian vendettas of the IMiddle Ages, which make such dehghtful reading. I loathe and abhor this raid on the fairies. Their extermination, the abolition of fables, parables, 250 LIFE'S ENIGMAS allegories, myths, and legends, will darken children's lives. Why drab for purple ? The eviction of Jack the Giant Killer, of Hans Christian Andersen's exquisite stories, and of ^sop's menagerie of eloquent birds and sagacious beasts is spoiUng the fathers and mothers of 1928. The disturbers are people who, having lost their own faith, resolve that no trailing clouds of glory shall illuminate the dawn of child-life. The gulf between children and modern thought is growing wider and deeper. No child compre- hends grown-ups ; and no one past forty years of age can breathe the atmosphere of childhood. All that we know for certain about children is that whatever system of religious or intellectual educa- tion you apply to a child's mind, it receives ideas only by dogma — hard, absolute, clearly defined dogma. If you tell a nice child that fairies exist, and describe to it Titania or the Mad Hatter in ' Alice in Wonderland,' the creations of Shakespeare and Mr. Dodgson are as real to that child as its parents. The raid against normal child-life now in progress will be avenged in the next generation by a counter-invasion of materialism wliich -mil loosen the unseen bands of society and react against the family and the Empire. Among the plethora of societies for preserving lost cats, lost women, and ancient biuldings, or for the restoration of lost health, there is surely room for a Fairy Rescue Society that shall preserve ' the Uttle people ' to England's children. It is, indeed, difficult to recall exactly the long, long thoughts of youth when the night hours brought horrors so terrible that no words could shape them, and also BELLINI'S 'DOGE' 251 sunshiiie and joy so keen that the pleasure of attainment fell short of anticipation. The illusions of children are Hke the benign bacteria by which plants are taught to increase in stature and fertility by means of the nitrogen they extract from the atmosphere. Plants so treated contain infinitesimally small creatiu'es which are gluttons for nitrogen. They eat by day and night, and store up in the root-nodules all that they cannot eat. So does the child store its illusions, carrying through life a reservoir of hope and faith in the love of beautiful things and the hate of ugly ones. When childhood changes into youth the earlier spell of illusions vanishes even as the colours of dawn fade at noon from the clouds lying on the horizon. Youth also has its own illusions and disillusions. It longs for release from control, examinations, and compulsory work, and thinks that release from disciphne is joy. It discovers that rehgious people and good people are not always the same thing ; that truth and merit exist outside the family in which one is born ; and that foreigners, though different, are not necessarily silly, wicked, or inferior. The mind of a lad in the process of shedding its illusions is a laboratory vdth. great experiments in progress. One may see the end of the process in the face of Bellini's 'Doge' in the National Gallery, a picture I would rather see daily than any other work of art in Europe, with the exception of ' The Lances ' at Madrid. The face of the Doge shows that he has not forgotten the illusions of childhood, though he has lost them ; it reveals the story of a life that has left him without illusions, but still neither cynic 252 LIFE'S ENIGMAS nor sensualist. That, after all, is an excellent setting to any life. Of aU the illusions of life the saddest are those of woman, whether as maid, wife, or widow. The maid who loves truly beUeves that the man she marries will remain by her side during hfe. She wakes and her husband wakes to find — illusion. In neither is identity preserved. Each gets a lesson in the law of multiple personaUty. Neither men nor women of fifty are what they seemed at twenty-five. It is harder on the woman than on the man that marriage is a solvent of mystery, for ' Man's love is of man's hfe a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.' Nobody improves on Byron's phrase. So I quote it, hackneyed though it be. Appetite for illusion is never subdued, even when one loses the keen sensations of childhood and discovers that hfe is neither all prison nor wholly paradise. The world ahead is always passing fair. Luck may change. The blue hills in the distant horizon are always more beautiful than the sandy foreground. I heard Lord Wolseley say in the early days of the Eand that goldfields unsurveyed and inaccessible are always counted richer than those that are known. He was right. In no department of hfe, except love, is there more illusion than about money. The masses still beUeve that the possession of much money means happiness ; although nobody knows a happy millionaire. Beleaguered by the forces of importunate avarice, the siege on the millionaire is never raised. And the majority of millionaires cannot enjoy riches or anything else when belief in the honour of man and the virtue of woman has vanished. ' Love A GAETERED DUKE 253 me for myself ' is the secular cry of the self- made rich mau who is not aware that the fact that he is unlovable is the reason why he is rich. The proverb ' happy as a king ' must have been made by a fool ; because, in the nature of things, a king cannot be happy unless he is also a great general who can dethrone other kings and add their paintings, curios, and territory to his own possessions. The most enviable lot in England is probably that of an English duke with a backbone, who has received the Garter, inherited his patrimony unimpaired, is associated with the history of his country, and married to an Enghsh wife. With moderate abiUties such a man may easily reach any place he covets. If his taste isj for seclusion, he can gratify it. Not being a cUmber, like most of us, he is immune from the jealousy that clogs our footsteps. Since none can give him anything he lacks, when such a man declares himself in a sense contrary to current opinion, nobody accuses him of a nefarious action or imputes to him unworthy motives. H^e may be thought a bore not because he is a bore but because he is truthful on public affairs. Other pubhc men must work for at least fifteen years or so before they are exempt from the usual charge of doing everything from the meanest motives and with the worst objects. Probably this view about the position of an ideal duke would be found to be an illusion if one only knew the truth about straw- berry leaves. Still, the elements of happiness at the command of a British duke of the type indi- cated include independence, fresh air, flowers, 254 LIFE'S ENIGMAS sport tliat is sport, and tlie power of translating one's ideas into realities without being hampered by want of money, time, opportunity, skill, or knowledge ; or any other element procurable by mortal man. Flies infest ducal ointment all the same. Much as I desire to preserve the illusions of children, the acceptance of myth as reaUty by men of the governing caste is a sign of disease. There is no nation and no empire that has decayed that was not the victim of mental debihty in its rulers in that special form to which democracies are specially liable. To hold power, tyrants must laiow facts, however unpleasant ; and therefore they maintain intelUgence departments to ransack the world for exact knowledge. When the facts are garnered, a capable tyrant acts on them. We collect facts, but act as though they were illusions. Our Intelligence Department before the Boer war was first-rate. Major Altham's report told us everything we ought to have known. We after- wards confirmed his report with vast expense of life and treasure. Our Government knew the facts, but, for party and political reasons, did not act upon its knowledge. As the brain-centre of a great Empire, the British Government is bound to know the facts about everything afiecting the King's subjects at home and abroad, and to act upon them with decision and judgment. When the British working man received a vote he acquired the same right to keep sober or to get drunk as the rest of us. Interference with the COMPULSORY VIRTUE 255 habits of Englislimen and confiscation of their property at the instance of the mad mullahs of teetotallsm may succeed for a time, but the illusion that a minority can always bend the majority to its will is sheer illusion. WHAT IS LUCK ? The contest between Sir Hiram. Maxim and Lord Rosslyn, which professed to solve the insoluble problem as to whether good luck is merely good play or a mystery both subtle and elusive, revives a question that has puzzled mankind since Adam was evicted from Eden. Science knows nothing about good or evil fortune, and Nature has no favourites. That, however, does not alter the fact that there are few of us who disbelieve in chance being a factor in human affairs. Out- of-door folk are firm supporters of the theory of luck, probably because there is no more specula- tive occupation than . cultivation of the soil. Farmers' and planters' calculations are more often upset by the varying moods of Nature than those of stockbrokers and lawyers. In tropical countries some crops depend on what the weather happens to be on a particular day in the year. Plantation coffee only matures when the blossoming day is favourable. If the sun is too hot, the blossom is burned up ; when heavy and continuous rain drenches the flower, the blossom refuses to ' set,' and the crop is lost. To produce a satisfactory coffee crop the fateful day of bloom should be neither hot, wet, nor windy when the jasmine- SEA AND SOIL 257 like perfume fills the air at dawn and tells the anxious planter what he may hope for. The vicissitudes of coffee planting are repeated in the cultivation of indigo, cinchona, tea, cotton, and spices. Pearl fishing is a pure gamble to the individual fisher, although chances average them- selves when accepted on a large scale. Cultivation of the land, and exploitation of the sea, whether for shrimps, whales, or pearls, so far from being two of the steadiest and most certain methods of securing the reward of virtuous industry, are always hazardous and often disappointing. How many British younger sons have toiled in the tropics for years only to see their little pile dis- appear before the ravages of a new fungus or the advent of an unknown fly ! The gambling element in gardening prevents it fi'om being ranged among the peaceful pursuits. Had Bona- parte devoted his life and career to revolutionising horticulture instead of pulling down European feudalism, many of the hazards and chances that beset forestry or flower-culture might, perhaps, have been eliminated. The best gardeners possess the gambling instinct, but the touch of Beelzebub, that makes the great Admu-al or War Lord, has not yet meddled with flowers or fruit, and man- "kind jogs along in a garden, taking the odds and generally losing. Imperturbable under failure, the good gambler maintains equanimity after success. The fall of man — which, by the way, took place in a garden — was due to Eve's inviolable belief that she was en veine and could afford to take chances when, as a matter of fact, she was out of luck. As much claptrap 258 LIFE'S ENIGMAS is talked about gambling as about temperance. Everybody gambles. The goody-goody do it in one way, other people in another. Where is the Scrunt who does not find it prudent to take the odds from that particular kind of ready-money bookmaker called an insurance company that his house will not be burnt down on one of three hundred and sixty-five days from the date of the bet ? Almost every kind of business involves the study of chances, and the best business man is the best student of chances — i.e. he who knows when to increase his stake and when to cut his losses. So deeply is the question of luck bound up with the conduct of high finance that the House of Eoths- child is understood always to have acted on the principle of having nothing to do with an unlucky man. In the vast field of sport one constantly meets with cases of men and animals who are so notoriously lucky or the reverse that the ancient belief in the good or evil star is accounted for if not established. Dame Fortune has the trick' of arbitrarily dogging the footsteps of some people and shunning the acquaintance of others. I was the schoolboy, who brought off a double event — first by being struck by a glancing stone and then being punished- for throwing it. I know of a special instance in the contrary direction. A man in Australia was travelling towards the coast with a mob of cattle and put up for the night at a solitary inn. He had no more idea of s^idden riches than of sudden death. While eating his ' tucker ' there came to him a penniless individual, who, somehow, did not look like a sundowner. The cattle man. A DERBY SWEEP 259 tendered hospitality to the stranger, and paid for his supper, bed, and breakfast. On parting next morning the stranger thanked his host and said that, although he had no money, he would ask his entertainer to accept a certificate for a small share in an undeveloped mine of which he was the chief owner. Eeceiving the gift with a laugh, my friend thought no more of the episode. The ten shillings he spent on his penniless guest is now represented by a steady annual income of eighteen thousand pounds from the undeveloped mine, I recall another case of a favourite of fortune who never bought a large income for ten shillings, but the way in which luck piusued him was uncanny. Time after time he acquired an interest in non- dividend-paying companies, which turned the corner and became valuable investments imme- diately after Fortunatus acquired an interest therein. This extraordinary person won the Derby sweepstakes at his club four years out of five, though he invested only in one chance at a time. If any portion of his great possessions were tlireatened by disaster he always managed to get out in time. He had, for example, a large interest in a company that was doomed, though nobody suspected the fact. For no apparent reason, when the shares were at their highest price, eight pounds, he sold out his large holding. Shortly afterwards the shares were unsaleable at eightpence. This man was sometimes frightened at his own good luck, and believed that a time must come when the events of his life would show a run on the black. s2 260 LIFE'S ENIGMAS If it were not for our belief in luck, life would lose mucli of its savour. In a highly organised com- munity, where specialisation of work is a necessity, monotony is the common lot. Not so when people ate raw bear or buffalo and drank out of the Mississippi. Wliat is called the frightful preval- ence of gambling is nothing more than insurrection against the rigidly and deadly conditions of monotonous industrialism. It is a mystery why British Governments refuse to recognise the existence of a universal passion for risking sprats in the capture of whales. In foreign countries considerable sums are easily obtained for the support of hospitals and for the relief of the poor by imposing a small toll on gambling tran- sactions. The reason why sanctimonious counsels prevail is not because our rulers hate vice, but because they fear those of their supporters who are not sportsmen. National capital, in the form of telegraph plant and wages, is invested on every racecourse in the kingdom. As you cannot extirpate private vice by coercive laws, the wise statesman takes human nature as it is, and utilises national habits for national purposes. There can be no doubt that street betting is an evil, but if bookmakers were licensed there would be no more difficulty in stopping street betting than in pre- venting unlicensed hawkers from peddling or in suppressing the Argyll Rooms. Luck is in- deed a mystery. There are certain things and names known to be lucky. The wide growth of the habit of carrying a mascot is evidence of the invincible faith or credulity of mankind in the relation between yellow dogs or tiger-claws and a healthy and prosperous career. A celebrated ENGLAND'S LUCK 261 dramatist tells me that no play, with the word ' London ' as part of the title, was ever a failure. My knowledge of the theatre is insufficient to test his statement, but I know of, at least, three instances pointing to the accuracy of my informant. If there is a luckier nation than England I never heard of it. Compare our history and position with those of the two nearest Great Powers. During the long struggle with France the luck was almost invariably on our side. But for the wTeck of a French man-o'-war, Australia might be flying the Tricolour to-day. Failure to support Dupleix from Paris gave to the military genius of Clive and Lawrence the opportunity that clinched success for their project of a British India. The recall of Dupleix by Louis the Fifteenth at a critical moment was a stroke of luck that enabled the British in India to carry out Dupleix's own plan of founding an Empire on the ruins of the Mogul monarchy. Dupleix died in poverty and neglect, but the first conception of the Indian Empire was as truly French as the design and execution of the . Suez Canal — which also became an instrument of British aggrandisement. In Canada, French genius and courage established the foundations of a new nation, but English and Scottish luck and pluck to-day reap the benefit. Tlie revocation of the Edict of Nantes was a signal piece of luck for England, for the blend of Huguenot blood with the stolid Anglo-Saxon race distinctly improved the British strain. To admit that France for two hundred years was persistently 262 LIFE'S ENIGMAS unlucky in her dealings with England is not to underrate the achievements of our own people, but merely to point out the advantages of being born both lucky and wise. If Villeneuve, for instance, had been an admiral of a sterner type, if Napoleon had studied the principles of sea- power or even had he refrained from embarking in two or three wars at one time when he was fight- ing England, British history would have been different. Having had all the best of the luck with France, the good understanding now existing with the cheeriest peoj)le in Europe is likely to be enduring. The French character is still little understood in England. Men or nations cannot be correctly described as unlucky, when they fail in everything they attempt, because they rub everybody the wrong way. In public and private life everyone knows of people with whom nothing succeeds, not because they are the victims of blindly \dndictive Fortune, but because they indulge in conduct or modes of speech that mankind is unanimous in abhorring. After all deductions are made, however, there is a mystery about good luck and ill luck that is at present unfathomed. One man toils all day and catches nothing ; another strolls to the banks of the stream of life and the fish jostle one another for the honour of taking his fly. Whether this is luck we cannot tell, but the elusive charm of good fortune is partly due to the fact that its laws are not understood. What a field for investigation ! WHAT IS FAME ? As I walked through this wilderness of London I lighted on a certain place where portraits of famous men and women are shown. Entering, I sat down to think ; and, thinking, slept. As I slept I dreamed that the worthies on the walls left then- frames and alighted on the floor. Silently they conversed one with another. Charles the Second with Hannah More ; Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon ; Henry the Eighth and Prince Albert ; Sir Cliristopher Mings, Blake, Tom Paine, with Nelson's Hardy ; Carlyle and Froude, with Mrs. Carlyle listening intent. The discarnate discussed a grave matter. Suddenly it came to me in my dream that the notables from the Corridor of Time were asking and answering the question. How came you here ? Those who did not make manifest the reasons why they were there were uneasy. Suddenly the discussion ceased and the ghostly crowd filed silently out of the building in twos and threes. They wended their way to Westminster to compare epitaphs written on the tombs of those buried in the Abbey, and to dis- cover which of the forgotten dead in Westminster were counted worthy of their place in the National Portrait Gallery. When the work of the epitaphs was finished the ghosts haunting the tombs of the 264 LIFE'S ENIGMAS Abbey gibbered awhile on the question, Why am I here ? I saw in my dream that still they did not agree, and after more talk they all joined in a pilgrimage northwards. In my dream I now saw the portals of a fair red building flung wide open and the ghostly crew wandered among waxen murderers, kings, heroes, and nobodies. A few of them had gained a triple crown by appearance in the National Portrait Gallery, in Westminster Abbey, and in the Gallery of Madame Tussaud. I noted then that the portraits of the illustrious dead lack the neck-or-nothing expression one would expect from winners in the great game of life. Fame of a kind is now stamped on a career when the waxworks people consider that the time has arrived for adding a talked-of figure to their collection. The murderers are mild and the kings are painted as though they were waiting for the barber. The rule at the National Portrait Gallery is that nobody's picture be admitted until ten years after death, but even that precaution does not ensure lasting fame in these days when celebrity is made as quickly as an apple-tart. When Byron woke up and found himself famous, newspapers played little part in securing fame for the fame-seeker. Mr. Gladstone's statue in the Strand exhibited only one little \\Teath on the anniversary of his birth ten years after he had passed away. Extolled and attacked for more than half a century, and more written about than any one of his contem- poraries, Mr. Gladstone had not lain in his grave for a year before the legend of his greatness was NELSON AT NINETY 265 revised by the cold liaud of time. As a specimen of intellectual, moral, and physical vigour it is probable that WiUiam Ewart Gladstone was the finest specimen of man who ever lived in the Western hemisphere, but with all his untiring industry, soaring ambitions, and forensic skill, when the blaze of notoriety in which he lived was extinguished by death it was not succeeded by the elementary fire immune from time. Years after Lord Beaconsfield's death his statue was covered with flowers, and for generations the great Hebrew's foresight will be recognised by posterity. The honesty of posterity in refusing to confirm, or in reversing, the judgment of contemporaries is noticeable. In Westminster Abbey many are inside who should be out, and many are out who should be in. Some of the great owe their fame to the manner of their death. Had Nelson, who lies iza St. Paul's, survived Trafalgar, and, like Hardy, who kissed him dying, lived until Queen Victoria came to the throne, he would have lost the affection of the masses. He would have quarrelled with Boards of Admiralty, and by advertising his relations with Lady Hamilton would have alienated a generation that preferred Exeter Hall to Nelson. His restless and eager spirit could never have brooked a long monotony of Merton and of peace. Had Nelson died at eighty-seven instead of forty-seven his fame would never have been what it is. Had Wellington been killed at Waterloo his fame would luive been as great as Nelson's. The field of Waterloo — even the orchard of Hougomout — is still without a monument to Wellington and his soldiers. Wellington in his prime was the target 266 LIFE'S ENIGMAS of the mob. The Common Council of the City of London reflected severely on his conduct of the Peninsular War. The cause of his unpopularity was the reason of his fame. Fame is our dream in the long, long thoughts of youth. Who does not remember the Spanish castles that he built in his teens where the sun was always shining and the idea of failure from malice, exhaustion, or ill-luck was never formed ? Any determined man may win notoriety, but renown is beyond his control and is always barred to the majority. A sculptor may be famous for thirty centuries ; a painter for fifteen ; but the greatest of musical performers are only famous to the people of their own time. Who can tell whether Paganini or Kubelik is the greater ? The means of com- parison are dead. We mask our real feelings, yet the snippets of autobiography pubUshed in 'Who's Who,' by the all-but-famous, blurt out human nature. In almost every case the writer sets forth what he has done in superfluous detail. Does he create a favourable impression upon the public ? Sometimes he succeeds. X., for instance, is a C.B. and a soldier. Under the head of ' Recreations ' he declares himself as ' fond of the usual games, but since being wounded has played but seldom and badly.' There is a world of pathos in this phrase. A lady writer epitomises her career : ' Same old . story, everything back at first, slow climb, more demand now than can be filled.' The taste for advertisement characteristic of our time is illus- trated by the notorieties. A writer who never sat PEPYSES ALL ! 267 in Parliament describes himself as ' statesman and author.' A naturalist and journalist pleads for his title to fame through a work on the ' Influence of the Sparrow ' ; and a prolix lexicographer pro- vides himself with a biography twice as long as that of Lord Roberts and four times that of Rudyard KipHng. Such is fame in the seeking. Notoriety is never the avenue to fame. Wilbur and Orville Wright, General Booth, Samuel Pepys, Dr. Jameson, Izaak Walton, and Lieutenant Digby Jones are famous for reasons which none of them sought deliberately to obtain. The silent pertinacity of the Wrights is rewarded by a success wrenched from nature at the risk of life and reputation — only a little while ago an attempt to fly was counted folly. The brain that con- ceived the idea of the Salvation Army, with the financial ability to administer the affairs of a world-wide society and the heart to act on the belief that religion and compassion are inseparable, gains respect. In spite of early bids for notoriety, Mr. Booth's achievement is the work of genius as distinct as that of Loyola. Samuel Pepys, administrator, observer, and gossip, is famous because he suddenly opened one window for us into the seventeeth century and another into our own hearts. We are all Pepyses ! He revealed himself as the type of the average man as nobody has ever revealed himself before. He explains the enigma of how vanity, sensuality, and greed may co-exist in a fine character. Had Izaak Walton lived to-day he would never have been famous. He was a man who owes canonisation to a love of nature, Walton's fame is due to the anglers at 268 LIFE'S ENIGMAS • heart who do not fish. Probably the extremely high price of first editions of ' The Compleat Angler ' has increased a reputation that rests like that of Gilbert White mainly on love of the open. My conception of an unknown man who deserves fame is satisfied wholly by the late Lieutenant Digby Jones. He was killed at Wagon Hill on January 6, 1900, when, owing to the miscarriage of an order, it was necessary for the English in the trenches to die where they stood. Digby Jones died, riddled with bullets, the bravest of the brave. I never saw him, nor any of his people, and only lately have I met one who knew him. For eight years I have cherished the memory of Digby Jones as a national possession like that of Sir Kichard Grenville. With diffidence I asked a distinguished officer who was at the Siege of Ladysmith whether he knew Digby Jones. His answer was quick and trembling. Himself a witness of the struggle on Wagon Hill, and acquainted with the personality of the gallant lad, he confirmed m glowing language the intuitive concept I had formed that a great hero is unknown to fame. On correcting this book for the press I learn that Digby Jones did a great national work. He stopped an epidemic of fimk — just in time. The names of some of the most famous people who ever lived are as unknown as if they never existed. The inventor of the wheel, for instance, must have conceived the idea of facilitating transport by cutting circular sections from a symmetrical tree trunk. Whether he completed the invention by discarding superfluous material ILLUSTRIOUS AND FORGOTTEN 269 from a solid disc, and thereby hit on the secondary but important invention of wheel-spokes, nobody knows. Who was the genius who invented bed ? We all accept as obvious the simple apparatus that contrives to fulfil two objects in encouraging repose and lifting tired sleepers out of reach of damp and microbes in the soil. But was it so simple ? The first to hit on the idea of raising the recumbent body from the earth deserves more fame than Gambrmus, Cadmus, or Archimedes. The discovery of fish as a food, particularly shell fish, deserves the gratitude of posterity no less than the first advertiser of the uses of tea, coffee, cocoa, quinine, salicylic, rubber, or opium. As we smoke the evening pipe of contemplation we know not to whom the fame belongs of introducing tobacco to man. The desire for tobacco may have been dormant in Mesopotamian cities in their prime, but the capacity of Jonah's contemporaries for enjoying a choice cigar under Assurbanipal or Sennacherib was surely as real as that of the General Staff ui Berlin to-day. In the heroic age fame was easier of attainment than now. No cheap Press then blurred one man's record or mvented that of another. We celebrate the centenaries of nobodies, and testimonials to the undistinguished are so common that mankind is doubtful about any man's fame until he has been dead a long time. Still, the conditions under which a man's memory fades or increases from the day of his funeral are a mystery. WTien "WTiistler was regarded as a mountebank, and Ruskin spoke of him as a coxcomb who flung a pamt-box in the face of the public, I heard Whistler compare his own merits as a painter with those of Velasquez. 270 LIFE'S ENIGMAS Whistler was not ' rotting.' He then detected qualities in himself that were hidden from the critics. Three hmidred years hence it may well be that Whistler's fame may vie with that of the Spaniard. Famous men are many, but the ' mute inglori- ous,' who have earned fame but have not received it, are even more numerous. To win fame under George the Fifth is harder than under George the First. Most of the good stories are told. The best music, books, machines, inventions, and paraphernalia of our enjoyment and use and wonder had yet to be born in the Eighteenth Century. It is calculated that only one person in five thousand is known outside his own circle, and that not ten per cent, of these reach fame of the kind that the world will not let die. With all their advantages, how few of the Kings of England or of France are famous ? Alfred the Great, who gave us the Militia and the Navy, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth are the only English monarchs whose fame is unchallengeable. Queen Victoria was the best of English monarchs, but whether she will rank with the Tudors, or with Edward the Seventh, as stateswoman posterity will determine. The German Kaiser for twenty years coveted so eagerly a place in history that in clasping notoriety he may have angered fame. The border line between fame and notoriety is none too sharply defined, but it does seem as though he alone wins fame who wants some- thing more than fame. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare, Milton, or Dickens had any i FAME'S SECKET 271 inkling tliat wliat they wrote was for all time or tliat their names were imperishable. On the other hand, all the great warriors knew what they were about in winning battles, because the fame of men of action transcends the fame of letters of art. The quest for advertisement sterilises the germs of fame. Reserve is the sign of great things behind. The secret of fame is the sacrifice of self. EUGENICS THE STERILISATION OF THE UNFIT Who are the unfit ? What is sterilisation 1 Reasoned answers to these questions are necessary before action is possible ; otherwise we shall sterilise the fit. Who are the unfit ? In the days when Thuggee flourished, the Government of India came to the conclusion that the Thug community was unfit and, in public interests, must be sterilised. It hanged fi-eely, but hanging did not sterilise Thuggee. Other sires survived. When, however, the Indian Government, benevolently despotic, prevented Thugs from marrying, the particular method of strangling wayfarers by silken cords, which had previously baffled the best adminis- trators India produced, quickly became extinct. Thugs, being efficient assassins, were justly classed as unfit because their worship of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction, was contrary to public interest. In the Indian Government's treatment of Thugs we get a possible clue to the treatment of the unfit in England. Julius Caesar himself, as an epileptic, would have come under the ban of Dr. Rentoul, who defines epilepsy as one of the breeding-beds of mental 274 EUGENICS degeneracy. When you come to think of it, Julius Caesar, far from being an exception, is an example of the type which has done most for humanity. The work of the world is mainly done by the gouty ; to speak by the card, by the irritable, sanguine, nervy, resolute people with great engine-driving power, not by stolid men and women whose physical machinery is perfect. That each of us is among the unfit is known to every soul honest with itself. The question of unfitness, therefore, is one of degree, and the medical tyranny that would extirpate breeding-beds of mental de- generacy at the cost of personal liberty of efficient people, is out of court, not because it is wicked, but because it is stupid. If, on the one hand, unfitness is a question of degree, on the other hand we must admit that some of the unfit are so unfit as to be public enemies ; so dangerous to the State as to justify extinction, segregation, or any treatment that enables the public to defend itself effectively against their attacks. Individual murderers are sterilised by hanging ; forgers are sterilised for a period of years by seclusion ; habitual criminals who return again and again to H.M. prisons are sterilised for long periods : the resumption of toxic fecundity being conditional only on re-entry to the life of the community and the existence of females willing to share their lives. The State, however, which sterilises murderers, and partly sterilises forgers, lavishly siibsidises msanity. Hanwell is a stud farm for deaf mutes, epileptics, lunatics, dipsomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, and sexual perverts. This stud farm for degenerates TAINTED MATEENITY 275 is maintained out of the same fund as the Koyal Navy — namely, the earnings of the efficient. Two women, patients in one of our largest asylums, have suffered from puerperal fever on twelve occasions. Twelve times have they been dis- charged from the asylum as cm'ed. Twelve times has a baby been born in the asylum soaked in the poison of prenatal influence and doomed to hand down to posterity legacies of sorrow and torment to unborn generations. These cases of women producing tainted off- spring at public expense when they themselves are brain tainted is a striking example of our method of conducting the affairs of the nation, but the sequel to the story is usually left to the imagination, since we do not know for certain whether the twelve children of these two women w^ould live or die ; whether they would marry or remain single ; inherit or escape from the maternal taint. I have, however, been so fortunate, through the kindness of one of our greatest alienists, to procure the results of a marriage which took place as far back as 1780 between a wealthy girl in whose family there had been insanity and a healthy man in her own rank of life. This couple had three children, one of whom was an idiot, and one was normal ; neither of them married. The third child was apparently normal, and marrying produced nine children, of whom the first was insane ; the second, thii-d, fourth, and fifth were either insane, suicidal, or melancholiac. Of the subsequent descendants, no fewer than twenty were imbeciles, neurotic, religious maniacs, deaf, or otherwise abnormal. Seven more were doubtful T 2 ^276 EUGENICS and twenty-five were normal. In the history of this family for 125 years we may observe the results of a marriage when only one parent was tainted and only one child received the blessing of the Church at her wedding. When of fifty-two descendants whose history is known twenty- seven were insane, abnormal, or diseased, and twenty-five were normal, we know that the orginal stock was defective. If the results of a sex union where the mental and mind envu-onment, clothing, housing, food, and general conditions for 125 years are favourable lead to disastrous results, it is unreasonable to suppose that the posterity of insane paupers is likely to pro- duce better results. AVhile, therefore, rhetoric about lethal chambers and what is ordinarily understood by medical men as sterilisation are equally im- possible in the present state of public opinion, and for some time to come, is there no way by which these unholy unions can be prevented and the black stream of misery that flows from them stemmed ? Yes ; I know there is. But the public must be prepared for a distinct advance in the required direction, not by tame surrender to the sacerdotal arrogance of the modern medicine man, but by the sane, healthy conviction that English girls need protection against brain taint no less than Indian wayfarers required protection against the Thugs. Travellers in the Mofussil always stood an oi?-chance of escape or of killing theii' man. English girls mating with men whose brains are tainted, or men themselves healthy, who marry into a tainted family — had better have perished by the bow-string of the Thug than HABITUAL PERVERTS 277 consummate such unions. The answer to the question, therefore, as to what is the unfitness that justifies sterilisation is that tlie unfitness shall be of a kind that is as dangerous to the community as miu-der or forgery, and that the sanction for interference shall rest as distinctly on the solid foundation of public policy as our unscientific and unintelligent penal code purports to rest to-day. It is noticeable that all writers on sterilisation of the unfit seem to assume that there is only one method of obtaining the desired end, and that method cannot be discussed. The State of Indiana has approved an Act for the sterihsation of con- firmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists, of which one clause provides that in no case shall the consultation fee of the medical experts consulted be more than three dollars for each expert. The Bird of Freedom may flap her wings over those three dollars, but in this monarchical country liberty is deemed more important than a mode of sterilisation that may be venal and must be empiric. If we are not ripe for a measure so drastic as that, is there no means of obtaining the desired end short of such plans as those favoured in the State of Indiana, or by Dr. Rentoul ? The unfit, dangerous to the community, are unfit not because they suffer from this or that disease, but because in the vo5'age of life, being rudderless, their passions invade the liberty of life of others. Habitual criminals like Charles Peace or Brinkley were rudderless. Habitual drunkards and maniacs like Jane Cakebread, whose affection for Phil May and Mr. Holmes, 278 EUGENICS the police-court missionary, was a survival from a dead self, are rudderless because their pyramidal layers were deficient, and their animal instincts were the prey of alcohol. The discovery of cerebral unfitness is no longer a mystery. Early infantile memory denotes the existence of good brain cortex layers and shows that the steering apparatus in the brain is in good order. Conversely, the absence of infantile, or juvenile, memory is a sure mark of a defective mind-rudder. Among a large number of criminals recently examined it was found that not one of them retained early impressions, and in the case of one young man, an extremely clever thief, he could remember nothing that happened before he was ten years old. The healthy brain layer — that is, the efficient rudder of the brain — ^retains impressions and is capable of concentrating attention and of con- secutive thought ; the unhealthy layer belonging to people we still call ' criminals ' is incapable of concentration, incapable of retaining impression. They are vague in their ideas, quickly change one subject to another. Oscar Wilde, after death, was found to have a tumour on his brain, a fact that pointed to a hospital rather than Reading gaol. The effect of good food and fresh air on children is to nouxish the instructive area — in other words, to provide the future man or woman with a good helm. Instinct of desire is the engine or motor power, and may be even better developed in the unstable mind than in the sane. This being true, a runaway motor-car on the public road, or a steamship going full speed ahead with no helms- man at the wheel, are smaller evils than degenerates STERILISE BY COMFORT 279 with rudderless instincts and unguided brains. Therefore those who have exhibited homicidal, perverted, sexual, or animal propensities dangerous to the public should be segregated for the same reason that a runaway railway engine is side- tracked and upset, or a derelict shij) on an ocean highway sunk by the guns of a man-of-war as a danger to navigation. Since public opinion must be at the back of every great reform, the methods of sterilisation that we can hope to apply here and now must offend no reasonable susceptibilities ; be immediately practicable, and be framed with the single view of adjusting our criminal and educational procedure so as to harmonise with the immutable laws of a Nature that knows no favourites. Verlaine was a degenerate who would have been dealt with harshly by the State of Indiana or by Dr. Eentoul, but the British public will only consent to sterilise the unfit for the one reason of enlightened self-interest. Sterilisation may be accomplished by comfort as well as by the knife. A census of the children born to parents living in a slum where defective pyramidal layers were the rule rather than the exception showed that the unfit were in the proportion of two and a half to one. From the extraordinary figures given to the International Housing Congress by Mr. W. H. Lever, at Port Sunlight, it appears incontestable that crime and disease disappear under favourable conditions as regards wages, employment, housing, food, fresh air, and recrea- tions. Further, it seems beyond dispute that 280 EUGENICS when liouses exceed twelve to the acre disease and death increase, weight and height gTow less, and degeneration sets in. Mr. Lever's experiments at Port Sunlight prove that decent housing accommodation is the most effective prescription for sterilising the unfit known to science. The Port Sunlight and other housing schemes are no longer experiments. They prove, as far as anything can be proved in this hfe, that crime and ill-health perish under sound conditions of life as certainly as they flourish where the pyra- midal layer is starved along with the rest of the body. Glasgow School Board experiments, taken for 74,000 school children, showed that both boys and girls Hving in a one-roomed family are two inches shorter than children in a two-roomed family and that the two-roomed children are shorter than three-roomed children and three-roomed children are shorter than four-roomed children. All this sounds very obvious to those who study the subject ; but does it not point to the need for grappling with the sterilisation problem in the broadest spirit, and in concentrating national attention, charity, and resources on imperial and strategical grounds, to the improvement of the breed by levelling up to create a fit class as well as to exterminate the unfit ? To continue the subsidy of stud farms for poisoning posterity implies that the pyramidal layer of parliament itself is defective, for now that the mechanism of the brain is better understood, the work of the present Asylums Board under the Lunacy Acts is a long stride towards national suicide. DEGENERATE PHILANTHROPY 281 Malthus, who changed his opinion five times, and many good men and true before and since, have sought carefully and Mdth tears the solution of the greatest of the Problems in the Great City. There is no hard-and-fast formula for the neutralisation of the unfit, but the process of wise sterilisation will begin on the day when the British public insists on the break-up of the con- centration breeding-camps of the insane. That step, once taken, logically compels the revision of the penal code in order that rudderless criminals may be prevented from pro-creating their kind, not by surgery, but by segregation. The marriage laws should be reformed by increasing (for the female) the age of consent ; by abolishing the gross injustice inflicted on women in such matters as divorce, separation a mensa et thoro, and woman's property ; and by an Act to enable clergy and registrars to refuse to celebrate marriages where certain scheduled diseases exist in either of the parties, or where in the case of male minors there is evidence of inability to support a wife. Complete revision of our educa- tional system is needed mth the view, not of pumping indigestible knowledge into a brain unnourished by good red blood, but the creation of citizens who shall be fit to reproduce theii- kind by a race fit to do their duty to themselves, their children, their country, and their king. Plain bible teaching sliows that Indian assassins or British degenerates, perverts and inverts, may be sterilised by hanging or starvation. Our chief obstacle to reform is the sickening sentimentality of philanthropists who are themselves degenerates. RACE CULTURE When the two-power standard in Dreadnoughts is secure, when caustic Germans no longer speak of our Territorial troops as ' rabbits to be shot down,' when every woman has a vote, every pauper a pension, and every peasant somebody else's fowl in his pot, we shall still find that a degenerate people has no future but decay. One of the most enviable creatures alive is the English mother who learns that her boy has passed for Osborne. She is enviable because her man-child is worthy, healthy, mannerly, and capable ; a combination seldom made without a good mother. Each mother of an Osborne cadet has realised an ideal. She has translated into boyhood the idea of Eugenics. The Osborne cadet may in the future take to drink or wreck his career in a thousand ways, but he starts as one of the pick of the English basket ; sound in body and mind. Race-improvers seek to give the nation train- ing, cultiire, and environment of the kind naval cadets find at Osborne. Dreadnoughts are laid down in vain unless we bestow as much care on improving our children's stamina as men give to the speed of obsolescent horses or formerly gave to the eyesight of obsolete falcons. I admit that JOWETT ON KACE CULTUEE 283 the word ' Eugenics ' is repellent, but the tiling is essential to our existence. To produce sound minds in sound bodies by impressing on all classes the dignity, the privileges, and the responsibilities of British parenthood is the race-improver's aim. Naturally we are misrepresented. Thank good- ness for that, for misrepresentation shows that someone is taking notice. Mr. Chesterton, to whom paradox is as irresistible as alcohol to a drunkard, says that the 'race-improver's' desire is that people shall be forcibly married to each other by the police. A distorted atmosphere is essential to the Chestertonian method, and it is not un- reasonable, therefore, that Eugenics should be misrepresented by a sufferer from paradoxitis. It is not a fact that Scotland Yard will be in- voked to effect the union of the fit, and it is also an error to believe that the plans and speci- fications for County Council lethal-chambers have yet been prepared. A portion of the inhabitants of these islands is suffering from dry-rot. The thirteen millions on the verge of want include among them many people who are happy — at all events, who are sometimes happy. Shortness of food is not the greatest evil from whic^h the people suffer. Dr. Jowett, who trained the pick of the governing caste, wrote in 1875 : ' We know how human nature may be degraded ; we do not know how by artificial means any improvement in the breed can be effected.' The discovery of the means by which the race can be graded up is the problem to which Francis Galton and his disciples address themselves. Mr. Montague 284 EUGENICS Crackantliorpe well says that ' tliere can be no founder of any science — tliere can only be workers at it. Some of these workers may become more prominent than the rest, but each man is the link in a chain which stretches far back.' Galton owes to Darwin (' The Origin of Species ' was published in 1859) what Darwin owes to Malthus for what Malthus wrote in 1798. Galton, Darwin, and Malthus owe a debt to Plato, but Plato was not the first race-improver. The Pentateuch through and through breathes the principles of race preservation and improvement. The exist- ence of the Jewish race is a standing advertisement of the truth of the science that Francis Galton has revived. Plato was not sanguine about the realisation of his own ideas, but if he had known Galton he would not have relegated them to the Greek Kalends by saying that ' Only when philosophers are kings, or kings philosophers, will cities have rest from their evils.' Race-improvement to-day is not a question of philosophy, but existence. The law under which a mob of cattle in Texas or Dakota deteriorates when neglected applies to men as to kine. The popular saying that ' like begets like,' like most popular sayings, is untrue in fact. Like does not always beget like. As I write I scent the perfume from a clump of white hyacinths of which one is a saffron coloured sport. Superior parents often produce undesirable children, and inferior parents sometimes, but rarely, produce a phenomenon of beauty or of brains. Heredity, however, is subject to a law which, not in every case, but on the average, produces certain results from the same causes with CERTIFIED INEBRIATES 285 practical certainty. All race questions touch the law of average. Everyone old enough to remember France and Germany before 1870 recognises the palpable improvement in the vigour and appear- ance of both races. This improvement in the average is not the result of chance, but proceeds from the steady cultivation of body and mind under a system of universal national service. It is artificially produced. If the first law of life is self-preservation, England must choose between State suicide and race- improvement. If the latter alternative be accepted, then the causes of deterioration must be dealt with as firmly as defects in a dam behind which is accumulated the rainfall of a county. The manufacture of criminals, idiots, and the con- genitally diseased, owing to alcoholised parentage, is now understood with some approach to exacti- tude. Public opinion is not ripe for compulsion, but the marriage of dipsomaniacs could be dis- couraged by the State in more ways than one without resort to the police. Savonarola, thun- dering from the pulpit of the Duomo at the vices of the Florentines, was not more eloquent than the cold facts which have been drawn by Dr. Sullivan and Dr. Tredgold from their investiga- tions into the relations between alcoholism, insanity, and disease. Money now wasted on Inebriate Homes will be diverted to a better use when our rulers have mastered the alphabet of race-improvement. The question whether a man or a woman is inebriate should be settled by a competent tribunal, and 286 EUGENICS when thus settled he or she should be disqualified from marriage either by State or Church. I have long held that the spread of sound ideas on the subject of race-improvement will either come through women or not at all. Many men who are deaf to the cry of ' Votes for Women ' are sensitive to any appeal for justice to women. The condition of ill-health in which men discharged from the fleet and army are now permitted to re-enter civil life will be unintelligible to posterity. It is an infamy inflicted on women, on posterity, and on the Empire, The introduction of a river of prussic acid into the waters of Windermere would be a sane proceeding compared with the condition of things brought to light by the annual reports of the Health Officers of our two fightmg services. Looking round at the creators of public opinion, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the extremists among them belong to the class of the unfit. It is no longer sufficient to ' replenish the earth.' We must replenish England with the right people. A rising birth-rate of knock-kneed forgers and feebletons and female sneak-thieves, or shop-lifters is a biological disaster, although many clever people see nothmg but hope and joy in a risuig birth-rate. Every child born into the world who never can be ' captain of his soul ' is a misery to himself and a dead weight upon England. Eugenics is religion. The mysterious power we term life can never be explained to everyone in terms or in creeds. The irresistible inference forced upon us is that beyond and above there is a Source of energy and guidance. PHYSIQUE AND BIRTHRATES 287 A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian. And caves where cavemen dwell, Then a sense of law and beauty. And a face turned from the clod, Some call it evolution, And others call it God. The Poor Law Commissioners have published their report. The 1,236 foHo pages of this im- portant document are packed with matter of the gravest interest. The report is a brief in the case for race-imjjrovement. Since 1876 the birth-rate has declined tvv^enty-five per cent., and since there has been little falling-olf in the labouring classes, the inference is justified that the fall in the upper classes is not less than thirty-five per cent. It by no means follows that the proletariat increases mainly from the unfittest specimens, but government does tend to become mcreasingly the tool of urban degeneracy. Modern Socialism is a device for gettmg bread by the ballot-box instead of by the sweat of the brow. ' Robbing hen- roosts ' is a process that cannot be indefinitely prolonged, and when the people who shoulder the burdens of the community are tired of the role of general provider, passive and active resistance or emigration may leave the incapables like jelly-fish, stranded on a sandbank. The highest birth-rates in England are found where the physique of the people is exceptionally poor. The most recent recruiting returns show that the stamma of the people is dangerously below that of Continental nations. In 1907, the latest year of which I have the returns, 8,806 London recruits were rejected for physical reasons out of 20,975 candidates for 288 EUGENICS enlistment. In Manchester, 1821 men were unsuitable out of 2,523. When the proportion of unfit is two or three out of every five who desire to serve, it is time for the nation to turn round and think seriously of her destiny. If men are not fit to serve in the ranks where good food, sanitary environment, and wholesome work and recreation are provided for body and mind, what are they fit for ? Unskilled labour requires no great intellectual development, but, lacking a strong physique, there is nothing but the rates, charity, taxes, or crime to subsist on. This country has billeted on it a tyrannical troop of deteriorated humanity, which is not troubled by a recruiting problem. Great Britain is already partly occupied by the army of the unfit. Motherhood is natural to girls, and the false delicacy imposed on women by men for selfish reasons must give way to more enligh- tened methods of training. If the mother is taught the elements of successful motherhood, when the baby is brought into the world under sounder conditions, the minds and bodies of boys and girls must be exercised by the discipline of games. Membership of football or cricket clubs teaches lads how to obey intelligently, but nothing short of national service will teach the English how to meet their obligations, or to maintain their fitness. All the boys of England might be trained for a year at the cost of supporting the unemployed for a week. We are like the people before the Flood who laughed at the warnings they received from Noah. We marry and are given in marriage, we TINNED FOOD 289 buy, we sell, we plant, we build, but the floods gather round us. The first step in national defence is to breed, rear, and train a race of self-respecting men and women, who will regulate their own lives and make the best of them. Cigarette Acts of Parliament and State encouragement of secret drinking by the persecution of publicans will not then be regarded as wisdom. Since the decay of agriculture compelled the masses to subsist on tinned, frozen, and imported food, the majority of the occupations by which a home is supported are no longer healthy. To deal practically with the clogging machinery of national life, a race- improving company of men and women have set themselves the task of ascertaining the facts and prescribing the remedies. The life or death of the nation hangs on the acceptance or neglect of race-improving principles. CONCERNING HEALTH Disease, like disseut or discredit, is a negative thing. All negative things are evils — necessary, perhaps, to prevent greater ones — but still evils. Ease, assent, and credit are positive things. No- body really knows the origin of the word ' ease,' though it is claimed by some pushful etymologists as Celtic. Though we cannot define ' ease,' we know it even when we get it. Bodily disease is attri- buted to nearly a score of reasons. Disease afflicts organised communities more cruelly than bar- barians ; but barbarians, in turn, are ravaged by epidemics to which we are tolerably immune. The causes of disease are attributed to race, heredity, sex, age, inter-marriage, temperament, climate, urban life, defective hygiene, occupation, air, previous disease, mental and moral conditions, external physical conditions, cold and chill, poisons, diet, epidemics, contagion, malaria, parasites, and growths. Some of us would add overwork, which strains and impairs efficiency ; and insufficient work, which clogs, congests, or rusts ' Brother Body,' as St. Francis of Assisi calls it. Health is like money. While you have it you don't think about it. As the chief luxury of ample means is the absence of anxiety, so the luxury of health consists in not worrying about pain. There SICKNESS IN WAE 291 is uo pleasure like sudden respite from paiu. When unwell you are always conscious of a tyrant's grip unless your work compels you to ignore the demon. Yet some of the best work in the world is done by the sick. In civilised communities few people are really well in the sense that savages with sound organs, or a white man happily hunting on veld, prairie, bush, or plain, is healthy. The Canadian settlers in Saskatchewan and the new North-West are developing a new type of super-health, inasmuch as they have become even harder and more capable of strenuous effort for long periods than the American farmers who swarm over the forty- ninth parallel. The effect on health of what is called civilisation is shown by the number of deaths from disease that occur in war. During the American struggle between the North and the South the deaths from disease in the ranks were 199,720 officers and men, and an equal, if not greater, number died after leaving the field and base hospitals than died there- in. In the Spanish-American War 293 soldiers died in battle and 3,681 died of disease. Of the entire force ninety per cent., or 158,000 men, were ad- mitted to hospital. Every one of these men was examined by surgeons and admitted to the army because of his physical fitness. General Botha in one of his visits to England told me that there were only three cases of fever in the Boer ranks during the six months previous to the end of the war, a time when over 20,000 of our men were down with typhoid in the Orange Free State alone. u 2 292 EUGENICS This torrent of disease was not due to inherent physical imfitness of American or British volun- tary troops, but to the worthlessness of the military systems of the British and American governments, and to the failure of electors to attend to Lord Beaconsfield's maxim — Sanitas, sanitas, omnia sanitas. Lord Wolseley has served his country well, but the ' scientific ' School of War associated with his name was as blind to the overwhelming strategic importance of the health factor in war as are the sightless fish of the Kentucky caves to the Statue of Liberty. Whether a soldier dies — as the epitaph in Win- chester Close reminds us — ' By musket or by pot,' or from bacterial poison, he is equally lost to the fighting line. Military and civil hygiene is a strategical factor of momentous national concern. Hitherto we have trained our fighting men with elaborate care and lavish expenditure of time and money to do certam things with guns, bayonets, rifles, lances, and sabres, but in time of national crisis we have handed them over to microbes and bacilli regarding their consequent slaughter as the act of God. We legislate against pestilence ; not against ill-health. In the Japanese War with Russia our allies established a new record : four men died from bullets to one from disease. In the Spanish- American War fourteen men died from preventable disease to one killed on the field of battle. Within a few years of her awakenmg from sleep wise old Asia teaches Europe the true relation of health to war, and though we may think ' Here endeth the M. LE COCQ 293 first lesson,' it is possible that we shall be startled by what the second lesson will be. In civil life the system of registering the results of avoidable disease suggests that we have almost as much to learn in the statesmanlike handling of national health as in dealing with the health of soldiers and seamen. Dr. H. D. Rolleston in an oration deUvered before the Medical Society of London on the ' Classifica- tion and Nomenclature of Diseases ' opens to the laj^man an avenue of thought on the relations of physicians and surgeons which suggests a restate- ment of the relations between patients and doctors. We are passing through a phase of medical evolu- tion which will remove existing landmarks and abolish accepted conventions. The mystery of the medicine man constitutes the greater portion of his healing power, just as the nauseousness of drugs is the criterion of their value to coloured men and illiterate whites. In the pursuit of truth the wisest physicians are losing the habit of prescribing medicines ' to be taken three times a day.' By the jettison of the pharmacopoeia the outlook for patients is improving. But what of the past ? The great physician is the great personality. He wields the power of suggestion. Though com- paratively unexplored territory, auto-suggestion in proper hands may enjoy a great, even what now seems a miraculous, future. Many years ago I was down with a tropical disease that left me with a clear brain and without fever, but on the brink of the precipice. I was told I was probably going to die, but I didn't want to die. The doctor pro- bablv was right but for the fact that before the ill- ness I had begun to read Gaboriau's ' Monsieur Lecoq,' which had recently been sent out from 294 EUGENICS home. Propped up in bed, I continued to read it, and found it so fascinatingly interesting that in the intervals of paroxysm I thought as much of the detective as of the disease. A French novel stood between eternity and me. The auto-suggestion in Mrs. Chick's complaint that Mrs. Dombey would not ' make an effort ' anti- cipated by half a century what is now the common- place of healing. The era of auto-suggestion is already reflected in the best fiction. The people who ' have no time to be ill ' are the salt of the earth. Their will-power asserts itself over the negative forces of evil striving towards physical and mental decay. Deportment in severe illness, as in shipwreck, is the best guide to character. Some patients, profoundly impressed with the importance of their condition, swell with pride in reflecting on the excruciating agonies they endure, at the hopeless nature of their disease, and, above all, at the rarity of their complaint. Life is so monotonous, and carries with it so little distinction to the masses of mankind, that anything making them different from the crowd to which they belong is of the nature of promotion. ' Swopping symp- toms ' is an agreeable habit of invalids. At Madeira or the Engadine, lungs ; at Neuheim, heart ; at Gastein, gout, tinctured with diplomacy ; at Carlsbad, liver ; and at Vernet-les-Bains, rheumatism, flavoured with reflections on the in- feriority of Biarritz. The majority of ailing folk cannot reasonably look for cure. All ' cure ' is but postponed death ; and most cures — other than surgical — are rather alleviation than repair. A working-man thrown out of employment with HOLIDAYS FOR BRAINS 295 five children dependent on him, or an aUing laundress suffering from incipient disease of the heart, might be benefited by a voyage round the world. Efficacious prescriptions require the removal of causes inaccessible to physicians. A fine charity and a rare one is giving holidays to over-worked artists, writers, doctors, lawyers, and other overstrained intellectuals. I know at least a dozen men and women, reputed as well-to- do, who would not only be the better for the holi- day they dare not take, but would ensure their capital of health, were it only possible to get away from their masterful obligations. To induce such people to take a holiday is an art. They will not accept money unless tact and wisdom is used in approaching them. There are Homes of Rest for Horses, Holidays for Factory Girls, Fresh Air Funds for Children, and Seaside Camps for Boys, and kindly provision for weaklings who are visibly, palpably, and notoriously in need of change and rest. But as the struggle for life is harder the fatigue of the efficient increases under increasing burden and their facilities for true recreation diminish. Their sorrows quicken the beating of no pulse ; no eye fills with tears because brain workers with fair incomes, every penny of which is pledged, work when they need rest. God bless all the kind hearts and generous hands devoted to the happiness of the poor, aged, feeble, or immature members of the community ! God bless the givers of so\ind teeth to Londoners ! But to me a more attractive and pathetic figure than any inefficient is the efficient blood horse struggling ^vith work that is too exactins without proper 296 EUGENICS interludes of rest and change. Were any millionaire dubious of the effect of inoculating our cities and towns with free libraries, I would suggest the ap- pointment of trustworthy confidential agents, easily found among the doctors and clergy of various denominations, who might be empowered to provide health for efficient brain workers in the form of a holiday with ease of mind, the only way in which real holiday can be taken. The ill-health of London is becoming an intract- able problem. London is unique. It is the only great city in the world that is soulless. London is without self-consciousness, enthusiasm, or pride. London is ignorant that it is London. Some Londoners rejoice in the dignity and grandem' of the metropolis, but there is no esprit de corps in London. No Londoner ever speaks of his city as the citizens of great cities from Athens to Man- chester have spoken of theirs. No Londoner speaks of ' our hospital.' London disease is looked after by voluntary workers ; men who toil year in year out without any possible reward coming to them. The task of collecting money to deal with London disease is an uphill job to all the chairmen of London hospitals, and especially to the Chairman of the London Hospital. If the working-classes contribute little to the support of the hospitals there is no cause for wonder. The tribute of the wealthy in the new school of finance is exacted as a right, not received as a favour. So little is the subject of national health under- stood that the struggle between the Anti- Vivisectionists and the supporters of research is not uncommonly regarded as a wrangle between VAGARIES OF ILLNESS 297 humane people and cruel ones. There is no doubt that a bad-hearted surgeon, like an evi]-li\dng clergyman, is worse than the average man ; but the investigations into the causes of disease which have resulted in the emancipation of medical science from mediaeval charlatanry have been conducted by high-minded, humane, and unselfish men. Needless repetition of experiments that have already established facts beyond dispute are indefensible, but the field of research is scarcely touched, and national health demands that a fi-ee hand under proper conditions of pubUcity shall be given to explorers of anatomy as freely as to ex- plorers of the Poles. A sick room is a prison, but the word ' prison ' means nothing except to those who have known what it is to be a prisoner. When I was in prison for refusing to withdraw a statement about a financial swindler which was afterwards proved to be true, the sudden exchange of my name for a number, and the sudden withdrawal of deference and convention struck me more than the change of diet, compulsory solitude, or the sedentary and agonising idleness. In serious ill- ness, when one is nigh unto death, there is a haze and blunting of faculty. Voices are heard as if they were a long way off. A film forms on the eyes so that objects appear iridescent to the sight of the dying. Exhaustion is complete. The mind is distorted. Our nearest and dearest sometimes become antipathetic — even revolting — A son loathes his mother ; a fiancee, her lover. Bed is prison ; the nurses — warders to whom a neutral attitude is impossible. Violent dislike of the day 298 EUGENICS nurse may be accomj^anied by adoring affection for the night nurse whose patience and gentleness during the sleepless hours leave indelible impres- sions, though she may be less competent than the day nurse. No great illness ever left a man as it found him. I have often noticed a change in the personality of one who has returned to work after a long interview with the Man with the Scythe. The worst period of a great illness is convalescence, when the novelty and the glamour of danger have worn away. Other people have fallen ill. New interests obliterate or divide the attention one has lately received. It is easier to bear the pains of great disease than to endure the horrors of slow convalescence. One learns that nobody is indispensable ; that when one is gone for good the world will go on exactly as before. The patient hears the unfeeling warble of the elemental blackbird and the liquid notes of the thrush who spends the day in assassinating worms on the lawn. The mysterious and momen- tary orchestra of birds that sing for three minutes at early dawn and then cease until the sun is nearly up is the chief landmark of the day of the rural patient. And so the world goes round. Illness is not wholly an evil. It delivers a message. FOR PUBLIC SAFETY During the last twenty years the great cities have changed ; new problems have come into existence ; old ones have been solved, half solved, or proved insoluble. No machinery exists for ascertaining how the London of to-day conjtrasts with metropolitan affairs twenty years ago. A one-man inquiry into some of the more salient facts may do little ; it may do something. Reams of statistics justify either effervescent optimism or the forebodings of Cassandra. For that reason I shall give no statistics, for, by intelligent handling, figures may be made to mean anything. The only way to write about London problems is to write as one would write, after he had shed political racial, and sectarian bias. Then, again, figures tell us nothing about the things we most of all want to know. No year-book, almanac. Blue-book, or annual report gives the slightest inkling as to how many of the 4,721,217 inhabitants of London are happy, prosperous, and hopeful, and how many are miserable, hopeless, and a source of weakness to the community. No statistics throw light on the character of the marriages that took place in London last year ; how many of them were justified by the health, means, energies, and em- ployment of the contracting parties ; or how mnnv 800 EUGENICS were destined to cause misery and loss to posterity. No statistics show how far the expenditure of nearly eight million pounds on charity in one year eased the lives of the living or subsidised the manufacture of undesirables. Least of all do we know how many of the babies born in London last year poBsessed brain structure fit to give the child a reasonable chance of success in life. The list of things that count, on which figures throw no light, might be multiplied in- definitely. Some London problems — those of the legal poor, for instance — are the problems of thirty-three cities ; others, like street cleaning, are those of twenty-eight, if you include West Ham ; others, like vivisection, are those of four ; others, like entertainment of illustrious foreigners, are those of two. There are no figures and no apparatus for accurately demonstrating the con- dition of contemporary London. But we know that the penumbra of problems hanging round the marriage union is much what it was twenty years ago. The Mansion House Committee, on which I sat in 1885, reported that it was very important to investigate the question of early marriages. In the intervening period of twenty-five years not only has no inquiry or action taken place, but the production of children in penniless wedlock or other'udse is now generally regarded like the fall of the thermometer or the precession of the equinoxes — things outside man's control. Phenomenal gi'owth in the political power of prolific and destitute invalids is the result. Invalids who are not content with a Poor Law that keeps everybody from starvation, however undeserving, have PLATO AND CHILDEEN 301 extracted pensions to which they do not contribute — the endowment of restricted output. There is no reason why the standard of London's health and efficiency should be lower than that of the old Greek or modern Japanese and Hebrew ideals. The Greek ideal, as set forth in the teaching of Plato and Aristotle, and the practice of the ancient Greeks was that the gods were" pleased with the cultivation both of body and mind. Greek teaching on the subject of physical culture was essentially religious in its character. The parents accordingly devoted much time and labour to the development of the beauties and faculties of their children. The teaching of the Olypiam games had as wonderful an effect upon the soul as upon the physique of the nation. The perishable garland of wild olive cut with a golden sickle from the sacred tree was the most coveted prize of ancient or modern times. The Greek teaching produced not only great athletes and a high standard of physical and mental efficiency, but universal belief in parental respon- sibility. Women of the highest rank nursed their children — a practice which has been nearly abandoned by Englishwomen of the comfortable classes. The teachings of Aristotle and Plato on the treatment of children would have qualified them as members of a modern town council for the minuteness and care bestowed on the subject of the children's education. But we have for- gotten them and their teachings. Plato was, I believe, the first to lay down that none but strong, healthy parents produced strong, healthy children. 302 EUGENICS It is a curious fact that for at least four liundred years the history of the medical science of ancient Greece languished because the standard of public health was too high to support a large community of professional healers. The health and beauty of Greek life arose mainly from the fact that Athenians were good parents. The training of body and mind is with the Japanese very much what it was witli the ancient Greeks. The patriotism which requires no stimulus from Navy Leagues or Army Leagues and the cheerful outlook on life which removes the necessity for an Athenian or Japanese Society for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Children are facts which should make Londoners think. Japan is a nation which lives on the principles of Plato and Aristotle. The natives live much in the open air, they are great water-drinkers, and they subsist mainly on simple fare. How far Japan will survive entry into the dangerous arena of luxurious civilisation is a matter of conjecture. Anyone may see in the Jews' Free School in Leeds, in any Ghetto in Eastern Europe, or in the agricultural colonies of the Jews at Kherson, the benign effect of freeing women from the struggle for livelihood during the critical period of their lives. Every English mother is worth about £275 to the nation. Nature strains every effort to endow her new-born infant with health and efficiency of function, but the manual labour of expectant mothers defeats Nature, and if con- tinued on the present scale means the collapse of society. Public interest grows in children of INFANTICIDE 303 school age, but the development of infants before birth, and for three years after, is an Imperial question of greater importance than the primary or secondary educational code. Neglect of woman- hood means national degeneration, saps parental responsibility, and shatters family hfe. Within the last few years in certain West-End flats, occupied by married men-servants living out, a custom has arisen of inserting in the agreement of tenancy a condition that a baby's arrival termi- nates the agreement and means eviction. This is (in effect) a subsidy for infanticide, and is therefore contrary to public policy. Another feature in the urban problem is the unhealthy growth of woman's labour ; it is the reversal of the law of nature which makes the woman bear the family and the man support it. Time was when men deliberated over the wisdom of marriage. To-day it is too often the young woman who dons her considering cap to meditate over the question as to whether she can afford to treat herself to the luxury of a mate and a child — with or without the sanction of Church or State, Notwithstanding recent in- vestigations into child life in Glasgow, Liverpool, London, and elsewhere, we know but little of children. No records are at present available showing the height, weight, health, sight, hearing, articulation, and memory of children ; although in the last twenty years there have been great improvements in physical training, the recreation centres, and organisation for dealing with disease. Despite these benefits there is increased fecundity of insane women, misuse of asylums by prema- tui'e liberation, and increase in the marriages 304 EUGENICS of scrofulous, consumptive, and syphilitic humanity. Every woman, guardian, and matron will bear me out when I say that the number of feeble- minded girls who enter the workhouse time after time with illegitimate children is on the increase ; there is no power to detain them, although they are utterly unfit to take care of themselves and their wretched children, handicapped with disease of body and mind from their birth. Although I have no belief in the power of Parliament to abolish the evils of sweating, drink, gambling, or unemployment, there is solid ground .for requiring legislation to defend feeble-minded girls and women from being thus victimised. The result of decay of parental responsibility, and the neglect of women, is the creation of a completely new type — the London hospital child. To paraphrase a well-known passage from Lecky's ' History of European Morals,' there exists in London a figiu'e which is certainly the most mournful, though it should be the most joyful, upon which the eye of Londoners can dwell. While science and art, civilisation, progress, luxury, and amusements are ever increasing, the cots of children's hospitals are filled with the incurable victims of a philan- thropy that is thoughtless and unkind. Cruel work is done in the garb of the cap and gown of a Sister of Mercy. There is no panacea to remedy these things. Eoyal Commissions are not wanted, even charity is well-nigh impotent except in staving ofi the demands of Socialism by seeing that no child goes hungry to school. If the ancient Greek, modern Hebrew, and Japanese ideal of EFFICIENCY UNBOUGHT 305 parental responsibility for the health of the off- spring is desirable, it follows logically, jQrst, that no man should be invested with legal right to profit by the degeneration or death of women or children ; secondly, that habitual criminals, tramps, professional beggars, charity cadgers, and the congenitally diseased should be segregated ; thirdly, that the State sliould assume some respon- sibility with regard to the physical and mental fitness of persons contracting marriages. English horses and cattle are the best in the world, but the problem of grading up the in- habitants of the great cities is widely different fi-om that of producing pedigree stock. We stand in need of more sternness, not of more compassion. It is useless succouring the suffering child unless the murderous parent is chastised as a warning to deter others from cruelty. Hysterical compassion for the worthless is a distinctive note in the scheme of government to-day, while at the same time the dealings of State departments with individuals is characterised by bad faith and harshness pro- ductive of inevitable misery in the future. Con- sider the problem of the old soldiers and the young ones who leave the Army broken in our service. Public responsibility for its fighting men is absolute. The main problems of great cities are no more soluble by Parliament or by millionaires than victory in a great war can be secured by legislation and by gold. National efficiency is the sum of three factors— spiritual, intellectual, and material. The latter absorbs so much of our national attention 306 EUGENICS as to obscure the need for discipline, restraint, and personal sacrifice, without which no family- can flourish and no nation endure. Nature has no favourites, not even London or Londoners. Disobey the inexorable laws of Nature, and London's overdraft on Nature's bank may run for a space but, when payment matures, principal and interest will be exacted to the uttermost farthing. SOCIALISM THE SILENT FORCES The greater forces are the silent ones. One hears the Avind screaming through the rigging and the thunder of the seas breaking inboard, but no one hears the moon hauUng the Atlantic into the North Sea. The roaring of a forest fire is impres- sive, but flesh is too gross to hear the rising of the sap in the trees of four continents. We are deafened by the continual cry for alms, backsheesh, subscriptions, and doles, but the force of compassion that annually and voluntarily transfers a sum of fifty milhons sterUng from one English class to another is a force beyond our ken. Family affection, which leads men to resist the suggestions of desire, hitherto dominated the British ; its operation is silent. We see its effect in ten milUon homes imponderable and still. The silence of the greater forces is more impressive than the din of Socialism. I shall never believe that the field of economics is best suited for our attack on Socialism. Figures and facts relating to commodities can be subjected to treatment by clever cooks on either side. X 2 308 SOCIALISM When tlie point of view differs, the same set of figures means different things to different sets of people. This is not the case in the biological field. Socialists, no less than individualists, are subject to the universal law of antagonism — the silent force that makes for progress, health, peace and comfort. Socialism may teach and believe the folly that material comfort may come to all under the reign of an omnipotent and atheistic bureaucracy adminstering the affairs of State. The law of life is fair competition. Competi- tion means to seek with, to quest. Plant, animal, and man are alike subject to the laws of an eternal prize-ring. There is also a struggle between group and group. Individuals form packs, whether barristers in the Temple, doctors in Harley Street, Germans in Central Europe, or wolves in Alaska ; not because barristers, doctors, Germans, or wolves love their kind, but because each kind is animated by a common sense of peril, and, desiring to escape it, organise for defence. Associations of individuals for mutual defence, whether as nations, trade unions, jungle trees, parasitic creepers, or carnivora, are subject to the condition that each individual must be vigorous. If the association be a human one each member must be alert, efficient, and intelligent. If he does not pull his own weight in the boat he is either put overboard to drown or is supported by those who contribute more than their proper share of work to escape the common peril. A loving, emotional, ignorant Parliament will do more harm in one generation than a succession of intelh- gent despots in a century. The deadliest influence in public affairs is the benevolence of an unintelligent I THE PEOPLE'S PEOGKESS 309 Parliament. As true education spreads and a larger number of the electors are able to perceive tbe reality of things, Socialism ■v\ill inevitably dwindle. Education tells against parasites and intellectual half-castes. No state or municipality ever produced wealth. They spend it like lords, but the production of wealth is the result of family affection working on the soul of the bread-winner to earn and to store gear and stuff for those he loves better than himself. Upon the principles laid down in the Ten Commandments all civilised society rests, not because the Decalogue is the expression of an arbitrary and mysterious Will, but because the Ten Commandments set forth the conditions of efficiency and equity in the working of the struggle for hfe between civilised men. If depriving man of that which belongs to him is against the Decalogue, the theft is also against Nature, whether the robber be footpad, swindler, or politi- cian. Few Socialists realise how Uttle the capture and transfer of the income of the rich would benefit the genuine labour class. Although per- sonally I prefer to develop the main attack on Socialism from the biological and eugenic entrench- ments, Mr. Frank Ireson's book, 'The People's Progress,' is the mobilisation, by a skilled intelligence officer in the army, of economics against ' facts ' put forward by Socialists. Having read the book three times, I am emboldened to express the opinion that since Mr. Mallock's work nothing more illuminating has appeared on the economic side. British society to-day consists of four groups of people — A., those with incomes of 310 SOCIALISM £1,000 a year aud upwards ; B., the people with, incomes between £250 and £1,000 ; C, the group with an average income of about £3 per week per family ; and D., the unskilled labourer in casual employment who is sometimes incapable, often unfortunate, and frequently destitute of any quality, faculty, or accomplishment that the community wants to buy. The more intelligent Socialists now commit themselves to the admission that there should be some graduation of income according to abiUty. Even the most earnest of the effer- vescent souls who advocate Socialism cannot claim to divide more wealth than exists, to divide wealth that is non-transferable, or to share in wealth that remains in existence only so long as the present order of society is maintained. Commercial confidence is a sensitive plant ; one blast of cold wind shrivels the pinnate leaves of the financial mimosa sensitiva. The instant the owners of property anticipated a seizure of capital by the State in order to handle its gross profits, trade would shrink like the giant jin in the ' Arabian Nights,' which vanished in a little cloud of smoke. Take the case of the Great Western Eailway. The Great Western Kailway is largely dependent for existence on pleasure traffic and the supply and transport of people and things adjacent to the fine between London and Cornwall. Under Sociahsm the majority of the consumers of the commodity sold by the Great Western Railway would be crushed out of existence, since wealthy people, from Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire to Devonshire I THE G.W.R. 311 and Cornwall would cease to occupy large houses. When the State acquired possession of the Great Western Railway, as part of the private property to be taken over from its present owners, the first effect would be to throw a vast number of the Great Western employees out of work. This process would be repeated wherever capital is invested in luxury trades. Since there would be no ' idle rich ' when the State controls all wealth, the existence of the Great Western Railway would be useless except for such traffic as contributed to the supply of the community under the sanction of a huge army of government officials who would dictate the employment, food, lodging, and dress of each one of us. The skilled artisan class, the men with their three pounds a week, would be the first to suffer and the last to gain anything from the transfer of the G.W.R. to the custody of bureaucrats. The only persons who would benefit by the adop- tion of the Fabian progTamme would be the loafers, shirkers, unemployables, and casual labourers. But even they would only get a few pence a day, because the proportion of the rich to the rest of the population is so small that the community at largo would get very little out of them. The amount of the national income as now existing and the amount available for dis- tribution, were Socialism to triumph, would be very different. If cricket were played on Socialist principles the best batsmen would have most of their runs taken from them and added to the score of the players whose achievements were expressed by ' a pair of spectacles.' The crack 312 SOCIALISM batsman would not take tlie trouble to score any runs beyond the maximum permitted under the rules of Clarion or New Age cricket. In computing the national income much of it is counted several times over, so that, in the pro- cess of ' dividing up,' the amount to be dealt with would be considerably less than Treasury records lead Socialists to believe. Mr. Mallock, cites the case of a great London doctor who visits the South of France for a fee of £1,200. The patient pays income-tax on this £1 , 200. The lucky doctor pays income-tax on the same sum. If the physician is engaged in law proceedings and has to pay £500 to barristers and solicitors, a portion of the £1,200 would pay income tax three times, and would be counted three times over in the total assessed to income-tax. The values thus paid and received, though real in relation to the physician and the lawyer, cannot be divided and redistributed by Socialists. The profits of all the traders in luxuries of art, such as curios and pictures, pay income-tax twice over, and the whole of the value arising from the competition of the rich to possess them would disappear when the rich either cease to desire their acquisition or are debarred from becoming rich. Take the case of a prima donna who earns £14,000 a year and spends £4,000 of it in rent, motors, hotel bills, servants, dress, and beauty doctors. The aggregate of these amounts figures as part of the national income. Suh consule Victor Grayson there would be no competition of the rich for a box on the grand tier, and there would be no rich people to pay fancy prices for stalls. The FALLACIOUS PLUTOPHOBIA 313 prima donna could not sing to thirty times as many people as she does now, for her voice would not stand it. Her income would fall to a twentieth or a thirtieth of what it is under the present order of society. Under Socialism nobody would pay a barrister fees of two or three hundred guineas a day, nor could a barrister earning those fees work harder than he works now. The Attor- ney-General under Socialism, could not attend to thirty times as many cases as he is engaged in now. His income would fall heavily ; it could not, therefore, be redistributed among the manual labourers. Our female servants earn in cash, food, and lodging about eighty-two million pounds a year. This sum is counted twice over — once as the income of the employer, once for the domestic ; but after Socialistic redistribution hardly anyone could afford to keep a servant, as the average income of the richest class would only be about £230 a year. Income and production are by no means identical. One of the richest men of my acquaintance tells me that no man can spend over £5,000 a year on himself without involving other people in the benefit or the injury caused by the expenditure. A rich man, instead of being the object of hatred and attacks, should be regarded as what he is — i.e. as an instrument of exchange between two sets of industrial people. If he no longer acted as a go-between a large portion of his income would disappear with his personality. It is physically impossible for a rich man to spend his large income entirely on himself, and as he does not keep his wealth in sacks under the bed, he cannot 314 SOCIALISM prevent otlier folk living out of that portion of it wliicli does not go down his throat or is not wasted in non-productive expenditure. Unless people can get a return from invested property they will neither trouble to accumulate property nor will they resist the temptation to live up to the full extent of their incomes. This is the effect produced in Oriental countries by primitive finance. When taxes were collected in Egypt by the kourbash, wealth hid itself or was exported. If progressive increase in the wealth of the com- munity is desirable in itself, then liberty to exhibit a wealth without penal taxation is essential for the production of nest-eggs. Persecution of exhibited wealth is purely barbarian and a rever- sion to the tribal simplicities of club and stone. Since every vice fights against natural law, and carries \s-ith it the germs of dissolution and death, the predominance of parasites who are gTeedy and can vote, threaten and lie, but cannot them- selves produce, can never finally succeed against the silent forces exerted by the efficient. THE REAL AIM OF SOCIALISM Nature abhors hybrids. Physical and intellectual half-castes usually reproduce the faults of both parents and the virtues of neither. Hence the obloquy that falls on persons of mixed blood or confused opinions when miscegenation is the result of a union between contraries and incompatibles. The antipathy of whites towards half-castes and quadroons may be based on instinct ; never on envy. Contrast the hatred of the (comparatively) racially pure Jew in many coimtries and in all ages with the contemptuous antipathy directed against the ill-bred octoroon hi the West Indies or the Southern States ; and agauist the Eurasians who are known as ' four annas in the rupee.' What ' a touch of the tar-brush ' is in respect of race much of the Liberal-Labour SociaHsm of the present day is in respect of thought — a mixture of undesirables. They are mtellectual half-castes, quadroons, mestizos, and octoroons. They place a foot on either shore. Kingsley, Maurice, Hughes, and the other noble-minded early Victorian reformers, who called themselves ' Christian Socialists,' had not a vestige of Socialism in their creed. They were Christians, not Socialists. They lived their own lives in sturdy individualism, extolled the family tie, and for a generation strengthened the cult of 316 SOCIALISM hearth and home. They based their reform hi politics on monarchy, in religion on Christianity, and in economics on self-help, co-operation, and self-reliance. Contrast the creed of Kingsley with the creed of all the authorities on modern Socialism, from Tridon and Bebel to Blatchford and Hyndman. With them Socialism stands for a system of life and thought expressing itself in religion as atheism, in politics as republicanism, and in economics as communism. It is, of course, convenient to Socialists with a view to election expediency to confine public attention to the economic side of Socialism and to divert the public mind from all the main issues of Socialist life and Socialist conduct. Believing as I do that Socialism is a greater and more immediate danger to England than to any other comitry in the world, I endeavour to under- stand Socialists so far as they will let themselves be understood. That Socialism exists in great and growing force, largely in consequence of unemployment, and that owing to the ambitions of Socialism the constitutional issue of 1689 is again before us, is my reason for plain speaking. The one considerable plea for Socialism is the contrast between the misery in our midst and the plethora of ill-spent wealth that is ill-gotten. A walk through the mean streets of London, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool ; a shilling seat at a cup-tie match ; an hour spent at Liverpool Street or Baker Street Station from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. as the trains disgorge the manual workers of the Great City, are enough to show that British townsmen are degenerating. ' The cause of much of this I AEMING THE MOB 317 deca}' is want of proper nurture, housing, food, warmth, ventilation, exercise, pure milk, and sound mother-craft. Drink, heredity, and impro- vident marriage accomit for much, but the fact remains that the people of the mean streets of England are the physical inferiors of those in the same class of life in Germany. It does not follow that what one autocratic bureaucracy has done to grade up the people a popular Government can do, but it does follow that the existence of millions of stunted and hungry people side by side with Yankees or cosmopolitans who give dinners at sixty pounds a head and live idly m riotous profusion engenders discontent that takes the form of desiring revolutionary change. To the hungry, no change can be for the worse. The most widely read writer on Socialism is Mr. Blatchford, whose sudden reinforcement of the opposite camp is surprising to those acquainted with the history of modern Socialism. It is certainly interesting to me. Some three years ago I wrote a preface to a book written by ex- Sergeant Edmondson entitled ' John Bull's Army from Within.' Mr. Edmondson had been cruelly and unjustly treated under military law, as Colonel Kinloch, a similar case, was cruelly and unjustly treated. Edmondson was reduced to the ranks and expelled from the army without trial, court-martial, or any opportunity of defend- ing himself. This is contrary to elementary justice, and, in the opmion of the best legal authorities, is also contrary to law. Colonel Kinloch was supported by men of high rank, influence, and ability. Edmondson had no one 318 SOCIALISM to stand by him, and, althougli his opinions and mine differ as radically as any two human beings can differ, I felt bomid to come forward in vindica- tion of bare justice, and I contributed the preface to his book, ' John Bull's Army from Within,' not because I loved Edmondson, but because I hate injustice. This book was reviewed by Mr. Blatch- ford, an ex-soldier, in the Clarion. In the Socialist paper Justice of Jan. 1, 1910, ex-Sergeant Edmond- son writes an open letter to the reviewer : ' Some three years ago you reviewed in the Clarion my book " John Bull's Army from Withki." Among over seventy reviews I valued your criticism more than any. Why ? Because at the tail end you gave advice. Let me remind you of it : " My advice to young men about to enter the army is — Don't." ' Is it not natural, therefore, that Vanoc reads with surprise Mr. Blatchford's statement in the Daily Mail : ' I was happy in the army. I am glad to have been a soldier even for a little while. I am proud of it.' A prominent leader of public opinion takes his comer too sharply when, as author of ' Merrie England,' he was ' happy in the army and is proud of having been a soldier ' ; and within three years — that is, during the time Mr. Blatchford tells us that he has been concerned about the German menace — advises the young men of England, as Roman Catholic Nationalists advise young Irishmen, not to join the army. But when once more he turns and argues in the Daily Mail for vuiiversal service ' against Germany,' I put on my thinking cap. Such flexibility of adaptation does not appeal to me. The rank and file of the voters, AEMING THE MOB 319 however, have but little leisure for working the deep levels in the banket formation of the modern press. Manual labourers (see page 103 of ' Merrie England ') are told by Mr. Blatchford that under ideal Socialism there will be no money and no wages. That every citizen would take what he or she desired of the common stock in food, clothing, lodging, fuel, transit, amusements ; and ' all other things ' would be absolutely free, and the only difference between ' the Prime Minister and a colHer would be the difference of rank and occupa- tion.' In Tariff Keform we know what a whole hogger is. The SociaHst whole hogger can give the Tariff Reform whole hogger two stone and a beating. Those who know that the unseen foundations of society are personal character, reliance, grit, courage, endurance, love of country, fidelity to family and faith, are handicapped with the knowledge that the poor will be with us so long as the fool is fooUsh, the idler idles, the gambler punts beyond his means, and the drinker drinks more than is good for him. When the Socialist whole hogger is a Cabinet Minister working in alliance with Irish Nationalists, who, for their own purposes, desire to bring to a standstill the machinery of the British Empire, it is evident that no responsible statesman can ever outbid the Georgian-Blatchfordian programme. The Liberal and Conservative rivals of the Socialist whole hoggers may nibble at Socialism as John Browdic pingled with the crust of the Yorkshire pie, but dry nurse and coddle the electors as they will, neither Free Tiaders nor Tariff Reformers can approach the large, divine, 320 SOCIALISM and comfortable creed of the Socialist whole hogger. He tells the people, as in the Gospel according to Mr. Blatchford, that the Socialist remedy would 'enable every one to live decently' — note the every one — ' and free from the sordid anxieties of daily livelihood which at present weigh so heavily on the greatest part of mankind.' How well these brilliant Socialists understand the weak side of human nature ! Everybody knows that the greatest comfort that money gives is not luxury or leisure, but certainty of release from the grinding toil of struggling for a living in a world where struggle in competition with others is the law of life. In the old days the ancients had a shadowy faith in the Hyperboreans— the people who lived at the back of the north wind, where everyone was warm, happy, beautiful, and comfoi't- able. In the early struggle with the Kaffirs at the Cape there was a native chief of a large tribe owning many flocks and herds. To him came a soothsayer, a rain-maker, who said that he had a message from the spirit world to deliver. ' To get rid of the encroaching English from the West, with their rifles and their soldiers, all that was necessary for the Kaffir king to do was to order his people to kill all the cattle upon which they subsisted until not a hoof remained in the land.' The king accepted this advice. The cattle were killed, but the people, plunged in the anguish of famine and decimated by death, discovered too late that the soothsaying whole hogger in divina- tion was an enemy in disguise, and that the cattle, instead of reincarnating in the shape of countless impis of invulnerable braves, stank 4 AEMING THE MOB 321 rotting upon the liills, and added pestilence to starvation. The Socialist whole hogger who tells the people of England that if they will only destroy their milch kine ' they will be free from the sordid anxieties of daily livelihood ' is as surely the enemy of the people as the Kaffir soothsayer. But how, it will be said, can Mr. Blatchford, who writes so beautifully about Germany, be an enemy of the people ? Is he not a patriot and philanthropist ? I do not know. But as a person who knows some- thing of the subterranean forces of Socialism I invite my fellow-countrymen to collate what Mr, Blatchford says now, not only with what he said tiiree years ago as to stopping recruiting, but also what was said then and is said now by the less discreet and less astute whole hogging Socialists on the subject of the use of physical force, not only against German invaders, but against English em- ployers. We have been told again and again by prominent and responsible Socialists that until arms are placed in the hands of the people the dominion of capitalism will continue. Who organised the Belfast riots ? A Socialist ex-soldier. The extraordinary enthusiasm of the leading Socialist whole hogger for a military reform which would arm the people not only against Germany, but also against the Kothschilds, the Bank of England, and other owners of property, is, to say the least of it, interesting ; none the less because Socialism knows no frontier. Therefore, so far as Mr. Blatchford is patriotic, he is not Socialist, and, so far as he is Socialist, he is not patriotic. To the initiated the strategy of the Socialist- Radicals is sufficiently plain. Here a little and there 322 SOCIALISM a little of the whole hogger policy has been revealed. The immediate object is avowedly the establishment of unicameral government in order to concentrate power in the hands of a Socialist directory in Liberal clothes, using the terminology of Cobden and the invective of George. Since the abolition of the House of Lords is im- practicable without the use of force, there is ground for the argument of those who contend that certain members of the Ministry have con- templated the fact that force will have to be used. The use of force to suppress the Second Chamber becomes more difficult as people awake to the obvious fact that the despotism of two or three versatile politicians is not necessarily an improve- ment on the order of society in which a poor Welsh boy of great ability and eloquence can rise to the second place in the Cabinet without hind- rance from capitalists or peers. WOMEN CONCERNING SPINSTERHOOD Doctors and lawyers alone know the volume of preventable suiTering inflicted on women by men. According to the majority of my women corre- spondents, the evil is now so general and so in- tolerable as to justify any steps that are necessary to bring about reform. In point of fact, the indifference displayed by the suffragists towards imperial affairs is due, not to ignorance or levity but to their conviction that the relation of the sexes is a matter that masters all other political con- siderations. It is not merely that marriage under the existing system of ' possession ' of the woman is frequently unhappy owing to the selfisli use made by man of his predominance, but the number of women injured by men and those who never find a mate are increasing rapidly, and their wrongs require change in law and custom. Un- married and unenjoycd women present tliis demand with an emphasis that cannot be rejected. I know a refined, well-born, and capable gentle- woman who says that she would marry a blind man, a cripple, or a fool rather than not marry, but she, like the pretty maid in the ballad, has Y 2 324 WOMEN never been asked to share the lot even of an undesirable. The tragedy of tlie immated woman is comedy only to the male fool. Tlie unmated woman is a growing force. She is the mainstay of a movement, begun by Mary Wollstonecraft's ' Vin- dication,' which is destined to influence the drift of national life and possibly to modify its chief institution. Unmated woman is rarely noticed unless by silly gibes. Yet here are her sisters in hundreds of thousands in excess of men in a country where, monogamy being the law of the Church and State, marriage is beyond their reach. Chastity is demanded by both the law and the Gospel from more than a million of women who are required by destiny to tread the dusty road of life without a man's strong hand to uphold them when weary, and with never a child to pluck at their skirts. It is no comfort to these unmated women to tell them that Nature's inexorable law of the fittest to survive requires the birth of more women than can be suited with a mate. The unmated women are no less conscious than their married sisters that they are equipped for racial duty, endowed with maternal affection for dream children, and gifted often with grace and charm for which there is no demand in the marriage market. Nature, say the unmated women, has not squandered her gifts upon them to remain unused. What is the life of the unloved ? It is not always the superior women who are chosen by men. Women who shine by reason of their beauty and nobility of character are often neglected, while the drunken and the unfaithful. THE UNMATED 325 cruel and spiteful shrews, find mates in this tangled world. The unmated ask why are the kindly, the chaste, and the gentle so often left to pine, and they are puzzled by the scheme of life that stunts their woman's nature. The restlessness and disappointment of the mate-worthy is to be found in the turmoil of woman's insurgency to-day. Among the gloomy mysteries of life there is none sadder than the possession by unmated women of the inclination for marriage concurrently with the pain and weakness inseparable from the female organism. ' Tell me what I am to do ? ' says one spinster. ' Here am I, just over thirty, with perhaps another thirty or forty years to live — with what interests am I to fill up these years without husband, home, child, or citizenship ? Am I morbid and wrong in thinking that it is by the sacrifice of unmarried women that the sanctity of the home is preserved and monogamous marriage built ? Is there anything in science or Nature which tells us that this sacrifice is necessary and right ? ' No answer can be given ex cathedra to my correspondent. She states the facts of the situation, but lacks imagination. In Greater Britain's sunnier Lands exist a redundancy of men who are unwived from lack of tact or opportunity. ' The Empire,' said Gordon, ' was made by its adventurers,' and the celibate adventurer of the Gordon, Kitchener, Rhodes, and Jameson type sets an example both to the eligible and to the sellish males under his control of abstinence from marriage. Eternal injury of the race is wrouglit by such discouragement of marriage by the leaders of men. A bachelor Prime Minister is necessarily 326 WOMEN ignorant of the fundamental conditions of family life, and his example influences large numbers against the making of homes as distinctly as Tertullian, who told woman that she was " The Gate of Hell.' Advice I have none to offer to those from whom I have learned so much, but I should say, as a man in the street, that women have it in their own hands to create a healthier public opinion on the subject and duty of marriage. That the conduct obligatory on one of the parties to the contract should also be compulsory on the other needs no argument — but the change can arrive only through woman's insistence. Further, it is in the power of woman to raise man's ideals in reference to marriage and to establish a higher standard of men's behaviour in the home. The foundation and maintenance of happy homes is the main object of statecraft and of law, and while unmated women are left in the cold that men may enjoy themselves as they please, they are obviously entitled to claim a revision of the conventions that govern the relations of the sexes. For instance, I cannot see why woman should not propose marriage to a possible mate, nor, if the existing custom of society were revised, how there could be any evil necessarily con- sequent on such a change. Leap year is supposed to confer on them that right. Queen Victoria proposed marriage to Prince Albert. The plain fact of the matter is that for men, having the force and the wealth behind them, and having exagger- ated their place and their value in the scheme of the home, the time has arrived to recognise the essential equality of women with themselves. WOMAN-MADE LAW 327 not merely in language but in fact. This does not imply the grant of the vote, but the recognition of men's duty. Let us assume that women obtain equal rights with men, includmg eligibility for Parliament, and that laws are passed enacting : L That in cases of infanticide the father shall be held responsible, and that girl-mothers, like Alice Cleaver (aged twenty), who was tried before Mr. Justice PhiUimore, shall no longer be sentenced to the gallows. 2. That registration of infected males shall take place on an appomted day. 3. That preventable injury to a woman's health by a dissolute man shall become a penal offence. How are those laws to be enforced if men object to them 'i I have never heard the answer to this question, because there is no answer miless men are willing to submit themselves to woman-made law. We therefore come back to the position of those who hold that the conversion, exposure, and persuasion of man is the right and only way of procuring the essential changes in laws dealing with the relations of the sexes. Men who are inclined to question or dispute the accuracy of the charge brought agamst them in respect of their treatment of women should look round and observe for themselves the signs of the times. The decadence of our race is largely, if not mainly, male decadence. Men indulge more frequently than women in some habit which interferes with their efficiency as a fighting, working. 328 WOMEN and thinking animal. Outside the criminal and drinking classes the stature and the health of women are improving. Not so men. An admirer of her own sex writes to say that she loathes and despises EngUshmen, and that the shameful remarks on mothers made by me have inspired her to collect every shred of evidence obtain- able against the English husband and father and to expoimd it to all her women friends — young, middle-aged, and old. ' My success,' she adds, ' has exceeded my expectations. When you inveigh against mothers and pitiable offspring why do you not mention the father's crying sin ? ' The lady, who signs herself ' A Young Woman of the Twentieth Century,' seems to have been xm- fortunate in her friends, but the evil against which she inveighs unquestionably deserves to be dealt with under the penal laws, and in my humble way I will do what I can to help. I would suggest, however, that the alienation of sensible men by maUgnant exaggeration does not advance the feminist movement. There is, moreover, a man's side to the un- mated woman's indictment. The unmated Bishop of London recently lifted up his voice against the feline tendencies of modern women. It is true that they have not been educated to the habit of thought usual among men which treats detrac- tion of the absent as ' bad form.' The fehne acerbity of unmated women, is notorious. The ' cat ' in society is common. Who has not heard the levity with which immarried women take away the characters of the absent ? Who does not know their practice of regarding allegation as MAIDEN AUNTS B29 identical with proof, and their mdifierence to the elementary laws of evidence ? How many of us do not turn away disgusted with the cruelty of women to women, especially of old spinsters to young spinsters ? Where the poison of asps is under her tongue woman cannot expect champions for female sufirage from the other sex. On the other hand, the ranks of the unmated also supply the most beautiful examples of unselfish courage, sympathy, and love this world's woman- hood contains. It is natural for a mother to befriend her child, for a husband to stand by his wife, for a wife to struggle for her man, but the unmarried women who give to other women's childreu the store of all the devotion ui their nature ' allure to brighter worlds and lead the way.' An epic might be written on the Maiden Aunt. In hospitals and in sick-rooms unmarried women for fifty years have placed men under inextinguish- able obligation. The resources of energy, vigilance, and knowledge freely poured out for a miserable wage are at the service of the whole community. It was no barren sentiment that made the British soldier kiss the shadow of Florence Nightingale in the hospital at Scutari. That soldier's kiss of the whitewashed wall was the bcgiiming of a new era. For more than half a centuiy the unmated women of England have won for themselves the right to justice which they do not yet receive from man. It is no less than their due that we men should recognise their claim upon us by a gentler outlook, by a more modest estimate of our strength and virtue, and by a juster sense of what is due to spinsterhood. THE MENDING OF MARRIAGE With five million females working for their liveli- hood in the Kingdom, it is high time that the in- stitution of marriage were subjected to searching examination. Frenzied women agitate for the abolition of the family and the substitution of the State for paterfamilias. Under the existing law the husband is the head of the house ; to him belongs the right of choosing the domicile, and he may require his wife to live with him where he chooses. The husband may enter into contracts, sue and be sued, squander his property, or leave the whole of it to a mistress as freely as though he were a single man. The relation of a man to his wife in this country is as follows : — The law gives the husband umestricted right of bequest. He is under no obligation to make provision for his wife after his own death. He may divorce his wife for a certain wrong done to him, though his wife cannot divorce him when proved guilty of committing the same act. To the best women the horror of matrimony is that, however unfortunately matched, the only avenue of escape is for the wife to disgrace herself and lose the custody of her children — an intolerable act. If the wife has WOMAN'S GRIEVANCE B31 money and the husband is penniless, unfaithful, a sot, idle, and degenerate, the woman cannot obtain a divorce unless the man is guilty of legal cruelty in the presence of witnesses. So long as the man abstains from actual violence before others, the woman is tied for life to a dissolute and maniacal pauper. A woman of property married to a wastrel or sot cannot obtain either separation or the custody of her children, except by bargain, and then only by maintaining her tyrant in luxury for the rest of his life. The marriage laws of England, are still burdened with the Asiatic doctrine that woman is a chattel. Protected by her husband, a married woman, for many purposes in law, is merged in the personality of her husband. If she commits a crime under his coercion, the crime is his, not hers ; he is punished, and she escapes. This rule does not apply to murder. Under these circumstances it is natural that a large number of marriages are unhappy, and that educated women with wide desire for economic freedom should denounce as iniquitous the man-made laws of marriage. Forty years have passed since the working of the marriage laws was investigated. Since that date details may have improved, but the fundamental grievance of woman is untouched, and it is not certain that men will ever consent to treat marital infidelity on equal lines with women. The plea advanced by me is that, the family being the foundation- stone of the State, an unfaithful wife commits a greater crime than a faithless husband. The husband does not necessarily injure his family by infidelity ; the wife does so injure it ; since 332 WOMEN her action, though undiscovered, may change the succession in fact though not in law. The vase of hfe should be kept pure, and woman, not man, is the vase. I am not discussing the moral side of the marriage question, though I agree with St. Augustine that the same moral obligation rests on the husband as on the wife. AU that I urge on man's behalf is that although infidelity in a man should in equity release his wife, the injury inflicted on the family by a bad wife is greater both in kind and in degree than that of a guilty husband. Anarchists and ' advanced ' thinkers of the modern Feminist school, in defiance of natural law, advocate that which is indistinguishable from promiscuity. Darwin was of opinion that even before the spring- ing up of marriage custom the jealous rage of the male would determine that there would be no general promiscuity of women. Nor can we doubt that if Piccadilly Circus were to relapse into jungle, and the primitive passions of man had free play, the most desirable females would again be possessed by the strongest and the bravest of men. Monogamous marriage is the keystone of civilisation, and although important details may require readjustment, substantial change in the relation of the sexes can only result in reversion to primitive conditions. In listening to the Suffragettes, I am impressed by their consis- tent avoidance of the elemental sex problem. What is the main fact about woman that differen- tiates her from man ? Not that she is weaker, less courageous, more emotional, or of less intelligence. The fundamental difference between man and woman is that the male is not prevented by nature CONTINUOUS EXERTION 333 from continuous concentration on the work of the world. To avoid using medical terms it is merely necessary to point out that by the terms of the speci- fication of that most marvellous of all inventions — woman's body — she is prevented, while fulfilling her natural and normal functions, from applying herself steadily and continuously to any occupa- tion involving exposure, excessive fatigue, and danger. So long as a woman is more emotional than man, and so long as her phases of emotion vary in intensity from causes not under her own control, so long will the work of administering the affairs, developing the resources, and safeguarding the persons and property of the community be more fitly entrusted to those who are alone capable of continuous and prolonged exertion of body and of mind, that is to men. Women never meet this point One of the best touches in the report of the Koyal Commission on the Poor Laws is the reference to the pathetic custom of brave women of the poorest classes, known as ' the purse under the pillow.' What is meant, of course, is that when the wife and mother is laid aside she continues the administration of her family by controlling its budget ui order to prevent the diversion of family cash to undesirable purposes. I receive many letters from yomig unmarried women which are astounding in their complete absence of those qualities of modesty and reserve which are usually regarded as essential to the character of womanly women. Many of these letters expatiate in burnmg phrases on the injury 334 WOMEN inflicted by dissolute men upon innocent wives and families. That these offences should be made criminal few will deny, but why the existence of exceptional cases of the kind should be employed as leverage for either abolishing marriage or for givmg women the vote I fail to understand. There appears to be a growing number of modern women who revel in the discussion of things and details which are disgusting. It is charged against the men of England by ' ladies ' of this school that the marriage tie has now become impossible to self- respecting women owing to disease produced by the criminal self-indulgence that is alleged to be almost universal among men. I do not believe a word of the charge. The average man is not a plaster saint, and there are admittedly cruel wrongs inflicted by a minority of husbands on their wives ; wrongs sufficient to warrant alteration of the law. But to upset the family and marriage and to substitute for fatherhood selection by the female or promiscuity is a foul dream of disordered minds. The wheels of life go merrily round when the matrimonial cogs fit, but they seldom fit, because every man and every woman desires three qualities in a mate, a combination rarely found in one person. Man requires female companionship, since loneli- ness is intolerable to all but saint or devil. Man also requires a mother to his children ; and in truth, be it spoken, also a woman to love him — a third element in matrimony not to be overlooked. It is the rarest of events for one woman to be at once friend, wife, and lover, and even if she is all three the marriage is still not happy unless the MAEBED MAKEIAGE 335 combijiation is in every way reciprocal. How often one sees in society men who have risen in- tellectually and socially but whose wives remain at the lower level of earlier years. Men of genius or even men of note are too much in demand to make good husbands. Jealousy is the weapon in woman's armoury most frequently in use. Many a man of capacity is tortured by wifely obsession of jealousy of his career, of his men friends, and of his duty. They are her rivals, and she hates them even as woman can hate. I began to make a list of great men unhappily married, but it is too long to publish, Shakespeare, Bacon, Byron, Milton, Shelley, Wesley, Carlyle, are but a few of the names that occur to one's mind in thinking over the mfluence of marriage on men of mark. Fair play compels one to admit that from the ethical standpoint all of the men were in the wrong. Men are always wrong where women are concerned. Men of genius, more- over, are often destitute of the business faculty, and poverty, or even moderate means, implies domestic arrangements compelling constant con- tact and incessant friction. Married people of means who cannot ' get on ' meet as seldom or as often as they please, and thus maintain appear- ances in public without undue strain. A small house is a place where dust accumulates and men inveigh ; conditions unfavourable to the joy of living. Everyone knows the literary man or artist who has ' arrived,' and is made much of by Mrs. Leo Hunter, but who neglects the mother of his children and comes to loathe her, because, he avers ' she does not understand him,' having 336 WOMEN a sordid soul that never rises above Monday's hash, pinafores, and paregoric. Such a man is a low hound, and the wife, knowing that he is not playing the game, despises and often grows to hate him. Separation from incompatibility where there are several children is condemnation to the man. I prefer men to women. They are stauncher friends, take larger views, and are less subject to gusts of emotion that distort judgment, and, like a white squall, make rough sea under blue sky. Honesty impels me, however, to admit the horrible selfishness of the average man where women are concerned. Among the richer classes boys are brought up to consider their sisters as their inferiors, for whom a smaller provision is necessary than for the males of the family. Seeing that there are not men enough to go round, there is no wonder that soon after the matrimonial boat is launched the man should consider himself as he is in law — captain — and his wife as the crew. Among the luxurious classes girls are taught to look on marriage as a profession and a destiny. Many of them have no money, all are brought up luxuriously, none of them are educated to fit them for any profession but wifehood. If they are good girls and temperamentally cold the system works fairly well. Sometimes they have strong affections. Then the system works badly and the newspapers benefit. Marriage on this plan is not ideal, but when the children come it sometimes works well. In the class below, marriage is often a desperate necessity, especially to girls without other occupation and who find themselves thrown HOME 337 by the sea of life on the barren reef of spin- sterdom. Human nature is unchanging. So long as men are men, strength will win beauty. Under existing conditions cunning or pedigree wins wealth or beauty — sometimes both. The result is anarchy, because the, children — if there are any — are often inverts and undesirables. In the mean- time, there is no institution to compare with the happy home'. Home is English ; quite English. Home is attacked by women, by taxes, by Socialism by philosophy. But there is no place so well worth fighting for as home, and the foundation of home is monogamous marriage. ON HIS MAJESTY\S SERVICE CLEAR THINKING No man living can accurately deterinino tlie con- dition of tlie society of wliicli he forms a part. Still, we know for certain that we live in a new era. Whether the new era marks progress or decay is a matter of opinion ; but we know for certain that we have seen in our lifetime greater changes than had previously occurred for thousands of years. For two thousand years we have made no advance in philosophy, poetry, or sculpture. No- poet has surpassed Homer ; no thinker has excelled Plato ; no sculptor has produced a master- piece greater than the best work of Pheidias or Praxiteles. It is probable that Amenhotep in Egypt and Darius in Persia were clothed as richly and as comfortably as King George the Fifth, the Kaiser, and Mr. Taft. There is every reason to believe that rich Babylonians lived in houses as luxurious as those of financial magnates to-day. The architecture of the Middle Ages— the abbeys, the minsters, and cathedrals — supplies models to the architects of London, Paris, and New York. The lamps and the torches that illuminated the feasts of the Pharaohs were probably just as 340 O.H.M.S. brilliant as those which shone on the fetes of George the Fourth or Napoleon. The same thing may be said of transport. Nimrod travelled at the same rate as Mr. Vanderbilt's coach — as quickly as our grandfathers. Abraham's messenger to Lot galloped at twelve miles an hour. By sea, little or no progress in speed was made between the time of Homer and the time of Dibdin, while any communication that Damon may have wished to make in writing to his friend Pythias would have gone at the same rate of sj)eed as a letter from Mr. Pitt to Lord St. Vincent. During the last sixty years all these material matters have been vastly improved, but it is an open question whether the faculty of clear think- ing in the new era has not actually receded since the carbon filament induced currents. Bellevilles, wireless, quadruplex, turbines, linotypes, motor-cars, and aeroplanes came into existence. The subject is so vast that I can only compare our capacity for clear thinking with that of our ancestors by examining one or two questions of current interest. The Romans presented examples of clear thought on military problems which we fail to equal. Napoleon was the greatest master of war the world has seen. Lord Roberts has more experience of modern war than any living Briton. Napoleon and Lord Roberts agree on the subject of artillery. Mr. Haldane differs from Napoleon and Lord Roberts. The view of the soldiers is that gunnery is a difficult science, and that to fight field batteries with success requires years of continuous training for the rank and file and the devotion of a lifetime VOTING GUNNERS 341 for the officers. Mr. Haldane's scheme creates one hundred and ninety-six Territorial Batteries, which Lord Roberts affirms would not be of the slightest use in war with a first-class Power, but would be a positive danger to their own side. The public is sufficiently interested in the Navy to know that amateur gunners in the Dreadnought's turrets would ensure the loss of any action against trained gunners in the turrets of the German Westfalen and her sisters. The skill required to fight guns on shore is in some respects even greater than the skill required from naval gunners. Nevertheless, the House of Commons, the British public, a large portion of the Press, and many Volunteers acquiesce complacently in the creation of one hundred and ninety-six Territorial Batteries, which will reinforce the enemy, whenever and wherever they are used, because they are a danger to their own side until and unless they are properly trained. Clear thinking shows that the men who are to man these Territorial Batteries are voters. War may be remote. The Government wants votes. There- fore the reduction of thirty-three Batteries of Regulars in order to get money to create one hundred and ninety-six Batteries of voters is good business for a Government in want of votes. It is bad for me. ' The Admiralty of the Atlantic ' (Longmans), a book written by Mr. Percival Hislam, discloses a fact known in service circles but hitherto kept from the public. Mr. Hislam states that the British Government has come into the possession of a matured scheme for the invasion of this country, which had not only been submitted to the German 342 O.H.M.S. Government, but had been adopted as a plan with the maximum probability of success. This plan involved the landing of German troops on the East Coast. What has England to meet a raid or invasion of that kind, supposing it were to take place during the present week ? Examination of the latest return shows that there are now not many more than twenty thousand infantry soldiers fit for the field at home. We are at the height of the ' squeezed lemon ' season. The last of the Indian drafts are about to leave, if they have not left. After they have gone, there are not more than three hundred serving soldiers of twenty years of age fit for foreign service in each home battalion. To complete the battalion to war strength — that is, up to a thousand men — seven hundred reservists must be added to each battalion on mobilisation. But the clear thinker will recognise that the German commander v/ill not wait for our mobilisation. He will strike home, hard and hot. Our striking force at Aldershot may be dispatched against the Germans within a couple of hours from the time of notice, but the striking force, with the exception of the Guards and two or three of the best battalions, would be sent to butchery at the hands of the best troops in Europe, because recently-trained soldiers in each battalion are too few to hope for success. Under the shadow of the Boer war clear thinkers foresaw the ruin of this country if the unreadiness of October, 1899, were repeated before the attack of a great military Power. To prevent the nation from being caught napping, it was decided to create the office of A SUPPEESSED EEPOET 343 Inspector-General, whose duty was defined as being ' to report upon facts, not upon policy.' The first Inspector-General was the Duke of Connaught. The reports of His Koyal Highness have been suppressed, although he was appouated for the express purpose of telling Parliament the truth about the Army. He is the auditor appointed by the shareholders in the Empire. To sum up the situation, the Territorial Army does not exist. The Militia has been abolished. The Territorial Batteries, when they do exist, are a danger to their own side, while at the present time the striking force at Aldershot is depleted of trained soldiers to such an extent that the odds are against success in a fight with a German Army Corps. When we add that the Kegular Artillery is disorganised, and that our readiness for war is no greater and the cost of the Array little less than it was sub consule Lans- downe, the clear thinker will conclude that it is about time to put an end to the tomfoolery at the War Office. The publication of the Duke of Connaught's report would stir the country from Caithness to Penzance, because it is a model of clear thinking. One word on the meaning of Avar trainmg. Picked troops trained on the Con- tinental or Japanese plan are men who will go into action at the will of their commander, garlanded with dynamite bombs, the fuses of which are alight. The equivalent of this feat was repeatedly accom- plished during the Eusso-Japanese war. One Japanese commander addressed the followmg request to his men at Port Arthur : ' Will the honourable front rank impale themselves on the Russian bayonets in the trenches so that the honourable second rank may proceed ? ' 344 O.H.M.S. They did it. This is war training. Clear thinking suggests that troops to be used in war should be war-trained. The want of clear thinking shown in our dealings with national defence is no reason for despair. The epigram declaring that tomb space at West- minster Abbey was exhausted at the time when the race of our great men became extinct has every merit except truth. There is plenty of raw material for greatness and many clear thinkers, but few of them get into Parliament or reach prominence in the Press because they will not say the things advertisers and townsmen want to hear. It is the misfortune of urban civilisation to look at things through an impure atmosphere where light is refracted and truth distorted or invisible. The unrest we see all romid arises mainly from the fact that the multitudes in the great towns are not led by lucid thinkers. The nation is unwell ; it wants a breath of fresh air to renew its youth. It lacks touch with the soil. Back to the land is a better cry for rulers than for manual labourers. American Presidents are men whose characters have been moulded by contact with nature. Log-splitting, agriculture, hunting, and fresh air have mstilled common sense and clear thinkmg into twenty-five Presidents of the United States. England was the cradle of Puritanism, America its result. The Puritanism of Stuart days was national and Imperialist. No Roundhead shirked service of the nation, still less denoimced those who served. The Puritans of to-day, under the name PURITAN IMPERIALISM 345 of anti-militarism, denounce battalions instead of injustice, battleships instead of ambition, and deplore military efficiency as leading, not to successful defence, but to miprovoked attack. Clear thinking would show the modern Puritans that England will never again attack another Power. If she retains all she has won she is lucky. Many of the Christian community, however, the Bible notwithstanding, believe that war cannot be reconciled with the profession and practice of Christianity. War under conditions that may and do arise — invasion, for instance — is righteous, and to refrain from a redressing of such evil is unrigh- teous. If resistance to invasion is righteous, efficient preparation is national duty. The old Puritans were Imperialist because they were clear thinkers. If resistance to invasion is right, resistance to defence estimates is as unreasonable as objection to outlay on fire-engines. Apparatus to put out fires cannot be improvised when the fire is well alight. The Cromwellian spirit gave us the Empire. The aloofness of the Free Churches from national defence is a repudiation of Cromwell. Clear thought could make and educate a healthy race, suppress habitual crime and trampdom, safe- guard property, liberty, and country, unite the Empire, and give to all new hope and happiness in life. Why not ? EDUCATION In this life we marcli as a caravan — ' on Safari.' Our marcli is between two eternities. Education is nothing more than equipment for this march on Safari through the world we know to the world we don't know. The only right education is there- fore the right adjustment of ourselves to our caravan environment. The unobtrusive ascend- ency of spurious education has reached danger point. Its evil influence arrests the development of our race. When Parliament took the plunge forty years ago and began to educate our masters, after making them omnipotent, men looked forward to a golden harvest of improved manners and a change for the better in the work of the nation. In essentials the change is not for the better, but the worse. Manners are distinctly worse. Memories may be better, but imagination, the quartz where the pure gold of genius is found, is killed by cramming. Carlyle's prediction is being partially fulfilled. If we have not created a race of ' clever devils ' it is only because our system of education has stunted intellect too successfully to enable Britons to manifest devils' capacity. In Mr. Forster's day the ideal was the construction of a ladder to enable mute, inglorious Miltons to emerge from the soil of hand labour and reach DECANTER MINDS 347 the upper aii- of university training. We have failed utterly, because pumping facts into children's minds, or, for that matter, into the minds of Balliol or Trinity men, is not an educative pro- cess. The proof is found in the phrase commonly applied to the sons and daughters of the upper classes when they leave college or discontinue lessons. They are spoken of and they speak of themselves as ' having finished their education ' ! Let me frankly disclaim any title to authority on the subject of education. I am uneducated. But for the same reason that I knew what was wrong with naval gunnery when British men-of- war's men flung their ammunition overboard instead of practising at the target in order to be proficient on the day of battle, so I perceive, in spite of cultured pedantry and the hierarchy of fallacious dogmatists, that British education is diseased, is administered by little minds, lacks soul, and is not adapted to the adjustment of young Britons of any class to their probable environment. If I could not spell, dropped the aspirate, and ate peas with a knife, this fact, if it be a fact, would not be affected thereby. Seeing that twenty Asiatics marry, beget children, and live on the sum paid to one English brain-worker drawing two hundred pounds a year, it is impossible \\-ithout misgiving to anticipate the future of our race in economic competition with men of colour, unless our system of education is revised in accord- ance with natural law. It is not because the prison chaplains tell me that our educational system is a bad one, and badly administered, that I denounce it, but because I see for myself slurred 348 O.H.M.S. work, unmannerly cubs, dirty children, general discontent, and widespread insistence on ' rights ' that do not exist, including the disclaimer of service to the caravan companions with whom we travel between the two eternities. I fail to see, more- over, that our Secondary Education produces a ruling caste. Our educational system manufactures white Babus, converts English fellaheen into redundant penmen, and, instead of educating the future mothers of the people to meet the conditions of their lives, substitutes a preference for feather boas and ready-dressed food for clean children and happy husbands. Our educational system has the digestive capacity of a decanter. There is no pepsine in the system of the syllabus. Adaptation to environment has little part in the education of gentleman or ploughboy. The gentle- man wants to be rich quick ; the ploughboy wants to be a clerk. The heads of the universities turn out graduates with minds as much alike as marbles. The bogus aristocracy of intellect either pities or despises those who have not been ' educated ' at a university. As trick-riding may secure for a bicyclist engagements on the music-hall stage, a university degree does not always smother the divine quality of independent thought ; but it generally smothers it, and leaves the M.A. Oxbridge with as much initiative as the dead. Only the best men and women survive the milling process that cuts, compresses and polishes the undergraduate mind into the cult of similarity and monotonous repetition which passes under the name of ' good form.' LORD MILNER 349 Women are not taught to tliink, or have not been taught until lately ; but, as Mr. Harold Gorst in his excellent book, ' The Curse of Education,' pointed out nine years ago, women have been been thinking all along. Why is the intuition of a woman quicker and the judgment of a woman sounder on the little things of life than the intuition and the judgment of man ? The only reason is that from time immemorial women have used faculties which decay from disuse in the male. Where university education has succeeded in turn- ing out first-rate men the result is due partly to the irrepressible genius of individuals and partly to the soul of a born teacher. No one can tell the influence of a Jowett on empire. Jowett's pupils have helped to mould the destiny of the four hundred millions of the British Empire — are mould- ing it — not because of Oxford but because of Jowett. Take Lord Milner's case. When he was a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette his friends mourned for his ' failure ' in life. He himself was tranquil and at ease. Being properly adapted to the environment of life, he knew that the time would come for greater things. The time came. Others may abhor as much as I admire Lord Milner's policy, but no one can deny the perfect temper — the effect of true education — he has shown throughout his stirring and almost unrequited life. Milner's work after the war in South Africa, Milner's ' kindergarten ' of Balliol men, so much derided, alone made possible the consolidation of South Africa — if consolidation be possible. Enfeebled, debilitated, and effeminate, the great English universities, despite their strident 350 O.H.M.S. claim to the monopoly of culture, yield an output of futility inconsistent with their traditions, their endowments, and their opportunities. Purged by a new Savonarola, their influence on ' bounders ' might be boundless. Will the Rhodes scholars reform their university or be stifled by her ? The ruck of the men educated at Oxford and Cambridge are no better and no worse than the people who have not enjoyed their advantages. The educa- tional ring, consisting of the headmasters of the great schools and the heads of colleges, have successfully smothered the ideal of 1870. No field- marshal's baton is yet found in the knapsack of the private soldier of life. As the Nonconformists ceased to manufacture saints since taking to politics, so the universities and the headmasters are losing the knack of making gentlemen to lead us. Deterioration of manners is not confined to the masses. Bad manners imply bad education, and for the education of the wealthier classes the ring of headmasters and heads of colleges are responsible. It is true that they have succeeded in captming the Fii'st Division of the Civil Service, but that is because ' the education of a gentleman ' costs two thousand pounds, not because the examinees are either educated or gentlemen. Until a wise Government lays strong hands on the public schools and universities the sham of false and futile ' education ' will continue. For one Milner we have a thousand fools. There ought to be more hits than misses. Easy acquisition of wealth enables a new class of parent to send its sous to Eton and Oxford, not for education but - for society. The consequent FALSE EDUCATION 351 decay of manners explains the decay of patriotism. The system is faulty through and through. A brilliant boy, in the opinion of the omnipotent ring of pedants, is a boy who earliest and quickest memorises a hundred thousand facts. A ' stupid ' boy is one who either cannot or will not attempt the task. But the ' stupid ' boys become the men who lead. Napoleon hated classics, and could not be induced to apply his mind to the subject. Wellington's teachers thought him a dunce. Clive was hopeless from the pedagogue's point of view. Washing-ton, Sheridan, and Livingstone were unmistakable failures from the scholasic stand- point. Disraeli never grasped the rule that ' ut ' should be followed by the subjunctive mood. Lord Randolph Churchill's false quantity in pro- nouncing the name ' Origen ' in the House of Commons procured for him the contempt of gerund- grinding mediocrities. Undigested mind-food decays and generates feculent gas-like food undi- gested in the body. Cultured windbags are known by the flatulent contempt they emit in the pi'esence of better men than themselves. The evil influence at work in the universities and in the public schools to arrest the develop- ment of the race is also at work in the provided and unprovided schools. No j^^liveried angels lackey the souls of the little ]■ girls educated there. In the schools of Anglo-Celtic Saxon great cities the giil children may finish their studies anatomically pure. That is all. Life has no surprises for them ; no romance. The fairies have vanished. The god Pan is dead. Sex is no mystery. Enthusiasm, imagination, idealism, if 352 O.H.M.S. latent, are not evoked. The girls are left to evolve these qualities as best they may. No vista of the harvest that might be reaped penetrates "Whitehall, Neither boy nor girl receives a glimmering that every British child is born to a great inheritance with stately traditions and a cheerful future. The environment that is the natural destiny of children is forgotten in the official syllabus. Sad lives on wrong lines are the rule. The curriculum, though comprehensive, accomplishes little or nothing in training the youngsters for their march on Safari through the world. The homes of the poor, with bright exceptions, have not improved since 1870. The mothers know little of food values ; what to buy ; how to cook what they buy. They know nothing of method in the conduct of their homes. They cannot cut out or make their own or their children's garments. They toil, but they neither knit nor sew. They are the chief supporters of the sweating system after mental veneering by a course of fancy needlework, drawing, French, map- making, the sol-fa system, botany, astronomy, and geology. They never heard of Hans Christian Andersen's ' Fairy Tales.' They know few ballads. Their pronunciation of English is unbeautiful. They buy ready-dressed food, ready-made gar- ments, and lose all faculty for a pleasing hfe. Their manners are revealed in the story of the poor woman being treated in hospital for an injury to her nose, when asked what animal had bitten her, replied, ' It weren't no animile, it were a lydy friend.' To treat undergraduates as sacks to be filled with facts pressed down and running over is silly, A BAD BOTTICELLI 353 since most of tliem liave a hard row to hoe in the field of life. But to treat little kiddies in the same way is the act of a Pobiedonostseff or a Torque- mada. The sewing taught in the schools is not the sewing the mites will want in life. Many tiny tucks are useless additions to the garments of the servantless class. So with cooking. The cook- ing that is wanted is not cooking taught with many pots and costly gear. The teaching of French with an atrocious accent is a bad jest. Time is worse than wasted on sketching, clay modelling, drawing, and painting. A true artist cannot be suppressed. But what is the use of teaching five hundred children something that they don't like and never will do well in the hope of unearthing a bad Botticelli ? No matter how bad the system, the good teacher deprives it of its major vices and imparts the finer qualities of her own personality. The best system fails without good teachers. The worst system reaches unlooked-for results with good teachers. The marvel is how good the teachers are. They are conscientious, devoted, and hard-working, but they are isolated. Their classes are too large— often thirty in the country and sixty in London, and they have no oppor- tunities of regaining the elasticity that is taken from them by the conditions of their toil. Inadequately paid, they are socially isolated. Above the class from which they are recruited, they are out of touch with culture, though requiring intellectual stimulus, sympathy, and appreciation more then barristers, solicitors, con- tractors, accountants, or professional agitators. Each of us should know and entertain one teacher. AA 354 O.H.M.S. The teacliers of British children of all ranks are the most important class of the community. On their work depends our destiny. In their keeping is the soul of empire, but, like Laocoon and his sons, our teachers strive in the coils of the snake of Whitehall. If we would improve national education we must make more of our teachers. It is now too late to rely on the deeds of our forefathers. To correct our national faults, and especially our over- weening confidence, our slurred work, our rule-of-thumb methods, our insensibility to the feelings of others, and the stolid insularity which procures for us universal dislike, is our educational problem. The universities do not concern them- selves with these things. The old conditions are dead. Leaders and statesmen reared on Latin and Greek were not equal to Dutch rural simplicity. Our workmen educationally, but only education- ally, are a long way behind the labourers, not only of Germany and the United States, but of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland. The fault is not theirs. It is ours. I say with Robert Lowe, ' Let us educate our Masters ' to behave, to observe, to obey, to apply, and to revere all that is worth reverence. HUMANITARIAN HUMBUG We are iii a transition stage. All things are in a crucible. Every British institution, including the seen and unseen foundations of society, are attacked with vigour. As the Black Death cleared the countryside, so the politics and discoveries of the last seventy years, by emptying the villages, have produced drastic changes in the life and hopes of the majority of the English people. In the lean years of the great wars with France, when farmers lived like fighting cocks and drank the health of Bonaparte as their best friend, agricultural labour, being voteless, was underpaid, and much of it was paid in com- modities on the truck system. Memories of the dark decades that followed Waterloo still Imger in rural districts, and echoes of the want and misery of those days are still heard from the lips of aged men, and are utilised for political purposes. Mechanical development, discoveries of gold in Australia, California, Canada, and Siberia, the monopoly of railway construction by English contractors, crcat(>d a magnetism in the great towns irresistible to the rural population. Gigantic impulse was given to street life, and since the country could no longer supply the great cities AA 2 356 O.H.M.S. with beef, beer, and bread, the inevitable war between town and country broke out. Capitalists and Chartists united, and discovered in Mr. Cobden a spokesman against the landlord, the farmer, and the agricultural labourer. Material prosperity of a large class followed, tension was relieved, and paeans of joy were raised over an industrial system in which the sway of manufacture over agriculture was firmly established on a profitable basis. t There were drawbacks. One of them was the intellectual and spiritual effect produced on the minds of stalwart labourers suddenly uprooted and turned into nomads in search of work. They had fought our wars. For the same reason that wandermg tribes are almost without exception destitute of religion, so the stream of immigrants to the cobblestones, gas, and smoke of the cities shed some of the patriotism that they had imbibed in the villages. The example of their urban employers further increased the tendency to regard the defence of comitry as the duty of castes to which neither they nor their masters belonged. To this day you may travel through the wealthiest manufacturing districts in York- shire, Lancashire, Durham, and Northumberland, where Cobdenism is enthroned, and you wiU not find one millowner or manufacturer in thirty whose son served in the Boer war. For forty years England forgot, under Cobden' s teaching, that agriculture meant not only the growth of wheat and the baking of loaves, but the maintenance of a healthy peasantry ; and even now the middle classes leave national defence to those above and HAEDNESS OF HEAET 357 below them. Thus we reap to-day, iii the pro- Zulus, the pro-Boers and pro-I)hiugras of the House of Commons, the results of Cobden's denunciations of the Colonial system and the military caste. He never wearied of describ- ing the navy and the army or what is now the Empire as aristocratic preserves, the apparatus of out-relief for the well-to-do, and a jungle of social intrigue and self-seeking. Wholly lost to sight was the relation between trade and defence. The navy relapsed into impotence. The army was a target for epigrams. National life was protected by the policeman and leading articles, and regulated by the courts of law. We are told to think of Rome and her vain imperial decrees when we see the seething myriads of the great city invited to become pensioners and parasites of the State, Is there any inherent contradiction or incompatibility between social reform and loyalty to our countrymen in Natal, Egypt, and India ? None whatever ; but if we would avoid the catastrophe that overtook Imperial Rome we must understand the nature of national decay. It may be some time before the skilled workman in the English town dwells in the country, before the farmer is a man of science, or the agricultural labourer a highly-paid mechanic ; but there is not a day to lose before we annul the mfluence of the men who, leaving to others the discharge of national duties of defence, have no word too bitter for their kith and kin across the sea, whether in India, the Nile Valley, or Natal, Rome fell, as Matthew Arnold says, because her heart was hardened, Romans 358 O.H.M.S. ceased reverence to tlie Eagles for the same reason that pro-Zulus lose afiection for the Flag. The problem of the native races in tropical and sub-tropical countries is especially difficult in Africa. The factors of the native problem are elemental ; they deal with sex and life. The Garden Colony covers thirty-six hmidred thou- sand square miles. The climate is delightful ; the soil rich ; water abounds. The Drakensberg Mountains act as a watershed. Pasturage is excellent and extensive. Natal is a pleasant land to live in, but the agricultural and pastur- able districts are thinly populated, and the Kaffirs have been foolishly allowed to establish vested rights over the best of the land. Labour is un- necessary to the majority of the adult coloured males. Women work for the men. The latter are so satisfied with their lazy life that natives of India have been imported to develop such portions of the soil as have been brought under cultivation by the colonists. Ample food, leisure, and an idle life produce in Kaffirs the same evils as those scheduled by Dr. Watts as the temptations of idle hands at home. Kaffir passions are stimulated by the condition of their lives, while the memories of Dingan and Cetewayo rarefy the respect and dilute the fear which black men in other parts of the world feel for whites. To certain classes of Kaffirs, as with a minority of negroes in the Southern States of America, defenceless white women present irresistible temptations to their lust. NEGEOID LUST 359 The. subject is not agreeable, but justice to our kitli and kin, who are outnumbered at least in the proportion of ten to one, and a great deal more in the country districts, requires that the fact should be stated and re-stated whenever the pro-Zulus, who are the same individuals as the pro-Boers, publish their libels against our brothers who hold the black wolf by the ears. Pro-Zulus, in their enthusiasm against the flag of their country, deny or minimise the sex-danger which lies at the root of the relations between blacks and whites. Profligacy in the white man is held up to scorn ; negroid lust is condoned, because white immorality being a weapon against the flag, Kaffir sensuality is a matter of no importance. In addition to the impulse given to anti- patriotism by the new nomadic habit of the British people, there is another reason why much patriotism has recently been smothered in the lethal-chamber. Alone among Euiopean countries England for centuries has heard no shot exchanged with foreigners on national soil. War is the struggle for national existence, and that has now become a thing apart. A large class of intelligent and benevolent people has arisen which has lost vision and judgment on the esentials of national life and national service. Their treatment of the Natal Colonists is identical with their treatment of othei people with whom they disagree ; such as the licensed victuallers and beer-sellers. The point is an interesting one, because the desire for prohibition springs from the same cause as pro-ZuIuism. The opponents S60 O.H.M.S. of public-liouses do not use them and, therefore, wish to prohibit other people from using them or from buying beer, wine, or spirits, for the same reason that they wished to prevent Dinizulu's arrest. It is useless to argue ; you may point out in vain that the consumption of beer per head has diminished in the last forty years. The paupers who were forty per thousand of the popu- lation in 1870 are only twenty-five per thousand now. The daily average of prisoners has diminished from one hundred and eleven per thousand to sixty per thousand. Savings banks deposits have increased from thirty-three shillings to ninety-three shillings per head, and licence-holders convicted for offences have sunk from fourteen to four per thousand. If the pro-Zulu prohibitionist people had their way the navy and the aimy would be disbanded ; in six months there would not be a white woman in Natal, an English administrator in the Soudan or Egypt, or a public-house in England. These anti-patriots breathe an atmosphere of their own. They see through a glass darkly ; to them men are as trees walking. Other people's sins occupy their waking hours. A dissipated and incapable sot like Dinizulu is a hero in their eyes, not because of his courage, his ancestry, his virtue, or his colour, but because, being weaker than and opposed to the British, he must be in the right. This fallacy of confusing weakness with right has led to untold misery, loss, and bloodshed. Murderers are caught red-handed, and cheat the scaffold even -in this country because they EXETER HALL 361 are lonely, sorrowful, good-looking, and weaker than the law. Philanthropist antipathy to the flag expresses itself in support of Egyptian wind- bags, whose bodies would be found in sacks in the Nile or the Bosphorus a week after the English had left Egypt. In Ireland the anti-patriots support the Birrclhsation of law ; not because they think that grazing is a nefarious pursuit, but because cattle-driving is the act of the weaker party, and unintelligent benevolence sides with the under dog. The vital mistake made by the pro- Zulus in South Afi'ica is on the identity of the under dog. It is a doubtful question in the judg- ment of the most experienced Colonists whether the English and the Dutch combined could suc- cessfully withstand a black rebellion. The only safety of the whites lies in prompt action and superior equipment. Eeadiness to cut off the head of the tortoise of disaffection is the condition of safety in South Africa. The murmuring of subterranean fires are audible to all who have ears to hear. Collisions between the white and black races when they occur are like the surf that re- sounds on the sunlit coast during the monsoon. The fringe of foam marks the meeting of bar- barism and civilisation. It is impossible to convey to the church- and chapel-going population of the United Kingdom the speechless loathing felt by the average South African Colonist for all that is meant by the term ' Exeter Hall.' European nations may amalga- mate. Not only is marriage barred between the black and white races, but even the contact of black with white children is injurious to tlie latter. 362 O.H.M.S. The late Lord Carnarvon spoke truly when he said ' The creation of a black colony means decrepitude and slow decay.' So it comes to pass that the party of the late Bishop Colenso, the Peace Society, which is the raw material of war, and Exeter Hall influence generally are obnoxious to the men on the spot. THE GEEEN SPHINX AND THE SEA Irishmen have long suffered from the management of the unfit. Irish moods vary between dreamily gentle meditation and volcanic explosion. Mr. Gladstone, who did not understand the multiple personalities of Ireland, always referred to Erin as ' She.' There never was a time when Ireland was a ' She,' or could be treated other- wise than as a nation possessed with multiple personalities. The elemental passions of two incompatible Irelands lie as near to the surface as molten rock and superheated steam in the unstable area of seismic disturbance. Average Englishmen know more of France, Germany, and Switzerland than of Erin. Few have the opportunity, fewer the desire, to understand the subtle and elusive charm and stainless honour of the Irish Celts in the South, or the strength and dignity of the stern and independent Scots settlers who made the North of Ireland a model of material progress. When King Edward went to Derry City in 1903, and from that historic citadel of Protestantism invited his Irish subjects of divers creeds to ' treat one another with mutual toleration and respect,' it seemed as though a new era had dawned. The Irish Land Act, by which the British taxpayer 864 O.H.M.S. contracted to advance in cash and credit a sum of not less than £112,000,000, was a practical and costly demonstration of the reality of the new- state of things. The late King's aptitude for peacemaking and His Majesty's natural desire to signalise his reign by the settlement of the Irish difficulty were followed by a series of measures — of which the Land Act was one — honestly intended to end strife. To understand the Irish question it is necessary to grasp the positions of the three parties concerned. Firstly, the relations of Ireland to the British Empire are too often ignored in considering the claims of Ulster and Nationalism respectively. The Empire, however, is more important than either Orangemen or Nationalists, and imperial interests cannot be set aside in favour of either north or south. The world's power to-day is divided among five nations possessing great fleets. Nations without great fleets may have riches, influence, and a future, but they are not world powers, because sea power determines territorial and trade questions. Ireland is an island without forests, iron, or coal ; she does not possess, and Nationalists cannot hope to acquire under any conceivable circumstances, either a powerful fleet or a mercantile marine of theu* own. An island Power that does not possess and cannot hope to acquire a powerful fleet lives on sufferance, and if the English ' yoke ' were thrown off to-morrow the effect would be, not the establishment of an Irish republic, as Sinn Fein fondly hopes, but inevitable overlordship by the great Power which succeeded England as mistress of the sea. This aspect of the VOTES WITHOUT EIFLES 365 Irish question, though seemingly remote, is all- important and is entirely lost sight of. Collapse of the British Empire would not mean Irish independence. It might mean that the sea power of Greater Germany would assert itself, or that a struggle between the United States and the successor of Charles the Fifth for the overlordship of Europe, including Ireland, might ensue. Whatever happened it would never mean an independent Ireland. Irish independence could only follow the defeat of the German Empire after the British Empire had collapsed, since Irish harbours on the Atlantic are too tempting a bait for any ' Admiral of the Atlantic ' to leave in Irish hands ; and whoever commands the coast controls the interior. While the British Empire holds together, it is the resolve of Englishmen to maintain paramountcy over Ireland, to preserve the Union, and to forbid the creation of any military or quasi-military Nationalist force. Even Liberal Governments, which are professedly sympathetic with Irish Nationalism, tacitly accept this principle by refusing to allow the formation of one volunteer battalion in Ireland. Consider what this means. Either the Irish people are to be trusted with Home Rule, in which case they may be trusted with rifles, or they are not to be trusted with rifles, and are, therefore, obviously unfit for Home Rule. There is no escape from this dilemma. All senti- mental phrases about union of hearts turn on the one question as to whether or not the population of north and south alike are to be trusted with rifles. We have often had in Belfast and in Derry an 366 O.H.M.S. object-lesson of what would have happened if Mr. Haldane's Territorial Army Bill had included a provision for trusting the Irish people, in the logical sense, and giving them the same means of self- defence which are given under that measure to British counties. British paramountcy in Ireland, while maintaining the Union, must forbid the accrediting of any Irish Ambassador, Minister, or Consul to Foreign States, and it involves indelible responsibility of Britain for maintaining order in Ireland. These conditions are thrust on England not by pride, but by geography. Until she is dead, England will never allow Ireland to exercise the functions of a sovereign and independent nation. The Irish people may develop all their racial strength on the lines of Sinn Fein, but only in co-ordination with Britain and the other States that go to form the British Empire. The borderline that separates the practicable fi-om the impossible is the strategical compulsion imposed on the Government of the United Kingdom by our international relations and the need for supremacy at sea. ■ This being the position of any English Cabinet, whatever its composition, it is clear that both sides have erred in their treatment of Ireland. Liberals have listened too exclusively to the Nationalist view, while Conservatives and Unionists have favoured Orange ascendancy. Imperial policy pre- scribes rigid impartiality between the contending parties, absolute justice, and the utmost extension of liberty consistent with the condition described above — namely, that under no circumstances shall the task of our admirals in a maritime war be ORANGE ASCENDANCY 367 made harder by the surrender of strategical points into other hands than ours. Let us now consider the view of Irish Nationalists, It cannot be denied that Protestant ascendancy with practical control of the loaves and fishes still exists in Ireland. The English people have no quarrel with the Irish. On the contrary, we are touched by the splendid qualities of the Irish regiments and admire the versatility and charm of the ' Celtic fringe.' Ulster Unionists and many Presbyterian ministers, however, foment strife between Anglo-Saxon and Celt and between Protestant and Catholic. Extreme Orangeism is associated not with Protestantism but with pelf ; not with conscience but with cash. Rightly or wrongly, and there is much to be said for their view, Nationalists hold that salaries and place- hunting are the basis of Unionist politics in Ulster. Selfish manipulation by the Orange group of Irish resources and English credulity is an undoubted fact, as I am about to prove, and no rational and independent Englishman in a position to judge doubts that Irish affairs might be conducted upon Irish soil, with great advantage both to England and to Ireland, without infringing the conditions for maintaining inviolable supremacy of the British race over Irish ports and harbours, and for maintaining order over every square mile of Irish soil. Nationalists further maintain with truth that, cattle-driving, Belfast, and Dcrry notwithstanding, Ireland is nearly crimeless. Since 1889 there is not one year in which the criminal offenders committed 368 O.H.M.S. for trial and convicted in Scotland have not ex- ceeded the number of convicted criminals in Ireland. Crime in Scotland is twice as great as crime in Ireland. If Ireland is freer from crime than Scot- land, her moral condition presents a still greater contrast. The Irish illegitimacy rate is one-tenth of that prevaiUng in Scotland. There is no part of the United Kingdom freer from what is commonly called immorality than the Irish Kingdom. Agra- rian crime, other than cattle-driving, has almost disappeared, and any independent inquirer with a knowledge of facts on the spot must admit that landlords who seek to obtain for bogs the price of rich plough lands contribute to disorder equally with the recalcitrant tenants. If Ireland is twice as crimeless and ten times as moral as Scotland, she is governed with a prodigality of waste which is bitterly resented by the majority who are ex- cluded from enjoying their fair share of govern- ment appointments. With 300,000 fewer population than Scotland, Ireland costs £2,000,000 a year more to govern. The majority of the salaries and fees drawn from the taxpayer are spent mainly on twenty-three per cent, of the Irish population. The law costs of Ireland are £421,687 ; the law business of Scotland is managed for £259,373. Besides the Irish law costs there is an annual item for the Irish Land Commission of £133,542, a monstrous sum to pay for the work performed. The longer the process of carrying out the Land Act can be delayed the longer will the taxpayer be compelled to pay three salaries for one man's job. The Local Government Board in Ireland for the current year cost £63,566, four times the PEOFLIGATE WASTE 369 amount spent in Scotland. The Royal Irish Constabulary cost £1,310,038, or three times the amount required to look after double the amount of crime in Scotland. The difference is not accounted for by murders, robberies, or outrages ; nor is it accounted for by any duties performed by the Irish Constabulary which are not performed by the Scotch police. They are assigned to the wrong places. The establishment is unnecessarily large and the men are underpaid. The fatal effect of tampering with law and order, or the unseen foundations of society, is shown by the recent trouble in Belfast. A section of the Royal Irish Constabulary amounting to not more than five hundred men, observing the profit that came to law-breakers in the west of Ireland, took a leaf out of the book of the evicted tenants. Their mutiny was nipped in the bud, but too late to prevent the contagion of disorder from infecting the Belfast mob, with the result that for the second time since 1893 a Liberal Government has fired upon British subjects in the streets. Talk of Macedonia, the Pogroms of Plehve, or Cahfornian disorders — we have only to look across St. George's Channel to see the effect of paltering with disorder and the result of squandering national resources for the purpose of obtaining pohtical support. Officialdom does not want ideas or independence, it wants cash ; but there is a sum of £2,000,000 sterling now wasted on the nominees of an effete system which is available for better uses. Of this sum £700,000 could be saved by the co-ordination of the Boards now responsible for the government BB 370 O.H.M.S. of Ireland ; £300,000 could be safely withheld from the legal profession. The English ratepayer is a shareholder in the Irish land system, and John Bull is the actual or prospective landlord of 150,000 tenants. When the Land Act is completed John Bull mil be the solitary absentee landlord of Ireland. It is therefore a foolish policy either to insult Catholics to please Protest- ants or to insult Protestants to please Catholics. The Liberals have done the latter ; the Unionists the former. The magic of property is already beginning to work in Ireland. There is no mystery about this ' magic ' ; it is the ineradicable instinct of ownership which exacts from every man greater effort than he will ever yield as a mere borrower. The educational system in Ireland is behind that of Scotland, Grermany, Denmark, or Japan, and also of more backward States. Only one in five hun- dred of the Irish Roman Catholic priests receives a University education. It is difficult to under- stand why it was ever dangerous to allow CathoUcs to receive higher education, from CathoUc funds, when a late First Sea Lord of the Admiralty was a pronounced Catholic and his uncle was a Jesuit priest. If we could trust Lord Walter Kerr with the British navy, surely we might earlier have trusted Ireland with a Catholic University. Britain needs all the manhood she can command to hold her own in the rivalries of peace and the sterner rivalries of war. To win the trust and friendship of Ireland is not impossible, and we need all the reinforcements we can gain. The population of France, our friend and ally, is stationary or receding. Japan is distant and AN IRISH ALLIANCE 371 Asiatic. The United States do not love us. War no longer rests with the people or government of Great Britain. We may find ourselves suddenly at war without notice if France or Japan require our aid. Is it not worth while for Irishmen and EngUshmen to follow the late King's wise advice and to treat one another ' with mutual toleration and respect,' and see whether, by wise and non- party treatment of the land and education laws, the Kingdom of Ireland could not be brought to strengthen the British Empire ? Except in Ireland, the tendencies and forces of the present day are all converging towards a united empire. There is only one discordant note. All the Prime Ministers of the daughter States are Home Rulers obviously because they do not miderstand the strategical question. The Parliaments of Canada and Australia have voted, ignorantly and impertinently, reso- lutions inviting British Ministers to give self- government to Ireland. Disease exists in the relations between Britain and Ireland, and if this disease is healed it will neither be by Ulster sur- rendering her Unionism and Protestantism nor by the Nationalists surrendering their nationality under the British flag. There has been too much loyalty to party, too little fealty to the country ; too much regard for party services, too httle recognition of patriotism. Jilinisters are appointed to manage Ireland and are figure-heads ; few understand their work. Favouritism is rife, mismanagement and extravagance permeate all departments because the tree of ascendancy still nourishes. Even Belfast and Derry riots, therefore, are not without their uses if they reveal to Orangemen the preposterous character of their claim to im 2 872 O.H.M.S. dictate Irish policy ; to Nationalists tlie absurdity of their dream of an independent Ireland ; and to the British their indelible responsibihty for order and the indissoluble nature of the tie that unites the British Isles. THE SENTINEL OF EMPIRE As the world knows little of its greatest men, so the most considerable of our public departments is sometimes laughed at and often misunderstood. The Foreign Office is not laughed at abroad. Russians credit British diplomacy with the finesse of Machiavelli, and attribute to their own Depart- ment of Foreign Affairs the stupidity of a moujik. English diplomacy at its best is very good indeed ; at its worst our great Thinking Department reflects, like the War Office, the shpshods of the nation. National safety depends on three things — incomparable diplomacy, a supreme navy, and an army ready for instant war. Consummate diplomacy is the first essential, because the fleet and the army only come into action after the Foreign Office has done its work. War has been averted more than once during the last few years by the silent skill of a department where the clerks ride in the Row, assemble for the day's labours at eleven a.m., smoke at their work, and are coveted as guests by hostesses from Tokyo to Washington. Supercilious, perhaps, and conscious of the defects of tlie world outside, there is among them a tradition that members of the service should do everything twice as well as other people — and do it mainly at their own cost. A few 374 O.H.M.S, years ago tlie Foreign Office was regarded, perhaps justly, as our most incapable department. King Edward, however, on his accession announced his intention of requuing efficiency as well as divine calm and mysterious immensity from his diplo- matists. A silent revolution was soon effected by reforms, retirements, and the application of com- mon sense, which has wrought changes in the diplomacy of Great Britain as real as those visible in the Royal Navy. Nothing leaked out. The public read without concern occasional announcements that Sir So- and-So had retired,that young men were appointed to important Embassies. Good diplomacy is in the front rank of the useful sciences. There is no mystery about it. Sincerity, dexterity, and foresight are its chief weapons, and worn-out Ambassadors who were rusty, gouty, and irritable ; Ministers in charge of Legations who were neither dexterous, sincere, nor prescient, quickly received a hint that promotion would not come their way, and, so far as the Treasury allowed, old-age pensions were allotted to the diplomatic lame, halt, and blind. Even the permanent head of the Foreign Office was retired — the fog in the Foreign Office disappeared. Sir Charles Hardinge succeeded after a series of failures. With the exception of Lord Pauncefote, who was an outsider brought into the sacred pre- cincts of the Foreign Office because a veritable famine of brain-power was raging indoors, every Under-Secretary failed. Lord Rosebery, when Foreign Minister, was allowed to make a stupid blunder in his attempt to make a Congo KANSAS 375 agreement, because tliere was no system of indexing treaties mtb cross references. The abortive searcli of the German vessels Bundesrath and Hertzog during the Boer war was due to the credulity and incapacity of the Foreign OfiEce, and the nation felt the crack of the German whip in the form of a demand for extravagant compensation. I could name a score of instances before the death of Queen Victoria Avhereby Foreign Office blunders made it a model of levity and thoughtlessness. One instance of stupidity, however, which occurred immediately after King Edward's accession, is understood to have had some share in the changes above referred to. When Queen Victoria died, the Legislature of the American State of Kansas sent a message of condolence to King Edward. The answers to condolences offered by foreigners w^ere composed by the Foreign Office. In transmitting the King's thanks the Foreign Office spoke of the ' loyalty ' and sympathy of the people of Kansas. The Kansas Legislature felt itself so insulted that it ordered the message to be expunged from the State records in consequence of the use of the word ' loyalty.' The British Foreign Office did not know that Kansas was an American State. One hears little about the drawbacks of a diplomatic career, but the prizes of the profession are few, and some of them are given to outsiders. Mr. Bryce's appointment to AVashington blighted the lifelong hopes of moi-e than one diplomatist more highly qualified than the author of ' The Holy Koman Empire.' Climate is often a serious drawback. The South American Kepublics on the Pacific coasts are not exactly the best places 376 O.H.M.S. to locate a family. Risks to life itself are not unknown, as was the case in the seige of the Pekin Embassies. Pay in the diplomatic service does . not begin for two years, is then scanty, and never equals the necessary expenditure. The qualifica- tions of candidates are good connections, the nomination of the Secretary of State, the possession of £400 a year, and ability to pass examinations which are now tests of capacity. Good manners are desirable, but more than one eminent diplo- matist has found bad manners and temper no impediments when he had climbed the ladder. I have seen a great Ambassador tear the bell-handle off the wall and hurl it at the tardy servant as he stood, quaking, at the door. Cursing and swearing was not wholly unknown until the besom of reform recently swept and garnished the halls of diplomacy. An astute young secretary, annoyed at being called by his chief — renowned for the use of tropical language — after midnight to act as amanuensis, took up a pen and put it down with a flash of lurid language. A second pen met with no better fate. When a third nib w^as consigned to the lower regions, his Excellency, aghast, asked for an explanation from his secretary. ' I have been told. Sir, on high authority, that if I wish to rise in the service I should model my conduct on that of my chiefs. The words to which your Excellency objects, as you well know, are favourites of your Excellency.' ' D — n your eyes. Sir,' said another Ambassador to an attache. ' D — n your Excellency's eyes,' replied the young man. The Imperial Intelligence Department, though far from perfect, is no longer busy in idleness. I LADY TYPISTS 377 thirsty for undeserved distinctions, prodigal of opj)ortunities, or indifferent to national interests. It no longer despises the business methods which alone succeed in modern times. Young lady typists were successfully installed in Downing Street without the dire consequences predicted by Tite Barnacles. No secrets of the weary Titan are revealed through feminine indiscretion, although secret dispatches and important papers are copied in the typists' department. The nation is sup- posed to be in a hot fit for reform, but no serious attack has yet been made on the Foreign Office in Parliament, although there is still room for improvement. With vast interests in Asia, it dispenses with an Asiatic Department, and it is said that no member of the Foreign Office staff can speak any Eastern language. Sir E. Satow, of course, is a pundit ; but he is not a F.O. clerk. One would think that proficiency in Japanese is as much required of somebody in Downing Street as knowledge of English by everybody in the Foreign Office of Tokyo. The collection of information about foreign countries is still defective. Navy and Army compete with each other to collect and pay for information some of which, at all events, should be obtainable by the ordmary staff of the Embassies. Negotiations are now conducted with such extreme rapidity that complete and accurate information about the actions, habits, and peculiarities of all prominent people should be collected and available for instant use. The Russian Foreign Office records in brown- paper dossiers minute details of every Eng- lishman and Englishwoman with the least influence on Muscovite affairs. The amount of 378 O.H.M.S. wliisky-aiid-sodci consumed by a British Vice- Consul ill Central Asia is duly entered up against his name in St. Petersburg. Having seen some of these dossiers, one is not surprised at the un- canny knowledge displayed by Continental diplo- matists when brought into contact with strangers. In consequence of the immense rapidity of communications, the responsibility of the Foreign Office increases yearly. The nerves of Britain enmesh the world and throb whenever touched. Our alliance with Japan, friendship with France, rivalry with Germany, as the ill-starred Conference at The Hague shows, make every international question a British question, while our guarantees under treaties with China, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Muscat, Persia, Portugal, and France are onerous enough to place old heads on all the young shoulders in the Foreign Office. It would be easy to give examples of the inveter- ate tendency of trained diplomatists to conceal their real intentions. A prominent French states- man was recently in Berlm, where he had an interview with Prince Blilow which turned on the Morocco question. Before leaving he asked the Chancellor to state Germany's intentions regard- ing the Bagdad railway, and was told that ' the project was received so coldly, with such universal displeasure, in fact, that it has been dropped, entirely dropped.' Withm a week the French diplomatist discovered by accident from a member of la haute finance (which has an incomparable EMBASSY ATMOSPHEEE 379 Intelligence Department of its own) that the German Government, at the instance of Prince Billow's denial, was making vigorous efforts in Paris to push forward the Bagdad railway. The disclosure of the Chancellor's little game was, of course, commmiicated to the British Government and the information transmitted to the King's representatives abroad. This incident explains in brief the reason why the atmosphere of a British Embassy is sometimes electrical. The atmosphere of a flagship is electrical, but the Admiral in time of peace has no other duty than preparation for war. The Ambassador, with his debonair, well- groomed, and charming young men, has a more difficult task in one respect than a Commander-in- Chief, whether naval or military, in time of peace. Warfare is his normal state. The Embassy people spend their time in meeting other diplomatists, their cJiers collegiies, who are always trying to outwit them, and about whom they possess knowledge which must always be concealed. If the British military attache wins a steeplechase, or one of the secretaries distinguishes himself as an amateur actor, at bridge, as a poet, or in society, strenuous efforts are made to annul the influence he has gained. An Embassy, like the mess of a crack regiment or the Avard-room of a flagship, resents the appointment of any who cannot contribute something to the dis- tinction of the Ambassador's staff, but the diplomatic atmosphere is, as a rule, too electric for the establishment of private friendship with foreigners. 380 O.H.M.S. The composition of an important Embassy is largely determined by the preferences and idiosyn- crasies of the Sovereign. The establishment of personal relations between the Sovereign and the various Embassies is one of the most fruitful sources of jealousy. Does the Monarch at a Court Ball converse with one Ambassador for a minute longer than with his rival, the fact is reported in full detail to every Government. At Constantinople these rivalries in the presence of the Sultan have sometimes led to amusing results. In order to prevent the British representa- tive from approaching His late Ottoman Majesty the former has been actually penned in a corner of the room by jealous budding diplomatists who engaged his attention while the Sultan was lassoed by the French, German, and Russian Ambassadors. So much of the diplomatic life abroad is necessarily occupied in social duties that social gifts, tact, and the power to please acquire exaggerated importance while more solid acquirements are apt to lie in the background. Take it all in all, however, it is absolutely true that, although force is still the dominant factor in human affairs, the servants of the public employed in our Foreign Affairs are generally as good as those of other countries. THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION WHY SMASH IT ? Millions of people know little more about the British constitution than the fact that clear articulation of the phrase is recognised by the police as a proof of sobriety. The British consti- tution is not fool-proof, like the American consti- tution ; it is vulnerable by those who shun the principle of compromise that miderlies every British institution from monarchy to money- lendmg. If we cast our eyes over the history of all the States that ever were free we may note that hitherto the people's jealousy has always been directed against the executive power. The British were the first to think of limiting that power by making it dependent on the people for its supplies. Many countries have copied or attempted to copy the British constitution. None of them has succeeded. Imperious ministers abroad have seized and held power under constitu- tional forms imported from Britain, but imperious ministers here must destroy the spirit of our constitution before they can seize sole power. In Abyssinia, before the battle of Adowa, General Baratieri received a telegram from Crispi as follows : ' Why do you not attack ? Are you afraid ? 882 O.H.M.S. I order you to advance at once.' Against his own judgment Baratieri obeyed. He went to destruction. Those who have seen the suppressed photograph of the bodies of the Itahan troops on the field of Adowa after mutilation by the Abys- sinians know the effect of one-man or one-chamber government. Crispi's message to . the Italian Greneral Officer Commanding-in-chief was sent without consulting the King, the Cabmet, or the Minister of War. The imported constitution does not work in Latin countries. The first peculiarity of English government is the concentration of the executive power in the person of the sovereign. By making one very great man in the State it was hoped that an effectual check would be imposed on the preten- sions of all ministers and generals and churchmen who aspired to the first place. Disorders which seem to be indigenous on Republican soil have been prevented in England by the adoption of a Limited Monarchy. When the Royal power was annihilated by Cromwell, a fruitless attempt was made to substitute a Republican Government in its stead. The vain efforts of the English to establish among themselves a pure democracy amazed and interested foreigners. Republican- ism neither consorts with the English character nor with England's task, and when means were once discovered to abridge the kingly power, bad kings were fomid better than good presidents. From the accession of Charles the Second to the death of George the Fourth, omitting William the Third, no impartial historian could declare that the English were ruled by a good kmg. L.S.D. 3SB If virtuous, he was stupid or tyrannical ; if genial, he was corrupt, unpatriotic, and licentious. England would never again sufi'er a George the Fourth on the Throne, but she would prefer a moderately bad monarch to a first-rate Republic. Notwithstanding our experience of a long line of kings who were defective in morals, in capacity, or iu good sense, the hereditary throne is now both more necessary to oiu* national existence and, on the whole, more popular — and more justly popular — with the masses than ever before. Our tenure of India and our prospects of a united empire depend mainly on the safety of the throne. The basis of the British constitution is the capital principle that belongs to Parliament alone. The Commonsat all times have been anxiously tenacious of the power of the purse, the Lords bcmg expected, in the case of money Bills, ' simply or solely either to reject or accept them.' The tradition of the House of Hanover is to rely on the people. Aristo- cracy is no help to an English king at variance with his subjects. Hence the passionate desire of our Celtic rulers to make out that the king is already, or is about to be, at variance with his subjects. Head of the church, the navy, and the army ; the source of all judicial power, and universal proprietor of the kingdom, the king is the fountain of honour and is the sole authority for the creation of peers of the realm. It sometimes happens that a sovereign wishes to create a peerage which a Prime Minister is miwilling to advise, and it also happens that Ministers may desire to defeat 384 O.H.M.S. their party opponents by a wholesale manufacture of peerages. To this the king may object. Ministers cannot make five hundred peers without the king, nor can the king make one peer without nunisters ; but, whatever the king does or refrains from douig, he can do no wrong. Mmisters, however, are not immune from error. The kmg is above the reach of all courts of law, and his person is sacred and mviolable. The power of the king is due to tradition, to personal capacity, and especially because he never goes out of office. In a few years he acquires more experience than any minister. Being detached from party, the national aspect of thmgs appeals to him more than to party politicians. It is not that the king is more patriotic than his majesty's ministries, but because each member of a cabuiet, unlike the king or the masses of his subjects, is immersed m a continual struggle for the ascendency of his party. Millions of citizens who never come in contact with the governing circle have little conception of the absorbing and compulsory service exacted by the party system from its votaries. Party comes before patriotism, before family, even before self. Party is like Islam. It drives man's nature and bmds him over to service from which there is no dispensation. A bad party man is looked upon as infamous, because his mind is judicial. Crimes committed for party are regarded as venial. Lies told for party are eulogised and rewarded. The Chmese Lie, the Old Age Pensions Lie, the Grocery Lie, were devised by party men and fired as projectiles into the ranks of the enemy, propelled by the high explosive of party passion. Party believes what FAULTY FINANCE 385 it will. For party water runs uphill ; for party a single chamber is a safe repository for the destinies of the race ; for party money is accepted from a criminal dynamitard to pay stipends to members of the Imperial Parliament. Suppression of salient facts that tell against one's own side is the rule of party. Statements were made on high authority in 1909 to the effect that were the real state of the navy known to the nation panic would ensue. There was no cause for panic. Ministers were alarmed. Grave anxiety will continue to prevail so long as German advances to France and to the United States present the possibility of a union of the three Powers against us, and so long as our Imperial Budget is provided only out of British resources. But party can never make a strong navy or army. Owing to the Outs exaggerating the sins of the Ins, the situation of om- finances is veritably appalling. Little interest is taken in national finance by the public. The essence of national liberty is the control of finance by representatives of the nation. It does not follow that the real national representatives are members of the House of Commons or that the majority in the House of Commons is representative of the majority of the nation. The theory of the constitution is the control of public expenditure by the House of Commons. How many realise that the House of Commons has ceased to control public expendi- ture ? Nearly seventy millions sterling is spent automatically. No Government cares a straw what votes are debated or how long a time is cc 386 O.H.M.S. consumed or wasted in the discussion. Every one of the votes for spending money that remains after twenty-three days' discussion by bores, cranks, Republicans, and Socialists is automati- cally thrust into the guillotine and passed at the rate of millions a minute without one word of discussion. This is not control of finance, and it is not constitutional. The theory of the British constitution is that the House of Commons shall consist of re- presentatives loyal to king and constitution. (Since members of the House of Commons were allowed to take the Oath of Allegiance though avowedly hostile to the British Empire, the mis- management of the national purse falls little short of a point which in City circles would be described as criminal. Public money is used to bribe interests whose support is required by the Govern- ment in power. The efiicient workman is compelled to provide for the old age of the inefficient work- man, though the former is not required to contribute to his own support at the age of seventy. When the House of Commons sanctioned this unprin- cipled concession to party it was nearly unanimous. A few faithful souls stuck to their guns and told the truth. Most of them have lost their seats. Mere railing at party is childish. Our duty is to strengthen our party, to improve it, and to fight for it. Any scatterbrain can be a revolutionary ; any fool, a stolid and immovable Tory. Skill, good temper, and high principle are needed for the statesmanship that avoids immobility on the ENGLAND IS WHIG 387 one side and the Gadarene rush on the other. That England is left centre is shown by history. We have always shirked revolution. Our so- called revolutions were compromises, even Crom- well's. Constructive government is now the only alternative to revolution and collapse of Empire. Support of our leaders should, therefore, be uncon- ditional and effective, but I deny the hereditary system in party leadership. Our leaders should be required to revise their former methods of administration of party rewards and of apportion- ing to servile henchmen seats in the House of Commons. The idea that the average constituency " elects ' a candidate is fiction. The constituency is rarely consulted. In the majority of cases a man with money goes to the party wirepuller and is given the chance of contesting a seat in return for the promise of so much cash. If a would-be candi- date has ability and character, but provides only part or none of the cost, he receives smooth words and is sent to contest an impossible seat. If he succeeds after two attempts in bringing down the majority within a small margin of success, the probability is that he will be thrown aside and the electoral plum given to some other Jack Horner who wishes to put his thumb into the electoral pie. Misuse of the Fountain of Honour also makes for anarchy and Socialism. Lord Kelvin attracted no attention from the Govern- ment so long as he was merely a man of science. When he became a politician he was made a peer without delay. Helmoltz, the ' opposite number ' of Lord Kelvin in Germany, was made a Baron cc 2 388 O.H.M.S. for liis services to science. The thinking depart- ments of party are of the nature of family circles. If the affairs of these islands alone were concerned, clotted nepotism would not matter. Who can doubt that the storm now gathering will tax to the utmost the abilities of the best possible men we can coax or drive into acceptance of the slavery of power ? In the event of war what ministry could stand a week if London is unable to obtain food ? Who on our side is thinking out that problem ? In a great war will Lancashire mill- hands allow food stored at Liverpool to go to Birmingham or Brighton ? Will Glasgow or South- ampton permit food to pass on to inland towns ? The skulking loafers in London, many of them foreigners and desperate, amount to over two hundred thousand. The police in the streets of London at any one time, except in emergencies, are about six thousand. The Territorials support the civil power at their peril. Seventy years ago De Tocqueville, in his * Democracy in America,' pointed to the great democratic revolution that he held to be irresistible. The correlation of the parts of the British Empire are more complicated and the task of welding them together more difficult than was the task of Chatham or of Pitt, but the thing can be done. The British Empire is the most complicated instrument of civilisation now in existence ; the British constitution the only machinery with elasticity sufficient to control it. Destroy one part and you destroy all, for the centre of gravity is fixed only so long as the three estates of the realm maintain their equilibrium as the resultant THE TWO WINGS 389 of forces seemingly opposed, but which really are organic and essential parts of the whole. One wing of a bird might as reasonably seek to abolish the veto of the other wing as for the popular chamber, that reflects our moods, to destroy the house in which our permanent convictions are enshrined. All second chambers are Conservative, and to complain of their Conservatism is discontent with water for being wet or fire for being hot. WORK As the solar system and all tte other suns and their satelUtes silently drift towards their goal in the Milky Way, the universe vibrates with work. From atoms to emperors, everything works that Uves. Not to work means decomposi- tion either in man or matter. Therefore if work be a curse, unemployment is worse than a curse. How difficult it is to take up work after a hohday ! Energy may be increased by long rest, but at the end of long rest the faculty for drudgery is less. The longer the period of unemployment, the greater the disincUnation to tug at the traces, unless the work be of that rare kind which saddens us only when we leave it. We, whose work is varied and interesting, are apt to forget the dull irksomeness of the iron collar encircling the neck of the majority whose work is uninspiring and whose leisure yields scant elation. Since 1817 the distress of the people has never been more dire. Gaunt faces haunt one's dreams. London is a circle of an inferno. A few are unemployable, but the bulk of the workless are the victims of misfortune, not fault. Of the sincerity of their desire for work there is no shadow of doubt, and since the only remedy for unemployment is employ- ment, its discovery is the first duty of rulers. WOEK IS MEDICINE 391 An assembly of men nearly a thousand strong, who must be verbose, but who need not be wise, are supposed to deliberate on the affairs of a favoured but improvident people. Delegation of work under such circumstances is inevitable. Parliament lounges, dawdles, and counts out. The Cabinet being the sole deposi- tory of Parliament's power, Party is enthroned and the country is left mainly to chance or un- paid patriotism. The waste of work in the House of Commons is appalling. The profusion of Nature in bringing so many lives into the world to ensure the survival of a few is in sharp contrast with the economy she displays in the conservation and correlation of her forces. Civilised man, unlike Nature, being a spendthrift of his organised energy, neglects the fit and tenderly cherishes the imperfect specimens of the race. Parliament breeds the work-shy and pensions the fraudulent, and then howls at the task of providing for them. Work is the one condition of health and of recovery from sickness. When men retire from work they usually retire into another world. Work is a medicine as well as a curse — even to the sick. Dr. Walther, of Nordrach, long ago came to the conclusion that the cure of consumption among the poor was impossible because his plan of treatment only succeeded -vvith patients having resources -within themselves sufficient to modify boredom, and thus avoid idleness with its inevit- able consequences. Non-thinking consumptives cannot endure the tedium of feeding, rest, and walking exercise without getting into mischief, 392 O.H.M.S. and that is why the work of many sanatoria is absolutely wasted. At the Cardii? Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute, held in 1908, Dr. Jane Walker, M.D,, the head of the East AngUan Sanatorium, stated, as the result of her great experience, that poor consumptives' chances of recovery are far greater when they are induced to work. Dr. Jane Walker accordingly imported two French experts to teach her patients ' intensive culture' under bell-jars (cloches). The popular idea of three months at a sanatorium, and then a discharge ' cured,' stands on a par with our system of stud farms for the insane, which produces more insanity than it cures. One of the silliest of Socialist catchwords is the apphcation of the term ' workers ' to manual labourers alone. Like other Socialist freaks of philosophy, this assumption would be humorous were it not for the fact that machinery, which, though liable to break down, is free from disease, can generally be substituted for manual labour and even for the lower intellectual tasks. No mechanism, however, can replace the worker whose output is in ideas or in leadership. By common consent leadership is the highest of all work. Superman uses his vitahty in the inspira- tion of his followers. From such work there is no release. Day and night the born commander is chained to his task. He sleeps only in snatches. No hour is wasted. The loftiest minds at times of crisis and of danger refute the futility that manual labourers alone deserve the title of ' workers.' I will give a concrete example. Documents relating to the defence of India from WHITE WOMEN IN INDIA 393 invasion and rebellion when Eussia was the enemy and France was regarded as her inevitable ally have lately come into my hands. The work involved by these strategical studies was colossal, and although the theory of invasion that inspired them has happily disappeared — for the moment — the work was not wasted. The contingency of rebelUon remains. Everybody with friends in India is disquieted as to the measures taken for providing places of refuge for the British and European civilians scattered about the face of India. Cossack invasion of India would inevitably have been followed by a native rebellion. It is now a question whether rebelUon without invasion is possible. All the manual labourers in Europe could not have produced the least of these strate- gical studies. It seems extraordinary, yet it is true, that a Government that has annually spent millions to provide against famine and to ' educate ' the natives should have grudged money which would secure the Uves of its own countrywomen throughout Hindustan. If the storm bursts and finds India unprepared with places of refuge, the deaths of all that are killed or outraged for the want of a place to fly to will lie at the door of Parliament that will not work. While the hospitality of the Inns of Court is outraged by the presence of Babu students con- spiring against British rule in India it were folly to ignore facts. In the absence of armed assistance from outside the suppression of an Indian rising is comparatively simple, provided timely steps are taken. I calculate tliat there are fortv-two 394 O.H.M.S. thousand Eiu'opean women and ten thousand British children in India. Nothing is more likely to hamper our action in putting down rebellion than having large numbers of women and children to think of during the storm. On the approach of danger all Europeans should be required to send home their women and children, transport being provided by the Government. If we are pre- pared for a rebellion it cannot be precipitated ; if we are not prepared the Government is guilty. To disencumber the fighting men of the women and children, instead of having a bad effect on the natives, is an act that would be an earnest of our resolve to hold India. To act on the contrary view is to contend that a would-be murderer is more likely to carry out his intentions when his victim is ready for him than when he is unready. Retention of India is our national education in work, resolve, and courage, and until the head of the Englishman's home accepts responsibility for India as for England he is fooling with fortune. Who will awaken Britain ? The watchword of the English in India is ' Never say die ' whatever the odds. No place taken up can ever be surrendered. Let us not forget the massacres of Cawnpore and the surrender of Kabul, and let us remember the lessons of Lucknow, Jellalabad, the house at Arrah, and Rorke's Drift in Natal. England's work in India rests on the staunchness of Mr. Smith. If Smith is more interested in diabolo than in India, four nations, ravenous for Empire, are working day and night for Smith's succession. Work in India requires iron mind and courage, but holding India also requires work in London. AN ENGLISHMAN'S HOME 395 The Daily Mail has made an admirable en- deavour to induce six million Londoners to provide eleven thousand Territorials, all of whom may soon be required in India, in Asia Minor, in Egypt, or on the Belgian frontier. The Daily Mail knows its public. Does it tell young Mr. Smith how sweet and decorous it is to die for England and for India ? No. The newspaper does not dwell on the hardships, pain, and draw- backs of a British soldier's duty, which is always abroad when he is wanted. The inducements held out to recruits are of another kind. The young and reluctant Smith is assured that a Territorial battalion is a privates' club, that the work is light, that the seaside camp is healthy, pleasant, and conducive to good appetite ; that the food is good ; that the recruit will get as much or more than he gives ;, that he needn't go abroad. Bivouacs in the rain after forced marches and no hot food are not mentioned. This is not the spuit that conqueied the Puujaub, the Sikhs, or the Mahratta nobility of the Deccan. It is not the spirit of England in the Peninsular War, nor when she faced a world in arms. It is not the spmt of the English who now hold India. It is the spirit of ping-pong and of missing words. It is not enough for Lord Esher to say that he wants men. Unless the nation is honestly told why men are wanted, and unless those men are properly trained for their work, we are better left to rot behind the shelter of the Navy. Often have I seen an Indian juggler seem to grow a mango tree out of nothing. By clever sleight-of-hand and patter he charms and distracts 396 O.H.M.S. the on-looker until the credulous believe the conjuring is magic. Our War Minister is a clever Tamasha Wallah, but he is not a magician. He juggles with words, figures, and men instead of a mango seed, a basket, a cloth, and a tom-tom. His work is supremely clever. He tom-toms until the cadence bewilders the public into the belief that the mango-tree of an efficient Territorial Army has grown from the bare seed of untrained Volunteers. Not merely the provision of men but the provision of right men is the work of the War Office. In 1907-8 the State trained for war 926,699 men, of whom the Royal Navy took only 185,366, leaving 741,333 as the number of land fighting Britons. This immense total greatly exceeds the peace establishment of the German Army. The country is dazed by the tom-tom and the patter of the Whitehall juggler and his confederates. But of the 741,333 men trained at the cost of the State only the Regulars are efficient for war. National concentration on material things began by the extinction of the yeoman in the eighteenth century and was completed by the sacrifice of the peasant and the farmer in the nineteenth. Cob- denism has weakened our perception of the work in the unseen world as well as the elementary facts of life here. In England ascetics are cranks ; in Asia they are saints with attributes and powers deemed supernatural in London or New York. Yet Mr. Smith might satisf}^ himself by personal experiment that there is a region of work around him where unseen workers tell of things that no gross ear can hear. All that Mr. Smith has to SMITH AS FAKIR 897 do is to go to Asia, sit for ten or twenty years under a bo tree with his eyes fixed on one object. With a diet of pulse and a little fruit, his beverage water ; avoiding human beings, sleeping as little as possible, and practising holding his breath as long as possible, he will then — if he does not die in the process — pass into an exalted state v/here faith, if not removing mountains, develops forces undreamt of in the Strand. Until Mr. Smith has done something of this kind he is not in a position to deny the existence of invisible but accessible force which works for good or evil according to the use that is made of it. The ' burying fakir ' phenomenon has been investigated by the Government of India with every possible precaution, and the fact of a man's surviving interment in the soil after rice planted on his grave was in flower is established by the records both of Calcutta and the Vatican. AUSTRALIA Neighbourless, opinionated, romantic, wealthy, musical, and new, the Australian nation is about to make interesting history. It is always difficult to write about our kin overseas — especially about Australia. She is destined to play a great, perhaps the greatest part in the settlement of the Pacific Ocean proposition, in which English-speakinig people hold the majority of the stock. The touchiness of neighbourless nations, isolated communities, and lonely men is the result of natural law, not of inborn contumacy. A lonely man of ability is a man who abides with good conceit of himself ; often, a man whose self- confidence is sublime ; sometimes megalomaniacal. Never comparing himself with his betters, he absorbs into his innermost soul a belief that, being the superior of anjiihing or anybody he ever sees, he excels those whom he has never seen. His horse is the best horse and his seat the best seat that ever were seen on prairie, on veld, or in the bush. The senior in a street-dwelling firm sometimes thus uses his position of lonely supremacy among clerks and junior partners. Also Emperors, club stewards, and captains afloat and ashore. The LANDOWNBKS' PEIDE 399 Belgians, with neighbours on all sides inhabiting territory which is the cockpit of Europe, are not a conceited nation, though the history of the Low Countries and their commercial success, industry, art, and energy warrant self-esteem. Australia, however, is opinionated for other reasons than the fact that she is neighbourless. She has warrant for the value Australians place on themselves. When a population scarcely exceeding the half of Greater London owns an empty continent the glamour of the landowner surrounds manual labourers Hke a halo. Pastoralists are patricians. A peasant State like Servia may prosper, but pastoral conditions and pastoral traditions inspire the pride that belongs to territorial magnates from Abraham to Vanderbilt. The fact that Britain won Australia and presented it gratis to a handful of Australians in no way detracts from their pride of ownership in a vast quantity of land, A third reason exists for Australian touchiness and Australian self-esteem. Until the new Common- wealth map was prepared the Great Victoria Desert, Gibson's Desert, the Great Sandy Desert, and the bulk of the Northern Territory were marked by cartographers as lands of desolation. Huddled into four cities on the coast, half the Australians, unlike other dwellers in cities, from earliest childhood drink in the elemental vastness, majesty, and terror of the Interior. Exploration by Australians has been carried to a point equalled by no other nation. The courage and resolve imparted by such examples in the Great Lone Land moulded Australian manhood and imparted a dignity to Australian ideals which old nations 400 O.H.M.S. lack. Yes ; tlie Colonials are touchy. Canada resented the title of ' Our Lady of Snows,' Govern- ment publications there give the impression of purple grapes, russet apples, and golden grain — not stinging cold, frozen tussocks, and continual ' freeze-up ' — as the chief characteristic of Canada. The Northern Territory of Australia is more than double the size of France, and does not contain as many white inhabitants as the village near the garden where I am writing. The Northern Territory contains 335,116,800 acres of land, and yet there is not as much land cultivated there as is cultivated by three neighbours of mine who farm for a living. Australian immigration policy has reversed the practice of Canada, with the result that a land capable of supporting two hundred million people holds a practically stationary population of about four millions, many of whom favour artificial restriction, not only of immigration, but of their own famihes. The government of the country is conducted in the interests of manual labourers, who welcome new-comers into their trade unions as little as Tibetans welcome foreigners. A consider- able section of untravelled Australians, conscious of the advantages of non-competition in their favoured land, regard the British with a half-pity bordering on contempt, and the Japanese with a dislike that finds valorous expression in insult. Japan, in Mr. John Foster Fraser's words, is packed to the bursting point. The fierce fecundity of the most virile of the Far Eastern races cannot be expected to perish for lack of rice and fish when SPILT MILK 401 near by is a continent wdtli only four persons to every three square miles, and when many of those persons are practising Malthusians. Rudeness to the Japanese by the Australians has been the rule for twenty years. By rudeness I mean the practical and continuous exhibition of distaste, dislike, repulsion, and disgust. Japan is gifted with a long memory. She can smile and smile and smile for a decade or a century — then she strikes, and strikes home. The stupidity of British brain- leakage which permitted the first Australian settlers to own a continent, won by five French wars paid for by the British and not repaid after opening a capital account with Australia, is a policy that begins to bear fruit. It is no use crjdng over spilt milk. Recriminations are futile. Thinking in compartments is the method of the servant caste. The time has come to face unalter- able logic. Necessity compels the yellow races to obliterate Australian civilisation. The yellow races possess the power to destroy Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane ; to occupy the Northern Territory and to compel future Australians to groom the horses of their Japanese masters ; to tend Mongolian infants and to drag Tartar gentry in the shafts of jinrickshas. The Australians will die gallantly ; they are fierce and steadfast fighters. They will fight and die, but without British aid they will be beaten easily and in detail — so easily that a few years hence the world will wonder at the interesting reminiscences of the dream of a White Australian. The Japanese may prefer first to occupy the Californian and Oregonian coast of North America, DD 402 O.H.M.S. but they could not expect to bold Sau Frannisco, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Victoria, and Van- couver City for more tban tbree years. The ele- mental capacity of ninety milUon North American whites would in that time assert itself and would concentrate its brain and physique on ejecting the yellow man. Australia, however, is in the lion's mouth. For many years Australia has been pin-pricking the Japanese, a people that does not forget because its foe is small, ignorant, and impotent, or because the views of manual labourers prevail over the views of the students of life. I once saAv a rat in a cobra's cage. The rat was unconscious of danger. He sat on his hind legs like a kangaroo, cheerful and placid, preening himself with his forepaws. As the snake drew near, erect for striking, the rat (like a kangaroo in his posture) was unconscious of danger. He did not recognise the striking attitude of the cobra, appre- ciate its power, or understand that in a few seconds he would be a dead rat. The snake drew nearer, and the rat, plucky as a bulldog, tried to play with the snake. The cobra seemed to kiss the rat. All was over. For three generations I have been connected with Australia. Some of my nearest and dearest live or lie there. I love Australia and the Australians. But their sonorous laws preventing Asiatic immigra- tion are sustained only by the guns of the Orion, the Lion, and their sister super-Dreadnoughts ; not by Australian poets or leader writers. The Australian Naval Department can construct nothing, and Lord Kitchener's scheme for territorial training can embody nobody that will save THE VINTAGE OP FOLLY 4(33 Australia from destruction unless Australian immigration policy is altered stock, lock, and barrel. China contains four hundred million people. China is half the size of Australia. India contains three hundred million people. India is half the size of Australia. Japan is one-eighteenth the size of Australia and contains forty-six million people. For practical purposes and when looked at in true perspective the Australian Government is doing little more for the utilisation of Australia than the black fellows they exterminated. There is no reason but the British Fleet why the yellow races should not evict the whites from Australia as the whites evicted the black fellows. The vintage of a hundred years of folly in the treatment of the oversea territories won by the British in the great wars with France now ripens to maturity. Vast unpeopled spaces, in a planet consisting for the most part of sea and desert won carefully and with tears, were handed over to the first white settlers without reserve, conditions, or mortgages. The result was that manual labourers, being more numerous than any other class, control Australian government. Though more enlightened than the manual labourers of other countries, owing to the immensities of Commonwealth possessions and potentialities, the manual labourers of Australia, Uke other democracies, believe firmly just what they want to believe and deny boldly that which they find inconvenient to admit. The Sydney Bulletin, one of the ablest of Social- ist overseas newspapers, teaches its subscribers that England is decadent, that the brain and pluck DD 2 404 O.H.M.S. of Australia are sufficient to keep the world at bay, that navies do not count for much on the Australian side of the Pacific, and that the British character is accurately represented under the name of ' John Bull Cohen/ These propositions are useful to Australian politicians, who, by playing on the foibles of untra veiled and uniglot manual labourers, obtain notoriety and place. During the scare of last year large sums were subscribed in Australia for the purchase of a Dreadnought. When a new arrangement was arrived at between the Commonwealth and the British Government the money was freed for other purposes, and the establishment of Dreadnought farms for the training of British immigrants was contemplated. The arrangement, however, is not popular with Australian manual labourers, and the spectacle of an almost uninhabited continent with undefended wealth concentrated in four accessible coast towns, well within the sphere of Mongolian strategy, is a state of things that favours an unpleasant alteration of the map. Korea, which would not look facts in the face, is now Japan. INDEX AASVOQEL, 13 Abdul Hamid, 195 Abolition of the family, tlie demand for the, 330 Acclimatisation, surprises in, 225 Actors, self-consoioiisness of, 244 Admiralty's Intelligence Depart- ment, the, 200 Advice in the gardening papers, 4, 5 Agricultural communitiea, patriot- ism in, 24 Albert, Prince Consort, 263, 32G Alcoholism and degeneration, 285 Alfred the Great, 270 Altham, Jiajor, 254 Amateur QaTdening, sound advice given by, 6 Amenhotep, 339 American phraseology, 71 American wit, 221 AmpthiU, Lord, 215, 239 Anglo-German friendship, 183 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the, 114 Animals and speech, 126 Animals, surprise in, 221 ' Annual Register ' as a ' bed- book,' 222 Anti-militarism of to-day, the, 345 Antipathies as a governing power, 165 Antipathy between Jew and GentUe, 84 Antipathy to the flag, philan- thropist, 301 Anti-patriotism, socialism and, 245 Anti-vivisectioniste, 296-7 Apache, the moral, 21 Architects, British, and woodland lore, 47 Aristotle, 89 Arithmetic and happiness, 79 Arnold, Matthew, 92, 98, 357 Artifice, manner and, 242 Ascetics, the keener vision of, 61-2 Asia and her lesson to Europe, 23 Asiatic, religion and the, 152 Asiatics and tlie fear of deatli, 57, 151 Asquith, Mr., 71 Astley, Dr., apparition of, 137 Athenians and words, 125 Atmosphere and public opinion, 54-5 Atonement Sacrifices, the origin of, 139-40 Aura of Empire, the, 176 Aura, proof of the existence of the, 173 Austraha and Japan, 402 Austraha and the Navy, 403-4 Australia, flower seasons in, 4 AustraUan courage, 399 AustraUan characteristics, 399 Auto-suggestion, future of, 293, 294 Auto-suggestion, healthy, 139 Avoidable, the inevitable and the, 62, 63 Babies, Germany's million, 179 Bacon, Francis, 110, 336 406 INDEX Baden-Powell, General, and the Boy Scoute, 26-7 Balaclava Charge, the folly of the, 211 Ealfour, A. J., 105, 186, 187 Balfour, P. H., 170 Balzac, Honore de, 196 Barnes, Mary, the Case of, 144, 145-6 Barrie, J. M., 196 Bath, Marquis of, 47 Bathurst, Earl, 46 Beardsley, Aubrey, 99 Bcbel, Professor, the socialism of, 316 Bedford, Duke of, 106 Bedroom windows, 56 Belgium and the Congo, 195 Bellini, Giovanni, 251 Belshazzar, 117 Benevolence in Parliament, the dangers of, 308-9 Bengali, indifEerence to death of the, 76 Bentham, Jeremy, 211 Berlepsch, Baron von, and the housing of birds, 56 Bird language, 17 Birds and hypocrisy, 16 Birds and their mystery, 10 ct seq. Birds, digestive process in, 14 Birds, greediness of, 13, 14 Birds, housing problem for, 55 Birds, singing of, 12 Bismarck and diplomacy, 21 Blackmailing, courage and, 216- 217 Blackmailing, servants and, 221 Blake, Thomas, 263 Blatchford, Robert, the socialism of, 316-21 ' Blue water ' problem, the, 200 Boer soldiers and the fear of death, 151 Boers, courage among the, 211 Boleyn, Anne, 263 Bolton, Dr. J. S., 143 Booth, General, 267 Botha, General, 291 Boy Scouts movement, the, 26-7 Bradlaugh, Charles, 205 Brain, the mapping of the, 143 Brain, the topography of the, 138 Branches, the beauty of bare, 50-1 British and Asiatic friendship, 207 British architects and woodland lore, 47 British character, effect of sport on, 20 British Empire a question of words, 134 British Empire, development of character in the, 166 British Empire, the English estimate of the, 201-2 British Medical Journal, 31 British Navy and peace, the, 183 British soldiers and the fear of death, 151 British, triple nature of the, 69 British working man, the, 74 Briton, religion and the, 153 Brotherhood of Man, the Roman Empire and the, 156 Bryce, James, 375 Buddhists and forest fires, 6, 51 Buddhism and the sanctity of life, 6, 51 BuUfinch, 13 Billow, Count von, 179 Bums, John, and his Town Plan- ning Bill, 42 ' Burying fakir,' the, 397 Bushido, the code of, 107 Byron, Lord, 133, 195, 252, 264, 335 Cesar, Julius, 273-1 Oakebread, Jane, 277 Calceolaria, 8, 9 Calcutta, evening exercise of inhabitants of, 5 Calendar, the Elizabethan, 4 Caligula, 156 Call of the wUd, the, 22 Campaign against fairies, the, 249 OampbeU, Rev. P. J., 164 INDEX 407 Campbell, Thomas, 95 Campbell-Bamieniian, Sir Henry, 71, 230 Cancer in flowers, 8 Cant and the law, 92 Cant as a lubricant, 87 Cant as our national failing, 87 Cant at Oxford and Cambridge, 92 Cant, definition of, 87 Cant in education, 92 Cant in English History, 195 Cant, self-control and, 88 Cape, flower seasons at the, 4 Carlyle, llrs., 263 Carlyle, Thomas, 92, 117, 335, 346 Carnarvon, Earl of, 47, 362 Carthaginians, cause of decay of, 11 Caste in England, 15,') Cast in India, 155 Catchwords, the value of, 122-3 Cathcart, Lady Ciordon, 40 CathoUc religion and imagination, the, 165 Caution of modern statesmen, 54 Cedars, unscrupulous, 49 Celtic races, melancholy of the, 97 Charcot, Dr., 173 Charity, the impotence of, 304 Charles I of England, 195, 208 Charles n of England, 263, 382 Chatham, Earl of, 53 Cheeriness of birds, the, 17 Chesterfield, Lord, 123 Chesterton, G. K., 283 Children, the illusions of, 251 Chinese and patricide, the, 16 Chinese civilisation, 209 Chinese method of paying doctors, 33 ' Christian Socialists,' 315 Christianity and compromise, 161-2 Christianity in Mayfair, 6 Christianity, the miracle of, 160 Church of England, declining in- fluence of, 80 Church of Rome, concession to the, 81 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 351 Civilisation, health and, 291 Civilisation, the tyranny of, 90 Clarion, the, 312, 318 Cleanliness leads to freedom, 24 Clear thought, modem improve- ments and, 340 Cleaver, Alice, 327 CUmate, tlie advantages of the English, 69 Coastal Erosion, the end of the Royal Commission on, 45 Cobdenism, 396 Cobdenism and the unemployed, 45, 91, 223, 356 Cobdenism, results of, 356-7 Coddling in education, 214-5 Colenso, Bishop, 362 Coleridge, S. T., 123 Corner, John, 216 Colombo, evening exercise of inliabitants of, 5 Colonials, the touchiness of, 400 Colonies, analogy between rhodo- dendrons and the, 113 Colonies, Germany's need for, 180 Commerce and friendship, 105 Commerce, war in, 217 Compassion, hysterical, 305 Compromise in the twentieth century, 54 Comradesliip, the ingredients of, 205 ' Comus,' the Lady in, 89 Conduct, religion and, 159, 162, 164 Confidence, commercial, 310 Congo, Belgium and the, 195 Connaught, Duke of, 343 Consumption and work, 391-2 Consumption, extermination of, 29 Controversialist, the successful, 79 Convalescence, the trials of, 292 Convention and cant in the marriage laws, 89 Cormorant, extinction of big, 11 Country house, the English, 197 Country houses and their topics, 31 Countrymen, the dear vision of, 69 408 INDEX Courage among the Boers, 211 Courage and blackmailing, 216-17 Courage in modem warfare, 212 Courage in politics, 218 Courage in women, 212-13] Courage of birds, the, 17 Court of Honour, a suggestion for a, 22 Courtesies of life, kinsfolk and the, 229 Oowen, Joseph, 129 Cowley, Abraham, 110 Crackanthorpe, Montagu, 284 Cranmer, Thomas, 43 Cricket and socialism, 311-12 Crime and multiple personality, 146 Crime in Ireland, 368 Crime in Scotland, 368 Cromwell, Oliver, 233, 382 Crookes, Sir AVilliam, 167 Crowds, and the sense of the in- evitable, 62 Cuckoo, as murderer in the nest, 16, 17 Culture and inaccuracy, 121 Curlew, hypocrisy of the, 16 Curzon, Lord, on truth, 75-6 DANDELIONS, eradication of, 5, 6 Danger of a normal life, 31 Daily Mail, 318, 395 Darwin, Charles, 10, 284, 339 Death, Asiatics and the fear of, 57 Death, the inevitable, 63 Decadence, male, 327 Decadence, pessimism and, 99 Decay in manners, cause of, 244 Degeneration, alcoholism and, 285 Degeneracy, increasing, 275-6 Democracy, flowers and, 9 Destiny, impulse and, 171 Devious folk, 21 Diet, war and, 53-4 Dillon, John, 97 Diplomacy, drawbacks of, 375-6 Diplomacy, the excellence of British, 373^ Diplomatic jealousy, 380 Diplomatists in private life, 243 Discipline, gunnery and, 91 DiscipUne of the body, 23, 24 Disease, causes of, 290 Disease, war and, 291 Disraeli, Benjamin, 28, 122, 223, 265, 293, 351 Divorce laws, injustice to women of the, 281 Doctors, Chinese method of pa3ring, 33 Doctors, disparity in diagnoses of, 32 Doctors, generosity of, 33 Doctors, the large number of, 28 Doctor, the relations of a patient to a, 33 Domestic surprises, 220 Drake, Francis, 195 Ducrot, General, 191 Duelling, as satisfaction for moral injvu-y, 21 Duelling, the abolition of, 230 Dukes, the enviable lot of, 253 Earlt rising and what it teaches U3, 36 Economics, socialism and, 307 Edict of Nantes, the, 261 Edmondson, ex-Sergeant, 317, 318 Education, cant in, 92 Education, coddling in, 215 Education, dangers of spurious, 346 Education, death of romance in, 351 Education in Ireland, 370 Education, socialism and, 308 Edward VII of England, 363, 364, 371, 374 Efficiency and physical health, 34 Efficiency a watch-word, 35 Elections, the fiction of, 387 Elimination in the garden, 7 Elizabeth, Queen, 270 Elm, the treacherous, 49 Emerson, R. W., 104 INDEX 409 Emotion and the Briton, 88 Emotion and the Frenchman, 88 Emotional energy in bird song, 13 Emotions, words and, 133 Empiricism in medicine, 31, 33 Empire, aara of, 176 Empire, gardeners of the, 113 Employers, the tyranny of, 91 ' Encumbrances,' servants and, 94 England as Nature's favourite,177 England, Browns and Joneses of, 188-9 England's downfall ' inevitable,' 65, 66 England, duty of the girls of, 193 England, memories of the flower gardens and girls of, 3 England's poor gentlemen, 70 English antipathy to Irish Nation- alism, 365 English clergy and Eoman Catholi- cism, 81 EngUsh history, cant in, 195 EngUsh luck, 261 English people, the stamina of the, 287 English sentiment for fishcrfolk and foresters, 46 English sport and foreign anti- pathy, 74-5 Era, the new, 339 Euclid, 89 Eugenics, need for, 283 Eugenics, religion of, 286 Em'ope, the two great camps in, 192 Europeans and Nature, 23 Exaggeration in leading articles, 118-9 Exercise leads to freedom, 24 ' Exeter Hall,' colonial loathing for, 361-2 Expansion, Germany's attempts at, 181 Experts, fallibihty of, 223 Eyre, Governor, 88 Facts and illusions, 254 Fau-baim, Rev. Dr., 154, 155 ' Fair Play ' in the garden, 7 ' Fair Play,' the hysterical cry for, 6 Fairies, campaign against, 249 Fairies, trees and, 48 Fairy Rescue Society, the need for a, 250 Falkland Islands, flower seasons in the, 4 Fame and notoriety, 270-1 Fame, difficulty of winning, 270 Fame, musicians and, 266 Fame, youth and, 206 Family aftection, power of, 307, 309 Family, demand for the abolition of the, 330 Family, ' little language ' in the, 133 Family peace, 229 Fanaticism of modern women, 43 Fanaticism, the necessity for, 43 Fantail, the dissipations of a, 17 Faraday, Michael, 225 Farrar, Dean, 120 February, irises in, 19 Female socialists and family life, 227 Femininity, Nature and, 37, 42 Ferrier, Dr., 143 Fish, singing, 12 PLsher, Admiral Lord, 199 Flammarion, Camille, 167 Flowers and democracy, 9 Flowers and their enemies, 8 Flowers, grouping of, 9 Flowers, the personality in, 1 Flowers, resilience of, 2 Flowers, English, appreciated by the Briton far from liome, 3 Fluency and insincerity, 128 Foreign OflBce, blunders at the, 374-5 Foreign Office, prestige of the, 373 Foreign Oflice, reforms in the, 374 Foreign Office, responsibility of the, 377-8 Foresight, gardens and. 111, 112 Forest fires, 51 Forest primteval, 51 410 INDEX PorestB, the German love for, 4G Forester, a happy, 50 Forestry, the need for careful study of, 52 Forestry, state system of, 45 Fortnightly Review, 154 Fortune, favourites of, 259, 260 Fortune, the mysteries of, 262 Foxgloves, triumph of, 7 France, what England owes to, 194 Francis, St., of Assisi, 290 Fraser, John Poster, 400 Frederick the Great, 40 French and emotion, the, 88 Fresh air and sanity, 5G Fresh air, the gospel of, 29 Fresh air, ParUament and, 30 Fresh air. Queen Victoria and, 30 Friendship, a perfect, 101-2 Friendship and politics, 102 Friendships and the typist, 104 Friendship between classes, the importance of, 210 Friendship between men and women, 203 Friendships, bogus, 106 Friendship, commerce and, 105 Friendships, the impossibility of unequal, 203 Friendship, international, 107 Friendships made at school, 204 Friendship of citizens, 102 Friendship, partnerships and, 108 Frontiersmen and the forests, 52 Froude, J. A., 263 Future life, the necessity for belief m a, 168 Gadarene swine, the, 140 Galton, Sir Francis, 283, 284 Gambler, equanimity of the, 257 Gambling, how to utilise the spirit of, 260 Garden, despotism of man in the,'4 Garden, ' fair play ' in the, 7 Gardens and foresight. 111, 112 Gardens as an aid to thought, 110 ' Gardens for Efficient Workers,' 110 Gardening and ima^nation, 9 Gardening papers, weekly advice in, 4, 5 Gardeners, gambling instinct in, 257 Gardeners of the Empire, 113 Genius and matrimony, 335 Gentile, antipathy between Jew and, 84 Gentleman, misuse of the word, 125 Geranium, 8, 9 German General Staff, the, 178 German Navy, the, 198 German selfishness, 161 German town planning, 42 German view of England, 197-8 Germans and sylviculture, 46 Germany, organised force in, 177, 181 Germany's attempts at expansion, 181 Germany's babies, 179 Germany's need for colonies, 180 George III and Shakespeare's plays, 118 George IV of England, 382, 383 George V of England, 339 George, Lloyd, 105 Girls of England, the duty of the, 193 Gladstone, W. E., 128, 264, 265, 363 Gobi Desert, the lesson of the, 23 Gordon, General, 113, 128, 325 Gorst, Hai-old, 349 Government, a tender-hearted, 41 Graliame-White, 10 Grandison, Sir Charles, the school of, 245 Grayson, Victor, 240, 312 Great Day of Reckoning, the, 86 Great Pamirs, lesson of the, 23 Great Western Rah way, the, 310 Greeks, ascetic ideals of, 34 Greek ideal, the, 301 Grenville, Sir Richard, 268 Grey, Sir Edward, 53 Grouping of flowers, 9 INDEX 411 Grundy, Mrs., and the Sui&agists, 87 Grundy, Mrs., influence of, S9 Grundy, Mrs., waning of the power of, 93 Gummidge, Mrs., 98 Gunnery and discipline, 91 Guyot, Tves, 207 HAECKEli, Professor, 135, 137, 138 Hafiz, the poet-sportsraan, 25 Haldane, R. B., 187, 233, 340, 341, 366 Hamilton, Lady, 195, 265 Happiness, money and, 252 Happiness, want and, 283 Hardinge, Sir Charles, 374 Hardy, Captain, 263, 265 Harmony and flowers, 8 Health and civilisation, 291 Health, Disraeli on the import- ance of, 28 Health, ease of, 290 Health, importance of national, 35 Helmoltz, Baron, 387 Henry \TII of England, 263, 270 Hindu on religion in England, a, 194 Hislam, Percival, 341 Holidays for overstrained intel- lectuals, 295 Holland, German absorption of, 181 * Home ' and the Northern races, 235 Home and socialism, the in- compatibility of, 240 Home and woman's movement. 236 Home Rule, the dilemma of, 365 Homer, 339 Homes, England's stately, 238-9 Homesickness in the Services, 236 ' Homing instinct' of birds, 18 ' Homing instinct ' of man, 18 Hooker, Richard, 163 Hope and the true soldier, 99 Hope in private life, 98 Hope the salt of life, 95 Housing question, the unfit and the, 280 Howard, John, 158 Hugo, Victor, 196 Humanitarianism and Nature, 24 Humming-bird, 13 Humphrey, Arthur, 104 Huxley, H. B., 140, 141, 208, 209 Hygiene in the eighteenth cen- tury, 53 Hyndman, Mr., 247, 316 Hypocrisy in birds and man, IC Ibsen, Henrik, 213 Hi-health, the diffusion of, 29 niness, mental distortion in, 297 Illusions of children, the, 251 Illusions of woman, the, 252 Imagination, the Catholic religion and, 165 Imagination, gardening and, 9 Imperialism and ' playing the game,' 77 Impulse and destiny, 171 Inaccuracy, culture and, 121 Incorporated Law Society, the raw native and the, 23 India, owl as bird of evil omen in, 12 Indiana, the unflt in, 277 Indiscreet talk before servants, 221 Individualism and home life, 239 Individualism, Natinre and, 55 Individuals, association of, 308 Inevitable, the avoidable and the, 62, 03 Inevitable, love and the, 64 Inevitable, resentment against the, 61 Infanticide, 303 Infant mortality, causes of, 85 Infant mortality in England, 85, 86 Injustice of men towards women, 327 Insanity, the subsidisation of, 274 Insects, singing, 12 412 INDEX Insensitiveness, modem, 245 Insincerity, diplomacy and, 243 Insincerity, fluency and, 128 Insincerity in dally intercourse, 118 Insincerity of literary men, 118 Instinct in ti-ees, 48 Insurance and gambling, 258 International friendship, 107, 206 International Housing Congress, 279 International maimers, 246, 248, International quarrels, 230-4 International relations, surprises in, 226 Invasion of England, scheme for the, 341-2 Inventions and surprises, 225 Inventors, unknown, 268-9 Ireland, crime in, 368 Ireland, education in, 370 Ireland, morality, in, 368 Ireland, misgovemment of, 368-9 Ireland, the supposed new era in, 363 Ireson, Frank, 309 Iris, untimely death of a Japanese, 2 Irish independence and sea- power, 364-5 Irish Land Act, the, 363, 369, 370 Irish Nationalism, English anti- pathy to, 365 Irish Nationalists, 367-8 Ito, Marquis, 208 JAUIESON, Dr., 101, 183, 267, 325 Japan, inscrutable, 207 Japan's long memory, 401 Japan, physical and mental training in, 302 Japanese, fecundity of the, 400 Jesuits and the Great Idea, 156 Jewish conversion, futility of attempting, 82-3 Jewish question, doubtful exist- ence of a, 83 Jews, lack of sportsmanship in, 84 Jews, societies for the conversion of, 82-3 Jockey Club, the power of the, 74 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 24, 129, 231 Jones, Lieutenant Digby, 267, 268 Jones, Dr. Eobert, 143 Jowett, Dr., 283 Joy and the inevitable, 63 Judaism as a force, 83 Judgment, increase of, 19 Justice, 318 KAFFma, idleness of the, 358 Kaiser, tlie, 179, 182, 183, 190, 239, 270, 339 Katharine of Aragon, 209, 263 Kea, sheep-killing propensities of the, 14 Keats, John, 130 Kelvin, Lord, 387 Kerr, Lord Walter, 370 Kestrel, increase of the, 15 Kiel Canal, the, 181, 183 Kindness, cruelty of, 60 King, tlie power of the, 383-4 King's Declaration, concession in the, 81 Kingsley, Charles, the sociaUsm of, 316 Kinloch, Colonel, 317 Kinsfolk and the courtesies of life, 229 Kinship, the insolence of, 228 KipUng, Eudyard, 97, 99, 267 Kitchener, Lord, 325, 402 Knight, Dr., Bishop of Rangoon, 82 Knowledge, the three kinds of, 135 Kubelik, 266 Kruger, Paul, 58 LA Salpetribbb, experiments at, 173-4 Labourer, the vocabulary of the, 127 Labrador duck, extinction of, 11 Lambs, thousands of dying, 15 Lancet, the, 31 INDEX 413 Land-love, the gratification of, 67 Language, the interpretation of, 128 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 10 Last words, 124 Law, cant and the, 92 Leading articles, exaggeration in, 118-9 Leather-jaoiiet, crushing the, 5, 6, Leather-] aclsets, entitled to Sliy- lock's appeal, 5 Lecky, W., 301 Lehmann, Liza, 12 Lenormand, Marie, 172 Leprosy in flowers, 8 Lever, W. H., 279 Lobelia, 8, 9 Libel action, inadequacy of, 22 Life in the open, the advantages of, 25 Limited monarchy, the advant- ages of a, 382 Lincoln, Abraham, 58 Literary men, insincerity of, 118 ' Little Language,' the, 237 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 167 rx)mbroso, Cesare, 167 London Hospital, the, 296 London, the ill-health of, 296 London problems, 293-4 Londoners, the hopefulness of, 96 Love and the inevitable, 64 Love in cities, 64 Love in the coimtry, 64 Lowther, Sir General, 244 Loyola, Ignatius, 207 Luck, English, 261 Luck, Nature and, 256 Luck, science and, 256 Lyttelton, Dr., 215 Lytton, Lord, 213 MacaitlAT, T. B., 76 Madame Tussaud'a, famous ghosts at, 264 Magnus, Sir Philip, and inQuenza in the House, 30 Mahan, Captain, 182 Maiden aunt, the, 329 Malet, Sir Edward, 239 Mallarm6, Stephen, 196 Mahock, W. H., 309, 312 Malthus, 281, 284 Man, the requirements of, 334 Man, selfishness of, 10, 336 Manner and artifice, 242 Manners, cause of decay in, 244 Manners, deterioration of, 350 Manners, international, 246, 248 Manners, Irish, 212-3 Marie Antoinette, 5 Marriage as a profession, 326 Marriage laws, convention and cant in the, 89 Marriage laws of England, defects of the, 330-2 Marriage laws, reform of the, 281 Marriage of the unfit, 303-4 Mary, Queen of Scots, 195 MascuUnity, Nature and, 37, 42 Mass, English clergy and the, 81 Massing of flowers, 9 Materialism, mysticism and, 137 Matrimony, genius and, 335 Maxim, Sir Hirara, 256 May, Phil, 277 Mayfair, Christianity in, Meath, Lord, 215 Melancholy of seabirds' song, 12 Memory, unfitness and, 278 Mendel, Gregor, 143 Mental distortion in illness, 297 Mental instability of to-dav, the, 147 Mercier, Dr., 143 Meredith, George, 196 ' Men-ie England ' of to-day, 90 Meyer, Rev. F. B., 140 Military hygiene, the importance of, 292 MUl, John Stuart, 87-8 MUner, Ix)rd, 349 Milton, John, 335 Mmgs, Sir Christopher, 263 Missions should begin at home, 85, 86 Moa, fate of the, 11, 171 Mohammedan conversion, 80-1 Mole-eyed morality, 159 414 INDEX Money and happiness, 252 Morality in Ireland, 368 Morality, war and, 59 More, Hannah, 263 Morgan, Professor de, 10 Morning Post, the, 199 Morsielli, Professor, 167 Mosea, 89 Mother, British respect for the, 238 Motherhood, the necessity for lessons on, 288 Mothers, Jewish, 302 Mothers, manual labour and, 302 Mott, Dr. F. W., 143 Miiller, George, 141 Multiple personality, the causes of, 144 Multiple personality, crime and, 146 Munro, Sir Thomas, 76 Murillo, Bartolom^, 99 Musicians and fame, 266 Mynahs, 13 Mystery in great unexplored spaces, 26 Mysticism and materialism, 137 Names, the importance of melodious, 123 Napoleon, 70, 163, 165, 212, 262, 351 National danger, public indiffer- ence to, 189 National defence and clear think- ing, 344 National defence and race im- provement, 289 National efficiency, the factors in, 305 National finance andparty govern- ment, 385 National income, the, 312 National Portrait Gallery, famous ghosts at the, 263 National Rei'iew, the, 199 National Service League, sugges- tion for the, 11 Nature and expediency, 7 Nature and femininity, 37, 42 Nature and individualism, 55 Nature and luck, 256 Nature and masculinity, 37, 42 Nature and the modem garden, 7 Nature, the buzz-saw of, 225 Nature, the conjuring tricks of, I'J Nature, humanitarianism and, 24 Nature, prodigality of, 38 Nature's methods, 40 Naval friendships, 204 Navy League, the, 188 Navy, ' Playing the game ' in the, 73 Nelson, Horatio, Lord, 63, 72, 132, 229, 230, 231, 232, 265 Nesting-boxes in Prussia, 56 Nero and Seneca, 120 New Age, the, 312 New Zealand, the kea of, 14 Newton, Sir Isaac, iiis only speech in Parliament, 29 Nicholas, Emperor, 115 Nicholson's Nek, the surrender at, 99 Nightingale, Florence, 329 Nitric acid, Germany's supply of, 201 Nordracht treatment, the, 30 Notoriety, fame and, 270-1 Nurserymen and flowers, 8 Nurses, the cry for registration of, 8 OAK, a veteran, 49 Oaks, the cracking of, 48 O'Connor, T. P., 97 Occult and the scientists, the, 167 Occult in Asia, the, 170 Old-Age Pension, 29 ' Omelette surprise,' 219 Osborne cadet, the, 282 Ostrich, vocal organ of the, 12 ' Overstrain ' or crime, 147 Owl, as the bird of wisdom, 12 Owl, as evil omen, 12 Owl, increase of the, 15 ' Owl Song,' Liza Lehmami's, 12 Owls, distress of superfluous, 15 INDEX 415 Owls, what we might learu from brown, 10 Oyama, Marshal, 137 PAGANCn, 266 Paine, Tom, 263 Paladino, Eusapia, the case of, 170 Palmerston, Lord, 75, 224 Palmistry, 172 Pan, the death of, 57 Pan-AngUcan movement, the. 80 Panics and town Ufe, 59 Pan-Grerman party, ambitions of the, 184-5 Paper, made of cheap wood, 52 Parker, Eric, on the wryneck, 13 ParUament and fresh air, 30 Parliament and tenderness, 40 Pamell, Charles Stewart, 195 Pa*rot, 13 Partnerships and friendship, 108 Party government, the exactions of, 384-5 Party government, national finance and, 385 Passions of the unfit, 277, 278, 279 Patagonia, flower seasons in, 4 Patient, the relation of a doctor to a, 33 Patricide unknown in China, 16 Patriotism and health, 35 Patriotism, the highest form of, 35 Patriotism in agricultural com- munities, 24 Patriotism, smothered, 359 Pauncefote, Lord, 244 Peace, the British Navy and, 183 Peace, Charles, 277 Pell, Sir Albert, 29 Pentateuch, race preservation in the, 284 Pepys, Samuel, 267 Personality as a clue to the occult, 175 PersoniUity , the causes of multiple, 144 Personality, the eternity of, 136 Pessimism and decadence, 99 Pessimism and ill-breeding, 25-6 Peter the Great, 208 Philantliropists and Nature's lessons, 38 Phillknore, Mr. Justice, 327 Physical force, socialism and, 321 Pigs, greediness of, 13, 14 Pitt, WilUam, 161, 231, 233 Plato, 89, 284, 301, 339 ' Playing tlie game ' in the Navy, 73 Plumbers and doctors, 33 Poitiers, Diane de, 163 PoUtics and the sportsman's spirit, 72-3 Politics, courage in, 218 Politics, friendship and, 102, 105 Politics, Mr. Smith and, 190 Politics, words and, 127 Poor Law Commissioners, report of the, 287 Port Sunlight, successful experi- ments at, 280 Portland, Duke of, 92 Prayer and natural law, 142 Prayer, the power of, 110-1 Praxiteles. 339 Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Society for the, 85 Primitive man and the unseen, 139 ' Princess of Wales ' violets, the origin of, 112 Prodigality of Nature, 38 Prohibitionists, the danger of, 360 Propagation of the Gospel, Society for the, 80, 82 Proposals of marriage by women, 326 Prothero, Rowland, 88, 106, 163 Psychical research, scientific pre- judice against, 167 Public opinion, atmosphere and, 54-5 Puritan code, tlie, 159 ' Purse under the pillow,' the, 333, Pycraft, W. P., 10 QuARRF.i-iilNO as an occupation, 227 416 INDEX Quarrels, international, 230-34 Quarrels, the management of, 229- 230 RABELAIS, 99 Race antipathy, 315 Race improvement, national de- fence and, 289 Race improvement, women and, 286 Rao, r. Vencata, 154, 155, 157 Registration of nurses, the cry for, 8 Reid, Dr. Archdale, 143 Religion and the Asiatic, 152 Religion and the Briton, 153 Religion and conduct, 159, 162, 164 Religion in the open, 24 Rentoul, Dr., 273, 277, 279 Responsibility of the Foreign Office, 377-8 Responsibility, parental, 301, 304, 305 Responsibility, public, 305 Reticence, surprise and, 220 Reveillire, Admiral, 150 Rhetoric in the House, 119 Rhodes, Cecil, 63, 65, 101, 325 Rhodes scholars, influence of the, 350 Rhododendrons and the Colonies, an analogy between, 113 Ribblesdale, Lord, 105 Riches, socialism and, 312-14 Roberts, Lord, 186, 188, 191, 267, 340, 341 Robin, daily diet of the, 13 Robin Hood, the hero of nurseries, 46 Robins and patricide, 15 RoUeston, Dr. H. D., 293 Roman Catholicism, English clergy and, 81 Roman Empire and the Brother- hood of Man, 156 Roman selfishness, 161 Rosebery, Lord, 71, 114 , 374 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71 Rosslyn, Lord, 256 Rudeness and the Stone Age, 103 Ruskin, John, 269 Raskin, John, on enthusiasm, 34 Russell, William, Lord, 43 ST. ATHANASIDS, 89 St. Vincent, Earl, 199 Salisbury, the late Lord, 108, 195, 200 Salisbury, Lord, 71 Sanity, fresh air and, 56 Sanity, suicide and, 169 School, friendships made at, 204 Science and luck, 256 Scotland, crime in, 368 Scotland, lawlessness in, 41 Seabirds and their song, 12 Segregation, sterilisation by, 281, 305 Self-control and cant, 88 Self-preservation, the instinct of; 168 Selkirk, Alexander, 222 Selous, Mr., 71 Seneca, 120 Sentiment, the triumph of, 60 Sermon on the Mount, the, 160 Servants and blackmailing, 221 Servants and ' encumbrances,' 94 Servants, indiscreet talk before, 221 Sexof soul, the, 204 Seymour, Sir Edward, 239 Shakespeare, AVilliam, 133, 335 Shakespeare and his vocabulary, 127 Shakespeare and the seasons, 4 SheUey, Percy Bysshe, 117, 195. 336 Sheridan, Richard, 351 Shylook, leather-jackets entitled to appeal of, 5 Sinn Fein, 364, 366 Size detestable in flowers, 8 Simon, Jules, 191 Small Holdings Act, the, 116 Smith, Miss, and Socialism, 188 INDEX 417 Smith, Mr., and national defence, 186-7 Smith, Mr., and politics, 190 Smith, Sidney, 129 Smith, young Mr., and the Terri- torials, 187 Smoke more eflEective than prayer, 6 Social Democratic Federation the, 246 Social reform in its relation to health, 28 Socialism and anti-patriotism, 246 Socialism and biliousnes"?, 55 Socialism and ' Oiiristian Social- ists,' 315 Socialism and economics, 307 Socialism and education, 309 Socialism and physical force, 321 Socialism and riches, 312-14 Socialism, cricket and, 311-12 Socialism, conditions of work under, 311 Socialism, the incompatibility of home and, 240 Socialism in England, the danger of, 316 Socialism, Miss Smith and, 188 Socialism, modem, 315 Socialist-Radicals, the strategy of the, 321 Socialist whole hoggers, 319-21 Socialists and the graduation of income, 310 Socialists, female, 2?7 Society, British, 309-10 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cliildren, 85 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 80, 82 South Africa, drought in, 14 South Africa, native race problem in, 358-9 Southey, Charles, 123 Speech, animals and, 12C Spenser, Edmund, 130 Sport and the English language 71 Sport, effect on British Character, of, 20 Sport in India, 75 Sport, the religion of, 70 Spring and the mysteries of life, 19 Stamina of the English people, the, 287 StarUngs, 13 Statesmen, the dangers of tender- hearted, 40 Stead, W.T., 137, 138 Stella, 237 Sterilisation by segregation, 281, 305 Sterilisation of the Unfit, the, 273 Stoffel,Colonel, 117, 191 Strand Magazine, 28 Streetcraft, 58 Street life, the impulse to, 355 Struggle for life in the garden, 9 Suez Canal, the, 224 Suffragists and Mrs. Grundy, the, 87 Suicide and sanity, 169 Sullivan, Dr., 285 Sun worship, the universality of, 36 Surprise in animals, 221-2 Surprise and reticence, 220 Surprise in a wine-bin, 219 Swaythling, Lord, 123 Swift, Dean, 237 Swinburne, A. 0., 196 Sydney Bulletin, 403 ' Swopping symptoms,' 294 Tapt, President, 339 Talmud, the, 43-4 Tariff Beform and the unem- ployed, 247 Teachers, the importance of good, 353-4 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 10 Temperaments, 96 Territorials, the useless, 341 Territorials, votes and the, 341 Territorials, young Mr. Smith and tlie, 187 Tertulllan on women, 43 Teuton alliance, the, 190 £ £ 418 INDEX Teuton, prescience of the, 201 Thompson, R. Campbell, 139 Thought, the principles of, 138 Thoughts and words, the blend- ing of, 132 Thrush, daily diet of the, IS Thugs and the Indian Govern- ment, 273 Tiberius, 156 Tibetan Mountains, lesson of the, 23 Times, the, 47 Times leaders, 119 Tirpitz, Admiral von, 179, 182 Tolerance, the increase of, 162 Topics in country houses, 31 Touchstone's principle applied to gardens, 8 Town Planning Bill, John Burns', 42, 240 Town planning in Germany, 42 Towneley, Houghton, 50 Tramp, the self-respect of the, 23 Tredgold, Dr., 285 Trees and fairies, 48 Trees, the instinct of, 48j Trees, the stability of, 48 Triple Alliance, the, 192 Troubles and the call of the wild, 22 Truth, the Oriental standard of, 159 Tryon, Admiral, 63] Tuokey, Dr. 0. Lloyd, 143 Tundras, lesson of the, 23 Turner, J. M. \V., 49 Tweedy, Sir John, 143 Typist, friendships and the, 104j Typists in Downing Street, 377 Tyranny of civilisation, the, 90 Tyranny of employers, the, 91 UNDER dog, the identity of the, 361 Unemployed, the urgent question of the, 247 Unfit and the housing question, the, 280 Unfit in Indiana, the, 277 Unfit, marriage of the, 303-4 Unfit, the passions of the, 277, 278, 279 Unfit, sterilisation of the, 148, 273 Unfitness and memory, 278 Universities, English education and the, 348-50 Upper classes, education of the, 347 Unseen, primitive man and the, 139 VATERSAY, Island of, 40-1 Velasquez, 269 Veriame, Paul, 99, 279 Victoria Cross, the, 211, 212, 217 H.M.S. Victoria, loss of the, 63 Victoria, Queen, 265, 270, 326, 375 Victoria, Queen, and fresh air, 30, 57 Victorian era, hypocrisy of the, 88 Victorian era, Mrs. Grundy in the, 89 Viheneuve, Admiral, 262 Voles in North Britain, 15 Votes and the Territorials, 341 Vultures, increase of, 15 WALKER, Dr. Jane, 392; Walther, Dr., 391 Walton, Izaak, 267 Want and happiness, 283 War and diet, 53-4 War and disease, 291 War and morality, 59 ' War Game,' the, 71 War in commerce, 217 War, root-cause of modem, 78 War training, the meaning of,3 43 Washington, 351 Waterton, Charles, 110 Watson, Dr. G. A., 143 Wellington. Duke of, 112, 265, 351 Westminster Abbey, famous ghosts at, 263 Whatoley, Archbishop, 229| Whistler, James MacNiel, 269, 270 INDEX 419 White, Gilbert, 268 White, Sir George, 193 Whitman, Walt, 67 ' Who 's Who,' human nature in, 266 Wiertz, Antoine, 99*15 Wilde, Oscar, 99, 278 Wilhelmina, Queen, 180 J Willett, Mr., and his Daylight Bill, 36 Will-power and the inevitable, C8 Wilson, Dr. Albert, 143, 145, 148 Wingless birds and their fate, 11 Wolseley, Lord, 252, 292 Woman and her wages, 89 Woman and modem education, 349, 351-3 Woman, the iUusions of, 252 Woman's movement, home and the, 230 Woman, unmated, 324-9 Woman's Su£Erage, coming of, 43, 72 Women and race improvement, 286 Women and their honour, 22 Women, courage in, 212-13 Women, the emotionalism of, 338 Women, feline, 328-9 Women, injustice ot^*he divorce laws to, 281 Women, modern fanaticism of, 43 Women, modem lack of courtesy towards, 245 Women's movement, the success of, 43 Women physical disabilities of, 332-3 Women, physical improvement of, 328 Women, Tertullian on, 43 Woodpecker, 13 Words and emotions, 133 Words and poUtics, 127 Words, the deceit of, 120] Words, the definitions of, 129 Words, the love of, 130 Words, the mastery of, 124 Wordsworth, W., 123 Workless, the problem of the, 390 Wren, 13,| Wright, Wilbur, 267 Wryneck, 13 Wykhamist motto, the, 243 YOUTH and'fame, 266 PRINTED BT SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. 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