and figures which the speech contained, and because of the extraordinary fluency of delivery. Mr. Bonar Law grows faster and faster in speech as though he were increasingly afraid of tiring the House and were impatient to finish his course. He need not fear. The House welcomes his rising and finds his speeches all too short. But the pace is killing, and the voice does not grow more distinct. The swift conversational style of speech has its advantages, but the attendant dangers are also real. Mastery of the House of Commons requires a certain deliberateness of utterance.

There is still no formal Opposition. The Privy Councillors maintain their places on the Front Opposition Bench, and nothing more than a growl of warning has been heard from any of its occupants. Mr. J. M. Robertson criticised the National Registration Bill with some acerbity; Mr. Pease and Mr. Hobhouse gave notice that they would be the resolute opponents of compulsion; Mr. Lough was for some time fretfully loquacious and threatened to become a daily and almost hourly speaker. But it seems to be considered not quite good form to attack the Coalition Government from this august quarter, and so Sir Thomas Whittaker crossed to his old place on the Radical side when he turned his ineffectual broadsides upon Mr. Long, and Mr. Ellis Griffith followed the same rule when he was minded to make a sharp retort to certain observations from his fellow Privy Councillor, Mr. Duke. The truth is, of course, that there cannot very well be any formal Opposition so long as all parties are agreed on the principle of a vigorous prosecution of the war, and Compulsory Military Service is the only subject on which a formal Opposition is likely to arise.

The little knot of Socialists, who attacked Sir Edward Grey so outrageously at the outbreak of hostilities and rejoiced the heart of the enemy by fixing upon him responsibility for the war, are quiet as mice in the House of Commons. Illness alone could silence Mr. Keir Hardie's rancour; Mr. Snowden has been content to talk fiercely against compulsion; Mr. Ramsay Macdonald just holds aloof. He has not retracted a word of his past writings, and he has not spoken, save to make a personal statement, for months. He does the work, which causes the enemy to hail him as a Daniel come to judgment, either with his pen or at the meetings of the Union of Democratic Control. He is too shrewd a Parliamentarian not to know that the open expression of his views in the House of Commons would be fiercely resented. So he labours in secret to organise a Peace Party which shall attract to itself all those Pacifists who have learnt nothing by their past follies, all the timorous and depressed

who would agree to any terms, however inglorious, which the triumphing German might toss them in contempt, and all those Democrats who cling to the absurd delusion that if there were but a more democratic control of foreign policy there would be an end of war. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's silence does credit to his political instinct, but his power for mischief is by no means negligible. He and his friends are in touch with a number of intriguing Radicals. There is Mr. Trevelyan, who resigned his Under-Secretaryship a year ago with no more effect than that produced by the fall of a drop of rain into the ocean; Mr. Outhwaite, the Ginnell of the Radical Left; Mr. David Mason, who has been publicly disavowed by every section of political opinion in Coventry; and finally there is Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, a back-bencher, whose prospects of promotion were blighted by the death of his patron, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Mr. Ponsonby has just been discovered by the German newspapers, one of which has assured its readers that "by his great eloquence and the flaming fire of his intellect, Ponsonby enjoys in the circles of the Young Liberal members of the House of Commons an influence which cannot be exaggerated." Poor Mr. Ponsonby! If his intellect is a flaming fire, why does he display in the House of Commons only its burnt-out ashes?

Those whose names have been mentioned are at heart against the war. But the principal opposition which has been offered to the Government has come from certain members of quite another turn of mind. They approve the war, but hold that the conduct of certain Ministers and certain Departments calls for criticism and even in some cases for censure. There is much force in what they say. Any Minister, however good, will work the better if he knows that he is liable to constant challenge. It can hardly be denied that the almost complete suppression of effective criticism for nine months was a contributing factor to the mistakes and miscalculations that were made. What has happened under the Coalition Government is that the natural critics of the Government have been taken into the Government itself, and their friends are naturally loth to criticise the new Ministry, especially for shortcomings in which the new-comers had no responsibility. The consequence is that the rôle of critic has been assumed by a number of members whose patriotism is beyond dispute, but who are also notoriously ambitious for their own self-advancement. There is a little band of Scotsmen in the House of Commons who are not given to hiding their light under a bushel, and who seized every opportunity for a full month before the House rose of airing their views and opinions until they became a weariness to their fellows. It is said that Mr.

!

Joseph Hume once made forty speeches in a single sitting on various estimates. Mr. Hogge is still a long way behind that record, but he and Mr. Pringle, and Mr. Watt and Mr. Cowan, and their guerilla leader, Sir Henry Dalziel, for weeks lifted up their plaintive voices in continual cry. Those who form Governments usually make mistakes in the distribution of the smaller loaves and fishes at their disposal. If the Prime Minister had spied merit among the Scottish back-benchers below the gangway he could have silenced a good deal of the shrillest criticism to which he has since been subjected. There is a popular idea that the persistent criticism of these Scottish members and of Sir Arthur Markham, who has associated himself with them, is of an unpatriotic character. Nothing of the kind. It is mainly due to the much more vulgar passion for selfadvertisement. Reticence and self-effacement are intolerable to some natures. That is the real trouble with Sir Henry Dalziel and his rather motley band.

AUDITOR TANTUM.

"THE FREEDOM OF THE OCEANS": GERMANY'S

NEW POLICY.

IN reviewing the first year of naval war, Count Reventlow, the intimate missionary of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, declared that "the past twelve months have demonstrated that the days of absolute British supremacy are at an end." The Imperial Chancellor, on behalf of the Emperor, has also claimed that Germany is fighting, among other things, for "the freedom of the oceans." In the new issue of the North German Lloyd Company's YearBook appears an article with the same burden. It is assumed that sea conditions will undergo, as a result of the war, "a complete transformation"; that an International Prize Court will be established as "a sort of conscience against the British acts of violence"; and that the "theory of mare liberum will form a whole programme of further progress in the development of International Law as soon as England's naval power has been broken down under the German arms, and, so far from being able further to hinder the advance movement of an international law at sea, she would at last become ripe for co-operating in the creation of such a sea law as would redound to the blessing of the entire World."1

In the United States there is also apparently a widespread impression among those who are generically known as pacifists as well as in pro-German and Irish-American circles that the conditions which have existed during the past hundred years at sea are likely to undergo some modification. President Eliot, of Harvard University, who has been foremost in denouncing German atrocities on land and sea, has contended recently that the day of sea control by one Power is past, and has urged that the seas are the property of all nations, and that their free use for commerce should be guaranteed by a joint alliance of the Powers. "A strong, trustworthy, international alliance 2 to preserve the freedom of the seas under all circumstances," he has argued, "would secure for Great Britain and her federated commonwealths everything secured by the burdensome two navies' policy, which now secures the freedom of the seas for British purposes. The same international alliance would secure for Germany the complete freedom of the seas, which in times of peace between Great (1) Kölnische Zeitung.

(2) Cf. the Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium.

Britain and Germany she has long enjoyed by favour of Great Britain, but has lost in time of war with the Triple Entente."

Although there may be a tendency on our part to dismiss these suggestions as absurd or Utopian, it is well that the British people should recognise that, though the British Navy has more than fulfilled the hopes which resided in it on the outbreak of war, they are involved already in controversies of a serious, if not critical, character with neutral nations, and particularly with the United States, as to the extent to which British sea-power may legitimately be employed without infringing the freedom of the seas as defined by ancient precedent, regulated by the general body of the Law of Nations, and governed by international usage. In fact, the British Government is confronted with a situation which takes the mind of an historian back to the opening years of the nineteenth century. We then became parties to a controversy which was concerned with the freedom of the seas, and that controversy led to one of the most deplorable and unnecessary wars in the world's history.

The two principal immediate causes of the war of 1812 were the impressment of seamen (alleged to be deserters from the British service) from American merchant ships upon the high seas to serve in the British Navy, and the interference with the carrying trade of the United States by the naval power of Great Britain.1 The British action rested on a series of Orders in Council, which were passed by way of reprisal against the action of Napoleon, and the British Government claimed to find justification for the course which it adopted in the illegalities practised by the French Dictator. The controversy with the United States dragged on for many months. The American authorities were continually spurred on to an energetic defence of the freedom of the seas and the rights of American traders by merchants who were suffering heavy losses and by unfriendly agents. There were no telegraphs in those days, and communication between the two countries was slow. On June 18th a Bill authorising a declaration of war, which had already passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, received the signature of the President. Five days later the British Government, unaware of the decisive action which had already been taken on the other side of the Atlantic, repealed the Orders in Council which were the main cause of the rupture. In these circumstances hostilities opened. The bone of contention had already been buried, and yet for two and a half years the United States and Great Britain fought over it. And the result? The Treaty of Ghent, which was signed on December 24th, 1814, left unsettled the main points of dispute.

(1) Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812 (Mahan).