trouble so long as they are spared the trouble of thinking. While they have far too many plans and patterns in their practical arrangements, they always start thinking, or rather guessing and groping, without any plan whatever. And the proof of it is printed in their letters and articles; for they can never offer anything except strings of random and motley examples, small and big, important and unimportant, probable and improbable, of points on which they happen to disagree with poor parents about the management of their homes. Now anybody who likes to know where he is going, anyone who has the controversial map in his mind, knows that such a road leads downward and never ends. It is obvious that anybody at any time could suggest infinite shades of alteration in anybody else's family, as in anybody else's face. Both are cases of a balance of features or influences, about which tastes differ interminably. It is said that science has been doing wonderful work in the making of artificial faces; and it is already suggested that science should make artificial families.

Eugenists are playing the old game of matchmaking, purged of its more generous motives; but even a Eugenist cannot be such a fool as not to see that matchmaking is a matter of taste. Hitherto there has been a feeling that the family, like the face, had a right to find its own balance or be content with its own compromise. There has been a delicacy, in discussion with any gentleman, about the forcible alteration of his features, or even about any direct discussion or eager planning of any farreaching reforms; any criticism on his face to his face. The too animated analysis of Mr. Brown's whiskers, in Mr. Brown's presence, is still thought uncivilized. Some hold that a woman may perhaps feel as much delicacy

about her unique privilege of having a baby as a man about his unique privilege of growing a beard. But it is not such sentimental fancies that concern me here, but the simple fact that such criticism and modification must be endless. Every family among our friends and equals offers examples, often extreme examples, of things that we ourselves should do very differently. The logical process, if it be logical, must end in all middle-class people interfering with each other; in the Robinsons agitating against a child so excitable as little Tomkins sitting up to a champagne supper, and the Tomkinses preventing a boy so nervous as young Robinson from being sent into the navy. But the logical process will not be logical. It will not be carried out; for the perfectly simple reason that the supper is a champagne supper and that the naval career is that of a naval officer. The reason is snobbishness; and no man can suggest any other.

I will put a plain case and a clear challenge to those who deny that such a social reform is merely a snobbish reform. A mother of children, the wife of a great land-owner, told me with her own lips that she was, or was going to be, a Christian Scientist. She gave as her reason a conviction that the Christian Scientists were more purely spiritual than other people. When I made the obvious reply that even they could not be so purely spiritual as Satan, she laughed and seemed to entertain the extraordinary idea that it was a joke. That, however, is not the aspect of the matter which affects the point, which is this. Here is the whole huge apparatus of a Health Ministry, here is a vast machinery of medical intervention, inspection, and warning, armies of medical officers and health visitors sent out, if only to instruct and advise; and all on the

possibility that people are not taking proper medical precautions or listening to proper medical counsel. And here is a woman who declares in two plain words that she will take no medical precautions; that she will listen to no medical counsel; that she will disregard all recognized rules of health; not occasionally and by accident, but, invariably, persistently and on principle. Even if the Health Ministry only existed to instruct, would not this be a case for instruction? Even if the 'home visitors' are only to persuade, is not this a home they ought to visit? And will anyone tell me at what time a 'home visitor' visited that great country house, in the middle of that great country estate, passed through the lodge gates and up the long elaborate avenue, penetrated the hierarchy of servants, and told the lady of the house that there was some reason to suppose that she was neglecting the medical side of 'mother-craft'? Would any of them do it, if the lady mentioned to-morrow in some magazine controversy or public speech (as she very possibly may) that she is a Christian Scientist? Would they do it then, though in effect she would have hung a notice on the lodge gates, and put a placard on the front door, saying 'I take no medical care of my children whatever'? I do not maintain their right to do so, for I think other things are involved for rich and poor alike; I do not even say that she would in practice prove a bad mother. Indeed, I think it most likely that she would, in fact, fall back on being a good mother by being a bad Christian Scientist. But that is because I have that romantic faith in motherhood, which is so earnestly

The New Witness

rebuked; and hold that the rudiment of common sense, which I believe to survive the ravages of poverty, can even survive the ravages of wealth. But for the health visitor there is no escape; he (or she) must pass trembling through the lodge gates and up the long avenue. It is impossible to imagine any case where there is clearer reason to suspect that hygienic rules are being disregarded, than a case of a divinely inspired dogma by which they are flatly denied. There cannot conceivably be any case in which such negligence should be anticipated, if not in a case in which it is actually announced.

But the important point about such social reformers is not merely that they are crafty; it is that they are, in the most exact sense of the word, unprincipled. They have no principle, even of their own, about the rights of a home, or even about the rights of the home visitor. They merely nibble away like mice, and are as ignorant as mice both of the substance and the ownership of all they destroy. Some of them do it more gently than others; some of them, rather alarmed at the cruder confessions of 'H. D. Player,' have already begun to say that of course the thing must be done with tact and sympathy. It will be generally agreed that tact is a very necessary virtue in the profession of the spy, in international or internal affairs.

But the question we ask the international spy concerns not his social manner, but his social status. We want to know what is his locus standi in our country; and a similar question is not inconceivable concerning our house.

THE legend of the Sleeping Hero is common to many countries. One might suppose it to be one of those superstitions which advancing civilization leaves behind, but that we find it realized afresh in the continued refusal of some people to-day to believe in Lord Kitchener's death. No doubt the idea is intertwined with the very fabric of the human heart that there are natures too fine for failure. Of them, at least, the old question: 'Why hast Thou made all men for naught?' should not be asked. If clouds obscured their setting, poetical justice demands a new dawn; the world has a right to their service.

So long as fairyland was recognized as a 'something between heaven and hell,' the valley of Achor had its door of hope. Even the Catholic Church once gave her sanction to belief in a hero's return. Prayers were said for centuries at Grenoble, that the Chevalier Bayard might be allowed to come back before the general resurrection, so that the world might be trained in the principles and practice of chivalry. The fact is interesting also as an authoritative pronouncement that Catholicism did not see in the spirit of chivalry the spirit of Antichrist.

The sleeping hero seems to differ from the sublimated beings whom the pagan invoked as demi-gods and the medieval churchman as saints. The Roman was 'aware of a stately pair' when Castor and Pollux were seen heading his phalanx, and the Spaniard -despite the statement of certain modern historians that the battle itself

is mythical holds to this day the belief that once, at least, St. James on a white horse turned defeat into victory for his country. But these glorified personages vanished as they came, while the hero was to return 'in the face and the form that we knew.' Scholars may see in the Red Indian Hiawatha a Western Adonis whose marriage with the Laughing Water meant fertility for the soil. But the myth probably floated in the air till attached to the story of a too-mortal chief, who should return from happy hunting-grounds in a winged canoe such as brought Pale-faces from the Sunrise. He it was who should then teach the arts of peace that avert famine, while, as of old, leading his tribe to war and protecting their village and their hunting.

In this, as in all the legends, it is some supreme day of national crisis that is to rouse the sleeping hero. The world's Armageddon should surely have given back one leader, at least, to every combatant nation. Serbia, for instance, could hardly wait for a darker hour than that of her recent devastation to recall Marco Kraljevic (King's son), whom legend declared to have survived the grim day of Kossovo. King Vukasin, his father, fell at the Marica, in 1371, after long war with the Turk, and Marco continued the struggle till that seemingly final defeat. Then despair seized upon him as upon the dying Roland. He cast his mace into the sea, and drove his sword into the living rock, where it has been guarded ever since by his adopted

fairy-sister, the Villa Raviyoyla, who also watches his sleep. But through the ensuing centuries the sword has been slowly rising from the rock, and when it is completely free the hour of Marco's waking and of the final liberation of Serbia will have come.

The fairy lady, the matchless sword, and the promised waking of the hero naturally remind us of our Own Arthur, of Excalibur, and the pale Queens. If

the island valley of Avilion, Where never falleth rain nor any hail, Nor ever wind blows loudly,

is to be identified with Glastonbury, it may be whispered that the poet had not seen the Somerset lowlands on a day when March wind drives fruitblossom petals before it and raises dust-devils on the long, high road. The courtly spirit of Lord Tennyson suggested a reincarnation of the hero in the rather prosaic form of the Prince Consort as

Scarce other than mine own ideal knight. Some Serbians may with more romantic appositeness have seen a return of their hero Marco, though outside their own border, in Mirko of Montenegro. National ballads delighted to call Mirko the sword of Montenegro'; sober history calls him its Lysander and Tyrtæus. The national army at the battle of Grahovo, in 1858, was led by Mirko in the absence of his brother, Danilo, in Paris. Mirko, in fact, was the elder brother, but had been passed over, in 1851, in his brother's favor, and was content to serve his country as President of the Senate. Danilo's inaction during the Crimean war had made him unpopular with the people. The Sultan had vainly offered bribes. The crisis came in the May of 1858, when Mirko took command of the army, and found 7,000 Turks encamped on the plain, like the French

at Sedan. His own 4,500 held the rocky defiles above, yet he made a last bid for peace, sending his brother's secretary a six-hours' journey for the purpose. The envoy was captured, but the outcome was the destruction of half the Turkish force at small loss to the Montenegrins. But despite the sixty battles of his campaigns, into one of which Mirko went after a meal of a few pears, his daughter fighting by his side, the inevitable end was a convention with Turkey in which Mirko's banishment was one of the articles. Before this Danilo had been

assassinated, and Mirko once more passed over, this time in favor of his own son, Nicholas. His expulsion, however, was not insisted on, and Mirko turned to the arts of peace, wrote verses, planted rice and coffee, and ultimately died of cholera in his son's arms. His widow, Stana, lived till 1895.

If this were indeed reincarnation, the hero's return served a good purpose. Other sleepers seem to have been undecided as to the right time for their return. Owen Glendower, surrounded in his lifetime by supposed portents, owed something of the weird power of his personality to his startling habit of appearing suddenly in unexpected places. The faith that so great a leader would return was strengthened by the fact that the places of his death and burial were never surely known. It was, accordingly, characteristic that some time after his passing he should be seen by the Abbot of Valle Crucis as he walked meditating in the fields at dawn.

'You have risen early, Father,' said the vision.

'No, my son,' replied the imperturbable monk; 'it is you who have risen too soon by a hundred years.'

And Glendower vanished.

Rebel chief as he was, with all the

qualifications of the hero of whom such a bard as Iolo of the Red Mantle should sing, history remembers Owen Glendower now rather as the far-seeing statesman and social reformer. 'His true claim to greatness,' says Mr. Owen Edwards, 'lay in his attempt to create out of the disorder' of his time, 'with its chaotic law, with its angry. passions, with its selfish aims, a nation with settled institutions and high ideals.' Among those institutions, Owen desired a Welsh-speaking clergy, and a Church reformed and connected, as in England, with the State; as well as a revival of learning, to be assisted by a Welsh University. This last was no wild dream; a dozen Universities were founded in Europe in his lifetime. Dare we suggest that something, at least, of this hero lives again in Mr. Lloyd George?

Welshmen who refused to believe Glendower to be gone forever had in Merlin another hero tranced by fairy power. The Siege Perilous of the forest of Broceliande had swallowed up both him and his wisdom, till such time as destiny should choose to call him back. There was also a younger dream-hero. In 1369, in reward for good service to France, Charles V gave a fleet to Owen Lawgoch, 'heir to the Crown of Wales,' hero of Welsh legend, but a pathetic and futile figure in history. It was December when Owen sailed from Harfleur and rough weather drove him back. Fresh hopes were budding when, in 1378, Owen Glendower being then nineteen, Owen Lawgoch was murdered at Mortagnesur-Mer by John Lambe, an English emissary.

Another of the sleeping heroes especially notable as brilliant failures is Sebastian of Portugal. 'It is all over for my country, but at least I die with her,' said Camoens on hearing of the king's death, at a time when he himself

was dying in exile, and in a poverty so extreme that only the begging of a faithful Javanese servant kept him alive. That was in 1578, and before half-a-dozen years had passed two false pretenders to Sebastian's name had been exposed. Yet about 1584, a tiler's son, named Sebastiao Gonzales, claimed to be the king, and was supported by a self-styled Bishop of Guarda. The pretender was sent to the galleys, the 'bishop' was hanged. Nevertheless, in the next year, one Mattheus Alvarez, traded on a personal resemblance, obtained money from a rich farmer whom he created Count de Torras Novas, promising also to marry his daughter, and the royal troops were confronted by a supporting force of 800 men. Once again, in 1603, twenty-five years after Sebastian had fallen in Africa, at El Kasr-el-Kebir, Marco Tullio, a Calabrian peasant who actually could not speak Portuguese, claimed his identity, declaring that he had escaped from the battlefield and had lived as a hermit in Sicily. The Portuguese in Venice believed his tale; and when banished to Padua by demand of the Spanish ambassador, and at Florence, and in the galleys to which he was consigned, the pretender made so many adherents that finally he was executed. As for Sebastian himself himself fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a Hapsburg lip, fatherless at birth, king at three, king-regnant at fourteen, melancholy dreamer, who longed to go crusading, and felt that un bel morir tutta la vita honora — it was an ill day for Portugal when he gave his power into the hands of an unfit Prime Minister and his mind to visions of crushing the Moor. A project of marriage with Marguerite of Navarre was abandoned for a dream of commanding the Portuguese forces in India. At nineteen he went off from a hunting party for wild raids against the