for the sake of their own special brand of war; international peace appeals to them as an overture to social war, and they oppose the present war because it divides the forces of social revolution and postpones the war of classes. Wars did not cease when they ceased to be fought for religion; and the elimination of nationality, for which the logical Catholic longs, would not make peace between labour and capital.

Perhaps it is as well that the old legal maxim Nemo potest exuere patriam applies in a general sense, and that patriotism is a bond of unity as well as a source of discord. Patriotism, or a rarer zest for mercy, has certainly tempered the Russian Revolution; and stress should be laid on the remarkable rapidity and success with which Russia appears to have overcome the tendencies inherent in every revolution. Faith indeed was required to believe that any basis of national unity could be speedily found as an alternative to that provided by the Tsardom and the Orthodox Church; and it is clear that the West has under-estimated the spread of political education among the Russian people, and the growth of a common sense in all the diverse parts of Russia's vast dominions. But when we read of social democracy in regions which we thought Oriental in civilization, and see Deputies from east and west, north and south, representing various parties but joining to form a coalition, we have obviously to discount the sharp contrasts commonly drawn between new Petrograd and old Moscow, Great Russians and Little Russians, peasants and craftsmen, and to admit that a fusion which took the West centuries to achieve is apparently being accomplished in Russia in as many months.

Nor should we blind ourselves to the possibility of error in our now fashionable habit of seeing an economic cause in all political movements and discovering everywhere an economic bar to national unity. It is a German jest that der Mensch ist was er isst; but a Russian national State may be made out of sounder stuff than German economic theories. A nation that went to war for a scrap of paper should be able to discern an uneconomic spirit in other nationalities.

It would be idle to pretend that Russia's military organization has not been shaken in the convulsion, or that the war may not be prolonged in consequence. But it is a far cry to the German assumption that Russia has ceased to be a serious factor in the situation. The Younger Pitt made a similar miscalculation about the French Revolution, and as late as 1792 was budgeting for years of peace based on the foundering of French military power. The Kaiser has refrained from his ancestor's blunder in championing autocracy against revolution, but his armies are on Russian soil, and his Junkers will see to it that they do not withdraw empty-handed. His Chancellor may talk of the peace which Russia may have at a price, but he knows that Russia will not and cannot pay the price; and the peace for which he hopes is merely a truce on the Eastern Front procured by Russian dissension. Even that he will not get, and the Russian Army is by no means in the parlous plight of the French in 1791-2. There has been a similar shock to discipline, but Russian officers are not the aristocratic caste that the French were under the ancien régime, and they have not emigrated in a body,

leaving the Army to find its leaders in the ranks. Nor is it reduced, like the French, to scraping the walls of houses for saltpetre to make munitions.

The military aspect of the problem is the one which impresses us most, because in this all-absorbing war we can hardly think in any other than military terms. But we may be sure that other aspects of the Russian Revolution are not without weight in Germany. Even in Germany public opinion is an element in success, and public opinion has been profoundly moved by the Russian Revolution. We sometimes forget the efforts the Kaiser made in July, 1914, to represent the war as war on the Russian bugbear. As a war on Tsardom it appealed to the German Socialist, and he was right enough in regarding the Tsardom as a principal bulwark of the Hohenzollerns. But the war has been perverted from a war against Tsardom into a war against a Socialistic Republic, and it is at least as likely that German Socialists may object to fighting a Russian Republic as that Russian Socialists will object to fighting the Kaiser. The spring has seen a simplification of the war and its issues by converting American democracy to belligerency and the Russian belligerent to democracy; and the Ides of March may prove in the end to have been as fatal to the German as to the Russian heir of Cæsar's name and mantle.

XVI.

THE PARADOX OF THE BRITISH

EMPIRE.1

It was a jest of Voltaire's that the Holy Roman Empire was so called because it was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. The British Empire is not quite so paradoxical, because it is at least partially British; but it is only an Empire in a sense which makes nonsense of the word, for it is like no other Empire that ever existed, and it would certainly smell as sweet if called by any other name. General Smuts recently remarked that the man who found a proper name for it would be doing real service to the Empire. Perhaps now that there is to be an English Tripos at Cambridge, the combined intelligence of our university schools of English may succeed in finding English names for that and other English things. At present the hand of classical language lies heavy on political science, and we have never escaped from the juvenile habit of trying to turn English thought into Greek and Latin prose and to describe English institutions in incongruous classical terms. Some of our pedagogues even cudgel their own and their pupils' brains to think what words an ancient Greek would have used to describe a "Q" boat or a "tank," and it may

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement 7 June, 1917.

be long before they realize that ideas which no Greek could understand cannot be turned into real Greek prose. While that obsession lasts we shall have to look to America for the growth of the English language, and continue to give our latest inventions irrelevant classical names; a chemist finds it easier to discover a new gas than to invent an English name for his discovery, and it will require a greater effort to substitute Commonwealth for Empire than to organize its government.

General Smuts has not merely exposed that particular terminological inexactitude in a speech; he is a living refutation of the falsehood of the word and a monument to the virtue of the thing. The Empire which has won the minds of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts has acquired something of which it stood in greater need than of gold or territory, and it has won those minds by a quality in the British Empire which belies its name. It is the spirit of adoption which

leads General Smuts to acclaim Great Britain as the senior partner in a common concern. The German can annex, but he cannot attract: for Kultur is an acid rather than a base, a solvent rather than a foundation of empire. Hence the German reliance on force; nothing less than a militarist mould of iron could counteract the disruptive effect of Kultur. No such constraint was needed for the British Commonwealth, and no such congeries of peoples has ever been held together by so slight a material bond. It is not, in fact, the British Army or the British Navy which holds the Empire together. They are needed to protect it from external foes, but not from internal disruption; and the Empire is a reign of the spirit and