armaments nothing but danger, and deprecates the use of menacing naval squadrons in support of what should, he thinks, be a peaceful diplomacy. Brought to a check by our preparations of defence and a manifest readiness to put them in operation, the Continental Governments really are much more amiable in their relations with this country than they were in the heyday of the Squeeze. But they are quite ready to be more so, to have a friendlier press, to abstain more obviously from adventures and designs for which, after all, money is running short, if by doing so they may accelerate the backward swing of the pendulum whereon Sir William Harcourt sits, like Cupid in a French clock. This, indeed, is the only right way of working the Squeeze the cheap and scientific way. You put on the pressure (Lord Salisbury knows the trick), and increase and increase it till you find that it will yield no more without danger of resistance. You then lift your hands, fold them, explain that your action has been entirely misinterpreted, and, to prove it, offer your most considerate friendship and co-operation. Why should we not be comrades? you ask; and still fold your hands and remain peaceable, awaiting your next opportunity. This is the present phase of the matter; and of course the cooler and most long-headed of our rivals abroad must have been delighted to read the correspondence between Sir William Harcourt and Mr Morley. Little

could have been expected from the Czar's disarmament proposal, so much respected for its intrinsic goodness, and so entirely shut out from consideration as a serious proposal. But it may help-it may help in England, now that, as we all understand, a regular campaign is to be opened, under redoubtable generalship, against the pestilent imperialism which has planted England on the Nile and stopped the Squeeze. Very promising that, our good friends abroad will think, and to be encouraged by every possible show of amicability and humblemindedness.

For days after the delivery of Sir Edmund Monson's speech at the banquet of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris, it still remained a matter of wondering speculation. In itself, what he had to say was not remarkable; but that it should be said by the British ambassador, in France and to France, seemed very strange indeed. Sir Edmund Monson is of the old school; earnest in his profession, but deliberate, circumspect, punctilious; a man unlikely to forget in any circumstances that ambassadors are not sent by one country to another, but by one Government to another. The ambassador's business is solely with the rulers of the nation to which he is accredited; and to go past them in order to address his "representations" and his intimations of reprisal to the people themselves is on the

face of it an improper thing to do. But yet it is an offence with many degrees of blackness, and Sir Edmund Monson's descent into them was by one step only.

-a

He began his speech by declaring a general dislike of the "new diplomacy," saying that it was "not without anxiety that he had decided to depart somewhat from the traditional limits by which the diplomatist is hampered" in what he was about to say. Then followed an ingeniously slighting reference to "the large increase, during November, in the coruscation of eloquence which has been flashed upon appreciative audiences throughout the provinces of our native land";by-stroke at our noble selves, carefully meant to soothe French ears and smooth the way for what was to come. What was to come was the real purpose of the speech-a double purpose, expressed in the following sentences, which are here put together with intent to bring out more distinctly what that same purpose was. "This outburst of British eloquence," he said, "has been considered in France to have been rather a display of fireworks, artificially designed and exploded, than the natural product of an atmosphere highly and dangerously charged with electricity, the result of friction systematically and injudiciously applied." But nothing could be more mistaken. Those autumn speeches and the comments thereupon may not have been entirely discreet, but "they served the useful purpose of

impressing all the world with the conviction that the advisers of the Crown represented at that critical period the sentiment of a united people." And "I hold that it is essential to leave no doubt in the minds of those with whom we have to deal as to the unanimity of Great Britain, and as to the depth of feeling which recent events provoked." That is an imperative duty; and "while it is true that no other attitude could have been taken by the British Government, there has never been from the outset the slightest reason why doubt should have existed in any quarter of what that attitude should be." Therefore "I venture to hope that by this time the idea of our being unduly squeezable and prone to make graceful but impolitic concessions has been thoroughly exploded." He hopes so, does Sir Edmund Monson, and so proceeds to a conclusion:—

"England, while jealously guarding her own interests, and steadfastly determined not to permit any encroachment upon her rights, has no aggressive designs which need inspire anxiety in those who will deal honestly and justly with her. . . . We ask France to disabuse herself of all suspicion of unfair intention on our part, and to meet us on every question at issue with an honest desire for equitable arrangement, and with no afterthought towards scoring a diplomatic triumph or driving a one-sided bargain.... I should like to think that the ideas I have so imperfectly expressed may find acceptance with those who are directly or indirectly responsible for the direction of the national policy. I would earnestly ask them to discountenance and re

frain from a continuation of that

policy of pin-pricks which, while it can only procure an ephemeral grati

(It is here that the second purpose of the speech came out)"I would entreat them to resist the temptation to try to thwart British enterprise by petty manoeuvres such as I grieve to see suggested by the proposal to set up educational establishments as rivals to our own in the newly conquered provinces of the Soudan. Such an ill-considered provocation, to which I confidently trust no official countenance will be given, might well have the effect of converting that policy of forbearance from taking the full advantage of our recent victories and our present position which has been enunciated by our highest authority into the adoption of measures which, though they evidently find favour with no inconsiderable party in England, are not, I presume, the object at which French sentiment is aiming."

Published at length next day, this carefully prepared speech had in both countries a great and the same effect,-surprise. Its meaning? its object? The French found little difficulty in interpreting either its spirit or its intention: its spirit was the spirit of cold-blooded aggression; its purpose, to extort submission from the fears of France, or (as alternative) to force on the war which is so likely to be the worse for England the longer it is put off. That was the French reading: in England we were more puzzled. The sincerity of the speaker's appeal for peace and fair dealing was obvious to us, if not to the French. Yet we could see that he had put himself out of order; one or two sentences in

his speech seemed to most of us injudicious, though not without defence; and SO grave and threatening a reference to M. Deloncle's school-plans for the Soudan was barely intelligible. Though we could not accept the French interpretations of a surprising departure from diplomatic custom, we had no confident explanation of our own.

All the while, however, it could be accounted for by a very simple though very troublesome reason. It all arose from the inveterate difficulty of convincing the French Government that our Foreign Office really means to stand by its determinations. Whether unbelief on this more obdurate in point was Paris than at Petersburg or Pekin may be doubtful. Perhaps not. But though the unhappy prepossession must be giving way by this time, one would think, it was still the despair of our diplomats in the French capital when Sir Edmund Monson tried a new way of destroying it. Look again to the passages here gathered from his speech, and mark how closely they are addressed to one and the same end. The Fashoda affair had been settled, as if by persuasion of England's inflexibility in that matter; nevertheless, it still remained an anxious duty to persuade France, or "those who are directly or indirectly responsible for the direction of the national policy," that the British Government is resolved to put an end to the idea of it as illimitably squeezable. Naturally, it has been the business of Lord Salisbury in his intercourse with the French

ambassador in London, of Sir Edmund Monson in converse with the French Government, to convey that resolution and establish it on a firm understanding. We may be sure that neither the Foreign Secretary nor the ambassador has been slack in the attempt. Yet how imperfect their success may be judged from this speech of the ambassador's, without going further. What could excuse its irregularities if the representations he enforced upon the French people had not been exhausted hopelessly upon the Government? Only their manifest failure when addressed to the Government of the country could justify his turning with them so emphatically to the country itself. Even then, in such a case, they should be of the highest moment but that they were. The settlement of the Fashoda affair counts for little in the reckoning which France and England must come to without further delay. The Bahr-el-Ghazal presents one troublesome question; not less imperative is the Newfoundland question, which must be resettled almost immediately. If, with these and other matters in dispute, they who are directly or indirectly responsible for the conduct of French affairs are still in the illusions lamented by Sir Edmund Monson, his appeal to France, which with less excuse would not fall short of impropriety, takes another shape, and becomes an obligation. Yet of course it could not but be felt as a mortification by the French people, who even insist upon it as a mortification

deed we are deeply to blame in the matter; but our fault lies in permitting the growth of a belief that England's fighting days are over, not in warning the French nation, at a critical moment, that its Government is acting on the mistake perilously long.

And there may be found the moral of the whole story. The Monson speech calls for record and remembrance as illustrative of the danger that lurks in the habit of giving in-of giving in to wrongful claims and slighting injuries. The times change, but the consequences of that mistake are still what they ever were. And so we see an ambassador confronted by so rooted a doubt that his country will ever fight again, that he must needs slap the doubter's face to convince him of his error.

The startlingly emphatic passage in Sir Edmund's speech which relates to M. Deloncle and the Soudan schools has its own explanation. Lord Kitchener's proposal to establish a college at Khartoum forthwith had many recommendations. The most important are those which have all to do with tranquillising the Soudan and redeeming the people from their wildness; but these the ordinary considerations are fortified by others. In Egypt itself there is a good deal of French school-teaching; the most useful language in Cairo, for example, when it is not the native Arabic, being French. This teaching and this second

language have been made a means of communicating to the native population the bitterest animosity that England is anywhere subject to the hostility of the French in Egypt. The teaching is so used notoriously, and with great success, as M. Deloncle and the French Government are of course aware. Therefore it should be no surprise if a wish to forestall similar operations at Khartoum entered into Lord Kitchener's plans; neither should it be any surprise that a French design to undermine and counteract them was instantly started.

Sir Edmund Monson was supposed to have made too much of the Deloncle scheme -exaggerating its importance, making a great grievance of a trivial and fantastic suggestion. But it was not too trivial to miss the approval of the Government, and with this explanation its significance will be better understood perhaps.

Going one day, by favour, into the studio of the greatest painter in England-would that we could say with a clear conscience the greatest of English painters I saw there a fine new canvas set up. Four feet long it was or thereabout, and more than two feet high-larger, perhaps; and all untouched except in a little space no broader than the painter's hand.

But there in that small space was a most brilliant and perfect piece of work. It lay to the left of the canvas, at no great depth in the foreground, and

was this a golden dish, and in it a load of fruit-figs, grapes, peaches-a splendid patch of ripe harmonious colour, with the finish of miniature painting; the dish resting on a low pedestal of white marble, such as might buttress the foot of a marble stair. It was an astonishing thing to see amidst the grey expectant vacancy that surrounded it. And the wherefore?

the explanation of it? The look of expectancy that ran toward the picture-piece from all parts of the canvas would have given the answer to a man of imagination; me the painter had to inform. The purpose of that patch of colours, first painted in, was to govern the colour-composition of the whole picture. Everything, neighbouring or distant, was to be referred to it everything determined by it.

It is a common practice, no doubt; but I being quite ignorant felt much enlightened, and that on things far beyond the composition of pictures. Here was a helpful rule adjustable to other employments than painting, but even more to the conduct of life, the government of our endeavours, aspirations, even our affections. The resemblance of the infant mind to a blank sheet of paper, so acceptable for its simplicity and so perfectly inept - what mischief it has carried into nursery and school! Try to replace it by the more true idea of palimpsest, and you will not succeed. Try again with the idea of a fair fresh canvas, which you are to treat in Mr Tadema's way-choosing the spot where