THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libns 4 ISAAC FOOT 4 POLITICAL AND LITERARY ESSAYS MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO 7 POLITICAL & LITERARY -^- ESSAYS 1908-1913 BY THE EARL OF CROMER MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 19*3 C COPYRIGHT PREFACE I HAVE to thank the editors of The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, The Nineteenth Century and After., and The Spectator for allowing the republication of these essays, all of which appeared originally in their respective columns. No important alterations or additions have been made, but I should like to observe, as regards the first essay of the series on " The Government of Subject Races " that, although only six years have elapsed since it was written, events in India have moved rapidly during that short period. I adhere to the opinions expressed in that essay so far as they go, but it will be obvious to any one who has paid attention to Indian affairs that, if the subject had to be treated now, many very important issues, to which I have not alluded, would have to be imported into the discussion. CROMER. September 30, 1913. CONTENTS "THE EDINBURGH REVIEW" PAGE I. THE GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES . . 3 II. TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE .... 54 "THE QUARTERLY REVIEW" III. SIR ALFRED LYALL ...... 77 "THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER" IV. ARMY REFORM 107 V. THE INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS OF FREE TRADE . 127 VI. CHINA 141 VII. THE CAPITULATIONS IN EGYPT . . . .156 "THE SPECTATOR" VIII. DISRAELI 177 IX. RUSSIAN ROMANCE ...... 204 X. THE WRITING OF HISTORY . . . .214 XI. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY ..... 226 XII. LORD MILNER AND PARTY .... 237 XIII. THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA ..... 250 XIV. THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE ..... 264 XV. WELLINGTONIANA . 277 viii CONTENTS PAGE XVI. BURMA .... ... 287 XVII. A PSEUDO-HERO OF THE REVOLUTION . . 298 XVIII. THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS .... 307 XIX. AN INDIAN IDEALIST . . . . .317 XX. THE FISCAL QUESTION IN INDIA . . . 327 XXI. ROME AND MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT . . . 340 XXII. A ROYAL PHILOSOPHER ..... 351 XXIII. ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL . . . .361 XXIV. PORTUGUESE SLAVERY ..... 372 XXV. ENGLAND AND ISLAM ..... 407 XXVI. SOME INDIAN PROBLEMS . . . . .416 XXVII. THE NAPOLEON OF TAINE 427 XXVIII. SONGS, PATRIOTIC AND NATIONAL . . . 439 XXIX. SONGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY .... 449 INDEX ........ 459 THE EDINBUKGH EEVIEW THE GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES * " The Edinburgh Review" January 1908 THE " courtly Claudian," as Mr. Hodgkin, in his admirable and instructive work, calls the poet of the Roman decadence, concluded some lines which have often been quoted as applicable to the British Empire, with the dogmatic assertion that no limit could be assigned to the duration of Roman sway. Nee terminus unquam Romanae ditionis erit. At the time this hazardous pro- phecy was made, the huge overgrown Roman Empire was tottering to its fall. Does a similar fate await the British Empire ? Are we so far self -deceived, and are we so incapable of peering into the future as to be unable to see that many of the steps which now appear calculated to enhance and to stereotype Anglo-Saxon domina- 1 Italy and Her Invaders. Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L.^Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1892. 4 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i tion, are but the precursors of a period of national decay and senility ? A thorough examination of this vital question would necessarily involve the treatment of a great variety of subjects. The heart of the British Empire is to be found in Great Britain. It is not proposed in this place to deal either with the working of British political institutions, or with the various important social and economic problems which the actual condition of England presents, but only with the extremities of the body politic, and more especially with those where the inhabitants of the countries under British rule are not of Anglo-Saxon origin. What should be the profession of faith of a sound but reasonable Imperialist ? He will not be possessed with any secret desire to see the whole of Africa or of Asia painted red on the maps. He will entertain not only a moral dislike, but also a political mistrust of that excessive earth-hunger, which views with jealous eyes the extension of other and neighbouring European nations. He will have no fear of competition. He will believe that, in the treatment of subject races, the methods of government practised by England, though sometimes open to legitimate criticism, are superior, morally and economically, to those of any other foreign nation ; and that, strong in the possession and maintenance of i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 5 those methods, we shall be able to hold our own against all competitors. On the other hand, he will have no sympathy with those who, as Lord Cromer said in a recent speech, " are so fearful of Imperial greatness that they are unwilling that we should accomplish our manifest destiny, and who would thus have us sink into political insignificance by refusing the main title which makes us great." An Imperial policy must, of course, be carried out with reasonable prudence, and the principles of government which guide our relations with whatsoever races are brought under our control must be politically and economically sound and morally defensible. This is, in fact, the keystone of the Imperial arch. The main justification of Imperialism is to be found in the use which is made of the Imperial power. If we make a good use of our power, we may face the future without fear that we shall be overtaken by the Nemesis which attended Roman misrule. If the reverse is the case, the British Empire will deserve to fall, and of a surety it will ultimately fall. There is truth in the saying, of which perhaps we some- times hear rather too much, that the maintenance of the Empire depends on the sword ; but so little does it depend on the sword alone that if once we have to draw the sword, not merely to suppress some local effervescence, but to over- 6 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i come a general upheaval of subject races goaded to action either by deliberate oppression, which is highly improbable, or by unintentional mis- government, which is far more conceivable, the sword will assuredly be powerless to defend us for long, and the days of our Imperial rule will be numbered. To those who believe that when they rest from their earthly labours their works will follow them, and that they must account to a Higher Tribunal for the use or misuse of any powers which may have been entrusted to them in this world, no further defence of the plea that Imperialism should rest on a moral basis is required. Those who entertain no such belief may perhaps be convinced by the argument that, from a national point of view, a policy based on principles of sound morality is wiser, inasmuch as it is likely to be more successful, than one which excludes all considerations save those of cynical self- interest. There was truth in the commonplace remark made by a subject of ancient Rome, himself a slave and presumably of Oriental extraction, that bad government will bring the mightiest empire to ruin. 1 Some advantage may perhaps be derived from inquiring, however briefly and imperfectly, into 1 Male imperando summum imperium amittitur. PUBLIUS SYBUS. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 7 the causes which led to the ruin of that political edifice, which in point of grandeur and extent, is alone worthy of comparison with the British Empire. The subject has been treated by many of the most able writers and thinkers whom the world has produced Gibbon, Guizot, Mommsen, Milman, Seeley, and others. For present pur- poses the classification given by Mr. Hodgkin of the causes which led to the downfall of the Western Empire has been adopted. They were six in number, viz. : 1. The foundation of Constantinople. 2. Christianity. 3. Slavery. 4. The pauperisation of the Roman prole- tariat. 5. The destruction of the middle class by the fiscal oppression of the Curiales. 6. Barbarous finance. 1. The Foundation of Constantinople. It is, for obvious reasons, unnecessary to discuss this cause. It was one of special application to the circum- stances of the time, notably to the threatening attitude towards Rome assumed by the now decadent State of Persia. 2. Christianity. That the foundation of Chris- tianity exercised a profoundly disintegrating effect on the Roman Empire is unquestionable. 8 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i Gibbon, although he possibly confounds the tenets of the new creed with the defects of its hierarchy, dwells with characteristic emphasis on this congenial subject. 1 Mr. Hodgkin, speak- ing of the analogy between the British present and the Roman past, says : The Christian religion is with us no explosive force threatening the disruption of our most cherished in- stitutions. On the contrary, it has been said, not as a mere figure of speech, that " Christianity is part of the common law of England." And even the bitterest enemies of our religion will scarcely deny that, upon the whole, a nation imbued with the teaching of the New Testament is more easy to govern than one which derived its notions of divine morality from the stories of the dwellers on Olympus. From the special point of view now under con- sideration, the case for Christianity admits of being even more strongly stated than this, for no attempt will be made to deal with the principles which should guide the government of a people imbued with the teaching of the New Testament, but rather with the subordinate, but still highly important question of the treatment which a people, presumed to be already imbued with that teaching, should accord to subject races who are ignorant or irreceptive of its precepts. From this point of view it may be said that Christianity, far from being an explosive force, is not merely 1 Decline and Fall, chap. xx. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 9 a powerful ally. It is an ally without whose assistance continued success is unattainable. Although dictates of worldly prudence and oppor- tunism are alone sufficient to ensure the rejection of a policy of official proselytism, it is none the less true that the code of Christian morality is the only sure foundation on which the whole of our vast Imperial fabric can be built if it is to be durable. The stability of our rule depends to a great extent upon whether the forces acting in favour of applying the Christian code of morality to subject races are capable of over- coming those moving in a somewhat opposite direction. We are inclined to think that our Teutonic veracity and gravity, our national conscientiousness, our British spirit of fair play, to use the cant phrase of the day, our free in- stitutions, and our press which, although it occasionally shows unpleasant symptoms of sink- ing beneath the yoke of special and not highly reputable interests, is still greatly superior in tone to that of any other nation are sufficient guarantees against relapse into the morass of political immorality which characterised the re- lations between nation and nation, and notably between the strong and the weak, even so late as the eighteenth century. 1 It is to be hoped 1 Any one who wishes to gain an insight into the fundamental principles which governed those relations cannot do better than 10 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i and believed that, for the time being, this con- tention is well founded, but what assurance is there if the Book which embodies the code of Christian morality may without irreverence be quoted that " that which is done is that which shall be done " ? 1 That is the crucial question. There appear to be at present existent in England two different Imperial schools of thought, which, without being absolutely antagonistic, represent very opposite principles. One school, which, for want of a better name, may be styled that of philanthropy, is occasionally tainted with the zeal which outruns discretion, and with the want of accuracy which often characterises those whose emotions predominate over their reason. The violence and want of mental equilibrium at times displayed by the partisans of this school of thought not infrequently give rise to misgivings lest the Duke of Wellington should have pro- phesied truly when he said, " If you lose India, the House of Commons will lose it for you." 2 These manifest defects should not, however, blind us to the fact that the philanthropists and sentimentalists are deeply imbued with the grave national responsibilities which devolve on Eng- land, and with the lofty aspirations which attach read the opening chapters of Sorel's L'Europe et la Revolution Franqaise. 1 Ecclesiastes i. 9. z Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, vol. ii. p. 328. themselves to her civilising and moralising mission. The other is the commercial school. Pitt once said that " British policy is British trade." The general correctness of this aphorism cannot be challenged, but, like most aphorisms, it only conveys a portion of the truth ; for the com- mercial spirit, though eminently beneficent when under some degree of moral control, may become not merely hurtful, but even subversive of Imperial dominion, when it is allowed to run riot. Livingstone said that in five hundred years the only thing the natives of Africa had learnt from the Portuguese was to distil bad spirits with the help of an old gun barrel. This is, without doubt, an extreme case so extreme, indeed, that even the hardened conscience of diplomatic Europe was eventually shamed into taking some half-hearted action in the direction of preventing a whole continent from being demoralised in order that the distillers and vendors of cheap spirits might realise large profits. But it would not be difficult to cite other analogous, though less striking, instances. Occasions are, indeed, not infrequent when the interests of commerce apparently clash with those of good government. The word " apparently " is used with intent ; for though some few individuals may acquire a temporary benefit by sacrificing moral principle 12 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i on the altar of pecuniary gain, it may confidently be stated that, in respect to the wider and more lasting benefits of trade, no real antagonism exists between commercial self-interest and public morality. 1 To be more explicit, what is meant when it is said that the commercial spirit should be under some control is this that in dealing with Indians or Egyptians, or Shilluks, or Zulus, the first question is to consider what course is most con- ducive to Indian, Egyptian, Shilluk, or Zulu interests. We need not always inquire too closely what these people, who are all, nationally speaking, more or less in statu pupittari, them- selves think is best in their own interests, although this is a point which deserves serious considera- tion. But it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, 1 Lord Farrer says : " It is the privilege of honourable trade that, like mercy, it is twice blessed ; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes ; each of its dealings is of necessity a benefit to both parties. But traders and speculators are not always the most scrupulous of mankind. Their dealings with savage and half-civilised nations too often betray sharp practice, sometimes violence and wrong. The persons who carry on our trade on the outskirts of civilisation are not distinguished by a special apprecia- tion of the rights of others, nor are the speculators, who are attracted by the enormous profits to be made by precarious invest- ments in half-civilised countries, people in whose hands we should desire to place the fortunes or reputation of our country. When a difficulty arises between ourselves and one of the weaker nations, these are the persons whose voice is most loudly raised for acts of violence, of aggression, or of revenge." The State in its Relation to Trade, p. 177. by the light of Western knowledge and experience tempered by local considerations, we conscien- tiously think is best for the subject race, without reference to any real or supposed advantage which may accrue to England as a nation, er- as is more frequently the case to the special interests represented by some one or more influential classes of Englishmen. If the British nation as a whole persistently bears this principle in mind, and insists sternly on its application, though we can never create a patriotism akin to that based on affinity of race or community of language, we may perhaps foster some sort of cosmopolitan allegiance grounded on the respect always accorded to superior talents and unselfish conduct, and on the gratitude derived both from favours conferred and from those to come. 1 There may then at all events be some hope that the Egyptian will hesitate before he throws in his lot with any future Arabi. The Berberine dweller on the banks of the Nile may, perhaps, cast no wistful glances back to the time when, albeit he or his progenitors were oppressed, the 1 It should never be forgotten that, in Oriental countries, whatever good is done to the masses is necessarily purchased at the expense of incurring the resentment of the ruling classes, who abused the power they formerly possessed. Seeley (Expansion of England, p. 320) says with great truth : "It would be very rash to assume that any gratitude, which may have been aroused here and there by our administration, can be more than sufficient to counterbalance the discontent which we have excited among those whom we have ousted from authority and influence." 14 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i oppression came from the hand of a co-religionist. Even the Central African savage may eventually learn to chant a hymn in honour of Astraea Redux, as represented by the British official who denies him gin but gives him justice. More than this, commerce will gain. It must neces- sarily follow in the train of civilisation, and, whilst it will speedily droop if that civilisation is spurious, it will, on the other hand, increase in volume in direct proportion to the extent to which the true principles of Western progress are assimilated by the subjects of the British king and the customers of the British trader. This latter must be taught patience at the hands of the statesman and the moralist. It is a some- what difficult lesson to learn. The trader not only wishes to acquire wealth ; he not infre- quently wishes that its acquisition should be rapid, even at the expense of morality and of the permanent interests of his country. Nam dives qui fieri vult, Et cito vult fieri. Sed quae reverentia legum, Quis metus aut pudor est unquam properantis avari ? J This question demands consideration from another point of view. A clever Frenchman, keenly alive to what he thought was the decad- ence of his own nation, published a remarkable 1 Juvenal, xiv. 176-8. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 15 book in 1897. He practically admitted that the Anglophobia so common on the continent of Europe is the outcome of jealousy. 1 He acknow- ledged the proved superiority of the Anglo-Saxon over the Latin races, and he set himself to examine the causes of that superiority. The general conclusion at which he arrived was that the strength of the Anglo-Saxon race lay in the fact that its society, its government, and its habits of thought were eminently " particularist," as opposed to the " communitarian " principles prevalent on the continent of Europe. He was probably quite right. It has, indeed, become a commonplace of English political thought that for centuries past, from the days of Raleigh to those of Rhodes, the position of England in the world has been due more to the exertions, to the resources, and occasionally, perhaps, to the absence of scruple found in the individual Anglo- Saxon, than to any encouragement or help derived from British Governments, whether of the Elizabethan, Georgian, or Victorian type. 1 " La superiorite des Anglo-Saxons ! Si on ne la proclame pas, on la subit et on la redoute ; les craintes, les mefiances et parfois les haines que souleve 1' Anglais 1'attestent assez haut. . . . " Nous ne pouvons faire un pas a travers le monde, sans rencontrer 1'Anglais. Nous ne pouvons jeter les yeux sur nos anciennes possessions, sans y voir flotter le pavilion anglais." A Quoi tient la Superiority des Anglo-Saxons ? Demolins. This work, as well as another on much the same subject (U Europa giovane, by Guglielmo Ferrero), were reviewed in the Edinburgh Review for January 1898. 16 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i The principle of relying largely on individual effort has, in truth, produced marvellous results. It is singularly suited to develop some of the best qualities of the vigorous, self-assertive Anglo- Saxon race. It is to be hoped that self-help may long continue to be our national watchword. It is now somewhat the fashion to regard as benighted the school of thought which was founded two hundred years ago by Du Quesnay and the French Physiocrates, which reached its zenith in the person of Adam Smith, and whose influence rapidly declined in England after the great battle of Free Trade had been fought and won. But whatever may have been the faults of that school, and however little its philosophy is capable of affording an answer to many of the complex questions which modern government and society present, it laid fast hold of one unques- tionably sound principle. It entertained a deep mistrust of Government interference in the social and economic relations of life. Moreover, it saw, long before the fact became apparent to the rest of the world, that, in spite not only of some outward dissimilarities of methods but even of an instinctive mutual repulsion, despotic bureau- cracy was the natural ally of those communistic principles which the economists deemed it their main business in life to combat and condemn. Many regard with some disquietude the frequent i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 17 concessions which have of late years been made in England to demands for State interference. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that the main principle advocated by the economists still holds the field, that individualism is not being crushed out of existence, and that the majority of our countrymen still believe that State interference- being an evil, although sometimes admittedly a necessary evil should be jealously watched and restricted to the minimum amount absolutely necessary in each special case. Attention is drawn to this point in order to show that the observations which follow are in no degree based on any general desire to exalt the power of the State at the expense of the individual. Our habits of thought, our past history, and our national character all, therefore, point in the direction of allowing individualism as wide a scope as possible in the work of national expansion. Hence the career of the East India Company and the tendency displayed more recently in Africa to govern through the agency of private companies. On the other hand, it is greatly to be doubted whether the principles, which a wise policy would dictate in the treatment of subject races, will receive their application to so full an extent at the hands of private individuals as would be the case at the hands of the State. The guarantee for c 18 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i good government is even less solid where power is entrusted to a corporate body, for, as Turgot once said, " La morale des corps les plus scrupu- leux ne vaut jamais celle des particuliers honnetes." 1 In both cases, public opinion is relatively impotent. In the case of direct Government action, on the other hand, the views of those who wish to uphold a high standard of public morality can find expression in Parliament, and the latter can, if it chooses, oblige the Government to control its agents and call them to account for unjust, unwise, or overbearing conduct. More than this, State officials, having no interests to serve but those of good govern- ment, are more likely to pay regard to the welfare of the subject race than commercial agents, who must necessarily be hampered in their action by the pecuniary interests of their employers. Our national policy must, of course, be what would be called in statics the resultant of the various currents of opinion represented in our national society. Whether Imperialism will con- tinue to rest on a sound basis depends, therefore, to no small extent, on the degree to which the 1 Vie de Turgot, i. 47. In the debate on the India Act in 1858, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose views were generally distin- guished for their moderation, said : " I do most confidently maintain that no civilised Government ever existed on the face of this earth which was more corrupt, more perfidious, and more capricious than the East India Company was from 1758 to 1784, when it was placed under Parliamentary control." i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 19 moralising elements in the nation can, without injury to all that is sound and healthy in indi- vidualist action, control those defects which may not improbably spring out of the egotism of the commercial spirit, if it be subject to no effective check. 1 If this problem can be satisfactorily solved, then Christianity, far from being a disruptive force, as was the case with Rome, will prove one of the strongest elements of Imperial cohesion. 3. Slavery. It is not necessary to discuss this question, for there can be no doubt that, in so far as his connexion with subject races is con- cerned, the Anglo-Saxon in modern times comes, not to enslave, but to liberate from slavery. The fact that he does so is, indeed, one of his best title-deeds to Imperial dominion. 4. The Pauperisation of the Roman Proletariat. This is the Panem et Circenses policy. Mr. Hodgkin appears to think that in this direction lies the main danger which threatens the British Empire. 1 " It still remains true that there is a large body of public opinion in England which carries into all politics a sound moral sense, and which places a just and righteous policy higher than any mere party interest. It is on the power and pressure of this opinion that the high character of English government must ultimately depend." Map of Life, Lecky, p. 184. It will be a matter for surprise if the ultra-bureaucratic spirit, coupled with a somewhat pronounced degree of commercial egotism, do not prove the two rocks on which German colonial enterprise will be eventually shipwrecked. 20 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i " Of all the forces," he says, " which were at work for the destruction of the prosperity of the Roman world, none is more deserving of the careful study of an English statesman than the grain-largesses to the populace of Rome. . . . Will the great Democracies of the twentieth century resist the temptation to use political power as a means of material self -enrichment ? " Possibly Mr. Hodgkin is right. The manner in which the leaders of the Paris Commune dealt with the rights of property during their dis- astrous, but fortunately very brief, period of office in 1871, serves as a warning of what, in an extreme case, may be expected of despotic democracy in its most aggravated form. More- over, misgovernment, and the fiscal oppression which is the almost necessary accompaniment of militarism dominant over a poverty - stricken population, have latterly developed on the con- tinent of Europe, and more especially in Italy, a school of action for anarchism can scarcely be dignified by the name of a school of thought which regards human life as scarcely more sacred than property. It may be that some lower depth has yet to be reached, although it is almost inconceivable that such should be the case. Anarchy takes us past the stage of any defined political or social programme. It would appear, so far as can at present be judged, to embody the last despairing cry of ultra - democracy " Furens." i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 21 It is permissible to hope that our national sobriety, coupled with the inherited traditions derived from centuries of free government, will save us from such extreme manifestations of democratic tyranny as those to which allusion has been made above. The special danger in England would appear rather to arise from the probability of gradual dry rot, due to prolonged offence against the infallible and relentless laws of economic science. Both British employers of labour and British workmen are insular in their habits of thought, and insular in the range of their acquired knowledge. They do not appear as yet to be thoroughly alive to the new position created for British trade by foreign competition. It is greatly to be hoped that they will awake to the realities of the situation before any per- manent harm is done to British trade, for the loss of trade involves as its ultimate result the pauperisation of the proletariat, the adoption of reckless expedients based on the Panem et Circenses policy to fill the mouths and quell the voices of the multitude, and finally the suicide of that Empire which is the offspring of trade, and which can only continue to exist so long as its parent continues to thrive and to flourish. 5. The Destruction of the Middle Class by the Fiscal Oppression of the Curiales. Leaving aside points of detail, which were only of special 22 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i application to the circumstances of the time, this cause of Roman decay may, for all purposes of comparison and instruction, be stated in the following terms : funds, which should have been spent by the municipalities on local objects, were, from about the close of the third century, diverted to the Imperial Exchequer, by which they were not infrequently squandered in such a manner as to confer no benefit of any kind on the taxpayers, whether local or Imperial. Thus, the system of local self-government, which, Mr. Hodgkin says, was, during the early centuries of the Empire, " both in name and fact Republi- can," was shattered. It does not appear probable that an attempt will ever be made to divert the public revenues of the outlying dependencies of Great Britain to the Imperial Exchequer. The lesson taught by the loss of the American Colonies has sunk deeply into the public mind. Moreover, the example of Spain stands as a warning to all the world. The principle that local revenues should be expended locally has become part of the political creed of Englishmen ; neither is it at all likely to be infringed, even in respect to those dependencies whose rights and privileges are not safeguarded by self-governing institutions. There may, however, be some little danger ahead in a sense exactly opposite to that which i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 23 was incurred by Rome the danger, that is to say, that, under the pressure of Imperialism, backed by influential class and personal interests, too large an amount of the Imperial revenue may be diverted to the outlying dependencies. If this were done, two evils might not improbably ensue. In the first place, the British democracy might become restive under taxation imposed for objects the utility of which would not perhaps be fully appreciated, and might therefore be disposed to cast off too hastily the mantle of Imperialism. It is but a short time ago that an influential school of politicians persistently dwelt on the theme that the colonies were a burthen to the Mother Country. Although, for the time being, views of this sort are out of fashion, no assurance can be felt that the swing of the pendulum may not bring round another anti-Imperialist phase of public opinion. In the second place, if financial aid to any considerable extent were afforded by the British Treasury to the outlying dependencies, a serious risk would be run that this concession would be followed at no distant period by a plea in favour of financial control from England. The estab- lishment of this latter principle would strike a blow at one of the main props on which our Imperial fabric is based. It would tend to substitute a centralised, in the place of our present decentralised system. Those who are immediately responsible for the administration of our outlying dependencies will, therefore, act wisely if they abstain from asking too readily for Imperial pecuniary aid in order to solve local difficulties. These considerations naturally lead to some reflections on the principles of government adopted in those dependencies of the Empire, the inhabitants of which are not of the Anglo- Saxon race. Colonies whose inhabitants are mainly of British origin stand, of course, on a wholly different footing. They carry their Anglo- Saxon institutions and habits of thought with them to their distant homes. Englishmen are less imitative than most Euro- peans in this sense that they are less disposed to apply the administrative and political systems of their own country to the government of backward populations ; but in spite of their relatively high degree of political elasticity, they cannot shake themselves altogether free from political conven- tionalities. Moreover, the experienced minority is constantly being pressed by the inexperienced majority in the direction of imitation. Knowing the somewhat excessive degree of adulation which some sections of the British public are disposed to pay to their special idol, Lord Dufferin, in 1883, was almost apologetic to his countrymen i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 25 for abstaining from an act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts " to mitigate pre- dominant absolutism " in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to his aid. He deprecated paying too much attention to the " murmuring leaves," in other words, imagining that the establishment of a Chamber of Notables implied constitutional freedom, and he exhorted his countrymen " to seek for the roots," that is to say, to allow each Egyptian village to elect its own mayor (Sheikh). It cannot be too clearly understood that whether we deal with the roots, or the trunk, or the branches, or the leaves, free institutions in the full sense of the term must for generations to come be wholly unsuitable to countries such as India and Egypt. If the use of a metaphor, though of a less polished type, be allowed, it may be said that it will probably never be possible to make a Western silk purse out of an Eastern sow's ear ; at all events, if the impossibility of the task be called in question, it should be recognised that the process of manufacture will be extremely lengthy and tedious. But it is often urged that, although no rational person would wish to advocate the premature creation of ultra-liberal institutions in backward 26 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i countries, at the same time that for several reasons it is desirable to move gradually in this direction. The adoption of this method is, it is said, the only way to remedy the evils attendant on a system of personal government in an extreme form ; it enables us to learn the views of the natives of the country, even although we may not accord to the latter full power of deciding whether or not those views should be put in practice ; lastly, it constitutes a means of political educa- tion, through the agency of which the subject race will gradually acquire the qualities necessary to autonomy. The force of these arguments cannot be denied, but there should be no delusion as to the weight which should be attached to them. It has been very truly remarked by a writer, who has dealt with the idiosyncrasies of a singularly versatile nation, whose genius presented in every respect a marked contrast to that of Eastern races, that from the dawn of history Eastern politics have been " stricken with a fatal simplicity." l Do not let us for one moment imagine that the fatally simple idea of despotic rule will readily give way to the far more complex conception of ordered liberty. The transformation, if it ever takes place at all, will probably be the work, not of generations, but of centuries. 1 Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, p, 27. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 27 So limited is the stock of political ideas in the world that some modified copy of parliamentary institutions is, without doubt, the only method which has yet been invented for mitigating the evils attendant on the personal system of govern- ment. But it is a method which is thoroughly uncongenial to Oriental habits of thought. It may be doubted whether, by the adoption of this exotic system, we gain any real insight into native aspirations and opinions. As to the educational process, the experience of India is not very en- couraging. The good government of most Indian towns depends to this day mainly, not on the Municipal Commissioners, who are generally natives, but on the influence of the President, who is usually an Englishman. A further consideration in connection with this point is also of some importance. It is that British officials in Eastern countries should be encouraged by all possible means to learn the views and the requirements of the native popula- tion. The establishment of mock parliaments tends rather in the opposite direction, for the official on the spot sees through the mockery and is not infrequently disposed to abandon any attempt to ascertain real native opinion, through disgust at the unreality, crudity, or folly of the views set forth by the putative representatives of native society. 28 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i For these reasons it is important that, in our well-intentioned endeavours to impregnate the Oriental mind with our insular habits of thought, we should proceed with the utmost caution, and that we should remember that our primary duty is, not to introduce a system which, under the specious cloak of free institutions, will enable a small minority of natives to misgovern their countrymen, but to establish one which will enable the mass of the population to be governed according to the code of Christian morality. A freely elected Egyptian Parliament, supposing such a thing to be possible, would not improbably legislate for the protection of the slave-owner, if not the slave - dealer, and no assurance can be felt that the electors of Rajputana, if they had their own way, would not re-establish suttee. Good government has the merit of presenting a more or less attainable ideal. Before Orientals can attain anything approaching to the British ideal of self - government they will have to undergo very numerous transmigrations of political thought. The question of local self-government may be considered from another, and almost equally important point of view. When writers such as M. Demolins speak of the " particularist " system of England and of the " communitarian " system prevalent on the i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 29 continent of Europe, they generally mean to contrast the British plan of acting through the agency of private individuals with the Continental practice of relying almost entirely on the action of the State. This is the primary and perhaps the most important signification of the two phrases, but the principles which these phrases are intended to represent admit of another application. It is difficult for those Englishmen who have not been brought into business relations with Continental officials to realise the extreme central- isation of their administrative and diplomatic procedures. The tendency of every French cen- tral authority is to allow no discretionary power whatever to his subordinate. He wishes, often from a distance, to control every detail of the administration. The tendency of the subordinate, on the other hand, is to lean in everything on superior authority. He does not dare to take any personal responsibility ; indeed, it is possible to go further and say that the corroding action of bureaucracy renders those who live under its baneful shadow almost incapable of assuming responsibility. By force of habit and training it has become irksome to them. They fly for refuge to a superior official, who, in his turn, if the case at all admits of the adoption of such a course, hastens to merge his individuality in the 30 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i voluminous pages of a code or a Government circular. The British official, on the other hand, whether in England or abroad, is an Englishman first and an official afterwards. He possesses his full share of national characteristics. He is by inheritance an individualist. He lives in a society which, so far from being, as is the case on the Continent, saturated with respect for officialism, is somewhat prone to regard officialism and incompetency as synonymous terms. By such association, any bureaucratic tendency which may exist on the part of the British official is kept in check, whilst his individualism is subjected to a sustained and healthy course of tonic treatment. Thus, the British system breeds a race of officials who relatively to those holding analogous posts on the Continent, are disposed to exercise their central authority in a manner sympathetic to individualism ; who, if they are inclined to err in the sense of over - centralisation, are often held in check by statesmen imbued with the decentralising spirit ; and who, under these influences, are inclined to accord to local agents a far wider latitude than those trained in the Continental school of bureaucracy would con- sider either safe or desirable. On the other hand, looking to the position and attributes of the local agents themselves, it is i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 31 singular to observe how the habit of assuming responsibility, coupled with national predisposi- tions acting in the same direction, generates and fosters a capacity for the beneficial exercise of power. This feature is not merely noticeable in comparing British with Continental officials, but also in contrasting various classes of Englishmen inter se. The most highly centralised of all our English offices is the War Office. For this reason, and also because a military life necessarily and rightly engenders a habit of implicit obedience to orders, soldiers are generally less disposed than civilians to assume personal responsibility and to act on their own initiative. Nevertheless, whether in military or civil life, it may be said that the spirit of decentralisation pervades the whole British administrative system, and that it has given birth to a class of officials who have both the desire and the capacity to govern, who constitute what Bacon called 1 the Participes cur arum, namely, " those upon whom Princes doe discharge the greatest weight of their affaires," and who are instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism. The method of exercising the central control under the British system calls for some further remarks. It varies greatly in different localities. Under the Indian system a council of experts 1 Essays. " Of Honour and Reputation." 32 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i is attached to the Secretary of State in England. A good authority on this subject says 1 that there can be no question of the advantage of this system. No man, however experienced and laborious, could properly direct and control the various interests of so vast an Empire, unless he were aided by men with knowledge of different parts of the country, and possess- ing an intimate acquaintance with the different and complicated subjects involved in the government and welfare of so many incongruous races. On the assumption that India is to be governed from London, there can be no doubt of the validity of this argument. But, as has been frequently pointed out, 2 this system tends inevitably towards over - centralisation, and if the British Government is to continue to exercise a sort of TravTotcpaTopia, to use an expressive Greek phrase, over a number of outlying depend- encies of very various types, over-centralisation is a danger which should be carefully shunned. It is wiser to obtain local knowledge from those on the spot, rather than from those whose local experience must necessarily diminish in value in direct proportion to the length of the period 1 Sir Charles Wood's Administration of Indian Affairs, 1859-66. West. 1867. Sir Algernon West was Private Secretary to Sir Charles Wood, afterwards Lord Halifax, who was the first Secre- tary of State for India appointed after the passing of the India Act of 1858, and, therefore; inaugurated the new system. 2 See, inter alia, Chesney's Indian Polity, p. 136. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 33 during which they have been absent from the special locality, and who, moreover, are under a strong temptation, after they leave the depend- ency, to exercise a detailed control over their successors. It is greatly to be doubted, there- fore, whether, should the occasion arise, this portion of the Indian system is deserving of reproduction. There is, however, another portion of that system which is in every respect admirable, and the creation of which bears the impress of that keen political insight which, according to many Continental authorities, is the birthright of the Anglo - Saxon race. India is governed locally by a council composed mainly of officials who have passed their adult lives in the country ; but the Viceroy, and occasionally the legal and financial members of Council, are sent from England and are usually chosen by reason of their general qualifications, rather than on ac- count of any special knowledge of Indian affairs. This system avoids the dangers consequent on over-centralisation, whilst at the same time it associates with the administration of the country some individuals who are personally imbued with the general principles of government which are favoured by the central authority. Its tendency is to correct the defect from which the officials employed in the outlying portions of the Empire D 34 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i are most likely to suffer, namely, that of magnify- ing the importance of some local event or con- sideration, and of unduly neglecting arguments based on considerations of wider Imperial import. It enhances the idea of proportion, which is one of the main qualities necessary to any politician or governing body. Long attention to one sub- ject, or group of subjects, is apt to narrow the vision of specialists. The adjunct of an element, which is not Anglo-Indian, to the Indian Govern- ment acts as a corrective to this evil. The members of the Government who are sent from England, if they have no local experience, are at all events exempt from local prejudices. They bring to bear on the questions which come before them a wide general knowledge and, in many cases, the liberal spirit and vigorous common sense which are acquired in the course of an English parliamentary career. It may be added, as a matter of important detail, that it would be desirable, in order to give continuity to Indian policy, to select young men to fill the place of Viceroy, and to extend the period of office from five to seven, or even to ten years. Although over-centralisation is to be avoided, a certain amount of control from a central authority is not only unavoidable ; if properly exercised, it is most beneficial. One danger to i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 35 which the local agent is exposed is that, being ill- informed of circumstances lying outside his range of political vision, he may lose sight of the general principles which guide the policy of the Empire ; he may treat subjects of local interest in a manner calculated to damage, or even to jeopardise, Imperial interests. The central authority is in a position to obviate any danger arising from this cause. To ensure the harmoni- ous working of the different parts of the machine, the central authority should endeavour, so far as is possible, to realise the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency ; whilst the local agent should be constantly on the watch lest he should overrate the importance of some local issue, or fail to appreciate fully the difficulties which beset the action of the central authority. To sum up all that there is to be said on this branch of the subject, it may be hoped that the fate which befell Rome, in so far as it was due to the special causes of decay now under considera- tion, may be averted by close adherence to two important principles. The first of these principles is that local revenues should be expended locally. The second is that over -centralisation should above all things be avoided. This may be done either by the creation of self-governing institu- tions in those dependencies whose civilisation is 36 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i sufficiently advanced to justify the adoption of this course ; or by decentralising the executive Government in cases where self-government, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, is impossible or undesirable. 6. Barbarous Finance. Mr. Hodgkin says that the system of Imperial taxation under the Roman Empire was " wasteful, oppressive, and in a word, barbarous." He gives, as an instance in point, the Roman Indiction. This was the name given to the system under which the taxable value of the land throughout the Empire was reassessed every fifteen years. At each reassessment, Mr. Hodgkin says, " the few who had prospered found themselves assessed on the higher value which their lands had acquired, while the many who were sinking down into poverty obtained, it is to be feared, but little relief from taxation on account of the higher rate which was charged to all." It is somewhat unpleasant to reflect that the system which Mr. Hodgkin so strongly condemns, and which he even regards as one of the causes of the downfall of the Roman Empire, is save in respect to the intervals of periodical reassessment very similar to that which exists everywhere in India, except in the province of Bengal, where the rights conferred on the zemindars under Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement are still re- i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 37 spected in spite of occasional unwise suggestions that time and the fall in the value of the rupee have obliterated any moral obligations to main- tain them. Nor are the results obtained in India altogether dissimilar from those observable under Roman rule. The knowledge that reassess- ment was imminent has, it is believed, often discouraged the outlay of private capital on im- proving the land. More than this, it is notorious that, at one time, some provinces suffered greatly from the mistakes made by the settlement officers. These latter were animated with the best intentions, but, in spite of their marked ability for they were all specially selected men they often found the task entrusted to them impossible of execution. Unfortunately political or administrative errors cannot be condoned by reason of good intentions. Like the Greeks of old, the natives of India suffer from the mistakes of their rulers. The intentions of the British, as compared with the Roman Government are, however, noteworthy from one point of view, inasmuch as from a correct appreciation of those intentions it is possible to evolve a principle perhaps in some degree calculated to avert the consequences which befell Rome, partly by reason of fiscal errors. In spite of some high-sounding commonplaces 38 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i which were at times enunciated by Roman law- givers and statesmen, and in which a ring of utili- tarian philosophy is to be recognised, 1 and of the further fact that, as in the case of Verres, a check was sometimes applied to the excesses of local Governors, it is almost certainly true that the rulers of Rome did not habitually act on the recog- nition of any very strong moral obligation binding on the Imperial Government in its treatment of subject races. The merits of any fiscal system were probably judged mainly from the point of view of the amount of funds which it poured into the Treasury. The fiscal principles on which the Emperors of Rome acted survived long after the fall of the Roman Empire. They deserve the epithet of " barbarous " which Mr. Hodgkin has bestowed upon them. The point of departure of the British Govern- ment is altogether different. Its intentions are admirable. Every farthing which has been spent and, it may be feared, often wasted on the numerous military expeditions in which the Gov- ernment of India has been engaged during the last century would, in the eyes of many, certainly be considered as expenditure incurred on objects 1 Perhaps the best-known example is " Salus populi suprema lex esto," a maxim which, as Selden has pointed out (Table Talk, ciii.), is very frequently misapplied See also the advice given by the Emperor Claudius to the Parthian Mithridates (Tacitus, Ann. xii. 11). i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 39 which were of paramount interest to the Indian taxpayers. Moreover, a whole category of British legislation connected with fiscal matters has been undertaken, not so much with a view to increase the revenue as with the object of distributing the burthen of taxation equally amongst the different classes of society. Much of this legislation has been perfectly justifiable and even beneficial. Nevertheless, it should never be forgotten that it is generally based on the purely Western principle that abstract justice is in itself a desir- able thing to attain, and that a fiscal or adminis- trative system stands condemned if it is want- ing in symmetry. It was against any extreme application of this principle that Burke directed some of his most forcible diatribes. 1 It has been already pointed out that the commendable want of intellectual symmetry which is the inherited possession of the Englishman gives him a very great advantage as an Imperialist agent over 1 " The idea of forcing everything to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it. It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order ; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes, and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth. Though I have no doubt that the minute, labori- ous, and very expensive cadastre, which was made by the King of Sardinia, has done no sort of good, and that after all his pains a few years will restore all things to their first inequality, yet it has been the admiration of half the reforming financiers of Europe ; I mean the official financiers, as well as the speculative." Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, ii. 126. 40 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES x those trained in the rigid and bureaucratic school of Continental Europe. But the Englishman is a Western, albeit an Anglo-Saxon Western, and, from the point of view of all processes of reason- ing, the gulf which separates any one member of the European family from another is infinitely less wide than that which divides all Westerns from all Orientals. Even the Englishman, there- fore, is constrained sometimes much against his will to bow down in that temple of Logic, the existence of which the Oriental is disposed altogether to ignore. Indeed, sometimes the choice lies between the enforcement on the reluctant Oriental of principles based on logic occasionally on the very simple science of arith- metic or abandoning the work of civilisation altogether. From this point of view, the dangers to which the British Empire is exposed by reason of fiscal measures are due not, as was the case with Rome, to barbarous, but rather to ultra- scientific finance. The following is a case in point. The land-tax has always been the principal source from which Oriental potentates have derived their revenues. For all practical pur- poses it may be said that the system which they have adopted has generally been to take as much from the cultivators as they could get. Reformers, such as the Emperor Akbar, have at times endeavoured to introduce more enlightened i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 41 methods of taxation, and to carry into practice the theories upon which the fiscal system in all Moslem countries is based. Those theories are by no means so objectionable as is often supposed. But the reforms which some few capable rulers attempted to introduce have almost always crumbled away under the regime of their suc- cessors. 1 In practice, the only limit to the demands of the ruler of an Oriental State has been the ability of the taxpayers to satisfy them. 2 The only defence of the taxpayers has lain in the concealment of their incomes at the risk of being tortured till they divulged their amount. Nevertheless, even under such a system as this, the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb by the fact that Oriental rulers recognise that they cannot get money from a man who possesses none. If, from drought or other causes, the cultivator raises no crop, he is not required to pay any land-tax. The idea of expropriation for the non-payment of taxes is purely Western and modern. Under Roman law, it was the rule in contracts for rent that a tenant was not bound to pay if any vis major prevented him from reaping. The European system is very different. A 1 Mill, History of British India, vi. 433. * Elphinstone, History of India, p. 77. 42 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i far less heavy demand is made on the cultivator, but he is, at all events in principle and sometimes in practice, called upon to meet it in good and bad years alike. He is expected to save in years of plenty in order to make good the deficit in lean years. If he is unable to pay, he is liable to be expropriated, and he often is expropriated. This plan is just, logical, and very Western. It may be questioned whether Oriental cultivators do not sometimes rather prefer the oppression and elasticity of the Eastern to the justice and rigidity of the Western system. Various palliatives have been adopted in India with a view to giving some elasticity to the working of the Land Revenue system. In Egypt, where the administration is much less Anglicised than in India, and where, for various reasons, the treatment of this subject presents relatively fewer difficulties, it is the practice now, as was the case under purely native rule, to remit the taxes on what is known as Sharaki lands, that is to say, land which, owing to a low Nile, has not been irrigated. It is not, however, necessary to dwell on the details of this subject. It will be sufficient to draw attention to the different points of view from which the Eastern and the Western approach the subject of fiscal administration. The latter urges with unanswerable logic that financial equilibrium must be maintained, and i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 43 that he cannot frame a trustworthy Budget unless he knows the amount he may count on receiving from direct taxes, especially from the land-tax. The Eastern replies that he knows nothing of either financial equilibrium or of budgets, that it has, indeed, from time immemorial been the custom to leave him nought but a bare pittance when he had money, but to refrain from any endeavours to extort money from him when he had none. Another instance drawn, not from the practices of fiscal administration, but from legislation on a cognate subject, may be cited. Directly Western civilisation comes in contact with a backward Oriental Society, the relations between debtor and creditor are entirely changed. A social revolution is effected. The Western applies his code with stern and ruthless logic. The child-like Eastern, on the other hand, cannot be made to understand that his house should be sold over his head because he affixed his seal to a document, which, very probably, he had never read, or, at all events, had never fully under- stood, and which was presented to him by a man at one time apparently animated with benevolent intentions, inasmuch as he wished to lend him money, but who subsequently showed his male- volence by asking to be repaid his loan with interest at an exorbitant rate. 44 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i Here, again, many palliatives have been suggested and some have been applied, but many of them sin against the economic law, which provides that legislation intended to pro- tect a man against the consequences of his own folly or improvidence is generally unproductive of result. In truth, no thoroughly effective remedy can be applied in cases such as those mentioned above, without abandoning all real attempt at progress. Civilisation must, unfortunately, have its victims, amongst whom are to some extent inevitably numbered those who do not recognise the paramount necessities of the Budget system, and those who contract debts with an inadequate appreciation of the caveat emptor principle. Never- theless, the Western financier will act wisely if, casting aside some portion of his Western habit of thought, he recognises the facts with which he has to deal, and if, fully appreciating the intimate connection between finance and politics in an Eastern country, he endeavours, so far as is possible, to temper the clean-cut science of his fiscal measures in such a manner as to suit the customs and intellectual standard of the subject race with which he has to deal. The question of the amount of taxation levied stands apart from the method of its imposition. It may be laid down as a principle of universal i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 45 application that high taxation is incompatible with assured stability of Imperial rule. 1 The financier and the hydraulic engineer, who is a powerful ally of the financier, have probably a greater potentiality of creating an artificial and self-interested loyalty than even the judge. The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the number of criminals, or even of civil litigants, in any society is limited ; whereas practically the whole population consists of taxpayers. In the second place, the arbitrary methods of adminis- tering justice practised by Oriental rulers do not shock their subjects nearly so much as Europeans are often disposed to think. Custom has made it in them a property of easiness. They often, indeed, fail to appreciate the intentions, and are disposed to resent the methods, of those whose object it is to establish justice in the law-courts. On the other hand, the most ignorant Egyptian fellah or Indian ryot can understand the differ- ence between a Government which takes nine- tenths of his crop in the shape of land-tax, and one which only takes one-third or one-fourth. He can realise that he is better off if the water is allowed to flow periodically on to his fields, than he was when the influential landowner, who 1 Lord Lawrence said : " Light taxation is, in my mind, the panacea for foreign rule in India." Bosworth Smith, Life of Lord Lawrence, vol. ii. p. 497. 46 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i possessed a property up - stream on the canal, made a dam and prevented him from getting any water at all. These principles would probably meet with general acceptance from all who have considered the question of Imperial rule. They are, indeed, almost commonplace. Unfortunately, in practice the necessity of conforming to them is often for- gotten. India is the great instance in point. Englishmen are often so convinced that the natives of India ought to be loyal, they hear so much said of their loyalty, they appreciate so little the causes which are at work to produce disloyalty, and, in spite of occasional mistakes due to errors of judgment, they are in reality so earnestly desirous of doing what they consider, sometimes perhaps erroneously, their duty to- wards the native population, that they are apt to lose sight of the fact that the self-interest of the subject race is the principal basis of the whole Imperial fabric. They forget, whilst they are adding to the upper story of the house, that the foundations may give way. This is not the place to enter into any lengthy discussion upon Indian affairs. It may be said, however, that the Indian history of the last few years certainly gives cause for some anxiety. Attention was at one time too exclusively paid to frontier policy, which constitutes only one, and i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 47 that not the most important, element of the complex Indian problem. That the policy of " masterly inactivity," to use the phrase epigrammatically, but perhaps somewhat incorrectly, applied to the line of action advocated by Lord Lawrence in 1869, required some modifications as the onward move- ment of Russia in Asia developed, will scarcely be contested by the most devoted of Lawrentian partisans and followers. That those modifica- tions were wisely introduced is a proposition the truth of which it is difficult to admit. The portion of Lord Lawrence's programme which was necessarily temporary, inasmuch as it de- pended on the circumstances of the time, was rejected without taking sufficient account of the further and far more important portion which was of permanent application. This latter portion was defined in an historic and oft-quoted despatch which he indited on the eve of his departure from India, and which may be regarded as his political testament. In this despatch, Lord Lawrence, speaking with all the authority due to a lifelong acquaintance with Indian affairs, laid down the broad general principle that the strongest security of our rule lay " in the content- ment, if not in the attachment, of the masses." x 1 The essential portions of this despatch, in so far as the pur- poses of the present argument are concerned, are given in Sir 48 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i The truth of this general principle was at one time too much neglected. Under the influence of a predominant militarism acting on too pliant politicians, vast military expenditure was incurred. Territory lying outside the natural geographical frontier of India was occupied, the acquisition of which was condemned not merely by sound policy, but also by sound strategy. Taxation was increased, and, generally, the material interests of the natives of India were sacrificed and British Imperial rule exposed to subsequent danger, in order to satisfy the exi- gencies of a school of soldier-politicians who only saw one, and that the most technical, aspect of a very wide and complex question. Neither, unfortunately, is there any sure guarantee that the mistakes, which it is now almost universally admitted were made, will not recur. Where, indeed, are we to look for any effective check ? The rulers of India, whether they sit in Calcutta or London, may again be carried away by the partial views of an influential class, or of a few masterful individuals. It is. absurd to speak of creating free institutions in India to control the Indian Government. Ex- perience has shown that parliamentary action in England not infrequently degenerates into Richard Temple's work (p. 185), and in Bosworth Smith's Life of Lord Lawrence, vol. ii. p. 186. i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 49 acrimonious discussion and recrimination dictated by party passion ; in any case, it is generally too late to change the course of events. Still less reliance can be placed on the action of the British Press, which falls a ready victim to the specious arguments advanced by some strategical pseudo- Imperialist in high position, or by some fervent acolyte who has learnt at the feet of his master the fatal and facile lesson of how an Empire, built up by statesmen, may be wrecked by the well-intentioned but mistaken measures recom- mended by specialists to ensure Imperial salvation. The managers of the London news- papers afford, indeed, be it said to their credit, every facility for the publication of views adverse to those which they themselves advocate. But it is none the less true that, during the years when the unwise frontier policy of a few years ago was being planned and executed, the voices of the opposition, although they were those of Indian statesmen and officials who could speak with the highest authority, failed to obtain an adequate hearing until the evil was irremediable. On the other hand, the views of the strategical specialists went abroad over the land, with the result that ill-informed and careless public opinion followed their advice without having any very precise idea of whither it was being led. It would appear, therefore, that there is need E 50 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i for great care and watchfulness in the manage- ment of Indian affairs. That same inconsistency of character and absence of definite aim, which are such notable Anglo-Saxon qualities and which adapt themselves so admirably to the require- ments of Imperial rule, may in some respects constitute an additional danger. If we are not to adopt a policy based on securing the content- ment of the subject race by ministering to their material interests, we must of necessity make a distinct approach to the counter-policy of govern- ing by the sword alone. In that case, it would be as well not to allow a free native Press, or to encourage high education. Any repressive or retrograde measures in either of these directions would, without doubt, meet with strong and, to a great extent, reasonable opposition in England. A large section of the public, forgetful of the fact that they had stood passively by whilst measures, such as the imposition of increased taxes, which the natives of India really resent, were adopted, would protest loudly against the adoption of other measures which are, indeed, open to objection, but which nevertheless touch Oriental in a far less degree than they affect Western public feeling. The result of this inconsistency is that our present system rather tends to turn out demagogues from our colleges, to give them every facility for sowing their subversive views broad- cast over the land, and at the same time to prepare the ground for the reception of the seed which they sow. Now this is the very reverse of a sound Imperial policy. We cannot, it is true, effectually prevent the manufacture of demagogues without adopting measures which would render us false to our acknowledged principles of government and to our civilising mission. But we may govern in such a manner as to give the demagogue no fulcrum with which to move his credulous and ill-informed country- men and co-religionists. The leading principle of a government of this nature should be that low taxation is the most potent instrument with which to conjure discontent. This is the policy which will tend more than any other to the stability of Imperial rule. If it is to be adopted, two elements of British society will have to be kept in check at the hands of the statesman acting in concert with the moralist. These are Militarism and Commercial Egotism. The Empire depends in a great degree on the strength and efficiency of its army. It thrives on its commerce. But if the soldier and the trader are not kept under some degree of statesmanlike control, they are capable of becoming the most formidable, though unconscious, enemies of the British Empire. It will be seen, therefore, that though there are some disquieting circumstances attendant on our 52 GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES i Imperial rule, the general result of an examination into the causes which led to the collapse of Roman power, and a comparison of those causes with the principles on which the British Empire is governed, are, on the whole, encouraging. To every danger which threatens there is a safe- guard. To every portion of the body politic in which symptoms of disease may occur, it is possible to apply a remedy. Christianity is our most powerful ally. We are the sworn enemies of the slave-dealer and the slave-owner. The dangers arising from the possible pauperisation of the proletariat may, it is to be hoped, be averted by our national character and by the natural play of our time- honoured institutions. If we adhere steadily to the principle that local revenues are to be expended locally, and if, at the same time, we give all reasonable encouragement to local self- government and shun any tendency towards over-centralisation, we shall steer clear of one of the rocks on which the Roman ship of state was wrecked. Unskilful or unwise finance is our greatest danger, but here again the remedy lies ready to hand if we are wise enough to avail ourselves of it. It consists in adapting our fiscal methods to the requirements of our subject races, and still more in the steadfast rejection of any proposals which, by rendering high taxation in- i GOVERNMENT OF SUBJECT RACES 53 evitable, will infringe the cardinal principle on which a sound Imperial policy should be based. That principle is that, whilst the sword should be always ready for use, it should be kept in reserve for great emergencies, and that we should endeavour to find, in the contentment of the subject race, a more worthy and, it may be hoped, a stronger bond of union between the rulers and the ruled. If any more sweeping generalisation than this is required, it may be said that the whole, or nearly the whole, of the essential points of a sound Imperial policy admit of being embodied in this one statement, that, whilst steadily avoiding any movement in the direction of official proselytism, our relations with the various races who are subjects of the King of England should be founded on the granite rock of the Christian moral code. Humanity, as it passes through phase after phase of the historical movement, may advance indefinitely in excellence ; but its advance will be an indefinite ap- proximation to the Christian type. A divergence from that type, to whatever extent it may take place, will not be progress, but debasement and corruption. In a moral point of view, in short, the world may abandon Christianity, but can never advance beyond it. This is not a matter of authority, or even of revelation. If it is true, it is a matter of reason as much as anything in the world. 1 1 Goldwin Smith, Lectures on the Study of History, p. 154. II TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE " The Edinburgh Review" July 1913 WHEN Emerson said " We like everything to do its office, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattle- snake," he assumed, perhaps somewhat too hastily in the latter case, that all the world understands the functions which a milch -cow or a rattlesnake is called upon to perform. No one can doubt that the office of a translator is to translate, but a wide difference of opinion may exist, and, in fact, has always existed, as to the latitude which he may allow himself in translating. Is he to adhere rigidly to a literal rendering of the original text, or is paraphrase permissible, and, if permissible, within what limits may it be adopted ? In deciding which of these courses to pursue, the translator stands between Scylla and Charybdis. If he departs too widely from the precise words of the text, he incurs the blame of the purist, who will accuse him of foisting 54 H TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 55 language on the original author which the latter never employed, with the possible result that even the ideas or sentiments which it had been intended to convey have been disfigured. If, on the other hand, he renders word for word, he will often find, more especially if his translation be in verse, that in a cacophonous attempt to force the genius of one language into an unnatural channel, the whole of the beauty and even, possibly, some of the real meaning of the original have been allowed to evaporate. Dr. Fitz- maurice-Kelly, in an instructive article on Trans- lation contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica quotes the high authority of Dryden as to the course which should be followed in the execution of an ideal translation. A translator (Dryden writes) that would write with any force or spirit of an original must never dwell on the words of his author. He ought to possess himself entirely, and perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of ; and then he will express himself as justly, and with as much life, as if he wrote an original ; whereas he who copies word for word loses all the spirit in the tedious transfusion. In the application of Dryden's canon a dis- tinction has to be made between prose and verse. The composition of good prose, which Coleridge described as " words in the right order," is, 56 TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE n indeed, of the utmost importance for all the purposes of the historian, the writer on philo- sophy, or the orator. An example of the manner in which fine prose can bring to the mind a vivid conception of a striking event is Jeremy Collier's description of Cranmer's death, which excited the enthusiastic admiration of Mr. Gladstone. 1 He seemed [Collier wrote] " to repel the force of the fire and to overlook the torture, by strength of thought." Nevertheless, the main object of the prose writer, and still more of the orator, should be to state his facts or to prove his case. Cato laid down the very sound principle " rem tene, verba sequentur," and Quintilian held that " no speaker, when important interests are involved, should be very solicitous about his words." It is true that this principle is one that has been more often honoured in the breach than the observance. Lucian, in his Lexiphanes? directs the shafts of his keen satire against the meticulous attention to phraseology practised by his contemporaries. Cardinal Bembo sacrificed substance to form to the extent of advising young men not to read St. Paul for fear that their style should be injured, and Professor Saints- bury 3 mentions the case of a French author, 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 467. 2 Weise, 1841, vol. ii. p. 303. 3 Loci Critici, p. 40. n TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 57 Paul de Saint- Victor, who " used, when sitting down to write, to put words that had struck his fancy at intervals over the sheet, and write his matter in and up to them." These are instances of that word-worship run mad which has not infrequently led to dire results, inasmuch as it has tended to engender the belief that statesman- ship is synonymous with fine writing or perfervid oratory. The oratory in which Demosthenes excelled, Professor Bury says, 1 " was one of the curses of Greek politics." The attention paid by the ancients to what may be termed tricks of style has probably in some degree enhanced the difficulties of prose translation. It may not always be easy in a foreign language to reproduce the subtle linguistic shades of Demosthenic oratory the Anaphora (repetition of the same word at the beginning of co-ordinate sentences following one another), the Anastrophe (the final word of a sentence repeated at the beginning of one immediately following), the Polysyndeton (the same con- junction repeated), or the Epidiorthosis (the correction of an expression). Nevertheless, in dealing with a prose composition, the weight of the arguments, the lucidity with which the facts are set forth, and the force with which the conclusions are driven home, rank, or should 1 History of Greece, vol. ii. p. 326. 58 TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE n rank, in the mind of the reader higher than any feelings which are derived from the music of the words or the skilful order in which they are arranged. Moreover, in prose more frequently than in verse, it is the beauty of the idea ex- pressed which attracts rather than the language in which it is clothed. Thus, for instance, there can be no difficulty in translating the celebrated metaphor of Pericles 1 that " the loss of the youth of the city was as if the spring was taken out of the year," because the beauty of the idea can in no way suffer by presenting it in English, French, or German rather than in the original Greek. Again, to quote another instance from Latin, the fine epitaph to St. Ovinus in Ely Cathedral : " Lucem tuam Ovino da, Deus, et requiem," loses nothing of its terse pathos by being rendered into English. Occasionally, in- deed, the truth is forced upon us that even in prose " a thing may be well said once but cannot be well said twice " (TO KaXfa el-n-eiv cnraf Trepiyvyvercu, 819 Se ovte eVSe^erai), but this is generally because the genius of one language lends itself with special ease to some singularly felicitous and often epigrammatic form of expres- sion which is almost or sometimes even quite 1 The use by Pericles of this metaphor rests on the authority of Aristotle (Rhel. i. 7. 34). Herodotus (vii. 162) ascribes almost the identical words to Gelo, and a similar idea is given by Euripides in Supp. 447-49. ii TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 59 untranslatable. Who, for instance, would dare to translate into English the following description which the Duchesse de Dino * gave of a lady of her acquaintance : " Elle n'a jamais ete jolie, mais elle etait blanche et fraiche, avec quelquesjolis details " ? On the whole, however, it may be said that if the prose translator is thoroughly well acquainted with both of the languages which he has to handle, he ought to be able to pay adequate homage to the genius of the one without offering undue violence to that of the other. The case of the translator of poetry, which Coleridge denned as " the best words in the best order," is manifestly very different. A phrase which is harmonious or pregnant with fire in one language may become discordant, flat, and vapid when translated into another. Shelley spoke of " the vanity of translation." " It were as wise (he said) to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet." Longinus has told us 2 that " beautiful words are the very light of thought " (? jap T ovn iStov rov vov ra KO\CL ovopara), but it will often happen, in reading a fine passage, that on analys- ing the sentiments evoked, it is difficult to decide 1 Memoirs, vol. i. p. 328. 2 On the Sublime, xxx. 60 TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE n whether they are due to the thought or to the beauty of the words. A mere word, as in the case of Edgar Poe's " Nevermore," has at times inspired a poet. When Keats, speaking of Melan- choly, says : She lives with Beauty Beauty that must die And Joy, whose hand is ever on his lips, Bidding adieu, or when Mrs. Browning writes : . . . Young As Eve with Nature's daybreak on her face, the pleasure, both of sense and sentiment, is in each case derived alike from the music of the language and the beauty of the ideas. But in such lines as Arethusa arose from her couch of snows, etc., or Coleridge's description of the river Alph running Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea, it is the language rather than the idea which fascinates. Professor Walker, speaking of the most exquisitely harmonious lyric ever written in English, or perhaps in any other language, 1 says with great truth : " The reader of Lycidas rises from it ready to grasp the 'two-handed 1 Literature of the Victorian Era, p. 382. n TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 61 engine ' and smite ; though he may be doubtful what the engine is, and what is to be smitten." It may be observed, moreover, that one of the main difficulties to be encountered in translating some of the masterpieces of ancient literature arises from their exquisite simplicity. Although the indulgence in glaring improprieties of lan- guage in the pursuit of novelty of thought was not altogether unknown to the ancients, and was, indeed, stigmatised by Longinus with the epithet of " corybantising," 1 the full development of this pernicious practice has been reserved for the modern world. Dryden made himself in- directly responsible for a good deal of bad poetry when he said that great wits were allied to mad- ness. The late Professor Butcher, 2 as also Lamb in his essay on " The Sanity of True Genius," have both pointed out that genius and high ability are eminently sane. In some respects it may be said that didactic poetry affords special facilities to the translator, inasmuch as it bears a more close relation to prose than verse of other descriptions. Didactic poets, such as Lucretius and Pope, are almost forced by the inexorable necessities of their subjects to think in prose. However much we may admire their verse, it is impossible not 1 On the Sublime, c. v. * Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 398. 62 TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE n to perceive that, in dealing with subjects that require great precision of thought, they have felt themselves hampered by the necessities of metre and rhythm. They may, indeed, resort to blank verse, which is a sort of half-way house between prose and rhyme, as was done by Mr. Leonard in his excellent translation of Empe- docles, of which the following specimen may be given : r)p.T(poipfva We may not bring It near us with our eyes, We may not grasp It with our human hands. With neither hands nor eyes, those highways twain, Whereby Belief drops into the minds of men. But Dr. Symmons, one of the numerous translators of Virgil, said, with some truth, that the adoption of blank verse only involves " a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose." 1 A good example of what can be done in this branch of literature is furnished by Dryden. Lucretius 2 wrote : Tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire ? . Mortua cui vita est prope iam vivo atque videnti, Qui somno partem maiorem conteris aevi, Et vigilans stertis nee somnia cernere cessas 1 Miscellaneous Writings, Conington, vol. i. p. 162. 1 iii. 1045 ff. n TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 63 Sollicitamque geris cassa formidine mentem Nee reperire potes tibi quid sit saepe mali, cum Ebrius urgeris multis miser undique curis, Atque animi incerto fluitans errore vagaris. Dryden's translation departs but slightly from the original text and at the same time presents the ideas of Lucretius in rhythmical and melodious English : And thou, dost thou disdain to yield thy breath, Whose very life is little more than death ? More than one-half by lazy sleep possest, And when awake, thy soul but nods at best, Day-dreams and sickly thoughts revolving in thy breast. Eternal troubles haunt thy anxious mind, Whose cause and case thou never hopest to find, But still uncertain, with thyself at strife, Thou wanderest in the labyrinth of life. Descriptive poetry also lends itself with com- parative ease to translation. Nothing can be better than the translation made by Mr. Glad- stone 1 of Iliad iv. 422-32. The original Greek runs thus : ws 8' or f opvvr firaavvTipov Zevpov VTTO fj.fv re irptara Kopvfr&erai, avrap reiTa prjyvvfitvov /xeyaAa fSpfpti, a/z^>i Se r ibv Kopv(f>ovra.i, diroTrrvfi 8' dAcls Ss TOT fTra(rai-r)S 1 Mr. Gladstone's merits as a translator were great. His Latin translation of Toplady's hymn " Rock of Ages," beginning " Jesus, pro me perforatus," is altogether admirable. 64 TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE Tol 8t iraari ed Trot/a'A.' cXa/xTre, TO. eiftevoi (m\6tavro. Mr. Gladstone, who evidently drew his in- spiration from the author of " Marmion " and " The Lady of the Lake," translated as follows : As when the billow gathers fast With slow and sullen roar, Beneath the keen north-western blast, Against the sounding shore. First far at sea it rears its crest, Then bursts upon the beach ; Or with proud arch and swelling breast, Where headlands outward reach, It smites their strength, and bellowing flings Its silver foam afar So stern and thick the Danaan kings And soldiers marched to war. Each leader gave his men the word, Each warrior deep in silence heard, So mute they marched, thou couldst not ken They were a mass of speaking men ; And as they strode in martial might Their flickering arms shot back the light. It is, however, in dealing with poetry which is neither didactic nor descriptive that the difficulty indeed often the impossibility of re- conciling the genius of the two languages becomes most apparent. It may be said with truth that the best way of ascertaining how a fine or luminous idea can be presented in any particular language is to set aside altogether the idea of translation, and to inquire how some master in n TRANSLATION AND PARAPHRASE 65 the particular language has presented the case without reference to the utterances of his pre- decessors in other languages. A good example of this process may be found in comparing the language in which others have treated Vauve- nargues' well-known saying : " Pour executer de grandes choses, il faut vivre comme si on ne devait jamais mourir." Bacchylides 1 put the same idea in the following words : dvarbv OTI T avpiov aXiov /36ts, /te$ev TnoTiv GiTreiTra^evTj. o\f/0fiai f) of Sophocles ; the " son, the sub- ject of many prayers " (7roXueuxeT09 vto?) and countless other expressions of the Homeric Hymns ; the " blooming Love with his pinions of gold " (o S' dfi(f>i6a\r}S aA! /cat ycuy wbs virecrr' Dr. Grundy's translation, which is as follows, adheres closely to the original text, but some- what grates on the English ear : A sailor's tomb am I ; o'er there a yokel's tomb there be ; For Hades lies below the earth as well as 'neath the sea. Another instance is the translation of the epigram of Nicarchus on The Lifeboat, in which the inexorable necessities of finding a rhyme to " e'en Almighty Zeus " has compelled the trans- lator to resort to the colloquial and somewhat graceless phrase " in fact, the very deuce." But criticisms such as these may be levelled against well-nigh all translators. They merely constitute a reason for holding that Shelley was not far wrong in the opinion quoted above. Few translators have, indeed, been able to work up to the standard of William Cory's well-known version of Callimachus's epitaph on Heraclitus, 236 THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY which Dr. Grundy rightly remarks is " one of the most beautiful in our language," or to Dr. Symonds's translation of the epitaph on Prote, which " is perhaps the finest extant version in English of any of the verses from the Anthology." But many have contributed in a minor degree to render these exquisite products of the Greek genius available to English readers, and amongst them Dr. Grundy may fairly claim to occupy a distinguished place. He says in his preface, with great truth, that the poets of the Anthology are never wearisome. Neither is Dr. Grundy. XII LORD MILNER AND PARTY " The Spectator" May 24, 1913 THE preface which Lord Milner has written to his volume of speeches constitutes not merely a general statement of his political views, but is also in reality a chapter of autobiography extend- ing over the past sixteen years. If, as is to be feared, it does not help much towards the im- mediate solution of the various problems which are treated, it is, none the less, a very interesting record of the mental processes undergone by an eminent politician, who combines in a high degree the qualities of a man of action and those of a political thinker. We are presented with the picture of a man of high intellectual gifts, great moral courage, and unquestionable honesty of purpose, who has a gospel to preach to his fellow countrymen the gospel of Imperialism, or, in other words, the methods which should be adopted to consolidate and to maintain the 237 238 LORD MILNER AND PARTY integrity of the British Empire. In his mission- ary efforts on behalf of his special creed Lord Milner has found that he has been well-nigh throttled by the ligatures of the party system a system which he spurns and loathes, but from which he has found by experience that he could by no means free himself. As a practical politician he had to recognise that, in order to gain the ear of the public on the subjects for which he cares, he was obliged to do some " vigorous swashbuckling in the field of party politics " in connection with other subjects in which he is relatively less interested. He re- signed himself, albeit reluctantly, to his fate, holding apparently not only that the end justified the means, but also that without the adoption of those means there could not be the smallest prospect of the end being attained. The diffi- culty in which Lord Milner has found himself is probably felt more keenly by those who, like himself, have been behind the scenes of govern- ment, and have thus been able fully to realise the difficulties of dealing with public questions on their own merits to the exclusion of all con- siderations based on party advantages or dis- advantages, than by others who have had no such experience. Nevertheless, the dilemma must in one form or another have presented itself to every thinking man who is not wholly carried LORD MILNER AND PARTY 239 away by prejudice. Most thinking men, how- ever, unless they are prepared to pass their political lives in a state of dreamy idealism, come rapidly to the conclusion that to seek for any thoroughly satisfactory practical solution of this dilemma is as fruitless as to search for the philosopher's stone. They see that the party system is the natural outcome of the system of representative government, that it of necessity connotes a certain amount of party discipline, and that if that discipline be altogether shattered, political chaos would ensue. They, therefore, join that party with which, on the whole, they are most in agreement, and they do so knowing full well that they will almost certainly at times be associated with measures which do not fully command their sympathies. What is it that makes such men, for instance, as Lord Morley and Mr. Arthur Balfour not merely strong political partisans, but also stern party dis- ciplinarians ? It would be absurd to suppose that they consider a monopoly of political wisdom to be possessed by the party to which each belongs, or that they fail to see that every public question presents at least two sides. The infer- ence is that, recognising the necessity of association with others, they ate prepared to waive all minor objections in order to advance the main lines of the policy to which each respectively adheres. 240 LORD MILNER AND PARTY The plan which has always commended itself to those who see clearly the evils of the party system, but fail to realise the even greater evils to which its non-existence would open the door, has been to combine in one administration a number of men possessed of sufficient patriotism and disinterestedness to work together for the common good, in spite of the fact that they differ widely, if not on the objects to be attained, at all events on the methods of attaining them. Experience has shown that this plan is wholly impracticable. It does not take sufficient account of the fact that, as the immortal Mr. Squeers or some other of Dickens's characters said, there is a great deal of human nature in man, 1 and that one of man's most cherished characteristics notably if he is an Englishman is combativeness. In the early days of the party system even so hardened and positive a parliamentarian as Walpole thought that effect might be given to some such project, but when it came to the actual formation of a hybrid Ministry, Mr. Grant Robertson, the historian of the Hanoverian period, says that it " vanished into thin air," and that, as Pulteney remarked about the celebrated 1 This statement is incorrect. The saying quoted above occurs in Mr. J. R. Lowell's address at the memorial meeting to Dean Stanley, Dec. 13, 1881. He introduces it as " a proverbial phrase which we have in America and which, I believe, we carried from England." xn LORD MILNER AND PARTY 241 Sinking Fund plan, the " proposal to make England patriotic, pure and independent of Crown and Ministerial corruption, ended in some little thing for curing the itch." Neither have somewhat similar attempts which have been made since Walpole's time succeeded in abating the rancour of party strife. Moreover, it can- not be said that the attempt to treat female suffrage as a non - party question has so far yielded any very satisfactory or encouraging results. Lord Milner, however, does not live in Utopia. He does not look forward to the possibility of abolishing the party system. " It is not," he says, " a new party that is wanted." But he thinks and he is unquestionably right in think- ing " that the number of men profoundly inter- ested in public affairs, and anxious to discharge their full duty of citizens who are in revolt against the rigidity and insincerity of our present party system, is very considerable and steadily increasing." He wishes people in this category to be organised with a view to encouraging a national as opposed to a party spirit, and he holds that " with a little organisation they could play the umpire between the two parties and make the unscrupulous pursuit of mere party advantage an unprofitable game." The idea is not novel, but it is certainly R 242 LORD MILNER AND PARTY statesmanlike. The general principle which Lord Milner advocates will probably commend itself to thousands of his countrymen, and most of all to those whose education and experience are a warrant for the value of their political opinions. But how far is the scheme practicable ? The answer to this question is that there is one essential preliminary condition necessary to bring it within the domain of practical politics ; that condition is that a sufficient number of leading politicians should be thoroughly imbued with the virtue of compromise. They must erase the word " thorough " from their political vocabulary. Each must recognise that whilst, to use Lord Milner's expression, he himself holds firmly to a " creed " on some special question, he will have to co-operate with others who hold with equally sincere conviction to a more or less antagonistic creed, and that this co-operation cannot be secured by mere assertion and still less by vitupera- tion, but only by calm discussion and mutual concessions. Marie Antoinette, who was very courageous and very unwise, said during the most acute crisis of the Revolution, " Better to die than allow ourselves to be saved by Lafayette and the Constitutionalists." That is an example of the party spirit in extremis, and when it is adopted it is that spirit which causes the ship- wreck of many a scheme which might, with more LORD MILNER AND PARTY 243 moderation and conciliation, be brought safely into port. In order to carry out Lord Milner's plan any such spirit must be wholly cast aside. Politicians and none more than many of those with whom Lord Milner is associated must act on the principle which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Henry V. : There is some soul of goodness in things evil Would men observingly distil it out. They must be prepared to recognise that, whatever be their personal convictions, there may be some " soul of goodness " in views diametrically opposed to their own, and, moreover, they must not be scared by what Emerson called that " hobgoblin of little minds " the charge of inconsistency. It cannot be said that just at present the omens are very favourable in the direction of indicating any widespread prevalence amongst active politicians of the spirit of compromise. The reception given to Lord Curzon's very reasonable proposal that army affairs should be treated as a non-party question is apparently scouted by Radical politicians. Neither does there appear to be the least disposition to accept the statesmanlike suggestion that in order to avoid the risk of civil war in Ulster, with its almost inevitable consequence, viz. that the 244 LORD MILNER AND PARTY loyalty of the army will be strained to the utmost, the Home Rule Bill should not be submitted to the King for his assent until after another general election. On the other hand, the " Die-hard " spirit, which led to the disastrous rejection of the Budget of 1909, and was with difficulty prevented from rejecting the Parliament Bill, is still pre- valent amongst many Unionists, whilst although a somewhat greater latitudinarian spirit prevails than heretofore, the influence of extreme Unionist politicians is still sufficiently powerful to prevent full acceptance of the fact that the only sound and wise Conservative principle is to neglect minor differences of opinion and to rally together all who are generally favourable to the Conserva- tive cause. Moreover, it must be admitted that Lord Milner is asking a great deal of party politicians. He points out, in connection with his special " creed," that the object of Mr. Chamberlain's original proposal was " undoubtedly laudable. It was prompted by motives of Imperial patriot- ism." There are probably few people who would be inclined to challenge the accuracy of this statement. He alludes to the unquestionable fact that it is well for every community from time to time to review the traditional foundations of its policy, and he holds that, if the controversy which Mr. Chamberlain evoked " had been con- LORD MILNER AND PARTY 245 ducted on anything like rational lines, the result, whether favourable or unfavourable to the pro- posals themselves, might have been of great public advantage." All these fair hopes, Lord Milner thinks, were wrecked by the spirit of party. " The new issue raised by Mr. Chamber- lain was sucked into the vortex of our local party struggle." Lord Milner, therefore, wishes to lift Imperialism out of the party bog and to treat the subject on broad national lines. Here, again, the proposal is undoubtedly states- manlike, but is it practicable ? There can, it is to be feared, be but one answer to that question. For the time being, at all events, Lord Milner's proposal is quite impracticable. Whatever be the merits or demerits of the proposals initiated by Mr. Chamberlain, one thing appears tolerably certain, and that is that so long as Tariff Reform and Imperial policy are intimately connected together there is not, so far as can at present be judged, the most remote chance of Imperialism emerging from the arena of party strife. It is true, and is, moreover, a subject for national congratulation, that there has been of late years a steady growth of Imperialist ideas. The day is probably past for ever when Ministers, whether Liberal or Conservative, could speak of the colonies as a burden, and look forward with equanimity, if not with actual pleasure, to their 246 LORD MILNER AND PARTY complete severance from the Mother country. Few, if any, pronounced anti-Imperialists exist, but a wide difference of opinion prevails as to the method for giving effect to an Imperial policy. These differences do not depend solely, as is often erroneously supposed, on a rigid adherence by Free Traders to what are now called Cobdenite principles. There are many Free Traders who would be disposed to make a considerable sacrifice of their opinions on economic principles, if they thought that the policy proposed by Mr. Chamber- lain would really achieve the object he unquestion- ably had in view, viz. that of tightening the bonds between the Mother country and the colonies. But that is what they deny. They rely mainly on a common ancestry, common traditions, a common language, and a common religion to cement those bonds ; and, moreover, they hold, to quote the words of an able article published two years ago in the Round Table : " The chief reason for the sentiment of Imperial unity is the conscious or unconscious belief of the people of the Empire in their own political system. . . . There is in the British Empire a unity which it is often difficult to discern amid the conflict of racial nationalities, provincial politics, and geographical differences. It is a unity which is based upon the conviction amongst the British self-governing communities that the LORD MILNER AND PARTY 247 political system of the Empire is indispensable to their own progress, and that to allow it to collapse would be fatal alike to their happiness and their self-respect." They therefore demur to granting special economic concessions which unless, indeed, a policy of perfect Free Trade throughout the Empire could be adopted they think, whatever might be the immediate result, would eventually cause endless friction and tend to weaken rather than strengthen the Imperial connection. Further, it is to be observed that whatever exacerbation has been caused by party exaggera- tion and misrepresentation, it is more than doubt- ful whether Lord Milner's special accusation against the party system can be made good, for it must be remembered that Mr. Chamberlain's original programme was strongly opposed by many who, on mere party grounds, were earnestly desirous to accord it a hearty welcome. Rather would it be true to say that, looking back on past events, it is amazing that any one of political experience could have imagined for one moment that a proposal which touched the opinions and interests of almost every individual in the United Kingdom, and which was wholly at variance with the views heretofore held by Mr. Chamber- lain himself, could have been kept outside the whirlpool of party politics. " A great statesman," 248 LORD MILNER AND PARTY xn it has been truly said, " must have two qualities ; the first is prudence, the second imprudence." Cavour has often been held up as the example of an eminent man who combined, in his own person, these apparently paradoxical qualities. Accepting the aphorism as true, it has to be applied with the corollary that the main point is to know when to allow imprudence to pre- dominate over prudence. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that when Mr. Chamberlain launched his programme, which Lord Milner admits " burst like a bombshell in the camp of his friends," he overweighted the balance on the imprudent side. The heat with which the con- troversy has been conducted, and which Lord Milner very rightly deplores, must be attributed mainly to this cause rather than to any inherent and, to a great extent, unavoidable defects in the party system. But in spite of all these difficulties and objec- tions, Lord Milner and those who hold with him may take heart of grace in so far as their campaign against the extravagances of the party system is concerned. It may well be that no special organisation will enable the non-party partisans to occupy the position of umpires, but the steady pressure of public opinion and the stern exposure of the abuses of the party system will probably in time mitigate existing evils, and will possibly xn LORD MILNER AND PARTY 249 in some degree purge other issues, besides those connected with foreign affairs, from the rancour of the party spirit. As a contribution to this end Lord Milner's utterances are to be heartily welcomed. XIII THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA * " The Spectator,'' May 31, 1913 IN the very interesting account which Mrs. Devereux Roy has given of the present condition of Algeria, she says that France " is now about to embark upon a radical change of policy in regard to her African colonies." If it be thought presumptuous for a foreigner who has no local knowledge of Algerian affairs to make certain suggestions as to the direction which those changes might profitably assume, an apology must be found in Mrs. Roy's very true remark that England " can no more afford to be indiffer- ent to the relations of France with her Moslem subjects than she can disregard the trend of our policy in Egypt and India." It is, indeed, manifest that somewhat drastic reforms of a liberal character will have to be undertaken in 1 Aspects of Algeria. By Mrs. Devereux Roy. London : Dent and Son. 10s. 6d. 250 xm THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 251 Algeria. The French Government have adopted the only policy which is worthy of a civilised nation. They have educated the Algerians, albeit Mrs. Roy tells us that grants for educational purposes have been doled out " with a very sparing hand." They must bear the consequences of the generous policy which they have pursued. They must recognise, as Macaulay said years ago, that it is impossible to impart knowledge without stimulating ambition. Reforms are, therefore, imposed by the necessities of the situation. These reforms may be classified under three heads, namely, fiscal, judicial, and political. The order in which changes under each head should be undertaken would appear to be a matter of vital importance. If responsible French statesmen make a mistake in this matter if, to use the language of proverbial philosophy, they put the cart before the horse they may not improbably lay the seeds of very great trouble for their countrymen in the future. Prince Bismarck once said : " Mistakes com- mitted in statesmanship are not always punished at once, but they always do harm in the end. The logic of history is a more exact and a more exacting accountant than is the strictest national auditing department." It should never be forgotten that, however much local circumstances may differ, there are 252 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA certain broad features which always exist wher- ever the European be he French, English, German, or of any other nationality is brought in contact with the Oriental be he Algerian, Indian, or Egyptian. When the former once steps outside the influence acquired by the power of the sword, and seeks for any common ground of under- standing with the subject race, he finds that he is, by the elementary facts of the case, debarred from using all those moral influences which, in more homogeneous countries, bind society together. These are a common religion, a common language, common traditions, and save in very rare in- stances intermarriage and really intimate social relations. What therefore remains ? Practically nothing but the bond of material interest, tempered by as much sympathy as it is possible in the difficult circumstances of the case to bring into play. But on this poor material for it must be admitted that it is poor material experience has shown that a wise statesmanship can build a political edifice, not indeed on such assured foundations as prevail in more homo- geneous societies, but nevertheless of a character which will give some solid guarantees of stability, and which will, in any case, minimise the risk that the sword, which the European would fain leave in the scabbard, shall be constantly flaunted before the eyes both of the subject and the xni THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 253 governing races, the latter of whom, on grounds alike of policy and humanity, deprecate its use save in cases of extreme necessity. In the long course of our history many mistakes have been made in dealing with subject races, and the line of conduct pursued at various times has often been very erratic. Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, broadly speaking, British policy has been persistently directed towards an endeavour to strengthen political bonds through the medium of attention to material interests. The recent history of Egypt is a case in point. No one who was well acquainted with the facts could at any time have thought that it would be possible to create in the minds of the Egyptians a feeling of devotion towards England which might in some degree take the place of patriotism. Neither, in spite of the relatively higher degree of social elasticity possessed by the French, is it at all probable that any such feeling towards France will be created in Algeria. But it was thought that by careful attention to the material interests of the people it might eventually be possible to bring into existence a conservative class who, albeit animated by no great love for their foreign rulers, would be sufficiently contented to prevent their becoming easily the prey either of the Nationalist dema- 254 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA gogue, who was sure sooner or later to spring into existence, or that of some barbarous religious fanatic, such as the Mahdi, or, finally, that of some wily politician, such as the Sultan Abdul Hamid who would, for his own purposes, fan the flame of religious and racial hatred. For many years after the British occupation of Egypt began, the efforts of the British administrators in that country were unceasingly directed towards the attainment of that object. The methods adopted, which it should be observed were in the main carried out before any large sums were spent on education, were the relief of taxation, the aboli- tion of fiscal inequality and of the corvee, the improvement of irrigation, and last, but not least, a variety of measures having for their object the maintenance of a peasant proprietary class. The results which have been attained fully justify the adoption of this policy, which has probably never been fully understood on the Continent of Europe, even if which is very doubtful it has been understood in England. What, in fact, has happened in Egypt ? Nation- alists have enjoyed an excess of licence in a free press. The Sultan has preached pan- Islamism. The usual Oriental intrigue has been rife. British politicians and a section of the British press, being very imperfectly informed as to the situation, have occasionally dealt THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 255 with Egyptian affairs in a manner which, to say the least, was indiscreet. But all has been of no avail. In spite of some outward appearances to the contrary, the whole Nationalist movement in Egypt has been a mere splutter on the surface. It never extended deep down in the social ranks. More than this. When a very well-intentioned but rather rash attempt was made to advance too rapidly in a liberal direction, the inevitable reaction, which was to have been foreseen, took place. Not merely Europeans but also Egyptians cried out loudly for a halt, and, with the appointment of Lord Kitchener, they got what they wanted. The case would have been very different if the Nationalist, the religious fanatic, or the scheming politician, in dealing with some controversial point or incident of ephemeral interest, had been able to appeal to a mass of deep-seated discontent due to general causes and to the existence of substantial griev- ances. In that case the Nationalist movement would have been less artificial. It would have extended not merely to the surface but to the core of society. It would have possessed a real rather than, as has been shown to be the case, a spurious vitality. The recent history of Egypt, therefore, is merely an illustration of the general lesson taught by universal history. That lesson is that the best, and indeed the only, way to 256 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA combat successfully the proceedings of the dema- gogue or the agitator is to limit his field of action by the removal of any real grievances which, if still existent, he would be able to use as a lever to awaken the blind wrath of Demos. How far can principles somewhat analogous to these be applied in Algeria ? In the first place, it is abundantly clear that, from many points of view, the French Govern- ment have successfully carried out the policy of ministering to the material wants of the native population. Public works of great utility have been constructed. Means of locomotion have been improved. Modern agricultural methods have been introduced. Famine has been rendered impossible. Mutual benefit societies have been established. The creation of economic habits has been encouraged. In all these matters the French have certainly nothing to learn from us. Possibly, indeed, we may have something to learn from them. Nevertheless, when it is asked whether the French Government is likely to reap the political fruits which it might have been hoped would be the result of their efforts, whether they are in a fair way towards creating a conservative spirit which would be adverse to any radical change, and whether, in reliance on that spirit, they are in a position to move boldly forward in the direction of that xm THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 257 liberal reform, the demand for which has natur- ally sprung into existence from their educational policy, it is at once clear that they are heavily weighted by the policy originated some seventy years ago by Marshal Bugeaud, under which the interests of the native population were made subservient to those of the colonists, numbering about three - quarters of a million, of whom, Mrs. Roy tells us, less than one-half are of French origin. It may have been wise and necessary to initiate that policy. It may be wise and necessary to continue it with certain modifications. But it is obvious that the adoption of Marshal Bugeaud's plan has necessarily led to the creation of substantial grievances, which are important alike from the point of view of sentiment and from that of material interests. It appears now that there is some probability that this policy will be modified in at least one very important respect, namely, by the removal of the fiscal inequality which at present exists between the natives and the colonists. The former are at present heavily taxed ; the latter pay relatively very little. It may be suggested that it would be worth the while of the French Government to consider whether this change should not occupy the first place in the programme of reform. The present system is obviously inde- fensible on general grounds, whilst its continuance, s 258 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA until its abolition results from the strong native pressure which will certainly ensue after the adoption of any drastic measure of political reform, would appear to be undesirable. It would probably be wise and statesmanlike not to await this pressure, but to let the concession be the spontaneous act of the French Government and nation rather than give the appearance of its having been wrung reluctantly from France by the insistence of the native population and its representatives. Next, there is the question of judicial reform. Mrs. Roy tells us that, under what is called the Code de VIndigenat, " a native can be arrested and imprisoned practically without trial at the will of the administrateur for his district." It would require full local knowledge to treat this question adequately, but it would obviously be desirable that the French Government should go as far as possible in the direction of providing that all judicial matters should be settled by judicial officers who would be independent of the executive and, for the most part, irremov- able. Some local friction between the executive and the judicial authorities is probably to be expected. That cannot be helped. It might perhaps be mitigated by a very careful choice of the officials in each case. In the third place, there is the question of THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 259 political reform. M. Philippe Millet, who has published an interesting article on this subject in the April number of The Nineteenth Century, is of course quite right in saying that political reform is the " key to every other change." Once give the natives of Algeria effective political strength, and the reforms will be forced upon the Government. But, as has been already stated, it would perhaps be wiser and more states- manlike that these changes should be conceded spontaneously by the French Government, and that then, after a reasonable interval, the bulk of the political reforms should follow. A distinction, however, has to be made between the various representative institutions which already exist. The Conseil Superieur and the Dele- gations Financieres have very extensive powers, including that of rejecting or modifying the Budget. At present these bodies may be said, for all practical purposes, to be merely representa- tive of the colonists. It would certainly appear wise eventually to allow the natives both a larger numerical strength on the Conseil and on the Delegations, and also, by rearranging the franchise, to endeavour to secure a more real representation of native interests. It must, how- ever, be borne in mind that the difficulties of securing any real representation of the best interests in the country will almost certainly be 260 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA very great, if not altogether insuperable. In all probability the loquacious, semi-educated native, who has in him the makings of an agitator, will, under any system, naturally float to the top, whilst the really representative man will sink to the bottom. It would perhaps, therefore, be as well not to move in too great a hurry in this matter, and, when any move is made, that the advance should be of a very cautious and tentative nature. The Conseils Generaux, which are provincial and municipal bodies, stand on a very different footing. Here it may be safe to move forward in the path of reform with greater boldness and with less delay. But whatever is done it will probably be found that real progress in the direction of self-government will depend more on the attitude of the French officials who are associated with the Councils than on any system which can be devised on paper. It may be assumed that the French officials in Algeria present the usual characteristics of their class, that is to say, that they are courageous, intelligent, zealous, and thoroughly honest. Also it may probably be assumed that they are somewhat inelastic, somewhat unduly wedded to bureau- cratic ideas, and more especially that they are possessed with the very natural idea that the main end and object of their lives is to secure xm THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 261 the efficiency of the administration. Now if self-government is to be a success, they will have to modify to some extent their ideas as to the supreme necessity of efficiency. That is to say, they will have to recognise that it is politic- ally wiser to put up with an imperfect reform carried with native consent, rather than to insist on some more perfect measure executed in the teeth of strong albeit often unreasonable- native opposition. English experience has shown that this is a very hard lesson for officials to learn. Nevertheless, the task of inculcating general principles of this nature is not altogether im- possible. It depends mainly on the impulse which is given from above. To entrust the execution of a policy of reform in Algeria to a man of ultra - bureaucratic tendencies, who is hostile to reform of any kind, would, of course, be to court failure. On the other hand, to select an extreme radical visionary, who will probably not recognise the difference between East and West, would be scarcely less disastrous. What, in fact, is required is a man of somewhat excep- tional qualities. He must be strong that is to say, he must impress the natives with the conviction that, albeit an advocate of liberal ideas, he is firmly resolved to consent to nothing which is likely to be detrimental to the true interests of France. He must also be sufficiently 262 THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA strong to keep his own officials in hand and to make them conform to his policy, whilst at the same time he must be sufficiently tactful to win their confidence and to prevent their being banded together against him. The latter is a point of very special importance, for in a country like Algeria no government, however powerful, will be able to carry out a really beneficial programme of reform if the organised strength of the bureaucracy backed up, as would prob- ably be the case, by the whole of the European unofficial community is thrown into bitter and irreconcilable opposition. The task, it may be repeated, is a difficult one. Nevertheless, amongst the many men of very high ability in the French service there must assuredly be some who would be able to undertake it with a fair chance of success. One further remark on this very interesting subject may be made. M. Millet, in the article to which allusion has already been made, says, " The Algerian natives will look more and more to France as their natural protector against the colonists." It will, it is to be hoped, not be thought over-presumptuous to sound a note of warning against trusting too much to this argu- ment. That for the present the natives should look to France rather than to the colonists is natural enough. It is manifestly their interest xm THE FRENCH IN ALGERIA 263 to do so. But it may be doubted whether they will be " more and more " inspired by such sentiments as time goes on. There is an Arabic proverb to the effect that " all Christians are of one tribe." That is the spirit which in reality inspires the whole Moslem world. It is illustrated by the author of that very remarkable work, Turkey in Europe, in an amusing apologue. Let once some semi-religious, semi-patriotic leader arise, who will play skilfully on the passions of the masses, and it will be somewhat surprising if the distinction which now exists will long survive. All Frenchmen, those in France equally with those in Algeria, will then, it may confidently be expected, be speedily confounded in one general anathema. XIV THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 1 " The Spectator," June 14, 1913 ALTHOUGH proverbial philosophy warns us never to prophesy unless we know, experience has shown that political prophets have often made singularly correct forecasts of the future. Lord Chesterfield, and at a much earlier period Marshal Vauban, foretold the French Revolution, whilst the impending ruin of the Ottoman Empire has formed the theme of numerous prophecies made by close observers of contemporaneous events from the days of Horace Walpole down- wards. " It is of no use," Napoleon wrote to the Directory, " to try to maintain the Turkish Empire ; we shall witness its fall in our time." During the War of Greek Independence the Duke of Wellington believed that the end of Turkey was at hand. Where the prophets have 1 The Ottoman Empire, 1801-1913. By W. Miller. Cam- bridge : At the University Press. 7s. 6d. 264 xiv THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 265 for the most part failed is not so much in making a mistaken estimate of the effects likely to be produced by the causes which they saw were acting on the body politic, as in not allowing sufficient time for the operation of those causes. Political evolution in its early stages is generally very slow. It is only after long internal travail that it moves with vertiginous rapidity. De Tocqueville cast a remarkably accurate horoscope of the course which would be run by the Second Empire, but it took some seventeen years to bring about results which he thought would be accomplished in a much shorter period. It has been reserved for the present generation to witness the fulfilment of prophecy in the case of European Turkey. The blindness dis- played by Turkish statesmen to the lessons taught by history, their complete sterility in the domain of political thought, and their inability to adapt themselves and the institutions of their country to the growing requirements of the age, might almost lead an historical student to suppose that they were bent on committing political suicide. The combined diplomatists of Europe, Lord Salisbury sorrowfully remarked in 1877, " all tried to save Turkey," but she scorned salvation and persisted in a course of action which could lead to but one result. That result has now been attained. The dismember- 266 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE ment of European Turkey, begun so long ago as the Peace of Karlovitz in 1699, is now almost complete. " Modern history," Lord Acton said, " begins under the stress of the Ottoman con- quest." Whatever troubles the future may have in store, Europe has at last thrown off the Ottoman incubus. A new chapter in modern history has thus been opened. Henceforth, if Ottoman power is to survive at all, it must be in Asia, albeit the conflicting jealousies of the European Powers allow for the time being the maintenance of an Asiatic outpost on European soil. It is as yet too early to expect any complete or philosophic account of this stupendous occur- rence, which the future historian will rank with the unification first of Italy and later of Germany, as one of the most epoch-making events of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notably, there are two subjects which require much further elucidation before the final verdict of contemporaries or posterity can be passed upon them. In the first place, the causes which have led to the military humiliation of a race which, whatever may be its defects, has been noted in history for its martial virility, require to be differentiated. Was the collapse of the Turkish army due merely to incapacity and mismanagement on the part of the commanders, xiv THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 267 aided by the corruption which has eaten like a canker into the whole Ottoman system of govern- ment and administration ? Or must the causes be sought deeper, and, if so, was it the palsy of an unbridled and malevolent despotism which in itself produced the result, or did the sudden downfall of the despot, by the removal of a time-honoured, if unworthy, symbol of govern- ment, abstract the corner-stone from the tottering political edifice, and thus, by disarranging the whole administrative gear of the Empire at a critical moment, render the catastrophe inevit- able ? Further information is required before a matured opinion on this point, which possesses more than a mere academic importance, can be formed. There is yet another subject which, if only from a biographical point of view, is of great interest. Two untoward circumstances have caused Turkish domination in Europe to survive, and to resist the pressure of the civilisation by which it was surrounded, but which seemed at one time doomed to thunder ineffectually at its gates. One was excessive jealousy in Solomon's words, " as cruel as the grave " amongst European States, which would not permit of any political advantage being gained by a rival nation. The other, and, as subsequent events proved, more potent consideration, was the fratricidal jealousy 268 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE which the populations of the Balkan Peninsula mutually entertained towards each other. The maintenance and encouragement of mutual sus- picions was, in either case, sedulously fostered by Turkish Sultans, the last of whom, more especially, acted throughout his inglorious career in the firm belief that mere mediaeval diplomatic trickery could be made to take the place of statesmanship. He must have chuckled when he joyously put his hand to the firman creating a Bulgarian Exarch, who was forthwith ex- communicated by the Greek Patriarch, with the result, as Mr. Miller tells us, that " peasants killed each other in the name of contending ecclesiastical establishments . ' ' In the early days of the last century the poet Rhigas, who was to Greece what Arndt was to Germany and Rouget de Lisle to Revolutionary France, appealed to all Balkan Christians to rise on behalf of the liberties of Greece. But the hour had not yet come for any such unity to be cemented. At that time, and for many years afterwards, Europe was scarcely conscious of the fact that there existed "a long-forgotten, silent nationality" which, after a lapse of nearly five centuries, would again spring into existence and bear a leading part in the liberation of the Balkan populations. But the rise of Bulgaria, far from bringing unity in its wake, appeared at first only xiv THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 269 to exacerbate not merely the mercurial Greek, proud of the intellectual and political primacy which he had heretofore enjoyed, but also the brother Slav, with whom differences arose which necessitated an appeal to the arbitrament of arms. Although the thunder of the guns of Kirk Kilisse and Liile Burgas proclaimed to Europe, in the words of the English Prime Minister, that " the map of Eastern Europe had to be recast," it is none the less true that the cause of the Turk was doomed from the moment when Balkan discord ceased, and when the Greek, the Bul- garian, the Serb, and the Montenegrin agreed to sink their differences and to act together against the common enemy. Who was it who accomplished this miracle ? Mr. Miller says, " the authorship of this marvellous work, hitherto the despair of statesmen, is uncertain, but it has been ascribed chiefly to M. Venezelos." All, therefore, that can now be said is that it was the brain, or possibly brains, of some master- workers which gave liberty to the Balkan populations as surely as it was the brain of Cavour which united Italy. 1 Although these and possibly other points will, without doubt, eventually receive more ample 1 This article was, of course, written before the war which sub- sequently broke out between the Bulgarians and their former allies, the Greeks and the Servians. 270 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge temporarily from their normal and conventional orbits, one result being that the British Admiral Duckworth wandered in a somewhat aimless fashion through the Dardanelles to Constantinople, and had very little idea of what to do when he got there. Mr. Miller reminds us of events of great importance in their day, but now almost wholly forgotten : of how the ancient Republic of Ragusa, which had existed for eleven centuries and which had earned the title of the " South Slavonic Athens," was crushed out of existence under the iron heel of Marmont, who forthwith proceeded to make some good roads and to vaccinate the Dalmatians ; of how Napoleon tried to partition the Balkans, but found, with all his political and administrative genius, that he was face to face with an " insoluble problem " ; of how that rough man of genius, Mahmoud II., hanged the Greek Patriarch from the gate of his palace, but between the interludes of massacres and executions, brought his " energy THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 271 and indomitable force of will " to bear on the introduction of reforms ; of how the Venetian Count Capo d' Istria, who was eventually assassin- ated, produced a local revolt by a well-intentioned attempt to amend the primitive ethics of the Mainote Greeks a tale which is not without its warning if ever the time comes for dealing with a cognate question amongst the wild tribes of Albania ; and of how, amidst the ever-shifting vicissitudes of Eastern politics, the Tsar of Russia, who had heretofore posed as the " pro- tector " of Roumans and Serbs against their sovereign, sent his fleet to the Bosphorus in 1833 in order to " protect " the sovereign against his rebellious vassal, Mehemet Ali, and exacted a reward for his services in the shape of the leonine arrangement signed at Hunkiar-Iskelesi. And so Mr. Miller carries us on from massacre to massacre, from murder to murder, and from one bewildering treaty to another, all of which, however, present this feature of uniformity, that the Turk, signing of his own free will, but with an unwilling mind e/ccav aeKovri ye 0vfj,a) made on each occasion either some new concession to the ever-rising tide of Christian demand, or ratified the loss of a province which had been forcibly torn from his flank. Finally, we get to the period when the tragedy connected with the name of Queen Draga acted like an electric shock 272 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE on Europe, and when the accession of King Peter, " who had translated Mill On Liberty," to the blood-stained Servian throne, revealed to an astonished world that the processes of Byzan- tinism survived to the present day. Five years later followed the assumption by Prince Ferdinand of the title of " Tsar of the Bulgarians," and it then only required the occurrence of some opportunity and the appearance on the scene of some Balkan Cavour to bring the struggle of centuries to the final issue of a death -grapple between the followers of aggressive Christianity and those of stagnant Islamism. The whole tale is at once dramatic and dreary, dramatic because it is occasionally illumined by acts of real heroism, such as the gallant defence of Plevna by Ghazi Osman, a graphic account of which was written by an adventurous young Englishman (Mr. W. V. Herbert) who served in the Turkish army, or again as the conduct of the Cretan Abbot Maneses who, in 1866, rather than surrender to the Turks, " put a match to the powder-magazine, thus uniting defenders and assailants in one common hecatomb." It is dreary because the mind turns with horror and disgust from the endless record of government by massacre, in which, it is to be observed, the crime of bloodguiltiness can by no means be laid exclusively at the door of the dominant race, xiv THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 273 whilst Mr. Miller's sombre but perfectly true remark that " assassination or abdication, execu- tion or exile, has been the normal fate of Balkan rulers," throws a lurid light on the whole state of Balkan society. But how does the work of diplomacy, and especially of British diplomacy, stand revealed by the light of the history of the past century ? The point is one of importance, all the more so because there is a tendency on the part of some British politicians to mistrust diplomatists, to think that, either from incapacity or design, they serve as agents to stimulate war rather than as peace-makers, and to hold that a more minute interference by the House of Commons in the details of diplomatic negotiations would be useful and beneficial. It would be impossible within the limits of an ordinary newspaper article to deal adequately with this question. This much, however, may be said that, even taking the most unfavourable view of the results achieved by diplomacy, there is nothing whatever in Mr. Miller's history to engender the belief that better results would have been obtained by shifting the responsibility to a greater degree from the shoulders of the executive to those of Parliament. The evidence indeed rather points to an opposite conclusion. For instance, Mr. Miller informs us that inopportune action taken in England T 274 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was one of the causes which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities between Greece and Turkey in 1897. " An address from a hundred British members of Parliament encouraged the masses, ignorant of the true condition of British politics, to count upon the help of Great Britain." It is, however, quite true that a moralist, if he were so minded, might in Mr. Miller's pages find abundant material for a series of homilies on the vanity of human wishes, and especially of diplomatic human wishes. But would he on that account be right in pronouncing a whole- sale condemnation of diplomacy ? Assuredly not. Rather, the conclusion to be drawn from a review of past history is that a small number of very well-informed and experienced diplomatists showed remarkable foresight in perceiving the future drift of events. So early as 1837 Lord Palmerston supported Milosh Obrenovitch II., the ruler of Servia, against Turkey, as he had " come to the conclusion that to strengthen the small Christian States of the Near East was the true policy of both Turkey and Great Britain." Similar views were held at a later period by Sir William White, and were eventually adopted by the Government of Lord Beaconsfield. An equal amount of foresight was displayed by some Russian diplomatists. In Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone (vol. i. p. 479) a very remarkable xiv THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 275 letter is given, which was addressed to the Emperor Nicholas by Baron Brunnow, just before the outbreak of the Crimean War, in which he advocated peace on the ground that " war would not turn to Russian advantage. . . . The Otto- man Empire may be transformed into independent States, which for us will only become either burdensome clients or hostile neighbours." It may be that, as is now very generally thought, the Crimean War was a mistake, and that, in the classic words of Lord Salisbury, we " put our money on the wrong horse." But it is none the less true that had it not been for the Crimean War and the policy subsequently adopted by Lord Beaconsfield's government, the independence of the Balkan States would never have been achieved, and the Russians would now be in possession of Constantinople. It is quite permissible to argue that, had they been left unopposed, British interests would not have suffered ; but even supposing this very debatable proposition to be true, it must be regarded, from an historical point of view, as at best an ex post facto argument. British diplomacy has to repre- sent British public opinion, and during almost the whole period of which Mr. Miller's history treats, a cardinal article of British political faith was that, in the interests of Great Britain, Constantinople should not be allowed to fall into 276 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE =v Russian hands. The occupation of Egypt in 1882 without doubt introduced a new and very important element into the discussion. The most serious as also the least excusable mistake in British Near-Eastern policy of recent years has been the occupation of Cyprus, which burthened us with a perfectly useless possession, and inflicted a serious blow on our prestige. Sir Edward Grey's recent diplomatic success is in a large measure due to the fact that all the Powers concerned were convinced of British disinterestedness . XV WELLINGTONIANA * " The Spectator," June 21, 1913 IN dealing with Lady Shelley's sprightly and discursive comments upon the current events of her day, we have to transport ourselves back into a society which, though not very remote in point of time, has now so completely passed away that it is difficult fully to realise its feelings, opinions, and aspirations. It was a time when a learned divine, writing in the Church and State Gazette, had proved entirely to his own satisfac- tion, and apparently also to that of Lady Shelley, that a " remarkable fulfilment of that hitherto incomprehensible prophecy in the Revelations " had taken place, inasmuch as Napoleon Bonaparte was most assuredly " the seventh head of the Beast." It was a time when Londoners rode in the Green Park instead of Rotten Row, and when, 1 The Diary of Frances, Lady Shelley (1818-1873). London : John Murray. 10s. 6d. 277 278 WELLINGTONIANA *v in spite of the admiration expressed for the talents of that rising young politician, Mr. Robert Peel, it was impossible to deny that " his birth ran strongly against him" a consideration which elicited from Lady Shelley the profound remark that it is " strange to search into the recesses of the human mind." Lady Shelley herself seems to have been rather a femme incomprise. She had lived much on the Continent, and appreciated the greater deference paid to a charming and accomplished woman in Viennese and Parisian society, com- pared with the boorishness of Englishmen who would not " waste their time " in paying pretty compliments to ladies which " could be repaid by a smile." She records her impressions in French, a language in which she was thoroughly proficient. " Je sais," she says, " qu'en Angle- terre il ne faut pas s'attendre a cultiver son esprit ; qu'il faut, pour etre contente a Londres, se resoudre a se plaire avec la mediocrite ; a entendre tous les jours repeter les memes banalites et a s'abaisser autant qu'on le peut au niveau des femmelettes avec lesquelles Ton vit, et qui, pour plaire, affectent plus de frivolite qu'elles n'ont reellement. Le plaisir de causer nous est defendu." Nevertheless, however much she may have mentally appreciated the solitude of a crowd, she determined to adapt herself to her WELLINGTONIANA 279 social surroundings. " C'est un sacrifice," she says, " que je fais a mon Dieu et a mon devoir comme Anglaise." Impelled, therefore, alike by piety and patriotism, she cast aside all ideas of leading an eremitic life, plunged into the vortex of the social world, and mixed with all the great men and women of the day. Of these the most notable was the Duke of Wellington. Lady Shelley certainly possessed one quality which eminently fitted her to play the part of Bos well to the Duke. The worship of her hero was without the least mixture of alloy. She had a pheasant, which the Duke had killed, stuffed, and " added to other souvenirs which ornamented her dressing-room " ; and she re- cords, with manifest pride, that " amongst her other treasures " was a chair on which he sat upon the first occasion of his dining with her husband and herself in 1814. It was well to have that pheasant stuffed, for apparently the Duke, like his great antagonist, did not shoot many pheasants. He was not only " a very wild shot," but also a very bad shot. Napoleon, Mr. Oman tells us, 1 on one occasion " lodged some pellets in Massena's left eye while letting fly at a pheasant," and then without the least hesitation accused " the faithful Berthier " of having fired the shot, an accusation which was at once confirmed by 1 History of the Peninsular War, vol. iii. p. 209. 280 WELLINGTONIANA the mendacious but courtierlike victim of the accident. Wellington also, Lady Shelley records, " after wounding a retriever early in the day and later on peppering the keeper's gaiters, inadvert- ently sprinkled the bare arms of an old woman who chanced to be washing clothes at her cottage window." Lady Shelley, who " was attracted by her screams," promptly told the widow that " it ought to be the proudest moment of her life. She had had the distinction of being shot by the great Duke of Wellington," but the eminently practical instinct of the great Duke at once whispered to him that something more than the moral satisfaction to be derived from this re- flection was required, so he very wisely " slipped a golden coin into her trembling hand." For many years Lady Shelley lived on very friendly and intimate terms with the Duke, who appears to have confided to her many things about which he would perhaps have acted more wisely if he had held his tongue. When he went on an important diplomatic mission to Paris in 1822, she requested him to buy her a blouse a commission which he faithfully exe- cuted. All went well until 1848. Then a terrific explosion occurred. It is no longer " My dearest Lady ! Mind you bring the blouse ! Ever yours most affectionately, Wellington," but " My dear Lady Shelley," who is addressed by " Her Lady- WELLINGTONIANA 281 ship's most obedient humble servant, Wellington," and soundly rated for her conduct. The reason for this abrupt and volcanic change was that owing to an indiscretion on the part of Lady Shelley a very important letter about the defence- less state of the country, which the Duke had addressed to Sir John Burgoyne, then the head of the Engineer Department at the Horse Guards, got into the newspapers. The Duke's wrath boiled over, and was expressed in terms which, albeit the reproaches were just, showed but little chivalrous consideration towards a peccant but very contrite woman. He told her that he " had much to do besides defending himself from the consequences of the meddling gossip of the ladies of modern times," and he asked indignantly, " What do Sir John Burgoyne and his family and your Ladyship and others talking of old friendship say to the share which each of you have had in this transaction, which, in my opinion, is disgraceful to the times in which we live ? " What Sir John Burgoyne and his family might very reasonably have said in answer to this formidable interrogatory is that, although no one can defend the conduct of Delilah, it was certainly most unwise of Samson to trust her with his secret. It is consolatory to know that, under the influence of Sir John Shelley's tact and good-humour, a treaty of peace was eventually 282 WELLINGTONIANA xv concluded. Sir John happened to meet the Duke at a party. " ' Good-evening, Duke,' said Sir John, in his most winning manner. ' Do you know, it has been said, by some one who must have been present, that the cackling of geese once saved Rome. I have been thinking that perhaps the cackling of my old Goose may yet save England ! ' This wholly unexpected sally proved too much for the Duke, who burst out into a hearty laugh. ' By G d, Shelley ! ' said he, ' you are right : give me your honest hand. 5 : The Duke then returned to Apsley House and " penned a playful letter to Lady Shelley." It is not to be expected that much of real historical interest can be extracted from a Diary of this sort. It may, however, be noted that when the Bellerophon reached the English coast " it was only by coercion that the Ministers prevented George IV. from receiving Bonaparte. The King wanted to hold him as a captive." Moreover, Brougham, who was in a position to know, said, " There can be little doubt that if Bonaparte had got to London, the Whig Opposi- tion were ready to use him as their trump card to overturn the Government." The main interest in the book, however, lies in the light which it throws on the Duke's inner life and in the characteristic obiter dicta which xv WELLINGTONIANA 283 he occasionally let fall. Of these, none is more characteristic than the remark he made on meet- ing his former love, Miss Catherine Pakenham, after an absence of eight years in India. He wrote to her, making a proposal of marriage, but Miss Pakenham told him " that before any engagement was made he must see her again ; as she had grown old, had lost all her good looks, and was a very different person to the girl he had loved in former years." The story, which has been frequently repeated, that Miss Pakenham was marked with the smallpox, is untrue, 1 but, without doubt, during the Duke's absence, she had a good deal changed. The Duke himself certainly thought so, for, on first meeting her again, he whispered to his brother, " She has grown d d ugly, by Jove ! " Nevertheless he married her, being moved to do so, not appar- ently from any very deep feelings of affection, but because his leading passion was a profound regard for truth and loyalty which led him to admire and appreciate the straightforwardness of Miss Pakenham's conduct. Lady Shelley exultingly exclaims, " Well might she be proud and happy, and glory in such a husband." That the Duchess was proud of her husband is certain. Whether she was altogether happy is more doubtful. 1 Maxwell's Life of Wellington, vol. i. p. 78 284 WELLINGTONIANA One of the stock anecdotes about the Duke of Wellington is that when on one occasion some one asked him whether he was surprised at Waterloo, he replied, "No. I was not surprised then, but I am now." We are indebted to Lady Shelley for letting us know what the Duke really thought on this much -debated question. In a letter written to her on March 22, 1820, he stated, with his usual downright common sense, all that there is to be said on this subject. " Supposing I was surprised ; I won the battle ; and what could you have had more, even if I had not been surprised ? " It is known on the authority of his niece, Lady Burghersh, that the Duke " never read poetry," but his " real love of music," to which Lady Shelley alludes, will perhaps come as a surprise to many. Mr. Fortescue, however, 1 has told us that in his youth the Duke learnt to play the violin, and that he only abandoned it, when he was about thirty years old, " because he judged it unseemly or perhaps ill-sounding for a General to be a fiddler." The Duke is not the only great soldier who has been a musical performer. Marshal St. Cyr used to play the violin " in the quiet moments of a campaign," and Sir Hope Grant was a very fair performer on the violoncello. 1 British Statesmen of the Great War, p. 241. WELLINGTONIANA 285 It was characteristic of the Duke to keep the fact of his being about to fight a duel with Lord Winchelsea carefully concealed from all his friends. When it was over, he walked into Lady Shelley's room while she was at breakfast and said, " Well, what do you think of a gentle- man who has been fighting a duel ? ' : It appears that during the last years of his life the Duke's great companion-in-arms, Bliicher, was subject to some strange hallucinations. The following affords a fitting counterpart to those " fears of the brave " which Pope attributed to the dying Marlborough. On March 17, 1819, Lady Shelley made the following entry in her diary : We laughed at poor Bliicher's strange hallucination, which, though ludicrous, is very sad. He fancies him- self with child by a Frenchman ; and deplores that such an event should have happened to him in his old age ! He does not so much mind being with child, but cannot reconcile himself to the thought that he of all people in the world should be destined to give birth to a Frenchman ! On every other subject Bliicher is said to be quite rational. This peculiar form of madness shows the bent of his mind ; so that while we laugh our hearts reproach us. The Duke of Wellington assures me that he knows this to be a fact. Finally, attention may be drawn to a singular and interesting letter from Sir Walter Scott to Shelley, giving some advice which it may be 286 WELLINGTONIANA presumed the young poet did not take to heart. He was " cautioned against enthusiasm, which, while it argued an excellent disposition and a feeling heart, requires to be watched and re- strained, though not repressed." XVI BURMA * " The Spectator" June 28, 1913 THE early history of the British connection with Burma presents all the features uniformly to be found in the growth of British Imperialism. These are, first, reluctance to move, coupled with fear of the results of expansion, ending finally with a cession to the irresistible tendency to expand ; secondly, vagueness of purpose as to what should be done with a new and some- what unwelcome acquisition ; thirdly, a tardy recognition of its value, with the result that what was first an inclination to make the best of a bad job only gradually transforms itself into a feeling of satisfaction and congratulation that, after all, the unconscious founders of the British Empire, here as elsewhere, blundered more or less unawares into the adoption of a sound and far-seeing Imperial policy. 1 Burma under British Rule. By Joseph Dautremer. Lon- don : T. Fisher Unwin. 15s. 287 288 BURMA xvi In 1825, Lord Amherst, in one of those " fits of absence " which the dictum of Sir John Seeley has rendered famous, took possession of ^ some of the maritime provinces of Burma, and in doing so lost three thousand one hundred and fifteen men, of whom only a hundred and fifty were killed in action. Then the customary fit of doubt and despondency supervened. It was not until four years after the conclusion of peace that a British Resident was sent to the Court of Ava in the vain hope that he would be able to negotiate the retrocession of the province of Tenasserim, as " the Directors of the East India Company looked upon this territory as of no value to them." For a quarter of a century peace was preserved, for there ruled at Ava a prince " who was too clear-sighted to attempt again to measure arms with the British troops." Anon he was succeeded by a new king the Pagan Prince " who cared for nothing but mains of cocks, games, and other infantile amusements," and who, after the manner of Oriental despots, inaugurated his reign by putting to death his two brothers and all their households. " There were several hundreds of them." It is not surprising that under a ruler addicted to such practices the British sailors who frequented the Burmese ports should have been subjected to mal- treatment. Their complaints reached the ears of xvi BURMA 289 the iron-fisted and acquisitive Lord Dalhousie, who himself went to Rangoon in 1852, and forthwith " decided on the immediate attack of Prome and Pegu." M. Dautremer speaks in flattering terms of " the tenacity and persistence of purpose which make the strength and glory of British policy." He might truthfully have added another characteristic feature which that policy at times displays, to wit, sluggishness. It was not until sixteen years after Lord Dalhousie's annexation of Lower Burma that the English bethought themselves of improving their newly acquired province by the construction of a railway, and it was not till 1877 that the first line from Rangoon to Prome a distance of only one hundred and sixty-one miles was opened. During all this time King Mindon ruled in native Burma. He " gave abundant alms to monks," and, moreover, which was perhaps more to the purpose, he was wise enough to maintain relations with Great Britain which were " quite cordial." Eventually the Nemesis which appears to attend on all semi-civilised and moribund States when they are brought in contact with a vigorous and aggressive civilisation appeared in the person of the " Sapaya-lat," the " middle princess," who induced her feeble husband, King Thibaw, to carry out massacres on a scale which, even in Burma, had been heretofore unprecedented. u 290 BURMA xvi Then the British on the other side of the frontier began to murmur and " to consider whether it was possible to endure a neighbour who was so cruel and so unpopular." All doubts as to whether the limits of endurance had or had not been reached were removed when the impecunious and spendthrift king not only imposed a very unjust fine of some 150,000 on the Bombay- Burma Trading Corporation, but also had the extreme folly to " throw himself into the arms of France " a scheme which was at once com- municated by M. Jules Ferry to Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador in Paris. Then war with Burma was declared, and after some tedious operations, which involved the sacrifice of many valuable lives, and which extended over three years, the country was " completely pacified " by 1889, and Lord Dufferin added the title of " Ava " to the Marquisate which was conferred on him. In 1852, when Lord Dalhousie annexed Lower Burma, Rangoon was " merely a fishing village." It is now a flourishing commercial town of some 300,000 inhabitants. In 1910-11 the imports into Burmese ports, including coast trade, amounted to 13,600,000. The exports, in spite of a duty on rice which is of a nature rather to shock orthodox economists, were nearly 23,000,000 in value. The revenue in 1910 was xvi BURMA 291 about 7,391,000, of which about 2,590,000 was on Imperial and the balance on local account. Burma is in the happy position of being in a normal state of surplus, and is thus able to contribute annually a sum of about 2,500,000 to the Indian exchequer, a sum which those who are specially interested in Burmese prosperity regard as excessive, whilst it is apparently regarded as inadequate by some of those who look only to the interests of the Indian tax- payers. The account which M. Dautremer, who was for long French Consul at Rangoon, has given of the present condition of Burma is preceded by an introduction from the pen of Sir George Scott, who can speak with unquestionable authority on Burmese affairs. It is clear that neither author has allowed himself in any way to be biassed by national proclivities, for whilst the Frenchman compares British and French administrative methods in a manner which is very much to the detriment of the latter, the Englishman, on the other hand, launches the most fiery denunciations against those of his countrymen who are responsible for Indian policy. Their want of enterprise is characterised by the appalling polysyllabic adjective " hebe- tudinous," which it is perhaps as well to explain means obtuse or dull, and they are told that 292 BURMA xvi they " are infected with the Babu spirit, and cannot see beyond their immediate horizon." M. Dautremer thinks that it is somewhat narrow-minded of the Englishman to inflict on himself the torture of wearing cloth or flannel clothes in order that he may not be taken for a chi-chi or half-caste, who very wisely dresses in white. He expostulates against the social tyranny which obliges him to pay visits between twelve and two " in such a climate and with such a temperature," and he gently satirises the isolation of the different layers of English society civilian, military, and subordinate services in words which call to mind the striking account given by the immortal Mr. Jingle of the dockyard society of Chatham and Rochester. It is, however, consolatory to learn that all classes combined in giving a hearty welcome to the genial and sympathetic Frenchman who was living in their midst. Save on these minor points, M. Dautremer has, for the most part, nothing but praise to accord. He thinks that " all the British administrative officers in Burma are well-educated and capable men, who know the country of which they are put in charge, and are fluent in the language." He writhes under the highly centralised and bureaucratic system adopted by his own countrymen. He commends the English practice under which xvi BURMA 293 " the Home Government never interferes in the management of internal affairs," and it is earnestly to be hoped that the commendation is deserved, albeit of late years there have occasion- ally been some ominous signs of a tendency to govern India rather too much in detail from London. Speaking of. the rapid development of Burmese trade, M. Dautremer says, in words which are manifestly intended to convey a criticism of his own Government, " This is an example of the use of colonies to a nation which knows how to put a proper value on them and to profit by them." The warm appreciation which M. Dautremer displays of the best parts of the English admini- strative system enhances his claims for respectful attention whenever he indulges in criticism. He finds two rather weak points in the admini- stration. In the first place, he attributes the large falling-off in the export of teak, inter alia, to " the increase in Government duties and the much more rigid rules for extraction," and he adds that the Government, which is itself a large dealer in timber, has " by its action created a monopoly which has raised prices to the highest possible limit." The subject is one which would appear to require attention. The primary business of any Government is not to trade but to administer, and, as invariably happens, the 294 BURMA xvi violation of a sound economic principle of this sort is certain sooner or later to carry its own punishment with it. In the second place, the Forest Department, which is of very special importance in Burma, is a good deal crippled by the " want of energy and want of industry which are unfortunately common in the sub- ordinate grades. The reason for this state of things is to be found in the fact that the pay and prospects are not good enough to attract really capable men." In many quarters, notably in Central Africa, British Treasury officials have yet to learn that, from every point of view, it is quite as great a mistake to employ underpaid administrative agents as it would be for an employer of labour to proceed on the principle that low wages necessarily connote cheap pro- duction. Sir George Scott in his introduction strikes a very different note from that sounded by M. Dautremer. He alleges that the wealthy province of Burma, which M. Dautremer tells us is not unseldom called " the milch-cow of India," is starved, that its financial policy has been directed by " cautious, nothing -venture, mole -horizon people," who have hid their talent in a napkin ; that " everything seems expressly designed to drive out the capital " of which the country stands so much in need ; that not nearly enough xvi BURMA 295 has been done in the way of expenditure on public works, notably on roads and railways, and that when these latter have been constructed, they have sometimes been in the wrong directions. He cavils at M. Dautremer's description of Burma as " a model possession," and holds that " as a matter of bitter fact, the administrative view is that of the parish beadle, and the enter- prise that of the country-carrier with a light cart instead of a motor- van." It would require greater local knowledge than any possessed by the writer of the present article either to endorse or to reject these formid- able accusations, although it may be said that the violence of Sir George Scott's invective is not very convincing, but rather raises a strong suspicion that he has overstated his case. Nothing is more difficult, either for a private individual or for a State financier, than to decide the question of when to be bold and when cautious in the matter of capital outlay. It is quite possible to push to an extreme the commonplace, albeit attractive, argument that large expenditure will be amply remunerative, or even if not directly remunerative, highly beneficial " in the long run." Although this plea is often indeed, perhaps generally valid, it is none the less true that the run which is foreshadowed is at times so long as to make the taxpayer, who has to 296 BURMA XVI bear the present cost, gasp for breath before the promised goal is reached. Pericles, by laying out huge sums on the public buildings of Athens, earned the undying gratitude of artistic posterity. Whether his action was in the true interests of his Athenian contemporaries is perhaps rather more doubtful. The recent history of Argentina is an instance of a country in which, as subsequent events have proved, the plea for lavish capital expenditure was perfectly justifiable, but in which, nevertheless, the over -haste shown in incurring heavy liabilities led to much temporary inconvenience and even disaster. But on the whole it may be said that where all the general conditions are favourable, and point conclusively to the possibility and probability of fairly rapid economic development, a bold financial policy may and should be adopted, even although it may not be easy to prove beforehand by very exact calculations that any special project under consideration will be directly remunerative. Egyptian finance is a case in point. At a time when the country was in the throes of bankruptcy, a fresh loan of 1,000,000 was, to the dismay of the conventional financiers, contracted, the pro- ceeds of which were spent on irrigation works. So also the construction of the Assouan dam, which cost nearly double the sum originally estimated, was taken in hand at a moment when xvi BURMA 297 a liability of a wholly unknown amount on account of the war in the Soudan was hanging over the head of the Egyptian Treasury. In both of these cases subsequent events amply justified the financial audacity which had been shown. In the case of Burma there appears to be no doubt as to the wealth of the province or its capacity for further development. In view of all the circumstances of the case the amount of twelve millions, which is apparently all that has been spent on railway construction since 1869, would certainly appear to be rather a niggardly sum. In spite, therefore, of the very unnecessary warmth with which Sir George Scott has urged his views, it is to be hoped that his plea for the adoption of a somewhat bolder financial policy in the direction of expenditure on railways, and still more on feeder roads, will receive from the India Office, with whom the matter really rests, the attention which it would certainly appear to deserve. The case of public buildings, of which Burma apparently stands much in need, is different. They cannot, strictly speaking, be said to be remunerative, and should almost, if not quite, invariably be paid for out of revenue. XVII A PSEUDO-HERO OF THE REVOLUTION * " The Spectator" July 5, 1913 IF it be a fact, as Carlyle said, that " History is the essence of innumerable biographies," it is very necessary that the biographies from which that essence is extracted should be true. It was probably a profound want of confidence in the accuracy of biographical writing that led Horace Walpole to beg for " anything but history, for history must be false." Modern industry and research, ferreting in the less frequented bypaths of history, have exposed many fictions, and have often led to some strikingly paradoxical con- clusions. They have substituted for Cambronne's apocryphal saying at Waterloo the blunt sarcasm of the Duke of Wellington that there were a number of ladies at Brussels who were termed " la vieille garde," and of whom it was said 1 The Life of Madame Tallien. By L. Gastine. Translated from the French by J. Lewis May. London : John Lane. 12s. 6d. net. 298 xvn TALLIEN 299 " elles ne meurent pas et se rendent toujours." They have led one eminent historian to apologise for the polygamous tendencies of Henry VIII. ; another to advance the startling proposition that the " amazing " but, as the world has heretofore held, infamous Emperor Heliogabalus was a great religious reformer, who was in advance of his times ; a third to present Lucrezia Borgia to the world as a much-maligned and very virtuous woman ; and a fourth to tell us that the " ever pusillanimous " Barere, as he is called by M. Louis Madelin, was " persistently vilified and deliberately misunderstood." Biographical re- search has, moreover, destroyed many picturesque legends, with some of which posterity cannot part without a pang of regret. We are reluctant to believe that William Tell was a mythological marksman and Gessler a wholly impossible bailiff. Nevertheless the inexorable laws of evidence demand that this sacrifice should be made on the altar of historical truth. M. Gastine has now ruthlessly quashed out another picturesque legend. Tallien the "bristly, fox -haired" Tallien of Carlyle's historical rhapsody and La Cabarrus the fair Spanish Proserpine whom, ; ' Pluto-like, he gathered at Bordeaux " have so far floated down the tide of history as individuals who, like Byron's Corsair, were Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes. 300 TALLIEN xvn Of the crimes there could, indeed, never have been any doubt, but posterity took but little heed of them, for they were amply condoned by the single virtue. That virtue was, indeed, of a transcendent character, for it was nothing less than the delivery of the French nation from the Dahomey-like rule of that Robespierre who deluged France in blood, and who, albeit in Fouche's words he was " terribly sincere," at the same time " never in his life cared for any one but himself and never forgave an offence." Moreover, the act of delivery was associated with an episode eminently calculated to appeal to human sentiment and sympathy. It was thought that the love of a fair woman whose life was endangered had nerved the lover and the patriot to perform an heroic act at the imminent risk of his own life. Hence the hero became " Le Lion Amoureux," and the heroine was canonised as " Notre Dame de Thermidor." M. Gastine has now torn this legend to shreds. Under his pitiless analysis of the facts, nothing is left but the story of a contemptible adventurer, who was " a robber, a murderer, and a poltroon," mated to a grasping, heartless courtesan. Both were alike infamous. The ignoble careers of both from the cradle to the grave do not, in reality, present a single redeeming feature. Madame Tallien was the daughter of Franois TALLIEN 301 Cabarrus, a wealthy Spaniard who was the banker of the Spanish Court. The great influence which she unquestionably exerted over her con- temporaries was wholly due to her astounding physical beauty. Her intellectual equipment was meagre in the extreme. At one period of her life she courted the society of Madame de Stael and other intellectuals, but Princess Helene de Ligne said of her that she " had more jargon than wit." As regards her physical attractions, however, no dissentient voice has ever been raised. " Her beauty," the Duchess d'Abrantes says in her memoirs, " of which the sculptors of antiquity give us but an incomplete idea, had a charm not met with in the types of Greece and Rome." Every man who approached her appears to have become her victim. Lacretelle, who himself worshipped at her shrine, says, " She appeared to most of us as the Spirit of Clemency incarnate in the loveliest of human forms." At a very early age she married a young French nobleman, the Marquis de Fontenay, from whom she was speedily divorced. It is not known for what offence she was arrested and imprisoned. Probably the mere fact that she was a marquise was sufficient to entangle her in the meshes of the revolutionary net. It is certain, however, that whilst lying under sentence of death in the prison at Bordeaux she attracted the attention 302 TALLIEN XVII of Tallien, the son of the Marquis of Bercy's butler and ci-devant lawyer's clerk, who had blossomed into " a Terrorist of the first water." He obtained her release and she became his mistress. She took advantage of the equivocal but influential position which she had attained to engage in a vile traffic. She and her para- mour amassed a huge fortune by accepting money from the unfortunate prisoners who were threatened with the fate which she had so narrowly escaped, and to which she was again to be exposed. The venal lenity shown by Tallien to aristocrats rendered him an object of suspicion, whilst the marked tendency displayed by Robespierre to mistrust and, finally, to immo- late his coadjutors was an ominous indication of the probable course of future events. Robespierre had already destroyed Vergniaud by means of Hebert, Hebert by means of Danton, and Danton by means of Billaud. As a preliminary step to the destruction of Tallien, he caused his mistress to be arrested, probably with a view to seeing what evidence against her paramour could be extracted before she was herself guillotined. From this point in the narrative history is merged into legend. The legend would have us believe that on the 7th Thermidor the " Citoyenne Fontenay " sent a dagger to the " Citoyen Tallien," accompanied by a letter in which she TALLIEN 303 said that she had dreamt that Robespierre was no more, and that the gates of her prison had been flung open. " Alas ! 5:i she added, " thanks to your signal cowardice there will soon be no one left in France capable of bringing such a dream to pass." Tallien besought Robespierre to show mercy, but " the Incorruptible was inflexible." Then the " Lion Amoureux " roared, being, as the legend relates, stricken to the heart at the appalling danger to which his beloved mistress was exposed or, as his detractors put the case, being in deadly fear that the untoward revelations of the Citoyenne might cost him his own head. The next act in this Aeschylean drama is described by the believers in the legend in the following words : " Tallien drew Theresia's dagger from his breast and flashed it in the sunlight as though to nerve himself for the desperate business that confronted him. ' This,' he cried passionately, ' will be my final argument,' and looking about him to make sure he was alone he raised the blade to his lips and kissed it." The result, it is alleged, was that Tallien provoked the episode of the 9th Thermidor (July 22, 1794). The few faltering sentences which Robespierre wished to utter were never spoken. He was " choked by the blood of Danton," and hurried off to the guillotine which awaited him on the morrow. 304 TALLIEN History, which in this instance is not legendary, relates that on the death of the tyrant a wild shout of exultation was raised by the joyous people who had for so long wandered in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. To whom, they asked, did they owe their liberty ? What was more natural than to assume that it was to the brave Tallien and to the loving woman who armed him to strike a blow for the freedom of France ? Tallien and his mistress became, there- fore, the idols of the French people. The Chan- cellor Pasquier relates their appearance at a theatre : The enthusiasm and the applause were indescribable. The occupants of the boxes, the people in the pit, men and women alike, stood up on their chairs to look at him. It seemed as though they would never weary of gazing at him. He was young, rather good-looking, and his manner was calm and serene. Madame Tallien was at his side and shared his triumph. In her case also everything had been forgiven and forgotten. Similar scenes were enacted all through the autumn of that year. Never was any service, however great, rewarded by gratitude so lively and so touching. It would be impossible within the limits of the present article to summarise the arguments by which M. Gastine seeks to destroy this myth. Allusion may, however, be made to two points of special importance. The first is that neither Tallien nor the lovely Spaniard languishing in xvn TALLIEN 305 the dungeon of La Force had much to do with the episode of the 9th Thermidor. " Tallien was a mere super, a mere puppet that had to be galvanised into action up to the very last." The man who really organised the movement and persuaded his coadjutors that they were engaged in a life and death struggle with Robespierre was he who, as every reader of revolutionary history knows, was busily engaged in pulling the strings behind the scenes during the whole of this chaotic period. It was the man whose 'iron nerve and subtle brain enabled him, in spite of a secular course of betrayals, to keep his head on his shoulders, and finally to escape the clutches of Napoleon, who, as Lord Rosebery tells us, 1 always deeply regretted that he had not had him " hanged or shot." It was Fouche. In the second place, there is conclusive evi- dence to show that, to use the ordinary slang expression of the present day, the celebrated dagger letter was " faked." When Robespierre fell, Tallien never gave a thought to his mistress. He still trembled for his own life. " His sole aim was to make away with Robespierre's papers." It was only on the 12th Thermidor that is to say, two days after Robespierre's mangled head had been sheared off by the guillotine that, noting the trend of public 1 The Last Phase, p. 203. X 306 TALLIEN opinion, and appreciating the capital which might be made out of the current myth, he hurried off to La Force and there concocted with his mistress the famous letter which he, of course, antedated. The subsequent careers of Tallien and his wife for he married La Cabarrus in December 1794 are merely characterised by a number of unedifying details. The hero of this sordid tale passed through many vicissitudes. He went with Napoleon to Egypt. He was, on his return voyage, taken prisoner by an English cruiser. On his arrival in London he was well received by Fox and the Whigs a fact which cannot be said to redound much to the credit either of the Whig party or its leader. He gambled on the Stock Exchange, and at one time " blossomed out as a dealer in soap, candles, and cotton bonnets." After passing through an unhonoured old age, he died in great poverty in 1820. The heroine became intimate with Josephine during Napoleon's absence in Egypt, was subsequently divorced from Tallien, and later, after passing through a phase when she was the mistress of the banker Ouvrard, married the Prince of Caraman-Chimay. Her conduct during the latter years of her life appears to have been irreproach- able. She died in 1835. XVIII THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS " The Spectator" July 5, 1913 THERE was a time, not so very long ago, when the humanists enjoyed a practical monopoly in the domain of English education, and, by doing so, exercised a considerable, perhaps even a predominant, influence not only over the social life but also over the policy, both external and internal, adopted by their countrymen. Like most monopolists, they showed a marked ten- dency to abuse the advantages of their position. Science was relegated to a position of humiliating inferiority, and had to content itself with picking up whatever crumbs were, with a lordly and at times almost contemptuous tolerance, allowed to fall from the humanistic table. Bossuet once denned a heretic as " celui qui a une opinion " (atpeo-t?). A somewhat similar attitude was at one time adopted to those who were inclined to doubt whether a knowledge of Latin and 307 308 THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS Greek could be considered the Alpha and Omega of a sound education. The calm judgment of that great humanist, Professor Jebb, led him to the conclusion that the claims of the humanities have been at times defended by pleas which were exaggerated and paradoxical using this latter term in the sense of arguments which contain an element of truth, but of truth which has been distorted and that in an age remarkable beyond all previous ages for scientific research and discoveries, that nation must necessarily lag behind which, in the well-known words uttered by Gibbon at a time when science was still in swaddling-clothes, fears that the " finer feelings " are destroyed if the mind becomes " hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration." All this has now been changed. Professor Huxley did not live in vain. His mantle fell on the shoulders of many other doughty champions who shared his views. Science no longer slinks modestly in educational bypaths, but occupies the high road, and, to say the least, marches abreast of her humanistic sister. Yet the scientists are not yet content. Their souls are athirst for further victories. A high authority on education, himself a classical scholar, 1 has recently told us that, although the English boy "as he emerges from the crucible of the public school laboratory " 1 The Public Schools and the Empire. By D. H. B. Gray. THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS 309 may be a fairly good agent for dealing with the " lower or more submissive races in the wilds of Africa or in the plains of India," elsewhere notably in Canada he is " a conspicuous failure " ; that one of the principal reasons why he is a failure is that " the influence of the humanists still reigns over us " ; and that " the future destiny of the Empire is wrapt up in the im- mediate reform of England's educational system." In the course of that reform, which it is proposed should be of a very drastic character, some half- hearted efforts may conceivably be made to effect the salvage of whatever will remain of the humanistic wreck, but the real motto of the reformers will almost certainly be Utilitarianism, writ large. The humanists, therefore, are placed on their defence. It may be that the walls of their entrenchment, which have already been a good deal battered, will fall down altogether, and that the garrison will be asked to submit to a capitulation which will be almost unconditional. In the midst of the din of battle which may already be heard, and which will probably ere long become louder, it seems very desirable that the voices of those who are neither profound scholars nor accomplished scientists nor educa- tional experts should be heard. These and there are many such ask, What is the end which we should seek to attain ? Can science 310 THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS alone be trusted to prevent education becoming, in the words of that sturdy old pagan, Thomas Love Peacock, a " means for giving a fixed direction to stupidity " ? The answer they, or many of them, give to these questions is that the main end of education is to teach people to think, and that they are not prepared to play false to their own intellects to such an extent as to believe that the national power of thinking will not be impaired if it is deprived of the teaching of the most thoughtful nation which the world has ever known. That nation is Greece. These classes, therefore, lift up their hands in supplication to scientists, educational experts, and parliament- arians yea, even to soulless wire-pullers who would perhaps willingly cast Homer and Sophocles to the dogs in order to win a contested election and with one voice cry : We recognise the need of reform ; we wish to march with the times ; we are no enemies to science ; but in the midst of your utilitarian ideas, we implore you, in the name both of learning and common sense, to devise some scheme which will still enable the humanities to act as some check on the growing materialism of the age ; otherwise the last stage of the educated youth of this country will be worse than the first ; remember what Lucretius on the bold assumption that wire-pullers ever read Lucretius said, " Hie Acherusia stultorum xvm THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS 311 denique vita " ; above all things, let there be no panic legislation and panic is a danger to which democracies and even, Pindar has told us, " the sons of the gods," l are greatly exposed ; in taking any new departure let us, therefore, very carefully and deliberately consider how we can best preserve all that is good in our existing system. Whatever temporary effect appeals of this sort may produce, it is certain that the ultimate result must depend very greatly on the extent to which a real interest in classical literature can be kept alive in the minds of the rising and of future generations. How can this object best be achieved ? The question is one of vital importance. The writer of the present article would be the last to attempt to raise a cheap laugh at the expense of that laborious and, as it may appear to some, almost useless erudition which, for instance, led Professor Hermann to write four books on the particle av and to indite a learned dissertation on aurd?. The combination of in- dustry and enthusiasm displayed in efforts such as these has not been wasted. The spirit which inspired them has materially contributed to the real stock of valuable knowledge which the 1 'Ev yap Sai/xovtort 6f3ois evyovTi /ecu TrcuSes Oewv. Nent, ix. 27. 312 THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS world possesses. None the less it must be admitted that something more than mere erudi- tion is required to conjure away the perils which the humanities now have to face. It is necessary to quicken the interest of the rising generation, to show them that it is not only historically true to say, with Lessing, that " with Greece the morning broke," but that it is equally true to maintain that in what may, relatively speaking, be called the midday splendour of learning, we cannot dispense with the guiding light of the early morn ; that Greek literature, in Professor Gilbert Murray's words, 1 is " an embodiment of the progressive spirit, an expression of the struggle of the human soul towards freedom and ennoblement " ; and that our young men and women will be, both morally and intellectually, the poorer if they listen to the insidious and deceptive voice of an exaggerated materialism which whispers that amidst the hum of modern machinery and the heated wrangles incident to the perplexing problems which arise as the world grows older, the knowledge of a language and a literature which have survived two thousand eight hundred storm -tossed years is "of no practical use." It is this interest which the works of a man like the late Dr. Verrall serve to stimulate. He 1 Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 3. THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS 313 was eminently fitted for the task. On the principle which Dr. Johnson mocked by saying that " who drives fat oxen should himself be fat," it may be said that an advocate of human- istic learning should himself be human in the true and Terentian meaning of that somewhat ambiguous word. This is what Verrall was. All who knew him speak of his lovable character, and others who were in this respect less favoured can judge of the genuineness of his huanm sympathies by applying two well-nigh infallible tests. He loved children, and he was imbued with what Professor Mackail very appropriately calls in his commemorative address " a delight- ful love of nonsense." His kindly and genial humour sparkles, indeed, in every line he wrote. Moreover, whether he was right or wrong in the highly unconventional views which he at times expressed, his scorn for literary orthodoxy was in itself very attractive. Whenever he found what he called a " boggle " that is to say an incident or a phrase in respect to which he was dissatisfied with the conventional explanation " he could not rest until he had made an effort to get to the bottom of it." He treated old subjects with an originality which rejuvenated them, and decked them again with the charm of novelty. He bade us, with a copy of Martial in our hands, accom- pany him to the Coliseum and be, in imagination, 314 THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS one of the sixty thousand spectators who thronged to behold the strange Africans, Sarmatians, and others who are gathered together from the four quarters of the Roman world to take part in the Saturnalia. He asked us to watch with Pro- pertius whilst the slumbers of his Cynthia were disturbed by dreams that she was flying from one of her all too numerous lovers. Under his treatment, Mr. Cornford says, the most common- place passages in classical literature " began to glow with passion and to flash with wit." His main literary achievement is thus recorded on the tablet erected to his memory at Trinity College : " Euripidis famam vindicavit." He threw himself with ardour into the discussion on the merits and demerits of the Greek tragedian which has been going on ever since it was origin- ally started by Aristophanes, and he may at least be said to have shown that what French Boileau said of his own poetry applies with equal force to the Greek " Mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose." In the process of rehabilitating Euripides, Verrall threw out bril- liantly original ideas in every direction. Take, for instance, his treatment of the Ion. Every one who has dabbled in Greek literature knows that Euripides was a free-thinker, albeit in his old age he did lip-service to the current theology of the day, and told the Athenians that they should THE FUTURE OF THE CLASSICS 315 not " apply sophistry," or, in other words rationalise, about the gods. 1 Every one also has rather marvelled at the somewhat lame and impotent conclusion of the play when Athene herself in reality one of the most infamous of the Olympian deities is brought on the stage to save the prestige of the oracle at Delphi and to explain away the altogether disreputable behaviour of the no less infamous Apollo. But no one before Verrall had thought of coupling together the free-thinking and the episode in the play. This is what Verrall did. Ion sees that the oracle can lie, and, therefore, " Delphi is plainly discredited as a fountain of truth." The explanation is, of course, somewhat conjectural. Homer, who was certainly not a free-thinker, made his deities sufficiently ridiculous, and, at times, altogether odious. Mr. Lang says with truth : " When Homer touches on the less lovable humours of women on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin- he selects his examples from the divine society of the gods." 2 But whether the very plausible conjectures made by Verrall as to the real purpose of Euripides in his treatment of the oracle in Ion, or, to quote another instance, his explanation of the phantom in Helen, be right or wrong, no 1 OuSev cro/oas Trapa (rapdvTa recall to the mind Tennyson's Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. XXIX SONGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY " The Spectator" September 20, 1913 A BRITISH Aeschylus, were such a person con- ceivable, might very fitly tell his countrymen, in the words addressed to Prometheus some twenty- three centuries ago, that they would find no friend more staunch than Oceanus : ov yo.p TTOT epets cos