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British working men, rightly taken, are the best subjects in the world.

(5) It is said that the Tsar fell because he stopped vodka, and Mr. Lloyd George may fall if he stops beer. The worst oppression we have in this country is the oppression of the crank, since it is an oppression without reason and without reward. Then there is the oppression of the Sugar Commission, which at the beginning was a device to preserve the goodwill of the German beet industry, and has since become a means of transferring our sugar-supply from Germany to Cuba. Thanks to the American policy of Protection and the impetus of high prices, there is now about as much sugar being produced as before the war. But the profits have gone chiefly to the United States. If at the beginning the West Indies had been given security for their cane, we might have regained a great industry. As it is, we have fermented the sweet of sugar into the sour of discontent. The queue at the grocer's shop is a little center of revolution. As for the Food Controller, being a tradesman he was distrusted by the poor, who have a strange prejudice against shopkeepers, even when they have become peers. If the control of foodstuffs had been left in the hands of Mr. Prothero and Captain Bathurst there would have been more food and less troubleand there would also have been less profit to the middleman.

Hinc usura vorax, rapidumque in tempore foenus,

Hinc concussa fides, et multis utile bellum

The forestaller and the regrater flourish on the sudden demands and panics of war. And the methods of the Food Controller gave them all the opportunities they could desire.

(6) Democracy, which was intended to be a form of government, has now become a State religion, and its clergy are, generally speaking, all those who cannot thrive upon their own trades. Its chief article of faith is that the round hole is made for the square peg. The making of munitions is put in the hands of a doctor, and the making of dyes is entrusted to a political whitewasher. A Jew, because he may be skilled in the reconstruction of companies, is given charge of the reconstruction of England. A revolution against incompetence in this country might be welcome were it not certain that the revolutionaries would cut off the heads of the wrong people.

(7) When Bacon was Lord Chancellor, the burning question in England was the naturalization of the Scotch, a subject which I rejoice to say is no longer in controversy. In Bacon's time it nearly caused a civil war, for Englishmen unworthily suspected James of putting lean courtiers into fat offices. But aliens had long been a cause of discontent in England. From the time of King John, who anticipated modern dentistry by discovering that teeth might be stopped with gold, our chronicles are full of more or less hostile references to the foreigner. Piers Gaveston, the first naturalized alien to be raised to the Privy Council and the peerage, caused a revolution which was disastrous to himself and his patron.

In the Middle Ages almost the whole trade of England was done by foreigners, who were also tax collectors, usurers, pardoners, and priests. The Englishman was exploited by the foreigner from the cradle to the grave, and could not even die without a last extortion for the good of his soul. As the fifteenth-century poet of the "Libel of English Policy"

wrote:

Also they bere the gold out of this land, And sucke the thrift away out of our hand:

As the Waspe souketh honie fro the bee So minisheth our commoditee.

The Germans especially had dug themselves in: they were above English justice and English customs; they were exempt from all laws against foreigners; they had the keeping of a gate of the City of London; and they had almost a monopoly of English commerce. Corruption was their chief means of maintaining their position:

What reason is it that we should goe to oste

In their countries, and in this English coste

They should not so? but have more liberty

Than we ourselves now also motte I thee.

I would to gifts men should take no heede

That letteth our thing publicke for to speede.

For this we see well every day at eye Gifts and fests stopen our policie. Now see that fooles ben either they or

wee:

Forever we have the worse in this countree.

When I hear of Sir Ernest Cassel giving a donation to our charities or a dinner to our lawyer politicians, that bitter cry the of fifteenth-century Englishman comes into my head: Gifts and fests stopen our policie.

This struggle against foreign exploitation, and especially against the German, was a main cause, or the main cause, of almost every revolt, riot, and revolution that took place in England from the time of Richard II to the time of Mary. To justify this statement I must refer my readers to my book, The Germans in England. A Danzig chronicler, contemporary with the Wars of the Roses, states as

the reason of these wars that the "common people (of England) hated the German merchant, and would follow any lord who did their will"; and an English chronicler describes how Warwick's army marched upon London and destroyed the German beerhouses-such evidence as this can neither be ignored nor refuted. Then we have Wat Tyler's rebellion, when the London mob chased the foreigner into the churches, and slaughtered those who could not say bread and cheese with an English accent. We have the Wyatt Rebellion, due to the betrothal of Mary to a son of the German Emperor and the accompanying restoration of Hanseatic privileges. All these events, as much as the present feeling in England, the anti-German riots in London, and the recent anti-Jewish riots in Leeds, show the need for a stronger policy governing the restriction of aliens. The national system is like the human system: if it is healthy it can absorb with comfort a fair number of foreign microbes; but if there are too many, and the constitution of the patient is weakened, fever is apt to result. "A reasonable amount of fleas," says David Harum, "is good fer a dog. Keeps him from worryin' about bein' a dog." And so a reasonable amount of foreigners may be good for a nation. But a nation is in danger when it is overrun by foreigners, especially when these foreigners belong to a nation which is the industrial rival and political enemy of the country in which they reside.

(8) When Bacon wrote that "Rebellions of the belly are the worst," he may have had in mind the contemporary troubles in Germany, for the Thirty Years' War was in great part due to the destruction of the Hanseatic system of trade by the English, the Dutch, and the Scandinavian Powers. The German towns

refused to allow protection for German industries; the commercial system degenerated into profiteering, and to save their own skins they blamed the Church, just as our Liberal politicians are trying to throw the blame for their manifold treacheries upon the Crown.

They cornered the pepper, they cornered the lard,

And blamed the Church that the times were hard,

so wrote a German satirist on the eve of the Thirty Years' War.

The destruction of the German Empire reacted upon British trade, and about the year 1640, when the Civil Wars began, there was one of the biggest slumps in the history of English commerce, a slump which the Royal policy of forced loans brought to a crisis. In the same way, the growth of French industry under the protective policy of Louis XIV brought about another commercial crisis which turned against King James II because that monarch leaned

upon France. The two main causes of the French Revolution, upon the other hand, was the Eden Treaty, which flooded France with English manufacturers and ruined French industry, and a run of bad harvests. During the Terror, Paris was in a state of famine. Food tickets were the order of the day, and people were guillotined for hoarding bread. Napoleon's policy was to re-establish the industrial system of France by returning to the policy of Louis XIV, just as Cromwell's policy was a return to the commercial system of Queen Elizabeth. In both cases the protection of industries and the opening of markets were the means used to relieve an economic crisis and bring to an end the bad trade and dearth which were the root of the national discontent.

Bacon clearly perceives that the

malady having an economic root there must be an economic cure. "The first remedy or prevention," he says, "is to remove by all means possible that material cause of sedition whereof we speak, which is want and poverty in the estate to which purpose serveth the opening and well balancing of trade, the cherishing of manufactures; the banishing of idleness; the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws; the improvement and husbandry of the soil; the regulating of prices of things vendible; the moderating of taxes and tributes; and the like." There is one compendious sentence the greatest of philosophers concentrates the whole business of economic statesmanship.

The last three heads of sedition, which I have numbered (9), (10), and (11), bring us directly to the propaganda which is going on in England today a propaganda working in the interests of the enemy, directed to revolutionary ends, and seeking for that purpose to unite all the discontents in one faction.

If I were to attempt to follow the intricate threads of these conspiracies through the various divisions of industrial, political, commercial, and intellectual propaganda, I should be led beyond the scope of this short article. The industrial propaganda had its nucleus before the war in the Independent Labor Party-a Party weak in numbers, for its total membership is only some thirty thousand, but strong in leaders skilful in the democratic arts of wire-pulling. Such narrow and bitter fanatics as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. Philip Snowden were neither in spirit nor in habit akin to our working men. We might rather compare them with the German Jews of high finance, since like them they professed an international creed and looked to Germany for their intellectual stock-in-trade. The

synod to which they looked for their doctrine was the International, where comrades of all nations debated with the fervor of the Early Christians the obscure dogma of Marxian economics and the fiery evangel of the Class War. How far official Germany assisted in this propaganda in order to undermine the national spirit of the countries she intended to conquer will probably never be known; but to do the German Socialists justice they never deceived their comrades as to what they would do in the event of war. When war should come, they said, they would be Germans first and Socialists afterwards, and would never be parties to any policy of undermining that most popular institution the German army, nor would they take part in an international strike to make war impossible. It is a heavy indictment against Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and his friends that they took no notice of these friendly warnings, but returned to advise their countrymen to an anti-patriotic course in which, as they knew, the Germans would never follow them.

When in the event our workingmen, like the German working men, embraced the "bourgeois* superstition of patriotism," and ranged themselves solidly on the side of their country, Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Snowden were left in a faction which was the more bitter because it had been proved to be wrong.

A second organization working upon parallel lines was created by the genius of Mr. E. D. Morel. Before the war this gentleman had chiefly busied himself in agitating the Congo question. That he had any sympathy with the obscure tribes that occupy the riverine plains of Central Africa is open to doubt. The tribulations

of the Hereros and Hottentots in

*Bourgeois is the one French word of which our Socialist orators never seem to tire, possibly because they know no other.

German Southwest Africa left him quite unmoved, and although Mr. Morel appears to be by birth and nationality a Frenchman, the sufferings of Belgium and of France have not stirred him to any display of public indignation. The cannibals of the Congo were merely pawns in Mr. Morel's game, which was to cause friction between England and Belgium and between England and France, and to secure for Germany the reversion of tropical Africa. Why this was Mr. Morel's game I have no means of knowing; what I do know is that it may be traced through all his writings and all his activities.*

The promoters of the Union of Democratic Control in a private letter to their friends proposed as one of their objects a peace without humiliation, and it is characteristic of those critics of "secret diplomacy" that this object does not appear in their public appeals for support. Nor is it clear why "popular control" should be advocated by men who are manifestly in a minority, unless it be because this catchword is like most catchwords, a mere device for concealing their true motives.

These two organizations work in close harmony upon parallel lines. They are well supplied with funds, and although their enthusiasm for popular control does not go so far as popular inspection of their accounts, we may surmise that powerful Free Trade or Free Import interests lie behind.

Allied at least in spirit with these two organizations is the Shop Stewards movement. The Shop Stewards are Trade Union officials whose ostensible work is to see that there are no invasions of Trade Union rights; but they have been working steadily to disturb the peace in the munition

*Mr. Morel's Morocco in Diplomacy is merely a popular rendering of the German official case, and one of his pamphlets on the African question is published by the "Germanistic Society of Chicago."

factories. They profess to believe in direct action with the object of "securing the means of production for the benefit of the workers"; but whatever the pretext the result is anarchy and disorganization. The Munitions Department were given powers by Parliament to deal with such mischief-makers; but the nerveless, ignorant, and incompetent hands of Dr. Addison and his subordinates were incapable of using them. The official in charge of labor received full reports of the mischief that was brewing, and indomitably sat upon these reports. When the trouble came the politicians took the matter in hand and heroically surrendered every position to the agitators, who boast that they won a complete success in what they call their dress rehearsal. With timidity and incompetence on the one side and overweening audacity on the other, the situation cannot but be perilous.

Such are the "factions grown desperate"; dangerous in themselves, they are made more dangerous by the discontents which they are joining and knitting in a common cause. These discontents are principally of two classes: the "discharged soldiers," who have generally a grievance as to pay or pension or disablement allowance which the agitator is quick to use for his own purpose; and those young men who have gone into "protected trades" in order to escape military service. Together they must number several hundred thousands, and ComThe National Review.

mittees of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates have been formed all over the country to rope them into the revolutionary movement.

Such is the general position: it is dangerous, but dangerous especially if the Government is without policy to meet it, save concession and surrender. The great majority of the population remains loyal; but history shows that an unorganized majority is helpless against an organized minorityand the majority is helpless if its organization, which is the Government, should fail it.

Let there be no mistake. The revolutionaries are implacable, and their object is to produce such a state of anarchy as shall leave this country helpless to continue the war. Such is

the plight of Russia at the present time; and such, the revolutionaries intend, shall be the plight of England. The conspiracy will fail if the Government shows resolution and stands firm in support of the loyal elements: it can only succeed if the Government, like the Government of Russia, commits suicide by sheer cowardice and incompetence. Things are drifting that way: blunder leads to blunder, and concession to concession. When surrender is made to sedition, loyalty becomes timid, and the well-affected begin to calculate that they may be on the losing side. There must be a change of spirit and a change of policy if Government is to regain the prestige and authority it has lost.

Ian D. Colvin.

CHAPTER VII.

CHRISTINA'S SON. BY W. M. LETTS.

It was clear that Lucilla was to be welcomed in the Travis household with due pomp, and with those culinary

efforts that attend the return of the prodigal and the reception of the stranger.

Laurence came home to an at

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