The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men—such as the late Lord Grey—who led it. But I suppose he speaks from experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will never become established in working-class villages. Forty-five to fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a comet." My friend uses an astronomical figure, I a geographical one; but we mean the same thing. The idea is to establish Oases—"fertile spots in the midst of deserts"—permanent centres of light and culture in manufacturing districts. "The Universities teach and train ministers of religion, and they go and live in their parishes among their flocks all the year round. Why not send lecturers and teachers of secular subjects in the same way? A system something similar to the Wesleyan or Primitive Methodists' ministerial system would answer the purpose. The country might be divided into circuits of four or five centres each, and a University man stationed in each circuit, to organize Students' Associations, give lectures, hold classes, and superintend scientific experiments, as the case may be."

This is a good illustration. The Church professes to place in each parish an official teacher of religion and morality, and most of the Nonconformist communities do the same. To place an official teacher of culture (in its widest sense) in every parish is perhaps a task beyond our national powers as at present developed; but to place one in every industrial district is not conceivable only, but, I believe, practicable. The lecturer who comes from Oxford or Cambridge, delivers his course, and departs, has no doubt his uses. He is like the "Hot Gospeller" of an earlier age, or the "Missioner" of to-day. He delivers an awakening message, and many are the better for it; but if culture is to get hold of the average lads and young men of an industrial district, its exponent must be more like the resident minister, the endowed and established priest. That he should live among the people whom he is to instruct, know them personally, understand their ways of thinking and speaking, is at least as important as that he should be a competent historian or mathematician or man of letters. If the State, or voluntary effort, or a combination of the two, could secure the permanent presence of such a teacher in every district where men work hard, and yet have leisure enough to cultivate their intellects, a yawning gap in our educational system would be filled.

It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way of example such a district as Dickens's "Coketown," or Disraeli's "Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which Cobbett expressively called "Hell-Holes." Let the State establish in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions. In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real Oasis—"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis" would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral principles of personal and social action which have been thought out "by larger minds in calmer ages."

That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."



IV

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader. If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal discussion and of freely exchanged opinion. I have lately written an article on "Life and Liberty" as proposed by some earnest clergymen for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher's Education Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of the State to teach religion. Both these articles have brought me a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile. The term allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of making a general reply. "Life and Liberty" are glorious ideals, but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice. Hence my title.

The State consists of persons who profess all sorts of religion, and none. If the State compels its citizens to pay for religious teaching in which they do not believe, it commits, in my opinion, a palpable injustice. This is not merely a question between one sect and another sect. It is, indeed, unjust to make a Quaker pay for teaching the doctrine of the Sacraments, or a Unitarian for teaching the Deity of Christ; but it is equally unjust to make an Atheist pay for teaching the existence of God, or a Churchman for teaching that curious kind of implied Socinianism which is called "undenominational religion."

The only way out of these inequities is what is commonly called "Secularism." The word has some unfortunate associations. It has been connected in the past with a blatant form of negation, and also with a social doctrine which all decent people repudiate. But, strictly considered, it means no more than "temporal" or "worldly"; and when I say that I recommend the "Secular" system of education, I mean that the State should confine itself to the temporal or worldly work with which alone it is competent to deal, and should leave religion (which it cannot touch without inflicting injustice on someone) to those whose proper function is to instil it.

Who are they? Speaking generally, parents, ministers of religion, and teachers who are themselves convinced of what they teach; but I must narrow my ground. To-day I am writing as a Churchman for those Churchmen whom my previous articles disturbed; and I have only space to set forth some of the grounds on which we Churchmen should support the "secular solution."

A Churchman is bound by his baptismal vows to "believe all the articles of the Christian Faith." These, according to his catechism, are summed up in the Apostles' Creed. He cannot, therefore, be satisfied with any religious instruction which is not based on that formula; and yet such instruction cannot rightly be enforced in schools which belong as much to unbelievers as to Christians. A Churchman's religious faith is not derived primarily from the Bible, but from the teaching of the Christian Church, who is older than the oldest of her documents. There was a Church before the New Testament was written, and that Church transmitted the faith by oral tradition. "From the very first the rule has been, as a matter of fact, that the Church should teach the truth, and then should appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching." For a Churchman, religious instruction must be the teaching of the Church, tested by the Bible. The two cannot be separated. Hence it follows that, while the State is bound to respect the convictions of those who adhere to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, the Churchman cannot recognize religious teaching imparted under such conditions as being that which his own conscience demands.

And, further, supposing that some contrivance could be discovered whereby the State might authorize the teaching of the Church's doctrine, the Churchman could not conscientiously be a party to it; for, according to his theory, there is only one Body divinely commissioned to decide what is to be taught—and that Body is not the State, but the Church; and there is only one set of persons qualified to teach it—viz., those who are duly authorized by the Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.

It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation without being subsidized in some way by the State. The principal requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission. If the Bishops and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely commissioned to undertake they will be divinely assisted to fulfil, this question need not be suggested. The first teachers of the Christian religion performed their task without either "Rate-aid" or "State-aid" and the result of their labour is still to be seen; whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get done for them what they ought to do for themselves. It may be well to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the Liberal Government was dealing with education. "We are now, more or less, in the middle of a crisis. We are always in the middle of a crisis. This crisis is about the religious question in our day-schools. I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our difficulty. What is it? The heart of our difficulty is partly that we have shifted on to the wrong shoulders the central function of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of what the teaching of the Church is, and the meaning of religious education, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious knowledge for everybody."

The difficulty as to means might be overcome if the Church would mind its own business, and leave to the State what the State can do so much more effectively. Let me quote the words of a great Christian and a great Churchman—Mr. Gladstone—written in 1894: "Foul fall the day when the persons of this world shall, on whatever pretext, take into their uncommissioned hands the manipulation of the religion of our Lord and Saviour."

Surely Churchmen will best serve the religion which they profess by joining with other "men of goodwill," though of different faiths, who desire the secular solution. In that way only, as far as I can see, can the interests of Education be reconciled with the higher interests of Justice.



V

THE STATE AND THE BOY

When Mr. A. J. Balfour was a very young man he published A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. Nobody read it, but a great many talked about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring, "How sad that Lord Salisbury's nephew should be an Agnostic!" When Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced, and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it was an essay in orthodox apologetic. Thenceforward Mr. Balfour ranked in their eyes as a "Defender of the Faith" second only to Henry VIII.

To compare small things with great, I have had a similar experience. Not long ago I wrote a paper designed to set forth the pretty obvious truth that increase in knowledge is not in itself a good. It evoked much criticism, and the critics once again exemplified our truly English habit of denouncing what we have not read. If these quaint people were to be believed, I was an enemy of education in general and of elementary education in particular. I hope that they will be as much relieved as were Mr. Balfour's critics when they discover that I am, and all my life have been, a zealous supporter of education, and, to some extent, an expert in it.

If the world could be exhaustively divided into two classes-the Educated and the Uneducated—I suppose that I should be included in the former, though I anticipate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line. It is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a sacred duty to its boys. If I leave the education of girls on one side, I do so, not because I consider it unimportant, but because I know nothing about it.

Information, as the great Butler said, is the least part of education. The greatest is the development of the child's natural power to its utmost extent and capacity; and the duty of so developing it must be admitted by everyone who ponders our Lord's teaching about the Buried Talent and the Pound laid up in the Napkin. Unless we enable and encourage every boy in England to bring whatever mental gifts he has to the highest point of their possible perfection, we are shamefully and culpably squandering the treasure which God has given us to be traded with and accounted for. We shall have no one but ourselves to blame if, as a Nemesis on our neglect, we lose our present standing among the educated peoples of the world. I always get back to the ideal of the "Golden Ladder," reaching from the Elementary Schools, by Scholarships or "free places," to the Secondary Schools, and from them again to the Universities. This ideal is, unlike some ideals, attainable, and has in repeated instances been attained. Again and again the highest mathematical honours of Cambridge have been won by Elementary Schoolboys, and what is true of mathematics might also be true of every branch of knowledge. I say advisedly that it "might" be true: whether or not it will be depends on our handling of quite young boys.

The pedagogic notion under which people of my time were reared was that every boy must learn exactly the same things as every other boy, and must go on learning them till his last day at school, whether that day arrived when he was fourteen or eighteen. "We must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek tragedians." So said Sydney Smith, and with perfect truth. "The grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum" was enforced on the boy whose whole heart was in the engineer's shed, while his friend, to whom literature was a passion, was constrained to simulate an interest in the blue lights and bad smells of a chemical lecture. "Let it be granted" (as the odious Euclid, now happily dethroned, used to say) that there is a certain amount that all alike must learn but this amount will prove, when scrutinized, to be very small. I suppose we must all learn to read and write, and it is useful to be able to do a sum in simple addition; though very eminent people have often written very illegible hands, and Dean Stanley—one of the most accomplished men of his day—could never be persuaded that eighteen pence was not the equivalent of 1s. 8d. Zealots for various "knowledges" (to use the curious plural sanctioned by Matthew Arnold) will urge the indispensability of their respective hobbies. One will say let everybody learn that the earth is round; another, that James I. was not the son of Queen Elizabeth. But let us leave, these pribbles and prabbles. Let every boy be coerced into learning what is absolutely necessary for the daily work of life; but let him, at a very early age, have his powers concentrated on the subject which really interests him.

One of the highest gifts which a teacher can possess is the power of "discerning the spirits"—of discovering what a boy's mind really is; what it is made of; what can be made of it. This power is a natural gift, and can by no means be acquired. Many teachers entirely lack it; but those who possess it are among the most valuable servants of the State. This power may be brought to bear on every boy when he is, say, from fourteen to sixteen years old—perhaps in some cases even earlier; and, when once the teacher has made the all-important discovery, then let everything be done to stimulate, and at the same time to discipline, the boy's natural inclination, his inborn aptitude. Fifty years ago, every boy at every Public School, though he might be as unpoetical as Blackstone who wrote the Commentaries, or Bradshaw who compiled the Railway Guide, was forced to produce a weekly tale of Latin and Greek verses which would have made Horace laugh and Sophocles cry. The Rev. Esau Hittall's "Longs and Shorts about the Calydonian Boar," commemorated in Friendship's Garland, may stand for a sample of the absurdities which I have in mind; and the supporters of this amazing abuse assured the world that Greek and Latin versification was an essential element of a liberal education. It took a good many generations to deliver England from this absurdity, and there are others like unto it which still hold their own in the scholastic world. To sweep these away should be the first object of the educational reformer; and, when that preliminary step has been taken, the State will be able to say to every boy who is not mentally deficient: "This, or this, is the path which Nature intended you to tread. Follow it with all your heart. We will back you, and help you, and applaud you, and will not forsake you till the goal is won."



VI

A PLEA FOR THE INNOCENTS

My "spiritual home" is not Berlin, nor even Rome, but Jerusalem. In heart and mind I am there to-day, and have been there ever since the eternally memorable day on which our army entered it. What I am writing will see the light on the Feast of the Holy Innocents;[*] and my thoughts have been running on a prophetic verse which unites the place and the festival in a picturesque accord:

"Thus saith the Lord, I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem:... and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."

The most brilliant Israelite of our times, Lord Beaconsfield, said of a brilliant Englishman, Dean Stanley, that his leading feature was his "picturesque sensibility," and that sensibility was never more happily expressed than when he instituted the service for children in Westminster Abbey on Innocents' Day—"Childermas Day," as our forefathers called it, in the age when holidays were also holy days, and the Mass was the centre of social as well as of spiritual life. On this touching feast a vast congregation of boys and girls assembles in that Abbey Church which has been rightly called "the most lovable thing in Christendom"; and, as it moves in "solemn troops and sweet societies" through aisles grey with the memories of a thousand years, it seems a living prophecy of a brighter age already at the door.

[Footnote *: December 28, 1917.]

It seems—rather, it seemed. Who can pierce the "hues of earthquake and eclipse" which darken the aspect of the present world? Who can foresee, or even reasonably conjecture, the fate which is in store for the children who to-day are singing their carols in the church of the Confessor? Will it be their lot to be "playing in the streets" of a spiritual Jerusalem—the Holy City of a regenerated humanity? or are they destined to grow up in a reign of blood and iron which spurns the "Vision of Peace" as the most contemptible of dreams?

In some form or another these questions must force themselves on the mind of anyone who contemplates the boys and girls of to-day, and tries to forecast what may befall them in the next four or five years.

It is a gruesome thought that the children of to-day are growing up in an atmosphere of war. Bloodshed, slaughter, peril and privation, bereavement and sorrow and anxiety—all the evils from which happy childhood is most sedulously guarded have become the natural elements in which they live and move and have their being. For the moment the cloud rests lightly on them, for not "all that is at enmity with joy" can depress the Divine merriment of healthy childhood; but the cloud will become darker and heavier with each succeeding year of war; and every boy and girl is growing up into a fuller realization of miseries which four years ago would have been unimaginable.

But at Christmastide, if ever, we are bound to take the brightest view which circumstances allow. Let us then assume the best. Let us assume that before next Innocents' Day the war will have ended in a glorious peace. God grant it; but, even in that beatific event, what will become of the children? They cannot be exactly what they would have been if their lot had been cast in normal times. Unknown to themselves, their "subconscious intelligence" must have taken a colour and a tone from the circumstances in which they have been reared. As to the colour, our task will be to wipe out the tinge of blood; as to the tone, to restore the note which is associated with the Angels' Song.

This is my "Plea for the Innocents." What will the State offer them as they emerge from childhood into boyhood, and from boyhood into adolescence?

Perhaps it will offer Conscription; and, with no "perhaps" at all, some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon ever conferred upon the youth of a nation. Then, if there is any manliness or fibre left in the adherents of freedom, they will answer that we adopted Conscription for a definite object, and, when once that object is attained, we renounce it for ever.

What will the State offer? Obviously it must offer education—but what sort of education? The curse of militarism may make itself felt even in the school-room. It would be deplorable indeed if, as a result of our present experience, children were to be taught what J. R. Green called a "drum-and-trumpet history," and were made to believe that the triumphs of war are the highest achievements of the human spirit.

As long as there is an Established Church, the State, in some sense, offers religion. Is the religion of the next few years to be what Ruskin commends: a "religion of pure mercy, which we must learn to defend by fulfilling"; or is it to be the sort of religion which Professor Cramb taught, and which Prussian Lutheranism has substituted for the Gospel?

And, finally, what of home? After all said and done, it is the home that, in the vast majority of cases, influences the soul and shapes the life. What will the homes of England be like when the war is over? Will they be homes in which the moral law reigns supreme; where social virtue is recognized as the sole foundation of national prosperity; where the "strange valour of goodwill towards men", is revered as the highest type of manly resolution?

It is easy enough to ask these questions: it is impossible to answer them. The Poet is the Prophet, and this is the Poet's vision:

"The days are dark with storm;— The coming revolutions have to face Of peace and music, but of blood and fire; The strife of Races scarce consolidate, Succeeded by the far more bitter strife Of Classes—that which nineteen hundred years, Since Christ spake, have not yet availed to close, But rather brought to issue only now, When first the Peoples international Know their own strength, and know the world is theirs."[*]

Know their own strength, and know the world is theirs—a solemn line, which at this season we may profitably ponder.

[Footnote *: "The Disciples," by H. E. Hamilton King.]



VI

MISCELLANEA



I

THE "HUMOROUS STAGE"

I am not adventuring on the dangerous paths of dramatic criticism. When I write of the "humorous stage," I am using the phrase as Wordsworth used it, to signify a scene where new characters are suddenly assumed, and the old as suddenly discarded.

Long ago, Matthew Arnold, poking fun at the clamours of Secularism, asked in mockery, "Why is not Mr. Bradlaugh a Dean?" To-day I read, in a perfectly serious manifesto forwarded to me by a friendly correspondant, this searching question: "Why is not the Archbishop of Canterbury Censor of Plays?" It really is a great conception; and, if adopted in practice, might facilitate the solution of some perplexing problems. If any lover of the ancient ways should demur on the ground of incongruity, I reply that this objection might hold good in normal times, but that just now the "humorous stage" of public life so abounds in incongruities that one more or less would make no perceptible difference. Everyone is playing a part for which, three years ago, we should have thought him or her totally unqualified. Old habits, old prepossessions—even in some cases old principles—are cast aside with a levity which even Wordsworth's young actor could not have surpassed. We all are saying and doing things of which we should have thought ourselves incapable; and even our surprise at ourselves, great as it is, is less than our surprise at our friends.

To begin at the top. I have long held the present Prime Minister in high admiration. I can never forget—nor allow others to forget—that he fought for the cause of Justice and Freedom in South Africa almost single-handed, and at the risk of his life. An orator, a patriot, a lover of justice, a hater of privilege, I knew him to be. I did not see in him the makings of a Dictator directing the destinies of an Empire at war, and in his spare moments appointing Successors to the Apostles within the precincts of an Established Church. Certainly of Mr. Lloyd George, if of no one else, it is true that

"The little actor cons another part,"

and I heartily wish him success in it. But it is true of everyone, and true in every corner of the stage. Let me strike into the medley at random. The anti-feminists, where are they? They have changed their garb and their "lines" so thoroughly that it is difficult for even a practised eye to recognize them in their new parts. Lord Curzon is a member of a Cabinet which established the women's vote, and such stalwarts as Mr. Asquith and Lord Harcourt welcome with effusion the enfranchisement of the victorious suffragette.

And what of the Pacificists? Where are they? Some, I know, are in prison, but, if it had not been for the rapid change of parts which the war has brought, they would have had a good many more fellow-captives than they have. The writer of this article was, from his first entrance into public affairs, a Pacificist to the backbone. He believed that war was the greatest of preventible evils, and that no war which had occurred in his lifetime had been justified by the laws of right and wrong. To-day that Pacificist is heart and soul with his countrymen in their struggle; and, having lived to see England engaged in a righteous war, he has changed his motto from "Rub lightly" to "Mak sicker."

Not less remarkable is the transformation of the liberty-lovers (among whom also the present writer has always reckoned himself). Four years ago we were eagerly and rightly on the alert to detect the slightest attempt by Ministers or bureaucrats or public bodies to invade our glorious privilege of doing and saying exactly what we like. To-day the pressure of the war has turned us into the willing subjects of a despotism. We tumble over each other in our haste to throwaway the liberties which we used to consider vital to our being; and some of us have been not merely the victims, but the active agents, of an administrative system which we believe to be necessary for the safety of the State.

But is there not a remnant? Have all the lovers of Liberty changed their garb and conned new parts? Not all. A remnant there is, and it is to be found in the House of Lords. This is perhaps the most astonishing feature of the "humorous stage"; and if, among superlatives, a super-superlative is possible, I reserve that epithet for the fact that the most vigorous champion of personal freedom in the House of Lords has been an ecclesiastical lawyer. From Lord Stowell to Lord Parmoor is indeed a far cry. Who could have dreamt that, even amid the upheaval of a world, a spokesman of liberty and conscience would emerge from the iron-bound precincts of the Consistory Court and the Vicar-General's Office?

Bishops again—not even these most securely placed of all British officials can escape the tendency to change which pervades the whole stage of public life. The Bishop of Winchester, whom all good Progressives used to denounce as a dark conspirator against the rights of conscience; the Bishop of Oxford, whom we were taught to regard as a Hildebrand and a Torquemada rolled into one—these admirable prelates emerge from the safe seclusion of Castle and Palace to rebuke the persecution of the Conscientious Objector, even when his objection is "nearly intolerable."

That the Press should have had its share in this general readjustment of parts was only natural; but even in what is natural there may be points of special interest. There is a weekly journal of high repute which has earned a secure place in the regard of serious-minded people by its lifelong sobriety, moderation, and respect for the prunes and prisms. When this staid old print, this steady-going supporter of all established institutions, bursts out in a furious attack on the man who has to bear the chief responsibility of the war, I can only rub my eyes in amazement. If a sheep had suddenly gone mad, and begun to bark and bite, the transformation could not have been more astonishing.

But I reserve my most striking illustration of the "humorous stage" for the last. Fifteen years ago it was the fashion to point at Lord Hugh Cecil as a belated upholder of exploded superstitions; as an "ecclesiastical layman" (the phrase was meant to be sarcastic) who lived in a realm of speculative theology, out of touch with all practical life; as a zealot, a bigot, a would-be persecutor; an interesting survival of the Middle Age; a monk who had strayed into politics. To-day we salute him as the one Member of Parliament who has had the courage to affirm the supremacy of the moral law, and to assert the imperious claim which Christianity makes on the whole of man's being.



II

THE JEWISH REGIMENT

It was an old and a true allegation against John Bull that he had no tact in dealing with other races than his own. He did not mean to be unjust or unfair, but he trampled on the sensitiveness, which he could not understand. In Ireland he called the Roman Catholic faith "a lie and a heathenish superstition"; or, in a lighter mood, made imbecile jokes about pigs and potatoes. In Scotland, thriftiness and oatmeal were the themes of his pleasantry; in Wales, he found the language, the literature, and the local nomenclature equally comic, and reserved his loudest guffaw for the Eisteddfod. Abroad, "Foreigners don't wash" was the all-embracing formula. Nasality, Bloomerism, and Dollars epitomized his notion of American civilization; and he cheerfully echoed the sentiments

"Of all who under Eastern skies Call Aryan man a blasted nigger."

Now, of late years, John has altered his course. Some faint conception of his previous foolishness has dawned on his mind; and, as he is a thoroughly good fellow at heart, he has tried to make amends. The present war has taught him a good deal that he did not know before, and he renders a homage, all the more enthusiastic because belated, to the principle of Nationality. His latest exploit in this direction has been to suggest the creation of a Jewish Regiment. The intention was excellent and the idea picturesque; but for the practical business of life we need something more than good intentions and picturesque ideas. "Wisdom," said Ecclesiastes, "is profitable to direct;" and Wisdom would have suggested that it was advisable to consult Jewish opinion before the formation of a Jewish Regiment was proclaimed to the world. There is probably no race of people about which John Bull has been so much mistaken as he has been about the Jews. Lord Beaconsfield's description of Mr. Buggins, with his comments on the Feast of Tabernacles in Houndsditch, is scarcely yet anachronistic.[*] But slowly our manners and our intelligence have improved in this as in other directions; and Lord Derby (who represents John Bull in his more refined development) thought that he would be paying his Jewish fellow-citizens a pretty compliment if he invited them to form a Jewish Regiment.

[Footnote *: See Tancred, Book V., chapter vi.]

Historically, Lord Derby and those who applauded his scheme had a great deal to say for themselves. The remote history of Judaism is a history of war. The Old Testament is full of "the battle of the warrior" and of "garments rolled in blood." Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and David are names that sound like trumpets; and the great Maccabean Princes of a later age played an equal part with Romans and Lacedaemonians. All this is historically true; but it never occurred to Lord Derby and his friends that the idea which underlay their scheme is the opposite of that which animates modern Judaism. Broadly speaking, the idea of modern Judaism is not Nationality, but Religion. Mr. Lucien Wolf has lately reminded us that, according to authoritative utterances, "The Jews are neither a nation within a nation, nor cosmopolitan," but an integral part of the nations among whom they live, claiming the same rights and acknowledging the same duties as are claimed and acknowledged by their fellow-citizens. It is worth noticing that Macaulay accepted this position as disposing of the last obstacle to the civil and political enfranchisement of the English Jews, and ridiculed the notion that they would regard England, "not as their country, but merely as their place of exile." Mr. Wolf thus formulates his faith: "In the purely religious communities of Western Jewry we have the spiritual heirs of the law-givers, prophets, and teachers who, from the dawn of history, have conceived Israel, not primarily as a political organism, but as a nation of priests, the chosen servants of the Eternal."

Mr. Claude Montefiore, who is second to none as an interpreter of modern Judaism, has lately been writing in a similar strain. The Jew is a Jew in respect of his religion; but, for the ordinary functions of patriotism, fighting included, he is a citizen of the country in which he dwells. A Jewish friend of mine said the other day to a Pacificist who tried to appeal to him on racial grounds: "I would shoot a Jewish Prussian as readily as a Christian Prussian, if I found him fighting under the German flag." Thus, to enrol a regiment of Jews is about as wise as to enrol a regiment of Roman Catholics or of Wesleyan Methodists. Jews, Romans, and Wesleyans alike hold with laudable tenacity the religious faiths which they respectively profess; but they are well content to fight side by side with Anglicans, or Presbyterians, or Plymouth Brethren. They need no special standard, no differentiating motto. They are soldiers of the country to which they belong.

Here let me quote the exhilarating verses of a Jewish lady,[*] written at the time of the Boer War (March, 1900):

"Long ago and far away, O Mother England, We were warriors brave and bold, But a hundred nations rose in arms against us, And the shades of exile closed o'er those heroic Days of old.

"Thou hast given us home and freedom, Mother England. Thou hast let us live again Free and fearless 'midst thy free and fearless children, Sparing with them, as one people, grief and gladness, Joy and pain.

"Now we Jews, we English Jews, O Mother England, Ask another boon of thee! Let us share with them the danger and the glory; Where thy best and bravest lead, there let us follow O'er the sea!

"For the Jew has heart and hand, our Mother England, And they both are thine to-day— Thine for life, and thine for death, yea, thine for ever! Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly? England, say!"

[Footnote *: Mrs. Henry Lucas (reprinted in her Talmudic Legends, Hymns and Paraphrases. Chatto and Windus, 1908).]

I am well aware that in what I have written, though I have been careful to reinforce myself with Jewish authority, I may be running counter to that interesting movement which is called "Zionism." It is not for a Gentile to take part in the dissensions of the Jewish community; but I may be permitted to express my sympathy with a noble idea, and to do so in words written by a brilliant Israelite, Lord Beaconsfield: "I do not bow to the necessity of a visible head in a defined locality; but, were I to seek for such, it would not be at Rome. When Omnipotence deigned to be incarnate, the ineffable Word did not select a Roman frame. The prophets were not Romans; the Apostles were not Romans; she, who was blessed above all women—I never heard that she was a Roman maiden. No; I should look to a land more distant than Italy, to a city more sacred even than Rome."[*]

[Footnote *: Sybil, Book II., chapter xii.]



III

INDURATION

Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent book on suffering called Lest We Grow Hard, and this is a very real peril against which it behoves everyone

"Who makes his moral being his prime care"

to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.

It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he assigned to this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior—

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turns his necessity to glorious gain";

and who, "as more exposed" than others "to suffering and distress," is

"Hence, also, more alive to tenderness."

This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth paid it. The brutal and senseless cry for "reprisals" which of late has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers and sailors and airmen. Of course, everyone knows that there is a sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare. Generation after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword to sword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes; this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation. And when, in more recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first employed.

But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand. They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians, and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are to commit the same foul deeds in Germany. "It is hard," says the Church Times, "to say whether futility or immorality is the more striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in the matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.

A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes, safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim that they must be bombed by English airmen. What a function to impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!

I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance of clerical ferocity has lately been reported. A raving clergyman has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to preach. Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop rebuked him. Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that the latter is true. The established and endowed teachers of religion have not always used their influence on the side of mercy; but on the question of reprisals I have observed with thankfulness that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have spoken on the right side, and have spoken with energy and decision. They, at any rate, have escaped the peril of induration, and in that respect they are at one with the great mass of decent citizens.

I am no advocate of a mawkish lenity. When our soldiers and sailors and airmen meet our armed foes on equal terms, my prayers go with them; and the harder they strike, the better I am pleased. When a man or woman has committed a cold-blooded murder and has escaped the just penalty of the crime, I loathe the political intrigue which sets him or her free. Heavy punishment for savage deeds, remorseless fighting till victory is ours—these surely should be guiding principles in peace and war; and to hold them is no proof that one has suffered the process of induration.

Here I am not ashamed to make common cause with the stout old Puritan in Peveril of the Peak: "To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have poured forth the blood of our brethren."

But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"—it should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character: bestial, childish, stupid, scurrilous, tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth century must not sink below the moral level of Marcus Aurelius.



IV

FLACCIDITY

My discourse on "Induration" was intended to convey a warning which, as individuals, we all need. But Governments are beset by an even greater danger, which the learned might call "flaccidity" and the simple—"flabbiness."

The great Liddon, always excellent in the aptness of his scriptural allusions, once said with regard to a leader who had announced that he would "set his face" against a certain policy and then gave way, "Yes, the deer 'set his face,' but he did not 'set it as a flint'—rather as a pudding."

To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once attracted notice by enouncing the homely truth that "the business of an Opposition is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a Government is to govern; to set its face, not as a pudding, but as a flint, against lawlessness and outrage; to protect the innocent and to punish the wrong-doer.

This is a duty from which all weak Governments shrink. If a Minister is not very sure of his position; if he is backed, not by a united party, but by a haphazard coalition; if he is unduly anxious about his own official future; if his eye is nervously fixed on the next move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern. He neither protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and the rebel. In this particular, there is no distinction of party. Tories can show no better record than Whigs, nor Liberals than Conservatives. It is a question of the governing temper, which is as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage to the soldier or incorruptibility to the Judge.

It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled the toad-eating school of publicists, that this governing temper was an hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors, who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used it on a large scale in the governance of England. "How natural," they exclaimed, "that Lord Nozoo, whose ancestors have ruled half Loamshire since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing men than that wretched Bagman, whose grandfather swept out the shop, and who has never had to rule anyone except a clerk and a parlourmaid!"

This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when heredity was everything, and when ancestral habit was held to explain, and if necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics; but experience and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest Minister who ever ruled England; but his pedigree would have moved a genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually that, according to Gladstone, who served under him, his direct authority was felt in every department, high or low, of the Administration over which he presided; and Peel was a very recent product of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the greatest ruler of the modern world, and the quality of his ancestry is a topic fit only to be handled in a lecture on the Self-Made Men of History.

When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain had, of all English statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers had learnt the art of rule. Ancestral achievements, hereditary possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes a man a ruler of men, and enables him to set his face as a flint against wrong-doing; is a faculty born in himself—"the soul that riseth with him, his life's star."

And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree. Sydney Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a reformer as ever breathed, knew that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and after the Bristol Riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against flaccidity with great plainness of speech. "Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned. You will save lives by it in the end."

It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as Matthew Arnold said, "an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence, and weakness almost incredible." Next year the Fenians blew up Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed: "A Government which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design, simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish, who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself irresolute and feeble?"

But the head of that feeble State, the leader of that irresolute society, was the fourteenth Earl of Derby, whose ancestors had practised the arts of government for eight hundred years.

In Ireland the case is the same. Both parties have succeeded in governing it, and both have failed. Mr. Balfour has been justly praised for his vigour in protecting property and restoring order; but it was Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan who, four years before, had caught and hanged the assassins of the Phoenix Park, and had abolished agrarian murder. It was, alas! a Liberal Government that tolerated the Ulster treason, and so prepared the way for the Dublin rebellion. Highly placed and highly paid flaccidity then reigned supreme, and produced its inevitable result. But last December we were assured that flaccidity had made way for firmness, and that the pudding had been replaced by the flint. But the transactions of the last few weeks—one transaction in particular[*]—seem worthy of our flabbiest days.

[Footnote *: A release for political objects.]

I turn my eyes homewards again, from Dublin to the House of Commons. The report of the Mesopotamia Commission has announced to the world a series of actions which every Briton feels as a national disgrace. Are the perpetrators of those actions to go unpunished? Are they to retain their honours and emoluments, the confidence of their Sovereign, and the approbation of his Ministers? If so, flaccidity will stand revealed as what in truth it has always been—the one quality which neutralizes all other gifts, and makes its possessor incapable of governing.



V

THE PROMISE OF MAY

This is the real season for a holiday, if holidays were still possible. It is a point of literary honour not to quote the line which shows that our forefathers, in the days of Chaucer, felt the holiday-making instinct of the spring, and that instinct has not been affected by the lapse of the centuries. It stirs us even in London, when the impetuous lilacs are bursting into bud, and the sooty sparrows chirrup love-songs, and "a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove"—or, to be more accurate, pigeon—which swells and straddles as if Piccadilly were all his own. The very wallflowers and daffodils which crown the costers' barrows help to weave the spell; and, though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into "the country places, which God made and not man."

For my own part, I am no victim of the "pathetic fallacy" by which people in all ages have persuaded themselves that Nature sympathized with their joys and sorrows. Even if that dream had not been dispelled, in prose by Walter Scott, and in verse by Matthew Arnold, one's own experience, would have proved it false.

"Alas! what are we, that the laws of Nature should correspond in their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings?" The Heart of Midlothian.

"Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends."[*]

[Footnote *: In Harmony with Nature.]

A funeral under the sapphire sky and blazing sun of June loses nothing of its sadness—perhaps is made more sad—by the unsympathetic aspect of the visible world. December does not suspend its habitual gloom because all men of goodwill are trying to rejoice in the Birthday of the Prince of Peace. We all can recall disasters and disappointments which have overcast the spring, and tidings of achievement or deliverance which have been happily out of keeping with the melancholy beauty of autumn.

In short, Nature cares nothing for the acts and sufferings of human kind; yet, with a strange sort of affectionate obstinacy, men insist on trying to sympathize with Nature, who declines to sympathize with them; and now, when she spreads before our enchanted eyes all the sweetness and promise of the land in spring, we try to bring our thoughts into harmony with the things we see, and to forget, though it be only for a moment, alike regrets and forebodings.

And surely the effort is salutary. With Tom Hughes, jovial yet thoughtful patriot, for our guide, we make our way to the summit of some well-remembered hill, which has perhaps already won a name in history, and find it "a place to open a man's soul and make him prophesy, as he looks down on the great vale spread out, as the Garden of the Lord, before him": wide tracts of woodland, and fat meadows and winding streams, and snug homesteads embowered in trees, and miles on miles of what will soon be cornfields. Far away in the distance, a thin cloud of smoke floats over some laborious town, and whichever way we look, church after church is dotted over the whole surface of the country, like knots in network.

Such, or something like it, is the traditional aspect of our fair English land; but to-day she wears her beauty with a difference. The saw is at work in the woodlands; and individual trees, which were not only the landmarks, but also the friends and companions of one's childhood, have disappeared for ever. The rich meadows by the tranquil streams, and the grazing cattle, which used to remind us only of Cuyp's peaceful landscapes, now suggest the sterner thought of rations and queues. The corn-fields, not yet "white to harvest," acquire new dignity from the thought of all that is involved in "the staff of life." The smoke-cloud over the manufacturing town is no longer a mere blur on the horizon, but tells of a prodigality of human effort, directed to the destruction of human life, such as the world has never known. Even from the towers of the village churches floats the Red Cross of St. George, recalling the war-song of an older patriotism—"In the name of our God we will set up our banners."[*]

[Footnote: Psalm xx. 5.]

Yes, this fair world of ours wears an altered face, and what this year is "the promise of May"? It is the promise of good and truth and fruitfulness forcing their way through "the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould." It is the promise of strong endurance, which will bear all and suffer all in a righteous cause, and never fail or murmur till the crown is won. It is the promise of a brighter day, when the skill of invention and of handicraft may be once more directed, not to the devices which destroy life, but to the sciences which prolong it, and the arts which beautify it. Above all, it is the promise of a return, through blood and fire, to the faith which made England great, and the law which yet may wrap the world in peace.

"For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations" (Isa. lxi. II).



VI

PAGEANTRY AND PATRIOTISM

Long years ago, when religious people excited themselves almost to frenzy about Ritualism, Mr. Gladstone surveyed the tumult with philosophic calm. He recommended his countrymen to look below the surface of controversy, and to regard the underlying principle. "In all the more solemn and stated public acts of man," he wrote, "we find employed that investiture of the acts themselves with an appropriate exterior, which is the essential idea of Ritual. The subject-matter is different, but the principle is the same: it is the use and adaptation of the outward for the expression of the inward." The word "ritual" is by common usage restricted to the ecclesiastical sphere, but in reality it has a far wider significance. It gives us the august rite of the Convocation, the ceremonial of Courts, the splendour of regiments, the formal usages of battleships, the silent but expressive language of heraldry and symbol; and, in its humbler developments, the paraphernalia of Masonry and Benefit Societies, and the pretty pageantry of Flag-days and Rose-days. Why should these things be? "Human nature itself, with a thousand tongues, utters the reply. The marriage of the outward and the inward pervades the universe."

The power of the outward reaches the inward chiefly through the eye and the ear. Colour, as Ruskin taught us, is not only delightful, but sacred. "Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.... Consider what sort of a world it would be if all flowers were grey, all leaves black, and the sky brown." The perfection of form—the grace of outline, the harmony of flowing curves—appeals, perhaps, less generally than colour, because to appreciate it the eye requires some training, whereas to love colour one only needs feeling. Yet form has its own use and message, and so, again, has the solemnity of ordered movement; and when all these three elements of charm—colour and form and motion—are combined in a public ceremony, the effect is irresistible.

But the appeal of the inward reaches us not solely through the eye. The ear has an even higher function. Perhaps the composer of great music speaks, in the course of the ages, to a larger number of human hearts than are touched by any other form of genius. Thousands, listening enraptured to his strain, hear "the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound." And yet again there are those, and they are not a few, to whom even music never speaks so convincingly as when it is wedded to suitable words; for then two emotions are combined in one appeal, and human speech helps to interpret the unspoken.

It is one of the deplorable effects of war that it so cruelly diminishes the beauty of our public and communal life. Khaki instead of scarlet, potatoes where geraniums should be, common and cheap and ugly things usurping the places aforetime assigned to beauty and splendour—these are our daily and hourly reminders of the "great tribulation" through which the nation is passing. Of course, one ought not to wish it otherwise. Not, indeed, "sweet," but eminently salutary, are these "uses of adversity," for they prevent us from forgetting, even if we were inclined to such base obliviousness, the grim realities of the strife in which we are engaged. And yet, and in spite of all this, beauty retains its sway over "the common heart of man." Even war cannot destroy, though it may temporarily obscure, the beauty of Nature; and the beauty of Art is only waiting for the opportunity of Peace to reassert itself.

To the prevailing uncomeliness of this war-stricken time a welcome exception has been made by the patriotic pageantry which, during the week now closed, has been enacted at Queen's Hall.[*] There were critics, neither malicious nor ill-informed, who contended that such pageantry was ill-timed. They advanced against it all sorts of objections which would have been quite appropriate if the public had been bidden to witness some colossal farce or burlesque; some raree-show of tasteless oddities, or some untimely pantomime of fairy-lore. What was really intended, and was performed, at a great cost of toil and organizing skill, was the opposite of all this. All the best elements of a great and glorious ceremonial were displayed—colour and form and ordered motion; noble music set to stirring words; and human voices lifted even above their ordinary beauty by the emotion of a high occasion. The climax, wisely ordered, was our tribute of gratitude to the United States, and never did the "Battle-hymn of the Republic" sound its trumpets more exultingly. For once, the word "Ritual" might with perfect propriety be separated from its controversial associations, and bestowed on this great act of patriotic pageantry. It was, in the truest sense, a religious service, fitly commemorating the entry of all the world's best powers into the crowning conflict of light with darkness.

[Footnote *: Under the direction of Madame Clara Butt (May, 1918).]



VII

FACT AND FICTION



N. B.—These two stories are founded on fact; but the personal allusions are fictitious. As regards public events, they are historically accurate.—G. W. E. R.

I

A FORGOTTEN PANIC

Friday, the 13th of September, 1867, was the last day of the Harrow holidays, and I was returning to the Hill from a visit to some friends in Scotland. During the first part of the journey I was alone in the carriage, occupied with an unlearnt holiday task; but at Carlisle I acquired a fellow-traveller. He jumped into the carriage just as the train was beginning to move, and to the porter who breathlessly enquired about his luggage he shouted, "This is all," and flung a small leathern case on to the seat. As he settled himself into his plate, his eye fell upon the pile of baggage which I had bribed the station-master to establish in my corner of the carriage—a portmanteau, a hat-box, a rug wrapped round an umbrella, and one or two smaller parcels—all legibly labelled

G. W. E. RUSSELL, Woodside, Harrow-on-the-Hill.

After a glance at my property, the stranger turned to me and exclaimed: "When you have travelled as much as I have, young sir, you will know that, the less the luggage, the greater the ease." Youth, I think, as a rule resents overtures from strangers, but there was something in my fellow-traveller's address so pleasant as to disarm resentment. His voice, his smile, his appearance, were alike prepossessing. He drew from his pocket the Daily News, in those days a famous organ for foreign intelligence, and, as he composed himself to read, I had a full opportunity of studying his appearance. He seemed to be somewhere between thirty and forty, of the middle height, lean and sinewy, and, as his jump into the train had shown, as lissom as a cat. His skin was so much tanned that it was difficult to guess his natural complexion; but his closely cropped hair was jet-black, and his clean-shaven face showed the roots of a very dark beard. In those days it was fashionable to wear one's hair rather long, and to cultivate whiskers and a moustache. Priests and actors were the only people who shaved clean, and I decided in my mind that my friend was an actor. Presently he laid down his paper, and, turning to me with that grave courtesy which when one is very young one appreciates, he said: "I hope, sir, that my abrupt entry did not disturb you. I had a rush for it, and nearly lost my train as it was. And I hope what I said about luggage did not seem impertinent. I was only thinking that, if I had been obliged to look after portmanteaus, I should probably still be on the platform at Carlisle." I hastened to say, with my best air, that I had not been the least offended, and rather apologized for my own encumbrances by saying that I was going South for three months, and had to take all my possessions with me. I am not sure that I was pleased when my friend said: "Ah, yes; the end of the vacation. You are returning to college at Harrow, I see." It was humiliating to confess that Harrow was a school, and I a schoolboy; but my friend took it with great composure. Perfectly, he said; it was his error. He should have said "school," not "college." He had a great admiration for the English Public Schools. It was his misfortune to have been educated abroad. A French lycee, or a German gymnasium, was not such a pleasant place as Eton or Harrow. This was exactly the best way of starting a conversation, and, my schoolboy reserve being once broken, we chatted away merrily. Very soon I had told him everything about myself, my home, my kinsfolk, my amusements, my favourite authors, and all the rest of it; but presently it dawned upon me that, though I had disclosed everything to him, he had disclosed nothing to me, and that the actor, if I rightly deemed him so, was not very proud of his profession. His nationality, too, perplexed me. He spoke English as fluently as I did, but not quite idiomatically; and there was just a trace of an accent which was not English. Sometimes it sounded French, but then again there was a tinge of American. On the whole, I came to the conclusion that my friend was an Englishman who had lived a great deal abroad, or else an American who had lived in Paris. As the day advanced, the American theory gained upon me; for, though my friend told me nothing about himself, he told me a great deal about every place which we passed. He knew the industries of the various towns, and the events connected with them, and the names of the people who owned the castles and great country-houses. I had been told that this habit of endless exposition was characteristic of the cultured American. But, whatever was the nationality of my companion, I enjoyed his company very much. He talked to me, not as a man to a boy, but as an elder to a younger man; paid me the courtesy of asking my opinion and listening to my answers; and, by all the little arts of the practised converser, made me feel on good terms with myself and the world. Yankee or Frenchman, my actor was a very jolly fellow; and I only wished that he would tell me a little about himself.

When, late in the afternoon, we passed Bletchley Station, I bethought me that we should soon be separated, for the London and North-Western train, though an express, was to be stopped at Harrow in order to disgorge its load of returning boys. I began to collect my goods and to prepare myself for the stop, when my friend said, to my great joy, "I see you are alighting. I am going on to Euston. I shall be in London for the next few weeks. I should very much like to pay a visit to Harrow one day, and see your 'lions.'" This was exactly what I wished, but had been too modest to suggest; so I joyfully acceded to his proposal, only venturing to add that, though we had been travelling together all day, I did not know my friend's name. He tore a leaf out of a pocket-book, scrawled on it, in a backward-sloping hand, "H. Aulif," and handed it to me, saying, "I do not add an address, for I shall be moving about. But I will write you a line very soon, and fix a day for my visit." Just then the train stopped at the foot of the Hill, and, as I was fighting my way through the welter of boys and luggage on the platform, I caught sight of a smiling face and a waved hand at the window of the carriage which I had just quitted.

The beginning of a new school-quarter, the crowd of fresh faces, the greetings of old friends, and a remove into a much more difficult Form, rather distracted my mind from the incidents of my journey, to which it was recalled by the receipt of a note from Mr. Aulif, saying that he would be at Harrow by 2.30 on Saturday afternoon, the 21st of September. I met him at the station, and found him even pleasanter than I expected. He extolled Public Schools to the skies, and was sure that our English virtues were in great part due to them. Of Harrow he spoke with peculiar admiration as the School of Sheridan, of Peel, of Palmerston. What was our course of study? What our system of discipline? What were our amusements? The last question I was able to answer by showing him both the end of cricket and the beginning of football, for both were being played; and, as we mounted the Hill towards the School and the Spire, he asked me if we had any other amusements. Fives or racquets he did not seem to count. Did we run races? Had we any gymnastics? (In those days we had not.) Did we practise rifle-shooting? Every boy ought to learn to use a rifle. The Volunteer movement was a national glory. Had we any part in it?

The last question touched me on the point of honour. In those days Harrow was the best School in England for rifle-shooting. In the Public Schools contest at Wimbledon we carried off the Ashburton Challenge Shield five times in succession, and in 1865 and 1866 we added to it Lord Spencer's Cup for the best marksman in the school-teams. All this, and a good deal more to the same effect, I told Mr. Aulif with becoming spirit, and proudly led the way to our "Armoury." This grandly named apartment was in truth a dingy cellar under the Old Schools, and held only a scanty store of rifles (for the corps, though keen, was not numerous). Boyhood is sensitive to sarcasm, and I felt an uncomfortable twinge as Mr. Aulif glanced round our place of arms and said, "A gallant corps, I am sure, if not numerically strong. But this is your School corps only. Doubtless the citizens of the place also have their corps?" Rather wishing to get my friend away from a scene where he obviously was not impressed, and fearing that perhaps he might speak lightly of the Fourth Form Room, even though its panels bear the carved name of BYRON, I seized the opening afforded by the mention of the local corps, and proposed a walk towards the drill-shed. This was a barn, very roughly adapted to military purposes, and standing, remote from houses, in a field at Roxeth, a hamlet of Harrow on the way to Northolt. It served both for drill-shed and for armoury, and, as the local corps (the 18th Middlesex) was a large one, it contained a good supply of arms and ammunition. The custodian, who lived in a cottage at Roxeth, was a Crimean veteran, who kept everything in apple-pie order, and on this Saturday afternoon was just putting the finishing touches of tidiness to the properties in his charge. Mr. Aulif made friends with him at once, spoke enthusiastically of the Crimea, talked of improvements in guns and gunnery since those days, praised the Anglo-French alliance, and said how sad it was that England now had to be on her guard against her former allies across the Channel. As the discourse proceeded, I began to question my theory that Aulif was an actor. Perhaps he was a soldier. Could he be a Jesuit in disguise? Jesuits were clean-shaved and well-informed. Or was it only his faculty of general agreeableness that enabled him to attract the old caretaker at the drill-shed as he had attracted the schoolboy in the train? As we walked back to the station, my desire to know what my friend really was increased momentarily, but I no more dared to ask him than I should have dared to shake hands with Queen Victoria; for, to say the truth, Mr. Aulif, while he fascinated, awed me. He told me that he was just going abroad, and we parted at the station with mutual regrets.

* * * * *

The year 1867 was conspicuously a year of Fenian activity. The termination of the Civil War in America had thrown out of employment a great many seasoned soldiers of various nationalities, who had served for five years in the American armies. Among these were General Cluseret, educated at Saint-Cyr, trained by Garibaldi, and by some good critics esteemed "the most consummate soldier of the day." The Fenians now began to dream not merely of isolated outrages, but of an armed rising in Ireland; and, after consultation with the Fenian leaders in New York, Cluseret came to England with a view to organizing the insurrection. What then befell can be read in Lathair, where Cluseret is thinly disguised as "Captain Bruges," and also in his own narrative, published in Fraser's Magazine for 1872. He arrived in London in January, 1867, and startling events began to happen in quick succession. On the 11th of February an armed party of Fenians attacked Chester Castle, and were not repulsed without some difficulty. There was an armed rising at Killarney. The police-barracks at Tallaght were besieged, and at Glencullen the insurgents captured the police-force and their weapons. At Kilmallock there was an encounter between the Fenians and the constabulary, and life was lost on both sides. There was a design of concentrating all the Fenian forces on Mallow Junction, but the rapid movement of the Queen's troops frustrated the design, and the general rising was postponed. Presently two vagrants were arrested on suspicion at Liverpool, and proved to be two of the most notorious of the Fenian leaders, "Colonel" Kelly and "Captain" Deasy. It was when these prisoners, remanded for further enquiry, were being driven under a strong escort to gaol that the prison-van was attacked by a rescue-party, and Sergeant Brett, who was in charge of the prisoners, was shot. The rescuers, Allen, Larkin, and Gould, were executed on the 2nd of November, and on the 1st of December Clerkenwell Prison was blown up, in an ineffectual attempt to liberate the Fenian prisoners confined in it. On the 20th of December Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother, "We are in a strange uneasy state in London, and the profound sense I have long had of the hollowness and insufficiency of our whole system of administration does not inspire me with much confidence." The "strange uneasy state" was not confined to London, but prevailed everywhere. Obviously England was threatened by a mysterious and desperate enemy, and no one seemed to know that enemy's headquarters or base of operations. The Secret Societies were actively at work in England, Ireland, France, and Italy. It was suspected then—it is known now, and chiefly through Cluseret's revelations—that the isolated attacks on barracks and police-stations were designed for the purpose of securing arms and ammunition; and, if only there had been a competent General to command the rebel forces, Ireland would have risen in open war. But a competent General was exactly what the insurgents lacked; for Cluseret, having surveyed the whole situation with eyes trained by a lifelong experience of war, decided that the scheme was hopeless, and returned to Paris.

Such were some—for I have only mentioned a few—of the incidents which made 1867 a memorable year. On my own memory it is stamped with a peculiar clearness.

On Wednesday morning, the 2nd of October, 1867, as we were going up to First School at Harrow, a rumour flew from mouth to mouth that the drill-shed had been attacked by Fenians. Sure enough it had. The caretaker (as I said before) lived some way from the building, and when he went to open it in the morning he found that the door had been forced and the place swept clean of arms and ammunition. Here was a real sensation, and we felt for a few hours "the joy of eventful living"; but later in the day the evening papers, coming down from London, quenched our excitement with a greater. It appeared that during the night of the 1st of October, drill-sheds and armouries belonging to the Volunteer regiments had been simultaneously raided north, south, east, and west of London, and all munitions of war spirited away, for a purpose which was not hard to guess. Commenting on this startling occurrence, the papers said: "We have reason to believe that one of the ablest of the Fenian agents has been for some time operating secretly in the United Kingdom. He has been traced to Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. It is believed at Scotland Yard that he organized these attacks on Volunteer headquarters, arranged for the arms and ammunition to be transferred by a sure hand to Ireland, and has himself returned to Paris." A friend of mine who had gone up to London to see a dentist brought back a Globe with him, and, as he handed it to me, he pointed out the passage which I have just cited. As I read it, my heart gave a jump—a sudden thrill of delicious excitement. My friend Mr. Aulif must be the Fenian agent who had organized these raids, and I, who had always dreamed romance, had now been brought into actual contact with it. The idea of communicating my suspicions to anyone never crossed my mind. I felt instinctively that this was a case where silence was golden. Fortunately, none of my school-fellows had seen Mr. Aulif or heard of his visit; and the old caretaker of the drill-shed had been too much gratified by talk and tip to entertain an unworthy thought of "that pleasant-spoken gentleman."

Soon the story of these raids had been forgotten in the far more exhilarating occurrences at Manchester and Clerkenwell which closed the year; and the execution of Michael Barrett on the 26th of May, 1868 (the last public execution, by the way), brought the history of Fenianism in England to an end.

As I looked back on my journey from Scotland, and my walk round Harrow with Mr. Aulif, I thought that the reason why he did not arrange for our School-armoury to be attacked was that he would not abuse the confidence of a boy who had trusted him. Perhaps it really was that the rifles were too few and the risks too many.

* * * * *

The year 1870 found me still a Harrow boy, though a tall one; and I spent the Easter holidays with my cousins, the Brentfords, in Paris. They were a remarkable couple, and if I were to mention their real name, they would be immediately recognized. They had social position and abundant means and hosts of friends; but, acting under irresistible impulse, they had severed themselves from their natural surroundings, and had plunged into democratic politics. It was commonly believed that Brentford would not have committed himself so deeply if it had not been for his wife's influence; and, indeed, she was one of those women whom it is difficult to withstand. Her enthusiasm was contagious; and when one was in her company one felt that "the Cause," as she always called it without qualifying epithet, was the one thing worth thinking of and living for. As a girl, she had caught from Mrs. Browning, and Swinburne, and Jessie White-Mario, and the authoress of Aspromonte, a passionate zeal for Italian unity and freedom; and, when she married, her enthusiasm fired her husband. They became sworn allies both of Garibaldi and of Mazzini, and through them were brought into close, though mysterious, relations with the revolutionary party in Italy and also in France. They witnessed the last great act of the Papacy at the Vatican Council; and then, early in 1870, they established themselves in Paris. French society was at that moment in a strange state of tension and unrest. The impending calamity of the Franco-German War was not foreseen; but everyone knew that the Imperial throne was rocking; that the soil was primed by Secret Societies; and that all the elements of revolution were at hand, and needed only some sudden concussion to stir them into activity. This was a condition which exactly suited my cousin Evelyn Brentford. She was "at the height of the circumstances," and she gathered round her, at her villa on the outskirts of Paris, a society partly political, partly Bohemian, and wholly Red. "Do come," she wrote, "and stay with us at Easter. I can't promise you a Revolution; but it's quite on the cards that you may come in for one. Anyhow, you will see some fun." I had some difficulty in inducing my parents (sound Whigs) to give the necessary permission; but they admitted that at seventeen a son must be trusted, and I went off rejoicing to join the Brentfords at Paris. Those three weeks, from the 12th of April to the 4th of May, 1870, gave me, as the boys now say, "the time of my life." I met a great many people whose names I already knew, and some more of whom we heard next year in the history of the Commune. The air was full of the most sensational rumours, and those who hoped "to see the last King strangled in the bowels of the last priest" enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

My cousin Evelyn was always at home to her friends on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, and her rooms were thronged by a miscellaneous crowd in which the Parisian accent mingled with the tongues of America and Italy, and the French of the southern provinces. At one of these parties I was talking to a delightful lady who lived only in the hope of seeing "the Devil come for that dog" (indicating by this term an Imperial malefactor), and who, when exhausted by regicidal eloquence, demanded coffee. As we approached the buffet, a man who had just put down his cup turned round and met my companion and me face to face. Two years and a half had made no difference in him. He was Mr. Aulif, as active and fresh as ever, and, before I had time to reflect on my course, I had impulsively seized him by the hand. "Don't you remember me?" I cried. He only stared. "My name is George Russell, and you visited me at Harrow." "I fear, sir, you have made a mistake," said Aulif, bowed rather stiffly to my companion, and hurried back into the drawing-room. My companion looked surprised. "The General seems put out—I wonder why. He and I are the greatest allies. Let me tell you, my friend, that he is the man that the Revolution will have to rely on when the time comes for rising. Ask them at Saint-Cyr. Ask Garibaldi. Ask McClellan. Ask General Grant. He is the greatest General in the world, and has sacrificed his career for Freedom." "Is his name Aulif?" "No; his name is Cluseret."

* * * * *

Next day at dejuner I was full of my evening's adventure; but my host and hostess received it with mortifying composure. "Nothing could be more likely," said my cousin Evelyn. "General Cluseret was here, though he did not stay long. Perhaps he really did not remember you. When he saw you before, you were a boy, and now you look like a young man. Or perhaps he did not wish to be cross-examined. He is pretty busy here just now, but in 1867 he was constantly backwards and forwards between Paris and London trying to organize that Irish insurrection which never came off. England is not the only country he has visited on business of that kind, and he has many travelling names. He thinks it safer, for obvious reasons, to travel without luggage. If you had been able to open that leather case in the train you would probably have found nothing in it except some maps, a toothbrush, and a spare revolver. Certainly that Irish affair was a fiasco; but depend upon it you will hear of General Cluseret again."

And so indeed I did, and so did the whole civilized world, and that within twelve months of the time of speaking; but there is no need to rewrite in this place the history of the Commune.



II

A CRIMEAN EPISODE

It was eight o'clock in the evening of the 5th of April, 1880, and the Travellers' Club was full to overflowing. Men who were just sitting down to dinner got up from their tables, and joined the excited concourse in the hall. The General Election which terminated Lord Beaconsfield's reign was nearing its close, and the issue was scarcely in doubt; but at this moment the decisive event of the campaign was announced. Members, as they eagerly scanned the tape, saw that Gladstone was returned for Midlothian; and, as they passed, the news to the expectant crowd behind them, there arose a tumult of excited voices.

"I told you how it would be!" "Well, I've lost my money." "I could not have believed that Scotsmen would be such fools." "I'm awfully sorry for Dalkeith." "Why couldn't that old windbag have stuck to Greenwich?" "I blame Rosebery for getting him down." "Well, I suppose we're in for another Gladstone Premiership." "Oh, no fear. The Queen won't speak to him." "No, Hartington's the man, and, as an old Whig, I'm glad of it." "Perhaps Gladstone will take the Exchequer." "What! serve under Hartington? You don't know the old gentleman's pride if you expect that;" and so on and so forth, a chorus of excited and bewildering exclamations. Amid all the hurly-burly, one figure in the throng seemed quite unmoved, and its immobility attracted the notice of the throng. "Well, really, Vaughan, I should have thought that even you would have felt excited about this. I know you don't care much about politics in a general way, but this is something out of the common. The Duke of Buccleuch beaten on his own ground, and Gladstone heading straight for the Premiership! Isn't that enough to quicken your pulse?"

But the man whom they saluted as Vaughan still looked undisturbed. "Well, I don't think I ever was quite as much in love with Dizzy as you were; and as to the Premiership, we are not quite at the end yet, and Alors comme alors."

Philip Vaughan was a man just over fifty: tall, pale, distinguished-looking, with something in his figure and bearing that reminded one of the statue of Sidney Herbert, which in 1880 still stood before the War Office in Pall Mall. He looked both delicate and melancholy. His face was curiously devoid of animation; but his most marked characteristic was an habitual look of meditative abstraction from the things which immediately surrounded him. As he walked down the steps of the club towards a brougham which was waiting for him, the man who had tried in vain to interest him in the Midlothian Election turned to his nearest neighbour, and said: "Vaughan is really the most extraordinary fellow I know. There is nothing on earth that interests him in the faintest degree. Politics, books, sport, society, foreign affairs—he I never seems to care a rap about any of them; and yet he knows something about them all, and, if only you can get him to talk, he can talk extremely well. It is particularly curious about politics, for generally, if a man has once been in political life, he feels the fascination of it to the end." "But was Vaughan ever in political life?" "Oh yes I suppose you are too young to remember. He got into Parliament just after he left Oxford. He was put in by an old uncle for a Family Borough—Bilton—one of those snug little seats, not exactly 'Pocket Boroughs,' but very like them, which survived until the Reform Act of 1867." "How long did he sit?" "Only for one Parliament—from 1852 to 1857. No one ever knew why he gave up. He put it on health, but I believe it was just freakishness. He always was an odd chap, and of course he grows odder as he grows older." But just at that moment another exciting result came, trickling down the tape, and the hubbub was renewed.

Philip Vaughan was, as he put it in his languid way, "rather fond of clubs," so long as they were not political, and he spent a good deal of his time at the Travellers', the Athenaeum, and the United Universities, and was a member of some more modern institutions. He had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends—at least of his own age. The Argus-eyed surveyors of club-life noticed that the only people to whom he seemed to talk freely and cheerfully were the youngest members; and he was notoriously good-natured in helping young fellows who wished to join his clubs, and did his utmost to stay the hand of the blackballer.

He had a very numerous cousinship, but did not much cultivate it. Sometimes, yielding to pressure, he would dine with cousins in London; or pay a flying visit to them in the country; but in order, as it was supposed to avoid these family entanglements, he lived at Wimbledon, where he enjoyed, in a quiet way, his garden and his library, and spent most of the day in solitary rides among the Surrey hills. When winter set in he generally vanished towards the South of Europe, but by Easter he was back again at Wimbledon, and was to be found pretty often at one or other of his clubs.

This was Philip Vaughan, as people knew him in 1880. Some liked him; some pitied him; some rather despised him; but no one took the trouble to understand him; and indeed, if anyone had thought it worth while to do so, the attempt would probably have been unsuccessful; for Vaughan never talked of the past, and to understand him in 1880 one must have known him as he had been thirty years before.

In 1850 two of the best known of the young men in society were Arthur Grey and Philip Vaughan. They were, and had been ever since their schooldays at Harrow, inseparable friends. The people to whom friendship is a sealed and hopeless mystery were puzzled by the alliance. "What have those two fellows in common?" was the constant question, "and yet you never see them apart." They shared lodgings in Mount Street, frequented the same clubs, and went, night after night, to the same diners and balls. They belonged, in short, to the same set: "went everywhere," as the phrase is, and both were extremely popular; but their pursuits and careers were different. Grey was essentially a sportsman and an athlete. He was one of those men to whom all bodily exercises come naturally, and who attain perfection in them with no apparent effort. From his earliest days he had set his heart on being a soldier, and by 1850 had obtained a commission in the Guards. Vaughan had neither gifts nor inclinations in the way of sport or games. At Harrow he lived the life of the intellect and the spirit, and was unpopular accordingly. He was constantly to be found "mooning," as his schoolfellows said, in the green lanes and meadow-paths which lie between Harrow and Uxbridge, or gazing, as Byron had loved to gaze, at the sunset from the Churchyard Terrace. It was even whispered that he wrote poetry.

Arthur Grey, with his good looks, his frank bearing, and his facile supremacy on the cricket-ground and in the racquet-court, was a popular hero; and of all his schoolfellows none paid him a more whole-hearted worship than the totally dissimilar Philip Vaughan. Their close and intimate affection was a standing puzzle to hard and dull and superficial natures; but a poet could interpret it.

"We trifled, toiled, and feasted, far apart From churls, who, wondered what our friendship meant; And in that coy retirement heart to heart Drew closer, and our natures were content."[*]

[Footnote *: William Cory.]

Vaughan and Grey left Harrow, as they had entered it, on the same day, and in the following October both went up to Christ Church. Neither contemplated a long stay at Oxford, for each had his career cut out. Grey was to join the Guards at the earliest opportunity, and Vaughan was destined for Parliament. Bilton was a borough which the "Schedule A" of 1832 had spared. It numbered some 900 voters; and, even as the electors of Liskeard "were commonly of the same opinion as Mr. Eliot," so the electors of Bilton were commonly of the same opinion as Lord Liscombe.

The eighth Lord Liscombe was the last male member of his family. The peerage must die with him; but his property, including the "Borough influence," was at his own disposal. His only sister had married a Mr. Vaughan, and Lord Liscombe, having carefully watched the character and career of his nephew Philip Vaughan, determined to make him his heir. This was all very well; no one had a word to say against it, for no more obvious heir could be suggested. But when it became known that Lord Liscombe meant to bring Philip Vaughan into Parliament for Bilton there was great dissatisfaction. "What a shame," people said, "to disturb old Mr. Cobley, who has sat so long and voted so steadily! To be sure, he is very tiresome, and can't make himself heard a yard off, and is very stingy about subscriptions; and, if there was some rising young man to put into his seat, as the Duke of Newcastle put Gladstone, it might be all very well. But, really, Philip Vaughan is such a moody, dreamy creature, and so wrapped up in books and poetry, that he can never make a decent Member of Parliament. Politics are quite out of his line, and I shouldn't wonder if Lord Liscombe contrived to lose the seat. But he's as obstinate as a mule; and he has persuaded himself that young Vaughan is a genius. Was there ever such folly?"

Lord Liscombe had his own way—as he commonly had. Mr. Cobley received a polite intimation that at the next election he would not be able to rely on the Liscombe interest, and retired with a very bad grace, but not without his reward; for before long he received the offer of a baronetcy (which he accepted, as he said, to please his wife), and died honourably as Sir Thomas Cobley. Meanwhile Lord Liscombe, who, when he had framed a plan, never let the grass grow under his feet, induced Philip Vaughan to quit Oxford without waiting for a degree, made him address "Market Ordinaries" and political meetings at Bilton, presented him at the Levee, proposed him at his favourite clubs, gave him an ample allowance, and launched him, with a vigorous push, into society. In all this Lord Liscombe did well, and showed his knowledge of human nature. The air of politics stirred young Vaughan's pulses as they had never been stirred before. What casual observers had regarded as idle reveries turned out to have been serious studies. With the theory of English politics, as it shaped itself in 1852 when Lord Derby and Disraeli were trying to restore Protection, Vaughan showed himself thoroughly acquainted; and, as often happens when a contemplative and romantic nature is first brought into contact with eager humanity, he developed a faculty of public speaking which astonished his uncle as much as it astonished anyone, though that astute nobleman concealed his surprise. Meanwhile, Grey had got his commission. In those days officers of the Guards lived in lodgings, so it was obvious for Grey and Vaughan to live together; and every now and then Grey would slip down to Bilton, and by making himself pleasant to the shop-keepers, and talking appropriately to the farmers, would act as his friend's most effective election-agent. The Dissolution came in July, 1852, and Philip Vaughan was returned unopposed for the Free and Independent Borough of Bilton.