damental notions of right which honest pacifists have all the while cherished more than peace itself, the very forces which had hitherto determined America to keep out of the war became by inexorable logic forces which will keep America in the war till the tremendous end is achieved. The pacifist American will tend to become the fellow-enthusiast of those who, let us frankly say, with a purer and more self-sacrificing Christianity, were eager from the first to fight for right. On them remains to complete this summary of a history in which every Englishman will see, as in our recent history, far more to admire than to blame. All the while Americans had studied to some purpose what they would have to do if they were compelled to go to war. The prompt adoption of conscription by Congress is the greatest example yet given of that growth in the power of self-government which does take place in every sound democracy. There need, therefore, be no hesitation or reserve there is, in fact, none-in welcoming with a joy which will be the parent of increased and steadfast resolution the declaration of war by America. Since it took place its importance, in a military sense, has become increasingly clear; but, besides, it does mean the commencement of a fellowship which, once begun, is bound to increase, between the two great English-speaking nations so long divorced, united now in the practical advancement of certain ideas of great moment for mankind which they equally cherish, and which the fortune of other countries has not allowed to take equally firm root in them. Englishmen have rather more difficulty than Americans in formulating those ideas, but this difference, which is perhaps, on the whole, to the credit of the American, is a merely superficial thing.

We have lately been reminded by

Dr. Page, in a magnificent speech, that the superficial differences between England and America are numerous and great. The analysis of national character is a thing which hands less skilful than those of Dr. Page should not attempt, but there are some causes of difference, affecting not the national character of Americans, but the working of their institutions, which can hardly be pointed out too often. To begin with, the American people is, on the whole, scattered over an enormous area. It is an obvious result of this that the interchange of ideas, slow as it is in an English country district, is in America, as a whole, slower still. The idea once planted is apt to take a longer time in undergoing healthy developments and modifications. Adequate information about the current events of the world is correspondingly slow in arriving. The

sole newspaper of many Western

Americans makes no such attempt to keep them posted in contemporary history as even the feeblest English newspaper does. Moreover, as is pretty well known, the actual white population of the United States is a vast and increasing aggregation of every European race. That these should be assimilated into what can be called a nation with a certain unity of traditions and aims would seem beforehand almost incredible. Yet, as we know, what Americans sometimes call "Americanism" is a fact. The little nucleus of people who leaven this vast lump, striving to maintain certain ideals, do under conditions of democracy (in some ways less complete than our own, but in some ways unbridled) form the directing element in the whole. We see now their success on the whole; we hardly realize enough the huge obstacles to that success. For our great purpose it must be remembered, too, that the common tradition imbibed by this

motley assemblage of peoples contains a large infusion of a sentiment which may be described as indifference to Europe, qualified by hostility to England. The fathers of this multitude, and very many of themselves, escaped into the New World, if not from actual oppression yet from cramping conditions in the Old. American conservatism would, in any case, have kept long alive the old tradition of aloofness from all European affairs, but the private recollections of many of the newcomers give abundant fresh food to that tradition.

Though the directing mind of America has, as we now know, fundamental things in common with the English mind, the divergence of American and English tradition in things not quite so fundamental is still marked. The fact is that the main lines of American life and character began to be traced long before the War of Independence. American historians have traced in many other matters, besides that of language in which a well-known essay of Lowell's traces it, the vestiges of an old England before (say) Charles II, from which in all save the mechanical appliances of life, we in England have traveled away faster than they. What, it may be asked, are the fundamentals of which we have spoken? An Englishman is shyer in speaking of them than an American, partly because he is shyer generally, partly also because, like our political constitution, they live for us in simple tradition, while for an American they have in part been formulated in a document like his Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. But the chief of them is a certain respect, deeply founded in religion, for the individual human being as such. Respect for the rights of other peoples is in turn founded on this, and in our two democracies that deliberately cynical view of foreign policy, from which

no Continental Government has ever quite got away, can take simply no root at all.

There are one or two things which an Englishman would like if he could to din into his American friends. In the first place, the mother country grudged them their independence very little, and made a hero of Washington right away. The wrong attitude of some Englishmen during the Civil War was a fact, and an ugly fact, regretted now by all of us, but it was largely the product of a complete and almost inevitable misunderstanding of the causes of the war, and, above all, it never-this is quite certainwas the attitude of England as а whole at all. Still more would it be well that Americans generally should learn what some of them knew very well, that England with its King and its Lords is a very real democracy, claiming, with some reason, that without the name of democracy it has got the thing in a more effective form than America. Lastly, let Americans get rid of the idea, of which the real causes are long past, though the English vice of shyness helps to keep it alive, that Englishmen are guilty, as Lowell alleged, and as even Dr. Page, alas! has repeated, of “a certain condescension" towards Americans. We are probably in one way or another apt to be objectionable in our manner to all other peoples, but when Americans attribute this to a condescending disposition towards their country because it is new, they have got on a false scent. We are, on the contrary, disposed to be deferential towards them and their great new world.

But enough of these minor matters. Our joint struggle together will test our friendship at many points, and it will stand the test and be far the stronger for it. The two peoples, guardians of one spiritual heritage, so long divided, so potent to influence

the world for good in their union, have joined hands with one another, with the French pioneers of all modern civilization, with the young nation of Italy, and with the elements of life The Contemporary Review.

and progress in many another country, to achieve the greatest task for which arms were ever borne. "How much the greatest event it is in modern history; and how much the happiest." Charnwood.

We are in the midst of the greatest war known to history. We have been fighting for nearly three years, and the road which we have to traverse before we reach the goal of victory is long and uncertain. The members of our Government are said to be overworked. Whatever energies they have should be devoted simply and entirely to the winning of the war. They possess the trust and confidence of the country as few Governments have ever possessed them. And it is hardly credible that in this hour of crisis they should decide to push a Reform Bill through the House of Commons. When in 1832 our demagogues thought it useful to destroy what Mr. Gladstone declared with truth was the best constitution ever devised by the wit of man, many months, a general election, and a threat to make peers preceded the passage of the Bill. With the Germans facing us on the western front, and the best of our citizens in the trenches, we cannot discuss as we should a measure which will gravely affect the future of the Empire. And so we are asked to take it as it stands, to withhold opposition, since opposition might weaken us in the face of the foe, and tacitly to consent to a revolution, the end of which no politician can foresee.

Only one excuse would be possible for this irrelevant legislation: a general demand from an undivided country that the Bill should pass. We believe that no demand of the sort has been made. The war still holds our atten

tion and fills our thoughts. For the poor game of politics we have happily lost our taste, and outside the House of Commons, which still thinks in programs and expresses itself in catchwords, franchises and polling-booths and their hideous accompaniments of falsehood and exaggeration were long ago forgotten. In truth, the war abroad meant peace at home, until without motive or reason this monstrous Bill was sprung upon us.

But we are told-and this is the one little shred of defense which has been suggested for the action of the Government "the present House of Commons is not sufficiently representative to deal with the task of reconstruction which will immediately follow the war." That is perfectly true. But if it is not sufficiently representative to deal with reconstruction, it is not sufficiently representative to deal with reform. If the new House be elected in accordance with a Bill which, so far from being approved by the country, is wholly unknown to it, what becomes of the representative principle? The Bill, if it be passed, will be passed without the general sanction, and will carry no heavier weight than is imposed by a coalition which has so grossly forgotten its duty as to interrupt the conduct of the war by wantonly meddling with the constituencies. That we must have a new register is clear to all; that the soldiers and sailors who have saved the country should be able to record their votes is an accepted axiom. But these two

necessary objects might be easily achieved without throwing the whole constitution of Great Britain into the melting-pot.

We do not pretend to know by what course of argument, if any, our Ministers were persuaded to do this thing at this moment. It is evident only that there is a general competition in renouncement. Politicians on either side are standing in white sheets to confess the hardened errors of their lives. Mr. Asquith, on the one hand, smiles unctuously upon women's suffrage. Mr. Long, on the other, gives up, at a word, the settled convictions of a long career. And they have done all this, it seems, without any impulsion from without. The Speaker presided over a committee which was said to be unanimous, and was not, and there was an end of it. No opportunity was given to members of the House to consult their constituents. If democracy has any meaning at all, its sacred privileges have been grossly violated, and the very forms of representative government have been openly defied.

The Bill, introduced into the House by Mr. Long, is said to be the result of the deliberations presided over by the Speaker. Yet it is like nothing so much as a reach-me-down from a Radical pigeon-hole. It might have been reposing the last twenty years in the dust of the Home Office. It is a measure ingeniously designed for keeping the Radicals in office as tenants for life. Though it may be foiled by accident of its purpose, that purpose is none the less plain for all to see. It is intended to ensure the permanent supremacy of the Radicals, to hand over the governance of the country to one section, and one section only, of the community. Now to this plan there are certain objections, which have nothing to do with the prejudices of class or party. Wealth and thrift may be crimes: to

pretend they are not is to court unpopularity. He who works with his cunning head may be a far worse man and citizen than he who works with his honest hands. So often have we been told this that it seems idle to contradict it. But even the criminally wealthy and the monster degraded by intelligence still deserve some small measure of justice at the hands of the State. To be tried by one's peers is (or was) the birthright of Englishmen. If Mr. Long's Bill is passed, the complete control of all classes will pass into the hands of one class a class which has no political experience, and which will, if it can, bend the law to its own exclusive purpose. The Trade Disputes Act was not passed for nothing.

In other words, the Reform Bill, which is to be smuggled through with as little discussion as possible, will disfranchise utterly the intelligent and thrifty minority. It may be, as that brilliant political philosopher and inactive savior of Ireland, Mr. Birrell, once proclaimed, that minorities must suffer. It is an amiable doctrine, which throws a flood of light upon the inherent justice of counting heads, but it is a doctrine which is not without its dangers. Mr. Birrell thought that, if only nothing was done in Ireland at all, the reign of peace might ensue, and he was rewarded inevitably with bloodshed and murder. And minorities may appear to his sanguine eye very ridiculous things. Obviously, as they are less in number than majorities, and since numbers alone are honorable, they deserve not the respect of such distinguished statesmen as Mr. Birre l the elect of Bristol. But minorities, if they are too harshly entreated, are still capable of rising against oppression, and when the democracy of Great Britain has converted itself, with Mr. Long's help, into a tyrant, according to the formula of Aristotle, then revo

lution may well be the one resource left to a persecuted minority.

Let us consider the situation of the country, which once might boast itself the best governed in the world. After a campaign of unexampled falsehood and chicanery, Mr. Asquith abolished, by methods upon which not even he, in his perpetual retirement, can reflect with pride, the veto of the House of Lords. The way in which the deed was done, no less than the doing of it, will remain forever a dark blot upon the gang of politicians who found profit in destroying the British Constitution. And when the crime had been committed, Mr. Asquith announced to an incredulous country that he regarded the reform of the House of Lords as a debt of honor. That debt he did not pay; none who knew him expected him to pay it; and now, fortunately for England, he has been deprived permanently of the opportunity of paying that or any other debt of honor. So we are confronted with the possibility of a single chamber, elected by manhood and womanhood suffrage,-no one can be so simple as to believe that the age of female voters will not be instantly reduced to 21, and that of women and men the same qualification will be demanded, without safeguards or compensations, without the power of second thoughts, without any sense of tradition or respect for the past. And what was once known as the best constitution in the world will degenerate into an omnipotent board of guardians, larger in size than its unhappy model, and equal to it in incompetence and corruption. Is it not plain for all to see, that no Government has the right to pass a Reform Bill through the House of Commons until the House of Lords is given renewed strength and power?

The strength of the British Constitution lay in its exquisite balance.

The King, the proper symbol of all power, the Lords and the Commons, exercised a wise restraint, each upon the others. But now that the Lords are deprived of all power, and that the Commons are to be elected by one class only, which will easily dominate all constituencies, we can boast no longer of the steady growth of our institutions. We shall be forced to admit, if the Government has its way, that in the midst of a great war a revolution has taken place without reason or excuse a revolution which will transform completely our social and political life. We are asked to pass from a limited monarchy to such an unfettered democracy as exists nowhere else in the world. France has her Senate. The United States of America are protected by the double restraint of Senate and Supreme Court. England alone will be the victim of a single chamber, elected by the suffrages of all men and all womenelected, that is to say, wholly and solely by the working classes, and England, by her position as the head of a vast empire, is the country least fitted to make the hazardous experiment. What encroachments will be made upon the freedom and property of the unrepresented minority we can dimly surmise. Confiscation and public theft will doubtless be the declared policy of our new rulers. The minority will be invited to pay all the taxes, and the majority will take great pleasure in spending the money thus gathered, with all the gaiety of wastefulness. Above all, one thing is obvious: the King will be asked to resign his throne, since no King can survive in a State which has but a single chamber and universal suffrage. And with the King will vanish the British Empire, for the King is the one gracious and visible link which binds the dominions oversea to Great Britain. Without his sovereignty and all that it means to us,