You will hardly feel the piquancy of the situation unless you recollect that President Roosevelt selected Mr. Taft as his successor, caused him to be nominated by the Republican National Convention of 1908; bequeathed to him his policy, or policies; and then went off to East Africa lion-hunting, only to be lion-hunted himself on his arrival in Europe. Returning to America, the ex-President was angered to find that his successor had not adopted his methods as well as his policies, and that the element of violence so marked in his own character was wholly absent from Mr. Taft's. Taking two months to think it over, Mr. Roosevelt put himself at the head of the Republican revolt, took the control of the party in the State of New York away from the party chiefs, then journeyed West and stirred dissension there. The Republican party therefore went into battle a divided and discordant army, and naturally were defeated. A Republican majority of seventy in the House of Representatives at Washington was converted into a Democratic majority of sixty. New York was lost; other States were lost; and both party and country were left in confusion. It was not wholly Mr. Roosevelt's work, but it was largely his work. It was a disaster which Mr. Taft set himself to retrieve, and that is one reason why he entered upon that great Western crusade.

Mr. Roosevelt, however, is not himself a candidate for renomination, and is not opposing Mr. Taft's. He is understood to prefer holding himself in reserve for 1916; holding also that it is doubtful whether he or Mr. Taft, or any other Republican, can be elected President next year. Logically, he ought to oppose, but logic has not much more weight in American politics than in English.

But Mr. Roosevelt, ever fertile in surprises, has given us another. In the Outlook, to which he is an "editorial contributor," he published quite lately a sharp criticism on the prosecution of the Steel Trust. Nothing the President can do seems right in his eyes, or else the way in which it is done is wrong. His article was thought to indicate an intention to become a Presidential candidate, but, for the reason above given, that is not so. None the less is it an attack on the present Administration, and a defence, pro tanto, of the Steel Trust, which was Mr. Pierpont Morgan's creation. Mr. Morgan found the man whom for years he has been denouncing as the enemy of business suddenly standing by his side in defence of an imperilled Trust. The effect, so far as Mr. Roosevelt was concerned, was twofold. If he thought to conciliate Mr. Morgan it is not clear that he has succeeded; and he forgot the West, from which there came at once a cry of resentment.

More than that, he announced a new and startling doctrine. He tells us that the Supreme Court in its Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust decisions "legislates," which it certainly does not. It interprets. He thinks it ought to legislate, and gravely asserts that if Congress does not pass such laws as Mr. Roosevelt thinks it ought to pass, then the Supreme Court should take up this neglected duty of legislation.

If there be anything fundamental in the Constitution of the United States it is its distribution of powers into Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. This Mr. Roosevelt ignores. In his Osawatomie speech last year he rebuked the Supreme Court because some of its decisions "were not in accord with the modern trend of public opinion! Speech and article together are a programme of revolution, if not of anarchy. The foundationstone of the American system is reverence for law, and especially for constitutional law. Mr. Roosevelt, whether he means it or not, is undermining the whole fabric. Lord Morley of Blackburn-a name never to be mentioned without honour in this Review-said some years since that "the two greatest natural phenomena he had seen in America were Niagara and President Roosevelt." Both are forces of disturbance.

And that is where Mr. Roosevelt's weakness lies-in his belief that he may tear down in order to rebuild, and that his personal conviction of what is right should be the supreme law of the Republic. Mr. Taft's strength is to be sought in his support of the principles and beliefs which Mr. Roosevelt would destroy. His appeal is to the innate conservatism of the American people. Whatever others may say of us, we are profoundly conservative in matters which are essential. The root-politics-or if not politics, policies-of the American people have been conservative since Hamilton embedded them in the Constitution, and Chief Justice Marshall for thirty odd years wove them into Judicial form and made them absolute law for all time. The best representative of them to-day is Mr. Taft, a great President who would have been a great Chief Justice had he followed his own bent. I cannot say how fortunate I think it for my country that in a crisis of its history-for crisis it is-it should be ruled by a statesman-President trained upon the Bench to a judicial conception of the issues which affect the welfare and the existence of the American Republic.

V.

A ROOSEVELT POSTSCRIPT.

February, 1912.-Within the last few days Mr. Roosevelt, according to cable dispatches, has reconsidered his position as t candidate for the Presidency. His latest, but not necessarily final, determination has been disclosed to his friend the Governor of Kansas and to the representative of the Chicago Evening Post. He says to both that, while he does not want, and will not seek, the Republican nomination, he will accept it if offered to him "spontaneously. The word spontaneously has no meaning in American politics, unless it be taken to refer to a possible "stampede" of the nominating Convention. But he still regards the renomination of President Taft as probable, even though his re-election be doubtful.

Mr. Roosevelt's declaration that he would, in certain circumstances, accept a nomination, puts him definitely before the country as a candidate. His wish to wait till 1916 has melted in the fire of his animosity to Mr. Taft. If he can defeat Mr. Taft in the Convention, he is willing himself to be defeated in the election. He may not mean that, but that is what he will be taken to mean. For months past he has allowed his friends to work for him and against the President. They were handicapped by the doubt whether Mr. Roosevelt would accept the nomination if offered him. They are handicapped no longer. His latest avowal is an invitation. He solicits his friends to redouble their efforts, and by all the arts known to American politicians, of whom Mr. Roosevelt himself is the most astute, to make his nomination not merely certain but "spontaneous." The contradiction in terms is only apparent. Whether their efforts are to be with the people in order to create an irresistible force of sentiment, or in the Convention itself by methods well understood and skilfully designed to carry the Convention off its feet at the psychological moment, the effect will be the same if they succeed.

The possibility of their success gives a new interest to Mr. Roosevelt's attacks, of more kinds than one, on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is in as many different moods about the Court as there are issues of the Outlook. With one hand he enlarges, with the other he restricts, the powers of the Court. At one moment he requires the Court to usurp the functions of Congress and legislate. That he holds to be the sole remedy for the supineness of Congress in denying an immediate statutory force to Mr. Roosevelt's whims. There is no other remedy, he declares; not stopping to reflect that every two years VOL. XCI. N.S.

I I

the people elect a new Congress to express the will of the people in the form of law. At the next, he threatens the Court with a reversal of its judicial decisions by appeal to the people. This is the proposal of his newest "editorial contribution" to his magazine: a proposal more revolutionary, more menacing than all the others. He now insists that, in certain cases, these decisions shall be referred to the electorate for acceptance or rejection. Nice points of constitutional law are henceforth to be determined by popular vote. The majority of the moment is to be the court of final appeal. In place of settled constitutional principles we are to have, or Mr. Roosevelt would have, the fluctuating caprices of an unbridled democracy. In place of constitutional law we are to have mob-law.

To you, with your Constitution already lying in ruins about you, this may seem no very formidable prospect. While the Parliament Bill was being forced through the House of Commons, while an inner Cabinet set up an oligarchy on the wreck of Parliamentary Government, the people were apathetic. In the tumult of Presidential politics in the United States, multitudes, and perhaps a majority, may be as careless about the gravest constitutional issues as you were. But Americans, with whom reverence for law is part of their birthright and their being, regard such a prospect with dismay, tempered by incredulity. It is impossible to believe that these suicidal counsels are to prevail. AN AMERICAN EXILE.

SAPPHO AND ASPASIA.1

SAPPHO AND ASPASIA, learned women of Greece, are not
legendary, like the Homeric figures, Andromache, Hecuba,
Helen, Penelope, and Nausicaa : they are historical.
And yet
it is exceedingly difficult to be sure of the precise character which
they possess, and the influence which they wield. Alike in many
respects-alike especially in this, that they set an early example
of feminine enlightenment, of emancipation from prejudice-they
are also alike in the fact that they were both the victims of con-
temporary witticisms. It is too little to speak merely of the gibes
of the wits. A kind of crusade was entered upon to destroy their
character, to deride their pretensions, to throw scorn upon their
names. It was especially the Attic comic dramatists, Eupolis,
Cratinus, and Aristophanes, whose trade was to make fun of
great figures of the past; and they assuredly did not spare either
Sappho or Aspasia. So that when we read about these women,
we are trying to delineate their characters as viewed through a
veil of prejudice and contumely. Moreover, the apologists and
champions for them have in a certain fashion added to our per-
plexity, for they availed themselves of the notorious device of
asserting that there were, in reality, two, if not more persons
bearing the same name. Consequently we find that there is one
Sappho who is called "of Mytilene," and another Sappho who is
styled "of Eresos," the first being a pattern of virtue, and the
second no better than she should be. The same device, also,
was practised with regard to Aspasia, although it did not attract
quite the same amount of attention. Aspasia, doubtless, was a

very ordinary name for ladies who, for whatever reason, might
have earned the title of "well-beloved." Thus, though these are
real characters, there clings about them a great deal that is
legendary. Having earned an unenviable notoriety, the most
contradictory assertions became rife among their enemies and
their apologists.

But though there is this much in common between Sappho and Aspasia, that both of them, like some of the leaders of the Women's Movement in modern times, attracted unfavourable attention from facile wits, the conditions under which they lived were essentially different. In the first case, that of Sappho, we have to deal with the social conditions of the Eolian Greeks, (1) A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, June, 1911, and at the London Institution, January, 1912.