is somehow being affected; Japanese restrictions on European residents do not worry him, but Australian restrictions on the Japanese are a perpetual irritation. The diplomatist-including in that category the higher officials of the Indian and Colonial Offices as well as of the Foreign Office-in the first place hates to have his arrangements interfered with by a few people in a distant colony, and in the second place finds it embarrassing to have to placate Oriental susceptibilities, continually offended by the assumption that Australians think all Asiatic races 'inferior.'

Australians, for their part, are candidly contemptuous of the Englishmen who so misread them-far more contemptuous than the most ill-bred Australian ever was of the Asiatics themselves. Against a certain clique or caste of Australian residents who, either to imitate English feeling or because they want Asiatic labour to bring down local wages, misrepresent and abuse the creed, the Australian feeling is one of anger rather than contempt. Unfortunately, their attention is so fully taken up with arguing about the justice of their desires that they give too little thought to the practical difficulties in the way of securing them. For this, after all, is the soundest argument against a White Australia,' that it can only be secured-until the League of Nations inaugurates its new paradise-by a population large enough to occupy the Commonwealth's empty spacesincluding especially the Northern Territory, confessedly unfit for the habitation of Europeans-or at least by a system of defence strong enough to make any would-be occupant think twice about the cost of occupation, such a system of defence, again, depending on a sufficient population. Every man holds his creed for himself; the Baptist cannot fairly ask the Taoist to protect him against conversion to Islam; and Australia cannot demand that England should protect her against Asiatic immigration so long as England is unconvinced of the need of a 'White Australia.' It was that discovery, more than any other cause, that brought the Australian Navy into being; the demand for a local squadron, until then confined to a few far-seeing publicists, became popular and insistent when 'The Times' one January morning declared that the Commonwealth must not count on the

British Navy to support a policy repugnant to British India. It is improbable that England ever will be genuinely convinced of the correctness of the Australian view, home-keeping Englishmen somewhat lack imagination, and do not readily envisage, in a community of fifty millions easily digesting a few thousand immigrants (and those usually of the better sort), the prospects of a community of five millions faced with the influx of ten times their number, mostly of the baser sort. The surest policy for Australia under these conditions is, in the first place, to convince Britain that she is in earnest about her creed, by spending every penny she can on the most efficient defence her experts can devise; in the second place, to convince the Empire that she is worth support, even if slightly wrong-headed, because she contributes to the confederate Britains something not only worth having but actually essential to their continued confederation.

And this to return to our original subject of discussion-is what Australia has, often no doubt unconsciously, been doing during the last ten years. From 1910 onwards she was establishing the beginnings of a defence scheme as sound as good advice and the temperament of her people could make it; the war caught her only halfready, but even so proved beyond dispute the value both of her new war-ships and of her new army. For the moment, now the war is over, both naval and military efforts are at a standstill. The squadron at minimum strength awaits the decisions of an Imperial Conference before resuscitation; the citizen army, its constitution and training-scheme vastly improved by experience gained in the war, will revive sooner. As for the second part of her policy, Australians hope that their share of the fighting, both on sea and on land, has shown the Empire something of their quality. They believe that the Anzacs, the men who took Mont St Quentin, the men who rode with Chauvel through Palestine, are worth helping in the work they are now set to do. If the rulers of the Empire are of the same opinion, the unfailing support of 'White Australia' is not too high a price to pay.

Art. 2.-WILLIAM JAMES.

1. The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry James. 2 vols. Longmans, 1920.

2. Collected Essays and Reviews. By William James. Longmans, 1920.

3. The Principles of Psychology. By William James. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1890.

And other works by the same.

THE Letters of William James are the fascinating record, belated but all the more welcome, of a great personality. Now the jewel of personality has many facets-perhaps their number is infinite in posse-whereby it responds to the stimulus of other souls, and flashes back upon them sparks of its own inherent fire, which nevertheless, in proportion as the reacting soul is sensitive and sympathetic, display a distinctive colouring, appropriate to the individual stimulus. Unfortunately such displays are rare. The necessities of life compel us ordinarily to conceal our personality. Like the larva of the caddis-fly, the soul secretes around it a protective tube of sand and dirt and shells, of rubbish and convention, ensconces itself in artificial darkness, and not infrequently dies therein, of inanition. It is only a few who dare to be themselves, and to reveal themselves. But they are the most interesting and delightful of persons; for, after all, there is nothing men relish more than personality. They come out in their letters better than in autobiographies, which always tempt to a pose, or in biographies, which nearly always tone down personality, and blur its outlines. One cannot but applaud therefore the rare act of filial self-denial by which Mr Henry James has allowed his father to speak for himself and given to the world these wonderful letters, embedded in a minimum of connective tissue, instead of a more conventional Life.' But he has shown excellent judgment and the literary art which is hereditary in his family by his selection of his material; this was very abundant, because any one who ever received a letter from William James would be sure to keep it. One could wish perhaps that he had not selected quite so severely, and had given us four volumes instead of two; but by excluding most of the

technical philosophy he has succeeded in exhibiting the enormous range of his father's interests in all sorts and conditions of men, and the many facets of his personality.

This method of selection is well calculated to bring out the vital fact that the best sort of letters is literally a 'correspondence,' and reveals, not only the writer, but also his endeavour to attune himself to the demands and interests of another, and so, indirectly, the person written to. It is marvellous how James succeeds in adapting himself to different personalities. He is equally a model and a delight when praising his son Henry's. (æt. 8) improved hand-writing:

'So well written that I wondered whose hand it was, and never thought it might be yours. Your tooth also was a precious memorial-I hope you'll get a better one in its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out. They ought to go into the Peabody Museum. If any of George Washington's baby-teeth had been kept till now, they would be put somewhere in a public museum for the world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that if you grow up to be a second George Washington, I may sell it to a Museum' (1, p. 276).

or when telling his son William (ct. 6) about some performing seals,

'the loveliest beasts, with big black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags' (1, p. 278).

or his daughter (æt. 8) about

'an immense mastiff, so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf. His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are magnificent, his tail keeps wagging all the time, and he makes on me the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good' (II, p. 26).

or again when coaxing a desiccated philosopher into taking a less pedantic view of a human problem :

'If the world is a Unit there are no sides-there's the moral rub! And you don't see it! Ah, Hodgson! Hodgson mio from whom I hoped so much! Most spirited, most clean, most thoroughbred of philosophers! Perchè di tanto

inganni i figli tuoi? If you want to reconcile us rationally to Determinism, write a Theodicy, reconcile us to Evil, but don't talk of the distinction between impediments from within and without when the within and without of which you speak are both within that Whole which is the only real agent in your philosophy' (1, p. 246).

Or again listen to his description of his brother Henry's style:

'You know how opposed your whole "third manner" of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it for ever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the "ghost" at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you do it, that's the queerness' (II, p. 277).

Or read finally his penetrating estimate of Shakespeare (II, p. 335):

'Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless that's the way to write about Shakespeare. . . . He seems to me to have been a professional amuser, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendour added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperesthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy, but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect ? But halte-là! or I shall become a Harris myself!'