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else was his superior, or even, he could hardly but realise perhaps, his equal.

The contrast was so marked that the Governor-General could hardly have missed it, but if he noticed it he did not show it in any way. Perhaps he thought it a very ordinary manifestation of human perversity or idiocy, and, anyway, he was encased in an impenetrable self-esteem which was fully equal to preserving his equanimity in the face of the opinions, real or affected, of his fellows. A colossus such as he must expect to be misunderstood by ordinary men, to arouse their jealousy, even their hatred. Indeed, he once said as much to me on another occasion in connection with a campaign of abuse directed against him by a rival satrap, and I remember replying gently that Chuangtzu had a very apposite simile in the cicada which wondered wherein lay the sense of the leviathan flying thousands of miles up into the air. "Quite so," he said, unabashed, delighted, no doubt, to find a man of so sound a judgment.

His high opinion of himself was, however, by no means ill-founded. He was a very exceptional man; in some ways a veritable colossus. Indeed, without such self-esteem, whether conscious or not, few men have ever made history; and instances readily occur to the mind of dominant personages with whom it took the final form of a belief they were divine. Our man of affairs went to no such lengths, but

his superiority to most of his fellow-satraps, and the gulf that separated him and some of them from the commonalty of men. He could scarcely be expected to ascribe in his own mind his outstanding success, the ascendancy he attained, to fortuitous circumstance, to anything indeed but to his own merit. He dominated, if not- except nominally - the whole province, at least his own satrapy, wherein the lives and fortunes of ten or more millions of his fellow-countrymen were at his mercy. That, it will be admitted, provided a fairly concrete basis for his self-esteem. And, everything considered, he bore extremely well this burden of untrammelled authority over his fellows which is apt to unseat the equilibrium of any but exceptional men. It was, indeed, as searching a test as could well be imagined. He came through it with flying colours, a tribute to the innate decency and common-sense of the man, and to the stability, the standards, and the inhibitions which were his inheritance from generations of Confucian discipline.

He exercised his power with a noticeable self-restraint, and interfered very little, and then reluctantly, with the age-old mechanism of administration. His rule was on the whole lenient and his satrapy well governed, save in one very important matter taxation. He impoverished his people to get the funds he needed for

his armies and his political right, but the incident was activities. Money he conceived typical of what I might call as a necessity, without which his calculated ruthlessness, he could not play his rôle on policy, not temper. the stage of high politics. It was indeed the chief weapon in his armoury. In exacting it, through taxation, arbitrary levies, forced loans, and so on, he was quite ruthless; and protests and recalcitrance were met with naked force, in extreme instances by a firing squad or the executioner's sword. This sort of thing was eloquent of the essential hardness that lay behind the sleek and amiable exterior of the man. Nevertheless he really did seem to dislike violence, though he used it without hesitation when he thought it necessary.

His attitude towards another matter was equally characteristic of him. It was during his first tenure of office as Governor-General, and and the capital was on the point of being assailed by a rival faction. The New Year was approaching, a time when the religious observances of the people imperatively demand the firing of crackers; and he was afraid that this custom might operate to the advantage of the enemy, or even be intentionally turned thereto by them, cracker fire and rifle fire not being easily distinguishable. He therefore gave orders that no crackers should be fired that year. The people disobeyed almost to a man. As one householder put it to me, "Governors-General come and go, but the gods must be served." He took no notice of it, realising his order was a mistake, and that he was up against something stronger than military force. He was not the sort of man to emulate the praying-mantis of another of Chuangtzu's similes, which tried to stop a chariot with its arms. The reaction of another satrap to a similar

On one occasion a sergeant of his own bodyguard was arrested and brought to headquarters for contravening a transitory regulation against gambling. He happened to be himself engaged at the moment in a game of dominoes with some leading officials and merchants, but he went out to deal with the offender, meaning, he told me afterwards, merely to reprimand him. The sergeant, however, insolently pointed out to him that he also was gambling; and what was the difference between disobedience was quite different. dominoes and dice? He was shot without further ado. "If I were to let that sort of thing pass," he said to me, my control over the army would be at an end." His judgment may or may not have been

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In his case it was not the New Year; but a wedding happened to take place while his restriction was in force. Crackers were fired as usual, and he descended in person upon the culprits, dragged off the bride

groom, and had him flogged for contumacy, an outrage public opinion was slow to forgive.

Our man of affairs treated public opinion in general with a noticeable deference, recognising in it a political force of great importance, but he was in no sense deterred from his purposes by it. To the Press and to the student movement he gave, where he was not actually manipulating them, an almost absolute freedom, so long, however, as they did not stand in his own way. But if somebody else set them to that course, or they tried it of their own volition, there was very little of the suaviter in modo about his reaction. As far as I know he had only one trial of strength with the students. He had appointed a new head to the leading university of the provincial capital, and the students refused to receive him. He sent his soldiers, turned the whole university out into the street, and installed his nominee; and when the students rallied and stormed the gates, his men opened fire without hesitation, routing the assailants with considerable loss of life. The students reconsidered matter, and decided to take him as he was, appreciating, no doubt, the wide latitude he allowed them when they did not cross his own path. And not very long afterwards the whole body of them testified their respect for him by taking part in a grand fête he staged for himself at the capital on an occasion of domestic felicity. Laudatory addresses were pre

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He loved display, the trappings and the pomp of power, and habitually surrounded himself with them. He was even more attached to the substance of which these were but the shadow. He was avid of power, and was entirely fearless, in a cool calculating sort of way, in the pursuit of it. That his nerves were of steel was evident when a hired assassin shot at him point-blank as he was leaving his yamen one day in the midst of his retinue. The bullet missed, and before the man could fire again or the Governor-General's bodyguards had collected their wits, he whipped out his pistol and shot him himself. The fat unwieldy man had shown himself quicker and cooler than any one else present.

But though his courage, physical and moral, was undoubted, he seldom trusted his political fortunes to the arbitrament of the sword. Perhaps it went against the grain with him to have recourse to hostilities when his ends could be gained, with equal if not greater surety, by finesse.

However that may

be, he never really fought a campaign. He was a convinced fence-sitter, dexterously keeping aloof from the internecine warfare endemic in that particular province. He conserved his strength while his fellowsatraps exhausted theirs on each other, and the end of each campaign almost invariably saw him about the only general with a fresh and intact army and undiminished resources. And when, in spite of himself, he was drawn in, he always kept this consideration in view, and fought half-heartedly. On one occasion he brought a well-thought-out campaign to the usual deadlock of mutual exhaustion by failing to fall, as arranged, with his full strength on the enemy's flank -how could he, when half his army had revolted and gone over to the enemy? The campaign over, the mutineers, who had remained as inactive as ever under their temporary allegiance, returned to the fold, and were forgiven.

This sort of thing made him persona non grata with his fellow-satraps, but somehow or other they never managed to get together and fall upon him in a body. It was not very difficult for him to play them off against each other, for they all had their individual axes to grind, and his help, even if it were no more than a contribution to an impoverished exchequer, was better than his hostility, for his army of 30,000 men was anything but negligible, and might, who

knows, one day get orders really to fight. Men who had suffered from his perfidy and had sworn to have his blood somehow thought better of it, wrote him off as impossible, and sought to use him when they could. He attained the established position of a confirmed neutral, and they and their fellows, mutually jealous, found themselves electing him Governor-General rather than let that post fall to one of their own number.

He was twice, by the election of his peers, Governor-General; and even when out of that office, remained the most influential of all the individual satraps in the province. They came and went; he went on for ever. His influence went beyond the confines of the province, and he carried weight in the wider sphere of national affairs, with which, indeed, the provincial situation was intimately connected. He stood out, a giant, among his fellows, but was he an Olympian ? Would the blind force that actuated him push him to greater heights, to play one day a leading rôle in his country's affairs? "If he could overcome his rapacity he would be a great man," said a common friend, to whose judgment of his own people I usually bowed. "Great without vision? "We have quite enough visionaries," was his answer. "We want men like him, the ordinary man with extraordinary qualities." "A duck with crane's legs?" I queried.

THE BLACK SHEEP'S HOME-COMING.

BY HELEN GRAHAM.

It was not an easy task to transform Peden Knowe Station into a fitting stage for a public reception.

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In the first place, the platform was too narrow it took all its width to contain the Reception Committee, and the crowd had perforce to stand outside on the public road. Then the station buildings were homely. It could hardly have been otherwise with bookingoffice, waiting room, station - master's quarters all housed under the one roof, and Mr Begg's children pattering in and out everywhere on their bare feet. The coal-shed, too, so handy for daily use, looked an unsightly excrescence with its lean-to roof on an occasion of ceremony.

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The transformation, however, had been taken in hand. Man, in the shape of the Reception Committee, had cleared the waiting-room of its accumulation of litter, repainted the coal-shed, and hung a string of flags from the signal-box to the chimney pot opposite. Nature, in the shape of April showers and sunshine, was trying gratuitously and unobserved by the Committee to do the rest. She had washed down the drab walls overnight, and warmed them since into a little colour, and now she was filling the flags out and

making them dance on their string.

Miss Euphemia Jameson, at any rate, found the result entirely pleasing. It put her in mind, she said, of Wembley on its opening day.

Miss Jameson, as a member of the Reception Committee, was one of the favoured few admitted on to the platform to await the arrival of the 12.10 train. Nearly every one of note and weight in Peden Knowe was by this time “forward" as Mr Soutar the Chairman expressed it-all but the laird and the minister,and each of these had sent an adequate apology. These apologies, with a programme of the proceedings and a pair of grey suede gloves, were in the Chairman's left hand, leaving his right hand free to receive and direct the Committee and operate upon his tall hat as the occasion might demand.

It was a proud position for Mr Robert Soutar, retired plumber and ex-Socialist candidate for the county, and it had been awarded him unanimously by his fellow-members in view of the fact that to-day's function was entirely his idea.

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