they have sadly degenerated. wear fantastic garments, they The distinguished men of cut capers, they cry aloud, that letters, who (we hear) are re- the attention of the mob shall tained at enormous expense to be fixed upon their persons, not tell the public what to buy, upon their works. Their two cannot boast the literary touch most stalwart allies are photowhich marked the smallest an- graphy and the press. They nouncement that appeared in are miserable if they are not 'The Spectator.' Evil com- granting interviews to "smart" munications corrupt good man- reporters, or composing interners, and the advertisers soon views with themselves for imcatch the tone prevailing in mediate publication. At the the adjacent columns. An anec- mere glimpse of a camera's eye dotic style persuades the pur- their faces brighten, and when veyors of quack medicines to reporters and photographers give the "life-histories" and desert them, they do their best portraits of unimportant per- to retrieve their position by sons who soothe their imaginary writing pompous letters to the diseases with pills. That is the papers. It is superfluous to calslipshod fashion of to-day, and culate what they might achieve no modern journal, advertising if they did not persist in being a stand from which the King's their own agents in advance. entrance into the city might The hoarding is their proper be viewed, could conclude the sphere, and they must reach notice with words so shapely it at all costs. At first no as these: "Nor may they fear doubt they assure themselves the Night's Approach ere the that notoriety is merely a Cavalcade be past." means to an end, that it is in fact a modest (or immodest) stepping-stone to fame. But very soon they begin to worship notoriety for its own sake. They live only in the presence of a crowd; their heads grow dizzy with applause, and they count a newspaper of small interest that does not contain some tribute to their grandeur. Europe may be at war: it is nothing to them. They look upon earthquakes and floods with the dull jealousy of rivals, who see their own glory outshone. And nothing but an amiable reference to themselves, even on a back-page, can restore their equanimity. The disproportionate place which advertisement holds in modern life is bad enough. Far worse is the habit of selfadvertisement, which grows daily, and which by its evil example is destroying the amenity of most professions. Lawyers and preachers, actors and writers, politicians and men of science, are jostling one another in the market-place to get the best corner for their tub. The chief end of all is to excite curiosity. They pursue their craft with what spirit they may when that chief end is attained. Meanwhile their pride is centred in notoriety. They would rather encounter ridicule than silence. They Thus a new race has been born in to the world, a race of which the quiet advertisers of the eighteenth century had no suspicion. And a new skill has kept pace with its new art. Where there are SO many masters it is perhaps invidious to choose; but it is not a little comforting to our national pride that of the three greatest two are of our own race, even if they cannot scale the Olympian height on which stands the supreme conqueror. Messrs Roosevelt, Shaw, and Cainethese, then, have reached the Pole of triumphing advertisement. They are notorious even in the remotest corners of the earth. Surely there breathes no single human being who does not know that Mr Roosevelt is an apostle of the strenuous life, that Mr Shaw wears flannel and eats herbs, that Mr Caine displays a striking resemblance to the late William Shakespeare. What these eminent men have done or will do besides does not matter. They "bulk large "-that is the correct expression-in the public eye, and we are not permitted to forget it. Mr Roosevelt is, as we have said, the greatest of them all. He has been given a larger field in which to display his talent. He has been photographed a hundred times more than any other living man. His smile, fixed by the camera, is familiar from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. It has beIt has bewitched the lions of Africa. It will astonish the lion-hunters of London when it visits us next year. In brief, it pervades the earth; it is reflected in the sun and moon, and when the long-expected oomet swims into our ken, there in its tail will lurk the all-embracing smile of Theodore Roosevelt. But if he who was lately President of the United States holds the first place unchallenged, Messrs Shaw and Caine run neck and neck for the second. At present it looks as though Mr Shaw would outstrip his competitor. Whichever wins, the world remains unshaken. Fortunately, the same fate always overtakes the amateur of self-advertisement. He wears out the public patience; he feeds the popular curiosity to satiety, until he becomes a finished bore. And he finds his punishment at last in the seclusion of a quiet suburb, where not even the policeman at the corner deigns to recognise him. This habit of advertisement, ludicrous as it appears in general, is most dangerous when it is affected by politicians, since, by putting power and influence into the wrong hands, it may do serious damage to an empire. Mr Lloyd-George, for instance, is the child of advertisement. Ever since the days of the Boer War, when he went about the country denouncing the policy of Great Britain, he has been a marked man. He has been pointed out to all as the contemner of his own land, as the man who escaped from from Birmingham disguised as a policeman. And since notoriety takes no account of brains, or patriotism, or service done to the State, he has profited by what should be a disgrace. With the utmost energy he has kept himself drum. The Chancellor disbefore the public gaze. His speech at Newcastle was nothing more than an affiche from beginning to end. It disdained facts, and it suppressed argument. But it displayed all the ready gifts of an expert advertiser. Mr Lloyd-George beat the drum, and blew the whistle. He applauded his policy in the tone of a cheap-jack at a country fair, who before he sells his unwelcome wares attempts to establish a link of false confidence between himself and his clients. He bragged that the richest men in the House of Commons sat on the Socialist benches, though he did not explain that, as their wealth did not come from that falling industry, the land, their interests were not jeopardised. He repeated the same threadbare jests about the Dukes, whom he imagines a class apart, and from whom he hopes to extract a useful election cry; and he proved in every word of his speech a profound contempt for his audience. Without regarding the possible result of his recklessness, he did his best, as he had already done at Limehouse, to excite class against class, and to stir up those animosities, vague and insincere, which most easily lead the dupes of democracy to revolution. In brief, he achieved an advertisement, and was content. But when we discount the value of the advertisement, and attempt to arrive at the meaning, if any, of Mr LloydGeorge's words, we instantly discern the emptiness of the coursed of the land in the familiar strain of ignorance and prejudice. He appears to believe that land has a definite, unchanging value, like a postage stamp, a value which is irrespective of what lies beneath it or what is put upon it. If once he gets his valuation, he thinks that the land may be conveyed from the private owner to public bodies without inquiry or examination. He will annex, on behalf of the State, mines as farms, developed land as prairie and, having fined the owner for not building upon his own land, he will fine him doubly for daring to claim a profit because he has built on it. So inveterate an enemy is he to employment, that he cannot contemplate the present prosperity of the Rhondda Valley without a feigned fury of indignation. "In the year 1851 the total population of the Valley was only a thousand,” he said, "to-day the population is 132,000." Did you ever hear anything so disgraceful? living has been found for 131,000 more than worked there fifty years ago. And the landlords have got their profit out of the transaction. It is bad enough that hard toil has been inflicted upon thousands of honest voters, who if they and Mr LloydGeorge had their way would eat the bread of luxurious idleness by robbing Dukes. It is worse still that a royalty of sixpence a ton should have been paid to anybody. Mr LloydGeorge, no doubt, would have A preferred that the Rhondda of the community. More than Valley should have been bought as waste land by the State, and kept these many years inactive. Mr Lloyd-George does not believe in "unearned increment." He is not quite sure what it means. Like Mr Ure, the magnanimous Lord Advocate, the gentleman who does not know how to apologise, he believes it to be a disease which afflicts the land and nothing but the land. He does not perceive that he himself is as fine an example of unearned increment as can be discovered. The books of reference tell us that he receives £5000 a-year from a generous country. What has he done to earn so large a sum? How can he compare his own services to the services of a zealous and intelligent landlord? It is not, in fact, to his own energy or energy or self-sacrifice that he owes his income. He owes it rather to the mere accident of a form of government. If he had not been returned by his constituents to the House of Commons, had there, indeed, been no House of Commons, these five thousand pounds would not be his. The British democracy was none of his making. Why then should he profit by it? Had he stayed among his own Welsh hills he would have been precisely the same man. But he would not have had £5000 a-year. Clearly it is a case of unearned increment, and as such it should be handed over to his constituents, or it should be heavily taxed for the profit VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXIX. that: why are not all human brains valued by an expert as the land of the landlords is to be valued? Then we should know precisely what a brain was worth. It would not vary in value any more than the land is to vary. It would be esteemed not by what was in it, nor by what it could do. Brain is brain as land is land. And it would be found that Mr Lloyd-George might profitably be given thirty shillings a-week, while the rest of his salary, being unearned increment, should go to the comfort of the poor. "What better use," asked he in his lachrymose voice, "than to use it for the picking up the broken, healing, curing the sick, bringing a little more light, comfort, and happiness to the aged?" We are not so destitute of heart as willingly to deprive Mr Lloyd - George of the privilege of doing good, which he would confine to the single class of landlords, the butt of his constant malice and invective. By far the most mischievous passage in Mr Lloyd-George's speech is its peroration. cunning blend of cant and truculence, it is nicely calculated to elevate the predatory instinct into a virtue. While it flouts the law, it is cunningly devised to bring tears to the eyes of all those who do not wish to work for their living. "Where did the table of the law come from?" he demands in his most bombastic manner. As a matter of fact, it came from the Houses 3 в of Parliament; but that answer is too simple for acceptance. "Whose finger inscribed it? These are the questions which will be asked." They will not be asked, since they stand in no need of an answer. "The answers are fraught with peril for the order of things the Peers represent, but they are fraught with rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude who have been treading the dusty road," &c., &c. It would not be easy to find a worse specimen than this of what the Americans call "guff." It has no meaning, and it sounds like philanthropy. Its worst vice is that it is designed to deceive the voter into a belief that he will be benefited by the transference of property from one class to another. The voter can be benefited only by himself, by his industry, by his sacrifice, by his selfreliance. Mr Lloyd-George's sentimentalising can only make him poorer, idler, and more corrupt. And if Mr LloydGeorge has not learned this simple lesson of morals and finance, he is not fit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. To argue with our present rulers is a difficult and thankless task. They have closed their ears to the voice of reason, and listen only to the dictates of passion. While Mr Lloyd-George invites the electors to lay violent hands on property of all kinds, the most 1 of his colleagues would destroy the House of Lords in a spirit of vindictiveness, and Mr Keir Hardie is pleased to threaten the throne itself. Only satire could deal with these demagogues adequately, and even if we had a satirist, satire would still seem out of fashion. Far happier was the sixteenth century: if her sins were no more heinous than ours, at least she had humourists intrepid enough to turn them into ridicule. Our own deficiencies and her better fortune are brought vividly before us by Mr F. G. Stokes' admirable edition of the famous satire, 'Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.' 1 Mr Stokes has performed a difficult task with the greatest skill. His lucid introduction and erudite notes have recovered for us, what is notoriously evanescent, every point in an ancient controversy. He has succeeded even in his translation, an enterprise which might well have seemed hopeless. Not a little of the satire resides in the bad Latin of the 'Epistolæ,' and it is a hazardous work to attempt to represent absurdities of diction in plain English. That Mr Stokes has produced something like the effect of the original by the use of a deliberately archaic style is vastly to his credit; and now for the first time those who have no Latin may get some idea of the wise and witty original. The events which immediately inspired the Epistola' were simple enough. Ône Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum: The Latin Text with an English Rendering, Notes, and an Historical Introduction by Francis Griffin Stokes. London: Chatto & Windus. |