formal offer authorized by the United States Government, would be welcomed by a Government of either party in this country, and would win the enthusiastic assent of our Parliament and people. We believe that not only statesmen like Mr. Taft, Mr. Roosevelt, and Mr. Root, but the sentiment of the great mass of the American people, would rally to the support of the proposal should it be formally set upon the platform.

But in considering its practicability, it would be wrong to forget that such a scheme must pass the severe test imposed by the Constitution of the United States in the case of Treatiesthe obligation to obtain a vote of twothirds of the members of the Senate. That body has often shown itself obdurate to the demands of popular opinion and of plain national interest, and fourteen years ago it wrecked a Treaty covering nearly the same objects as

The Nation.

as it may appear, the realization of this beneficent idea in the near future probably depends more upon the accomplishment of Irish Home Rule than upon any other conditions. For the hostility of Irish politicians in America has persisted for generations as a fruitful cause of embitterment in the relations of Great Britain and the United States, and the failure of the first Anglo-American Treaty was specially the work of Mr. Davitt. The open sore of Irish discontent once healed, the natural sympathy between the two great Anglo-Saxon nations will, in the United States, generate a compelling force of public opinion, which even the Senate would not dare defy, in favor of unrestricted arbitration and of that further co-operation in the great task of world-peace to which Sir Edward Grey looks forward as the outcome of an Anglo-American agreement.

The Unionist party, or at least a section of it, appear to be losing their heads. Scarcely a day passes without some fresh and startling proposal for the "reform" of the House of Lords being given to the world. Many of us thought that the original RoseberyLansdowne proposals went quite far enough. Not a few looked with grave misgiving on the attempt to graft the elective principle on the old constitution of the Great Council. Such attempts necessarily open the door to even more drastic proposals, and already some of the younger members of the Unionist party are clamoring for a completely elective Second Chamber. To me such a proposal seems insane. At the very moment when, by the admission of everybody, except a few bureaucrats, the House of Commons

is ceasing to represent the people, it is proposed to make the will of the people prevail by turning the other House into a second House of Commons. Lord Balfour of Burleigh declared on Thursday that he would be a bold man who would say that during the last twenty-five years our representative system had been growing in success. Let no one think this statement is the extravagance of an unregenerate Tory. Mr. Belloc has lately published a book on the Party System to prove that we are governed by a group of wirepullers. Mr. Sherwell, the highly respected Radical member for Huddersfield, says that “our Parliamentary system is rapidly developing into a real, if undesigned, absolutism." Philip Snowden, the Socialist, is even more outspoken. On 6 July 1907, just

Mr.

after the Campbell-Bannerman Resolutions, he wrote: "That the House of Commons represents the will of the people and is engaged in trying to carry out the people's wishes, is one of those constitutional myths like the veto of the Crown and the liberty of the subject, we all pretend to cherish but know to be unreal. We have not a democratic Constitution. The people do not rule. The House of Commons does not represent the will of the people. The Government is an autocracy restrained, just like the Tsar of Russia, by considerations of self-preservation and self-interest. It is the knowledge of these facts which makes this agitation against the House of Lords almost contemptible." Personally, I subscribe to Mr. Snowden's opinion without reserve. The House of Commons is in some ways less representative of the people's wishes than it was before the Reform Bill of 1832, and far less than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. And the reason is not far to seek. The more numerous the body of electors the more certainly do they fall under the control of the wirepuller. In a constituency of a few hundreds the personality of a candidate counts for much. Multiply the voters a hundredfold and he becomes a mere emblem. The choice of the emblem nowadays rests usually with a little group of self-elected wirepullers and they naturally prefer one who will do as they tell him. Hence the fetish of "loyalty to the party," which simply means that members of Parliament are not now expected to act on their opinion of what public advantage requires. Still less are they to regard the wishes of their constituents. Their sole duty is unquestioning obedience to the behests of the clique which governs the party, Liberal, Tory, Labor, or Nationalist, to which they may happen to belong.

The truth is the House of Commons

concern.

is breaking down. No patriot, certainly no Conservative, can view its present condition without profound Mr. Snowden, in the article already quoted says: "It would be an instructive lesson to the electors, who have imagined that they were voting for a man to represent their will in Parliament, if they could see that member coming in from the Terrace or the smoke-room at the ringing of the division bell, and, at the entrance to the lobbies, being pointed by the party Whip into the particular lobby he must go to register his vote for a motion about which, in nine cases out of ten, he has not the remotest idea. He has not heard a word of the discussion; he does not even know what the question under discussion is; he votes as 'a supporter of his party,' and if he understood the question and had opinions upon it, it would make no difference. He is there to support his party; to follow his leaders; to do as he is told. This is expressing 'the will of the peo ple'." All this is literally true. Yet, even so, it is not the whole truth. Not only are the decisions of the House of Commons mere echoes of the decrees of the Cabinet, but even its debates are becoming increasingly lifeless and unreal. With the exception of two or three men, everyone knows what a speaker will say before he opens his mouth. He is not allowed to think for himself. He is forced to follow the beaten track. What wonder that his audience is usually reduced to those who intend to follow him in the discussion, and that the rest of the House reads, writes, smokes, or gossips in some other chamber of the building until a division puts a temporary stop to this parody of Parliamentary discussion.

Such is the condition to which the tyranny of the caucus and the Cabinet has reduced the most famous legislative Assembly in the world. And

place, or in the place chiefly associated with his work, is a challenge to the least curious mind, and makes the earth seem to speak its history. But statues of Dickens, even if they seemed for other reasons to be a desirable part of a memorial to him, are ruled out. He himself said that he wished for no memorial of that kind. It may be said that we should use our discretion in obeying the modest selfdepreciations of a genius. Discretion to set Dickens's wishes aside was employed when he was buried in Westminster Abbey. He had said that he would be buried quietly, and that the world should not know the time or place. Statues seem a trivial contradiction of his wishes after that, perhaps. But the family of Dickens are the High Court of judgment in this matter, and they have always deprecated statues. And, after all, while Dickens's works remain, all memorials must appear trivial, if not impertinent. The works are the only true monument. circumspice.

Si monumentum requiris,

The Dickens stamp, however, avoids all these difficulties. The scheme proposes to discharge, as Lord Rosebery well said, "a debt which is long overdue." What ought to have been one of the greatest literary properties in history was not of great pecuniary worth to the creator of it and has been of little to his descendants. The details or rather the estimates-of this literary property are worth thinking over. It is reckoned that there are 25,000,000 sets of Dickens's works in existence. Dickens is supposed to have died worth between £70,000 and £80,000, and of this sum about £50,000 came from his public readings. No one could possibly dispute Lord Rosebery's comment: "Now, I think we shall all feel that that is a very inadequate return as compared with modern returns-with the modern return,

for example, of a successful play-to this great genius, for what he did for us. . . . He has left twenty descendants-three children and seventeen grandchildren-who are by no means placed in this world as the descendants of Dickens ought to be. It is not through their own fault. They make no claim and no complaint, but it does seem a debt of honor, from this nation at any rate, to them and to ourselves that we should not let this family of our great genius suffer under any kind of want." When Dickens wrote there was no copyright in the United States. He derived not a penny of profit from all the multitude of his readers in America. Lord Rosebery was certainly well guided in saying that in America, where the readers of Dickens from first to last must be more numerous even than in this country, there would be an enthusiastic readiness to pay off "the debt which is long overdue." bitterness which Americans felt towards Dickens after the publication of "Martin Chuzzlewit" is dead. It died in Dickens's lifetime. Even the most resolute resentment must have yielded to the generous acknowledgment of American qualities which Dickens wrote as a preface for the later editions of "Martin Chuzzlewit.” But it would require a heavy subscription indeed to overtake the arrears of rent for the Elysian fields which Dickens put at the disposal of the world. Surely there is no more precarious property than literary property, none which brings such uncertain profits or which brings them for so short a time. As Mr. Birrell has said, however long a copyright may last it does not help the author who has sold it outright. Authors do not speculate on their books being read many years after their death.

The

What is the character of the peculiar debt we owe to Dickens? Everyone

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will put it differently, and so much the better, provided that we all recognize that the debt is a vast sum. Lord Rosebery picked out only one point among many, but it is perhaps the most important. He said that Dickens taught us how to laugh. Dickens came into a world that was not distinguished by its faculty for laughter. "Am I not right in saying," exclaims Lord Rosebery, "that a laugh, a real laugh, at any literary product, except of course a comedy on the stage, any laugh over a book that you are reading, is almost the rarest luxury which you can enjoy? Anyone who feels depressed, who feels unhappy, who feels physically unwell, has only got to take down his 'Pickwick' and read a few pages, possibly that he knows by heart already, and he will find himself indulging in that innocent and healthy exhilaration of which I spoke."

Dickens, indeed, makes an appeal to our generation different from that of which those who read him in monthly parts were conscious. They laughed, no doubt, but they wept with a more consuming ardor -at all events, with a simple emotion of which we of to-day are scarcely capable. The crowds which struggled to get early copies of the new part wet from the press were moved to profound and lasting gloom by the death of Little Nell or Paul Dombey. They could hardly wait in their impatience to know how the plot developed and whether, let us say, Martin Chuzzlewit married Mary. Today we are comparatively indifferent to these things: we recognize that the plots are no plots, or at least do not matter. They all depended on how many more monthly parts the publishers wanted, or whether Dickens already did or did not see his way to a new novel. "Oliver Twist" begins to end, so to speak, over and over again,

and takes new life and goes off again at a glorious tangent. "Edwin Drood" } almost alone has proportion and form because Dickens sketched out his plot and sat down to write it, knowing exactly in advance how and when he meant to end it. We perceive to-day also that nearly every character of Dickens is a static thing: it does not grow with the plot, nor does the plot depend upon the state of soul-or the resultant action-of anybody in the book. You might lift Pecksniff out of "Martin Chuzzlewit" and put him into "Nicholas Nickleby" and he would figure there just as adequately and no less delightfully. The same thing might be said of almost any character in any of Dickens's works. But the lover of Dickens, every man who is not a fool in fact, is not affected by these things. He forgets that the chronology of "Martin Chuzzlewit" will not bear examination, and that Jonas cannot have committed the murder when he is said to have committed it. It is nothing to him that the Yorkshire schools have long since been reformed, and that the diabolical system of nursing of which Mrs. Gamp was the archetype no longer exists. He passes quickly over the sentimentality as mere alluvial deposit in which the gold is always to be found. And the gold is not only plentiful but always near the surface eloquence, laughter, geniality and whimsicality, in a profusion which always seems new. Except perhaps tobacco, for those who feel about it as Kingsley did, there is no solace in the world like Dickens. We begin to laugh as we think of the innumerable passages which vie in our mind for the position of favorite. You can pay half a guinea for a stall in a theatre and be bored to death. You can buy two hundred thousand words of Dickens for sixpence and pass into a land of delight of which the vision