The

dents. He made one mistake in love, and just in time transferred his affections to the most suitable of future wives. And by the most audacious of coups he became Mayor-the youngest Mayor on record-of his native town. His is the sort of career which the average townsman of the Potteries admires, and thinks amusing as well as clever. Bennett works out his history on humorous lines, and it is in its way very laughable. But he has carried through a much better joke in his play, "What the Public Wants." Its dialogue is brilliantly incisive. initial situation, which shows a great newspaper director confronted with friends who dislike the standard of taste adopted by his journals, is repeated with variations throughout the four acts. Again and again the policy of "What the Public Wants" is confronted with common decency, the demands of art, the matter of public morals, and the comfort of private persons. But the piece, though extremely diverting, is, of course, a key-play, to vary the label roman-à-clef, and its one purpose is to satirize, as it does aptly and mordantly, a newspaper millionaire of the hour. The only other play which Mr. Bennett has had staged, "Cupid and Common Sense" " is a version of "Anna of the Five Towns." It is effective enough for three acts, but the last act, which aims at pointing the moral of the disillusionment of romantic love, misses fire, because it requires a break in the action and brings on characters that during the interval have lost their stage identity.

10

ferocious attacks upon "certain popularities." On women novelists of the day he is ruthlessly bitter and yet not unfair; he acknowledges their good points. There is indeed an element of hardness about his attitude towards life, as well as towards its interpreters. Love is for him a passion that is sure to end in disappointment, and the "common sense" which sacrifices it to material advantages has his sympathy. He does not sentimentalize this passion any more than he does the pathos of age. The old he makes lag, like veterans, superfluous on the stage. There is a piteous example of this in "The Old Wives' Tale," where an old lady is described as promising to a young couple presents they do not want, and they smilingly murmur "Poor old thing!" Age, I fear, does not obtain from Mr. Bennett its proper meed of respect and indulgence. Alike towards the old and towards love he is unromantic, and echoes the opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw. Nor will he allow any false dignity to death. Constance Baines's husband may not in his coffin escape criticism; his beard stood out in a perky, tiresome way even when the undertakers began their job. So, again, Mr. Bennett is sometimes a little bitter in his references to religion. What I have heard through Staffordshire relatives of the enthusiasm of Methodism in the 'sixties and 'seventies makes me dubious about accepting some of his pictures of chapel life in those decades. In point of fact, Mr. Bennett is a realist of great imaginative power. We must not look to him perhaps for poetry or romance. But if we can bear the prose of life refracted through a very practical and unillusioned temperament, we may trust him about that confidently.

F. G. Bettany.

11 "Fame and Fiction: An Inquiry into Certain Reputations." By E. A. Bennett. (Grant Richards.)

The controversy as to the Declaration of London has now been in progress for a year, but as yet it cannot be said that any convincing defence of that new code of sea law has been produced. In many cases the advocates of the Declaration have been content merely to appeal to authority. Sir Edward Grey, they say, and the negotiators of the Declaration are able and patriotic men. What they have accepted cannot be bad for the nation. Therefore the Declaration of London is good. It is a simple syllogism. But it is open to two serious objections. In the first place, the Declaration of London does not represent the views of Sir Edward Grey. That may be seen by examining his instructions to the British delegates at the Haue and London Conferences. The British delegates at these two Conferences were in a decided minority and were hopelessly outvoted, though the British mercantile marine represents half the tonnage of the world and the new code of laws vitally concerns it. So that this is not the code planned by Sir Edward Grey, but something imposed upon him by foreign Powers; something which he accepted, if anything, against his will, and the contentions of the opponents of the Declaration represent his original views. And in the second place, the appeal to authority is never convincing. No one in this world is infallible. The duty of the British citizen is not lazily to accept what he is told, but to search and examine for himself.

The National Review has never taken a partisan view on these matters; the writer has never taken a partisan view. He appeals with confidence to past articles in the National Review and to letters in the Times in 1904, criticizing

Unionist administrators when they showed weakness in defending the rights of the merchant marine and in maintaining the strength of the British Navy. He holds that this is no party issue; and he appeals to his countrymen, not as opponents of the Government, but as Englishmen.

The first count against the Declaration, and one of the gravest, is that it constitutes a terrible menace to the food-supply of our country in time of war. In the past, all food in British ships was liable to capture by hostile cruisers where that food was not the property of neutrals. But food in neutral ships was regarded as exempt from seizure except when it was destined for the armed forces of the enemy or consigned to a beleaguered fortress. Now, under the Declaration,' food may be treated as contraband, when

(1) It is destined not only as in the past for the armed forces of the enemy State, but also for "the administrative authorities of that State."

(2) It is addressed to the enemy authorities or to a trader established in the enemy country, and when it is notorious that this trader farnishes to the enemy objects and materials of this nature.

(3) When the destination of the consignment is to one of the enemy's fortified places or to another place serving as a base of the armed forces of the enemy.

Under the second and third conditions, the neutral is given the right of proving if he can-before the International Prize Court which is to have the last say, that the food is not destined for the armed forces of the enemy or

1 I ignore the Commentary of the Drafting Committee of the London Conference, as it is not part of the Declaration and therefore cannot be regarded as binding on the Powers and the New Court

to capture food consigned in neutral ships to belligerent ports. On the contrary, all the precedents are against such a practice. In 1793, Great Britain in retaliation for the action of France, directed her cruisers to capture food consigned in neutral vessels to the French ports, she being then at war with France. The United States promptly protested; the matter was referred to a mixed Commission; and this Commission decided that food was not liable to capture in these circumstances. The British cruisers obeyed the ruling. In 1885, the French Government issued a proclamation declaring rice contraband during the war with China. Again the British Government protested, but as not a single British vessel with rice on board was touched, the matter went no farther. Bismarck, however, seized the opportunity to remark in the Reichstag that the French action was "a justifiable step in war." In 1904, during the war in the Far East, Russia included provisions in her list of contraband, and seized several ships with such cargo. This was followed by the inclusion of raw cotton in the list of contraband. Action was at once taken by two Powers, Britain and the United States. Both protested against the treatment of food and cotton consigned to a belligerent port in a neutral ship as contraband, when there was no proof that they were destined for the enemy's armed forces. Lord Lansdowne, in a note of June 1, 1904 stated:

His Majesty's Government observe with great concern that rice and provisions will be treated as unconditionally contraband, a step which they regard as inconsistent with the law and practice of nations.

Mr. Hay, the American Secretary of State, on August 30 of the same year, declared a decree of the Russian Prize Court, confiscating a cargo of flour and railway material in the Arabia, con

in effect a declaration of war against commerce of every description between the people of a neutral and those of a belligerent state.

Dealing with this question, Mr. Balfour, then British Prime Minister. stated to a deputation on August 25, 1904: "From the position we have taken up there is no-I will not say probability but-possibility of our receding, inasmuch as we think we stand, we know we stand upon the solid basis of International Law to be found in all the textbooks and which is in accordance with the general practice of civilized nations."

Indeed so indefensible was the position of Russia, that the Russian Government referred the matter to a commission of experts, under the presidency of Professor Martens, and as the result of the finding of that Commission fresh instructions were issued to the Russian Navy. These recognized that provisions were not contraband unless they were consigned to a belligerent Government or Government service, or the enemy's armed forces or the state contractors (fournisseurs). And the judgment of the Russian supreme prize court on May 2, 1905, declared that 13,300 bags of flour in the Calchas, a British ship which had been seized by the Vladivostock squadron, consigned to a British firm in Japan, were not contraband. But it upheld the condemnation of thirty-six bales of cotton consigned to two private Japanese firms in Kobe.

There is sufficient disproof in the

above series of precedents of Sir E. Grey's extraordinary allegation that present international practice permits the destruction of food in neutral ships. But if the British Foreign Office is not convinced, a mass of further evidence can be produced. It is remarkable, however, that the Foreign Office completely changed its mind on this issue between 1907 and 1910. For in 1907, in his instructions to Sir Edward Fry, who represented Britain at the Hague Conference of that year, Sir Edward Grey's view was that food could only be treated as contraband in neutral ships when consigned to beleaguered fortresses. Why has the British Government done what Mr. Balfour pronounced "impossible” in 1904, and receded from a position upheld by the United States in 1793 and 1904, and "in accordance with the general practice of civilized nations"? Why has it made this surrender to Germany?

It is said by some critics that the matter is not vital because in war our food will have to be conveyed in British ships, which under the existing law of nations are liable to capture and destruction. But in real fact the demands of the Navy for auxiliary and transport purposes in war will be so extensive, the tonnage required for military purposes so enormous, that our shipping will not be physically able to discharge this task. The history of the Cuban war of 1898 and the RussoJapanese War of 1904-5 and the expert evidence given before the Food Supply Commission will emphasize this. From fifteen to thirty per cent., and perhaps even more, of our food-supply may have to be conveyed in neutral vessels. Drive up the rate of insurance on them to an inordinate level by depriving them of all protection-for our own cruisers, as I shall shortly show, will have their hands full-and the price of our food will be immensely increased,

with the probable result of starvation to our masses.

With the law of nations as it stands,. if a belligerent, such as Germany, attacks American ships laden with wheat for Britain, the German Government will hear of the matter from the United States. The fear of provoking a strong neutral will be a tremendous deterrent. But under the Declaration of London the attack is permitted, and the neutral, by accepting that Declaration, is estopped from the use of force to assert its rights at sea. How Britain gains by liberating the German cruiser captains from all fear of neutral interference might well be explained by the Foreign Office. If it be said that our captains also gain because they know what will and what will not be fair prize, the answer is that the price paid for this knowledge is far too high. Provisions can pass without let or hindrance up the Channel to Antwerp or Rotterdam on the way to the German army or navy, and the British cruisers under the Declaration cannot touch them. While our food-supplies are gravely imperilled, the German food-supplies are assured. And we are asked to throw up our arms and rejoice!

But the defenders of the Declaration attempt a reply to this. They say that food can be shipped to this country in neutral ships with safety by the simple process of consigning it to a neutral port, when it is not subject to seizure. At the neutral port it can be transhipped. Wheat, that is to say, instead of proceeding direct to Liverpool from the Argentine or the United States, would be carried to Brest or Havre or Antwerp, and there reshipped and conveyed in British vessels under the protection of our fleets. to British ports. From the practical standpoint, however, there are immense difficulties in the way of such a manœuvre. The French ports have not