hundred and sixty-two votes. The next strongest party is the Kenseikai, the result of a fusion of several parties, and as it is led by Viscount Kato it is sometimes known as the Kato party. Last year it had one hundred and twenty-two votes in the House, and was recognized as the Opposition. A third party is the Kokuminto, or National party. Its leader is Mr. Inukai, and it had thirty-six votes in the House. A fourth party is the Shinseikai, or New party; it had about fifty votes in the House.

In addition to these parties, the membership of the House was completed by a dozen Independents. The combination against Mr. Hara's Government consists of the Kenseikai, Kokuminto, Shinseikai, some Independents, and perhaps a few members of his own party. At the end of January last there was a movement among these politicians with a view to the organization into a compact body of all those who were in favor of a bill for universal suffrage, so as to insure a successful fight against the government and the Seiyukai. A general election will take place in the early

summer.

Under the old electoral law there were about one million five hundred thousand voters, the qualifications being a certain length of residence in the given electoral district and the payment annually of ten yen-about five dollars-in direct taxation. This law was revised on May 22, 1919. The requisite length of residence was reduced to six months, and the annual payment in direct taxation to three yen about a dollar and a half. (Almost everything is taxed in Japan.) This revision increased the number of voters to about three millions. The number of members of the House of Representatives was raised from three hundred and eighty-one to

VOL. 18-NO. 907

four hundred and sixty-four. This meant a very considerable extension of the franchise, but it was not considered sufficient by the bulk of the people. Hence the agitation.

The view taken by the Hara Government, and backed by the Seiyukai generally, was that while accepting universal suffrage in principle it was necessary to see first how the revised electoral law worked out, and that to prepare the way for universal suffrage there should be a revision of the electoral law for the Local Assemblies. In Japan at least at present'universal suffrage' is not extended to include women. Nor is it the intention to apply it to Korea, Formosa, or any part of the Outer Empire, but to Japan proper alone, where the number of voters will depend to some extent on the age limit assigned. Taking one voter to every five persons in Japan's population, which is now nearly sixty millions, the total number of voters would be twelve millions. Judging by the large amount of support the proposed measure is receiving, it seems to be likely that there will be universal suffrage in Japan in a comparatively short time.

One of its chief protagonists is Mr. Osaki, already mentioned. After a long visit to Europe last year, which he spent in a close study of the political and industrial situation in the West, he recently returned to Japan, where he has been making speeches on the burning question of the day. He is not a revolutionist, but he has always been identified with the foremost political thought in Japan, and he looks forward with every confidence to the orderly evolution of his country. Labor no doubt will play some part in that evolution, but labor is only beginning to have a political cast, and there has not yet been a labor member of the Diet.

[The Manchester Guardian]

CAB OR TAXICAB?

BY ST. JOHN ERVINE

I MUST be ageing, for I find that I look back to things with more tolerance than I contemplate things about me. When, for example, I saw a coach-and-four driving through Roehampton the other morning I felt that it would be a far, far better thing for us if we were to scrap our motor engines and restore horseflesh to its proud place again. The driver was a smartly dressed man, with a stock about his neck and a gray tall hat on his head and a big cigar in his mouth; and there was a man with a very fine red coat who blew a coaching horn. He, too, had a stock about his neck and a gray tall hat on his head and a big cigar in his mouth, and he so closely resembled the driver that he might have been his twin. Perhaps he was, but there is a strong resemblance between all men who have to do with horses, and it is as likely as not that a similarity of look between two horsy men is due less to blood than to occupation.

Both these men had a defect which I have noticed in other men who lived in stables and with horses- they had flat feet. A comrade of mine, when I was stationed in the Life Guards' barracks at Windsor, told me, after I had drawn his attention to the number of old Guardsmen who were flat-footed, that the ammonia in the stables drew down instep of the men's feet.

i, at least, was the theory he had invented to explain the phenomenon. I do not know what truth there is in it. All I know is that flat feet are common among men who have to do with horses.

While I watched this coach-and-four

off to London I remembered that there were no taxicabs plying for hire,

or pretending to ply for hire, in town when I first burst upon it, but that soon afterwards these engines began to obtrude themselves upon the public notice. There must, I fear, be a strong strain of reaction in me, for I went about then vowing hard that nothing would ever induce me to put my feet on a motor-omnibus while I could contrive to get myself behind horseflesh.

I cannot describe my sense of shame when soon after I made this vow I broke it. I felt that I had betrayed the whole animal world, and I had a vision of a pony that once was mine being led to the knacker's showing dreadful reproach in its large, limpid eyes as it passed me by on the road. I, who had often stroked a horse's muzzle and had been rubbed sore by its bare back, had capitulated to machinery and petrol and stink! I did not, indeed, surrender to the motor-omnibus without a struggle, nor do I ever enter one even now not utterly loathing it and all its ways and works. I hate the way in which it sways and swiggles and I hate its unmannerly lurches and its air of aimless haste. I hate it because it causes the roads to be prepared with a surface which is cruel to horses, and I hate it for the way in which it ruins the comfortable ways of men.

Mr. Wells has somewhere expressed extreme contempt for the horse. He describes it as an unclean and ugly beast, and he gives a very interesting account of the aesthetic horror he has to endure when he is perched on the box-seat of a vehicle and is obliged to look at the distasteful contours of the animal which is pulling it along. Mr. Chesterton somewhere else defends the horse with great skill. I am torn between the two of them. I like horses because I like living, responsive, affectionate things. But I like machinery, too. I like steam engines, and I think there are few things so lovely as rail

'Gentleman Joe.' All those cabmen modeled themselves on Mr. Arthur Roberts, who, only a month or two ago, returned to the stage to show the modern revue comedian what comic acting is, and took himself away again in disgust at his colleagues' incompetence.

way lines glistening in the sunshine, or tram lines gleaming at night on a glossy London road in the high, cold glow of electric arc lamps, or the great steel limbs of a ship's machinery. I feel sorry for the man who cannot realize that the Forth Bridge is a beautiful thing and that the great gantries in Harland and Wolff's shipyards are amazingly lovely. But when I come to compare a hansom-cab with a taxicab, or a motor-bus with a horse-drawn bus, then I abandon Mr. Wells alto gether and I cleave unto Mr. Chesterton. I do not like taxicabs nor do I like taxi-men. I hate motor-buses, and if my principles would permit me to hate any human being I should hate the driver of a motor-bus. I do not ask you to believe that all hansom cabmen and all horse busmen were agreeable and delightful creatures, for I remember an exceedingly unprofitable argument I once had with a cabman in the Brixton Road in the course of which I lost my temper and he lost a tip; nor do I ask you to believe that all horse busmen had a ready wit, for many of them were surly and dull, and, generally speaking, their wit, like that of the drill sergeant, was either traditional or invented by journalists; but I do ask you to believe that, take them for all in all, they were human beings, agreeable and companionable in most cases, and possessed, some of them, of a real romantic flair.

Those of us who remember London of fifteen years ago, when Bernard Shaw was filling the newspapers with the least of his sayings and young men were coming down from Oxford and Cambridge in the sure and certain belief that they were supermen, only to discover that there was nothing for them but the Civil Service-those who remember that London will remember that they sometimes saw a hansom cabman who might fairly be entitled

I do not feel any pride in being driven about the town by a taxi-man. I do not feel that people on the footpath are gazing at him and saying, Heavens, but that's a smart-looking chap!' I have never seen a smartlooking taxi-driver. I do not believe that any taxi-driver knows what a buttonhole is or has the capacity to take pride in his appearance. If I go into the street and hail a taxicab, am I not certain to be served, if I am served at all, by a grubby-looking, frowsty mechanic who has not washed himself or his cab with any skill or care? He will reek with oil and have grease all over him. He will refuse to take you to the place to which you wish to go unless you bribe him with double fare or fare and a half. If you ask him to help you with your bag, he will tell you that he cannot leave his cab, although the rotten thing is unlikely to run away. He will not talk to you as one human being should talk to another. He never knows where any place is.

And if you turn in disgust from this follower of 'Enry Straker, this creature from the Polytechnic, this incivil engineer, and seek the driver of the motorbus, what do you find? Well, generally, you do not find anything at all, for you are barricaded from him by glass, and have no chance of ever piercing to his human quality. But if you are as persistent as I am and track him down to some terminus where he can be seen off his box for a few moments, you will find that he is a little, pale-faced, nerve-racked, irri

All day long the black procession of events continues. The cigarettes that used to be so mild and fragrant simply sputter with saltpetre till one jumps. The print of the newspaper is too small, the head-lines too sensational, and the modern habit of making you read all the news three times in head-lines, in summary, and in full-would try the temper of a saint. Then the railway station is draughty, and one cannot go into the waiting room because there is a vile person sitting at the fire, wheezing and sneezing enough to give influenza to the whole county. The train, when it arrives, is overcrowded, and third-class passengers tumble in profusion into the first-class carriages, and some horrible woman's horrible baby begins to paw the knee of a new pair of trousers with a hand sticky with melted chocolate.

One arrives at the office, and one finds everybody as happy and cheerful as if they were on holiday. One envies them bitterly for the easy time they I seem to be having. They appear to think that work means devolving work on to other people, especially on to one's self, and, the less work they do, the higher salaries they draw. It is really a rather tall order that one man should be expected to do the entire work of the office.

But there is no need to continue the history of the bad-tempered man in detail. The wine at lunch is bad and dear. The fish is bad and dear and not enough of it. He cannot get a piece of household bread but has to eat a roll, which always gives him indigestion. There is no sugar for the coffee, but only saccharine which, he has been told, medical men say should be prohibited. Apart from this, the waiter seems to be at everybody else's beck and call except his. He is kept waiting six minutes even for his bill. If only he had the courage, he would go away

without leaving a tip. In any case, the whole tipping system is a disgrace and should be abolished. It is not that he begrudges the money, but the system is degrading. It makes waiters servile - or, at least, it used to, before they got so damnably independent. The truth is, the working classes are getting altogether too uppish. Strikes here, strikes there, and asking for the moon

they expect to be paid double for doing no work at all, while the unfortunate middle classes sweat away, day in, day out, in order to give them cheap bread and build houses for them and keep the country going.

And he goes on feeling like that till he gets back among the middle classes in his office where, as we have shown, he is forced to the conclusion that they never do any work either. In the end, he is convinced that he himself is the only hard worker, the only burden bearer, the Atlas of the world. What is the matter with the man? Have the stars in their course been fighting against him or is it that he needs a pill? It is not often, perhaps, that we find so complete and unexceptioned an existence of ill temper as we have just described. Few people could carry out such a prolonged programme of wrath without bursting a blood vessel. The ordinary man is bad-tempered only in bits. He does not damn everybody's eyes promiscuously. He would write to the papers for no smaller a reason than the increase of the habit of smoking among women, the indecency of the new fashions, or the bad behavior of young men in Richmond Park on Sunday. He lives placidly enough apart from these and similar outrages. He has long since abandoned the hope that the Coalition Government or domestic servants can be improved as a result of writing letters to the papers. He has merely grown cynical about them. He laughs because he feels