Salut Public, as it were, for the dead level of party artifice, accidental miscellaneous pur- and whose strength lies in a poses requiring despatch, -as composite obedience to his it proves, for a sort of uni- coalition. versal supervision and universal subjection. They are to report weekly, these new Committee men, but to deliberate in secret. Their number is Nine, firm Patriots all." The number of our Committee is greater than Nine. But, as any one may see, they are firm Patriots all. They too sit in secret, and silently silently impose their decrees. Carlyle foresaw their tyranny and their end. "An insignificant thing at first," said he, "this Committee, but with a principle of growth in it. Forwarded by fortune, by internal Jacobin energy, it will reduce all Committees and the Convention itself to mute obedience, and work its will on the Earth and under Heaven for a season. A Committee of Public Salvation whereat the world still shrieks and shudders." That is the depth of degradation to which Mr Asquith has dragged Great Britain. To paint his sin in colours too black is impossible. It is equally impossible to exaggerate what may be the consequences of that sin. And who are the revolutionaries who have substituted a Committee of Public Safety for the best Constitution that history has known? "A stranger set of cloud-compellers the world never saw." First there is Mr Asquith, a self-interested opportunist, who can never lift his eyes from Then comes Mr Lloyd George, a fanatical Welshman, who won his first notoriety by a passionate hatred of England, and who, an apostle of peace, once urged the Boers not to surrender. "No man," said he, "with a good rifle in his hand would give it up merely because he obtained a paper signed by Mr Joseph Chamberlain in exchange." Thereafter follow Mr Churchill, a political adventurer, and Mr Birrell, a dilettante whose most brilliant invention was his "hecatombs of slaughtered babes," and Mr Runciman, the champion of untainted Brixton, and Mr Samuel, who thinks it no shame to put himself and the Post Office in Mr Tillett's pocket, and Viscount Haldane, the youngest of our viscounts, if Lord Carrington permits us thus to call him, a doughty supporter of Second Chambers, who cast a willing vote to abolish the House into which he has recently been received, and Lord Morley, who closes a pedant's career with an act of Jacobin violence. The Greys and Harcourts, the Carringtons and Buxtons matter not a jot. They are content to do what they are told in ignominious silence, the obedient shadows of their masters. And now that their evil work is done, we do not imagine that they find the Government Bench a bed of roses. They have removed the last fence of security from the Commons, and no Ministry was ever in more bitter need of that security than theirs. Hitherto Mr Asquith has been able to put off the more fiercely exigent of the groups which make up his coalition with the plea that the House of Lords would not permit their demands. Now he is exposed naked and unpitied to the insolent importunity of all his supporters. He has adopted for his own the maxims of the French Revolution. "Government by the poor and payment by the rich" is inscribed upon every Radical banner. The Ministry has rashly accepted the French Convention as its model. "The parting of the ways in the Revolution," wrote Lord Acton, "was the day when, rejecting the example of England and America, the French resolved to institute a single, undivided legislature." Mr Asquith, arriving at this same parting of the ways, has rejected the example of many centuries. He has followed revolutionary France to his own undoing and to the undoing of his country. He has rejected the sane example of America, which, democracy though it be, has never "thought of abolishing either the Senate or its legislative authority," has never dreamed "the mad dream of a single chamber." In brief, he and his colleagues have sown the storm of violence; they are already reaping the whirlwind of rebellion. From his political opponents Mr Asquith deserves neither courtesy nor consideration. He and his colleagues, never states men, have now ceased to be politicians. They are the contrivers of revolution and the enemies of society. Though they have done their best to stifle freedom of speech by every artifice of coercion, though they have reduced to nothingness the one deliberative assembly that was left us, there still remains a united Opposition, which will obstruct, by all means in its power, the Radical measures of disruption, and will thwart untiringly the Radicals' cherished ambition to disintegrate the Empire. That the Constitution will ever again possess the prestige and authority which Mr Asquith has stripped from it is impossible. The broken image is never the same again, however cunningly it be repaired. But at least it is not too late to save the State, or to punish, as he deserves, the careless, insolent image-breaker. The Nemesis which lies in wait for reckless demagogues has already overtaken Mr Asquith's Ministry. The strikes, which have ceased for the moment, were the direct consequence of Mr George's precepts and the Prime Minister's method. The mob has learned its lesson well and swiftly. The doctrine of selfishness, preached during the past year, has been eagerly adopted. So long as the strikers got their own way they were indifferent alike to the sufferings of their women and children, and to the grave loss inflicted upon the country. They were impatient of checks as Mr Asquith himself. The Prime Minister, their great exemplar, thwarted for the moment in his policy of disunion, decided to destroy the Constitution. He put away from him reverence for the past and thought of the future. And the leaders of the strike showed as little respect for Mr Asquith as Mr Asquith showed for the House of Peers. The last act in the tragedy of Liverpool closely resembled the tragedy of August 10, when England was placed under the heel of a single chamber. To conciliate Mr Redmond, Mr Asquith reduced to a nullity the House of Lords. To enforce the demands of 250 insolent drivers of tramway cars the agitators were prepared to impose a general strike upon the country. In either case there was a complete lack of the sense of responsibility. In either case the means employed were infinitely greater than the end that was to be attained. In other words, the mob has sat patiently at the feet of Mr Asquith, and has already vastly improved upon the lessons which he he has taught. The revolution which now disturbs the peace of England is following the normal path of revolutions. Those who inaugurated it are already left behind. That which happened to France in the eighteenth century is being ominously reproduced. Mr Asquith and his friends have aroused passions in the breasts of their wild supporters which they can neither satisfy nor assuage. They refuse to see the logic of VOL. CXC.-NO. MCLI. their words and actions. They have preached lawlessness for years; they have practised licence in their handling of the Constitution. And when their followers, more obviously consistent than they, desire to take the next step, they are virtuously aghast. "I do not know," said Mr Churchill, "that in the history of the world a similar catastrophe can be shown to have menaced an equally great community." For this menace Messrs Asquith, George, and Churchill are jointly and severally responsible. And if no community as great as Britain has ever been thus threatened, it is because no community save England has ever been so weakly governed and so shamefully inflamed. However, that has taken place which the merest tyro in politics might have foreseen. The Labour Party is loudly incensed against the Radicals. So far have they travelled together on the road of anarchy that Messrs Hardie and Macdonald pretend to be indignant at the defection of their colleagues. That Mr George should approve of physical force, that Mr Churchill should call out the military to suppress hooliganism, is to them the rudest of shocks. Of what use is it to talk anarchy in the House of Commons, if you thwart it in the country? Why should the practical disciple, who throws a brick-bat, be fired upon by an unbridled soldiery when he is obeying the behests of his masters? And thus we have witnessed 2 E the inevitable spectacle, earlier says Mr Macdonald. "I did than we expected, of the Govern- it," says Mr George. And ment attacked with reckless this painful anxiety to stand violence by its own henchmen, well with the country would supported by the votes and be comic indeed, were it not speeches of the Tories. fraught with tragic consequences. The end of Radicalism is already in sight. Mr Asquith must either march in the vanguard of labour or yield his office to those who will. He has sent the stone of anarchy rolling down the hill, and, like all apostles of revolution, is surprised that it gathers velocity as it goes, and that he cannot, by a mere act of volition, check its downward flight. If any proof were needed that our governors understand neither the situation of the country nor the delicacy of their own position, it would be afforded by the loud chorus of self-congratulation with which they have greeted what they believe to be the end of the strike. For this beneficent consummation they one and all claim the credit. "I did it," Printed by William Blackwood and Sons. BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. No. MCLII. OCTOBER 1911. VOL. CXC. ASIATIC TURKEY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. IT is by no means easy to form an appreciation of the changes wrought in Turkey by the advent of constitutional government. The difficulty is not confined to those who watch the country from without; it is almost as great for such as are acquainted with a part, or parts, of the Ottoman dominions. The empire is vast, the means of communication insufficient, and provincial distinctions so strongly marked that experience of any one district is little or no warrant for embracing generalisations. Nor is there any salient unity of aspiration; public opinion in each province is determined by local conditions and uninfluenced by consideration of the needs of neighbouring districts, concerning which correct information is seldom to be obtained. Every traveller in Asiatic Turkey must be familiar with the baffling conviction that his views are based upon VOL. CXC.-NO. MCLII. You evidence as fragmentary as the glass in a kaleidoscope. follow with absorbed interest the political drama which is being developed in the centre wherein you find yourself; the actors are all known to you; you have heard the issues discussed from the hour of the first morning caller soon after dawn, until the prolonged evening coffee-drinking draws to a close towards midnight. You ride away over desert and mountain, where the talk is all of the ravages of raider and of locust, and coming again to some city on the telegraph line you attempt to pick up the threads where you dropped them. It is not to be done; there is no news, or what news there is takes the form of inconsequent and contradictory gossip. You must be content to fall once more into eager participation in local perplexities, partly dissimilar from those you left behind, though 2 F |