and very much exhausted with the bustle of the day, he enjoyed sounder sleep than had refreshed him for many weeks. He was awakened in the middle of the night by a loud knocking at his door. He immediately seized his blunderbuss, but, recognizing the voice of his own valet, he only took his pike. His valet told him to unbar without loss of time, for the house had been set on fire. Popanilla immediately made his escape, but found himself surrounded by the incendiaries. He gave himself up for lost, when a sudden charge of cavalry brought him off in triumph. He was convinced of the utility of light-horse.

The military had arrived with such dispatch that the fire was the least effective that had wakened the house for the whole week. It was soon extinguished, and Popanilla again retired to his bedroom, not forgetting his bar and his chain.

In the morning Popanilla was roused by his landlord, who told him that a large party was about to partake of the pleasures of the chase, and most politely inquired whether he would like to join them. Popanilla assented, and after having eaten an excellent breakfast, and received a favorable bulletin of Skindeep's wound, he mounted his horse.

The party was numerous and wellarmed. Popanilla inquired of an huntsman what sport they generally followed in Blunderland. According to the custom of this country, where

they never give a direct answer, the huntsman said he did not know that there was any other sport but one. Popanilla thought him a brute, and dug his spurs into his horse.

They went off at a fine rate, and the exercise was most exhilarating. In a short time, as they were cantering along a defile, they received a sharp fire from each side, which rather reduced their numbers; but they revenged themselves for this loss when they regained the plain, where they burned two villages, slew two or three hundred head of women, and bagged children without number. On their return home to dinner they chased a small body of men over a heath for nearly two hours, which afforded good sport; but they did not succeed in running them down, as they themselves were in turn chased by another party. Altogether, the day was not deficient in interest, and Popanilla found in the evening his powers of digestion improved.

After passing his days in this manner for about a fortnight, Popanilla perfectly recovered from his dyspepsia; and Skindeep's wound having now healed, he retired with regret from this healthy climate. He took advantage of the leisure moment which was afforded during the sail to inquire the reason of the disturbed state of this interesting country. He was told that it was in consequence of the majority of the inhabitants persisting in importing their own pineapples.

It is, perhaps, symptomatic of the times we live in that, during a Coalition Member's assault on Mr. Devlin in the House of Commons on Monday, a voice was heard shouting, 'Kill him!' Some accounts say that the cry came from two or three persons. That even one person could be found in the ranks of Members of Parliament capable of uttering such a sentiment is a measure of the degradation that has come over public life under the rule of Mr. Lloyd George. We doubt if ever before in the history of the English Parliament were such words heard within the walls of the House of Commons. There have been outbursts of passion, issuing sometimes in blows and sometimes in vulgar vituperation, but never until the year 1920 has the howl of the beast that is in man been heard echoing so frankly in that assembly of gentlemen. Something has undoubtedly happened to the public life of England. It is as though all the standards had perished, and the political scene had become no place for a gentleman.

During the nineteenth century, England possessed two great codes which did much to insure the decencies of public life. There was the code of the gentleman, and there was the code of the Nonconformist conscience. It was possible to be a gentleman without having a Nonconformist conscience, and it was possible to have a Nonconformist conscience without being a gentleman. But, in either case, there was a standard of manners which was also a standard of morals. Conduct was, from the point of view both of the gentleman and the Puritan, three fourths of life, and the man who could

not 'conduct himself' decently was regarded as unfit for the duties of a legislator.

The Victorians had a real sense of shame when the House of Commons took to fisticuffs. They regarded it as un-English, and were inclined to blame the Irish for having destroyed the dignity of the 'Mother of Parliaments.' They still had at the back of their minds an ideal of dignity to which English gentlemen should conform. This did not mean that they resented plain words or were horrified by malicious and venomous speech. They did not object to plainness or even venom, provided it was the plainness and venom of a gentleman. Disraeli did not spare his opponents, but he fought with the rapier and not with the mud of the streets. Mr. Balfour described the statement of an opponent as 'a frigid and calculated lie': it was a phrase of cold courtesy compared to the vulgar retort, 'It's a bloody lie,' uttered the other day by Mr. W. M. Hughes in the Australian Parliament. The difference between a gentleman and a man who is not a gentleman is not necessarily that they mean different things: it is often simply that they express them differently. It is often necessary to castigate an opponent, but one must castigate him within the rules. Up till a century or so ago, the rules permitted even a challenge to a duel. Fox's bitter denunciation of a supporter of Lord North's led to a duel in which he was wounded. Pitt had to fight George Tierney for having accused him of want of patriotism. Canning and Castlereagh fought merely because Canning had declared that Cas

tlereagh was not fit for the post of Secretary of War.

And, even in speech, a license of abuse was permitted in those days which would have seemed intolerable to the later Victorians. It was the journalists rather than the statesmen, however, who claimed unlimited rights of vituperative speech, and it was not till the arrival of O'Connell in politics that a politician arose who in a contest of bad language was secure of triumph over any journalist on earth. The contests in vituperation between O'Connell and the Times form an amusing chapter in the history of political manners. The Times described O'Connell as 'the worst being in human form that ever disgraced the floor of an English Senate,' and sneered at him as 'the big beggarman' and 'the loquacious mendicant.' O'Connell, in retort, described the Times as 'the tawdry female who, with rouged cheeks and in faded silks, takes the air in the Strand by gaslight.' The Times replied that he was an 'unredeemed and unredeemable scoundrel.' O'Connell declared that the Times was 'like a misplaced milestone-it cannot by any possibility tell the truth.' The Times in its wrath broke into

verse:

Scum condensed of Irish bog!
Ruffian, coward, demagogue!
Boundless liar, base detractor!

Nurse of murders, treason's factor!
Of Pope and priest the crouching slave,
While thy lips of freedom rave;

and a great deal more to the same purpose. We will not presume to decide which of the combatants carried off the honors in the prolonged duel of bad words. O'Connell, however, was a demagogue who had a genius for violent invective that it was by no means easy to cap. He was a moborator, not a Parliamentary statesman, by instinct, and abuse poured from him like water from Niagara. He antici

pated and excelled what is now known as Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse manner in his description of the House of Peers. "They are,' he said of the Lords, 'the soaped pigs of Society, the real swinish multitude, as obstinate and as ignorant and as brutish as their prototypes.' He called Wellington 'a stunted corporal,' Sir Henry Hardinge 'a one-armed ruffian,' Brougham 'the greatest miscreant that ever breathed,' and said of Peel that his smile was 'like the glint of the plate on the lid of a coffin.' He said of Disraeli in a famous passage:

He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief who died upon the cross, whose name, I verily believe, must have been Disraeli. For aught I know, the present Disraeli is descended from him, and with the impression that he is, I now forgive the heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died upon the cross.

Englishmen have good grounds for congratulating themselves on the fact that O'Connell never became Prime Minister. At the same time, O'Connell's vehemence was frequently just on the edge of laughter. His vituperation, vulgar at times though it was, was a form of humor. He could quarrel violently with a Member in the House and fell him with his furious invective, and a day later he would walk arm-inarm with him down Whitehall. There is this also to be said: his life was a life of agitation. He was not the keeper of the dignity of Parliament; he was a man who enabled a whole people to stand upright. The British statesman has other duties. He has a tradition to preserve, a code to live up to. He is not free to throw down the standards of public life and comport himself like a baited atheist at a street corner.

It is a rather remarkable fact that the present degradation of English public life should coincide with the union in office of the two political opponents who had in pre-war days shown

the least regard for the decencies of debate. It was Mr. Bonar Law who first threatened Liberal Ministers with lynching in London. It was Mr. Lloyd George who invented the Limehouse manner. They now sit side by side on the Front Bench to carry out the decrees of yet a third defier of the old codes, Sir Edward Carson, the first man seriously to bring back the old threat of bloodshed into British politics. Now, we are not among those who regard Sir Edward Carson as a moral leper for believing in physical force. He advocated a course which must inevitably have led to the murder of policemen and soldiers by his followers if the Home Rule Bill had been passed in its original form. He may say that he was prepared to face these consequences, and, if so, he has the right to be judged by his motives, like any other rebel.

We can only respect Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, and Sir Edward Carson, however, if they frankly recognize the fact that they have broken down one of the greatest traditions of English life- the tradition of government by persuasion - and substituted for it a belief in the appeal to violence. None of the three is an Englishman, and the English tradition appeals to them as little as it did to. O'Connell. They do things that no Englishman would do. What is worse still, they do things that no English gentleman would do. The English gentleman - the real English gentleman in contrast to the ideal - has his share of faults. We are in the present connection claiming for him no sort of superiority except that he did, according to his lights, attempt to govern England like a gentleman. He may have suffered from the egotism of class, a lack of imaginative sympathy, an insular indifference to the things that seemed to be no practical concern of

VOL. 21-NO. 1052

his. But he had certain standards. He liked to think of himself as a sportsman who played the game. Above all, he had an ideal of self-restraint which again and again enabled him at a crisis to behave with Roman gravity. It was this gravity of conduct that made the late Duke of Devonshire so admired a figure in English public life. The Duke had very few ideas- if any - but he had a grave common sense which was at that time so highly esteemed as an English virtue that he died in the odor of statesmanship. We do not deny that there was a great deal of humbug in the statesmanship of such men as the Duke of Devonshire. At the same time, he embodied a great tradition of behavior - a tradition that many Englishmen are only beginning to appreciate, now that it is all but gone.

Mr. Lloyd George has long thrown self-restraint to the Welsh winds, and every arriviste in his train feels free to make the same gesture. Never in the House of Commons, until his Premiership, had there been such a disregard of truth and the decencies of politics. The House of Commons was once the greatest instrument of its kind in the world, but Mr. Lloyd George has played on it like the leader of a jazz orchestra till all is noise and vulgarity. How far he is personally responsible for this it is difficult to say. The war may have destroyed some of the old inhibitions, and even before the war there was a gathering tide of violence that threatened to sweep away the traditions both in politics and in the arts. Mr. Lloyd George, however, preceded the war, and was a herald of the new indecorum. Since then, he has sunk beyond indecorum, and has become a master of the base appeal as well as an expert in political infidelity. Nothing binds him but the need of a momentary triumph. To-day's promise is not binding for to-morrow. Every scruple,

every ideal, every code is gone, and a stupefied House of Commons under the spell applauds him as it might a dancing dervish. His want of restraint, unfortunately, has become infectious, and now one of his weaker brethren has interrupted the political labors of the House of Commons with the shout, 'Kill him!'

Does no Coalitionist leader realize the peril to the gentlemen of England should that cry invade English politics? Sir Edward Carson taught the argument of bloodshed, and Republicans

learned the lesson. A Coalition Member shouts 'Kill him!': the word may be taken up by a striker or one of the swelling host of the unemployed. We cannot destroy the decencies of life without teaching our opponents to destroy them. If the rich do not restore reason to politics, be sure the poor will not be reasonable when they get into power. The Lloyd Georges and the Hugheses are simply training revolutionists in misbehavior and unscrupulousness. That is not the least of their crimes against civilization.