Such is the situation that confronts Lord Salisbury at home and abroad. He has been given a great majority in order that he may see to it that the Commonwealth takes no harm. What will he do with it?

AN IMPOTENT DICTATOR.

It is mere guesswork to try to answer this question. The probability is that he will do nothing with it. The stream of events is just now running too swiftly for even a Minister with a brand-new majority to materially deflect its course. Nothing that Lord Salisbury can do can prevent depression in trade, the steady increase of foreign competition, the growth of taxation. Neither can he control the forces which threaten to convulse the Far East with war. So far from being a deus ex machina, he probably feels himself a mere fly upon the wheel of Destiny. He might lighten his burden if at the eleventh hour he were to modify his ruthless policy in South Africa. But the pride and arrogance which drove us into the war bar the door against our retreat. No doubt if Mr. Chamberlain could be translated to the heights of Olympus, a great and perceptible relief would be experienced. But there is no Eagle to bear the British Ganymede to the knees of the gods. Not even the new majority can help to get rid of Mr. Chamberlain. What then remains to be done?

NO SOCIAL REFORMS.

In home affairs there is nothing in the shape of any kind of reform that entails any kind of expenditure. The necessities of the Treasury are such that it is doubtful whether the Government can renew its doles. It certainly will not be in a position to do more than tinker with the question of Old Age Pensions. We are face to face not with the question of making our old veterans of industry more comfortable, but of averting a catastrophe which would leave even the ablest bodied amongst us without our daily bread.

INSURANCE AGAINST CHAMBERLAINISM.

As the nation has chosen its Chamberlain, it has now to insure itself against the risks of Chamberlainism. As the nation has condoned the military expedition which has wrecked the army, there is nothing to be done but to sweep up the pieces and start anew. But it is just this starting anew which will afford Lord Salisbury his chance of proving whether he has any adequate appreciation of the gravity of the crisis and the necessity for making a clean sweep. At present the appointment of Mr. Brodrick to the post of War Secretary does not augur well for any very drastic dealing with the army. If Lord Roberts is ever able to escape from South Africa he will probably sanction a very cautious tinkering policy, the only practical result of which will be the addition of millions to the war estimates. The presumption is therefore that Lord Salisbury will not do much with his brand-new majority, but muddle on in the same old way until some terrible catastrophe compels even the most obstinate optimist to see facts as they are.

WHAT OUGHT TO BE DONE?

If Lord Salisbury were capable of rising to the height of his great opportunity there are certain things which he could do, and which will have to be done sooner or later by some one or other. The first thing to be done is to appoint a competent Commission of the best experts available, military, naval, and economists, to consider whether the lesson of the war in the Transvaal is not to demonstrate the substantial truth of M. Bloch's famous paradox, that war on any great scale between equally matched foes has practically become impossible.

The war, if it has demonstrated nothing else, has proved the enormous difficulty and costliness of making war under modern conditions. If it cost £100,000,000 and required 250,000 men for twelve months to overcome the resistance of 40,000 untrained farmers, how much would it cost, and what sacrifices would it entail to wage war against a great Power? The whole question of big versus little armies is involved in the answer. There was a time when the practice of continually increasing the weight of armour had to be abandoned, for the development of the system had reached a point when it defeated its own ends. The knight's horse could no longer move beneath the mountain of armour heaped upon his back. The problem for discussion is whether we have not reached a similar point in relation to our gigantic armaHave modern armies not become so unwieldy as to be unmanageable, and ruinously expensive? Can any nation fight a war to a firish under modern conditions? Would not economic difficulties involve both combatants in inextricable ruin long before the military problem could be fought out on the field?

ments.

to us.

OUR FOOD SUPPLY.

This brings us to another question of vital importance What about our food supply in time of war? We have found it difficult enough to supply rations for our troops although we had undisputed command of the sea, and they were after all but a handful of men. What would be our position if, say, London were in the position of Ladysmith, and the army of the invader had paralysed all internal communication and severed the arteries of our complex civilisation? It is idle saying that this has been considered. It has never even been seriously examined since we lost the command of the swiftest steamers on the ocean highways. The provisioning of England in war time, what is the irreducible minimum of food which we should have in reserve, what the indispensable strength of the navy necessary to protect the myriad ships which bring our food from over sea? It is no use blinking the consideration of these things. If Chamberlainism is to rule the roost, then some form of protection, some system of bounty or corn law that would foster the production of the indispensable supply of our daily bread becomes inevitable. This may spell ruin for our manufactures. But in what other way can we rely upon averting the horrible catastrophe of our island fortress being reduced to submission by sheer starvation, not of the garrison so much as of the unemployed millions of the civil population?

After these questions had been discussed, not in the leisurely way of our Royal Commissions, but with the desperate and unremitting earnestness of those Councils over which Napoleon would sometimes preside for eight and ten hours a day, the ground would be cleared for framing proposals for the new Army.

DEPLUTOCRATISE,-

The first indispensable foundation of the new system should be to strike a deadly blow at the plutocratic cancer which at present makes the Army the plaything of the well-to-do. In the Army of the Future if any officer were to be found living beyond his pay, he should be cashiered. If the Army is to be democratised, there must be no golden barrier between the private and the commissioned ranks. Soldiering should be recognised as a workaday profession, and officers should stick to their work like doctors, or solicitors, or the slaughterers of the shambles. The social glamour which surrounds the epaulets should be warred against as fatal to efficiency. The officer should be worked like a

German and kept up to his mark by perpetual exercise. The hopeless and hideous breakdown of our Army in South Africa in every department--a breakdown of which the C.I.V.'s tell some strange tales,-ought to be regarded as marking the end of the old régime. It has persisted after the abolition of purchase down to the present day. But the Army will never be democratised until the present rule of the rich is killed out root and branch.

COLONIALIZE

In the second place, all parts of the Empire should be allowed an equal share, according to their numerical strength, in the reconstituted Army. The “mere Colonial” must share equally with the scions of our aristocracy or of the plutocrats of Park Lane in the command and general direction of the Army. The Colonial has had a bad experience of the result of the other system. Never again will Canadians and Australians regard it as an object of pride to serve in an Army whose chiefs can show no more intelligent appreciation of the future, no more resourceful adaptation of the means of the present, than that which has been displayed in the present war. The superciliousness of the society-bred officer has done mischief enough already. In the future the mere Colonial" must rank by right with the best of the old country.

-AND RAISE STANDARD OF EFFICIENCY.

66

Thirdly, while the total sum available for military purposes must not be increased, more pains must be taken to make the individual fighting unit more intelligent and more efficient. We do not want a large professional army. We want a thoroughly capable one. This may mean that we shall have to pay our soldiers half-a-crown or even five shillings a day. With smaller numbers we could afford higher pay. The evidence which this war has afforded us of the extent to which India has been over garrisoned should not be forgotten. If, in such a time as this, we can safely deplete India of 20,000 fighting men, it seems to afford a presumption that in ordinary seasons the army of India is at least 20,000 too strong. A small highly-trained professional army, supplied with the latest and most efficient weapons of destruction, with an adequate artillery and a commissariat department always ready for action, is the ideal towards which most men's eyes are turning.

EVACUATE THE TRANSVAAL.

It will here be objected that it is nonsense to talk of reducing the numbers of our regulars while South Africa will necessitate their increase. To which I reply that it is nonsense imagining that we are going to maintain a huge army in South Africa. This war has lost us South Africa, unless we promptly retrace our steps, reverse our policy, and make it up with the Dutch on the basis of British rule at Durban, Cape Town, Kimberley, and, if needs be, at Johannesburg, but never a trace of the direct Imperial factor anywhere from Table Bay to the Zambesi. A settlement that permitted us to set up British rule within a ring-fence on the Rand would not be ideal; but it would at least be possible. And the system which the Government is now aiming at is simply impossible.

COMPULSORY SERVICE?

There remains the larger question of the training of all our people in arms. If Chamberlainism is to prevail, the cost of adequate insurance will necessarily include

conscription in one form or another. Possibly the Sviss system, or some modification of the Swiss system, might be devised and adapted for our insular circumstances and our great civic population. No one can hate conscription more than I do, but it is a grave question whether, in the absence of any system of direct taxation which makes the man in the street feel immediately the pressure of the cost of war, there is any other expedient left than that which would render every mother's son of us liable to be drafted for foreign service whenever our Government involved us in war. If by some supreme exercise of the national common sense it could be enacted that no war should ever be made until a majority of the adults had paid half a crown per head into the Treasury there would be an end to all such wars as those which are now afflicting us. But as no Government will propose the adoption of so effective a check upon the liberty of making war, we may have to fall back upon the other resource that of direct personal liability to be sent to the front. We might not all be called out. But the fact that the moment war was declared every household might find one of its most cherished members called out for service would probably do much to abate the fool-fury of our music-halls and the criminal incitement to war on the part of our press.

A BETTER WAY.

Personal service would at least do something to bring a sense of personal responsibility home to the average citizen. Of course it is much preferable that the nation should meet its difficulties in another way, and that, abjuring Jingoism and all its evil ways, the Government should deliberately set itself to the cultivation of international friendship and the rendering of helpful service to its neighbours, rather than to perpetually provoking their suspicion and alarm. But of that there is no chance. Ephraim is for the moment wedded to his idols, and we must leave him alone, or, rather, we must endeavour as best we can to shield him from the consequences of his idolatry.

PHYSICAL TRAINING FOR ALL.

Even if there were no danger of having to fight for our lives, even if all armies were relegated to limbo, and no man were ever again to lift his hand against his brother man, it is a question for the gravest consideration of all of us whether the time has not come when, in the interest of the physical development of our people, statutory provision should not be made for compelling every youth, male or female, to undergo every year a certain It need period of athletic training in the open air. not, and, I hope, will never be, of a military character. But as we regard it essential to see to it that every English child has an irreducible minimum of school learning to enable him to hold his own in the world, is it not equally our duty to see to it that the human body, that Temple of God, does not deteriorate, but has at least an irreducible minimum opportunity of retaining or of regaining the Divine Image? Physical education intelligently directed and universally enforced would do wonders in arresting the decadence now, alas, only too visible in many of our manufacturing towns and in the streets of the capital.

But we are wandering into Utopia. Let me then return to prosaic realism, and, in reply to the question, What will they do with their majority?-make the only answer that seems probably correct, and say-Nothing.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE IN CHINA.

BY THE BEST AUTHORITY IN THE WORLD. SIR ROBERT HART, who for forty-five years has been intimately connected with China, and for the latter part of that period has been recognised by everybody as the best authority upon all questions relating to the Chinese and their government, contributes a truly alarming article to the Fortnightly Review. Sir Robert Hart is not a literary man, and his essay manifestly proceeds from a pen more accustomed to framing official reports than to writing magazine articles. Notwithstanding its quaint division into some score sections, each under a separate letter of the alphabet, from A to Q, the article is better worth reading than anything that has been written by anybody during the whole of this crisis. Dr. Morrison's narrative of the incidents of the siege may surpass Sir Robert Hart's account of the same episode in contemporary history; but the importance of the article does not lie in its description of the siege-it is to be found in his diagnosis of the causes which brought about the siege, and his prediction as to the results which may confidently be anticipated in the future from the forces now at work in the Chinese Empire. Briefly speaking, Sir Robert Hart's opinion is that no power on earth can prevent the sentiment which produced the Boxers dominating China and defying Europe. Never have the exponents of the Yellow Danger had so weighty a declaration in their favour from so eminent an authority.

OURSELVES TO BLAME.

And what makes it all the worse to bear is that Sir Robert Hart is quite certain that we have only ourselves to blame for all that has happened. First of all we treat the Chinese unjustly, and then prod them into adopting the very tactics which will end in our expulsion from China. He says:

What has happened has been the logical effect of previous doings. Europe has not been ungenerous in her treatment of China, but, even so, has wounded her a more tactful, reasonable, and consistent course might possibly have produced better results, but in no case could foreigners expect to maintain for ever their extra-territorialised status and the various commercial stipulations China had conceded to force.

Wên Hsiang, the celebrated Prime Minister of China during the minority of Tung Chih in the early sixties, often said, "You are all too anxious to awake us and start us on a new road, and you will do it; but you will all regret it, for, once awaking and started, we shall go fast and far-farther than you think-much farther than you want!" His words are very true.

THE BOXERS A VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT.

The Chinese were very slow to assimilate European ideas, but by our persistent pressure we succeeded in introducing into the Chinese mind that it would be a famous piece of statecraft to invent the Boxers. Sir Robert says:—

The teaching thus received began gradually to crystallise in the belief that a huge standing army on European lines would be wasteful and dangerous and that a volunteer association-as suggested by the way all China ranged itself on the Government side in the Franco-Chinese affair-covering the whole Empire, offering an outlet for restless spirits and fostering a united and patriotic feeling, would be more reliable and effective, an idea which seemed to receive immediate confirmation from without in the stand a handful of burghers were making in the Transvaal:

hence the Boxer Association, patriotic in origin, justifiable in its fundamental idea, and in point of fact the outcome of either foreign advice or the study of foreign methods.

The Boxer Association, therefore, in the opinion of this expert observer, corresponds very closely to the outburst of patriotic sentiment which forty years ago produced our Volunteer movement.

BUT POSSESSED OF -HYPNOTIC ?—POWERS.

He mentions, however, that the Boxers either possess, or lay claim to possess, supernatural powers to which our Volunteers never aspired. He says:

Something akin to hypnotism or mesmerism seems connected with Boxer initiation and action: the members bow to the south-east, recite certain mystical sentences, and then, with closed eyes, fall on their backs; after this they arise, eyes glazed and staring, possessed of the strength and agility of maniacs, mount trees and walls and wield swords and spears in a way they are unable to at other times; semi-initiation is said to render the body impervious to cut or thrust, while the fullyinitiated fear neither shot nor shell; the various sub-chiefs are, of course, fully initiated, but the supreme chief is described as more gifted still-he sits in his hall, orders the doors to be opened, and while remaining there in the body, is said to be elsewhere in spirit, directing, controlling, suggesting and achieving. One of the best shots, in a Legation guard, relates how he fired seven shots at one of the chiefs on the Northern Bridge, less than two hundred yards off the chief stood there con. temptuously, pompously waving his swords and as if thereby causing the bullets to pass him to right or left at will: he then calmly and proudly stalked away unhit, much to the astonishment of the sharpshooter! Though professing to know nothing beyond the domain of sense, the Chinaman is really an extravagant believer in the supernatural, and so he readily credits the Boxer with all the powers he claims.

:

PARTITION, CONVERSION, OR THE WHIRLWIND. The Boxers being therefore the legitimate and inevitable outcome of the grafting of Western European ideas upon Chinese patriotic sentiment, we have to face the certainty of the fact that the movement in its essence will not die out, but will increase and spread until it assumes proportions which will defy us. Sir Robert Hart says:

Twenty millions or more of Boxers armed, drilled, disciplined, and animated by patriotic-if mistaken-motives, will make residence in China impossible for foreigners, will take back from foreigners everything foreigners have taken from China, will pay off old grudges with interest, and will carry the Chinese flag and Chinese arms into many a place that even fancy will not suggest to-day, thus preparing for the future upheavals and disasters never even dreamt of. In fifty years' time there will be millions of Boxers in serried ranks and war's panoply at the call of the Chinese Government; there is not the slightest doubt of that! And if the Chinese Government continues to exist, it will encourage and it will be quite right to encourage, uphold, and develope this national Chinese movement; it bodes no good for the rest of the world, but China will be acting within its right and will carry through the national programme! Nothing but partition-a difficult and unlikely international settlement, or a miraculous spread of Christianity in its best form-a not impossible, but scarcely to be hoped for, religious triumph, will defer, will avert this result; is either the one or the other within the limits of practical politics or practical propagandism? I fear not! And if not, what? Then the lawlessness of the present uprising must be condoned and the Manchoo dynasty supported to this end it will be made to "lose face 33 as little as possible-but trade in arms will not cease and our sons and grandsons will reap the whirlwind.

MEANTIME, PATCHING UP.

Of these three courses he decides that the last is the only one open to us, and although he goes on to talk about compensation and punishment the logic of his article points unmistakably to our accepting whatever terms we can get from the Chinese, and making the best of them, knowing that if we go further we shall fare worse. It is to be hoped that the German Emperor will read Sir Robert Hart's article, and readjust his policy to the facts to which this supreme expert bears unimpeachable testimony.

A SIGNIFICANT RUSSIAN DECLARATION.

In immediate connection with Sir Robert Hart's paper it is well to read the short article which Professor Martens, the well-known Chief Justice of Christendom, has contributed to the Monthly Review on the subject of the Hague Conference and China. In this paper Professor Martens, whose authority on International law cannot be disputed by any, declares himself in most unqualified fashion against any attempt to utilise the present crisis for the purpose of still further increasing the domination of Europe over the Chinese. After setting forth the admitted facts as to the privileges which we have extracted by force from the Chinese, he continues :—

Therefore I maintain that the civilised Powers, in settling their account with China, should not endeavour either to increase the privileges of their countrymen in China, or favour, by the exaction of new immunities, the propagation of the Christian religion among the Chinese, or undermine the authority and the prestige of the Chinese Government, or increase in the hearts of the Chinese people their hatred and animosity against all foreigners.

We cannot recognise any right whatever belonging to the Christian nations of imposing upon the Chinese an unscrupulous exploitation of their natural riches; we are unable to concede to Protestant and Catholic missionaries the right of propaganda at the expense of the strength of the Chinese State; we recognise absolutely no legal title justifying the systematic poisoning of the Chinese by opium, the importation of which is imposed by force upon China; lastly, we express in all sincerity our conviction that the Chinese have the same right to insist that "China should belong to Chinamen" as the Russians or English that their country should belong to them.

It would be difficult to put into shorter compass a policy more absolutely antagonistic to that which the German Emperor appears to be pursuing in China at the present moment.

THE BOXERS MIRACLE-WORKERS.

The Rev. Roland Allen, of the Church of England Mission, Peking, contributes to Cornhill for November a most instructive paper on Some of the causes which led to the siege of the foreign legations at Pekin." First he cites the force of hunger, for ever since the coup d'état North China has suffered from drought and the people attributed the calamity to the anger of Heaven caused either by the Empress' highhanded action or by the presence of foreigners. As the Boxers advanced, the rain fell, as though to encourage the belief that Heaven was on their side. The second cause was the force of religion. The Boxers were religious enthusiasts. They were believed to be attended by "divine soldiers" in untold thousands

The Boxers professed and the people believed that they were aid of these gods they could in a short time-a few days or months-drive every foreigner out of China. The Boxers professed and the people commonly believed that they could work miracles to prove their divine mission. Not only in the country but in the streets of Peking they performed tricks which were almost universally accepted as miraculous. They cut themselves with their swords without drawing blood; they lifted millstones by a single thread; they drove their spears through bricks and withdrew them, leaving no hole; they balanced a large stone attached to a short stick upon the top of a Chinese wine cup so that it could not be made to fall; in dining they had but one pot of food, yet however many of their number came to share in its contents all had enough. THE FOREIGNERS KNOW NO RIGHT."

66

The third cause of the rising was a rankling sense of foreign injustice. The news of foreign encroachments spread with a rapidity unknown in former times, thanks chiefly to the advance of Christian missions !

As a Chinese put it one day to me, a few years ago you could travel 500 li without finding a Christian; now you cannot go fifty without finding a church. And where the missionary goes there goes information, and an increasing desire for information and a growing interest in the condition of the State. . . . Truly or falsely the Boxer preachers protested and the people believed that in the Lisotung peninsula the Russians used forced labour, that in Chiao Chou Germans broke into the houses of honest men and submitted their women to the vilest usage, under threats of fearful vengeance if any resistance was offered. One of our own teachers reported to me the gist of a speech which he heard a Boxer deliver at a street corner in Peking. Summed up in a word it was this: treacherous seizure of the land, forced labour, rape. Chinese Christians would come to me to ask if these charges were true. They were in every one's mouth. "The foreigners knew no right." .. True or false, the people believed these stories, and many, very many, of them had their own instances to cite of friends or relations who had been deprived of justice in the courts by priestly interference.

The writer suggests that the rulers of China supported the Boxers as a refuge of despair. “They preferred a momentary vengeance and annihilation to slavery."

JUSTICE,--OR JUDGMENT?

Mr. A. Edmund Spender raises in the Westminster Review "a plea for justice." He contends that the Allies have no right to exploit China for their own selfish purposes. "China is a debtor to no man," and simply desires to be left alone. But if we disregard the claims of justice, Mr. Spender draws a grim picture of the Nemesis that awaits us. He says:

The same reason that makes us envious of the yellow labourer in our colonies will give us cause to repent of our haste to develop a hitherto exclusive country. Compared to our thousands or hundreds in the competition, China will raise up her millions. Quick as the Japanese to adapt themselves to new circumstances, they will learn of us new trades and then will oust us from their marts. They will be our keenest commercial competitors; not even the shoddy markets from the Fatherland will be able to undersell them. Wherever they go they take the first rank in business. As bankers in the Straits we may see them any day driving about in their carriage and pair; as managers in Japan we find them set over the heads of Japanese to keep the business on a sound financial basis. Out of the torrent of the Fraser River they are picking up a fortune out of the gold-washing from the silt in their baskets with a patience that would make a Canadian bankrupt.

THE "QUARTERLY'S" COUNSEL.

The Quarterly Review analyses the situation thus :--Great Britain, so far, stands alone, with the Triple Alliance facing her; and her hope lies in the defection, partial or com plete, of Germany from that alliance, or in the enunciation of a