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plural voting there is a great deal to be said. We live under what Aristotle called a democracy of the fifth class, in which only the lowest bear sway. The wise and good, the able and well-educated, are completely and utterly disfranchised. Their votes, until the revolution comes, will not decide the fate of any election. They pay the taxes, they do the work of the country, and for their pains they are unrepresented in the councils of the State. It was the advantage of plural voting -not an excessive advantage -that it did a very little to redress the balance. But Mr Asquith and his friends care not who supports them. The respect of the good and wise is nothing to them. It is heads they want, not brains. And so the plural voter stands in their way; and though he be not, like millions of women, a danger to the State, he must be ruthlessly suppressed.

The representation of universities, one would have thought, needed no defence. It is worth preserving, merely because it is there. It has made possible the aid of many scholars -such as Sir Richard Jebb, Mr Butcher, and Sir William Anson-who without it would never have sat and spoken at Westminster. The anomaly, if anomaly it be, is gracious and trivial; and surely any party that was not blinded by the mad fury of partisanship might have spared half a dozen distinguished opponents, when it knew that it started in the game with a clear lead of eighty Irish

men. The argument which Mr Asquith employed to justify the suppression of the University seats does credit neither to his intelligence nor to his sense of humour. "Take my own University of Oxford," said he.

"I took my degree. I

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was for some years a Fellow of my College. I have never had a vote for the University, and have not one now. Why?

.. Because I was not then in a position, and have never since been tempted to incur the otiose expenditure of, I think, something like £20." Mr Asquith's position is, we believe, unique and disgraceful. We do not suppose that there exists another graduate who, being a Fellow of his College, has resolutely refused to take his M.A. degree. It is idle to plead that he was too poor. He was not too poor when he was receiving the emoluments of a fellowship. A university does not live on the reflected glory of its alumni. They also must pay their Tpopeia; and that Mr Asquith, owing all to Oxford, should decline to pay its fees, and then make his refusal a reason for abolishing University representation, is a piece of cynicism which will not escape the eye even of the Labour Party.

For the rest, the Radicals lightened the debate with a jest after their own heart. "We intend," said Mr Harcourt, "and we hope that the Opposition will believe, although we do not expect they will believe, to have redistribution before the next General Election." Why should he hope? And if

he hoped, why should he not in his ear. A packed meeting, expect? He knows the record with every ticket - holder acof the Government in the way counted for, is a better solace of truth. He has not forgotten to his soul than no meeting at the Prime Minister's "debt of all. But he loves best to be honour." The reform of the pointed at in the street as one House of Lords, which will not who robbed Paul to pauperise "brook delay," is still in his Peter. So the song of the mind. Why, then, should he land has been stuffed into the hope to trick the Opposition a throats of a thousand raucous second time? Το use this gramophones, and serves the damaged form of words is empty heads for argument. If merely to convict himself of the world did not know Mr an inane gravity. Could he Lloyd George there might be smile, nothing would have per- votes in this antic. Even now suaded him to plead so foolish for the ignorant it is a danger. an excuse. From the moment The land demands a subtler that he refused to put a clause management and more faithful into the Bill undertaking that toil than the factories of monit should not come into opera- opolists. And if Mr Lloyd tion without a measure of George gave it to the people, redistribution, all the world what could the people do with knew that his assertion was it? The transfer might asmeaningless and insincere. To suage the malice of the envious. such a pitch has politics brought It would send the land out of us that a promise made by the cultivation. To ask the people, Government bench is received whatever that word means, to with loud and continuous take over the land, and still to laughter. But what matters burden the people with the it? The arch mountebank of weight of free trade, is not all is preparing a surprise. merely folly but criminal folly. He is angry at the ill-success It could have but one issueof his Insurance Act. He lives the ruin of people and land. on popularity and votes, as a And perhaps, if this object chameleon lives on air. He were achieved, Mr Lloyd will languish utterly if the general applause do not echo

George might be sated at last.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons.

BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

No. MCLXIII.

SEPTEMBER 1912.

VOL. CXCII.

OMAR, THE POLICEMAN OF BEYROUT.

"IF I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

A quaint conceit that of the all-conquering Macedonian. To change his truly magnificent personality, if for any other, then for that of a cynic philosopher who, living in one sort of a tub, had probably never tasted the luxury of the other, and apparently had not a civil remark to pass to a neighbour!

Personally, although I admit that a good many things in my position might bear improvement, I should be reluctant to barter away my own personality for that of anybody else, for fear that I might, after all, find that I had made a bad bargain. For I seem to remember that Damocles sat uncomfortably on the seat of Dionysius, that Abou Hassan's temporary exchange of places with the Caliph was not altogether successful, and that Sancho Panza was only too willing to resign the governorship of Barataria

VOL. CXCII.—NO. MCLXIII.

and return to his old position of squire to Don Quixote.

A man's own weaknesses, deficiencies, anxieties, and wants he presumably knows; he can only make a bare guess at his neighbour's. The Duke, for example, whose rentroll and position I am at times tempted to envy, may, for all that I know to the contrary, have a skeleton in his family cupboard or be a martyr to chronic attacks of toothache or indigestion.

Still, I found myself wondering the other day who or what I would choose to be, if it were a law of nature that at the end of a fixed period a man should be compelled to relinquish his own and take upon himself a new personality. A sea-gull, then, before all things, as being a bird that seems to have more friends and fewer enemies than most, that may be said to command three elements -earth, air, and water,- to live a happy, devil-may-care existence, and not to be over

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particular about the quality with impunity be be dumped

of its food. A male of that species, I need hardly add, as the trouble of laying and the responsibility of hatching eggs would act as drags upon an otherwise unfettered life.

Were I, however, compelled to retain my humanity, then, if I were not myself, I would be Omar, the policeman of Beyrout.

The policeman in Beyrout, be it said, is by no means a negligible quantity, and his office that is, if he really does his duty is anything but a sinecure. For Beyrout, with all its beauty, is an evil place to live in, and, in common with a good many other towns on the Levantine coast, is little more or less than a hotbed of iniquity. There is, of course, quite a large respectable element in the teeming population; but on the other hand it is a place where all forms of blackguardism and rascality are rife-a den of thieves where sinners from all nations congregate. True, the Syrian inhabitants are, or at any rate if left to themselves might be, more or less inoffensive; and there is a fair sprinkling of American, English, and German merchants and traders who carry on their business quietly under difficult circumstances. But unfortunately Greece and Italy, Turkey and Bulgaria, Egypt and Armenia seem, or seemed a few years back, to regard Beyrout as a sort of conveniently situated rubbishheap whereon all that was unsavoury or undesirable might

down. And the rubbish thus dumped down accumulates, and goes on accumulating, with the result that the seashore and back-streets of the town are inhabited by the greatest set of ruffians imaginable-men to whom murder only ceases to be a fine art because it is so commonly practised; women who only fall short of being Messalinas or Cleopatras because comeliness and opportunity for sin on an imperial scale are denied to them. Have I exaggerated? I think not. Driving with 8 friend one Friday morning along the seashore on our way to the Lebanon for a week's end, I saw a large and enthusiastic crowd, and heard loud shouts and revolver shots-the sound of which I had grown accustomed to associate with jubilation by day and violence by night.

"What is the kick-up?" I asked my friend, who, being an English resident in the town, might be expected to be better informed than myself.

"I've no idea; but I'll find out when we come back. I can ask my clerk-he is sure to know.'

And the clerk's tale, as repeated to me on the Monday night, was simply this. The crowd, the cheering, the revolver shots were so many greetings to the "boss Mussulman murderer" of the district on his triumphant return from

two years' deportation to Rhodes. It appeared that the

fellow was known to have been implicated in the murder at various times of no less than seven Christians. But "dead men tell no tales," and the loss of an odd Christian or two sits lightly on the conscience of the rulers of Beyrout. When, however, an eighth attempt had resulted in a non-suit, or, in other words, the intended victim had only been wounded instead of killed, and might therefore be expected to lodge a complaint at the British Consulate, a strong hint was conveyed to the disappointed hero that for two years to come his room would be more welcome in Beyrout than his company, and Rhodes was recommended as a pleasant place of residence. Now, however, his banishment was over, and he was at liberty to take up his interrupted career.

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Again, in the course of a brief visit to Cyprus, I came across a Scotsman fresh from Beyrout. "Mon," he said to me, "yon is an awfoo place. There were sax men murdered there on Saturday night, an' so I came away.' In point of fact, I believe that only five men had been actually murdered, the sixth victim being the murderer himself, who had run amuck with a revolver, and had been eventually shot down by the police.

A story that I heard of the awful cruelty practised by some women on another member of the sex will not bear repetition.

Plenty of scope, then, for police work, and it may be

added, plenty of policemen to do it. Unfortunately, where to over- police such a place would be impossible, the sufficiency of the police protection to the would-be respectable citizen, both in Beyrout and elsewhere, commonly depends even more on the quality than on the quantity of the police

Under-policed, then? Possibly so, but in the background-to him who knew the ropes-there always lay the possibility of an appeal unto Omar. Nominally by no means the Chief of the Police, though I fancy that he had reached a grade corresponding to that of our Inspector, Omar to the Englishman in Beyrout really and truly personified what Mr Grummer once claimed to personify in Ipswich: "law, civil power, and exekative."

Here, however, I must interpolate a few words as to what were nominally the two great powers in Beyrout-the Vali, and the Chief of the Police. The Vali, then, or Governor, a Turk, of course, rules a Levantine town or province on strictly Turkish principle,Turkish indeed, yet by no means original, as being borrowed from Rome. Verres, Pontius Pilate, and others practised it when the world was some two thousand years younger. First catch your hare, and then cook it. The hare, or in other words, the governorship, is, or as things may have been altered under the régime of the "Young Turks"-used to be, captured by the employment of wholesale bribery at Constantinople. Not

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