reasonableness" is his social line. But any one who imagines that this good form of his implies weakness or softness of fiber makes a great mistake. He is on easy and familiar terms with his convictions, and has no need to parade them or typify them in a red tie and hobnailed boots, nor any fear of their being jeopardized by his clothing the external man in the correct garb of ceremonial observance. Nor is this all. MacDonald has the pride and the shyness of the Scot-all the Scot's stingy economy, all his queer secretiveness. Nothing will induce him to wear his heart upon his sleeve, or, to put the same thing in another way, to talk socialism at the dinner-table. It is the same thing; that is the point. His gift, his daimon, the thing he has which other politicians have not got, is a faith which makes him go, which is as much part of him as the blood in his veins, and, as little as that, to be made a show of.

Here is the second reason for welcoming the testimony of direct contact. The quality my American friend sensed is hard to convey by description or analysis. It is the explanation of the extraordinary devotion to MacDonald felt by the rank and file of his own party and, resentfully, in the last resort, by any and every critic in it, of whom there are plenty; of the exasperated hostility with which he is derided by Liberals and Tories, who cannot understand it; and of the bitter and unrelenting campaign directed against him by the communists in Moscow and elsewhere. It made him from 1914 to 1922 the target of an abuse such as no one since Glad

stone has had to meet and, at the same time, defeated every effort in those years to keep him out of the lime-light. It helped to give a special luster to his brief premiership and a sense of catastrophe to his fall.

The one short word we have to indicate the quality is genius; but that overworked expression does not, of itself, tell one much, and helps not at all to particularize the thing MacDonald possesses. Perhaps one can get nearest by a comparison. In personal magnetism, assisted in either case by masculine beauty and a musical voice, as well as in a certain baffling aloofness, maddening to colleagues, in intellectual power and in intellectual limitation, and in oratorical command, there are close resemblances (as well as minor suggestive differences) between Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Gladstone. But there is one remarkable distinction between them. Gladstone, dying in 1895, entirely failed to see that the creative phenomenon of the time, in Europe, and above all in Britain, Britain, was the awakening selfconsciousness of the working class and the stirring of a revolt against commercialism that affected all classes. Mr. MacDonald had, by the time he entered his thirties, grasped this fact and equipped himself in relation to it. If it is true of Gladstone, as a modern historian has put it, that "there was no great thing he did or wanted to do," it is not true of MacDonald. A vision of a great thing to be done brought him into politics, has colored all his work, and has been conveyed, by him, to some millions of his fellowcountrymen. The special quality both of his thinking and of his speak

ing derives from their connection with a central idea. No such idea has visited his parliamentary competitors. Discontinuity speaks from voice and action of the most brilliant of them, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill.

The dreams of the boy color the life of the man. In his formative years of poverty in Lossiemouth, young Ramsay MacDonald fed his imagination with the legends, stories, and ballads told him by a remarkable grandmother, learned a fundamental realism and sincerity toward life from a no less remarkable mother, and, in his brief school-days, devoured every book on science on which he could lay his hands. When at eighteen he came up to London he was determined to be a scientist. An illness deflected him; but scientific training gave him, for good and all, his socialist method. He was and remains an evolutionist. For him society is a growth; proceeds by adaptation, not by by destruction. Looking at the facts and forces of the nineties, he decided that the period of Liberalism was over and set his hand to building a new party to express the new ideas permeating the minds of then isolated groups and bring them into vital contact with the organized trade-unions. Those who were there know that it was in the main to the determination, energy, and patience of its young secretary that the creation of the Labor party in 1900 was due; know too that but for MacDonald the first victories of the new party at the 1906 election would have been impossible.

He created a new party. More, he gave that party not only a pro

gram but a philosophy. The BritishLabor party is socialist; since 1918, when its constitution was amended to include "workers by hand and brain," broadly socialist; since 1925, when a new program of action based on "avowedly Socialist principles" was indorsed, specifically so. The socialism of the British Labor party is evolutionary, scientific, and democratic. MacDonald has been the main force in making and keeping it

So.

His has been the guiding brain in the party ever since 1894, when Keir Hardie hailed the new recruit as its "greatest intellectual asset.' Then he brought with him a connected and coherent social philosophy, which has been deepened and enriched by experience but not essentially changed. The views set out in "Socialism and Society" (1908) or "Socialism and Government" (1909) are the views of "Socialism: Critical and Constructive" (1921); they are the views he has impressed on the mind of his party. He has suffered for his consistency, and the party has profited by his suffering. Thus, believing as he did in reason and coöperation as the instruments of social and national development, he was a pacifist before 1914 and in 1914 stood on his position. He could, in the fatal JulyAugust days, have entered the war government. He refused and, instead, went out into the wilderness. He held a section of the party stanch and at the same time held it back from self-righteous sectarianism; in 1918, thanks to him, it was possible to close the divided ranks of British Labor and resist the communist wave that split every socialist party on the Continent. He fought communism

as he had fought militarism in Britain with argument and logic-above all with a positive socialist philosophy -and beat it. More than that, he was able to hold British Labor true to the internationalism taught it by the pacifist section, with the result that to-day the Labor party is in the unique position of never having seen red about Russia, either for or against.

This consistent belief of his in coöperation and consent is the key to his success as a foreign minister. It was an even more important asset than his unique knowledge of foreign countries and conditions. Discussion of the achievements of Britain's first Labor government is frequently wide of the mark because the premises are not truly stated. The government was, from the start, in a one-to-three minority. It was let in by Liberals and Tories who believed that Europe would break it. MacDonald assumed office because no socialist can refuse service, with a perfectly clear conception of what could and should be done. At the Albert Hall in January, 1924, he said, "We believe we can give peace to Europe." He knew, as every one did who thought about it, that until peace was given to Europe there was no constructive thing anywhere that could be begun. The ground had to be cleared off. His own realism was complete. He knew too that he could do it, and how. In office he used the weapons, and only the weapons, he had consistently advocated out of it-coöperation, good-will, frankness, and friendliness. He did not talk of the British army and navy; he relied on idealism, and it worked, as it will, when single-mind

edly pursued. Nine times out of ten the idealist excommunicates himself because, at the test of action, his mind pays tribute to the materialist illusion. MacDonald's did not. He knew his facts, and he knew in what he believed. The London settlement ended the period of war mentality and started that of coöperation. Locarno is a partial fruit of the new method; the Geneva Protocol would have been a more complete one. When he had reconciled France and Germany, MacDonald turned to Russia. Idealism again, if you will. There was and is much in Russia he did not like, but "Russia exists." Europe is a family; its members have got to live together. "We are not to be our own judges, here or hereafter.” The Russian treaties were an essential part of his peace policy. When the Liberals allied themselves with the Tories against the treaties, they made the general election of 1924 inevitable; when they entered into a pact with the Tories, they made its result inevitable. Inevitable, but not permanent. The great Tory majority of November, 1924, is already visibly breaking up. Every by-election since has registered the rising tide of Labor sympathy.

22

In the biography of his wife published in 1911, Ramsay MacDonald told the world as much as he desired any one to know of his private life. The book is a literary phenomenon in many ways and in none more so than in its obliteration of the personality of the author. It is a picture of Margaret Ethel MacDonald, not of her husband. What it tells us about him is, in the main, the curious fact that it was, and is, as natural to him

to speak to the world as it is unnatural to speak to any individual. Parsimonious in the small change of affection to the living, he can overflow with generous appreciation of the dead. Death moves something primitive in him, for here again he is a Scot and walks near the great mysteries and simplicities, achieves poetry in his prose when he writes or speaks of them. Moreover death, apart from ceremonial aspects which appeal to him, is the great separator, the great revealer of individuality.

MacDonald is a singularly definite individual himself; perhaps for that reason he is little interested in or aware of the individualities of others. He has no talent for intimacy, and lacks, as a leader, the trick of creating individual attachment to himself, though he possesses in high degree the power of creating group attachment. People complain that he is hard to talk to; and most of his difficulties, as premier, were due to a misplaced and childish secretiveness about small things. For instance, he mentioned to no one that an old friend had given him a motor-car, though, had he done so at the time, every one would have been glad to know that an overworked and underpaid public servant (a British prime minister gets £3500 a year after income tax has been deducted) had been secured this measure of relief. Nor did he tell any one that, when he went out of office, he gave up both the car and its endowment. This mystery-mongering of his is the more irritating since, in all larger matters, his honesty and sincerity are transparent. He has nothing to conceal. Scandal has never touched him. In more than thirty years of public life,

no one has ever found any failure of loyalty with which to accuse him. His record proves him immune to ordinary temptations of ambition. The critics on his hearth fulminate, in the main, against his patience, and the fact that the trumpet has never been his instrument. He does not believe that the walls of Capitalism will topple at its breath. Dazzled by the goal, they are impatient of the road, and annoyed by his insistence that "the space between the 'is' and the 'isto-be' has got to be traveled." The rise of the party has been so rapid that they understate the solidity and strength of the resistance to it presented by habit, the actual organization of society, and the fears which their own ill considered, illogical, and ill tempered vociferations excite. Between his cautious reasonableness with its tender respect for tradition and romantic delight in beauty of form, and their impassioned unreasonableness, there is a constant internal warfare. It constitutes his major obstacle in the task of converting opinion.

No one knows that better than he. The life of no leader of a progressive party is a bed of roses; his pillow is adequately enough stuffed with thorns to satisfy the bitterest of his opponents or the most captious of his friends. Presumably he finds consolation in the fact, which acts as the final exasperation of his critics, that they know, even better than he knows, that the future of Labor in Britain is as closely tied up with him as its past has been. He made Labor government possible in 1924; he makes it possible, even probable, in 1928 or 1929.

T

HE PALACE of Montebello was alight. The illumination from doorways and lofty windows streamed down through miles of terraces and vistas, over gleaming statues and lines of guarding soldiers to the valley and the far-off spires of Milan.

The Bonapartes, once more gathered together under one roof-all but Lucien were scattered through the various apartments of the palace. They had come quite a way from the shabby lodgings of the Rue Pavillon -even from the house on the Via Malerbe, though that had not been without its dignity. No longer was life a question of shoes and hats for the girls, sixty-centime dinners for Napoleon, or for Lucien the signing of vouchers and shooing rats from a wine-barrel. Now there were robes and banquets quite imperial in splendor. Never outside of fairytale had there been so swift a climb and all due to a much criticized brother-a little man who would have been lost in any crowd, except for the fact that crowds had a way of opening up for him.

It was eight o'clock. Josephine's maid had disappeared; and she herself was clasping ornaments with enameled gold and black lions at wrists and shoulders and surveying

the effect in a full-length mirror. From a desk in the cabinet adjoining came the rapid scratch of a quill pen; but Napoleon looked up between the paragraphs that marched at doublequick across the pages. On his moody face, as he glanced through the doorway at the loveliness of upturned arms and bust and shoulder, was an expression of tenderness mingled with bitterness and despair. But Josephine, unconscious, only hummed an air that carried echoes of Gipsies, of far-off tropical isles, of voodoo women of Martinique. There lovely women were accustomed to dancing on volcanoes; and there were volcanoes smoldering in the eyes of the man who sat with poised pen in the next room. Yet when the quill dipped in the ink-well again, the letter to the Directors had all the usual vigor and despatch. In the lines one might have caught his own incisive stride, each word an echo of his boot-heel. The Directors, rulers of France, muddling things up there in Paris, should have heard and trembled. Strange dual nature that could burn with such devouring passion, yet drive the spur and crack the whip with such merciless precision.

Josephine, however, did not tremble, though for the moment her new position had lost something of its