mischief was confined to ill- Government were able, in the first session of this Parliament, to check a wild scheme of reduction in the national armaments. That reduction was pressed largely by Colonel Seely. It is ominous that Colonel Seely is now the colleague of the War Minister whose estimates he attacked with virulence less than timed questions, to reckless encouragement given to mischievous intriguers, and to attempts captiously to criticise and to interfere with our agents abroad, which were deprived of their pernicious tendency only by the gross ignorance of the subject under which the critics laboured. On the whole, in spite of some dangerous and reckless Parliamentary episodes, Sir Edward Grey has been permitted to steer a course directed by the best traditions of our foreign policy. Bitter disappointment was felt by those who had hoped for a reversal of all the traditions of sound diplomacy; but it found vent only in obscure murmurings, and was recognised only by those who were able to observe the under-currents of the political tide. As regards India, the contempt of their fellow-members and the indifference of all sensible men at home have been the just reward of the fractious rancour of disappointed officials and of ignorant and hare-brained globe trotters, like our Cottons, Keir-Hardies, Rutherfords, and Mackarnesses. But time alone can show whether these have not worked deeper mischief in native circles, and whether they have not pushed the Secretary of State into dangerous experi ments. But let us observe some of the symptoms of the pernicious influence of this reckless and heterogeneous majority in other spheres. It was by means of Conservative votes that the two years ago. Let no one fancy that the contingent which he then led has abandoned its aims or lost its hopes. We have only to remember that early in the past session the Government withdrew their navy navy estimates, and recast them on a lower scale, in obedience to the threatened revolt of a powerful section of their followers. It is true that we have had of late bold assertions of a strong naval policy, and brave words have been uttered. But it would be a mis take to feel any confidence in such declamations. They are devised to meet a growing sense of insecurity that has spread over the nation. They are prompted by passing phases of foreign politics which have forced public attention. As soon as the clouds have disappeared, the old apathy and listlessness may reappear, and the inveterate obstinacy of those who care little for our foreign position will reassert itself. It will do so with the powerful support to be received from a financial position which is hopelessly involved, and for which the Government have no solution to propound except vague threatenings against particular classes, and revolutionary schemes of taxation that will banish capital and check enterprise. And it will have the sympathy, if not the active support, of a large section of the Cabinet. It is the same picture, in whichever direction we look. In the Trades Disputes Bill, a show of firmness and of respect for the first principles of justice appeared on the Treasury Bench on a Wednesday, to be followed by an abject and ignominious surrender to the selfish arrogance of class privilege on the following Friday. The result is shown in the studied sarcasm of the judgment delivered by two such eminent Radicals as the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton in the recent case of Conway v. Wade. A baseless figment of new financial resources, in the Taxation of Land Values, was first welcomed as a fit ting subject for consideration: then decisively condemned by the Lord Chancellor in the only sense in which it would be acceptable to the Parliamentary apostles of Socialism: then revived by the SolicitorGeneral for Scotland, in Scotland, in a series of stump orations, as the prime article of his political faith; and now is accepted as an axiom by those patterns of responsible Parliamentary representation who glory in the name of disciples of Mr Henry George. By parity of method, if Bedlam were let loose, it would first be accounted as an axiom of broad-minded toleration to listen patiently to its ravings: then some of our present majority would find in these ravings some suggestion of plunder or anarchy suited to their taste: and next they would be accepted as political oracles, which none but the selfish reactionary would venture to dispute. And in all this wild career nothing is more comic than to observe how seriously the political pundits of the Ministerial majority take themselves. They have learned their own game: three years have sufficed to make them think themselves the repositories of Parliamentary tradition; and upon any eccentricity of which they have not been the originators they frown with all the solemnity of neophytes. Mr Victor Grayson mouths his vapid platitudes, but does so without learning the little tricks of manner, and without having gained admission into the little coteries of the party which confer the cachet of political wisdom. So he is howled down, and each petty member of the Radical party thinks he is thus rendering powerful and efficacious aid to Mr Speaker in protecting the decencies of debate, and is thereby raised, in his own opinion, to the platform of serious politics. No one perceives the grades of political experience with greater acuteness than he who has just learned that there is some one who may possibly be even more crude and irresponsible than himself. So the political mountebank finds himself jeered when he apes the tricks that taught others to rise, and must console his discomfiture in meditating upon the mellow wisdom that prompts a Chancellor of the Exchequer to regale the ears of the tap-house politician with projects of raiding hen-roosts, and to indulge in sensational pictures of stripping the richest of his neighbours of their ill-gotten gear. Mr Victor Grayson is accosted with orthodox head-shaking. Mr Lloyd George is the authorised financial representative of the wealthiest empire in the world! temporary hallucination, and If the nation wishes to study its own political barometer, let it pay attention to the personal element in the composition of that amorphous majority to which it has entrusted its destinies for the moment. Let it weigh in well-adjusted scales the wisdom, the temperance, the restraining responsibility which may be present in that majority against its recklessness, its readiness to temporise with the forces of anarchy, its heedless neglect of all that is solid in national character. To do so it must perforce devote itself to what may appear the sorry task of watching the proceedings in the House of Commons. They have ceased to be of interest, and the newspapers, rightly gauging the taste of their readers, no longer provide reports which have palled upon the appetites of those for whom they cater. Instead of that, we have the gossip of the lobby and the fantasies of Punch's jester-who has, in very truth, become a serious chronicler compared with his brethren of the daily parliamentary press. Only a faithful mirror will give to the English citizen a true picture of what the Mother of Parlia After all, to the plain citizen this personal element means a good deal. It is no pleasant topic to dwell upon, but it cannot be ignored. It is not an accident emerging from purely fortuitous circumstances. On the contrary, we are reaping as we have sown. In a fit of epidemic madness the nation gave an overwhelming majority to a party which long political exile had deprived of the first germs of political responsibility. Under the rush of a headlong flood of impulsive feeling it crowded into the ranks of its Parliamentary representatives scores of men who had never gravely considered political questions, and who hardly contemplated their own candidature as a serious matter. What wonder that in the strange jumble of ill-assorted ingredients, elements should be thrust to the surface which have no equilibrium of their own, and are the playthings of contending currents? What wonder that amidst these eddying whirlpools the nation should rub its eyes after its own ments has become. We do -small as was the proportion was not wonder that the commercial instincts of newspaper of the Bill which ever proprietors make them shrink discussed. Only thus could it from such distasteful provender. be seen how the persistent But the real character of the monotony of Mr Birrell's perpresent House of Commons can siflage has degenerated into a only be guessed from its fruits, reckless frivolity which treats and can only be known to anarchy and avowed lawlessthose who view it from day ness as merely good subjects to day or learn it by the for a joke, and is ready to painful process of studying scoff at the axioms of polian adequate and faithful re- tical economy in order to conport of its proceedings. It is ciliate the forces of disorder; only by such a process that and how even the natural the lamentable confusion, the moderation and good sense of lack of consistency from day Mr Runciman can be betrayed to day, the reckless injustice, into imitations of the jaunty airily ignored by the apolo- autocracy of his predecessor as gists of the Government, which Minister of Education. The characterised the discussions on necessary attention to Parliathe Licensing Bill, could be mentary procedure cannot be seen in their true absurdity given too soon or too earnestly. Printed by William Blackwood and Sons. BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. No. MCXXI. MARCH 1909. VOL. CLXXXV. MOUNT ABU. BEFORE the inquiring Englishman has been in the East a year a suspicion is almost sure to be borne in upon him that India is more spiritual than Europe. It will either come through dipping in Oriental books or through conversation with some intelligent Hindu or Moslem, and for years he will be trying to square this new idea with what he knows of Eastern character through practical contact with it. Instinct, tradition, reason, will deny it, but something will whisper that this is prejudice, the Englishman's inability to see a different point of view; and the uneasiness left by the doubt will be kept awake by occasional glimpses behind the inscrutable Oriental mask. Then, may be, a Hindu will tell him plainly and politely in his own mother tongue that the English are barbarians, who VOL. CLXXXV.-NO. MCXXI. I. search out the means and miss the end of life; that the Oriental seeks unity, the Western differentiation; that the Oriental unites, while the Western separates, mind and matter; that the Oriental seeks to be caught up in the Universal, the Western to dominate the Particular. To which the Englishman may be prompted to reply that God will look after the Universal and man's business is with the Particular, and that the aggregate of good in the world depends upon his attention to it. One's first impressions of the East often last long. The maggot of national disparagement was put into my head a week after landing by a Hindu who answered my regret that the East and West could not understand each other better, and seemed to be drifting even farther apart, by saying X |