NOTES OF THE WEEK . FOREIGN AFFAIRS. Guilds S. AND G. By S. Verdad . THEIR CRITICS-VII (continued). By H. .. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY And THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION By Ramiro de Maeztu . OUT OF SCHOOL. By Kenneth Richmond . Ideals and METHODS. By R. A. Vran-Gavran . Music By William Atheling . A CARTOON. BY Will Dyson. . READERS AND WRITERS. By R. H. C. SONIA From Machar’s ‘‘Confessions of an Author”). Translated from the Czech by P. Selver VIEWS AND REVIEWS : Here and Now. By A. E. R. REVIEW Reincarnation : the Hope of the World Pastiche By Francis Andrews LETTER TO The Editor from W. MEMORANDA (From last week’s NEW Age A CARTOON. By Will Dyson . . . D. . . NOTES OF THE WEEK. LORD COURTNEY,as the practical politician he professes himself to be, might have been expected to understand the major issue of the war He might have been expected, that is to say, to understand that the war is not being fought for the particular purpose of repairing Germany’s breach of the neutrality of Belgium but to prevent the attainment by Germany of her object in attacking Belgium-namely, the establishment of her hegemony of Europe. Everybody, we should have thought, would by this time have realised that the German threat to the balance of power in Europe-itself the condition, as it has now been demonstrated the maintenance of the balance of power in the world-was a threat that it would have been necessary to meet even if Belgium had never been overrun and, therefore, as a corollary to it, that the restitution of Belgium alone couId not be regarded as putting an end to the menace if at the same time Germany were threatening the balance of Europe in another direction. Nevertheless we find Lord Courtney in the “Manchester Guardian” disregarding this elementary fact about the war, and arguing as if Germany’s hegemony of Europe could. only be effected by annexations in the West. In particular, he thinks, her present Russian occupations are no concern of ours, and are certainly not worth our while to fight against. Should we have intervened, he asks, if the present situation in Russia had been brought about in a war between Russia and Germany alone? Should we then have felt it our business to defend the integrity of Russia? And he assumes in reply that we should not have done so, and concludes from this triumphant piece of reasoning that we have no more ground for intervening now that the situation has been brought about by other means. Leaving aside, however, the moral question, of which we understand, pacifists like Lord Courtney have a ‘monopoly ; ,and assuming that it were proper for the world to see the Empire of Russia reduced to the condition of the native territories of Africa and partitioned among the Powers the question of policy would still remain. Would it be to the advantage of Europe, would it be to the advantage of the world, that militarist Prussia should become stronger at the expense of Russia even if as a compensation Germany were to offer to restore Belgium, Serbia, Lorraine, and the other Western spoils? The reply is so clearly in the negative, having in view the character and ambition and military talent of Prussia, that we must affirm that, even if Russia is unwilling to defend herself, the world must defend her; and that even if she were willing to self-determine herself into the arms of Prussia she must be refused the world’s permission. Lord Courtney’s remarkable device for ending the war by permitting Germany to win it is an example of practical politics too common among our political pacifists to be overlooked. We trust that his lordship will reconsider the case for the European balance of power and revise his present conclusion. The restoration of the Russian provinces, however, is not the only necessity the Allies have for continuing the war even in the face of the liberal offers recently made by Germany of concessions in the West. We referred last, week to the question of the relative techniques of the two opposing groups of Powers; and we indicated that in our opinion it would not be safe to conclude a peace with Germany upon any terms while she remained in possession of a superior military technique The reason is obvious. When as between two parties a peace is concluded which leaves in the hands of one a weapon of superior value to any in the possession of the other, the peace so concluded is at the discretion of the holder of the superior weapon-in short, it is a peace that is forced on the weaker party, however the fact may be disguised. That at present the technique of Germany in respect of the submarine is superior to our own is unfortunately patent. We have neither as yet an absolute defence against it nor any other means of preventing its use. To conclude the war therefore. while this is the case would be to leave Germany virtually in possession or sea-power, for the simple reason that we should only continue to hold the sea with her consent. And the same holds good of other weapons as well. To have to rely upon the moral self-restraint of your- opponent is to be exposed to the chance of his self-restraint breaking down In other words, mere rules and regulations of warfare cannot any longer be regarded as a sufficient defence. We must be prepared for the very worst that our enemy can do when all the rules and regulations of war have been cast aside. But that is scarcely the case at this moment, far in anarchy as the Prussian militarist has travelled; for there are still measures he may take that are beyond our present defence to meet, as they are also, at present, beyond our power to forecast. All we can be sure of is that while Prussia retains any power to do us harm and we have no defence against it, her situation is one of menace to ourselves in the circumstances of which there can be no real peace. Only when we can say to Prussia that she can do what she likes and be still superior to her shall we be able to say that the war to end war has been really won. *** Prince Lichnowsky’s Memorandum, to which we referred last week, has now been acknowledged as authentic, and it becomes in consequence an indubitable historic document of the first importance. It should be published by our Government broadcast. The testimony it bears to the amiable efforts of our Foreign Office during the years before the war to establish a working rapprochement with Germany is, in the words of “ Vorwarts,” “ absolutely brilliant.” If Herr Scheidemann has not seen fit, for other reasons, to admit the fact and to realise that it knocks the bottom out of the popular German myth of Germany’s war of defence against the Imperialist aggression of the EuropeanAllies, its effect upon German popular opinion must be considerable. Pointed. too, as it has been by Prince Lichnowsky’s disciplinary degradation, it cannot fail, we think, to be read in Germany with particular attention. We are concerned, however, with its effect at home almost as much as we are with its effect in Germany. What have our pacifists to say to it? If the bottom has been knocked out of the German theory of defensive war, it follows that the bottom has been likewise knocked out of our pacifists’ theory of an aggressive war. The Allies stand acquitted by Germany’s foremost ambassador of all the imperialist designs attributed to them in Germany and elsewhere. His testimony is ‘‘ absolutely brilliant. ” Will our pacifists now make the amends honorable and confess that they have been deceived like the German people, and like Prince Lichnowsky himself? Will they admit that they, too, were wrong in refusing to believe that the Prussian militarist caste deliberately brought about the war? *** There is a very good excuse for Herr Scheidemann in continuing to shut his eyes to the fact. After having supported his Prussian masters during so many crises of the war, it is hard for him and his party to confess that they have been fooled to the top of their bent. Moreover, he has a lively apprehension, based, upon his experience of the policy of Prussia, concerning what might happen to Germany if the Social-Democrats should desert Prussia and leave Germany to the mercy of the Allies. The formulae of the Bolshevists, he says, have not been encouraging in their practical consequences to a German revolution; for, in spite of all the pious protests of the strangest Socialist party in the world, the Prussian militarists at once proceeded to divide Russia among- them. Would the Allies, he asks, after four years of war, treat Germany differently if Germany were to follow the example of Russia? Would the working-classes of England and France refrain, any more than the Prussian militarists have refrained, from taking advantage of a German revolution to destroy German nationality? As we say, Herr Scheidemann’s question is natural under the circumstances.With Prussia and only Prussian examples before him, he cannot easily bring himself to believe that there can he among the Allies a magnanimity to a helpless enemy which he has never seen displayed by his own governing classes. Nevertheless we believe that he is profoundly mistaken. It is not Mr. Henderson alone who has affirmed that ‘‘ the Socialists of Germany may be assured that in emancipating themselves they will not be exposing their country to the is, we believe, the Allied world fate ofRussia”-it Grievously as the German Socialistshavewronged the world by aiding and abetting the world’s enemies, the world, we believe, would be unable to treat them, in the event of their regeneration, as the Prussian militarists have treated Russia. ’The apprehension, however,must needs continue to exist until it is removed by more powerful voices than those of the Allied Labour parties. Here is once more an opportunity for the policy we have before suggested of offering to the German people even at the eleventh hour peace with mercy as an alternative to the offer to Prussia of peace with justice. *** While awaiting a German revolution which they do little to bring about, our pacifists continue to dream of the establishment of a League of Nations. They have not yet grasped, it appears, the most elementary condition of such a League-namely, the defeat, from within or without, of the sworn enemy of internationalism, Prussian militarism. But how ineffective such a League would be if it either included or excluded a militarist State like Prussia may be demonstrated from the very case put forward by Lord Parker in the House of Lords last Wednesday. Under the aegis of a League of Nations, lie said, there would have been no neutrals in the present war; for when a State, like Prussia, had clearly broken the rules laid down by the League, it would be the duty of every other nation, party to the League, to join in making war on ‘it. Imagine, now, what would have been the situation of Holland and Switzerland and Denmark under these circumstances. As members of the League and‘ custodians of its rules, they would have been expected to Ay to arms in its vindication simultaneously with the rest of the world, only to find themselves compelled to bear he brunt of the Prussian attack. Lord Parker’s contribution to the debate was equalled in absurdity by the sententiousness of Lord Lansdowne. This pacifist leader, who has to his embarrassment become an associate of revolutionaries in his declining years, was of the opinion that if only Prussia could be forced to join a League of Nations more would have been done to get rid of Prussian militarism than can be done by any other means. If only, in other words, the cat were belled, how easy would it be for the mice to play. The advocates of the League of Nations remind us of another cat, the cat i’ th’ adage. that let I dare not wait upon I would. Assuming for the moment that a League of Nations, equipped with its super-sovereign super-national authority (a la Mr. Sidney Webb), is desirable, it is the business of its advocates who will the end to will the means. And since it stands to reason that the means are the extinction of Prussian militarism by storm or by earthquake, by defeat or by revolution, it is to one of these that they must look for the fulfilment of their wish. *** On the same day that the League of Nations was being discussed in the Lords, another excuse for shirking public responsibility for national policy was beingadvocated by the pacifist group in the House of Commons.We refer to Mr. Trevelyan’s proposals to create a Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs to advise, direct, and generally control the Government in matters of foreign policy. Now there is no doubt whatever in our minds that the neglect hitherto of the study of foreign affairs has been a disgrace to the House of Commons and, still more, to the vast mass of the electorate. For an Imperial people we are as ignorant of geography, let alone of national psychologies, as might become the inhabitants of the interior of China; and we are rather proud of it than ashamed. Anything,therefore, that is designed to call attention to the fact that we both live in the world and have relationswith the world is all to the good of our national mentality. It is a necessary, and an increasingly neces- sary, part of the political education of our citizens. But the proposal to form a Standing Committee of the House of Commons to act as expert critics of the Government appears to us to be designed to have precisely the opposite effect from that which is doubtless intended. In the first place, such a Committee must needs be from the nature of the case, more or less secret; its existence therefore does not do away with the imagined evils of secret diplomacy. In the second place, it is bound to be either powerless and therefore useless, or possessed of power and therefore a rival or a screen of the Government. And, in the third place, in either event it becomes a substitute €or the House of Commons and hence an excuse for the continued negligence by this body of its public duty of public criticism of the Executive. All this was stated with great force by Mr. Balfour in the debate on Wednesday, but without the qualifications which we shall now add. For he allowed it to he concluded that, after all, the present system of conducting our foreign affairs, because the device suggested was no improvement, did not stand in need of improvement. On the contrary, however. The criticism which inspired the suggestion to create a Committee of Foreign Affairs was a criticism of substance even if the remedy suggested was useless; and the criticism is this, that the Government's foreign policy is apt to be motived by ideas and influences that are either anti-national or dubiously national. In a word, it is only by accident, as it were, that our foreign policy is the true expression of the character and ideals of the nation. The remedy for this, however, is neither a League of Nations nor a It Standing Committee of the House of Commons. is the reorganisation of our Foreign Office, and chiefly of its personnel; the wiser selection of our Foreign Ministers, and the better instruction both of the electorateand of members of Parliament in the rudiments of foreign affairs. Given these reforms, which can be carried out with other advantages than their immediate purpose, neither a Super-national Authority nor a super-Government Committee would be necessary. The nation through the House of Commons would be ready to be directly responsible for itself. *** To those in this country who still cling to the notion that the European balance of power is a purely British interest, in which the rest of the world has no part, we commend a recent article by Herr von Salzmann in the “ Vossische Zeitung.” He is not concerned,like some of our publicists, with the effect upon Russia alone of the proposed Japanese intervention which the German annexations in that country have provoked; but he is concerned with its effect upon the relations between the three existing world-Powers of Japan, America, and Britain. As a candidate for world-power herself, Prussia, he says, had the satisfaction of seeing before the present war the three existing Powers nicely directed to destroying or, at least, to menacing each the other. Japan in particular was a potential enemy both of America in the East and of the British Empire in the South. Thanks, however, to the recent German annexations in Russia this pleasing disorientation of Japan, America, and Britain was no longer in existence. By threatening to occupy Russia and to establish her hegemony of Europe by means of the Slav race, Prussia had now attracted all Japan’s enmity, as well as the enmity of England and America, to herself. All three would thereafter be not only united against Prussia, but not, as formerly, divided among themselves. Japan. in other words, would no longer look towards America or further India, since she had now her flank exposed to the attack of Prussia through Russia. We are not concerned to judge whether Herr von Salzmann’s article is well or ill founded in history; but it appears to us to be a view to balance the pessimistic views that prevail in some of our journals concerning the intervention of Japan in the war. Above all it demonstrates clearly the relation of world-power to the European balance of power; and-reveals how sensitive the one is to’ the other in a world as ruled by the sword. *** It is sometimes necessary to call a man an incorrigible dunce or something worse ; and we do so in the case of Mr. John Hill, the Secretary of the Boilermakers’ Union, after a good deal of provocation. Mr. Hill has lately been writing in his official journal much of the narrow-minded nonsense concerning the alleged purely capitalist character of the war that we hoped had been disposed of for intelligent persons by events if not by reason. It is a capitalist war, he says, and the capitalists are collectively making profit out of every day of it. The peoples are at last beginning to see that they have been duped. We can understand that anybody in the position of Mr. Hill might have held these views and expressed them in this language in the early days of the war, when it was by no means clear that there could have existed in the modern world a militarist Power in whose table of values Capitalism ranked as subordinate to conquest: but the evidence has accumulated with every day of the war that far from it being a capitalist’s war or anvthing so comparatively civilised, it is an atavistic war of pure conquest. That, on the one side, the Allies have capitalist interests to defend we do not, of course, deny. That, on the other side, Prussia has capitalist ends to pain we do not deny either. Rut neither on the side of the Allies nor on the side of Prussia is the capitalism the predominant factor: in the one case, it is the defence of civilisation ; in the other, it is the conquest of power. But even if it were the purely capitalist war of Mr. Hill’s arrested imagination, the issue ought by no means to be indifferent to Socialists and trade-unionists. Between a capitalist system which rests. in the last resort, on the consent of free electors and that can he overturned by the properly organised economic Dower of the proletariat : and a capitalist system which rests on the terror of the sword-there is surely something to choose, if it is only the choice between the ape and the tiger. In failing to discern any difference, Mr. Hill is proving that he is no man to go tiger-shooting By the way, we shall be interested to observe, with. after the war, the conduct of our present-day pacifists. When anti-Prussianism is no longer necessary, will they turn with us to anti-capitalim and wage that war to the end? Or will they preach compromise in that struggle, too ? *** The Women’s party, under the leadership of Mrs. and Miss Christabel Pankhurst, continues to take both its political ideas and its political phrases from the university of the “Daily Express. ” At the celebration, recently held in the Albert Hall, of the great “Suffrage victory, ” a resolution was passed-the only resolution of the meeting, we believe-pledging the women of England to their “primary duty of defeating proGermanism and Bolshevism on the industrial as well as on the political front.” We are quite as much opposed to pro-Prussianism and to Bolshevism as the Women’s party can be; for the one is militarist capitalism and the other is anarchist syndicalism. But we were not aware that these propagandas needed a whole new party to counteract them, or that it is the “primary duty” of the newly emancipated women of England. Miss Christabel Pankhurst employed a comparatively original phrase when she defined the contribution about to be made by women to politics as “a new dimension” ; but the “primary duty” to which the meeting pledged itself was not a new dimension at all, hut an extension in familiar space. Eight thousand pounds, however, was collected in the course of the meeting; and we supposethat its dimensions, at any rate, were satisfactory Foreign Affairs, By S. Verdad. COUNT HERTLING,and other ‘German statesmen taking their cue from him, accuse the Entente Powers of hypocrisy because, it is alleged, we are “forcing” Holland to do something, and are thereby acting towards her as the Germans (the plea is put forward in justification) had to act towards Belgium. The pacifists among us will naturally try to make capital out of the incident ; but we cannot allow either them or the enemy to treat the law of angary as negligible By this law-which has been in use for century after century-a belligerent country is authorised to seize the property of a neutral within its jurisdiction, provided, of course, that compensation effected. The analogy with the case of is Belgium-thus falls to the ground; but we need not necessarily let the matter rest there. We in this country must, willy-nilly, be both counsel and judge of the Allied cause, and of the acts performed by the Allies in the prosecution of it. In the absence of an International Court, this appearance of partiality cannot avoided; but it is, nevertheless, our duty to act, be as far as we can, in anticipation of the approval of such a Court if it should ever be erected--as it will be under the name of history. In short, we must submit to be judged, if not by any contemporary court, then by the Court of History. *** It is not the case that of two disputing parties there is always, as the saying goes, “something to be said for both sides.” In some cases there is nothing to be said in defence of one party and everything to be said in defence of the other. Not to admit this is to deny that there can ever be a clear distinction between plain right and plain wrong. Few of such disputes as there may be, there are at least some. Now it is the Allies’ contention that as between their cause and that of Germanythe issue is between right and wrong absolutely. It is not denied that there are explanations and extenuating circumstances in the case of Germany; but, whatever these may be, it is contended by the Allies that the cause of Germany is absolutely wrong. The case, from our point of view, therefore stands thus: that the Allies maintain that Germany’s object is wrong- ; and that, since it is an aggressive object, its accomplishment beprevented. The German object, as must we define it, is her hegemony by military means, first, over Europe. and, later, over the world. This being the rase, it behoves every nation to join in defending itself and the world against Germany. Unless they wish to be enslaved themselves. and to he the means of enslaving the world, it is their duty to fight against Germany. *** We recognise that not all nations are in a position to do this. The small nations bordering on Germany, for instance, are certainly not. It follows, therefore, that whether they fear or do not fear the threatened hegemony of Germany they must needs be neutral from discretion. But because they must be neutrals it does not at all follow that they should allow themselves be employed by Germany for their own and to the world’s enslavement. Even if they do not fear enslavement for themselves, it is not right that they should be the means of enslaving the world. Their rights, in short, extend to disposing of their own fate, but not to disposing of the fate of their neighbours. The smaller nations, that is to say, owe a duty to the world, if not to themselves. It may be contended that the smaller nations cannot perform their duty without jeopardising their neutrality. But that is their affair. Having taken the view that it is in the world’s interest that Germany should not exercise mastery over Europe, we are entitled to adopt the necessary means to enforce this view. This is not military necessity, but moral necessity. If the means should imperil the position of the neutrals, no blame attaches to us; for the position of the neutrals is ex hypothesi immoral, however discreet we may acknowledge it to be. By virtue of our command of the sea we are in a position to require of Holland certain services.If our object in the war were imperial aggrandisement the expense of Holland or of any other at nation, we should be guilty of tyranny if we employed our sea-power in this way. But we contend that we are fighting for the liberty of the world, and for Holland included; and hence that we are justified in using our sea-power for this purpose. *** This essential fact is seen by the Dutch Government, which has admitted, albeit unwillingly, our contention. The Dutch people do not. Which is more likely to be right? In fine, we are compelling Holland to do what she ought to do, but (for good reasons) dare not do-namely, assist the Allies in defending both herself and the world against the hegemony of Germany. Let us insist that we fully recognise the difficulties with which both the Government and people of Holland are confronted. Holland is technically a neutral, for the excellent reason that she stands between two fires. Well and good. Unfortunately, of the two contending Powers between which Holland is placed-England and Germany-one of these Powers -viz., Germany-has hitherto exercised her influence over Holland to her own advantage. Germany has, in fact, extorted concessions from Holland which have had the effect of making Holland an unwilling but useful aid to our enemies. The question then arises: if Holland were persuaded to yield favours to Germany, why should she not yeild equal favours to the Allies? Her neutrality would have been impartial if she had, in effect, resisted giving favours to Germany; but the moment she allowed herself to do so we were entitled to demand a corresponding surrender to ourselves. It is true that Germany would threaten her if Holland conceded anything to us; but ought we, in the circumstances outlined, to let. this obstacle stand in our way? As a neutral Holland should have helped neither party to the conflict. ’The moment she helped Germany (as she began to do long ago), even if she did so under duress, at that precise moment she was bound either to help the other party equally or to cease pretending to be neutral. *** This is our theoretical case, and we believe that it cannot be refuted in law, in moral argument, or in any other way. Let us add a word with respect to the position of the Dutch people. It has long been known that they are not favourable to the Germans as a body. Holland was both a cultured and a commercial nation before the German States were united in the old “ Bund,” and indeed long before the German States individually had the semblance of a culture. It is an historical axiom that a nation bordering on the sea becomes civilised in point of time before an inland nation; and the Dutch have reason to be as grateful to the sea for its protection and for its blessings as we ourselves. Nor is- it true to say that respect for the German arms can influence the Dutch people; for the Germans have been far from successful on land and they have never been able to break down our sea barrier, despite the unscrupulous employment of submarines.If the Dutch have grown to respect Germany on account of German “ frightfulness,” they must have forgotten their own history. Can they not recall-or their statesmen for them--that thrilling episode in the annals of the Low Countries when the people, threatened, as now, from the mainland, determined, necessary, to destroy the dykes, flood the if entire country, and retire to their islands rather than surrender their freedom ? Guilds and their Critics, VII.--Function THE CLASS STRUGGLE. (Continued.) III. APART from the definite economic function of management, is there no other deposit of social value in the rnaster-class? It would be monstrous if, after generations of control not only of industry, but of education, of access nut only to wealth but to culture, the governing classes should bring nothing- in. their hands but a certain skill in management. such a result would prove the intellectual bankruptcy of the nineteenthcentury. Have we not heard it said that the triumph of economic democracy would mean the starvationof the arts and sciences? Is not this at bottom the Conservative as distinct from the Liberal, defence of the existing system? But I need not labour the point, because we can hardly deny to the British governing classes a certain quality, as indefinable as manners-personality. The close observer might with truth remark that the rich and favoured of Great Britain have been criminally negligent of their intellectual opportunities : that their mentality is something. to seek. In my own experience, in cosmopolitan company in various parts of the worId. I have too often found the Englishman less mentally equipped than Frenchman, German, or Spaniard. But almost invariably he carries most weight by investing his platitudes with personality. There was a time, not far distant, when even that quality seemed to be disappearing. The younger generation of the wealthier classes, released from the responsibility of management, their funds in joint stock companies, either frequented clubs and racecourses, or scoured the world in search of game, furred or feathered. There was a noticeable increase of intellectual vacuity and moral slackness. If the war has done nothing else, it has toned up our officer class, which is broadly representative of social and political power. There has been an accession of personality amongst the officers and of discipline amongst the rank and file. But let the masters beware : discipline is not docility : may, if put to it, trample upon docility behind barricades. In mentalityand exact knowledge I fancy a youth from a council school is the superior of a youth of equal age in Eton or Harrow. But in personality. . . . With something so intangible, it may he best to illustrate. Here shortly are the life-stories of two men of equal age, and both friends of mine. John Temple is the son of a prosperous merchant. He was born into a comfortable home surrounded by a religious atmosphere, and early subjected tu regular habits. He was sent in due course to a public school, where he was simply but plentifully fed, and went through the usual curriculum, partly classical, partly modern. From the first, the ambition was sedulously implanted to cut a gallant figure in outdoor sports. He was practically always in training either for gymnastics,rackets, swimming, football, or cricket. He developed the habits of good sportsmanship-courtesy, chivalry, and loyal team-work. Above all, he was by constant suggestion impressed with his future, in which he would be the master of men, first in his own business and later in politics and social affairs. To the power of the purse were to be added uprightness, reliability,consideration for his equals and those placed under him. No weakness; always strength of purpose. Ideals, of course, so long as they were conventional, but he must steadily guard against subversive notions, which would have a disquieting effect upon his work. This was best secured by keeping in with his own set. Tone and good manners were essential. Being destined for business, he did not go to the University, but straight into the counting-house. The death of his father prematurely weighted him with AND responsibility. Alert and intelligent, he was quick to see the importance of facts, of a true and reliable balancesheet, of the statistics of his trade and of the trades with which he dealt. That carried him to national statistics and international problems. His business had considerable connections with America. He was not content to accept second-hand evidence of affairs across the Atlantic, so accordingly we find him frequently crossing, and not only transacting his immediate business,but comparing notes upon management, production, transport, trusts and control, and all the problems incidental to commerce. He had learnt at school the value of team-work, so it was hardly surprising to find a profit-sharing scheme adopted. His family training had taught him not merely the value but the duty of sympathy with those in trouble. We adopts a benevolent scheme and personally visits his employees when sick. An employee, on the birth of a child, finds a five-pound note in his pay envelope. It is hardly surprising: that he secures the enthusiastic support of his. staff and “Mr. John” has a way with him. workmen. His position established, he marries a woman of character, who regulates his domestic concerns end seconds his efforts, whatever they may he. He devotes time to his children, teaches them games, and attaches them to him. It is all, done systematically. He sees ahead a dear six months of comparative quiet. Trade is normal, demand and supply about balance each other, prices are steady. So he buys the latest and best guns and rifles, and camp outfit, and all the paraphernalia of a hunting expedition. He gives personal attention to every detail. At Nairobi he is equally particular in choosing his head man and the long string of porters. He comes back with exceptionally good specimens, which you may see in his hall and study. When the war comes, he promptly offers his services to the Government, and he is there to-clay, without salary or self -seeking, As the years fly past, his friends learn to trust him, seek his advice, lean upon him. He does not disappoint them. Always he is so busy with one thing or mother that somehow he finds no time to open a book, to weigh an idea, or to stimulate his imagination. Of the economic value of his managerial function there can be no doubt. Is his personality the product of his class environment and valueless in a Pew society? My friend Torn Wilson has a very different history. He is the son of a carpenter, and was born in a jerrybuilt house in a mean street of an industrial town. His parents were Nonconformists, arid did their duty by their son. When he could toddle he played on the pavement, and sometimes his father or mother would take him to the park. All too soon, he was sent to an infant school (he was less of a drag upon his mother there), later to the Board and to Sunday school. Torn never experienced actual poverty, but, when his father was unemployed or on strike, he went on short commons. left school at the age of thirteen, and He became message-boy for the grocer, who was deacon at the chapel. For six months he brought his mother home two and six a week, later five shillings. He occasionally got a penny or two from the customers, which was spent as boys spend pennies. At fifteen his father apprenticed him to a trade. At eighteen he was an improver, at twenty, a journeyman. Separated by this time from his parents (capitalism breaks up family life), he was lonely and uncomfortable in “ digs.,’’ and soon began ‘‘ walking out ’’ with a comely girl, whom he soon married. He had already joined his union, attending the. branch fairly regularly. Each Saturday morning Torn would allot so much of his wages--to rent, so much to the Oddfellows, so much to the Prudential, so much to beer and baccy, so much to his union, the rest to his wife. His beer and baccy money and his union subscription he would packet, his wife disbursing the rest. I remember once when visit- ing Tom on a Sunday afternoon that his wife opened a cupboard door, showing me little envelopes in which the money was separated as she and Torn would arrange. there was no spare money. The trade union branch meeting was a weekly event with Tom. The business was generally tedious, but he would talk of other things with his friends. In time he was appointed to some office, and gradually grew in influence. He was steady and reliable; his mates trusted him. About this time he read Bellamy’s “ Looking Backward ’ and Blatchford’s ’ ‘ ’ Merrie England. )) He joined the I.L.P. He did not like the S.D..F., which tie regarded as irreligious; there was something hard and unsympathetic about it. At election times, whether Parliamentary or municipal, he would draw five shillingsfrom his savings as a subscription to the funds, and spend all his spare time working for the Labour candidate. In this wise, Torn has spent the years. He is the same age as John Temple, but is physically twenty years older. His employers have drawn out of him his surplus energy. At night he reads a page or two from some book, or the “Labour Leader,” or “Reynolds,”but he is generally fatigued, and the “hooter” hosts at six o’clock in the morning. So he is in bed by ten o’clock as a rule. On Sunday he lies on till nine o’clock, has a leisurely breakfast, and so to chapel. TOM’S life, if you measure it in self-denial, is more heroic than John Temple’s; but it is infinitely more circumscribed. Where Tom Wilson thinks in shillings John Temple thinks in thousands. Torn Wilson turns over a’ year, John Temple Yet TOM, too, has personality, very attractive in its modesty and quiet endurance. But John Temple has capitalised his personality, whilst Torn Wilson’s has gone into his work, as though it were nothing. The truth is that the new society will have no use either for John Temple’s or Tom Wilson’s personality -the one a master, the other a wage-serf. But when we remember the devitalising effects of capitalism, its moral and intellectual debasement of the master, its physical and social debasement of the servant, we shall discover that our national wealth in personality has depreciated; that we cannot afford to disregard personality wherever it can be found. What must be done is to throw both the master and proletarian personalities into, the melting-pot. The resultant amalgam will profoundly. affect the future destinies of our own country the world. and I V. The foregoing is the first and not the last. word on personality.. National Guildsmen have something more specific to say upon it. It is their contention that the commodity valuation of labour, by ignoring personality, strikes at the worker’s most sacred possession. When the worker recovers it in enfranchised form, when he knowingly puts it into the product (from which he is no longer divorced by the wage-payment), a new era of qualitative production mill be begun. Even those who are engaged on production which is necessarily quantitative, if denied the joys ofcraftsmanship, will nevertheless compensate themselves in procuring as consumers the best of the craftsman’s skill. V. Nothing here written must obscure the plain fact that the class struggIe is the dominant element in social statics, as is the class war in social dynamics. But an examination of certain qualities in certain classes creates a doubt whether there are not other factors to be taken into account, other principles that transcend the purely economic theory of class confrontation. Creates a further doubt, if Senor de Maeztu will forgive me, whether these qualities, although "subjective,”residing in the individual, may not be found to be social “ objects,” things in themselves, possessing “ primacy.” Even if we declare the “ primacy of things,’’ recognise that men cluster like bees round some “ thing,” be it a football or .a church dogma, from whence all associations arise, our doubts are not resolved. If a church dogma be a “ thing,” so also may be personality or liberty. Amongst the ‘‘ ends ” or “ things ” sought by education (itself an instrument) are personality and the development of potential citizenship. Certainly I can conceive an association seeking personality or liberty, not by the assertion of subjectiverights, but in an objective spirit and with an objective end. Let us then consider the case of a deposed master class. Let us assume-that this class possesses faculties of social value, the gift of management, personality, or what not. Let us still further suppose that this class retires upon what compensation equity grants it (always remembering that not one farthing of compensation is paid for the loss of the control of the labour monopoly), retires and sulks, declining all assistance to the new regime. The community assuredly will have something pertinent to say to these pocket Achilles. This, perhaps : “ Gentlemen, you are the inheritors, and still inherit (even though dispossessed of economic power), qualities and faculties acquired by your class at our expense. You must act as men and not as sulky babies, and we accordingly expect you without further nonsenseto put all your capacities, which we require, at our disposal. Your refusal will be a crime, and the punishment will not he to your liking.” What if they become conscientious objectors? These The’ question of personal liberty is raised. conscientious objectors, in effect, say that they must have full liberty “ to grasp the position they covet,” or to stand idle, or even to conspire for the counterrevolution. No doubt there is something in this of the liberal principle, even though we must not forget that Liberalism has no monopoly of liberty or the concept of liberty. Broadly put, and allowing for recent changes in the temper of Liberalism, the liberal principlestill stands for only such restrictions of personal liberty as are necessary to the maintenance of the power that guarantees the liberty. Senor de Maeztu’s alternative principle is to. bind individuals, authorities, and nations in definite functional activities, and to establish juridical power, backed by force, to maintain it. It seems difficult to deny the proposition that the end is greater than the association; that “ rights arise primarily from the relation of the associated to the thing that associates them.” My difficulty is not to deny the truth of this, but to discover its limits, to ascertain how far, if carried to its extreme, it may infringe upon other principles equally precious in human association. But so far as its economic application is concerned, it justifies resort to compulsion where there is noncompliancewith the assignment of functions in the public I see no infringement of personal liberty in interest. compelling men to return to the community what they and their ancestors have received from the community. This is not the negation of personal liberty, but the necessary nurturing of the commonwealth in which personalliberty thrives. In the light of history, who can doubt that it has been the assertion of subjective rights, through the media of monarchy, economic power, law or custom, that was the predisposing cause of the great human tragedies? Democrats would be foolish or worse to let continue an order of society which permitted subjective rights to function to the detriment of mankind as a whole. I do not doubt that it will find in the functional principle an instrument of escape. But let us beware lest in driving out one devil we admit another. I shall not argue, but only assert that personal liberty, restricted but protected by law, has been of priceless value in the body politic. That the functional concept clashes with the concept of personal liberty is assumed, rightly or wrongly. I can see it so wisely applied that personal liberty is enlarged ; so peremptorily applied that we may find ourselves the victims of a mechanical tyranny no less galling than in the days when S. G. H. subjective rights held sway. The Russian Lesson for Industrial Democracy. By Ramiro de Maeztu. We cannot but think of Russia. “ S. G. H.” has properly said that the Labour guns must be levelled at exploitation, but not at management, while Mr. Janko Lavrin in his wonderful series of studies has made us drink the waters of that great river, Dostoyevsky, at which for two generations the Russian people have quenched their thirst. Strange as it may seem, the problem of Dostoyevsky and the problem of industrial management are one and the same. Let us begin by dealing with the second. The Russian peasant has been brought up for centuries in the passive obedience of the Tsar, as the representative of God upon the earth. He knew of no other obedience than that due to the Tsar. Once the Tsar disappeared he could not find any other motive for discipline; in other words, the great Russian failure is due to the fact that the Russian democracy had not thought beforehand of the problem of hierarchy under the complex conditions of modern life. Sir Paul Vinogradoff has said that the noneducated classes of Russia have revolted against the educated, and that the very thin layer of educated people which had been painfully formed in a process of centuries is on the way to being destroyed. NOW, if you replace generals and officers of experience by inexperienced men like Krylenko, you destroy the army. You also destroy the courts if you substitute for judges and lawyers revolutionaries composed of ordinary soldiers, sailors, and so on. And you also destroy the whole of industry if you suppress the men who know how to manage it. It is most likely that this general destruction has been very carefully planned by the Germans, although carried out by men utterly unaware of what they were doing. But, apart from this probable hypothesis, a problem is raised of universal interest. What will happen if the communist and democratic idea is suddenly,applied to modern industry? An interesting story has been told by Mr. Wilton. In one of the biggest cartridge factories of Petrograd the soldierclerks decided to form a committee to manage the works. They dismissed the previous managers and elected two unknown officers, their private friends. For a few days they had in their hands both the management and the money. Afterwards they quarrelledamong themselves, and the two officers were then discovered to be escaped convicts, who had stolen the uniforms of officers they had murdered. As far as we can follow what has happened in Russia, it appears that only about one factory in twenty has continued working since the workmen have been in control of management. The immediate result of ‘‘ the taking over of the instruments of production, distribution, and exchange ” by the working classes has been the absolute paralysis of the industry of the country. Does this fact dispose of the noble ideal of industrial democracy? Or is it not a warning indication of what must be done to make a success of industrial democracy? Industrial democracy must win in the end because it is impossible to prolong indefinitely a system of work under which the majority of men have not an adequate idea of what they are doing, that turns them into machines, and robs them of vitality. Capitalism, on the other hand, does not secure to the industry competent management. One may say that all new industries start under competent management ; otherwise they fail. But the continuation of every industry depends on the chance of the shareholders electing as competent managers as the pioneers. They may do so or not, and this insecurity is one of the legitimate grievances of the Socialist movement against Capitalism. The two advantages we hope to derive from industrial democracy are, first, that the workmen may take a greater interest in their industry when they have a share in its control; and, second, that this control itself may secure to the industries competent management. As the workmen are in more intimate touch with the work than the shareholders, they are likely to choose better the competent managers. The Russian lesson obliges us to qualify our hopes. It has already been observed that the mass of the workmen cannot immediately take full control of the complex modern industries. A good foundry must be directed by a man who unites the practical experience acquired in the workshop with an irreducible minimum of theoretical knowledge that cannot be acquired in the workshop itself. This is even more true of all the more complicated industries-the electrical,the chemical, etc. Never again, we can say, will it be possible for an average intelligent workman with no other education than that of the workshop to grasp the complexity of a modern scientific industry. The managers of a scientific industry must be men with a scientific education. And this means that a strict industrial democracy is impossible, so long as the average workman has not received a scientific education which allows him to discuss the technical problems of management with the full knowledge what he is talking about. of And if a strict industrial democracy is impossible, a parliamentary or representative democracy is also difficult. It is impossible, for instance, that the women who varnish the wings of aeroplanes should themselves select the proper designs for new machines; but it is also difficult that they should properly select the persons best fitted to choose them. Of course, the shareholders have not, a priori, any advantage in this respect over the workman; but many of them are better educated, and this is what enables them to choose in so many cases passable managers. There are industries, some of them rather complex, like watch-making, which do not require in their managers any other scientific knowledge but elementary mechanics, which the average workman can easily. learn. These industries are susceptible of industrial democracy and of democratic management, given a reasonable amount of common sense and discipline. But the really scientific industries are not susceptible to industrial democracy, because in their case neither the average workman is capable of managing them nor is he capable of choosing their competent managers. And it is useless to take over the instruments of production, distribution, and exchange if the industries themselves are going to be brought to a standstill and the workmen are deprived of their means of living. It is useless to kill Capitalism if the industries are killed as well. In other words, the catastrophism of Marx has been proved possible but undesirable. The problem of industrial democracy in scientific production can only be solved by a process of universal scientific education. And now let us deal with the problem of Dostoyevsky, out Of School. IT is clear enough, at all events, that without unity. of the understanding we cannot perform the act, or reach the state, for which our most inclusive term is "meditation”-an act of synthesis, involving a supraintellectual state of comprehension, that is prior to any but a fugitive and accidental command over the intuitions. A unity of the understanding does not imply anything so alarming as a complete grasp of all knowledge. A child can meditate ; an illiterate ploughman can meditate; for that matter, a dog can meditate. thought-material, Their whatever its range and state of development, can be embraced as a whole. The type of citizen who is led by the “Daily Mail” and the “ Daily Express” cannot meditate. The rambling mob of his ideas about the war, for instance, can never be turned to face a common centre. He can follow the idea that it is highly important we should not be beaten in the field; but, while he is following it, he is diverging from all other ideas. You can put him in a panic -as it is the business of the leader writers, who cater for him, to know-by administering a shock to any one of his ideas : men; food; ships; spies; monosyllables work best. Try to, combine even two ideas : he fails to follow, and thinks you are confusing the issue I am not sneering at the Plain Man, who is what his education, in and out of school, has made him, and what his Press tells him to go on being; he is only an objective example. There is no central place in his mind, where he can sit down quietly, make his ideas stand still and look at him, and get the sense of them as a whole. Intellectual reformers are apt to be filled with groanings over the content of his mind; but the trouble is lack of relation, not of content.. The ploughman has a much smaller stock of notions, but he can think, and he can sometimes penetrate beyond thought. Our ideal trio of artist, saint and philosopher can carry the same process wider and further. They can escape into the general; then their minds can expand widely enough to embrace a fresh unifying concept; and then they can bring this concept to the new, particular expression, or symbolisation, of which they have been in search. This gives us a general notion of escape and return; but the line of thought has a break in it, during its passage through the region which we are calling “ We may be able to plot the whole curve of escape.” the child’s or the ploughman’s thought, if it is definite enough and we have enough insight ; with the higher workings of intuition, our graph runs off the paper. We can only note where it reappears, and Brace it back In the case of a again to the particular expression. real inspiration, we may well surmise that the- line passes through infinity before it returns, like the graph of a rectangular hyperbole. Even for us who have no genius (unless, for all we know to the contrary, in a latent condition), the smallest personal: experience of meditation shows that an escape into the general-the clumsy phrase must be taken to include the sense that, for a moment, we grasp and hold our entire mental content as a unity-has some analogue in the disappearance a line into infinity. The of state of comprehension gives a feeling, analogous to the mathematical paradox, of an infinite that is dispersed and focussed both at once. For the intuitions, as well as for the graph of xy = infinity behaves like a circumambient Everywhere which is also a mathematical. point. I apologise to those who, through no fault of their own, detest all mathematics; the allusion could not be helped, because the mathematical is the only symbol of infinity that has been logically "proved," and can be used as a connecting link. But directly you touch the idea of infinity, finite terms, naturally, become insufficient. Verbal phrases, the chord of the diminished seventh, some of Blake’s intuitional arrangements of line-these are just as much symbols as the mathematician’s symbol of the figure 8 lying on its side. When we speak of a unity of the understanding, the mind tries to picture an agglomeration of ideas with a line drawn round them. But the whole sense of that unity, when we get it, is a sense that every idea, in virtue of its connection with the rest, is supported in its outward reach towards a distant margin which is not itsboundary, but only our own present boundary; beyond this, the limit of our exploring thought, we feel that the idea has an unlimited potential range. Our first business, if we want intuitions-if .we want inspired thought and inspired work-is to extend our boundary; and the first step in that direction is to regard St as extensible. Here the vis inertiae of the human mind is against us. In face of all the evidence of evolution, it assures us that the boundary is now fixed, and that the only thing to do is to cultivate the ground within it and make ourselves comfortable there. (It would be interesting to trace German expansion-mania, in the territorial sense, to an origin in a compensating fantasy, due to the suppression of belief in spiritual,, as distinct from biological, expansion.) The remedy must be to cultivate the sense of the boundary as something temporary and conditional, which can be thrust outward-as all experience shows that it can be-by gradual development. We are in sight of an amplification of the points, aIready considered, that vital hypothesis ought to replace dogma, which is a hard and fast boundary; and that our material symbols of reality-also hard and fast boundaries-ought to be seen more clearly as the fluctuating unrealities that they, in themselves, really are. On the latter point, it is noteworthy how completelyour conception of energy has come to mean, solely, that which affects matter; even when we know (as far as we know anything) that matter is only energy behaving in a particular way. In the same way as we tend to the manifest absurdity of viewing energy as a function of matter, so we tend to the equally manifest absurdity of regarding purpose as a function of energy-as something to be judged by its doing. If purpose has any meaning, its meaning is, precisely, whatever lies beyond the mere doing. And this brings us back to the importance of hypothesis Dogma is, ultimately, confined to terms of mere doing. It IS useful as marking a boundary from which we do not mean to recede, like its more active cousin, a vow or resolve; it is cramping when it marks a boundary beyond which we need not trouble ourselves to go. All conception of purpose lies beyond dogma, in the region of belief in hypothesis There is even a criticism to he advanced against dogma as a high watermark, a mark that shows how far the tide has reached, without any of the errors of Mrs. Partington or the courtiers of Canute, if we regard it also as a mark from which the tide must not ebb before a further flow. We know that the mood of exaltation, in which we seem to understand everything. yields, by nature and rhythmically, to a withdrawal of the mind inwards, upon itself; and if, in the period of ebb, we demand of ourselves the glow of faith and perception that belongs to the period of flow, we put a most unholy strain upon our own natures-a strain of which the consequence is either pessimism or humbug. (”Bishop Blougram’s Apology” shows an excellent blend of this humbug and pessimism, intermixed with ’a confused perception of the heed for giving faith a reasonable amount of rest.) The rhythm is not between faith and insight on the one hand, and doubt and negation on the other: it is, rather., the simple rhythm of diastole and stystole, activity and rest, But T need not begin to poach upon an earlier preserve of Mr. Allen Upward’s, KENNETH Richmond. Ideals and Methods. By R. A. Vran-Gavran I. As the muddy river bottom spoils the clear mountain water so evil methods spoil good ideals. 2. A man with benevolent methods and without any ideals is a less dangerous beast that a man with high ideals but without scruples as to methods. 3. There are many more splendid idealists h the world than splendid methodists. 4. You, splendid Christian and communistic idealists, look what an evil smell your rosy ideals contract when your methodists are Jesuits and Bolshevics ! 5. I was lying down among my flock of sheep. “How do you look at us men?” I asked, wonderingly And the sheep answered in a sweet way :-“In ideals you are superior to us, but in methods we are superior to you. ” 6. In a gold mine I asked shining gold :“Why does a man kill another man because of you ?’ ’ Answer :“Because I am more precious than man.” Tremblingly, I asked again :“Tell me something more.” “Men lose their power struggling for power, and I am always powerful, being indifferent towards power.” 7. My black raven was circling over me. I told him : ‘‘ My dear enemy, I prefer to see you anxiously looking for my carcass than my rich friends coming with alms anxious for my life.’’ 8. My cat, with a rat in her paws, looked at me triumphantly and said: “ Am I not exactly following the example of human history of ten thousand years? ” “ Not quite,” I said and blushed. ‘‘ You would not be inferior to us in following our example if you had instead of a trembling rat another cat in your paws and the same appetite.” 9. The existence of ideals has a double meaning: A poverty at the present and an abundance in the future. Our ideals are painful because they represent a burial feast of the present and birth agony of the future. 10. I was riding on the back of my ass with my brains smoking of philosophy: Then I asked my grey animal : ‘‘ Could you give me any good advice, you fool? ” “Yes,” he said readily. “ Those of you who use weak means towards their ideal do not believe in the strength of their ideaI.” “ Tell me something more, you wizard.” “ Yes. Those of you who rush towards their ideal through dirty channels do not see their ideal frightened of dirt walking behind them instead of before. And they rush towards a vacuum.” I I. I walked up to an anthill and watched the most wonderful society on earth. Then I dared ask the busy ants : “ HOW do you call us men, you cher petits? ” “ We call you criminal insects.” “ And how do you call our civilisation? ” A laughing answer: “ A haughty noise, and a noisy disorder.” I walked down the hill again. 12. I asked the Sun and Earth :“How could not you make giants of men through ten thousand years?” ‘‘Because War hindered us. Cripples generated mankind during ten thousand years, the fathers of giants being destroyed by War.” 13. Lucifer came one night to me and whispered : “What reward do you want for all your pains?” “I want to see the whole road upon which mankind climbed up to civilisation. How long would it take us ?” “Five minutes. But I could go with you on such a read only one minute.” ‘‘Why ?’ ’ “It smells unbearably.’’ 14. “‘What are you doing, Miserable?” I asked a man who was up to kill his neighbour. “I ani killing the barrier of my ideal.” “On the same block and with the same sword you are killing both of them : your enemy and your ideal. Are you not aware of it, Mutton?” 15I asked men, the reputed bad mathematicians :“From whom did you receive your ideals?” ‘‘ From our God, ” they said. “How many gods have you?” “One only.” “And how many ideals?” “Many !” I turned away, thinking that either their God was a devil, or they were devils. I6. A black magician, who ruled over a herd of men, asked me :“Why is it always supposed that there is one God only but many devils ?” “One God means the prophecy of one ideal mankind has to have; many‘ devils means the symbol of many methods men are using at present to reach God,” I said. “Tell me something more on this sublime subject,” he asked, with irony. “If you allow me to cast pearls before swine, I will tell you, i.e., I will tell you that ideal and method are one and the same thing. And whoever separates them becomes a prolific father of devils.” 17. Walking on a sobbing star I met once a two-legged herd with rifles in hands. “ What are you up to?” I asked. “ We are up to kill the enemies of our ideal.” “ Are your enemies mean creatures? ” “ Meaner than worms ! ” ‘‘What a mean idea3 then must be yours, requiring such a mean sacrifice !” And‘ they said : “ Tell us something more ! ” “ If I should consider my enemies meaner than myself I would rather sacrifice myself to my ideal. ” By William Atheling. The GAELIC. There is music which reminds one of great forests, of wind and unbridled ocean; there is music, by no means inferior, which reminds one of gilded chairs and the court of Le Grand Monarque; and thereis music which reminds one of nothing so much as of too much underwear and too many waistcoats. Lest the casual reader accuse me of harshness, E will not name the individual cause of this last reflection. ’The bow in violin-playing should not sound as if covered with a mixture of glue and treacle. In contrast, I ’am almost beginning to believe that Philip Ashbrooke’s name (as manager) on a concert programme is a fair guarantee of quality. I have been let down rather badly once or twice, but the GoldsmithHall.) Haley concert was not a let down. (Wigmore Miss Katie Goldsmith gave her Purcell delightfully, with taste, discretion, temperament, firmness, causing no anxiety to her auditors. The Pugnani Praeludium and Allegro might have been _chosen to illustrate the decadence of music during the first half of the 18th century. Not that it is a bad piece, but there is in it more talk and less meaning than in the ,Purcell selected. Mr. Rowsby Woof accompanied excellently, and the piece was excellently played. The Glazounov Concerto in A. Op. 82 opens with a pleasant moderato, goes into a cheap Andante and ends in the restaurant manner. It is not good enough. And damn cadenzas!) her In final selection Miss Goldsmith made Woof’s “ Scherzo” more interesting than Cui’s ”Orientale,” and the Smetana was excellentlychosen a finale. Woof for is a youngmanof an eye on. talent, and worth keeping Miss Haley’s first move should be to get another accompanist. She has herself a delicate softness of voice, and an art adequate for the rendering of Legrenzi. One noticed a slight clipping of words in her Italian, there was ease and grace, and this tendency, in so far as it makes for clarity, is a good one, but it was just a shade overdone. In the English her singing was like little jets of breath, and she did not close her words at the end; her accompanist (Mrs. Haley) was constantly an annoyance. The Colson song is bad, and the other English composers did not show well against Legrenzi and Faure. If I have dwelt more faults than on virtues, I do on not wish to give the impression that faults were, in this concert, predominant. shall go to hear both I Miss Goldsmith and Miss Haley as often as they choose. Gladys Moger (Wigmore Hall) produced a caterwaul with a few mellifluous spots in it; a mannered squall, the words utterly smeared into a compost; but there was beauty in the melody, and the actual sound was not bad. She began with Henry Lawes’ music for Comus with atrocious accompaniment, and finished the critic before she had finished her first selections. This was all’ the more unbearable as I had heard Stroesco’s carefully thought programme (Aeolian Hall) the day -before, and had noted the admirable contrast he gets from varying the apparent distance from which the sound. proceeds. I did not understand what he aimed at with his rhythm system, which was to my ear, defective. He was admirably accompanied Di Veroli. by The voice ,is most pleasing, and, a by no means daily occurrence among singers, thought had been expended on the presentation. Plunkett Greene brought his faithful’ audience once more together, and one saw various grey and iron-grey heads not seen at other recitals. He wastes himself on second-rate modern poems set without mastery, but when he gives us something with body to it, as for example “Kerry I Am” or “Mistress Maguire” or “ ‘Twas in the Month of May” the old fire is still Music, there, and one need not fall back on the fine manner, somewhat Tennysonian, arid somewhat a reminder of what was once the best taste. KENNEDY-FRASER. Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser has brought out another volume of ‘‘Songs from the Hebrides. ” These traditional melodies of the Gael are among the musical riches of all time, and one need use no comparatives and no tempered adjectives to express the matter. They have in them the wildness of the sea and of the wind and the shrillness of the sea-birds, and whether they will pass away utterly with the present industrious collector I am unable to say, Miss M. Kennedy-Fraser sang “with no voice” but with a magnificent comprehension the whole rhythm-structure: of The Death Croon, and “Of, Donnan of Eigg” : Early puts the sun greeting on Stroa, Early chant the birds the beauty of Donnan. I: is just possible that this curious “Figure eight” rhythm cannot be conveyed to the contemporary musicianby contemporary musical notation. “ Early puts the sun greeting on Stroa, Early chant the birds the beauty of Donnan At any rate, the wildness of these chants had not been transmitted to Miss M. ‘ Kennedy-Fraser's understudy, Miss P. Kennedy-Fraser, who has a lovely voice, and sings to her own pleasant harping. She gets, in the Seal-Woman’s song, a rhythm, and in the mouth-music for dancing a decidedly lively rhythm, but she has none of the elder woman’s fire and wildness. Arthur Jordan, their male singer, has a honied voice and a temperment which cannot tell a bag-pipe from a soft-cushion. He purred through "Kismul's“ Galley” and his other wild numbers with a placidity which would not have disturbedthe knitting circle in any Victorian vicarage. One’s sole desire was to move him with dynamite. Miss P. Kennedy-Fraser was, however, satisfactory in “Aillte,” for here the song is narrative, after the event, and is not an expression of the singer’s emotion, but, only a telling of happenings or emotions of others. For this she is fully equipped, and here, if ever, one heard the epic note. If ‘anything can be, this is the sound of the Ossianic bards, and Homer would have been sung in such manner : all ote tosson apemen, oson te gegone Boesas, rimpha diokontes tas d’ ou lathen okualos neus egguthenornumene liguren d’ entunon aoiden. So much for the performance (Aeolian Hall). Of the actual work done in collecting and preserving this Gaelic music we cannot speak too highly or with an excess of appreciation. The only trouble is that it needs some singing, I do not quite know who is to sing it. Mullings is stated on the programme to have sung it. Mullings is a splendid actor for opera, but I doubt if even his voice is the ideal one for this work. Robert Parker may have sufficient savagery at his command,for the men’s songs. The Mouth-music for dancing : “Hin, hin, haradal O” !, makes interesting comparison with the African syncopation, and both in the Gaelic and African there is the curious and splendid figure eight, or fold-over of one rhythm-end into the start of the next. But my impression is that the melodic line is finer in these Gaelic things than in anything African. At any rate, it is -not inferior, and with all the talk of modern music, I cannot see that the “freedoms” have amounted to much more than a rather timid reaching out from, let us say, Mozart, toward a few rhythms older than Gregory, older than the pietising and general taming of music during the Middle Ages. A few danse-du-ventre tunes did survive among the people, and are occasionally discoverable in early manuscripts, but with these Gaelic airs before us we must conclude that the best melodies stayed unwritten, THE WAR TO Democratise Germany of “Carry giving on, you If ye brave Social Democrats! Some slight instalment of those you crush the Allies, they are we trying will to think force Liberties on you ! “ Readers and Writers, Mr. KENNETH RICHMOND,I believe, proposes to write some critical notes on the series of articles upon dostoyevsky which my colleague, Mr. Janko Lavrin, concluded last week. You will observe that I refer to him as my colleague; and the reference implies the expectation, as well as the wish, that Mr. Lavrin will continue to write for THE NEW ACE. He has, in fact, a series ready upon Ibsen, towards which I look forward with as much interest as I now look back upon his treatment of Dostoyevsky. In order not to provoke comparisons of myself with Mr. Richmond, who is an expert on the subject of psycho-analysis, I will content myself with observing that Mr. Lavrin’s series has been more universally enjoyed than most of the series hitherto published in THE NEW Age. Not more than a single disapproving word has been sent to THE New AGE upon it ; and that word, I may say, came from an old contributor, with whose notions of tragedy in particular Dostoyevsky’s, rather than Mr. Lavrin’s, really clashed.This fact should be very pleasing to Mr. Lavrin, who is nothing if not desirous of creating prestigefor his nation. He has succeeded, he may be assured,in raising our esteem of Serbian culture by several degrees and when, as we should, we recall the names of the Serbians now or recently in this country who have actually added to the SUM of the world’s culture, the list must contain his name. *** I will not presume to anticipate the judgment of Mr. John Francis Hope upon the work of another Serbian writer-a dramatist, Mr. Joseph Kosor, four of whose plays have just been translated into English, and publishedby Mr. Henderson, of Charing Cross Road. (Two of the plays, by the way, have been translated by Mr. Selver.) But I can speak without temerity of the work of a third Serbian writer, Father Velimirovic You will find it difficult to procure the books and booklets published by this author during his exile in England; but I can assure my readers that the difficulty would be rewarded. The Student Christian Movement (of 32, Russell Square, W.C.) publishes the longest of them under the title of “’The Agony of the Church.” This book consists of four essays on the Wisdom, the Drama, the Agony, and the Victory of the Church respectively; and it sets out in language as simple as the thoughts it expresses are profound a concept of living religion which carries with it the sense of reality. The same subject is treated in two further essays by Father Velimirovic-one of which, “ The Religious Spirit of the Slavs,” is published by Macmillan(IS. net), and the other of which, in the form of “Letters to an English Friend,” has not as yet, I think, found a London publisher. But it will, I hope, in the course of the next few weeks. Finally, I have before me Father Velimirovic’s remarkable essay on “The New Ideal of Education,” published by The Electrician Company, of Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, E.C. (3d. I should say, though no price isindicated). This essay expresses succinctIy and with the unique simplicity of the writer the ideals that brood in the Slav soul. It deserves to be much more than merely read, it deserves to be got by heart. *** It should be possible before very long to begin to discern some of the outlines of the new continent that will arise from the flood of the present war. That it will be a new continent I am convinced; and that it will contain as essential features some of the aspects of the Slav soul I am likewise confident. For what has been spiritually most apparent during the war has been the. struggle of the Slav soul to find expression in the Western medium. Russia, we may say, has sought to Europeanise herself; or, rather, Russia has sought to impress upon Europe Russian ideas; with this further resemblance in her fate to the fate of the pioneers of every great new spiritual impulse, that she has been crucified in her mission. The crucifixion of Slavdom, however, is the sign in which Russian ideals-or, let us say, Slav ideals-will in the end conquer. They mill not, I anticipate, submerge our Western ideas; the new continent, in other words, will be the old continentover again; but they will, I believe, profoundly modify our former configurations, and compel us to draw our cultural maps afresh. But in what respect, it may be asked, will our conceptions be radically changed? The reply, I think, is to be found confusedly in the events of the Russian Revolution, and clearly in the writings of the Serbians to whom I have just referred : in the substitution of the pan-human fer the national ideal, and in the attempt, this time to be made with all the strength at the disposal of intelligence, to create a single world-culture-a universal Church of men of good-sense and good-will. This appears to me to be the distinguishing feature of the new continent about to be formed ; and we shall owe it, as I have said, to the Slavs. *** A number of readers of THE NEW AGE have, I know, charged us with chauvinism during the war. But this, I submit, is a little grotesque in view both of the record of THE NEW AGE and of the anything but chauvinistic hopes we continue to entertain Reviewing the volumes of this journal from its first appearance, I was surprised to discover how pan-human and international THE NEW AGE has been by a kind of instinct-for mere reason cannot account for the facts I am about to cite. Contributors to THE NEW AGE, during the past ten years, number among themselves representatives of almost every race and nation under the sun, all of whom have met in these pages in the spirit of a common culture, and, I believe, a common hope and good-will, The list, if I may trouble my readers with it, is really astonishing. It includes French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian,Polish, Jewish, Serbian, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Austrian, Hungarian, Finnish, Armenian, Syrian, Turkish, Egyptian, Icelandic, every species of colonial, including Dutch Javanese, American (north and south), Indian, Japanese, Burmese, Negro, Chinese, and Sinhalese. If it were desired, in fact, to hold a Congress of Races and nations, the contributors to THE NEW AGE during the last decade would be as fully representative as any that could be got together. And as an example of fraternity and of common ideals, I do not think that our Congress could be equalled. This is sufficient evidence, I hope, that THE NEW AGE is not by nature chauvinistic, British imperialist, or insular. Show me, indeed, the journal that is less os whenjudged by its works. It is evidence, moreover,that nationalism in the sense in which The NEW AGE is proud to be an English journal is not incompatible with internationalism and with panhumanism. The true spirit, indeed, of all these degrees of association is one; and the less contains the greater as certainly as the greater contains the less. *** I have ventured to remark upon this fact about THE NEW AGE in the hope, first, of silencing certain of our “pacifist” critics,and,secondly, to urge the importance of internationalism the approaching in new age. What had been hitherto done by a kind of instinct and by only a small group of people must in future be done with intelligence and by many. There must be in every nation of the world at least one organ of international culture--not, you will understand, of international propaganda-to which may be contributed,with the certainty of being read and understood, articles by anybodyin any part of the world. Each nation,in other words, must aim at expressing the whole of world culture in its own tongue. That, I think, would be a practical thing to aim at ; and if, as I should like to believe, either THE NEW AGE, or a magazine of a still more general character under its auspices, might be the English example of the new spirit, I should sing my Nunc Dimittis with satisfaction. R. H. C. Sonia. From “The Confessions of an Author” by J. S. Machar. (Translatedfrom the Czech by P. Selver.) READDostoyevsky’s ‘‘Crime and Punishment. ” I read the story of the student Raskolnikov in my uninviting room, shivering with cold and writhing with hunger; my spirit was haunted by that feeling of grief and emptiness common to every .Czech in the nineties; the conflict of life, such as I had been compelled live it under the insane yoke of the secondary to school and then hunting after niggardly coaching jobs with vain yearnings for freedom and sunshine within, burdened and afflicted me unspeakably; I was sated with the world which I did not know, nauseated by life of which I had no experience, having no strength because there was no hope, and there was no hope, because there was nowhere for it to seize hold. My spirit weighed upon me like a fallow field full of of which-my verses-swayed to and weeds, a few fro there sadly and despondently, waiting submissively for the stroke of the scythe, the foreboding- of an early death persisted in me with extraordinary strength, because death seemed to me the natural and only result of my condition. And into this spirit there now fell sentences and scenes the like of which I had met with neither in life nor in literature. I read each page three or four times in succession; I did not hurry, I was not anxious to know what the end of the story would be; my spirit was in a ferment, everything within it rose upwards, my nerves were strained like wires and quivered with anguish-my own suffering was doubled by the suffering of another, and evinced itself as sheer physical pain. And meantime I used to go to school and felt the whole inanity of so-called studies, Xenophon, Cesar, dogmatics, mathematics; I used to go to my coaching jobs, and the more they afflicted me, the more I afflicted others, insisting to them how important it is to know the irregular perfects and the ablative absolute--Idid everything like a machine, but with a spirit in painful turmoil. ‘Then evening came, and jaded and hungry I would sit down to Raskolnikov “A human louse ”--yes, that is what Raskolnikov called the murdered usuress . . . but her stupid sister was aIso a human louse, a superflous louse, the scamp Svidrigailov was a louse, the drunkard Marmeladov was a louse, the magistrate Porphyry was also a louse, and, finally, so was Raskolnikov himself. And Sonia, the poor skinny harlot, who would give herself to every such louse in the street-does she stand above them? And amongst all this murdering, loving, condemning, drinking and merry-making-how unnaturally the virtuous Avdotya Romanovna is drawn ! And you, reader, are sickened by men and the world; but, my dear fellow, look closely at yourself . . . not only your clergyman, your teacher so-and-so, the person so-and-so, with whom you are acquainted, whom you despise, whom you loathe-you yourself are just such a human louse, a superfluous creature of chance. You turn up your nose at the world-but what do you demand of it? You are sickened by life-who. keeps you there? A stone falls into the water and nobody notices it, and the stream does not stand still, You are puffed up, vain, my reader-quote a few of your ephemeral verses that have appeared in print-those images, those rhymes, those banalities-you cannot ? Ah, yes, immortal art is something quite different, I something vastly remote from you . . . you read, for instance, ‘‘Crime and Punishment, ” and you will writhe like a worm. . . . Humble yourself, proud human louse, the meanest crossing-sweeper is worth as much as you, and perhaps more: he is well aware of his paltriness, and has no wish to thrust his among the stars. Scourge yourself, scourge, you see how much easier I feel at once. Ye gods, how I scourged myself . . . the sufferings I went through over that dreadful book! I finished reading it-and, suddenly, all was still. Into my spirit there mounted a kind of frosty calm, the surging grew numb, and as if the book had prompted me with a single ghastly idea, which seemed to me axiomatic, I felt that I must murder a human being. And I knew that I must kill them with an axe like Raskolnikov and I found the axe in Mrs. Randa’s kitchen, and it was sharp, having been recently whetted by Mr. Randa. And I felt further that my victim must he some old woman or other, and her features would resemble those of the old usuress in the novel. . . I found her. One afternoon I was going across the Staromestske namesti. In a covered way by St. Tein’s Church. there was a shop where plates, pots, and dishes were sold. I caught sight of the proprietress, an ugly old woman. A human house-thus Fate wills it. . . . I walked round a few times, watching the shop. Nobody went in there, the old woman was sitting in her recess, with her knees drawn upclearly she was warming her feet at the glowing coals. I seemed to be dreaming. I was satisfied, I went home, sat down, and considered the matter in cold blood. It now occurred to me that I must know whether there was a bell on the door of the shop. I went back. I entered the shop, a bell tinkled above my head. The old woman looked at me, and it seemed to me that she guessed what I had in mind. Her glance struck me as sharp and inquisitive. I asked for a tea-cup, was a long time choosing, and kept on looking at the old woman. Yes, she’s the one, I said to myself. I bought a cup at last, went out, but stood still in front of the shop. The old woman was watching me . . . after a while she opened the door, stood on the threshold, looked about as if at random, and then fixed me with a long stare. I went away as if disgraced. It struck me that this woman fancied I was a thief, a common pilfering thief. My prompting received its first blow : then on the next day the golden March sun, a hamper from my moths with washing, a loaf of bread and a page of her dear, honest Gothic script, dealt it the final one. I was cured of my fancies, but the book left a strong impression. I was humbled, reduced and taken down to where other mortals were living. I began to judge them, not according to their faults and failings, but according to my own. Feeling myself as a component part of the whole, I judged from the part to the whole. You have given Dostoyevsky credit for having preserved me from murder by his “Crime and Punishment." No, gentlemen, a hundred times no. Dostoyevsky is not a parochial schoolmaster of that sort. I got to know him otherwise. . . . I did not seek Sonia, but I found her. . . . Sonia’s name was Marie, but in that house she had been patriotically re-christened Vlasta, and she was sixteen or seventeen years old. She was delicately made and fair-haired, and her colouring was so pronouncedly vivid, that she seemed to have been, moulded in sugar and tinted by an adept at painting, who knew naught of shades and nuances, but had put a full red on the face, an honest summer azure upon the eyes, cinnabar upon the lips, and the ideal whiteness of the human body upon the brow and temples. Her hair was dyed yellow-the lurid yellowness of straw ; later, when she stopped-colouring it, I saw that it was chestnut ... We sat facing each other; I looked at her and felt sorry for her. It was half because of promptings from Raskolnikov, half really because of the circumstances under which I was vegetating. We seized each other’s hands, and she made her confession. At an early age she had lost her mother. Her father was a teacher, and through his grief at her mother’s death, he had begun to drink and play cards Then they had driven him from his post. She had been seduced by some student or other on a summer night in the holidays She had reached Prague and the house where she then was. Sometimes her father visited her, took every farthing from her and went away Of her present life, of the value of life in general, o f her future, I spoke enthusiastically and with conviction. And so we sat, two lost creatures, in a silent deserted room of an ill-famed house till a late hour in the morning And me parted with a shy kiss and the promise to see each other again on the afternoon of the next day She came down at five o’clock the next day, and we went through crooked streets across the Franz Josef Bridge as far as Stromovka to a lonely path along the We continued our conversation of the day Moldau. before. We described our childhood to each other, and discovered many points in common there. We spoke of our likings and longings, and in many things we were in agreement. And we admitted that we were as close to each other as if we had known each other for years. When night came on I accompanied her home. On the way back she was sad, unusually sad at the thought of what awaited her at home. . . . At the street-door she begged me to wait a little, as she would return at once. She came, took me by the ked me to walk quietly and led me upstairs to her room. Amid pure kisses and tears we sat together for a long, long time. . . . She wept for her own sake and I for her, too because I felt that she was fond of me and I of her. We made plans for the future, but we saw no escape from the present, for duty bound her to that house and to that life. . . . About three o’clock in the morning, somebody knocked on the matchwood walll of the room and whispered : “Are you asleep, Vlasta? It was her friend. Vlasta opened the door and let her in. Valerie, a stout girl, introduced herseIf to me ceremoniously, gave me her hand, and sat down wearily upon the bed . . Valerie propped her head in her hand and softly lamented : “How can I get away from here . . . how can I get remarked Valerie, “only away from here?’’ You owe fifty gulden . . . but I’ve got a hundred and twenty against me. . .” “ Yes, fifty gulden, but where am I to get them from?” “Don’t shout, Vlasta,” said Valerie, soothingly, “we’ll get something together for you. I’ve got seven gulden, Elsa has three . . .” and she recounted a whole string of poetical names with a complete total of thirty-five gulden. “I will get together the rest,” I announced “Now let’s celebrate the occasion !” suggested Valerie, and from her room she brought in a bottle of wine and seven gulden, wrapped up in a handkerchief, which she gave to Vlasta. They kissed each other; then we drank, got into a festive mood and made plans. Valerie knew of an office where they provided situations. Vlasta could only go somewhere as a shop-girl, for of household work she knew absolutely nothing. Valerie declared positively that something would turn up, and that she was glad that Vlasta, anyhowwould get away from that life. And as it often happens that when a man is himself on dry land, he tries to help another from the water by plans and advice at least, so we both began to arrange Valerie’s life by our “ifs” and “perhapses.” But she shook her head, stood up, gave us her hand, and with the words: “I’ll manage somehow, children, to drag my battered life along,” she went to bed. In broad daylight I went out, reached home, took my Xenophon, my grammar, my exercise-books, and made my way to school. In the afternoon I tied my books up in a parcel, and took them to the second-hand booksellers; a quarter of an hour later I made a journey with a second parcel. Palacky, Safarik, Svatopluk Cech, JiInasek, Hellwald, Vrchlicky. Arbes, Trebizsky , and many others were priced by Taussig, Pascheles, and Alexander Storch. Ah, how lightly these coryphees of our literature were priced ! Pascheles on the Velke Staromestske Namesti was the only one who paid at all reasonably. . . . In those two days I felt as if I had shaken off the burden of Raskolnikov’s “ human louse.” My life seemed to have suddenly gained content, meaning, value. I felt that I had sacrificed it for ever and it stirred me to think that I had sacrificed it to so unhappy a being. In my fancies I surrounded my head with a gleam of romance, and it was particularly pleasant to me. I gazed with contempt upon the bourgeois, their wives and daughters whom I met in the street-how prim and unpleasantly prudent these creatures were ! How they would have turned away from me with the disdain proper to respectable ratepayers, if they had known ! And so I set this delicately-made Vlasta on the altar of my soul pitied her, spoke t o her in my thoughts surrounded her with an ever bighter and ever holier radiance until, as it often happens with love, I really adored her who was living within me and whom I had created for myself I at once realised the contradiction in her dual being when I took her the money that evening She accepted it, she thanked me-but somehow in a matter-of-fact way, that I had not expected. I did not consider that I had sat up two nights with her, that the pitch of her highly-strung mood had to reach slackening point, that it was not possible to wander for ever in the celestial spheres-I took none of this into account and I was chilled, mortified, disenchanted. I gave her the money and did not want to detain her. She did not detain me long, promised that she would let me know how things turned out, and I went away. When I got home I sat down by my empty box and laughed bitterly at myself But this ebbing of emotion was certainly followed by a corresponding flood-again I saw her in her unhappiness, making her confession; the surge of emotion ceased, and I waited in suspense for her letter. . . . * * upon day passed by, week upon week-no letter came. For some time I endured that with the tranquil pride of an offended man but at last I went to inquire. Vlasta had left Prague the very next day in the afternoon -more than that they did not know. . . . I was embittered both against her and against myself I had become quite accustomed to the array of a fiction-hero ; now my array was torn : the novel in which I figured appeared to me a piece of utter folly which had robbed me of my beloved books; its heroine was God knows who, her array had also Iost its glory, and the worst torment was caused by the reflection that she would think of me with something of the derision with which a designing female of that kind would generally remember an unsophisticated fool who had crossed her path Supposing that is, she remembers me at all, I reflected. . . . Man is never satisfied with the novels in which life entangles him. Me applies his standard and makes his demands. But life does things differently. Its novels flow along in a broad river-bed, they are seemingly without form, logic and meaning-but only seemingly. If we had eternity’s calm and angle of vision, we should find in them everythhg.: masterly form, iron logic, and deep meaning. But we deal with life in the same way that we deal with nature; where we are shortsighted, we lay the blame on them, and where we do the insolent glances of coxcombs, stood about her, not comprehend, we speak of them as muddle-headed chattingand laughing. Vlasta was beaming. I departed authors ; but chiefly, I think, we reproach them for their unobserved. When she questioned me afterwards, I lack of good taste and aesthetical feeling, as if these told her. She reddened, looked on one side, and eternal masters were compelled to acknowledge the explained that it could not be helped, she could not drive hoary standards of beauty set up by our school-books customers away. and the chameleon-like dictates of our ephemeral Then one day I followed her and one of these young critics ! men. She closed the kiosk, they linked arms, and Now I reproached life for its lack of good taste and walked towards her lodging, where they both vanished aesthetical feeling when, contrary to expectation, I through the doorway. received Vlasta’s letter. She was, she said, serving in a the end, the end. . . . I went home. ham-and-beef shop in the Celetna Ulice. A fine novel ! What was the good of all this, I thought to myself. The heroine behind the counter of a ham-and-beef shop ! I was torn by a corroding physical pain. Redemption, And she wrote that I was to come at ten o’clock when the return to an honourable life--what folly! Moral they closed, and that she had lots of things to tell me. regeneration-where lay the flaw? Ah, a worm-eaten I was there by nine ; I sat down in the eating-room and apple would be sound forsooth. The end, the end. . . . Vlasta brought me the sausages I ordered. And she But, after all, I was glad of it. These tiresome walks, related that she had been obliged to go home to some these tiresome conversations would cease. My village beyond Chrudim, that she had been with conscience would be relieved of a task for which, properly relativesto have a complete change. To have a complete speaking, I had no strength. I reviewed those days, change--these words reconciled me. . . . Her hair was and it appeared to me that I was clad in the array, not no longer dyed, her face no longer bore the weary of the hero of a novel, but of a bourgeois moralist. I signs of squandered nights-it was as fresh in its turned red with anger at the thought of how ridiculous youthfulness a blossoming peach-spray. When the shop as I must be. to this chit of a girl with such a past,’ with was closed I accompanied her to Vinohrady, such experience, and such yearnings in her soul . . . where she had a lodging. I felt that she I slunk round the kiosk only once again. I saw that was happy. She did not explain why she had not Vlasta had again dyed her hair an infamously light written, and I did not ask about it. She confided to colour. This was the last chapter. The end, in good’ me that a young assistant-teacher was courting her out sooth, the end. in the country; this delighted her and she told me about After that I got a letter from her. A despairing letter. on that evening it in very great detail. Altogether She supposed I knew all. She was a worthless wretch. there was another flood-tide of her whole nature; she Rut I should not desert her. And if E did not come, arose from herself above the normal of ordinary things ; she would go back to the place where we had met for there was an intensity in all her movements, glances the first time. . . . and words, all was in a kind of superlative which I threw the letter into the grate and went nowhere. allures, fetters and drags you along to admiration. But Then, after a few days, another one came. She wrote the flood-tide goes down and the normal of life is so curtly and categorically that if I did not come that day drab and monotonous. . . . or the next, then on the following day she would most We parted in high spirits and met the next day in a certainly be in that house. I matter-of-fact, sober and prosaic mood. Again By chance I discovered later that I did not go. accompanied her home. She complained of weariness, of Vlasta was in that house. I was impressed by the fact men who molested her, and of the smell of sausages that she had kept her word, but it did not. disturb me. in the shop. I comforted her, but my comfort was As far as my feelings were concerned, she had died feeble, and half-hearted, and I was glad when we long before. reached the door of her lodging. ********* A whole series of such drab days went crawling on. Two years later I was at “The Bear Cubs,’’ a After she had grumbled about her present grievances, cabaret at Perstyn. Smid’s company, which had just her thoughts would leap back to memories of past days, been got together, was giving a performance of vocal’ of her former life . . . more and more frequently. . . . and instrumental music upon a small stage. Smid drew I guessed that she was brooding about it. considering, my attention to a new singer, petite and pretty; who comparing, passing judgment, and bewailing her lot. was just about to appear, but whose voice, it seemed, And I was silent, because I could find nothing to say ’was not up to much. It was Vlasta, . . She came on in and because the whole thing was beginning to be dull a red costume, her hair was dyed yellow, she assumed and objectionable. a military bearing- on the stage and sang a song, the Then one evening there was another flood-tide of chorus of which ran :emotion. For she had given notice to her employer, And he’s a hussar, the ham-and-beef dealer, and had obtained a place as a And he has a sharp sword; vendor of soda-water, She was delighted with the Firmly he can sit change and the fresh outlook on life; it pleased her to Upon his black horse. think how we mould go to the country in the evening He gives the horse its oats, . . . she confided to me that the assistant-teacher who And hurries to meet me. was In love with her had already written twice to her, The black horse and myself that although she did not care for him she had written He loves equally. . . . back, that I should not be angry with her, as I knew This chorus was sung the second time by a considerable what I was to her, and the like. And I did not part of the audience, and Vlasta, marching in step begrudge her this innocent game-indeed it gave me along the stage, saluted in military style, When she pleasure, since what I felt for her had long ceased to had finished singing, she took a plate and went round be love. I felt myself something of a guardian towards making a collection. When she reached me, she her, an elder brother, a man who has drawn someone lowered her eyes-nothing more. out of the water, and who is waiting until their life Then she sat down at the performers’ table with some is restored. scabby young man who at once put his arm round her Her kiosk stood at a deserted corner of Vinohrady waist. Square. . . At seven o’clock I would go to her, wait until she closed, then we went out into the country. ********* And. a few years later, as a result of this incident, It happened on several occasions that when I arrived I wrote my book “ Magdalena,” I found people there. Well-dressed young men, with Views HERE and Reviews. AND Now. I HAVEdecided that, for me at least, the idea of immortality, of life after death in any form, continuous or discontinuous, is inacceptable. It means nothing to me but an escape from the difficulties of this life by reverting to the fantasies of childhood; it is expressive of a failure of adaptation to environment, and on this pointI am in agreement with the psycho-analysists, particularly Jung in the “Psychology of the Unconscious. are certainly compelled, as Mr. Clutton” We Brock alleges in the first essay in “Immortality,” to make up our minds about it; “it is impossible to be really an agnostic about the question of a future life. If this life is a preparation for another [or for five hundred others, as the re-incarnation theory demands] it cannot be the same for us as if it ended with death; hence we cannot escape from a working hypothesis that it does or does not end with death, which must, one would suppose, affect our conduct.” But we are not therefore compelled to suppose that the conduct of believers in immortality is better than that of unbelievers ; Mr. Clutton-Brock himself admits that “ it is a strange fact that unbelievers in a future life do not greatly differ in conduct or in values from believers”; on the contrary, he argues, in their case, sal to believe in a future life is the supreme example of man’s passion for disinterestedness." It is naturally kindly that Mr. Clutton-Brock should rather pity these men for refusing the reward of Comfort and consolation for their righteousness ;but, none the less, he admires their action as “the last asceticism of which man in his passion for absolute values Is capable.” But the admission that unbelievers in immortality may lead morally heroic lives does not invalidate the argument that the belief in immortality does affect conduct. It certainly does and, on the whole, prejudicially; ‘‘ it is,” says Jung, “a positive creed which keeps us infantile and therefore ethically inferior. Although of the greatest significance from the cultural point of view and of imperishable beauty from the aesthetic standpoint, the delusion can no longer ethicallysuffice humanity striving after moral autonomy. ” It is right, because appropriate to the needs of that stage of development, that we should cry for our mothers in our childhood; but to enlarge that cry into a cosmogony, to attempt to explain the universe in the terms of our infantile fantasies, is to became monstrous like Peter Pan, to refuse to grow up from the stage of “man born of woman” to man born of the Spirit, is to blind our eyes to the vision of “the sign of the Son of Man in heaven,” is to fail to “see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” On the one hand, the belief in immortality enables “man to remain a child for all time” ; on the other hand, it produces anxiety. “The rule is great uncertainty among believers, which they drown with fanatical cries among themselves or among others ; moreover, they have religious doubts, moral uncertainty, doubts of their own personality, feelings of guilt, and, deepest of all, great: fear of the opposite aspect of reality, against which the most highly intelligent people struggle with all their force. ” The renunciation of the belief in immortality, though, does not always produce the ascetic heroes whom Mr. Clutton-Brock admires ; “ to-day there are countless neurotics,” says Jung, “who are so simply because they do not know how to seek happiness in their own manner.” We free ourselves with difficulty, and not always with foresight; “art thou one who had the right to throw off a yoke? ” asked Nietzsche, and we are frequently so crippled in the process of becoming free that, at the best, we can only admit that “a good servant makes a bad master,’’ at the worst, we can only be committed to the care of the psychiatrist. It was of such a case that “Bishop Blougram” said : And now what are we? unbelievers both, Calm and complete, determinately fixed, To-day, to-morrow, and forever, pray ? You’ll guarantee me that? Not so, I think. In nowise! all we’ve gained is, that belief, As unbelief before, shakes us ’by fits, Confounds us like its predecessor. There is no doubt that we cannot, without injury, dispossess ourselves of the spiritual heritage of the race unless we can get out of this vicious circle. “The stumbling-block,” says Jung, ‘‘ is the unhappy combinationof religion and morality. That must be overcome. How? By the discovery of reality, adaptation ” to it, mastery of it. “ The infantile and moral danger lies in belief in the symbol because through that we guide the libido to an imaginary reality. The simple negation of the symbol changes nothing, for the entire mental disposition remains the same ; we merely remove the dangerous object. But the object is nut dangerous; the danger is our own infantile mental state, for love of which we have lost something very beautiful and ingenious through the simple abandonment of the religious symbol. I think belief should he replaced by understanding-; then we should keep the beauty of the symbol; but still remain free from the depressing results of submission to belief. This would be the psychoanalytic for belief and disbelief. ” cure From this point of view, Christianity, particularly expressed in the English translation of the Gospels, has incomparable advantages over any other symbolic representation of life. I have still to discover the idea for which I cannot find some warrant. in the Gospels; and my personal experience is merely typical of the historical experience. The orgiastic and ascetic types can both refer to Christ for authority; the individualist, the socialist, the communist, have each claimed Him in turn; the pacifist and ’militarist alike are indebted to Him. To Mr. Benjamin Kidd, He is the Saviour of Social Science ; to Voluntarists like Auberon Herbert or Tolstoy, Me is the Supreme Example; to virgins, He is a lover who never ravishes; to the ravished and injured, He is the healer of wounds and the Redeemer. Nietzsche thought that his ‘‘Will to Power” was the doctrine of the Anti-Christ ; but Ignatius declared : “For the business is not one of persuasive talk; but a matter of might is Christianity-, whensoever it is hated by the world.’’ Mr. Benjamin Kidd identifies his “Science of Power” with Christianity, and the psycho-analyst recognises his patron saint in the figure of Christ. But it is no longer possible for us to be saved by faith in Christ; by becoming as little children we may inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, but we have not conquered the Prince of this world; we cap be saved only by understanding, and only so ‘far as faith is the substance, the understanding, of things hoped for can it help us to adjust ourselves to reality, to learn that “now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. ” For the conception of eternal life as the everlasting Here and Now carries the implication of urgency upon the very face of it; that urgency was felt by Christ : “I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day ; the night cometh, when no man can work.” That urgency was accompanied by a no less striking perception of the conditions of eternal life: “as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world ” (John ix. 4). “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” It is this life which is eternal life, and those who look for life hereafter are failing in the adaptation to the Here and Now; and if Jung’s demonstration of the introversion of the libido which originates the usual conception of immortality is not immediately acceptable to them, perhaps “ Bishop Blougram” may rally them, as he rallied Gigadibs, ‘to a perception of reality. Do you know, I have often had a dream (Work it up in your next month’s article) Of man’s poor spirit in its progress still Losing true life for ever and a day Through ever trying- to be and ever being Before its actual sphere and place of life, Halfway into the next, which having reached, It shoots with corresponding foolery Halfway into the next still, on and off. As when a traveller, bound from north to south, Scouts fur in Russia-what’s its use in France? In France spurns flannel-where’s its need in Spain? In Spain drops. cloth-too cumbrous for Algiers ! Linen goes next, and last the skin itself, A superfluity at Timbuctoo. When, through his journey, was the fool at ease? That urgency of the everlasting Here and Now lies upon us no less than it did upon Christ; all things are possible unto us, as unto St. Paul, hut only if we accept the heritage of the race, and do not accept fantasy reality. If the City of God is not made with for human hands, human beings will not be able to live in it-and angels need no habitation just as they If dispense with visible means of subsistence. Christianity not mean this, then the idea of the Second did Coming was simply an absurdity, insteacl-of being a simple prevision of what the race may attain. “Oh ! it makes me mad to think of what men will do, and we in our graves,” said Browning’s Filippo Lippi; and the same assurance of progress may safely be credited to Christ. But the condition of progress is absolute; “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”-and the truth is, in a phrase, that the libido must be expressed, and not repressed. The way of weakness, of failure in adaptation, is from without, inwards; the way of power is from within, outwards. On this point, Jung says : “Through the change of the centre of interest from the inner to the outer world, the knowledge of nature has increased enormously in comparison that of earlier times. By with this, the anthropomorphic conception of the religious dogmas has been definitely thrown open to question : therefore, the present-day religions can only with the greatest difficulty close their eyes to this fact ; for not only has the intense interest been diverted from the Christian religion, but criticism and the necessary correction have increased correspondingly. The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent; in any case, its dogmatic contents have become related to Mithraism.” But precisely because Christianity has led human thought to independence, it has freed us from the fear of death, and nearly freed us from the fear of life. It is a fact of great import that fear, the most disabling of the emotions, is not instinctive; the experiments conducted by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell and Mr. Benjamin Kidd and others are conclusive on this point, that fear is derivative and communicated from the experience of others. The perception of this fact opens up the possibility of banishing fear from human experience, of raising within a generation or two a race whose activities will nnot be inhibited at their source. “Perfect love casteth out fear”; so does perfect knowledge, and creative activity; and a number of other things. All this modern insistence on “creative evolution,” the creative impulses, and so forth, is an indication of the turn of the tide, of the egression of the libido, of the discovery of the universe. There are still thinkers, like Senor de Maeztu, who imagine that the progress of the race demands the suppression or limitation of the individual, apparently accepting Tennyson’s statement that “the individual withers, and the world is more and more,’’ and applying it with Prussian But the utter unwisdom of this “nay-saying” severity. has become apparent; if there is not room for the complete individual in the world, then I incline to the opinion that it will be bad for the world. “Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow, ” said Huxley ; and in a similar connection, Carlyle told us : “Light, or failing that, lightning; the world can take its choice. ” Psycho-analysts deal mainly with those who have failed to become explosive; but the whole world of civilisation is at war because a few men suffered from political claustrophobia, and resisted being “hemmed in. ” Limit the individual, or threaten to limit him, and the world explodes; and it was a truer psychology that dictated the famous manifesto of the International : “You have a world to win; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” But those chains are psychological; the world is not to be won in an after-life, but by the coming to earth of the Son of Man, by the setting free and sublimation of the libido in work which, while it benefits the race, expresses the individual. “Work is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile CompuIsion,” says Jung ; but work so chosen would be the work which we find to do, and are exhorted to do ‘‘with all our might.’’ For we are born again into reality and not into fantasy; and here and now have eternal life whenever the sublimated libido finds unobstructed expression. A. E. R. Reviews. Re-incarnation : The Hope of the World. By Irving S. Cooper. (Theosophical Publishing House IS. 6d. net.) The theory of re-incarnation retains its attractiveness despite the banality of its advocates; and Mr. Irving S. Cooper cannot, with all his resources of dreary dialectic, rob it of its fascination as the most complete mechanical theory of morals. At first blush, it seems self-evident to a generation trained to the idea of causal connection and the evolution from the simple to the complex that “as a man sows, so shall he also reap” and that, in Divine law, there is no wrong without ’a remedy, although we may have to carry the case into the court of another life to obtain it. The problem of apparently unjust suffering seems to be solved by the theory that it is only-the inevitable consequence of wrong-doing in a previous life, and has the purpose of teaching us to “cease to do evil, learn to do well.” It seems convincing to explain the infant prodigy by the idea that in a previous life he had developed powers of mastery. in his subject which he is now able to exert for the benefit of the race. It seems also to dignify man by makinghim responsible for both the good and evil of human existence; there is the universe, wisely constructed and well-ordered by God, made of a mesh of immutable laws and inevitable consequences which man may invoke either for good or evil. In its own way, the doctrine of re-incarnation emphasises the Platonic teaching that “God geometrises ” ; everything is weIl-ordered, symmetrical, perfect in plan and execution even to the bureaucracy of the heavens which orders our coming and going into and from earthly existence. But the theory which seems to. accord so closely with modern evolutionary teaching breaks down when we examine it in the light of that teaching. For re-incarnation is committed to the argument that God, like Nature, makes no leaps, the process of evolution is complete from the amoeba to the man. But it is known that there are “missing links” in the chain of evolution, links that can only be supplied by fossil remains, the exercise of scientific imagination, and an act of faith; while, on the re-incarnation hypothesis, those links are necessary to the evolution of innumerable souls proceeding from the animal to the human. Admit that it is possible to leap one stage in the process of evolution, and the whole argument of continuous evolution put forward as the proof of reincarnation breaks down. The pithecanthropus erectus, the three-toed hipparion, arid the rest, must be alive to-day if we “rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things”; for just as re-incarnation excludes the remission of sins, so it excludes the remission of an inevitable stage in the inevitable process of evolutionIf God geometrises, He must be geometrical; if re-incarnation is true, there are no “missing links, ” and the Theosophists, with their resources of occult knowledge, should be able to produce those links for examination. The doctrine also limits unwarrantably the scope of Divine activity by confining it to causal connection. An infinity of being will have infinite manifestations, and even the-ancients (who did not know everything) assumed that there were three fundamental principles which may be called Providence, Destiny, and Human Will. That God works by process need not be denied; prediction of any kind would be impossible if He did not: but that He is also a person is the very teaching of that religion which this doctrine of re-incarnation is supposed to supersede. For Christ understood perfectly well that God geometrises, but insisted on the fact (new to the Orient) that God also loves. If Destiny is the principle of absolute necessity, Providence is the principle of absolute liberty; and Human Will, intermediate between the two, is the principle of change. Through man, the process becomes personal ; Destiny, “Death is swallowed up in victory,” and Providence rules the world through man. Nature may make no leaps, although the “ missing links ” suggest that she may forget some of her steps; hut Providence may interpose at any moment to permit of new forms of life being created, while leaving no more trace of its action than does a katalytic in a chemical combination. If the remission of sins is a spcculation, so is re-incarnation and it has this advantage over re-incarnation, that it obviously does not proceed from a one-story mind. There is not only justice in the universe, there is also love; and if we only get far enough away from modern art, it is possible to discover beauty. A third argument against the theory is that by explaining too much, it explains nothing at all. Grant, for example, that the existence of genius is a proof of devotion to the same pursuit in a previous life, then the genius must be re-incarnated in his next life with more heightened powers of the same kind; "other heights in other lives, God willing,” as Browning put it. The singer would therefore be doomed to sing “for all eternity,” or, at least, the eternal recurrence; the poet, the musician, the mathematician, the warrior, every subdivision of human activity mould be eternally reproduced by the same persons if experience is worked up into faculty during our sojourn in the heavens. Our destiny would not he evolution, but the division of labour; men, like cattle in the hands of the breeder, would be reduced to their functions, and just as “the cow is sacrificed to her udder, the ox to his sirloin,” so would men he the victims of their talents, and reincarnation would not be an evolution but a continual return to type. Nor could we hope for the reformation of the wicked, for their experience likewise would be worked up into faculty, and “the dog would return to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire,” Besides, we can indict the justice of re-incarnation from experience ; grant that the wicked will have a bad time in their next incarnation, they will not perceive the justice of this inevitable retribution because they will not remember the deeds of this life, and suffering, the purpose of which is not perceived and accepted, does not make the recipient better but worse. Unless every apparently unmerited calamity is accompanied by a revelation of its connection with a crime, unless we are told every time, by some occult means, that this (whatever it may be) is retribution for such and such an act performed by us so many years or lives ago, we shall still doubt the justice of the universe. There is an old story apposite to the point. An Englishman suddenly and without provocation assaulted a Jew in the street ; and on being asked to explain his action, retorted that the Jew was one of the accursed people who crucified Christ. “ But, man,” said the Jew, “ that was two thousand years ago.” “ Perhaps it was,” the Englishman replied, “hut I only heard of it this morning.’’ Now, it cannot be pretended that the Jew, having no cognisance of his personal complicity in the Crucifixion, would regard the assault as a just retribution for the suffering he had inflicted in Palestine; he would certainly not be disposed to accept it as a correction, but to resent it as punishing one man for the sins of another. And there is no escape from the difficulty by the argument that in some future incarnation we shall remember all our previous lives, and recognise the justice which has pursued and purged us throughout the ages; for a history of unmerited suffering will never produce an assurance that it was merited, will never induce the sufferers to lend their minds to their own correction by making the assumption that they agree in principle with those who devise and impose the penalties. If there is no remission of sins, if “as a man sows, so shall he also reap,” we are committed to what Bishop Blougrarn called a “bewildering entanglement of horrible eventualities past calculation to the end of time.” The very theory that was to clear up the difficulty, to solve the problem of evil, only perpetuates and complicates it. It is a theory that exalts the body above the mind and soul, earth above heaven ; which asserts and emphasises that the only experience which is final is physical and not spiritual experience, that maintains the geocentric conception that this is the only planet of innumerable myriads that is habitable. It is a theory that appeals only to those who have learned no science since Darwin, and can find no analogy to special creation in the, Mutation Theory, to those who have learned no theology since their childhood and can. unaided, picture Heaven only as an everlasting choral service, with real harps, real trumpets, real choristers, and an indubitable Archbishop officiating. To the materialist, a mechanistic theory offers a larger conception because he is capable only of extension, and knows nothing of ascension or penetration or of the mysteries of attraction. If he desires justice, it must be automatic justice ground out by what Carlyle derided as “the machine of the Universe ”; and he gets that in the re-incarnation theory. Yet so strange are the delusions of the human mind, this very theory, the most material, the most mechanical, theory of morals ever invented is offered as a theory antagonistic to materialism; a theory that demands that we should return to the flesh to suffer exactly what we have inflicted, or to enjoy whatever we have sacrificed, pretends to be superior in spirituality to any other, and to be “the hope of-the world.” It is better to be humble and accept the mystery of existence than to be stupid enough to accept an explanation that tries to square accounts in the circle of rebirth, with good and evil doled out to us in accurate rations by an imaginary QuartermasterGeneral, and finds no place for generosity in the scheme of things. Pastiche. TWO BANNER SONGS. I Up with the banner of the guilds Up with the craftsman’s sword; Sing glory to the hand that builds, The harvest’s overlord, Up with the banner of the guilds! Up with the craftsman’s sword ! Sing 0 for spring and youth and fire, And strife which builds again, The heart made free by great desire, The soul that conquers pain Sing O for spring and youth and fire, And strife which builds again, Sing out the challenge to the fray When men are marshalled power, When scorn shall throw their bribe away, And freedom’s branch shall flower Sing out the challenge to the fray, When men are marshalled power. O welcome widening days of wrath And splendid strength of spring, When you shall take the firelit path And strife be blossoming, 0 welcome widening days of wrath And splendid strength of spring. II What shall we have for banner In the glory newly born, Our scarlet cloud above the hills, Our falchion of the morn An oriflamme embroidered well, A cross of silver sheen, Or the symbol of a broken chain Two rending hands between ? The head of Christ, the brows of pain, The pale thin cheeks of grief, The keen light of the eyes that dream The firm lips of belief? . One morning in the days unborn Above us flying free, Will fold and flap our banners’ joy And wind-flung liturgy. One morn the cloud above the hills Will fashion, falchion-wise A glowing pennon of the guilds Before the rich man’s eyes. An oriflamme will burn the sky, A cross will lifted be, Arid ancient chains will sever them I the strong grip of the free. But most will gleam the head of Christ, The bruised brows of pain The light within His glorious eyes, To see us stand again. FRANCIS ANDREWS TO THE EDITOR PAINTED DRAGONS. Sir,-1 fear I am trying your reviewer’s patience. If he will exercise a little further forbearance with me, I shall convince him that my bearings are not lost, that I am not confronted with a dilemma and that I do not maintain conflicting propositions The misunderstanding is in the use of terms : this is not unusual when controversialists are sincere. The stumbling block here is the word ‘( legalism ” and the kindred substantive “ legalist.’’ I use both in apointedly unfavourable sense. For example, a notorious acquittal is recorded following a verdict diametrically opposed to evidence and summing up. Confident appeal is made to this ruling case and other acquittals, less notorious but equally subversive of justice, follow : that is legalism When an occupant of the seat of judgment, speaking for his colleagues, says, ‘‘ We feel that the appellant is succeeding on a technicality and we regret to order his acquittal ’) : that is a Bench of legalists, of umpires LETTER in a g a m e When ex-President Taft admits the notorious that “ the great majority of criminals in the fact United States escape punishment ” : that is the work of legalists who order the release of a murderer if there is an error of spelling in the indictment Consistently with this nomenclature I vigorously repudiate the suggestion your reviewer attributes to me that “ judges should be trained in legalism rather than in litigation. ” I maintain that judges should be given a training directed to des-clop the judicial faculty rather than the forensic gift. Fast bowling is not the best apprenticeship for tea-tasting. Candidates for the Bench should be trained in equity. But here we come to the greatest misconception of all. Your reviewer places codes in contradistinction to equity ! Prodigious ! But natural enough as the prejudice of a codeless country Is he unaware that French jurists affirm L’equite est l’esprit de nos lois ” ? Re acknowledges the advantages of a good code. Very well : the quality of goodness in a code resides in its being a helpful guide in equity. A good code intelligently administered is the negation of legalism Your reviewer cannot be unaware of the unfortunate circumstances in our history which dug the great gulf between law and equity. Thus saith Austin : “ The distinction is utterly senseless, when tried by general principles, and is one prolific source of the need. less and vicious complexness which disgraces the systems of jurisprudence wherein the distinction obtains ” What of the complete dilemma ’ which depends upon a senseless distinction, that of placing code and equity in the position of hostile forces, whereas the unwearying efforts of the greatest jurists have been directed -and have secured a large measure of success-towards bringing equity and its vesture, a good code, into, closest harmony ? The Bar Council strenuously and successfully opposes the first step in the direction of that happy consummation namely, the establishment of an Imperial School of Law As between the legal systems of this country and France, it is impossible to dissociate them from their exponents I suggest to your reviewer that here, too, no less than in India, there is a definite issue. Let it be decided by the respective attitude of the laity in the respective countries to the legal products of each. That is a fairer test than the puffs of the purveyors W. D. (Front. last week’s NEW AGE.) We shall win in the end by our differences from Prussianism and not on our resemblances to it. Tout comprendre is not always tout pardonner.“ Notes of the Week.” -Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty but of peace. The Labour guns must be levelled at exploitation ; if they destroy management, they may retard the economic change we seek.-S. G. W. It is not Nietzsche but Dostoyevsky who forms the landmark and the bridge between the present culture and that of to-morrow. The great riddle of the Sphnix is the problem of Value, the problem of God. The greatest struggles of the Universe take and must take place in our conscioussness. Nothing is so easy as to arrive at a creed; nothing is so difficult as to attain to conscious religion. A real Superman is the man with the deepest and widest Cosciousness .-JANKO Lavrin est Memoranda. The attainment of culture should not denationalise a man ; it should make him more, not less, himself--John FRANCIS HOPE. Little is done fairly on this side of death. The best of us need to be on guard against behaving like the worst.-R. H. C. The obvious, which often gets left out of a discussion because it is the obvious, takes its revenge by coming in at the conclusion and upsetting it.---Kenneth Richmond Without Labour there would be no Leisure.-A. E. R. GERMAN Democrats. “Well, we haven‘t the courage to fight German Militarism; Allies have ! ” but, thank God, the