The next thing I can remember was being deep down under the water. It was very dark; nearly black. I fought to come up. I was terrified of being caught on some part of the ship and kept down. That was the worst moment of terror, the only moment of acute terror, that I knew. My wrist did catch on some rope. I was scarcely aware of it at the time, but I have the mark on me to this day.

At first I swallowed a lot of water; .then I remembered that I had read that one should not swallow water, so I shut my mouth. Something bothered me in my right hand and prevented me striking out with it; I discovered that it was the life belt I had been holding for my father. I let it go. As I reached the surface I grasped a little bit of board, quite thin, a few inches wide and perhaps two or three feet long. I thought this was keeping me afloat. I was wrong. My most excellent life belt was doing that.

Everything that happened after one had been submerged was a little misty and vague; one was slightly stupefied from then on. When I came to the surface I found that I formed part of a large, round, floating island composed of people and débris of all sorts, lying so close together that at first there was not very much water noticeable in between. People, boats, hencoops, chairs, rafts, boards, and goodness knows what besides, all floating cheek by jowl.

A man with a white face and a yellow moustache came and held on to the other end of my board. I did not quite like it, for I felt it was not large enough for two, but I did not feel justified in objecting. Every now and again he would try to move round toward my end of the board. This frightened me; I scarcely knew why at the time. I was probably quite right to be fright

to hold on to me. I summoned up my strength to speak was an effortand told him to go back to his own end, so that we might keep the board properly balanced. He said nothing and just meekly went back. After a while I noticed that he had disappeared. I don't know what had happened to him. He may have gone off to a hencoop which was floating near by. I don't know whether he had a life belt on or not. Somehow I think not.

Many people were praying aloud in a curious, unemotional monotone; others were shouting for help in much the same slow, impersonal chant: 'Bo-atbo-at-bo-at- I shouted for a minute or two; but it was obvious that there was no chance of any boat responding, so I soon desisted. One or two boats were visible, but they were a long way from where I was and clearly had all they could do to pick up the people close beside them. So far as I could see they did not appear to be moving much.

By and by my legs got bitterly cold, and I decided to try to swim to a boat so as to get them out of the cold water, but it was a big effort swimming. I can normally swim a few hundred yards, but I am not an expert swimmer. I only swam a few strokes and almost immediately gave up the attempt, because I did not see how I could get along without letting go of my piece of board, which nothing would have induced me to abandon.

There was no acute feeling of fear while one was floating in the water. I can remember feeling thankful that I had not been drowned underneath but had reached the surface safely, and thinking that even if the worst happened there could be nothing unbearable to go through now that my head was above the water. One's life belt held one up in a comfortable sitting

position with one's head lying rather pback, as if one were in a hammock. for One was a little dazed and rather stupid a and vague. I doubt whether any of the people in the water were acutely frightened or in any consciously unbearable agony of mind. When Death is as close as he was then, the sharp agony of fear is not there; the thing is too overnewhelming and stunning for that. do One had the sense of something takOing care of one- - I don't mean in the

in my case, at least to the fact that, being a very bad sailor, when presently a little swell got up I was seasick. I remember as I sat in the water I thought out an improvement which I considered should be adopted in the case of all life belts. There should be, I thought, a little bottle of chloroform strapped into each belt, so that one could inhale it and lose consciousness when one wished to. I must have been exceedingly uncomfortable before I thought of that.

The swell of the sea had the effect of I causing the close-packed island of wreckage and people to drift apart. Presently I was a hundred yards or more away from anyone else. I looked up at the sun, which was high in the sky, and wished that I might lose consciousness. I don't know how long after that it was that I did lose it, but that is the last thing I remember in the water.

The next thing I remember is lying naked between blankets on a deck in the dark. I was, I discovered later, on a tiny patrol-steamer named The Bluebell. Every now and again a sailor came and looked at me and said, "That's better.' I had a vague idea that something had happened, but I thought that I was still on the deck of the Lusitania, and I was vaguely annoyed that my own stewardess should not be attending to me instead of some unknown sailor. Gradually memory came back. The sailor offered me a cup of lukewarm tea, which I drank. We were on a teetotal vessel. There did not seem much wrong with me except that my whole body was shaking violently and my teeth were chattering like castanets, as I had never supposed teeth could chatter, and that I had a violent pain in the small of my back, which I suppose was rheumatism.

The sailor said he thought I had better go below, as it would be warmer. 'We left you up here to begin with,' he explained, 'as we thought you were dead and it did not seem worth while cumbering up the cabin with you.' There was some discussion as to how to get me down the cabin stairs. 'It took three men to lift you on board,' someone explained. I said that I thought I could walk; so, supported on either arm, and with a third man holding back my dripping hair, I managed to get down. I was put into the captain's bunk, whence someone rather further recovered was ejected to make room for

me.

The warmth below was delicious; it seemed to make one almost delirious. I should say that almost all of us down there were a little drunk with the heat and the light and the joy of knowing ourselves to be alive. We were talking at the tops of our voices and laughing a great deal. At one time I was talking and laughing with some woman when a sailor came in and asked if we had

lost anyone in the wreck. I can remember the sudden sobering with which we answered. I did not then know what had happened to my father: she was almost sure that her husband was drowned. He was, she had already told me, all she had in the world. It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking-up of her whole life, yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.

I can remember two exceptions to the general merriment. The captain of the Lusitania was among those rescued on our little boat, but I never heard him speak. The other exception was a woman, who sat silent in the outer cabin. Presently she began to speak. Quietly, gently, in a low rather monotonous voice, she described how she had lost her child. She had, so far as I can now recollect, been made to place him on a raft, which, owing to some mismanagement, had capsized. She considered that his death had been unnecessary; that it had been due to the lack of organization and discipline on board, and gently, dispassionately, she said so to the captain of the Lusitania. She further stated her intention of saying so publicly later. It seemed to me, fresh from that incompetent muddle on the Lusitania's deck, that she entirely proved her case. A sailor who came in to attend to me suggested that she was hysterical. She appeared to be the one person on board who was not.

It must have been about half-past nine at night when I came to myself on board The Bluebell. As to the interval, I heard afterward that I had been picked up at dusk by a rowing-boat; that in the gathering darkness they had very nearly missed me, but that by some curious chance a wicker chair had floated up under me, after I lost consciousness; that this had both helped to raise me farther out of the water than I should otherwise have floated, and so

likely enough saved my life by lessening the strain on me, and had made a slightly larger mark which had been noticed in the water, and they had rowed to it. The little boat had transferred me to The Bluebell. I was handed up to it along with a lot of dead bodies, but the midshipman who handed me on board said, 'I rather think there's some life in this woman; you'd better try and see.' So they did. They told me that when I recovered I went straight off to sleep without regaining consciousness and slept for two hours before I came to myself on the deck of The Bluebell in the dark.

We got into Queenstown Harbor about eleven. A man, the steward who had waited at our table on the Lusitania, came on board and told me that my father had been rescued and was already on shore. When we came alongside, the captain of The Bluebell came in and asked if I could go ashore, as he wanted to move on again. I said certainly, but not wrapped in one tiny blanket. Modesty, which had been completely absent for some hours, was beginning faintly to return. I said I could do it if only I had a couple of safety pins to fasten the thing together; but it was a man's ship, and the idea of safety pins just produced hoots of laughter.

Finally someone went ashore and borrowed a 'British Warm' from one of the soldiers on the quay. Clad in this, with the blanket tucked round my waist underneath it, and wearing the captain's carpet slippers, I started for the shore. The gangway was a difficult obstacle. It was so placed that it meant stepping up eighteen inches or possibly a couple of feet. I must have been pretty weak, for I had to get down on to my hands and knees and crawl on to it. At the other end of the gangway my father was waiting.

PARLIAMENTARY government has sunk into an abysm of discredit. It seems to have lost entirely the confidence of the public. In the nineteenth century nations made revolutions to establish parliamentary institutions and were convinced that they had discovered a final form of government. Even barbarous nations hastened to adopt a constitution and to set up a legislature as soon as they became ambitious to pose as civilized.

Is the parliamentary system, then, but an episode, a fugitive incident in the evolution of political life? Or is it exclusively a British product, impossible to acclimate upon the continent, thriving only in the hands of Englishmen and immersed in the fogs of London, and under the Gothic arches of Westminster? Or is our present constitutional crisis perhaps something more serious than the failure of any particular type of government?

In endeavoring to answer these questions we must bear in mind two contemporary phenomena: the growing complexity of government functions, demanding ever higher standards of efficiency, and the greater freedom and intelligence with which the modern public criticizes its rulers. The machinery of state, formerly comparatively simple, has become confusingly complicated. And that machinery, which was regarded as something mysterious and almost sacred by our ancestors, is now examined and tested with irreverent familiarity, and its remotest intricacies bared to the gaze of the curious and malevolent.

The charges brought against our present forms of constitutional government are not slanders. Experience confirms them. Any man can see for himself the inefficiency, the corruption, and the incompetence of our parliaments. The stupidest man on the street is aware of the corrupt, parasitic oligarchies that thrive like deadly fungi in the shadows of our legislative halls. We see these things with our own eyes. But no critic or investigator has yet found a better type of government to substitute for our present discredited machinery of state.

The breakdown of parliamentary institutions is no argument for returning to even worse systems of the past. It is nonsense to talk of reëstablishing the old-style monarchies. So critics of existing institutions are looking in the opposite direction for what they seek

to proletarian or bourgeois dictatorships or the deus ex machina of a providential man of destiny. But we should bear in mind one thing. Such times as these are propitious for the appearance of a Marius, a Sulla, a Cæsar, perhaps

but also of a Catiline. It will not do to trust too much to individuals masquerading in Cæsar's toga. A Cæsar, an Alexander, a Napoleon, is a rare apparition in history. Catilines are far more common.

Our critical generation of to-day, therefore, perceives clearly the faults of parliamentary institutions, and modern freedom of discussion makes these faults a matter of universal knowledge. Constitutionalism is now threatened by the very arms that it

has forged. To criticize the government to-day is a civic duty; to criticize the monarchies of old was a crime. We should not forget this difference. The fairest skin seen through a lens is as scarred and rough as the photograph of the moon. The skin of parliamentary government is not beautiful, but it is unjust to scan it under the magnifying glass of the present, and to scan other systems through the delusive medium of a romantic past. We must also bear in mind that the critical intelligence and free discussion of to-day are qualities that, once bestowed upon mankind, are difficult to take away. Our modern political institutions may decay-they are certain to undergo radical transformations; but free thought, free discussion, and critical intelligence will be hard to extinguish among the populace. You may perhaps change a citizen into a subject, but you will never be able to change him into a reverent vassal, persuaded that his king or emperor is infallible, or resigned to the consequences of the latter's errors. Henceforth a nation compelled to bow to a régime of force will never rest until its hour of liberation comes.

Let us grant, therefore, that modern democratic government is faulty and inefficient in many ways. But is not this inefficiency a universal phenomenon, due to the enormous complexity of the modern state? All governments had their capacity put to an extreme test during the World War. The nation that was first to collapse in both a military and a political sense- and not only was the first to collapse but was the most completely and definitely ruined was not a nation with parliamentary government, but an autocratic state governed by a personal ruler, a state theoretically designed for war. It was not the democracies of England and America, impatient of

military service and loath to gird on the sword; it was not the Republic of France with her factions; but Imperial Russia, armed with all the powers of absolutism, that failed to meet the test.

Therefore, we feel warranted in believing that the present crisis is not so much a crisis of constitutional and democratic government as a crisis of government itself. And it is logical that governments should be most severely criticized precisely in those countries where criticism is most intelligent in those countries possessing democratic institutions.

Two great reactionary movements against parliamentary government, two experiments in direct action, are occupying the attention of the world to-day; and they are most instructive. One of them, in Russia, has resulted in the disarticulation of a society that, in spite of the appalling defects of its political structure, did function after a fashion previously. The other, in Italy, presents quite different features. Fascism did not aim to overthrow the constitution. It has preserved existing institutions, and has superimposed itself upon them. In this it has followed the precedent of the political revolutions of ancient Rome, which began with the dictatorships of Marius and Sulla, and culminated in the Empire.

Republican institutions did vanish in the first century before Christ they wasted away without entirely ceasing to exist. The Roman Senate did not lose all its authority until the Empire became an Oriental despotism. Throughout the reign of the Western Emperors it regained great influence for brief periods. The Emperor was, by a fiction, the representative of the republic. Similarly, Porfirio Diaz was nominally a constitutional president in Mexico. But even the shadows of outlived democracy