which is at once practicable the true sense Conservative, for and far-reaching, appeals alike to the country and to the towns. It offers a chance to the poor man, for whom the Liberal Land Bills do nothing. Every year some eighty per cent of the men on one labour colony, known to the writer, who have been given a training on the land, are sent back to the towns to kick their heels, or at the best to dissipate their training in some unskilled urban employment. Such methods are a waste both of money and men. It is for us to institute a land policy which shall increase the productiveness of British land, revive rural prosperity, palliate the disease of unemployment by opening a new career to men of a certain aptitude, and bring the problems of rural and urban economy into one survey. The follies of Liberal land legislation must be met not with a blank denial but with a sound alternative. But most of all it is our business to break down the class antagonism which Mr Lloyd - George has created in the industrial areas. It will be a slow task and a difficult task, for the forts of folly are not undermined in a day. We have to admit frankly the justice of the workman's claim for better conditions and equal chances. We have to show ourselves active in those causes which mean much to him-a comprehensive pensions scheme, insurance against unemployment and sickness, and a wholesale revision of the Poor Law. Such reforms are in they are based on a belief in the organic interdependence of the parts of the State. But above all we must educate the industrial areas out of the "class" fallacy, which is both economically and politically ruinous. The Liberal party has stolen the Socialist old clothes; very ancient garments they are, for the wiser Socialist has long discarded them. They imagine that the distribution of existing wealth, assuming it to be possible, in some way or other creates new wealth; that, if you have ten potatoes, and want to feed five hungry men, the way is to give them two each, rather than to get more potatoes. In the second place, they share the antique heresy that labour and capital are so independent that the health or debility of the one has no direct bearing on the wellbeing of the other. These are the principles which underlie Liberal policy; and the Socialist, who is, as a rule, a much more thoughtful politician, seeing that his old adversaries are inclined to play his game, gives them his cynical approval. It is the duty of Conservatives to break down this wall of prejudice, which prevents the workman from voting on a principle like an intelligent citizen. They will have many allies in this task, and the strongest will be the plain logic of experience. should not be hard to convince thinking men how intricately the interests of labour and capital are intertwined; and, when this is achieved, it is only It a step to a broader view of the a natural growth, deep-rooted whole economic problem. That in fact. We have to show is all that Conservatism asks that Conservatism, so far from for. It is content to stake every- being blind to social evils, is thing upon reason and inquiry. the only creed which goes to It courts the full light of day, the heart of the problem. We and fears only the twilight of have to work out a new conclass bigotry and shallow pre- stitutional machinery, legisjudice. In this educative task lative and executive, which there is one way in which shall be adequate to the reConservative employers of quirements of the Empire. labour can render immense Above all, we have to face assistance. There is no dem- the great economic question, onstration of the truth which stretches from English have stated which comes home unemployment at one end to to the workman with such Imperial defence at the other, effect as that given by his the question of how we are participation in some scheme of profit-sharing. We know very well that in many industries such schemes are out of we em the question. But in many, especially those not formed into companies, a wise ployer might with profit to his business and advantage to the State so arrange matters that the workman had a stake in the success of the enter prise. Such partnerships of capital and labour are more educative than all the theories in the world. If the fallacies of agitators are to be finally exploded, capital must take labour into its confidence. a to increase our national and Imperial assets, and provide that new wealth which alone can solve our social dfficulties, and which no juggling with present not formed present wealth will provide. This is the central fact of our policy-the restoration of nationalist economics. Every other reform depends upon the increased productivity which will follow inevitably from a reform of our present casual fiscal methods, for such change implies a new attitude towards every public question. The most far-reaching scheme of Imperial unity, as well as the homeliest measure of social betterment, becomes practicable only when we resolve to look economic facts squarely in the face. Tariff Reform is the fundamental foundation of Conservative policy, because on the attitude which it involves depends the realisation of all other ideals. These are high and difficult matters, but there is much to give Conservatives courage. They are fighting against a patch Our main business for the present is, as we have said, educative and deliberative. There is an immense constructive task in front of us, and before we can enter upon it we must get our minds clear on every detail. We have to work out a land policy which shall meet the needs of the cities and the equally pressing needs of the counties, and which shall be no forced hothouse plant, but work faith and a motley army. The Liberalism which based itself on a noble if mistaken creed and rigorous logio was a formidable enemy; but the Liberalism which has abandoned the appeal to reason and sets its trust in class jealousy and sectarian passion is foredoomed to failure. It will be destroyed sooner or later by the furies which it seeks to unchain. We fight to-day, in a sense in which we have never fought before, for the organic conception of the State, for national and imperial unity, for the progress which founds itself upon fact and reason. In such a war we have great allies. It is never very safe to generalise about national spirit; but we can see through the ages of our history a spirit which, when blown into flame at a crisis, has consumed the forces of secession and disunion. It is the spirit which made a monarchy out of a heptarchy and an empire out of a monarchy. This true and ancient English feeling has been always the foe of sectarianism, whether religious or political, Puritan or Jacobite, oligarchio or popular. It has stood for the unity of the nation, the community of publio interest. It is an ill force to war against; for it is the essential England-that England which is slow and patient and in the long-run very sure. A certain Mr A. H. Scott, a Lancashire Liberal member, made a speech last year which contained these significant words: "Even if the Germans did come, they would not be such fools as to interfere with the industrial and wealth-producing classes. They would only interfere with the landowning classes; and if it was the latter's land which was protected, then let them pay for the protection." Such treason against nationality may be talked with impunity for a season, but England will not endure the seotary for ever. There comes a day when the country awakens to his mischief, and he is called by his true name; and on that day his seditions are blown into thinnest air. Printed by William Blackwood and Sons. BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. No. MCXXXIV. APRIL 1910. VOL. CLXXXVII. NATIONAL LIFE OR NATIONAL DEATH. Britain. IN the midst of the noise and at Americans strike home in confusion of domestic politics there has come to us from across the Atlantic the voice of a student and thinker,1 who, writing to warn his own countrymen of the United States against what he considers the greatest of national dangers, proclaims truths and sets forth facts and laws which are in every way as applicable to this country as to his own, and which affect not merely the conditions under which we as a nation exist, but the more vital question of our continued national existence. Many will smile at the idea that the great British Empire, that Empire on which the sun never sets, could ever cease to exist. We ask them to hear what this writer has to say, and not be dismayed when they find that his shafts aimed In his opening chapter he speaks of patriotism, and tells us how to distinguish true patriotism from that false patriotism under whose cloak nations are betrayed and given over to pillage. The two most common forms of false patriotism are contempt for and prejudice against other nations, and vainglorious boasting as to one's own. To boast of a nation's wealth, under the delusion that it is patriotic, is to commit a crime against patriotism. The true patriot is known by his actions. When, in peace, men postpone their patriotic activity to a time of war, their procrastination is only indicative of their worthlessness. In national defeat distinction cannot be made as to the cause of it. For a nation 1 The Valor of Ignorance, by Homer Lea. Harper Brothers, New York and London. 2 G VOL. CLXXXVII.-NO. MCXXXIV. to suffer defeat through unpreparedness is, to all practical purposes, as bad as though it were through cowardice in the field. In consequence, the man who opposes, in time of peace, suitable preparations for war, is as unpatriotic and detrimental to the nation as he who shirks his duty or deserts his post in time of battle. National existence is not a haphazard passage of a people from an unknown beginning to an unforeseen end, but is part of life itself, formed by the same immutable laws. "No state is destroyed except through those avertible conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to evade and perish rather than to master the single lesson taught by the washingaway of those that have gone down before them. In their indifference and in the valor of their ignorance they depart, together with their monuments and constitutions, their vanities and gods." From the beginning of human life, from the day when the brawniest paleolithic man had with his stone axe killed or reduced to submission all those who had invaded his immediate thickets, and so by this primitive process founded the first kingdom, of which he was king and his crude axe the sole law, the procession of events has followed the same rule. The lives of men and the lives of nations are similar: they pass from the cradle to manhood, expanding in intellect, accumulating vigour and strength until, in due time, they grow old, die, and are forgotten, down in the deep vast ossuary of time. The same struggle for existence results in the gradual elimination of those possessed of least combative power. "As manhood marks the height of physical vigor among mankind, so the militant successes of a nation mark the zenith of its physical greatness. The decline of physical strength in the individual is significant of disease or old age, culminating in death. In the same manner deterioration of military strength or militant capacity in a nation marks its decline." The inexorable law of combat is thus picturesquely sketched : "Wars-victory-a nation. Wars -destruction-dissolution. Such is the melancholy epitome of national existence, and such has it been from the beginning of human association until to-day. From the time, six thousand years past, when the wild highlander rolled down from the mountains of Elam and moulded with sword and brawn the Turanian shepherds into the Chaldean Empire, until within the last decade, when the Samurai of Nippon rose out of their islands in the Eastern Sea and carved for themselves a new empire on the continent of Asia, there has been no cessation nor deviation from this inexorable law governing the formation and extinction of national entities. "All kingdoms, empires, and nations that have existed on this earth have been born out of the womb of war, and the delivery of them has occurred in the pain and labor of battle. So, too, have these same nations, with the same inevitable certainty, perished on like fields amid the wreckage and cinders of their defenceless possessions." The long continuance of the Chinese Empire may, by those who have thought but superficially, be quoted against this dootrine. Empires innumerable have been founded, flourished, and disappeared, while the |