to serve the ends of their own long-projected bid for world dominion. We have realised, with a bitter resentment, the danger to which our policy had exposed us, and we have resolved that we will never lay ourselves open to a like danger again.

But in this realisation and this resolve there lies a fresh peril to which it is well that attention should be drawn. At the very time when our leaders are expressing their agreement with the 'cosmopolitan principles' of the League to Enforce Peace they are also preparing to close and strengthen the organisation of the British Empire on the basis of an Imperial tariff system. It is essential that we should realise the change which—unless we proceed with extreme caution and consideration for the legitimate rights of others-this policy is likely to make in our relations with the peoples not of our own household, and especially in their attitude towards the question of the freedom of the seas. The danger is painted with convincing clearness by M. Henri Lambert, in an open letter' in reply to an attack by Professor Brentano of Munich on British naval militarism.'

'The world has the most powerful reasons for desiring and willing that the command of the seas should be exercised by a Free Trade nation. This is a political axiom, almost a truism. It must, of course, be admitted that, since 1897, English Free Trade principles have manifested disquieting hesitations and compromising tendencies both in foreign and home politics; but it must also be recognised that England has remained the only great Free Trade nation.

For the rest, the world for more than half a century past has had no cause to complain of the manner in which England has exercised her naval supremacy, so far as concerns the freedom and policing of the seas, or the respect and protection to be accorded to commercial navigation. . .

'At the same time, had English policy succumbed, or were it still to succumb, to "Chamberlainism," tending to cut off from the world an immense economic domain and to exercise in it a protectionist and militarist imperialism, the other peoples would, in my opinion, have the same imperative reasons for combining against this gigantic British enterprise of monopoly and spoliation as they have had in combining against the present German enterprise of conquest and economic domination.**

* Recueil de Rapports, p. 161.

It will be clear to all thoughtful people that this is not an opinion which we can afford to neglect in establishing the principles on which the British Commonwealth of the future is to be founded. In an article published in this Review in July 1915* the writer pointed out how the claim had been made, and justly made, by British statesmen that the Imperial power of Great Britain had come to be regarded as held in trust, not only for the Empire and its members, but for the world at large. It is the recognition of the justice of this claim which, as M. Lambert points out, has in the present war ranged neutral opinion overwhelmingly on our side. Clearly, then, our Free Trade tradition has in this respect stood us in good stead, and the goodwill of the world which it has gained for us is certainly not an asset to be lightly thrown aside. The Cobdenite tradition is, for the time being, popularly discredited among us, and this discredit has postponed into a yet more distant future the possibility of realising the ideal of universal peace based on universal freedom of trade and intercourse. In the light of the revelations made since the outbreak of war, it may be necessary for us to protect ourselves against any repetition of the German abuse of our policy of the 'open door.' The development of submarine warfare may to some extent deprive us of the advantages of our insular position; it may even convert that previous advantage into a disadvantage; and therefore it may be necessary to take measures to make these islands, as far as possible, economically self-contained and self-supporting. Conceivably also on political grounds some sort of system of Imperial preference may prove desirable. But whatever protective system may be found necessary should be limited to ends which will be universally recognised as legitimate, namely, to what is absolutely necessary for the securing of our safety, the free development of our commerce and industry, and the strengthening of the ties that bind us to the British dominions beyond the seas. The danger to our future lies in the clamour that will arise for the protection of British industry against legitimate as well as illegitimate competition and the consequent substitution of a 'protectionist and militarist 'Imperialism' for that wide, humane, and generous principle on which our Empire has hitherto been based. Let there be no

* British Imperialism and the Problems of Peace.

illusion about the results of such a substitution. The British flag waves over one-fifth of the earth's surface, and this stupendous fact has, on the whole, been accepted with equanimity by other nations, because for a long while past this flag has been the symbol of the open door and of equal rights for all. They will hardly view it with the same complacency if it become the symbol of monopoly and exclusion.

It may be argued, with much show of reason, that we have a perfect right to do what other nations in their several spheres have consistently done. It is, however, not a question of right, but of expediency. The United States, building up a tariff wall round its vast territories and asserting a monopoly of interest in the whole Western Hemisphere, threw down a challenge to the world which has not been taken up. But, though the illusion of peace was preserved, this attitude was really a warlike one, based as it was on 'possible blood'; and numerous recent books by American publicists show that the opinion is rapidly growing that, if it is to be maintained, the United States must arm in its defence. The American attitude has, in short, been made possible partly by the preoccupation of the other Great Powers with more pressing interests, partly by the 'isolation' of the Americas-an isolation which, as President Wilson admits, no longer exists. The situation of the British Empire is wholly different. Its strength and its weakness lie in the fact that it is scattered over the whole face of the globe. Its continued security, then, depends on one of two things: the undisputed British mastery of the seas, or the willing acquiescence of the nations in its existence as a power held in trust for humanity. Now it is scarcely to be expected that, if the freedom of the seas' were to be placed under an international guarantee, the 'naval police' of the nations could be trusted to protect a 'gigantic British enter'prise of monopoly and spoliation,' even if it could be trusted to protect the British Empire as it is. The monopoly, in short, would be based upon our sea-power, which sooner or later would be challenged, and the old race of competitive armament would begin anew, the blame for it being laid this time, not upon Germany, but upon us.

The moral which it is desired to draw from this is, not that we should refrain from protecting and promoting our own interests, but that we should continue to regard them—as in

the past we had learned to do-as very intimately bound up with the legitimate interests of other nations. So long as our Empire lasts we shall have to maintain our power to guard the highways of the sea, for these-as the Germans well understand -are the arteries through which pulses the very lifeblood of our body politic. We now perfectly understand,' wrote Lord Sydenham in a recent letter to The Times,' the meaning of the 'freedom of the seas in terms of German Kultur, and we shall 'never abandon one iota of our maritime rights unless and ' until it is certain that all war between Powers possessing naval 'forces has been rendered absolutely and finally impossible.' This is the only possible attitude for us to assume; and it will be effective for our own security and for the peace of the world so long as we exercise our rights with the same moderation as in the past. That, within any measurable distance of time, the conditions will obtain which Lord Sydenham postulates as the sine qua non of the surrender of these rights, the present writer does not believe. Even if after the war the Great Powers were to accept and act upon the programme of the League to Enforce Peace, this would not-as the framers of the programme themselves admit-make war impossible or even improbable, but would at most greatly strengthen the chances of preserving peace. As for President Wilson's proposal for a Universal Union, the best possible comment on it, in view of the experience of the ages, is that contained in an answer made by Lord Castlereagh to the similar proposal made by the Emperor Alexander I. almost exactly a hundred years ago. 'The problem of a Universal Alliance for the peace and happiness 'of the world has always been one of speculation and hope, 'but it has never yet been reduced to practice, and if an opinion may be hazarded from its difficulty, it never can.'

W. ALISON PHILLIPS.

SWINBURNE

The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne. By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. Macmillan. 1917.

'I do not suppose that anybody now alive (I speak of lovers of poetry) who was not alive in 1832 and old enough then to enjoy the first perfect work of Tennyson, has had such a sensation as that which was experienced in the autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr. Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads." And I am sure that no one in England has had any such sensation since.'

Thus wrote Mr. George Saintsbury, some twenty-two years ago, in a volume of 'Corrected Impressions': and it is certain that no one survives to-day to compare the emotional experiences of 1832 and 1866, to report to us. Indeed of the men who in 1866 were old enough to wage war over 'Poems and 'Ballads' the greater number pre-deceased its author, and by this time a very few remain. Mr. Saintsbury, who happily survives (but will not be called 'Doctor'), was an undergraduate in 1866. He tells us :

'The autumn must have been far advanced before [the book] did come out, for I remember that I could not obtain a copy before I went up to Oxford in October, and had to avail myself of an expedition to town to "eat dinners" in order to get one. Three copies of the precious volume, with " Moxon " on cover and " John Camden Hotten" on title-page, accompanied me back that night, together with divers maroons for the purpose of enlivening matters on the ensuing Fifth of November. The book was something of a maroon in itself. . . . We sat next afternoon, I remember, from luncheon time till the chapel bell rang, reading aloud by turns in a select company "Dolores" and "The Triumph of Time," "Laus Veneris " and "Faustine," and all the other wonders of the volume.'

The hubbub raised over Poems and Ballads' in 1866 still, after half a century, interrupts criticism with an echo too loud for its real importance, even for its historical importance. It was not, to be sure, a mere hubbub of the market-place, and