N O T E S OF THE W E E K . FOREIGN AFFAIRS. By S. Verdad . MILITARYNOTES. By Romney . THE ECONOMIC OF HISTORY.By Anderson. VIEW w. VIEWSAND THE AFRICAN SITUATION.---VI. By Dr. H. J. Poutsma . LETTERS FROM RUSSIA. By C. E. Bechhofer . DRAMA. John Francis Hope . By READERS AND WRITERS. By R. H. C. . SOUTH REVIEWS: WHAT’S A NAME? By IN A. E. R. . REVIEWS . CURRENT CANT By PASTICHE. John Triboulet, L’Hibou, Pallister Barkas LETTERS THE EDITOR TO from F. S . Button, Deep Singh, Ivor Brown, F., Philip T. Kenway, G. D., J. Molony, E. W. Morgan PRESS CUTTINGS . NOTES OF THE WEEK. MR. IVOR BROWNis an accession to the ranks of National Guildsmen whom we welcome for his earnestness and ability. All the more, therefore, do we deplore the tragic blunder of his recent defence of the introduction women into industry. of It will have been noted how eagerly his support was seized upon by women correspondents of this journal and pointed to as evidence that National Guildsmen are divided. But it must not be so. Far from being a minor question upon which it is allowable for professed Guildsmen to differ, the question of the introduction of women into industry is, in our most considered judgment, vital. W e who are not members of the National Guilds League, but students of the subject with no propaganda to consider, once more explicitly affirm our unalterable opposition to women in wage-industry. The facts of the situation may appear to be wholly against us. Undoubtedly heaven and hell are conspiring a t this moment to sweep more and more women into factories and offices and elsewhere. ’The women themselves are entering industry with every appearance of enthusiasm ; and a considerable proportion of men are urging or inviting them in. Nevertheless we believe that the whole movement is one colossal infatuation, a piece of national dementia; and that sooner or later it must and will be stopped unless the race is to fall into ruin. case made against them had either been answered or openly set aside as not worth discussion. As it was, their contributions were, from the point of view of a debate, irrelevant and out of order. The question a t issue was not their personal feelings on the subjectabout which any more than about our own we do not care a damn-but whether, in fact, it is socially good in any and every sense of the word that women should be in industry. We reply in the negative; and we are serious enough to insist upon a discussion of our reasons Failing a fair discussion we can promise to treat with the utmost disrespect every correspondent, professing guildsman or otherwise, who denies it to us, or attempts to slip past our sleepless guard. *** * * * We need not repeat the arguments of our notes on the subject which appeared in THE NEW AGE in August, 1912. They are there, they can be read, and they have never been answered. It speaks badly, indeed, for our readers, including some of the Guildsmen, that, without attempting to reply to the case there stated against women in industry, they should continue their advocacy. Matters of reasoning will never be settled by disputants ignoring each other’s points ; and if, outside THE E AGE,such dodgery is stupid, in these NW pages it is offensive. Why should we write, only to be ignored by the very people who pretend to examine our ideas? Strictly speaking, neither Mr. Ivor Brown nor his approving correspondents should have been permitted resume the discussion of the subject until the to A few considerations only need be added here to those already so frequently advanced in these pages. Mr. Ivor Brown-to do him justice-is opposed, so he tells f us, to the extension o women’s sphere in industry. W h a t a miracle it is that the right limit of women in industry should have coincided with the appearance of Mr. Ivor Brown as a sociologist. Twenty years ago, when there were only a million women in industry, would have been too soon to cry haIt. Ten years ago, when there were only two millions, the right proportion of women was still not reached. But a year ago, by which time three million women were in, was the happy moment when Mr. Ivor Brown could say : thus far, but no further. Similarly, if we remember, there were slavery-abolitionists in America who contented themselves with opposing the extension o slavery to f other States than those in which it already existed. In those it was tolerable, if not actually right; but to extend the system one square yard further into another State was, according to them, a matter of principle worth fighting for. Well, we cannot see that geography or the status quo has anything to do with the subject. America, as Lincoln said, could not be half-slave, halffree. Either slavery was right and therefore to be encouraged,or a t least permitted, everywhere; or it was wrong and to be forbidden everywhere. Women’s industry, similarly, is either light or wrong (we have nothing to do with expediency, for the moment). If it is right, then n o sphere ought to be arbitrarily closed If it is wrong then, then every sphere should be closed to them, whether it prove possible or not ! to them (please note the word “arbitrarily”). *** I t is exasperating to discover a .woman correspondent of THE NEW AGE replying to Mr. Brown’s chivalrous point, namely, that woman is too good for industry, with the retort that “ a simpler solution would be to make industry good enough for woman.” That is exactly our case for keeping women o u t of industry until the wage system is abolished. The wage-system, we say, is not fit for men, let alone €or women. We want to abolish it so that industry may be fit for men, and therefore for women as well ! W e have never contended that women, if they like, should never enter industry. Women were admitted in the old guilds. What we say is that the wage-system is not fit for them. But men have not only made the wage-system, they are the only people who can unmake it. Not the employing classes, for they naturally wish to perpetuate it, since on its profits they grow f a t ; but the wageearners themselves. Now, can anything be conceived more fatal to the attempt of men wage-earners to abolish the wage-system (and so to make industry good enough for women), than to swamp their efforts by adding to their competing ranks millions of low-waged women? I t is a lunatic’s notion. I t is on a par with imagining that if only the number of slaves in America could have been increased by fresh importations from Africa, slavery would have stood a better chance of being abolished. On the contrary, the more women enter industry the more difficult will it be for men to make industry fit for them. Women are, in fact, a t this moment playing the profiteers’ game; they are making the abolition of the wage-system practically impossible. causes, its probable effects, and its possible remedies. Chief among its causes is the political ambition of the present generation of Trade Union leaders. Elected, a s they are, to carry on the economic work of their organisations, they no sooner find themselves in office than they immediately aspire to join the Westminster Club. Once there it is not to be wondered at that they straightway forget what manner of men they were. They lose touch with their members, who speedily discover the fact ; and at the first push they are repudiated. And serve them right, we would say, if it were not so tragic for their country and their class. Better by far that they should swill beer with their own men than sip champagne with profiteers’ clerks a t Westminster. Their “immorality” would be less damaging to everybody than their painful respectability. + e * * * * + Are women necessary in industry? Think about it, we beseech our readers. Is it not a curious reflection that the more society develops labour-saving machinery the more human labourers are supposed to be necessary? Where in God’s name is the economy of machinery, if with every fresh machine additional human labour must be found? By and by, we suppose, labour-saving machinery will have become so perfected that children from the cradle will be necessary to carry on industry. Instead of releasing greater and greater numbers of the population from industrial for other functions, the end will be that the whole population will be labouring industrially night and day to keep the labour-saving machines running ! Such a nightmare is obviouslywe timidly hope-ridiculous on the face of it. Something must be wrong somewhere. W h a t is i t ? W h a t is it, we ask? Why, the explanation is almost too patent to require stating. The explanation is that under the wage-system (in which labour, whether mechanical or human, is bought and sold as a commodity) the introduction of labour-saving machinery is equivalent to the introduction of cheap labourers, whose competition forces down the level of wages until a t last women can be more profitably employed than men. Machinery tends to reduce wages by competing with living wage-earners ; a s its amount increases, wages fall until only cheap labour stands any chance of competing with it. Women are cheaper than men; that is, they can compete with machines in economy. Hence their introduction into industry, the capitalist leading them by the hand. ** From the public point of view one o the most serious f facts’ of modern Trade Unionism is the progressive enfeeblement of the hold of its leaders upon the men. “For years past,” says the “Times.” “Trade Union discipline has been ebbing away and has altogether disappeared in many unions.” So it has, and we have recorded many examples of the fact. But to record and to deplore it is not enough. W e ought to examine its The probable effects of their betrayal of their duty to their Union will be t o leave the latter a prey to mobinstinct. The Unions of men without leaders-or, worse, of men with leaders they do not trust-will tend to become groups of desperate anarchists exposed to the influences of mob-suggestion, I t is fortunate that in the majority of cases the rank and file are sound, wellbalanced and wonderfully moderate. Otherwise, the mind would refuse to picture the chaos that would follow on a strike of the men against their leaders. For the practical purpose of organising industry, however, our leaderless Unions are useless, however sane they may be. ’Trusted leaders are necessary; and until they are found, the Trade Unions are likely to be as great a nuisance to the nation as a torment to themselves. W e appeal once more to the Unions to get rid of their twicers and to kick out from their offices every official whose eyes are on a political career. Without a single exception, Trade Union leaders who aspire to political eminence are double-dyed hypocrites or profound numskulls. The Unions should require of their officials a solemn pledge to abstain from politics as from drink and drugs. Such a self-denying ordinance would clean out the movement and rid it of rats. ’* * 0 Our recommendation to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress to sit continuously during the present revolutionary period appears to have fallen, with all the rest of our advice t o Labour, upon deaf ears. Of any further consideration of Mr. Lloyd George’s recent epoch-making invitations to Trade Unions to come in and manage industry, we have heard no word. All the statesmen and thinkers of the movement seem to have shut up shop for three years or the duration of the war. Where is that great statesman, Mr. Philip Snowden? or that “intellect of the Labour movement,” Mr. Ramsay MacDonald? At his busiest he could find time to write books on India, on Parliament, on Socialism. In his present leisure can he not find time to examine the future of Trade Unionism? Events march, however, in spite of the absence of leaders. The following provision of the West of Scotland Armaments Committee i s significant if small : “In the case of union men it is arranged that immediately a case of avoidable bad time-keeping - . . is brought to notice, the employer will report to the trade union, who will investigate, and if necessary fix the fine.” The responsibility of the Union as a Union ! * * * A little thought seems a t last to be stirring among the officials of Trade Unions. In the “Daily Citizen’’ of May 29, Mr. A. G. Walkden, the secretary of the Railway Clerks Association, which is not, we believe, affiliated with the National Union of Railwaymen (Oh, dear, no. Our black coats !), foresees that the present enforced co-operation of the companies under Government may bring about their permanent fusion after the war. Already, indeed, the companies a r e fusing into solidarity in preparation for the struggle to retain the railways in their hands. Competitive canvassing for traffic is being stopped, receiving offices are being closed as the leases fall in, joint offices are being instituted, and administrations are being reduced. In a word, says Mr. Walkden, there is in preparation a grand railway combine. W e are not surprised in the least. Naturally not, since we announced the coming fusion many ages ago. W h a t surprises us is that Mr. Walkden advocates nationalisation-and nothing else. Nationalisation is for the nation to demand, not the railwaymen themselves. Their business is to be prepared to meet on negotiating terms either a combine or the State, and to insist upon partnership with one or the other. Anything else is poking their Trade Union nose into political business, where they stand a good chance of having it nipped of ! f + * * In the same issue of the defunct “Daily Citizen” Mr. Pickles, the assistant secretary of the National Union of Painters, warns the Trade Unions that they are in for a bad time if they leave the capitalist class to deal with the transition period from war to peace. He urges f the assembly o a national conference of Trade Unions to demand a joint Committee of Government and Trade Union representatives to superintend the repatriation and reinstatement of Labour. But, bless your life, will the Trade Unions do i t ? For all they claim to be farsighted statesmen, they cannot see more than a week ahead. The outbreak of peace will find them, we are afraid, as unprepared for peace a s the outbreak of war found them unprepared for war. Still, nearly a year from the beginning of the war, the movement is without a head. The Parliamentary Committee of the Congress ought to be impeached for its neglect ! industry is placed upon the Statute Book. A l l industries,” the latest Annual Report of the Association says, “must stand together if they are to secure that prominent share in the conduct of State affairs to which their importance entitles them, and which, especially under existing conditions, it is vitally important they should obtain.’’ Already the Association claims to have done a good deal; and, judging by recent legislation, we can well believe it ! And why not, seeing that in addition to its own members, it commands the support of nearly 200 members of Parliament, drawn from both sides of the House, who together form a “Commercial Committee” for the sole purpose of advancing the interests of employers. W e doubt, however, whether the Labour members have ever heard of the existence of this body ! * * + * * * Mr. Frederic Harrison is an example of a man who tries to undo in his old age the good he has done in his youth. I n a recent letter to the “Times” (May 29), he turns upon the Trade Unions to-day who are striving to maintain a t home the conditions of labour to which their fellow-members on service will have to return, in these familiar terms : “Having tried to serve the cause of Labour now for fifty years past, I see with shame and bitterness bow ill some sections of the workmen are serving their country, in very truth how they are traitors to their order and their race. The great labour leaders with whom I worked long years ago would have sunk with shame and remorse to have seen what some so-called Trade Unionists are doing now. ” Fortunately for them, they are dead. * + * In the technical trade journal, “Arms and Explosives, ” the editor draws attention to the conclusion from the holding up of several of our industries by the cessation of supplies from Germany. This has been the case in the steel trade, the dyeing industry and in printers’ ink. “The object-lesson,” says “Arms and Explosives, ” “appears to be that the individual initiative of business men cannot be relied upon to ensure self-contained supplies for the carrying on of commerce. ” This is clear enough, and the reason is plain. I t is at present nobody’s business to co-ordinate any industry and to provide for all its needs. The various needs are left to individuals to divine and to supply as best they can and from whatever source is available. Thus it happens that, without knowing it, an industry drifts into dependence upon a foreign supply which may be cut off at any moment and leave the industry stranded. It is as if a n Army in the field were to leave to its departmental heads the supply from any source of the needs of their particular a r m ; and, in several instances, the heads, to save themselves trouble and expense, were to depend upon sources within the control of the enemy. Naturally at any moment the enemy could paralyse such arms by simply commandeering the sources of supply. Until somebody (a National Guild Council, for instance) is responsible for the supply of the needs o f each industry, every industry will remain a t the mercy of chance. Even the State has done better than our commercial men. The State had, a t any rate, taken care that the oil, coal, etc., necessary to its Army and Navy should not be in enemy hands during war time. U * % Professor Wrightson recently scoffed a t the suggestion made in these pages that England should be farmed nationally. A series of articles in the “Times” by Mr. A. D. Hall has, however, made a similar suggestion with all the authority to which our leading agricultural organising expert is entitled ; and Mr. Hall has been supported in a letter signed by Sir Horace Plunkett, Mr. Charles Bathurst, Professors Somerville Dunstan, Hart-Synnot and Mr. R. A. Yerburgh. These gentlemen ask the Government “not to refrain longer from the preparation of_a national scheme for agriculture. For the carrying out of such a scheme an elaborate organisation [administrative, we suppose] must be available, so that the Government may be connected with every farm in the country, through channels which link up the agricultural resources of county councils, university institutions, and the larger societies of agriculturists. ” T o these we would add the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, taking pains to see that every labourer is a member of it. + * + As well a s the economic power exerted by employers upon workmen the Employers’ Parliamentary Association, under the presidency of Sir Chas. Macara, exerts a corresponding power over politics T o this end it is sought to federate all employers, irrespective of partypolitics, for the purpose of compelling Parliament t o consult with business men before legislation affecting Though the “Round Table” has never once mentioned THE NEW AGE, the two journals, the one a quarterly, the other a weekly, have much in common. The discourtesy of the editors of the quarterly shall not, therefore, prevent us from acknowledging the intelligence of their articles. The latest issue is full of excellent matter for National Guildsmen, and we would recommend its purchase by serious students. The article on “ W a r and Industrial Organisation” is particularly good, and will, no doubt, provide other writers in these columns with material for comment. The purpose, however, of this present note is to draw attention to the following passage from an article in the same issue on “Finance in War.” “ I t has been suggested that the war may produce a spirit of earnestness. But by bringing a mass of men close to the primitive facts of life it may also awaken the spirit which questions .existing conventions ; and the modern industrial system, like any other system of organisation, depends on the great majority of mankind accepting established conventions without question. ’’ Now the accepted convention of the modern industrial system is none other than the buying and selling, at the price determined by the Laws of Supply and Demand (L.S.D., curiously enough !) of men’s labour-power. Should that be questioned, the whole system built upon it will topple to pieces. W e beg our readers to question it without ceasing. Foreign Affairs. By S. Verdad. AT the present moment the situation in the Balkans is distinctly more promising for the Entente Powers than at any time since the war began? The Greek elections, his with the return of M. Venizelos to power-with party, at any rate, sure of a majority in the Chamber over all other parties combined-have been the chief cause o this change in what, until very recently, apf peared to be a complex enough series of difficulties. Ironically enough, unless the King of Greece chooses to pay more attention in future to the facts of the case f than to the wishes o his consort, his country will in no wise benefit from the position thus brought about. For a week or two after the elections it was doubtful whether M Venizelos, despite his majority, would, after all, be prepared to assume office. That doubt has been dispelled. w h e n the Chamber meets M. Venizelos will about head a solid group of 180 members-roughly sixty more than the total of the remaining parties. M. Gounaris, unless he throws over his former policy, and incidentally the King, and agrees unconditionally to whatever suggestions may be put forward by the Venizelists will have to give way. King Constantine, whose health is expected to be much improved by the time the Chamber is ready to meet next month, will then have to make his choice. If he still refuses to ally his country to the Triple Entente Powers, the only constitutional course open to him will be a dissolution of the new Cabinet formed by M. Venizelos followed by a new series of elections and the strong probability o a revoluf tion, or at any rate an intense display of feeling against tha Royal family. A general election in such circumstances would inevitably mean the return of M. Venizelos again, with a stronger majority than ever. On the other hand, the King may see the wisdom of annoying’ his German relatives, including the Queen, for the sake of preserving his throne * I ) * nand’s army. One important step to this end has already been reported in the Press, namely, the recall o Sir Henry Bax-Ironside as British Minister to Bulf garia, and the appointment in his stead of Mr. H. J. O’Beirne, at present our Councillor of Embassy at Petrograd. I t will thus be seen that our negotiators have a t last placed themselves in the position of being able to play one Balkan State off against another, though, as I have often said in these pages, there was no reason why this could not have been done six or even eight months ago. I t must not be assumed that there is anything sordid in the transaction proposed, whatever appearances may indicate. I t is only on the lips of sentimental Liberal statesmen in this country that we hear a continual series of pathetic appeals to “right” and “justice” and other abstractions with which the remaining belligerent Powers are not concerned. The Balkan States, all of them, are taking part in this business for the purpose of making money, i.e., for the purpose of adding to their territory and increasing their economic productivity. I have specified already the territory to which each separate State lays claim, and that territory alone is in question and will alone be the deciding factor in inducing Greece and Bulgaria and Roumania to g o to war. * * * That the Turks are beginning to realise the seriousness of the position in the Balkans is shown by the desperate attacks which have just recently been made on the Anglo-French armies in Gallipoli. On June 29, July 2, and July 4 the attacks made by the Turks, under the command of their German officers, were particularly violent. They failed, nevertheless, in their main object, which was to show both the Bulgarians and the Greek!; that not even the most powerfully equipped invader could long maintain his position on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Even the Turks now know that the forcing of the Dardanelles is only a matter of time, and that in five or six weeks the advance of the Allied troops there will be resumed with greater vigour than ever. + * * M. Venizelos, however, will have difficulties of his own. He knows, a s he knew all along, that Greece cannot move a step unless the aid or the neutrality of Bulgaria has first. been secrured In order to induce Bulgaria to remain neutral, as we know, M. Venizelos promised the Bulgarian Government before his fall from office the cession of Kavalla, Once this fact was made public it was natural that Bulgaria should have insist& ever since on the cession of Kavalla; and if M. Venizelos secures the consent of the King to his plans this is one of the first and most peremptory demands he f will have to consider. Despite the great influence o M: Venizelos the cession of Kavalla would not be popular in any part of Greece. But this is not the only factor to be reckoned with. Suppose Bulgaria-who, remember, will not fight for justice or humanity, but for pieces of territory lung haggled over-suddenly decides to support our enemies. In that case, a s I have reason to believe, the Allies would guarantee the integrity of Greek territory, thus rendering the cession of Kavalla unnecessary. Suppose however, M. Venizelos cannot move the King; suppose the decision o the Greek Government f through some such circumstance as yet another election, were postponed for a few precious months longer. In that case the Allies would complete their negotiations with Bulgaria, Five the Sofia Government entire liberty to compensate itself out of Greek territory, and obtain as a reward the immediate assistance of King Ferdinand On the other hand, although the recent fighting in the direction of Lublin is not by any means to be regarded as decisive, it appears to be taken for granted in the Foreign Offices that the Russians have now retreated as far as they mean to, and that their advance now depends chiefly on the supplies of munitions at present being sent to them through Archangel rather than to the military opposition they are likely to meet with. A dilemma is consequently certain to present itself to Roumania in the course of the next six or eight weeks. If by that time, as is highly probable, some definite arrangement has been entered into by the Allies either with Greece or with Bulgaria, it is clear enough that the value of Roumania’s aid will be much less than it would have been four or five months ago. If Roumania chooses to remain neutral, well and good : she would forfeit her one chance of gaining the Bukovina, though incidentally, if we wished to negotiate with Greece rather than with Bulgaria, she could keep Bulgaria from interfering on the opposite side. On the other hand, if Roumania joined Russia-the more likely outcome of the Bucharest Government’s deliberations--the campaign in Hungary would be brought to a relatively speedy conclusion, and the example would react powerfully on Turkey as well as on the hesitating Balkan States. I t is, of course, true that the Austrians and the Germans are doing everything they can t o counteract the recent steps which the representatives of the Entente Powers have been taking. But enemy finance is in a poor condition; and the summoning of the Turkish Finance Minister to the recent conference must have been meant as a stroke of heavy-handed humour. Austria is all but bankrupt, a s Germany will be in another six months. Whatever else these countries may do, they cannot encourage either Turkey or the Balkan States with loans. Military Notes. By Romney. GERMANY has little to lose by war with the United States, and even something to gain. The country of Mr. R. B. Kerr is not of present military importance. Its army is as obsolete and insufficient as the economic interpretations of history which still find favour in its intellectual circles, and its navy can do little more than burden an already overweighted scale. The only assistance which America can afford is in the nature of supplying munitions-but this she affords already to the Allies, for a consideration, and is compelled to refuse to the Germans by the British blockade. In the circumstances she is to all intents and purposes a German enemy already, with this additional German disadvantage, that she cannot be treated as an enemy owing to a nominal and one-sided state of peace. Let that peace be broken and Germany can at once set about to blow up ammunition factories and to torpedo liners by means of her secret agents and of the large GermanAmerican population. Seeing the extent of that population,and the general corruption of American public administration, there is every reason to fear that she would be all too successful in these tactics; and since a shortage or stoppage in the Allies’ munition supply will be a more serious disaster for them than the defeat of many army corps, there is a good deal to be said for the arguments of that German party which proposes war with America. Of course Germany would thereby forfeit all hope of favourable American intervention for peace; but the chances of such intervention are in any case small, and the chances of the Allies paying any attention to it are smaller. *** The growth of the Volunteer movement and the use of the Territorials as Regular troops recalls some remarks which I made in THE NEW AGE long before war began. I said then that English military organisation forms itself naturally upon certain well-defined lines, determined by the economic and social organisation of the country, and that whatever hard and fast schemes were devised by energetic war ministers, we always reverted in the end to type. So long as England remains the present commercial and industrial society, with large colonial possessions, so long shall we require three lines of defence. We shall require a highly efficient and ever-ready professional army for work overseas a second line, whether supplied by volunteering : or compulsion, which will be not so efficient, but whose partially trained cadres will be capable of rapid expansion and training up to Regular standard ; and lastly, a sort of levy en masse of those elements of society who, whether physically fit or not, cannot be spared from that industrial and commercial work which is even more necessary in war than in peace. The first force will always be recruited from the same elements as at present. The second line which, when it was supplied by the militia, was drawn mainly from the agricultural classes, is now furnished by the Territorial force, which is recruited entirely in the large and small towns. The third line is filled by the professional and commercial classes and, partly, by skilled artisans. Since in war its place is at its normal work of organising and maintaining the supply of food, guns, clothes, boots, and shells, it would not ever be called upon save in the event of actual invasion, when those occupations would cease, at any rate temporarily, and the services of those engaged in them be available for fighting the enemy. *** All that was quite understood by the War Office prior to the great changes of the South African War. After that struggle, however, all our previous military ideas were thrown into the melting pot The first line remained as it was. The force which had supplied the second line-the Militia-was practically abolished or reduced to an intermediate stage between the first and second lines, and called the Special Reserve. The force which had supplied the third line-the Volunteers-had its standards and obligations raised to such an extent that it practically assumed the place vacated by the defunct Militia in the second line. The professional, commercial, and artisan classes who used to enlist in it, ceased to do so owing to their inability to meet the increased demands on their time, and it became recruited from those whose youth or economic position enabled them to do so. For various reasons, however, they were almost entirely drawn from the towns, whilst the Militia was mainly rural. The old third line ceased to exist. Now comes the interesting part. War is declared, and immediately War Office standards are swept aside, and we revert to our type. The Territorial Force, whose transformation had been hidden by the identity of tradition with the old Volunteers, openly and obviously assumes the functions of the Militia, garrisoning the colonies at once, and, later, taking its place in the firing line. Another force springs up identical in spirit and composition with the aboriginal Volunteers of 1793 and 1859, for purely Home Defence duties in emergency. These are the lines upon which our military organisation has developed and will develop; and as the division has its origin, not in any War Office ideas but in the economic organisation of the country, any introduction of compulsory service will not affect it. Even granted that the second line be recruited by compulsion, there always will remain the need for a purely professional army for oversea service, and there always will remain a certain residuum of men engaged on skilled commercial industrial and work who, however much you may train them in peace time as soldiers, will simply have to be left to their normal occupations in time of war, unless we and our Allies are to go without rifles, shells, uniforms, or boots. *** It would be wrong to let this week pass without a further protest against the present popular mood of reasonless squabbling and spiritless discouragement. A leading politician recently remarked that democracy is on its trial. It is, and, by the soldiers’ verdict, at any rate it stands discredited. Popular government as it exists in England seems to associate with it something at once ludicrously contemptible and terribly dangerous. Whilst we are sneering at the politicians, their incompetency is ruining us. Whilst France, Russia and Germany, under the rule of the soldiers, are able to devote themselves heart and soul to the task of preserving their honour and existence, this country is showing itself worthy of neither by standing aside in helpless apathy, whilst a little clique drawn from the lawyers, the moneylenders, the Welsh Methodists and the other criminal classes shamelessly bickers and squabbles Over its own mismanagement. It is vain to say with Messrs. Chesterton and Belloc that this is not democracy, and that the people as a whole are not really responsible for it. The truth is that no system which hands over supreme political power as a prize for skill in the kind of monkey tricks which win success in public meetings and debating societies will ever produce a class of ruler decently honest-let alone capable of guiding his country through a crisis like the present. *** Now, I am certain of this-that no race upon this earth has more loyalty to waste than the English. They are the sort of people who will invest their rulers with positive haloes of romance and affection if their rulers will only allow them, and I, as one of them, and sharing that disposition, do most earnestly protest at being cheated out of my King and fobbed off with a lousy attorney. Well, when the armies come back, perhaps with the help of a rope or two, they will end it. Meanwhile,we are indanger-not from the Germans, for they are on their last legs, but from our own chickenheartedness-from the footling despondency that may tempt us to give way when victory is within our reach. The Economic View History of IN the midst of a Socialist tradition which was mainly one of discussions of those questions of distribution, of riches and poverty, of the relative spheres of the individual and the State, the principles of State interference,and so on, which were collectively known as the British “Social Question,” THE NEW AGE writers have once more emphasised that the essential and distinctivething about Socialism is the economic emancipation of the proletarian class, and that this must be the criterion of all social reconstruction. But they have tried to combine with this a conception of the dignity of the State which is quite lacking in German Socialism, and of the practical supremacy of the general good. Now my point is that such an attempt does not enable one to dispense with the economic view of history which Marx reckoned so important : (I) Whoever believes that the aim of the social movement must be in the way of working-class emancipation from the exploitation which is characteristic of the capitalist system has got to hold and justify the belief that the most important and the really effective social changes are those which consistin the transference of economic predominance from one class to another. But (2) if he is further to maintain the ethical paramountcy of the State, what he has to do is rather to put the economic view of history in a setting which I think one can safely say it never had with Marx, and which he at least would have held could only strangle the theory. (I) The economic view of history can never again be so immediately plausible to English people as it was in the early days of the S.D.F. and the Socialist League. But I will say that its opportunities for exact estimation and an appreciation of its true value are much greater to-day than they were then. The early plausibility was due to a sheer confusion, in which Marx himself to some extent shared. The Marxists, including Marx at a later period in his activities, believed, and Aveling wrote a pamphlet to show, that Marxism could be regarded as just an extension (!) of Darwinism--that it set forth the “natural” history of human society, that the class war was a sort of Darwinian struggle for existence “on a higher plane,” and so forth. This kind of thing still flourishes bravely in America. It is, in passing, interesting to note that it is evidently the view of Marxism taken by Mr. R. B. Kerr (for which see his various recent letters in this journal), in whose hands it becomes, indeed, the raw-materialist conception of history. I thoroughly agree that this Marx should have been an enthusiastic disciple of Malthus. But the philosophic basis of the speedy acceptance of “historical materialism” here had little enough to do with Darwinism, and Marx at least cannot be said to have been taken in by it. Their proposals for a science of history were reckoned one of the great achievements of the later members of that school of British empiricism whose leaders were the Philosophic Radicals. The “empirical laws of human progress” are to be found in the writings of Buckle and in the sixth book of J. S. Mill’s “Logic. ” And there were (and are) those among Marxists who consider that in Buckle we have the forerunner of Marx in showing that history, taken on a naturalistic basis, may be a science. The present situation is that, with the discrediting of such attempts at “scientific” history, it is supposed that Marx’s view is finally refuted. History, it is said, is precisely not science. I shall try here simply to indicate how different a thing the economic view of history is from the methods of these historical generalisers, and in what sense history must be a science. We must set aside that meaning of the word in which history is a record; it is to be taken as referring to what is or may be recorded. But history is not, of course, the whole of events; it is political events. Only those peoples are historical which have a definite polity. Others are non-historical, even if they exist at the present day. For Marx, then, the condition of political life is the differentiation into economic classes. And indeed some such principle of differentiation between historical and non-historical or pre-historic is employed by all modern historians, though, of course, all do not, like Marx, make this principle economic. But in so far as we have any such principle, we have science. (Of course, on the other hand, it would be shown that it is only social phenomena which are historical as defined-whatever the definition is-whose life could be recorded, or which would be worth while making a record of.) But if history for Socialist theory is a science, it is a practical science. No philosopher will deny that, however little this may have to do with its scope or validity, a theory always arises in connection with the discharge of a practical interest, and in the case of Socialist theory the practical reference is never very seriously obscured. This is a general truth, even though it has taken Socialist thought all the time since Marx’s analysis of capitalist economy to work out such a relatively practical scheme as National Guilds. The practical meaning of this view of history, then, is just that any fundamental social change must be brought about on condition of an alteration in the relative status of economic classes, and that no other means are really efficacious in initiating or consolidating political results. It implies that it is only by an analysis of capitalism that it is possible to discover those conditions under which present-day society can (it certainly does not entitle us to say must) change into something else. This theory, then, is something very different from the collection of platitudes about the influence of heredity and environment on the individual which many Socialists understand by it. It is simply a sociological theory of history. The class war is, indeed, on this view the “motive force” of history, but it is quite different from the biological “struggle for existence. ” In fact, I find the phrase “class struggle” very misleading in this connection. That might, indeed, apply to a passing phenomena like a lock-out or strike in modern times, but the notion of a permanent state of war, as distinct from actual hostilities, does much more justice to the essence of the case. This should be kept in mind when we come to deal with the moral claims of the State, and to consider whether the class war is “within” the State or not. One thing we must remember. For Marxism of any kind the historical unit is not the individual person, but the class. There is no use in denouncing the class war on the allegation that so the individual puts his interest before his social duty. A class is an interest and an interest is a class. This point can stand further illustration, for the misunderstanding is deep-seated both with Socialists and with their opponents. In the debate on the Munitions Bill on June 28 Mr. Hobhouse said: The Bill proposed to restrict the profits of employers. With regard to that two factors must be considered. One was the profits which the employer ultimately hoped to raise, and the other was the wages paid to the employees. If they were going to limit the profits of the employer, were they going to limit the wages of the employed? . . . It was assumed when they proposed to tax the war profits of a company that the company was the consumer of the dividend. It was nothing of the sort; it was merely the distributor of the dividend. The dividend was paid to persons who quite likely had lost dividends from other companies by the very operation of the war. Now, apart from the fact that there is the Poor Law to deal with such cases, and quite apart from Mr. Hobhouse’s motives, the whole point is missed. The question is (for us) that of limiting the independent power of a class, but the speaker regarded it (conveniently enough) as the limitation of the income of individuals. Against all such we may affirm that there would still be exploitation, and society would still be predominantly capitalist, even though capital were so distributed that the vast majority of those who lived on rent, interest, or profit were existing in the direst poverty. Sentimental British Socialism, with its “wars against poverty,” has never seen this. The above argument, then, treats economic classes as collections of individuals who consume. But for the consistent Marxist consumption and even distribution are not real economic categories at all, though they may be conditions which have to be taken account of in detailed schemes of industrial or social organisation. The same objection, of course, applies to those workers who imagine they would be equitably dealt with under a scheme of compulsory military or industrial service if only all individuals, capitalist or proletarian, were equally compelled to serve. In connection with this whole subject, however, there is a question which I should like to see discussed by those responsible much more fully than it has been. The position and constructive schemes of THE NEW AGE would seem all to be based on an economic view of history. They rest, that is to say, on a predominantly economic analysis of society and social movements, and they regard the main practical problem as that of the economic emancipation of a class. But it has not been made clear how far their economic theory is Marxist, and how far not. On Marx’s theory of value, exploitation is real. In fact, the theory of value and the view of history are systematically interdependent--the historical view turns on the exploitation of labour for its account of the emergence of economic classes; the theory of value is an analysis of the processes of capitalist production-it is an historical account of economic value. But, on the basis of the prevailing consumptioneconomic, exploitation is not real-it is meaningless. Yet both THE NEW AGE writers and Mr. Cole in his “World of Labour,” while they do not proceed upon an economic theory of a Marxist type, seem to be governed in their practical proposals by a classemancipation doctrine of some sort. If so, must we take it that the mere poverty-motive, that the facts of wealth distribution, are a sufficient basis for social analysis and reconstruction? This, I must say, I find very thin. (2) The general outline of any possible solution of the remaining question will appear to be on the lines of a recognition of the limits of history and of practice. On the question of ethics I shall only say here that with the view of the nature of history we have elicited-and this holds of scientific history on any basis-it will be quite clear that the moral value of conduct is nonhistorical. We can affirm with confidence that in any situation, historical or non-historical or pre-historic, in which the individual finds himself there will always be something which is his duty, and there will be lines of conduct which he ought not to follow. This theory is no theory of motives, or of their occurrence in the individual. The question of the basis of institutions is somewhat different. But we shall be able to distinguish between their historical form and their ethical value. The actual State, we shall say, is historical; it is inevitably an economic class-function. It is in no given historical epoch free from the bias of an interest. And the practical importance of this cannot be exaggerated. But this is very different from the red-herring theorythat the State and other institutions are “a capitalist dodge to gull the workers.” We cannot fully share the aesthetic horror with which THE NEW AGE regards the idea of a Parliamentary Working-class Party. We could not share it at all were it not that the State, as well as being historical, is national. But now we are face to face with the principal difficulty, as I think, in the way of an economic view of history, at least in any Marxist form. How does it account for international war? We have, indeed, heard much in regard to the present war about its economic causes-the Bagdad or Cape-to-Cairo Railways, etc. But even on that showing it is not a war of one social class with another, but of two capitalist groups. Marx does not deal explicitly with this difficulty-the only indications of a solution are in his “Eastern Question.” This point I propose next to deal with. W. ANDERSON. The South African VI. Situation, By Dr. H. J. Poustsma, We are continually being told that demands for better wages, agitation and labour unrest tends to drive capital away. Let us now see what inducements are held out to the investor by the Chamber of Mines and the Press. The Editor of the “Cape Times” made the following interesting statement in an article deprecating the nationalisation of the industry, published on April 7 last :-“At the end of the war the Union Government, even if it pursues the safest and most conservative policy in regard to the expenditure of public money, will find considerable difficulty in obtaining capital sufficient for its needs. That capital cannot possibly be procured in South Africa; and if the European money market learnt that the Union Government intended going into the Gold Mining business, it would certainly not be obtained from oversea.” Why not? Let us hear: “A government’s credit varies,” says the article, “directly with the rise or fall of its reputation for prudent finance ; and if the Union Government by setting up as a gold miner, put its stock on the same level as mining shares, the issue of new stock would speedily become impossible.” Why would the issue of new stock become impossible? Can a government which expects to raise unlimited capital for the purpose of suppressing a strike or a rebellion, or of conducting an expensive and doubtful campaign against a foreign State, not hope to raise sufficient funds to open up a gold mine? We had better let this titled mouthpiece of the Chamber of Mines tell his own story in his own dull way. “The producing mines of the Rand,” he says, “arc: capitalised for about 80 millions sterling, and pay something like 8 millions sterling in dividends; quite a respectable return were it uniform. As a matter of fact we are probably not overstating the case when we say that not 20 per cent. of the existing gold mining companies are paying dividends at all : that very nearly 20 per cent. are producing, but payingno dividends : and that something over 40 per cent. are closed down.” Now if that statement means what the ordinary reader would understand it to mean it is certainly a very excellent reason why the Government should not go “into the gold mining business”; but it is a far better reason for closing down the gold mines altogether as a swindle upon the public, as well as a danger and a curse to those employed in them. Are we to understand, in the first place, that only 20 per cent. of the money invested in the gold mining industry is yielding a return of any kind, and-that that 20 per cent. is only yielding a return of 10 per cent.-a matter of 2 per cent. all round? Is this the industry for the sake of which so many respectable men have been, and are being, turned into either criminals or spies, and so many pure women into prostitutes? And for which thousands of healthy men are being filled, in the vigour of their youth, with the most deadly of all diseases? Or, on the other hand, does the statement that “the producing mines of the Rand are capitalised for about 80 millions sterling” not mean, after all, that 80 millions sterling have been invested in them, but merely that 10 millions, or even 5 millions have been “watered” into “about 80 millions”? It is to be presumed that this is where Sir Jan Langerman got his “two or three hundred millions,” which would be necessary to buy out the companies from. Has Sir Jan the impudence, I wonder, to suggest that the Government, in the event of nationalisation, should not only pay full nominal value for this “watered” stock, but that it should buy up the “something over 40 per cent.’’ of “closed down’’-and apparently worthless-mines on the same basis? But perhaps he knows what he is talking about after all. Some of the closed down mines may be as useful and as valuable to the Chamber of Mines as any of those that are paying dividends. Perhaps they are “not dead but sleeping.” It is fortunate, by the way, that the Editor of the “Cape Times” has a better argumentthan the above against the stupid proposal of the Labour Party to “nationaIise” the mines. It is this: . . . “the Labour Party’s attitude towards the treatment of employees on the nationalised railways scarcely seems to warrant the belief that it would be perfectly content with the condition of the working miner if only the mines were nationalised.” Even the Editor of the “Cape Times” can be logical and weakly sarcastic occasionally ! Of one thing we may be certain, however : Whether the amount actually invested in the Rand Gold Mines be 30 millions sterling or 300 millions, only a very small proportion of the amount paid out annually in dividends finds its way into the pockets of the ordinary investor. The real meaning of the passages I have quoted from the “Cape Times’ ” article is that those who invest their money in gold mining stock are gamblers-without, however, the usual sporting chance of the common gamblerwhile those who invest it in Government stock are capitalists content with a modest but safe return; and that it would he neither prudent nor honourable for a Government to conduct a lottery, not to mention an open swindle. I have said that the only advantage which the people of South Africa can possibly derive from the gold mines is the wages, etc., received in exchange for the labour and other services rendered, either directly or indirectly, in the production of gold. But according to the article in the “Cape Times” from which I have just quoted, the Government derives an advantage of another kind : “One way or another,” it says, “either from direct taxation or profits, or from indirect revenue through the customs and the railways, the Union Government gets something like 12 millions sterling out of the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. . .” If that passage were not either a stupid blunder or a silly imposture it would, taken with the other passages I have quoted, amount to this: that the Union Government has entered into a partnership with the Chamber of Mines for the double purpose of cheating the European investor out of his money, and squeezing the last farthing out of the workers, white and black, engaged on the mines. The European investor is cheated by allowing him only 2 per cent. on a very risky investment, while the Government walks off with 33 1-3 per cent. of the total product of the industry. The workers are still worse off; the policy of the Chamber of Mines is to reduce wages to a minimum, and that of the Government is to squeeze as much as possible out of that minimum through the But the impudence of the “Cape Times” is customs. even worse than either the trickery of the Chamber of Mines or the tyranny of the Government. If the Chamber of Mines pays the white miner 16s. 8d. for creating 30s. worth of gold, and ruining his health in the process, and the Government forces him to pay 10s. of it in taxes, it is called an “indirect” tax on the industry. And if the miner got drunk and was fined I suppose it would be called an indirect fine on the industry ! But let us analyse further the statement of the “Cape Times.” We have seen that the total amount of gold produced annually in the Rand area is worth. Of this the shareholders are supposed to get in dividends, and the Government in taxes. That leaves to provide material and wages. The former includes not only the coal, oil, wood, machinery, etc. for the mines, but also the food, clothing, furniture, motor-cars and what not, used and consumed not only by those directly employed in the mines but by the numerous storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, tinkers, tailors, fiddlers, strollers, etc. indirectly provided for. The latter includes not only directors’ fees, managers’ and engineers’ salaries, white and black miners’ wages, but also the fees and perquisites of the political hangers-on, and the storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, etc. aforesaid. Is the “Cape Times’’ prepared to accept this distribution of the revenue derived from the gold mining industry? Mr. “Willie” Rockey, on the other hand, the memberforLanglaagte-who is in Parliament, and in the Unionist Party because he attends church regularly, is a professed teetotaller, and has the peculiar faculty of being able to raise a laugh at awkward moments, not by his wit, however-claimed, during the debate on the Estimates, already referred to, that the mining industry spends a year in wages and for the purchase of goods. In reference to certain reflections indulged in by Mr. Madeley and other Labour members regarding the methods of the mining magnates, Mr. Rockey observed, according to the “Gallery and Lobby” Reporter of the “Cape Argus”: It’s the luck of the game; some of us know too much about it ; had we succeeded we should have been millionaires; as we failed we are only members of Parliament.” “A roar of laughter, loud and long,” adds the Reporter, “followed this climax, and with this Mr. Rockey resumed his seat.” A statement of that kind coming from anyone but a good Christian or a Labour representative would have been considered pretty serious, but from Mr. Rockey, a pillar of the Church and a member of the party accused of these malpractices, it was considered a good joke. He probably winked at the Government benches-unseen by the Labour members--as he made it; and Mr. Rockey’s wink is more amusing than that of an ostrich, and as reassuring as that of a cardinal. However, even Mr. Rockey’s figures are more reliable than those of the “Cape Times.” Allowing for some exaggeration, we may take it that the paid out in wages and the spent on goods-less the amount squeezed out in taxes by theGovernment-represents the gross benefits which the people of South Africa derive, either directly or indirectly, from the gold mines. But since the vast bulk of the goods is imported from abroad the net benefits consist of the wages and profits to be derived from the handling and s& of them. And even the thirteen millions sterling spent in wages is not such a huge sum when it is remembered that the industry employs about 22,000 whites and 180,000 colouredpeople-nativesin all. This works out at no more than an average of each per annum for those directly employed, not to say anything of the thousands indirectly maintained by the industry. Is it any wonder, after all, even from the point of view of the orthodox political economist, that there is more poverty, and more vice that springs directly from poverty, in and around Johannesburg than in any other city or town, in proportion to its size, in the world-with the exception of Kimberley, perhaps, which, in addition to its other natural advantages, possesses the richest diamond mines that the world has ever known? Is it any wonder that Lady Florence Phillips and other pious matrons should be compelled to forgo many of their legitimate amusements in order to teach the wives and daughters of the poor how to lead honest, pure and healthy lives on an income of nothing? And yet in spite of it all there are people who are perfectly satisfied. Mr. E. A. Wallers, for instance, says that the position is “extremely satisfactory,” Of course there are other industries in the Witwatersrand area. There is a brewery and innumerable hotels and canteens; there are butchers, bakers, tinkers, tailors, etc. in galore, but the only fund available for their maintenance is, according to the Chamber of Mines, the Press and the political economists, the few millions sterlingsay 25 at the very most-derived from the gold mining industry. Will Mr. J. A. Hobson or some other economist explain how it is that over a million persons manage to subsist on a year---or less than each? For they do subsist after a fashion-many of them better than is good for them-and even those who are rendered superfluous by improvements in machinery and general “speeding up,” hang on to the industry as parasites of one kind or another. The only person who has explained it up to the present, as far as I am aware, is Mr. J. M. Nield, the author of the Minority Report of the Railway Commission; and he not only explains how they manage to subsist after their present fashion, but how they could fully supply every reasonable want without resorting either to vice or crime-as the majority are now forced to do-and without injuring the shareholders or interfering with the directors or their hangers-on-except by finding honest work for them. And that this would not be such a difficult task will be realised when it is remembered that Johannesburg possesses every advantage which the most prosperous inland city or town anywhere could possibly possess, plus the richest gold mining area, and the most prosperous gold mining industry in the world. Mr. Nield’s plan, however, would probably interfere, to some extent, with the interesting and ingenious operations of the Stock Exchange, and would establish principles diametrically opposed to all known theories of the political economists. Will the Economists further explain how it was that when mining plant and other requisites, including foodstuffs, etc., had to be transported from the coast in ox-wagons; and when the processes of extracting the ore from the earth and the gold from the ore were primitive and costly, the people were far better and the shareholders no worse off than they are now? Mr. Nield also explains this, as we shall see. Before going further, however, let us see what becomes of the squeezed out of the industry by the Union Government. Part of it, which the “Cape Times” calls an “indirect” tax-how much would be difficult to say-goes to the Railway Administration for transport services. The remainder helps to provide fat salaries and emoluments for a Governor-General and Staff, Cabinet Ministers and their numerous satellites, Senators and M.L.A.’s, Judges and Magistrates-to keep the people in awe; a Defence Force to keep an imaginary enemy in awe; Universities and Colleges for the benefit of the rich; experimental farms and an army of Stock, Scab, and Fence Inspectors for the benefit of the lazy; police to protect the property of the rich against the hungry poor; detectives, spies, prisons, reformatories, and one or two insane and leper asylums-and these only because the inmates have a more dangerous kind of madness and a more A contagious form of disease than those outside. little is handed over, now and then, to the local authorities to help to provide very small salaries for sweated elementary school teachers, and to build and maintain a very inadequate number of very bad schools for the children of the poor. That is all. His Excellency the Governor-General, who appears to have come out here with the settled conviction that the people of South Africa-the male portion, at any rate-are whiskered children ; and who addresses them in a sort of baby-talk-the sort adopted by European officials in their POW-wows with natives-containing vague references to the great White Chief, the British Navy, the Union Jack-as if it were a kind of deityand what not ; and abounding in pastoral metaphors, keeps on assuring us that the gold mines will by and by assist us in developing our agricultural and other resources. He cannot see, poor man, that the gold mines are actually preventing the development of these other resources, partly by their very existence and partly through the policy which the Government is assisting the Chamber of Mines to pursue. How? It is obvious that no industry of any kind can be established and no resource developed unless a market can be found for its product. The farmers of South Africa would have no difficulty in producing plenty of foodstuffs, etc., if they could find a ready and profitable sale for them. Leather, boots, cloth and clothing of all kinds, furniture, etc. could easily be manufactured on the same terms. But there is admittedly and palpably no satisfactory market for any of these things. Why? Firstly, because the people are too few and too poor-through unemployment and low wages; and secondly and chiefly, because South Africa imports a sufficient quantity of commodities from abroad to more than meet the limited demand. Mr. Nield shows in his report, as will be seen later, how the first cause-the fewness and poverty of the people-can be remedied. The second cause-importation of commodities from abroad-can never be wholly removed. Why not? Because as long as South Africa or any other country continues to devote 60 per cent. of its energies to the production of a commodity for which it has no possible use, and which does not form raw material of any conceivable industry, it must either give that commodity away for nothing, or it must import approximately 60 per cent. of its requirements in exchange for the commodity it produces for the foreign market. Over 60 per cent. of the wealth produced in South Africa consists of gold and diamonds, for which the people of South Africa have clearly no use, and which is exported to other countries. If the people not engaged at present in the production of gold and diamonds attempted to produce the commodities required by those so engaged what would the latter have to give the former in exchange for them? Gold and diamonds? Rut the people of South Africa have use for only a limited quantity of gold and diamonds; and it would certainly be foolish and unprofitable to think of keeping all the gold and diamonds they produce. And if, as some seem to imagine, the people of South Africa could and should produce and manufacture all their requirements locally instead of importing them, what could they receive in exchange for the gold and diamonds for which they would have no use? The answer that rises instinctively to the lips of the “ average citizen”-steeped from his youth up either in the theories of political economists or the practices of the retail trader-is “money.” It is surely unnecessary to consider such a stupid notion. Nearly everybody newspaper people and politicians know that but all trade is an exchange of one commodity for another, money being merely the medium through which the exchange is effected; and that in the case of trade between one country and another this medium is never employed. Neither South Africa nor any other country could dispose of a single article to the people of another country except in exchange for some other article of equal, or approximately equal, value. But, says the practical politician of the State Socialist type, South Africa should at least produce sufficient of its own requirements to give honest employment to all its citizens. What if it is producing sufficient for that purpose already, if the work were properly distributed ? What if some of the people are working too hard and for too many hours out of the 24? This is a question that does not appear to have occurred to the political economists. Perhaps when they have found out all that will ever be known about the “ponometer” (see “Work and Wealth,” Chap. 5, page 66) they may be expected to turn their attention to it. Let us now proceed to the consideration of the present policy of the Chamber of Mines-which is, as I have said, to reduce the cost of producing gold to a minimum-and of the inevitable effects of that policy, and the part that is being played in it by the Union Government. There are three generally recognised methods of reducing the cost of producing any commodity, viz.: (I) Improvements in machinery and methods of production ; (2) Increases in the efficiency of the labourers engaged in it, in which may be included long hours-when they don’t interfere with efficiency-piece-work, and the employment of women and children; and (3) Reductions in wages. The first two methods are generally re- garded-except by a few cranky humanitarians--as not only legitimate but praiseworthy and socially beneficial ; and the only reason why the third method is frowned upon by humanitarians and economists alike is that it might impose hardships on the labourers-by leaving them hungry and “cold o’ nights”-and tend to reduce their general efficiency. But the Chamber of Mines has discovered a fourth method which should prove a peculiar puzzle both to the humanitarians and the economists, namely, the gradual substitution of black labour for white. It would be extremely difficult under ordinary circumstances-and apart from the advantages to Society of an increase in the gold supply of the Rand mines-to say whether or not this policy is to the best interests of the community. ‘There can be no doubt, on the one hand, that gold mining is a very dangerous and unhealthy-not to say deadly--employment, and many might be inclined to think‘ that it is better to sacrifice the lives of black men rather than white men. But we are faced, on the other hand, with this double difficulty : that the alternative for white men is unemployment and, therefore, starvation or crime, and that the black man can live just as well without working in the mines---if they were left alone-as by working in them, and that they don’t want to work in them. But in any case it will be admitted that the effect upon the community as a whole-apart from the interests of the labourers-of a reduction of working costs on the gold mines, would be exactly the same whatever might be the method employed in bringing it about. It will be as well, therefore, to consider the general effects of the policy before attempting to deal with the particular method of giving effect to it. I think it will be admitted that the general assumption on the question has hitherto been, and still is, that every increase in the amount of social wealth in the aggregate, and of any particular commodity or form of wealth, from whatever cause it arises, must be to the advantage of society. Mr. Nield has exhaustively examined this assumption in his Minority Report of the Railway Commission and has arrived at the conclusions which I have already attempted to explain, but which may be again briefly summarised as follows: That there is obviously some limit to the demand for commodities, and therefore to the beneficial effects of increases in their quantity, that under the present system of individual ownership of the forces and implements of production, and individual appropriation of the product for purposes of sale, the limit to the demand for commoditiesis not identical with, or determined or bounded by the consuming capacity of society-which must, however, have a limit also-but by its purchasing power. That the present labour supply of society is more than capable, owing to continued improvements in productive processes of satisfying even the demands arising from consuming capacity; that some of the labourers are, therefore, either temporarily or permanently unemployed ; and that this unemployment, by reducing the purchasing power of society, tends to further restrict the demand €or commodities. That, consequently, every increase in productive efficiencyunaccompanied by a corresponding increase in consuming capacity or purchasing power-must inevitably result in industrial stagnation and depression. If this theory, diametrically opposed as it is to the prevailing opinions of economists of every existing school of thought, is correct, it is clear that the remedy Mr. Nield proposes, namely, systematic reductions of hours of labour and increases in wages must be equally correct, and that a frank recognition of its correctness and its immediate application to industry would prove a solution of the industrial problem. That this is SO, in fact, will be fully demonstrated in our examination of the effects of the opposite policy pursued in the past, and contemplated in the future, by the Rand Chamber of Mines. Pretoria, May 15, 1915. Letters from Russia. By C. E. Bechhofer. THE bullying of non-combatant alien enemies is ladylike, but not universal. That they do possess some rights was shown at the beginning of the war, when Spain offered to look after German and Austrian interests in Russia to the best of her ability and to use her consulates for their subjects’ needs. With all her good wishes it was soon found necessary to transfer this work to the service of a Great Neutral Power. The only man in Tolka who had the linguistic qualifications for the work happened to be an Englishman, and he was chosen; for a month or so I assisted him. We received all sorts of alien enemies. The usual fine of for speaking German was apparently relaxed in our case, though we were very soon denounced to the police by a lady as spies. Every morning the first client was a man who sat on our stairs for two hours before the reception, ringing the bell. He had given up hi5 passport to the police at the beginning of the war, receiving a slip of paper that gave him permission to reside for three months in the town. As he was over forty-five years of age he would be allowed to return to Germany and he wanted a passport. We sent to headquarters at Odessa for him and offered to send it to him when it arrived. But every day he came to tell us of his latest persecutions by the police. In vain we told him his authorisation of residence had long since expired and that he was perfectly properly harassed. He insisted that we were to blame for keeping him waiting for the new passport. It came at last and, as he scrawled his signature upon it, ignorant, like all our other clients, that we were not neutrals, “Thank God,” he said, “now I can rejoin my regiment!” My chief and I consulted, if we should inform the police; we decided if the man was to be as big a nuisance to the Germans as he had been to us by all means let him go. Then there was a rich Russian business-man who wanted to become a naturalised citizen of the Great Power. Were you born there? we asked. No, said he. Have you spent many years there? No. Are you thinking of going there? Good heavens, no. Why do you want a naturalisation? Well, I thought it would be safer for my property; I offer you 6,000 roubles for a passport. Declined. We had also the advice of an Austrian admiral, caught at the outbreak touring, how to take the Dardanelles. Military operations, he told us, were absolutely necessary. The plans of the Turks were such that without an army we could not hope to force the passage. One day his wife was in the office on some business of documents,when the postman entered. “To-day is a day of rejoicing,” he said, “you should all go down on your bended knees and thank the Lord you have lived to see this day!-Peremishl has fallen!” The Austrian lady began to weep. “What’s the matter,” cried the postman,“to-day is a day of great good news, and you weep?” The lady, said we, is Austrian. The postman reflected. “Yes,” he said at last, “she is right. What is good news for us is bad for her. Perhaps she And ruminating he left us. has relatives there.” While the Black Hundred (which means simply the extreme nationalists) has decided, in the words of its jackal, the “Novoya Vremya,” that “there is no place any more in Russia for Germans and [of course] Jews,” the normal Russian has a humaner opinion. I once took the ferry across the Dnieper. Owing to the floods the usual landing-place was in mid-stream, but the ferry landed us there without alteration and stopped to see us walk the waters. I tried to climb over the stern of an anchored boat as a means of getting ashore. It was the sailor in charge of the ferry who picked me out of the water. When he had dried and ordered me, wrung out my clothes, brushed my hat and refused my tip, he asked me kindly if I were not a German. It did not occur to him, as it would to a reader of the “Evening News,” that if I were German, he was helping a cur, a baby-killer. No, he actually accepted me as I swam, and asked if I were not a German. To-day I bought some plants from a gardener. He asked me how I could know that such and such a tree was Indian. I explained. You are English, he cried, I thought you must be German. He did not expect me to be a wifebeater or a cut-throat, but simply the usual foreigner in Russia, who has always been a German. When the “Novoye Vremya” says Germans, it means all foreigners. To that type of mind, especially exemplified by rich Russian women and cultivated by them in their children, there are no such creatures as Allies, entitled to certain politenesses; to-day’s Ally may be tomorrow’s Enemy, so (feminine manners !) treat him as a foe sit once! Our queerest client was a Syrian Christian priest from somewhere in Persia, with his bloated twelve-yearold son. His tale was that when the Russians entered Persia they evacuated a piece of territory and dispatched the inhabitants into Russia. In the press he had been separated from his wife and daughter. Travelling night and day he had come to Tolka; would we restore him his wife. and daughter? Or, if we could not manage his wife, would we find his daughter? and would we have his son placed in some educational institution? And would we give him money for his The old man was quite prepared to take a journeys? last farewell of his son, and we managed to get the shifty-eyed young person into a college at Warsaw. Other philanthropists provided the father with money to search out his wife and daughter, the latter of whom, I fancy, was dear to him only for her possible matrimonial value. Every now and then we called on the Chief of Police for aid and advice, and the charming fat man showed us his postcards and revolvers and paid us pretty compliments. And I remember visiting all the police-stations of the town with an enthusiastic Little Russian patriot, who was looking for “her” people. When Russians came to get news of prisoners in Germany or to send letters and money to them, we advised them to write to the International Bureau at Berne, or to apply at the Spanish Consulate. When they decided upon the latter course, we gave them the very necessary supplementary advice that, in case they were dissatisfied with the Spanish Consulate’s methods, they should write directly to the King of Spain. In case !-my vice-consular (temporary) blood curdled when I compared the Spanish methods with ours. One day also, in conversation with a rich German prisoner, I discovered that a big London-Petrograd bank is remitting money to Germany through Stockholm. Slavonians, Scandinavians, Tartars, Poles, Mongols, Caucasians (whose name is legion) Ukrainians and the rest, but the Russian habit has been to absorb them into one great nation. In turn every subject nation has been deprived of its peculiar ambitions and redirected towards the common aims o€ Russia. Like Islam, Russia absorbs all its peoples into one society. The main bond is the language. Where Russian is spoken, there are Russians, be their fathers who they may. But where another tongue is spoken and Russian barely understood, there are the passive unabsorbed subjects of the empire. Contrast us with England, said the third officer, with whom I was chatting. I have travelled in your India and seen how there no such absorption has occurred. The present Eurasians are, almost without exception, descendants of low-class Europeans and outcaste native women. When the Portuguese captured Goa, they seized the women of the chief Mohamedans, baptised and married them. But the English have always separated themselves from the Indians; each race refuses to blend with the other. There is the dictum that no more than three generations of an English family can survive in the tropics, and the majority of Anglo-Indians marry in England. Russia is an empire of absorption; England, at its noblest, of federation. If India to itself did rest but true! cried I, touched on my pet subject. Lacking but the Kshattriyas, it might have established the English in their place and in that association have renewed the spirit of the old castes. Rut while everything was favourable For such a future of association, the Hindus commenced absorption among themselves. The old castes have drawn together; every day a barrier falls. The dream I had that the Brahmins would draw away and, as a caste, join with the English to govern India, was lost when I woke to find sub-castes of Brahmins more divided from one another than any of them from the lowest Sudra. From the maelstrom of that society the only ways out are a retirement into the rigid old systemToo late, said he,-or a general mixing. But the English will never mix with the future mixture and India will start life again either as a purely subject nation or as a pseudo-independent branmash of Aryan and Mussulman. Which, agreed the officer, will be converted in a lump to Christianity. We discussed contemporary politics. You know the tale of Witte’s life and death, he asked. Let me put it baldly. He aimed at becoming the first Dictator of Russia. He was friendly with all, from the Emperor, who would willingly have made over his power to him, 20 per cent., 20 per cent., to the social democrats, who were silly enough to think They’d sell their own mothers for 20 per cent. him a democrat. But he gained the complete confidenceof none; he was always suspect, hence his utter But I left Tolka for the Caucasus. The first part of fall. But only now have the documents come into the the journey lay through the Ukraine to Rostov-on-thegovernment’s hands that could convict him of treason. Don by the Sea of Azov. Most of the way I had three He is supposed to have poisoned himself at the officers for company, returning home on leave from the Emperor’s command, lest worse disgrace should befall Polish front. Two of them were passing the time in him. You noticed how mysterious and unnamed was drinking. As always happens in Russia, one told me his fatal disease, and how, contrary to all custom, the all his life history, how, nineteen years old, he had Court was not represented at his funeral. Not a hint eloped with a girl of eighteen, how he favoured early of this has appeared in the Press, but you know how marriages, how he felt in the trenches, how glad he tales, and true tales, travel in Russia. was to be travelling home. When, alter a couple of days, we reached Rostov, we went together to the Did you ever hear what Witte said of our reigning market, bought caviare pulled fresh for us from a huge family?-“My dear sir, what sort of people are they? sturgeon and hurried off to an hotel to eat it. None of Just talk to them; they have read nothing.” My friend the solid salt-preserved caviare you are so dainty with, left me at Rostov, with a last advice. When you pass hut new and soft and so delicious that my stomach through Tiflis, he said, do not visit Griboyedof’s tomb. prides in the memory to this day ! The hotel was Ask yourself if a man could really write ‘‘Woe From Tartar. Tartars are not yellow-skinned, hunchbacked Wit” (“Gore ot Uma”) without a single other line of Mongols, as many people would seem to suppose; I his verse ever having been seen or heard of. Imagine a should describe them as Europeans with high cheekbones.rich young ambassador, anxious to shine in society, and his needy secretary that wrote his dispatches for We are accustomed absurdly to exaggerate the him and in whose handwriting is the original of the Better not to visit the tomb ! question of race in Russia. True, there were the comedy. Wyndham’s Theatre. Mr. du Maurier’s only apparent purpose is to twinkle, twinkle. But if Mr. du Maurier and Miss Martindale are in By John Francis Hope. different to, or ignorant of, the great war, Mrs. Marion Craig Wentworth* sees in one incident of it an I AM beginning to wonder whether the stage will be opportunity adapting the feminist propaganda. of When the the only institution unaffected by this war. It is true women wanted votes, they declared a maternity strike that Mr. John Palmer roundly asserts that all “modern” “no votes, no babies,” was the cry uttered most vociferously literature passed away in its sleep on the night of by sterile spinsters. Exactly why Mrs. Wentworth August 4, 1914, and that the future is pregnant with the possibilities of a new literature. It is true that objects to the war, is not clear; all that this play reveals is that women bear children and that some men Mr. J. T. Grein, attempting to entertain our wounded are killed in war. Apparently Mrs. Wentworth objects soldiers, is forced to go back to the 1890 decade for comedy ; but the stage remains unregenerate. We may to men being killed, but she does not, as Socrates did, think that women ought to go to war; she wants to prophesy and prophesy, but we record only our faith, make war impossible. If there were no men in not our observation; there are no signs of the renaissance Germany, the Kaiser would have no soldiers for his army; on the stage. Mr. Francis Coutts produces ‘‘Enterprising Helen,” a comedy that would never have, so she insists that women should not bear children been comic, and now seems merely futile; Mr. Gerald withouta promise from the Kaiser that there shall be no du Maurier plays in “Gamblers All” as though there more war. The Kaiser, I doubt not, would give the were not, and never would be, a war in Flanders. I am promise, if sufficient pressure were brought to bear sure that our French Allies misinterpret the fact that upon him; but all that the play shows is that the Kaiser our theatres are still open when they suppose that we will not be influenced. The women of the village are amusing ourselves. We are not; “Gamblers All” become war brides, although, as Hedwig continues her is a national humiliation, and with whatever motive we propaganda, the number declines; but, at last, she go, the effect is only a fit of bad conscience. The fact comes into conflict with the authorities, and would be that it has been played for a few weeks is easily shot for treason but for the fact that she is pregnant. explained. The Waller public and the du Maurier public However, she is arrested, and shoots herself; and her are numerous enough to fill a theatre €or some time; message to the Emperor is never sent. and curiosity to see a favourite actor in a new part It is clear that Mrs. Wentworth is no prophet of the suffices to explain the apparent success of this renaissance. She belongs to the Tractarians of the production. To the worshippers of actors, the play is a stage, to those who put forward arguments instead thing of nothing; and a critic need not lack company of characters, and imagine that defeat in debate is a in this case. tragic catastrophe. Apart from questions of drama, which do not really arise in this connection, the For the play itself is pre-historic. How long ago was perversity of the idea condemns it to failure. If the war it that we talked of the eleventh commandment, “Thou will do anything at all, it will bring- us back to the shalt not be found out”? It does duty as the theme of realisation of natural forces, to a reliance on natural “Gamblers All.” How long ago was it that the Press instincts and functions ; and Mrs. Wentworth, by bringing settled the question : “What is Gambling” ? when Mr. her feminist propaganda to a futile end, has tacitly Cadbury refused to publish betting news in his papers, admitted it. Rut what a failure either of argument but gave space to the quotations of the Stock or art, to reach a conclusion or produce an effect Exchange? The question is argued again in “Gamblers exactly the opposite to what was intended ! There is All,” with the husband maintaining that Stock no doubt that Mrs. Wentworth thinks that Hedwig Exchange business is “legitimate speculation,” while cards was a heroine, that she had a nobler conception of love and betting are only forms of gambling. So we have a and of motherhood than had the other women. Yet she husband who speculates legitimately, and, at least, tells is the one who degrades the very function that she no lies about it ; and a wife who gambles illegitimately, is performing, who, because the Kaiser enjoins and pretends that she is going to a concert when she matrimonyfor racial reasons, can lower the prestige of motherhood by calling women “breeding-machines.” is really going to a gambling hell. In debt to the extent In the grip of one of the most powerful of natural of three hundred pounds, she tries to wheedle the money forces, she yet tries to bargain; as though the fact of out of her husband with the plea that it is for purposes motherhood established a property right in men, and a of charity; she dare not avow the real nature of her power of control of the destiny of nations. With a debts, because he would never forgive her for her mind that does not reach beyond the four walls of her gambling. The play proceeds as such plays always home, she yet presumes to forecast the future, and, in proceed; she is found out, and her husband finds it the name of Life, to lay an embargo on the actions of the unborn. Her nobler conception of motherhood is impossible to believe her when she professes her repentance. a claim of mortmain; her pacifism is an assertion of The usual lover is introduced (in this case a proprietary right, and her only service to life is suicide. moneylender), who pays her debts and invites her to It is not thus that drama will be re-created. These run away with him. A touch of crime is provided for galvanised ideas are not even true to the facts of Mr. Gerald du Maurier, who in this case forges the feminism to-day. With women on all sides offering their services to the nation, the idea of chaffering in name of the moneylender to pay the debts of the heroine ; the market-place for the price of every feminine activity and the play ends in a welter of reconciliation, the has become old-fashioned, and it always was disrepuhusband forgiving the wife, the lover forgiving the wife table. The fear now is not that women will not get for deceiving him and her brother for forging his name, their price, but that their services will not be accepted; the brother forgiving the lover for having cherished and it is being learned by us all that the service of the immoral hopes concerning his sister, the wife’s stepState is not, as Hedwig thought, dishonourable to the daughter forgiving everybody and making love to the individual. brother. I think that is all. Wherever the * War Brides.’’ By Marion Craig Wentworth. renaissance may begin, I do not think that it will be at (Heinemann. IS. 6d. net.) Drama. Readers and Writers. Is a “Monograph on Mona Lisa” (Grevel and Co., 5s. net) Mr. John R. Eyre contends that what is known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa is the original of which the well-known portrait in the Louvre is only a copy. He argues very minutely in favour of his contention from contemporary evidence and from recent research. He has the negative support of Browning, who referred to “that Jaconda, whereof a copy contents the Louvre,” and the positive support of Mr. P. G. Konody. For what it is worth, he has my support as well-but not upon historical or documentary grounds, but on a comparison the two pictures. The Louvre Jaconda owes, of I am sure, a great deal more of its reputation to literature than to the art of portrait painting. Its Mona Lisa is in my judgment unworthy the character of Da Vinci and, in fact, utterly alien to it. She is a coquette in the grand style vulgar, such as no doubt appeals to the critics who admire the portrait; but not, oh not, in the grand style simple of which Da Vinci was a master. The Isleworth portrait, on the other hand (it is now, by the way, in Boston, U.S.A.) is in the simple style of greatness. Mona Lisa is here a coquette, that is to say, a woman ; but after the manner of Eve before the Fall. I am quite indifferent whether Da Vinci or a modern John Brown painted it; or whether its price is likely to be enhanced by Mr. Eyre’s Monograph. It is better than the portrait in the Louvre. *** In a good introduction to an admirable selection from the “Imaginary Dialogues” of Landor (Oxford Press, IS.) Mr. E. de Selincourt affirms that “as a writer of prose none surpassed Landor . . . who gave currency to the ripest wisdom and the noblest reflections.” Wordsworth, Southey, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning and Swinburne were all, he reminds us, impressed by Landor;and he might have added many more. Swinburne compared him with Simonides, Austen Dobson called his prose Greek honey, Carlyle said he was an unsubduable old Roman, W. C. Bennett referred to him as “the old man eloquent” [Isocrates], Stuart Blackie said he was the most finished master of style that ever used the English tongue, and Mr. BirreII said he “took pains to he splendid.” After this procession of whirlwind and fire, my still small voice will scarcely be heard; yet I must utter my judgment, which is that ail these writers have exaggerated the greatness of Landor. Not once but on at least a score of occasions, led by some such remark as I have quoted, I have tried to read Landorrend him,. you understand-for, of course, I have run through his dialogues several times-but at every trial I have found him not worth the effort. He has many virtues, I agree; his sentences, his choice of words, his elevation of sentiment are beyond reproach; but there is nevertheless no virtue in him. And the reason, I think, is that he had no prophetic fire. One single confession reveals this as no analysis could: he hated Plato and regarded him as “a conceited and self-seeking sophist.” But let me set against him Coleridge’s words : “It might very well be thought serious trifling to tell my readers that the greatest men had ever a high esteem for Plato; whose writings are the touchstone of a hasty and shallow mind.” Landor had not, perhaps, a hasty mind, but shallow I submit it was. Whence then came the tributes so freely showered upon him? In an age just about to tumble into the popular period he held himself aloof, and retired, as we know, to an ivory tower in Italy to write to please himself. By contrastwith the sweating public educators of his day, who were wrestling with wild ignorance in the market-place, Landor seemed to them to be an austere god living upon ambrosia in the Isles of the Blest. But it was all an illusion. As far off as he appeared from the world of men he was, in fact also, from the world of reality. No one has ever been warmed or inspired, fed or clothed by him. Far from having given currency to any ripe wisdom I can recall no phrase from his prose nor any thought associated with his name. He wrote a few immortal poems-two and a stanza-and these perhaps will keep his prose in print. But alive it never will be, for it never was. *** I have Mr. Pickthall’s permission to reproduce the following letter sent to his literary agent by the editor of a popular London, not American, magazine. The contempt implied €or the intelligence of the average reader will be observed peeping through the rag-time style of the editor himself. Which is more to be pitied it would be hard to say. I would toss up for my contribution. I am afraid Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall’s article-in its present form-does not carry out my suggestion. He has written a very charming essay on an average respectable Turk living in Constantinople during the present war. That is hardly what I want for a talking-point article. These talking-point articles have got to have a good deal of “punch” in them. I won’t say they have to be sensational, but they have got to carry in them soemthing which will enable us to bill the feature. The fact that Mr. Pickthall knows Turkey and writes exceedingly well, and tells us that the respectable Turk is a friend of England and not a friend of Germany, has no element whatsoever in it that would lead to the sale of a single copy of this paper. What I thought was that he, with his knowledge, would write us something poignant about the Dardanelles, something, say, with a heading like this: “The Dardanelles Forts Must Fall,” giving us good reasons for that assertion. The big public to-day have to be tempted to read things, and I assure you it isn’t easy to hold a quarter of a million circulation. In order to tempt them one must give them a big dollop of raw spirit, as it were. Lots can be said on Turkey and the Dardanelles, and Mr. Pickthall. with his knowledge and his sympathies, can say it, but this particular article does not get home, and I would very much prefer it if you would allow me to return the MS. to you, for it is an article that would appeal to the sixpenny reviews, I feel sure, such as “The Outlook,” and, instead, get Mr. Pickthall to do us another article on popular lines. In which case, to save him trouble, it would be an advantage for me to know just the gist of what he proposes to take for his subject. I could tell him right off yes or no. *** Mr. Tudor Jones’ synopsis of Eucken’s philosophy in Messrs. Constable’s series (Philosophies : Ancient and Modern, 1s. each) is very well done; but despite the labour of the original and the lucidity of his disciple, the result is as little convincing as the cause. Undoubtedly a synthesis was needed of the conflicting theories of Naturalism and Intellectualism ; but philosophicallyit was scarcely to be sought, much less discovered, in mysticism. Eucken, however, not only founded his philosophy on something no more substantial than hope, he harked back to the dubious example of the Biblical Jesus. Thus he belongs rather to the tradition of Christian mysticism than to the tradition of philosophy. I am not saying, of course, that for this reason he is not worth reading. Anything that inspires to the practice of mysticism is all to the good, since it is certain in my opinion that with the faculties we already possess, Man has come to the end of his tether. Progress must continue, if at all, horizontally instead of perpendicularly, until a new faculty is developed to apprehend the world in a new way. On the other hand, such practice is not what is conveyed by the idea of philosophy ; and we naturally somewhat resent the intrusion of the will, even good will, into speculations regarding the truth of things. This alloy of parti pris is, however, characteristic of much German, even more than English, thought ; and Eucken is indubitably German. *** In “Mithraism,” a volume in another of Messrs. Constable’sseries (Religions : Ancient and Modern, 1S.), Mr. W. J. Phythian-Adams attempts an account of the history and doctrines of the “pagan” faith that, alone among them all, so nearly met the challenge of Christianity. Julian the Apostate was a Mithraist and fought hard to restore the rites even in the first flush of the Christian triumph. The Church, however, having once suppressed the scattered groups of the cult, took the usual official precautions to destroy their evidences. In every chapter of Mr. Phythian-Adams’ learned little work you may read to the effect that his conclusions are conjectural. Conjectural, indeed, they are, and, except for the purpose of arousing wonder, useless. Not only is the symbolic language itself in fragments; but each fragment requires a key we no longer possess. To read’ the few records would necessitate a knowledge of astrology, the symbolism of form and gesture, the “signs” of natural objects, and a score of other "occult" sciences. We have, to our shame, none of them. The simple Galilean has indeed conquered. R. H. C. Views and Reviews. What’s in a Name? THERE are times when I know not whether to laugh or cry at the vagaries of pacifists. I hope that they write in good faith; indeed, the absurd simplicity of their proposals suggests that they do, for ulterior motives demand intelligent concealment ; but one proposalsucceeds another, each more futile than the last, until one feels convinced that they are the people of whom Emerson said that “their two and two are not quite four. They are wrong not in one particular, but in all particulars; and we know not where to begin to set them right.” Their view of the world and of human nature has its charm, no doubt, but it lacks reality; “men are not gods, but properly are brutes,” said Browning’s Bishop Blougram with a necessary over-emphasis of certain attributes of mankind, and the propaganda of Pacifism tacitly admits this opinion by its postulation of an hypothesis. “If men did not want to fight, war would cease,” they assume and sometimes assert. No doubt; but the assumption does not bring the permanent peace they desire within the bounds of possibility. So long as they confined themselves to the sphere of prophecy, no one would trouble to confute them; indeed, the only way to answer a prophet is to prophesy the opposite with equal vigour, a procedure that commendsitself neither to courtesy nor to common sense. Rut when they attempt to support their prophecies by evidence, and lay impious hands upon stores of knowledge, the sake of human sanity we must attempt to for prevent their falsification of fact and meaning. Here is Mr. Kehler,* for example, claiming that his peace plan proposes to accomplish his purpose “by the utilisation of known principles in psychology. ” I know of nothing in psychology that suggests that the nature of things can be altered by a change of name. Mr. Kehler asserts (for I cannot dignify his contention by calling it argument)that if we call our War Department the Peace Department, the ideal of peace will become or will tend to become paramount, and the activities of man will instinctively turn to the realisation of the only ideal pIaced prominently before his notice. He relies upon what he calls “a law of the association of ideas by which men, and therefore institutions, tend to function according to the names or titles by which they are called, and according to the traditions which attach to those names or titles.” But this assumption begs the whole question. Ideas do become associated, we all how; but the complexes that result are not remarkable for logical consistency, nor are they at all invariable. Rob words of a precise connotation, and they will arouse most incongruous images in the mind; indeed, what we call hypocrisy is often due to the fact that people do not attach the same meaning to the same word. When the facts speak one language, and the words another, it is well to fix precise meanings to the words. To the person who had suffered * “An Open Letter to the Nation with Regard to a Peace Plan.” by James Howard Kehler. (Kennerly. New York.) ejection, the “dissembling of love” did not adequately describe the kicking downstairs; and I feel sure that the Polish revolutionists did not agree with the General who reported that “peace reigned in Warsaw.” As with Constance in ‘‘King John,” peace was to them a war ; and the absurdity of Mr. Kehler’s suggestion may be demonstrated by showing that he has been forestalled by the armament makers, of all people in the world. At the annual general meeting of Armstrong, Whitworth Co., held on April 18, 1914, it was stated on and behalf of the management that “if the shareholders wanted to be re-assured, they should look upon the firm as equipping the police of the world. The ultimate appeal for all order was force, and a great armament firm furnished the means for the suppression of disorder. That was really how they should be regarded.’’ That apparently is how Mr. Kehler would regard them. The connotations of the idea of peace are various, and it is of no avail to call a soldier a peace-maker, or an armament firm the servants of peace. They do not change their nature with their name. To make “war upon war” is still to make war; high explosive and shrapnel behave after their kind even if we do regard their effects as a form of peaceful persuasion. “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”; and war would be stripped of none of its terrors however often it was called peace. For the activity is the reality, not the name by which we describe it ; revolutions are made neither by rosewater nor by nomenclature. Mr. Kehler is, of course, playing with the idea of suggestion. We says: “The power of suggestion is too well known to require comment here. Schoolboys know that the public can be definitely and effectively psychologised for an idea by giving the idea a name and giving the name publicity. The Army and the Government of our country can be turned into constructive and positive, instead of negative, agents for peace if the nation will revise the name of one of its institutions to accord with the present functions of the institution.” Mr. Kehler was, I think, ill-advised to rely upon schoolboys as his authorities in this matter; for the power of suggestion is by no means so unlimited as their obiter dictum suggests. For example, America has called itself a democracy, but it has not become 0ne; it may regard itself as a nation of peacemakers, but its history records one of the bloodiest wars of the world, and the Monroe Doctrine suggests that the American people would not regard an invasion as a peaceful settlement. Suggestion is a potent means of self-deception, and may intensify the characteristics to which it is applied; but self-deception is only an attempt to evade judgment, and in this case resembles the habit ascribed by Plutarch to the Athenians, “of softening the badness of a thing by ingeniously giving it some pretty and innocent appellation, calling harlots, for example, mistresses, tributes customs, a garrison a guard, and the jail the chamber.” The proper name of the process is not suggestion, but euphemism. The fact is, of course, that man is not the simple creature that he likes to think he is. His motives are seldom clearly perceived, and still less often are they avowed; and particularly is this. the case with war. A striking example may be found in Thucydides; he says that the real cause of the Peloponnesian War “I considerto be the one which was most formally kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm that this caused at Lacedaemon, made war inevitable. Still, it is well to give the grounds alleged by either side”; and he proceeds to state the speeches of the ambassadors. What Thucydides attributes to craft may more frequently be attributed to unconsciousness ; public opinion establishes conventions, but it does not act upon motives; it only assists in the repression from consciousness of the real nature of motives. At the beginning of this war men whose whole training had been in the arts of peace, who ignored politics and thought themselves superior to what Miss Jane Harrison calls the “herd-instinct” of patriotism, suffered a psychological revolution, found themselves in the throes of passions that they could neither explain nor understand. Rut they did not describe them as “pacific” feelings; they joined the Army; and if Mr. Kehler’s suggestion were adopted, his whole plan would crumble at the first touch of reality, and those whom he had deluded would discover that there are times when, if Peace with Honour is desired, it can only be obtained by War. A. E. R. REVIEWS Lena Hale. By C. M. Theobald. (George Allen and Unwin. 6s.) Lena Hale is a German-Jewess who began her sexual career with a “betrayal’‘ and a marriage that turned out badly. After that she had an affair with a doctor that disgusted her, was enraged with herself for ’Then a journalist fell in love "having cheapened herself.” with her, but she did not love him, and when she discovered that a friend of hers was thinking of suicide because the journalist no longer loved her, she broke off all relations with the journalist,, and thus forced him into marriage with her friend. Then came the clean, athletic boy, who broke off his engagement for her “She chid herself, called herself a school-girl, sake. hut to no purpose” ; she loved him, but refused to wreck his life by a scandal, for she was still married. Then Boris Ravendale came from America; and after a little while, “she chid herself, laughed at herself for a schoolgirl, but she looked just as eagerly for Boris’ letters.” By this time, she had become a novelist, and denied the universality of the maternal instinct; but Boris was so backward in responding to her amorous advances that she nearly accepted the invitation of another novelist to live with him. Boris at last returned, proposed, allowed her husband to divorce her, and then married her; and the book ends with : ‘‘Your son, Boris. Your son-and fulfilled--my destiny.” mine. You see-I’ve O’Corra, M.F.H. By Miriam Alexander. (Melrose. 6s.) This is the story of an heiress who, on the strength of six lessons in a riding school, goes to Ireland, buys horses, hunts, and keeps up a pack of fox hounds. Whenever she drives, whether it be a horse or a motorcar, she smashes into something ; and whenever she would ride to hounds, the horses take the bit between their teeth and gallop miles in the opposite direction, and throw her violently into a ditch. Yet she is never hurt, is not even drowned when she goes to a steeplechase in a leaky old boat, after she had smashed up the car! nor, heiress as she is, does she win the ladies’ race, although she was one of the three fools who put their horses at the mill-race, and missed the jump. But one thing she does do. Kerry Kinnane is very poor, and very proud; and when she begins to notice that he is a man, she cannot understand why he does not make love to her. §he is “put wide” to the situation by an Irish girl, who tells her that if she does not want Kerry to go to Australia for ever, she must propose to him. She does so, appropriately, in the Kennels, and he accepts her in the same place; so the Kylecorra hounds will. be kept up. Let us hope that Kerry will buy her some better cattle, and teach her how to ride. Miss Roll of Honour. By Evelyne Close. (Melrose. 6s.) This is a war story, the “facts” of which seem to be taken from the “Daily Express,” while the fiction is invented by the author. The daughter of a parson is engaged to be married to a captain; and, when his regiment is mobilised, he marries her and leaves her at the church door. He is wounded in the head, with the remarkable result that all his love for his wife leaves him. When he returns home convalescent, she recognises this; and refuses to consummate the marriage. She is told that an operation might restore his love, which both of them really desire; but as it The would delay his return to the front for some weeks, she votes against it. Thus she sacrifices not only her husband (which was much) but hi5 love (which was more) to her country, Later she received a letter telling her that he had had another bang on the head; which had miraculously restored his love for her; and the next news was that he was dead. So when she received his sword, she went down to the garden gate and drew it as some troops marched by to the tune of “Tipperary.” He had made his will in her favour before he left, and it would not be contested by his people on the ground that the marriage had never been consummated, because they did not know that; and, if they had, they had become so fond of her that they would never have thought of contesting his devise of property. The rest of the story rakes in the reported atrocities in Belgium, and their effect upon recruiting in a country village. The Path of Life. By Stijn Streuvels. Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. (George Allen and Unwin. 5s. net.) We do not share the enthusiasm of the translator for this volume of sketches. Stijn Streuvels may be the “most distinguished Low-Dutch author of our time,” although it is only six years since Israel Querido was translated with the assurance that he was the most distinguished Dutch man of letters. Certainly, Streuvels’ talent, as revealed in this volume, does not justify a European reputation; and we doubt whether we should have heard of him but for the facts that he has been a baker and has lived in the south-east corner of Flanders. We must admit that our own tramppoets and bathchairmen-autobiographers and navvynovelists have prejudiced us against writers whose lowly origin is emphasised presumably to recommend them to our attention. We are never asked to remember that Sophocles was a soldier, nor are Shakespeare’s plays recommended to us as the work of a poacher; and Streuvels is either a member of the republic of letters or he is not. We think that he is, although of the lowly grade of writers in dialect, a fact on which Mr. de Mattos insists but does not reproduce. We might as well read an Anglicised version of Burns as study these sketches for dialect. The very first sentence, for example, is : “I was a devil of a scapegrace in my time,” which seems to us remarkable neither for truth, wit, nor beauty. However, here they are, realistic little sketches of children being thrashed by their parents and locked up in lofts until they apologise; of girls being confirmed and torn from mystical contemplation of their souls to perform field-work for a man whose intentions are dishonourable; of poverty, accident, death; of a courting between a middle-aged, pious lacemaker and a somewhat profane blacksmith which ended in an attempted rape; of the disappointment of a boy whose mother could not buy him a pipe she had promised because she had failed to get work, all of them written in a most prosaic detail. For instance, a description of a sunset : “It was light; the evening was falling slowly, slowly, as though the daylight would never end. In the west the sky was hung with white and gold tapestry against an orange background. On the other side, the moon, very wan still, floated in the pale blue all around it. Beside the bluey trees long purple stripes of shadow now lay, with fallen clusters of branches, on the plain. You could hardly tell if day or night were at hand.” We agree, although we do not recognise “bluey” even as a dialect word. M. Streuvels’ talent does not seem to us to deserve more immortality than is conferred by publication in the monthly magazines. His Father’s Wife. By J. E. Patterson. (George Allen and Unwin. 6s.) Without going so far in appreciation as the American reviewer who described this story as “a Sophoclean subject handled in a masterly manner,” we may accord it a welcome. The reviewer’s reference to Sophocles is misleading and superficial. Mr. Patterson’s story certainly deals with love within a forbidden degree of affinity; but, like most modern men, he recognises that no peculiar sanctity attaches to a table of affinity, and as consanguinity does not exist between a man and his stepmother, only a facetious horror at their union could be expressed. The difficulty is simply a legal difficulty, not a natural or spiritual one; and Mr. Patterson does not attempt the Sophoclean expression of horror, nor does his hero fall into lamentation as did Tom Jones when he thought that he had committed incest. When a law is oppressive, human nature evades it; and Mr. Patterson deals truly with life when he makes his hero, after the death of his father, depart to another land where the affinity would be unknown, and live legally and happily ever afterward with the woman who, but for his tardiness and diffidence, might have been his instead of his father’s wife. But the chief interest of the book will be found not in its subject, but in the characters that are depicted in the story. Roger Rugwood and his father, Aaron, are well contrasted; and the natural diffidence of the one, and the masterliness of the other, would have brought them into mortal conflict even if their relations had not been complicated by the love of woman. Mr. Patterson describes well the growing hostility of the inhabitants of the island towards Aaron, whose success isolated his friends and incensed his enemies. The quarrel with Wallasca, no less than the reconciliation is well done; and Mr. Patterson certainly deals in a masterly manner with the voyage and shipwreck of Roger Rugwood. We find too obvious a reminiscence of Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking of Barbara Rugwood, without the justification of the “damned spot” ; but Barbara’s ride across the sands, and Aaron’s last sacrifice, compensate €or a slip that invites critical memories. We have only one complaint to make : Mr. Patterson, particularly in the sobriety and truthfulness of his handling of life, reminds us of Fielding, but with this omission, that he does not provide those illuminating comments on life that are the surest sign that the novelist is a master of his art. Mr. Patterson tells the story as though it were the story of Aaron, Roger, and Barbara Rugwood; but it is really Mr. Patterson’s story, and we do not want him to be as invisible as the stagemanager of a play. Fiction is not action, nor mere reporting of actions; hut personal observation of and comment on the problems of life. We hope to hear from Mr. Patterson in his next novel. The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances. By Christian Gauss. (Heinemann. 6s. net.) It has become customary to present the Kaiser as everything undesirable, from an anachronism to Antichrist; and Mr. Gauss has painted in the usual features rather more strongly by this selection of the speeches of the German Emperor. The speeches of must monarchs are not worth reading, although we all listen to them courteously and applaud them dutifully (shall we ever forget that our own King once said, “Wake up, England”?); but the German Emperor is distinguished from other royal speech-makers hy the fact that he nearly always said something remarkable. It is this characteristic quality that enables compilers to turn back to his speeches and to make selections proving his “amazing egotism, ” his “megalomania,” and all the rest of the qualities that have made him the laughing-stock of Europe. Mr. Gauss does not seem to laugh quite so consumedly as one might have expected, although a man does not cease to be ridiculous when doing the things which were ridiculous when he said them; Mr. Gauss does not seem able to see the joke, and imagines that a ridiculous popinjay has suddenly become a villain. We think that Mr. Gauss overestimates the importance of the Kaiser by regarding him as the creator instead of the mouthpiece of the German psychology; but as he has decorated his book with four nice photographs of the Imperial imbecile (or whatever is his current description), we may commend his diligence even while we think it to be misapplied. If we were to apply to everyone the test proposed by Mr. Gauss, “out of his own mouth let him be judged,” some of us would look very silly. The German Emperor comes better out of the test than would most speechmakers, and we agree with the publisher that this selection of his speeches “presents an admirable picture of the man, his character, and his mind.” Men, Women, and War. By Will Irwin. (Constable. 6d.net.) 3s. Mr. Irwin has written half a dozen essays on the war which are less solid than are some of the recent books, but have at least the interest that attaches to personal observation. His first one deals with his experiences in Belgium in September of last year, and tends to confirm the German account of the “atrocities’’ as "reprisals.” He is at his best when describing “The Soul of France” or “The British Calm”; but he certainly exaggerates the state of German industry when he says that “from end to end of Germany most factory doors are closed and the machinery stands immovable in grease,” and his argument becomes impossible when he declares that “Germany has felt the shock least of any Continental nation. ” European production is not quite at the standstill that Mr. Irwin’s American hyperbole suggests; but as his essays do not pretend to convey exact information, but rather his impressions, it would be carping criticism to insist on these defects. He has written a fine story of the Battle of Ypres, the great one in October and November of last year, and since supplemented by others; and is quite in the swim with the other writers of war books when he declares that ‘‘democracy is on test, so, I feel, is real Christianity.’’ No American could say less, and no Englishman could say anything else. Myth and Legend in the Bible. ByKeighley Snowden. (Watts and Co. 2s. 6d. net.) We should have thought that the controversy concerning the authenticity and historical value of the Old Testament was dead by now ; or, at least, that if people wished to know the results of that critical controversy, the volumes in the Home University Library would have been cheaper and more accessible to the public. However, Mr. Keighley Snowden has thought it worth while to state in his own way the results of that critical controversy and to make “as plain and interesting as anything in the newspapers” the story of the Old Testament. He has succeeded; but we may suggest to the Rationalist Press Association (for whom this volume is issued) that they should issue a new edition of the Old Testament rearranged in the chronological order determined by criticism, with the parallel passages placed side by side and their sources indicated. The approximate dates and other details might be placed in the margin. A critic’s Old Testament would make the activities of the Rationalist Press Association worthy of the attention of posterity. Australia v. Germany. By F. S. Burnell. (George Allen and Unwin. 3s. 6d. net.) This is a frivolous account, by the correspondent of the “Sydney Herald,” of the Australian Expedition to New Guinea. It resembles too much the accounts of the original “Eye-Witness” to have any more value than his. The same trivialities are recorded, in this case of life on board a troopship, as well as in camp, what John Jones said to Bill Adams being recorded as of as much importance as the military operations. Here, at least, was matter for history; but Mr. Burnell records the fact that Lieutenant Bond marched along “discoursing on lepidoptera and such,” as though that were all that was to be noticed in a battle. The total impression that he conveys is that the expedition was a singularly easy one, succeeding by an effective bluff at the first onset ; and for the rest he is compelled to fill his space with personal stories and the trivialities of camp-life, even taking the trouble to record the songs invented and sung by the troops. The volume is illustrated with twelve photographs; and we may say in conclusion that the title is in very bad taste, Current Cant. “Let for the rich eat cheaply.”-“Evening News. ” nothing.”-“Daily Express.” DARE. soldiers.”-“Daily Pastiche, TWO CONVERSATIONS. An Anecdote (after Chagfort) . “How many quarrels has the doubt of the meaning of the syllable Hoc created in the world!”-MONTAIGNE. Tom : They are making a great noise about nothing. Will : Yes, the discussion is very loud. A trifling subject, Ibelieve. What the deuce is it, I forget? Tom : A tomfool affair about the manner in which tram guards should give out tram-tickets. How call they argue on it. So simply silly. It is plain enough that a train guard is a capable man, although he does sometimes punch the hole in the wrong place. Eh? Will : Oh, no. I don’t agree vvith you. This matter about Democracy, which is degenerated laissez-faire, privileged inefficiencyTom: Don’t be an ass! Aristocracy is a colossal failure. Now, before the modification of the corn laws in ancient PeruWill : Yes, go on. I’ve got you. I’m strong on ancient Peru, also(Discussion continues. Thales, Bacon, Randall, Trismegistus, Nietzsche, Cole, Dicey quoted. Discussion continues ad infinitum.) A DISCOURSE. (The following conversation was overheard 300 years ago. Cervantes reported the first few lines, the remainder he omitted. It will be hardly necessary to remind the reader that Duke or duque in the original Spanish, translated into modern debating slang is Aristocracy; Sancho, Democracy and Quijote, that uneasy portion of mankind that has been born in its wrong class or age). The Duke : Ah, Sancho, you will never be surfeited with governance, it is such a delightful thing to command and to be obeyed. I am certain that when your master becomes an Emperor, as without doubt he will, his affairs trending that way, he will not be dethroned so easily. He’ll only grieve in his soul that he left coming to it so late. Sancho: Sir, I think it is a good thing to command, even though it be a flock of sheep. (Cervantes records no more. What follows is an accurate report of that part of the conversation which has never yet been published. Trib.). Quijote: Yet, pardon, my lord. On second thought, it seems to me that it were unwise to make Sancho a Governor. Could your lordship tend sheep or keep in order the market of Sevilla, or manage the salt-pits at Cadiz ? The Duke : No. Why do you ask that? Quijote: And I will wager that you have no mind to undertake these occupations. But, that is well, for even the weakest guild in Spain would not accept of your lordship’sservices. The guilds in our country and in all Europe are ruled by Sancho, and your lordship cannot improve on that government. As for Sancho stepping to the head of the State, turning into a politique : it is unthinkable. He would be as much out of place there as you would be in the tailors’ The Duke : Dear Knight, be not so hasty. First, we know that Sancho desires to be a State-Governor. He has pressed for the office for nearly a century (sic, evidently a mishearing here. Read, year.) Let him try. He will abdicate in a week, but though he did not, others would govern in his name. You or I, or the devil. But, although he has this desire, remember it is a flim-flam that you, yourself, put into his head : it is not natural to him. ’Tis a passing desire which must be soothed away. I’ll swear that if you give him secure and free governance over a flock of sheep or a craftsman’s bench and tools, he’d be satisfied. As you say, in these things lie is the best manager, or if he be not there are those of his family who are very capable. As for State Government, that is the translation into action of what the greatest bodies of human power want, but cannot express. Government is ever an advocate’s conflict between the evil cunning and the honourable wise, which, together, are the smaller part of mankind. The fools and the passively good have never governed and never will, though they are titled Emperor Claudius Caesar or Governor Sancho Panza. Good and evil Governors thrive upon power and its responsibilities, but for the generality the exercise of power has a savour which tempts their palates, but their stomachs are not strong enough to partake of much of it. A good State is a good housekeeper who knows the appetites of the members of her family, and can treat each without starving or surfeiting As Sancho “The spirit of France.”--SIDNEY “Gaby’s Mirror.” smile cheers wounded “The art of knowing how.”--SELFRIDGE AND CO. “Mr. Herbert Samuel has come to the rescue of the Farmer.”-“Everyman.“ “Lord Curzon’s hard truths should fortify, the Government. ”-“Saturday Review.” “Women have discovered their opportunity, will be no going back.”-ROBERT DONALD. not weaken and there “The war-worn soldier has proved, in the actual battle zone, that ‘Phosferine’ gives immediate relief .”-“Daily Chronicle.’’ “Why does not the Government treat women as it treats men, and take them into partnership?”-C. NINA BOYLE. “Bride murder made easy.”-“ John Bull.” “‘It is a great satisfaction for those connected with the ‘Daily Mail’ to know that this journal has such an immense army of well-informed supporters able each day to spread the truth.”-“Daily Mail.” “I have offered to the War Office the services of my engineering workshop, and of about twenty smiths and fitters.”--S. W. Goosey, A.M.I.M.E. “A disciple of the Lord reposes the utmost confidence in his Master, and what a precious thing it is to know that the Divine Providence is operative in this awful war. The universal rule of Providence is one of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.”-“New Church Magazine.” “Ask Mail.” specially for White Horse Whisky.”-“Daily “H. G. Wells, in his review of the social problem, has got down to the fundamental question of character.”-W. HANDLEY JONES in the “London Quarterly.” “The Church aims at the betterment of men --PAUL JACOB BANNER. spiritually." “‘Perhaps,’ writes one of our correctors from Banbury, ‘Miss Violet Asquith has grown to resemble the present Mrs. Asquith through living with her.’”-“Star and Echo.” “It is the duty of every employer to explain to his workers and his servants the advantage of investing their savings in the War Loan, and the necessity that they shall do so.”-“Daily Express.” “O us . How Loan. Lord, we thank Thee for all thou hast bestowed upon . . and pray that thou wouldst be with us still. . . . to double your income and yet support the War ”-“British Weekly. ” “Hilaire Belloc knows more about the War than any other writer.”-‘‘Sunday Herald.” CURRENT SENSE. “The Beast we must Slay.-HORATIO “John Bull.” BOTTOMLEY.”- says, it is good to rule a flock of sheep. He knows it is Positively good. ’Tis the same with the craftsman whose knowledge stretches well over the first production of some article, he is a free man when he truly rules that process. He is not anxious to control all the other processes of his craft by holding up his poll to be counted, nor, on the other hand, if his ability speaks clearly, does he wish to have his nose ever held down to the elementary bench. His trust in the higher craftsmen is not founded on his opportunities to spy their every action and to check them eternally, or on his ignorance of and servility to their ambition and vanities, but his trust is founded on his knowledge that his guild tolerates nothing but good and true work. His freedom lies in the Spirit of his Guild, the Principle of the highest Quality, which, if maintained by the sense and virtue of the guildsmen, is such a strict and powerful judge that it can tear a false master-workman from his chair, and turn off the useless apprentice to the wars. The general virtue for good work, the guild spirit, protects the Guild from tyranny, for’ tyranny going downwards will shake the gravet in the hand of the meekest workman. The greatest engine of Guild government cannot give justice, prevent tyranny, and promote liberty, if there be not an instant recognition by the guildsmen of base and faulty work. When the Guild Spirit rules, Sancho rules, and Sancho be worthy. To rule in State he may lend his name, he will never lend his mind. At heart, he would rather watch a cock-fight than meddle in State policies. Had he wished to be a Governor without your suggesting as much, Sir Knight, we would find that he and his brothers had ruled the world since creation. They were ever the many. Quijote : In the State, my lord, who are the honourable wise and the evil cunning? The Duke : They are the advocates of dumb or lisping power. The one seeks government by inspiration of the angels for eternal justice and liberty, the other seeks government by the prompting of the devils for vain ambition and greed. The poets champion the first; the champions of the latter seem to be philosophic-lawyers. These factions struggle age after age, fighting with pamphlets, poems, books, declamations. The cunning win best victory by speaking first. They can capture an age ere the wise have spoken. But, though the voice of wisdom is late and low it reaches far and echoes long. Sancho: But, Sir, shall I not be a Governor of an island ? The Duke (winking at Don Quijote) : O, certainly, good (To Quijote) : I do this to keep your word. He Sancho. had never thought of such a thing, but that you put it into his head. Sancho : Dios ? Won’t Teresa, my wife, be a fine lady ! JOHN TRIBOULET. AD ASTRA. Twinkle, twinkle, “A. E. R.” What a judge of men you are! Up above the world too high To gladden any human eye. Twinkle, twinkle, ‘‘C. E. B.” The Great Bear in new light we see. Tell us, man of scorn and skill, How d’ye say Przemysl? Twinkle, twinkle, Marmaduke, Patron of the Mameluke. Now my pen in mourning dipsStar and Crescent in eclipse. Twinkle, twinkle, Ezra Pound, Like a candle underground. Cubes, potatoes, prunes and prisms Summarise your witticisms. Twinkle, twinkle, ‘‘Romney” Dazzling the unmartial eye. How, when you so scintillate, Can a non-com. coruscate? rye, TWO RONDEAUX. BY VAILLANT. If thou dost think that I love thee, And of some haven there hast thought, All that I did was but for sport To pass the time away, pardee! God and my soul my witness be That much mistook hath been thy thought; If thou dost think that I love thee. Other than thou my heart would see, Elsewhere and in another sort; I set my sail for another port, And this but folly is, ladie, If thou dost think that I love thee. Good folk, my lady’s gone astray: Who findeth her, as truth I say, Howsoe’er sweet and bright she be, I give her to him joyfully, Nor this dispute in any way. She knoweth what game ’tis she doth play, God knoweth how true my love alway, And that she’d no ill words of me. Good folk, my lady’s gone astray. This dame I guarded well alway, That none might evil on her lay ; For, in good truth, a fair ladie To man a precious thing must be ; Alas! I am lonely, poor, to-day : Good folk, my lady’s gone astray. A RONDEAU. BY HUGUESDE BLOSSEVILLE. This burden would I bear no more, O Love, that thou hast laid on me; Of this, I pray thee, hold me free, As unto thee I give it o’er. Never have I one comfort known In serving thee my life’s each day ; But alway in discomfort gone And fearing Jealousy alway. Lay not thy service on me more; Some other one may burdened be ; Ne’er shall it weigh again on me : Of goods thou giv’st too scant a store; This burden would I bear no more, O Love, that thou hast laid on me. (Translated from the French by Pallister Barkas.) LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. Twinkle, twinkle, Alice M. All the stars do kiss thy hem, Phoebus’ mantle thee adorning, Salutamus: Star of Morning! Twinkle, twinkle, my NEW AGE; Star shells burst on every page, By whose light you boldly tilt At the mills of England’s guilt. L’HIBOU. THE MUNITIONS BILL AND THE TRADE UNIONS. Sir,-I read, week by week, your exceedingly clever editorial notes. Much, if not all, what you have written on the attitude of the Government in relation to the Trade Unions during the negotiations which have resulted in the various Treasury and other agreements, I find myself in sympathy with. I have many times desired to write a note expressing to you my thanks for your brave and knowledge-inspired articles. Time, however, is equally the master as well as the servant of all, and the performance of duties in recent months has left little time for the amenities of life. Starting, therefore, from the spring-board of gratitude, I am sure you will not misunderstand my present complaint. Please turn to the bottom paragraph of your first column on page 218 of your current issue. Read again your statement :“They”-the Trade Unions-“have agreed to leave the fixing of the price of their labour during the remainder of the war in the hands of the Government and their employers. Before listening to my complaint please also remember that you stated in the preceding paragraph that“The amendment undergone by the Bill in the Commons does not appear to us to have altered its character for anything but the worse, if that be possible.” Now also be good enough to allow me to quote from Part II of the Bill as drafted the following clause :“Any proposal for any change in the rate of wages, salary, or other emoluments of any class of persons employed in the establishment shall be submitted to the Minister of Munitions, and shall not be made without his consent.” Now listen, please, to the clause as amended by the Commons, and which is, of course, now the law of the land :“Any proposal for any change in the rate of wages, salary, or other emoluments of any class of persons employed in the establishment or of any persons engaged in the management or the direction of the establishment (other than a change for giving effect to any Government conditions as to fair wages or to any agreement between the owner of the establishment and the workmen which was made before the 23rd day of June, 1915),shall be submitted to the Minister of Munitions, who may withhold his consent within fourteen days of the date of the notice.’’ Now be good enough to remember that this Part II of the Act applies only to controlled establishments and that you have argued “that no ‘controlled establishment,’ carrying with it the obligation to limit profits, will be brought into existence,” and you will see the cul de sac in which you have landed those of us who usually find your arguments so conclusive and satisfactory. And while my pen is still running, Mr. Editor, do you mind if I say that some of us did our utmost to secure the insertion, in the place of the Government Fair Wages Clause, of the Trade Union rate of wages, and I have yet to hear of any satisfactory reason why the latter proposal was rejected. In any case, my first quotation from your editorial notes is simply not true. Let me tell you why. The A.S.E. has an agreement with the Engineering Employers’ Federation under which a monthly control conference is held for the consideration of matters arising from wage advance claims and conditions of labour, etc. Under the Bill, as submitted to the House of Commons, that agreement and the monthly conferences would have been entirely shelved for the rest of the war period; and the Minister of Munitions would have been the only medium through whom wage rates, in “controlled establishments,” could beraised. Under the Act the amendments agreed to and incorporated enable us to go forward without any restriction or control by the Minister of Munitions department. The right of our members, therefore, to have their wage rates raised by the methods already in existence remains unaltered and unimpaired. F. S. BUTTON, member of the Council, A.S.E. *** INTERNMENT OF MR. MAHOMED ALI. Sir,-The last Indian mail brings news of the internment, under the Defence of India Act, of Mr. Mahomed Ali, the well-known editor of the “Comrade,” and his brother Mr. Shauket Ali, by the order of the Chief Commissioner of Delhi. This is an astonishing act of the Executive, which, as is already apparent, is bound to create widespread excitement, not only among the Mahomedan, but all sectionsof the Indian community. As the whole question of the Indian unrest at the present moment is very much to the fore, I think the significance of the step taken by the Government ought not to be allowed to be lost on the British public. In the opinion of the vast majority of the educated community in India, including men who have had opportunities at first hand of knowing the principles and politics of the two brothers, Mr. Mahomed Ali and Mr. Shauket Ali were emphatically the kind of persons who, in the present state of Indian feeling, should not have been interned. Both these men have for a number of years been before the public in active political life, and never has there been any suggestion that they lent themselves any underhand conspiracy of any sort or kind. to The whole of their propaganda, such as it has been, has been carried out in the light of day. This is a view which is based on facts and it has been endorsed on various occasions in unmistakable terms by men, both in the Government of India and others who, though not included in the Government, enjoyed the highest confidence of the authorities as leaders of public opinion. For instance, I notice that Mr. Mazhar-ul Haque, who is admittedly a leading representative of the Mahomedans of India, having been an elected member of the Viceroy’s Council, has just moved a resolution protesting against the internment of Messrs. Mahomed Ali and Shauket Ali at a public meeting held at Bankipore. In recent months Mr. Mahomed Ali has rendered very valuable services by fearlessly expressing the views and sentiments of the Mahomedan community at considerable personal sacrifice. That he by doing so incurred the wrath of the officials was more than atoned for by the unquestionable utility of his actions at a time when the majority of representative Mahomedans had been frightened into complete silence as regards the feelings of this community. Since, however, the “Comrade” press was confiscated and the paper as a consequence stopped publication, Mr. Mahomed Ali was known to have retired into a dignified abstention from politics. Without, therefore, any provocation that the public is aware of, and without disclosing any reasons whatsoever for the action, the Chief Commissioner of Delhi has thought fit to pass an order which savours more of sheer vindictiveness than as calculated to serve any useful public purpose. As one who may claim to know something of Indian feeling, I have no hesitation in saying that this internment will lead to a greater political excitement and unrest in India than almost anything else, considering all the circumstances, and especially the state of Muslim feeling, that the authorities could have perpetrated. It is clear, from the mail papers, that a great deal more will be heard of this incident during the next few weeks. The object of this letter, all too brief as it is, is to bring the matter before those who may still have any time or inclination to take an interest in Indian affairs and in the vindication of British rule in India. DEEP SINGH. *** HAPPINESS AND THE WAGE SYSTEM. Sir,--I make no apologies for the continuation of this discussion upon happiness, because I believe it to be important. Nor can I willingly allow Senor de Maeztu to banish happiness from the world with a flourish of the pen. So with a flourish must I recall it. Afutile enterprise this pen-waving, perhaps, yet what else would you ? It was once urged that the warriors could at least settle the deadlocks of the talkers-but now! The argument falls under two heads. In the first place, my critic ridicules my definition of happiness. It is impossible, he argues, that desires and doings should run unimpeded on their way. But suppose I am hungry and eat : what then? Then I am told that “if we eat a cake we wish at the same time to hare it too.” Personally, I do not: I am content with the eating When I have finished, I may want more cake, but that is a very different thing. Unhappiness is caused by the repression of desire and by the blocking of action. It is obvious that our desires are often complex and contradictory, and that we may wish to do a lot of things at once. It were easy to imagine a man whose sympathies in this war, for instance, were entirely divided. He might side with Belgium against Germany and with Germany as against Russia, with Servia against Austria, and with Turkey against the Allies, and so on. Either he would have to remain neutral, if he could, or else one point would weigh more than the others, and he would stand decisively for one side. So with ourselves. We may have conflicting desires and no decisive act of will, or we may have conflicting desires, a victory for one side, and then an act of will. Unhappiness may be caused either by inability to make up the mind at all or by inability to carry through an action when decided upon. Happiness, therefore, rests upon decision and success. It results “when our desires and doings run unimpeded on their way.” Happiness may never be complete any more than truth and beauty may be absolute. “Every act of will carries with it the selection of a desire and the sacrifice of contrary desires. And if the realisation of a desire is agreeable, the sacrifice of those which give way to the victor is disagreeable.” Certainly. But that does not disprove the existence of a balance of happiness. The married man abandons solitude and solitude has charms : but he is not, therefore, necessarily unhappy. He has won more, perhaps, than he has lost. Assuming, then, that happiness is not a mere figment of imagination, or a dreamer’s will-o’-the-wisp, assuming it to consist in the free flow of normal human desire into the channels of actions, what is its relation to labour? My position is that happiness may depend in great measure upon freedom in work. Senor de Maeztu is at pains to show that the making of many beautiful things is unpleasant. That is true enough, but he only faces one aspect of the problem. We have to consider not only the process itself, but the whole set of conditions under which that process takes place. The second is just as vital as the first. No one but a lunatic would suggest that it is possible to make all work and all processes definitely pleasant in themselves. In the best of worlds there will be nasty things to do. But the happiness of the doers will be largely affected by their status and treatment and selfrespect. The wage-system is founded upon the absolute purchase of a commodity. The man sells his labour for money: that labour is no longer his in any sense of the word. He has no control over the process or the product. The articles “he has mixed his labour with” are nothing to him : he is not responsible for their excellence. He must go again into the market and sell his ware-labour-power. During his work, he is scarcely human at all, but a mere living- tool. Now, quite apart from the particular process in question, no work under those conditions can be free. The worker has no real motive to work well, save only that by so doing he may increase the price of his commodity. Neither his sense of ownership nor his sense of responsibility is appealed to. Having neither rights nor duties, he is not free. In recent articles I have endeavoured to show that there still lingers in manhood a desire to do good work and to do service for the community, and I cannot repeat the arguments now. This desire has been crushed and choked by the wage system. It may die out altogether. It may even be dead, though I do not believe it. But, granted the existence of this and kindred desires, is it not possible that men may be actually happier when, by the abolition of the wage-system, they have attained rights and duties and have exchanged the status of the tool for that of the person? The actual work might be the same, but the conditionswould be utterly different. Make every workman a responsible member of the community, self-governing, and bond-slave neither of the private capitalist nor of the profiteering State, and there will be released a mass of desire now thwarted and repressed. The desire for freedom, the desire for service-both will find expression. Then, if my definition of happiness containsany truth, the abolition of the wage-system will mean an actual increase of happiness in the community. Doubtless, too, such a reorganisation of society would abolish many painful and wasteful processes of work and even sacrifice the beauty of the Havana cigar. But, even if it did not, the alteration of conditions, which Senor de Maeztu entirely neglects, would hare done much to set free the activity of men and thus increase happiness. It can still he argued that happiness lies within the individual and is not dependent on the outside world : like beauty, it is not won by taking thought. It springs from temperament : lives by character : it is the gift of the gods, unattainable when denied, irrevocable when given. Life, then, is for the singing birds and no change of outwardcircumstance can crush them or benumb. Here, naturally, is half the truth, possibly more than half. But it does not debar from action or vitiate my thesis. If some are happy when clouds are dark, why should we not work to make them happier still with brighter skies? Happiness does not rest solely with the individual, because the isolated individual is a fiction and non-existent. Happiness is not entirely “within ourselves,” because the content of ourselves must come from somewhere. Alter circumstances, end a war, destroy a wage-system, and you do not, I grant, make happiness of necessity. But you do make may for it. Lastly, I must protest against Senor de Maeztu’s separation of happiness and morality. He is a Kantian; I, Utilitarian. To me happiness in the full sense, the eudaemonia of the Greeks, is the end, and morality is the will to that end coupled with the discretion to achieve it. In defining my end I am with Aristotle, not with Bentham : but in my attitude to happiness I am with Mill and not with Kant. Certainly “the Guild idea must be ethical,” and will be ethical just in so far as it clears away barriers to human happiness and releases the choked desires and hindered activities of long-suffering man. It is our duty to promote happiness, and that happiness will, I insist, be more easily realised “when our desires and actions run unimpeded on their way,” when, if we may translate this into terms of economics, we have established freedom by the abolition of wage-slavery. IVOR BROWN. *** SURVEY OF THE WOMEN WORKERS’ WORLD. Sir,--A few mouths ago I criticised the organisation of the Women’s Labour Exchanges, pointing out that they are costly blunders in ordinary times. Even more patent is the failure of these institutions in such a crisis as we are now going through, revealed for all who have eyes, in the methods by which the Government manifested its need of female labour; and the organisation and employment of it when “registered” at these Exchanges. According to an official reply 80,000 women registered, and of these only 2,000 are being employed. What is happening with regard to the rest of the volunteers no one apparentlyknows. Yet the most sensational appeals have been made as to the need for female labour in agriculture, business, the railways, and so forth, and there are Some odd stories going about as to the wages some of the Women are receiving. For instance, it is said that on a certain line the young women issuing tickets are getting seven shillings and sixpence a week. Now, anyone who has had the patience to read my earlier articles here will remember that my position here as a bread-winner and thoroughly experienced worker myself has always been, that the claim (made for the most part by women who have no right to speak for the working woman) for equal pay for men and women, is unfair and economically unsound. I cannot too often remind intelligent women that the bread-winning of the man and the woman stand on wholly different grounds. The average man normally supports wife and child. The average woman normally supports herself, and, occasionally, helps to support a relative. (I except €or the moment the penniless widow with a child whose provision by the State, one of the most imperative questions of the day, is one that the Feminist Suffragette has rarely been known to trouble about.) This being so, equality of wages is in the highest degree unjust, and no sophistry about the work being the same can obscure the issues. As a matter of fact, the work of a man and woman never is precisely the same, the man’s stronger physique telling in ways I cannot go into here. But between identity of payment and starvation wages for the young- woman is a vast difference, and nothing to my mind more surely proves the absolute indifference of the Feminist leaders to the real welfare of the bread-winner than the utter lack of any effort made by them to see that the conditions under which girls and women are being pushed into industry shall be tolerable, and such as to make virtue of life possible. Whilst letters are appearing on every side from Lady This or Lady That, or this or that well-known novelist (with a substantial money-making husband, banker, fellow of a College, stockbroker, or what not to fall back upon) urging that .“there are splendid openings for women to take the place of men,” not one of these women or organisations concern themselves with the conditions under which young and inexperienced girls will work. Take, for example, the introducing of girl clerks into night work. In several instances brought to my knowledge girls leave such work at four o’clock in the morning after being shut up all night in an office with young men. Whether the Suffrage ladies who are so eager for women to take the place of men are too stupid or too unimaginative, or simply too ignorant to understand the peril of this, I know not; but what I do know is that you cannot get women to do anything in the matter unless there is the usual fuss and publicity that seem to be accompaniments of any organised voluntary women’s work to-day. Then, again, how can a girl live respectably on this 7s. 6d. a week? If the men whom they are replacing got twenty-five shillings a week, then, surely, it ought to be incumbent on the employers to give these girls twenty shillings and sixpence at least. Much better, in my opinion, mould be the substitution as collectors, issuers of tickets, etc., of much older women of forty and upwards. The work is not of a kind that offers safe and healthful conditions to young women, the future mothers of the working classes; and the temptations besetting girls incidental to the publicity of the life, the expenditure of starvation wages that ought to be spent on food upon the latest finery, considered suitable according to young lady clerk ideals, coupled with the standing for hours together in the most mechanical of work, would operate far less disastrously upon older women. Of course, it will be next to impossible to get influential women to work quietly in the direction of altering these and other similar wrongs-the real wrongs of the woman proletariat. The real tragedy of the Women Workers’ Cause is that it is in the hands of bad leaders ; some unscrupulous and self-seeking, who drag swarms of feeble-minded women after them quite as ready to shriek for Votes for Women as they are for Conscription, or anything else that they are incapable of understanding, some embittered by experiences incapacitate them from seeing things in their that right proportion, and, if possible, more spiteful and illdisposed towards any woman who has the courage to stand outside their self-advertising cliques than towards men; some well-meaning but stupid, who, in the hands of right-minded, high-minded women, might be quite useful members of Society, whereas as leaders they are in the highest degree mischievous. If it were not for an encouraging sign and tendency here and there, what else could one do but despair to find Mrs. Pankhurst once more being puffed and paragraphed into fame by, amongst other things and persons, an enterprising Music Hall, Mr. Austin Harrison, most meticulous of writers, and Mr. Horatio Bottomley. Here is a woman, who, only a few months ago, was doing on a small scale what the most abominable of Germans have been doing on a big one; burning the residences of innocent persons, trying to blow up churches and cathedrals. injuring priceless pictures, and, worst of all, by stirring up idle, and, in many cases, deficient girls and women to do evil, dragging down the woman’s moral currency, so that it will be fifty years before women recover their moral elevation. And all this because she and her following could not get the Law approved of by the great mass of decent women altered to suit her. Yet, now, this woman is posing as a Patriot, pouring out her scorn upon the Germans in behalf of an Army consisting of the very men who, not a year ago, were all that is vile according to the gospel of the Pankhurst family; and she has the further impudence to inform the Government that she is willing to organise the women workers. I have not the least doubt that some eminent post will be found before long for Mrs. Pankhurst, and speeches to celebrate the interesting occasion will be made by the obliging Mr. McKenna and the Head of New Scotland Yard. AS I say, were it not that now and again a ray of light and wisdom appears often in the most unlikely quarters, the despair of the thoughtful would be complete. This time it shows itself in a letter signed “E. Stevenson,” in the “Standard” of June 16. I quote one paragraph, but the letter is well worth very careful reading in its entirety:“What is wanted is some organisation whereby women can combine for legitimate work. Their services for the production of war material can only be temporary. . . . If we say, for the sake of argument, that one million of our men are permanently withdrawn from the labour market by death and injuries in this war, a figure none of us anticipate or believe in, what does this really mean? It would not let in a flood of women for work because you have a huge population under the fighting age who will be ready soon For employment and the return to civilian life of hundreds of thousands of men. . . . The whole of our troubles arise from the fact that the source is not attacked. Men in, every direction were attacked, as more or less human brutes, with every vice and no virtues, crushing the weaker sex and all sorts of nonsense, while all the liberties and privileges enjoyed by women in this country are due to the men who have for generations fought for them. Emergency work is, therefore, largely unsuited Cor women ; and what sane person would expect a woman to work during our winter months at tramwaydriving ?” Now, all this is sound, sober sense, and I have not the smallest doubt that up and down the length and breadth of this country are hundreds and thousands of women proletariat, who, in their inmost hearts, feel the same. Hut women workers have even less moral courage than men ! and, alas ! they do not possess the sense of solidarity or disinterestedness shown by men in the humblest ranks, inspiring them to unite. During the twenty years I have been writing upon the work of women, I have been brought into the closest touch with women bread-winners of every social rank, and I have hundreds of authentic documents. Not one per cent. so much as mentions the vote or regards it with anything but bitter contempt; but the injustice of women to one another, the tyranny of the mistress over her domestic, the unfairness of and jealousy of the head-mistress to her assistant-mistress, the intrigues of women against one another, the appalling position of the elderly proletariat when she comes up against her woman employer in the educational or nursing world, or wherever she is, who is determined to get rid of her, and throws her on to the scrap-heap; stories so merciless and horrible that one would not have credited them had not facts been given which figure again and again. Yet, never once have I found women with the courage to come into the open and seek legal redress for their wrongs. As “E. Stevenson” says, and as I have said many times, we need wholly different organisations than any that exist ; a great Union split into vast sections supported financially, morally, and practically by every genuine bread-winner. It would be the greatest mistake to model such a Union comprising within itself every class of educated employee exactly upon the men’s trade unions. Women require protection in a way men do not, and the fatal mistake of having well-to-do and rich women representing penniless bread-winners is seen at the very outset-in the initial standpoint taken up by such bodies, the precise name of which I have forgotten- of which Miss Heather-Bigg, extremely well meaning hut wholly mischievous, is the mouthpiece which opposes any sort of legislative protection of women. We have such an object-lesson as to the meaning of brute force before our eyes to-day that perhaps it is almost like irony to emphasise its significance. But we have got into such hopelessly wrong lines that it is necessary to reiterate ceaselessly that no matter from what standpoint you approach the matter, the woman who is penniless, and has to take part in the struggle for existence, is more handicapped than is the man, equally penniless, who may be working in the same set of circumstances and environment. Every penniless woman knows this. Every woman really standing alone knows that the pretence that she can challenge her male colleague upon a level of precise equality is as hollow and untrue and injurious to her as that other assumption that a woman earning an insecure, precarious wage or salary of thirty shillings or two pounds a week, has even the frail “independence” that the man with average good health has. These assumptions are all made by women who have never for three days known the real conditions under which the penniless, educated woman proletariat lives, or the meaning of the grim tragedy during unemployment, ill-health, or middle age. That is why it is difficult to read with patience about the exploits of Miss Money, the daughter of General Money. I make no apology for giving the lady’s name, as she has sought the publicity of the newspapers in declaring that as a “vanman,” the driver of a well-known draper’s van, she is “most happy,” and “finds the life most healthy and delightful.” It is this superficiality, this wicked determination not to see facts however much they affect the lives and happiness of others, that is doing such incalculable harm to our national life to-day. Does Miss Money really suppose the conditions under which she-a fashionable young lady, the daughter of a general-is driving that van, resemble in the remotest degree those of a carman of the normal kind? Is she working twelve and fourteen hours a day? Does she appear at the yard at five in the morning when required to? Does she suppose that playing at the business for a time-which she can end to-morrow -for a few hours a day with an allotted time for lunch and tea resembles in the remotest degree the real thingone of the hardest forms of labour, involving a good deal of discipline and character-wretchedly paid, compelling the man to sit for hours in the sun, or as often soaked, through-with other unnameable hardships that the “delightfulWest End Firm” will take very good care not to so much as mention? Hasn’t it occurred to her that without much difficulty (being of so enterprising a nature she might undertake the job herself), she could find an oldish man perfectly competent to take on the work to whom it would be a god-send; for, in spite of there being a superfluity of work in certain directions and areas, there are still numberlessmen of middle-age starving and semi-starving with their families ? But the strange thing is that though this elementary ethical maxim was readily recognised in the case of starving needlewomen, it has not been found possible to pierce the empty-headed vanity of those women who are taking the bread out of the mouths of the starving journalists, particularly the female ones. As those who are organising charities on their behalf know, there is acute distress amongst the women journalists for whom there is no work. Vet, in one meek, we find Lady Byron, Lady Chance, Lady Troubridge, Lady Warwick, the Hon. Mrs. Anstruther, and a host more describing the forms of charity and activity generally that the journalist is not only perfect1 able to describe, but that really from the standpoint of the public, being more disinterested and unbiased, she- ought to be employed in describing, in place of those persons immediately connected with the movement or work. Only the other day, I heard of a well-to-do member of the Lyceum Club justifying the holding of a little post bringing in thirty shillings a week that a penniless, and, no doubt, by now starving woman had striven to get, on the ground that she was “giving the money away to some of the War victims she was assisting"; and this sophistry was most sympathetically received by her well-dressed audience ! The writer, who for twelve or fourteen years has done the Employment column of the “Queen,” Mrs. Heitland, the wife of a Cambridge tutor, and, therefore, a superfluous and a subsidised “journalist,” is helping to render the market, at its best very restricted for the expert-journalist, even more congested and overcrowded for the capable but penniless woman seeking such work. Yet the extraordinarything is, that whilst in all probability Mrs. Heitland would agree that for the wife of a well-paid Cambridge tutor to be knitting socks and selling them and competing against the poor needlewoman is a selfish and wicked act, yet she does not apparently recognise it is far less so than the same action in the journalist’s work-a-day world. For whilst there is an almost unlimited amount of needlework to be done at all times, and, moreover, the needlewoman can very likely also scrub and cook, the amount of journalism available at all times is far below the supply of journalists, and at this moment is restricted to such a degree as to inflict fearful suffering upon the real proletariat ; and such expert work as that upon the “Queen” has almost entirely ceased. Meanwhile, a critic quite fairly challenges me to say “What Ought to be Done to Organise Women’s Services.” First and foremost, Registers of the kind just made, processions of the Pankhurst family and friends, deputations and such-like nuisances bringing the noisy selfadvertising women to the front, are precisely what are not wanted. Again, the rushing of ladies into agricultural work is folly of the first water. But, now, as to what could be done. Get out of the minds of women that the first thing and the middle thing, and the last thing, and the most important thing, is to be earning money. Go about the work quietly, wherever possible, enlisting the service of a woman who has knowledge and experience. Labour matters are far too serious to allow of their being attended to by young ladies who ought to be still in the schoolroom. (Really, in many of the Government Departments the qualities that would be perfectly in place in guiding a man to choose in a ball-room appear to have guided the authorities making the appointment-hence, our present confusion!) For instance, a large amount of unskilled labour is needed by farmers. Very well, in all the villages and country districts round, say, for forty miles, there are healthy young married women already used to the country, and, probably to field labour. Well, here is your labour for the farmer in plenty without bringing utterly useless lady students down from London at a big expense. But do not be content to throw the young woman who has hitherto looked after her home and children into the fields. At once get four or five kindly women of leisure in each country district to arrange that the home shall not suffer. Very often the young woman’s mother or sister living elsewhere can come and see to the home. Provide the money €or the fare. If possible let each lady arrange to take one of these babies into her own nursery. This No does away with all the drawbacks of the creche. Committee will be needed, no expensive professional nurse to run it; the child will be given the same healthy outdoorlife asthe better-class child. Arrange, if possible, that the young wife who has been working all the week has Saturday and Sunday quite free to look after her home. You don’t want these young wives to lose their close interest and sentiment for their homes and babies, but if you take them away all the week for a long time there is immense danger of this. Of course, in addition to the care of the babies these women of leisure must look after the moral and physical welfare of the women. Remember the husband is away fighting and temptation will dog the steps of the young and comely. It isn’t necessary, in my humble judgment, to organise War clubs, or things of that kind. If in one village there are twenty women coming in every day to work for the farmer, then, probably,six women of leisure are needed, each of whom will see to it that everything is done to assist and cheer the woman. What we need more than anything- to-day is Personal Help, the help that one woman well-off, welleducated and well-disposed can give a woman always struggling against poverty, always harassed, usually illeducated and incompetent. Does anyone suppose that we should need all this gigantic and costly system of school inspection, of maternity centres, schools for mothers, clinics, and the rest of it, if the thousands of well-off and wealthy women were individually doing-not alone their duty-but also their blessed privilege of helping ? As more Labour is wanted, some sort of central body might be brought into existence to which each district would make its returns and the farmers their wants, so that if necessary, country women, with the safeguards I have named, could be drafted from one part of the country to another. Pretty nearly every village has a clergyman’s wife who could act as correspondent. Under this system I have indicated, the farmers would get in an orderly and organised way the amount of female labour they need, and the right kind of Labour. In addition to the countrywomen requisitioned all over the country, their children would be properly cared for by the educated women of leisure. Let any reader who is sceptical as to the need of this go into the first Suffolk or Hampshire village he is near and investigate as to the way the children are fed, etc. In three south of England villages last winter I sought to get plain oatmeal-unsuccessfully. But by way of compensation every kind of tinned horror was kept, and I learned the consumption of these commodities was enormous. Now, with regard to the belated point of Munitions, there is, as everyone knows, an immense divergence of opinion. But in one direction I am positive that there is absolute equanimity of opinion by those entitled to know -general practitioners. Most of the work is wholly unsuited to girls. It is not that they haven’t the actual strength involved, but that it necessitates too great a strain on vital organs. This would not show-itself at the time, but itwould tell later on in a most disastrous way. Now, if the doctors are wrong on this extremely important matter, the error must be demonstrated without a shadow of doubt. But so far as human nature can be infallible they seem to be right, and some substitute for this girls’ labour must be found. Older men, older women-for whom there is not the danger that is incurred by the mothers of the future-Colonials not eligible for military service, are available here. As regards other portions of labour involved in the making of shells unaccompanied by this objection the greatest care should be taken that only the robust girls and women capable of this strenuous work offer themselves. Delicately nurtured women could not stand the strain, and would need so many special conditions that they would be more bother than they are good. The most hopeful sources of supply are to be found amongst the female relatives of the men who hitherto have made them. But, as I have already exceeded my space, I must return to this important subject of the right organisation of Woman’s War Service in my next contribution. F. *** ART AND INDUSTRY. Sir,-In his letter of July 1st Mr. de Maeztu says : “I object to beauty in articles of use on the same ground that Meredith resented the intrusion of style in a book of science.” To this I reply that I for my part am equally inclined to object to any article of use that is not perfected into some sort of beauty, and that though there must be some degree of style in all books, in books of science, where the need for simple lucidity is paramount, may the good Lord deliver us at least from the style of Meredith. Mr. de Maeztu proposes, he writes, to sit in ready-made reach-me-downs, on a machined chair, eating tabloid foods and contemplating the master pieces of “pure art” composedby those hitherto “imprisoned artists,’’ the tailor, the joiner and the cook, freed to that end by his action. This really seems to me a rather mad proposal on his part; my own would be rather to duly pay and honour these honest craftsmen and chance the “masterpieces.” The trouble is that craft and art cannot exist separately, as Mr. de Maeztu supposes, any more than can body and soul, and that the term “pure art,” unless, indeed, it rightly applies to certain futurist pictures, is a meaningless expression. How can one separate, for instance, in Mr. Epstein’s monumental work, his pure art from his craft of marble cutting? As to other arts, I would have all painters start at house painting and all architects at bricklaying, and if very many got no further, how much happier we should all be. (Fancy a “pure art” architect.) Against much evidence I retain the fond belief that there is a grain of art in every man, however microscopic it may be, and that it is in its expression, often laborious, that the truest pleasure lies. I admit, however, that there are forms of labour where one can express other high qualities rather than one’s art sense. Failing these qualities, the night-soil man, for instance, in our ideal state would need extra high pay and shorter hours. In his article of July 8, Mr. de Maeztu accuses Mr. Ivor Brown and myself of being dreamers. Be it so. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” And a beautiful and possibly fruitful dream is surely better than the horrible nightmare of Mr. de Maeztu’s come-day-go-dayGod-send-Sunday Industrial State. God send him better dreams. But I doubt if he can realise simple beauty even awake. He cannot see beauty in a well-made chair, only vain luxury. Consequently he cannot believe there can be real happiness in making such. The very list he gives of beautiful things proves this. Rough gold and pearls are merely raw material, nor are cigars, to my mind, conspicuousfor beauty, and as to lace and tapestries, as long as the maker and designer are one and the same, and a soulless commercialism does not demand an ill-paid duplication, craftsmen may be very happy indeed. It is, the however, rather a list of mere luxuries than of things of beauty. Mr. de Maeztu agrees with Mr. Ivor Brown when he says : “We are happy when we are free, when our desires and doings run unimpeded on their way,” though he contendsthat such happiness is impossible. I would myself amend the definition as follows : I would say that we may be happy when our desires and doings run impeded, not unimpeded, to their end, the element of struggle being necessary to many. In conclusion, let me suggest an explanation of the cause of our difference. Mr. de Maeztu is, I take it, a thinker who lives with and on ideas, the kind of man who, in England especially, cannot be too highly valued, but I hazard the further suggestion that he has never laboured with his hands and that he is therefore in this particular question somewhat at a disadvantage. For though my own mental scope may be narrow and much more limited to the field of actual experience, yet I was, as a matter of fact, for some years in a new country “up against” the basic facts of civilisation, and I have learnt that given youth and health and security for the product of one’s work, the very hardest labour can be a joy. There is actually a joy in axe work, in spade work, one can even express some individuality in a farm gate, and still more, later, in garden and in home. And it is by reason of having felt the pleasure of these simple things that I am able to feel at second hand the craftsman’s pleasure in the well-made chair on which we started this argument and in the Romney Green table of which I happen to be the happy, and by no means, as Mr. de Maeztu would contend, merely the vainglorious possessor. Furthermore, I am no writer, a slow and painful marshaller of my few ideas, and I should be almost ashamed to say how long these crude sentences have taken me to write. “Weary drudgery!” says Mr. de Maeztu. Not a moment of it. Notwithstanding the poorness of the product there has been the happiness of trying. Let me end with a question. If the New Social State is going necessarily to consist at best of ninety-nine melancholy machine minders to one “pure arter” (blessed are the pure in art), is it really much worth while worrying ourselves about the National Guilds at all? PHILIP T. KENWAY. *** MALTHUSIANISM. Sir,-I hasten to apologise to Mr. R. B. Kerr and your readers concerning my error with regard to the family of Malthus. This is the result of trusting to memory, and an unreliable authority. The point made through it, however, was not important, barring the injustice to Malthus himself. I think it will be readily agreed that Malthus’ suggestion of late marriages is, in any case, an impracticable proposition. By a step in logic, we are driven to New Malthusianism, a development which, I think, Malthus did not foresee. I have pleasure in recognising that Mr. Kerr’s statement of the possibilities and results of Neo-Malthusianism is so well put, that I am content to leave it at that. I had considered until now that Neo-Malthusianism, like many other virtuous practices under capitalism, such as thrift or profit making, was an individual advantage, but a national disadvantage. Mr. Kerr widens the scope of the discussion to such an extent, that two ideas immediately present themselves. (I) It must be at least a hundred years before we can get the practical test, by result. (2) If the present war is going on many years, or any further wars like it, the process of population reduction will hardly need any assistance from NeoMalthusians. Further, if it is worth discussing in detail what may happen in future centuries, there is another factor which perhaps Mr. Kerr has not considered. “Civilised” countries are ruled by a dominant minority; the people do not rule, but only think they do, or pretend to think they do--I am not sure which. All social laws are devised by the small dominant class, to suit their own (mainly economic) convenience; and this is true of the laws of marriage, or rather sex-relationships. Assuming the existence of the dominant class, still unshaken, threatened with reduction of proletarian population, so as to seriously threaten the source of their wealth and power. They may sweep away monogamy with a cry of moral indignation, re-establish polygamy, or readjust sex laws in a hundred other ways through the medium of eugenic science; in short, they would have no scruple whatever in turning completely topsy-turvy in all their alleged moral ideas in order to keep up the adequate supply of labour power and reserve unemployed. Just at the moment we have seen many curious illustrations of this in the lightning conversions of many eminent people over the matter of illegitimacy. But it turns out that the “war baby” is largely a myth, so the sudden enthusiasm for the illegitimate child is being- damped down. However, all this is interesting speculation, but cuts no ice in our present difficulties. Mr. Kerr’s exposition of the economic motive of military castes is excellent ; it is the one thing that needed stating to help clear away the fog that has gathered around the whole controversy. G. D. *** THE PLEASING ART OF PROSODY. Sir,-I had no idea that the Judgment Day was come and gone; yet it must be so, for here we have Mr. Pound arisen from the grave on which T. K. L. shed tears nearly two years ago. I hope, if any of your readers have noticed other phenomena of such a sort, that they will at once communicate with me, either privately or through your correspondence columns. I should be sorry indeed to be found with my lamp unlit, dissecting Mr. Pound. But, alas, Mr. Pound, that roaring lion, has grown too dry for the edge of my knife. I fear that his hide is thickened, his mane matted with the dust that his tail lashes from the pantomimic stage upon which he has stalked for so long-before the flood, I remember. Rather would I take him by the hand, as Yank with Briton reunited, and cry hail to the new dawn rising so obviously before us ; that fresh and glorious age when endeavour, and study, and passion for ideas (the vile wills-o’the wisp!) shall have faded away like some ghostly nightmare; when the use of the mind, and the acquisition of knowledge shall have been stamped out for a leprosy; when the young author shall sit down and write that which hits him between the eyes! Still, readers of THE NEW AGE will understand and admire the fine change. ‘‘The pleasing Art of Poetry’s designed To raise the heart and moralise the mind.” Tut! There is a bad, subversive attempt to impart knowledge ! Let us try a l’Imagiste :Poetry ! Boob ! Yahoo ! And again : “The English Trade Unions are the hope of the world.” What a thought ! How much simpler and more beneficial would it be to scrawl :Union ! Bunion ! I cannot do better than end this letter with the revelation of a mystery to Mr. Pound. A story was refused because the hero hung his-ah--continuations over the back of a chair. Why? Because, Mr. Pound, the remark was unnecessary to the point of insanity. But I join Mr. Pound in my surprise at the editor’s refusal; though Mr. Pound will not join me in my gratification. J.MOLONY. *** “LE DIABLE BOITEUX.” Sir,-In reply to Miss Alice Morning’s query, an English version of “Le Diable Boiteux” is published under the title of “The Devil on Two Sticks” by Sisley’s Ltd. The translator’s name is not given, but there is an introduction by Malcolm Hine. E. W. MORGAN. Subscriptions to THE NEW AGE are now at the following rates :United Kingdom. Abroad. 28s. One Year 14s. 15s. Six Months Three Months 7s. All communications relative to THE NEW AGE should be addressed to THE NEW AGE, 38, Cursitor Street, E.C. Press Cuttings. “The nation has no love for the coal-owners and all the middlemen who €or nearly a year have been sucking us like leeches. It regards with sceptical scorn all their attempts to prove that nobody makes a bloated profit out of bloated prices. . . . With regard to the trouble in South Wales the universal feeling is disgust. These coal-owners are past praying for. They cannot get on with the public, and they cannot get on with their men. They have bled the public. . . . We take our stand on the simple fact that the coal barons are public enemies, who have forfeited the confidence of the nation-the nation has a right to sweep them aside and defend itself against their greed. . . . The Government has taken over all the railways. Let the Government take over all the coal mines. The coal belongs to the nation.”-“Star and Echo.” “Servitude is obnoxious to all living creatures--to all, that is, who realise their servitude. If the manhood of Britain has done little as yet. to fling off its back the share-holding, “capital” owning, money-lending set of profiteers, it is because, as yet, it does not realise how its liberty is thereby throttled. It is because it is not realised that industrial servitude is, in some respects, but little removed from serfdom, as that-in its essentials-was hut a pruning of chattel slavery. Let it not Se thought that there is any intention here to picture the army of wage-earners as a patient white-winged heavenly host, that is for ever oppressed by the malice and the cunning of black-winged Luciferian capitalists. . . . What does not yet appear to many of the receivers of Rent, Interest and Profits is that they are virtually slave-owners, too. . . . Not all the culture and generosity and public spirit of the capitalist class (and working men are the first to appreciate these qualities even in their employer if he will but let them flow first towards those ‘at home’) can mitigate the servitude. It is, too often, not realised, even by the wage-earners themselves, that wage service is servitude. Notwithstanding much unrest at its conditions, wagery is, in itself, endured as part of the eternal scheme of things. Of the several thousand strikes which have been a feature of the last fifteen years, not one, probably, has been fought for the overthrow, of the wagesystem. . . . Men walk with such a tragic readiness into the cage of the wag-e-system because their minds have been already shaped that way from childhood. . . . So, if we turn from the present to the future, in wonder as to the remedy that shall be adopted, it is (in the opinion of the present writer) to the constructive proposals first outlined in Mr. Orage’s journal that we may look with most hope. . . . Through the guilds we should attain that which the parliamentary vote alone can never give us-a real and effective citizenship for all.”-“The Venture.” “We have often called attention to the truth that the Suspension of Trade Union rules is a much graver business than it sounds, and that, indeed, the difference between the working classes who were driven deeper and deeper into the morass after the war with Napoleon and the working classes as we know them to-day, is the result of nothing else than the building up of these trade union defences which the working classes are now asked to relax. To this suspension their leaders have agreed. It is an act of patriotism which few of their upper-class critics will ever fathom. But in making it they have to consider the welfare of future generations, for whose interests they are trustees. And here we may ask the question that is put in THE NEW AGE (which takes a just pride in the expansion of ideas about labour organisation that were originally preached in its columns) : Have the Trade Unions received sufficient assurance in return ? We have urged in these columns from the first that at least it should be made a condition of an arrangement such as this that all armament workers should belong to a trade union.”-‘‘Nation.” “To anyone who really knows the labour world the condescending compliments occasionally addressed to Trade Unionists upon the excellence of their conduct during war time are ludicrous; they are almost as funny, indeed, as the stream of vituperation that is constantly poured out from other quarters. They demonstrate an attitude of mind that is deplorable. They give rise to speculation that should be impossible. In these democratic days it should be almost unthinkable that such a gulf should be fixed between the classes of the nation as will allow the members of one class to be utterly incapable of realising what are the attributes of another. Labour, says one set of sapient critics, has not yet realised what it has at stake. It is not putting forth its best efforts. . . . It grumbles about extortionate food prices and asks for an advance in wages. . . . What are the facts? The facts arc these : The foundation of the nation is the worker. All we have and hold, all we have won down the centuries, all our national greatness and national strength? and nationa; honour is a legacy from dead and gone British workers, from the nobodies of other days. If we come out of the present trial with banners flying and drums a-beat, it will be because the workers of Britain have fought with their traditional pluck, and held on with their traditional endurance. . . . We do not say that there are no black sheep in Labour’s ranks ; there are. But, broadly speaking, especially of the organised workers, we confidently state that no class in the history of this or any other country has shown such superb selfsacrifice, such serene and conscious patriotism, as the labouring classes, the backbone of these islands.”“Reynolds’ Newspaper.” “It is strange to find the ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Times’ advocating Socialism for the period of the war: that is, that the State should take over the Industries which go to supply munitions. . . . . But must we not acknowledge that, if this is necessary in a time of emergency, then it needs as background a less rampant individualism in ordinary times? There must surely be a mean between the excessive organisation of Germany and the rampant individualism which has characterised England. In civil matters, in industrial and social life, at any rate, we have been of late years repenting of our individualism. But the Church-our part of the Church-it was never so rampant as to-day. Truly, I believe it will be our destruction as an organised body, unless, like the State, we can repent and turn again towards real control by the body, as a whole, of its officers and members.”-THE BISHOP OF OXFORD. “In many establishments and as regards many departures from practice, the Trade Union rules may doubtless be revived. How far, and for how long they can be enforced will depend, as heretofore, partly on the extent to which they are reasonable and appropriate, and partly on the strength of the union, which will-to say the least --not be likely to be the same after the war. But it would be wise for Trade Unionists to face the fact that, in some cases, at any rate, Humpty Dumpty simply cannot be set again on the wall. The whole organisation of the workshop will have changed. . . . If the old order cannot be restored, it is for the Trade Union world of today, and for its very experienced leaders, with such help as they can get, to work out, between now and the end of the war-not only for the engineering industry only, but also for the building and other disorganised trades---a ‘new inodel’ and a new policy with which to meet the new conditions that may otherwise bring down the skilled mechanic to the level of the labourer without the labourer himself gaining any elevation in the process.”---“New Statesman.” “The intellectual calibre of our railway magnates may be gauged by the muddle into which they have suffered our railway system to lapse. Their worth as citizens is displayed in the fact that, being perfectly aware of the gravity of the situation, and of the existence of a speedy and efficient remedy, they decline to apply that remedy. because they fear that its application must be preceded by an inquiry which will reveal the truth to the public. The management of the railways is in the hands of people ignorant of the scientific principles which should govern the transport of goods and of the means of ameliorating the condition of our railways which science offers them. The officials of those Departments of the Board of Trade which are principally concerned with internal transport, viz., the Railway Department and London Traffic Branch, so far from exercising the functions of guardians of the public interest, devote their efforts to bolstering up the existing condition of affairs, burke inquiry, and render improvement impossible.”--HENRY MURRAY.