ture capable of high development should be precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and natural disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough-the waste of strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open spaces and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children. This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people, and Indians on arriving are horrified to realize that the boasted Imperial race consists of a majority so degraded in appearance as our working-men and women. But the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the banana-box to the grave.

"Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes, "stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in order.

. With even the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."

At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning, the working boys' education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment-of interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the Board

Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put in, no enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our army within twentyfive years will understand what we mean. Nevertheless, at fourteen the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development. When he leaves school, shades of the prisonhouse begin to close upon him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are "finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best he develops into the average working-man of the regious we have called unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:

These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet, if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity! No man that has dreams can rest content because the English worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare intoxication.

We do not rest content; far from it. But to us the perpetual wonder is, not that "the lower classes are brutalized." but that this brutality is so tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that surprises us, but

their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but their inexplicable acquiescence. "O sacred head, O desecrate, 0 labor-wounded feet and hands," cried the poet before a Crucifix of the Son of Man, and to-day is a fitting time to remember the words.

The Nation.

And yet there are still people who sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.

The "form and order” of the Coronation Service and of "the ceremonies that are to be observed" has been issued in various shapes and at various prices by the King's Printers (Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode, East Harding Street, E.C.) and we may employ the occasion of re-reading this noble service to look into its religious and political meaning. Gladstone wrote of the Coronation Service with passionate admiration. What are the underlying ideas which appealed to him, and which shine through the whole service in its relation to the people? The Service is, as Gladstone said, a thing by which the religion of the nation is attested. It is like the compact made at the accession of a Jewish King-a covenant between the Lord and the King and the people. The King is reminded that he owes allegiance to God and justice to his people; the obligations of the people to render homage and obedience to the King are demanded on the condition that the King obeys the Divine law, and administers justice in the light of that law; and both King and people avow their conviction of the unalterable mercy and guidance of the Almighty on condition that their part of the covenant be observed. Although the Service is, one might almost say, lyrical in its spirit of devotion, there is no insistence what ever on purely distinguishing Anglican doctrines. It is a Service which any Christian might join in without dissent.

If

We hear so much of the Coronation, that the public might easily pass into thinking that the Coronation is a kind of pageant of which the symbols mean very little beyond keeping up a tradition. Owing to gossip, the influx of visitors, and the power of a popular Press, it might happen by one means or another that the significance of the Coronation would be lost in an orgy of secondary meanings. The only corrective of that distorted yet inevitable tendency is to read the Service. ever there was a form of words which causes all the tokens and trappings of an ancient usage to fall into their proper places and serve the central and most simple purpose of the ceremony, it is this Service. The King holds the nation in trust, and never has greater emphasis been laid on the profound responsibilities of that trust. One might be casually led to think of the Coronation as an excessive act of homage to the King, on whom all attention is concentrated. Nothing could be wider of the truth. As one reads the Service one is rather impressed by the thought that a King, exceptionally sensible of the nature of his charge, could hardly bear up under the burden of responsibility loaded upon him and urged with all the emphasis of weighty words. The person of the King, we mean, enjoys the homage of the people only as the embodiment of the trust confided to his keeping. From the first word to the last there is not a breath or shadow

of sycophancy. The Service is worthy of a free people-worthy of a people who rationally but devotedly believe. in the convenience and efficacy of a constitutional hereditary monarchy.

The Service is a selection from words and usages which go back to the earliest times. The accretion of ceremo

nies hundreds of years ago had already become SO unmanageable that an abridgement of the Coronation became inevitable. In a history of the Coronations, "The Coronation Book," by the Rev. Jocelyn Perkins (Sir I. Pitman, second edition, 7s. 6d. net), we are reminded that Richard II., worn out with the protracted rites, was carried fainting from the Abbey. Parts of the ceremony gradually fell into disuse, but the whole was still inordinately long. After the Coronation of George IV., for example, the procession of the Regalia was abandoned. This fine and telling ceremony was revived at the Coronation of Edward VII., and the present form of Service (with the possible exception of the sermon, which, however, is expressly required to be short) seems to have brought us to a point where nothing can be sacrificed without spoiling the historical grandeur of the office.

As Mr. Perkins says, the Coronation is in danger of losing some of its meaning through being performed so long after accession. The "sacring" of a King with the holy oil undoubtedly expressed more to Englishmen, say before the time of Queen Anne, than it expresses to us to-day. The unction was supposed to invest the King with peculiar powers, and he emerged from the ceremony possessed of a dual character, half cleric, half lay—a mixta per

sona:

Not all the water in the rough, rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed King.

The divine aid was, and is, invoked upon the Sovereign in the same manner

as upon Bishops; and the episcopal character of the vestments worn by the King is plain to the eye. "The Recognition," as it is called, of the King and Queen very early in the Service, takes one back to the ancient custom of electing a King:

The King and Queen being so placed, the Archbishop shall turn to the East part of the Theatre, and after, together with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Great Chamberlain, Lord High Constable and Earl Marshal (Garter King of Arms preceding them), shall go to the other three sides of the Theatre in this order, South, West, and North, and at every of the four sides shall with a loud voice speak to the people; and the King in the mean while standing up by his chair, shall turn and show himself unto the People at every of the four sides of the Theatre as the Archbishop is at every of them, the Archbishop saying:

"Sirs, I here present unto you King GEORGE, the undoubted King of this Realm: Wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage and service, Are you willing to do the same?"

The People signify their willingness and joy, by loud and repeated acclamations, all with one voice crying out,

"God save King GEORGE." Then the trumpets shall sound. William the Conqueror, as we know, was anxious to secure his position by exacting the expression of popular consent-i.e., the consent of election-when he received the crown from Archbishop Eldred. The "Yea, yea!" of the people was, unhappily, taken by the Norman soldiers to be a hostile shout, and they fired the houses of the Saxons. Two or three times the suggestion of popular election is to be found still embedded in the Service. One may find a counterpart to the survival of these suggestions in the fact that anyone has a right to attend the gathering of Privy Councillors and other notable persons who assemble on the demise of the Crown to proclaim the new King, and

also to sign his name to the proclamation. That assembly is not a meeting of the Privy Council but in truth represents the Witan and so the tradition of popular election.

The promises cxacted from the King are sobering indeed::

Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Dominions thereto belonging, according to the Statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the respective Laws and Customs of the same?

King. I solemnly promise so to do. Archbishop. Will you to your power cause Law and Justice in Mercy to be executed in all your judgments?

King. I will.

Archbishop. Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? And will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of EngThe Spectator.

land, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them, or any of them?

King. All this I promise to do.

No sooner is the King crowned than the choir adjures him in delightfully direct and simple words:-"Be strong and play the man: keep the commandments of the Lord, thy God, and walk in His ways." Nor must we forget the excellent words-as moving as any in the whole ceremony-with which the Dean of Westminster gives a copy of the Bible to the King:

Our gracious King; we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is wisdom; this is the royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God.

A number of police and diplomatic revelations in recent months have called attention to the extraordinary and threatening development which the international spy has taken in the world behind the scenes at the present day. Many circumstances have combined to render his sinister calling at once more easy and more formidable. From the telephone to the aeroplane, from the abolition or facilitation of passports to the cosmopolitanism of newspapers, commercial agencies, and Stock Exchanges, there is everywhere the means of sudden communication and surreptitious profits to an extent incredible in times not very remote from our own. A Cairene broker's assistant, by first spying on the domestic secrets of an extravagant prince,

can set his foot on the ladder which conducts him to the directorate of one of Europe's greatest newspapers; and every foot of his tortuous progress is marked by secret transactions with dangerous accomplices and public catastrophes to trusting dupes. Great agglomerations of alien populations in almost every country afford ready sympathizers to the spy, facile aids to his inquisitions and investigations, dexterous informants in his search for knowledge, devoted accomplices, bound by the shibboleths of race and tradition, when the agents of law or government are pressing hard upon the traces of the betrayer of national security. It was easier for the ministers of justice to track an escaping criminal from den to den in the Alsatia at Whitefriars or

in the Liberties of Westminster two hundred years ago than it is to-day to watch or capture the subtle thief of public secrets who is protected by the fraternity of calling and kinship from Houndsditch to Odessa.

The scandal at the Quai d'Orsay, as the Paris Press is accustomed to entitle the disclosure of diplomatic secrets by a subordinate of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, may serve to illustrate the unscrupulous skill of the spy as well as the extent of his operations and the variety of his methods and occupations. The world-wide system, indeed, by which a grave and cultured Oriental, a Jew from the Turkish province of Mesopotamia, was able to offer the most intimate documents of the French Foreign Office for purchase by London newspapers, cosmopolitan concession-hunters at Constantinople, or Italian and German Governments reasonably suspected of a desire to pry into French policy, forms a phenomenon of modern development that has too many counterparts. The manytongued Maimon from Bagdad-his very name reminiscent of the great Maimonides of the Middle Ages who is the pride of Jewish philosophy-seems to have qualified himself from his earliest years for the practice of the peculiar profession which he and his class love to exercise. Speaking most European as well as most Levantine tongues, he possessed the linguistic key to half the back-doors between the Tigris and the Thames. He became a gatherer of information. Information of all kinds and any kind. For the merchant of such wares there are the most various descriptions of buyers to be found. A common pretext and a common object of the collection of news is to supply the Press. There are so many papers, and there are so many sorts of information which are in demand. Besides, to supply the Press is a handy cloak for supplying

other clients as well. And if the offer of purloined intelligence to an attaché fails to result in a bargain, then there is the chance of disposing of the venture to an editor, even an American one. In addition to politics and the Press there is the Stock Exchange. Early knowledge of a State secret may be far more valuable on the Bourse than up the back-stairs of an embassy or a legation.

The cosmopolitan nationality of the international spy immensely assists his quest for the materials of his trade. In nine cases out of ten the persons who are in possession of news or documents which the spy wants to know or to copy, and who are at all likely to be tempted by his offers, are persons who are in financial distress, or who have habits which bring them to the usurer at least occasionally. Here one cosmopolitan comes to the assistance of another cosmopolitan; or, rather, the international spy can get on terms of intimacy and familiarity with all the international money-lenders of the place. Those fowl of a feather have one belief in common; that birds of prey should help one another, unless self-interest oppose. A share of the spoil easily removes the obstacle of self-interest; and the spy learns from the usurer precisely what officials in confidential positions have expensive tastes and deplore the difficulty of indulging them. Means are found to bring the spy and the confidential official together, in some congenial place, at a gaming-table, in a club of doubtful antecedents. The acquaintance is made. The temptation is sketched out. A mere glance at certain papers, or their copies will be repaid liberally. lavishly, and not a soul in the world need ever hear of the transaction. The spy is ready to pledge "his word of honor" that there is no treason in the transaction; that the intelligence is merely wanted for a newspaper; or for