most people pronounce the name differently from the call; they speak of "cook-oo," while the bird calls "cukk00." Peewit is another call-name, though it does not give the call with accuracy. Butterbump, or bootherboomp, is a name which used to belong to the bittern eighty or a hundred years ago, when bitterns used to boom in the Lincolnshire fens; of late years, when bitterns have visited the fen country, they have generally been shot. Chiff-chaff is as good an imitative name as any; the veriest Cockney would know and remember a chiffchaff's note if he heard it once tumbling among the twigs in the wind. 'Chiff-chaff is an indisputably right name, because the soft "ch" is one of the few consonant sounds which can be heard and reproduced with certainty from a bird's call or song; and the sound "aff," perhaps, is another which is nearly the same in the bird's note as in the human voice. You get it again in "yaffle," or "yaffingale," which is a country name imitated from the jubilant laugh of the green woodpecker. But it is easy to see how differently the consonants are heard when you find the chaffinch's sharp, single note bringing it two country names, twink and spink. Eve-churr, again, names the bird at once; more prettily perhaps than nightjar, though both are good; eve-jar is a variant. Curlew looks as if it ought to be a name imitated from the cry, but the French courlieu, like the old French corlicus, a courier, probably goes back to currere and levis, one who runs lightly. Other birdnames are not imitative, but descriptive, or occasionally a mixture, as haychat, stonechat, whinchat, corn-crake is an alternative for the landrail. But reel-bird, for the grasshopper warbler, is purely descriptive; though the whirring sound which the bird makes at dusk is very like the running of a fisherman's reel with a light check.

Phrases and sentences imitating characteristic birds' songs go back to the beginnings of the language. Thomas Nash has one of the earliest lines in the poetry of spring, of a garden village:

In every street these tunes our ears do greet,

Cuckoo, jugjug, pu-we, to-witta-woo.

The nightingale and the owl are plain enough; but is "pu-we" the peewit, or possibly the thrush? The thrush sings two or three phrases very clearly. "Chip Joey" is one; in Buckinghamshire the villagers used to say it meant rain coming. "Billee knew it; he knew it, he knew it," is another; Tennyson brought the note into "The Throstle." The yellowhammer has a very old country song, "A-little-bit-of-bread-andno-chee-eese," one of those monotones which carry the full meaning of afternoons of high summer. The wryneck's cry comes with the cuckoo's, a cry of May mornings; you cannot find the right consonant for it, but "Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear," is something near it. Perhaps the most elaborate imitation is French; Audubon heard it from a peasant of the nightingale, and it may not be too old to set down again:

Le bon Dieu m'a donné une femme

Que j'ai tant, tant, tant, tant battue Que s'il m'en donne une autre

Je ne la batterais plus, plus, plus, plus,

Qu'un petit, qu'un petit, qu'un petit!

The oldest of all can only be guessed at. But possibly it belongs to the woodpigeon, and it has variants. One is "Take two sheep, David"; but that is clearly derived from the much older "Tak' two coos, tak' two." How did David get into the song? It used to be David among the children of a Hertfordshire village many years ago. But

"Tak' two coos," which seems to be a phrase belonging to every part of England, comes down from the time very The Spectator.

far off. Perhaps Walton's milk-maid knew it; perhaps Piers Plowman heard it "in a May morning on Malvern hills."

BY MR. S. H. SWINNY, M. A., It is probable that the Reforms have both gained and lost by the considerable time which has elapsed since the present Government came into office. After ten years of reaction, a Liberal Government regained power. Everywhere, among the workers at home, in South Africa, in Ireland-there were hopes that a new era had dawned; and not least in India, when it became known that the destinies of that country were to be entrusted to that great apostle of freedom, John Morley. The Liberal Ministry was formed, and the country in January, 1906, gave them the greatest majority which any English Government had enjoyed for generations. But in India year followed year, and except for a change in the name of the Secretary of State, and the bitterness that follows disappointment, there was nothing to tell the people of India that a Liberal Government was in power. It seemed the triumph of that specious pretence-the removal of India from the sphere of party-which means that India is to be eternally governed by an autonomous bureaucracy, the serene continuity of whose rule shall never be disturbed by a breath of popular sympathy. And while the people of India were growing sick with hope deferred, Lord Morley, so his apologists declared, was studying the Indian question, and painfully realizing the greatness of his burden. And now at last when even his warmest friends had given up hope, when those Indian leaders who had expressed their trust in him, had thereby lost the confidence of great numbers among their fellow-country

Editor of the Positivist Review men, he produces a scheme which, if it does not go very far, at least goes entirely in the right direction. It is certainly a case of "better late than never."

By this delay, the reception of the reforms in some quarters has been improved. Where men had ceased to hope for any reform, even the smallest and most shadowy advance is welcomedhow much more a substantial improvement in the political position of the Indians. But while some, sick with hope deferred, are full of gratitude, others have passed the stage at which gratitude is possible. They have definitely separated themselves from the existing order, and are not to be reconciled. Thus the delay in the Reform has greatly minimized its power for good. Even much wider changes would not restore the old era of good will, the old faith in peaceful and constitutional progress.

There is one great improvement in the actual Reform compared with the original suggestions of the Indian Government. The Advisory Council of Notables has disappeared. As foreshadowed, it would not have adequately represented the classes most interested in politics, and it would almost certainly have been reactionary. On the other hand, the popular representation on Legislative and Executive Councils is increased. In the Provincial Legislative Councils, the official majority is actually to disappear, the numbers to be increased, and the procedure amended. The Council of the Lower Provinces, to take one instance, will consist of forty-six members of

whom twenty will be elected in place of twenty of whom seven are elected. It will be seen, therefore, that the proportion of elected members is increased. So is the proportion of nonofficial members sitting by nomination, and some of these will represent interests which will not necessarily support the Government. But it is evident that this is a very different thing to a popular majority. It will be a gain that the official members will have to conciliate non-official support, and refrain from measures which rouse the antagonism of all sections of the community. But in ordinary times and with ordinary prudence, the Government will be able to get sufficient support from the non-official members to be secure of a majority.

There

Much, in fact, will turn on the skill of the popular leaders, their power of conciliating minorities and holding their own followers together. will be much danger that the immediate effect of the Reform will be to increase the differences between rival communities. The Government may yield to the temptation to tread in the footsteps of Sir Bamfylde Fuller and openly bid for the support of the Mahomedans, by promising them preferential treatment. And the Mahomedans may yield to the temptation of separating themselves from the mass of their countrymen with whose interests their own are ultimately bound up. It is for the true leaders of the people, whether Mahomedan or Hindu, to show their patriotism by a policy of conciliation which will put an end to these intestine feuds. Many, perhaps the majority, of Anglo-Indian administrators have always been ashamed of such a policy; and recent events must have taught even the most reckless how much easier it is to provoke such antagonisms than to allay them. Something will be gained by the mere increase in size. The Hindustan Review.

The new as

semblies will be less of Councils and more of Parliaments; and in such bodies there is a tendency to jealously guard privileges already obtained and to desire to extend them, in which almost unconsciously all the non-official members of the new Councils will sooner or later share. Moreover, the farcical procedure in the Viceroy's Council by which most of the elected members spoke first and one after the other, will now disappear. Amendments may be moved to the Budget, and there is little doubt that whatever their numbers the wishes of the popular leaders will receive more attention. But the late leader of the Liberal party, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, wisely said in speaking of Ireland:

If an instalment of representative control were offered to Ireland, or any administrative improvement he would advise the Nationalists thankfully to accept it, provided it was consistent and led up to their larger policy-but he repeated, it must be consistent and lead up to the larger policy. To secure good administration was one thing, but good government could never be a substitute for government by the people themselves.

Judged by this test, the Reform initiated by Viscount Morley should be accepted by the Indians-not of course as a satisfaction of their demandsbut as an instalment which in making the Councils more representative of the Indian people, may well pave the way for making them truly representative.

But if the Indians accept this Reform with gratitude, they must not let that gratitude blind them to legitimate causes of discontent. The Partition of Bengal still remains; their fellow-countrymen are still in prison without trial or opportunity of defence; the drain of wealth still continues. Assuredly, India has need of the patriotism of every one of her sons.

The sudden retirement of the French Ministry from the Chamber and from office seems to have been due to a purely personal and accidental cause. It is easy, of course, to assign political reasons for it in the unsettlement created by various disquieting influences, and exhibiting itself periodically in attacks on the administration and policy of the Government. There are the recurring labor troubles, the financial anxieties caused by repeated Budget deficits and by the probable results of the income-tax and old age pensions, the purchase of the Western Railway-a public benefit, but involving unknown liabilities hereafter-and the thoroughly unsatisfactory condition of the Navy, as revealed by the report of a Commission, which was the subject of the fatal debate. These things are prominent in the leading French newspapers-especially in those which are most read outside France-but we see no evidence that the electorate generally is anxious, or that the Chamber takes them to heart. The Ministry fell at the end of a debate which should have been exciting, but was generally dull, and at the fagend of a Session that had dragged ou so unexpectedly that a third of the members had gone on their holidays, some of them to promote inter-Parliamentary good-fellowship on the shores of the Baltic. M. Delcassé, who reappeared in politics early last year for the first time after his enforced retirement at the "Morocco crisis" of 1905, and is President of the Naval Inquiry Commission, made a bitter attack on the Ministry, some of whose members had been active in forcing him out of office. M. Clemenceau, who is stated for some days to have shown signs of fatigue and illness, made an entirely unnecessary rejoin

der. A charge of neglecting the Navy, he said in substance, came very badly from a Minister who had concurred in that neglect on the part of his colleagues at a time when, by his foreign policy, he was conducting the State to disaster. M. Delcassé was roused to fury; he attracted the sympathy of a number of the ordinary supporters of the Premier, and the irreconcilable Monarchists with the unified Socialists, at present equally irreconcilable, combined against the Ministry in the Chamber, as their followers had in the bye-election at Abbeville, when a Monarchist won by the help of 2,200 Socialist votes. Ministers were thus defeated on a technical motion, made no effort to retrieve their fortunes-as they might have done on a direct issue-and walked out. Paraphrasing the account given by the Temps, we may say that at eight o'clock M. Clemenceau raised a storm, and that twenty minutes later he had been swept away, and refused to attempt to recover himself. The affair rather reminds us of Lord Rosebery's pusillanimous resignation on cordite.

As Lord Palmerston wrote on a celebrated occasion, "I have had my titfor-tat with John Russell, and have turned him out." That is precisely M. Delcassé's attitude, but he seems to have gained a barren victory. The division list shows a split in the three Republican groups of the Chamber, which can only be ascribed to a sudden impulse of sympathy for him in a tired House; and, under the system of voting which was in force till this week, it still seems possible-though M. Clemenceau has declared otherwise -that the Ministry might have escaped defeat. And, on general grounds, the defeat was undeserved. Apart from finance, which must pre

sent insuperable difficulties to all Ministries in the present condition of the Chamber and French politics, the record of this Ministry was distinctly good. It had maintained itself longer than any other among the forty-seven Cabinets of the Third Republic, despite frequent intrigues among aspiring supporters who believe entirely in "rotation in office"; and in a French Ministry stability is a merit in itself. It had coped, not altogether unsuccessfully, with recurrent Labor troubles, in spite of Socialist hostility and the sympathies of many of its own Radical Socialist supporters; and, if it had not yet reformed the Navy, the evils in that service are of such long standing, that it was a task of extreme difficulty. It had disposed successfully of the irritating questions set up by the application of the law of separation of Church and State, and had given the Church better terms perhaps than Monarchists and Vatican had allowed her to deserve; and it had done something to check ultra-Protectionism. In foreign policy, though M. Delcassé justly took credit in his outburst for beginning the policy of en

The Economist.

tentes and alliances, his work has been

carried on effectively by M. Pichon, whom nobody will suspect of inclination towards a "spirited"—and dangerous-course. The Morocco question is out of the way, and the understandings with Russia and Great Britain are stronger than ever. Sir Edward Grey's policy of ententes has not borne practical fruit as yet. But the friendly understanding with France is all to the good, and we are glad to think that, pending a General Election, there is no reason to expect any great change in French policy or in the composition of the Government. An excellent successor to M. Clemenceau would have been found in M. Bourgeois, who has learnt much at the Hague Conference and otherwise about foreign policy since his fall in 1896; but a still better choice is that of M. Briand, the Minister of Justice, whose judgment and caution has effected a settlement of the ecclesiastical difficulties, and who, though a confessed agnostic, has been liberal to the Roman Catholics in spite of his own party and the Clerical leaders.

Mr. James Lane Allen carefully explains to the readers of "The Bride of the Mistletoe" that the book is not a novel, but a story, and that it is to be followed by two other books, one also a story; the other, judging by its second title, "An Interpretation," an explanation of the first. When an author feels it necessary to explain that he is going to explain it would be hardly courteous to say that one understood him, and an attitude of civil bewilderment becomes Mr. Allen's readers until he chooses to give them further light than he bestows upon

them in his story. It seems to show a husband and wife at the fatal moment in which the woman is forced to admit to her mind the fear that has long haunted her heart, and to acknowledge that she is no longer necessary to him. The love of the two had been very deep and the cessation of its mutuality not only slew her happiness but cast the shadow of its blight upon many a lovely trait deemed inborn and perennial but really rooted and grounded in that happiness, and the morrow morn finds her not only different in feeling but different in soul. The tale