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of the State Military was the most direct and immediate cause, perhaps, of any that provoked the present strife. The crime we talk of too much and its responsibility must be shared by the peacemongers. Of the rival bad eggs, warlike gravity and pacific levity, we deem pacific levity to be the worse addled of the two. In a more primitive state it would seem probable that those who adopted the creed of non-resistance were dedicated as poultry for the consumption of their more vigorous and less scrupulous fellows. At the present time their activities form a direct incitement to the energies of the contrary Faddists, who have elected with the solemnity of a holy creed the idea that the arbitrament of the sword must ever be the be-all and the end-all of human existence.

The tendency to conflict is so disastrously strong that society is perpetually constructing heavier and more costly barriers against it. Insurance

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is one of the most effective of the methods of protection, but if we are willing to allow our Peace Faddists to prevent the principle of Insurance being applied in the most important emergency that can possibly befall, it is to be feared that we shall never get the better of the rival fanatics who menace this fool's paradise of Pacifism. People who cannot be persuaded to see the expediency of grouping themselves defensively are a danger to themselves and a danger to society. healthy nation and particularly a nation in the making, grasps the idea instinctively and at once. Our weakness for protestants of every kind has led us intermittently to ignore it. But where the body politic is healthy the sane old maxim is bound, in the end, to reassert itself-that what concerns all should be decided by all and that what imperils all must be confronted by all. And where the realization of the fact is unduly

delayed, the state should not refrain from inculcating the sharp truth that the recalcitrant-the refractaire-is by way of outlawing himself. Police protection from anarchy is given tacitly on this one condition. The danger of war is the true democratizer and the realization of a balance of grouped conflicting apprehensions and interests upon a scale compatible with the leviathan aggregates of today is the surest preservative of peace.

The logical object lesson of pacifism unrestrained and of anarchy minus the policeman, is visible in the deliquescence of Russia at the present moment. While our Utopians are babbling of the Russian Revolution being the greatest thing in the world and how much the best, the sequence of historical events rushes down the inevitable abyss. First the abandonment of effective co-operation with predestinate allies at the critical moment, then the loss of initiative, the accumulative lack of governance, the negation of all control and order, finally the repudiation of all national coherence, the progressive decline of internal co-operation and the desperate knock on the door of Famine-a threat beside which even that of a forced German ascendency pales for the moment into insignificance. The danger of Germany indemnifying herself east by her losses west is qualified only by the fact that friend or foe are bound to be almost equally at a loss in a continent of absolute chaos. Work, action, achievement is postponed to aimless walking about in public thoroughfares and endless febrile talk in pursuit of chimeras: the whole country resembles the fever ward of a lunatic asylum. Pacifism in action

We hear little from Petrograd (we speer in vain after the gesture of a great man) and nothing from the rest of Russia. But when we can descend from the general to a private view the

details are, if possible, more in key with Colney Hatch than the whole picture. A friend went to see some brigand-anarchists who had returned from America and installed themselves in a fine (stolen) mansion in the capital. He asked them with unsuspected irony why they did not put their principles into practice in the great republic. "Ach! you're right! but that beastly police of theirs." A genial Cossack came to their house reeking with blood from the battue of police and asked for food. He was touched by kindness and, promising "I will repay," returned presently with a bottle of port stolen from a rich cellar in the same street. The Austrian prisoners struck obstinately for more pay and when their plea was disregarded, the Russian workmen went on strike out of sympathy until the prisoners' claim was conceded. . . .

The pathetic thing is that the greatest outstanding military exploits of this The New Witness.

War are probably to be credited to the troops under Nicholas, Brusilov and Ivanov: we can never forget the debt the Allies owe to Russia's almost incredible hardihood, long suffering, enduring valor. Yet precisely when the moment came to gather the ripe fruit-the defeat of the hated exploiters, the liberation of Slavdom, the triumph of the Cross, the long dreamed-of occupation of the metropolis of the near East-at that precise moment, when the need of the Allies was at its sorest and the hope of an honorable ending most instant, the blood of heroes turns into water and the conversation and practice of ordinary citizens into a distillation of Bedlam. Shakespeare must revise his verdict that there are none so mad as your English. The popular delusions of the past stretching back to remotest antiquity have been surpassed, nay, distanced illimitably, by the stark madness of Russian Pacifism. Thomas Seccombe.

AN EREMITE OF TODAY.

The recluse instinct survives in England, perhaps, better than in other countries these rushing centuries. "Every Englishman is an island," wrote Emerson sagely, in reference to the English love of keeping the home in surrounded and green privacy, of keeping one's life guarded from intrusiveness. The privet hedge is for the individual what the guardian sea is for the nation. But the hermit unit is the family, not the individual, and so we feel a little critical of our rector, and with a sigh wish him married.

Striding along the road, his coattails flying, his hands loosely clasped behind him, his gaze bent abstractedly on the people he passes, the rector is a striking figure. His great height, something Elizabethan in the cut of

his clipped and pointed gray beard, his air of remo teness-which is less an actuality than an impression-mark him as out of the common, would so mark him even in a great city. Along our country roads he is of course familiar, but yet makes the impression always of something rare and unfamiliar. We are on no give-and-take terms of little friendlinesses in daily life. Even those of us who have least penetration feel that his inner life is more real to him than the outward facts of existence, of which, indeed, he seems to be half the time unaware, and that the inner life of his parishioners is equally more real to him than their daily routine, and common joys and sorrows. As they for the most part are but dimly conscious of any

other current than the obvious one of immediate need, this oddness of the rector's affects many of them uncomfortably, gives them a feeling almost of resentment.

Our rector's attitude to the children is as odd as the rest of him. When they see his long figure, his remote, clear glance in the street they are alarmed. Nor does his abrupt "Well, Mary-Ellen-Julia, how is the baby sister?" please little Miss Sophie Bennett, aged eight, the proud possessor of an infant brother whom the rector baptized not a week ago by the name of Royal Edward, in memory of an uncle lost in the ship of that name. But when he "conducts"in the thorough meaning of the termthe children's service at three o'clock every Sunday, he is a singularly beloved person. No child would miss that hour in the week, and no child is afraid to go to church alone. They come flocking from all directions while the rector pulls the bell, even the smallest boys and girls who can scarcely speak plainly. Inside the church they settle in the pews like alighting birds, preening and fluttering, removing hats and shaking out curls and brief skirts. The rector, curiously, makes no mistake in their names on Sunday, and has a word for eachlifting a tiny one to a seat, finding a place where three little sisters may squeeze in together, piloting a shy group to a pew. He sings the first hymn with vigor, walking meanwhile up and down the aisle to see that everyone is happy and comfortable, holding out a finger at the door to a late-comer, whom he carries in his hand as it were to a seat, righting an upside-down hymn-book for a small child, pretending to read and anxious for the correct look of things, checking an ill-timed bit of fun among the boysall simply and sensibly. The service is short but has a special charm, a

feeling of reality and vigor and a sense of comradeship, and the little story or talk is not a matter of talking down. The most fidgety children are contented. A grave and friendly rector in a white surplice smiles at them, and they flock to his outstretched hand like birds, chattering and unafraid when they are dismissed. They carry away with them a simple lesson of the war, a little knowledge of what love of country can be, perhaps a groping and childish awareness of the love of God.

see.

Yet the village does not love the rector. Neglect of any duty is never charged against him, but the fault they find with him is that he is not married, and they resent that he lives -like a hermit of old-laborious days in the parish and his garden, broken by long walks and midnight study, and with no pleasures that they can He is solitary as regards family. He allows no woman to approach his house. At one period he had a housekeeper and she fell in love with him. All the village knew it before the rector. The fact that whenever he was in church, there also was Mrs. Bracket under his eye, seemed to him an exaggerated devotion, but not to himself. The discovery came one day when, after a week's absence, he returned unexpectedly, and let himself into his house to find Mrs. Bracket fondling one of his old coats and weeping over it. "Oh, Sir," she sobbed in explanation, "when you are away I have nothing else to love!" The rector, cold with terror, got rid of her, and thereafter set his face against the sex. He shouldered the entire burden of his own household management, cleaning, cooking, laundry, without assistance. If he wants information about supplies, he consults a shop-clerk in London, never a neighbor or a village wife. His bedroom, a corner of his study, and the kitchen are the only

rooms in use. His cooking must be elementary, we gather, from the fact that he once confessed to having stewed a pheasant in a casserole with eight onions and was unable to eat it, to his distressed astonishment. He does up his own surplices, and they are beyond cavil. He is shabby, but, unlike the anchorite of old, keeps to a fastidious personal regard. He has the look of the particular man-good linen and well-kept hands.

The village never ceases to hope that the rector may marry. It longs for a conventional rectory to observe, and imitate, and gossip over. It would welcome even a rector's wife who was meddlesome. A dark and silent rectory with no one to answer bells or receive messages, a hermit parson of austere life, addicted to long hours of digging and planting in his fields and garden, and the burning of many candles at night-these are matters for perplexity. The cottagers are half ashamed of the rector, half envious of more normal parishes. Their occasional moments of pride when some distinguished man sits in our little, ancient church and is whispered to be "a friend of parson's," or when they hear in some vague way that parson's scholarship is held to be wonderful-are few in comparison with their days of fretting discontent. "Birth or death or a wedding, all you get out of the rector is, 'Quite so, quite so'!" Mrs. Parker complains, with very little exaggeration. "And an infant with croup, he has no idea what it means! He's too far off from ordinary folks, having no family. Not that he hasn't beautiful words at times. The things he said when the last of my boys went with the colors -I've five serving-made me dry my eyes, I was that proud."

Discipline and solitude, a mind that lives habitually in a lofty air and glows only in Alpine colors, without

earthly fire, take a man a little apart from the common toil of sun and earth. But in rare times of spiritual struggle the shadow of divinity, that may emerge in tears from any human soul, meets something divine and divinely tender in his. The rector has a few worshipers among the villagers who have met him, as it were, soul to soul. They cannot say why they give him allegiance, cannot answer the common murmur, but their worship is unquestioning.

The two bachelor brothers who live in the tiny farmhouse that was once a hunting-box of a Stuart King see something of the rector's less austere side. He will drop in at long intervals to Sunday supper and discuss the crops, and the war, and hunting. On a Sunday night he is tired, and likes to stretch out luxuriously before the blaze of apple-branches, smoking in silence. His friends understand and respect his silence, but if visitors should come the rector is never uncouth or dull. He can rouse himself almost genially to the kind of conversation about the parish and the county that is expected of him. Only his voice is odd and unmodulated in a room. It has become part of the church furniture, one might think, and is incongruous away from the pulpit or lectern.

Another age-perhaps even another faith in this age-might mould this eremite to an anchorite fanaticism. As things are, he will never go out into the wilderness, nor yet set fire in a market square to a heaped-up pyre of vanities. He is an eremite born; but born also of the English habit of mind that is so suspicious of excess of zeal, of oddity, so worshipful of To veσóv -the middle course. England allows him to be something of a recluse for the English are a recluse nation. But England pulls him back from going over the border towards a Stylites life.

Some day perhaps he will find himself Then he will marry for duty's more an Englishman than an eremite. sake. The Spectator.

Marjorie Grant.

WARTIME FINANCE.

(The colossal expenditures of the war, and the pressing problems which confront the different Governments and the financiers and business interests of the different countries are of so profound national concern that THE LIVING AGE proposes to print for the present, from week to week, a department specially devoted to their consideration.-Editor of THE LIVING AGE.)

CURRENCY INFLATION AND HIGH

PRICES.

One of the most difficult problems in the whole range of political economy is the connection between the volume of currency and the range of prices. Yet, partly perhaps because this problem is so difficult, there are few questions upon which writers and speakers are more habitually dogmatic. Where the monetary system is comparatively simple, consisting either of coin or of officially printed paper, dogmatism is more or less excusable. For example, when the French Revolutionary Government in the eighteenth century, finding themselves short of money, proceeded to print assignats or assignments on the Church lands which they had confiscated, and to issue these assignats as the equivalent of money, the effect on prices soon became apparent. Tempted by this easy method of meeting their obligations, the Revolutionary Government proceeded to issue more and more assignats as fast as they could be printed, with the result that after a time prices of ordinary commodities expressed in assignats rose to ten, twenty, and even fifty times their previous figure. Here the relation between cause and effect is quite obvious. It is equally obvious in the case of the paper roubles now being issued by the Russian Government. The Russian rouble has fallen, as compared with the pound sterling, to about a quarter of its previous

value, which means that everything which the Russians buy from abroad is four times as dear as it was before, expressed in roubles. We are glad to note that this question is now being discussed in Labor circles, and the Russian example of currency inflation is utilized by the Federationist, the organ of the General Federation of Trade Unions, to impress upon its readers the importance of the currency question as affecting prices. The crude view which so many Socialists put forward, that the rise in prices is entirely due to "profiteering," is politically pernicious, and absolutely unsupported either by current facts or by economic theory.

The difficulty of estimating the results of currency inflation under modern conditions arises from the fact that our currency no longer possesses the sweet simplicity of metallic coins and officially printed pieces of paper. In substance the greater part of the currency of the United Kingdom consists of bankers' checks. At the back of these checks are the deposits entrusted to the bankers by their customers. But the banker knows by experience that he need retain only a portion of these deposits to meet calls upon them. The rest he invests, and it is from those investments that he gains a living for himself and his staff. Nor is the proportion of cash that he holds ready to meet his obligations a fixed one. He

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