The atlas always remains at the end of the long trail. He whose health is broken, his resources crippled, or his home duties so exacting as to prevent him from once more seeking the peace of God on the mountain-tops, or beside the roaring river, or in the embrace of the gloomy jungle, has still left to him the solace of an atlas, with magic memories that breathe life and perspective into its colored flatness. The pale blue spaces are transformed into silken seas that dandle strange craft beneath brazen skies, or into mountains of green water that rush like slavering wolves on the sides of some doomed tramp overdue at Lloyd's, a pawn in the game of those who gamble on men's lives. The herring-bone symbol that marks a range of mountains brings back the vision of arduous climbs in sun or snow. His eye follows the wormlike course of streams in British Columbia, and once again he hears the roar of falls and his feet slip at treacherous fords, and his hand plays the big trout round the pool back of the green boulder. His finger rests on the tiny circle which marks some Eastern city, and once more the babel of bazaars and the shrill call from tiled minarets reach his ears, once more he sees the shambling camels, the veiled women hurrying like shadows through the gateways; once more he smells the myrrh and spices, and even odors less pleasing, but part of retrospect. north-eastern sweep of Prussia coastline that hedges the half-frozen Baltic recalls sledging parties on gray winter afternoons and the homeward tramp over crisp snows, with the sad honkhonk of wild geese far overhead. different to his eye is the message of the blue curve of the Gulf of Mexico, its crystal water broken by the leap of silvery tarpon or the crash of falling 2372

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLV.

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rays! As his finger traces the coastline of Venezuela, halting at the sub-baked port of La Buaira or off the verdant shore of Trinidad, bathed in Orinoco mud, he pants for air.

I suppose that every traveller has his favorite maps, and for myself none takes precedence of that of Asia Minor, where two spots bring back wonderful, though very different, memories. One of these is the little splash of blue that marks the Sea of Galilee, and once more, as I watch it, I am on the moonlit roof of a Franciscan Casa Nova at Tiberias, looking down on the silver mirror of the sacred lake and lending only an indifferent ear to the crooning reminiscences of a gentle soul of a lay brother whose simple lot is cast amid the holy places. An old gray heron flaps across the disc of the moon, croaking on its way towards Magdala, and other sound is there none, save the regular plash of oars somewhere round an angle of the walls, reminding one that Peter and Andrew are still busy with their nets.

How different a vision is conjured up by the little ring just below the centipedal diagram of the Caucasus, marked Tiflis! What a turmoil of raging Tartars dominated by Cossack patrols, giants who carry Russia's majesty in their belts, wherewith to bend the insurgent peasants-the Georgians, Armenians, Kurds, and Persians-to the will of the Little Father! These, with Lazes, Jews, Mongols, and what not, chaffer and wrangle in seventy languages! The finger wanders thence along the perforated line denoting railroad to the decaying port of Batoum, once the rendezvous of a hundred tankers, which drained the petroleum of Baku for transport to the Mediterranean, but long since reduced by an

abortive revolution to the status of Hawthorne's Salem.

Eastern Asia has its memories also, and the next map but one brings back to me a little verandah giving on the mighty fabric of Gunung Salak, the sleeping volcano that over-shadows the fairyland of the Buitenzoorg gardens in the narrow isle of Java. A mile and a half the burning mountain rears its smoking crest above a little tumbling river, in which native women croon over the gaudy sarongs out of which they beat the water with large stones. The feathery palms, dwindling in perspective so as to look no more than the green plumage of a parrakeet, cling to its sides until they can no longer breathe in the rarer atmosphere, then fall despairingly away, leaving the giant bareheaded in the golden sunrise. The enchanted tenant of the balcony is held spell-bound. He does not notice the geckoes that flash up and down the wall, nor does he even hear the loud droning of the carpenter-bees at work beneath his feet. He has eyes only for the growing glory which is creeping down the timbered flanks of Salak to incarnadine the flimsy roofs of bamboo villages on the foothills. Then a little shower comes to break his dream, comes seemingly out of the fathomless blue, hanging bracelets of pearls on the outstretched wrists of gaunt trees, and for a moment blotting out the radiant landscape in a fairy mist.

Another map I love well is that of North America. As my eyes roam over its eight million square miles compressed into a parti-colored diagram six inches square, I recall many an unforgotten scene in the Rockies, among the greener mountains of Carolina, on the desolate keys of Florida, along the parched plains of Texas and Arizona. Then they are drawn to a little island off the coast of California, and once again I find myself drifting over the

enchanting sea-gardens of Catalina, floating, as in an airship, over tangled pastures in which fishes of brilliant hue loom on their errand of rapine amid gorgeous sea-flowers. Here, in very truth, is God's Garden of Sleep. No dust lies on its winding paths. No voice trembles in its groves and thickets. The blooms that deck its carpet have no scent. A movement with the oar sets a current in motion which parts the curtain of kelp, disclosing the trousseau of chiffon and chenille in which the mermaids love to deck themselves for their marriage with the dead. The light seems polarized, mystic, wonderful, and the sun's rays are caught and flashed back by golden fishes and by the lovely shell of the abalone. Beauty without noise is rare anywhere, and nowhere more rare than in America.

From Catalina to Lake Tahoe on my map is a distance of a fraction of an inch, though in reality the connection involves one in some hours of sea travel and two days and nights in the train. Tahoe, a dream-lake, mirrors four thousand feet of snow-capped sierras in its two thousand of deepest opalescence, now green, now blue, now gray, like the eyes of Swinburne's lady. All about the lake is a silent witchery that works in the blood after time has done its cruel best to dim the beauty of it. Towering pines stand like grim sentinels, along its shores. and, helped by the soft winds from the Pacific, strew their needles on the earth for the little ground-squirrels to play at hide-and-seek on. The peace of this sweet lake of the sierras is holy. It is a silent benediction. It is the kind of peace that made Thoreau wonder why, with Mother Nature to turn to, men should worry so seriously over the little things of life.

Such and other comforts the old atlas brings at the end of our travels, anl he who cannot read such golden mem

the sick and infirm, the creation, through the Development Bill, of machinery for the regeneration of rural life. All these constitute as essential and vital parts of the Budget as the taxation of ground values and the imposition of a super-tax.

It

The mistake made by the Liberal Government of 1894 will not be repeated. Sir William Harcourt's great financial proposals raised a huge revenue for the State, but it was not hypothecated by the author and his colleagues to any specific purpose. The result was that when the Tory Government came into power they reaped the abundant harvest sown by Sir William Harcourt, and proceeded to squander it on the most reckless and wasteful enterprises. The very first year two millions of the yield was voted practically to arrest the decline in landlords' incomes due to the fall in agricultural rents. That sum soon went into the pockets of the landowning class. ought to have been devoted to a wellconceived plan for aiding and improving agriculture, for assisting the establishment of small holdings, for improving rural transport and organizing cooperation, so as to help farmers, great and small, to bring their produce to market under conditions which would enable them to compete successfully with the foreigner, for the endowment of scientific research in agriculture, and for the training of the population engaged on the soil. Had that use been made of the £2,000,000 expended under the Agricultural Rates Act, not merely would the agricultural community have derived a hundred times as much benefit as they have ever received from that barren grant towards rates, but the nation as a whole would have profited in the enrichment of its land. It would be safe to say that even the landlords themselves would have now been deriving much more advantage, direct as well as indirect, from such an enlight

ened expenditure than from the crude dole so precipitately and unintelligently handed over to them out of the yield of Sir William Harcourt's Budget taxes. What was done with the balance of that yield? Can any one point to one useful national enterprise promoted by it?

What was left after the landlords had enjoyed the first cut was frittered away over futile expenditure on armaments. How futile that expenditure was the South African war demonstrated to the world. It was part of my plan in raising a revenue for the urgent national needs of the hour to raise it by means which in succeeding years would grow into a substantial and a swelling surplus. It was also part of the same plan that this surplus should be earmarked from the outset. in so far as the declaration of the Government could accomplish that object, to ends which might in themselves be beneficent and fruitful. That is why I devoted so considerable a portion of what would have been even otherwise an overburdened Budget statement, to an elaboration of the schemes sanctioned by the Government for social reform and national development.

The Protectionist Party in this country are more alarmed about these schemes than about our methods of taxation. They recognize that these plans when matured will appreciably increase the bank balance of Liberalism.

For that reason, even if the Budget goes through, I predict that auother concerted effort will be made to rouse a fresh naval or military panic. so as to rush the Government into the criminal extravagance of unnecessary armaments on land and sea. A suecessful agitation of that kind would bankrupt social reform, and the enor mous advantage which would other wise be gained by means of the Budget surplus would be completely thrown away.

Nothing would be left for our

in 1912 have, for the moment, disappeared from the stage. The sensational drama of a foreign invasion has ceased to draw. It is not now to the interests of the Tory Party to dwell too much on the "grave national emergency" whilst the country sees them fighting with grim tenacity in the House of Commons against contributing a penny towards the fund which the Government are raising to meet it. But when the taxes are established, the Tory members will strive to divert their produce from the channel of fruitful reform, which may win gratitude for the party which initiates it, to the barren waste which ends in popular disappointment and national restlessness or even disaster. Liberals will have themselves to blame if they lack

perspicacity and firmness to resist these manufactured cries of national danger.

I sincerely hope that our schemes of social reform will not end with the establishment of a national system of insurance. The Budget has revealed the intensity and the universality of the interest taken in the land question in this country. It affects not merely every class, but every industry. My opinion as to the feeling in the country on this subject is not in the least affected by the result of the Bermondsey election. We have had five bye-elections since the introduction of the Bill. They all showed a majority of voters for the Budget, and Bermondsey is no exception to this rule. And if a comparison is instituted between the anteBudget and the post-Budget contests, it

will reveal a startling change in the electoral prospects of Liberalism. Bermondsey may perhaps indicate that the London democracy has not up to the present grasped the importance of the land question to the same extent as the rest of Britain. A rational land system lies at the very root of national well-being. Liberalism will commit one of the most fatal blunders of its career if it allows this question to rest until it is settled. The real meaning of the enthusiasm aroused by the Budget is that the country has risen in revolt against the land monopoly. It has impoverished our rural districts, it has driven old industries away from our villages, and has prevented the estab lishment of new ones; it has emptied the Highlands, and scattered the robust population from which flowed the most splendid material for the defence of the country to the ends of the earth. It has cramped the natural, healthy growth of our towns. Streets which might have been filled with real homes, affording ample breathing space to restore the energies of our laboring population, in all ranks of life, have been crushed into airless blocks of unsightly buildings which are the eye-sore of our great cities and a danger to civilization. Traders, manufacturers, professional men, business men, builders and workmen in town and country, have long been smouldering with disaffection against this oppression of landlordism, and with the Budget their discontent has burst into flame. If Liberalism leaves the matter there and does not substitute some more rational system, it must inevitably suffer for its lack of courage and foresight.

The Budget campaign must be the beginning and not the end of the Liberal effort in land reform. The intelligent foreigner who supplies the Tariff Reform party with ideas has foreseen that the British democracy are profoundly dissatisfied with the conditions