Seen superficially, this is a fairly accurate account of the fate of movements for the reform of some glaring injustice, some hoary cruelty of the past. But is it true? Is the world slowly but surely getting better—are the monsters of ignorance and tyranny slain one by one by our great reformers and laid to rest for ever in a grave of ignominy? We accept the axiom that slavery has been abolished. Of all causes that commanded devotion, struggle, persistency, the anti-slavery movement stands forth as a moral protest of supreme import. Wilberforce and Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Clarkson fought for a principle which may well be regarded as the very soul of civilization. The Civil War brought the ideals of human rights and equality into bloody conflict with the forces of oppression and commercial exploitation. The new consciousness of human fellowship made white men lay down their lives for the freedom of black men. A worthy cause, a sublime offering, a task to which we would like to say "Done, done, once and for all time!" But is it done? Slavery is not only inherent in every savage and barbaric race, it is not only paramount in the mind of the Arab trader. Once the social bulwark of the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, and India, of Greece and Rome, it persisted in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and survived as serfdom of one kind or another through centuries of advancing culture. The desire for power over fellow-beings, for opportunities to control their lives and exploit their labour, is apparently irradicable. Slavery is still amongst us in a hundred forms and under new names. All military conquest involves the ancient practices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of the invader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die. The persistence of slavery seems, then, to be a demonstration of the unchangeability of human nature and of the ultimate hopelessness of idealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical application is local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions. There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do not mutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation of their souls, and we have lost confidence in the rack and the thumb-screw. But we need only transport ourselves to other lands and study other people's views of judicial necessities, and we shall find that the punitive systems of the thirteenth or the eighteenth centuries are still with us. Theoretically the blood of the black and the white man is of the same good quality, and yet very little provocation is needed for the outbreak of race riots. Negroes and negresses who have given offence to white people need harbour no illusions concerning the restraining influences of our Western civilization.

Like a mountain in eruption the war has thrown up the sordid passions, the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common human soul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, to destroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to cause weeping and wailing amongst the innocent—these are the necessities of warfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. There are others. It brings to the surface strata of human nature to which culture has never descended. It explodes our humanitarian theories by a series of well-directed mines. The ancient horrors of devices for the punishment of the enemy are feeble competitors with our modern inventions. Our poison gas, our burning oil, our metallic monsters that spit death on the enemy and crush his fine defences, our flying bomb-throwers, all show that we have not as yet succumbed to humanitarian or Christian ethics. There have been some startling illustrations of the folly of assuming that we have safely and irrevocably traversed certain stages of human indifference. We shuddered at the revelations which called Florence Nightingale to the Crimea; we now shudder at the heartless carelessness revealed by Commissions and Reports. The triumph of Red Cross organization, the mass of charitable and voluntary effort to relieve suffering, the heroism and splendour of individual sacrifice, soften, but do not reverse, the impression of a general humanitarian debacle.

We may, of course, take shelter behind the jejune explanation that there are two worlds with two moralities. One is war and the other is peace. We may affectionately survey the hospitals and orphanages, the institutions for the blind and the mute, the asylums and the charities with which each belligerent country pays tribute to the virtues of the merciful life. Whatever we do, we cannot dispel the darkness by a frenzied denunciation of war. The monster is not outside ourselves; it is created and sustained by the hardness of our hearts and the obtuseness of our brains. The responsibility is ours in war as well as in peace. Reformers of all ages have battled with the wickedness of the world, they have stormed stronghold after stronghold of social iniquity. Their failures are no less conspicuous than their successes. Human nature is infinitely pliable and infinitely resistant.

Is it, then, all a matter of change and recurrence? Do culture and morality grow like flowers in a garden, obedient to the will and taste of the gardener, but destined to fade and die with the turn of the season? Do not the civilizations of the past with their perfection of knowledge and art mock our faith in the permanency of human achievement? Babylon and Egypt, Athens and Rome carried the seed of corruption within their husk of glory. They had elaborate systems of social organization, of laws, of elucidation of the mysteries of life. They saw beauty and pursued it, in colour and sound, by word and chisel. The gods were kind to them, and now and then dispensed with altar and temple. Divine presences revealed themselves in brook and cornfield, on mountain-tops and in the faces of animals. Reformers of all kinds were amongst them: men of the sword with dreams of Empire and conquest for the good of the nation, priests who demanded sacrifice in the name of a god, orators who by skilful laying of words taught the art of philosophic calm. Problems faced them, social iniquities troubled them; they grappled with morals and strove to build up a better and happier future.

I was sinking into a reverie over the fall of Babylon and the problems of recurrence when Marie-Joseph arrived. Marie-Joseph is my oldest and dearest peasant friend. She is over seventy and devoted to hard work. Her face is rosy and wrinkled, and when she laughs it becomes a mass of merry furrows. Her body gives one the impression of an animated board. It is strikingly flat and stiff, and proudly erect. She works in the fields and tends the cows, and when she bends down to hoe the potatoes or cut the grass, she just folds herself in two. The stiff straight back in the neat black dress is different from all the other toiling backs on the slopes. When I look down from the mountain-tops to the pastures and plots below, I can always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from the others. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we sat down to chat over a cup of coffee—nay, four cups of coffee, for Marie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink, and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways, though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think. Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. She is wholly innocent of the former dissipation and carries out the latter function without any trouble or fuss. She is, therefore, justified in disposing of my painful efforts with a contemptuous shrug of her wooden shoulders.

"Marie-Joseph," I said cautiously, when I had watched the third cup of coffee disappear, and duly discussed butter and cheese, wine and cows, "do you think the world is getting better?" She was slicing a chunk of bread with her capacious pocket-knife, and stopped short. Her small bright blue eyes peered at me curiously. "I mean, do you believe there is real progress—that we are better than we used to be?"

The knife came dancing down on the plate. "Better?" she said; "not at all; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to have processions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest was different from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then; they all wore aprons, and our cure used to insist on them wearing aprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons."

"All women should wear aprons," I repeated mechanically, as my thoughts flitted back to Babylon.

Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. "Did you grasp what I said?" she asked; "there is no modesty nowadays. And you people who come from England," she added sternly, "with your short skirts and your peculiar ways, don't improve matters."

I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Joseph wasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion by discoursing on the merits of soupe au fromage.

We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment of the decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personal predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the politician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fair representation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It is not, but it is one of those to which we are driven in the desperation of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This explains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we have always savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?) with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When we in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom.

Oh, how I sigh for Mercury!

Supposing this sinful earth is only a school for reformed Martians; supposing human nature and history always repeat themselves, and the end is as the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless diversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of the furnace of life. Some gain ascendancy and lay claim to mental supremacy, to science and religion and the overlordship of the universe. I am sure Mars, Mercury, and Tellus are equally prone to this weakness. One day—in the uncountably many of solar mornings—there is a collision, a breaking up of all the old forms through contact with some mysterious roving mass of burning matter. The planets with their kings and prophets disappear in fire and gas, The perturbation in the vast Cosmos of Change is probably not greater than that caused by the fall of an old and rotten tree before the cleansing winds of spring.

All mankind clings to the hope that something escapes destruction and rises unchangeable and eternal above the domain of nothingness. In that hope we strive for better things and go forth to reform life, and in the striving we find our spirit. We know we are shortsighted and sometimes blind, and that the fight is often hopeless. But the joy, the imperishable joy, lies in the struggle. Don Quixote is inexpressibly dear to us because he personifies the ridiculous tasks which we attempt, though we know them to be ridiculous.

There is a human need which is always paramount, yet surprisingly little recognized. It is the need of an enemy. Life is a perpetual looking forward to a time when we shall have conquered. We are happiest when we see the enemy in all his ugliness and wickedness, and can draw our swords without any doubt as to his presence. We prefer solid dragons of evil to flitting butterflies of sin. We are ever in search of the enemy in our schemes of reform, our political wrangles, our moral crusades. The growth of individuality is indissolubly bound up with cognizance of the enemy. He may be hiding in the bowels of the earth, defying the attempt to tame the soil to our advantage; he may be mocking our efforts to find scientific solutions to the riddles of nature; he may be encamped in our own souls, confounding our goodness and demolishing our moral defences. But he must be there. Without him life would be stagnant, energy and virtue purposeless.

War satisfies the human hunger for a sight of the enemy. All the vague sense of evil which in peace-time makes the morality of our next-door neighbour a matter of anxious concern to us is now solidified in hatred of the foe of the country. Smaller enmities are patched, national brotherhood is recognized. The country at war with us becomes the target of all our moral bullets. Tyranny, cruelty, lust, greed, and all manner of abomination dwell there; its people are the servants of Antichrist.

The evil seen in the enemy stimulates unseen good in the masses, to whom the sacrifices of war would be impossible but for the conviction that the nations have been sharply divided into sheep and goats. The abolition of war will come about when we have learnt to eliminate sham enemies and to recognize the real one within our own hearts. In our present stage of cosmic education, the idea of a negative peace is entirely repellent. Now and then, after a bout of too much talking or too much doing, we may dwell tenderly on the thought of complete inaction and stillness. A nightmare is an excellent means of inducing a desire for dreamless sleep. But normal, natural humanity shuns complete rest. Hence the notorious failure—mental and physical—of complete holidays. We must attack something, and if there is no work to attack, we attack the inanimate stupidity of our surroundings. It is strange that the laborious task once achieved should so often become the thing abhorred. Scales fall from our eyes, perspective is restored, and we see what a trumpery affair held us enthralled. I have often thought with dismay of the effect on scores of reformers, whom I know, if the reform to which they have sworn allegiance should be accomplished. To many this would be a personal disaster of the gravest kind. For years they have poured their mental energy and their devotion into one channel. The enemy was always there, to be beaten at sunrise and cursed at sunset. The cause inspired high ideals and hard work; self and selfish matters were neglected in the pursuit of victory. Life eventually became identified with the cause and its vicissitudes, and, like the picture in Olive Schreiner's story, the work took on brighter and more wonderful colour, whilst the painter became paler and paler. Narrowness of vision and purpose became essential conditions of efficiency, and gradually human attributes became sharpened into fanatical weapons of assault. Few reformers live to see the triumph of their cause, and fewer still succeed in preserving equilibrium of judgment.

There is, verily, every excuse for the pointed energy of reformers. The world is full of horrors that cry aloud for extirpation; one head cannot easily harbour knowledge of all the strongholds of wickedness. True, those who are called by the spirit to become missionaries of mercy can harbour a greater measure of sympathy than the average man. The average man suffers through incapacity to reach the fountain of spiritual replenishment at which the saints refresh their parched throats. An acute sensitiveness to the suffering of others, without a corresponding power to reach the sources of comfort, leads to the abyss of madness. Nature imposes limits to sympathy in most minds, barriers of forgetfulness without which healthy thought is impossible. The danger to the mind of indulging in unlimited sympathy has been emphasized by the most divergent students of psychological law. Herbert Spencer analysed it with characteristic thoroughness. Nietzsche went farther. He reacted violently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and in philosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. The war has shown the human need of self-defence against excessive sympathy. We are surfeited with horrors on land and sea; the ghastly truth of a carnage which exceeds anything known in history, of maimed and broken lives, of starving and homeless people, is shunned lest we lose our reason in impotent and disruptive pity. The man of bayonet and bomb, who a short time ago spent mildly exciting days over his desk in the City, and who was anxiously concerned over the indisposition of his neighbour's cat, has made himself a heart of steel for the purposes of the war. If sympathy interfered with the issue of every bullet and the thrust of every bayonet, there would be an end to military efficiency. The civilian has not seldom gone far beyond the needs of emotional self-defence and equipped himself with a heart of stone. The perfect Man of Sympathy—controlling His sympathy, yet radiating it to all the world and its sins—was Jesus Christ. His compassion had none of the corrosive qualities which drove Nietzsche to distraction. He could retain the consciousness of all the suffering which men inflict on fellow-creatures and yet keep ever abundant the measure of His pity and the regenerating power of His love. He saw the root of our evil, the one cause and the one remedy. He is the catholic and consistent reformer, whilst we—we of the smaller measure—flounder in the web of a hundred causes.

Each cause can be endowed with an importance which outdoes all the others. Education—can any one deny the overwhelming need of proper concentration on its possibilities? "Here we have a generation of ignorant, selfish, immoral creatures, devoid of a sense of social responsibility," says our first reformer; "why, the remedy is obvious: let us begin with the children in the schools. Is any one so dense as not to perceive the all-pervading importance of the guidance we give to the young?"

"It is no use beginning with the children whilst those who teach them are so hopelessly sunk in materialism and stupidity," says our second reformer. "Look at the education laws; they are all ill-conceived and ill-administered. Education is not only a failure; it is a dead-weight of falsehood and class tyranny which hampers progress. Let us go straight for socialism and equal human rights and opportunities. Your education is only used to perpetuate industrial slavery and to keep the children of the working classes ignorant of the blood-sucking system into whose meshes they will be thrown unless we combine and make our influence felt now."

"You are neglecting the most obvious duties which should come first," says the quiet and motherly voice of the third reformer; "infants die by the hundred thousand owing to neglect. There will soon be no babies for you to instruct either in materialism or socialism. The race will die out whilst you talk. Look at the slums and the careless, ignorant mothers; we want infant-welfare work, we want a new baby cult, we want to teach people parental responsibility."

"Nonsense," breaks in the virile voice of the fourth reformer; "what you want is to take people away from the slums, to bring them back to the country. Land nationalization is what we need—a free, healthy life, far removed from the factories that kill soul and body by the grinding monotony of existence. Man was made for life on the soil, for contact with sun and wind, flowers and trees. They will give health and life to your babies."

"Your schemes have only a secondary importance"—the voice of a prominent suffragist is now heard. "Give women the vote and these reforms will follow. Men have made all these abominable laws and customs; women will bring in just and human laws and change all social life. As for the suggestion that country life will improve the standard of living, I can only say that it is made in ignorance of the real conditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She is often the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keep the children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a long travesty of the laws of health."

"Naturally," comments the temperance reformer, "whilst you allow the labourer to soak himself in drink and to spend his money at the public-house. Drink is the root of all our social troubles: it ruins the body and corrupts the mind, it poisons the unborn children, fills our prisons and asylums. You may legislate and equalize opportunities as much as you please; so long as you allow the cursed liberty of drink there can be no health and no human decency. Prohibition is the most urgent of all our needs."

An athletic-looking young man, rosy-cheeked and clear-eyed, who had been listening with a somewhat supercilious smile, now joins in the debate. "There would be no need for you to bother about drink if you could persuade people to give up flesh-eating. Vegetarianism is the cure of all ills. It drives away disease and the craving for stimulants, it gives you pure blood and a desire for the really simple life. I live in a tent on ninepence a day and sleep in the open. I grow my own fruit and vegetables and do my own cooking. Thoreau is my master and Carpenter my friend. I hate smoky cities with their slums and their shambles and your whole sickly civilization."

"Sickly!" repeats a Christian Scientist, with reproachful emphasis on the word. The speaker is a woman of sixty, whose face bears the stamp of successful self-discipline and a sound physique. "I have seen vegetarians who looked extremely sickly. Before I became a Christian Scientist I, too, sought health by various systems of diet. Now I know that all disease is but an error of mortal mind, and in Science and Health, by Mrs. Eddy, we are told——"

She was not allowed to finish her sentence, for a Congregational minister, famous for his pulpit denunciations of sin, has risen and gravely waves his hand to ensure a respectful hearing. "All you people," he says, in a voice vibrating with solemn indignation, "are pursuing fleeting shadows. The kingdom of God is within. This false cult of health by self-hypnotism, or health by living like the beasts in the field, gives undue weight to things which, after all, relate to the body. It is the soul of man that is important, not where he lives or what he eats. We need the fear of God and the thirst for His mercy; we need the Divine guidance which will transform and sanctify our social relations."

"And pray how has the Church dealt with the war?" cries the pacifist who has now risen, his eyes ablaze with denunciation of the minister. "The Christian Church—established or unestablished—is nothing but the handmaid of the politician and the State, the servile echo of capitalists and diplomatists. You talk of Divine guidance and the sanctification of life. How do you respect life and the teaching of Jesus Christ? Jesus said, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.' You, His professed followers, bless war and its orgies of hate. You stand by hypocritically thanking God for your own sanctity, whilst Christians drench battlefields with the blood of Christians. The abolition of war is the reform to which you should all bend your lives and direct your prayers. Even now you have not learnt your lesson. Your social order, your laws, your constitution, your personal liberties, your lives and those of your children, are thrown to the Juggernaut of war, and yet you continue your futile pursuit of shadows. Without peace there can be no reform."

I have joined in the debate, I have heard all these voices. They are familiar to me with the familiarity of the songs of our childhood. Their sentiment is true, oh so true! yet so sadly inadequate. The reformers are valiant and true, and every one has hitched his waggon to his pet star. Happiest are those who do not encounter the cross-influence of rival stars or see the irony of our human limitation of sight and achievement. The blood-red cross of the crusader will stand no admixture of colour. The soul dominated by one idea gains ground. Henri Dunant, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, General Booth, Josephine Butler—these succeed by dint of their singleness of purpose. The narrowness serves to concentrate the strength and accelerate the work.

The reformer may be bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though execution is likely to be the penalty of too close application to principles.

He must not fear the companionship of the crank. He had better recognize that he is one. What is a crank? The dictionary is somewhat vague as to the meaning. I find that the verb is unravelled as "bend, wind, turn, twist, wind in and out, crankle, crinkle." The last two appeal to me strongly. How I have crankled and crinkled over wrongs and horrors which I have discovered on my little path! No crank can see his crankiness at the time of crankling, though sometimes he sees it afterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seem ridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank. The man who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or left naked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was an intellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crank of all times, champion of forlorn causes, the inspired rebel of the spirit.

There are small and noisy and irritating cranks. I have met scores of them. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfully ingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of a morbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of their own importance.

I have for many years been the privileged though unworthy recipient of confidences and schemes for the elimination of all manner of cruelty and wickedness from the world. My office in Piccadilly has received within its sympathetic walls a procession of born cranks, of souls charged with high missions for the betterment of the world. Faddists, eccentrics, dreamers, mystics, workers chained to lifelong slavery by their dominant idea, have poured out their plans to me. Sometimes visitors came who clearly had crossed the unguarded frontier between sanity and insanity, interesting and pathetic and clever, yet of the great order of God's fools. They were not unhappy, for their path was brilliantly lit by an idea, whilst the rest of the world was plunged in darkness. They would scold me and pity me because I refused to follow their light, but they were never unkind.

There is an old blue easy-chair in the office, dilapidated and springless, in which I have deposited my cranks. I always choose a hard, uncomfortable seat opposite, from which I conduct my defence against the insidious appeal of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from my memory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be. The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable, but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure.

Here is the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that we were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes.... Here is the woman who believes sex to be the source of all good, all life, all joy. She holds a medical degree and is passionately opposed to the emancipation of womanhood. She is unmarried, and dresses with old-fashioned emphasis of the eternal feminine. With a soft and languid smile she deprecates the fate which sent her to the medical school instead of the nursery. "Why," she tells me, with radiant eyes, "everything is sex; poetry, painting, sculpture, religion are sex. Women who suppress their sexual nature by pursuing the chimerical advantages of votes and professions are guilty of race-suicide. Race-suicide must be stopped." There is the believer in the immediate return of Jesus Christ and the approaching end of the world. He comes as a convert with a message, and laden with books of prophecy. A year ago he was still a successful man of business, and a gay soul with no inclination towards the holy life. The merry twinkle in his eye has disappeared, and in its place I see the dull glow of an obsessing idea. "What is the good of all your struggle and your agitation?" he says; "everything will come right and the wicked will be punished. Join me in proclaiming the coming of the Lord. Let people be warned and repent in time." There is the lively, mercurial lady in green who deals in statesmanship and high politics, who knows everybody of importance, and who controls the fate of nations through her magic influence behind the scenes. To-day she has been to the War Office, yesterday the Home Office trembled at her approach, to-morrow certain officials in high diplomatic circles will know to their cost what she thinks of them. There is the pompous lady of a hundred committees. She has a passion for committees, and no sooner has she formed one or sat on one than she discovers the general unworthiness of the assembly. She comes to expose people, to prove how utterly incapable they are of managing affairs.

The priestess of some system of New Thought arrives. She is pleasant and unruffled. "Can you deny," she asks, "that nothing exists for you but that which you allow to enter your mind?" No, I cannot. "Very well, then, you can control the universe by thought. You can gain happiness, health, peace of mind, and long life. By thought and meditation you can make for yourself a world of harmony, a consciousness which excludes everything that is ugly and painful and jarring." I murmur that this is no doubt possible, but it seems a trifle selfish whilst so many human souls are struggling in the sea of trouble. I am sharply pulled up. "I thought you would be too immersed in the wretched folly of agitation to understand," she says; "I came to show you the better way." She is followed by the clothes enthusiast. He wears sandals and has discarded the abomination of starched linen. "We are forming a Society for the Revival of Greek Clothing," he announces. "From the aesthetic and the hygienic points of view, nothing is more important than the clothes we wear." I venture on a feeble Teufelsdroeckh joke. He does not condescend to listen. "We must get rid of hideous trousers and feet-strangling skirts [I am lost in admiration over the indictment of the skirt, for I remember a certain reception in Washington in the days of the snake-skirt when I stumbled and fell at a moment when a little dignity would have been my most precious possession]; we must wear loose white draperies amenable to the air and the washtub." I quite agree, but raise some practical obstacles and a few conventional pegs of delay. They prove intolerable, and my visitor departs convinced that I am not one of the elect.

Missionaries of dietetics come in a motley procession. There is the man who believes we can eat anything provided we masticate everything with bovine thoroughness; there is the man who believes that we ought to eat nothing during long bouts of purgative fasting, and who lives cheerfully and inexpensively on hot water during two yearly periods of twenty days. There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which, properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell proliferation or hard water—there is always a complementary cure. I listened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils of salt. Salted food, I was told, is the cause of our troubles. We are salted and dried until all power of recuperation is driven out of our nerves and muscles. I was asked to study the subject. The theory was well supported by scientific reasoning and evidence, and on the following evening I had thoroughly entered into the saltless ideal. A vision of the dispirited haddock had materially assisted my conclusion when a visitor was announced. He was preceded by a card showing impressively that he was a man of learning in theories of disease. "I have come," he said, "in the hope that you will take an interest in my experiments and conclusions with regard to disease in general. I have discovered that the one cure for rheumatism, consumption, and cancer is salt, plenty of common salt."

The trouble with all these people is not that they are all wrong. They are probably all right. It is a question of angles and quality of the grey matter of the brain. The trouble is the limitation of experience and outlook imposed by fate upon each individual.

A league or society is theoretically the one human institution which is akin to heaven. You have an object and a programme. You know you are occupied with the most important task in the world. But you feel powerless alone. You send out your appeal for support and kindred souls flock to your banner. Can anything be more soul-satisfying than a community of those who think alike, who feel alike, and who work for the same end? Anarchy is impossible, and you decide on a constitution and rules for the management of your spiritual brotherhood. A committee is appointed to control the affairs of the union, and officials to carry out its wishes. Now you have the ideal of which you dreamt, the pure collective force which should prove irresistible. Friends within and enemies without.

But you have not excluded the canker of human differences. Your kindred souls discover that, though they think alike on the one point which drew you together, they differ strongly on others. There are other opinions, religious and political, than those which come within the purview of your little organization. You surprise some of your friends in the act of discussing your denseness in matters of which they have a firm and clear grasp. You begin to wonder how it is possible for people who have such a perfect vision of certain necessary lines of reform to manifest such unmitigated stupidity in regard to others. If you are wise, you resign yourself to the inevitable divergence of mind; if they are wise, they agree to pardon your shortcomings.

Fanatics flower in a society like poppies in a wheat-field. They have lost sight of everything but the urgency of the cause. They are intolerant because they have no knowledge of human nature and no self-criticism wherewith to check the wild ideas that sprout beneath their immense self-confidence. They turn withering scorn on committees and officials who refuse to give effect to their suggestions to burn the House of Commons, or stop the traffic of London, or commit combined suicide in Hyde Park as a protest against the continuance of the iniquity which they denounce. They would do things in a different manner. They intend to show the world and politicians that their views cannot be ignored with impunity. For you and your lukewarm followers they have nothing but contempt—the contempt which is earned by the coward. The fanatic is troublesome, but comparatively easy to deal with. There is another product of organized reform on which you cannot so easily shut the door. It is the ideologue who rides the scheme to death. It is the doctrinaire who must form systems within systems and policies within policies. It is not enough that you have set out to suppress something or to encourage something. You must follow his particular way. He is in terror of compromise and sees profligacy in sweet reasonableness. He knows the tragic failure of other movements with vacillating policies. This one must be saved at all costs. 'Twere better to smash the whole movement than proceed along undesirable lines. He would scorn victory that came through avenues not recognized by him. Certain words and phrases have completely captivated his imagination. With them he fences heroically and causes a sufficiency of clatter and noise. He is in deadly earnest and will brook no rivals. Parties within parties are formed, and the energies which should be directed towards fighting opponents are absorbed in combat within the society.

There is another element of disaster which now and then gains ascendancy in the community of reformers. It is the professional agitator, the parasite who will speak for or against a principle according to the economic advantage which one side or the other may offer. You may hold that such a man is not altogether undesirable, provided he can "organize" and persuade people that the society is worthy of support. You may think that he is no more blameworthy than the lawyer who pleads your views so eloquently and who handles the jury with such consummate skill, though his sole incentive is your fee and not your case. If you act on such a belief and allow your professional agitator to manage your society, you will certainly one day find your ideals turned to ashes and your organization for moral action turned into money-making machinery.

Whilst life teaches you that societies are frail human institutions and that conferences and congresses do not bring about the millennium, you are saved from despair if you keep ever fresh your sense of humour.

There are problems in the life of the reformer which the mountains never fail to put before me. I have so often come to them from the heat and turmoil of controversy. I have come like a soldier from battle, covered with mud and slightly wounded, yet exultant in the spirit of the fray. The mountains speak to me, and lo! another self appears. They speak to me of beauty, of peace, of the infinite mystery of life; they give me broad effects of light and shade, and obliterate the small pictures which pursue me on the plains. Yesterday, in the stillness of Alpine midwinter, the moon shone clear and full on the glacier. I sat gazing at the outlines of the peaks trembling in the pale light of a perfect evening. The noisy mountain torrents were held captive in prisons of ice, but here and there the sound of an irrepressible rivulet threading its underground way through stones and earth brought to my ears a song of spring. I love the trees, the sky, the snow—all my senses respond to the call of the solitude of Nature. I felt free and happy; I sank into the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and slums, passed before my eyes. How can one forget! How can one enjoy peace and beauty! Duty bids us to descend, love bids us to share the suffering.

And yet are there not two ways of seeking perfection, two paths clearly defined and well trodden throughout the ages—reform of self and reform of others? What may at first sight appear as aesthetic or mystic egoism is perhaps the better way. The hermit who forsakes the world and renounces the social ties and burdens which most men count of value is bent on the purification of his own soul. Monasticism—with all its faults—recognized the essential need of self-examination and self-discipline. It bade us cleanse our souls, conquer our own temptations, by a rigid system of religious exercise. Our modern reformer is not always conscious of any need for self-reform. He lustily attacks the misdoings of others and remains happily ignorant of the Socratic rule, Know thyself. "Every unordered spirit is its own punishment," says St. Augustine, and the disorder is not removed by assaulting the faults of others. We have, first and last, to be captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early Christian monasticism held that as this world is the domain of the devil, the only safety lies in flight from it. Such a view precludes the possibility of social reform on a general and lasting basis. It has a radical consistency and a scientific precision which are only disturbed by the course of actual events. Supposing all humanity could be withdrawn, every precious brand snatched from the burning and the whole made into a vast monastery? The devil would be sure to slip in and cause a disturbance.

The social reformer assumes that the world is worthy of his care, and that we are here to make it as habitable as we can. He lives in the midst of sinful humanity and accepts the inheritance of earthly conventions. He may choose to live in the slums whilst his spirit clamours for a hermitage amongst the blue hills. His ways may be crotchety and his temper irritable—what does it matter so long as he is carrying out his appointed task in the cosmic order?

To the true nature-lover there is no renunciation in forsaking the things prized by most men. His virtue may be vice concealed; he gathers bliss where others find boredom. Give me a tree, a perfect tree, and you may keep your palaces. Give me the green fields with a hundred thousand flowers, and you may keep your streets and your piles of gold. Give me the wild wind and the breath of the torrent, and I have no wish to hear your hymns. There is a brazen self-sufficiency about the nature-lover which baffles and offends the mind of the crowd. The most amazing thing about him is that he turns hardship and deprivation into pleasure. Take away his house and he shelters in a cave. Deprive him of your company and he laughs to himself. Take away his possessions and he tells you he is rich because he wants so little, whilst you are poor, for you have surrounded yourself with a hundred unnecessary wants. Like Antaeus, the mythical giant, he derives his strength and his power to overcome enemies from contact with the earth. He discovers a mode of being, behind and beyond ordinary existence. He says to the busy crowds of industry and commerce, to the men and women who wear out their lives in the joyless chase of success: "You will die before you know satisfaction and rest. Come and be human, come and grow in the sunshine and the rain." He finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and to his scorn of reformers:

Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even—for that is the seat of sympathy—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers—and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it—that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live.

And whilst thus branding those who set out to reform others, he shows his adherence to the great order of self-reformers by the following conclusion:

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Thoreau cultivates simplicity with an intense regard for the effect on himself. He is—in spite of his seclusion—above all a prophet amongst men. He made great discoveries in the realm of the mind—the mind attending closely to Nature, but he is too much the naturalist and the land-surveyor to lose himself in the raptures of nature love. He is a stranger to the ethereal touch with which Fiona Macleod opens the magic door of that which is felt but not seen in earth and sky. He misses the mystic hour when ghosts of the green life are about. That hour has been seized by Algernon Blackwood, who makes us feel the fascination, the vague dread of the elemental powers. There is a dream-wood in which the souls of all things intermingle, and once imprisoned there, the nature-lover may not escape until he has paid toll to the pixies.

There is, after all, nothing incompatible in the life of self-enrichment and the life of self-expenditure. They are interdependent, and rule the ancient order of gnosis and praxis. Whether we go to nature or religion or science for replenishment, we must be filled. And the ironic power which presides over our feasts compels the most inveterate egoist amongst us to share his treasures. Mind is for ever craving to give to mind. If we want nothing better than to boast of our superiority, the boasting imparts a lesson to others and is therefore a gift. But the reforming spirit spares few who think. It is generally believed that the purely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is above moral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homer and Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, so say the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts the good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of "preaching." "To go preach to the first passer by," wrote Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor." He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himself tutor to innocence and the model of subjective moralizing.

However widely we roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words which make the soul fertile.

No; the tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature. Sometimes they furnish material for literature. Their principal use in life is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of which great deeds are born.



NATIONALITY

I can remember no time in my life when I was not addicted to the study of humanity. The marvels of faces, types, and characteristics were, I feel sure, with me in my cradle. At the age of ten I had evolved a kind of astrological chart of my own, according to which all human beings, including uncles and aunts, grandmothers and children, could be placed in twelve categories. There were the long-nosed, thin-lipped, sandy-haired, over-principled people, who always knew right from wrong and who grudged me an extra chocolate because it was not the hour to have one. There were the snub-nosed, full-lipped, dark-eyed people, whose manners were jolly and who positively encouraged illicit consumption of fruit in the thin-lipped aunt's garden. There were the shortsighted, solemn people with bulging foreheads and studious habits who saw print and nothing else. They bored me and belonged to my eleventh category. As far as I can see now, my categories were a florid elaboration of the four temperaments of Hippocrates, though I have no idea of the cause of my childish absorption in the subject. It was certainly altogether spontaneous and not encouraged, for I have a vivid recollection of how an eager and eloquent description of my categories (profusely illustrated by mimicry) brought me a sharp reprimand and a very nasty tonic. The tonic was taken under compulsion, but the cure is still unaccomplished.

And now for many years I have sat at my chalet window and seen the world go by. The path from the village below to the peaks and pastures above runs past my nest. On it, in the summer months, there was a straggling procession of tourists and climbers, peasants and townsfolk. They were of all nationalities, and their loud voices proclaimed the immutability of the curse of Babel. I used to be annoyed at the close proximity of the path, until, one day, I discovered its marvellous opportunities for anthropological research. Then I settled down, content to limit my wooing of the solitude to the early morning and the late evening, or the time when the wild autumnal gales brush the mountains clear of trippers and paint the surrounding foliage in glorious tints of red and gold. For I assure you the proper study of man is man, and the proper study of woman is both man and woman.

Here comes the Parisian youth with his charming young mamma of forty. His face is pale and distingue, and the black down on his upper lip has been trained with infinite care. Though his grey mountain suit is fashioned for great feats of daring, it has the rounded waist and martial shoulder-lines with which the Parisian tailor pacifies his conscience when he supplies English fashions. His stockings look ferocious. His dark eyes sparkle with inquisitiveness behind the pince-nez. He is vivacity incarnate, he is urbanity on a holiday. Mamma takes his arm and they trip past me. She is pretty, and would be plump if the art of the corsetiere had not abolished plumpness. Her hat conveys a greeting from the Rue Lafayette, her little high-heeled boots show faultless ankles and the latest way of lacing up superfluous fat above them. A hole and two uneven stones maliciously intercept the progress of that little foot. Mamma stumbles, and is promptly and chivalrously replaced in an upright position by the son. "Mon Dieu!" she cries; "what a path!" and through my open window there floats the odour of poudre-de-riz disturbed by nervous excitement. Papa follows. He is fat. No one can deny it, and I do not think he would like any one to try. Honesty is writ large on his rotund countenance. Now he is hot and somewhat weary with the climb. He carries his hat under his arm and large pearls of moisture shine on the puckered forehead. His hair is thick and closely cropped, and strives upward with the even aspiration of a doormat. His cheeks are a little sallow and pendulous. He smiles under his thin moustache, the contented smile of an honest, hardworking, successful man. I know him well; I seem to have met him in a hundred editions in the offices of municipalities and prefectures, behind the counters of banks and shops. He is generally amiable, but he can lose his temper, and when he loses it, it is worth your while to help him to find it.

Here comes the Heidelberg professor, accompanied by two fair daughters. He is tall, of commanding presence, and walks with patriarchal gravity under a green umbrella. A large pocket, embroidered and ingeniously designed with numerous compartments, is strapped to his waist. He strokes his long, well-trimmed beard as he admonishes the girls to pay serious attention to the natural beauty of the scenery. He rummages the pocket for his field-glasses. "This, dear children, is Mont Blanc. I do not say that our Schwarzwald is not just as lovely in its way. This mountain was first climbed by Paccard and Balmat. It stretches from the Col de Balme to the Col du Bonhomme and the Col de la Seigne. [A book is now extracted from the fourth division of the pocket.] There are the following passes: the Col d'Argentiere, the Col...." His eye-glasses slip downwards on his nose. The girls are not listening. Gretchen is entirely absorbed in the fascinating appearance of an Italian who has just passed, and who by unmistakable signs conveyed to her that she is adorable. His flashing eyes, his jet-black hair, his lithe figure, his pointed toes, the nimble way in which he managed to press her hand behind the very back of her father, have stirred her imagination. Hedvig is shocked. The elder daughter is permeated with respect for her father's professorial dignity. Every gesture betrays the capable housekeeper. She seems to be made of squares—good, proper, solid squares. She tells the smiling Gretchen, whose cheeks suggest strawberries and cream, that she must never encourage dark Italians by looking at them. She should look at the ground when such men pass. She should be more attentive to father. The sound of their footsteps dies, and the green umbrella is but a dream. Hedvig has filled my window with visions of a well-ordered German home, of sausages and Sauerkraut, of beer and pickled fruit, of embroideries and coffee-parties.

Here comes a hatless representative of young Russia. His clothes are shabby and neglected; he walks with a shuffling, tired movement. But his face is startling. It seems to light up the path with some kind of spiritual fervour. His hair is long and golden, his beard suggests an aureole of virtue, his large blue eyes are penetrating but mild. A confused series of faces flash through my mind—Abraham, Tolstoy, Jesus Christ? Yes, it may seem sacrilegious, but the man is like Jesus Christ. I see now that the likeness is studied, cultivated, impressive. This is one of the intelligentsia who has lingered for a while in Geneva or Lausanne en route for the haunts of spiritual revolution. A din of dear familiar voices now fills the path and seems to shake the tops of the pines. "I guess you won't try that again. I did Munich in one day, Dresden in one and a half, Berlin in two, and Europe in twenty." Three women and a man stop opposite the chalet. The ladies are charmingly dressed in summer frocks of white and pink and blue, and carry nothing heavier than a parasol. The man is laden with cloaks, rugs, and bags. They peer into my window and try to catch a glimpse of the interior. I hastily draw the curtains and leave one peep-hole for myself. "Quaint houses these Swiss live in," says one. "It isn't a bad shanty," says the man. "Let's have a glass of milk," says another.

"Dew lait," they shout through the window. I callously observe them through my peep-hole. The man is of a fine American type, sinewy, resolute, hawk-eyed. The mountain sunshine provides me with Roentgen rays, and I see Wall Street inside his brow. "Dew lait," they yell. As there is no answer, they hammer at the door. The door is adamant. They leave reluctantly. "I think I saw the face of one of those Swiss idiots through the curtains," says the lady in pink; "of course he would not understand what we said."

There is a delightful readiness to jump to conclusions on the part of visitors. Sometimes they are the reverse of flattering, but they are always a source of delighted interest to me. I remember one day, years ago, when I had gone to draw water at the source, which emerges as a thousand diamonds from the rock and then descends into the hollow trunk of a tree and becomes tame and inclined to domesticity. The cows had come for a drink at the same hour, and we had just exchanged a few polite remarks when I found myself observed by an English clergyman. Yes, unmistakably English. His face was prim and clean-shaven, his collar straight and stiff, upon his lips there played a sweet and devout smile. He lifted up the tail of his coat ceremoniously and, selecting a clean stone, seated himself upon it. He radiated condescending kindness.

"Lor a bun," said he. I asked the cows to excuse me for a moment and turned to him. "Lor a bun," he repeated, this time with a query. I stared uncomprehendingly. The sweet smile became sweeter. "Lor a bun, ma pettit fille, eh?" At last I understood. "Oh, yes, the water is excellent here," I replied, "and freezingly cold if you put your fingers in it." He departed in unceremonious haste.

For some years I have watched the procession of nations on my path. French, German, English, Russian, Austrian, American, Italian—they all brought me a picture of their tribal characteristics, trivial, thumbnail sketches, but nevertheless true to life. It may be urged that holiday-makers do not constitute reliable material for the observation of national peculiarities. I am not so sure. A man on a holiday generally takes his goodwill with him, and endeavours, at least, to restrain his temper and his prejudices. He may fail in the attempt, and be a peevish thing at play, but the attempt will show him at his best. From the hotels below, where the crowds of cosmopolis stayed en pension at reasonable and unreasonable terms, the sound of music and songs visited me in the evening. The nations were waltzing. International peace reigned under the auspices of the Swiss hotel keeper. Forgotten were the ancient feuds of dynasty and religion. Common humanity was uppermost.

And now the nations are at war. The concourse of friendly strangers who used to meet in the hotels is sharply divided into hostile groups. Travel is suspended or severely restricted. The Frenchman who a short time ago raised his glass in friendly salute to the German at the opposite table, who had guided him across the moraine, is now convulsed at the thought that he could ever forget the essentially brutal and inhuman character of all Germans. The German wishes he had dropped the Frenchman into the crevasse. There would then, he argues, have been one less of these treacherous, mean people, whose love of military conquest is only checked by impotence. He remembers Napoleon and the fact that any insignificant-looking chip of the Latin block may one day threaten the heart of Germany. The easy and good-humoured internationalism of tourist-life is at an end.

I do not know to what extent modern facilities for inexpensive travel have helped to establish friendship and understanding between the nations. But I do know that a person who claims to be educated, and who has never travelled abroad, is insufferably boresome. I prefer the society of a mole. The mole does not lecture me on the incalculable advantages of remaining in one's dark passages. I do not shut my eyes to the fact that some people go abroad and come home with their stupidity unmodified by experience. But they have been made uncomfortable, and that is something. A series of pricks of discomfort might dislodge the obstacles to mental circulation. A Swiss hotel may serve to check the contempt which the Philistines of all nations (there is a truly international bond between them) feel at the thought of a foreigner, though the shock of finding oneself amongst such peculiarities of clothes, or frisure, or table-manners may be almost unbearable. "Can you tell me," said a charming but agitated old lady from Bath one day, "of a hotel where there are no foreigners?" "I am afraid I cannot," I answered. "The hotel you have in mind would be full of foreigners in Switzerland, and you would but add to their number."

Even the most cosmopolitan habitues of Nice, or Monte Carlo, or Homburg feel the mildly stimulating effect of being in the presence of foreigners. You are interested or disgusted, you are attracted or repelled; your curiosity is aroused; you guess, you weave romances, you make conscious use of the rich material for comparison which lies before you. In Europe, apparently, the nations meet but do not merge. America achieves the miracle. I remember one evening in New York. I had addressed a meeting of good Americans and was coming home in the train. I was tired and unobservant and kept my eyes closed. Suddenly a loud remark in Danish attracted my attention. I looked up at the row of humanity in the long carriage. Sitting opposite me, standing at my side, hanging by the straps, were the nations of the world. The racial types were there: Slavonic, Latin, Teutonic; the skull dolichocephalic and the skull brachycephalic rested side by side without any attempt at mutual evacuation. I could distinguish the faces of Frenchmen, Jews, Englishmen, Japanese, Germans, Poles, negroes, Italians. They did not study one another. They were journeying home from the day's work. A strange homogeneity brooded over the company. America had put her super-stamp on their brows. They were citizens of an all-human country.

What, then, is this mysterious power which seems to master the Old World, whilst it is mastered by the New World? Nationality is clearly a mundane thing. It is not generally suggested that heaven is mapped out into national frontiers; the Christian religion and other faiths are bent on roping in all the nations. The missionaries who are sent out to Africa and China go with the conviction that there is room in heaven for the black and the yellow sinner. True, the black and the yellow man will first have to shed their somewhat irregular appearance and come forth white and radiant, but the belief in the possibility of such a feat is proof positive that we regard the nationality of a man as a transient business. Nationality is local, spirituality universal. Nationality is a form, a mould, a means; spirituality is the essence, the force, the object. The problems of nationality are wrapped up in the problems of personality. A personality is an amalgam of likes and dislikes, of habit and prejudice, the product of circumstances and a will. There is such a thing as multiple personality, and there is also multiple nationality. But the simple measure of nationality is severely natural and elemental. It is rooted in the need of understanding and being understood. It begins with love of self (we do love ourselves, in spite of all assurances to the contrary), family, and tribe. In a world of diversity and uncertainty it envelops us with a comforting assurance that there are creatures who feel and think as we do. It endows us with a group-soul, without which we, like ants and bees, cannot face life. The sense of nationality is but an enlarged sense of personality.

It is a realization of unity which comprises many lesser units. Our household, our village, our country, our constituency, are all independent unities which we deliberately (though not always successfully) press into the service of the greater unity. The lesser unities always run the danger of being superseded by the greater unities. The conditions of soil and climate in a hamlet produce a crop of personalities similar in content and range, a type which we may distinguish by the shape of the nose or the trend of the remarks. Ten neighbouring little hamlets may have their little ways of distinction which separate one from the other, and yet one day—to their dismay—discover that they have greater generalities in common. Once the discovery is made, prudence and common sense demand co-operation. The great nations are built up on the discovery. Italy, Germany, and Great Britain have taken it to heart after endless trials of the smaller unities. America had one severe trial, and then settled down to circumvent and undo the curse of Babel. The sense of separateness, once so precious to Florence, Genoa, and Pisa, could not resist the larger conception of Italy.

There is no reason, historical or logical, why this expansion of the consciousness of unity should not proceed until there is nothing further to include. The recognition of an all-human brotherhood is followed by the realization of an all-animal brotherhood in which the essential likeness of all that breathes and feels is paramount. Personally, I have never found the slightest difficulty in accepting our near relationship to the apes. On the contrary, every monkey I meet—and I have specially cultivated their acquaintance—reminds me sharply of the simian origin of our dearest traditions.

The consciousness of unity and the consequent sense of separateness from some other body or bodies are subject to constant change and surprisingly erratic in their application. A bare hint to the Welshman, the Scotsman, the Breton, the Provencal, or the Bavarian that his national idiosyncrasies do not exist, and you will speedily see a demonstration of them. And yet, a moment ago, they felt entirely British or French or German. Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians have each a keen sense of national separateness (and superiority), but let the tongue of slander touch their common nature, and Scandinavia rises in indignant unity. I have attended many International Congresses, and have observed how easily the party is on the verge of grave national crises. Each alliance musters a good-humoured tolerance of the deficiencies of others. But let an opponent of the whole scheme, for which they have assembled, attack the principle which is sacred to all, and there is an immediate truce and concerted action against the intruder. Russian and German troops have found it necessary to suspend their fighting in order to defend themselves against the attacks of wolves. The hungry pack of wolves, waiting by the trenches at night, presented a force which called for united opposition, and the European war had to wait whilst the men of the opposite armies joined in killing them. When the slaughter of wolves was happily over, the human battle was resumed. Supposing, instead of wolves, an airship of super-terrestrial proportions had brought an army of ten-armed, four-headed, and six-legged creatures, bent on dealing out death to the occupants of the trenches, what would have happened? Supposing the inhabitants of a more cruel and vicious planet than ours (cosmological specialists assure us such exist) developed powers of warfare before which the exploits of Hannibal or Attila paled into insignificance, and learnt the art of destroying life not only in their own world but in others as well? They might come armed with new atmospheric weapons, trailing clouds of suffocating fumes to which resistance with guns and bombs would be utterly ineffectual. The horror of the unknown danger would paralyse the war, batteries would be deserted and the trenches would quickly be internationalized. The sense of our common humanity, outraged at the sight and the smell of the monsters, would assert itself. Generals and statesmen of the belligerent peoples—if any were left to direct the defensive—would hold subterranean meetings, and, forgetting the cause for which they sent men to die nobly but a few days ago, would discuss how they could save the united remnants of humanity by strategy and simulation.

The sense of unity is, after all, dependent on innumerable conditions and circumstances over which we have little control. There is the unity of tradition and education, of Eton and Harrow, of Oxford and Cambridge. It moulds opinion and imposes certain restrictions of conduct and prejudices in outlook. Rivalry is an indispensable and normal adjunct of such unity. Races and the honour and glory of one's school and team can stir the group-soul to incredible heights of enthusiasm and effort. There is the instinctive unity of seafarers. Who has not, when crossing the ocean, felt that he was part of a small world independent and isolated from others, but bound together by special ties of adventure? An encounter with an iceberg will bring the common responsibilities and dangers to the notice of the most inveterate individualist, but even while the ship moves uneventfully forward, he, perforce, shares the feeling of oneness. There is the humorous unity which will seize the opposing parties in a court of law and make them join in laughter at some feeble judicial joke just to experience the relief of forgetting that they are there to be contentious.

The advocates of the theory that nations and nationalities are eternally distinct and separate can see no analogy of unity in the simple examples of everyday life. They tell us conclusively that England is England and France is France, and our humble retort that we know as much and something besides is silenced by the further information that each nation has a soul that will tolerate no interference from other souls. They forget, our apostles of the creed of separateness, that the States of to-day are built up on a vast mixture of races and nationalities. They forget, also, that nationality is not a fixed and immovable quantity. Like personality, it is alive and changing, susceptible to influence and experience, liable to psychic contagion from the thoughts and emotions of others. There is no pure nationality. Hybrids are regarded as inferior creatures, as biological outlaws. The truth is, we are all hybrids. Our bluest blood has all the shades of common colour in it when examined ethnically. Great Britain—and Ireland—contains a mixture of Romans, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and Celts. To-day, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish are mixtures within mixtures. And what is the British Empire? A conglomeration of races and languages, a pan-national product of conquest and colonization, in which the forces of racial modification are always at work obliterating old divisions and creating new claims to national recognition.

The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a rich racial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others. The Great Russians, the White Russians, and the Little Russians may each claim to have sprung from the purest Russian stock, but no one has as yet been able to settle satisfactorily the meaning of that claim. The Russians have successively been proved to be of Mongol, Slav, Teutonic, Aryan, Tartar, Celto-Slav, and Slav-Norman origin. Italy, believed to be the home of pure Latin blood, has sheltered and mingled a great number of races, such as Egyptians, Greeks, Spaniards, Slavs, Germans, Jews, and Normans. The Republics of Central and South America are to a large extent peopled by half-breeds. Here the commingling is flagrant and offensive to the partisan of the superiority of the white race. Spain in Mexico and Portugal in Brazil have produced a wild-garden crop which is the despair of the custodian of racial law and order. The search for national purity brings many unexpected discoveries and destroys various theories. It reveals the fact that America has no monopoly of racial amalgamation.

France and Germany appear to us as opposites and irreconcilables. Yet, if you pursue Germany to the hour of her birth you will find that her mother was France. Examine France physiologically and you will find that her muscles and arteries have a German consistency. A thorough investigation of the origins of Germany may prove that she is more Gaulish than Gaul. The Germanic invasions of France are matters of elementary history. Originally a mixture of Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, she is only Latin in part. Caesar conquered Gaul, but the Roman mixture has not obliterated previous or subsequent additions. The Latin blood of France was thoroughly diluted by Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, Normans, and other peoples of Germanic stamp. When Gaul was partitioned into the Burgundian kingdom, Austrasia, and Neustria, there were already present the selective processes which, centuries later, shaped the French and the German souls. Neustria clung to Roman culture, whilst Austrasia nurtured the seeds of the specific Kultur which attained its full bloom in the twentieth century. Through rivalry and war the two types persisted. Charlemagne crushed the rebellious Saxon spirit and conquered Bavaria. He unified the divergent tendencies, but only for a time. In 843 his empire was partitioned. France grew out of the western portion, Germany out of the eastern. Lotharingia or Lorraine was established as a middle kingdom. Did kind Fates design it as a guarantee of peace and stability?

The Germans are apt to claim for themselves a pure and Valhallic origin, an exceptionally unmixed descent of the highest attributes. The primogenial origin may be hidden in obscurity, but the German people have absorbed Gauls, Serbs, Poles, Wends, and a medley of Slav and Celtic races which confound all claims to racial purity. Slavs settled in Teutonic countries and Teutons settled in Slavonic countries. The German colonists who invaded Russia at the invitation of Catherine II were imported to strengthen Russia, just as the Great Elector helped thousands of Huguenots fleeing from France to settle in Brandenburg, and gave them the rights of citizenship for the sake of the vitality which they would impart to his depopulated country.

The belief in the unalloyed purity of races and the consequent battles for national exclusiveness seem to be founded on one of those gigantic illusions which hold humanity captive for centuries. Here, as elsewhere, knowledge will spell freedom. When we realize that here and now nations are in course of transformation, that the divisions of the past are not the divisions of to-day, and that we, despite conservatism and resistance, are made to serve as ingredients in some great mixture of to-morrow, momentous questions arise. Are nations made by war and conquest? Are peoples amalgamated by oppressive legislation? Do political alliances between States create international unities?

Such alliances have not in the past caused any organic union. The nations have met like partners at a ball and danced to the tune of the dynastic or religious quarrel which happened to be paramount at the time. The grouping of nations in alliances has simply been a means of more effective prosecution of military campaigns, a temporary convenience to be discarded when no longer needed. If the example of the past is to be followed, then Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and America, though holding hands now, will separate when the war is over, and may find it necessary to use the same hands for chastizing each other. Alliances have been political games and devices, useful or useless according to the shrewdness of their instigators, but of no value in promoting love between nations. Old-time enemies become friends, and old-time friends become enemies at the command of the political drill-sergeant. England was the hereditary enemy of France. Prussia was the ally of England. In the war of the Austrian succession, France in alliance with Prussia fought England and Austria. During the Seven Years War Prussia, allied to England, fought Austria allied to France. England, allied to France and Turkey, fought Russia in the Crimea. Turn the kaleidoscope of history and you see the English driven out of Normandy, Napoleon defiling Moscow, the Russians attacking Montmartre. Any schoolboy, can trace the changing partners in the grand alliances of the past, or refuse to commit them to memory on account of the bewildering fluctuations in international friendship.

A fiery common hate, though acting as a powerful cement for a time, is no guarantee of durability. Napoleon and the French were hated by the nations, as Wilhelm and the Germans are hated to-day. Rapacious designs for hegemony have always brought about a corresponding amount of defensive unity on the part of those whose independence was threatened. Whether it is Spain or France or Germany that dreams of world-supremacy, the result is international combination. Richelieu and Bismarck rouse the same resentment. A great hatred cannot by itself create a lasting unity, for hatred is apt to grow out of bonds, and, having settled its legitimate prey outside the circle, generally ends by turning on its neighbours within it.

Who can deny that nations have been made by conquest? Heroic self-defence, anger, bitter opposition to the violation of liberty, are of little avail if the psychological factors are favourable to amalgamation. A few decades, a few centuries, and there is fusion between oppressor and oppressed. Hence the loyalty of conquered nations to their foreign masters, at times, when rivals vainly hope for trouble. Hence the indisputable fact that many a nation which but a short time ago fought valiantly for liberty now manifests not only passive resignation, but positive contentment. If, on the other hand, the psychological factors do not favour amalgamation, the legacy of resentment and opposition is handed on from generation to generation and the injury is never forgiven. Cases of contented acceptance are quoted as evidence of the ultimate blessings of war by the adherents of the theory that efficient military measures constitute right. To me they are rather evidence of the strength and endurance of the pacifying forces in human life, and of the sovereignty of the greater unities which draw nations together. If, in spite of the injuries and devastations of war, it is possible for men to forgive and to labour for the same social ends, that is surely proof that the peoples erect no barrier to brotherhood. The truth is, war sometimes achieves that which pacific settlement and free intercourse always achieve.

History has a cavalier way of recording the benefits of conquest. The feelings of the great conquered receive scant consideration. It is enough that after the passage of some centuries we contemplate the matter and declare the conquest to have been beneficial. Was not France invigorated by the wild Northmen who overran her territories and settled wherever they found settlement advantageous? The Normans, originally pirates and plunderers, intermingled with the gentler inhabitants of France. When they turned their eyes to England they were already guardians of civilization. And we blandly record the Norman conquest of England as an unqualified benefit, as an impetus to social amenity, art, learning, architecture, and religion. Protests are useless. The earth abounds in instances of the spread of knowledge, inventions, culture, through war and subjugation. The "rude" peoples who cried out at the outrage, and who fain would have kept their rudeness, receive no sympathy from posterity.

This, I repeat, is no argument for the perpetuation of the old ways of aggression. We have reached a new consciousness and a new responsibility. We see better ways of spreading the fruits of civilization. In the past ambition and brute force, hatred and suspicion, fear and deceit, have had full play. In spite of barbaric warfare and Machiavellian politics the human desire for unity and co-operation has not been uprooted.

The principle of nationality is emerging from the tortuous confusion of the ages. We see that it follows no arbitrary rules of state or empire. It is a law unto itself: the law of mental attraction and community. The centres of passionate nationhood—Poland, Finland, Ireland—withstand all attempts at suppression. You cannot break a strong will to national independence by sledge-hammer blows. In all the wars of the past nations have been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of the people. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossed countries and populations to each other as if they had been balls in a game of chance.

A new conception of human dignity and of the inviolability of natural rights now demands a revaluation of all the motives and objects for which governments send subjects to battle. Democracy is finding her international unity. A great many wars of the past are recognized as having been, not only unnecessary, but positively foolish. The force of an idea is threatening to dispel the force of arms. The idea which rises dominant out of the European war is the conviction that nations have a right to choose their own allegiance or independence; that there must be freedom instead of compulsion; that real nationality is a psychological state, a tribute of sympathy, a voluntary service to which the mind is drawn by affection. To some who lightly praised the idea, treating it as an admirable prop to war, the consequences and application will bring dismay. For here you have the pivot of a social revolution such as the world has never yet seen. It cannot only remain a question of Belgium, or Serbia, or Alsace-Lorraine. It will inevitably be retrospective and prospective. It cannot be limited to the possessions of Germany or Austria or Turkey. It will not pass over India, South Africa, and Egypt. All empires have been extended by conquest of unwilling nationalities. Bitter wars have been fought in Europe for colonial supremacy in other continents. The unwilling tribes of Africa, Asia, and America who have been suppressed or exterminated to make room for the expanding nations of Europe knew little of the liberty of choice which has now become the beacon of militant morality. The principle—if triumphant—will be destructive of empire based on military force. It will be destructive of war, for war is national compulsion in its most logical and uncompromising form. If there is nothing and nobody to conquer, if you may not use armies to widen your national frontiers, or to procure valuable land for economical exploitation, the incentive to war will be removed. The principle will be constructive of a commonwealth of nations, and empires which have achieved a spiritual unity will survive the change of form.