harborage in the home of Louise de Seilles "on the borders of Dauphiné; and, with French hearts at their best in winningness around her, she learned again, as an art, the act of breathing calmly." And the phrasing of that brings us to the most intimate of all the allusions-the one where, in A Faith Upon Trial, Meredith is speaking of his wife, lying mortally ill:

Sweet was her voice with the tongue,
The speechful tongue of her France,
Home of her birth and her love.

Singularly international and unconfined in his view, "The world," he said, "is being visibly universalized: to deny us this larger citizenship is the worst provincialism." Among all the European nations, France held the largest place in his heart. Italy, however, came a very good second, and in America, as I have said, his interest was profound. For Russia throughout most of his life his sympathy naturally was less. Yet in regard to the Crimea even, in Beauchamp's Career, his view was singularly just. He paid tribute to "the dauntless Lancastrian who thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded" (John Bright), and to the three Quakers (Robert Charlton, Henry Pease, and Joseph Sturge) who, on the eve of the war, made a pilgrimage to the Czar beseeching him to give way "for piety's sake." Yet not the most malevolent of detractors has dared ever to speak of Meredith as a pacifist. Had they done so, his vindication might safely have been left to his most intimate of friends, Admiral Maxse, the original of Beauchamp! Later in life, too, he was a warm supporter of The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, and, in 1905, he wrote The Crisis-with its lately much-quoted lines:

Now has come

The day when thou can'st not be dumb Spirit of Russia. .

Beauchamp's Career, it may be noted in passing, well repays perusal at this moment-the Militia Bill, the invasion panic, Lord Palmerston's methods-all these things are not so far away as when we last read of them. Diana of the Crossways, in a less degree, but in the same kind of way, has a new value now in respect to Ireland. Meredith's sympathies, clear enough in that book, are fully given in two articles-A Pause in the Strife and Concessions to the Celt-in the Fortnightly Review of 1886. In the first of these he wrote: "Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated. The question set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible matter has gone to ashes. . . . We shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to put trust in the most generous race on earth."

In considering tributes to Italy, our minds turn, and rightly turn, first to Swinburne. Yet Meredith, in Vittoria, has not only left us a portrait of Mazzini that is without equal, but he has proved his passionate sympathy with Italy's struggle in the fact of his creation of Vittoria. She, as Sandra Belloni, is his greatest of soul; close to nature, elemental; she is, from the first, in touch with poetry and passion at their source; the only question in regard to her, as Sandra, is whether she can find a vision large enough to unite her powers. In Vittoria the ideal is found: the great destiny that was foreshadowed is realized. The call to Italy's service is supreme-demanding the whole, both her Art and her personal relations. In that great scene at La Scala, she sings-the stage curtain held above her, after the Austrian officials have ordered its lowering, by a dozen noble youths of Milan: Our life is but a little holding, lent

To do a mighty labor; we are one

With heaven and the stars when it is spent

To serve God's aim, else die we with

the sun,

and those further words in which Meredith expresses the ideal of Italy's chief:

Beloved, I am quickly out of sight:

I pray that you will love more than my dust.

Were death defeat much weeping would be right;

'Tis victory when it leaves surviving trust.

You will not find me save when you forget

come to

Earth's feebleness, and
faith, my friend,
For all Humanity doth owe a debt
To all humanity, until the end.

Published in the Fortnightly Review for 1866, when Meredith was war correspondent for the Morning Post in Venice, historically and emotionally Vittoria appears to me to entwine with events of the present as does no other book. Where else in our literature is there a passage adequate to experiences now, as is the one in which Vittoria is seeking her husband after the Battle of Novara, and likelier to find him dead than alive?

She read the faces of the mornings, as human creatures have tried to gather the sum of their destinies off changing surfaces-fair not meaning fair, nor black black, but either the mask upon the secret of God's terrible will; and to learn it and submit, was the spiritual burden of her motherhood, that the child leaping with her The Contemporary Review.

heart might live. Not to hope blindly, in the exceeding anxiousness of her passionate love, nor blindly to fear; not to let her soul fly out among the twisting chances; not to sap her great maternal duty by affecting false stoical serenity; to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle her womanly weakness with the tears that are poison when repressed; to be at peace with a disastrous world for the sake of the dependent life unborn; by such pure efforts she clung to God. Soft dreams of sacred tenderness, tragic images, wild pity, were like phantoms encircling her, plucking at her as she went, but they were beneath her feet, and she kept them from lodging between her breasts. The thought that her husband, though he should have perished, was not a life lost if their child lived, sustained her powerfully. It seemed to whisper at times almost as if it were Carlo's ghost breathing in her ears: "On thee." On her the further devolved; and she trod down hope, lest it should build her up and bring a shock to surprise her fortitude: she put back alarm. The mountains and the valleys scarce had names to her understanding; they were but the scene where the will of her Maker was at work. Rarely has a soul been so subjected by its own force.

"Not to let her soul fly out among the twisting chances," to Meredith that achievement appeared the end and aim of earth's teaching. Not to abate by one atom our capacities for desire, yet to control them, instead of being dragged in the wake-such was, such would be today, his Reading of Life, even though it involve for us, as it did for Vittoria, that we tread down our Hopes as we put back our Fears. M. Sturge Gretton.

With the outbreak of war the industrial system broke down, though it showed remarkable powers of adapta

tion to new circumstances. It is perhaps no criticism of capitalist industry that it failed in the country's hour of

need. Industry must necessarily organize itself on the assumption of peace as the normal state of affairs. No economic system, however well organized for peace, could therefore be expected to stand the strain of war production without considerable changes. The general effect of the War upon industry has been to complete the Industrial Revolution, and to place beyond all doubt the power of the economic organization to satisfy the demands made upon it for commodities and services. It is in so far as the changes which have gradually been introduced have been a logical completion of the Industrial Revolution, that grave evils have been accentuated. But whilst the War has added the final words of a long and tragic chapter of our economic history, it has also opened a new one, owing to the recognition of certain elementary facts which the materialism of the past overlaid with its half-truths

The War has brought home the truth, subconsciously accepted, but rarely openly admitted, that industry primarily exists to satisfy the material needs of the community. During the past three years the general attitude of mind has been that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the fulfilment of national requirements. The practice has undoubtedly fallen behind the theory, but more has been done avowedly in the national interest than ever before. The War has also brought into prominent relief the further fact-too often ignored in the past-of the important part labor plays in industry. The most truculent militarists have been driven to admit that the prosecution of the War depended largely upon the industrial workers, without whose co-operation and sacrifice the prodigious production of war materials would have been impossible.

The significance of the changes

which have taken place during the War cannot at present be fully appreciated. There are conflicting tendencies the relative strength of which it is idle to pretend to estimate. The history of industry during the past three years has still to be told. The greater part of the material lies locked in the Ministry of Munitions. Certain broad developments, however, may be mentioned. The most obvious of these has been the large part which the State has taken in organizing and controlling industry. National factories have been opened; national subsidies have been given to industrial enterprises; the State has bought raw materials on a very large scale for distribution to manufacturers, and built ships for transport purposes; it has taken active steps to improve industrial organization, and interfered in an unprecedented degree with methods of production, with prices and profits. The State has, in a word, assumed responsibility for the operations of a considerable portion of the capital and labor employed in industry. It is interesting also to observe that the concentration of large numbers of workers in munition factories, and the introduction of new grades of labor, e.g., women, in a large number of processes, gave rise to conditions which the State was driven to attempt to remove by stimulating "welfare work." It is well to remember, further, that whilst the State has tolerated many evil industrial conditions during the War, under the plea of national necessity, the seamen's accommodation in the standard ships built by the Government is far in advance of that required under the Merchant Shipping Acts. State action, if we could unravel its details, would be found to be both good and ill. Unfortunately, the ill is public property, the good but little known.

Whilst a considerable body of em

ployers have been deprived of the opportunity of making unlimited profits through the operation of the Munitions Levy and the Excess Profits Tax, and though in many respects there have been drastic restrictions on the full freedom of action of the employing classes, yet, on the whole, it is questionable whether their permanent interests have been injured. What they may have lost in profits, they have gained in experience, in new methods and future possibilities. Labor, on the other hand, has been not only controlled but crippled. From the Shells and Fuses Agreement and the Treasury Agreement, through the Munitions of War Acts, and the orders of the Ministry of Munitions, to the Defense of the Realm Act and the Military Service Acts, Labor has had to surrender one by one all its sources of strength. The employer has sacrificed a proportion of his extra profits; Labor has surrendered its charter of liberties. The trade unions had gradually built up a body of rules and regulations intended eventually to supersede the arbitrary, and often tyrannical, rule of the employer in the industry. These regulations were intended to govern wages, conditions, hours, apprenticeship, demarcation, and cognate questions, and to set certain standards which should protect workpeople against the superior economic power of the employer. Many trade union regulations may have been unwise and injurious to industry; but they were largely the reflection of unwise and injurious influences deeply rooted in the industrial system. However this may be, they were a sort of Labor charter, any attempt at the infringement of which before the War invariably aroused all the fighting instincts of organized Labor. It was this charter which the Government asked the trade unions to sacrifice in the national

interest, in return for which the unions received a solemn pledge that their regulations should be restored at the end of the War. In the meantime improved organization and equipment, increased subdivision and dilution of labor have proceeded rapidly, and appear likely to create a situation in which some at least of the old trade union regulations cannot be fully and literally applied without scrapping a good deal of the new organization and machinery. The new developments also have been made the occasion for suggestions that the trade union practices should be permanently abandoned.

On the other hand, trade unionism has been accepted during the War by the community as a whole and by the Government in a way which few people would have dreamed of prior to the War. The rapprochement between the Government and the trade unions has been one of the outstanding facts of the War. It cannot be doubted that the authority in the State of the trade union officials has been enormously increased. In spite of this-or rather largely because of this-there has been amongst the younger men and keener spirits a revolt from trade union orthodoxy, which it must be confessed has stood the strain of war no better than the industrial system. And if it be true that employers as a class have during the War learned much, it is equally true that one of the most significant outcomes of the War is a new trade unionism, which has also learned much from the experiences of the past three years. It is this new, gathering force amongst the workers which betokens the close of the epoch of the Industrial Revolution and the opening of a new chapter in our industrial history.

The haste with which the readaptation of industry has had to be carried out has naturally resulted in errors and evils which might otherwise have

been avoided, and in any estimate of the changes which have taken place, these must be allowed for. For the rest, it is well-nigh impossible to weigh with any approach to accuracy the gains and losses of the industrial developments arising out of the War, the good which should be preserved and strengthened, and the evil which should be cast out. Though the War has witnessed the logical completion of the Industrial Revolution-and, indeed, because of it-the old order has become discredited. There will be relatively few people who will feel any regrets as it passes away. Yet it must be admitted that the era of State action has not been universally successful; in some directions it has been decidedly the reverse, and in consequence has generated a reaction against State interference. On analysis, however, we shall see that this reaction is due not to State intervention per se, except in the case of certain employers, but to the restriction of civil and industrial liberty on the one hand (which is not a necessary accompaniment of State action), and to mismanagement by business men unaccustomed to handling large questions of policy on the other; whilst the rapid improvisation of means of satisfying urgent national needs has inevitably produced confusion, overlapping, and contradictions. Whilst people have resented the régime of the Ministry of Munitions, however, the grounds of objection of employers on the one side, and workpeople on the other, are by no means the same. The former regard State interference partly as mere muddling and inefficiency (though it should be remembered that the business men of "push and go" must bear probably the greater part of the burden of this charge themselves), but also as a great blow at their freedom of enterprise and the privileges they have enjoyed

The dilution and subdivision of labor, the introduction of new methods and contrivances in the more important staple industries, have probably resulted in a greater diffusion of skill. In some directions it has blurred more than ever the distinction between the skilled and the semi-skilled worker, it has increased the mobility of labor, and opened up new avenues for the employment of women. The competition between men and machinery for employment has taken a fresh turn, owing to the shortage of workers. In consequence, there are new possibilities of eliminating many unnecessary and degrading forms of labor. There can be little doubt that recent developments have pointed the way to a reduction of wastage in human effort and in material. New methods of organization have led inevitably to "scientific management," which has added another element of controversy to the relations between employers and workers. In so far as it means the application of "science" to the utilization of capital in industry, "scientific management" is to be welcomed; in so far as it "organizes" the human factor in industry it arouses, and will continue to arouse, the bitter opposition of the trade unions. There is every sign that the experience of the War is leading to a specializa

*See the Supplement on "Labor Unrest" in The Athenaeum for July, 1917.