which could not have been foreseen.' They therefore came to the conclusion that 'they must confine themselves simply to applying the historic and admitted rules of the Law of Nations'-in common parlance, to consign the Declaration of London to the scrap-heap. Much material on this and on cognate subjects is to be found in 'Studies of an Imperialist,' a brilliant collection of prophetic essays by Lord Sydenham. In this brief study of sea-law and sea-power, we have not yet touched upon the direct influence of the law and custom of the sea upon operations between the actual fighting forces. One branch of that subject, the status of troop-transports, has so important a bearing upon our own system of Empire defence, that the indifference displayed towards this important matter in recent discussions presents a curious phenomenon. Before the days of the Gladstone administration of 1868 to 1874, when Cardwell introduced his army reforms, our system of Empire Defence was to keep the bulk of a long-service army perpetually serving abroad, thus providing, in each area of oversea territory under the British flag, a military force considered adequate for security. This, in the days of long voyages under sail, may have been a wise precaution, but it did not tend either to economy or to efficiency. Little, if any, military training, as we now understand it, could be performed, and garrison work at some out-of-the-way station was monotonous and uninspiring. One of the main features of the Cardwell reforms was the reduction of oversea garrisons to skeleton forces, keeping a body of shorterservice troops in the United Kingdom to reinforce any threatened area. The substitution of steam for sails enabled us to adopt this policy without prohibitive risk, but the success of the system always depended, and still depends, upon the security of the seas for the movement of British troop-transports, whether Britain is neutral or belligerent. Procedure in the recent Great War renders it unnecessary for us to dwell on the point that the law and custom of the sea, set originally by ourselves when we feared invasion early in the 19th century,* sanctions the ruthless destruction by belligerents of enemy trooptransports. It is surprising that this aspect of sea-law * Instructions to Admiral Keith (' Admiralty In-Letters,' August 1803). has been ignored almost entirely in the brief for the British Empire's vital need for adequate sea-power to defend sea-communications. This need is shared, to a limited extent, by other Powers whose territories are divided by sea, in so far as they have adopted our own system of depending upon troops in the home country for immediate reinforcement, in times of emergency, of their oversea garrisons. We have now dealt with two of the three branches of our subject of sea-law; with Courts for its administration, and with a code for those Courts to administer. There remains the question of enforcing the decisions of such Courts. Under that heading, we can only express the hope that conformity with the law, without seizing upon the transient and illusory advantage offered by unrestrained violence, will be as strong a feature of the procedure of all great Sea-Powers in the future, as it has been of Great Britain's procedure in the past. Financial exhaustion, by our supreme effort in the late War, has caused us to stand aside in the competition for sea-supremacy, which in the past gave us the dominating voice in deciding and enforcing sea-law. We have already taken note of Commander Stewart Bowles's comparison between conceptions of war on land and at sea. They differ completely, not only in immediate object, but also in method. The immediate object of war on land is destruction. Its method accordingly is violence. The immediate object of war at sea is deprivation, and its method accordingly is preservation and law. When dealing myself with questions of law on land in time of war, I confess to having derived comfort from the saying: Inter arma silent leges, which I used to translate freely: Lawyers must be silent in the presence of Competent Military Authorities. It may be that, in time of peace, the converse should be in force: Inter leges silent arma. Members of the combatant services would do well to be silent and leave such matters to the legal profession. I may perhaps express the hope that, when framing the future Law of the Sea, members of that profession will combine political wisdom and foresight in foreign affairs with their skill in legal technicalities. GEORGE ASTON. Art. 2.-THE OXFORD DICTIONARY. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon THE issue on April 19 of the three last sections of what for nearly half a century has been called the New English Dictionary will bring to an end the greatest lexicographical enterprise in the history of the world. Initiated some seventy years ago by the Philological Society, made possible by the public spirit of the Clarendon Press, and carried through by the life-work of a little group of scholars, aided by a devoted staff of assistants, it now stands before us in ten mighty volumes, the glory of English scholarship. Its progress has lasted through two generations and each instalment has been eagerly received by that small section of the nation, very much too small, which recognises that we have accidentally acquired, along with an Empire, the most expressive of European languages, according to Grimm; the most virile, according to Jespersen; the most poetic, according to Paul Bourget and most students of comparative literature. There have been, from the earliest times, a few choice spirits capable of appreciating the romance and beauty, the cultural and historical significance of word-history, but it was Richard Chenevix Trench-his second name is commonly misspelt, e.g. on the jacket' of Dent's 'Everyman' reprint-who first made these treasures accessible to the reading public in his 'Study of Words' (1851) and 'English Past and Present' (1855), and it is largely to Trench's inspiration that we owe the great work of which the English nation ought to be, but is not, legitimately proud. It may be noted that of the four editors two have been Scottish and a third bears at rate a Welsh name. any The task of setting the machine in motion fell to Herbert Coleridge and that electric personality Frederick James Furnivall. The latter, with characteristic enthusiasm and optimism, imagined that the work would be self-supporting and even that vast profits, to be made C available for the furthering of philological science, would flow into the coffers of the Philological Society. In point of fact the production of the Dictionary has cost the Clarendon Press some 300,000. No millionaire has offered to shoulder part of the burden, and the only outside contribution received has been a present of 50007. from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, to whom vol. vi (L, M, N) is gratefully dedicated. The inception of the work dates from 1859, when Herbert Coleridge confidently hoped to begin publication in two years' time. At his death, in 1861, Furnivall was left to bear the burden alone, and, as frequently happens in such undertakings, material went on accumulating, voluntary editors went on editing, re-editing and subediting, and publication receded into the dim distance. It was not till 1879 that an agreement was made between the Philological Society and the Oxford Press and that J. A. H. Murray was formally entrusted with the editorship. He began work in the 'scriptorium' at Mill Hill School, where he was a master. The first section appeared on Feb. 1, 1884, and it was calculated that the whole Dictionary would be finished in about ten years! There have now been four editors. Dr Murray, who became Sir James in 1908, soon saw that the task would be too much for a single director, however much help he might receive from his staff of assistants and his army of voluntary readers, contributors, and philological advisers, the last category including almost every scholar of distinction in Europe. Henry Bradley began to share the burden of the letter B, and in 1896 settled as coeditor in Oxford, whither the editor and 'plant' had transferred themselves in 1885. In his later years Murray hoped to finish the Dictionary on his eightieth birthday, but this was not to be. He died in 1915 at the age of seventy-eight, after a life of strenuous intellectual effort for which it would not be easy to find a parallel. He was succeeded as chief editor by Bradley, who carried on the work till his death in 1923. Dr W. A. Craigie, who is now in Chicago showing the United States how to compile a national dictionary, was 'added to the board' in 1897, and Mr C. T. Onions, who had long been an assistant on the staff, became a full editor in 1914, taking over the command-in-chief from Dr Craigie, when the latter had finished his allotted portion, which included the tremendous problem of the unlimited number of words that can begin with un-. Those of us who belong to the Philological Society, a harmless little group of unobtrusive individuals who meet once a month in London, have a vivid recollection of the two great scholars whose task is done, and of the two much younger editors who happily survive and, it is to be hoped, have still long years of valuable work before them. 'Dictionary evening' at the Philological was always an excitement. The editor of the section in preparation arrived from Oxford with his bundle of proofs, told us how the dictionary was getting on, and was bombarded with questions by members who wanted to know what documentary or etymological discoveries had been made with regard to age-old problems in word-history. If I may be pardoned a personal reminiscence, I would remark that my interest in the Dictionary dates almost from boyhood, because that amazing linguistic genius, the late James Platt, who was reading papers to the Philological Society while yet in his teens, was my schoolfellow. Until his untimely death in 1910, he was the stand-by for the editors whenever a mysterious word from Choctaw, Tibetan, or Malagasy needed explanation. He worked with few books, and he was said to have more than a bowing acquaintance with about a hundred languages. My first acquaintance with Sir James Murray, who for many years sent me his proofs to read, dates from the last decade of the 19th century. It is associated with a radiant July day, a pleasant inn in the woods, and a luncheon-party (chief items Black Forest trout and Ihringer Riesling) given in honour of the great lexicographer by Friedrich Kluge, most learned and most beloved of 'Germanists.' To this luncheon was invited, a trait of Kluge's unfailing kindness, a young Englishman who occupied an unimportant post at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, and who listened with proper reverence to his betters as they discussed questions of lexicography and recondite problems of Middle English phonology. Normally the meal should |