NOTES OF THEWEEK . FOREIGNAFFAIRS: Poland. JOURNEY ROUND MY ROOM-VI By S. Verdad . THE WILL TO FREEDOM. By Zarathustrian REVIEWS : The Gulf. The Fortune. Fields the Fatherless. We of ‘Italy . EARNEST TRIFLES. By Edward PASTICHE. By Fitzgerald Bernard Moore . Desmond .. Gilbert, . of . GUILDS AND THEIRCRITICS-IV (continued). By S. G. H. . An APOLOGYFOR THE LIBERTYOF THE PERSONVIII (concluded). By O. Latham . STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY MENTALITY. By Ezra Pound. XIX-Conclusions OUT OF SCHOOL. By Kenneth Richmond . MEMORIESOF OLD JERUSALEM-IV. By Ph. J. Baldensperger. Edited by Marmaduke Pickthall . LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from K. R., Ezra Pound, B. H. Dias, Ernest Wilton Schiff. MEMORANDA (from last week’s NEW AGE) . PRESS CUTTINGS . If the worst is allowed to come to the worst, and the inheritance of the Tsar falls piecemeal into the power of Prussia, all the problems that began the present war will be repeated upon a still larger scale. The economic resources of Russia are tremendous. Merely on the scale of Western cultivation, she can easily feed a population of 500 millions. It is estimated that Russiacontains coal enough to supply the world’s needs for, at least, a century. Her forest-land is almost half the world’s total. Turkestan might compete with America in the production of cotton. The Russian output of naphtha before the war was equal to that of the rest of the world; and its exploitation was only being begun. To leave to Prussia the unfettered privilege of employing these vast resources would be more than to compensate her for the loss of her intended monopoly of Asia Minor. Instead of Middle Europe, Germany would have the means of creating an Eastern Europe, the menace of which, if a little more remote in point of time from that of Middle Europe, would assuredly be not less in point of size. Nor is it the case that Mr. Lloyd George contemplated this exploitation as the work of a peaceful and democratic Germany. He specifically warned the Russians against the designs of militarist Prussia. In other words, we were to contemplate fatalistically the seizure by the Prussian military autocracy of the inexhaustible militarysupplies of a conquered Russia. That this is, to say the least of it, unwise on our part, nobody will deny; and it is still more unwise, because, for the present, at any rate, the case is not past help. There is life, we believe, in Russian democracy, which only needs to be encouraged and fostered to renew in Russia an independence of spirit which even Prussia would find formidable. And it is surely our policy to feed that spirit with faith and hope as well as with charity. *** We have not yet been able to see any of the German comments upon Mr. Lloyd George’s speech; but we take the liberty of forecasting some of them. To the German Socialists, and particularly, of course, to the growing numbers of the Minority Socialists, the terms of the speech will, we think, prove to be in the main acceptable. As the “ Herald” has pointed out, there is not now and there never has been much difference in NOTES OF THE WEEK. AFTER having tacitly denied for months that we had any right to ask for a fresh definition of our war-aims and peace-terms, or, in the alternative, affirmed that they had been clearly enough defined already, Mr. Lloyd George on Saturday admitted the need and proceded to satisfy it in aspeech, excellent in tone, reasonable in substance, but different from the speech originally intended by him for the New Year. The reasons for all these changes are not beyond guessing, though we shall not stop to guess at them. It is enough to say that the need to satisfy Labour was Turning to the speech probably the least of them. itself, we shall find that the war-aims defined in it are three, but that the conditions of peace are more numerous. The war-aims are as follows : the vindication and re-sanctification of international treaties ; the general acceptance of the principle of the selfdetermination of nations; and the creation of some kind of international organisatison for the purpose of reducing armaments and preventing war. The conditions of peace, on the other hand, fall into two categories : the imperative and the optative. To the former belong the restoration (with reparation) of Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, and the occupied territories of France, Italy, and Roumania ; and the “reconsideration” of the problem of AIsace-Lorraine; while to the latter belong a series beginning with the democratisation of Germany, and dying away with vague hopes for an independent Poland. *** Before commenting on the speech in detail, we may remark on the omission of any positive hope of the re-integration of Russia. Mr. Lloyd George’s referencesto Russia were certainly sympathetic; but their tone was that of fear for the life of the patient. Is this tone, however, justified by the potential situation ? Was it politic under the very doubtful circumstances we know to prevail? Admitting that only Russia can save Russia, it appears to us that a re-affirmation of our faith in Russian democracy would have been wiser than Mr. Lloyd George’s palinode. In any event, moreover, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of Russia ; we cannot wash our hands of her crucifixion. substance between the terms of the German and the Allied Labour and Socialist movements. Hitherto, the chief difference has been between the German Socialist parties and their view of the aims of the Allied Governments. But now that Mr. Lloyd George has practically endorsed the British Labour party’s declarations, the But latter difference may ,be expected to disappear. what of the Prussian military autocracy that still wields so much influence as well as power in Germany? How will Prussia take Mr. Lloyd George’s speech? To begin with, the speech cannot fail to be regarded as a symptom of weakness on the part of this country. The deduction will, of course, be wrong, as so many Prussian deductions concerning us have been wrong in the past; but the mentality of Prussia suggests, nevertheless, that this deduction will be made. And, assuming it to be made, what‘ is likely to be Prussia’s attitude towards the three war-aims defined in the speech? We find it hard to believe that Prussia’s reply can be other than in the negative. For think what the acceptance of these war-aims involves for her-an admission of her unjustifiable wrong-in other words, the complete abandonmentof her plea of military necessity in national self-defence ; reparation ‘for the same ; submission to the principle of democratic self-determination on the part of neighbouring and prospectively constituent small nations ; and the establishment of an International Court composed chiefiy of anti-militarist Powers. ‘The acceptance of these terms by Prussia would be equivalent,as Lord Lansdowne has already pointed out, to an admission of defeat. They would imply, in effect, the democratisation of Germany. And we have only to examine the situation as it presents itself to the Prussian mind to be reasonably certain that on this very account they are unlikely to be accepted. *** This possibility, if not probability, has no doubt been taken into account by OUTGovernment ; and it may even be the case that Mr. Lloyd George’s speech was designed to create just this difficulty. For if, on the one hand, such German democratic opinion as there is must needs approve of these war-aims while, on the other hand, the Prussian military autocracy must needs disapprove of them, not only will it be clear to the world that Prussian militarism is continuing the war, but it will be clear to German democracy as well. Thereafter the wisdom of defining the Allied aim as the supersession the Prussian military caste will become even of more apparent than it now is; and it may then be so defined with the tacit consent of the German people. It is to this end, indeed, that everything points. All our aims, we have often said, are comprised in the single aim of getting rid of what Mr. Lloyd George himself describes as “ a dangerous anachronism in the twentieth century ”--a powerful nation directed by a military and autocratic caste; and until that aim has been realised, none of the aims contingent upon it can be accomplished or secured. We leave it an open question whether it would not have been wiser to promulgate this aim at this moment and in harmony with the declaration of President Wilson. President Wilson, for his part, has long ago come to the conclusion that as Prussia is not likely to commit suicide by admitting principles fatal to militarism, she must be destroyed either from within or from without ; and the American formula of last week : ‘‘Victory over autocracy either by military means or by a constitutional revolution in Germany to be followed by a peace of justice tempered with mercy for the German people’’ is merely a new summary of his stant attitude. In appearing to be willing to- accept the uncovenanted word of the present rulers of Germany we are running the risk of appearing also to be at crosspurposes with America. But the danger may be more apparent than real; for if, as seems to us probable, Prussia declines to accept Mr. Lloyd George’s terms, there will then be no policy open to us but to endorse the policy of President Wilson and to admit that he has been more far-sighted than our own statesmen. *** In continuing to insist upon the importance of a constitutionalchange in Germany we know we are exposing ourselves to the charge of fanaticism. The charge comes, however, with a particularly ill grace from the people most disposed to make it, namely, our pacifist Liberals, For the history of Liberalism has been the history of a struggle for constitutional reform. It is true that in these days we have learned that constitutional Veil and political reforms are not everything. after veil may be lifted, but veil after veil will remain between the citizen and the perfect freedom he desires to behold. Yet we are not so ungrateful to Liberalism as to deny the value, of the constitutional changes it has won for us merely because with the winning they have been realised to be only secondary to economic On the contrary, but for those constitutional change. reforms it is probable that the economic problems would never have issued as definite problems at all. As in Ireland, our economic problems would have been so mixed up with political problems that neither could have been clearly envisaged and dealt with. But in virtually denying that a constitutional change in Germany is imperative, or that it would effect, as nothing else would, a real revolution in Prussian mentality, it is precisely our Liberals who are casting doubts upon the value of their own historic, not to say their recent past. Only think of the importance they attached to such a comparatively slight matter as the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords. To judge from the contemporary writings of the Liberals, nothing less than the liberty of democracy was at stake. Yet the same writers to-day, almost without exception, either openly or silently deride the “Liberal” contention of President Wilson that the abolition of the veto of the Prussian autocracy upon the democratic programme of the peoples of the world is an urgent and vital necessity. But if we are past Liberalism in this country, it does not follow that Germany is no longer in need of Liberalism; and still less, that the world is not in need of the liberalism of Germany. The liberalisation of Gerrnany is, indeed, our only security for democracy, in other words, for our freedom to achieve economic emancipation unhampered by obsolete political and military claims. And our Liberals, instead of being the first to scoff at the notion of requiring the democratisationGermany as a condition of peace, should be of the first to .insist upon it. *** We never thought to find Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in agreement with us on the perils for democracy of the proposed League of Nations. In the “ Labour Woman” for January, however, he criticises the proposal in terms which would be read in these-columns without surprise. Replying first to the question how the League is to be composed and controlled, he says : “ If it is to be composed of Government representatives only and the majority of its members are to be of the diplomatic type [as, of course, they are], it will be a danger to democracy and no security for peace. If it is said that its statutes are to provide that there can be no war without arbitration and that whichever nation breaks these statutes will find all the others its enemy, the reply is that that is very fine on paper and nothing else. There will be balances of power, camps and secret agreements within the League. No great Power, however wrong, will ever find itself isolated. Only small Powers, however right, will be isolated.” To the question how the League is to do its work, Mr. MacDonald replies : “ If it is to be a Secret Committee of the Nations, it is nothing more than a rehabilitation of the methods which have made the war inevitable. If it Is to act apart from national Parliaments, it is to be a new obscure authority, which will present to the various Parliaments the accom- plished fact which they will be able neither to modify nor reject. It will speedily result in the removal from Parliament altogether of the control of the international policy, and will strengthen Executives, Foreign Offices and Crowns against the democracies.“ Finally to the question how the League is to enforce its decisions Mr. MacDonald replies that “ if it is to have armed force at its command, it is to be able to impose its will upon nations that have never been consulted . . . ; it is to become a super-state and limit the self-government of national States accordingly. . . .” Mr. MacDonald having thus, to our minds, completely disposed of a League of Nations as an instrument of democracy, then proceeds to deny that his objections are necessarily fatal. They only indicate, he says, the directions in which safeguards must be created if the League should ever be formed. This trimming, so characteristic of the politician, is not at all to our taste. *** There is still another reason, however, why Labour should think twice before resigning its prospective control over international; policy into the hands of a super-State composed of members of the capitalist and ruling classes. Besides thereby surrendering the right (or, at any rate, the power) of nations to determine their own actions, Labour would, at the same rime, be forfeiting its own right to strike. The parallel between international arbitration and industrial arbitration has already been drawn (in the “Herald”) by that well-known pacifist and pro-capitalist Liberal, Professor Pigou, who openly supports the League of Nations because it is designed to effect. in international relations the kind of peace he desires to see effected in industrial relations by means of compulsory arbitration. The Labour party, however, is opposed to compulsory arbitration in industrial relations between Capitalists and the proletariat. Unlike Professor Pigou and other capitalist spokesmen to whom industrial peace at any price is preferable to economic justice, Labour has so far declined to purchase industrial peace at the cost of a perpetuation of an unjust economic system. Labour has declined to surrender. either the right or the power. to strike for no matter what prospect of industrial peace. Rut in supporting a League of Nations designed for no other purpose than to make war (or the strike of a nation) impossible, Labour is endorsing the parallel plea of Professor Pigou and his school for an industrial League designed to make strikes impossible; and the argument for the one will most certainly be directed against Labour upon the other. We cannot see, indeed, what possible reply Labour can offer to Professor Pigou when after having procured their assent to compulsory arbitration for the purpose of avoiding war, he invites their assent to a scheme of compulsory arbitration for the purpose of avoiding strikes. If Labour is “pacifist” in internationalaffairs, it must in common consistency be pacifist in industrial affairs. If to the love of peace it is prepared to subordinate the love of justice internationally, the same love it must be prepared to to subordinate industrial justice. The truth, however, is that, for the time being, Labour, like all the rest of the world, is ready to clutch at anything that promises to make war impossible. Shirking the responsibility of democracy, which is surely to conduct its foreign affairs with justice, democrats are to-day inclined to surrender their duties to any kind of League that undertakes put an end to wars of any kind, for justice to equally with aggression. But this mood will pass, and with it the servility of democracy and the resignation of its responsibility and independence. When it is realised that the proposed League of Nations is likely’ to be nothing more than a glorified League of Capitalist Governments, one of whose first acts will be to employ its own existence as an excuse far suppressing strikes in every country, Labour will discover what comes of ploughing with the Liberal heifer, Foreign Affairs, By s. Verdad. Now is the time, it may be suggested, for some sort of pronouncement with regard to Poland; and there are one or two Polish propagandist bodies in this country which might let us hate their views on the subject. Apart from the Polish point of view, however, there is presumably an Allied one; and I do not see how we can possibly avoid a complete reconsideration of the Polish question after recent events in Russia. What were the hopes of the Allies during the first year or two of war? An Allied victory being naturally assumed, it was confidently expected, especially in view of the Grand Duke’s rescript, that Russian Poland, Austrian Poland, and a large slice of German Poland, would be combined into an autonomous, or even an independent State, which should form a mighty buff er between two proportionately powerful countries. The first stage of the new Polish question was settled to the disadvantage of the Allies, after Mackensen began his great offensive at the end of April, 1915, and by June had defeated the Russians on the Dniester, the Bug, and the San, and turned their line at Halicz by June. Further Russian defeats in the summer and autumn of 1915 enabled the Germans and Austrians, not, indeed, to come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement regarding the administration of Poland, but, at any rate, to devise a Council more or less temporarily acceptable to the Poles, and yet able to safeguard the interests of the Central Powers. It is riot my purpose to deal here with the difficulties which the Central Powers have since had to face in their dealings with the Poles, or with the acute questions which have arisen between Germany and Austria themselves over their new-formed State. I should like rather to ascertain what the Allies are thinking, or aught to think, about Poland, I will premise nothing in respect of Russia; but, to one fact, attention ought to be drawn, namely, that all parties in Russia, with the exception of the Cadets, appear to be ‘anxious to wash their hands of any dependencies or outlying provinces inherited from the old regime. So far as the Social Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks are concerned, such provinces or subsidiary kingdoms may, if they wish, form part of the United States of Russia as independent entities ; but no pressure is to be brought to bear on them to induce them to do so. Finland does not appear even to desire this. Northern Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, the Caucasus, Siberia, etc., may, perhaps, form a federated Republic on the model of the United States and Switzerland; and it appears to be thought inadvisable to make any arrangements for a joint army, on the model of those countries, on the assumption that armies will no longer be necessary. Well and good. How are we affected in these circumstances, assuming that the Cadets never again achieve sufficient power to demand strategic annexations, or even if they do? The assumption must be made at the start that the Central Powers and their Allies are to be defeated; for, despite the Jeremiahs, I believe a defeat to be quite possible if only because of the eventual exhaustion of the enemy. With the American troops over in force, well supplied with guns, shells, and aeroplanes, the defeat of the Central Empires is as certain as anything can be in this world. It must also be taken for granted, however, that there will be little scope for sentiment at the end of the war, even on the part of the victors, and that sentiment will be subordinated to material considerations. I hardly think, for example, that a portion of the German Rhineland will be torn off in order that a buffer State may be created-not because there will be some sentimental consideration for the finer feelings of the Rhinelanders, But simply because such a solution of the western border question would ultimately be too troublesome. The Allies, in their own interests, have no wish to create new Irelands and new Alsace-Lorraines on account of the political irritation they would cause. Poland, therefore, so far as the Allies take it upon themselves to in deal with it at all, will necessarily be regarded from a purely military and political point of view. How far is an independent Poland likely to be of use to us? of difficulty to Germany? of difficulty to Austria? of assistance to Russia? as a peace factor in Europe? These are the practical questions which will be asked; and ‘there may even he some quibbling over the meaning of “ independent." It was suggested to me long ago by a prominent and influential Pole--I omit his name lest he should be hanged or shot for his suggestionPolish question would never be really solved that Germany and Austria were defeated by England until and Russia in a great war (the conversation took place in 1913) and England subsequently assumed the protectorate of a United Poland, including the districts seized by the Germans and the port of Danzig. ’The theory of this man-not altogether far-fetched--was that England’s protection was a sure guarantee of liberty ; for our traditions of freedom, justice, and progress on the Continent have survived from the Napoleonic era ; and that, further, England’s protection of Poland would be symbolised in a very tangible form by the British Navy, a squadron of which would at all times keep watch and ward in the Baltic. Here is, at any rate, an ingenious! proposal. But how far is it in our interests to accept it? Are all the Poles likely to be satisfied with it? Or some of them? Is it likely that after the war we shall still find a few of the large Polish landowners-if there are any left-openly sympathising with Prussia in order to gain moral support for the retention of their estates? Or are the Polish workmen likely to make common cause with the revolutionaryparties in Russia, and thus threaten to render the Polish State, no matter how constituted, unstable? Poland as a whole forms a highly important manufacturing area! it is an industrial prize like Silesia or the western provinces of Germany. Whatever the outcomeof the war may be, it is obvious that the Germans and the German Austrians will continue to devote greater attention to what they will presumably still call “ real politics ” than the Russians-they will recognise the economic and military value of Poland, and bend all their energies to the usual processes of peaceful penetration; and who or what shall stop them? There are many Pales even at the present time who would be prepared to see their country’s difficulties solved by the appointment of an Austrian Archduke as reigning prince or king in preference to the election of even a prominent Pole as President of a Polish Republic The Allies will naturally be guided by these considerations in making up their minds. A buffer State is useless unless it is strong; able, in other words, to resist financial and economic influences as well as possible military aggression. Now Poland could not be turned into a strong buffer State unless Danzig and part of Silesia were annexed, and this would mean cutting off the great landed estates of East Prussia from the rest of Prussia. This very fact raises another In view of the new Russian attitude of nonproblem. interference, the destiny of Courland and Livonia becomes doubtful. Both provinces have a mixed population; but German is the predominant language of trade, and the important coast towns, such as Riga, were colonised ages ago by Hanse merchants. Ancient German claims to these provinces have been revived, and every attempt will be made to induce the people there to vote for autonomy under German suzerainty. As Courland is only across the East Prussian border, it is not impossible that we may live to see the provinces of East Prussia, Courland and Livonia forming a new German or Prussian possession, separated from Germanyproper by a revived Poland. These provinces might perhaps be administered, in such a case, as colonies, though I realise as well as anybody the kind of fight the Germans are likely to put up before they lose Danzig and their East Prussian territories. Indeed, Mr. Lloyd George’s reference on Saturday last to “an independent Poland, comprising all those genuinely Polish elements who desire to form part of it,” might almost be held to exclude Danzig definitely. Mr. Belloc, as I understand from some of his recent remarks, attaches immense value to the unification of Poland and to its erection into an entirely independent State. I ani not opposed to this by any means; but again I insist that good reasons far such a proposal will have to be shown to the Allies before they are likely to bestir themselves in the present state of affairs in Central Europe and in Russia. If the majority of the Polish people appear to be content to settle down to peaceful industry under the rule of an Austrian princeling or of the descendant of some noble Polish’ stock, it is not for us to say that they must be prepared to assume heavier responsibilities, even if we give Allied guarantees. To speak frankly, no small nation in Europe will be inclined, at any rate immediately after this war, to regard guarantees as worth the paper they are written on; and if Poland feels that her general interests incline her to the side of the CentralEmpires, then we must acquiesce in that decision, For, even if we were to promise the Poles independence, how should we guarantee and assure it? if Russiawere prepared to take her share, there would be little difficulty: but we are to understand that Russia is not prepared to interfere at all. Neither the British Fleet nor the French Army could save Belgium from devastation; neither the Allied Fleets in the Mediterranean nor the Italian Army nor the efforts of the Russians could prevent Serbia from being overrun. I admit that Poland, if the people were sincerely desirous of achieving their complete independence, and if Poland as a whole were again welded into a solid unit, could defend herself on the only side from which aggression is likely to come to better advantage than Serbia or Belgium; for her population would be much larger and her industrial resources greater. But to talk of the war as being lost if Poland is not united and made independent is to make several large assumptions. There is yet another point in connection with Poland which I have not touched upon, and that is the religious aspect. Apart from the large Jewish elements, the Polish population consists almost exclusively of ardent Roman Catholics, with more than one holy edificeto remind them of their former religious as well as political greatness. I have heard it urged that an independent Poland would bring together and render effective the civilising and human tendencies of the Church of Rome, thus countering the harsh, stubborn, and indeed anti-social traditions of the Prussias. Poland, the argument runs, joined with Austria and South Germany, would be a strong refining influence in CentralEurope, would soften the bitter Lutheran feelings of the Germans, and would act as an intermediary between Slavonic and Western European culture. This argument, I admit, is not without force; and I have myself emphasised, from time to time, the important cultural value of Roman Catholicism. But there is, I fear, one objection. And that objection is simply this, that the Roman Church never rests content (when it is in a position of power) with spreading the refining cultural influences at its command, but sooner or later enters upon a series of political intrigues having for their object, not so much the improvement and progress of humanity as the maintenance and increase of the power of the Church itself. To this end the Church is willing to ally itself with reactionary forces, such as the German Government; and it hardens such forces instead of softening them. Guilds and their Critics. PRODUCER (continued). V. Confining ourselves in this chapter to the industrial as distinct from the art craftsman, the question still remains to be answered how would the craftsman protect his particular craft and mystery inside the Guild organisation? This is the essential point of Mr. Ambler's letter, and I think also of a very interesting critique, quoted earlier, in the '' Manchester Guardian, " by "H.," whom I suspect to be Professor Hobhouse. The question presupposes two different classes of producers-the skilled and unskilled. The former may be presumed to be the trade craftsman, the latter the labourer. But the distinction is not so easy as it looks. For a generation or more, the-skilled workman, so called, has really been the organised workman. Generally stated, skill and organisation have been coincident; but it does not follow that inadequate organisation spells lack of craftsmanship. The classic instance is the agricultural labourer, whose skill cannot be in serious dispute. The war has brought his skill and national value into bold relief. In like manner, we have suddenly discovered the functional value of the sailor. Whilst it is true that the mechanism of steam and electric power has enabled shipowners to dispense to a large extent with the weather-wisdom and sailing qualities of the old-time sailor, whilst captains and mates can nom secure their " tickets " without the previously necessary training In sailing ships, it yet remains true that the best captains are they who have learnt their trade literally " before the mast," and the best seamen are they who have acquired their skill, alertness and keen observation in " wind-jammers. " But hitherto Both the agricultural labourer and the seaman have been criminally underpaid, because inadequately organised. It is not without significance that one of the most powerful craft organisations in existence is the Merchant Service Guild, composed entirely of captains and officers of the mercantile marine. It was this organisation that laid up the P. & O. boats until its terms were accepted. Mad there been a strong agricultural union, as powerful on the land as is the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in the engineering shops, the history of the " release " of men to the army from '' industries of national importance " would have been vastly different from the blundering jumble it has become. Amongst the thousand and one lessons we have learnt from the war, not the least is the national importance (apart from its sectional value) of trade-organisation and the authority it confers. Priceless in war, it will prove infinitely precious in the settlement. and in the succeeding peace. There cannot, I hope, be two opinions as to the necessity of preserving and refining the crafts both of agriculture and seamanship. But our difficulties do not end with these two crafts. The war has expedited the tendency, already constituting a problem in those 'far-off days of peace, to break down the barriers between the " skilled " and " semi-skilled," particularly in the engineering industries. " Repetition " has been crowned with a halo of patriotism and automatic machinery has received the blessing of the Church and the plaudits of our governing classes. The consequent '' dilution '' has become a stupendous fact in industry, not only because spinners and weavers have became engineering war-workers (incidentally earning double and treble wages) but women have invaded the engineering shops in hundreds of thousands. In one large works known to me, of 7,000 employed, 65 per cent. are women. These women are not merely engaged on shells; they are working 5.9 and 9.2 guns. To add to the confusion, repetition " wages have exceeded '' skilled " " wages, with the result that skilled men have been drawn from their proper occupations to the more highly paid but. much less skilled work, It is an open secret IV.-THE that recently, when " leaving certificates " were withdrawn, there was considerable anxiety that the craft jobs would be deserted for the attractive " repetition " wages. To obviate the danger, more liberal wages were offered to the " skilled " men, who had resolutely From the insisted upon the time-basis of payment. other side, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers has opened its' doors to certain grades of semi-skilled workmen, to the chagrin of the old-fashioned craftunionists. Through the eyes of the selfish craftsman, the damage seems irremediable; but insult has yet to be added to injury by the employers, who, unless they can be restrained, intend to maintain this great army of semiskilled in a mad gamble of world-competition in purely quantitative production. When the war is over, we shall find ourselves faced with a mountainous national debt. It will be argued, both by the Government and the employers, that the only possible way to meet our national obligations will be by a gigantic commercialcrusade, the one and only consideration being large profits, out of which the debt-interest and sinking funds must be paid. An informed and alert Labour party must answer, both by deeds and argument, that wealth conscription is the way to pay the debt and that qualitative production is the only way to preserve our self-respect and create a sane economy. Quantitative production, in the conditions envisaged, spells the indefinite prolongation of wagery and the final degradation thecraftsman. of VI. We cannot be too cautious in drawing conclusions from such incongruous conditions; it would be safer indeed to draw none. War prophecies are, after all, only the transitory hopes or fears of the moment. It is better to fall back upon first principles. The condition precedent to National Guilds is the labour monopoly. This monopoly, of course, includes every grade of labour from the simplest to the most complex. Labourer and craftsman meet here on common ground; each is vitally concerned to preserve the labour monopoly, to keep his organisation " blackleg-proof. " This numerical monopoly obviously includes the control of all the crafts within its boundaries. Since the end in view is qualitative production, it follows that the development of every craft is imperative. Nor does it seem unreasonable to assume that the responsibility for maintaining and developing the craft properly falls on those who have already acquired it. The narrow craftsman takes the selfish view that the increased industrial power of the semi-skilled is an invasion of his own prescriptive rights, bought and paid for by premium, apprenticeship and other special training. In a competitive wage-market, there is something to be urged for this point of view: it is essentially a property right, which, if destroyed, threatens other propertyrights. If, for example, the employers overwhelm the craftsmen by a combination of semi-skilled labour and automatic machinery, they cannot complain if the craftsmen, in their turn, combine with the semi-skilled and unskilled and so oust the employer, whose powers of exploitation are thus rendered nugatory. And that is precisely what has happened. Up to a point, the employers have been careful not to antagonise the craftsmen; more than once, they have played off the craftsmen against the semi- and unskilled. It is the simple truth that the craft unions, in days now gone, let LIS hope for ever, co-operated with the employers in the preservation of a large supply of unskilled or unemployedlabour. But with machinery has come largescale production, relatively improving the economic position of the semi-skilled at the expense of the craftsmen, who, being in the same wage-bondage with semiskilled and unskilled, can only escape destruction by joining in a labour combination that can at once abolish wagery and establish qualitative production on a sound foundation, Whatever justification there may be to preserve existing privileges in a competitive wage-market, such justification disappears like an evil dream in the’ harmoniouseconomy of Guild organisation. Every accretion of skill and experience goes into the common fund of productive capacity, in due course bringing a far richer return than was ever dreamed of in the philosophy wagery. From this point of view, it becomes of evident that semi-skilled Guildsmen are economically more desirable than unskilled ; that every semi-skilled man who passes the test and becomes a genuine craftsman is an accession to the actual or potential wealth of the Guild. Thus, the craft-unionists, who under wagery had an incentive always to become a close corporation and to limit the progress of. the semiskilled, under the Guilds have a much stronger incentive work up to its highest pitch of skill every scrap to of available labour. For not only does every accretion of skill lighten and sweeten the day’s work, but it is one more guarantee that only qualitative work will be entertained. Only through the purifying spirit of a proud and self-reliant craftsmanship can this be attained. When, therefore, “ I-I ” anticipates the formation of trade unions inside the Guilds “ to defend their special interests as against the general interests of the industry," he is partially right as regards the fact but egregiously wrong as regards the motive. Undoubtedly the craftsmen will see to it that their crafts do not suffer and are not submerged in an inchoate mass of nondescript labour. It would surely be an evil day if Labour, in securing the monopoly of its labour, lost its craft tradition. The organisation therefore that “ H ” foretells as something dangerous, or even fatal, to National Guilds, will be in fact an imperative necessity. This general principle of craft-protection does not await expression until National Guilds are formed. It is equally applicable in the transition period of industrial unionism : equally applicable under workshop control, upon whose committees must sit the representatives of every craft and occupation concerned. I cannot help thinking that industrial unionism would develop quicker if this fact were rather more emphasised. Fundamentally, the case for industrial unionism is the need for Labour control, but this does not preclude every available protection for the crafts. The real danger to the crafts is the failure of Labour to gain that fundamental monopoly-the foundation of each subsequent development. VII. Of the organisation of the crafts under the Guilds little need be written. It is now generally admitted that technical education and training must be put absolutely under the control of the Guilds. In these technical schools young Guildsmen will begin their contact with industria1 reality. We can but murmur a fervent prayer that they will find it as fascinating as their fathers found it tedious. Whether such training will eventually supplant apprenticeship I do not know. The Guilds will in their wisdom decide when the time comes. Nor need we seek to know with particularity how craftsmen will organise for greater security, or how enrich their traditions by fresh experiences and new discoveries. I need only point out that there already exist great institutions, libraries and laboratories, the preserves of the middle-class “ technicals, ” who flourish endless initials after their names, their peacock way of telling us that they are “members” or “associates” of this or that solemn society or association. Do not nail their ears to the pump ! VIII. All who accept the Guild analysis of wagery are agreed that the capitalists mould production to their own consumptive purposes. But the capitalists disappear when National Guilds emerge from the class struggle, leaving the control of production to the producer, always provided there are consumers to consume. The production of commodities is not a pastime; it is a function created out of human needs. Whilst the producing Guilds have it always in their power to decline any form of production they may deem derogatory, their most obvious duty is to meet the desires of the consumers in every legitimate way. And Guild organisation will be lacking in a vital part unless it makes it easy for producer and consumer to meet and discuss production, in small things as in great, But that does not really carry us very far, because it is a fact (and will remain a fact after the proletarian intermediateconsumer has become a final consumer) that in the vast mass of products the consumer throws the responsibility upon the ‘producer to do his best. This best-or worst-is roughly tested to-day by market competition. With that competition removed, the producer’s responsibility is increased and not decreased. The burden of a competitive price disappears; the burdenof quality remains or is added. It is astonishing the vast number of things we consume without special thought. On rising this morning I flicked the incandescent burner into radiant light, forgetting that in my youth I was quite content with lamp or candle. I went into the bath-room where is a blessed miracle of hot or cold water by a turn of the wrist. Very and different from, say, fifty years ago. The gas-fitters plumbers may have taken the hint from some crotchety consumer; I am certain the credit belongs to them. On coming down to breakfast I found my letters on the table, all sealed in envelopes,’ cut and pasted by ingenious machinery. On the table also were a linen tablecloth, some salt, mustard, and pepper, their appearance in each case a marvel. I forget what I had for breakfast, but I remember the tea came from China -surely a great performance. I glanced at my watch, which is a self-winder. Had I thought of it, I might have remembered that my grandfather inserted a key into the face of his old “ turnip,” whilst my father wound up his watch by opening the back. Every hour of the day down to midnight, which finds me writing with a fountain-pen, has been full of strange adventures with the products of human skill and ingenuity. I am tolerably certain that the changes wrought in each decade are the work mainly of the producer, the craftsman, of the inventor who is an inspired craftsmanand sometimes an idiot. On the other hand, I am particularabout ‘my clothes, my hat and my boots, and go to some trouble to get what I want. The makers of these articles, I generally find, are interested in meeting my requirements apart altogether from monetary considerations. Whilst it is evident that, when the mass of the workers become final consumers, they will grow more imperious in demanding quality and variety, demands which all intelligent Guildsmen will welcome, I cannot but rejoice that the producer will have achieved sovereignty over his own work and be no longer at the beck arid call of others, whose only claims upon him are their bank-balances. But this control over his own work, as I have already said, carries very much the same responsibility as attaches to a doctor when called for by a patient. Andrew Undershaft, Armourer, declined to draw distinctions between the warring nations. But: had any Government suggested to him to reduce the quality of his guns or adulterate his guncotton, I fancy he would have closed his account and called in his loans. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand we may anticipate friendly co-operation between Guild producers and. consumers. When serious differences arise, not even soluble by the Guild Congress, what authority remains to enforce equity and execute justice? None, save the State; and not the State, until we have related it to the Guilds in general and to the Guild Congress in particular; s. G. H. VIII. The antagonism to the partisans of liberty would be a good deal more intelligible, I confess, if it emanated from writers who maintained the economic interpretation of history as a dogma. (To call anything a dogma is not to be offensive. On the contrary, it is a form of praise. For it is at least something people can try to understand. It has a meaning.) The resentment which all the older Socialists and some of the newer felt against Liberalism even at its best rested on a just conviction that political and personal liberty were stones offered them instead of bread. And from this it is easy to jump to the conclusion that they can never matter, at least, until after the Social Revolution. Not only did these concessions leave economic conditions untouched, and cause the minds of men to be directed from ends to means that would never lead to anywhere except to disaster; but as the Liberals interpreted them, they mean nu more-or very little more-than machinery for voting:. Even among the greater Liberals, like Acton and Morley, to whom Freedom was the essential idea of politics, the same obtuseness to the dominance of economic power repelled the Socialist. Indeed, it is not surprising, when we remember that strange' product of the nineteenth century mind, the S.D.P. Nobody could have seen more clearly than it did that the wage-system was the enemy; and equally nothing could be more pathetic than their political propaganda except the belief that it would prevail. Thanks to the enlightenment of our damned undertakings by Syndicalism, these confusions are now only memories. Just as Syndicalism cared not at all for the State, so political and personal liberty met with its impatient scorn. And, plainly, if the partial strike be an immediate weapon whereby the revolutionary antagonism of classes is kept alive and stimulated : if the general strike be a social myth, an anticipation of the future giving an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action; if a catastrophic revolution be the sole means to a better world which only the middle class would think of defining; if the basis of it all be the hope that out of chaos the unforeseeable purposiveness of natural forces may bring forth order-then we need trouble about nothing but the barricades and meetings for the interchange of testimony. Wild men stammering gospels in strange tongues do not take heed, either in over India or Ireland, of the police. Whenever religious men they have hung the terror of judgment and the end of the world, for their constitutional right to freedom of worship they have not been very careful. Guild Socialists (it cannot be denied) have descended from these heights of religious exaltation. If this makes them more easily intelligible to common men, it also lays upon them responsibilities that they cannot neglect. They must have a political theory, and this theory must be capable of rational defence. Politics, we may say, is in principle only an extension of morality. Or if it be thought necessary to avoid the ambiguity connected with the term politics, let us agree that social theory deals ultimately with values realised in social groups or communities. These groups, moreover, however true it may be to define then by reference to the common things which are their objects, consist of individuals. Insist as you like on the utter insignificance of the person in the eyes of God or of those eternal values that lie beyond himself ; it can never be irrelevant fer social theory to take poor mortals into account. A different attempt may, however, be made on somewhatsimilar grounds to call in question the maintenance a theory of political liberty. of National Guilds, it may be urged, is a form of Socialism, and, as such, it has rightly despised the political An Apology for the Liberty of the Person. -for this, it sees, is a mere consequence of the economic. Economic power precedes political power. Therefore, to develop a theory of political and personal liberty is, at the best, a superfluous luxury, and, at the worst, a wilful hindrance and return to the middleclass political Liberalism which Socialism abandoned, but which has remained its real enemy. If we provide for economic freedom, all the others will follow in its train, while Liberalism can pursue only one of two roads, arid on either it will meet with disaster. It may, like the old Radical, devote itself to the extension of the franchise and the provision of education, and the other impedimenta and shibboleths of bourgeois democracy. Or like the newest sort of Lilberal (e.g., Mr. J. A. Hobson) democracy v. privilege may serve it as a battle-cry. Within the capacious net which these gentlemen cast a place may be found for all sorts of curious fish, from the abolition of the censorship and the restoration of the freedom of the shipowner to a scheme of industrial reconstruction remarkably like National Guilds. This, it will be said, is your most obvious affinity. There is nothing in your argument (which may be true enough, for all we know or care) which is not perfectly compatible with it; and this is not surprising, for it should best be regarded as an attempt to plough with the National Guild heifer and sow a crop of Liberal reaction. Such an objection as this would be treated lightly by Mr. de Maeztu, because he is antagonistic to the economic interpretation of history, which he thinks is tainted with the German heresy. I disagree with his argument, though it would scarcely be relevant to discuss it here; and I go further, and assert that the maintenance of a doctrine in principle that of the materialistconception of history is essential to any defensible form of Socialism. For 'the present, I content myself with recalling to the minds of National Guildsmen the familiar saying that economic power precedes political power, and inquiring whether it is to be taken seriously or not. If it is not, what is to prevent a member of the Labour, or any other political party, bringing in a Bill to create National Guilds, and expecting it to pass in the changed state of English feeling which we are told has been brought about by the war? But the fact is that nothing is more familiar to students of Guild literature than the double principlewhich forms the basis of its constructive policy (a) that economic power precedes political power, and (b) that industry must be a function undertaken by the Guilds in partnership with the State. That a man should unfeignedly believe both of these dogmas is essential to this way of salvation. The assumption that this principle exhausts the rule of faith, however, is as erroneous as it is facile. Economic conditions may be dominant, without the maintenance of what degree of political freedom is left to us even in a capitalist state being worthless. Still more is this true of personal liberty, so far as you care to distinguish the two. Freedom of speech and the freedom of the Press are invaluable if not absolutelyindispensable weapons in the conflict with economic and its correlated tyrannies; while if we consider National Guilds coming into being or actually developed, political and economic freedom may pass as their justification. To suggest, then, that this many-sided and carefully balanced position is mere Liberalism is foolish : and the fatuity of it is not diminished but increased if we say that we mean, of course, the principle and not the party. Even the passage of political institutions sometimes means something. The contrast of the writings of the greater and older LiberaIs with the futility of their Parliamentary activities, and the ultimate outcome of the travail of the mountain in the shape of a little adder, like the Insurance Act, is one of the most pathetic things in history. But it is also one of the most significant, That it should be possible at all is enough to call for an investigation into the dogmas of Liberalism, no matter how old and distinguished. But that the complacency Lord Morley should survive it unscathed of is sufficient evidence of intellectual error, since we know it does not indicate a mere senile decay. The mere progress of discussion among Guildsmen has already taken the problem far beyond the regions of pure or applied economics; and the economic conditions by reference to which the problem is defined and the solution distinguished, have not become less important. We cannot avoid problems of political theory : and to keep philosophy out after that admission is altogether impossible. But it would perhaps be equally undesirable. The philosopher, after all, is like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, also one of the servants of Jahwe distinguished from the others only by his peculiar subtlety. That an argument of this sort should be capable of almost indefinite extension is not surprising when we recognise liberty is and must be the centre of political controversy. I have discussed only some of the abstract principles which ought, to govern our attitude to it, and I have neither completed nor illustrated the discussion. Even to provide some part of a philosophy of the Guilds, it ought to be expanded and its application to particular cases-say to that of the conscientious objector-pointed out. More important still, the question of freedom in the Guild has never received the attention which it requires, although one may welcome several brief notes on it by Mr. W. M. Ewer without agreeing with them. This particular fragment on social theory, however, may be brought to an end here with a summary of the argument. I. Liberty involves the free and responsible direction of one's own life. On the negative side it implies security that no one should be molested in doing what he fakes to be his duty by the intimidation of authority, however exercised. Like everything else it must be estimated by reference to objective values. It is not doing what one likes, but what one believes to be right. 2. Liberty belongs, therefore, to men's souls; and a failure to appreciate its value may therefore arise either from a contempt for the-soul or a mistaken idea that the soul is somehow unreal or cannot have value. This can be guarded against by showing that the soul (or self) has a reality of its own which is not merely that of its objects. 3. There are three senses in which a thing may have value. (a) it may be an intrinsic value; (b) it may have value as a means; (c) it may have an additive value. These are different but not mutually exclusive in one thing. In the case of each appeal must be made to reflective consideration. 4. Liberty has value for its own sake: it may be worth striving after, although it has no result beyond itself; and as an element it enormously increases the values of wholes into which it enters. The problem of its value as a means is more complicated because of the various degrees of unity possible between it and its end. The connection in the case of liberty is very intimate; so that most great ends arise (if at all) directly out of liberty. 5. It is as a means that liberty chiefly requires to be defended and discussed. The asserted antithesis of personal and political liberty is false. It is not really supported by the analogy of the Greek state : and in the modern state the two are in principle the same and a means to values. 6. The fact is that although the functional principle and the primacy of values (rather than of things) may be accepted as the basis of societies, other elements enter into any state which is defensible : while if these are isolated the states built up on them may be very bad and need not exclude slavery. The functional principle (which is supposed to assert political but not personal liberty) is no more than a statement of certain abstract conditions which a decent society implies. But to complete the elements of its structure liberty at least must be added. 7. The personal side of' liberty must be emphasised even more than the political in the modern State because the danger that threatens us is not the tyranny of a despot but the impersonal dominance of the State. 8. A further argument can be drawn from the analogies among various social groups. The basis of the generally admitted recognition of nationality is easy to see; it is that it is a potential value, and therefore at once sacred and intangible. This is true also in general about other social groups and about the individual. 9. The objection based on the dogma of Original Sin --that such a view as this implies a romantic and impossibly idealistic view of human nature, is baseless, and itself rests on a confusion between religion and morality. 10. Such a position differs from Syndicalism by recognising the political community and its importance and from any form of Liberalism by maintaining that economic power precedes political power and welcoming all the consequences of this principle. O. LATHAM. Studies in Contemporary Mentality. By Ezra Pound. XIX.-? VERSUS CAMOUFLAGE. '' Je n'aurais jamais fait. "-BRANTOME. THE market value of man per head depends somewhat upon the supply. It is to the advantage of the purchasers to keep this value fairly low. The populace, as the only producer of more populace, has a monopoly theproduction. This monopoly has never, so of far as we know, been gripped and used by the populace its own special advantage. to Mr. W. H. Hudson in "The Purple Land that England Lost " describes a country where men were too scarce. Too high a value per head per labouring human may endanger the civilisation of any given area, i.e., we may arrive at a condition of primitiveness, a state of affairs when no one will do anything for, or even in co-operation with, anyone else; as, per example, the Bat, dull and nearly useless condition of much of rural New England to-day. The danger of this sort of set-back, this relapse into pastoral inanity, is, however, only operative when the relatively high value of labour is accompanied by an inability or an unwillingness to co-operate; by a lack of interest in diversity, by a lack of impetus in dividing and diversifying the modes of expending energy. The repopulationists, in yelling for more and more populace, forget or conceal the fact that a few brains are of more use in defending a country than a large lot of human bodies. A few more skilful professors of chemistry would be worth a number of regiments, and, in the end, cheaper to produce and maintain. It is not only conceivable but highly probable that early civilisations disappeared when, either by invasions of barbarians or by uprisings of the lower inhabitants, the skilled men, the scholars, the intellectuals of the country, were exterminated. (The art of trepanning was known in South America ages ago and for as many ages forgotten. We now know this by the discovery of skulls mended with silver plates around which the bone has re-grown.) The danger to civilisation lies not so much in destroying a score or so million human beings, as in destroying perhaps half a million of the inteIligent. The restrengthening of any nation or party depends far more upon gathering to it the intelligent, and in enlightening such populations as it has, than in a senseless multiplication. Notwithstanding these facts, which it is decidedly unpleasant of me, and decidedly bad form for me, to mention, we find the publications to which I have drawn the reader’s attention busied almost if not all of them in the construction of camouflage, in a diverse-appearing but fundamentally unified endeavour to prevent thought, or at least to deaden it, to damp it down, to prevent, if riot thought, at least any vigour, any explorativeness, but, above all, any accuracy, in popular thinking-. Whether it be the timorous treading of the ‘‘ Spectator,” and that sort of press, deploring the unusual in all its forms; whether it be the grab-theEarth tone of “ Chambers,” or the suet-pudding roll of Mr. Bart Kennedy’s phrases, or the silliness of the illustrated weeklies and fashion papers, or the commonsense exterior of Mr. Bottomley, or the sweetreasonableness of the papists, or the unspeakable stupidity of the “ Church,’’ or the epilepsy of the chapel, or the plot full of lacunae from the pen of the cheap fictioneer, it all goes into camouflage. Is all this necessary? Is the stuff under the camouflage worth all this painting?, Roughly, this canvas and cording seem to be spread over a few very simple matters: one, that Christianity is no longer believed in by a number of enlightened people. Some humane principle, as, for example, the “ fraternal deference ” of Confucius would, if introduced, finish off Christianity. The German, seeing that Christianity was ready for extinction, took, in his usual blunt-headedness, the wrong end of the stick. He tried‘ to substitute the ethics of the alligator. This is what Mr. Yeats would call attempting to “ restore an irrevocable past. ” The principles of Confucius will do quite as well, probably better than those of the Gospels; any humane ethics would probably serve; at least they would free us from the plague of vendors of taboos, and practitioners of sacerdotal monopolies ; from bigots who will pretend to a right, a sort of droit du seigneur, to interfere in other men’s private lives. This defines the camouflage of the religious and semireligious publications, put up mostly, but not entirely, by people with a definite material interest in Christianity. The other papers are camouflage over the “ economic situation.” Is this necessary? Do we not all know that there is a tension between capital and labour? Will this great cat and its infinite progeny stay forever in its various and commodious bags? Since presumably ‘‘ Capital ” in the abstract desires the enslavement of “labour” in the abstract, the docile, ductile enslavement ; since “ Labour ” in the abstract desires the annihilation of capitalists; is there any reason why the intellectual, if he exists, should not discuss the two forces cleanly and clearly, seeing presumably nothing but his own destruction in the uncontrolled reign either of capital or of labour-with-itspresent -mentality ? The capitalist (perhaps one per cent. of him) might keep a few intellectuals in his scullery. I am inclined to think one per cent. a rather excessive estimate. I doubt if the intellectual life is much led Labour? in Petrograd as managed by Trotsky-Lenin. My domicile has three rooms, one of them exceeding small. I feel that a lodger, chosen at his own instigation, would be an incursion and, more or less, an interruption. I prefer some more temperate treatment of financial inequality. Tsarist Russia has got what she played for. Any aristocracy or ruling class that does not work and sweat to educate the people under it is bound to go down in blood, and I am inclined to think it deserves to. The German ruling caste is probably more firmly fixed than any other in Europe or America. I have already, in these columns, said my say of the German. educational system, the philosophy underlying it, and my reasons €or condemning itfundamentally ; but the German class is seated firmly because it has worked to educate its populace in certain directions. It has had perhaps onIy one blind spot, or has offered its people facilities for vision along every other line, if only they will bow down to the particular national fetich. It has been the brag of English and American commerce for at least two decades that “ Brains arc cheap. ” For the folly of that hucksters’ slughorn England and America are now paying. It seems to me desirable that no future bills, or at least fewer future bills of this sort should be “ run up.’’ Or conversely, it seems advisable to do away with a good deal of the ‘‘ current magazine, and periodical ” camouflage. I have endeavoured in this little series of articles to indicate certain phases of “ current magazine and periodical ” activities or declivities or whatever the just term may be. Their aim, as stated, would seem to be a clogging rather than an aiding of the nation’s mental activities. There remains, in Mazzini’s terms, ‘‘ education.” I think he spoke both of that of the press and that of the schools. It might be not inadvisable to do away with the parson altogether, and apply the Church endowments to a betterment of the local schools. It is undoubtedly a good thing for the people of scattered communities to meet once a week. Too great a seclusion may breed a sort of barbarous dullness. This excuse is often given for the continuing of church services after a religious belief is extinct. The same purpose would be served if a rather better village schoolmaster were provided, and if on the Sabbath he should discourse on some literary or scientific subject, (it might he well to avoid politics and economics, leaving the ‘‘ Lord’s Day ” a day of pence, and preventing the informative flow of words from dropping into argument). By providing, not a clerk’ in orders, but a free man with a university education, the ground would be cut away from those good Tories who argue that the Church should be kept up because “ at least it keeps a gentleman ’’ (or something more or less like one) in every parish. Of the two chief branches of camouflage, the religious is the less real. I mean that enlightened people are practically through with it. It is a moribund issue. It has been burbling along for two thousand years. It is really much more easy to settle, or dispose of. The economic reality is not only “ under discussion,” but the discussion is new; it is full of new and constantly renewed complications. Intelligent people are by no means of one mind. All one can pray for is more honesty and less camouflage. The thing is so tremendously difficult that we need every scrap of honesty and every scrap of intelligence that can be focussed on it. Only German Emperors and Bolsheviks see the thing as a quite simple matter. Here is the future struggle. In the affairs of culture the peace terms are much more easy to settle : we should by all means keep Shakespeare. Let the Kaiser take Jahweh (preferably to the island of Elba). The monotheistic temperament has been the curse of our time. Out of School. The ultimate problem of education is that which Mr. Edmond Holmes has called “ The Problem of the Soul ”; and the first question about it is whether that is its right name. Mr. Holmes’s little book, published under this title by Constable at 3d. net, does a great service to both the “nature” and the “nurture” schools of educational thought-the greatest service of all, for which it will be cordially disliked by them both : it aboIishes them, by showing that they depend, as schools, upon a false opposition. Each of them, considered separately, misses something, which is its union with the other. Mr. Holmes goes to the root of the matter when he says that the point of focus for the attention of a good teacher is the child’s consciousness. Fix your eyes upon consciousness and the ideas of nature and nurture coalesce, like two visual images of the same object that have been held apart by the muscular effort of squinting-. Consciousness is the region of contact between personality and environment, and it is only in that region that the word education has meaning. To go back to the method of elementary association, the beginning of philosophic teaching (the end is, I think, further from realisation than “‘A. E. R.’s ” optimism would suggest), we find that the teacher with an instinct €or her work encourages the prehensile ‘faculties of a child’s mind to reach out and make good their hold upon as many different perceptions as possible. Both the value and the permanence of each perception depend upon its being held, not for itself, but for its relation with others. A spider’s web does not make a bad illustration, and most teaching is like an attempt tu make the web with only one or two points of attachment. The cross-threads joining up the radial lines are the relations between relations that spring up in the mind; and it is the patterning of these threads that can never be perceived by people who have never been trained to think along more than one line at once. (“ Cobwebs of learning, admit-able for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit ”? It depends upon whether the web is made of mind-stuff alone, or of that something more than mind which we have to discuss.) Consciousness is the threshold of that which we call the soul, as interest is the threshold of that which we call inspiration. In considering the elements of genius, and the first principles of education for genius that can be deduced from them, we have found that philosophic teaching, however much it is freed from pedantry and however closely it corresponds to the natural play of philosophic instinct in children, only covers part of the ground; or rather, it covers the whole ground, but in only one aspect. Its correlatives arc education in fellowship, and education in art. Hut each of these three can be expressed in terms of the others; hence the tendency of the philosopher, the saint and the artist to look askance at one another, each believing that he alone has the perfect doctrine. Truth, goodness and beauty are the only forms of currency that are mutually convertible down to the smallest genuine residue. The trouble is that the conversion takes place, like the meeting of parallel straight lines, in infinity. It is something that happens in what we call the soul. So far, in attempting to locate the soul, we are taking three loci instead of one; and it cannot be said that we are much further on. A better figure than three parallel lines would be the three dimensions of space which also, we are told, meet in infinity. For the three dimensions meet under- our very noses as well, at any and every point; only the point, put under the microscope of consciousness, proves to be infinitesimal. Infinity of space consists in all the points that there are. The infinite consciousness, if there is such a thing, might be supposed to consist in all the consciousnesses that there are. At all events, we have enough data to say that the immense latent store of the individual unconscious mind consists in the moments of consciousness that have been experienced during the individual life, related-to what extent we cannot be certain-with the experience of other individuals and, more hypothetically, with a universal experience. Our instinct for selfdevelopment (including the child’s instinct for selfeducation) prompts us to train our consciousness in the widest possible grasp of relations, factual, personal and aesthetic. Education in philosophy, fellowship and art is the social expression of that instinct along its three main lines. The units of experience, individual, social, racial or universal, are there, in the unconscious mind, entirely sterile in so far as they remain unitary. (I am using the word unit merely as representing a convenient atomic theory ; my “ units,” like atoms, would be resolved in a final analysis into some such aether of consciousness as we may imagine to constitute the life of a protozoon.) All that matters, all that constitutesindividuality and development, is the nexus of relations between the units. In practice these relations will include many things apprehended by the personal and aesthetic perceptions, but not converted into the intellectual currency. These percepts we are apt to class as unconscious, confusing consciousness with intellectual consciousness. As a matter of observation, intellectual percepts are often more unreal, further ‘from the full-blooded apprehension which is true consciousness, than the unformulated personal or aesthetic realisations that subsist “ at the back of the mind.” Rut the whole distinction between conscious and unconscious is unsatisfactory. I must revert to terms that I have used before in THE NEW AGE; and speak of undifferentiated sensation, shading down to mere protoplasmic groping, as subconscious, while I class the percepts that are fuller than consciousness can seize, shading up towards intuition and inspiration, as super-conscious. In the super-conscious region we have the continuum between consciousness and soul. With this I can return to Mr. Holmes, whom I have left in the most unmannerly way upon the doormat while I developed a further point in the thesis of these articles. The point, however, has its connexion with Mr. Holmes’s much more comprehensive discussion of consciousness. “The Problem of the Soul’’ shows very satisfactorily how wide is the gap between biological determinism and philosophical commonsense, whatever Professor Bateson may yet have to say on the question. I must confess that I hear anything that Professor Bateson says to the accompaniment of a curious creaking sound, which I think must be the sound of poor old Mendel turning in his grave. It is painful to listen to an invaluable biologist trying to make biology do the work of metaphysics. Mr. Holmes also puts environmental determinism into its proper place as an important piece of machinery, and no more. The real problem of the super-conscious mind, shaken free from “explanation" in terms of mechanisms that only explain themselves, sees chiefly as the riddle of its origin. Wisely he concluding that the riddle is unanswered by the factual data in our possession, he adopts the reincarnation theory as the most plausible conjecture and as throwing the problem of the soul’s origin back into the remote past. But this solution is hardly worthy of Mr. Holmes’s faculty for escape from thinking in terms of time. The origin of super-conscious mind can no more be located in the past than in the future; it is a perpetual becoming. And it is the business of educational research to catch the elements of soul in the nascent condition. We have to study inspiration, with its analogues of involuntary thought, intuitive perception, and dream fantasy. It is here that the continuum between mind and soul is just beginning to be mapped out. We can only begin to understand the education of the psyche as we begin to understand the things that we and children dream, awake or asleep. *** Anyone who tried to make sense of the final sentence in my second paragraph, last week, may be relieved to know that by a very specious misprint the word “ art ” was twice transformed into the word “act.” The result was like giving Samuel Smiles a portfolio in the government of the unconscious mind. KENNETHRICHMOND. Memories of Old Jerusalem. By Ph. J. Baldensperger. IV. Bir Ayub was another great attraction, not only for us boys, but for all Jerusalem, when the Siloam fellahin brought the glad tidings of its overflow alter persistent rain. When the peasants see the water rising, they fill a pitcher and run with it to Jerusalem, where they receive bakhshish from their ordinary watercustomers. “Farr Bir Ayub (Job’s Well has overflowed) cries the fellah. The news spreads like wildfire, and, if the day is clear, there is a general exodus towards Bir Ayub ’Temporary coffee-houses are set up beside the stream, and all Jerusalem goes down there for a picnic. The rushing water was a rare and lovely sight to us, who were accustomed to see it only still, in cisterns. Bir Ayub is a deep shaft, measuring no less than 39 metres, situated at the junction of three valleys. All the water from the slopes of the Mount of Olives, Zion, and the Hill of Evil Counsel gushes out here. It is probably the En Rogel of Scripture, the boundary between Judah and Benjamin (Joshua xv, 7). Some Jews think that it is Nehemiah’s fountain, which others place. at Ain Sitti Miriam, The Muslims, knowing little of Joab, and having a great veneration for Job, identify it with the latter. Salih el Kak, a Siloam fella, who used to come with goat’s milk to our school, had a special admiration for Job, who was a wealthy prophet. In order to test Jab’s piety, Allah let Iblis, destroy his property, but he bore all with patience. Every fellah, when suffering, asks for Sabr Ayub (the patience of Job). When Ayub was covered with boils, he smelt so bad that no one would approach him but his wife. As they were very poor she carried him about in her abba {cloak) upon her back, begging for their living, during seven years. Iblis, appearing to her as a lovely youth, said : “Leave that old beggar and come live with me.” Exceedingly indignant, she went and told the Prophet of this impudent proposal. Ayub was so infuriated that he swore: “If ever I recover from my calamity I will give you a hundred stripes for having the effrontery to talk to Iblis, ” She, nevertheless, continued to carry him about, until one day she set him down upon the spot where the well now stands, while she went off upon some errand. While she was gone Ayub.” prayed fervently to be delivered from his pains. Jubrail (Gabriel), the Faithful Spirit, appeared suddenly, and, striking the ground, caused water to gush out. “Wash yourself,” said the Angel, “and drink of this water which now is red, but which will soon turn green when it flows gently, and then turn white and sink below the level of the ground. Ayub did as he was told, and instantly grew young and healthy. He took possession of the land around, and became the owner‘ of the spring for ever. He planted vegetables obtained rich crops. The very rain which and fell on his plantations turned the leaves to gold. He became wealthier than he had ever been before. worriedabout the oath which he had sworn against his wife, he consulted Gabriel, who told him : “Take a palm branch with a hundred leaves and strike her gently with it.” Ayub thanked him and obeyed, and everyone was much relieved. A lamp burns day and night in honour of Ayub in a niche of the well-shaft, furnished by the piety of the Siloam villagers. An Imam of the Haram esh-Sherif said that the water has many healing qualities. It effectively removes boils in remembrance of the prophet; it restores sight-to the blind, cures rheumatism, and enables barren women to have children, and pregnant women to give easy birth. A derwish said : “It is well known that 70,000 angels pray continually on the Sakhrah,* and that the * The rock within the so-called Mosque of Omar. suspended rock is carried by as many jinnis who sigh grievously beneath the weight. Every time a purified believer enters the Haram, the burden of the rock is multiplied by 70. When many true believers enter simultaneously, the wicked spirits shed tears in such quantities that the water gushes out at Bir Ayub.” The more worshippers in the Haram the more water flows; thus, piety has a direct relation to the coming harvest. Fully a quarter of the town is taken up by the Haram esh-Sherif,* and another quarter is inhabited by Muslims only, where we never ventured. But we were fascinated by the distant vision of the most distinguishedMosque in Islam, which has replaced the Jewish temple. We were too welI accustomed to the sight of carcases and rubbish generally to be astonished that such sacred hills as those of Moriah and Zion up to the very gates of the Sanctuary of David should be strewn with refuse. The hills, the fields, the roads, the very air, were foul with offal of the city thrown at random when the donkeys carrying it out considered that they hac! had enough of their load. Most of the rubbish is taken out through the Bab el-Mugharibeh (Gate of the Moors), which, in English, is appropriately known as the Dung Gate. The Jews, who live inside the walls, contribute most to the pollution of their sacred hills. The filth begins at the very homes of the Jews, where the remains of figs and other rotten fruits defile the streets, and are scattered all along the way till the residue manures the fields of the fellahin of Siloam. Muslims and Christians, passing, held their noses as for a carcase, whilst the tribe of Judah enjoyed the spirits which they had distilled from the said fruit in their ghetto. ’The owners of the fields from the valley to the hill-top do not object, as this intense manuring helps their land, of which the original soil is unproductive, being composed of lime and gravel from the ruins of the former city. ‘The fame of Siloam cauliflowersgrown on this refuse has spread through Palestine and Syria, and along the walls fine fields of barley cover the rubbish for a good part of the year. The filth attracts a number of stray dogs who find abundant food among the dung-heaps, while their bitches shelter in the cactus-hedge which covers a big area inside the Dung Gate. The Turkish sentries, generally kind to animals, hardly interfere with the comings and goings of “unlucky dogs,” as they humbly and quietly pass the gate. In the evenings, we used to watch the innumerable turtledoves and ,pigeons, home. from the fields, wheeling around the two great cupolas of the Dome of the Rock (miscalled the Mosque of Omar) and the Mosque. El Aksa. The doves nest in the stately cypress-trees of the Haram enclosure, in company with tribes of sparrows, and are sure never to be disturbed within the sacred precincts. Thousands of rooks, like a black river, passed high above our heads towards the city walls, which were otherwise deserted for the night ; and there subsided noisily. These Rocks of birds, which are a feature of Jerusalem, have given rise to many legends of King Solomon as having power over the birds above his throne. Salih el Kak was always willing to relate them. The birds, he said, were the devoted subjects of the king. They flew about his throne perpetually in such force as to protect him from the fierce rays of the sun. Every morning they would gather round him for their prayers. He noticed that the Nisi- (the whiteheaded vulture) always came in last of all. The Nisr excused himself, saying: “My father is so old, and has so lost all his feathers that when the birds pass by they tease him. So I wait till every bird has passed before I start.” “Ma sh’Allah !” said the king. “Thou art a sturdy son”; and, stretching out his hand, he laid it on the * The temple area. Nisr’s head, and blessed him with these words. “Neither thou cor thy descendants shall ever lose the feathers of the head,” and, for a token of that blessing, the head-feathers of the vulture are white unto this day. In the splendid barley fields in spring, one used to see a thoroughbred horse, the property of some Pasha or Efendi, tethered here and there ; proudly neighing, and then Iistening to the echo of its voice as it resounded from the old grey city-walls. The Asayil [sing. Asil), or thoroughbred Arab horses, are never used for hard or menial work. This is reserved for their bastard cousin the Kadish Sometimes a Kadish belonging to a man of Nabi Daud would enjoy the pasture and some of the reputation of an Asil. But, generation ally, the Kadish is employed in mills or as a beast of burden, and fed upon a little dry barley and a lot of or chopped straw, which swells his stomach uselessly. The Asil receives a good ration of barley, no chopped straw at all, and succulent food only in the spring. Every gate of Jerusalem was closed at sunset in my boyish days, except the Jaffa Gate, which was kept open a few hours later. The poor citizen who arrived too late had to go round half the town to enter. Belated Jews home from the cemetery would follow us, if the Dung Gate happened to be closed. A sort of antisemitism was at that time pretty general, Muslims, as well as Christians, having a dislike for Jews. The best thing such a belated Jew could do was to follow us and enter the Montefiore Jewish Settlement in the valley of Hinnom. He would never have dared to cross the hill of Zion for fear of the Muslims of Nebi Daud, and the passage by the Jaffa Gate, and through the Christian quarter was as dangerous. “Yahudi,”* “Siknaji,” “Khakham,” called out in an insulting tone, though no real insult, were resented for the‘ implied disdain, and they were sometimes accompanied by a blow or shower of missiles. We took, however, kindly to the Jews, in spite of their distrust, simply because they were so scared of everybody. More than once my brothers and myself, in later life, protected them from hostile fellahin. Outside the walls of Jerusalem no Jew was bold enough to live in those days, except only in the Montefiore Settlement, where they were perfectly safe, being surrounded by a solid wall, and guarded by Darfuri negroes (Muslims) at the gates at night. One evening certain of the older boys climbed up the hill towards the Greek cemetery and Nebi Daud When we neared the top, a strong wind almost blew us back. Suddenly we came face to face with a whiteturbaned Muslim with a close black beard--who apparently walking up and down--and we were frightened, was for we had expected to be quite alone, since Nebi Daud closed its gates at an early hour. “What is your name?” asked one of the bigger boys. “Wafa,” answered the man, astonished at the question. The boy ran back, and, like a flock of scared birds, we followed him down hill. “A narrow escape,” he said, when we were safe indoors. “We have met a Marid not a doubt of that, and if I had cot had the presence of mind to flee at once, we should have been either flightened to death or captured in his grip. Doubtless, a man has been killed on that spot, and the Marid hovers there until his time is up. ” Wafa was one of the kindest inhabitants of Nebi Daud, as we learnt later. He was a well-established greengrocer in the Suk inside the Jaffa Gate, and for many years we bought our vegetables at his shop. My mother was on visiting terms with his family afterwards; and as children we could enter the harim without any fear, and learnt to know the ways of the secluded beings. * Spanish Jew. Polish Jew. Spanish rabbi. Death, or fulfilment of a promise, given soemtimes as a proper name to Muslims. The women, as a rule, had eyes and eyebrows black with kohl, and often a few marks upon the cheeks and hands. ‘The older- women dyed their grey or white hair red. After asking my mother when she wouId look for brides for her sons, and repeating the name of Allah at every question about the family, the women would talk fasatin.* Then they would inquire what food we generally had; and, finally, would ask for flowers to plant about the terraces of the enclosed houses. Mantur and Rihan (Levkaja and Basil) are the favourites with Muslim women, who love roses also, but cannot cultivate them in their tiny flower-pots. As we grew up, and were five boys before the birth of my only sister, these harim visits stopped for decency. The return visits were rather disagreeable, as the women entered the garden and completely devastated it, despoiling it of every flower and bud, as if it was an open field. Journey Round My Room. VI. AGAINST one wall of my room is a small bookcase, neatly constructed, but more in the fashion of a lectern than of an ordinary bookcase. It contains three shelves, on each of which rest three heavy books bound with carved wooden covers. On the cover of the first book is a representation of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, surrounded by lotus-leaves. On the second is Garuda, the winged angel; the third shows a temple, with a curved flight of steps leading up to it. ’The other six have various designs. These nine books are my “Mahabharata.” The actual text-it is the famous Calcutta translation--I purchased at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar, under somewhat amusing circumstances, which may be told another time. The covers were carved for me by Mohammedan craftsmen in Kashmir, from the designs of a local Brahmin. The “Mahabharata.” is the largest, and, many say, the hest single collection the world has of tales and precepts. One may open it at any page in any volume and be tolerably certain of finding a story or a parable at once interesting and instructive. ’The tales are didactic in the best sense. They make life seem worth living for the lessons it affords. The worst fit of depression vanishes before a page or two of the “ “Mahabharata.”; the reader returns to the world with new ” courage for himself and others. There is one trifling difficulty, however, or the “Mahabharata.” would be the, Book of Books nonpareil. The trouble is that when the “Mahabharata” would be of most value to you--in danger, depression, or despair-then is just the time you feel that no good could come of reading it. The tradition says that the only books which can be opened in such moments are the sacred books of one’s religion. Unfortunately, we are not all of us Hindus, and for this reason the “Mahabharata.” can never appeal to most of us when we most need it. One of the early tales in the “Mahabharata.” has always seemed to me a typical one. It certainly has neither the poetry of so many of the other stories-the principal tale, for instance, of the five brothers, or that of Nala and Damayanti, or of Sakuntala-nor has it the importance of such portions of the. collection as the Bhagavat-Gita, or the Discourses of Bhishma. But it is a fair example of the contents of the “Mahabharata." Whoever can read it with interest, need not fear to attempt the whole several thousand pages of the book. And even those to whom the style does not appeal will not, I hope, refuse to read this one short extract. It may be calIed : THE TALE OF THE THREE DISCIPLES. There was a holy man, a Rishi, who had three * Plural of fastan. = a petticoat. favourite pupils, by name, Upamanyu, Aruni and Veda. One day he told Aruni of Panchala to go and stop up a breach in the watercourse of a certain field. This was a channel, banked with earth and stones, and constructed to carry water from a spring to meadows which needed irrigation. Whenever water was required, the channel was dammed and the bank breached; and the water flowed out over the field. Afterwards, when the field had drunk enough, the dam would be broken and the breach repaired, and the ,water flowed on again in its old course. When Aruni received the command of his teacher, he went into the field to mend the watercourse He soon found that it was impossible to stop up the breach by ordinary means; yet he was unwilling not to fulfil the Rishi’s order. At last he saw a way, and cried out, “I will do it in this way.” Then he lay himself down in the breach, and thus stopped the water with his own body. Finding, after a long while, that Aruni had not returned, the Rishi asked his other pupils where he was. They anwered, “Sir, thou sentest him to repair the watercourse in the field.” The Rishi then remembered, said, “Let us go to where he is.” and When they arrived there, the Rishi called out, “Aruni, where art thou? Ho, my child, come hither.” Aruni, hearing the voice of his teacher, at once rose up and went to him. ’The Rishi asked him where he had been, and Aruni answered, “Here, in the breach of the watercourse. I was not able to devise any other means, so I lay myself down there to preventthe water from running out. Only when I heard thy voice did I leave it to come to thee, and let the waters loose. I salute thee, my teacher; tell me what I am now to do.” The Rishi replied, ‘‘Because thou hast obeyed even my smallest command, thou shalt obtain good fortune. Religion and wisdom shall shine forth in thee.” This was a sign that Aruni’s novitiate was ended, and he bade farewell to his master and comrades, and went away to his own country. Upamanyu, was another pupil of the Rishi. One day the Rishi ordered him to herd the cattle. Upamanyu, went out with them and watched over them all day; and when he had brought them back safely in the evening, he presented himself before his teacher. The Rishi looked ’at him and saw that he was well and strong. He asked him, “Upamanyu, my child, on what dost thou live?” Upamanyu, answered, ‘‘Sir, I live by begging, as many Brahmins do.” But his master answered : “The alms that thou receivest thou shouldst first offer to me.” The next day, Upamanyu, drove out the cattle again. When he had begged food, he carried it, at once to the Rishi, who took all from him, and sent him back to the cattle. He brought the herd back in the evening, and came to his master. The Rishi saw that he was still well-nourished, and said, “Upamanyu, my child, I took to-clay from thee all thou hadst obtained in alms, leaving thee nothing. On what, then, didst thou live ?” Upamanyu, replied, “Sir, when I had given thee all I had, I went begging a second time for myself.” But the Rishi said, “Not thus shouldst thou obey the commands of thy teacher. Other mendicants are neglected because thou hast a double share. Thou hast shown thyself covetous and greedy. ’ ’ Upamanyu, assented to this, and went out again the next day with the cattle. When he came back in the evening, he went to his master. The Rishi looked at him and said, “Upamanyu, my child, I took from thee all thou didst obtain in alms, and thou didst not beg a second time. How, then, dost thou live?” Upamanyu, replied, “Sir, I now live upon the milk of these cows.” The Rishi then said to him, “It was not right for thee to take this milk without first having my consent.” Upamanyu, went out again with the cattle. He returned in the evening, and stood before the Rishi. His master saw that lie was still strong, and said, Upamanyu, my child, thou no longer livest by alms, nor dost thou beg a second time, nor dost thou drink the milk of these cows, and yet thou art strong and well. How dost thou live ?” Upamanyu, answered, “Sir, I sipped the froth that the calves throw out when they are drinking their mothers’ milk.” The Rishi said, “’These generous calves, I suppose, took pity on thee and threw out much froth for thee to drink. Wouldst thou rob them of their food? Know that this, too, is forbidden thee !” Upamanyu, obeying his master, continued to herd the cattle, but he neither ate food obtained by begging, nor drank the milk of the cows. For several days he fasted, but at last, overcome by hunger, he ate the poisonous leaves of a certain tree. From eating these he became blind and fell into a pit. When at sunset Upamanyu did not come to salute his master, the Rishi asked the other youths where Upamanyu, was; they said that he was herding the cattle and had not brought them back. The Rishi then said, “Upamanyu is angry because I forbade him many kinds of food, and he does not wish to return until it They went into is late. Let us go and find him.” that part of the jungle where Upamanyu, usually drove the cattle, and called him. Upamanyu, in the pit heard his name called by the Rishi, and cried out, “I am here, at the bottom of a pit.” The Rishi, accompanied by his disciples, followed the sound,-and came to Upamanyu, and asked him how he had fallen in. Upamanyu, told him that he had become blind from eating the leaves of the poisonous tree. The Rishi then said, “Glorify the twin Aswins, the divine physicians of the gods, and they will restore thy sight. ’’ Upamanyu, then sang a hymn to the Aswins, and the twin gods appeared to him, saying, “We are content. Here is a cake for thee; take and eat it.” Upamanyu, then said, “O Aswins, your words have never proved untrue. But I dare not eat this cake without first offering it to my master.” Then the Aswins said, “Once thy teacher invoked us. We gave him a cake like this, and he ate it without first offering it to his teacher. What thy teacher did, thou too mayest do.” But Upamanyu answered, “O Aswins, I implore your forgiveness. I dare not eat this cake without first offering it to my master.” The Aswins then said, “O youth, we are pleased with thy devotion to thy teacher. His teeth are of black iron, but thine shall be of gold ! Thy sight is restored thee, and thou shalt have good fortune.” When the twin gods had said this, Upamanyu regained his sight and climbed out of the pit. The Rishi received him with affection and said, “Thou wilt obtain prosperity, as the Aswins have foretold. All religion shall shine forth in thee, and all wisdom ” Then Upamanyu knew that his time was over, and he went away to his own country. The name of the Rishi’s third pupil was Veda. His teacher said to him, “My child, stay here in my house and serve thy teacher. It shall be to thine advantage. ” And Veda served the Rishi for many years, burdened like an ox, and suffering heat and cold, hunger and thirst ; but he never complained. At last his teacher was satisfied with him, and granted him good fortune and all wisdom When the Rishi gave him permission to depart, Veda went away and began to teach in his own home. He took three pupils, but he never laid difficult commands on them, or ordered them to obey him unquestioning,; for, having himself suffered much hardship whilst he was in the house of the Rishi, and remembering the trials of Aruni and of Upamanyu, he did not wish to treat his pupils with severity. The Will to Freedom.* By Zarathustrian. IT has probably occurred to many people besides myself to ask whether the eternal discord that rages around the various alleged true meanings of Christianity is not, perhaps, the inevitable outcome of the Gentile’s vain endeavours to grasp the infinite subtleties of the Jewish mind. In any case, with two millenniums of Christian wranglings behind us, it would seem a little late in the day for anyone, save, perhaps, a more than usually profound Jew, to tell us dogmatically that Christianity means this or that and nothing more. Hence, possibly, a Gentile’s best grounds for abandoning Christianity might be that Heine and Dr. Oscar Levy both repudiate it. Any such assumption ofauthoritative dogmatism on the part of a Gentile, however, is surely a little surprising, and when Dr. Figgis undertakes to draw two pictures-one of his own view of Christianity and the other of Nietzsche’s-and invites us to gaze with admiration and approval on the one, and with horror on the other, we are tempted to ask ourselves whether such differences of standpoint, as between Gentiles, do not partake of the nature of a disagreement on the question of the colour of Adam’s beard. In adopting this method of discrediting a critic of Christianity, moreover, a dialectician skilfully evades the real difficulty of the controversy. For Nietzsche’s serious concern was not so much to reinterpret the gospels for us, as to show that, whatever the gospels might mean. and whatever Paul night have professed to believe, our present condition, our present outlook or lack of outlook, our present morality or immorality, must be regarded chiefly as the fruit of two thousand years of Christian tradition. Whether Nietzsche were right or wrong in regarding Paul as an impudent preacher of anarchy, whether he were justified or riot in seeing something unutterably base and despicable in the values of Christianity, are, after all, secondary considerations, if Dr. Figgis can give us a pedigree, an etymology, of modern thought, modern disorder, modern sickness, and modern impudence, which does not lead back to Christian sources, or which does not savour of Christian influence. I hope this is clear, because it is a fundamental and, I believe, just objection to the kind of book I have before me. Nowhere, however, in his book does Dr. Figgis As far as I am aware, attempt this line of refutation. after a careful study of Dr. Figgis’s work, the learned author would be as ready at Nietsche was to assume that we are the outcome at least of an attempt to approximate to the Christian ideal. Dr. Figgis sees that Nietzsche’s “ attack on mere peaceful domesticity is a reaction against a sophisticated culture ” ; he agrees that ‘‘ a certain process of hardening is needful to manhood ; he further admits that Nietzsche’s “ attack on ” pity is intended mainly as a rebuke to that sentimentalism in regard to pain which has tended to ruin discipline home, school, and State,” and he concedes the in point that ‘‘the anarchy of the purely individualistic ideal of the last century is becoming apparent in moral, intellectual, and artistic matters, and in social and political spheres it affords no pleasing prospect. ” But if we search “The Will to Freedom’’ in the hope of discovering whether these evils had another source than Christianity, if we endeavour to find the suggestion anywhere stated in Dr. Figgis’s book that nineteenth century individualism was not the outcome of Paul’s exhortations to megaIomania , we shall be rudely disappointed. Dr. Figgis will agree with Nietzsche on one page when the great German philosopher exposes the absurdity of the general modern belief ‘‘ that everyone’s opinion is equally valuabIe ” ; but when Nietzsche declares that he can find the root principle of this * “ The Will to Freedom.” By John Neville Figgis D.D., Litt.D. (Longmans, Green and Co., 6s. net.) maniacal and inflammatory doctrine in Pauline insolence, Dr. Figgis turns solemnly back to his own beautiful picture of Christianity, and invites us to search it in vain for any trace of such a quality. Obviously the only sound reply to Nietzsche would be as follows :-“ You may be right or wrong, sir, about your estimate of Christianity-this is really beside the point, because, after all, you were not an accredited authority on the subject, nor did you ever claim to have had the true meaning of Christianity supernaturally revealed to you-but, at all events, I am prepared to trace every one of the evils to which you point so scornfully, to values that have not and never have had any relation whatsoever to Christian doctrine or the Scriptures. I can name those values, I can show the land of their birth, and the anti-Christian credo of which they are but a part ! ” ’This would be unanswerable. It would leave Nietzsche standing high and dry, beating the air with his indictment of Christianity, and would cleanse Christian tradition once and for all of many a stain which at present it is difficult altogether to overlook. Nowhere, however, does Dr. Figgis attempt to do this. Nowhere does he even seem to have an inkling that this is the method of attack. He prefers to adhere to his more appealing and apparently more concrete tactics of the two pictures already described, and smiles sympathetically when he sees the horror in your face as you glance at the picture from Nietzsche’s hand; The very mildness, kindness, and splendid display of fairness with which lie does this is one of the most seductive, most Christian features of the book. It is all so urbane, so generous, so loftily condescending. “ His opinions may be what you will, but Friedrich Nietzsche, the man, we love, and shall go on loving even when he hits us hardest ” (p. 9). Who could be wrong who can be so magnanimous towards a foe? That is the suggestedimplication, that is the hint underlying the whole book. I do not for a minute suggest that it is deliberate, or that it ,is consciously made in order unduly to influence the unwary reader,; I am convinced that Dr. Figgis had no such intention; but I can foresee that quite a large number of readers will be far too much impressed by the profligate luxuriance of the reverend critic’s condescension ever to doubt a word he may utter in a more severe and less generous vein. It is a natural and ready inference. We are all much too prone to assume that where restraint and magnanimity are displayed in an attack the attack itself and all its most mortal blows arc, on account of the generous appearance of the assailant, entirely justified and beyond suspicion. I mention this as a caution for the guileless. Pathos is always seductive, and there is genuine pathos in the attitude of the animal that licks the human hand that is tormenting it. If Dr. Figgis really believes that "nothing can relieve Nietzsche from the stain OF having stimulated tendencies already sufficiently strong towards that essential evil of Paganism which we see at its worst in Nero and at its best in Diocletian ” ; if he is really convinced that “ on Nietzsche’s principles we might look forward a millennium or two and see in a vision a race of masters, seated in a grander Colosseum, once more urging on torturers to whip their skive-gladiators into courage by white-hot electric rods, in order that their aesthetic sensibilities may be stimulated ” (p. 99), then it is difficult to believe that as a hearty Christian he can sincerely love this man. Any profession of love of this sort is surely a misunderstanding, which, though harmless in appearance, establishes an atmosphere of such tender and charitable feeling all round that it may serve the doctor’s purpose very much more usefully than he suspects. is quite possible, for instance, that it may so It influence the reader as to make him decline to entertain for one moment the thought that anything Dr. Figgis says about his subject can possibly be either wrong or unjust. So much for two of the broader aspects of the book. If now we proceed to examine it in detail we certainly do find a conscientious endeavour to portray Nietsche in all his multifarious moods and attitudes. The doctor is deeply read in his subject, and gives a vast amount of particulars that are not infrequently omitted altogether in books about the great German thinker. The author is also commendably sound in much of the criticism offer. He will have nothing do, for he to instance, with the supposed dependence of Nietzsche on Stirner. He rightly absolves Nietzsche of the charge so ignorantly and fiercely made against him by almost all the poorly cultivated newspapers of this country, of having, by his pro-Germanism and bellicosity, acted the part of a philosophic Bernhardi behind the ideas of Pan-Germanism. He denies the contention reiterated with mulish obstinacy by so many more shallow critics of Nietzsche, that the latter panders to mere unbridled egoism in the individual. He elevates Nietzsche above the smart epigramatists who are out to epater le bourgeois;lays stress upon the German’s earnestness and passion, and liberally adorns his book with long and well-selected quotations from Nietzsche’s own works, which provide good illustrations both of Nietzsche’s style and his thought. It is all the more surprising, therefore, save on the assumption that Dr. Figgis must be radically opposed to Nietzsche, and bitterly so, to find such passages as I have already quoted, and the following, interspersed among these pages:P. 150 : “ The Putomayo atrocities, and others more recent, which we need not cite, are in accord with his (Nietzsche’s) teaching. ” P. 79 : “ in theory Nietzsche rejects all moral valuations. ” P. : “ Briefly, the morals of Nietzsche consist in an exaltation of courage and a rejection of all other moral values, and a sense of the value of distinction and individuality. ” P. 148 : “ The superman, as Nietzsche preaches him, is inexpressibly vulgar,” etc., etc., in much the same vein. As I must take it for granted that I am addressing readers of Nietzsche in this review-for space does not allow me to expound Nietzsche afresh, I merely quote the above passages without comment leaving it to those who are familiar with Nietzsche’s works to form what opinion they may choose of Dr. Figgis’s reliability from the extracts. After three years of war, and three years in the Army, I am proud to have this opportunity of confessing .publicly that I am still a convinced Nietzschean, that I still hold Nietzsche’s attitude towards Christianity, and that recent events have not moved me one inch from the position I held in the spring of 1914. In the ferocity, brutality, and impudence of the Germans,in the megalomania that induced them to imagine for one moment that they were entitled to worlddominion, I see the inflating bellows of Pauline arrogance. their assumption of Right I see those In seditiousdoctrines of equality and of immortality granted to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, which ultimately leave poor, hitherto modest, Tom, Dick, and Harry with vertiginous notions as to their own altitude ! In the commercial rivalry which occurs as a sort of rumbling bass throughout the cacophonous uproar of the world conflict I see the fatal suite : Catholicism, Protestantism, Puritanism (Mother, daughter, and abortion) ; and since a form of government may be judged from the nature of the revolutions it provokes, the ugliness and versatile stupidity of Protestantism, together with the appalling sordidness and commercial cupidity of Puritanism, stand for all time as the most convincing condemnation of the stronghold of traditional Christianity. I see all this because long ago Nietzsche demonstrated satisfactorily to me the relation of these distressing phenomena to the Christian cosmogony, and when I behold the ugliness, the sickness, the rampant individualism, the pompous and overweening pretentions of every petty creature, fit or foul, which characterises our age; when I see decadence so far advanced, so thoroughly in possession of European humanity, that despite the rude scourge of this war, not one of the great lessons that might have been learnt from it have as yet been taken to heart, I should like Dr. Figgis to show broadly that in ascribing these revolting features of the modern world to Christ’s gospel and Paul’s interpretation of Christianity, Nietsche was wrong, mistaken, prejudiced, blind. Dr. Figgis has attempted to refute a good deal of Nietzsche’s minor doctrine piecemeal. Let him take this broad and principal charge-which, after all, is the basis of Nietzsche’s teaching---“ that only by a transvaluation of the ignoble and debasing values of Christianity can we possibly hope for all elevation of the type man ”; and let him explode it ! For presumably Dr. Figgis is not satisfied with this age. Does he want tu alter it? If so, does he wish to achieve this end by adding more and more Christianity to it?more and more Paulinism? Should that be his nostrum Iet him say so, and then we shall know the extent to which he is suffering from his contemporaries. One of the chief objections I have to “The Will to Freedom” is that it practically scouts the whole of this vast problem. And in dealing with Nielzsche this problem is fundamental. It is, moreover, huge, because the future of mankind turns upon it. In the mass of detail discussed in Dr. Figgis’s book this is apt to be overlooked. One cannot see the wood for the trees. Now a last word or so on two subjects of the greatest importance nowadays-Freedom and the Working Man, and I have finished. Dr. Figgis has something to say about Nietzsche’s notions of freedom, but it is not enough (see pp. 237 and 288). Nietzsche pronounced what are probably the most profound words ever uttered about freedomwords that project the whole of the modern question of freedom on to a higher plane. He said :-“ Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke. “Art thou one entitled to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his Anal worth when he hath cast away his servitude. “ Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra ! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me : free for what? ” (Zarathustra. Part I. Chap, XVI I). The meaning here is obvious enough. You cannot have the freedom of the guide and of the guided at one and the same time. You cannot profit as a chela unless you are prepared to surrender your freedom for the time being to a stage. If you are an excellent subordinate and nothing more, you forfeit your excellence by wresting freedom, at the cost of your subordination position, from your master. This is a view of freedom deliberately overlooked by the modern world, and it is a pity Dr. Figgis does not refer to it. He complains that Nietzsche’s doctrine, as a gospel of Power, is opposed to freedom. Rut I reply with equal justification that with his (Dr. Figgis’s) doctrine of freedom for all, he is just as busy propounding a doctrine of Power, but with this difference : Whereas Nietzsche’s doctrine of Power is limited and directed towards order, Dr. Figgis’s is unlimited, and therefore must in the end promoteanarchy; for freedom to all is power to all. In fact there are no greater advocates of the Will to Power, little as they appear to he aware of it, than such representatives of the Christian school of thought as Dr. Figgis, But, as I say, they promote disorder, by assuming with their subversive doctrine of equality, the right of freedom and therefore of power, for all without distinction. Obviously this is not only an unpractical, but also a dangerous ideal, Christian though it may be. Altogether there is not a sufficient attempt made in Dr. Figgis’s book to do justice to Nietzsche in this respect. Either Dr. Figgis admits or he denies that some are born to lead and others to follow. If he denies it then his doctrine of freedom for all is at least plausible. If he admits it, then he should at least have pointed out that a good many of Nietzsche’s precepts that he condemns are dangerous only as applied to followers and not to leaders. Nietzsche strove to liberate the rare man, the gold from the mass of quartz. Nietzsche thought that it is the rare, desirable man, who is in danger of bearing too heavy a yoke nowadays. Much that Nietzsche says, therefore, only applies to higher man, and it is easy to make ducks and drakes of his gospel by not observing this distinction. I doubt whether Dr. Figgis has sufficiently observed this distinction. As to the question of the working man, Dr. Figgis again simply does not do Nietzsche justice. He could not have read, or he must have forgotten Aphorism 40 in “ Skirmishes in a War with the Age,” neither could he have read Aphorism 57 of the “Antichrist.” “When the exceptional man treats the mediocre with more tender care than he does himself or his equals, this is not mere courtesy of heart on his part--but simply his duty. ” (“Antichrist,” p. 220.) The kind of exploitation of the working man carried on by a capitalistic Age was as opposed to Nietzsche’s instincts as anything could possibly be. Dr. Figgis, I fear, has read Nietzsche and understood his language too much through the glasses of this Age-our Age. To exploit, in the capitalistic sense, does indeed mean to grind down for your own use, to abuse, to outrage; in Nietzsche’s sense it meant none of these things. It meant simply “ turn to some use.” In this sense, Michael Angelo was exploited by the Pope, Whistler was exploited by those whose portrait he painted, and the translators of the Bible were exploited by James I. Unless a people is given some higher achievement for their riches, their art and their strength, by a Pericles or his equal, they may, by failing to he exploited, squander their riches, their art and their strength or futilities. This has been ably pointed out by that penetrating Chinese writer Ku Hung-Ming. Of course exploitation in the capitalistic sense is everything that is horrible, because it neither leads to any great popular achievement, nor does it ever fail to debase the people it exploits. All it succeeds in doing is to enable a certain number of vulgar and futile mer, and women to dress extravagantly, to enjoy the winter sports in Switzerland, and to overfeed the rest of the time in some. usury-junker’s paradise, while the Church seeks, and pretends to find, those that are specially in need of spiritual salvation only in the prisons and slums. There are one or two misstatements of actual fact in Dr. Figgis’s book which, though trivial, should be pointed out by a reviewer conscientiously endeavouring to do his duty to the public. On p. 16 Dr. Figgis says that after Leipzig Nietzsche “ went for a year’s service in the cavalry.” For “ cavalry ” read ‘‘ artillery.” On p. 17 Dr. Figgis says that after Nietzsche’s riding accident “the muscles of his heart were injured.” For “ muscles of his heart ” read “ two pectoral muscles.” On the whole “The Will to Freedom” is probably the best book that has ever emanated from a Christian divine on the subject of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is the best in many ways. It shows the widest reading of Nietzsche’s works, the sincerest attempt to penetrate Nietzsche’s meaning, and above all the least bitter and least prejudiced exposition of his doctrines. I have treated it with some elaboration because of its exceptionally high merits. It is possible that the injustices it contains are inevitable from the Reverend Doctor’s angle of vision. Nietzsche hit Christianity and the Church very hard indeed, and it is probably only human that in hitting back Christians and representatives of the Church should not be over nice in their choice of weapons. In approaching Christians and Christianity, to use a war metaphor, Nietzsche thought, it only safe to wear a gas helmet, and that alone perhaps is sufficientto provoke the use of at least a little poisoned gas. Reviews. The Gulf. By Hugh Spender. (Collins. 5s. net.) Mr. Spender’s novel (it is almost a novel) is comme il faut. Everybody says and does the correct thing in the recognised way. It ought to be very difficult for an English girl to marry a Prussian officer, for there is a great gulf fixed between them; but ‘’ omnia vincit amor,” and if the Prussian officer is worthy, of course the English girl will marry him. She would marry anybody who was worthy of her. He is worthy ! He is one of the most efficient officers of the Guards, and a sincere pacifist ; when he drinks to “ Der Tag,” he secretly hopes that it will never come. His military genius and his English sympathies, to say nothing of his engagement to an English girl, attract the attention of the Kaiser, who gives him a Staff appointment and forbids him to write to or to see his beloved. Apparently he was the last, and the most efficient, German spy in Belgium; and when the war broke out, he was sent in the vanguard. His fair trial of Belgian suspects, his protests against German outrages and his refusal to take part in them when ordered, brought him to his last court-martial, and sentence of death. But he escaped; yes, he escaped and went to America, where he was joined by and to the lovely English girl, and began a campaign in favour of the brotherhood of humanity. Mr. Spender saves the reader the trouble of speculating about the characters of the story by simply telling him exactly what they thought, felt, said, or did. He gives us the whole content of their consciousness, and we can see for ourselves that they have the correct feeling for, the correct idea of, everything. “Humphrey was also worried about his own position. He felt the call of his country. But there was Edith, his sacred charge. What additional sorrow it would cause her to have a lover on one side and a brother on the other, who might even have to kill one another. He supposed it would be their duty to try to do so ! And yet Germany, by her invasion of Belgium, had made every man who had a spark of idealism long to throw himself into the contest. Every time he went out, the posters which appealed for recruits seemed to burn into his brain.” Irreproachable sentiments irreproachably expressed ; one can feel that he had “a spark of idealism,” and no more, one can understand that the call of his country for recruits seemed, and only seemed, “to burn into his brain,” one can feel how “ sacred ” his charge was (she was about thirty years of age); and for more than three hundred pages, Mr. Spender maintains this level of inspiration, a remarkable feat ! The Fortune: A Romance of Friendship. By Douglas Goldring. (Maunsel. 5s. net.) Mr. Douglas Goldring has told with some vivacity the story of a man who knew. another man who was always right. at school and at Oxford, this Irish gentleman dominated the English bourgeois, taught him what to wear and how to wear it, what to eat and what to drink, taught him how to behave himself in society, taught him what to read, what to think, taught him even how to write. So he became a success; his first play, named after a property of the Irish’ gentleman, was a success, and the English bourgeois married a member of the aristocracy. Love did not supply that fillip to the hero’s dramatic genius that friendship did, and the wife, therefore, developed a quite engaging jealousy of the friend’s influence over her husband. Then the war came, and the Irish gentleman developed quite cynical ideas of national “honour,” and, for once, lost the power of guiding his friend to do the right thing. The Englishman joined the Army, and his wife rejoiced to think that, on this one point, at least, they were in perfect agreement; it was a triumph for her influence over her husband. But, alas, the reality of the war taught the silly Englishman how right the Irish gentleman was; and when he returned to London, wounded, he gave evidence before the Appeal ’Tribunal in support of the Irish gentleman’s claim for exemption on the ground of conscientious objection. The Irish gentleman was very brilliant, although the book does not record any instances of it; and the Tribunal was very stupid, of course, and ordered him to take: combatant service. As the Irish gentleman, king Irish, was not liable for service, he had the laugh of the Tribuna?; he went back to his house in Ireland, sat on the doorstep, and looked over Dublin. Thither his English friend wanderedto join the Staff at the Curragh; was caught in the Dublin revolution, and was shot by one of his own men. This converted his wife to the pacifist doctrine of the Irish gentleman; she ended her feud with him, and promised to educate her son to hate war. Moral : The Irish are always right, whether they fight against England, or have conscientious objections to any form of fighting. The only blow struck by the Irish gentleman was a box of the ears that he bestowed on a girl who declared that she loved him; and as this failed to cure her of love, he could no longer believe in the efficacy of physical force. He was an Irish gentleman. Fields of the Fatherless. By Jean Roy. (Collins. 6s. net.) Whatever it Is this a novel or an autobiography is, it is not literature. The author sets down literally, fact by fact, the details of a poor Scotch girl’s life from infancy to maturity, as though a collection of facts could make a truthful picture of Iife. She has not even the blessed brevity of Caesar, for if she went anywhere, or anybody came to her, she reproduced faithfully whatever they said or did, without any regard to the intrinsic value of the details recorded. The method is simply : “He said this” and “I thought that” ; “she did this” and “I felt that” ; “we went to so-and-so and such-and-such things happened. “ Antonio told a better tale than this,! Her judgments are the purely conventional ones of a domestic servant who had no “followers”; she is rather superior to her girlfriends who have “fellows,” and do not admire good literature and pictures as she does. She seems never to have been smitten with the dangerous passion of love, but she seems to have had an ideal of love which her more experienced girl-friends neither had nor She is saved from being a prig only by appreciated. a quite unreasoning family feeling for a family to which she was allied only by the so-called bar sinister. We of Italy. By Mrs. K. R. Steege. (Dent. 4s. net.) Mrs. Steege offers in this volume a selection of letters written by Italian soldiers. They are very different in literary quality from those written by English soldiers ; they have a flow of speech that seems phenomenal to us, and they talk of their intentions and their emotions in a manner that contrasts strongly with the casual phrase of slang that the average Englishman uses in similar circumstances. They are all heroes, every man of them; they say so, and no one can know better than themselves: but they say it with such ardour and sincerity that we can believe them. After all, it is only a proof of their sense of reality that they call things by their right names ; the Englishman belies himself with his casual comments, his continual understatements. It is heroic to face modern shell-fire, and the man who does it is a hero, and has a right to call himself by his proper name ; these chest-slapping Italians are really fine fellows, even if they say it themselves. Earnest Trifles. By Edward Moore. To become human the natural man must be steeped for a time in culture. But to become cultured he must emerge from it, shake it off and treat it lightly. He who never raises his head above the pond of culture is a barbarian. Not servants of culture, but masters! its masters can culture be advanced. For only by Culture is that which, being created, creates again. The great man is its fosterer, but also its child. The modern world has lost the ability to reverence the things it does not understand and still more the things it does understand. Mr. Arnold Bennett demonstrates with stolid brilliance in his novels that anything may be made interesting. By the bye, what does that prove? To be interesting beginning. is not the end of art, but the Among living men of genius, Mr. H. G. wells possessesthe greatest powers and the weakest will. He is a tempest of energy straining to every point and without method even of the whirlwind. the In Mr. Wells’ novels there is always a breeze blowing, but there is never the open air. A storm in a hothouse. (A) His thoughts great thinker. (B) avails the thoughts think the notions of any account? But utter truth, whether thoughts are more should be reverenced, for he was a But was he a great man? What of a mere thinker? Or do you a Bentham or a Spencer can be of when Caesar or Goethe speaks, they they be in jest or earnest. Their than thoughts. A philosopher is an emasculated poet, and how many of the poets are great men? One or two; the remainder are interesting weaklings. Pallas Athene : the least beloved of the deities; she sprang full grown from the brain of Zens. Like John Stuart Mill, she had no childhood and nothing of the child in her ! Some of our thoughts deepest thoughts think that thinks itself? we consciously think, but our themselves. Intuition- thought What is progress ? That conscious thought should more and more become unconscious, should attain the effortless perfection of instinct. To think for the sake of thinking -is a solemn hobby. It is the result that matters. The highest type is not the thinker, but he who is born exempt from the necessity of thought. In the superman that will be instinctive which in men is a difficult, laborious attempt. A golden frivolity will be his distinction. The forms of expression in their order of value : song, speech, thought. In how much is song superior to thought? Inasmuch as it is less conscious and cannot explain itself. The three dullest words : Holy, holy, holy. They have clothed themselves because they have not virtue. in all the virtues to Duty. It is less than human to be a slave-even ‘‘ A creature of impulse!” everyone said. But all the time he was acting in accordance with a vigorous code-only it was not their code. You have decided to extend your sympathy to the suffering. Very well. Let your first sympathetic exercise to discover whether they deserve it. be You sigh over the sorrows of past genius. But these poets and artists should have learned to command success; they were far too romantically proud of their failure. Nowadays writers are better advised ; they learn first of all the secret of success; and if in addition they would learn that of possessing genius there is no doubt they would produce masterpieces. Mea culpa! I have been deceitful and treacherousa grief and a reproach to my friends. Alas, I have developed ! Artist. Everything I have written thus far has been mere surface, mere play; but my next work will be really sincere and profound. Critic. Ah, beware ! Great men are to be valued by their virtue, small men by their virtues. Heaven knows both need this justification? Admirable irony! You scare away the sanguine meddlers who demand at the first look to understand everything, and become angry if the most profound riddle is not straightway made clear to them, In the ideal university there mill be classes on Philosophy, Art, and Irony. They never quarrels wi’ their pay ; Soa it wor wrong of Parson, theer, Coz Aaron nobbut lacked a cheer. Me made his tunes, he played about, An none but Parson had a doubt What he was bound for-poor young lad! A-course I’ll own-though he wor madThem tunes he played, them songs he sung, They minded you of bein’ young, They took me hack, a boy, agen, At work wi’ Feyther down the Fen When all the birds they uster sing At sunrise, till the air would ring An’ sheep and cows would stir about Wi’ everything to make yer shout. Yes, it wor strange what he could do, His fiddle seemed to mazzle you! The labourers would catch a songAn’ they was catchy-all along; They sing ’em yet; an’ Georgy Bell He plays ’em by the village well. Rut all the while trade didn’t mend, Until at last ther’ come the end. They selled him up, lock, stock, an’ stoan, An’ off he went, away, aloan; Becoz he sung, but couldn’t save, I think his feyther in the grave Must sure a-stirred, ’owever deep : That smash would waken any sleep! Young Aaron wentI dunno whereThey say he’s gone to Manchester, An’ there, mayhap, mid soot an’ smoke, Makes music for the city folk; Plays on his fiddle, time agen, Them tunes he larned down Martin Fen From shepherds or from wagon-boys Or men at plough--or any noise. He made his tunes out of the air, From birds, or beasts-lie didn’t care! An’ Parson says he’ll make a name. (Our Parson, what’s the one to blame?) As if he iver could agen Find such a hoam as Martin Fen; As if he could, by fiddle-fad, Get half the name his feyther had. Lost in some smoky town he plays An’ thinks, I lay, on sunny days, Of all the things what make life dear, Like beans and bacon, cheese and beer! A dreamy good-for-nothing lad, Sure-bound to lose all what he had, He might a-riz, an’ come to be As high as you, or even me! An’ bin well known the country round As comfortable, warm, an’ sound. His name is known for many a mile, It raises, far an’ wide,- a smile: While folk they whisper, “ Not right sharp !” A fool! a fool! wor Aaron Tharp. BERNARDGILBERT. NIGHT. Silent we stood, the odour of your hair Was in my nostrils, and your warm hands were In mine enfolded : silent we And silent and still the blue-black night above. I could not see Your face, I only knew That silence and darkness and love enfolded me and you As thus we stood, Begirt by night’s vast solitude. The hours, on great black wings passed high above, Made reverent and tremulous by the mystery of our love. Then suddenly The veils of dark were lifted, showing me Your lustrous eyes, your face so pale and still, And turning, I saw the silver disc of the moon, rising over the hill. DESMOND FITZGERALD. Pastiche. THE FOOL. What say? Tharp ? Yis : Aaron Tharp lived theer! Not quite sharp? Not quite-I fear! ’Twer very sad! Though theer wor summat-’tis hard to sayBut he come to his end and went away. He’d a nice little place as his feyther made, All gone to pot, I be much afraid; Old Aaron built it in his day, A worthy feller, true an’ sound, Respected by the country round : To think as his name should be forgotten! If he’d known what a fool he had begotten! He toiled an’ moiled into his grave To leave a lad, what couldn’t save! Noa note of grace, noa sense of cash! He lost his all be bein’ rash! An’ fer what? For what? To play the fiddle! ‘‘ Hey diddle diddle ! ” To make up tunes in his empty head An’ ruin his eyes wi’ the books he read! He raumed an’ babbled all day long About the way to sing a song! Follered the lads at plough about, To hear ’em sing would make him shout! He’d sit on the bar of the “ Ship ” at night, To catch the tunes was his delight; Or to play the fiddle about the town : An’ all the while his trade went down! That trade what poor old Aaron tended, ’Ez fell to nowt, an’ can’t be mended; Coz businesses is all the same; You’ve simply got to play the game With all your soul an’ all your heart, Or else you’ll soon be in the cart. He was encouraged by our parson! ’Twere wrong of parson! It’s very well for them to talk, To sing an’ play, and, idle, walk, Rut aren’t they paid for doin’ that? They mind their bread is buttered fat! Parsons is sensible, you see, O’most as cute as lawyers he; Not quite-a-course-coz noa one couldBat very nigh-just as they should, Parsons is sound at heart, I say ! LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. CONTEMPORARY MENTALITY. Sir,-For the honour of the R’s, I must put in a word of appreciation for Mr. Pound’s long, impatient, and admirably light-hearted study of the dismal. The thingneeded doing; and it could not have been done in any different vein, especially during this fourth war winter, without driving us to suicide. With “ M. B. R.’s ” defence of Chesterton I quite agree. I like Chesterton; Mr. Pound I don’t know, and should very possibly dislike if I did. But Mr. Pound’s rain of darts has not fallen only on the just; as a reader with some pretensions to a critical faculty I have been picking a good many of them out of my own hide, at a loss of little but bad air from the punctures. Not all his confounded insolence and literary contempt of court can lessen the searchingness of his “ paradise ” criterion of fiction; and they are oddly justified by a sense that every point which goes home goes in virtue of its own sharpness and impetus. K. R. *** Sir,--Mr. Chesterton has already answered his defender more forcibly than I can. He wrote some years ago : “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” That is his declaration, his basis. In those words he arrays himself on the side of chaos and camouflage and obscurantism, and against every true writer whose sole aim and hope is that he may some day “do the thing really well.” The mental status quo of contemporary periodicals is as I have defined it in my series of articles. This status quo has no more powerful, and therefore no more damnable supporter, than Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton. EZRA POUND. *** ART. Sir,-There is no use arguing with these people. There is no use trying to make them understand the difference between the rhetoric of Victor Hugo rather messily transposed into stone or plaster, and sculpture which is an art of form, whose language is form and whose effects when they are lastingly impressive are by form produced. Mr. Ezra Pound attempted some such explanation in your paper years ago; it only produced a riot. But, then, he expressed himself very badly and in the jargon of his horrible vortex. Still, he is better than the people who think that the obvious reproduction of sexual organs is the one means of producing- “ powerful ” art. “ Powerful ” is a word these people are exceedingly fond of. They apply it to messy fiction like that of Mr. Thomas Burke. They need and perceive nothing else. Your correspondent drags in Mestrovic’s temple. Surely this concerns architecture rather than sculpture. Architecture has laws and a technique of its own. A building has and must have what a statue has not, or need not of necessity have-namely, a hollow inside. I believe that once the talented Lutyens, carried away by excess of fancy, created a beautiful house-plan-with no stairways. Did your “ powerful ” Mestrovic enthusiast by any chance consider the lighting of Mestrovic’s temple? Religion has, I admit, nearly always stood for the propagation of darkness. But a temple with no means of lighting is surely excessive. Perhaps it is intended to light it with pure genius, or from some secret Serbo-Croatian power station, the clue to which is denied us. B. H. DIAS. *** DRAMA. Sir,--If I am correct in stating that the chief object of modern criticism in serious journalism should be with the intention of educating public opinion, then I must ask your indulgence for joining issue with Mr. J. F. Hope. I have read his articles with regularity and with interest, but with ever-increasing annoyance, as not only are they destructive and discouraging, but so often they show venom and a malicious satire which are not the legitimate weapons of a fair-minded critic. I have no brief for any one of the authors whom Mr. Hope sees fit to scourge so mercilessly, nor do I know what qualifications may possess which entitle him to administer he such castigation, but to accuse Mr. Barker of “ incurable provincialism” and to add that “ Vote by Ballot” “ should be quite at home on tour ” is in the nature of an intentional insult to Mr. Barker and a quite unwarranted impertinence towards those provincial members the theatre-going public who do not enjoy Mr. of Hope’s facilities for ‘‘ wasting an afternoon ” in a Londontheatre. ERNEST Wilton SCHIFF. Memoranda. (From last week’s New AGE.) The only difference between war and peace with Prussia is that during war conscription of men and money and industry is temporary, whereas during peace these conscriptions will be permanent institutions. The question for America is not one of the substance of the proffered peace-terms, but of the party that proffers them. All that the Prussian autocracy has it may offer to give for its life-all save the principles which are its life. What the Trade Unions are entitled to demand in exchange for the temporary occupation of their territory is exactly what the Allies have the right to demand on behalf of Belgium : restitution, reparation, and security. -“ Notes of the Week.” The Germans are now in precisely the same position as the French a century or so ago. So long as British sea-power remains intact Germany cannot win the war. Our possession of Palestine and Mesopotamia frustrates for ever the execution of the plan for the sake of which the German Government went to war.-J., M. KENNEDY. Sovereignty is nothing more than the final authority in practice. We desire to take from the State as many nonsovereign functions as possible while leaving to it precisely and only the function of sovereignty. The finality of the authority of the State gives to its authority a value greater than the preceding authorities, but not of necessity an ethically superior value. It is not in the nature of the human mind to make an end of anything. The arbitrary and the compulsory are in the nature of things, but it is the work of man to reduce them to a minimum.-“ National Guildsmen.” All races move towards the fulfilment of their prevalentdreams. The fraternity of men is an excellent dream, provided that we do not forget that it is derived from the paternity of God; and that the paternity of God imposes on us the commandment of acquiring as much as possible of His wisdom, His righteousness, and His power. Cain and Abel are born of the same Adam and Eve.RAMIRO MAEZTU. DE We may live at peace with our neighbours when it is agreed that we must be different, and no peace is possible in the world between nations except on this understanding. Irish enmities are perpetuated because we live by memory more than by hope. There is moral equality where the sacrifice is equal. There can be no understanding where there is no eagerness to meet those who differ from us, and hear the best they have to say for themselves-A. E. It is by relativity of sound and not by loudness that music is constructed.-WILLIAM ATHELING. Without the exercise of pure philosophic thought, which all children pursue by nature and most adults avoid by custom, truth can sometimes be momentarily captured, but never held. Development means differentiation without loss of unity, or rather with concomitant gain of unity because there is more to unite. The process by which a feeling emerges as a thought has to be induced; it cannot be commanded. You know the good teacher by her saying, not ‘‘ Think ! ” but ‘‘ Think of camels. ”-KENNETH RICHMOND. Press CUTTINGS. To the Editor of the “ Daily News.” Sir,-It may be that a League“ of Nations, including Germany, will ensure peace; certainly it Will not ensure disarmament. It is not conceivable, for instance, that our country will thereupon dismantle the Navy. In that case, how are we better for the League of Nations? The heart sinks at the prospect of reshouldering OUT old intolerable burden. There is a far more promising outlook for us in the prospect of a regenerate Germany and the victory of Democracy. Whatever may be feared from an impure democracy, there can be no fear, at least, of war from a pure one. Pure democracy means a Labour Government; and Labour government and war are incompatible terms. No Labour Government would contemplate, or dare to contemplate, war. I own that I look steadfastly towards Russia, who has set an example to the rest of the world. The advent of a Labour Government in this country cannot be long delayed, and such a following of the Russian precedent would precipitate change far and wide. The supreme endeavour of all peace-lovers just now ought to be the overthrow of the Central European autocracy, the last in Europe of a vile breed. That done; we may look for the reward of our blood-shedding. “Rend your, hearts and not your garments,” we may tell the Germans.--MAURICE HEWLETT. January I. The determination of the United States and the Allies once again to make clear to the Russian and German peoples the war aims of democracy has been discussed in diplomatic circles, and late yesterday afternoon was the subject of authoritative comment by the State Department. Whether a reply is to be made by Mr. Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, or by M. Clemenceau is not decided, but the substance of the reply is certain to be entirely in line with Mr. Wilson’s utterances, especially his last Address to Congress, although more emphasis may be laid on the fact that the hopes for peace which all the peoples share are rendered futile in advance because the present spokesmen of Germany cannot be trusted. President Wilson looks upon the Brest-Litovsk AustroGerman peace terms as they appear to the people of the United States and Entente countries overseas arid to their Governments, and it is most probable that a restatement of war aims will be in the form of an appeal to the people of the Central Powers over the heads of their rulers, pointing out again with unmistakable clearness that no peace can come until military autocracy is superseded by leaders representative of and responsible to the German people. It is hoped here that as a result of the reply the shallowness of the Germans’ peace trap will be exposed and that President Wilson’s persistent differentiation between the present German Government and the German people will begin to bear fruit.-“ Times “ Washington Correspondent. The control of industry, however, connotes an entirely different set of ideas from that expressed by the President of the Trades Union Congress in the minds of the more advanced Socialists, the intellectuals of the movement. This section considers the questions of hours, wages, and conditions mere details, and firmly advances as its programme the complete wiping away of the industrial system, the abolition of wages in the existing meaning of the term, and the substitution of Democracy for Autocracy in the workshop. This is to be done through the Unions securing every worker as a member so that they may have the entire monopoly of labour. Then will come a number of stages where the unions will be taken more and more into partnership, and the system of dual management will be developed. The unions will then become an organism embracing all the workers in any way engaged in the industry and finally will come the stage when the complete control of industry in the interest of the producer will have been attained. To quote the words of one of the high priests of the movement :“ The primary conception, it will be gathered, is that of a functional trades union, an association of men, that is, with a specific place and part and responsibility in industry. From all association for common defence against employers we would have the trade union become an association for the public defence and advancement, not only of its members, but of the interests of the nation as contained within the industry itself. And the means to this end are surely not beyond imagination. They imply, in the first place, that each great industry shall be organised as to its necessary labour in such a way that every man employed in it shall belong to the trade union that controls it. In the next place it is required that every ,contract €or labour shall be made not with the individual workman, but with the union of which he is a member. Finally it is required that, as the union accepts responsibility for the maintenance in efficiency of all its members, the earnings of all its members shall be pooled in the union bank and pay to be on a uniform scale to each of the members whether working or unemployed. ” And the basis of this whole conception is set out quite explicitly in a more recent pronouncement : “Let it be never so plausibly accepted that the capitalistclass should continue to exist; let it be never so plausibly argued that the maintenance of the profiteering system is necessary or advisable, the resolute affirmation must be made and maintained by labour that, while one penny of profit continues to be earned by capital, labour cannot enter into a final agreement with it. Compromises, temporary agreements, conditional settlements, these, it is true, cannot be avoided. What can be avoided is the admission that, except by their force, capitalists as such have a right to exist. The principle that labour is entitled to the whole of its product is just, and any dilution of the principle is a concession to injustice. ” The above sketch will be recognised as the Guild system advocated most plausibly and with a brilliancy of argument and intelligence not to be matched in current journalism by THE NEW AGE. However much one may admire the presentation-of the case, no one with any knowledge of practical commercial conditions can regard it as more than the ingenious fantasy of a brain devoid of the sense of realities. Whatever development may arise in the evolution of industrial conditions, many intervening steps must be painfully and laboriously climbed before society is ripe for such a change.-J. R. RICHMOND(Address to Glasgow University Engineering Society). Unfortunately the old practice of a large periodical output of titles to the rich and the importunate, which was tolerated “as usual ” in the early days of the war, seems to persist even at the very height of the crisis. We do not for a moment suggest that the titles of this sort which are announced this morning are all of them the fruits either of cash contributions or of political expediency, though there are cases in which the latter motive is obvious enough. The agitation on that subject,which was led by Lord Selborne and others during the year, does at least seem to have produced a certain effect. But it would have been infinitely more decent to have abandoned the whole business for the period of the war, when only national service counts and those who are serving the nation best are least anxious that their service should bear even a suspicion of personal interest.--“ Times.”