mentary adroitness, the art of being all things to all men, but no streak of genius. His ingrained conventionality of mind has made him the ideal man to be first Labor Premier, but as the second he would strain the patience of his friends, and he would, I think, never be allowed a third term. Mr. Snowden, despite a popular Budget, has already shrunk to insignificance. Mr. Webb, with a library of Fabian tracts behind him, is rapidly qualifying for a seat in the Lords, where he will do nothing in particular and do it very well-superlatively well if only his chief will be so super-venturesome as at the same time to award another peerage to Mrs. Webb. With one exception, the other personages are even less impressive. Messrs. Trevelyan, Buxton, and Ponsonby have their Ministerial places only to remind us that Labor's occupation of the Treasury Bench has not so much as broken the line of succession of our ruling families. The solitary member of the Government who stands half a head above the rest is Mr. Wheatley; but Mr. Wheatley is hardly likely to go much further than he has gone already. He is what the late Lord Fisher would have called 'a great conceptionist,' and to Trades-Union secretaries and such as they he appears a dangerous visionary. On the other hand, the 'advanced' thinkers know perfectly well that, because he is a believing and practising Roman Catholic, there are a great many points beyond which he will not advance with them.

If the positions gained are to be held and improved, Labor in the next few years must discover to the world a new leader capable of translating into practical politics those high hopes raised by the evangelists of yesterday. He will have to be a statesman, but much more than an ordinary statesman; for he must at once satisfy the men and women whose thoughts of life are as

humdrum as the toil by which they earn a living, and keep at the right pitch of exaltation the spirits of those who are yearning for Utopia. The first are the voting strength of the party; the second its sole spiritual driving force. Without the two together, Labor must relapse into impotence as a political body, though the idea that this can happen is now generally derided.

The Conservative Party has its ups and downs, but in comparison with the others is fixed and solid. Even under the ludicrously bad management of Mr. Baldwin it holds its place as the largest single Party in Great Britain, and there is no likelihood that it will be further reduced in the near future. The struggle of to-morrow and the day after will be between the 'Progressives' for second place.

It

In this combat two considerations must be taken into account. is frequently stated as axiomatic that Labor will keep and improve its lead; but a merchant of bulls might be excused for saying that the odds are even. Until the last general election Mr. MacDonald's party had glamour as its prime asset. It was the unknown quantity therefore magnificent. But the glamour is already going, and before long it will be gone, unless there should appear above the political horizon some inspired and inspiring leader as yet unknown. But when we come to consider the prospects for the Liberals, something more than a mere decline in Socialist prestige must be premised before a Liberal revival can be expected. As long as the Liberals choose to be no more than a right wing to the Socialists or a left wing to the Tories, there will be no improvement in their fortunes, and there may well be a declension. People who want Socialism will deal at Mr. MacDonald's store, where, if the goods do not come up to expectation, they are at all events the

best available. People who want Toryism will still go to the old shop where, despite the outrageous blunders of the managing director, a fine tradition lingers. While Mr. Lloyd George continues to advertise something 'just as good as Socialism,' the public may gape about his stall as about a cheap-jack's, but they will not buy. The conservatively minded may secretly sigh for the wares which Mr. Asquith could give them if he were really in business. But he is like the superannuated tradesman who, while he cannot leave the shop altogether, does not trouble about selling anything. Like Dr. Johnson's reformed tallow-chandler, he loves to attend on 'melting days,' in order to sniff the familiar odors; but he is vastly more interested in the art and machinery of politics than in anything politics might produce. Further, he does not advertise at all.

IV

The Liberal Party, in fine, can, if it likes, recover much of its old power. But the condition of such revival is that Liberalism shall again mean something, if not precisely what the old Liberalism meant. And while adapting itself to the times, it must not belie its whole tradition; it must remain fundamentally Liberal. Every Liberal candidate must be able to go to his constituency with the words, 'I am a Liberal because I believe in Liberty,' and successful candidates will subsequently have to back their words by their votes. Mr. Lloyd George struck the right note the other day when he told his Welsh supporters that the traditional task of his party was 'defending and extending the boundaries of freedom.' Unfortunately, everybody knows that the tradition is no longer followed, and that few British statesmen have done more to curtail the boundaries than Mr. Lloyd George himself. In the ballad of

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the American flag, freedom is depicted as descending from her mountain height'; in Mr. George's opinion some uninhabitable crag of his native land is her proper abiding-place. On the lower planes, where we must live and work and die, he has no use for her save as a rhetorical figure. During the war he was but one of the many Ministers in all the Allied countries who were responsible for restrictive legislation; but with him it could never be felt, as with some others, that the laws he fathered or sanctioned were devised to meet an exceptional emergency. With him the country is always in danger, in peace as in war, and his invariable plan to meet the danger is some kind of interference with the right of ordinary men to order their lives as they please. His ideal seems to be a beneficent and energetic bureaucracy, with a general election. every five years or so to confirm its decrees. Should confirmation not be forthcoming, one suspects that he would sacrifice the ballot box rather than the beneficence and the energy. Now and then, of course, he does almost persuade us that he is in earnest. about freeing the land from 'the rusty chains of feudalism,' or, at least, he almost persuades those of us who live in towns. But in rural England they are more skeptical. The modern squire, as a squire, does not after all suggest feudalism to personal acquaintances. Either he is an impoverished person who can be pronounced harmless, or a wealthy townsman who spends in the village a little of the money he has made in the city. So long as this money lasts, he is a not unwelcome, though probably a derided, object of the countryside.

Under Mr. Lloyd George, no revival of Liberalism is, I imagine, possible. Nor is it much more likely should Mr. Asquith succeed in holding a position always threatened. Though without any burning faith in democracy, and

even with a certain lawyerlike distrust of mankind in the mass, he is orthodox enough. With hand on heart he could repeat his predecessor's dictum that 'good government is no substitute for self-government.' But all the while he would be making the mental reservation that good government is a mere figment of the imagination. The real trouble about Mr. Asquith, however, is that he is an economist, and of late years has become an economist of energy. Were he Prime Minister again, with a number of faithful second lieutenants to drudge for him, and a substantial majority on the benches behind him, he would do respectably well; but he is not of those who 'face a hopeless hill with sparking and delight,' and he has got into the habit of regarding as hopeless every hill to be climbed. He could keep together an army (mostly marking time) that had never known rout or serious discomfiture. He is not the man to inspire courage in a Party that once, twice, and thrice has endured dire defeat.

But, whereas the Labor leader of tomorrow will require to be gifted with something very like supermanhood to satisfy the hopes set on him, the Liberal leadership could be successfully filled by one of abilities but a degree above mediocrity. The task before him is not particularly hard. It will not be his business to persuade the public to accompany him through several wildernesses into a promised but unglimpsed land of milk and honey. On the contrary, his main concern will be to urge them to follow their own noses. True, the advice will seem novel to them, and it will, therefore, have to be repeated several times, and with energy, before they grasp its implication. But it is impossible to think that liberty, either as word or fact, has lost all the lure it has exercised over humanity since the beginning of recorded time. Judged at

its lowest, simply as a slogan, there is magic in it. "The people have a right to make their own mistakes' -the essence of Liberalism is in that spell-binding phrase. It ought to be popular, and it is very hard to understand why none of our ambitious young politicians is shouting it from the housetops.

All this, of course, is not to hint that Liberals can go back to unmitigated laissez-faire, which modern conditions have made impossible. Young Manchester has killed the anarchical ideals of Old Manchester. 'Angels alone, that soar above, enjoy such liberty' as the early Cobdenites postulated for all and sundry; but there is no obvious reason why the Liberal Party should not again announce its championship of the individual both as regards his person and his property. Lest there should be any mistake as to their meaning, the word 'individual' would have to be emphasized.

As things are, control, and even increased control, may be necessary for the great Capitalist corporations, and checks against the tyranny of Labor combinations may have to be devised. But the right of the individual to go his own way as long as he remains an individual is quite another matter. A reformed Liberal Party might, in opposition, do worse than concentrate on safeguarding such personal liberties as the individual still possesses, and in office might set itself to the restoration of many that have been lost. The Party would thus regain its character, and, having once more a raison d'être, could no longer be treated by its adversaries with contempt. No special harm would be done to the community, and, it may be, much good. The ordinary swing of the political pendulum would be a guaranty against exaggerated licence, and, as periods of freedom would alternate with periods of paternal rule, the fear of paternalism harden

ing into oppressive Prussianism, which at present is very real, would be removed.

V

That Labor is making the way easy for such a Liberal revival, and may end by making it inevitable, leaps to the eyes. As yet the average Englishman only grumbles at the trammels put upon him by Government after Government, and is not actively in revolt against them. If he is not allowed to buy tobacco after eight o'clock in the evening, he calls the law an ass, and perhaps bribes the barmaid at the nearest public house to supply him with a packet of cigarettes; but his annoyance does not affect his vote at the next election. For one thing, none of the candidates offers to take up the question for him. If, again, he hears that the police now have the right to search private dwellings for improper books and pictures, his resentment against this potential invasion of his home is wholly abstract. The principle involved does not really stir him.

Principles, indeed, do not bulk largely in the English mind until and unless they are made matter for a political agitation. Then, they will often fill it to the exclusion of every material consideration. What happened when the Lords threw out Mr. George's Budget in 1909 is worth remembering. In advance, the man in the street did not seem to care much, one way or the other; but when the whole eloquence of the Liberal Party was employed in telling him that the Chamber in which he was represented had been flouted by the Chamber that represented a class only, his ire was aroused. That he would stand for defense of the House of Commons and not for the house in which he lives, is incredible. So far, however, no politician has thought it worth while to tell him that his house is

seriously threatened. The middle-class elector still tries to fancy that, whatever else is taken from him, his house is his castle. The proletarian knows that it is nothing of the sort, and is sore about it; but nobody-least of all the Labor Party the Labor Party- offers him redress. Governments come and go, but, as far as he can see, he is going to be inspected and spied and pried on until the earth covers his coffin.

It is, however, clear that we are but at the beginning of the assault on the Englishman's status as a free man. Unless he happens to belong to the comparatively small section of the income-tax payers, in which case he is painfully aware of his obligation to work for the State during several months of the year, he is as yet far from accounting himself a serf. The assailing forces have been careful to advance little by little, with a law here and a bylaw there, a restriction one year and a perquisition the next. Often the individual is unaware of the barriers erected about him until the inevitable moment arrives when he knocks his head against one of them. But an important fact has to be borne in mind. Labor cannot afford to advance quite as slowly and cautiously as the parties which have hitherto held office. Either it must put into operation some of its plans for the regeneration of Britain or perish; and every intelligent Socialist agrees that without a number of new and drastic restraints on ordinary men and women these plans cannot be sensibly advanced. When, therefore, Labor starts its big push, the threat will be, not to our minor liberties, but to some or all of those rights which have ever been treated as inherent in each human being born outside servitude.

First and foremost, perhaps, is the whole question of a man's right to own property. property. The merely sentimental Laborite sometimes says he has no ob

jection to an individual owning a property provided it is a little one, and that if he favors confiscation at all it is only in the case of those of great possessions. As talk, this is pretty - but it is not practical politics. Tarquin struck down his largest adversaries first, and was deposed for his temerity. In these days his mistake is never repeated. The Socialist Minister, at war with property, will strike first at the small owners; and, though even at them he will strike indirectly, there is no reason why he should not strike hard. When he has disposed of them, he may turn his attention to the big men, who will then be friendless. No British Parliament will from start to finish be asked to pass a law for transferring lands or houses to the State, or even mines and railways; but the position of the existing owners can be made untenable within a short space of time. Mr. Wheatley's Housing Bill illustrates the point. Whether it will fulfill its ostensible purpose of obtaining houses in which people can live, remains to be seen; but it will certainly multiply the great present difficulties of every person to whom a house belongs and will break the poorer of them. As an act it will serve to prevent any individual of modest means from building or buying a house of his own. And so the attack on private ownership will continue.

Other Socialists, again, are fond of telling the public that it is only real property at which they aim, and that the acquisition of personal property has their warm approval. The distinction is unpractical. A house, a field, a garden, are real property, but they are also among the most personal things a man can have and hold, and, were they as widely distributed among the population in England as in France and Ireland, their transfer to municipalities or the State could not be contemplated. In existing conditions it would appear

that the protection and restoration of small property might be made a prominent item in any programme of genuine Liberalism as a counter to the Socialist proposals. Something of the kind is occasionally mentioned in inconspicuous corners of Liberal addresses, but its vote-winning value has not been exploited since the days of three acres and a cow. That cry, or its topical equivalent - a four-roomed dwelling and a wireless installation, in some neighborhoods- is the obvious reply to such as Mr. Wheatley.

Intimately connected with the problem of nationalization is that of the right to work or to withhold work. During a recent railway strike a Labor Minister told the House of Commons that the Government could not be expected to carry on the services of a public-utility company run by private capital. Had the line belonged to and been managed by the State, what would he have said and done? Another Minister has lately refused reinstatement to certain police strikers, and, from the point of view of a logical Socialist, he was unquestionably right. Nationalization of an industry must mean that all employed in it are brought to the police level. The miner, for instance, is just as necessary to the community as the constable; but, although his immediate employer is, or can be envisaged as, a private person, he can 'down tools' at will. As an official, he would lose that privilege. That the rest of us might be more comfortable under those conditions may be granted or disputed, but it does not affect the issue. The Liberal, because presumably he values liberty as more precious than efficiency, must stand for the right to strike even though it involves many hardships. Equally, by the way, he must stand for the right to work. Just as he must oppose dragooning by the employer, public or private, so must