were those which must always govern those concerned in Biblical revision. A fourth movement inaugurated by Bacon was the teaching of the four great languages -Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean, in the Universities of Europe, which was ordered by Clement V shortly after his death for reasons which seem borrowed from his works.

It does not lie within the scope of this article to estimate the position of Roger Bacon among the great men of his century or his country; the time has not yet come, when, with all the materials before us, we can revise the judgments by which the last two centuries have consecrated his fame. Excellent as are the Commemoration Essays just published, the work of M. Charles published more than half a century ago is still the most valuable account of his life and writings, though it much needs revision. More than one-half of Bacon's writings still await publication; and, until they are in the hands of scholars, the history of 13thcentury science and philosophy cannot be written. We in England have a special interest in this work. Roger Bacon was our first great English philosopher; he was typically English in his independent attitude and practical turn of mind; he influenced the teaching of Oxford, and, through Oxford and Scot and Ockham, the later philosophy and politics of medieval Europe; he established the tradition of free enquiry which has made English workers open out so many new paths in the world of thought and science. We have raised him a monument in the University where he once taught; it remains but to put that teaching on record for whoso will to read.

ROBERT STEELE.

Art. 13. THE HOME RULE CRISIS.

A UNIONIST Member of Parliament was reprimanded by the Speaker not long ago for saying that the country was drifting into Civil War because an old gentleman could not make up his mind. The remark may have been unparliamentary, but it was none the less illuminating. If we stand to-day on the brink of an appalling catastrophe it is due in no small measure to the fact that in a critical period the supreme power in the State has fallen into the hands of a man who combines unrivalled gifts of parliamentary leadership with a complete incapacity to face facts or to come to any decision upon them. Again and again in the last few months Mr Asquith has averted a breakdown in Parliament by the exercise of his amazing skill in debate. Of no one could it be more truly said than of him that he plays upon the House as upon an old fiddle. But not once since the beginning of this great constitutional crisis has he shown the slightest trace of any understanding of the forces at work outside, or made any visible effort to direct or control them. Devoid alike of imagination and of resolution, he has drifted on from debate to debate, from incident to incident, the slave of a Parliamentary situation which he has himself created, and of events in Ireland which have long since reduced that Parliamentary situation to a dangerous farce.

There is a Mr Asquith of current legend-austere, unflinching, logical and lucid. Whatever substratum of fact may once have existed for these epithets, they have little application to the real Mr Asquith of the present day. His famed lucidity, it is true, still survives, in a sense, and still receives from his opponents in debate the customary homage of a banal compliment. But it is a lucidity of phrase alone, and not of thought, a lucidity which explains but never enlightens. It would pass the wit of man to discover, in the whole series of Mr Asquith's speeches on this Home Rule issue, what is the real object of his measure, or what is his own idea of the future destiny of Ireland and of the United Kingdom. There are lucid phrases to please the Nationalists, lucid qualifications to assuage the doubts of faltering Liberals, lucid retorts to Unionist attacks.

But there is neither coherent vision nor illuminating glimpse, to tell us what it is all about, or why he is doing it. This vagueness and incoherence are not the artifice of one who deliberately conceals his purpose. They are, on the contrary, merely the outward expression of the lack of definite policy or purpose behind. It would be futile to attempt to strip off the outer integument of debating points in order to get at the real Mr Asquith underneath. There is no such person. The trouble with Mr Asquith is just that he never has been anything, either Nationalist, Federalist or Unionist, on this Home Rule question, and that he has never really wanted, and does not now want, to do anything with it. For twenty years he has held a season-ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself. Since 1910 he has been pinned down by Parliamentary exigencies to a particular measure. But he has never faced the consequences of his measure in action, and will not face them now. He cannot bring himself to abandon the policy of forcing Home Rule upon Ulster; but neither can he bring himself to interfere with Ulster's preparations for resistance. And if Civil War should break out, as it well may, next month or the month after, he will still be found letting things take their course and justifying himself with dignity, conciseness and lucidity till some impatient man of action among his colleagues decides to lock him up.

There are several of Mr Asquith's colleagues who would long ago have made some real effort to settle the issue if they had been in his position. Mr Churchill, indeed, has more than once actually tried to bring about a real decision. The federal scheme first outlined at Dundee on September 12, 1912, and the "pogrom" of last March were each in their very different ways efforts to find a solution in the world of actualities and not of phrases. But Mr Churchill has little personal authority in his party, and no other colleague has attempted to interfere with the Prime Minister's control, or noncontrol, of the Home Rule situation. The only other person who could have exercised a really decisive influence in the shaping of policy to meet facts is Mr Redmond.

But Mr Redmond is as incapable of a positive or constructive policy as Mr Asquith himself. He is little more than a respectable and eloquent lay figure enshrining the tradition of Parnellite Home Rule. To that he has clung tenaciously, imperiously, and regardless of all the obvious consequences which make that solution impossible, simply because his imagination has never been able to soar to any other.

But if the fatal conjunction of Mr Asquith's planlessness and Mr. Redmond's narrow persistence in the groove of an obsolete and impossible policy are primarily responsible for the intolerable situation into which Parliament and the country have drifted, it cannot be said that Unionist leadership has done much to avert the impending catastrophe. If great issues could be settled by argument alone, then certainly the Unionist leaders have done all that ability and eloquence could do to bring home to Parliament and to the public the impolicy and the danger of the Government's proceedings. But great issues are ruled by will and by ideas; and in that domain Unionist leadership has lacked the compelling force which alone could transform the situation. The Unionist leaders have made little or no attempt to quicken and kindle the national idea which, once fully conscious, of itself excludes and repels the idea of separation. They have denounced the Government's policy as unconstitutional and revolutionary, but they have never made it sufficiently clear that they really mean what they say, that they really mean to dispute the validity of the Home Rule Bill if it gets on the Statute Book under the Parliament Act, and mean to repeal it if they are returned to power. On the other hand, while they have been nervously anxious not to be thought unconciliatory, they have never clearly indicated on what lines and by what method they themselves would be prepared to arrive at a real settlement by consent. They have allowed Ulster, which has known its own mind from the first, to become the protagonist in the drama, while they themselves have tended to relapse into the position of a Greek chorus, dwelling alternately upon the wickedness and the impossibility of coercing Sir Edward Carson and his Covenanters.

Sir Edward Carson, indeed, has bulked steadily larger

on the political horizon as the crisis has developed. And the secret of his power has lain precisely in the fact that he has represented not abstract argument but concrete will, the will of a great community embodied and intensified in the single will of its leader. The impression of strength and even greatness which he has created has been deepened by the simplicity of his character and by his essential moderation, a moderation which has shown itself alike in his restraining and steadying influence upon Ulster itself and in his repeated limitation of the Ulster case to the claim to retain only the same rights in the Parliament of the United Kingdom as are enjoyed by any other part of the kingdom. But the very strength of Sir Edward Carson's position and personality has been in one sense a weakness to the Unionist cause, for it has focussed public attention too narrowly on Ulster. The wider and more important issue of the Union has been too frequently allowed to recede into the background; and Unionists have fallen unconsciously more and more into the mental habit of advocating not the principles of Unionism against a divided kingdom, but the principles of Home Rule in favour of a divided Ireland.

With thus much by way of prelude we can now proceed to review the development of the crisis from the point at which we left it in the April number. When the House of Commons reassembled after Easter, the Opposition devoted itself with redoubled zest to the task of extracting from Mr Asquith, now restored to the House in his dual capacity of Prime Minister and Secretary of State for War, and from his colleagues, the true facts with regard to the projected coup against Ulster. In spite of the ingenuity shown in the arts of evasion and prevarication, this process of mental dentistry met with considerable success. On April 22 a new White Paper was published superseding the original White Paper of March 25. The original White Paper contained eight documents-according to Mr Asquith and Colonel Seely these were all the material documents in existence. The new White Paper contained fifty-five. Even here there were some obvious omissions on the most vital points. There was no record either from the War Office or from General Paget of the instructions given to the latter during