other fields of thought so acute, competent, and well prepared and vigorous as Mr. Hobhouse.

His description of the sources and processes by which public opinion in our time is formed is not lacking in trenchancy, and it might give a pleasure, certainly not intended by its author, to the cynical persons, either at home here or across the Channel, who regard popular government as elaborate dupery, were it not for the author's fervid perception and enforcement of the prime truth that under every political or social question lies the moral question.

The very figure of John Bull as the typical Englishman seems out of date and inapplicable as an expression for the average Briton of the present day. The easy-going, stout, well-meaning, rather dull old gentleman, a little proud if the truth be told of his very dulness, and apt to conceive of it as an incident in that fundamental honesty which distinguished him from his sharp-witted neighbours, the well-nourished territorial magnate, slow-going, hard to move, but implacable when once stirred, ,narrow perhaps, but fundamentally just and honourable in all his dealings, is no fit representative of the average public opinion of our day. For that, we have ourselves coined a new abstraction: 'the man-in-the-street,' or 'the man-on-the-top-of-a-bus,' is now the typical representative of public opinion, and the man-in-the-street means the man who is hurrying from his home to his office or to a place of amusement. He has just got the last news-sheet from his neighbour; he has not waited to test or sift it; he may have heard three contradictory reports, or seen two lying posters on his way up the street, but he has an expression of opinion ready on his lips, which is none the less confident because all the grounds on which it is founded may be swept away by the next report that he hears. The man-in-the-street is the man in a hurry; the man who has not time to think, and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time. He is the faithful reflex of the popular sheet and the shouting newsboy. . . . The man-in-the-street is familiar with everything. Nothing is new to him; it is his business not to be surprised. He knows already all about any appeal that you can make to the better side of him, and he has long ago chopped it up in his mill of small talk and catch phrases and reduced it to such a meaningless patter that the words which must be used have acquired trivial and lowering associations.

5

All this is vigorous satire, and it is true. Still, to check a despondent fit, let us remember Sir Robert Peel's words a dozen years before the first Reform Bill: The tone of England-of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion.' If this was a true story in 1820, are we so much lower to-day? And before being too sharp upon our democracy to-day, let us not forget, for instance, Burke's complaint of the Demos of his day: It is but too true,' he cries, 'that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom; they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having someone below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his • Croker Papers, i. 170.

E.g. Mind in Evolution (1901).

share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the passion in which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our Colonies; our dependents. This lust of party power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought were never organised to that kind of music.'

Let us at once say that Mr. Hobhouse is as far removed as possible from the temper of the mere croaker, the frondeur, the mauvais coucheur, or-to use the ugliest term in all political slangthe mugwump. No dilettante, his mind throws itself into energetic contact with circumstances. He faces the unwelcome facts of his time without any of the weak spirit of disenchantment, and with a manful determination that, though the world has not in recent years gone his way, the battle is by no means over. The whole strain of his argument is positive and constructive, and though he has the high merit of being an idealist, he has long been a close, exact, and direct observer of working politics from day to day. Just as for the purposes of mental philosophy he investigated with scientific rigour the ways of the animals at the public gardens in Manchester, so in politics he rigorously attends to his details, while we are sensible all the time of the pulse of a strong humanity, and of that warm faith in social progress which is, in other words, faith in men, hope for men, and charity for men.

An accomplished Frenchman, now dead, one of the ten thousand critics of democracy, illustrates by a story of his friend Bersot his conviction that human nature will remain to the end pretty like itself, apart from forms of government or measures of social economy. One day Bersot, writing upon Arcachon and its pleasures, wound up his article by saying, 'As for happiness, why there, as everywhere else, you must yourself bring it with you.' So Scherer himself, in like spirit, could not but believe that it is the same with institutions. They depend on what men bring with them. In a less discouraged spirit, or rather with no discouragement of spirit at all, Mr. Hobhouse still recognises that self-government is not in itself a solution of all political and social difficulties. It is at best,' he says, 'an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work, but when those ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.' The fundamental reform for which the times call is rather a reconsideration of the ends for which all civilised government exists; in a word, the return to a saner measure of social values. 'We shall be under no illusion,' he concludes, about democracy. The golden radiance of its morning hopes has long since faded into the light of common day. Yet, that dry light of noon serves best for those whose task it is to carry on the work of the world.'

III

The starting-point of Mr. Hobhouse's book is the practical operation of Imperialism and the imperial idea within the last fifteen or twenty years. He misses, by inadvertence I suppose, the historic origin of this far-reaching movement of the day, for he does not remind us that it first began in the rejection of Home Rule in 1886. Unionists, in resisting the new Liberal policy for Ireland, were naturally forced to make their appeal to all the feelings and opinions bound up with concentration, imperial Parliament imperial unity, and determined mastery in the hands of the predominant partner.' Conservative reaction had set in during the general election of the previous year, and had shown itself in the unconcealed schism between the two wings of the Liberal party (for the Liberal party is always by its essence a coalition). What precipitated this reaction in the direction of Imperialism was the proposal of Home Rule, and the arguments and temper in which its antagonists found their most effective resort. Perplexities in Egypt, that weighed quite as heavily on Lord Salisbury as on Mr. Gladstone, strengthened the same impression.

To the imperial idea' itself and the light in which it was offered to honourable, patriotic, and liberal-minded men, Mr. Hobhouse does full justice.

'See,' the Imperialist would say, 'this marvellous work of our race, the vast inheritance of the generations which we hold in trust for our descendants-in mere size the greatest Empire of history, in variety of interest, in the extraordinary complexity of its composition far surpassing all political societies that the world has ever known. Consider how it extends the laws of peace over prairie and jungle, mountain and steppe, subarctic ice and torrid forest; how it maintains order and administers justice with equal success for the brand-new mining community, for the ancient civilisation of the Ganges or the Nile, or for the primitive clan of the Indian hills. Is not this,' urges the enthusiast, 'among the greatest of human achievements, this unparalleled adaptability in arts of conquest and of government? And yet this is not the best. What is an infinitely greater matter is that where the British flag goes, go British freedom, British justice, an absolutely incorruptible Civil Service, a scrupulous impartiality as between religion and races, an enthusiasm for the spread of that individual liberty and local self-government which have made England herself so great! ... You talk perhaps of humanity-a vague, abstract idea. But do you not see that any genuine humanitarianism must be the result of a gradual broadening of those very sympathies which first make a man a good patriot? There was a time when love for England, as a whole, was too wide a conception, and men were Mercians or Northumbrians, but not Englishmen. Just as it was an advance when the love for England superseded this narrow provincialism, so is it an advance when Imperialism supersedes your narrow Little Englandism. You may say that Empire means force, aggression, conquest. That may have been so in the past, but we live in an age when Empire is free, tolerant, and unaggressive, and if we still acquire territory, we acquire it not for ourselves but for civilisation. You may object to the method by which the Empire was built up, but here it is in being-a great fact, a tremendous responsibility.'

'Taken at its face value,' as Mr. Hobhouse says, no wonder that this appeal proved seductive and almost irresistible. This paren

thesis, by the way, on Little Englandism deserves a word or two of quotation. Is there nothing to be proud of in Little England, in her history, her literature, her thought, the great men that she has borne for the world, her struggle for political and religious freedom? 'The question might be raised whether the British Empire as a whole has any history to show which compares with the history of Little England; any science, any literature, any art; in fine, any great collective military achievement, worthy to be weighed (in the scale against the resistance of Little England to Philip the Second or to Napoleon. A great Imperialist once coupled the name of Little England with the policy of surrender. It was a libel. Little England never surrendered. On the contrary, she three times encountered Powers which aspired to the mastery of the world, and three times overthrew them. The genuine pride of patriotism is surely lost when littleness of geographical extent can be construed into a term of reproach. It is the other face of the same vulgarity which boasts that a single British colony is greater than the land that produced Kant and Goethe.'

Anybody in whom the boisterous intoxication of the last ten years has not extinguished all capacity of candid thought, whatever way his conclusions upon particular policies and events within that time may lean, will find this salutary vein well worth pondering. One remark occurs to me upon these glorious things in passing. They were done when England was under the sway either of monarch, or aristocracy, or both. Of a democracy originally British, the most astonishing and triumphant achievement so far has been the persevering absorption and incorporation across the Atlantic of a ceaseless torrent of heterogeneous elements from every point of the compass into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State with eighty millions of pópulation, combining the centralised concert of a federal system with local independence, and uniting collective energy with the encouragement of individual freedom. How does this stand in comparison with the Roman Empire, or Roman Church, or the Byzantine Empire, or Russia, or Charles the Great, or Napoleon? That, however, is digression. Meanwhile, Mr. Hobhouse, with energy of perception and without vehemence or excess of language, contrasts the plausible promises of Imperialism with its performance, and here South Africa obviously supplies the leading case. He gives no undue proportion to the Boer War, and does not allow it to draw him too far from either the central line or the rationalist temper of his speculation. Still, the annexation, through military conquest, of two small States, lawfully inhabited, possessed, and governed by white men, is so striking an example of reaction-I am not sure whether against democracy or not, but against our ruling maxims for a century past, that it was impossible for him not to dwell upon it. I will not take the reader over the still heated embers of this dire conflagration, but a few

sentences from Mr. Hobhouse's summary of the immense self-dupery of the Boer War are essential in any account of his book and its subject. Little by little, he says, it has become clearer that 'the new Imperialism stood, not for a widened and ennobled sense of national responsibility, but for a hard assertion of racial supremacy and material force.' The unprejudiced observer was compelled to recognise that, 'judged by actual performance, it meant perpetual warfare, battles which, where black or yellow men were concerned, became sheer massacres, campaigns which, where a resolute white race stood in the way, involved desolation unspeakable, the destruction of political and personal freedom, and the erection on their ruins of an un-English type of overpaid and incompetent officialdom, the cold-shouldering of the British immigrant, and the recrudescence of servile labour. Finally comparing the battle-cry with the actual result of victory, he began to ask himself whether the enterprises on which his fellow-countrymen freely spent their blood were such as minister to the glory of the Empire and the good of humanity, or rather to the vanity of a self-confident satrap and the lucre of a capitalist.'

By Imperialism he understood a free informal union with the Colonies, combined with a conscientious but tolerant government of tropical dependencies. This was in essence the conception of the Empire bequeathed by the older generation of Liberals, and precisely the antithesis of present-day Imperialism, the operative principle of which is the forcible establishment and maintenance of racial ascendency. The trap laid for Liberals in particular consisted in this-that they were asked to give in their adhesion to Imperialism as representing admiration for an Empire which more and more has been shaped upon Liberal lines. Having given their assent, they were insensibly led on on to the other meaning of Imperialism-a meaning in which, for all practical purposes, these principles are set aside. And there was a medium to facilitate the change. For if the Empire was so liberally formed, so free, tolerant, and unaggressive, could we have too much of it? Should we not extend its blessing to those that sit in darkness? And so, by

a seductive blending of the old Adam of national vanity with the new spirit of humanitarian zeal men are led on to the destruction of their own principles.'

The story is an old one. In these high matters let us be sure that nothing is as new as people think. Names are new. Light catches aspects heretofore unobserved. Temperature rises and falls. Yet the elements of the cardinal controversies of human society are few, and they are curiously fixed. Though the ages use ideas differently, the rival ideas themselves hold on in their pre-appointed courses. Democracy is not new, and reaction against it is no newer. The questions so vigorously and acutely sketched by Mr. Hobhouse