and who would permit no man to vote, if he did not first ascertain that he would vote early and often on the right side. But the Radicals, intent upon displaying a hatred of their own country, forgot the ambition of Mr Kruger. He, in fact, was but a poor victim, who was done with when he had fed their spite. Nevertheless, with a dogged spirit he stuok to his policy. He travelled up and down Europe in vain. Now Holland shouted itself hoarse at his approach; now brave little Switzerland, that fair home of an untrammelled democracy, roared applause in the ear of the autocrat. But Holland and Switzerland were as powerless and unwilling to help Mr Kruger as were the English Radicals who paid him surreptitious visits. Not even Dr Leyds, with his carefully suborned press, could achieve anything; and probably Mr Kruger was woefully disillusioned before his death. As for those who have never believed Mr Kruger a pattern of civic virtue, they may deplore with an honest heart the death of a stubborn adversary, and only regret that he died not on the field of battle, but survived to be the puppet of as foolish an agitation as modern Europe has witnessed.

It was once said by a French poet, who desired to excuse an unpopular championship of England, that Mr Kruger could not be a great man, because the Taal which he spoke contained no more than four hundred words. From this point of

view, at any rate, we are vastly superior to the Boers; for, as Mr Henry Bradley points out in his interesting little book, 'The Making of English' (London: Macmillan), we take our words where we find them, and are always adding to our vocabulary. Ever since there was an English language two processes have been discernible. On the one hand, we have simplified our grammar until we have rid ourselves of almost all the inflexions, which once encumbered us; on the other, we are constantly plundering other tongues for words, which may make our meaning plain. In this last respect, as in many others, we have been filibusters; we have raided where we would; and we have never scrupled to lie under an obligation to the strangers, who have visited our shores. An English dictionary, in fact, is in one sense a history of our national enterprise and adventure. For instance, as you may see in any dictionary, the inhabitants of Great Britain have touched the civilisation of the Romans at many points, and even before the English came to Britain the old British language was already under a debt to Latin. The AngloSaxons, again, while while they eagerly discarded all words of Celtic origin, as did the French also, enriched their language with many Latin words, and presently marked their conversion to Christianity by levying another tax upon the Latin tongue. Then came the Danes and lent us another hand; nor is it without a strange irony that the word "law'

was given to us by the lawless Vikings, and that every time a politician faces the free and independent electors upon the "hustings," he must needs use a Danish word for the platform upon which he stands. It is superfluous to point out that the Norman Conquest revolutionised our language as it revolutionised our life. The words which describe the pursuits of gentlefolk are mostly of French origin; and it is a curious comment upon history that, as Wamba points out in 'Ivanhoe,' while living animals -ox, sheep, calf, swine, deer -retain their native names, they were described by French words-beef, mutton, veal, pork, venison when they were brought to table. The reason of this divergence, Mr Bradley reminds us, is that the Saxon slave herded the animal while he lived, and the French lord ate him when he was killed. And thus we went on collecting our words like so many curiosities, until the revival of learning made us acquainted with Greek, and taught us the habit, which we have never lost, of coining new names for new sciences, as barbarous as they are convenient. The discoveries, moreover, of Drake, Hawkins, and the rest, are marked as clearly in our dictionaries as

on

our maps. They brought back with them not only new products, but new words wherewith to describe those products. Gong, tobacco, and potato belong so intimately to our language that it is easy to forget their foreign origin. Yet these words came from over-sea, and

by their very sound suggest the source of the useful objects which they denote.

But vocabulary is not language, and though English has borrowed words from every language of Europe, and has pilfered the savage dialects of America and Australia, it still remains separate and itself. Just as a man does not change his character because he fills his house with the spoils of the world, so a language may guard its own character inviolate, though it use as many foreign symbols as it likes. Yet while exotic words, such as our travellers have brought back from the East, have no more than a technical value, the English tongue is doubly fortunate in that it is an ingenious and equal compound of German and Latin elements. The great beauty of our literature lies in the contrast between these two sources of speech. The German gives force, the Latin sonority to our verse and prose, while the interchange of German and Latin causes a variety which every other language may seek in vain. To attempt to "purify" English would be not only to impoverish it, but to render it unintelligible. When Mr Morris, in his zeal for antiquity, set out to exclude Latin words from his prose, he arrived at a jargon which never was spoken, and which was besides clumsy and of an evil sound. Shakespeare, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, and the other masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth turies, were great because they did not disdain either element

cen

of their language, and because they could weave into perfectly harmonious patterns the many threads which tradition had placed in their hands. To-day, to our great detriment, a simpler practice prevails. When Steele and Addison, to stem the tide of slang, which threatened to overwhelm our literature, devised a prose which aimed at purity and neatness, they exercised a worse influence upon our speech than they contemplated. It is true that Johnson and Gibbon did their best to ensure a reaction. They, at any rate, were not afraid of eloquent Latin, nor of nicely balanced antithesis. But their authority was long since overlooked, and we are confronted with English loose and meaningless, which, debauched by the smart facility and the false picturesqueness of the daily press, has strayed so far from its origins that it would be unintelligible to our ancestors of the sixteenth century, if haply they might revisit the earth. But to the seeing eye, words bear upon them something at least of their history. While caprice ensures the life of one new term, and decrees the death of another, while such new coinages as boycott and hooligan survive, where many others perish in oblivion, accident changes or limits meaning as it will, and it passes the wit

an

of man to turn this accident into a law. Of this wayward caprice Mr Bradley gives not a few examples. The primary sense of fast, for instance, is "firm," "immovable"; but the idea of firmness grew into that of strength in movement, and so into that of rapidity. Today the later sense predominates, and that which runs as quickly as possible is described by the word which once stood for immobility. There is, in brief, no end to the changes of meaning, which metaphor or generalisation may bring about. Many simple terms acquire by association an emotional significance which does not belong to them, so that hardly Я sentence may be written which does not carry with it a vague half-understood allusion to history. He, therefore, is the finest master of style who never loses hold of the past, who feels, what he can only express to minds as knowing as his own, that the words of his choice have each its own pedigree and its own life. Nor will he limit himself either to Saxon or to Latin. He will use the full resources of his speech with a justified pride, remembering that our language has as many colonies as our King, and that in this one respect at least we are the resolute conquerors world.

of the

CHEFOO, June 1904. THREE Japanese infantrymen leaned with their backs against a greasy sea-rook, which raised its slimy crest four feet above the level of the water. The three little men were fortunate, since they were able to rest their rifles on the rock, while the less fortunate of their companions, waist-deep in the water, were wearied to death in keeping the breeches of their pieces out of the brine. The three seemed entirely indifferent to the discomfort of their surroundings, though the whole company had been wading in the mud - flats for the last three hours, and had now halted in a deep pool formed in a sand depression. They were engaged in a comparison of their experiences during the last twelve hours. To the Western soldier the experiences of a lifetime would have been covered in the short space of time taken by the 4th Division of the Imperial Japanese army to carry at the point of the bayonet the walled town of Kinchau. To the Japanese soldiers it was but a delightful incident in the service which their country required of them. Their theme at the moment was the bloody grips they had been engaged in during the morning's street fighting in Kinchau. Nor was it idle

boasting, since the stains on the bayonet-catches of their rifles, blackening in the sun, gave sickening evidence of the carnage at which they had assisted. But the carnage behind them was nothing to that which they were to engage in before the sun set. At the moment the three little bluecoated soldiers appeared to take no interest in the lesser holocaust which was even yet taking place in the vicinity. They were discussing the past, which had been washed more vividly scarlet than the present, between the mouthfuls of sodden boiled rice which they scooped in handfuls out of the wicker satchels suspended to their belts. Such is the character of the Japanese soldier.

There was a terrifying rush of a great projectile above their heads. A hissing plunge, a half-subdued report, lashings of blinding sea-spray. The thick ranks of the company fell aside like driven skittles, and five helpless masses of human flesh bobbed convulsively in the water, which in patches showed yellow, brown, and red. A shriek of derisive laughter from the spectators who picked themselves whole from the mêlée was all the dirge vouchsafed to the victims

more, it was all they would have desired. Mahtsomahto,

the Nagasaki recruit, leaned forward from his rock and picked up the cap of one of his fallen comrades. He fitted it upon his own head to replace that lost in the early morning struggle. His action appealed to the simple humour of those round him; they clapped him on the back and bubbled with mirth in the ecstasy of their congratulations. The mutilated remains floated clear, and the ranks closed up.

Then an officer came wading through the sea. He shouted an order to the colonel of the battalion. Another order passed from mouth to mouth down the line of company officers, and then the three little infantrymen had to stow their ricebaskets away quickly and take their rifles from the rest which the slimy rock gave them. The battalion was to move. Where and how the men in the ranks did not know; but as the water descended first to their knees and then to their ankles, they realised that they were moving off to the left, and to their great joy the direction was taking taking them nearer to the Russian position. As their feet made the dry shore that position became defined to them. There was no mistaking it, for the gunboats, having spent the whole morning dragging for blockademines in the bay, had now found & channel by which they could safely take advantage of their light draught, and, having anchored, their shells were bursting all along the summit of the slope which frowned in front of the

advancing infantry; also, far away to the left, the dark shadow of Mount Sampson's slopes was emitting countless little jets of flame. They came and went almost with mathematical precision. These jets were the burning charges of the massed Japanese fieldbatteries. They were adding to the Inferno which crowned the ridges where the Siberian Rifles, grim, dogged, and hungry, lay prostrate behind the filled gabions waiting for the climax which they knew this fierce cannonade but prefaced. The advancing infantry could trace the enemy's position from the bursting of the Japanese shells, as minutely as if they were reading a chart. They could see the great column of lurid smoke and flame shoot upwards as some 6-inch projectile struck the tip of the parapets, and as the smoke from these explosions mushroomed out and hung as a murky pall above the works, the darker patches were mottled with the white smoke-discs of bursting shrapnel. The din was deafening, for underlying the deeper detonations was a ceaseless crash of small-arms, punctuated with the grinding rattle of automatic weapons.

The infantry battalion began to crawl upwards as its direction brought it under the cover of the ridge. It was now crossing ground recently held by the leading battalion of the 4th Division. The ranks frequently opened, to avoid trampling upon the trail of human suffering which marked the accuracy of Russian shooting. The head of