have been given to all ports to prevent these people coming in, and the police have been instructed." That is well, so far as it goes. We do not like Sir William's reservation. "There is," he said, "and always has been, free speech in this country for our own nationals, who are entitled to hold their own views." They may be entitled to hold their own views, but are they entitled to express them? Assuredly not when the expression of these views is designed to destroy the discipline of the Navy and the Army. Even those who claim to do as they like are checked, or should be checked, when they come to sedition. Let us not forget that it was the Campbell case which broke up the Government of Mr MacDonald; and let it not be said that the Tories gave no more thought to open disloyalty and perversion than did the Labour Party. But one firm step has been taken, and we may hope that the seditious rascals, who visit our shores upon the false pretexts of trade and commerce, shall henceforth be prevented from poisoning the minds and paralysing the hands of the working classes. Meanwhile Mr Cook, that humble disciple of Lenin, has been foiled of his attempt to bring to nought the mining industry. He knew well enough that he could neither shorten the hours nor increase the wages of the men whom he represented. The most that he did accomplish was to make it impossible for the mines to be worked at all. How the lot of the miners could be made easier by a policy of destruction he did not explain; but lest he should be unable to do as he liked, he attempted to include the other unions in the strike which he contemplated for his own. That he failed is another proof-the first was given at the General Election-that the working men of Great Britain are not to be seduced from the paths of sanity by the foolish rhetoric that comes from Russia. While the extreme agitators, such as Mr Cook, are resolved upon war at any price, Mr Baldwin persists in his settled policy of conciliation. He aims at the friendly approach of class to class. He hopes to emerge for ever from that "era of anyhow in which we have sojourned too long. He does not believe in "muddling through." (Truly the inventor of that vile phrase should stand in the pillory for all time.) He knows that nothing worth doing can be done without forethought and design. "Power," he says, quoting Disraeli, "has only one duty-to serve the social welfare of our people." But that social welfare cannot be served unless both parties to the contract are in agreement. There must be give and take on either side, and more than that, there must be mutual understanding. So long as the working classes believe the capitalists to be mere limbs of Satan, so long as the capitalists complain that the working classes have no other ambition than to shirk, the necessary approach will be difficult indeed. And surely Mr Baldwin never did the cause of industry a better service than when he defined and defended capitalism itself. "The doctrines preached to-day in regard to capitalism are misleading and mischievous," he says, "because capital is only our savings-savings of rich and poor alike. We cannot get on without it. We want as much as we can get, and we want it cheap. Achievements and improvements have come in this country with the cheapness and the growth of capital, and we want to learn that you can dissipate and waste the capital of the country just as much by indulging in strife at home as you can by waging war in France and Flanders." That is sound sense, especially as it makes clear that capitalism is not of a class but of all classes." The denunciation of capital as such," thus Mr Baldwin goes on, "is really in the long-run in vain, because in the last half-century-through co-operative societies, through the savings banks and savings certificates-we have seen an enormous increase in the number of financial smallholders, and they are the greatest assets of the modern State." That is perfectly true; indeed, it may be said that the working classes, being smallholders, are committing industrial suicide when they attack violently and senselessly the capitalism of which they are part. fessed, a nation of individual- is, and the mere fact that masters and men have sat down together makes the subversive tactics of Mr Cook, Lenin's humble admirer, of very small effect. And there is another thing which still holds Mr Baldwin's attention. "Many men in industry," he said, masters and men alike, up to now have too often failed to see the wood for the trees. They have thought only of themselves and of their own industry. These are the trees. We are, as Mr Baldwin con- They have missed the wood, 66 which is the nation as a whole." wants, unity in place of dis If only they would always envisage the wood, if only they would keep the nation in their mind, as well as the advantage of their own particular trade, there would be no more unrest in industry, and the risk of unemployment would be infinitely decreased. Indeed, there is no aspect of the industrial problem to which Mr Baldwin closed his eyes at Welbeck. His speech delivered there might be accepted by masters and men as the last word upon a vexed question. He had wise words to say of management and organisation: 66 Engineers have to manage men," he insisted, "and the management of men is more difficult than the mastery and application of the laws of heat and light. Technical efficiency is not enough. No management is scientific which forgets the man inside the workman." Here, then, we have a wise exhortation delivered to both sides, an exhortation to peace, which should not fall upon deaf ears. If we leave out of account the Bolsheviks, the base imitators of Russian heretics, we shall find few who are genuinely in favour of destructive methods. In the last resort, masters and men would rather see their factories busily employed than silent and empty, and Mr Baldwin has done his best to rekindle the dying embers of an old enthusiasm. "There is no room in England," he says, "for the wrecker or the slacker. . . . I want, and the whole Party cord, and co-operation in the place of antagonism." It is a part of a government's duty, as we have said, to give counsel to the doubter and encouragement to the waverer. This counsel and this encouragement Mr Baldwin provides. The government has another duty: to rule the country with an equal hand and to punish sedition. It is not so easy to rule and to punish as to give good advice. But unless the evildoer is restrained, good counsel is proffered in vain. For a small minority, if only it be vicious enough, may upset the plans of the wisest administrator. We have seen in Russia what harm a mere handful of ruffians may accomplish, if that handful does not shrink from the methods of "terror." By only one policy-a policy of restraint— can a government suppress 66 terror," and all the ills which it brings with it. Doctor Johnson, like the far-seeing statesman that he was, talked, to use Boswell's phrase, "with a rough contempt of popular liberty." "They make a rout about universal liberty," said he, "without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty." In truth, Doctor Johnson knew well enough, what is too often forgotten, that the very essence of government is restraint, and that, if we are to look to government for rational government, too much restraint is better than too little. We hope, therefore, that Mr Baldwin, while he does his best to bring together in the bonds of friendship the warring elements of society, will be quick to restrain (and to punish) those licentious persons who think that the world is well lost, if only they are free to practise sedition and conspiracy, and who pretend to believe that it is the inalienable right of every unbridled citizen to do as he likes. is what he says, and by way of explanation he insists that "it is in the thirty years from 1870 to 1900 that the English novel can be said in the full sense of the word to evolve." And he selects three forces which he finds behind this evolution. "One of these is a new consciousness of technique that came to us from France; secondly, the new theory of morals as applied to the novel, and that also came to us from France; and thirdly, a new word, an obnoxious word that came to us from heaven knows where, and that shows no sign of leaving us for a long while to come, the word Realism." It is always interesting to hear a craftsman discourse of his craft, and when Mr Hugh Walpole chose the evolution We cannot believe that these of the English novel as the forces were either new or essubject for his Rede Lecture, pecially potent in 1871. Never he made a wise and apposite did man or woman succeed in choice. But there is one danger the business of writer who was which the craftsman faces when not conscious of of technique. he attempts to reveal his own When Homer sat himself down secret; he has a clearer under- to describe the siege of Troy standing of his own purpose or the return of Ulysses in the than of the purpose of his pre- two best narratives that the decessors; he perceives a world has ever seen, he did not novelty in what is not wholly surrender his genius to the new, and even though he pro- accident of the hour. There tests, as Mr Walpole protests, are no accidents in the realm that he does not believe in the of art, and the realm of art progress of the arts, he still was discovered many cenlooks upon the past with an turies before 1871. Nor did eye of kindly scepticism. this consciousness of technique, Walpole, indeed, believes that which was not new, come to us there is such a thing as the from France, itself bedevilled modern novel, a form, invented in 1871 by the memory of about 1870, and given to Eu- romanticism. How should rope, or at any rate to England, France, corrupted by the easy by George Eliot. "Indeed, the rhetoric of the romantics, teach new world of the novel is any lessons of self-consciousness breaking in upon us in this to England, a nation which had year of the publication of not yet forgotten the noble tra'Middlemarch,' 1871." That dition of the eighteenth century? Mr VOL. CCXVIII.-NO. MCCCXVII. F And the new theory of morals The audacities of thirty years which Mr Walpole attributes to his annus mirabilis, if it were new, had little to do with the art of novel-writing. It was but a reaction in favour of outspokenness against the stern convention of the nineteenth century. What prisons and circumlocution offices were to Dickens and his contemporaries, sexual problems were to the intrepid novelists of the 'seventies and 'nineties who had been on a trip to Paris. They had read the works of Zola, that hot gospeller, that bitter foe of artistic expression, who thought that the duty of the novelist was not to select but to tumble all the contents of a well-filled notebook out upon paper. And the change which they pretended to inaugurate was a social, not an artistic change. It matters less what is the theme of the novel than the skill with which the theme is handled; and if it is a mere contest of tedious disclosure, one set of facts is not worth more than another. The New Women, whose works Mr Walpole mentions as "a bold challenge to British morality "they were no challenge to literary art,-did not differ in style or boredom from their predecessors. They merely chose something else to write about, and their books and their influence are buried as deeply in the pit of forgotten things as the history of the Rougon Macquarts' them selves. And as to the word realism, we understand it and care as little about it as does Mr Walpole himself. ago are already demoded. Mr Joyce may appear to some bolder than the rest, but the choice of topics, not generally discussed, is not a stage in the evolution of an art, and the novel remains precisely what it was when Apuleius found witches in Thessaly. Whatever the novelist, ancient or modern, discourses about, whatever secrets he uncovers, whether his speech consists of "yea" or "nay," or of the words which are commonly chalked upon shutters, he must, if he is to achieve an artistic success, be master of narrative, character, and expression. These are the three tests. And when Mr Walpole sorrowfully admits that neither George Meredith nor Thomas Hardy has had any part in the evolution of the modern novel, we cannot agree with him. Influence comes from those who survive, and these two have a better chance of survival than the brave intrepid ones who shrank not from dangerous themes. Truly there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the havoc wrought by time among old novels. A century ago was published in Paris a directory of English fiction. This directory contained the titles of some 20,000 novels, the greater part of which are to-day entirely forgotten. Again, Mr Walpole quotes a writer in The Nineteenth Century,' who makes the bold assertion that "there are at least a hundred and fifty living novelists, men and women, whose work is worthy of serious attention, and, out |