bates on all the subjects, he is left without a single opinion of his own on any subject. A sixth will own that what has most astonished him is to note how quickly the hope of rendering any real public service has deserted him, and with what contentment he has lapsed into the ruck of the rank and file, rarely speaking, always voting as the Whips tell him, disillusioned, unambitious, marvelling mildly at the futility of things, a mere placid, if also an indispensable, cog in the machine.

It is not in short, as a rule, from M.P.s themselves that one is able to obtain much light on the general question of the influence of public life upon character. Most of them are conscious that the inside and the outside views of Parliament are very different things, and that the strain of trying night after night to catch the Speaker's eye, the mental and moral turmoil stirred up by the first application of "party discipline," the growing sense of aimlessness as the division lobbies are endlessly tramped, the hopeless recognition that Parliament is too unwieldly to do its work, and the ensuing wonder that any sensible man should be wasting his time, health, and money on so unprofitable a treadmill, make up a staggering and quite unsuspected load of disabilities. But very few of them put to themselves the sort of questions that an outsider would like to have answered. Does public life, for instance, take the bloom off a man's spirit? Does it narrow and coarsen him? Does it increase or diminish his moral courage? Do the endless compromises which are the first condition of the party game tend to weaken the love of truth in those who play it? Does per

sonal success come to mean more to them than the public good? When their desire to tell the truth conflicts with their desire to say what will be agreeable to their audience, which wins? Are politicians more or less lia.

ble than ordinary men to keep whatever ideals they may have fresh and green within them? Does the stress of public life broaden a man's view or make him more one-sided? Do those who take part in it find that they are gradually losing their feeling for literature and art, that they are crushing out of themselves the finer pleasures of the imagination, that they are parting with their relish for the quieter, simpler things of life?

These are the questions that a looker-on at the Parliamentary game would like to have answered. But he will find for the most part that he will have to depend on his own powers of observation and deduction to resolve them, and that he will get little assistance from M.P.s themselves. My own experience is that most men who enter Parliament acquire a sort of dual nature, the political side of which is less pleasing than the other and more private side. A Legislature, like any other body of men, is bound to evolve its own code of ethics and its own peculiar way of looking at things. But when you find a man voting for measures of which you know he disapproves, and opposing others which in the freedom of personal talk he will heartily applaud; when you see him repeatedly subordinating private convictions to party loyalty, throwing over ante-election pledges without an apparent pang, and inclining insensibly towards the purely tactical view of all things political-it is sometimes difficult to remember that his conduct argues no real deterioration of character and may be justified by an appeal to those higher expediencies that alone make the party system workable.

I should say there are four distinct ways in which the House of Commons is apt to influence a man. First, it is liable to foster the vicious mental habits of exaggeration, and therefore of insincerity. Indeed I hardly know any

politicians who deal quite honestly with themselves and their audiences, who do nothing to popularize clap-trap, who preserve a true sense of proportion, and whose speeches are a real index to their minds. Secondly, it encourages a feeling of irresponsibility. "No doctor," wrote the late Mr. Lecky, "would prescribe for the slightest malady; no lawyer would advise in the easiest case; no wise man would act in the simplest transactions of private business, or would even give an opinion to his neigh bor at a dinner party, without more knowledge of the subject than that on which a member of Parliament is often obliged to vote. Thirdly, public life demands from its successful practitioners a pernicious facility. In that respect

The Outlook.

it is worse even than journalism, worse by the margin that makes the tongue a more unruly instrument than the pen. Very few men, I fancy, engage for long in politics without finding themselves more or less spoiled for serious intellectual exercise. And finally, I wish some candid M.P. would let us know whether a Parliamentary career does not tend to narrow a man's range and by its mere power of absorption to leave him stunted, vacant, and jaded, and very largely incapable of interesting himself in outside pursuits. I should not like to dogmatize on the point, but it is a commonplace of observation that political distinction is often perfectly compatible with a vast degree of stupidity and narrowness.

Sydney Brooks.

A recent remark of ours that the over-elaboration of the mere machinery of American politics has done much to impair the efficiency of American statesmanship, appears to have been widely, sometimes favorably, usually unfavorably, commented upon in the United States. It is curious that more Americans do not recognize, what to a foreign and friendly observer seems very clear, that one of the prime defects of their political system is precisely this excessive multiplication of arbitrary devices and the habit of regarding them as an end in themselves. The whole American Constitution is in a way an ingenious conspiracy for doing nothing; the energy which under the British or Cabinet form of government is devoted solely to legislation being largely frittered away in the United States in friction between the various authorities that were created to check and balance, and have come in fact almost to neutralize, one another. Americans, again, have always been too apt to regard the suffrage as the essence of democracy. So long as

they were free to vote at recurring periods for a multitude of short-term officers, they have persuaded themselves that little more was needed to fulfil the amplest ideal of popular government. They have always had a tendency to deify the ballot-box, to think more of success at the polls than of efficiency in office, to regard the problems of government as solved when they had selected one set of candidates to office in preference to another set, to spend their energies on choosing their representatives and then to forget to watch over them, to pay too much attention to who is to do the work and too little to how it is being done, and to sleep with the comfortable assurance of a public duty adequately performed from

the eve of one election-day to the dawn of the next. They have never properly realized that democracy is criticism, is control, is an alert and informed public opinion, and is not really machinery at all. Whenever anything

gone wrong, their instinct has been

right by some purely superficial readjustment, some legislative expedient, some amendment of the external accessories of government. For every evil, no matter what its nature or origin, they either have recourse to the Statute-book or else proceed to exalt the executive at the expense of the legislative power in order to safeguard democracy against itself.

In all other relations of life, a direct and trenchant people, the Americans delight in being tortuous and roundabout in their politics. Their motto seems to be that two or three elections should always be made to do the work of one. A burden has thus been laid upon universal suffrage that the average, busy, well-intentioned, but not over-zealous citizen is quite unable to support, and that has in fact been taken off his shoulders by organized hosts of professional politicians. The entire nominating system, from the "primary" meeting to the District or State Convention, and thence to the National Convention, has fallen into the hands of the Bosses through the sheer necessities of the case. The ordinary man cannot or will not spare the time to attend to it; and though in theory it strictly conforms to democratic principles, and though not a step is taken that could not claim the sanction of "the will of the majority," in practice it is controlled from beginning to end by men who make politics a means of livelihood, and who manipulate its complexities in their own interests. It was

in the hope of restoring a direct influence to the people, and of enabling them to declare unmistakably which candidates they wished to represent them in the contest for the White House, that the "Presidential primary" was invented. has only been adopted in about a third of the States, it has failed to "bring out the vote" to the extent anticipate it has not evoked a clear expression of the will even of those who did vote, and while undoubtedly it has stimulated popular interest, it has also added enormously to the turmoil and expense of a Presidential campaign. For the past four months the Government of the United States has been practically at a standstill, and all the efforts of the Administration have been concentrated on "rounding up" delegates for Mr. Taft. The circumstances of the present contest are, no doubt, exceptional; it has never before happened that a President and an ex-President The Nation.

But so far this device

have fought one another for the party Lomination. But it is worth insisting that, whenever there is a serious struggle between powerful candidates for the party leadership, what has happened during the present year is likely to recur. That is to say, there will be an internecine warfare inside the party ranks, spreading over the whole continent, consuming from four to six months, agitating and distracting the public mind, involving all the stress and heat of a Presidential campaign, and settling at the end but one issuethe choice, namely, of a single party candidate for the Presidency. That

is an excellent instance of what we meant by talking of the over-elaboration of the machinery of American politics. Unless Americans devise means of simplifying their electioneering procedure, they will soon find that one year out of every four will be devoted to nothing else.

W. P. Ker, who contributes a volume on "English Literature Medieval" to the Home University Library, is professor of English Literature at University College, London, and has already published more extended works in this field of research, including a volume on Epic and Romance, and one of Essays on Medieval Literature. He approaches the difficult task, therefore, of compressing into a single small volume a sketch of English literature from the story of "Beowulf" to the writings of Chaucer with an especially ample equipment and a well-grounded enthusiasm. The result is a compact and illuminating sketch of the least-known period of English literature. Henry Holt & Co.

"The Jonathan Papers," by Elizabeth Woodbridge make as delightful a book of essays as one would wish to find. The introductory chapter makes clear the author's point of view. She says that if Pippa had been a New Englander she would have spent the forenoon of her "day" cleaning the cellar, the afternoon cleaning the attic, and only gone out for a little walk after the supper dishes were done, because she thought she "ought" to have a little exercise in the open air! The essayist speaks feelingly on the subject of pleasures as pleasures, and the bulk of the book is made of descriptions of delightful outdoor pleasures. The descriptions are not dull, like most nature writing, the style is flexible, and