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In this silent incantation of the steadfast stars, I salute Thee.

In the lonely rest house at work's end,

I salute Thee.

In the flowery garland of the fragrant evening sky, I salute Thee.

Every season has its songs,

songs

of the spring, songs of the summer, songs of the rains, and these too are sung by the children at the appointed times. And finally there are the poet's plays interspersed with dance and song, which are carefully rehearsed and acted two or three times a year. It is certainly not the fault of their teachers if the children who pass through this school do not come out of it with their imaginations kindled and their tastes refined.

After staying in this place for three days, I see it as the nearest embodiment in existence to-day of the Platonic idea of the education of youth. Tagore has not consciously borrowed from Plato; he has followed his own road to a conclusion that is above all things Indian and Bengali, but the same thought is in his mind-the thought of the unconscious effect of beautiful sights and sounds upon the growing intelligence, and their power to subdue it to the useful and the good. It is difficult to express this in any language that does not sound affected and sentimental, especially to those accustomed to the robust methods of the English public schools; and its virtue lies entirely in its being unselfconscious and unexpressed. That Tagore contrives by his own presence and influence influence which is as strongly practical on one side as it is poetical on another.

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These boys and girls, in fact, are being trained in every possible way to be useful and active citizens. By an ingenious arrangement the older girls take charge of the little boys of the junior school, and thereby learn a great deal that is useful in mothering and

home-keeping. All are taught what is called domestic science, and will presently, it is hoped, help to spread this much-needed knowledge in the villages of Bengal. The boys, meanwhile, are having the Scout spirit instilled into them in a manner that would rejoice the heart of General Baden-Powell. The neighboring villages are grouped round the settlement, and the boys of the school are sent in to deal with the villagers' emergencies and to organize their sports and amusements. When cholera broke out in one of the villages last year they went in and cleaned out the place and purified its water. All this means a break with caste and custom that can with difficulty be realized by a European. Among the boys are sons of Brahmans, who bring with them from their homes all the pride and prejudice of their caste. They are left absolutely free to go their own way, and nothing ostensible is done to break down their exclusiveness. If they choose to have their meals apart, it is permitted, and some of them do for the first few months after their arrival. But the spirit of the place gradually kills the pride of the little Brahman, and after this beginning he settles down with the rest and learns to be an equal among equals. The Shantiniketan teachers do not inveigh against caste; they are content to teach a way of life in which caste prejudices seem absurd and inhuman.

But at Shantiniketan the school is not everything. Joined up with it is a research department for adult students, presided over by the learned pundit Vidhushekar Bhattacharya, who is engaged in deciphering ancient Sanskrit texts written on palm leaves, and who shares his study with another famous scholar who is at work on a Sanskrit dictionary. This department has a reputation outside India, and two Italian professors from the Uni

versity of Rome are at this moment pursuing their studies there. I listened one evening to a learned and eloquent theme delivered by one of them to the teachers and students of the colony. Metaphysical subtleties that outHegel Hegel are commonly discussed in this circle, and the plain man from the West quickly finds his brain spinning in a whirl of Indian terminology which the pundits handle with a terrible familiarity. I will not try to plumb these depths; sufficient to say that the search for the ultimate reality is pursued indefatigably at all hours of the day and night by these ardent spirits.

The Agricultural Research Department, another branch of the colony, swings back to the practical. This bears the name of Sriniketan, 'the Abode of Energy,' - and is situated a mile away, in and around the village of Sural. Here is an experimental farm and vegetable garden, with technical schools in spinning and tanning for the instruction of the villagers. Professor Gangulee, Tagore's son-in-law, who has done so much to prepare the way for the Agricultural Commission that has just been announced, was at work in this place for a year or more, and to look at it is to see what he and other Indian agricultural reformers have in mind. The farm has the special object of showing the villagers of this district what can be grown on their own sandy soil and how their methods may be improved. There are model growths of cotton, rice, pineapple, bananas, ginger, and various other plants that are being tested for their suitability to this part of Bengal. There is also a stock farm for improving the breed of cows and buffaloes; and a delightful Japanese gardener is showing

how vegetables and flowers should be

grown.

I cannot speak as an expert, but on all hands I have heard the highest tributes paid to the practical value of this work and to the disinterested zeal of the men who are carrying it on. They have great difficulties to overcome the apathy of the peasant, the objection of the landed class to experiments that break in upon the old ways, the eternal problem of finance, which is only to be solved when the self-supporting basis is reached. That is hoped for after another year or two years, but pioneers are sanguine, and there are unforeseen trials and aberrations of nature that defeat the best intentions of even scientific agriculturalists.

Certainly at Shantiniketan, if anywhere, the 'practical visionary' is seen at work. You pass from dreamland into reality at a turn of the road, and back again into dreamland at the next turning. The special quality of this place is the combination of the two things and the correction of the one by the other. One trembles a little to think how it could go on and this delicate balance be maintained if the presiding genius were removed. He sits in the centre of it a gracious and picturesque personality, his flowing locks falling over his blue robe, the very personification of the poet as the painter would wish him to be. All here are his devoted servants, and hang on his lips as he discourses of loving-kindness and homely duties, or plunges deep into the mysteries of the Divine Being and His manifestations in art and nature. I shall always think of him as sitting in his great chair in the large open portico of his house at Shantiniketan, with the Indian sunlight playing on the walls behind him.

DRESS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS1

BY MICHAEL MACDONAGH

I HAVE been associated with Parliament as a journalist for thirty-nine years, and to me the most remarkable of the changes within that period is that the House of Commons has become almost entirely bareheaded. Not more than two or three in the great throng are to be seen wearing their hats. Yet well within my time it was a breach of etiquette for a member to sit in his place 'uncovered.'

This innovation in Parliamentary customs respecting dress has been made more marked than ever by the appearance of women in the House. In the case of Lady Astor, the first woman member to be elected, the authorities of the House advised that the proper course for her was to wear a hat, not only in accordance with the old religious rule that women should come to churches with their heads covered as a sign of modesty, but also for the more relevant reason that members of Parliament were, by long tradition, expected to be covered bringing their hats with them into the House, wearing them when they were seated, and uncovering only when they stood up. Lady Astor yielded to this opinion, and, though her example of always wearing a hat was followed by only three of the eight members of the sex who sat in the Parliament of 1924, it came to this that in that Parliament the ancient custom of sitting covered in the House of Commons was observed more by women, small though

1 From the Empire Review (London publicaffairs monthly), March

their numbers were, eight out of six hundred and fifteen, than by men.

The wearing of hats in the House of Commons may have been as ancient as Parliament itself, a heritage from the primitive moots, at which the leading men of the nation, endowed with the experience and wisdom of age, met in the open air with covered heads for the discussion of public affairs. Or else, an alternative suggestion, it arose in the seventeenth century, during the contests between the Parliament and the Crown, when the Commons, as a token that they were masters in their own House, put their hats on to receive a message from the King, instead of taking them off as such of them as wear hats do to-day. But however the custom of sitting covered may have originated, it was followed down to recent times as an essential part of Parliamentary procedure, ceremony, and deportment. Pictures of the House of Commons in the nineteenth century, as well as in the seventeenth and eighteenth, show the members seated with their hats on. Only the fashion of the headdress underwent a change. We see the sugar-loaf hat with wide brim of the Roundheads, and the Cavalier's broad-leafed beaver hat with rich hatband and plume of feathers, in the seventeenth century; the three-cornered or cocked hat, surmounting wig or pigtail, in the eighteenth; and the top hat in the nineteenth.

The first breach of the rule or habit was made by ministers and their whips. Ministers first came into the

House bareheaded, so far as I have been able to trace, in 1852, the year the present Chamber was first used. In the extensive new Palace of Westminster, which rose out of the ashes of the old, burned down in 1834, ministers were each provided for the first time with a private room, and in these rooms they began to leave their hats for no other reason than to save themselves the trouble of taking them off every time they rose in the House, which they had frequently to do in answering questions or in discussing amendments moved to a Bill in Committee.

So it came to pass that to be bareheaded in the House was the distinguishing mark of a minister. Two ministers, however, continued to sit covered on the Treasury Bench. These were the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Among the Chancellors of the Exchequer whom I have seen from the Reporters' Gallery, each, in turn, the sole wearer of a hat on the Treasury Bench, were Mr. Goschen, Sir William Harcourt, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Lloyd George. There was a breach in the observance of the custom during Mr. Bonar Law's term of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the course of the Great War. It was revived by Mr. (now Sir) Austen Chamberlain, who succeeded Mr. Bonar Law. He, indeed, was faithful to the custom, not only as Chancellor of the Exchequer, before and after the Great War, but as Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Even in the last Parliament of the War Coalition Mr. Chamberlain might have been observed, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, facing his critics with his silk hat tilted over his eyes. The purpose of this adherence to an old custom by one particular cabinet minister became a mystery in its later

years. At any rate, a recent Chancellor of the Exchequer, replying to a question I put to him on the subject, confessed he was at a loss to explain why it was that the one minister who appeared covered in the House was the minister responsible for the imposition and collection of taxes. But the explanation to which I have been led gives to the custom quite a constitutional significance. The Chancellor of the Exchequer wore his hat among his bareheaded colleagues to imply that as guardian of the public purse he occupied an independent position one, as it were, combining the powers and responsibilities of a minister with the freedom of action of a private member. I do not know whether the position of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in that respect has changed; but he, like the Financial Secretary, observes no longer the symbolic custom of sitting covered on the Treasury Bench.

As for the whips, the bare head, when everybody else was covered, told members who they were as they hurried in and out of the Chamber, or stationed themselves in the Members' Lobby, looking after their men, as the challenge of the division bells might, at any moment, ring out. Now the bareheaded whips are lost in a hatless crowd. In fact, so general had become the unparliamentary habit of appearing in Chamber and Lobby uncovered that in the late Labor Parliament there were only two or three private membersas members on the back benches are called who might be relied on always to be seen wearing their hats. One of the faithful was, and is, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, 'Father of the House' by the longest unbroken service as a member.

To what is due this transformation of the Commons from a silk-hatted to a bareheaded assembly within a generation? Parliamentary habits and

customs are always undergoing modification and obliteration. Usages of etiquette drop away little by little, unperceived, until they disappear altogether, and are finally forgotten. Some of them, no doubt, outgrew their significance or usefulness. But there is a general explanation. The rules which govern order and decorum in the House of Commons are both written and unwritten. The written rules, or 'Standing Orders' as they are officially called, are fixed in print, and can be altered or abrogated only by special resolution. They relate, for the most part, to procedure. But the code of conduct

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So imperceptible almost is this slow waning of ancient usages in the House of Commons that the period at which particular customs came to an end cannot be exactly stated. For example, it was the practice during the greater part of the eighteenth century for members to wear court dress- skirted coats of cloth, waistcoats and breeches of velvet or satin, silk stockings, silverbuckled shoes, lace ruffles, and wigs. Ministers also displayed the stars and ribbons of such orders as had been conferred on them by the sovereign. The general use of elaborate dress in the House of Commons died out early in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but it was worn by ministers on great occasions, such as 'full-dress debates' (the origin of this phrase,

which is still extant, is obvious), in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Yet the most diligent search in official records, in newspapers and magazines, and in diaries and biographies of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, has failed me in fixing the exact time when this transformation was completed, and a grand ceremonial feature of Parliamentary life wholly disappeared.

I think, however, that the substitution of a more sombre style of dress for the rich apparel and the three-cornered hat which prevailed in Parliament throughout most of the eighteenth century set in during the French Revolution. The eighth Duke of Argyle relates in his Autobiography that his father used to say that Charles Grey, of Northumberland, — afterward the Earl Grey of the Reform Bill of 1832, was the only member of the House of Commons who ostentatiously wore colored or light attire, all the other members being in mourning, when the news came from Paris that King Louis XVI had been beheaded. So far as I have been able to gather, dress in this country lost much of its richness of ornamentation, both in sorrow for the victims, and joy at the leveling principles, of the French Revolution. Leigh Hunt gives us in his Autobiography pictures of the two greatest Parliamentarians in the early years of the nineteenth century. He says he saw Pitt 'in a blue coat, buckskin breeches and boots and a round hat with powder and pigtail'; and Fox, Quaker-like as to dress, with plaincolored clothes, a broad round hat, white waistcoat, and, if I am not mistaken, white stockings.'

Still, as I have said, the custom of wearing court dress and orders by leading ministers was observed far into the nineteenth century in debates on the big political questions of the day.

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