AGO
 
 NOVISSIMA 
 VERBA 1920
 
 NOVISSIMA VERBA: 
 
 LAST WORDS 
 
 1920 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC HARRISON 
 
 D.C.L., LITT.D., LL.D. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
 
 PR 
 <4H 
 Hf 
 
 first published in 1921 
 
 (All rights reserved) 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRAS
 
 TO 
 
 THE EARL OF ROSEBERY 
 K.G. &c. &c. 
 
 18891921
 
 PREFATORY 
 
 These Notes on events and books of the day were 
 published in the "Fortnightly Review" month by 
 month during the year 1920. It was not found neces- 
 sary to make any addition, excision, or qualification 
 to comments which, by the courtesy of the 
 " Review," are now issued as they appeared at the 
 time. After very careful consideration, I offer these 
 essays as my deliberate judgment on urgent problems 
 of State, still far from solution or settlement. 
 
 F. H. 
 
 Bath, October, 1921.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAQE 
 
 I - 9 
 
 II - 22 
 
 III - - 40 
 
 iv - 56 
 
 v - 68 
 
 vi - 83 
 
 VH - 99 
 
 vm - 118 
 
 IX - - 135 
 
 X - 153 
 
 Xi - - 169 
 
 XII 187
 
 JANUARY 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 1TAKE up again my pen to record the occasional 
 Thoughts which strike a very old observer of 
 current events in the world of change and storm 
 in which we live. When I noted them in the last year 
 of the great war (Obiter Scripta, Chapman and Hall, 
 1919) the dominant fact was that " a war of Classes 
 was about to supersede the war of Nations." The 
 Russian Revolution had sent a thrill of expectation 
 through the democracy of the human race. There 
 was coming on, I said, " a new Social Order as deep 
 and as wide as any in the history of civilisation." Two 
 years have passed. And all these things seem to have 
 increased tenfold. Russian revolution has been fol- 
 lowed by that of Germany and of Austria. King- 
 doms, Constitutions, Churches, peoples are in chaos. 
 Above all, the relations of the great and the small 
 nations, of Capital and of Labour, of trade and taxa- 
 tion, of the State and the citizen, seem about to con- 
 vulse civilisation. 
 
 I never joined the early enthusiasm for a League of 
 Nations. It seemed to me to be premature impos-
 
 10 NOVISSIMA VERSA 
 
 sible in the actual moral conditions of nations. In 
 May, 1918, I wrote thus : " A general and peaceful 
 League of Nations will never be formed until the con- 
 version of mankind to a purer moral and religious 
 form of life." It was the dream of an eloquent pro- 
 fessor who roused grand hopes in the people into 
 which practical statesmen were drawn and almost 
 forced to take part. In the golden age of Democracy 
 the cool sense of political wisdom is swept away. 
 Could nations work in harmony whilst old hatreds, 
 ambitions, fears, jealousies, and greeds remained un- 
 tamed? So far from curing them, the war had vastly 
 stimulated them. When, after an orgy of glorifica- 
 tion, amiabilities, and rhetoric, the Nations at last 
 met in conference in Paris, the old passions and 
 desires were bent on mastery. 
 
 The world was kept in the dark whilst for six 
 months the so-called deliberations went on. They 
 were really disputes^ changes, compromises, rather 
 than deliberations. The grandiose Covenant of the 
 President with his Fourteen Points was an academic 
 programme with no statesmanship of concrete know- 
 ledge and foresight behind it. As applied to the real 
 facts of the world, it needed incessant modification, 
 reservations, exceptions, wherein the splendid 
 enthusiasm of Mr. Wilson was continually baffled by 
 diplomatists, who seemed to be using a tongue that 
 he hardly understood. The statesmen and the soldiers 
 of France insisted on strategic guarantees ; Britain
 
 LAST WORDS 11 
 
 was bound to claim separate membership for her 
 Dominions, and had to keep Ireland, Egypt, Syria, 
 and India out of the self-determination formula ; Italy 
 was keen for the old Hun doctrine of grab ; Japan 
 was out for Pacific islands and a good slice of China. 
 In the midst of these very human Powers the Presi- 
 dent stood for international Brotherhood. He had a 
 hard time of it ! 
 
 Clearly the only real statesman there was our Prime 
 Minister. His energy, rapid intelligence, versatility, 
 sense of realities, patience, self-command, and de- 
 bating power over and over again saved the situation 
 and dominated the Conference. He made the Presi- 
 dent see the hard facts that stood before his visions. 
 He made the ' ' Tiger ' ' feel that soldiers must not 
 override political necessities. He withstood Italian 
 bandits and Polish, Roumanian, and Hungarian 
 ambition. His obvious ignorance of the old Balance 
 of Power, and his fortunate innocence of diplomatic 
 vice made him the proper moderator of a new Europe 
 and the childhood of young nations. These gifts 
 made him as completely master of the Conference as 
 Bismarck ever was at Berlin. It is a misfortune that 
 Mr. Lloyd George is impulsive, almost too much the 
 opportunist, the too- willing servant of the democracy 
 he loves and from which he rose. Withal, he is the 
 new leader of a new time.
 
 12 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Mr. Wilson made fatal mistakes which stamp him 
 as a pretentious amateur in State-craft. He came 
 over with nothing but a vague Utopia, of which he 
 had not worked out either the details or the obstacles. 
 Next, he refused to accept the co-operation of ex- 
 perienced men opposed to him in party, and even of 
 influential men of his own party. He affected to act 
 as an autocrat ; and Europe was long ready to accept 
 him as Dictator. He absented himself from his 
 proper duties and his own people, so that for months 
 he saw his authority to speak for America passing 
 away into bitter opposition and distrust. He dragged 
 the unwieldy Covenant into the Treaty, wasting 
 months when the enemy were regaining their co- 
 hesion, and almost risked thereby a renewal of the 
 war. Finally, in the Conference, his ignorance of 
 the European imbroglio and his constant change of 
 plan reduced the action of the Powers to apathy, in- 
 consistencies, procrastination, and discredit. 
 
 I am not judging Woodrow Wilson as an Ameri- 
 can statesman. He is clearly one of the noblest 
 enthusiasts in the public Leaders of the world. His 
 view of the dominant authority of a President of the 
 Republic is entirely right ; and his proud insistence 
 on unity of control is a true gospel in these days of 
 anarchic inconstancy and servility to every gust of 
 opinion. As an American President he is a worthy 
 successor of Washington, and for the simpler and 
 localised problems of the Republic he was almost an
 
 LAST WORDS 13 
 
 ideal Chief Executive. But when he came to recast 
 European civilisation, he was the Professor, the 
 essayist, the idealist he ever was ; and he undertook a 
 task for which he had no experience, and in which he 
 was at fault. He is a great orator, but no debater : a 
 great moralist, preacher, inspirer but, like Demos- 
 thenes, Cicero, or Burke, he failed when he brought 
 his idealism to compose the world after an awful war 
 and a yet more sinister revolution. Idealists ruin 
 things when they meddle with European convulsions, 
 as the Tsar Alexander, Joseph II., and many more 
 have found. Wilson has gone far to ruin Europe. 
 ****** 
 
 At the moment of the Armistice the victorious 
 Powers were paramount masters, and the Republic 
 and its President were acknowledged as their Head. 
 They could have made they ought to have made a 
 conclusive Peace with the enemy in November, or at 
 latest in December. Instead of that, they wasted two 
 months in parades, banquets, oratory, and progresses 
 in which Wilson figured as the Grand Pacificator. 
 In coming to Europe he was bound to show that he 
 had united all parties at home, as did Lloyd George, 
 and that he fully represented the Republic. We took 
 his word for it till the crash came, like an aeroplane 
 when the pilot has lost control. The tragedy was 
 the result of over-weening arrogance and practical 
 impotence in great statesmanship. 
 
 ****** 
 
 In the end of 1918 the one thing urgent was Peace. 
 Instead of making peace, Wilson led the nations and
 
 14 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 their rulers to discuss his vague scheme of a Pacific 
 League, as if the Conference were an International 
 Congress of Jurists. He went about trying to indoc- 
 trinate the public of Europe with the Idealism of 
 Peace much as in America he sought to indoctrinate 
 the citizens with the Idealism, first of Neutrality and 
 then of War to save Democracy. If there is one 
 lesson in strategy the war has taught, it is the neces- 
 sity of suddenness, of rapidity, of unity, of secrecy 
 the supreme power of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, 
 Cromwell, and Foch. But, as dominated by Wilson, 
 the lessons of peace learned by the Conferences were 
 dilatory discussion, change of plan, impracticable 
 promises, postponed decisions. Europe, America, 
 the world would have hailed a definite peace made in 
 1918. Wilson forced on us a truly idealist Covenant, 
 which could not get to work until after 1920 if it 
 can ever work then. The Paris Conference dragged 
 on like that of Vienna until Napoleon left Elba. 
 The opponents in the Senate have a very strong case 
 against the Covenant : a practical Peace they would 
 have willingly accepted. Its danger to us all is 
 evident new wars, unrest, impossible tasks, and dis- 
 appointment if not despair lurk in every class. 
 If, by the double tragedy of Wilson's ignorance, 
 obstinacy, presumption, and his physical collapse, the 
 League of Nations is not yet dead, it is postponed at 
 least for months whilst chaos is at hand, and the vast 
 burden of the League of Nations is thrown on Eng- 
 land and France. 
 
 ******
 
 LAST WORDS 15 
 
 The war, and many documents, books and revela- 
 tions of our time, have deeply changed the estimate 
 of Frederick the Great which Carlyle in the 'sixties 
 sought to establish. The King, as we see now, gave 
 a great development to, though he was not at all the 
 author of, Prussian militarism that has brought Euro- 
 pean civilisation so near to ruin. But, though 
 Frederick enlarged the system he inherited, he is not 
 responsible for the monstrous orgy of public crimes 
 which his successors brought upon the world. One of 
 the latest studies of the Prussian King is the Life by 
 Norwood Young (Constable and Co., 8vo., 1919). 
 This book, with all its industry and vigorous reason- 
 ing, is rather an indictment than an impartial history. 
 Frederick was neither a blunderer, a poltroon, nor a 
 monster but a consummate master of the evil craft 
 in which he and his contemporaries were steeped. 
 Mr. Young made the same error as Carlyle for his 
 Life of Frederick deals solely with his wars. The 
 three wars occupied only ten of the forty-six years 
 of his reign. Of the thirty-six years of peace in which 
 he reorganised Prussia and raised it to be the best- 
 governed State of the eighteenth century, Carlyle told 
 us not much. Mr. Young tells us almost nothing. 
 
 The estimates of George Eliot called out by her 
 centenary support, I think, what I have said in more 
 than one review of her work that her reputation will 
 surely, but slowly, revive from the depreciation into 
 which younger generations, a new atmosphere, and a
 
 16 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 more hustling life has cast it down of late. Again, 
 sound criticism agrees with me in holding that her 
 supreme gifts are in her earlier, lesser, and rural 
 romances, not in the greater stories of her famous 
 age. Though Romola is artificial, Middlemarch over- 
 crowded with banalities, and Daniel Deronda un- 
 pleasant, her work as a whole will appeal to a cultured 
 and serious audience as having a peculiar and noble 
 form of romance. As do Milton and Wordsworth, 
 she will retain her own body of readers, more select 
 than numerous. And this will be a permanent light 
 in English literature. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I am deeply interested in the Outspoken Essays of 
 the Dean of St. Paul's (Longmans, 1919). The new 
 study of Our Present Discontents is indeed an inde- 
 pendent survey of our chaotic condition by one who 
 is at once a religious reformer and a social philosopher. 
 It is not for me to analyse the essays on St. Paul, the 
 Churches of Rome and of England, Cardinal New- 
 man, Dr. Gore, and personal survival. But the Dean's 
 unsparing review of current Democracy, Patriotism, 
 Birth-rate, the Future of our Race, must command 
 attention and rebuke the popular optimism of poli- 
 ticians and journalists who live by pleasing con- 
 stituents and readers. The motto of this book, from 
 Euripides, is axXtjp' aXr^. Much of it is, indeed, " a 
 hard saying." In such times as ours, what we want 
 are true things, however hard. It is the only chance 
 of life.
 
 LAST WORDS 17 
 
 It is a hopeful sign to find a popular Prelate of our 
 ancient Church attacking with resolute vigour and in 
 a scientific spirit such complex social problems as 
 Population, the statistics of birth and maternity, the 
 future of our Race, Emigration, the Empire, 
 Patriotism and international Brotherhood. What 
 popular catchwords, what favourite nostrums, and 
 mendacious fallacies are cut to the bone by the Dean's 
 masterly use of the logical knife ! Withal, he speaks 
 as a priest should, his scientific knowledge infused 
 with religion as well as with morality. There is 
 nothing in it of the vagueness of the popular sermon, 
 of the sentimentalism of the philanthropist. It is the 
 voice of a thinker on society who is entirely ' ' out- 
 spoken," who is not afraid to tell truths to which the 
 ignorant masses are blind, and which the experienced 
 are apt to conceal or disguise. 
 
 The most terrible of his forecasts is the picture he 
 draws of the future of the English race. " We are 
 witnessing the decline of the industrial revolution of 
 160 years ago. The cancer of Industrialism has begun 
 to mortify, and the end is in sight " (p. 101). In 
 some 200 years, he says, the vicious Industrialism in 
 which we live will have worked out its own exhaus- 
 tion. The reckless waste of our coal, the concen- 
 trating life in unwholesome cities, and the ambition 
 of organised Labour to get more in material value 
 than it chooses to produce will force our impossible 
 population to be reduced and take to country life to
 
 18 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 grow food. It is a dismal forecast depending on 
 the condition if statesmen, workmen, and capitalists 
 all continue to hold by their present habits and ideas. 
 For my part, I think 200 years rather too liberal a 
 limit of time. 
 
 The recent revolution in our Parliamentary system 
 has delivered over Britain and the Empire to millions 
 of men and women who are utterly ignorant both of 
 economic certainties and of international relations. 
 These millions are really tame, well-meaning, poten- 
 tial Bolshevists if the essence of Bolshevism is the 
 purpose to give the manual labourers the sole control 
 of all labour and the entire enjoyment of the product 
 of their work. To this Marxian result politicians, 
 philanthropists, and social reformers combine to lead 
 by a series of graduated and disguised surrenders. 
 They promise, compromise, and capitulate. It is the 
 " bedside manner " of our Ministers. 
 
 I would not say that mortification has begun, and 
 I look for a recovery of health within two generations 
 rather than 200 years. But in my darker hours I can 
 see a vision of our glorious England reduced, after 
 passing through long and cruel sufferings, to be forced 
 to grow its own food, to live again in pure air and in 
 touch with Nature, and without the rage for artificial 
 enjoyments. Our beautiful, but very moderate, 
 island would be more like Ireland, or even like
 
 LAST WORDS 19 
 
 Holland after its decline at the end of the seventeenth 
 century. Many States of our English race will be 
 prosperous and growing in many parts of the globe. 
 In the meantime, half our present population will 
 enjoy a stationary condition of health, contentment, 
 and peace. The fate of the other half is silence. 
 
 The Dean, as I have said, is quite as much a re- 
 former in religious as in social organisation. Indeed, 
 the larger part of his book is devoted to movements 
 in Churches, Roman and Anglican, and to the 
 spiritual problems of mysticism and immortality. 
 With these I have no business to deal. But, as a 
 Churchman, Dean Inge is quite as outspoken as he is 
 on Socialism. " A profound reconstruction is de- 
 manded," he says. "The new type of Christianity 
 will be more Christian than the old, because it will 
 be more moral " (p. 135, essay on Bishop Gore and 
 the Church of England). We all want to see in detail 
 the Dean's new type of Christianity. 
 
 I have enjoyed the essay on the Greek Anthology 
 in Sir Edward Cook's new (and, alas ! his last) book, 
 More Literary Recreations (Macmillan, 1919) a very 
 pleasant book of literary criticism, which challenges 
 thought even if we do not accept all its verdicts. His 
 account of these exquisite short poems, and of the 
 incessant attempts to translate them, occupies more 
 than a third of the book. These pages, with about 
 100 pages on Classical quotations and Pliny's Letters, 
 make delightful reading. Would that our young
 
 20 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 poets of to-day would study these epigrams and 
 mottoes their clarity, simplicity, restraint, pathos. 
 Not a word is wasted in needless epithets, not a line 
 but has a plain thought, startling in its brevity, and 
 yet haunting the memory by its grace. The history 
 of this wonderful collection is a key to the Greek 
 genius by the long ages over which it lived, and 
 grew, the various lands and the diverse types of cul- 
 ture in which it flourished. 
 
 The non-scientific public is quite right in taking a 
 lively interest in Professor Einstein's new theory of 
 Space, but quite wrong if they ask to have the theory 
 made plain to them. In detail, it can only be made 
 intelligible to those who are versed in the higher 
 mathematics, and indeed the very recent learning 
 inter apices of the highest mathematics. They who 
 carefully study all that has been published by Pro- 
 fessor Eddington, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Crommelin, 
 Professor Wildon Carr, and others in the Times, may 
 see three things : (1) that a profound shock has been 
 given to current ideas about Space, Time, and all 
 absolute theories about the Universe ; (2) that for 
 practical purposes our ordinary geometry and 
 astronomy need hardly any correction ; (3) that they 
 who desire to follow out Professor Einstein's vast, 
 subtle, and intricate calculations must steep them- 
 selves in the very recent geometry of four dimensions 
 and the like mysterious novelties.
 
 LAST WORDS 21 
 
 For myself, making no pretension to such learning, 
 I am interested only in the signal reaction of the new 
 theory on the general philosophy of the Relative. All 
 the more so, because exactly fifty years ago I wrote 
 an essay to show that all absolute ideas about Space, 
 Time, the Universe, or the geometric and physical 
 conditions of the world outside the range of our imme- 
 diate observations are futile. " We have not, and 
 cannot have, any proof that our laws of nature and of 
 things exist outside of the human mind in the mode 
 in which we conceive them." "Does the Infinite 
 Universe through Space conform to the modes of 
 mind of the human mites which inhabit this planetary 
 speck? ' ; The objective order of the Universe, I 
 wrote, may be utterly different from our conceptions 
 of it : even Space, Time, ^Ether, Gravitation are only 
 our human ideas, the best explanation of our observa- 
 tions we have yet given. It is possible they are only 
 our dreams. For myself, the Einstein "revolution 
 in science " has given me no shock. It only falls in 
 with the philosophy of Relativity which I have 
 preached all my life.
 
 FEBRUARY 
 
 1920 
 
 II 
 
 PEACE is made by us with some of our 
 enemies ! peace is not made by the biggest 
 and most powerful of our comrades in war. 
 Peace is made but not rest. Peace opens a vast 
 array of most arduous and menacing problems. Our 
 condition seems more full of toil and peril than it 
 was in the autumn of 1918. In the first place, the so- 
 called Treaty of Peace and its monstrous Covenant 
 are impossible, ruinous, suicidal and must at once 
 be recast. To modify it in detail is not enough. It 
 must be recast, and that in the absence of its principal 
 author. And then, inextricably entangled in the 
 Treaty and the Covenant, tremendous obligations lie 
 on us to reconstruct nations in Europe and in Asia. 
 At the same time, our own Parliamentary system is 
 in dissolution within and without ; and Labour prob- 
 lems are at least as numerous, as urgent, and as per- 
 plexing as they ever before have been. On Britain 
 there lies a task as heavy as any in its long, glorious 
 
 history. 
 
 **#*** 
 
 22
 
 LAST WORDS 23 
 
 The withdrawal of the American Republic from 
 the cause of the Allies even if it be not final but 
 temporary has reduced Europe to a series of 
 dilemmas. The Treaty of Peace hangs on the 
 Covenant ; the Covenant hangs on an effective 
 League of Nations ; the operative League of Nations 
 was designed to meet the action of Mr. Wilson, who 
 is designated to summon the Sessions, as also he was 
 the official and irremovable President of the United 
 States. In this colossal stale-mate of all the Great 
 Powers little really permanent can be settled. Their 
 vast schemes of reconstruction are still hardly more 
 than drafts and programmes. These vast schemes 
 were feasible only by the enormous forces and the 
 paramount authority which they held collectively at 
 the Armistice. In November, 1918, they had five 
 millions of men in arms flushed with victory, and 
 nothing but desperate rabbles to resist them. They 
 could have imposed their terms on all Europe. Four- 
 teen months have passed. The people clamoured to 
 be demobilised ; the five millions are now hardly one 
 million. For a year the Powers have wrangled and 
 intrigued against each other. Their credit is gone ; 
 they are defied, insulted, and tricked ; their own 
 people complain and threaten them at home. And 
 the only one of the Powers which was not exhausted 
 and ruined will have no more to do with them, and 
 refuses to share in the awful responsibilities she has 
 drawn on them.
 
 24 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 For the moment it is in vain to hope that the 
 American people will soon relent and bring help, in 
 vain to call upon the League of Nations. As well 
 call upon Baal. Until the League is a solid, united, 
 and recognised power, with international authority, 
 and controlling at least armies of a million or more, 
 perfectly equipped, they can do nothing except 
 perorate and pass more orders. They have not one- 
 tenth of the force and the prestige they possessed in 
 1918. They can raise no new armies, no more Vic- 
 tory Loans. They are war- weary and almost in- 
 solvent. Whilst they talk of reorganising the Middle 
 Europe, settling in peace the Balkans, removing the 
 Turkish Power from Europe, protecting Armenia, 
 Syria and Palestine, reconstructing Persia and Meso- 
 potamia do they realise that any one of these may 
 mean a new war? Still more, do they realise that our 
 new masters, twenty millions of voters, the advancing 
 party of labour, will vote neither men nor money for 
 war? 
 
 The key to the Labour problems of the world lies 
 in the attitude of workmen to the principles as well 
 as to the practice of the Soviet Government of Russia. 
 None but the more violent groups of Socialists have 
 anything but repudiation of the ferocious tyranny 
 with which Lenin and Trotsky are trying to carry out 
 the fundamental doctrines of the Marxian creed. 
 The important question is How far do Socialists 
 generally hold by the basis of the Bolshevist system
 
 LAST WORDS 25 
 
 the domination of society by the manual labourers, 
 by force, if and when possible and necessary? Light 
 may be thrown on this by studying a book put out by 
 the Independent Labour Party in their Library and 
 published by the National Labour Press of Man- 
 chester, London, and Leicester The Dictatorship 
 of the Proletariat, by Paul Kautsky, now translated 
 by H. J. Stenning. Kautsky, as the editor very truly 
 says, is the most eminent Socialist writer of the Con- 
 tinent. An Austrian by birth, he lived in Germany 
 and in England, has worked all his life with the 
 Minority Socialists, edited the remains of Karl Marx, 
 and in 1882 founded the Neue Zeit. 
 
 Karl Kautsky is the ablest and most systematic ex- 
 ponent of Socialism of the Marxian type, of which he 
 is, with some differences, the legitimate heir. His 
 book, which is a criticism of Russian Bolshevism, was 
 published just before the Armistice of 1918 in Vienna. 
 The preface to the English translation, whilst admit- 
 ting that " they have made mistakes," that the Soviet 
 Government " have accomplished wonderful achieve- 
 ments," warns British Socialists of the difference 
 between the conditions of Russia and those in 
 Western countries, " between what may be expedient 
 as a temporary measure and what is best for stable 
 conditions." Kautsky 's whole argument, which is 
 close and judicial, is that the dictatorship of the 
 Soviets is not democracy, but is the tyranny of a sec- 
 tion only of the proletariat, explained and perhaps
 
 26 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 justified by the local conditions of the Russian people, 
 but is not true Socialism, and is not possible in 
 Western nations where democracy is established. 
 "Democracy and Dictatorship are irreconcilable," 
 he says, "and the whole proletariat of the world is 
 attached to the principle of general democracy." 
 Lenin's dictatorship is not democratic and " Social- 
 ism without democracy is unthinkable." 
 
 Karl Kautsky is ready to hail the ascendancy of 
 Society by the proletariat and their control of the 
 State, if it be secured by democracy and not by dic- 
 tatorship. The Russian Revolution " has for the first 
 time in the history of the world made a Socialist 
 Party the rulers of a great Empire." " No wonder 
 that the proletarians of all countries have hailed Bol- 
 shevism. The reality of proletarian rule weighs 
 heavier in the scale than theoretical considerations." 
 But the error of Bolshevists is in obtaining rule by the 
 wrong methods by imposing a dictatorship which 
 denies liberty to all, defies other proletarians, and 
 does not include peasants. To assume that these dic- 
 tatorial methods are applicable to Western nations is 
 the defiance of democracy and is false Marxism. 
 Marx always thought it possible that in England and 
 America ' ' the proletariat might peacefully conquer 
 political power." " Confining the outlook to trade 
 interests narrows the mind, and this is one of the 
 drawbacks to mere Trade Unionism." " Democracy 
 signifies rule of majority, but not less the protection
 
 LAST WORDS 27 
 
 of minorities." Kautsky's book forms a manifesto of 
 rational Socialism which is this. The methods of 
 the Soviets in Russia are wrong : their ultimate pur- 
 pose is right. It is the control of the State by the 
 manual labourers of the cities, but not including those 
 who till the soil. 
 
 There is such a flux of occasional poetry in crypto- 
 grams which looks very like poetry, but is often in 
 harsh discords and hard to understand that it is re- 
 freshing to come upon verses which have the true ring 
 of melodious phrase and clear graceful thought. I 
 notice in the Spectator of January 10th four stanzas, 
 signed Evelyn Grant-Duff, which seem to me to be 
 the genuine thing : 
 
 TO A KINGFISHER. 
 
 A splash, a dart, a gleam of blue, 
 A spray of jewels rainbow hue, 
 Between the rushes gray and bare, 
 Sweet little sapphire of the air. 
 
 Thou flashest 'gainst the Western sky 
 Where the once lovely colours die, 
 Their sunset death and eerie mist 
 Hangs o'er the waters thou hast kissed. 
 
 Would that our young bards would give us some 
 more like that. 
 
 I was one of the very first to honour the genius of 
 Thomas Hardy. I have indeed long studied his
 
 28 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 philosophic insight almost more than his romances or 
 his poems. In both there is the substratum and 
 undertone of a serious thinker on human life albeit 
 of the dismal school of Lucretius. Long since recog- 
 nised as the accepted doyen in the art of romance, 
 Thomas Hardy has always seemed to me to have a 
 high poetic imagination that no one since Browning 
 has shown. The Dynasts present a Miltonic world- 
 drama such as rises far beyond the reach of Tenny- 
 son, Swinburne, or any contemporary poet. For 
 years past we Hardy it es have seen in the reviews, 
 magazines, and journals short poems that could be 
 instantly recognised as his without any signature at 
 all. With all his range of subject, from the world 
 around and Nature before us, the conception and the 
 tone were always his own, like no other man's. It 
 was therefore with peculiar interest that I took up the 
 new volume of Lyrics (Macmillan and Co., 1919). 
 
 It is an amazing evidence of fertility, even in mass 
 and variety of subject. This first volume of Collected 
 Poems has 521 pages, and about the same number of 
 separate poems. They range over more than fifty 
 years. The scene is mostly Wessex, of which every 
 hill and dale, every moor and down, village and farm, 
 church and graveyard (especially the graveyards), in- 
 spire thoughts. What Lakeland was to Wordsworth, 
 that, as we all know, Wessex is to Thomas Hardy. 
 If the field of vision is limited to two or three counties 
 in South- West England, the immediate subject is of
 
 LAST WORDS 29 
 
 almost infinite variety from the vault of heaven and 
 ideal space to the smallest flower, bird, tree, or pond, 
 the humblest byre, sheepfold, doorstep, or head- 
 stone. We, who have looked out for these occasional 
 lyrics in magazines, knew how, as Wordsworth says, 
 the meanest flower that blows touches the poet's 
 heart. Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson, saw unutter- 
 able meaning in the simplest things. So too, in a rare 
 sense, does Thomas Hardy. This volume is one long 
 hymn to the poetry seen by him in his native home. 
 
 It is not on the poetic beauty of these lyrics that I 
 wish to dwell ; nor shall my reverence for the poet's 
 genius and my love for an old friend prevent me from 
 speaking my whole mind. We saw that these lyrics 
 were always pitched in a very minor key. Sorrow, 
 regret, disappointment, pessimism, despair, the 
 grave, the dead, ghosts and the after- world, was the 
 burden of all. And these were broken only by wild 
 tales of revenge, murder, treachery, gibbet, and jail 
 fierce love, savage penalty, and brutal crimes of 
 rude peasants. These lyrics were gloomy but full of 
 power and tragic poetry. They took high place beside 
 Shelley's Cenci and Stanzas in Dejection, or Tenny- 
 son's The Sisters and his Rizpah. Yes ! but in these 
 500 lyrics of Thomas Hardy there is almost nothing 
 else. This is too much. Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, 
 Tennyson, could be weird and sad enough at times, 
 but the world and man had other meanings for them, 
 and they often revelled in nature, with hope, and joy
 
 30 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 and love. But in this mass of lyrical effusion, Nature 
 is a graveyard ; man is a hopeless mystery ; love works 
 out tragedies; Death ends all but it leaves ghastly 
 wraiths on earth. 
 
 One heading might serve as title for nearly every 
 poem in this collection. It is Memento Mori. He 
 says : 
 
 TO LIFE. 
 
 Life with the sad seared face, 
 I weary of seeing thee. 
 
 1 know what thou would'st tell 
 Of Death, Time, Destiny. 
 
 (p. 107.) 
 
 This is the idea, the refrain, of the whole series. The 
 Earth is " the torn troubled form I know as thine." 
 There are bridals but Nature cares not if they turn 
 out well or ill. One wedding ends in a fire and leaves 
 the bridegroom " a charred bone." The lover goes 
 to wed his bride. He is met on his way by her phan- 
 tom, i.e., his ideal image of her ; when he reaches her 
 house he finds her "pinched and thin" she is the 
 real woman of fact, of flesh and blood, the other was 
 only his fancy. So the poet said to Love " depart 
 thou, Love" "thou hast features pitiless, and iron 
 daggers of distress." Love replies that his departure 
 would end Man's race. " So let it be, Mankind shall 
 cease." Well! but this is a veritable "Dance of 
 Death." As in the famous monkish myths, pictures,
 
 LAST WORDS 81 
 
 or tombs, Death is supreme Lord. The rich, the 
 powerful, the beautiful, the happy, the joyous, the 
 bride, the mother, the lover, the illustrious, the lowly, 
 all have the grim Skeleton beside them. So medieval 
 mystics saw human life. So Thomas Hardy seems 
 (in poetry) to see it. 
 
 ****** 
 
 This is not Byron's pose, nor the moaning of 
 Shelley and Keats. Byron, Shelley, Keats, were all 
 exiles from home, decried, destined to early death 
 abroad. And yet their pessimism was occasional. 
 But Thomas Hardy has everything that man can wish 
 long and easy life, perfect domestic happiness, 
 warm friends, the highest honour his Sovereign can 
 give, the pride of a wide countryside. We know him 
 as a warm friend, a gracious host, rich with every kind 
 of public and private virtue. To me at least, he never 
 looked so mournful as in the photograph in this 
 volume ; nor did I ever hear from his lips the weird 
 wail of these verses. There is no affectation in them. 
 They are his own inmost thoughts his philosophy of 
 life. This monotony of gloom, with all its poetry, is 
 not human, not social, not true. 
 
 Such plain speaking pains me, and I must justify 
 it. His song to Annabel is " leave her to her fate, 
 Till the Last Trump, farewell." '* I look into my 
 glass And view my wasting skin, And say : Would 
 God it came to pass, My heart had shrunk as thin ! ' 
 
 He meets Despair and says, that black and lean
 
 82 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 may be earth, yet the heavens are bright. No ! cries 
 the Thing it is night above too ! Jubilate is a poem 
 of the dead in a churchyard coming up out of their 
 graves to dance and sing. Christmas Eve brings up 
 a buried soldier to ask why is it called " Anno 
 Domini"? When the Earth is at last extinct and 
 become " a corpse," the Lord will repent having 
 " made Earth, and life, and Man." In a churchyard, 
 the dead "mixed to human jam," complain of the 
 new parson levelling the sward and moving their 
 memorial stones. The curate secures that an old 
 pauper going to the workhouse shall not be separated 
 from his wife. Why ! to be separated, he says, is the 
 one thing that reconciles me to the House ! Roses 
 from the Riviera in winter are pleasant but, poor 
 things, they will rot in our cold land. 
 
 The poor birds, too, have the same fate waiting 
 them as man and flowers have. Shelley's Skylark may 
 thrill us with rapture. But near Leghorn it is fallen 
 to earth " a pinch of unseen, unguarded dust : a 
 little ball of feather and bone." The bullfinches sing 
 from dawn till evening, but they do not know of 
 " All things making for Death's taking ! ' So, too, 
 the dear little robin is a happy bird in a shining sky 
 but in heavy snow, says he, "I turn to a cold stiff 
 feathery ball." The titles of the lyrics suggest the 
 same tale. " Revulsion," " Her Death and After," 
 "Friends Beyond," "The Souls of the Slain," 
 "Doom and She," "God-forgotten," "By the
 
 LAST WORDS 88 
 
 Earth's Corpse," " The Levelled Churchyard," " In 
 Tenebris, I., II., III.," " I have lived with Shades," 
 "Bereft," "The Flirt's Tragedy," "The Dead 
 Man Walking," "He abjures Love," "The Dead 
 Quire," "The Vampirine Fair," "After the Last 
 Breath," " Before Life and After," " The Unborn " 
 are warned not to be born, " The Ghost of the Past," 
 "God's Funeral," "Ah! are you digging on my 
 grave?" "The Obliterate Tomb," "The Choir- 
 master's Burial," " For Life I had never cared 
 greatly," " The coming of the end." 
 
 At the coronation of King George V. the buried 
 kings and queens below ask what the noise and dis- 
 turbance mean. At his funeral King Edward VII. 
 soliloquises that perhaps if he were to live again he 
 would rather be a plain man. Vanitas Vanitatum. 
 It is not so much Mors janua Vitae, as it is rather 
 Vita janua Mortis. And the Portal opens to the 
 Nether- world, not to any world above. 
 
 We do not shrink from the poetry of sorrow but 
 we want something else. The Inferno should lead up 
 to Paradiso. But in these 500 poems there is little 
 happiness, joy, or hope save the mirth in some 
 soldiers' songs and fair-time jaunts. I say nothing of 
 the form, which is always vigorous, rare, and of 
 unique quality. Only I regret that, like Meredith, 
 Hardy follows the bad example of Browning, who 
 would deliberately fashion verses of harsh discord. 
 
 Here are many poems without a trace of melody. 
 
 3
 
 34 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 And there are pieces in this volume which are painful 
 to see; too gruesome, even cynical. "Time's 
 Laughingstocks " has some cruel pieces '* A Sun- 
 day Morning Tragedy " and others, such as " The 
 Ruined Maid " ; the fifteen " Satires," pp. 391-398 ; 
 "Her Death and After." But, certainly, " Pan- 
 thera " is a myth with a Satanic grin which should 
 never be unearthed to-day. 
 
 My philosophy of life is more cheerful and hopeful 
 than that of these Lyrics but they do not at all 
 diminish my entire admiration for The Dynasts and 
 for the Romances. Truth to say, I believe in Thomas 
 Hardy as a great writer of prose both in substance 
 and in form more than of verse. In romances at 
 any rate, though we see the Lucretian undertone in 
 them all, the scene is above ground ; the actors are all 
 living and are often happy and prosperous. These 
 delightful stories of his of real life are, and must 
 be, men and women lovers husbands and wives, in 
 a living world. And real life is not fated to end in 
 nothingness. 
 
 I take a lively interest in the new translation of the 
 grand medieval Epic Chanson de Roland. Captain 
 C. Scott-Moncrieff has now turned these 4,000 lines 
 into very literal, slightly archaic, English, in the 
 original assonance measure (The Song of Roland, 
 Chapman and Hall, 1919). It is a bold and successful
 
 LAST WORDS 35 
 
 venture. Both the poem itself and the new version 
 raise special problems. The date, locality, and 
 authorship of the famous Song of Roland are some- 
 what uncertain. Its rude, and at times its barbaric, 
 ferocity is not quite congenial to modern taste in 
 poetry, satiated with Idylls of the King. Then, 
 assonance is alien to English rhythm perhaps is im- 
 possible to acclimatise with our double-knotted and 
 crashing consonants. The questions are : Can these 
 fierce shouts of bloodshed, massacre, and torture be 
 made pleasant to those who enjoy the poetry of to- 
 day? Can the crude assonance of 4,000 lines with- 
 out rhythm or melody be made tolerable to English 
 ears ? 
 
 Captain Scott-Moncrieff has solved both problems. 
 The ' ' Roland ' ' is the best preserved of the early 
 medieval epics. It certainly belongs to the end of 
 the eleventh century, just before the first Crusade, 
 and it presents us with a living picture of that fierce 
 time of battle and fanatical Christendom. Its joy in 
 carnage and every horror of the battlefield, its passion 
 for knightly honour, reckless chivalry, feudal loyalty 
 and justice, its deadly race against the Infidel and the 
 Saracen, its blind devotion to Church, ritual, and 
 priests, are only relieved by occasional gleams of 
 friendship, womanhood, and Nature. But its inten- 
 sity, vitality, and strength make it a great poem, less 
 horrible than the Niebelungen, and less fantastic than 
 the Arthurian legends. The poet believed it all to be
 
 36 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 true, and he exults in every act of his heroes. Cleav- 
 ing an enemy from the skull to the chine is every- 
 day 's work. Tearing a traitor limb from limb by 
 wild horses is feudal law. Massacring a hundred 
 thousand Paynims is God's service. An Archbishop 
 is one of the foremost Paladins. All this the Normans 
 who conquered kingdoms in the eleventh century held 
 to be true chivalry and pure religion. 
 
 This monotony of slaughter and fanaticism reads 
 rather thin in prose, whether English or French. To 
 transform it into rhymed couplets would destroy its 
 grand simplicity, much as Pope's couplets destroy 
 the Iliad. To modernise it into Tennysonian blank 
 verse would take the sting out of the lines. It has 
 to be in verse then, in what verse? Captain Scott- 
 Moncrieff takes the ten syllable heroic line of Shakes- 
 peare and Milton but neither in blank verse nor in 
 rhyme. He follows the original which is in assonance. 
 That is, the vowel sounds rhyme, but not the con- 
 sonants " rage " and " shame " are good assonance ; 
 so are "chiefs" and "seat." The same sound in 
 vowel, but not in consonant, endings has to be kept 
 up all through the "laisse," or stanza which may 
 run from ten to fifty lines. The effect of this 
 assonance in English is faintly perceptible, unless it 
 runs into true rhyme ; but it gives an impression that 
 it is not blank verse, and the sense is not carried on by 
 involution of the verses. The result is a quaint sense 
 of archaism which has not the fine melody of rhymed
 
 LAST WORDS 87 
 
 verse, nor the measured dignity of blank verse, nor 
 yet the baldness of plain prose. 
 
 Next, the English used is slightly archaic, or rather 
 of the primitive ballad form like a child's tale. 
 Thus, the effect of the unusual assonance, coupled 
 with the antiquated form, produces an impression of 
 sustained old-world chant, intended solely to be 
 heard, not to be read. This is essential to the spirit 
 of the poem which never was anything but a 
 Chanson a ballad for the voice not the eye. No 
 prose can give the ring of the verse with its sense of 
 speed and fury, and of almost delirious passion which 
 believes any extravagance. Again, no regular modern 
 verse can picture the blood-lust and savagery which 
 were held to be heroism and piety eight centuries 
 ago. To my ear, the strange assonance-rhyme along 
 with the old-English phrasing come nearer to the 
 original than either prose or verse could attain. So 
 I take the experiment to be a success ; and I advise all 
 who care for medieval history and for primitive epics 
 to study the original side by side with Captain Scott- 
 Moncrieff's translation. 
 
 As a specimen (at once of success and failure) I 
 quote the lines of the last prayer and death of Roland 
 (CLXXVI 2334-2396) :
 
 88 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 " Very Father, in Whom no falsehood is, 
 Saint Lazaron from death Thou did'st remit, 
 And Dan-iel save from the lion's pit; 
 My soul in me preserve from all perils 
 And from the sins I did in life commit ! " 
 His right-hand glove, to God he offers it 
 Saint Gabriel from's hand hath taken it. 
 Over his arm his head bows down and slips, 
 He joins his hands : and so is life finish'd. 
 God sent him down His angel cherubin 
 And Saint Mich-ael we worship in peril; 
 And by their side Saint Gabriel alit; 
 So the Count's soul they bare to Paradis. 
 
 Now I have before me three versions in modern 
 French prose of F. Genin, 1850 ; of Alex de Saint- 
 Albin, 1865 ; and of Leon Gautier, 1894. And I am 
 clear that the new verse translation is quite as accurate 
 as these, and gives a far truer sense of the rude lilt 
 of the old Chanson. 
 
 Needless to say that much of this might be im- 
 proved. It is obviously a first attempt and Captain 
 Scott-Moncrieff talks of a new edition of his work. 
 In the first place he must base his text on that of 
 Leon Gautier, Edition classique, with all its Notes and 
 Glossary. Then let us beg him to print the original 
 text on the same page, or, better, on the opposite 
 page of the translation. I am not going to criticise 
 details ; but there are two words, the translation of 
 which seems to me quite inexplicable. Why is li (of 
 course le from ille) always translated " that " instead 
 of "the"? That Emperor, that Count, that King 
 become tiresome. Again, why is chevaucher always 
 " canter," instead of " ride," " gallop " or " trot "?
 
 LAST WORDS 89 
 
 Even in a charge of twenty thousand knights, they 
 stick to the ladies' pace, and never break into a gallop. 
 
 That Emperor lie canters on with rage (1812) 
 
 Canter therefore ! Vengeance upon them do ! (2426) 
 
 The idea of Charles at the head of 100,000 knights 
 "cantering," of the massed chivalry of France 
 charging with a Hyde Park canter on the Paynim is 
 too much to bear. 
 
 Assonance suits the wild primitive swing of the 
 ancient Chant. But let assonance never be intro- 
 duced into English verse. It is utterly inapplicable 
 to our tongue, which multiplies and sounds its final 
 consonants whilst in French these consonants are 
 mute. 
 
 Quant Rollant veit que bataille serat, (1110) 
 
 Plus se fait fiers que leun ne leuparz (1111) 
 
 Pronounced in French this couplet makes a fair 
 rhyme. 
 
 When Rollant .sees that now must be combat, 
 More fierce he's found than lion or leopard 
 
 This couplet in English does not rhyme at all.
 
 MARCH 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 III 
 
 WITH bankruptcy, war, and revolution hanging 
 over Europe, the immediate need is an 
 official declaration by Britain that we do not 
 now exact the full measure of the Treaty so-called 
 of Peace. It is, as I said last month, " impossible, 
 ruinous, suicidal." When I so described it I had not 
 seen Mr. Keynes' book on its Economic Consequences 
 (Macmillan, 14th thousand, 1920). The world had 
 already condemned the Treaty as an elaborate scheme 
 to crush Germany and Austria for a whole generation, 
 to which the fierce passion of the French Minister 
 and the Mosaic judgment of the American President 
 had made us a party. Wilson and Clemenceau are 
 gone ; and the dominant part which Wilson held when 
 he came to Europe in 1918 has now passed to Britain. 
 France and Italy may struggle to get the vast sums 
 and the rich lands they claim from Germany and 
 Austria. But we can, and we must, revise the 
 Treaty or chaos waits for us, at home and abroad. 
 No doubt the British Government cannot now with- 
 draw from the Entente. Any formal alteration of 
 
 the Treaty must be made by the League of Nations. 
 
 40
 
 LAST WORDS 41 
 
 But Britain should at once make it clear how far it 
 
 will assist in crushing Germany and paralysing 
 Europe. 
 
 Mr. Keynes' book has now been published many 
 months, and no sort of official reply to it has been 
 issued. Nothing but the angry cries of bureaucrats 
 has been heard. No such crushing indictment of a 
 great act of international policy, no such revelation 
 of the futility of diplomats has ever been made. In 
 the teeth of its masterly analysis the literal execution 
 of the Treaty is out of the question, for it would 
 strangle our own industrial revival. The Prime 
 Minister said at first whatever he said afterwards 
 that we " were not going to wreck our own indus- 
 tries." We are doing it now. Whatever public 
 men, in or out of office, may have talked about 
 penalties, indemnities, and reparation, whatever 
 exultant millions expected in their triumph, we must 
 all face the facts that these promises and hopes can- 
 not be fulfilled ; and to talk more about them is to 
 starve Europe and ruin ourselves. It is one of the 
 canons of an unlimited democracy : populus vult 
 decipi et decipiatur. If Aristides will not humour 
 their passions, he must retire into exile. 
 
 I have carefully studied Mr. Keynes' book, and I 
 entirely agree with his main conclusions. So far as it 
 is a personal criticism of ministers and a political
 
 42 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 pamphlet, I say nothing; nor do I pretend to judge 
 the details of his economic estimates and his proposed 
 " remedies." Whatever may be his miscalculations 
 or his indiscretions, he has made out an overwhelming 
 case against the Treaty as it stands on its economic 
 side and the scale of its reparations. We are not likely 
 to agree to Mr. Keynes' doctrine that the Germans 
 can bind us to the exact language of Mr. Wilson's 
 various addresses, speeches and letters ; the words of 
 which not ten men in Europe or in America had in 
 mind on November llth, 1918, when the German 
 delegates accepted Foch's terms. They knew they 
 were exhausted and might be utterly destroyed. To 
 talk about Wilson's orations in New York as inter- 
 preting the Treaty is mere debating verbiage. 
 
 The main points on which the Treaty is unworkable 
 are these : (1) The annihilation of the German mer- 
 cantile marine is extravagant, if German trade is to 
 exist at all. Unless it does, no payments can be made. 
 (2) To exclude Germany from all overseas possessions 
 and to confiscate all property of Germans therein is a 
 further destruction of German trade. (3) The expro- 
 priation of German private property is a vindictive 
 and immoral provision ; and when it is extended to 
 non-German lands, and even to those of neutrals, the 
 whole scheme is ludicrous by its impossibility, as well 
 as infamous in its spite. The complicated attempt to 
 make Germany an outlaw in international trade
 
 LAST WORDS 48 
 
 economically outside the pale of civilised nations is 
 little more than a grim joke. 
 
 As to the provisos about coal and metal, whilst the 
 savage destruction of mines by the defeated Germans 
 must be repaired, this ought not to be carried out with 
 a violence which would stifle German industries. And 
 the prolonged occupation of purely German lands, 
 especially those lying far to the East, will be a con- 
 tinuous source of unrest to Germany and of risk to 
 the Allies. And the same holds good of the railway 
 and river transport in German territories. Again, 
 the embargo on the union of German Austria with 
 the Empire is wanton blindness. In the first place, 
 the union is inevitable, and, in the next place, with- 
 out such union Vienna is a starving derelict. Writing 
 whilst everything is still in the making, and the 
 League without U.S.A. in suspended animation, 
 waiting for " artificial respiration," I shall say 
 nothing now about territorial rearrangements. Many 
 of them are quite questionable, and will have to be 
 modified. Poland is a desperate crux. 
 
 The strength of Mr. Keynes' book, and the key to 
 the problems of Europe, lie in the scheme of repara- 
 tion, as designed in the Treaty. Its literal exaction 
 would deprive the populations of Europe, including 
 our own, of the means of livelihood. I make no 
 attempt to explain, or to criticise, the figures given by
 
 44 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Mr. Keynes, who is a consummate economic and 
 financial authority. The world knows that, after 
 detailed examination, he puts as a total recoverable 
 from Germany in a course of years a sum not more 
 than two thousand millions of pounds in one form or 
 other. Perhaps, if he were writing to-day instead of 
 last autumn, he would not put it higher than one 
 thousand million, and that without interest over a 
 long period. For my part, I should be glad to hope 
 that the Allies together may receive even that reduced 
 sum. 
 
 It may be asked how came such an extravagant 
 scheme to be made by the Heads of the Great Powers, 
 and accepted by the democracies of Britain, America, 
 and France ? The answer is that it was done in secret 
 sessions ; the real meanings were falsified ; and when 
 the Gargantuan Treaty of June 28th, 1919, was at last 
 published, none but professional publicists ever read 
 it through, and none but professional economists could 
 understand its subtle effects. The thing was a case 
 of cephalitis turgida " Swelled head." Wilson 
 caught the disease from Wilhelm ; and he improved 
 on it, with the American way of going ten times better 
 than anyone else. He infected France ; and then 
 British good sense succumbed. And in the hulla- 
 baloo of the Peace celebrations real facts and imminent 
 dangers were hidden away and overlooked. We were 
 hoodwinked. I know that I was.
 
 LAST WORDS 45 
 
 I shall not attempt to criticise the " remedies " pro- 
 posed by Mr. Keynes, nor do I venture to propose any 
 others. The burning question of the hour is rather 
 by what power, and under what authority, can any 
 remedies be effected. As the Treaty and the Cove- 
 nant stand, the only lawful way of modifying the 
 Treaty is by revision by the League of Nations. The 
 Niagara Treaty was signed by twenty-eight States. 
 It consists of 440 Articles, and occupied eighty-four 
 columns of close print in the Times. The League of 
 Nations is the Court of Appeal. What is the League 
 of Nations doing now ? And if it be in active session, 
 what chance is there of any decision being taken when, 
 by the constitution, all decisions must be unanimous? 
 Is it conceivable that France or Italy will release their 
 claims and forgo the awards on which they built such 
 hopes ? And must we be bound by their claims and 
 their hopes ? I trust not. 
 
 Even if the fatal Liberum Veto did not exist, when 
 is the League going to act in force ? But the dangers, 
 the famine, the bankruptcy are urgent. Something 
 must be done at once. As immediate and official 
 revision by the League is out of the question 
 as indeed the Treaty at the moment is almost a scrap 
 of paper again action is left for Britain, the only 
 Power whose head is beginning to shrink to normal 
 proportions. We can, and we must, by any such 
 diplomatic camouflage as will serve, make it under- 
 stood by Germany that at least by us the penal
 
 46 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 articles of reparation will now be partly relaxed and 
 at any rate will be postponed. U.S.A., which is out 
 of the game, " retired hurt," will not complain. Nor 
 will Japan, which has cynically watched the suicide 
 of Europe. If France insists on full payment, if Italy 
 desires both sides of the Adriatic and part of Asia 
 Minor, they must take their own course. Britain is 
 not bound to help them to ruin civilisation, whilst the 
 author and potential President of the Covenant is 
 " not taking any." 
 
 ****** 
 
 I turn to another book on the Treaty and the 
 League Europe and the League of Nations, by 
 Charles Sarolea (G. Bell and Sons, 1919) a masterly 
 criticism of the Versailles settlement by one who is a 
 firm believer in the idea of the Covenant, but has made 
 a thorough study of all the difficulties and dangers it 
 presents. Mr. Sarolea, by birth a Belgian, long 
 settled in Britain, and now Professor in the University 
 of Edinburgh, is one of the best living authorities in 
 the languages, history, and diplomacy of the 
 European Powers. His book serves as a counterpart 
 and supplement to that of Mr. Keynes, for it deals 
 largely with the territorial and national problems of 
 the settlement, as Mr. Keynes deals with the economic 
 and reparation problems. The two books together 
 make an unanswerable case for the immediate revision 
 of the Treaty and for the consolidation of the visionary 
 League of Nations into a practical international 
 
 Union. 
 
 ******
 
 LAST WORDS 47 
 
 Mr. Sarolea begins by grasping the enormous 
 problems presented by the dissolution of four great 
 Empires that extend from the Rhine to the Pacific. 
 I hope he overstates the case in saying " it will take 
 fifty years to organise the new Europe." Certainly 
 it was not done in six months at Versailles. The only 
 remedy against chaos and famine, he says, is inter- 
 national co-operation ; but Mr. Sarolea rather under- 
 values true patriotism which should be neither 
 aggressive nor exclusive. He stoutly defends the 
 claim of the smaller nations to an equal voice in the 
 League on the principle of the American Senate's 
 equality of votes. The most valuable part of his criti- 
 cism is the discussion of the ** Obstacles to the 
 League " : (1) military that of disarmament by land 
 and by sea ; (2) political the conflict of external and 
 internal disputes between races and religions ; (3) 
 domestic the adjustment of delegacies to the League 
 with the changing representatives of nations at home ; 
 (4) then come in difficulties economic, of the League, 
 or of separate nations ; (5) that of the biologic growth 
 of peoples within their own borders ; (6) that of race 
 and of language, of national sentiment, of religion, of 
 intellectual culture ; (7) of organisation within the 
 League; and, finally, of its executive power, i.e., of 
 the sanction to compel submission to its decisions. He 
 truly says : * ' A weak League of Nations would be far 
 more dangerous than no League of Nations." As 
 things are, he sees that the League is rudimentary ; 
 but he has faith that all these obstacles can be over- 
 come.
 
 48 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Would that our able Labour leaders and the vast 
 organisations they control would take to heart all that 
 Mr. Sarolea writes in his Chapter VII. on " Democ- 
 racy in Foreign Policy." He shows how the settle- 
 ment of Versailles was a compromise made under con- 
 flicting party cries at home. " The Congress of 
 Versailles mainly reflected the mind of the mob, 
 whilst the Congress of Vienna (1814) reflected the 
 sober reason of a few responsible statesmen. " By the 
 " mob mind " he means, first, the mind of the war 
 party, and next, " the mob mind systematically 
 worked by a sensational Press and secretly acted upon 
 by private financial interests." " Modern democra- 
 cies have been more generally aggressive than 
 pacifist." And he insists on a really essential axiom 
 when he writes that " under modern conditions a body 
 of expert specialist diplomats is even more necessary 
 than under the old conditions." " Amateur diplo- 
 macy by party politicians " is a source of danger and 
 confusion. The popular cry for all open diplomacy 
 in the eyes of the people is as preposterous as to ask 
 that bankers and traders should make all business deals 
 in open exchange. The ultimate assent of the nation 
 to any liability imposed on it is a totally different thing 
 from the public discussion of its conditions. 
 
 One of the most valuable chapters in this book is 
 that on the " Future of Poland. " He shows how the 
 policy of the Allies has varied thrice. At the outset 
 there were Polish armies in every one of the three
 
 LAST WORDS 49 
 
 great armies shooting down each other. At first 
 the Allies used Poland against Prussia and Austria. 
 When Russia entered Galicia the cause of the Poles 
 was forgotten and suppressed. At the end of the war, 
 with Russia out of it, the Allies took up the cause 
 again, and even worked to make Poland a barrier to 
 separate Germany from Russia. Truly tragic is the 
 state of Poland, as Mr. Sarolea with first-hand know- 
 ledge describes it as * l the most vulnerable of the new 
 States." It has no real frontier : an open plain, an 
 historic battlefield. It has neither true limits nor 
 centre, is surrounded by its secular enemies, with no 
 homogeneous race, and with five millions of Jews 
 whom it cannot assimilate, of German and Russian 
 origins. Divided in races, religions, industry, classes, 
 and by tradition, Poland is at the mercy of its mighty 
 neighbours. Its one hope lies in the League of 
 Nations, which as yet is itself little more than a hope. 
 
 It is an axiom of politics that as between nations 
 the sentiment of gratitude has no place. To-day we 
 might rather say that ingratitude is the natural and 
 normal rule. We are told that our country is now the 
 object of universal ill-will and depreciation among our 
 Allies and friendly neutrals. This is utterly unreason- 
 able, but it seems to be human nature. There is not 
 one Power which we have injured nor even one that 
 we have not helped and treated with singular amity. 
 That France should turn round on us and talk of 
 breaking up the Entente would be monstrous. If in 
 
 4
 
 50 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 August, 1914, we had not rushed in to save her, 
 France would be now reduced to the level of Spain 
 if not of another Poland. Where is our offence? 
 Simply that we refuse to be dragged by France to 
 decimate and crush Germany and to second all her 
 claims to some Mediterranean coasts. Poland is sore 
 that we cannot guarantee her the extensions she 
 demands. Roumania, Italy, Serbia, Greece, Syria, 
 Arabia all make impracticable claims and charge us 
 with deserting them. Because the nations are bitter 
 to find their extravagant hopes unrealised, they turn 
 round upon the Power which for the time is the least 
 stricken and seems the strongest. 
 
 We have gained nothing ourselves to the detriment 
 of any one of these nations. On the contrary, we 
 have done all we can to help them in men, arms, and 
 money. Our sole offence is that we will not because 
 we cannot do more ; and we refuse to follow them in 
 aggressive and impossible adventures. Italy calls on 
 us to curb the Serbs and the Greeks. Serbs and 
 Greeks call on us to resist the aggression of Italy. 
 Under the impulse of Wilson the Old Man of the 
 Sea striding on the Covenant no doubt we promised 
 more than we can perform . Things change Govern- 
 ments change and what is possible one month is im- 
 possible the next. In all our long history there never 
 was a time when the Governments of Britain were 
 faced with such a sea of dilemmas. At home and 
 abroad they are beset with cries to embark on policies
 
 LAST WORDS 51 
 
 which are contradictory, impossible, would mean new 
 losses, further debt, even more wars whilst the whole 
 world is heaving as if it were waiting for an earth- 
 quake. Give us all we ask cry foreign nations ! Do 
 this and do not do that ! is the babel of party cries 
 at home. The confusion abroad and at home makes 
 any action impossible even if Heaven sent an arch- 
 angel to be our Minister. 
 
 ****** 
 Of all the attacks on us, the most unreasonable are 
 those of the baser party Press in America. Of what 
 can the Republic complain ? When war broke out it 
 stood officially (not too benevolently) neutral, 
 grumbling about maritime rights recognised by 
 nations for centuries and practised of late by U.S.A. 
 We accepted the lead of their President when he came 
 over, as if he were President of the United States of 
 Europe. We joined in with his tremendous schemes 
 for re-organising the world. Was it for us to ask him 
 to prove that he represented his nation ? What would 
 have happened if we had said Bring over senators of 
 both parties, or we cannot recognise you as repre- 
 senting your country ? To make our Irish trouble an 
 American injury is an outrageous defiance of national 
 independence. What if we treated as a British injury 
 the oppression of their coloured citizens and our 
 Japanese allies, or of all who choose to drink alcohol. 
 The Irish problem is a struggle between two races and 
 two religions, not in Britain, but in Ireland as much 
 a domestic question as that between Democrats and 
 Republicans in the States.
 
 52 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 A new translation in verse of Lucretius which has 
 just reached me Lucretius on the Nature of Things, 
 by Sir Robert Allison (Arthur L. Humphreys, 1919) 
 turned my thoughts again to the great Roman poet, 
 who in the lurid times of the old Republic meditated 
 on the World and on Man. It is a book to study in 
 our not quite dissimilar days. And I at once re-read 
 Morley's stirring chapter in his Recollections, Vol. 
 II., pp. 113-130, which he calls " An Easter Digres- 
 sion ' ' : a disquisition on the Lucretian theory of Life 
 and Death. After some telling passages from ancient 
 and modern writers, he " revives his memories of 
 Lucretius " ; and a fascinating study in criticism it is. 
 He begins by quoting various estimates and transla- 
 tions of the poet, and what has been said of him by 
 Dryden, Polignac, Voltaire, Lamartine, Macaulay, 
 Mommsen, Goethe ; and then Morley gives us his own 
 idea of the Pessimism of Lucretius warmly praising 
 the brilliant Chapter IV., which J. W. Mackail 
 devotes to this poet in that most masterly of all hand- 
 books his Latin Literature. 
 
 Sir Robert Allison, of Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 already known by his translations of Plautus and of 
 Cicero, has now put the 7,400 lines of Lucretius' six 
 books into close and literal blank verse, nearly keeping 
 line for line. It is impossible to render Latin hexa- 
 meters into English pentameters in quite the same 
 space above all, such closely-knit verse as that of 
 Lucretius without at times sacrificing an epithet.
 
 LAST WORDS 53 
 
 But this is far better than Dry den's way of adding 
 needless words. So the English reader, who finds 
 Munro's exact prose version of these mighty meta- 
 physics rather too stiff and lugubrious, may read the 
 entire poem in Sir Robert Allison's accurate, easy, 
 and sonorous lines. He adds to the charm of Lucre- 
 tius by constant quotations in foot-notes of parallel 
 passages from modern poets Spenser, Milton, 
 Shakespeare, Marlowe, Gray, Byron, Keats, Tenny- 
 son, Browning, Swinburne several of these being 
 evident reminiscences of the Latin lines. 
 
 ****** 
 
 I cite a few lines of Sir Robert's version of some 
 famous phrases that everyone knows : 
 
 Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. I. 101. 
 To such dread deeds did superstition lead 
 
 Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret 
 
 In terris oppressa gravi sub religione 
 
 Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat 
 
 Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, 
 
 Primum Graius homo mortales tollesre contra 
 
 Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra. I. 62-67. 
 
 When human life lay grovelling on the ground, 
 A piteous sight, by superstition crushed, 
 Who lifting high her head from heaven, looked down 
 With lowering look, then first a man of Greece 
 Dared lift his eyes, and dared to face the foe. 
 
 Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur 
 
 Inque brevi spatio mutantiir saecla animantum 
 
 Et quasi cursores vital lampada tradunt. II. 77-79. 
 
 Some nations wax and others wane, and soon 
 The races of mankind are changed, and each 
 In turn to other hands the torch of life, 
 As runners do.
 
 54 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 I welcome a second and revised edition of Mr. F. 
 S. Marvin's Century of Hope (Oxford, Clarendon 
 Press, 1920). It is a worthy continuation of The 
 Living Past, now in its fourth impression, at the same 
 press. The former book was a sketch of Western 
 Progress down to 1815. The new volume is a manual 
 of the growth of political, social, scientific, and artistic 
 humanity from Waterloo to the Great War (1815- 
 1914). It is, of course, only a summary of the leading 
 ideas in thought, and of the decisive events which made 
 the unity of the West and the progress of a common 
 civilisation. It deals with Nationality and Im- 
 perialism, with Socialism, Internationalism, Evolu- 
 tion, Education, and Religion, in the same spirit of 
 judicial sanity, sound learning, and synthetic imagina- 
 tion, which make the former book a trustworthy 
 manual for the teacher. And though written by an 
 ardent patriot in the midst of war, it is perfectly just 
 to Teutonic energy and genius. 
 
 The Century of Hope is a standing rebuke to the 
 shallow jesters who cast stones at Victorians at the 
 work of their own fathers and grandfathers as if the 
 nineteenth century was an age of conventional 
 formulas and contented torpor. On the contrary, it 
 was an epoch of concentrated effort to expand the life 
 of civilisation in new achievement. It did not think 
 this could be realised in an intellectual and moral go- 
 as-you-like ; nor did it hail a millennium in anything 
 which looked new and surprising. But, as Mr. Marvin
 
 LAST WORDS 55 
 
 shows, the age from 1815 to 1914 was inspired by 
 optimism at once sane and instructed. Pessimism 
 and optimism are labels flung about by the frivolous 
 or the ignorant. To be obsessed either by gloom or 
 by hope, without knowledge of facts, is equally 
 wrong. Humanity is ever encircled with tremendous 
 difficulties : it is endowed with incalculable powers of 
 recuperation. The ignorant do not see the dangers ; 
 the poor-hearted do not feeVthe hope. The wise man 
 is often full of anxiety for the immediate future : he 
 never loses faith in ultimate victory. He is always at 
 once pessimist and optimist ; for he never underrates 
 the practical difficulties which obstruct the path of 
 progress. But all the time he knows that progress 
 must in the end prevail. And in the darkest hour he 
 awaits the certain Dawn of Light.
 
 APRIL 
 
 - 1920 - 
 IV 
 
 THE great Conference of Powers, on which the 
 hopes of civilisation rest and for which infernal 
 chaos yawns, is fast becoming a matter of comic 
 opera, pantomime, and romance. The firm of Spen- 
 low, Jorkins, and others, are at their old game. Mr. 
 Spenlow is in Court but he can be sent for : he bobs 
 about between Court and the office. He has a partner 
 Mr. Jorkins, " who keeps himself in the back- 
 ground." Mr. Jorkins is not seen, " he cannot be 
 seen at present." But nothing can be done in busi- 
 ness without his approval. " Mr. Jorkins is immov- 
 able." Mr. Jorkins will not listen to this. Mr. 
 Jorkins " will have his bond." He does not come 
 down into the office to discuss things with his partners. 
 However " painful to their feelings," the partners 
 dare not act without him. He is really " a mild man 
 of a heavy temperament " but he is " the most 
 obdurate of men." That is why business drags on in 
 the firm of Spenlow and Jorkins. Alas ! There is 
 no comedy at all. It is the Tragedy of Nations, in the 
 twentieth-century crisis of the civilisation of the 
 world. Famine, massacre, more war all are around 
 and upon us. Everything is adjourned till the Powers 
 
 can agree. 
 
 # * * * *
 
 LAST WORDS 57 
 
 The imminent danger is that the League of Nations 
 may become a potential source of international 
 animosity and disputes. So far from being a means 
 of restoring harmony, it is rapidly breeding new 
 grounds of division. The twentieth-century Gospel 
 of Peace is passing into a game of grab. Europe was 
 not altogether peaceful before 1914 ; but two great 
 Alliances and Ententes held the great Powers in some 
 common policies. America was thriving more than 
 ever and kept aloof. Asia and Africa had local 
 troubles, but nothing revolutionary. In 1920 it is all 
 changed. The League of Nations has stirred a 
 cosmopolitan eruption, far more than Rousseau's 
 Contrat Social stirred up European revolution. For 
 a generation the Powers have never been so bitter, so 
 jealous, so suspicious, so keen to seize all they can, so 
 prone to resent each others' acts, so obstinate in refus- 
 ing agreement. This is true of all. The United 
 States are torn asunder by the Covenant. They made 
 war and still do not make peace. 
 
 I have always been and I am still an ardent 
 believer in the great destiny and the grand example 
 of the Republic. When I came back from my unfor- 
 gotten intercourse with its patriotic citizens now 
 twenty years ago, I published in my Memoirs my deep 
 conviction that they hold " the crucial pivots on 
 which the future of humanity will turn, so that the 
 van of human progress will ultimately point toward 
 the West." I think so still : I have never doubted
 
 58 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 it. The idea of a confederation of Nations is one that 
 I have myself preached all my life. When Mr. 
 Wilson formulated it with such eloquence and moral 
 fervour, I was ready to welcome the Utopian scheme 
 as an ideal ; though I said the nations were not ripe 
 for it unless the spiritual exaltation during the war had 
 given them new souls and had cast out the devils of 
 national greed, jealousy, and hate. As to the 
 Adriatic and Eastern problems, I think Mr. Wilson 
 was right, and I wish the other Powers had accepted 
 his lead. On the other hand, the reservations of the 
 Senate seem to me inevitable, just, and necessary ; and 
 I trust that the League will be modified in accordance 
 with them. But the paralysis of Europe, and the 
 advance on it of famine and confusion, are too heavy 
 a price to pay even for a more reasonable form of 
 peace. 
 
 An idle discussion seems to be arising as to whether 
 Labour " can form a Government "; and this can 
 only be settled by the old rule : solvitur ambulando. 
 Surely no one who watches the debates in Parliament 
 and in the recent Trades Union Congress can doubt 
 that such men as now fill the Labour benches, and 
 many more such men as are quite ready and very likely 
 to join them, can form a Ministry fully competent to 
 carry the House with them and to hold their own in 
 debate. Many an independent observer would be 
 glad to see such men as Mr. Clynes, Mr. J. H. 
 Thomas, Mr. Adamson, released from perpetual criti-
 
 LAST WORDS 59 
 
 cism and placed with all the responsibility of power. 
 But this is only the House of Commons' point of view, 
 which now is but part, perhaps not the principal part, 
 of the vast new problem of Government. The war 
 and the world-revolution that followed have changed 
 all things, and especially the tremendous task of 
 administering this amorphous and unexampled 
 Empire. At times the House seems to be a mere 
 Duma with no force behind it at all. All the real 
 forces seem to be seething inside and around the 
 United Kingdom. 
 
 What Mr. Clynes and his able comrades will have 
 to consider is this. How are they going to keep in 
 hand the " extreme men," as they are called, who 
 may be a small minority, but whose passion will seek 
 to realise the dream of " social liquidation," so dear 
 to European revolutionists, yet which the organised 
 and entrenched resources of British Conservatism will 
 not " take lying down," as did the plutocracy of 
 Russia. No one can suspect any Bolshevism in Par- 
 liamentary Labour, but there is plenty of it outside ; 
 and it is one of the marks of aggressive Democracy 
 to denounce as traitors those leading democrats who 
 achieve place and pow r er. What has become of 
 Kerensky and Prince Lvof ? To the question How 
 will Labour fill the minor and permanent offices of 
 civil and imperial administration which require expert 
 and specially trained servants a service every day 
 becoming more complicated and more arduous ? it is
 
 60 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 usual to reply Oh ! the permanent services will be 
 used. Yes ! but will they not be the real masters of 
 policy? Will not the extremists denounce them? 
 Besides, if the extirpation of Capitalism were to suc- 
 ceed, how is the expert training to be got? The 
 whole of our civil, legal, economic, military, and 
 financial administration is born, bred, and trained 
 under Capitalism can be trained in no other way. 
 Lenin has to get his experts by high pay and 
 terrorism. He has to bribe or drive back to work the 
 able men of the old regime, and he dare not trust 
 them. To work the vast and complicated machine of 
 modern society there is needed a lifelong training in 
 administration and the inherited and instinctive 
 resources of capitalist families. 
 
 Writing before the new Irish Bill has been debated, 
 it is impossible to criticise it. As I am half Irish in 
 blood, have been since 1867 a public advocate of Irish 
 Nationalism, and in 1886 was a Gladstonian candidate 
 for Home Rule, I cannot forbear a word about the 
 most crucial problem that has tried British Govern- 
 ment in my memory. The new Bill is, to my mind, 
 the most hopeful of any that have preceded it, and in 
 some form I fervently trust it may become law. Still, 
 I cannot understand the drafting which opens the Bill 
 with two Parliaments, to be ultimately, if possible, 
 united in one. I have always maintained that Ireland 
 is one nation, and that the assertion of that fact is the 
 indispensable basis of all Irish policy. The Bill should
 
 LAST WORDS 61 
 
 have begun with creating a real Parliament for Ire- 
 land. Then, as the inevitable pledge to preserve the 
 local claims of the North-East counties, their Parlia- 
 mentary representatives should form a statutory, irre- 
 movable standing Committee empowered to veto any 
 law, order, or liability imposed on their local areas, 
 under very carefully-contrived clauses of reasonable 
 conditions. Those who condemn the Bill whether 
 they be Unionists, Liberals, Nationalists, or Sinn 
 Feiners propose no other, even possible, scheme. 
 Their futile negative, or non possumus, is rank 
 mischief-making. 
 
 I trust that British patience and coolness will be 
 able to discuss and modify the Bill, apart from our 
 present excitement over the horrible crimes rife in 
 Ireland to-day. Let us remember that the demand 
 of separation is an entirely recent and quite artificial 
 battle-cry, concocted by literary enthusiasts and noisy 
 town-bred talkers. None of Ireland's real public men 
 ever dreamed of it neither O'Connell, nor Butt, nor 
 Parnell, nor Redmond, nor any Parliamentary or 
 Nationalist Party for generations. It has no real hold 
 on the peasants, for all but the most ignorant know it 
 would be their ruin. It is one of those strident catch- 
 words which suddenly seize the Celtic imagination, as 
 " Prince Charlie " did the Highlanders in 1745, and 
 the " King " did to the Bretons in France in 1793. 
 It is a passing delirium which has no hold on the Irish 
 nation. It may destroy the offered Home Rule.
 
 62 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 But, whether it passes or not, this last effort of Britain 
 to restore peace must convince all abroad, even Irish- 
 men in America and the Dominions, that Britain does 
 not oppress Ireland, but offers her real self-govern- 
 ment ; and that the difficulties which bar a settlement 
 are wholly caused by antagonism between Irishmen 
 in Ireland ; and that is an ancient quarrel of religion 
 and race, bred by ignorance deeper than any other in 
 the civilised world and fomented by the conspiracy of 
 a treasonable priesthood. 
 
 ****** 
 
 The crisis on the Turkish problem adds new interest 
 to the history of that land, especially when it comes 
 from a recognised authority. M. Charles Diehl, of 
 the French Institute, Professor in the University of 
 Paris, who has devoted so many years of study to the 
 political and artistic questions of the former Greek 
 Empire seated at Constantinople, has just issued a 
 summary of the history from the first Constantine in 
 330 A.D. down to the last Constantine XI. in 1453. * 
 In some 250 pages he tells us with masterly concise- 
 ness this wonderful story of the rise, expansion, 
 decline, and fall of New Rome, over its evolution of 
 1,123 years, a story hardly inferior in fascination to 
 that of Old Rome in a similar period. With a 
 multiplicity of dates, lists of one hundred Emperors, 
 tables of chronology, bibliography of literature, maps 
 of the City and the Empire at its extension and 
 decline, he gives fifteen photographs of buildings, 
 
 Histoire de 1' Empire Byzantin, Charles Diehl. A Pioard, 12mo. 1919.
 
 LAST WORDS 63 
 
 drawings, mosaics, and portraits. The volume forms 
 a scientific account of the complex civilisation which 
 the Turks under Mahomet the Conqueror over- 
 whelmed exactly 467 years ago. 
 
 The book is an admirable manual for the student 
 or the publicist, as it concentrates in handy form the 
 final judgments of a master in this branch of history. 
 But it is impossible in the limits of space to throw over 
 the story the colour of personal or detailed narrative. 
 The object is to show the ultimate conclusions to be 
 drawn on these manifold problems. And this is done 
 by one whose authority is known in Europe and 
 America. M. Diehl does ample justice to the real 
 continuity of Byzantine civilisation, its glorious his- 
 tory as the maintainer of antique literature, art, and 
 organisation under the barbarous invasions from 
 North or East, as the champion of Christendom for 
 eight centuries, as the missionary and teacher of the 
 Slavonic races, and the source, even in its own ruin, 
 of the European Renascence of learning. He 
 explains the vast expansion of the Empire by 
 Justinian, who ruled the lands round the Mediter- 
 ranean and the Euxine from Cadiz to the Euphrates 
 and the Arabian deserts. He traces the long story 
 of its gradual decline over nine centuries the defeat 
 of the Persians and the fateful battles with Arabs and 
 Turks the bitter strife over image-w r orship the civil 
 and military administration the development of art 
 and literature the jealous enmity of the Latins and
 
 64 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 the Roman Church which led to the breaking up of 
 the Byzantine world and its domination by Islam. 
 
 I take much interest in books about Sappho and in 
 the constant attempts at the hopeless task of trans- 
 lating the fragments which survive. Exactly seventy 
 years ago I told my college tutor who seemed not 
 to have read them that " the world has never pro- 
 duced the equal of these odes " ; and in 1892 I wrote 
 the Life of Sappho for our Calendar of Great Men, 
 calling her " the greatest genius who has ever 
 appeared amongst women." So I welcome a new 
 verse translation of the odes, including the newly- 
 found ode to Anactoria. Dr. Way, who has done so 
 much by his verse translations of Homer and of the 
 Greek dramatists, has now ventured on the impossible 
 in a new and somewhat startling plan. 1 He seeks to 
 present some of Sappho's thoughts in intelligible 
 sequence, to interest the general reader who may 
 know nothing of the Greek fragments. In this way 
 he knits together lines which he thinks belong to a 
 connected poem, retaining entire the famous Sapphic 
 stanzas, and some others which seem complete as they 
 stand. Thus the "Invocation to Aphrodite' is 
 made up of four fragments. The " Leto and 
 Niobe ' ' is compacted out of fourteen fragments. 
 
 i SappJio and the Vigil of Yentis, translated by Arthur S. Way, 
 D.Litt., Macmillan and Co., 1920.
 
 LAST WORDS 65 
 
 Dr. Way uses that beautiful little volume of Mr. 
 H. T. Wharton, 2nd ed. (D. Stott, 1887). We find 
 that some six broken and detached lines in the original 
 make no less than twenty lines in Dr. Way's 
 " Lament for Adonis." It is very ingenious. I 
 hesitate to say more. I fear scholars who love these 
 gems of Greek lyricism as they are in their ruin, like 
 bits from the Parthenon marbles, may repeat what 
 Bentley said of Pope's Homer. Many of these Eng- 
 lish verses are graceful. Only they are not Sappho. 
 Now, as J. Addington Symonds so well put it, " her 
 every word has a peculiar and unmistakable per- 
 fume." It has the royal hall-mark of inimitable 
 grace. Poets from Catullus down to Swinburne have 
 tried to give us that perfume in their own tongue. 
 Alas ! perfume is a thing that will not bear carriage. 
 It evaporates in the act of transport. Diamonds are 
 not to be replaced by paste. A phrase of Sappho's, 
 imbedded in an old grammarian's lucubrations, glows 
 like a diamond on a dark floor. 
 
 But those who * ; have no use ' ' for Sappho in Greek 
 are we to say now the great majority of future 
 B.A.'s and M.A.'s? I advise to try Dr. Way's com- 
 posite version, because some pathetic and exquisite 
 lines of Sappho in the original seem mere common- 
 place when transposed into literal English. For 
 instance, the four lines : 
 
 piv (jsXiwa 7..T-X.
 
 66 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The Moon has set, the Pleiades too, etc. seven- 
 teen words in all states a simple fact in plain Eng- 
 lish, but in Greek it has a melody and a poignant thrill 
 of its own. Dr. Way has to use thirty-two words 
 with half a dozen new adjectives and ideas, and then 
 the four words with which it ends : 
 
 'sYW Se nova y.ateuScd 
 have to become ten words : 
 
 "and I ah me! 
 Lie on nay couch alone, alone! " 
 
 There are verse translations of this fragment by J. 
 H. Merivale and J. A. Symonds, but both also 
 expand and seek to decorate the Greek. That 
 simplicity, reticence, reserve in Greek poetry and art 
 make both inimitable. And of all poetry, ancient 
 or modern, that is the secret of Sappho. 
 
 Let me add that Dr. Way, who is always ingenious, 
 is in many poems graceful. Take No. 3 : 
 
 y..t.X. 
 
 " The Stars that round the Queen of Night 
 
 Like maids attend her, 
 Hide as in veils of mist their light 
 When she, in full-orbed glory bright 
 O'er all the earth shines from her height 
 A silver splendour."
 
 LAST WORDS 67 
 
 Mr. Wharton quotes versions of this by other 
 poets ; but they all use twice the number of words and 
 many superfluous images. Strangely enough, in a 
 parallel line, Tennyson, after Homer, Iliad viii. 555, 
 writes : 
 
 " As when in heaven the stars about the Moon look beautiful " 
 
 Now, Sappho says that the stars hide their bright 
 light around the full moon. This is more true and 
 more poetic. The glory of the stars is when the moon 
 is down. When the moon is full the stars pale and 
 cease to show their beauty. Homer is never 
 " precious," and Tennyson is never harsh. But 
 Sappho is always at once " precious " in a good 
 sense and lovely.
 
 MAY 
 
 -1920- 
 V 
 
 IN the almost unprecedented confusion of the hour 
 (April loth, 1920) the Prime Minister at sea 
 his colleagues hardly less so the state of Ire- 
 land more ghastly than ever, and the new Bill stand- 
 ing over for debate U.S.A. not able to decide if it 
 has a government or a policy at all the Supreme 
 Council on tour, now taking villeggiatura on the 
 Riviera in such a state of things, the wise man who 
 takes a detached view of public affairs in a remote 
 retreat will withhold his judgment until better 
 advised. It is for an omniscient Press, writing only 
 twelve hours before it is read at the breakfast table, to 
 tell us what we ought to think about it all. Here, 
 down in Bath, I try to possess my soul in peace with 
 law, philosophy, and books of the day. 
 
 A portentous sign of the New World in which we 
 live is the suddenness with which rooted ideas are 
 abandoned and dominant changes are made. Re- 
 forms that have been fought over for generations pass 
 almost by consent. The franchise is doubled ; 
 Women have votes and even exceed the male voters ; 
 Home Rule is carried by Unionist majorities against 
 
 68
 
 LAST WORDS 69 
 
 the Liberals ; Labour becomes the New Rich, and the 
 lower Middle Class, whose " fixed incomes " are now 
 " sinking incomes," become the New Poor. Bishops 
 and Deans invite Nonconformists to their cathedrals. 
 The Minister of Education welcomes denomina- 
 tionalism to public schools. The House of Lords 
 leads the way in Divorce. Socialism is advocated in 
 academic, literary, and aristocratic quarters. The 
 biggest Empire on earth is transformed into the mil- 
 lennium of Labour. And the biggest Republic on 
 earth goes " dry " and retires from the world. 
 
 To an old lawyer one of the most amazing changes 
 is the welcome that has been given to the splendid 
 reform of the law of Property introduced by the Lord 
 Chancellor with so much eloquence and learning. It 
 is the greatest and most useful reform in our Law 
 that has been seen for centuries. As an old con- 
 veyancer and Professor of Law myself, I recognise 
 the benefits it will confer on the public, if not on the 
 profession as well. In my early days of the law in the 
 'fifties, I remember Lords Lyndhurst, Campbell, 
 Westbury, Cairns, and Selborne. I was secretary 
 to the Royal Commission of 1869 for Digesting the 
 law ; and for two years I had to register the schemes 
 of famous Judges and draft those of Bethell, who, 
 whatever his other defects, had a real passion to restore 
 order and consistency in the law of Property. In the 
 present Chancellor law reform has found a younger 
 and far more practical enthusiast. In these Notes it
 
 70 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 is impossible to discuss a Bill of 250 pages, with its 
 radical abolition of antique anomalies and its judicious 
 assimilation of the law of Inheritance and of Land. 
 As one of the survivors of the law-reformers of two 
 generations, I trust the Bill will pass with due amend- 
 ments in both Houses. It is one of the best products 
 of the New Time. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Though the scope of the Bill is so large, and indeed 
 so startling at first sight to the old-fashioned pundit, 
 it will not disturb the holders of important landed 
 estates, nor those holders of other property who take 
 care not to die intestate. The really great changes in 
 the law introduced by the Bill concern devolution on 
 intestacy. Those who have any considerable interest 
 in land for the most part make regular wills, if not 
 elaborate entails. Speaking generally, the Bill will 
 not affect either the laws of Wills or of Entail. To 
 get rid of the antique feudal survivals will remove 
 many a trivial nuisance, but need not concern 
 the general public. But now that so great a body of 
 landed estates are being broken up, and so many small 
 holdings in land are created, it is necessary to provide 
 for intestacy. The assimilation of freeholds to lease- 
 holds is an inevitable result of the immense multiplica- 
 tion of small freeholds, as also is the simplification of 
 the title to land. The Americans who adopted our 
 common law naturally got rid of feudal traditions, and 
 called interests in land and houses real estate. The 
 Bill does this for us.
 
 LAST WORDS 71 
 
 The new book by the Regius Professor of Modern 
 History at Cambridge 1 must deeply interest all who 
 reflect on the revolutionary age in which our lot is 
 cast. With great and wide learning and signal 
 detachment of mind, Professor Bury traces the his- 
 tory of the Idea of Progress as the accepted law of the 
 civilisation of mankind. He speaks as a historian, 
 not as apostle of any school, and he gives us an 
 encyclopaedic survey of the successive theories by 
 which Progress and Civilisation have grown to be 
 associated in men's minds. He begins his survey with 
 the Greeks the Athenian poets Aristotle and 
 Plato, Roman Epicureans and Stoics, the Mediaeval 
 Church, the Renascence, Descartes and Bacon, 
 French and German idealism, the revolutionists : and 
 thence he comes down to Evolution, social and 
 physical, Comte, Darwin, and Spencer. It is a his- 
 tory of Philosophy so far as belief in a law of progress 
 is a factor in the civilisation of Humanity. The book 
 is dedicated to Saint-Pierre, Condorcet, Comte, 
 Spencer, " and other optimists." 
 
 Like all vast generalisations, the idea of human Pro- 
 gress and the conscious sense of a common civilisation 
 was a very slow movement, built up gradually by par- 
 tial enlightenment and fitfully seen by poets and 
 thinkers in special manifestations. Bacon and 
 Descartes and their followers in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury changed the whole basis of speculative thought ; 
 
 i The Idea of Progress, by J. B. Bury (Macmillan and Co., 8vo., 1920)
 
 72 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, and the Encyclopaedists in 
 the eighteenth century, enlarged these new ideas so 
 as to touch the moral and social condition of man. But 
 Professor Bury treats the Abbe de Saint-Pierre about 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, famous author 
 of the " Project of Perpetual Peace," as the first to 
 imagine a Utopia of Progress in human civilisation. 
 Narrow as was his knowledge of history, shallow as 
 was his sense of scientific truth, and naif as were his 
 projects to secure the happiness of all, the generous 
 Abbe's heart had inspired a new optimism which 
 dreamed of an indefinite progress to the welfare of 
 man. 
 
 It is with Montesquieu, Turgot, Diderot, and Con- 
 dorcet that the idea of Progress as a practicable 
 enlargement of civilisation first became a true social 
 law, as part of a scientific philosophy of life. With 
 all their limitations and prejudices, Montesquieu and 
 Voltaire did much to popularise the idea of a philo- 
 sophy of history. Diderot founded the belief of man 
 as the centre of our World ; the Encyclopaedists and 
 the Economists in various ways popularised this idea. 
 Turgot was a great political reformer as well as a wise 
 philosopher of life. But Condorcet is the true 
 prophet of Progress, of which others had been the 
 intellectual students. And it is Condorcet whom Pro- 
 fessor Bury honours with special interest. " It is 
 amazing,' 5 he writes, " that the optimistic Sketch of 
 the Progress of the Human Mind should have been
 
 LAST WORDS 73 
 
 composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 
 1793 " ; and that it was written without books was " a 
 marvellous tour de force. 19 And in the Dedication 
 the Professor couples the name of Condorcet with that 
 of Comte, as indeed Positivists do also. 
 
 Mr. Bury passes on to criticise Rousseauism and 
 British and German philosophers who had visions of 
 Progress ; but he considers that it is rather from 
 France in the nineteenth century that came 
 systematic theories of Progress as an ascertainable law 
 of civilisation. The more definite schools which made 
 it the basis of schemes to mould society were those 
 founded by Saint-Simon and August Comte. With 
 discernment and solid evidence, the Professor treats 
 Saint-Simon as the successor of Condorcet, and Comte 
 as the successor of Saint-Simon. It was Saint-Simon 
 who in 1814 transformed Cordorcet's idea of Pro- 
 gress, meaning a growth in knowledge and intellectual 
 sanity into a far wider social power that explained 
 the mediaeval system and included religion as an 
 essential social force. This pregnant conception is 
 certainly the foundation of Positivism ; and, as Mr. 
 Bury says, Comte derived more from Saint-Simon 
 than he or his French disciples were willing to admit. 
 Comte broke with Saint-Simon at the age of twenty- 
 two, and he did not begin his System of Philosophy 
 until five years after Saint-Simon's death. Un- 
 systematic and elusive as was that founder of a sect of 
 Socialists, the Count must be regarded as the first who
 
 74 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 propounded a dogmatic scheme of general social Pro- 
 gress. He it was who in 1814 wrote : " The golden 
 age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the 
 perfection of social order." 
 
 But Professor Bury naturally treats Comte as far 
 the most important and systematic apostle of the idea 
 of Progress. All Positivists will accept the words 
 with which he opens his Chapter XVI. : 
 
 " Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish 
 the idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's 
 vision. The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of 
 Bazard and Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed 
 as curious rather than serious propositions, but the massive system 
 wrought out by Comte's speculative genius his organic scheme of 
 human knowledge, his elaborate analysis of history, his new science 
 of Sociology was a great fact with which European thought was 
 forced to reckon. The soul of this system was Progress, and the 
 most important problem he set out to solve was the determination of 
 its laws." 
 
 Professor Bury gives a thoughtful sketch of 
 Comte's philosophy of history and the famous " law 
 of the three stages." This is not the place to discuss 
 his account of the Philosophic Positive (1830-1842). 
 I will only note one or two points. Comte's law never 
 implied that the human organism, or Society, was ever 
 successively in one or other of the three stages ; but 
 that individual minds and branches of knowledge pass 
 through three phases in that order : individual minds 
 and societies often being in all three stages simul- 
 taneously as to different matters. I remark also that 
 Comte did treat the future of Asiatic and Polynesian
 
 LAST WORDS 75 
 
 races Islam and Hindooism in his Politique Posi- 
 tive (1854). Again, why assume that men in the 
 earliest prehistoric age were not fetichists, i.e., 
 attributed to external objects what they themselves 
 felt or feared ? The races who killed the mammoth 
 may have had much intelligence ; but what do we 
 know of their theories about Nature other than such as 
 we find in primitive people? And, even if the tribes 
 who inhabited European caves had evolved a system 
 of Theology, as Mr. Bury suggests, may they not have 
 had predecessors, and again, are they the true 
 ancestors of ourselves to-day ? There may have been 
 a huge gap in the glacier ages. 
 
 Professor Bury limits his study of Comte to the 
 Philosophic, and does not seem to know the Politique 
 Positive (1851-1854, English translation and analysis, 
 1875-1877). But Comte's philosophy of history and 
 of progress is most fully stated in the third volume of 
 the Politique (1853). Many points in the Professor's 
 criticism would be cleared up by referring to this work 
 and to Dr. J. H. Bridges' Illustrations of Positivism 
 (second edition, 1915). If Professor Bury would turn 
 to the New Calendar of Great Men (of which a new 
 edition is in the press), he will find about seventy of 
 the philosophers and men of science, whom he men- 
 tions, treated in the sense of Comte's philosophy of 
 history, and largely in complete agreement with his 
 own views. Reference to English students of Comte 
 would show that they, at least, never attribute to his
 
 76 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 writings any doctrine of finality, that they recognise 
 many of his speculations as ideals to meditate on 
 rather than to act out in the immediate present, that 
 they repudiate any idea of orthodoxy and sacer- 
 dotalism, that they in their own society and the prac- 
 tice of their lives reject the names of " sect," of 
 *' Comtism," of " authority "; indeed, as a matter 
 of fact, profess and claim a full measure of personal 
 liberty of thought and action. 
 
 Mr. Bury then treats of the theory of Evolution 
 and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) as having intro- 
 duced the third stage in the idea of Progress. And, 
 as he says, 
 
 " the ablest and most influential development of the argument from 
 evolution to Progress was the work of Spencer. He extended the 
 principle of evolution to sociology and ethics, and was the most con- 
 spicuous interpreter of it in an optimistic sense." 
 
 The summary of Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy 
 (1862), with which Mr. Bury practically closes his 
 study, will be accepted by most of Spencer's 
 followers, though they may not accept the criticisms 
 with which it is followed. The Professor evidently 
 regards Spencer as the most resolute upholder of 
 philosophic optimism. 
 
 " The synthesis of the world-process which these volumes lucidly and 
 persuasively developed, probably did more than any other work, at 
 least in England, both to drive home the significance of the doctrine 
 of evolution and to raise the doctrine of Progress to the rank of a 
 commonplace truth in popular estimation, an axiom to which political 
 rhetoric might effectively appeal."
 
 LAST WORDS 77 
 
 The interesting question then arises : How far does 
 Professor Bury himself believe in Progress? Is he 
 one of the " other optimists " to whom, with the 
 leading Four, his book is dedicated? We search the 
 Preface and the Epilogue ; and we must admit that we 
 find no conclusive answer. He declares that his pre- 
 sent attempt is " a purely historical inquiry." On 
 the other hand, he raises the problem of Progress to 
 a dominant moral and even religious power. He 
 finds that the hope of Progress has reformed the 
 ethical code of the Western world. The hope of an 
 ultimate happy state on this planet to be enjoyed by 
 future generations has replaced, as a social power, the 
 hope of felicity in another world. Progress seems to 
 be a counter-balance to the idea of Providence and the 
 dogma of personal immortality in Heaven. The Pro- 
 fessor has spent an immense amount of learning and 
 of thought on the genesis of this idea. He sees how 
 ethics and creed are largely involved in it. Is it a 
 great truth : is it an idolum saeculi? He leaves the 
 answer to us. As a last word he asks if the law of 
 Progress comes out of the law of Evolution, may it 
 not be itself evolved into some other unknown law of 
 change ? Optimists will reply : Perhaps it may be ; 
 and we will leave the infinite seons to come to settle 
 that question in their own good time. 
 
 All those who enjoyed the society of Henry James, 
 and the far wider range of his readers all over Europe 
 and America, will be glad to see the letters which he
 
 78 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 wrote to his family and his friends, and which have 
 now been edited with skill and care by Mr. Percy 
 Lubbock. 1 They will reveal to the world without the 
 charm of his personality and a nature of rare affection- 
 ateness, brimming over with generous sympathy for 
 all forms of beauty and of intelligence, yet all the 
 while endowed with an inexhaustible spirit of subtle 
 observation. These letters to parents, brother, sister, 
 nephews, nieces, cousins, and aunts, give us a bright 
 picture of New England family love and companion- 
 ship which has a primitive freshness in the air of our 
 crowded, hustling, standardised British life. Here 
 we have a cultured and keen American mind studying 
 British ways and the ever-revolving scene of old 
 Europe with thorough detachment, as if it were being 
 studied from another continent. The young na'if 
 traveller from New York descends upon us, as it 
 might be from Mars, all eyes, all nature's child, keen 
 to get to the heart of old Europe, finding how strange 
 and complex it is, and yet with such culture in his 
 brain and such sympathy in his heart that it fills him 
 with intense and growing interest. He is among us 
 long not at all of us then he passes to view the 
 charm of Italy and the esprit of France. But Europe, 
 England, London, Kent, grasp his soul more and 
 more. Wilsonian neutrality in the great war revolts 
 him, almost kills him. At last he is wholly with us 
 on the side of defending civilisation. In July, 1915, 
 
 1 The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy 
 Lubbock (Macmillan and Co., 2 vols., 8vo., 1920).
 
 LAST WORDS 79 
 
 he is naturalised, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Gosse being 
 two of his sponsors. In Februarj*, 1916, whilst the 
 Republic was still an unfriendly neutral, he dies as a 
 British subject and O.M. 
 
 Until the last this loving, generous, gentle soul of 
 his seems never to have been touched by any public 
 care, seems hardly aware of war, revolution, or policy, 
 either in America or in Britain, until the great up- 
 heaval of 1914 overwhelmed his hitherto tranquil spirit 
 of detachment and neutrality. He knew the leaders ; 
 he was in the whirl of our politics ; nothing of them 
 touched him, hardly gave him a moment's thought. 
 Again, with a nature of such tenderness, with streams 
 of affection flowing from his pen-tip to scores of 
 " dearest Emilys," " dearest Betsys " they cannot 
 all be cousins this love for beautiful and gracious 
 women never seems to have got concentrated upon 
 any one, even for a time. In all these forty-six years 
 of a correspondence brimming over with loving words 
 to men and to women there is not the faintest trace of 
 any supreme affection. This subtle master of the 
 human heart lets us see no scintilla of personal 
 romance of his own. Let those who care to read 
 between the lines of these letters try if they can dis- 
 cover any such. 
 
 These Letters suggest two points first as to the 
 mental habit and secondly as to the style of Henry
 
 80 XOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 James. He seems to close his mind resolutely against 
 any interest in warring causes and social movements. 
 In a letter of advice to his nephew he says, in 1899, 
 " Thank God I've no opinions not even on the 
 Dreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of 
 things as a more or less mad panorama, phantas- 
 magoria and dime museum." And there is more in 
 this Carlyle vein. But this devotion to Art broke 
 down in the Great War in 1914. Again, the letters 
 prove his intense modernity of mind. Not only will 
 he put aside the clash of parties and nations, but he 
 turns with indifference from the Past. There is no 
 trace that he ever seriously cared for history, or lived 
 in the past even in Rome, or Paris, in Florence, 
 Venice, or Touraine. In each he is the American 
 tourist, keen about art and society. He tells Mr. 
 Gosse, in 1900, that he hungers and thirsts for "a 
 gleam of reflection of the life we live, of artistic or 
 plastic intelligence of it, something one can say Yes 
 or No to, as discrimination, perception, observation, 
 rendering." 
 
 This passion for the present visible scene of modern 
 life reacts upon his culture and on his style. To read 
 these Letters one would think that he was indifferent 
 to, almost ignorant of, the great literature of the past. 
 In a flood of correspondence with men of letters, 
 students, and critics, there is a great deal about 
 modern romance, drama, and art, but hardly a single 
 word about our great English writers in verse or prose.
 
 LAST WORDS 81 
 
 I find nothing about Wordsworth, Cowper, Gray, 
 Burns, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Fielding, Richardson, 
 Sterne, Dryden, Pope, not even about Milton or 
 Spenser. He must have read them ; but they seem 
 not to have been infused into his mind, and they cer- 
 tainly did not form his style. If he had really studied 
 the Letters of Cowper, of Gray, of Walpole, would 
 he have written these, or the curiously tesselated and 
 mystically interwoven passages in so many of his 
 graceful romances ? If he had been born and trained 
 in Old not in New England his mind would have 
 had a broader range, and his style would have had a 
 simpler and an easier flow. 
 
 But let us not overlook the many bright and sug- 
 gestive pictures of illustrious Victorians. What 
 loving portraits of Burne- Jones, of William Morris 
 and of his wife " a grand synthesis of all the Pre- 
 Raffaelite pictures " of Mrs. Humphry Ward, of 
 Turgenev, of Stevenson, of the Eliot Nortons, of 
 George Meredith, of Gladstone, of Ruskin, of George 
 Eliot, of Paul Bourget, and Alphonse Daudet. In 
 this age of caricatures, diaries, and abominable indis- 
 cretions, how sweet, how generous, how artless are all 
 these revelations of a very affectionate and subtle spirit 
 poured out in such volubility to the men and women 
 of a large and distinguished family from New Eng- 
 land, and to such a circle of cultured people, both 
 English and foreign. Henry James, though domi-
 
 82 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 ciled and naturalised in Britain, was still American 
 from first to last. The simplicity, the lovability, the 
 graceful enfantiUage, of his open heart are a refreshing 
 relief from our national morgue.
 
 JUNE 
 
 -1920- 
 
 VI 
 
 LET us face the facts. The relations between the 
 Three Great Powers and the League of 
 Nations are not only anomalous and confusing, 
 but they show the impotence of the Covenant for all 
 effective purposes. The Powers refer a mandate on 
 the Baltic Powers to the League which naturally 
 refuses it, as having neither authority, nor arms, nor 
 means. The Three and the League are really the 
 same body under different names ; but they act as if 
 they were rival and even unfriendly Powers. The 
 Three have great armies in the field and great nations 
 in their hands. The League has nothing but costly 
 officials, commissions, and resolutions. To protect a 
 small State it has no more real power than the Society 
 for Protection of Women and Children. It is now 
 certain that America will never work out in Europe 
 the Wilsonian Covenant. Without America the 
 League is bankrupt. Let us face facts, and cease to 
 chase a Utopian mirage. Our three Allied nations 
 must do the best they can to clear up the urgent 
 problems which threaten us all with ruin. 
 
 ****** 
 
 83
 
 84 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 It is not for us to judge the political problems and 
 parties within the Republic. There was much to 
 justify both sides in the deadlock between President 
 and Senate Democrat and Republican. It is 
 entirely for them to settle things in their own way in 
 their own home. But see the result of the deadlock 
 on the world around ! It is plain that the Covenant 
 and the Fourteen Points were the American con- 
 dition on which the Republic brought its enormous 
 weight, its wealth, its inexhaustible armies and 
 material resources, into the war. But for that 
 Covenant, Britain, France, and Italy would have 
 made a quick, plain, direct Peace with their enemies 
 in some form. But the terms of American interven- 
 tion had entirely transformed the whole situation. 
 The civilised nations had been banded into a moral 
 Alliance. Their potential force, as well as their 
 material force, as such an Alliance, was overwhelm- 
 ing. The Peace had been bound up with the Ameri- 
 can Utopia. And fifty races in Europe and in Asia 
 were fired with the passion of self-assertion at the call 
 of the biggest of the Entente Powers. Then the 
 domestic quarrel in the Republic broke out. It with- 
 drew both in action and in council. It left its deserted 
 comrades in war to deal with the confusion of Europe 
 and to pacify the furious hopes and hates of races. 
 
 The Republic withdrew in action : it did not with- 
 draw in words. Refusing to meet in Council, refus- 
 ing men, money, or goods to its own creation, the
 
 LAST WORDS 85 
 
 League of Nations, it did not cease to criticise, to 
 complain, and to interfere, both officially and un- 
 officially, in the doings of its late Allies, and in the 
 execution of its own Treaty. It did not ratify its own 
 Treaty, yet it condemned the Allies who have ratified 
 theirs. The President would do nothing, meet no 
 one, discuss nothing ; yet he claimed to dictate to us 
 his wishes or his censures from his sick-room. Sena- 
 tors, mayors, the Press, bark and growl about British 
 attempts to settle convulsions in the world which 
 the Republic will not touch, inasmuch as "it passes 
 by on the other side." And the journals and even 
 important public men, use Ireland, Egypt, India, 
 and the sea, as counters in their own party game. 
 We well know the supreme necessity of a good under- 
 standing between our peoples the awful conse- 
 quences of a rupture. And our public men and our 
 Press bear insults and injuries in silence. But a man, 
 wholly independent of any party or place, a man who 
 has for a lifetime honoured the greatness and destinies 
 of the Republic, may fairly ask in this terrible hour 
 when civilisation is in sore straits is it an honourable 
 part of so glorious a nation to jeer at the Good 
 Samaritan whilst it prefers to " pass by on the other 
 side"? 
 
 That the League of Nations formally declines the 
 mandate to protect and save Armenia, is a cruel blow 
 to the hopes and promises which for years have 
 buoyed up that piteous people. After all that has
 
 86 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 been said and done by Britons and Americans from 
 the time of Gladstone and Salisbury, it looks like 
 weakness or bad faith to surrender these remnants 
 of an ancient race to their oppressors, or rather 
 to their assassins. Yet it cannot be weakness 
 or bad faith. It is Fate. Who can undertake 
 such a distant and impracticable task, if the League 
 of Nations declares that it has no power for 
 such an undertaking? What a mockery is this 
 League which in its consolidated might of the Great 
 Powers was to protect the small weak States. What 
 could have been done at the end of 1918 is impossible 
 now. Where are the armies that can save this 
 ancient, Christian, civilised, half -massacred race, sur- 
 rounded by savage enemies in far-off Asia, whom our 
 own Musulman fellow-citizens will not permit us to 
 crush or curb, as it would be disrespectful to the suc- 
 cessor of their Prophet ? 
 
 Surely the awful prospect of the final extermina- 
 tion of a Christian nation must appeal to the great 
 American people who for generations have worked 
 so hard and promised so much to help the oppressed 
 races in Turkey. American missionaries and philan- 
 thropists have done more for Armenians than any 
 others in Europe. It was the American President 
 and American representatives who, during the war 
 and the Conferences, most passionately pleaded for a 
 League of Nations to protect the weak peoples in the
 
 LAST WORDS 87 
 
 East. The belief of the world was that, whatever 
 other task the Republic undertook, the mandate to 
 save Armenia would be their obvious duty. And now 
 an internal dispute seems to reject that and every 
 European cause until after March, 1921, at earliest. 
 The League of Nations which Europe accepted at the 
 urgent insistence of U.S.A. is powerless in the 
 absence of her vast resources in energy, in wealth, in 
 men. And the strident appeal to self-determination, 
 which the President fired as a subterranean mine 
 below the heaving crust of European nationalities, has 
 roused such storms of hope, ambition, and strife that 
 the victorious Powers are over-strained in efforts to 
 satisfy or control them. 
 
 These promises to weak peoples, these potential 
 mandates, seem about to breed endless trouble and 
 strife. I view with anxiety our proffers to Serbia, 
 Greece, Syria, and Mesopotamia, as well as that to 
 Armenians. One of the worst imbroglios is that of 
 Palestine. I fear that Mr. Balfour's promise to the 
 Jews was even more dangerous than his treaty with 
 Italy. By all means let as many Jewish patriots as 
 desire it, go to Palestine, purchase estates or farms, 
 and settle there. But, as the country is now occu- 
 pied by its ancient people, Musulmans, Christians, 
 and others, with a very small Jewish minority, the 
 idea of creating in it a new Jewish Nation is non- 
 sense. The Allies and the Jews themselves are 
 puzzled and divided about what Zionism means. 
 There has been some ridiculous * ' hot air ' ' which 
 we might call Zangwillism which talks about dis-
 
 88 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 possessing the Arab and non- Jewish population, even 
 by force, and of constituting a Maccabean kingdom 
 according to the " Jewish Peril." But even the 
 more modest Zionism of bringing many Jews to 
 Palestine is a fanciful Sinn Fein kind of dream. And 
 I hope that our Government will give no more 
 encouragement to the nonsense of creating any sort 
 of Jewish nation. 
 
 I am invited by the Zionist Central body to sign 
 and support their Appeal to have Palestine made the 
 Jewish National Home. Of all the mischievous and 
 absurd cries about Races, this is the worst. Jews 
 may be a race, or a sect: they are not a nation. They 
 have a religion of their own, and inherit physical, 
 moral, and intellectual qualities. But that does not 
 make a nation ; much less does it give a right to turn 
 other races out of their own homes. Catholics do not 
 pretend to be a nation, nor do they claim to turn all 
 inhabitants out of the Papal States of the Church. 
 Gypsies are not a nation : nor do they claim to return 
 and drive the Fellaheen out of Egypt. All people 
 with red hair or long noses, or all the Smiths and 
 Joneses in the Empire or America, might as well 
 pretend to be a "nation"; or the Danes claim to 
 return to their ancestral homes in East Anglia. Jews 
 not only are not a nation ; but they have been for 
 2,000 years citizens of almost every nation on the 
 earth. They have been active members of countless 
 political nationalities for ages especially of British,
 
 LAST WORDS 89 
 
 American, French, Italian, and German. They are 
 no more a nation than Buddhists or Quakers. 
 
 And what right have they to Palestine ? More than 
 1,000 years before Christ they savagely overran that 
 land and massacred its native peoples. If race is de- 
 cisive, it belongs to the remnants of the Hittites, 
 Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and 
 Jebusites. History records no more ruthless exter- 
 mination than the story in Holy Writ how they 
 destroyed man and woman, young and old, ox, sheep, 
 and ass all except their friend, Rahab, the harlot. 
 Nothing more horrible is recorded of Attila and his 
 Huns, or of Wilhelm and his " Huns." A few cen- 
 turies later they were carried off as slaves ; and, ex- 
 cept for short intervals, they never recovered the 
 country as a nation, but lived in it as scattered exiles. 
 In Greek and Roman times they were only refugees, 
 who had no national or territorial rights. In the 
 Gospel age the inhabitants of all Syria were largely 
 Greek or Roman in race, in allegiance, in language, 
 and in civilisation. And now, because of this original 
 massacre and because they crucified the Founder of 
 Christianity, this Arab tribe, which has been wander- 
 ing about the world for two thousand years and has 
 lost all sense of common language, or political unity, 
 or agricultural habits, summons the Supreme Council 
 to place it as "a nation," and imitate Joshua in turn- 
 ing out the lawful inhabitants. Many rash promises
 
 90 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 were made in the stress of war, and we have too many 
 mandates as it is. 
 
 I cannot pass over the Centenary of Herbert 
 Spencer without a word to express my honour to the 
 most important English philosopher of the nineteenth 
 century. I knew him well for more than forty years ; 
 I worked with him in many a public cause ; I carried 
 on controversies with him, which happily ended in 
 personal sympathies; and I have published in more 
 than one book, and especially in my Oxford Herbert 
 Spencer Lecture, 1905, my own estimate of his sys- 
 tem of philosophy. I am well aware that the 
 twentieth century turns, with a perhaps inevitable 
 reaction, from those whom the nineteenth century 
 honoured. But the mature judgment of the future 
 will do justice to the profound powers of mind and 
 the inexhaustible industry which Spencer brought to 
 his task in a long life of devotion to intellectual and 
 moral progress. His signal achievement was to have 
 been the only English thinker, since the crude 
 attempt of Bacon, who had systematically worked out 
 a Synthesis of general knowledge. 
 
 ****** 
 
 This is so vast, so rare, and yet so dominant an 
 achievement that, even if later knowledge reveals its 
 errors and its incompleteness, it takes a place of its 
 own in the history of human thought. In a new book 
 Professor Bury has shown how a synthetic theory of 
 civilisation reacts on moral, political, and religious
 
 LAST WORDS 91 
 
 ideas from age to age ; and he very justly groups to- 
 gether as the founders of our law of Progress Con- 
 dorcet, Comte, and Spencer. It is Spencer, in fact, 
 who alone in the English-speaking world has de- 
 veloped the philosophy which on the Continent arose 
 after the convulsion that closed the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. Our great English men of physical science and 
 of moral and social science have worked more or less 
 on specialist and limited fields, where conclusive 
 accepted results are possible. Spencer is still " our 
 one synthetic philosopher." The attempt to frame a 
 real concatenation of scientific and moral ideas has 
 effects so pervading and constructive that it retains 
 its permanent power over subsequent thought, 
 although in many parts its solutions are not accepted 
 as final. Thus Spencer will rank with Bacon, Locke, 
 Hume, Adam Smith, and Darwin. 
 
 I am much interested in the very timely book just 
 published by Mr. Hartley Withers. 1 He is an 
 economist of great experience and of signal independ- 
 ence of judgment ; and he has written a lucid and 
 balanced estimate of the current schemes of industrial 
 reform. It is a manual of the case for Capitalism, 
 which should be invaluable were it taken to heart both 
 by employers and employed, for it is by no means a 
 partisan defence of Capital, of which it frankly states 
 the evils and the defects under present conditions. 
 For its evils and its defects he proposes social, moral, 
 
 1 The Case for Capitalism (Eveleigh Nash Co.). pp. 255.
 
 92 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 and practical remedies ; but after a close examination 
 of various forms of Communism, State Socialism, 
 Bureaucratic, and Guild Socialism, he shows the solid 
 advantages of a recognised system of Capitalism over 
 all the tyranny, monopoly, and chaos which must re- 
 sult from any of the familiar schemes of eliminating 
 Capital by a vast social and economic revolution. 
 
 He opens his study with a chapter on the " Weak- 
 ness and Strength of Capitalism ' ' ; and in this he 
 states fully the ordinary attacks made on it, and then 
 the gain to freedom and general utility which it con- 
 fers on the mass of the citizens in a normal de- 
 mocracy. There is another chapter on the " Achieve- 
 ments of Capitalism " in conferring on the public the 
 enormous improvements in human life in recent 
 times, as compared with the oppression and sufferings 
 of former generations and this in spite of all that 
 rhetoric can declaim as to still unremedied abuses. 
 In the incalculable multiplicity of modern life the 
 demagogue can find a ready text. The true reformer 
 in politics or in economics must patiently survey the 
 entire field and set off local and partial evils against 
 the widespread ruin that yawns in the darkness of an 
 unknown abyss of social upheaval. We can all see 
 how a crazy social gospel of new industry converts a 
 magnificent and populous city into the dying wilder- 
 ness of Leningrad.
 
 LAST WORDS 93 
 
 With inexorable logic Mr. Withers exposes the 
 mendacious sophists who tell excitable workmen that 
 the " capitalist is a thief " ; and the card-sharper trick 
 of Karl Marx that Capital robs Labour of the " sur- 
 plus value." This is the poison seed that has grown 
 up as Bolshevism. Every sane economist knows that 
 ' t profit ' ' earned over the wages paid out usually has 
 to be devoted (1) to the debts due for rent, plant, 
 materials, and capital lent for user, (2) to reserve and 
 fresh industrial undertakings, and (3) in a very minor 
 degree, often very moderate, to the personal use of 
 the capitalist. Without No. (1) there would have 
 been no work produced and no wages at all paid ; 
 without No. (2) there would be constant stagnation 
 and no increase of business or wider employment. 
 And yet Labour leaders allow ignorant workmen to 
 be gulled into fancying that the entire " surplus 
 profit" is (a) their own product and property, and 
 (b) is plundered by the capitalist. Labour will never 
 be fit to form a Government until it has induced the 
 working masses to put aside this silly falsehood of 
 Marx. 
 
 After showing the radical antagonism between 
 State Socialism and Guild Socialism, and the repudia- 
 tion of State bureaucracy by both, Mr. Withers ends 
 with an admirable chapter on " Capitalism and 
 Freedom." Though Capitalism has its own defects, 
 it protects citizens against the oppressive bondage in- 
 evitable in every known form of Communism,
 
 94 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Socialism, or Guilds. Guilds could only live by en- 
 forcing rigid monopolies. Socialism cannot wriggle 
 itself out of bureaucratic despotism. Socialists and 
 Guildists regard the general public as mere " fodder " 
 for their fads. The "consumers" mean the whole 
 commonwealth except themselves, and are to be their 
 bond-slaves, to buy what they tell them, do what they 
 are ordered to do, and pay the prices that they fix. 
 Socialism and Guildism are Sinn Fein in working 
 clothes. Ireland and Russia to-day are the Paradise 
 of the "top-dog." As to workmen showing rare 
 zeal for the State, Mr. Withers tells us how the 
 Tommies in camp laughed when he asked if they 
 found "fatigue work" so stimulating. Altogether 
 Mr. Withers' book is a wholesome manual of rational 
 industry. The only part of the case for Capitalism 
 which he omits is that of the moral value and the 
 moral duty of Capitalism, so powerfully enforced by 
 Auguste Comte in his Polity as the Social ideal of a 
 regenerated Humanity. 
 
 The last alas! the posthumous tale of Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward (Harvest, Collins and Co.) will be 
 widely read by all who love her books, but also as a 
 record of her splendid activity to the last breath of 
 life during these cruel days of war and toil. I know 
 not if it will add to her literary reputation. For my- 
 self, as an old friend, I value it for telling us so much 
 of herself. No woman in all these six years of stress 
 and strain worked so hard, saw so much, studied so
 
 LAST WORDS 95 
 
 deeply the problems in France, Belgium, and 
 America, appealed so vividly to the hearts of men and 
 of women, in the cause of a better world for those 
 who are to come. Years hence this little book will 
 be found a living chronicle to explain how women 
 took to the land and to men's work and ways and 
 clothes, how the villages took their part, and pen- 
 sioners of both sexes, parsons, and squires, Canadians 
 and Americans, fell into rank in the old country. 
 Mrs. Ward was to the last one of the most strenuous 
 opponents of Votes for Women. This book will 
 show that she rejoiced in seeing all that women could 
 do and only wished them to hold fast to what women 
 can do best. 
 
 Although the young mockers cease not to call out 
 " Go up " to the bald-headed Victorian prophets, it 
 is curious how persistently the Georgians seem busy 
 with records of Victorian work. The poets, priests, 
 writers, and politicians of the nineteenth century 
 have been studied in abundant biographies and criti- 
 cisms ; and a brilliant satirist has portrayed four 
 Eminent Victorians in pungent vignettes, which look 
 too much like snap-shots in a picture-paper. Happily 
 now truer portraits of seven eminent Victorians have 
 been given us by a sympathetic and serious student 
 of modern thought. Mrs. W. L. Courtney's por- 
 traits 1 have every quality that Mr. Lytton Strachey's 
 
 i Freethinkers of the Nineteenth Century, by Janet E. Courtney, 
 O.B.E. Chapman and Hall, 1920.
 
 96 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 want. They are based on careful study of the 
 originals : they are singularly truthful : and they 
 judge the character and the work of each subject with 
 an impartial but kindly mind. I have been myself 
 in close touch with Frederick Denison Maurice, 
 Matthew Arnold, Charles Bradlaugh, Thomas Hux- 
 ley, and Leslie Stephen ; and I have myself written 
 estimates of Miss Martineau and of Charles Kingsley. 
 And I am amazed to find how faithfully a Georgian 
 lady from books has made my friends live again. 
 
 The four " Eminent Victorians " were good sub- 
 jects to be analysed but they were not typical 
 leaders of nineteenth-century thought and progress. 
 The seven leaders of thought, chosen as types of Vic- 
 torian opinion, differ widely both in character and in 
 creed ; but they were all stout asserters of liberty of 
 judgment and pioneers of new phases of belief. 
 "Free-thinkers" does not mean sceptics: it means 
 those who burst obsolete bonds of tradition. Two of 
 the seven were earnest parish priests : Arnold was a 
 reformer of the Church : Huxley, Stephen, and per- 
 haps Miss Martineau, were Agnostics : Bradlaugh 
 was the only real Iconoclast. The seven Victorians 
 have perhaps hardly any common mark except 
 Honesty, Courage, Conviction. To my memory all 
 seven are set forth in this book in the living form as 
 I knew them and withal are judged with a genial 
 independence of mind. Mrs. Courtney is neither 
 advocate nor satirist ; she gives us the facts, and does
 
 LAST WORDS 97 
 
 not range herself under anyone. I am myself per- 
 sonally much interested in her story of Maurice's life 
 and family, as of all the seven I had chiefly moral 
 sympathy with him, albeit the least intellectual agree- 
 ment. In creed I am far more with Huxley and 
 Stephen : and in sympathy and in belief, least of all 
 the seven with Bradlaugh. If Maurice and Stephen 
 could be amalgamated in one religious eirenicon, it 
 would go far to realise a Positivist ideal. 
 
 Of the seven biographies suggestive and sound as 
 they all are the central and dominant names are 
 those of Huxley and of Stephen (the only one who 
 survived Queen Victoria). These two studies I would 
 specially recommend young readers to mark, if they 
 care to understand what we Mid- Victorians were 
 thinking. They are also the only studies which Mrs. 
 Courtney seems to have made from personal know- 
 ledge. Of Maurice, Arnold, Huxley, and Kingsley 
 I have written so much in various books of my own, 
 that I will only now say how entirely I am in general 
 agreement with Mrs. Courtney's portraits. Both her 
 Huxley and her Stephen are most faithful and in- 
 teresting estimates. Stephen of them all was most 
 near to me in age, in social and intellectual fellow- 
 ship ; and I find in these pages a fine record of a noble 
 life. I worked with him in many a stiff road that he 
 trod so stoutly : and I grieved to find that he would 
 not join me when I trod paths of my own. Mrs. 
 Courtney has told most vividly and faithfully her
 
 98 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 story of some who in the last century fought and died 
 in the long battle which, for more than fifty years, 
 was waged to secure intellectual freedom for our 
 children.
 
 JULY 
 
 -1920- 
 VII 
 
 IN the early days of climbing Mont Blanc travellers 
 were told by the guides to keep silence at a cer- 
 tain mauvais pas, for fear that the vibration of 
 speech might loosen an avalanche upon their heads. 
 Our country is now passing through a corridor over- 
 hung with treacherous blocks. Its path has never 
 been through such a confused conglomeration of 
 dangers. Before these pages are read, some of these 
 masses may have been left behind, or some of them 
 may have fallen. Where any wrong utterance may 
 do mischief, it is best to keep silence even from good 
 words. The amazing complications of the various 
 crises that beset our statesmen, with all the reactions 
 of each dilemma on all the rest, cannot be treated in 
 a few paragraphs or pages ; and no one of these 
 dilemmas ought to be handled apart from the rest. 
 As the world rings with baseless rumours, many of 
 which are concocted by envy, malice, or fanaticism, 
 as the true facts are known to no one outside the inner 
 councils, a mere observer of the political imbroglio, 
 whatever he may think, had better keep to himself 
 both criticism and advice. No man has a right to 
 
 99
 
 100 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 make either of these public, unless he is able to judge 
 the situation all round, as a whole. 
 
 The long and checkered history of our country can 
 show no time of manifold crisis like this. The whole 
 world seems seething at once. A series of incalcul- 
 able convulsions has entirely recast all familiar values. 
 The war coming on us (at least to the public) like a 
 bolt from the blue the Russian culbute the Ameri- 
 can descent upon Europe her still more incredible 
 desertion the entire reconstruction of our Parlia- 
 ment the entire revaluation of all industrial prob- 
 lems, of all financial, commercial, and class problems 
 the enormous responsibilities thrown on Britain by 
 the Treaty and covenant and our alliance the revo- 
 lutions no longer latent in Ireland, Egypt, Syria, 
 Mesopotamia, Turkey, and India all of these to- 
 gether make an unexampled chaos of problems. The 
 Government has to deal with all of them at once, and 
 each of them in view of all the rest. Parties, the 
 Press, factions, classes, and groups, each call out 
 separately for their own special cause. They will not 
 see that each problem depends on a network of other 
 problems. Do this ! Do that ! Do not do this ! is 
 shouted by ten thousand throats. But it is impos- 
 sible to do anything even to cease doing unless all 
 the surrounding conditions are taken into account 
 and solved. All I say is, no man has a right to judge 
 the situation, unless he will study all the complica-
 
 LAST WORDS 101 
 
 tions of the crises, and will weigh each proposed plan 
 in the light of its relation to all the rest. 
 
 At this most critical hour of the Anglo-French 
 Entente, a very timely work has been given us in 
 English the Life of the great French Patriot of 
 1870 by an eminent French statesman now Presi- 
 dent of the Republic. 1 Gambetta was far the greatest 
 Frenchman of his time ; and his death at the age of 
 44 was an irreparable loss to France and to Europe, 
 for as an inspiring national force he was at least the 
 equal of Cavour or Bismarck, and he had a nobler 
 nature than either of these. The story of his wonder- 
 ful career (1838-1882) has now been told with singu- 
 lar lucidity and perfect truth by M. Deschanel, one 
 of the wisest as well as the best informed of living 
 statesmen in France. This analysis of the long duel 
 between France and Germany from 1870 to 1918, by 
 one who has long been of the inmost circle of French 
 diplomacy, is invaluable to enable Englishmen to 
 understand the internecine struggle in which France 
 has lived for two generations. Though M. Deschanel 
 ends his book at 1882, it throws a flood of light on the 
 problems which the Great War has sought to solve in 
 blood and ruin. Let Englishmen study this admir- 
 able Life, if they wish to know what are the aims and 
 dilemmas of Frenchmen. Gambetta was the type of 
 all that is best in France : M. Deschanel has proved 
 himself to be a masterly historian. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Gambetta, by Paul Deschanel. W. Heinemann, 8vo., 15s. 
 
 ,-ri rfti irnnMlft I IQD&RV
 
 102 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The book has a singular interest for me, and I feel 
 justified in bearing witness to its scrupulous imparti- 
 ality and its truth, because during the whole period I 
 followed with keen sympathy every phase of French 
 politics, was constantly in France, and was in close 
 touch with many French politicians. I knew Gam- 
 betta personally and discussed the situation with him 
 in his house in the Rue Montaigne, where he gathered 
 his colleagues to his breakfast parties. I have heard 
 him as President of the Chamber. I knew many of 
 his colleagues, especially Ranc, Challomel-Lacour, 
 Louis Blanc, Spuller, Saint-Hilaire, Saint-Simon, 
 Rouvier, Felix Faure, Jules Ferry. During the 
 great Seize-Mai struggle of 1877, I was for three 
 months in France, and as the Times correspondent, I 
 was even acting in concert with Gambetta's party. 
 When Gambetta first appeared in the Chamber, I 
 was writing at home on the necessity for union 
 between France and England as the prime condition 
 of European peace. The day after his death, i.e. on 
 January 1st, 1883, I pronounced a eulogy on his 
 career at Newton Hall. Few Englishmen can have 
 studied the whole story of Gambetta's work in 
 France more continuously than I have done. And I 
 find M. Deschanel's biography a truly Tacitean 
 account of his illustrious chief. 
 
 The Life is written with all the literary charm and 
 the scrupulous justesse of a French Academician. It 
 is no panegyric, no legend, no apology. It is based
 
 LAST WORDS 108 
 
 on a thorough study of Parliamentary Papers, the 
 Memoires of the chief politicians engaged abroad and 
 at home, and several unpublished letters of Gambetta 
 himself. An unusual grace is given to this biography 
 of a profound statesman by his beautiful love-letters 
 to his beloved Leonie, to whom he wrote daily and 
 who exerted over him so useful an influence. These 
 letters, says M. Deschanel, "form a romance that 
 throbs with passion." "You are my moral and in- 
 tellectual home," he wrote to her in 1876. This Life 
 of a statesman is no encyclopaedia of blue-books and 
 despatches : it is the romance of a wonderful career. 
 Gambetta was not, like Cavour and Bismarck, born 
 with title and wealth, but in the modest home of a 
 naturalised Italian tradesman. His education, his 
 club-debatings, his penury, his life as a student and 
 then at the bar, are full of Parisian character. M. 
 Deschanel gives a life-like portrait of the irrepressible 
 passion of the man. I too have seen him bound up 
 from his chair, when I asked him why they did not 
 continue the fight in 1871. " Parce qu'ils n'avaient 
 pas de courage," he roared. As Paul Deschanel 
 truly says : he was possessed with " the passion for 
 France." 
 
 Gambetta was the soul of France in the last 
 desperate defence of 1871 ; but he was even greater 
 as founder of the Republic, 1873-1877. M. 
 Deschanel very truly shows that the construction of 
 a constitutional Republic was essentially the work of
 
 104 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Gambetta. The Republic has now endured through 
 tremendous strains for exactly halt' a century, whilst 
 the Empire which Bismarck founded has pulled itself 
 down in shameful, final ruin. As the President says, 
 Gambetta brought to his life-long task "practical, 
 effective statesmanship." During my long travels in 
 France, July to November, 1877, I visited the groups 
 of the Gambettist 363 deputies all over France, and 
 I saw how the chief in Paris was the centre of the 
 entire Liberal party the Foch of the republican 
 armies. He told the Marshal President either " se 
 soumettre ou se demettre "; and he made good the 
 summons. As Lamartine said of Mirabeau "his 
 ringing phrases became the proverbs of the Revolu- 
 tion." This was far more true of Gambetta's, for 
 his epigrams were both the battle-cry of revolution 
 and also the maxims of reconstruction. Gambetta 
 was greater than Mirabeau or Danton. Mirabeau 
 knew that he had " left nothing but a vast upheaval." 
 Danton said "Let our memory perish!' Gam- 
 betta's memory will live as the Washington of the 
 Republic of France. 
 
 Gambetta was no mere orator and party chief. He 
 was a far-sighted statesman, who had solid convictions 
 of sound policy deep-seated in his brain. The Presi- 
 dent shows how the practical politician was inspired 
 by the theories of Auguste Comte who "exercised 
 a great and ever increasing influence over him." 
 When fanatical radicals attacked the very spirit of
 
 LAST WORDS 105 
 
 government and tried to suppress the army, Gam- 
 betta crushed them with a speech which embodied 
 Comte's motto Order and Progress. As M. Des- 
 chanel says : " for the first time the mind of a poli- 
 tician was guiding universal suffrage towards an 
 organised democracy." "His mind was saturated 
 with Mirabeau and Comte." At the Sorbonne, 
 Gambetta described Comte as * ' the most powerful 
 thinker of the age." As M. Deschanel says '* The 
 teachings of Auguste Comte had at this time a wide- 
 spread influence"; and at a banquet in honour of 
 M. Littre, Gambetta declared himself practically a 
 believer in the positivist ideal of moral science applied 
 to politics. The whole positivist body in France con- 
 tinued to give Gambetta a hearty support in all his 
 political activities. To them he has always seemed 
 the true type of the republican statesman who dis- 
 dains to be either demagogue or dictator. 
 
 It must not be supposed that this fine study of the 
 President, full as it is of wise state-craft and lucid 
 analyses of complicated situations, fails to give us a 
 picture of Gambetta the man. His origin and up- 
 bringing are full of interest. Genoa, Gascony, 
 Cahors, united to breed in him genius, passion, and 
 resolution. His forbears were Catholic, some of his 
 uncles, priests. His looks, which some jesters called 
 Jewish, were intensely Italian ; his wit, humour and 
 charm were intensely French. There were in him 
 strains of Rebelais, Mirabeau, Voltaire and Diderot.
 
 106 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The fou furieiu: that Thiers once called him, had in- 
 exhaustible powers of work, of patience, of sagacious 
 self-restraint. He not only saw the immediate need 
 of the hour, but he foresaw how the present would 
 work out. A fine saying of his is this : " Parties are 
 formed by ideas : groups are formed by interests." 
 It is rare that the story of one who rode on the top- 
 most waves of a great revolution can show so much 
 of family affection, of love for a noble woman, of 
 magnanimity to opponents. His rejoinder to Thiers 
 when he cried out : " There sits the man who has 
 freed our provinces from the occupation," was the 
 act of a generous soul and true patriot who can for- 
 get "party" and can smile at insults. Gambetta, 
 indeed, was a truly great Frenchman ; and in this 
 Life the President has written a book that is worthy 
 of such a subject. 
 
 In philosophy the problem of the hour is the Law 
 of Progress. It is inevitable that, after a cataclysmic 
 epoch of Change, thoughtful minds should ask : Is 
 this Progress is it morally and socially all to the 
 good is it destined to continue? Professor J. B. 
 Bury, of Cambridge, published a very learned history 
 of The Idea of Progress, on w r hich I commented at 
 the time. Mr. Marvin, of Oxford, and his friends 
 have published, at the Clarendon Press, a series of 
 essays on Progress from 1870 to 1914. And now the 
 Dean of St. Paul's has issued from the same Press 
 his Romanes Lecture, entitled, as is Professor Bury's
 
 LAST WORDS 107 
 
 book, The Idea of Progress. Here we have three 
 views of Progress. Professor Bury gives us, with 
 scholarly judgment, the history of the Idea ; the 
 Oxford essayists see mostly the blessed signs of the 
 change. The Dean is critical, trenchant, almost 
 negative. Nothing so brilliant, so full of wit, of 
 irony, of home thrusts at credulity and ignorance 
 has appeared. We might think he had inherited the 
 flashing rapier of a much older Dean, were it not that 
 his long studies of the Platonists had endowed him 
 with the Socratic vein of pungent probing to the root 
 of all forms of conventional and emotional sophistry. 
 The literary honours of this tri-partite discussion rest 
 with Dr. Inge, who has certainly won the first round 
 "on points." 
 
 The key of the Dean's argument is disproof of the 
 belief in a Law of Progress, automatic, inevitable, 
 continuous, moral, and beneficent stated in its most 
 violent form by Spencer, and still the moving spirit 
 of democratic rhetoric everywhere. As he shows, it 
 is to misuse Darwin's science, if we assume that such 
 a law of human perfectibility is a necessary result of 
 evolution. Dr. Inge shows how little modern 
 astronomy encourages the glorification of our planet 
 and the infinite welfare of its inhabitants. Nor does 
 scientific history disclose any continuous improve- 
 ment in man's nature and happiness. But the dogma 
 of necessary progress in things political is the mis- 
 chievous lure that persuades the people that what
 
 108 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 seems " to be coming " is necessarily good, and that 
 the law of change is destined to sweep away such 
 antique superstitions as Country, Property, Order, 
 and Government. And the law of Progress in 
 religion "has distorted Christianity." The Dean 
 sweeps aside Spencer's preposterous dogmatism of 
 differentiation in the Universe, as well as Hegel's 
 dream of an unalterable and infinite Absolute both 
 of which are anathema to the philosophy of experi- 
 ence. With a great deal of this the school of thought 
 with which I hold is in perfect agreement. We are 
 meliorists, not optimists. We trust that Man can 
 better himself and his earth, but has no automatic 
 perfectibility to look to. We agree with Huxley that 
 cosmic nature is far from Man's friend ; but it is ex- 
 travagant to call it Man's enemy. We do not see any 
 certainty that man must be perfect. But we hope to 
 do the best under difficult conditions to improve our 
 lot and also ourselves. 
 
 It is not the business of an ecclesiastic to see truths 
 in Comte, but it is the part of a philosopher to under- 
 stand him. In assuming that Comte's philosophy 
 accepts any absolute or necessary Law of Progress, 
 Dr. Inge goes too far. Progress, indeed, is a primary 
 and sacred motto of Positivist religion ; but it is 
 " Progress the End " that is, the object of human 
 endeavour and, as it is to be inspired by Love, it is 
 moral progress ; and, being based on Truth, it is ever 
 subject to external limits. Astronomy, Physics,
 
 LAST WORDS 109 
 
 Physiology, Biology show us how vast, how menac- 
 ing, are these limits. They are outrageously over- 
 stated in the scientific Agnosticism of Professor 
 Huxley and in the cynical atheism of Bertrand 
 Russell. Our environment on earth has infinite 
 dangers and obstacles, and also infinite opportunities 
 for good and for happiness. If it will only last for 
 some millions of a?ons, that is quite enough for us. 
 But when the Dean finds support in Huxley's and 
 Russell's nightmare of a demonic world about to 
 swallow up mankind, how does he reconcile such com- 
 promising terrors with the Omnipotence and Benevo- 
 lence of a Creator ? Positivists are not troubled either 
 with the potential horrors of scientists nor with the 
 logical dilemmas of Creation. They live in a world 
 which courage and thought can make a tolerable 
 home at any rate for countless generations to come. 
 That is enough : and they are not at all busy with 
 metaphysical revelations about the Universe, nor with 
 the baffling inconsistencies which obtrude on the 
 prayers of theologians. It is a misunderstanding to 
 assume that Comte either stated or attempted to 
 state any " Law of Progress " as a necessary conse- 
 quence of evolution. He stated the moral la\v, that 
 is, the duty of humanity to improve itself and its own 
 world, and that, as a fact, that duty had been fairly 
 observed. Surely, this is on the lines of all rational 
 Theology.
 
 110 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The Romanes Lecture is a veritable mine of home- 
 truths, and it scintillates with brilliant epigrams. But 
 home-truths have their brighter side in practice, and 
 epigrams too often over-state them till they become 
 paradoxes. A Bishop once told an eminent Dar- 
 winian that he saw the ape in him ; but do 
 " we " to-day does anybody now believe we are 
 "descendants of monkeys"? The rational view of 
 history admits that civilisation ebbs and flows in suc- 
 cessive stages of decline and growth ; but the doctrine 
 of recurrent cycles is rejected by competent students 
 as plainly contrary to facts. The Dean regards seven 
 centuries I presume from A.D. 300 to A.D. 1000 
 as the Dark Ages and worthless. He consigns to 
 Nirvana the Latin Fathers and the Catholic Church, 
 Tribonian and Roman law, Byzantine polity, litera- 
 ture, and art, Charlemagne, Alfred, Theodoric, and 
 Otto. Does history show that " civilisation is a 
 disease almost invariably fatal, unless its course is 
 checked in time ' ' ? How would the Dean check 
 civilisation? Have we "devastated the loveliness of 
 the world"? Have we "enslaved the animal 
 creation "? Do dogs, cats, horses, sheep, cattle, and 
 elephants consider us to be human devils? Russians 
 and Germans have done horrid brutalities, but has 
 not the civilised world risen up in abhorrence? Has 
 not the conscience of men and still more of women 
 impelled them to deeds of humanity in vast popu- 
 lations such as were unparalleled in former Ages? 
 Comte certainly held that " the Catholic monotheism 
 of the Middle Ages was ah advance upon pagan
 
 LAST WORDS 111 
 
 antiquity." It is strange indeed to find an Anglican 
 ecclesiastic ridiculing that as superstition. 
 
 I remember a former Dean of St. Paul's who 
 wrote a great book in praise of Latin Christianity. 
 I am proud to think that Comte's whole conception 
 of history is governed with the same idea of imperish- 
 able advance, both moral and intellectual, which we 
 owe to the Middle Ages, and even to the Dark Ages. 
 To write that Comte aimed at a Theocracy, or the 
 subjection of State to Church, or to repression of free 
 thought this is misrepresentation ; for the very 
 centre of his system is complete independence of 
 State and Church, of material and of spiritual power, 
 and of unlimited freedom of opinion. 
 
 ****** 
 
 In the end, however, the Dean, who is very scep- 
 tical about any regular Progress, gives us an ample 
 field for Hope. Curiously enough, this is precisely 
 the Positivist attitude to the future at any rate on 
 earth. We, too, have no absolute certainty of any 
 necessary Progress. We acknowledge our human 
 limitations and dangers. We hope to overcome them 
 by faith, by science, by moral energy. So far we go 
 with the Christian triad of Faith, Hope, Love. The 
 evolution of Humanity seems to us on the whole to 
 be morally progressive with cruel failures and sets- 
 back. History of Man has a real, but somewhat 
 chequered, continuity ; and we will not allow our- 
 selves to be downhearted by the noble indignation of
 
 112 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 one who sometimes uses satire to give point to his 
 moral warnings. 
 
 Those whom the Dean's dilemmas have made 
 downhearted may take comfort from studying 
 another volume issued by the Clarendon Press 
 Recent Developments in European Thought, essays 
 edited by F. S. Marvin, Oxford, 8vo., 1920. Mr. 
 Marvin, the author of The Living Past, The Century 
 of Hope, and other works, has now edited a volume 
 of twelve essays by graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, 
 Manchester, St. Andrews, and Durham, to illustrate 
 the "Progress of Western Civilisation" in the last 
 generation, starting with the Franco-German War of 
 1870. The editor opens with the view that a great 
 stage in the growth of unity among nations is marked 
 by two international tragedies ; but he does not agree 
 with the Dean that the war of 1914 exhibited on the 
 whole a cyclical reversion to mediaeval barbarism. 
 He admits that there is with some ' ' a falling in the 
 barometer of temperament," but he finds that the 
 tragedies of the period are rather on the surface than 
 in the nature of humanity, and that " such an output 
 of mental energy, rewarded by such a harvest of 
 truth, is without precedent in man's evolution." He 
 points to " the advance in international unity and 
 social reform within the State," both of which were 
 heralded by Comte before 1857. He finds "good 
 grounds for thinking that the average man has im- 
 proved in goodness " ; and still more that " the collec-
 
 LAST WORDS 113 
 
 live soul of man has grown." The man of science is 
 certain that foresight will " make the reign of man 
 upon the planet wider and firmer than before. The 
 spirit of science is the spirit of hope." 
 
 The same tempered optimism animates the other 
 essays, which are occupied in tracing recent develop- 
 ments in philosophy, religion, history, economics, and 
 biology. Their main business is to show develop- 
 ment, which they do not claim to be at all automatic, 
 necessary, or continuous, but which on the whole, 
 and with frequent failures and reactions, they take to 
 be conducive to human welfare. The essays on Phil- 
 osophy and on Religion are much occupied with 
 criticism of recent specialist theories, but neither 
 essays are revolutionary nor pessimist. The learned 
 and masterly study of Historical Research by Mr. 
 G. P. Gooch is an invaluable summary of all that has 
 been done in our times to show how *' the scope of 
 history has gradually widened till it has come to in- 
 clude every aspect of the life of humanity" "an 
 immense and almost an immeasurable advance in his- 
 toric studies." This splendid survey of recent history 
 amply justifies the editor's words (in p. 10) : " No 
 single generation before ever learnt so much, not only 
 of the world around it, but also of the doings of pre- 
 vious generations." Alas! the Romanes Lecture 
 would only lead us to think that we are progeniem 
 vitiosiorem .
 
 114 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The essays on Atomic Theories, Biology, Art, 
 Music, are specialist studies on recent achievements. 
 The sixth essay, on Political Theory, by Mr. Lindsay, 
 summarises new views about the functions of the 
 State and the altered position of Parliament. It 
 appears to be rather a statement of new books than a 
 practical judgment on actual conditions. The 
 coupling of Parliament and Trades Unions as equally 
 legitimate sources of political power ignores the essen- 
 tial difference that Parliaments are chosen by electors 
 of all degrees of interest, capacity and education 
 and now by women as well as men ; whilst Trades 
 Unions are associations of manual labourers neces- 
 sarily with none but elementary education, and 
 united by only one interest that of gaining higher 
 wages and making their labour easier. To gain these 
 ends, they are usually indifferent to the welfare of 
 other citizens and to that of Country, which many of 
 them regard as a discredited Idol. All this would 
 come under the head of the Anarchy which the 
 Romanes Lecturer foresees, but yet it seems to fall 
 in with the general optimism of this Oxford volume. 
 The Economic Development is treated from three 
 points of view "The Industrial Scene, 1842," 
 *' Mining Operations," and " The Spirit of Associa- 
 tion," all by Mr. C. R. Fay, of Cambridge. The 
 three papers give a fair statement, from well-known 
 text-books and Parliamentary inquiries, of the deplor- 
 able evils of the industrial civilisation which the 
 Romanes Lecture denounces. But it goes on to show 
 what great and continuous improvements have been
 
 LAST WORDS 115 
 
 accomplished in eighty years by the untiring efforts 
 of men in association, led by public-spirited men and 
 women drawn from all classes and ranks. I am old 
 enough to remember 1842 myself, both in town and 
 in country; and, whatever Blue-books tell us of 
 horrors and starvation, working people on the whole 
 were quite as cheerful as they are to-day ; they had 
 many enjoyments which are now lost, and there was 
 nothing like the amount of social discontent. Was 
 Pickwick's England as terrible as Trotsky's Petro- 
 grad? 
 
 So the book closes with a perfect paean by Miss 
 Melian Stawell to the ultimate enlargement of 
 Humanity by the united efforts of Man. Its theme, 
 like that of the Dean, is Hope progress by human 
 effort. Its motto is from Shelley 
 
 To hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates 
 
 It is indeed an idea which, at any rate in the Universi- 
 ties and in our science schools, the warnings of suc- 
 cessive Romanes Lectures have not yet eliminated. 
 
 In these times of Industrial Unrest no more valu- 
 able summary of sound thought has appeared than is 
 Mr. Harold Cox's book, Economic Liberty (Long- 
 mans, 1920). He begins with a historical sketch of 
 the freedom of labour, until it has developed into the
 
 116 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 extreme licence of refusing to carry the King's troops 
 and their equipment. He goes on to prove that 
 Socialism of this kind "is of necessity the negation 
 of liberty." The Ethics of Property, the Ethics of 
 Socialism, Class Warfare, all rest upon the logical 
 postulate that to destroy the institutions of Society, 
 liberty of action must be suppressed and force must 
 be used to assert the rule of the social theorists. 
 Bolshevism, with its horrors, is a local and special 
 form of tyranny; but all communistic and guild 
 Socialism involves the same despotism the same 
 monopoly the crushing out of all who resist the 
 dominant factions is a necessity for Socialism ; and 
 Mr. Cox shows that this dogma is blandly asserted not 
 only by Lenin, but by the leaders of International 
 Socialism, by prominent officials of our great Trades 
 Unions, as well as by the "intellectuals" who ex- 
 pound the Gospel of the New Life. Be my brother, 
 or I will kill thee ! says Lenin. The motto of Belgium 
 is " L 'Union fait la Force." The motto of our inter- 
 nationalists is " La Force fait PUnion " Those who 
 do not accept the Union creed must be made to feel 
 its irresistible arm. 
 
 Especially valuable just now is Mr. Cox's admir- 
 able chapter on Nationalisation. He traces the 
 growth of this cry to the crises of war, the monopoly 
 possessed by the coal-miners, and the dependence of 
 Legislature and the Government on an enormous in- 
 crease of Labour votes. The necessities of carrying
 
 LAST WORDS 117 
 
 on the life of the public, ignorance of economic facts, 
 and the eagerness of workers to take advantage of 
 crises to gain more money all these combine to make 
 Nationalisation the lure to a millennium, in spite of 
 all the proofs of its conspicuous failure.
 
 AUGUST 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE Conventions at Chicago and at San Fran- 
 cisco have now (July, 1920) made it plain that 
 no American help in the pacification and 
 restoration of Europe can be expected before March, 
 1921, and, indeed, little, if any, and that very doubt- 
 ful, during that year at all. It is a momentous and 
 disastrous result of the world's high hopes; for the 
 chaos and strife in which Europe exists to-day are 
 mainly caused by its accepting the extravagant 
 Utopias of Woodrow Wilson. We stand practically 
 alone faced with an accumulation of menacing 
 tasks : sore-stricken and almost desperate allies, in- 
 tolerable mandates thrust on us, jealous and bitter 
 colleagues, impracticable promises to weak States, 
 veiled or open rebellion, bankruptcy, even revolution, 
 seriously discussed by statesmen. Look round the 
 world. France in very reasonable anxiety, Italy in 
 very bitter complaint, our enemies restless, defiant, 
 and almost chaotic, Russia entirely chaotic, China 
 nearly as bad, Japan in a dilemma, Poland in great 
 peril, the Balkan people on the edge of war, Armenia 
 deserted, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine in ferment 
 
 118
 
 LAST WORDS 119 
 
 with monstrous liabilities, Egypt, India, Ireland, in 
 revolt more or less violent. 
 
 It is a sea of dangers to make the boldest feel grave. 
 The mighty people of America, to whom not one- 
 tenth of our difficulties were even tendered, have now 
 formally refused to touch any outside tasks, and have 
 resolved to give all their efforts to their own troubles 
 at home. There are times when I could wish that we 
 did so, too. I feel often that within our Empire, 
 within the United Kingdom, are tremendous prob- 
 lems to solve, some almost beyond our strength, even 
 if we let the world outside go to ruin in its own way, 
 as American patriots say is the right thing to do. It 
 may be but Englishmen never shrink from tasks and 
 duties to which they have once put their hand and 
 given their best blood. The conditions of the world, 
 more than our own desires or plans, have involved us 
 in these accumulated liabilities. We have not the 
 geographical aloofness of Americans, and we are not 
 prone to run back into a moral aloofness, either. 
 Noblesse oblige. The historic traditions of an ancient 
 nation force it to hold fast, even in extreme risks. 
 We smile at gambols to twist the tail of the sham 
 heraldic lion ; it is not safe to pull the tail of the bull- 
 dog. No ! I am sorely tempted to say : we have done 
 enough for alien nations let us turn to do for our- 
 selves. But I know that England must play her 
 great part out.
 
 120 NOVISSIMA VERB A 
 
 Much as I feel the impossibility of retiring from 
 our duties, I repudiate the intolerable burden which 
 many of them present in their official form. It is 
 hopeless to do anything at all with regard to Russia. 
 We can do nothing in arms or by embargo or official 
 intercourse. Nothing can be done to Russia : 
 nothing can be got from Russia. Let who will do 
 business with Russians and get anything they can. 
 Our Government had better leave Russia alone. So, 
 too, let the Baltic peoples settle their own affairs. I 
 fear we can do little to save Poland from the fate 
 which it has so rashly drawn on itself. Fiume, Con- 
 stantinople, Smyrna, Anatolia, even Armenia and 
 Cilicia are imbroglios in which we may seek to be 
 useful but which we cannot settle by ourselves, and 
 in which we ought not to exhaust our own strength. 
 Italy and Yugo-Slavia must settle their claims by 
 themselves. We have no right to back up the Greek 
 adventure in Anatolia, nor have we anything to do 
 with the Turks in Cilicia. As to Constantinople, the 
 Dardanelles, and free sea-way into the Black Sea, we 
 already have secured it, and can make it permanent. 
 It is extravagant for Britain to attempt to settle the 
 whole world in a state of internecine turmoil. 
 
 Our Asiatic responsibilities, our "mandates" 
 there, our African liabilities, are an even more 
 tremendous charge. That "blessed word" that 
 fatal name Mesopotamia, seems to open on us an 
 interminable mirage of desert and wild nomads. The
 
 LAST WORDS 121 
 
 prospect of civilising a vast tract of raw wilderness, 
 over which restless Musulmans rove, is a dangerous 
 delusion, which would be intolerable in the height of 
 our former prosperity. If it be impossible at once to 
 withdraw altogether, let us prepare to place it as soon 
 as possible under the independent rule of some native 
 chief, such as the Emir Abdulla. As to Palestine, 
 which in a fit of perverse sentiment our statesmen 
 promised to the Jews in the vein of rhetorical folly, 
 in which Disraeli seized Cyprus, "as a means of 
 civilising Asia Minor," the sooner we get out of this 
 escapade the better. Why a Christian Power should 
 surrender the scene of the Gospel to those who cried 
 out " Crucify Him ! " no one can say. If the French 
 choose to conquer and hold all Syria, it is their adven- 
 ture, and we should not assist. At any rate, let us 
 get rid of mandates and spheres of influence as soon as 
 possible. They are intolerable burdens and incal- 
 culable risks. It is monstrous that, in a time when 
 bankruptcy, riot, and revolution yawn for us at 
 home, we should be flinging countless millions and 
 our best blood into these bottomless pits of Sheitan. 
 
 It is surely time that Ministers returned from in- 
 terminable conferences abroad to look after the 
 imminent perils that gather round us at home. 
 Debates in Parliament, especially those in the House 
 of Lords, where statesmen can speak freely what they 
 think and what they know, and the warnings of men 
 of great financial experience must convince the most
 
 122 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 thoughtless that the economic state of our country 
 indeed, of all Europe has never been so near the 
 brink of ruin. That is our first care, for it has behind 
 it infinite dilemmas and perils. Then, the very con- 
 stitution of the United Kingdom is in urgent need of 
 repair. There are two problems concerning it which 
 must be undertaken. One is a systematic scheme of 
 Devolution based on the report of the Speaker. The 
 other is the reform or recasting of the House of 
 Lords. For my part, as to Devolution, I rather in- 
 cline to the views of Mr. Murray Macdonald. For 
 the Lords the report of Lord Bryce prepares the 
 ground. In any case, what is needed is a real, 
 efficient, independent Second Chamber to embody 
 the counsels of the Elder Statesmen. Nothing can 
 be worse than the democratic nostrum of a Single 
 Chamber autocracy. The worst of all autocracies is 
 an ochlocracy. As Lord Grey has said : Single 
 Chamber rule would be " the very devil." 
 
 To everyone who has to do with our economic 
 problems, be he workman, employer, or politician, a 
 really indispensable book is the new revised edition of 
 The History of Trade Unionism, by Sidney and 
 Beatrice Webb (Longmans and Co., 1920). The 
 original edition of 1894 was an exhaustive and 
 authoritative account of this great element of modern 
 industrial life ; and the indefatigable authors have now 
 extended their work to the present year, adding about 
 250 pages, or something like a third of the whole.
 
 LAST WORDS 128 
 
 They say with truth that the thirty years which have 
 elapsed since 1890 have been momentous in the his- 
 tory of Trade Unionism ; have enormously increased 
 its numbers, wealth, and power; have recast its legal 
 and internal organisation that Labour are already 
 the " Opposition," and make a bid to be the 
 "Government." This is indeed to write what is 
 practically a new book and it is one which every 
 public man, whether his part lies in the theory or the 
 practice of economics, will do well to master. As one 
 who has been in close association with this movement 
 now for at least sixty years, and who in its latest 
 development differs widely from the theories of these 
 authors, I make bold to say that the new volume is a 
 permanent contribution to the history of our times. 
 
 During the last thirty years which the new part 
 of the work covers the membership of the societies 
 increased from about one and a half millions to more 
 than six millions from about 20 per cent, of the 
 adult male manual workers to 60 per cent., or 12 per 
 cent, of the census population ; and this increase has 
 been nearly continuous during that period, common 
 to various grades of workers and in both sexes. And 
 this has been accompanied by a series of Acts of the 
 Legislature and new organisation within, such as 
 various Amalgamations and Federations, the Shop 
 Stewards' movement, and the Guild System and the 
 claim to " Direct Action." The outstanding feature 
 of the Trade Union world has been the enormous
 
 124 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 advance in organisation and influence of the miners, 
 the railway men, and the transport workers. The 
 history of all these is elaborately worked out with 
 figures and incidents, including the famous Sankey 
 commission, and the railway strike of September, 
 1919. Needless to say, that both of these are de- 
 scribed from the workmen's point of view, Mr. 
 Sidney Webb being their representative on the Com- 
 mission ; and the story would be very differently told 
 by those who defend the interests of the public and 
 the institution of Property which it is sought to 
 " socialise." 
 
 But on the whole there is only a minimum of par- 
 tisan colour in this book as a real history of Trade 
 Unionism. It is rather an encyclopaedia of industrial 
 facts ; and not a single element in this immense field 
 is omitted, nor is the historian sunk in the advocate. 
 The long, tangled, and confused series of Acts of 
 Parliament from the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century is accurately stated, the various Commissions 
 of Inquiry beginning with 1867 and the consequent 
 settlement of 1875, the entrance of Socialism about 
 1880-82, the growth of the Congress, the dock strikes, 
 the eight hours' day movement, the miners' strike of 
 1911, the Osborne judgment, the effects of the great 
 war, the demand for socialisation, syndicalism, share 
 in management, "direct action," co-operative alli- 
 ance, the Labour Party in Parliament, Soviets and 
 the Independent Labour Party, profit-sharing and
 
 . LAST WORDS 125 
 
 the Whitley Councils all of these are treated with 
 accuracy and with necessary detail. The book, in 
 fact, is the material by which this vast and growing 
 industrial power may be studied, rather than a body 
 of opinions by which it is to be judged. 
 
 And now, as I look back over the sixty years of my 
 own experience of Trade Unionism, I am filled with 
 a mixture of feelings of confidence and of anxiety, 
 nor can I altogether share the exultations of my 
 friends the authors. In the present century the 
 fundamental character of Unionism has changed. 
 What was once a movement to equalise the resources 
 of Labour in dealing with Capital has degenerated 
 into a vast social war to eliminate Capital. When I 
 sat on the first Royal Commission of 1867-9 Unionism 
 was a constitutional movement to bring employers to 
 satisfy the claims of the wage-earners. For forty 
 years it did this with signal success, and all men of 
 good will rejoice in the blessed improvement in the 
 moral and material conditions of the workers it has 
 achieved. They are vast, general, and permanent. 
 But to-day Unionism, at least in its official and vocal 
 form, is Socialist it stands for a catastrophic social 
 revolution, aiming at the removal of Employers as an 
 order, the elimination of Wages as an institution, at 
 the workers being (under universal democracy) their 
 own employers, in a word in being masters not only 
 of Industry, but of Society. Our authors recognise 
 this momentous change in their first sentence. In
 
 126 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 1894 they described a Trade Union as a continuous 
 association of wage-earners to improve the conditions 
 " of their employment." In 1920 they alter this to 
 the conditions "of their working lives." They ex- 
 plain that Unionism no longer recognises a capitalist 
 or wage-system at all. 
 
 Now a catastrophic social revolution such as this is 
 not to be faced with a light heart and paeans over the 
 " record "' majorities of the card- vote. Will the 
 secular strength of British Capitalism and Con- 
 servatism submit without resistance? Will the good 
 sense of the forty millions who are not Unionists 
 accept the lead of the six millions who are ? Are the 
 six millions all convinced followers of the eloquent 
 leaders and of the dexterous managers at Congress 
 and Conventions? Do the Labour chiefs feel sure 
 that they can organise a tremendous industrial revo- 
 lution without its ending in the ghastly ruin of Petro- 
 grad and Moscow? For my part I feel doubts. I 
 spoke of " the official and vocal part " of Unionism, 
 for I believe this new claim of Socialism to be the 
 work of a quite moderate minority. I doubt if one- 
 tenth of these six millions are convinced Socialists 
 or if one-twentieth are convinced Communists and, 
 after all, Socialism is only a colourable, half-way, un- 
 workable kind of Communism. The prodigious in- 
 crease in numbers of Unionism has its dark side ; for 
 much of it is the result of bullying, boycotting, 
 strikes, anti-social and inhuman tyranny to destroy
 
 LAST WORDS 127 
 
 personal freedom. These six millions are no more 
 converts to Socialism than are the Russian people 
 converts to Leninism. These mass meetings of 
 miners, railway men, and dockers too often ring with 
 appeals to envy and malice, with false accusations, 
 wild rumours, and a venomous mendacity of the kind 
 made familiar by Soviet Commissars at a massacre of 
 bourgeois. 
 
 With all my heart I rejoice in the immense 
 improvement " in the working lives " of our people. 
 All good men and women rejoice in it, bless it, and 
 work for it. Rut this indispensable material progress, 
 directly due to Unionism, has been soiled by a deep 
 moral and spiritual degeneration of character. In 
 forty years Unionism has become a class- war, de- 
 graded by the moral and social evils inevitable in a 
 class-war. The principle of forcing a minority even 
 a majority to join an official order is defended by 
 leaders as an essential duty. The cause of the 
 "Trade" as superior to any rights of the public or 
 even of the nation is paraded as if it were a sacred law. 
 The resort to " direct action " as a means of penalis- 
 ing their fellow citizens till they get their money is a 
 social crime. What would they say if doctors, nurses, 
 and undertakers struck work for another 15 per 
 cent.? And when "direct action" or penalising 
 their fellow citizens is used to force the Government 
 to change its foreign policy, it is the Soviet system 
 in full cry. Altogether, Organised Labour stands
 
 128 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 charged at the bar of Humanity with a veiled sym- 
 pathy with the Bolshevist dogma of Labour domina- 
 tion and exclusive mastery of Society, with whatever 
 tends to the violent dissolution of the British Empire, 
 with a friendly indifference to the orgies of plunder 
 and assassination in Ireland. In the United King- 
 dom, in Europe, in Asia, Africa, or the Empire, the 
 cause of Labour, we are told, is the one thing that 
 counts, or which working men ought to promote. 
 
 The avowed aim of organised Labour now is not to 
 improve "the conditions of employment," but to 
 extinguish Capitalism ; and Labour now is absolute 
 master of the Constitution if it chooses to act in con- 
 cert. The "dictatorship of the proletariate" means 
 the devotion of the national wealth to the interests of 
 the manual labourers. There will be no spare capital 
 in the hands of any upper or middle class to be used 
 for social and charitable purposes ; there will be no 
 upper or middle class at all. We need not discuss 
 whether this is a good or a bad result. Many social 
 reformers, as well as the whole order of workmen, 
 look on 'it as a blessed hope, and I sympathise with 
 that hope myself. But, as soon as it comes about, 
 the vast sums annually given to relieve disease, in- 
 firmity, and destitution will have to be found else- 
 where. The parrot-cry of State-aid is obviously futile 
 in the ever-growing danger of national bankruptcy 
 as well as of bureaucratic incompetence. The cost of 
 maintaining free hospitals, free homes, any kind of
 
 LAST WORDS 129 
 
 liberal relief, will have to be met by the workmen 
 themselves out of their societies and clubs. But as 
 yet workmen have not learned the habit of giving. 
 They expect '* the Rich " to give, and they want to 
 do awav with " the Rich." 
 
 We hear much of the cry of distress that goes up 
 on all sides from the hospitals which are menaced with 
 bankruptcy and dissolution. As yet this cruel end of 
 our great voluntary institutions is heard only from the 
 principal hospitals, which hope to find temporary help. 
 But let us look at this problem in all its tremendous 
 possible breadth. Not only are these splendid fruits 
 of modern civilisation faced with bankruptcy, but all 
 the minor forms of charitable endowments and of 
 social benevolence are in the same peril. That peril 
 is caused by two general and increasing forces which 
 are transforming modern society. The first is the 
 enormous increase of all prices doubling or trebling 
 the values everywhere. The other is the general and 
 increasing impoverishment of the whole order of 
 property holders. It was this class alone which year 
 by year found the vast sums devoted to all kinds of 
 charitable endowments. And this class is being re- 
 duced to extreme pressure and even to penury. If 
 the social revolution designed by Socialism were to 
 succeed, this class would end in extinction. 
 
 ****** 
 
 As a matter of fact, the world is immensely the 
 
 poorer. Some fifty or sixty thousand millions 
 
 9
 
 130 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 (60,000,000,000) of wealth has been lost ; and we 
 have wasted at least two or three years of our national 
 income. Nothing can replace this huge deficit but 
 production. And Labour demands are making pro- 
 duction impossible. 
 
 By the sudden demand of double and treble wages, 
 by breaking contracts, and defying discipline, Labour 
 is grasping at the exclusive receipt of the w r hole profits 
 of industry. The result is that capital will not 
 embark on undertakings of which the whole produce 
 is claimed by the manual \vorkers. The enormous 
 wealth invested in railways, mines, and factories is 
 becoming insolvent and unsaleable book-debits, for 
 Labour, dominant in the Commons, refuses to vote 
 the inevitable rise in rates. " Direct action " means 
 the government of this Empire by excited groups of 
 workmen, obviously ignorant of the complications of 
 international politics. It is aiming at what all history 
 proves to have been the worst of all forms of govern- 
 ment, when, as at Athens, on the death of Pericles, 
 noisy bands of some thousand of mob orators dragged 
 down their State to ruin. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Hitherto the bulk of all these " voluntary " endow- 
 ments has been found by " the upper and lower 
 middle-class" the rentiers retired people of the 
 educated orders living on invested savings and in- 
 herited property. The rich and the speculators, of 
 whose doings the Press takes note, really do no great
 
 LAST WORDS 181 
 
 part of *' the charities." It was done by the millions 
 out of small earnings and " fixed incomes." But the 
 small traders, the hard-worked "professional " men, 
 the rentiers "the new poor" are doomed to ex- 
 tinction. They can hardly get "a living" as it is. 
 The "profiteering" and the speculation due to the 
 war, which show so large in the public eye, are soon 
 to come to an end. They never did and never will 
 do much in charity giving. This henceforth will 
 have to be done by Labour. Labour does not yet 
 realise this. In time, no doubt, it will realise it. But 
 the idea of a workman subscribing his guineas to a 
 Hospital or a Home for Incurables sounds like a jest. 
 Their societies, which deal in hundreds of millions, 
 will do it some day. But till "The Day" of the 
 emancipation of Labour comes there will be cruel 
 times for hospitals and all forms of " good works " of 
 relief to want and misery. No temporary help, no 
 State aid, no petty charge will suffice. Till Labour 
 learns its new duty, the sick, the helpless, and the 
 destitute will be sorely pinched. 
 
 It is not merely the Hospitals and Charities which 
 are menaced with ruin, until the People in the mass 
 undertake their support. The most urgent case of 
 all is that of Ministers of religion of all the different 
 Churches. The celibate Priesthood of the Roman 
 Church, maintained on very modest lines by the con- 
 tinuous gifts of the entire congregation, may struggle 
 on even in these times. The humble and less literate
 
 182 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Ministers of the Free Churches will survive. But the 
 episcopal Church and its clergy have to pass through 
 a cruel time of pressure, in which many of their better 
 aspects, and some of their worse aspects, will be lost. 
 It will be transformed we trust not extinguished 
 in the process. The country vicarage and rectory, 
 with their culture, graces, learning, and humanity, 
 will be no more known. Many will rejoice that these 
 outworks of the " landed gentry " will be, with their 
 ancient " patrons," only a memory of the past. And 
 some, too, will grieve that the courtesy and 
 benevolent help of the parson and the squire, and all 
 the charities and civilities they often worked together 
 will be swept away, when the speculating business 
 man and the popular orator have succeeded to squire 
 and parson. Labour, no doubt, one day, by its 
 wonderful co-operative energy, will supply the village 
 reading-room, dispensary, the games, the holiday- 
 making, and all the spiritual education of the ancient 
 Church of their fathers. But the intervening time 
 before Labour has learned how to replace what it is 
 bent on destroying this will be a hard time for the 
 old poor as well as for *' the new poor." 
 
 And it is not hospitals, charities, and churches 
 alone that will suffer if the extinction of capitalism 
 and middle-class is achieved by " direct action " secur- 
 ing the mastery of society by workmen. Literature, 
 learning, science, art, and culture have disappeared 
 under Bolshevism, and the essential aim of what to-
 
 LAST WORDS 188 
 
 day is called Socialism is the prohibition on the 
 accumulation of capital, even of small savings, in the 
 hands of private families. Now, any general view of 
 history, even a biographical dictionary, will show that 
 almost all forms of civilised progress have been bred 
 and nurtured in families where some inherited re- 
 sources enabled its members to devote their living to 
 study, to thought, to poetry, to art. All these must 
 be free. They cannot be produced to the order, or 
 maintained by the allowance, of a workman's club 
 a Soviet, in fact. We may hope that in a distant 
 future a victorious and cosmopolitan ergatocracy will 
 find a means to supply the intellectual, moral, and 
 spiritual needs of modern civilisation, but the passing 
 of capitalism and personal property to communism 
 and the supremacy of organised Labour will be a pro- 
 cess both long and somewhat painful to what has pre- 
 sumed to call itself "an upper" and "a middle 
 class." 
 
 The impulse of the reader no doubt will be to treat 
 all this as an impossible future, and the warning as 
 that of an alarmist. It is quite true that our solid 
 and sensible people are very far from being Leninists, 
 and have no sort of dream of abolishing wages, 
 employers, and capitalism. But the course which 
 organised Labour is taking has the gradual and con- 
 cealed effect of paralysing and drying up capital. 
 The tumultuous interchange of values, and the 
 sudden blazing up of emergency industries during
 
 184 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 the war, coupled with the reckless inundation of 
 paper money, caused conspicuous cases of profiteer- 
 ing wealth, and a general impression of increased 
 spending power. But this impression is a mere 
 illusion, as in Russia, w r here bank notes pass by the 
 cwt.
 
 SEPTEMBER 
 
 1920 - 
 IX 
 
 AT a time of unparalleled confusion in Europ< 
 and in the world along with complicated 
 problems at home it is the part of a good 
 citizen to look straight, and to speak straight, if he 
 speak at all. The United Kingdom, the Constitu- 
 tion, the Empire, our foremost place in the nations, 
 were never before in such peril as they are to-day ; but 
 the glamour of victory and the show of prosperity 
 blind men's eyes to the perils. At the same time, the 
 unseen menace behind is unknown to the public, and 
 they are amused by a grandiose stage play of cosmo- 
 politan pacification. Why do all these conferences 
 and councils, treaties and compacts, come to nothing, 
 so that the so-called " peace " seems to breed new 
 wars? Why do schemes of reforming the Constitu- 
 tion end in mere debates and essays? Why do 
 treason, rapine, riot, and murder trample on law and 
 government in Ireland? In one word, Britain is still 
 busy with preposterous tasks which it is utterly unable 
 to perform ; and still seeks to give political reality to 
 what is only the fading dream of pedantic idealists. 
 On the other hand, these cosmopolitan visions draw 
 
 off the mind of statesmen and the public from the 
 
 135
 
 136 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 urgent need of internal problems. And as to foreign 
 problems as well as Ireland, the public does not see, 
 and the statesmen will not acknowledge, the latent 
 two-fold obstacle which makes action so feeble, 
 so shifty, so futile. 
 
 In this extraordinary crisis of our country it is a 
 duty to speak without reserve. The present writer, 
 entirely detached from any party or Parliamentary 
 interest, whose utterances involve no other's responsi- 
 bility, may at any rate say what he thinks plainly, 
 without fear or favour, as he has done all his life. The 
 enormous complications of the situation and the 
 multiplicity of incidents and interests make an all- 
 round judgment almost impracticable yet a one- 
 sided judgment is worse than none at all. If a man 
 has daily read and weighed the news, reports, and 
 statements in several journals of different party 
 colour, all the debates in both Houses, night by night 
 from beginning to end, together with the contents of 
 foreign as well as provincial and Irish journals even 
 the editorial articles, which at least disclose what the 
 writers either fear or wish to cover up then he must 
 see in what a welter is the world and our country 
 to-day ; and if he comes to any conclusion about 
 policy, he will not do so in ignorance of essential facts. 
 But how very few, even of those who take interest in 
 politics, can pretend to do this ! How entirely is all 
 this knowledge shut off from the twenty million men 
 and women who form our democracy and who read
 
 LAST WORDS 137 
 
 nothing but what some party journal chooses to tell 
 them, or know nothing but what someone else repeats 
 to them ! Our people really live in utter ignorance 
 of all essential facts, and yet they claim to settle 
 everything, if not by " direct action," at any rate by 
 a more or less indirect form of political opinion. 
 
 On the face of things, in the fore-front of the press 
 news, comes the execution of the Treaty and the 
 League of Nations, which is fatally bound up with it. 
 Now, all these conferences, councils, agreements, the 
 assemblies, commissions and reports, are empty cere- 
 monials and parades about a thing which has no life 
 no force in it. A League of Nations, which the 
 United States as yet officially repudiates, which now 
 treats Germany and Russia as its opponents to be 
 feared, which consists of nations each struggling to 
 get what it can for itself, which has no effective force 
 to impose its will, even if its members had common 
 objects such a League is a mere theatric spectacle 
 to amuse the people. A League of Nations without 
 America is an army in uniform but without any arms. 
 A League of Nations which envy and suspect each 
 other, and have different and incompatible aims, is as 
 futile a combination as would be a universal Church 
 composed of Christians, Jews, Musulmans, and 
 Brahmans. I do not deny that it is a noble and fruit- 
 ful ideal which in times to come will be realised and 
 have a blessed effect upon civilisation. But to-day it 
 is premature and impossible. I do not doubt that it
 
 138 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 inspired with hopes the peoples and the armies during 
 the war, and was sincerely preached and believed in 
 by leading statesmen. If the President had retained 
 the full support of his countrymen, and the statesmen 
 of Europe had been in real control of their respective 
 Governments, perhaps at Christmas, 1918, a practical 
 League of Nations might have been founded. 
 
 The occasion was lost ; the sacred fire of humane 
 aspiration died down, and eight precious months were 
 wasted in disputes about indemnities, protection, 
 formalities, local trifles, and the impossible task of re- 
 settling a shattered world. In the meantime the rela- 
 tions of victors and conquered entirely changed ; in 
 each country revolts and discord broke out, largely 
 by the effect of the Covenant itself : chaos, famine, 
 and bankruptcy ensued. Yet still statesmen confer, 
 proclaim, and rush about, in order to carry out formal 
 pledges to which they set their seals at Versailles. To 
 execute to the letter every clause of that farrago of 
 grandiose impracticabilities whilst at home ruin 
 impends is the Byzantine folly of discussing the 
 Creed whilst the enemy is at the gates. The urgent 
 thing now is not to keep the eyes intent on the 
 parchments of Versailles and St. Germains but to 
 see how the safety, prosperity, and honour of Britain 
 can be secured in the general chaos which threatens 
 our country with the worst evils it has known in its 
 glorious history.
 
 LAST WORDS 139 
 
 There is a cry now to close the Supreme Council and 
 to leave things to the League. Well ! but look at 
 realities, and be not misled by all this mystery of the 
 Covenant, Council, and Assembly, subordinate Com- 
 mittees and the rest. They only exist on paper, and 
 piles of reports and recommendations. They have no 
 power to act at all. Strictly speaking, the whole 
 apparatus as yet exists only in draft proposals. There 
 are as yet no mandates at all legally appointed. The 
 only real power is in the hands of the British and 
 French Prime Ministers with the Italian Minister 
 from time to time called in to form a third. This 
 triumvirate of the victorious Powers, who alone have 
 powerful armies in the field, virtually decide on policy, 
 and summon small Powers to ratify their decisions. 
 They arrange for the execution of the Treaty and they 
 distribute mandates to each other. But all this, to 
 have full legal authority, ought to be submitted to the 
 League and formally voted by it. This has not been 
 done ; and the Triumvirate naturally hesitate to sub- 
 mit their policy to a miscellaneous body of minor 
 States which have their own interests to consult. The 
 mandates are only unauthorised proposals of what the 
 principal belligerent Powers would have done. They 
 formally declare that they do not intend annexation, 
 but only wish to help the native people to govern 
 themselves. Unfortunately, the native people now 
 violently protest they do not want help. 
 
 Put aside for a time Treaty and Covenant at least
 
 140 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 put them in the second place. The urgent thing 
 now is the best road to safety and orderly peace for 
 the moment. How is any concert of nations possible 
 if each nation has its own object ? The United States, 
 as represented by its President, certainly desired the 
 peace of the world : to be achieved, perhaps, by the 
 " freedom of the seas " a phrase which covered 
 much. Britain had no imperial aims, though the war 
 threw into its lap enormous material profit. France 
 never did, and does not now, seek anything but her 
 own safety and compensations. Italy aims only at 
 enlarged frontiers and control of the Adriatic and the 
 Levant. The smaller States think only of getting 
 the best safeguards from their neighbours and the 
 largest areas they can obtain. What folly to hope for 
 peace from a parchment League of Nations, when 
 each nation is bent on getting all it can for itself 
 and Britain is puzzled how to keep and manage what 
 the fortune of war has unexpectedly flung on it, and 
 finds itself the object of envy, suspicion, and hatred 
 because fate has given it a dominant place which it 
 neither looked for nor sought. 
 
 The Covenant and the great Wilsonian League 
 cannot now be rudely dropped ; but they can be 
 cherished as a fine ideal and bright hope that must be 
 kept before our eyes with academic theories, but not 
 by practical action. There are plenty of professors, 
 learned legists, and indeed leading M.P.'s even 
 Ministers all willing and able to do this. But
 
 LAST WORDS 141 
 
 statesmen, with urgent dilemmas on their hands, 
 ought to leave Utopias to the men of ideas and devote 
 their whole thoughts to realities and emergencies. 
 The alarming condition of Europe directly concerns 
 our very existence as well as general peace and so do 
 the restless movements in the East and our Asiatic 
 mandates. Poland, Russia, Germany, Turkey, 
 Syria, Mesopotamia, all bristle with problems as acute 
 as any that ever occupied diplomacy. But there are 
 domestic problems even more acute Ireland, the 
 United Kingdom, the Constitution of the Empire, 
 our relations with France, with America, the 
 authority of Parliament, the claims of Labour, with 
 incessant demands and threats of ** direct action," of 
 nationalisation, the Soviet system, the imminence of 
 increased prices, the paralysis of capital, the growth 
 of taxation, the extreme dilemma of finance. Now, 
 this mountain of tasks is too much for one mind, how- 
 ever powerful and swift. 
 
 I cannot join with attacks on the Prime Minister or 
 his colleagues. I doubt if the country seriously 
 desires to displace them ; and I am sure that if either 
 of the Opposition parties came to power, they would 
 bring us to immediate disaster. But as a critic of 
 Government ought always to be ready with an alterna- 
 tive policy, I venture very humbly as a mere outside 
 bystander, and very respectfully as a well-wisher to 
 Mr. Lloyd George, to suggest that the time has come 
 for him to take the traditional place of a Prime
 
 142 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Minister, i.e., in Parliament ; and that he should make 
 our home problems his first care. There are ten or 
 twenty such problems to deal with any one of which 
 is big enough to occupy the whole time of a states- 
 man. Parliament is losing all its prestige and 
 efficiency, and is leaving the field of practical work 
 open to the advancing Soviet system. The continual 
 absence of the head of our Government, absorbed in 
 the European tangle, is having a paralysing effect on 
 policy similar to that caused by the illness and the 
 sulking of Mr. Wilson on the policy of the United 
 States. If Parliamentary government is to be main- 
 tained, the head of the Government must be con- 
 tinuously in Parliament. 
 
 No doubt there are foreign problems, European, 
 Asiatic, African, which must be handled in some way, 
 under the general direction of the Prime Minister. 
 But for these and for visits abroad, there are com- 
 petent authorities in the Government. The proper 
 organ for these is the Foreign Secretary, now leader 
 in the House of Lords. Then there is the Colonial 
 Minister, not to mention others. Mr. Balfour seems 
 devoted to the League of Nations, and to-day he 
 should regret both the Italian secret treaty and his 
 patronage of Zion. The Irish rebellion mainly due, 
 I think, to the delay and indecision caused by the 
 absence and pre-occupation of the Prime Minister, is 
 certainly the most formidable problem of our time 
 one of the most formidable in the entire historv of the
 
 LAST WORDS 143 
 
 British Empire. Nothing can save it from disaster 
 but genius, courage, and insight, and all these, alone 
 of our public men, the Prime Minister possesses. It 
 will need all his powers, all his time, and it can only 
 be done whilst his personality and his ideas are at work 
 in the midst of his fellow-citizens, and in the House 
 of Commons, where the issue has to be joined. 
 
 In all our history there never was a crisis of such 
 wide extent and of such tremendous consequences. 
 The public and the Press thunder forth incessant 
 advice, for the most part in flat contradiction. No 
 one will listen to any reason that they dislike, nor 
 believe any statement which opposes their views. 
 But there are two very sinister facts underlying all 
 public action, of which the public knows nothing and 
 which the Press thinks it better to ignore. The first 
 is, that our very existence and the success of any 
 policy requires us to maintain close alliance with 
 France and good understanding with America. How- 
 ever much we deprecate policy which France passion- 
 ately holds to be necessary for her existence, we can- 
 not oppose it, we hardly can remonstrate unless in 
 strict privacy. Whatever international outrages on 
 us are committed by the Press and public men in 
 America, we have to bear them in silence. There are 
 two reasons which force us to consider American 
 opinion as of vital importance. The first is that we 
 owe to U.S.A. a very large debt more than half our 
 entire income, one-tenth of our whole national debt
 
 144 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 and excited feeling in America might call for its imme- 
 diate liquidation. The second is that really strong 
 action in Ireland would inflame party passion in 
 America to a point which their statesmen could not 
 control. 
 
 In addition to the underlying risk of inflaming 
 American opinion by asserting government in Ireland 
 is the still more formidable danger of rousing violent 
 opposition from Labour. Any attempt at " vigorous 
 policy," i.e., now military occupation of the island in 
 reality, is met by a storm of protests from all anti- 
 ministerial factions. " Labour " is filled with ignor- 
 ance, prejudice, and wild battle-cries about Irish 
 oppression, and Labour in its bitter hostility to all 
 conservative policy is more or less supported by what 
 remains of Liberal dogmatism. If the twenty 
 millions of voters who are now impatient and factious 
 were to be united against the one or two millions of 
 real Conservatives, no efficient Government could 
 exist. They who shout out to break Bolshevism, to 
 protect Poland, to save Armenia, to civilise Syria and 
 Mesopotamia above all to put down Sinn Fein rebels 
 must be reminded that the' effective control of 
 British policy is in the last resort in the hands of an 
 incalculable mass of electors, whose ruling desire is to 
 have no more fighting, no show of militarism at home 
 or abroad, who suspect any tendency to imperial 
 extension, who still hold on to obsolete formulas about 
 the oppression of Ireland by Britain and who in the
 
 LAST WORDS 145 
 
 main close their minds down on anything which seems 
 to delay the promise of the universal reign of Labour 
 and its inheritance of the effete dominion of Capital. 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 Where is the Covenant now ? What is the League 
 of Nations doing now? The fifteen or more signa- 
 tories drop out one by one : the remainder have con- 
 flicting interests and are powerless to act, even if they 
 were agreed in any common policy. Of the Big Four, 
 America withdrew a year ago. As to Italy, she all 
 but fought with Greece over their respective shares 
 of the spoil of Austria and Turkey. Desperate efforts 
 have been made to keep England and France together 
 even cruel sacrifices and constant differences for 
 it is a matter of life and death to both of us. We 
 had to suffer France to overrun Syria and to break our 
 engagements with the Arab chiefs to abandon 
 Armenians in Cilicia to prepare an era of unrest and 
 insurrection from the Taurus to the Persian Gulf. 
 Again, we had to allow France, or some French influ- 
 ence, to push the Poles on to engage the Russian 
 nation, to hamper us in all our attempts to make 
 peace with Russia, and now France formally declares 
 what is in effect war with the de facto Government of 
 Russia. Alas ! The dominant idea of French poli- 
 ticians is to found Poland as an Eastern curb on 
 German ambition, and to get some return of the 
 enormous sums once lavished in Russian loans. 
 Futile and dangerous delusions which Britain dares 
 not actively oppose. 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 10
 
 146 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 This cosmopolitan chaos has re-acted at home with 
 revolutionary violence. The Government, Parlia- 
 mentary institutions, the constitution, industry, our 
 social economy, have been shaken to their founda- 
 tions. In January, 1918, I wrote " the war of 
 Nations is being entangled with, is merging into, the 
 war of Class, and essentially, between those who hold 
 capital and those who work with their hands." The 
 Bolshevist revolution sent *' a thrill through the 
 masses such as the world has never yet known " 
 " there is coming over civilisation a change even more 
 enormous than the war " " there will be a wholly 
 new social order." (Obiter Scripta. Pp. 1, 2, 3.) 
 And now this has come about, mainly in consequence 
 of social chaos which the war caused and by the 
 extravagant Utopias hatched in Washington and 
 acclaimed in Europe as a new gospel. 
 
 As the head of the British Government has been 
 absorbed in continental politics and rarely present in 
 Parliament, succeeding indeed to that " dictatorship 
 of the Nationalities " which Mr. Wilson enjoyed on 
 his first visit to Europe, organised and unorganised 
 Labour formed Soviets which put themselves into 
 direct relations with the Government, treated them- 
 selves as the real Opposition, and forced their own 
 views with menaces that were by no means negligible 
 or empty. Government no longer deals with the 
 remnants of the old conventional parties. It has to 
 deal with vast Trade Soviets and rebel groups, which
 
 LAST WORDS 147 
 
 regard the House of Commons as an effete 
 anachronism. Consciously or unconsciously, the 
 Government, threatened daily not only with its very 
 existence but with the social chaos of industrial revolt, 
 acquiesces in the " new social order," leaves the con- 
 stitution impotent, and practically inaugurates the 
 Soviet system. Are we about to recognise the Rus- 
 sian Soviet autocracy and to see at home the dictator- 
 ship of our domestic proletariate ? 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 It is now clear that Lenin and Trotsky, and the 
 miscreants who have seized power in Russia and 
 plundered its treasures, are working to ruin this bour- 
 geois kingdom and destroy the Empire. No one can 
 doubt that widespread Bolshevist conspiracies to defy 
 true democratic opinion, and to break up the Con- 
 stitution by treasonable violence, are in full swing in 
 England, Scotland, and probably in Ireland, as well 
 as in the Near East and the Far East. What is called 
 the *' extreme wing of organised Labour " is plainly 
 Bolshevist, is an outlying force of the Bolshevist host. 
 Now, the pressing question to-day is this are the 
 promoters and members of these " Councils of 
 Action," of the " direct action " committees, in 
 alliance, or in sympathy, with these British Bol- 
 shevists? Are the Labour M.P.'s, honourable and 
 right honourable, is the Labour Party, as a body, in 
 league with this British Bolshevism? If the official 
 Labour Party does not approve of and encourage such 
 treason, why does it not disavow it?
 
 148 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Our country, the Empire, and our constitutional 
 Government are now being attacked by a Russian 
 enemy in league with treason at home, just as truly 
 as in 1914 it was being attacked by the Kaiser and his 
 spies and agents here. How is it possible to enter into 
 regular relations and amity with a Government of that 
 kind? Not only do its ministers and agents preach 
 the most deadly enmity to our country, but it is 
 proved by a series of events that there is no crime, no 
 trick, no fraud which they are not ready to practise in 
 pursuit of their schemes. Contracts, agreements, 
 promises of theirs are worth no more than the lies of 
 
 cs. 
 
 card-sharpers on a racecourse, or of burglars and 
 assassins in a thieves' kitchen. If private citizens 
 choose to do business with Russian merchants, let 
 them be free to do it at their own risk. But it would 
 be dangerous and discreditable for any British public 
 authority to come to official terms with any agents of 
 a gang of tyrants who are carrying on a secret, but 
 deadly, war with our country, and who publicly avow 
 that any arrangements they may make are only 
 intended to delude their opponents. Agents of such 
 a Power ought to be summarily dismissed if, indeed, 
 they are not arrested as spies. 
 
 We have come now to the parting of the ways. 
 Trade Unionism, which has a fine history of at least 
 seventy years of constant increase in power, which has 
 given untold and incalculable benefits not only to the 
 labouring masses, but to society as a whole is it, or is
 
 LAST WORDS 149 
 
 it not, the ally, or if not, at least the friend, of a 
 fanatical enemy of our country which is working by 
 revolution to destroy our society and reduce the king- 
 dom to anarchy and civil war? If Trade Union 
 members, who are said to number six millions, do not 
 mean this, the time has come for them to show them- 
 selves against it. If the official leaders of the Labour 
 Party, who speak with voices so different at West- 
 minster from what they utter on platforms, do not 
 favour Bolshevist intrigues, they must show it by 
 deeds as well as words. Are these new " Councils 
 of Action ' ' going to be Bolshevism under a disguise ? 
 Is " direct action " another name for civil war? 
 
 The confusion in Europe, in Asia, at home, 
 increases every day, and I take up my pen again to 
 express my anxieties for the future with more pre- 
 cision. I have been " meliorist " if not optimist all 
 my life, and by every conviction and experience I am 
 inclined to believe in ultimate progress and also in the 
 essential good sense of the popular judgment. But 
 there comes a time when our good hopes are destined 
 to mislead us and when the popular judgment is under 
 spasmodic excitement. Such a time is this from two 
 overwhelming causes. The first is the abysmal over- 
 turn of ideas, habits, and conditions caused by the 
 world- war, which shook to its bases every nation, class, 
 and government, inducing a general belief that all had 
 to be reconstructed de novo. The second is that the 
 necessities of war involved the direct appeal to
 
 150 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 organised Labour in all its forms, whilst the sudden 
 and enormous increase in the electorate took the 
 ultimate control of the Kingdom and the Empire 
 away from those who had some experience and know- 
 ledge of political problems and handed it over to those 
 who had no knowledge or experience at all. The 
 result of an electric atmosphere among men and a 
 vast change of power into new hands has produced a 
 silent, unobserved but radical revision of the British 
 Constitution. We are coming under a Soviet system. 
 
 It is usual to charge this upon the present Govern- 
 ment, and especially on the Prime Minister ; and it 
 cannot be denied that they have done much to produce 
 this change, or at least to accept or submit to it. But 
 they are not at all the authors of the change, nor are 
 they responsible for it, inasmuch as it was forced on 
 them by the condition of things and by our new ultra- 
 democratic electoral system. The antiquated adminis- 
 trative and parliamentary machinery of our Constitu- 
 tion is utterly unstiited both to states of war and of 
 revolution. And we are slow to recognise that for 
 most social, economic and governing purposes the 
 state of war and of revolution practically continues 
 still. Our electoral system is at present the most 
 ultra-democratic in the world nothing remains but 
 to give votes to boys and girls at school. Neither 
 France nor the United States have anything like such 
 an electorate. France and the United States each 
 have a very effective Senate. We have none, but a
 
 LAST WORDS 151 
 
 pageant under sentence of being scrapped. France 
 and the United States each has a written Constitution 
 both of them in my opinion superior to our own. 
 Ours is a fluid or elastic body of statutes, practices 
 and traditions which the mob orators say may easily 
 have the Soviet system engrafted on to it, may indeed 
 be superseded by the Soviet system. 
 
 A new Constitution could be voted in a few nights 
 by a bare majority of the House, elected by twenty 
 millions of men and women utterly unversed in 
 political problems. On the other hand, the industrial 
 workers are organised in Great Britain with a strength 
 and a discipline far greater than the workers of 
 America, France, or Germany. British Trade 
 Unions possess wealth, cohesion, and opportunities 
 beyond any industrial societies in the world. They 
 are, indeed, far the most powerful social force in the 
 country. Any British Government, dependent night 
 by night on a simple vote of a single House, is forced 
 to attend to the claims of these tremendous trade 
 armies, and whenever these are agreed among them- 
 selves a Government has to yield with more or less 
 decent show of qualification or resistance. The 
 instinct of the Prime Minister always recognises real 
 forces. 
 
 We are so much accustomed to look on our old 
 institutions as eternal, so little given to follow any-
 
 152 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 thing to its logical consequences, that the ordinary 
 man treats with a smile contingencies which he thinks 
 to be far too tremendous to be possible. He thought 
 the same of the war in July, 1914, and of the rule of 
 Lenin and Trotsky down to 1919. The average 
 citizen in easy circumstances will not see that an 
 entirely new social atmosphere has been created on 
 the habitable globe, as if from pole to pole it was over- 
 charged with electric cycles. Such new ideas, hopes, 
 courage, and ambition have never been infused into 
 thousands of millions of men and women in such mass 
 and over such range of area and clime. I am not one 
 to regret or complain of all this rejuvenescence of 
 humanity. But I do say, Recognise its reality, and 
 understand its force. Do not think that all is well 
 all is as before all will come right. No ! not if we 
 all rest on our old ways and shut our eyes to the new 
 spirit. They say that in Ireland business, amusement, 
 life, and pleasure seem to thrive outwardly without a 
 check or a blot, but assassination, treason, insur- 
 rection, and conspiracy work incessantly beneath the 
 outward show of peace, order, and prosperity. Some- 
 thing of the kind may be going on here also.
 
 OCTOBER 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 X 
 
 CTTHE Life of Lord Courtney, by Mr. G. P. 
 A Gooch (Macmillan and Co., 1920), is at once 
 a faithful portrait of an eminent public man 
 and an invaluable contribution to the political history 
 of our time. My own close relations with Leonard 
 Courtney lasted for exactly sixty years, and I was 
 keenly engaged with many of the causes and move- 
 ments to which he devoted his life. We had common 
 friends, often wrote in the same organs of public 
 opinion, and at times stood on the same platforms. 
 Now and then I warmly supported and followed his 
 lead : and again I engaged in vehement opposition to 
 his chosen causes. No man of our time took a nobler 
 part in resisting the reckless imperialism which led to 
 incessant wars in India, in Egypt, in South Africa; 
 and in all these I and my friends were proud to regard 
 him as their trusted chief. On the other hand, his 
 dogmatic creed of self-help, of proportional repre- 
 sentation, of woman's suffrage, and of pacifism was 
 alien to all my deepest beliefs. At the root of our 
 two minds there was an ingrained antagonism between 
 Courtney's individualism and our ideal of social 
 
 humanity. Thus it is that with a truly impartial judg- 
 
 '53
 
 154 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 ment I offer my tribute to his public career as that of 
 a great citizen whose courage, tenacity, and lofty 
 spirit did honour to the highest traditions of English 
 public life. His life from first to last, of which this 
 book is a faithful record, is a story of devotion to 
 patriotism, honour, good faith, and an almost 
 romantic spirit of personal sacrifice. 
 
 The point in this story which specially interests me 
 is this. Here is a man of great powers, acknowledged 
 to be of eminent public service, who continually re- 
 fuses office, even of the most tempting sort, who is 
 constantly rejected and fails in his aims, solely because 
 of his stern independence of mind, and his stoical 
 resolve to suffer none of his convictions to be sacrificed 
 to party. He refuses office in which he would be 
 specially useful, he votes against his party, he resigns 
 his place in the Government, he makes it impossible 
 to enter a Cabinet, and he passes the last eighteen 
 years of his public life as a wholly independent critic 
 of Government outside of all party connections. This 
 was because nothing could tempt him to yield a jot 
 of his cherished principles, even to place himself where 
 he would be unable publicly to assert them. I need 
 not say how highly I honour such steadfastness, 
 worthy of an Aristides or a Cato, how much I value 
 such outspoken courage in our public life. But the 
 moral I draw is this that the true place for such inde- 
 pendence is outside of Parliament, free from all party 
 ties, devoid of all ambition for office. It is of the best
 
 LAST WORDS 155 
 
 interests of the nation that it should have such abso- 
 lutely free and brave politicians and critics. But they 
 must stand aloof from party and from office : their 
 strength lies in opinion, not in force. They have to 
 touch the conscience, not to make laws : they must 
 keep clear of the party discipline. As was the case of 
 Mill even of Burke the chief part of Courtney's 
 public service was done outside the bounds of party 
 and office. Would that all could see how impossible 
 it is to serve both ideal convictions and official place. 
 
 Mr. Gooch's book gives us a faithful record of Lord 
 Courtney's public career ; but it is not at all limited 
 to that, for to a great extent it is the history of the 
 political world in which Courtney took part during 
 more than half a century. As a strict biography of 
 a politician, this so far detracts from the life-like por- 
 trait of a personality all the more that Courtney 
 himself had a very minor action on the policy which 
 he so often criticised and sought to influence. In 
 literary vivacity, therefore, this very industrious and 
 accurate memoir is far from a success. There is too 
 much about humdrum Parliamentary tactics and for- 
 gotten and forgetable personalities. And this also 
 detracted from the biography of Sir Charles Dilke. 
 The heroic standard of Courtney's principles is too 
 often obscured by tiresome details from persons whom 
 he did not convince, and who certainly never con- 
 vinced him. In this volume there are printed, more 
 or less in full, no less than seventy-eight letters from
 
 156 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 others, many of them trivial, complimentary, and out- 
 side his proper work. Very few of these letters have 
 any literary value, nor are Courtney's own letters 
 specially distinguished in form. All those House of 
 Commons tactics and friendly courtesies extend the 
 bulk and dim the vivid impression of a man of rare 
 virtue and power, though they will be most useful 
 some day to the historian of the Victorian age. 
 
 A new history of philosophy by the Cambridge 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy cannot but attract 
 students of modern thought, and they will turn with 
 great expectations to the History of English 
 Philosophy, by W. R. Sorley, Litt.D., etc. (Univer- 
 sity Press, 8vo., 1920). My own expectations, I con- 
 fess, have not been entirely satisfied. The field of 
 the inquiry is too limited in area, in time, in language. 
 The method of the inquiry seeks rather to state dates, 
 facts, and schools, and to give short summaries 
 of numerous writings, rather than to expound definite 
 judgment on the value of each school and philosopher 
 in aiding in the evolution of thought. Again, the 
 enumeration of an immense number of different 
 theories leaves the reader waiting to be informed what 
 in the author's judgment is the essential outcome of 
 this mass of learning, and, above all, what is the 
 author's own point of view in philosophy. He tabu- 
 lates with great industry and precision the doctrines 
 of some hundred and twenty philosophers, who for the 
 most part differ widely from each other, but we do not
 
 LAST WORDS 157 
 
 see with which of them he concurs and how he would 
 class himself. The Chronological Tables and the 
 bibliography occupy no less than seventy pages, and 
 extend from A.D. 1516 to 1918. Out of this vast 
 library of learning, in what solid body of truth has 
 Professor Sorley himself found salvation and offers us 
 as sound reality ? 
 
 The field of the inquiry is too limited in time. It 
 practically starts with Francis Bacon's Advancement 
 of Learning in 1605. The result of this is to reduce 
 to bare mention the philosophers of the Middle Ages 
 and of the Renaissance from Roger Bacon in the thir- 
 teenth century down to William Gilbert in the six- 
 teenth century. But Roger Bacon is surely one of 
 the greatest of English philosophers, the peer of 
 Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. But 
 Roger, Duns Scotus, and Ockham are hurried over 
 with a page, or half a page, whilst Henry More has ten 
 pages and Bentham has twenty pages. Surely, too, 
 Gilbert is of prime importance in any history of Eng- 
 lish philosophy, yet he is reduced to a perfunctory 
 single page, apparently because he wrote in Latin. 
 Why should a history of philosophy be limited to the 
 English language ? This limitation points to a serious 
 defect in the professor's method. Gilbert, like Roger 
 Bacon, as did Descartes and at times Francis Bacon, 
 wrote in Latin, because their whole work was asso- 
 ciated with, and was addressed to, European thinkers, 
 not to those of their own nation. That English
 
 158 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 philosophy only began in 1600, and ended in 1900, is 
 a double misconception, as is the assumption that it 
 appeals only to those who read our language. 
 Philosophy has no limit of age, of language, or of race. 
 To confine it to nationality, century, or literary form 
 is radically to disfigure it. 
 
 The initial mistake was to undertake a history of 
 English philosophy. There is not, and there never 
 has been, any truly English philosophy, nor English 
 science, nor English astronomy or physics. All the 
 higher developments of knowledge and research are 
 not only European, but now are cosmopolitan. And 
 this is especially true of the crown of all knowledge in 
 philosophy. Our own philosophy did not begin with 
 the first book in English, and it did not end with the 
 reign of Victoria. And why English rather than 
 British philosophy, seeing that large chapters are 
 devoted to Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, 
 Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, and the 
 recent Scottish school. The author, himself a dis- 
 tinguished Scot of eminent Scottish academies, seems 
 inclined to the recent phase of Northern philosophy 
 which in the twenty years since Victoria has given us 
 such an abundance of critical, if not of original, 
 philosophy. It seems odd that so distinguished a 
 member of that race and school should open his history 
 of philosophy with an English book, should entitle 
 the study a history of English philosophy, and should 
 close it with the end of an English sovereign. As was
 
 LAST WORDS 159 
 
 said of a lady's costume, il commence trop tard, et il 
 finit trop tot. 
 
 The book will be very useful to students, especially 
 to those who are being crammed for examinations, for 
 it gives the dates, chief works, and a summary of the 
 views of one hundred and tw r enty English philoso- 
 phers, of whom few undergraduates know the names, 
 and of whose views they may very well remain 
 ignorant. The so-called *' history " is, in fact, a cata- 
 logue or summary of works on philosophy published 
 in English between 1600 and 1900; but it is not a 
 weighty estimate of the permanent result of the 
 thinkers named. Indeed, a work purporting to deal 
 with the dominant ideas of three centuries, but which 
 said little or nothing about French, German, and 
 Italian thought in those ages, their influence upon 
 British thought, and the reaction of British thought 
 on them, nothing of Descartes, Leibnitz, Diderot, 
 Kant, Hegel, and practically nothing of the influence 
 abroad of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, 
 and Mill such a work loses sight of the very central 
 idea of philosophy. The French, the German, and 
 the American text-books do this. The now-forgotten 
 history of philosophy of G. H. Lewes (1880) did this. 
 Such a book as that of Mr. Archibald Alexander 
 (1907), which in 600 pages treated philosophy from 
 Thales to Thomas H. Green, did this. But the Moral 
 Professor in Cambridge avoids this indispensable 
 task.
 
 160 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 A new translation of the Agamemnon always gives 
 me the occasion to re-read the drama which I have 
 long held to be the grandest of all tragedies in any 
 language or age. And now Professor Gilbert Murray 
 has published his version, in rhyming verse with notes 
 (G. Allen and Unwin, cr. 8vo., pp. 91). The Pre- 
 face, Stage-directions, analyses of the Chorus, and 
 Notes are most valuable aids to the English reader, 
 and in every sense worthy of Dr. Murray's high office 
 and great reputation. The version of the Greek 
 original may hold its own with the well-known trans- 
 lations in prose or verse by Dr. Verrall, 1889, and of 
 Mr. Morshead, 1899 ; and where Dr. Murray differs 
 from them, perhaps scholars will prefer to follow him. 
 The volume altogether will be of real help to the 
 student of ^Eschylus ; and it will certainly have the 
 same vogue as Dr. Murray's translations of Euripides 
 and of the CEdipus and Frogs. As a metrical trans- 
 lation of the most tremendous of all tragedies, it has 
 to compete with an immense number of others the 
 London Library alone has more than twenty. Two 
 famous poets have made egregious failures. Brown- 
 ing's is queer and uncouth ; Fitzgerald's is mere 
 " variations " on the sacred text of ^Eschylus. 
 
 I doubt if Dr. Murray's method suits ^Eschylus as 
 well as it suits Euripides. It is too modern, vernacu- 
 lar, and Browningesque at times to fit the Pheidian, 
 Biblical majesty of the Oresteia. Rhyme is out of 
 place in the mighty declamation of these iambics ; and
 
 LAST WORDS 161 
 
 in the Stichomuthia, or " capping " of alternate 
 lines always a doubtful device to us the rhyming is 
 almost comic. The perpetual use of " God " for 
 " the gods," and even " 'Fore God," jars on my 
 ear ; and there are too many daring new compounds 
 like " Ghastly-wed," " Gold-changer," " bird- 
 throated," '* third-thrower." It is risky to imitate 
 the poet's new mint; but I admit that " Hell in 
 cities, Hell in ships" for the famous iXsva? eXEictaXt; 
 is a daring and successful stroke, from which Milman 
 admits that he shrank. Altogether Dr. Murray's 
 work is an honour to Oxford scholarship ; but a verse 
 translation of a sublime poet should be poetry. And 
 for my part I cannot part with my Dean Milman 
 which I have enjoyed for fifty-five years. Milman 
 was himself a poet, albeit of early Victorian type. His 
 Translation of the Agamemnon and of the Bacchanals 
 and numerous Greek lyrics (John Murray, illustrated, 
 1865) is, to my mind, a rare introduction to Greek 
 poetry. And his version of the Agamemnon, if less 
 scholarly, is more like the spirit of Greek poetry than 
 any of those by recent hands. 
 
 One of the most striking facts of our time is the 
 incessant efforts that are made to bring about some 
 religious harmony even a union of various Churches. 
 Things are being done by ministers, clergy, and even 
 prelates, which would have been thought intolerable 
 down to the close of the Victorian era. And the 
 purely secular Press lias opened its columns to debates 
 
 ii
 
 162 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 and controversies as to church membership and the 
 need of development in religion. There is ample 
 ground to account for all this. The war shook all the 
 conditions of life over the whole globe with a disturb- 
 ing force greater than any experienced by the life of 
 man. The habitable world from the Alaskan 
 promontory to the Indian Ocean was drawn into the 
 vortex. At the same time the relations of social order 
 and industrial discipline were stirred to their founda- 
 tions. The essential unity of humanity was revealed 
 as it had never before been made so manifest. And 
 the universal uprooting of society drove men to ask 
 the question if religion could not do something to 
 find an eirenicon of mankind. 
 
 To the man-in-the-street, to common sense cer- 
 tainly to the agnostic it would seem that all these 
 efforts have been futile. As a keen-sighted dignitary 
 of the Church reminds them, what hope of union of 
 Protestant churches is there if prelates insist on 
 Episcopacy and the antique Creed? It is as if pur- 
 posely meant to exclude all Presbyterians, all 
 Unitarians, as well as the vast body of religious per- 
 sons who would call themselves Christians, but would 
 not submit to have their faith limited by any dogmatic 
 creed, whether ancient or modern. And what 
 glimmer of union is there between any Protestant 
 communion and one of which the essence is the miracle 
 of the real presence and the sanctification of the priest 
 as the miracle-worker? To common sense it would
 
 LAST WORDS 163 
 
 seem that no reunion of Christians can advance a step 
 whilst there is no real agreement as to the source and 
 authority of the Scriptures, as to the definite meaning 
 of the Creed, and especially as to the nature of Christ, 
 and the truth of His birth, life and death. It is no 
 use to talk about Christian reunion if you are willing 
 to leave all this in the air. 
 
 If prelates and theologians are too rigid in their con- 
 ditions of religious union, there are many able and 
 excellent leaders of thought whose ideas of religion 
 are noble in spirit but intellectually vague. I was 
 attracted to a new volume by Dr. Bosanquet, a very 
 distinguished philosopher and moralist. What 
 Religion Is (Macmillan and Co., 1920, sm. 8vo., pp. 
 81) is a beautiful book, with almost all of which I 
 should feel in sympathy, if I were to vary a few names 
 and phrases. But my difficulty is to understand what 
 exactly, in plain words, the writer means. In his 
 opening sentence he raises what he so finely calls " the 
 S.O.S. of humanity " " what must I do to be 
 saved ? ' The answer seems to be You are saved if 
 you have religion. True! but what religion? 
 Something that you hold as supreme ! Yes ! but what 
 is that ? It is as much as to say You are saved if you 
 have X. This indefinable X runs through the whole 
 book. " In the unity of love and will with the 
 supreme good you are saved you are free and you are 
 strong." But what is the supreme good and how am 
 I to reach it? " Be a whole, or join a whole." This,
 
 164 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 he says, is religion. " We must not let go our main 
 grasp of the values love, beauty, truth." But that 
 is what all who reason about religion have said from 
 St. Paul to Auguste Comte. The formula would 
 cover the Pope, General Booth, the Chief Rabbi, the 
 Sheikh-ul-Islam and a Chinese Mandarin. As Aris- 
 totle said of Plato : "It is beautiful, but is it 
 practical? " 
 
 Heartily accepting this formula of Dr. Bosanquet, 
 our own faith, as I have often tried to explain, is this. 
 The business of religion is not so much to tell men 
 what goes on in Heaven, and how to get there when 
 we leave this earth but rather to tell men how to do 
 their duty whilst they are here : and what the brother- 
 hood of man really requires them to do one to another. 
 Unhappily, all forms of Protestant Christianity are 
 far too " spiritual " to do anything of this kind. 
 Heaven, not earth, is their sphere. Rome at times 
 does something, too often on the wrong side, in the 
 wrong way. The Catholic Church once did much ; 
 and so did some Protestant churches in the day of their 
 power. But to-day they are silent, and protest that 
 their sacred office has nothing to do with things social, 
 industrial, political, or national. So say Baptists, 
 Unitarians, Churchmen, and Romanists, at least in 
 England, for they fear that their congregations would 
 disappear if they presumed to meddle with mundane 
 things. So they talk of nothing but Heaven, whilst 
 the masses are ever less interested in it as a matter of
 
 LAST WORDS 165 
 
 vital concern. There will be no real peace on earth 
 until there is promise of a common religion based on 
 scientific certainties which all can accept, and training 
 men from childhood to practise that personal and 
 social conduct in life which is at once their duty and 
 their true happiness. 
 
 An amazing example of the way in which Obscur- 
 antism lifts its old head at any new step taken in the 
 progress of science is to be seen in the eagerness of 
 metaphysico-theology to make a hit out of the novel 
 Einstein theory of physics. The famous professor has 
 proposed a new development to the geometric condi- 
 tions of the world, which so far high scientific 
 authority and recent observations seem to justify. 
 Thereupon certain mystics in what they call 
 philosophy and theology cry out : See how rotten and 
 treacherous a foundation is your boasted science ! 
 Since Euclid, Newton, and Darwin were all wrong, 
 let us return again to our sublime and antique fancies, 
 and put no trust in their pretended scientific certain- 
 ties. Long ago Mr. Arthur J. Balfour started this 
 red-herring across the chase of Truth ; which I then 
 described as " sub-cynical pessimism," " a kind of 
 despairing quietism." Serious men of science never 
 imagined their knowledge to be complete or final, even 
 in their own special branch, and have always 
 been willing to hail novel improvements and cor- 
 rections. Like Newton, they knew they were only 
 picking up solid fragments on the shore of a bound-
 
 166 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 less sea. But it is a comical form of muddle-headed- 
 ness which fancies the discovery of a new shell or an 
 unknown bit of rock proves all that has yet been 
 gathered in to be worthless. 
 
 Dr. Einstein himself has now given to the English 
 reader his own account of his theory in what he calls 
 the simplest form Relativity, A Popular Exposi- 
 tion, translated by Dr. R. Lawson (Methuen and 
 Co., 12mo., pp. 138). Now, " the average reader," 
 so addressed, will not be able to master this learned 
 book unless he is fairly familiar with recent physics, 
 and especially the modern development of the 
 geometry of four dimensions. In the next place, let 
 the average reader be reassured that the new doctrine 
 of relativity concerns those who work inter apices on 
 the ultimate problems of geometry and astronomy. 
 The Euclid of the schools and the solar system of 
 ordinary text-books remain untouched. Euclid deals 
 with the measurement of objects on this globe, by 
 men. The Newton of academic examinations 
 explains the diurnal and annual rotations of the 
 planets and the physics of our solar system. Neither 
 Euclid nor Newton ever laid down final, absolute, and 
 ultimate laws of the universe. If anyone supposed 
 that Newton did this, Dr. Einstein tells them they 
 were premature, and that Relativity goes a long way 
 farther than they dreamed. Professor Eddington, 
 the Astronomer-Royal, and some of our highest 
 authorities, have now explained the Einstein doctrine
 
 LAST WORDS 167 
 
 and are willing to accept it, though it is still waiting 
 demonstration by final tests. But to assume that 
 this is to knock the bottom out of science is indeed 
 childish superstition. 
 
 I have done my best to follow Dr. Einstein's new 
 book and the various expositions it has called forth. 
 And I will only say that the extension therein given 
 to the doctrine of Relativity causes me no difficulty to 
 accept, for I have been a firm believer in an extreme 
 form of Relativity all my life. Even at Oxford I 
 never could bring my mind to believe in any Absolute 
 Reality outside my personal consciousness, however 
 high the probability that our scientific knowledge was 
 correct in fact. I have never known any limit to 
 Relativity, i.e. to the truth of things being true, so jar 
 only as human powers and conditions admit. Accord- 
 ingly, I hail Dr. Einstein's enlarged Relativity of 
 Time and Space, which to me have always been mere 
 working forms of the human understanding. But 
 when, in Part III., pp. 105-114, he determines the 
 structure of Space in se, and denies that " the stellar 
 universe is a finite island in the infinite ocean of 
 space," but postulates a finite universe, he is going 
 too far. Geometry may prove this in a fourth 
 dimension, i.e. a non-human world. But a geometer 
 has no right to dogmatise about the universe by what 
 are merely X Y Z theories on paper. All these tables 
 are not geometry, i.e. the measuring of real things, 
 but they are algebraic conundrums, which may have
 
 168 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 no real existence outside the brain of the calculator. 
 Dr. Einstein is more geometrician than philosopher. 
 Relative philosophy will recall him to earth by remind- 
 ing him that it is an unverified assumption that his 
 idea of Space and Time, his ratios, and his figures rule 
 throughout the universe. Dr. Einstein's new Rela- 
 tivity may be an unanswerable tour-de-force in super- 
 geometry, but it has no right to pose as Relative 
 Philosophy. There may be not only a fourth, but an 
 nth geometry in the universe, or the universe may be 
 a figment of his own imagination. True Relativity 
 rejects all forms of the Absolute.
 
 NOVEMBER 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 XI 
 
 THE establishment of a statesman of tried 
 authority in the French Republic is a happy 
 omen for the peace of Europe and for the 
 union of our two great nations. On that union the 
 future of civilisation is staked. At first sight, it 
 might be thought that nothing of great importance 
 had been effected by the transfer of M. Millerand 
 from the office of Prime Minister to that of President 
 of the Republic. Those who know France have seen 
 that the change is of deep significance. M. Millerand 
 does not accede to the Elysee as a courtly figurehead 
 and judicious Chairman of Cabinets, but as the 
 masterful chief of a great people who receive him as 
 their guide and inspirer. He himself declared that 
 he would accept office only on those conditions. He 
 even suggested that he hoped to see amendments in 
 the Constitution. But the Constitution already offers 
 to an able President an authority greater than that 
 of a British Prime Minister and greater than that of 
 a President of the United States. Our Prime Minis- 
 ters, we know, can be dismissed by the sudden vote 
 of a very small majority of a single Chamber, and at 
 
 times they have been hampered by the silent influence 
 
 169
 
 170 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 of the Crown. The American President (elected for 
 four years only) can be absolutely checkmated by a 
 Congress which he cannot dissolve and a Senate which 
 has almost equal authority in foreign affairs. 
 
 M. Millerand is now irremovable President of 
 France for seven years. His position is quite different 
 from what it was when he was Prime Minister and 
 had to defend his every act with opponents in the 
 Chambers and could be overthrown by a single vote. 
 He has himself declared that he claims the right to 
 conduct negotiations with allies. He has legal 
 authority to do much which Woodrow Wilson 
 attempted to do, but which the American Constitu- 
 tion proves to be ultra vires. No doubt the French 
 President can be held up by the entire Parliament 
 acting together. He is no dictator, but a constitu- 
 tional Minister. But M. Millerand has gifts to lead 
 Parliament which no President since Thiers ever has 
 had. He has a much longer term of office than an 
 American President. He cannot be dismissed in a 
 night sitting as a British Prime Minister may be. 
 He ascends to his high office with all the prestige of a 
 great Parliamentary leader, yet he has no authority 
 above him to represent the nation. Like an Ameri- 
 can President, he is irremovable, and for a term prac- 
 tically double. And yet, as Chairman of a real Par- 
 liamentary Cabinet, he can take active and con- 
 tinuous part in Parliamentary legislation with a free- 
 dom which no American President can exert. He is
 
 LAST WORDS 171 
 
 the first French President since Thiers who has suc- 
 ceeded to that office with an immense majority in the 
 Chamber. 
 
 The opinion of those who know France best long 
 ago convinced me that a strictly Parliamentary 
 Executive on the British lines is unworkable in that 
 country, and that a Presidential Executive neither 
 party leader nor dictator is best suited to the genius 
 and traditions of the Republic. The vast mass of 
 rural citizens, at last disillusioned of an Empire, have 
 always been opposed to the faction-fights in the 
 Chamber at Paris. Their ideal is stable Republican 
 Government. Internecine Parliamentary cabals have 
 ever been the grave of French statesmen. Socially 
 speaking, and for maintenance of the institutions of 
 order and of property, the French people are more 
 settled more conservative than either the British 
 or the American people. There is in France a more 
 steady horror of ochlocracy and communism than in 
 any Anglo-Saxon race. The recent Socialist Con- 
 gress at Orleans showed how organised Labour in 
 France, constituted as it is on Socialist lines, by a 
 crushing majority repudiated the Bolshevist Com- 
 munism and its tyranny ; whilst neither British nor 
 American Socialism, much less German and Italian 
 Socialism, have taken any such emphatic step. The 
 social system of France still mainly a self-support- 
 ing and industrial peasantry is more stable than the 
 social system of Britain and America where gigan-
 
 172 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 tic industrial enlargement fills the mind of capitalist 
 
 and workmen with perpetual visions of a new 
 world. 
 
 A real statesman in the position of an irremovable 
 President, who is also the effective chief of his own 
 Cabinet, through whom he is in daily touch with 
 Parliament, is far more able to effect his own policy, 
 if he keeps it resolutely in his mind, than is an Ameri- 
 can President or a British Prime Minister. Our 
 Minister has to be continually hedging and compro- 
 mising and altering his plans as the House seems to 
 sway backwards and forwards ; and often he is forced 
 to show the whole of his hand prematurely, or meet 
 rude and stormy insults. An American President is 
 not in regular touch with Congress, and what he calls 
 his Cabinet is not a true Parliamentary Cabinet in our 
 sense. A French President is, or rather may be, in 
 a position which shares some of the advantages of a 
 British Prime Minister in that he is never at arms' 
 length with Parliament, and also he has the great 
 strength of the American President in that he is irre- 
 movable by direct vote. Now M. Millerand has all 
 the opportunities of using both advantages and I 
 confidently look for a new and stable Government in 
 France more conservative in spirit and more effective 
 in international peace.
 
 LAST WORDS 178 
 
 M. Millerand and Mr. Lloyd George have worked 
 together with rare comradeship, and we trust that 
 this common entente may continue and increase. 
 But the difficulties to be overcome are deep seated. 
 Union between England and France forms the very 
 condition of the welfare of both. But there are in- 
 herent differences in our interests and mental habits. 
 France in her heroic struggle has been all but bled to 
 death. Her chief industrial district has been ruined 
 for a generation. Her deadly enemy has even still 
 larger material resources and a population almost 
 double ; and there are no strategic barriers between 
 them. France adopted the Wilson programme 
 enthusiastically whilst it seemed to mean a powerful 
 protector and, in the extinct triple Treaty, a per- 
 fectly efficient safeguard. But she never had any 
 illusions about a world-peace and an omnipotent 
 League to restore civilisation, such as was the honest 
 dream of the English people and Government. 
 France was far too miserable about her wounds and 
 her defenceless state to indulge in visions about 
 general civilisation. When Wilson withdrew, and 
 took with him the abortive triple guarantee, France 
 could see nothing but her own almost desperate isola- 
 tion the need of indemnities and new provinces. 
 How w r as she to get money, coal, Eastern allies, and 
 security in the Mediterranean? Her one hope was 
 gold, Poland, Asia Minor, Syria, restored mines, 
 manufactures, allies, and more coloured troops. All 
 else might go to ruin its own way. All that was very 
 natural in a people faced with the imminent peril of
 
 174 NOVISSIMA VERSA 
 
 their beloved France. But it was not the British way, 
 and not the way to European peace. 
 
 Frenchmen have two qualities in rare perfection 
 a logical perspicacity to follow out reasoning to its full 
 consequences, together with an incurable tendency to 
 suspect motives and aims of friends and foes. Now the 
 English mind is much slower to detect danger, deser- 
 tion, or treachery ; and is averse to pressing every 
 point to its logical sequence. The Frenchman takes 
 up his data and follows them up to the end coute que 
 cotite. Now the English mind, when it finds reason- 
 ing come to startling results, begins to hark back and 
 think there was something doubtful in the data from 
 which he started. He says things have altered, what 
 was true at first is no longer true. He begins again 
 from fresh premissa he is an opportunist by habit 
 and from experience. The Frenchman turns round 
 and accuses him of treachery, of vacillation and ill-will 
 perfide Albion! This accounts for many things in 
 recent disputes. French and English Ministers 
 agreed with Wilson's schemes to re-settle Europe, to 
 make Germany pay, and to put her in chains. Eng- 
 lishmen, in a year or two, began to see that Germany 
 could not pay all and that to put her in chains was 
 to make it impossible that she could pay at all. They 
 began to see that Poland was a very poor substitute 
 to France for Tsardom Russia, and that Soviet Russia 
 would not and could not pay the Tsardom debts. 
 They saw that France could not hold Cilicia and had
 
 LAST WORDS 175 
 
 no real hold on Syria. Frenchmen heard all this with 
 rage and suspicion. What ! Germany is not to pay, 
 nor Russia ! Poland no good ! Syria a failure ! 
 What is to become of France then? 
 
 England and France must hold together or both 
 will fall. But the difficulties of joint action are great. 
 Our nation is, above all things, practical ready to 
 see that conditions are changed, that new plans must 
 be formed. And our Governments are more com- 
 pletely and continuously under the direction of Parlia- 
 ment and of opinion than is usually the Government 
 of France. But the French people and their rulers, 
 with the passionate will of their race and their exact 
 and scientific mind, vehemently insist on literal execu- 
 tion of every agreement and precise adherence to 
 every clause of a common policy. To differ from 
 their view is to desert them to see new conditions 
 is to side with their enemy. All this makes co-opera- 
 tion extraordinarily difficult. It is impossible for us 
 to join in all the schemes on which France has set her 
 heart and yet we cannot actively oppose them. We 
 will, and we must, press Germany to make good her 
 reparation in all reasonable measure ; but we cannot 
 join France in fresh military invasion of German land. 
 We know how futile are hopes of any Russian 
 Government recognising outstanding liabilities how 
 vain is the refusal to trade until this is done. We 
 know how precarious is the hold of any Christian 
 Power on any Asiatic littoral. And we know how
 
 176 NOVISSIMA VERSA 
 
 precarious and how intractable is the new-born Polish 
 nation. Yet we cannot formally resist the French 
 entetement for these schemes. As a matter of fact, 
 we are powerless to take any adequate part in any of 
 them. With Constantinople, Palestine, Meso- 
 potamia, India, Ireland, all in military occupation, 
 we have not a man to spare. Finally, the democracy 
 at home places an absolute bar on any fresh commit- 
 ments of a warlike kind. On the contrary, it is loudly 
 calling out for a great reduction of those we have. 
 
 The result is that everything connected with the 
 Covenant must be counted at present as secondary, 
 and our first and urgent care must be the home 
 interest of the United Kingdom and, indeed, of the 
 entire Realm overseas. Circumstances now force us 
 to take up much the same position as that of the 
 American people. They cry as practically did both 
 Conventions America first ! France too cries 
 France first ! rather, indeed, La France quand memel 
 That is a cry which we cannot share, but which we 
 cannot defy. It will require infinite diplomatic 
 adroitness to avoid being entangled in desperate 
 adventures which our reason opposes and our people 
 condemn, and yet to avoid the charge of deserting 
 our ally. One w r ay of cementing alliance would be to 
 reduce at least by one-half even by two-thirds the 
 monstrous profit we make by the price of indispens- 
 able coal to our friends. Sorely as we need the gain, 
 our financial position is greatly better than that of
 
 LAST WORDS 177 
 
 Italy or France. For my part, I would practically 
 sell coal at cost price, and, indeed, I would cancel the 
 sums advanced on loan. A second way of clearing up 
 all grounds of estrangement would be frank and com- 
 plete publicity for all facts and intentions. We have 
 suffered all through the war by secret policy and by 
 withholding adequate explanation of our own case. 
 France, Italy, America have never had true under- 
 standing of what is our actual condition and what are 
 our real aims. There is a conventional bar on a 
 British Government defending itself until it is 
 formally attacked in Parliament. The " English 
 gentleman's" pride is to treat all abuse with con- 
 temptuous silence. And yet we now know the incal- 
 culable power of active and skilful propaganda. It is 
 time for a British Government to force upon all the 
 real facts and its own determined policy. 
 
 The burning problem of Nationalisation has been 
 ably treated by a great succession of the leading 
 statesmen, economists, capitalists, Socialists, and 
 workers, from almost every point of view and with a 
 variety of different experiences ; and it has been my 
 business to study them, whether supporting or 
 opposed to the scheme. But of all that I have seen 
 none seem to me so convincing as the essay of Lord 
 Emmott. 1 In some 78 massive pages Lord Emmott 
 
 Nationalisation of Industries. A. criticism, by Lord Emmott. 
 T. Fisher Unwin, Limited, 2s. 
 
 12
 
 178 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 has examined the entire case for nationalising indus- 
 tries ; generally, or in mines, railways, transport, and 
 land. It is done with rare lucidity and judicial impar- 
 tiality, shirking no aspect of the problem, and 
 examining each scheme in detail. He combines in 
 himself many qualifications for wise judgment a 
 trained economist, an experienced statesman, an 
 eminent financial authority, an old official in both 
 Houses, a great industrial chief, and an ardent 
 Liberal. As might be expected of a public man of 
 such wide range of interests, the whole essay is com- 
 posed \vith scrupulous moderation, entire fairness, 
 and the weight of judicial decision. 
 
 Lord Emmott begins with a thorough and truly 
 Liberal examination of the causes of Industrial Un- 
 rest. He shows that nationalisation of all industry is 
 mere tyranny as the Bolshevist experiment proves 
 because universal and real Communism, being in 
 incessant conflict with the acquisitive instincts of 
 human nature, can only be maintained by ruthless 
 universal coercion. This English and French 
 Socialist leaders have at last come to see. Lord 
 Emmott then passes on to examine the organisation 
 of nationalisation, as proposed in various schemes. 
 He proves that the virus of coercion must rule in any 
 type of nationalisation, and that any form of coercion 
 of any industry necessarily implies bureaucracy. It is 
 futile for Labour leaders to repudiate bureaucracy in 
 words if they ask for the national organisation, which,
 
 LAST WORDS 179 
 
 whatever it be called, is nothing but a monstrous, 
 disciplined, hard-and-fast official staff. He goes on 
 to show how this staff grows and hardens, and how it 
 reacts on politics, and how industrial nationalisation 
 will demoralise government, leading to a system 
 wherein Parliament and Ministries become the resorts 
 of those who promise most to their electors. In an 
 ultra-democratic Constitution the ultimate effect of 
 nationalisation is to place the pay, the hours, the con- 
 ditions, of each industry in the hands of the workers 
 themselves. No Minister of nationalised industry 
 could refuse the demands of the workmen acting 
 directly on the M.P.'s they elect. 
 
 One of our burning questions is Bureaucracy ; for 
 the advancing armies of Socialism wave banners 
 which, whatever may be their professions, necessarily 
 involve a multiple system of bureaucracy ; and, on the 
 other hand, all who hold by our social order repudiate 
 the extension of bureaucracy camouflaged under 
 another name. And now we have a very timely book 
 about the eminent civil servants of our age by one of 
 the most eminent of them all. Sir Algernon West's 
 Contemporary Portraits 1 is at once a memoir of the 
 Civil Service of the Victorian era and a book of per- 
 sonal impressions and delightful anecdotes. For 
 
 i Contemporary Portraits: Men of My Day in Public Life, by the 
 Right Honourable Sir Algernon West, G.C.B., with twenty-four 
 illustrations, 8vo., Fisher Unwin, Ltd.
 
 180 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 some forty years Sir Algernon has ably served his 
 country, has been at the very centre of the official 
 world under all administrations, and, as a member of 
 many commissions, councils, and clubs, has known 
 everyone and has heard of everything going. The 
 result is a vivid picture of that vast and silent staff of 
 officials who in practice work the British Empire, but 
 who are so little known to the ordinary public 
 ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro. One 
 of the oldest of their comrades has now come forward 
 "to sing the praises of good men" by a faithful 
 record of what he has seen, not, as Isaac Walton puts 
 it, "by vague reports and barren eulogies," but by 
 pictures of the men as they lived and worked. 
 
 *#**** 
 
 And these men did work. It is a story of indomit- 
 able energy, conscientious sacrifice to duty, patience, 
 tact, and fairness, of which we may be proud. No 
 Civil Service in the world none, perhaps, in history 
 can show a better series of able men serving their 
 country without any adequate reward and without 
 recognition except from the statesmen and the 
 sovereigns whose business they carried on. I can 
 myself bear witness to the truth of these portraits. 
 Though I have no pretension to be a civil servant, yet, 
 as I have served on two Royal Commissions and 
 sundry official Committees, and on the London 
 County Council, and have been a member of many 
 clubs and societies, I have known most of the persons
 
 LAST WORDS 181 
 
 described and have been the friend of many of them. 
 As I am a year older than Sir Algernon, my memory 
 goes as far back, and, I think, is as sure as his, and I 
 can certify to the accuracy of his portraits. All that 
 he tells us of Lords Farrer and Lingen, of Sir 
 Spencer Walpole, Sir Louis Mallet, Lord Welby, of 
 Trollope, Arnold, Mowatt, Lushington, and Digby, 
 bring back to me the men as I knew them, and have 
 often served or debated in their company. I wish 
 that Sir Algernon had written more of Sir Henry 
 Maine, of Lord Hobhouse, of Herman Merivale, of 
 Bertram Mitford, and of Lord Thring, each of whom 
 had special gifts and individual tasks of their own. 
 
 Let it not be supposed that this book about civil 
 servants is a dull summary of official minutes. It is 
 full of good things, of humorous anecdotes, and 
 witticisms that do not often pass outside certain 
 coteries and clubs. The old Dickens' Circumlocution 
 clerks, we hear, were like the fountains "which play 
 all day from 10 to 4." Alfred Montgomery, the 
 last of the old dandies, rebuked a clerk in his shirt- 
 sleeves by suggesting that he might take off his 
 trousers ; Lord Hammond's hall-porter excused his 
 chief's absence : " for he had gone to a funeral the 
 only day's pleasuring he has had for four years." 
 Matthew Arnold in his early economic days took " a 
 blow-out " in Paris, and then mistook Frederick 
 Leveson-Gower for his own chief, Lord Granville.
 
 182 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 The Treasury complained that he did not stop at 
 Edmonton : " How could I," said the Inspector, 
 "when John Gilpin couldn't?" But the story that 
 Arnold didn't know common plants and trees is quite 
 ridiculous. He loved and knew Nature as well as 
 Wordsworth or Tennyson. Gilbert's coat of arms 
 and motto for Sir Blundell Maple was Coeur-de-lion 
 in prison, Blondel m'appelle. The history of No. 10 
 Downing Street is extremely interesting. The 
 twenty-four illustrations are wonderfully life-like, 
 especially those of Sir Algernon, of Mallet, Arnold, 
 Farrer, Walpole, Trollope, Rowton, Welby, and 
 Mo watt. The book altogether is one that fills a gap 
 in the biographies of our time, and it ought to fill a 
 gap in the shelves of any collection that calls itself a 
 library. 
 
 The first the urgent task of this Session must be 
 to take in hand the appalling condition of Ireland. 
 It threatens the very existence of the United King- 
 dom, of the Empire, of the Throne, of civilisation. 
 For the moment, Ireland is practically a separate Re- 
 public, under military occupation and sporadic civil 
 war. If this were to last, what becomes of our 
 monarchic Constitution, of our Imperial position in 
 the world ? I say that this is the worst crisis that has 
 befallen Britain for centuries. In these pages I have 
 foreborne to meddle with the Irish dilemma, so 
 tangled, so obscure, so inexplicable are the facts ; and 
 my own forecast of the future seemed so hopeless that
 
 LAST WORDS 183 
 
 it might appear unpatriotic to state it. But now that 
 my ' ' Last Words ' ' perhaps my last days are soon 
 to close, I cannot but say that our country never was 
 in more imminent peril. 
 
 There is a general cry for a frank understanding 
 between the British and the Irish peoples ; and it is 
 certain that now the people of Britain desire to accept 
 whatever the Irish people claim, short of inflicting a 
 deadly wound upon our own island. But how are we 
 to get into touch with the Irish people, if the loudest 
 voices in its name repudiate all dealings with the 
 united nation's Government and Parliament? Who 
 are the true representatives of Ireland? Where are 
 they ? What do they claim ? This nation cannot deal 
 with secret murder clubs nor with demagogues in 
 America and overseas. For one nation to treat with 
 another nation, both must have authorised persons to 
 represent them and to bind their own nation by their 
 contracts. Where are the Irish representatives, and 
 who can show that they have power to pledge the 
 Irish people? The actual Government of Soviet 
 Russia are known persons, having visible power to 
 make good their agreements if they choose to do so. 
 But where are those who can pretend to speak for 
 Ireland, to bind Ireland by any treaty they might 
 sign? 
 
 I study the various proposals of our Elder States-
 
 184 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 men ; and with all the spirit of goodwill and of peace 
 they breathe, I fail to see how their schemes would 
 work out. These wild, ill-disciplined, and barbarous 
 reprisals must be sternly repressed. But what then, 
 if civilians, officials, police, soldiers, continue to be 
 murdered by secret assassins? If the Irish people 
 claim to be at war, why continue the farce of civil law, 
 juries, pensions, subsidies, and the whole pretence of 
 carrying on civil government? If military occupa- 
 tion be necessary, it should be such as we honourably 
 carry on now on the Rhine in the enemies' country. 
 If all military occupation is monstrous, and, as 
 Labour insists, all soldiers are to be withdrawn, who 
 can guarantee but that parts of Ireland will follow the 
 example of so many provinces of Russia, and break 
 out in general chaos, plunder, and appropriation? 
 And of all military manoeuvres, the gradual with- 
 drawal from an enemy country is the most difficult, 
 as the German Army found in November, 1918. If 
 Ireland were to have a separate army and absolute 
 control of all ports and shipping, the maintenance of 
 British trade and commerce, and the very safety of 
 this country, would be at the mercy of enemy 
 factions. 
 
 The essential question is : How can the British 
 people be brought into free speech with the Irish 
 people? The Home Rule Bill, even amended and 
 enlarged, will not do that. What will? I do not 
 pretend to say what would. But it happens that a
 
 LAST WORDS 185 
 
 scheme of this kind, obviously "heroic," was shown 
 to me, was submitted to Government then engaged 
 in drafting the Bill. It was proposed by an English- 
 man, a resident landowner in the disturbed West of 
 Ireland. His idea was this. Let freely-chosen dele- 
 gates from Ireland meet an equal body of delegates 
 from Britain, and try to frame a treaty of peace, as 
 if they were sent by two nations that had been carry- 
 ing on a desultory war. The Irish delegates were not 
 to be nominated by the British Government, nor was 
 any condition to be imposed on them by the British 
 Parliament. They were to be free representatives of 
 the Irish people, to treat in their name. 
 
 Such was the "heroic" scheme of an English 
 gentleman living on his property in Ireland and in 
 close touch with the farm people around him. But 
 how were free delegates from Ireland to be found? 
 What would be their authority if they were found? 
 If that were the only difficulty, it could be got over 
 at once. There are at present 105 duly elected 
 M.P.'s from Ireland, of whom, unfortunately, we 
 only see at Westminster a very small contingent. 
 Suppose that the whole of these Irish M.P.'s chose 
 in Dublin, say, five (or seven) delegates, and that the 
 British House of Commons in Westminster chose an 
 equal number. Let the chosen meet in friendly 
 interviews in an independent spot say the Isle of 
 Man with an independent chairman say from an 
 Overseas Dominion, such as General Smuts. It is no 
 doubt a highly unconstitutional vision, though 
 scarcely more wild than that of some current schemes.
 
 186 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 But, at any rate, it might give an intelligible answer 
 to the question : What do the Irish people claim 
 which the British people can accept ?
 
 DECEMBER 
 
 - 1920 - 
 
 XII 
 
 OF all the problems produced by the World War 
 and the chaos it left, none is more urgent than 
 the reorganisation of the United Kingdom 
 and the Dominions of the Crown. Our antique, 
 unique, abnormal Constitution is obviously unfit for 
 its new task. The great overseas Commonwealths are 
 loudly calling for admission to the government of the 
 Empire. What a change it is since a hundred years 
 ago they were the "Colonies"! India, once the 
 possession of a trading company, is receiving a 
 Liberal Constitution, and grumbles fiercely that it is 
 " not good enough." Ireland declares itself to be an 
 independent Republic, and in parts it is so in fact. 
 " Home Rule all round " is the universal cry, the in- 
 evitable demand of the vast populations who in war 
 have proved their force and their ambitions people 
 who are to Britain what the Roman world was to 
 Rome when Julius Caesar admitted them to power 
 as the equals of Old Rome. 
 
 The Empires are passing away ! And, not only are 
 
 they becoming Republics, but they are disintegrating 
 
 187
 
 188 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 into ethnic, internecine Republics. Germany, 
 Austria, Russia, Turkey, China, have thrown off 
 Emperors, and with the Balkan and the Baltic races 
 are setting up a network of national governments. 
 The Covenant and the solvent cry of Self-determina- 
 tion have whirled round the world and have started 
 ferments more potent than any of Rousseau, Luther, 
 or Peter the Hermit. Nowhere have they found a 
 soil so well prepared as in the so-called British 
 Empire, which is made up of thirty or forty separate 
 nations, distinct in language, religion, laws, and 
 habits. It is high time that the relations of these 
 forty nations to Parliament and our anomalous Con- 
 stitution were revised with a view to real facts. 
 France, the United States, Switzerland, Portugal, 
 were Republics with no Emperors, no subject 
 nationalities of any importance. The enormous ex- 
 tent and infinite diversity of those w r e govern makes 
 the task almost insoluble, and it is monstrous to leave 
 them in the hands of that effete institution the Par- 
 liament at Westminster. 
 
 I honour and respect our statesmen whose honesty, 
 public spirit, self-control, and good sense are un- 
 equalled in any age; but they are at the mercy of 
 adventurers and nonentities. The practice and tone 
 of Parliament were formed when it consisted of a 
 single class a governing class, of wealth, high breed- 
 ing, a common education, and loyalty to the Crown 
 and Constitution. Ministers continue these anti-
 
 LAST WORDS 189 
 
 quated civilities in face of a noisy opposition which is 
 often like a park meeting of rebels and traitors. Pitt, 
 Canning, Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, thought they had 
 done enough when they had convinced " honourable 
 gentlemen " of their policy and intentions. Ministers 
 still keep up the old etiquette, though " the people " 
 neither know nor care for what they say, and despise 
 the Parliamentary babble as a mere blind, except that 
 some treasonable "question," or some mendacious 
 insult is " reported " far and wide by the gutter Press. 
 Ministers are satisfied if they can assure " their 
 honourable friend ' ' that ' ' the rumours are incor- 
 rect." What they should do is to speak to the People 
 in language that the People understand. 
 
 It is recognised now that Parliament in its present 
 form is an effete institution, because it obstinately 
 clings to forms and functions which were devised when 
 all the conditions were different. A century or two 
 ago it was the Legislature of a moderate kingdom 
 ruled by a patriotic ** governing class." Now it is the 
 Executive public meeting pretending to rule over an 
 unwieldy agglomeration of nationalities permeated 
 with unrest, sedition, and revolution. The House of 
 Commons is three times too numerous : it is choked 
 with its antique rules, forms, and conventions ; it has 
 one hundred times too much to do, with impossible 
 tasks over which it mumbles and blunders in idle talk. 
 A rational executive body should not contain more 
 than a dozen members ; a rational legislative body
 
 190 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 should not contain more than 300 members. 
 If either such body sat for more than three 
 or four hours, it would degenerate into a club, 
 open to gossip, amusements, and casual attend- 
 ance. The Sessions are still arranged as they were 
 when fox-hunting squires cheered Mr. Walpole and 
 "good society" trusted Mr. Pitt. The parapher- 
 nalia of first and second readings, Committee stage, 
 and report stage were invented when the House con- 
 sisted, not only of honourable gentlemen, but of good 
 citizens who knew "that the King's Government 
 must be carried on," and before obstruction had been 
 perfected into a fine art. So, too, Questions, once 
 an honest inquiry about two or three points of import- 
 ance, have swollen into the hundreds of bogus insinua- 
 tions, in which Ministers display their power of equi- 
 vocation and rebels can trumpet their treasonable 
 calumnies the only things the People's journals re- 
 port in conspicuous headlines. 
 
 * * # * * * 
 
 All these evils have grown worse under every 
 Government, and never were so mischievous as in this 
 time of chaos and our urgent tasks of reconstruction. 
 Some years ago, in essays in the Nineteenth Century, 1 
 I tried to describe them and their remedies. It was 
 proposed to reduce the number of members, to have 
 short sittings, regular Sessions at reasonable intervals, 
 
 1 House of Commons, i. and it. Nineteenth Century, vols. x. and 
 xi., Sept., 1881, Jan., 1882.
 
 LAST WORDS 191 
 
 limitation of Questions, of "Readings," time-limit 
 of speeches as worked so well in the London County 
 Council above all, reference of Bills, not of Com- 
 mittees of the whole House, but, on the admirable 
 French plan, to special Committees of about eleven, 
 chosen by proportional systems from the House, each 
 charged with departmental subjects Foreign Affairs, 
 Finance, Army, Navy, Law, Home, India, 
 Dominions, and so on, with power to summon Minis- 
 ters, regularly examine them and their documents, if 
 need be in private, and report to the whole House. 
 These essays were submitted to Mr. Gladstone, not 
 by me, and, I need not say, were utterly condemned 
 by him as if I had put a rash hand on the Ark of the 
 Covenant. In all matters of Parliamentary practice 
 Mr. Gladstone was a rank Conservative I trust he 
 was the last. A time-limit to speeches, he thought, 
 would be as horrible as to return to judicial torture. 
 
 All this no doubt involves an entire reconstruction 
 of our Parliamentary system, and even a revision of 
 the Constitution. It is to that I am coming. 
 Already by law, if not yet in practice, one of the three 
 kingdoms has a Parliament of its own indeed, two 
 Parliaments. This has broken up the Parliamentary 
 system, and makes it inevitable that Scotland, Wales, 
 and England should have national assemblies of their 
 own. Some people think that England may be 
 divided into North and South, or East and West if 
 not the vast metropolitan area as a further unit.
 
 192 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 Then comes the problem of unifying these national 
 bodies, as well as the claim of the Dominions and of 
 India to enter the Imperial Council. It is a complex 
 and tremendous problem, but it is inevitable and 
 urgent. The new Irish Bill, and the claims of the 
 Overseas Commonwealths, force it upon us. This is 
 not the place to discuss it, and I do not presume even 
 to offer any scheme of the kind ; but it must be faced 
 and at once. Furthermore, it involves the re- 
 organisation of our whole system of Imperial Govern- 
 ment, and, indeed, of our venerable British Constitu- 
 tion itself. Nearly every State in Europe has revised 
 its Constitution in recent years. 
 
 There is nothing sacred, eternal, monumental, 
 about our Constitution which has the unique quality 
 of being neither written nor rigid, nor inflexible, nor 
 protected against change and development as is the 
 case in France and the United States. The singular 
 thing, as de Tocqueville said, is that there is "no 
 British Constitution." It is composed of ancient 
 Acts of Parliament, amending Acts, explanatory 
 Acts, various traditions, customs, immemorial prac- 
 tices, judicial decisions, and Parliamentary resolu- 
 tions. This composite mass of laws, rules, judg- 
 ments, customs, and traditions has never been pub- 
 lished with any official authority ; but, what is still 
 more remarkable, it can be completely altered and 
 replaced by a single Act of Parliament. There is 
 nothing treasonable or even irregular in proposing a
 
 LAST WORDS 193 
 
 drastic revision of the Constitution. A drastic re- 
 vision has even begun. As the Irish Bill has broken 
 into our Parliamentary system, which the cry of 
 Home Rule all round radically breaks up, so the 
 imminence of a sort of Irish Republic challenges the 
 very tenure of the Crown. If this were to be con- 
 tinued in any form, our coins, proclamations, proto- 
 cols and banknotes would have to be varied. " The 
 United Kingdom," Britt. Omn. Rex, would become 
 as obsolete as Franc. Rex. 
 
 I am far from regretting that we have no written 
 and rigid Law of the Constitution. The fact that it 
 can at any time be amended by Act of Parliament has 
 great advantages, at least for a nation that once was 
 ' Left Centre," and it suits our practical, compro- 
 mising, and illogical turn of mind. But now, the 
 Constitution is actually being changed in the regular 
 way, and far greater changes are urgent and inevit- 
 able. It might be well, then, to consolidate the mass 
 of Constitutional rules which suit us to-day in a single 
 new Act which would be what on the Continent they* 
 call ' ' an organic law. ' ' To protect it as being final 
 or unalterable would be idle. Such a consolidating 
 Act would have to express the constitution and 
 powers of the Central Imperial Council (and I can 
 imagine these to be quite limited and few), the con- 
 stitution and powers of the national assemblies, and, 
 I trust, a Senate of some kind, elective as in France 
 and the United States, the relative powers of 
 
 13
 
 194 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 National, County, and Municipal bodies, the law of 
 National and Local taxation, and, finally, the rights, 
 obligations, and hereditary succession of the Crown. 
 All this is a big task ; but the Future is rolling up with 
 imperious challenges to deal at least with some of 
 them at present. And real statesmen should consider 
 a systematic plan on which they can all be solved in a 
 form at once practical, masterly, and in the spirit of 
 British traditions. 
 
 These various branches of a complete Constitution 
 hang together, and they cannot be treated independ- 
 ently. They react on each other and must be re- 
 garded as related parts of a systematic whole. It is 
 a big task, but not more arduous than that of the 
 great men who framed the Constitution of the United 
 States. I trust we can find men of foresight equal to 
 Franklin, Washington, Patrick Henry, and their 
 colleagues. Even in recent memory we have seen 
 successful new Constitutions evolved out of revolution 
 and war by France, by Italy, by Brazil, by Germany, 
 Portugal, Japan, and China. Most of our own prob- 
 lems have been more or less treated and at least pre- 
 pared by various Commissions, Councils, and volumes 
 e.g.) the Imperial Conference of 1911, the 
 Speaker's Conference on Devolution, Lord Bryce's 
 Committee on a Second Chamber, the King's re- 
 markable foundation of the House of Windsor to 
 supersede that of Hanover or Este; lastly, by such 
 books as those of Sir W. Anson, Mr. Bagehot, Mr.
 
 LAST WORDS 195 
 
 A. V. Dicey, Lord Bryce, and other lawyers of great 
 official experience. Every point has been fully dis- 
 cussed, but no action has resulted. All have been 
 snowed under by the avalanche of unbusiness-like 
 business which chokes both Government and Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 The famous Act 12-13 Will : and Mary, 1700- 
 1701 A.D. is commonly called the Act of Settlement, 
 but its settlement has been frequently amended and 
 revised ; and in its central point it has become 
 flagrantly odious to our feelings to-day. Of that 
 presently. But there are incidental anomalies. The 
 bitter struggle which overthrew the Stuarts of Roman 
 faith has long passed. Parliament and office are now 
 open to all sects of Protestants, to Catholics, to Jews, 
 to all forms of belief biblical or ethical, agnostic or 
 materialist. There are millions of our Catholic fellow- 
 subjects in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, 
 Australia, and everywhere, and it is monstrous to 
 exclude Catholics from such offices as that of Lord 
 Chancellor, Lord Keeper, and Viceroy in Ireland. 
 I would go further, and w r ould delete from the Act 
 the words "being a Protestant." What is a 
 Protestant? Am I a Protestant? Certainly, I pro- 
 test against citizens being excluded from public duty 
 in consequence of any religious faith they hold or do 
 not hold. Not merely must the Sovereign " be a Pro- 
 testant," but he " must join in communion with the 
 Church of England." What about the Church of 
 Scotland ? This limitation in the Oath of the Corona- 
 tion Ceremony to a religious body which is but an
 
 196 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 infinitesimal part of the King's subjects is contrary to 
 all modern ideas of religious equality, and, what is 
 worse, the Oath requires the Sovereign " to preserve 
 to the Bishops and clergy of the Churches committed 
 to their charge their rights and privileges." We 
 know what trouble this Oath caused in the time of 
 the Catholic Emancipation and to Victoria in the 
 Disestablishment of the Church of England in Ire- 
 land. In the imminent Disestablishment of the 
 Church of England in England, what is going to be 
 done? In truth, much in the Coronation Ceremony 
 and the barbaric rites copied from Byzantine 
 Emperors in the tenth century, and certainly the 
 Sectarian Oath will have to be revised. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 I come now to the vital point the Succession to 
 the Crown. On the childlessness of the Stuart 
 Protestants in 1700 the Crown was limited to the 
 " heirs of the body of Sophia, wife of the Elector of 
 Hanover." There are now dozens of such descend- 
 ants in the Hohenzollerns, Tsars, ex-Empress of 
 Austria, besides princelets in Germany, Austria, 
 Italy, and Spain. It would amuse a genealogist to 
 make a list of the men and women who are ' ' heirs of 
 the body of the Electress Sophia," most of them un- 
 desirables, many of them enemies, and some of them 
 infamous. It is urgent to find a new root for the title 
 to our Throne. *
 
 LAST WORDS 197 
 
 An obvious name is that of Queen Victoria. But 
 to that there are three objections. It does not free 
 us at all from the foreign families, from Hohen- 
 zollerns and some of our worst enemies in German 
 dukeries. It has much of that incongruous, genea- 
 logic jumble that attaches to the Electress Sophia. 
 Lastly, it belongs to the Victorian world that has 
 passed away. The name of King Edward VII. also 
 brings in foreign royalties and it is pre-war. 
 
 Now I make bold to affirm that a new settlement of 
 hereditary right to the Throne should be based on our 
 honoured Lord, King George V. He represents to 
 the whole Empire the world- war, the new world, our 
 hopes of a purer social order. The war was the most 
 tremendous struggle, the direst peril in our history ; 
 and through it all George was the personal embodi- 
 ment of our courage, our energy, and our faith in our 
 cause. Daily in ten thousand gatherings rang out : 
 God save the King ! He is the only one of our 
 Sovereigns for nearly two centuries who ever led our 
 armies in the field. He was with his men in France ; 
 he was with his seamen in the Fleet. From the first 
 days of August, 1914, to the last days of November, 
 1918, King George and his family fought, worked, 
 spoke, and lived as no English King ever yet did. 
 
 I say that it would be a just tribute by the nation 
 in memory of all it owes to him and to his if King
 
 198 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 George were officially enacted as the source of a new 
 dynasty. With admirable judgment he has himself 
 cast off all outlandish family names, has called his 
 own the House of Windsor, and his collaterals by 
 familiar English place-names. Let Parliament, then, 
 cast off outlandish princes as having any claim to the 
 blood-royal of England. Not only has the war given 
 to King George a part that has never been filled by 
 any king since the Conquest, but his personal record 
 as a devoted public servant and truly good man stands 
 above them all. I am no courtier and I know no more 
 of Courts than the man in the street ; but as an his- 
 torian I can recall no other English king since Alfred 
 who was stainless in every phase of public duty and 
 domestic life, who was in every aspect of kingship all 
 that should be the real Head of the State and the first 
 gentleman in England. 
 
 And we have the same hopes in his family for the 
 future. No Prince, neither Richard the Crusader, 
 nor Harry of Monmouth, nor Harry Tudor, ever 
 brought royalty home to the Britons at home and 
 overseas as does our popular Prince of Wales. His 
 personality and his ubiquity have illuminated the in- 
 stitution of princedom and have knit up the Empire as 
 nothing before has done. Burke said John Howard 
 had " made a circumnavigation of charity." The 
 Prince makes circumnavigations of English manhood. 
 Like his father soldier, seaman, sportsman, student, 
 speaker, hard worker, " good fellow " he goes
 
 LAST WORDS 199 
 
 round the world showing it what the best type of 
 young Englishman is, as no Prince before ever did or 
 could do. 
 
 There are some functions of kingship which should 
 be amended in any new Act of Settlement. We trust 
 that the odious appendage of Emperor will be deleted 
 from the King's title. It was one of Disraeli's 
 Arabian Nights, as we now know disliked by Victoria 
 and Edward. The war has seen the disappearance of 
 four mighty Empires. It was their Imperial char- 
 acter which was their ruin. Let us cast out that word 
 of evil omen. The oligarchy under the Hanoverian 
 kings sought to make them their tools, deprived the 
 Throne of power, and were afraid of royal favourites. 
 There is one function that should be restored in prac- 
 tice to the King. He is " the fountain of honour," 
 and all honours, titles, honorific offices in Court should 
 be placed absolutely in his own gift, to the exclusion 
 of any Minister. So we might get rid of the scanda- 
 lous sale of titles, the exclusion of rivals, the personal 
 intrigues, and all the dirty secrets of a Prime 
 Minister's office box. If " honours " there have to 
 be, I would rather trust a King than a Minister. At 
 the same time, a pompous apparatus of forms and 
 etiquette could be got rid of mediaeval and even 
 Victorian rules about standing, kneeling, kissing 
 hands, chamberlain's gymnastics, and dragging 
 harassed, sick, exhausted Ministers to Balmoral, in a 
 crisis. And with this, the Prime Minister's daily 
 letter to the Sovereign, as seen in the Lives of Glad- 
 stone and Beaconsfield. The King, as of old, should
 
 200 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 be authorised to sit in a Cabinet Council, not as Chair- 
 man, nor as a member, but to understand questions 
 of special moment. I would even allow him to listen 
 in silence to debates in either House. He should be 
 recognised as the true ' ' Patriot King ' ' and this 
 George V. is and will be. 
 
 But there is something farther, and I cannot with- 
 hold my conviction that the monarchic principle is 
 itself deeply shaken. Four mighty Empires crashed 
 for ever during five years of war ; the Brazilian and the 
 Chinese some years earlier. But over the civilised 
 world republics have been taking the place of 
 monarchies. When I was at school the only republic 
 in Europe was the Swiss. There are now about a 
 dozen, covering two-thirds of the whole continent. 
 Except our own, the only Thrones of the larger States 
 are those of Italy and Spain ; and neither promises 
 much support to the monarchic principle. For 
 half a century republics have been supplanting 
 monarchies. The war, chaos, and the New Order 
 have created a landslide in favour of democratic 
 republics. No one can count on there being any kings 
 left at the end of the century. When you once have 
 accepted unlimited democracy, the inevitable step is 
 the Republic. 
 
 Now there are in the United Kingdom two main 
 aspects to the monarchic problem. The first is the
 
 LAST WORDS 201 
 
 noble stimulus to patriotism, self-devotion, and 
 national union which is given by loyalty and honour 
 for our King as embodying the peoples of our race. 
 It is said that with some of our overseas compatriots 
 faith in King and Prince is the one remaining bond 
 of union ; and in Canada, New Zealand, India, it is a 
 governing link of incalculable power. Against this 
 must be put the fact that the republican idea is deep- 
 set in Ireland, in parts of Scotland, in the north and 
 centre of England, in Australia, in South Africa, and 
 even in London blazes out with revolutionary violence 
 such as Cabinets and Parliaments prefer to ignore 
 rather than to crush. It is in vain to treat this as 
 merely the explosion of ' ' extremists . ' ' Behind them 
 there is in the democracy a deep, widespread, in- 
 domitable faith in the republic as the normal form of 
 the State in all three Kingdoms and Overseas. 
 
 I believe that both sides of this problem of 
 Monarchy could be met, if in any re-settlement of the 
 Constitution our country were frankly to be styled 
 the Commonwealth, or Union of Commonwealths, 
 which it is, and George V. and his successors were to 
 be styled their Hereditary Chief. The historic halo 
 and romantic traditions which gather round our Royal 
 House are priceless and irreplaceable. No country 
 has such a record in the thousand years since Alfred ; 
 and it would be brutal to cast it away when its flame 
 never burned so bright and so pure. For two centuries 
 the Republic of Holland owed allegiance to the
 
 202 NOVISSIMA VERBA 
 
 dynasty of their glorious Founder, William the 
 Silent, as their hereditary Head. Our dynasty has a 
 longer and a more splendid story to record. If 
 democracy, as seems inevitable, will not stand kings, 
 the invaluable traditions of loyalty might yet be pre- 
 served in a Royal House. The style of our Head in 
 any new Act of Settlement would be : 
 
 Hereditary Chief of the United Commonwealths. 
 
 A word as to each part of this title. President is a 
 temporary and bourgeois office ; and, except in 
 U.S.A., with no traditions or glamour about it at all. 
 Hereditary Chief is a title well known in Scotland, in 
 Africa, in India. Commonwealth is a fine old Eng- 
 lish word, and is free from associations with Latin and 
 French republics. The plural Commonwealths would 
 remind men of the many nations in these islands and 
 of overseas nations who join under the same flag. We 
 might avoid the name British, which, even more than 
 English, may meet racial antipathies in Ireland, as 
 English or Saxon would do in Scotland and in Wales ; 
 and British may have an irritating sound in Australia, 
 in South Africa, in India. " United Common- 
 wealths " raises no question of race, and suggests no 
 race predominance or national precedency. The 
 twentieth century will see the end of feudal institu- 
 tions, let us hope by a peaceful evolution into far 
 broader social institutions. The Crown is a typical 
 institution of feudalism, as much in its chivalrous side
 
 LAST WORDS 208 
 
 as in its oppressive side. And whenever the passion 
 for the republican ideal, which now moves civilised 
 man from China to Peru, shall force Englishmen to 
 join with all others of English speech, it may be 
 possible to preserve and even to increase the prestige 
 of a Royal House and all its incalculable influence 
 for good.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Absolute, the, 21, 166-168. 
 
 Agamemnon^ the, by Professor 
 G. G. Murray, 160-161. 
 
 Allison, Sir Robert, Lucre- 
 tius, 52-53. 
 
 American Republic, 9-11, 23, 
 51, 57, 83-85, 118-120, 143. 
 
 Anthology, Greek, 19-20. 
 
 Armenia, 85-87, 120, 144. 
 
 Armistice, the, 13, 23, 138. 
 
 Assonance, in verse, 36-39. 
 
 Balfour, Mr. A. J., 87, 142, 
 
 165. 
 Bolshevism, 9, 18, 26, 59, 128- 
 
 134, 147-149. 
 Bosanquet, Dr., on religion, 
 
 163-165. 
 
 Bradlaugh, Charles, 96-97. 
 Bryce, Viscount, 122, 194-195 
 Bureaucracy, 179, 182. 
 Bury, Prof. J. B., on Progress, 
 
 71-77, 106. 
 Byzantine Empire, 62-63. 
 
 Clynes, J., M.P., 58, 59. 
 
 Conference, Paris, 14, 56-57. 
 
 Conventions, American, 118. 
 
 Cook, Sir Edward, 19-20. 
 
 Covenant, the, 10, 22-23, 84-86, 
 140-141, 145. 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 71, 74-76, 91, 
 94, 106-111. 
 
 Constitution, Reform of, 135- 
 136, 150-152, 187-203. 
 
 Courtney, Lord, Life of, 153- 
 156. 
 
 Courtney, Mrs. W. L., Free- 
 thinkers, 95-98. 
 
 Cox, Harold, 115-117. 
 
 Crown, the, 188-203. 
 
 D 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 71. 
 
 Devolution, of Parliament, 
 122. 
 
 Deschanel, Paul, Life of Gam- 
 betta, 101-106. 
 
 Diehl, Charles, Byzantine Em- 
 pire, 62-63. 
 
 " Direct Action," 126-130, 149. 
 
 C E 
 
 Calendar of Great Men, the, Economic Consequences, 40-45. 
 
 64. Edward VII, King, 197. 
 
 Capitalism, 91-94, 126-134. Einstein, Prof., 20-21, 165-168. 
 
 Chancellor, the Lord, 69-70. Eliot, George, 15-16. 
 
 Churches, Future of, 19, 131- Emmott, Lord, on National- 
 
 134, 161-166. 
 Clemenceau, G., 11. 
 
 isation, 177-179. 
 Empires, End of, 199-203. 
 
 205
 
 INDEX 
 
 France, 101-106, 169-177. 
 Frederick the Great, 15. 
 
 Gambetta, Life of, 101-106. 
 George V, King, 197-198. 
 George, see Lloyd George, 197, 
 200-201. 
 
 League of Nations, 9, 23-24, 
 45-46, 57, 83-87, 137-140, 144- 
 145. 
 
 Liberty, Economic, by Harold 
 Cox, 115-117. 
 
 Lloyd-George, 11, 56, 141-143. 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 20. 
 
 Lucretius, 52, 53. 
 
 M 
 
 Mandates, the, 83, 87, 120-121, 
 
 144. 
 
 Marvin, F. S., Century of 
 Hope, 54-55. 
 
 European Thought, 
 
 112-115. 
 
 Marx, Karl, 93. 
 Millerand, M., 169-174. 
 Harrison, Frederic, Obiter Milman, Dean, 111, 161. 
 
 Scripta, 9, Memoirs, 57. Monarchy, the, 201-203. 
 
 Home Rule, 184, 187. Morley, Lord, 52. 
 
 Hospitals, Future of, 130-134. Murray, Prof. G. G., on Aga- 
 Huxley, Prof. T., 96-97, 109- memnon, 160-161. 
 
 on Sophocles and Euri- 
 
 Courtney, 113, 153-156. 
 Grant-Duff, Poem by, 27. 
 Grey, Viscount, 122. 
 
 H 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 27-34. 
 
 110. 
 
 pides, 160. 
 
 Industrialism, 17. 
 Inge, Dean, 14-19, 106-111. 
 Ireland, 60-62, 142-143, 182- 
 186. 
 
 N 
 
 Nations, League of, see League. 
 Nationalisation, 116-117, 177- 
 
 179. 
 New Poor, the, 69, 130-132. 
 
 James, Henry, Letters of, 77- 
 82. 
 
 Kautsky, Karl, 25-27. 
 Keynes, Maynard, 40-45. 
 
 Labour Party, 24-25, 58-60, 
 
 125-130, 141-144. 
 Law Reform, 69-70. 
 
 Obiter Scripta, 1919, 9, 146. 
 Obscurantism, 165. 
 Ochlocracy, Athenian, 180. 
 
 Palestine, 87-90, 142. 
 Parliament, Reform of, 122, 
 
 135, 189-195. 
 Philosophy, English, History 
 
 of, 156-159. 
 
 Poland, Future of, 48-49. 
 Positivism, 21, 111, 167, 168.
 
 INDEX 207 
 
 Progress, Idea of, 71-77, 106- Treaty of Peace, 40-45, 135- 
 
 111. 137, 139. 
 
 Proletariate, dictatorship of, Triumvirate, our, 139. 
 
 128. 
 
 Property, Law of, 69-70. 
 Prince, of Wales, 196. U 
 
 United States, see America, 
 R Wilson, &c. 
 
 Relativity, Theory of, 20-21, 
 
 166-168. v 
 
 Roland, Chanson de, 34-37. 
 Romanes Lecture, the, 106-112. Victoria, Queen, 197, 199. 
 
 Victorian Era, the, 95-98, 179- 
 
 S 181 - 
 
 Sappho, 64-67. w 
 
 Sarolea, Charles, 46-50. 
 
 Scott-Moncrieff, Roland, 34-39. Way, Dr. A. S., on Sappho, 
 
 Settlement, Act of, 195-203. 64-67. 
 
 Soviets, the, 24, 125-130. Wales, Prince of, 198. 
 
 Sorley, Dr. W. R., History of Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 94-95. 
 
 Philosophy, 156-159. Webb, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney, 
 
 Social, Order, a new, 9, 68-69, 122-125. 
 
 146-148 West, Sir Algernon, Contem- 
 
 Socialism, 9, 24, 59, 125-130. porary Portraits, 179-182. 
 
 Speaker, The, Mr. Lowther, Wilson, Woodrow, 10-14, 50-51, 
 
 122. 57-58. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 71, 76-77, Withers, Hartley, on Capital- 
 
 90-91. ism, 91-94. 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 96-98. 
 Strachey, Mr. Lytton, 95-96. 
 
 Y 
 
 T Young, Norwood, on Frederick 
 
 Trades Unions, History of, th Great, 15. 
 122-125. 
 
 Growth of, 122-130. 
 
 Criticism of, 125-134, 
 
 148-149. Zionism, see Palestine. 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Ebeneeer Baylis * Son, Trinity Workf, Worceiter.
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 CAYLORD 
 
 PRINTED IN U S
 
 A 000 697 987 6 
 
 N9 29