sport, and war is contrasted with the ideals of our State Church; the squabbles of our Government over religious education at home, and its profound horror of Chinese slavery in South Africa and of oppression on the Congo, with "pandering to priestcraft" in Ireland, and "peddling opium in China against the wish of the Chinese."

Our author is immensely struck with the work done by "The Great Unpaid,"-a name which, he says, is truthful rather than humorous. He points out that "the country Towns, Boroughs, and Districts, and Parishes, and all the machinery of their government, are entirely managed by the voluntary labours of those with the wealth, leisure, and ability to do 80. They sit as Magistrates, they govern the town as Councillors and Aldermen, they look after the roads, sanitation, watersupply, lighting, schools, poor-houses, and are expected by the powers that be in Parliament to put into and keep in working order educational and licensing enactments; and recently the whole reorganisation of the territorial forces, or new Army Bill, and the putting into effect of the Small Holdings Act, are to be largely entrusted to them for their successful operation. That they undertake all these duties, that they do them so well, and with so little

- almost no - friction, and

In

with so little dissatisfaction to those whom they thus govern, is," he is inclined to think, "the most impressive feature of English life." As to the conditions under which England waxed grew great, he points out how we have changed from our former habits and ideas. We were an agricultural people above all things else,-love of the land was deep rooted. 1901, 77 per cent of the population had become urban, and only 23 per cent remained rural. Yet he shows clearly that the accumulation of land in comparatively few hands, since the days of Elizabeth when land was plentiful, is but the natural consequence of investment by the abler men who make fortunes, and that many of England's largest landowners to-day are new people of this type.

Individualism, self-dependence, was the characteristic of our people. Our American shows how one party at least in the State is coquetting openly with Socialism. stating that, roughly speaking, one person out of every seventy is now in receipt of an old-age pension, he says,

After

"Is human nature a different thing in this island? Will men save here who are being saved for? Will men work here when others must work for them? On the contrary, less here than in almost any other country. They are slow, stolid, cold-blooded, and selfish. A fight, or drink, or sport, these rouse them, but little else does..

...

The British workman's savings bank deposits are only some 265 million dollars. It would take three times this amount to pay his drink bill for one year. But nobody dares take his cup away from him. Instead of that it is proposed to promise him support in his old age, so that he need not save at the public - house in the meanwhile.

"This matter of old-age pensions is an insidiously elastic form of outdoor relief, which will be stretched to suit the political exigencies of the hour, and a very enticing invitation to shiftlessness, to trust in God and let the powder get damp. It is the beginning of the change of English attitude from frank and free individualism to the fashionable present day effeminacy of State support."

"We have seen," he says, "how neither opportunity nor responsibility has been denied to any man. Any man may rise in church, in State, or society. So much has ample freedom done. Men made England, and kept her inviolate. But now what a change! At the hour of this writing practically every important legislative movement is in some sort a plea and a plan to soften men, to lessen their responsibilities, and to make them feel that they need not earn their opportunities. This may do in some Utopian kingdom of which I know nothing, but it is death to

of its constituent parts. "When one remembers that there is no written constitution here, no infallible or inviolable body of law, but that each emergency is met by common sense and solved by the application of a kind of working worldly wisdom, one admires the more the calm way in which each, from the highest to the lowest, submits, is satisfied, and goes his way."

Of the King he says, "He is the cheapest investment and the most valuable asset England has to-day. Whenever he has taken a part in national affairs it has been for the glory, the peace, and prosperity of his country. When he meddles it is not to advertise himself, not for the humiliation and undoing of his country, but for her honour. . . The King is the people plus the experience, the knowledge, the impartial situation, and unprejudiced mind, which the people

ought to have before making a decision or passing judgment. . . . His wisdom is not the wisdom of the people, with the knowledge they have; but the wisdom of the people, with the knowledge and experience he has. It is the knowledge of many, filtered through an unique experience, and this comes close to being the acme of common-sense."

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Most interesting is his analysis of the House of Lords. After stating that "it still remains the most democratic institution in England," and that "it may still claim for itself to be the Witenagemot, or Gathering of Wise Men,' and that "one wonders why it does not defend itself along those lines," he adds, "It is not a house of birth or ancestry, for it is composed to-day to an overwhelming extent of successful men from almost every walk in life." "The Englishman would not be what he is, nor would he in the least be transmitting his very valuable Saxon heritage, if he gave up his democratic custom of an aristocracy of power for the feeble continental custom of an aristocracy of birth."

the

And then he proceeds: "William the Conqueror divided England among commanders of his army, and conferred about twenty earldoms; not one of these exists to-day." Nor do any of the honours conferred by any sovereign from William Rufus to John.

"All the dukedoms created from the institution of Ed

ward the Third, down to the commencement of the reign of Charles the Second, except Norfolk, and Somerset, and Cornwall-the title held by the Prince of Wales-have perished. Winchester and Worcester, the latter merged in the Dukedom of Beaufort, are the only marquisates older than George the Third. Of all earldoms conferred by the Normans, Plantagenets, and Tudors, only eleven remain, and six of these are merged in higher honours. The House of Lords to-day does not number among its members a single male descendant of any of the barons who were chosen to enforce Magna Charta. The House of Lords does not contain a single male descendant of the peers who fought at Agincourt. There is only a single family in all the realm, Wrottesleys, which can boast of a male descent from the date of the institution of the Garter, 1349. In a word, the present House of Lords is conspicuously and predominantly a democratic body,

chosen from the successful of the land. Seventy of the peers were ennobled on account of distinction in the practice of the law alone. The Dukes of Leeds trace back to a cloth-worker; the Earls of Radnor to a Turkey merchant; the Earls of Craven to a tailor; the families of Dartmouth, Ducie, Pomfret, Tankerville, Dormer, Romney, Dudley, Fitzwilliam, Cowper, Leigh, Darnley,

Hill, Normanby, all sprang from London shops and counting-houses, and that not so very long ago.

"Ashburton, Carrington, Belper, Overstone, Mount Stephen, Hindlip, Burton, Battersea, Glenesk, Aldenham, Lister, Avebury, Burnham, Biddulph, Northcliffe, Nunburnholme, Winterstoke, Rothschild, Brassey, Revelstoke, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Michelham, and others, too many to mention, have taken their places among the peers by force of long purses gained in trade.

"Lord Belper, for example, created in 1856, is the grandson of Jedediah Strutt, who was the son of a small farmer, and made wonderful ribbed stockings...

"The Saxon system still prevails. Those who push themselves to the front, those who accumulate a residue of power in the shape of leisure, are called upon to govern so that the others need not be bothered by such matters. It has been harder in some ages than in others for the man, unassisted by birth, to rise. But there has been no time in England when it has been wholly impossible. As a consequence of this, there is probably no body of men in the world who combine such a variety of experience and knowledge amongst them as the House of Lords. There are one or more representatives of every branch of human industry and professional skill.

more

"Strange as it may seem, there is no assembly where a man could go-granted that all the peers were present where he would be certain of getting sound advice upon every subject, from higher mathematics and abstruse law down to the shoeing of a horse or the splicing of a cable.

"Why the English themselves, or, at any rate, certain of their number, wish to abolish this assembly of the picked brains and ability in every walk in life, from literature and chemistry to beer-brewing and railroadbuilding, I, as an American, cannot understand. It is the culmination of the essential philosophy of Saxondom. This is what the race has been at for two thousand years, not to be too much governed by, but to permit to govern, those who have proved themselves most capable of doing so."

Of the House of Commons he has less to say. It is

"the most cosmopolitan, the most influential, and the most interesting legislative assembly in the world." But

66

one wonders, as one sits and listens to this hodge-podge of questions and answers about everything under this British sun that never sets, how anything is ever done. The present Parliament (1908) contains six hundred and seventy members. More than one-eighth of the total are irreconcilable Irishmen, who are there to bribe, bully,

or balk the House, if thereby Ireland may have a parliament of its own. Fifty-four are labour members. Think for a moment of the problem of dealing with the affairs of the greatest Empire we know in such an assembly, with its multitude of interests and its variety of personalities. No wonder

there is conciliation, even to the point of flabbiness, otherwise nothing could be done."

"I believe," he says, "that the House of Lords is, as a rule, a surer interpreter of the sober wishes of the English people as a whole than the House of Commons." Our American has much to say about how England is falling behind in the race for Commerce. He speaks of our "national unanimity in playing ostrich, and burying our heads in the sand on the question of England's continued commercial supremacy"; our always wide advertising of the fact that England still leads in the volume and value of her export and import trade over Germany, or the United States, or other rivals, but no honest analysis of the facts.

"What boots it how fast England goes ahead, if her rivals go ahead faster than she does? What a silly fellow we should dub the youth who congratulates himself upon having grown so much stronger, so much heavier, so much taller in ten years, if all his rivals had during that time grown even stronger, heavier, and

taller than he. Between 1886 and 1906 Germany increased her exports of manufactured goods $415,000,000. During the same period England increased hers $300,000,000. Far more important even than that, Germany is keeping her men at work in her industries and on her soil.

In 1894 Germany exported 26 out of every 10,000, in 1907 she exported 4 out of every 10,000 men. In 1894 England exported 9 out of every 10,000 men, in 1907 she exported 40 out of every 10,000 men. Between 1903 and 1907 the increase of men leaving England for other countries was 61 per cent, and unemployment greater in 1907 than for

was

ten years previously." He shows that from 1892 to 1905 England's wealth has increased by no more than her population, while in Germany wealth has increased by 60 per cent over increase of population. "These figures," he says, "present a problem that cannot be laughed away. If the income tax and death duties are to be increased, then capital, which is the very blood of increased commercial and industrial prosperity, is gradually thinned and weakened." He points out the great flow of capital into foreign investments, and says that it is a bad sign, "since it means that English capital is drifting away from use in England, and for the employment of English labour, to assist in the development of rival