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pride is stately consumption of wealth produced by others." You can imagine the thrill of rage which ran through the hearts of the "poor," thus easily played upon by Mr Lloyd-George. But the "poor" have votes, and there is nothing like an extravagant sentimentality to catch votes. Mr LloydGeorge remembers what was done at the last election by fanciful pictures of knouted Chinamen. Alas for his purpose! The knouted Chinamen have returned to their own country laden with spoils, and the grotesque picture of a hard, grasping landlord, a Duke if possible, will take their place.

It is bad enough that men are content to govern the country on these terms, that for the sake of place they will thus forget the common obligations of life. It is far worse that they should use the weight and dignity which high office gives them in the popular mind to inflame class-hatred and greed. If Mr Lloyd - George could look higher than Downing Street, he might reflect that even the Chancellorship of the Exchequer was not worth winning at the expense of revolution. Now, if revolution were possible in England, Mr Lloyd-George's speeches would be artfully contrived to promote it, and when it came he might be the first to lose his head in the storm which his idle words could raise and his idle hand could not control. Of all forms of government, democracy is by far the most dangerous, the most palpably illogical. It springs not from a love of

liberty but from a desire to shift responsibility and to take the easy path. The future of our Empire depends upon the reckless belief that the opinion of a thousand fools is better than the opinion of one wise man. And for this very reason demagogues should be more scrupulously careful to weigh their words. Too often, when their position proclaims them leaders, they decline the leadership. They prefer to follow where the rabble is thickest and noisiest. If the rabble demands the property of others as the price of its votes, they promise it with an easy generosity. But we have no cause for despair. There were Lloyd Georges before Lloyd-George, and they have gone, one and all, into the night of forgetfulness. differs from his predecessors only in that his seat on the Treasury Bench has helped to lower the prestige of Parliamentary government. Sixty years ago Dean Mansel put the Limehouse speech into fluent verse

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"Theft, my friends? The gods have

pity on your weak and watery brain! How can they who own the total steal

the portion? Pray explain. Men in nature's state are equal: pro

From the sanction of the people all its perty, conferred by laws,

rights and safeguards draws. You but hold it at their pleasure, you must yield it at their summons : And the pleasure of the people, seek it

in the House of Commons."

What Dean Mansel wrote in contempt no longer ago than 1850, Mr Lloyd - George repeats to-day in pompous

earnest. And the very recur- nel in a monoplane. It was a rence of these noxious prin- gallant feat, and it is no ciples is our best hope that wonder that it touched the they will never be put into universal imagination. There practice. None the less, an was no one who did not apinfinite deal of harm has been plaud the courage, the skill, done. The flame of envy and and the persistence of M. malice has been fanned. And Blériot, who had travelled from for what? That Mr Lloyd- France to England at a pace George, who brags that he is which defied all creatures save "one of the children of the a light-winged bird. What people"-a piece of snobbish- did the ardent Socialist think ness which was greeted with of it? a shout of "Bravo, David!" -should for another term of years misdirect the affairs of England.

There can be no doubt, however, that in the Radical's view the landlord is capable of every atrocity. He cannot, if he would, appease his critics. If he show energy in his country's service, he is held guilty of impertinence. If he be charitably disposed, he is caught red-handed in a baleful attempt to pay ransom. Mr Masterman protests that he ruins the countryside with his motor-cars. Mr H. G. Wells, on the other hand, complains that the motor-car was worked on the other side of the Channel, "while in this country the mechanically-propelled road vehicle, lest it should frighten the horses of the gentry, was going meticulously at four miles an hour behind a man with a red flag." Clearly, then, it is the fault of "the gentry that everything goes wrong. The sentimental politician, indeed, does not perplex himself with facts, or with the ordinary processes of reason. A month ago an intrepid Frenchman, M. Blériot, crossed the Chan

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With an excitement which seemed wholly inapposite, Mr H. G. Wells saw in the triumph of M. Blériot the disgrace of England. Now, we cannot think that Mr Wells was moved to despair by an overwhelming sense of patriotism. We fear that there was more than a spice of satisfaction in his vehement denunciation. M. Blériot has crossed the Channel, he said in effect,-what then will happen to our Navy? "Is the Navy bright?" M. Blériot has crossed the Channel, and who can help asking, "Are we an awakening people?" M. Blériot has crossed the Channel, and there is not a soul in England who can speak French or knows a single word of German. We might as well say that Lieutenant Shackleton has been to the South Pole, and Russia and Turkey are in ashes. Or suppose we inverted the argument, and insist that, because M. Blériot has crossed the Channel, therefore the French Navy is "bright," the Parisians all speak English, and German is taught with success in every school in France. Does Mr Wells believe this? And if he

does not, why does he thrust does not conform to his own rigid standard, and, again like Mr Masterman, he will not take the trouble to study the foreign countries which M. Blériot's feat has convinced him are our superiors. For our part, were we minded to make one of those generalisations which to-day pass for sober, reasoned truth, we should say that a sure sign of England's decadence is the reluctance of her intellectual teachers, such as Messrs Masterman and Wells, to study the rudiments of the subjects which they discuss or to learn a few elementary lessons concerning the foreign countries with which to her detriment they are eager to compare their unfortunate native land.

upon England the hasty generalisations with which he has no wish to burden France? And why does he assert that because M. Blériot has crossed the Channel the Frenchman's schools are places of vigorous education? He could not write thus if he had ever seen a French Lycée or examined its sad curriculum and its sadder pastimes. And then, that nothing of prejudice may be lacking, he confuses with M. Blériot's success the uncensored plays of France and the foreign novels which are not "kindly, sedative pap." The truth is that Mr Wells, like Mr Masterman, is filled with a vague displeasure against England because it

SIR THEODORE MARTIN.

THE death of Sir Theodore Martin, which 'Maga' regrets to record, severs one of the world's few remaining links with a distant past. Born a year after Waterloo, he grew up in the midst of a romantic movement which influenced his taste and dictated his preferences. In his childhood he had seen Scott; Thackeray was his contemporary; Froude was his friend; all the great personages of the Victorian era passed before him; and as he retained his marvellous zest for life, his keen interest in affairs, until the end, he understood, if he did not approve, the desires and aspirations of the rising generations. Such an age as

his, "frosty but kindly," has no drawbacks. He never lost the youthfulness of spirit which delights in thought and work and talk. Those who were privileged to know him will not easily forget his quick enthusiasms, his just indignations. If there was much in this present age that he condemned, he condemned it as a contemporary, not as a stranger looking upon the world from the high tableland of another age. In brief, he kept his sympathies ever fresh, and it was his good fortune to lay down the burden of life before it became too irksome to be borne.

In a Preface written in 1903 for the 'Bon Gaultier Ballads,' he declared that of his long and very crowded life literature had occupied the smallest part. If it were the smallest part, it was also the intensest, and it is the man of letters in Sir Theodore Martin, not the able and industrious lawyer, that will survive in our minds and memories. He was wise enough at the outset of his career to make law his support and literature his recreation, and we read what he wrote with the greater pleasure, because we feel the author's own pleasure in the composition of every line. It was to Edinburgh that he owed his birth and education, and he was already thirty when he went to try his fortune in London. There he threw himself into the practice of his two professions with the energy and power of work which remained with him all his life. A paper of his writing in 'Fraser's Magazine,' which bore the admirable title of "Flowers of Hemp; or, the Newgate Garland. By one of the Family,"— had-in 1841-won him the friendship of Aytoun, already familiar to all readers of 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and thus, to cite Sir Theodore's own words, "a kind of Beaumont and Fletcher partnership was formed, which commenced in a series of humorous papers that were published in 'Tait's' and 'Fraser's' Magazines

in the years 1842, 1843, and 1844." These papers, collected together as the 'Bon Gaultier Ballads,' achieved a success of popularity of which their authors had never dreamed. And they deserved abundantly all the success which was theirs. A gayer, livelier set of parodies does not exist. They stand the sternest test comparison with 'Rejected Addresses.' The secret of the collaboration remains unpierced. We can do no more than give an equal share of praise to each, and congratulate ourselves that two wits of close sympathy and quick understanding were there to pay Lockhart and Macaulay, Tennyson and Mrs Browning, Moore and Leigh Hunt the supreme tribute of parody. For the next twenty years Theodore Martin published little else than verse translations. He sought his originals in German, Latin, and Italian. He attempted those enterprises which have always been deemed impossible, and he attempted them with a high courage that often baffled failure. As we have said, he grew up in the heyday of Romance, and it was but natural that he and Aytoun should play their part in the literary revolution by turning into English the poems and ballads of Goethe. The uniformity of style discernible in these admirable versions makes it difficult to believe that they were not all the work of one hand. But as Sir Theodore has told us, "from a habit of working together we naturally caught each something of the other's manner. How far this went may be seen from a passage in a letter of Aytoun's when revising the proof-sheets of our volume in 1858: 'In going over the poems I was very much struck by the occasional resemblance of our styles. There is one of yours, "To my Mistress," which I could almost have sworn to be mine, from the peculiarity of the cadences, if I did not know it to be yours." What was doubtful to the authors is doubly doubtful to us, and we would defy the most sensitive reader to separate the work of the two collaborators. But the composition was a delight, as we know from a youthful Preface written two years ago by Sir Theodore. "We worked together," he wrote, "in the days when 'life was all before us,' by Salisbury Crags or on the shores of the Firth of Forth." And the authors took a proper pride in the result. "We may hang out our shields," said Aytoun, "as at Ashby-dela-Zouch, and without any fear await the coming of challengers who shall contrast their performances with ours.'

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To-day Romance is no more in fashion, and the captive earls, and the false lovers, and the maids of honour of Goethe's ballads seem like creatures who have been beguiled by their translators from another planet. A work of more solidly enduring merit is

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