fill his place. But though the number of those who have learned their political faith in the school of Fox and Canning and Gladstone does not constitute a majority in our own or perhaps any country, they, nevertheless, gather strength from the fact that while the Chamberlains and Déroulèdes of every land necessarily contradict each other, we plead for the same cause and uphold the authority of the same tribunal-the voice not of a class nor even a nation, but of the civilised world. The Jingoes, the Chauvinists, the German Colonials, the Panslavists, the Irredentists-how absurd they seem in every country but their own! Their critics, few as they are, have grown steadily in numbers and influence since Grotius was moved by the horrors of the Thirty Years' War to claim a footing for moral principles in international affairs. And it is from this band that Penn, the Abbé Saint-Pierre, Bentham, Görres, Kant, and other dreamers have come-men who realised quite as clearly as their critics the Utopian character of their dreams at the moment, but felt it worth while to bear testimony to certain truths till the fulness of time should come. The Hague Conference, though the achievements fell short of the wishes and hopes of the Tsar, marks the beginning of a new epoch. The first step towards liberty is to complain of your chains.

In quite recent times the internationalists have received reinforcements from the Socialists and labour leaders of all countries. The inadequacy as it seems to many of their sociology does not diminish the importance of the fact that in every country there is a growing body of men who refuse to hate or even to despise other countries, resolutely oppose every manifestation of the war-spirit, and proclaim in season and out of season the community of interests of the workers of the world. It is to the German Socialists that we look, and do not look in vain, to give utterance to the better mind of their land when the Emperor forbids his soldiers to give quarter to the Chinese and holds up the Huns for their imitation, or when Carl Peters is to be brought to the bar of public opinion. It is to them, too, that we look for the expression of the simple but forgotten truth that the strength and

influence of Germany lies more in a free and prosperous people at home than in securing the deserts of Damaraland and the tropical swamps of the Cameroons-still waiting for the colonists who will never come. In England, too, the Boer War has had the effect of banding the labour leaders together to issue a manifesto-the first issued by English labour in reference to a question outside domestic affairs.

In addition to the growing number of men, both thinkers and workers, who refuse any longer to bound their patriotism by their frontiers, and who recognise that the nationalist ideal must be supplemented by the internationalist, there is a second cause for hope. John Bright once remarked that the only good thing he could see of war was that you could have a very little of it for a great deal of money. If Bright spoke to-day, he would apply his test equally to the armed peace. The German Emperor has expressed his contentment with the drill-sergeant's millennium; but the German worker agrees on this matter with the Tsar. The words of the famous Encyclical contain the simple truth: "The financial charges strike at public prosperity at its very source. The intelligence and physical strength of the nations, labour and capital, are for the major part diverted from their natural application and unproductively expended. The armed peace of our days is becoming a crushing burden, which the peoples have more and more difficulty in bearing."

England is the richest country in Europe; but at the present rate our expenses, leaving war altogether out of account, are increasing far more rapidly than our wealth. This process can nowhere go on indefinitely; and long before the limit of taxable capacity is arrived at the limit of taxable patience will be reached. This line of reasoning applies, of course, still more strongly to wars than to armed peace. M. Bloch has not proved nor attempted to prove that war is impossible. His object has been to that a struggle between nations or alliances of mately equal strength are impossible save at a blood and money that no nation would be able

.d.

To-day the hope of progress at home and of tranquillity abroad lies in the recognition, in theory and practice, of the supreme claim of the moral ideal, not less in our dealings with our own dependencies and with other nations than in the social transformation through which England must pass in her progress towards a healthier and a happier life.

I.

IX

PAST AND FUTURE

A wanderer is man from his birth,
He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time;
Brimming with wonder and joy

He spreads out his arms to the light,

Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.

Whether he wakes

Where the snowy mountainous pass,

Echoing the screams of the eagles,

Hems in its gorges the bed

Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light

Where the river in gleaming rings

Sluggishly winds through the plain;

Whether in sound of the swallowing sea-
As is the world on the banks,

So is the mind of the man.

This tract which the river of Time

Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.

Border'd by cities and hoarse

With a thousand cries is its stream.

And we on its breast, our minds

Are confused as the cries which we hear,

Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

The Future, MATTHEW ARNOLD.

UCH was the allegory by which the regretful and unwilling herald of our latter-day era delineated the power of external circumstance to give to each generation its peculiar quality.

In order to extract the kernel of positive warning from the husk of vague pessimism, we must ask what is the difference between the banks of Time which the English used to see and those which they see to-day. The difference is this: in the past life was naturally-that is, by the process of existing social and economic conditionsbeautiful and instructive; while to-day life moves in conditions which tend to make it ugly and trivial. It can still be made more beautiful and instructive than ever, but if so it will be by artificial means and by conscious effort of our own. The world on the banks, having become naturally ugly, must be made artificially beautiful. This formula baldly stated may easily be misunderstood and so needs to be illustrated by a few examples.

Alike in the range of known history and in the dim patriarchal days, three great forces are seen to preside over the work of transformation, three that have power to form the intelligence and the character, making nations and, what is better, making men. In these three all history is summed up. The mutual affections of human beings towards each other constitute the first. The second is external sight and sound and feeling. The third is the instruction of the mind-the direct act of education, whether spiritual or scientific.

(a) of these three powers that form, the first may be considered stable or possibly, an optimist may be allowed to hope, progressive. If the world has improved upon the whole, which the present writer would be unwilling categorically to deny, the chief improvement will be found in the greater freedom, strength, and subtlety of the communion of persons. Under this head, too, may be included humanitarianism, or the dislike of obvious cruelty to others.

(b) But whatever may be the mutual relations of the fellow travellers on the deck of the ship, the banks of the stream have changed for the worse. The second of the great moulding forces-the surroundings of life that strike the