shame is a negative feeling; it is dislike, it says - Do not; and if conscience, if our whole moral life, springs from this negative origin, it loses value for us the moment we are aware of the fact. We cannot consent to a universe in which that is so. Imputing this source to the good, Solovyof at once fails to justify it for us; the Kingdom of Heaven itself is for him a negative, to which we attain by being ashamed, not of this world,' but of our very selves. True, he says that 'the object of condemnation in asceticism is not material nature as such. From no point of view can it be rationally maintained that nature, considered objectively whether in its essence or in its appearances is evil.' But here it is only the acquired Western part of him that speaks, and it is contradicted in a few pages by the instinctive Oriental. He says that the animal life in man must be subordinate to the spiritual; but he means that it must be denied and destroyed by the spiritual.

The moral question with regard to the sexual function is in the first place the question of one's inner relation to it, of passing judgment upon it as such. How are we inwardly to regard this fact from the point of view of the final norm, of the absolute good are we to approve of it or to condemn it . . . to affirm and develop or to deny, limit, and finally to abolish it?

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Solovyof says we are to abolish it.

The carnal means of production is for man an evil . . . our moral relation to this fact must be absolutely negative. We must adopt the path that leads to its limitation and abolition; how and when it will be abolished in humanity as a whole or even in ourselves is a question that has nothing to do with Ethics.

Here is the very doctrine of the Kreutzer Sonata; but in Solovyof it is supported by a dark mysticism which he never clearly expresses. According to him the carnal means of production

is somehow the cause of death. 'Man's final acceptance of the kingdom of death, which is maintained and perpetuated by carnal reproduction, deserves absolute condemnation.' Such, he says, is the positive Christian point of view, which decides this allimportant question according to the spirit and not according to the letter, and, consequently, without any external exclusiveness.' True, the Manichæan drift of Christianity has always existed; but always Christianity has resisted it, always its bright positive has overcome that dark negative; and even Solovyof allows a practical compromise with his own doctrine, though the doctrine itself he insists is true, in the following curious passage.

The idea that the preaching of sexual abstinence, however energetic and successful, may prematurely stop the propagation

of the human race and lead to its annihilation is so absurd that one may justly doubt the sincerity of those who hold it. It is not likely that anyone can seriously fear this particular danger for humanity. So long as the change of generations is necessary for the development of the human kind, the taste for bringing that change about will certainly not disappear in men.

He does not see that, if the change of generations is necessary for the development of the human kind, it is the darkest pessimism, implying the malignity of God himself, to hold that the process necessary for that change is itself sinful.

But Solovyof, as soon as he comes to deal with economics, escapes from his own madness, and, indeed, supplies an antidote to it. Here he is subject to Western thought, here he is no longer a pessimist or a Manichee, and here he escapes from his psychological error. In the chapter on the Economic Question, he insists that man is not entirely an economic being, that the economic man is a figment of bad

metaphysics; and he points out very shrewdly that Marxian Socialism has been infected with the error of the bourgeois economics which it set out to destroy.

The defect of the orthodox school of political economy the Liberal, or more exactly, the Anarchical, school - is that it separates on principle the economic sphere from the moral The defect of Socialism is that it more or less confuses or wrongly identifies these two distinct, though indivisible, spheres. From the plutocratic point of view the normal man is, in the first place, a capitalist, and, then, per accidens, a citizen, head of a family, an educated man, member of some religious union, etc. Similarly, from the Socialist point of view all other interests become insignificant and retreat into the background if they do not disappear altogether before the economic interest.

In fact, the error of the economic maniacs is of the same nature as the error of the sex-maniacs. Both find but one content in human nature, whether it be sex or the struggle for life; and Marxian Socialism is based upon that monomania, like plutocracy. Both, says Solovyof, have the same motto 'Man liveth by bread alone.' "The struggle between the two hostile camps is not one of principle. . . . One party is concerned with the material welfare of the capitalist minority, the other with the material welfare of the labor majority.' It could not be better put, though it is not true of all kinds of Socialism; and in refuting it Solovyof also refutes his own Manichæism. 'Economic relations,' he says,

of human will. But it is merely an impetus which spurs men to activity, the further course of that activity being determined by psychological and moral, not by economic, causes.

And, again, 'productive labor, possession and enjoyment of its results, is one of the aspects of human life or one of the spheres of human activity.' Now apply all this admirable doctrine to 'carnal reproduction.' It also is a simple and ultimate fact, which cannot be deduced, as such, from the moral principle. It also is necessary to the maintenance of human life; and the fact that it is so is independent of the human will. To say that it is evil in itself is as if one said that the instinct of self-preservation was evil in itself; which is to condemn the nature of the universe, as we know it. Solovyof, when he comes to economics, does not condemn the nature of the universe or of man, because economics is a wholly Western study and he has not read his own Eastern heresy into it. But, inevitably, if he had thought consistently he would have been forced either by his economic doctrine to give up his Manichæism, or by his Manichæism to give up his economic doctrine. The two are incompatible, but Solovyof did not discover it. So the interest of his book is not in its philosophy, but in that conflict between East and West which divides it into two inconsistent parts. The very sincerity of the writer, which never fails, makes the conflict the more patent. Here we have in philosophical terms the tragedy of Tolstoy's last years. For Manichæism makes life impossible; and that is why Christianity, which says that life is not only possible but glorious, must always condemn it.

THE older Europe and North Africa and the Near East- the Roman Empire in a word holds a number of dead towns. The number is not large in proportion to the towns still living, because, save under a violent pressure, men will not abandon the city; for the city is the storehouse, not only of the material wealth, but of all their tradition, which makes them and their wealth together. The number of such towns is especially limited in Britain, because Britain, in spite of the Pirate Invasions of the Dark Ages, preserved its material continuity with antiquity better than any other province. If you make a list of the principal English towns standing before the modern change say, in the time of the Civil Wars

you will be astonished to find what a very large proportion of them are certainly of ancient establishment, and what a very small proportion can even doubtfully be ascribed to origins later than the Roman occupation.

It is so with all the surface of England. It is so with the Roman roads, as I recently stated. It is so with the harbors, save the quite modern ones, and it is so with the distribution of wealth and of political importance in the various districts up to the industrial revolution.

The dead or decayed cities, then, are less numerous with us than with most other communities. But what there are of them have a special interest, because they stand to-day in such a crowded land.

There are three sorts of towns or sites of this kind.

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There are, first of all, the sites to which tradition (sometimes only preserved in a vague name) ascribes the position of some centre that has disappeared, or, failing tradition, the remains of fortification and the convergence of many roads. Badbury Rings, for instance, in Dorset, where five of the great roads meet, and where certainly there stood a centre all memory of which has disappeared. Or fields where the word 'old' appears grotesquely isolated. 'Old Winchester,' for instance, right away from the town, upon the hills. These last names are a puzzle all over Europe. You very often find them in places where a town could hardly ever have been. Sometimes they are associated with a legend which may have some germ of truth, but which as it stands is incredible, and that legend often enough tells one in detail of how and why the original inhabitants migrated.

There has been much debate upon that adjective 'old' attached to such bare fields without a trace of building or of defense. But I have seen no acceptable conclusion.

The second kind of dead town is one of which we know certainly the historical existence, and which has yet within recorded time altogether ceased to be inhabited. Some very few of these have up and down Europe kept ruins of their buildings: whether preserved by the same cause which destroyed them, as at Pompeii, or saved from loot by desert or distance

as at Timgad, the most wonderful place under the sun. But the greater

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part have lost even their foundations, though often their defenses remain. Silchester is our great example in this country; Wroxeter is another. Old Sarum is a third.

There is a third sort of town often called dead which is not dead, but decayed; and this decay has come usually from causes which history can trace. Either an industry has left the place, or means of transport, the sea, or a river, have become less convenient. Or, more rarely, direct political action, apart from material causes, has doomed it. This third class is the most numerous, naturally enough. For the fortunes of towns may fluctuate, but the complete death of a town is rare.

Of the three categories, it is the second which presents the greatest interest - at least, the greatest historical interest-because it presents the most problems. How and why did such a town as Silchester disappear, or such a town as Wroxeter? Why did men completely abandon Timgad? Or, for the matter of that, Babylon?

Then there is that other problem, how, each having been abandoned, should the vestiges of each so thoroughly disappear within the few centuries allowable?

I have written the word 'loot,' and that is certainly the main cause. But its thoroughness is astonishing! The very foundations disappear. How do they disappear? Hippo, in North Africa, was a great town. It was a chief bishopric. It was so big that an army of certainly more than 70,000 could not properly besiege it. Its site is known. There is nothing left. I despair before such a puzzle. Academic men have been found who would say that the old buildings were insignificant. That is nonsense. Towns of which the corporate life is known, wealthy, loaded with generations of

building, towns whose material was stone, and of which the surviving fragments are sufficient to show their character, leave hardly a trace. The earthworm covers any slight ruin with a little cushion of mould not very deep, but that will not answer the question posed. I can only suppose that when these places were quarried everything was taken. It would certainly pay one better to dig out the bricks from an old cellar and foundation if a strong modern house fell into ruin than to make new bricks, and one can point to many places where the foundations have thus been looted within living memory. I know the site of more than one old house in my own country which has entirely disappeared; cellars, footings of the walls, and all.

Another problem as to these dead towns is the lack of reference to them. One would have thought that during the interval between their last habitation and the revival of modern and accurate research, there must have been a long period during which the appearance of the place would have excited curiosity and provoked stories. But one does not find them.

Take Pevensey. Pevensey was a traditional port. It must have had importance, for it had a keep very heavily fortified by the Romans. It remained important at the time of the Norman Conquest, for it was the goal of William's fleet. It has only gradually declined because the harbor went dry. But you cannot trace the decline save in quite its later stages, and of that long period when it must have been partially cut off from the rest of England we know nothing.

Nor do we know anything of the Port of Lympne, except that it was a Roman harbor, and is now dry land. I remember one and only one reference to such things in the period

of transition, and that is a single famous sentence the origin of which (though not the present form) is as old as the seventh century. It describes the site of one of those innumerable battles in which the kinglets of the Dark Ages raided into their neighbors' territory from the marches of Wales to the North Sea, and from the North Sea to the marches of Wales. It was a battle which impressed its own time and posterity, because, though it had no political effects that we know of, it involved a great slaughter of the clergy and seemed to fulfill a prophecy of St. Augustine's. In the few words remaining to us of that fight there is the phrase 'By the waste Chester that is there,' which means 'By the formerly inhabited fortified Roman post' (or camp or town). To what post or town it refers we do not know, for it cannot possibly relate to the continuous town of Chester itself, though the struggle was somewhere in the neighborhood.

As a rule a town dies without witnesses to its death and without mourners, and its memory perishes.

Therein lies the physical fascination of such places. They are at once haunted and isolated. You are certain that you will hear no voices and have no vision, and yet you know that they were crowded. It is like going into a house which you knew well in youth, and which has been empty for many years. Or it is like seeing palely reflected in a window-pane the portrait of someone dead, so that it seems like the figure of the dead alive again and caught in the glass advancing. It is a fascination felt much more strongly as time passes and as one's acquaintance with the place increases. Why, I do not know. It ought, one would think, to be the other way.

There is a Roman theatre unused which I have visited many times, and I know that after my last visits

to it it seemed more peopled than before.

No small part of the magic of a town it stolen away from it by the detestable modern habit of belittling the past. Luckily, we can apply to this basest of historical errors the most powerful of historical criteria, which is common sense. One can appeal to the common experience of mankind and so correct the worst errors of pedantry even in a time when the pedant is worshiped as he never was worshiped before.

For instance, when an academic man tells you that a boat could not sail into the wind until the seventeenth century, you can refer then to the people who sail boats, unless indeed you have time to teach the man to sail a boat himself; then he will find out first, what would happen to any boat that could not sail into the wind; secondly, how no one, not even an ape, could sail a boat without the boat itself teaching him how to put it on a wind. It is so all through the field of history, and it is so particularly in the case of these dead towns.

Take the case of Pevensey. There is at Pevensey (now but a village) and there remains, outside the village, the wall of a fortfort- largely

Roman.

If a man tells you that

the wall marks the size of the whole of the Roman town, ask him to consider what is worth while at all by way of a port. You have here a place which a fleet of many hundred vessels carrying a force (William the Conqueror's) of many thousand men and horses could still use as a port six hundred years after the full imperial period of Rome. A port which not only can be used in that fashion, but which obviously suggests itself for use in that fashion to an invader is not a port served by a little village. It is obviously a port served by some considerable town. The dimensions of