so well as, not indeed to repress sympathy with the less favoured of this there is evidence on every page-but to inspire the conviction that the existing social order is absolute and beyond discussion.

'Property to him means self-realisation; and the abuse of property was no more just ground for a crusade which logically aimed at doing away with it than the abuse of other human powers or instincts would make it reasonable to try and do away with-say-love, or religion.

'Socialism, as he read it, despised and decried freedom, and placed the good of man wholly in certain exterior conditions.

'I don't so much want to take from them and to give to the others. I only want to be sure that the beauty, and the leisure, and the freshness are somewhere-not lost out of the world.

'Never, never, be ashamed merely of being rich-of living with beautiful things, and having time to enjoy them! One might as well be ashamed of being strong rather than a cripple, or having two eyes rather than one.' (Ib. pp. 175, 177, 213, 214.)

Well, property is a form, though not the highest form, of self-realisation; and the Socialist State, were it to become actual, might not improbably come into conflict with individual freedom, though freedom does not consist in doing what you please. Millionairism is as mischievous to millionaires as it is to society; but few will contend that the possession of property is, in itself, a thing of which to be ashamed. And, human nature being what it is, there is not much fear of these considerations being overlooked. The Franciscan idea sets up a standard by which they may be and (some of us think) should be balanced. But they have their weight, and this weight is considerable; no one formula exhausts the truth of things.

Mrs Ward's contention that social and economic questions should be treated on non-party lines is now generally admitted to be reasonable. Must it not also be recognised that labour unrest, emphasise its evils as we will, is a sign of growth? It is not most prevalent where the pinch of poverty is sharpest. One of its conditions is a certain intelligence and power of reflection in those affected; and this presupposes a material standard above the lowest. In 1789 there was

less misery among the French than the German peasantry. But the former had become articulate-hence the Revolution; the latter were dumb. The central feature of the situation by which we are faced to-day is not so much the problem of poverty in itself, as the increasing perception of the fact that the only sufficient reason for the permanence of the actual, or any conceivable, social order is that it is believed, not indeed to be faultless, but to work more effectually than any other by which we could replace it for the good of the community at large. Where this belief is weakened, the social order is imperilled. If it were destroyed, the social order would not last a week; its foundation would be gone. During the last fifty years this belief, with regard to the system under which we live, has been shaken. The proof of this is the amount of apologetic on the subject which is current, and of which 'Marcella' is a type. As religious apologetic indicates religious insecurity, so social apologetic indicates social insecurity; people do not apologise for what is unhesitatingly received. This consideration rules out of court the common objection to social reconstruction, that it is revolutionary. The question is, Is it on the lines of the general human movement? The most complete, because the most inevitable, revolutions are those which are brought about by this movement, and are in the nature of things.

Mrs Ward's fear of Socialism, while useful as a corrective, has a tendency (it may seem) to become excessive. Society, in the first place, is not identical with the existing social order. It was before this order was, and will remain when this order has passed away. For, firstly, it is founded not on this or that social or economic order, but on human nature and the laws of things. And, in the second place, the influence of Socialism in this country is unlikely to be lasting. Socialism is a plant of foreign growth, and presupposes conditions not commonly met with among us. It is based on ideas rather than on experience; and ideas flourish in a lighter soil than ours. There is something practical, perhaps even prosaic, about English thinking. Facts, or what we take to be such, influence us much, theories little. We were pragmatists before pragmatism; our first question with regard either to a belief or an institution is not, What can be said for

or against it? but, How does it work? Such Socialism as we have is academic, not popular. Where it is found in the ranks of labour it is an afterthought a way of accounting for certain pressure, with the disappearance of which it will disappear. Nor, even where it is a greater power than it is or is likely to become in this country, is the Socialism of to-day that which Mrs Ward has in view. The theoretical Socialism of the last century, says a well-informed writer,

'provided an apparently materialistic and rationalist, but, in truth, largely idealistic and often highly irrational vent for the needs and aspirations of the modern German soul. Born of Hegel, and fashioned by the two Hebrew Apostles, Marx and Lassalle, [it] contained sufficient elements of semi-philosophical mysticism to entitle it to rank as a cult-a cult in which "other-worldliness" was replaced by perfervid faith in a miraculous, albeit mundane, "Future State." But into Socialist, as into Catholic and Lutheran orthodoxy, "Modernism" has crept. Belief in the transformation of the capitalistic universe by a revolutionary miracle that should at one stroke abolish riches and misery, vice and wrong, has gradually been undermined by critical exegesis and by a doctrine of relativity known as "Revisionism," upon whose impious heels "Nationalism," as distinct from the old uncompromising "Internationalism," is now pressing hard.'*

In Germany, the Mecca of the sect, the Socialists disclaim the wish to destroy the Empire, and profess to be a Nationalist party in the best sense of the term.' If this changes the character of Socialism, it also changes the case against it; and the controversy must be revised.

The Liberal party, as such, comes off badly at Mrs Ward's hands. There is, it seems, an occult connexion between it and want of principle. Wharton and Marsham are examples; neither could be trusted round the corner with a shilling. Her virtuous and enlightened magnates have Liberal, even Radical or semi-Socialist, leanings; they are weak on the Game Laws, and strong on Factory Legislation; their souls are troubled, at intervals, by the contrast between St James's Square and Bethnal Green. But the Liberal party is for them what the Hussite doctrine was for the Reformation; as Duke George put

* The Times,' January 9, 1912.

it to Luther at Leipzig-'Das walt; die Sucht'-' God help us! the plague.' Law and order are paramount; the mystical view of the death penalty in 'Marcella' (i, 434)—'I believe that, if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would himself claim his own death, as his best chance, in this mysterious universe, of self-recovery-might have come straight out of Joseph de Maistre. For him the priest and the executioner were the twin pillars of the social fabric and the aboriginal representatives of the Deity. For us the executioner, at least, is a survival-for whom the most that can be urged is that, till reason comes of age, force, in one shape or another, must act as regent and govern in her name. So, too, Tressady's conclusion, 'Government to the competent, not to the many,' is open to the objection that the two are neither necessarily nor always contraries. Mob-law and Labour tyranny are undoubtedly dangers against which society does well to guard. But the worst evils of both may be incurred under a Government which depends for support upon a combination of disparate and conflicting interests. And the tyranny of finance is a more actual danger than either. It is at once more ubiquitous, more insidious, and more difficult either to shake off or to control.

Mrs Ward's philosophy of religion is likely to be of more permanent value than her contribution to political and economic science. The latter is of the nature of an Interims-Ethik; the former has a value for its own sake. On the one side, it is a weapon against the most hateful of all tyrannies, namely (as she says), 'tyrannies and cruelties in the name of Christ'; on the other, it is mediating and constructive; it destroys to rebuild. On the old site, now cumbered with the débris of falling creeds and departing standards, a new Jerusalem, fairer and more enduring than the old, will rise.

Arnold of Rugby has seldom been estimated at anything like his real value. He was a prophet. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he saw more truly and spoke more boldly than any English Churchman since the Reformation. The non-committal attitude, characteristic of so much Anglican theology, was foreign to him; he would neither fence nor hedge nor trim. By temperament and conviction alike he was the irreconcilable opponent of

the Oxford Movement; its casuistry jarred on his sense of truth. Had he remained at Oxford he might have been another and a greater Newman: 'a greater scholar, as great a preacher, as imposing a personality, with convictions equally assured and impact equally forcible, he would have formed a rival camp.' It was not to be. The Church went down into the trough of the great wave in whose backwash she is still drifting, with broken spars and rent canvas. Calmer seas, it may be, lie before her; but a belt of troubled water remains to be crossed before they are attained.

Matthew Arnold was cast in another mould. He was without his father's intensity, but he inherited his literary instinct; the one made Rome, the other made Israel, live. The first English critic of his time, his criticism was a song before sunrise; the old order was extinct, the new unborn. His contemporaries never quite understood him. They were practical party men, writing up their own side, writing down the other fairly, no doubt, and in accordance with the rules of the game. But the practical temper has its limitations. Only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, but which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years.'† Neither father nor son adopted the ecclesiastical standpoint; yet, were a man asked about the genuine position of the English Church, he might do worse than refer the enquirer to the Arnolds. For the father the Church was nothing less than the nation viewed from the standpoint of religion; the son criticised, with what was perhaps to some an unwelcome candour, the reason given by Dissenters for their refusal to conform. The type of Dissent which he had in view is a thing of the past; and the Church of to-day is less in touch with the general mind than was the case a generation back. Whatever the reason, the non-episcopalian churches seem, at least for the time being, more successful in dealing with ideas than the episcopalian; a Scottish congregation would make short work of such preaching as is acquiesced in by the average English churchgoer. But, historically, the National Church has been more

* Pretractarian Oxford,' by W. Tuckwell, p. 121.

† Culture and Anarchy,' xxviii.