Cabinet to make a treaty with a foreign nation, and afterwards "lay the papers on the table. He thought that the public discussion of foreign policy, though obviously dangerous, would on the whole be safer than secret diplomacy. I thought that the danger of discussing treaty engagements with foreign Powers in a House of Commons, elected as parliaments now are, far outweighed any possible advantage. A few days after the publication of the article the war began. With a fuller knowledge of the facts than I had then, I repeat my objection to Bagehot's proposal. Secret diplomacy is not very popular at this hour. But if the engagement or understanding with France for the defence of her coast had been laid before the House of Commons in 1908, when it was made, few, I think, will contradict my assertion that it would have been repudiated by that body. It was the Parliament elected in 1906, and still in "the morning flush of passion." The leaders of the Labour Party were in the zenith of their power, and amongst the most trusted were Messrs. Snowden and Ramsay Macdonald. The small but well-organised army of Syndicalists and Trades-Unionists were supported by Radical allies. Does anyone doubt the reception which that House of Commons would have accorded to Sir Edward Grey's "conversations" with the French Government? We should have been told that the defence of the French coast was the business of the French Government: that England had nothing to do with Continental politics: that the international solidarity of Labour would defeat the mad dreams of militarism, etc., etc. What would have been the consequence? Great Britain would have been perfectly isolated. We should have been left without an ally in the world. The dangers of secret diplomacy have been proved to be great: but those of public diplomacy would be greater.

It must be admitted that Bagehot had some of the vanity of variety, to borrow one of his own phrases, or he would not have ventured so often and so far into the region of pure literature. Banking was his business, and journalism: politics were his passion belles lettres were his amusement. To be truthful, he is not in the first class of literary critics. He was a voracious reader and a cultivated man, in the best sense of the term, and he was evidently fond of poetry. But there is nothing really distinguished about his essays on Shakespeare and Milton, Shelley and Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. They are not among the best things that have been thought and said about those poets, and one misses the sure touch of really great critics like Arnold and Renan. Worse than this, some of Bagehot's literary judgments are obviously bad. He had the same weakness

for a feeble prig like Hartley Coleridge that Carlyle had for Sterling, whose "Life" is only redeemed from utter vacuity by that wonderful description of the greater Coleridge, spinning round his garden at Hampstead droning for hours about "sumject" and "omject." Still worse than his foible for an intellectual failure is his article on Macaulay, which comes very near to being a bêtise. Bagehot started out with the theory that the historian is a cold and insensible person, who writes about other times because he has no sympathy with his own. Of Macaulay this is not only not true, but the very reverse of the truth. Macaulay was warm-tempered and warm-hearted: a good hater as well as a good lover: one of the most affectionate and sympathetic of men. He hated that varlet Croker worse than cold boiled veal: he almost worshipped his Whig leaders, Lord Grey, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Holland. How can it be said of a politician who rises to be a Cabinet Minister, that he is indifferent to or detached from his own times? No doubt we have the advantage over Bagehot of having read Macaulay's correspondence with his sisters and his friends, letters overflowing with animal spirits and sentimentality. But Bagehot had no business to invent a theory about the historian's temperament, and then to force Macaulay to fit into it without a scrap of evidence.

Bagehot's political biographies are, to my taste, among the best of the last century. Bagehot does not use the splendid rhetoric of Macaulay, the blows of whose sonorous hammer will always delight young men. Macaulay is spoiled for the fastidious by his enthusiasm with him "every man is god or devil." Those who have outlived the illusion of life will prefer Bagehot's well-bred satire and judicial humour. He had in perfection the art of hitting off a character or a situation in a phrase. When he said of Brougham that "if he had been a horse nobody would have bought him with that eye"; and of Disraeli that "his chaff was exquisite, but his wheat was very poor stuff," the keenness of the wit is undeniable, and the strokes contain just as much truth as satire ought to contain. Bagehot simply did not believe that a man of first-rate mental calibre could be a sincere Tory. It was very well for the Sir Johns and the Lord Tomnoddies to be Tories. But Bolingbroke, Lyndhurst, and Beaconsfield, the three firstclass minds that adopted Toryism, were classed together by Bagehot as "eloquent sceptics"-probably with some truth. Bagehot showed his knowledge of the world by using his wit sparingly, but his humour was always bubbling up, as when he ascribed Gibbon's abhorrence of the French Revolution to the fact that "Gibbon had come to the conclusion that he was the

ence.

sort of man a mob kills." There is, to be sure, something of intellectual scorn in Bagehot's reiterated belief in the safety of stupidity. Robert Lowe was too brilliant to be a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer. "The faculty of disheartening adversaries by diffusing on occasion an oppressive atmosphere of business-like dullness is invaluable to a Parliamentary statesman. Lowe could not do this, but Sir George Cornewall Lewis by his manner was able to "leave an impression that the subject is very dry, that it is very difficult, that the department has attended to the dreary details of it, and that on the whole it is safer to leave it to the department." This process of damping down discussion is not so easy to-day as it was fifty years ago. Few better things on the Conservative side have been said than that: "property is indeed a very imperfect test of intelligBut it is some test. If it is inherited, it guarantees education. If it is acquired, it guarantees ability. Either way it assures us of something." All of us who know anything of the history of the Waterloo period have been puzzled and annoyed by Francis Horner. Why did his contemporaries talk and write about him? Why has he a monument in Westminster Abbey? What was he any way? as an American would ask. Bagehot has answered these questions in his article on "The First Edinburgh Reviewers" with more than his usual pleasantry. "Francis Horner's was a short and singular life. He was the son of an Edinburgh shopkeeper. He died at thirty-nine; and when he died, from all sides of the usually cold House of Commons great statesmen and thorough gentlemen got up to deplore his loss. Tears are rarely Parliamentary all men are arid towards young Scotchmen; yet it was one of that inclement nation whom statesmen of the species of Castlereagh and statesmen of the species of Whitbread-with all the many kinds and species that lie between the two-rose in succession to lament. The fortunes and superficial aspect of the man make it more singular. He had no wealth, was He had no wealth, was a briefless barrister, never held an office, was a conspicuous member of the most unpopular of all oppositions—the opposition to a glorious and successful war. He never had the means of obliging anyone. He was destitute of showy abilities; he had not the intense eloquence or overwhelming ardour which enthral and captivate popular assemblies: his powers of administration were little tried and may possibly be slightly questioned." He did not, however, impose on that stout old Tory, Sir Walter Scott, who used to observe: "I cannot admire your Horner: he always reminds me of Obadiah's bull, who, though he never certainly did produce a calf, nevertheless went about his business with so much gravity

that he commanded the respect of the whole parish." This, however, does not satisfy Bagehot, who continues: "It is no explanation of the universal regret that he was a considerable political economist: no real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist: he is much more likely to be sorry for his life." Here is Bagehot's explanation of the puzzle. "The fact is that Horner is a striking example of the advantage of keeping an atmosphere. This may sound like nonsense, and yet it is true. There is around some men a kind of circle or halo of influences, and traits, and associations, by which they infallibly leave a distinct and uniform impression on their contemporaries. It is very difficult, even for those who have the best opportunities, to analyse exactly what this impression consists in, or why it was made--but it is made. . . . There is Lord Somers. Does anyone know why he had such a reputation? . . . . The truth is that Lord Somers had around him that inexpressible attraction and influence of which we speak. He left a sure, and if we may trust the historian, even a momentous impression on those who saw him. By a species of tact they felt him to be a great man. The ethical sense-for there is almost such a thing in simple persons -discriminated the fine and placid oneness of his nature. It was the same on a smaller scale with Horner.. Sydney Smith said, the Ten Commandments were written on his countenance.' Of course, he was a very ugly man, but the moral impression in fact conveyed was equally efficacious. I have often,' said the same most just observer, 'told him that there was not a crime he might not commit with impunity, as no judge or jury who saw him would give the smallest credit to any evidence against him."" I wish I had space to quote the whole of the passage, for as a piece of prose political satire it has not, I think, been beaten by Swift or Smollett. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in a very fine essay on Pope, has explained how it is that the art of political satire has disappeared. Modern political partisans, whether writers or speakers, are so violent and so rude that they miss their effect. Mr. Balfour a few years ago accused Mr. Asquith of "a felon stroke"; and the other day a Member of Parliament accused the Government of "cheating." Nobody believes that Cabinet Ministers are felons or cheats, and Cabinet Ministers know quite well that they are not. Satire to be effective must be three parts true, and the whole must be politely put. Mr. Chesterton recommends those who would recover a lost art to read Pope on Addison. I recommend them "the soft plume" of Walter Bagehot.

ARTHUR A. BAUMANN.

THE NAVY'S WAR REHEARSALS.

THE national possession of a number of ships and their munitions may be regarded as a habit, a convention, of inherent power sufficient to ensure its own continuance. The maintenance of these ships, and particularly their human adjuncts, at a high level of efficiency, at a tingling tension of war-expectancy is, on the other hand, a matter in the last degree artificial, demanding the most frequent renewal of a motive energy which itself must have originated in abnormal circumstances. Prolonged, instant readiness for war in times of peace is an artificiality, perhaps the supreme artificiality of our civilisation, as the need of it is the supreme immorality. Even a professional warrior is normally peaceable; to arouse him, in great masses, to war-readiness requires persistent and powerful influences, to be applied externally, generated internally. A nation can hire fighting men; it must depend upon those men themselves whether or not they pass their peace time exclusively in learning war in the nation's behalf.

Since about the turn of the century the Navy has so spent its days. A dozen years of devoted struggle and self-reformation have, in this war, given us our island immunity from war horrors.

In 1900, as in 1915, the nation rested secure behind its sea defences. But in those days protection could be given without very imperative demands on instant readiness for war, thanks to a fortunate dispensation which left all navies to differ merely in the degree of their unpreparedness, as in these exacting days we apply the term. There was no general recognition and acceptance of the war ideal as later it came to be understood, an almost fanatical conception which sees war as the sole aim of each man's existence; which subordinates every interest, whether professional or personal, to war; which regards nominal peace merely as a period preparatory to war; which calmly recognises the possibility of hostilities breaking out on any morrow, and so orders its life as to be ready, to the last detail, should possibility turn to fact. The Navy existed for war; even in those easy-going days no member of it could deny its function. Men, of course, were prepared to fight should occasion arise. But preparation for war figured only as a nebulous make-believe in normal routine. War itself was regarded only as a vague possibility, not as an insistent preoccupation clouding in advance each day of peace. Gunnery was regarded as an intrusive nuisance barely to be R R*

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