they may lead toward a new birth, a later and finer renaissance. It would be hard indeed to over-estimate the value of action upon the thinker's mind, if only the chance for action comes as it has come to these Knights of the Holy Spirit.

One question more. Why in speaking of these returning soldiers must we speak only of the officer class? Among all those four million soldiers in the ranks is there none whom the things of the mind also fill with a kind of homesickness-none who longs for none who longs for knowledge and wisdom and beauty with a yearning that consumes him? It is absurd to suppose that there is none. But six months in Oxford, at her cheapest, costs about the same as a workingman would spend on bringing up a family of six the whole year round, and that with exceptional comfort.

The Nation

THE IRISH QUESTION AGAIN

BY LORD HUGH CECIL

THE Spectator has so long maintained the Unionist position that I venture to ask some space in its columns to emphasize an aspect of the present Irish situation which British Home Rulers seem resolutely to ignore. Mr. Asquith, for instance, does not seem to realize how profoundly the Irish situation has been modified by recent

events.

The great new feature of the Irish question is that the Irish people have rejected with unanimity any Federal solution of the problem of Irish government. The Ulstermen remain where they were, unshaken adherents to the Union: the Sinn Feiners, carrying an overwhelming majority of the electorate of the three Southern Provinces, adhere to national independence: the remains of the old Nationalist Party,

now apparently joined by distinguished proselytes like Sir Horace Plunkett, declare for the autonomy of a Dominion within the British Empire: no one whatever, so far as is known, is now in favor of Home Rule or any similar Federal scheme. Some Irishmen want to make Ireland an independent republic; some Irishmen want to make it a self-governing Dominion; some Irishmen want to keep it as it is, part of the United Kingdom; no one wishes to make it wishes to make it a province in a Federation. This plainly destroys the basis of the Gladstonian policy. Mr. Gladstone always based his proposals on their acceptability by Irishmen as a final solution of the Irish question. Home Rule is no longer accepted by any Irishman as a solution, final or even temporary, of the Irish question.

What reply do British Home Rulers like Mr. Asquith make to this new objection to their policy? They do not tell us. But I conjecture that they would say that the Sinn Fein movement is only a mood a mere fit of irritation provoked by injudicious management on the part of the British Government, and likely to pass away and be replaced by the former acceptance of Home Rule as the object of Irish desire. I am persuaded that this interpretation of the late Election is entirely untrue. The Irish are not so silly as Home Rulers believe: if they rejected Federalism at the late Election (as they did), they did it because they hate Federalism. The enthusiasm for Irish nationality, only deeply felt by a small body of opinion, is quite sincerely, though not profoundly, felt by the great majority of Irishmen. But they have begun to see that Federalism does nothing for nationality. They now fully realize the absurdity of a plan which would satisfy the national aspirations of the Irish by making Ireland a Federal province. And if

Federalism cannot satisfy national aspirations, it offers less than does the Union of material prosperity and social security. Some bodies of Irish opinion, and notably the heads of the Roman Catholic Church, probably in their hearts prefer the Union as the quietest, safest, and most prosperous form of Irish government. These influences were all thrown at the late Election on the side of Sinn Fein, not out of love of independence, but in order to kill the Home Rule Act. A sentimental love of nationality, coalescing with a prudent and materialist preference for the Union, combined to overthrow the Nationalist Party and achieve the strangely complete victory of Sinn Fein. This is my interpretation of the late Election, and I believe the only one that has been put forward which does not assume the Irish to be raving lunatics.

If I am right, the majority of Irishmen, while making independence their first preference, would make the Union their second preference, and put Federal Home Rule third on the list. If this is their verdict, plainly we must give up Home Rule: no one would suggest imposing it on Ireland against the will of the Irish. Instead I would require the Irish to frame their own plan in detail as a Parliamentary Bill and submit it to Parliament. For that purpose I would set up four Provincial Councils for the four Provinces in Ireland, to be elected according to Proportional Representation. These These Councils might sit together and act jointly, if they pleased, but would not be obliged to do so. This would doubtless result in the three Southern Councils acting together, and the Council for Ulster acting separately. It would then be left to the Councils, acting jointly or separately, to present to Parliament whatever plan for Irish government they prefer; and, in order

to prevent the plan being shelved, it would be provided that a Bill brought in at the request of a Provincial Council should be placed in the charge of the Chairman of Ways and Means, and should take precedence of all other Parliamentary business on any day on which it was set down for discussion in the House of Commons. By this means the Irish would be forced themselves to face all the difficulties of Irish government, and to present detailed proposals to Parliament, which Parliament would not be allowed to neglect. That this would immediately provide a solution of the Irish question I do not suppose; but it would do two things. It would help to educate the Irish people in political wisdom, and it would show everyone in Ireland, in Great Britain, and in the world that we were in good faith trying our best to satisfy the discontents of Irishmen. The Spectator

IN PRAISE OF WATER

BY G. SANTAYANA

THE transformation of landscape by moisture is no matter of appearance only, no mere optical illusion or effect of liquid stained glass. It is a sort of echo or symbol to our senses of very serious events in prehistoric times. Water, which now seems only to lap the earth or to cloud it, was the chisel which originally carved its surface. They say that when the planet, recently thrown off from the sun, was still on fire, the lighter elements rose in the form of gases around the molten metallic core; and the outer parts of this nucleus in cooling formed a crust. of igneous rock which, as the earth. contracted, was crushed together and wrinkled like the skin of a raisin. These wrinkles are our mountain chains, made even more rugged and

villainous by belated eruptions. On that early earth there was no water. All was sheer peaks, ledges, and chasms, red-hot or coal-black, or of such livid metallic hues, crimson, saffron, and purple, as may still be seen on the shores of the Dead Sea or in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado

rifts that allow us to peep into the infernal regions, happily in those places at least without inhabitants. This hellish sort of landscape, which we must now plunge into the depths to find, was the first general landscape of earth.

As the cooling progressed, however, the steam that was in the upper atmosphere began to condense and to fall in rain. At first the hot drops no doubt sizzled as they fell and rose again immediately in vapor, yet the meteorological cycle was established notwithstanding. The rain that evaporated descended once more, each time colder and more abundant, until it cut channels among the crags, ground and polished their fragments into boulders and pebbles, formed pools in the hollows, and finally covered the earth up to its chin with the oceans. Much detritus meantime was washed down from the rocks; it gathered in crevices and along the pockets and slacker reaches of rivers. This sediment was soaked with moisture and mixed with dissolved acids; it became the first soft layer of earth and finally a fertile soil. Water in this way softened the outlines of the mountains, laid the floor of the valleys, and made a leafy and a cloudy place of the planet The sages (and some of them much more recent than Thales *) tell us that water not only wears away the rocks, but has a singular power of carrying away their subtler elements in solution, especially carbonic acid, of which

*e.g., Professor L. J. Henderson, of Harvard, in a book published in 1917 on The Order of Nature, from which I borrow most of these data.

the atmosphere also is full; and it happens that these elements can combine with the volatile elements of water into innumerable highly complex substances, all of which the atmospheric cycle carries with it wherever it goes; and with these complex substances, which are the requisite materials for living bodies, it everywhere fills the sea and impregnates the land.

Even if life, then, is not actually born of the moist element, it is at least suckled by it; the water-laden atmosphere is the wet nurse, if not the mother, of the earth-soul. The earth has its soul outside its body, as many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The winds that play about it are its breath, the water that rains down and rises again in mist is its circulating blood; and the death of the earth will come when some day it sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its soul inside its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids, and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.

No wonder that living beings find things that are fluid and immersed in moisture friendly to the watery core of their own being. Seeds, blood, and tears are liquid; nothing is so poignant as what passes and flows, like music and love; and if this irreparable fluidity is sad, anything stark and arrested is still sadder. Life is compelled to flow, and things must either flow with it or, like Lot's wife, be left behind.

The Athenæum

PROPAGANDA IN THE BALKANS

At the end of September last those whom we in Macedonia had come to regard as our deadly enemies became our would-be friends with a suddenness which was almost painful. Kultur is a leavening influence, and our spurious local Hun in Bulgaria is every bit as

frightful in war and as oily in defeat as the genuine article on the Rhine.

To escape this unfamiliar and rather overpowering atmosphere of friendliness our section of the Salonica Force immediately made for the nearest available enemy and found ourselves at a lonely spot on the Turkish frontier. The name of the O.C. Local Bulgars began with Boris, and he was a Candidat Offizier or Cadet, and acting Town Major. As an earnest of goodwill, he showed us photos of his home, before and after the most recent pogrom, and of his grandfather, a bandit with a flourishing practice in the Philippopolis district, much respected locally.

We took up our dispositions, and shortly all officers were engaged sorting out the suspicious characters arrested by the sentries. It was in this way that I became acquainted with Serge Gotastitch the Serb.

When he was brought before me I sent for Aristides Papazaphiropoulos, our interpreter, and in the meantime delivered a short lecture to the Sergeant-Major, Quartermaster-Sergeant, and Storeman on the inferiority of the Balkan peoples, with particular reference to the specimen before us, to whom, in view of the fact that he seemed a little below himself, I gave a tot of rum. He eyed it with suspicion. 'What's this?' he asked suddenly (in English). 'Whiskey?'

I informed him that it was rum. "That's the goods,' he said, and drank it. I then commenced interrogation.

'You are a Bulgar?' I asked.

'No,' said Serge cheerlessly, 'I am Serb.'

bringit me here with others, and I workit on railroad. My family I not know where they are; no clothes getting, no money neither. English plenty money,' he added, à propos of nothing.

I ignored the hint.

'Then you are a prisoner of war?' I suggested.

'In old time,' he continued, "Turks have Prilep. I go to America and workit on railroad Chicago - three, four year. When I come back Turks take me for army. Not liking I desert to Serbish army. When war finish, Serbs have Prilep. I go home Serbish civil. Then this war start. Bulgar come to Prilep and say, "You Bulgar, you come work for us." You understahn me, boss?'

'I must look into this,' I said to the Sergeant-Major. 'Send for the interpreter and ask the Bulgar officer to step in. He's just going past.'

Boris arrived with a salute and a charming smile and listened to my tale. Then he turned a cold eye on Serge and burst into a torrent of Bulgarian, under which Serge stood with lifting scalp.

'Sir,' faltered Serge, when the cascade ceased, 'I am liar. All I said to you is false. I am good Bulgar. I hate Serbs.'

'Then you are not, in fact, a Serb?' I said.

'Nope,' said Serge, nodding his head frantically (the Oriental method of negation).

'Do you want to go home?' I asked cunningly.

'Sure, boss,' replied he. 'Want to go Chicago.'

Boris uttered one blasting guttural

'I hail from Prilep,' he explained. 'When Bulgar come Prilep, they say, "You not Serb; you Bulgar." So they

great rapidity. 'You understand, mon ami,' explained Boris; 'he is really a Bulgar, but the villainous Serb propagandists have taught him the Serb

ian language and that he is Serb. It is his duty really to fight or work for Bulgaria, just as it was ours to liberate him and his other Bulgar brothers in Serbia from the yoke of the Serbs. It is understood, my friend?'

'Oh, absolutely,' I replied.

He withdrew, exchanging a glance of hatred with Aristides Papazaphiropoulos, who approached saluting with Hellenic fervor.

'You wish me, Sare?' he asked.

'I did,' I answered, and outlined to him what had passed. 'Is it true that propaganda is, or are, used to that extent?'

'It is true,' he answered sadly. "The Serb has much propagandism, the Bulgar also. But in this case both are liars, since the population of Prilep is rightfully Greek.'

Three days later Boris appeared before me with a sullen face.

'I wish to complain,' he said. 'You have with you a Greek, one Papazaphiropoulos. It is forbidden by the terms of the armistice that Greeks should come into Bulgaria. Greeks or Serbs it is expressly stated. I wish to complain.'

'You are wrong,' I replied. 'He is no Greek. He is a Bulgar. But the cunning Greek propagandists have taught him the Greek language and that he is a Greek. It is really his duty to be the first to rush on to the soil of his beloved Bulgaria

'Ach!' said Boris, grinding his teeth; 'you mock our patriotism. You are an Englishman.'

'I don't,' I replied. 'And I'm not. I'm French. We came over in 1066. You ask my aunt at Tunbridge Wells. But the villainous English propagandists taught me English, and the Scotch gave me a taste for whiskey, and

But Boris had faded away.

Punch

HENRY JAMES: A LAST GLIMPSE

It would be easy to justify the suspicion, which the sight of Within the Rim aroused, and to make it account for the tepid and formal respect with which we own to have approached the book. Essays about the war contributed to albums and books with a charitable object even by the most distinguished of writers bear for the most part such traces of perfunctory composition, such evidence of genius forcibly harnessed to the wagon of philanthropy and sullen and stubborn beneath the lash, that one is inclined, for the sake of the writer, to leave them unread. But we should not have said this unless we intended immediately and completely to unsay it. The process of reading these essays was a process of recantation. It is possible that the composition of some of them was an act of duty, in the sense that the writing of a chapter of a novel was not an act of duty. But the duty was imposed upon Henry James not by the persuasions of a committee nor by the solicitations of friends, but by a power much more commanding and irresistible a power so large and of such immense significance to him that he scarcely succeeds with all his range of expression in saying what it was or all that it meant to him. It was Belgium, it was France, it was, above all, England and the English tradition, it was everything that he had ever cared for of civilization, beauty, and art threatened with destruction and arrayed before his imagination in one figure of tragic appeal.

Perhaps no other elderly man existed in August, 1914, so well qualified to feel imaginatively all that the outbreak of war meant as Henry James. For years he had been appreciating ever more and more finely what he