food and money and pleasure completely in England, unless that he wants, and to refuse they are checked instantly firmly to do an hour's work. and brutally. A vile opinion He is not perturbed at the is harder to combat than vision of lost industries and poison-gas or the stealthy innational ruin. He can make a fection of a plague, and it pleasant shambles of a work- must be excluded rigorously less world as soon as he has from our shores, lest it concorrupted, undisturbed, the taminate the people. The whole Navy and the Army. Of course, of Europe is at last awakening the Communist is a ridiculous to the danger. Some seven fellow, and at present there are hundred miscreants have been not many of him, but he sent back to their native Russia preaches a doctrine of destruc- from France, which has suffered tion and general enrichment most severely from the seeds which sounds pleasantly in the of disease which they have ears of the fool, and if he be sown. And what can be done not hindered in the lawless- in France, far more widely ness which bids him say and perverted by Communism than do as he likes, he will grow into is England, can surely be done a serious danger. in our own country. Nothing stands in our way save that foul inheritance of middle-class Liberalism, that every one within the borders of Great Britain may say what he likes. That is one branch, we are told, of the great tree of liberty," and it must not be lopped off though it is full of chattering magpies and carrion crows. However, our present Government seems to be resolved at last upon a policy of excluding the treacherous, mischief-making aliens. Sir William Joynson-Hicks set beyond doubt the purpose of the Home Office: "The Government," said he, do not feel justified in granting facilities to enable aliens known to be engaged in subversive activities abroad to come to this country to confer with those engaged in similar activities here. Telegraphic orders have been given to refuse visas. Instructions So little power of invention has he that without foreign aid and support he is silent. Were the inspiration to cease which now comes to him from Russia, he would have no words to say, no policy to expand, not even a policy of destruction. His activities, therefore, may easily be cut off at the main. We have but to insist that no Bolsheviks shall bring their odious propaganda into this country, and our Communists will be reduced to the dumbness of ignorance. They are at present, as we have said, few in number. So not long since were the followers of Mr Ramsay MacDonald. And we must not leave them in a contemptuous peace. Russian gold and Russian cunning have achieved their fell purpose all the world over, and we have no reason to believe that they will fail 66 1 have been given to all ports to prevent these people coming in, and the police have been instructed." That is well, so far as it goes. We do not like Sir William's reservation. "There is," he said, "and always has been, free speech in this country for our own nationals, who are entitled to hold their own views." They may be entitled to hold their own views, but are they entitled to express them? Assuredly not when the expression of these views is designed to destroy the discipline of the Navy and the Army. Even those who claim to do as they like are checked, or should be checked, when they come to sedition. Let us not forget that it was the Campbell case which broke up the Government of Mr MacDonald; and let it not be said that the Tories gave no more thought to open disloyalty and perversion than did the Labour Party. But one firm step has been taken, and we may hope that the seditious rascals, who visit our shores upon the false pretexts of trade and commerce, shall henceforth be prevented from poisoning the minds and paralysing the hands of the working classes. Meanwhile Mr Cook, that humble disciple of Lenin, has been foiled of his attempt to bring to nought the mining industry. He knew well enough that he could neither shorten the hours nor increase the wages of the men whom he represented. The most that he did accomplish was to make it impossible for the mines to be worked at all. How the lot of the miners could be made easier by a policy of destruction he did not explain; but lest he should be unable to do as he liked, he attempted to include the other unions in the strike which he contemplated for his own. That he failed is another proof-the first was given at the General Election-that the working men of Great Britain are not to be seduced from the paths of sanity by the foolish rhetoric that comes from Russia. 66 While the extreme agitators, such as Mr Cook, are resolved upon war at any price, Mr Baldwin persists in his settled policy of conciliation. He aims at the friendly approach of class to class. He hopes to emerge for ever from that era of anyhow" in which we have sojourned too long. He does not believe 66 in muddling through." (Truly the inventor of that vile phrase should stand in the pillory for all time.) He knows that nothing worth doing can be done without forethought and design. "Power," he says, quoting Disraeli, "has only one duty-to serve the social welfare of our people." But that social welfare cannot be served unless both parties to the contract are in agreement. There must be give and take on either side, and more than that, there must be mutual understanding. So long as the working classes believe the capitalists to be mere limbs of Satan, so long as the capitalists complain that the working classes have no other ambition than to shirk, the necessary approach will be difficult indeed. And surely Mr Baldwin never did the cause of industry a better service than when he defined and defended capitalism itself. "The doc trines preached to-day in regard to capitalism are misleading and mischievous," he says, "because capital is only our savings-savings of rich and poor alike. We cannot get on without it. We want as much as we can get, and we want it cheap. Achievements and improvements have come in this country with the cheapness and the growth of capital, and we want to learn that you can dissipate and waste the capital of the country just as much by indulging in strife at home as you can by waging war in France and Flanders." That is sound sense, especially as it makes clear that capitalism is not of a class but of all classes. The denunciation of capital as such," thus Mr Baldwin goes on, 'is really in the long-run in vain, because in the last half-century-through co-operative societies, through the savings banks and savings certificates-we have seen an enormous increase in the number of financial smallholders, and they are the greatest assets of the modern State." That is perfectly true; indeed, it may be said that the working classes, being smallholders, are committing industrial suicide when they attack violently and senselessly the capitalism of which they are part. 66 We are, as Mr Baldwin con Mr fessed, a nation of individualists, and yet there is not a little that the Government may do for us. It can set a council to watch over the production and the cost of food. It can establish the agricultural industry, by far the most important industry of all, upon a secure basis. It can encourage the building of houses for men and women to live in. But it cannot succeed in these endeavours unless they co-operate in whose interest the plans of betterment are devised. Baldwin is not yet satisfied with the reply that has been made to his speeches. "I appealed for a truce," he said. at Welbeck. "I may not get a truce, but I have got something: I have got many of those engaged in the great industries, masters and men, sitting down together, and considering as they have never considered before, facing realities as they have never been faced before. Whatever happens, that is a great and remarkable thing." Indeed it is, and the mere fact that masters and men down together makes the subversive tactics of Mr Cook, Lenin's humble admirer, of very small effect. And there is another thing which still holds Mr Baldwin's attention. "Many men in industry," he said, "masters and men alike, up to now have too often failed to see the wood for the trees. They have thought only of themselves and of their own industry. These are the trees. They have missed the wood, have sat which is the nation as a whole." wants, unity in place of dis If only they would always envisage the wood, if only they would keep the nation in their mind, as well as the advantage of their own particular trade, there would be no more unrest in industry, and the risk of unemployment would be infinitely decreased. Indeed, there is no aspect of the industrial problem to which Mr Baldwin closed his eyes at Welbeck. His speech delivered there might be accepted by masters and men as the last word upon a vexed question. He had wise words to say of management and organisation: Engineers have to manage men," he insisted, and the management of men is more difficult than the mastery and application of the laws of heat and light. Technical efficiency is not enough. No management is scientific which forgets the man inside the workman." Here, then, we have a wise exhortation delivered to both sides, an exhortation to peace, which should not fall upon deaf ears. If we leave out of account the Bolsheviks, the base imitators of Russian heretics, we shall find few who are genuinely in favour of destructive methods. In the last resort, masters and men would rather see their factories busily employed than silent and cord, and co-operation in the place of antagonism." It is a part of a government's duty, as we have said, to give counsel to the doubter and encouragement to the waverer. This counsel and this encouragement Mr Baldwin provides. The government has another duty: to rule the country with an equal hand and to punish sedition. It is not so easy to rule and to punish as to give good advice. But unless the evildoer is restrained, good counsel is proffered in vain. For a small minority, if only it be vicious enough, may upset the plans of the wisest administrator. We have seen in Russia what harm a mere handful of ruffians may accomplish, if that handful does not shrink from the methods of "terror." By only one policy-a policy of restraintcan a government suppress 66 terror,' ," and all the ills which it brings with it. Doctor Johnson, like the far-seeing statesman that he was, talked, to use Boswell's phrase, "with a rough contempt of popular liberty." They make a rout about universal liberty," said he, "without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty." In truth, Doctor Johnson knew well enough, what is too often forgotten, that the very essence of government is restraint, and that, if we are to look to government for rational government, too much restraint is better than too little. We hope, therefore, that Mr Baldwin, while he does his best to bring together in the bonds of friendship the warring elements of society, will be quick to restrain (and to punish) those licentious persons who think that the world is well lost, if only they are free to practise sedition and conspiracy, and who pretend to believe that it is the inalienable right of every unbridled citizen to do as he likes. is what he says, and by way of explanation he insists that "it is in the thirty years from 1870 to 1900 that the English novel can be said in the full sense of the word to evolve.” And he selects three forces which he finds behind this evolution. "One of these is a new consciousness of technique that came to us from France; secondly, the new theory of morals as applied to the novel, and that also came to us from France; and thirdly, a new word, an obnoxious word that came to us from heaven knows where, and that shows no sign of leaving us for a long while to come, the word Realism.' It is always interesting to hear a craftsman discourse of his craft, and when Mr Hugh Walpole chose the evolution We cannot believe that these of the English novel as the forces were either new or essubject for his Rede Lecture, pecially potent in 1871. Never he made a wise and apposite did man or woman succeed in choice. But there is one danger the business of writer who was which the craftsman faces when not conscious of technique. he attempts to reveal his own When Homer sat himself down secret; he has a clearer under- to describe the siege of Troy standing of his own purpose or the return of Ulysses in the than of the purpose of his pre- two best narratives that the decessors; he perceives a world has ever seen, he did not novelty in what is not wholly surrender his genius to the new, and even though he pro- accident of the hour. There tests, as Mr Walpole protests, are no accidents in the realm that he does not believe in the of art, and the realm of art progress of the arts, he still was discovered many cenlooks upon the past with an turies before 1871. Nor did eye of kindly scepticism. Mr this consciousness of technique, Walpole, indeed, believes that which was not new, come to us there is such a thing as the from France, itself bedevilled modern novel, a form, invented in 1871 by the memory of about 1870, and given to Eu- romanticism. How should rope, or at any rate to England, France, corrupted by the easy by George Eliot. "Indeed, the rhetoric of the romantics, teach new world of the novel is any lessons of self-consciousness breaking in upon us in this to England, a nation which had year of the publication of not yet forgotten the noble traMiddlemarch,' 1871." That dition of the eighteenth century? VOL. CCXVIII.-NO. MOCCXVII. F |