Page images
PDF
EPUB

enthusiasm, but the work which is yet to be done the long vistas and the yet unfolded close. It is not what the State has done or can do which inspires, but the infinitely nobler possibilities which arise through the voluntary co-operation of men to wring from nature and life the utmost they can give." Such, in brief, is the problem to be solved, the hope to be entertained in England, and if we are to make small ownership a success we must follow resolutely in Ireland's footsteps.

The best methods of production, then, and co-operation-these are the first lessons that the small owners have to learn, and a man must be found with knowledge enough and enthusiasm enough to teach them. The prosperity of Denmark has been established entirely by the faithful mastery of these two lessons, and if our small owners are to cultivate the land profitably and to compete with other nations they must be equipped as well as, or even better than, those other nations. And this brings us to a point of equal importance. It is useless to ask the credit of the State for the purchase of small holdings, it is useless to establish a race of farmers upon the soil, if you do not also protect the fruits of their toil. How can our small owners compete successfully with the small owners of Denmark, who are not cursed with the dogma of Free Trade, and who enjoy in addition all the advantages of knowledge, cooperation, and cheap freights?

VOL. CXCII.-NO. MCLXIII.

Many years ago we destroyed by our fiscal system the agriculture of England. We have turned our arable land into pasture. We have discarded the plough to make ranches. We have been guilty of the same folly which our ancestors deplored in the sixteenth century. We have found it easier and more advantageous, because it demands less labour, to breed sheep and cattle than to grow corn. Where on the countryside men once lived we now find "a necessary brood of cattle" more profitable; and truly we may echo the words written by Harrison in his 'England more than three hundred years ago. "If it should come to pass," said he, "that any foreign invasion should be made which the Lord God forbid for His mercy's sake!-then should these men find that a wall of men is far better than bags of money, and complain of the want when it is too late to seek remedy." So to-day the greed and folly of Free Trade send our farmers across the sea to Australia.

It is idle and useless, then, to promote a policy of small ownership unless at the same time we pass a measure of Tariff Reform. If we are the dumping - ground of all the farm produce of the world, how shall it pay us to grow our own?

There is but one method of restoring the fugitives to the country, and that is to make farming profitable. There is but one way to make farming profitable, and that is to protect our markets against the free ingress of farm

2 E

produce from protected countries. Nor in this business is it only pounds, shillings, and pence which are involved. There are involved also the happiness and dignity of the country. A slur lies upon the nation that imports its corn and its eggs and its butter from abroad. We shall free ourselves from the slur by no other means than by the wise teaching and encouragement of agriculture and the fair protection of our own markets.

It is to this point of Tariff Reform that the the argument always comes back. The Free Trade Government, in promising the country folk better houses and a minimum wage, is indulging illusory hopes. There is no hoard of money which can be asked to provide for these privileges. The cottages of the countryside will be better built when higher wages enable the labourers to pay a fair rent for them. The wages of the labourers will enable them to pay this rent when the fruit of their toil is adequately protected. To suggest that a man should be better paid and live in greater comfort, and at the same time to insist upon a policy of "cheap food," is to take the science of politics very lightly indeed. A minimum wage for agricultural labourers would have an immediate and disastrous effect.

[ocr errors]

A large number, especially of those who are old or weak, would be discharged at once and for ever. More land than before would be turned to grass. Many small farms, which cannot be worked by the farmer and his family, would be given up, and absorbed into larger holdings. The Insurance Act has already laid upon the farmers of England a burden heavier than they can bear, and, as was pointed out the other day in The Irish Homestead," "in a country whose industries are all in competition with foreign countries, adding fifty per cent to wages by Act of Parliament might take fifty per cent off the national power of paying wages at all.” That is excellent good sense, as should be apparent to any but a Radical free-trader, who believes that there is a milch cow, called capital, in every village, which may be asked to provide the labourer with whatever sustenance he needs. There is no such milch cow; a profit may be obtained from the land only by the work of the hand and the sweat of the brow. And as the security of a country depends upon those who are adscripti gleba, we would urge, with what force we may, the adoption of a fair system of ownership, and such a measure of Tariff Reform as would make that ownership dignified and profitable.

IN MEMORIAM: ANDREW LANG.

THE melancholy death of Mr Andrew Lang has been the occasion of a multitude of tributes in the press which bear unequivocal testimony to his remarkable position in the world of journalism and letters. That he was at the head of his profession, that he was the deacon of his craft, was tacitly conceded or assumed by all. There were differences of opinion as to the intrinsic value of his work. Among so many voices some must have been raised by persons unfitted, from constitution or training, to do justice to his peculiar merits. But of malicious detraction or premeditated disparagement scarce a sound has reached our ears.

In attempting to commit to paper for remembrance some notes on the salient characteristics of his temperament and genius, it is natural that the first thought should be of his unique versatility. Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, to quote once more an epitaph which has been in great requisition; and the remainder of the sentence may also be applied to him without any qualification. For the best part of quarter of a century he had been a regular contributor to 'Maga. During that period he wrote, inter alia, of ghosts, of Homer, of 'Edwin Drood,' of Queen Mary, of games, of certain favourite byways of history. These are but a few of the subjects on

which he discoursed to the world with a felicity and a charm all his own. He could not "bring it twangingly off" save on themes which interested

him. Fortunately the range of his interests was unusually extensive. Yet he would never have been able to display his characteristic ease and mastery but for the habit of unremitting industry. True, he wrote with an enviable facility. His, too, was the precious faculty of utilising odd minutes, of filling up spare moments whenever and wherever they occurred. Ingenuous youth with a turn for writing is apt to picture the successful journalist "dashing off" his epoch-making articles in less than no time for a princely fee. If any one ever seemed to lend countenance by his example to the "dashing off" fallacy it was Mr Lang.

But beneath all his brilliance and rapidity and grace was a foundation of sound learning, laid by sheer hard work, as genuine and exacting in its kind as that which is essential to the barrister or the man of business. Since the death of Southey there has been no more conscientious, no better equipped labourer in the vineyard of letters. To the very end he was working "up to the collar"; and, if he sometimes felt the strain and scrupled not to say so, there was never for one moment the slightest relaxation of effort.

It were idle in the meantime

to weigh his multifarious productions in the scales, and by balancing his grave against his gay, his poetry against his criticism, his criticism against his history, to conjecture what portions will be best remembered by future generations. Doubtless his choicer gifts reached their high-water mark in some of his sonnets. Possibly some of his very best stuff lies buried in the files of The Saturday Review.' Curiously enough, the most disappointing of his works is the Life of Sir George Mackenzie.' We suspect that in the course of composition he discovered a promising subject to be for some reason or other less congenial than he had anticipated. The book bears unmistakable traces of fatigue, if not of disgust: traces from which his magnum opus is surprisingly free. The History of Scotland' was conceived upon a modest scale. It expanded, however, from a text-book for the use of the upper forms of schools into the four solid volumes which occupied the chief of his waking hours for some of the best years of his life, and upon which he bestowed more pains and trouble than upon any other single work. There the final structure far outran the original design. It was not so with his 'History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne.' He must have been well aware of the magnitude of such an enterprise. To prepare

[ocr errors]

a hand-book of that subject is a task which no man competent to undertake it could contemplate at any time of life without a sinking of the heart. He did not flinch, notwithstanding the burden of wellnigh threescore years and ten, and the book appeared in the very week in which he diedhis last testament and confession, as it were, to the educated public.

Everybody is more or less familiar with the style in which such compilations for scholastic purposes are usually executed. We must all have noted how the hackneyed statements and the hackneyed judgments get passed on from hand to hand. We must all have become conscious how the necessary process cess of compression squeezes out the vital juices which firsthand study and appreciation alone can be trusted to supply. Mr Lang's History of English Literature '1 is one of the few performances of its class instinct with real life. In tone and method it is the very antithesis of Brunetière's wellknown manual of French literature. It is a delightful causerie, in which, from the first page to the last, we seem to be listening to the author's living utterance. Like others of his works, it discloses a fair proportion of those mysterious slips of the pen which the critical novice delights to castigate, but which, as older hands know too well, successfully pursue the fallentis semita vitæ in proof, and leap into the

1 Longmans: 1912.

blaze of day only when the sheets have issued from the press beyond recall. The presence of such patent corrigenda, however, in no wise diminishes the attractiveness of the book. The author's opinions invariably spring from the direct application to the matter in hand of a sensitive, vigilant, and trained intelligence, so that, even when they seem wayward as in the vilipending of 'Jonathan Wild' they are neither petulant nor "thrawn." It is refreshing, though not unexpected, to find a really adequate estimate of Miss Austen, in which her matchless genius is neither patronised nor poohpooh'd. Equally refreshing is it to come across an account of such Restoration dramatists as Otway and Lee which conveys an intelligible impression of their place in our literature, and imparts a correct understanding of how and what they wrote. Wherever the reader pleases to dip into the volume, he is certain to light upon something at once true and pregnant. For not the least of its excellences is that Mr Lang has "let himself go," and indulged in a thousand of those happy strokes of which he alone possessed the secret; strokes which never decline upon the mechanical artifice of epigram, but which serve to elucidate all that is to be told with unrivalled humour, delicacy, and precision. Thus, of Smollett's heroines he remarks that they are regarded by his heroes "rather as luxuries than as ladies." Of Southey he notes that, "on

entering Balliol College, Oxford, he declared himself a rebel, wearing his hair long, as becomes men of genius, while women of genius commonly wear their hair short." Browning, he tells us, won the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. "Of these many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the manner of the poet." FitzGerald's 'Omar,' "though idolised by the worst judges," remains a very pretty piece of paganism. "Before his fortieth year,' Mr Gosse informs us, there had set in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect.' But this appears only

[ocr errors]
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »