gives him for a brief space a new being. Books on brasses are common enough, but, generally speaking, they interest only collectors, ecclesiastics, and architects. Being confined strictly to their subject, and taking up each class of brasses in turn by centuries, they furnish no historical view either of the brasses or of the important personages whom they commemorate, and they stir the imagination rather less than might a good dictionary. Mr. Macklin's book is arranged by periods, the various chapters are accompanied by brief papers on topics connected with the subject, and by comment of that class which awakens the critical spirit; he writes not only the history of an art fallen into desuetude, but also of a kingdom incessantly changing its outward semblance, but never long forsaking its ancient ideals, and he makes each chronicle elucidate the other. Some eighty-five pictures show certain brasses described in the text, exhibit a palimpsest brass, and a tombstone despoiled of its brass. It will be an exceedingly well read man who does not find some matter entirely new to him in this clear and consistent sketch of four centuries of English history, as recorded in brasses. E. P. Dutton & Co.

In spite of the weapons and a vice or two borrowed from the white man, the hunting Indian of to-day scarcely differs from the savage who tried the souls of Puritan and Pilgrim, but never in the centuries of his acquaintance with the stranger from over the seas has he been so sympathetically presented as in Mr. Arthur Heming's "Spirit Lake." Between the days of the acute and truthful but misjudging "Jesuit Relations" and the present era of minute studies based

on knowledge of the stone age and of tribal civilization, he has been So assiduously observed and questioned that the elaborate ceremonial web which he has spun about his life, and the woodcraft by which he has preserved the life itself are equally well observed, but Mr. Heming has put flesh upon the theoretical skeleton acquired by embedding it in the story of a hunter's family life. The hunter Standing Wolf, his nephew, his seven children and his adopted son, and his mother and multitudinous dogs go North together to obtain skins wherewith to pay the trader for their advances, articles furnished on credit. Their luck and their adventures form the story, quarrel with the medicine man furnishes a reason for introducing information in regard to superstitions, and the author also contrives to show how much respect the Indian has for the white man's land, and for the white man. Mr. Heming dedicates his book to his father and mother from whom he "learned to love both nature and art." "Spirit Lake" affords ample evidence of study of the former and of mastery of the latter. The twenty-four pictures with which he has illustrated the book would serve to make it noteworthy had it no other merit for they exhibit an Indian as different from the Plains Indian as can be imagined, and so treat his dress and his physical peculiarities as to make it seem the most natural thing in the world that he should address the beasts whom he kills as "Brother." The pictures no more reflect any other artist than the text reflects any other author. Mr. Heming possesses in two fields the originality of profound knowledge. The Macmillan Company.

The interest of what is taking place in the four Western Mediterranean Departments of France at the present moment is two-fold.

It is interesting, first, as the most modern example of the French power of organization-I mean, of political organization, proceeding from belowand though that example is somewhat belated, it should be to every student of European History one of the most distinctive events of our time,

Secondly, it is interesting as the original of what cannot but be in the future many a challenge against a certain falsity residing in the representative system.

As to the first of these points; in every considerable movement of French History there has been present a quality but rarely discovered in the crises of other nations; from those of some, notably of Britain, it is entirely absent. This quality consists in a power to direct great numbers of men, not by the conscious plan of one brain, but sub-consciously as it were, by the common action of a number.

The weakness and disadvantages of such a quality are apparent. Direction so given will be exceedingly sensitive to slight changes of environment. It will be guided by instinct rather than reason; it will be inhuman in the full sense of that word; it will be cruel or cold or greedy or self-sacrificing beyond the general normal of individual character. It will with difficulty seize the nature of a carefully calculated plan opposing it. In general it will suffer the consequence of sharp errors of emotion bred in a moment and expiated throughout a generation. was this force which made the massacres of September, which overthrew

It

Robespierre, which elected Napoleon. In a more concentrated form, it was this force which combined into so puissant a whole the separate men-not geniuses-who formed the committee of public safety. It was this force which made the Commune; so that to this day no individual can quite tell you what the Commune was driving at. And it is this force which at the present moment so grievously misunderstands and overestimates the strength of the armies which are the rivals of the French-indeed in that connection it might truly be said that the peace of Europe is preserved much more by the German knowledge of what the French army is, even than by the French ignorance of what the German army is. I say the disadvantages of this force or quality in a commonwealth are apparent, for the weakness and disadvantage of something extraneous to ourselves are never difficult to grasp. What is of more moment for us is to understand, with whatever difficulty, the strength which such a quality conveys. Not to have understood that strength, nay, not to have appreciated the existence of the force of which I speak, has made nearly all the English histories of France worthless. French turbulence is represented in them as anarchy, and the whole of the great story which has been the central pivot of Western Europe appears as an incongruous series of misfortunes. Even Carlyle, with his astonishing grasp of men and his power of rapid integration from a few details (for he read hardly anything of his subject) never comprehended this force. He could understand a master ordering about a lot of servants; indeed he would have liked to have been a servant himself, and was one to the best of his ability, but

Its

he could not understand self-organization from below. Yet upon the existence of that power depends the whole business of the Revolution. strength then (and principal advantage) lies in the fact that it makes democracy possible at critical moments, even in a large community.

There is no one, or hardly any one, so wicked or so stupid as to deny the democratic ideal. There is no one, or hardly any one, so perverted that, were he the member of a small and simple community, he would be content to forego his natural right to be a full member thereof. There is no one, or hardly any one, who would not feel his exclusion from such rights, among men of his own blood, to be intolerable. And there is no historical example of a class of men so kept under who were not kept under by force. But while every one admits the democratic ideal, most men who think and nearly all the wiser of those who think, perceive its one great obstacle to lie in the contrast between idea and action. The obstacle is this, that the psychology of the multitude is not the psychology of the individual. Ask every man in West Sussex separately whether he would have bread made artificially dearer by Act of Parliament, and you will get an overwhelming majority against such economic action on the part of the State. Treat them collectively and they will elect-I believe they will elect in years to come-men pledged to such an action. Or again, look at a crowd when it roars down a street in anger-the sight is unfortunately only too rare to-day-you have the impression of a beast majestic in its courage, terrible in its ferocity, but with something evil about its cruelty and determination. Yet if you stop and consider the face of one of its members straggling on one of its outer edges, you will probably see the bewildered face of a poor, uncertain, weak

mouthed man, whose eyes are roving from one object to another, and who appears all the weaker because he is under the influence of this collective domination. Or again, consider the jokes which make a great public assembly honestly shake with laughter, and imagine those jokes attempted in a private room! Politicians know well this difference between the psychologies of the individual and of the multitude. The cleverest of them often suffer in reputation precisely because they know what hopeless arguments and what still more hopeless jests will move collectivities, the individual units of which would never have listened to such humor or to such reasoning.

The larger the community with which one is dealing, the truer this is; so that, when it comes to many millions spread upon a large territory, one may well despair of any machinery which shall give expression to that very real thing which Rousseau called the General Will. In the presence of such a difficulty most men who are concerned both for the good of their country and for the general order of society, incline, especially as they grow older, to one or other of the old traditional organic methods by which a State may be expressed and controlled. They incline to an oligarchy such as we have here in England, where a small group of families, intermarried one with the other, dining together perpetually and perpetually guests in each other's houses, are, by a tacit agreement with the populace, permitted to direct a nation. Or they incline to the old-fashioned and very stable device of a despotic bureaucracy such as flourishes amazingly in Germany to the evident good of that State, and did until recently support the expansion of Russia. The evils of such a compromise with a political idea are evident enough. The oligarchy will be luxurious and corrupt as is our own, and