66 all restraints, and hoped for the best. So there were strikes and threats of strikes, and that industrial discontent should be merged in revolution, there were vague talks of direct action." In a few years the leaders of the Trade Unionsnot the Unions themselves were completely out of hand. They spouted treason as they chose, and told the working men of England that their best hope for the future lay in universal destruction. They have been met with soft words and subsidies, and they have been grateful for neither subsidies nor soft words. As the authority of the Government has perished in such things as are controlled by the Home Office, so it has perished in the affairs which touch the Empire. As a result of winning the war we have lost Ireland, partly at the instigation of the United States, which has always been our secret enemy. We have weakened our position in Egypt. We have so grievously bedevilled India that it is all but a lost dominion. These are some of the disasters which victory has brought upon us. From these disasters we may estimate the condition of England. And it is not surprising that all the foreigners-and they are many-who are illaffected towards us are loudly and openly rejoicing. Yet the gloomy picture that is everywhere painted of our decline is but a partial picture. It might well be painted in other and gayer colours. Before we fold our hands and gloomily take for granted the ruin of England, let us look about us and see how the other nations are faring. We cannot measure ruin itself except by comparison, and when we are assailed by the insults of those who delight to prophesy our downfall, we shall best recover our courage and composure by surveying our rivals, and by asking ourselves whether, after all, our state of mind and policy is not better than theirs. Would we change places with France, which tries in vain to find a stable Government, which witnesses, without hope, the fall in value of the franc, which permits the Communists, at their free will, to murder honest citizens who have fought for their fatherland? May we not say, without earning the reproach of Pharisaism, that we have a Government which represents the country, and which, if it show energy, is secure for the next four years? Do not our judges administer justice fearlessly and without the interference of the State? What need have we, then, to look askance at the future? Nor have we any need to envy Germany, which, in spite of her industry, rises slowly from her bed of depression, and which, before the coming of Hindenburg, suffered from the same insecurity which besets France. We, at any rate, are able to balance our budget, and to pay the annual tribute which the United States exact. To be solvent six years after tion would find room in our the signing of a peace is a thinly populated dominions for solid reason, if not the only thousands of men and women, reason, for satisfaction. Noth- who, not by their own fault, ing could irk us more bitterly are workless and hopeless tothan to be under an obligation day. Thus we should at once to the United States, and strengthen both the motherland happily we have already put and the dominions. upon our back the burden of repayment. This could not have been done without great sacrifices, and while we would exact a scrupulous economy from our Ministers, who have contracted the bad habit of thinking in millions and in tens of millions, we may take a lawful pride in the scrupulous zeal of our taxpayers. it not for two causes of suffering we should have no reason to complain of our lot, which we still think more fortunate than the lot of other countries. Were In the first place, the number of men and women unemployed in Great Britain might well daunt a braver nation. That they are unemployed is due partly to high taxation, partly to over-population. The weight of taxes laid upon us takes away vast sums of money which might be spent in new enterprises, and there will come a time when our Ministers discover that it is not the wisest policy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Again, over-population is not an incurable disease. On the one hand, if we have not room for our people to move in, we have a perfect right to exclude the aliens who take refuge (and the dole) upon our shores. A vigorous plan of emigra These difficulties, unemployment and over-population, are not insuperable. Superable, also, is the laziness of our working classes. The English working man is not, and has never been, a model of industry. Froissart discovered and recorded many centuries ago the plain fact that Englishmen did not love work. But if Englishmen do not love work, they possess in a high measure the quality of rising to a great occasion. Under stress they can do more in a short time than others. They will, if it be necessary, forget the imperative claim of looking on while others play football; and if only they could get over the wicked habit of "ca' canny,' which they pretend is a political principle, and is, in truth, an excuse for idling, all will be well. Especially all will be well if the politicians do not surrender their authority at the mere dictate of numbers, if they do not admit that no class, save the working class, has any right to justice or consideration. They will, perhaps, insist some day that there shall be the same law for the poor as for the rich, that when sedition wears the garb of liberty of speech it shall be as severely punished as it de serves. When these principles the beginnings of their race. are respected, and when the Trade Unions are brought back within the restraints of law from which Mr Asquith and his friends released them, then Englishmen may defy the opinion of the world with an easy mind and a clear conscience. They may even restore a proper discipline to Egypt and India, which the incontinence of the Radicals has stirred to disaffection and revolt. Above all, we may look to the future with equanimity, because we know that England is safely anchored to the past. Whether they are conscious of it or not, the most of Englishmen are willingly obedient to tradition. They feel at once proud and secure in what has gone before them. What has been, they say, shall be. To ask them to make a sudden change in policy or habit is like recommending them to the surgeon's knife. They move slowly in mind and body. When they have made a revolution-it rarely happens to them they very soon retrace their steps. Quick to see their error, they acknowledge, in act as in word, that the accumulated wisdom of many centuries is better able to ease their ills than the patent medicine of the last political quack that came along. And when in confidence they go back to the past, they do not go back merely to the last Government or to the last century; they go back, all unconsciously, to The blood of true and faithful citizens flows in their veins, and moved by their blood, they will one day kick out the pestilent aliens, whose business it is to deceive honest Englishmen and to destroy a country which they cannot understand. Not long ago an English archæologist was excavating in his county a famous fort. There was within the fort an alleyway, which ended in a circle. While he pondered on the purpose of this, an aged peasant related, what his grandfather had told him, that it was there the soldiers used to drive in their cattle. And his grandfather had learnt it from his grandfather, and so through countless generations from the Roman invaders. Thus the thought of the peasant was carried back to the truth over a thousand years, and who shall change the mind and character of a people to which all history is but as yesterday? The United States cherish other methods of life and thought than these. Their eyes are fixed upon what they call progress." They have a firm belief in the march of mind. and for them mind marches always, if it march in the right direction, towards dollars. Mr Hoover has lately said, in the preliminary report which he made as Secretary of Commerce, that "the standard of living in the United States was the highest in the country's history, and therefore the highest in all history." Why he wrote the last seven words we do not know. Surely it is recognised all the world over that the United States can be compared only with themselves. What have they to do with history Before they came into being history was not, and they have marked their own marvellous progress by the breaking of all known records. You see them with one hand pocketing dollars, with the other distributing "ideals" to the dark and awestruck Europe. Think of the glory of being the only competitor in the race of wealth and comfort, and of outdistancing your last achievement at every lap! Surely the career of these States is without parallel, and if only gold can do the trick, in a few years all Europe will be on its knees in front of the United States, begging for the crumbs that fall from the heavily laden table of successful materialism. Perhaps it is not quite so easy as Mr Hoover thinks to measure to-day's standard of living with that of yesterday. The Athens of Phidias, Ictinus, and Pericles saw the Parthenon rise upon the Acropolis, whence it still looks down in its beauty. The great Augustus found Rome wood, and left it marble. How shall we compare these achievements, these high and pure standards of life, with the triumph of which Mr Hoover stands in awe, and which, he assures us, places the United States hors concours in the history of the universe? "Our national savings," says 66 Mr Hoover, are accumulating at an unparalleled rate." That must be a source of vast satisfaction to the citizens whose standard of living has surpassed all known standards" the highest in the country's history, and therefore the highest in all history." And yet when they are celebrating their material splendour, when they are letting the whole world know how great they are, how much greater they shall be, are there no reflections which check their pride, is there no humility which suggests that perhaps, even with the highest standard aforementioned, all is not well with the United States ? The higher they climb, the farther they travel from the rare chance of self-knowledge. Not for them the maxim which descended from Heaven: Know thyself! With their outward eye fixed upon the ladder of progress, whose every rung is marked by a vast increase of dollars, how shall their mind's eye turn inward upon themselves? Ever since they revolted against England, which once was their mother-country, and no longer is the mothercountry of their cosmopolitans, they have been growing in arrogance and wealth. A warning was given them many years ago by Francis Parkman, their own historian. who in the weakness of their dissensions," thus wrote Parkman, "needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that might defy every "Those foe but that most dangerous of all foes-herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past, and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her power from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics." Such was Parkman's warning. The United States did not heed it. They went on their way towards wealth gaily, and without knowing what they meant or what they did. Though they have attained the highest standard of living ever seen, they have guided their lives by other standards equally dangerous. Their vanity persuades them to believe that, if they be present when any deed is done, they did it. It is this strange hallucination which causes them to boast aloud that they won the war. That they did nothing of the sort is proved by the number of the killed and wounded in each of the Allied Armies, by the plain record of events. They achieved less than the smallest of the British dominions. It may not be their fault. They came late into the war, untrained and uninstructed, and however will ing the rank and file may have been, they were led by officers who did not understand their business. But nothing will serve them but to go about and to tell all and sundry that they were the authors of victory. They believe one another, though nobody else believes them, and they will end by making themselves supremely ridiculous. That they should give a comic interpretation of the letters A.E.F., and repeat that it means "After England Fails," cannot distress us. We know too well what our sufferings were and what were our achievements to care a jot what the Americans say. But what of them? Who shall respect those who respect themselves so little as to babble such things as these? But they have “the highest standard of living in the country's history, and therefore the highest in all history.' We are not likely to forget this eloquent statement. We can but ask whether it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul. In private, as in public, the Americans lack delicacy. In public they proclaim aloud that they won the war. In private, in spite of their grandeur, in spite of their "highest standard of living," they addict themselves to the collection of souvenirs. The souvenirs which they collect belong naturally to others. This fact does not deter them from the chase. Many of them, no matter where they are entertained, think that |