source of natural revelation, and suggesting the faith that, as each is absolute, all are ultimately one. This is, of course, in substance the ancient Platonic doctrine; and it is curious to see how living Plato remains even to-day; and to observe Mr Bridges recalling in noble verse the same great argument which the Dean of St Paul's has restated in his lectures.

'Gird on thy sword, O man, thy strength endue,
In fair desire thine earth-born joy renew.
Live thou thy life beneath the making sun
Till Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one.
Thro' thousand ages hath thy childhood run :
On timeless ruin hath thy glory been:
From the forgotten night of love's fordone
Thou risest in the dawn of hopes unseen.

Higher and higher shall thy thoughts aspire,
Unto the stars of heaven, and pass away,
And earth renew the buds of thy desire
In fleeting blooms of everlasting day.

Thy work with beauty crown, thy life with love:
Thy mind with truth uplift to God above:
For whom all is, from whom was all begun,

In whom all Beauty, Truth, and Love are one.'

What a virility of soul there is in it, what a Roman manliness, simplicity and strength! It has not, of course, the imaginative power of Crashaw's 'Saint Theresa' or Thompson's Dead Cardinal'; but genius at its highest has always been a strange mixture of sanity and ecstasy, and some of those who have had most of it would feel more kinship with the noble sanity of Bridges than with the ecstatic fires of Thompson or Crashaw. The distinction is the old one; the gift of Crashaw and Thompson is the rarer gift: they add to life's possibilities a new and strange element into which few will enter. Mr Bridges, on the other hand, does a wider work with a plainer endowment, touching to new life and higher energy the most ancient and universal of the hopes and loves of man.

There lies his special strength. Only those who have an actual or imaginative understanding of Christianity will ever appreciate such a poet as Francis Thompson. But there is no one who has not himself gone through

some of the experiences which lie at the root of Mr Bridges' poems of Nature, Love, and Religion. He brings to each the questioning insight, the fearless sincerity, the untiring observation of our own day; but to each he also brings the sense of a great tradition of human thought and feeling, and of himself as only one of a great company drawn from all ages and all peoples. So there are two sides to the impression he makes on his readers. On the one hand, every new reading of his poetry strengthens the impression of the poet as a strongly marked individuality, as a man who is definitely and all through his life increasingly himself and no one else. On the other, he reminds his readers of many of his predecessors, men, some of them, so unlike himself; of Herrick sometimes, of Shelley now and then, of Tennyson occasionally, oftener of Wordsworth, oftener still perhaps of Milton, and again of Keats. He often, too, recalls the Latin poets, especially Catullus, and the Greeks, especially the choruses of the tragedians. Yet the dominant note is a modern one, and it is a modern poet more than anyone else who is recalled by the last word of his shorter poems. It is with a brave stoicism, one of action and not merely of endurance, like that of Carducci's last poems, that he gathers his heart together to face the inevitable end.

'Weep not to-day: why should this sadness be?

Learn in present fears

To o'ermaster those tears

That unhindered conquer thee.

Think on thy past valour, thy future praise:

Up, sad heart, nor faint

In ungracious complaint,

Or a prayer for better days.

Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace

Draweth surely nigh,

When good-night is good-bye;

For the sleeping shall not cease.

Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away
Deem, nor strange thy doom.
Like this sorrow 'twill come,
And the day will be to-day.'

JOHN BAILEY.

Art. 13.-THE MARCONI AFFAIR.

1. Reports from the Select Committee on Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Limited, Agreement [152]. Published as a special supplement to 'The Times,' June 14, 1913.

2. Debates in the House of Commons. Times,' October 12, 1912, June 19 and 20, 1913.

THE circumstances under which the now notorious agreement between the British Government and the Marconi Company was negotiated, the story of the promotion, culmination, and collapse of the great Marconi boom, and the still more astounding story of the part played in one department of that boom by three of His Majesty's Ministers, have been brought before the public in three Special Reports from a Select Committee, in some 1500 pages of Bluebook, in 350 columns of Hansard, and in countless thousands of columns of print. The publication of these Reports, and the debates upon them in the House of Commons, afford the possibility of forming a final judgment on the whole affair which has hitherto been wanting.

As regards the main facts, at any rate, we may assume them to be known to our readers. We are free then to proceed straight to the point and ask what precisely it was that the Attorney-General, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Chief Patronage Secretary were doing when in April of last year they embarked upon their 'investment' in the shares of the American Marconi Company, what was the real nature of their transactions and in what sense and how far were they in any way improper or unbecoming?

Let us look first at the bare facts, entirely divested of any question of Ministers' motives or of their realisation of what they were doing. The three Ministers concerned undoubtedly took part in a Stock Exchange gamble, which Lord Robert Cecil's report with justice stigmatised as scandalous. At any rate, as regards the original 10,000 shares, bought by Sir Rufus Isaacs, they took part in it as 'insiders' exploiting the ignorance of the public. In this respect alone the conduct of Ministers was, to use the mildest word, unbecoming. But that,

after all, is the least grave of the criticisms to which their transactions are open. Much more serious is the fact that the subject matter of their speculative dealings were the shares of a company so intimately bound up with and so dependent upon the parent Marconi Company, both in actual fact and in Stock Exchange opinion, as those of the American company. Every objection, on the score of the danger of a conflict between Ministerial duty and private interest, which could be urged against the purchase by Ministers of English Marconi shares while the contract was still pending, really applies with almost equal force to the purchase of the American shares. Could anything be more fatal to public honesty than to lay down a rule that public servants, while not allowed to speculate in the shares of a company contracting with the Government, should be free to speculate to their hearts' content in any shares, however closely affected by the contract, so long as they belong to a technically distinct company?

But the gravest feature of the whole business is that Ministers entered upon their speculations on advice and special information given them by the Managing Director of a Company engaged in securing from the Government a contract of immense importance to that company and to all its subsidiaries. No form of bribery is more easily accepted or more difficult to detect than the giving of a Stock Exchange 'tip'; and none, consequently, needs to be more anxiously guarded against in our public life. Nothing has been more significant of the refusal of Ministers and their friends to face the real nature of the transactions in which they took part than the exaggerated distinction which they have throughout attempted to draw between the mistaken charge made or implied in certain papers, that they had speculated in English Marconi shares on official information—a charge which they have repeatedly described as the gravest and most offensive that could possibly be made and the facts which they themselves have admitted and profess to regard as venial indiscretions. There is no essential distinction in impropriety between the two. If anything, for a Minister to speculate on information received from a contractor is worse than speculating on information received in the ordinary course of his official work as a Minister. The Vol. 219.-No. 436.

S

latter speculation may only be known to the Minister himself; the former places him in a position of obligation and creates a tacit but none the less definite expectation of favours to be rendered in return. In this case the favour was a double one. Ministers not only acted on the valuable information given, but they secured a further substantial advantage in buying the shares at 2. It is true that these shares were not bought from the contractor directly. But they were known to have come from him, and the intervention of Mr Harry Isaacs no more altered the essential features of the transaction as regards Sir Rufus Isaacs than his own intervention did as regards the other Ministers. After all, the test of the impropriety of any transaction is the facility with which it could lend itself to corruption; and the use of the intermediary is as old as the history of corruption itself.

That Ministers were guilty of the gravest impropriety is the only verdict that can be passed on the facts as they now stand disclosed. That they could not have realised all these facts as plainly as they have been here set forth is obvious. But that they were as fatuously innocent as they have since made themselves out to be is frankly incredible. We are asked to believe that Sir Rufus Isaacs, with all his varied experience of Stock Exchange transactions, had no sort of notion of the kind of market operation this American Marconi issue was to be. We are asked to believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was under the impression that he was making an "investment" when, with no spare money available to invest, he took up shares in a company which had never paid a dividend, and was only induced by a totally unforeseen rise to dispose within a few days of seven-eighths of his holding at a profit of over 60 per cent. We are asked to believe that, when Sir Rufus Isaacs took the 10,000 shares from his brother, he assumed that he was just in the position of any ordinary member of the public, and might equally well have bought them through his broker and advised his colleagues to do the same. We are asked to believe that a mere assurance that the American Marconi Company did not participate in the dividends of the parent company was sufficient to convince the AttorneyGeneral that there was no connexion between the two companies and no harm in buying American Marconi