resemblance between the government of the Empire between Diocletian and Justinian, and the socialistic legislation of England in our own day. There is the enormous difference that the industrial life of the Empire was very primitive, there being no massproduction of utilities for the masses. What we are now witnessing may not be, as Spengler thinks, the slowly advancing paralysis of "Faustian culture, but the results of imperfect adaptation to the sudden demands of mechanization and of modern city life. I am disposed to think that this sudden transplantation of the countryman, within three or four generations, into the unnatural surroundings of the large town, has more to do with social unrest than is usually supposed. The obsessions of ill-usage which generate the revolutionary temper seem to occur almost exclusively among the town-workers. In material comfort, they are better off than ever before; but they suffer from a chronic malaise which makes them hate all the conditions of their lives.

The town-worker does not consciously recognize the call of the country; he only feels the aching of racial habits, thousands of years old, and now suddenly thwarted. But I think it is significant that our war-poetry from 1914 to 1919, the poignant sincerity of which goes to our hearts as we read it, constantly dwells on the rural life of England. This poetry is indeed a revelation of the national character, and as such might have been discussed in my second chapter. There was none of the swashbuckler boastfulness of earlier English poetry, like the famous speech of Henry V before Agincourt, in Shakespeare, which the Germans recommended to their own officers. There was plenty of the grimly humorous realism which is thoroughly English. But above all, the lads about to die saluted, like Owen the Harrovian, the green fields and the school I know"; they listened, like Julian Grenfell, for the song of the blackbird;

they thought wistfully, like Rupert Brooke, of the peace and holy quiet" of Grantchester Mill. The age of machinery has forced a large proportion of the hand-workers to lead a life which is not natural to human beings, and there has been no time to adapt the organism to these new conditions. Samuel Butler's fable of the Erewhonians who broke their machines showed deep insight under the form of bantering satire; such a choice may actually be made within the next century and a half, even in this country, though we cannot tell how the gradual reversion to simpler conditions will be brought about. There seems already to be some decline in the acquisitiveness which for a time spurred a naturally lazy people into thrift, industry and hard work.

If there is any gift to civilization which the world owes to England, and which has perhaps produced all the fruit which it is capable of bearing, it is our great discovery of popular representation, of parliamentary government. At the present time, we find not only that many nations have fallen back upon one-man rule, but that in those which still retain democratic institutions the politicians are regarded with general contempt, or, as in France, with hatred. We can no longer dismiss, as mere political cynicism, the words of Hobbes. "The Laws of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and in sum doing to others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be obeyed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. . . . For though [men]obtain a victory by their unanimous endeavour against a foreign enemy, yet afterwards, when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their

interests dissolve and fall again into a war amongst themselves." The proved impotence of democratic government to curb anti-social conspiracies gives fresh confirmation to the wise words of Abraham Lincoln: "It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies."

Is the fire of patriotism burning brightly enough to save our society from disintegration and our empire from disruption? We hear too few exhortations in the spirit of Edmund Burke: "A great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our station and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our situation and ourselves, we ought to . . . elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.' These are the sole conditions under which little England can maintain her almost miraculous and always precarious greatness; and without them our hard-won liberties hang on a slender thread. Only a nation which is one in spirit can remain free.

August, 1926.

W. R. INGE.